“What about your friends?” Parker asked. He was stalling; he already knew the answer.
“They ain’t my friends, amigo,” Spencer said. “I think you pretty much did me a favor taking them out—big picture, anyway.”
“Fuck you!” Finn suddenly snarled. It appeared she did know to disengage the safety.
Lifting the sub gun, she held down the trigger and let loose with a long, ragged burst. CPUs came apart like clay pigeons. Crater-like wounds opened in the walls. Plastic screens shattered. Parker flinched when the weapon went off, but quickly began scanning for Spencer’s exact position. The man wasn’t moving. Which makes sense, he thought, since she’s firing about four feet off the ground. He’s in more danger from a ricochet.
Suddenly, the suppressed weapon ran dry. Finn sobbed and pulled the trigger several times, trying to make it work. Finally, she threw it away from her.
“Parker?” Spencer asked.
“Yeah,” Parker answered.
“We have a deal?”
“Yeah.”
He heard Spencer moving, but his eyes were on Finn. After he heard the corrupt warden go up the stairs, he rose and walked over to her. To his shock, she came into his arms as he scooped her up, putting her on her feet. He felt drunk with relief, and almost crushed her naked form to him. He stopped himself, holding her at arm’s length.
“Are you okay? Are you shot?”
“No,” she said. “I need clothes.”
“Aw, fuck,” he swore. He felt devastated.
“It’s all right,” she told him. “They didn’t have time to…” she trailed off as she struggled to find the words for what had happened to her. “Do what they wanted,” she finished. “They just beat the hell out of me.”
“My clothes are still wet from my little swim,” he said. “And I’m so sorry I couldn’t get here sooner, Finn, I am.”
“I know,” she said, still trying to cover herself with her hands while Parker avoided looking at her. “I just really want to get myself dressed but I don’t know where my clothes are and there’s bodies all over the place.” She stopped. Her eyes brimmed with tears and she swallowed. “They murdered children, Parker.”
He cursed, hating himself for not saving everyone. Still looking away, he asked, “Did they say why they chose this mall of all places?”
“The prisoners seemed mostly interested in the heroin,” she told him. “But the cop-guy was looking for something else. He kept calling it a ‘gimme.’ Then he called it a motherboard.”
Parker frowned. “A motherboard? He find it?”
“I really need to put some clothes on.”
Parker sighed—too much was happening too fast. Again. Questions without answers were piling up. “Of course. I’ll bring you clothes from upstairs, from the mall. I saw a JC Penney’s.”
“JC Penney’s?” Finn pulled a face. “Did you happen to see a Marshall’s? Even an Old Navy?”
“You’re a real pain in the ass,” he said. “And I’m getting tired of talking to you while looking the other way.”
He suddenly flashed on a young Sara, five going on six, demanding that he look the other way when he brought her a towel. It seemed like only yesterday when he’d changed her diapers. He swallowed, blinked. “Just give me your sizes so I don’t have to guess. I’ll clear the area as I go up and see if the looters left anything.” Might as well get some dry clothes for myself, he silently added.
“Parker, I-I…” she didn’t finish.
“What?” He resisted the urge to look at her when her tone changed. He flashed on the Hispanic girl he’d been forced to grapple with. He hoped she found help soon. And also that she didn’t try and kill him again as he left.
“I don’t want to stay down here with these bodies.”
Parker looked around. The off-white and eggshell gray paint and computer housings made the spilled blood stand out in vivid scarlets and crimsons. The place looked like a butcher shop.
“Okay,” he said. “Follow me up; we’ll put you in one of the offices where you can lock the door, and then I’ll get the stuff.”
“I want a new gun; this one is empty,” she said.
He understood how she felt, but her obvious unfamiliarity with them, coupled with her unpredictability, made him nervous. On the other hand, she’d just been abducted and violently mistreated by human predators in a world without 911.
“You don’t need a new gun,” he said. “You can swap magazines. I’ll show you how later. But for now, grab one, and let’s get you some clothes.”
Nervous that Spencer was waiting to ambush them for reasons of his own, Parker led the way back up into the hallways above the clandestine server farm. He needn’t have worried about Spencer; the man was gone.
Despite Finn’s disdain, he made his way to JC Penney’s. Out of all the lootable items available, casual clothes were low down on the list. He outfitted himself in an almost identical ensemble to the one he’d worn before and then tried to do the same for Finn. He would have to do without his tactical pants in favor of some dark-colored work slacks with reinforced knees. He lamented the loss of his pockets, but he’d lost most of his ammo, anyway. He purposely picked dark-colored clothes for him and Finn. They needed to blend in. He quickly picked up a pair of utilitarian boots for them both—again, not exactly military quality, but they were better than a pair of thin-soled tennis shoes.
Pausing in front of the lady’s undergarments section, he looked at the bewildering array of bras and panties. He didn’t know women’s sizes. He started holding them and trying to guestimate based on Finn’s size. He flashed on the mental image of her naked and grunted in embarrassment.
“Screw it,” he muttered, and grabbed a couple handfuls of sports bras and a few boxes of underwear in a cross-section of sizes. “She’ll figure it out.”
“The world feels different, now,” Finn said. “I know it’s stealing, but I know we have no choice. I don’t understand how I ended up here.”
He avoided looking at her out of respect for her modesty as she dressed, but he could hear how close she was to tears. In a way, he thought that was better than the dull, robotic voices of some victims he’d seen who’d seemed to have unplugged from the world.
“In situations like this,” he said, his voice careful. “You think, what’s the next step? You do it, then you think, what is the next step, and you do that. You don’t try to figure out the answer to life, the universe, and everything while you’re hurting.”
“I love that book!” Finn said. “Made me laugh so hard.”
“What book?” Parker asked.
“Never mind,” Finn sighed. Dressed, she looked over at Parker. “Parker?”
“Yes, Finn?”
“Did you pick out my underwear?”
“Shut up.”
“These seem like excessively granny panties.”
“You’re not going clubbing.”
“You know they make active-wear sports undergarments for women now.”
“Finn?”
“Yes, Parker?”
“Shut up now, please.”
They holed up in the back office of Victoria’s Secret and Finn slept while Parker brooded. The girl, he supposed ‘young woman’ was the better term, was strong. Maybe stronger than he’d given her credit for. After what’d happened to her, she hadn’t for a moment thought of giving up the hunt for her friend.
Parker was impressed.
They ate a couple of the PowerBars he’d had in his pack before each drinking a bottle of water they pilfered from one of the smashed vending machines. Parker insisted they eat and drink. Both had expended a ton of energy tonight and needed to refuel. Then Finn fell asleep on some bedding they’d scavenged from Bed, Bath, and Beyond. He leaned against the locked door of the office and watched her sleep. He let the hours count down, dozing on occasion.
He knew better than to think of his daughter, and every time his thoughts came back around to her, he pushed them away. He knew to
o little, understood too little. First do the next thing, then the thing after that. Big questions were not survival questions, and survival was the prerequisite to everything else.
He dozed off and woke about noon.
He didn’t know what had awakened him at first but he came to his feet with his weapon ready. Finn snored very softly. Then he heard the sounds that had startled him awake. Gunshots.
He cocked his head.
It was rifles, not in the mall, but obviously close by. The sharper cracks could have been M4 platforms, which might mean law enforcement or national guard, but might not. Either way, he wasn’t getting involved.
He eased himself back down and waited it out. He thought he heard shouting, maybe inside the mall itself, on the other end, but then it died out and a few minutes after that he heard no more gunfire.
He dozed again and it was evening when he woke for a second time. He had a kink in his neck from the uncomfortable way he’d slept, and he rubbed at it, trying to figure out how long exactly he’d been asleep.
Finn was sitting up, knees under her chin, arms wrapped around her legs. She looked...better, he decided.
“Hey sleepy head,” Finn said. “You want to loot the Frozone?”
Parker laughed, startling himself at the sound. The rest must have done him good as well. He shook his head.
“Frozen yogurt is just yogurt by now,” he said. “Which means it’s lumpy spoiled milk.”
Finn made a face and he offered her one of the bottles of water. She drank and he broke out some more rations from his bug-out kit. Parker studied her while she ate the jerky he had packed along, assessing her mood.
“You feeling okay?” he asked.
“Sleep did me good,” she replied.
It wasn’t exactly an answer, he reflected. Maybe it was answer enough, though. No matter what, they had to keep moving, so he nodded and didn’t say anything.
“We heading out?” Finn asked.
“Soon as you’re ready,” he nodded.
They gathered up their gear and packed it away.
19
From the mall, the TV station stood on the hill like a beacon. Off on the horizon, Parker stared at the sky as the sun slid in a red disc down past the city and into the horizon. Last night went on forever, he thought. Let’s hope tonight treats us better. Then, almost inevitably by now, his new mantra—But I have miles to go and promises to keep.
It felt good to leave the mall behind him. That he should have returned here again in search of another lost girl, dragging a third in tow, was a hard dose of dramatic irony.
He’d been too worried about Finn earlier to think about memories. There hadn’t been time. Now, he replayed the day he’d lost his daughter over and over again in his head. Right there at the front of the mall. He’d ducked inside to get a new laptop. But Sara was difficult in the mall—she slowed him down—and the laptop was already paid for. All he had to do was pick it up from the customer service counter and be done with it. But the line was long. He hadn’t thought about that; truth was, he’d been distracted. Truth was, he’d been distracted a lot in those days.
He remembered coming out and finding her gone. Searching frantically for twenty minutes before realizing he needed to call 911, get a missing person’s report filed. Telling his wife had not gone well, obviously, and his shame and defensiveness had turned to anger. But it hadn’t mattered—hours turned into days, days into weeks, and his life fell apart. By the time his wife left him, he’d been so comfortably numb with alcohol and prescription meds that it’d barely registered.
Finn was quiet as they walked. Lost in his own memories, Parker didn’t notice at first, and then he didn’t know what to say to her. He thought maybe saying nothing might be the best choice, though even through his brief exposure to her, he knew she was normally an upbeat and gregarious personality type. Still, he wasn’t her father, and any attempt to act like it could seriously backfire on him. Soon enough, they stopped to drink from the water bottles each carried and stood staring back at the mall. They didn’t have to squint very hard to see bodies lying in the parking lot.
“I was pretty shy,” Finn said out of nowhere. “As a kid, I mean. I was new to the middle school and everyone else had gone to school together since, like, kindergarten.”
Parker didn’t say anything, giving her time to get it out. Now that the adrenaline had bled off, his hand was starting to shake. He wanted a beer very badly. He jammed the hand into his pocket.
“But Ava was nice to me,” Finn continued. “She maybe lived in fear of people finding out how fucked up her parents were getting, and she was poor, but she didn’t care. She was strong. She didn’t back down from anyone.”
Parker heard tears behind her voice, and he took it as a good sign. If she could vent, could release that emotion, maybe she wouldn’t shut down.
“There’s no reason to think anything really bad has happened to her.” He was hedging the truth a bit, but if he hadn’t thought there was hope, he wouldn’t have started out on this odyssey to begin with. “She may be in trouble, sure, but we don’t know this church is like the Manson Family,” he said. “How did they seem to you?”
Finn was silent, and for an instant Parker grew fearful she was shutting down. But then she began talking, haltingly at first and then with more confidence.
“They didn’t seem psycho,” she said. “Ava never would have listened to them to begin with if that was the case. She may have been searching for some kind of family experience, but she wasn’t stupid or desperate. At first, the church seemed like, you know, a church. Youth groups and picnics and stuff like that. There were even people our age and younger there.” Finn paused. “Though, some of them were a little weird and the ones who were in the teen groups, their parents were never around. I started thinking they’d been kidnapped or something weird, but Ava said they just didn’t know us.”
Something vague, but he felt important, clicked in the back of Parker’s mind. “Seemed kidnapped how?” he asked.
Finn heard the urgency in his voice and looked at him. “I don’t know,” she said. “Like I said, their parents were never around, only Dr. Marr. Ava supposed they were all back on the farm where they wanted us to live.”
He was feeling his cop intuition starting to stir.
“But you didn’t buy that?”
Finn shook her head. “No,” she said. “I mean, they never mentioned their parents, like Marr had simply cloned them from a pod in the last week or something. They would drone on with all the Luddite philosophy the church was pushing, but nothing… you know, teen-like. It was like that part of them didn’t exist.”
Parker paused, brow furrowed. He tried to choose his next words carefully, then gave up and decided to come out with it. “Like maybe they were conditioned or something, like kidnap victims.”
Finn looked at him, obviously puzzled. “I meant that as a joke at the time, but I don’t know,” she said. “I’m not sure I’d know for sure what that would look like. But they were weird. I don’t know how else to say it, but seeing them was what put some doubt in my mind about the whole church.”
Parker reached into his knapsack and opened the sealed sandwich bags he’d put his wallet in before he set out. He opened it up then and pulled out a worn snapshot-sized school photo of his daughter Sara.
“Wow,” Finn said, half amazed and half incredulous. “Usually people keep photos on their phone.”
“As I think you might have noticed, I’m old-school.”
He handed the picture of his daughter over to Finn. “Was this girl one of the ones there?” Finn looked at the photo.
“How long ago was the picture taken? I didn’t see any kids as young as her—just teenagers and a bit older.”
Finn took the picture back. He stayed silent for a moment, staring at the image of his daughter. Without looking up, he said, “This was taken a while ago. She’d be your age now; maybe a bit older.”
Finn reached out and brushed
his arm. Parker found himself incredibly touched that, after what she’d endured, she was comforting him.
“Will you tell me what happened?” she asked.
He almost said no out of pure reflexive habit, but something stopped him. “I messed up,” he said instead. “I was supposed to be watching her,” he commented, his voice almost a whisper. “We were over there by the mall, and I got out of the truck… I was a goddamn cop,” he said, his eyes burning and his throat tight. “I knew better; I knew what could happen because I’d seen it happen before. But I was in a hurry and it was only going to take a minute.”
He stayed silent for a while, Finn’s hand resting comfortably on his forearm. Finally, he zipped up his wallet in the bag and put it back in his knapsack.
“Is that why you’re helping Ava?” she asked.
He smiled, but it was bitter. “I don’t know why I’m doing anything anymore.” His stomach grumbled—without the appetite suppressing meds or alcohol, he was ravenous. He had exactly two MREs in his bag. They were old, and he’d really only kept them because some old vet had told him he’d want them if shit really did hit the fan. Energy bars and jerky weren’t meals. Even after eating a hundred of the mushy things, though, he realized they were better than the alternative and they were high in calories. Calories meant energy. He gave Finn one.
“Spaghetti,” he said. “You’re lucky.”
“God!” Finn’s eyes grew huge. “I’m so hungry!” They ate in silence, completely absorbed in the act of eating. Out on the horizon, he saw the sky lightening further as dawn continued approaching. He began shoving the now empty packets into the brown envelope of the MRE bag.
“We’re close,” he said. “I want to try and get a look at the church while people are groggy.”
“Like we ‘attack at dawn’?” Finn asked.
“No,” he said. “Not like, ‘we attack at dawn.’ First, we’re not a platoon of Marines and, second, there is no ‘we’ in this part. Just me.”
“I feel as if we’ve had this discussion before,” Finn laughed.
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