“You stay there, and you do not move until I tell you it’s safe.”
Jessica nodded, biting her lip. “I only wanted to tell you about the bad man.”
Ava put a finger to Jessica’s lips, shushing her for now. “We know.”
Sara was changing the mag on the MP7 as Ava returned to cover the doorway.
“I know exactly what you’ve got planned for me, ladies.”
Ava looked at Sara, not quite believing what she was hearing.
Solon’s drawl carried to them easily. “I must, however, congratulate you on finding me so quickly. Your tactical logic does you credit. I thought I’d have a few more minutes to make my preparations, but no matter. I am fully aware that you need me dead. You cannot for one moment countenance the idea of me getting away and bringing word of your resistance unit back to my superiors. That’s why you have already executed all my men. But we have five companies of infantry itching to come looking for y’all, in Terre Haute alone.”
Ava tried to gauge from the sound of Solon’s voice where in the room beyond the door he might be.
“Why don’t you come out, Lieutenant Solon, and let’s talk this over, see if we can’t come to some sort of arrangement?” Sara offered.
Through the ruined door, they heard Solon snort. “Oh pur-lease, young lady, don’t insult my intelligence when I have been so complimentary about yours. I assume your comrades in arms will be joining you soon; they can’t have failed to hear the shooting from within this property. If I were you, I would order them to stay back. That is, if you don’t want them to die with you, as you most invariably will, at some, shall we say, indeterminate moment of my choosing.”
“Kill us?” called Ava. “Now you’re insulting us. What’s to stop us from climbing out this bedroom window here, covering the building in gasoline and burning you out?”
Another snort. Solon was enjoying himself. “Because, quite simply, I won’t let that happen, young lady. Please, call to one of your associates and ask them to look in the firebox beneath the seat of the second truck.”
“Why?”
“Just do it.”
Ava went to the bedroom window and opened it, keeping one eye on the doorway and Sara as she moved, even though she doubted the angle of the door would allow Solon to shoot through it and actually hit her. But there were security catches on the window, placed from the outside, so it wouldn’t open more than three inches without being forced, and Solon would hear that happening before they could escape.
Damn it.
Outside, Ava could see that Margret and a young fighter named Gray were approaching the house now, their guns raised. Ava waved to get their attention and motioned them to stop; when Gary came close enough to hear a loud whisper, she bent to the three-inch gap and told them not to enter under any circumstances.
“When they’ve checked the far truck, ask them to check the same box on the first truck.”
As Ava relayed these strange requests to Margret and Gary, a damp gnawing of dread and fear built in her guts. Solon sounded supremely confident for a man who was one bullet hole from death. What was he doing? Just stalling? Was there another platoon out of Terre Haute just a few miles back along the highway? Was he trying to eke out the resistance fighters’ exposure to give the follow-up team a fighting chance of catching up to them?
No, there was something steely in Solon’s voice that transmitted a grim authenticity to his message. This was a guy holding aces.
Gary and Margret returned simultaneously, hurrying along among the remaining ARM fighters drifting back from their fruitless searches.
Margret’s face was grave. “The far truck’s firebox has enough C4 and detonators to wipe Indiana off the earth.”
“The other truck, the one Brian shot up, has none, just an empty box,” added Gary. “But it’s a sure bet it had the same stockpile as the first.”
From behind her, Solon called out: “Did you discover what I’m carrying yet? The stockpile that will win me this little battle?”
He gave us time to find the explosives, Ava realized, torn between screaming and laughing. And to discover more were missing.
“Okay,” said Ava, “you guys better get back. No sense in us all going up in smoke.”
“Ava…” Margret began, but the words died in her mouth. She knew Ava was right. If she was going to lose anyone on top of Brian, it was better to lose two than twenty. “Good luck,” Margret said softly, and she moved everyone toward the Christian Center.
Ava watched through the window until the ARM fighters were at what she considered to be a safe distance. Soon, they were all sheltered in the shadow of the Christian Center, the fighters huddled in a knot of worry, waiting for whatever resolution was to come.
Even though Ava didn’t really know how much C4 Solon had, whatever happened, she felt the ARM cell would be safe—for the moment, at least. Ava’s mind went into crazily high-gear unrealistic optimism. Perhaps only one of the fireboxes had carried explosives. Perhaps the other had just been for Hershey bars, and the platoon had eaten them all at their last rest stop. Thoughts and hopes about Solon’s intentions or bluff tumbled around her brain. She felt frozen with indecision. Luckily, Sara still had her head facing the correct way.
“How do we know you’ve got explosives, Lieutenant?” Sara called from the bedroom doorway. “I’ve played poker. I know how to bluff, too.”
There was a shuffle behind the closed door, and a detonator was pushed through one of the holes torn open by Solon’s bullets. It clunked to the floor and rolled away through the dust. “Where there’s one, there’s more. Satisfied?” called Solon.
Ava and Sara could both imagine the shit-eating grin on Solon’s face.
Ava looked at Sara; she was out of ideas. Sara rubbed at her temple—the same tic that Ava had seen Parker exhibit in moments of severe stress. Like father, like daughter.
Is this how it was going to end for both of them, after going through so much? To have gotten this far, stayed alive so long—to have suffered so deeply—only to check out for a nothing asshat with an overblown sense of his own importance, who’d blow himself up rather than let them get away?
Christ, fate, whatever you want to call it, sure had scribbled some dirty lines over their lives. She might as well have never made that 911 call to Parker all those months ago. For all the good it had done her and Finn, she should have just laid down and died.
“Quite a reversal, don’t you think?” called Solon. “I did three tours of duty in Iraq and two in Afghanistan. Basra, Helmand Province, every day ready to be tagged by an IED or fragged by a teenager hiding a suicide vest. And yet here I am, just a few short years later, thinking that turning myself into a human bomb is a fully viable option.”
“This is a man getting ready to die,” Ava whispered to Sara. Sara nodded her agreement. The doomsday clock was ticking, and they were all out of options. She glanced to the girl in the corner, who’d curled into a ball and held her head in her hands. She didn’t blame her.
“We could force the window,” Sara said, but there was an edge of desperation to her voice.
“He’ll hear, and he’ll detonate,” Ava answered absently, still looking around the room. “He wants his last gloat and justification to be heard. He wants to hear us give up. But the longer he talks, the longer we have to figure something out.”
Apart from the door and the window, there was no other route out of the room. They had two options.
Solon kept talking, almost casually. “I didn’t sign up for this, you know. This. Police actions and crowd control over my own fucking people.”
Ava could hear tears in Solon’s voice now, real tears. He’s crying. She imagined Solon’s thumb moving toward the detonator with every breath. Like he was using tears as gradations of sorrow to count him down to zero.
“But I’m dead even if I do go back. I lost the platoon; Terre Haute is under martial law. No one will believe I didn’t run away and desert my own men, no one. I
can die here, or with a noose around my neck in front of a jeering crowd. What difference does it make? I’ll tell you what difference it makes. None at all. This way, maybe they’ll remember me as a hero. A fighter.”
Ava and Sara were edging back from the door. There was no time, and their lives were compressing into a singular moment. Ava reached out and held Sara’s hand, and Sara squeezed Ava’s fingers and looked into her eyes. Ava couldn’t tell if the face she saw was Sara’s or Finn’s at this point, but in these seconds before certain death, it didn’t really matter.
“Hey ladies, are you ready?” Solon called, an angry strength suddenly popping into his voice. “I said: Are you fucking ready? Because I am. I’m as fucking ready as hell!”
“Ma’am?” asked Jessica. “Ma’am? What’s he going to do?”
Ava turned to look at Jessica, but before she could answer, the girl scurried to what looked to be a hatch in the floor that she’d uncovered. Lifting it open, her eyes wide, she gestured Ava over with frantic little waves. Without thinking for another moment, Ava yanked at Sara’s hand and all but pushed Jessica into the hatch before doing the same to Sara and lowering herself in after them. And that was when the house blew apart.
The detonation lifted the roof in a gust of flame and then tore the property to shreds, forcing pieces of the disintegrating wooden structure two hundred feet into the air.
The force of the blast knocked the walls of the neighboring house as though they’d been punched by a giant. Smoldering pieces of the destroyed building settled on the roof, starting small fires. The flames spilled out in every direction, and as the shockwave coursed from the center of the detonation, it threw both Ford trucks onto their sides like toys. The “Jesus Loves You” sign near atomized in the rush of heat and power, throwing letters into the air like plastic daggers.
Across the street, the searing breath of the blast rolled over the ARM fighters huddled against the wall of the Christian Center.
All that was left in the blast’s wake was a terrible silence and the occasional thud of debris raining down onto the highway.
9
Two corrections officers came seemingly from nowhere, but when Parker thought about it later, he realized they must have been obscured by the sally port wall and that, if the klaxon hadn’t sounded, he and Kenny would have walked into the recreation area cold, and the guards would have seen how stained the boy’s pants were for sure. The klaxon had been a blessing in disguise, even though it turned everything upside down.
Parker nudged Kenny forward and hissed, “What’s the emergency procedure here when the alarm sounds?”
Kenny locked the gate behind them, and turned and began to walk briskly alongside Parker as he whispered, “Any open cell doors will be locked. Prisoners from this area are in the gym now, and they’ll be stuck there with their guards for the duration of the emergency.”
The two officers who had sprung from behind the wall, were well ahead of them now. They had split up and begun checking that cell doors were locked as they went down the line, slapping the metal with the flats of their hands and rattling handles. Henshaw had stopped what he was doing with the mop, leant it against a table tennis set-up, and gone to the nearest open cell, entering it and then closing the door behind him. Nobody looked back at Kenny and Parker, every individual intent on following their lock-down routine.
Kenny and Parker reached the first of the table tennis set-ups.
“What now?” Parker asked.
“There’s a rally point in corridor nine. We’re supposed to go there and receive instructions on the emergency.”
Parker once again found himself thanking the EMP Event which had robbed institutions like this of their means of easy communication. As Parker listened to the klaxon, there were several fluctuations in the note of the wailing. The klaxon was being sounded by hand on a winding handle.
It’s an ill wind…
The corrections officers went to the far port and one of them began opening it. The officer who was waiting, a short, plump guy with a comb-over, called back to Kenny and Parker. “Move it, you two, come on!”
Parker turned his face to one side as if he were checking the cell doors to make sure they were secure, but he need not have worried; whatever the emergency was, it had caused Comb-Over to shift focus. He didn’t give Parker a second glance as they approached, instead turning back to his buddy and the gate.
Parker sped up, and Kenny did, too. Parker could see the sweat once again starting to roll down Kenny’s cheeks and dampen the top of his collar. Comb-Over’s buddy walked into the port, and Comb-Over himself held the gate open for Kenny and Parker, slamming it shut behind them after they entered.
The other officer began opening the next port gate as Comb-Over looked at Kenny. “Jeezus, Kenny, this ain’t a Sunday afternoon picnic with your mom. Pick your fucking feet up when I tell you to.”
“S-s-sorry, Bryce,” Kenny stammered.
Bryce turned his head to Parker and was about to say something else when the slow penny that was rolling around in his head dropped. “Hey… who the f—”
But that’s as far as he got. Parker butted Bryce’s nose with his forehead. Bryce groaned, staggered back, and crashed into his buddy. Parker grabbed Gate-Officer around the neck, rabbit-punching him with three short, sharp, hard-knuckle blows. The man went down.
“Cuff him,” Parker told Kenny as he bent to ensure Mr. Bryce Comb-Over was unconscious, as well, giving him a savage short-arm punch to the temple. The force of the blow lifted the flap of hair off Bryce’s pate like the opening to the lair of a trap-door spider, and Parker cuffed him and dragged him to a corner of the port, instructing Kenny to do the same with the other guy.
It was only then that Parker saw that Kenny was crying.
“I’m not going to hurt you, son, if you do as you’re told. That’s all you have to do to stay alive.”
The boy nodded his terrified assent as fat tears dripped off his nose. They made him look even younger than he had before.
Parker took the magazines from the corrections officers’ guns and pocketed them. He was amassing quite an arsenal. Right now, though, he still hoped he could get out of the place without firing a shot. Bullet slinging would offer a whole new level of pain to this impromptu prison break, and if he could walk out of here without there being a firefight, that would suit Parker just fine.
Parker used his cuff to wipe the tears from Kenny’s face and nose. “Son, if we walk out of here and someone sees you crying, we’re busted. I need you to look normal. Well, as normal as a guy who’s peed his pants looks, okay?”
“Y-yes,” Kenny said. “I’m just scared is all.”
“So am I, son. So am I.”
They made it to the next port without incident, and halfway along the corridor the klaxon wail rang down to the sound of a dying rhinoceros breathing its last.
“Does that mean it’s emergency over?”
“No,” said Kenny, his face dry now but his eyes still a little red. “Someone goes to the roof and operates it for five minutes. That’s meant to get everyone to the rally point who’s supposed to go there.”
Parker hoped no one was going to do a head count of corrections officers, considering the trail of sleeping workers in his wake.
Beyond the next port was the rally point.
Already, thirty or so corrections officers had assembled to get their orders. There was a goldfish bowl containing ranks of dead CCTV screens, and at the front of it stood a senior-looking officer who was preparing to address his assembled teams.
Parker and Kenny joined the back of the small crowd, and Parker tried to shrink in his shirt. Everyone was looking forward, ready to listen. Parker’s plan was to listen to the briefing and melt away while everyone was consumed by whatever the emergency was.
The senior corrections officer, a gray-haired, sixty-year-old bulldog sporting a walrus mustache and a tobacco chewer’s mouth, put his hands on his hips and began.
“We got a situation on D-Block, gentlemen and ladies. Hostages have been taken, weapons have been seized, and barricades have been put across both access corridors.”
A hubbub of voices broke out. The senior corrections officer, whose nametape, Parker could now see, read “Rayleigh,” raised his hands in a placating gesture. “Simmer down. Yes, the occupants of D-Block are not what you might call the most cooperative of prisoners, but they’re political, not career, criminals. They have demands. That gives us options. That said, if you have to go in weapons hot and take out a few of the motherfuckers once the hostages have been released, I won’t be filling out any forms to have you disciplined, if you get my drift.”
There was a ripple of laughter among the crowd. Parker felt bile rising in his throat as he listened. As a cop, he’d been in plenty of situations where he could have cleaned the streets of some serious shit with a bullet and a blind eye. But what was the point of being the same as the scum you were fighting? What was the point of fighting anything evil if you ended up as evil as them?
Parker felt his face warming and his eyes focusing hard on Rayleigh. The walrus-faced fuck was the sort of petty autocrat who stood behind violence to shield himself from justice. Parker despised men like this. It was men of this weak character who’d created the world he’d wanted to escape from in his cabin. Men like this who broke his heart and made him doubt whether humanity had any chance at all.
Rayleigh continued, “I’ve already sent the negotiation team in to speak to the leader. That resistance bitch, Calman. No doubt, she’ll be looking for recognition as political prisoners, just like the last time.”
Parker’s ears pricked at the word “resistance.” It chilled him. So, there was a prison population of resistance fighters here, and some of them were women?
Jesus. What if Sara or Ava had been captured during his weeks of solitary confinement? What if his daughter was on D-Block now, behind a barricade, about to be dealt with by teams of corrections officers going in armed and dirty, with a boss who was telling them he’d look the other way?
Dead Reckoning (911 Book 3) Page 8