Now that they were moving closer, Parker heard male voices, more low-pitched, barking orders. He felt something inside of him sink. Something about the cadence and response of the men’s voices reminded him of the police or military. He was almost sure, from the voices alone, that they were about to tangle with FEMA forces. He’d wanted to avoid this at all costs.
He ducked under a branch and dodged some tree roots, his leg aching as he forced it to work. Up ahead, Ava had her weapon up, obviously nervous, but Finn was moving much too fast for the tactical reality of the situation.
“Finn!” he hissed. He didn’t dare raise his voice any louder. “Finn, slow down, goddamnit!”
Ava heard him and called up to Finn, who heard her voice and looked behind her, seemingly surprised to see them. She stopped moving and smiled. Over her shoulder, through a broken phalanx of birch, Parker saw a dirt road. To their left, the road curved, and a cluster of Devil’s walking stick bushes had choked out the trees and run riot in a large patch. He recognized the shrubs from deer hunting; the plants were favorites of the white-tailed deer he’d hunted all his life.
Each step he took hurt his leg, and he was hobbling and sweating heavily by the time he was able to reach Finn. He could feel moisture under the duct tape he’d wrapped around his leg and figured he was bleeding again. He used his rifle butt like a walking stick and painfully took a knee; Finn pushed a finger against her lips and then jerked her thumb over her shoulder toward the hidden stretch of road.
“Movement without visas is against the law under the FEMA Emergency Powers Act,” a male voice said.
Instantly, Parker didn’t like the speaker. The tenor came off as officious and pompous to his ears. He knew that, if confronted with the voice face-to-face, he’d have an overwhelming urge to insert his foot in the man’s ass.
Should make it easier to shoot him, he thought. It was going to be the opposite of easy for him, he knew. Since the Event, he’d avoided showdowns with what he had come to consider extended Council forces who didn’t know what was happening behind the scenes. He couldn’t fault them for attempting to subjugate the population to maintain order.
Before the Event, he’d considered them brothers.
Moving silently, Finn rejoined them. “We have to find out why that woman screamed,” Finn insisted, whispering.
“If it’s a mounted patrol,” Parker said (and he didn’t see how it could be any other kind), “then they’ll have crew-served weapons. We won’t be able to scare them off with a show of force.”
“I know,” Finn said. “We’ll have to ambush them. If they have somebody on visa violation, that means they have food and maybe weapons with them. That means a hoarding charge.”
“And a hoarding charge is punishable by hanging,” Ava finished.
“These guys may not know who they’re working for,” Parker pointed out. “You want to blow some non-Council National Guardsmen or Deputy Sheriff away?”
“If they’re about to execute some lady for having too many cans of creamed corn, then we have to do something.” Finn’s tone was resolute, and he didn’t think he could talk her down.
“You agree with this?” Parker asked Ava.
“I don’t care about them,” Ava said. “I’m not sure I think it’ll do any good to save whoever they’ve stopped. I’m here because I can’t convince Finn not to be.” She looked at him, and her voice grew very soft. “Parker, you had to know it was going to come down to this sooner or later. We’re defying the Council. We’re like goddamn America’s Most Wanted to the FEMA troops, or whatever you want to call them. At least for southern Indiana. We’re outlaws, and we might as well accept that.”
Parker didn’t say anything. The three of them had become Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kids with each one of them taking turns playing Butch. They were more than likely outnumbered, definitely out-armed, and had no business jumping in to save anyone. Why was he still here?
“Get down on the ground!” The prick-voice shouted. “Sergeant! If they’re not on the ground in three seconds, light them up!”
Clear as a bell, the sergeant answered: “Yes, sir.”
Parker sighed. “Slow,” he said. “We approach slow.”
Finn and Ava nodded, already up and creeping forward. Parker scowled to himself at the cluster of a formation the girls were making. If they made it out of this encounter alive, he was going to have to spend the time he hadn’t wanted to spend back in New Albany teaching them how to move tactically.
The three of them crept slowly forward. Finn stepped on a branch once and it snapped loudly, but through the bushes, they heard the unseen unit talking, completely unaware, and they continued their approach. At the line where the bushes met the road, they carefully peered in between the latticework of branches.
On the road, a single Humvee was parked. A soldier in the turret had trained an M249 light machine gun over the heads of the rest of his team. Parker saw a first lieutenant, his Beretta out and pointed, barking orders as a sergeant and specialist, each armed with M4 carbines, moved among a row of civilians.
There were five people on the ground. A man with his face a bloody mask where he’d been struck; a quietly crying woman who tried counselling a teenage girl whose nose had been broken, smearing blood across her face. Two boys, elementary school age, lay in the dirt next to them, their own faces full of blank shock.
The specialist zip-tied the last child and then moved over to a tangle of bikes on the road. Three of the bikes had the kind of trailers Parker had once associated with hipster dads and soccer moms in Spandex and expensive running kicks. The kind they’d pulled children or even pets with as they’d completed their work-outs in between guzzling Starbucks coffees and taking intense work conference calls on the latest iPhones.
Now, he saw they were packed with supplies. Death sentences.
“Lookee, lookee what we have here,” the specialist sang out.
The enlisted man was a lanky ginger with a rash of freckles across his nose and cheeks. He looked all of nineteen to Parker.
“What do you have, Woodhaus?” the lieutenant asked.
“Power bars, Gatorades, motherfucking pork and beans,” the E-4 answered.
“Having a picnic?” the sergeant asked the dad. “Out for a family meal while everyone else is starving?”
“No one is starving!” the woman yelled. “No one is starving!”
“Sergeant,” the lieutenant said, “if the prisoner continues to violate my mandate to remain silent, you are authorized to use force.”
“Quiet, Mandy,” the man said. He looked up at the officer. “This is all a misunderstanding.”
Despite the grotesqueness of the situation, Parker almost smiled. Everyone with a college degree always thought they could talk their way out of having violated the law, maybe by quoting or misquoting the Constitution. Street criminals sulked, or offered to trade information, but even people like them who ought to know better still tried to talk their way out of trouble. He swallowed his mirth, though. This wasn’t a traffic stop. Lives hung in the balance here.
“Save it,” the Sergeant said.
“Jackpot!” Woodhaus called.
Parker looked over. The enlisted man held up a Walther .380 he’d pulled from one of the bike trailers.
“Parker,” Finn said. “Parker, please.”
Parker gripped his weapon until his knuckles were white with tension. Next to him, Ava slowly lowered one knee and sank to the ground out of her crouch, her own weapon coming up. He swallowed. If Eli had still been in the National Guard, he would have been called up to serve. If he’d still been a sworn officer, he would have been doing security patrols.
“Get him up,” the lieutenant snapped. “We don’t need to turn them over if we find firearms. We’re authorized to carry out summary sentencing right here.”
The wife started screaming all over again, and the man shouted as the sergeant reached down and hauled him to his feet. The little boys started crying.<
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“In accordance with the powers provided under FEMA Security Acts 720,” the lieutenant began reciting.
“Parker!” Finn begged.
“Screw this,” Ava said.
Parker put a hand on her arm. “Do as I say. Do exactly as I say, understand?” He shook her, making sure he had her attention. “Do you understand, Ava?”
She nodded, and he turned to Finn. “You have the shotgun,” he said. “You have to target the guy with the M249.” He didn’t recognize the sound of his own voice; he sounded like a robot in his own ears.
“Who?” Finn asked.
“The motherfucker with the machine gun, Finn,” he said. She nodded. “I mean it. You have to control the kick and keep firing until he’s down, until he’s nothing but bloody rags, or we’re all dead,” he whispered. “Ava, shoot the officer, the guy with the handgun. Once he’s down, go for the redhead. I’m going to try for the sergeant because he’s closest to a hostage.” And they are hostages, he thought. Not prisoners, not detainees, but American hostages. “After that, I’ll also try for the redhead.” He swallowed. “Once we fire the first rounds, we come out of the bush and move toward them. They go to the ground we keep putting bullets into them, understand?”
“Step away from the prisoner, Sergeant,” the lieutenant ordered.
On the road, the sergeant had placed the father on his knees, facing the ditch on the far side. The lieutenant, his pistol at a sort of effete-looking port arms, stalked forward, finger already on the trigger.
“Are you ready?” Parker whispered. When Ava and Finn had both nodded, he began his countdown. “Three, two, one!”
Finn’s Mossberg went off in his ear. He’d sighted in on the sergeant standing next to the father as he counted down, and now he squeezed his trigger three times. The AR crack-crack-cracked and he saw the high-velocity rounds strike the man above the buttocks, right below the edge of his ballistic vest. The man grunted and twisted, stumbling backward.
Unthinking, Parker, weapon stock snug in his shoulder, came through the bush. He snap-aimed and fired. The sergeant’s face disappeared in a starburst of pink mist. At his side, Ava fired, her trigger control less precise than his. But at less than twenty yards, the range was point-blank for the rifle. The lieutenant, short but bulldog-broad, staggered and went to one knee as three rounds struck his vest.
He hadn’t been wearing any sort of protective plates in his vest, and the bullets hammered into his body. Blood squirted into the roadside dust, making a crimson-looking mud. Parker pivoted.
The E-4 was now coming alive and reacting to the ambush, but the gunman was too late to save himself. He struggled to get his rifle off his shoulder as Parker put two .223 rounds into his thigh. The kid screamed, loud and long, as high-pitched as the woman had earlier, and dropped to the hard-packed dirt of the road.
Parker shuffle-walked into the kill zone and shot him in the head, blowing his jaw from his face so that it hung shattered from the shreds of his skin. Whirling, he tried lining up a shot on the Humvee gunner, but held his fire. The man was bent backward over the rim of the turret, his arms spread wide as if in supplication. His chest looked like a dented beer can where Finn’s .12 gauge had slammed into him. He shot the man low in his torso anyway, angling the round slightly upwards to make sure it tumbled through his internal organs.
He looked over at Ava then, with her rifle snugged tight into her shoulder; she stood over the officer, her muzzle less than a foot from his head. The man wasn’t moving. She fired three times, caving the front of his skull inward.
It was over.
Parker took his Spyderco out of the sheath on his belt and used the small thumb post to open it one-handed. He thrust it out handle-first to Finn. “Cut them free,” he said.
She nodded and went to work, cutting the dad free and then moving to the others. The mom was crying, fighting to get her terror response under control after the chaotic seconds that had unfolded. She began profusely thanking Finn.
“Where were you headed when they caught you?” he asked the man. “You took a big risk,” he added, thinking, I ought to know.
“Canada,” the man answered. Regaining his feet, he offered Parker his hand as Ava watched. She was white-faced and strained-looking, but her fingers were well clear of the trigger. Parker ignored her, giving her the privacy of dealing with the kills in her own manner.
“Canada?” Parked grunted. He didn’t know why, but he was surprised. “We’ve been in New Albany,” he told the man. “Official word is the border’s sealed. Our troops on one side, the UN Peacekeepers and NATO detachments on the other. Same with Mexico.”
The man nodded. “Stories have filtered through about the UN and NATO mission troops doing what they can to help refugees cross over. If you can find a remote location and slip over, they’re running sanctuary programs in all the provinces.”
“How many days you been on the road?” Parker asked.
Behind him, Finn cut the rest of the family free and stepped back as the mother gathered her children into a hug. Half watching Finn, Parker noted that she seemed uncomfortable with all the displays of family affection.
“This was only our second day,” he said. “Gee, sorry.” He laughed awkwardly and offered Parker his hand. “I’m Will Deckard.”
Parker shook it. “I’m…” he paused. If the man were caught and interrogated, he would give the three of them up to save his own family, no question, and if he used his own name, the Council would be able to pinpoint him in a specific direction. “I’m Jim Parker,” he finished. All the guy had to do was say ‘a black man and two twenty-something women,’ and they’d know anyway, he figured.
“I’m obviously glad to meet you.” Will said, squeezing his hand as he shook it. “I’d hoped that by staying to back roads we could slip by patrols, but I guess I was wrong.”
Parker shook his head. “You need to travel overland, maybe only at night. Since the Event, I’ve only seen a handful of aircraft in the air, and none of the FEMA troops I’ve run into seem to have been issued night-vision gear.”
The man looked crestfallen. “Yeah,” he said. “I made a fatal mistake. If it hadn’t been for you…”
“We owe you our lives,” the wife added, interrupting her husband.
Parker nodded, and caught Ava’s eye and nodded again. She walked over and began inspecting the Humvee. “We’ll divvy up the gear and weapons here,” he said. “See if the soldiers had field packs stored in the back of the Humvee; if they did, you can put your food in those. We need to move, soon as possible,” he added. “A single Humvee is usually recon for a larger patrol. These guys don’t call in, someone’s going to come looking for them.”
“Hey, Parker,” Ava called from over by the Humvee. “What are these?” She held up two OD green canisters roughly the size of Coke cans.
“Smoke grenades,” he answered. He turned to Will. “Get your family moving; we’re doing the same.”
The man nodded, and the little group began looting the dead. It was a gruesome and grisly task. Ava had found the field packs and handed them over to the couple along with the Beretta and a couple hunting knives. What little food and water they found was waved off, with Will telling them they had enough. Parker didn’t argue, and they quickly split it up, Parker and Ava grabbing two of the packs they’d found in the back of the Humvee to put everything in. By the end, Parker, Ava, and Finn wore modular lightweight load-carrying equipment suspenders or MOLLE as they were called by the military, which allowed them to carry spare magazines and other items in readily accessible pouches. They’d also swapped out their weapons for the ones the soldiers carried.
Parker noted that the only grenades were either smoke for signaling or CS gas. There were quite a few of them, too. They took them as well as the men’s protective masks. He’d finished sliding a second 100 round drum for the M249 into his backpack when the radio burst to life inside the Humvee.
“Tango 1-3, this is Tango 1-1; radio check.�
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In Parker’s mind, a stopwatch began counting down. Leaving the vehicle as Tango 1-1 repeated its comm check, he went over to where the rest of the group, his people and the family, were huddled together in conversation. He looked at the five members of the Deckard family. They were scared; they had every right to be.
“We have to get moving,” he said. “Once these guys don’t answer back, someone is going to come looking.” He handed hard copies of area maps he’d taken from the Humvee to the father. “Take these,” he said. “Try and cut through hard terrain. These guys are pretty much sticking to the roads, so it’ll be your best chance.”
“I can’t thank you enough,” Will said. His voice almost broke, but he forced back any extra emotion he might have been tempted to show. “I’m not going to lie,” he told Parker, “I was in IT before this.” He laughed, a bitter sound. “Talk about useless jobs now. Anyway, I don’t know anything about stuff like this.” His cheeks reddened in embarrassment. “I guess what I’m saying is that I could use your help getting my family to safety if you’re willing to give it.” He held out his hand, indicating his wife and daughter and the twins. “We could use your help.”
Parker swallowed. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I have family of my own to reach.”
Will nodded. “I get it.”
“Look,” Parker said, “If you can find a place to lay low until dark, then wait. No matter what. move slow, and stay off the roads. Don’t try to cross rivers, especially at interstate bridges. Follow them upstream and you’ll be more or less heading north. It’ll take longer—only walking takes longer than biking—but it’s worth it if you get there alive.”
Will nodded.
Then Parker heard the trucks approaching.
Dead End (911 Book 2) Page 14