But Kleet shook his head, glancing to the guard before looking back at Parker to answer.
“Nope. We ain’t been outside for association for nine weeks give or take, day or night. We figured there was shit going down; maybe they let their guard down on some folks they’d let out at night for some reason. All we ever seem to see these days are Castillo and Rodgers.”
“Just the two of them?”
“Most of the time, sure. There’s other officers out there, a moment’s runnin’ away with their shotguns and their Tasers. We found that out the hard way.”
Parker hadn’t considered that only two officers at a time would be on the wing. There were nine Mandingo Warriors, plus Henshaw and Parker.
The numbers started an itch, but Parker wasn’t ready to scratch it… yet.
“They were shooting people,” he told Kleet. “Lots of people. Civilians.”
Kleet eyed him for a minute, and then leaned in. “Get the fuck outta town.”
“I saw it. Spencer made me watch.”
“She-it. We heard about the trouble with the resistance fighters on D-Block. Heard the gunfire, smelled the smoke. They locked us down for thirty-six hours after that. But… civilians, man?”
“Women, too. Never seen anything so… evil in my life. Shot in the back. Dumped in a mass grave.”
Kleet’s eyes had widened, but Parker could see the man believed him. “And they keeping us alive? Criminals like me? What the fuck got them doing that?”
Thinking back to all that he’d seen, Parker explained to Kleet what Spencer had been up to the first time he’d met him—using the worst of the worst prisoners to go out, cause havoc, rape, steal, and terrify. Perhaps that was what Spencer had in store for Kleet and his crew, he suggested.
Kleet nodded, with what looked to be approval, “Nothing like having a scared population to make them easier to control. Business 101.”
Parker got a taste of Kleet’s amorality from the comment. It wasn’t that he was evil, he surmised—it just didn’t occur to him to really care. All that mattered was doing what needed to be done to take care of business. The pragmatism was breathtaking. Inexcusable as far as Parker was concerned, but understandable. And maybe, in this new world, is was what anyone who wanted a fighting chance would have to accept. Even those fighting for a cause would need to be able to work with men like this, and understand them, to have a chance against the government and men like Spencer. Men like Kleet and his crew, who could be bought or reasoned with for the sake of support and business and survival, would be the equivalent of independent voters in an election—they’d swing their power to one side or another, and that side would likely win the war.
That didn’t stop him from wanting to see people like Kleet locked up, but… he saw that not everything was black and white. On another day, he would have laughed at his own pun. Today, though, Parker thought that if he didn’t hold it together, tears would come. Never had he felt so dislocated from the life he wanted, from the goals he had chased.
A shadow of a shade. Robbed of fight, robbed of power, robbed of family. Trying to stir up hope from a conversation with a gang leader. Kleet was a murderer, a blight on civilized society, and yet Parker was treating him as a resource, trying to pull something clean out of the dirt.
Parker got up from the table, and without another word to Kleet, he asked Castillo to return him to his cell.
Ava left Billtown without a clear plan of what to do or where to go next.
All the remaining vehicles had been appropriated by the now ex-ARM fighters to take what remained of their families and loved ones onto the road and spread to the four winds.
For her part, she’d changed out of her ACU, dumped her MP5, and stuffed a Beretta into her pack with as much ammunition as could be spared, and then put another Beretta into the waistband of her pants, where it sat snugly against the small of her back as she walked. She stayed off the roads in case of FEMA patrols and moved through the woods instead, lighting only small fires at night so that smoke wouldn’t show above the treeline. She would sleep lightly, extinguishing her fires before dawn. Then she’d move on, following streams and gullies, heading as broadly southwest as she could. It wasn’t that she’d picked west for any particular reason—she just liked walking toward the sun setting through the trees in the evening rather than away from it. It felt hopeful, in some way.
Parker’s respite from the stinking shithole of a world outside his cell door didn’t last long.
Sitting on his bunk, trying to bore a laser hole through the wall with his one good eye, he almost didn’t notice the door open. Two rock-faced and wholly anonymous U.S. Marshals entered. One trained an MP7 on Parker’s head and the other put the requisite cuffs, chains, and waist belt onto his body.
Neither marshal said a word or made eye contact with him as they worked. He knew the drill and so did they. Once they had him in the chains and cuffs, they marched him as quickly as his hobbled legs would take him—out of the wing, into the main corridor, through four sally ports, and into an administrative area of the prison which Parker hadn’t been in before. They took him up in an elevator and marched him along a corridor which was covered in a carpet. For the first time in months, Parker felt himself disorientated by his feet making no sound on the institutional floors of this corrections facility.
Through a set of double doors and a vestibule containing tall, potted rubber plants, office sofas, and armchairs, and on past a secretary’s desk with a keyboard and blank-screened computer. From the ceilings came the whisper of air conditioning. Parker felt it chill the slick of prison sweat fermenting on his scalp—it was like diving into an oasis after a month-long trek through a merciless desert.
The marshals took him through one more set of doors and into a brightly lit office, spacious and modern.
A broad sweep of windows at one end looked out over the surrounding area. The prison basked in the afternoon glow, the rocky hills in the distance looking like a magical city drawn onto the landscape by an angel. Other than bare patches of sky through cell windows, and one night looking through a window into the very mouth of Satan, Parker had seen little except walls and bars. His heart beat hard and strong to see something that reminded him of before.
Before his life had died.
Ava didn’t meet anyone for nearly seven days, other than coming across a homestead backed onto a grove of American chestnut trees, with smoke rising from a chimney, a FEMA truck parked outside, and soldiers smoking and lazing around it, awaiting orders. Perhaps a designated rest stop and supply base for roving patrols. There were idle F-350s and plenty of outhouses for storage. She made a mental note of its location, but gave it a wide berth and struck deeper into the woodland.
Through the trees as she walked, she could see fields that would once have been tended by farmers but were now sprouting weeds, being left to overgrowth in the burgeoning spring. A depressing sight, and more evidence—if it was needed—that the whole country was being overtaken by the weeds and thorns of the corrupt, Council-led government.
Ava had rations with her, but she was also foraging near the river for cattail rootstock and their corndog-tasting flower spikes. She collected wild asparagus on the edges of the woodland to supplement the food she carried and, every third day, she would wait in the woods, set snares, and see what meat she could catch. Cottontail runs were easy enough to identify, and although it wasn’t the season for easy pickings, she became adept at setting snares and getting enough meat to cook and pack for three days of traveling. Waiting near her snares, she’d think about how far she’d come from living in the suburbs and shopping at grocery stores. She’d changed immeasurably under Parker’s tutelage and her more recent mentors—to the extent that she rarely even remembered the old world. She only missed the friends she’d made, and lost, along the way.
She had no maps since those had been appropriated by the fleeing ARM fighters. Ava had thought, momentarily, about arguing their seizure, but in the end had
let it slide. She didn’t know where she wanted to go anyway, so why would she need a map? Regardless, her sharp memory, and insistence on sticking to the same direction of travel, gave her enough clues about where in the state she was.
The Huey, which had given her cause to stop, had now been hovering within earshot for almost a minute. The chestnuts overhead weren’t being caught in the downdraft anymore, but the engines of the helicopter were loud enough for Ava to accurately range its position and direction from where she was. She listened for the footfalls of FEMA forces, or the barking of dogs that might come if she were being tracked. Nothing other than the Huey hovering overhead gave her the impression that anything was out of the ordinary, however. So, she moved low through the trunks toward the noise, curiosity getting the better of her. If the Huey wasn’t looking for her, what the hell was it doing?
There were three men in the room.
Spencer sat at his vast desk looking at Rayleigh, who was trying to hang a photograph of a man Parker didn’t recognize. The man in the photograph stood in front of a U.S. flag, wore a blue suit with a red tie, had his hand on the heart pocket of his jacket, and was staring off imperiously into the middle distance of possibility.
“No,” said Spencer to Rayleigh, “it’s not even close to level. More to the right, goddammit… no! The right! Your right!”
Rayleigh’s face was hot with exertion and panic. He wasn’t a tall man and was already on tiptoes trying to place the large framed portrait correctly. That’s when Parker noticed that, not far from Rayleigh, there was another portrait of similar size. It was leaning against the wall, and was a portrait of a different man altogether. This man, standing in a similar pose to the man in the picture Rayleigh was maneuvering, was someone Parker did recognize. The last president of the United States. And Parker knew you only changed a president’s photograph for one reason—when there was a new president in post.
Rayleigh let go of the edges of the frame and stood back on his heels. The frame held for two seconds and then slipped out of alignment again. Spencer thumped his desk with his fist, and Rayleigh jumped back to the wall and started all over again.
The third man in the room was in his late thirties, his hair slicked back from his high forehead and gelled. His heavily lidded eyes and hooked nose suggested the profile of a bird of prey. Unruffled in his cream linen suit, he had a gold-topped cane in one hand, and it lay resting along the side of his left leg. He was not looking at Rayleigh and Spencer—he was looking directly at Parker.
An unexpectedly broad smile lit his face when he realized who he was looking at, too. He looked genuinely pleased. With not inconsiderable effort, he used the cane to lever himself to his feet and began limping across the plush carpet.
Parker didn’t know him, but he seemed to know all about Parker. He walked around the ex-cop and the attending marshals, looking for all the world like someone considering a marble statue in a fine art museum. He even stroked his chin in the manner of someone appreciating something unattainable. In other circumstances, the attention he was giving Parker might have been misconstrued as having the frisson of sexual desire running through it. The edges of his slit mouth glistened with fresh spit, the hoods of his eyes lifting to show sparkling blue eyes beneath.
“Well, well, well,” he said in the voice of a Southern gentleman from another age—one who was about to bid upon his chosen buck in a slave auction.
Suddenly, seemingly without prompting, the man’s face fell, as if he’d had a vitally important thought. He started patting the pockets of his jacket, and then the pockets of his razor-creased pants.
The surreal air to the proceedings on the far side of the office ended when Spencer was finally happy with the portrait’s aspect and Rayleigh could get down off tiptoe and relax. The man in the linen suit was still patting his pockets in an absentminded way, like a kindly schoolteacher looking for a pen.
Parker watched as Rayleigh and Spencer looked at the man with a seriousness suggesting he held power over them. Whatever his eccentricities, they were going to accept them, because judging by their expressions, to do otherwise might bring terrible retribution.
“Ah! Of course!” the man said, and finally he reached under his jacket to the breast pocket of the scrupulously white shirt beneath. From there, he pulled forth a length of white material. Putting his cane under his arm, he came as close to Parker as a lover might, just out of range of forced physical contact. The marshals holding Parker tensed at the man’s proximity, and Parker realized they were as scared of him as Spencer and Rayleigh.
The man lifted his hand toward Parker’s face, paused, and whispered: “Hold still, Mr. Parker,” and with that he hooked a new, elasticated eyepatch over Parker’s head. Prissily adjusting it until he was happy with the way it looked.
“That’s better,” he said, stepping back. “Much more pleasing on the eye than that unsightly cavern of wrinkled flesh. I approve.”
Parker remained silent. This was all too weird, all too beyond the un-comfort zone he’d been in for the previous few months. It didn’t compute. It was like his mind was short circuiting. The man pointed at the presidential portrait Rayleigh had hung on the wall under Spencer’s direction. “Noble and wise, don’t you think?”
“I don’t know who that is,” Parker replied honestly.
“Well, you don’t need to know who he is, as long as people think he looks noble and wise. That’s a fine baseline skillset for a president, don’t you think?”
Parker eyed the man, wondering what all this was leading up to. “I suppose so.”
“Well, Mr. Parker, perhaps you haven’t heard. The United States has a new president. A noble and wise man, if the portrait is anything to go by. It probably follows that you did not know there was an election last week to elect him. No reason you should know, I suppose. Only twelve of us voted, after all. But we can come to those details in due course.”
The man in the linen suit paused again, smiled, and straightened an imaginary stray hair on his widow’s peak. “First things first, Mr. Parker. Please let me introduce myself. I am Farmer Grayland, the boss of the president of the United States.”
22
Sara reached into the pack, pulled out a wound pad, pried the two halves of the sterile cover apart, and held it for David’s gloved hand to receive. Ten-year-old Cal Grove moaned with shock-induced delirium, and Nurse Samantha Diaz, with the sixty-a-day cigarette voice, held his head, gently smoothing the injured boy’s hair and surreptitiously checking his vitals with two fingers against his knotted carotid.
David took the pad from Sara, removed the covering, and pressed the pad onto the hole in Cal’s side. The blood seeping from the wound abated as he applied pressure. Cal groaned, but settled a little.
Sara looked around at the worried faces in the room as Cal settled back. Mom Gloria, Dad Phelan, and Sister Lacey. The all-American nuclear family in one respect, but tortured and terrified in all others. While Cal had been hunting in the woods near their home, a dog had attacked him. There hadn’t been a suggestion of froth at its lips when Phelan had shot it, so Sara figured they probably weren’t dealing with rabies on top of the ragged wound, but infection was the number one consideration. Phelan had described the German shepherd as having its snout buried in his young son’s side when the screams had brought him running from the house. He’d grabbed his Mossberg 500 pump-action hammerless repeater shotgun as a reflex action when he’d heard the first yell of his son’s terror, and the dog had been so intent on burrowing into Cal’s side that he’d been able to walk up to it and blow out its spine without it lifting its head.
Gloria had run all the way from the Groves’ farmstead, traversing the three miles to the Reynolds’ ranch to fetch the doctor, his nurse, and their new assistant to tend to their injured son.
Sara had driven Reynolds’ Blazer while David and Sammi had prepped with Gloria and gotten all the information they could.
Now, David pulled back the wound pad and looked
at the boy’s side. His grimace told everyone in the room that things were not going well. Gloria buried her head in Phelan’s shoulder and her slow sobbing seemed to make the room quieter. Sara made ready with another pad and stitch pack, thinking about how her life had changed beyond recognition in the last few weeks.
Sammi hadn’t shot her. David had made tea, and with uncharacteristic trust and warmth, considering the times they were living in, she had been welcomed into their home. In short order, in fact, she had become their EMT driver and chief procurer of supplies. She hadn’t had to shoot at anyone, nor pick up her MP5 or touch her Beretta for anything other than cleaning. Most of the time, her weapons sat gathering dust in a corner of the Reynolds’ house, forgotten and silent. Somehow, the time away from them had become welcome, though she never would have guessed that might be possible in this new world order.
The attack on the prison and the loss of the ARM fighters under her command still bit into Sara with shame and bitter desperation, but she’d held herself together. Mostly, the memories ate into her at night when she laid in her bed at the ranch, her eyes wide with crushing insomnia, and in those minutes by herself she would see their faces when she closed her eyes. The faces of Margret and Crow and Ava, especially. Pictures cycled through—Ava’s uniform ripped apart by bullets, and the burning firetruck, with the bodies of her friends hanging dead from the doors. Sleep would eventually take her in the small hours before dawn. Fitful and troubled, she always woke up feeling unrested and hollow.
But during the days, she had a purpose—not to kill or raid, but to heal and help.
Her presence had taken the pressure off David and Sammi, who were constantly called upon to treat the accidents and ailments of the surrounding communities to the west of Terre Haute. There were no ARM resistance cells here; the Council and FEMA left them mostly to their own devices, coming into the communities only to remind them that there was a new order, and to take tribute however they could in the forms of food and supplies from the already beleaguered and hungry people in the area.
Dead Reckoning (911 Book 3) Page 17
