In the uncertain light, he saw the point man for the patrol was almost directly over Finn’s position. Time slowed for Parker as he swung his sights onto his target. Then he yelled, “Fire!” and, abruptly, his senses were on fast forward. He squeezed his trigger and killed the man over Finn, and the entire group opened up. The first five men in the patrol went down. Out beyond the first squad, a four-man fire team swept toward them, and the firefight broke out in a chaotic free-for-all.
Ava unleashed the M249 she’d taken from the first soldier, running a long blast that Finn’s shotgun punctuated with booming emphasis. Parker saw men shudder and fall as bark exploded off of trees and branches tore loose under the fusillade.
The M249 light machine gun had a signature sound as distinct as the .12 gauge, and it drew the soldiers’ attention. Parker, armed with the distinctive M4, got up and began maneuvering through the thick bush of the hardwood swamp. Ahead of him, three figures silhouetted themselves.
Automatically, he went to a knee as he snugged the stock of his weapon into his shoulder and took a bead on one of the men. His target broke right and simultaneously the other two cut left. He led his first target a little and then opened fire, letting the charging man race into his bullets. The soldier flopped into the dark vegetation and Parker swung his weapon around to engage the other two.
Instead of going to ground and returning fire, however, the pair slipped into a stand of pines, momentarily disappearing from sight. Panting from exertion, Parker moved forward, looking for clear targets. The girls continued firing, and the woods on the Council side was alive with muzzle flashes.
The soldiers were fully inside the perimeter of their hasty ambush now, figures swirling around in the chaos. Moving toward the last position where he’d seen Finn and Ava, Parker shot a tall, bulky figure charging through the brush from less than twenty meters off. The figure went down.
A branch snapped close enough behind him to be heard over the gunfire and Parker turned. One of the two men he’d seen before ran toward him, weapon up, obviously night-blind from muzzle flashes and not seeing Parker’s exact location. A shaft of moonlight breaking through the branches as Parker rolled to his back illuminated the figure’s face for a moment, the man’s eyes showing white. Parker thrust the barrel of his carbine toward him like a spear and fired a three-round burst that swept the soldier away into the vegetation.
The second man appeared and turned toward the report of Parker’s weapon. Startled by the man’s appearance in such close proximity, Parker tried swinging his M4 around. The man was close enough that Parker caught the smell of cigarettes on his clothes and breath. The soldier instinctively snatched Parker’s barrel as it came around, screaming as his flesh came into contact with the hot metal.
The man stepped forward then, throwing a shoulder into the already off-balance Parker and knocking him to the ground. He landed awkwardly, rifle trapped beneath him. Wrestling with the weapon, he felt more than saw the man drawing a bead on him.
Directly over Parker’s head, a shotgun fired, the muzzle blast illuminating the little patch of woods around them. The soldier aiming at Parker went down, his weapon going off as he fell. Finn screamed out and fell next to him. Parker, finally freeing his weapon, shot the prone body of the soldier again.
Coming to his knees, weapon in hands, Parker looked around for another target, but there weren’t any. Not thinking, he reached down and grabbed Finn by the arm. Hauling her to her feet, he wrapped his arm around her waist and began moving. The clouds parted and silver shafts of moonlight penetrated the broken canopy, illuminating the killing ground in a glowing, surreal light that was almost cinematic. His ears ringing, he saw Sara, only a couple of yards from him, firing a coup de grace into a gut-shot soldier only steps in front of her. He blinked, and the scene shifted like a stereoscopic 3-D photo in one of those old ViewFinder toys he’d played with as a kid. Ava was up on one knee, the M249 to her shoulder, firing back and forth with wild sweeps of her weapon, putting out a wall of lead.
Parker took two more steps, all but dragging Finn with him, and a bullet slammed into his hip, knocking them both down. His body was numb; he knew he’d been hit, but not yet how badly. He popped up to his feet, leaving Finn down, adrenaline and instinct controlling him like a marionette on strings. He blinked, and the scene shifted in the same hypnotic, disassociated way it had before.
His muzzle found targets of its own volition; his finger worked the trigger without conscious input. He heard someone shouting in rage, blinked, and realized it was himself. He saw two men come out from beneath a huge tamarack growing at a canted angle, busting through a wall of thick tag elder to appear next to Ava. Sara, turning, shot one even as the second shot her, slamming into her shoulder. Parker fired a moment later and the man dropped.
Bullets whizzed through the air around him, cracking into tree trunks, burrowing into the peaty soil and snapping branches.
In that moment, a loud explosion came from the direction of the cabin and Parker figured the fire had finally reached the ammo he had stored in the basement. The ensuing shouts for help had any remaining able-bodied soldiers near them running toward the mayhem instead of at them.
Parker looked down at Finn, and suddenly the pain of his wound slammed through him and he staggered. Pulling up his shirt, he saw that the 5.56 mm bullet, a round infamous for its tumbling effect in the body, had penetrated from the front, bounced off his hip staying near the surface of his skin and gouging out a trench-like trail around his body before exiting out the back.
He stepped on the leg, and it supported his weight; he could still walk. Centering himself, he tried to see what was happening with Finn who was lying on her side clutching her body. Sara began walking toward him, dropping the spent magazine from her M4 and inserting a fresh one. She stepped into a moonbeam and Parker saw that she was splashed in blood and covered with mud; she looked barbaric.
A man came up off the ground and slammed into her. They went down in a tangle of limbs, too intertwined for Parker to take a shot, and he rushed forward. Sara screamed, the sound high-pitched but savage. The man yanked her head back by her hair and then she got the muzzle of the M4 up between them and shot him under his chin, blowing the back of his skull off.
Walking up to them, Ava hauled the body off Sara and helped her to her feet. After the brutal dissonance of the firefight, the sudden quiet near them seemed oppressive.
“Pull security, Ava,” Parker said. “Sara, strip the bodies—full magazines, medical supplies, better weapons, anything you think we can use but that won’t slow us down.”
“I’ve been hit,” Sara said. She didn’t sound in pain or scared, but matter of fact. It was the shock, Parker assumed.
Stepping up to her, he pushed her jacket back and lifted the collar of her shirt to check the damage. “It’s a through and through and you’re already coagulating,” he said. “We don’t have any time now but I’ll get it bandaged.” She nodded and went to work.
“What about Finn?” Ava protested, her words catching in her throat.
“I’m seeing to her,” Parker said.
Dropping down next to her, he inspected her, terrified of what he would find. She’d been so close to the soldier when she’d taken the round, her body had muffled the report of the shot.
She was dying.
Her stomach was torn open, half her guts on the marshy ground but her intestines weren’t ruptured. She writhed, moaning low—obviously in agony, but trying hard not to cry out in case there were more enemy in the nearby area.
Working on automatic pilot, making soothing sounds and telling hopeful lies, Parker tended to her wounds. Unhooking the trauma kit from his web gear, he put on gloves and immediately gave her ketamine from his supplies. Oftentimes, pain medication wasn’t initially given in large amounts for fear that the depressant qualities of such medications would hamper or even stop breathing. Parker gave no thought to that now—there was no point.
Finn didn’t n
eed to be stabilized for transport. There was no emergency room or surgical team in her future. She was going to bleed out her last seconds in this stinking hardwood swamp. He gently placed the blue-gray looping coils of her intestines back in the cavity of her stomach and then packed the wound with moist gauze from the small bottle of sterile water he had in his kit. Finn watched him, her eyes dull and animal stupid with the powerful painkiller.
Parker looked up as Sara and Ava came over, shrinking their area of overwatch. Ava stifled a cry when she saw Finn, and came to one knee. Sara cried silently, tears spilling down her face.
Parker turned to check his daughter where she’d been hit.
Blood soaked her shirt. A round had entered above her collarbone and come out the back of her trapezius, above the shoulder blade. It looked like someone had taken a power drill to the muscle.
“Through and through,” he told her. “I’m going to use ketamine, but only a little; we have to move, and you’ll have to be alert.”
Sara nodded in a robotic motion, still staring at Finn. She didn’t move or cry out as he administered the narcotic analgesic, either. Using gauze and then copious amounts of medical tape, he dressed the wound after smearing it with antibiotic ointment.
Handing her a plastic canteen along with Tylenol for potential fever and a heavy dose of Cipro for infection, he told her, his voice quiet but firm: “Take these; drink this water.”
Mutely, she obeyed his commands.
He turned to Ava. “Are you hurt?” His voice was barely above a whisper.
She shook her head. “No,” she said. “How about you?”
“I need to dress this wound so it doesn’t keep bleeding as we move,” he said.
Sara seemed to snap out of her dreamish state. Reaching out and grabbing his forearm, she hissed at him, “We’re not leaving her.”
Parker met her eyes, and let her see the truth in them. “Of course not,” he said. “But we have to move quickly.” He looked at her more closely, realizing he had to keep her from sliding into shock. She needed something to focus on, a task for her consciousness to cling to like a life buoy. “We have to get her off the ground; we have to be able to move her—do you understand?”
Sara nodded quickly. He could almost see the cogs of her mind, shut down moments ago, begin turning. She looked at him, her eyes sharp, listening to every word. He handed her the bayonet from the sheath on his harness suspender.
“I need you to get me four rifles, M4s like mine, understand?” He gestured to his own weapon and she nodded. “Dump the magazines, make sure there’s no round in the chambers, and bring them to me. Take your pistol in case some of them are only wounded, but use the knife if possible, understand? Soldiers could return at any time, so hurry.”
“Okay,” she said.
“Stay sharp, Sara,” Parker told his daughter.
“I got this,” she replied.
She sounded nervous, her voice wired tight with tension. That was fine—it was a tense situation. He started cleaning his wound with a small bottle of hydrogen peroxide as Sara slipped out into the trees to retrieve the rifles.
“I’m not going to take any,” Parker said aloud, glancing to Ava where she sat holding Finn’s hand.
“What?” Ava asked, not looking up.
“Ketamine,” Parker said. “I’m not going to take any pain medicine. I’ll take some Tylenol for inflammation and fever, and Cipro for the infection, but that’s all. Just so you know.”
Ava nodded once, a curt gesture. “Good.”
Parker checked on Finn. She looked back at him, eyes clouded, her breathing regular but labored. Her dressings were already spotted from seeping blood. He packed his own wound and used the last of the medical tape on the roll to secure it in place. He had to do the exit wound without seeing it, but it couldn’t be helped until they got in a more stable location. There was a clock ticking down in his head. It would take time for reinforcements to reach them, but they would be coming, and in numbers far too great to battle.
Sara came back with the rifles and set them next to him in a pile. She looked like her shoulder was bothering her; he took that as a good sign regarding her level of shock.
“Did you have trouble?” he asked.
She showed him the bayonet; there was blood on the blade. “A little; not much,” she answered. “Not enough to slow me down.”
“Good,” he said. “Now I need two uniform tops and two pairs of boot laces. Can you get those?”
Sara nodded. “We’re carrying her out of here? Making a stretcher?”
Parker nodded. “Hurry.”
He turned his attention to the rifles then. Double-checking to ensure they weren’t loaded, he laid them out in two lines of two. He began checking his own weapons.
“Count your ammunition,” he told Ava. “Check your equipment, and make sure your shoes are tied and that you don’t have another wound you haven’t felt yet. We’re moving out of here in a few minutes.”
“Where are we going?” she asked. “We’re not really going to try to make the Vineyard, are we? Not now?”
Parker shook his head. “I’m still thinking. But for now, yes, we need a goal. If we get lucky and beat the Council there, and if we can take the guards, they may have better medical supplies, better equipment. They may even have some medical staff; we’ll ask Sara.”
“All those ‘ifs’ and ‘mays’ are big ones.”
“Tell me about it.” He leaned over, meeting Finn’s eyes. He took her hand in his—it was cold in his grip. “We’re going to get you out of here,” he whispered. She didn’t reply, but her eyes shifted. It was a small thing, but he’d take it.
About twenty yards away, a single pistol shot cracked out of the darkness. Parker jumped, startled. Ava swung her M249 in the direction of the report, but Parker put a restraining hand on her arm.
“Wait,” he said.
Ava nodded.
A few seconds later, Sara called out in a low whisper, “It’s me, don’t shoot.”
She approached, pistol in one hand, shirts and shoelaces in her other. She held up the pistol, her finger lying alongside the trigger guard in the manner Parker had taught her as a little girl.
“One of them woke up as I rolled him to get the shirt off. Startled me; I was using both hands to strip him and the pistol was closer; I’m sorry.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Parker said. “We’re leaving.”
He felt an overwhelming urge to take some Ketamine, but he pushed it firmly into the back of his mind and forced himself to focus on the task at hand. Once the adrenaline wore off, the withdrawal symptoms were going to kick in hard, and they needed to be far away from here by then. In the meantime, he figured the agony of his wounds were a good way to keep the adrenaline flowing and avoid dwelling on what came next.
If you use right now, he told himself, you die.
Using the bootlaces and his heavy-duty military masking tape, he secured the four rifles, muzzle to buttstock, into two poles. Next, he threw two of the BDU tops to Sara and said, “Do what I do.”
Together, they tucked the sleeves inside of the shirts and then buttoned them up. Working together, they fed the rifles up through the sleeves, forming a makeshift stretcher.
He knelt down beside Finn, brushed her hair out of her face and, on impulse, kissed her forehead. He looked up and saw Sara watching him.
“We’ve been through a lot together,” he said, his voice catching in his throat. “Both Ava and I owe her our lives.” Looking down at Finn, he smiled. “She packs one hundred pounds of whoop-ass in a two-pound can.”
Finn looked up at him, she coughed and a trickle of blood spilled over her lip to run down her throat. Reaching over, Parker grabbed handfuls of her clothes, soggy with blood, at the shoulder and knee, and rolled her up onto her side facing him hoping the Ketamine would keep her from feeling any pain.
“Slide the stretcher under her,” he said.
When Sara had done so, Parker rolled Fin
n back; she moaned, eyelids fluttering, and he winced. Once she was in place, he looked up at Ava and Sara.
“We have to adapt. I’ll be at the front, which means my hands won’t be free. Each of you take a pole and keep your weapon ready in the other. That means pistols only: keep the M4s on your 3-point harnesses. It helps that she’s less than one-hundred-twenty pounds,” he told Sara. “Because with your shoulder wound, you won’t be able to trade out hands when your grip gets tired. A travois would be better, but it’s impossible to drag something through this undergrowth.”
Ava looked down at her M249. The sheer volume of firepower she’d been able to deliver with it had saved them more than once during the firefight, and she seemed reluctant to part with it.
“Ava,” Parker said, “I know, but we don’t have a choice.”
She looked over at Finn and then nodded, setting it down and taking a loose M4 to replace it. She secured it to the body sling before tugging at the straps on her pack, and then stood, Glock ready. “Let’s go.”
As the three of them moved into position, Finn made another gurgling noise and lifted her hand. Instantly, Ava was on a knee beside her. Taking Finn’s face in her hands, she leaned in close.
“What is it? What do you need?”
Finn gargled her own blood again, but the word was clear. “Gun…”
Ava sob-laughed.
“And though she be little, she is fierce,” Sara said and Parker snapped his head up.
“I used to say that to you when you were little,” he told her.
“I remember.”
Parker fought the emotion threatening to boil over inside him and walked over to the body of the man who’d shot her and snatched the M9 pistol from his leg holster. He racked the slide, ensuring a round was in the chamber. Walking back to Finn, he knelt and put the weapon in her hand.
“A round’s in the chamber, so be careful with it. And keep your head to the side so you don’t choke, understand?” he told her.
She nodded.
Then, picking Finn up, the group fled.
Dead End (911 Book 2) Page 21
