The Signal (The Bugging Out Series Book 8)

by Noah Mann

  Back in Lana’s domain.

  The machinery humming further below us sent soft, monotone vibrations through the ship. I could feel the propellers turning as the Vinson accelerated. It was an older ship, not as quiet as her newer brethren, I assumed. Silence didn’t matter now, though. Pedal to the metal would be the order of the day in the operation Lana had conceived.

  How many, though, had she coopted? This was not all her doing. At one time I would have considered it shocking that anyone would throw in with a person like her, and commit to helping bring about the end of our species. Especially those with the technical skills to help her make this happen. Engineers. Physicists. Tradesmen. People who bore those titles would have also had to subscribe to Lana’s apocalyptic vision. Thinking minds, calculating intellects, gritty know-how, were all qualities of those who wanted to die along with the rest of humanity.

  She’d made that happen. And I knew why Schiavo had stated what she had about Lana—the woman would never miss the end she’d envisioned. She was still here.

  That meant we had to be on guard.

  “How far down will we have to go?” Schiavo asked, looking to me.

  I had an inkling why she had posed the question to me. I had built many things in my life, though nothing approaching the complexity of a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier. Still, there could be similarities in the concepts, and universal realities such as heat rising and cold air falling.

  “You put the boiler in the basement,” I said.

  “I didn’t get to the lower decks on Lana’s part of the ship,” Martin said. “She could have a menagerie down there for all we know.”

  I wouldn’t be surprised at anything we might come across, but we absolutely had to locate whatever was controlling the ship and bring the vessel to a stop.

  “All right,” Schiavo said. “I’m on point.”

  Martin glanced to me. It was not her place to be at the front of a column, no matter how much she wanted to lead. But there was one major difference here which negated the concern we both were sharing—she had no troops to lead. Just us. Civilians.

  “Okay,” Martin said.

  He had to accept her decision, as did I. There was no time to argue the point in any case. Every minute we delayed, the carrier sailed further away from the point Schiavo had called the strike in on, and closer to the people we cared about.

  Schiavo moved out, leading us to our first set of stairs, the steep set of treads awkward to negotiate with weapons at the ready. There was no further way to descend where the stairs let out, just corridors straight ahead and to the left.

  “We’re going to have to cross over to—”

  The lights went suddenly out, plunging us into darkness.

  Twenty Seven

  I moved toward a compartment opening I’d noticed, feeling for the edge of the doorway that would lead into it.

  “I’m covering left,” Schiavo said.

  But left of what? Her left? Mine? In the inky world into which we’d been plunged, we could be aiming at each other and not even realize it.

  “There’s a space here,” I said.

  Everything was by feel. Schiavo and I had had our gear, including flashlights, confiscated by Lana’s people.

  But Martin hadn’t been with us. He still retained all his gear, including the weapon light on his M4, a fact Schiavo realized at the same instant I did.

  “Martin, give us some light,” she said.

  There was a brief hesitation before he responded.

  “I can’t,” he said.

  His reply was too calm. Too monotone. Something was wrong, and a second later, both Schiavo and I knew the precise nature of the problem.

  “Go ahead,” Lana said. “Turn it on.”

  My finger slid onto the Benelli’s trigger just before a wash of brightness filled the narrow corridor, the beam of Martin’s weapon light splashing off the floor to reveal not only Schiavo and I crouched against opposite walls, but also Martin several feet away, Lana standing behind him, the barrel of a sawed-off Remington pump pressed against my friend’s back. Her face was partly obscured by a set of night vision goggles, infrared emitter atop them allowing her to see in complete darkness.

  “Guns on the floor,” she said, flipping the goggles upward to see us with unaided vision.

  We did as she instructed, Martin, too, his light now spread along the length of the corridor.

  “Where are all your masked men?” I challenged her.

  She brought a boot up and planted it on Martin’s back, shoving him toward us with a kick. He recovered and turned to face our captor.

  “Do you believe I need them?” Lana asked. “Circumstances would seem to indicate I’m doing quite well on my own.”

  “Can you stop the ship?” Schiavo asked, leaping to a direct inquiry that actually seemed to surprise the woman.

  “No,” Lana said. “But I can stop you.”

  She took a step backward, giving herself a few feet more distance to us. To her targets. We could rush her, and if she began firing there was no doubt in my mind that we would fight. But, even as she’d backed away, she did not begin to fire.

  “I remember something,” she said. “I think of it often. It was when I was a child in Poland. A very young child. Not even in school yet.”

  For some reason she’d drifted off into a monologue. As long as she was talking, she wasn’t shooting. But every second that she kept us here, at bay, the Vinson moved closer and closer to Bandon, and away from the location that Schiavo had given to the Louisiana.

  “We had a dog,” Lana continued, the shotgun shifting every few words so that its aim landed on each of us. “A stray. My mother said we had nothing to feed the dog. But I saved scraps from the table and fed it when I would go outside to play. One day, my mother caught me doing this, and she disciplined me. She told me there was not enough food for the dog. So I had to stop feeding it.”

  Sounds echoed through the ship, sharp and quick. Lana hesitated, listening, discounting the errant noises which were likely products of cut beams reacting to motion through the violent sea.

  “Then, the dog had puppies. She gave birth behind a shed in a pile of rotting hay. For days she tried to feed them, but she had no food for herself. I begged my mother to let me feed the mother dog, but she beat me for asking.”

  Lana quieted for a moment, a weird, teary smile curling her lips as the childhood memory mixed with some twisted adult disdain.

  “One puppy died every day for a week, until they were all gone. Then the mother died a few days later. Animals dragged away the bodies and devoured them. But that is what animals do.”

  She shifted the aim very deliberately toward Schiavo now.

  “My mother had hair like you,” Lana said.

  “Is this supposed to explain why you’re doing what you’re doing?” Martin asked. “Because you had a heartless mother?”

  “There are too many heartless mothers,” Lana said. “And fathers. And people in general. We’ve all done enough damage, to each other, to the planet.”

  “Killing us, killing everyone, won’t erase what happened to those puppies,” I said.

  She shook her head slightly at me.

  “I’ve seen worse than dead puppies in my life,” Lana sneered. “That is what this is about. The carnage, the indifference, that man is capable of. It needs to stop.”

  Her shotgun shifted to me.

  “It has to stop now,” she said.

  Her finger lay very plainly on the trigger. I sensed Schiavo and Martin both tense off to my side. It was about to happen. Some of us, hopefully, would survive.

  Even then, with our failure in this attempt to stop the ship, death would catch up soon enough.

  BOOM!

  It wasn’t an explosion, but it sounded like one, the crack of the shotgun amplified in the confines of the corridor. A flash, too, erupted as the weapon was fired.

  But neither came from Lana’s sawed-off Remington.

  Her b
ody jerked forward, gun falling from her grip, a splatter of blood showering the wall next to her as her body bounced off of it and folded in half, slamming hard onto the floor. Behind her, in the silhouetted shadows cast by Martin’s light, Chris Beekman stood, his own shotgun smoking in his hands. He racked a fresh round into the chamber and covered the woman he’d just taken out without a second to spare.

  “Chris,” I said, grabbing my Benelli and rising. “How did...”

  “Number one, tail wind,” he said.

  On the floor, Lana gurgled, blood spilling from her mouth, her breath bubbling as she choked within.

  “Number two, Sergeant Hart likes to talk,” Beekman said. “He described how you all made it back topside. I just reversed the order when I couldn’t find you on the flight deck. Then I followed that nutjob’s voice.”

  I silently thanked the garrison’s medic for his chatty nature and his mind mapping abilities. Schiavo stood and kicked Lana’s shotgun away, picking up her own Benelli as Martin grabbed his M4 from the floor.

  “Did you bring the C-Four?” Schiavo asked.

  “Plenty,” Beekman told her.

  The arrival of the explosives had changed the equation for Schiavo, and negated the necessity of our mission into the depths of the ship to find what was controlling it.

  “All right,” Schiavo said. “We’re heading back up. We’ll take the time to transfer the charges down to this level and place them all along the starboard side of the ship. I can’t imagine that three hundred pounds of C-Four wouldn’t punch a hole in—”

  She stopped, her gaze angling toward the very side of the ship she’d been referencing. The starboard side. Martin, too, looked, directing his M4 there, though not at any overt threat, but to wield his light and illuminate the corridor where our attention had refocused.

  “Dear God,” Schiavo said.

  The same dread that sparked her reaction flared suddenly in me. In all of us.

  “What the hell is that?” Beekman asked, the sound rising now, echoing through the Vinson’s hull.

  “Torpedoes,” Martin said.

  Twenty Eight

  We heard it just seconds before it hit, the sound of the whirring propellers transmitted through the carrier’s steel hull in the same way that a pinging sonar must have terrified World War Two submariners. There’d been no expectation when Schiavo had ordered the strike that we’d still be aboard when it hit. Though less lethal than one of the nukes the boomer could have unleashed, what the colonel had ordered would leave no chance of radioactive fallout that could affect Bandon.

  Torpedoes...

  It had been her idea, and her call, to utilize the sub’s other choice of weaponry. An inspired choice, I’d thought then. Now, it seemed we would be taken out by the underwater ordnance, not just the carrier.

  “Run,” Martin said, in as calm a voice as I’d ever heard him use.

  Beekman turned first, but only made it a few steps before we heard two distinct sources of the sound seem to dive beneath us, to a position directly below the keel of the carrier.

  Then they exploded.

  Martin’s weapon light stayed on, and, strangely, the emergency lights which previously had glowed dim throughout the vessel flickered back to life as the blast tore through the decks below us. I was hurled upward, into the corridor’s ceiling, as were my friends.

  Except Schiavo.

  The wall next to her bent in her direction, and the floor split along a twenty-foot length, directly beneath her feet. The fissure spread open like a steely, screaming maw, swallowing Lana, her body disappearing in a sudden gush of misty spray.

  “Angela!”

  It was Martin, horrified, calling out to his wife as he recovered from the impact. I looked and saw what was terrifying him.

  The same jagged hole, which had taken Lana whole, also had Schiavo, only her upper half visible, everything from the waist down pinned in the torn steel.

  “Help me!” Martin said.

  He scrambled to his wife over the buckled floor, Beekman and I joining him. Schiavo looked to us, her gaze clear, both hands planted on exposed supports pressed against her hips, pushing for all she was worth.

  “Are you hurt?” Martin asked, setting his M4 aside and giving her a quick look.

  “I don’t...think so,” Schiavo said.

  Beekman took a flashlight from his pocket and shined it all over Schiavo.

  “I don’t see any blood,” the pilot said.

  “Let’s pull you out of there,” I said.

  Martin and I each grabbed her under the arms and pulled.

  “AHHH!” Schiavo shouted. “Stop!”

  We eased our grip on her.

  “What is it?” Martin asked, kneeling next to his wife.

  Schiavo tried to shift her body, turning against the metal to no avail.

  “There’s something sharp pressing on my hip, and my legs are bent against a pipe. Or a bunch of pipes.”

  I grabbed the flashlight from Beekman and bent close to the narrow hole, peering into the gap just next to Schiavo. What I saw made my heart sink, and my soul hurt. The entire structure beneath us had been sheared in half, and Schiavo was in between, the two parts having sprung back together after the blast. Only a small deformation in one steel beam had allowed her to not be cut in half, pinning her instead.

  “How is it, Fletch?” Martin asked.

  I looked up to Schiavo.

  “Can you turn at all?” I asked. “Just to get one hip past that beam?”

  She tried again, cranking her upper body, hoping that would make the lower half follow. But it didn’t. She stopped, spent from the effort, and looked to me.

  “I can’t,” she said.

  Martin lay flat on the floor and grabbed at the inch-thick steel that had been ripped and peeled in the blast. He pulled, and pulled, his effort magnificent and futile and heartbreaking all at once. After a moment Schiavo reached out and put a hand gently on his shoulder.

  “Stop, Martin.”

  He did, his gaze meeting hers, one desperate, and the other resigned to what had been made inevitable.

  “Immovable object,” she said. “It’s no use.”

  Martin drew a few breaths, surveying the carnage once more.

  “Are you sure?” he asked his wife. “Are you really sure?”

  She nodded.

  “If it was just my leg, I’d say cut it off. But it’s not just my leg.”

  She was accepting her fate, and trying to convince her husband to do the same. I wasn’t ready to give in yet, though. Once more I looked into the fissure, reaching down, searching for some piece of steel that might just be hanging on by a thread. If I could get a solid grip and move it just a few inches...

  “Fletch...”

  I pulled back from the hole and looked to her.

  “Get out of here,” Schiavo said, shifting her attention to her husband. “You, too.”

  Martin smiled and shook his head.

  “Nice try,” he said.

  Schiavo twisted her upper body against the force pinning her below the waist, seeking more comfort than release. She’d already come to accept that there was no escaping the hold the mangled steel had on her.

  “You don’t have much time,” Schiavo said, looking between Martin and me. “The ship is going down.”

  Around us all, the ship groaned and screamed, metal twisting against the assault of the sea pouring in several decks below us, the Vinson reacting to the flooding as any ship would.

  “The ship is starting to list,” Beekman said.

  “You don’t have time to pretend you can save me,” Schiavo told Martin. “Chris won’t be able to take off if the deck reaches too steep an angle.”

  I looked to the pilot. He said nothing. No words to dispute or agree with Schiavo’s estimation. Which meant she was right.

  “I’m not pretending anything,” Martin said.

  He sat next to his wife on the buckled floor. From below, icy air was gushing through r
uptures in the structure as the rapid inflow of seawater displaced the atmosphere trapped in the lower decks. It was as if some chilled, bitter wind was adding its concurrence to Schiavo’s acceptance of her fate. This had become a place of death, and it would take more lives still.

  “You can’t do this,” Schiavo pleaded with her husband.

  Martin took her hand in his and looked to Beekman and me. He was frantic no more. If anything, for himself and for his wife, he was at peace.

  “You both need to get moving,” he said.

  I looked at Martin, and then Schiavo. Her husband’s words, and his own acceptance of what was to come, had eased her insistence that he leave her behind. In its place there rose a calmness, one tinged by sadness that, of all places, this would be the end of them.

  But not all of us.

  “Fletch, you have to go,” Schiavo said, echoing Martin’s words. “Consider it an order, if that’s necessary.”

  “I’m a civilian,” I said, not wanting to fully accept the inevitable.

  “Then go because you have a wife, and a child, who both need you,” Schiavo said. “Isn’t that reason enough?”

  It was. And she knew it.

  “Fletch,” Beekman said. “She’s right about the deck. We don’t have much time.”

  The decision was made, if not in my heart, then in my head. I would never be okay with what I was about to do, but leaving them, leaving my friends behind, was the only thing I could do.

  “The best worst option,” I said, echoing something we’d faced earlier.

  “It is,” Schiavo said.

  As if to emphasize the gravity of the moment, of the decision, the Vinson rattled severely, mimicking the power of an earthquake within. The great vessel was in her death throes.

  “Fletch...”

  I nodded at Beekman’s urging.

  “I’m going to miss you both,” I said.

  Martin nodded and turned to face his wife. Schiavo, a skim of tears glazing her eyes, smiled and spoke her final words to me.