by Noah Mann
“Walk halfway to the helicopter and stop,” I instructed her. “Neil will walk out and meet you. You then continue to the helicopter and get aboard. If you deviate from those instructions you will be shot.”
Quincy glanced behind. In the tree line behind us, Schiavo and Lorenzen stood with the remainder of the garrison, weapons also low but ready.
“If you shoot me, we shoot him,” Quincy reminded me.
The process had been agreed upon in an ATV exchange following my discussion with General Weatherly. I imagined it might be similar to the trading of spies during the Cold War, with each crossing a bridge at the same instant to return to their handlers and countrymen. Here, though, what each side was giving fell lopsided in our favor, relative to any damage done. Neil had gone into the enemy camp on a mission of necessity. Of his own choosing. By his own design. And he had saved us.
Sheryl Quincy had been a simple spy. A mildly effective turncoat.
But, besides the ability to weigh one’s worth against the other, what mattered to me was something more basic, yet more profound—I was getting my friend back, both physically and in esteem.
“Walk,” I instructed Quincy.
Across the field, Neil waited as Quincy began to move. At the halfway point, as instructed, she halted, and my friend walked out to meet her. Once he reached where she was she continued on, tossing a sideways look at my friend as she passed. Hardly a minute later she reached the helicopter and climbed aboard.
The rotor spun up and the door closed. With a whining whisper the stealth aircraft leapt into the air, banking severely, nose dropping as it accelerated, skimming the dead trees as it flew east. Gone.
My friend, standing a hundred yards away, watched it go. Then he turned toward me and began to walk, and I began to walk toward him. I would not have been surprised to hear Schiavo and her troops rushing out to join me, but I didn’t, and I understood why. She knew that this moment of reunion was for us. For Neil and me. There would be others, as he was reunited with Grace, with friends. The town, when they learned what he’d done, or the story of his exploits we allowed to be told, would be beyond grateful.
That, though, could wait.
We crossed the distance quickly until just a few feet separated us.
“Hey, Fletch.”
“Neil.”
He came forward and pulled me into a hug. I returned the gesture. For that instant we were back in high school, on the gridiron, celebrating after a stellar touchdown. The separation we’d endured for months melted away. We were together again.
My friend was back.
We eased back from our embrace and just looked at each other, smiling, in awe.
“I knew you’d get the message,” Neil said. “You’re such an anal nut job. Every wall has to be perfectly plumb. Use the right size nail. If something’s not right, it gnaws at you.”
“What if I’d been a closeted Hawks fan?” I challenged him. “This all would have fallen apart.”
“Like I wouldn’t know that.”
The tone of the exchange shifted right there. Neil’s mood quieted. Darkened by a degree. We’d come to that point in what had to be discussed, how one of us had never been the man the other thought he was.
“Fletch, I have to tell you some things.”
“No,” I said, shaking my head. “You don’t.”
“After all this, no, I do. I really do, Fletch.”
“Neil...”
“Let me—”
“Olin reached us,” I said.
Instantly, the mood I’d noticed darkening by a degree seemed to teeter on the edge of some abyss. It was as if the shadow of some hellish storm cloud had passed over him.
“Olin...”
“Yes,” I confirmed, worried that my friend might think my opinion of him had lessened because of his colleague’s revelations. “It’s all right. He told us everything.”
“Olin is here?”
I shook my head.
“He left. He said he’d be close by if you want to see him, but he was pretty sick. I don’t know if—”
I could no longer ascribe my friend’s expression and demeanor to mere surprise that I knew of his covert life. Something was troubling him. More deeply than anything I’d ever seen.
“Neil, what’s wrong?”
“Ty Olin was here?” my friend asked, seeming to seek confirmation of an impossibility.
“Yeah. He heard your transmission. He said the Ranger Signal was meant for him.”
What color there was in my friend’s face drained completely. He turned quickly away from me, his gaze scanning the far edge of the woods, manically searching the dark spaces between the trees.
“Neil, what’s wron—”
The sound from the far edge of the woods cut off my question. It was loud, and sharp. A rifle shot. Just one. One whose signature flat crack was unmistakable.
But even as my mind processed what the sound was, and from whom it had originated, my eyes were taking in a sight so horrible I was left frozen. Immobile. Just standing there as a single bullet tore into my friend’s chest and blew a hole out his back, dead center, destroying his spine.
“Neil!”
A shower of my friend’s blood sprayed over me as he dropped like a ragdoll. I dove to cover him as weapons behind me opened up, Schiavo and her troops laying suppressing fire on the shot’s point of origin.
“Neil!”
I grabbed my friend and rolled him over, kneeling on the damp earth, a few wisps of new green beneath me as I cradled my friend’s lifeless body.
“Neil, come on. Come on.”
His eyes were rolled halfway back, head just dead weight at the end of his neck, blood trickling from his nose and mouth.
“Come on, Neil. You’re okay. You’re okay.”
Lorenzen, Westin, and Enderson moved past, weapons up, not firing anymore as they pressed toward the woods. Schiavo stopped next to me as Hart knelt alongside and put his fingers to my friend’s neck. What he felt, combined with the volume of blood he saw on the ground, and upon me, left no doubt as to what he’d determined.
“He’s gone, Fletch.”
I looked to the medic, then up to the captain, tears in her eyes. Then, I looked down to my friend, my best friend, and I pulled him close, holding his body against mine as I wept.
Fifty
Funerals filled the following days. Carol Everett’s. Nathan Chester’s. And Neil’s.
My friend’s services were a blur to me. Much of the days following his death were, as well. I remembered Grace absorbing the news without hysterics. With strength and some odd measure of understanding as to just what her husband had done for us all. I remembered Commander Genesee, in full uniform, saluting my friend’s coffin as it was lowered into the ground at the cemetery. I remembered Schiavo reporting that a patrol led by Sergeant Lorenzen had located Olin’s hideout, just where I’d described it, but there was no sign of the man.
And I remembered the meeting.
“We aren’t what’s left of the United States of America,” Mayor Allen said as he opened the first Defense Council proceedings since my friend’s death. “For all intents and purposes, we are the United States of America.”
“What does that make everyone else?” Elaine asked.
“A threat,” Lorenzen answered.
Schiavo didn’t correct him. Didn’t massage his words down to something less ominous.
“Which is exactly what we are to them,” Schiavo said, adding emphasis to her sergeant’s point.
“So what do we do?” Elaine asked.
“We do what we’ve been doing,” Mayor Allen said. “Keep growing. Keep planting. Keep turning the world into something we remember.”
“And while we do that,” Schiavo said, “we stay ready to end anyone who tries to interfere.”
It was the hopeful politician and the pragmatic warrior, each stating their case. Through it all, I said nothing. I simply listened. No one pressed me to offer any input. If th
ey had, I wasn’t certain what I would have said. Or could have said.
* * *
When the meeting concluded, Elaine and I left, walking together along the road’s shoulder. To our right the sun was setting over crashing waves we could hear, but not see, long streaks of reddened clouds stretched across the sky. There was no talking head forecaster to tell us what the weather would be over the coming days, but you could feel it—a storm was on the horizon.
“Del said we’d lost the ability to sense things,” I said to Elaine, for no reason other than sharing a bit of wisdom from the first friend I’d made after the blight. “That doesn’t just apply to weather, I think.”
I’d told her about Del Drake before. About our bond near my Montana refuge, and our fight against the dictatorial forces building near that once lovely slice of western territory. He’d sacrificed his life to save mine. That was a great gift, without question, but I often thought that the simple things he’d shared with me were more profound, and everlasting.
Now, another friend who’d sacrificed had been taken, but this time that event had unfolded without reason. Or without any reason I could fathom.
“Neil loved you.”
I nodded.
“Grace will be all right,” Elaine said.
Again, I nodded. She would be all right. And Krista. And Brandon. All of us would be. Every single person in Bandon, natives and those who’d come in search of survival, would have the chance for another day, and another, because of what Neil Moore had done. Because of what my friend had kept secret.
Another, though, had revealed secrets, though he’d wrapped them in deceit. He’d offered truths as lies, and lies as truths.
Black is white. White is black.
I doubted that my friend had anticipated what would ultimately happen when he’d offered that warning to me. And I was certain that, in no way, did he have any inkling that a man from his past would appear and be his executioner.
“Ranger meant nothing,” I said, the statement offered to simply let it out. “All that mattered was Neil’s voice. That was what brought Olin here.”
“He meant to kill him all along,” Elaine said, her hand tightening around mine.
She was right. The man, the spy, had been on a mission. How much was fact of what he’d told me, what he’d told us, was impossible to know. BA 412 was real. Neil had confirmed that. The rest of what Olin had shared could be treated as suspect.
“What about the sample?” Elaine asked.
With Schiavo’s blessing, I’d shared that morsel of Neil’s communication with my wife, just as the captain had with her husband, and with Mayor Allen. We were all bearers of that secret now. That some quantity of BA 412 existed, secreted by Neil Moore in a place whose precise location he’d taken with him to the grave.
“It’s somewhere,” I said. “But not here.”
“We’ll never find it,” she said.
“Good,” I told her.
But that response was simplistic, I knew in my gut. It mattered more that no one would ever find it.
Fifty One
Ten days after Neil’s death, as Elaine and I slept, the phone rang.
“What time is it?” Elaine asked groggily.
My watch on the nightstand gave me the answer.
“Two forty.”
“Will you get it?”
I planted a quick kiss on the back of her head and swung my legs over the edge of the bed, soles of my feet slapping cool hardwood as I moved from our bedroom to the hallway, and from there to the living room where the offending device continued to blare. There was no urgency about me. The town had settled back into a state of near normalcy. Most of the checkpoints had been deactivated, and only a few patrols journeyed beyond Bandon’s borders each day. We were wary, but not worried.
“Hello,” I said as I lifted the handset.
I expected to hear Corporal Enderson’s voice, or one of the other members of the garrison who were on night watch. Possibly a fence at the livestock pens had fallen, and cows had slipped out. A fire might have erupted. Or a leak might have sprung at one of the oil wells outside of town. There were any number of reports that I, as a member of the Defense Council, might be receiving.
But it was none of those things. It wasn’t even a resident of our town on the other end.
“Hello, Fletch,” Tyler Olin said.
For a moment I could not respond as my brain worked through the possibilities of how the man who’d killed my friend was speaking to me. The most likely scenario involved him accessing one of the deactivated checkpoints whose hardwired phone was still connected. At each such device was a listing of town numbers so that, should a particular need arise, those occupying the facility could reach any person in town. Olin had simply exploited this oversight.
“What do you want?”
“Well, first, I want to say that I’m sorry.”
“Sorry...”
“It doesn’t mean much, I know,” Olin admitted. “But it needs to be said. Just as what I did needed to be done.”
“Killing my friend was a necessity?”
“He was my friend, too, Fletch.”
My fingers drew tight around the plastic handset.
“You didn’t call to apologize,” I told the man, the murderer.
“Where is it?”
“Where is what?”
Olin chuckled softly at my resistance.
“Please, you drive off a superior force with, what, empty threats?”
“Actually, yes,” I told the man, just a morsel of the reply a falsehood.
“No,” Olin said. “No, it doesn’t work that way. Besides, I saw his face.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Our friend, through my rifle scope. He looked surprised. Maybe even frightened. What was it, did you tell him about me? That I’d stopped by?”
I had, and Neil had reacted just as Olin was surmising. But how could the man read the situation so clearly? Was it simply that his training, and the life he’d led, gave him the ability to lay bare the truth of almost any observable event?
“I’m going to hang up, Olin. But first I’d like to give you some advice.”
“Advice? There’s something you can tell me I don’t already know?”
“Yes,” I said. “You should probably run. You should run far. And keep running. Because if I ever see you again, or if I find out you’re somewhere close, I will come for you. And I will kill you.”
There was silence on the other end. I thought that the man was just absorbing what I’d told him. The warning I’d given. The promise I’d made. But the quiet continued. No response came. Not even the sound of breathing.
“Olin?”
But he was gone. I didn’t even know if he’d stayed on the line long enough to hear what I’d said.
“Olin?”
I eased the phone away from my face and stared at it, fingers bearing down harder, tighter, until the handset cracked in my grip.
“Eric...”
I turned to see Elaine at the end of the hallway. She stared at me in the din of the living room.
“Who was it?”
“No one,” I said. “No one at all.”
Thank You
I hope you enjoyed Ranger.
You can learn about my books, release dates, and my occasional newsletter by visiting my website:
www.noahmann.com
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Book 1: Bugging Out
Book 2: Eagle One
Book 3: Wasteland
Book 4: The Pit
Book 5: Ranger
About The Author
Noah Mann lives in the West and has been involved in personal survival and disaster preparedness for more than two decades. He has extensive training in firearms, as well as urban and wilderness Search & Rescue operations, including tracking and the application of technology in victim searches.
gging Out Series Book 5)
