Warnings from the Future by Ethan Chatagnier

Author:Ethan Chatagnier
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Acre Books

THE LAW OF THREES

They roll out at 10 p.m. with the radio crackling. Whit tries to keep his mind on the LSAT study books hidden in the book bag at his feet. The messages coming through the speaker urge everyone to be careful, to exercise caution, but the whole night-shift fleet is swirling around the parking lot like a cloud of energized bees. In the hallways of the station, the mood had been somber, almost silent. It was amazing to see grown, armed men feel so vulnerable in the guarded hallways of their own station. But now that each pair is wrapped in a cruiser, some doing donuts or fishtailing out of figure eights, the lot is a rave of red and blue lights. The men roll past Whit and Vargas flashing three fingers in the air, expecting to see them flashed back. Whit does not lift his hand. Though he’s always had the tendency to be carved by the expectations of others, he won’t celebrate this. He remembers this mood. High school. Homecoming. The radio says stay safe out there, but the body politic says be aggressive, B-E aggressive.

Vargas rolls out plenty slow, the caboose of the train, steering with his elbows while he eats his nightly cup of chocolate pudding. He regards himself as some kind of sage or oracle, and Whit supposes anyone who’s been patrolling so long without being promoted out of it has to. He waxes his mustache, not with a hipster twirl but into a fat black slug that overfills the entire upper lip. Somehow he never gets his pudding in it, which does indeed feel like a mystical power. Vargas also thinks there’s power in moving slowly. Whit is not sure there’s power in anything the force does. But other times he thinks every one of his actions is a wasted act of power: resting a hand on a holster, speeding down an empty night street, or even stopping on a busy sidewalk to double-knot a loosened shoelace.

When the cars come out of the lot, they split left and right into two trails, and from there into smaller and smaller groups until finally he and Vargas are alone headed southwest on International. You can smell the canal and the marshy coastline a few blocks away. The smell travels farther at night, a stink of plant matter ripening in still water. A few blocks more and they’re in what Vargas calls Zombieland: weak, irregular streetlamps illuminating now and then the dead souls pushing shopping carts full of obsolete VCRs, or walking that slow junkie waltz with the whole body rocking. Then there are the groups, the gangs, three or four or five teens walking abreast in the street, enlarged by their oversize athletic apparel. If there’s a pipe being passed or a gun tucked in the back of a belt, or anything else citable, Vargas likes to startle them with the lights and siren and watch them scurry, he says, like bugs.

Whit’s foot nudges his satchel, heavy with two fat books of practice questions.

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