Dead Reckoning (911 Book 3)

by Grace Hamilton

  Spencer was grumbling under his breath between the bursts of gunfire, giving in, Parker noticed, to anxiety. He’d rolled his hands into fists and both of his thumbs were rubbing furiously at his curved index fingers.

  Momentarily, at least, the gunfire took Parker’s mind off what had happened in the interrogation room.

  The marshals, once they’d secured Parker in chains, had thrown the cup of water over the front of his jumpsuit and toweled him down to clear away the chunks of vomit; it hadn’t done much for the smell, though.

  Spencer ushered them through a sally port and beyond it Parker could see a long line of windows. Outside the glass, the night sky was black. As the machine gun fire started up again, the reflections from multiple muzzle flashes moved across the surface of the windows like dazzles of sunlight on oily water.

  Before they reached the windows, a door at the top of a stairwell opened and Rayleigh appeared, puffing hard and looking like he’d run up four flights of stairs.

  Before he had a chance to speak, Spencer roared something unintelligible and backhanded the walrus-faced chief officer across the mouth, sending him spinning into the wall and cracking his head against it. Rayleigh, dazed but still conscious, looked at Spencer.

  “You…you…”

  Spencer drew the Beretta from his hip holster and fired two shots, and Rayleigh flinched as the plaster on the wall next to his right ear exploded.

  Behind Spencer, Parker froze along with the officers who’d been propelling him along the corridor—the shots had been close, and a good sign the warden was coming unhinged. Another glimmer of hope shot through Parker’s guts, suggesting things might be going his way, finally.

  “Go on, Rayleigh, say what you were gonna say. I dare you!” Spencer yelled at the man.

  The machine guns started up again outside, their reports rattling the windows. Rayleigh’s face crumpled into tears. Spencer walked past the man on the floor, holstering his handgun, and spat “fucking snowflake!” at Rayleigh, who by now was crying freely.

  The marshals dragged Parker forward to join Spencer at the window. Although they released his arms and let Parker stand on his own, they were taking no chances. Parker felt the cold muzzle of a pistol digging into the side of his temple and the click of its safety being taken off.

  More muzzle flashes and the rattle of gunfire drew Parker’s attention away from the gun at his head. He looked down at what was happening on the ground below them.

  It took him a few seconds to work out what was going on, though. It was as if his mind was rebelling, not wanting to process what his eye was now seeing.

  Below, in what Parker would later find out was the prison’s farm garden, there was a chained row of civilians standing next to a pit. Parker could see the outlines of bodies—a lot of bodies—in the bottom of the pit. Guards were forcing them to their knees. When the line was collectively kneeling, five other guards with MP7s opened up, raking fire backwards and forwards into heads and backs.

  Spumes of blood splashed into the air, bone fragments blasted out of faces, and bodies jerked like puppets before falling into the pit to lie pathetic and still.

  Finally, an officer with what looked to Parker like a SIG Sauer walked the length of the pit, dispatching anyone who was still moving.

  Parker knew then that everything he’d experienced up to this moment had only been on the outskirts of the battlefield. Because right now he was entering hell.

  Parker watched two more executions; two more lines of civilians cut down, tumbling into the pits.

  Spencer warned him that, if Parker closed his good eye for one second, he’d take it out with his thumb. “I don’t need you to be able to see for me to un-tell the myth of Jimbob Parker. One eye or none, it’ll happen. Then, and only then, will you be allowed the mercy of death.”

  18

  Crow Michelson died in Sara’s arms.

  The fatal wound was from a bullet that had entered his back, gone through his lung, and pushed two jagged shards of rib through the wall of his chest. Sara didn’t know when Crow had been shot, but he’d fought his way down the corridors, out into the quad and through the wreckage of the gates while she’d hung from him like a rag. She wasn’t sure if he’d drowned in his own blood, or if his heart had given out from the sheer exhaustion of half-pulling, half-carrying Sara out of the prison. But in the confusion of the firefight, and with supreme effort, Crow had managed to carry her to the treeline and into cover.

  Crow. The man made of bricks. Demolished.

  The night was alive with gunfire as FEMA forces cut down the last of Margret’s team as they ran. In her semiconscious state, Sara remembered looking back toward the prison, but the only people who’d come out behind her and Crow were the FEMA troops who had ambushed them in D-Block.

  Sara hadn’t considered that some troops would be stationed inside the prison as a contingency. If guerillas were staging resistance actions all over the U.S., it stood to reason that they might beef up security in the prisons where captured fighters were being held.

  Sara’s plan had gotten everyone killed.

  As far as she could tell now, she was the only survivor.

  She left Crow where he died, aware that she would have left a trail of blood for FEMA dogs to follow, and blindly headed further into the trees. There were creeks coming off the Wabash which she used to cover her tracks, splashing through the cold water. She made it through the sewage pipe and emerged from the tunnels before dawn, right where Darwin Road crossed Clear Creek.

  Sara emerged from the trees and broke into a deserted farmstead. There was no food in the pantry, or anything to heat the place, but she used blankets in a closet to dry herself, and then dressed in some jeans and a sweater the owners had abandoned, discarding her bloodied ACU. Not for the first time, she wished she had her parka, but that had burned in the firetruck right along with Margret’s just-in-case letter. Not that she needed the letter now—who was left for her to lead?

  The grenade blast which had thrown her against the prison wall had sprayed the side of her body with cuts from thin splinters of metal. Somehow, though, she found after a swift body search that she was basically okay.

  She dumped the uniform in the closet and set about searching the house for any medical supplies she could find.

  Of course, there was nothing. The farmhouse had already been looted, and she realized she’d been lucky to find blankets and spare clothing.

  Sara drank some water, collected her thoughts as best she could, and headed out again, through the black ash and brush alongside Clear Creek. It would be quicker to walk on the road, she knew, but there would be patrols looking for survivors of the raid, so Sara couldn’t risk sticking to the blacktop. At some point, she would have to change her boots for something more civilian, but right now they were helping her make better progress through the forest than sneakers ever would.

  Traveling, it was all Sara could do to hold herself together. She’d only allowed herself a brief cry, back at the house, but she could barely breathe for the pain in her heart. Everything had changed so quickly. The sense of failure was acute and shameful, and she mourned the fighters she had led to their deaths. The image of Ava flying backwards, three heavy rounds smacking into her, kept flashing before Sara’s eyes. That wonderful woman, who had believed in her completely, wiped out of existence in a matter of nanoseconds.

  No battle plan survives the first engagement, she remembered Parker telling her outside the cabin, and she felt the razor truth of his words with every step that took her further away from the prison, away from Ava, and perhaps away from her dad.

  Dazed, Parker was pushed back down the corridor to his cell as a bulldozer moved in to dump a huge bucket of lime into the pit outside and push in the mounds of earth pyramided at the sides, drowning the bodies in a mass grave.

  Once the gunfire had stopped, the silence that descended was complete and all-encompassing. It was a physical silence; the silence of evil left to run its cours
e unchecked.

  Parker’s heart and head ached with it, cold and impotent.

  In his head, he ticked off the well-established historical atrocities. Nazi Germany, Cambodia, former Yugoslavia, Syria… but never in his darkest and most gnawing nightmares had he imagined that he would see it here in the United States. This couldn’t even be chalked up to war or terrorism—it was Americans turning against Americans. Replaying the images in his mind eclipsed his own loss; it put a perspective on events that stretched with raw agony to every horizon of his internal landscape. As the marshals released him from his bonds in his cell and he fell on his bunk, the clang of his cell door closing sounded to him like God’s heart breaking. And it felt that final.

  Parker had seen some things as a cop—the likes of which he hadn’t thought humanity was capable, until witnessing them with his own eyes—but tonight he had seen into an insanity so massive that he felt like an ant crushed beneath the whole weight of the world.

  Never before had he craved human contact so much.

  And never before had he so needed to feel the warmth and love of his daughter in his arms.

  Parker had only one eye through which to cry, but it shed enough tears for a thousand eyes as the night wore on. A thousand eyes that wished never to look again upon anything like what he had been made to witness that night.

  Sara pushed on as the sun rose on a cloudless day.

  She was thankful the weather was holding, at least. Although it was chilly and fresh, it was dry enough to make travel fairly easy-going. A road bridge crossing Clear Creek had briefly shown Sara an F-250 with mounted 7.62 mm M240 machine guns moving slowly across it. She’d ducked into the long grass around a copse of chestnut. The FEMA soldier in the back of the truck had looked briefly in Sara’s direction, she was sure of it, but had also looked right through her. The F-250 carried on across the bridge, though, and Sara struck out again. She didn’t know where she was going, beyond moving forward. Part of her wondered if a concussion was driving her, more so than any plan, but any time she thought seriously about what came next, images of Ava and Crow assaulted her. So, she kept going, making her feet move her forward—to somewhere. Anywhere else but what and where she’d come from.

  Eventually, exhausted, she fell to her knees and crawled into a tangle of shrubbery. Beneath the white, flat-topped flower clusters in a thick grove of southern arrowwood, she sank into a fitful, troubled sleep.

  19

  Ava fell to her knees, with the taste of blood in her mouth and legs like cramped stumps of pain.

  She had run as far and as fast as she could.

  Ava’s escape—dressed as she was in the ACU, and weighed down by belts, clips, guns, and webbing attached to the IOTV—had become a shaking, numbing, headlong sprint of purgatory. Her lungs were as raw as uncooked steak that had been beaten into ragged strips by an insane chef wielding a steel-headed tenderizer.

  The prison was many miles behind her, though, and she felt sure she hadn’t been followed.

  Ava rolled onto her back, sucking huge gulps of air into her beleaguered lungs. She knew that, if she was to make it back to Billtown, she’d have to ditch the uniform and find some transport. But that could come later. Right now, her priority was to slow her breathing to a human level and stop her heart from spilling out of her mouth, waving a white flag.

  Images flashed through her mind as she lay among the trees. Sharp bursts of light, and those bullets crashing into her chest. The blood dripping out of dead Marty Smith’s broken mouth. Ava playing dead beneath three bodies until the attacking FEMA soldiers had disappeared down the corridor. They’d been intent on catching up with Crow Michelson.

  But Ava was still alive.

  Dead fighters had saved her life by shielding her with their bodies. The grenade detonation had thrown their fried corpses on top of Ava, taking the full force of the blast. She’d been crushed beneath their weight, already winded and in agony from the three MP7 rounds that had smashed into her chest. The IOTV had done its job and stopped the bullets with its Kevlar inner lining, but the close range of the shots had thrown her off her feet, and the grenade had covered her in other fighters’ flesh and blood.

  But it was the human shield of her dead compatriots that had saved her life the second time, as the FEMA soldiers had run off in pursuit of others, not thinking to check her status at the bottom of a pile of broken, twisted torsos.

  Ava had known immediately that she didn’t have any time to waste and begun wriggling out from under her dead comrades. As she’d gotten up, the sound of distant gunfire and explosions had increased in intensity. Whatever had happened to turn the tables on the operation had been reaching a climax, and surviving had meant she’d have to find a way out of the prison, and fast.

  When she’d made it through the destroyed doors of the building and into the quad, she’d seen that the firetruck had been blown apart and was burning. Bodies of resistance fighters hung out of the doors, their clothes on fire and their faces accusatory grimaces of pain. The FEMA soldiers she had followed down the internal corridors leading to the goldfish bowl office had already left the quad. Through the swirling smoke coming off the firetruck, Ava had seen them running at full tilt to join the battle against the remains of Margret’s team.

  For a moment, Ava had thought that she might do the same, to help her comrades, but by the time she’d passed the outer prison gates the firing had stopped, and she’d seen three fighters—one of them could have been Margret—forced to their knees and executed with single shots.

  She’d known that, if she attacked the FEMA troops now, she’d surely suffer the same fate, and it would serve the memories of their fallen comrades better if she lived to avenge their deaths, rather than senselessly throwing her life away now.

  So, Ava had lit out East, relying on her invisibility in the darkness. She’d stayed off roads, heading into the trees once she’d made it across the vast area of grassland on that side of the prison. She didn’t know if Crow had managed to get Sara away, but she prayed that he had. At some point, she hoped they would be able to meet up to take stock of the situation back in Billtown.

  Having breathed through her memories of the night and slowed her heart rate, Ava stood up and rubbed her face hard with her palms to revive the urgency that had dissipated as fatigue set in. On some level, she knew she was in shock from all that had happened and from the pain in her bruised ribs where the bullets had hit the Kevlar, but she couldn’t let any of that stop her. She’d be caught if she did. With her face and mind set, she struck out through the trees again.

  Ava couldn’t keep the killing pace of a full pelt, so she jogged as much as she could over the boggy ground. Two hours later, she paused, her hand against the trunk of a tall black ash tree. She’d stopped because something large was moving up ahead, and she heard an engine idling.

  Fuck.

  Were the FEMA troops on her trail? Were they getting ahead of her and waiting for her to emerge from the trees? In the far distance, she thought she heard a dog barking, but couldn’t be sure. Ava got down on her belly, inching through the grass and mud.

  As she got closer and saw what was through the trees, the sense of relief she felt was so overwhelming that she almost burst into tears.

  Sara awoke in the late afternoon, under a much-changed sky.

  Clouds were glutting what before had been a clear blue bowl. As she rolled from beneath the arrowwood bush and sat up, she winced. As if things weren’t bad enough, she had a bad crick in her neck. Sara rubbed at it and rolled her head around her shoulders, but nothing would shift the nagging pain.

  There was the distinct possibility of rain in the air as the weather rolled in from Kentucky across southern Indiana. She wished that she’d at least kept the top half of her ACU to wear beneath her sweater, but it hadn’t occurred to her that she’d need it for warmth. She hadn’t wanted to risk being picked up with the uniform on her person. Though now, with the change in the weather and the first thin sp
ray of water peppering her back, she’d have to make finding shelter a priority. If she didn’t find somewhere dry, a miserable night awaited her—with no warmth, out in the elements and covered in wet clothes.

  Through the gloom, Ava saw an ancient turquoise Chevy Silverado—like the firetruck, it was primitive enough not to have been affected during the EMP Event. There were a bunch of camouflage decals on the doors and the side of the beast, designed for hunting, Ava surmised. Two men were in the cab, smoking, the red glows at the ends of their cigarettes moving like fireflies. Not military. Hunters, probably in the woods to get a fresh kill for their families.

  Something was amusing them. Ava heard them laughing inside the cab. She saw one of the men raising a small bottle of liquor to his lips. Maybe they weren’t hunting; maybe they were just shooting the breeze and having a good time.

  It had been an age since Ava had had anything even approaching a good time, and for a moment she felt a pang of envy. What would it have been like if she hadn’t joined the resistance? If she’d tried to carve a life out of the apocalypse as best she could? Found someone to love—maybe even learned how to farm… Perhaps… No. Ava squashed the idea. You don’t give up. You do not give in.

  This fight matters. And it must continue…

  Within three minutes, she was driving away in the Chevy, the two near-drunk hunters’ hands tied behind them, on their knees in the mud.

  Ava had left their feet untied so they’d be able to walk back to their homes, but taken their guns and their bourbon.

  Ava drove hard, west out of Terre Haute. Most of the highway in this area had already been cleared of dead cars and the going was easier than she’d expected.