911: The Complete Series

by Grace Hamilton

  He saw the world through layers of gauze and pain; nothing made sense: he was dislocated from both time and space. He drifted back down into warm blackness.

  Sometime later, he swam back up out of the darkness. Blinking, he tried to focus his eyes. Images were smears of shape and color, indistinct and abstract. He ground his teeth, but stopped when he realized how sore his jaw was. His face felt distorted, and he tried touching it.

  I could use some Oxy. Fuck, Percocet.

  He realized he was tied up.

  That information sent a little jolt of fear through him. More alert, he tried taking better stock of his situation. He was bound, hands and feet. He looked around. Along one wall he saw empty wall coolers. His gaze traveled past empty display racks and chest-high shelves, past large windows partially boarded up with plywood, to an Icee machine next to a nacho cheese dispenser: a convenience store. Americana at its most pure. Like America, the store had seen better times. He turned his head farther and found Ava staring at him. She had a shiner under her left eye, but other than that she looked okay. She was trussed up the same as he was.

  “You look like shit,” she said.

  “Did Finn get away?” he asked. It hurt to talk.

  “As far as I know,” Ava said. “They were bitching about not being able to find her on the way here.

  Parker took a breath and coughed at the stink before gasping at the pain it caused. “Good enough. And here we are. That smell is probably from a meth lab in the back.”

  Mentioning meth made him think of his pills again, and he wondered where they were. He hoped the gang hadn’t found them. “Simply because it’s the end of the world doesn’t mean addiction stops. If anything, the need only got worse.”

  “Are all men rapists?” she demanded suddenly. She’d practically spat the words out. “Tell me, Parker, is that it? Are all of them biding their time because society won’t let them do what they want to do?”

  He lifted his head at the sudden change of subject and whacked his head on the wall behind him. Groaning, Parker tried to smile, but it hurt, so he shook his head; that hurt, too. His lips were swollen, but he could still make himself understood. “My wife,” he said, “was a nurse. She always said it was an ugly irony of biology that the hormone responsible for sexual arousal was also the exact same one responsible for aggression.” He shrugged, tentatively tested his bonds. “So, yes, if that’s what you’re asking; on a biochemical level, we’re pretty much animals with a drive to mate that’s entirely divorced from morals or ethics.” He gave up trying to free himself. “But the answer to your question is still no, even if we are all capable of it at a biochemical level. But when civilization crumbles and people find themselves under only the law of the jungle, then the ones who were only acting civilized because they feared society. Well, they reveal themselves pretty quick.”

  “I guess that wasn’t a fair question,” Ava muttered.

  “Fair enough,” Parker allowed. “We have to get out of here.”

  “I tried while you were out,” Ava told him. “I couldn’t find anything to use, and I couldn’t break the ropes. Maybe you can.”

  Parker grimaced. “No. Too tight.”

  “Maybe these assholes were Boy Scouts.”

  “Yeah, maybe.” He squinted and blinked. It felt like there was sand under his left eyelid. “I have a bunch of broken vessels in my eye?”

  “Your left eye is red as hell,” Ava told him. “You’re right is mostly okay.”

  He grunted in agreement. Then, “Maybe I can get my hands over my hips and butt, then bring my legs through. With them in front, I can untie yours.”

  “If any of us is getting their hands past their ass, Parker,” Ava told him, “it’s me.”

  “Fair enough.”

  Ava sat up and then rolled slowly onto her side, trying to get her hands past her buttocks, her face growing red as she struggled. Parker, groggy, watched her, hoping for the best.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” a rough voice demanded.

  Ava looked up; Parker, surprised, turned his head. One of the gang members stood in the aisle. It was H&K boy, Parker saw, and he had the shotgun resting on his shoulder like a Texas Ranger in an old movie, a bottle of Coors Light in his other hand. The sight of the beer made Parker’s mouth water even as he saw Ava’s Glock stuck in the front of the man’s filthy jeans.

  Shirtless, the guy’s arms and torso crawled with shithouse tats—the kind of ink you could buy in prison or jail for a few packs of cigarettes. He was in shape, knotted and heavy with muscle. His feet, shoved into some worn cowboy boots, made sharp, distinct claps as he walked down the aisle toward them.

  Parker looked at the man, unsure where this was going. Ava struggled into a sitting position beside him and sneered at the man. He chewed on a wooden match. Très butch, Parker thought.

  “Scratching my ass,” Ava said.

  “Pretty soon, you won’t need to do that for yourself,” the man offered, grinning. He had big, square, yellow teeth, like a farm animal. “Scratch your ass, I mean,” he said needlessly. “I’m talking about sodomy, totally talking about sodomy; you got that, right?” He moved the match to the other side of his mouth. “Sodomy is like a science word; it means ass rape. Though, I guess, technically, it’s not just ass—”

  “I know what sodomy means,” Ava snapped. “It’s the thing your daddy should have done to your momma so we didn’t have to deal with you, fucktard.”

  The match moved to the opposite side of the man’s mouth, and his eyes narrowed as his expression flattened out. Suddenly, he squatted down between the two of them, resting on his haunches. Despite themselves, both Ava and Parker flinched.

  The man grinned abruptly. When his lips peeled back fully, Parker saw the quarter inch gap between his front teeth and smelled the Copenhagen on his breath. There was a tattoo of a horned devil with a forked tongue flickering on the side of his neck; he hadn’t bathed in a while.

  Setting the beer bottle on the ground, he reached up and took the match out of his mouth, then pointed it at Ava. Parker noticed the beer bottle was filthy—a piece of trash and not something the man had been drinking out of just then. Some kind of pea green algae had taken up residence inside of it.

  “That’s pretty good,” Gap-tooth said. “You’re smart; I like that.” He laughed. “Who the fuck am I kidding, am I right? I don’t give a shit how smart they are,” he told Parker, turning his head to look at him as he spoke. “I’m really more concerned with a woman’s external qualities in a relationship.”

  He made the last word sound like the punchline in a dirty joke. Which, Parker supposed, it was. Gap-tooth reached out and poked Ava in her breast with the wet matchstick. She recoiled in surprise, and he poked her through the crotch of her jeans. Instinctively, she scooted backward in revulsion.

  “Shit,” he said. “That little old matchstick scares you, wait until you see the biggest cock on Cell Block D, am I right?” He turned pseudo-serious for a moment. “You got that by ‘external qualities’ I was referring to tits and ass, right?”

  Parker managed to find his voice. He was coming down off the numbing effects of the pills he’d taken, and he felt cranky and sort of hungover. The normal lassitude that had existed around him in the suburbs of New Albany was gone, and the man he’d been on the night of the Event revealed himself for the first time in a long time.

  “Why don’t you leave the girl alone, you gap-toothed fuck?” Parker growled out, his throat dry. The man regarded him, expression solemn. Parker went on. “How many fucking movies do they have to make before douche-canoes like you catch on that bad guy monologues are bullshit? Probably never, am I right? Because you’re a fucking piece of shit idiot, am I right?”

  Parker saw he had the man’s full attention. While that had been his goal, now that he had it, he wasn’t sure it was going to work out that great for him. The man smirked, the corners of his mouth curling up like the Grinch’s in the Dr. Seuss book about Christma
s.

  “Monologue,” he said. “I like that. It’s a noun, obviously, am I right?” He laughed. “It means a long speech by a single actor in a play or movie or, more archaically, as part of a theatrical production.”

  He grinned, skinning his lips back from his teeth again to put the gap there on rigid display. The tone of his voice was familiar, jovial even. Right below the current of his “it’s just us fellows” banter, there was a deep, dark current of rage.

  Ava began crying then, surprising Parker. She was strong enough that the tears came silently, rolling down the slope of her cheeks, but the guy had finally gotten to her. Parker’s mouth went painfully dry.

  Gap-tooth continued. “Or, and I think this meaning is a little more pertinent to our situation: second, a long and tedious speech by one person during a conversation.” He reached out and goosed Ava with the matchstick again. “Pretty good, huh, blondie-blondie-do-my-laundry, am I right?”

  “Please,” she whispered.

  Gap-tooth put the matchstick back in his mouth and shook his head. “Stop that. Save the begging for later, for the sodomy.” He turned back to Parker. “Had one of those Word of the Day calendars up in my cell at Lawrence Correctional Facility. Did three years for…” He reached over and tapped Ava’s leg. “Get this…sodomy!” He laughed loudly and, to Parker, most disturbingly, with utter sincerity.

  He stopped and regarded Parker then, who looked back at him, feeling the hate racking his body like a fever. “Granted, sodomy of a child, but still, sodomy.” He winked at Parker. “She was my girlfriend’s daughter; I ain’t down with that incest shit, I promise. Fucking weird, am I right?” He shook his head as if aghast at the actions of some people. “That girl was better taking it up the ass at fifteen than her mom ever got to be.”

  “You’re a pig,” Ava spat. “A fucking pig.”

  “And you’re going to squeal like one when I’m through,” Gap-tooth said.

  Parker jumped at the movie reference and its ugly connotations, and the man turned to him. He moved the matchstick to the other side of his mouth, and Parker smelled the gun oil on the Mossberg. The shotgun was much cleaner than the convict.

  “You got my little piece of movie trivia, did ya? Perfect set-up if you ask me. Thing is: for you, the situation is a little more immediate. See, when it comes to banging out the split-tails we acquire, we have a democratic process by which we determine who gets to do all the sodomy, first. So basically, until our outriders to the north return tomorrow, blondie-blondie-do-my-laundry here is safe enough.” He reached down between his thighs and retrieved the filthy beer bottle. “You, on the other hand, are not subject to any fucking dice games. Now, this blonde skank over here shot Martin. But you know what? Fuck Martin. Sodomize that bastard all to hell for all I care.” He rolled the matchstick faster, a sort of tell tick, Parker observed. “But you, nigger? You killed Blake, and Blake is a little more of a problem, for me personally.”

  “Because of all the sodomy?” Parker asked.

  Gap-tooth lifted his eyebrows in faux-shock. “I didn’t take you for a homophobe, nigger. While yes, the biggest cock in Cell Block D is an equal opportunity magic wand, I like ’em a lot younger and a shit-ton less hairy than Blake.” He paused, as if in deep reflection. “Though, given my reference to prison, and Blake’s unfortunate stylistic choices vis-à-vis that manbun, I can see your confusion.”

  He snapped his arm down and broke the beer bottle against the floor without looking. The bottom broke with a sharp, musical sound and dark amber glass exploded out in shards. Parker looked at the long, stalactite-like shards on the broken bottle dangling loosely in Gap-tooth’s grip. Slime, green and black with algae, dripped in snot-like sludge off the points. He swallowed.

  “Blake was my friend. He had my back. I had his.”

  Parker tried to roll away, but never came close to having a chance. Gap-tooth struck, stabbing the toxic shards of glass deep into his quadriceps. Parker grunted in pain as it slid through his skin, cut the tough fascia below, and then buried itself in his muscle. The wound immediately began burning. Somewhere out there, he could hear Ava cry out, and he was glad that she was safe—if only for the moment.

  Gap-tooth snatched Parker up by the tight curls of his head and dragged him across the floor. Parker tried to buck out of the painful grip, but there was little use. Entering the beverage cooler, Gap-tooth dropped Parker to the floor and left. After a moment, he came back in pulling Ava by her hair and dropped her down a few feet away from him.

  Gap-tooth squatted down again and slapped Parker on the leg. Then he took hold of the neck of the bottle still sticking out of Parker’s thigh and pushed it deeper into the muscle. Parker ground his teeth together to keep from crying out, but Gap-tooth twisted sharply, and he screamed. Gap-tooth twisted again then, pressing hard, and the glass fang broke in his hand, leaving a sliver the size of a Scotch tape dispenser in Parker’s thigh.

  The man finally stood then, cradling the Mossberg in his arms. He regarded the writhing Parker with satisfaction. “That’s the only reason you’re even still alive,” he said. His voice was matter-of-fact. “So I can watch you die of infection.”

  He turned toward Ava and grabbed the bulge in the front of his stinking jeans, his abdominal muscles flexing. “I’ll see you later, blondie.” His face suddenly split in an almost beatific grin, matchstick cocked up at a jaunty angle with his gap on prominent display. “Oh, yeah, and just so you know what you have to look forward to,” he said, and winked, “sodomy-wise, I’ll leave the door open.”

  Resting the Mossberg on his shoulder again, he strolled out of the cooler.

  8

  Parker looked down at his leg. His pants were soaked with blood and more of it was pooling on the dirty floor, making mud out of the grime. He panted, breathing like a woman in labor. He could just barely see the tip of the glass poking out from his wound as his body began trembling with directionless adrenaline.

  Ava rolled over onto her stomach and began inch-worming her way toward him. He looked at her in confusion.

  “Do you have any blood borne pathogens?” she asked.

  “What?”

  “Blood borne pathogens,” she repeated. “Anything like Hep C, or HIV, or anything else? Tell me!”

  Confused, Parker shook his head.

  “Good,” she said. She continued inching toward him.

  Outside, through the open cooler door, they heard men laughing. Ava froze at the sound. She shut her eyes tight and a shudder of disgust gripped her body with almost seizure-level intensity. “If I never hear another group of men laughing again,” she said, her teeth clenched, “I’ll die a happy woman.”

  Parker tilted his head and looked between the beverage racks of the cooler. He didn’t answer Ava, but she didn’t need an answer; he understood perfectly how she felt. He saw movement, and then AR-guy and Gap-tooth dragged into view a beaten woman, a brunette with the look of a once-upon-a-time soccer mom written all over her, and pushed her down.

  “Knees,” AR guy said.

  “Oh, fuck,” Parker moaned.

  “That’s all her trouble and none of our own,” Ava said. “You can’t save everybody.” Her voice was somber.

  He looked down at her. She’d crawled right up to him through the broken glass and the puddle of his blood, her face even with his hips.

  “Look at that,” Gap-tooth said, speaking of the soccer mom. “She knows the position.” Men laughed.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” Parker all but hissed at Ava.

  “We’ve got to get that fucking sliver out of your leg immediately; the longer it stays in there, the faster infection will spread and, most importantly, the longer that glass will keep cutting away at your muscle fibers.”

  She scooted forward, struggling to get into position. With her hands and feet tied behind her, she had to first rest her cheek on his thigh, then inch her face along his leg toward the wound.

  “Look at her head bob,” a younger,
tenor male voice giggled. “You were right; eventually, they get what the fuck they have to do!”

  “You’re fucking lucky, Shitbird,” Gap-tooth replied. “If she hadn’t caught on, I was going to fucking shoot her and teach you how to suck a dick, Lawrence-style.” Men laughed.

  “In your dreams,” Shitbird replied in his squeaky tenor. His voice had cracked a little.

  “You say no to me in a dream,” Gap-tooth said, “you better wake up and apologize.”

  Parker glanced up at the activity in the other room, but the men had gathered around the woman and he couldn’t see what was going on. He looked down at the back of Ava’s head as she tried to help him. Tears built up in the backs of his eyes—tears of helpless frustration, tears of fear for what this girl was facing, and tears of rage at himself for how badly his flawed plans had turned out for everyone.

  “You can’t suck infection out like snake venom,” he argued. His voice almost broke. “You can’t even really suck out snake venom; that’s a myth.”

  Gagging noises echoed through the open door from the front of the looted store. He’d winced at the word “suck” when he’d said it. His fists balled up into clubs of rage. Enough, enough, he told himself, stop being a junkie and start being a cop; start being smart.

  When Ava answered, her lips were near the tear in his jeans and her breath was warm on his skin. “I know, Parker,” she said. “You’re already infected, but if I can get the glass out, you might still be able to fight and run, and you might bleed most of the bacteria out.”

  “I, uh,” he fumbled forwards. “Thank you.”

  “Shut up, Parker,” Ava said.

  Then he felt her lips on his wound and the pain made him flinch. He knew his blood was getting in her mouth as her teeth dug around to find a grip on the glass shard. Six weeks he’d wasted after prepping for years, and then insisting on riding out on the open roads, even after the near miss with the guardsmen should have given him all the warning he needed to realize Eli was right—because here they were, right where they shouldn’t be.