by Noah Mann
Except in this man. I doubted that few, if any, had ever used his solid moral compass against him without suffering severe consequence.
“Ansel should be done with the power issue,” Dalton told us. “He’ll get you to the transmitter and then set you up for the night.”
“Thank you,” Schiavo said.
“Yes,” I concurred with complete sincerity. “Thank you.”
Dalton gestured toward the exit to the stairs, extending his hand like a servant might to guide the way. Or like a friend. We stepped through the opening and were about to climb back toward the waning daylight when our host spoke again.
“Eighty-two.”
“Pardon,” Schiavo said.
“We have eighty two in our community,” Dalton elaborated.
“That’s a good number to keep alive for so long,” I said.
Dalton nodded, but there was a tinge of melancholy about his agreement.
“We started with two hundred and three,” he said.
More than half his people gone. Friends, and likely some family as well. He’d suffered and persevered. All these things we’d learned about the man in our very brief time with him made me increasingly comfortable toward our unexpected alliance. And, without much thought on it, I knew why.
Martin.
He reminded me of him. Determined. Fair, firm, protective. We’d been greeted by force when first arriving in Bandon, but that iron fist soon changed to an open hand. We were welcomed after our intentions were confirmed. Here, in Dalton, I saw much the same demeanor and calculation. And I thought it certain that Schiavo must have made note of the very same.
“Your people are lucky to have you,” Schiavo said.
Nothing more was said in the basement meeting space. As we climbed the stairs I surveyed the walls, a rough patch job showing over what was likely an even rougher cut through hard earth. They’d dug out this space beneath the building, and there was no doubt that the small room we’d seen was just part of their excavation, which explained much. Our patrols had been spotted, and, like some wily creature, Dalton and his people had retreated to the safety of a manufactured invisibility. That he, and they, had abandoned that defensive posture to intercede in the ambush said much about the level of trust that could develop between our two towns.
We grabbed our weapons and gear from where we’d left them and emerged into the crisp, cool daylight, sun settling toward the western hills. Just up the road, a heavy tow truck rumbled out of a ramshackle building and headed toward the highway, the trio of people visible in the cab giving us a glance as they drove past. In such a wrecker, their only destination could be the site of the ambush to recover our Humvee.
“They don’t waste time,” Hart said.
I looked around, but Gina was nowhere to be seen. She wasn’t guarding the door anymore, nor anything else in view. Still, we were not alone for long as Ansel came around from the back of the building, ducking through a length of chain link peeled back from a rusted fence.
“You all set?”
His question didn’t surprise any of us, nor the haste it hinted at. He hadn’t been down below when Dalton had promised us radio time and shelter, both which the man before us was supposed to arrange.
“We need to send a message to our town,” Schiavo said.
Ansel seemed to puzzle at that, glancing toward the doorway for a second.
“He said you could use the radio?”
“Yeah,” I told him. “And he said you had a place for us to bunk tonight until our vehicle is fixed.”
The man seemed genuinely, if quietly, surprised. He looked briefly again to the door before nodding at us.
“Then I’ll get that done for you,” Ansel said. “Follow me.”
He started off across the street that paralleled the highway. We followed, Schiavo spotting something as we did.
“Specialist...”
Hart looked and saw her point toward the building from which the tow truck had emerged. Moira was just coming out, shoving the old doors closed over the opening, giving the building a look of abandonment and disrepair. Anyone looking from the outside would hardly think anything of use or value was inside.
“You have a patient,” Schiavo said.
“Yes ma’am.”
Hart jogged off toward the woman with the wounded shoulder. Ansel eyed the scene sideways, with restrained suspicion. Maybe they were a couple and he felt some jealousy rising. Maybe. But I didn’t think so. In fact, I didn’t know what to think the man. But I sensed something. Something that wasn’t right.
“Radio is up that trail.”
Ansel stopped and directed us to a worn path through the grey woods at the base of a hill. The ground was damp from snowmelt, but that would not last long. The sky, clear as it was for most of the day, was darkening with clouds, the temperature dropping as a new front moved in. By morning, when, hopefully, we would be on our way home, the land would be dusted white again.
“When you’re done, find me in the back of the old diner,” Ansel told us. “There’s a place there for the three of you.”
Without waiting for an acknowledgment he turned and left us.
“Someone took a leak in his cereal,” Schiavo said, judging the man’s harsh demeanor toward us. “Or he just doesn’t like you.”
“It’s me,” I said.
The captain and I climbed the small hill and made contact with Bandon, Krista answering our call before Westin took over. We gave them a brief rundown of our situation, but Schiavo gave no hint as to the bit of diplomacy she’d engaged in. That would be better done in person, and I was pleased as punch that I would be there to see the reaction of the Defense Council to what she’d arranged.
Twenty One
Night came quick and cold with snow falling just before twelve.
By the time we were ready to turn in, the Humvee had been towed back into town and was pushed into the old garage. Tires for it could be had on the cheap from any number of its brethren that had been abandoned on roads and in fields as efforts to contain lawlessness faltered once the blight had taken hold. The people here would have little difficulty effecting the repairs that had been promised.
Some, though, were not entirely amenable to assisting us.
“Captain,” Hart said, sitting on one of the cots that had been provided for us.
“Yes, Trey?” Schiavo asked, the late hour and full day allowing her to address her medic with some informality.
“The woman,” Hart said. “Moira. There was something about her.”
“I think she’s taken,” I said, attempting a bit of levity.
But Hart shook his head at that. He was dead serious.
“Her wound was...weird.”
Schiavo rolled on her cot and propped herself up on one elbow to face the young soldier.
“How so?”
“It was a laceration, a deep one, really rough. Not from a blade. But when I asked her how it happened she got, I don’t know, quiet, and then she gave me a BS answer.”
“Why is it BS?” I asked.
“She said it was from falling sheet metal,” Hart answered. “That cut wasn’t from anything with a clean edge. To me it looked like a jagged piece of wood did the damage. Splintered wood.”
“There’s enough of that around here,” Schiavo said.
She wasn’t wrong. Every dead tree, at some point, would fall and splinter. A stumble near one could have sent the woman falling against the ragged hunk of wood.
But Hart didn’t think so. He wasn’t saying that, but I could tell. He didn’t openly doubt his captain’s suggestion, but he didn’t embrace it either.
“You patched her up, yes?” Schiavo asked.
“Bandaged and antibiotics,” Hart confirmed.
“Okay, then her injury is her business.”
Schiavo was making it clear that the matter was resolved, at least to her satisfaction. Hart accepted her word and laid back on his cot, settling in for the night, the sound of heavy fla
kes rustling against the corrugated metal patch job that had been done on the roof.
I knew why Schiavo wasn’t keen to entertain any speculation as to the real cause of Moira’s wound—propriety. We’d been in Camas Valley all of eight hours after members of their community had saved us from almost certain death. Openly doubting what any of those people said was not even close to the realm of what was acceptable. Particularly after what Schiavo had managed to arrange with Dalton.
Yes, it was odd that Moira would lie, when there was little apparent reason to. But this was their town, and what happened here was their business. That’s what I believed.
In the morning as we were about to leave, my opinion would change completely.
Twenty Two
Hart drove the Humvee out of the repair shop and into the falling snow, a good inch on the ground already.
“No plows out there ahead of you,” Dalton said as Schiavo and I loaded our gear into the back of the vehicle.
“None needed,” the captain said, thumping the hood of the dark green workhorse. “We’ll replace the tires you put on from our supply.”
“That would be appreciated,” Dalton said.
“We’ll be in touch as soon as everything is formalized,” Schiavo told him.
Dalton reached out and shook her hand again. I took my place in the back, behind Schiavo in the passenger seat. Dalton stepped back from the vehicle, and when he did I could see just past him to where someone stood at the edge of the road. It was Ansel, his face almost unrecognizable through the downpour of white between us.
Wait...
He stood there, looking past his leader, directly at me. Not at the vehicle or the others in it, but at me. Nothing else seemed to hold any interest to him except meeting my gaze. And I suddenly knew why.
Damn...
“Take us home, specialist,” Schiavo said, and Hart got us moving.
I didn’t look away from Ansel as we drove past, nor he from me. I sensed we both knew what had just happened—recognition.
You could be wrong...
I told myself that. It was a possibility. I was far from infallible.
But here, I wasn’t.
“You eager to see your girls, Fletch?”
“I am,” I told Schiavo.
There was more I wanted to tell her. Even in light of how she’d handled Hart’s doubts toward Moira the night before, what I’d just realized about Ansel could not be withheld. Even if it was just my opinion. An opinion that also related to the woman who’d lied about her injury.
But, what if it wasn’t only that? What if there was some evidence? Some fact to back up what I was certain was true? That would take things out of the realm of conjecture.
There was a way. Or there might be. I would know one way or the other once we were back in Bandon.
Twenty Three
I kissed my daughter on the forehead and lowered her into her crib. Elaine stood alongside me and eased a light blanket over our swaddled child. We turned the nightlight on and left Hope to sleep, retiring to the living room.
“Quite the adventure?”
My wife’s question was predicated on what she’d heard, not what I’d shared. And I wasn’t ready to fill her in on all the details as I saw them. Not yet. Not until I had proof that would support what I believed.
“It was that, and then some.”
“Survivors,” she said, settling into the couch as I stood near the fire place, the last of a log burning low in the hearth. “I was starting to think we were all that was left. Around here, anyway.”
“No,” I told her. “We’re not alone.”
She eyed me for a minute, in that way she did when she sensed something wasn’t quite right, her expression both hard and soft at the same time. More worry than wariness in her gaze.
“What’s going on?”
“Nothing,” I said, mostly lying.
She patted the spot next to her on the couch, signaling for me to join her. But I shook my head.
“I need to do something,” I told her.
“What?”
“It’ll only take fifteen minutes.”
My wife’s gaze narrowed down on me.
“Eric, what’s going on?”
I took my coat from where I’d earlier draped it over the back of a chair and slipped into it as Elaine’s stare shifted to the pistol holstered on my hip.
“You didn’t take that off when you got home,” she said, realizing what had been obvious since my return just twenty minutes earlier.
“Fifteen minutes, I promise. Then I’ll tell you. Everything.”
I knew that she trusted me, and my judgment. That didn’t mean she preferred being kept in the dark. But I wasn’t going to alarm her with possibilities. The truth, supported by facts, was what I needed. And what she deserved.
“Fifteen,” she said, allowing a vague smile. “Not sixteen.”
I stepped close and leaned down to plant a soft kiss on her warm lips.
“Be right back.”
* * *
The absence of snow scraping my face was a welcome change from the night I’d chased the intruder from our house, but I let my mind drift back to that evening as I retraced the steps I’d taken in my pursuit. When I reached the end of my progress, where the masked man had stopped me, I paused. This time, though, I did not retreat to my house to call for reinforcements. This time I continued on.
Enderson, Hart, and Westin had searched for the intruders, and had found items in the snow. A radio. A map. And they had also found a splintered fence post where footprints in the deep snow continued on into the dead woods. I came to that post after walking on a minute longer.
The broken support was obvious, just part of an old picket fence that defined the border of a yard at the very end of the neighboring block. Beyond it there were no more houses. Bandon, as a developed town, ended at this point. I turned my flashlight on and swept the area to my rear. A house, empty, stood there. It was one of many in the town still to be rehabilitated for future occupancy. No one had lived in it since its owner abandoned it and fled for California during the blight.
“No one would see you run through here,” I said aloud.
It was a perfect escape route. One that was not stumbled upon by chance. It was planned.
“But you still fell,” I said to myself, shifting the light to the jagged end of the fencepost. “Because you’d never been chased before.”
I crouched close to the post and examined the rough shards of wood pointing upward. Snow had topped the unbroken support that night, and would have covered it again within an hour after it had been snapped. Rain had drenched it in the interim. There was every likelihood that any evidence left at the moment of impact would be washed away. Gone.
But it wasn’t.
“Blood,” I said.
There it was. The tawny, fibrous internal structure of the old post was stained a dark color. Black, it appeared, with a tinge of crimson. Someone had been injured right here.
“Moira.”
I rose and shined my flashlight into the woods, shades of black and grey defining the darkened landscape. No one out there. Not now. But I had what I needed. Confirmation of a suspicion. Evidence of a lie.
But what to do with it?
* * *
Elaine listened to me lay out everything. When I’d finished, she thought for a moment, considering the possibilities I’d just told her.
“It’s forty miles to Camas Valley,” she said. “Could they have made it back there without being missed?”
“They have vehicles.”
“In the storm that night they’d need them,” Elaine said.
And who would have followed through the blizzard?
“What do you think?”
There was zero hesitation in my wife’s reply.
“You can’t keep this to yourself.”
“I know,” I said.
The only question was when and where to share what I’d learned. With whom was a
given.
Part Three
The Alliance
Twenty Four
“They have batteries,” Schiavo told the Defense Council, correcting herself for effect. “Let me rephrase that—they are making batteries.”
Years ago, in the old world, such a statement would have been greeted with shrugs. But this was not the world of convenience stores with well-stocked shelves, or online retailers where everything from a triple A to a lead acid car battery could be ordered and delivered the next day.
“One of their people is a chemist and worked in the industry,” Schiavo said, relaying what Dalton had shared with her to even the scales of the agreement being proposed. “What they produce is crude, but they work. That’s according to Dalton.”
Mayor Allen, whose connection to the position he held had seemed diminished following the passing of his wife, leaned forward, as if energized by what was being said.
“Batteries,” he said, looking to the rest of us.
Us...
That grouping included one who’d missed several meetings recently, for good reason—Elaine. She sat next to me, Martin on her other side. Every few minutes she’d glance instinctively toward the room’s door, which was open just a crack. Beyond it, in an office across the hall where a small, folding crib had been set up, Krista sat with our sleeping daughter, her first foray into babysitting. My wife had insisted that she be part of the meeting, something that I could have argued against if it weren’t for the fact that there was no reason she shouldn’t be. Yes, she was a mother now, with a very small infant to care for, but I’d remembered my father telling stories about his grandmother keeping the farm going after my great grandfather died in a blizzard, leaving her with those forty acres and three young children. Elaine, I knew, was made of the same stuff. Even more so, I knew from experience.
“Martin...”
The town’s former leader looked to the man who’d replaced him.
“Yes?”
“What is our supply of batteries?” the mayor asked.
Martin had kept himself involved in the logistics of the town’s supply of non-food consumables, be they produced locally or scavenged. Everything from toilet paper to light bulbs to pencils was his purview. Batteries, the life blood of so many necessary electronic devices, large and small, had become a concern of late.
