Hellfire (The Bugging Out Series Book 7)

by Noah Mann

  “There!”

  I slowed and stopped, looking to what he’d spotted, my heart sinking as the image became clearer through the steady fall of ash. The Humvee in which Schiavo, Martin, and Carter had left Bandon was nosed into the corner of a building just off an intersection, the upper part of a wooden telephone pole embedded in its left rear door, penetrating into the back seat area.

  “Good God,” Genesee said.

  He climbed out, forgetting his weapon. I didn’t as I left the driver’s seat and approached the wrecked vehicle, my AR slung, eyes scanning the immediate area that I could see for any signs of an ambush, past or present.

  “It’s empty,” Genesee said after checking the interior. “I don’t see any blood.”

  And I didn’t see any indication of a firefight. There were no impacts on the vehicle, nor any char marks which would point to some explosive round disabling the Humvee.

  “Their trailer’s gone,” I said, eyeing the empty space behind the vehicle. “The hitch is snapped off.”

  Before whatever had happened here, something violent had ripped what they were towing free.

  “Where the hell are they?” Genesee wondered, looking in all directions.

  That was the question of the moment, and one we had to answer.

  “Cover your ears,” I said, drawing my Springfield from its holster on my hip.

  Genesee followed my instructions. I raised my pistol, flipped the safety off with my thumb, and fired three fast shots into the air. Then, we waited, listening.

  “I don’t hear anything,” Genesee said.

  “Give it a minute,” I told him. “They probably aren’t standing outside with a weapon waiting for this kind of—”

  Bang. Bang. Bang.

  The reply was obvious. And close.

  “Down the street,” Genesee said, pointing in the direction we’d been driving.

  We were back in the Humvee in a few seconds and cruising down the street, looted and rubbled storefronts barely visible to either side.

  “I don’t see anything,” Genesee said.

  I honked the Humvee’s horn, its anemic blast barely registering. But, it was enough.

  “Lights,” Genesee said, pointing ahead and to the left.

  I saw them, too, the beams of two flashlights criss-crossing each other as they swept back and forth, the person wielding them resolving through the ash as I steered the Humvee toward the curb and stopped in front of a bank building. Carter Laws lowered the lights when he saw us.

  “Carter!” I shouted as both Genesee and I climbed from the vehicle.

  “Fletch!”

  The young, newly minted private ran up and threw a bear hug on me. A second later, Schiavo raced out of the bank building, her presence and Carter’s appearance leaving no doubt as to who was hurt.

  “Where’s Martin?” Genesee asked.

  “He’s inside,” the captain answered.

  “Help me with the medical supplies,” Genesee said.

  I left Schiavo and Carter to do just that and hurried into the building.

  Eight

  Martin lay on his right side on a makeshift bed in the teller area of the bank. Two desks that had been righted and pushed together had formed the base of where he rested, with a collection of scavenged blankets and old bedding folded beneath his body to offer some cushion against the hard surface.

  “Martin,” I said, approaching and putting my AR aside.

  “Fletch...”

  The man who’d mastered the art of firm graciousness, a quality I’d experienced soon after arriving in Bandon, reached a hand slowly toward me. I slipped my gloves off and took hold of it, holding tight, with an arm wrestler’s grip.

  “You don’t look half bad,” I told him.

  “I’d hate to see the other half,” he quipped.

  Genesee came in a moment later, Schiavo and Carter with him, each carrying bags and boxes of medical supplies and equipment.

  “Martin,” Genesee said. “Grace tells me you had a pretty hard hit from a telephone pole.”

  “It won,” Martin joked, coughing suddenly, his face grimacing in pain.

  Genesee put a hand on the man’s shoulder and looked to me.

  “Fletch, the oxygen bottle and mask.”

  I retrieved the items for him. A moment later a slow flow of oxygen eased Martin’s discomfort slightly as Genesee checked him over, focusing on the large bruise and swelling beneath his left armpit.

  “What happened?” I asked. “We saw your Humvee down the street.”

  “When the big quake hit we were just starting through that intersection,” Schiavo said, shaking her head as she recalled the moment. “It was violent, Fletch. So violent.”

  “I was driving,” Carter said, some guilt seeming to inhabit his tone.

  “It’s wasn’t your fault, private,” Schiavo said. “You just happened to be at the wheel when it hit.”

  “What was that piece of telephone pole in the back?” I pressed.

  “It snapped off, Fletch,” Schiavo said. “The whole top of the pole was whipping back and forth so hard in the quake that it broke away and flew into the vehicle. Right where Martin was sitting in the back seat.”

  “I think you’ve got a couple fractured ribs,” Genesee said. “And a minor pneumothorax.”

  “Air in the chest cavity,” I said.

  I’d picked up enough from medical television shows in the old world, and from interactions with people like Grace and Doc Allen, to recall that which Genesee was describing.

  “Classic impact injury,” Genesee said, giving Martin a quick shot to numb some of his pain. “I’m going to have to put in a chest tube. I’m getting breathing sounds on the left side, but they’re reduced. My guess is it’s only a minor puncture in the lung. The ribs appear to have reset themselves, so we’re not going to have jagged ends in there causing more damage, as long as he takes it easy.”

  The doctor went about performing the procedure that was necessary to remove air from the cavity around the left lung. We assisted as best we could, sterilizing our hands before wielding lights and passing bandages. It was all done in twenty minutes, a large bandage covering Martin’s left side and a snug wrap circling his torso to help secure his injured ribs.

  “You’re going to be sore for a while,” Genesee said.

  Martin nodded, smiling groggily through the transparent oxygen mask.

  “Thank God you were monitoring the satellite frequencies,” Schiavo said to me. “It was blind luck that we found a SATCOM unit a few blocks over.”

  “There must have been a unit stationed here as the blight hit,” Carter said. “Probably a roadblock on the interstate.”

  Checkpoints. That’s what they’d been. My first encounter with the violence and breakdown of order brought on by the blight had occurred on a road in Montana, near Arlee. It made perfect sense that such a restriction on movement, hopeless as it was, would have been put in place where Carter suggested.

  What Schiavo had thought, though, was not as accurate.

  “We weren’t the ones who heard you,” I said.

  It took a few minutes to explain what had transpired, from the arrival of the SEALs to our setting off on a mission to save a mission.

  “You’re apparently pretty important to someone,” Genesee told Schiavo.

  “We need to get moving,” I said, ending the moment of sharing. “We’re going to have to head west instead of south to find a passable bridge. If we’re lucky, it will be clearer at the coast. We can be back in Bandon day after tomorrow.”

  Schiavo thought on that for a moment, then shook her head.

  “I can’t go back,” she said. “I have to get to Portland.”

  Martin coughed and reached up to ease the oxygen mask away from his face, but said nothing, just regarded his wife with a mix of worry and wonder.

  “Angela,” I said, taking the moment to a more personal level, “there’s duty, and then there’s futility. Going on is futile. The
situation is untenable.”

  “There’s no way Air Force One will be in Portland,” Genesee said. “They would have evacuated at the first sign of the eruption.”

  “The message you received from the SEALs came after the eruption,” Schiavo pointed out. “Long after. And according to you they stated that I have to get to Portland.”

  “That’s moot now,” I said. “There’s one vehicle between us and we have to get Martin back to Bandon.”

  The man tried to sit, but only managed to prop himself on one elbow. Genesee reached to steady his patient.

  “I’m not going back,” Martin told us, though his gaze was fixed fully on his wife. “Not if she’s not, and, in case you haven’t figured it out yet, she’s pressing on.”

  Schiavo didn’t want to smile, but a hint of that very expression spread slowly upon her face as she regarded the man she loved, and his undeniable devotion to her.

  “You can’t be serious,” Genesee said, reading what the silence between them was telling him. “This man needs rest, and you can’t walk to Portland. Not from here.”

  She looked away from Martin, to Genesee, and shook her head.

  “We’re not walking,” she said. “The other Humvee is just banged up. We can get that running. Wouldn’t you think so, Private Laws?”

  Carter seemed taken aback by the proposition. Not of continuing the mission, but of getting their wrecked transport on the road again.

  “I can give it a look, ma’am,” Carter said.

  He shouldered his weapon and turned toward the door, but never made it a single step as I reached out and put a hand to his shoulder to stop him.

  “Let’s just stop,” I said.

  “Fletch,” Schiavo said, the tone that wrapped my name plainly admonishing me for resisting her decision.

  But I wasn’t doing that. Not at all.

  “No,” I said, shaking my head at her, then looking to each of those gathered around our wounded friend. “Let’s just not play this back and forth like some of us are going to head for home and some of us are going to keep going. We’re not splitting up. At the end of any discussion or argument we’re going to have, we’ll come to the same conclusion.”

  “We’re sticking together,” Martin said, adding a quick nod toward me.

  “We are,” I said.

  Genesee, though, wasn’t fully grasping what I’d just said. And what we’d all just agreed to. Even him, by default.

  “Wait,” the Navy doctor said, an inkling of what I’d just stated beginning to sink in. “You’re not serious.”

  “You saw their Humvee,” I reminded Genesee. “The left front suspension is shot.”

  When the vehicle had been pushed off the street and over the curb, multiple supports that allowed proper ride and steering had been bent, the wheel at that corner of the Humvee canted at more than a 45 degree angle. There was no chance that the vehicle would get them to Portland, or even out of Coburg.

  “Martin needs to stay immobile,” Genesee said.

  “Like he would be riding in our Humvee back to Bandon?” I challenged him. “How is that different from him riding in our Humvee heading north?”

  Genesee chuckled with disbelief and shook his head.

  “She’s going north, Clay,” I said.

  “So am I,” Martin added.

  “Me, too,” Carter said, adding a half-raised hand to emphasize his commitment to go on.

  “Every minute we debate this the ash gets thicker out there,” I said.

  Genesee stepped close to me, hardly a foot separating us.

  “And do you have any idea what it will be like in Portland?” he pressed me. “What kind of hell we’ll find there?”

  I didn’t. But that didn’t matter. If our friends were going, I was going. I’d tried to convince myself after Olin’s death that I could separate myself from what needed to be done to keep Bandon on a prosperous path. That I could, without malice, turn my back on tasks and necessities which I was suited to perform. I wanted to be home with my family. With Elaine. And Hope.

  But Bandon had survived, and begun to thrive, because of me. And because of others just like me. None of us were heroes, but to a man, and a woman, we were all integral to what had been accomplished. If each of us who’d contributed to the town’s resilience in the face of the blight simply decided to no longer walk that path, all that we’d sacrificed for would settle into a state of stagnation. That, almost certainly, would mean failure. And death.

  We had to move forward, and part of making that a reality was what I could bring to the table in this very endeavor. I had no true idea what we would find in Portland, nor why Schiavo had been summoned there by, presumably, the highest authority in our battered and fractured nation, but it was her duty to complete the mission she’d been given. And it was my place to see that she had every chance to succeed, because at the end of this journey she, and we, might find something vital to our town’s survival.

  “Get Martin ready to move,” I told Genesee.

  Martin, though, didn’t wait for any assistance. He levered himself to a sitting position and then slid off the makeshift bed, standing next to it, unsteadily at first.

  “I just need help with my shirt,” Martin said.

  “This is crazy,” Genesee said.

  Schiavo didn’t take the man’s bait. She simply stepped past him and helped Martin get his shirt on and his gear ready. I didn’t engage with Genesee either, having learned over our short time alone together that, despite his protestations, the man knew he had something, and someone, worth fighting for. His reluctance to go beyond this point was fueled largely by a desire to return to Grace. Once he considered the gravity of the mission Schiavo had been given, though, I knew he’d come to understand that by helping her, he was helping Bandon. And without Bandon...

  “Just plain nuts,” Genesee mumbled, then began to repack the medical supplies that had been brought in from the Humvee, readying himself to move out.

  He’d committed himself to reaching our friends and bringing them home. Only half of that desire had been achieved. In his reaction I saw the hint of fear that those we’d found, along with the two of us, might end up dead along the highway somewhere to the north, much like the family we’d stumbled upon in their van.

  He might be right, I knew. We’d all cheated death in some way since the blight, some more than once, in places near and far, and in situations that were clearly dire.

  But not as dire as this. I had to admit that. This, what we were about to attempt, bore the greatest threat that I had faced. We were going up against Mother Nature, in all her glorious fury. A few people, I supposed, had done so before and lived to tell the tale.

  A few...

  I hoped that we would soon join that very exclusive club of survivors.

  Part Two

  Portland

  Nine

  There was no day. Only night. And though we might have rested in Coburg for the remainder of the day until the unseen dawn arrived the next morning, we did not. We began the journey to Portland as soon as we’d loaded the Humvee and not two minutes after Carter had swapped out the air filter. A hair over a hundred miles separated us from our destination, a distance that, on a normal day in the old world, we would have covered in less than two hours.

  In the blighted world, with the rage of Mt. Hood’s eruption choking the air and fouling the land, it took almost twelve. We used our remaining air filters just reaching the city’s outskirts, delineated only by faded and broken road signs like the ones that had marked our arrival in Eugene.

  We also had a guide.

  “Bear left if you can,” Carter said.

  He was riding shotgun as I drove. A paper map lay open on his lap, though he hadn’t looked at it once. His attention was fixed out the windows as we crept deeper into the city. His city. His hometown.

  “If it’s clear ahead, we can have a pretty straight shot toward the airport down Columbia Boulevard.”

  I followed
his directions, driving slow, weaving around rotting vehicles and debris from rubbled buildings which had collapsed into the street. We’d left the interstate a while back, taking city streets east toward the airport. Carter peered through the falling ash, navigating almost by feel. Through memories that had been sullied by too many realities since the blight, this new nightmare included.

  “Everything used to be so green,” the young private commented, his head shaking slightly. “So green.”

  That color had been stripped from the world by the blight. What remained had been erased by the rain of ash from the eruption of Mt. Hood, not quite 50 miles further east.

  “It’s amazing that you can make out where we are,” Martin said from the back seat.

  He sat between Schiavo and Genesee, supplies crammed in nearly every space around them. After he’d offered the comment, he gasped slightly, drawing a shallow, painful breath. The injury he’d suffered was wearing on him. I hoped that we’d soon reach some place where he’d be able to truly rest.

  “I can almost feel my way around this city,” Carter said. “There was a great Vietnamese restaurant near here, just down that street there.”

  He pointed to the left, and I glanced that way, seeing only darkness and the faintest hint of an intersection.

  “Good pho,” Carter said. “Really, really good.”

  The young man smiled, though only for a moment. All that he’d known and experienced and reveled in was gone, from noodle restaurants to wooded parks. I wondered if it was almost better that he couldn’t lay his eyes upon the exact places bubbling up in memory. Perhaps it was best that the city was veiled in smoke and ash. In my own situation, I had no idea what I would feel were I to venture back to my home in Missoula, and I’d thought about what my own reaction would be to finding the place I’d known as home for so long just a ravaged shadow of its former self.

  “Turn right coming up,” Carter said.

  I slowed and made the turn, taking us onto Columbia Boulevard. We continued east for just five minutes before the way forward was hopelessly blocked by a literal wall of trucks and trailers which had been piled high to create a substantial roadblock. With the drifting ash added to the barrier, it looked like something Dante might have conjured in a fevered dream.