After several more minutes, Ava walked up behind them. “I think she’d like to talk to you, Parker,” she said.
Parker nodded and stood. Out on the edge of what he could see, a line of headlights winked into existence. Though several miles away, they were obviously heading in their direction. In this new America, only one group of people were brazen enough to travel in vehicles with the lights on for the whole world to see; the Council was coming for them.
They came back and crouched near Finn. She looked at Parker and tried to smile, and he saw that she seemed more alert than she had before, more aware.
“Hey, Parker,” she said. “You’ve looked better.”
He smiled and took her hand. “I owe my life to you, you little idiot,” he said. “What are you doing, acting like a hero?”
Finn looked at Ava and smiled. “I was trying to impress a girl,” she said. Ava took her other hand.
Parker laughed, it coming out as an abrupt, raw sound. “Yeah, well, that’s a pretty good reason.”
“You guys have to get going,” Finn said. “Once they see how we kicked their ass, they’re going to be all over this area.” She looked at Parker, her eyes growing feverish from the pain again. “I did good, right? You didn’t want me to come when you found me, but I showed you, right?”
Parker leaned down and brought her hand to his lips. He closed his eyes hard to stop the tears from coming, and then he nodded quickly. “You showed me good,” he whispered.
“You have to go,” Finn said.
“No!” Ava protested, but it was more of a sob than a word. “We’re not leaving you.”
“Shut up, blondie,” Finn told her. “A girl tells you she loves you and you immediately start trying to order her around?”
Ava was too exhausted to keep up her charade of strength. She hung her head and cried as Finn tried to soothe her.
“Shut up,” Ava said. “You quit trying to comfort me; you quit trying to take care of me.”
“It’s the only thing I ever wanted to do,” Finn told her simply. Ava didn’t answer—she couldn’t answer. “You’ve got to take care of your dad,” Finn said to Sara. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but he’s getting old as hell. Without us girls around, he’ll never make it.”
Sara put her hand on Finn’s leg. “I’m sorry we never met earlier, Finn. You’re one impressive lady.”
“Parker?” Finn asked.
“Yes?”
“It’s time for you to go, okay? I’d like to fall asleep like this, looking at the stars. That’s not a bad way to—” her voice caught, but she pressed on, “to…go to sleep.”
Hating himself for thinking it, Parker remembered those headlights out in the darkness. He nodded. “Okay, Finn; whatever you want, honey.”
“I hurt,” she said. She squeezed his hand and he looked her in the eyes. “I hurt,” she said again, “and I’m cold.”
He understood her meaning, and he nodded. “Ava,” he said. “Over in my pack is a coat; would you go and get it, please?”
Ava looked up, panic on her face. She was quiet for a moment, and then she shook her head. “No,” she said. “Have Sara get it. I want to sit here until she falls asleep.” She paused, and when she spoke again, Parker knew she understood. “Give her something for the pain, okay? She doesn’t deserve to hurt.”
Parker nodded and began opening his medic bag. Sara got up and went over to where he’d dropped his pack. Parker carefully laid out his Ketamine syringes. Taking a small length of tubing, he tied a tourniquet around Finn’s arm. She’d lost so much blood that her veins were hard to find at first. Sara came back and laid Parker’s jacket over her, then backed away. On Finn’s other side, Ava cradled Finn’s head and didn’t move. After a few moments, Parker felt her cephalic vein begin filling with backed up blood.
The opioid crisis in America had reached pandemic proportions by the time the Event had happened. Parker’s office, like numerous law enforcement agencies, had been given extensive familiarization courses. From his overdose awareness training, he knew five grams of the drug was frequently lethal in a one-hundred-fifty pound person. Finn had been thirty pounds lighter than that when he’d met her. The weeks of privation under Council rationing had only reduced her further.
His hands didn’t shake as he pushed the plunger and smoothly injected the dose. Then, because he wouldn’t get a second chance to get it right, he gave her another shot, this one in the shoulder.
“Honey, do you feel better?” he asked.
She made a soft, warm sound, but the words were too slurred for him to make them out. He looked up at Ava, but she wouldn’t meet his eyes. He took his surgical shears out.
“Finn, I’m going to loosen these bandages a little so they’re not so tight, okay?”
She didn’t answer, and he snipped one side of her dressing, removing pressure. Blood instantly began flowing out.
They waited in silence for a while after that. Sara and Parker sat silently, waiting for Ava to cry herself out. When the tears stopped, they got up and moved out.
26
Sara felt bad about slowing them down, insisting she was all right despite the haggard and drawn look that etched itself deeper into her face with every passing hour. Parker had insisted that they both take more antibiotics, but he still worried constantly about her. They were keeping to the hills, trying to stay above the patrols searching for them, and it was cooler there, gentler on her fever.
Well after sunrise, they holed up for a few hours and slept. They moved out again in the afternoon, but their fatigue was constant, and it made Parker realize that they had to start reconsidering the manner in which they’d been doing things—before they ended up walking in circles.
Both he and Sara needed to rest. The last of their adrenaline had burned off hours ago and Parker was a sweaty, shaking mess. His vision had been reduced down to a tunnel’s worth and, every minute, he was thinking about the pain meds in his pack as he wrestled with his need for them. Given everything that’d happened… could happen… he couldn’t risk becoming complacent. Finn would chew him a new asshole if he did.
Fuck. Finn’s gone.
Reaching into his pack, he took out four Tylenol and handed two to Sara, taking the other two with a sip of water.
He looked at Ava then, who was walking woodenly along in a slightly catatonic state. It was obvious how hard she was taking the loss of Finn, but he had no idea what to say to her. The Ava he’d known seemed to have died with her friend.
The weather had been changing for almost two days now, with clouds gathering in gray waves on the horizon and piling up, threatening rain. The sun was going down fast as they came off a wooded hill overlooking a valley on the approach to the Vineyard and with the sun going down, it was going to get cold quick.
Reaching the tributary creek running behind the compound, they headed straight downstream.
Except for intermittent lights on the highway and county roads below them, they hadn’t seen a single patrol. When the foliage along the creek bank thinned, Parker stopped them. The girls stared at him with deep, bruised circles under their eyes, filthy and strained to their breaking points. They looked like ghosts.
The Vineyard was just over the low ridge, less than two or three football fields’ worth of ground away.
“This is it,” Sara told him.
“What can we expect?” Parker asked.
“A fight. More than likely. I’m assuming they won’t know that Truesdale is dead, but word about Dexter’s death and me disappearing will have spread, so no one will be greeting us with open arms. I’m guessing the ones Truesdale left in charge will fight until it looks like they’ll lose.”
Parker nodded. “If they run, they live. If they surrender, they live. If they hide, they live. They fight, even for a moment, they die.” He looked at the girls. “When we go in, don’t look at faces, and don’t look into anyone’s eyes,” he added. “It’ll slow you down. Look at their hands. If their hands ar
e holding a gun or any kind of weapon, fire. If they’re empty, take the time to double-check. But you have to be automatic, quick on the trigger, willing to make a mistake, because we will be outnumbered.”
He waited to see if Sara was going to argue, but she looked back at him with the thousand-yard stare of a combat veteran.
“We’re not serving a warrant,” he continued. “We’re not some government commando unit on a secret mission. We haven’t had time to plan or train, and we aren’t fresh. We’re basically outlaw raiders and we’ve been beat to shit. If we try to be knights in shining armor, we will lose—and losing is death. We don’t want to die, so we can’t show mercy.”
He realized he wasn’t experiencing the same crisis of conscience that had plagued him before he’d struck the TV station while looking for Ava on the night of the Event. There, his instincts as a cop had shadowed his decision to fight. But since the ambush, and now with Finn’s death, a Rubicon had been thoroughly and irrevocably crossed, both within himself and seemingly in the country.
He looked at Ava, expecting some sort of snarky reply given that she could have drawn him a map of the compound while they’d still been in New Albany, but her head was down and she was quietly checking her weapons. Parker waited for her to look up and, when she did, the light in her eyes that had dimmed so drastically on their walk there seemed a bit brighter. Maybe she was still in there. After a final weapons check, Sara drew a crude map in the dirt to indicate where the women’s barracks would be, and they set out.
27
The Vineyard
The compound was almost a hamlet, with nearly fifteen different buildings laid out neatly against the base of a hill and overlooking the vineyards. There wasn’t decent cover from this approach, either, making Parker feel exposed as the dawn began bleeding through the night’s clouds. As they crawled in, he didn’t dare rise up fully for a better view of where he was heading. He knew a man with a rifle would have a field day catching them, running across open ground.
“That’s the kitchen and common dining room,” Sara pointed out to where a knot of eight men had wandered from a building on the far side of the group of buildings, some lighting cigarettes. Not all of them were armed, but half were.
They were less than a hundred yards away from where they stood but still shielded by the buildings. “We’ve got to hit them now,” Parker said. “Before the men disperse.”
Ava didn’t say a word, but nodded, and the three of them formed a loose triangle formation with Parker at point and began walking toward the nearest building. A young woman, hair in a bun, came out of the building closest to them and froze when she saw them. She opened her mouth to scream even as Ava ran up and knocked her to the ground by jabbing her in the stomach with the barrel of her M4.
“Jessica,” Sara said, kneeling by the girl. “It’s me, it’s Sara, do you recognize me?”
Eyes huge, Jessica nodded. Sara removed her hand from her mouth. “I’ve come to get you out, to get you away from the Church.”
Jessica looked up at her. “I don’t want to leave the Church….”
“What the fuck?” Ava snarled.
Parker put his hand on her arm. “Quiet,” he whispered.
“What do you mean you don’t want to leave?” Sara asked. “That’s all we talked about.”
“Don’t you know how scary it is out there?” Jessica asked. “The government came the night Truesdale left us; told us all how we could stay here at the Vineyard, but how there were bandits and killers roaming around. The section leaders agreed to work with them because of how dangerous it is out there.”
“Just like that?” Sara asked. Her voice was almost comically incredulous. “After everything Marr taught us? They teamed up with the Council? And you’re going to stay here?”
“Truesdale said you killed Dexter and worked for the government,” Jessica said. “If you can do it, why not us?”
Sara looked as if she’d been slapped. “Does everyone feel this way?” she asked.
“Sara,” Jessica said, “it’s like the section leaders say: if we fight now, what will we do? Where will we go? They know who we are.”
“Jesus wept,” Ava said.
Parker looked at Jessica. Of course, they weren’t going to fight. Marr, Truesdale, Maggie—their leadership, their true leadership and not the middle-management types like the section leaders—were all gone. Those who remained at the Vineyard were a flock of sheep without a shepherd, and they were going to follow the path of least resistance. He felt the urge to laugh bubbling up in his chest, and at the same time, he felt furious at Sara for believing in her delusional thinking, but his anger passed quickly as he saw the look of horror on her face.
She’d been following the Golden Rule, treating people the way she would want to be treated, but not the way they actually wanted to be treated. This was a tough lesson, and one young adults were supposed to learn—but now it seemed likely to mean their deaths.
“Canada,” Sara said. “We have a way to Canada—”
“Shut up, Sara,” Ava said. She got up off the girl. “Don’t say a thing to these people; they’ll only tell the FEMA forces.”
Sara’s mouth worked, but no sound came out. The emotional strain of everything she’d experienced had begun moving in a confusion of expressions across her face. Rage, grief, exhaustion, and agony. She’d been pushed too far, Parker realized, and he needed to keep control of her. Ava was already running on emotional bankruptcy. If one of them snapped, then it was likely both would snap.
Whatever happened in the next few moments would decide how the rest of this encounter was going to unfold. He had to speak up, to guide them back to a place of neutrality before things spilled over and got out of hand.
“Sara—” Parker began.
A heavyset fireplug of a man in a green John Deere hat, with mutton chop sideburns, walked around the corner of the building; he had a deer rifle with a scope over one shoulder. He stopped, mouth open, and stared at the scene before him.
“No,” Parker said.
Eyes bulging, the man began backing up, his fingers clawing at the leather strap of his sling.
“No!” Parker said, his voice sharp.
The man got the sling off his shoulder and fumbled with the stock, trying to swing the unwieldy weapon around. He opened his mouth to shout and Parker knew it was over; he lifted his M4.
Sara shot the man in the chest, a tight three-round burst punching into his torso and cracking the sternum. With an almost idiotic look of surprise, the man went down, and the burst of gunfire echoed down the shallow valley below the empty vineyards.
“Shit-fuck-shit!” Ava shouted.
Parker jumped to his feet and ran to the edge of the building. The men who’d been standing in the knot in front of the kitchen building were all looking in his direction. A few of them had started walking in Parker’s direction, responding to the unexpected gunshot.
Behind him, he heard the sound of flesh on flesh as someone slapped someone else. The men coming toward him unlimbered their weapons, but froze mid-step when they saw him.
“Not everyone feels the way you do!” Sara shouted, presumably at the girl, Jessica. “Some of them want to be free!”
Parker lifted his carbine and cut loose with several bursts, purposefully aiming above their heads. The men scattered like quail.
“No!” Jessica shouted back. “No one wants to leave the Church! You were the only malcontent!”
“Who the fuck uses the word ‘malcontent’?” Ava asked.
Parker came running back toward them, knowing he’d only bought them seconds. “Move! Move! Goddamn it, move!” he yelled.
Ava was already coming to her feet. The imprint of Sara’s hand was a red blotch on Jessica’s cheek, and Parker’s daughter was drawing back her hand to strike the girl a second time.
Parker grabbed her by the wrist and she locked eyes with him, berserk with fury.
“We’re not shooting innocents. Run, o
r die,” he said.
That got through. Both Ava and Sara began running then, heading for the thin line of bushes edging the Vineyard. Parker jogged after them, body half-turned backward to watch for the men he’d scattered and their companions. He was used to the pain in his leg and hip now, though the injuries still slowed him. Jessica remained on the ground, one hand to her inflamed cheek. A figure started coming around the corner of the building, and Parker fired twice into the wood frame of the structure so that the person ducked back out of the line of fire.
Parker turned and ran in earnest.
28
There was no time to process or discuss what had happened; they wouldn’t have been capable of doing so anyway. They needed to flee, so they fled. Parker couldn’t help thinking they were nothing more than corpses running, too stupid and too stubborn to know better. They were already dead, but they weren’t smart enough to lay down and die.
Behind them, they heard people shouting, and several sharp bangs of high caliber rifles followed after that, but it became apparent to Parker very quickly that the men of the camp had no intention of following them into the woods. Still, he had no way of knowing how much they were in communication with FEMA forces, so he pushed the girls and his own body hard.
At least, while they were running, there was no chance they’d have to talk about what had happened, he figured.
Too tired for games, they started moving directly toward the rail line rendezvous. Parker assumed that, if the Council didn’t know about the underground railroad Maggie had described, then there was little reason they should anticipate their direction of flight. He was thinking it might be sixty miles—three days of hard travel. Better to move by day than risk stumbling blind in the dark; especially with the temperature dropping more each day.
It was going to come down to luck, he knew. Again.
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