Dead Reckoning (911 Book 3)

by Grace Hamilton

  “Yeah, Dustin,” Ava snorted. “Super-followed. That’s why we’re just strolling in here.”

  Dustin scowled, but behind him Adam grinned. “It go well?” he asked.

  Sara nodded. “Well enough. I think we’re as close to ready as we need to be.”

  Surprised, Ava looked at her sharply, but Sara ignored her.

  Adam nodded, adjusting the sling of his AR as he spoke. “Good to hear. Listen, control wants to talk to you ASAP. They told us to pass on that they want to see you right away for a debrief before you go to the arms room or get something to eat.”

  “Fine,” Sara said, apparently taking that as a signal for them to move on—she brushed by them without another word, and Ava followed behind her with a shrug at the curious men.

  Adam laughed as the two women walked away, and Ava lengthened her stride until she’d caught up with Sara. In a low voice, she said: “They want to see us ‘ASAP,’ like maybe they were worried we’d take a vacation before giving a report?”

  “They’re like kindergarten teachers,” Sara answered, bitterness riding in her tone.

  “Still,” Ava muttered, “it sounds ominous. Wait until they hear what we have to tell them.”

  Sara said nothing, not even giving a nod of assent. That worried Ava almost as much as what they had to recount to the cell leaders.

  What the fuck was going on in Sara’s head?

  3

  The nurses had discontinued packing his eye cavity as the wound beneath it healed further, and Parker had been given an elasticated eyepatch to cover the hole in the side of his face. Now, when he looked in a mirror as they let him carry out his daily ablutions with an ancient, battery-operated shaver—under guard, of course—he looked less like a pirate and more like a one-eyed ice cream salesman. He’d gotten used to his newly restricted vision, too, learning to compensate by sweeping his head from side to side periodically, providing him a fuller range. Not that it mattered. There wasn’t anything to look at.

  The jagged throbbing in Parker’s newly empty eye socket had stopped even before the dull aching in his arm and leg; the nurses had known what they were doing. But even so, the pain itself had offered some distraction, at least, from the boredom. Parker hadn’t so much as seen sunlight other than through the slits of overly high and narrow windows.

  And then there was the fact that Parker had no idea where he was. It could be Guantanamo Bay for all he knew. He hadn’t been allowed any contact with the outside world. It seemed that all his captors wanted to do with him at the moment was to fix his wounds, helping him recover from his infections.

  And get him addicted—that goal had become clear pretty damned fast, and Parker had had more than enough time to contemplate the path they’d laid out for him.

  The lack of any schedule had left more than enough time for him to think about his addiction, in fact. And to remember one simple fact: There were poor addicts, and there were rich addicts.

  Poor addicts steal, cheat, and allow themselves to be exploited for their fixes. Rich addicts—your rock stars, film stars, and Fortune 500 executives—can and do buy the really good stuff. The clean stuff. The stuff not cut with anything that might poison a vein, or cause a stroke, or stop the whole breathing thing.

  Parker was a rich addict, and he knew it.

  Calhoun would give him his daily dose, and Parker would feel that euphoric rush of warmth, and there would be none of the gut churning, sweat running, paranoia-inducing terror of withdrawal—because Calhoun would be back again the next day.

  Within a short time of starting the daily injections, Calhoun hadn’t had to hold Parker’s arm down to introduce the dose. Parker had let her inject him without resistance. What would be the point of fighting? he reasoned. If they withdrew his drug, within just a very few hours of the time when his body had expected the next dose, he’d be sweating his life away to agonizing cramps, puking his guts up, climbing the walls, and begging them for another hit, knowing that he’d do anything they wanted—or tell them anything they wanted to know.

  Weirdly, however, the opportunity to lie to his captors never arose. Every day, Parker waited for the interrogation to begin, but it never did. The only people to talk to him were Calhoun and the bald male nurse, whose name he eventually learned was Greaves.

  Greaves was a Nurse Private First Class with weak watery eyes set above doughy cheeks, and he didn’t have anything interesting to say. Or at least he wasn’t prepared to make the effort required for saying something interesting to Parker.

  In his previous cop life, Parker had known plenty of guys like Greaves. Insular, minimum-effort guys who just turned up, did what they were told, and picked up their checks at the end of the month. The sort of guys who would do their jobs, but couldn’t be relied on when there was trouble. The kind of guys who would hide in the john when the captain asked for volunteers. Parker figured he most likely wouldn’t want to talk to Greaves anyway—he just wanted to find out where he was being imprisoned.

  But Calhoun and Greaves were giving nothing away.

  Calhoun would check in on Parker before she went off shift just to ensure that Greaves had set the shackles and straps correctly, so that they’d keep on holding Parker to the bed when he wasn’t in the gym. That was all they let him out for, after all. For whatever reason, they’d said they wanted him to be able to stay in some modicum of physical health; Parker could only guess it was because they wanted to use him for something later. But beyond that, his world was his room.

  He even ate in his room—they allowed him one hand free for that. The food was tasteless and dull, and could always be eaten with a spoon and swallowed with minimum chewing. They didn’t want to have to give him a knife, even a plastic one, to cut anything. Parker knew that a sharpened spoon could be fashioned into an effective prison shank, too, but his captors only allowed one spoon into the room at a time. And the guard who brought the plastic trays of plastic food always made sure that it was taken away.

  Parker didn’t see any other “patients” at the hospital, either—if that was in fact what the facility was; his wing of the building seemed to have been developed especially for solitary confinement. And so, for all intents and purposes, he seemed to be the only person there who wasn’t either a nurse or a guard. He didn’t even get a visit from a doctor. His treatment plan was carried out entirely by Calhoun and Greaves.

  Besides them, a succession of guards stood sentry duty outside Parker’s room. There was no pattern to who would turn up on what day, and they all looked like they were cut from the same rock. Parker couldn’t imagine the sentries were happy to be babysitting him, standing shoulder to shoulder in the corridor, parting only when Calhoun or Greaves entered the room. Whoever the guards were on any given day, though, they were always armed with Heckler & Koch MP7A1s on shoulder slings. Each gun would be chambered for the H&K 4.6×30 mm cartridge, Parker knew—supremely effective against most next-gen body armor, and utterly lethal against an ex-cop in a cotton nightshirt who was wearing no pants.

  The sentries would unstrap Parker’s legs and, under the watchful muzzles of the H&Ks, allow him to put on prison sweats and replace his prison issue flip-flops with Nike Air Max Torch 4 cross-trainers. While he was still covered by one of the guards, the other would attach ankle chains, cuff Parker’s hands to a waist belt, and march him the 180 paces to the gym. Parker had counted the paces the fourth time they had taken him there.

  In between examining his captors and losing himself to the drugs, Parker thought about Sara. And he thought about his desperate attempt to give her and Ava time to escape the FEMA forces at the roadblock, wondering what had happened to them after that. Sara and Ava were resourceful fighters and also had the necessary skills to avoid engagement with the enemy when they needed to. At least, he thought they did. Parker hoped that his girl had made it, and that Ava had also, and that they were now lying low with the resistance—or, better still, that they’d made it across the border into Canada, away from th
e fucked-up, near fascist state the U.S. had become.

  That was what he couldn’t really get his mind around. How had they let it happen? How had no one noticed that these forces of evil—the very antithesis of what America stood for—were ready and established, planning to take over immediately as soon as the EMP Event dropped its crushing boot down on all electrical systems in the country? How had nobody done something to curtail their power ahead of time?

  The fact that the government, now based in Chicago, had quickly been able to mobilize forces in vehicles that had been protected from the EMP Event by Faraday shields, and that they had communication systems that still functioned—albeit at a rudimentary level—proved they would be a tenacious and able adversary. The resistance, and people like Parker, might be able to cause minor irritations to the system, but winning the occasional battle wouldn’t win the war. The only way to defeat the government forces would be to find a way to combine all the resistance units and like-minded people into one army that could fight its way into the capital.

  But there was only so much that he could do from where he was now, and he knew it.

  His training and natural survival instincts had kicked in to create an internal map of the facility, to be used in the event of a chance to escape, but the powers holding him had restricted his world to such an extent that, if they hadn’t been turning the lights off at night, Parker wouldn’t have had any idea how long he’d even been out of his hospital room, let alone the building’s internal geography. As it was, the drugs had messed with his timetable enough that only shift changes and lighting changes suggested a rough estimate of time, at best.

  Parker had always felt he was a half-glass-full kinda guy, even when he’d been at his lowest, caught in the grip of addiction, thinking about his collapsed marriage, he’d always been able to find a reservoir of optimism to carry him through. But now—cycling through the room, corridor, gym, room, corridor, and gym on repeat, ad infinitum—all he had to look forward to was Calhoun bringing him that tiny syringe of escape. The liquid that would keep him corralled in these walls better than any chains.

  Nothing changed.

  No one talked to him.

  No one asked him anything.

  Nothing was expected of him; nothing was demanded.

  Even with the attendance of Calhoun and Greaves, and the ministrations of the sentries, Parker had never felt more isolated or alone—before or after the night of the Event. Everything had been shrunken down to a routine.

  Some guys liked the stability of predictability, and Parker himself had, occasionally, been grateful for the discipline of routine, and of knowing the exact parameters needed to keep motoring on through life, relationships, and career. However, this was something wholly different. This life, if it could be called that, was claustrophobic, cloying, and crushing. It was as if he was being tortured by routine. An assault being made on his sensibilities with drudgery, isolation, and the velvet-gloved, iron fist of addiction.

  If he let himself consider the future—his own future—all Parker could imagine was the endless tract of nothingness before him. They could keep him like this forever, wearing him down into a complete slave to the needle, stripping what made Parker Parker from the shell of his body and flushing it away with silence and fake smiles.

  Every day, the rock-hewn sentries would come into the room, unlock his bonds, allow him to get dressed and wash, and without a word indicate that he should walk from the room. The routine was set. Parker would turn right, walk ninety paces along the corridor, make a right, and walk another ninety paces to the doors of the gym. It had gotten to the point where there was no doubt in his mind about what to expect from each and every moment of his existence.

  Until a slab of limestone clunked onto Parker’s shoulder as he began to turn right out of his room. It stopped him dead in his tracks, his routine and protocol irretrievably broken.

  He looked at the guard who had put a hand on his shoulder. With the muzzle of his H&K, the man pointed down the corridor in the opposite direction.

  Today, Parker was going left.

  Considering who was signaling the change in routine, he could only take the change as a sign of what he’d been expecting all along—questioning, or else death. Maybe something in between the two—something worse. So, as the first panic attack since his last serious pill addiction battered Parker with its force of shock, he stumbled to his knees, crashing down with a thud before the surprised guards.

  Parker couldn’t move; instead, he was desperately trying to curl into a fetal clench of protection.

  Above him, the sentries sighed as they hauled him off the floor and wordlessly dragged him along the new and unfamiliar path.

  The burst of anxiety caused by the sudden change had robbed Parker of the ability to count footsteps, let alone draw maps in his head. He didn’t know how far they dragged him or for how long.

  4

  The Forest Glade Public Golf Course & Country Club was a nice enough place. It hadn’t been a truly exclusive haven of the rich in its day, but it had become an enclave of the upper middle class. What was important for the Northern Indiana resistance cell, though, was its location and facilities.

  The clubhouse and outbuildings were positioned on the outskirts of the small community of Billtown, which was nestled five miles north of the old State Patrol barracks housing the FEMA internal defense forces. Situated at the top of a small hill, surrounded by eighteen holes, it gave a commanding view of the area. The official FEMA interface was housed in the old city hall, so the clubhouse was being used as a civilian project liaisons annex in Brazil—mainly as cover, a reason for people to be seen coming and going regularly without drawing unwarranted attention.

  From inside the restaurant, the resistance planned its operations and conducted its intelligence gathering and sabotage missions. In the basement and outbuildings, it hid its weapons and ammunition. It was a hidden dagger poised at the heart of the Indianapolis Consolidated Regional Authority.

  Ava and Sara made their way up the drive and passed through a gate that was now covered on either side of the road by rose bushes run riot. Logistical and service people walked the grounds around them, busy with their own business, but the two women could feel eyes of observers following their every step.

  They’d spent two months in Canada, recovering from the ordeal they’d survived, worrying about Parker and mourning the loss of Finn.

  But then things had changed.

  They’d learned how they’d become symbols to a burgeoning American resistance movement, that their escape from New Albany and their hellish journey north was being spread through rumors and mythologized into a rallying cry. They’d learned that former American allies in the UN and NATO had grown terrified of the fascist machine that was morphing America into something new, building it up from the ashes of what many now openly suspected had been an act of premeditated treason.

  Now, however, with the clandestine backing of other nations’ intelligence services, the resistance was thriving, and the country was teetering on the beginnings of open rebellion. Ava and Sara hadn’t needed any time to decide where they stood on the matter.

  As evening set in, they made it to the safe house. The building was a one-story ranch-style leftover from a 1970s housing boom. Set on four acres, it was well off the road, down a winding dirt path that was partially obscured by blackberry brambles on one side and mulberry bushes on the other. There was a man sitting on the porch, apparently doing nothing more than relaxing. He wore logging boots and a beat-up old jean jacket. His beard was wild, a long way from hipster—not that “hipster” meant anything now—and he had his hair tucked into a battered old green John Deere hat. Ava and Sara knew he had a weapon within easy reach, just as they knew that the woods behind the house were patrolled by resistance members.

  Real security for their group lay in flying beneath FEMA’s radar, but they were prepared to shoot their way clear if it came to that.

  The man on
the porch said something they didn’t catch, and the front door swung open as they made the front steps. Margret Atkins, the cell leader, stepped out to meet them. She wore a chambray shirt untucked over Carhartt jeans and Adidas hikers. She was in her late forties, and in another lifetime had been a high school principal.

  “Ava, Sara,” Margret said. She smiled. “Good to see the terror twins in one piece.”

  “Good to see you, too, Margie,” Ava said. “Good to be back. Been a hell of a trip.”

  Margret’s face scrunched up with concern. “You had trouble?”

  “Nothing major,” Sara interjected smartly. “We did get spotted, but it was no trouble getting away.” Ava opened her mouth to protest how Sara was downplaying the encounter, but Sara quickly continued: “We found no major changes from the other recon runs. Towers and roof position the same, ditto the foot and K9 patrols. We still haven’t seen any armament heavier than a 7.62 sniper rifle. Mostly just carbines, shotguns, and pistols. They’re armed like a police station, not an army camp. There is a new sign labeling the fencing as electrified, but there’s no current running through it—it’s just for show.”

  Ava couldn’t believe what she was hearing, but she also didn’t want to show open rebellion against Sara. She’d have to question her in private and figure out what the point was to downplay the forces they were up against.

  “Really?” Margret asked. “My other scouts are reporting an increase in foot patrols in the areas around the outside of the prison. As much as a thirty percent increase in manpower.”

  Ava opened her mouth to speak, but again Sara cut her off. She shook her mass of dark, curly hair. “We did see a single woman and dog team outside the site, but nothing to indicate our plan couldn’t work as is.”

  Margret studied Sara for a moment, scrutinizing her face the way she must have examined problem students in her high school. Sara looked back at her, her expression calm.