Houston, 2030: The Year Zero Page 4

  Chapter 4

  Deputy Kim waited at the Beat office, but Tan was absent. Early in the morning, both policemen were summoned to a street fight, and now Tan collected the witness statements. The fight originator, an Indomerican man twenty-something of age, in torn shirt, with a black eye and bloodied nose, was locked behind the bars at the far corner.

  Mark looked at his watch. “It seems, you gents can't join us today.”

  “No, sir, we'll be fine. The man didn't do much. Vegetable theft, believe it or not…” Kim replied, passing Mark a one-page incident report. “Actually, I had to bring him into the Beat for his own protection sake. If Tan and I left the poor bastard with those angry Chinamericans, they would resolve to a far-eastern cruelty. A death by thousand cuts, a pond full of crocodiles… We can release the man by now, and go about our serial killer business.”

  “Let us play this a bit,” Alex suggested. “Can you bring the man here? Tell him the FBI came to see him.”

  Deputy went to unlock the cage.

  “Mister Sharma? I am Sergeant Investigator Zuiko; and this is Special Agent-in-Charge Pendergrass, from the F.B.I.,” Alex introduced them, heavily stressing every letter in the ‘FBI’ part. Mark mentioned how masterfully Sarge had avoided his own association not with the Bureau, but the Harris County Police. “Tell us. What happened this morning?”

  “Nothing, sir. I'm living in tee north of tee Slum. I'm taking a shortcut like this every morning. Tee other men. They jumped on mee. I'm making nothing wrong,” the man spoke in heavy Indian accent.

  “Did the Deputy here – read your Miranda warning, Mister Sharma?” Alex asked with blunt expression. The man nodded. “Thus, you must understand you have the right to remain silent, correct?” The man nodded again. “But… Do you think this makes it legal for you to lie in front of the FBI?”

  Sarge sounded a high-profile prosecutor from a movie. “No, Mister Sharma, this does not give you the right to lie! Do you think the FBI would come here for no reason? No, sir! The uninterrupted food supply is a matter of national security. That what it is, Mister Sharma. Now, tell the jury what happened – really…”

  Now the man was even more scared.

  “As I said, a shortcut every morning. About a week ago, I picked a couple of carrots from tee veggie bed. Just two. Eat them on tee way. So I started picking one or two every morning. I thought, they have so much carrot, no harm if I take one or two. Today, I picked jus' one carrot, sir. And – they jumped on mee!”

  “They – do you mean: the veggie owners, correct?”

  “Correct, sir.”

  “Did you resist the arrest, Mister Sharma?”

  “No, sir. Tee Deputy here – he took mee to tee beat.”

  “Deputy Kim! Did or did not the defendant… I mean: the suspect, resist the arrest?”

  “No, sir! I mean: yes, sir! Oops, it's not right either… I confirm, Your Honor: the suspect did not resist the arrest…”

  “OK, I believe the case is crystal-clear: theft and trespassing. Multiple offenses! Two years in a labor camp, I reckon. But to the suspect's defense – he cooperated with the Police, so the Judge may reduce to just one year,” Alex stated, as if asking Mark's opinion. “Shall we do the paperwork and bring the case to the prosecution, Special Agent?”

  Mark shook his head. He applied all his effort not to applaud over the comic ‘Court at Law’ scene.

  Alex turned to the man again, and spoke in determined hushed voice, as if switching roles to the defendant's attorney instead of the state prosecutor: “But… Tell me now… I must know this to help you… Just two carrots, or – say, two pounds a day?”

  “No, sir, I swear. One or two carrots! We've no food at home!”

  “I believe you,” Sarge concluded, “we let you go this time. But if we learn you're collecting more carrots from your neighbors, it will be up to the District Attorney, understand?”

  After the door slammed behind hurriedly departing Mr. Sharma, the officers had a good laugh. So done with the morning case, Deputy Kim locked the Beat. The note at the door stated: On patrol. Wait here or call 911 if urgent. They cycled at slow pace along Garret Road. Soon later, Alex waved to Mark and Kim and turned to a bike trail to rendezvous with Deputy Tan at the Chinamerican wards.

  The Garret Road Slum, or GRS for short, was a late development. Unlike the slums, which evolved from the former suburbs, this had few proper roads. The transportation network consisted of convoluted dirt paths. There were small shacks built with anything imaginable: from old tires to plastic film and cartons. Endless rows of vegetable patches occupied the rest of the land. Several Amerasian women, barefoot and with conical straw hats, carried buckets of water on long shoulder poles, the trail became too narrow to pass safely. Mark and Kim got off the bikes.

  The entire scene looked like a photograph from the Vietnam War. Mark's father-in-law had several albums of such old photographs – chem photos, as everybody called them now. Most photos were black-and-white, and only few – with unnaturally bright colors. Kodachrome-X, Mark suddenly remembered the foreign-sounding trademark name; David mentioned it on several occasions. He said, the photos did not come on the screen instantly, but had to be ‘developed’ and printed in a special chemical lab. Cameras had no screens at all, and you could only guess if the pictures were any good until the lab did its processing magic. Unbelievable, how much perseverance one needed to make photos back then.

  David was in the Air Force, and deployed in Vietnam from 1970 to 1972. He served as a ground mechanic, and avoided most of the dangers. An avid photographer since teen years, he snapped thousands of pictures: endless photos of his friends, on the airfields, in front of fuel trucks, cargo planes, or Huey helicopters. Many photos depicted the daily life in Saigon: market stalls, racing pedicab drivers, female students in long white dresses, beggar boys playing in front of a fancy cafe, and so on. The country-side: rice paddies and women in black pajamas and conical hats. Here in the Slum, the resemblance was exceptionally striking.

  Was America now living the same lifestyle as Vietnam sixty years ago? The good thing, there had been no war in the United States. David's albums had few photos with the evidence of the brutal war, which burned in Indochina for good twenty-five years. A carcass of a crashed helicopter in the jungles…

  Lucky, America suffered no war at home. They turned the corner, and reality sharply contradicted Mark's conclusion: a stripped carcass of military Hercules protruded from emerald rice paddies. Mark remembered seeing it on the SRTV news. Few years ago, this plane had a critical failure upon a takeoff and crashed into the slum, ending lives of six military personnel and thirty slum dwellers. The remnants of the plane now became home for several families. On the footpath, an Amerasian man in his late twenties struggled on a single crutch, accompanied by little semi-naked girl, probably his daughter. The cripple had a civilian shirt, but his military-issue pants and sunglasses told the officers the man was a recent vet. Perhaps, the war had not been on the American soil yet, but the slum life was not very different from one in Vietnam back in the seventies!

  Kim asked the man how to locate the Hobsons' dwelling. The vet explained, drawing an imaginary map with his finger over the palm of the other hand. The little girl watched the conversation while sucking her thumb.

  Another striking similarity with the Vietnam War. One photo in the albums Mark remembered: a Vietnamese Military Police chatting with a disabled ex-soldier, with two semi-naked kids watching. The cripple from that picture also had his leg stump on the crutch handle, and one kid also sucked his thumb… Kim nodded, and the man continued crutching along the footpath. Passing Mark, he mumbled: “How-r-you, sir?” The girl waved her hand and said “Hullo.” Interesting, what the Vietnamese crippled ex-soldier and those kids from the photograph told American GIs during the War?

  “Our first address,” Deputy pointed. “On that little path, the second
right. Only, the vet didn't recall anybody with an artificial leg in that family…”

  “Let check them anyway, hence we are here,” Mark said. A long day was ahead, but Major Ferelli would never give a car for the investigation work. Besides, a car was pretty useless in this slum, with its narrow dirt paths instead of roads.

  They pushed their bikes along the trail for another five minutes, meeting yet another group of women with water buckets on shoulder poles. The shack, in which ‘these Hobsons’ lived, resembled a pile of recycled furniture and chipboard. An elderly woman sat at the porch, cleaning veggies.

  Mark pulled out his badge. The old lady introduced herself as Mrs. Hobson and invited the officers in. A piece of battered plastic film substituted for the shack door. Inside, an old sofa and a triple bunk bed occupied almost all the room. Mark guessed, no less than six or seven people lived here – on forty-five square feet. As foretold, the first address produced nothing. The family originated not from New York, but from Seattle, and moved to Houston in 2028. The old lady's grandson served currently in the Army, but, thanks God, at the border between Canada and Republique Quebecois, in the UN Peacekeeping Corps. A relatively safe assignment: the real war between the break-away Quebec and the rest of Canada had ended four years ago in a weary stalemate. No, they were the only Hobsons here, and no, none of their relatives was one-legged, thanks God again…

  They bid goodbye to talkative Mrs. Hobson and continued on their bikes towards the slum's north, in which the database gave another possible hit for Hobsons. Here the population was predominantly Indomerican, and the shacks stood denser. Women carried water not on shoulder poles, but on their heads. There were visibly more school-age children around.

  “The Amerasians send their kids to school, no matter what,” Deputy commented. He lived in the Koreamerican community, which concentrated at the western side of the Slum. “The Asians work hard. These Indian people are not so. Lazy bastards. See, how many children miss school? Their veggies are no comparison to ours. No bloody wonder, our late Mister Sharma stole those stupid carrots from the Chinamen!”

  “I don't think the people are lazy, Kim,” Mark disagreed, “there are just too many. The land is failing.”

  Soil on some vegetable patches resembled useless silty dust. The Presidential program, Sustainability Through Horticulture, advertised so much ten years ago, did not work too well. Without chemical fertilizers and pesticides, this patch of land could supply food for limited number of people, – clearly way less than the local population. The Indomerican Slum was a miniature copy of India herself. Eleven years ago, the CNN news had it every evening: the water and food crisis in South Asia…

  The fate of India was closed immediately after the Meltdown, as the software industry lost its momentum. Apple went bankrupt and was bought, with all the debts, by Microsoft for just one dollar. The Microsoft itself soon became a charity: few hundred software engineers in Vermont and Berkeley, surviving on Presidential grants to support the remaining operating systems. The collapse of banks, consumer electronics companies, and airlines followed.

  The Indian make-believe ‘middle-class’ simply ended overnight: all these programmers, outsourcing accountants, and call center operators – were not needed anymore. After the middle-class jobs, all other more-or-less lucrative occupations had disappeared: tourist attractions, hotels and for-profit beaches, souvenir-making and souvenir-selling, even the tailor shops.

  Four hundred million desperate people fled from dysfunctional cities to the countryside. It did not help a bit. Impoverished villagers did not have enough land, enough water, and enough food for all. The lucky ones got themselves a fishing boat and sailed all over the place: from Australia to Myanmar and Madagascar, and even to the United States. The rest… Nobody was sure what this crisis ended with, – the news just stopped coming. Some speculated there should be several million survivors; few guessed the remaining India's population at fifty to eighty million. But everybody uniformly agreed the survivors lived in Stone Age by now…

  Soon Kim and Mark located their second database hit: a mix family with a Caucasian husband and an Indomerican wife, plus five kids. At the front of their tiny shack, a plywood shelf with several pairs of cheap rubber sandals indicated the owner's business. The cobbler himself was at work: cutting an old car tire to make soles for yet another pair of flip-flops. Fittingly to the common proverb, not only the cobbler's children, but the entire family – had no shoes whatsoever. Two older kids, about six and seven, dressed in stained shorts, helped their father by holding tools and offering free advice. Three other boys, aged between two and five, did not belong to the workforce yet: completely naked, they built a castle in the road dust. Their mom cooked something conspicuous in an old blackened pot set on top of four bricks. The fuel between the bricks looked like dried cow dung.

  Kim approached the cobbler. “How is the business, Mister Hobson?”

  The man spoke with juicy southern accent. “Good morning to y'all. Business – as usual. Who the hell would come for a pair of 'flops in April? The display's just for fun. My sons enjoy setting and packing the shelf. I don't mind. I'd say, they should learn how to run a proper shop, what'd y'all think?”

  Mark also doubted the display was needed. Evidently, Mr. Hobson worked by the order, or sent his production for sale in the better-off neighborhoods. Here, in the Indomerican community, hardly one person out of ten had sandals or 'flops on.

  The cobbler turned to Mark. “And ya, sir? Also with the Police?”

  “The FBI,” Mark said.

  The man whistled. “The FBI! Ya must be a rich man. Don't ya need a pair of tire sandals? At home? My quality's good, and my prices are – excellent! I give ya a discount! For a pair of sandals – jus' five thousand dollars. Ya'll can't find 'em any cheaper…”

  Mark glanced at the shelf: the sandals were of the common ugly type. “Do you have children's sizes in stock, sir?” he asked. Not like Mark wanted to purchase something right now: his kids all had a pair, and he did not have five thousand dollars in his pocket. The answer being rather predictable, he hoped to cut the sales pitch in polite way.

  “Children's sizes? For ya' kids? Ya' a rich man, as I jus' said! Nos'sir. Not in stock. But for ya, I can do by the order. The small sizes go five hundred cheaper: I sell school sandals for forty-five hundred! Ya'd like to order now?”

  “No, not today. I don't remember the kids' sizes, anyway. This is more like my spouse's responsibility,” Mark lied. The trick worked. In these slums, shoes for children were an exuberant luxury, only ‘rich’ people could afford.

  “We wanted to ask you, sir,” Kim wisely used the pause to insert his question: “do you have a relative, or know of someone named Nicholas Hobson?”

  “Nicholas Hobson? My gran'-granduncle was Nicholas. But he's dead long time. Surely, it's not him y'all after? Nos'sir! Not on my side of the family. Not on her side too. OK, I'll ask anyway…” He turned to his wife, still at the cooking bricks. “Nayna, sweetheart, the officers hear, they're asking if we have Nicholas Hobson for a relative!”

  “No, darling,” the woman replied. Surprisingly, she spoke without a trace of Indian accent. “All my relatives have Bengali names. Even by a nickname, American name, whatever, – I don't know of any Nicholas in my clan.”

  “Ya've so many relatives, sweetheart. If I were ya, I wouldn't be that sure.”

  “Maybe, not ‘Nicholas,’ but just ‘Nick?’ Nick Hobson?” Mark corrected the Deputy's question.

  “If any boys in my family went under ‘Nick,’ they surely wouldn't be Hobsons,” Nayna said. “I'm the only Hobson, and that's only because crazy to fall in love with this dude,” she pointed to her husband.

  Mark did not want to press the questions further. The woman's skin was dark, and the facial features were clearly Indian. Likely, nobody in her family would pass for a Caucasian.

  The cobble
r started again, “As for the shoes for ya' kids…”

  Mark and Kim wished the cobbler good day and rushed away before the sales pitch progressed.

  The next two database hits were also a complete waste of time. The first place was a small tailor shop. As for the cobbler, their business was slow, and they too desperately wanted to sell Mark something. This time, Mark did not mention the FBI at all. Perhaps, his office attire made the locals believe he was rich. Apparently, Deputy Kim was not targeted in the impromptu sales. Goddamn slums! Next time, if I need to do an investigation here, I must borrow a police uniform, Mark decided. After fighting his way through endless T-shirt and pants offerings, Mark finally received the desired information. Yes, the Hobsons lived here – two or three years ago, but since moved on. Where to? They never told us! Need a baseball cap, by chance? And none of them was Nick Hobson, anyway. What about a skirt? Not for you, for your wife, sir?

  At the second location, an old Indomerican woman simply waved her hand: “no Hobson, no Hobson.” She was plainly scared of Kim's uniform and not inclined to talk. So much for my decision to wear the uniform next time, Mark thought. Either way, extracting information here was like pulling a tooth. They abandoned the uncooperative crone and went to ask the neighbors. Few quick questions confirmed that the federal data were too old.

  The next address came from the AFCO – Armed Forces' Career Office – database, which tended to be the most reliable. They approached tiny huts, constructed from dirt bricks and recycled wood and leaning on each other for extra support.

  “I remember the place,” Kim suddenly pointed out, “We investigated a dual rape here, approximately three years ago. Forgot the surnames too, but now it comes back: Hobsons, for sure.”

  “A dual rape?”

  “Yes. Two sisters were raped. Back then, I was just a trainee and didn't learn any details…”

  The little hut stood empty: its door unlocked and nothing of value inside. An elderly neighbor volunteered his opinion: “Great family, but unlucky ones. Yes, unlucky! Girls are working so hard to get the younger brothers through school. Law-obeying too. The boys went to register in AFCO a couple of months ago… Not often we see this now. Everybody runs from the Army, yes! In our time, we all volunteered! I served during the Desert Storm! My first deployment in… Oh, never mind… Anyway, the family you're after. Their dad died four or five years ago. An industrial accident, they said. The following year their mom died too. Cancer. The oldest girl, Amy, was just sixteen, and the second – not sure, eleven or twelve, I guess. And then – boom! Both girls got raped, imagine this! A great family, but unlucky, so bloody unlucky…”

  “Did they have any relative, a young man, served in the Army Corps of Engineers, now a vet with an artificial leg?” Mark asked.

  “A young man, you say? Served in the USACE? Not what I know of… No. If such was here, I would have seen. I sit here all day. Too difficult to move around – arthritis, goddammit… I would recognize a military guy from half a mile away! Back in Kuwait we used to… Oh, never mind… You two are busy, I understand… No, no such a relative, for these unfortunate girls. Sorry, can't help you any better, gentlemen…”