911: The Complete Series

by Grace Hamilton

  “Easy, goddamnit!” he shouted. “I’m not here to hurt you!”

  “Screw you, nigger!” the man shrieked.

  Parker felt a surge of rage. The bat came up again, and he reached out with his hand and caught it. He’d wrapped his fingers around it like the jaws of a trap closing and now he held it firmly. The man’s struggle was futile, his grasping the handle with both hands and straining almost comical.

  Parker curled his other big hand into a fist. He didn’t appreciate racial epitaphs. What he should do was break this motherfucking racist’s jaw for him. He felt the man’s weakness as the guy tried to pry his weapon free—ridiculous high-pitched grunts and squeals coming with the effort.

  Sighing, Parker uncurled his fist. He was an uninvited intruder in this man’s home. Maybe he was a strung-out junkie, but awakening in the middle of a disaster to find a large man in your home was stressful; it didn’t exactly bring out the best in people.

  “Oh, hell,” he muttered.

  He jerked the bat out of the man’s hands and tossed it behind him. The guy fell back in panic, yellow-tinged and bloodshot eyes rolling like a spooked horse’s in fear. The guy pressed himself up against the wall in panic.

  “Please, please,” he stammered. “The woman in the next room, she’ll do whatever you want! Take whatever you want—just don’t hurt us!”

  Parker’s stomach knotted in disgust and he pushed down a fresh surge of anger.

  “Ava?” he demanded. “Is Ava in the next room?” His voice had dropped an octave, turning into a threatening snarl.

  The man blinked against the light, confused. “Ava?”

  “Yes, goddamnit, Ava,” Parker said.

  “Ava’s not here, man,” the guy said.

  A woman’s voice, harsh from decades of liquor and cigarettes, shouted out from down the hall. “Who is it, Bobby? Who the fuck is it?”

  Bobby turned his head, obviously pissed at being interrupted. “It’s a goddamn big nig—” he cut himself off and looked back at Parker, attempting an apologetic smile. “...Guy,” he finished. The attempt was lame. “Says he looking for Ava!”

  “Ava?” the woman all but screeched. “Why the fuck is he looking for her here?”

  “How the hell should I know?” Bobby shouted back. “Shut the fuck up, Annie, and let me talk!”

  “Screw you!”

  “Uh, hey,” Parker began.

  Bobby waved a hand at him, still addressing the female voice. “I’m handling this, woman!”

  “You couldn’t handle your dick with both hands, asshole!”

  The screeching woman appeared in the bedroom door.

  This wasn’t Parker’s first rodeo. He’d run hundreds of domestic disturbance calls, both rousted and aided the homeless, worked countless drug busts, and interviewed innumerable addicts over the course of his law enforcement career. But the situation here was quickly rising to the top of the list for weird and annoying.

  “Ava?” he reminded them.

  Bobby looked at him. “Ava?” He seemed dubious.

  Then he chuckled, and Parker, despite not being given to pedantic word choices, could only have described the sound as ‘lascivious.’

  “Yeah,” he grinned. “I could see how a fella might want her for comfort on a messed up night like this.” He continued grinning, revealing more fully the extent of his missing and rotting teeth.

  Parker swallowed, pushing down the white hot flash of anger that had risen up in him at the comment. It was much harder to do when he was Jonesing for an Ativan. Frankly, he understood the irony of his distaste for junkies, given his own fragile state with medication. But he was also thinking about the frightened voice he’d heard on the phone, alone and in trouble, and now he realized the girl behind it had known only this sonofabitch for a father.

  He could take only so much, he decided. This was her father? Fuck that. He shoved Bobby hard up against the wall, bouncing his greasy head off the fake wood paneling.

  Bobby squeaked in protest. Out of instinct, Parker looked towards the woman to make sure she hadn’t decided to come to the aid of her man. She merely watched him, eyes bright with interest, one hand clutched at the bottom of her throat and the other hugging herself. He got the distinct impression that he could have beaten Bobby to death with his Maglite right in front of her, and that same eager, excited expression wouldn’t have changed in the slightest.

  He turned his attention back to the sputtering Bobby.

  “That girl is out there alone and in trouble,” he said. His lip lifted into an aggressive sneer as he eyed the man. “I’m not in the mood for any bullshit. Start talking or I’m going to get unpleasant.”

  “Okay! Okay!” Bobby protested. “We haven't seen her in months, man.”

  “Thinks she’s too good for us,” the woman said. “All high and mighty.”

  Bobby nodded enthusiastic agreement with jerky motions of his head. “Yeah, always looking down her nose at us,” he said. “She’s been living in an apartment over in the university district.”

  “Address,” Parker said.

  “I don’t know—” Bobby began, but Parker cut him off.

  “Give me an address or I’ll toss this shit-heap of a house and take any drugs I find, right down to aspirin.”

  “You can’t do that!” the woman shouted. It was the most interest he’d seen her display yet.

  “Try me,” he told her.

  “All right,” she hissed. “I got it written down on a Mother’s Day card she sent me.”

  “She sent you a Mother’s Day card?” Parker asked. He didn’t bother trying to keep the incredulity out of his voice.

  “Yeah,” the woman muttered, her face petulant. “No money, no present. Just some fucking Hallmark shit about forgiveness or some crap.”

  “Jesus,” Parker said, amazed at the woman.

  “I know, right?” she said. “And her, with that big time job at Starbucks and all.”

  Parker sighed. “Get me the address.”

  Bobby started to say something, but Parker cut him off. “Don’t say anything; I don’t have the energy for your bullshit.”

  Bobby stood, tapping one foot and scratching at the inside of his left forearm and elbow.

  Parker knew addiction was addiction. And he wasn’t exactly in the best place to judge Ava’s parents, but the nature of their personalities made it hard for him not to be utterly disgusted with them. He doubted he wanted an Ativan or a beer quite as badly as the two wanted their next fix, but he couldn’t deny the need that insisted on pushing its way into his thoughts. He wondered if maybe Bobby had a beer in his refrigerator that was getting warm, going to waste.

  Angry with himself, he pushed the thought out of his head. It was with a sense of relief that he finally heard the woman returning. Aware she could have retrieved a weapon from her room instead of the information he needed, he shifted his stance subtly and rested his hand on the butt of his pistol. Come to it, he could step back to put Bobby between himself and the woman. Use the flashlight to hopefully blind her and then pull his weapon.

  Luckily, his concern was unnecessary.

  She extended her anorexic arm, holding a crumpled, pale blue Hallmark envelope. As she did so, she let her housecoat fall open. Parker caught a glimpse of grayish skin spotted by acne. Protruding ribs under breasts dropping like fried eggs. The thatch of her graying public hair ran riot between legs that were the approximate shape and size of broom handles.

  Parker took the envelope and the woman simply stood there, making no move to close her robe and grinning at him with teeth that were about as straight as a collapsing picket fence. He looked at the envelope and saw a smoothly scrolling feminine script on the front. He took note of the corner where Ava had presumably written her return address. Satisfied, he pulled the card out and shoved the envelope in his back pocket.

  “This is recent?” he asked. He reached the Mother’s Day card out to her.

  Annie shrugged. “Few months. Best
I have.” She looked at him dully, not taking the card until he finally lowered his arm.

  “Jesus,” he repeated, mostly because he didn’t have anything else to say.

  Bobby cleared his threat nervously until Parker looked back at him. Seeing he wasn’t about to be struck out of turn, Bobby spoke.

  “Look, big man,” he said. “The city’s in a bad way. We aren’t in any shape to take care of ourselves,” he said. “I was hoping we could get you to maybe get some... things for us.”

  Parker looked at him, momentarily speechless at the addict’s nerve. Is he really asking me to score drugs for him?

  Taking Parker’s surprised silence as passive encouragement, Bobby pressed on, licking his lips eagerly.

  “We could try and pay you,” he said. “We don’t have a lot, but maybe we could work out a trade,” he suggested. “Annie here ain’t too much to look at, but she’ll do anything you want.” Bobby grinned big, a used car salesman closing the deal. His front tooth was dead and stood out in a dark gray rectangle between the yellow of his other teeth.

  Parker looked at Annie to see how she was taking her own husband offering to pimp her out. She put one hand on her hip and gave him a grotesque parody of a come-hither look.

  Parker’s stomach did a slow flip-flop.

  “So,” he said. “That’s going to be a ‘no’.”

  “Screw you, nigger!” Annie screeched at him.

  Parker turned and began making his way through the obstacle course of their living room. The pair followed him, cawing. Annie kept up an unending slew of racial epithets mixed in with her obscenities.

  Bobby began simultaneously yelling at her to shut the fuck up and begging Parker to reconsider. It was with the air of a man submerged too long underwater, and finally breaking the surface, that Parker left the house and emerged through the cloud of flies out into the night again.

  He looked at the card still in his hand. He shook his head at it, as he didn’t want to read what Ava had written, and was frankly amazed she’d tried reaching out to the woman he’d seen in there. He set the card down on the porch railing and, putting the revolting train wrecks that were Ava’s mother and father behind him, he set off to run down his next lead.

  9

  The address on the envelope was for an area of the city Parker didn’t know all that well, but he had to do what he could to find it.

  As he walked, Parker worried. Eli had been correct. There should have been helicopters in the air, especially by now. At this point, enough time had elapsed that there also should have been a fleet of ground vehicles from outside of the detonation zone on the streets. Procedures were in place for disasters, he knew; back in the day, he’d been part of seeing to that.

  Now, he couldn’t help but get a frightening picture in his head of the entire country laid out like this from coast to coast, silent and dark. The image was too disturbing to entertain. Keeping the black and frigid waters of the river on his right, he pushed east.

  The cult angle was a new wrinkle. The more he considered it, however, the less strange the information seemed. He’d seen firsthand the home that Ava came from. This church, whatever the hell it was all about, he was sure would seem more secure and welcoming than her parents’ house. It would provide her emotional shelter and a place of belonging. These were powerful concepts, he knew.

  Still, some sort of doomsday cult also compounded the dangers he potentially faced. The chance that they would be difficult to deal with was a distinct possibility. Because nothing can be easy, he thought.

  Against the night sky, the burning fires threw a wash of orange glare against the dark horizon. Coming up out of the Goose Hollow neighborhood where Ava’s parents lived, and into the slightly more affluent Five Tree Hill enclave, he paused to study the scene below him.

  The distance between Ava’s new apartment and her old home was minimal on the map, as the crow flew, but the several hundred acres of municipal airport in between would make the trip a long one if he stuck to either the interstate or surface streets. If he wanted to make good time, he had to cut across.

  But the airport was in flames.

  He had little idea of how exactly it had happened, though obviously vast reservoirs of aviation fuel were explosively combustible and would have been in abundance at the airport. Without the active electronics of automated regulatory systems or a functioning safety infrastructure, the place had been a bomb waiting to happen.So it had happened.

  He sighed at the sight of what lay in front of him, sounding like an old man even to himself. His long walk had just gotten a little longer. He watched the roiling black smoke rising from the fires for a moment. So many fires burning, he thought, it was like civilization itself had been this big potential bonfire waiting for something, or someone, to light it. Fire was the ancient enemy, after all; it burned and destroyed everything that man could build. It was always there, always hungry.

  Below him, people milled around in the intense glare of the flames, lost and apparently fascinated by the continuing destruction. Like most airports, this one sat more adjacent to the city rather than properly within it in order to accommodate the runways and noise pollution. Beyond the fence in front of him, odd, undulating reflections caught his eye. Squinting, he tried making out what he saw. After a moment, he realized that through the smoke he was watching the reflections of the burning aviation fuel on water.

  The city reservoir was housed beyond the airport, out where the river looped back around and diverged from the interstate. With a sick feeling, he understood that the lowlands were now flooded. The electronic controls for the several great water towers must have failed at an inopportune time, releasing a deluge of the city’s drinking water that now formed a lake some fifteen acres across. As he looked closer, his eyes adjusted and he realized he could even see the tops of freight trains where the water had washed into the rail yard.

  Murphy and his law are having a field day, he thought.

  He heard a clatter of hooves on asphalt behind him, back on the street, and turned, startled. As he spun, a giraffe—moving much faster than he recalled ever seeing on the few nature shows he’d watched—cantered down the access road. He knew his mouth was hanging open like an idiot, but he was too engrossed in watching the huge, gangly creature gallop to stop staring. He was mesmerized.

  He’d taken his daughter to the zoo several times, and he clearly remembered her laughing fascination with the creatures. A cruel hand of guilt-ridden nostalgia gripped his heart and squeezed. The massive animal cantered slowly past him, head taller than a house, its hide spotted in vivid yellow patterns and its hooves clicking loudly on the pavement.

  This close to the wild animal, Parker realized how magnificent the beast truly was. And he was not a religious man, not after losing Sara, but he found himself praying for the creature. Everything that man built could fall away, he understood—he’d experienced it. But life, the essence of it, the chaotic creation of it, went on, endlessly varied, changing form into a myriad of shapes; life went on.

  He wasn’t superstitious; prepping was his superstition in its own way, so he didn’t take seeing the giraffe as a sign of anything mystical. It wasn’t a promise; it wasn’t an omen. But the sheer incredulity he’d felt upon seeing a giraffe canter by him on the streets of a small, worn-out, factory city north of Louisville filled him with a sudden, unbidden, confusing optimism.

  Things weren’t going to be all right—you got no promises—but things could be all right. He wished Sara could be here to see it with him.

  This time, he didn’t fight the burning in the backs of his eyes; he let the tears build up until several spilled over the lips of his eyelids and slid down his cheeks as he watched the animal turn down a side street and disappear behind some buildings. “Stupid fucker,” he muttered to himself, and self-consciously wiped his face.

  In the distance then, he heard the sharp cracks of gunfire, and this snapped him from his reverie. The shots were too far away to be an
immediate threat, he knew, but they brought him back to reality. He gave a sigh that again sounded a little too tired and old mannish for his taste. Adjusting the shoulder straps on his backpack, he set off walking again.

  10

  Continuing down the street overlooking the airport and flooded railyard, he passed a corpse a little further down. It lay face down in the gutter, limbs limp and sprawled out. He paused to study the body. It was a white male in casual business attire: blazer, slacks, loafers, and a light blue button-down shirt. Lying next to him was a shattered iPhone. The hair on the back of the head was matted and stiff with blood.

  Hand on the butt of his pistol, Parker looked around to ensure the young man’s killers weren’t nearby. He saw nothing, and he had to keep moving. Before long, he entered what he thought was Ava’s neighborhood.

  Ava’s door was ajar.

  Parker frowned as he eyed the flimsy door to the low-rent apartment. This wasn’t a particularly dangerous part of town, but it wasn’t the sort of area where people commonly left their doors unlocked, either.

  Plus, the very nature of her fear in the 911 call and this talk of cults had him wary.

  He pulled his pistol and clicked on his Maglite, bringing them up and crossing them at the wrist. Stepping to one side to avoid silhouetting himself in the entry, he used his foot to swing the door the rest of the way open. The hinges were apparently much better maintained than her parents’ had been. It swung inward smoothly, with only a whisper of sound. He swung his combined light and pistol around, playing the illumination into the dark cavity of the opening.

  “Ava?” he called in a loud voice.

  There was no answer. He saw a small kitchen right off the entrance with a counter containing a battered stove, sink, and tiny dishwasher facing a living area. Keeping the Glock ready, he reached out and pushed the door open further, until it came up against an interior wall.

  The kitchen in the moving light gave an impression of orderliness, unlike her parents’ house. No dirty dishes on the counter or stacked in the sink. No garbage lying around, and the cheap linoleum of the floor was clearly swept and mopped.