by Noah Mann
The question beyond that which clearly nagged at my friend was which military? From what nation? Or was the force aligned with some self-styled ruling entity?
“Neil, we’ll know for sure when we find them. Everything else is just guesswork.”
He nodded, knowing I was right. But my assurance did not erase his worry or his wondering. It only forced it into the quiet place within, where it gnawed at him as the ocean rustled around us.
“Fletch,” he said, hesitating as he looked across the space to where Elaine stood at the controls of the Sandy, keeping us moving.
“Yeah?”
He stared at her, then looked to me again. In the dim mix of moon and starlight drizzling through the wheelhouse windows I saw his expression. And I saw it change, shifting fast, almost too fast, from a mask of uncertainty to a quick, oversure smile. Like a camera flash going off. There and gone.
“Nothing,” Neil said.
Whatever thought it was that had compelled him to seek some conversation with me, it was gone. Forgotten or buried.
I suspected the latter.
Neil pulled his body into the seat and turned half away from me, closing his eyes and seeking that slumber which eluded me. I wondered while I watched him what it was he’d wanted to say. Something about Elaine, I imagined, considering his brief focus on her at that moment. Was he about to express some doubt to me about her? About the bond, the love, that had developed between us?
No. He wouldn’t. He’d expressed the exact opposite of that to me on several occasions since Elaine and I had breached whatever barrier had kept us apart. His opinion would not have shifted a hundred and eighty degrees. Not this soon, and not without reason.
It was something else.
If it was important, he would tell me when the time was right. If it was not, it wouldn’t matter. That’s what I told myself.
But still I wondered. For a while. The thought, the curiosity, faded as we pressed north, and by the second day after Neil had sparked that wondering, it was gone. Out of my mind as we kept moving. Slowing not a bit.
Until we saw the graveyard.
Three
The hulking ship lay upside down on the water, capsized fully, rust red belly swamped each time a wind wave rolled in past the islands. Its rudder and the tip of one propeller blade rose a few feet above the surface of the gently curling sea. Stern high was how she had come to rest, deck planted solidly on the sloping shallows below. A good storm might shift the dead vessel further down that submerged incline, burying her forever, surviving microorganisms in the briny ocean attacking every bit of exposed metal. Consuming what remained over the millennia to come.
“There’s more ahead,” Neil said. “A lot more.”
I slowed the Sandy and brought us alongside the capsized ship, creeping forward. I looked ahead, to what Neil was seeing through the binoculars. Even unaided I could make out what he was seeing in the day’s waning light—lines of ships, large and small, sunk and scattered along the shore to either side of the Hecate Strait. Freighters and fishing boats and bulk carriers abandoned upon the unforgiving shores of Graham Island to the west, and those splits of land to the east.
“Does this look random to you?” Neil asked.
“No,” I answered.
“That hull’s been breached,” Elaine said, pointing through the wheelhouse windows.
She was right. The capsized ship we were cruising slowly past had a pair of jagged holes in her bottom. Folds of thick steel were peeled outward, like the blooming petals of some rusty flower.
“From inside,” I said.
Neil lowered the binoculars and looked to the ship we’d pulled alongside. Just one in a massive nautical boneyard. Where craft after craft had been sent to their final resting places with intentional violence.
“She was scuttled,” he said. “They all were.”
Intentionally sunk. But not just that. They’d all had their seaworthy lives ended along the shores of the strait, out of any lanes that ships might still pass through. Keeping the way ahead clear.
But the way ahead to what?
“I think we’re on the right track,” Neil said.
I nodded and steered us away from the capsized freighter. Back into the strait. None of us said anything about the most obvious part of what we’d just come upon. Obvious and welcome. Something good because of its absence.
Bodies.
Neither beached and bloating, nor floating upon the water. There was no sign of death. No equivalent to the bleached bones we’d tread upon on our trek across the wastelands to Cheyenne. Whatever souls had been upon the sunken ships, they were not here. They had gone on.
That gave us hope.
Night came. The water ahead sloshed black in the darkness. To either side, land rose as shadows that blotted out stars low in the sky. My shift at the wheel was nearly up. Fifteen minutes more and it would be my turn to make an attempt at sleep. But that was not to be.
Two minutes after I turned the wheel over to my friend we saw the light.
Four
We should have only seen night. Instead, we saw a speck of white, off to our left, sweeping across the water and land in the distance. A spoke of bright, almost blinding white that revealed features along the shore. Low, craggy hills. Shallow, jagged cliffs.
And a short jetty reaching out into the sea.
“A lighthouse?” Elaine wondered aloud, more disbelief than doubt in the question she posed.
I looked to Neil. He brought the throttles back and turned us toward the origin of the beam. Toward land.
“A lot of these were automated,” he said. “Almost all.”
“And it would still be operating?”
The doubt in my question was clear. No, it wouldn’t. It couldn’t. Even the most automated machinery, save the satellites that hung invisibly above in orbit, required maintenance. Care. Repair. Gears needed lubrication. Wires corroded from the salt air. Bulbs burned out.
What shone in the darkness before us shouldn’t be.
“I see someone,” Elaine said, binoculars zeroing in on something. “Just a shadow, but they’re there.”
I lifted my smaller pair of binoculars and focused in through the windshield, scanning the looming structure as its light swept across my field of vision, drizzling a glow to the ground at its base. That was where I saw what Elaine did. A figure in silhouette. A man. Standing there. Waving his hands back and forth above his head.
Beckoning us.
“Mary Island,” Neil said, glancing away from the ship’s controls to a map we’d taped to the wall above the side window. “There’s a lighthouse marked on here.”
Elaine looked to me, uncertain.
“Why would anyone be set up on an island?” she asked.
“Same reason Bandon kept its food on a ship offshore,” I suggested. “Isolation and protection.”
“Announcing your presence with a big ass light isn’t exactly hunkering down,” Neil countered.
He was right. But so was I. Both of our estimations were made in the blind, however. The truth, I suspected, would only come from the man in the shadows waving us toward shore.
* * *
We tied the Sandy off to posts rising from the makeshift dock in a cove out of view of the lighthouse and looked toward land.
“I don’t see him,” I said.
“I don’t see anyone,” Elaine added.
“I see something,” Neil said, gesturing toward the rocky shore to our right.
We looked, the high sweep of the unseen light spinning beyond the terrain drizzling enough from above to reveal a boat wrecked on the rocks. It was small, with an outboard motor swinging free against the gentle waves washing in from the channel. The same waves that had swamped it, submerging its left side, the opposite still visible above the water’s edge.
“That thing took some fire,” Elaine observed.
Its wooden hull, dirty white, was marred by darker splotches. Bullet holes.
Ne
il stepped past us, his AK at the ready, even more so than a moment before. We’d come off the boat with our weapons and packs. Circumstances had taught us to always be prepared to leave at a moment’s notice, with everything necessary to survive on our person. If the Sandy should blow up as we transitioned from dock to solid ground, we could still survive. For how long wasn’t entirely up to us.
“I have movement,” Neil said.
Looking past him we saw the same. Motion. A certain frenetic quality to it. An urgency. That could accurately be said about the slim man running toward us down a rocky path that ended at the dock.
“Hold it right there,” Neil told the individual, bringing his AK up to punctuate the command.
The man slowed, then stopped, the light spinning above beyond the terrain scarred with dead woods and toppled trees. His sunken gaze regarded us with utter surprise.
“What the hell are you doing?” the man asked us, breathing fast. “Are you crazy?”
I gripped my AR just a bit tighter and stepped past Neil. His gaze, I could see, was sweeping the darkened shore to either side of the dock. Elaine, too, would be doing the same, scanning for threats. This could be nothing more than an ambush. A performance to lure us to a place of vulnerability, not unlike the sirens of mythology beckoning ships to their demise on jagged shores.
“You turned on the light,” I said, my own gaze drifting on and off the man, fearing a nasty surprise that might emerge from the shadows.
But all there was was him. This scrawny stranger in something that had once vaguely looked like a military uniform. Now it hung threadbare from his frame, shirt and pants mismatched, boots nearly worn through and stained with something dark.
I activated the weapon light attached to my AR and shone it at his feet, his soiled boots shining with splotches of wet red.
Blood.
My AR came up again, harsh light aimed right between his eyes.
“Can you ease off, pal?” the man requested.
But I didn’t. I kept the light where it would nearly blind him. Where it would keep him off balance. At a disadvantage.
“Who are you and why did you turn on the light?” I pressed him.
“I’m Jeremy.”
I glanced to Neil. He nodded and moved past Jeremy, off the dock, to the path the man had come down, moving a dozen yards or so up the rocky trail, to a position of better cover.
“Are you military?” I asked Jeremy.
He nodded lightly. A half confirmation at best.
“I was,” he said. “I might still be. Who the hell knows anymore?”
That answer didn’t suffice. The look on my face spoke plainly to that.
“Private Jeremy Ebersol,” he said. “Okay? Now what the hell are you doing here?”
Again I waited. Another question hadn’t yet been answered.
“I saw you on radar, okay? I turned on the light because I thought you were stragglers.”
Elaine stepped close. Standing next to me, her MP5 aimed at the dock beneath our feet.
“Stragglers?” she asked.
Jeremy reached up and combed his fingers through his wispy hair, shaking his head at the mild interrogation he was being subjected to.
“Everyone’s already come through,” Jeremy tried to explain. “At least I thought they had. When I saw you...”
“People have come through here?” I pressed him. “People from down south?”
He puzzled at that question, as if the answer would have been self-evident to even the least intelligent of our species.
“You got the signal, right?” he asked.
“The White Signal,” Elaine said.
He nodded, still confused that we were failing to grasp what he was trying to get across.
“You got the signal,” he repeated. “You had your directions to here, so...”
I shook my head at the young enlisted man. He’d probably joined up just before the blight took hold, planning on four years, some G.I. benefits, and maybe a free beer or two over the years to thank him for his service. Instead he got this, whatever this was.
“We don’t have any directions,” I told him. “No one sent us here.”
His gaze narrowed down, then began to swell, worry rising. His gaze shifted to our weapons and he took a step back.
“Look, I’m just supposed to log the channel transits,” Jeremy explained, a pleading in his tone and manner. “I’m a nobody.”
“No,” I said, reaching out with one hand and grabbing him by the collar. “You’re the somebody who’s going to give us answers.”
I spun him around and began walking him off the dock, Elaine just behind. We only made it to the transition from rickety wood to solid land. That was where Neil stopped us as he jogged down the path he’d moved up.
“There are bodies up there,” my friend said.
I glanced to Jeremy’s stained boots, then looked to my friends.
“We have our first answer,” I said.
Elaine grabbed the young soldier’s arm and pulled him from my hold, shoving him past Neil with the butt of her weapon.
“Get moving,” she said.
Jeremy turned toward us, hands held in front, palms open in some sign of surrender.
“Move,” Elaine repeated.
Finally the young man nodded and led us up the path.
Five
They lay in a neat row outside the blockish base of the old lighthouse. Five of them, in full camouflage, the pattern vaguely familiar without allowing me to know, with any specificity, from where it originated.
Neil was not so limited.
“Russians,” my friend said, staring down at the bodies, each mangled by bullet holes and signs of explosive trauma. “Elite troops.”
Elite, possibly, if my friend was correct. But the wasting frames beneath their uniforms belied the harsh truth that, wherever they’d come from, they were poorly supplied.
“I saw a demonstration they put on while I was on assignment in St. Petersburg,” Neil said. “A lot of door blowing and dummy shooting. House clearing stuff.”
It was easy to forget sometimes what we’d all done and experienced in the old world. Working for the State Department, my friend had trotted the globe, sampling locale fare, experiencing whatever his hosts decided to present. Things such as what he described were not out of the ordinary, I imagined. Blowing things up with some precision gunfire added for good measure was an easy, and impressive, show to put on.
But here, it appeared, they’d met their match.
In this guy?
I wondered that to myself as I focused on the young private.
“They hit us just before first light yesterday,” Jeremy said, looking over the fallen soldiers with a mix of sadness and dread. “They got inside before we got the upper hand.”
Conical impact craters from bullet strikes and scorch marks from explosions marred the thick walls of the base structure, evidence of the fight he’d described. Or some fight.
“Who’s we?” Neil asked.
Jeremy tipped his head toward the lighthouse door. Elaine stepped that way, careful, and nudged the door open with the muzzle of her MP5. A quick flick of her flashlight revealed the interior for an instant. Just long enough to see what she then reported to us.
“Bodies in here,” she said. “Crappy uniforms like his.”
“We hit some of them from the tower,” Jeremy said. “The rest my buddies nailed with grenades as they got through the door. Some of them caught the blast, too.”
Elaine glanced back into the interior of the lighthouse, then looked to me. Really looked to me. Trying to share some understanding with her eyes. A warning maybe.
“Private Ebersol,” Elaine said, joining us again around the young soldier. “Where did the Russians come from?”
He shrugged and shook his head, just a kid beaten down by circumstance and what the new world served up to every survivor each and every day they still drew breath.
“We heard rumors from co
mmand that they’d hit the Aleutians a while back and were working their way down the coast,” Jeremy told us. “Someone said they were trying to get to the lower forty-eight.”
Elaine soaked in what the young man was sharing. Eyeing him with some practiced analysis. Drawing on the requirements of her old self. The one where the FBI credentials she still hung onto put her in situations just like this. Questioning someone.
As she would a suspect.
That she was doing so registered quietly with me. I made no overt moves, simply letting my finger slide closer to the trigger of my AR. At the ready. For what I didn’t know. At the moment, she was in control.
To my left, Neil hadn’t yet picked up on what Elaine was doing. On the doubt she was expressing with subtle shifts in her manner. He was focused very intently on the mangled bodies at our feet.
“Your buddies in there saved your ass,” Elaine said.
Jeremy nodded, grateful, almost teary.
Elaine, too, nodded. An understanding rising. I saw her fingers flex tight around the MP5’s grip.
“They meant a lot to you,” Elaine continued. “You were stationed here together. You get to know people pretty good when you’re isolated like this.”
“Yeah,” Jeremy confirmed, emotion ready to well.
“You guys were all close,” Elaine said. “You were friends.”
“We were.”
Jeremy’s gaze settled toward the ground. Elaine glanced to me, just a quick look, some intensity in the brief connection. Some wariness.
Then she fixed hard on the soldier trying to sell the tale.
“Jeremy...”
He looked up from the ground to Elaine.
“If they were such a good friends, why are they lying inside in a bloody heap while these invaders are arranged out here like heroes?”
For an instant he puzzled at the question. An instant in which Neil finally caught the gist of Elaine’s doubt and brought his AK slowly up.
It was in the next instant when all hell broke loose.
Jeremy, whose real name was most likely something akin to Yevgeny or Igor or Vladimir, reached fast behind his back and drew a long, dark knife from beneath his shirt. A combat blade meant to be as intimidating as it was deadly. Elaine stepped back first, Neil and I following suit, putting a few yards distance between us and the now obvious imposter. He swiveled his body, tracking each of our movements, shifting the blade between us, keeping us at bay.
