Wasteland

by Noah Mann

  “Head north,” I told Neil.

  Ben looked back to me.

  “I need to go east,” he said.

  “I don’t care where you need to go,” I told him. “We’re heading north.”

  He wanted to protest, but didn’t. He laid the Dragunov taken from the dead professor across the handlebars and said no more as Neil drove us out of the city.

  Thirty Five

  We bounced along, making no more than ten miles an hour over the terrain, Neil steering us along low points in the landscape, following natural depressions, trying to mask our movement from those who might be watching. Or chasing us.

  “You okay?” I asked Elaine.

  “Yeah,” she answered.

  We bobbed and swayed with each bump and turn. She held onto a grab bar welded to the frame with one hand, and to me with the other. A quiet had settled over her. Tiredness, I thought, though I feared it might be more.

  “You didn’t say anything about the others,” I said.

  I didn’t have to explain my observation. She knew what I was referring to. Knew what I might have expected her to protest, considering the empathy she’d displayed toward others in vulnerable states. The shattered souls we’d left behind were the epitome of that.

  “We couldn’t have helped them,” she said. “The most we could have done is end their misery. And I couldn’t bring myself to do that. Could you?”

  “No,” I said. “I couldn’t.”

  Then, she squeezed my hand.

  “Don’t hate me for what I’m going to say,” she said.

  “You couldn’t say anything to make that happen.”

  She accepted that with a thin smile, then her mood darkened, the life in her eyes dulling.

  “I want to go home,” she said. “It’s selfish, but it’s what I want. I can’t save everybody we come across.”

  “Your super power is wanting to,” I told her, and her face brightened.

  A rock jolted the flatbed as we rolled over it.

  “You might be missing some bumps,” I chided my friend.

  “You get the ride that you pay for,” he said.

  The conjoined drivetrain surged, one engine struggling. Neil slowed us, nursing the vehicle on. But twenty miles north of the city the tandem motorcycle gave out, both engines sputtering, frame rattling, then shaking violently, until finally one of the welds holding the two bikes together snapped.

  The abrupt stop jolted us, but didn’t throw anyone from their place on the vehicle, the waning speed and Neil’s anticipation of trouble preventing a harsher end to our ride.

  “This is too open,” I said, standing on the flat earth where we’d broken down.

  “There’s a house to the west,” Elaine said.

  A half mile, maybe, from where we stood, but it wouldn’t help us.

  “No houses,” I said. “We need someplace low to settle in before dark. Not anywhere they might look for us. Because they will be looking.”

  “And we’ve gotta get away from this,” Neil said, gesturing to the wreck as he slipped into his pack.

  We had five or six hours until the first licks of nightfall. That meant we could put eight miles between us and the remnants of the tandem bike.

  “Let’s load up and move,” I said.

  We headed out, due north, across wide open ground, but ten minutes into our trek I knew we wouldn’t make the distance I’d anticipated. Neil had perked up, the prior day’s find in the greenhouse boosting his energy, at least for now, but Ben was dragging. He struggled to keep up, forcing us to slow. As the sun touched the western boundary between sky and earth we’d made only five miles.

  “Up to the right,” Neil said, pointing to a drop off in the flat land we’d been traversing.

  We moved there and stopped, a dry gully our home for the night, huge rocks strewn about it. Ben leaned his back against a hunk of weathered granite and slid to the ground, spent.

  “Look what they didn’t find,” Neil said, plucking an orange from the bottom of his pack.

  “They missed the seeds, the food,” Elaine observed. “This is how species go extinct.”

  “Good riddance,” I said.

  Neil held the orange out to me. I took it and passed it to Ben.

  “Thanks,” he said, fingers pulling at the rind to expose the delicacy within.

  Neil passed out the remaining fruit he’d squirreled away and we

  sat in the bouldered gully and feasted as the sun set. I sucked the magnificent pulp surrounding the pit of a peach, savoring the juice in my mouth as I eyed the man who’d saved us.

  “Ben, these are my friends.” I said. “The ugly one is Neil. And the brains of our merry little band is Elaine.”

  Ben stared at us for a moment as he, too, continued to eat. Taking in nourishment that had, for so long, seemed nothing more than a dream.

  “Pleased to meet you,” he said, nodding to me. “That I can even say that I owe to your friend here risking his ass to save mine.”

  “Is it just Ben?” Neil asked. “Like that Moto nut job back there?”

  “Ben Michaels,” he said, then added with some hesitation. “Colonel Ben Michaels.”

  Colonel...

  One of the thugs who’d been setting him up for target practice had called him ‘soldier boy’. I’d forgotten that in the heat of that moment, and those that followed.

  “Military,” Neil said, the words slipping out past a barely hidden sneer.

  “Air Force,” Ben specified.

  “You fall out of the wild blue yonder?” Neil asked with derision.

  Ben absorbed the verbal shot and sized up my lifelong friend. He half smiled and nodded, not surprised by the reaction he was receiving.

  “I get it,” Ben said. “Where was I, where was everybody in uniform, when the world went to hell?”

  It wasn’t a question that required an answer. It was simply a statement of wondering fact.

  “Bingo,” Neil said.

  “I can’t speak for everyone else,” Ben began, “but I was following orders.”

  The man, the Colonel, had a defiant streak in him. Though, in context with the happenings since the onslaught of the blight, one might easily confuse that demeanor with rationalization.

  I knew for certain that Neil was doing just that.

  “Following orders,” my friend mocked. “Where the hell have we heard that before? Auschwitz, maybe?”

  Ben didn’t bite at the bait being heaved openly his way. But he did meet Neil’s gaze, and he didn’t look away. Weakened by the treatment he’d suffered during his short captivity, the Colonel was no match for my friend if they had become a pair of charging bulls. In no way, though, was he backing off his statement, or backing down.

  “Maybe we should put off killing each other until morning,” I suggested.

  Things quieted for a moment and we continued to eat. It was Elaine that broke the silence next with her own question.

  “Why did you save us?”

  For a moment the man seemed to consider his reply. Seemed to weigh any possible wording against some cold, hard truth.

  “A bit of quid pro quo, I’d say,” Ben answered, gesturing next to his leg. “But beyond that, I need your help. I think the whack on the head they gave me was worse than I thought. My balance is all off. My leg is weak. I can’t get to where I need to be in this condition. I can’t complete my mission.”

  “Your mission,” I repeated, the statement on the verge of comical. “You have a mission?”

  “Isn’t everything worth blowing up already wasted?” Neil wondered aloud.

  None of us expected the answer that followed.

  “No,” Ben said, the answer singular and sober.

  I looked to my friends, then back to the military man.

  “Just who the hell are you?” I asked. “You don’t look like a one man army.”

  “I don’t need an army,” Ben said, finishing his orange and spitting the last of the seeds aside, eyeing each
of us with a sort of precious surprise. “You have no idea where you are, do you?”

  “Should we?” Elaine asked.

  As we waited for an answer, I noticed her push a small mound of dirt over the orange seeds the newest member of our group had discarded. Planting them, in essence. The ultimate expression of hope that our mission had been successful. That in a few months a tree might sprout to eventually offer its bounty to any who might pass. A miracle, to be sure, would be required for citrus to grow here in the windswept prairie, but we had already seen enough miraculous sights to not discount the wildly hopeful. The improbably possible.

  “In every direction from where we sit are enough megatons to obliterate most of the planet,” he said.

  I understood. We were in the missile fields of middle America. Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles sat in underground silos, controlled by launch crews in hardened bunkers beneath the earth who waited for orders to fire, and the launch codes that would authenticate any such command.

  “The blight beat your warheads to the punch,” I said. “Most life is obliterated.”

  “Not all,” Ben said. “There are still enemies out there.”

  “So you’re supposed to, what, nuke them?” Neil asked, the question hardly more than a joke.

  Ben didn’t laugh. Instead, he nodded and peeled another orange that had been passed his way, separating the slices and feeding one into his mouth.

  “You’re kidding, right?” Elaine pressed him.

  “I’m not.”

  I looked to my friends, then fixed on the man who’d just informed us he was a bringer of death, a destroyer of worlds.

  “You tell us you need our help, in something like this,” I said, almost incredulous. “I’d like a bit more of an explanation.”

  Neil waved off my question and slid closer to Ben.

  “Forget that,” Neil said. “This is all bullshit.”

  “Is it?” Ben challenged him mildly.

  “You say you were sent on a mission, out here, to launch some nuclear strike?”

  “Yes,” Ben confirmed Neil’s restatement of our understanding.

  “No,” Neil said. “Anyone who can send someone to do that can just order it from wherever they are.”

  “At one time, yes,” Ben said. “Not anymore.”

  “No,” Neil said, shaking his head emphatically. “This is a presidential order? This mission of yours?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re telling us the President has no access to communications that can reach the missile crews?” Neil asked.

  “What missile crews?” Ben asked.

  His question needed no answer. No explanation. In it was both story and quandary. The blight had been in full force for more time than anyone secured underground would be supplied.

  “What happened to the crews?” I asked.

  “We got a lot of ‘see ya later’ transmissions,” Ben said. “Can’t say I blame them. Protocol was that, in case a crew had to abandon the Launch Control Center, the LCC, for any reason, they were supposed to send a final message and then lock the place down.”

  “Wait a minute,” Elaine interjected. “Everything I ever heard through channels was that a remote launch was possible.”

  “Channels?” Ben asked.

  “She was FBI,” I explained.

  “Well, FBI is right,” Ben said. “Or was right. Doing what she suggests requires the infrastructure to support it. Satellites. Planes. We’re trending toward the stone age, my friends.”

  “We saw a plane,” Elaine told him.

  “Grey, flying high,” I added. “East to west.”

  Ben nodded, the revelation no surprise to him.

  “A probe flight,” Ben said. “We’ve been sending them out when we can. That might have been the last one.”

  “Probing for what?” I asked.

  “Places that aren’t affected. Or that have recovered. Mostly overseas. You probably saw one heading to Asia. China, most likely.”

  “You don’t sound enthused by the prospects,” Neil said.

  Ben fed another piece of orange into his mouth.

  “Waste of time.”

  “But you coming here to launch a missile isn’t?” Neil asked.

  “Those are my orders,” Ben told my friend.

  “What makes you the man for this job?” I asked.

  “You mean before Moto’s boys used my head for cricket practice?”

  Ben quieted for a moment, eating still more, a slender line of juice dribbling from one corner of his mouth, the trickle seeming to embarrass him. He reached up and wiped it away with the back of his hand.

  “You’ve all seen the President get on Air Force One,” Ben said. “Or walk across a tarmac toward a limo or a helicopter.”

  “Of course,” Elaine said.

  “The olden days,” Ben said. “You’d see that on TV, and you’d see a guy walking behind him with a briefcase cuffed to his wrist.”

  “The Football,” Elaine said.

  “Give FBI a cookie,” Ben said. “And what is the Football, FBI?”

  Elaine flashed him a tired look, but played along.

  “The Football was a briefcase that contained the codes necessary to initiate a nuclear strike.”

  Ben nodded, working his jaw as if some stiffness was setting in.

  “Did you ever see the guy walking behind him?” Ben asked. “About twenty feet. Just some anonymous Air Force officer. A colonel.”

  “You,” I said.

  “Among others,” Ben confirmed. “But, yes, often that was me.”

  “And what were you?” Elaine asked.

  “We joked that we were Mr. Football.”

  None of us got the inside humor. Ben shifted, straightening against the boulder serving as a backrest.

  “If something happened to the actual Football, there was always one of us with the president,” Ben said. “What was inside that case was also inside us. Up here.”

  He brought a finger to his temple and tapped lightly.

  “You know the codes,” Elaine said. “The codes to launch a strike.”

  “I knew the codes,” Ben corrected. “Those were wiped long ago. Now I only know one. The one for the missile I have to launch.”

  It was an incredible tale. Too incredible to be the fevered ranting of a warped mind. Too fantastic to not be precisely what he was describing. He had nothing to gain from sharing what he was, except what he had stated he needed—our help.

  “Look, I was a day from reaching the LCC to complete my mission when Moto’s people grabbed me. I’d come from a base in the Northeast by helicopter, which ran out of fuel, then by quad, which broke down, and finally walking on my own two feet. I didn’t expect to run into anyone out here.”

  “Expect the unexpected,” I told him, speaking from experience.

  “They found ID on me and thought I was some scout for an attack on their group,” Ben said. “They were trying to beat and scare these imagined plans out of me. That went on for five days. They’d drag me out away from the city and drill rounds past me. If you hadn’t interceded I would have ended up on a plate like the rest of those...people.”

  As driven a man as he was, the thought of what he’d witnessed, what we’d all witnessed, brought a grim halt to his explanation.

  “You said the crews secured the LCCs,” Elaine said. “I don’t imagine there’s a simple lock on a door you stick a key into.”

  “No,” Ben confirmed, coming back from his dark recollections. “But there is a way in. And I need to get there so I can get in and get this over with. I need your help.”

  It was the closest the military man had come to offering a formal plea. But he wasn’t begging. Not yet.

  Our lack of reply, of agreement, though, did elicit a look of incredulous, mild disgust from the man.

  “Do you have any idea what you’re doing?” Ben asked, looking to each of us. “Do you?”

  “Trying to survive,” I told him.

  H
e shook his head and shifted position, leaning toward us. Toward the strangers he’d saved.

  “You’re saving the world,” he said. “Just like I am. We’re just going about it in different ways.”

  “How so?” Elaine pressed him.

  “You’re trying to keep people alive,” he answered. “I’m here to send a fair number to meet their maker.”

  What he was saying didn’t compute. He was saving the world by, what, killing?

  “Losing the cryptic doublespeak would go a long way in convincing us to give you the help you say you need,” Neil said. “What the hell are you supposed to blow up?”

  “Not so much a what as a who,” Ben said.

  “Come again,” Elaine said.

  “There’s a French Legionnaire,” Ben said. “A former commander in—”

  “He commanded a unit in Iraq during the first Gulf War,” I interjected. “A unit with a high proportion of Polish volunteers.”

  Ben eyed me with surprise that bordered on mistrust. As one might regard a person they’d just realized was a double agent.

  “They captured an Iraqi bioweapon scientist there, didn’t they?” I pressed him.

  “How do you know that?”

  I took a moment to share with him the story of Micah, and Eagle One, and our collective encounters with those sporting black uniforms and flying the tricolor flag.

  “The NSA?” Ben asked, more awestruck than surprised now. “He hacked the NSA?”

  “He did,” I assured him. “And a helluva lot more than that.”

  Ben puzzled at the statement. At my gradation of some other act to trump the impossible. To punctuate my words I reached into my pack and retrieved the three plastic vials, holding one out and shaking it, the seeds within rattling softly, like beads in a muted maraca.

  “From that guy’s greenhouse?” Ben asked.

  I shook my head, smiling.

  “From his lab,” I answered, taking another item—the blue notebook—from my pack. “He figured it out. How to beat the blight. It’s all in here.”

  Ben reached across the open space between us and took both the vial of seeds and the notebook in hand. He opened the latter and flipped through the pages of diagrams and formulas and notations.

  “You read this all?”