The Signal (The Bugging Out Series Book 8)

by Noah Mann

  “True separation,” Martin observed. “You really want to spread out.”

  “If we’re going to do this, we have to commit. It has to be for a purpose, and it has to serve that purpose.”

  “Survival,” he said.

  “To borrow from Elaine, get the eggs out of the same basket.”

  Martin nodded, both agreeing and not with the same gesture.

  “Fletch...”

  “Yes?”

  “Micah.”

  That was all he said, and all he had to say. His child, the young soul who’d saved Bandon, and all who had come to it, and possibly the human race in its entirety, was buried in the town cemetery. His life had been too short, but his influence on the years that followed had been immeasurable. He was a touchstone to many.

  And an anchor to his father.

  “When Elaine came around to what I’d suggested, I turned into the doubter. I told her you couldn’t force people to leave. That was true. But she reminded me that there was a better way—they would follow someone. The right person.”

  Martin’s head tipped slightly downward, his gaze settling on the wooden porch floor.

  “A lot of people still remember you as their leader,” I said. “The town’s leader. They’re going to take whatever cue there is from you.”

  He looked to me now, a mix of sadness and apology in his eyes.

  “I can’t leave him,” Martin said, his head shaking slightly, like a leaf disturbed by some faint breeze. “I just can’t.”

  “You don’t have to leave him forever,” I said.

  Martin seized on those words, a mix of confusion and possibility in his gaze.

  “Someone will have to stay here,” I said. “To fish, to run the petroleum processor. Not to mention the wells.”

  An infrastructure that supported Bandon had been built and maintained around it. These things could not all be loaded on the backs of trucks and hauled off to some new enclave.

  “Bandon will just become another settlement,” I said. “In time it will grow again, but so will the other places we plant our flag. It won’t be the only shining light—just one among many.”

  “But if I stay...”

  “Too many will stay with you,” I said. “You have to leave. But that doesn’t mean you can’t visit. Someday, maybe, you could move back. You and Angela. Once Bandon is just that place that most everybody came from.”

  Martin stared at me and considered what I’d proposed for a moment. The impossibility of leaving his late son behind had seemed to dissolve away, replaced by a logical progression of events. Leave. Visit. Return. Only the first two were necessary to his signing onto the plan to scatter the population.

  If that plan ever came to fruition at all.

  Thirty Four

  Elaine brought the suppressed MP5 up and snugged it against her shoulder, her cheek tipping toward the extended stock. The sights lined up as she looked down the top of the receiver and barrel. She drew a breath, released it slowly, and squeezed the trigger.

  A quick burst of 9mm rounds spat from the end of the slender suppressor, fire pulsing and muted cracks sounding. Fifty feet from her a pair of cans arranged atop an old fencepost spun into the air, tumbling to the ground as the row of dead pines behind them erupted with a shower of blighted grey dust.

  She adjusted her aim as I watched from behind, directing more fire into the fallen cans, each dancing further off into the woods with each barrage she put into them. When her magazine ran dry she removed it and safed the compact submachinegun before looking to me, a pleased grin on her face.

  I held out a fresh mag to her, the last of the five I’d filled before our trip to the shooting range just east of town. She waved off the offer and handed me her weapon and the spent magazine.

  “That felt good,” she said.

  Two cans. Three jugs of water. Some old hunks of driftwood. She’d expertly blasted each into oblivion.

  “You needed it,” I said, setting the MP5 on the open tailgate of our pickup. “You’ve needed it for a while.”

  Two years it had been since she’d had any trigger time. The last time she’d held her preferred weapon was the day she’d lost the use of her legs. She’d always been highly proficient with it, and practiced regularly, but in the time since that last battle against the Unified Government forces there hadn’t seemed much point in it. That, at least, was what I imagined she thought.

  But with the burden now placed upon her as leader of Bandon, and especially with the momentous proposal being considered, if nothing else, she deserved some plain old stress relief in the form of the free application of firepower against inanimate objects.

  She reached out and took the MP5 in hand once more, its magazine well empty. For a minute, she just held the weapon, testing its weight. Reacquainting herself with it.

  “I was pretty good with this thing,” she said.

  “For a stubby little gun, yeah, you were.”

  She smiled at me, but the expression lasted just a few seconds.

  “I remember wondering when I became an FBI agent if I’d ever have to take a life in the line of duty,” Elaine said. “That seems like such a quaint thought now. I mean, how many lives have I taken since the world went to hell? Is there any way to even know?”

  I didn’t know why that nagging curiosity had risen right then. On occasion I’d wondered the same thing myself. How many people had I killed? More unsettling, though, was the reality that the question could be asked at all. In a normal life, when such things were possible, the answer would almost universally be ‘zero’. But we’d left ‘normal’ in our dust long ago.

  “No,” I said. “But every life you took saved one that mattered. Either you, or me, or someone else.”

  She didn’t doubt my response. Nor did she dwell on what the answer might mean for her.

  “It was just a stray thought,” she said, laying the MP5 back on the tailgate. “I hadn’t used that for anything other than killing in a long time.”

  The killing, maybe, was done now. And the dying. I truly wanted to believe that.

  “What will Martin do?” she asked me.

  I’d told her of his visit. And his hesitation. And, maybe, his acceptance of what was being discussed behind closed doors. But, when the moment came to actually decide, only he knew what path he would choose.

  “I don’t know,” I told her.

  “He has every reason to stay.”

  “He does,” I agreed with my wife. “What about her?”

  “Angela?”

  I nodded. After Martin had left, the part she would play in his decision began to percolate in my thoughts.

  “The garrison is here,” I said. “Do they stay together? Does she split them up?”

  “That will be part of the discussion,” Elaine said.

  The Town Council would continue debating and deciding on Bandon’s fate as a community when they reconvened the next morning. When any consensus on a plan would be reached was still unknown.

  “It’s more than just her,” Elaine said. “You split the garrison, but what about Clay Genesee?”

  There was no longer any illusion that he was Commander Genesee, United States Navy. He’d formally resigned, inasmuch as that was possible, by handing a letter to Schiavo shortly after he and Grace had said ‘I do’ to each other. Still, he was the only actual physician left after the passing of Doc Allen. A capable cadre of nurses, led by Grace, as well as the garrison’s medic, Sergeant Trey Hart, rounded out the medical staff which had kept the town’s residents alive through injuries and illness.

  “People have traveled to see doctors before,” I reminded her. “If he’s centrally located, it’s a two-hour drive from one of the settlements. Fifteen minutes by air if necessary.”

  “I know all that,” she said. “It’s just convincing people that that sort of arrangement will be workable is not a slam dunk.”

  “None of this is,” I said.

  “Yeah. In some ways, it’s the
hardest thing we’ve had to do.”

  “You know why?”

  “Not entirely.”

  “Because we’re creating the unknown,” I said.

  I wasn’t a man prone to bouts of profound thought, or words, but I was fairly certain that I’d described the situation with accurate brevity. If only the solution were as easy to express.

  “Let’s go pick up our little girl, Mr. Philosopher,” Elaine said, ribbing me as she wheeled herself to the passenger door.

  I stowed the weapon and gear and locked the tailgate up, then climbed behind the wheel just as Elaine expertly swung her chair into the back and joined me in the cab.

  “Have you thought about where we should go?” Elaine asked.

  “I haven’t,” I told her as I started the pickup and pulled away from the firing range.

  “After all the places we’ve scouted and been, you don’t have any preference?”

  “No,” I said.

  “If this all goes through, we’re going to have to make that decision,” she said.

  I steered from the dirt track back onto the road that would take us to town.

  “That time will come then,” I said.

  She puzzled at me for a minute or two as we neared the edge of Bandon. Then, as the buildings and the newly grown trees and the people out for walks came into view, she understood. She knew.

  I didn’t want to think about leaving yet. Even though it had been my idea which had sparked the possibility of this place becoming just a memory for us, that didn’t erase the true, affectionate connection I felt for all that was here.

  “I’m going to miss it, too, Eric.”

  I glanced to her and smiled. She undid her seatbelt and slid across the bench seat and sat next to me, head leaning on my shoulder, comforting me with her presence as we drove into the town that we called home. For now.

  Thirty Five

  The Town Council discussed the proposal for three days. Rumblings of what was being considered began to ripple through the town’s population. Calls even came in from Remote asking what was happening. There was gossip. Theories. Outright lies. Accusations.

  Mostly, though, there was fear. Uncertainty. The life everyone had fought for was being branded a danger, most felt, without the life they would have to make in a new place coming with any guarantees of safety and prosperity. At a town meeting called to clear the air and give the residents facts, it was that very fear which began to overwhelm the gathering.

  “There are none,” I said, loud enough to be heard over the voices challenging the Town Council members who, mostly, stood before those they served. “No guarantees.”

  I’d stayed off to the side of the gathering, which was being held in the cool afternoon air outside the old meeting hall, its confines turned into a storage space for all manner of supplies. Bandon’s junk drawer, it had become. But the memories of momentous discussions and decisions which had been made within were still fresh in most minds. As were memories of who had made those decisions.

  “Martin, are you going along with this?”

  The challenge was nearly shouted at the town’s former leader as he stood just behind me, all eyes shifting from Schiavo and Elaine and the others who had assumed the mantle of government, and back to the man who, in practical purposes, had been a dictator without force. People had listened to him, had followed his edicts, because those actions on his part had kept them alive in the most trying times.

  Now, in this time, a clear majority of those in attendance were looking to him again, for the same guidance he had once offered.

  “I can’t tell you what to do,” Martin said.

  I could sense it as he spoke those words, the crowd’s resurgent hope in his leadership deflating. He wasn’t giving them what they wanted.

  He was, however, giving them what they needed.

  “I can tell you that I will be moving on,” Martin added. “Angela and I will be making a new home wherever this journey takes us.”

  I glanced to the members of the Town Council. Schiavo, an advisor to the body, allowed a slight smile at what her husband had just said. Seated in her wheelchair next to the town’s senior military officer, my wife was less overt in her appreciation toward Martin. A broad, almost uncharacteristic smile was spread across her face, as though some great weight had just been lifted from her. From all of them.

  Which it had.

  * * *

  Residents gathered in knots to discuss what they’d just heard once the meeting ended. Some peppered those who’d brought the proposal to them with questions in a more intimate setting. When all that had subsided, there were just the four of us left, standing near our cars a block away from the meeting hall, one Humvee and one old pickup.

  “You know anyone who’s looking to sell one of those?” Martin asked.

  “A pickup?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Bill Powers was working on a couple he scavenged, if I remember correctly.”

  “He is, yeah,” I said.

  I was slightly confused. Unless Martin wanted the hassle of a vehicle to maintain on his own, I couldn’t understand why he, or they, needed anything more than the Humvee assigned permanently to Schiavo.

  Then, I understood. The Humvee wasn’t assigned to her—it was attached to the office. The commander of the garrison.

  That smile at the airfield after we’d landed had been about more than happiness at our survival. It had come from a place of deeper satisfaction. Of decision.

  “Do you have something to announce?” I asked Schiavo.

  She thought for a moment, then shook her head.

  “I’ve discussed it with Elaine,” she said.

  I looked to my wife, offering her a raised eyebrow.

  “I don’t have to tell you everything,” she said, grinning.

  “Obviously,” I said.

  “People are going to want to vote on the proposal,” Schiavo said. “After that I can make my intentions known.”

  Colonel Schiavo, whom I’d met as Lieutenant Schiavo in the battle on Mary Island, was going to shed all those terms before her given name, Angela, and join the ranks of civilian life.

  “Paul is ready,” she said, offering clear praise to her second in command, Lieutenant Paul Lorenzen, who’d been in operational command of the garrison for some time now.

  “I know he is,” I said. “But are you?”

  She smiled a shrug.

  “Don’t know,” she said, leaning against Martin like a high school girl close to her crush. “But it’s time.”

  We’d all lived several lifetimes since the blight exploded across the globe. Done more, seen more, than most would ever have in a single lifetime in the old world. Angela Schiavo most certainly deserved a chance at a life that did not involve camouflage and command.

  “You want me to call Bill and see if he’s got a truck ready for sale?” I asked.

  Martin shook his head.

  “I’ll give him a call,” he said. “Soon.”

  That time would come, he knew. But, for now, his wife still did wear mottled green and black, and did have to make decisions that could end in life or death for so many. He didn’t want to jump the gun, because she didn’t, I knew. She was a pro, and always had been.

  And always would be.

  Thirty Six

  We had a week of spring left. And then summer. By fall, those who would be moving on from Bandon had to be in their new settlements. In houses which were ready for them. With enough infrastructure to provide for them before the ultimate deadline.

  Winter.

  Despite the time crunch, though, the numbers were impressive. Following the meeting where Martin shared his intentions, a survey was completed. A test of the town’s acceptance of the proposal. To say that the results were surprising was an understatement.

  “Ninety two percent,” Elaine announced in the Town Hall conference room. “Ninety two percent agree with the proposal.”

  She looked to me, and to Schiavo,
and to Martin. We were there with Dave Arndt, the five of us having accepted appointment to what was being called the Resettlement Committee. On our shoulders the challenge of deciding exactly how, and where, to move the population rested. And now we had an idea of just how many people that would entail.

  “Seventy or so don’t want to go,” Martin said, thinking. “Another hundred will have to stay here to operate the fishing fleet, the oil wells, a scaled-back ranching and farming operation.”

  “Just under two hundred will remain,” Elaine said.

  “That leaves about seven hundred who’ll be part of the move,” Dave said.

  “Ten settlements of seventy,” I said.

  The number hung there for a moment as each of us considered the possibility. And the difficulties.

  “Is that doable?” Dave wondered. “Prepping ten new towns? I mean, essentially that’s what we’re talking about. Making ten towns ready for human occupancy.”

  That was what we were talking about. Some pieces of the puzzle that would allow such a scattered endeavor were already in place, and would remain so. Remote’s greenhouse operation would provide the plants and seeds for every new settlement. Just up the road from them, Camas Valley would be called upon to build more batteries, more solar and wind generators, and more electric vehicles to outfit these far flung outposts. Much, though, would have to be done on the fly.

  Figuratively and literally.

  “We need to find those towns first,” I reminded everyone.

  Elaine nodded and looked to Dave Arndt.

  “Don’t you two have a plane to catch?”

  Thirty Seven

  We cruised in the surviving Cessna at a thousand feet above the ground, Dave piloting the aircraft up and down to follow the rise and fall of the terrain below.