by Noah Mann
“There’ll be one sentry behind us on the roof of the bank,” Neil said as I helped him toward the front of the old store. “And another one a few hundred yards due west of us.”
“No one else?” I asked.
“Nobody skips the rallies,” he assured me. “Mothers take their infants.”
We just had to avoid being spotted by those charged with being lookouts. Neil, it seemed, had made a habit of gathering intelligence on the machinations of Perkins’ colony and its inhabitants. No doubt aided by abilities honed during his secretive former life, he had obviously been planning for the very escape we’d carried out—only without me in attendance. He’d fixed where threats would be. Guards. Groups of survivors. Sentries. All to make his breakout and flight from captivity...
Wait...
That word which had rattled off in my thoughts took on sudden extra importance.
Flight...
It could mean ‘to run’, which had been its intended usage in my head. But it also meant something else.
“Can you still fly?” I asked my friend as we neared the front of the trashed old store.
“A plane?” he reacted, surprised at the question.
But only for a moment.
“You came in on a plane,” he said.
“Perkins’ and his people have it,” I said. “We landed on a road just west of the river.”
We paused near the front door of the business which I could now tell, from remnants of lettering on its broken windows, that it had been a liquor store. Neil looked to me, a hint of some energy rising in him.
“He’ll have it at the airport by now,” Neil told me.
I nodded.
“They were hooking up a tow strap when we drove past on his throne-mobile,” I said, a realization of one complicating factor rising. “The airport has to be five miles from where we are.”
“Just about,” Neil confirmed.
“We’ll never make it there before they lock things down tight,” I said.
“Once they find us gone it’s going to be hunting season,” my friend said.
“We can’t fly out of here,” I said, disappointed.
It would have been the quickest manner of escape from Perkins and his people. We could be back in Bandon in a few hours. But it wasn’t going to happen that way. There would be no sneaking onto the airport grounds to set off in the plane that Dave Arndt had piloted before his death.
Before his murder.
“Perkins doesn’t know that,” Neil said.
“What?” I pressed, not following where he was going with his statement.
“Perkins will think just what you were,” Neil explained. “The plane would be our fastest way out. He’ll have people swarming to the south near the airport. And west where you first landed. His people have occupied the northern section of town, so that will be covered.”
Now I understood. But I did not like the reality of what my friend was suggesting. Not at all.
“We have to go east,” I said.
“Yes,” Neil confirmed.
East was away from Bandon. Away from home.
“We’ll have to hurry north before the show ends, then cut across the residential areas,” Neil said.
I stared at him for a few seconds. Time was precious, I knew. We had to beat the horde of followers who would do Perkins’ bidding and hunt us down.
“Detour is the best option,” Neil told me.
“I know,” I said, looking outside to the dark, deserted streets that would not be that in a very short time. “Let’s move.”
* * *
It took us three minutes to cross the four-lane avenue just north of our position, and five more to make our way through the brown and dusty yards behind homes in the residential enclave before we turned east, hugging the sides of buildings to shield us from the view of any sentries perched on higher vantage points.
“This one we’ve gotta cross fast,” Neil said as we left a neighborhood and skirted a pair of stores which faced a large boulevard.
“I can’t hear the crowd anymore,” I said.
“We’re too far,” Neil reminded me. “We’ll know when—”
And then we knew. To our right as we emerged from between the two stores, the section of the city we’d fled began to light up right before the clanging alarm was sounded. This time it was not to warn of any intruder.
This alert was for us.
“Go,” Neil said.
With one arm under his left shoulder we jogged out into the wide street, crossing it at our best speed. Our best, though, wasn’t good enough.
“Down!’ I shouted, pulling my friend into the gutter on the far side of the boulevard just as the muzzle flashes I’d glimpsed to the south manifested themselves near us as dozens of rounds from automatic rifles tearing into the blacktop.
We were three hundred yards from the intersection where the bank we’d been held in was located. At that distance, in this light, the only explanation was that the sentry located atop that building was equipped with some sort of night vision optics. Whether he’d spotted us and alerted others, or whether others had alerted him to our escape, it was impossible to know.
What was certain, however, was that we had to leave the scant cover I’d dragged us into. And fast. The next volley of shots, without a doubt, would not be wildly sent our way. They would be on target.
“Fletch, we’ve gotta—”
“I know,” I said.
I pulled Neil up, the both of us leaving the gutter and the street behind, running in tandem toward a gutted grocery store just across the sidewalk. We made it inside as the next bursts of automatic fire ricocheted off the building’s crumbling brick façade, bits of weathered red stone bursting outward like shrapnel. A sharp sliver of the brick struck me just below my right eye, tearing a short, deep hole in the fleshy part of my cheek.
“Damn!”
I dragged a sleeve across the wound as I swore, then got moving again, helping Neil toward the back of the building. The shotgun was now in my hand, two rounds in it. I had another twelve in my pocket. It was nowhere near enough firepower to win any standoff with the mob Perkins would have descend upon us, so fighting had to be the last of our last resorts.
“Neil, can you run?” I asked. “On your own?”
He drew a breath and nodded, pulling free of my assisting grip as we reached one of three back exits, its door wrenched free of the jamb and lying inside. Beyond I could just make out a parking lot with charred hulks of six cars lined up like victims of some automotive firing squad. I reached into my boot and retrieved the knife, handing it to Neil.
“In case,” I said.
“In case,” he affirmed, then he ran through the door and into the open swath of blacktop behind the store.
I followed, and once outside the sound of engines racing began to rise. The posse had been set loose on our trail. Which meant we couldn’t leave one.
“Hang a left,” I said as we crossed from the lot to a cluster of vacant lots surrounded by houses.
“That’s north, Fletch,” Neil warned me.
“I know.”
“His people lay their heads there,” Neil said.
“Right,” I said. “But they’ll all be out looking for us.”
Neil thought quickly, reconsidering the plan he’d conceived just moments ago. We’d be making our way into the lion’s den, but the lion would be out feeding.
“Hide in plain sight,” I said.
“Okay,” my friend agreed.
We altered course as the rumble of engines spun up close behind, a trio of vehicles speeding across the parking lot behind the store and continuing on through the vacant lots, splitting up to race down the driveways of the nearby homes. No one appeared to notice us running due north through the rear yards of the neighborhood backing up to the commercial area, and we didn’t allow ourselves to stop to look for any pursuers. It was an all out dash, not to freedom, but to safety—temporary as it might be.
&nbs
p; “I’m fading, Fletch,” Neil said after nearly ten minutes of sprinting and jogging and climbing over fences that had managed to not collapse in the years following the blight.
“One more block,” I said.
Next to me I saw his head nod, though his chin was nearly planted upon his chest. He’d left fatigue in the dust a quarter mile behind, and exhaustion just after that. What my friend was pushing against was more than just some physical wall—it was against himself. His body and his mind was screaming at him to stop.
Finally, as we crossed a narrow residential street running east to west, those screams won out and he collapsed on the opposite side of a stone wall after climbing it just behind me.
“Done,” Neil said. “Done. Can’t...can’t...”
He was gasping, but the rush of air was almost a whisper. What strength he’d had was spent, and what I saw now on my friend’s face, and in his eyes, was frighteningly familiar. I’d seen it before on our journey back from Cheyenne when sickness and starvation had put him on the verge of death. Here, to come back from this similar state, he would not have to do what he had then, but he could also not go on.
I looked around, appraising our position. We were maybe a mile north of where we’d been held captive, in the backyard of a house with broken windows and missing doors. Large patches of its roof were only partially covered, groups of shingles ripped away, likely by some vicious wind event, leaving stained and sagging plywood sheathing exposed. The place had been open to the elements for years, and did not show any sign of attempted repairs. This was not one of the homes that Perkins’ followers would have occupied.
Which meant, for us, it was the best place in a bad situation.
“Let’s get you inside,” I said.
I helped Neil up, supporting almost his full, thinned-out weight, his feet barely moving as I walked him into the once-pretty home. The back doorway we entered through led into a kitchen, and beyond that a dining room and small living room. It had been a modest house for its onetime occupants, but now was an abandoned, dank shell of its former self.
Neil managed to lift his head. He scanned the space as I did.
“Too exposed,” he said.
He wasn’t wrong. The front door and windows were missing. Anyone walking by with searching or surveillance in mind could simply shine a light in and see most of the interior.
“There,” he said.
I tracked his gaze, which had fixed on a door just off the kitchen.
“Basement,” I said, and he nodded.
Eight
The cramped space beneath the small house was damp and dark and cold, all conditions which were difficult, but also necessary at the moment.
“Eat,” I told Neil.
I’d positioned my friend on a stack of lumber leftover from some remodeling project. That kept him off the soggy ground. Remnants of discarded drapes still dry in a plastic storage tub provided a makeshift blanket to provide some warmth as he ate the MRE contents shoved in the cargo pocket of his pants. After a few minutes he’d consumed the meager meal, but he’d also begun to show signs of recovery.
“Dry and stale,” Neil said. “Meals Rarely Edible lives up to its name.”
Dry...
He needed water. We both did. But there was no source to provide any. No running taps in the kitchen, and any that had gathered in puddles within the house would be fouled beyond any filtering we could manage.
“How far do you think the river is?” I asked him.
Neil shook his head then let it rest against the stone foundation wall behind him.
“Too far,” he said. “I’m okay. We’ll come across a stream to the east.”
“Sure,” I said, unconvinced by that likelihood. “But when? You’re in no shape to move right now.”
“I can argue against your position,” he feigned challenging me.
“You’d lose,” I said.
“Yeah,” he admitted. “I would.”
I lowered myself onto the lumber pile and sat with my friend in silence. There was no sound at all. No hint of the pursuit we’d evaded.
But there would be. This I knew.
“He’s going to come hard at us, Fletch.”
“I know,” I said.
We were the key to his plans. Or what he believed we knew was. What, though, did we actually know? What did my friend know?
“Where is it, Neil?”
He looked to me, saying nothing for a moment.
“Are you sure that’s a question you want the answer to?” he asked.
“I do,” I said.
Neil shifted his position, sitting straighter. Eyeing me unlike he ever had, it was not my friend looking at me right then—it was the possessor of a secret. The keeper of some terrible knowledge.
“Ty Olin got the sample of Four Eleven,” Neil said, referencing the identifier of the original biologic agent which caused the blight.
“And you got Four Twelve,” I said, stating the conventional wisdom amongst those who had any knowledge of the covert operations to secure the pair of deadly pathogens.
“I was supposed to,” Neil said.
Now I straightened where I sat, absorbing what my friend had just hinted at—that Four Twelve didn’t exist.
“Four Twelve was a lie?” I pressed him.
He thought for a moment, taking time to choose his words, something he’d rarely, if ever, done with me. We were close enough to speak freely, and always had been.
Not for this, it appeared.
“I was with a SEAL Team that raided a lab—”
“Olin shared that,” I interrupted my friend. “Was he lying, or did he just believe a lie?”
“Did he tell you what things were like in D.C. as the blight spread?”
“Factions forming,” I said, recalling Olin’s words from our first meeting. “Power grabs. Everything was going to hell. So the government released the blight sample he secured on its own to force a faster collapse of civilization.”
Neil nodded, and it seemed to me there was some shame in the gesture. Some apology, even.
“We weren’t living up to what we were supposed to do,” he said. “Or be.”
“What the hell happened, Neil? With you? With this sample of Four Twelve you supposedly ran off with?”
My friend shook his head, his thoughts seeming to drift back to that time. To when his lie began.
“We raided the lab,” Neil explained. “There was no one there. It had been abandoned. There was just leftover equipment and compounds.”
“I don’t understand,” I said. “If it was abandoned...”
“I didn’t want it to be abandoned, Fletch. I was planning on Four Twelve being there. I was counting on getting that sample so I could leverage it.”
I processed what he was saying, which paralleled suspicions that he’d planned to give Four Twelve to the nascent Unified Government forces to counter its use by our own leadership.
“Mutually Assured Destruction,” I suggested.
“Essentially,” he confirmed. “Only no one would have the button to push.”
In that snippet of his explanation I understood both the truth of the matter and the misconceptions which had developed around his actions. My friend was not going to hand the deadly virus to either side.
“You were going to keep it for yourself,” I said. “As a doomsday threat.”
“Hell of a plan to hatch in the middle of an apocalypse, right?”
It was a thin attempt at self-deprecation. Neither of us reacted with anything close to a laugh.
“I figured if both sides thought the other might have it...”
“They each might dial down any likelihood of outright conflict,” I said, completing the suggestion for him.
“It was a chance,” he said. “But when there was nothing there to give that the threat I could wield any credence, I created it. I told the SEALs with me that I found the sample.”
“Red water with organic compounds?” I asked, o
nce more drawing on what Olin had told me.
Neil smiled at me.
“Organic compounds,” he repeated. “The red water thing you got from that message I slipped you, but the rest had to come from Ty Olin.”
The hidden instructions on how to craft a facsimile to Four Twelve had reached me inside Krista’s book of drawings. I’d used that to threaten General Weatherly and end the siege of Bandon. I’d had no idea then that it was only a lie based upon another lie.
“Olin also said you killed your superior when she came looking for the real sample,” I said.
According to Neil’s former CIA colleague, after the agency lab had discovered that the vial of Four Twelve they’d been given was nothing remotely dangerous, his handler had been dispatched to the Virginia farm where he resided with his ailing elderly father. What happened there, Olin had said, was the outright elimination of a woman ready to expose his actions. All that was hearsay to this point. I wanted confirmation, or denial.
What I received was a mixture of both.
“I didn’t kill Allison Millbank,” Neil said, confirming the name Olin had shared with me. “My father did.”
“What?”
My friend had told me after reaching my refuge in Montana that his father, not wanting to suffer through the cancer that was killing him, had taken his own life so that his son would be free of any burden to care for him as the blight ravaged the world. I’d believed him then. But then I’d believed much of what he’d told me. Too much, it appeared.
“She drew a weapon when I wouldn’t give her the answer she wanted about Four Twelve,” Neil said. “My father heard the argument, came up behind her, and put two rounds in her head.”
I let that sink in. Dieter Moore would do anything to protect his son. Anything. And it seemed he had.
And continued to do so with his next action.
“He told me I had to leave,” Neil said. “I’d never outright told him what I did, but he sensed that there was more to my work than what was on the surface. He knew people would be coming when Allison didn’t return to Langley. He also knew I wouldn’t leave him there to die.”
