Destroyer (The Bugging Out Series Book 9)

by Noah Mann

  “There are women and children,” I said, wanting to immediately throw a splash of cold water on Stu’s almost brutal proposal. “They were followers. Their leader is dead. My guess is they don’t know what to do.”

  “How many died in the fight with you and the Marines?” Hannah asked.

  “From the time Neil and I escaped from Perkins, I’d estimate between seventy and eighty were killed,” I answered.

  “You said Perkins told you there were about four-hundred total in Klamath Falls?” Elaine asked, referencing the quick briefing I’d given the Council at the beginning of the meeting.

  “Four hundred and five was his claim,” I said. “From what I saw that looked to be accurate.”

  “That would leave over three hundred people out there who he taught to hate us,” Stu commented. “And you think we should try to bring them into the fold? Send out the welcome wagon for them?”

  “No one’s said what we should do yet,” Elaine cautioned the man. “Except you.”

  Stu eased back in his chair and absorbed the mild rebuke. As it was, my wife was just trying to get a handle on what the options were in dealing with the Yuma survivors before coming to a consensus. If that was even possible.

  “They’re not a fighting force,” I said. “It’s been two weeks since Perkins died. My best guess is that they are just trying to hang on.”

  “They haven’t reached out,” Joel said. “They have radios, from what you said. They monitored our communications.”

  “The repeater at Camas Valley should be able to hear any transmission,” Hannah added, validating the point her fellow Council member was trying to make.

  A point my wife made for all to hear.

  “Why wouldn’t they try to contact us if they wanted to put Perkins behind them?”

  She asked the question directly to me. I suspected she also knew I would have no good answer, which I didn’t. There were possible explanations, but possibilities weren’t something she could abide by in her position. The fate and future of Bandon, and of its plans to diversify its population through new settlements, was in many ways in her hands.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  Elaine nodded thoughtfully, accepting my honesty. She looked to her fellow Council members, waiting for any further input, but there was none. It was time to suggest a path forward. Time to initiate some action with regards to the remaining Yuma survivors.

  “We can’t do anything until we know if they’re even still there,” my wife said. “They could have scattered. They could be moving this way. We need information.”

  The other Council members, one by one, nodded. Even Stu Parker. When they’d offered their silent consent to whatever Elaine was thinking, she looked to me.

  “Chris Beekman needs to take a look,” she said. “I want him to have an observer who knows what to look for.”

  I hadn’t expected that.

  “Will you go, Eric?”

  I wasn’t Fletch to her. I never really had been. But I’d always been willing to do what was needed, when it was needed, even if not asked. Here, she was asking me to return to the place where I’d watched Dave Arndt die. Where I’d found my lifelong friend inexplicably alive, only to have him die in my arms once again.

  “You don’t have to make contact or land,” she assured me.

  “If we see anyone, we should be prepared to reach out,” I told her.

  “Leaflets,” Hannah suggested.

  Like some throwback to warfare in the previous century, we would be dropping messages to those who had expressed a desire to destroy us.

  “Tell them to surrender?” Joel asked.

  “Order them to,” Stu said.

  “How about we tell them to contact us by radio,” Elaine said. “You’d be able to receive if you’re overhead or nearby just like we did at the train.”

  I nodded. Then Stu leaned forward and planted his elbows on the conference table.

  “Okay,” he said. “Let’s say you go there, and drop your little leaflets, and they call back on the radio. I can tell you first thing I want them to know—we want our dead back. Dave’s body is still there, and if they’ve done anything to it I swear to—”

  “Stu,” Elaine said, interrupting him gently. “We’ll make provisions to get our casualties returned. I promise you that.”

  She looked to me then. I’d noted her use of the plural in the statement. Besides Dave, Neil was still out there, far from Klamath Falls, in the grave we’d dug for him by Medicine Lake. If we were going to bring Dave home at some point, the same respect had to be afforded to my friend.

  “We’ll come up with some wording,” Elaine said, looking to me. “You’ll get Beekman on board?”

  I nodded. Where the man had once seemed almost a reluctant member of our community, his experience supporting our mission to and from the threatening carrier off our shore had changed him somewhat. Not softened, but surfaced an openness about him. I though that, maybe for the first time, he felt useful, even integral to our success. And our survival.

  “We’ll wait for the report from the scouting mission before making any further plans,” Elaine said. “Agreed?”

  The other Council members each raised a hand as a formal affirmation of the decision. She nodded and looked to me.

  “You’re up,” she said.

  Once again, I was.

  Thirty Six

  Chris Beekman’s overland scavenging mission to Ward Field in Northern California had yielded results better than he had imagined. Two Cessna 206 single engine aircraft had required only minimal work to make them airworthy after their disassembly and hauling back to Bandon.

  One of them, though, he had special plans for.

  “I’ll have number two outfitted with pontoons in two weeks,” Beekman told me as we flew over the mountains which filled the landscape between Bandon and Klamath Falls. “That will open up a whole new range of destinations. All we’ll need is a long enough lake or a slow flowing river like the Coquille where it empties into the harbor.”

  We...

  He was even talking like he was part of the town now, in addition to acting like it. He’d required no convincing at all to pilot this mission, and even suggested a safer approach to our destination, one where we would slowly circle the city in decreasing intervals. That would give me a chance to observe with caution, alerting him to any threat while it was still in the distance.

  Any danger would initiate our retreat from the airspace over Klamath falls. The M4, muzzle down between my knees, was only for use in the worst-case scenario—that we should have to set down. That wasn’t going to happen, I told myself. And I tried to make myself believe it.

  “We’re getting close,” Beekman said.

  He quieted and looked out the left window, staring briefly at the woods surrounding the town, a splash of false green still visible even after several storms over the past weeks.

  “Dave was a good student,” Beekman said. “A good pilot. A good friend.”

  He looked to me. I nodded but added no more. He was down there, we assumed. Still lying where he’d fallen. I doubted that Perkins would have had his people bother with a burial. And, as Elaine had assured Stu Parker at the Council meeting, we wouldn’t leave him there. This trip, though, was not meant to bring him home. The most we could do was offer our respect as we passed over.

  “I’ll start a two-mile loop,” Beekman said as he banked to the left, setting us up to circle Klamath Falls in a clockwise orbit. “You tell me when it’s clear to close in a bit.”

  “Got it,” I said.

  I lifted the binoculars I’d brought and began scanning out the passenger side window beneath the right-side wing. It was easy enough to zero in on specific landmarks from memory, the bank building in which Neil and I had been held in particular. But I tried to focus on areas of the city closest to our flight path, specifically trying to spot any sentries which would alert the remaining population to our presence.

  “No lo
okouts that I can see,” I said.

  “If you could they wouldn’t be very good lookouts,” Beekman reminded me.

  We completed one full orbit of the city, then Beekman took us closer in by a quarter mile, the center of the city more visible now, streets and intersections looking much like I’d remembered them from my brief exposure.

  Except for one thing. One horrific, undeniable thing.

  “I see bodies,” I told Beekman.

  He kept his attention on flying, but shot a quick glance my way.

  “How many?”

  I lowered the binoculars and looked to him.

  “A lot,” I said.

  Ten minutes later, after working our way closer to the apparent carnage I’d spotted, Beekman took us down low, just a few hundred feet off the ground, the Cessna cruising parallel to a main thoroughfare so that I could plainly view the boulevard. And the death which had come to it.

  “Jesus...”

  It was all I could say when the horror came into view. It was not simply ‘a lot’ of bodies—it was hundreds. Men. Women. Children. Lying in groups along the sidewalk and in the street, a large number congregated around one of the flatbed trucks which was parked near the bank. A pair of bodies were sprawled upon it, a large box open between them.

  “Can you get lower?” I asked. “And make another pass?”

  “Absolutely,” Beekman said.

  He turned and set up another run just above the street, hardly a hundred feet above the ground now, less space between our aircraft and the tops of buildings. It was close enough now that, with the binoculars, I could see more clearly what the box had contained.

  Pills. Bottles of them, the empty containers strewn about, bright red capsules spilled in several places near bodies. I could also make out the glint of shell casings on the ground, and rifles which had been dropped once their users had succumbed to the now obvious poisoning.

  It was a murder suicide. Mostly the latter, with the former reserved for those who had not gone along willingly.

  “It’s like Jonestown down there,” I said, lowering the binoculars, not wanting to see anymore.

  Like the cult which had decimated itself by drinking cyanide-laced fruit punch in the jungles of Guyana back in the late 70s. Those people had followed their leader into the abyss. Here, it seemed to me that, without their leader, all the survivors from Yuma saw was an abyss.

  “You can schedule with the Council when to come back for Dave’s body,” I said. “There’s no threat left here.”

  “Right,” Beekman said, no joy in his acknowledgment. “Right.”

  He advanced the throttle and eased the yoke back, gaining altitude and turning us toward home. There would be relief in what we would report, but no joy. Perkins had held his people together too well. In this insane world, they’d accepted his promises, and the premise that they were based upon—that only he could bring them to a better place.

  I could only hope that now, somehow, most of those we were leaving behind had found that peace despite their leader’s hollow assurances.

  Thirty Seven

  Johnny Tartek...

  It took me a while to understand why Neil would choose the name of a high school football rival of ours to be his last words to me. A somewhat long while. Two weeks and two days, actually.

  Then, one evening, while Elaine and I sat with Hope in our living room watching an old kids’ movie on the scavenged television hooked to a scavenged DVD player, I remembered. I remembered The Hit.

  Grace had referenced it obliquely when I mentioned the name, but I hadn’t connected that incident to anything meaningful. But meaning there was in it.

  ‘I can take him down...’

  That was what Neil had told me, and then told our coach, when Tartek, a lineman of substantial talent and mass, had started to decimate our offensive line. I was at the center position in that game, and Neil was in his usual spot as tight end. He had speed, but he also had guts. Too many, at times.

  It was a ‘message’ play that Coach Macklin allowed. A sweep right behind the line that would put Neil on a collision course with the bull named Tartek. And a collision it was, reminiscent of an eighteen-wheeler t-boning a compact car in an intersection. The bigger player was knocked off course, allowing our running back to slip past for a game-winning touchdown. Neil, though, ricocheted off the impact like a pinball, landing hard on his left side and getting up slowly.

  Johnny Tartek...

  I understood now what that name was—my friend’s final gift to me.

  “I have something to do,” I said, looking to Elaine.

  “Something to do?”

  I nodded at her very obvious curiosity, our daughter obliviously fixated on the movie.

  “What?” Elaine pressed me.

  “Is it all right if I say I’ll tell you later?”

  It was her turn to nod, a signal of trust that transcended her puzzlement. I stood, planting a kiss on our daughter’s head and one on my wife’s cheek.

  “Don’t wait up,” I said.

  Elaine’s curiosity piqued at that, but she didn’t press me for any explanation. She let me do what I had to do, and go where I had to go.

  * * *

  “Excuse me?”

  That was Clay Genesee’s reaction when I stopped by the hospital and asked to speak to him privately. He’d likely suspected it was some medical issue that I wanted to keep confidential. In a way, it was.

  “Grace can’t know,” I said.

  Genesee leaned back against the desk in his small office and crossed his arms over his white coat, considering me with a mix of wonder and disgust.

  “Number one, why would I tell her?” he said. “And number two, what purpose would exhuming that man’s body serve?”

  The marker bearing Neil’s name had already been stripped from the spot we’d buried the man we’d believed was him, and had been replaced with one bearing the name of Riley Grimes. But I had to know, and Neil’s final words to me had planted the morsel of information that would assuage the doubt he’d noticed in his dying moments.

  “In high school Neil took a hard hit in football from a guy named Johnny Tartek,” I said. “It actually broke his arm, but he didn’t tell anyone but me. He didn’t want to miss the next game, which was the last game of the season. The final game of our senior year. Only after that game did he tell his father and go to the doctor. It was a bad fracture, and it was made worse by his stubbornness.”

  “As I can understand,” Genesee said.

  “That break would still be obvious,” I said. “Wouldn’t it? If you took an x-ray or looked beneath the skin?”

  Now the man realized fully what I was asking. He was even less enthused than when he was ignorant of my desire.

  “There are ethical issues here, Fletch. And legal ones. I’m not saying things like this are never done, but that’s in the old world with courts and subpoenas and procedures.”

  “And we have none of that, Clay. This is me asking you. I have to know for sure.”

  “You think the imposter might have died out there with you?”

  “No,” I said, shaking my head. “I don’t. But Neil knew enough that there’d always be a part of me that would wonder. Maybe not now, but down the road it might bubble up. That doubt.”

  “How did he know?”

  “Because he knew me better than anyone,” I said. “He used his last words to point me toward the answer that would prove it one way or the other.”

  “Something about this old injury,” Clay said.

  I nodded. Genesee said nothing, just staring at me for a long moment.

  “It’s not grave robbing, Clay,” I said to break the silence.

  “A flip comment isn’t going to convince me, Fletch.”

  “What will?”

  He looked off for a moment, seeming to consider not just what I’d asked, but what any action on his part in response to that would say about him. It was a personal struggle the former Naval officer was
working through. He’d come from a system of rules and regimentation, but, in the end, he’d chafed at the strictures of that life. Leaving it had, in my opinion, allowed the person who Clay Genesee was meant to be to flourish.

  Rules, he’d come to realize, and to accept, weren’t made to be broken—they were made by men, all of whom were dead. Those who mattered were not. And I was one of those lucky few.

  “Tell me this will put him to rest for you,” Genesee said.

  I considered that. He wasn’t asking me to forget my friend—only to let him exist in memory, not in wonderings.

  “It will,” I said.

  Genesee accepted that with a nod.

  “All right,” he said. “Let’s make this happen.”

  Thirty Eight

  It was just shy of midnight when we reached the top of the coffin scavenged from a funeral parlor up the coast in Coos Bay, both of us having taken turns digging for nearly two hours. I spent five minutes clearing the lid so that the upper half could be lifted open.

  I didn’t particularly care to see what was inside.

  “Climb out, Fletch,” Genesee said.

  It was his call, and I was happy to oblige. I lifted myself from the rectangular cut we’d made in the earth, most of the coffin’s lower half still covered. Bandon’s sole doctor climbed down in and motioned for me to pass him a small medical bag he’d brought along. He reached in and retrieved a pair of heavy rubber gloves, slipping into them before straddling the lid and reaching down. A solid tug released the upper half and, by the light of his headlamp and the flashlight I was holding above, he opened the coffin to reveal the decaying face of the man I’d believed was my friend.

  I hoped that, after this endeavor, that misplaced belief would still hold true.

  Genesee reached into his bag again, one gloved hand coming out wielding a sharp scalpel, its blade gleaming in the artificial light.

  “The left radius?” Genesee asked, seeking confirmation of what I’d shared about Neil’s injury.

  “Left forearm,” I answered. “I don’t know which bone.”