Dead Reckoning (911 Book 3) Read online

  Dead Reckoning

  911 Book Three

  Grace Hamilton

  Jack Colrain

  Contents

  911

  Copyright

  Dead Reckoning

  Blurb

  Thank you

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Epilogue

  End of Dead Reckoning

  Thank you

  Sneak Peek

  Also by Grace Hamilton

  911

  Dead Lines

  Dead End

  Dead Reckoning

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales, is entirely coincidental.

  RELAY PUBLISHING EDITION, JUNE 2018

  Copyright © 2018 Relay Publishing Ltd.

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  www.relaypub.com

  Blurb

  In a world on the brink of chaos, a father and daughter must both learn to let go and find their own reasons for survival. But letting go comes at a cost.

  After destroying the Church of Humanity, Jim Parker has become a hero of the rebellion from inside prison walls—even if he doesn’t know it. But despite what he may think, his mission is just getting started.

  Meanwhile, Ava and Sara are determined to save Parker and also help the rebellion. They lost Finn, but they refuse to think that Parker might also be lost for good. But when they help plan and execute a prison break, it turns out that they weren’t nearly as prepared as they thought.

  Suddenly, it’s not just Parker facing a new world and losses to be reckoned with, but all of them. But whether they can survive fighting against the Council and its government, let alone find each other and move forward, is the real test they have to pass.

  Thank you

  Thank you for purchasing ‘Dead Reckoning’

  (911 Book Three)

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  1

  Parker woke up with a jolt, his head clear for the first time in he didn’t know how long. But despite his awareness, a frightening blankness began at the bridge of his nose and spread out to infinity on his left. If he wanted to see things on that side, he had to turn his head much more than felt natural. No matter what his dreams suggested, he wasn’t getting that eye back, let alone his sight.

  A cumulus of cotton wool tickled the top of his cheek, and he could feel the stretch of tape holding a wound pad in place over the empty socket.

  Parker didn’t so much grieve for the lost eye as regret the effect it might have on his performance. How difficult it would now be to operate at anything close to full physical capacity if he ever got out of here… wherever here was.

  The room was small, the hospital bed beneath him on the hard side of comfortable. The air smelled of disinfectant, and there was a small high-up window to his right, covered with a blind. A drip on a stand beside the bed fed some unknown fluid into his right arm—an arm that, like his left, was still chained to the metal rails on either side of the bed. His mouth felt clean and fresh, as if someone had been in while he’d slept and washed it out for him.

  Only a set of closed double doors, wide enough to get a hospital bed through, led out of the room. Through the frosted glass panels in both, he saw the heads of two crew-cut men.

  Swallowing his dread, he brought himself out of the space’s physical inventory and reminded himself of the path he had to take forward.

  Focus.

  Stay alive.

  Find Sara.

  But as had happened before when her face crossed his mind, any thought of Sara brought on the rush of memories. The SUV, the FEMA roadblock. Sara and Ava running while he drew fire with the truck. The busted windshield, the sting of bullets, the peppery stink of CS gas. There was only a hazy recollection of bullets tearing into the SUV while he’d still been inside.

  The warm ache of pain in his face, arm, and leg told him that he’d been injured. And that was all on top of the lazy pulsing in his mutilated, half-gone pinkie, and a leaden feeling in his gut that probably spoke equally of pain, anxiety, and hunger. What he wouldn’t give for his old friend Eli to walk in, hand him a beer, and show him a way out.

  The doors swung open and a short, stocky brute of a woman came in, the winged “N” of the U.S. Army Nurse Corp. prominent on her advanced combat uniform. Her hair was pulled back away from her pocked face in a tight bun, but she wore no cap. She carried the rank of a master sergeant, Parker noted, and her breast tape told him her name was Calhoun.

  The nurse said nothing as she picked up a folder of notes on a cabinet by the side of the bed. She flicked through the pages, paying no attention to Parker whatsoever. He didn’t bother trying to talk to her first; one way or another, he doubted she was there to help him based on the hard set to her face.

  Calhoun’s eyes snapped up. “How are you feeling?”

  Parker, his mouth suddenly dry, said nothing—he couldn’t. Calhoun’s voice was familiar; he just couldn’t place it. He looked her over more slowly, trying to let her figure or her hard expression jog his memory of where he might have met her, and got nothing for his efforts.

  But her voice…

  She asked him again how he was feeling, and something about the timbre of her words finally had an effect. Parker’s mind became a jumble of images, a wave of confusion and nausea sweeping over him. His guts seemed to turn to chilled water and he clenched his eye shut to resist the urge to vomit or start screaming. The only time he’d ever felt like this before had been when he’d not been able to get his opiate of choice into his system. Calhoun was cold turkey in a uniform.

  He gulped down panic and opened his eye back up to see Calhoun scribbling something in the notes, and then she stood there in front of him, fingering a gold pen she’d taken from her top pocket. She looked up, and commented almost casually, “You were shot, and your trauma treatment at the scene of engagement was inadequate. You’ve been suffering from advanced sepsis and deep wound infection. If I didn’t know better, I’d say someone pissed in your wounds.”

  Parker blinked.

  “I imagine the gentlemen who captured you were none too gentle. You killed a lot of their friends.”

  The chill in Parker’s guts was spreading. He wanted to ask about Sara, to find out if she’d gotten away, but stopped the words in his throat. He didn’t know where he was, or what they knew of him here. Leading off with his anxiety about Sara would be a tactical error, and immediately give them a strong lever with which to extract information. There was no other reason why they would have
treated him, or wasted antibiotics and nurse hours on him—they must want something from him. Parker pushed the immediate thoughts of Sara deep into the recesses of his thinking; he couldn’t afford the time or energy for sentiment.

  “Where am I?” he asked once he felt confident he could speak without betraying any emotion.

  Calhoun put the folder back down, narrowing her eyes at him. “That isn’t the answer to my question.”

  “I don’t know how I am. I haven’t had time to think about it.”

  Calhoun experimented with a smile on her face, but it came out like a dog pulling its lips back to bare its fangs.

  “Well, I suggest you do think about it, Mr. Parker. That’s perhaps the easiest question you’re going to be asked in the coming weeks.”

  So, they know who I am. And if they know who I am, they know what I’ve done.

  And that made the fact that they had kept him alive for the purposes of interrogation several notches more uncomfortable. How many people had he and the girls killed at the cabin? And how much trouble beyond even that did they suspect could be traced back to him? No, Parker wasn’t just a random arrest from a roadblock misunderstanding—which was the story he would have gone with if they hadn’t known his identity—now he was James Parker to them. And James Parker meant a great deal in terms of enhancing the government’s intelligence on the resistance.

  Parker, agile enough mentally to ride that information out without a flicker, pulled a quick 180.

  “I feel wasted,” he said.

  Perhaps Calhoun just wasn’t very good at smiling, he considered. If he played ball with her, he might get some information coming back down the two-way street of communication. He still couldn’t place her voice, though, and that itched at him with annoying persistence.

  “That’s better,” Calhoun answered. “The doctors were thinking that perhaps they should leave feeding you until tomorrow. If you don’t cooperate, we still might.”

  Parker’s world sucked blackly into a singularity of thought. And in that flat, weightless moment, it came to him exactly where he’d heard Calhoun’s voice before.

  “Let the bastard bleed out,” someone had said. “I don’t give a fuck if Spencer wants him. Let him die.”

  While he’d been out of it, delirious with infection caused by his pissed-on wounds, that harsh voice had interrupted his suffering. Someone else had said: “We should have just slit the bastard’s throat.”

  And Calhoun was the one who had answered, “Fuck it. We still might.”

  As Parker focused on the woman who had blithely suggested that slitting his throat was a treatment plan worth considering, the rug of his having lost an eye was pulled expertly out from beneath him—he hadn’t been able to see that another nurse had entered the room. As Parker turned his head to the left, he caught a flash of the man’s uniform, the army nurse insignia, and the tray he was holding out to Calhoun. Parker didn’t see the nurse’s name-tape or face; once the tray was in Calhoun’s hand, the nurse about-faced and marched out of the room. Parker’s last view of the man was his near bald pate shining brightly beneath the strip lights as the door clacked shut behind him.

  Calhoun placed the tray on the bedside table next to the folder and picked up the loaded syringe it had been transporting. The lack of left-sided vision, and the implications for that absence going forward, were immediately pushed from Parker’s thinking as his good eye focused in on what Calhoun was holding now. The size and shape of the syringe was such that, as a former police officer, Parker knew its use only too well. Usually, this syringe size had the correct load capacity to deliver doses of insulin to a diabetic’s upper skin layer.

  But Parker wasn’t diabetic.

  On the street, this kind of syringe was more often part of an addict’s rig. What it usually contained would be far from insulin. Thinking about the possibilities, Parker felt his mouth going dry. His stomach flipped like a circus tumbler when Calhoun gestured with the would-be instrument of healing, now probably meant for a very different purpose.

  The drip beside him would have held any medical drugs they’d decided he actually warranted—this was something different.

  Calhoun did the fang-smile again as she checked the thin barrel of the syringe for bubbles, holding it up to the light. The liquid within was clear, but viscous. A bead of it bulbed at the point of the needle. Calhoun turned the implement toward Parker.

  “What’s that?” he asked, keeping his voice level and low. And yet, he thought he knew full well what it was, and why Calhoun was giving it to him.

  Calhoun’s sudden iron grip settled on the wrist of his right hand. She said nothing, intent, hardly showing signs that she was breathing at all. Parker tried to lift his arm, but Calhoun’s full weight was already on it. He yanked at the chain holding his left hand, but that arm would only reach a quarter of the way across his pelvis. When his arms failed him, Parker tried to bring his leg up to kick her away, and only then discovered his ankles were strapped to the bed, and that he was completely immobile.

  “What is it?” he repeated, only wanting confirmation for what he already knew. “What are you doing?”

  “Oh, don’t worry,” Calhoun said, any pretense at professionalism evaporating like a spring mist in the sun, “the first hit is always for free. Just enjoy yourself.”

  The needle slid into a vein on the back of Parker’s hand with a tight prick, his hand standing proud as a direct result of Calhoun’s grip. The cool liquid slid gently into Parker’s system as the plunger on the rig was pushed down, and he tensed with expectation.

  Parker imagined the drug—the heroin, he was sure, because what else would it be?—pulsing up his arm toward his heart. Pushing to where, in a matter of moments, it would be distributed around his body, reaching his brain in less than a minute.

  As consciousness began to slide, like crockery from a table on a storm-tossed ocean liner, Parker gave himself up to the feeling and the darkness of Calhoun’s sharp-fanged smile.

  2

  Practically mirrors of each other, Ava and Sara crept through the woods backing onto the Wabash River in western Indiana. Moving in tandem, they slipped through the trees fronting Justice Road, which overlooked the old Federal Correctional Institution two miles south of Terre Haute. In the approaching twilight, they tried to become shadows and near succeeded.

  They were still wet from their march through the sewage tunnel drilled beneath the Wabash, back where it narrowed a little in its snake-like progression through the state. Dressed in gray, cargo-pocketed trousers and black long-sleeved T-shirts, the two of them could have passed for twin nightmares if looked at sideways, and they knew it. They might not have been the best trained, but looking like they were professional soldiers could give them that extra inch of confidence and time they might need if confronted.

  Ahead of them, across the road, the correctional-institute-turned-FEMA-prison stood, lit by towers of bright halogen lamps and roving searchlights. The sound of industrial generators hummed loudly in the background. There were two towers with Squad Automatic Weapons teams nursing M249 light machine guns. On inspection through binoculars, though, Ava noted that the FEMA troops up there didn’t move like they were alert and ready; instead, they slouched like they were bored out of their skulls.

  Getting to within a hundred yards of the compound, Sara and Ava stopped and crouched under the low boughs in a stand of pine trees. Their dark civilian clothing matched with sturdy hiking boots in neutral earth tones, thin gloves, and balaclava hoods meant someone would have to be looking for them to find them from this distance, even with binoculars. One way or another, however, their infiltration of this place relied on subterfuge as much as stealth. If captured, it would be easier to ditch the hoods than try and rub camouflage paint from their skin. In dirty civilian clothes, even dark and suspicious as they might be, they had much more plausibility in presenting their forged IDs and FEMA work visas than they would have had if dressed in military clothing.

>   Sara passed the Zeiss Terra ED Pocket 8x25 binoculars to Ava. She’d been using them to scan the SAW-manned towers. Compact and powerful, the optics were part of the operational package provided by the American Resistance Movement. The op package had also included a SIG Sauer P226 outfitted with an SRD9 suppressor, and they had 20-round extended magazines. Ava had expressed a wish that the pack could have included a shitload of chocolate, too, but Sara had told her she couldn’t have everything. The guns and binoculars would have to suffice.

  Of course, both of them knew that if they had to use the 9 mm handguns, things could go very wrong, chocolate or no chocolate.

  Crouched beside Sara, Ava scanned the building through the binoculars, sweeping them slowly from left to right, cataloguing details. Water tower, a mess of administration buildings, an entry quad overlooked by towers with SAW teams, and long, two-story wings for warehousing inmates. Basically, your standard grim fortress of incarceration.

  The local power grid installation had been fried on the night of the Event in the nationwide, coordinated EMP attacks. Since then, FEMA forces—directed by the clandestine Council within the so-called government—had turned the place into an American gulag. Dark stories had reached the local ARM forces headquartered near Brazil, Indiana, communicating that people were being “disappeared” from the surrounding towns and so-called “Mercy Centers” set up by FEMA to process refugees and the displaced. Ava smiled darkly, thinking of it as she looked into the darkness. Mercy, in those places at least, was the last thing on the agenda. The real reason the centers had been set up, and the local populations encouraged to leave their homes to gather within them, had been to weed out potential troublemakers, and the people of fighting age, to remove them from the game entirely.