“And?”
“And most people want to be individuals. We’re Americans, for Christ’s sake; we flipped the bird to the King of England. We dumped tea in the harbor. We’re the Land of the Free; we want to be able to tell the police to fuck off without going to prison. The government should fear the people; the people should not fear the government.”
Parker shook his head. “What does being an individual have to do with sheep and wolves?”
“Keep up, Jim. For those people who like order, this feels right to them; it feels natural. Then, because they feel that way, they start getting a pack mentality of ‘us against them’ regarding the people they’re trying to help. A sort of pack-think.”
Parker knew his buzz wasn’t causing his confusion. “You’re mixing your analogies here. Besides, sheep are in herds, not packs.”
“But dogs are in packs and those are the ones I’m talking about.”
Parker could hear the smugness in Eli’s tone without having to see his face.
“That’s a pretty damning indictment,” Parker pointed out. As an ex-cop, he felt sort of defensive about the description, but he also wondered if he simply had some vestiges of pack-think, as Eli described it, still left in him.
“Not every cop, or soldier or first responder or whatever, is a Nazi waiting to happen—I don’t mean that,” Eli said. “I know better. But every human being is susceptible to pack-think. It’s in our DNA for survival.”
“So if they trust the system, because they’re part of the system, they don’t even notice that their role as sheepdogs is to bring the sheep to slaughter,” Parker finished.
“Well, only those that break away from the herd. It’s why the Council doesn’t need to be huge for this silent coup to work. They only need shepherds in key places to exploit natural human tendencies. Some soldiers and cops and whatnot will fight, of course. But most? Pack-think; the sheep versus the shepherds.” Eli sighed. “I may be a little drunk.”
They sat in silence for a while.
“Man,” Parker said. “Have I told you how much I hate picking apples?” He rubbed at the dry skin covering a popped blister on his palm.
“Could have fooled me,” Eli replied.
Parker stopped lifting his beer bottle when it was halfway to his mouth. He looked at his friend, the man who’d first walked into the hellscape of the city with him on the night of the Event, helping him as they’d gunned their way to the point where they’d each split up to follow their own pathways: Parker to heading off to save Ava, and Eli heading across the interstate to reach his wife, Jen.
“What the hell does that mean?” Parker demanded when Eli didn’t elaborate.
“It means, if you hate picking apples so fucking much, why the hell have you been doing it for six goddamn weeks?”
Parker couldn’t say anything. He hadn’t told Eli about his plan or that he’d let himself get derailed. Hell, Eli had been his oldest consistent friend since he’d let booze and prescription pills start to take over his life following the bad shoot that had flushed his LEO career down the tubes.
Maybe it was because Eli still wouldn’t talk about what happened after he arrived at his sister-in-law’s.
He looked at the beer bottle still hanging halfway to his mouth. Why was he still picking apples? He’d used his injuries as an excuse to stay where he was, but deep down, there was a voice in his head telling him it was something more. Had he developed a sheep mentality with each pop of an Ativan into his mouth? Surely not. Not now, when everything was coming together. I don’t have a problem.
He gave admitting he had a problem a mental middle finger and chugged down the last of the beer. He turned and looked at Eli.
“Come here,” he said. “I want to show you something.”
“What?”
“You’ll see,” he said. “Come on.”
“What about Finn and Ava?” Eli asked.
“They’re asleep. They’re both worn out from hating my guts.”
“They hate your guts?” Eli asked. He stood as Parker did.
“Well, I think Ava does,” he clarified. “Finn may still be in the ‘deeply disappointed’ phase.”
“Lovely.”
Parker nodded; opening the door, he tilted his head, indicating Eli should follow him. Once inside, he turned on a powerful 5-cell Maglite and led him through the dark living room of the little house and into his bedroom. Parker opened his closet and handed the flashlight over.
“Uh, what are we doing in your bedroom, brother?” Eli asked, taking the flashlight.
Parker smiled without humor. There had been a time when Eli was the only one who could tease him out of a dark mood, but he found little to be humorous about these days.
“Relax—I’m going into the closet here, not coming out of it,” Parker replied. “Hold the light along the back wall for me, smartass.”
“Sure.”
“I get smartass all day long with Ava, you know,” Parker told him.
“Unclench your panties, Jim,” Eli said. “What are you showing me?”
“This.” He finished prying the false wall out of the side of the closet, set it to one side, and stepped out of the other man’s way. Curious, Eli stepped in closer, playing the beam of the flashlight around the area.
The beam came to rest. Eli cocked his head to one side and let out a low whistle.
Within the hollowed-out section of the wall was Parker’s stash; at least what he’d managed to hold onto. He wasn’t a fool. When the marshals came through with the National Guard in tow, Parker obediently turned over the canned goods and supplies he’d had stashed around the house and under the beds—all in the name of civic duty—but he’d intentionally ignored everything he’d hidden behind the false wall.
Eli silently took it all in. There were stacks of military MREs, generic antibiotics in travel-safe containers, water purification filters, several trauma capable medic kits, spare batteries, hand crank radios, binoculars, high-end daypacks, and extra headlamps and flashlights.
And guns.
Parker had every range covered, too. For long-distance shooting, he had an FN SCAR Mk-17 outfitted with a scope. Beside that was an M4 with a ten-inch barrel, and a Mossberg pump action 12 gauge next to the seating brackets for his pistols. In the brackets hung a Glock .40 cal., a Ruger .357 revolver, and a compact Bersa Thunder .380.
“Not a Sig Sauer among the bunch,” Eli noted.
“We’ve been stocking food by the orchard, as well,” Parker told him.
“Let’s go back outside,” Eli said, his voice quiet.
“Sure.”
Parker replaced the false paneling and the two old friends made their way back outside, where they resumed their seats on the porch. Eli opened a beer and handed it to Parker before opening another one for himself and drinking from it. They were silent for a moment.
“What’s going on with you, Jim?” Eli’s voice was still quiet, more serious than it had been since they’d gotten together that night.
“I know it’s dangerous, but I’ve got to go get Sara—” Parker began.
Eli made a slashing gesture with the flat of his hand. “That’s exactly what I mean, Parker. You’re not a stupid man, but you’ve been behaving downright stupidly for far too long now.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” Parker demanded.
“You think I hadn’t noticed that you’ve been popping pills since long before the Event?”
“Those were prescribed and then there were all my injuries.” Parker could feel himself growing hot as he fought to keep calm.
Eli held up his hand. “I get that, man, I do. What about all that time in between? Living is hard. Under these circumstances, it’s downright dangerous. Who wouldn’t want to escape into a dopamine stasis, if only for a little while, but did you ever stop to think that maybe the reason why those FEMA medical folks are so quick to give you drugs is so you lose sight of exactly how long you’ve been picking apples?”
Parker found himself opening and closing his mouth like a fish out of water, unable to speak. There was no way that he was intentionally being encouraged to stay on the drugs, was there? He found himself staring at the remains of his pinky. His pain was real. Or, at least, it had been.
“I’m your oldest friend,” Eli said. “Instead of keeping me in the loop with what was going on with you, you formed a Sisterhood of the Apple-Picking Pants with two sorority cheerleaders.”
“That’s not fair,” Parker said. “You weren’t there. I know they have no training, but they got shit done and did it under tough conditions. They deserve respect.”
Eli shrugged. “Maybe so. A woman runs into a burning house to save her baby, and she’s a hero, right? But does that make her a firefighter?”
“Come o—” Parker started.
“No, Jim,” Eli cut him off. “You think a woman calling 911 wants you to send her to the fire, or do they maybe want the real thing?”
Parker had already struggled with this question earlier, and he didn’t answer. He shook his head. “I know, I—”
“Hold on, friend, I’m only getting started. This here is a motherfucking reality intervention. You sit down and listen, really listen, to what I have to say. Don’t listen so you can think up counter-arguments; fucking hear what I’m saying.”
Parker drank his beer.
Eli half turned in his chair so he was facing him. “I saw stacks of MREs in there. Why?”
“You know why. You had them too.”
“Had, being the operative word. Why do you still have yours?”
“In case we need to move out.”
“Exactly,” Eli said. “So, you were prepared. Making preparations and being prepared are reasonable courses of action. Except the penalty for hoarding is death by hanging and I’ve seen folks swing for a helluva lot less than what you have in that bedroom. The whole point of prepping is that you have your shit ready to go the instant something happens. You keep a go-bag with you at all times so that, whenever and wherever you get caught, you have what you need to get to your cache.” Eli jerked a thumb over his shoulder at the house. “If you hadn’t had that cache up and ready for a long, long time, you’d have zero business identifying and calling yourself a prepper in the first place. You had everything you needed to go after Sara ready and waiting when the Event went down. That doesn’t even include your cabin.”
Parker’s beer no longer had any taste, but he took a sip anyway.
“And another thing,” Eli continued. “The whole community is talking about what went down at the checkpoint this morning, and I’m not talking about the fucking hangings. Ava put on quite a show. Given what I saw in your house and what you told me, that show was nothing more than a distraction because you three almost got caught today.”
“I told you we’re storing food—”
“Why?” Eli cut him off.
Parker blinked. “We’ll need to eat—-”
“Bullshit. You have a fucking death sentence hidden in your wall back there. Said subject of death sentence being all the gear you need to go and find your daughter. Yet instead of going to get her, you’ve exposed yourself and those two girls to daily chances of an execution by smuggling it out in that manner. They trust you, Parker, and you’ve deliberately been putting them in danger over and over for six long fucking weeks. You don’t have a plan, man, you have a suicide pact.”
Parker felt his cheeks stinging with awareness as his hand went unconsciously to his pocket to finger a little white pill nestled inside. He realized what he was doing and pulled his hand free, his cheeks heating at the look of awareness on Eli’s face.
Fuck it, what had he done?
He tried to form a response, but couldn’t find the words. He took another long pull of his beer, bad taste or not.
“Parker.” Eli’s voice was gentle. “You’d been prepping for disaster for years, so you already had everything you needed. You finally get a tangible lead on Sara after all these years, and you know that, as part of the Church you’ve told me about, she has enemies in this Council you say is pulling the strings behind the scenes.
“Do you go after her? No. Instead, you wait six fucking weeks. Meanwhile, the Council cleans up the chaos that could have cloaked your movements, consolidates their control of transportation routes, harvests all the supplies that were laying around out there, including my own damn stash, and gives your enemies a month and a half head start on rounding up your daughter if they’re looking to mop up this Dr. Marr’s operation.”
“I don’t think they are,” Parker said. “They would have killed us all outside the television station if that were the case.”
“Fair point. However, before, you had to get to Sara and maybe break into some place. Now, you have to break out of a place, avoid patrols, which, by the way, are filled with some trigger-happy bastards, and then break into and back out of some other place. You’ve made your job that much goddamn harder for zero gain, and you’ve almost gotten two girls killed, and one of them raped.”
Eli leaned over and tapped his finger into Parker’s chest, looking him square in the eye. “You need to stop acting like a sheep and start acting like the wolf you should be, or the sheepdogs are going to rip you apart. If it was my little girl out there? Nothing could stop me.”
Parker’s temper finally flared. “Goddamn it, Eli!” He held up his injured hand, almost shoving it in his friend’s face. “In case you’ve forgotten, I was shot up to shit. I needed time to heal.”
Eli didn’t rise to the bait. He shook his head, his voice even when he spoke again. “Horse shit. You peddle that to someone who doesn’t know better. Two weeks, Parker. Two weeks and the FEMA doctor cleared you for work. Once the fracture in your rib started knitting, everything else was gravy. You’ve been ready to travel for a while and you haven’t. Period.”
Parker sat silently. At times during Eli’s rant, anger and denial had flashed to the surface. He had thought this through; he had reasons for his plan… ones that seemed smart and good. Stripped of ego, with the facts laid out before him, it felt like failure. He sighed, a slow, heavy sound.
“You’re right,” he told Eli. “There is no good reason for my actions. I was stalling. So, okay then, smart man, what do I do now?”
3
Both men turned their heads at the hard slap of shoe leather on the ground as they watched Owen Mackle running up toward them. The boy was twelve, and big for his age, but slimming down under a regime of daily labor and rationed food.
Breathing hard, he cut across the lawn and came right up to the steps of Parker’s place. Eli leaned forward, concern etched into his face.
“Easy, Owen,” he said. “What’s wrong?”
The boy stood straight as if to report, breathing rapidly, and Parker saw that his Avengers T-shirt was damp with sweat. A sense of impending doom seeped into Parker with the sight of it, turning his stomach cold. He lifted his beer and took two quick swallows. Lowering the bottle, he pretended not to notice Eli watching him out of the corner of his eye as they waited for the boy to catch his breath.
“It’s troops,” Owen got out. “They’re doing a sweep of this neighborhood, going house to house. They got to our house first and Mom sent me to warn people.”
“Good job,” Eli told him. He and Parker rose to their feet. “You take care of yourself.”
The kid nodded and took off at a sprint.
Eli turned to Parker. “You dicked around too long and now they’re here. They do a thorough toss of your place, you know they’re going to find your shit.”
Parker nodded. “I know.” His hesitation and indecision had put people in danger. Again. “I’ve got to wake the girls up and we have to go, now.” He put his hand on Eli’s arm. “Come with us,” he urged the other man. He didn’t want to point out that there wasn’t anyone holding him back.
“Sorry, brother, I’ve had my fill of being on the move,” Eli replied. “I intend to ride out my time on th
e front porch drinking swill until the lights come back on.”
Parker didn’t know what to say. He couldn’t fault the man for not wanting anything to do with his plan but damn, if he could use his help. They could use his help. “If you change your mind, I’ve got a pack ready for your use.” Parker almost reached out to touch his friend but based on the look on his face, he dropped his hand.
“Thanks,” Eli nodded. “But I’m presently liking my retirement idea better. Besides, someone has to keep an eye on these yahoos around here.”
They re-entered the house then, Parker illuminating the way with his Maglite.
“Ava, Finn!” he yelled. “Get up—get up now!”
Ava appeared in the doorway, butcher knife in hand and flashlight on. Sleepy-eyed, Finn appeared behind her. Eli eyed Ava. She was dressed in her sports bra and panties, but her feet were already shoved into her hiking boots. The knife looked like a short sword in her grip.
“Maybe you should let her lead,” he said.
Parker ignored him. “Grab your bug-out bags,” he said. “Soldiers are coming house to house. They get in here, we’re done.”
“Good thing we hung around for a month and a half to give them the chance to chase us out at the last minute,” Ava told him, sarcasm dripping off each word.
“Your feelings are duly noted. Now, go shake your asses; we have to leave,” Parker answered, keeping the anger out of his voice.
Ava nodded in acknowledgement. “Let’s go, Finn.” The two girls hurried back into their rooms to dress.
Parker turned to Eli. “Will you grab my pack and the pistols? There’s a second Maglite on the nightstand. I have some medication and, uh, maps, in another room; I’ll be right back.”
Eli looked at him, his face unreadable, then nodded. “Hurry, Jim.”
The two men went through opposite doorways and Parker entered the bathroom. He dropped to his knees beside the cabinet under the sink and opened the doors. Pushing his way past several rolls of toilet paper and cleaning supplies, he popped out a section of drywall he’d scored with a utility knife.
Dead End (911 Book 2) Page 4