by Noah Mann
The fact was, I was going to make a decent looking corpse.
I laughed at that thought, then coughed. Even as my body was weakened and succumbing to a dwindling air supply, my mind remained mostly sharp. Over the hours I’d drummed against the slab in hopes of eliciting my rescue I had thought about the overall situation. I’d imagined being outside. With the others. I’d let my mind craft the how and the when of our departure from Skagway.
And, of course, I’d thought of Elaine.
She had gotten out. She had to. That was the only outcome that made any cosmic sense. We’d sacrificed to save the children. They, and she, deserved to see the sun and breathe the air.
I was going to miss her.
Clunk...
The sound was just off to my right and slightly above. Just the remnants of the collapsed structure shifting. Sounds like that had jolted me several times since my burial Early on I’d been buoyed by the sharp snaps and pops. Rescue, I’d thought. Salvation.
Nothing followed but more occasional smacks and groans as concrete and steel slipped and ground against one another.
Clunk... Clunk...
Again the sound came. I looked toward it.
“Hello,” I said, my voice weak and wispy.
Clunk...
Was that still shifting? Maybe the remainder of the chamber about to come down upon me and end things quickly?
Clunk...
Fletch...
Clunk...
“Neil...”
I spoke my friend’s name after hearing him call to me. Was it an illusion? Some dying dream?
Fletch...
“Fletch!”
If it was a dream, it was more real than any I’d ever known.
“Neil...”
My voice cracked, too soft to hear. I looked to the rebar that lay next to me. What strength I had left I used to pick it up, and to lift it, and to strike it down upon the slab with every ounce of force I could muster. Then, it fell from my grip.
I had nothing left.
“Fletch! Fletch! Is that you?!”
Rocks tumbled. Gritty dust rained down. A crack opened above. The beam of a flashlight sliced through the narrow opening.
And air rushed in.
“Neil...”
“We hear you, Fletch!”
I breathed. And breathed. And watched as the world above opened to me once again, bit by bit.
Part Five
Departures
Forty One
I was pulled from darkness into more darkness.
But it was darkness that I knew. Darkness that I craved. A night sky dancing with the light of dead and distant stars.
“Fletch, can you hear me?”
I opened my eyes and nodded at my friend as he leaned over me. He was smiling. Actually smiling. Whatever joy he might feel at finding me would not be expressed if...
“They’re okay?” I asked, coughing out the last word.
“They are,” my friend told me. “We dug them out four hours ago. They’re all okay. Every last one.”
“And...”
Another coughing fit choked off what I wanted to ask. That turned out not to matter one bit.
“She’s fine,” Neil said. “Elaine is just fine.”
I managed to catch my breath and spit the grit from my mouth as someone handed me a canteen of water. Hands lifted me and guided me out of the hole they’d excavated with their bare hands and small tools. I sat on the stump of a felled tree and tried to gather my thoughts.
“She saved me,” I told my friend.
“I know,” he said. “I know.”
It wasn’t an admission that his worry had been wrong, but it did speak to some realization that, as much as he feared what I might face with her in a dire situation, being with her in such a situation might very well be the best of both worlds.
“Where is she?”
“Just up the road with Martin and the lieutenant.”
“Schiavo is okay?”
Neil nodded, though there was less than full joy in the gesture.
“And her guys?”
My friend shook his head.
“Acosta,” Neil told me.
Acosta. A bear of a young man. He’d survived the blight, the years after, and fell here, in a place he could not have imagined he’d be fighting.
“In the collapse?” I asked.
I was almost afraid to know, but I had to. If he’d fallen at my hand, in the collapse I’d initiated, however necessary, there was little doubt that knowledge would haunt me for some time.
“No,” Neil told me. “He went down in the firefight. They took Kuratov by complete surprise.”
That part of the plan, even with the loss, had worked. But my hastily improvised part?
“How many did they get?” I asked.
“Little more than half,” Neil told me. “You got the rest. Brought the roof right down on them. They’re buried in there.”
“We got them all?”
My friend nodded, grinning at my incredulity. He reached out and helped me to my feet.
“I think there’s someone who’d like to see you,” Neil said.
A short walk through the dead woods and up the road proved him right. Very right.
Elaine broke away from Martin and Schiavo and walked toward me, flashlight of the rescuers guiding the way. I stopped when she reached me. She put her hands on my face, gently, as if testing that I was really here.
“We need a vacation,” Elaine said.
“I can’t say I disagree with you.”
She slid her arms around my neck and held me tight. I was sore. I’d been battered and blasted. Parts of me hurt that I didn’t even know existed. But I wasn’t going to let her go. Not for this. Not for anything.
Forty Two
We buried Acosta in the cemetery just outside of town.
He was accorded what military honors Schiavo, and all those he’d had a hand in saving, could manage. Men from Yuma fashioned a coffin out of wood scavenged from a building whose structure would likely not survive another winter. Someone found a trumpet. Someone else used it to play taps. Schiavo spoke. His comrades fired a volley of rounds in salute. Then he was lowered into the hole dug by hand and dirt was shoveled in.
And that was that. Another death. This one, at least, not anonymous, like so many had been since the blight. Private Fernando Acosta was not a forgotten corpse left to be ground to dust by wind and weather on the prairie somewhere. He was known. He was loved. And he would be missed.
“Any response to your communication yet?” I asked, walking alongside Schiavo, my hand holding Elaine’s as we made our way with the others back toward town.
One of the radios had been found. Kuratov had stashed it with the food and supplies near where the initial assault on the pit had begun. Whether it had come from Ketchikan, or belonged to the garrison from Skagway, wasn’t apparent, and, frankly, didn’t matter—that it worked and allowed Westin to initiate satellite communications once again was.
“The next satellite pass is in an hour or so,” Schiavo said, looking to Westin. “Is that right?”
“Eighty minutes,” Westin said.
“We should have some idea around then what the plans are for this place,” Schiavo said, her gaze sweeping over the hundreds who’d made the short trek to pay their respects to her fallen soldier. “And for these people.”
The White Signal was still blasting across the land, choking opportunities for normal communications. Westin had explained during a quiet moment on our journey north that the signal originated in a satellite and was, due to the destruction of ground-based infrastructure and controllers, difficult to manage. Now that Schiavo had sent a message to her headquarters, one updating the status of Skagway and the existence of a potential cure for the blight, it was hoped that the incessant and monotonous broadcast would be shut off in the near future.
“In terms of what to do with everyone,” I began, “I might have a thought on that. On how t
o get them out of here.”
“You might?” Schiavo asked. “What kind of transportation do you have in mind?”
I raised my free hand and pointed over the roofs of the town ahead, to the white bridge of the Northwest Majesty looming against the blue sky.
“She came in on fumes according to the crew,” Schiavo said.
A skeleton crew of sixteen, all volunteers from the cruise line that had operated the vessel before it was requisitioned by the government, were mixed in among the survivors they’d brought north. The Vensterdam’s surviving crew, numbering just eight, had been similarly cast into the mix of humanity forcibly brought to Skagway.
“What about the other ship?” I asked.
“The Vensterdam?” Schiavo asked.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Fuel,” Elaine said, coming quickly up to speed.
“While I was laying in that hole yesterday, I was sort of gaming how I would get us out of here,” I said. “If the only thing keeping the Northwest Majesty stationary is lack of fuel, we give her a transfusion from the Vensterdam. Same process has worked before.”
“Clever,” Schiavo said, smiling at my allusion to the fill up she’d received courtesy of Elaine.
“It’s a chance,” I said, dragging my suggestion back toward the realities it might face. “The Vensterdam’s been on her side flooded for a while.”
“I didn’t see any fuel slick when we pulled in to the harbor,” Schiavo said.
“If her fuel tanks aren’t ruptured...”
The lieutenant nodded at Elaine’s hopeful musing.
“Then you may have a ride out of here,” Schiavo said, then thought for a moment. “If it’s possible, it would be a big job. I’m going to have my hands full with other matters. Do you know anyone who could shepherd the project?”
“I do,” I said. “And so do you—Martin.”
“He held Bandon together,” Elaine said. “Even had it thriving, as much as that was possible.”
“He knows how to get things done,” I added. “And, he knows how to get people to get things done.”
Schiavo considered who we were proposing. She’d already met Martin, and I suspected already had a sense that he was a capable leader. From the concern he’d shown her while in her weakened state, I knew she also considered him a decent human being.
“Can you see if he’ll take it on?” she asked me. “I need to go wait for that reply.”
“Sure,” I said.
Schiavo and her men, short by one now, split off as we entered the town and headed to the store they’d taken over. Elaine and I walked on, together, still holding hands. She glanced over her shoulder at the weapons slung on our backs.
“You think this will always be necessary?” she asked me, nodding to the firepower we toted. “Armed at funerals, at weddings, while gardening.”
“You’re planning on gardening?” I asked, feigning shock.
“If we find green when we get back home, I’m gonna be a backyard farmer.”
I could see that. And I could see myself right alongside her, hands plunged into the wonderful soil. But I understood the question she’d posed. The wondering that had risen. I had no problem being armed in my day to day life, and hadn’t even before the blight wiped away the social structures meant to prevent most crime and thuggery. What Elaine was talking about was beyond that. She was referring to the readiness posture most had adopted as sort of present day minutemen.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know how many random threats are still out there. My guess is fewer and fewer every day.”
“We can hope,” she said.
People like Moto from Cheyenne. He’d been vaporized so that we might survive. But others like him, in places across the globe, how likely was it that they could hang on much longer to cause the mayhem and pain that they reveled in?
“Once they’re gone,” I began, “it’s like we have a clean slate. To do everything over again without having to invent the wheel, discover fire, map the world.”
“You almost sound like you think this was all a good thing.”
I shook my head at Elaine’s suggestion.
“No, what happened happened. Whether what comes next is good, or better, than what we had...that depends on us. On all of us.”
She squeezed my hand tightly and leaned against my shoulder as we walked.
“Despite your obvious flaws, I kinda sorta love you,” she said.
“Well, despite my obvious flaws, I absolutely certainly love you.”
We could have said more to each other right then, but we’d said all that really, truly mattered, so we walked in silence into town to the stop we wanted to make together.
Forty Three
Grace sat in a chair at the front of the house looking out the window, her gaze glued on Krista where the little girl played hopscotch on the sidewalk with a friend she’d made from San Diego.
“I’m surprised you can let her be more than five feet from you,” I said.
Neil, half sitting on the arm of the chair, as close to his wife as he could be without actually resting on her lap, couldn’t disagree with what I’d playfully observed.
“She needs to be as normal as she can,” Neil said. “Do normal things.”
“In an abnormal world,” Grace interjected, looking away from her daughter outside to where Elaine and I sat on the couch, a muted, thankful joy in her gaze. “I want to thank you two so much. I want to thank everybody.”
“Grace, what else would we do?”
It was my way of deflecting the appreciation she was expressing. But I understood that she needed to say it, and needed us to know the totality of what we’d done for her. And for Neil. Not to mention Krista.
“Neil, you,” Elaine said. “You’d do the same.”
Grace and Neil both looked quickly out the window as Krista squealed, their hearts skipping beats until they realized that the sound came from the girl’s celebratory shriek after landing her marker in the desired square.
“Breathe again,” Elaine told them.
“You’re going to have to get used to the whole breathing thing, buddy,” I said.
He puzzled at me, but Grace didn’t. She shifted his hand from where it rested on her arm to the small bulge of her belly.
“Hey there, coach,” Grace said to him. “Birthing coach.”
“Oh, brother,” Neil said. “I haven’t had a chance to think about that part.”
“Right,” Elaine chided him playfully. “Because that’s the difficult part.”
More shrieks of childish happiness rose from outside. Grace looked again, no urgency now, but some subtle concern rising.
“Did she see...things down there, Fletch?”
I knew what Grace was asking. I didn’t know the best way to answer. But I had to offer something that was both truthful, and consoling.
“Grace,” I said, and she looked to me. “Listen to her. That’s what matters. Not what anyone saw. Just listen to that laugh. Okay? She’s here. She’s alive. And she’s yours.”
It took a moment, but she smiled.
“Thank you, Fletch.”
I stood and walked to where she sat, planting a kiss on her cheek.
“Elaine and I have to get going,” I said. “We have to run a mission for the lieutenant.”
“A mission?” Neil asked. “What kind of mission.”
“Recruiting,” I told him.
* * *
Martin was supervising the removal of the accessible supplies from the pit when Elaine and I approached.
“You’ve got this humming,” Elaine said.
“So far,” he said, dragging a sleeve across his brow. “We’ve got fifty working this shift. Chris Hill thinks he can get that forklift the construction crews left behind working. If so, this will move a lot quicker.”
He’d taken on this task without being asked. Just jumped in knowing that the hundreds who had filled Skagway would need to eat for as long as they were her
e.
“Reinhardt is handling rationing and distribution,” Martin told us. “Danforth has his people working on water. The purification unit here was damaged in the fight. We’ll get it all figured out.”
“And Perkins?” I asked.
“Bitching about something, probably,” Martin said.
Cases of MREs flowed out of the pit’s main entrance in a bucket brigade of formed by dozens of volunteers. Heavy blue barrels containing dry goods were rolled up the incline by two and three people at a time. This job was getting done. And it would have to get done without Martin.
“You’re needed elsewhere, my friend,” I said to him.
It took just a few minutes to explain the idea to him. He listened, intrigued, gears working in his mind. Already he was silently identifying pitfalls the effort might face.
“It’s no sure thing,” he said when I’d finished. “But—”
Corporal Enderson’s sudden arrival, jogging through the dead woods toward us, cut Martin’s comment short.
“What is it?” I asked.
Enderson took just a second to catch his breath. When he had, the expression he flashed spoke volumes before he ever said a word.
“Lieutenant just got off the radio,” the corporal said, beaming.
“Your HQ replied?” Elaine asked.
Enderson nodded, grinning now.
“She wants you,” he said, looking to Martin. “And you, Eric. At the store in five. Got it?”
I nodded.
“What’s going on?” Martin pressed the young soldier.
But Enderson didn’t let on. He simply let the joy about him show.
“In five,” he repeated, then he turned and jogged off the way he’d come.
“Well that was interesting,” Elaine said.
“Can you stay here for a bit and help keep this running?” Martin asked Elaine.
“Of course.”
Then Martin looked to me and pulled the gloves from his hands, setting them atop a stack of boxes.
“We’ve been summoned,” Martin said to me. “Let’s not keep the lady waiting.”
