“At ease,” the first voice said. Parker’s vision returned enough to see that the man who’d spoken was a second lieutenant. Square jaw, broad shoulders, clean-cut—a real Joe College-looking sort of guy in his mid-twenties. “Spencer wants to have a conversation with this guy; you want to tell him you fucked up?” the lieutenant asked.
“We could say he ran?” someone in the group suggested.
“No,” the lieutenant said. “Look, beat his ass a little bit if it makes you feel better, but he’s going into detention, end of story.”
Parker closed his eye as the men moved in.
Epilogue
The train rolled north.
Sara and Ava sat quietly, their backs to the wall of the boxcar. Across from them, the Deckards sat, huddled together. One of the little boys wasn’t with them anymore. Ava didn’t ask what had become of him.
Sara cried for a while, but she did it silently. As night fell, it got colder and the women huddled together. At one point, the train rolled to a stop and they heard soldiers talking outside. The little ragged band of people hidden behind the shipping crates at the rear of the boxcar waited in silence. Their weapons had been taken from them—the price of admission—and they knew they would be helpless if discovered.
After what felt like an eternity, the train began rolling again and the daughter they’d saved before looked at Ava, her expression vacuous with weariness. “We must have crossed the border.”
Ava nodded. Sara leaned in close to her and laid her head on her shoulder. Soon, her breathing smoothed out and became more regular, and Ava realized she was asleep. She listened to Sara breathe, leaning her head back against the wall of the boxcar.
She sat like that for a long time, staring into nothing, replaying images over and over in her head. Two hours later, the train stopped and someone opened the door. She nudged Sara and the woman came awake, still groggy.
“What is it?” she asked.
“We’re here,” Ava told her.
“We’re safe?” Sara asked.
“I think so.”
Ava felt her face twist almost painfully, and realized she was smiling. She thought about Parker. She looked up, seeing through the dark, through the ceiling to the sky in her mind’s eye, and then she looked past the sky to the heavens.
“But it’s not over,” she promised.
End of Dead End
911 Book Two
We really hope you enjoyed this series. Keep reading to find a sneak peek from Dead Reckoning.
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Grace Hamilton is the prepper pen-name for a bad-ass, survivalist momma-bear of four kids, and wife to a wonderful husband. After being stuck in a mountain cabin for six days following a flash flood, she decided she never wanted to feel so powerless or have to send her kids to bed hungry again. Now she lives the prepper lifestyle and knows that if SHTF or TEOTWAWKI happens, she’ll be ready to help protect and provide for her family.
Combine this survivalist mentality with a vivid imagination (as well as a slightly unhealthy day dreaming habit) and you get a prepper fiction author. Grace spends her days thinking about the worst possible survival situations that a person could be thrown into, then throwing her characters into these nightmares while trying to figure out "What SHOULD you do in this situation?"
It’s her wish that through her characters, you will get to experience what life will be like and essentially learn from their mistakes and experiences, so that you too can survive!
You can also follow Grace on fb.me/AuthorGraceHamilton and GraceHamiltonBooks.com
Jack Colrain never intended to be a writer. But retiring after 30 years living, fighting and surviving in some of the grimmest regions in the world, he found himself with some stories to tell and lessons to impart.
What he’s picked up over the years can’t be found in any survivalist classes or the latest prepper books—they’re hard earned from surviving in the harshest conditions and can be found only in his books. He doesn’t live in a cabin in the woods (yet) but in the wilds of another kind: downtown LA, with his wife and two kids. They don’t always understand his prepping, but when SHTF Jack knows he’ll be able to keep them safe. They’ll thank him later.
Jack now spends his free time writing books about characters who get into certifiably FUBAR situations, whether they're survivalist scenarios or more criminal/government related, and then he tries to get them out of it using the skills he’s learned. He hopes that by reading his books readers will absorb some survival skills and a few more people will make it out okay when it’s TEOTWAWKI.
BLURB
In a world on the brink of chaos, a father must learn to let go.
After destroying the Church of Humanity, Jim Parker is a hero of the rebellion. But his mission is just getting started. Living on the run takes its toll on Finn, Ava, and their friends, but Parker gains hope from the ordinary people he sees performing small acts of resistance every day. When word reaches the rebels that the malicious Colonel Brian Hays is inside the Council compound, they hatch a plan to infiltrate the stronghold and take him out. Parker offers to lead the operation, but he has another goal in mind: convincing his daughter Sara to join his side—whether she wants to or not.
When the planned raid on the compound goes awry, Parker finds himself a prisoner of the Council. Now, he’ll have to do what he can to help his friends from the inside while attempting to bring Sara over to the resistance—but does a father really always know best?
Get your copy of Dead Reckoning at
www.GraceHamiltonBooks.com
EXCERPT
Parker woke up with a snap. His head clear for the first time in he didn’t know how long. There was a blankness that began at the bridge of his nose and spread out to infinity. If he wanted to see things on the left side, he had to turn his head much more than he used to. A cumulus of cotton wool tickled the top of his cheek. He could feel the stretch of tape holding a wound pad in place over the empty socket.
Parker didn’t so much grieve then for the lost eye than he regretted the effect it might have on his performance. How difficult it would now be to operate at full capacity if he ever got out of here… wherever here was.
The room was small, the bed on the hard side of comfortable. The air smelled of disinfectant. There was a small high-up window to his right, covered with a blind. There was a drip on a stand feeding unknown fluid into his right arm – an arm that, like the left – was still chained to the metal rails on either side of the bed. His mouth felt clean and fresh, as if someone had been in while he was asleep and washed it out for him.
There was a set of closed double doors, wide enough to get a hospital bed through, leading out of the room. Through the frosted glass panels in both, he saw the heads of two, seemingly crew-cut, heads.
Focus.
Stay alive.
Find Sara.
The rush of memories came back. The SUV, the FEMA roadblock. Sara and Ava running while he drew fire with the truck. The busted windshield, the sting of bullets, the peppery stink of CS gas. The warm ache of pain in his face, arm and leg told him that he’d been injured. There was a hazy recollection of bullets tearing into the SUV while he was still in it.
The doors swung open, and a short, stocky, brute of a woman came in, the winged “N” of the U.S. Army Nurse Corp prominent on her Advanced Combat Uniform. Her hair was pulled back away from her pocked face in a tight bun. She wore no cap. She carried the rank of a master sergeant, and her breast tape told Parker her name was Calhoun.
Calhoun said nothing as she picked up a folder of notes on a cabinet by the side of the bed. She flicked through the pages, paying no attention to Parker whatsoever.
Calhoun’s eyes snapped up. “How are you feeling?”
Parker, his mouth suddenly dry, sa
id nothing. Calhoun’s voice was familiar, but he couldn’t place it. And in truth he couldn’t give an accurate report.
But her voice…
Parker’s mind became a jumble of images, a wave of confusion and nausea sweeping over him. His guts seemed to turn to chilled water. The only time he’d ever felt like this in his life before was when he had not been able to get his opiate of choice into his system. Calhoun was cold turkey in a uniform.
Calhoun scribbled something in the notes from a gold pen she took from her top pocket. “You were shot, and your trauma treatment at the scene of engagement was inadequate. You’ve been suffering from advanced sepsis and deep wound infection. If I didn’t know better, I’d say someone pissed in your wounds.”
Parker blinked.
“I imagine the gentlemen who captured you were none too gentle. You killed a lot of their friends.”
The chill in Parker’s guts was spreading. He wanted to ask about Sara, to know if she’d got away, but stopped the words in his throat. He didn’t know where he was, or what they knew of him here. Leading off on his anxiety about Sara would be a tactical error, immediately give them a strong lever with which to extract information. There had to be no other reason to treat him, or waste antibiotics and nurse hours on him – they must want something from him. Parker pushed the immediate thoughts of Sara deep into the recesses of his thinking.
“Where am I?”
Calhoun put the folder back down. “That wasn’t the answer to my question.”
“I don’t know how I am. I haven’t had time to think about it.”
Calhoun experimented with a smile on her face, but it came out like a dog pulling its lips back to show its fangs. “Well, I suggest you do think about it, Mr. Parker. That’s perhaps the easiest question you’re going to be asked in the coming weeks.”
So they knew who he was. And if they knew who he was, then they knew what he had done. And that made the fact that they had kept him alive for the purpose of interrogation several notches more uncomfortable. Parker wasn’t just a random arrest from a roadblock misunderstanding – which is what he would have gone with if they did not know his identity – now he was James Parker to them. And James Parker meant a great deal in terms of enhancing the government’s intelligence of the resistance. Parker, agile enough to ride that information out without a flicker, pulled a quick 180.
“I feel wasted,” he said. Perhaps Calhoun just wasn’t very good at smiling, he considered. If he played ball with her then he might get some information back down the two-way street of communication. He still couldn’t place her voice, and it itched at him with annoying persistence.
“That’s better,” Calhoun said, “the doctors were thinking that perhaps they should leave feeding you until tomorrow. If you don’t cooperate, we still might.”
Parker’s world sucked blackly to a singularity of thought. And in that flat, weightless moment it came to him exactly where he’d heard Calhoun’s voice before.
“Let the bastard bleed out,” someone had said. “I don’t give a fuck if Spencer wants him. Let him die.”
While he’d been out of it, delirious with infection caused by his pissed-on wounds, he remembered that harsh voice. Someone else had said: “We should have just slit the bastard’s throat.”
And Calhoun was the one who had answered.
“Fuck it. We still might.”
As Parker focused on the woman who had blithely suggested that slitting his throat was a treatment plan worth considering, the rug of losing an eye was pulled expertly from beneath him: He had not been able to pick up that another nurse had entered the room. As Parker turned his head he just got a flash of his uniform, the Army nurse insignia, and the tray he was holding out to Calhoun. Parker didn’t see the nurse’s nametape or face, because once the tray was in Calhoun’s hand, the nurse about-turned and marched out of the room. Parker’s last view of the nurse was his near bald pate shining brightly beneath the strip lights as the door clacked shut.
Calhoun placed the tray on the table next to the folder and picked up the loaded syringe it had been transporting. The lack of left-sided vision, and the implications for that going forward, were immediately pushed from Parker’s thinking as his good eye focused on what Calhoun was holding now. The size and shape of the syringe was one that, as a former police officer, Parker knew only too well. Usually this syringe size had the correct load capacity to deliver doses of insulin to a diabetic’s upper skin layer.
Parker wasn’t diabetic.
On the street this kind of syringe was more normally part of a fixing addict’s rig. What it usually contained would never be insulin. Parker felt his mouth going dry. His stomach drained of cold and flipped like a circus tumbler.
Calhoun did the fang-smile again as she checked the thin barrel of the syringe for bubbles, holding it up to the light. The liquid within was clear but viscous. A bead of it bulbed at the point of the needle. Calhoun turned the rig towards Parker.
“What’s that?” he asked, keeping his voice level and low, but knowing full well what it was, and why Calhoun was giving it to him.
Calhoun’s sudden iron grip settled on the wrist of his right hand. She said nothing, intent, hardly showing signs that she was breathing at all. Parker tried to lift his arm, but Calhoun’s full weight was on it. He yanked at the chain with his left hand, but his arm would only reach a quarter of the way across his pelvis. It was at this moment that Parker discovered his ankles were strapped to the bed, and that he was completely immobile.
“What is it?” he repeated, only wanting confirmation for what he already knew. “What are you doing?”
“Oh don’t worry,” said Calhoun, any pretense at professionalism evaporating like a spring mist in the sun, “the first hit is always for free. Just enjoy yourself.”
The needle slid into a vein on the back of Parker’s hand, one that was now standing proud of his skin as a direct result of Calhoun’s grip. The cool liquid slid gently into Parker’s system as the plunger on the rig was pushed down.
Parker imagined the drug – the heroin, what else would it be? – pulsing up his arm towards his heart. Pushing to where, in a matter of moments, it would be distributed around his body, reaching his brain in less than a minute.
As consciousness began to slide, like crockery from a table on a storm-tossed liner, Parker gave himself up to the feeling and the darkness of Calhoun’s sharp-fanged smile.
Get your copy of Dead Reckoning at
www.GraceHamiltonBooks.com
Also by Grace Hamilton
EMP Lodge Series Book One
EMP Lodge Series Book Two
EMP Lodge Series Book Three
EMP Lodge Series Book Four
EMP Lodge Series Book Five
EMP Lodge Series Book Six
911 Series Book One
911 Series Book Two
911 Series Book Three
Dead End (911 Book 2) Page 25
