Avenger (The Bugging Out Series Book 6)

by Noah Mann

  And that was it.

  People wandered away, families and friends and neighbors grouped and chatting, some sharing stories of their brief interactions with members of the San Diego survivor colony that had taken place during times of darkness and elation in Skagway. Snippets of lives recounted. Brief recollections. That’s all that was left of their lives, most buried nameless, only a few bearing identification on their person that would allow some marker to be crafted with any true specificity.

  “It’s important that we did this.”

  I looked to my right, to the familiar voice. Grace smiled at me, Brandon bundled and asleep on her shoulder.

  “So many have died with no remembrance,” she said.

  “You sound like Elaine.”

  “Thank you,” Grace said, taking my simple statement of fact as the compliment it was.

  “Where’s Krista?”

  Grace gestured with a nod. Just beyond, her daughter was jogging ahead of those leaving the cemetery, obvious haste about her.

  “She’s in a heck of a hurry,” I said, and Grace smiled at her daughter just before she disappeared beyond the entrance to the cemetery.

  “It’s almost two,” Grace said. “She’s late.”

  I puzzled at what she’d said.

  “The broadcast,” Grace reminded me.

  “Right.”

  Our beacon. That’s how I thought of the daily broadcast, transmitted at precisely one in the afternoon, every single day for the past two months since the Defense Council had authorized the effort to bring any still alive into our community. To grow our population. Krista had taken on the responsibility, with the blessing of the garrison’s com expert, Westin, who I was certain was pleased to be freed of the rather mundane task. Krista had embraced that aspect of her time at Micah’s transmitter, just as she’d done at my Montana refuge while attempting to connect with Eagle One.

  “She loves being useful,” Grace told me.

  “Just imagine her at twenty,” I said. “She’ll be running this town.”

  Grace nodded, though it wasn’t a wholly joyful expression of agreement.

  “She won’t know a real childhood,” Grace said.

  That was true in many respects. But the world was what it was. And we were doing our best to make what rose from the ashes a better place, not just a flawed recreation of the flawed original.

  “She’s a pioneer,” I told Grace. “When we’re bones in the ground, she’ll be able to look back and know how far we came. That may not be the way it should have been, but, it’s not a bad thing.”

  Grace accepted my honest, if hopeful, appraisal with a nod.

  “You should probably get home to that new baby,” Grace said.

  “That’s the plan.”

  I leaned in and gave my friend’s widow a peck on the cheek, and planted another on the beanie-covered head of their son, dead to the world on her shoulder. Soon Brandon would move beyond toddling. He would walk. Run. Fall. Get up. He would have a childhood the same as my Hope would.

  “You should bring the kids by,” I said. “Elaine would love the company.”

  Grace nodded and grinned, knowing and doubt in the gesture.

  “Yeah, I think you’re gonna need a few days to acclimate,” she said. “Trust me.”

  She reached out with her free hand and put a palm against my cheek, then tapped it playfully before turning and following the tail end of the procession of townspeople out of the cemetery, leaving me alone.

  But as I began walking toward the exit, I realized I was not the last one present in the place where the dead rested for eternity. A dozen yards away, near a bare pear tree, its limbs stripped of their leaves by the season, a man stood. A good man.

  “Doc...”

  Everett Allen, man of medicine, mayor of our town, turned toward me as I approached. He managed a smile, then once again faced the headstone that marked the grave of his wife.

  “How are you, Fletch?”

  “I’m a father,” I told him. “That makes me ecstatic and terrified.”

  The man I would always think of as Doc, despite his political title, gave a light chuckle and turned back to the slab of chiseled stone bearing the name Carol Allen. A pair of artists, more used to working with clay and paints in the world as it was, came together to craft the headstone for the man, and his late wife, who were respected by all. He stood on the wintry carpet and reached a bare hand to brush snow from the top of the marker.

  “I just wanted to spend a little time with my girl after the service,” he said.

  I felt a warm bulge build in my throat, emotion rising at the simple display of love the man had for the woman that was no longer at his side. Decades of marriage, of companionship, had forged a bond that separation by death could not break. It was a lovely, heartbreaking thing to bear witness to.

  “This tree’s going to be lovely once spring comes,” I said.

  He finished clearing the top of his wife’s stone and looked to the nearby pear tree, gangly, barren limbs seeming pained and lifeless. But within there was vigor just waiting for the slumber to pass.

  “It’ll be nice shade,” he said. “I was thinking about bringing a folding chair up here with me once it warms up. On occasion. Then I can sit and have a nice talk with her.”

  “That sounds nice,” I told the doc.

  He considered my affirmation for a moment, then his smile grew a bit, and he set a knowing gaze upon me.

  “It sounds like an old man who doesn’t know what to do with himself now that half of who he was is gone.”

  “Doc...”

  He waved off my apologetic concern.

  “Fletch, that’s just the way I grieve. I imagined most folks my age do the same when they lose the love of their life.”

  Words were all I had to offer, and words were inadequate. At least to me they were.

  “You should come by and see Hope,” I said, ignoring Grace’s advice to embrace the ‘we’ time that Elaine and I would have with our daughter. “She’s kind of adorable.”

  “I imagine she’s just that and a fair measure more. I’ll pay a visit in a few days after you and Elaine get used to not being a duo anymore.”

  I nodded and took in the feel of the winter’s day. It was cold but not bone chilling. Not like Montana winters could be. This was an anomaly. A freak blizzard that blanketed and battered the coast. Were there news stations still reporting, I imagine it would have been a major story. A storm of suitably biblical proportions—or at least the news copy would read as such. So much of the old world that had been hyped in both good times and bad now seemed so...mundane. The world was real now. What we saw and felt and experienced had little, if any, filters. Truths were easier to identify.

  At least in the case of Doctor Everett Allen. He was putting on a brave face. Carrying on. Surviving.

  But this act of survival, compared to what he’d gone through to weather the blight and the collapse of civilization, was taking a greater toll. I could see that in him. In the slackness of his shoulders. In his weary smile. His almost listless gaze.

  The truth I knew at this moment was that I was worried about him.

  “Do come by, Doc,” I said. “Please.”

  He reached out and shook my hand, but said no more. I left him, and when I looked back just before passing through the open cemetery gates I could see him, one hand planted on his wife’s headstone, leaning against it, his gaze cast upward, to the blue heavens above.

  Nine

  We were making progress and moving backward at the same time.

  Six women were expecting, and the town’s sewage had begun to flow into the Coquille River, untreated. The grazing fields had greened enough through spring and summer to support our livestock without requiring the pulp processor, and a pair of cows had escaped their fenced pasture and were struck and killed by a military truck hauling barrels of diesel from the refining plant. Sapling spruce and fir trees had been planted and were growing, but one of the
bee colonies brought in on the Rushmore’s first visit to Bandon had swarmed and headed off, perhaps confused by the scent of dead foliage persistent in the air.

  And, yet again, we’d been reminded that we were not alone. The pilfering, which had initially been blamed on local youth, was discovered to be the act of outsiders. How many was not known. Possibly it was just the two I’d encountered, a man and a woman. A couple who’d survived and were scavenging in carefully planned intrusions. Talk amongst the members of the Defense Council had turned to the question if the town needed to increase its readiness once more, as it had when the Unified Government forces surrounded us on three sides. Not to that level of preparation for armed conflict, but sufficient to have some chance of stopping the thieves before one of our own was hurt. Or worse.

  But the most exciting thing to happen, in terms of reestablishing humanity’s foothold on a brighter future, had nothing to do with any efforts we’d undertaken. Or with any vigor we applied to our own defense. It came by chance, with Dave Arndt walking near the beach one morning, staring absently out to the Pacific. Twenty minutes later, after a giddily frantic call from him over the radio, a good half the town was crammed onto a bluff, some with binoculars, though Dave had assured us that none would be necessary.

  “Just keep looking,” he told us.

  Schiavo and Martin stood with me, Sergeant Lorenzen and Specialist Hart on the far side of the crowd, every eye fixed on the ocean, gazes sweeping the rolling waters beyond the towering rocks. Once again I hadn’t wanted to come when the phone rang at our house, and once again Elaine reminded me of the status I’d achieved in the town, telling me it would raise questions if I was absent from a potentially important event. That was how Martin had relayed the information to me, saying that Dave assured that what we would see would ‘shake the earth’. In light of the spate of temblors we’d experienced, his choice of words was probably not appropriate. More telling, though, was his refusal to tell anyone what he saw, insisting that it had to be seen so that its full effect could be experienced.

  “I have a baby at home I could be gawking at,” I said.

  A week it had been since our daughter arrived. Seven days of sleepless nights and restless days. And I’d loved every minute of it. Every second with the being which I had no concept how much I could love.

  “If Dave Arndt says we need to see something,” Martin told me.

  “I know,” I agreed.

  Dave was as solid a citizen as they came. There had to be a compelling reason for him to be as cagy as he was being.

  A few seconds after I had that thought, the reason became abundantly clear in a shower of spray a few hundred yards off the beach.

  “Holy...”

  Schiavo’s truncated reaction was almost lost amongst the gasps and joyful curses rolling through the crowd.

  “Was that a...”

  Martin, too, seemed stunned to the point of near silence by what we’d just seen.

  “Yes,” Dave said. “That’s a whale.”

  Despite the promise that we wouldn’t need binoculars to see what would happen, an assurance that had been spot on, Schiavo raised those that she’d brought along and zeroed in on the continuing event, more blasts from the creature’s blowhole jetting upward beyond the light surf.

  “This isn’t possible,” I said with obvious uncertainty. “Is it?”

  “Apparently we’re not the only survivors,” Martin said.

  “Many species of whales subsist on the tiniest organisms in the ocean,” Dave Arndt said. “A lot of those live off of decaying matter. Which, one can assume, has been plentiful in everywhere after in the wake of the blight.”

  “Even hundreds of feet under the sea?” Schiavo asked, lowering the binoculars as she laid a doubting gaze on the man.

  “Hey, college was a long time ago,” Dave said. “And I took Marine Biology because I needed a science course, not because I expected to need it to understand this. But that’s what I remember.”

  Schiavo thought on that for a moment, then flashed Dave a smile.

  “Fair enough,” she said, turning to Martin and me next. “If something that big survived...”

  “Maybe there’s hope for a fishing fleet somewhere down the road,” Martin surmised.

  Bandon had been a fishing village at one time, and up until the blight struck a small number of boats made their way past the lighthouse on a near daily basis to seek their bounty from the ocean. I’d been told this by more than one local who’d known the joy of fresh fish purchased right off the dock, and I wanted to think that, someday, I’d be able to experience the same with Elaine and Hope.

  That, though, was a day which might be far off. Right now it was enough to see what we were, and to realize how buoying it was to everyone’s spirits. That collective joy was plain in the crowd that had come to witness proof that nature was more resilient than we’d given it credit for.

  But the numbers that I saw behind me, staring with glee out to the ocean, did not represent all who lived in Bandon. Nor all who I’d expected would be present. A very distinct group of residents was not in attendance. Their absence, I thought, could be nothing other than purposeful.

  And that purpose was made plain to me less than twenty-four hours later after a knock on my door.

  Ten

  They didn’t approach Mayor Allen, or Captain Schiavo. Or even her husband, Martin, who’d led Bandon through the worst of times to a more prosperous now.

  They chose me to share that they wanted to leave.

  “We want to start fresh somewhere,” Mike DeSantis said as we stood in the shelter of my porch, a light rain falling beyond. “It’s time, Fletch.”

  The man, who’d just turned forty, was not a Bandon local. He’d come to the isolated town a few months before I’d arrived. Originally from Seattle, he knew that there was no returning to that city, if there was anything left of it to go home to. Besides being overrun by the drug-crazed hordes soon after the blight ravaged our civilization, it was to be expected that every manner of human caused disaster had plagued the once shining city. Fires. Vandalism. Contamination. Destruction.

  “Is there any more reason than what you’ve said?” I asked.

  Mike looked to those who’d accompanied him to my house—Nick Withers and Rebecca Vance. Neither appeared to be keen on elaborating any more than what their spokesman had already offered. But what they were suggesting, or even planning, I felt deserved at least some measure of explanation.

  “This isn’t a prison,” I said. “No one is going to force anyone to stay where they don’t want to be. But a lot of people have sacrificed, have given everything there is to give, so that you all can stand here right now and freely say you want to turn your back on that.”

  “It’s not like that, Fletch,” Nick said.

  Nick and I had come through a firefight in the woods nearly a year ago. He’d experienced first-hand what facing death was.

  “Fletch, people weren’t happy with the captain during the siege,” Mike said. “A good number of people. Dozens.”

  To be certain, Captain Angela Schiavo had made some tricky decisions during the time our town was encircled by the Unified Government forces, and I’d warned her that some would be resistant to her desire to collect a portion of the residents’ personal ammunition stores. But had the reaction to that, or to something else, risen to the level that some of our friends, our neighbors, now wanted to flee the community beginning to rise from the ashes of the blight?

  “We lost more than half our ammo,” Rebecca reminded me. “Half, Fletch.”

  The woman spoke to me with an AK strapped across her back

  “And what is with this so-called Defense Council?” Rebecca challenged. “Defense against what?”

  “The unknown,” I answered, with complete honesty.

  “It sounds authoritarian,” Mike said.

  It was clear they held strong feelings about the concerns they were airing. I had to remind myself that, even if
I did not agree with their beliefs and any conclusions they were drawing, I had to attempt to be understanding. These were good people, I knew. Good people who were drifting away from what Bandon was, and what it was becoming.

  “And now there’s talk about bringing the checkpoints back,” Nick said.

  “We’ve had intruders,” I reminded them. “You know that. We have to be on guard.”

  “Right,” Rebecca said, her sarcasm plain. “First it was local kids doing the robberies. Now it’s some big scary unknown group of people. This is classic manipulation by the government, Fletch. You know that. You saw it when the blight first hit. Distract the people from what’s really happening. Stage events.”

  I’d seen plenty, but I hadn’t seen anything staged. Not the shooting of the driver at the checkpoint near Arlee, nor the downing of the passenger jet by an Air Force fighter played over and over on the TV news. Maybe Rebecca had seen things which I hadn’t been privy to. Or maybe she was letting old fears and beliefs inform her view of the present.

  “It’s probably just a few people, Rebecca,” I told her. “We’re just being cautious. There’s no army out there again.”

  “So you say.”

  I wasn’t getting through to her. In fact, I wasn’t sure I should even bother trying. It was plain to me that they’d come here with their mind made up. They’d thought this through, agreed on a course of action, and taken the first steps to make that happen.

  “Fletch,” Mike began, “the bottom line is that a group of us wants to settle somewhere else. To have more control over how we do things.”

  “And don’t do things,” Rebecca added, some fire still in her.

  Nick reached into an old bag slung from one shoulder and retrieved something. It was small and wrapped with plain brown paper, but a bright pink ribbon circled it, a frilly bow topping the obvious present.

  “We brought this for Hope,” Nick said, handing the gift over.