911: The Complete Series

by Grace Hamilton

  If he was smart, he’d slip out of the area before either side found him, but this was the only pharmacy he’d come across that hadn’t looked absolutely gutted. Back at their camp, Ava had come down with something, some sort of an infection, and her temperature kept threatening to climb over 104 degrees. So far, Tylenol had kept it knocked down enough to keep her out of immediate danger, but if they didn’t address the underlying infection soon, she’d only get worse.

  Pressing his face against the glass, he peered in. The pharmacy was dark, and the smoke choked out the moonlight to a large degree, but from what he could see the place looked mostly intact. It was far too early in the emergency for every place, everywhere, to have been looted. Up the street, one of the looters shouted something at the defenders, who yelled back for him to fuck off.

  “Screw it,” Parker said.

  He used a pry bar to break the glass in the door. The shop itself looked like it was a throwback to the 1960s, a place that had been continuously operating for generations, and the glass was thick, but it wasn’t the new plasti-anti-shatter stuff they put in malls these days.

  He cleared the glass shards from the opening, and then stopped to listen. The looters were no longer arguing and the defenders were silent, as well. He was banking on the people behind the barricades thinking it was the looters they’d been yelling at, and vice versa. Wasn’t like they were going to check with each other.

  A gunshot rang out from behind the barricade and the looters started firing back. For one long, chaotic moment, the street burned with bullets knifing through the smoke. Parker carefully pushed his way through the opening, glass crunching underfoot as tendrils of smoke from the street began sliding into the abandoned area.

  Lifting his head, he looked around, getting his bearings. There was a soft drink cooler with a sliding glass door against one wall, now dark. In front of him, there were three aisles filled with merchandise, and in the back he saw the pharmacy counter with its window shuttered. Beyond that was the black opening of what looked like a short hallway. He looked over his shoulder; the firing had died down outside making him assume both groups were taking stock of the situation.

  Moving slowly, he navigated through the small store. Shrugging off his daypack, he stopped long enough to sweep bandages, sports wraps, medical scissors, and disinfectant into the bag. He crept forward until he was at the shuttered window. With pry bar firmly in hand, he attacked the deadbolt securing the folding metal shutter to the counter. After several tries, it came apart in a screech of metal and he popped it free of the lock housing.

  Sliding the mangled shutter up, he threw his bag over the counter and climbed across after it. Remembering the looters, he pulled down the shutter after him before turning on his little Maglite, remembering to keep one eye closed to preserve his night vision.

  There was a counter under a locked display case of nicotine, a cash register sitting on it. Next to it, the counter turned like a letter ‘L’ and there was a pharmacist workstation. Taking up the other wall were multiple wire racks and shelves filled with medications, and he quickly looked through them.

  He found a few broad spectrum antibiotics he could use, but little else. Realizing the prescription stuff must be locked up, he began hunting for a safe. Under the long arm of the counter were sliding panels, and when he opened them up he found rows of locked metal drawers, each alphabetized.

  “Bingo,” he muttered.

  Sucking in a harsh breath, he went to work with the pry bar. There was nothing quiet or subtle about his actions now; he dug into them like a hungry man cracking oysters. Popping the locks and wrenching free hinges, he reached in to pull out plastic bags of prescription medications and stuffed them into his backpack. He took all of it—antibiotics, narcotics, antivirals, sleeping medication, and even Lantus, a diabetic medicine in pre-filled syringes. He figured that what he didn’t need he could use for trade later.

  The medical supplies he’d collected over the years were at his cabin up north, but they wouldn’t last forever even once he got to them. Parker knew that drugs like Percocet and Vicodin were going to be better than cash for bartering, too, and so the central pocket of his backpack filled quickly.

  He was almost finished when the looters entered the store.

  He heard them pushing through the opening he’d made, their voices loud in the space. Parker had dealt with plenty of drunks in his time, and these guys sounded like they’d been drinking. A man with what sounded like a two-pack-a-day Camel unfiltered habit rasped instructions to someone with a tenor voice who sounded all of nineteen.

  “See this glass?” the raspy voice asked. “Just fucking happened.”

  “Maybe it was a ricochet bullet,” the tenor replied.

  “Fuck that. Ricochet wouldn’t have cleaned it out so nice.”

  “Other looters?”

  “Or those pricks from the furniture store trying to get an angle on us.”

  “Then maybe you two brain surgeons should stop talking and start treating this seriously,” a third voice said. This one was sharp and belonged to a woman.

  Parker silently whispered shit to himself. He killed the Maglite, plunging the back of the pharmacy into complete darkness. He opened the eye he’d kept closed and the gloomy room came into better focus. Silently, he replayed his mental layout of the pharmacy and remembered the short hallway he’d seen running up beside the pharmacy at the back of the store. More than likely, it led to employee bathrooms, maybe an office or breakroom. If there was a backdoor for deliveries, that’s where it would be.

  Grimacing in frustration, he knelt behind the counter and threw up the shutter in a single motion. The metallic clatter echoed loudly in the dark store.

  “I’m in the back, and I’m armed!” Parker called out, crouched down. “I’m going out the back door. There’s still plenty of stuff here for you guys. I needed medicine for my friend.” It was only half a lie; he did need medicine for a friend.

  “Come out with your hands up!” the raspy voice yelled.

  “Screw that,” Parker told him. “You want me, you’re going to have to come get me,” he said. “In a closed space like this, my shotgun is going to do me just fine.” A shotgun sounded good to him, and in fact, he wished he actually had one right now.

  “Three of us, one of you,” the woman said.

  “Yes,” Parker replied. “But I’m awesome and you three are pathetic douche-canoes.”

  “Fuck you!” the kid shouted, taking the bait.

  Parker shifted, moving along the counter so that his voice wasn’t coming from the same place. He mentally pinpointed the three based on their voices.

  “I took some stuff,” Parker said. “Some medicine my friend needs, but that’s it,” he lied again. He hoped appealing to their greed would work. “There’s a whole bunch of stuff left. Plenty for everyone.”

  “So you take what you have and we go our merry ways?” the woman asked. She had definitely moved closer.

  The flickering red light from the fire burning next door gave the place a hellish, surrealistic look, and Parker realized he was going to have to commit to a decision very soon. If he froze or hesitated, the group would corner him back here very quickly.

  “Sounds good to me.” Parker said. “What’s the point of finding a bunch of stuff if you lose people? That’s not sound business.”

  “Sure, sure,” the man said. “That makes sense to me, right, Kate?”

  “Don’t use my name, Dennis!” the woman snapped.

  Parker closed his eyes. He was dealing with idiots. Bad sign for talking his way clear based on reason. Maybe good if he had to get in a firefight with them. As had been the case with drunks, he’d dealt with a lot of stupid people as a cop. Meanwhile, all three had crept closer, and Parker suddenly understood there wasn’t going to be a sane, peaceful resolution, and the quicker he gave up hope of that, the sooner he could act to save himself.

  He thought for a moment of dying here in this store, bleeding o
ut on the linoleum floor. Ava and Finn waiting for him to return, and him never coming. Maybe, Ava’s fever spiking even higher and not coming back down. She’d die, leaving Finn alone.

  “Jesus,” he whispered to himself. “Screw that noise.”

  He lifted his handgun up over the counter and triggered three rounds, putting lead and noise out to startle the looters. He came over the counter right behind the shots, ears ringing, and slid across it to the other side. He landed and went to his hands and knees, scuttling toward the hallway he’d seen earlier.

  In front of him, a display rack of sunglasses crashed to the floor and he caught an impression of a slim figure of medium height running toward him. He didn’t hesitate. He lifted his pistol, closed one eye, and fired. Muzzle flash lit up the area around him in strobe light bursts as gunpowder stung his nose.

  He fired twice more and the figure stumbled backward, some kind of long gun dropping from his hands, but he didn’t go down and Parker fired twice more yet again. This time, the figure fell and Parker opened his closed eye as he scrambled over the man’s body. It was the kid—nineteen, twenty years old, spiky black hair and multiple piercings in one ear.

  The other two opened fire from either side of the store. The sound of gunshots assaulted his ears, leaving them ringing as he high-crawled away. One of them had a pistol, a 9mm or maybe a .40 caliber by the sound of it, and the other was using a semi-automatic rifle, but Parker’s hearing was too degraded by the multiple shot reports to narrow down on the caliber.

  He counted shots as he scrambled forward. Four from the pistol in front of him; six from the rifle behind him. Tubes of toothpaste and packages of floss and toothbrushes rained down around him in a cascade. Plastic bottles detonated like mini-bombs and he smelled mouthwash. Over his shoulder, bottles of vitamins exploded off the shelves and rolled around on the floor.

  He caught a flash of shadow from the rifleman and fired. He put three rounds into a shelf holding feminine hygiene products and through the shelf partition behind them. The bullets punched out the other side and he heard the startled scream of the man as they struck home. The front half of the man’s body hit the floor at the end of the aisle and a wide pool of blood, inky black in the reddish-tinged gloom, spread in a lake.

  He swung his pistol around as the female looter came around the far aisle by the hallway. He centered the pistol as she came into view, finger poised. He hesitated then, surprised. Even in the uncertain illumination of the fire raging across the street, the woman was visually arresting.

  More than six and a half feet tall, she wore a Harley-Davidson Motorcycles tank top and her fake breasts were massive, ridiculously so—each the size of a grown man’s head, and they swung and bounced without benefit of a bra behind the thin material of her shirt. She snarled, her face drawn and tight, peppered with acne scars and framed by hair hung in teased out dreadlocks. Numerous piercings showed from her lip, nose, and eyebrows, and her ears were stretched out in huge loops with gauges the size of coffee cups. A myriad of tattoos crawled up her neck and over her jaw.

  In the second it took him to catalog the laundry list of improbable features, she fired. The bullets struck him along the left side of his body in a series of searing hammer blows. A bullet ripped a bloody gouge from his shoulder, turning him slightly. He cried out as a second slug cut through the outside edge of his body before another sliced his triceps above the elbow.

  The final bullet blew the pinky of his left hand off at the second knuckle. Agony exploded from the end of his arm and his voice cracked sharply as he screamed. Operating on the electricity of his adrenaline high, he returned fire. The pistol in his hand barked, recoil making it jump in his grip. The slide racked with each shot, lifting the muzzle as Parker continued pulling the trigger.

  His first round struck her low in the belly, blossoming red above the button of her ripped jeans. The next five shots walked up the mid-line of her body, striking the solar plexus and cracking the sternum before blasting out her throat and smashing in her jaw. His slide locked open.

  She flopped over backward and hit the floor. Instinctively, Parker dumped his spent magazine and went for his spare. He shrieked in agony as his ruined finger came up against his pocket even as the pain caused him to spasm as if electrocuted.

  He dropped his pistol and clawed up the bottom of his pants leg where he kept a Ruger .380 hold-out. The .380 ACP was not known as a man-stopper, but the pistol was small enough to hide in the palm of his hand, making it ideal as a concealed weapon.

  Behind him, the rifleman moaned and, in an almost fugue state of kill or be killed, Parker thrust the .380 forward and put four rounds into the downed looter. The man’s head jerked twice and more dark blood pumped from the wounds. Satisfied, Parker lowered his weapon, panting against pain like a woman in labor.

  He lifted his wounded hand and looked at it. His palm and wrist were painted crimson with his blood. He thought he’d broken his bottom-most rib and that wound poured blood, as well. The pinky was gone at the second knuckle and bits of raw meat clung to a sharp, protruding splinter of the bone.

  “I can see the bone,” he said aloud.

  Hearing his voice, he realized he was in shock and that only adrenaline had tempered the pain of the other two wounds to sharp burning sensations, but the exposed nerve endings of his ruined finger burned at the touch of the air as if they were being dipped in acid.

  He knew he was going into shock and, combined with the pain, it was too much. Turning his head, Parker dry heaved several times and then lay back, cold sweat drenching him. After a moment, he forced himself up to his knees, clutching his wounded hand to his chest.

  He looked at the dead woman. She’d been carrying everyone’s perennial favorite; a 9mm Glock 17. It lay on the floor at her feet, and he leaned over and picked it up. He hissed in pain as he sat back down. Waves of nausea rolled through him and he broke out in another round of cold sweat. Blood streamed down his arm now, and his hand burned with the worst pain of his life. Putting his good hand against the wound in his side, he watched as it came away wet.

  Carefully raising his hand, he inspected the wound a second time, seeing fragments of his pinky bone in white flecks amongst the pink, raw hamburger-looking bits of flesh and muscle. He was stunned by the pain. He knew that, except for the lips, the fingertips were about the most sensitive area of the body. There were more nerve endings there than in the genitals. Except, in this case, his fingertip was gone but that didn’t stop the pain.

  He thought about running and climbing and jumping with this hand, and the wounds in his side and arm, and knew it was unlikely he’d be able to get through such movement. Maybe for a short burst, but not for the distance he had to travel back through the groups of looters. No way. And if more looters came, he was going to be severely compromised in a fight.

  Pushing himself to his feet, he was forced to lean against the counter for a moment so that he didn’t vomit. Involuntary tears filmed his eyes to distort his vision, his heart pounding in his chest. Gritting his teeth, he made it back over the counter and then lay there for several minutes.

  He thought about the pain killers in his bag. They wouldn’t do, he realized. He needed something faster acting than pills. Battlefield-level analgesics. The stuff paramedics gave to victims of motor vehicle accidents. He needed morphine.

  Pulling a bag of 3cc syringes from under the counter, he tore it open with his teeth. He tucked one into the pocket of his jeans for safe keeping and scanned the shelves, grabbing a box of 20 gauge needles before opening his daypack. His vision narrowed to a dark tunnel and he felt lightheaded to the point that his thoughts were incoherent even to himself.

  Grinding his jaw, he took a knee to avoid falling over and pawed through the pack, his Glock now tucked into the small of his back.

  He found what he was looking for quickly.

  He held it in his hands. Ketamine. Used as a superior battlefield analgesic in Iraq and Afghanistan, it was known on the street
s as Special K. As part of a joint Sheriff and State Police Search and Rescue training exercise, he’d been briefed on its use for trauma patients.

  He could only take the minimum dose of 0.4mg per kilo of body weight or risk becoming too drowsy. That would be as dangerous as trying to move or fight in his present state. He held up the syringe. This is a no-brainer, he told himself. You have to travel.

  He hesitated anyway.

  This was what he’d sworn he’d never do, and now he didn’t seem to have a choice. It all went back to that one damn mistake. Though he’d ultimately been cleared of wrongdoing in the shooting, he’d still killed an innocent boy in the line of duty. Cleared or not, he carried the memory in an anchor of guilt around his neck. During the mandatory psychological briefing afterwards, he’d mentioned his inability to sleep, his constant state of agitation. The psychologist had recommended a psychiatrist who prescribed Ambien for sleep and Ativan for the agitation.

  They’d helped until they didn’t, and he became a liability on the street, costing him his job. He’d battled the addiction the pills had brought on enough for him to be able to work as a 911 Operator, but the temptation to slide over into heavier use had always been there, as it was now, a demonic presence over his shoulder. Ketamine, Special K, was as addictive as fuck, he knew. This was a real gamble, considering his attempts at sobriety.

  Fresh gunfire erupted outside. He thought of Ava burning up with fever.

  “Just enough to be able to move,” he told himself.

  Pushing apprehension out of his mind, he drew up his dose and gave himself the shot in his good shoulder. Flinging the needle away, he rested for a moment, panting. Very quickly, an ocean of warm euphoria flooded his body, washing away the pain. It was still there, but the nausea had Evaporated and the agony of the wounds in his side and hand were quickly being reduced to dull throbbing.