911: The Complete Series

by Grace Hamilton

  The warden opened his mouth to speak, and then seemed momentarily distracted. He cocked his head to one side.

  Parker listened, too. He had to concentrate, but yes, he could hear something.

  It was the sound of machine gun fire.

  16

  Inside the firetruck’s cab, behind the armor, the bullets rang and sparked against the outside plating with incessant fury.

  Crow drove, hammer down, and the ancient truck lumbered along, breathing like a wounded rhino and grumbling like a blue whale’s appendix.

  Stuffed into the cab, dressed in ACUs, ACHs, and IOTV armor liberated after the Seelyville battle, Sara and ten similarly dressed ARM fighters waited for the explosion they knew was about to blot out the sound of the gunfire.

  Crow simply glared with grim intensity through the tiny viewing slit in the armor covering the truck’s windshield. His fingers drummed on the steering wheel as he muttered under his breath, “Come on. Come on. Come on!”

  If Ava and her guerilla fighters had done what was expected of them, the firetruck’s passage through the first set of prison gates was about to get much easier. Sara looked at her watch. Midnight. Everything was happening on time.

  The explosion of C4 one hundred yards in front of the firetruck lit the inside of the cab, even through the narrow viewing slit. Faces, suddenly illuminated, looked focused and frightening as if each person had placed a flashlight beneath their chin guard and bathed their face in a Halloween glow.

  Then the blast wave hit.

  The cab bucked and rolled, and Sara prayed it would stay upright.

  Crow had to fight the wheel as the truck slewed savagely left and a rain of debris clattered and thudded against the shell of it.

  “Keep going, Crow! Keep going!” Sara yelled.

  “Ain’t nuthin’ gonna stop me!”

  Sara looked over Crow’s shoulder, focusing through the viewing slit. What had once been a high security gate was now a blackened mess of wreckage. Bodies of corrections officers littered the road. Seconds before, they had been firing on the truck with their H&K MP7 9x9 mm submachine guns. Now they were scattered and opened up as if by a can opener. Splashes of blood and hunks of roasted flesh clung onto snapped bone—harsh evidence of the explosion’s butchery.

  The firetruck rumbled past and over the ruined bodies. Once through the wall and into the quad, it came under sustained fire from the two tower-mounted M246 5.56 mm light machine guns and attendant SAW teams. The armor held as the bullets thumped into the vehicle, but Sara didn’t think her teeth would.

  “Now!” she screamed, and metal flaps on either side of the cab were lowered, MP7s moving into position and being trained on the towers, shooting constant rounds at the SAW teams. Sara saw the men dive for cover. They weren’t used to taking fire. Sara pulled open the cab door next to her and screamed “Go! Go! Go!”

  Nine fighters leapt out in a blind rush as the MP7s gave covering fire.

  Sara’s own MP7 had to be fired one-handed because of what she was carrying. Responding, two corrections officers were across the quad, firing with M500 pump-action shotguns. Sara took the legs of one and Crow popped rounds of fire through the head of the other.

  Sara and Crow reached the outer prison door at the same time. The ARM fighters behind them provided a semicircle of protection and kept a close eye out for the appearance of any other officers. One of the men in a tower found a few vertebrae, stood up, and reached for his M246. Ava appeared behind him in the tower box and shot him in the head. She finished off the two other injured men as her counterpart in the other tower did the same. In the confusion caused by the blast at the prison gate, Ava and her team had run inside the compound, keeping low against walls, and swarmed up the towers to neutralize both SAW teams.

  Sara made a fist and waved her thanks to Ava before turning to the small firebox she was carrying. With nimble fingers, she undid the clasps and pulled the IED from inside. It was a 500g pack of C4. Sara put the detonator into the plastic, trailed out the attached wire behind her, and ordered everyone to get back to the safety of the firetruck.

  The officer whose legs Sara had shot reached for his M500, pumped it, and sent a hail of fire toward the fighters.

  Mary Cameron went down holding her thigh, blood pumping out. Crow and Steve Williams together yanked Mary up by her IOTV and threw her into the cab of the truck, where one of the machine gunners abandoned his post momentarily to administer first aid. Sara had already fired a rake of shots from her MP7, and the officer who had shot Mary flopped back into the dust.

  That distraction neutralized, Sara found cover and blew the inner door.

  The boom from the explosion rolled around the quad and a billow of dust and debris engulfed the firetruck. As her vision cleared, Sara saw the door had been punched in and ingress to the prison proper was assured. Meanwhile, Crow had gone to the dead corrections officers and retrieved two bunches of keys. One, he kept for himself, and the other he threw to Sara.

  Ava, now down from the tower, jogged over with her team.

  As they approached the building, they heard gunfire and explosions from the direction of the minimum security camp. Margret and her team had engaged the FEMA troops.

  “Go get ’em, Margie,” Sara grunted as she led her ragged, improvised strike team forward toward the destroyed prison entrance.

  Two corrections officers were dead behind the wreckage of the entry gate. The ceiling beyond it had partly collapsed and dead wires were hanging loose from the punctured tiles and light fittings. There was a round, windowed office beyond a wide expanse of steel-barred gates. Crow began sorting through keys as they approached the lock.

  The clatter of shell casings exiting an MP7 accompanied by the guttural back and forth of the firing piston split the air. A stream of bullets spat from the doorway of the goldfish bowl. The fighters dived for cover. Crow fell down behind a section of the blown-in door as Ava rolled away from the bullets chewing up the floor where she’d just been standing. Bullets sparked on the bars of the gate, sending deadly ricochets in every direction. Sara felt one ping off her ACH, snapping her head to one side.

  From a prone position, she returned fire, blowing out the glass office and scattering papers into the air, punching holes into the metal drawers of the filing cabinets against the back wall and tearing through anything between her and them. Whoever was in the office was now hunkered down with the bullets from Sara’s MP7 dancing around the office like fleas on the back of a dog.

  Crow crouched and ran for the lock, and Ava stood over him, firing into the office through the bars. The fourth key he tried turned the lock and the bars swung back on well-oiled hinges. Ava stepped past Crow, stalked into the goldfish bowl, and finished the job. She emerged four seconds later with a thumb raised.

  They were in.

  Sara didn’t have a plan of the facility, so they would have to do this the hard way—finding where the civilian prisoners were being held and releasing them as they found them. Hopefully, by then, the FEMA forces would be neutralized by Margret’s bombs and strike team. There had been some discussion about whether they should release everyone in the prison, but Sara’s memory of what Spencer had done with his crew of rapists and murderers didn’t entice her to let another gang of scumbags out to prey on the local population. The only question would be whether they could distinguish between the prisoners who belonged there and those who didn’t—if they couldn’t, they’d be letting everybody go, there was no question.

  But they had a specific target for this mission, too: the people they’d seen being trucked into the prison, and others like them.

  Sara entered the goldfish bowl of an office, stepping over the dead corrections officer as she moved, and began opening filing cabinets. Ava did the same while the rest of the team took up defensive positions covering the three corridors that led from the entrance into the bowels of the prison.

  “Got it,” Ava announced. Pushing the dead officer off the desk, she laid d
own a folder marked “Population” and flicked it open. The folder had five sections, one for each block of the prison. Each section listed the cell occupants and their dates of admission. Sara and Ava noticed the label ‘resistance prisoners’ at the same time, and met eyes. Their target was D-Block. There were ninety-seven prisoners there, and all had been brought in during the last three months. A quick scan determined that, unlike the prisoners listed on the pages for the other blocks, the prisoners there were of mixed sex, and mixed ages, and none of the names had anything listed against them in the column marked “Reason for Detention.”

  For Sara, seeing this blank column was almost as chilling as seeing the open-backed trucks arriving on the scout mission with Ava. Nearly a hundred Americans, all of them locked up without trial, representation, or reason by a government run by a Council who believed they could do whatever they wanted. It made her sick, and if her father had been there, it would have made him sick, too. With a fire rising ever hotter in her belly, Sara looked at the prison map pinned to the wall of the office.

  She stabbed her finger onto D-Block and traced the route back to their present location.

  “Ready?” she asked Ava.

  “Like you wouldn’t believe,” came the firm reply.

  Twenty-five more fighters had joined Sara’s team from the battles around the prison walls. They had come in weary, dusty but psyched. This now meant that Sara’s team had thirty-five members, and Margret’s guerillas taking on FEMA numbered around 140, if they hadn’t met too many casualties.

  Len Zukowski, a sandy-haired jester of a man, lead fighter of his small cadre, reported that the FEMA fighters were taking losses but digging in, and that Margret’s fighters were holding their own.

  Sara welcomed the news. They didn’t need the FEMA fighters making their way into the prison. Margret’s fighters didn’t need to win the battle; they only had to stall the troops and stop them from advancing. They’d worry about the FEMA troops once they’d released the prisoners. With their forces combined, and their determination, Sara was certain they’d prevail.

  The ARM fighters made their way into the prison, opening gates with the liberated key bunches and not finding much pushback. Corrections officers who showed themselves were mopped up easily. The remainder, Sara figured, had gone to ground, recognizing that no one was paying them enough to fight this battle.

  The resistance operation continued, taking zero casualties and going through the prison like a chisel through balsa.

  So, when the cell doors around them sprang open, and four FEMA troops swarmed out firing MP7s amid grenade explosions, Sara wasn’t so much surprised as confused.

  But she had no time to explore the thought.

  The force of the blast threw her against a wall, and as she slipped into unconsciousness, the last thing she saw was Ava taking three bullets to the chest.

  17

  Spencer walked ahead of Parker along the corridor. U.S. Marshals held Parker’s arms tightly at his biceps and propelled him forward. His wrists were still cuffed and connected to the waist chain which ran in a line of links to the thick shackles around his ankles. He didn’t mind being pulled along, though, for once. He was as curious as the others to find out what was happening.

  The sounds of gunfire at the prison hadn’t yet stopped.

  Spencer had offered no explanation for the shooting. He’d just told the marshal in the room to go outside and bring in Fredericks, and to make sure Parker was chained “every which way.”

  Without another word, Spencer, still chewing on his cigar, had led the way out of the interrogation room and into the corridor. He marched purposefully, and Parker, still reeling from the contents of the cigar tube and stinking of vomit, was half-marched, half-dragged in Spencer’s wake.

  The sound of machine gun fire reverberated down the corridor in staccato bursts. Evidently there was quite a firefight going on outside. A kernel of hope started to germinate in Parker’s heart. Maybe the resistance is attacking.

  Spencer was grumbling under his breath between the bursts of gunfire, giving in, Parker noticed, to anxiety. He’d rolled his hands into fists and both of his thumbs were rubbing furiously at his curved index fingers.

  Momentarily, at least, the gunfire took Parker’s mind off what had happened in the interrogation room.

  The marshals, once they’d secured Parker in chains, had thrown the cup of water over the front of his jumpsuit and toweled him down to clear away the chunks of vomit; it hadn’t done much for the smell, though.

  Spencer ushered them through a sally port and beyond it Parker could see a long line of windows. Outside the glass, the night sky was black. As the machine gun fire started up again, the reflections from multiple muzzle flashes moved across the surface of the windows like dazzles of sunlight on oily water.

  Before they reached the windows, a door at the top of a stairwell opened and Rayleigh appeared, puffing hard and looking like he’d run up four flights of stairs.

  Before he had a chance to speak, Spencer roared something unintelligible and backhanded the walrus-faced chief officer across the mouth, sending him spinning into the wall and cracking his head against it. Rayleigh, dazed but still conscious, looked at Spencer.

  “You…you…”

  Spencer drew the Beretta from his hip holster and fired two shots, and Rayleigh flinched as the plaster on the wall next to his right ear exploded.

  Behind Spencer, Parker froze along with the officers who’d been propelling him along the corridor—the shots had been close, and a good sign the warden was coming unhinged. Another glimmer of hope shot through Parker’s guts, suggesting things might be going his way, finally.

  “Go on, Rayleigh, say what you were gonna say. I dare you!” Spencer yelled at the man.

  The machine guns started up again outside, their reports rattling the windows. Rayleigh’s face crumpled into tears. Spencer walked past the man on the floor, holstering his handgun, and spat “fucking snowflake!” at Rayleigh, who by now was crying freely.

  The marshals dragged Parker forward to join Spencer at the window. Although they released his arms and let Parker stand on his own, they were taking no chances. Parker felt the cold muzzle of a pistol digging into the side of his temple and the click of its safety being taken off.

  More muzzle flashes and the rattle of gunfire drew Parker’s attention away from the gun at his head. He looked down at what was happening on the ground below them.

  It took him a few seconds to work out what was going on, though. It was as if his mind was rebelling, not wanting to process what his eye was now seeing.

  Below, in what Parker would later find out was the prison’s farm garden, there was a chained row of civilians standing next to a pit. Parker could see the outlines of bodies—a lot of bodies—in the bottom of the pit. Guards were forcing them to their knees. When the line was collectively kneeling, five other guards with MP7s opened up, raking fire backwards and forwards into heads and backs.

  Spumes of blood splashed into the air, bone fragments blasted out of faces, and bodies jerked like puppets before falling into the pit to lie pathetic and still.

  Finally, an officer with what looked to Parker like a SIG Sauer walked the length of the pit, dispatching anyone who was still moving.

  Parker knew then that everything he’d experienced up to this moment had only been on the outskirts of the battlefield. Because right now he was entering hell.

  Parker watched two more executions; two more lines of civilians cut down, tumbling into the pits.

  Spencer warned him that, if Parker closed his good eye for one second, he’d take it out with his thumb. “I don’t need you to be able to see for me to un-tell the myth of Jimbob Parker. One eye or none, it’ll happen. Then, and only then, will you be allowed the mercy of death.”

  18

  Crow Michelson died in Sara’s arms.

  The fatal wound was from a bullet that had entered his back, gone through his lung, and pushed two jagged s
hards of rib through the wall of his chest. Sara didn’t know when Crow had been shot, but he’d fought his way down the corridors, out into the quad and through the wreckage of the gates while she’d hung from him like a rag. She wasn’t sure if he’d drowned in his own blood, or if his heart had given out from the sheer exhaustion of half-pulling, half-carrying Sara out of the prison. But in the confusion of the firefight, and with supreme effort, Crow had managed to carry her to the treeline and into cover.

  Crow. The man made of bricks. Demolished.

  The night was alive with gunfire as FEMA forces cut down the last of Margret’s team as they ran. In her semiconscious state, Sara remembered looking back toward the prison, but the only people who’d come out behind her and Crow were the FEMA troops who had ambushed them in D-Block.

  Sara hadn’t considered that some troops would be stationed inside the prison as a contingency. If guerillas were staging resistance actions all over the U.S., it stood to reason that they might beef up security in the prisons where captured fighters were being held.

  Sara’s plan had gotten everyone killed.

  As far as she could tell now, she was the only survivor.

  She left Crow where he died, aware that she would have left a trail of blood for FEMA dogs to follow, and blindly headed further into the trees. There were creeks coming off the Wabash which she used to cover her tracks, splashing through the cold water. She made it through the sewage pipe and emerged from the tunnels before dawn, right where Darwin Road crossed Clear Creek.

  Sara emerged from the trees and broke into a deserted farmstead. There was no food in the pantry, or anything to heat the place, but she used blankets in a closet to dry herself, and then dressed in some jeans and a sweater the owners had abandoned, discarding her bloodied ACU. Not for the first time, she wished she had her parka, but that had burned in the firetruck right along with Margret’s just-in-case letter. Not that she needed the letter now—who was left for her to lead?