The Bones of Texas City Read online

he Bones of Texas City

  by Regan Wolfrom

  Copyright © Regan Wolfrom 2012

  I don’t have a problem with what I do. I don’t make the laws for the State of Bayou and I certainly don’t force people to break them. If you steal or hoard or badmouth the government, you’ll get your summons and you’d better come in, and you damn well better bring your family in with you. The sentence you’ll get may seem harsh, but it’ll be way worse if you don’t come in.

  If you don’t come in they pass your name on to someone like me. It’s my job to make sure people like you no longer exist.

  ♥♥♥

  You can see from the Gulf Freeway why they should have left Texas City to die. The empty interstate only reaches down to the northwest tip of the city now, to what they still call Exit 16.

  You get off there because there’s nowhere else to go, driving by a mall that never had better days, and more dead buildings after that, old gas stations from when we still had gas and big box grocery stores, where the food was left to rot for so long that there was nothing left to scavenge once people finally realized they ought to. I think it looks exactly like what will happen when the rest of us are gone, our old world picked clean until there’s nothing left but the bones.

  Before the comet came and scared the planet shitless, Texas City was the proud and poisoned heart of that great chemical wasteland that ran from the sea walls of Galveston up to the sludge in the Houston Ship Canal. Texas City was a place with dirty blue-collar jobs, plenty of churches and even more liquor stores, the kind of place you’d end up if you didn’t have anywhere else to go.

  My mother grew up in Texas City, a pretty Latina girl living in a worn but well-kept house on 3rd Street North, going to school, helping out at home, and dreaming of marrying a man who wouldn’t hit her.

  She met my father at the poor man’s Mardi Gras out on the island, a clean-cut Welsh-Irish boy from Pennsylvania who didn’t speak a word of Spanish. She ran away with him three days later. She never went back to Texas City, never returned to the world she’d known all her life; I don’t think there was ever a time when she missed what she’d left back here.

  The only connection she’d kept to that world was her dead brother’s name, the one she passed on to me.

  On good days you can make it all the way into town without putting on a mask. Most days aren’t good days, though, and there were already enough fumes leaking into the car that I had to pull over on the Lowry to hook the filter onto my visor; the little trickle of rain was probably just making things worse, scrubbing the atmosphere for poison and dropping it all down on me. After almost a decade of brownouts and blackouts and almost no maintenance, there are still clouds of noxious chemicals erupting from the pipes and tanks along the industrial canal, as seals and joints finally corrode and break down, surprising the residents with yet another reason to wish they had a way to leave.

  I should be happy my mother made it out almost forty years ago.

  The Vagrancy Report had come in from outside one of the boarded-up tenements on Third Street, a few blocks east and across the old railbed from where my mother came from. Like most tips about vagrants from places like Texas City, it came as a crumpled scrap of paper left on a windshield, an anonymous note for the state troopers that got passed up the chain to us.

  Most vagrants are people who don’t belong here, usually migrants from other states who just aren’t entitled to rations; I feel for those poor bastards, but at the end of the day I ship them to the State Jail in Houston for internment until their governments can come and get them.

  But I wasn’t looking for a migrant, not down in Texas City; that’s more a place you’d run away from. We have no known fugitives south of the Sam Houston, so there’s a pretty good chance the girl I’m looking for shouldn’t even exist.

  I walked around the low-roofed tenements, seeing spots where the boarded up doors had been opened; there are so many empty houses in Texas City that I would have never expected squatters in those crumbling and rat-infested one-story tenements. But the scarcity has changed different places in different ways; down by the muddy waters of Galveston Bay people had started to stick together, gathering together for warmth in the middle while the outlying fingers of the city had withered and died. They were pooling their rations, living and eating together, not yet at the point where they’d be hungry enough to turn on each other.

  I know that’ll start to happen before the end of the year.

  Then it’ll start to be more like the town my mother had talked about, a sad and desperate place, like a hot pot of crawdads clawing like crazy to keep every last one of their buddies trapped in the boil.

  Sometimes I wonder how much her memories of Texas City were tarred by her father, if the anger and abuse he’d let out had been far worse than any of the crap spewing from the refineries and tire plants.

  It’s a wonder she was able to stop that hate from washing over me.

  I tried to corner a couple of kids between the sidewalk and the building, but they saw me coming and managed to scurry off long before I got close enough. No one else would talk to me, either.

  All I had to go on was the note itself, or rather the copy I had on my tablet: Vegrent girl in church. Three boys keeping her.

  I made my way to the nearest church as the sky opened up. By the time I saw the crumbling walls of St. Mary’s the rain was falling heavy and fast, new rivers forming where the broken pavement met the curb. The sun had set and it was getting dark, low-lying clouds covering the new moon, the streetlights long ago forgotten. I switched night vision on to my mask.

  I crouched down behind a large, squat palm, my back against a white-brick building that had likely been abandoned even before the world had ended. I pulled out my service pistol and holstered my tablet.

  I didn’t have to wait for very long.

  A black boy was walking up the sidewalk, almost in a jog, glancing each way as he went. He was young, probably around seventeen, and he was clutching a backpack in one hand. He didn’t look like the kind of kid who carried a gun. I guess he wasn’t too scared of a starving girl.

  The church was still standing, which is more than can be said of many churches these days that never got sanction from the new State Government. Its walls were still white for the most part, topped by a light brown roof that had started to fall. The bell tower stood tall and only a little weathered, the bells long removed. The high and narrow stained glass windows had long been shattered, with only the bottom halves boarded up.

  The rounded front doors had been removed, replaced by plywood affixed with half-pounded nails, with more than one place to crawl through.

  I watched the boy kneel down and push his way through one of the openings.

  I waited for a few minutes more before following inside.

  The ceiling at the entryway was long opened to the elements above, and the interior walls had begun to crumble from weather and neglect. The floor, maybe marble once, was covered in fallen plaster, congealed into yellow-brown paste, and all of the wood trim that remained was rotten with East Texas Wet.

  As I walked I could hear the crumple of leaves and garbage, and I saw the scurry of cockroaches among scattered piles of rodent droppings.

  It was hard to imagine anyone living there.

  I looked through the open doorway where the vestry began, and in that dark and musty room is where I saw her.

  She was about twenty, possibly younger, with long dark hair and tired but pretty skin. She was naked, sitting in the dark on a tattered couch with only a stained white blanket hanging over her as she shivered. As soon as I saw her I knew what she was.

  Someone had wanted her and so they helped her escape.

  O
n her bare neck I saw a locket in the shape of a heart; I was surprised to see that she’d been able to hold on to something.

  The black boy was sitting beside her, his arm wrapped around her as though he had convinced himself that their transaction was now a relationship. I wonder if he honestly believed that she would fall in love with him soon, as long as he kept bringing her scraps from his table.

  Neither of them knew I was there, and I stood silently for a moment, watching them.

  I watched the girl lean her head against his shoulder. I didn’t know why.

  “Stand up,” I said as I aimed my gun at the boy.

  After a few seconds of shock at me being there, both of them rose, the boy placing his hands in the air, the girl clutching at her blanket for cover. She looked terrified; she knew I wasn’t there to rescue her.

  I think they both knew right away what I was, though they couldn’t see much of me outside of the gear, the black armor, the gun, and the mask and visor blocking every bit of my face. It’s not that much different than what the troopers wear, or the supply guards for that matter.

  The gear is usually enough to keep people from trying to fight back.

  “IDs,” I said.

  The boy slowly lowered one hand, reaching into his pocket and bringing out his card. He held it out and I scanned it with my visor: Benny Anderson... legitimate second child of two good citizens from New