Parker wondered if they knew who he was. Ex-cops weren’t the most welcome among this population.
With his cop’s eye, Parker scanned the faces as best he could as Castillo and Rodgers pushed him toward the nearest knot of prisoners. The only face he recognized was Henshaw, the thin, white-afroed trustee, but the man made no sign that he recognized Parker in return.
Rodgers and Castillo returned to the officer station at the end of the hall, and Parker was left marooned in space. All the seats were occupied except one, so, shrugging to himself, Parker headed toward it.
Before he sat at a table with five other convicts, who each looked as if they’d been carved that morning from solid hunks of antisocial behavior, Henshaw caught his eye. The trustee didn’t say anything, but the look on his face told Parker that sitting at this table wasn’t a good idea.
Parker sighed and walked past the only empty chair. When he reached the wall at the other end of the recreation area, he leaned against it with a growing sense of resignation. He had more questions in his head than answers, and he still didn’t know how he was going to get out of here, what Spencer’s plans for him were, what Calhoun’s note would lead to, or how he was going to bring down the Council. Everything right now was a complex puzzle and none of the pieces fit together. Or even came from the same picture.
And hanging over it all was Sara. How was he expected to carry on when the person he’d pledged to protect, his own blood, was lying cold on a slab somewhere, awaiting cremation?
At first, even after Calhoun’s note, he hadn’t cared about any of it anymore. He’d told himself he ought to lie back and die, finally, instead of being too stubborn to just fucking give up. Those sentiments had bled out like Finn, though, partly because of the images of Sara’s and Finn’s bodies that stayed arrested in his mind, demanding revenge. He didn’t only want to take down the men who’d been at the forefront of their deaths; he wanted retribution against the whole goddamned Council. It had taken time, but his depression and grief had given way to rage and determination. He wouldn’t be giving up any time soon, regardless of the odds he faced.
Parker was so lost in his thoughts that he didn’t notice one of the convicts from the table with the empty chair had risen and entered his orbit. This giant was the equivalent of three enormous black guys who’d been poured into one body. Parker was tall, but this guy could have whispered in a giraffe’s ear by standing on tiptoe. His hair was a wild afro, and three incisors had been replaced with gold teeth. His arms folded slowly and deliberately across his chest, and Parker could see exactly what was happening. The underside of the man’s forearm held the crossed spears and diamond shield tattoo of the Mandingo Warriors gang, a vicious, exclusively black brotherhood of men, set up specifically to protect their brethren from the ultra-racist Aryan Brotherhood in prison and beyond. As a cop, Parker had had several run-ins with Demo, as the Mandingo Warriors styled themselves. Such encounters were never pretty. Being a cop was seen as bad—but being a black cop, well, that was especially disappointing, as far as they were concerned.
This mountain on legs wouldn’t be the leader of his prison tribe, though. He’d be one of the foot soldiers sent by the leader, who Parker guessed was still back at the table, waiting to see what this new face could bring. This was a well-tested ritual, and Parker knew showing any sign of weakness would color his whole time among these inmates. This was his first opportunity to make them understand he was someone to be reckoned with.
The arms-folded Mandingo said nothing. He just stared at Parker with intense eyes that could have drilled through iron.
Parker had three choices—to break eye contact and show acquiescence, to attempt to attack the guy with a sequence of punches that would probably see him fatally shanked with a prison knife before Castillo and Rodgers intervened, if they even bothered, or the third option…
Parker reached up, pulled the Mandingo’s head down, and kissed him on the forehead. The Mandingo staggered back as if electrocuted and raised a fist to punch Parker into the middle of next week, but his wrist was caught in a sudden grip from behind.
“No, dawg,” said a voice that dripped with authoritarian menace. “Do not touch him.”
The Mandingo stepped away, revealing a much smaller black man. He was of similar build and height to Parker. He had less ink than the Mandingos, but bore the same spear and diamond shield tattoo. He pointed at the table from where he’d just sprung.
“Sit,” he motioned to Parker.
The Mandingo’s name was Gace, and his gang-boss was Kleet.
Kleet seemed fascinated by Parker’s skin beneath the jumpsuit, rolling back his sleeves and pulling the collar apart at his neck and chest. It was as if he’d never seen a black man without gang tattoos as ID.
Prison tattoos were a currency of trust in the penitentiary system, and Parker knew it. If you understood what to look for in the markings of rival gangs, you knew who to maim or kill. No one wanted to make the mistake of killing someone from their own or an allied tribe. But if you didn’t belong, if you had no allegiance, you were everyone’s prey.
“You’re either a spy or a fool,” said Kleet when he finished sizing up Parker.
“Neither,” said Parker. “I upset a few people in the government. They put me in here until they work out if they want to hang me or shoot me.”
Kleet laughed. “And you kissed Gace to get our attention. Your only way out of an impossible situation. I like your spunk.”
“I don’t know you yet,” Parker replied, with his first half-smile in a month.
Kleet clapped him on the shoulder and announced that no one was to mess with Parker. Gace looked positively crestfallen, and rubbed at the patch of skin Parker had kissed like he was trying to scrub a bad memory off his head.
Kleet was in for murder one, armed robbery, and more Class-A misdemeanors concerning drugs and prostitution than he could be bothered to list. Kleet’s greatest regret, he declared, was not killing the guys he’d killed twice. They’d raped his gang-sister, and they, as far as he was concerned, deserved to die more than once. Being deleted once wasn’t enough.
When Parker had had dealings with career criminals as a cop, the first thing that had come out of their mouths when he’d come into contact with them had been “It wasn’t me! I didn’t do it!”
Kleet was the complete opposite. He was proud of what he’d achieved within the criminal underbelly he inhabited. He understood that world and seemed to have made a success of his time in it; except, of course, for getting caught. Parker considered it bad form to mention the last point, seeing as how everything else was going so well.
Listening to the man’s life story, Parker couldn’t even begin to measure the gulf between his life and Kleet’s; it felt like a billion miles in terms of experience and action, and yet here they both were, guilty of their crimes (in the eyes of what passed as law in the U.S. now), and both willing to do more of the same. Kleet to outdo his rival gangs in Indianapolis by whatever means necessary, and Parker feeling the same way about the Council in Chicago.
The other Mandingos in the gang sat silent as Kleet held court at the table, and Parker took every one of them in. Each was built in various shades of Gace, and each could have taken Kleet out with a hand tied behind their backs and one eye closed. That none of them would was a mark of Kleet’s power, both within the prison and without, in the pre-EMP Event world, anyway.
What impressed Parker most in the here and now, though, was that Kleet wasn’t boastful. He wasn’t acting beyond his own capabilities, and he displayed a primal bravery and honor toward his men and the people in his care. There was a feudal aspect to his talk of territories, soldiers, and the craft of criminality, but as Parker listened, it occurred to him that this attitude fit the new world pretty well.
Parker couldn’t bring himself to feel positive about the man Kleet had been in the past, but what about the future? Did the new world need men like Kleet to take it back now? Did Kleet represent
the kind of man who might be useful in the fight to come? In the same way Spencer was using convicts to spread horror and violence, the question seemed to have become whether Parker could see himself enlisting men like Kleet to fight alongside him. But then, Parker wondered, would Kleet even care? If he was outside the prison system tomorrow, would he exploit citizens in exactly the same way he had before?
Meet the new ruling class, same as the old.
Or… did Kleet have a pearl of civic duty in the closed clamshell of his criminal intent?
But whatever Kleet’s crimes were, and however they were listed out—and they had been many and varied—he was a leader of men. Charismatic, assured, and supremely confident of his abilities. If nothing else, Parker wondered what he could learn from a man like Kleet… what he could get him to do. Would trying and potentially succeeding make him as bad as Spencer, just viewed from the other end of the telescope?
Questions. Questions. Questions. But few answers.
If he got the chance to associate with the general prison population again, Parker’s immediate mission would be to find some answers. He’d have to, assuming he wanted to survive.
14
The modifications to the firetruck worked.
It was a dinosaur of a beast, built in the early 1970s with an electrical system too basic and simple to be affected by the EMP blast, and it had been left to languish at this rural substation of a county volunteer fire department on the outskirts of Billtown. It ran like an ill-tempered mule and was loud as a tractor. But it was also fully functional, powerful, and big. And now it was ready.
Sara’s plan was simple, the way most combat plans needed to be. Using welding torches, the guerilla cell had upgraded the truck with hillbilly armor to her specifications, until it had become a makeshift armored personnel carrier. It could stand up to small arms fire at least well enough to penetrate the gates of the prison. Once inside, it would provide a secure and defensible shelter from which to launch an assault into the prison proper.
Margret had sent scout observer teams ahead to get a full picture of the movements and numbers of corrections officers at the facility, as well as to take a look at the presence, if any, of FEMA troops, and gather any other intelligence they could regarding the defenses inside the prison. Anything to help them once they were through the gates.
To get as close as possible to the Terre Haute facility while remaining unseen, the cell had taken a circuitous route, utilizing open fields along with the occasional state or county access road. Running with the lights off, they thought they could make it unnoticed almost to the bottom of the small hill leading up to the installation. The final half mile would be a head-on charge under fire, but they were hoping speed could carry them through the outer defenses and directly into the heart of the facility.
Sara and Ava walked ahead of the lumbering truck, behind that Margret was driven by Crow in the F-250, and they came with a long stream of fighters, perhaps two hundred pulled together from the cells around Billtown and surrounding areas walking purposefully in their wake. They carried the cell’s entire stock of weaponry with them: MP7s, M500s, M16s, and many Colt AR-15 5.56×45 mm magazine-fed semiautomatics. Some of them with high capacity magazines and bump-stocks. Cell operatives had worked through the night to increase their store of pipe bombs by breaking up the C4 from the firebox in the F-250. They had also made some larger IEDs which would be used to take out the main doors to the prison.
It wasn’t a well-drilled military spec fighting force by any stretch of the imagination, but Sara’s speech in the clubhouse had been relayed by their cell leaders to every one of them, and the ARM fighters were fired up, ready to release as many prisoners from the hell of the Terre Haute facility as they could.
Sara’s heart was near its bursting point, too. She’d never felt such a wave of respect directed at her as she was from these brave people, and through Sara on to her father. This would be the first big battle of many, and she knew it would absolutely shape the rest of the war to come. Even if Parker couldn’t be rescued, and was already dead, she’d vowed to herself as they set out that she’d be fighting for him—that this battle would be fought in his honor.
And if they could take a federal prison like the facility at Terre Haute, it would send a shockwave across the country to all the other resistance cells. A message that the Council and their cronies might have the firepower, but they didn’t have the stomachs to defend their cancerous regime.
Look at what Lieutenant Solon had shown them about the mindset of the enemy. He’d been so sure that execution by his despotic leaders for his failure awaited him back at Terre Haute—so sure that he’d killed himself in an explosion of C4. If Lieutenant Solon was an example of the caliber of leaders the Council could muster up, Sara reasoned that their victory was not only likely, but assured. And, in turn, she’d been sure to share that sentiment with those traveling at her side.
The firetruck’s engine was loud, and carried on the still night air. At this point, however, there were enough wooded areas between them and the prison site, situated on a curve of the Wabash, to shield them from discovery. Their route had been well laid out in advance. During the course of their recon missions, the scout observer teams had cut through wire fences and left unobtrusive logger flagging to help guide the way.
Sara’s nerves were taut, but the brisk pace of the walk helped smooth her emotions. Ava, silent, walked easily beside her. Glancing to her friend, Sara felt another sudden rush of gratitude for Ava’s support, which she hadn’t yet been able to put it into words and wasn’t even sure how to express. Their bond had become so strong, her depth of gratitude for this friendship surpassed words.
Ava had believed in her when she hadn’t believed in herself, and her ridiculous story of the fire-breathing unicorns in that dumb game had crystalized important things for Sara. Ava’s infectious exuberance masked someone who thought deeply. If, after all that thinking, Ava came out of it backing Sara to the nth degree, Sara could rest assured that the course of action she’d set ARM on was the right course of action. It might not be the best course of action, but Sara was convinced it was the right one.
And Sara wasn’t the only one who was convinced.
Before they’d left Forest Glade, Margret had taken Sara to one side to speak to her alone in the kitchen. Margret had made sweet tea and liberated some Maryland cookies from the store for the occasion. “Last packet,” she’d said with a smile and a wink. They’d eaten companionably for a time, until, like a flicked switch, the mood around them changed to something more somber, more dangerous.
“You’ve done well,” the older woman had said at last. “I see so much of me in you, Sara. You’re a leader, but more than that, you have the strongest moral compass I have seen in many years.”
Sara had felt herself blush, and looked away. “I only want to do what’s right for those people.”
“I know. But that’s not what I want to talk to you about.”
Sara had shifted forward in her seat. Intent. Engaged.
“It’s about what follows.”
Sara had tried not to look confused.
She’d answered, “Well, I assume we’ll follow the plan. Move from here. Find a new base. Continue a guerilla war against the Council and their FEMA cronies.”
“If that’s what you want.”
The confusion in Sara’s mind had doubled. “Me?”
“Yes, Sara. You.”
“But…”
“Some people are not going to come back from this mission. Good people. Christ, I might not come back…”
“Don’t talk like that, Margie…”
“I need to, Sara, because even if I do come back, I want you to take over as cell commander.”
Sara had felt frozen, hearing that. “Me…? You can’t be serious.”
“I’ve never been more serious of anything in my life. The way you spoke at the meeting, you not only changed minds, but you inspired and fired imaginations. They’r
e following you now, not me.”
Sara had put down her cup, stunned. “I’m in my twenties, Margie; I’ve never led so much as a… a softball team. I’m a follower. Not a leader.”
“Not anymore. Not even close.”
Margret rose from her seat, then, and came around to Sara. She’d held her tight and close, and kissed the top of her head. “Sara, you are remarkable. Whatever happens tomorrow, don’t ever forget that. Your daddy is going to be beside himself with pride when he finds out what you’ve done—”
Ava nudged her arm, bringing her back to the darkness. “Hey, you’re quiet. What’s up?”
Sara snapped back into herself with a sigh, leaving the kitchen, the sweet tea, the cookies, and Margret’s bombshell behind.
“Oh, you know, just thinking about stuff.”
There was a pause, and Ava asked more quietly, “Parker?”
“Something like that,” Sara lied, not wanting to talk yet to anyone about what Margret had said.
“Okay,” Ava answered, but there was a tinge of suspicion in the word.
It’s okay, Sara thought, I’ll tell you soon, Ava; you have a right to know, but I haven’t even found the words I need to convince myself. I need to understand all this myself, first. She felt in the pocket of her parka, the envelope Margret had given her rustling a little in her fingers. Margret had told Sara before she’d left the kitchen that the letter would explain to the ARM leaders what her wishes were concerning Sara, if Margret didn’t return. If Margret did return, she’d tell them all anyway, but the letter was just a contingency plan, just in case.
Sara had dared not open it, and had simply slipped it into the inside pocket of her parka and gone directly to the substation to join the crew finishing the firetruck conversion. And now, not knowing what would befall any of them, she wished she was better at separating her feelings from the cold, hard pragmatism she’d need for battle.
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