The jails are empty.
“Where are you taking me?”
“And if you pay her in hydro … ooooh-wee! She’ll do this thing with her tongue where—”
I debate raising my voice and asking again, but then I realize that it doesn’t fucking matter.
Nothing matters anymore.
I turn and look back out the window. As I follow the razor wire with my eyes, a sizzle beat begins to float into my head. Like the sound of an electric chair being warmed up.
A few turns later, just as the shiny gold dome of the capitol building comes into view in the distance, we encounter something I haven’t seen in weeks. Maybe months.
Traffic.
Cars are parked and double-parked along every main street and side street as far as I can see. Some aren’t even facing the right direction, and some are pulled right up onto the sidewalks—probably so their drivers can solicit the services of the naked ladies Officer Friendly and Deputy Dickface were talking about. That, or they’re buying drugs from the pop-up bong stands a few feet away. They definitely aren’t down here to window shop. Every store I’ve seen since we passed the jail has either been looted or burned.
Downtown Atlanta feels like Times Square on New Year’s Eve—only instead of confetti, it’s raining ashes from a nearby car fire; instead of fireworks, you hear gunshots; and instead of wearing stupid plastic sunglasses and carrying inflatable noisemakers, the women aren’t wearing anything, and the men are carrying machine guns.
The cops flip on their siren to try to get through, but nobody pays them any attention. Nobody, except for the working girls who turn and twiddle their fingers at their best customers.
“Damn it!” The cop driving slams his palms against the steering wheel. “We’re gonna have to call Hawthorne again.”
“I’m on it.” The cop in the passenger seat snatches the CB radio off the dash. “Hey, Sheryl. It’s Ramirez. Can you send Hawthorne to help bring us in? We’re on the corner of Northside Drive and MLK.”
“Again? Don’t y’all know not to go that way?”
“It’s blocked every damn which-a-way, Sheryl. Just send Hawthorne. I ain’t walkin’ this suspect ten blocks down MLK.”
“Okay, fine. You don’t have to be so salty about it.”
“And tell him to hurry up!” Ramirez slams the CB back in its cradle.
Gunshots ring out in the distance, but like the siren, nobody on the street seems to notice.
“They really need to get us a damn helicopter. This is bullshit,” Ramirez huffs, crossing his arms and shifting in his seat. His knee is bouncing so fast it’s making the car shake, and I realize that he’s jonesing for something.
“Hey, I’mma go get a blow job real quick. You want anything?”
“Come on, man. Hawthorne’s gonna be here in less than ten minutes.”
“It’ll only take me five,” Ramirez sneers. As soon as he pushes his door open, white noise explodes into the car—a deafening mixture of hip-hop, techno beats, gunshots, car horns, dogs howling, women screaming, and alarm systems going off. But when Ramirez slams his door shut, it goes almost completely silent again.
Must be the bulletproofing.
“Fuckin’ dumbass,” Officer Friendly mutters under his breath.
Opening the center console, he takes out a flask and unscrews the cap with a flick of his hairy-knuckled thumb. As he brings it to his lips, his eyes, shadowed by a Neanderthal-like brow bone, cut to mine in the rearview mirror. He takes a swig. Then, he turns to face me.
“Want some?” he asks, holding the flask out and giving it a little shake.
When I shrug, he chuckles, his meaty face contorting into something even uglier.
“Oh, right. You’re a little tied up, huh?”
Suddenly, something slams into the windshield, causing Officer Asshole to drop his flask and scramble for his gun. I look up to find a guy crouching on the hood of the car, peering in at us through the eyeholes of a King Burger mask. Skeleton features have been smeared onto it with neon-orange paint, matching the bone-like stripes spray-painted on his black hooded sweatshirt.
The car begins to bounce violently as another Bony, and then another, leap onto the hood, the roof, the trunk. The zombified King Burger twists his head from side to side, like a raptor studying its prey, before he takes a gun out of his hoodie pocket and presses the barrel to the glass.
I duck just before the concussion of bullets and splintering glass rings in my ears.
Ka-boom!
Ka-boom!
Ka-boom!
Ka—
Thud.
The car stops shaking.
The bullets stop flying.
And the sounds of downtown Atlanta fill the air again as Ramirez hops back inside and slams the door.
“Goddamn, I hate those motherfuckers!”
I sit back up to find King Burger slumped against the bulletproof glass, his lifeless eyes halfway open as blood trickles down his mask, filling every crack in the shattered windshield.
“That’s the third car we’ve fucked up this week! The chief is gonna be so pissed.”
“If he’d buy that damn helicopter, this wouldn’t keep happening!”
Officer Friendly turns to look out his side window. “’Bout fucking time.”
I follow his gaze and notice blue flashing lights reflecting in the broken shop windows on MLK Jr. Drive as a behemoth of a SWAT tank comes barreling into view. It’s two lanes wide, and it has a metal blade on the front that’s at least a foot thick. People on the street scatter like rats, jumping into their parked cars and trying to get the fuck out of the way before they get smashed.
Officer Friendly flips on the PA system and grabs the microphone. “Thanks a lot, good buddy,” he announces through the loudspeakers as the tank grinds past. Then, he throws the car in drive and turns left onto MLK once the intersection is clear, leaning all the way to the left to see around the shattered windshield and the dead body on the hood.
“Why don’t we ever get to drive the Scorpion?” Ramirez whines.
“Because we weren’t military, remember?”
“Hawthorne should at least let me shoot the cannon some time.”
Officer Friendly drives a few blocks and turns left onto Central Avenue where a huge crowd of people is gathered in a park.
“Oh shit! We got a dead man walkin’!”
The cop car slows to a crawl, and I do the stupidest thing I could possibly do.
I turn and look out my window.
The left and right sides of the park are lined with spectators, standing behind metal barricades and kept at bay by at least a dozen riot cops holding machine guns. On the far side of the plaza, a woman in a burlap jumpsuit is standing with her back to me. A row of freshly planted saplings stretches out to her left, and Governor Fuckface and a TV crew are standing to her right.
My guts twist.
No. No, no, no, no, no.
Keep driving!
But they don’t. They pull to a complete stop and watch as the woman’s head suddenly snaps backward. Her body jerks, her knees buckle, and the earth swallows her whole.
Stomach acid claws its way up my throat, but I swallow it down and squeeze my eyes shut. I tell myself that it’s not a bad way to go. It’s instant. Clean. There are way worse ways to die. Cancer is worse. Disembowelment, terrible. I could be burned at the stake or locked in an iron maiden. I could be—