Dead Reckoning (911 Book 3)

by Grace Hamilton

  Parker couldn’t help thinking that his captors enjoyed making him wait an extra hour or so from time to time, to pay him back for them having to listen to Billy Ray Cyrus on endless repeat, if nothing else.

  The waitress put Parker’s coffee on the tray, smiled at Sara, and waddled away from the counter to pick up their pancakes, moving in rhythm to Shania Twain’s vocals coming over the loudspeaker. Sara had been very specific about her order, delighting Parker with her serious precociousness. “I want to order my own pancakes, Daddy,” she had declared as they’d made their way into Elkhart’s W. Jackson Blvd. Dairy Queen. Listening to her, watching her, Parker’s heart had swelled with love and pride at the little woman his little girl was becoming.

  There had been no line to wait in; they’d been able to walk right up to the order point, through streams of golden spring sunshine. Its warmth radiating through the windows, feeling more than pleasant on Parker’s skin.

  “And what can I get you today, young lady?” the enormous, apple-shaped waitress had asked.

  Sara’s hands tangled and twisted behind her as she concentrated, causing her words to run together like cars colliding on a foggy day. “I would like two pancakes, please, with the syrup already on so that it soaks in by the time we sit down plus two small squirts of ice cream, but I don’t want them to touch the pancakes, please.” Sara had run out of breath by the time she’d gotten to the end of the sentence, and the last five words had come out as a croak.

  The waitress’s eyes flicked to Parker, and they exchanged smiles. “Well, if that’s what you want, young lady, that is exactly what you will get.”

  Parker ruffled Sara’s hair and she gave him her best “Don’t mess up my hair, Daddy” look. Parker’s grin was so wide that its ends threatened to meet around the back of his head and let loose his jaw.

  Parker looked around the Dairy Queen. It was 8 a.m. on a Monday morning and they were still the only customers.

  He checked his watch. Looked through the window at the parking lot, and beyond to the row of stores on the other side of the street. Apart from Parker’s SUV, there were no other cars at all.

  The SUV stood in a golden patch of sunlight, utterly alone.

  Something at the back of his mind itched. He couldn’t…

  “Daddy!” Sara tugged at Parker’s hand. Parker blinked and looked at his seven-year-old daughter. Sara had obviously been trying to get his attention for some seconds while he had been staring into the parking lot. She was pointing toward the counter. Parker blinked and focused on the waitress.

  “That’ll be $5.99,” she said in the tone of voice used by someone who’d already said the same thing twice already.

  Parker handed the waitress a ten, picked up the tray they were offered, and waited for change. The waitress grinned at Sara as she handed it over.

  Sara led Parker to a booth near the window. “Daddy, you must always listen to what people are saying. Miss Munro says that not listening is rude. You were rude to that lady. You should apologize.”

  Parker wasn’t used to being scolded by his daughter. “Hey, who’s the parent here?” he mock-complained as Sara popped open her pancake box and picked up her white plastic fork.

  Next, Sara’s scream threatened to shatter the glass of every window in the place.

  A greasy, wet, black rat, its eyes shining with rodenty malevolence, sat in the middle of Sara’s pancake box. Its quick feet trailed smears of ice cream through a brown slick of now rancid syrup. Before Parker sprang out of the booth, dragging Sara’s thin arm with him, he noticed dots and dashes of rat shit running across the surface of the pancakes like the devil’s own Morse code.

  “Jesus!”

  Sara turned away from the table and buried her head in his side.

  There was a sudden stab of pain in Parker’s thigh.

  The rat continued sitting on the pancakes, cream in his whiskers, the beast’s tiny front paws scrabbling at the surface of Sara’s breakfast.

  Another searing pain. This time in the top of his right arm. It had come out of nowhere. He watched with horror as blood welled from beneath the material of the white cotton, police-issue shirt. The blood was coming so thick and fast that it began to sweat through the material and run toward the crook of the arm cradling Sara’s head.

  Only, Sara wasn’t there anymore.

  Parker spun on his heel, wildly searching the restaurant with his good eye. Where had she gone? What the fuck was happening? How come I only have one eye?

  “Sara!” he shouted, something harsh and prickly catching in his gullet.

  He coughed. Parker’s mouth felt like it had been soaked in vomit. The gouging pain of prolonged retching caught in his throat.

  And the restaurant suddenly stank of vomit and the peppery odor of CS gas.

  “Let the bastard bleed out,” someone said. “I don’t give a fuck if Spencer wants him. Let him die.”

  There was only the rat. Parker couldn’t see the waitress anymore. Through the window, the street and parking lot were just as deserted as before.

  Focus! Parker thought. First principles. Stay alive. Find Sara. Pressure. Apply pressure.

  Parker clamped his hand over the welling patch of blood soaking his arm and moved away from the rat. The creature had become distracted from the pancakes, and was looking at the blood seeping through Parker’s fingers as he pushed down on the impossible wound that had appeared beneath his shirt, backing away from the table.

  Parker, not giving the rat a chance to think about springing off the tabletop toward his fresh blood, pulled the police issue Glock 22 .40 caliber from his hip holster, flicked the safety, squeezed the trigger and disintegrated the rat’s head. The headless body smashed against the window and slid down, leaving smears of syrup, ice cream, and blood.

  “We should have just slit the bastard’s throat.”

  “Fuck it. We still might.”

  Nowhere voices, saying nowhere things. Parker’s thinking stalled, his throat tight as things went black.

  The darkness lasted a long time.

  Sara.

  He tried to sit up, but his body didn’t want to coordinate. It didn’t want to do what he wanted it to.

  He wanted the taste of pancake and rat-flavored vomit to get the fuck out of his mouth, too.

  And, Parker wanted Sara.

  But when he asked for her, the words came out as nonsense.

  Taking the methadone might have fixed, for a few hours, the physical symptoms of withdrawal, but it did nothing to tackle the psychological effects. And the hallucinations… they were hard to shake himself out of. But still, the drug was the only escape.

  He hated himself for doing it; he loathed himself for succumbing to their control. He knew that, while he was accepting their methadone, he was putting himself into their cage and locking himself in to save them the trouble. But he couldn’t make himself fight it.

  Parker’s captors no longer gave him a spoon with which to eat his food. He’d been reduced to scraping food from the prison tray with his bare hands. But that food was ingested only once Parker had guzzled down the methadone, running his index finger around the bottom of the medicine cup and licking the precious liquid off his skin. He forced himself not to think about how pitiful he looked, how disgusting his habit had become, blanking his mind of everything he could. The fix came first, to the extent that it came at all.

  It was while he was sucking up the last of his methadone, waiting for his puréed mush to cool enough for him to be able to scoop it into his mouth, that Parker had his first glass-half-full idea in months. And when the idea came, it exploded in his head like a grenade.

  He sat there blinking for a moment. The simple beauty of the idea twanging around his head like a pinball.

  Normally, in a situation like this, Parker would have been focused from the get-go on finding a way to escape. He would have been clinically set on identifying any wrinkle that could be exploited to his advantage. That’s what the step-counting, a
nd internal map-making, had been for. The urge had been there to begin with, even injured as he’d been. Addiction, however, had blunted his thinking. Parker had become mentally numb to such an extent, and trapped in the routine so deeply, that one deviation from it—turning left instead of right in the corridor—had caused a full meltdown. A panic attack that had left him paralyzed with fear, shivering naked on this concrete floor for two cycles of Billy and three of Shania. That’s how far under his skin his torturers had wormed themselves in.

  It was clear to Parker that the powers that be knew of his past weaknesses and were determined to use the knowledge to their advantage. They’d just ramped up his susceptibility to pills and alcohol and replaced it with smack. In just a short while, they’d succeeded in emptying him of all of his fight and fury.

  But the new idea, sudden and crystal clear and shining with vibrant possibility, blossomed fully formed in his head, blowing away the methadone cobwebs which had silted his thinking.

  While Parker had been getting injected with heroin, he’d had zero control over the amount of drug that had entered his body. Calhoun had seen to that. Now that he had been robbed of the most basic, if cruel, attentions of Calhoun, though, things had changed.

  Parker was now in charge of how much methadone went into his body.

  The strategy laid out before him by that bare fact was so simple.

  And that was the key.

  From this moment on, every time a tray of food was brought in with its accompanying pot of green addiction, Parker would drink the methadone down, yes, but he’d leave a little in the jar—just a milliliter or so. Just enough to decrease the level of active drug in his body, but not so much that it would cause a full cluck round of withdrawal. The residue, he’d mix into leftover food.

  Within hours, Parker would become his own withdrawal program.

  The accepted way to come off opiate dependency was through this form of graduated withdrawal. A little less methadone in every dose for a week, and then you reduced intake again the next week, and so on, until the body was weaned from the drug completely. It was a tried and trusted method, and one Parker was oh so familiar with from tackling his pill addiction. Here, he couldn’t afford to decrease the amount of drug week by week—he didn’t know how much time he had. But, he could do it every few doses, and despite the strength of the addiction he felt, he knew his motivation to find Sara would be enough to allow for the shorter regimen.

  Parker’s thinking went like this: If he could get off the methadone completely, and yet make his captors think he was still hooked, it would give him an advantage—a slim one, but an advantage nonetheless. And sometimes a slim advantage was all you needed. Surely, they weren’t going to keep him here forever. What would be the point? And if they were softening him up for something, some greater purpose, as he thought they had to be, they were taking their damn time about it… which gave him time to get himself clean. And now Parker was determined to get himself ready for whatever was to come. To be free of the addiction would be a massive step forward in raw preparedness.

  Enlivened, now, he saw that in one small way he was fighting back; he might not be out on the trail, striking hard and fast with astonishing violence, but he’d become the hero of his own body. However much Billy’s achy heart was breaking, Parker’s was mending.

  Maybe that had been their next mistake, Parker reasoned. Locking up guys who opposed state oppression of the kind he was witnessing now, instead of leaving them to rot in a roadside ditch—that was nearly always a mistake. Just look at history. If Parker got free of this place, he was determined to make their mistake not just a single insect-like inconvenience on the back of the beast, but a whole fucking plague of locusts.

  Naked, cold, and alone—wasn’t that the moment of birth for every animal?—this cell would become the womb from which another animal would plop defiantly onto the straw. Parker wasn’t interested in vengeance, either; this wasn’t about settling scores. This wasn’t going to be blind rage or a counter reign of terror just replacing one system of despotism with another. No. This was the beginning of something new, something better, and Parker would do everything he could to make it happen. Not for himself, but for the America that Sara and her children would grow up in.

  The smile on Parker’s grubby, grizzled face showed itself now against every possible force that was being used to crush his spirit. His surroundings would have the opposite effect from what had been intended. This cell, with its squalor and insane music, had not destroyed him, and it would not. It would rebuild him.

  And Parker was ready for that. He’d make himself ready.

  6

  Chan had not been exaggerating.

  The government was coming, but it was only in the direction of the cell’s base of operations. It wasn’t that they’d discovered the cell and were sending forces to engage them on home turf. But the route they were taking down US 40 out of Terre Haute would bring them within yards of the substation and the work going on there to adapt the firetruck, which was only half-finished.

  Sara, Ava, Margret, Brian, and the rest of the cell had lit out toward East Glenn, where the advance scouts under Brian’s command had reported FEMA activity coming their way. They’d be able to catch sight of them near there before they got too close.

  Ava passed the binoculars to Sara as they crouched in the treeline overlooking a section of US 40 heading into the city. The land was flat and without ready cover beyond this line of cork elm and low spicebush with its gentle slopes of grass. The road was mostly clear of dead vehicles, and the FEMA convoy—made up of two Ford F-250 Super Duty trucks, each with vehicle mounts holding M240 7.62 mm machine guns—rolled almost silently along. Ahead of the trucks, a phalanx of maybe twenty FEMA infantry walked in weapons-cold formation. They weren’t expecting trouble, Sara noted. This was just a patrol… perhaps one heading to the nearby pissant burgs of Seelyville and Cloverland. Going there just to be a presence. Reminding the populace that the government was in control and that they wouldn’t countenance any resistance. Sara was reminded of the Robin Hood films she had watched in her early youth, sitting on her dad’s lap, chewing popcorn and guzzling chocolate shakes. The Sherriff of Nottingham’s men would always be out terrorizing the locals, throwing lit torches onto thatched roofs and generally oppressing the serfs. Now, there was just bile rising in her throat—no sweet taste of chocolate and popcorn as she surveyed this scene.

  Sara was only grateful she saw the Council for what they really were now. Vultures pecking at the corpse of America. Ruling by fear and violence. She shivered in the spring heat, the chill of all those wasted years running down her bones. She would be eternally thankful that her father had gotten her away from the influences of the Council and the Church of Humanity. If, at the end of this, she found out James Parker was still alive, then that would be the only icing on a huge cake of shit; reconnecting with her father, and seeing him survive all this, would almost make everything she’d been through worth it.

  Margret elbowed up through the brush and, keeping her voice low, asked for Sara’s assessment.

  Sara whispered back, “They’re not coming for us, but they’re heading for the substation. There’s a good chance they’ll find what we’ve been doing to the firetruck, and we’ll be down one asset. It’s going to be difficult to replace.”

  Margret cursed beneath her breath. “We need it for the assault on the prison.”

  Sara nodded. “If we want to hold onto it, we’re going to have to take them out.”

  Ava licked her lips and squinted at the small column of soldiers. “We could risk it, get back to the substation, cover up our activity there and see if they just stroll on by.”

  “Won’t happen,” Sara hissed. “They’d have been bound to have taken the firetruck already if they knew it was there, and if they didn’t and this is their first recon, they’ll take it this time. No question.”

  Sara knew that taking on the FEMA forces in the open was a risk, but US 40
offered no high ground before the substation for mounting a fully surprise attack. She pulled a map from her pack and spread it out on the grass. “They’re two miles out of Seelyville. We passed through it on the way here.”

  Ava snorted. “I must have blinked and missed it.”

  Sara rolled her eyes. “Yes, it’s a small town, but remember that Christian Center we passed?”

  Ava shook her head. “I was kinda concentrating on staying alive, not taking in the architecture. Is there a guide book?”

  Sara grinned and punched Ava lightly on the shoulder. “Funny.” She turned to Margret. “If we could get back to Seelyville fast, and I mean really fast, that big old barn of a Christian Center has given me an idea.”

  Margret was silent, thinking, her face a mask of concern. “We can’t jeopardize the firetruck; we’re going to have to engage, and it’s going to have to be a ‘No Survivors’ action. We can’t risk there being communication back to FEMA. These guys have to disappear off the field like they never existed. Will your plan deliver that?”

  Sara explained what she was thinking to Margret and Ava. When she finished, Margret repeated her question about whether or not it would work to eliminate the whole force.

  Sara nodded, sure of herself now. “Yes, ma’am.”

  Margret nodded curtly. “Then, let’s do it.”

  One hour later, they were ready. Sara and Brian Chan waited beside US 40 in the April sunshine. Seelyville was pretty much deserted. Without power or supplies, the residents without prepper stores had gravitated to the government’s so-called Mercy Centers in Terre Haute or Indianapolis.

  Meanwhile, the rest of the cell’s members were also in position. Sara felt uncomfortable about using the Christian Center as a massacre point now that they were acting out her plan, but it really was the best building between the FEMA column and the substation. Any chance of success rested on this location.