911: The Complete Series

by Grace Hamilton

  The warm ache of pain in his face, arm, and leg told him that he’d been injured. And that was all on top of the lazy pulsing in his mutilated, half-gone pinkie, and a leaden feeling in his gut that probably spoke equally of pain, anxiety, and hunger. What he wouldn’t give for his old friend Eli to walk in, hand him a beer, and show him a way out.

  The doors swung open and a short, stocky brute of a woman came in, the winged “N” of the U.S. Army Nurse Corp. prominent on her advanced combat uniform. Her hair was pulled back away from her pocked face in a tight bun, but she wore no cap. She carried the rank of a master sergeant, Parker noted, and her breast tape told him her name was Calhoun.

  The nurse said nothing as she picked up a folder of notes on a cabinet by the side of the bed. She flicked through the pages, paying no attention to Parker whatsoever. He didn’t bother trying to talk to her first; one way or another, he doubted she was there to help him based on the hard set to her face.

  Calhoun’s eyes snapped up. “How are you feeling?”

  Parker, his mouth suddenly dry, said nothing—he couldn’t. Calhoun’s voice was familiar; he just couldn’t place it. He looked her over more slowly, trying to let her figure or her hard expression jog his memory of where he might have met her, and got nothing for his efforts.

  But her voice…

  She asked him again how he was feeling, and something about the timbre of her words finally had an effect. Parker’s mind became a jumble of images, a wave of confusion and nausea sweeping over him. His guts seemed to turn to chilled water and he clenched his eye shut to resist the urge to vomit or start screaming. The only time he’d ever felt like this before had been when he’d not been able to get his opiate of choice into his system. Calhoun was cold turkey in a uniform.

  He gulped down panic and opened his eye back up to see Calhoun scribbling something in the notes, and then she stood there in front of him, fingering a gold pen she’d taken from her top pocket. She looked up, and commented almost casually, “You were shot, and your trauma treatment at the scene of engagement was inadequate. You’ve been suffering from advanced sepsis and deep wound infection. If I didn’t know better, I’d say someone pissed in your wounds.”

  Parker blinked.

  “I imagine the gentlemen who captured you were none too gentle. You killed a lot of their friends.”

  The chill in Parker’s guts was spreading. He wanted to ask about Sara, to find out if she’d gotten away, but stopped the words in his throat. He didn’t know where he was, or what they knew of him here. Leading off with his anxiety about Sara would be a tactical error, and immediately give them a strong lever with which to extract information. There was no other reason why they would have treated him, or wasted antibiotics and nurse hours on him—they must want something from him. Parker pushed the immediate thoughts of Sara deep into the recesses of his thinking; he couldn’t afford the time or energy for sentiment.

  “Where am I?” he asked once he felt confident he could speak without betraying any emotion.

  Calhoun put the folder back down, narrowing her eyes at him. “That isn’t the answer to my question.”

  “I don’t know how I am. I haven’t had time to think about it.”

  Calhoun experimented with a smile on her face, but it came out like a dog pulling its lips back to bare its fangs.

  “Well, I suggest you do think about it, Mr. Parker. That’s perhaps the easiest question you’re going to be asked in the coming weeks.”

  So, they know who I am. And if they know who I am, they know what I’ve done.

  And that made the fact that they had kept him alive for the purposes of interrogation several notches more uncomfortable. How many people had he and the girls killed at the cabin? And how much trouble beyond even that did they suspect could be traced back to him? No, Parker wasn’t just a random arrest from a roadblock misunderstanding—which was the story he would have gone with if they hadn’t known his identity—now he was James Parker to them. And James Parker meant a great deal in terms of enhancing the government’s intelligence on the resistance.

  Parker, agile enough mentally to ride that information out without a flicker, pulled a quick 180.

  “I feel wasted,” he said.

  Perhaps Calhoun just wasn’t very good at smiling, he considered. If he played ball with her, he might get some information coming back down the two-way street of communication. He still couldn’t place her voice, though, and that itched at him with annoying persistence.

  “That’s better,” Calhoun answered. “The doctors were thinking that perhaps they should leave feeding you until tomorrow. If you don’t cooperate, we still might.”

  Parker’s world sucked blackly into a singularity of thought. And in that flat, weightless moment, it came to him exactly where he’d heard Calhoun’s voice before.

  “Let the bastard bleed out,” someone had said. “I don’t give a fuck if Spencer wants him. Let him die.”

  While he’d been out of it, delirious with infection caused by his pissed-on wounds, that harsh voice had interrupted his suffering. Someone else had said: “We should have just slit the bastard’s throat.”

  And Calhoun was the one who had answered, “Fuck it. We still might.”

  As Parker focused on the woman who had blithely suggested that slitting his throat was a treatment plan worth considering, the rug of his having lost an eye was pulled expertly out from beneath him—he hadn’t been able to see that another nurse had entered the room. As Parker turned his head to the left, he caught a flash of the man’s uniform, the army nurse insignia, and the tray he was holding out to Calhoun. Parker didn’t see the nurse’s name-tape or face; once the tray was in Calhoun’s hand, the nurse about-faced and marched out of the room. Parker’s last view of the man was his near bald pate shining brightly beneath the strip lights as the door clacked shut behind him.

  Calhoun placed the tray on the bedside table next to the folder and picked up the loaded syringe it had been transporting. The lack of left-sided vision, and the implications for that absence going forward, were immediately pushed from Parker’s thinking as his good eye focused in on what Calhoun was holding now. The size and shape of the syringe was such that, as a former police officer, Parker knew its use only too well. Usually, this syringe size had the correct load capacity to deliver doses of insulin to a diabetic’s upper skin layer.

  But Parker wasn’t diabetic.

  On the street, this kind of syringe was more often part of an addict’s rig. What it usually contained would be far from insulin. Thinking about the possibilities, Parker felt his mouth going dry. His stomach flipped like a circus tumbler when Calhoun gestured with the would-be instrument of healing, now probably meant for a very different purpose.

  The drip beside him would have held any medical drugs they’d decided he actually warranted—this was something different.

  Calhoun did the fang-smile again as she checked the thin barrel of the syringe for bubbles, holding it up to the light. The liquid within was clear, but viscous. A bead of it bulbed at the point of the needle. Calhoun turned the implement toward Parker.

  “What’s that?” he asked, keeping his voice level and low. And yet, he thought he knew full well what it was, and why Calhoun was giving it to him.

  Calhoun’s sudden iron grip settled on the wrist of his right hand. She said nothing, intent, hardly showing signs that she was breathing at all. Parker tried to lift his arm, but Calhoun’s full weight was already on it. He yanked at the chain holding his left hand, but that arm would only reach a quarter of the way across his pelvis. When his arms failed him, Parker tried to bring his leg up to kick her away, and only then discovered his ankles were strapped to the bed, and that he was completely immobile.

  “What is it?” he repeated, only wanting confirmation for what he already knew. “What are you doing?”

  “Oh, don’t worry,” Calhoun said, any pretense at professionalism evaporating like a spring mist in the sun, “the first hit is
always for free. Just enjoy yourself.”

  The needle slid into a vein on the back of Parker’s hand with a tight prick, his hand standing proud as a direct result of Calhoun’s grip. The cool liquid slid gently into Parker’s system as the plunger on the rig was pushed down, and he tensed with expectation.

  Parker imagined the drug—the heroin, he was sure, because what else would it be?—pulsing up his arm toward his heart. Pushing to where, in a matter of moments, it would be distributed around his body, reaching his brain in less than a minute.

  As consciousness began to slide, like crockery from a table on a storm-tossed ocean liner, Parker gave himself up to the feeling and the darkness of Calhoun’s sharp-fanged smile.

  2

  Practically mirrors of each other, Ava and Sara crept through the woods backing onto the Wabash River in western Indiana. Moving in tandem, they slipped through the trees fronting Justice Road, which overlooked the old Federal Correctional Institution two miles south of Terre Haute. In the approaching twilight, they tried to become shadows and near succeeded.

  They were still wet from their march through the sewage tunnel drilled beneath the Wabash, back where it narrowed a little in its snake-like progression through the state. Dressed in gray, cargo-pocketed trousers and black long-sleeved T-shirts, the two of them could have passed for twin nightmares if looked at sideways, and they knew it. They might not have been the best trained, but looking like they were professional soldiers could give them that extra inch of confidence and time they might need if confronted.

  Ahead of them, across the road, the correctional-institute-turned-FEMA-prison stood, lit by towers of bright halogen lamps and roving searchlights. The sound of industrial generators hummed loudly in the background. There were two towers with Squad Automatic Weapons teams nursing M249 light machine guns. On inspection through binoculars, though, Ava noted that the FEMA troops up there didn’t move like they were alert and ready; instead, they slouched like they were bored out of their skulls.

  Getting to within a hundred yards of the compound, Sara and Ava stopped and crouched under the low boughs in a stand of pine trees. Their dark civilian clothing matched with sturdy hiking boots in neutral earth tones, thin gloves, and balaclava hoods meant someone would have to be looking for them to find them from this distance, even with binoculars. One way or another, however, their infiltration of this place relied on subterfuge as much as stealth. If captured, it would be easier to ditch the hoods than try and rub camouflage paint from their skin. In dirty civilian clothes, even dark and suspicious as they might be, they had much more plausibility in presenting their forged IDs and FEMA work visas than they would have had if dressed in military clothing.

  Sara passed the Zeiss Terra ED Pocket 8x25 binoculars to Ava. She’d been using them to scan the SAW-manned towers. Compact and powerful, the optics were part of the operational package provided by the American Resistance Movement. The op package had also included a SIG Sauer P226 outfitted with an SRD9 suppressor, and they had 20-round extended magazines. Ava had expressed a wish that the pack could have included a shitload of chocolate, too, but Sara had told her she couldn’t have everything. The guns and binoculars would have to suffice.

  Of course, both of them knew that if they had to use the 9 mm handguns, things could go very wrong, chocolate or no chocolate.

  Crouched beside Sara, Ava scanned the building through the binoculars, sweeping them slowly from left to right, cataloguing details. Water tower, a mess of administration buildings, an entry quad overlooked by towers with SAW teams, and long, two-story wings for warehousing inmates. Basically, your standard grim fortress of incarceration.

  The local power grid installation had been fried on the night of the Event in the nationwide, coordinated EMP attacks. Since then, FEMA forces—directed by the clandestine Council within the so-called government—had turned the place into an American gulag. Dark stories had reached the local ARM forces headquartered near Brazil, Indiana, communicating that people were being “disappeared” from the surrounding towns and so-called “Mercy Centers” set up by FEMA to process refugees and the displaced. Ava smiled darkly, thinking of it as she looked into the darkness. Mercy, in those places at least, was the last thing on the agenda. The real reason the centers had been set up, and the local populations encouraged to leave their homes to gather within them, had been to weed out potential troublemakers, and the people of fighting age, to remove them from the game entirely.

  “It’s going to be hard,” Ava whispered, nudging Sara’s elbow as if to emphasize the point.

  Sara grunted in response, still scanning the compound for whatever she could take in at this distance. Ava didn’t push for more of a response, knowing her friend was thinking of her father. Instead, she went back to examining what lay in front of them—it might as well have been a military obstacle course. The prison sat in ten acres or so of land, surrounded by a double row of seven-foot, chain-link fencing, this leading straight up to the high, roll-topped prison walls. A forest of extreme high voltage pylons in lattice towers ran like pillars in the Coliseum in Rome at intervals, coming out from the building, over the fence, and on toward the treeline. Fire breaks had been cut through the woods under the arterials, which hung with colored marker balls all the way to where they gave way to the wooden T-pole models.

  On the road leading to the front gate, there was a billboard-like sign declaring the space a government installation and warning trespassers they would be shot. Ignoring the sign, Ava counted personnel, a checkpoint at the gate, two more elevated guard towers, and a position on the roof where a man with what looked like a scoped Fabrique Nationale Special Operations Forces Combat Assault Rifle was posted. In the run between the two fences, two K9 teams patrolled on either side of the compound.

  Thinking she recognized the weapon for what it was, and what it could do, she once again felt lucky that they’d been given a crash-course in weapons and warfare by the lanky guard who’d taken a liking to her and Sara in Canada. Not for the first time, she thought maybe she’d take him up on that offer of a real date if things ever got somewhat back to normal; moving to Canada for good no longer seemed hard to imagine—especially if they could rescue Parker, who’d become like family to her just as much as Sara had. The little time they’d taken to recuperate had been time well spent, at least—that was what mattered right now.

  “Uh oh,” Sara grumbled, interrupting her thoughts.

  “What?” Ava asked, glancing away from the binoculars to see her friend pointing downward and to the left.

  “You see that sign? You think it’s bullshit?”

  Reminded again that Sara had eyesight too superior to her own to seem natural, Ava pursed her lips and turned, running her binoculars along the fence line until she saw what Sara had gestured to. A red-and-white placard hung on the chain-link fence, providing a warning.

  HAZARD!

  STAY BACK: FENCE ELECTRIFIED

  “That’s new, right?” Sara commented.

  This was the third reconnaissance operation they’d conducted over ten days, drawing closer each time—noting patrols, guard numbers, defenses, weaponry, and possible exfiltration routes. Just looking at the place made Ava’s guts churn with anger.

  This was the first time they’d noticed the sign, and she was almost sure it hadn’t been there before… one of them would have noticed it.

  “Takes a lot of juice to put current through a ten-acre fence, I think,” Ava answered. “They’re still running gennys out here, so I think it could be a bluff.”

  Sara nodded. “But we have to know.”

  “How we going to do that?” Ava scoffed. “Crawl up and touch it?”

  “You see any dead grass?” Sara asked, scanning the ground.

  “It’s all pavement.”

  “If we get close enough, we should be able to hear it hum,” Sara suggested. “I think,” she added.

  Ava watched her friend doubtfully, wondering if they were tempting fate already
. “We downwind still?”

  “I smell the river,” Sara said. “There’s not much of a breeze, so I assume so.”

  “We’re going to crawl right up there on an ‘I assume so’?” Ava pressed.

  “Yes,” Sara said.

  Ava translated the tone easily. What her friend was really saying was, Don’t fuck with me now, Ava. When she didn’t argue, Sara added, “You wait here; cover me.”

  “Don’t try to sideline me,” Ava snapped quietly.

  Sara glanced sideways and met Ava’s eyes before she answered. “Then, let’s get moving.”

  Ava shrugged, biting down further argument. “Fine.”

  Settling slowly onto their stomachs, they began crawling down the drainage gully which provided a natural defilade of cover from the installation. They slid forward in fits and starts, checking the positioning of guards and activity in the installation. Under their clothes, the skin of their elbows and knees scraped off painfully and the exertion soon caused Ava to break out in an all new sweat. After twenty minutes of painstaking movement, they were at the lip of an old metal culvert protruding from a raised bank, about ten yards from the fence line. Not only were they near the fence, but their new positioning also gave them an uninterrupted view of the prison entrance.

  “You really are sure your dad is in there?” Ava whispered, noting Sara’s thousand-yard stare at the fence and the high wall beyond.

  “If he’s alive, yeah. Don’t you believe it?”

  “Yes. If he’s alive. I just want to make sure you remember that.”

  “We talked about this—it makes sense they’d want him alive, to find out more about where we went and what he knows. It’s where they’re taking threats to the system and, if he’s alive, it would be logical to assume it’s where he is. He’s certainly a threat. But he’s not the only one we’re here for anyway. Everyone here is on borrowed time, remember? We want to do our best at getting everyone out who shouldn’t be here. Now, zip it. I’m listening.”