She shook her head. “There’s some mushy material around, but mostly it’s pink skin and blood in the socket.”
Parker nodded, but the motion sent lightning bolts through his skull. Do the first thing. When that’s done, do the next thing. Then the thing after that. He was coming out of his confusion as much as the concussion would let him.
“That’s good,” he said, without irony. “Take those four-by-four gauze pads and wet them with the sterile water from the kit. You’re making a wet-to-dry bandage, so soak them good.”
Moving in robotic motions, Ava did as she was told. Parker moaned and then gasped as she placed the wadded bandages into place. He wasn’t going to pass out. Pain was a really good stimulant.
“Now put dry four-by-fours around and over the wet ones already in place,” he instructed her.
He looked at Sara. She held her mangled hand up, but the other one was on the pistol grip of her M4 as she watched the pile of soldier bodies lying close by. She was missing a finger and she was the least wounded of them.
“Okay,” Ava said. “Done with that.”
“Good, good job,” Parker said. “Now wind the gauze wrap there around the wound; give me plenty of it.”
Once it was in place, he used the pain to goad him into further action. They should have already been up and moving, fleeing the scene, but he was betting none of the members of either team had gotten off a radio transmission. Plus, they had to bind their wounds or they wouldn’t get two hundred yards.
“Ava,” he said, “I’m going to wrap Sara’s hand up. You have to get out from your body armor so I can clean and dress your wound. You’re bleeding the worst of any of us.”
She didn’t argue. Now that Parker had centered himself, she seemed to be fighting against her own mind slipping away into a perpetual cloud of pain and confusion.
Working quickly, he wrapped Sara’s hand, realizing that he wouldn’t be able to do much for her here. She’d have to wait until they reached a safer location. Turning back to Ava, he noted that she’d started removing her body armor, but seemed to have stalled.
“Sara, help me,” he said. They both rose up to their knees and, working together, managed to finish removing the body armor. He next cut a large rend in Ava’s shirt after looking to see if she was bleeding anywhere else.
Technically, he should have gotten her trauma naked so as not to miss any possible wounds. With the grenade explosions and all the frenzied shooting, every one of them should have been treated in such a fashion, but that wasn’t going to happen at the moment.
He poured hydrogen peroxide from a little bottle in the kit over her wound and watched it foam up. She didn’t shudder at the liquid spilling over the nasty-looking avulsion, and patted the wound dry with the cravat included in the kit before applying antibiotic ointment. His hands felt stiff and numb, making his gestures clumsy, so he forced himself to slow down and focus.
“Sara, get my second med kit, please.”
She rummaged through the mess of gear that had spilled out of his rucksack and found the converted shaving pouch he’d used to build the medic kit. She held it up to show him and he nodded.
“Good, now hand me the tape inside of it. The masking tape.”
Working quickly, he ripped two four-inch pieces free. Folding one edge down on each of the longer sides, he applied the tape on either side of the widest part of Ava’s wound and then used a needle and thread to sew them together. After that, he taped a pressure dressing over as much of the mess as he could, and finally they helped her back into her shirt.
“We’ve got to get moving,” he said knowing they didn’t have much time before other soldiers would show up.
Both Sara and Ava just looked at him, but after a moment, all three of them got up and crossed the road. Parker counted eight bodies as they looted the dead. Sudden, overwhelming violence and liberal use of firepower had carried the day for him in every encounter so far, but it wouldn’t carry him all the way home, he knew. The moment they didn’t have surprise on their side, they were finished.
There was something else, too—an element he’d been using instinctively up until now that he had to get an adequate hold on and apply more consistently. Surprise was important, vital. But in two of the encounters they’d had, the use of smoke had saved his life. Misdirection, he thought. Sow confusion; use tactical deception.
“Take any BDU top that’s less bloody than the one you have on,” he said. “Check those ghillie suits and see if any of them are intact; if they are, take those, too.”
“How much farther do you think we can walk in our condition?” Sara asked. The bandage on her hand had already bled through in two spots.
“We should be dead,” Ava said.
Parker didn’t argue with her. There was no point in denying the truth of the statement. “But we’re not,” he told her. “So long as we don’t give up, we don’t have to be, understand?”
She met his gaze, winced slightly at the sight of his ruined face, and then nodded.
“Good,” he said. “Let’s see what we can save and then let’s get as far from the roads as possible.”
29
They skirted the parking lot of a Best Buy where a civilian work detail seemed to be moving pallets of dry goods from one side of the building to another, making no apparent sense to Parker. The workers were only lightly guarded by a four-man squad armed with carbines, but they didn’t engage them.
They followed a drainage ditch into a canal and then followed the canal for half an hour, moving slow. Somewhere along the way, both Ava and Sara developed pronounced limps, which came close to matching Parker’s gait. Typical hiking over-use injuries, one in the hamstring and the other in the ankle. It slowed them further. Each of their bandages showed red as the strain of movement reopened their wounds.
Finally, they came upon a creek and Parker stopped them.
“I think,” he said, “that this is the Kokomo Creek. It’ll lead us to one of the forks of the Wildcat Creek and we can follow it to Kokomo.”
“I don’t feel good,” Ava said.
Parker examined her, and then looked to Sara. He felt something leave his body as he cataloged their wounds and took stock of his own. It was hope, he realized. Hope had floated out of his body like a soul leaving a corpse. He didn’t feel defeated, but he felt a certitude he couldn’t explain. Not all of them were going to make it if they kept on this way. He thought about leaving Sara or Ava the way they’d left Finn, losing one of them also. He replayed the image of the gasoline soaking into Maggie’s clothes and hair.
Misdirection, he thought. He smiled and the tears in his good eye stung worse than the wound of his missing one.
“We’re going to need a vehicle,” he told them.
Then he lied, telling them they’d plan to use the back roads to eat up distance and then drive past the rendezvous site before ditching the vehicle and doubling back, fooling their pursuers. The girls believed him because they didn’t have a choice. Whole, in one piece, they would have seen through him immediately, but they were on the twenty-first mile of a marathon race they’d run while wounded.
So it was easy for Parker to fool them: they trusted him.
Moving as quickly as they were able, they retraced their route and came back to the work detail. There was a large van the workers had obviously rode in, and one of the ubiquitous SUVs the FEMA forces used.
They were too weak, too wounded to take prisoners.
They killed the four guards with an ambush and the civilians scattered, running in all directions. They took forty-five seconds to loot the dead after that, and then they drove away in the SUV.
30
Keeping to secondary roads, they made it almost two hours before the end came. They were going to have to cross Highway 31 anyway, so Parker took a chance.
Then their luck ran out.
The wipers swiped back and forth as rain fell on the windshield. It was coming down hard, and showed no sign of letting
up. Parker blinked, looking out through the glass, and saw how deep the puddles on the sides of the road were getting. He blinked again and shifted his gaze, and that was when the checkpoint suddenly came into view.
A green and white US Marshal car sat in the middle of the road, its lightbar flashing in cyclic revolutions of red, high beams on. To either side of it, Humvees sat with their front ends angled out, motors idling. Soldiers, shapeless forms in OD green rain gear, stood without moving, weapons in hand, staring down the road toward them. The only thing keeping them from opening fire was that no one yet knew three fugitives had stolen a vehicle that looked to be government-issue.
“Shit,” Ava said from the back seat. Exhaustion made her voice raw.
This is how it ends, he thought. Let’s get it done.
It was more than just thinking on his part, though; it was acceptance. He’d known back at Wildcat Creek that their extraordinary run of luck was over. They were done. Misdirection, he thought. Tactical deception, he thought. But the word his spinning mind kept coming back to was much simpler: Sacrifice.
“Look over there.” He pointed behind them and off to the right. “Here’s what’s going to happen,” he said. “I’m going to hit reverse and back around that school bus. We’ll have seconds before they open up, maybe less. You both go out the side where the school bus is blocking their vision. You’ll have to move fast.”
“Parker, no—” Ava began.
“No time,” he said simply. And he was right.
Reaching for gear shift, he slammed the vehicle into reverse and hammered down on the gas. The SUV shot backward and the troops at the checkpoint immediately lifted their weapons. Cutting around the front of the school bus to the other side of it, he then slammed on the brakes, sliding the rear of his vehicle just past the back of the bus effectively blocking anyone from the road seeing them, if only for a moment.
“Go! Go! Go!” he screamed.
He turned and found Sara staring at him, half broken and half shell-shocked. The end had needed more build-up, more time for the mind to accept and understand and prepare for what was happening. They weren’t going to get that.
“Go!” he yelled at her. “Go to the train! I’ll pull them off you.”
Sara started to protest, but Ava was already tugging at her arm, and when the soldiers opened fire, Sara pushed herself over the back of the seat. Ava kicked open the rear door and they both rolled out, tumbling down between the bus and their SUV as headlights appeared in Parker’s rearview mirror.
“I love you!” Sara shouted,
The roar of the V8 engine drowned the rest of her words out as he shifted back into drive and accelerated. The open rear door struck the bus and slammed shut as he shot forward. His windshield spider-webbed in half a dozen places and he felt the chassis shutter as it absorbed rounds. Bullets plinked into the hood and hammered the engine block, and a jet of steam from the radiator spewed up through the grill.
But the engine was a Hemi, and that meant something. It meant it was tough, that it could do the work and take adversity, so, expecting to die, Parker pushed it to the limit.
He swung the SUV to the right even though it exposed him to fire, because Sara and Ava were running to the left. It wasn’t enough to draw the authorities after him—he had to convince them they weren’t interested in any possibility of that train. If the Council thought they were using the railway to escape the country, they’d violate half a dozen international agreements to run them down.
It wasn’t enough to sacrifice himself; he had to sacrifice himself successfully.
The driver’s window blew out, showering him with glass; the headrest of his seat shattered as a round slammed into it. A bullet burrowed through the door and buried itself in his thigh next, and the seat began filling with blood.
Guiding the SUV off the road, Parker bounced across a curb, the impact shuttering up through the suspension and rattling his teeth. The front of his vehicle rammed a guardrail and he skidded along it for several yards as the back windows blew out. A round burned by his ear and the rearview mirror exploded.
The guardrail ended, and the slope of the greenway hill forming the on-ramp started. He turned the wheel and realized he couldn’t control his right arm anymore. It’d been shot at some point, though he couldn’t remember feeling a thing. His front tires hit the grass and he gave it all the gas he could. More bullets tore into the vehicle and it convulsed as both tires on the passenger side went flat and the rims made contact with the ground.
Past the guardrail, he pointed the vehicle down the access lane and toward a grimy-looking Dairy Queen. There was his plan, he thought. If he could get the rig behind the fast-food restaurant, it was conceivable the girls could have bailed out there and gotten out of the area from that point, leaving him behind. Nothing to suggest the fugitives were heading for the train in the opposite direction.
The steam spewing from the shot-up radiator began to lessen as it ran out of moisture and the abused engine started knocking violently. The automatic transmission wasn’t able to get out of second gear now, and the grinding noise as the timing slipped grated over the gunfire. He got the SUV into the parking lot behind the Dairy Queen and saw half a dozen dead vehicles sitting abandoned. The next block over was an example of the type of business area that always sprang up in cities around freeway access points. It was filled with gas stations and fast-food restaurants.
The steering wheel jerked in his hands as the power steering abruptly cut out, and the vehicle drove head-on into a parked Celica. The crash was loud, and the force of the impact threw him around in the cab of the SUV. His face bounced off the steering wheel, and his tooth went through his lower lip.
Spitting blood, he threw his shoulder against the door and promptly fell to the pavement. He heard a metallic thunk and, as he was getting up to his hands and knees, a projectile slammed into the pavement nearby, and there was a detonation off to his right. Gray smoke billowed out but, as he stood, he caught a whiff of it and realized it wasn’t smoke, but CS gas.
He started running, and two more rounds dropped out of the sky around him, going off about fifteen yards away. They’re using M320s, he thought as his over-used leg began buckling. The M320 was a 40-mm grenade launcher; capable of being utilized as a standalone weapon, it was most commonly attached under the barrel of an M16 or M4 assault rifle.
He staggered forward into the swirling gas, and his eye began burning. Tears streamed down his face and his eyelid swelled to a slit. He was gasping for breath, and the gas seared his lungs, doubling him over. He retched violently and threw up on his boots.
Coughing, he went to his hands and knees, and began crawling. After only a few moments of crawling, he was blind, and snot flowed in rivers from his nose as he began throwing up again. He went to his belly, trying to reach the outskirts of the cloud, but he couldn’t see well enough to pick a direction.
His good eye felt seared enough to bleed, and he started gasping like a fish on land, unable to breath. He realized he’d lost his grip on his weapon somewhere, and he fell to his stomach. Cupping his hands to the sides of his face, he tried breathing in pockets of clean air that he only hoped were trapped beneath the majority of the gas cloud.
He made zombie sounds, gurgling moans of agony, and tried pulling his shirt up over his mouth and nose. His head swam from asphyxiation and he threw up inside of his shirt, staining his bloody, sweat-slicked flesh with bile and bits of undigested MREs.
Suddenly, hands were on him. Grasping him under his arms, men hauled him to his feet and began to drag-carry him. He was far too crippled to resist. He dry heaved, stomach cramping, but nothing came up. He could see a little out of his right eye and he caught blurry images of uniformed men in military issue protective masks. Walking out of the cloud, they threw him to the ground and stood around him, the muzzles of their weapons pointed at him. With the snouted hoods of the protective masks, they looked like some sort of science fiction pig-man hybrid—alien, not hu
man.
He lay there, thankful he could breath, but they didn’t offer to rinse his eye with their canteens, and he started to become terrified they’d let his eye burn itself blind. He took his shirt bottom and furiously wiped at his eye, trying to scrape the riot control agent from his face. He’d thrown up so much that it was nearly impossible for him to find a dry corner of the shirt. He burrowed his face in the crook of his arm and moved it around, managing to relieve some of the caustic burning. Above him, the soldiers took off their protective masks, but his vision remained too blurry for him to see their features clearly.
“Search him,” someone ordered.
He didn’t resist as two men began stripping him of his weapons and gear. He complied, each breath he drew becoming slightly less painful than the last. His head cleared enough for him to start hoping he’d bought the girls enough time.
“Jesus,” a disgusted voice with a deep southern drawl said. “He yakked up all over himself; this is fucking nasty.”
“Make sure you get every last thing off him before we take him to detention,” the first voice said. Parker blinked, and the voice addressed him. “Where are the women who were with you?” Someone kicked him in his leg, and he hissed with pain. “Which fucking way did they go?” the voice demanded.
Parker shook his head and then began to laugh hoping it sounded maniacal enough. “We crashed and bailed out. My leg is shot; they took off toward the downtown,” he said. “I have no idea where they were running to.” He spat his mouth clean of vomit. “Hell,” he said, trying hard to sell it as he forced another laugh out, “they don’t know where they’re going. We were just running north and hoping.”
“No matter,” the voice said. “We’ll round them up.” Turning his attention to the other soldiers, the voice said, “Get him up and ready for transport.”
“Fuck,” the southern drawl said. “You know how many of us this sonofabitch has killed? Let’s do him right here and hang his body from the overpass.” There were general mutterings of agreement to this proclamation.
Dead End (911 Book 2) Page 24