Dead Lines [911]

by Grace Hamilton

  Eli nodded. “And about goddamn time. She kicked him out. Jen’s there to make sure she doesn’t get any silly ideas about taking him back before the whole thing’s finalized. I was binge watching Ancient Aliens on Netflix when the power went out. I went up to the roof to see what was what, and realized it was city-wide when I saw that a goddamn plane had fallen out of the sky and hit our Walmart.”

  “Yeah,” Parker nodded, “I saw that on my walk home. Goddamn shitstorm out there right now.”

  “I ain’t leaving Jen alone in this mess; I gotta get to her.” He grinned. “It occurred to me that now might be a good time for you to introduce yourself to Mary Margaret. I have discovered,” he said in a mock professorial voice, “That the female of the species is very susceptible to the advances of an alpha male in situations such as this.”

  Parker laughed. “Sure, emotionally vulnerable divorcee meets rugged man’s man in the middle of a survivalist wet dream. It’s like a Hallmark Channel movie of the week. Though, I guess if it were Christmas time it’d be a little more spot-on.”

  Eli made a face, reminding Parker for a moment of Al, who was currently drinking up his beer. “Yeah, Jen loves those movies,” he said. “What the hell is up with everything being set at Christmas-time, though?”

  “We’re drifting in our conversation,” Parker pointed out.

  “Either way,” Eli said. “We got Al to look after things here. I thought you might want to take a little walk.”

  “I am going north,” Parker said. “But I got someone of my own who needs looking into when I get there. How about we work together until we get up by Jefferson Street Bridge? That’ll put you a couple of blocks from Mary Margaret’s neighborhood and I can check in with who I need to see about.”

  “Sounds good,” Eli said. “I’ll take what I can get. I figure, once your more undesirable elements figure out exactly how overtaxed the authorities are, it could turn a little The Purge on us.” He looked at Parker closer then, suspicion on his face. “You got a lady friend you been keeping from me?”

  Parker smiled and shook his head. “Nothing like that, Eli. Just a girl I…” Parker trailed off for a moment, searching for a way to explain himself. Finally, he shrugged. “Just a girl I know. She might need some help, so I’m going to see what I can do.”

  “Good enough,” Eli said.

  “Let’s git ‘er done,” Parker said.

  The two men began walking.

  5

  Purposefully bypassing more well-travelled thoroughfares, Eli and Parker moved out using cardinal compass directions, rather than streets, as a route guide. Both had bug-out routes already mapped out as part of their prepping, but neither had actually planned to go into the city. This was going against everything they had planned for, but it was one of those things you couldn’t really predict.

  It was past midnight, and though the streets and highway had consequently not been filled with rush hour traffic, there had still been more than enough people on the roads to create more car accidents than normal emergency systems could possibly handle. Compound that by a complete lack of working vehicles for police or fire responders, and Parker realized people were most likely dying right now, even as he made his way across the city.

  He knew he couldn’t save everyone, too. Literally, physically, could not save everyone. He understood the fact, but still it ate away at him. As he and Eli walked through even the neighborhoods that were next to their own homes, he saw more fires than he had on his way in.

  Things were getting worse, not better.

  “Helicopters,” Eli said.

  “What about them?” Parker asked.

  “Assuming the EMP was localized—”

  “Assuming it was an EMP,” Parker cut in.

  Eli shrugged. “I know we don’t know know if it was, but if it walks like a duck…” he gestured around him with one open hand.

  Parker frowned, but nodded. “True enough,” he allowed. “So what’s your point about helicopters?”

  “Just that there should be some FEMA, or military, or neighboring EMS choppers overhead by now. I get that the electronics in the local aircraft would be done for,” Eli said. “But somebody down in Louisville should have seen us go off the goddamn grid.”

  “We don’t know how far out the network was shut down,” Parker pointed out.

  “Yeah,” Eli agreed. “But it feels big, ya know?”

  Parker didn’t say anything, just nodding.

  Eli wasn’t wrong; it did feel big. And somewhere out in all of this mess, there was a young woman in trouble, who needed help, and who’d needed help before this disaster had struck. Who maybe even had some insight about what’d happened.

  “Plus,” Eli continued. “This city isn’t exactly the City of Brotherly Love anymore,” he added. “Prison brotherhood love, maybe, but not Philadelphia.”

  “Al said something like that earlier,” Parker told him.

  “The old coot ain’t wrong all the time.”

  They crossed under an overpass and walked in silence for a while. Every few blocks, the skyline would change enough to give them a glimpse of other parts of the city and, as if to prove their point, the horizon ran orange with fires. It was a hellscape.

  Parker sighed, understanding that he didn’t even know what he was doing. Not really. If he’d still been a cop, he would have laughed at the idea of someone else trying to play hero like this. But he wasn’t someone else, he thought... he was him, and there was no chance he could ever rest easy if he didn’t try to help. Going forward was the only option.

  As they walked down to the end of a block, the entire dynamic of the night changed for them in the blink of an eye.

  They cut across a small neighborhood playground with two swings, a teeter-totter, and an old jungle gym in need of repainting. The links of the chains on the swings made high pitched sing-song noises as they slowly drifted back and forth in the slight breeze. With streetlights out and the playground cast in darkness, it was an admittedly eerie sound.

  Beyond the playground, the neighborhood’s socio-economic status shifted. This was a place for the working poor. Two or three big steps down in terms of real estate value from their own neighborhood. It was a place of rundown tenements and old, single-story houses housing far more renters than home owners. The cars sitting idle and dark on the street were older models, less well cared for.

  The two men ducked through a rent in a chain link fence. Trash, blown up into the weeds, choked the bottom of the rusty barrier. They slid down a short hill and hopped onto the sidewalk. Parker looked up, saw the spire of the State Building on his right, and adjusted himself so that he and Eli were walking more or less north again.

  The girl’s scream split the night with all of the ear-shattering subtlety of an air-raid siren.

  The shriek was loud and sharp, and so filled with terror that goosebumps broke out along the flesh of Parker’s arms. Both he and Eli’s heads snapped around and they saw sudden movement from a rundown single-story house with an old, sagging, wrap-around porch. The battered front door flew open, banging hard against the outside wall, and they watched a shape emerge from the pitch black cavern of the house.

  “Jesus,” Eli swore in surprise.

  Parker narrowed his eyes, instantly attempting to size up the scene and make a determination as to the threat level and possible inciting source of danger. He identified what appeared to be a college-aged black female running and shouting, but not much else. Wary, he stepped forward. She screamed for help again.

  Two men burst out of the house after the girl.

  “And there it is,” he said to himself.

  “Shit!” Eli shouted.

  The men were lean, in their early twenties, and dressed in cutting edge street hip hop fashion. Baggy canvas jeans sagging, heavy tan boots, loose zippered hoodies open over Naughty Gear t-shirts and several gold chains each. They each wore black bandana handkerchiefs tied over their faces like outlaws in an old west movie. One
of them carried a gold-plated Sig Saur .45 in one hand, the other what appeared to be an old school MP5 semi-automatic pistol.

  “Gun!” Parker announced loudly out of force of habit, the way he’d been taught as a rookie sheriff deputy.

  He stepped forward and drew his pistol as Eli automatically stepped to one side, creating distance between them, and he did the same, the big gleaming Colt Python clearing leather. It made its reassuringly metallic click as he automatically thumbed the hammer back.

  “Police!” Parker shouted, his voice filled with command presence. Inside, he winced. The declaration had come naturally in the situation, out of force of habit, but he’d also just committed a felony by impersonating a police officer.

  “Freeze!” Eli shouted. He took a knee and sighted down the six-inch barrel.

  The fleeing girl had hit the bottom of the steps and lunged for the street, the two men right behind her. At Parker’s shout, all three of them looked up the street towards him. Even in the dim light, Parker saw relief splashed across the young woman’s face.

  “Help me!” she shouted.

  “Fuck them!” the taller, thinner man who was armed with the MP5 said.

  His partner lifted the Sig Saur—a fancy, signature piece of a weapon—and pulled the trigger three times. The weapon barked loud, its muzzle flash popping like a strobe light in the black-out conditions. The girl staggered and fell, going to a knee, her face becoming a sort of blank mask of hurt and confusion.

  Next to Parker, Eli fired and the sound of his weapon going off rang loud in his ears. Parker sighted down the length of his own barrel and lined up the shooter. The Sig Saur bucked again and barked in the guy’s hands, and Parker stroked his trigger twice. The .40 cal kicked comfortably in his hands and he tightened his two-handed grip down on the handle to ride out the recoil.

  Blood, black as ink in the night, blossomed on the gunman’s body, center mass, as Parker had placed both slugs into his torso. The guy staggered backward, his pistol clattering to the street. As he stumbled, Parker lined him up for another shot, but held fire as the guy dropped straight down to his ass and flopped over.

  The second assailant was holding his arm where Eli had shot him, and turned and ran off between two houses with his own firearm left lying behind him on the street. Eli made to follow and Parker, rising from his knee, put out an arm and held him up. Eli looked at him in surprise and Parker shook his head.

  “Let him go,” he said. “He doesn’t have a piece anymore, and that wound will keep him busy. We have to see about the girl.”

  Eli nodded and both men started forward to where the girl lay crumpled in the street. Parker knew before they reached her that she was dead. Like the shooter’s, the pools of her blood looked black on the asphalt. He’d seen enough dead bodies to recognize the utter stillness of her pose.

  He swallowed. “Jesus,” he whispered.

  Eli looked down at the girl, then over to where her attacker lay spread out on the sidewalk like Christ on the Cross. “You never get used to the suddenness of it,” he said.

  Parker looked over at him; Eli turned and looked at the narrow run between the two houses, where the second attacker had fled. Parker heard the strain in the veteran’s voice. In that moment, all the dead Parker had seen as a police officer were there with him, a crowd of ghosts haunting him with the memories of their tragedies.

  Right in front was the little boy. Parker turned his head as his face tightened into a mask of grief, eyes burning in the back. He blinked the burn back, forced his breathing to slow.

  “Just like Baghdad,” Eli went on. “You’re walking, it’s hot as fuck, or you’re sitting in the Humvee sweating like a pig. Maybe you’re driving, or pulling checkpoint duty, as exposed as fuck, the way you’ve been for hours, and then boom.” He snapped his fingers. “A sniper, or an IED, or some idiot yanking his vehicle out of line in a checkpoint, and in the next moment someone’s dead.” He snapped his finger again. “Just like that.” He turned back around and looked Parker in the eyes. “Then maybe you fire your weapon a little bit, maybe there’s some back and forth with insurgents, whatever. The next second it’s over, and everything is quiet again. And, pretty soon, boring.” He nodded towards the body of the girl. “Only, someone who was alive a minute before is now dead.”

  “Yeah,” Parker agreed simply.

  It wasn’t like that for a cop, though, he knew. At least not most of the time. There was usually more of a build-up. Ambushes did happen, but that wasn’t how most officer-involved shootings went down. There was a call, a code 3 run to the incident with lights and sirens, or even a straight shot without sirens to some domestic disturbance or report of men fighting. You had time to think, to go over contingencies in your mind.

  Then you were on scene, heart thumping, forcing your breathing to stay even, nerves alive as adrenaline ran through your system like jolts of white-blue electricity. Some cops lived for that rush, and Parker couldn’t lie to himself, he hadn’t hated it. You made a decision in a moment, a split-second, a goddamn heartbeat of time, and at the end your life changed forever.

  He saw himself alone in a dark hallway. He stood with his weapon out, muzzle up, just the way he was now. Overhead, the lights had been knocked out in several places to give the junkies shooting up or the prostitutes giving twenty dollar blowjobs more privacy. On the threadbare carpet at his feet, a thirteen-year-old boy lay face down, leaking blood in sluggish rivers.

  Parker blinked the image away, forcing it from his head.

  It’d been a bad shoot, a mistake that had cost an innocent kid his life, but he’d been cleared. Now all he had to do was live with it. It’d already been the end of his career as a law enforcement officer.

  But now, he looked at this girl... now this. Another girl he’d failed to save.

  He clicked on his Maglite and played the beam over the body. After a moment, he looked at Eli; the man stood scanning the dark houses around him for any sign of movement. Parker next looked at the man he’d shot and dissected what he saw. “We could have a problem,” he told Eli.

  “Yeah? What’s that?”

  “These guys, I think they’re Naptown boys,” he said, unconsciously using street cop slang for Indianapolis. “See that neck tattoo?”

  “Yeah, ‘East Side’ in Old English lettering.”

  “Probably 49th Street or Block Burners.”

  “What the hell is a Block Burner?” Eli asked. He turned his head and spat. “That like a Crip or a Blood or something?”

  “Not so national,” Parker said. “They’re east side Indianapolis. One of the few crews to spread outside of the city and make it this far south. Point is, they’re organized and ruthless, and I doubt these two strayed very far from their own hoods. I thought they were mostly down in Louisville, those Clarkstown Housing Projects, doing business with the CDP bangers. But here they are.”

  “Fuck me,” Eli cursed. “The hurt one is probably hooking up with his crew right now—we have to get moving.”

  “Let’s at least take the girl into the house and off the street,” Parker said.

  Eli turned and looked at him. “This situation is so FUBAR, Parker,” he said. “No cell service to call for help, no ambulance to come if we did; just people dying and no one able to do any fucking thing about it.”

  Parker nodded and holstered his weapon. He bent and gently placed his hands under the girl’s shoulders and lifted. She felt like a sack of loose meat in his hands, and he felt his throat tighten. “I could use a drink,” he muttered to no one in particular.

  Eli put his hand out, stopping Parker. “We don’t know there aren’t more assholes in that house.” He sighed, then continued, lifting his weapon. “Christ, for all we know, the girl didn’t live alone. There could be people in there hurt, tied up, dead—what the hell ever.”

  “This is mission creep,” Parker said. He looked around. “Besides, we just kicked it off out in the middle of the street, guns blazing, and no one has come out
to see what’s up.”

  “Maybe they’re afraid,” Eli said. “Either way…”

  Parker gently lowered the dead girl’s body back to the ground. Her flesh still felt warm in his hands. She couldn’t be more than twenty years old. He didn’t even know if the gangster had shot her on purpose or if she’d been hit by rounds meant for him and Eli. He felt queasy.

  Standing, he lifted his weapon. “One quick check,” he told Eli. “Just to make sure. Then we put her on the porch and slide out of here before any more perps come back.”

  “We’ve got miles to go and promises to keep,” Eli said.

  Parker looked at him, a sense of dark déjà vu slipping into him as he recalled thinking those very same words earlier that night, what now felt like a lifetime ago.

  “You a big Robert Frost fan?” he asked.

  Eli shrugged. “Seems appropriate. Got it stuck in my head from when I was a kid.”

  Parker sighed, and again forced the image of the dead boy out of his head. It was a restless ghost that haunted him. He thrust his chin towards the house. “Let’s get this over with,” he said.

  They crossed the sliver of weed-choked and run-riot lawn with their pistols held ready. The door hung open, a black rectangle in the dark. Parker figured that, if anyone was in there, they’d already have heard the shots. There wasn’t going to be any sneaking up on the bad guys. In fact, a stealthy approach could very well get them shot by a terrified homeowner who’d just been victimized by vicious gang members.

  “Hello to the house!” he shouted. “I’m with the city,” he said. This was true enough, certainly. He stepped up on to the porch. “And don’t shoot!” he added.

  “Nice touch,” Eli said.

  Parker gave him a look. “Did you want to take over?”

  “Moi?” he shook his head. “I’m just a dumb grunt. Without a crew-served weapon and grenades, I don’t even know how to secure a house.”

  “Smart ass.”

  Dropping into a crouch, Parker slid through the door quickly, his skin crawling at the level of exposure this decision entailed. Entering, he found himself in the short entranceway for the decrepit and rundown old Craftsman style home. He moved past a small interior door that was clearly for a coat closet, trusting Eli to cover it so that he could focus on getting a better idea of what was happening in the house.