“But something happened while I was out in the big world, Parker. Something unexpected.”
Spencer had to apply a new light to the end of his cigar. Since the coughing fit, he’d neglected it and it had gone out. He puffed hard as his Zippo licked flame on the end of the cigar. “Cheap shit stogie. You just can’t get the good stuff anymore.”
The cloud of blue smoke drifted across the table between Spencer and Parker, flickering between ephemeral and substantial, depending on the stuttering intensity of the strip light.
“I started to hear stories, Parker. We’d capture terrorists and ask questions, about your so-called resistance, and you know who a lot of their ramblings referred to?”
Parker shook his head, tempted to tell Spencer to shit or get off the pot.
“They were referring to you, Jimbob. Fancy that. Little old you. It seems that, out there in the land of the oppressed, you have become something of a myth to inspire the masses.”
Parker stared back at the warden, wondering when the joke was coming. But the man seemed deadset serious. Of all things, this hadn’t been what Parker was expecting.
Spencer leaned in, and now Parker could hear the outrage in his voice. “There are people out there doing things in your name, against the Council, FEMA, the government… hell, even against me. Blowing up shit, attacking shit, shooting shit—and a number of them are doing it in your name. Or by your example. Apparently, while you’ve been here, detained at my pleasure, you’ve also been in Mississippi, blowing up bridges; you’ve been in Kentucky, stealing from our ammunition dumps; and in, get this—boy, you will not believe it—in Chicago, when the undersecretary for defense was assassinated… well, there at that moment, I hear you your goddamned self pulled the trigger. All while you were stuck here in this jail, enjoying the hospitality of our free fucking heroin. What do you make of that, boy? Huh? Whatcha got to say to that?” Spencer snarled.
Parker’s head was spinning, but the rage in Spencer’s expression was enough to tell him that the man meant what he said. What the hell?
“I can see from your eye there that you are surprised by this development, Parker. And hell, I thought you might be,” Spencer added in disgust, spitting onto the floor in emphasis. “Jesus, I’m telling you—not as surprised as I was. Fuck. Jimbob a fucking myth. All fucking John Wayne rolling into every town to take on the bad guys. Jimbob Parker… The Magnificent One! Jesus.”
Spencer laughed himself into an angry fit. It took nearly two minutes for him to stop, and included Spencer croaking to the marshal to get him a glass of water. When Spencer had finished coughing, and drained the cup, he said simply and quietly, with his eyes fixed on Parker: “Unfortunately, you can’t kill a myth.”
Parker said nothing. He only stared back into the abyss of Spencer’s face.
“A myth is a story. You can’t kill a story, Jimbob… but you can… un-tell it.”
Spencer had to relight his cigar for the second time.
“So, you’re going to die, Jimbob, and I’m going to kill you myself, with my own bare hands. I’m going to take out your remaining eye and I’m going to chew it up next to your ear, smacking my lips and savoring every gristly moment. And when you hear me swallow it, you’ll know that the next thing I’m gonna do is eat out your heart.
“But before that, I have to attend to the Myth of Parker. I have to send a message to the masses that you are not to be trusted, that you are not to be followed, and that anyone who does has made the worst fucking decision of their lives. My mission, therefore, is to ensure that your mythology does not become martyrdom.”
Spencer’s last words were a hiss and for the first time since their conversation had begun, Parker felt a chill run through him.
“But, Parker, that’s all for tomorrow when my guest arrives. Tonight, I think there should be a truce. A relaxation of hostilities. For old time’s sake. What do you say?”
Parker had barely followed where this conversation had come from, let alone formed a response. He remained silent, staring back at the warden as if to dare him into answering his own question.
“How ’bout we start with a peace offering?” Spencer reached into his uniform breast pocket, pulled out a cigar tube, and placed it carefully on the table next to Parker’s hands. “Here you go, Jimbob. Be my guest.”
Parker left the tube where it was.
“No, I insist. Open it. Please.”
Parker did as he was told. He unscrewed the lid on the cigar tube, upending it to let gravity slide the cigar out; but all that came out was a crumbly mass of ash. It covered Parker’s hand, settling into the cracks in his skin.
He looked at Spencer. “What the…?”
Spencer smiled into Parker’s eye. “I thought you might like to spend some time with Sara… before I flush the rest of her down the toilet…”
When Parker finished vomiting, Spencer sent the marshal out to get him a towel and some water in a plastic cup.
Parker’s wrists were raw and bleeding from where the cuffs had dug in as he’d yanked at the restraints, trying to break free and get to Spencer. But the cuffs had been too strong, the restraining bar on the table too sturdy. So, spent, exhausted, stinking from the vomit soaking into the front of his jumpsuit and pooling at his feet, Parker slumped back in his chair and made eye contact with Spencer for the first time since he’d opened the cigar tube.
The towel and the cup of water went unused on the table. All Parker wanted to do in this moment was spit curses at the man before him. “I will kill you, Spencer. I will kill you, and I will take down the Council. I swear on everything holy in this fucked up universe. I. Will. End. You.”
Spencer grimaced as he brushed Sara’s remains from the table and rubbed the palms of his hands, like a man getting rid of something distasteful on his skin.
The warden opened his mouth to speak, and then seemed momentarily distracted. He cocked his head to one side.
Parker listened, too. He had to concentrate, but yes, he could hear something.
It was the sound of machine gun fire.
16
Inside the firetruck’s cab, behind the armor, the bullets rang and sparked against the outside plating with incessant fury.
Crow drove, hammer down, and the ancient truck lumbered along, breathing like a wounded rhino and grumbling like a blue whale’s appendix.
Stuffed into the cab, dressed in ACUs, ACHs, and IOTV armor liberated after the Seelyville battle, Sara and ten similarly dressed ARM fighters waited for the explosion they knew was about to blot out the sound of the gunfire.
Crow simply glared with grim intensity through the tiny viewing slit in the armor covering the truck’s windshield. His fingers drummed on the steering wheel as he muttered under his breath, “Come on. Come on. Come on!”
If Ava and her guerilla fighters had done what was expected of them, the firetruck’s passage through the first set of prison gates was about to get much easier. Sara looked at her watch. Midnight. Everything was happening on time.
The explosion of C4 one hundred yards in front of the firetruck lit the inside of the cab, even through the narrow viewing slit. Faces, suddenly illuminated, looked focused and frightening as if each person had placed a flashlight beneath their chin guard and bathed their face in a Halloween glow.
Then the blast wave hit.
The cab bucked and rolled, and Sara prayed it would stay upright.
Crow had to fight the wheel as the truck slewed savagely left and a rain of debris clattered and thudded against the shell of it.
“Keep going, Crow! Keep going!” Sara yelled.
“Ain’t nuthin’ gonna stop me!”
Sara looked over Crow’s shoulder, focusing through the viewing slit. What had once been a high security gate was now a blackened mess of wreckage. Bodies of corrections officers littered the road. Seconds before, they had been firing on the truck with their H&K MP7 9x9 mm submachine guns. Now they were scattered and opened up as if by a can opener. Splashe
s of blood and hunks of roasted flesh clung onto snapped bone—harsh evidence of the explosion’s butchery.
The firetruck rumbled past and over the ruined bodies. Once through the wall and into the quad, it came under sustained fire from the two tower-mounted M246 5.56 mm light machine guns and attendant SAW teams. The armor held as the bullets thumped into the vehicle, but Sara didn’t think her teeth would.
“Now!” she screamed, and metal flaps on either side of the cab were lowered, MP7s moving into position and being trained on the towers, shooting constant rounds at the SAW teams. Sara saw the men dive for cover. They weren’t used to taking fire. Sara pulled open the cab door next to her and screamed “Go! Go! Go!”
Nine fighters leapt out in a blind rush as the MP7s gave covering fire.
Sara’s own MP7 had to be fired one-handed because of what she was carrying. Responding, two corrections officers were across the quad, firing with M500 pump-action shotguns. Sara took the legs of one and Crow popped rounds of fire through the head of the other.
Sara and Crow reached the outer prison door at the same time. The ARM fighters behind them provided a semicircle of protection and kept a close eye out for the appearance of any other officers. One of the men in a tower found a few vertebrae, stood up, and reached for his M246. Ava appeared behind him in the tower box and shot him in the head. She finished off the two other injured men as her counterpart in the other tower did the same. In the confusion caused by the blast at the prison gate, Ava and her team had run inside the compound, keeping low against walls, and swarmed up the towers to neutralize both SAW teams.
Sara made a fist and waved her thanks to Ava before turning to the small firebox she was carrying. With nimble fingers, she undid the clasps and pulled the IED from inside. It was a 500g pack of C4. Sara put the detonator into the plastic, trailed out the attached wire behind her, and ordered everyone to get back to the safety of the firetruck.
The officer whose legs Sara had shot reached for his M500, pumped it, and sent a hail of fire toward the fighters.
Mary Cameron went down holding her thigh, blood pumping out. Crow and Steve Williams together yanked Mary up by her IOTV and threw her into the cab of the truck, where one of the machine gunners abandoned his post momentarily to administer first aid. Sara had already fired a rake of shots from her MP7, and the officer who had shot Mary flopped back into the dust.
That distraction neutralized, Sara found cover and blew the inner door.
The boom from the explosion rolled around the quad and a billow of dust and debris engulfed the firetruck. As her vision cleared, Sara saw the door had been punched in and ingress to the prison proper was assured. Meanwhile, Crow had gone to the dead corrections officers and retrieved two bunches of keys. One, he kept for himself, and the other he threw to Sara.
Ava, now down from the tower, jogged over with her team.
As they approached the building, they heard gunfire and explosions from the direction of the minimum security camp. Margret and her team had engaged the FEMA troops.
“Go get ’em, Margie,” Sara grunted as she led her ragged, improvised strike team forward toward the destroyed prison entrance.
Two corrections officers were dead behind the wreckage of the entry gate. The ceiling beyond it had partly collapsed and dead wires were hanging loose from the punctured tiles and light fittings. There was a round, windowed office beyond a wide expanse of steel-barred gates. Crow began sorting through keys as they approached the lock.
The clatter of shell casings exiting an MP7 accompanied by the guttural back and forth of the firing piston split the air. A stream of bullets spat from the doorway of the goldfish bowl. The fighters dived for cover. Crow fell down behind a section of the blown-in door as Ava rolled away from the bullets chewing up the floor where she’d just been standing. Bullets sparked on the bars of the gate, sending deadly ricochets in every direction. Sara felt one ping off her ACH, snapping her head to one side.
From a prone position, she returned fire, blowing out the glass office and scattering papers into the air, punching holes into the metal drawers of the filing cabinets against the back wall and tearing through anything between her and them. Whoever was in the office was now hunkered down with the bullets from Sara’s MP7 dancing around the office like fleas on the back of a dog.
Crow crouched and ran for the lock, and Ava stood over him, firing into the office through the bars. The fourth key he tried turned the lock and the bars swung back on well-oiled hinges. Ava stepped past Crow, stalked into the goldfish bowl, and finished the job. She emerged four seconds later with a thumb raised.
They were in.
Sara didn’t have a plan of the facility, so they would have to do this the hard way—finding where the civilian prisoners were being held and releasing them as they found them. Hopefully, by then, the FEMA forces would be neutralized by Margret’s bombs and strike team. There had been some discussion about whether they should release everyone in the prison, but Sara’s memory of what Spencer had done with his crew of rapists and murderers didn’t entice her to let another gang of scumbags out to prey on the local population. The only question would be whether they could distinguish between the prisoners who belonged there and those who didn’t—if they couldn’t, they’d be letting everybody go, there was no question.
But they had a specific target for this mission, too: the people they’d seen being trucked into the prison, and others like them.
Sara entered the goldfish bowl of an office, stepping over the dead corrections officer as she moved, and began opening filing cabinets. Ava did the same while the rest of the team took up defensive positions covering the three corridors that led from the entrance into the bowels of the prison.
“Got it,” Ava announced. Pushing the dead officer off the desk, she laid down a folder marked “Population” and flicked it open. The folder had five sections, one for each block of the prison. Each section listed the cell occupants and their dates of admission. Sara and Ava noticed the label ‘resistance prisoners’ at the same time, and met eyes. Their target was D-Block. There were ninety-seven prisoners there, and all had been brought in during the last three months. A quick scan determined that, unlike the prisoners listed on the pages for the other blocks, the prisoners there were of mixed sex, and mixed ages, and none of the names had anything listed against them in the column marked “Reason for Detention.”
For Sara, seeing this blank column was almost as chilling as seeing the open-backed trucks arriving on the scout mission with Ava. Nearly a hundred Americans, all of them locked up without trial, representation, or reason by a government run by a Council who believed they could do whatever they wanted. It made her sick, and if her father had been there, it would have made him sick, too. With a fire rising ever hotter in her belly, Sara looked at the prison map pinned to the wall of the office.
She stabbed her finger onto D-Block and traced the route back to their present location.
“Ready?” she asked Ava.
“Like you wouldn’t believe,” came the firm reply.
Twenty-five more fighters had joined Sara’s team from the battles around the prison walls. They had come in weary, dusty but psyched. This now meant that Sara’s team had thirty-five members, and Margret’s guerillas taking on FEMA numbered around 140, if they hadn’t met too many casualties.
Len Zukowski, a sandy-haired jester of a man, lead fighter of his small cadre, reported that the FEMA fighters were taking losses but digging in, and that Margret’s fighters were holding their own.
Sara welcomed the news. They didn’t need the FEMA fighters making their way into the prison. Margret’s fighters didn’t need to win the battle; they only had to stall the troops and stop them from advancing. They’d worry about the FEMA troops once they’d released the prisoners. With their forces combined, and their determination, Sara was certain they’d prevail.
The ARM fighters made their way into the prison, opening gates with the liberated key bunches an
d not finding much pushback. Corrections officers who showed themselves were mopped up easily. The remainder, Sara figured, had gone to ground, recognizing that no one was paying them enough to fight this battle.
The resistance operation continued, taking zero casualties and going through the prison like a chisel through balsa.
So, when the cell doors around them sprang open, and four FEMA troops swarmed out firing MP7s amid grenade explosions, Sara wasn’t so much surprised as confused.
But she had no time to explore the thought.
The force of the blast threw her against a wall, and as she slipped into unconsciousness, the last thing she saw was Ava taking three bullets to the chest.
17
Spencer walked ahead of Parker along the corridor. U.S. Marshals held Parker’s arms tightly at his biceps and propelled him forward. His wrists were still cuffed and connected to the waist chain which ran in a line of links to the thick shackles around his ankles. He didn’t mind being pulled along, though, for once. He was as curious as the others to find out what was happening.
The sounds of gunfire at the prison hadn’t yet stopped.
Spencer had offered no explanation for the shooting. He’d just told the marshal in the room to go outside and bring in Fredericks, and to make sure Parker was chained “every which way.”
Without another word, Spencer, still chewing on his cigar, had led the way out of the interrogation room and into the corridor. He marched purposefully, and Parker, still reeling from the contents of the cigar tube and stinking of vomit, was half-marched, half-dragged in Spencer’s wake.
The sound of machine gun fire reverberated down the corridor in staccato bursts. Evidently there was quite a firefight going on outside. A kernel of hope started to germinate in Parker’s heart. Maybe the resistance is attacking.
Dead Reckoning (911 Book 3) Page 14