Dead Lines [911]

by Grace Hamilton

  He sprinted out into the street, grateful now for the blacked out streetlamps. He couldn’t simply run after the convicts chasing Finn—it would leave him too exposed to the trigger-happy officer if the man decided to follow up further on his seemingly inexplicable frenzy of shooting. And there was that shotgun. Trying to find cover, Parker cut hard and ran into the parking lot of a Subway Sandwich Shop, dodging in among several vehicles.

  He saw the next street over running parallel with the one he was on and sprinted towards it. He risked a glance over his shoulder as he fled, but saw no one coming in pursuit. He also didn’t hear anymore gunfire. The corrections officer hadn’t engaged the escaped prisoner. A cold feeling of disquiet and apprehension crept over him, and the idea that the corrections officer could be corrupt entered his thoughts for the first time.

  In the next instant, sharp, stabbing runner’s pains lanced into his side. He was too long out of shape for this kind of exertion. Forced to slow his pace, once he was able to place a furniture store between himself and the direct line of sight to where he’d left behind the correction officer, he slowed all the way to a walk. He didn’t have a choice—he wasn’t physically capable of keeping up that fast a pace, but his fear over what could be happening to Finn spurred him to at least keep moving.

  He’d told her to head for the river, so he had a rough idea of where she would hopefully be—even with having lost sight of the convicts chasing her. He grimly told himself that those men weren’t out to kill her, at least not right away; what they wanted to do took time.

  12

  The river cut through the city’s eastern side, broken up every few miles by bridges where major avenues bisected its length. Those beautiful, million points of light that made up a night sky, which Parker felt he’d not seen for decades because of light pollution, were now totally obscured by the haze of smoke from the hundreds and hundreds of fires burning across the city.

  Gunshots were far more common now, and the sounds of shouting and screaming had grown much too frequent to allow any sort of peace of mind. Even now, hours after the event had plunged the city into a new dark age, there was still no sign of any help coming—federal or state, military or national emergency services. Nothing. Nobody.

  Only moments behind, Parker turned off the street he’d been following and raced down a flight of cement stairs. The city had put in narrow grass runways with gazebos and benches as city park spaces along different parts of the river, and he was now coming off the stairs onto a long run of landscaped trees, grass, and sturdy hedge bushes.

  Smoke from the city’s innumerable fires hung over the cooler air of the water, but the river itself looked dark and cold, running swift between two banks that lay about a hundred yards apart. The water had the frigid, inky polluted look of most rivers running through heavily built up industrial areas. It wasn’t a body of water that invited swimming—it was water that promised to kill you.

  Suddenly, he heard Finn scream. His stomach cramped painfully at the terrified sound she made and he zeroed in on the noise. Up ahead, he saw a narrow basketball court next to a small playground, its space containing several swings and a plastic slide that was attached to a pirate ship made out of wooden beams treated against the moisture. There were several streetlights positioned around the court, but they were, of course, dark.

  Even with the smoke obscuring the stars and the sliver of a moon, he easily made out several shapes moving in the darkness.

  Parker wanted to shout and draw the attackers away from the girl, but he realized intuitively that he wasn’t any longer in a law enforcement situation. He was in combat. What’s more, he would kill without warning to protect the girl from the animals. His shout would only serve to possibly alert the one with the gun, or cause them to use Finn as a human shield.

  Breathing heavily, fighting the painful stitch in his side, he jogged forward as quietly as he could manage. He sounded like a lumbering mule to himself, but he hoped the grass deadened any sound. As he got closer, he could see that the men in the orange jumpsuits were mixed by race and build, seemingly only uniform in their correctional garb. They converged around Finn in a laughing pack, pulling at her limbs and clothes while she sobbed and fought back as best she could.

  He heard one of the men cry out in sudden pain to the laughter of the others, and Finn yelled something unintelligible. Then there was the sound of heavy fists on flesh and Finn’s voice went silent. Parker was close enough now, and could no longer contain his rage. He swept up his pistol and pointed it at a man with his fist wrapped into Finn’s hair. Parker’s finger took up the slack on his trigger and his jog shifted into a slow heel-toe-heel-toe motion to center his balance.

  From his left, up on the sidewalk running parallel to the river park, two firearms erupted out of the dark.

  Lead buzzed around him and he spun, caught off guard; reflexively ducking, he spun towards this new threat. He saw muzzle flashes, bright strobe-light impressions in the darkness, and heard bullets burning through the air. In the next moment, he felt the impact of a round slam into his chest and he went over backward, grunting under the impact. Pistols cracked and he had an impression of clods of earth being thrown up out of the lawn-like grass to either side of him. He understood, without thinking, the danger of losing momentum in a gunfight—volume of fire mattered dearly, and especially when accuracy was compromised.

  His left pectoral muscle, and the ribs beneath it, screamed in pain from the impact of the round, and only the flood of adrenaline into his body kept him moving. He lifted his pistol, zoned in on the scintillating starbursts of muzzle flashes lighting up the night, and worked his trigger.

  The Glock bucked and kicked in his hand, jumping as the recoil jolted hard in his grip. He pulled the trigger fast, pumping rounds out as quick as the handgun action could cycle and building up a rhythm. He dug his feet into the ground as he fired and pushed off with his free hand, rising into a crouch as he continued firing at his attackers. Once up, he used his free hand to draw a fresh magazine from the holder on his belt just as the last of his thirteen rounds burned off.

  The thumb on the hand holding the pistol came down like a switch and he hit the mag-release button, dumping out the empty container. As it fell away, he was already sliding the fresh one home, seating it deep into the well and engaging the bolt. His finger immediately began working the trigger as his free hand now enveloped the one holding the pistol to steady his aim. As he started burning through this second magazine, he began taking steps backward to create distance between himself and the men up the short incline from him.

  Where’s the shotgun? he kept thinking. Where’s the shotgun?

  He saw one of the gunman pull away from the other, his own night vision too compromised by muzzle flashes to give him total clarity. He knew it was the corrections officer, creating distance, changing the angle of their fire and offering two separate ballistic trajectories to catch him in a crossfire. All while making it harder for him to hit both of them in a single hail of bullets.

  Parker realized he was losing what little initiative and momentum he’d gained. A quiet, practical voice inside of his head informed him, quite analytically, that he was going to die. He had to make a decision, and he didn’t have time to debate—he was either going to react or he was going to die. Even if he did react, in fact, he was probably still going to die.

  Turning sideways to the gunmen was a risky move; while it reduced his silhouette, it also nullified the effect of his body armor. If he took a round to the side, or under the armpit, he was dead. But this seemed his best bad option. Turning perpendicular to the two attackers, he began shuffling back towards the river as fast as he could, his pistol continuing to pour murderous cover fire. But the targets were separated by too much distance now for him to effectively engage both, and the gig was up.

  “Parker!” Finn screamed.

  Parker left the bank in a sloppy dive that was half belly flop and totally devoid of any grace whatsoever. He h
it the black water and felt the air driven from his lungs as the chill water enveloped him in a frigid, wet blanket. He kicked downward as he felt the strong, if sluggish, current take hold of him, and he didn’t try to fight it.

  He existed for an eternal moment, suffering in a liquid world of perpetual icy darkness. He sensed bullets striking the water above him, knifing into the depths, but he was already feet, and then yards, from where he’d entered the river, and so none of the bullets found their mark.

  He kicked downriver, going with the current to enhance his speed. It probably made greater tactical sense to attempt a swim upstream, as that was counter-intuitive to his adversaries, but he wasn’t a goddamn SEAL, or even a LEO diver with a disciplined exercise schedule. Not anymore. Running, jumping, fighting, and swimming, not to mention dealing with the physical repercussions of adrenaline roller coaster rides, was exhaustive.

  The man he’d used to be was not the man he was now.

  He’d had little choice about going in the water—it was that or die—but there was now a real possibility that he was going to drown and save his attackers the work. He’d had to do the horrible math of survival by leaving Finn and now his guilt was almost overwhelming.

  If he’d stayed on the bank, he would have died, and if he’d died then, by all understandings possible, Finn died and Ava died. For now, however, Finn had time—time to be raped and maybe tortured, he knew, but time nonetheless. If she were to be rescued at all, it had to be by him. There was no one else. If he died, he couldn’t help her.

  The truth was an uncompromising gravity forcing him into its orbit.

  But his clothes, shoes, vest, equipment, rucksack, and even the pistol in his hand conspired against him, and he sank like a stone. His muscles burned, chewing through the oxygen of the single breath he’d managed to take on entering the water. He angled back in towards the shore, drifting diagonally with the current instead of trying to fight straight out across it.

  He felt panic mounting and his movements became more erratic and disjointed. He needed to breathe.

  Striking out, he felt his hand collide with hard gravel and silt. Desperate, he clawed at the rocks, almost frightened enough to drop his pistol. His knees found purchase, though, and he broke the surface. Heaving through the surface, he sucked in huge lungfuls of air to feed his oxygen starved body.

  Paranoid he’d surfaced too close to where he’d gone in, he dove back down into the water as soon as he’d gotten adequate breath. As he went under, he heard the sharp crack of a pistol, but when submerged, he detected no trace of any bullets entering the water nearby. He kicked hard, but stayed closer in to the shore now, still not fighting the current. He let himself shift into a feet down position and, when the weight of his clothes and gear dragged him down, he simply kicked off the bottom in a sort of frog-jump, instead of trying to swim.

  In a series of underwater bounds, he propelled himself downstream and again broke the surface, in a less desperate manner, and breathed in. This time, there were no angry shouts, no barking pistols. That was good because he realized his level of exhaustion was fast growing terminal. It was a struggle to ignore his burning muscles as he sank and finally pushed himself off the bottom to lunge for the shore one last time.

  He came up into the shallow eddies of waist deep water where the current’s pull was still strong enough to tug at his legs, threatening to sweep him downstream. Breathing heavily, he shoved the pistol into its holster and lunged forward, using his arms and legs to fight the water’s strength. The bank was a jumble of sharp boulders here, clearly designed to keep people out of the deep and swiftly moving Ohio River. He reached towards the rock and got his hand on an edge, only to have it slip off. He fell hard on his side on some large submerged rocks and cursed in pain under his breath. As adrenaline bled away, the shock of the cold returned and he began trembling. He wanted a beer in the worst possible way.

  “Goddamn it!” he moaned.

  He got another finger-hold and banged his elbow hard against a stone, but now he was scrambling up the rocks. Above the boulders, the bank was steep and covered in brambles. He lay quiet for a moment, straining to hear whether the convicts had followed him. Hearing nothing, and knowing time was of the essence once again on this hellish night, he finally managed to scramble the rest of the way up the unforgiving bank.

  At the top, he found that the riverside park had given way to an asphalt parking lot seeded with parking meters that looked old enough to have been installed in the 1960s. He had to move. He squished when he walked, and water poured out from every crease and pocket on his body. His shaking grew almost uncontrollable as he lurched forward, redrawing his pistol.

  Either the sons of bitches were gang raping Finn now, or they were carrying her someplace, and if they got even a small head-start on him, he’d be sure to lose them.

  Crossing the parking lot, he walked across a cracked cement sidewalk and darted in between two massive Elm trees that were older than the parking meters. His night vision had recovered from the muzzle flash and he tried picking out movement ahead of him as he went forward. Dropping into a crouch, he circumvented a park bench and then a trashcan, crossing a path that formed part of a jogging trail for people who wanted to run along the river.

  Up ahead, he saw motion and he slowed even further, afraid the corrections officer would have been savvy enough to put out sentries. He couldn’t understand the relationships behind the group working together. The mystery of it troubled him, but he knew he had to put it aside for now. He had to be focused, locked on and absolutely flawless in his execution.

  The last time before tonight that he’d held a gun, he’d accidentally killed a child. That was not the stuff of which heroes were made, yet here he was. He paused for a moment and hunkered down in the lee of a small cement house used by the City Works Department. In front of him, still on the basketball court, he saw the crew all gathered together around Finn.

  “We have time,” the one Parker recognized as the convict with the handgun said. “I’ve been in fucking lockdown for six months, so how long do you think it’ll take me to finish?” He laughed low and hard. To Parker’s ears, it sounded like the grunting of a baboon, ugly and savage.

  “We have a window,” the corrections officer said. “We make that window, you can buy all the pussy you want. We miss that window, I shoot you myself to explain your escape.”

  “We’ll have a house,” another one of the group protested. “When we’re done, the people living there won’t exactly be using it, and we’ll have time then. It’s not like it’s ten fucking miles away or something.”

  “No,” the officer all but snarled.

  “It’s six fucking blocks!” one of them whined.

  The gun carrying convict leaned in close and said something to the corrections officer, and Parker dropped flat as the two of them abruptly began walking directly towards him, separating themselves so that they could talk in private. He was tempted to open fire from ambush, but he still respected the shotgun, wherever it was, and feared what the rest of the crew would do to Finn if he opened fire on them.

  He was a tough guy, he’d been a very good cop, and he was an excellent marksman, but he wasn’t Jason Bourne. The memories of his last bad shot haunted him, making him second-guess himself at every turn. He took a deep breath, let it out slowly, and lay very still in the cover of the small Public Works pump house.

  13

  “Colson,” the corrections officer said, voice tight with barely contained rage. “Get those fucktards under control or I damn well will.”

  When the convict answered, he said something that made Parker’s blood run cold.

  “Look, Warden Spencer,” the convict said. “I know pulling the girl along with us is stupid. But these are guys who’ve been a minimum of ten years in the slam; we barely have control of them. That girl is getting fucked whether it’s right here, right now, or at the house. These fools think this is a goddamn cartel hit! Hell, I don’t even kno
w why I had to recruit them in the first place, and they’re looking to me for answers.”

  Warden? Parker thought; it made him feel sick, and a little scared. This wasn’t a CO gone rogue, as the uniform had seemed to indicate. This was a Federal Bureau of Prisons facility administrator running around and helping a band of the worst of the worst run amuck. The realization was almost as disconcerting as stumbling across the JSOC Little Bird.

  “Jesus Christ,” Warden Spencer snapped. “You think I know what to say? I was told to expect a power outage during the transit, that that was the signal. I thought they meant they’d tampered with the vehicle!” he said, and then he waved his hand around to indicate the darkened city. “But then this shit happened and the ride went out, too.”

  “Who the fuck are these guys, and why the hell do they care about hitting some dealer’s house?” Colson demanded.

  “I don’t know,” Spencer admitted. “I have a contact whose name is ‘you-don’t-need-to-fucking-know,’ who used to get stuff inside the facility. He came to me, the money was good, and he promised the diversion would be big enough to cover my ass when it was over. But this is too big,” he said. “This is so damn big you know you don’t want to fuck with whoever can do this. So I don’t think getting laid is at the top of the priority list.”

  “Then you shouldn’t have used these guys,” Colson said. “These aren’t pro hitters from goddamn Juarez or Kiev, or vets gone bad. These guys are street animals. I have no idea why they’d be picked if this is such a big gig. But that ain’t my problem. My problem is that they’re not exactly what you’d call forward fucking thinking individuals. They’ve got a piece of ass in hand after a long time in the slam. They’re not giving it up for a hypothetical reward later. It’s not how they’re built, so give them the girl and let’s go hit the mall already.”