“Okay, you can come in,” Tobacco Juice said. “But the rest stay here until we get the go-ahead to let you all in.”
Nathan nodded, and with that he turned and walked back to the wagon.
Tony clung to Nathan, coughing into his coat. “Don’t go Daddy, I don’t like it.”
Since Cyndi’s death, Tony, Nathan’s eleven-year-old, hadn’t exactly descended into any traumatic well of sadness, but Nathan had noticed the boy wasn’t as confident as he had been. And now, Nathan heading off without him into the unknown was sending even his already diminished level of confidence spiraling downward.
To lose one parent could be seen as unfortunate, but to lose another…
“It’s gonna be fine, son. I’ll just go in, talk to whoever is in charge, and then I’m sure they’re going to let us through. I’ll be back by the morning. Maybe even sooner.”
Tony relaxed his arms and looked up at Nathan with Cyndi’s blue eyes. “If you’re sure?”
“I am.”
Nathan squeezed his son, ruffled his hair, and left him to scratch at their Malamute sled dog Rapier’s ears, joining Freeson, Lucy, and Tommy at the wagon.
Free and Lucy were as unlikely a couple as it was possible to imagine. Free, a gnarled and grumpy mid-thirties mechanic from New York State, and Lucy Arneston, just a squeak under forty, a millionaire socialite and Bloody Mary expert with a nice line in waspish putdowns and a fine eye when out hunting deer, had been thrown together in adversity and had stuck.
“You sure this is a good idea?” Free asked, eyeing the roadblock and huddle of Casper residents.
“I don’t see what choice we have. They’re not going to trust us if we don’t trust them.”
Free shrugged. Lucy crossed her arms across her mink coat and sighed.
Tommy, his immoveable US Marines baseball cap permanently reversed no matter what the weather, was someone Nathan could only describe as a Texan fixing a redneck mask over his Native American body, sucked in his cheeks. “You sure you want to go alone? I could follow cross-country, keep my head down…”
Nathan held up his hand in refusal. “Tommy, no. Come on—you heard what I said about trust. They’re just scared of strangers is all. If they wanted us dead, they could have killed us all where we stand. If I were running Casper, these would be the hoops I’d make people jump through to get in, too. I’ll be okay.”
By the sour look on Tommy’s face, Nathan could see that he wasn’t convinced. “We’re nearly out of food, and getting low on ammo.”
Nathan didn’t have time to argue this out. They needed to get into Casper stat, and if that meant going in alone, then he would. “Where else are we going to get to if we don’t at least try?”
Tommy shrugged. “Just don’t let them use you like a door mat.”
“I won’t.” The chilly silence that descended between the men was cut through by Brandon. Nathan’s baby son, as if amplifying everyone’s hunger, started to cry from within the wagon. Lucy, who’d willingly become his de facto nanny since Cyndi’s passing, pulled the canvas aside and climbed up to see to him. The wails hung in the air with a grim finality, causing Nathan to set any other concerns aside.
Dave and Donie, the two twenty-one-year-old techno whizzes, jumped down from the wagon. Dave was a clean-cut looking African American, Donie an edgy punk-goth with crazy red hair (which she’d recently colored after a score at a half-looted drug store). She reached into her biker jacket, all zips and studs, pulling out a compact digital walkie-talkie. “It’s got about three-quarters’ charge, and should reach from here to Casper. The land is flat enough.”
“Say the word, and we’ll come running,” Dave added. Not a natural warrior, the boy had been through a torrid time in Detroit, and he was growing into a hard-muscled, canny combatant who Nathan could rely on to have his back.
Nodding, Nathan pocketed the walkie-talkie, feeling it settle against his side just below the hard edge of the Kevlar vest. “Right. Let’s do it,” Nathan said, setting his jaw.
Get your copy of Black Ice
Available January 10 2019
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BLURB
911 operator Jim Parker wants—more than anything—to be useful again. When a catastrophic EMP strikes, and he’s the last person a kidnapped girl speaks to before the lines go dead, he knows he can’t let her down. Especially when the circumstances are so similar to his own daughter’s disappearance. With the world falling apart around him, he wants to do nothing more than retreat to his prepper cabin. But with a fresh lead on his daughter, and another innocent girl’s life on the line, the disgraced cop will do everything in his power to track them down.
Finn Meyers has lost Ava, her best, and only, friend in the world, but she knows where the missing young woman might be—and perhaps Parker’s long lost daughter. Now, Parker must form an uneasy alliance and tackle his own internal demons as the two begin a perilous journey that will take them to the headquarters of a mysterious cult in Indiana.
But what they find along the way will shatter all their preconceptions—and threaten the world as they know it. Can a has-been and a has-not save the innocent, and stop a disaster from happening?
Grab your copy of Dead Lines
(911 Series Book One) from www.GraceHamiltonBooks.com
EXCERPT
CHAPTER 1
Southern Indiana, 2306 hours
Countdown: 25 seconds until Event.
James Parker rubbed the sandy grit out of his eyes and stared at the monitors in front of him. Three screens—low light, supposedly easy on the eyes—sat at his station along with a computer, telephone, and emergency communications radio. He was suffering from a hangover headache pounding dully behind his temples, and it hurt to use his eyes, even in such dim lighting.
His hand, big and calloused, massaged a five o’clock shadow rapidly heading towards full-on homeless scruff. He wanted another Vicodin, but had promised himself not to take too many at work. Mostly, he kept that promise. Mostly.
The light in the room was muted, more a soft ambience with the illumination designed to be easy on an operator’s eyes, and the soft glow of computers reflected like silvered mirrors from each station. From all around him, the white noise of the call center was a light murmur of background conversations punctuated by the alerts of incoming calls. Parker leaned back in his comfortable chair and eyed the clock.
Fifteen minutes to quitting time.
He lifted a hand to Kevin Oaks in a lazy gesture of greeting as the man, his relief, came in through the door of the “vault” and meandered towards the coffee maker on the table in the corner.
Right behind him, though, Parker’s supervisor Annie Klein burst through the door, resembling a squat lead ball fired from a musket. An old, not well taken care of musket. Her arms, pudgy bowling pins topped by raptor claws of fingers, clutched her iPhone and a thick pile of official manila folders.
Avoiding eye contact, Parker sat up and spun around to more fully face his row of monitors. His conversations with the indefatigable Ms. Klein inevitably ended in a poor fashion. He’d already earned two written warnings for insubordination, and HR had informed the union that he was currently under investigation. Yay.
He couldn’t afford to lose another job. His pension and retirement benefits were closely tied to his employment with the city. After how he’d left the department, getting fired from this job would vastly reduce his options. Besides, when the factories had closed down and moved to Mexico, they’d taken the greater part of employment options with them. Try as he might, he couldn’t see himself working as a barista, jumping to fetch absurd coffees for uppity IT techs half his age.
He sighed. “Because I’m old,” he muttered.
An indicator light blinked on. He moved his foot and nudged the pedal, opening the line.
“911,” he said into his headset mic. “What is the nature of your emergency?”
“Please help!” a young woman’s voice cried into
the line. “Please help, something horrible is going to happen!”
“Calm down, miss,” he said. “Let me help you.” He’d taken enough calls by now to know whether it was the real thing or not. This felt real.
Automatically, his voice went down a register, sliding from gravely baritone to an almost basso profundo. It was a habit left over from working domestic disputes and suicide interventions as a law enforcement officer. It helped in his new career.
He went on, “I need your name, ma’am.”
His eyes went to his screen and he quietly cursed. She was on a cell; the caller locator software had the 812 area code, but that was it so far. He could have figured that much out on his own by her southern Indiana accent alone. Go Hoosiers, he thought.
“They’re going to do something at Stapleton Mall, the Church!” the girl half-sobbed.
He winced internally at the location, the reminder of his daughter, but pushed the feeling away quickly. He possessed an instinct, a residue left over from working patrol. This girl was fighting to hold it together; he could hear it in the timbre of her voice. She wanted to be brave, she was fighting to be brave, but she was utterly terrified.
“They’ve already killed a girl... I guess you’d call them a cult,” she went on. “The Church kidnapped me, and Casey, Jesus, they killed Casey!” The words burned through the signal into his ear and he heard the raw anguish and terror in her voice.
Parker’s stomach clenched. This was no hoax.
He eyed the caller ID screen—nothing. Goddamn satellites. He frowned. He inhaled through his nose, calming himself. Since Sara had disappeared, such actions were only effective at work. Outside of the call center, it took Ativan, 4mgs at a time, to calm him. Usually with a Steel City Lager chaser. Sometimes something stronger.
“Tell me your name,” he repeated. His voice remained steady, calm. He might be all this girl had until he could dispatch officers to her 20. He didn’t want to fail her. Didn’t want to fail another girl the way he’d failed Sara.
“It’s Ava,” she choked out. “It’s Ava Talbot—”
The line went dead.
Everything went dead.
“No! No, no!” he shouted, turning towards the screen. “Hello? Ava, hello!”
He was sitting in the dark. Not the low illumination ambience he was used to, but dark. Every light in the room was out, all screens dead, overheads down, his headset utterly silent. He felt frustrated rage building up in him.
“Goddamn,” he swore.
He began breathing faster as he thought about that crying girl out there, alone. Unbidden, tears of impotence burned the backs of his eyes. He scowled, almost snarled, and pushed everything back. Why hasn’t the auxiliary power kicked on? he suddenly wondered.
“Why hasn’t the auxiliary power kicked on?” he bellowed.
He heard the two other 911 operators who were sitting beside him and still on shift also cursing. No one answered his question. In front of him, set off to the side since it was never used, the back-up ham radios kicked on. They were old redundancy systems, designed for use during cell tower incapacitation by inclement weather. With them suddenly being used... well, if he’d needed more proof that the shit had surely hit the fan, this by God was it.
“Able Seven,” a patrolman Parker knew as Mark Denham said into his radio. “Be advised, Dispatch, we have complete power outages in my vicinity. Stoplights went out—I need Fire and Rescue to Harp and Neilson Avenues. Multiple MVAs; multiple vehicles versus pedestrian!”
Parker knew Denham. He was a twelve-year veteran, calm and collected under pressure. He sounded more than excited, more than under pressure. He sounded shook up. One of the other operators took the call and began trying to roll Fire and Rescue.
“We’ve got a, wait… Jesus Christ!” another officer broke in. “We’ve got a plane down on Baker and Freemont! It slid into a row of houses! Everything’s burning!” The line clicked off, and for a moment there was silence. Then the officer clicked over again, his voice hard and flat. “Dispatch,” he said. “We need everyone. I’ve got six large residences fully engulfed. There are people trapped; I can hear them screaming from here.”
Like a dam breaking, more calls began coming in. Just like that, in a handful of seconds, the system overloaded and Parker realized that the city was done. Traffic lights being out were one thing, but a plane down? That meant only one thing: an EMP detonation. It was no longer about his little local 911 sub-station in a middle-sized suburb north of Louisville; this situation was going to be managed at State level now, or not at all. At least until FEMA rolled in.
There were not enough available officers to handle this kind of volume. The ones off duty were most likely busy scrambling to protect their families. When the officers came in, if they came in (because if this was Katrina level bad, they might not, he realized), it’d be to find themselves under a unified emergency command system.
And one girl, lost and crying on the phone with no GPS lock, was not going to get help. In the big picture, she wasn’t even going to matter. He’d failed her. Just like he’d failed Sara. That rage—that old red rage that burned hot, the one he’d tried to kill with Ativan and Zoloft and Pendleton drunk neat—stirred up in him, and he was galvanized.
“Think, goddamnit, think,” he told himself.
His eyes rapidly adjusted to the dark; probably because his pupils were already blown up big from the opiates, he thought with a touch of self-recrimination. He had no way to find her. Ava, he told himself. Her name is Ava, she’s not a problem, she’s a girl, and she needs me.
What did he know? What had he learned during that call?
She was a Hoosier, born and bred by that accent. He knew her area code, though that was a pretty open-ended clue. But what he really knew, the thing that shook him in his belly, was that he knew the Stapleton Mall area very well. Sara had been involved there, and emergency or not, this was the closest thing to a clue about her disappearing he’d had in a long while.
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(911 Series Book One) from www.GraceHamiltonBooks.com
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Killing Frost (After the Shift Book 2) Page 27