911: The Complete Series

by Grace Hamilton

  The thoughts energized Sara in a way she hadn’t experienced in a long while.

  Her dad was alive. And yes, maybe she’d lost one battle, but she hadn’t lost the war.

  They rolled into Seelyville just before dawn, without having met any FEMA forces along the way. David had kept to back roads and only taken to the highway when they’d gotten well clear of Terre Haute. Seelyville was much as they had left it. The exploded house was still a ruin. The only thing that Sara could make out as markedly different was a row of fresh graves alongside the Christian Center. Sara assumed that Mace hadn’t left the FEMA soldiers’ bodies out to rot and had respectfully buried them.

  David and Sammi approached the wreckage of Mace’s house, David scratching his head.

  “When did this happen?”

  Surprised that David had known which property they were heading to before she or Ava had indicated it, Sara gave them a thumbnail report about heading off the FEMA troops at the Christian Center. When she was about to give them the fuller picture of how Solon had forced a stand-off with the folks who lived in the home, Sammi held up a hand to stop her.

  “We know Mace. David delivered Jessica.”

  David stepped into the ruins first, located the hatch, and rapped a complicated signal on it with his knuckles. Ten seconds later, the hatch opened and they were all descending into the shelter, Sammi closing the hatch behind them.

  Ava’s shoulder and immobilized arm didn’t stop her climbing down the ladder, and Sara was pleased to see that Ava’s strength and sharpness were returning.

  They spent some time hugging Mace and Jessica and getting reacquainted while some water was heated for coffee. David and Sammi already knew about the deaths of Mace’s wife and son, and Jessica had thrown her arms around Sammi as if she were family.

  Listening to them chat over coffee, Sara exchanged glances with Ava. Ava was picking up on it, too. Something wasn’t quite right. Since Sara had been helping the doctor and his nurse, they’d never mentioned Seelyville or Mace and his prepper shelter. They’d never asked Sara to go there to ask for supplies, like they had when they’d sent her off on runs to other outposts. And Mace’s shelter was so well stocked that it seemed odd that they’d never mentioned it, given that they clearly knew him. Plus, there was the vibe she and Ava were picking up on—something was being held back, kept secret from the two of them. She could feel it in the air.

  Stuck for an explanation, Sara had no choice but to voice her concerns. Despite her trust for all of these people, the fact that things weren’t making sense couldn’t be ignored.

  But when she interrupted the small-talk, Mace smiled, and Sammi nodded. And Jessica asked, “Shall I show them, Daddy?”

  Mace looked questioningly at David, who sighed, his reluctance showing through, but in the end, he said, “They’ve got a mad scheme to go rescue James Parker. I think it’s a plan worth exploring, and I think it’s time the Network made contact—not only with James Parker, but his daughter.”

  Sara’s confusion was complete.

  So far as she’d been aware, David and Sammi were medics, living a parochial life under the radar of FEMA and the Council, just healing and fixing.

  She looked to David, having seen her own confusion reflected on Ava’s face. “What is… the Network? David? I don’t understand…”

  Mace stood up. “It’s probably easier if I show you.”

  And with that, Sara’s life changed… again.

  Doctor David Reynolds was a doctor, but he was also so much more.

  “Ringuard Industries,” he said as Mace started moving boxes of dried food from one of the shelter’s many metal shelving units to get at the wall behind it. “You’ve heard of them?”

  “Sure,” Sara answered. “Biotech company. Cutting edge science. Food production, famine technology, plastic recovery from the oceans using bioengineered plankton. Fuel from cow farts. That sort of thing.”

  David guffawed, but grinned at Jessica’s giggling response. “Yes. That’s us.”

  Sara stared. “Us?”

  “Yup. I’m Doctor David Reynolds.”

  “I know. But what’s that got to do with…” And then it hit her. David Reynolds, such an innocuous name, such a replicated name, such a down-home name, not unlike her own.

  “You’re the Ringuard Doctor David Reynolds? Seriously?”

  “One and the same,” Sammi replied.

  Ava was having the same shocked-to-her-bootheels moment as Sara. “You’re a billionaire. Ten times over.”

  Mace had uncovered the whole shelf now; set into the wall was a metal hatch—a combination lock in the center.

  Jessica jumped up. “Can I, Daddy? Can I?”

  Mace ruffled his daughter’s hair and said, “Sure.”

  Jessica climbed onto the metal shelf and began twisting the dial.

  Sara was still reeling. Billionaire Ringuard?

  She dug something out of her memory, a distant newspaper headline. There hadn’t been much financial news and current affairs when she’d been with the Church of Humanity. But there had been a newspaper that had carried the banner headline: “Ringuard CEO Sells Tech Giant.” It had been big news ten or twelve years back, so big that it had even reached the rarified confines of the Church of Humanity.

  “You sold up, bought an island or something, and disappeared from public life.”

  “Well, I disappeared,” David allowed, his eyes on the hatch. “But I don’t have an island. I put my money to a better use than buying an easy retirement under palm trees.”

  “More’s the pity,” Sammi chided him jokingly.

  “Shush, Sammi,” David said, reaching out and squeezing her hand. “You wouldn’t have had it any other way,” he joked.

  “I did it!” Jessica exclaimed, and the hatch in the wall opened to reveal a compact piece of electronic machinery in a rubberized case. It had a small screen, various dials and meters, a keyboard and mouse attached, and a bank of blinking lights. Sara couldn’t decide if it was a prop from a science fiction movie or the coolest piece of tech she’d yet seen.

  Mace leaned in, flicked a switch, and punched a code into the keyboard.

  The screen lit up with three audible beeps. Words began to run across it in a no-nonsense, luminous green font.

  “NETWORK NODE ALPHA SEVEN. BEGIN START-UP SEQUENCE FOR RELAY.”

  The rustle of a weapon being unholstered and the safety being clicked off took everyone’s eyes from the screen. Ava was moving as far away from David, Sammi, and Mace as the shelter allowed.

  “Keep your hands where I can see them.”

  Sara held up her hands, glaring at her friend. “Ava, what the fuck?”

  Ava didn’t take her eyes off the others. “They’re government. Fuck it, Sara, they’re Council. We’ve been tricked.”

  David closed his eyes and sighed. “I’m afraid, young lady, you couldn’t be further from the truth. We’re as far away from those tyrants as could possibly be.”

  Ava shook her head violently. “That’s high-end tech. That’s government shit.”

  Sara could see where Ava was coming from, but something about her assessment didn’t make sense. She held her hand out to her friend, gesturing for her to calm down, if not stand down.

  She looked to the doctor she’d come to think of as a friend, glancing to the others and then back his way again before she asked, “What is that machine?”

  “I’d prefer to talk without a gun pointed at me, if that’s okay,” he said wryly.

  Sara looked back at her friend. “Ava. Please. I trust these people. Let’s relax.”

  Ava clearly didn’t want to comply, but she lowered the weapon so that it was by her side; she didn’t engage the safety or put it down, though, and David narrowed his eyes.

  “That’s the best we’ve got right now,” Sara offered after a moment’s pause. “Please. What the hell is going on?”

  And so, David told them.

  When he had sold his shares in Ri
nguard Industries, twelve years earlier, it hadn’t been to retire from the company he’d worked three quarters of his life to build into a world leader in biotech. David had understood the way the world was going. The corruption of the politicians; greedy corporations manipulating those politicians; the whole world being run to advance the ideologies of a chosen few. It wasn’t a world that set capitalism against communism anymore, or one concerned with borders and countries. That was all lies being fed to the populace to keep them fearful and supine. He pointed out, “If you keep people scared, they will consume, and they will swallow anything. We’re talking about the zero-point-one percent versus the rest of the world: the monied against the un-monied.”

  Sara sat down, thinking of her own father as David explained that he’d always been a prepper at heart. Growing up against the backdrop of the Cold War, how could he have been anything else? With money, he’d realized, there was something he could do to make sure that, if the worst happened—like the government falling, say—he was in a unique position to do something about it.

  So, he’d set up the Network.

  David had been secretly funding preppers like Mace for eight years before the EMP strike.

  Mace broke in at that point, sitting before them with his daughter on his lap as he spoke. “You don’t think I built a shelter like this on cops’ wages, did you?”

  Following Mace’s point, David smiled apologetically at Sara. “I reached out to your father, spoke to him briefly. At the time, I’m afraid he was so consumed with finding you… it didn’t make sense to pull him in. I thought I might reach out to him again later, but he’d pulled into himself. With you still out of the picture, we didn’t think he’d be interested.”

  Sara swallowed any argument she might have mustered —she had all the faith in the world in her father, but from everything she’d heard, he had had a one-track mind before he’d found her. She couldn’t find it in herself to be surprised at David’s reasoning, and it apparently rang true enough to Ava that her friend finally put down the gun she’d been holding, having engaged its safety and offered her own bashful apology to the group.

  David kept going, to explain that he’d brought preppers together from across the country, and given them not only the resources they needed to survive almost anything, including an EMP Event, but also set up—without government knowledge—a means to communicate, should a situation demand it.

  “That’s the whole point,” Sammi insisted. “Keeping it off the grid. Completely.”

  David’s money had set up a succession of EMP-shielded, line of sight microwave transmitters that would allow any information to be disseminated across the country in a matter of hours. A Pony Express of preppers who would receive a message from a designated transmitter and then, when the software in the machine had decoded it for that station, they could pass it on to two other stations at agreed upon times.

  David’s foresight and planning, or prepping, had ensured that an EMP attack wouldn’t knock out the Network. It had been piggybacked onto the cell network by a clandestine group of trained prepper engineers and had taken nearly five years to complete, using equipment created specifically for the task in Chinese labs owned by Ringuard.

  “How many people are in the Network?” Sara asked, still trying to get her head around everything she’d heard, and desperately trying to reconcile this David to the Doctor David she’d come to know.

  “We have nearly a thousand relay stations like this one here, which cover about sixty percent of the United States. For areas where line of sight transmission isn’t viable, we have manual relays where designated preppers can carry encrypted data by hand to the next relay station for it to be passed on to the next series of relays.”

  Taking it all in, looking at the high-tech machine in front of her, Sara suddenly felt anger rising in her gut as she realized the scale of the enterprise: “And you’ve done nothing? The American Resistance Movement knew nothing about you? You’ve just sat on your asses with your toys and done nothing to fight back while thousands of people have been put to death?”

  Sammi looked to David, a scowl darkening her face. “See? I was right to say don’t tell her. I could see this coming, sure as Christmas.”

  Sara and Ava both glared to her as Jessica whispered to her father, and then Sara pushed again. “Why haven’t you done something? And what about me? Why wouldn’t you have told me, before now? You were like…” Sara stopped, choking back a sob that had suddenly popped into her throat. It was true. They’d been like family after she’d lost Ava and everyone else, whether she’d realized it at the time or not. This felt like yet another betrayal in a long list of them.

  “We didn’t know who we could trust after the attack, Sara,” David said gently, the exhaustion returning to his features. He sat down on a crate with a sigh. “It’s not that we didn’t want to do anything; it was waiting for the right moment. And you… we were going to tell you soon. We just had to be sure it was safe. For everyone.”

  “If the right moment isn’t the government being replaced by a bunch of fucking Nazis,” Ava broke in, “what is?”

  David met Sara’s eyes. “We can call up two, maybe three thousand people. All trained in weapons and survival techniques. They have supplies, access to vehicles, and a determination to fight back against the forces which are destroying this country.”

  Ava was channeling Sara’s anger now, and she leaned forward. “But when? What are you waiting for?”

  Mace hugged Jessica to his chest, glancing between the man and women in front of him as he did. “Look, we have been waiting, yes, and we didn’t make our presence known to ARM because, hell, any one of them could have been a spy for the Council. The Council can’t be fought on the streets and destroyed on the streets—we have to hit them where they live.”

  Sara had heard this kind of procrastination before. The time was never right. “If you wait for the time to be right,” she hissed, “you’ll wait until everyone dies of old age!”

  David looked at his shoes, and though he spoke quietly, his voice was full of steel. “Sara, stop. The Network is about survival—first and foremost, survival—its secondary purpose is to fight back… but when it’s appropriate. I think that time might be approaching,” he added, meeting Sara’s eyes and nodding, as if he’d come to some private conclusion. “Tell her, Mace.”

  Mace stood up, setting Jessica down and pointing her toward a shelf where some snacks were, distracting her. “Get us some food, darling?” When she headed across the shelter, he stood before them digging his hands into his pockets, and he spoke softly but firmly. “You know they’ve announced they’re going to execute your father…”

  Sara felt her eyes blazing and glared back at him.

  “They’re going to do it on the roof of the State House in Indianapolis. They’ve been building up to an event like this for months. They’ve been working on re-establishing the TV and radio networks. It’s why they didn’t kill Parker straight away. He’s become a hero for the resistance, whipping people up into thinking they could fight back. Did it not occur to you how he did it? How do people over in New York know about James Parker, ex-cop, 911 dispatcher, over in Seelyville? It’s not by word of mouth, Sara. Everyone’s too afraid to congregate, to talk.”

  Sara’s brows furrowed. “The Network has been telling people about him?”

  “Yes,” said David. “Your father is a brilliant and charismatic leader. And what’s more, he didn’t seek it out for himself—it was thrust upon him, and he took it. The way he rescued you and others proved it, as did his sacrifice, just as you told me about it. The American people need a hero. Someone who’s like them. So, we gave them James Parker. The Council have the chance now to discredit and execute him on Saturday. In three days. They want to execute American hope, Sara—it’s not only your father they’re trying to get rid of.”

  Sara caught her breath, having it all laid out like that, as she looked around the shelter to the adults she’d come to k
now and trust in the past months. Barely holding in a scream, she turned to David and asked, “And what are you going to do about it?”

  “We hear Grayland, the head of the Council, and their newly installed stooge president, Lassiter, are going to be there at the execution. We’re going to kill them and give the Council the bloodiest nose it’s ever likely to receive.”

  Sara sat down hard, reaching for Ava’s hand for support. She couldn’t take in what she was hearing.

  David continued. “And if we can, we’re going to make Ava’s crazy plan become a reality. We’ll help you to rescue your father, James Parker.”

  27

  Parker looked through his binoculars at the Indiana State House in Indianapolis.

  Rain misted the lenses and the wind pushed against his hands, trying to shake his view, but he could see the domed, neoclassical building and the work that was going on there to prepare for his execution. On the roof over the portico, workers toiled in the rain to finish a flat platform of wooden beams and scaffolding. Technicians were setting up a generator, trailing cables to a series of TV cameras. Other workers were lugging around jerry cans of gasoline, and yet others were constructing a metal cage in the center of the platform.

  Parker passed the binoculars to Gace, who was lying next to him on the roof of the 13-story State of Indiana Government building directly in front of the State House. The building took up a whole office block and had provided space for support services at the State House back before the EMP Event. Now, half of it had been burnt out and the rest of it deserted. Parker and the Mandingos had had no trouble getting into the building through a side entrance—they hadn’t even met a guard. The Council’s forces obviously weren’t as widespread as they’d thought, or as in-depth as the Council propaganda suggested to the populace.

  They’d spent the night out of the rain and worsening storm, but now, on the morning of Parker’s fated execution, Parker and Gace had come up to scope the site and make a real plan.