The kid giggled as they passed the body. “That’s Mrs. Perkins,” he laughed. “Wheeler says we gots to kill ’em every so often because they could get pregnant and abortion is wrong.”
Neither Ava or Parker said anything in response, and soon they were in a small clearing in the center of the elms. The edges of the clearing were thick with chokeberry and sunburst bushes. The wind sort of drifted through the branches around them, giving the whole scene a feeling of isolation. Still, Parker looked around and found, through a gap in the branches, that he had a direct line of sight back to the convenience store. About two hundred yards away, one of the men lounged on the top of a Ford Expedition, hunting rifle in his hand. Parker realized it was the other man.
“Dig,” Shitbird commanded.
Picking a spot, Parker stuck his shovel in the ground and kicked it in. Scooping up a shovel full of dirt, he turned toward Shitbird.
“Why are you making us dig our own graves when you left that woman to rot?”
“Cause, Wheeler said we don’t have to dig nothing ourselves is why,” Shitbird snapped. “And Mrs. Perkins is going in that hole you’re digging. Plus, we need a new place for me to dump the buckets of our shit away from the store.” He spat. “Plumbing don’t work too good.”
“You don’t say,” Ava muttered. She was digging, too.
“They make you dump the shit?” Parker asked. “Is that why they call you Shitbird?”
“I told you not to call me that!” He snapped the rifle into his shoulder pocket. “You call me, sir! You call me, sir! Wheeler says you gotta call me, sir!”
“Yes, sir!” Parker yelled, breaking his cycle. Then, in a softer voice, “Yes, sir, I’m sorry, sir. I was only asking, sir.”
Mollified, Shitbird nodded, then spit a stream of tobacco juice onto Parker’s shirt. “You don’t ask nothing—”
Nigger, Parker thought.
“Nigger,” Shitbird said.
He’s dumb as fuck. That can work in our favor.
He turned his back to the kid and began digging again. Under his breath, he whispered gently to Ava. “I’m going to do something; watch the first time.”
Ava nodded.
They dug for ten more minutes and had a pretty good start on the hole. Suddenly, Parker groaned loudly. “My leg!” he cried.
He let it buckle, and he fell into the little mound of dirt, moaning in agony. The reaction was instantaneous. Shitbird ran across the distance and started kicking Parker in the back.
“Get up, get up, fucker!”
“He can’t while you’re kicking him!” Ava shouted. “Let me help him.”
Wild-eyed, the kid backed up, nose running. He waved the gun back and forth between the two of them.
“Goddamn do it, then,” he said in a half-snarl. “Next time one of you stops digging before I say so, I’m killing you both. Sweet ass or not.”
“I understand, sir; I understand, sir,” Ava said. She struggled to help Parker get up. “Anything you say, sir.”
“Goddamn right.”
“Ava,” Parker whispered. “Next time I go down, distract him when he gets close.”
She nodded. Once Parker was on his feet, she handed him his shovel, and he took it and started digging. “Sorry about that, sir,” he said. “My leg’s cut up bad.”
“I don’t fucking care. Dig.”
“Why did you call that woman ‘Mrs. Perkins’?” Ava asked. She continued digging.
Shitbird giggled. “Cause she used to be an English teacher. Wheeler thought that was funny.” He paused. “Wheeler used to ask her if he was conjugating his verbs correctly. You know, while he was—”
“We get it,” Parker said. “Sir.”
“Glad you fucking do,” Shitbird said. “Cause I gots no fucking idea what it means. Must be about fucking.”
“Depends on the sentence,” Ava muttered.
Parker heard the threads of steel running through her voice, and it gave him courage. When the time came, she would be all in.
A movement on the edge of the clearing caught his eye.
He started and then dug faster to cover it. Finn looked out at them from the trees, a questioning expression on her face. She held up the Bersa .380. Parker thought furiously.
He’d seen Finn kill before. On the night of the Event, when escaping the convicts in the basement of the Stapleton Mall—despite everything she’d gone through with the convicts, she’d proven herself more than capable under fire. He knew he could rely on her. She’d shoot Shitbird, and he and Ava would hit the ground. He’d use the kid’s AR to harass the last three gunmen after that, and they could retreat deeper into the woods.
It made sense. But then again….
He looked at Finn and shook his head. If Finn could stay in hiding, she might end up being their Hail Mary. They couldn’t risk having her be seen yet if there hand wasn’t forced. Plus where are Gap-tooth and AR guy? He caught Finn looking at him in surprise, confused. He shook his head at her again and, obviously reluctant, Finn disappeared.
Five minutes later, he let out a ragged cry of pain and fell to one knee.
“Hey!” Shitbird shouted.
“You stupid black sonofabitch!” Ava yelled. She sprang to Parker, who was hunched over. “You’re going to get us killed!”
She began punching him in the back and shoulders, screaming more insults. Shitbird, obviously off-balance, took a step forward.
“Hey—” he said.
Ava spun toward him. “No, please,” she sobbed. “Don’t shoot us because of him. I’ll do anything you want; don’t shoot me.”
Crawling toward him on her hands and knees, she moved around Parker’s body so that she approached the kid from the outer side of the clearing. He automatically turned to follow her movements, turning his back to the store and placing Parker out of his sight, over his shoulder.
Ava grabbed his feet and held on. “I’ll do anything,” she pleaded with him.
Parker slowly reached over and grasped his shovel like a baseball bat.
Ava lifted herself to her knees, her face right in front of his crotch and looking up at the kid’s face. He made that giggle again and then sniffed loudly.
Parker, unsure why he’d trusted his injured leg more than Finn, rose up shakily, his thigh trembling under the pressure as more blood seeped out to soak his already saturated jeans.
Ava started undoing Shitbird’s pants. “You didn’t get your turn for this last night with Mrs. Perkins, right? I can do it now if you’ll let us live.”
“Goddamn right,” the kid said. He was breathing heavily, and he swallowed so hard his Adam’s apple clicked.
Parker had a great and abiding respect for Sammy Sosa, performance-enhancing drugs or not (who was he to judge someone about drug use?). On steroids or not, the Dominican knew how to swing a bat, how to pop his hips and get his whole body into it. Channeling his inner Sammy Sosa, Parker lined up the back of Shitbird’s head with the edge of his shovel and cocked back.
Three things happened almost simultaneously. There was a whump sound as something hit the dirt at Parker’s feet with great force. Then a rooster tail of earth sprayed him. Then the heavy crack of a rifle rolled into the clearing.
Parker flinched and Shitbird spun around in surprise, backing away from Ava.
“Next one goes in your back,” the man on the Expedition shouted to Parker. “Get ’em digging and quit fucking around, Shitbird.”
Shitbird looked from Ava to Parker. His pants were undone and his face was flushed so red the pus nodules of his whiteheads stood out in vivid relief. Parker dropped the shovel and Ava backed quickly away, still on her knees.
“Motherfucker!” Shitbird shouted.
Rushing forward, he slammed his foot into Parker’s leg so that he crumpled, sliding down into the waist-deep hole. Worried about Ava, he quickly pulled himself up to the edge. She had her hands up as the kid pointed the muzzle of the AR at her.
“No!” Parker shouted. “She didn�
��t know; she didn’t know!” he lied. “She was really pissed at me and I took a chance; she didn’t know!”
You did it again, Parker berated himself. You came up with a half-assed plan that almost cost someone who trusted you their lives.
Shitbird looked back and forth between them.
The kid really is dumb as fuck, Parker thought. I wonder why they trusted him to guard us by hims—
Parker started. He hadn’t seen the other two men at all this morning. He thought about sending Finn away moments ago. This whole thing could have been a charade by AR-guy or Gap-tooth to get their hands on Finn if she was still in the area.
“Fucking dig,” Shitbird said.
They dug.
10
The Vineyard
Sara Parker walked along as if she didn’t have a care in the world.
But, she was still sore, and she’d been forced to hide the bleeding after Truesdale had finished with her. She avoided the man now, when she could, but she knew she had to get over that—and quick. Soon enough, she would have to insinuate herself back into his good graces.
And she understood exactly what that was probably going to lead to. She pushed those thoughts out of her head. Eyes on the prize, Sara, she told herself. Mission first.
Despite everything that had happened, the vines hung heavy with fruit as workers busied themselves picking the elderberries. Walking down the rows on the edge of the north vineyard, she waved to Section Leader Dexter and showed him the wicker basket she was carrying.
Typically, section leaders kept tabs on the church members under their administrative control. When she’d woken that morning, it had been to find out that Truesdale had reassigned her and she would now work directly under him in the church offices, placing her outside of the normal organizational divisions. It would give her wide latitude, essential for her real job.
At a price. She wasn’t looking forward to anymore one-on-one time with Truesdale.
Dexter didn’t wave back; he bent his head and lit a cigarette, exhaling smoke through his nostrils in twin streams. He sneered at her, and she realized with a jolt that it was a knowing leer.
Sara’s stomach tightened as the truth hit her. He knows. She flashed on the photo album. It was a trophy book, and trophies were put on display. Cheeks burning, she turned quickly and walked toward the woods. Before she entered them, she took a quick look over her shoulder, but Dexter looked busy with directing some of the workers and, from her angle, she didn’t think he could see her.
Once through the first screen of trees, she turned east and began walking faster. A hundred yards into the deeper woods, she climbed a small hill and stood next to a red oak for a minute, watching her back trail.
Satisfied she wasn’t being followed, she ducked through some slippery elm and cut down the back of the hill. She came out in a dry riverbed and followed it for a quarter mile. Coming to a little pile of rocks haphazardly stacked in a loose pyramid, she stopped.
After a moment, a figure down the path stepped into view. She was dressed in hunting boots, dark Carhartt jeans, and a faded black and green flannel shirt, her hair tucked up under a dark blue Hoosier hat. Sara knew her well.
“Hello, Eloisa.”
The woman smiled, and they hugged.
“Is everything okay?” Eloisa asked.
Sara had known Eloisa since her childhood. She had been one of the first people Sara had met when she’d first been brought to the church. Over the years, she’d become her most trusted confidante and the closest thing to a friend that Sara had bothered to develop. And Eloisa worked for the Council.
“I haven’t found anything.” Sara couldn’t keep the bitter undercurrent out of her voice. “I’ve been all over the offices.”
Eloisa studied her. “Did something happen, something I should know about?”
Sara shook her head. “Nothing that’s mission-relevant.”
Eloisa reached out and took Sara by both arms, leaning in close. “You play tough because you are tough. And maybe you didn’t buy into all of Marr’s hippy-dippy bullshit any more than I did, but I’m still your oldest friend and I know you’re not a robot.” Eloisa leaned in closer and kissed Sara on the forehead. “I know you, Sara Parker; what happened?”
“I couldn’t keep Truesdale at bay,” she admitted softly. “He caught me snooping in his office.”
What Eloisa said next probably should have served as a warning for Sara, but it didn’t. Sara spent every waking hour pretending to be something she wasn’t, trapped in a situation not of her choosing. Eloisa was her lifeline to a better world. So when Eloisa’s next question wasn’t, “Are you all right?”, but was instead, “Does Truesdale suspect anything?” her faith in Eloisa and in Eloisa’s concern for her didn’t waver.
Sara shook her head. “No, I told him I was getting requisition forms and he assumed I was trying to get strawberries or chocolate on the sly. Once he…got off, he completely lost interest.”
Eloisa nodded. “When Truesdale was Gruber’s lieutenant in the old days,” she said, referencing Dr. Marr’s former head of security, “he caught me in the motorpool trying to fit Marr’s vehicle with a GPS tracker for Control.”
“What did you do?”
Eloisa shrugged. “Told him I’d dropped my tampons in the work rig earlier in the day.”
Sara frowned. “That doesn’t even make sense,” she protested.
“It does if you don’t think about it, and he stopped thinking the moment I jacked him off.”
“He didn’t try to rape you?”
“I was on the rag, he thought, a bloody mess,” Eloisa said, and tapped her temple. “He thought that was, and I quote, ‘yucky as fuck,’ end quote.”
“I wish I’d thought of that,” Sara said. Her throat tightened and she swallowed.
Eloisa hugged her like a mother might have. “You live and you learn, honey. Everyone pays their dues. The world of realpolitik is an ugly business, but once you scrape away the veneer, it’s the only true world there is.”
Sara nodded, not breaking down. Eloisa was right. Eloisa had always been right, all her life, and that meant the Council’s belief system was right. Morality, the concept of good and evil, shifted with culture. Under it all, strong dominated weak. Working with the Council was the safest place she could be. Abandoned by her mother to the church, forgotten by her father, raised in a supposed ideal state by Marr, only to see rampant victimization right under the woman’s nose. No, it was time she had real power on her side.
“I understand,” she told Eloisa simply.
“Good. It’s hard, but it’s all there is.”
“Why doesn’t the Council raid the Vineyard?” Sara asked. “You own the whole country, or most of it.”
“Because we’re on a mole hunt, and mole hunts are done quietly,” Eloisa said. “At least, I think that’s it. I haven’t been fully briefed, either.”
“I don’t think Marr would have left hard copies of anything lying around, Eloisa. I tossed Truesdale’s office and her old office, and all I got for it was…” Sara trailed off.
“The hard copy thing was a long shot, yeah, but my bosses want those names, badly. Is there anything you found that we could use?”
Sara looked at her. “The camera he used.”
Eloisa looked at her sharply. “Camera?”
“Truesdale,” she explained. “He keeps a photo album of girls. They’re printed out so he has a physical trophy, but he took a picture of me with a digital camera, after.”
Eloisa nodded thoughtfully. “Marr knew one of our Inciting Event protocols was a possible EMP route. She couldn’t have secured her operations completely, but she could have utilized smaller Faraday cages at her different locations.”
“If he has a camera that still works, why not a laptop with a battery charging station?” Sara pointed out. “Or even one of Marr’s? It’s a lot more likely than handwritten notes or print-outs.”
“Where haven’t you looked?” Eloisa
asked. “Think.”
Sara bit her lip, hard, forcing the feelings surging up inside of her back down. “I don’t have to think. The only place I haven’t been able to find a legitimate excuse to enter yet is Truesdale’s bedroom.”
“Good girl,” Eloisa said. She caught Sara’s gaze and held it. “You can do hard things, Sara. You’re strong—that’s why we’re friends. You can do what’s necessary.”
Sara nodded. “I know, Eloisa.”
“I miss you so much, baby,” the Council agent said. Then she hugged Sara as if she were a little girl. “This will be over soon.”
“I know, Eloisa. But I better get back. That rat-faced bastard Dexter was watching me as I left. I think Truesdale might have already bragged about fucking me to him.”
“Dexter?” Eloisa laughed. She made her voice high-pitched and nasal, like a middle-school nerd reciting a chemistry formula. “Hi, my name is Dexter and I’m a dildo.”
Sara laughed. This was one of the first things that had bonded her to Eloisa, mocking Church leadership. “He wishes he was a dildo.”
“Don’t let me forget,” Eloisa said. “Your berries.” Walking back to her blind, Eloisa opened a camouflaged pack and pulled a plastic bag of fresh elderberries from inside. “Hold out your basket, Little Red Riding Hood. We wouldn’t want,” she made her voice high again, “Dexter, getting suspicious.”
“Thank you, Eloisa,” Sara said. “I won’t let you down.”
“I know you won’t, baby; I know you won’t.”
11
Walking quickly, Sara came over the hill and down onto the footpath leading back to the Vineyard. Four steps down the trail, though, she stopped walking. Something was wrong; she smelled cigarette smoke. She quickly looked around her, her hand creeping toward her pocket.
Section Leader Dexter stepped out onto the wooded path, rifle slung over his shoulder. Sara stayed very still, watching him. Same lanky build, same rat-faced overbite. Same cigarette dangling from his lips like he thought he was a cowboy.
“Who were you talking with, Sara?” he demanded.
Dead End (911 Book 2) Page 10
