David and Sammi weren’t leaders, and they had little interest in fighting—not because they weren’t unhappy with the situation, far from it, but because their focus was on the sick and injured. The only hospitals in Terre Haute were being used as so-called Mercy Centers, and everyone had heard the rumors of what was happening to anyone who went there. Disappeared or put to work as slave labor. So, the people here stayed in their homes, tended their farms and livestock as best they could, plowed vegetable gardens by hand, and made do and mended. Nobody ventured to the Mercy Centers, no matter what they needed.
And although Sara hated what had happened to her people and country with a burning passion, that energy was now being syphoned in an entirely new direction. Her nights were still problematic, but her days helping David and Sammi heal and protect the people in this community had had the parallel effect of starting the process of healing within herself.
All through that afternoon, David worked hard on the wound in Cal’s side, disinfecting, cleaning, closing a jagged tear in an intestine, and holding veins closed with artery forceps as Sammi held the wound open with her hands. Then, David began stitching layers of skin back together, by candlelight, Sara mopping at his brow with cotton wool.
Eventually, the hole was tightly closed and stitched like a railroad across the boy’s pale skin. He had fallen into a deep sleep after Sammi had given him painkillers and anxiolytics to help calm him down.
Sara helped Phelan carry Cal to his bed while David sank into a chair, leaking exhaustion like a deflated balloon. It had been a difficult surgery carried out under testing circumstances.
Sammi was kneading David’s shoulders when Sara came down the stairs and back into the living room. While Sammi worked on David, Sara began clearing the mess of the impromptu operation. The clinical waste bag wasn’t even a third full before there came a furious banging at the door. Gloria opened it to see a pale man standing in the doorway, rain at his back and a thin jacket around his shoulders.
“Doctor Reynolds, please, I wuz told you were here… you’ve got to come… come quick…”
Wearily, David got to his feet, his eyelids little more than hoods in the candlelight. Without a word, Sammi helped him into his coat and the circle turned again.
Ava dived beneath the chestnut as another Huey battered by overhead out of a cold gray sky. She’d been lost in thought, walking through the trees not long after the dawn of the sixteenth day she’d spent on her own.
She put her loss of focus down to not being awake properly after an uncomfortable night below her waterproof sheet. There had been a rainstorm at 2 a.m. that had squalled beneath her temporary shelter and saturated her pants. She still felt damp now as the trees moved in the downdraft from the helicopter, spraying her with moisture from the leaves and peppering the back of her head as she ate dirt.
The Huey moved on, but was traveling far too slowly for this to be a simple trip from A to B. It was either looking for something or someone, or had a specific mission that was going to keep it in the area. Ava prayed that finding her wasn’t its mission, and that it was hovering nearby completely coincidentally.
Farmer Grayland waited while Parker read the paper. He’d already put the DVD into the player, and the TV was showing a bobbing screen saver while it waited for Grayland to press play on the remote.
Parker felt like he was reading about someone else and that they’d used the wrong picture to illustrate the text. In lurid, tabloid gutter journalism, written in a manner that the National Enquirer would have been reluctant to print, was the story of how the people’s favorite rebel, James Parker, had been exposed by his daughter’s secret diary to have been a pedophile who had abused her in appalling ways from the age of two (as far back as she could remember) to the age of eight, when her momma, desperate to escape from beneath Parker’s evil attentions, had run away to join the Church of Humanity. The text went on to ask how anyone could follow a man like this or set him up as some sort of fulcrum point of morality.
Parker had long since staggered to a chair in the prison teaching unit. It was a room with idle computer terminals, screens, TVs, and DVD players that had once been reserved for helping the prisoners become useful members of society again. He’d sat down heavily, the words on the page swimming in the tears in his eye.
“The roll-out’s been going well. We’ve printed off roughly a million of them, and they’re being distributed far and wide.”
Parker didn’t need to know the how, and he was pretty sure he could work out why they were doing this.
Grayland had a glint in his eye that showed he was enjoying himself.
Parker looked up. “Why not just kill me now?”
“When you’re still useful to us? Don’t be foolish, Parker. We have one last week to make more revelations, denigrate you further. The idea of Parker cannot transcend to martyrdom. Even flawed heroes can be forgiven. Even someone who has such a… disgusting… past as you. A few more stories will bring the masses to Indianapolis against you.”
The trees opened up a little, and Ava looked along a stretch of highway. No route makers told her which road it was, but a Huey was holding station and below it was a bronze Ford F-350 with two guys getting out of the cab, looking like they had just arrived. They weren’t in uniform and looked for all the world like a couple of civilians. The door in the side of the Huey slid back, and a soldier who appeared began to operate the winch. He kicked a small plastic crate into the air, so that it spun and bounced on a line; then he began lowering it to the waiting civilians.
All was going well until a catch on the side of the crate came open and the rotor draft caught its contents. The whirling rotors distributed the cargo over the men, the Ford, the highway, and into the trees all around them. A whirling scatter of papers and glinting flat plastic boxes, which it soon became apparent were CD jewel cases, burst forth. Papers blew in every direction, many of them thrown in the trees surrounding Ava.
The civilians were running around like clowns in a silent movie, trying to pick up as many papers and CD boxes as they could. Despite the fact that she had to worry about being seen, Ava couldn’t help but find the sight of it all funny—it made her grin for the first time in days.
Ava saw some of the freed papers fluttering in a bush five yards away as the Huey turned in the air and powered away. The men-clowns were still running about trying to pick up as much as possible now that the downdraft was easing with the helicopter’s departure.
Ava went forward, low, and within a second had two pieces of paper. Without stopping to look at them, she moved back into the depth of the woods, and didn’t stop until she was back at her pack and shelter.
Only then did she look at what was in her hand.
Parker’s world was slipping. Could they damage him anymore? Could they torture him more than they had done by showing him the dead body of his daughter, making him rub her ashes from his hands? Could they do worse than addict him to heroin?
Yes, was the answer.
Yes, they could. Even if there was the tiniest spark out there, the briefest light which might explode a fire of rebellion inside people in his name, if that was the case, yes, they could do worse to him.
I’m not a goddamned hero, he thought.
But some people think I am, and that’s what makes the difference. Grayland and his cabal of councilors and his fake president could extinguish that last gleam of hope, not by killing the man, but by killing the idea of him.
Parker’s shoulders twitched, and the marshals with their MP5s zeroed their muzzles on him as Spencer gloated from his own seat. Grayland took a step back, still wary. A man who enjoyed the torture, but not the pushback. Parker caught a glimpse of fear in his eyes.
Grayland gathered himself and smoothed his hair back with his hands as he limped to a table, picked up a remote, and pointed it at the DVD player.
The picture came to life immediately. Parker couldn’t help but recognize the room on the screen. The Oval Office. Sitting
at the desk was the man whom Grayland had told Parker was the new president, the president who’d been voted in by just twelve people.
“My fellow Americans,” he began, his words like hot nails being driven into Parker’s ears, “tonight I want to talk to you about an enemy of everything you hold dear, the man who would fight to his last breath to destroy this shining city on a hill we strive to build together. The man I speak of is James Parker, a pedophile, drug addict, and traitor.”
“I wrote that,” whispered Grayland, looking immensely pleased with himself.
The president on the screen held up a leather folder for the camera to see. Inside was one sheet of paper, showing the seal of the president of the United States, a small block of text, and a furious looking signature.
“I have just this day signed the execution order for James Parker, this man who has been fighting against those honorable men and women who’ve been attempting to put our country back together, and raising further disorder in these difficult times.”
The president was replaced by a still photograph of Parker standing in his cell, in his jumpsuit, hands handcuffed in front of him, guards preparing to walk him from the cell.
“The execution,” the president continued with solemnity, “will take place one week from today.”
A date flashed up on the screen.
“James Parker will be taken to Indianapolis and publicly executed for the good of this great nation. Join us, my fellow Americans. Join us on that day, as we turn the TV and radio services back on, to see this treasonous stain on our flag put to death for innumerable crimes.”
Grayland flicked off the TV with the remote and clapped his hands prissily.
Parker was still floating in a cloud of unreality; all he felt was chill vertigo and a sense of emptiness that would not fill with coherent thoughts.
Grayland smiled.
“Seven days till showtime, Parker. What shall we tell the world about you next?”
23
“It’s not true. Any of it.”
“The problem with a lie is that it’s twice around the world before the truth can get its boots on,” said David, wearily. He’d been up most of the night delivering a baby sixteen miles away. Sammi had been twenty miles south, helping a man who had fallen from his barn roof and dislocated his shoulder. Sara had been driving between the two, assisting where she could, and taking supplies to Sammi and David where they were needed. She’d scored some gasoline and out-of-date antibiotics from the family of the husband with the dislocated shoulder. She’d also read the notice pinned to the door of an empty store.
Sara had driven back to the Reynolds’ ranch with Sammi, and then gone straight off to pick up David from the property where mother and baby were doing well. But, all the while, her hands had been shaking on the wheel and her eyes had buzzed with tears. David, habitually tired because of the non-stop workload, had snored in the passenger seat all the way home in the worsening weather. Lightning had fizzed across the sky as the rains ramped up, splattering on the windshield, hardly being affected by the wiper blades.
PEDOPHILE. Of all things.
But, truly, that wasn’t the point.
He was alive. Her father wasn’t dead.
What headlines, though… She’d read the gut-churning letters, and read of the impending execution, six days from now in Indianapolis. It had all left a trail of hurt through her body and her soul.
She’d ripped it off the door. Passed it to Sammi and David, who had passed it between them. Sammi’s eyebrows had threatened to backflip over the top of her head. David had read and re-read it.
“None of it is true. Sara?”
Sara had all but exploded. “Of course, it’s not true! My dad… Daddy… would-would… NO! It just makes me sick to think they could say that about him. And for the record, I never even kept a diary.”
“Your father—” Sammi had started gravely.
Sara had picked up the sheet of paper that David had left on the table. “This is nothing.”
The three had been silent for a while. Only the patter of rain against the windows of the ranch house had told them that anything could be happening in this time-locked moment.
Sara got up and paced to the bookcase. She picked up her Beretta. She hadn’t touched it for weeks, and so she dropped the magazine into her palm. It was full.
“What are you going to do?”
Sara thought for a moment. Clipped the magazine back in the gun and put it back on the shelf.
“Nothing,” she said. “There’s nothing I can do, except go there and commit suicide.”
The room fell to silence.
Just the rain to interrupt.
And their breathing.
They’d stopped letting Parker go into general population to mix with Kleet and the rest of the Mandingos.
He was again being fed in his cell.
For the two days after Grayland had shown him the DVD of the president’s execution proclamation and the paper listing his heinous crimes against his daughter, Parker had been left to his own devices. Food and drink had been brought by staff, but no one had spoken to him.
On the afternoon of the second day, five days before his execution, Grayland came to visit him again; this time, he brought along two U.S. Marshals.
Parker was handcuffed and chained and taken again to the teaching room, where he was put in a chair under a bright light and monitored by an old video camera on a tripod with a blinking red light on the front, indicating it was recording.
Grayland perched on the edge of a computer desk, looking at his nails and smoothing his hair back every so often.
Spencer came in with a Manila folder.
Parker eyed him suspiciously as Spencer handed him the folder, which he could only just open with his cuffed hands. Inside of it were pictures of a naked young black woman chained to a chair. The first picture was a screen grab from a camera. The next picture showed the same scene, but with the addition of a huge thug of a man, in uniform, whose sleeves were rolled up for business, and he was standing in front of the young woman. The next picture, the last, saw the woman’s head snapping back from a full-fisted punch from the thug. The image was grainy and indistinct, but she looked a lot like Sara.
Parker’s spine frosted over as a tinny scream tore through the room.
He jumped, and the photographs slipped from his fingers. Grayland was alert, his eyes sparkling. Parker almost believed the man was going to start clapping again. But no. A computer monitor was turned on, showing camcorder footage of the room. The woman who looked like Sara was still chained to a chair. Screaming.
The thug was spraying her with a liquid from a yellow can, and she was screeching with terror. The sound sliced into Parker’s ears like razors, and it felt like time was freezing over as he watched, only the video footage to tell any passage of time.
The thug reached into his pocket, pulled out a Zippo, and lit it. He covered his face with his other arm and set the woman alight.
The thug walked out of the shot as the woman screamed and writhed in the flames. Shaking in the chair, hair combusting, head turning, trying to avoid the encroaching licks of fire. As her head went up in sizzling flames, she screamed: “Daddy! Daddy! Daddy! Make it stop! Daddy!”
The thug came back into frame, raised a shotgun, and blew off half her face.
Two other uniformed thugs came into the shot then, patting down the flames with asbestos fire blankets. Soon, the woman’s near-decapitated body was a smoldering ruin of shriveled flesh and leaking brains. The thugs unchained her from the chair and dragged her floppy corpse to the corner of the room, where they arranged her limbs into a familiar pattern.
The first thug pulled a digital camera from a Faraday bag, taking the pictures which had been shown to Parker to prove Sara was dead.
Grayland stood up from the desk and approached Parker.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Parker, but we told you a little lie about your daughter. I’m afraid she didn’t die acc
identally in the riot. I ordered her execution myself. For the purposes of this meeting, you understand, though it was all taken care of some time ago.”
Parker’s head throbbed with sickness; his belly was tangled like brambles. The sheer terror as she’d burned increased and folded him up inside, so that he couldn’t speak, or even comprehend his surroundings in any definite manner.
Grayland interrupted Parker’s train of thought. “Turn it on, Spencer. Mr. Parker. Your attention, please.”
Parker didn’t have any strength left. His head weighed a million tons.
Spencer sighed, came over, stood behind him and, clamping his hands around Parker’s face, lifted his eyeline, to look upon another monitor.
Grayland cleared his throat. “These are live pictures, Mr. Parker.”
Parker could see the trustee, Henshaw, chained to a chair in the same room where they’d burned and shot Sara. The same thug was covering Henshaw in fluid.
There was no sound, but Henshaw’s face took a few seconds to realize what liquid was being drizzled over him. And when he did, he also began to scream, the angry sound cutting through the room.
The thug stood back, lit his Zippo, and gave a thumbs-up to the camera.
Grayland stood between Parker and the monitor so that he could no longer see Henshaw’s tortured, terrified face. He handed Parker a sheet containing a paragraph in closely typed lines.
“I’ve prepared a script for you, Mr. Parker. I’d like you to read it aloud while you look into the camera. Any reluctance to perform, and Mr. Henshaw will suffer the same fate as your daughter. I’m sure you wouldn’t want to be responsible for Mr. Henshaw’s death. And, of course, we do have sixteen other Mandingos to follow up with. That would make quite the cook-out, don’t you agree?”
Dead Reckoning (911 Book 3) Page 18
