by Noah Mann
“Welcome to Bandon,” Martin said, smiling.
I hesitated, glancing to the mound of plastic which had sealed us off from the rest of the town for four days. Days in which we’d talked, and slept, and held each other. And worried. About what would, what could, happen to us.
This was not what either of us had imagined.
“So what was it?” I asked, holding position on my side of the barrier. “What did they put in me?”
No one offered any answer. Because no one could.
“Come on,” Martin said, reaching out and taking me by the arm. “Time to get out of here.”
I felt Elaine grip my hand and watched her step past the fallen barrier before us. With her urging, and Martin’s, I made the crossing myself.
Our first journey outside was to the cemetery.
* * *
Mike Riley and Sarah Fredericks were laid to rest in a quick and simple ceremony, their bodies encased in crude metal burial boxes which had come in on the most recent supply delivery by the Rushmore. Dirt was shoveled in by hand, and the few dozen who’d come to pay their respects strolled slowly out of the greening cemetery.
Eddie Lang was among them. Among us. He’d pulled the trigger, loosing a few bursts from his AR. Fifteen rounds it turned out, three of which had found Mike and Sarah. She was killed instantly. He lived a few minutes after the distraught crew from the checkpoint reached them. Since that moment, Eddie had been inconsolably silent. He’d shut down. Even here it took friends and neighbors to guide him to and from the burial site.
He was a tractor salesman. Not a soldier. Yet, thanks to the blight, he was neither anymore.
“I’m going to request some help for him when the Rushmore arrives,” Schiavo said as we reached the edge of the cemetery. “It might be possible to evacuate him to somewhere he can get real help.”
“Genesee can’t help him?” Elaine asked.
Schiavo shook her head.
“He’s as much a psychiatrist as you,” the captain said. “Or me.”
“He can’t leave,” Martin said. “He can’t. This is his home.”
“He needs better treatment than we can give him,” Schiavo told her husband.
“She might be right,” I told Martin.
But he was having none of it.
“Every person we lose is a failure,” he said. “No matter the reason. We don’t have people to spare. Every life matters here.”
For a moment we walked in silence, down the path from the cemetery and toward the road to town. There was grass everywhere. Trees had grown. Fruit hung from low limbs. In the near distance, without much effort, you could hear the calm mooing of cows, or the frantic crowing of penned chickens mixed amongst the crash of waves rolling in from the Pacific. If we could get past this new situation, whatever it was, we had a chance, a good chance, to reach a point where we could thrive again. Grow. Build the world back up from this one speck on the Oregon coast.
So I knew what Martin meant. Every single life did matter. This was a numbers game. The more we had, the more chance there was to grow. And not just in the question of procreation. There was work to be done. Every willing and able body would be needed to keep making progress.
A willing body, though, required a sound mind.
“Who’s going to make the decision?” I asked.
It was directed to no one in particular, but Schiavo was the logical choice to answer among the three fellow residents who were with me.
“I’ll talk to Commander Genesee, and if he thinks it would be prudent I’ll have a message sent in the next burst transmission to see if it’s even a possibility.”
We were still reliant on quick transmissions bounced off a satellite at very precise moments of the day for both outgoing and incoming communications. As the White Signal had ended, and the Red Signal before it, there was always that chance that the Ranger Signal would cease someday soon and free up the airwaves for more robust and frequent contact with the outside world.
What that would mean for the man who had recorded the current transmission, my friend, and for us, I had no idea.
Twelve
Elaine and I settled back into the life that had been interrupted by my abduction and return. But that life, like the town, had changed.
A wariness had begun to build. In the first days after we’d been released from quarantine that uneasiness had been directed at us. Neighbors and friends who’d been warm and welcoming were hesitant to approach. Their fear, wholly understandable, soon faded when no sickness materialized, allowing all anxiousness to focus where it should be—on the unknown.
We were all in the dark. The perpetrators of my taking had to be out there. Somewhere. Men in black with some agenda none of us could yet fathom. That uncertainty had returned our recovering town to a posture of defense. All were involved. Everyone was affected.
The town’s school, opened in the weeks after our return from the tribulations in Skagway, was closed again out of an abundance of caution. Children met in small groups with either of Bandon’s teachers, in private homes so as not to have all together in the same place in case of an attack.
Fuel was being rationed, as the well which produced oil that was processed into diesel was beyond the town’s border and difficult, if not impossible, to protect. It still ran 24/7, but the reality was it could cease its flow at any moment, either through mechanical failure or outright sabotage.
One positive, though, had been spawned by recent events. A bit of the old world’s technology, silenced since soon after the blight struck, had been brought back into operation. The ringing phone in the living room reminded me of that.
“I’ll get it,” I said, rising from where I’d planted myself on the couch and crossing the small room to where the phone sat on a side table. “Hello?”
There was no interconnected exchange linked to an outside source which the Ranger Signal could interfere with, as the Red Signal had while the world was crumbling. A pair of former telecom engineers had scrounged enough material from Bandon and nearby abandoned communities over several months, working feverishly in recent days to complete a rudimentary direct wire system with simple phone numbers. Elaine and I were the impossible to forget ninety-nine.
“Fletch, what are you doing?”
It was Enderson, third in terms of rank in the six-person garrison assigned to Bandon.
“Elaine and I have a shift on the north perimeter in a while,” I told him. “She’s changing.”
“I’m changed,” she said from the hallway, overhearing my half of the conversation.
“What’s up, Mo?” I asked, the ‘never Morris, only Mo’ directive having taken hold long ago where the young man’s name preference was concerned.
“Can you two step outside and...just listen?” Enderson requested.
I took a few steps toward the front door, lifting the phone and dragging its long cord with me. The Ranger Signal could still overpower and interfere with a simple cordless handset, so going old school was the order of the day when needing to converse at any distance from where the phone was wired in.
“What are we listening for?”
“Just listen and tell me if you hear anything.”
“Okay,” I agreed, looking to Elaine. “He wants to know if we hear anything outside.”
Elaine didn’t ask for any clarification on the request. She moved to the door and past me as she pushed it open. I followed and a moment later was standing with her in the front yard, stars twinkling above and a hush thick upon our street, and our town.
“Put the phone down and just listen,” Enderson told me.
I lowered the phone handset without a word, holding it and the unit’s base low near my waist. Then, as he’d asked, I listened. And listened.
“Do you hear that?” Elaine asked.
I didn’t. Glancing at her I saw her gaze cast up into the night sky. My hearing had never been as acute as my eyesight, but Elaine could detect footsteps in a darkened forest, or mum
bles of mine from a room down the hall. If she was sensing something where we stood, I knew there had to be something there.
“What is it?”
She shushed me with a shake of her head and kept listening. I tried to tune in to whatever had caught her attention, focusing on the vast heavens above. Letting all other sounds fade until there was just that looming nothingness.
That was when I heard it, too.
“An engine,” I said.
“Aircraft,” Elaine added. “Small and at altitude.”
She was right. The distant, steady whine could have been a small plane akin to the one that Neil, Grace, Krista, and I had arrived in so long ago. That could mean that there were more survivors inbound.
Or it could indicate something very, very different.
“Mo, we hear an aircraft,” I said, bringing the handset back up.
“So I’m not crazy,” Enderson said. “I was coming on watch at HQ and the sound just was there. It would come and go.”
“I still hear it,” Elaine said. “It’s moving south to north.”
“Elaine—”
“South to north,” Enderson said, prompting that he’d heard what had been reported. “That’s what I hear.”
“Is there any way we can get eyes on what kind of aircraft?” I asked.
“I could break out the night vision binoculars, but I doubt we’d be able to zero in on a target,” Enderson said. “It sounds awful high to me.”
“It has to see us,” Elain said. “Whoever’s on it.”
She was right. There were enough lights burning in town, including a good number of streetlights which had been put back into use after an additional hydro generator was installed in the Coquille River. The town, for now, had enough power from hydro, solar, and diesel generators to power almost anything it needed.
But all the power we had couldn’t give us what we needed at this very moment—a good look at what was up there.
“If they see us, they have to know we have an airstrip,” Elaine said. “It’s on every map and chart of the area. They wouldn’t be flying that blind.”
“No, they wouldn’t,” I agreed.
On the other end of the call, Enderson was thinking the same thing, and coming to a similar conclusion that I and, I suspected, Elaine was as well.
“They’re not planning to land,” Enderson said. “They’re on a reconnaissance flight.”
They...
It was safe to assume that the ‘they’ looking down on us from above were at least related to what had happened to me. In the hollowed out world as it was, there weren’t enough of our kind to make coincidences even possible.
“I’ve got to inform the captain,” Enderson said, then he ended the call.
I nodded with the phone against my cheek and listened for a few minutes more until the sound of the aircraft faded to nothing.
“What do you think they want?” Elaine wondered aloud. “It can’t be the cure for the blight. We already passed that along. It’s no secret.”
“Maybe they don’t know that,” I said.
“You don’t sound convinced of that.”
“I’m not,” I told her.
“Then what? Why spy on us?”
I thought for a moment. A half dozen answers rattled about in my thoughts, but one kept sticking.
“To look for weaknesses,” I said.
Elaine looked to the sky again, nodding.
“Only one reason to do that,” she said.
She was right.
“To prepare for an attack,” I said.
Thirteen
I hated being apart from her.
“I think we should hold here,” Nick Withers said to me, his voice hushed.
I nodded and stopped behind the splintered trunk of a tree, most of its limbs snapped off and turning to pasty dust on the still barren forest floor. Nick moved a few yards further and lowered to one knee next to a mound of beefy, jagged rocks.
“I’ve got east and north,” I said.
“East and south,” Nick replied.
We were on the eastern perimeter of the town, a half hour past sundown, enough light remaining that we could see a hundred yards or more through the thinning woods beyond our position. Behind us, to the west, was Bandon, and an array of checkpoints to provide a more robust defense than the roving patrols could manage. Patrols like the one I was on.
And Elaine.
She was somewhere to the north, paired with Private Quincy, doing much the same that Nick and I were—staking a forward position for a while and scanning our slice of the pie. Observing. Searching. Hoping to find nothing, but almost certain that something was out there. Someone was out there.
A lot of someones.
Elaine and I had worked every patrol together until now, the luck of assignments catching up with us. Or, maybe, it was Schiavo and Lorenzen deciding that a husband and wife should not be placed together on every occasion. The captain and her sergeant were taking very seriously the needs of the town as a whole, with that paramount over personal wishes and aversions of the residents as individuals. Reluctant as I was, I had to yield to whatever they believed was best.
Just a few minutes after Nick and I took up our position, I was as thankful as could be that Elaine was not with me when muzzle flashes blazed in the woods to the east and south, bullets whizzing over our head, rounds chewing into the wasting stand of fir and pine that surrounded us.
“Contact!” I shouted out of habit, though no warning was necessary. “Covering!”
My AR came up, no suppressor on the muzzle, the sight picture I found in the distance just a mix of vague shapes and hellish incoming. I squeezed off three bursts and rolled to the right to a nearby tree, its trunk more stout than the one I’d chosen before. It was then that I saw Nick huddled against the rocky mound he’d been planted himself at, tucked into a ball as rounds splintered off shards of rock.
“Nick!”
He didn’t respond. The twenty-seven year old grease monkey, who was more at ease with a ratchet in hand than the grip of an AK-47, simply shivered, his weapon pulled tight to his chest.
“Nick!” I shouted his name again. “Lay some fire!”
The young man’s eyes came up, finding mine, his body trembling, from a cold that was not external. This shiver that afflicted him came from a wave of utter terror that had drenched him, penetrating to the bone. He was nearly catatonic.
I knelt behind the tree and fired the rest of my mag toward the muzzle flashes, too distant and obscured by the darkening woods to give me any clear sight picture. I dropped the empty and inserted a fresh magazine, chambering the first round and squeezing off a series of single shots before dashing to the rocky covering which shielded Nick. Incoming rounds kicked up dust and dirt a yard or two behind me.
“Nick, can you hear me?”
I hunkered down in the shelter of the sharp boulders and grabbed him by the coat collar.
“Nick!”
Finally, he showed some response, his gaze angling up at me as a flurry of rounds pecked at the far side of the rocks. I looked into his eyes and saw none of what I needed to at that moment. There was no fight in them. Nearly no life at all. Just a blank window to what the sudden eruption of terror had done to the man.
He was helpless.
I leaned left and fired to the east at the extreme north end of the force that was out there, muzzle flashes defining the limit of their line. Or the limit they were allowing me to see. In minutes they could move further north and flank the position we held. There would be no cover from such a move. No tactics to thwart it. We’d be overrun.
“Nick, we’ve gotta move,” I told the young man, shaking him by the collar. “Due west. You hear me? We’ve got to run. Right through the trees.”
He didn’t react at all. I grabbed the AK from him and tossed it aside. I was going to have to drag him clear of the attack we were facing, and all his weapon was now was dead weight that I would have to move with us.
“We’re moving, Nick. Do you understand?”
Again I shook him, with no effect, then I drew my hand back and swung the gloved palm across his face. The impact jolted him, his body shuddering as though some electric shock had run through it. His head swiveled left and right, his gaze finally settling on me. There was life in his eyes again, I could see. At least partially, Nick Withers was back with me.
“We’re gonna move, Nick, okay?”
He looked left and right, cringing instinctively as incoming fire bracketed our position, already dead trees threatening to topple as their wasted trunks were chewed away by the unrelenting streams of bullets.
“Nick?”
Again he fixed on me and nodded.
“Stay down and when I grab you we move west, got it?”
“Got-got-got it.”
The fear-induced stutter at least told me that he was processing what I’d said to him, which meant, hopefully, that I wouldn’t be hauling dead weight through the woods back toward town.
More fire shifted north. The force out there was moving to flank us. And I was beginning to hear voices in the distance. Commands being given. In English. For a moment I was grateful that the Russian force we’d decimated along the Alaskan coast hadn’t reconstituted and followed us home seeking revenge. But I quickly realized that American bullets would make us dead just as quickly as Russian ones, and it was time to make our move before that happened.
A final time I leaned left past the rocks and fired off bursts at the enemy’s northern advance. My AR ran dry and I let it drop to hang from the sling across my chest.
“Now!”
I grabbed Nick and pulled him away from cover, pushing him ahead, his own feet propelling him through the trees as we weaved left and right around the trunks, chunks of decaying wood spraying down from above as incoming rounds struck high.
“Move!”
Thankful that I wasn’t having to drag a catatonic friend away from the danger zone, I urged him on, reloading as I ran nearly alongside. A hundred yards into our retreat, with sporadic fire still whizzing past, I halted briefly, motioning for Nick to keep moving. I brought my AR up from where I stopped next to a knot of young pines that would never reach maturity. By the time I had it aimed in the direction of the enemy, the incoming fire stopped. Just ended. As if a cease fire order had been given.
