The soldier from the rear of the vehicle walked to the side of the road. He was in full kit and body armor, one hand resting on the pistol grip of an M4 hanging off him in a three-point sling.
“What the fuck you see, Stoddard?” the soldier asked.
“Right fucking there, asscrack,” answered the soldier behind the searchlight, presumably Stoddard. “At your feet.”
Through the screen of brambles, Parker watched the bulky figure bend down and pick something up off the gravel shoulder. His chest tightened when he realized what the man was holding.
“It’s a stupid fucking water bottle,” the soldier complained.
Finn’s water bottle.
“There still agua in it?” the soldier riding shotgun asked.
“Yes, sir,” the first soldier asked.
“Like maybe someone was just fucking drinking from it?” Stoddard asked, his voice sarcastic.
“Like maybe it’s going to be a long fucking night if we keep stopping for every piece of trash left on the side of the road, do you mean?”
“Screw you,” Stoddard replied. “Lazy fuck. You may not be smart enough to remember, but one of the bitches we’re looking for is that hot-ass blonde from the checkpoint the other day; word is she was down for it. She may need rescuing.” Stoddard moved the searchlight toward the rear of the vehicle and let it rest.
“Really?” the first soldier asked.
“Yeah, fucking really, dumbass.” Stoddard said. “Lieutenant, I gotta piss.”
“Take five,” the officer said.
The driver cut off the engine and got out of the vehicle. Night vision ruined, Parker had difficulty making out his features as he made his way around the front of the vehicle to join the others.
“I was there,” the driver said, “when the marshals did their little public service announcement.”
“Yeah,” Stoddard laughed as he passed them, undoing the front of his BDU pants. “I heard one of the prisoners shit themselves; fucking hilarious.” Stopping in front of the brambles, he began urinating.
“That’s one kinky whore then,” the first soldier said. “I mean, three pieces of shit get gakked right in front of her, one of them shitting himself, and she lets the whole checkpoint detail feel her up—I mean, search her for contraband,” the guy finished sarcastically.
Parker closed his eyes in disgust as the squad laughed. He felt Ava stiffening beside him, and he reached out to touch her arm in case she was thinking of doing something stupid. She recoiled from his touch, and he froze as Stoddard stopped pissing on the other side of the brambles.
“Yeah,” Stoddard said. He buttoned his pants. “She definitely needs rescuing.”
“Rescuing?” the driver laughed.
“Fuck yeah, from not having my big hog in her motherfucking pussy.”
More monstrous laughter followed, but they were suiting up and preparing to head out, the water bottle forgotten.
The three of them lay still, breathing the stink of Stoddard’s piss as the squad clambered back into the Humvee and then drove off.
6
They made good time through the rest of night. Riding mostly in silence, they covered twenty miles on I-64 as the terrain around them turned into the rolling, wooded hills that covered so much of southern Indiana. With no interference from man-made lights, the stars shone down brightly, lighting their way and making it easy to navigate around any cars still left on the interstate. As morning began creeping up out of the east, Ava spotted a derelict barn near to falling over.
Physically tired from the trip and emotionally exhausted, the girls fell asleep almost instantly after Parker offered to stand watch for a while. He waited until he heard their breathing even out and then deepen. Once he felt sure they were asleep, he quietly reached into his pocket, pulled a few pills out, and looked down at them.
There was a funny phenomenon with alcoholics, he knew. Once addicted, their tolerance grew exponentially, until they had to consume vast amounts of alcohol in order to seem relatively sober. After a while, as their liver began functioning less and less, almost miniscule amounts could leave them shit-faced.
He held the round white pills up, eyeballing them in the shafts of morning sunlight cutting through cracks in the barn wall. Hay motes floated up among the beams, and outside birds had begun calling to each other. Percocet, he decided. Tasted nasty, unlike Ativan.
Once upon a time, he’d been a functioning addict. Able to hold his job as a 911 Operator, able to keep a tight, disciplined mask in place while interacting with his friends, Eli and Al—Al, who’d disappeared one night and was never seen again.
He’d been a high-functioning addict even on the night of the Event, slowly destroying his life in private, but able to function under the extraordinary stress of being a 911 dispatcher.
For that one long night and through the next day, he’d risen above the burgeoning addiction that had followed his killing that boy, which had blunted the pain of his wife leaving him and Sara being kidnapped. Then he’d stalled out, losing his inertia under the excuse of his injuries and in the endless cycle of apple picking while the Council had tightened their control, making passage through checkpoints without the necessary paperwork impossible. Maybe in the beginning he’d been right to rest and resupply, but then a month and a half had whisked by and, well, it seemed objects at rest tended to stay at rest. Somewhere in all that resting and resupplying, he hadn’t been high-functioning anymore; he’d simply become a goddamn addict.
Angry, though at what he didn’t precisely know, he shoved the Percocets into his mouth and chewed them. They might taste nasty, but buccal absorption through the mucous membrane diffused much faster into the bloodstream, thereby speeding up their impact.
He closed his eyes. Addicts were liars. He was a liar. Addicts were selfish. He was selfish. And addicts were fearful all the time; fearful of discovery, fearful of losing the means to get high, and fearful of people getting too close. He was a coward.
Selfish, lying, coward, he thought. Sounds about right. Ava’s right. If there’s a hero here, it’s not me. Somewhere along the way in the mess that was his life, he had changed, and he was dragging Ava and Finn down along with him. Oh sure, Ava had said she wanted to help him, but she never would have known about Sara if he hadn’t brought her up. And Finn. She’d follow Ava into hell if it meant staying with her.
They ate MREs for breakfast. The girls, lifelong friends, had already begun the process of healing after their argument. They said nice things to each other, being overly thoughtful. Finn’s love for Ava was obvious, but he saw how Ava loved the other girl, too, if not exactly in the same way. He was the odd man out, the third wheel on his own rescue mission.
He dry-swallowed an Ativan/Percocet combo to even himself out while the girls packed up, and they soon started pedaling.
For the most part, they stuck to county access roads that at least roughly paralleled the interstate. It was pleasant enough travel and they didn’t push the pace too hard, making frequent stops.
Most addicts chase the high, the first high, the unobtainable high. After a while, they take their drug of choice to feel normal. Non-addicts, upon hearing that well-worn truism, often misunderstand “normal” to mean “straight.”
But it wasn’t like that for Parker.
He chased the high, and the high was still there. It was just, as someone once sang, that a little might have done it, but when a little didn’t do it, you took more and more. Not to feel “straight,” because fuck straight—straight was what you were avoiding in the first place. No, you took more to feel normal. The new normal, which was high.
By twilight, blood pumping through his system from all the exercise, Parker was rolling along in a light, euphoric cloud, feeling warm and fuzzy. Feeling safe.
“What the fuck was that?” Ava said suddenly.
They all immediately stopped, Parker swimming up out of his buzz and trying to sharpen his senses. Then he heard it, too, in the distan
ce, the high-pitched whine of ATV engines. More than one, and maybe a whole bunch.
“Come on!” Finn shouted. “Get to the tree line.”
Parker looked up and saw a shallow draw full of slippery elm, beech, and sugar maple less than a mile away. It was a dense stand and, in the twilight, dark. It was a good call, but the approach began on a hilltop and it would be a hard sprint for them to get there before the ATVs were on them.
“Go!” Ava shouted.
The three of them pushed hard against their pedals, pulling the hill beneath them in what felt like slow motion. Parker panted, his side aching, and he was almost immediately drenched in sweat. The opioids and narcotic analgesics played hell on his body. Adrenaline release was delayed, heartbeat slowed even after exercise, his muscles sluggish and unresponsive.
He fell behind and the girls reached the top of the slight incline well ahead of him. They stopped at the crest of the hill and turned back, clearly worried about him. Behind him, four 4-wheelers and a Polaris Ranger Side-by-Side with a third man in the cargo space ripped out over the hill like something out of Mad Max and headed straight toward them.
They’d already have gone if it weren’t for me. “Go! Go!” Parker shouted at them as they hesitated. Sweat dripped from him, and his throat was thick with mucus. Behind him, the motors on the ATVs whined as throttles opened up, having spotted him.
“Come on!” Ava pulled at Finn.
Finn looked torn, turning from Ava and looking back at Parker. He was gaining, but his chest was tight, squeezing off breath and sending ragged jolts of pain into his side. Ava jerked Finn’s arm again, and Parker caught her eye.
“Go,” he said. He couldn’t shout anymore, but she could read his lips.
Finn made up her mind and jumped off her bike, followed almost instantly by Ava. The two sprinted for the tree line and he topped the hill just as they made the cover of the woods. More to buy himself a chance to catch his breath than out of any hope of killing their pursuers, he turned the Ruger .357 on the approaching band and triggered three rounds.
The hand cannon roared in his grip and immediately the cluster of ATVs fanned out. Then the third man in the rear of the side-by-side opened up with an AR-15, laying down a 10-round fusillade of semiautomatic fire.
High-velocity rounds skipped off the ground around him and burned through the air past his head.
“Shit!” he cried out, ducking as he was hit by sprays of dirt from the bullets.
Leaving his bike where it fell, he spun around and ran for the trees. His pack weighed him down now; it was unpleasant enough riding a bicycle with one, but running was a nightmare. He almost dropped it, but the thought of the ammunition inside stopped him.
He burst through the edge of the woods and immediately entered something out of a fairytale. Twilight having descended, in the hollow it was almost fully dark. Branches slapped his face as his foot caught on roots and he went down to one knee, ripping the skin under his pants. He struggled up and pushed deeper, following the sounds of Ava and Finn as they crashed through the woods ahead of him.
First the guardsmen, and now these assholes. Was this my plan all along, to move out in the open and hope to hide every time, as I pop from one encounter to the next? Eli was right; I should have listened to someone who knew what they were talking about. Just like in New Albany, I’ve put everyone in danger because I was too proud to change my mind.
He made a decision, reflexes still slowed from the drugs. “Ava, Finn!” he shouted., “We can’t outrun them.” We, he thought, but don’t I mean me? The girls could scoot on to an escape just fine. It was the addict who couldn’t keep up with them. If he’d had one of the better weapons, the SCAR maybe, or even the Mossberg, he might have yelled out immediately for them to keep running. But he only had the Ruger, and he hesitated long enough to hear them respond from only a little way ahead of him.
“All right,” Ava shouted back. “We’ll fight.”
“Maybe we can negotiate with them,” Finn said.
Liking Finn’s plan, Parker pushed past a slippery elm and slid out of his pack to move faster. Slippery elms had eight-inch oblong leaves and down-facing twigs growing close together; it was more like a bush at lower levels, with dense leaves closer to the forest floor. At first glance, his pack looked like a mound of earth in the gloom.
He left the pack hidden beneath some branches and moved to the better cover of a maple. On one knee, he quickly reloaded the Ruger to its full nine-round capacity.
In front of him, he heard the muffled whine of ATV engines approaching, and then they shut off. Moments later, men began crashing through the woods. Even in his somewhat dulled state, he could easily see that these weren’t soldiers or LEOs. They moved out of sync and in no formation; on the other hand, he knew, firsthand, that they were well-armed.
“Come out, come out, wherever you are,” one of the men sang out.
“Real fucking original. Go eat ass!” Ava shouted, quoting Eli.
“Come any closer and we shoot,” Parker yelled.
“We got better guns,” another one yelled.
“Yeah,” shouted a third. “So send out your womeeen.”
This witticism brought out a burst of jocularity from the entire band. Parker heard them rustling and caught flashes of their bodies moving through the brush. He cursed himself in sudden realization. He was outnumbered, and located in a position where he could easily be flanked to either side. That had been one amateur decision. Thinking he could negotiate with a band of scum like this when they thought they had the upper hand was another one.
Simply, James Parker was tired of making mistakes.
“You may have better guns!” he shouted out.
He spotted a blond-haired kid in a sloppy manbun and patchy beard. He carried an Ithaca 37. The .12 gauge was a solid weapon at this range—maybe even more so than the AR semi-auto.
“We may have better guns, but what?” the voice hollered back.
Parker lined him up in his sights. His finger took up the slack in his trigger and he slowed his breathing from what it had become since his crashing run through the woods.
“Nothing!” he shouted back. “You may have better guns, full-stop.”
Patchy Beard’s head snapped to one side at the sound of Parker’s voice being so close. Their eyes met across ten yards through the broken foliage of the hollow. Eyes widening, Patchy Beard tried turning. Parker stroked the trigger.
The .357 roared in his hand. His senses, dulled by the pills, had caused him to squeeze the trigger in a clumsy manner. Instead of a slow, even pull, he’d jerked a little at the last moment and his round was off-mark.
Luckily, he’d anticipated the shot, and his round still struck the man. He caught him in the left shoulder so that he grunted and staggered under the impact as his blood blossomed red and flesh tore under the force. The shockwaves of the 158 gr. Hydra-shok JHP round had traveled into Patchy Beard’s body easily, his flesh rippling like water as the kinetic energy jerked him around like a ragdoll. He staggered, dropping the Ithaca 37 to the ground.
Parker re-sighted and pulled the trigger a second time, almost losing control of his grip because the nerves between his hand and his brain weren’t cooperating. Because of this, his second shot was off-mark, as well, but it still managed to strike the man high in the gut, putting him down.
Patchy Beard went over backward, squealing in agony and crying out animal noises of hurt as he bled out. Over Parker’s right shoulder, Ava unloaded with the Glock as the band of men returned fire. Pivoting, Parker tried counting muzzle flashes to locate enemy positions, but his adrenaline was losing its battle with the Ativan and he lost track of where everyone was after only a moment.
Ava fired another tight burst, the semiauto .40 cal. rounds going off in a firecracker line. The AR cut loose then, forcing Parker behind his tree as a virtual wall of lead chewed through the woods around him.
Patchy Beard grunted as two of the high-velocity rounds struck hi
m, and with those he finally fell silent. A hunting rifle, maybe an old school .30-06 Springfield, boomed several times, and the trunk of the sugar maple beside Parker vibrated under the impact. Hearing rustling behind him, he spun around even as he lifted the .357, but only saw Finn running away through the woods, half bent over, Bersa .380 in her fist.
He hoped she made it.
He rolled back over on his stomach as Ava fired, and he heard someone scream and knew she’d tagged one of them. He felt a barbaric rush of triumph, remembering Eli quoting Robert E. Howard on the night of the Event: Barbarism is the natural state of mankind. Civilization is unnatural. It is the whim of circumstance. And barbarism must ultimately triumph.
Considering the actions of people after the collapse of the state in every country from Czechoslovakia to the Congo, it seemed an accurate belief. Civilization was a thin veneer; he’d seen that for himself as a cop. Man could rise above it, but not always, and not all men.
A heavyset man burst through the branches in front of him. Parker caught an impression of an H&K platform with Aimpoint sight in the moonlight. Then Parker was pulling the trigger on the .357 and the big gun boomed in his hand, its muzzle flash dazzling his eyes. Unprotected, his ears began whining in protest at the sonic assault, and the heavy recoil almost ripped the heavy pistol from his grip. Even shooting at almost point-blank range, he missed with all four rounds; his reflexes were simply too off-kilter to adjust.
The man turned, sweeping up the barrel of his rifle. Parker never heard the shot that did it, but the top of the man’s head burst open in a blood halo. The man, falling, shook under three more impacts and finally Parker heard Ava’s Glock booming.
Killed instantly, the man sagged to the raw earth and went tumbling as his momentum dissipated. With his eyes still dilated from the muzzle flash, Parker saw the man’s fall as more of an impression than anything else. He blinked, trying to recover his vision, and worked his jaw to pop his ears and offset the booming discharges.
Dead End (911 Book 2) Page 7
