Parker crawled out from behind the truck and tried the cab door. It was locked. More time was wasted while he fumbled the key into the lock in the downpour. He had to wipe rivulets of water out of his eye as it ran in sheets from his hair and over his forehead. With the door open at last, he climbed up into the cab and fumbled the key into the ignition slot on the flat green dash.
The engine roared to throaty life, shaking the cab. More glass exploded around him as the marshals stopped trying to neutralize Kleet and concentrated on Parker and the truck.
As the truck roared forward, his foot hard on the gas, Parker hoped that Kleet would have the sense to roll clear and surrender.
The machine was a good one, solid and reliable. It reached a reasonable speed in five seconds as Parker turned it around, broadsiding the marshals and clipping the oil drums with a mighty clang. The marshals had dived for cover, but one of the drums smashed into one of them, sending him sprawling in the mud.
In the huge side mirrors, Parker saw Kleet rise painfully to one knee now that he had no cover, emptying his magazine at the recycling cage. As his Beretta ran out of ammunition, the truck tore through the cage, twisting metal, cans, and garbage. He didn’t see what happened to the marshal.
Machine gun fire from a different direction clattered into the truck. The mirror on the far side of the cab shattered, and Parker knew it meant that more had come from the administration block and were firing at him as he headed around the side of the building, following the signs to the prison exit. The last he saw of Kleet in the mirror was the gang leader falling backwards into the mud, arms splayed. Parker had no idea if Kleet had been shot or if he’d fainted from blood loss, but he had no time to go back and check. The man was lost either way, and had been as soon as he’d taken those shots.
It was time to put the hammer down.
The compound gates came up much quicker than Parker was expecting. The windshield of the truck was running with streams of rain, and he still hadn’t worked out how to start the wipers. So, when the walls and gates ahead were lit by a huge skittering of lightning, and the boom of thunder tore through the truck’s shot-out side windows, Parker realized he had only seconds before he reached them.
The windshield fell apart as it was strafed from off-center fire. Parker had already ducked as the muzzle flashes lit up. The cab sang with tortured metal and another burst of bullets rattled into the metal surrounding him.
Parker kept his hands on the wheel and crunched down on the gas, the engine protesting like a monster from the depths.
Lightning crackled overhead with attendant thunder. Parker heard the front of the truck smack into the gates and sail through easily with all the momentum its five tons had mustered. He heard the gates clattering behind him, leaving bullets flying past the cab as the truck powered past the officers and marshals who were still shooting.
Parker risked a look over the dash.
Now out of the compound, he could see another short road heading toward an outer perimeter fence, and another set of chain-link gates and the forested hills beyond. He squinted into the distance, rain coming in to drench him and irritating his one eye so he had to shield himself from the pelting water.
What Parker saw ahead gave him the first pause he’d had since getting out of his cell.
Calhoun was the easiest to recognize. Her barrel chest and hairbun identified her in her army nurse uniform. The two figures next to her were undoubtedly Castillo and Rodgers. All three were kneeling on the road, directly in front of the chainlink gates which came next. Blocking his exit. Their hands were clasped to the back of their heads. Behind each kneeling figure was a FEMA soldier holding an MP5 against their skulls.
Parker had four seconds to make up his mind as he slowed the truck. Stop, or drive through?
Before he had a chance to choose, though, Calhoun looked up, wind and rain whipping at her body, her face a mass of cuts and bruises. She had been beaten hard. Her nose was bleeding as if broken.
Blood decorated her like warpaint.
Their eyes met, and she was staring right into Parker’s soul.
Don’t stop. Don’t make this all for nothing. Make it count.
Calhoun roared, reached up, and took the barrel of the MP5 in her hands, taking the FEMA soldier by surprise. Instinctively, he squeezed the trigger and Calhoun flopped forward into the mud.
Parker screamed his rage into the storm and pushed the gas pedal to the floor.
26
Ava had explained her plan to Sara in the Blazer as they’d headed toward Seelyville through the storm. Sara had listened with increasing incredulity. It was daring and it was borderline insane, but it might just work.
Still, Sara had to mentally slap herself back to reality a few times as doubts crept into her mind. The last time she had tried something along the lines of what Ava was proposing, everyone had died. But as she felt the weight of the magnum in her hands, she also knew that risks had to be taken—otherwise, the world would never change. If they could free her father from the Council, he would be the man to lead a revolution.
David and Sammi were quiet as they drove. Sara knew that Sammi shooting Ralph had probably ended their lives as they knew them—especially in the area north and west of Terre Haute. Sara thought grimly about where she herself would have put the bullet if their roles had been reversed with Sammi, with that man threatening Ava, but Sammi was not a killer.
That was the real measure of the gulf between people like David and Sammi, and Sara and Ava. They had made their choice long ago, to use their talents and skills for the preservation of life. Understanding how different they were from her and Ava, Sara felt a fraud, like she’d been playing at the healing role out of self-indulgence. Gazing into her own navel because she’d lost one battle so one-sidedly.
But while David and Sammi might have been great at healing the sick, Sara knew there was another question to be answered: Who was going to heal the country?
The thoughts energized Sara in a way she hadn’t experienced in a long while.
Her dad was alive. And yes, maybe she’d lost one battle, but she hadn’t lost the war.
They rolled into Seelyville just before dawn, without having met any FEMA forces along the way. David had kept to back roads and only taken to the highway when they’d gotten well clear of Terre Haute. Seelyville was much as they had left it. The exploded house was still a ruin. The only thing that Sara could make out as markedly different was a row of fresh graves alongside the Christian Center. Sara assumed that Mace hadn’t left the FEMA soldiers’ bodies out to rot and had respectfully buried them.
David and Sammi approached the wreckage of Mace’s house, David scratching his head.
“When did this happen?”
Surprised that David had known which property they were heading to before she or Ava had indicated it, Sara gave them a thumbnail report about heading off the FEMA troops at the Christian Center. When she was about to give them the fuller picture of how Solon had forced a stand-off with the folks who lived in the home, Sammi held up a hand to stop her.
“We know Mace. David delivered Jessica.”
David stepped into the ruins first, located the hatch, and rapped a complicated signal on it with his knuckles. Ten seconds later, the hatch opened and they were all descending into the shelter, Sammi closing the hatch behind them.
Ava’s shoulder and immobilized arm didn’t stop her climbing down the ladder, and Sara was pleased to see that Ava’s strength and sharpness were returning.
They spent some time hugging Mace and Jessica and getting reacquainted while some water was heated for coffee. David and Sammi already knew about the deaths of Mace’s wife and son, and Jessica had thrown her arms around Sammi as if she were family.
Listening to them chat over coffee, Sara exchanged glances with Ava. Ava was picking up on it, too. Something wasn’t quite right. Since Sara had been helping the doctor and his nurse, they’d never mentioned Seelyville or Mace and his prepper shel
ter. They’d never asked Sara to go there to ask for supplies, like they had when they’d sent her off on runs to other outposts. And Mace’s shelter was so well stocked that it seemed odd that they’d never mentioned it, given that they clearly knew him. Plus, there was the vibe she and Ava were picking up on—something was being held back, kept secret from the two of them. She could feel it in the air.
Stuck for an explanation, Sara had no choice but to voice her concerns. Despite her trust for all of these people, the fact that things weren’t making sense couldn’t be ignored.
But when she interrupted the small-talk, Mace smiled, and Sammi nodded. And Jessica asked, “Shall I show them, Daddy?”
Mace looked questioningly at David, who sighed, his reluctance showing through, but in the end, he said, “They’ve got a mad scheme to go rescue James Parker. I think it’s a plan worth exploring, and I think it’s time the Network made contact—not only with James Parker, but his daughter.”
Sara’s confusion was complete.
So far as she’d been aware, David and Sammi were medics, living a parochial life under the radar of FEMA and the Council, just healing and fixing.
She looked to David, having seen her own confusion reflected on Ava’s face. “What is… the Network? David? I don’t understand…”
Mace stood up. “It’s probably easier if I show you.”
And with that, Sara’s life changed… again.
Doctor David Reynolds was a doctor, but he was also so much more.
“Ringuard Industries,” he said as Mace started moving boxes of dried food from one of the shelter’s many metal shelving units to get at the wall behind it. “You’ve heard of them?”
“Sure,” Sara answered. “Biotech company. Cutting edge science. Food production, famine technology, plastic recovery from the oceans using bioengineered plankton. Fuel from cow farts. That sort of thing.”
David guffawed, but grinned at Jessica’s giggling response. “Yes. That’s us.”
Sara stared. “Us?”
“Yup. I’m Doctor David Reynolds.”
“I know. But what’s that got to do with…” And then it hit her. David Reynolds, such an innocuous name, such a replicated name, such a down-home name, not unlike her own.
“You’re the Ringuard Doctor David Reynolds? Seriously?”
“One and the same,” Sammi replied.
Ava was having the same shocked-to-her-bootheels moment as Sara. “You’re a billionaire. Ten times over.”
Mace had uncovered the whole shelf now; set into the wall was a metal hatch—a combination lock in the center.
Jessica jumped up. “Can I, Daddy? Can I?”
Mace ruffled his daughter’s hair and said, “Sure.”
Jessica climbed onto the metal shelf and began twisting the dial.
Sara was still reeling. Billionaire Ringuard?
She dug something out of her memory, a distant newspaper headline. There hadn’t been much financial news and current affairs when she’d been with the Church of Humanity. But there had been a newspaper that had carried the banner headline: “Ringuard CEO Sells Tech Giant.” It had been big news ten or twelve years back, so big that it had even reached the rarified confines of the Church of Humanity.
“You sold up, bought an island or something, and disappeared from public life.”
“Well, I disappeared,” David allowed, his eyes on the hatch. “But I don’t have an island. I put my money to a better use than buying an easy retirement under palm trees.”
“More’s the pity,” Sammi chided him jokingly.
“Shush, Sammi,” David said, reaching out and squeezing her hand. “You wouldn’t have had it any other way,” he joked.
“I did it!” Jessica exclaimed, and the hatch in the wall opened to reveal a compact piece of electronic machinery in a rubberized case. It had a small screen, various dials and meters, a keyboard and mouse attached, and a bank of blinking lights. Sara couldn’t decide if it was a prop from a science fiction movie or the coolest piece of tech she’d yet seen.
Mace leaned in, flicked a switch, and punched a code into the keyboard.
The screen lit up with three audible beeps. Words began to run across it in a no-nonsense, luminous green font.
“NETWORK NODE ALPHA SEVEN. BEGIN START-UP SEQUENCE FOR RELAY.”
The rustle of a weapon being unholstered and the safety being clicked off took everyone’s eyes from the screen. Ava was moving as far away from David, Sammi, and Mace as the shelter allowed.
“Keep your hands where I can see them.”
Sara held up her hands, glaring at her friend. “Ava, what the fuck?”
Ava didn’t take her eyes off the others. “They’re government. Fuck it, Sara, they’re Council. We’ve been tricked.”
David closed his eyes and sighed. “I’m afraid, young lady, you couldn’t be further from the truth. We’re as far away from those tyrants as could possibly be.”
Ava shook her head violently. “That’s high-end tech. That’s government shit.”
Sara could see where Ava was coming from, but something about her assessment didn’t make sense. She held her hand out to her friend, gesturing for her to calm down, if not stand down.
She looked to the doctor she’d come to think of as a friend, glancing to the others and then back his way again before she asked, “What is that machine?”
“I’d prefer to talk without a gun pointed at me, if that’s okay,” he said wryly.
Sara looked back at her friend. “Ava. Please. I trust these people. Let’s relax.”
Ava clearly didn’t want to comply, but she lowered the weapon so that it was by her side; she didn’t engage the safety or put it down, though, and David narrowed his eyes.
“That’s the best we’ve got right now,” Sara offered after a moment’s pause. “Please. What the hell is going on?”
And so, David told them.
When he had sold his shares in Ringuard Industries, twelve years earlier, it hadn’t been to retire from the company he’d worked three quarters of his life to build into a world leader in biotech. David had understood the way the world was going. The corruption of the politicians; greedy corporations manipulating those politicians; the whole world being run to advance the ideologies of a chosen few. It wasn’t a world that set capitalism against communism anymore, or one concerned with borders and countries. That was all lies being fed to the populace to keep them fearful and supine. He pointed out, “If you keep people scared, they will consume, and they will swallow anything. We’re talking about the zero-point-one percent versus the rest of the world: the monied against the un-monied.”
Sara sat down, thinking of her own father as David explained that he’d always been a prepper at heart. Growing up against the backdrop of the Cold War, how could he have been anything else? With money, he’d realized, there was something he could do to make sure that, if the worst happened—like the government falling, say—he was in a unique position to do something about it.
So, he’d set up the Network.
David had been secretly funding preppers like Mace for eight years before the EMP strike.
Mace broke in at that point, sitting before them with his daughter on his lap as he spoke. “You don’t think I built a shelter like this on cops’ wages, did you?”
Following Mace’s point, David smiled apologetically at Sara. “I reached out to your father, spoke to him briefly. At the time, I’m afraid he was so consumed with finding you… it didn’t make sense to pull him in. I thought I might reach out to him again later, but he’d pulled into himself. With you still out of the picture, we didn’t think he’d be interested.”
Sara swallowed any argument she might have mustered —she had all the faith in the world in her father, but from everything she’d heard, he had had a one-track mind before he’d found her. She couldn’t find it in herself to be surprised at David’s reasoning, and it apparently rang true enough to Ava that her friend finally put down the gun she
’d been holding, having engaged its safety and offered her own bashful apology to the group.
David kept going, to explain that he’d brought preppers together from across the country, and given them not only the resources they needed to survive almost anything, including an EMP Event, but also set up—without government knowledge—a means to communicate, should a situation demand it.
“That’s the whole point,” Sammi insisted. “Keeping it off the grid. Completely.”
David’s money had set up a succession of EMP-shielded, line of sight microwave transmitters that would allow any information to be disseminated across the country in a matter of hours. A Pony Express of preppers who would receive a message from a designated transmitter and then, when the software in the machine had decoded it for that station, they could pass it on to two other stations at agreed upon times.
David’s foresight and planning, or prepping, had ensured that an EMP attack wouldn’t knock out the Network. It had been piggybacked onto the cell network by a clandestine group of trained prepper engineers and had taken nearly five years to complete, using equipment created specifically for the task in Chinese labs owned by Ringuard.
“How many people are in the Network?” Sara asked, still trying to get her head around everything she’d heard, and desperately trying to reconcile this David to the Doctor David she’d come to know.
“We have nearly a thousand relay stations like this one here, which cover about sixty percent of the United States. For areas where line of sight transmission isn’t viable, we have manual relays where designated preppers can carry encrypted data by hand to the next relay station for it to be passed on to the next series of relays.”
Taking it all in, looking at the high-tech machine in front of her, Sara suddenly felt anger rising in her gut as she realized the scale of the enterprise: “And you’ve done nothing? The American Resistance Movement knew nothing about you? You’ve just sat on your asses with your toys and done nothing to fight back while thousands of people have been put to death?”
Dead Reckoning (911 Book 3) Page 21