Carol Meeks had stood for all the people when she said, “If you want to go back there and get killed finding their bodies, you go. I won’t be going with you.”
Carol had lost a husband and many friends, so Ava understood the sentiment and wished that she hadn’t asked. These people were broken, and there was little she could do to put them back together.
Carol turned to the others. “Before Sara came up with her suicidal plan, we were going to move. We’re too exposed here. I know you’re all grieving—my heart has been destroyed—but we have kids, elderly, and sick here, and if we stay, the government is going to find us in a heartbeat. We need to get away from here now. Not as a group, but as individuals.”
There was almost complete agreement in the room. Ava stayed silent; she didn’t feel she had the right to say anything. She wished she had Sara’s confidence and power of persuasion—she wished she could stand up like Sara would have and told these people not to give up.
But… she wasn’t Sara. Only Sara was Sara; in that moment, thinking it to herself, Ava realized she missed her friend more than she could say. Her heart ached, and her belly turned at the thought of never seeing Sara again.
Carol Meeks was using the shock of losing John, her husband, as a motivator, and she was getting through to the people around her. Watching, observing from the depths of her own form of shock and grief, Ava couldn’t help but marvel at the thin, thirty-year-old woman’s emotional aikido—using the weight of the grief against itself, to pivot it into a plan. The plan was that Carol and Kim Randle—a wiry, middle-aged black woman with homespun wisdom and an eye for detail—would set about dividing the supplies of food, fuel, weapons, and ammunition fairly among the remaining fighters. They would suggest routes out of Billtown for everyone, with a view to the whole cell being scattered to the four winds within the next twenty-four hours.
Everything that Margret and her deputies had fought to create would be gone by dawn.
Ava closed her eyes to the inevitability of the end. In this region of the U.S., at least, the Council had won.
20
“Please don’t shoot. I’m not looking for trouble.”
There was nothing else Sara could do but ask, and she had nowhere else to go if she did turn around, so she raised her hands.
“Perhaps coming into my house uninvited was not the best way to make that clear, young lady.” The man took another step out of the gloom; he was in his mid-fifties, running to fat, and had a halo of wispy red hair around his head. He wore a grubby button-down tucked into his jeans, and his brown boots had heels that added at least two inches. His eyes, though, they were different—the clear hazel orbits were his strongest feature. They pierced the air, gloomy as it was, and assessed Sara with the precision of a laser beam.
Sara returned his gaze evenly, knowing there was no point in looking at the gun. His eyes might tell her if he was going to shoot first and ask questions at the funeral. Although the muzzle of the weapon oscillated with a near Parkinson’s vibration, the man’s eyes were steady, suggesting a control that helped Sara breathe more easily.
“Step inside and shut the door,” he said in a flat, accentless voice.
“Are you going to shoot me?” she asked first.
“I might, if you keep the door open long enough to ruin my rug.”
Sara lowered one hand, felt behind her for the door handle, and shut the storm out.
But he didn’t lower the gun, and if he did mean to shoot her, Sara had just shut off her only means of escape.
“Who are you?” the man asked, taking a step closer and looking her up and down. She imagined she presented a pitiful picture, soaked and under-dressed for the weather as she was.
For a moment, she considered lying. If her father’s name was spreading around the country as a major irritant to the Council, disguising her name might well be prudent right about now. Then again, if the man with the gun already knew who she was, it wasn’t the way to engender trust.
Is this how it’s going to be for all time now, because of the failed raid… second-guessing myself at every turn?
The hesitation she felt was new, but she gulped down her nerves and took another moment to consider her options. She’d screwed up at the first hurdle—there were good people dead because of her. She had to figure out if she even wanted to be Sara Parker anymore. But could she do that? Slough off her name and identity like a snakeskin and begin a new life? Invent a life-story? Become someone else?
As the man grimaced at her, waiting for a response, she blinked and a flash of intense gunfire sparkled across her memory…
Her father driving the SUV at the roadblock; bullets spitting off the bodywork as the battle raged; the SUV going forward, never deviating—rushing into the hail of machine gun fire. James Parker. My daddy.
She might not have the confidence to lead, but she still had a name.
“My name is Sara Parker,” she said. “I was just looking for somewhere to escape the storm, and thought your place was empty when nobody answered. Who are you, sir?”
“Before I tell you anything, please lift your sweater. I can see the bulge of a handgun there. I’d like you to carefully remove it and put it on the floor.”
Sara did as she was told.
“Kick it here.”
The gun skittered off the rug, bumping across the floorboards at his feet. Sara put her hands up again. The man held the shotgun in one hand and bent to pick up the Beretta with the other. He put Sara’s gun in the waistband of his jeans.
“Well, you’re cooperative, at least. That’s to your credit. You can lower your hands. Come and sit. I’ll make us some coffee and light the fire.”
Sara lowered her hands and sat on the sofa nearest the fireplace, conscious that rainwater was dripping from her clothes and hair.
The man lowered the shotgun and stared at Sara with those endless hazel eyes, not blinking or wavering, making thirty seconds feel like hours. At last, he blinked. And smiled.
“I’m Doctor David Reynolds. Pleased to meet you, Sara.”
Reynolds made a smart 180, so much so that Sara flinched at the sharp scuff of his boots on the floor. Then he began walking away toward the kitchen, turning his back on her as if she wasn’t there, ignoring this new, unknown stranger who had pretty much broken into his house uninvited in the middle of a storm. He put the barrel of the shotgun casually over his shoulder as he walked away.
Sara didn’t understand. In the space of thirty seconds—her putting down her gun when asked, and the doctor staring at her—he seemed to have completely relaxed, as if leaving her alone on his sofa was the most natural thing in the world. She stared after him and shook her head. It didn’t make any sense.
“Oh, don’t get too comfortable,” said a sixty-a-day female voice out of nowhere. “He’s far too trusting. I, on the other hand, am not, and if you do anything I don’t like the look of, young lady, I’ll shoot you in the face.”
21
Parker was released from his cell after three days.
Castillo and Rodgers came for him at 7 a.m. and took him to the recreation area, where he was served breakfast with Kleet and the other Mandingo Warriors.
Parker wasn’t in the mood for company, though. He couldn’t work out what Spencer was up to, other than making sure there was no routine he could adhere to, and thus look for chinks in it that he could exploit. But today, after being left in his cell for three days, seeing no one other than Castillo bringing him his food, he was out. No discussion or preamble or explanation to it.
And after everything, Parker was numb. The sounds and the smells of the prison had been shut out as he’d ridden waves of desperate misery over the fate of his daughter and the exterminated civilians. He’d taken to cracking his knuckles and rubbing his palms together constantly, as if there was endless dirt on his skin, and he was trying to scrub out the memory of the ash long after the physical presence of it had gone. He wished he could wash his heart clean in the same way. I
t was clogged with Spencer’s muck, and he wanted to be free of it.
With everything that had happened, he’d spoken little since coming to the recreation area, only nodding along as some response seemed needed, but finally Kleet wanted to know what was eating at Parker, and leaned in as if to demand it of him.
“You gotta face like a nine-dollar whore’s asshole, man. They let you outta yo’ cell. At least that should make you feel better.”
Parker had forgotten how to speak, it seemed. He shoveled more dire gruel into his mouth and pushed its gristle over his tongue, down his throat. He didn’t look up or make eye contact.
Kleet put down his spoon, pointedly, and stared hard across the table. Disrespect could be a killer in jail, Parker knew from his training so long ago, and Kleet was a proven killer. But Parker didn’t need added aggravation; he’d had a heap of it already. He raised his hand without taking his eyes off his plate.
“Sorry,” he said simply. “Been a tough few days.”
“You expected it to be easy for an ex-cop in here?”
Parker’s head snapped up, and he stared back at the other man.
The amusement on Kleet’s face was clear. He shoved his thumb over his shoulder to where Castillo was pacing, swinging his baton like an extra in a cheap prison movie.
“You know? Castillo told you?”
“Sure the duck did. They want to make it as purger-tory as they can for you in here, man. Of course, they told us. They want you broken.”
Parker tensed, unsure where this was going. “I’d worked that out for myself.”
Kleet picked up his spoon and took another mouthful of the food substitute from his tray and chewed with an open-mouthed grin, gold teeth flashing through the mush.
“I don’t like being played,” he said through his food. “If they want me or my crew to dance on your blacktop, brother, they gonna have to come up with something betta than ex-po-lice. See, I figure if they be lockin’ up cops, that’s either because this cop have been a bad muthafucka as a cop, or they been bad muthafuckas to the muthafuckas runnin’ the country. Either way, we gonna need bad muthafuckas to get this shit back to how it was.” Kleet paused to swallow, and said conspiratorially, “Betcha didn’t think I’d be so… public-spirited, eh, Parker?”
Parker shook his head, the tide of misery receding a little. Not enough to stop him drowning in it, but enough for him to get a glimpse above the waves.
“No, Kleet, I didn’t think you’d be so… politically minded.”
“She-it man! You think they niggaz operate in a vacuum? Politics allows us to operate in the way we want to out there, man. What kind of lame-ass nigger are you, Parker? You think, because I chose crime, I don’t know what goes on? If I want my business to thrive, I have to anticipate the prevailing conditions, employ flexibility in my markets, diversify—be proactive, not reactive, you get me? Just because I run drugs and not numbers on Wall Street, you think my concerns are different in any which way? I work in a service industry, man. The rules aren’t any different for me than they are for the CEO of a Fortune 500 company.”
Kleet reached forward and slapped Parker on the shoulder. “Nigger, you got a hell of a lot to learn ’bout how the real shit-world works.”
Parker nodded, offering a quick grin to show he understood, and with that Kleet and Parker finished their meals as some Mandingo Warriors played table tennis—Parker noting the agility of Gace and some of the others at the tables… huge men they might be, but lumbering hulks they were not.
And with the meals done, Kleet wanted to know where they had taken Parker three nights before.
“We heard shooting,” he commented after asking.
Cold hands clenched at Parker’s guts. He was back at the window suddenly, looking down onto the open pits and the falling bodies.
“You don’t know?” he asked Kleet quietly. Somehow, he’d assumed everyone would have known by now. Seeing those bodies fall… it had been one of those moments that seemed like it ought to have changed the world, and not just how he felt about it.
But Kleet shook his head, glancing to the guard before looking back at Parker to answer.
“Nope. We ain’t been outside for association for nine weeks give or take, day or night. We figured there was shit going down; maybe they let their guard down on some folks they’d let out at night for some reason. All we ever seem to see these days are Castillo and Rodgers.”
“Just the two of them?”
“Most of the time, sure. There’s other officers out there, a moment’s runnin’ away with their shotguns and their Tasers. We found that out the hard way.”
Parker hadn’t considered that only two officers at a time would be on the wing. There were nine Mandingo Warriors, plus Henshaw and Parker.
The numbers started an itch, but Parker wasn’t ready to scratch it… yet.
“They were shooting people,” he told Kleet. “Lots of people. Civilians.”
Kleet eyed him for a minute, and then leaned in. “Get the fuck outta town.”
“I saw it. Spencer made me watch.”
“She-it. We heard about the trouble with the resistance fighters on D-Block. Heard the gunfire, smelled the smoke. They locked us down for thirty-six hours after that. But… civilians, man?”
“Women, too. Never seen anything so… evil in my life. Shot in the back. Dumped in a mass grave.”
Kleet’s eyes had widened, but Parker could see the man believed him. “And they keeping us alive? Criminals like me? What the fuck got them doing that?”
Thinking back to all that he’d seen, Parker explained to Kleet what Spencer had been up to the first time he’d met him—using the worst of the worst prisoners to go out, cause havoc, rape, steal, and terrify. Perhaps that was what Spencer had in store for Kleet and his crew, he suggested.
Kleet nodded, with what looked to be approval, “Nothing like having a scared population to make them easier to control. Business 101.”
Parker got a taste of Kleet’s amorality from the comment. It wasn’t that he was evil, he surmised—it just didn’t occur to him to really care. All that mattered was doing what needed to be done to take care of business. The pragmatism was breathtaking. Inexcusable as far as Parker was concerned, but understandable. And maybe, in this new world, is was what anyone who wanted a fighting chance would have to accept. Even those fighting for a cause would need to be able to work with men like this, and understand them, to have a chance against the government and men like Spencer. Men like Kleet and his crew, who could be bought or reasoned with for the sake of support and business and survival, would be the equivalent of independent voters in an election—they’d swing their power to one side or another, and that side would likely win the war.
That didn’t stop him from wanting to see people like Kleet locked up, but… he saw that not everything was black and white. On another day, he would have laughed at his own pun. Today, though, Parker thought that if he didn’t hold it together, tears would come. Never had he felt so dislocated from the life he wanted, from the goals he had chased.
A shadow of a shade. Robbed of fight, robbed of power, robbed of family. Trying to stir up hope from a conversation with a gang leader. Kleet was a murderer, a blight on civilized society, and yet Parker was treating him as a resource, trying to pull something clean out of the dirt.
Parker got up from the table, and without another word to Kleet, he asked Castillo to return him to his cell.
Ava left Billtown without a clear plan of what to do or where to go next.
All the remaining vehicles had been appropriated by the now ex-ARM fighters to take what remained of their families and loved ones onto the road and spread to the four winds.
For her part, she’d changed out of her ACU, dumped her MP5, and stuffed a Beretta into her pack with as much ammunition as could be spared, and then put another Beretta into the waistband of her pants, where it sat snugly against the small of her back as she walked. She stayed off the roads in cas
e of FEMA patrols and moved through the woods instead, lighting only small fires at night so that smoke wouldn’t show above the treeline. She would sleep lightly, extinguishing her fires before dawn. Then she’d move on, following streams and gullies, heading as broadly southwest as she could. It wasn’t that she’d picked west for any particular reason—she just liked walking toward the sun setting through the trees in the evening rather than away from it. It felt hopeful, in some way.
Parker’s respite from the stinking shithole of a world outside his cell door didn’t last long.
Sitting on his bunk, trying to bore a laser hole through the wall with his one good eye, he almost didn’t notice the door open. Two rock-faced and wholly anonymous U.S. Marshals entered. One trained an MP7 on Parker’s head and the other put the requisite cuffs, chains, and waist belt onto his body.
Neither marshal said a word or made eye contact with him as they worked. He knew the drill and so did they. Once they had him in the chains and cuffs, they marched him as quickly as his hobbled legs would take him—out of the wing, into the main corridor, through four sally ports, and into an administrative area of the prison which Parker hadn’t been in before. They took him up in an elevator and marched him along a corridor which was covered in a carpet. For the first time in months, Parker felt himself disorientated by his feet making no sound on the institutional floors of this corrections facility.
Through a set of double doors and a vestibule containing tall, potted rubber plants, office sofas, and armchairs, and on past a secretary’s desk with a keyboard and blank-screened computer. From the ceilings came the whisper of air conditioning. Parker felt it chill the slick of prison sweat fermenting on his scalp—it was like diving into an oasis after a month-long trek through a merciless desert.
The marshals took him through one more set of doors and into a brightly lit office, spacious and modern.
911: The Complete Series Page 64
