Parker’s prison break had taken a whole new turn. He grabbed Kenny’s arm and dug his fingers in hard, not listening as Rayleigh finished off his pep talk. Deputies started handing out M500 pump-action, 12-gauge shotguns from an armory store next to the goldfish bowl.
“Kenny, is there a Sara Parker on D-Block?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never worked there.”
“Where can we find the lists of prisoners? I need to know if my daughter is about to get shot.”
“Y-your daughter?”
“Yes. And if you think I was mean and scary before, you’d better prepare for next level, boy.”
Kenny was shaking again.
“I need a list. Now. And you are going to get it for me.”
Tears pricked the corners of Kenny’s eyes, but Parker had no time to give the boy a chance to pull himself together.
“I said now. Where is it?”
“Rayleigh’s office would have one, I guess.”
“And that’s where exactly?”
“Next to where they’re handing out the shotguns.”
Of course it is. Yup. That’s exactly where it would be, Parker thought bitterly. One day, just one day not turning into an enormous shitshow. That’s all I ask, Lord.
The corrections officers who were getting their shotguns were now going to another store to get Kevlar vests, neoprene arm and leg armor, and tactical ballistic helmets fixed with injection-molded polycarbonate face shields.
The crowd in front of Parker and Kenny was thinning as the corrections officers got their weapons and armor, organizing into their strike teams under Rayleigh’s deputies. There was no longer any chance to go back the way they’d come, but then again, that hadn’t been much of an option before anyway; Parker and Kenny would reach the end of the line and have to come under the scrutiny of Rayleigh and his men.
Although Parker was a head taller than Kenny, he stood behind him, as this would at least hide the stretched material of his shirt, and he prayed that Kenny’s pants had dried sufficiently in the last twenty minutes to escape suspicion.
There was a line of only five corrections officers in front of them now. Parker felt his heart hammering and his mouth drying, and he wondered if that stink of sweat in his nostrils came from Kenny or himself. Probably both.
Rayleigh turned away from the front of the crowd and went back into his office. The last few shotguns and pieces of armor were handed out. Parker tensed, ready to reach for his holstered Beretta even though he didn’t much fancy his chances against thirty corrections officers with M500s and the confidence of body armor.
It would be a very short trip to hell.
Parker leaned forward and whispered in Kenny’s ear: “I want you to go into Rayleigh’s office and get the prisoner list.”
“He’s not going to give it to me. Listen, mister, I’m doing everything you ask, but if you think he’s gonna give me that information without wanting to know why, you might as well shoot me now. It just ain’t gonna happen.”
“Just walk to the office, kid, and I’ll create a distraction that will draw him out before you get there. Remember, I’ll be watching you the whole time. One wrong move and you’ll regret it.”
“I’m already regretting it, sir.”
Parker put a hand on Kenny’s back and pushed him forward firmly. “Go.”
Kenny began to walk toward Rayleigh’s goldfish bowl of an office.
The last few corrections officers were putting on their armor, shotguns resting against the wall. The deputies had backed into the storeroom and armory to lift out equipment for Kenny, Parker, and the last few stragglers. Parker felt exposed now more than ever, but still no one was looking in his direction. He sneaked a quick look behind him to make sure no one would be able to see what he did next. From the leg pouch next to his holster, Parker pulled out a small CS gas grenade. Taking a deep breath, he pulled the pin and threw it over the heads of the suiting-up corrections officers so it landed exactly where it needed to: inside the armory. No one had seen where the canister had originated, but as it popped open with a hiss, everyone knew where it was now.
“Christ! Gas!” someone shouted. The corrections officer in the armor storeroom came out through the door coughing and spluttering, his eyes streaming. The suited officers were running backwards, away from the pall of irritant. Parker had guessed correctly that the armory was where any SGE 400/3 gas masks or equivalents might be stored, so now they were unavailable. That meant everyone was going to be concentrating on the gas, and not on Parker.
Keeping his mouth closed and his eye slit, Parker moved toward the goldfish bowl. Kenny was already inside, and Rayleigh was pushing past him to see what the commotion was. Once inside, Kenny began pulling out drawers from filing cabinets and searching Rayleigh’s desk. The walrus-faced senior corrections officer walked into the pall of tear gas, shouting at his men, wanting to know what in the blue fucking blazes was going on.
Parker took three more paces toward the goldfish bowl. The key to surviving CS gas without a respirator was to run away. Simple as that. Once the micro-powder got into your eyes, the pain was severe and the tears debilitating. Parker only had one eye to close. So, squeezing his good eye into a slit, he skirted around the main core of billowing gas coming from the armory some twenty feet from the goldfish bowl. He put the crook of his elbow over his mouth and nose, trying to breathe only when he needed to through the material. Parker steeled himself against the stinging in the slit of his right eye. He fixed his already compromised vision on the goldfish bowl door so, if in the end he had no choice but to close it, he at least knew the direction he had to keep walking in.
The shouts were dying down from across the rallying area. Someone had managed to close the armory door and that had stopped the flow of fresh gas leaking into the area. There was still a huge amount of the white gas to be dealt with, but it was no longer expanding.
Parker reached the office doorway.
Kenny had stopped searching, and Parker saw in the boy’s hand what he’d been so diligently looking for.
Not a folder, but Rayleigh’s spare Beretta.
Kenny squeezed the trigger and the pistol bucked in his hand.
Parker was already diving to one side as the round sizzled past his ear, the clink of the clearing casing tinking against the doorframe where Kenny stood.
Sonovabitch, Parker thought as he hit the floor, rolling on his shoulder and back up to a knee as he drew his own Beretta.
“Convict escaping! Convict es-ack—” Kenny’s words stalled in his mouth as two closely grouped bullet impacts expanded his throat like a bullfrog and almost tore his head from his body. Kenny’s body collapsed in a gush of blood.
Two things immediately concerned Parker about what had just happened. First, the gunfire in the enclosed space would have alerted all the officers in the vicinity to Parker, and in this room full of shotguns, that was… problematic. And second, maybe more importantly, Parker had not fired the shots that had stolen Kenny’s voice and his life.
“Gun down and hands up, Mr. Parker,” said a voice Parker recognized at once.
He held the Beretta out and let it drop, raising his hands above his head.
“You may turn around.”
As he did so, the voice barked orders at the senior corrections officer. “Rayleigh, get one of your imbecile men to open a window. I find the whiff of CS gas mighty irritating. Much like the way I feel about how you’ve been running this facility in my absence.”
Rayleigh began ordering his men around.
Parker had now turned a full 180 on his knee.
As the last of the gas cleared, through tears, he saw a tight group of eight U.S. Marshals in gas masks holding shotguns and pistols. All pointing at him.
At the head of the marshals was a high ranking corrections official. This was indicated by his uniform braiding, long service medals, and evidence of commendations. The man was holstering the SIG Sauer that had provided the fatal period to
Kenny’s final utterance. He was taking off his gas mask and giving Parker visual confirmation of what he’d already guessed from the voice.
“If anyone is going to shoot James Parker, it is going to be me,” Warden Spencer announced.
10
Sara came to in darkness and in silence.
She was either deaf and blind, or otherwise in a pitch-black, acoustic dead zone. It took her a couple of seconds to organize her thoughts, and to realize she was still holding Ava’s hand. Her shoulder ached, and her knees felt like she’d scraped all the skin from them. Her mouth was full of dust and she was lying on something hard and cold. Warm liquid ran down her cheek, too, and in the dark she brought her free hand up to touch her face, feeling out the runnels of sticky liquid nestling in the hollows of her neck and shoulder. She could feel the liquid drying, and the chill shiver of evaporation as whatever the wetness was started to dry on her skin.
“Mmmm. HmmHHmmmmHHhhhhhhhh.”
Not deaf, then.
They were words, but she couldn’t make them out. Suddenly, a bright light shone directly into her eyes. If the blast of light hadn’t hurt so much, she might have been more thankful that she hadn’t gone blind, as well. But as it was, she just wanted to turn her head away. That’s when she saw that the hand that had touched her cheek was gloved in red.
Blood.
Sara felt her face again, letting go of Ava’s hand as she tried to sit up.
“Are you okay, ma’am?”
She recognized the voice, but couldn’t attach a name to it. Eventually she realized it was the girl… the girl in the bedroom in the house in Seelyville.
The girl with the secret.
Jessica. Yes. Jessica. That was her name.
Sara’s eyes were getting used to the light, and details of her surroundings were leafing out of the darkness. The overwhelming color of wherever they were was dirt brown. Even the light source was tinged with it. Dust rained down from above, too. Catching in her throat, gritting her eyes. Sara had to wipe them twice before the tears cleared. The room she saw was maybe thirty feet square. Constructed from bare bricks, lined with metal shelves full of tins of every possible kind, packets of staples, boxes of cereal, noodles, and vacuum-packed survival rations. For a moment, it took her right back to the basement in Parker’s cabin.
Then she noticed Ava, lying unmoving on the floor next to her.
In the dancing light, Sara could see a growing contusion filling with fluid in the middle of Ava’s forehead. Sara instinctively felt for a pulse, and was heartened by the strong beat of Ava’s heart beneath her fingers. Quickly, she felt her friend over, looking for more injuries but not finding anything significant beyond bumps and cuts. Her friend had taken an enormous whack to the head at some point, and looked like she’d be out for a while, but she’d be okay.
She looked up to talk to Jessica, and suddenly a gun emerged from the darkness—held in a firm, white-knuckled grip.
The light wasn’t clear enough for the pistol to be identified, but as the dusty beam swung up, Sara caught a glimpse of a well-muscled forearm, a red checkered shirt with the cuff rolled up to the bicep, and a beaded, old-young face in a halo of dark curls, sporting laser-focused green eyes, a set mouth, and a well-kept, but wiry beard.
“So, before I shoot you for blowing up my house, why don’t you tell me who the hell you are and why you stopped in this anonymous burg? Hmm?”
Sara saw the knuckles whiten further as he began to apply pressure to the trigger.
“Daddy! No!” yelled Jessica, looking up from the crouch she’d taken beside Ava. “It was the bad man! These ladies saved me! If it wasn’t for them, I’d be shot.”
The man didn’t lower the gun, but the blood returned to his knuckle-joint. He looked at Ava lying there in her ACU.
“She’s FEMA. FEMA killed my wife and my boy. I am not feeling at my most merciful right now.”
Sara tried not to rush her words, desperate as she was to stop either of them getting shot. “This’s Ava. She’s not FEMA. We’re resistance. She’s in disguise, sir, I promise you.” It was only when the words left her lips that she realized how lame they must have sounded. “Can I check her pocket for ID? Please? And show you?”
The man nodded, and Sara began patting Ava down. Ava groaned and tried to roll away. That was another good sign, consciousness returning. Sara found a driver’s license in a breast pouch, plus a FEMA ID for a Corporal Andrew J. Wooding, and handed them over. The man flicked his eyes to each laminated card, and then looked at Ava.
“Lost some weight.”
“And some gender.” Sara hoped the quip would relieve the tension in the confined space, and from the look on his face and the way Jessica was looking at Ava, she thought it had worked.
The man threw the cards down and lowered his gun. It was, she could now see, a SIG Sauer P228, fitted with an unlit Streamlight TLR-1s weapon light. The man knew what he was doing around weaponry, then.
“My name is Sara Parker,” she said, holding out her hand. “We followed the man your daughter mentioned into your house; he had the explosives.”
The man smiled wide, flicked the SIG to safe before he put the gun down on a metal shelf next to an industrial-sized tin can of coffee.
“Sara Parker? Sara goddamned Parker, daughter of Jimmy Parker? No shit?”
Sara didn’t fully comprehend, but she went with the flow anyway. “That’s me. Sara Parker, living and breathing.”
The man hissed a laughing breath and clapped his hands on his thigh.
“Sara Parker. I don’t believe it! Jimmy Parker’s girl, all growed up!”
His name was Mace Richardson, and Jessica Richardson was his eleven (eleven last week, Daddy, and you forgot!) daughter. They were in his family’s fall-out/general purpose TEOTWAWKI shelter, fifteen feet below the property’s basement. Its entrance had been made via a steel ladder affixed inside a steel tube, from a surface hatch in Jessica’s room. She’d held off telling them for so long because she wasn’t supposed to go upstairs without her father, and she’d done so anyway while he’d been dozing.
Mace was a prepper and, since the SHTF, this was where he and his family had been hiding out. Mace told Sara that, not long after the EMP Event, all of Seelyville, except the Richardsons, had evacuated to the Terre Haute Mercy Center. Mace had a basic mistrust of government and, knowing he had more than a year’s supply of food in the shelter, he’d thought it would be better if his family stayed where they belonged until “Situation Normal,” as Mace put it, returned.
Outfitted like her own father’s cabin basement, Mace’s shelter was packed with food and other supplies. A metal lining behind the brickwork had afforded excellent Faraday-cage-like EMP resistance, and so the electrics down here worked fine, even after the explosion. A faucet draining into a huge enameled sink was plumbed through the foundations of the house into an old well out back. The water the well produced came through a gravity filter and purifier, and tasted clean and fresh when Sara sipped it gratefully. There was a rack of books and magazines, and packs and packs of cellophane-wrapped batteries of all shapes and sizes, plus a camping stove with more than a dozen gas canisters locked in a fire chest. Not to mention several shotguns, handguns, collapsible fishing rods, and a shit ton of ammunition.
This wasn’t just prepping. This was an Aladdin’s cave of survival. With all this wonder before her eyes, half lost in her own memories of her father’s prepping and their time together, Sara felt bad that she’d almost asked about how Mace knew her father before asking what had happened to his wife and son.
Mace’s eyes dropped when she did, and he pulled his daughter to his side before responding.
“FEMA. Jessica and me were out checking our snares for fresh cottontail in the woods up by Snake Creek. Marion and Corey were in the Christian Center looking for books in the library they got there. The FEMA scum musta caught them coming out as they rolled up. Looting is a capital offense in a state of emergency. They shot them
with their M220s, I guess. It was all over by the time Jess and me got back. There wasn’t much left to bury.”
Sara swallowed, trying not to think of what Jessica must have seen. “I’m sorry,” she choked out.
“People thought I was insane building this shelter, making a safe place for my family. I lost count of the times I was laughed at and ridiculed. I’m not some nut, though. I just wanted to protect what I love, in case anything… changed. Had Marion and Corey stayed in the shelter, they would be alive today. Outside, it’s not safe for anyone. After the EMP attack or before, you ask me.”
There was a long silence after that, until Ava began to stir, her hand going to the hardening bump in the center of her forehead even before she opened her eyes.
Solon had detonated his bomb just as Ava had been pulling closed the hatch above her; it had slammed the hatch shut and knocked Ava down fifteen feet. She’d crashed onto Sara and they’d both been knocked unconscious. Jessica’s reminder of their final moments upstairs in her bedroom helped Sara remember the rest. She felt shocked all over again at how lucky they’d been.
“Don’t speak,” Sara told Ava as her eyes widened at her surroundings. “We’re safe. Just keep still for now.” Ava nodded and accepted the sip of water from the mug Jessica held to her lips.
Mace had already tried to open the hatch while they were unconscious to see the extent of the damage, but there must have been a whole heap of timber and rubble from the destroyed house on top of it and it wouldn’t budge. They’d have to hope wreckage from the home was moved if they stood a chance of getting out, he admitted.
Realistically, Sara doubted Margret and the others would bother searching through the wreckage for their bodies. Perhaps they were here for the duration, until… until what? Well, at least there was plenty of food and water.
Dead Reckoning (911 Book 3) Page 9