Dead End (911 Book 2) Read online

  “What the hell does Ilsa, she-wolf of the SS, got going on with the rubber dumbbells at the ends of the chains?” Ava asked Parker.

  “They’ll serve as counterweight,” he told her. “They’re only two or three pounders.”

  “They couldn’t have found something more dignified than wimpy-ass women’s dumbbells in pink and purple?” Ava demanded.

  “I think the incongruity is part of the message they’re sending,” Finn commented. “The whole thing is like Nazi performance art, designed to sick us out.”

  “Mission fucking accomplished,” Ava said.

  Parker watched the blonde marshal walk over to the street lamp and begin twirling the ends of the chains with the light hand weights on the ends.

  “Check out Lara Croft, Tomb Raider,” Ava muttered. She’d spoken the words like someone trying to get a bad taste out of her mouth.

  The female marshal released the weights and they sailed up over the crossbeam of the street lamp. She let links slide through her guide hand until she could reach the ends of the chains with the weights. Once she had a hold of them, she quickly pulled them into place and tossed the loose ends to her colleague in the back of the truck.

  “She seems pretty practiced at doing that,” Finn whispered.

  “Not her first rodeo,” Parker agreed.

  “Bitch,” Ava said, her voice dark.

  Parker nodded, either in agreement with Ava or in answer to some internal stimulus. His mind was elsewhere. Watching the display going on in front of them and hearing his companions’ reactions, he couldn’t help weighing the differences he saw multiplying in the two young women who’d somehow come to form the center of his world since the Event.

  Finn had suffered terribly that night—enduring attacks, vicious humiliation, and unprovoked violence. She’d fought and killed to survive. Those actions were things that changed you, Parker knew well enough himself. In response to being kidnapped, beaten, coming within inches of rape, and nearly being murdered, she seemed to have recently doubled down on the ideals she’d cherished before the world had changed around her.

  She’s living like, as long as she’s still civilized, there’s still a civilization. He respected the hell out of her internal strength, but feared it was, ultimately, the strength of a martyr. Personally, he wasn’t interested in being a martyr.

  Ava, on the other hand, upon learning of her betrayal at the hands of the most important person in her life—the decidedly misguided Dr. Lorraine Marr and her Church of Humanity—had engineered one escape attempt after another. In the end, she’d risked blowing herself into a fiery death rather than submitting. That had taken the confidence of a zealot. He wasn’t interested in being a zealot, either.

  In the back of the Chevy, the three armed men were padlocking the chains into place around the prisoners’ necks. The steel links bit into flesh so tightly that skin bulged over the chain nooses; immediately, the listless men’s faces began discoloring with trapped blood. On the ground, the female marshal cinched the chains into place, one after the other, and lodged them tight around the lamp post with those little hand weights.

  “Next,” the state trooper said.

  Parker turned in surprise. The line had continued moving as he’d watched the execution unfolding. Now it was their turn to present their work visas, and all three of them stepped forward.

  “I said, ‘next’,” the man snapped at them as a group, but he was keeping his attention on Ava.

  Parker ground his teeth, then sighed with resignation. Ava was a beautiful young woman, and her already firm figure had only become more noticeable during the last six weeks as she’d taken up an intense bodyweight training regime. The workouts were partly preparation and partly a rebuke of all the downtime they’d spent in New Albany.

  Why are we still here, Parker?

  I’m prepping, getting ready. There’s a lot of danger out there.

  That didn’t stop you from walking out the door of your job to come after me when the power went down.

  That’s different.

  Yeah, now you know the Council is hunting the Church of Humanity. That should be great for Sara.

  “Are you going to give me your fucking work visa or am I going to have to shove this shotgun up your black ass?”

  Parker blinked.

  “No, sorry,” he mumbled, not wanting to look the state trooper in the face. He offered the trooper his visa. “Uh, why are those guys being executed?”

  The trooper held his hand up, not taking the visa. “Wait,” the trooper told him, “I love this part.”

  Parker turned back as the blonde, having climbed into the cab of the Chevy, stomped on the gas. The big pickup jerked forward, its spinning tires churning up smoke as she peeled the rig out. The three armed men who’d been left standing on the sidewalk watched impassively as the prisoners were instantly jerked clear of the truck bed.

  They dangled from their necks as the steel links tore into their flesh, the truck no longer there to support them. None died instantly. With their hands and feet bound, they jerked as they choked to death slowly. Two of the prisoners lost control of their bladders and dark stains painted their crotches before urine could be seen dripping down from their legs.

  The trooper chuckled. “Like motherfucking fish on a hook; like fish on a hook. You don’t know how many times during a traffic stop I wished I could do something like that.” He looked at Parker’s visa before handing it back. “To answer your question, boy, they were caught hoarding food.” The officer cocked his head then, regarding the side pouches Parker and the girls wore off their shoulders and around their bodies.

  Parker froze. There were almost a full week’s rations of freeze-dried food in their bags. They were smuggling the supplies to a cache point outside of the city under the guise of their work visas. What they carried on them was a death warrant.

  “Whatcha got in those bags?” the trooper asked.

  “I, uh,” he stuttered. His brain felt slow and thick and stupid. Stoned, he couldn’t think on his feet.

  “He’s got the same thing I’ve got, officer,” Ava interrupted. Her voice was a purr. “Lunch. Nothing in there but my PB and Js.”

  Sliding her bag from her shoulder, she handed the satchel to a blushing Finn without looking back. She stepped forward then, pushing Parker out of her way and slightly past the bottleneck of the checkpoint.

  Reaching the state trooper, she leaned in close. “But who knows what I’m hiding on my body.” She put her hands on her hips and smiled at the man.

  Parker blinked. He wasn’t pretending to be something he wasn’t—he was a man and, despite his protective feelings of loyalty toward Ava, he understood she was beautiful. But she’d just transformed herself into some kind of stripper superhero with a few changes in body language and the pitch of her voice. For a moment, he believed she’d do whatever the trooper wanted, right there in the middle of the street.

  “Uh, Ava,” Finn said.

  Ava spun back to her. “Shut the fuck up, Finn. You may not see who has the power now, but I sure as hell do.” Finn stepped back at the rebuke, and Ava spun around to face the trooper again, and leaned forward; the curve of her breasts pressed against the thin material of her shirt. “And, officer?” she practically purred, “I find power very sexy.”

  “Oh, you’re very naughty,” he chuckled. “And naughty girls are always up to something. You’ll definitely have to be searched.”

  She cocked an eyebrow. “Shall I assume the position?”

  The officer grinned, making him look like a hungry shark to Parker. The state trooper was no longer looking at him, however, and so he caught Finn’s eye and waved her over. As Finn scooted past, Ava turned slowly and grabbed the front bumper of the truck parked at the curb. She spread her legs and slowly bent over, offering the heart-shaped globe of her ass up for the trooper’s inspection.

  Catcalls whistled out and Parker saw the two National Guardsmen approaching, goofy grins plastered acr
oss their barely post-pubescent faces. Ava looked back over her shoulder and smiled, and the armed men crowded around the young woman like jackals on a kill.

  As they swarmed around her, he saw the trooper running his hands across Ava’s ass and then up under her shirt. He heard her giggle in a sugary falsetto and his stomach did a slow flip-flop. He wanted to vomit at his own impotence, but if he were to step in now to stop it, they’d all be arrested and end up dangling over a lamp post until they shit themselves before dying.

  “Come on,” Finn whispered. “She’s giving us time to get this food hidden; we can’t waste it.”

  “Yeah,” he agreed. “You’re right.”

  Finn put her head down and quickly hopped on her bike. Parker made to follow her, but as she pulled away, the group of armed men behind them all started laughing. He closed his eyes. His hand slipped into his jeans pocket and pulled a small white tablet out. Popping it into his mouth, he jumped on his own bike. The pill was tasteless beyond its slightly chalky texture; he swallowed it dry.

  Parker and Finn rode slowly, mixing in with the rest of the workers on their way to work.

  “It worked,” Finn said. “She pulled it off.”

  “Like a French Resistance guerilla,” Parker said.

  Finn looked at him oddly for a moment, and he grew afraid he was slurring his words without realizing it. His heart beat faster at the thought, and at the realization that he’d responded with more fear of that than at the prospect of Ava’s potential harm by the overzealous soldiers.

  “Yeah, I guess so,” Finn said, turning her head back to face the road.

  They kept riding, neither of them feeling much like talking. “We have a plan,” Parker said at last, reminding himself of the fact as much as he was speaking to Finn. “We have to stick to the plan; we can’t run off half-cocked. You don’t do things without being methodical, crossing t’s and dotting i’s. Preparation is key to success.” He paused. “I know Ava doesn’t always understand that.”

  “She must,” Finn said. Still, Parker heard the accusation in Finn’s voice as she spoke. “She’s been patient while you healed and has supported the plan, despite her wanting to be on the move weeks ago.”

  Parker could understand Ava’s desire to be on the move, but every time he thought he was ready, there was something holding him back and telling him he needed more time.

  Time for what?

  The Council was filled with brutal, violent people, and they were changing what could only be referred to as the “corporate culture” of the emergency government forces. The so-called government became more like an occupying army every day. Killers with badges; criminals who operated under a veneer of civilization and authority, much as Stalin’s and Hitler’s followers had. A plan that relied on a young girl flirting with such men might work on a sanitized television episode, but Parker knew that, in real life, it was playing with fire, or at best it was an open invitation to gang rape.

  Parker started to say something to Finn, to take charge of things, to be a leader, to be the man she’d known on the night of the Event, but now wasn’t the time. Plus, he felt lethargic, too calm in his Ativan-muddled head.

  They reached the orchard in fifteen minutes and laid their bikes down a short space away from where other workers were gathering to pick up ladders and collection bags. Behind an idle forklift, Finn and Parker opened the top of an irrigation weir and hid their supplies. There was already quite a collection in the damp, hollowed-out space.

  They heard a bike bounce off the ground hard behind them and turned. Ava was approaching them, her face far from furious at whatever had happened. Instead, her expression was cold as an ice field as she stared them down. Parker couldn’t meet her gaze. He knew he didn’t deserve to.

  “Ava, I’m sor—” Finn tried to say.

  Ava cut her off. “Don’t worry about it,” she snapped. “Right, Parker? All’s well that ends well, right? As long as we’re prepared, as long as everything is going according to THE PLAN?”

  Parker didn’t respond.

  “Every time we go through that checkpoint and play ‘let’s-pretend-we’re-spies’ with stone cold killers, we risk people like Isla and Fernando stringing us up by chains off a goddamn lamp post.”

  “We can’t take off unprepared…” Parker began.

  “And now?” Ava cut him off. “I flirted and got felt up during a pat-down, but those sick sonofabitches think I liked it, Parker. I pretended to like it so we could dump food in a pile that could be found at any time.” Her voice had become quietly furious.

  “I—” Parker started. His stoned mind couldn’t form words fast enough to keep up with her.

  Ava cut him off again. “At any time, Parker. We could be walking into the crosshairs of a Council Small Kill Team every time we go back to the same drop point. And let’s not forget tomorrow or the day after, Parker. What happens when the girl who giggled while she was felt up goes back through the same checkpoint? Full body cavity search? And what, I’m supposed to be okay with that because you have a plan?”

  Parker simmered quietly, casting a look around to make sure no one could overhear them. He did have a plan; he did have a purpose. Yeah, it left those who’d pledged to help him vulnerable, but his plan made sense.

  “No. Parker, just fucking no.” Ava said before he could speak again. “We shouldn’t even be here.”

  She turned and stalked away. Finn, her expression pained, started after her, but then turned back to Parker. She seemed torn, and he understood why. She and Parker had bonded tightly over the night of the Event, but she’d been in love with Ava for almost as long as she’d been old enough to understand what the word ‘love’ meant. And Parker knew he no longer seemed like the man he’d been that night.

  Parker saw everything playing across her face and gently shook his head. “Go,” he said. “Go after her. It’s my turn to drive the forklift anyway.”

  “I know you feel you have to do this, this way,” she said. “I get that…” she trailed off and looked away, leaving Parker to wonder just exactly how much she really got it anymore.

  He climbed up into the forklift and turned the ignition over. The tractor roared to life, its engine too loud for them to talk. Finn turned and followed Ava, leaving Parker to shuffle apple bins back and forth in the clearing. After a couple of minutes, he took another tablet out of his pocket and chewed it up.

  2

  Eli sat beside Parker on the porch of the ex-cop’s house, drinking the last of Parker’s beer stash, which was warm as piss but still good after a long day of working out in the fields. Silent, Parker savored the warm, soft comfort of his buzz. He wasn’t drunk, merely loose. He was relaxing after a hard day’s work, he told himself, and nothing more. Besides, given how the girls were feeling about him, this was as close to warmth as he was going to find, he figured.

  The former Army infantryman was probably his closest friend, and had been a fellow prepper, but with the confiscation of all items deemed to signify hoarding by the Council, he now kept his head low, choosing not to make any waves that would call attention to himself.

  Parker reminisced at his side silently, wishing for the old days, when the beers had been cold and the conversation lively. He tugged at this shirt, leaning forward to let the sweat run down his back. For almost fall, the weather had yet to cool off.

  The neighborhood around them was quiet. Since the Event and the subsequent crackdown by Council forces had melded into the fabric of legitimate authority institutions, life had taken on the rhythms of nineteenth-century agricultural society—a society that was living in fear of its brutal overloads.

  After a few minutes, a National Guard Humvee rolled slowly down the street, two soldiers inside. The passenger nodded at Parker and Eli as they drove past. Both men raised their hands in acknowledgment. They, and their homes, could be searched at any moment, for any reason. It didn’t pay to antagonize the men with guns.

  “You ever hear the sheepdog versus wol
f analogy?” Eli asked, finishing off his beer.

  Parker nodded. It was a popular analogy in military and law enforcement circles. Society was separated into two groups, was how it went: people were either sheep or wolves. Wolves fed on sheep. There was a third group also: some people were sheepdogs, and they protected the sheep from the wolves.

  “I believe it,” Eli said. “For broad depictions of personality types, anyway. But have to say, it bothered me. I was always in the group of folks who felt it left out a fourth player.”

  “How so?” Parker asked. He hadn’t thought about the analogy in years, but he willingly listened to Eli talk about it.

  “Well, putting aside the generally insulting comparison of American citizens to sheep,” he said, “and acknowledging that your various criminal elements, terrorist groups, hostile regimes, et cetera, are metaphorically wolves, and cops and soldiers and intelligence agents are sheepdogs….”

  “Go on,” Parker said. “Remind me of this unnamed fourth player.” Eli tended to philosophize when buzzed, and Parker had no problem letting him ramble on.

  “The shepherd,” Eli said. “Sheepdogs don’t guard sheep because they love sheep; they’re not even the same species. No, the sheepdogs follow the shepherd’s commands. They protect the sheep from the wolves because the sheep are the shepherd’s property. And, when it comes time to drive the sheep to the slaughter pens? It’s the sheepdogs who do it.”

  The two men watched the red taillights of the Humvee drive away down the street.

  “I take it,” Parker said, “you expanded the analogy because most of the government forces don’t have a clue about the Council?”

  Eli went to take a drink of his beer, but found it empty and set it back down. “Most people who get into law enforcement, or join the military, or become first responders, function well in a hierarchal world. It appeals to them, intrinsically. Rank makes it easy. High ranks give orders and make the plans, and lower ranks carry them out. There’s an order and structure to it. Work hard and you’re promoted. It’s linear, dependable, easily understood.”