He set about cleaning and dressing his wounds with the supplies he’d liberated. At some point, he felt his face break into a goofy grin and he chuckled for no reason. The wound on his side was bad. He’d been lucky enough that the shot had missed any vital organs, and that was good, but the bullet had ricocheted off his rib, cracking it and bouncing out his side, ripping a gnarly exit wound. He’d have to sew it up when he got back to their camp.
The wounds to his left arm were largely superficial, at least, and dressing them was mostly about controlling blood loss. Ten days, two weeks, tops, he told himself. He felt very confident right now. He’d be able to travel quickly. Hell, maybe there’s just be a week of recovery if he took it easy the first couple of days.
Standing, he slung his pack over his right shoulder and held up his injured hand, freshly wrapped. Under different circumstances, he’d have kept it in a sling, but that wasn’t going to work right now.
He thought that, if he used more Ketamine, he might be able to move in a day or two, once Ava recovered from the fever and infection. New Albany wasn’t that far. For an instant, a dark shadow of concern flashed through his mind.
Once an addict, always an addict, he thought to himself before the dopamine began flooding his neurons. Then the worry was gone, and he felt warm and confident, ready to take on the world, wounds or no wounds. Ready to save his daughter. He started moving out.
“I can handle it,” he told himself.
He’d hold on to that delusion for far too long.
1
Six weeks later…
Parker walked slowly, pushing his bicycle and chewing an Ativan with the dull repetition of a herd animal working its cud. With their own bicycles, Finn came along behind him as Ava walked a bit behind her.
The expression on her face was one of displeasure, and it made Parker think about his ex-wife for the first time in a long time. She’d also worn that same frustration-turning-to-anger set to her jaw toward the end of their marriage. He briefly wondered where she was, what had become of her, and if she’d survived. He pushed the thoughts out of his head, though. She’d made it clear a long time ago that she wasn’t his problem to worry about.
Dawn was barely an hour old, and the three of them were on the road to their FEMA designated jobs.
Up the road, people stood quietly in line before a military checkpoint and, slowing, Parker and the girls took their places at the end of the line. Parker didn’t say good morning to his neighbors. New Albany wasn’t really a place for things like that anymore. It was a place where men with guns told you to shut up and stand in line.
And to pick apples.
Parker hated picking apples. The work was repetitive and boring, and suffering through it each day was like undergoing Chinese water torture. Nothing more than a drip, drip, drip of monotony and duplication of effort.
Absent-mindedly, he flexed and stretched his injured hand. Like the wounds to his arm and side, the pinky was healed in the sense that the wound had closed over, but the hand still ached incessantly. Sometimes he felt phantom pain in the tip of the missing finger that was every bit as intense as his other wounds. Weeks of picking apples hadn’t helped the pain any, either.
Still, even more than apple picking, Parker hated the emergency government; each day, they issued even more draconian legislation. Six weeks ago, they’d dragged the ill Ava and his injured self into New Albany. Their small group had been thankful enough then for the organization and medical care. In the weeks that had followed that, however, the true purpose of the emergency centers had only grown clearer. The Council was solidifying power, which meant gaining control of all food, medicine, and firearms. A situation Parker couldn’t live with. America was a changed country now.
Two National Guardsmen stood in the bed of a two-ton military truck and looked over the line of workers with mindless and reflexively hostile glares. They wore body armor and carried M4 carbines, which hung off Mamba 3-point slings, muzzle down, but the soldiers kept a hand on their pistol grips, obviously ready, and maybe even eager, to use them.
There had been problems in the first days after the night of the Event. Bands of marauders had been looting, raping, killing, and burning. In a nation of some three hundred million firearms, the outlaws had been well armed and vicious. Police, emergency workers, and National Guard soldiers had been killed, and the violence had quickly cemented an “us versus them” attitude across the country, forcing law-abiding citizens to pick a side and stand with either the impromptu government or rebelling citizens—with family members often getting split between the two sides.
Parker had learned quickly that the majority of the most vicious gangs were Council-organized and armed, designed to sow terror and foment violence to justify harsh crackdowns. The cabal that was the Council was a shadow government within the government, and there was no other way of seeing it.
In order to facilitate relief, the emergency government had quickly used its powers to consolidate essential supplies, like food and water, into central locations. It had then proclaimed “hoarding” to be an illegal activity, sending preppers underground faster than rats leaving a sinking ship. Those found with more than essential foodstuffs were penalized, and then imprisoned in work programs. As criminal elements had continued their savage rampages, martial law had been imposed, and with it, a weapons confiscation program had been set up.
Parker’s own knowledge of the Council did him no good. The average law enforcement officer or National Guardsman wasn’t going to listen to wild accusations about government conspiracies, not when they were receiving better housing and increased rations as rewards for keeping the populace under control.
Standing between the angled-in trucks, a state trooper in uniform, with a Mossberg 12-gauge on a state-issued 3-point sling, checked work visas. Since the consolidation of power under FEMA’s “Charters for Order After a Global Catastrophic Event,” life had gotten much less free in the Home of the Brave.
“Look at that fucker,” Ava seethed. “You realize how arrogant and lazy those bastards have gotten? I’ve been reading about the French Resistance during World War Two; I could take them out, no problem.”
“Easy,” Finn said. “Those men have families, people who would miss them. People who are counting on them to come home. We don’t need to start thinking like Jason in Friday the 13th. They don’t know anything about the Council.”
“We have people counting on us,” Parker said. “Something goes wrong with our own version of the ‘French Resistance,’ then the ones counting on us don’t have help.”
Ava shot him a disgusted look. She turned to Finn to press her point. “Then why aren’t we helping ‘our people,’ Parker? Why have we spent six weeks twiddling our thumbs and picking apples while you figure out—what? How to save the whole town of New Albany?” she demanded. “And how, exactly,” she added, looking at Parker now, “are we going to save someone from armed oppression without killing some SOBs?”
Finn started to respond, but Parker cut her off with a motion. “Not now,” he murmured.
People in the line were looking at them. One of the guardsmen in the truck had taken notice. Parker, nervous, felt his mouth go dry. Ava stepped in front of him and glared back at the folks who were staring.
“You looking at something?” she demanded.
Several looked away, and Parker breathed a sigh of relief. Finn unobtrusively pulled on Ava’s sleeve. The taller girl resisted Finn’s efforts for a moment, then stepped back.
“Keep it the fuck down!” the trooper shouted. Shoving a work visa into a woman’s hands, he curtly gestured for the woman and her daughter to move past the checkpoint and toward the designated work areas. The little girl went silently, dark circles under her eyes. She was too old to be sucking her thumb, but she was.
Parker and the girls moved forward in line, drawing closer to the trooper in his motorcycle helmet and mirror-lensed aviator shades.
Parker looked at the little girl wit
h her mother, guilt eating at him. He still worried constantly about Sara, his own daughter. After more than a decade, he now knew where she was being held and he had yet to go get her.
I’m sorry, baby, I need more time.
But another voice in his head chimed in as he subconsciously swiped at the Ativan powder stuck to his teeth. Liar! You know why you haven’t left yet.
His reflections were abruptly cut short. From down the road behind them, he heard a heavy engine revving and the squealing protest of tires as a vehicle took a corner too fast. As he spun around to look, the heavy, crunching rhythms of thrash music spilled down the street in an auditory assault.
“Oh, damn,” Finn said.
A black civilian 350 Chevy with an extended cab and a lift kit over forty-inch tires was cruising up fast, forcing the people in line to back up quickly in order to avoid being hit. Ava swept her arms out, pushing Parker and Finn backward out of danger. The Chevy stopped under a street lamp directly across from them.
“Marshals. Definitely a confiscation mission,” Finn said. “You know the penalty for hoarding.”
“Apparently, it’s better to rule in hell than serve in heaven,” Parker misquoted, his voice dull.
“These peckerwoods can kiss my ass,” Ava snarled.
‘Mission confiscation’ meant exactly what it sounded like. Under new FEMA unification laws, if government forces saw something they liked, they could commandeer it for the ‘Emergency Government Effort’. Resistance was met with lethal force and, if the items were deemed part of a hoarding cache, the means of applying that lethal force became more elaborate.
Two individuals in plain clothes, a heavyset Latino male and a blonde female, hopped out of the vehicle. Both wore Oakley wrap-around shades, carried Sig Sauer pistols, and had bronze shields clipped to their belts.
“Sig Sauer,” Parker rasped. You notice all the assholes are carrying Sig Sauers? his friend Eli had pointed out on the night of the Event, what felt like a thousand years ago now.
“Homeland Security,” Ava said. “If they try a shakedown, we’re fucked.”
“Oh God,” Finn spoke up. “Do they have prisoners?”
Parker watched the federal agents walk to the back of the truck. They both wore tight jeans tucked into steel-toed work boots and black, collared, short-sleeve shirts with USMS in red lettering over their hearts.
“Not Homeland,” he said. “U.S. Marshal Service.”
“Oh God,” Finn moaned again. “There’s going to be shakedowns, for sure.”
The agents reached the back of the truck and popped the tailgate. The beefy marshal hopped up onto the bed of the truck as the female opened the rear door of the cab and pulled three long lengths of one-inch steel chain from inside. The metal links clattered with sharp, tympanic notes as they hit the pavement.
No one in line said anything and everyone stood silently, watching the events unfold, most of them staring vacantly ahead like victims of shock, which, in a very real way, they were.
Following their confrontation with Captain Hayes and the Council’s forces during the night of the Event, Parker, Ava, and Finn had been forced to watch as the organization, working behind the scenes, had implemented its blueprint for seizing the country. FEMA emergency proclamations had strangled personal freedoms more quickly than the most ardent conspiracy theorists could have imagined.
Now, the blonde pointed at the state trooper and then jerked her thumb toward the truck.
Nodding, the trooper turned to the guardsmen and waved them over. The two young men hopped down and moved over to climb into the back of the pickup. After a moment, the three armed men hauled up three chained prisoners from the bed of the truck.
There were gasps from several people in line, including Finn. Ava folded her arms and frowned. Parker simply stood still, chewing another Ativan and watching the scene unfold.
The men were hauled to their knees by their hair. Two black males in their twenties and a white man somewhere between sixty and sixty-five, Parker guessed. It was somewhat difficult to tell their ages because they’d been beaten so badly that their faces were swollen masks of bruises and dried blood.
“Oh no,” Finn whispered.
“What the hell does Ilsa, she-wolf of the SS, got going on with the rubber dumbbells at the ends of the chains?” Ava asked Parker.
“They’ll serve as counterweight,” he told her. “They’re only two or three pounders.”
“They couldn’t have found something more dignified than wimpy-ass women’s dumbbells in pink and purple?” Ava demanded.
“I think the incongruity is part of the message they’re sending,” Finn commented. “The whole thing is like Nazi performance art, designed to sick us out.”
“Mission fucking accomplished,” Ava said.
Parker watched the blonde marshal walk over to the street lamp and begin twirling the ends of the chains with the light hand weights on the ends.
“Check out Lara Croft, Tomb Raider,” Ava muttered. She’d spoken the words like someone trying to get a bad taste out of her mouth.
The female marshal released the weights and they sailed up over the crossbeam of the street lamp. She let links slide through her guide hand until she could reach the ends of the chains with the weights. Once she had a hold of them, she quickly pulled them into place and tossed the loose ends to her colleague in the back of the truck.
“She seems pretty practiced at doing that,” Finn whispered.
“Not her first rodeo,” Parker agreed.
“Bitch,” Ava said, her voice dark.
Parker nodded, either in agreement with Ava or in answer to some internal stimulus. His mind was elsewhere. Watching the display going on in front of them and hearing his companions’ reactions, he couldn’t help weighing the differences he saw multiplying in the two young women who’d somehow come to form the center of his world since the Event.
Finn had suffered terribly that night—enduring attacks, vicious humiliation, and unprovoked violence. She’d fought and killed to survive. Those actions were things that changed you, Parker knew well enough himself. In response to being kidnapped, beaten, coming within inches of rape, and nearly being murdered, she seemed to have recently doubled down on the ideals she’d cherished before the world had changed around her.
She’s living like, as long as she’s still civilized, there’s still a civilization. He respected the hell out of her internal strength, but feared it was, ultimately, the strength of a martyr. Personally, he wasn’t interested in being a martyr.
Ava, on the other hand, upon learning of her betrayal at the hands of the most important person in her life—the decidedly misguided Dr. Lorraine Marr and her Church of Humanity—had engineered one escape attempt after another. In the end, she’d risked blowing herself into a fiery death rather than submitting. That had taken the confidence of a zealot. He wasn’t interested in being a zealot, either.
In the back of the Chevy, the three armed men were padlocking the chains into place around the prisoners’ necks. The steel links bit into flesh so tightly that skin bulged over the chain nooses; immediately, the listless men’s faces began discoloring with trapped blood. On the ground, the female marshal cinched the chains into place, one after the other, and lodged them tight around the lamp post with those little hand weights.
“Next,” the state trooper said.
Parker turned in surprise. The line had continued moving as he’d watched the execution unfolding. Now it was their turn to present their work visas, and all three of them stepped forward.
“I said, ‘next’,” the man snapped at them as a group, but he was keeping his attention on Ava.
Parker ground his teeth, then sighed with resignation. Ava was a beautiful young woman, and her already firm figure had only become more noticeable during the last six weeks as she’d taken up an intense bodyweight training regime. The workouts were partly preparation and partly a rebuke of all the downtime they’d spent in New Albany.
/> Why are we still here, Parker?
I’m prepping, getting ready. There’s a lot of danger out there.
That didn’t stop you from walking out the door of your job to come after me when the power went down.
That’s different.
Yeah, now you know the Council is hunting the Church of Humanity. That should be great for Sara.
“Are you going to give me your fucking work visa or am I going to have to shove this shotgun up your black ass?”
Parker blinked.
“No, sorry,” he mumbled, not wanting to look the state trooper in the face. He offered the trooper his visa. “Uh, why are those guys being executed?”
The trooper held his hand up, not taking the visa. “Wait,” the trooper told him, “I love this part.”
Parker turned back as the blonde, having climbed into the cab of the Chevy, stomped on the gas. The big pickup jerked forward, its spinning tires churning up smoke as she peeled the rig out. The three armed men who’d been left standing on the sidewalk watched impassively as the prisoners were instantly jerked clear of the truck bed.
They dangled from their necks as the steel links tore into their flesh, the truck no longer there to support them. None died instantly. With their hands and feet bound, they jerked as they choked to death slowly. Two of the prisoners lost control of their bladders and dark stains painted their crotches before urine could be seen dripping down from their legs.
The trooper chuckled. “Like motherfucking fish on a hook; like fish on a hook. You don’t know how many times during a traffic stop I wished I could do something like that.” He looked at Parker’s visa before handing it back. “To answer your question, boy, they were caught hoarding food.” The officer cocked his head then, regarding the side pouches Parker and the girls wore off their shoulders and around their bodies.
Parker froze. There were almost a full week’s rations of freeze-dried food in their bags. They were smuggling the supplies to a cache point outside of the city under the guise of their work visas. What they carried on them was a death warrant.
911: The Complete Series Page 26