more?”
“I don't know,” Langley said. “We've been emailing them all morning and haven't gotten a response yet.”
“Jesus,” the officer said. I was thinking the same thing.
Langley said, “We can't even bring in stuff from other centers. Everybody got shorted.”
That sent a chill through me. I went outside and made my way to the front of the center. There I saw the mass confusion of an angry crowd of at least fifteen hundred people. Streams of people were coming into the lot from the street. Chants were starting up here and there. They were feeding off each other's anger, bearing down on our position at the gates to the Food Distribution Center. The noise was deafening.
The Bandera Road Center was in the shell of an abandoned HEB, San Antonio's dominate grocery store chain before the quarantine. Most of the HEBs were gutted by looters in the first few weeks of the quarantine, and this one, with its boarded up windows and ring of concrete barriers around the front doors, looked nothing like the proud red and white store it had once been.
The parking lot was huge, though it didn't seem so right then with all those people crowding it. And more were coming in from every side even as I stood there. I shook my head in disbelief.
Earlier, when Chunk and I drove into the lot, most of those people were still in line, though that system quickly broke down, the crowd pressing inward on the half circle of concrete barriers that separated us from them.
“Chunk,” I said.
“Stay close,” he said.
A dozen SWAT officers stepped up to the concrete barriers, the rest of us in a line behind them, shoulder to shoulder with our batons in both hands. The SWAT guys were armed with a tommy gun-looking contraption called a pepper ball gun. The pepper balls looked like gumballs, only each one was loaded with oleocapsicum resin- pepper spray. Mean stuff. Police departments all over the world used it to disperse large crowds like this one. But the only time I had ever seen it used first hand was on gang fights. I couldn't believe they were about to use it on regular civilians.
A man in khaki slacks and a gray polo shirt carried a bull horn up to a platform in front of the crowd.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, though even with the bullhorn's amplification it was hard to hear him over the noise of the crowd. “Ladies and gentlemen, please,” he said. “My name is Bob Prentice with the Metropolitan Health District.”
Maybe he thought telling them he was with the MHD would buy him some credibility with the crowd, but he was wrong. Rather than quiet down, the people in the front started shouting questions up at him, and the urgency of their demands seemed to completely derail him.
“Ladies and gentlemen, please,” he said. “More food is on the way.”
A sea of voices shouted him down. “When? How much?”
“You all need to return to your homes,” he said. “Another drop will come later this evening. Please return to your homes and wait there.”
That didn't even come close to mollifying the crowd, and as I remembered what I'd overheard Jennifer Langley saying in the women's locker room, I couldn't say I blamed them for being so upset. They were being lied to, and they knew it.
A panic erupted somewhere in the crowd and spread. It was like somebody had dropped a stone into a pool of water and I was watching the ripples spread from that. The energy of that panic shot outwards and I saw people pushing each other, some running for the edges of the crowd and the exits, others violent out of desperation. They all pushed toward the concrete barriers.
I drew a breath in between my teeth.
“Easy,” Chunk said.
The crowd broke on the barriers like a wave.
Prentice yelled into his bullhorn for calm, but no one listened.
Only Treanor seemed to keep his composure. He marched down the line, barking orders at the SWAT officers, all of them raising their pepper ball guns to their hips.
“Fire.”
The SWAT guys started firing, the thump thump thump of the pepper ball guns reminding me of those deposit capsules being sucked through the overhead tubes at the drive-thru of a bank.
Orange splotches the size of dinner plates appeared on the chests and shoulders and backs of the people closest to the barriers, and then people started falling. Smoke filled the air, and even with the protection of my gas mask I could feel a slight burn in my sinuses from the pepper spray.
Earlier, there had been anger and desperation, but now there was fear and panic and pain. People ran every which way trying to escape the burning in their lungs, and I'm sure a few of them were trampled in the exodus.
Treanor ordered the SWAT officers over the wall, and they immediately jumped the barrier, directing their fire into wide arcs over the crowd.
At first it didn't look to me like they were aiming their shots, but then I realized what they were doing. They were directing their fire at areas away from the exits, and when the people ran from the smoking corners of the lot where the shots landed, they found themselves at the exits, where they could flee to the streets and the neighborhoods beyond.
Treanor stood on top of the wall and yelled for the rest of us to come over.
We did. We formed a skirmish line, and with our shields and our sticks we forced the few remaining stragglers to run for the gates.
My eyes watered, as much from the pepper spray smoke in the air as from pure, blinding fear. My head was soaked with sweat. It ran down my face and the back of my neck. My stomach had turned into knots.
Treanor was still yelling-hadn't stopped yelling since all this began-and I wondered if the man wasn't secretly enjoying this. He was like some little brass general, sending the troops in to beat some ass.
“This is us,” Chunk said as Treanor's shouts drew closer to us.
Treanor read off a list of ten names that included mine and Chunk's. “Those names I just called will secure the west entrance to the lot,” he said, the west entrance being the main one off Bandera Road. “Establish your perimeter and lock it down tight.”
We advanced on the west entrance and set up a defensive line across the driveway. I looked down the row, but I couldn't tell who anybody was behind their riot gear. I did get the sense that most of them were as scared as I was, which didn't make me feel any better about the situation.
A long white wall stretched along the roadway to my right, and I could see Chunk eyeing it suspiciously, like it might prove to be a problem later on. Across the street was an abandoned building that had once been a pawn shop, now without any front windows, its cinder block walls pocked with old bullet holes. Beyond that was a long row of store fronts and a strip mall. All the shops were closed now, and damaged by looters.
Behind the store fronts was a tall stand of oaks, and through the occasional gap in the foliage I could see the roof of a house or two.
People walked through the scene, though they gave us a wide berth, for which I was grateful. I could still feel the tension in the air. Those people, all of them, were on the edge of something, their patience stretched too far.
Not for the first time I wondered what the outside world must think of us. Did we still seem like Americans to them, fighting in the streets, eating the nation's charity, our buildings crumbling, our streets still littered with corpses in places? It didn't look like America to me.
We stood there in the glare of the midday sun, the temperature mounting beyond the ninety degree mark and everyone's nerves becoming more and more frayed as the day marched on. People yelled at us, raised their fists and shook them in defiance. A few threw stones.
I was soaked through with sweat, every part of me sticky, my underarms and my crotch feeling like a swamp, and I was continually shutting my eyes, hard, to clear them of runoff sweat.
I was wondering how long I'd have to stand there when an explosion nearly knocked me off my feet.
The building across the street had been hit with some kind of homemade bomb. It was a sloppy job, but powerful. Dust and bits of rock crowded the air, and soon flames and smoke roiled upward.
