The Zone Read Online Free

my life, full medical and dental, and I can draw my regular pension at age sixty. I draw SSI, and the State will let me have four years at any State university, books included, for free.
    But I can’t make it stick. I can’t get the logic to win. I can’t deal with starting completely over at forty-two. I can’t help feeling betrayed by family and profession, can’t help feeling utterly diminished by the loss of my position. I went from Police Sergeant to…nothing. I still can carry, and the retired badge is heavy and looks real. But its not, and I’m not. I’m surplus to requirements, unnecessary, useless, empty, invisible.
    I know what I’m feeling is illogical, but there it is. Sitting in the park eating a burger and watching the kids, wandering around at all hours is what I do now. Pushups and situps and movies. No phone, the TV only connected to a DVD player and an old VHS unit. Ignore everything beyond line of vision. Take it one breath at a time. Never go near the PD buildings, do not think of the framed photos of my friends and team-mates hanging in the lobby alongside all the other officers who caught a violent end-of-shift.
    My son is doing ten years in Huntsville, after a lengthy and ultimately futile legal battle; I made a few calls and insured that he was in a minimum security facility with first-timers rather than general population, as the son of a decorated police officer would have been in trouble in the yard. My ex lost her business to the expense and distraction of his legal defense, and is working for someone now. My daughter is pregnant and the father is not going to step up in terms of support. Can’t, really, being a teenager who majored in text-messaging.
    That really doesn’t touch me much; his going to prison was a reality I had accepted long ago, just as my daughter’s chances of being a welfare mother were likewise pretty solid. That my ex would allow the two to destroy everything she had worked so hard to build wasn’t a terrible shock, either. My failings as a parent, and my children’s shortcomings were things that I had accepted a long time ago.
    Maybe if I had been more optimistic about my kids’ chances in life it might have made a difference in how they turned out, but I doubted it. The girl wasn’t dumb, but she had the same depth of personality as a mirror. Pretty and in-style was the limits of her ambition, and the insular world of school pecking orders were her horizons. Too careless to use birth control, too enamored of herself to weigh the sincerity of praise from others, too focused on the moment to think about tomorrow.
    A fresh start- that was how someone suggested I look at it. It was true enough: I was stripped of home, career, family, wife; my team was dead, my body was impaired, and I was burdened with guilt about not dying with my officers, about not John-Wayne-ing our way out of the trap. About not simply telling Narcotics to piss off and going home.
    It was surreal; I could go by my ex-home and there it was, nothing really changed except the fact that I no longer had a key or the right to go inside. The PD was the same way: retired badge or not, I had to go in the lobby like everyone else, wait for an escort, intrude into the busy work day of others when once my arrival meant they had to pay attention. I could go in, but I never did. My team was gone, buried under a flag and volleys and the wail of bagpipes, with politicians solemnly praising attributes which didn’t really matter in those busy seconds in the House. Everything was changed, and all because we had done the job they hired us to do.
    Cooper saved my life in the wrecked aftermath: the news of his suicide reached through the other crap and back-handed me hard. We had exchanged a few mumbled awkward phrases before the Grand Jury and at the award ceremony, but had not really spoken at all. I knew he was hurting bad: the deal was his brainchild, and he had the added burden of having gone down without