Dr. Lorraine Marr stepped into the room, regal as a queen ascending her throne. Her cheeks burned with color and her thin slash of a mouth lay drawn back in a straight line as her eyes darted around the room, taking in the scene.
“Is this how the faithful, how the very future of mankind itself, behaves?” she demanded. “Well? Is it?”
The men parted before her advance, looking down, none of them laughing now. Gruber released Ava’s hair and stepped back, leaving her on her knees before the approaching head of the Church of Humanity. Ava looked away and pushed a trembling hand across her running nose.
“Ava,” Dr. Marr said, her voice soft. “Oh, Ava, why have you forsaken me in this most glorious of prophetic hours?”
“You could have stopped this,” Ava accused.
“I could not have,” Dr. Marr replied. “I had no means to stop the detonation.”
“You knew it was going to happen!” Ava shot back. “You could have told someone—anyone! People died! My God, you saw that plane fall out of the sky!”
Dr. Marr pursed her lips into a frown of distinct disapproval. She stepped back and regarded the quietly crying Ava with a cold stare. It was as if some internal switch had flipped and the mother figure who’d first enticed a lonely and lost Ava into her flock was gone, only to be replaced by a chill tribal matriarch of doomsday worshippers.
“It was not His Will that the act be stopped,” she intoned. “The detonation was the catalyst to a better world. God our Father is a grim and terrible judge, Ava. You might want to remember that in case you think about running again.” She turned to Gruber. “Take her,” she ordered.
Grinning, Gruber obeyed.
7
They came up the off-ramp, neither one of them feeling like talking, and entered another commercially zoned district. It was an area he knew fairly well from his days on patrol. Small crowds were in the street here, milling around, and they also saw people pushing grocery carts filled with obviously looted items across the glass-strewn parking lot of yet another strip mall.
Several looters stood on the edge of a growing mob like outliers in an animal herd on the African Savanah. Should they see something and bolt first, the rest of the crowd would know it was time to run like a bunch of zebras from hunting cats.
Parker pulled up short, eyeing the scene.
Five blocks down, an empty police cruiser with its doors hanging open sat in the middle of the street, the officer nowhere in sight. Every window of the strip mall was broken. The 7-11, the liquor store, Abby’s SunTan World!, and even the H&R Block tax place. What the fuck are you going to loot from a H&R Block? he wondered. Computers, he could only guess, though this seemed like a small reward.
The initial spree was now clearly over and people were wandering in the businesses behind the shattered windows and smashed-in doors, picking through debris like vultures on a carcass. Parker felt a surge of disgust at the lawlessness.
The sole exception to the vandalism was the little store owned by his friend, Bob Hoang. However, from the looks of things, trouble had finally found the man.
At the far end of the block, he saw the small, bodega-style sandwich shop locked up and still intact. Bob, a Vietnamese refugee who’d fled to America after the war there, rolled back and forth in front of his business in a worn-looking wheelchair. In his lap, there was a matte-black Ruger semi-automatic pistol, and he kept his right hand on the gun as he spun the chair to face a mixed race group of looters.
The looters numbered at least twenty, and between them they carried a collection of baseball bats, crowbars, heavy 5 to 7 cell flashlights, and tire irons. He heard them calling Bob names, yelling at him to get his old ass out of the way. Bob lifted his pistol and flipped them off with his free hand by way of answering.
“That your boy?” Eli asked.
“Sure is.”
“Looks like it’s starting to get a little Black Hawk Down over there.”
“Yeah,” Parker agreed. “This is starting to get old.”
“Got that right,” Eli agreed.
The crowd began chanting, “Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you!” Twenty voices in synchronicity, their tones filled with mocking hatred. The hair along the back of Parker’s neck lifted like the hackles of a dog. Though the vulgarity was modern enough, the chanting sounded primal, or tribal even. Pack hunters calling out as they taunted and surrounded their lone, weakened prey.
It’s only been hours, he thought, and already people are regressing.
It made him queasy and angry. It didn’t, though, leave him all that surprised, which was why he’d become a prepper to begin with. He’d first become actively interested in prepping while watching the state dissolution of Czechoslovakia in the early 1990s, after the Soviet Union collapsed and the Iron Curtain fell along with the Berlin Wall.
In Czechoslovakia, different ethnic groups that had held placid under the steel yoke of Communism splintered along age-old racial divides, nursing grudges held since the Second World War that were themselves grown from grudges much older than that. The states of Bosnia and Croatia had emerged as the most volatile new countries from the splintered remains of the ComBloc nation.
The results had appalled him.
The situation hadn’t come from a third world country in Africa or Central America. Though communist and obviously not rich, it had still been a modern European country. Yet, it had quickly descended into a bloodbath of ethnic cleansing and vicious civil war. Muslim versus Christian, Bosnian Serbs versus Croats... a continuous orgy of killing.
People who’d been neighbors all their lives, living in peace, had turned on each other over the thinnest of pretexts. Public schools had transformed into “R&R” rape camps filled by men stealing the wives and daughters of men who’d been their co-workers, neighbors, and friends. There was indiscriminate murdering of men, women, and children by snipers who’d been shopkeepers and school teachers or university students before the conflict. Families burned alive in their homes by people who’d grown up on the same street as them.
Everything had … fallen apart, transforming into a medieval age of slaughter, and it had happened almost overnight. Thousands of miles away, he’d been left feeling deeply troubled, questioning everything he’d assumed about people. He knew it was popular to bash the government in times of crisis, and Katrina certainly underscored that point years later. But he’d been a police officer, part of the establishment, and he’d seen FEMA help people, and knew the local National Guard officers personally. He worked side-by-side with men and women who dedicated their lives to helping others as firefighters, medics, and members of law enforcement. There was plenty of good in the world, he’d told himself over and over again. He believed in law and order and the basic decency of human beings.
So much had changed since then. He hadn’t slipped over into his true, near obsessive focus on prepping until Sara had disappeared, but the first seeds had been sown in those early years—by the flickering images of CNN and the NBC Nightly News.
Maybe that Robert E. Howard guy had it right, he thought. Maybe barbarism is the natural state of mankind.
Looking at a pack of thugs circled up like hyenas on a kill around a lone, elderly, and wheelchair-bound, man, Parker couldn’t think of a counter-argument. He lifted his pistol.
“That seems a little preemptive,” Eli said.
His tone was calm, but Parker could tell the man was worried he was about to back-shoot half a dozen people for yelling insults.
“Relax,” Parker said. “I’m thinking I’m going to empty half my magazine into that Chevy Grand Caravan over there, overwhelm them psychologically with the sound of eight or nine rounds going off at once, and see if I can’t use the herd instinct to get them to scatter.”
“Oh.” Eli sounded mildly curious. “Go ahead then... I’m kind of interested to see what happens.”
“Get back!” Bob yelled again, loudly enough to carry his voice clearly across the parking lot. For a one-hundred-twenty-poun
d man in his seventies, he could holler when he wanted to.
The crowd surged forward, though, closing the distance and yelling curses. Parker took several steps forward and sighted down the barrel of the Glock. He smelled gun oil and the mildly acrid residue of the ammunition propellant.
Teeth gritted in distaste for the looters, he lowered the muzzle of the weapon until it was aimed at the heavily vandalized mini-van next to the crowd. Out of long habit, he gently exhaled and curled his finger around the trigger, increasing the pressure in imperceptible increments.
“Holy shit!” Eli suddenly said.
Parker snapped his head up. From around the corner of the gutted convenience store at the end of the strip mall, five men had rounded the building, moving fast, four of them holding pistols and the fifth carrying an AR-15.
“What the hell is this?” Parker demanded.
“I don’t know, but I don’t want to try and out-gun a damn AR platform. Drop that bastard now or let’s get out of here,” Eli replied. “I’m sorry about your friend, brother, but I got a wife who needs me.”
Parker didn’t reply as he watched the new group of men, all white males in their mid-thirties with facial hair and dressed in expensive ‘casual’ clothes. They looked decidedly like the ‘all hat and no cattle’ variant of cowboy.
“Leave that man alone!” a burly, blond-headed man at the front of the group shouted. He held a big Sig Saur P250 .357 with a custom slide in his hand.
“What the fuck is with assclowns and Sig Saurs?” Eli wondered.
“Yeah!” shouted the AR-15 gunner. “Leave him alone!” The shout had a decidedly sycophantic sound to it.
“Oh, Christ,” Eli said. “They’re all goddamn crayon-eating, window lickers. It’s going to be a clusterfuck.”
“Or a bloodbath,” Parker said, his voice grave.
“Hey, screw you!” one of the mob yelled.
“We should leave,” Eli said. “I don’t see how this ends well.”
“He’s my friend,” Parker responded.
“No promises, Jim,” Eli told him. “Jen comes first to me. Last time we got involved, it happened sudden, like an ambush. But I have responsibilities.”
“Understood,” Parker told him. And he did.
The vigilante group spread out into a cinematic Wild Bunch-style walk-down, weapons up and ready. Seeing them approach, Bob used the opportunity to roll his wheelchair back out of the way, pistol still at the ready. He glanced around and saw Parker standing in the parking lot for the first time then. Parker, meeting his eyes, lowered the Glock and nodded. Unobtrusively, as the two groups concentrated on each other, the man began rolling his chair in the direction of his friend.
“Okay, break it up. This LA Riots bullshit is done with,” the blond vigilante and apparent group leader announced.
“He’s a really gifted orator,” Eli commented.
Parker snorted in derision. His mind was busy calculating angles and outcomes. Things didn’t look promising.
The larger group of looters didn’t seem to have a central leader, and in response to the sudden confrontation, they began spreading out nervously under the threat of superior firepower. A few stragglers at the edge of the smaller group closest to Parker and Eli began drifting farther apart from the main group.
In accordance with Murphy’s scientific principle of one thing going wrong if another did, things immediately escalated to SNAFU.
“I said, break it up!” the vigilante leader snarled. Rushing forward the last couple of steps, the blond lifted his hand and drove the butt of his big pistol into the face of a large Latino holding a twenty-four inch Craftsman Industrial crescent wrench. The sound of his nose breaking popped across the parking lot in a sickening crunch. He stumbled backward under the impact and dropped the heavy tool.
The Latino male spun, twisting as he fell to his ass, and Parker saw blood gush in an open flow from his smashed nostrils like water out of a hydrant. The vigilante, a manic Jack ‘O Lantern grin spread across his face, stepped in close and pistol-whipped him across the face with the long barrel of the Sig Saur.
“I said, break it up, you goddamn animals!” he yelled. The looters scattered, yelling more obscenities.
“He’s off his fucking rocker,” Eli said. “I know it helps in crowd control to isolate the opposition leader, but I think these tourists were already starting to disperse.”
Before Parker could respond, someone threw a grimy tire iron at the blond vigilante. Parker saw its dark silhouette come twisting out of the night in a boomerang spin and watched it pierce the vigilante’s cheek. The guy fell back, screaming, his teeth shattered, and dropped straight down to the ground.
The AR-15 gunner screamed something choked and inarticulate, his face burning bright red with rage. He threw the butt of the rifle into his shoulder and opened fire. Instinctively, Eli and Parker split off from one another, diving for cover. Bob spun his chair around and began wheeling it as fast as he could towards Parker.
Light, high velocity .223 rounds burned out of the AR, muzzle flashes lighting up the night in strobe-light flashes. Several members of the mob went down immediately, bullets zipping through their bodies and spraying bright arterial blood in grotesque gouts. The rounds impacted with hammer-like thwacks on their flesh and the staccato bark of the semi-automatic rifle cracked harshly across the parking lot.
One of the looters went down, a gaping concave opening in his head where his face had been only moments before. Another looter, a black female in a tank top, her left arm covered in a sleeve of intricate tattoos, took two rounds to the chest. She staggered and fell, red streams splashing from her torso as she dropped.
Next to her, a burly and bearded twenty-something hipster in tailored jeans went down when several rounds struck his abdomen, unzipping his guts like a butcher knife through cheap fabric. Screaming, he dropped to his knees before keeling over and writhing in agony on the ground. His designer glasses, with their mandatory oversized black frames, flew off his face and broke apart on the ground.
At the sudden bursts of gunfire, the rest of the vigilantes began opening fire with their handguns. Looters exploded out of their loose knot, fleeing in blind panic. The vigilante, fully caught up in a frenzy of fire and misguided street justice, started shooting them in the back.
Parker didn’t think.
He brought the Glock up in a single, fluid motion, putting the sights on the AR-15 gunner, and pulled the trigger. The grinning buffoon took the first and second shots at center mass. Impacting at almost 27,000 psi, the bullets instantly turned the man’s sternum, ribs, and lungs into a crunchy porridge that splattered his crew with hot scarlet spray.
From a few feet away, Eli lifted his own pistol as he fell into a modified Weaver stance. The gun barked twice, the .357 revolver booming across the parking lot in contrast to the sharper cracks of Parker’s pistol. A vigilante standing over the gut-shot looter in an executioner’s stance dropped instantly, hitting the ground.
Realizing they were under fire, the final two vigilantes turned and sprinted for cover. Parker willed his reflexes to disengage and only narrowly avoided gunning them down out of instinct and a sort of bloodlust rage that frightened him with its intensity.
“Let ‘em run!” he shouted at Eli, but the veteran had already stopped firing.
Leaving the wounded behind without a second thought, the remaining looters fled across the street, around buildings or down back alleys, disappearing in moments. The gut-shot looter lay on the ground moaning, his adrenaline-saturated heart pumping his life’s blood out into a rapidly growing pond of rubescent fluid.
“Bob!” Parker shouted, ears still ringing. “Are you okay?”
The store owner turned towards Parker, shock evident on his weathered face. He nodded once, then spun his chair around and rolled over to the mortally injured looter who’d by now fallen silent. He rolled into the puddle of blood, staining the palms of his hands as he turned the wheels of his chair.
“Jesus,” Eli said, and lowered his pistol. “Has everyone in this city lost their fucking minds?”
“Predators are always out there,” Parker reminded him. His voice sounded tired to his own ears. “Just waiting for a chance to exploit someone for their own gain. And stupid, too,” he added. “Plenty of stupid out there at any one time. Stupid is always ready to make a bad situation worse.”
The two men walked over to where Bob sat next to the now unconscious looter. The store owner looked up at Parker, his face pale and sweaty.
“Those guys just opened fire,” he said. His voice shook and he swallowed loudly. “At first I was glad for the help; I thought it would be easier to scare that crowd off.” The man’s eyes misted over. “I didn’t want to kill anyone, but those guys started gunning them down...” He trailed off and looked over to where the vigilante leader lay crumpled on the ground, sobbing in pain and gagging on his own teeth and blood.
“You want to help this guy?” Eli asked, indicating the comatose Hispanic looter.
Parker slowly shook his head.
“You know as well as I do that those .223 rounds are designed to tumble on impact. His internal organs are shredded in there; with no way to get him to an ER, he’s dead. It’s kinder to let him bleed out while he isn’t aware, rather than risk waking him up to stop the bleeding.”
Eli whistled softly.
“Cold, man; cold,” he said. “One hundred percent right, of course. It is what it is, brother—but still, cold.” He strolled casually over to the writhing, moaning vigilante and picked the man’s handgun up off the ground. He engaged the safety, then slid the pistol into the waistband of his jeans at the small of his back.
“It’s only going to get worse if the government doesn’t get some National Guard troops in here,” Parker said. “Considering there are about six and a half million guns in Indiana, we’re lucky this wasn’t worse. It’s probably some kind of a statistical miracle the looters weren’t carrying, too.”
911: The Complete Series Page 9
