“It’s going to be hard,” Ava whispered, nudging Sara’s elbow as if to emphasize the point.
Sara grunted in response, still scanning the compound for whatever she could take in at this distance. Ava didn’t push for more of a response, knowing her friend was thinking of her father. Instead, she went back to examining what lay in front of them—it might as well have been a military obstacle course. The prison sat in ten acres or so of land, surrounded by a double row of seven-foot, chain-link fencing, this leading straight up to the high, roll-topped prison walls. A forest of extreme high voltage pylons in lattice towers ran like pillars in the Coliseum in Rome at intervals, coming out from the building, over the fence, and on toward the treeline. Fire breaks had been cut through the woods under the arterials, which hung with colored marker balls all the way to where they gave way to the wooden T-pole models.
On the road leading to the front gate, there was a billboard-like sign declaring the space a government installation and warning trespassers they would be shot. Ignoring the sign, Ava counted personnel, a checkpoint at the gate, two more elevated guard towers, and a position on the roof where a man with what looked like a scoped Fabrique Nationale Special Operations Forces Combat Assault Rifle was posted. In the run between the two fences, two K9 teams patrolled on either side of the compound.
Thinking she recognized the weapon for what it was, and what it could do, she once again felt lucky that they’d been given a crash-course in weapons and warfare by the lanky guard who’d taken a liking to her and Sara in Canada. Not for the first time, she thought maybe she’d take him up on that offer of a real date if things ever got somewhat back to normal; moving to Canada for good no longer seemed hard to imagine—especially if they could rescue Parker, who’d become like family to her just as much as Sara had. The little time they’d taken to recuperate had been time well spent, at least—that was what mattered right now.
“Uh oh,” Sara grumbled, interrupting her thoughts.
“What?” Ava asked, glancing away from the binoculars to see her friend pointing downward and to the left.
“You see that sign? You think it’s bullshit?”
Reminded again that Sara had eyesight too superior to her own to seem natural, Ava pursed her lips and turned, running her binoculars along the fence line until she saw what Sara had gestured to. A red-and-white placard hung on the chain-link fence, providing a warning.
HAZARD!
STAY BACK: FENCE ELECTRIFIED
“That’s new, right?” Sara commented.
This was the third reconnaissance operation they’d conducted over ten days, drawing closer each time—noting patrols, guard numbers, defenses, weaponry, and possible exfiltration routes. Just looking at the place made Ava’s guts churn with anger.
This was the first time they’d noticed the sign, and she was almost sure it hadn’t been there before… one of them would have noticed it.
“Takes a lot of juice to put current through a ten-acre fence, I think,” Ava answered. “They’re still running gennys out here, so I think it could be a bluff.”
Sara nodded. “But we have to know.”
“How we going to do that?” Ava scoffed. “Crawl up and touch it?”
“You see any dead grass?” Sara asked, scanning the ground.
“It’s all pavement.”
“If we get close enough, we should be able to hear it hum,” Sara suggested. “I think,” she added.
Ava watched her friend doubtfully, wondering if they were tempting fate already. “We downwind still?”
“I smell the river,” Sara said. “There’s not much of a breeze, so I assume so.”
“We’re going to crawl right up there on an ‘I assume so’?” Ava pressed.
“Yes,” Sara said.
Ava translated the tone easily. What her friend was really saying was, Don’t fuck with me now, Ava. When she didn’t argue, Sara added, “You wait here; cover me.”
“Don’t try to sideline me,” Ava snapped quietly.
Sara glanced sideways and met Ava’s eyes before she answered. “Then, let’s get moving.”
Ava shrugged, biting down further argument. “Fine.”
Settling slowly onto their stomachs, they began crawling down the drainage gully which provided a natural defilade of cover from the installation. They slid forward in fits and starts, checking the positioning of guards and activity in the installation. Under their clothes, the skin of their elbows and knees scraped off painfully and the exertion soon caused Ava to break out in an all new sweat. After twenty minutes of painstaking movement, they were at the lip of an old metal culvert protruding from a raised bank, about ten yards from the fence line. Not only were they near the fence, but their new positioning also gave them an uninterrupted view of the prison entrance.
“You really are sure your dad is in there?” Ava whispered, noting Sara’s thousand-yard stare at the fence and the high wall beyond.
“If he’s alive, yeah. Don’t you believe it?”
“Yes. If he’s alive. I just want to make sure you remember that.”
“We talked about this—it makes sense they’d want him alive, to find out more about where we went and what he knows. It’s where they’re taking threats to the system and, if he’s alive, it would be logical to assume it’s where he is. He’s certainly a threat. But he’s not the only one we’re here for anyway. Everyone here is on borrowed time, remember? We want to do our best at getting everyone out who shouldn’t be here. Now, zip it. I’m listening.”
Ava let the slight slide. In truth, Sara had no idea whether or not her father was alive or if he’d died saving their lives. Under those circumstances, Ava didn’t mind cutting her friend some slack.
Further thought was curtailed by the throaty diesel growl of two M939 5-ton, 6x6 military trucks that rumbled along the approach road toward the gates. In the uncovered backs of the trucks, Ava could see people in civilian clothing sitting crushed together, chained at the wrists to one another. The trucks stopped at the checkpoint and FEMA soldiers came forward from the guard post to check the IDs of the drivers.
Ava had seen this sort of thing before on the History Channel, in a series called Nazis: A Warning from History. Civilians in trucks being taken into prison camps. This was straight out of the fascist playbook, and it made her feel comprehensively sick. She felt the waves of impotence coming off Sara, too. They were both boiling inside at what they were witnessing, but there was nothing they could do except watch the people being taken inside. Drawing attention to themselves now would be suicide, at best.
And then, things got so much worse.
There was a shout from the back of one of the trucks. Two men had managed to slip some of their chains and begun clambering over the side in a desperate bid for freedom. But although their hands were free, and they were able to jump to the ground, stumbling to their hands and knees upon landing, their ankles were still hobbled by chains linked to each other’s feet.
Ava wanted to close her eyes, but couldn’t do it.
Their escape quickly became a pathetic mockery of whatever they’d hoped for, and Ava wished that she and Sara had been further away, so as not to see the details. Ava’s thoughts on the danger they themselves were in froze as two FEMA soldiers easily caught up to the struggling men and dragged them back to the truck. One of the men, a man in his thirties, was sobbing, and the other, a white boy with thinning hair who didn’t look like he’d eaten for a month, was telling the soldiers how sorry he was. “I won’t do it again!” he screamed, followed with the most childlike thing Ava had ever heard, stinging her eyes with tears as he repeated, “I promise! I promise, I won’t!”
Ava clutched Sara’s shoulder as both men were put on their knees on the road at the back of the truck, in full view of the people still chained there, and then they were double-tapped in the back of their craniums. Blood and brains gushed into the spotlight glow, and the bodies fell sideways into the road.
A visible fl
inch of fear transmitted itself through both trucks of civilians.
Below them, Ava could hear women wailing. Children crying. She bit down on the sleeve of her shirt, knowing she couldn’t afford to cry out herself and that she was moments away from doing so.
The prison gates were opened then, and the trucks grumbled on into the inner quad.
Focusing so intently on the miserable scene unfolding below them meant that Ava and Sara hadn’t seen what was approaching their position from the west, behind the supposedly electrified fence. The soldier was a female in her mid-twenties, her blonde hair tucked up under her uniform hat and her hand on an M4 on a 3-point sling. A large black and tan Alsatian walked beside her. As the patrol approached, the guard dog suddenly stopped.
Sara froze, half over the lip of the depression, Ava right beside her. The woman’s voice carried to them clearly across the short space. There weren’t two dozen yards between them and the patrol.
“What is it, boy?” they heard the soldier asking the dog.
Like the turret of a tank, the canine’s big head swiveled around until its predator eyes stared into Ava’s. The Alsatian began barking ferociously. It lunged against its leash, coming up against the fence as it snarled.
Not electrified then, Ava had time to think.
Sara scrambled backward as the guard began yelling into the handset of the walkie-talkie clipped to her shoulder epaulette. Almost immediately, an air horn klaxon blared to life and the searchlight on the tower closest to them blazed with light.
“Fuck!” Sara hissed as Ava yanked her another step away from the fence.
The female soldier fired, the sharp cracks of the 5.56 mm rounds almost lost in the cacophony of the siren. Geysers of dirt showering both of them, Ava and Sara pulled their silenced pistols as they scrambled back the way they’d come in a bent-over sprint, but neither returned fire. Speed was going to save their lives now.
Coming out of the drainage gully, they popped over the side of a hillock and slid to the bottom. Behind them, more dogs were barking as they fled, and Ava knew pursuit was likely.
The beam of the searchlight swept past them and they threw themselves down as it came back across. Fifteen yards away, the treeline began, opening up one of their predetermined escape paths.
“Go! Go!” Ava urged automatically, knowing her words were unnecessary but saying them anyway.
They broke cover and raced for the woods, zigzagging in short bursts. It seemed to take forever for them to cover the distance, while behind them several more rifles opened fire. They made the woods, and Ava threw a look over one shoulder.
“They’ve turned the dogs loose,” Sara panted.
Ava held up her P226. “Dogs, we can handle,” she said.
Sara nodded, and they broke through a screen of bushes to where an old hiking trail ran down toward the Wabash. They opened up on the firmer ground, running hard. Within a matter of a minutes, however, they heard the dogs on their trail.
“Shit.” Ava half-gasped at the sound of the pursuing dogs.
“Ready?” Sara asked.
Out of breath, Ava just nodded.
“Right,” Sara said. “Now!”
Both stopped running, skidding to a stop. In unison, they spun and took a knee. They lifted their pistols in two-handed grips and pointed them back down the path, only seconds before three Alsatians rounded the corner. To Ava, they didn’t look like dogs. The dogs she knew were pets. They liked treats and getting their bellies rubbed.
These beasts were mythological monsters, all flashing eyes and snarling muzzles filled with knife-like fangs. The growls bridging their barks were savage, terrifying things that made her feel like she’d entered a horror movie. Every ounce of these creatures was primal hunter-killer.
Sheer terror eliminated any compulsion that might have stayed their hands. In the moment, Ava felt like she was a woman from the ice age facing dire wolves.
The pistols coughed and the slides racked back, ejecting their brass.
The 9 mm bullets struck the dogs, one after the other, punching into their broad chests with lethal kinetic energy. The last dog in the line vaulted over his dead packmates and charged directly at them. Again, the two women moved in synchronicity. The pistols fired.
The Alsatian yelped as its body absorbed the two 9 mm rounds and it crumpled into the dirt just feet away from them.
“Holy shit,” Sara breathed out. “That was too close.”
“We’ve got to go,” Ava said.
She jumped to her feet and Sara followed. Down the path, they heard a unit of pursuers approaching, more dogs with them. Ava whirled and raced two hundred yards through the woods, not running flat-out to avoid overtaxing herself, but with fear lending speed to the pace she set for them.
At a small clearing, they left the path, crawled through a barbwire fence, and jumped over the edge of a creek bed to begin following a small tributary south to the Wabash. They managed to stay just ahead of their pursuers, and two miles downstream, they entered the large sewage tunnel and followed their markers through the maze.
They moved rapidly through the sewer pump station. The water inside soaked their hiking boots and was slimy with algae. Trash and detritus lined the way, the air and space both ripe with overturned shopping carts, old tires, and random pieces of lumber mixed in with rotting clothes and torn plastic bags stuffed with garbage.
When they were sure they were far enough ahead of their pursuers to risk it, Ava took out a mini Maglite and shone it downward. At different intervals, other tunnels and pipes broke off and led in different directions. They had used green spray paint, disguising their signs as random graffiti, to mark their path.
About seventy yards in, they came to a rusted Public Works gate. Comprised of metal bars, each half of the gate was secured to the other with a heavy length of stainless steel chain and a massive padlock. They’d come across the gate on an early reconnaissance mission and devised a plan.
Using heavy-duty bolt cutters that they’d left hidden beneath some garbage for just such an escape as this, they clipped off the links around the old lock, crossed through the gates, and then relocked the chains behind them with a new lock they’d left with their bolt cutters. Dogs couldn’t follow their scent in the miasma of polluted water they’d come through, but even if they came this way, Ava and Sara were betting pursuers wouldn’t be equipped with bolt cutters or suspect them of switching locks.
Twenty minutes later, they moved down a forced-flow tunnel and slipped out of a valve chamber into the lift station wet well, from which they climbed metal stairs to the surface.
Positioned on a concrete slab in some swampland connected to the Wabash, the area lay tucked into a semi-rural corner west of Terre Haute called Larimer Hill. There, they got back to their green and white 1978 K5 Blazer and lit out to the northeast, and then along US 150; they recrossed the Wabash, went through the north of Terre Haute, and joined US 40 where it ramped in from Wabash Avenue. Mercifully, FEMA forces were thin on the ground in this part of the city, and so they weren’t stopped for ID checks.
An hour later, they were pulling into a settlement east of Billtown, an unincorporated community of five hundred people comprised almost exclusively of resistance sympathizers; the ARM cell headquartered here was fifty strong.
The Council had taken little interest in the settlements between Indianapolis and Terre Haute, other than to get them to repurpose their agricultural efforts toward FEMA needs. A small squad of military police were garrisoned at an old State Patrol barracks about five miles outside of Billtown, but they were circumvented easily enough when the need arose.
Ava drove them off US 40 and followed a dirt track along the edge of Billtown until they came to a park. The park had fallen into disarray; the grass needed mowing and the bushes had gone untrimmed. A once-cultivated jogging path wound between baseball diamonds, basketball courts, and soccer fields. At a point where the park abutted a neighborhood of two-story colonials, they’d be ma
king contact with the resistance security element, and it was near there that they parked and climbed from the Blazer.
They came out between two lawns of a cul-de-sac, onto the sidewalk, and heard someone whistle. They knew the drill and stopped where they were. There were designated marksmen in random second-story windows of the houses around them. Frozen, Ava and Sara simply stood and waited. They had travelled in grim silence all the way from Terre Haute and what they had witnessed. Other than engine noise, the whistle was the first external sound they’d heard since they’d killed the dogs.
Two bearded men in jeans and flannel shirts appeared out of a toolshed, one of them armed with an ugly looking Protecta Bulldog 12-gauge. Its rotating cylinder, like the drum magazine on a Thompson submachine gun, gave it a distinct profile. The other man, lankier and darker, had an AR casually slung over one shoulder. As always when they dealt with established cells, Ava could feel the men inspecting them, scrutinizing them for possible weakness.
There was nothing quite like violent conflict and clandestine armed struggle to instigate a rise in traditional gender roles. There were plenty of women in the resistance, and both Ava and Sara knew it; many of them had engaged in firefights with the new American government. But a two-woman team conducting ops on their own was an anomaly. This, combined with the fact that they had entered into the Western Indiana cell from the national organization, made them a source of curiosity and sometimes suspicion.
“Were you followed?” the man with the AR asked. Ava recognized him as a squad leader named Dustin. His friend with the shotgun was named Adam.
Dead Reckoning (911 Book 3) Page 2