Scorched Earth

or

20 Cigarettes.


The bug bit me.
Let's see where this goes.


Prologue

In ordinary times, in an ordinary place, an attentive police officer would have pulled the vehicle over long before it got to its destination.  But these were not ordinary times, nor was this an ordinary place.  And the police officers in this local were less concerned about being attentive and preventing crime than they were about fulfilling their ideological obligation.  And so, the dilapidated Sport Utility Vehicle, with its missing license plates, cracked windshield, and burnt-out taillight made its way to its destination without any intervention from law enforcement.

The destination was a place called, "The Jungle."  The Jungle was a stretch of forest sandwiched between the Interstate and the urban sprawl.  It was comprised of alder trees, blackberry thickets, drug addicts, professional victim-criminals, derelict RVs, and garbage.

The vehicle pulled up to one of the entry points to the Jungle, a dirt access road that had once been barred by a thick metal gate.  The lock on the gate had been cut years earlier, and the gate itself uprooted and sold for scrap.   The SUV backed in between a pile of illegally discarded tires and a broken and moldering coach.  The SUV stopped.  Its occupants poured out in a frantic, drug-accelerated Chinese fire drill and they opened the back hatch.  They dragged the blanket-wrapped body out of the SUV and dumped it between some discarded tires and a rusting washing machine.  The body away, they got back into their ride as quickly as they got out of it.  And the vehicle with its one working tail sped off into the night, the occupants eager to forget the dead body and score their next high.

The body would be discovered within hours, but it wouldn't be reported to the police until days later.  When the police finally showed up, they assumed the dead man was just another drug addict in a city that catered to the addict-class.  They wouldn't connect the corpse to the home invasion until weeks later, and they'd never discover that the dead, middle-aged veteran of multiple overseas tours had been murdered by his own heroin addict son.

More damaging than the sloppy police work was the lack of imagination.  In retrospect, the response to man’s murder and the conditions that enabled it was predictable, inevitable even.  But none of the entities that allowed the crime to happen; the cops, the politicians, the media, the non-profiteers, the addict-class, none of them ever considered that they might be held accountable for their actions and inactions.  Even if they had been warned, they would not have done anything differently.  They were too caught up in the moment, too caught up in their own egos and vanity, too caught up in the greed of unearned cash, too caught up in the pursuit of power for power’s sake alone, too caught up in the comfort of routine and mediocrity.

They weren't serious people.  Unfortunately for them, there were still serious men who walked the earth.  And one serious man had nothing left but his promises and his honor.