Dead Lines
911 Book One
Grace Hamilton
Jack Colrain
Contents
911
Copyright
Dead Lines
Blurb
Thank you
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
End of ‘Dead Lines’
Thank You!
Sneak Peek
Also by Grace Hamilton
911
Dead Lines
Dead End
Dead Reckoning
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales, is entirely coincidental.
RELAY PUBLISHING EDITION, FEBRUARY 2018
Copyright © 2018 Relay Publishing Ltd.
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
www.relaypub.com
Blurb
911 operator Jim Parker wants—more than anything—to be useful again. When a catastrophic EMP strikes, and he’s the last person a kidnapped girl speaks to before the lines go dead, he knows he can’t let her down. Especially when the circumstances are so similar to his own daughter’s disappearance. With the world falling apart around him, he wants to do nothing more than retreat to his prepper cabin. But with a fresh lead on his daughter, and another innocent girl’s life on the line, the disgraced cop will do everything in his power to track them down.
Finn Meyers has lost Ava, her best, and only, friend in the world, but she knows where the missing young woman might be—and perhaps Parker’s long lost daughter. Now, Parker must form an uneasy alliance and tackle his own internal demons as the two begin a perilous journey that will take them to the headquarters of a mysterious cult in Indiana.
But what they find along the way will shatter all their preconceptions—and threaten the world as they know it. Can a has-been and a has-not save the innocent, and stop a disaster from happening?
Thank you
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(911 Book One)
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Prologue
AVA
They were coming for her.
She’d been too late. The end was very much nigh in southern Indiana, she realized.
Go Hoosiers! she thought in a sort of controlled hysteria. Dropping the phone in disgust now that it was dead, she tried settling the racing of her heart. It was hard work; her mind kept flashing back to the body of the young woman, Casey, laying so still in that grotesque parody of sleep.
Think! She scolded herself. Think, damn it.
In the spirit of necessity being the mother of all invention, she cast about herself, looking for any item with potential to be useful in some way, any way. But the room she hid in was a bare and empty cement box. Tall, grimy windows sat up high, only revealing a sky filled with the cold light of indifferent stars.
She was on the second story of the abandoned packing plant. It’d been twenty years since it’d seen use and now it was a cold, drafty, hollowed out shell of a building. Even its ghosts kept their own counsel. On the production floor below, the rusted frames of automated packing machines sat unused and forgotten in the dark like Jurassic skeletons.
Running in here had not been a wise decision.
For a girl who prided herself on wise decisions, Ava reflected, she sure hadn’t been making too many of them as of late.
Dr. Lorraine Marr looked up at the building.
It reminded her of the artistic vision of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the seminal pioneer of the modernist architecture style. “Less is more.” The packing plant was all straight lines of weather-aged concrete, tall narrow windows set high in the battlement-like walls, and minimalistically adorned with naked steel catwalks and fire escapes.
If she’d been a glass or two of red wine into a different sort of evening, she might have pondered the implications of her reactions, between her admiration for the plant design and the structure she tried to build her own life on. Stark, utilitarian, with straight, uncomplicated lines and almost belligerently sturdy building materials.
Somewhere in this cold, dark monstrosity of a building, there was a young woman who had brought a spark of… something, into her life. Then betrayed her and put at risk everything Lorraine Marr had built in the years following her humiliation and greatest failure.
Put it at risk on the very eve of her seeing all of her warnings and predictions coming to fruition.
“She’s in there?” Marr asked.
The heavy bulk of the man standing next to her nodded. Hank Gruber was disciple number one, a man who did not ask questions. Faith did not require proof; it was the single defining mark of belief. And Hank Gruber was a believer.
“Yes,” he said. “She’s in there.”
His voice was surprisingly well modulated, for coming out of such a heavy beard and blue collar, two-hundred-fifty-pound frame. The voice belied his outward appearance, which was vaguely Hell’s Angel meets Paul Bunyan, and hinted at his Columbia education.
“How?” Lorraine asked.
“She stole the phone from Casey,” he said simply. “Before the EMP hit. Sara used the find phone app downloaded on hers to locate it.”
“I would have thought Ava a little more capable than that,” Marr mused.
“She was under stress and in a tight window of opportunity,” Gruber pointed out. “No matter. We’ll have her soon enough.”
“I don’t want her hurt,” Marr said. More men came up to form a little squad around her and Gruber. One of them held a big dog on a leash. “Not like Casey.”
“That was unfortunate,” Gruber allowed. “But Casey left us little choice.”
“If anything, Ava’s twice as stubborn as Casey,” the dog handler said.
“I don’t want her hurt,” Marr repeated.
Her voice brooked no argument, and the team of men murmured their acquiescence. She smiled with the same, almost unconscious, sense of self-satisfaction that always thrilled her whenever she was obeyed. She knew people considered her group a cult, and herself a cult leader. This didn’t bother her.
‘Cult’ came from the word ‘occult,’ which itself meant ‘hidden.’ In its purest sense, any religious group with mysteries not shared with outsiders, from Opus Dei to Kabbalah to the Mormons, could be considered a cult.
Dr. Marr’s church had secrets, and she was proud of them. She was already in full control of her flock, too, but on this day her most significant prediction had come true—and the world, at least the immediate world, for sure, had gone dark. The darkness of all the silent tech-chatter offered mankind a chance to start over again, to b
etter themselves, to be resurrected and get it right this time.
Marr’s expression soured. Why couldn’t people see that? Why couldn’t Ava see that? No matter. In time, she would.
“Go bring her to me,” she said.
Gruber nodded once and gestured with a massive arm towards the abandoned packing plant. The five men standing around Marr and Gruber moved into action. Jogging forward, they pulled Tasers out and then split apart, two of them and the dog going around to the front while the other three made for the loading docks at the rear of the building.
Gruber made to follow his men but stopped when Marr laid her hand on his arm. He turned to look at her, trying to read her expression in the dark.
“I really don’t want her hurt,” Marr said. “The young people of our flock are the future of this group, this family. Like all families, there’s pain and arguments, but in the end Ava will realize she belongs with us, belongs to us.”
“We’ll bring her back, Dr. Marr,” Gruber promised. “Don’t worry. Casey was an accident. An,” he searched for the appropriate word, “aberration,” he finally settled on. “Things happened quickly, people responded, events unfolded.” He looked at her, finding her eyes. “It won’t happen again,” he assured her.
Marr smiled at him. “My dear Hank,” she said. “I can always count on you, can’t I?”
Gruber nodded, the movement strangely earnest and almost child-like for such a big man. “Yes, you can.”
“Bring our girl home,” she said simply.
“Yes, ma’am,” Gruber said.
He turned and left to follow his men, the faithful, into the building. Marr watched him go, and after he was gone, she stood alone in the dark without moving. She had waited for a long time, and the night, as predicted, was now at hand. But she was a patient person. It was a strength. She could wait a little more for things to be perfect, to be exactly right.
She smiled into the darkness, though no one was there to see it.
1
Southern Indiana, 2306 hours
Countdown: 25 seconds until Event.
James Parker rubbed the sandy grit out of his eyes and stared at the monitors in front of him. Three screens—low light, supposedly easy on the eyes—sat at his station along with a computer, telephone, and emergency communications radio. He was suffering from a hangover headache pounding dully behind his temples, and it hurt to use his eyes, even in such dim lighting.
His hand, big and calloused, massaged a five o’clock shadow rapidly heading towards full-on homeless scruff. He wanted another Vicodin, but had promised himself not to take too many at work. Mostly, he kept that promise. Mostly.
The light in the room was muted, more a soft ambience with the illumination designed to be easy on an operator’s eyes, and the soft glow of computers reflected like silvered mirrors from each station. From all around him, the white noise of the call center was a light murmur of background conversations punctuated by the alerts of incoming calls. Parker leaned back in his comfortable chair and eyed the clock.
Fifteen minutes to quitting time.
He lifted a hand to Kevin Oaks in a lazy gesture of greeting as the man, his relief, came in through the door of the “vault” and meandered towards the coffee maker on the table in the corner.
Right behind him, though, Parker’s supervisor Annie Klein burst through the door, resembling a squat lead ball fired from a musket. An old, not well taken care of musket. Her arms, pudgy bowling pins topped by raptor claws of fingers, clutched her iPhone and a thick pile of official manila folders.
Avoiding eye contact, Parker sat up and spun around to more fully face his row of monitors. His conversations with the indefatigable Ms. Klein inevitably ended in a poor fashion. He’d already earned two written warnings for insubordination, and HR had informed the union that he was currently under investigation. Yay.
He couldn’t afford to lose another job. His pension and retirement benefits were closely tied to his employment with the city. After how he’d left the department, getting fired from this job would vastly reduce his options. Besides, when the factories had closed down and moved to Mexico, they’d taken the greater part of employment options with them. Try as he might, he couldn’t see himself working as a barista, jumping to fetch absurd coffees for uppity IT techs half his age.
He sighed. “Because I’m old,” he muttered.
An indicator light blinked on. He moved his foot and nudged the pedal, opening the line.
“911,” he said into his headset mic. “What is the nature of your emergency?”
“Please help!” a young woman’s voice cried into the line. “Please help, something horrible is going to happen!”
“Calm down, miss,” he said. “Let me help you.” He’d taken enough calls by now to know whether it was the real thing or not. This felt real.
Automatically, his voice went down a register, sliding from gravely baritone to an almost basso profundo. It was a habit left over from working domestic disputes and suicide interventions as a law enforcement officer. It helped in his new career.
He went on, “I need your name, ma’am.”
His eyes went to his screen and he quietly cursed. She was on a cell; the caller locator software had the 812 area code, but that was it so far. He could have figured that much out on his own by her southern Indiana accent alone. Go Hoosiers, he thought.
“They’re going to do something at Stapleton Mall, the Church!” the girl half-sobbed.
He winced internally at the location, the reminder of his daughter, but pushed the feeling away quickly. He possessed an instinct, a residue left over from working patrol. This girl was fighting to hold it together; he could hear it in the timbre of her voice. She wanted to be brave, she was fighting to be brave, but she was utterly terrified.
“They’ve already killed a girl... I guess you’d call them a cult,” she went on. “The Church kidnapped me, and Casey, Jesus, they killed Casey!” The words burned through the signal into his ear and he heard the raw anguish and terror in her voice.
Parker’s stomach clenched. This was no hoax.
He eyed the caller ID screen—nothing. Goddamn satellites. He frowned. He inhaled through his nose, calming himself. Since Sara had disappeared, such actions were only effective at work. Outside of the call center, it took Ativan, 4mgs at a time, to calm him. Usually with a Steel City Lager chaser. Sometimes something stronger.
“Tell me your name,” he repeated. His voice remained steady, calm. He might be all this girl had until he could dispatch officers to her 20. He didn’t want to fail her. Didn’t want to fail another girl the way he’d failed Sara.
“It’s Ava,” she choked out. “It’s Ava Talbot—”
The line went dead.
Everything went dead.
“No! No, no!” he shouted, turning towards the screen. “Hello? Ava, hello!”
He was sitting in the dark. Not the low illumination ambience he was used to, but dark. Every light in the room was out, all screens dead, overheads down, his headset utterly silent. He felt frustrated rage building up in him.
“Goddamn,” he swore.
He began breathing faster as he thought about that crying girl out there, alone. Unbidden, tears of impotence burned the backs of his eyes. He scowled, almost snarled, and pushed everything back. Why hasn’t the auxiliary power kicked on? he suddenly wondered.
“Why hasn’t the auxiliary power kicked on?” he bellowed.
He heard the two other 911 operators who were sitting beside him and still on shift also cursing. No one answered his question. In front of him, set off to the side since it was never used, the back-up ham radios kicked on. They were old redundancy systems, designed for use during cell tower incapacitation by inclement weather. With them suddenly being used... well, if he’d needed more proof that the shit had surely hit the fan, this by God was it.
“Able Seven,” a patrolman Parker knew as Mark Denham said into his radio. “Be advised, Dispatch, we have comp
lete power outages in my vicinity. Stoplights went out—I need Fire and Rescue to Harp and Neilson Avenues. Multiple MVAs; multiple vehicles versus pedestrian!”
Parker knew Denham. He was a twelve-year veteran, calm and collected under pressure. He sounded more than excited, more than under pressure. He sounded shook up. One of the other operators took the call and began trying to roll Fire and Rescue.
“We’ve got a, wait… Jesus Christ!” another officer broke in. “We’ve got a plane down on Baker and Freemont! It slid into a row of houses! Everything’s burning!” The line clicked off, and for a moment there was silence. Then the officer clicked over again, his voice hard and flat. “Dispatch,” he said. “We need everyone. I’ve got six large residences fully engulfed. There are people trapped; I can hear them screaming from here.”
Like a dam breaking, more calls began coming in. Just like that, in a handful of seconds, the system overloaded and Parker realized that the city was done. Traffic lights being out were one thing, but a plane down? That meant only one thing: an EMP detonation. It was no longer about his little local 911 sub-station in a middle-sized suburb north of Louisville; this situation was going to be managed at State level now, or not at all. At least until FEMA rolled in.
Dead Lines [911] Page 1
