by Noah Mann
“Long rifle,” I said.
Neil began to swerve the pickup back and forth, jerking from curb to curb along the residential street in anticipation of what came next, rounds impacting as the would-be sniper dialed in their aim.
“It’s from the bank,” Neil said.
I shifted to look that way, now northwest from our moving position, and could see both the silhouette of the building’s high top, and muzzle flashes spaced about every three seconds. We’d suspected that someone atop that structure had spotted us with some sort of optics made to cut through the darkness, and now it was clear that such a device was mounted atop a precision rifle.
“They can’t shoot worth a damn,” Neil said.
It was true what he said. The marksman was not that, sending rounds at us that were only ‘close’, not ‘on target’.
“He only needs a lucky shot,” I reminded my friend.
“No, all he needs is to radio everyone and tell them where we are,” Neil said.
It had to be assumed that Perkins’ people would have some communication ability among those they’d sent after us. No one was bothering with bells or radio clicks to send warnings about us. They’d be broadcasting in the open, sharing our location immediately as it became available.
PLINK!
The lucky shot finally found us. Some good fortune was still on our side, though, the round punching a single hole in the left front of the hood, seeming to miss anything vital in the engine compartment.
“Damn!”
Neil swore as he jerked the pickup to the right to avoid a pile of old tires seemingly meant as a barricade long ago. Without using the vehicle’s headlights, obstacles could become collisions with little warning. This one he missed by inches, straightening out again past the makeshift barrier before resuming his side to side swerving.
“He’s not shooting anymore,” Neil said after a moment.
I looked again in the direction of the bank building and saw that the terrain of this neighborhood had sloped downhill, obscuring us from view.
“We’re blocked,” I told him.
“Good,” he commented, turning now, taking a side street to the east. “We’ve gotta use the cover while we have it.”
I maintained my watch out the rear of the cab, wisps of light flashing briefly over the houses on the south side of the street.
“They’re back there,” I reported. “Out of sight.”
“Are they on our trail?”
I considered his question as I watched the beams from the headlights drift in and out of view.
“No,” I said, making some mental approximations based upon the motion of the light’s sources. “They’re running patterns, it looks like. Up one block, then cut over to another.”
I heard my friend let out a breath as he turned south once more, our position still low enough that we could not be seen by the gunman atop the bank building.
“There may still be lookouts this way,” he said. “If there are, they won’t engage us. They’ll just call in everything on wheels.”
“That’s out of our hands,” I said.
Neil turned to me as he drove and in that instant I saw something familiar in his eyes. It was the same cold surety I’d been witness to when he’d executed the cannibals discovered in a shack near my old refuge in Montana.
“If you see a lookout, Fletch, kill them. Even if they don’t have a weapon. Just kill them.”
He looked back to the road ahead and kept us heading south. What he’d said didn’t shock me, but it did sober my sense of our reunion. This wasn’t two old friends getting together at some picnic in the park after a long separation. It was a fight for survival. Any illusions beyond that I had to put away for a later time.
“We’re gonna make it,” I told my friend.
Then I turned and scanned the way we’d come, houses thinning out as we began to leave Klamath Falls and our pursuers behind.
For now.
Eleven
An old sign with barely any paint visible marked the two lanes we were speeding along as Highway 39. Another informed us that the California border was less than five miles distant.
“Anything, Fletch?”
I looked behind once again. There wasn’t even a hint of headlights or any presence whatsoever in the night.
“Nothing,” I reported.
I felt the pickup slow, Neil easing off the accelerator, our speed dropping by half. We couldn’t fully relax, but for the moment we could catch our breath. And more.
“Here,” I said, taking the open can of beans from the cupholder. “Down this.”
Neil eyed the offering for a moment.
“What if the guy had syphilis?”
I allowed a half chuckle at his quip.
“Then enjoy your beans and syphilis,” I said.
My friend took the can and tipped the contents into his mouth as he drove, emptying it in three swallows. I opened the second can from the shoulder bag, discarding the pop top on the floor before handing it over.
“I’m gonna be fun in closed quarters tonight, Fletch.”
“Like I wouldn’t already know that, gas master,” I said.
We’d spent too many hours together as disgusting teenagers to not know which one of us could unleash a pungent hell after ingesting the proper amount of beans or chili. Neil was the clear top of the heap in that category. I smiled at those memories. Then, I was just smiling, simply because he was here. With me.
But as fulfilling as that moment was for me, I knew what lay ahead for my friend when we returned to Bandon. It would be, in many ways, painful. More so than joyous. Grace, too, would be shattered by this impossible revelation. Neil Moore had come back from the dead, and with that reappearance came all the emotional baggage one could imagine. And some none of us could.
“Fletch...”
“Yeah?”
“Are you sure that plane that spooked our hosts wasn’t from Bandon?”
“Positive,” I answered.
He considered that for a moment, his head shaking slightly.
“If that wasn’t someone out looking for you, then it was someone else out looking,” he said. “And there’s a lot of nowhere out there that someone can fly a plane around and look, but this someone zeroed in on Klamath Falls. At night.”
All that he said was true, and, in its own way, troubling. The unknown had, more often than not, led to events which were unpleasant at best, and deadly at worst.
“Someone was scouting with a purpose, Fletch.”
“I know,” I said. “But is that really something for us to worry about right now?”
He quieted and shook his head, slowing the pickup to a crawl. I looked to see what had brought us to a near stop.
“Bridge,” he said.
“I’ll get out,” I said.
He stopped and put the truck in park. I climbed out and, with my AK in one hand, walked forward toward the narrow span, just two lanes crossing a minor canal or stream. Except it did not.
Even in the weak moonlight it was plain what lay ahead. Just yards from dry land the structure had crumbled, huge chunks of concrete fallen into the flowing waters, creating a mini dam which the current rushed over. I looked back to my friend and shook my head.
“The road slips off to the left over here,” Neil said when I returned to the pickup, pointing out his window.
I looked and saw the shadowed silhouettes of low buildings to the northeast.
“We can avoid the town if we stay close to the stream,” I suggested.
Steering clear of any contact at this point was preferable, even if it happened to be some stray group of survivors, however unlikely that might be. Eyes that could see us would be attached to mouths that could share what had been seen should Perkins come calling.
“Sounds good,” Neil said.
He backed up a bit and then turned east onto the gravel road that paralleled the stream. Rocks clicked off the fenders as we cruised through the darkness. I kept a
watchful eye to the north, looking past my friend as he drove, the backs of buildings a few dozen yards distant. The night made the town appear as just a collection of boxy shadows. In the daylight it would be worse, I knew. The sun would reveal the harsh realities of a dead place. A place waiting to be weathered away, eroded by rain and wind like mountains had been for eons. This place, whatever its name was, would not last that long.
“Can Bandon hold him off?” Neil asked.
The question came out of nowhere, but it was not hard for me to understand the true ‘why’ of it. He was worried about the family he’d left behind. The family I was certain he now believed he’d lost.
“We’re strong,” I assured him. “He doesn’t have any secret weapon to use.”
Neil nodded and steered around a deep rut in the road.
“Good,” he said.
I waited, saying nothing, giving him the chance to speak more on the matter. But he didn’t. I suspected he couldn’t. Not right then. The news I’d shared with him about Grace hadn’t just opened some old would—it hade created a new one. A cut that was deep and raw.
“It’s going to work out,” I said as the silence lingered. “It will.”
He didn’t respond to my words. Instead he stayed focused on the dark road ahead, his gaze slack, more from dammed emotion than fatigue right then.
“Neil...”
“Fletch, later, okay?”
The relationship we’d always shared, one of direct truthfulness, had to be put on hold. For a while, at least. As hard as that was, I had to respect what he wanted. What he needed.
“I’d trade a steak dinner for a map about—”
BTHUNK!
The sound was deafening, and the impact that caused it jolted the pickup, literally lifting the right front in the air after a brief dip into the hole neither of us had noticed in the dark. A sickening shriek rose from the engine compartment as the steering wheel whipped back and forth in Neil’s grip.
“Something broke,” he said. “Big time.”
He didn’t even steer the vehicle to the side of the gravel road. It simply rolled that way, the only control he maintained was the brake, which was pressed to the floorboard until our forward motion stopped fully.
“We can see if there’s a garage open at this hour,” I said, injecting some gallows humor to the plainly humorless moment.
“Our luck they’d only take cash,” Neil quipped right back at me.
We stepped from the pickup and surveyed the damage. The nose of the pickup had settled low on the right side, the corresponding front wheel twisted severely to the left, away from the direction we’d rolled.
“Tie rod had to snap,” I said.
“Spring and shock didn’t fare much better,” Neil added.
There was something else, though. Something we smelled first, the acrid scent of burnt diesel hitting us just before the pop and the flash of fire erupted.
Twelve
The unseen rut in the road had done more than disable our suspension and steering. Something under the old diesel’s hood had broken and caused a fire, oil or fuel flashing on the hot engine to send smoke billowing and flames licking from the front wheel wells.
“Get the gear,” I said.
Neil and I both returned to the vehicle, reaching in through the front doors we’d left open to retrieve the two AKs we’d wielded, along with the shoulder bag, canteens, and five spare magazines. It wasn’t remotely enough to sustain us, but it would have to do until we could manage that for ourselves.
“This thing’s going to mark our position for five miles,” Neil said, the glow of the now raging fire building. “Twenty when the sun comes up and that smoke column becomes visible.”
I nodded and thought, the sound of flowing water bringing an idea to the surface. A possibility.
“We push it into the stream,” I suggested.
Neil thought for a moment, looking toward the tributary which had altered our course of travel. Below the bank it was impossible to see if we could maneuver the truck that far, the light from the fire blocked by the bulging embankment. My friend reached into the truck quickly, recoiling from the building inferno, and returning to where I stood nearer the stream with a flashlight in his hand. At another time neither of us would have chanced using the light, lest its beam aid in marking our position. But with the vehicular bonfire beginning to rage twenty feet from us it could do little to make things worse.
He activated the light and directed it down toward the water, what it revealed immediately ending any thoughts of forcing the truck to freewheel down into the stream with us pushing. The remnants of thick stumps rose high on the embankment like bollards used to block vehicles from entering restricted areas.
“It’s just gonna burn, Fletch.”
He turned the flashlight off, but before he did the beam shifted, illuminating the opposite shore for an instant.
“Wait,” I said, snatching the light from him and turning it on again. “Look.”
He tracked the beam and saw what I had, resting inverted atop the opposite bank.
“A boat,” Neil said.
It was dull and metal, like the one we’d used long ago to cross the Green River with Elaine as we sought the cure for the blight near Cheyenne. Some amount of dust had accumulated along one side of the upturned craft, a dirty drift crafted by years of wind and weather. But from fifty feet away it still looked viable. The only way to know for sure, though, was from up close.
“We have to cross this stream,” I said.
Neil thought for a moment.
“This has to flow south,” he said. “It’s southwest right now, but it has to make a turn toward California.”
I’d spent enough time scouting the terrain in the south of Oregon to suspect he was right. This far inland, the waterways would not be flowing toward the Columbia River or the Pacific. They would be meandering through farmlands toward the border.
“I know south isn’t the best direction,” my friend said.
“Actually, it’s not terrible,” I said. “If we can get south to California and then turn west to the coast, we can make it north to Bandon. No map necessary.”
“Boat then walk?” Neil suggested.
I nodded.
“If it floats,” I said
“Let’s find out,” he said.
I slung the bag over my shoulder, the weight of the canteens and extra mags more nuisance than burden. We each held our own rifles as we sidestepped down the embankment, its slope turning from dry and dusty to sloppy mud where the water sloshed upon it.
“The current doesn’t look bad,” Neil said.
“Runoff hasn’t peaked yet,” I said.
Without knowing the snowpack from the previous winter, it was impossible to tell when the bulk of the spring melt would make its way to where we stood. But there was a steady current, I could see. Steady but manageable.
“You’re okay doing this?” I asked my friend.
“Eighty percent,” he assured me.
I imagined he was referring to his strength. The food he’d eaten since our escape, both from Jake’s MRE and the open can of beans left in the truck, had given him a burst of energy. But that was temporary. Still, there was little choice but to press on as quickly as we could. I would have to keep an eye on him, though. And, in an oddly comforting way, despite his fragile state, I knew he’d be doing the same for me.
“I’ll go first,” I said.
My first step into the water soaked me to the knee, and the second submerged me in the chilly water to the waist. But, as Neil had estimated, the current was not unmanageable. I was halfway across the thirty-foot body of flowing water when I looked back and saw my friend stepping into the stream.
“It’s only waist deep,” I shouted back to him.
He held his AK at chest level, keeping it dry, and worked his way toward where I stood, handling the gentle rush of water with ease.
Until the unseen log floated into him from upstream a
nd he disappeared beneath the surface.
“Neil!”
I unslung the bag and tossed it and my own AK to the soggy bank ahead, then turned back to where my friend had been. The glow of the fire raging above the embankment flickered upon the moving water, and in that weak, stuttering I light I caught a glimpse of movement at least twenty feet downstream from where Neil had last been. It was it arm, and his hand, the AK still in its grip, held above the water. The fool was trying to keep his weapon dry instead of saving himself.
“Neil!”
I shouted his name and dove into the water at a gentle angle, swimming in the shallows toward him. With each breath I took as my head popped above the water I could see Neil struggling, trying to get his footing as the current continued to push him away from me. And still, as he flailed and tumbled, he kept hold of his AK.
“Drop the weapon,” I shouted after a quick breath.
He didn’t listen. The beefy AK seemed to act like an anchor, pulling him down every time he almost managed to get upright again. His strength, almost nonexistent as we began to cross the stream, had to be at its lowest.
His will to live, and to fight, though, was not.
I’d closed about half the distance to him, just a ten-foot gap remaining when he stopped, his feet finding purchase on a solid patch of the stream bed. I spun my body and jammed my boots into the soft floor of the waterway and grabbed my friend’s shirt as we, once again, stood next to each other.
“You’re crazy,” I said, gulping air and eyeing his AK.
To that he shook his dripping head.
“I’m not ending up unarmed again,” he told me, his gaze steely and certain. “Not a chance.”
I couldn’t argue with his desire but risking his life as he had just felt wrong. That was my problem, I knew, the brief time we’d had together since being miraculously reunited coloring my reaction. To see him almost swept away was horrific, and the bottom line was I couldn’t imagine losing my friend. Again.
