by Noah Mann
“It’s a flare,” I said.
Outside, night turned to day in a hundred yard bubble around the blazing flare, revealing the carnage that had been visited upon the isolated island. Dark objects lay upon the ground. Half a dozen, I counted. Bodies. There would be more, I knew, beyond the reach of the light. Lost in shadow or hidden near the edge of the dead woods.
“I think they want us to show ourselves,” Elaine said.
“We’re easy targets if we walk out into that,” Neil reminded us.
“If they wanted us dead,” I said, “we’d already be dead.”
Neil knew I was right. He wasn’t really protesting Elaine’s suggestion. All that we’d been through had simply ingrained a layer of distrust in all things except those with which we were intimately familiar. And a hovering helicopter in the night, armed to the teeth, was not that.
“Let’s go,” I said.
We rose from where we’d taken cover and lowered our weapons. Then, with me in the lead, we walked out into the sizzling light.
Ten
We stopped twenty feet from the flare, in the full wash of its illumination, and waited, listening to the helicopter hover in the distance. And hover. Making no move to approach.
“I don’t like this,” Neil said.
His wariness was well founded. Aside from the aircraft continuing to stand off, as a hunter might with prey in their sights, we were completely exposed where we stood. Easy pickings for any Russian who might have survived the aerial attack and was lurking in the darkened woods.
“I’m with Neil,” Elaine agreed.
“We don’t have a lot of options here,” I reminded them.
Then, slowly, the sound of the helicopter changed. It grew louder. And louder. Soon we began to feel the wash of its rotor. Smoke from the flare swirled in the brightening glow as the rush of air fed its flame.
I looked up and saw the stars blotted out. Something dark and solid between us and the heavens. The wind it generated blasted us and pushed the flare a dozen yards from where it had landed. Soon we were leaning into the raging wash as the craft settled toward the earth, its shape plunging into the glow of the nearby flare. Gaining definition. Revealing a massive helicopter, single main rotor spinning atop a wide fuselage with weapon pods mounted on stubby outriggers protruding from each side. Ganged rocket launchers and missile racks I could make out, along with forward facing single barrel weapons. Fifty-calibers by the appearance. And from openings on each side just aft of the cockpit, multi-barrel weapons were swiveling, masked and helmeted operators manning each. These were the miniguns we’d heard firing.
“Sea Stallion,” Neil said as the craft came to rest on the flat earth, wheels supporting it as a ramp at the rear slowly lowered.
“What?”
My friend looked to me.
“It’s a Marine Sea Stallion,” he said, identifying the aircraft, then looking back to it. “This one is tricked out.”
That it was, I had to agree, even though I knew little about the specific craft. Besides the almost comical array of weaponry it carried, two elongated fuel tanks hung beneath each outrigger. The thing had been outfitted to go into battle at some distance from its base.
Still, its grey body bore no markings. Or those which it had carried had been painted over. For what reason, I had no clue.
“We’ve got company,” Elaine said.
Figures spilled from the back of the Sea Stallion, coming down the loading ramp. There were four, all uniformed identically, grey and black pattern of camouflage from neck to boots. They wore no helmets, but they were all armed, with what appeared to be M4s, the military cousin to my AR.
And each and every one was pointed at us.
“Just keep your weapons down for now.”
The words seemed more suggestion than order as the group stopped just short of where we stood, and the soldier who spoke them, a woman, bore no aggressiveness in her stance as she stepped past the three who’d approached with her, lowering her weapon. A name was sewn onto the right breast of her uniform, but she identified herself before there was any need to read it.
“I’m Lieutenant Angela Schiavo,” she said, offering each of us a look. “United States Army.”
We looked amongst ourselves, then to the lieutenant again. She nodded to the soldiers just behind and they brought their rifles down to a low ready position. Not aimed at us anymore, but easily returned to that state.
“You’re civilians,” Schiavo said, eyeing us. “Where is the garrison assigned here?”
“If you mean the Americans, they’re dead,” I told her.
She let that register for a moment.
“Where?”
“Inside,” I said.
She made a couple hand motions and the three soldiers behind split up and moved off, one heading into the building and the other two toward the woods, weapon lights switching on as they began to search the perimeter.
“Can you tell me what happened here?” Schiavo asked.
“Besides you blowing the hell out of the place?” Neil responded, rolling his wounded shoulder.
Schiavo motioned toward the helicopter as its rotor spun down. The door gunner facing us disappeared from his position, and a moment later he and another soldier appeared on the loading ramp and approached quickly.
“I have someone who can look at the shoulder for you,” Schiavo said. “Now, do you actually know what happened here?”
I explained to her about our arrival after seeing the light, and about the Russians, including their infiltrator. As I did so, one of the newly arrived soldiers, whose name patch identified him as Hart, had Neil sit on the ground as he began checking his wound.
“So this was the second attack,” she said.
“Is there going to be a third?” Elaine asked.
Schiavo surveyed the identifiable body count and shook her head.
“If they lost this many after two goes, they can’t afford a third.”
“Chunk of stone,” Hart said, looking up from where he was tending to Neil. “Secondary shrapnel. He’s lucky.”
“Hear that, Neil?” I said. “You’re lucky.”
My friend shot me a look and winced as Hart began to clean the penetration in his shoulder.
“I feel so, so lucky,” he said.
“Specialist Hart is a fine medic,” Schiavo said. “Finest I’ve ever served with.”
The soldier who’d entered the building returned, his M4 slung and his expression grim. Enderson was stitched on his right breast, and a pair of stripes on his upper sleeve put his rank at corporal.
“The garrison is KIA,” Enderson reported to Schiavo.
Killed In Action. Truer words had never been spoken. The unlucky few soldiers who’d been assigned to this hunk of rock had given their best, and then their all, trying to hold onto it.
“Thank you, corporal,” Schiavo said.
Her attention shifted for a moment, from the three of us and her troops to the bodies scattered about outside. What had been a neat arrangement of fallen Russians when we’d arrived had been violently disturbed by explosions used in the second attack. Now those corpses, and that of the infiltrator, were strewn about, some whole, most blasted to pieces.
“They’re Russians,” I said.
“They were,” Schiavo corrected me.
The two soldiers who’d headed off to check the perimeter, a Sergeant named Lorenzen and a Private named Westin, returned, the latter lowering himself onto a fallen log nearby.
“We swept the tree line and the back side of the lighthouse,” Lorenzen told his commander. “Just bodies.”
“Okay, sergeant.”
“If we’re going to spend any time here, I suggest a sweep all the way to the shore,” Lorenzen said.
“We’re not setting up shop,” Schiavo assured him. “Acosta.”
The other soldier who’d come off the helicopter with Hart stepped forward. He was a wide eyed private, eager and ripped. The young man had found time
in the blighted world to pump iron.
“Lieutenant,” Acosta said.
“Tell the pilots we’ll be wheels up in forty minutes,” Schiavo said.
“Yes, ma’am,” Acosta acknowledged, then he hustled off back to the helicopter and disappeared up the loading ramp.
“What do they want with this place?” I asked, and Schiavo looked to me. “The Russians.”
“What does anyone want?” Schiavo asked, answering herself an instant later. “Food.”
People would kill for food. I’d seen it. Elaine and Neil, too, had witnessed what human beings had been driven to in the pursuit of sustenance. Why would armies be any different?
“There’s a small cellar with a few months’ provisions,” Schiavo explained. “That was their objective.”
“Like the Army of Northern Virginia foraging their way across the union,” Sergeant Lorenzen said.
“Have we been invaded by Russia?” Elaine asked.
Westin, bald and somewhere between twenty years old and dead, snickered from where he’d taken a seat on the log.
“Did I make a joke?” Elaine asked the soldier sharply.
“Invade?” Westin asked. “Russians?”
Lorenzen eyed his subordinate.
“Easy, private,” the sergeant cautioned the man.
Westin stood and faced Elaine, but moved no closer.
“You think they want to plant a flag here?” Westin challenged Elaine.
“I think that might have been one of their intentions,” Corporal Enderson said as he stood from where he’d been searching through an attacker’s gear, unfurling a small banner he’d retrieved, its white, blue, and red horizontal stripes crisp and clean.
Westin gave the flag a dismissive glance and focused on Elaine again.
“They’re scavengers,” he said. “Just like us. Just like anybody left on this Godforsake—”
“I believe your sergeant suggested you stand down,” Schiavo interrupted. “Private.”
Westin eyed her, his commander, a hint of the same dismissiveness he’d shown the Russian flag in his gaze as he regarded her. I couldn’t tell if there was a lack of respect, or if the man was just beaten down by what we’d all been through. Whatever it was, he took the reiteration of Lorenzen’s subdued order and turned away, striding off past the pair of Russian bodies to a position where he stood alone.
“It was just a question,” Elaine said to Schiavo.
“He’s on edge,” the lieutenant explained. “We all are. This is just our first area to clear. There are garrisons up and down the coast.”
“Why here?” Neil asked, standing, his shoulder now bandaged. “Why were ships with people coming by here?”
“It was for processing,” Schiavo answered.
“Processing,” Neil repeated, his disdain plain for the word. “Processing.”
Schiavo nodded, puzzled.
“You do know how terrible that sounds,” I said.
“Like Nazi terrible,” Elaine added.
“They just get ‘processed’ and then they’re taken away,” Neil said.
Schiavo eyed each of us and shook her head.
“No,” she said. “Not like that. I promise.”
Neil stepped toward her and shifted his AK so that it hung solidly across his front.
“Processing for what?” my friend pressed her.
“For Repop,” Schiavo said, the truncated term holding enough possible innocence in what it implied that the worry was momentarily dialed back for the three of us.
“Repopulation?” Elaine asked.
Schiavo nodded and ran a hand over her head. Elaine looked to me.
“It makes sense,” she said. “If you’re trying to stabilize things, you gather everyone in one place so it’s easier to supply.”
“Transports with survivors would transit this route and be logged,” Schiavo said. “Mary Island was the southernmost point of that route.”
“Is that what this is all about?” I pressed her. “Herding everyone together?”
“That’s my understanding,” she confirmed. “A repopulation center was established in Skagway. Identified communities with a sufficient number of survivors were evacuated there.”
“Forcibly evacuated,” I said.
“I don’t know anything about the parameters of the specific evacuations,” Schiavo said.
“We do,” Neil told her. “The parameters include blood stains and four hundred of the people we care about disappearing.”
Schiavo considered what Neil had just told her. What we’d all told her. But there was something we hadn’t shared.
“Why weren’t you three among those?”
Neil said nothing. Neither did Elaine. I suspected that my friends were making the same decision that I was—that offering up information on where we’d traveled, and what we’d found, was not completely prudent. Not yet. We knew nothing of the lieutenant and her unit. Only what they had shared. None of which we could verify. So, for the time being, we would hold close what we knew. And what we possessed.
Information, even in this new age, could be power.
“Don’t want to talk about it,” Schiavo said. “I see.”
“Why Skagway?” Elaine asked.
Schiavo shrugged and slung her M4, some coolness rising. A chill about the subject I’d sensed in her as each morsel about where our friends had been taken was drawn out.
“That information was not part of my briefing.”
“You don’t sound enthused about any of this,” I said.
Schiavo thought for a moment. Maybe weighing the propriety of any reply. Of making any statement of discord to an outsider.
“In my world, you don’t group your assets,” she said. “You spread out as a matter of defense.”
So she spoke her mind. Somewhat. Without being insubordinate or belaboring the issue. She was a thinking soldier. An honest leader. That shouldn’t have surprised me, but it did.
“Are you going there?” Elaine asked. “To Skagway?”
Schiavo didn’t answer this time. Maybe doing some withholding of her own.
“Is that your boat tied off at the east dock?” the lieutenant asked.
“It is,” I confirmed.
Schiavo thought for a moment. Studying us. Maybe appraising our wherewithal. Our grit.
“You look like you’ve been through some hard times,” the lieutenant said.
“Do you know anybody who’s had it easy since the blight?” I asked.
She smiled and shook her head.
“Lieutenant...”
It was Enderson. He’d retrieved something else from one of the dead Russians. A small round of metal, a bit larger than a quarter, a dull, rusty sheen upon its surface. He held it up and Schiavo stared at it, her expression darkening.
“Kuratov,” Enderson said.
Schiavo took the small medallion and rolled it over again and again in her fingers like a foul talisman.
“Yeah,” she said, agreeing with the corporal.
“Is that his name?” Elaine asked.
“Him?” Schiavo asked, gesturing to the Russian the medallion had been retrieved from before shaking her head. “No. This little hunk of metal here identifies this soldier as belonging to Forty Fifth Spetsnaz.”
“The same unit that went into Ukraine without insignia,” Enderson added.
Ukraine. It was difficult to remember the time when that dominated the news. It all seemed so small now. So insignificant compared to what had followed. And what was still unfolding.
“Their commander was...is a man named Aleksy Kuratov,” Schiavo said. “There were some reports that he’d gone rogue with his unit after the blight spread across Asia and Europe. When we had later reports of possible Russian incursions in the Aleutians, command just figured it was isolated instances of starving units acting out of desperation.”
“Kuratov doesn’t act out of desperation,” Sergeant Lorenzen said. “He always has a plan.”
�
��Right,” Schiavo said, that reality seeming to spark some concern in her. “Right.”
Enderson found a second red medallion in another Russian’s pocket and stood, handing it to me. I wiped a splotch of blood from it with the thumb of my glove and examined both sides. There were no markings. None at all. Just a smooth reddish patina upon the circle of metal.
“Kuratov gives every one of his troopers those,” Enderson said. “They treasure it more than any medal they could be given. Now, it’s yours.”
I wondered if what I’d just been given could be considered a war trophy. Something akin to a Samurai sword taken from a Japanese officer during World War Two. Or a Luger off a dead German soldier in the same conflict. Was this to be my memento of this battle?
“Go ahead,” Enderson said, smiling. “Might be worth something someday.”
The thought of just tossing it back amongst the dead Russians was there, but so was the odd desire to retain it, so I slipped the small trinket into my shirt pocket, an uncertain keepsake at best.
“If you’re going to Skagway, I’d recommend against the boat,” Schiavo said. “If Kuratov is in the area, that craft will not absorb much fire. And he will fire at anything that moves.”
“Movement means life,” Enderson said.
“Life means food,” Lorenzen added, completing the train of logic.
I thought on the warning she was giving us. We all did. Neil, though, was the first to utilize it to try and push through the lieutenant’s reluctance to offer certain information.
“So maybe we’ll ask again,” Neil said. “Are you going to Skagway? Because whether we get there by boat or by chopper, I don’t much care. None of us do. We just want to get there ASAP. And by air is sure as hell going to be quicker than by boat, especially since you’re telling us our choice of transport could be very unhealthy.”
Schiavo considered what Neil was asking, and what he was suggesting.
“We have to check on garrisons in Ketchikan and Juneau before we continue on to Skagway,” Schiavo said. “And I can’t get authorization to let you tag along for...”
She looked beyond those gathered close to the one who’d separated himself.
