Dead Lines [911]

by Grace Hamilton

  He’d left the 911 center to help someone in trouble. Putting himself out as a player in the scenario, he’d quickly discovered more people in need of help. Upon helping them, he’d incurred a feeling of responsibility for them that had forced him to abandon or delay his original goal. He shook his head in frustration.

  Ava was out there with no one to help her. He looked at the semi-conscious mother, feeling the weight of the baby in his arms. The little girl had grown so exhausted that she was only whimpering now.

  “Goddamn it,” he muttered. He looked over at the man. “Change of plan,” he said. “I’ll help you get her to the door.”

  The man looked relieved at Parker’s announcement. “That sounds like a good idea.” He held out his hand. “I’m Dominic Mendoza.”

  Parker shifted the baby and took the man’s hand for a moment. “James Parker,” he said. He indicated the woman with a thrust of his chin. “With the baby and no help, we only have one option. You and I are going to have to support her while I carry the baby. I don’t care if we’re dragging her feet along behind us; we don’t have a choice.”

  Dominic nodded. “What about that tourniquet on her arm?”

  “It’s a pressure bandage—basically keeping pressure on the wound. I stuffed the gash with gauze that will cause her blood to clot so she’ll stop bleeding. In theory,” he added. “You put her arm around your shoulder on that side,” Parker told him. “That way I can eyeball it clearly while we move. Something happens, it jogs loose, whatever, I’ll see it and deal with it.” He shrugged. “It’s the best we can do.”

  Parker crouched down and gently laid the little girl on the sidewalk. Turning, he and Dominic carefully pulled the woman into a sitting position, and then, placing her arms over their shoulders, rose up, bringing her to her feet.

  “Okay,” Parker told him. “Put your arm around her waist and support her for a moment.”

  “I got it,” Dominic said.

  Parker reached for his pack, slipped it over his shoulders and strapped it back on him before kneeling down to pick up the somewhat listless baby, and then returned to his place. The woman was a loose, limp weight in their arms. She mumbled something, but Parker ignored her. He was tired. He wanted a cold beer. Good God, did he want a beer.

  “Let’s get this done,” he said.

  Through sheer force of will and brute muscle, the two men managed to move the woman and baby down the street’s several blocks to the parking lot entrance of the call center. Parker drew them up short.

  “Let’s set her down here,” he told Dominic. “I don’t really want to see anyone in there at the moment.”

  “Problem?” Dominic asked.

  “My boss,” Parker replied. “Don’t worry, you’ll meet her,” he said. He was unable to suppress a small grin.

  Dominic smiled back, nodding. “Say no more. I work at the post office; my supervisor’s an aspiring Nazi.”

  Working in sync with an easy companionship that belied the manner in which they’d first met only a couple of minutes before, they set the woman down. Parker gave the little girl to Dominic and quickly checked to see how the bandage was faring.

  Satisfied, he rose. Damn, he was glad he’d done his research and created an emergency first aid kit that rivaled that of a paramedic. He was ready for battle—literally. The little girl had ceased crying. She looked at him with enormous blue eyes. She smiled and gurgled. Feeling slightly goofy, he grinned back. He looked up at Dominic and then held out his hand.

  “Good to know you, Dominic,” he said.

  “Good to know you,” Dominic replied, and the two men shook hands.

  Stepping back, Parker looked at the door and made a face. “Give me ten seconds to get moving and then knock. Tell them the QuikClot was put in place twelve minutes ago.”

  Dominic nodded. “Twelve minutes,” he repeated. “Got it.”

  Parker turned and began walking. The night was already shaping up to be one hell of an experience. Unbidden, like a dream rising up out of the lake of his subconscious, a random quote filtered through his mind.

  “Miles to go and promises to keep,” he muttered.

  3

  Parker set off from the call center for the second time that night.

  He felt good about what he’d done and pained that he couldn’t do more, all at the same time. The rescue had been a good thing, obviously, but it also represented an equally obvious example of mission creep for him.

  There were most likely dozens, if not hundreds, of instances where he could be needed in the city right now. Where he could help, could maybe save lives. If he allowed himself to get drawn into broader rescue efforts, there would be no one to help Ava. Her trail was already nebulous and cold; the more time he spent doing something else, even something important, the more remote his chance to effect an outcome in her case became.

  Truth was, there would soon be an army of emergency workers setting up operations in the area. If the EMP effect was only localized, then state and national groups were already on the move. There were contingencies in place for the general civilian population. The girl had... well, only him.

  He moved fast to try to save time, but soon had to slow down and conserve his energy a little. He didn’t exactly run marathons in his spare time. Once he’d turned in his badge and left the department, his depression had made exercise almost impossible in his state of mind, and he was no longer in the sort of shape he would have liked. Too much McDonald’s, too many beers. He knew full well that being in good shape was one of the most important aspects of being fully prepared, but he’d always put it off. He’d start working out tomorrow, he’d tell himself. Tomorrow came and went, and now he found himself struggling, despite all the gear he had that was supposed to keep him alive. Dumb move.

  Cutting under a highway overpass gridlocked with dead vehicles, he skirted

  the edge of one of the city’s industrial zones, it being filled with silent, dark factories and warehouses, before cutting across a lower middle class residential neighborhood.

  Everything lay quiet around him and he saw no one moving around. Given the lateness of the hour, he wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that the residents had slept through the initial flash. They’d wake up tomorrow realizing their alarms hadn’t gone off and feeling panicked about school or work. The horror would really hit them when they tried turning on their coffeemakers and the morning news, only to discover themselves transported back to a virtual dark age.

  He chuckled a little at the mental image. Then he thought about a thousand diabetics waking up to discover their refrigerated insulin had gone warm while they’d slept. He stopped chuckling.

  Feeling somber, he hiked through several darkened streets before crossing a major arterial road that was dotted with abandoned vehicles, then entering a commercial area filled with supermarkets, strip malls, and assorted businesses positioned to service the quiet neighborhoods he’d traversed.

  He saw the roaring flames of another disaster rising up into the nighttime sky well before he came onto the scene. A commuter plane, most likely a red-eye out of Indianapolis, had fallen out of the sky like a dead bird and slammed into a Walmart Superstore. The main building burned brightly, but the real conflagration roared with inferno intensity where the tail section, broken free of the plane’s superstructure, had sheared off the pumps in a Chevron gas station and ignited the fuel wells beneath them.

  A crowd milled around in the aftermath of the catastrophe, watching the buildings burn. Without someone to assume command and keep them back, the onlookers watched mesmerized, and were apparently unconcerned by the chances of any secondary explosions.

  Parker turned off the light on his head and walked slowly up to a woman on the sidewalk who was standing a little apart from the others. He sized her up. Mid-sixties, with a body built by sedentary living and American convenience store nutrition. Her hand shook as she smoked a cigarette. He could tell she’d been crying.

  He saw her sizin
g him up in return, her eyes widening slightly with alarm. He knew what she was seeing. A good-sized black man approaching her in a world turned suddenly post-apocalyptic. Clothes splattered with blood. He put a hand up to assure her he meant no harm and stopped well outside of her personal space.

  “Hey,” he said, “I wanted to tell you to be careful about secondary explosions. You all are standing way too close.”

  Indeed, the street felt like it was illuminated as brightly as noontime, and the heat of the fires was warming them to an almost uncomfortable degree. As always, he was struck by how loud big fires were. Things made noises as they burned, and fire was a noisy eater.

  She looked at him more closely and then took a long drag from the cigarette. She was in shock, he realized.

  “I was in there shopping,” she said, her voice dull. “I like shopping this time of night because there’s so few people and no damn screaming kids. I came out and turned my car on. I was changing the radio station and the car died.” She smoked furiously, becoming more animated as she related her story. “I looked up and realized the lights were out everywhere. I thought it was a blackout. So I sat there for a moment, and BAM! The plane fell out of the sky.” She looked away before adding, “All those people in there, inside, sitting in the dark, and never knowing what was about to hit them.”

  She trailed off and Parker could see her shutting down. She wasn’t in good shape and was likely far more intimidated by the prospect of a long walk home in the dark than he’d been. For all he knew, too, she had no one to hurry home to anyway—no one to lend a sense of urgency to the night’s events. She’d mill around smoking cigarettes and reliving the images of the commuter red-eye falling out of the sky and crashing into a building she’d left only moments before. He knew she wasn’t physically capable of survival on her own, and her mental facilities were beyond his ability to control.

  As he edged away from her to resume his journey, he realized for about the fiftieth time that hour how badly he wanted a drink. And that, for him, was likely going to be a tougher issue than any cross-town midnight hike. He wanted to drink, and when he drank he didn’t always like to stop. It was under control for now, and he knew Ava couldn’t be helped if he were impaired, but the urge... the overwhelming instinct was there anyway, and there was little he could do about it. Angry with himself, he turned and started walking. Up the street, the window of a little electronics store exploded when someone standing in a knot of people threw a brick through it. The crowd cheered and someone used a tire iron to break away glass so that they could enter the place and begin looting.

  “Wait!” the woman called after him. “You should wait! The police and firemen will get here soon; they’ll tell us what to do.”

  He waved a hand back over his shoulder and kept walking. Police and fire were going to be a good long time coming, he knew. Also, he didn’t need to be told what to do.

  Head down, he began walking faster.

  Twenty minutes later, he entered his own neighborhood.

  Divorce had downgraded his circumstances considerably, and his house here was not the place he’d made a home out of with his wife and daughter. Instead, it was a small one-story on a secondary street filled with retired couples, single moms, and a few aging bachelors, which Parker now found himself among the ranks of. It was a place where the picket fences needed painting and the lawns frequently needed mowing.

  For all that, he felt he’d lucked out in the neighbor department. Two in particular had come to be some of the closest people he currently had in his life. Men he could share a beer with, or borrow tools from. Men who espoused more libertarian than purely conservative beliefs, when they bothered to talk politics at all. Men who understood what divorce did to you.

  They were men who didn’t expect him to spill his feelings about losing his daughter, men who understood that sometimes you needed to be left the hell alone, and they didn’t get all butt-hurt when you needed to be by yourself.

  “Halt!” a voice shouted. “State your business! I’m armed. Don’t try any funny stuff—you look like one of them colored fellas I done seen on them inter-webs.”

  Parker turned towards the voice, illuminating the area “This is what passes for a neighborhood watch around here? An old fart who still thinks revolvers are better than automatics?” He snapped off the light, allowing the owner of the voice to see him.

  The man stepped off the porch, Remington 870 pump action shotgun cradled in his arms. He was of average height, whipcord thin, and somewhere in his middle sixties. As he came closer, Parker made out his blue Military Veteran ballcap, stitched with the name of the ship he’d been assigned to during the Vietnam War in yellow thread.

  “You walk all the way here from work?” he asked.

  Parker nodded. “Oh, yeah. Took a stroll right down clusterfuck lane, Al.”

  “Civilians,” Al said. He said the word with a special sort of distain. “Glad you made it home okay,” he told Parker. He sized his friend up. “You run into any trouble?”

  Parker patted the pistol riding forward off of his hip. “I had some comfort with me if I did. But I didn’t need it. People haven’t turned feral quite yet.”

  “Just wait,” Al said. “They go much longer without their goddamn fancy phones, it’ll turn into a zombie apocalypse here in the Hoosier state.”

  “Let’s hope it doesn’t get that bad,” Parker said.

  Al shook his head. “When those factories pulled out and went to Mexico, it changed this town, and not in a good way. We may not be as bad off as Detroit or Flint, but there’s a lot of angst and anger under the surface here.”

  Parker nodded. He’d been law enforcement when it happened. He’d seen the change for himself over the course of his career. The jobs went, and hopelessness took their place. Soon, there was more of everything bad: more drugs, more domestic calls, more homeless, more gangs. Al wasn’t far wrong—they might not be Detroit, but they sure as hell weren’t Mayberry either. Things had a real potential for getting ugly.

  What he’d seen on a daily basis in those days had spurred in him a need to better prepare himself for what he felt in his gut was coming down the pipeline. His prepping had started with a little of this and that, and before he’d known it, it had become a way of life—one that he was thankful for in this very moment. Every time he went grocery shopping, he bought two cans of everything. One went to his stockpile and the other to his pantry. He budgeted money to spend every paycheck on various gear and creating back-ups for his back-ups. Right now, he was really pissed he hadn’t bought that generator he’d had his eye on for a long time. He had stored gas, but never bought the generator the gas was for. It’d probably only have gotten stolen anyway, though, what with everyone grappling for power.

  Al jerked his thumb back over his shoulder towards his modest home. “Long walk you took there, old man. You want a beer? Might as well drink ‘em before they get any warmer.”

  Parker hesitated. He had, in fact, been thinking about nothing else for the last half an hour. It wasn’t just the idea of a reward after a long walk, either; his body missed it, and the craving was strong and only growing stronger.

  He thought about Ava, though, and told himself he could wait a little longer. Just a little bit longer, that’s all he had to get through.

  “I’m okay for now.” He noticed the old canvas knapsack on Albert’s back for the first time. “You going hiking?” he asked.

  Al looked a little abashed. “Truth is, there are a few things I might have been low on. I thought I’d wander up the road to the 7-11 before it runs out of stock.”

  Parker shook his head. “It’s a zoo once you get out of the neighborhood,” he warned his friend. “It’s only going to get worse. You should stay here until the authorities have more of a presence. Some fool asshat will do something stupid and you’ll have to shoot him. You know I’m prepped well, so stay at my house.”

  Parker hadn’t told anyone how much food, water, and other gear h
e had stashed around his place. Prepping was a lot like a fight club. The first rule was that you didn’t talk about it. It could be mentioned, but one didn’t go around bragging about the eight cases of chili he had stashed in the house. In fact, his food stockpile was all over his house and outside. He had buried an old refrigerator that had been gutted. Inside, he’d stocked a variety of canned food, water, and freeze-dried foods. Hell, even his furniture that looked old and decrepit was actually hiding more food. The end table his buddies put their beer on was nothing more than a hollow box, filled with supplies and with a piece of wood over the top. He had dressed it up by putting some boring old tablecloth over the top, which made it look even less conspicuous.

  If someone decided to loot his house, looking for food, they were going to be pretty disappointed. His two friends knew he had a healthy supply of goods and they knew about the linen closet that was secretly a pantry, but they didn’t know the rest. That was his little secret.

  Al made a face at the unwelcome idea of accepting help. Parker knew not being entirely self-sufficient in an emergency didn’t sit well with the man, so he pressed his point home, putting a hand on his shoulder.

  “It’s not charity, Al,” he said. “Truth is, I would appreciate someone here guarding the house. You know I got enough stuff in there to keep us all fat and happy for months. I don’t want anyone else but us to enjoy it. But I have an errand that can’t really wait.”

  “Well, let’s not start hugging like democrats,” Al said. Parker laughed and took his hand off the older man’s shoulder. The old vet looked at him, his eyes keen under bushy brows. “What kind of errand would make you willingly walk out into the shit show we got going on? You know I use my ham radio. I got buddies north and southeast of us, and they’re all saying the same thing. Planes falling out of the sky, car accidents, people beginning to loot, fires, folks lying dead in the street.”