Ranger (The Bugging Out Series Book 5)

by Noah Mann

  She’d changed. We all had. But, in her case, I feared not all of that which was different was for the better.

  “We need to get you checked by the doc,” Schiavo said, looking to me.

  I didn’t want to leave my home. Not so soon after returning to it, and to Elaine. But the choice wasn’t really mine.

  “She’s right,” Elaine said, taking the blanket from the floor where it had fallen and draping it snugly around my shoulders again.

  “You need to be looked at,” Martin agreed.

  Schiavo flashed him a look, then focused on me again.

  “Let’s go,” she said.

  Elaine kept an arm around me as we walked to the Humvee. Those neighbors and friends who’d stood out front after my return smiled joyfully and spoke soft welcomes to me as I slipped into the Humvee, Elaine next me, Schiavo riding shotgun as Quincy drove us away from the place I called home.

  Martin did not come with us.

  Seven

  He didn’t look like a Navy man. Much less a full commander.

  “Your core temp will rebound fairly quickly,” Clay Genesee said, tipping my head back and lifting each eyelid as he examined the whiteness of my sclera. “Plenty of warm liquids. But take care not to overheat. Don’t overdo it on the blankets tonight.”

  The last direction he said to Elaine, who stood to the side in the exam room in the town’s clinic with Schiavo next to her.

  “You mentioned a bad taste in your mouth?”

  I nodded at the doctor’s question as he eased his hands back from my face.

  “Yesterday,” I confirmed. “When I woke up on that road.”

  “Almost certainly from some anesthesia that was used on you,” Genesee said. “It’s a common aftereffect.”

  Elaine crossed her arms and shifted nervously.

  “So after they knocked him out at the cottage, they gassed him?”

  “Yes,” Genesee told Elaine.

  She looked to me, worried.

  “I’m fine,” I assured her.

  Schiavo, though, eyed me with some doubt as to that certainty.

  “Why grab him and put him under, commander?”

  Genesee looked to the woman who he outranked when their military classifications were placed side by side. Here, though, Captain Angela Schiavo was in charge.

  “I’m not on the spook side of things, captain. Never have been. And this sure seems like some black bag guys dreamed it up.”

  There was no outright derision toward Schiavo or her question. Just a vague dismissiveness. But it made clear to me that the rocky relationship between the captain and her superior subordinate had not improved in the few days I’d been away. From the moment Commander Clay Genesee had stepped off the transport which had brought him ashore from the Rushmore, an undercurrent of tension had existed between him and Schiavo. At first I’d wondered if some ember of misogyny smoldered within the man. At first. But as time wore on it became clear to me, and to anyone who took the time to notice, that what afflicted him was not distaste for his leader, but distaste for the institution. The military. He’d been ordered to Bandon, just as other medical personnel had been sent to the known survivor colonies. Yuma. San Diego. Edmonton.

  His internal clash with the assignment he’d been given spilled out ways subtle, such as his quiet clashes with Schiavo, and in a manner impossible to miss—his refusal to wear anything resembling a uniform.

  Commander Clay Genesee, originally from Allen, Texas, was a prisoner without shackles. That was how I sensed that the man saw himself. And me, and the other residents of Bandon, to him we were work product. Assignments he had to complete on a daily, sometimes nightly, basis.

  He was no Doc Allen, to put it mildly.

  That comparative thought was eerily prescient, I realized, as the door to the exam room opened after a quick, soft knock. It was a gentle tapping that I knew. That I recognized.’

  That I missed.

  “I heard you found your way back to us,” Everett Allen said as he stepped in, flashing a quick smile Genesee’s way. “Doctor.”

  Mayor Allen, formerly Doc Allen, had seen the residents of Bandon through the worst of times. He’d tended gunshot wounds and broken limbs and heart attacks. He’d treated Micah Jay, Martin’s boy, through the unlikely heart procedure that had kept the boy alive—for a while. Now, at an age when most in the old world would have retired to days of fishing and reading and napping, the man had been asked to take over for Martin as leader of the tight knit community of survivors.

  But, despite the change in role, he could not entirely let go of the vocation which had occupied the majority of his life.

  “He checks out okay?” Allen asked the man who’d replaced him.

  “Slight hypothermia and some post anesthesia effects, but he’ll be fine.”

  Allen nodded at the report. A slow, thinking gesture that ended when his attention shifted to me.

  “So you’re feeling all right?”

  He was Doc Allen again. Stepping into his old shoes in an unfamiliar place. His office had been in his home, not at the downtown clinic which had opened next to the garrison’s headquarters. But the manner, the concern, was the same.

  “I actually feel pretty good,” I told him.

  A foot to my left, I felt Doctor Genesee turn half away and slip his hands into the wash basin, water flowing as he scrubbed down after the examination.

  “Good,” Doc Allen said, his warm gaze narrowing down at me. “You’re sure?”

  “He’s fit, Mayor Allen,” Genesee said, some edge to his tone, and certainly in his obvious use of the man’s current title. “I checked him from top to bottom.”

  Doc Allen considered this.

  “You had him strip down?”

  Genesee finished at the sink and turned back to face the man he’d replaced.

  “There are ladies in the room,” Genesee said, gesturing to Elaine and Schiavo. “And he presented no issues. No complaints other than a taste in his mouth yesterday.”

  “From anesthesia,” Doc Allen said.

  “Yes,” Genesee said, his irritation simmering now. “He’s fine.”

  Doc Allen looked to me again. Weighing something. The situation in total, maybe.

  “I guess the question is, why did they anesthetize him?”

  Genesee wiped the last of his hands’ dampness on his jeans and came around the table I sat upon so that he was talking with Doc Allen over me, as if I was the disputed land in the battle of their clinical abilities.

  “As I told our esteemed captain, you’re going to have to ask the operators who grabbed him to find that out.”

  “Maybe,” Doc Allen said, allowing the possibility. “Maybe.”

  The old man looked to me again, serious and comforting all at once.

  “So the only effect from your forced excursion was some cold and a medicinal taste in your mouth? Nothing else?”

  I shrugged.

  “Some soreness,” I said. “That’s just from being in the elements and...”

  I stopped there. Remembering. Recalling that at least one bit of discomfort I’d experienced hadn’t come from the hours I’d spent walking barefoot and barely clothed in the rain and cold.

  “What is it?” Doc Allen probed.

  “Eric...”

  Elaine’s quiet burst of concern brought me out of the recollection.

  “My arm,” I said, reaching with my left hand to the back of my right arm, behind the bicep. “This was really sore. A bit of a sting to it. But I almost can’t notice it now.”

  Doc Allen looked to Genesee. The navy commander in civvies absorbed the revelation and stepped close again.

  “Let’s get your shirt off,” Genesee said.

  A moment later it was, both he and Doc Allen standing behind, staring, but not silent.

  “Angela, come look,” Doc Allen said.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  Schiavo joined the men examining me. Elaine, though, didn’t move, a worr
y building in her gaze. Fear as well.

  “What did you find?” she asked.

  Schiavo studied what the medical men had pointed out to her.

  “Someone did a little work on you, Fletch,” Schiavo said.

  “Work? What do you mean work?!”

  Doc Allen put a calming hand on my left shoulder and looked to Elaine.

  “We’ll deal with this,” he said, the words as much a promise as they were informational. “He’ll be fine.”

  “I thought I was fine,” I said.

  Elaine stepped close and took my hands in hers.

  “Doc...” she implored the older man gently.

  It was Genesee who answered, though.

  “You have a puncture,” he said.

  “Very small,” Doc Allen added. “But it’s there.”

  “And there’s a slight bump beneath the skin,” Genesee continued.

  “A bump? What kind of bump?”

  Again, Doc Allen held back, letting the man who was charged with my care give the diagnosis.

  “It looks like something was inserted,” Genesee answered. “It’s beneath the skin.”

  I didn’t panic. There was no need to do so, and no point in such a reaction even if I’d been inclined to let fear overwhelm reason. Elaine squeezed my hand and looked into my eyes.

  “It’s all right,” she said. “They know what to do.”

  Schiavo took half a step back from where she’d stood to see what the doctors had discovered.

  “What are you going to do?” she asked.

  Genesee glanced to his predecessor, then fixed on his leader.

  “We’ve got to get in there and see what it is,” he told her.

  “Surgery?” Elaine asked.

  “Minor,” Genesee said, a surprising calmness to his manner now. “We could even do it with a local. Or light sedation.”

  Doc Allen thought for a moment, unsure.

  “I’d think sedation,” the older man said, agreeing. “No discomfort at all, Fletch. You’ll sleep right through it.”

  “Wonderful,” I commented, the sarcasm biting in my tone. “I get grabbed and knocked out, then I come home and you’re going to do the same.”

  “It won’t be a long procedure,” Genesee said, shifting his attention briefly to the man whose learned probing had led to the discovery. “Doc Allen and I will take good care of you.”

  There was no decision to be made. It was obvious I was going to let the men do what needed to be done. Something had happened to me during the time I’d been gone. Something unknown that had to be made known.

  “Let’s get it over with,” I said, looking to Elaine.

  She nodded, agreeing, but not happy that this was a road we had to travel.

  “All right,” Doc Allen said. “Let’s get you prepped.”

  * * *

  Twenty minutes later I was lying on a gurney in the clinic’s modest surgical suite. Elaine stood with me, mask and gown hiding most all of her. But not her eyes.

  “They said I can stay if you want,” she said, holding my left hand gently, an IV line already inserted into the back of it.

  “You want to see this?”

  “I won’t be looking,” she said, the mask stretching over the building smile I could not see. “But I want to be close.”

  Those eyes. How harsh they’d seemed, how determined, when we’d first met under very different circumstances. Now, as determined as they still were, there was a sweetness and a vulnerable beauty in them.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “We’re going to get started now,” Genesee said as he stepped close, Doc Allen approaching as well.

  The men who would cut into me wore surgical scrubs and masks and clear face shields. And confidence. Whatever friction existed between them, it had been set aside. They were men of medicine. That was all that mattered at the moment.

  “Ready for a nap?” Doc Allen asked me.

  I nodded and squeezed Elaine’s hand as Genesee brought the syringe up and inserted its needle into a port in my IV line. He depressed the plunger and I fell into blackness.

  Eight

  I remembered no dream. No green world as it was, or how we were making it that way once again. But when my eyes began to open I was certain that I was dreaming. That I had to be.

  Where am I?

  Again, in as many days, I was waking in a place I knew I should not be. But this place was not like the other. It was not outside. Not in the cold. There was no rain. There were walls and a door and furniture and there was something else.

  Familiarity.

  I shifted where I lay in the small bed. Not my bed in my home. But a bed I knew. A bed I’d last seen with a dead child resting peacefully upon it.

  I was in Micah’s room.

  “Don’t freak out.”

  The voice, too, was familiar. As was the breathy rasp that distorted it. I looked toward the sound and I saw Martin, looking and sounding as he had when I’d first laid eyes upon him. He wore a full bio hazard suit and respirator, eyes staring out at me through thick plastic lenses from where he stood at the door to his late son’s bedroom. When we’d reached Bandon after a treacherous flight in search of Eagle One, Martin had greeted us in the town’s meeting hall covered just as I saw him now. That had been a precaution, we’d learned, to protect his son’s compromised immune system from any germs or contaminants he might unwittingly transmit to the child from outsiders.

  But here, now, he was wearing all the same gear. And, more worrisome, as I glanced past him to the room beyond, I could make out the clear plastic divider in place once again. Used to bisect Micah’s radio and computer room from a visitor’s gallery, Martin had pulled it down in the moments after his son passed away.

  “What’s going on?” I asked, my voice wet and thick. “What’s happening?”

  Martin stepped close and reached a hand down.

  “I’ll help you sit,” he said.

  I took his hand and began to shift my position on the bed. My right arm ached sharply. I looked to it and saw a clean gauze bandage circling the bicep.

  “All the way up,” Martin guided me, his grip firm and comforting. “Just let your senses catch up, then we’ll all talk.”

  All?

  He wasn’t referring to just the two of us. I leaned a bit, looking past him again to the space beyond the open door. Through the mild distortion of the plastic room divider I could make out a pair of feet, their owner blocked from view by the edge of the door frame.

  “Who’s out there? What happened? Where’s Elaine?”

  My questions weren’t frantic, despite the rapid fire manner in which they came. But I was concerned. What I was seeing before me, what surrounded me, was not normal. Was not right.

  Something was wrong. With me.

  “Elaine’s in the next room,” Martin told me. “Doc Allen and Commander Genesee are, too. And Angela.”

  The medical, political, and military brain trust of the town was waiting for me just a few yards away. Along with the woman I loved.

  “Martin,” I said, pushing off the small mattress and willing myself to stand, “how bad is it?”

  Beyond the fat round lenses of his mask I saw the muscles beneath his cheeks bulge, hinting at a smile I could not see. An expression of reassurance. But in his eyes I saw nothing that matched that calming gesture.

  I saw uncertainty.

  “Let’s go see everyone,” he said, gripping my left elbow lightly for support as he helped me into the next room.

  * * *

  They sat there, the four of them, in folding chairs, staring through the plastic divider.

  “It’s good to see you up,” Schiavo said.

  I gave a half nod as Martin helped me to a chair, Micah’s old chair, already placed to face those who’d been waiting to see me. As I settled into it I looked through the divider and focused on Elaine. She wore a manufactured smile which did little to mask the worry which was plain just beneath the expression�
��s thin veneer.

  “Will someone please tell me what’s going on?”

  I asked calmly, but with my desire for a quick and certain answer more than clear. Martin let his hand rest on my shoulder for a moment, then stepped a few feet to the side to look at me as Commander Genesee began to speak.

  “We found a capsule beneath your skin.”

  A capsule?

  I glanced toward my right bicep and reached with my left hand to gingerly touch the bandaged spot at the back of my arm.

  “It was very small,” the Navy doctor went on. “Extremely small.”

  “Precision machined metal,” Doc Allen added.

  I stared at them, massaging the tender spot where they’d found the foreign body which had been placed in mine.

  “There were micro fine holes in its surface to dispense its contents,” Genesee said.

  “Dispense?”

  I posed the question by reflex, mildly shaken by what the medical men had just revealed.

  “That’s why you’re in here,” Martin said.

  I looked to him, then out to Elaine. The smile was fully gone from her face now. A harsh wash of angry fear had replaced it.

  “Just until we know if you’re contagious,” Genesee explained.

  That word chilled me, even as it explained all that I saw around me. The isolation I’d been placed in. The precautions Martin was taking, now meant to protect him from what existed on this side of the barrier.

  “You think they grabbed me to, what? Act as some unwitting Trojan horse?”

  “We don’t know,” Schiavo said.

  Elaine hadn’t stopped looking at me. Her gaze was fixed with mine whenever it shifted her way. She wasn’t even listening to what was being said, I thought, some clear sign that they’d all discussed the facts and fears of the discovery before I’d come out of the anesthesia.

  “Just a minute,” I said, forcing myself up, standing to face those who were bringing me news of my own potential and impending mortality. “You can’t just hand me ‘I don’t know’.”

  “We don’t know, Fletch,” Doc Allen responded, stamping his approval on the reality Schiavo had stated. “So we have to take precautions based on the possibility that you might become infectious.”

  I didn’t sit again. Not immediately. But hearing the term ‘infectious’ tossed out sent a ripple of queasiness through my knees.