Wasteland

by Noah Mann

  I wasn’t sure which I found more disquieting.

  “How much farther to water?” I asked.

  Elaine stopped us at the corner of a fallen building, covering the way ahead as Neil pulled the map out to orient us. He squinted through the dim light of the heavens and then pointed down the main road to the east.

  “A couple miles,” Neil told us. “Across open ground.”

  “Wonderful,” Elaine said.

  I scanned our surroundings. We had cover where we’d stopped, but if we pressed east in the dark we’d be exposed. Possibly to the individual, or individuals, who’d drilled three precise shots into the stranger we’d watched die.

  “I’d feel better moving when we can see what’s out there,” I said. “And who.”

  Neil tucked the map away and nodded. He licked his lips, spreading what moisture he could upon them. Holing up for the night would mean waiting to quench our thirst. The last of our water had been consumed as we walked during the night to reach the splotch on the map that had once been an oasis of civilization, but was now just another reminder of how barren the world had become. We could spend the time looking, searching houses, businesses, hoping against the truth we all knew for water. For food. For anything to carry us on and through the next day. And the next. And the next.

  “Gonna be a dry night,” Elaine said, looking around the corner of the structure we’d stopped at, peering up a dark street that split off the main road. “Houses up this way.”

  “Your pick,” I said.

  She started to move, just stepping clear of the building’s shattered wall when Neil grabbed her backpack, stopping her.

  “Wait,” he said, gesturing with the muzzle of his Benelli, upward across the street. “Look.”

  Both Elaine and I did, immediately seeing what had grabbed my friend’s attention, a bolt of colored cloth, faded and tattered, hanging limp atop a flagpole outside what had once been a modest hardware store. A flag. Vertical stripes of blue and white and red upon its field just visible in the muting glow from above.

  “That’s the French flag,” Neil said, his years at the State Department allowing instant recognition.

  French...

  Somehow they were part of this. Or those who spoke the language. Legionnaires, if what Micah had shared with me back at Eagle One was to be believed. To him, the child, it seemed a logical supposition, connecting dots of a possible source of the blight with those who had planned to exploit it. Whatever it was, from experience I knew, as did Neil, that those who’d flown that flag in our country were capable of killing. They’d tried to end our lives, along with Grace’s and Krista’s, at my refuge, blasting at us from a helicopter gunship until fire from one of our own brought them down.

  And it appeared that their brethren had been here, where we now stood.

  “It’s shredded,” Elaine said. “Abandoned. Just like this town.”

  I nodded. I wanted to believe that.

  “Let’s get inside,” I said.

  Elaine got us moving again, a light breeze kicking up, tossing the flag, its metal clasp banging against the pole as we left it behind.

  * * *

  It was a world of taking.

  If there was food, you took it. Water. Batteries. Toilet paper. Weapons. Ammunition. Finders truly were keepers in the blighted now.

  But like a store looted during a riot, all that was desired, or useful, had been stripped from the proverbial shelves. Cupboards were bare. Silent refrigerators sat open and empty in every place a person had called home. Still, it was in one’s nature—in our nature—to look.

  “A handful of double A’s,” Neil said, returning from the kitchen, the three slender batteries in his open palm. “I kept a few. Who wants the rest?”

  Elaine looked to me from where she sat across the living room of the house we’d occupied. She shook off the offer.

  “Fletch?”

  I reached up and took the batteries, slipping them into the front pocket of my pack on the floor.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “My scrounging is complete,” Neil said, tipping his head toward a hallway. “I’ll be in the bedroom. Wake me when breakfast is ready.”

  I smiled and watched my friend disappear down the hallway.

  “Couch is more comfortable than the floor,” Elaine said, lifting her MP5 from the cushion next to her and leaning it against an end table.

  I’d planted myself on a patch of bare hardwood soon after we’d entered the smallish house, shedding my pack and letting my AR rest atop my crossed legs. Now I was being invited to join her on the couch. Not the equally comfortable chair adjacent to it, but next to her.

  What had she said in the days before we left Eagle One? As we walked away from the hole in the earth where Micah would rest for eternity?

  That Cheyenne was a long way and there’d be plenty of time for questions and answers. Or something to that effect.

  “So tell me the tale of Elaine Morales,” I said as I stood, bringing my AR with me and leaning it next to her weapon as I sat beside her.

  She sniffed a laugh, one seeming directed at herself. Then she smiled and looked to me.

  “Special Agent Elaine Deborah Morales,” she said. “Pleased to meet you.”

  “Special Agent?”

  She nodded and reached into her pack on the floor, retrieving a slender black wallet from deep within and handing it to me. I flipped it open and looked down upon credentials identifying the woman I sat next to as a Special Agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

  “Not that that means much anymore,” she said, staring at the open wallet as I looked to her. “It did once.”

  I closed the wallet and handed it back. She held it for a moment, as if testing what weight it bore, then returned it to the dark place she’d buried it inside her pack.

  “I should probably chuck it in the river when we get there in the morning.”

  “FBI...” I half chuckled. “That must have been an interesting life.”

  “Yeah,” she agreed for effect. “Bank fraud really gets the juices flowing.”

  “Not a lot of bang bang and chasing bad guys?”

  “Oh, I chased plenty of bad guys,” she said. “Mostly as they ran their fat asses from their desk to a door. Those were some of the most intense five yard foot pursuits. Just epic law enforcement, let me tell you.”

  She was a cop. A fed. To some in the recent past that would have been a mark against her. In a tangible way, she’d been aligned with the very entity that a good many people blamed for what had happened. Not the blight, necessarily, but the wholesale abandonment of the population, leaving man, woman, and child to fend for themselves.

  “How did you end up in Bandon?” I asked her.

  She thought for a moment, then shifted her position on the couch, turning to face me a bit more, her knee coming to rest against my leg.

  “I’d just been transferred from Philadelphia to the RA in Eugene—”

  The wisps of moonlight reflecting through the room’s shattered windows must have revealed my confusion at the acronym.

  “Resident Agency,” she explained. “Satellite locations for the main Field Offices.”

  “Nice town to be in,” I commented, recalling a trip to the pleasant city on the Willamette River a half dozen years earlier, mental images of that visit flooding back. “So green.”

  “It was,” she agreed, though it, like every other place blessed with foliage and rainfall had turned grey and died.

  “Much white collar crime in Eugene?”

  “I didn’t have time to find out,” she said. “From the moment I hit the ground there I was working containment cases. We all were. Anyone with a badge and a gun was working roadblocks and inspection stations.”

  I nodded, darker memories of my visits to those coming back as well.

  “I was on the opposite side at some of those,” I told her. “I saw people die at them. People in uniforms, some with badges, shot them down. They
were innocent. All they wanted was to live their lives.”

  “I know,” she said, those times for her, nearly two years past now, weighing heavy. “We heard about incidents. Never saw any.”

  “I’m glad,” I said.

  She drew a shallow breath, as if summoning some reserve to go the remainder of the way. To complete the tale.

  “When the Red Signal came, everything just fell apart,” she said, pausing, each bit of what she shared taking her to places, to things, she’d left behind. “We had no communication with Portland. None with Washington. The signal was blocking everything. I thought we’d have at least some guidance.”

  “They abandoned you along with everyone else.”

  Elaine didn’t immediately agree with me. It seemed, for some reason, she still wanted, still needed to believe that some semblance of honor, of duty, of responsibility still existed in whatever organs of the state remained. If any did at all. This, to me, was the hardest thing to comprehend in considering everything Elaine Morales had told me.

  But in the next words she offered, I understood completely.

  “My brother was in Europe,” she said, hesitating, then adding a hopeful correction. “Is in Europe. He’s in the Army. Stationed in Germany.”

  “Did you hear anything from him?”

  “Before, yes. After the Red Signal there was nothing.”

  “How bad was it there for him before?”

  I knew I was treading delicate ground, but she’s opened the door to this part of her. And I truly wanted to know. I wanted her to be able to share what she’d clearly held close for so long.

  “The last time I talked to him was on a video chat. He was upset. He’d been crying. I could see it in his eyes. I asked him what was wrong, and he told me that his company had been ordered to surround a German town and keep people from leaving.”

  There she stopped, not for long, but long enough to recognize where this was going.

  “What was that place you saw the man resist and die for it?”

  “Arlee,” I told her.

  “What he described was his Arlee,” Elaine said. “Only a hundred times worse. A mini war, he called it. Apparently some of the residents were German reservists who’d snuck their weapons home because of the chaos that was spreading. Someone fired a shot from the town. My brother’s unit fired back. Then all hell broke loose.”

  “And the bodies piled up.”

  She nodded, her gaze rising toward the ceiling, the barest sheen of tears gleaming one her eyes as she tried to hold the emotion in.

  “He’s just a kid,” Elaine said, her voice cracking. “He joined up to serve his country and they made him do that. They made him be part of that. And now where is he?”

  Maybe it was a rhetorical questioning as to his physical location that she was asking. But it might as easily have been a worried wondering about what mental damage had been done to him.

  “Eugene to Bandon isn’t too far,” I said, steering her back toward something she did have answers for.

  “No,” she agreed, blinking away the tears that had threatened. “It wasn’t.”

  “But why there?” I asked. “Why not east, or south, or north?”

  A hint of a smile shaped her lips right then. The kind a person allows when silly memories rise.

  “The ocean,” she said. “I like the ocean. And, honestly, the way the world was coming unglued, I thought I might never see it again. So I made my way to the coast and walked along the shore. I scrounged for food. That was back when you could still find a can of beans here and there.”

  “It must have been cold along the coast about then.”

  “It was. But I just kept walking. I figured the food would run out and I’d just die there, somewhere along the Pacific.”

  “But you didn’t.”

  “No,” she said, a memory-filled breath flavoring the confirmation. “I didn’t.”

  She hesitated there. I didn’t prod her to move on, letting whatever was anchoring her to that point in her tale work its way free.

  “I found Bandon,” she said, an odd hint of disappointment in her words. “And I lived.”

  She paused there for a moment and looked to me. Her eyes were glistening again.

  “I lived,” she repeated.

  Then I knew. She’d wanted it to end. All that she’d known, that she’d loved, was gone. Like so many, she’d simply decided the point of going on was folly, because what was there to live for?

  And yet, she did live on. When she could have put the barrel of a gun in her mouth and ended it, she did not. Where she could have curled up in an abandoned house and let starvation take her, she had not. And the reason why was as universal as any. It was the reason I was still here. That Neil was still here. It was the reason Bandon survived. The reason some stranger had found a way to bring the green life of a single plant to a barren world.

  Hope.

  “You couldn’t give up,” I said. “You had to live. For your brother.”

  I’d found her center. Her meaning. It was no act of supreme analysis or investigation. It was simply understanding the nature of true humanity. Just as Neil could not, and did not, abandon his dying father so he might join me earlier at my refuge, Elaine Morales could no more accept with certainty that her brother was gone. Odds be damned, like us, he could be out there, across the ocean, struggling to survive.

  “All I want is to live long enough to see him again,” she said, and the skim of tears spilled. “To hug him and tell him everything’s going to be...going to be...”

  Her head bowed now. Sobs came, quiet and wet. I reached out and put a hand on her shoulder. She leaned toward me, her face collapsing against my shoulder, a gasping cry shaking her. I put both arms around her now and held her, and a moment later I felt hands sliding up my back. I felt her embrace.

  Then she looked up at me. Close. Intimately near. Her hand that rested behind my right shoulder rose slowly to the back of my neck, fingers spreading, caressing, the lightest, sweetest touch I’d ever known.

  I leaned down, and she rose up, eyes closing, our lips meeting, a soft and subtle first kiss. Five seconds, ten maybe, then we eased apart, looking into each other’s eyes. Just looking. Neither of us said a thing. After a moment she let her head come to rest on my shoulder and closed her eyes as the both of us settled into the cushions of the couch. Falling toward sleep.

  Holding each other.

  Six

  I was dozing, not quite asleep, when the spurt of static from down the hall stopped my descent towards dreams. My eyes opened and angled first to my left. Elaine had drifted off and rolled away from our embrace. She was curled up on the end of the couch, dead to the world. Then I looked toward the hall, the sound hissing there in sporadic, electric bursts broken by silence.

  Carefully I stood, trying to not disturb Elaine. Night hung still outside, a welcome coolness flowing through the shattered windows. By instinct I took my AR in hand as I walked down the hall, knowing, however, that I would not need it. I knew what the sound was. And I knew why it was.

  Neil sat on the edge of a bare mattress in a small bedroom, small radio in hand. It was the one given to us by Martin before setting off from Bandon. We’d assumed that taking the aircraft would be a one way trip to Cheyenne, making a return over land necessary, and the radio was to be used when we neared the Oregon coast to make contact. To announce our arrival and avoid any friendly fire incidents from those guarding the town’s perimeter.

  But here, my friend held it in hand, its small display glowing blue, nagging static rising and falling as he dialed the squelch up and down. He saw me at the doorway, watching, and smiled, then looked down to the device again.

  “I know there’s no chance of hearing them at this distance, with mountains between us, but...”

  But...

  Hope beyond hope. Neil had put that spark in me long ago. It stoked a will to survive I hadn’t thought myself capable of. Here, in the tiny, dark room, it was that same d
egree of hope against the impossible that had him listening to the electronic scratch of dead air.

  “I have spare batteries for this,” he assured me, not wanting the folly of his actions to impact the point when we might actually need to make contact. “Silly and stupid, isn’t it?”

  “No,” I said.

  I wondered if he dreamed of them. Of Grace and Krista. The wife and child he’d committed to. The instant family made in a way possible before the blight’s devastation, but unlikely. If visions of them did inhabit his sleep, I hoped they were pleasant.

  He switched the radio off, its display going dark.

  “We have to find it, Fletch,” he said, looking to me, the determination in his eyes that I’d never seen. “We have to.”

  “We will,” I assured him.

  But he shook his head, and he stood, crossing the short distance from the bed to the doorway, eyeing me close up. Allowing me to see that the determination about him was not simply something expressed in words. It oozed from him. It radiated from him, like heat from a maddening fever. It was his mission, because it was the only thing that would save those whom I suspected smiled or screamed at him, in dream or nightmare.

  “If we don’t find it,” Neil began, “then I have nothing to go back to.”

  He hadn’t given up hope, the very thing he’d instilled in me. But he was looking beyond the horizon to a place where that darkness was infinite.

  “It’s there, Neil. And we’re going to get it.”

  He looked at me for a long moment, then he nodded slowly in the darkness, accepting my words as reassurance. Maybe as a promise.

  “Good night, Fletch.”

  He turned and went to the bed, lying down without another word. He rolled away from me, facing the broken window where moonlight drizzled in. I left him, hoping he would sleep. That he would sleep deeply, with any dream he desired, free of nightmares that were all too possible.

  I returned to the living room, to the couch where Elaine remained curled against the back cushion, her knees pulled up, arms drawn tight across her chest, hugging herself. I eased myself onto the cushion next to her, still hoping not to disturb her sleep. But she stirred, and turned toward me, her curled body extending, arm draping across my chest, hand clutching my shoulder as she nuzzled her face against my neck.