Destroyer (The Bugging Out Series Book 9)

by Noah Mann

  “You’ve got a nice setup here,” my friend told Steven and Marcia. “Preparations. Isolation. And we’ve seen a lot since the blight hit. But something else is about to hit, and all the calories you’ve squirrelled away won’t stop it. Neither will a shotgun and an AR.”

  “That group that passed by a while back,” Marcia reminded him before looking to me. “There were hundreds of them heading north. Is that who you’re talking about?”

  It had to be, I knew. No other substantial group of survivors could exist now. Not in this area.

  “Four hundred,” I said. “They came from Yuma to destroy the town I’m from.”

  I felt Neil’s gaze shift my way.

  “The town that we’re from,” I corrected myself.

  Steven looked at us both for a moment, a stoic sadness about him. We’d brought a threat to him and his family without ever wanting or intending to.

  “Timothy, Penny,” the man said, loud enough to be heard in the back of the house. “Come here.”

  A moment later a young girl came through the doorway to the right of the hearth, followed by an older boy, an M4 with laser sight slung across his chest. Both eyed us warily, much like their pet and protector had.

  “This is our daughter, Penny,” Marcia said, brushing her little girl’s blonde locks off her face. “She’s six. And this is Timothy.”

  “I’m ten,” the boy said before his mother could. “Almost eleven.”

  “His birthday is next month,” Martha said, smiling. “On the eighth.”

  “It’s nice to meet you,” I said. “I’m Eric.”

  “I’m Neil. Very pleased to meet you both.”

  Neither child said anything in response to our greeting. That didn’t surprise me. We were likely among the very few people other than their parents they’d seen in years, and certainly for the little girl the blighted world was all she had known.

  “I have a little girl,” I said, fixing my attention on Penny. “She’s younger than you.”

  The tiniest smile flashed on the child’s face, then she nuzzled up close to her mother’s shoulder.

  “You have a steady aim,” Neil said, addressing Timothy.

  “My aim was on him,” the boy said sharply, nodding toward me. “Not you.”

  “Timothy,” Steven said, gently admonishing his son for the hint of rudeness in his tone. “Put your rifle in the rack and take your sister in the back to play.”

  Penny shifted from her mother and looked up to her father.

  “Can we light a candle?” she asked him.

  He smiled, her question, her simple presence, softening nearly all about him for that moment.

  “A little one,” Steven told her. “Timothy, a little light, okay? Make sure the shades are drawn tight.”

  The boy slipped his M4 into the rack next to his mother’s rifle and nodded, taking his sister by the hand and leading her from the front room. A moment later a lighter clicked and a soft glow built in the doorway behind Steven.

  “You’ve been here since it all began?” I asked, flexing my left hand and adjusting the makeshift bandage.

  “You’re hurt,” Marcia said before either of them could answer.

  “Lost a finger,” I said. “I can manage without it.”

  Steven reached across the table and waited for me to present my hand. I hesitated only briefly, then let him have a look. He unwrapped the bandage and eyed the bloody wound.

  “He was shot,” Neil explained.

  “Hopefully you gave better than you received,” Steven said, taking the candle in hand and using it to illuminate the space where my ring finger had been.

  “We did,” Neil assured him.

  “The people who are after you did this?” Marcia asked. “The ones who you say are coming?”

  “Yes,” I answered.

  Steven looked to me, then to Neil, and finally to his wife.

  “I’m used to working on paws,” he said. “But I might be able to tidy this wound up a bit.”

  “I’ll get your medical kit,” Marcia said, standing.

  “The trauma kit with sutures,” Steven told her, looking back to us. “And a meal please, for our friends.”

  Marcia smiled, one of the truest smiles I’d seen. It was the joy of a person who was welcoming guests into her home, however unexpected they might be. It was the look of earnest hospitality.

  “Of course,” Marcia said, then disappeared through the doorway to the left of the hearth.

  * * *

  A few minutes later, after a few strategic lidocaine injections in my battered left hand, Steven began cleaning the wound, carefully trimming away excess skin that remained after my finger was ripped away. Behind him, in the kitchen where soft light glowed, Neil had joined Marcia as she readied food for us.

  “You never answered my question,” I said.

  The veterinarian working on my mangled hand never looked up, keeping his focus on his work, illuminated by a small headlamp he wore.

  “We’ve been here since before it all began,” Steven said, replying to what I’d asked a few minutes earlier.

  “You saw it coming,” I said.

  “I’ve seen something coming for a long time,” he said as he snipped bits of bluish skin away, leaving enough to create a flap that would seal the wound. “I bought this property ten years ago just before our son was born. Worked on it on weekends, over summers. Drove up from our home in Redding hundreds of times, hauling building supplies. Food. Water purifiers. Pumps.”

  “Do you have a radio?” I asked. “Anything to make contact?”

  “Electronics invite detection,” Steven answered. “I focused on the essentials that would let us stay alive undetected.”

  “I crammed all that in just before the blight exploded,” I said. “I already had a place, sorta remote. That’s where my survival journey began.”

  “Your daughter wasn’t born then,” Steven said, doing the math in his head.

  “No. I hadn’t met my wife yet. That happened in Bandon.”

  He began to suture the skin folds, closing the wound.

  “This Bandon place,” he said. “You’re telling the truth? There’s a cure for the blight?”

  “There is,” I told him. “We’ve been seeding and replanting as fast as we can. There are two settlements near us doing the same.”

  “Are you getting outside help?”

  “Not anymore,” I told him, taking a few minutes to fill him in on what we’d experienced, and who we’d been in contact with. “The chances are there’s no longer any functioning government.”

  “Did we have a functioning government before all this?” he asked, flashing a smile as he finished stitching me up. “Any antibiotic allergies?”

  “Do I answer with a woof?”

  “I’ll take that as a no,” Steven said, then gave me an injection in my upper arm before bandaging the freshly closed wound. “It’s gonna hurt for a while, and you’ll need to keep it clean. As clean as possible.”

  “Will do,” I said.

  Steven put his tools and supplies back in their case and scooped the trash into a small sack which he tied and placed atop the mantle for later burning. Finished, he looked back to me.

  “How long do you think until these people make a move on this cabin?”

  I thought for a moment, listening to the steady rain pound outside.

  “I don’t know that I see his people pushing through this weather,” I said. “They have numbers, but most aren’t great physical specimens.”

  “Storms like this are usually over by dawn,” Steven said, thinking for a moment. “I’ll move the family to a deeper hide then.”

  “Good idea,” I said, admiring the man and what he’d accomplished. “You keep your food and supplies away from where you lay your head. That’s smart.”

  “It keeps us mobile,” Steven explained. “Though we haven’t really had to bug out from this place for, oh, must be three years now.”

  “That was y
our last contact?”

  He nodded. I was certain he never expected any further contact with the outside world, likely believing that they might be the very last people alive. But they weren’t.

  “When this is over, we can send you seeds and plants,” I told him.

  “Fresh vegetables,” Steven said, chuckling softly. “I don’t even know that I remember—”

  A sudden rush of sound from the kitchen drew his attention. And mine. It was Willow, dripping wet as he bolted into the room, muddy paws leaving thick tracks on the wood floor. Marcia and Neil hurried in behind her.

  “He just flew through the dog door,” Marcia said, worried.

  Steven stood and faced his Doberman, the dog sitting now, looking up to him.

  “Show me,” he said.

  Willow moved quickly to the front door. Steven blew out the candles and opened it. The dog walked out onto the covered porch, followed by the rest of us, Neil and I taking our AKs in hand. Near the east edge of the porch, with water pouring off the roof edge in front of him, Willow stared directly to the northeast.

  “They’re coming up the road,” Steven said, looking to me. “Apparently they don’t mind getting a little wet after all.”

  “He’s pushing them,” Neil said, looking to me. “Like riding a horse until it drops.”

  Steven looked back to his wife.

  “Get our go bags and weapons,” he instructed her. “Tell the kids we’re moving now.”

  Twenty Four

  We moved through the downpour, Neil and I bringing up the rear, Steven at the front, his family filling the space between us. In the dark it was impossible to miss puddles and trip over the dead roots of toppled trees, the littlest of our number, Penny, tumbling half a dozen times in the first twenty minutes after we’d fled the backwoods cabin.

  “How far, Steven?” I asked.

  “A quarter mile more,” he said.

  That was twenty minutes in these conditions. But, in less than one minute, we were stopped cold by a sharp explosion from behind.

  From where we’d come.

  Neil and I took positions to cover the family as Steven got his wife and children behind a pair of trees. In the distance, even through the pounding rain, we could all see the remnants of a fireball rolling into the wet darkness above, leaving a column of hot orange flames at its point of origin.

  “They blew the cabin,” Neil said.

  “Mommy, our house,” Penny said, her mother clutching her.

  “We have other houses, baby,” Marcia comforted her.

  But I could see the woman’s gaze, even in the weak light the night allowed. It was fixed upon me with pure terror brimming.

  “Let’s move,” Steven said.

  “Go,” I said. “Neil and I will hang back to make sure no one follows.”

  Steven moved toward his wife and children and helped them up, taking his little girl in his arms so they could move more quickly. I focused on Marcia and gave her a nod.

  “No one’s getting to you,” I said.

  “Marcia...”

  She hesitated for just a few seconds, staring at me, as if trying to decide if I was the kind of man who could deliver on the promise I’d just made. Before she came to any obvious conclusion her husband pulled her away.

  “They won’t know how to find us,” she told him.

  “That’s probably better,” Neil said, answering exactly as I would have.

  In thirty seconds they were gone, disappearing to the west. Somewhere ahead of them Willow had been sent to scout. If there was trouble in that direction, he would warn them.

  “What do you want to do?” I asked Neil.

  He stayed focused on the dimming fire in the distance, the storm beginning to quench its initial fury.

  “We have to lead them away from those children,” he said.

  “Agreed,” I said. “North of the lake, then?”

  “Right.”

  The family was moving to a hideout somewhere south of the lake, likely in dense woods. Our move would, if executed properly, keep Perkins far from them. To manage that, though, we would have to lure his fighters into skirmishes where we could take them on in smaller numbers.

  “Let’s move due north right now and set up an overwatch position,” Neil suggested. “If they shift south, we can see it and move on their flank.”

  It was a solid tactical plan, but it would require one thing that was out of our control.

  “This will only work if we can see them,” I reminded my friend.

  “They’ve got their bonfire,” Neil said. “Perkins will want to check the rubble for our bodies. That won’t be cool before sunrise.”

  He had a point. It was possible that Perkins believed he’d cornered us in the cabin and had ordered it demolished when no response came to his demands to surrender. The evidence of that success or failure lay in a pile of blazing timbers.

  “Let’s find a spot,” I said.

  I moved from behind the tree, ready to head north. Neil’s sudden grip on my shirt stopped me.

  “Just so we’re in agreement,” he began, “we’re either ending Perkins right here on this mountain, or we die trying.”

  That wasn’t at all how our mad dash to freedom had been envisioned back in Klamath Falls. Nor when we eliminated the scouting party in Tulelake. But here, on this mountain, that was precisely what it had turned into.

  Twenty Five

  The storm stopped before first light, just as Steven had said it would.

  “We don’t even know their last name,” I said, soaked to the bone.

  “They didn’t offer it,” Neil said. “You told them ours and they withheld theirs.”

  I didn’t know why that just-realized fact puzzled me, but it did. It was just a minor curiosity in a world wiped of things such as anonymity. There was little reason to deny information about one’s self to others. Nothing could be exploited from it. There was no identity theft.

  There was subterfuge, though. Revelations about my friend had taught me that. The lie was more useful than silence, it turned out. For him, at least.

  Until that was turned against him.

  General Weatherly had put the screws to him once the truth of his duplicitous defection to the Unified Government had been revealed. Perkins, too, had seen opportunity in Neil Moore.

  Me...all I cared about was that I had my friend back.

  “It was probably Smith,” Neil said. “Something obvious.”

  “I’ll ask them once this is over,” I said.

  The sun began to rise in earnest, rays of daylight slicing through holes in the clouds. We were positioned beneath and behind a rocky outcropping on a slope above the northern shore of Medicine Lake, shivering and hungry. The meal that Marcia had been in the process of preparing, cold as it was, had never been served, its ingredients shoved into her children’s backpacks as we fled the cabin. Once more we were running on will, any strength to be summoned fueled by adrenalin.

  The first burst of that came with the sound of engines. Multiple engines.

  “I hear three,” Neil said.

  “Trucks,” I added.

  He nodded and we readied our position, resting the barrels of our AKs on shelves of small boulders we’d spent the dark hours arranging for just such a purpose. We had no more ammunition than when we’d begun our climb to Medicine Lake, nine spare magazines between us, a combination of what we’d left Klamath Falls with and those scavenged after the ambush at the warehouse complex. With three grenades added to the mix, we could put up a fight, but it would have to be on our terms.

  “Which way are we going if this goes down?” Neil asked.

  We’d considered two avenues of egress from our position once the fighting broke out, allowing us to shoot and move, keeping the attackers off balance and unsure of where we were. From our current spot we could shift to a higher vantage, or a lower one. Each had its combination of advantages and disadvantages.

  “Let’s go higher,” I said.


  “Okay.”

  Whoever came at us would have to fight their way up the slope, crossing uneven and open terrain.

  “There they are,” I said.

  The trio of trucks we’d heard were easy enough to spot, as were the dozens of fighters on foot flanking the transports. It was almost certain that a dozen or more enemy were out of sight, held back in the woods, ready to provide supporting fire if that became necessary. And it would become necessary, we both knew.

  “Fletch...”

  “I see it.”

  The convoy was splitting up, with two trucks turning to follow the south shore of the lake, and one moving along the road closest to us. An equal ratio of fighters divided up with each, leaving the smallest force closing unknowingly in on our position while the other pushed in a direction we had hoped to prevent.

  “They could be rolling right on top of that family in a few minutes,” Neil said.

  We didn’t know the precise location of the hideout the family had moved to, but the two dozen fighters on foot fanning out into the woods that were nestled next to the lake were uncomfortably close to where they might be. That was a risk neither of us were willing to take.

  “We hit this element when it gets below us,” I said. “That will draw the others back to our side of the lake.”

  “They’ll have to backtrack,” Neil said, agreeing. “We’ll have time to reposition.”

  If we could completely destroy the vehicle and the dozen armed foot soldiers attached to it, we would significantly improve our odds. With the advantage of elevation and surprise, not to mention the almost certain lack of battle hardening some of those below us would possess, I believed this was our best opportunity.

  “You handle grenades if we need them,” Neil said. “You have a better arm.”

  I set the trio of fragmentation grenades on a low rock between us. If it came to needing them, I would only need to pull the pin and roll one down the slope. The blast alone might drive anyone advancing back, forcing them to take cover.

  “There’s going to be a hell of a lot of lead flying,” I reminded my friend.

  “Ours first,” Neil said.

  “Damn straight,” I agreed.