911: The Complete Series

by Grace Hamilton

  Dear God, Eli, he thought. Then, he blinked away the image of his friend and thought. Whatever they do to Ava, it’ll be my fault. Then, almost as fast: I wish I had an Ativan.

  Her voice muffled, Ava said, “Don’t scream.”

  Parker grit his teeth. He concentrated all his focus on the pain in his wrists, trying to block all conscious thought away from his leg. Ava jerked her head up and the piece of glass cut its way free, bringing a fresh torrent of blood with it. Parker’s body was instantly soaked with sweat, but he managed not to cry out.

  “My turn,” Gap-tooth said outside the cooler. Men laughed.

  “I want to go! I want to go!” Shitbird protested.

  Parker heard a sound he recognized, fist on flesh, and he looked over in time to see someone drop to the ground. He had an impression of a skinny, younger man, but the bottom of the cooler blocked his view.

  “We got what we call a hierarchy around here, am I right?” Gap-tooth commented. “You know that. And Shitbirds go last; it’s the motherfucking law of the jungle, bitch.”

  Ava had turned her head and spat the glass out along with a mouthful of Parker’s blood. She breathed heavily for a moment, gathering her strength. Then she pushed herself into Parker and managed to get into a sitting position.

  “What about the bleeding?” she asked. Her face and chin were smeared with his blood, her teeth red with it. She turned her head and spat out some more residue.

  “It’s dark, venous,” Parker said. “That’s better than bright red, arterial. That’s good. Bleeding’s also good for the infection.”

  “But if it keeps up?”

  Outside, AR-guy barked an order. “Shitbird, go see how much tweek is left! I intend to use this boner all night long.” Men laughed.

  “But…” Shitbird began protesting.

  “Really?” Gap-tooth asked. His voice was mild.

  “I’m on it,” Shitbird said quickly, and they could hear rustling as he walked away.

  “But if it keeps up,” Parker said, “I’ll bleed out. However, I think it’s going to clot fine. The amount coming out is already slowing. I’m clotting.” He didn’t sound entirely convinced, even to himself.

  “Is there anything I can do?” Ava asked.

  She rested her head against his shoulder and, after a moment, Parker lowered his own onto hers. She’s my friend, he thought, maybe one of the best I’ll ever have. The thought made him think about Finn and hope she was all right.

  Outside, AR-guy spoke up. “I’m bored. Let’s do something else.”

  “Face down, ass up! Face down, ass up! Face down, ass up!” Gap-tooth sang out. AR-guy laughed and the third rapist, who Parker couldn’t see, started a second chorus of “Face down, ass up!” with Gap-tooth.

  “Hey!” Shitbird protested. “I didn’t get a bl—”

  “Shut the fuck up, Shitbird,” AR-guy snapped. Men laughed.

  Parker felt Ava jerk against him and knew he had to speak up, figuring the potential for him bleeding out would distract her from the rape taking place mere feet away from them.

  “No, don’t worry about it,” Parker told Ava. “Direct pressure is the only thing short of an ER and that’s not an option right now.”

  “We already know we can’t get our hands past our hips. What if I rolled over?” she suggested. “You could chew through what they tied us with?”

  “It’s industrial strength plastic on these zip-ties,” Parker said. “Our abductors know their business.”

  “We’ve got to get out of here,” she said quietly.

  “I know,” Parker said. “We need a chance, though.”

  As if to punctuate his point, the woman they’d brought in began whimpering outside the door. They heard the violent slap of flesh on flesh, a damp, organic sound.

  They sat quietly for a long time then, hate growing darker in their hearts. Sometime later, the pure exhaustion of the events caught up to them and they both dozed off.

  Parker woke with a start later, jolted awake.

  “What was that?” Ava asked. Her voice was thick with sleep.

  “Gunshot.” Parker said. “Just one, outside.”

  Then, somewhat faintly, they heard something else. Men laughing.

  9

  Parker came awake, shouting. Pain exploded in his wounded leg and he felt something tear before blood ran down his leg again. It must have clotted by now, he thought, confused.

  “I said get the fuck up!”

  He blinked and looked up. By voice, he recognized Shitbird. The kid was younger than Ava, meth-skinny and meth-jittery, his face an explosion of pimples and his hair lank with grease under a grimy Confederate flag hat with an American flag pin in it.

  He held an AR-15 of his own and there was a K-bar combat knife in his hand. He grinned, showing that his dental hygiene was in line with the rest of his crew. He held up the K-bar.

  “I’m going to uncut your legs,” he said. “You try anything and Wheeler says I can gut-stab you, nigger, and get first turn with Susie Sunshine here.” His grin faded. “I never get first turn.”

  “Yes,” Parker said. “You seem like a well-respected member of the crew. Shitbird, is it?”

  “Shitbird,” Ava laughed. “More like ‘little bitch,’ you feel me?”

  “Shut the fuck up!” Shitbird shouted at her. Spittle formed white cobwebs in the corner of his mouth.

  Parker saw his pupils were blown. He’s high as fuck, he thought. Like I have any room to judge. Then he moaned in agony as Shitbird kicked the foot of his injured leg.

  “Don’t call me that!” he yelled. “Wheeler says niggers got to call us ‘sir’.” He turned on Ava and showed her the eight-inch blade of the K-bar. “He also told me mouthy cunts don’t need both nipples.”

  Ava swallowed, and Parker fought to regain his composure. After he got his breath, he tried talking the kid down.

  “Okay, sir,” he said, trying to keep the sarcasm from his voice. “We’re very sorry if we disrespected you.”

  Shitbird looked at him. “It’s not only niggers,” he said. “Others got to call us ‘sir’, too. Wetbacks, Chinks, everybody.” He pointed his knife at Ava. “And all split-tails, even if they’s white.”

  “Whatever you say, sir,” Ava replied, taking her cue from Parker.

  Shitbird wiped his nose with a crusty sleeve. “Goddamn right,” he said.

  Bending down, he quickly hooked the edge of his blade under the plastic zip tie binding Parker’s legs and cut him free. Shitbird squatted there for a moment, giving Parker a look that said, ‘Go ahead, try and kick me, see what happens.’

  Parker kept still and, after a moment, Shitbird cut Ava’s feet free. Standing, he backed up, sliding his knife into a belt sheath. Parker noticed he had a tattoo of a Confederate flag on his neck when he glanced sideways and his hair shifted. The avalanche of pimples on his cheek spilled over his narrow jaw and cropped up inside the faded ink.

  “Get up,” he told them.

  “Our legs are asleep,” Ava protested. “We can’t get up on our own.”

  Shitbird adjusted the AR in his hands. He spit brown tobacco juice at her, splashing her legs. “That ain’t no fucking concern of mine,” he said. “Now get the fuck up before I decide you’re trying something funny.”

  Parker and Ava slowly, clumsily, got to their feet, hands still bound behind them. Shitbird backed out of the cooler then, holding the muzzle of the AR on them. Once they were outside the cooler, Parker saw two empty bottles of Johnnie Walker Red Label on the floor. And blood splatter congealing on the linoleum.

  “What do you want?” he asked.

  “I want you to go out the rear door behind the counter right there, nigger.”

  Park winced internally at the repeated use of the word. It’s the lack of imagination that gets under my skin the most, he thought. I’m black, you’re a fucking racist, I get it. Come up with some new material already.

  Afraid Shitbird’s meth-induced volatility could explode
at any moment, though, he kept quiet. Walking in front of Ava, he turned sideways and pushed against the EMERGENCY bar on the rear door, and stumbled outside, trying to favor his good leg. He squinted against the autumn sunlight.

  He moved a little way from the door and stood, waiting for Ava and Shitbird to come out. They needed to escape; the situation was dire. He held little doubt that he could have one-punched Shitbird under normal circumstances. While he was trained in police-grade defensive tactics, he wasn’t a karate expert, and he didn’t know if he had enough skill to kick the AR out of the kid’s hand and then take him down—hell, he wouldn’t have known even if one of his legs hadn’t been throbbing in pain and his skin feverish with infection.

  Ava came out a moment after him, also blinking against the sunlight, Shitbird right behind her. Parker looked down at the kid’s logging boots and suddenly recognized them as one of the ones that had been using his head for a football earlier. Pissed off all over again, he used the energy to survey the area, looking for tools or advantages.

  He looked left to right, clocking the back of the store with a trained eye. Green shattered glass on the pavement; black garbage bags stuffed to bursting piled against a cement block wall next to the door. On the other side of the wall, a stack of rotting pallets and a dirty, green garbage dumpster. Clouds of flies hung over the refuse, big enough for their droning to be an annoyance. The smell of deep fryer grease remained so strong Parker almost gagged on it.

  He saw two shovels lying on the ground.

  Shitbird pulled out his knife and cut Ava’s hands free. Backing up, he threw the knife on the ground in front of her. He gestured with his muzzle.

  “Cut him free; then throw the knife on the ground and back the fuck up.” He suddenly remembered to add, “Bitch.”

  Ava looked at him, taking a moment to rub circulation back into her wrists.

  “Guh-on!” Shitbird snapped, his voice breaking on the command.

  Puberty’s really fucking with him, Parker decided.

  Ava bent and picked up the knife. Parker turned his back to her, and she cut him free. His numb hands instantly filled with pins and needles, and he turned around, already rubbing at them. Ava stood beside him, still holding the K-bar. He froze.

  “Drop it,” Shitbird ordered, getting excited.

  “Ava,” Parker said softly.

  “The girl,” Ava said. “Where’s the girl from last night?”

  Shitbird raised the AR to his shoulder. “You want to find out? Wheeler said—”

  “You could go first,” Ava cut him off. “Yeah, yeah, I know.” She threw the knife down. “What happened to her?”

  “Pick up those shovels and start walking,” Shitbird said. “You’ll see soon enough, bitch.”

  “Bitch,” Ava said with him, finishing the sentence in sync with the kid.

  “You call me ‘sir’!” he shouted at her. “You call me sir! Wheeler said you got to call me, ‘sir’!”

  Parker, no stranger in his police work to meth psychosis, recognized how close the kid was to the edge.

  “Easy, sir,” he said. “Ava, not now, not now. Call him ‘sir’.”

  She looked at him, and then nodded faintly. “Sir,” Ava said, her voice flat.

  “N-n-now you turn around and you fucking walk with those shovels!”

  “Yessir, yessir,” Parker said. “We’re walking. Ava, pick up the shovels, please. I don’t know if I can bend without starting to bleed again.”

  Ava bent down and grabbed both shovels, handing one to Parker. Taking them, they began walking. Stepping off the cracked asphalt behind the convenience store, they entered a field of cheatgrass, following a worn footpath toward a stand of elms about a hundred yards away. At the edge of the field, they found out what had happened to the woman.

  Parker had been at more murder scenes than he wanted to remember, though he remembered every single one. It wasn’t hard to figure out what had happened here.

  She’d been forced to kneel and then executed with a single shot to the back of the head. She’d pitched forward on her face, still on her knees. Face down, ass up, face down, ass up! He heard them chanting in his head. He looked away.

  The kid giggled as they passed the body. “That’s Mrs. Perkins,” he laughed. “Wheeler says we gots to kill ’em every so often because they could get pregnant and abortion is wrong.”

  Neither Ava or Parker said anything in response, and soon they were in a small clearing in the center of the elms. The edges of the clearing were thick with chokeberry and sunburst bushes. The wind sort of drifted through the branches around them, giving the whole scene a feeling of isolation. Still, Parker looked around and found, through a gap in the branches, that he had a direct line of sight back to the convenience store. About two hundred yards away, one of the men lounged on the top of a Ford Expedition, hunting rifle in his hand. Parker realized it was the other man.

  “Dig,” Shitbird commanded.

  Picking a spot, Parker stuck his shovel in the ground and kicked it in. Scooping up a shovel full of dirt, he turned toward Shitbird.

  “Why are you making us dig our own graves when you left that woman to rot?”

  “Cause, Wheeler said we don’t have to dig nothing ourselves is why,” Shitbird snapped. “And Mrs. Perkins is going in that hole you’re digging. Plus, we need a new place for me to dump the buckets of our shit away from the store.” He spat. “Plumbing don’t work too good.”

  “You don’t say,” Ava muttered. She was digging, too.

  “They make you dump the shit?” Parker asked. “Is that why they call you Shitbird?”

  “I told you not to call me that!” He snapped the rifle into his shoulder pocket. “You call me, sir! You call me, sir! Wheeler says you gotta call me, sir!”

  “Yes, sir!” Parker yelled, breaking his cycle. Then, in a softer voice, “Yes, sir, I’m sorry, sir. I was only asking, sir.”

  Mollified, Shitbird nodded, then spit a stream of tobacco juice onto Parker’s shirt. “You don’t ask nothing—”

  Nigger, Parker thought.

  “Nigger,” Shitbird said.

  He’s dumb as fuck. That can work in our favor.

  He turned his back to the kid and began digging again. Under his breath, he whispered gently to Ava. “I’m going to do something; watch the first time.”

  Ava nodded.

  They dug for ten more minutes and had a pretty good start on the hole. Suddenly, Parker groaned loudly. “My leg!” he cried.

  He let it buckle, and he fell into the little mound of dirt, moaning in agony. The reaction was instantaneous. Shitbird ran across the distance and started kicking Parker in the back.

  “Get up, get up, fucker!”

  “He can’t while you’re kicking him!” Ava shouted. “Let me help him.”

  Wild-eyed, the kid backed up, nose running. He waved the gun back and forth between the two of them.

  “Goddamn do it, then,” he said in a half-snarl. “Next time one of you stops digging before I say so, I’m killing you both. Sweet ass or not.”

  “I understand, sir; I understand, sir,” Ava said. She struggled to help Parker get up. “Anything you say, sir.”

  “Goddamn right.”

  “Ava,” Parker whispered. “Next time I go down, distract him when he gets close.”

  She nodded. Once Parker was on his feet, she handed him his shovel, and he took it and started digging. “Sorry about that, sir,” he said. “My leg’s cut up bad.”

  “I don’t fucking care. Dig.”

  “Why did you call that woman ‘Mrs. Perkins’?” Ava asked. She continued digging.

  Shitbird giggled. “Cause she used to be an English teacher. Wheeler thought that was funny.” He paused. “Wheeler used to ask her if he was conjugating his verbs correctly. You know, while he was—”

  “We get it,” Parker said. “Sir.”

  “Glad you fucking do,” Shitbird said. “Cause I gots no fucking idea what it means. Must be about fuck
ing.”

  “Depends on the sentence,” Ava muttered.

  Parker heard the threads of steel running through her voice, and it gave him courage. When the time came, she would be all in.

  A movement on the edge of the clearing caught his eye.

  He started and then dug faster to cover it. Finn looked out at them from the trees, a questioning expression on her face. She held up the Bersa .380. Parker thought furiously.

  He’d seen Finn kill before. On the night of the Event, when escaping the convicts in the basement of the Stapleton Mall—despite everything she’d gone through with the convicts, she’d proven herself more than capable under fire. He knew he could rely on her. She’d shoot Shitbird, and he and Ava would hit the ground. He’d use the kid’s AR to harass the last three gunmen after that, and they could retreat deeper into the woods.

  It made sense. But then again….

  He looked at Finn and shook his head. If Finn could stay in hiding, she might end up being their Hail Mary. They couldn’t risk having her be seen yet if there hand wasn’t forced. Plus where are Gap-tooth and AR guy? He caught Finn looking at him in surprise, confused. He shook his head at her again and, obviously reluctant, Finn disappeared.

  Five minutes later, he let out a ragged cry of pain and fell to one knee.

  “Hey!” Shitbird shouted.

  “You stupid black sonofabitch!” Ava yelled. She sprang to Parker, who was hunched over. “You’re going to get us killed!”

  She began punching him in the back and shoulders, screaming more insults. Shitbird, obviously off-balance, took a step forward.

  “Hey—” he said.

  Ava spun toward him. “No, please,” she sobbed. “Don’t shoot us because of him. I’ll do anything you want; don’t shoot me.”

  Crawling toward him on her hands and knees, she moved around Parker’s body so that she approached the kid from the outer side of the clearing. He automatically turned to follow her movements, turning his back to the store and placing Parker out of his sight, over his shoulder.