911: The Complete Series

by Grace Hamilton

  Sara looked at her arms poking naked from her vest top, seeing the goosebumps there as if from a distance. She took the sweater from Ava and put it on. Then she turned back to the stars.

  “Don’t blame them for thinking about their safety first. They lost Brian. Things could get a lot worse.”

  Sara’s jaw was set as if she’d chewed up all the words she had and all that remained were splinters of anger in her mouth.

  “If it helps, Sara, I agree with you. The prison should be our priority.”

  Sara turned from where she’d stood staring into the night. “I do get it, and you’re right—they are concerned for their families. If I still had a family, I’d be concerned for mine, too.”

  Sara had lost her mother, and probably her father, in far too short a time, and perhaps it had hardened her, Ava considered, or if not hardened, at least sharpened her determination not to let everything she’d lost be in vain. Ava wanted to hug her friend, tell her that she got it, that she understood, but there was a force field around Sara. A force field that was both keeping Ava away and holding Sara together. Ava felt instinctively that, if she hugged her, her friend might break. So, she tried something else.

  “Sara,” Ava said. Her voice was quiet. “Let me tell you what got me thinking you were right. It was this epiphany I had in Canada, but by the time I thought to talk to you about it… it didn’t seem to make sense to mention it.”

  Sara glanced sideways at her, her eyes narrowing. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, remember the rec room?”

  “Sure.”

  “Well, I figured out that if I ate late, right before they closed the cafeteria line after dinner, I could get almost an entire hour of time on that game system they had. The one you told me I was wasting time on—remember?”

  Sara huffed out a breath, but Ava grabbed her arm before she could stalk away. Turning to her, Sara glared. “You’re talking to me about video games?”

  “Hear me out,” Ava replied. She loosened her hand on Sara’s arm, squeezing once before she let go. “Please.”

  Sara shook her head, but nodded. “Go ahead.”

  “Anyway, they had plenty of combat games and sports games, but those have never been my thing. I don’t even know why I wanted to play; it’s not like I’m some huge gamer, or was before everything happened. But I needed to get away somehow; while I was playing, I wasn’t remembering so much. I needed that after what happened to Finn. That make sense?”

  Sara nodded again. “Sure, yeah, I figured it was an escape,” she allowed, taking a resigned seat on the porch step, Ava joining her a moment later.

  Ava wondered if Sara had the same image of Finn in her head as she did; it had taken months, but the pictures in her head—from Finn bleeding out and breathing her last breath—had at least reverted back to better memories. Her smile. Her laugh. Her brightness.

  “Well, I started playing this wizards-and-warriors-type fantasy game. Dragons, spells, chainmail bikinis for the barbarian women, the whole nine nerd yards. It felt silly, but in a good way, you know? I could figure out the problems of how to win in the game, and after a while I got a little obsessed. You saw that. It took me to this huge make-believe world and I could wander around chopping at things with my sword or having my magic unicorn burn them up when it breathed fire.”

  “You had a fire-breathing unicorn?” Sara asked, spitting out a laugh. “I’ve never heard of that.”

  Ava grinned. “Oh yeah, it was pretty cool. See, I started on this quest to turn my regular horse into a unicorn; then, once I did that, I could do another quest to either get Pegasus wings or dragon breath. I figured burning stuff was the way to go, and when I went after the necromancer, I—”

  “Ava,” Sara said gently, her eyes finally meeting her friend’s, for the first time since they’d come outside. “Focus.”

  Ava wondered for a moment if it had been a mistake to get into this, but it seemed to have brought Sara to the surface of her force field, so maybe it was worth persevering. Trying not to appear too self-conscious, Ava smiled, feeling her cheeks reddening a little. “I know it was stupid. But it was something I could get lost in for a while. If I got an ending I didn’t like, I could go back to a previous ‘save’ and get it right.”

  “I get it,” Sara told her. She squeezed her hand. “But what are you trying to say?”

  “I realize now, thinking of that game, of what we did, that you, me, your dad, Finn—we weren’t warriors.”

  Ava cut herself off from whatever she’d been about to add, biting her lip. Sara looked as if she’d been slapped.

  “Bullshit!” Sara said in a hot rush. “We fought like heroes; Finn was a warrior!”

  Ava took a deep breath and held up her hand in supplication. “Hear me out, Sara.”

  Still glaring, Sara bit off her words and gave a curt nod.

  “I don’t mean that, in real life, we weren’t brave, or that we didn’t fight hard. We did; I know we did. I mean in game terms,” Ava added.

  Sara met her eyes again, confusion bleeding out of them. “How so?”

  “Well, in the game, you could be all sorts of things, right? You could cast spells or pray to gods for some kind of divine power. You could be a knight or a barbarian, these massive, weapon-wielding tanks that went toe-to-toe with ogres or powerful witches and slugged it out… you see what I mean?”

  “And that’s not us?” Sara asked, sarcasm rippling in the comment.

  “We’re not wizards or warriors, Sara. Our primary characteristics aren’t magic powers or superhuman strength,” Ava explained.

  “Then what was our primary power?”

  “We’re assassins.”

  Sara looked at her. Her expression was nonplussed. “Like Lee Harvey Oswald? Like… murderers? That’s your grand revelation? That we’re villains?”

  Again, Ava shook her head. “No. Not assassins in the evil sense, assassins in game terms.”

  Sara shrugged, looking back out into the night. “I don’t understand.”

  “Assassins are stealth characters. If they attacked a knight or a magic user head-on, in their light armor with their knives, they’d get squashed or incinerated. But if they sneak around and attack from ambushes, they’re just as deadly as any creature or player in the game.”

  “Speed, surprise, aggression,” Sara said. Her voice was dull. “Exactly what Dad taught me.”

  “Right. That’s Parker all over. Focus and fight,” Ava agreed. “We weren’t marines storming a beach or whatever. We didn’t go head-to-head with FEMA units until today, and that’s just because we had no real time to plan. When we beat them before, it was because we caught them sleeping, by surprise, and attacked ruthlessly. There were times when we all should have died.” Ava was talking in a rush now, forcing this out before Sara could argue. “We ended up shooting it out with heavily armed patrols and we lived because they never saw us coming. That was the secret to us surviving.”

  “And when we were forced to fight head-to-head,” Sara said, “Finn died, and Brian died today. Is that what you’re trying to say?”

  “I’m saying that that’s what thinking about playing the game has made me realize,” Ava said. “Your dad showed us things, but he was never teaching us how to be soldiers. He was teaching us how to be guerillas.”

  “What’s your point, Ava?” Sara asked, her shoulders hunched in, guarded.

  “My point is that us leading a straight charge into a heavily defended prison compound—against a well-trained, well-armed enemy that expects us—isn’t the way we survived our journey to Canada. The resistance needs to know that the Council troops are ready for us, expecting us. We’re not going in with helicopters and tanks or fire-breathing unicorns, Sara. Parker would say our plan’s bullshit. That’s what I’m saying now. We have to find a way that achieves your goal, but at the same time keeps these people and their families safe.”

  Sara was silent, and Ava didn’t say anything else, watching her. Finall
y, Sara sighed, letting everything out in a pent-up breath.

  “You’re not wrong, Ava,” she said. “But I don’t know if it matters.” She reached out and lightly touched her arm. It wasn’t the hug Ava thought Sara needed, but it had come through her force field and it felt right. “Somehow, our surviving against the odds has made us heroes to these people. They’re looking to us, to my dad—if he’s still alive. Mace told me today he thought Dad had gone to ground and was whipping up an army. Can you believe that?”

  “Of your dad, Sara? Hell yes, I can. If he’s out there, I reckon that’s exactly what he’s doing,” Ava answered, grinning at the thought of it. It sounded right.

  Sara continued, “Yes, he would. But these people, they’re not fighting to simply get away from the Council; they’re fighting to defeat them, to build something. They’re not fighting only for survival—they’re fighting for freedom. I want to fight with them.”

  Ava blinked back a build-up of tears that had surfaced suddenly. She’d told Margret and the rest of the cell about the increased patrols and the executions to save lives, to get them to reconsider their plan of attack. But what Sara was saying was true enough; putting yourself in harm’s way was sometimes the only way to go. Her so-called revelation might mean something to her, and how she thought of what they were doing… but in the grand scheme of things, what did it change?

  “Part of me is screaming to leave, to get out and head back to the safety of the UN refugee camps in Canada,” Sara said, turning and putting two hands on Ava’s shoulders, near shaking her. “My hatred was focused on the Church for so long that even my run-ins with the Council seemed like a diversion sometimes, like background noise. My battle was personal, but now…” Sara fixed her eyes unblinkingly on Ava, the force field completely gone now—Sara was back in the present. “Now I’ve found myself enlisted in an army. An army that must win, must take the Council down. But this army wants to wait. Wants to go somewhere and regroup. And that must not happen. Not yet. And I’ve got to convince them of it.”

  Ava wanted to question why, but found herself nodding instead; somehow, she felt the urgency in the moment also, for whatever reason. “And I have every faith that you will, no question,” she answered.

  Having said that, she pulled Sara into a tight hug. Ava had meant it. She’d meant it more than she’d ever meant anything in her life.

  Sara asked Margret the next day to convene a council of war in the clubhouse. Every local cell leader in the Billtown to Brazil area attended.

  The mood was somber, and Ava knew that Sara would have a fight on her hands in persuading the room that running and hiding wasn’t the best way to help their fellow countrymen.

  There’d been a general hubbub of conversation in the room when Margret called the meeting to order and asked Sara to open the discussion.

  Ava squeezed Sara’s hand as she stood, whispering, “Knock ’em dead, tiger.”

  Sara squeezed her hand back, turned to the room and began. “You all know me. I’m Jim Parker’s girl.”

  Nods of assent rippled around the room, and a couple of cell leaders clapped at the sound of Parker’s name. Mace’s assessment of Parker had been right, Ava thought. Evidenced yet again by the positivity in this room at the mention of his name.

  “And in the time I’ve been here, I’ve gotten to know many of you, not as well as I should, but well enough. You all want this Council and false government to fall. Correct?”

  More applause.

  Ava’s sight was caught by movement to the side of the room. Crow Michelson, in his late forties, built like a stack of bricks, and twice as rough as that around the edges, sat forward in his chair, pushing back a lick of graying hair that had strayed onto his forehead. He was a tough but cautious fighter who Ava respected, but she knew he was one of the prime movers in prioritizing the resistance’s flight out of Billtown.

  “That’s as it may be, Sara,” he said once eyes had been drawn to him, “but if we’re all dead, the Council and the government… well, they carry on, and there’s nothing we can do about it.”

  Sara had expected this, Ava knew. “That’s true, Crow, I can’t argue against your logic. But logic isn’t the only thing to consider here.”

  Crow scoffed, but didn’t argue immediately. A few faces at the table showed they were more in his camp than Sara’s, however.

  “My dad was a 911 dispatcher,” Sara continued. “Every hour, sometimes every minute, people would ring that number at the most terrible moments in their lives to ask for help. They would be in a time of extreme need. What was he supposed to tell them? ‘I’m sorry, ma’am, we’re moving offices and we need every available body here to carry boxes? I know your husband is bleeding there in front of you, ma’am, but I reckon I can get someone to you by… say, Tuesday?’”

  Crow’s face had reddened as Sara spoke, and he thumped his fist hard on a nearby table. “Now, you just hold on a minute, you—”

  Sara held up her hand, and said clearly and loudly: “Crow, I have not finished.”

  He turned to Margret. “Margie, have I got to sit here and listen to this emotive bullshit?”

  Margret smiled. “Yes, Crow, I think you do. Let the lady finish.”

  Crow deflated like a week-old birthday balloon and collapsed back in his chair.

  “When Ava and I went to scope the Terre Haute prison facility, we saw trucks of civilians—shackled civilians—being taken inside. Two of those men made a break for it as the truck slowed down at the entrance gates. Their hands were tied, their legs in chains, but they tried.”

  The room had gone silent, the air still, and everyone was razor-focused on Jim Parker’s daughter, Ava included.

  “They got about twenty feet before the guards caught them. Instead of dragging those civilians back to the truck, they put them on their knees in front of their friends, maybe their own families, and shot them both through the backs of their heads. In front of their friends, their families, their wives, and their children. Because, yes, there were children in those trucks.”

  The color was draining from Crow’s face.

  Sara gave the room a moment to breathe, and then continued, “This is what America has become, ladies and gentlemen. This is what the Nazis did to the Jews, and it is happening right there in Terre Haute. I don’t know if people are being exterminated in that camp, but we saw two executions outside of it. This is an emergency. This is 911, or the closest we have to it now, and those people are calling us. So, there’s the question. Do we walk away? Do we prioritize ourselves, or do we go to help them?”

  Ava had never felt a room so shivery with natural electricity. You could have powered all of Chicago with the energy being generated in the room. She looked at Sara and realized, for the first time, that for all intents and purposes, she was a little bit in love.

  Sara, though, was immobile, her eyes fixed and her hands on her hips, daring someone to argue with her.

  Margret stood. “Thank you, Sara.” She scanned the room, meeting the eyes of those surrounding her, one by one. “Okay, everyone, you’ve heard what she has to say. The question has been raised. Do we fight or flee? Raise your hand to fight.”

  Crow Michelson was the very first to raise his hand, and everyone else followed immediately thereafter.

  13

  Parker was pushed down the last few steps of the landing by one of the corrections officers escorting him to the recreation area. He pitched forward from the force, just managing to break his fall with his hands before he broke his nose. He rolled onto his back to see Rodgers extend his baton with a flick of the wrist and touch the point of it against Parker’s chin.

  “Careful there, asshole, or you might hurt yourself if you’re not careful.”

  The other officer, Castillo—a thin, mustachioed Hispanic with a rasping laugh and a graveyard of crooked teeth for a mouth—hissed his approval at his colleague’s humor. Beside him, Rodgers was white and hairless and pudgy, like a Kewpie doll made from candy i
cing on a child’s birthday cake. His eyelashes were long and feminine; his demeanor anything but.

  They’d come for Parker, unexpectedly, after breakfast, with the news that, on Spencer’s orders, he was going to be allowed to associate with the general population. Supposedly, to see how well he “played” with others.

  Parker wondered what twisted machinations this change in his circumstances represented, but he knew he’d have to be at his most alert and ready, no matter what. Whatever Spencer had planned would not be fun.

  It had been five days since Calhoun had passed him the note, and he had seen her, as promised, to check on his wounds, but she’d made no more attempts at clandestine communication, other than to accept the crumpled note back from Parker’s hand as she’d put his used dressings into that clinical waste bag she’d carried in.

  What was Calhoun plotting? He had to wonder if this was a genuine attempt to reach out to him, or another of the sick mind games Spencer liked playing.

  Parker had no idea, and couldn’t risk talking to anyone about it. But as unlikely as it seemed that she might want to help him, he also couldn’t ignore the possibility that, at least for the moment, she was on his side.

  He’d pretty much been left to himself in the cell, other than at meal times and twice being taken to shower. Even the 1 a.m. beatings had stopped.

  Sara’s death still gnawed savagely at him, but depression was transforming into a background rage that, right now, was still easy to control. A few more pushes down the stairs, however, and Parker wondered what might happen to his self-control. But he didn’t want to waste a chance to get his hands on Spencer by hitting Rodgers back, so he lowered his eyes and climbed back to his feet.

  It was the same recreation area he’d passed through with Kenny. Two table tennis set-ups at which no one was playing, and the eating area of fixed tables and chairs, which now held fifteen or so men dressed in orange jumpsuits, all of them in tight huddles having quiet conversations.

  The prevalence of amateur tattoos on forearms, necks, and faces told Parker that the other inmates of C-Block were unlikely to be resistance fighters, and more likely to be prisoners who had been in the facility before the EMP. Perhaps the same kind of men Spencer had used to spread fear and violence on the night of the Event. The type of men who had been fixing to rape Finn.