Marines by Jay Allan Read Free Book Online

across. 
    The Bronx side was unprotected, and while the immediate area around the bridge was cleared, about a hundred meters from the river we started to walk past ancient, but occupied, apartment buildings scattered among burnt-out shells and rubble-strewn vacant lots.
    It was early afternoon, and there were some people moving about their business, though it was very sparse and nothing like the crowded bustle of the MPZ.  Along one broad avenue there were a number of businesses, mostly stores carrying various supplies, but also a small medical clinic with a long line snaking out the door and 30 meters down the street.
    Everything was old and dirty, and the streets were pockmarked with deep ruts and holes.  There was a faint reek in the air, no doubt from old leaking sewer lines among other things.
    We moved into a fourth floor apartment in a decrepit 300 year old building five blocks from the ruins of Yankee Stadium.  There was a small lobby with a single light fixture hanging from a wire and the wreckage of an elevator that looked as if it hadn't functioned in a century.  There was a single staircase, old and rickety, but still standing as far as the third floor.  From the third floor landing there was a wooden ladder used to access the fourth and fifth levels.  My parents tried to be strong for us, but my mother started sobbing when she saw our new home.  My father was silent.  He helped my mother up the ladder and then carried my sisters up one at a time.  I climbed up myself before he came back for me, but he reached over and helped me up onto the landing.
    My father was ludicrously over-educated for his new job managing the outdated technology systems of the plasti-steel plant, but he was lucky to have any employment at all.  As violators of multiple statutes, my parents were not eligible for any form of government assistance, so without a job we would go hungry.  I don't recall hearing my father complain about working 12-hour shifts for sustenance wages, but I don't remember ever seeing him smile again either. 
    The neighborhood was a nightmare, totally overrun by warring drug gangs.  It had been eighty years since the police department had withdrawn from regular coverage of the areas outside the Protected Zone, and the gangs completely owned the place.  My parents quickly learned that residents paid the local gang leader for protection if they wanted to survive, and if two gangs were fighting over the turf they paid both just to be safe.
    Long before the police departed, most other city services had already been suspended.  There was no operating mass transit, no real hospitals, and no outside lighting.  The streets had deteriorated to the point that they were impassible to vehicles, and in many places even walking was a challenge.  There was an electrical grid of sorts, and we usually had about 4 hours of power each day, though there were times we went a week or more without.  We had battery-powered heaters, so if the electric stayed off for a couple days in winter and we couldn't recharge them, we just bundled up against the cold.  The water service was usually working, though we only had hot water if the heaters were functioning.  It was brackish, untreated water, but filtering it helped considerably, leaving just a mildly oily taste.
    Most of the residents of the neighborhood were Cogs, uneducated workers born there who worked at menial and dangerous, jobs and who had a life expectancy less than half that of Zone dwellers.  But there were Outcasts as well, skilled workers like my father who had been expelled from the MPZ for one infraction or another and who now survived however they could in a world for which they were wholly unprepared.
    Then there were the Gangs.  There wasn't a lot of hope in the neighborhood, and to many the Gangs offered the promise a better existence...or at least the chance to be one of the bullies instead of the bullied.  The truth was that life in the Gangs was