Hellfire (The Bugging Out Series Book 7)

by Noah Mann

  “The water will recede,” Schiavo assured me. “We’ll get there.”

  But how soon? That was my worry. If Elaine was hurt badly, she needed to get out of here and to the hospital without delay. Working against that was the fact that our planned ride out of the danger zone had been shot out of the sky. Men were dead, yes. They’d sacrificed themselves to best the enemy that threatened us and our way of life. But all I could think about was what I might lose. It was a selfish moment, and I didn’t care.

  “We need a helicopter,” I told Schiavo.

  She thought, then nodded toward Lorenzen.

  “Sergeant, find some high ground and get on your radio. Contact the Rushmore and tell them we need a helicopter evac for wounded.”

  “On my way,” Lorenzen said, taking his empty M4 with him as he fished the radio from his pack and sprinted toward a higher hill just to the north.

  Carter approached, breathing fast, his heart racing.

  “You did good,” Schiavo said.

  “Thank you, ma’am. But I’d rather not do that again.”

  “Me either, private.”

  * * *

  The minutes ticked by, an interminably slow march of time. Five. Ten. Twenty minutes. Nearly a half hour after the flood had raged past, its remnants had receded enough that we were able to cross the valley and reach the others, sloshing through muddy tangles of stumps and whole trees uprooted by the destructive waters.

  “Elaine,” I said as I rushed into the low spot atop the hill.

  “Babe?”

  Her eyes were closed and splatters of blood covered one side of her face and the whole left side of her body where Hart had cut away her clothes.

  “I’m here,” I told her, shedding my gear to kneel next to her and take her hand. “Do you feel my hand?”

  She squeezed my grip but said nothing. I looked to Hart.

  “She took a lot of shrapnel,” Hart explained. “Left side and back. The head wounds are superficial as far as I can see. But we need to get her to a doctor.”

  “Already working on it,” Schiavo said.

  Less than a minute later, Lorenzen ran up the hill, radio in hand.

  “Adamson didn’t want to send a chopper,” Lorenzen said. “I told his comm officer that I would personally swim out to them and kick his ass if that bird wasn’t here in twenty minutes.”

  Schiavo considered the insubordination her second in command had just admitted to. Maybe.

  “Kick Adamson’s ass, or his comm officer’s?” she asked.

  “I left that open to interpretation,” Lorenzen answered. “But the helicopter is on the way. It should be here any minute.”

  Admiral Lionel Adamson had been beyond stingy when it came to using the two working Seahawk helicopters stationed aboard the Rushmore, allowing neither to be used for transport of supplies to shore, nor to move personnel. If he had not authorized their use now, in this medical evacuation of my wife, I would have joined Lorenzen in his swim out to the boat to make our displeasure known.

  “I also was able to reach Dalton,” Lorenzen said, looking to Schiavo. “They didn’t lose anyone.”

  “No one?” Schiavo asked, incredulous and relieved all at once.

  “He said once the mortars started and bridge blew, the enemy acted like they knew they were up against a large force.”

  Schiavo’s plan had worked. With amazingly low casualties. That mattered little to me, though.

  “Babe,” Elaine said, her voice weak and thin. “Eric.”

  “I’m right here with you,” I assured her.

  “Is Hope all right?”

  “Our baby is fine,” I said.

  “But we...Eric?”

  “Elaine, I’m with you. Feel my hand.”

  “I can’t,” she said, her eyelids clamped shut.

  In the distance the throbbing wop wop wop of helicopter blades could be heard.

  “The helicopter is almost here,” I told her.

  “I can’t feel anything,” Elaine said, barely above a whisper. “I can’t...”

  She stilled.

  “Elaine...”

  I squeezed her hand. It was limp.

  “Elaine!”

  The helicopter appeared over the hilltop. Lorenzen waved it in with a flare as Hart pushed me aside and began administering CPR to my wife.

  “Elaine!” I screamed as Schiavo held me back. “No!”

  Part Five

  The Unknown

  Forty Two

  I walked with my daughter through fir saplings as high as my shoulder.

  “Daddy,” Hope said, pointing, to a small bird flitting about the low branches, green needles quivering in the rush of air created by the bird’s beating wings.

  “That’s a bird, sweetie,” I said.

  She ran toward the tiny finch, spooking it, and it maneuvered quickly away from her outstretched hand, swerving through the high branches of a dead, grey pine that had refused to succumb to time and weather.

  A dead survivor, I thought.

  We were not that. None of us. This I knew from experience, and through the pure joy of watching my two-year old daughter chase after the fleeing bird, giggling madly.

  Two years...

  She’d been born in the time between surviving and thriving. In the time when we fought our last true battle. Our final conflict of arms. She was a cooing baby that night and day, safe in the home of her Aunt Grace and her cousins Krista and Brandon. The titles of relation were not conferred because of blood lineage, but for more important reasons.

  Love and loyalty.

  “Bird!”

  Hope’s joyous screeching of the newly learned word buoyed me as I walked slowly behind, letting her stretch her metaphoric wings and explore the space before her. We were in the grove of new woods planted eighteen months ago on the border of the decaying forest. Soon, if plans moved forward, a swath of those grey and crumbling trees would be bulldozed, making way for still more replanting. The greenhouse operation at Remote was running at full capacity, and the hundred residents who now inhabited that settlement were already working on expanding their growing operation.

  “Daddy!”

  She looked back at me as she sprinted awkwardly, beaming.

  “I’m coming,” I assured her, adding playfully, “but you’re so fast!”

  She laughed and set her sights on some imagined point ahead, half-running, half-stumbling toward it. And if that didn’t whimsically mirror how we’d all gotten to where we were now, through some focused bashing through the unknowns that defined the world after the blight, then nothing did. There were fewer of those surprises, now, but they hadn’t disappeared entirely.

  One had come not long after we’d eliminated the Unified Government forces in what became known as the Rogue River Battle. Just ten days past that event, Mayor Everett ‘Doc’ Allen did not show up for a Defense Council meeting. It was Dave Arndt who was dispatched to the man’s house. He found him, in bed, gone. Sometime in the night he’d passed in his sleep.

  The Defense Council, too, had changed, in name and in makeup. It became the Town Council, shedding the militaristic implications that its former name implied. Schiavo now sat as an advisor to the fully civilian leadership. Nelson Vickers had replaced me on the Council, voted into the seat I had willingly vacated. But he’d only accepted a one year term, requiring a new candidate to seek the office.

  Or the office to seek the candidate.

  It was Martin who’d approached the new mayor, expressing the Council’s desire to have the full two-year term served. That would mean commitment. In the end, that was the only real question. Acceptability to the citizens was a given. Competence was without question. Integrity was beyond reproach.

  And that was how I became the first husband of Bandon.

  Elaine had been elected. Unanimously. And not in some Soviet-style election stinking of fraud and predestination. All those who’d lived in Bandon, and struggled, and survived, knew that Elaine Morales Fletcher
was the exact person they wanted making decisions which would affect the future of every person who called our town home.

  The wounds she’d suffered at Lobster Creek had almost taken her from me, and from our daughter. As I’d flown with her that day on the helicopter dispatched from the Rushmore, I’d thought we’d lost her. But she’d hung on as we were lifted from the wilderness and transported to Bandon. Genesee worked tirelessly, keeping her alive after Hart had revived her. Giving her a chance at the life we now had.

  And it was a good life, despite the challenges.

  She was well into her term, and was chairing a Town Council meeting as Hope and I wandered through the patch of growing woods. Two more survivor colonies had been located, one in Northern California, and another a hundred miles east of Bandon, the pair of enclaves requiring immediate support to move out of a purely survival mode. Our town, with regular resupply visits from the Rushmore, had become the hub of distribution to get foodstuffs, medical equipment, and, most importantly, seeds to these distant groups. Managing such a flow of material had put a strain on our town, and on those settlements, Remote and Camas Valley, through which supplies had to flow.

  “The bird gone,” Hope said, stopping just ahead and frowning at the empty sky.

  “He’ll come back,” I assured my daughter.

  She turned and glared at me.

  “Not a boy bird,” she scolded me. “A girl bird!”

  I nodded and smiled. Our sweet, determined daughter was turning out to be just what the new world, our world, needed. One who would speak their mind, while at the same time appreciating the simple joy of wandering through greening woods. She was a handful, yes, and with Elaine devoting a great deal of time to her duties as mayor, she was usually my handful. And gladly so.

  It did put a crimp in the contracting business I’d started, once again putting to use, on a smaller scale, those skills I’d honed in the old world. I was more hands on now, hanging doors and installing windows with hands that, in my old life, had become accustomed to shuffling contract paperwork and holding a cell phone to my ear. But it felt good to swing a hammer again, and to dig a trench. On occasion, when the job would allow it, I would bring Hope with me. Usually there was a willing resident who was more than happy to play with her as I completed whatever tasks were needed. That was the thing about Hope, and about any of the children born since the blight—they represented what we could get right.

  And, mostly, they were as cute as hell.

  “Go see mommy,” Hope said, reaching up to me.

  I scooped her up and was planting sloppy kisses on her neck that made her giggle when I heard it—my cell phone was ringing.

  It wasn’t the old days. I wasn’t juggling paperwork with a customer in my ear. No, our world was different now, but a pair of enterprising engineers with expertise in communications had, almost six months ago, completed a year-long project to establish a rudimentary cellular network that covered Bandon, Remote, and Camas Valley. No caller ID existed, yet, but I was fairly certain who was on the other end of this call.

  “Hi, babe,” I said as I answered.

  “You’d feel pretty foolish if this was Martin,” Elaine said. “Or Clay.”

  “Maybe I call all my friends ‘babe’.”

  “Mm-hm,” she sighed and grunted at my weak humor. “Where are you two?”

  “We are running through the woods chasing birds,” I said.

  “Mommy!” Hope shouted, grabbing at the phone.

  “There’s a request to have some mommy time,” I said.

  “It just so happens we’re done with business for the day. You want to swing by and pick me up?”

  “Mommy!” Hope shouted, laughing as I fended off her attempt to seize the phone in my hand.

  “We’re on our way,” I said.

  * * *

  So much had changed, I thought, as I drove through town, Hope buckled in a booster seat next to me. I often had moments of nostalgia rear up, unannounced. More cars could be seen on the streets, products of mechanical ingenuity and an almost limitless supply of parts scavenged from abandoned vehicles scattered on roads up and down the coast. Stop signs had been repainted, and there was discussion of reenergizing a few traffic lights downtown to manage both traffic and pedestrians as they crossed the roads.

  Bandon was different. It was growing. Becoming a town that, with every passing day, seemed more like what it had likely been before the blight. There was a time when I’d wanted to leave the very place I now called home, mostly because I felt it was too complacent. That those in charge had it on a steady course toward a slow decay. I’d been wrong, and I thought back now on those times with an unexpected fondness.

  Now there were cars. And pedestrians who’d forgotten how to look both ways getting clipped by drivers who’d lived without speed limits for too long. There was a bar in town, serving a pretty good selection of, what else, local brews. And there were fights after too much imbibing mixed with too much talking.

  The jail in Bandon found itself being used at least once a month, exclusively for one of these drunk and disorderly infractions, its inhabitants always the same combination of two or three people. A police force was in the works, which would relieve the town’s garrison from having to deal with civilian infractions.

  That military body now numbered eight, with the addition of two more recruits—Michael Poulson and Molly Anne Beck. The structure of the garrison had changed somewhat, with Schiavo giving battlefield promotions to those who’d served with her over the years. Lt. Lorenzen now had day to day responsibility for the troops, which included the newest recruits and Sergeants Enderson, Westin, and Hart. Corporal Carter Laws rounded out the tested and tried unit, and had proven himself to be a fine and reliable soldier.

  A wedding, too, had changed the face of our town. And added to it. Grace had married Clay Genesee, and within a few months they were expecting, the baby born just two months ago, a little girl named Alice, who was doted on by her big sister Krista, and looked upon with some loving suspicion by her four-year-old brother, Brandon.

  So much was different, yes, but so much was good, too. Every day I reminded myself how lucky I was to not only be alive, but to be alive here, with the people who’d become more than friends.

  “Mommy!” Hope shouted, craning her neck to see above the dash of the old pickup as we pulled into the parking lot of the town hall. “Mommy there!”

  Mommy was there. My love. Elaine. Beaming at the both of us from the wheelchair that no longer seemed like a reminder of loss. Shrapnel from the tank fire at the battle along the Rogue River had damaged her spinal cord and left her paralyzed from the waist down. Somehow, in the months after that terrible event, Elaine had not only been able to carry on with what she’d done to that point, she’d taken on more, adapting her physical limitations to any situation that presented itself. Including leading the town.

  And exiting the town hall via the side stairs.

  It was one of the things she loved to do to both terrify and inspire me, ignoring the ramp at the front of the building that she used upon entering, and instead pulling a wheelie and dropping expertly down the three steps to the sidewalk outside. As I stopped the truck near the exit she performed that very maneuver, wheels bouncing, chair tipped back, her balance never faltering.

  “You love it when I do that, don’t you?” she ribbed me.

  “I always love watching my wife on the verge of splitting her skull open,” I shot back.

  “Hasn’t happened yet,” Elaine said, wheeling herself to the passenger door and pulling it open to see our beaming child clapping madly upon seeing her. “Hi, baby!”

  I’d gotten used to not hopping from behind the wheel and helping her into the truck. That had lasted about a week until she’d perfected the choreography she executed now, hauling herself with her left hand up into the cab, and using her right to swing the compact wheelchair backward and over the side of the pickup, placing it perfectly in the bed where she coul
d retrieve it just as easily. She grabbed her legs and swung them in, closing the door before leaning over our daughter to kiss me.

  “Rough day running around the forest?”

  “Brutal,” I told her.

  “Bootal!” Hope mimicked adorably.

  Elaine turned her focus to our little girl, smothering her with sloppy mommy kisses. I pulled away from the town hall and out of the parking lot, driving my family home.

  Forty Three

  I was no longer among those who exercised authority in Bandon. That life, and those roles, I’d left behind. But I was not out of the loop as to decisions being made, and, on occasion, I was called upon to offer any expertise and advice that I could.

  An instance such as that occurred on a glorious spring Tuesday.

  “Have you thought about my offer?” Dave Arndt asked me as he slipped into the headset and plugged it into the Cessna’s intercom and radio system.

  “I have,” I told the man, adjusting the mic so that it was closer to my mouth. “And I decline.”

  We sat in the aircraft that had been restored from the useless state it had been found in on a stretch of road outside Coos Bay. Our expanding scouting patrols had discovered it, and another almost identical aircraft in an old farm field, more than a year ago. A Bandon transplant, Chris Beekman, who’d been a bush pilot in Alaska in the old world, had taken it upon himself to not only haul the Cessnas south to town, but also to restore them to working order. Once he’d completed that, he’d offered lessons to any who were interested, most paying through some sort of barter. Dave had helped Chris renovate a small hangar at the airport to secure his lessons.

  “You would love it,” Dave told me.

  “I love being a passenger,” I said.

  He smiled and started the engine, the 172’s propeller jerking, then settling into a steady, blurring rotation as the engine revved up. The high-winged aircraft was one of the most familiar in the old world, and its usefulness had transferred to our time. It, and its near twin, had been used to establish initial face to face contact with the recently discovered survivor colonies, Dave landing on stretches of road to deposit Schiavo or Martin to meet those who’d come through the blight and all that had followed.