Sara had expected this, Ava knew. “That’s true, Crow, I can’t argue against your logic. But logic isn’t the only thing to consider here.”
Crow scoffed, but didn’t argue immediately. A few faces at the table showed they were more in his camp than Sara’s, however.
“My dad was a 911 dispatcher,” Sara continued. “Every hour, sometimes every minute, people would ring that number at the most terrible moments in their lives to ask for help. They would be in a time of extreme need. What was he supposed to tell them? ‘I’m sorry, ma’am, we’re moving offices and we need every available body here to carry boxes? I know your husband is bleeding there in front of you, ma’am, but I reckon I can get someone to you by… say, Tuesday?’”
Crow’s face had reddened as Sara spoke, and he thumped his fist hard on a nearby table. “Now, you just hold on a minute, you—”
Sara held up her hand, and said clearly and loudly: “Crow, I have not finished.”
He turned to Margret. “Margie, have I got to sit here and listen to this emotive bullshit?”
Margret smiled. “Yes, Crow, I think you do. Let the lady finish.”
Crow deflated like a week-old birthday balloon and collapsed back in his chair.
“When Ava and I went to scope the Terre Haute prison facility, we saw trucks of civilians—shackled civilians—being taken inside. Two of those men made a break for it as the truck slowed down at the entrance gates. Their hands were tied, their legs in chains, but they tried.”
The room had gone silent, the air still, and everyone was razor-focused on Jim Parker’s daughter, Ava included.
“They got about twenty feet before the guards caught them. Instead of dragging those civilians back to the truck, they put them on their knees in front of their friends, maybe their own families, and shot them both through the backs of their heads. In front of their friends, their families, their wives, and their children. Because, yes, there were children in those trucks.”
The color was draining from Crow’s face.
Sara gave the room a moment to breathe, and then continued, “This is what America has become, ladies and gentlemen. This is what the Nazis did to the Jews, and it is happening right there in Terre Haute. I don’t know if people are being exterminated in that camp, but we saw two executions outside of it. This is an emergency. This is 911, or the closest we have to it now, and those people are calling us. So, there’s the question. Do we walk away? Do we prioritize ourselves, or do we go to help them?”
Ava had never felt a room so shivery with natural electricity. You could have powered all of Chicago with the energy being generated in the room. She looked at Sara and realized, for the first time, that for all intents and purposes, she was a little bit in love.
Sara, though, was immobile, her eyes fixed and her hands on her hips, daring someone to argue with her.
Margret stood. “Thank you, Sara.” She scanned the room, meeting the eyes of those surrounding her, one by one. “Okay, everyone, you’ve heard what she has to say. The question has been raised. Do we fight or flee? Raise your hand to fight.”
Crow Michelson was the very first to raise his hand, and everyone else followed immediately thereafter.
13
Parker was pushed down the last few steps of the landing by one of the corrections officers escorting him to the recreation area. He pitched forward from the force, just managing to break his fall with his hands before he broke his nose. He rolled onto his back to see Rodgers extend his baton with a flick of the wrist and touch the point of it against Parker’s chin.
“Careful there, asshole, or you might hurt yourself if you’re not careful.”
The other officer, Castillo—a thin, mustachioed Hispanic with a rasping laugh and a graveyard of crooked teeth for a mouth—hissed his approval at his colleague’s humor. Beside him, Rodgers was white and hairless and pudgy, like a Kewpie doll made from candy icing on a child’s birthday cake. His eyelashes were long and feminine; his demeanor anything but.
They’d come for Parker, unexpectedly, after breakfast, with the news that, on Spencer’s orders, he was going to be allowed to associate with the general population. Supposedly, to see how well he “played” with others.
Parker wondered what twisted machinations this change in his circumstances represented, but he knew he’d have to be at his most alert and ready, no matter what. Whatever Spencer had planned would not be fun.
It had been five days since Calhoun had passed him the note, and he had seen her, as promised, to check on his wounds, but she’d made no more attempts at clandestine communication, other than to accept the crumpled note back from Parker’s hand as she’d put his used dressings into that clinical waste bag she’d carried in.
What was Calhoun plotting? He had to wonder if this was a genuine attempt to reach out to him, or another of the sick mind games Spencer liked playing.
Parker had no idea, and couldn’t risk talking to anyone about it. But as unlikely as it seemed that she might want to help him, he also couldn’t ignore the possibility that, at least for the moment, she was on his side.
He’d pretty much been left to himself in the cell, other than at meal times and twice being taken to shower. Even the 1 a.m. beatings had stopped.
Sara’s death still gnawed savagely at him, but depression was transforming into a background rage that, right now, was still easy to control. A few more pushes down the stairs, however, and Parker wondered what might happen to his self-control. But he didn’t want to waste a chance to get his hands on Spencer by hitting Rodgers back, so he lowered his eyes and climbed back to his feet.
It was the same recreation area he’d passed through with Kenny. Two table tennis set-ups at which no one was playing, and the eating area of fixed tables and chairs, which now held fifteen or so men dressed in orange jumpsuits, all of them in tight huddles having quiet conversations.
The prevalence of amateur tattoos on forearms, necks, and faces told Parker that the other inmates of C-Block were unlikely to be resistance fighters, and more likely to be prisoners who had been in the facility before the EMP. Perhaps the same kind of men Spencer had used to spread fear and violence on the night of the Event. The type of men who had been fixing to rape Finn.
Parker wondered if they knew who he was. Ex-cops weren’t the most welcome among this population.
With his cop’s eye, Parker scanned the faces as best he could as Castillo and Rodgers pushed him toward the nearest knot of prisoners. The only face he recognized was Henshaw, the thin, white-afroed trustee, but the man made no sign that he recognized Parker in return.
Rodgers and Castillo returned to the officer station at the end of the hall, and Parker was left marooned in space. All the seats were occupied except one, so, shrugging to himself, Parker headed toward it.
Before he sat at a table with five other convicts, who each looked as if they’d been carved that morning from solid hunks of antisocial behavior, Henshaw caught his eye. The trustee didn’t say anything, but the look on his face told Parker that sitting at this table wasn’t a good idea.
Parker sighed and walked past the only empty chair. When he reached the wall at the other end of the recreation area, he leaned against it with a growing sense of resignation. He had more questions in his head than answers, and he still didn’t know how he was going to get out of here, what Spencer’s plans for him were, what Calhoun’s note would lead to, or how he was going to bring down the Council. Everything right now was a complex puzzle and none of the pieces fit together. Or even came from the same picture.
And hanging over it all was Sara. How was he expected to carry on when the person he’d pledged to protect, his own blood, was lying cold on a slab somewhere, awaiting cremation?
At first, even after Calhoun’s note, he hadn’t cared about any of it anymore. He’d told himself he ought to lie back and die, finally, instead of being too stubborn to just fucking give up. Those sentiments had bled out like Finn, though, partly because of
the images of Sara’s and Finn’s bodies that stayed arrested in his mind, demanding revenge. He didn’t only want to take down the men who’d been at the forefront of their deaths; he wanted retribution against the whole goddamned Council. It had taken time, but his depression and grief had given way to rage and determination. He wouldn’t be giving up any time soon, regardless of the odds he faced.
Parker was so lost in his thoughts that he didn’t notice one of the convicts from the table with the empty chair had risen and entered his orbit. This giant was the equivalent of three enormous black guys who’d been poured into one body. Parker was tall, but this guy could have whispered in a giraffe’s ear by standing on tiptoe. His hair was a wild afro, and three incisors had been replaced with gold teeth. His arms folded slowly and deliberately across his chest, and Parker could see exactly what was happening. The underside of the man’s forearm held the crossed spears and diamond shield tattoo of the Mandingo Warriors gang, a vicious, exclusively black brotherhood of men, set up specifically to protect their brethren from the ultra-racist Aryan Brotherhood in prison and beyond. As a cop, Parker had had several run-ins with Demo, as the Mandingo Warriors styled themselves. Such encounters were never pretty. Being a cop was seen as bad—but being a black cop, well, that was especially disappointing, as far as they were concerned.
This mountain on legs wouldn’t be the leader of his prison tribe, though. He’d be one of the foot soldiers sent by the leader, who Parker guessed was still back at the table, waiting to see what this new face could bring. This was a well-tested ritual, and Parker knew showing any sign of weakness would color his whole time among these inmates. This was his first opportunity to make them understand he was someone to be reckoned with.
The arms-folded Mandingo said nothing. He just stared at Parker with intense eyes that could have drilled through iron.
Parker had three choices—to break eye contact and show acquiescence, to attempt to attack the guy with a sequence of punches that would probably see him fatally shanked with a prison knife before Castillo and Rodgers intervened, if they even bothered, or the third option…
Parker reached up, pulled the Mandingo’s head down, and kissed him on the forehead. The Mandingo staggered back as if electrocuted and raised a fist to punch Parker into the middle of next week, but his wrist was caught in a sudden grip from behind.
“No, dawg,” said a voice that dripped with authoritarian menace. “Do not touch him.”
The Mandingo stepped away, revealing a much smaller black man. He was of similar build and height to Parker. He had less ink than the Mandingos, but bore the same spear and diamond shield tattoo. He pointed at the table from where he’d just sprung.
“Sit,” he motioned to Parker.
The Mandingo’s name was Gace, and his gang-boss was Kleet.
Kleet seemed fascinated by Parker’s skin beneath the jumpsuit, rolling back his sleeves and pulling the collar apart at his neck and chest. It was as if he’d never seen a black man without gang tattoos as ID.
Prison tattoos were a currency of trust in the penitentiary system, and Parker knew it. If you understood what to look for in the markings of rival gangs, you knew who to maim or kill. No one wanted to make the mistake of killing someone from their own or an allied tribe. But if you didn’t belong, if you had no allegiance, you were everyone’s prey.
“You’re either a spy or a fool,” said Kleet when he finished sizing up Parker.
“Neither,” said Parker. “I upset a few people in the government. They put me in here until they work out if they want to hang me or shoot me.”
Kleet laughed. “And you kissed Gace to get our attention. Your only way out of an impossible situation. I like your spunk.”
“I don’t know you yet,” Parker replied, with his first half-smile in a month.
Kleet clapped him on the shoulder and announced that no one was to mess with Parker. Gace looked positively crestfallen, and rubbed at the patch of skin Parker had kissed like he was trying to scrub a bad memory off his head.
Kleet was in for murder one, armed robbery, and more Class-A misdemeanors concerning drugs and prostitution than he could be bothered to list. Kleet’s greatest regret, he declared, was not killing the guys he’d killed twice. They’d raped his gang-sister, and they, as far as he was concerned, deserved to die more than once. Being deleted once wasn’t enough.
When Parker had had dealings with career criminals as a cop, the first thing that had come out of their mouths when he’d come into contact with them had been “It wasn’t me! I didn’t do it!”
Kleet was the complete opposite. He was proud of what he’d achieved within the criminal underbelly he inhabited. He understood that world and seemed to have made a success of his time in it; except, of course, for getting caught. Parker considered it bad form to mention the last point, seeing as how everything else was going so well.
Listening to the man’s life story, Parker couldn’t even begin to measure the gulf between his life and Kleet’s; it felt like a billion miles in terms of experience and action, and yet here they both were, guilty of their crimes (in the eyes of what passed as law in the U.S. now), and both willing to do more of the same. Kleet to outdo his rival gangs in Indianapolis by whatever means necessary, and Parker feeling the same way about the Council in Chicago.
The other Mandingos in the gang sat silent as Kleet held court at the table, and Parker took every one of them in. Each was built in various shades of Gace, and each could have taken Kleet out with a hand tied behind their backs and one eye closed. That none of them would was a mark of Kleet’s power, both within the prison and without, in the pre-EMP Event world, anyway.
What impressed Parker most in the here and now, though, was that Kleet wasn’t boastful. He wasn’t acting beyond his own capabilities, and he displayed a primal bravery and honor toward his men and the people in his care. There was a feudal aspect to his talk of territories, soldiers, and the craft of criminality, but as Parker listened, it occurred to him that this attitude fit the new world pretty well.
Parker couldn’t bring himself to feel positive about the man Kleet had been in the past, but what about the future? Did the new world need men like Kleet to take it back now? Did Kleet represent the kind of man who might be useful in the fight to come? In the same way Spencer was using convicts to spread horror and violence, the question seemed to have become whether Parker could see himself enlisting men like Kleet to fight alongside him. But then, Parker wondered, would Kleet even care? If he was outside the prison system tomorrow, would he exploit citizens in exactly the same way he had before?
Meet the new ruling class, same as the old.
Or… did Kleet have a pearl of civic duty in the closed clamshell of his criminal intent?
But whatever Kleet’s crimes were, and however they were listed out—and they had been many and varied—he was a leader of men. Charismatic, assured, and supremely confident of his abilities. If nothing else, Parker wondered what he could learn from a man like Kleet… what he could get him to do. Would trying and potentially succeeding make him as bad as Spencer, just viewed from the other end of the telescope?
Questions. Questions. Questions. But few answers.
If he got the chance to associate with the general prison population again, Parker’s immediate mission would be to find some answers. He’d have to, assuming he wanted to survive.
14
The modifications to the firetruck worked.
It was a dinosaur of a beast, built in the early 1970s with an electrical system too basic and simple to be affected by the EMP blast, and it had been left to languish at this rural substation of a county volunteer fire department on the outskirts of Billtown. It ran like an ill-tempered mule and was loud as a tractor. But it was also fully functional, powerful, and big. And now it was ready.
Sara’s plan was simple, the way most combat plans needed to be. Using welding torches, the guerilla cell had upgraded the truck with hillbilly armor to her spec
ifications, until it had become a makeshift armored personnel carrier. It could stand up to small arms fire at least well enough to penetrate the gates of the prison. Once inside, it would provide a secure and defensible shelter from which to launch an assault into the prison proper.
Margret had sent scout observer teams ahead to get a full picture of the movements and numbers of corrections officers at the facility, as well as to take a look at the presence, if any, of FEMA troops, and gather any other intelligence they could regarding the defenses inside the prison. Anything to help them once they were through the gates.
To get as close as possible to the Terre Haute facility while remaining unseen, the cell had taken a circuitous route, utilizing open fields along with the occasional state or county access road. Running with the lights off, they thought they could make it unnoticed almost to the bottom of the small hill leading up to the installation. The final half mile would be a head-on charge under fire, but they were hoping speed could carry them through the outer defenses and directly into the heart of the facility.
Sara and Ava walked ahead of the lumbering truck, behind that Margret was driven by Crow in the F-250, and they came with a long stream of fighters, perhaps two hundred pulled together from the cells around Billtown and surrounding areas walking purposefully in their wake. They carried the cell’s entire stock of weaponry with them: MP7s, M500s, M16s, and many Colt AR-15 5.56×45 mm magazine-fed semiautomatics. Some of them with high capacity magazines and bump-stocks. Cell operatives had worked through the night to increase their store of pipe bombs by breaking up the C4 from the firebox in the F-250. They had also made some larger IEDs which would be used to take out the main doors to the prison.
It wasn’t a well-drilled military spec fighting force by any stretch of the imagination, but Sara’s speech in the clubhouse had been relayed by their cell leaders to every one of them, and the ARM fighters were fired up, ready to release as many prisoners from the hell of the Terre Haute facility as they could.
Dead Reckoning (911 Book 3) Page 12