Sleepless. Part 3

"Anyway, all the Pentosan really does is keep you alive. You're still sleepless, still in pain. Some sleepless have been given ma.s.sive doses of Quina -crine and recovered. Briefly. Then they get worse than before. Palsies. Liver failure."

He shrugged again.

"Valium, stuff like that, mostly it's people grabbing at whatever makes them feel better for an hour or two."

Hounds was tapping the brakes, slowing as they approached the line of cars before the Los Angeles River checkpoint.

"How you know all that s.h.i.+t?"

Again Park shrugged.

"I sell drugs."

"s.h.i.+t."

Hounds wiped sweat from his forehead.

"My f.u.c.king mother-in-law, she's with us. Sleepless for a couple months now. b.i.t.c.h is getting bad. f.u.c.king insufferable. Stumbling around all f.u.c.king hours. Talking s.h.i.+t all the time. Freaking out the kids. Why's Grandma calling me Billy, Daddy? Try explaining to a kid, Well, honey, it's cuz Granny's thalamus is being eaten away by misfolded proteins and she's having waking dreams that are more like f.u.c.king nightmares and she doesn't know where the h.e.l.l she is and she thinks you're her son who was actually a miscarriage she had in high school when she was fifteen. I could give her ten Valium and a bottle of Zinfandel and she'd chill out; I'd f.u.c.king kiss you that worked."

Park didn't say anything.

Hounds held out his hand.

"f.u.c.k it, give me the f.u.c.king things."

His partner pa.s.sed him the bottle of Valium.

"Yeah, you should give it a try. Got nothing to lose."

Hounds pocketed the pills.

Park looked away, and Hounds caught it in the rearview.

"What the f.u.c.k? This a problem for you, a.s.shole?"

Park didn't say anything, just watched the crowd around the Red Cross truck start to roil as people realized there weren't enough bags of rice to go around.

Hounds drove.

"Worst can happen to the old lady is she can die."

He rubbed the back of his neck.

"f.u.c.king real worst thing is that she could live another six months. Jesus. I get it, I go sleepless, I'm eating the bullet. Soon as I know it's for real, I'm out. My wife's mom, she gave us the money to put the down on our first place. Found out her daughter was marrying a black guy, she started reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X. I mean, that was bulls.h.i.+t, but I appreciated the thought. Now? Watching that, watching someone rot in front of you? I thought I could get my wife to go along, I'd put the bullet in her brain. And swear to G.o.d, she'd f.u.c.king love me for it. Aw, this f.u.c.king s.h.i.+t, what now?"

A SWAT in full body armor, visored Kevlar helmet, a belt of 5.56-mm draped over his shoulder feeding the M249 Squad Auto in his arms, waved them to the side.

Hounds stuck his head out the window.

"What the f.u.c.k? We got a perp in here."

The SWAT walked over, s.h.i.+fting the machine gun's b.u.t.t to his hip and pulling off his helmet.

"Easy, man, just trying to cut you through the line. Roll up here on the side."

He pointed at the empty traffic lane, bordered by spools of razor wire, kept clear for military and emergency traffic.

Hounds nodded.

"Thanks, G, my bad with the att.i.tude. Just someone up the chain put something in my captain's a.s.s and we spent the day tracking down some f.u.c.king dealer."

The SWAT set his helmet on the roof of the car, looked in the back at Park.

"Dreamer?"

Hounds grunted.

"Right, you'd think that, make us roll for this s.h.i.+t when there's real police work to do. f.u.c.king recreationals is what he's selling."

The SWAT ran a hand over the top of his crew cut, a fine spray of sweat getting caught in the halogen glow of the generator-driven spots lighting the checkpoint.

"Any ups? I'm about to fall over here."

Kleiner showed the remaining bottle and Baggie.

"Demerol and X."

The SWAT stuck out his hand.

"Hit me with a couple tabs of X. Might keep me from shooting some of these f.u.c.king spics."

Kleiner poured some pills into the outstretched hand.

"What's the go-down?"

The SWAT shook two of the pills into his mouth and started to chew, tucking the others into a pouch on his tac belt.

"Avenues are burying one of their warlords. Guy started his Impala the other day and it blew up under him. f.u.c.king Cyprus Park psychos. Anyway, funeral cortege is gonna roll at midnight tonight, and they want to run it right through Cyprus Park turf and over to Forest Lawn. Send some kind of I-don't-know-what-the-f.u.c.k message."

Hounds pointed east.

"f.u.c.k that. Tell them no f.u.c.king way. Blockade the street."

The SWAT nodded.

"Where you out of?"

Hounds took off his sungla.s.ses.

"West Bureau, Hollywood Community. Something to say?"

The SWAT held up a hand.

"Nothing to say, police is police. But we got a treaty on with Avenues right now. They're doing neighborhood enforcement east of San Fernando. All it really means is we can hit their turf without worrying too much about taking fire. But we come down on them about how they bury their dead? Next thing you know, cop can't come out from behind the wire without a sniper taking potshots, getting shrapneled by a garbage can IED."

Hounds put his shades back on.

"Yeah, I get it. Keep some of the sc.u.mbags on our side while we deal with the worse sc.u.mbags."

The SWAT picked up his helmet.

"Hey, that's a nice way of looking at it, but a little optimistic from where I am."

He put on his helmet and pointed at the pedestrian bridge that crossed Los Feliz Boulevard where it jumped over the bone-dry bed of the Los Angeles River.

"See that?"

They could see it.

Hanging from the bridge, pinned in the light from one of the checkpoint halogens, a corpse, arms bound behind its back, skin blackened by fire, dangling by a chain that snaked down to what was left of its neck.

"That's a sixteen-year-old cousin of the Cyprus Park warlord. Avenues hung him up there this morning. Checkpoint commander, he said leave it up. Said he ain't gonna f.u.c.king antagonize Avenues as long as this is his post. Says he gives a f.u.c.k, just wants to stop watching his officers die. So you tell me."

He buckled the chin strap of his helmet.

"Who's dealing with whose sc.u.mbags over here? Cuz I don't f.u.c.king know."

"What do those f.u.c.king fas.h.i.+on plates have to do with it?"

Hounds pointed at a small group of men and women dressed in fitted black short-sleeve fatigues and Dragon Skin armor, Masada a.s.sault rifles at the ready, cl.u.s.tered around two armored Saab 9-7X SUVs with swooping white door stickers that matched the patches on their shoulders.

The SWAT spit.

"Thousand Storks? They got f.u.c.k all to do with it. Waiting here to escort some a.s.sholes from city hall on a tour of Gla.s.sell Park. Local council-woman wants to show how the situation has been normalized. f.u.c.king s...o...b..aters will end up all over the evening news, speeding around, jumping out of their vehicles, securing perimeters and s.h.i.+t. Everyone will think they really deserve those huge security contracts. Tape won't show the three guns.h.i.+ps they got hovering overhead giving cover. Know why they won't shoot that? Because a hovering helicopter isn't good TV. f.u.c.k this s.h.i.+t."

The SWAT snapped his visor down and waved to the side of the road.

"Pull on in here, I'll move the wire."

Hounds rolled slowly forward as the SWAT carefully pulled aside one of the corkscrews of wire, giving the cop a nod as they accelerated toward the checkpoint.

"That f.u.c.king guy and this duty he's on, I got one thing to say about that guy."

He nodded to himself.

"Better him than me, man. Better him than me."

Park was looking out the right side window, down at the I-5.

Some stretches were still entirely open. This one, directly under a checkpoint, was sealed by barricades of abandoned cars a quarter mile to the north and the south. From what Park heard, the middle sections of the barricades would be rigged with charges to blow the cars out of the way if a military or law enforcement column needed to pa.s.s. Through most of the length of the 5, from the Mexican to the Canadian borders, a lane was supposed to be kept open for military traffic, but there were long unpoliced stretches of the interstate where road gangs set tariffs, using the lane to cruise north and south, pulling motorists over and siphoning their gas. Down here that kind of thing wasn't much of a worry. There was the more basic worry regarding the many choke points where abandoned cars had acc.u.mulated like plaque in an artery.

Like the plaques left behind on a sleepless brain, blocking its normal function, leading it to Baroque variations on its usual course of business.

Park thought about all these accretions of debris, within the body and without, driving it to more bizarre extremes. The Crown Vic rolled to a stop at the checkpoint, and he looked up at the hanged man twisting slightly to and fro in a hot shaft of air rising from the generators.

The cops in the front seat showed ID and badges to the cops manning the checkpoint, showed the ID they'd taken off Park, and were waved along with specific instructions about how to approach Silverlake Station.

Coming off the overpa.s.s, the bed of the Los Angeles River behind them, they pa.s.sed the Los Feliz Golf Course, only slightly more brown now than it had been before severe water rationing became mandatory.

The boulevard here was all but empty. The bars and restaurants that had been outposts of East Side gentrification were gated, boarded up, or burned out. A few sleepless walking aimlessly, scratching their heads, rubbing their eyes, talking to themselves. Some Griffith Park refugees had managed to cross the I-5 and the river below the checkpoint and were scavenging in the abandoned storefronts. Not that there was much left. But once the boulevard dipped under the railroad just past Seneca, the blocks started to repopulate.

Heavily armed vatos, favoring AR15s and Tec 9s, were on every street corner. Sandbags lined the edges of rooftops, gun barrels peeking out from behind. Taco trucks and tamale carts were at the curbs, vendors sporting holstered sidearms. Kids played in the street, running in and out of the night traffic, young mothers calling to them in Chicano Spanish. Older men sat at tables on the sidewalks, playing cards or dominoes.

Hounds pulled his Glock from its holster and tucked it between his thighs.

"I find out who fingered us for this f.u.c.king detail, I'm gonna get his home address, come back here, and pay one of these vatos twenty bucks to go burn his house down with him and his family inside. I mean, look at this s.h.i.+t. Like another f.u.c.king country. What the f.u.c.k."

Kleiner stuck one of Park's Demerols between his lips.

"Be like this in the Fairfax pretty soon. The Jews, they're starting to put up sawhorses at the ends of their blocks. Yarmulkes and Uzis. Gonna change the name to Little Israel any day now."

They drove past a dropped 1980 Chevy Stepside, a man perched on the fender, leather holsters crossed over his chest Pancho Villa style, mad d.o.g.g.i.ng them.

Hounds gritted his teeth.

"Give me the eye. Find your a.s.s west of the Five, break your a.s.s down you look at me like that. f.u.c.king savages over here. G.o.dd.a.m.n jungle. Show me now, show me the guy who thinks building a border fence would have been a bad idea, and let me make that a.s.shole run naked through this s.h.i.+t."

Down San Fernando, just before Treadwell, they came to the concrete anti-car bomb barriers that closed the street around Silverlake Station. Freshly spray-painted across one of the barriers, over the tangle of tags, a new graffito: The retrofitted minigun on a Stryker infantry fighting vehicle turned and trained its cl.u.s.ter of barrels on the Crown Vic, an amplified voice blaring.

"Welcome to Silverlake Station. Get out of the f.u.c.king car with your hands in view and get your f.u.c.king face on the pavement."

Hounds killed the engine.

"f.u.c.king jungle."

DRIVING DOWN SKID Row had always been a prospect not unlike visiting the set of a George Romero movie. But with the advent of the sleepless prion, that effect had started to envelop the entire city. The sidewalks, malls, movie theaters, tourist attractions, beaches, and restaurants becoming populated with stiff-necked, shuffling sleepless.

Zombie jokes were common. Gallows humor being about all the situation made room for.

Movies themselves had not stopped shooting. Certainly production had been scaled back, and more than one studio had gone under or, more accurately, been consumed whole by somewhat heartier compet.i.tors, but even as energy costs spiked, even as all cities, most suburbs, and many rural areas, experienced outbreaks of organized violence, even as the standing army was deployed with obvious permanence to the oil fields in Alaska, Iraq, Iran, Venezuela, and Brazil, even as the draft was reinstated and the gears of the economy audibly snapped their teeth and ground to a squealing halt, even as the drought extended and crops withered, even as the ice caps melted and coastal waters rose, people still liked a good picture.

The fact of millions of sleepless wandering about trying to fill the dark hours meant an expansion of one market, even as it contracted in other areas.

Sleepless provided other new opportunities as well.

I'd been told by a client about an independent horror movie he was helping to finance. A zombie picture. The zombies played almost exclusively by sleepless extras.

A new standard in zombie verisimilitude.