Avenger (The Bugging Out Series Book 6)

by Noah Mann

  “Thanks.”

  “It’s great to have something like Hope to come home to, eh?”

  The medic’s words brought a smile to my face. What was that cliché? Absence made the heart grow fonder?

  Damn straight, it did.

  “You got that right,” I said.

  We left town and drove east as the sun rose on this new day we’d been granted.

  Fifteen

  Remote sat along Highway 42, two lanes of blacktop that wound inland from coastal Oregon. The town’s most notable feature was an old covered bridge that crossed Sandy Creek, a minor stream that spilled into the Coquille River just south of the highway. The span had long ago ceased to function as a thoroughfare and was, at some point, converted into a pedestrian crossing and attraction of sorts, with historical markers and picnic benches beneath its peaked roof.

  Schiavo and I strolled carefully onto it from the east side as Hart stood on the bank of the creek and tossed stones into the babbling water flowing past.

  “It feels sturdy,” the captain said.

  It did. But my concern was the structure above. Weather had penetrated the shingled roof, the assault of wind and rain and snow unchecked and unrepaired for years now.

  “Those timber supports will need to be rebuilt,” I pointed out.

  She looked at the growing damage over our heads and shook hers.

  “This isn’t a vital structure,” she said. “Except for the wood that’s left.”

  We’d be using that elsewhere in town, I suspected, to make repairs where they were needed most.

  “Hart,” Schiavo called out, and the specialist jogged up from the bank of the creek as we left the bridge and returned to the Humvee.

  The medic drove us through the tiny hamlet, to scattered houses where we stopped and performed cursory inspections. Half of the buildings would require substantial work to make them safe for habitation. Most of the rest were usable with only repairs necessary to seal the houses against the weather. A few were beyond hope, and would need to be scavenged for materials to allow the remaining structures to survive.

  “There’s a cluster of buildings to the south,” Schiavo said, pointing as we came down Sandy Creek Road.

  A short drive from the bridge, across the highway and along Remote Lane, we reached a small white structure with a rusting old gas pump in front. A sign, faded by sun and the elements, was barely readable where it was mounted at the edge of a rickety overhang.

  “Remote Store,” Hart said, reading the signage as he pulled the Humvee to a stop in the road in front of the structure.

  Another board dangled from a single nail, some letters painted upon it once identifying the building as a U.S. Post Office. Schiavo walked toward the building and pulled the board down. It fell to the soggy ground and snapped into three pieces.

  “This is in rough shape,” I said, surveying the outside. “New clapboards on at least the west facing wall. Same for the roof. We’re going to need to find a fair amount of shingles to make this and the other buildings weather tight.”

  Schiavo nodded, but said nothing. Instead she stepped back, further into the narrow road, and gave the old store a once over from this new vantage point.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “This would make a decent administrative center,” she said. “Town Hall, garrison outpost, take your pick.”

  She wasn’t wrong. If the building could be made safe and functional, its location, just far enough from the small residential cluster, would make it almost perfect for a group wary of the trappings of government. But for that to even be an issue, there would need to be that presence.

  “Are you thinking of dividing the garrison?”

  “I am,” she told me.

  Specialist Trey Hart perked up at that statement. He came around the front of the Humvee to face his leader.

  “You’re going to split us up, ma’am?”

  “I think we should have someone here while people get settled,” Schiavo told him. “Two of you.”

  Hart looked to the old store, seeming to contemplate the structure for a moment before facing the captain again.

  “I’d like to volunteer,” the young soldier announced.

  Schiavo regarded him without voicing a thought one way or the other.

  “It makes sense to have some medical personnel here,” Hart told her. “A forty mile drive on that road is one hell of a haul for Commander Genesee to make a house call. And Mayor Allen...”

  Doc Allen, to everyone who’d known him before he’d taken on the role of the town’s elected leader, was well along in years. In the old world he would have been retired and enjoying leisurely walks and breakfasts on the porch with his wife. His late wife. Her absence had only seemed to bring the detriments of aging into more focus where it concerned him. He possessed all his mental faculties, but something in his spirit had most definitely been weakened. His shoulders stooped a bit more. His gaze was lucid but lackluster. In a pinch he could, and had, helped Commander Genesee in the hospital. How much longer that would hold true was not certain.

  “He’s got a point,” I said.

  Highway 42 was passable. We’d had to cut and push a few fallen trees from the roadway to clear the way forward, but the pavement was sketchy at best along several stretches. Until we could manage to make repairs, which could take months, the battered road was going to be the only reasonable lifeline between Bandon and the new settlement.

  “Okay,” Schiavo said, granting his request.

  Another member of the garrison would certainly volunteer to join Hart in this temporary assignment, leaving the captain free from having to choose.

  “Should we check out your new billet, specialist?” Schiavo asked.

  Hart smiled and led the way into the old store.

  There wasn’t much to see inside. Anything not part of the actual building had been scavenged. Bits of trash and glass were scattered about, remnants of some previous investigation of the premises.

  “Your thoughts, Fletch?”

  I’d already begun thumping the walls by the time Schiavo solicited my opinion, as she had on the other houses and outbuildings we’d scouted already.

  “I’m not seeing anything too bad,” I told her. “Except for the exterior items, this is in surprisingly good shape. Better than just about any we’ve looked at.”

  There was even some glass still in the windows. I looked through the one on the eastern wall, a long, narrow structure just outside across a swath of muddy ground, maybe fifty feet from the garrison’s new outpost. I’d noticed it on the way in, a garage or workshop of some sort, I thought, the wide wooden door that faced the street splintered and peeled back to reveal a dark interior.

  “I’m going to go check that building next door,” I told Schiavo and Hart. “We might be able to borrow from it to refurbish this exterior.”

  Schiavo gave me a nod and I left them, crossing the space to the front of what I was certain now had been some sort of storage building. Instinctively I readied my grip on my AR as I stepped into the opening where the main door had once hung. There was no expectation of a threat from within. Or from anywhere, for that matter. Whatever intrusion there’d been back in Bandon, this location, forty miles away, was too distant to serve as any haven for those who’d perpetrated the break-ins.

  For an instant, though, I flashed back to my encounter with the starving grizzly north of my refuge in Montana. That creature had come through a sturdy wall as I searched for a usable automotive battery, and only a few fortunate shots from the very weapon I still carried saved me that day.

  There would be no bear here. I knew that. But the ingrained need to be ready took over as I kept my finger alongside and just above the trigger and retrieved a small flashlight from my pocket, its narrow beam cutting across the trashed space, revealing what had once been an old pickup, just frame and rusted cab now resting on the gravel floor. Old oil drums lay on their side near the west wall, a door there closed, windows
nearby broken out. I scanned the rafters above, all seeming solid, as did the exposed interior wall framing.

  The remainder of the space was just a picked over conglomeration of open crates, broken containers, and shelving tipped and piled in one corner. Nothing of much use or interest lay anywhere within the four walls. I thought that until I my flashlight beam swept a spot on the floor just behind a pair of upright 55 gallon drums.

  I froze, the light fixed on the cleared-out spot, no trash or discarded items littering the floor there, the area purposely swept clean. But not empty.

  Two rocks...

  That was what had seized my attention. Two small rocks. They were arranged close to each other, with a narrow space left between them. I stepped close and crouched, shifting my light to illuminate the sides of the rocks that faced each other. Each was scarred black. Charred. By some small but intense fire that had burned between them. Like a flame from some chemical fuel tablet.

  Exactly how Olin had heated his food at his hideaway near Bandon. Two rocks, a fuel source, in a place that provided shelter, and cover.

  He’d been here. The man who’d murdered my friend had crouched right where I was and tended to his covert fire. But when? Before he came to Bandon, or after he’d done his damage and slipped away?

  “Fletch...”

  It was Schiavo. She’d come through the open front of the building and was sweeping her flashlight across the space. I stood so the beam could find me.

  “What is it?” she asked. “What did you find?”

  I motioned her over and showed her the compact cooking arrangement. She puzzled at my interest in it, but only until I spoke.

  “Olin cooked just like this where he holed up,” I said. “Exactly like this.”

  She stepped a bit past me and crouched to examine the rocks, dragging a finger gently across one’s top.

  “There’s a layer of dust,” she said, scanning the otherwise unremarkable space and its hodgepodge of discarded contents. “This could have been here for months, Fletch.”

  I knew that. But it was a sign, a concrete indication, that Tyler Olin hade come through this very place.

  “He’s not here,” Schiavo said, standing again. “There’s no reason for him to be here.”

  “Of course there is. BA Four Twelve.”

  The biological agent that was cousin to BA 411, the engineered cause of the blight. A companion disease that would do to humans what eleven had done to plant life the world over.

  “We don’t have it,” Schiavo reminded me.

  “No,” I said. “But he doesn’t know that.”

  Neil’s brief message hidden in Krista’s drawings had confirmed Four Twelve’s existence, and gave simple directions on how to mimic it, an act which had allowed me to threaten the Unified Government’s forces into ending their siege of Bandon and fleeing. The same message had also promised that the real sample of the deadly bioweapon was somewhere safe. But Neil had been killed before he could share the location, if he’d been inclined to do so at all.

  “He could still be looking for it,” I told the captain.

  She eyed me for a moment, then nodded as her gaze dipped briefly.

  “He told you, didn’t he?”

  “Who?” I asked.

  “Martin,” she answered. “He told you he thinks you were specifically targeted.”

  I hadn’t considered that the man had told his wife about what he’d discovered while investigating any link between the break-ins. But it did not surprise me that he had.

  “He thinks the other burglaries were diversions,” I said.

  “Fletch...”

  “Olin wants Four Twelve,” I said. “He asked where it was when he called my house.”

  “And then he disappeared,” Schiavo reminded me. “What is that, nine months ago? Nine and a half? If he’d wanted to keep looking for it, he wouldn’t have taken almost a year off.”

  Tyler Olin was a patient man. He’d crossed the desolate country to seek out our shared friend. I expect he’d thought Neil would hand over the sample of Four Twelve he’d spirited away from the government, but something had convinced him that his old partner in spying was not going to be so cooperative. So he killed him.

  He killed my friend.

  “Fletch, if he was here, he’s long gone. There’s zero evidence of any other conclusion.”

  “And Martin?”

  She considered her words for a moment, choosing carefully.

  “Martin cares. About you. About the town. About everyone. That makes him...”

  “Wrong?”

  Schiavo hadn’t considered that challenge to the opinion she was offering, and, in the end, she wouldn’t counter it.

  “Jittery,” she said. “He sees shadows, and things in the shadows.”

  “He wasn’t wrong about Quincy,” I reminded Schiavo, her husband’s singular role in unmasking the Unified Government’s traitor in our midst undeniable.

  “I know,” Schiavo said. “I know. But this isn’t that. Okay? This is a couple of rocks and my husband showing concern for a friend. Don’t let the two combine to create some reality that simply doesn’t exist.”

  There was enough doubt in what I was thinking, and what Martin had suggested, to put any true fear aside. Add to that the certainty with which Schiavo was trying to soothe any fears on my part, and I had to admit the unlikelihood of what I was thinking. Tyler Olin wasn’t here now. He wasn’t anywhere to be seen now. There were no other signs that he was, or had been.

  “Okay,” I said, sweeping my boot across the dusty floor to knock the pair of rocks away. “Let’s—”

  “Captain!”

  It was Hart. He stood at the doorway, peering in, his gaze then shifting to something off to his right.

  “You need to see this.”

  We moved quickly to the door and joined Hart outside, each of us looking to the east at a column of dense black smoke rising in the distance.

  “Camas Valley?” Schiavo wondered aloud.

  The direction was right, maybe just a bit north of due east. Even the distance seemed possible. But it would have to be one hell of a fire for the smoke column to loft as high as it was.

  “That’s ten miles,” Hart said. “Something big is burning.”

  “Thank God everything is wet,” I said.

  The blizzard had left coastal Oregon and points inland blanketed in white. The two weeks since had left a soggy mess where the unusual abundance of snow had melted, only a few patches of it remaining in deeply shaded spots. Were this two months later, with the dead forest dried out, any substantial fire, combined with even a slight wind, could sweep across the landscape, endangering every town that remained standing. Including Remote.

  “We need to check it out,” Schiavo said.

  I looked to the sun, arcing past noon to the west already. We had the time to do a quick run toward Camas Valley, maybe fifteen miles by the highway, before darkness would make a return trip to Bandon treacherous on the spotty road.

  “Specialist, let them know what we’re doing.”

  Hart heeded his captain’s order and hustled to the Humvee, operating the radio from the front seat for a moment before returning.

  “Ma’am, I’m not sure they can hear.”

  “Too much terrain in the way,” I said.

  The rise and fall of the landscape, made up of hills large and small, was, at least in our present position, preventing any direct radio communication.

  “They may not be acknowledging,” Schiavo said. “But they may be hearing us. We’ll transmit along the way while we check it out.”

  “You sure about this?”

  My challenge, mild as it was, was acceptable. I wasn’t one of Captain Angela Schiavo’s troops. But that didn’t stop Hart from shooting me a quick look that doubted the wisdom of my choice to do so.

  “Do we really need to know what’s burning?” she asked, voicing the crux of my doubt. “No.”

  “But you want to,” I said. />
  “That’s out of the ordinary,” she said, pointing at the twisting ribbon of smoke rising ever higher. “I like ordinary. Ordinary things don’t surprise. Right now I’m surprised that something in this soggy landscape found a way to ignite. Aren’t you?”

  I was. And she was right—ordinary, as boring as it might be, was good. It was safe. This was something else.

  “How long to Camas Valley?” Schiavo asked.

  “Thirty minutes,” Hart Said. “Probably closer to forty five considering the condition of the highway.”

  “Not with me at the wheel,” Schiavo said, and started off toward the driver’s side of the Humvee.

  “Shotgun,” I said.

  “Be my guest,” Hart said.

  We joined the captain in the vehicle and she pulled away from what would become the garrison outpost in Remote. Back on the highway she kept a lead foot on the accelerator, steering us along the winding road toward the smoke billowing skyward beyond the hills.

  Sixteen

  We estimated we were within a mile of the origin of the smoke when we could go no further.

  “Wonderful,” Schiavo said as she slowed the Humvee and stopped it a dozen yards short of the obstruction, thumping the steering wheel lightly in frustration. “Just wonderful.”

  “I’ll check it out,” I said.

  I left the passenger door of the idling vehicle open as I approached the stout, fallen tree that lay across the two lanes of blacktop. It had split into sections upon impact, the blight long ago robbing it of any interior structural integrity. But those pieces, seven to ten feet in length, and each a full thirty inches in diameter, were multi-ton hunks of dead wood that would be difficult to push clear using the Humvee, even if attempting such was wise.

  Which it wasn’t. We still hadn’t been able to definitively reach Bandon via the radio since setting out from Remote, and all we needed was to disable our means of transportation trying to bash our way through the remnants of the massive fir in our path. An up close look at the monster tree only confirmed that it wasn’t going anywhere, which meant the cause of the smoke ahead near Camas Valley would have to remain a mystery. If it were as small as the few pines we’d had to clear on our way to Remote we might have been able—