Jessica spent much of her time searching through the wreckage, which had been made safe for her, for mementoes and photographs. By the time she finished, with Sara’s help, she’d salvaged five photographs and a teddy bear who’d had his ears “blowed off,” the child said as she ruffled his head like a proud mother on her child’s first day of school.
Eventually, Sara got another chance to speak to Mace about Parker and what he’d heard about her father.
“Oh, I heard he’s a big time resistance fighter now.”
“You heard?”
“I don’t mean to go into details, Ms. Parker—that’s beside several points, I reckon—but I did hear that he’s been fighting back, and fighting back hard.”
Sara didn’t want to press Mace in case he took badly to her badgering him, but she couldn’t help asking how recent the information was, given that he and his family had been hiding in his admittedly impressive shelter. “Has he been fighting back recently? Have you heard about him… in the past few months?”
Sara prayed that the answer would be yes, confirming her father was still alive, but knew it was probably too much to ask for, even before he answered.
“No, ma’am, not recently, a good four or five months ago. Would probably’ve been before you all got separated, I’m afraid.”
Which would tie in with James Parker’s self-sacrificial drive in that SUV toward the roadblock of FEMA troops, which had allowed Sara and Ava to escape. Sara’s hopes fell with her heart, as she once again downplayed the danger of the situation she and Ava had been forced to leave her father in.
“We heard, though, he’s gone to ground and is gatherin’ an army. He’s gonna take those bastards in Chicago down. That’s what I heard, anyways,” Mace added. “So maybe he got away. If anyone could, it’d be your dad.”
Sara didn’t know what to say. Had her father become a legend the moment he’d died in a hail of bullets, or was there a ring of truth to the story? Was there an army of resistance fighters coming, and was James Parker its leader?
So, Sara didn’t say anything. She just hugged Mace.
The man took a moment to respond, his shoulders tense and his arms awkward. But in the end he found the ability to reciprocate and the embrace went on for a long minute.
When it came time to head back to the substation to see how work was progressing on the firetruck, Mace thanked them for their offer to join the resistance, but declined all the same.
“No. I’d like to stay here with my daughter… and my wife and my son.”
Margret shook his hand. “I understand, Mr. Richardson. And thank you again for saving the lives of my two best soldiers.”
“No, ma’am,” said Mace, “thank you, for giving me something to believe in. I hope that one day things here will heal, and all these deaths won’t have been for nothing. Maybe we’ll see you all then.”
Margret let Mace’s hand fall upon those words, and led Sara and Ava back to the Ford and the cell fighters.
“Move out!” she called, and with that they marched off into the gathering gloom.
11
Warden Spencer showed Parker a photograph of Sara lying dead in the corner of a cell.
Her face was half-eaten away by shotgun pellets and had been charred by intense heat. Whoever had taken the picture hadn’t even bothered to cover her naked body. In any other circumstance, her splayed legs and breasts would have been upsettingly lewd for a father to look at, but now… with bullet punctures, trails of blood, and a breast turned to overdone pork on her chest, the picture broke Parker’s heart, smashed it as if it was frozen in liquid nitrogen and dropped on a stone.
The interrogation room was lit by harsh white light. Parker had been dressed in an orange correctional facility jumpsuit. He was sitting on a fixed chair, ankles in chains, handcuffed to the restraining bar in the center of the table before him. A one-way mirror wall was ranged behind Warden Spencer, and in the corner of the room a U.S. Marshal, holding an MP7 across his chest, stood at attention.
In the surface of the mirror, if Parker flicked his good eye up, he could see his bruised and cut face. For the last five nights, at 1 a.m., two or three U.S. Marshals had visited him in his cell for what they jokingly told him was beatin’ practice because they enjoyed working out on the “uppity nigger” and reminding him of his place.
They weren’t expert at beating, at least. Parker had worked that much out from their sloppy blows. And the fact they hadn’t been going all-out to break his bones had told him the beatings were placeholders, while they waited for Warden Spencer to be ready for him.
Parker had heard the D-Block riot being quashed on the first night after his aborted escape, having been taken to a new cell on the second floor looking down on the recreation area. He’d smelled the smoke as, in a last-ditch attempt to hold the strike teams of corrections officers back, the ARM inmates had set alight mattresses and whatever else they could find. The screams of women and men had filled the air as volley after volley of shotgun fire had echoed around the prison.
Within an hour, it had ended, the last shots fired. The aroma of smoke dissipated by 3 a.m., and since then the prison had been quiet. Parker had remained alone in his cell the whole time, not knowing if Sara was in D-Block, caught up in the riot, alive or dead. The fear gripped him. Had he lost his daughter like Ava had lost Finn? Maybe he’d even lost all of them—Finn, and then Sara and Ava in this very prison.
On the fifth day, marshals had brought Parker to the interrogation room, where he’d been handed what seemed to be incontrovertible proof that Sara was not only dead, but that she had died in abject agony.
Before their most recent meeting, Parker had last seen Warden Spencer at the fatal stand-off at the cabin. Council men had surrounded Parker’s ex-wife and her Church of Humanity bodyguards in the remote family cabin in the Hoosier National Forest. Maggie, and Ava’s best friend, Finn Meyers, had died as a result. And afterward, on the run from the Council and FEMA, Parker, Sara, and Ava had barely escaped.
And here was Warden Spencer again—the big cheese, it would seem, in Indiana Correctional, management for the Council—running an internment prison for political prisoners and bad-think civilians.
Yet again, someone close to Parker had died because of Warden Spencer. His only daughter. His best and only stake in this fucked-up world—not only dead, but completely and utterly destroyed.
Spencer picked up the photograph and scrutinized it closely, a salacious grin widening wetly above his chin. “Not often you see a good natural bush these days, Jimbob, is it?”
Parker stared ahead flatly, willing himself not to respond, let alone cry.
“I do appreciate a woman with a good healthy bush and that…” Spencer put the photograph up to Parker’s good eye, and continued, “…is a mighty fine example of a dying breed of sexual topiary.” Spencer snorted like a consumptive pig at his awful pun. Then he dug deeper and harder into the wreckage of Parker’s shattered heart.
“I would say her blowjob days are over, though, wouldn’t you, Jimbob? A shotgun in the face will do that to a girl. Perhaps a good hot wax of cum over those pretty little titties might make up for it. What do you reckon… Daddy?”
There was a hollow in the space where Parker used to be. The atmosphere had been emptied, and all that was left in the air was a shadow of his former life.
Spencer put the photograph back into a Manila folder and lit himself a cigarette. He sucked in deeply, enjoying the taste, and blew a smoke ring for sheer amusement, his eyes sparkling at what he’d achieved. Next, he laughed and slapped the table and spoke to Parker as if they were buddies sitting on the porch on a summer evening, shooting the breeze and drinking beer.
“See that, Jimmy boy? See that ring? Goddammit if that isn’t the best smoke ring I ever blew! Damned if that don’t make me proud.”
Parker was nothing, he thought to himself; not a man, not a name, hell, he wasn’t even a ghostly presence in this room.
Warde
n Spencer roared, leapt up, and swiped Parker hard across the face with the back of his hand. The draught of sudden air from the vicious arc of his arm blew the folder onto the floor, spilling pictures of dead Sara at Parker’s feet. He was snapped back in his chair, head spinning, his cuffed wrists barking painfully as the chains jerked at the table’s restraining bar.
“Goddammit, you answer me when I speak to you. You will speak!” Spencer’s voice peaked in a croak, and a wave of sticky spittle fell across Parker’s cheek from the warden’s pig-like hole of a mouth.
“Don’t worry, Daddy,” said Sara.
Parker looked up.
As Spencer continued to rant and rave, he saw Sara appear from behind the fat warden and smile at him. He let himself fall into the sweetness of the hallucination. Spencer was punching him, but the blows felt numb, and Parker couldn’t help smiling at the vision of his beautiful seven-year-old daughter. Her skin unblemished, her eyes bright—the way she’d been before being spirited away by his ex-wife to work for the Council inside the Church of Humanity. The more Parker smiled at his little girl, the more Spencer raged, and the more ineffectual his blows felt.
“It’s going to be okay, Daddy,” Sara promised. She came forward and hugged Parker’s neck, nuzzling into him as he closed his eyes.
Spencer’s shouts became little girl giggles in his ear, and the blows from his fists landed like kisses.
The window was dark with night, but the light overhead was still phosphorous bright, inking tattoos of pain into his eye, even with the lid closed. Parker tried to lift his head, but his bloodied cheek was stuck to his pillow. He gingerly peeled the fabric away from his face and pushed himself up, groggily, putting his head in his hands.
The photograph of Sara—shot, naked, burned, dead—was still scraping layers from his brain. But sitting in there with it was Warden Spencer’s shit-eating grin, floating like the Cheshire Cat from Lewis Carroll’s lost masterpiece, Alice in Hades.
Parker rolled up the sleeves of his jumpsuit, looking for needle marks. The horrors inside his head felt like a bad trip, and he wouldn’t have put it past them to have put him straight back on intravenous drugs after his near escape from the facility.
But Parker’s arms were clear. He checked the backs of his hands and his groin for signs of forced injections. Nothing.
Sara was dead, and he was sober.
Never before had he ached so much for the oblivion of hard drugs, or a bottle of cheap bourbon.
He sat like that on the edge of the bunk the whole night. Not sleeping, not moving. He didn’t look out of the barred window once and wasn’t visited by a marshal for beating practice. Perhaps even they felt sorry for him.
He was only aware that the night was over when sounds came from corrections officers moving along the landing outside his cell, banging on the doors to wake inmates for ablutions and the breakfast queue.
Parker noted that the cells on either side of his were thumped on, but not his. This was usual. Parker was not allowed to join the general population of C-Block. For the last five… no, six days, his meals had been brought directly to his cell.
His face felt like it had been replaced with a melted waxwork of himself. New lumps and cuts from the silent beating Spencer had meted out in the interrogation room had erupted over the previous injuries. One of the cuts felt hot beneath his fingertips and his skin came away shiny with weeping pus. There was the start of an infection there in the lump beside the bridge of his nose.
Just another shitty thing in a succession of shitty things.
A key turned in the lock and the cell door swung out. Parker was expecting the usual corrections officers, one with a tray of breakfast and the other covering him with the muzzle of an M500 shotgun.
But this morning was different; there was the officer with the shotgun, as always, but standing beside him was Calhoun with a medical kit.
“Hello, Parker,” she said without emotion.
Parker blinked, his gut tumbling between fear that he was about to be made into a junkie again and happiness that he was about to be made into a junkie again—so he could forget Sara was dead.
Involuntarily, Parker pulled down his cuffs to cover his forearms as Calhoun came in.
“It’s okay,” she said, putting her medical kit on the bed and snapping open its clasps. “I’m here to dress your wounds. The only needles I’ll be giving you will be if you need anesthetizing before being stitched.”
Parker said nothing, and Calhoun approached. He felt surprise, the first emotion to cut through his shock and grief, that another officer didn’t follow her in to cuff him while she worked. He tried to hold onto it as a sort of lifeline. Clearly, they didn’t think he posed much of a threat with the only exit from the cell blocked by a goon holding an M500.
Calhoun worked silently, swabbing Parker’s wounds with saline, disinfecting them and covering those that needed it with gauze and tape. The wound that Parker had thought was beginning to become infected was closed with Steri-Strips, and she shielded his eye with one blue-gloved hand while she sprayed plastic skin onto it with the other. To make triple-sure the wound was protected, she covered it with a wound pad. But the first wound pad she tried to put on slid off and fell into Parker’s lap. Parker reached down to hand it back to her, out of instinct, but he felt Calhoun’s hands tense against his shoulder and he caught an almost imperceptible shake of her head as his fingers touched the fallen pad.
Confused, but noticing that Calhoun’s body was blocking the view of the corrections officer with the M500, he left the fallen pad where it was and covered it with the palm of his hand.
Calhoun finished and removed her latex gloves, dropping them into a yellow clinical waste bag with her swabs, used tray of plastic forceps, and cotton wool balls. She nodded to Parker just as imperceptibly as before and headed back through the door. “I’ll check in on your wounds in 48 hours, Parker. Leave the pads on, okay?”
“Copy that,” Parker said as the cell door closed.
He waited a good five minutes before examining the wound pad under his hand, and when he did so, he made sure he was lying flat on his bunk with his back to the door. The pad itself looked normal enough. Three inches square with a shiny side made from a permeable type of plastic that meant it wouldn’t stick to the scabbiest of wounds, and a non-shiny side that felt like the velvet nap on a pool table. Except this pad’s shine was different—two layers of surgical tape had been placed across its shiny side. Parker worked his thumbnail under one corner of the tape and inched it back across the surface of the pad. There was a folded square of paper beneath.
Parker teased it out with his nail and looked at it in the cupped palm of his hand. Making sure the hatch in the cell door was closed, he unfolded the paper.
In small, neat handwriting, a message read: “Not all is lost. It’s become clear Spencer is insane. Random executions have begun. We need your help to remove him from the game.”
12
Considering the exhaustion felt in the wake of the Seelyville battle and its resolution, Margret had most of the substation cell move back to Billtown for rest and recuperation. The work on the firetruck was to be maintained by a skeleton crew of welders, guards, and scouts who would work through until the conversion work was done. The F-250 was being driven on to Brazil, where a Ford service center would be raided for parts so the windshield and windows could be replaced.
The evening was quiet, the mood subdued around the cell base. People sat at tables eating in near silence, keeping their own counsel. The fighters knew they’d won a satisfying battle against the FEMA troops in Seelyville, but it had only served to bring into sharper relief the enormity of the task ahead.
Wiping out Lieutenant Solon’s patrol might yet prove to be a mistake.
No doubt, they would already have been missed, and perhaps more patrols would be sent in their direction, maybe even coming from Indianapolis in a closing pincer. Suddenly, Forest Glade and Billtown didn’t feel so safe.
Murmurs at the dinner table came from some who thought a tactical withdrawal out of the line of fire should take precedence over the planned attack on the federal prison in Terre Haute. In response, Ava saw Sara’s lips tighten and her fists clench in lieu of arguing.
Ava knew that Sara wouldn’t want to leave their fellow citizens locked up, terrorized, and tortured by the Council and their quislings. Sara wouldn’t walk away from them just for her own safety, and that meant Ava wouldn’t, either. Plus, Ava still felt bad about circumventing Sara’s report on the defenses and patrols around the prison. Since Finn’s death, she had relied on Sara’s solid presence and sure focus to anchor her against the raging tides of her fight and flight responses. She had long ago admitted to herself that her growing admiration for Sara had turned into a strong affection in the time since Canada. Their clandestine journey back to Indiana to hook up with Margret’s ARM cell had only solidified those feelings. Sara’s determination to do something to help the people beneath the yoke of the Council’s oppression, and her fury at the injustices meted out, were also emotionally powerful hooks.
As the talk at the table again turned to the idea of shifting the base, Sara threw down her napkin and stood up from the table too. Margret and Ava exchanged glances as Sara stalked out, Margret’s concern clear. Ava nodded, drained her glass, and followed Sara from the room.
Outside, the night was chilly but not yet cold.
The clouds were scarce, and the sky had filled with stars. One of the positives of the EMP Event, Ava thought, and perhaps the only one, was that now no light pollution from towns and cities could spoil the view of the heavens. The Milky Way—the backbone of the night, as people in southern Africa called it—was rising in all its majesty.
Ava handed Sara a sweater she’d picked up on the way out. “Thought you might want this.”
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