Dead Lines [911]

by Grace Hamilton

  “Help?” She mocked. “You think they’re coming to help?”

  “They don’t know what’s happening here,” he admitted. “But they’re the first wave of authority coming back. Most likely, there’s a FEMA and National Guard convoy rolling into the city now.”

  Marr laughed again. It was an ugly enough sound that Parker half lifted the Glock back up.

  “They’re not coming to help,” she hissed. “And they do know about this situation.” The knuckles of the hand holding the pistol showed white as she clenched it hard. She lifted her free arm and pointed towards the three helicopters. “They’re going to land right here, right now.”

  “Bullshit,” Parker said.

  But they were flying low, he had to admit. Lower than he would have thought for a recon flyover. He looked. They were undeniably oriented towards them, but that didn’t mean anything in and of itself; they were still too far away. Granted, if she was talking, she wasn’t shooting, so he was ready to play along.

  As he was about to speak Ava cut him off.

  “Tell the truth for once, you goddamn sociopath,” she suddenly screamed. “Tell us why you hurt people and kidnapped them!” Her adrenaline abruptly bled off and she sort of sagged inward on herself. “Just tell us,” she demanded again in a soft, defeated sob.

  “Did you take my daughter?” Parker suddenly asked with a flash of intuition following Ava’s outburst. “Sara Parker!” he said. He felt like Alice at the Hatter’s Tea Party, but in that moment he couldn’t have held back if he’d tried.

  “I took people’s children,” Marr admitted, and Parker began trembling. “I may have taken yours.”

  The approaching helicopters grew very loud.

  Mouth dry, he gave the date Sara had disappeared. He felt like he was choking on sawdust as he got the words out. “Right over there, at Stapleton Mall.”

  His heart stopped when Marr answered.

  “Such a special girl, Sara is,” Marr said. Her voice had a serene, disengaged quality to it.

  “Where is she?” Parker demanded. He lifted his weapon without thinking and pointed it at Marr’s face. “What have you done with my daughter?” he shouted. “If you hurt her…” his voice quavered.

  All this time—Jesus, after the divorce and the meds and the drinking. After the sorrow, so bone wrenchingly deep that he’d driven his fists through walls in fits of uncontrollable rage. His finger took up the slack on his trigger.

  “Hurt?” Marr scowled. Her face twisted up in derision. “You think I hurt them? I was trying to save them! I knew this was coming; I know what happens next. I tried to save everyone I could.”

  “You murdered Casey,” Ava said. “Was that helping her?”

  “No,” Marr said. “But it was saving you.” She turned a harpy mask of a face back to Parker. “And saving your daughter, too.”

  “You mean saving yourself,” he accused. “That’s what was most important, right?”

  His voice was steadier now. He couldn’t deny that the helicopters were most definitely headed their way now, and he was getting a nasty feeling that the woman, batshit crazy as she was, might not be wrong about the aircraft.

  “Yes,” she admitted. “I was saving myself, too, saving everyone in my church.” She seemed to have burned out her anger and her voice was flat again. “Casey and Sara found out. I got lax after all these years. They found out what I was running from, what I was preparing them for.” She smiled a bitter smile. “They only wanted to help, of course. They knew people would be hurt, that people would die when this all happened. They stole my laptop and tried to run.”

  “And Gruber killed them,” Ava said.

  “My daughter is dead?” Parker felt ice shards churn in his belly.

  But Marr shook her head no. “No. We caught them as they tried to steal one of our cars. Sara was captured, but Casey ran. She was getting away and she wouldn’t have had to run very far to get to people.” She smiled then—amused by the irony, Parker supposed. He didn’t see the humor. “After all,” Marr went on, “Stapleton Mall is down the road.” She shrugged, more in a gesture of helplessness than indifference. “I told Gruber to stop Casey no matter what….” She trailed off.

  “And he fucking shot her?” Finn spoke up. “What the fuck is wrong with you!”

  Marr shrugged again. She looked tired now, and her face showed every year of her age, Parker thought.

  “It’s not what I wanted, but Gruber is…” she paused, and looked over at Parker and continued, “was, I suppose now, a blunt instrument.”

  “I’m going to ask you one last time,” Parker warned. “Where is my daughter.” He hadn’t accented it as a question.

  “She must have sent her to the Vineyard,” Ava said. “If she wasn’t killed, that’s where she’d be.”

  “What the fuck is the Vineyard?” Parker demanded. He raised his voice because the approaching helicopters had grown even louder. He couldn’t feel the rotor wash yet, but soon they’d have to scream at the tops of their lungs to be heard.

  “Don’t you see,” Marr told him. “It doesn’t matter now, none of it matters now. I ran out of time—they’re here. We’ve all run out of time.” She gestured to the helicopters circling overhead. Her hair blew back and whipped around her face in a tattered banner.

  “Place your weapons on the ground and lay face down!” a voice boomed from an external PA system on the middle helicopter.

  Parker looked up at them, growing steadily more concerned. These weren’t civilian agency craft, or National Guard choppers in their bland government paint jobs. These were sleek racecar-like choppers with darkly opaque windshields and jet black exteriors.

  They’re motherfucking black ops helicopters, he thought stunned.

  The blasting megaphone repeated its command.

  The two flying flank to either side of the middle chopper were some high-speed, low-drag (as Eli would no doubt have put it) variations on the ubiquitous Blackhawk model. He knew exactly what the one in the middle was—he’d seen another like it the night before, crashed over a semi-trailer turned Faraday cage in the middle of the damn interstate.

  It was a MH-6 Little Bird. Parker finally dropped his pistol and looked at Marr in amazement. She hadn’t been lying, he realized, not about any of it. She was still a nutcase, but she hadn’t been lying.

  She met his eyes and he saw the thousand-yard stare in her gaze. She still held her pistol.

  “No,” he said. “Don't! Tell me where Sara is!”

  “You know what Azim Premji said?” she shouted over the sound of the choppers.

  “What?” Parker shouted back. He wasn’t asking a question really—he didn’t know Azim Premji from Bart Simpson, but the seeming non sequitur baffled him.

  “He said, ‘When the rate of change on the outside is more than what is on the inside, be sure the end is near.’”

  He hadn’t bothered listening to her blather on about some damn quote by some damn intellectual. He was moving forward even as she lifted her pistol.

  “Stand down, Dr. Marr, stand down,” the hard male voice, electronically amplified, boomed from the Little Bird.

  She brought the pistol to her temple and pulled the trigger. Her head jerked and blood exploded out from the other side in a spray that was instantly scattered into rain by the rotor wash. The noise of the shot was lost in the cacophony of landing helicopters. Her body crumpled and sprawled out on to the parking lot.

  Parker realized the pilots apparently had zero fucks to give about him, or the two girls, as the MH-6 settled down. Leaving his pistol where it lay, he sprinted out from beneath the helicopter as it dropped down from above him.

  Finn and Ava were already moving, huddling into the lee of the chain link fence. It offered little protection, but it was as far away as they could get in the immediate instant. He joined them as the MH-6 came down smoothly on its skids.

  Mind racing as he desperately tried keeping up with each wild turn of events, Parker watched th
e blades slowly spin down, and the two gunships pulled back into a hovering overwatch.

  Something caught his eye, movement on one of the Blackhawks. He looked up and saw the cargo door slide open. From seventy-five yards off, he recognized Spencer instantly. He was wearing an olive drab Nomax flight suit. He’d upgraded his shotgun to an M4 somewhere along the way. He made sure Parker was looking, then he smiled big before slamming the door closed again.

  Parker looked back towards the Little Bird. There was a 30mm chain gun underslung on the attack helicopter, and it rotated under the belly of the aircraft until the industrially brutal muzzle rested on the three crouching civilians.

  “Jesus,” Finn whispered. “Are they going to kill us?”

  “I think we’d already be dead,” Parker said, hoping it was true.

  The door on the copilot side of the cockpit opened and an improbably tall man emerged.

  Parker was tall, but this guy was NBA tall, at 6'7" or 6'8" maybe, and dressed in the same type of OD green Nomax flight suit as Spencer. The coveralls were devoid of any name or unit and rank indicators. He wore a Sig Saur P226 in a shoulder holster.

  What’s up with assholes and Sig Saur’s? Parker wondered, remembering Eli’s observation from earlier. We’re three for three now, buddy, he thought.

  He rose and stood in front of the girls. He didn’t feel steady on his feet. What he felt was bone weary and utterly defeated. Even though he knew he was dead at the lift of a finger, he wasn’t going to face any man while cowering—not if he could help it.

  Anticlimactically, the tall man ignored him and walked over to where Marr lay dead in a lagoon of blood. He stopped and looked down at the body, hands on hips. After a moment, he pulled what Parker recognized as an Iridium Extreme sat-phone from a pocket on the sleeve of his flight suit.

  He punched a number in and held it up to his ear. Turning, he regarded Parker and the girls with a cruel, Aryan mask of indifference. Between high-set cheekbones, he had clear, cerulean-colored sniper’s eyes. A Roman nose over a generous slash of mouth. After a moment, he casually turned his back on them and began speaking into the phone.

  “That guy’s a serious asshole,” Finn said. “I worked at Starbucks, so I know one when I see them.”

  Parker didn’t argue.

  He waited. He didn’t know what else to do. Behind him, Ava and Finn got to their feet. Parker could only imagine what kind of godforsaken refugees they must all look like. No one said anything and, after several moments, the tall man put the sat-phone away.

  “Hey,” Parker shouted. “Hey, talk to me, goddamn it.”

  “Uh, Parker,” Finn said. “Don’t yell at the giant man with helicopters and huge machine guns.”

  The guy stopped walking. He turned and looked at Parker. He had a shadow of a smile on his face. Parker had seen stone killers before, and this guy had the tell-tale dead eyes of a deep water predator. He remained silent, not answering Parker.

  “She was right,” Parker challenged. “Marr, she was right, wasn’t she? No one’s coming to help; things aren’t going to get better, are they?”

  The question made the guy smile. “Not for you, they’re not,” he said.

  The shock that came from grasping the implications of what the man had told him silenced Parker. The man looked at the cockpit of the Little Bird and gave the pilot the “start it up” hand signal, and the rotors began spinning as he walked away to re-board.

  “Wait!” Ava shouted suddenly.

  She surged forward and Parker caught her in his arms, bringing her up short. She fought him for a moment, but he hugged her tight and she stopped struggling. The three of them turned their heads against the rotor wash of the helicopter as it built power for its take-off. Turning his face away from the wind, Parker watched the slipstream pushing the smoke from the old TV station away from them and toward the Ohio River as the helicopters took off and flew away.

  The trails of smoke rising up over the city in the morning light were too numerous to count. This is the new normal? he asked himself in disbelief. Somewhere out there, in the middle of all of the new, feral landscape, was Sara. Sara, who must by now have given up any hope of him coming to help her.

  “Now I’ll never find her,” he muttered.

  Finn reached out and put her hand on his arm. “I’m so sorry,” she said.

  Ava stepped up to him. “I know how I can repay you for what you did for me,” she told him.

  He looked at her blankly. He was glad she was alive and safe, but he only had room for sorrow at the moment. Then, once again, everything changed.

  “I can take you to your daughter,” she said.

  End of ‘Dead Lines’

  911 Book One

  We really hope you enjoyed the start to our new series. Keep reading to find a sneak peek from Grace Hamilton’s EMP Lodge series, Dark Retreat.

  Thank You!

  Hopefully we achieved our goal and you enjoyed a good few hours reading about Parker & Finn, and come out a bit wiser on what to do in a SHTF situation. If you liked it, please consider leaving a review.

  Loved this book? Share it with a friend, www.GraceHamiltonBooks.com/books

  To be notified of the next 911 release please sign up for Grace’s mailing list.

  Grace Hamilton is the prepper pen-name for a bad-ass, survivalist momma-bear of four kids, and wife to a wonderful husband. After being stuck in a mountain cabin for six days following a flash flood, she decided she never wanted to feel so powerless or have to send her kids to bed hungry again. Now she lives the prepper lifestyle and knows that if SHTF or TEOTWAWKI happens, she’ll be ready to help protect and provide for her family.

  Combine this survivalist mentality with a vivid imagination (as well as a slightly unhealthy day dreaming habit) and you get a prepper fiction author. Grace spends her days thinking about the worst possible survival situations that a person could be thrown into, then throwing her characters into these nightmares while trying to figure out "What SHOULD you do in this situation?"

  It’s her wish that through her characters, you will get to experience what life will be like and essentially learn from their mistakes and experiences, so that you too can survive!

  You can also follow Grace on Facebook and GraceHamiltonBooks.com

  Jack Colrain never intended to be a writer. But retiring after 30 years living, fighting and surviving in some of the grimmest regions in the world, he found himself with some stories to tell and lessons to impart.

  What he’s picked up over the years can’t be found in any survivalist classes or the latest prepper books—they’re hard earned from surviving in the harshest conditions and can be found only in his books. He doesn’t live in a cabin in the woods (yet) but in the wilds of another kind: downtown LA, with his wife and two kids. They don’t always understand his prepping, but when SHTF Jack knows he’ll be able to keep them safe. They’ll thank him later.

  Jack now spends his free time writing books about characters who get into certifiably FUBAR situations, whether they're survivalist scenarios or more criminal/government related, and then he tries to get them out of it using the skills he’s learned. He hopes that by reading his books readers will absorb some survival skills and a few more people will make it out okay when it’s TEOTWAWKI.

  BLURB

  Three months after life as she knows it was decimated, Megan Wolford has only one goal: protect her daughter, Caitlin, at any cost. When a mysterious illness strikes Caitlin down, Megan is forced to forage for medical supplies at a remote lodge. The last thing she wants is help from her fellow survivors when so many in her life have let her down—but soon she'll find herself with no other option.

  Ex-Navy SEAL Wyatt Morris is doing everything he can to hold his family together after the tragic death of his prepper Dad, so when Megan enters their lands, he is mistrustful at first despite feeling drawn to her. He won't turn away an ill child though—no matter how deadly the world has become. The arrival of another stranger named
Kyle soon gives them all a new reason to be suspicious. Wyatt knows he’ll have to forge alliances in order to keep his family safe, but trusting the wrong person could be a deadly mistake.

  When Megan and Wyatt discover her daughter’s illness may be linked to Kyle’s arrival, it sets off a race to discover the truth before it’s too late to save Caitlin—and the rest of the Morris clan. Can they work together for survival . . . and something more?

  Get your copy of Dark Retreat here.

  Megan Wolford stumbled over a rock and nearly dropped her daughter before she quickly regained her footing. The sight of a log cabin through the trees had given her a boost of adrenaline and she found she was practically running through the damp forest despite her heavy burden.

  She’d fallen several times, bruising her knees and twisting her ankle. Her arms had deep cuts from tree branches that showed no mercy. There wasn’t exactly a trail to follow, which meant she was cutting through the heart of the forest and its unforgiving terrain. She was making her own way, as usual, which always seemed to be far harder than it had to be.

  “Caitlin, hold on, baby. Hold on,” she whispered to the lifeless seven-year-old in her arms.

  Megan was doing her best not to panic, but Caitlin had collapsed a couple miles back and she’d been carrying the sleeping child ever since. Carrying her where she didn’t know, but now that she saw what appeared to be a hunting lodge of some sort in front of her, she had a destination in mind. She had a goal.

  It gave her something to focus on other than the agony that was tearing through her entire body. Another tree branch slapped her in the face, making her wince in pain. Her physical discomfort was nothing compared to the emotional anguish she felt at the thought of losing her daughter. Caitlin was the only thing she’d left in this world. She couldn’t lose her.