The blow struck the back of his head in a solid thump that jerked him forward. A muzzle, burning hot, pressed into the back of his head as a brutal knee dropped into the middle of his back. Thinking this was the end, he squeezed his eyes shut.
“Move, you die,” the man hissed.
Disorientated by the blow, still compensating for the effects of firing the .357 so rapidly, and with his senses still dulled by drug use, Parker went limp. Face pressed close to the ground, he looked around for where his pistol was. He couldn’t find it.
“Cease fire!” the man on top of him shouted. “Cease fire! Cease fire, goddamnit!”
In a ragged, sputtering cadence, the firefight came to a halt. Parker’s ears popped and, though still ringing, he could hear better. The muzzle at the back of his head never wavered.
“I got your daddy, little girl!” the man shouted.
Like wolves answering the howl of another wolf, the voices of surrounding men came laughing out of the forest in response. In reply, Ava opened fire, but with only her weapon firing, it was easy to pinpoint her location. The AR cranked open and the man fired eight times into her area.
There was silence after that.
“You dead?” the man shouted. “Or are you reconsidering the idea of shooting your way clear?”
“I sure hope that was the slope-looking bitch you shot up, Caleb,” a voice laughed. “I liked the look of the blonde.”
More rough laughter, on cue.
“Well?” the man shouted. “Are you alive?”
The remaining men moved into position around them, but Parker wasn’t sure how many were left. He watched one of them picking up the H&K from the man he had killed. Eli had had one. It was a civilian version of the G3 currently carried by the German army. It fired a 7.62 mm. round and could drop a man easily. Ava didn’t stand a chance against it with only a handgun.
“Fine!” she shouted. “I’m still alive, dickbreath.”
“Come on out or your daddy takes a round through the back of his black head.”
“Run!” Parker shouted.
The man slammed the butt of his weapon into the back of Parker’s head. His skull exploded in pain and starbursts of agony detonated behind his eyes as his face snapped forward and bounced off the ground, filling his mouth with dirt.
“Yes,” the man shouted. “Or, by all means, keep fighting six guys with rifles using a handgun, thus revealing your position so we can blow you apart from a safe distance. Or run and we’ll kill this joke of a hero here and shoot you after we’ve had our fun.”
“Four,” Ava shouted back. “I count four! There were six, but now you have four.”
“Yeah, congratulations on being able to count,” the man shouted. “But that doesn’t really change what my lieutenant in Afghanistan used to call ‘the truth on the ground,’ now does it?”
“Are you the blonde?” one of the men hooted. “I sure hope you’re the blonde!”
The pain in his head left Parker nauseated, his vision spinning like he was going to vomit. He thought about the bag of pills hidden in his pack. If he could get a couple of those in him, he’d be okay. He still hadn’t located his gun, though—that was a problem.
“Last chance, bitch,” the man holding Parker down shouted. “You fucking answer me in five seconds or he dies.” He promptly began a five-count. “Five, four, three—”
“All right!” Ava shouted. “I’m coming out.”
The man pinning Parker lowered his voice and asked one of the others, “You spotted that other girl yet?”
“Not yet,” the man who’d picked up the G3 answered.
“Hot damn!” someone out of Parker’s vision shouted. “It is the blonde!”
The man on his back stood, leaving the sole of one boot on the back of Parker’s neck. “Toss that mean ole gun into the bushes, blondie!” he shouted. “I wouldn’t want you thinking you can go all John Wayne on us before we get a chance to talk proper.”
The pressure on the back of his neck eased and the man walked around in front of him. It was the AR shooter, and apparently the crew’s shot-caller.
“Hey, nigger,” the man said.
Parker looked up. The toe of the man’s boot slammed into the side of his skull. His head jerked to one side under the impact and the world spun like a tilt-a-whirl. He groaned in pain and tried pushing himself up.
“Run!” he tried yelling again, but his words were slurred, sounding slushy in his own ears.
He fought his way to his hands and knees, trying to take the opportunity to grapple with one of the gunmen, but he heard Ava screaming even as the shot-caller kicked him again. This time the toe struck him in the side of the neck and pain lanced down his spine, his body flushing hot even as his belly burned cold from adrenaline.
Then two people were kicking him, and his nose started bleeding. A boot caught him low in the gut and he instinctively curled up on his side. Hugging his body to protect himself, he took the butt of the falling rifle directly on his temple and that put him out. He lay there in a twilight state.
“Hard head,” he heard someone say.
He was struck again and he lay there dazed. He felt blood rushing out of his ear and figured that was a bad sign.
The shot-caller loomed above him. He raised his rifle above his head. “I don’t know how a fuck-up like you ended up with two pieces of ass, but that time is over.” The rifle butt came down and this time it did its job. Parker saw only darkness.
7
Parker drifted in and out of consciousness. He got impressions of sights and sounds, and shuffling men jostling him un-gently. Propped up into the front seat of the side-by-side, he faded in and out. At one point, the dull pounding in his head woke him long enough that he realized he was being dragged into a building.
He saw the world through layers of gauze and pain; nothing made sense: he was dislocated from both time and space. He drifted back down into warm blackness.
Sometime later, he swam back up out of the darkness. Blinking, he tried to focus his eyes. Images were smears of shape and color, indistinct and abstract. He ground his teeth, but stopped when he realized how sore his jaw was. His face felt distorted, and he tried touching it.
I could use some Oxy. Fuck, Percocet.
He realized he was tied up.
That information sent a little jolt of fear through him. More alert, he tried taking better stock of his situation. He was bound, hands and feet. He looked around. Along one wall he saw empty wall coolers. His gaze traveled past empty display racks and chest-high shelves, past large windows partially boarded up with plywood, to an Icee machine next to a nacho cheese dispenser: a convenience store. Americana at its most pure. Like America, the store had seen better times. He turned his head farther and found Ava staring at him. She had a shiner under her left eye, but other than that she looked okay. She was trussed up the same as he was.
“You look like shit,” she said.
“Did Finn get away?” he asked. It hurt to talk.
“As far as I know,” Ava said. “They were bitching about not being able to find her on the way here.
Parker took a breath and coughed at the stink before gasping at the pain it caused. “Good enough. And here we are. That smell is probably from a meth lab in the back.”
Mentioning meth made him think of his pills again, and he wondered where they were. He hoped the gang hadn’t found them. “Simply because it’s the end of the world doesn’t mean addiction stops. If anything, the need only got worse.”
“Are all men rapists?” she demanded suddenly. She’d practically spat the words out. “Tell me, Parker, is that it? Are all of them biding their time because society won’t let them do what they want to do?”
He lifted his head at the sudden change of subject and whacked his head on the wall behind him. Groaning, Parker tried to smile, but it hurt, so he shook his head; that hurt, too. His lips were swollen, but he could still make himself understood. “My wife,” he said, “was a nurse
. She always said it was an ugly irony of biology that the hormone responsible for sexual arousal was also the exact same one responsible for aggression.” He shrugged, tentatively tested his bonds. “So, yes, if that’s what you’re asking; on a biochemical level, we’re pretty much animals with a drive to mate that’s entirely divorced from morals or ethics.” He gave up trying to free himself. “But the answer to your question is still no, even if we are all capable of it at a biochemical level. But when civilization crumbles and people find themselves under only the law of the jungle, then the ones who were only acting civilized because they feared society. Well, they reveal themselves pretty quick.”
“I guess that wasn’t a fair question,” Ava muttered.
“Fair enough,” Parker allowed. “We have to get out of here.”
“I tried while you were out,” Ava told him. “I couldn’t find anything to use, and I couldn’t break the ropes. Maybe you can.”
Parker grimaced. “No. Too tight.”
“Maybe these assholes were Boy Scouts.”
“Yeah, maybe.” He squinted and blinked. It felt like there was sand under his left eyelid. “I have a bunch of broken vessels in my eye?”
“Your left eye is red as hell,” Ava told him. “You’re right is mostly okay.”
He grunted in agreement. Then, “Maybe I can get my hands over my hips and butt, then bring my legs through. With them in front, I can untie yours.”
“If any of us is getting their hands past their ass, Parker,” Ava told him, “it’s me.”
“Fair enough.”
Ava sat up and then rolled slowly onto her side, trying to get her hands past her buttocks, her face growing red as she struggled. Parker, groggy, watched her, hoping for the best.
“What the fuck are you doing?” a rough voice demanded.
Ava looked up; Parker, surprised, turned his head. One of the gang members stood in the aisle. It was H&K boy, Parker saw, and he had the shotgun resting on his shoulder like a Texas Ranger in an old movie, a bottle of Coors Light in his other hand. The sight of the beer made Parker’s mouth water even as he saw Ava’s Glock stuck in the front of the man’s filthy jeans.
Shirtless, the guy’s arms and torso crawled with shithouse tats—the kind of ink you could buy in prison or jail for a few packs of cigarettes. He was in shape, knotted and heavy with muscle. His feet, shoved into some worn cowboy boots, made sharp, distinct claps as he walked down the aisle toward them.
Parker looked at the man, unsure where this was going. Ava struggled into a sitting position beside him and sneered at the man. He chewed on a wooden match. Très butch, Parker thought.
“Scratching my ass,” Ava said.
“Pretty soon, you won’t need to do that for yourself,” the man offered, grinning. He had big, square, yellow teeth, like a farm animal. “Scratch your ass, I mean,” he said needlessly. “I’m talking about sodomy, totally talking about sodomy; you got that, right?” He moved the match to the other side of his mouth. “Sodomy is like a science word; it means ass rape. Though, I guess, technically, it’s not just ass—”
“I know what sodomy means,” Ava snapped. “It’s the thing your daddy should have done to your momma so we didn’t have to deal with you, fucktard.”
The match moved to the opposite side of the man’s mouth, and his eyes narrowed as his expression flattened out. Suddenly, he squatted down between the two of them, resting on his haunches. Despite themselves, both Ava and Parker flinched.
The man grinned abruptly. When his lips peeled back fully, Parker saw the quarter inch gap between his front teeth and smelled the Copenhagen on his breath. There was a tattoo of a horned devil with a forked tongue flickering on the side of his neck; he hadn’t bathed in a while.
Setting the beer bottle on the ground, he reached up and took the match out of his mouth, then pointed it at Ava. Parker noticed the beer bottle was filthy—a piece of trash and not something the man had been drinking out of just then. Some kind of pea green algae had taken up residence inside of it.
“That’s pretty good,” Gap-tooth said. “You’re smart; I like that.” He laughed. “Who the fuck am I kidding, am I right? I don’t give a shit how smart they are,” he told Parker, turning his head to look at him as he spoke. “I’m really more concerned with a woman’s external qualities in a relationship.”
He made the last word sound like the punchline in a dirty joke. Which, Parker supposed, it was. Gap-tooth reached out and poked Ava in her breast with the wet matchstick. She recoiled in surprise, and he poked her through the crotch of her jeans. Instinctively, she scooted backward in revulsion.
“Shit,” he said. “That little old matchstick scares you, wait until you see the biggest cock on Cell Block D, am I right?” He turned pseudo-serious for a moment. “You got that by ‘external qualities’ I was referring to tits and ass, right?”
Parker managed to find his voice. He was coming down off the numbing effects of the pills he’d taken, and he felt cranky and sort of hungover. The normal lassitude that had existed around him in the suburbs of New Albany was gone, and the man he’d been on the night of the Event revealed himself for the first time in a long time.
“Why don’t you leave the girl alone, you gap-toothed fuck?” Parker growled out, his throat dry. The man regarded him, expression solemn. Parker went on. “How many fucking movies do they have to make before douche-canoes like you catch on that bad guy monologues are bullshit? Probably never, am I right? Because you’re a fucking piece of shit idiot, am I right?”
Parker saw he had the man’s full attention. While that had been his goal, now that he had it, he wasn’t sure it was going to work out that great for him. The man smirked, the corners of his mouth curling up like the Grinch’s in the Dr. Seuss book about Christmas.
“Monologue,” he said. “I like that. It’s a noun, obviously, am I right?” He laughed. “It means a long speech by a single actor in a play or movie or, more archaically, as part of a theatrical production.”
He grinned, skinning his lips back from his teeth again to put the gap there on rigid display. The tone of his voice was familiar, jovial even. Right below the current of his “it’s just us fellows” banter, there was a deep, dark current of rage.
Ava began crying then, surprising Parker. She was strong enough that the tears came silently, rolling down the slope of her cheeks, but the guy had finally gotten to her. Parker’s mouth went painfully dry.
Gap-tooth continued. “Or, and I think this meaning is a little more pertinent to our situation: second, a long and tedious speech by one person during a conversation.” He reached out and goosed Ava with the matchstick again. “Pretty good, huh, blondie-blondie-do-my-laundry, am I right?”
“Please,” she whispered.
Gap-tooth put the matchstick back in his mouth and shook his head. “Stop that. Save the begging for later, for the sodomy.” He turned back to Parker. “Had one of those Word of the Day calendars up in my cell at Lawrence Correctional Facility. Did three years for…” He reached over and tapped Ava’s leg. “Get this…sodomy!” He laughed loudly and, to Parker, most disturbingly, with utter sincerity.
He stopped and regarded Parker then, who looked back at him, feeling the hate racking his body like a fever. “Granted, sodomy of a child, but still, sodomy.” He winked at Parker. “She was my girlfriend’s daughter; I ain’t down with that incest shit, I promise. Fucking weird, am I right?” He shook his head as if aghast at the actions of some people. “That girl was better taking it up the ass at fifteen than her mom ever got to be.”
“You’re a pig,” Ava spat. “A fucking pig.”
“And you’re going to squeal like one when I’m through,” Gap-tooth said.
Parker jumped at the movie reference and its ugly connotations, and the man turned to him. He moved the matchstick to the other side of his mouth, and Parker smelled the gun oil on the Mossberg. The shotgun was much cleaner than the convict.
“You got my little piece of
movie trivia, did ya? Perfect set-up if you ask me. Thing is: for you, the situation is a little more immediate. See, when it comes to banging out the split-tails we acquire, we have a democratic process by which we determine who gets to do all the sodomy, first. So basically, until our outriders to the north return tomorrow, blondie-blondie-do-my-laundry here is safe enough.” He reached down between his thighs and retrieved the filthy beer bottle. “You, on the other hand, are not subject to any fucking dice games. Now, this blonde skank over here shot Martin. But you know what? Fuck Martin. Sodomize that bastard all to hell for all I care.” He rolled the matchstick faster, a sort of tell tick, Parker observed. “But you, nigger? You killed Blake, and Blake is a little more of a problem, for me personally.”
“Because of all the sodomy?” Parker asked.
Gap-tooth lifted his eyebrows in faux-shock. “I didn’t take you for a homophobe, nigger. While yes, the biggest cock in Cell Block D is an equal opportunity magic wand, I like ’em a lot younger and a shit-ton less hairy than Blake.” He paused, as if in deep reflection. “Though, given my reference to prison, and Blake’s unfortunate stylistic choices vis-à-vis that manbun, I can see your confusion.”
He snapped his arm down and broke the beer bottle against the floor without looking. The bottom broke with a sharp, musical sound and dark amber glass exploded out in shards. Parker looked at the long, stalactite-like shards on the broken bottle dangling loosely in Gap-tooth’s grip. Slime, green and black with algae, dripped in snot-like sludge off the points. He swallowed.
“Blake was my friend. He had my back. I had his.”
Parker tried to roll away, but never came close to having a chance. Gap-tooth struck, stabbing the toxic shards of glass deep into his quadriceps. Parker grunted in pain as it slid through his skin, cut the tough fascia below, and then buried itself in his muscle. The wound immediately began burning. Somewhere out there, he could hear Ava cry out, and he was glad that she was safe—if only for the moment.
Dead End (911 Book 2) Page 8