Ava let the slight slide. In truth, Sara had no idea whether or not her father was alive or if he’d died saving their lives. Under those circumstances, Ava didn’t mind cutting her friend some slack.
Further thought was curtailed by the throaty diesel growl of two M939 5-ton, 6x6 military trucks that rumbled along the approach road toward the gates. In the uncovered backs of the trucks, Ava could see people in civilian clothing sitting crushed together, chained at the wrists to one another. The trucks stopped at the checkpoint and FEMA soldiers came forward from the guard post to check the IDs of the drivers.
Ava had seen this sort of thing before on the History Channel, in a series called Nazis: A Warning from History. Civilians in trucks being taken into prison camps. This was straight out of the fascist playbook, and it made her feel comprehensively sick. She felt the waves of impotence coming off Sara, too. They were both boiling inside at what they were witnessing, but there was nothing they could do except watch the people being taken inside. Drawing attention to themselves now would be suicide, at best.
And then, things got so much worse.
There was a shout from the back of one of the trucks. Two men had managed to slip some of their chains and begun clambering over the side in a desperate bid for freedom. But although their hands were free, and they were able to jump to the ground, stumbling to their hands and knees upon landing, their ankles were still hobbled by chains linked to each other’s feet.
Ava wanted to close her eyes, but couldn’t do it.
Their escape quickly became a pathetic mockery of whatever they’d hoped for, and Ava wished that she and Sara had been further away, so as not to see the details. Ava’s thoughts on the danger they themselves were in froze as two FEMA soldiers easily caught up to the struggling men and dragged them back to the truck. One of the men, a man in his thirties, was sobbing, and the other, a white boy with thinning hair who didn’t look like he’d eaten for a month, was telling the soldiers how sorry he was. “I won’t do it again!” he screamed, followed with the most childlike thing Ava had ever heard, stinging her eyes with tears as he repeated, “I promise! I promise, I won’t!”
Ava clutched Sara’s shoulder as both men were put on their knees on the road at the back of the truck, in full view of the people still chained there, and then they were double-tapped in the back of their craniums. Blood and brains gushed into the spotlight glow, and the bodies fell sideways into the road.
A visible flinch of fear transmitted itself through both trucks of civilians.
Below them, Ava could hear women wailing. Children crying. She bit down on the sleeve of her shirt, knowing she couldn’t afford to cry out herself and that she was moments away from doing so.
The prison gates were opened then, and the trucks grumbled on into the inner quad.
Focusing so intently on the miserable scene unfolding below them meant that Ava and Sara hadn’t seen what was approaching their position from the west, behind the supposedly electrified fence. The soldier was a female in her mid-twenties, her blonde hair tucked up under her uniform hat and her hand on an M4 on a 3-point sling. A large black and tan Alsatian walked beside her. As the patrol approached, the guard dog suddenly stopped.
Sara froze, half over the lip of the depression, Ava right beside her. The woman’s voice carried to them clearly across the short space. There weren’t two dozen yards between them and the patrol.
“What is it, boy?” they heard the soldier asking the dog.
Like the turret of a tank, the canine’s big head swiveled around until its predator eyes stared into Ava’s. The Alsatian began barking ferociously. It lunged against its leash, coming up against the fence as it snarled.
Not electrified then, Ava had time to think.
Sara scrambled backward as the guard began yelling into the handset of the walkie-talkie clipped to her shoulder epaulette. Almost immediately, an air horn klaxon blared to life and the searchlight on the tower closest to them blazed with light.
“Fuck!” Sara hissed as Ava yanked her another step away from the fence.
The female soldier fired, the sharp cracks of the 5.56 mm rounds almost lost in the cacophony of the siren. Geysers of dirt showering both of them, Ava and Sara pulled their silenced pistols as they scrambled back the way they’d come in a bent-over sprint, but neither returned fire. Speed was going to save their lives now.
Coming out of the drainage gully, they popped over the side of a hillock and slid to the bottom. Behind them, more dogs were barking as they fled, and Ava knew pursuit was likely.
The beam of the searchlight swept past them and they threw themselves down as it came back across. Fifteen yards away, the treeline began, opening up one of their predetermined escape paths.
“Go! Go!” Ava urged automatically, knowing her words were unnecessary but saying them anyway.
They broke cover and raced for the woods, zigzagging in short bursts. It seemed to take forever for them to cover the distance, while behind them several more rifles opened fire. They made the woods, and Ava threw a look over one shoulder.
“They’ve turned the dogs loose,” Sara panted.
Ava held up her P226. “Dogs, we can handle,” she said.
Sara nodded, and they broke through a screen of bushes to where an old hiking trail ran down toward the Wabash. They opened up on the firmer ground, running hard. Within a matter of a minutes, however, they heard the dogs on their trail.
“Shit.” Ava half-gasped at the sound of the pursuing dogs.
“Ready?” Sara asked.
Out of breath, Ava just nodded.
“Right,” Sara said. “Now!”
Both stopped running, skidding to a stop. In unison, they spun and took a knee. They lifted their pistols in two-handed grips and pointed them back down the path, only seconds before three Alsatians rounded the corner. To Ava, they didn’t look like dogs. The dogs she knew were pets. They liked treats and getting their bellies rubbed.
These beasts were mythological monsters, all flashing eyes and snarling muzzles filled with knife-like fangs. The growls bridging their barks were savage, terrifying things that made her feel like she’d entered a horror movie. Every ounce of these creatures was primal hunter-killer.
Sheer terror eliminated any compulsion that might have stayed their hands. In the moment, Ava felt like she was a woman from the ice age facing dire wolves.
The pistols coughed and the slides racked back, ejecting their brass.
The 9 mm bullets struck the dogs, one after the other, punching into their broad chests with lethal kinetic energy. The last dog in the line vaulted over his dead packmates and charged directly at them. Again, the two women moved in synchronicity. The pistols fired.
The Alsatian yelped as its body absorbed the two 9 mm rounds and it crumpled into the dirt just feet away from them.
“Holy shit,” Sara breathed out. “That was too close.”
“We’ve got to go,” Ava said.
She jumped to her feet and Sara followed. Down the path, they heard a unit of pursuers approaching, more dogs with them. Ava whirled and raced two hundred yards through the woods, not running flat-out to avoid overtaxing herself, but with fear lending speed to the pace she set for them.
At a small clearing, they left the path, crawled through a barbwire fence, and jumped over the edge of a creek bed to begin following a small tributary south to the Wabash. They managed to stay just ahead of their pursuers, and two miles downstream, they entered the large sewage tunnel and followed their markers through the maze.
They moved rapidly through the sewer pump station. The water inside soaked their hiking boots and was slimy with algae. Trash and detritus lined the way, the air and space both ripe with overturned shopping carts, old tires, and random pieces of lumber mixed in with rotting clothes and torn plastic bags stuffed with garbage.
When they were sure they were far enough ahead of their pursuers to risk it, Ava took out a mini Maglite and shone it downward. At differen
t intervals, other tunnels and pipes broke off and led in different directions. They had used green spray paint, disguising their signs as random graffiti, to mark their path.
About seventy yards in, they came to a rusted Public Works gate. Comprised of metal bars, each half of the gate was secured to the other with a heavy length of stainless steel chain and a massive padlock. They’d come across the gate on an early reconnaissance mission and devised a plan.
Using heavy-duty bolt cutters that they’d left hidden beneath some garbage for just such an escape as this, they clipped off the links around the old lock, crossed through the gates, and then relocked the chains behind them with a new lock they’d left with their bolt cutters. Dogs couldn’t follow their scent in the miasma of polluted water they’d come through, but even if they came this way, Ava and Sara were betting pursuers wouldn’t be equipped with bolt cutters or suspect them of switching locks.
Twenty minutes later, they moved down a forced-flow tunnel and slipped out of a valve chamber into the lift station wet well, from which they climbed metal stairs to the surface.
Positioned on a concrete slab in some swampland connected to the Wabash, the area lay tucked into a semi-rural corner west of Terre Haute called Larimer Hill. There, they got back to their green and white 1978 K5 Blazer and lit out to the northeast, and then along US 150; they recrossed the Wabash, went through the north of Terre Haute, and joined US 40 where it ramped in from Wabash Avenue. Mercifully, FEMA forces were thin on the ground in this part of the city, and so they weren’t stopped for ID checks.
An hour later, they were pulling into a settlement east of Billtown, an unincorporated community of five hundred people comprised almost exclusively of resistance sympathizers; the ARM cell headquartered here was fifty strong.
The Council had taken little interest in the settlements between Indianapolis and Terre Haute, other than to get them to repurpose their agricultural efforts toward FEMA needs. A small squad of military police were garrisoned at an old State Patrol barracks about five miles outside of Billtown, but they were circumvented easily enough when the need arose.
Ava drove them off US 40 and followed a dirt track along the edge of Billtown until they came to a park. The park had fallen into disarray; the grass needed mowing and the bushes had gone untrimmed. A once-cultivated jogging path wound between baseball diamonds, basketball courts, and soccer fields. At a point where the park abutted a neighborhood of two-story colonials, they’d be making contact with the resistance security element, and it was near there that they parked and climbed from the Blazer.
They came out between two lawns of a cul-de-sac, onto the sidewalk, and heard someone whistle. They knew the drill and stopped where they were. There were designated marksmen in random second-story windows of the houses around them. Frozen, Ava and Sara simply stood and waited. They had travelled in grim silence all the way from Terre Haute and what they had witnessed. Other than engine noise, the whistle was the first external sound they’d heard since they’d killed the dogs.
Two bearded men in jeans and flannel shirts appeared out of a toolshed, one of them armed with an ugly looking Protecta Bulldog 12-gauge. Its rotating cylinder, like the drum magazine on a Thompson submachine gun, gave it a distinct profile. The other man, lankier and darker, had an AR casually slung over one shoulder. As always when they dealt with established cells, Ava could feel the men inspecting them, scrutinizing them for possible weakness.
There was nothing quite like violent conflict and clandestine armed struggle to instigate a rise in traditional gender roles. There were plenty of women in the resistance, and both Ava and Sara knew it; many of them had engaged in firefights with the new American government. But a two-woman team conducting ops on their own was an anomaly. This, combined with the fact that they had entered into the Western Indiana cell from the national organization, made them a source of curiosity and sometimes suspicion.
“Were you followed?” the man with the AR asked. Ava recognized him as a squad leader named Dustin. His friend with the shotgun was named Adam.
“Yeah, Dustin,” Ava snorted. “Super-followed. That’s why we’re just strolling in here.”
Dustin scowled, but behind him Adam grinned. “It go well?” he asked.
Sara nodded. “Well enough. I think we’re as close to ready as we need to be.”
Surprised, Ava looked at her sharply, but Sara ignored her.
Adam nodded, adjusting the sling of his AR as he spoke. “Good to hear. Listen, control wants to talk to you ASAP. They told us to pass on that they want to see you right away for a debrief before you go to the arms room or get something to eat.”
“Fine,” Sara said, apparently taking that as a signal for them to move on—she brushed by them without another word, and Ava followed behind her with a shrug at the curious men.
Adam laughed as the two women walked away, and Ava lengthened her stride until she’d caught up with Sara. In a low voice, she said: “They want to see us ‘ASAP,’ like maybe they were worried we’d take a vacation before giving a report?”
“They’re like kindergarten teachers,” Sara answered, bitterness riding in her tone.
“Still,” Ava muttered, “it sounds ominous. Wait until they hear what we have to tell them.”
Sara said nothing, not even giving a nod of assent. That worried Ava almost as much as what they had to recount to the cell leaders.
What the fuck was going on in Sara’s head?
3
The nurses had discontinued packing his eye cavity as the wound beneath it healed further, and Parker had been given an elasticated eyepatch to cover the hole in the side of his face. Now, when he looked in a mirror as they let him carry out his daily ablutions with an ancient, battery-operated shaver—under guard, of course—he looked less like a pirate and more like a one-eyed ice cream salesman. He’d gotten used to his newly restricted vision, too, learning to compensate by sweeping his head from side to side periodically, providing him a fuller range. Not that it mattered. There wasn’t anything to look at.
The jagged throbbing in Parker’s newly empty eye socket had stopped even before the dull aching in his arm and leg; the nurses had known what they were doing. But even so, the pain itself had offered some distraction, at least, from the boredom. Parker hadn’t so much as seen sunlight other than through the slits of overly high and narrow windows.
And then there was the fact that Parker had no idea where he was. It could be Guantanamo Bay for all he knew. He hadn’t been allowed any contact with the outside world. It seemed that all his captors wanted to do with him at the moment was to fix his wounds, helping him recover from his infections.
And get him addicted—that goal had become clear pretty damned fast, and Parker had had more than enough time to contemplate the path they’d laid out for him.
The lack of any schedule had left more than enough time for him to think about his addiction, in fact. And to remember one simple fact: There were poor addicts, and there were rich addicts.
Poor addicts steal, cheat, and allow themselves to be exploited for their fixes. Rich addicts—your rock stars, film stars, and Fortune 500 executives—can and do buy the really good stuff. The clean stuff. The stuff not cut with anything that might poison a vein, or cause a stroke, or stop the whole breathing thing.
Parker was a rich addict, and he knew it.
Calhoun would give him his daily dose, and Parker would feel that euphoric rush of warmth, and there would be none of the gut churning, sweat running, paranoia-inducing terror of withdrawal—because Calhoun would be back again the next day.
Within a short time of starting the daily injections, Calhoun hadn’t had to hold Parker’s arm down to introduce the dose. Parker had let her inject him without resistance. What would be the point of fighting? he reasoned. If they withdrew his drug, within just a very few hours of the time when his body had expected the next dose, he’d be sweating his life away to agonizing cramps, puking his guts up, climbing the wall
s, and begging them for another hit, knowing that he’d do anything they wanted—or tell them anything they wanted to know.
Weirdly, however, the opportunity to lie to his captors never arose. Every day, Parker waited for the interrogation to begin, but it never did. The only people to talk to him were Calhoun and the bald male nurse, whose name he eventually learned was Greaves.
Greaves was a Nurse Private First Class with weak watery eyes set above doughy cheeks, and he didn’t have anything interesting to say. Or at least he wasn’t prepared to make the effort required for saying something interesting to Parker.
In his previous cop life, Parker had known plenty of guys like Greaves. Insular, minimum-effort guys who just turned up, did what they were told, and picked up their checks at the end of the month. The sort of guys who would do their jobs, but couldn’t be relied on when there was trouble. The kind of guys who would hide in the john when the captain asked for volunteers. Parker figured he most likely wouldn’t want to talk to Greaves anyway—he just wanted to find out where he was being imprisoned.
But Calhoun and Greaves were giving nothing away.
Calhoun would check in on Parker before she went off shift just to ensure that Greaves had set the shackles and straps correctly, so that they’d keep on holding Parker to the bed when he wasn’t in the gym. That was all they let him out for, after all. For whatever reason, they’d said they wanted him to be able to stay in some modicum of physical health; Parker could only guess it was because they wanted to use him for something later. But beyond that, his world was his room.
He even ate in his room—they allowed him one hand free for that. The food was tasteless and dull, and could always be eaten with a spoon and swallowed with minimum chewing. They didn’t want to have to give him a knife, even a plastic one, to cut anything. Parker knew that a sharpened spoon could be fashioned into an effective prison shank, too, but his captors only allowed one spoon into the room at a time. And the guard who brought the plastic trays of plastic food always made sure that it was taken away.
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