Disenchantment 27

*****

 

 

 

 

“You’re not going to worry about any of your missing persons’ cases anymore for the foreseeable future. If you were at roll call yesterday, or any other briefing recently, you would know that,” said Captain Morgan. The man’s name was humorous for most people upon first hearing it, due to being the same name as a popular brand of rum, and for those in the know about history, a once-upon-a-time Welsh privateer.

 

As Morgan had worked his way up through the ranks in the police force, he caught some shit for it. However, he had always said, “It may be Detective Morgan,” or, “It may be Lieutenant Morgan now, but you know what rank is coming.” And indeed it had come.

 

“Yeah, I could have guessed that. You know, you’ve had me doing other stuff already, Captain. I was out until 3:00 am last night doing crowd control.” Hornblende was tired, and it showed on his face, in his mannerisms, his voice.

 

“Yeah, the whole damn city is crowd control.”

 

“So, can I do homicide?”

 

“Nope, homicide is on homicide, everyone else, including you, is on crowd control.”

 

“Damn... Captain, I put in the time, the years.”

 

“Yeah, so has everyone else. This city is falling apart. We need boots on the ground out there. You’re not the only one. The mayor has decided that the fire department, the volunteer or reserve fire department, whatever they’re called, and anyone else that we can get our hands on is now part of the police department, and we are all on crowd control. I’ve asked for state help, federal help, county help from the sheriff’s department and it’s not coming. Other areas are much worse than us. We’ve given up doing anything but crowd control and homicide cases. We are starting to get a number of those, and good luck finding suspects.

 

“And, just so you know, we are doing shifts of eighteen hours on and twelve hours off, for now. It could get worse.”

 

“I’ve never been averse to working hard, Captain.”

 

“Yeah, you’re a good man, Hornblende. However, people like you are few and far between.”

 

“Anything else?”

 

“Several other things. We’re responding to violent crimes in progress only. After the fact, any crime other than murder we don’t have the resources to investigate at present. Do you know how disheartening it is to have to have your officers hang up on concerned citizens if they don’t take the hint immediately? It’s horrible.”

 

Morgan seemed to get lost within his own thoughts for a moment before he spoke again. “You ever see any combat?” he asked Hornblende.

 

“No sir, I never served in the military.”

 

“It’s weird, sometimes surreal. I was in Desert Storm, and my old man served in Vietnam. We haven’t had a war on our own soil for ages, but we sure like to jump into other people’s shit. I had this talk with my father, before he passed. It’s the civilians. Some of them just go on with their lives like nothing is happening. They still go to work, gather in groups to socialize. I would always say to myself: What the fuck? Don’t they know that shit could hit the fan at any minute? Why are they so casually walking the streets when they could get hit by a bullet at any second? I guess Vietnam was much worse than Desert Storm, of course. But I see the same shit out there now, in our streets.

 

“People just doing their shit, ignoring the chaos around them. Bars are still open. Some businesses are still operating as though nothing is going on. It’s not everyone, but it is a large section of them that don’t seem to know that bullets can start flying at any second. It’s crazy. It makes me appreciate those who are constantly calling to report wandering bands of homeless in their neighborhoods. They are being overly dramatic, but at least they know something is wrong. People need to get their shit together.”

 

“Are you saying we’re at war?” asked Hornblende.

 

“No, this is far worse.

 

“Of course, there is much else: Some countries no longer exist. Sections of our own country are under water. A good portion of Florida is gone. Seattle, New York, Charleston, Honolulu, fucking New Orleans is just plain gone now. Shit, half of China is flooded. But as far as you’re concerned, we are starting a curfew tonight. We don’t even have the manpower to enforce it.”

 

“A curfew? Why? Three-quarters of the people here don’t have a home to stay in. What about them?”

 

“It’s more for the residents. We keep the interlopers off the streets, hopefully in shelters or at least parking lots that are becoming half-ass shelters, and we keep the citizens home.”

 

“So, the homeless aren’t citizens?”

 

“Not of my city, they’re not. In my city they are potential looters and murderers and rapists. Quit your bleeding heart horseshit, Hornblende. We’ve got to keep order here.”

 

“Do we have the capabilities of maintaining a curfew?”

 

“No, it seems we don’t. Look, we’re hoping that people willingly follow the rules of a curfew. If they see enough boys in blue, or whatever color the fire department wears, they might just follow the rules.”

 

“And if they don’t?”

 

“We’re fucked.”

 

 

 

 

*****

 

 

 

 

They had never wanted to let him out, so he let himself out. It was actually quite easy. Chaos had always been on his side throughout his life. It was part of the reason he was still alive. He knew how to take advantage of it when it happened. When the waters came to the fancy resort-style institution in which he was kept, they were too quick to remove the patients and Andrew Timothy Fargle was easily able to just walk right off the premises. Chaos was a good friend of his.

 

Schizophrenia, they had told him was what he had, paranoid schizophrenia. People say things all the time, but it doesn’t make those things true. Jojo was true, when he talked to him. Why could he possibly hear Jojo if he wasn’t real? Doctors were full of all sorts of nonsense. They tried to tell him that Jojo was part of his illness, something that was only in his mind, wasn’t real, but Andy knew he was real. It was all very simple really, yet the shrinks persisted in their nonsense that Andy pretended to go along with.

 

He had had a Filipina nanny when he was a child. At the age of five, he had attacked her with a knife. Jojo had explained to him that she was evil, she was bad, was going to hurt him and his parents. Being very young, he hadn’t done much damage to her. It did scare her enough to quit, and that was fine with Andy. When he was seven years old, he had attacked a fellow child in the classroom, right in front of the teacher, unprovoked they had said. The kid was of Japanese descent. It was the eyes. Jojo told him that the eyes were evil.

 

He didn’t kill the first demon until he was twelve. They were demons, evil beings masquerading as humans, but easy to spot. It was the eyes. They could behave like humans, but never fully pass. His mother had taken him and his two siblings to a pizza place. A group of college students were there, ordering pitcher after pitcher of beer. They were seemingly there long before Jojo’s family had arrived, drinking away the day, being loud and boisterous, but not so much so that they had bothered the other customers much. By the time Andy’s family was ready to go, only three remained. A Korean girl had laid her head on the table and fallen asleep after having had too much to drink. The two others at the table were a new couple and not interested in much going on around them, the alcohol having had given them both only eyes and ears solely for each other. Andy had merely walked up, grabbed the empty glass pitcher that had recently held beer, and brought it crashing down on the girl’s temple. That was enough. She was hospitalized for three days before death came, but never regained consciousness.

 

After that, Andy had to go away for a while. His father had only ever visited once. Even then he seemed distracted and nervous, never much caring for the paternal role, always off on business trips, or as he would say, putting a roof over his family’s head. It was a very nice roof and Andy didn’t really care if his father visited or not as he barely knew him. His mother was a different story entirely. She would come daily, then weekly, then monthly. Around the time that he turned eighteen, she had stopped coming altogether. That upset him. She would cry at first when visiting, but over the years becoming more cold and distant. Andy himself wasn’t much of a talker, only ever volunteering information when asked, and even then only answering the way he thought that others wanted him to answer, keeping his true self, and Jojo, hidden.

 

They had tried various medications, and different ways to combine them over the years. He was honest with the doctors initially, until Jojo almost disappeared. He had become fainter and fainter and talked less and less often until one day he had stopped communicating with Andy altogether. That scared Andy, so he lied to the doctor’s telling them Jojo was louder and more demanding than before. When they switched his medication, and Jojo returned, he claimed that Jojo had gone. The psychotherapy consisted of him lying and agreeing that Asian people weren’t evil. He was quite a good liar, but still wasn’t allowed out until the age of twenty-five.

 

His parents were wealthy and were able to pay for an extraordinarily nice facility that allowed him to experience the outside world, while still living in a very controlled setting, a halfway house of sorts. The courts agreed that he was not a threat to society as long as he stayed on his medication. His mother visited once when he was in the facility, mostly just to sign him up and fill out paperwork, but he never saw his father again.

 

He remained calm and collected for the most part, until he was allowed to go out on his own for periods of time, at first an hour, then two, then three. There were other people at the facility and one of them was Laotian. Andy feigned friendship with him despite the constant lectures from Jojo. He waited and bided his time. Finally, he was allowed to get a job and became a groundskeeper for a local park through an outreach program concerned with rehabilitating people with mental illnesses.

 

That was what Andy was waiting for. With the job, he was allowed to be away from the facility unsupervised for a solid ten-hour block of time. He faithfully did his job for over three weeks, until they stopped watching him so thoroughly, then he took a day off, and had ten hours to hunt down demons. He was able to kill three people on the outside of the facility that day. The last girl, a sixteen-year-old of Chinese descent, he had also raped. He was a virgin at the time and just wanted to experience sex. He figured that she was a demon anyway, so it wasn’t like he raped a real person. He looked at it more like experimental masturbation. He had pictured being able to wipe out dozens that day, and was disappointed with only three. It took a lot more energy than he had thought. He did manage to get back to the facility and slit the throat of his Laotian housemate, before the police caught up with him.

 

At his trial, he was sentenced to another mental health facility, and not jail. Still, it had to be maximum security. His parents were able to afford the prestigious, ocean-side establishment. The judge also made it clear that he was never to be allowed out again. So, Andy waited and bided his time. Then the oceans rose. Jojo claimed it was because there were too many demons in the world and Andy needed to reduce their numbers for the waters to recede. As it happened, many of the employees quit, most without notice, and when it came time to move the patients, it was almost too easy for Andy to just walk off into the sunset.

 

He had burglarized and begged in order to eat and even managed to take out a demon before he found himself in Santa Clarita on a hot February night. It was easy to just move with large groups of newly nomadic people and he had never drawn much attention to himself. He knew, in the end, he would do something rash and perhaps get caught again, and he figured it was this night. Jojo was getting more and more boisterous.

 

“We need to bring the water level down, Andy!” Jojo screamed at him.

 

“I know.” While in the various installations he was kept, he would talk to Jojo in his mind, but when out and about, he preferred to answer him aloud.

 

“Every single one you get brings the water level down a solid foot.”

 

“Fine, I’ll do another one tonight.” He was wandering along Interstate 5. Traffic was at a complete standstill. In days past, it was impossible to actually walk along an interstate. Those days were over as cops had much more serious things to do. The worst-case scenario was that he was told to get off the freeway, but usually, they just ignored him.

 

“There’s one,” said Jojo.

 

Andy looked, and indeed there was. She was in a smaller white Toyota, Andy didn’t know enough about cars to have any idea what the model was. She was young, and pretty, maybe about twenty. On the four-lane highway, she was three lanes away from him, as he walked along the shoulder.

 

He realized then that there were also a group of cops and firefighters about fifty feet up the road. They were near an exit and seemed to be herding people walking along the freeway off of it. Andy hesitated.

 

“Do it,” said Jojo

 

“The cops are right there.”

 

“You can do it. Be quick. You will be partially blocked from their view if you open the driver’s side door.”

 

That was true, it seemed to Andy. He started walking through the cars to get to the Toyota, demon car. As he walked, he noticed one of the men looking at him, a black guy. He began to hesitate again.

 

“Do it. You can get it done before they get to you.”

 

Forgetting that his initial concern was getting caught and not merely finishing the kill, before caught, he walked around the car to the driver’s side. Looking in, he noticed that the car was locked.

 

“Hey!” yelled the black cop, motioning for Andy to come toward him.

 

“Do it!” yelled Jojo.

 

Andy wasn’t sure how to proceed with the woman’s door locked. The black cop began walking toward him.

 

Then a solution presented itself. The woman, who seemed to be talking on her cell phone, rolled down the window.

 

 

 

 

*****