Surviving the Refuge (Survivalist Reality Show Book 2) Read online

  Like a dam breaking, more calls began coming in. Just like that, in a handful of seconds, the system overloaded and Parker realized that the city was done. Traffic lights being out were one thing, but a plane down? That meant only one thing: an EMP detonation. It was no longer about his little local 911 sub-station in a middle-sized suburb north of Louisville; this situation was going to be managed at State level now, or not at all. At least until FEMA rolled in.

  There were not enough available officers to handle this kind of volume. The ones off duty were most likely busy scrambling to protect their families. When the officers came in, if they came in (because if this was Katrina level bad, they might not, he realized), it’d be to find themselves under a unified emergency command system.

  And one girl, lost and crying on the phone with no GPS lock, was not going to get help. In the big picture, she wasn’t even going to matter. He’d failed her. Just like he’d failed Sara. That rage—that old red rage that burned hot, the one he’d tried to kill with Ativan and Zoloft and Pendleton drunk neat—stirred up in him, and he was galvanized.

  “Think, goddamnit, think,” he told himself.

  His eyes rapidly adjusted to the dark; probably because his pupils were already blown up big from the opiates, he thought with a touch of self-recrimination. He had no way to find her. Ava, he told himself. Her name is Ava, she’s not a problem, she’s a girl, and she needs me.

  What did he know? What had he learned during that call?

  She was a Hoosier, born and bred by that accent. He knew her area code, though that was a pretty open-ended clue. But what he really knew, the thing that shook him in his belly, was that he knew the Stapleton Mall area very well. Sara had been involved there, and emergency or not, this was the closest thing to a clue about her disappearing he’d had in a long while.

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