911: The Complete Series

by Grace Hamilton

  A broad sweep of windows at one end looked out over the surrounding area. The prison basked in the afternoon glow, the rocky hills in the distance looking like a magical city drawn onto the landscape by an angel. Other than bare patches of sky through cell windows, and one night looking through a window into the very mouth of Satan, Parker had seen little except walls and bars. His heart beat hard and strong to see something that reminded him of before.

  Before his life had died.

  Ava didn’t meet anyone for nearly seven days, other than coming across a homestead backed onto a grove of American chestnut trees, with smoke rising from a chimney, a FEMA truck parked outside, and soldiers smoking and lazing around it, awaiting orders. Perhaps a designated rest stop and supply base for roving patrols. There were idle F-350s and plenty of outhouses for storage. She made a mental note of its location, but gave it a wide berth and struck deeper into the woodland.

  Through the trees as she walked, she could see fields that would once have been tended by farmers but were now sprouting weeds, being left to overgrowth in the burgeoning spring. A depressing sight, and more evidence—if it was needed—that the whole country was being overtaken by the weeds and thorns of the corrupt, Council-led government.

  Ava had rations with her, but she was also foraging near the river for cattail rootstock and their corndog-tasting flower spikes. She collected wild asparagus on the edges of the woodland to supplement the food she carried and, every third day, she would wait in the woods, set snares, and see what meat she could catch. Cottontail runs were easy enough to identify, and although it wasn’t the season for easy pickings, she became adept at setting snares and getting enough meat to cook and pack for three days of traveling. Waiting near her snares, she’d think about how far she’d come from living in the suburbs and shopping at grocery stores. She’d changed immeasurably under Parker’s tutelage and her more recent mentors—to the extent that she rarely even remembered the old world. She only missed the friends she’d made, and lost, along the way.

  She had no maps since those had been appropriated by the fleeing ARM fighters. Ava had thought, momentarily, about arguing their seizure, but in the end had let it slide. She didn’t know where she wanted to go anyway, so why would she need a map? Regardless, her sharp memory, and insistence on sticking to the same direction of travel, gave her enough clues about where in the state she was.

  The Huey, which had given her cause to stop, had now been hovering within earshot for almost a minute. The chestnuts overhead weren’t being caught in the downdraft anymore, but the engines of the helicopter were loud enough for Ava to accurately range its position and direction from where she was. She listened for the footfalls of FEMA forces, or the barking of dogs that might come if she were being tracked. Nothing other than the Huey hovering overhead gave her the impression that anything was out of the ordinary, however. So, she moved low through the trunks toward the noise, curiosity getting the better of her. If the Huey wasn’t looking for her, what the hell was it doing?

  There were three men in the room.

  Spencer sat at his vast desk looking at Rayleigh, who was trying to hang a photograph of a man Parker didn’t recognize. The man in the photograph stood in front of a U.S. flag, wore a blue suit with a red tie, had his hand on the heart pocket of his jacket, and was staring off imperiously into the middle distance of possibility.

  “No,” said Spencer to Rayleigh, “it’s not even close to level. More to the right, goddammit… no! The right! Your right!”

  Rayleigh’s face was hot with exertion and panic. He wasn’t a tall man and was already on tiptoes trying to place the large framed portrait correctly. That’s when Parker noticed that, not far from Rayleigh, there was another portrait of similar size. It was leaning against the wall, and was a portrait of a different man altogether. This man, standing in a similar pose to the man in the picture Rayleigh was maneuvering, was someone Parker did recognize. The last president of the United States. And Parker knew you only changed a president’s photograph for one reason—when there was a new president in post.

  Rayleigh let go of the edges of the frame and stood back on his heels. The frame held for two seconds and then slipped out of alignment again. Spencer thumped his desk with his fist, and Rayleigh jumped back to the wall and started all over again.

  The third man in the room was in his late thirties, his hair slicked back from his high forehead and gelled. His heavily lidded eyes and hooked nose suggested the profile of a bird of prey. Unruffled in his cream linen suit, he had a gold-topped cane in one hand, and it lay resting along the side of his left leg. He was not looking at Rayleigh and Spencer—he was looking directly at Parker.

  An unexpectedly broad smile lit his face when he realized who he was looking at, too. He looked genuinely pleased. With not inconsiderable effort, he used the cane to lever himself to his feet and began limping across the plush carpet.

  Parker didn’t know him, but he seemed to know all about Parker. He walked around the ex-cop and the attending marshals, looking for all the world like someone considering a marble statue in a fine art museum. He even stroked his chin in the manner of someone appreciating something unattainable. In other circumstances, the attention he was giving Parker might have been misconstrued as having the frisson of sexual desire running through it. The edges of his slit mouth glistened with fresh spit, the hoods of his eyes lifting to show sparkling blue eyes beneath.

  “Well, well, well,” he said in the voice of a Southern gentleman from another age—one who was about to bid upon his chosen buck in a slave auction.

  Suddenly, seemingly without prompting, the man’s face fell, as if he’d had a vitally important thought. He started patting the pockets of his jacket, and then the pockets of his razor-creased pants.

  The surreal air to the proceedings on the far side of the office ended when Spencer was finally happy with the portrait’s aspect and Rayleigh could get down off tiptoe and relax. The man in the linen suit was still patting his pockets in an absentminded way, like a kindly schoolteacher looking for a pen.

  Parker watched as Rayleigh and Spencer looked at the man with a seriousness suggesting he held power over them. Whatever his eccentricities, they were going to accept them, because judging by their expressions, to do otherwise might bring terrible retribution.

  “Ah! Of course!” the man said, and finally he reached under his jacket to the breast pocket of the scrupulously white shirt beneath. From there, he pulled forth a length of white material. Putting his cane under his arm, he came as close to Parker as a lover might, just out of range of forced physical contact. The marshals holding Parker tensed at the man’s proximity, and Parker realized they were as scared of him as Spencer and Rayleigh.

  The man lifted his hand toward Parker’s face, paused, and whispered: “Hold still, Mr. Parker,” and with that he hooked a new, elasticated eyepatch over Parker’s head. Prissily adjusting it until he was happy with the way it looked.

  “That’s better,” he said, stepping back. “Much more pleasing on the eye than that unsightly cavern of wrinkled flesh. I approve.”

  Parker remained silent. This was all too weird, all too beyond the un-comfort zone he’d been in for the previous few months. It didn’t compute. It was like his mind was short circuiting. The man pointed at the presidential portrait Rayleigh had hung on the wall under Spencer’s direction. “Noble and wise, don’t you think?”

  “I don’t know who that is,” Parker replied honestly.

  “Well, you don’t need to know who he is, as long as people think he looks noble and wise. That’s a fine baseline skillset for a president, don’t you think?”

  Parker eyed the man, wondering what all this was leading up to. “I suppose so.”

  “Well, Mr. Parker, perhaps you haven’t heard. The United States has a new president. A noble and wise man, if the portrait is anything to go by. It probably follows that you did not know there was an election last week to elect him. No reason you shou
ld know, I suppose. Only twelve of us voted, after all. But we can come to those details in due course.”

  The man in the linen suit paused again, smiled, and straightened an imaginary stray hair on his widow’s peak. “First things first, Mr. Parker. Please let me introduce myself. I am Farmer Grayland, the boss of the president of the United States.”

  22

  Sara reached into the pack, pulled out a wound pad, pried the two halves of the sterile cover apart, and held it for David’s gloved hand to receive. Ten-year-old Cal Grove moaned with shock-induced delirium, and Nurse Samantha Diaz, with the sixty-a-day cigarette voice, held his head, gently smoothing the injured boy’s hair and surreptitiously checking his vitals with two fingers against his knotted carotid.

  David took the pad from Sara, removed the covering, and pressed the pad onto the hole in Cal’s side. The blood seeping from the wound abated as he applied pressure. Cal groaned, but settled a little.

  Sara looked around at the worried faces in the room as Cal settled back. Mom Gloria, Dad Phelan, and Sister Lacey. The all-American nuclear family in one respect, but tortured and terrified in all others. While Cal had been hunting in the woods near their home, a dog had attacked him. There hadn’t been a suggestion of froth at its lips when Phelan had shot it, so Sara figured they probably weren’t dealing with rabies on top of the ragged wound, but infection was the number one consideration. Phelan had described the German shepherd as having its snout buried in his young son’s side when the screams had brought him running from the house. He’d grabbed his Mossberg 500 pump-action hammerless repeater shotgun as a reflex action when he’d heard the first yell of his son’s terror, and the dog had been so intent on burrowing into Cal’s side that he’d been able to walk up to it and blow out its spine without it lifting its head.

  Gloria had run all the way from the Groves’ farmstead, traversing the three miles to the Reynolds’ ranch to fetch the doctor, his nurse, and their new assistant to tend to their injured son.

  Sara had driven Reynolds’ Blazer while David and Sammi had prepped with Gloria and gotten all the information they could.

  Now, David pulled back the wound pad and looked at the boy’s side. His grimace told everyone in the room that things were not going well. Gloria buried her head in Phelan’s shoulder and her slow sobbing seemed to make the room quieter. Sara made ready with another pad and stitch pack, thinking about how her life had changed beyond recognition in the last few weeks.

  Sammi hadn’t shot her. David had made tea, and with uncharacteristic trust and warmth, considering the times they were living in, she had been welcomed into their home. In short order, in fact, she had become their EMT driver and chief procurer of supplies. She hadn’t had to shoot at anyone, nor pick up her MP5 or touch her Beretta for anything other than cleaning. Most of the time, her weapons sat gathering dust in a corner of the Reynolds’ house, forgotten and silent. Somehow, the time away from them had become welcome, though she never would have guessed that might be possible in this new world order.

  The attack on the prison and the loss of the ARM fighters under her command still bit into Sara with shame and bitter desperation, but she’d held herself together. Mostly, the memories ate into her at night when she laid in her bed at the ranch, her eyes wide with crushing insomnia, and in those minutes by herself she would see their faces when she closed her eyes. The faces of Margret and Crow and Ava, especially. Pictures cycled through—Ava’s uniform ripped apart by bullets, and the burning firetruck, with the bodies of her friends hanging dead from the doors. Sleep would eventually take her in the small hours before dawn. Fitful and troubled, she always woke up feeling unrested and hollow.

  But during the days, she had a purpose—not to kill or raid, but to heal and help.

  Her presence had taken the pressure off David and Sammi, who were constantly called upon to treat the accidents and ailments of the surrounding communities to the west of Terre Haute. There were no ARM resistance cells here; the Council and FEMA left them mostly to their own devices, coming into the communities only to remind them that there was a new order, and to take tribute however they could in the forms of food and supplies from the already beleaguered and hungry people in the area.

  David and Sammi weren’t leaders, and they had little interest in fighting—not because they weren’t unhappy with the situation, far from it, but because their focus was on the sick and injured. The only hospitals in Terre Haute were being used as so-called Mercy Centers, and everyone had heard the rumors of what was happening to anyone who went there. Disappeared or put to work as slave labor. So, the people here stayed in their homes, tended their farms and livestock as best they could, plowed vegetable gardens by hand, and made do and mended. Nobody ventured to the Mercy Centers, no matter what they needed.

  And although Sara hated what had happened to her people and country with a burning passion, that energy was now being syphoned in an entirely new direction. Her nights were still problematic, but her days helping David and Sammi heal and protect the people in this community had had the parallel effect of starting the process of healing within herself.

  All through that afternoon, David worked hard on the wound in Cal’s side, disinfecting, cleaning, closing a jagged tear in an intestine, and holding veins closed with artery forceps as Sammi held the wound open with her hands. Then, David began stitching layers of skin back together, by candlelight, Sara mopping at his brow with cotton wool.

  Eventually, the hole was tightly closed and stitched like a railroad across the boy’s pale skin. He had fallen into a deep sleep after Sammi had given him painkillers and anxiolytics to help calm him down.

  Sara helped Phelan carry Cal to his bed while David sank into a chair, leaking exhaustion like a deflated balloon. It had been a difficult surgery carried out under testing circumstances.

  Sammi was kneading David’s shoulders when Sara came down the stairs and back into the living room. While Sammi worked on David, Sara began clearing the mess of the impromptu operation. The clinical waste bag wasn’t even a third full before there came a furious banging at the door. Gloria opened it to see a pale man standing in the doorway, rain at his back and a thin jacket around his shoulders.

  “Doctor Reynolds, please, I wuz told you were here… you’ve got to come… come quick…”

  Wearily, David got to his feet, his eyelids little more than hoods in the candlelight. Without a word, Sammi helped him into his coat and the circle turned again.

  Ava dived beneath the chestnut as another Huey battered by overhead out of a cold gray sky. She’d been lost in thought, walking through the trees not long after the dawn of the sixteenth day she’d spent on her own.

  She put her loss of focus down to not being awake properly after an uncomfortable night below her waterproof sheet. There had been a rainstorm at 2 a.m. that had squalled beneath her temporary shelter and saturated her pants. She still felt damp now as the trees moved in the downdraft from the helicopter, spraying her with moisture from the leaves and peppering the back of her head as she ate dirt.

  The Huey moved on, but was traveling far too slowly for this to be a simple trip from A to B. It was either looking for something or someone, or had a specific mission that was going to keep it in the area. Ava prayed that finding her wasn’t its mission, and that it was hovering nearby completely coincidentally.

  Farmer Grayland waited while Parker read the paper. He’d already put the DVD into the player, and the TV was showing a bobbing screen saver while it waited for Grayland to press play on the remote.

  Parker felt like he was reading about someone else and that they’d used the wrong picture to illustrate the text. In lurid, tabloid gutter journalism, written in a manner that the National Enquirer would have been reluctant to print, was the story of how the people’s favorite rebel, James Parker, had been exposed by his daughter’s secret diary to have been a pedophile who had abused her in appalling ways from the age of two (as far back as she could remember) to the age
of eight, when her momma, desperate to escape from beneath Parker’s evil attentions, had run away to join the Church of Humanity. The text went on to ask how anyone could follow a man like this or set him up as some sort of fulcrum point of morality.

  Parker had long since staggered to a chair in the prison teaching unit. It was a room with idle computer terminals, screens, TVs, and DVD players that had once been reserved for helping the prisoners become useful members of society again. He’d sat down heavily, the words on the page swimming in the tears in his eye.

  “The roll-out’s been going well. We’ve printed off roughly a million of them, and they’re being distributed far and wide.”

  Parker didn’t need to know the how, and he was pretty sure he could work out why they were doing this.

  Grayland had a glint in his eye that showed he was enjoying himself.

  Parker looked up. “Why not just kill me now?”

  “When you’re still useful to us? Don’t be foolish, Parker. We have one last week to make more revelations, denigrate you further. The idea of Parker cannot transcend to martyrdom. Even flawed heroes can be forgiven. Even someone who has such a… disgusting… past as you. A few more stories will bring the masses to Indianapolis against you.”

  The trees opened up a little, and Ava looked along a stretch of highway. No route makers told her which road it was, but a Huey was holding station and below it was a bronze Ford F-350 with two guys getting out of the cab, looking like they had just arrived. They weren’t in uniform and looked for all the world like a couple of civilians. The door in the side of the Huey slid back, and a soldier who appeared began to operate the winch. He kicked a small plastic crate into the air, so that it spun and bounced on a line; then he began lowering it to the waiting civilians.