by Noah Mann
“So?”
“The Hawks were from Atlanta,” I said, recalling the location of the NBA team in the world before the blight. “But we never were into them. Not into basketball much at all. Football was our sport. That’s what we watched together. That’s what we played together.”
“Atlanta,” she repeated, thinking along with me. “Why would say that?”
I didn’t know. It was doubtful he was sending some covert indicator of where he was. I suspected he was far closer than the south. The activity in our area, and what Grace had been able to recall about where they’d traveled, pointed to somewhere between here and the Rockies.
“Atlanta,” I said again.
“Could be what they are making their capital,” Elaine suggested, almost immediately discounting the thought. “But how would telling us that help?”
“It wouldn’t,” I said.
Elaine eased her head toward the edge of the fallen bunker and peered around, scanning the riverbank to the east. As she took that moment, I focused on my friend. On what he’d said.
It was in those quiet few seconds that pieces began to tumble into some vague order.
“He didn’t just send a message to me,” I said, and Elaine looked back to me. “Olin thinks the Ranger broadcast was meant for him.”
“Maybe it was.”
If that was true, then my friend was using different methods to send messages to those beyond his physical reach. To those people who mattered to him.
To us.
“He’s talking to us,” I said. “There’s more to that transmission than just the obvious.”
I returned to considering why he might reference Atlanta. What could he be pointing us toward?
“Disease,” Elaine said, offering an answer to a question I hadn’t directly posed. “The Centers for Disease Control is in Atlanta.”
“CDC,” I said, using the government organization’s acronym. “They deal with biological threats. Plagues. Anthrax.”
“And viruses,” Elaine added with ominous realization. “They would have samples of biological agents there. Things that could be used. Against us.”
She was right. If money meant anything at the moment, I’d bet on the accuracy of what she’d just suggested.
“He was slipping in a warning,” I said. “About what we would be facing.”
Elaine nodded, puzzling at something after a moment.
“Why not just have Grace tell us?”
I shook my head.
“That would bring her into whatever he’s doing,” I said.
But what was he doing? What was he trying to tell us? To tell me?”
“If you’re right,” Elaine began, “then the person in the most danger may just be him.”
I nodded, beginning to believe she was right. My friend’s leaving was not the act of a traitor—it was a man taking on a mission. Just as he’d done with Olin in their old lives. Here, though, it appeared that Neil Moore might have gone into the belly of the beast to save the very people he’d abandoned.
But how?
“There’s something else,” I said. “There has to be more. He wouldn’t have known about Atlanta or viruses before he left us. He had to discover that once he’d joined up with them.”
“If what Olin said was right, they expected him to join the cause from the beginning.”
Elaine was correct. But he’d grown disillusioned with what they might do, just as he’d grown disillusioned with the rightful government. Only he didn’t tell them he’d changed his mind. He just took off.
To find me.
“What else could he have slipped into that transmission?” Elaine wondered aloud.
We could have mused on what my friend might be trying to say all night. But the rocket fired from across the river ended any speculation we might have undertaken.
Forty One
It was not an RPG. We’d been on the receiving end of that weapon on Mary Island, its screaming approach a distinctive calling card. This was not that.
The projective dragged a fast tail of fire across the flowing waters as it streaked toward the reconstructed bunker.
“Enderson!” I screamed, hoping my warning would reach the corporal in time and allow him to dive clear of the coming impact.
It did not.
The warhead exploded just below the narrow, sandbagged firing port facing the river, sending a shower of white hot sparks arcing outward, in every direction, bits of molten shrapnel raining down upon the position Elaine and I had moved to.
“Eric!”
She grabbed me. My wife. My love. Her strong hands dragged me back from the open ground I’d leapt into without even realizing it, pulling me down to a place of cover behind the jagged remnants of a reinforced concrete wall that had once been part of the old checkpoint. Fire drizzled down from the dark night like falling fireflies set ablaze. A tiny chunk of white hot metal landed on Elaine’s leg, burning instantly through her pants and sizzling against her flesh.
“AHHH!”
I swung my gloved hand at the smoking patch of flesh, then unlidded my water bottle and drenched the spot, keeping a steady stream of liquid onto the wound through the squirt top.
“Are you okay?! Did you get hit anywhere else?!”
Elaine shook her head and planted a gloved hand over the burn.
“Check the river!” she told me, ignoring her own pain.
I grabbed my rifle and swung around the left edge of the rubble, checking the bridge beyond the smoldering bunker. It was clear. No sign of any movement. I shifted past Elaine as she took her own MP5 in hand and followed me as I crawled to the right side of the rubble, poking my head around to be greeted by a volley of rounds ricocheting off the shattered concrete slabs.
“Back!”
I pushed Elaine behind and swung my AR into a slice of the visual pie that was clear, squeezing off a series of bursts at a half dozen silhouettes charging along the bank, moving to flank us.
“We’ve gotta move!” she shouted.
I fired more bursts until my weapon ran dry. As I ducked back behind cover to reload, Elaine scrambled past and kept any movement on our right side at bay until a targeted volley of fire ripped into the rubble just inches from her head.
“Elaine!”
I grabbed her and pulled her body back, not sure if I was going to find in that instant that I’d been made a widower. But she rolled as I pulled, coming to her hands and feet.
“They’re not trying to miss,” she said, referencing the encounter with the enemy that Nick Withers and I had had in the eastern woods. “This is the real thing.”
“We can’t hold here,” I said.
In the distance, due south of us, a heavy volume of fire began to roll across the terrain. A major attack was in progress, precisely where Schiavo had anticipated. What we were facing might be a diversion, but it was effective. And may have been deadly.
“We’ve got to get to Enderson.”
Elaine nodded and fired a wild spray of fire over the top of the rubble.
“Go!” she shouted.
I didn’t want to leave her. Despite any agreement I’d made to not favor her if danger should arise, I could not force down my desire, my need, to protect her.
But, I reminded myself, here we were protecting each other. Neither of us would make it out of here on our own. I had to let her do what was necessary to keep us alive as a partner, not a wife.
“Now!”
This time I did not delay at her direction. I brought my reloaded AR up and charged across the short distance to the smoldering remains of the bunker, the satisfying burp of Elaine’s weapon firing behind me. I reached the cover of the back wall, a thin line of fire licking up what remained of its wooden structure, then brought my weapon to bear and fired controlled shots at the edge of the field where it began to slope down to the river. Elaine bolted across the same space I had just traversed seconds before, favoring one leg, but keeping her speed up until she rolled past me and took
a position on the opposite end of the burning back wall.
“Mo!”
I shouted out to Enderson as fire peppered the wall, and the two sides of the bunker that were equally damaged. Splinters of wood erupted from each impact, and jets of sand popped upward with each hit on one of the sandbags that had been tossed about by the explosion.
“Mo!”
“Here...”
The reply was weak, and soft, and when I glanced behind toward where it had come from, I saw the upper half of Corporal Morris Enderson dragging the other half out, crawling low and slow, as if creeping beneath a barbed wire obstacle in training camp. But this was not training. It was all too real.
As were his wounds.
“Mo!”
I called to him as I backed away from the corner of the burning bunker and grabbed him by the jacket, pulling him clear of the rubble. He was stunned and bleeding, though I couldn’t tell how much was from superficial shrapnel wounds and how much was from serious injury.
“They’re across the river!” Elaine reported.
This was no feint by third rate troops. These were serious shooters moving on our position. And on us.
“We’ve gotta get him out of here,” I told her.
“We’ve gotta get us out of here!”
She was right in her correction. Dead right, if we didn’t hurry.
“Can you cover?” I asked her.
She reloaded and reached out. I knew what she wanted and handed her my AR.
“Where are we going?” she asked, incoming rounds ripping dangerously close.
We’d left the old pickup truck a hundred yards away from the checkpoint, on a side road due south of our position. That had to be our destination. There was no way we could carry the soldier to the next defensive line protecting the town, not with an enemy in pursuit.
“We try for the truck,” I told her. “If we can’t make it, we go west to the water.”
The alternative was the worst option, trying to slog our way south toward town through sand and surf, totally exposed on the beach and the harbor’s edge.
“We better make it to the truck,” Elaine said.
“Agreed. Ready?”
With still more fire coming in, from the east and the north now, she nodded and popped up, firing with one weapon, the other ready for action. I heaved Enderson over my shoulders, arm around his leg and hand holding his wrist, locking him in position as I jogged south. I couldn’t look back. Doing so would only slow us. The only way I knew that Elaine was alright, and still with us, with me, was hearing the constant bursts of fire covering our retreat.
A few minutes after beginning our withdrawal we saw the old workhorse vehicle on the shoulder of the narrow road.
“Are they following?” I asked as I eased Enderson into the back.
Elaine tossed me my AR as I climbed into the bed of the truck with our wounded man.
“I don’t think so,” she said, hobbling back to check on him with me. “They might be holding at the river.”
If true, they were just drawing the noose tighter, slowly squeezing the amount of territory we had to call our own.
“Get us to town,” I said.
Elaine got behind the wheel and pulled the truck through a tight turn over both rough shoulders of the road. Just minutes later we passed through our interior defensive line, which was now the front line of our town, and neared the center of Bandon, cows and goats and pigs scattered about the streets.
“They pulled the livestock in,” Elaine said, shouting through the space where the truck’s rear window had once been. “Damn!”
She swore as she jerked the steering wheel, swerving to miss a dairy cow trotting in fear down the center of the road.
“That means the pens were overrun,” I said, knowing what that meant. “We lost the northeast checkpoints.”
The enemy was less than half a mile from us.
Forty Two
We reached the clinic in the old pickup and pulled Enderson from the open bed of the vehicle with assistance from Genesee and two residents who’d volunteered as orderlies.
“Stay with us, Mo,” Genesee said as he lowered the corporal onto a gurney and began wheeling it into the clinic through the open double doors.
Right past Grace.
“Are you two all right?” Grace asked, a set of too-big blue scrubs hanging on her frame.
I helped Elaine toward the entrance, keeping the weight off her injured leg.
“She has a nasty burn,” I said.
“I’m all right,” Elaine protested.
Grace hurried forward and helped me get Elaine into a wheelchair just outside. She crouched and slipped a pair of synthetic gloves on, tearing the singed fabric around the wound to probe the burn. Elaine winced and grabbed the tall rear wheels of the chair.
“You’ve got about a two-inch area of third degree burns,” Grace said, looking up to Elaine, and then to me. “She’ll be fine. You did good soaking it.”
She could tell from the dampness of Elaine’s pants below the knee that I’d dumped all the water I could on the wound.
“I’ll take her in and get a dressing on it until the doctor can take a look,” Grace said.
I was ready to follow her in, but Grace’s glance past me signaled that someone else had arrived. The Humvee’s screeching tires confirmed to me who it was even before I looked.
“How is he?” Schiavo asked, looking through the clinic doors as Grace wheeled Elaine inside.
“He’s shaken up,” I told her, having checked him more closely on the ride in. “Some minor shrapnel wounds. But I think he’s just stunned.”
Stunned could mask serious injury, I knew. A traumatic brain injury could present itself after experiencing what Enderson had. But for the moment, his prognosis seemed good. I hoped it would remain so.
“They crossed the river,” I reported.
Schiavo nodded, not surprised.
“They pushed us back all along our lines,” she said.
The noose analogy was seeming very appropriate.
“Did we lose any more people? We heard about the two.”
“No,” she answered, though that response didn’t seem to assuage her any. “But we will when they come again.”
I noticed that there was no doubt in her reply. No ‘if’, but ‘when’.
“When do you think that attack will come?”
“They’ll let us stew in defeat for a while,” she said. “A day, maybe two.”
For now, at least, it was quiet. But in silence, fears could multiply.
“We’ve got people pushing for a surrender,” Schiavo said. “Mayor Allen and Martin are dealing with them right now.”
“How many?”
“It only takes a few,” Schiavo said. “And there are more than that.”
The flyers had been seen by most residents, and those who hadn’t been exposed to them first hand had heard, second hand, what the Unified Government was promising.
“If we lose more ground, he may have no choice,” Schiavo said, referencing Mayor Allen’s question about the right time to do the unthinkable. “We have no more buffer space. Their next stop is in the streets.”
If there was any good news to be had, Schiavo didn’t offer it.
“I’m going to go have a look at Mo,” she said, then disappeared into the clinic.
I listened to the silence of the night, hoping it would last, then I, too, went inside.
* * *
“She won’t be winning any dancing contests for a while,” Grace said.
She stood next to the gurney that Elaine lay upon in one of the three treatment areas in the clinic. I held my wife’s hand and sneered at the bandage showing where the lower leg of her pants had been cut away.
“Always in the leg,” she said. “Why do I always get hit in the leg?”
In the battle we’d had aboard the Groton Star in the waters off of Bandon, she’d taken a ricochet just above the knee. Now she’d have a fresh scar.
Another reminder of just how we’d fought to maintain this life in the face of daunting odds.
“Tomorrow will be better,” Elaine said to me. “It will.”
“You rest for a bit,” I said, leaning in to kiss her.
I nodded toward the exit and stepped outside the treatment room with Grace. We stood in the hallway as Corporal Morris Enderson talked with Commander Genesee and Captain Schiavo two doors down.
“He’s going to be okay,” Grace said. “So is Elaine. She’ll have some scarring.”
“She hates her legs anyway,” I said. “I’m kind of fond of them.”
Grace smiled. A real smile. Something I might have seen on her face back at my Montana refuge, or when we first returned from Skagway. If I was being truly hopeful, I might say that she was turning some mental corner.
“And how are you?” I asked.
Grace smiled again and gave something that was part nod, part tip of her head.
“I had to do something,” she said. “I had to help. Judy Newland said she’d sit with Krista and Brandon while I came down here.”
Maybe it was the connection to who she was, to who she’d been. A nurse. I thought that getting back into familiar rhythms was doing her good. As she did good for others.
“Is it really that bad out there, Fletch?”
I couldn’t lie to her. But I also couldn’t say anything. I couldn’t bring myself to utter any description of the deteriorating situation. All I could do was offer a small nod.
Grace’s resurgent brightness dimmed a bit, but didn’t crack.
“We’ll get through this,” she said to me, a skim of tears suddenly glistening in her eyes. “There’s always hope.”
Before either of us could react further to her words, to words borrowed from her husband, from my friend, she turned and went back into the treatment room with Elaine, leaving me in the bright hallway. Thinking on my friend’s mantra. Wanting to believe them.
There’s always hope...
He’d said that to me. Many times. Implied it in other ways.
What else had he said, without me knowing, without any of us knowing? As Elaine and I had discussed at the rubbled bunker, before the rocket attack took out the checkpoint, Neil was sending a message. By allowing Grace and the children to even be among us he was signaling that they were safer here. By referencing the Atlanta Hawks, he was hinting at the Unified Government’s access to pathogens at the CDC.
