by Noah Mann
“Has anyone checked the orchards?” Elaine asked.
“It’s not necessary,” I told her. “It’s there. It’s everywhere.”
Everywhere except...
I grabbed the phone from my wife and dialed from memory, a three-digit extension all that was needed to ring any of the two hundred handsets in use. It rang in my ear, once, then twice.
“Who are you calling?” Schiavo asked.
“Seed processing,” Krista answered.
The young girl, fourteen now, had taken a job as clerk at the germination lab where plants were cultivated and seeds were harvested from the immune stock. It was only three days a week, time spent mostly handing out packets of seeds to farmers and home gardeners who’d placed orders, either in person or over the phone.
“Krista, let me talk to Willy,” I said.
Willy Kellridge ran the germination lab and had, almost singlehandedly, sped up the processing of seeds from young plants, a necessity to sustain and expand the town’s farming operations. His background in chemistry didn’t perfectly suit the forty-year-old for the position, but his quick intellect did, allowing him to create entirely new botanical processes from scratch.
“He’s not here,” Krista answered. “He was taking today off to look for rocks and shells down at the beach. I think he wants to grind the shells up for fertilizer, or something.”
What she’d just shared wasn’t what I’d wanted to hear. Until it was.
“Have you been there alone all day, Krista?”
“Yep. I even opened up. Willy gave me the keys and—”
“Lock the door,” I told her. “Lock it and don’t open it until I tell you, understand?”
I could hear a soft, frightened gasp at the other end.
“Fletch, what’s wrong?”
“Has anyone been in today?” I asked the teen girl.
“Ju-just one person this morning to drop off an order,” Krista reported. “Fletch, please, what’s—”
“Krista, you have to trust me,” I said. “It will be all right. Now, have you left the building today?”
“No,” she said. “I brought my lunch and I...I just stayed in and did paperwork for Willy.”
“You didn’t take a step outside? Not for anything?”
“No,” she said. “Not a step.”
“Okay,” I said, easing myself toward a place of calm for her sake. “I’ll be there in a few minutes. Lock the door. I’ll call your mom and let her know what’s going on.”
“Okay,” Krista said, steeling herself as much as any fourteen-year-old could.
“Be right there.”
I ended the call and handed the phone back to Elaine just as Jackson came jogging up.
“It’s in town,” he said, breathing hard. “Rob Oldham is over at the tractor shed saying his raspberry bushes are covered in grey ash.”
Schiavo looked to me, then to Elaine.
“That’s north, east, and south,” the military advisor said, providing information to the town’s leader as well as simply speaking to a friend. “It’s coming from all sides.”
Elaine nodded and thought for a moment.
“Eric, I know you said it doesn’t matter, but we need to know how far it’s pushed into the plantings we’ve done in the woods,” Elaine said.
“If it’s here, it’s going to blow right through there,” I said.
“I still want to know,” she countered.
It was her call to make. I could see the logic in the desire and the decision, but in a normal situation. This was not that. We’d all experienced this scenario before as the blight swept over the entire planet. If it was back, it wasn’t likely that it was any less potent than its first appearance.
In all likelihood, it would be more.
“Where did it come from?” Elaine asked, frustrated.
“Here,” Jackson told her. “It never left. It’s been in the soil, the trees.”
“Why now?” Elaine pressed. “We’ve had almost perfect crops for years.”
“We can figure that out later,” I interjected. “The only thing that matters right now is securing the seeds that haven’t been exposed to any of this.”
“That’s why you wanted Krista to lock the germination lab down,” Schiavo said.
I nodded. It was a gut reaction, one that would have come to others eventually, but it had bubbled up in my thoughts first.
“She’s got to be scared after that call,” Martin said.
“I’ll call Grace for you, Fletch,” Schiavo said, taking her own cell from her pocket and dialing as she started back toward the car.
“Jackson, we’ve got to go,” Elaine said. “I’ll keep you updated.”
The farmer nodded, but it seemed more an acceptance of some awful fate than simple acknowledgment. There was fear in his eyes. The kind of fear I’d seen in people who were facing a terrible unknown.
The truth was, it wasn’t an unknown. And we were all facing it. Again.
Forty One
We locked down the germination lab and posted guards to secure it after bringing Krista out. Willy was snatched from his foray to the beaches south of town and brought to the site just after dark, confirming what we wanted to hear—that the vault holding the immune seed stock hadn’t been opened in weeks. His efforts had been focused on using naturally produced seeds and seedlings in that time, effectively isolating the supply from any mutated contamination which might be causing the resurgence of the blight.
He wasn’t certain, though, that we were facing the same kind of threat.
“It could be generational,” he told the Town Council, which had been gathered for an emergency meeting that both Martin and I were asked to sit in on. “Just like the initial discovery that ultraviolet-b radiation in sunlight was the catalyst which supercharged the rapid spread of the blight, the immunity could be something that is deprecated after a certain number of generations.”
“Is that available in English?” Stu Parker asked.
“The immunity gets less and less after each plant produces seeds,” I said, annoyed. “Momma plant produces seeds with less resistance to the blight than it. Baby plant produces seeds with even less resistance. And so on. Is that clear enough for you, Stu?”
Elaine fixed an annoyed gaze of her own on me and I settled back into the chair I’d taken next to Schiavo. I wasn’t sure if it was Stu’s grating nature at the moment, or the mere fact that it was sinking in what we were facing. In a way it was the worst possible thing to deal with as a community. Volcanic eruptions and malevolent military forces we’d overcome. This, though, was a repeat of the very thing which had nearly wiped the planet clean of all life.
This second go round might finish the job.
“So the seeds in the vault won’t matter?” Hannah asked the man charged with protecting them.
“No, they very well could be the key to getting past this,” Willy said. “Fletch was right to lock them down.”
“Could,” Elaine said, parroting the man’s qualifier.
Willy nodded and shrugged.
“We’re in uncharted territory here,” the man told the Council.
Elaine looked around the room and rolled her chair back from the table, turning so that she could reach a map which was prominent on the wall. On it was Bandon and the surrounding area stretching almost to the settlement at Remote. She pointed at that spot where more than a hundred people now resided.
“Remote isn’t reporting any signs of blight yet,” she said. “Camas Valley, either. That’s from communications twenty minutes ago. But I’m guessing from what we’ve heard and seen that that’s going to change.”
“If failure is built into the seeds we’ve produced, then it will affect them,” Willy confirmed.
Something, though, struck me right then. More curiosity than question, at first. Within a few seconds, though, as the wondering churned fast in my thoughts, it became a full on imperative to understand.
“Why?”
Those gathered for the meeting looked to me.
“Why aren’t they reporting anything?” I asked. “They have seeds planted from the same stock that we do, at the same time.”
“Remote planted even earlier,” Martin said, catching on to what I was getting at. “They wanted to get a jump on the growing season.”
Attention shifted from me and Martin to Willy, who seemed to be intensely pondering the inconsistency I’d just pointed out.
“Willy?” Elaine prodded the man.
“I don’t know,” he said. “We’re only a few hours into this. I’d need to check the fields at Remote and Camas Valley and verify what they’re seeing.”
Before any agreement could be offered to that suggestion, Schiavo spoke up.
“That may not be a good idea,” she said.
“Why?” Joel Matthews asked her.
She stood and moved to the same map that Elaine sat near in her wheelchair, pointing to several points.
“The three farming operations are hit,” Schiavo said. “Gardens here, and here, and here, and, well, basically everywhere.”
In the hours after the resurgence of the blight had taken everyone by surprise, dozens of home gardens had been reported as affected. It was accepted that, by morning, a survey would show that the impending damage would be one-hundred percent.
“We know that,” Elaine said. “Why shouldn’t Willy confirm what’s going on inland?”
Schiavo took a moment and looked to each of those around the table. For some reason, when she’d finished, her gaze settled on me.
“Because what if the problem is us,” she said.
She still looked at me, the woman, the leader, who’d faced all that there was to be faced in battle, and more. I’d been witness to those acts, by her side during some of the most intense moments either of us had faced. And I’d watched her change, from a junior Army officer thrust into chaos to a full Colonel being handed the ultimate destructive power by the President of the United States. We understood each other. That was why she had fixed on me, I believed, because what she was suggesting was painful to even consider. In war, in a fight for one’s life, though, hard truths had to be faced before they could be overcome.
“You mean something here,” Elaine said, and Schiavo nodded.
“We have to consider that,” I said.
Elaine thought for a moment, then rolled herself back to the table. Schiavo sat again next to her.
“Do we have any people out in the field?” Elaine asked. “Any scouting or scavenging missions?”
“None at the moment,” Hannah Morse answered.
“Marv and Ginny Ballis are at the cottage down the coast,” Stu shared. “They’re due back tomorrow. I mean today.”
It was past midnight. A new day had effectively begun. In the dark, in homes across Bandon, worry had risen from a place it had been buried for a while now. Worry and outright fear. Only the youngest of residents, from newborns to children who were toddlers at the time the town was a beacon known as Eagle One, had no memory of the blight and its ravages. Those of us who did were feeling a sickening sense of déjà vu, one that we’d not expected to ever experience again.
But we were.
“Close the roads,” Elaine said.
“Wait,” Stu said. “This is a Council decision. We have to agree on any—”
“Not under the emergency powers section of the charter,” Elaine reminded him.
The documents which formalized Bandon’s government after Martin had stepped away from his de facto leadership of the town several years ago included the provision Elaine was invoking, one that could only be overturned should the remaining elected Council members vote unanimously to do so.
That wasn’t going to happen.
“Elaine is right,” Joel said. “This situation requires action.”
Stu shook his head and settled back into his seat.
“I’m not disagreeing with it, I just think if—”
“We don’t have time to think and debate,” Elaine interrupted him, turning to Schiavo next. “Will you have the garrison set up the required roadblocks and initiate patrols?”
“Lt. Lorenzen will take care of it,” she said.
Her former second-in-command, who now led the garrison, would take on the task with his usual measured tenacity. Now, though, he had more teeth to put into any bite that needed to be taken out of the mission.
“I’ll have him integrate the Marines into the assignment,” Schiavo added.
Though Lorenzen shared his rank with Lt. Mason, an understanding had been reached in just the last twelve hours that command decisions would rest with the Army lieutenant leading the garrison. There was no animosity between the cordially rival service members, only good-natured joking concerning how many of the competing service members it would take to screw in a light bulb, though much cruder versions of the ribbing had clearly been shared. But in this instance, I had no doubt, nor did Schiavo, I was certain, that both units would coalesce around what needed to be done.
“All right,” Elaine said.
She gave each person in attendance a final look, gauging reactions to the decisions she’d made. There was no open resistance, not even from Stu Parker. We’d faced crises before, but nothing like this. The first scourge of the blight had wiped out nearly the whole of humanity. Now it was back, and it had taken direct aim at those of us who’d adapted and overcome. And if we couldn’t find a way to beat it back once again, we’d soon join our brethren who’d already left this world.
“God help us,” Elaine said, ending the meeting with that hope which, in itself, signaled the grim reality we faced.
Forty Two
By noon the next day Bandon was sealed off. Roadblocks had been placed at the north, south, and east entrances to town. The survey of the saplings and orchards planted on the outskirts of town had been completed, confirming that the blight was, in a terrible repeat performance, on its way to wiping out all that we’d struggled to recreate since returning from Cheyenne with the cure.
The cure that was not that at all, it now appeared.
The in-town survey of all things that had been planted was also near completion. Everything from flower beds in the park to vegetable gardens in the backyards of so many homes was being inspected, the degree of damage to each noted for a report to the Town Council.
One report, though, became more urgent than others. Martin’s call to me as I stole a few minutes with my daughter at home made that clear.
“Can you meet me at Mrs. DaSilva’s house?” he asked me over the phone.
“I have Hope right now,” I told him. “I’ll need to get—”
“Bring her, Fletch. This can’t wait.”
I didn’t know what had him so worked up, though it could have been any number of things. Panic hadn’t set in among Bandon’s residents—not fully. But already there was clear worry, and complaints against the town’s leaders for letting this happen. That was fear speaking, I knew. Normally rational people lashing out because, deep within, they knew that those who could be blamed were long dead. It was more venting than complaining, when one looked at the overall situation.
That, though, didn’t ease the building tension by any appreciable amount. And there was no telling what tomorrow would bring. Or the next day.
“On my way,” I told Martin.
I needed no more explanation from the man, his judgement that my presence was somehow necessary more than enough reason to make that happen. I gathered my daughter up and loaded her in the child seat next to me in the pickup. In just over five minutes I pulled up in front of Noreen DaSilva’s house. She was sixty and a blight widow, her husband dying during their journey west from their home in Missouri. Like others, they had followed the beacon to Eagle One, but only she had made it, arriving just before Neil and I had with Grace and Krista. In the years since then her home had been on the south side of town, with woods just a stone’s throw from her back porch. As were the greying saplings whic
h, just a day ago, had brimmed with vibrant green needles on strong limbs.
When I pulled up to the curb in front of the woman’s house, Martin was waiting at the bottom of the front steps. I wouldn’t describe his expression as grim as much as uncertain. That would not have surprised me regarding anyone else, but it did with him. Martin Jay had always been decisive. An action taker. His adeptness at sizing up situations and reacting quickly and appropriately had, in essence, kept Bandon and its residents alive through the worst of the blight. That I now saw in him something unlike that surety was unsettling.
“Come on, sweetie,” I said, lifting Hope from her car seat and setting her down on the browning parkway grass next to the sidewalk.
“Uncle Martin!”
She ran toward him, his expression shifting immediately to joyful. The smile was muted, though, and as he picked her up and wrapped her in a hug he looked to me, something more showing through his gaze now—confusion.
“Oh, you brought my favorite little helper!” Noreen DaSilva said, beaming brightly as she came out of her house and scooped Hope from Martin’s arms, my daughter wrapping hers around the genial woman’s neck. “I have got some cookies just out of the oven that need tasting.”
Noreen looked to me, as did my daughter, and I gave a quick nod. The grandmotherly woman lowered Hope to the walkway and took her tiny hand, leading her into the house.
“What is it, Martin?” I asked once we were alone.
He gestured toward the side of the house and led me that way, down the path to the back yard, where Mrs. DaSilva’s beloved greenhouse sat behind her residence and the detached garage. Martin went to the opaque structure, layers of plastic covering its metal skin, trapping heat and moisture within to foster plant growth. The woman had bred a dozen varieties of tomatoes from seed, sharing nearly all with neighbors and friends. Her green thumb was well known, but even it could not stop the scourge which had come again to our world. As Martin opened the flimsy door I could see rows of drooping grey stalks even before entering, the blight infecting this collection of greenery as it had all others.
