911: The Complete Series

by Grace Hamilton

  Parker reached the office doorway.

  Kenny had stopped searching, and Parker saw in the boy’s hand what he’d been so diligently looking for.

  Not a folder, but Rayleigh’s spare Beretta.

  Kenny squeezed the trigger and the pistol bucked in his hand.

  Parker was already diving to one side as the round sizzled past his ear, the clink of the clearing casing tinking against the doorframe where Kenny stood.

  Sonovabitch, Parker thought as he hit the floor, rolling on his shoulder and back up to a knee as he drew his own Beretta.

  “Convict escaping! Convict es-ack—” Kenny’s words stalled in his mouth as two closely grouped bullet impacts expanded his throat like a bullfrog and almost tore his head from his body. Kenny’s body collapsed in a gush of blood.

  Two things immediately concerned Parker about what had just happened. First, the gunfire in the enclosed space would have alerted all the officers in the vicinity to Parker, and in this room full of shotguns, that was… problematic. And second, maybe more importantly, Parker had not fired the shots that had stolen Kenny’s voice and his life.

  “Gun down and hands up, Mr. Parker,” said a voice Parker recognized at once.

  He held the Beretta out and let it drop, raising his hands above his head.

  “You may turn around.”

  As he did so, the voice barked orders at the senior corrections officer. “Rayleigh, get one of your imbecile men to open a window. I find the whiff of CS gas mighty irritating. Much like the way I feel about how you’ve been running this facility in my absence.”

  Rayleigh began ordering his men around.

  Parker had now turned a full 180 on his knee.

  As the last of the gas cleared, through tears, he saw a tight group of eight U.S. Marshals in gas masks holding shotguns and pistols. All pointing at him.

  At the head of the marshals was a high ranking corrections official. This was indicated by his uniform braiding, long service medals, and evidence of commendations. The man was holstering the SIG Sauer that had provided the fatal period to Kenny’s final utterance. He was taking off his gas mask and giving Parker visual confirmation of what he’d already guessed from the voice.

  “If anyone is going to shoot James Parker, it is going to be me,” Warden Spencer announced.

  10

  Sara came to in darkness and in silence.

  She was either deaf and blind, or otherwise in a pitch-black, acoustic dead zone. It took her a couple of seconds to organize her thoughts, and to realize she was still holding Ava’s hand. Her shoulder ached, and her knees felt like she’d scraped all the skin from them. Her mouth was full of dust and she was lying on something hard and cold. Warm liquid ran down her cheek, too, and in the dark she brought her free hand up to touch her face, feeling out the runnels of sticky liquid nestling in the hollows of her neck and shoulder. She could feel the liquid drying, and the chill shiver of evaporation as whatever the wetness was started to dry on her skin.

  “Mmmm. HmmHHmmmmHHhhhhhhhh.”

  Not deaf, then.

  They were words, but she couldn’t make them out. Suddenly, a bright light shone directly into her eyes. If the blast of light hadn’t hurt so much, she might have been more thankful that she hadn’t gone blind, as well. But as it was, she just wanted to turn her head away. That’s when she saw that the hand that had touched her cheek was gloved in red.

  Blood.

  Sara felt her face again, letting go of Ava’s hand as she tried to sit up.

  “Are you okay, ma’am?”

  She recognized the voice, but couldn’t attach a name to it. Eventually she realized it was the girl… the girl in the bedroom in the house in Seelyville.

  The girl with the secret.

  Jessica. Yes. Jessica. That was her name.

  Sara’s eyes were getting used to the light, and details of her surroundings were leafing out of the darkness. The overwhelming color of wherever they were was dirt brown. Even the light source was tinged with it. Dust rained down from above, too. Catching in her throat, gritting her eyes. Sara had to wipe them twice before the tears cleared. The room she saw was maybe thirty feet square. Constructed from bare bricks, lined with metal shelves full of tins of every possible kind, packets of staples, boxes of cereal, noodles, and vacuum-packed survival rations. For a moment, it took her right back to the basement in Parker’s cabin.

  Then she noticed Ava, lying unmoving on the floor next to her.

  In the dancing light, Sara could see a growing contusion filling with fluid in the middle of Ava’s forehead. Sara instinctively felt for a pulse, and was heartened by the strong beat of Ava’s heart beneath her fingers. Quickly, she felt her friend over, looking for more injuries but not finding anything significant beyond bumps and cuts. Her friend had taken an enormous whack to the head at some point, and looked like she’d be out for a while, but she’d be okay.

  She looked up to talk to Jessica, and suddenly a gun emerged from the darkness—held in a firm, white-knuckled grip.

  The light wasn’t clear enough for the pistol to be identified, but as the dusty beam swung up, Sara caught a glimpse of a well-muscled forearm, a red checkered shirt with the cuff rolled up to the bicep, and a beaded, old-young face in a halo of dark curls, sporting laser-focused green eyes, a set mouth, and a well-kept, but wiry beard.

  “So, before I shoot you for blowing up my house, why don’t you tell me who the hell you are and why you stopped in this anonymous burg? Hmm?”

  Sara saw the knuckles whiten further as he began to apply pressure to the trigger.

  “Daddy! No!” yelled Jessica, looking up from the crouch she’d taken beside Ava. “It was the bad man! These ladies saved me! If it wasn’t for them, I’d be shot.”

  The man didn’t lower the gun, but the blood returned to his knuckle-joint. He looked at Ava lying there in her ACU.

  “She’s FEMA. FEMA killed my wife and my boy. I am not feeling at my most merciful right now.”

  Sara tried not to rush her words, desperate as she was to stop either of them getting shot. “This’s Ava. She’s not FEMA. We’re resistance. She’s in disguise, sir, I promise you.” It was only when the words left her lips that she realized how lame they must have sounded. “Can I check her pocket for ID? Please? And show you?”

  The man nodded, and Sara began patting Ava down. Ava groaned and tried to roll away. That was another good sign, consciousness returning. Sara found a driver’s license in a breast pouch, plus a FEMA ID for a Corporal Andrew J. Wooding, and handed them over. The man flicked his eyes to each laminated card, and then looked at Ava.

  “Lost some weight.”

  “And some gender.” Sara hoped the quip would relieve the tension in the confined space, and from the look on his face and the way Jessica was looking at Ava, she thought it had worked.

  The man threw the cards down and lowered his gun. It was, she could now see, a SIG Sauer P228, fitted with an unlit Streamlight TLR-1s weapon light. The man knew what he was doing around weaponry, then.

  “My name is Sara Parker,” she said, holding out her hand. “We followed the man your daughter mentioned into your house; he had the explosives.”

  The man smiled wide, flicked the SIG to safe before he put the gun down on a metal shelf next to an industrial-sized tin can of coffee.

  “Sara Parker? Sara goddamned Parker, daughter of Jimmy Parker? No shit?”

  Sara didn’t fully comprehend, but she went with the flow anyway. “That’s me. Sara Parker, living and breathing.”

  The man hissed a laughing breath and clapped his hands on his thigh.

  “Sara Parker. I don’t believe it! Jimmy Parker’s girl, all growed up!”

  His name was Mace Richardson, and Jessica Richardson was his eleven (eleven last week, Daddy, and you forgot!) daughter. They were in his family’s fall-out/general purpose TEOTWAWKI shelter, fifteen feet below the property’s basement. Its entrance had been made via a steel ladder affixed inside a
steel tube, from a surface hatch in Jessica’s room. She’d held off telling them for so long because she wasn’t supposed to go upstairs without her father, and she’d done so anyway while he’d been dozing.

  Mace was a prepper and, since the SHTF, this was where he and his family had been hiding out. Mace told Sara that, not long after the EMP Event, all of Seelyville, except the Richardsons, had evacuated to the Terre Haute Mercy Center. Mace had a basic mistrust of government and, knowing he had more than a year’s supply of food in the shelter, he’d thought it would be better if his family stayed where they belonged until “Situation Normal,” as Mace put it, returned.

  Outfitted like her own father’s cabin basement, Mace’s shelter was packed with food and other supplies. A metal lining behind the brickwork had afforded excellent Faraday-cage-like EMP resistance, and so the electrics down here worked fine, even after the explosion. A faucet draining into a huge enameled sink was plumbed through the foundations of the house into an old well out back. The water the well produced came through a gravity filter and purifier, and tasted clean and fresh when Sara sipped it gratefully. There was a rack of books and magazines, and packs and packs of cellophane-wrapped batteries of all shapes and sizes, plus a camping stove with more than a dozen gas canisters locked in a fire chest. Not to mention several shotguns, handguns, collapsible fishing rods, and a shit ton of ammunition.

  This wasn’t just prepping. This was an Aladdin’s cave of survival. With all this wonder before her eyes, half lost in her own memories of her father’s prepping and their time together, Sara felt bad that she’d almost asked about how Mace knew her father before asking what had happened to his wife and son.

  Mace’s eyes dropped when she did, and he pulled his daughter to his side before responding.

  “FEMA. Jessica and me were out checking our snares for fresh cottontail in the woods up by Snake Creek. Marion and Corey were in the Christian Center looking for books in the library they got there. The FEMA scum musta caught them coming out as they rolled up. Looting is a capital offense in a state of emergency. They shot them with their M220s, I guess. It was all over by the time Jess and me got back. There wasn’t much left to bury.”

  Sara swallowed, trying not to think of what Jessica must have seen. “I’m sorry,” she choked out.

  “People thought I was insane building this shelter, making a safe place for my family. I lost count of the times I was laughed at and ridiculed. I’m not some nut, though. I just wanted to protect what I love, in case anything… changed. Had Marion and Corey stayed in the shelter, they would be alive today. Outside, it’s not safe for anyone. After the EMP attack or before, you ask me.”

  There was a long silence after that, until Ava began to stir, her hand going to the hardening bump in the center of her forehead even before she opened her eyes.

  Solon had detonated his bomb just as Ava had been pulling closed the hatch above her; it had slammed the hatch shut and knocked Ava down fifteen feet. She’d crashed onto Sara and they’d both been knocked unconscious. Jessica’s reminder of their final moments upstairs in her bedroom helped Sara remember the rest. She felt shocked all over again at how lucky they’d been.

  “Don’t speak,” Sara told Ava as her eyes widened at her surroundings. “We’re safe. Just keep still for now.” Ava nodded and accepted the sip of water from the mug Jessica held to her lips.

  Mace had already tried to open the hatch while they were unconscious to see the extent of the damage, but there must have been a whole heap of timber and rubble from the destroyed house on top of it and it wouldn’t budge. They’d have to hope wreckage from the home was moved if they stood a chance of getting out, he admitted.

  Realistically, Sara doubted Margret and the others would bother searching through the wreckage for their bodies. Perhaps they were here for the duration, until… until what? Well, at least there was plenty of food and water.

  Sara checked Ava over more carefully as she laid still. Nothing broken, and while the blue-tinged bump on her forehead was livid, there was no suggestion that the bone beneath it was fractured. Ava was having difficulty focusing on her, but that was understandable after the blow on the head she’d taken. Probably a concussion—no more, no less.

  For her part, Sara ached from shoulder to shoulder across her back. A small price to pay for survival, though.

  Mace pulled the lids from some tomato soup and handed the separate cans to Sara and Ava, with a spoon each. “Eat it cold. We don’t waste gas on heating food that can be eaten straight out of the container.”

  Grateful for the food, hot or cold, Sara didn’t argue. Ava also ate hers quickly, scraping the insides of the can with her finger.

  “Feel better?” Sara asked.

  Ava grinned from beneath a tomato mustache before wiping it away with the back of her hand. “Getting there.”

  There was a screen at the back of the shelter where a chemical toilet was installed, and as Jessica went to it, she said to Mace: “Daddy, I need the music.”

  Mace smiled and picked up a mouth organ. He played mournful blues to spare his daughter’s blushes while she did her business behind the screen.

  Insanely, as the melody curled and twisted around her, Sara felt tears picking at her eyes. It was the cutest, most human moment she could imagine. A father making sure that, not only was his daughter’s physical safety assured, but that her sensibilities and confidence were also preserved. It was a moment so human that it made Sara’s heart swell.

  A little girl and her daddy. Making the world worth saving.

  In the end, it was less than three hours before Margret and her ARM fighters uncovered enough of the wreckage to discover the hatch in their search for Sara’s and Ava’s bodies. In answer to a loud yell of welcome from Mace, they let them know they were clearing debris to lift it open. While they waited, Mace recounted how he knew Sara’s father.

  It turned out Mace had been a Vigo County sheriff’s deputy when James Parker’s infamous fall from grace had been the talk of police departments across the length and breadth of Indiana. It had been a real “There but for the grace of God go I” situation, he told Sara. Every officer prayed that they wouldn’t end up in a similar bind—accidentally discharging a weapon and killing a child—and Mace admitted that for some time after Parker’s demise, he’d hesitated more than once in drawing his weapon from its holster. One time, during a hold-up in a liquor store in Cloverland, that hesitation had almost gotten him killed. The incident was one of in a series that convinced Mace that prepping for the unexpected, whatever that might be, was a good idea.

  And it had been through prepping that he’d gotten to know James Parker more personally. Not in person initially, but through online prepper groups. Their mutual background as cops gave them an affinity online. Mace remembered meeting Parker for the first time at a prepper cook-out and day hike, six summers before, at Hemlock Cliffs in the Hoosier National Forest. They’d become buddies, and over the intervening years Mace had heard all about Sara, and seen the way her absence ate at her father. Mace said Parker had shown him so many pictures of Sara as a young girl in emails and instant messages that he’d grown to know her face almost as well as he knew Jessica’s. Once she’d said her name, common as it might be, he had no doubt that this Sara Parker was his buddy’s daughter.

  As they talked, though, much of their conversation spun back to Parker. Mace’s relief that Sara had met up with him, that they’d found each other, was almost palpable—to the extent that it nearly brought her to tears, he was so glad to hear they’d finally been reunited. More than anything else since Parker had found her at the cabin, it made her realize how much he must have been hurting over her absence for all those years. When Mace heard Parker had gotten separated from them as they’d fled north, the conversation turned serious once again, but their mutual worry was forced to take a backseat—the hatch was finally pried open. After they emerged, blinking into the light, to howls of delight and amazement from Margret and t
he others, Mace confessed he could go on all day talking about James Parker—especially now that he was such a hero, given what Sara had been able to tell him and what he’d heard in passing. But the storytelling had to end.

  While some of the cell members had been searching the wreckage of the Richardsons’ property, Margret had charged the other ARM fighters with rocking the blast-tumbled Ford back onto its wheels. All four tires had survived the blast, though the windshield hadn’t. It had been a miracle the explosion hadn’t set off the C4 in the cab’s firebox, too, but the metal container had protected its contents perfectly.

  Margret also had a detail of resistance fighters collecting weapons and ammunition from the dead FEMA troops. Once Sara and Ava were back on the surface, they set about burying Brian, with Mace’s blessing, next to the graves of Corey and Marion Richardson in the peace garden behind the Christian Center.

  “When this is all over,” Margret vowed to the mound of fresh earth, “we’ll come back and take you home, Brian. You have my word.”

  It took a while for everyone’s amazement that Sara and Ava had survived to die down. Mace, self-deprecating and shy, seemed to quietly enjoy taking first Margret, and then whoever else wanted to go, down into his shelter. He was proud of it, rightfully so, and everyone was staggered by his survival refuge, and grateful that it had saved Sara’s and Ava’s lives. And, of course, they were charmed by Jessica, the guardian angel who had led them there.

  But their house, constructed mainly of wood with concrete foundations, had been completely blown apart in the blast. The wreckage looked as if it had been caught in the path of a hurricane. Not one wall or stick of furniture had survived. The only blessing was that the blast had detonated up and out rather than down to the shelter.

  Of Solon, there was no sign at all save for a blackened hand connected to half a forearm.