Ranger (The Bugging Out Series Book 5)

by Noah Mann

  “No,” he said, then turned and made his way back through the fog.

  “Do you have any idea?” Elaine asked me when Martin was gone.

  I nodded, the chill of the misty night clinging to my sweaty skin.

  “Who’s new here and wants to be anywhere else? Who came in on the Navy ship which has disappeared? Who has the medical expertise to manage an epidemic so that we stay sick?”

  There was no doubt that I was talking about Commander Clay Genesee, United States Navy.

  “That’s one hell of an accusation,” Elaine said.

  “So you disagree?”

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  In the distance, the sound of another aircraft, prop driven, began to rise, coming in low like its just departed, speedier cousin, this time from the south. Our thoughts shifted from Genesee as a suspect to the thing cruising north toward us.

  “I just wanted one night,” Elaine said, her mood souring by a few degrees. “One night with you and none of this.”

  I pulled her into a loose hug, understanding what she meant. Her night, our night, had been defiled by the reality of the enemy we faced. Mine, also, by my friend’s invasion of my dreams.

  “We’re okay,” I told her.

  “I know,” she said.

  We both felt that. Both knew it. Both believed it.

  For now.

  Twenty Two

  The Defense Council visited the animals on the northeast edge of town. Private Sheryl Quincy had been drafted to join us, providing additional firepower to what we carried with us. Only Mayor Allen was unarmed.

  “This is too exposed,” Schiavo said.

  She was right. Cows and goats and various other livestock wandered about the fenced field, smaller animals in more contained pens. In quickly constructed buildings on the far side of the field, chickens spent their days laying eggs, unafraid of foxes or coyotes who would have preyed upon them in the time before the blight. The only predators of note were those on two legs in the woods just beyond the fields.

  “The grass is growing out here,” Mayor Allen said. “And the processor needs water from the creek to make the supplemental food for them. Particularly the cows.”

  He pointed to a small shed standing next to the perpetual creek that spilt off from the Coquille River upstream, before rejoining it nearer the northern bridge. Within, powered by an array of solar panels, was the pulp processor which had come in on the Rushmore’s first visit to Bandon. Fed by an endless supply of dead wood, harvested from the grey forests that bordered the town, the processor combined the almost chalky remnants of what the blight had wrought with moisture to form, through heat and pressure, edible loaves which the animals could subsist upon until the meadows and fields beyond town became self-sustaining. It was a marvel of technology developed by unknown engineers in a far off place, and it was vital to our continued survival.

  It also could not be moved.

  “We’re secured out here pretty well, captain,” Private Quincy told her commander. “I’ve made sure we have six sentries backing up when the ranchers are on site.”

  Ranchers...

  Two men and one woman from town who’d had experience with livestock. They were wholly responsible for the health and care of every beast, winged or hooved, that we’d been provided with. Along with the ‘Farmers’, they were key to our ability to provide for ourselves.

  We just had to get past this threat for that to matter.

  “I check the coops on the far side of the field myself every afternoon while we’re out here,” Quincy told her commander.

  The coop was the closest structure we had to the presumed enemy lines. Having personnel traverse the open terrain to inspect and tend to the chattering mass of fowl could be seen as inviting some response by our unseen adversary.

  “Is there any way to at least move the chickens closer to town?” Mayor Allen asked.

  “I can ask the ranching crew,” Quincy said.

  “Do that,” Schiavo told the newest member of her unit.

  “Will do, ma’am,” Quincy said.

  Martin walked along the fence, stopping and surveying the herd of cattle. We had thirteen now, plus fourteen milking cows. Thirty goats. Twenty-five pigs. The chickens numbered in the hundreds.

  “Maybe we should strengthen this area,” Martin suggested. “Put a strongpoint here.”

  “That might just draw more attention,” I said.

  “It would be one more fighting position to supply if bullets start flying,” Elaine said.

  Schiavo nodded at her observation. We’d run into this issue before, when errant movement reports came in. Invariably those residents drafted into service would respond with members of the garrison, bringing their personal weapons and ammunition, the latter of which had raised questions about effective distribution during any prolonged engagement.

  “We need to do something about our ammo issue,” Schiavo said.

  “We have a good supply, ma’am,” Quincy told her.

  “We do,” Schiavo agreed. “But what doesn’t belong to the garrison is scattered all over town in a couple hundred houses. People respond ready to fight, but only with what they can carry. Their reserves remain at their houses.”

  Her concern was valid. Resupplying any force would mean multiple trips to dozens of houses to retrieve individual ammo caches. That would take too many people out of the fight.

  “We need to centralize,” Elaine said.

  “No one’s going to like having their ammunition seized,” I told the captain.

  “Not seized,” Schiavo said. “Temporarily repositioned. And not all of it. Only half. We just need to make sure there’s a central store of ammo. One collection point, one distribution point.”

  It made sense. But I knew of several residents who would resist anything that even appeared like an infringement of their rights.

  “Some won’t go for that,” I said. “At all.”

  “We’re not going to confiscate anything,” Schiavo said.

  “Voluntary?” Mayor Allen checked.

  “Recommended,” Schiavo clarified.

  As long as there was no threat of forcibly taking ammunition, the action might only send a ripple through the community. But ripples, down the road, could build to crushing waves, I feared.

  “Ma’am, the garrison armory is jam packed,” Quincy told her commander. “There’s no room.”

  The storage room in the town hall, which had once been used to keep banners and decorations for the kind of community events which were common before the blight, could hold no more of the ammunition which had been stuffed in its confines. Schiavo, I knew, had been leery about keeping the supply of armaments and small explosives there in the first place. Too many people came and went. The town hall was the administrative hub of the town. To have so much potentially volatile material there was not wise, in her mind.

  “I’d like to get everything but our personal supply out of the town hall,” Schiavo said, looking to Mayor Allen. “Can you think of a new location for a town armory?”

  The mayor thought for a moment, instinctively glancing back toward the town, only the peak of the church’s steeple visible from the distance we’d traveled.

  “There’s an old auto shop just north of downtown,” he said. “I was told the man who owned it left early on after the blight started. During the building inventory it was considered for a food storage location, but it’s not the cleanest space.”

  “We can clean,” Schiavo said. “How secure is it?”

  “Steel doors,” Mayor Allen said. “A big rollup door at the front.”

  Schiavo looked to Private Quincy.

  “When we get back to town, talk to Sgt. Lorenzen about getting this space readied for use as the town armory.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  The captain looked to me next.

  “Fletch, will help Mayor Allen with the request for residents to transfer part of their ammunition to the town armory? People respe
ct you.”

  “Meaning we need to balance the presence of a dirty politician,” Mayor Allen said, smiling.

  “We’ll be the first to bring half of our supply,” Elaine said.

  “That’s a start,” Schiavo said.

  Everyone had been heard on the idea. Almost everyone.

  “Martin...”

  The man turned toward me as I spoke his name.

  “A centralized town armory sound good to you?” I asked.

  He nodded an acceptance of the idea, but said nothing. He was preoccupied, some thought, or series of thoughts, filling his head right then.

  “What is it?” Schiavo asked her husband.

  “I was just thinking that this might not be such a good thing we’re doing,” Martin answered.

  “What?” she asked.

  He looked to her, to Mayor Allen, then to the dead woods beyond the green fields.

  “The town’s political and military leaders are standing right here,” Martin said. “And we’re probably being watched right now.”

  Eyes shifted slowly to the still dense forest, grey and tall. The enemy could be right there, as Martin suggested. A single sniper of moderate skill could eliminate the town’s power structure in a few seconds. It was unlikely they would make such an overt move.

  But not impossible.

  “We need to get you two out of here,” I said.

  Martin backed away from the fence and stepped close to his wife.

  “Mayor,” Elaine said, gently placing her hand on the elderly man’s elbow to guide him away from the open space.

  “Ma’am,” Private Quincy said, bringing her M4 up to a ready position.

  “In a minute, private,” Schiavo said.

  Elaine looked to me and I signaled with a nod to keep moving and get the mayor clear of the area.

  “Angela, let’s go,” Martin urged his wife mildly.

  Still she didn’t move. She stood her ground, staring out across the fields, past the livestock, to what was unseen in the distant woods.

  “Private...”

  “Yes, ma’am?”

  “You stay sharp when you’re out here,” Schiavo instructed.

  Quincy nodded and kept her eyes on the line of dead trees.

  “Will do, ma’am.”

  With that, Schiavo turned away and began following Elaine and Mayor Allen back toward town. Martin and Quincy trailed her, but I hung back. For just a minute. Scanning the shadows between the trees for any movement. Any sign of presence. I could see none.

  But I could feel it.

  Twenty Three

  Fog shrouded the town the morning the stranger arrived.

  He came from the east, overland, ignoring roads and trails as he slipped through the barren woods and was spotted by Sergeant Lorenzen and Private Westin walking along the street two blocks from my house. The patrol escorted the man to the garrison’s offices downtown. That was where I first saw him after receiving a call to get there ASAP.

  In fact, it wasn’t the first time I’d laid eyes on the stranger.

  “Who is he?” I asked Schiavo in the center’s lobby, glancing past the captain to an interior room beyond a window, the stranger sitting and chatting with Lorenzen.

  “You don’t know him?” Schiavo asked.

  I fixed on the man and shook my head.

  “But I’ve seen him,” I told her.

  On the table before him lay a weathered Cattleman. The same hat and the same man I’d seen at the cabin in the woods.

  “When I was out there,” I said. “He was stalking me. Or stalking someone.”

  “He was carrying that,” Schiavo said, gesturing to the corner of the room where we stood.

  I looked and saw what she’d directed me to. Leaning against the wall was a Winchester lever gun. The same .30-30 I I’d seen him carrying at the cabin. A small shoulder bag sat next to it on the floor, top flap open after some obvious search.

  “He had a bigger pack when I saw him,” I told the captain.

  “He’s travelling light,” she said. “Probably has a camp somewhere close by.”

  He’d cached his supplies and come to town with only the minimal amount he’d need. But need for what?

  I looked from the man beyond the one-way glass to Schiavo again, seeing immediately that her attention was focused hard on me, not on the visitor.

  “And it was you he was stalking,” the captain said. “He asked for you when we brought him in. By name. Said he was looking for Eric Fletcher.”

  Once more I looked to the stranger. To the man who had been seeking a very specific prey—me.

  “He won’t tell us anything about himself,” Schiavo explained. “There’s nothing identifying in any of his possessions. He said you’re the only one he wants to speak to about why he’s here. Hell, he’s talking baseball with Paul in there right now.”

  It didn’t appear that the man was worse for wear. Not wasting away, or even thinned out, as one might expect of a lone stranger appearing out of nowhere. He’d appeared well supplied when I’d seen him at the cabin, and, looking upon him now, from a closer distance, I thought it almost certain that he’d been supported somehow. Supplied by others.

  “You think he’s part of the group that grabbed me?”

  Schiavo thought for a moment, then shook her head.

  “I don’t see how that makes sense. They take you, release you, then have this guy shadow you until, for some reason, he decides to make contact? To what purpose?”

  She was right. I hadn’t asked the question with any surety that what I was suggesting had been the case, but the man’s appearance here, in search of me, made no more sense than anything we could imagine at the moment. And there would be no understanding until I did what I knew Schiavo had summoned me here to do.

  “I’ll talk to him,” I said.

  I removed my belt, the holstered Springfield heavy as I passed my rig to Schiavo. She set it on a desk behind her.

  “We’ll be right out here,” she said. “Watching and listening.”

  * * *

  A moment later I sat where Sergeant Lorenzen had been, facing the stranger. Alone with him.

  His hands rested atop the table, folded, a slight smile on his lips as he seemed to study me.

  “You’re a hard man to find.”

  “Not really,” I said. “Chances are I’m the only Eric Fletcher left alive.”

  “Could be...Fletch.”

  He spoke my nickname with such knowing, such familiarity, that I felt a brief chill ripple up between my shoulder blades. The kind of iciness that comes both from within and far away at the same time.

  “Yes, I know a lot about you, Fletch. Pretty much everything. Up until the blight, that is.”

  It was my turn to appraise the man, the stranger. To seek some clear understanding of the who, and the what, and the why of his presence before me. Nothing showed on his face but that thin, almost smug grin.

  Then, he glanced away from me, to the window. Light in the room and near darkness beyond the glass mostly hid the space from which I’d come.

  “The cavalry is close,” he said. “They don’t trust me.”

  “They don’t know you,” I said, adding almost too quickly. “I don’t know you.”

  For a few seconds the stranger just looked at the glass, as if meeting the stares he could not see boring into him from the far side. His gaze then shifted to me and he sat back in his chair, hands slipping easily to his lap. Out of view. I knew he’d been searched before being placed in the room. There would be no weapon on him. But still I was wary. Something about those hands, and not being able to see them, unnerved me.

  “Tyler Olin,” the stranger said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Now you know who I am,” he said.

  Tyler Olin. If he was being truthful, it offered me no insight into who he really was. The name meant nothing to me.

  “Okay, Tyler—”

  “Ty,” he interrupted. “People call me T
y...Fletch.”

  Again, he wielded the familiarity like a scalpel, carving shallow cuts in my defensiveness. As much as I hated to admit it, this man, in an inconceivably short time, had found a way to push my buttons simply by uttering a nickname given to me by—

  “Neil,” I said, and Olin’s grin deepened.

  “Good old Neil,” he said.

  “You know him.”

  “Knew him,” Olin corrected. “Or I thought I did.”

  “Who were you to him?” I asked, some fervor to my question. “Friend? Colleague?”

  Olin sniffed a quiet chuckle.

  “Colleague,” he repeated selectively. “That makes us sound so...ordinary. Like bankers, or doctors.”

  “So you did work with him at the State Department,” I said, zeroing in on what had to be a certainty.

  As it turned out, I was more wrong than I could have imagined at that moment, or at any in the span of time that I’d known my absent friend.

  “I didn’t work for the State Department,” Olin said.

  I stared at him, wary and confused.

  “And neither did Neil Moore,” Olin added.

  The silence I responded with opened the door for him to continue. To set my head spinning with foul revelation.

  “Your friend wasn’t some low level diplomat lackey,” Olin said. “That was his cover.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” I pressed the man. “I’ve known him since we were kids. I know what he did for a living.”

  The grin was gone. Now Olin managed something that might have been a smile, though it seemed more an involuntary expression that was part bitter, part sweet.

  “My wife thought I worked for the Department of Agriculture the entire time we were together,” Olin said. “From the day I first asked her out until the moment she took her last breaths in my arms.”

  He stopped there for a moment. Seizing on memories from old, dark places, it seemed. When his attention refocused on me there was no hint of a smile.

  “Your friend and I both worked for the CIA,” Olin said.

  Twenty Four

  My world didn’t come crashing down around me. Just a portion of what had been, that place held only in memory, crumbling now, beliefs peeling away, like a building whose foundation had just been compromised.