No one knew what had happened.
Had it been a secret experiment gone wrong, a secret superfood created, consumed, designed to end the plague of shortages? And if so, did that food actually carry a new virus that played with the genetic code and undo millions of years of evolution?
And what did he think?
Above my pay grade, Jack thought. They just need people like me, and Rodriguez, and Thompson, to make sure the Can Heads stay away.
And every day, every night, that got harder and harder.
His eyes had shut sometime in the middle of the night.
Cops weren’t supposed to sleep; this wasn’t like the Fire Department. They still maintained that code of “on duty—to serve and protect.”
That meant awake.
Still, it was quiet and he had slept.
The phone on his desk rang, shrill in the middle of the night. Cell service had largely disappeared save for the few satellites services and those that could afford them. Landlines had also grown increasingly undependable—cables cut, telephone poles down. When lines in the supposedly safe areas got damaged, no team would go out to work on them, at least when it was dark.
The desk phone gave out a sharp trilling noise. He saw the time.
2:12 A.M. Christie.
“Hey,” she said.
“Up late again?” he said.
“Just checking on you.”
Jack laughed. “You know if I had a nice warm bed to sleep in, that’s what I’d be doing instead of—”
“It’s so quiet here. Hate it when you do nights.”
“Only a few more days. You should sleep.” A pause. “I would.”
“Yes.”
Jack’s tone did little to take the edge off Christie’s voice. She worried. But more than that, she kept at him about their need to get away from this, to leave the city.
The chats often turned into arguments. Their relationship another casualty of this new world.
Get away? Another job? Go where? Do what?
Supposedly there were opportunities if you traveled deep enough into the country. Factories where things still got made, plants where they struggled to process and stretch the thin food resources.
Jack had resigned himself to this life.
The money wasn’t bad. Sooner or later, he might get posted to Manhattan, a desk job. Just had to hang the hell in there.
But Christie didn’t buy any of it.
“Quiet tonight?” she asked.
“So far. Fingers crossed.”
A longer pause this time. “Okay. Be safe.”
“Always do the best I can. Now you—”
A little laugh from his wife. “I’m going, I’m going.” She took a breath. “Good night.”
“Good night,” Jack said, feeling terribly alone when the line went dead.
He hit the keyboard of the ancient computer on his desk, a true dinosaur, and began scrolling through the still-empty fields of information that had to be filled out.
An hour later.
The screen in front of Jack had long turned into a sleepy blur as he lost the fight to keep his eyes open.
A few minutes… he had told himself.
Everyone did it. As they waited—or hoped that the morning would come without anything happening. But then the alarm began ringing. A door slammed. Jack’s eyes opened. Instantly awake.
He looked up at the precinct map on the station-house wall. One spot glowed bright red.
Rodriguez was already suited up. “Breakthrough, Jackie. Red Hook. Same fuckin’ building as last week.”
Jack stood up, and started for the locker room with Rodriguez at his shoulder.
“Same building? Jeezus.” Jack said.
“Yeah. Sorry man.”
Jack knew the building well. Most of the old Red Hook section of Brooklyn had been fenced off. A few government warehouses sat there, not much else. But there were still a few apartment buildings with people in them, fortified with some security and really the only option for the poor slobs who lived in them.
Nowhere else to put them. And they didn’t have much of a voice in any decision about their fate.