PLASTIC WORLD

Is the world made of plastic?

Is the city buried in dreams?

Is the world made of plastic?

‘Cause that's the way is seems.

— Kool Keith, “Plastic World”

It had been a nice dinner. A breeze was blowing through the windows as we finished Justine’s grilled chicken, and we opened up a bottle of Pinot Grigio we bought the previous fall in Paso Robles. We did dishes together and I was wiping down the counters when she went to the bathroom.

I poured another glass, leaving a little in the bottle for her to finish, then turned on the TV. It was the evening news, with a report about a new study on microplastics and their effect on the bloodstream, indications that the increase in plastic contamination was causing fertility issues, as well as erratic and violent behavior in a small sample of college volunteers.

I barely paid attention, checking my texts as Justine came back into the room with her keys in hand.

“Can you hand me the recycling?” she asked.

“Oh, don’t worry about that,” I said. “I’ll take it out.”

“I got it,” she said, grabbing the plastic bag from me, and putting some old take out containers and water bottles in it before closing the drawstring.

“You should let your man do that for you,” I said.

“Normally, I would,” she said, smiling. “But I have to grab something out of my car anyway, so I’ll let you off the hook. This time.”

“Well, thank you,” I said. “But hurry back, I want to start watching that new baseball show tonight.”

“OK, I’ll just be a few minutes,” she said, then gave me a quick kiss.

I sat down on the couch and picked up the remote, scrolling to the baseball show, starring Ryan Gosling as a former Major League pitcher who moves to LA to try to make it as an actor. Justine loved him and insisted on seeing anything he was in.

I began watching the trailer when I caught a glimpse of flashing lights out the window, and the sound of a helicopter circling overhead. The whir of the rotor blades was not unusual for us since we lived so close to the freeway, but it seemed like it was much closer than normal, hovering just overhead.

I went to the window and looked out. In the darkness, I saw the outlines of at least a half dozen police officers, flashlights bouncing off the walls, yelling commands at someone in the alley. I squinted, trying to imagine who might warrant such force.

Then I saw Justine zip-tied on the ground.

They were reading her her Miranda rights.

They picked her up off the concrete as she protested, proclaiming her innocence, that this was all some kind of mistake, that they got the wrong person, no no no please you can’t —

They threw her in the back of an unmarked SUV and slammed the door, and suddenly it was silent.

Shock ran through my body. Fight or flight instincts kicked in, and without realizing it, I stood still, unwittingly choosing flight, until I finally realized what I was doing and ran out into the alley, sockless, chasing after the speeding away SUV.

It was futile.

The chopper flew away. The officers had driven off. Justine was gone. I stood in the alley now, alone.

In my hurry, I hadn’t brought my keys, so I had to knock on a neighbor’s door to let me back into my own apartment.

I didn’t know his real name, we all just called him “Sarge”. He always dressed in olive drab or other vaguely military-inspired clothes, and had flags on his wall, like that snake cut into pieces from the Revolutionary War, as well as a sign that read: “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” It was attributed to Benjamin Franklin.

Even though I didn’t know him well, the whole building trusted him with their spare sets of keys and with getting their mail and watering their plants while they were away for a weekend in Palm Springs or Big Bear, so it wasn’t abnormal for me to call on him when I needed a small favor.

What was abnormal was him answering his door with a pistol in his hand.

“Oh, Marc, it’s just you,” he said, uncocking the gun.

“What’s with the gun?” I asked.

“Come in,” he said, looking around furtively.

He closed and double-locked the door behind him.

“What can I do for you, Marc?” he asked, turning down a portable police scanner he had on his coffee table.

“Well, the first thing is, I locked myself out of my apartment on accident,” I said. “Do you still have my spare set of keys?”

“Of course,” he said, and went to a drawer to rummage around for them.

“What else?” he asked.

All of a sudden I felt tired all over my body, the adrenaline draining out of me. 

“Actually, do you have a drink?”

“Sure,” he said, handing me the keys. “Brown or clear?”

“Doesn’t matter,” I said.

“Everything OK?” he asked, while pouring me a double bourbon for his bar cart.

“Thanks,” I said, taking a long drink. “Did you hear all that commotion outside?”

“Why do you think I answered my door that way?” he asked.

“I’m not sure how or why, but while she was taking out the recycling, some guys arrested or kidnapped or just took Justine away. She’s gone!”

I found myself crying, and I wiped away my tears as quickly as they came, not wanting him to see. I pounded the rest of my drink, and without asking, Sarge refilled it.

“I guess you haven’t heard?” he asked, messing with his scanner, trying to find the right frequency.

“Heard what?”

“Do you want the short version or the long version?”

“The short version, I guess,” I said.

In between static I could hear snippets of police officers yelling out codes and instructions to each other as Sarge told me the news:

“OK, well, the deal is this: the rumblings I’ve heard is that the feds are conducting raids all around the country tonight, because tomorrow the President is going to give an Oval Office address about the risks of microplastics in the blood and brain of at-risk people around the country. Justine is just one of hundreds, even thousands, they are rounding up who they have determined have a concentration amount, and they are detaining those folks to determine the severity of their infection.”

“Infection? She’s not infected.”

“Their word, not mine.”

“So they say my wife is infected, and they are detaining her? Where?”

“Not sure yet,” he said. 

“How do I find out?” I asked. “I need to find her.”

“I have some people I can ask, if you want me to make some inquiries.”

“Please.”

“OK, I’ll check in with my guys and get back to you tomorrow. Want another drink?”

“I shouldn’t,” I said, setting the glass down. He nodded.

“Then here are your keys,” he said, handing them to me, then another set. “Here are a set of mine, in case you might need them in the future. And you can take this pistol with you just for tonight. I’ll get it back from you tomorrow.”

He tried to give me his gun, but I waved it away.

“Well, do you have any weapons in your home?” He asked.

“No,” I said.

He shook his head, looked around.

He picked up a Louisville Slugger from the corner of the room.

“Just in case,” he said, and winked at me.

**

I barely slept that night. My dreams, when I did fall asleep, were of Justine: her face, her hair, her silhouette walking on the beach then disappearing into the surf. I sweated through my sheets and laid awake in them as the sun came up.

Sarge knocked on my door early, two cups of coffee in hand. I put on a bathrobe and urged him inside.

“What are you doing up this time of the morning?” I asked.

“I finished some PT and made a few calls,” he said, sipping his drink.

“Did you find anything?” I asked. “Do you know where Justine is?”

“My source on the force says she’s likely being held at a temporary shelter somewhere in the city that just popped up in the last two days. They’re doing this all over the country. They’re running tests.”

“What kind of tests?” I asked.

“About plastic in people’s bodies.”

“So people are being held indefinitely in camps all over the country, getting tests run on them without their consent, and are being classified as ‘infected’, and my wife is one of them?”

“According to my source, yes.”

“And who is your source?”

“The guy who told me works under the guy who runs the camp here in LA.”

The guy who ran the camp in LA was Captain CC Graves, a former LAPD colleague of Sarge’s. They were in the same unit but didn’t know each other well or ride together, just saw each other around the NELA station and at meetings.

Since then, Sarge washed out of the force into private security and consulting while Graves upped his rank, and being an outspoken supporter of the president, was now the head of this local task force.

The new wrinkle with all of this was the scientific testing that the detainees were to undergo. Sarge showed me a video on the internet about an emergency bill that had passed in Congress in the dead of night last night to fund this testing for “the common good”, which passed on a party-line vote, with the vice president coming to the Senate to cast the deciding vote. Money would be pouring into the country to “study” those suspected of being infected by too much plastics in their blood. Justine was just one of hundreds, thousands, millions.

He got a ding on his phone, read it, then told me to turn on my TV.

A “breaking news” chyron came over the screen, and the president addressed the country from the Oval Office.

“My fellow Americans, last night, on my orders as your Commander in Chief, strike forces comprised of select military and law enforcement teams conducted targeted raids in communities all around the country to identify and detain citizens suspected of being poisoned by the continued microplastic scourge that has plagued our beloved United States, turning otherwise decent folk into violent thugs and crazed lunatics. It has to stop, and it has to stop now.”

“These detainees were taken to facilities specially equipped with the latest technologies and the best scientists to study this issue, because these individuals post a serious national security and criminal threat to our way of life. I want to thank Congress and our vice president for their swift, decisive, and bold decision to fund this action, and I want to thank the people of this great nation for their support in keeping America safe and healthy in this difficult time. I will provide further updates as our brilliant scientists release the results of their studies. In the meantime, God bless you, and God bless the United States of America.”

I turned off the TV and threw the remote at the wall.

“What do I do?” I asked, but it was more of a statement than a question.

“I have some ideas,” Sarge said.

“You have some ideas,” I repeated. “Why don’t you tell me on the way to get some more coffee.”

The shop is called The Village Bakery and Cafe. There was a long line, almost to the door, with customers waiting for drinks and pastries, breakfast egg dishes. Everyone waiting was on their phone, watching videos of people becoming violent, assaults, citizens run amok. 

Sarge watched them as well, shaking his head as he scrolled on his phone. I kept mine in my pocket, my thoughts on Justine. I just stared at the wall, my mind going over and over the last moments I saw her, before they put her in the van.

The door opened and behind us came a pair of men in lab coats, putting medical masks over their faces as they walked in.

One of the scientists said to the other, “Should we get coffee for the whole crew, or just us?”

“Just us, I guess,” the other one said. “I don’t know who half these people are anyway, they’re staffing up so fast over there.”

“I know, right? It’s a free for all.”

“Government efficiency at its finest.”

They kept talking, but I stopped listening. Already my mind was racing. I tapped Sarge on the shoulder and looked him in the eye.

“Now I have an idea,” I said.

We hopped into my car, coffees in hand, and drove over to a costume shop I knew in North Hollywood that had fallen on hard times lately due to the lack of productions in the area. Everything was shooting in Jersey or Atlanta or Ireland anymore, so they could use all the business they could get.

Sarge and I picked up lab coats and safety goggles, then went over to CVS and got blue medical gloves and masks, just like the ones I saw on the men at the bakery.

Finally, we went over to the Warner Brothers prop shop and I flashed my badge from a gig I had the previous year, and we picked up some hard shell cases, test tubes, beakers, and other equipment that I thought would pass muster with any security we might encounter.

Between these stops, I told Sarge my plan: we’d pose as lab techs who had gotten hired by a new company and infiltrate the camp. While faking doing studies on the detainees, we’d find Justine and break her out.

I drove, gesturing with my hands, trying to convince Sarge to join me in what I realized as I was talking about it was an insane plan. The more I spoke, the more desperate I sounded, the more I knew my plan was falling on deaf ears. I talked and talked, hoping I was convincing him, but knowing I wasn’t. Finally, I had enough.

“You haven’t said anything in a while,” I told him as I pulled up to a stop light. “What do you think? Are you with me?”

He wasn’t even looking at me, he was staring out the window.

“You know something?” he said. “It’s the funniest thing. All these videos are all over the internet and on social media the last few days showing people going crazy, attacking people, turning the cities into security threats. But look out the window — does this look like a criminal hellscape to you?”

I looked out the window. A few old ladies were buying fruit from a vendor with a cart. A crossing guard held up a stop sign to let students pass safely. A man in shorts and a tank top jogged by us.

“No,” I said. “It does not.”

“Right,” he said. “So if they’re lying about that, what else are they lying about?”

**

While we suited up in Sarge’s apartment, he made a call to another source he had in the local government who told him the local staging area was the parking lot of Dodger Stadium, and that anyone taken in the greater Los Angeles ares was likely being held there. However, they would begin transporting high-risk individuals to the Western relocation camp in Arizona in a matter of days, so time would be of the essence.

“Better let me drive,” Sarge said, so we headed out to his car, where he switched the plates to ones he used when he was on stake-outs.

Our apartment complex was just down Riverside Drive, only a few minutes from the stadium, and as we approach Chavez Ravine, what had previously felt like a wild, daring thing to do suddenly become very real and I felt a certain tightness in my chest, a shortness to my breath.

We hit some traffic at an intersection and I cleared my throat.

“Hey,” I said. “Maybe we should…I don’t know, think about things a little bit, you know?”

“You serious?” Sarge said, turning his head to glare at me. “This was your idea.”

“I know,” I said. “But now I’m wondering if there’s another way, if maybe…”

“Don’t second guess this,” Sarge said.

“What if we get caught?” I said.

“I know some people,” he said.

“Wouldn’t that effect your consulting business?” I asked.

“I have no shortage of ways to make money, Marc. I learned to be resilient in the military, and I’ve carried that over into my civilian life.”

“Yeah, well, I just think maybe we’re rushing into this, is all.”

“We are,” he said. “That’s what I love about it.”

I didn’t say anything. The cars in front of us inched forward, toward what we could now see was a checkpoint. I looked ahead, said nothing. I think I gulped.

“Look,” he said, “are we doing this? You said you wanted to find your wife, right? Well, here we are.”

“Here we are,” I repeated.

I motioned for him to go forward, and then caught a glimpse of the slightest of smiles on his face.

The checkpoint was run by the national guard, and on Sarge’s insistence, we used our real IDs, since he said there was no point in faking it. What was fake was the name of the lab company he said we were contracted out from, which was one of at least a dozen dummy companies with vague names he had created for his work for situations where he needed to bluff his way into somewhere.

The trick, he told me, was to act like confident, but not in a boisterous way or by puffing up your chest, but in a way that implies you already belong there. Wear the right clothes, have the right props, and most of all, act bored at having to go through their questions and red tape. It’s only those who truly don’t belong that get angry, and those are the ones who get found out.

We gave our IDs to men with assault rifles, dressed in camo, who called our names in to a supervisor on their shoulder radios. There was no record of us, of course, but Sarge didn’t act agitated by that, just nodded and scrolled on his phone, engaged in idle chitchat with the man: 

“Busy day, huh?” He asked.

“You have no idea,” the guardsman said, flashing a light on the “lab equipment” we had stacked in the back seats.

“Staffing up fast will do that,” Sarge said.

“You’re telling me, brother.”

“That’s one thing these politicians don’t understand: logistics.”

The guardsman nodded slowly, as though he had just heard something very wise.

“Preaching to the choir, my dude.”

His radio squawked. He nodded. 

“Copy,” he said, then turned back to us. “So, we don’t have a record for you guys, so I’ll give you a temporary pass for the day, but just make sure to call your guys and register you for tomorrow, OK?”

“10-4,” Sarge said. 

“You’re clear to go,” the man said, and raised the gate, passing us through.

The stadium itself was shut down, but the giant parking lot was full of white tents, white trucks like the kind you’d see on a movie shoot, and white-clad lab techs and detainees in white hospital gowns. The only thing not white was the gray chain-link fences enclosing those who had been picked up, caging them into various areas with white letters on aluminum signs identifying each enclosure.

We parked and picked equipment up out of the car. We put empty vials in boxes and masks on our face. As we walked towards the detainees, we saw a large electronic sign, the kind you’d see by the side of the highway, that reads: 

NO PLASTIC PRODUCTS

BEYOND THIS POINT

Guards with growling dogs prowled the fenced-in areas, detainees sat on the dirty ground unless they had a silver space blanket to shield them from the asphalt, officers shouted commands on megaphones or oversaw the whole scene from the vantage point of moveable towers on wheels.

There was no one to check in with, no supervisor on duty that we could see, so we just went around to the cages, one by one, checking for my wife, asking in whispers if anyone knew of a Justine from Silver Lake. Some no’s, some head shakes, some Spanish that I couldn’t understand.

We canvassed several cages, faking drawing blood and instead taking temperatures, until we got to a large white tent and noticed an unusual commotion.

A set of bright lights turned on, even though it was daytime. Then I noticed the camera.

A bottle-blonde with a facelift in jeans and a white button-down and no lab wear approached a man in uniform and shook his hand. The uniformed man then sat down as someone attached a cavalier microphone to his lapel.

Sarge walked up to me.

“That’s him,” he said. “Captain Graves. CC, as I used to call him.”

“And who’s the other one?” I asked.

“A journalist, I’d guess.”

The journalist sat down opposite the Captain, looked through a stack of notecards in her hand.

“Ready?” the journalist asked.

Graves smoothed his uniform, then nodded.

“Roll, please,” the journalist said, and we continued our work as we watched in our peripheral vision.

“Good evening from Dodger Stadium here in Los Angeles. I’m Molly Novia, and today, we’re here with Captain Graves of the Southern California Plastic Task Force. Thank you for being here, Captain.”

“Great to be with you.”

“Captain, let me start by asking: what is the purpose of these camps?”

“Well, first off, let me just take issue with that term. These aren’t camps, these are temporary detainment facilities, and as the president said in his address to the nation, they are to separate those suspected of acute plastic infection from the rest of the population.”

“But why is that necessary? Is there some security issue the public is unaware of?”

“Well, just open your phone, and you’ll see countless videos from around the country of people being attacked, people being hurt and worse by those we suspect as altered by the excessive amount of plastic in their bloodstream.”

“I think we’ve all seen at least one of those types of videos, and shocking as they are, do they warrant this kind of reaction? To fund this kind of operation, to take this drastic of a step to arrest and run tests —“

“Let me stop you right there, Molly. Our job is to keep this citizens of this country safe. Now, people are being threatened with violence in every community, and our goal is to stop that. Our goal is to save lives. What we’re doing, under the president’s bold leadership, is the only thing preventing this nation from sliding into irreversible chaos.”

“But if you —“

“I’m done here,” the Captain said, and tore the mic off his jacket.

“Captain? Captain?” Molly said, as he walked off.

“I said I’m done!” he yelled back at her.

Molly looked at her crew and shrugged. She took her own mic off and looked to her cameraman.

“Make sure to get some b-roll of the tents and everything, OK? Thanks.”

We continued our “testing” as the crew got shots of our work, the cages, the detainees — many of whom asked for help. I was surprised the guards allowed any of this, because it was a desperate and sad scene, and I think I would have thought so even if my wife wasn’t among them. We watched other lab techs — real ones, not imposters like us — drawing people’s blood against their will, fighting back until they needed restraints.

Sarge and I were in cage 67, taking the temperature of a young black woman, when the cage door opened. 

We turned to see Captain Graves.

“What’s the status of this detainee?” he asked.

“Not sure, sir,” Sarge said from behind his mask. “We just started our procedure.”

He took a clipboard from one of his assistants. 

“Is this Katherine Fairchild?” he asked.

“No, sir,” his assistant said. “She’s in the next one over, this is —“

“Her name is —“ Sarge began.

“Forget it,” he said, and began walking to the next cage.

I looked over, and when I did, I realized Justine was in that enclosure with Katherine.

A shiver went through me, tingling in my hands and feet, my head suddenly light.

I stared at Justine, shocked at how frazzled and unkempt she looked in the short time she had been in captivity, and my empathy and love for her grew beyond what I had previously imagined possible.

I was so moved by her condition and my racing thoughts on how to get her out that I didn’t even notice that the Captain had doubled back and walked up to Sarge.

“What’s your name?” he asked, standing much too close to Sarge and looking him directly in the eyes.

“I’m just one of the new lab techs, sir,” Sarge said.

“Do I know you?” he asked. “Have we met before?”

“I don’t think so, sir.”

“Are you sure?” The Captain asked again. “Take off your mask.”

Just then, a phone rang. The Captain’s assistant answered it and handed it to his boss.

“Sir?”

“What is it?”

“It’s the president, sir.”

That’s when he finally broke eye contact with Sarge.

“I have to take this,” he said to Sarge. Then to his assistant, he said, “Get his info.”

He walked off, chatting with the White House, while the assistant pulled out a pocket notepad to get Sarge’s name.

“Don’t bother,” Sarge said. “We’re done for the day. Let’s go.”

I watched Justine sitting on the dirty ground in her cage as we left.

**

“I saw her,” I said, as we put equipment back in the car.

“I know,” Sarge said.

“So what are we doing leaving?”

“He made me,” Sarge said. “It’s only a matter of time before he realizes who I am. He already suspects it, we had to get out of there.”

“But she was right there!” I said, and realized that I was yelling now.

“Keep your voice down,” he said. 

“What are we going to do?” I asked.

“Let’s exfiltrate the area first, get to a safe place, then make a new plan,” he said.

We got in the car and drove towards the checkpoint, where they were waving cars through.

“Did anyone there seem violent or crazy or anything to you?”

“No,” I said.

“What about your wife?”

“I only saw her for a few seconds,” I said.

“The only ones who seemed aggressive to me were the people in charge,” he said. “Everyone else was normal, docile even,” he said. “Unless they were getting their blood drawn against their will.”

When we arrived at the checkpoint, the same national guardsman was there.

“Leaving us so soon, fellas?” He asked.

“We’ll be back tomorrow, bright and early,” Sarge said.

Then he got a call on his radio. He nodded, then put his hand up, indicating for us to stop.

“Hang out right here for me real quick,” he said.

He walked over to confer with another guard, and I looked down to see Sarge about to shift the car into gear to speed off. I looked at him, shook my head no. He took a deep breath and nodded.

Captain Graves walked up to our car and slapped the hood.

“How you doing, boys?” He asked.

“Fine, sir,” Sarge said. “Just headed home for the day.”

“Short shift, huh?” 

“We just do what they tell us,” Sarge said.

“Well, you can do what I tell you and take down your mask.”

“Sir, it’s against our policy to —“

“Take down your mask, dammit.”

“Sir, there’s a risk of contamination of our specimens if —“

The Captain pulled out his sidearm from his holster. He didn’t point it anywhere but the ground, but he had it ready in his hand just the same.

“I’m not going to ask you again: pull down your mask and show me your face.”

Sarge did.

“Hey, Graves,” Sarge said.

“Hey, Sarge,” Graves said.

“Now that you know its me, are we free to go?”

“No,” Graves said.

“Are we being detained?”

“Doing a little ‘private security’ work, Sarge?”

“If we’re not being detained, we would like to leave.”

“Oh, we can find reasons to detain you. You’re not scientists — do you know how many statutues you just violated?”

“We are exercising our fifth amendment rights against self-incrimination, and if we are not under arrest, we would like to be free to leave.”

“Have it your way,” Graves said, putting his pistol back in his holster. “But I’m going to call my guys at the station, so expect a visit from the LAPD and a few other agencies very soon, Sarge. They’ll be very interested in this little stunt.”

“I’ll be waiting,” Sarge said through clenched teeth.

Then Graves leaned into the car.

“And as for your friend. Marc Clement, right?”

He was holding a photocopy of my ID in his hand.

I didn’t know what to do, so I nodded.

“You came here for your wife, right? Justine Clement? Well, she’s going to be transferred to Arizona first, then we’re sending planeloads of plastic-infected people to Greeland. Hope you got a good last look at her.”

He laughed, slapped the hood of the car again, and Sarge sped off.

“Fuck,” he said. “Fuck fuck fuck fuck.”

“Are we fucked?” I asked.

“I wouldn’t exactly put it that way,” he said. “But it’s not good.”

“What about Justine?” I asked.

He had no answer.

We drove back towards Riverside Drive when suddenly he turned right and went up a steep hill.

“Where are you going?”

“It’s probably not safe to go home,” he said. “Besides, I want to see something.”

He continued on up the hill until he pulled over into the dirt.

The view from the top of the hill overlooked the baseball stadium and the parking lot that surrounded it, the whole tent city and cage structure looked small and insignificant from that vantage point. But I knew Justine was down there somewhere, milling around among the detainees that now looked like ants to me, and I felt a distinct rage inside of me at my inability to help her, to save her, to comfort her.

“I always hated that guy. He was too by-the-book, too much of an ass-kisser, felt more like a politician than a policeman.”

“Do you really think he’s going to send Justine away?” I said.

“He’s going to make it so they take my business, my livelihood away,” Sarge said.

“I’m never going to see her again, am I?” I asked. And for the first time the reality of that hit me. I cried, shielding my face with my hands, sobbing into my palms.

Sarge looked at me with a mixture of concern and pity and sympathy.

“This is the worst moment of my life since I got kicked out of the force, and I’m willing to bet it’s the worst moment of your life in a long time too. But you know what the best part is? Now we’ve got nothing to lose.”

He opened the trunk and reached under the little spare tire.

“Remember when I tried to give you a gun last night, Marc?”

“Yes.”

'“You’ve never shot a gun before, have you?”

“No.”

“Want to try?”

We waited for the sun to start going down, which just so happened to be when there was a shift change, some guards leaving the cages, and others arriving in SUVs.

Sarge showed me how to lay down on the ridge, look through the sight, steady my breathing, and aim for the center mass. Luckily, the guards didn’t move around too much, just posted up at a particular cage door and scanned the area, bored. They themselves didn’t seem overly concerned about the hostility of their captured.

I looked to cage 68 to see Justine being picked up by a guard, handcuffed, and escorted to a waiting schoolbus, painted white and converted for transport of the prisoners.

“They’re taking her!” I whispered.

“Why are you whispering?” He asked.

“I don’t know!” I said, still whispering. “But we have to do something.”

“Pick a target,” he said. “On my signal, execute.”

I chose the guard with Justine. I waited until he had her on the bus and stood next to it, chatting with the driver. 

“I have him,” I said.

“Shoot!” He yelled.

We fired our rifles almost simultaneously.  

I saw the man I targeted clutch his stomach and go down. Nearby, another guard went down with a headshot. Sarge was skilled.

I cocked the rifle and let a bullet cartridge out to aim for another shot, but below me was chaos.

The bus driver took off, Justine and a few others sitting in the seats, screaming. I watched her go, then saw a a dozen or so detainees escape from their cages and run free.

“Let’s go!” I yelled to Sarge as he took another shot.

I ran to the car and got in the driver’s seat, and he hopped in next to me.

I peeled out, kicking up a cloud of dirt and raced down the hill. As I turned a corner, I noticed a few unmarked SUVs, lights and sirens on, blocking our exit towards Riverside Dr.

“What do I do?” I yelled to Sarge.

“Ram them!”

“Ram them?” I repeated.

“Yeah, ram them,” he said. “I never liked this car anyway.”

He sinched his seatbelt tighter as I sped up, guards emerging from their vehicles with their guns drawn.

Sarge put his rifle out his window and fired wildly towards them.

I slammed on the accelerator and watched the guards try to jump away to safety.

I don’t remember the collision itself, just the jolt of the hit and the hiss of the airbags popping, hitting my head on the window as we rolled to an abrupt stop.

And I remember them peppering Sarge with bullets, the blood pouring from him onto the ground, right before I passed out.

**

I came to in a beige trailer, handcuffed to a chair, my head in the kind of pain I didn’t previously know existed. I was thirsty and hot and every part of me ached.

And there was a man in a mask and lab coat drawing a vial of blood from my arm.

As he existed the trailer, he kept the door open, and Captain Graves walked in.

“Good,” he said, “You’re awake. I was hoping to get a chance to talk to you before you were gone.”

“Gone where? Are you arresting me?”

“No,” he said.

“Are you going to kill me?”

“No,” he said.

“Then what?”

“We’re going to send you away, with the rest of the Polymers.”

“Polymers?”

“That’s the new term the administration is using for plastic-infected people.”

“How do you know I’m infected?”

He sat down across from me.

“Let me explain something to you: we’re all infected. The recent studies show everybody has some level of plastic in their blood and their brain, men have it in their semen, pregnant women have it in their placentas. They’ve found microplastics in the soil, in lettuce crops, carrot crops, hell, they even found nanoplastics in clouds. It’s everywhere.”

“Then why the fuck are you kidnapping people? Why did you take my wife?”

He sighed.

“You don’t follow politics, do you?” he asked.

“Not really,” I said. 

“Well, the president needed a win. Polls showed the public has no appetite for foreign intervention, so they had to whip up a domestic crisis. By controlling it, he shows a strong hand. And, this being an election year, it’s good for him to be on TV as much as possible. See?”

He grabbed a remote from the desk and turned on a TV, mounted on the wall. Sure enough, the president was in front of Air Force One, discussing the first loads of citizens being deported to Greenland.

“How do you know all this?” I asked. “Seems like bullshit to me.”

“The president and I went to prep school together. And he’s going to give me a position on his re-election campaign, probably make me an ambassador next term. I’m sorry you won’t be around to see it.”

“Am I going to Greenland too?”

“Yep. First, we’re going to do a few more tests on you. Then you’re on the next flight out of the country.”

He stood up, grabbed the remote again. 

“Oh yeah, and sorry about your friend,” he said, smiling.

The president had finished his talk, and the station cut away to shots of Polymers attacking innocent citizens.

“By the way, those are AI-generated,” he said, and turned off the TV.

**

The tests were some form of torture. The lab techs used needles and scaples to poke and stick every inch of me under the guise of science and safety. There was no numbing agents or anesesia, just pain down to my nerve-endings, before carrying me out on a stretcher and putting me into an ambulance.

As we drove away from the stadium, I saw Sarge being placed into a black body bag, bloody all over.

We drove in silence up the 5 freeway into the Valley. I asked where they were taking me, first the lab tech in the back, and then the driver. Neither answered.

The lab tech was on his phone, watching videos. He started laughing, took out his ear bud, then yelled up to the driver: “You hear this shit?”

“What?”

“These people are fucking nuts: I just saw a video of people eating plastic, burning plastic in their fireplace, wrapping themselves in plastic wrapping. Shit, one guy was grating plastic onto his food like it was a block of parmesan cheese!”

“What the fuck?”

“Yeah, he said he thinks it makes him special, gives them super powers or something. ‘Plastic makes me stronger’, that was his quote.

“Fucking polymers,” the driver said. 

“Glad they’re taking them out of the country,” he said, then put his ear bud back in.

That’s when I noticed his wedding ring. 

“Hey, man, can I ask a favor?”

“What?” he asked.

“They separated me from my wife. I don’t know when I’m going to see her again. Can I just write a note to her? Do you have a pen?”

He rolled his eyes. “I don’t know,” he said.

“C’mon, you’re married, right? Help me, please.”

“OK,” he said. “But don’t tell my partner up there. He’s more by the book that me.”

I put my finger to my lips and winked.

He laughed, handed me a pen and the back side of a lab form.

“Can you loosen my restraints?” I asked.

“Not supposed to,” he said.

“I can’t write like this,” I said, demonstrating my lack of movement.

“Fine, but just for a minute,” he said, looking towards the driver, nervous.

He undid my straps and put his ear bud back in.

“Happy?” He asked.

“Happy,” I said.

I began the note, writing only “Justine” before scribbling a bunch of nonsense.

Instead, I was looking at the lab tech, waiting for my moment.

As we merged from the 134 to the 101 freeways, I reached out and stuck the blue plastic ball point pen in his right eye. He screamed, and the driver swerved. He yelled back, asking if the tech was OK, who couldn’t answer, because he was busy trying to extract the pen.

I pulled it out myself, stabbing him with it over and over in vital areas, trying to keep my eye on the driver, who was still driving chaotically, and fumbling with a gun that he eventually dropped.

It slid back near me and I reached out and grabbed it, stuck it to the driver’s head.

“Pull over,” I said.

**

Van Nuys airport was busier than usual that day, several commandeered commercial airliners were on the runway and Molly Novi and her camera crew, in their van, were broadcasting the first deportations of Polymers to leave the states.

I drove the ambulance through a checkpoint, wearing the driver’s uniform that I took off from him at gunpoint before zip tying him and leaving him in the bushes at Lake Balboa Park.

The lab tech I put under a white sheet and told the guards at the airport he was an injured detainee being sent for transit, flashing the driver’s badge and acting bored, and they waved me right through. Sarge was right again.

I drove right onto the tarmac and unloaded the lab tech, and a few guards helped me lift him directly onto the plane.

It looked like a normal airplane, except every other row of seats was missing and in its place was testing equipment and vials of blood taken from the detainees.

We were able to squeeze the gurney in the exit row, and I thanked the guards as walked back down the stairs.

That’s when Justine came out of the bathroom. I looked at her and I began to cry again, but this time I didn’t shield my eyes. I let it pour out of me.

She saw me and ran to me, and before we knew it, we were hugging and kissing. The other detainees were staring at us, but I didn’t care. I unstrapped the lab tech from the gurney and slid him into a seat, put a mask over his face to try to cover my tracks.

I strapped Justine into it, gave her another kiss, and went to the door.

I whistled for the guards, who came back up.

“Just got told this one is too weak to fly, being taken back to the stadium,” I said. “Can you help me get her off?”

The guards shrugged and the three of us carried my wife off of the plane, and into the ambulance to safety.

I sat back in the driver’s seat and turned on the flashing lights as we pulled out of the airport’s parking lot.

Once we were past the guard post, Justine got off the gurney and sat next to me in the passenger seat.

“Thank you for coming to get me,” she said.

“I love you,” I said, and grabbed her hand.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

“Sarge is dead,” I said. “We’re going to our building to pick up some of his guns, then we’re going back to the stadium to free the rest of the detainees. Then we’re going to kill Captain Graves. Are you with me?”

“Sounds like a suicide mission,” she said.

“It does, doesn’t it?” I said. “Maybe we should reconsider.”

“No,” she said. “Let’s go.”

“Let’s go,” I repeated.