Metro by Stephen Romano Page A

Witness Protection Program now?”
    â€œWe didn’t witness anything,” Jollie says.
    â€œMaybe you didn’t,” Andy says. “But I saw some shit back there, man.” Then he laughs. Gallows humor.
    Like It’s all over and I know it because I saw some shit back there.
    One hundred percent, dude.
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    A fter almost a minute of silence, Mark snubs out his joint on the side of the Black Box and says: “Okay. I’ll tell you at least enough so you understand a few things.”
    â€œA few things?” Jollie says.
    â€œI’ll tell you enough. There’s a lot I don’t know, actually. It’s a big thing I’m a part of. But I can tell you my role in it. I can tell you where I came from.”
    So that you know the last five years weren’t bullshit. So that you know you’ll be safe with me. So that you’ll know how I really love you.
    He has to let them know that now , while they still have time. Before they are forced to move again.
    So he tells them a story.
    The real thing, the whole thing.
    As much as he knows anyway.

4
november 12
    H e never really has a childhood, but tough shit, kid—the world’s a very unfair place, in case you haven’t heard. We’re lucky if we get one shot to be normal.
    And what the hell is normal anyway?
    His normal life starts in the womb of a teenage girl who gets knocked up on the night of her high school graduation, then gives the kid up for adoption when she realizes she has no money, no prospects, no future. She commits suicide two weeks after having the baby. That happens in Fairview, Oklahoma, where the sky is blue and the traffic is easy, and there’s a factory that closes, leaving damn near everybody right up shit creek. Our boy never knows about any of that. He doesn’t see the sky there turn black. He doesn’t feel the air in town go from cold to colder to deadly. He never knows the agony of the locals who become bums, the tortured cries of the families who go belly up, the slow starvation and the mass migration to bigger cities. That’s if you are one of the lucky few who make it out alive. Some of them go back to school, upstate. Some of them become strippers in even smaller shithole towns. Most of them become became career criminals, if they aren’t killed during the learning curve by other career criminals. Families with bought-and-paid-for securities and business owners who were strapped into suits of armor the day before become melodramatic punch lines to jokes told years ago. What remains of Fairview’s economic infrastructure is gobbled up by the mob, and everything left over is collateral damage—right down to the shops on the main drag, the stores in the mall, the seat covers on the stools of the last bar that never closes, even when the storm finally calms down and reveals nothing but a wasted ghost town full of zombies.
    This happens around the country more than you can possibly imagine.
    It happens every year.
    There are entire sections of America that simply don’t exist anymore.
    What usually happens next is an elaborate chain of corruption and consequence involving land deals and insurance scams, all orchestrated by smart lawyers and mortgage experts and mob lieutenants who have advanced degrees in finance. The land is renamed and reborn again and again on paper and in the real world. Deeds and trusts and futures are sold to greedy land developers, houses and buildings are scalped one at a time to ghost companies, then resold until the market value triples. And then it gets complicated. Then, they start building something else there and call it the future. Gated communities. Exurbs. Model for new world order. Everybody parachutes out a bazillionaire.
    Again, our boy sees none of that.
    That’s the part of the story he knows nothing about.
    The rest is history.
    His history.
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    A s the little town he was born