The president was eyeing the encroaching tornado.
“Grayland! Please, we’ve got to get off this damn roof!”
The man looked up, his face serenely unconcerned as he waved his cane in casual comment.
“You will make your short address, Lassiter, or you’ll be tragically assassinated, and I’ll vote in a replacement within the hour. Does that sharpen your resolve?”
President Lassiter nodded.
The director held up a shaking hand. “Live in three… two… one… cut to one.”
President Lassiter’s face filled the monitor screen. His face was doughy with fear and sheened in sweat. Through the thickening wind, his fear was evident from his twitching eyes and lizard tongue licking at his lips. Lassiter cleared his throat and spoke in a reedy, weakened voice.
“My Fellow Americans, you join me here in Indianapolis to witness the execution of the traitor and heinous pedophile, James Parker. I do not need to tell you of his crimes against our nation or the treasonous acts of terrorism he has perpetrated and inspired, as he will tell you himself.”
“Roll VT,” said the director. And the piece of false drama Parker had been forced to recite in the prison, upon threat to Henshaw’s life, came on the monitor.
Parker’s face on the screen was streaked with blood and tears. His voice was croaky and filled with emotion.
“I, James Parker, freely and of my own volition today confess to the following crimes. Murder, sedition, terrorism, treason, and to the molestation and rape of not only my own daughter but several other children, both male and female. I am a pedophile first and foremost, and as such I deserve to die. Added to those heinous crimes, I led a false rebellion against the legitimate government of this great nation, and I accept the judgment of this court without question. May God forgive me and have mercy on my soul.”
The monitor screen began showing live pictures of Kleet in the cage. Immediately, marshals started dousing Kleet and the steel floor he was sitting on with gasoline from the fuel cans. Kleet moaned but was too weak to resist. The best he could do was crawl to the far edge of the cage, and then to the center when he realized he was surrounded by marshals with more gas.
Parker couldn’t see a way out; Kleet was about to be burned alive on camera. All the other Mandingos were lying dead inside, cut down by the marshals as Spencer had led Parker onto the roof after ordering their executions. Parker had a shotgun stuck in the back of his neck and, yet again, the Council had the drop on him.
“Can we go now?” President Lassiter asked Grayland.
“Yes, you can,” said Grayland. He nodded decisively and clicked his fingers.
One of the marshals fired at the president. The blast hit him in the chest and blew him off the platform. The wind was blowing so hard, they didn’t even hear him hit the ground.
“Tragic,” said Grayland.
He turned to Parker as a marshal lit a flaming torch doused in gasoline and stood by the cage, waiting for the signal to proceed.
“We were expecting you, you know. Like a dog that returns to its own vomit, we calculated there was a chance you would show up. I commend you on destroying the forces below and spoiling the broadcast, but Marine One will be here momentarily and, once you see Mr. Kleet burning, perhaps we’ll shoot you in the belly and leave you for the tornado. How does that sound? Merciful? I do hope so.”
A helicopter swung up from behind the shadow of the building behind Grayland. He smiled. “Right on cue. I do like it when things run like clockwork, don’t you, Mr. Parker?”
Grayland’s face fell then, though it took Parker a moment to see why, and then it was Parker’s turn to smile.
The helicopter rising up beside them was turning its belly-mounted cannon on Marine One, which was only now lifting from the State House parking lot; this flying machine was an Apache, swinging in the wind, but stable enough to do what it needed to do.
Parker felt the shotgun fall away from the back of his neck as the Apache opened fire.
They’d had no time to properly identify the bodies.
Eight dead black men lay at the foot of the metal stairs that led up to the gantry tower slung below the roof. They were covered in tattoos and they’d all been recently shot. They had been dropped with a succession of accurate headshots. The enclosed space reeked of unzipped life. As Sara, Sammi, and the other Networkers made their way gingerly through the field of fresh death, Sara looked for her dad among the dead. Relieved again that he wasn’t to be found, they made their way in single file up the gantry tower, weapons ready, and approached the flapping hatch that led to the roof.
Sara began the last short climb and lifted the hatch just as the Apache opened fire on Marine One.
In the howling wind, under the traveling sky, she watched with disbelief as the green and white-topped Sikorsky Sea King bearing the presidential seal peeled opened like a can of beans along one side, canting sickeningly, touching its rotors against the side of the State House and then dropped behind it. The whump of detonation, and the hot breath of the ensuing explosion, made Sara drop the hatch.
“Jesus!”
But there was no time to process how the plan was unfolding. The other thing she’d seen amid the helo death match was the object of their mission. Parker was in the cage, and a marshal was about to set him on fire with a burning torch.
Sara threw back the hatch, launched herself onto the roof, rolled, and got up on her knee, firing as she went.
She charged.
The explosion of Marine One took everyone by surprise.
Grayland hit the deck—like the pussy he was, thought Parker—but the Council leader wasn’t his immediate concern. Spencer may have taken the gun from the back of his neck, but he was still there. Parker turned, thankful that they hadn’t had time to secure his hands with cable ties or handcuffs. It was an oversight he would use to his full advantage.
He turned, hoping the marshals would be too busy firing at the Apache that had now redirected its cannon toward the State House roof. He grabbed at the barrel of Spencer’s M500 with his gloved hand just as the warden pulled the trigger. The blast burst against Parker’s ear, but the shot went wide, hitting the director square in the back and sending him sprawling and dead into the monitor.
Spencer was strong and determined. Parker, weakened by months in prison, was still a match, but it was a more equal fight than it might once have been.
They whirled and turned. Struggling to move the barrel of the gun left and right, Parker strained, thinking he was lucky that the gloves he’d put on at the last minute were there to help him grip the barrel of Spencer’s weapon and spare him any burns he might have sustained otherwise. “I’m gonna fucking kill you, Spencer,” he spat through gritted teeth.
“Any time you ready, boy. Shall we split a cigar or are you too traumatized to open a tube?” the man hissed.
The reference to Sara’s supposed ashes spurred Parker on, and he screamed his fetid anger into the storm as he pushed against Spencer.
His anger-fueled momentum pushed Spencer back. But then Parker felt his kidney explode in an incredible starburst of incendiary pain. He fell to his knees, breath shocked from his body as he saw the marshal who had smashed his kidney with the butt of his M500 and was turning the gun to finish the job.
“Oh no, you don’t, boy. This motherfucker is all mine,” shouted Spencer into the wind, training his shotgun on Parker’s face.
Hell, is this it? Did this really all come to nothing?
Parker directed his anguish into the barrel of Warden Spencer’s shotgun, daring him to go ahead.
But the shot never came.
Chief Officer Rayleigh, his walrus face tortured with an ugly anger, his hands handcuffed behind his back, was running toward Spencer, Parker, and the marshal. Parker hadn’t noticed that the man was on the roof, so concerned had he been about Grayland and Kleet, and then the fight with Spencer. But Spencer had obviously made such an enemy of Rayleigh that revenge was his
only concern.
Rayleigh had apparently slipped his guard as the helicopter attack had started and, in the confusion, was more than ready to unleash his retribution on Warden Spencer.
The officer-turned-hostage seemed a mile wide and resembled a concrete barrel as he slammed into the three of them.
The last of Parker’s wind was knocked from his body as he was bowled over like a nine-pin. Spencer himself was thrown into the air by Rayleigh, the wind at their backs providing extra power to the hit. Spencer fell over the lip of the roof, head first and screaming, Rayleigh and the marshal following, with Rayleigh still screaming his kamikaze yell.
And Parker, out of breath, dizzy, in excruciating pain, and with no power left in his fingers to stop himself, rolled off the roof, too, into a terrifying freefall.
Sara rounded the dome in the middle of the coppered State House roof, firing as she ran. She had no idea if Sammi and the others were behind her, and she didn’t care. She was intent on the marshal with the burning torch who was framed by the Apache hanging in the air behind him. The helo was unable to fire for fear of hitting Parker in the cage, but she was ready.
Sara sprayed bullets from her MP5 along the green rooftop, cutting into the wood of the platform and peppering up the legs of the marshal with the torch. The bullets bit into his crotch, his belly, and then his chest. He was dead where he stood, but the torch dropped from his hands and ignited the gasoline.
It went up with a whump just as Sara reached the cage. Her dad was cowering in the corner furthest from the fire, covering his head with his cuffed hands. Sara shot off the lock, opened the cage door, and reached in just as her dad’s gasoline-soaked boots caught fire.
She had no time for anything else; she grabbed Parker by the collar of his jumpsuit and dragged him from the cage. She dropped to her knees as soon as they were out of range of the gas and began beating at the flames with her hands as Parker screamed.
The last of the flames extinguished as Grayland, still in a prone position on the roof, fired his SIG Sauer at Sara’s helmeted head.
Two shots poleaxed her, and she spun away from her dad, rolling toward the roof’s edge.
Her head rang, and a black wave of unconsciousness was enveloping her from the concussions that had hit her helmet like a wrecking ball.
As she slipped from consciousness, something strange appeared in her vision.
She couldn’t quite understand what she was seeing. It didn’t make sense. But she felt like she wanted to sleep more than anything else in the world and couldn’t help closing her eyes as the tornado began tearing its way toward the State House, now no more than sixty seconds away.
“You’re insane! I can’t!” The pilot of the copter had his eyes on the funnel of the tornado bearing down on the State House. Through the windshield, they could see that even the Apache—smaller, leaner, and more agile than the Huey—was having real trouble remaining stable as the white finger of destruction tore out windows in nearby buildings, throwing up an immense ball of debris. It was like a moving, slow-motion explosion, or a giant from a fairy tale, stomping on the city.
Ava pushed the Beretta into the side of the pilot’s neck. “Land on the roof or I will end you myself.”
“We’re dead anyway!” he screamed.
“Then it doesn’t matter if you try! Land! Now!”
The pilot lifted the Huey toward the roof. The Apache, held in a similar way by David, with a gun against the back of the pilot’s neck, lifted out of their path lest the wind blew them into each other.
Ava could see Sammi and the Networkers finishing off the remaining marshals and tugging Parker’s body with his smoldering feet, and then there was Sara, unconscious, across the roof near where the Huey was attempting to touchdown.
“We can’t land. But we can hover!” the pilot said. “Best I can do!”
“Do it!” Ava yelled, her stomach lurching as the tornado came ever closer.
In the back of the Huey, two Networkers pulled back the side door of the helo and prepared to take Sammi, Sara, Parker, and the others onboard.
“I’m going in seven seconds, whether you shoot me or not!” the pilot shouted.
Everyone was on board by six.
“Get us out of here!” Ava screamed.
The Huey lifted as the tornado started to bite into the far wing of the State House.
Sara’s face disappeared, but not before Parker recognized her. Their eyes met, and a blossom of love opened in his heart, confirming once and for all that his daughter was alive.
Parker had managed to catch one hand on the guttering as he rolled off the roof. Spencer, Rayleigh, and the marshal were broken bodies on the concrete forty feet below in a pool of blood, their necks broken and their faces caved in. Parker had almost joined them, the realization that he would be unable to get himself back on the roof on his own steam making him contemplate defeat, let go and take his chances with the fall.
But just as he was about to drop, Sara’s stunned face had appeared over the lip of the roof and his heart had soared.
And then she was gone. Pulled away from the edge by an unseen hand.
Parker had screamed out to her, but the boom of the storm and the rotor blades drowned him out.
With Sara’s face fixed in his mind, Parker heaved with his arms as an updraft of deadly wind caught the weight of his body and swung one leg onto the roof. With his fingers bleeding, cut deep from the metal gutter, he rolled onto the copper roof as the Huey lifted high and followed the Apache away from the tornado.
Debris was flying in stinging vortices, as the tornado itself, now black with torn-up city, was eating along one side of the State House. It blew out windows, tore up guttering, and ripped off roof panels, flinging them around like shrapnel.
Parker stood up in the teeth of the wind.
The hatch back into the State House, where he might have sought refuge, was being torn away by the wind. There was no way down, and the tornado was almost upon him.
Then, out of nowhere, Grayland stepped from behind the stonework supporting the dome and shot Parker twice in the stomach.
The bullets sliced through his guts with hot pain, and Parker’s eyes fizzed with red and black dots. His belly had been opened up like a tin of tomatoes.
Grayland raised his gun to finish the job, speaking what, he had to guess, would be his final words as the funnel of the spinning tornado crashed against the portico. “If I’m going down, Parker, so are you!”
Parker waited for the shot, his eye closed and his hands clutching his stomach.
But the gun was empty.
Parker roared into the tornado: “Fuck you, Grayland! Let’s go down together!”
And with that, Parker rushed at Farmer Grayland, the Council boss. The man who had tortured him, physically and psychologically, and who had made him think that he was watching his daughter die—the leader of a corrupt organization that was destroying everything about America that Parker had ever believed in. His hatred felt beautiful, his anger justified, and his motivation clear as a running spring.
With his belly unravelling, and the taste of grim death in his mouth, Parker wrapped his arms around Grayland in a terminal bear hug. He stumbled to the edge of the State House roof and leapt into the eye of the storm.
Epilogue
Six months later.
Sara and Ava had arrived in New Albany.
They’d left David, Sammi, and the Networkers to care for Kleet’s burned legs and boiled feet, feeling that they just had to get away. Of course, not before they’d searched devastated downtown Indianapolis for Parker—alive or dead. They’d found nothing.
The tornado’s final irony had been that, before it had even reached the State House, it had severed all communications to the reinstated TV and radio systems. The broadcast had been seen only by the people who were there. It had had no impact at all.
As they’d moved through the state, though, they’d personally seen that the influence of the Council,
though not fully removed, was highly diminished by the loss of their leader, and the death of their so-called president. A blow to their competence and legitimacy that they would take a long time to live down and might never overcome. On the ground, there were less patrols of FEMA troops, the infrastructure of the country was getting back to some semblance of order, and the American Resistance Movement had risen again, now integrated with David’s Networkers. Together, they were having a series of successes against Council forces—and the battles won were seen as significant victories.
The ARM forces had wanted Sara to take command of her own unit with Ava, especially now that the truth of Parker’s situation—of his torture into confessing things he hadn’t done—was being disseminated by the Network. But Sara had refused. It hadn’t been a blanket-forever no, Ava felt sure, but, for now, she wanted to clear her head and get some structure back into her life. She needed to heal inside, in the same way that Ava needed to heal her broken bones. They’d both been through the wringer, coming out sadder and more reflective—not exactly morose, but not feeling the weight of the victory they’d achieved. They’d both lost so much to gain it. And they’d been so close to getting Parker back, that his loss seemed to sting that much more for both of them.
Ava had seen the change in Sara now that she was certain that Parker hadn’t survived. For a while, there had been hope; Sara had retained at least a sliver of optimism. But the search through the debris and storm damage in the city center had drained that positive feeling and left a hole for both of them to deal with.
Ava wasn’t sure if Sara had really seen Parker hanging from the guttering of the State House; perhaps it had been a fevered hallucination from the concussion she’d suffered when Grayland’s bullets had ricocheted off her life-saving ACH. But, no matter what, they’d learned enough from Kleet to know that they’d come close to having him back in their company, alive.
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