Sara checked Ava over more carefully as she laid still. Nothing broken, and while the blue-tinged bump on her forehead was livid, there was no suggestion that the bone beneath it was fractured. Ava was having difficulty focusing on her, but that was understandable after the blow on the head she’d taken. Probably a concussion—no more, no less.
For her part, Sara ached from shoulder to shoulder across her back. A small price to pay for survival, though.
Mace pulled the lids from some tomato soup and handed the separate cans to Sara and Ava, with a spoon each. “Eat it cold. We don’t waste gas on heating food that can be eaten straight out of the container.”
Grateful for the food, hot or cold, Sara didn’t argue. Ava also ate hers quickly, scraping the insides of the can with her finger.
“Feel better?” Sara asked.
Ava grinned from beneath a tomato mustache before wiping it away with the back of her hand. “Getting there.”
There was a screen at the back of the shelter where a chemical toilet was installed, and as Jessica went to it, she said to Mace: “Daddy, I need the music.”
Mace smiled and picked up a mouth organ. He played mournful blues to spare his daughter’s blushes while she did her business behind the screen.
Insanely, as the melody curled and twisted around her, Sara felt tears picking at her eyes. It was the cutest, most human moment she could imagine. A father making sure that, not only was his daughter’s physical safety assured, but that her sensibilities and confidence were also preserved. It was a moment so human that it made Sara’s heart swell.
A little girl and her daddy. Making the world worth saving.
In the end, it was less than three hours before Margret and her ARM fighters uncovered enough of the wreckage to discover the hatch in their search for Sara’s and Ava’s bodies. In answer to a loud yell of welcome from Mace, they let them know they were clearing debris to lift it open. While they waited, Mace recounted how he knew Sara’s father.
It turned out Mace had been a Vigo County sheriff’s deputy when James Parker’s infamous fall from grace had been the talk of police departments across the length and breadth of Indiana. It had been a real “There but for the grace of God go I” situation, he told Sara. Every officer prayed that they wouldn’t end up in a similar bind—accidentally discharging a weapon and killing a child—and Mace admitted that for some time after Parker’s demise, he’d hesitated more than once in drawing his weapon from its holster. One time, during a hold-up in a liquor store in Cloverland, that hesitation had almost gotten him killed. The incident was one of in a series that convinced Mace that prepping for the unexpected, whatever that might be, was a good idea.
And it had been through prepping that he’d gotten to know James Parker more personally. Not in person initially, but through online prepper groups. Their mutual background as cops gave them an affinity online. Mace remembered meeting Parker for the first time at a prepper cook-out and day hike, six summers before, at Hemlock Cliffs in the Hoosier National Forest. They’d become buddies, and over the intervening years Mace had heard all about Sara, and seen the way her absence ate at her father. Mace said Parker had shown him so many pictures of Sara as a young girl in emails and instant messages that he’d grown to know her face almost as well as he knew Jessica’s. Once she’d said her name, common as it might be, he had no doubt that this Sara Parker was his buddy’s daughter.
As they talked, though, much of their conversation spun back to Parker. Mace’s relief that Sara had met up with him, that they’d found each other, was almost palpable—to the extent that it nearly brought her to tears, he was so glad to hear they’d finally been reunited. More than anything else since Parker had found her at the cabin, it made her realize how much he must have been hurting over her absence for all those years. When Mace heard Parker had gotten separated from them as they’d fled north, the conversation turned serious once again, but their mutual worry was forced to take a backseat—the hatch was finally pried open. After they emerged, blinking into the light, to howls of delight and amazement from Margret and the others, Mace confessed he could go on all day talking about James Parker—especially now that he was such a hero, given what Sara had been able to tell him and what he’d heard in passing. But the storytelling had to end.
While some of the cell members had been searching the wreckage of the Richardsons’ property, Margret had charged the other ARM fighters with rocking the blast-tumbled Ford back onto its wheels. All four tires had survived the blast, though the windshield hadn’t. It had been a miracle the explosion hadn’t set off the C4 in the cab’s firebox, too, but the metal container had protected its contents perfectly.
Margret also had a detail of resistance fighters collecting weapons and ammunition from the dead FEMA troops. Once Sara and Ava were back on the surface, they set about burying Brian, with Mace’s blessing, next to the graves of Corey and Marion Richardson in the peace garden behind the Christian Center.
“When this is all over,” Margret vowed to the mound of fresh earth, “we’ll come back and take you home, Brian. You have my word.”
It took a while for everyone’s amazement that Sara and Ava had survived to die down. Mace, self-deprecating and shy, seemed to quietly enjoy taking first Margret, and then whoever else wanted to go, down into his shelter. He was proud of it, rightfully so, and everyone was staggered by his survival refuge, and grateful that it had saved Sara’s and Ava’s lives. And, of course, they were charmed by Jessica, the guardian angel who had led them there.
But their house, constructed mainly of wood with concrete foundations, had been completely blown apart in the blast. The wreckage looked as if it had been caught in the path of a hurricane. Not one wall or stick of furniture had survived. The only blessing was that the blast had detonated up and out rather than down to the shelter.
Of Solon, there was no sign at all save for a blackened hand connected to half a forearm.
Jessica spent much of her time searching through the wreckage, which had been made safe for her, for mementoes and photographs. By the time she finished, with Sara’s help, she’d salvaged five photographs and a teddy bear who’d had his ears “blowed off,” the child said as she ruffled his head like a proud mother on her child’s first day of school.
Eventually, Sara got another chance to speak to Mace about Parker and what he’d heard about her father.
“Oh, I heard he’s a big time resistance fighter now.”
“You heard?”
“I don’t mean to go into details, Ms. Parker—that’s beside several points, I reckon—but I did hear that he’s been fighting back, and fighting back hard.”
Sara didn’t want to press Mace in case he took badly to her badgering him, but she couldn’t help asking how recent the information was, given that he and his family had been hiding in his admittedly impressive shelter. “Has he been fighting back recently? Have you heard about him… in the past few months?”
Sara prayed that the answer would be yes, confirming her father was still alive, but knew it was probably too much to ask for, even before he answered.
“No, ma’am, not recently, a good four or five months ago. Would probably’ve been before you all got separated, I’m afraid.”
Which would tie in with James Parker’s self-sacrificial drive in that SUV toward the roadblock of FEMA troops, which had allowed Sara and Ava to escape. Sara’s hopes fell with her heart, as she once again downplayed the danger of the situation she and Ava had been forced to leave her father in.
“We heard, though, he’s gone to ground and is gatherin’ an army. He’s gonna take those bastards in Chicago down. That’s what I heard, anyways,” Mace added. “So maybe he got away. If anyone could, it’d be your dad.”
Sara didn’t know what to say. Had her father become a legend the moment he’d died in a hail of bullets, or was there a ring of truth to the story? Was there an army of resistance fighters coming, and was James Parker its leader?
So, Sara didn’t say anything. She just hugged Mace.
The man took a moment to respond, his shoulders tense and his arms awkward. But in the end he found the ability to reciprocate and the embrace went on for a long minute.
When it came time to head back to the substation to see how work was progressing on the firetruck, Mace thanked them for their offer to join the resistance, but declined all the same.
“No. I’d like to stay here with my daughter… and my wife and my son.”
Margret shook his hand. “I understand, Mr. Richardson. And thank you again for saving the lives of my two best soldiers.”
“No, ma’am,” said Mace, “thank you, for giving me something to believe in. I hope that one day things here will heal, and all these deaths won’t have been for nothing. Maybe we’ll see you all then.”
Margret let Mace’s hand fall upon those words, and led Sara and Ava back to the Ford and the cell fighters.
“Move out!” she called, and with that they marched off into the gathering gloom.
11
Warden Spencer showed Parker a photograph of Sara lying dead in the corner of a cell.
Her face was half-eaten away by shotgun pellets and had been charred by intense heat. Whoever had taken the picture hadn’t even bothered to cover her naked body. In any other circumstance, her splayed legs and breasts would have been upsettingly lewd for a father to look at, but now… with bullet punctures, trails of blood, and a breast turned to overdone pork on her chest, the picture broke Parker’s heart, smashed it as if it was frozen in liquid nitrogen and dropped on a stone.
The interrogation room was lit by harsh white light. Parker had been dressed in an orange correctional facility jumpsuit. He was sitting on a fixed chair, ankles in chains, handcuffed to the restraining bar in the center of the table before him. A one-way mirror wall was ranged behind Warden Spencer, and in the corner of the room a U.S. Marshal, holding an MP7 across his chest, stood at attention.
In the surface of the mirror, if Parker flicked his good eye up, he could see his bruised and cut face. For the last five nights, at 1 a.m., two or three U.S. Marshals had visited him in his cell for what they jokingly told him was beatin’ practice because they enjoyed working out on the “uppity nigger” and reminding him of his place.
They weren’t expert at beating, at least. Parker had worked that much out from their sloppy blows. And the fact they hadn’t been going all-out to break his bones had told him the beatings were placeholders, while they waited for Warden Spencer to be ready for him.
Parker had heard the D-Block riot being quashed on the first night after his aborted escape, having been taken to a new cell on the second floor looking down on the recreation area. He’d smelled the smoke as, in a last-ditch attempt to hold the strike teams of corrections officers back, the ARM inmates had set alight mattresses and whatever else they could find. The screams of women and men had filled the air as volley after volley of shotgun fire had echoed around the prison.
Within an hour, it had ended, the last shots fired. The aroma of smoke dissipated by 3 a.m., and since then the prison had been quiet. Parker had remained alone in his cell the whole time, not knowing if Sara was in D-Block, caught up in the riot, alive or dead. The fear gripped him. Had he lost his daughter like Ava had lost Finn? Maybe he’d even lost all of them—Finn, and then Sara and Ava in this very prison.
On the fifth day, marshals had brought Parker to the interrogation room, where he’d been handed what seemed to be incontrovertible proof that Sara was not only dead, but that she had died in abject agony.
Before their most recent meeting, Parker had last seen Warden Spencer at the fatal stand-off at the cabin. Council men had surrounded Parker’s ex-wife and her Church of Humanity bodyguards in the remote family cabin in the Hoosier National Forest. Maggie, and Ava’s best friend, Finn Meyers, had died as a result. And afterward, on the run from the Council and FEMA, Parker, Sara, and Ava had barely escaped.
And here was Warden Spencer again—the big cheese, it would seem, in Indiana Correctional, management for the Council—running an internment prison for political prisoners and bad-think civilians.
Yet again, someone close to Parker had died because of Warden Spencer. His only daughter. His best and only stake in this fucked-up world—not only dead, but completely and utterly destroyed.
Spencer picked up the photograph and scrutinized it closely, a salacious grin widening wetly above his chin. “Not often you see a good natural bush these days, Jimbob, is it?”
Parker stared ahead flatly, willing himself not to respond, let alone cry.
“I do appreciate a woman with a good healthy bush and that…” Spencer put the photograph up to Parker’s good eye, and continued, “…is a mighty fine example of a dying breed of sexual topiary.” Spencer snorted like a consumptive pig at his awful pun. Then he dug deeper and harder into the wreckage of Parker’s shattered heart.
“I would say her blowjob days are over, though, wouldn’t you, Jimbob? A shotgun in the face will do that to a girl. Perhaps a good hot wax of cum over those pretty little titties might make up for it. What do you reckon… Daddy?”
There was a hollow in the space where Parker used to be. The atmosphere had been emptied, and all that was left in the air was a shadow of his former life.
Spencer put the photograph back into a Manila folder and lit himself a cigarette. He sucked in deeply, enjoying the taste, and blew a smoke ring for sheer amusement, his eyes sparkling at what he’d achieved. Next, he laughed and slapped the table and spoke to Parker as if they were buddies sitting on the porch on a summer evening, shooting the breeze and drinking beer.
“See that, Jimmy boy? See that ring? Goddammit if that isn’t the best smoke ring I ever blew! Damned if that don’t make me proud.”
Parker was nothing, he thought to himself; not a man, not a name, hell, he wasn’t even a ghostly presence in this room.
Warden Spencer roared, leapt up, and swiped Parker hard across the face with the back of his hand. The draught of sudden air from the vicious arc of his arm blew the folder onto the floor, spilling pictures of dead Sara at Parker’s feet. He was snapped back in his chair, head spinning, his cuffed wrists barking painfully as the chains jerked at the table’s restraining bar.
“Goddammit, you answer me when I speak to you. You will speak!” Spencer’s voice peaked in a croak, and a wave of sticky spittle fell across Parker’s cheek from the warden’s pig-like hole of a mouth.
“Don’t worry, Daddy,” said Sara.
Parker looked up.
As Spencer continued to rant and rave, he saw Sara appear from behind the fat warden and smile at him. He let himself fall into the sweetness of the hallucination. Spencer was punching him, but the blows felt numb, and Parker couldn’t help smiling at the vision of his beautiful seven-year-old daughter. Her skin unblemished, her eyes bright—the way she’d been before being spirited away by his ex-wife to work for the Council inside the Church of Humanity. The more Parker smiled at his little girl, the more Spencer raged, and the more ineffectual his blows felt.
“It’s going to be okay, Daddy,” Sara promised. She came forward and hugged Parker’s neck, nuzzling into him as he closed his eyes.
Spencer’s shouts became little girl giggles in his ear, and the blows from his fists landed like kisses.
The window was dark with night, but the light overhead was still phosphorous bright, inking tattoos of pain into his eye, even with the lid closed. Parker tried to lift his head, but his bloodied cheek was stuck to his pillow. He gingerly peeled the fabric away from his face and pushed himself up, groggily, putting his head in his hands.
The photograph of Sara—shot, naked, burned, dead—was still scraping layers from his brain. But sitting in there with it was Warden Spencer’s shit-eating grin, floating like the Cheshire Cat from Lewis Carroll’s lost masterpiece, Alice in Hades.
Parker rolled up the sleeves of his jumpsuit, looking for needle marks. The horrors in
side his head felt like a bad trip, and he wouldn’t have put it past them to have put him straight back on intravenous drugs after his near escape from the facility.
But Parker’s arms were clear. He checked the backs of his hands and his groin for signs of forced injections. Nothing.
Sara was dead, and he was sober.
Never before had he ached so much for the oblivion of hard drugs, or a bottle of cheap bourbon.
He sat like that on the edge of the bunk the whole night. Not sleeping, not moving. He didn’t look out of the barred window once and wasn’t visited by a marshal for beating practice. Perhaps even they felt sorry for him.
He was only aware that the night was over when sounds came from corrections officers moving along the landing outside his cell, banging on the doors to wake inmates for ablutions and the breakfast queue.
Parker noted that the cells on either side of his were thumped on, but not his. This was usual. Parker was not allowed to join the general population of C-Block. For the last five… no, six days, his meals had been brought directly to his cell.
His face felt like it had been replaced with a melted waxwork of himself. New lumps and cuts from the silent beating Spencer had meted out in the interrogation room had erupted over the previous injuries. One of the cuts felt hot beneath his fingertips and his skin came away shiny with weeping pus. There was the start of an infection there in the lump beside the bridge of his nose.
Just another shitty thing in a succession of shitty things.
A key turned in the lock and the cell door swung out. Parker was expecting the usual corrections officers, one with a tray of breakfast and the other covering him with the muzzle of an M500 shotgun.
But this morning was different; there was the officer with the shotgun, as always, but standing beside him was Calhoun with a medical kit.
“Hello, Parker,” she said without emotion.
Dead Reckoning (911 Book 3) Page 10
