Parker looked at Grayland with sickened wonder. He hadn’t thought they could take him any lower, and yet here they were, digging down through him into the grave of his soul.
Grayland shook the papers, a little agitated.
“Shall we begin?”
Ava had no way of playing the DVD, but had already worked out that its contents would back up the text and picture of Parker on the leaflet. She’d read the paper and its unbelievable lies what seemed like a million times. The only useful pieces of information it contained were the time, date, and location of Parker’s execution: The State House in Indianapolis, Saturday. And really, she was lucky she knew that much—only her near-OCD impulse to keep track of days passing had allowed her to work out the actual date once she’d referenced the little marks she’d been making on a paper in her pack. It made her wonder how many people who read the pamphlet would know the date without being told. She imagined at least some people had kept on marking off days on calendars. Pretending things were normal, or would return to normality at some point.
Ava knew that she would have no real chance of springing Parker from the clutches of the Council and their forces, but that wasn’t going to stop her trying. As she stomped along roads, leaving the woods behind so she could travel faster, she headed back east, toward Billtown and Indianapolis beyond that. It was a risky path, traveling like this, and the chances of not being discovered were lower than a rattlesnake’s belly, but she couldn’t leave Parker behind—the man who had saved her life so many times—without at least trying to help him.
She planned as she traveled, remembering Parker’s preparations in New Albany. The first thing she needed was a stock of weapons, and a small guerrilla force of ARM fighters.
That wish, of course, presented its own set of problems.
She didn’t know of ARM weapons stockpiles, and she also didn’t know how to contact the ARM forces who had scattered from Billtown. There was one contact who she thought might be a good place to start, though; so, eventually finding her bearings—she was a mile west of Alta—she took the 61 south, toward Terra Haute, planning on skirting the city around the northern suburbs and then heading southeast, cross-country to Seelyville and the help she knew she might find there.
Only once did she have to avoid FEMA forces, and if they did see her diving off the road, they didn’t stop to look for her. The two patrolling Fords, with their machine gun towers and bored-looking gunners, rolled past her hiding place without a second glance.
Ava thanked her blessed luck and carried on south—tired, hungry, and thirsty, but determined to get to Seelyville as quickly as she could.
And then things went downhill.
The weather worsened; rain and lightning drenched and then illuminated her path, making it as slick as a mirror, reflecting bursts of light.
Perhaps it was her focus and determination that was her undoing. Maybe it was the whizzing forks of plans in her head, mirroring the lightning overhead, that took away all her attention. Whatever it was, Ava didn’t hear the pounding hooves of the bolting horses through the rain until it was far too late. Ava had only a second to turn as six horses, terrified and foaming at the mouth, with wide rolling eyes, clattered into her. She was thrown into the air as if she’d been hit by a wrecking ball.
Ava spun up, the world rotating as if in slow motion. She had the wherewithal to protect her head as the upside-down world came crashing toward her like a hard, tarmac piston. She hit the ground with a shuddering thud that didn’t hide the sudden crunching sound as her collarbone snapped and the ground took her consciousness away like a slamming door.
The wave of darkness rolled over her then, and the pain in her shoulder died away. The last thing she heard was a voice in the distance.
The voice of a young man, saying: “Davy. Go fast. Get Dad. Tell him a woman’s hurt bad. We need Doctor Reynolds now!”
24
Parker stumbled back from the cell door as it opened without warning.
Castillo came in swiftly, his purpose seeming clear enough. Parker threw up his arms, expecting a blow to the face. However, instead of turning his MP5 on the ex-cop, Castillo showed Parker his back and covered the door with the machine gun. Calhoun came in next, followed by Rodgers. When all four were crammed into the cell like a badly played move in Tetris, the army nurse did something Parker was absolutely not expecting. She slammed the door closed behind them.
The door wasn’t locked, but the whole claustrophobic atmosphere of the cell was so far outside Parker’s experience in the prison that, on a day when his will had nearly been crushed out of existence, he still had the presence of mind to get himself into the far corner and cross his arms, adopting some rudimentary defensive position.
Calhoun held up her hand. “Stand easy, Parker, this isn’t what you think it is.”
Rodgers glanced at his watch. “Twenty seconds.”
Parker couldn’t bring himself to lower his fists. So many, and so insidious, had been the mind-fucks perpetrated on him, that he didn’t know up from down. His heart fluttered in his chest, expecting savage duplicity from the woman who had turned him into a junkie, and who’d threatened to slit his throat when he’d been at his most vulnerable.
“Wh-what do you want?” Parker stammered.
Calhoun came forward, her palms spread wide to show there was nothing in them. “We can’t let them kill you, Parker.”
This took so long to get through Parker’s food-blender thought processes that, before he had a chance to answer, Rodgers said: “Sixty seconds.”
Rodgers pulled the cell door open a crack and peered outside, glancing both ways and also down into the recreation center before he retreated back into Parker’s cell.
“We don’t have any time,” Calhoun said. “They’re going to transport you to Indianapolis for execution on Saturday, in the morning. We’re going to get you out of here before that.”
Parker looked at Castillo and the less than impressive Rodgers. “You’re going to fight your way out with these two?”
Calhoun shook her head gravely. “No, we’re just here to explain so that you’re ready.”
This has to be another trick.
Another attempt to raise his hopes only to have them dashed again. Parker licked his lips and looked into Calhoun’s eyes. That’s why he didn’t see her reach into her leg holster, pull out the SIG Sauer P226, and hand it to him, butt first.
Parker didn’t know what to do, and simply stood frozen before her.
Calhoun put the weapon in his hand and squeezed his palm with her own. “Take it,” she said softly.
Prodded again, Parker gripped the pistol. Calhoun reached into her utility belt and pulled out four more 9x19 Parabellum magazines and dropped them onto the bed. “Hide those.”
“One minute twenty,” said Rodgers. Castillo was shifting nervously from foot to foot.
“If we’re discovered before we get out of this cell,” Calhoun said, “we’re going to shoot you ourselves and tell the marshals you tried to take the guns.”
Parker blinked. “Okay.” He nodded, not knowing what to think anymore.
Calhoun gave Parker a key. “It’s a master. It will get you all the way out of the main block and into the compound. From there, you’ll need to take a truck and bust out through the gates. We’re going to create a diversion.”
Parker knew his face was a puzzle of confusion.
“There will be a riot at 5.30 a.m. We’ve given Kleet a key, like you, and also the code to get into the armory. They will tear the place apart and try to escape at the same time. In the confusion, you should be able to get out by running in the opposite direction of the disturbance. Castillo has made sure the truck in the south compound will have the ignition keys on top of the passenger-side front tire. Got that?”
Parker had no words. The information was coming in a rush.
“One minute forty,” said Rodgers.
Calhoun squeezed Parker’s shoulder. “Make this count, Pa
rker. When you get out there, bring these fuckers down. I’ve followed orders my whole life, and would have continued, but the execution of the civilians turned all our hearts. Officer Rayleigh, too. Get out and make them pay.”
Calhoun turned as Rodgers opened the door, peeked out onto the deserted landing running in front of the cells, and indicated to the others that it was okay to leave. In three seconds, Parker’s visitors had left and the door was locked once again.
He stared at the gun in his hand and the magazines on the bed as he heard their footsteps receding into the distance, trying to make sense of what had happened, and what he should do—if anything.
Sara was dead.
Parker’s name was smeared with pedophilic mud.
He’d read out a message to save Henshaw’s life.
There was no coming back. He had no fight left in him, and he wasn’t the man they thought he was. But Parker did have another chance to escape now… just not in the way Calhoun expected.
Parker took a deep breath, flicked off the safety on the SIG, and placed the muzzle against his own temple.
Ava emerged from blackness like a cork bobbing up through thick oil.
Her head throbbed like it had been trampled, and she couldn’t move her left arm—when she tried, a crackle of pain crunched in her shoulder as if it had been stabbed with a broken bottle. She tried opening her eyes, but the light was too bright. There were low voices mumbling in the distance, too, but the way the sound reverberated told her that she was no longer outside on her trip toward Seelyville, but indoors, lying on a bed.
Ava tried to speak, but her lips were glued together with dried mucus.
The last thing she remembered was the voice of the boy calling for someone named Davy to get a doctor, and the pounding of the horses’ hooves as the stampeding animals had run on.
The urgency of the hoofbeats in her memory seemed to chime with her heart, and suddenly the desperation of her mission flooded back into the hollows of her body that weren’t grumbling with pain.
Ava snapped open her mouth and eyes at the same time, and began to say, “I’ve got to…” but her voice trailed away. Sara was sitting on the side of the bed, holding her hand. Large as life, twice as beautiful. Smiling.
“Am-am I dreaming?” Ava asked lamely. She truly couldn’t think of anything else to say.
Sara shook her head. “Absolutely not. You have a broken collarbone that David has strapped up. Sammi has filled you full of painkillers, and I’ve just got back from rounding up the horses that bowled you over like a tenpin, but other than that, I’m as real as real can be.”
Looking at Sara’s half relieved, half questioning expression made the throbbing in Ava’s shoulder subside. Such a rush of love and warmth filled her that it was as if everything bad from the past months had become a dream, at least momentarily. Having her back felt monumental, and she couldn’t speak all over again.
“Just lie still. You’re safe,” said Sara, and it was near enough the best thing Ava had heard in her life.
Ava put her head back on the pillow and rotated her hand so that she could grip Sara’s fingers and squeeze her hand. “I thought you were dead.”
“Same here.”
Thoughts that Ava didn’t want to be having encroached. “Have you seen the message from the Council about Parker?”
Sara’s face darkened, and she nodded.
“We’ve got to do something,” Ava said.
Sara let go of her hand and turned her head away. Ava reached out haltingly, but Sara shifted out of her reach, still not meeting her eyes.
“Sara?”
Sara got up, and Ava’s eyes followed her to the window of the snug, homely house she’d woken up in. Four people, two boys and what she took to be their parents, sat with two older people. One had a stethoscope around his neck and looked like his whole body, except his hazel eyes, were made from raw exhaustion. He spoke in a low voice to an older woman, wearing a white lab coat, gray curly hair pulled back in a ponytail, and a face that looked like a map of the Rockies. After a while, the woman broke away and went to the window where Sara was staring into the rain-soaked fields through the blinds. Ava couldn’t hear what the woman was saying to Sara, but Sara shook her head and wrapped her arms around herself.
Ava tried to sit up against the starburst of pain in her broken shoulder. She pushed into a sitting position and then moved sideways unsteadily, thinking to get to her feet.
She wavered, but before she could tumble from the bed or attempt standing, the man with hazel eyes was at her side. “Not yet, young lady. You need to rest.”
“Sara.” She shrugged against the man’s hand, but didn’t try to stand again, already having to swallow back nausea from her first attempt. “You know what they’re going to do to him. We have to do something.”
Sara spun around, her face a race of whirling emotions and pain. “The last time I tried to do something, I got everyone killed!”
“Not everyone,” Ava said, pointing at her face with her good hand.
Sara shook her head. “I’m not putting any more lives at risk.”
“He’s your father!”
“And I thought he was dead, and I’ve tried to do something more than just kill people. Working with David and Sammi—it’s making a difference.”
Ava didn’t know what to do with that, she was still so woozy from the pain and the drugs. She glanced sideways to the man she took to be the doctor, and then back to her friend who she’d recently thought dead. Sara had turned back to the window, but not before Ava had noticed rare tears running down her cheeks.
Sara helped Sammi get Ava to the sofa.
Through the window, the storm was building steadily. The afternoon light was fading, and shocks of lightning were cracking the sky. Ava gripped her arm and wouldn’t let go.
“You can’t just give up.”
Sara wanted to pull away, but Ava’s desperation held her on the arm of the sofa, looking down on her injured friend. “I’ve not given up, Ava. David and Sammi are fighting back in their own way. Keeping people healthy, delivering babies, giving first aid. How screwed would you be right now if there’d been no one around to fetch us?”
Sara pointed at the family on the other sofa. “If it hadn’t been for Jacob and his brother, Davy, you’d still be lying by the side of the road waiting for the horses to come back and trample you again. Or worse, FEMA to find you! I want to help! I want to do good!”
And she meant it. Parker and ARM had done great things, but it was a war of attrition. You couldn’t go up against the Council. You had to settle for little victories. Victories like mending a broken collarbone.
“You think the Council is going to let you walk off into the sunset and become a nurse? After what happened when we attacked the prison?” Ava pressed.
Across the room, Ralph Prentice’s face came alive all of a sudden. He stood up. Looked at David and Sammi. “What did she just say?”
David’s exhaustion shifted; his eyes looked toward Sara, concern in his eyes. Then he turned back to Ralph, “Oh, I don’t know what the girl’s talking about, Ralph. She’s delirious. Take no notice.”
But Ralph was energized. He stood up, walked to a cabinet set against the far wall, and began opening drawers. Sammi stood and indicated to Sara to keep her mouth shut.
The Prentices’ horses had escaped from their field when Davy had accidentally left their gate open. They’d been spooked by the lightning, crashed their way through the farm entrance, and clattered into Ava—she’d simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time. They’d taken Ava into their house while Ralph had gone to fetch David, Sammi, and Sara. A man of very few words, Ralph used the ones he did speak with true paucity of expression. He’d said nothing other than that the doctor was needed because a woman had a broken shoulder. Now, his demeanor had completely changed at the mention of the prison.
It occurred to Sara that she didn’t have her gun. David didn’t have his shotgun, either, and Sa
mmi’s pistol was back in the Blazer.
They didn’t think about arming themselves while they were treating the sick and injured, everyone was usually so glad to see them.
But now the temperature in the room seemed to have dropped thirty degrees, and Ralph was turning from the cabinet holding a Smith &Wesson .44 magnum. He pointed it at Ava. “Now, you repeat what you said, little lady, or I’m gonna have to make you an extra mouth, and maybe that one will tell me.”
Ava looked down the barrel of the magnum, her mouth sucked clean by a vacuum of dryness. She hesitated, but then responded flatly, “I said ‘You think the Council are going to let you walk off into the sunset and become a nurse? After we attacked the prison?’” The worlds already sounded like those of someone else. She wished she was dislocated from them—had never said them aloud in this room.
Ralph cocked the hammer on the enormous blue-black pistol. His arm and biceps strained under his checked shirt, but the aim didn’t waver. “My brother Tom was a guard at the Terra Haute facility when ARM attacked it. They ran him down at the gate in an armored firetruck. I had to collect what was left of him in two bags!”
Tears squeezed out from the corners of his eyes, and Ava flinched backward into the couch, her eyes on the gun.
“I’m sorry,” she said softly. “I truly am.”
“Ava!” Sara said harshly, grabbing Ava’s good arm as if to stop whatever she’d say next.
Ava looked up, grimacing. “What else am I supposed to say? I can’t rewind time. I said it. He knows.”
Ralph moved the end of the gun between Ava’s forehead and Sara’s chest. As if he was deciding who to shoot first.
“Ralph, come on.” David stepped forward, his own hands raised. “You don’t have to do this. These girls are no threat. Christ, they’re not even armed. You know I’m not. Put the gun down and let’s talk about this.”
Dead Reckoning (911 Book 3) Page 19
