Chasing echoes the falle.., p.1
Chasing Echoes (The Fallen Republic Book 3), page 1
Praise for Tarr’s previous novels:
Dogsoldiers—
“Dogsoliders invents a new genre while endorsing an older one; it’s…a desperate mission at the end of civilization, with all the grit and savagery that implies.”
—Stephen Hunter
Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the Bob Lee Swagger series
Bestiarii—
“Grab a handful of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Lost World, stir in a generous helping of Jurassic Park, and season with a sprig of fresh Tom Clancy and you have the makings of Bestiarii. James Tarr takes the reader on a heart-pounding trip through a dystopian landscape, where human enemies are the least of our concerns. Bringing his encyclopedic knowledge of the firearms world to bear, the author grips his audience with finely-observed technical details and highly relatable characters.”
—Iain Harrison
Editor, Recoil magazine
Season One winner of the History Channel TV series Top Shot
Whorl—
“From the first chapter until the last graf, I was intrigued by the plot, engaged by the characters, and surprised by (Tarr’s) breadth of knowledge. In fact, when I finished ‘Whorl’ I complained to Tarr about his leaving me wanting more. Get your own. You can’t borrow mine.”
—The Outdoor Wire
By James Tarr—
The John Phault Series
Failure Drill
Splashback
Splits and Transitions
The Dave Anderson Series
Whorl
Waiting For The Kick
The Echoes of Pangaea Series
Bestiarii
Fire and Bone
The Ghosts of Xicotepec
The Fallen Republic Series
Cascade
The Snarling Sea
Chasing Echoes
Dogsoldiers
Nonfiction—
Carnivore (with Dillard Johnson)
The Fallen Republic
Book Three:
CHASING ECHOES
James Tarr
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, businesses, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
CHASING ECHOES
First publication: August 2023
Copyright 2023 by James Tarr
All rights reserved.
This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without
permission of the copyright owner
Cover design by Damonza
ISBN: 979-8854002967
Printed in the United States of America
“…I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn’t. They kept going, because they were holding on to something. That there is some good in this world, and it’s worth fighting for.”
J.R.R. Tolkien
The Lord of the Rings, Part Two:
The Two Towers
“He no longer watches television and he doesn’t read magazines; he’s completely cut them out of his life because he really does feel that we’re living in some kind of Orwellian nightmare now, and that everything you hear now contributes to turning you into a robot, the new model for the new concentration camp, where the camp has been built by the inmates themselves, and the inmates are the guards, and they have this pride in this thing they’ve built, they’ve built their own prison, and so they exist in a state of schizophrenia where they are both guards and prisoners and as a result they no longer have—having been lobotomized—the capacity to leave the prison they’ve made, or to even see it as a prison.”
My Dinner with André (1981)
Prologue: Trey
“All right, everybody off your asses and get up.” The cop banged on the doors with his baton as he walked down the row of cells. Not one of the new, expandable steel ones, but an old-school wood baton, long as an arm. Trey looked over but didn’t move from the bed. Never be the first one to dance for the man. He was one of four people in a cell meant for two.
“We gettin’ transferred?” someone asked in confusion.
“Headin’ to court,” another of his cellmates said. Trey frowned but didn’t say anything. It was the wrong time of day to be heading to court.
“Stand clear!” they heard, and then the cell door slid open. It was only then that Trey stood up. He moved to the door first and looked out. They’d opened four cell doors, and there were ten guards standing there in helmets, with face shields over black masks, holding long riot batons in both hands. None of the prisoners seemed especially eager to step out, as something seemed off. It was never a good thing when cops were covering their faces, even though the virus shit seemed to be real. Although you could never be too sure. He glanced around. There were cameras all over the St. Louis City Justice Center, but there was no guarantee they were turned on.
“The fuck’s going on?” someone called out.
“You’re getting released,” one of the bulky cops said, his voice muffled from the mask and visor.
“Who?” Trey asked.
“Anyone not in here for murder is getting the boot,” the cop informed them.
Trey shared a disbelieving look with his cellmates. “Says who?” he challenged the cops.
“Says the mayor and DA,” one the cops said, and even though his face was covered by the mask, the hate and distaste were clear in his voice. He was staring at Trey. Several of the cops were. He assumed they knew who he was.
“The fuck?” someone said, but not too loudly. They didn’t want to jinx it.
One of the cops gestured with his big baton. “Everyone get their asses out here so we can get you processed out. This is going to take all fucking day as it is. And put your masks on.”
Forty-five minutes later Trey found himself standing on the sidewalk in front of the ugly gray cube that was the Justice Center, still not sure he wasn’t having a weird, fucked-up dream. He was surrounded by dozens of men in the same frame of mind. When they’d called his name to grab his personal effects, “Trayvon Gardner!” he’d been half-convinced it was some trick, and they’d slap the cuffs on him. Or drag him into a room and beat him to death with those scarred sticks. He had no doubt most of the officers working inside the joint knew he was suspected in the death of a SLMPD officer earlier that year. Suspected, but never charged. Not that that made much difference if someone decided to dispense a little street justice. But, instead, he found himself outside, unexpectedly free, gaping at the world like a fool.
He stood on the corner for about five minutes, just trying to get his mind right. They’d given him his phone back, but he hadn’t called anyone. Hadn’t been ready to talk to anyone. He was just about to start walking when he heard honking, and looked over to see Mickey-Mo’s Monte Carlo. His lieutenant swung around a group of street muscle and pulled up to the curb in front of Trey. Trey got in and Mickey pulled away before anyone else could ask for a ride.
“Yo, man, I heard they was lettin’ people out. Sounded like bullshit, but I rolled down anyway.”
“So what the fuck is going on?” Trey asked his #2 man. “I was in for three days, and no arraignment. None of the guards would tell us shit. I knew something was up, but I didn’t know what. Everything’s weird with this virus. My celly had a phone he bought off a guard but what I could see on there didn’t make much sense.”
“President last week on TV talkin’ bout the terror attack,” Mickey said. “You, me, everybody half-thought it was bullshit, but whatever. They say she shut down the airplanes, but who the fuck flies? Then we saw that dude, remember? Fuckin’ zombie motherfucker half in the window of that salon in J-Lou, practically cuttin’ hisself in half trying to get to those screamin’ bitches.”
Trey barked out a laugh. “Them throwing hair dryers and brushes at that poor fool.” It had been funny, but terrifying at the same time, not that he’d ever admit that. The zombie had spilled a literal bucket of blood down the glass, the bricks of the building, and across the sidewalk, and he didn’t care. Didn’t give two shits. Wasn’t human anymore, more like an animal. Then his guts started coming out. Loops of intestine, spilling onto the sidewalk. And the man stomping on them hisself as he tried to climb through the window. Grinding them into the cement with his shoes. Trey had killed people, and not just that cop, but he’d never seen anything like that.
“And after that, things started getting crazy real quick. Crazy zombies wandrin’ everywhere, lots of people getting sick. Then you got popped—”
“Fucking stupid,” Trey said, shaking his head. He’d just been caught up in the moment. Been in the right place at the right time to see the security glass go down and the guard run off and the looting start at the corner mart, so he’d run in, trying to snag some high-value shit. Scratch-offs or the like. He’d been out the door two minutes later, just in time to run right into three carloads of police—who hadn’t even been responding to the alarm, they’d just been driving by. Talk about bad luck.
“So you didn’t hear about the shutdown?” Mickey asked him.
“No, what shutdown?”
Mickey gestured out the windshield. “Traffic look a little light to you? Maybe not here, but you go to south city, some a’ them white suburbs out west, you’ll see ain’t nobody on the roads. President shut their shit down. Morning after you went in.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The cars, man. All the ne
“When was this?”
“Two days ago, man.”
Trey was having trouble wrapping his head around it. “All the Caddies?”
“No, man, all of them. All the new cars. Caddies, Chevys, Fords, probably all the foreign shit too. Not just Toyotas but the expensive shit, Jags, Range Rovers. Every car that had that satellite shutdown shit, she ordered shut down.”
“All of them?”
“All of ‘em, that’s what I’m sayin’. Like she threw a killswitch. Crost the whole fucking country. They’re sitting in garages and on the street, you turn the key and nothing. Not too many of those out where we is, but still.”
“Them white folks gotta be pissed.”
“You know it. Oh, but it wasn’t just the cars. She shut the buses down too. Lots of people in the hood pissed about that. ‘No mass transportation’ is what they’re saying. Worried about spreading disease. Buses here, but subways in New York, the trains in Chicago, all of it, everywhere. And I hear they’re going to be shutting down the city offices today, maybe tomorrow. All city services, ‘cept for police. Maybe even the courts. I think that’s why they let you all out.”
“Did they all lose their damn minds?”
Mickey-Mo shook his head. “No man, it’s the virus. It’s no joke. Day-Ray’s sister went full zombie, and I know two brothers whose moms up and died from it. Lots of people sick.”
He was pretty sure one of his cellmates had been sick as well, snifflin’ and wiping his nose, but it could have just been a cold. It was that time of year. “Well, I ain’t sick. And I ain’t dead.
“Miss Willie done passed.”
“Yeah? Shit.” Wilma Williams had been in the neighborhood forever. Taught grade school for close to fifty years, and been active in the church before and after. Church, soup kitchens, Habitat for Humanity…Trey was pretty sure Heaven was a sucker’s bet, but if it existed, Miss Willie was up there, looking down, hands on her hips, tsking and shaking her head.
Mickey had been working his way north and west through the city streets. He turned a corner, and before they even had a chance to process the scene in front of them a bullet punched through the center of the Monte Carlo’s windshield. Mickey stomped on the brakes with a yelp, and both men ducked, then looked up, peering over the dash.
There was a cop car, halfway up the block and on the opposite side of the street. The doors were open, and cops were fighting with people in front of the car in the street. Two cops, and three people. Three zombies. One of the cops was a short, chubby chick, and she had her pistol out, Trey saw, waving it around, but one of the zombies had his teeth sunk into her arm. She fired another shot, this one going up into the air, as her partner, punching, went down under two zombies. Screaming, terrified, she managed to switch the pistol to her other hand, left hand, and started blasting, firing wildly, into the zombie biting her. After about six shots the zombie finally dropped, but its teeth were still sunk into her arm and it pulled her down to her knees. She shot it in the face and it fell off her, then one of the other zombies atop her partner noticed her on the ground and leapt at her, his face and shirt covered in blood. The female cop fired until her gun was empty, the bullets going everywhere as the zombie bit and clawed and punched. Thirty seconds after the shooting stopped the one zombie still moving sat up, looked around dazedly, then keeled over sideways.
“You see that shit?” Mickey-Mo said in awe.
“Roll up there, closer,” Trey told him.
“Aw, man, that bitch put a bullet through my window,” Mickey complained, reaching up to stick a fingertip through the hole in the glass. But he took his foot off the brake and the Monte Carlo rolled forward slowly, until they were even with the police car on the opposite side of the street. “Shit, they all dead?” Mickey asked.
Trey stared at the bodies for a long few seconds. None of them were moving. He looked around, up and down the street. Nobody was nearby, everyone had cleared out as soon as the shooting started. “Come on,” he told Mickey, and jumped out of the car.
“What we doin’?” Mickey asked, but he followed dutifully.
Trey stood over the pile of bodies and stared. There was blood everywhere. Half the lady cop’s face had been chewed off, her eyeball bulging. Her one arm had been bitten down to the bone. The other cop, his neck looked like he’d been attacked by a pit bull. The zombies had been shot to shit. Everyone was covered in blood. There were pools of bright red under them, offering distorted, nightmarish reflections of the cloudy morning sky.
Trey pried the pistol, a big Beretta, out of the dead copchick’s hand, but he saw the slide was locked back. It was empty. He dug around on her vest, and found the pouches for spare magazines. He ignored the bright yellow Taser gun.
“Trey?” Mickey asked.
“Grab his pistol, and his spare mags.” He would have loved to take their bulletproof vests, too, but didn’t think they had the time. Shit, forget their vests, he wanted to take their car. Trey stuck the cop’s gun in his waistband, shoved the spare magazines into a pocket, and then looked into the idling cop car.
He leaned in, and came back out with a pump shotgun. The SLMPD SWAT Team officers had rifles, M4s and G36s—Trey had started learning about guns, figuring it was a smart move—but the regular street cops only had shotguns. He and Mickey ran back to the Monte, dove in, and Mickey burned rubber tearing ass out of there.
“Holy shit, man, there was so much blood you could smell it,” Mickey said.
“Yeah,” Trey said. His heart was pounding. He checked his mirror, then looked over his shoulder out the back window, but nobody was chasing them. He settled back in the seat. He pulled the empty magazine out of the gun, fished a loaded one out of his pocket, and slid it into the pistol. The slide release on the big Beretta was obvious, and when he pushed on it the slide shot forward with a satisfying metallic snick. As Mickey drove he noticed how many of the commercial buildings they were passing had been looted. Then they passed nearly an entire block of small businesses which had been burned down to the bare walls. His eyes opened wide as they passed the blackened skeleton of a police car sitting in the middle of the street. It was still smoking, and he could smell the burned plastic and rubber as they passed. He turned his head to watch it as they went by. “Damn, what the hell happened around here?” He’d been thinking about stuffing the pistol under the seat, but instead kept it in his hand, in his lap.
“I tol’ you man, it’s been lit. Zombies and looting and people just not givin’ a fuck. Settlin’ old scores, startin’ new ones. Cops are hardly rolling out on anything, and if they do it’s three, four, five cars ‘a them. Cuz if they don’t get shot at, zombies come runnin’ straight at ‘em and the lights and sirens, try to eat they faces, don’t care if they got guns, don’t care about nuthin’. I heard tell the cops aren’t doin’ shit. I mean not answering 911 most of the time, and only ever showing up if somebody dropped bodies, and maybe not even then. I think they don’t plan on doin’ shit until the National Guard shows up. Mayor called I guess, and we’re supposed to get some. Soldiers. Keep the peace. Help with the curfew. Next day or two.”
Trey grunted and studied the streets as they roared north. And thought.
There’d been serious gang warfare in St. Louis since long before any of the current participants had even been born. Some of the modern gangs could be traced back to the 1950s. The Bloods and Crips had moved in in the eighties and most of the city was filled with their various factions. The South Side was mostly white, and what gangs you could find there were Mexican—Surenos MS-13 and the like, although there were a few Haitians and Bosnians trying to make moves.
