The living room opened up next, and through the front windows his eyes, already adjusted to the dark, began taking in details. He saw a sagging, spring-worn sofa and matching easy chair. They looked approximately two hundred and fifteen years old. Another divan looked equally as aged. A few end tables stood placed around the small living space. The fifty-five-inch HD television on the wall must have been worth as much as all the rest of the furniture combined.
Parker drew up short. “Jesus,” he said in disgust.
Eli came up behind him and let out a long, low whistle.
The living room was destroyed. The TV spider-webbed from the impact of what looked like beer bottles, which now lay below it in heaps of shattered glass floating in frothy spilled beer. All the pictures from the end tables had been knocked to the floor and a China hutch had been busted apart.
A woman, perhaps the mother of the girl out in the street based on her age, lay on the floor. A mass of dark hair obscured her face, her flower print dress shoved above her hips, her underwear down by her ankles. She’d taken three or four shots to the body and was dead and gone.
“They’re fucking animals,” Eli muttered in distaste.
“Let’s look in the back of the house,” Parker replied.
He felt hollow and empty inside. He’d seen a lot in his years of wearing a badge, but such inhumanity always left him shaken to the very core of who he was. Handguns primed and ready, the two men pushed deeper into the little house, broken glass crunching underfoot. They found who they assumed to be husband and father shot dead in the kitchen.
The assailants had kicked in the back door and the frame was splintered where the deadbolt had been knocked free of the latch housing. It wasn’t hard for Parker to reconstruct the events in his mind. You didn’t need to be a brilliant CSI. Obviously, the man had rushed to see what was happening—there was still a baseball bat beside his body—and the perps had shot him dead, putting several of those big .45 caliber slugs from the gaudy Sig Sauer directly into his face.
The skull of the face looked like shattered pottery. Parker stepped past the body.
Once Parker and Eli cleared the master bedroom, and then a second smaller one that had obviously belonged to the girl, judging by the Nikki Minaj poster, they stood still for a moment, at a loss over what to do next in the face of such tragedy. Parker fought away an almost overwhelming urge to open the dead man’s fridge and see if he kept any beer in there.
“I thought I’d left this shit behind me in Baghdad,” Eli said.
Parker shook his head. “No, it’s here, too. Always beneath the surface.”
“Barbarianism is the natural state of mankind. Civilization is unnatural. It is the whim of circumstance. And barbarianism must ultimately triumph,” Eli said in the voice of a man quoting great and insightful wisdom. “Robert E. Howard wrote that,” he told Parker. “The guy who created Conan the Barbarian. I read all of his stuff when I was deployed.”
“I wouldn’t call that an optimistic view of humanity,” Parker said.
Eli shrugged weary agreement. “Let’s put the girl on the porch, get her out of the street; least we can do.”
“What about the gangster? Screw him?” Parker asked.
“Screw him,” Eli agreed.
6
They walked for a while in silence, nervous now about their surroundings. It wasn’t normal precaution, either; they knew they had made an enemy. An enemy who could decide to strike back hard if they let their guard down or walked into the wrong area.
Several times, they avoided the larger streets to cut through an alley or over the lawn between two houses. Eight blocks over, though, it was as if the pair of them suddenly entered another city. Four streets down, they heard the roar of a massive conflagration and witnessed brilliant, volcano-like emissions spewing up into the air as they approached.
A U.S. Army CH-47 Chinook had fallen out of the sky and plummeted onto a tenement building. Now, three massive Human Urban Development low-income housing buildings burned, all of them fully engulfed by fire. Part of the helicopter lay on the street, where several nearby vehicles also burned. The other half of the massive, sixteen-ton airframe had dropped straight through the roof of the middle building on the block, judging by appearances, Parker guessed this had ignited the boilers, if the intensity of the fire was any indication.
Acrid smoke hung in a pall in the air. It burned the back of Parker’s throat and stung his eyes. He watched the building blaze, thinking of how many lives had been lost in this single mishap alone. This whole night was like a circle of hell from out of Dante’s Inferno.
There were no emergency vehicles anywhere and a crowd of onlookers milled around in the street, some dressed in pajamas or wrapped in blankets. Children with soot-smeared faces and vacant, shock-riddled expressions watched the fire. People wept openly and clutched one another.
“That’s weird,” Eli said.
Parker bit back a scathing reply to the thoughtlessness of the comment. ‘Weird’ didn’t begin to encapsulate the amount of human suffering they saw. But in the next instant, some part of his cop-intuition belatedly picked up on a tone in the veteran’s voice. He turned towards the man.
“Weird how?”
Eli pointed at the mangled bulwark of the helicopter frame lying in the street. “You know what that is? Other than a helicopter, I mean?”
Parker looked toward it, narrowing his eyes in contemplation. The chopper was big—the biggest he’d seen. This wasn’t a weather bird from some local television station. His brow furrowed further. It wasn’t a local or state police chopper, either—and not a commercial one, not with that paint job.
“Military,” he said, working through the question. “A big work horse. I did some joint Homeland training with the Indiana National Guard a few years back; they had one. Called it a ‘shit-hook,’ or something.”
Eli nodded. “Sort of. It’s a Chinook; all the military branches use them. But that’s not what makes it special. If the nose hadn’t spun off over there, I wouldn’t have noticed.”
“Yeah?”
“That radar array,” Eli said. “That’s not standard. That’s not typical U.S. Army Chinook stuff. In Baghdad, I was regular infantry, just a grunt. But one day my battalion got rotated to serve as force protection for the secret squirrels.”
“English, please.”
“Special Operations Forces—I dunno, maybe Delta, but not the Rangers. SF for sure. They’d swoop in with their Little Birds and hit a High Value Target, and we’d pull duty as a rapid reaction force in case something went wrong, or to provide ground security on a particular street where they were operating.”
“And?”
“And,” Eli said. “That is a Chinook, but it’s not a regular one. That model’s the MH-47E, specially designed for the high-speed, low-drag crowd. It has advanced terrain following and avoidance radar. Cutting edge bullshit.” He pointed at the wreck and the futuristic array of antennas jutting from the nose. “Just like that one.”
“What does that mean to us?” Parker asked.
“It means,” Eli said. “There were less than thirty of those sonofabitches ever made, and all for the Nightstalkers. That’s the Special Operations Aviation Unit that serves as taxi drivers to Delta Force. They were the unit that ferried the Seal Team Six guys on the Bin Laden raid. So, what we need to be asking ourselves is why a Tier One asset was hovering close enough to ground that it didn’t turn into Lego pieces when it crashed, and why the hell it was in our sleepy little piece of the Heartland in the first place.”
“On the night we’re hit by an EMP,” Parker finished.
“Yeah,” Eli grunted. “Like I said, weird.”
“I don’t think there’s a lot we can do down there,” Parker said. “It’s advanced too far. But if we go down there, we both know we’re going to find something we can’t help but get involved in.”
“Mission creep,” Eli echoed. His voice sounded a little bitter. “You want to loo
p around and find an on-ramp?”
“Good idea.”
They found a dying pilot half a mile away.
The pilot’s aircraft was down in the middle of Lexington Avenue, the major East-West thoroughfare for the city. And, as bad luck would have it, it had dropped down on a semi-tractor tailor to where its spinning rotors had opened up the trailer like an aluminum can.
Several other vehicles had been on the road at the same time as the semi—Lexington was a busy street, even at this time of night. Almost miraculously, all the other vehicles seemed to have managed to coast to relative safety when their electronics had burned out; at least along this stretch. Further down, in both directions, fires burned, the vehicles’ occupants long gone. The place was deserted.
“Curiouser and curiouser,” Eli said.
“Alice in Wonderland?” Parker asked as he sized up the scene.
“Lewis Carroll, pillar of children’s literature and unredeemed pedophile,” Eli agreed.
Parker turned his head and spat. “You’re saying the guy who wrote the book that became the Disney movie, including that weird-ass one with Johnny Depp, was a child molester?”
“They think the book was basically sort of a long love story to his niece, Alice, whom he was infatuated with.”
“Nothing’s sacred.” Parker turned away. “Come on, let’s go around.”
Eli reached out and touched his arm. “Hold on.”
Parker stopped. “What?”
“Remember what I said about that shithook being a secret squirrel?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s a MH-6 Little Bird, the preferred ride of choice for Tier One operators everywhere.”
“You think it was with the Chinook?”
“Yeah, except look at the damage.”
“What about it?”
“It’s designed to come apart on hard landings. Energy transference, like NASCAR race cars do.”
“And that one’s in pretty good shape.”
“That second skid didn’t even break all the way off. We’re talking thirty-foot fall, tops, maybe less than that.”
“So what? It was hovering a couple stories over Lexington?”
“Or providing over-watch on that semi,” Eli suggested.
“That close? Not very ‘covert’ if you ask me.”
“Like I said,” Eli told him. “Curiouser and curiouser.”
“Let’s go take a look,” Parker said. “It’s right there in front of us and this time it’s a mystery too big to ignore.” I’m sorry, Ava, he mentally added. I’m coming.
“Let’s do it,” Eli agreed.
The co-pilot had gone out the side door of the Little Bird when it had ripped off during the hard landing. He lay twenty yards from the wreckage in a sort of purple, boneless mass with an obviously shattered spine. Rigor mortis had fully set in.
They walked past the body and up to the tangled wreckage. The right skid seemed to have slid through the truck cab’s passenger side window, decapitating a rider and punching the driver out through his own door.
Coming around the side of what remained of the truck, expecting to find the driver, they found the pilot and he was still alive. Somehow. Parker, who’d seen a dozen bad MVAs over the course of his law enforcement career, didn’t know how. The man had become wedged like lunch meat in sandwich bread against the front bumper of the big rig and the front part of the Little Bird where he must have been thrown through the now missing windshield.
Parker realized with a sick certainty that the extent of the man’s compression injuries was so severe that being pinned was the only thing keeping him from immediately bleeding out. He couldn’t be saved.
“Hey, buddy,” Parker said. “Is there anything I can do? I don’t have a lot, but still, I’ll do what I can.”
“Water,” the man said, his voice hoarse and weak.
“I got you, brother,” Parker said.
He glanced over at Eli and they shared a look. It was bad. The man sounded slightly breathless, but not really pained, despite the gravity of his wounds. His state of shock was already profound.
The pilot’s face showed paper-white, his lips so blue with cyanosis that they seemed stained by berries. Lines of stress stood deeply etched into the flesh of his face and a syrupy stain of bright red blood ran out of the corner of his slightly gasping mouth and down over his chin.
Parker pulled a bottle of water from his pack and carefully gave some to the man. Grimacing in anguish, the man drank. He gargled abruptly, though, and Parker pulled the bottle away as he sputtered and coughed. The water that dribbled out of his mouth was tinged pink.
“You supposed to give water to someone with a gut wound?” Eli asked, his voice low.
Parker shook his head, but shrugged. The man looked up at them and grinned weakly, his eyes unnaturally bright. “It don’t make no difference,” he said. His voice was raspy, and cracked with the strain of speaking. “I got no time and no hope.”
“What’s your name, brother?” Parker asked.
“CWO Aldiss, David Aldiss, U.S. Army.”
“The One-Sixty?” Eli asked.
Aldiss gave him a weak smile. “I’m supposed to say no,” he said. “But I don’t have the energy to lie.” His breath came in a ragged chain of wheezes. “You’re military, I take it?”
“Third Infantry,” Eli told him. “I did some sector security with the D-boys one or two times. You guys fly like fucking stuntmen; best in the world, hands down.”
“Fucking-A-right,” he said.
“That Chinook we passed about a mile back—that part of your operation, too?” Parker asked him.
Aldiss nodded, the motion weak. He winced with pain. If it was possible, he’d grown even paler while they talked to him. “Yeah,” he said, his voice a whisper. “Anyone survive?”
Eli shook his head no. “Far as we can tell, you’re it.”
“Where’s the co-pilot?” Parker asked.
“He had to leave. He and the driver survived the crash.”
Carefully, Parker helped him drink more water. “They with your unit, part of the transport taskforce?” he asked.
“You picked up on that, huh?” the pilot said. “Yeah, there was something in there. The whole back of the truck was a Faraday Cage. You know what that is?”
“I know enough to wonder why the spooky spooks of Joint Special Operations Command were driving something around in one of them on the very night we got hit by an EMP strike.”
The pilot shook his head in a slight motion that still managed to elicit a wince of agony. “Not JSOC,” he said. “Not totally. Flight team doing over-watch was us. But the boots on the ground were security agents from Department of Energy, OST.”
“OST?” Eli asked.
“Office of Secure Transportation. Sworn Law Enforcement Officers from the National Nuclear Security Administration Office. SWAT-style outfit, very high speed,” Parker explained. He looked at Eli, “They guard the nukes when we ship them across country.”
Eli looked like he’d been slapped. “We fucking drive our nukes around—like, through cities and everything?”
The pilot coughed and more blood bubbled over his chin. “Relax,” he said. “We’re from the government and we’re here to help you. What could go wrong?”
“Jesus? Two guys left here to walk through this shit-show with a bomb?”
The pilot shook his head. “It wasn’t any materials or a device on this run. Not nuclear, anyway. Whatever we were hauling was small enough to fit in a briefcase once they pulled it out of the big security box it was in. No one on the team knew what we were moving.”
“But it was in a Faraday Cage,” Parker said.
The guy nodded. “At least in part.”
His head went slack and his breath grew even more shallow. Parker didn’t know what to do. The thought of leaving someone, let alone someone in uniform, to die alone made him physically ill in his belly. But there was nothing he could do.
“W
hy’d you tell us all this?” Eli asked, his voice soft. “Is there something you want us to do?”
Aldiss smiled. There was blood on his teeth. “I wanted to keep you talking, keep you here for a little while.”
“We’re not going anywhere, brother,” Eli told him.
They stood there for a while instead, talking about the Pacers, and whether the Browns were going to have a team that year. Odds said they weren’t. It was white noise; man-talk more suited to a game of pool in a tavern than to a deathwatch. And CWO David Aldiss fell into an incoherent stupor before long. He said a woman’s name several times, but then fell silent.
Parker watched the man’s labored breathing slow further. After a while, though it was far less time than it felt like while he stood watching it, the breaths stopped, and Aldiss’s chest stilled. The two remaining men stood silent for a moment. When they looked up, neither one seemed to know what proper protocol for walking away from a dead body was.
“What do we do?” Eli asked.
“I think,” Parker said, choosing his words carefully, “we turn and walk away.”
AVA
Time had run out.
Inside the building, Ava heard a sliding metal door on the loading dock rattle open. The sound bounced around the echo chamber of the empty packing plant, rolling off walls and down corridors. There was nothing particularly stealthy about the faithfuls’ approach. They didn’t need to be quiet, she reflected. They controlled the exits. The rest was elementary.
She had no intention of simply giving up, however.
It wasn’t logical, but if she tried, she might escape. No point in giving into feelings of hopelessness and despair—it didn’t make good sense. She briefly flashed on Casey’s body and then shivered. Obviously, running was not without its dangers.
Dead Lines [911] Page 7
