by Noah Mann
Stripped, but not empty.
A chair rested against the back wall, maybe ten feet away, and in the chair a naked man sat smiling at us, one hand clenched to his stomach, the other hanging at his side, gripping a long knife, blood dripping from it.
“She was right,” the man said upon seeing us. “She really was right.”
I stepped into the space and swept the room with my light, the man its only occupant. The knife blade tapped the leg of the chair a few more times then slipped from his fingers, blood continuing to flow from a pair of long gashes across his wrist.
“Who are you?” I asked, Schiavo and Hart following me in.
The man didn’t reply. He simply beamed at us, his gaze swimming as if some marvelous truth had been confirmed.
“You’re hurt,” Schiavo said. “We can help you.”
He lifted his hand and gazed at the deep cuts, red bubbles pulsing with each beat of his heart.
“It wasn’t enough,” the man said.
“I have a medic with me,” Schiavo said.
The man looked to us, the glare of my weapon light sparkling off his eyes as I maintained a cautious aim on his chest. He shook his head, still smiling.
“That won’t be necessary,” he said, then eased the clenched hand away from his chest, revealing a grenade in his grip.
“No pin!” Hart warned.
The pin which should have been in place to make the weapon safe was gone, presumably pulled by the man. Schiavo pushed her medic backward, away from the threat. Hart spun, catching a foot on the metal frame of the door. He tumbled to the floor, blocking the way out.
“Goodbye,” the man said, easing his hold on the grenade, the safety lever releasing.
A soft pop signaled that the internal fuse had been lit.
“Go!” I shouted.
Hart got to one knee and reached for his commander, pulling her through the doorway as I moved to exit. Too fast, it turned out.
Where Hart had tripped himself up on the hardened door jamb, my boot caught on Schiavo’s as she was hustled clear. I fell sideways, beyond the door.
One second...
Two seconds...
That’s how long it had been from the instant the man ignited the fuse. He didn’t hurl the grenade in our direction, instead cupping it gently, serenely against his chest. How long was the fuse on the type of weapon he held? Three seconds? Four?
I couldn’t know for sure, and there was no time to chance the effort it would take to make it out of the room. As I heard Schiavo and Hart tumble into the corridor outside, in the clear, I pushed myself up and against the door that had swung almost fully inward, putting it between me and the suicidal man.
At the instant I made it to my feet the grenade detonated.
There was sound, and smoke, and a pulse of fire to accompany the wild spray of shrapnel that ricocheted about in the confines of the steel compartment, but the greatest effect I felt was the heavy steel door, which had shielded me from the worst of the blast, slamming into me as the concussive wave hit it. I was smashed against the wall behind, almost crushed between it and the door, the impact stunning me. The world went dark for a moment, smoke choking me and voices screaming my name through the echoing ring that filled my head.
“Fletch!”
I lay crumpled on the floor as Schiavo and Hart pulled the door away, sound and light seeming twisted. The haze that surrounded me, that surrounded them, gave everything I saw an almost angelic blur. If the stench of burning flesh hadn’t been so pervasive I might have thought I was seeing actual angels.
“Fletch!”
“Yeah,” I said, then coughed for a full ten seconds as Hart helped his commander lift me from the floor.
“Get him out of here,” Schiavo said.
As they pulled me around the door, the swinging light on the AR slung across my front passed over the man. Or what was left of him. A large red stain covered the wall behind where he’d sat, and the mangled chair that had supported him, along with his body below the hips, lay in a heap in the corner, tossed there by the violent explosion. That was all there was.
“We need a safe space,” Schiavo said as they helped me from the horrific scene. “Down that way.”
They half carried, half dragged me down the hall to the left, Schiavo clearing the way with her M4’s light, searching for a suitable room to regroup.
“Here,” she said.
She and Hart pulled me into a compartment that was not as bare as the others we’d come across previously. Two chairs were toppled in the space. Hart righted one and Schiavo eased me into it, stripping my weapons and gear until I sat there, wobbly, just my clothing and boots left. Hart closed the door. It was not a watertight barrier, and there was no lock on it, just a knob that turned freely.
“Sergeant check him out,” Schiavo said.
Hart dropped his gear as his commander covered the door. He knelt next to me, supporting me with one hand while examining me.
“Can you hear me, Fletch?”
“Yeah, Trey,” I said. “You and the church bells ringing in my head.”
“That should pass,” he assured me.
He ran his hands over me from head to toe, shaking his head when he was done.
“Not a scratch,” Hart said, amazed. “Be thankful you weren’t behind this door.”
He tipped his head toward the barrier Schiavo was covering. It was some sort of synthetic material made to look like wood. The space we’d taken refuge in, it seemed, had been some sort of office aboard the carrier in its more useful days.
“Navy steel saved your life, Fletch,” Hart said.
“Is he all right to continue?” Schiavo asked.
“Yeah,” Hart said, repacking his medical gear. “Doesn’t even need a bandage. Just a few minutes to get his wits back.”
“Okay,” Schiavo said, glancing back to me. “And your opinion?”
“I’m okay,” I said. “But I don’t want to do that again.”
Hart let me sit for a few minutes then helped me back into my gear when I insisted on standing.
“Who do you think that guy was?” Hart asked.
“I’m more interested in who the ‘she’ was he kept mentioning,” I said.
There were enough oddities thus far to occupy our discussion for hours. But we didn’t have hours, because Martin might not.
“We know one thing from that whole fiasco,” Schiavo said. “Martin didn’t come this way.”
“He wouldn’t have missed grenade guy,” I agreed. “So do we backtrack or press another direction?”
“Let’s head down one of these corridors and see if it will circle back to those stairs,” Schiavo said.
I picked my AR up from where Hart had leaned it against the wall and snapped it onto the sling across my gear vest.
“I’m ready,” I said.
“Hart is point,” Schiavo said.
I understood her shifting me off the lead of our short column. I felt back in the game, but was I really? The effects of the blast had largely worn off, but would any resurface? She needed a fresh set of eyes, and ears, clearing the way for us.
“I’ll tailgun,” I said.
“Get us moving, Sergeant.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
* * *
We did as Schiavo had said, Hart leading us left out of the room we’d hunkered down it, then right, searching for a connecting corridor which would take us back toward the bow of the ship.
Instead, we came upon another anomaly to add to the horse sounds and the naked man with the grenade.
“This makes no sense,” Hart said, stopping us.
Just beyond him, where the way forward should be, a slab of steel had been crudely welded, blocking the passage. Its edges were uneven, and several gaps existed on its perimeter, the largest just big enough to shine a light through.
“Let me look, sergeant,” Schiavo said.
She stepped to the barrier and took a small flashlight from her vest, shining i
t through the opening as she eased her face close to the opening for a look, recoiling quickly before seeing anything, a sour look upon her face.
“What is it?” I asked.
Schiavo stepped aside and let me have a look for myself. But it wasn’t anything within sight that elicited her reaction, nor mine as I put my face to the opening.
It was what I smelled.
“Oh man,” I saw, backing away.
“Fletch?” Hart asked.
“Decomp,” I said.
Fourteen
The sickly-sweet stench that drizzled through the opening meant that death lay somewhere beyond the barrier. Recent death. Not the kind that had been commonplace in the months and years after the blight. There would be no remains nearly mummified by stale air sitting in some living room rocker. That was a lengthy process witnessed by many who set out on scouting and scavenging missions from our earliest days in Bandon.
No, what we would find, if we made it past the blockage, were those who’d gone to meet their maker within days of our arrival on the Vinson.
“That’s from more than just one body,” Schiavo said.
Not far from where we stood were the decomposing remains of human beings. Whether we would ever know who they were, or why and how they died, was an open question.
“We’re not getting past that,” I said.
“Unless we blow it,” Hart said. “I have two charges. Ed wanted me to bring some backups in case anything happened to his.”
Sergeant Ed Westin had blown the power cables to the transmitter on deck, and was, at that moment, attempting to rig some sort of communications system to reach beyond the carrier. Because of Hart we had the means to breach the barrier, but should we?
“Let’s find another way to—”
The sudden rush of light cut Schiavo off. Up and down the corridors, and in compartments off of the passageways, lights flickered to life all at once, cold fluorescents clicking then humming as they warmed up. Even beyond the makeshift wall we’d encountered the lights had come on, a shaft of brightness angling through the small opening at its edge.
Schiavo killed her flashlight beam and pocketed it.
“Someone has control somewhere,” Schiavo said.
“Over there,” I told her, motioning to the barrier. “You barricade the center. You protect what deserves protecting.”
She nodded, unconcerned.
“There’s no point in breaking through,” Schiavo said. “Martin didn’t. He has to be on this side.”
“Unless there’s another way through,” Hart said.
She shook her head.
“We stick with the plan,” she said. “Find him, and then we figure out the rest.”
We turned away from the barrier, Hart still in the lead. The ringing in my ears had almost totally subsided, and the feeling that I’d been punched in the gut by some behemoth boxer was fading as well. I wasn’t a hundred percent yet after almost being blown up.
Three times...
This was the third time I’d been faced with death by explosives. From a nuke while we hunkered down in a missile control center beneath the Wyoming wastelands. In the pit in Skagway as the Russian forces were taken out. And now at sea, by a crazy man with a grenade.
She was right...
His words bubbled up in my thoughts and nagged at me as we turned left, then right, and followed a long passageway. Schiavo couldn’t afford to consider what the man had told us, but I couldn’t avoid doing that very thing.
She really was right...
Someone, a woman, had meant something to the naked man. A woman who had told him something that came to pass. But what had come to pass?
Our presence.
It had seemed to be the catalyst for the man’s reaction, and for his decision to finish himself off after an unsuccessful attempt at suicide in the hours before we came upon him. If our arrival, our showing ourselves to him, was the thing the unknown woman had been right about, then there was some importance placed upon it.
And upon us.
But why?
It was the parallel question to go with our wondering as to why the carrier had anchored itself in the proximity of Bandon. My concern that we were, yet again, a target, seemed to be given credence by what the man’s crazed words implied.
Someone, some woman, had expected us to do exactly what we had done—come to the carrier.
“Angela,” I said.
Schiavo glanced behind as we kept moving.
“What happened on the hangar deck was a trap,” I said.
“I know that, Fletch.”
“I don’t think we’re done with that sort of thing.”
“Because we were expected,” she said.
Contrary to what I’d thought, Schiavo had been entertaining the same line of reasoning which had just struck me. Even in the midst of the chaos, with the man she loved missing, she was pressing on and weighing all angles which might explain, in some small way, just what the purpose of all this was.
Fifteen
We cleared the deck, and the one we’d come down from, finding more welded barriers which seemed to cut the center section of the carrier’s lower decks off from the rest of the ship. Heading even deeper, several decks further down, the same blockades, at roughly the same points, appeared to confirm that belief.
And nowhere did we find Martin, nor any sign of him.
“Almost everything has been stripped,” Hart commented as we paused to regroup on the lowest deck we’d been able to reach. “It’s like they cleaned up before they did all this reconfiguring.”
He nodded toward the final barrier we’d found, in a central passageway cramped by thick pipes and conduits. It was the last way possible to access the center portion of the ship, and it was blocked like all the other avenues to continue had been.
“He’s not here, Angela,” I said.
Schiavo stared at the blockage and nodded, knowing what that meant.
“If he’s not on this side of the barriers...”
“Then he found a way to the other side,” I completed the suggestion for her.
“Why would he do that?” Hart asked. “If he fell and was just trying to get away from people following him, why not wait for us?”
“He’d know we would come for him,” Schiavo said, allowing, at least in part, her medic’s supposition.
They were both right. But so was another fact that had begun to occur to me as we searched the lowest decks of the Vinson.
“He’s been in this situation before,” I said.
“What do you mean?” Schiavo pressed me.
“When he was on the hunt for the mole in Bandon during the Unified Government siege,” I said. “He was operating in the shadows. We had almost no idea what he was doing until he bagged his quarry.”
Private Sheryl Quincy, Schiavo’s replacement soldier delivered by the Rushmore, had been nothing more than an enemy infiltrator, feeding information to her masters to increase their tactical advantage. And Martin had put a stop to that, working on his own.
“He saw a path to discovery that none of us did, and he followed it,” I said. “What if the same situation presented itself when we were scouting the sound on the hangar deck?”
“You think he didn’t fall into that hole?” Hart asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “If he did or didn’t, something down there might have caught his attention.”
“And the arrow?” Schiavo asked, referencing the marker Martin had left for us.
“He wanted us to follow him,” I said. “We know that. But maybe it’s not because he was running, but because he’d found something. Something he had to follow—not something he had to run from.”
Schiavo processed what I was suggesting. She knew it was well within her husband’s makeup to do precisely what I’d described, to spot an opportunity and exploit it.
“We’ve got to get to the other side, Angela,” I said.
It wasn’t such a secondary suggestion anym
ore. Martin had to be beyond the barriers. She looked to her medic.
“You said you have two charges?” she asked.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“If my demo training is accurate, two will be just enough,” she said. “But not here.”
“Where?” I asked.
She jabbed her thumb upward.
“Where we smelled the decomp,” she answered.
It was an unpleasant path we would have to take, but it made the most sense.
“We know there was life there recently,” I said. “It’s gotta lead somewhere.”
She nodded and motioned for Hart to get us moving again.
* * *
We reached the intended barrier and were immediately hit by the awful stench slipping through the cracks around the edge.
“Make it happen, Trey,” Schiavo ordered.
She and I backed off, taking a position around a corner down the passageway as her medic placed the explosives.
“It makes sense,” Schiavo said, looking to me from our position of safety. “That he’d do that.”
“I know,” I said.
But she shook her head. There was more to her agreement than I was understanding.
“When he gets something in his head,” Schiavo began, “some idea or imperative, he becomes a heat-seeking missile. I know he had to be that person for so long while leading the town...”
“He wants to protect, Angela.”
“He still sees himself as a lone savior sometimes,” she said. “Even after I came into his life.”
Her frustration was expressed only as some muted feeling. A general desire for him to be different. But I sensed that, inside, where her truest self existed, she was screaming at him right now.
Mostly, though, she was afraid that, because of his actions, she might lose him.
“Ten seconds,” Hart said as he came fast around the corner.
He ducked and pressed himself against the same corridor wall we had. I covered my ears and closed my eyes as the seconds ticked down.
Four...
Three...
