by Noah Mann
“Isn’t this how this all started, Fletch?”
I looked to Dave from the passenger seat and adjusted the headset’s boom microphone closer to my lips.
“How so?”
“You and me, up in a plane, when that signal came out of nowhere.”
He was right. And that wasn’t some ancient event. It was two weeks ago, now.
“Let’s just make this an uneventful trip,” I said.
Dave smiled and nodded, his attention focused out the windshield, the midday sun laying sparkles across the glass. All the protection that Chris Beekman had added to the aircraft, a hundred pounds or more of fine metal mesh, had been removed, extending the range at which we could survey the landscape below.
We weren’t searching in the blind, however. On my lap was a map with circles around towns to scan from the air. Places which, if they were habitable, would fit the criteria that had been established.
No settlement could be closer than roughly forty-five miles as the crow flew from the nearest other settlement. Taken to its extreme, that meant that, theoretically, a string of ten settlements could stretch out four hundred and fifty miles from Bandon. More likely, though, these newly occupied towns would exist in a widely spread cluster stretching mostly south and southeast from where we’d taken off. The reason for that was obvious as we looked to the earth below.
“Hard to believe how stark that line is,” Dave commented.
It was that. Black turning to grey as we flew on a southeast heading, passing over the area where the volcanic ash from the eruption of Mount Hood still painted the landscape dark. Where the southernmost reach of the ash cloud ended, the familiar canvas of blighted grey began, forests withered and toppling.
“Look at all that fertilizer,” I said.
At first the ash cloud had been devastating, though Bandon had escaped the worst of it. But as the months passed and the rains came, what the volcano had spewed had become a welcome amendment to the soil. In all the dead land below, when life again did spread its way, trees and berry bushes and run of the mill weeds would find hospitable earth ready to accept and nourish their roots.
“Yeah,” Dave said. “And then there’s all that.”
The dead zone. The grey world. I’d trudged back and forth across half the country through the gritty, colorless dust that was cast off from every dying pine or blade of grass. It was a sickening sight then, and it was no less so now. The new growth, the return of greens and yellows and purples, had spread from Bandon over the past three years, so much so that little evidence of the blighted woods remained within sight of town. And what did remain was slated to be bulldozed.
Or would have been.
There still would be seeding in and around Bandon. That process would not stop. It could not stop. But the pace would have to slow as seeds and saplings were transferred to each of the new settlements. The vision was no longer a single place of greenery, but, rather, a spreading patchwork of life across the landscape as we reclaimed more of the earth. And secured ourselves in the process.
“Were you surprised that Chris didn’t want to pilot this mission?” I asked Dave.
“I think he’s more focused on replacing the plane he lost.”
My pilot was right about that. Chris Beekman, almost immediately after returning from our successful mission to the carrier, had begun scouting locations where more salvageable small planes might exist. A flight south had led him to what he was looking for. At an airfield across the border in California, just inland from Crescent City, he’d spotted a trio of abandoned aircraft, two Cessnas and a twin-engine Piper. All looked to be in rough shape, and the runway at what was called Ward Field was unusable, Beekman reported. A road trip would be required to reach their location and give them a closer look.
“I told him if he’s able to get any of them airworthy, I’d want to talk about buying one from him.”
“Looking to start a charter business, Dave?” I asked my friend.
“Maybe,” he said. “I also think we’re going to be doing a lot of short hops between all these new settlements.”
“You’re gonna be a busy man if Chris hands the keys over to you.”
“He’s gotta get ‘em into the air first,” Dave reminded me.
That part of Chris Beekman’s plan was underway as we spoke. With the overland trip approved by both Elaine and Schiavo, Beekman had headed out a few hours before we’d taken off. With him were Sergeants Enderson and Hart, Will Sherman who did odd jobs around the airport for Beekman, and two Humvees with extra fuel and special trailering hitches installed. The plan was, if the planes were found to be repairable, the wings would be removed, strapped lengthwise to the fuselages, and each aircraft would be towed back to Bandon.
“If all three are worth salvaging, how hard do you think it will be for Chris to only come home with two?” I asked.
“That’ll just mean another trip to—”
Dave’s answer ended abruptly and he leaned forward, rising a bit from his seat, as far as the safety restraints would allow, so that he could see past the nose of the aircraft. Past and below.
“Fletch...”
I was already looking, searching for what might have caught Dave’s eye. It only took a few seconds to spot what he had. Missing it was impossible.
“Green,” I said.
“A lot of green,” Dave added.
Thirty Eight
Dead ahead of us, on a patch of earth bordered by a road on the south, was a swath of that color. That hue of life amidst a grey world.
“Those are trees,” Dave said. “Live trees.”
“I know,” I said. “That’s gotta be ten acres or more.”
“Where are we?” he asked, scanning the terrain ahead. “Is that Klamath falls up there.”
“Yeah,” I answered, checking the map. “There’s an airport there.”
Dave looked to me, more than a hint of surprise about him.
“You want to set down?”
“That’s life down there, Dave. It’s worth checking out.”
We were forty miles from the survivor colony that had been located in Northern California near Hornbrook, and eighty miles south of Clearwater, far inland from Bandon, where the other band of survivors been discovered. Neither of those groups had reported contact with anyone from the area around Klamath Falls.
“We haven’t scouted this area,” Dave reminded me.
“Exactly. What if they’ve been here all along?”
Dave looked again as we passed to the south of the area of interest, just off our left wingtip as he put the Cessna into a wide orbit around the uneven patch of living foliage.
“But Fletch, that’s not just some people. Stuff is growing down there. Stuff is alive. How is that possible?”
“How is it possible that everything around Bandon is green now?” I asked him. “Maybe we’re not the only ones who found the answer.”
He nodded, but wasn’t fully convinced.
“You think it’s a good idea?” he pressed.
“If we don’t, it’s just going to mean another trip out here,” I told him. “We’ll eventually have to make contact with whoever’s down there.”
“I suppose, if it all checks out, this wouldn’t be a bad place for one of our settlements,” Dave said, warming to the idea. “If there’s already some sort of presence there, and things growing, our people would have a leg up on making it work.”
“Right,” I said, pointing to the south as Dave made another orbit. “The airport is about three miles east of the Klamath River.”
Dave shook his head at that information, and the suggestion that accompanied it.
“This spot is another two miles to the river,” he said. “That’s a five-mile walk. And we’d have to leave the plane behind. Unprotected.”
I knew what Dave was thinking without him needing to say it.
“You think you can land on one of these roads?”
He nodded and pointed to a straight stret
ch of blacktop that ran directly toward the area of greenery. It was free of wrecks and other obstacles, mostly fields to either side.
“No obstructions, and plenty long enough for landing and takeoff,” he said. “That’s two thousand feet easy, and I only need a bit over fifteen hundred.”
Leaving the Cessna behind, unattended and unprotected, was not a great idea, I had to admit. But I was equally unsure of the novice pilot’s ability to land on surface not intended for that.
“Fletch, the guy who landed you on an aircraft carrier taught me how to fly,” Dave assured me. “I can do this. Really.”
One of us was a capable pilot with over a hundred hours at the controls, and the other guy was me.
“All right,” I told Dave. “Let’s go have a look.”
Dave keyed the mic button on the yoke.
“BC, this is SF Two, do you copy?”
There was only soft static in response. The hiss of dead air.
“BC, do you read?”
“We’re awful far with terrain between us,” I said.
His attempt to notify those back home of our plan was logical, but likely impossible. There simply was no line of sight between us and the receiving station in town.
“Bandon Center, this is Scouting Flight Two, we are landing near Klamath Falls to investigate a possible survivor colony.”
Again, there was no reply.
“Just wanted to give it a shot,” Dave said, then ceased his efforts at communication. “I’m gonna swing around and have a look before lining us up.”
He performed the maneuver smoothly, banking over the Klamath River before leveling out with our intended landing strip dead ahead. From the map I could see that it was a stretch of asphalt named Balsam Drive, farmland and farmhouses sparse to either side. Food had once been plentiful here. Things grown. Animals raised. Perhaps, somehow, enough people had hung on until the cure for the blight had, somehow, reached them.
Or, had they come across an entirely different way to defeat the scourge which had ravaged the earth.
“We’ve got clear air and minimal obstructions,” Dave reported as he did a low pass over the road.
“Those wires won’t be a problem?”
“Halfway down the landing and takeoff run,” he said. “We’ll be on the ground passing under them.”
More electrical wires had, at one time, crossed the road at several places. But time, weather, and neglect had brought the poles supporting them down. Or, possibly, survivors not long after the blight struck had taken them down for firewood. That was the time of scavenging and scavengers, taking what was necessary to stay alive.
“Wires on the road won’t snag the wheels?” I asked.
“I don’t see any, Fletch.”
Those lengths of copper and steel wire might have been valuable to someone at the time. Or even to those who now tended the greenery that had drawn us to this place.
“We have power,” I said. “No reason to think they wouldn’t, I guess.”
Power required wire to distribute. This, and what we’d seen from the air, pointed to a group of survivors who weren’t just scratching for scraps to stay alive. They’d found a way to actually live. To sustain themselves.
And now, we’d found them.
“Turning for final approach,” Dave said.
He nosed the Cessna up, gaining altitude and turning toward the river again, executing the sweeping turn for his final approach. There would be no low pass this time. We were going to see up close just who had carved out an existence in the hills at the end of the road.
“Fifty feet,” Dave said as we slowed and settled toward the road. “Twenty. Ten. Five.”
The wheels screeching as they spun suddenly on the pavement announced our touchdown. We rolled down the unmaintained road, bouncing over potholes and deep gouges where the blacktop had been ripped away. But nothing made it impassable, and just past a collapsed farmhouse where an intersecting road split off to the north, Dave slowed and swung the Cessna until it was pointing the way we’d come, now ready for departure. He set the brakes and shut the engine off.
“Let’s see who our neighbors might be,” Dave said, slipping out of his headset.
I removed mine as well and released my seatbelt, opening the passenger door and stepping out with my M4 in hand and my Kimber on my hip. Both had replaced my preferred weapons, which had been lost when we were captured aboard the carrier. I felt completely comfortable with my new personal arsenal, both rifle and pistol nearly identical platforms when compared with what I’d lost. Neither, I hoped, would be seeing any use on this scouting mission, but they, and I, had to be ready.
Yes, whoever was up the road might be our neighbors, our fellow survivors, but they were still an unknown.
And we’d learned, more than once, just how that void of information could turn to disaster with little warning.
Thirty Nine
We left the Cessna behind and walked toward the hills.
A quarter mile up Balsam Drive a road split off to the right, leading to the area we’d seen from the air. We walked alongside each other, Dave on the right edge of the road with his Remington 12 gauge, and me on the left, my M4 held low but ready.
“It’s awful quiet, Fletch.”
I nodded. We’d begun to forget just how silent the blighted world was. Bandon had moved beyond all that, to point where conversations and car engines and the occasional bird tweeting no longer seemed odd. This, what Dave and I were experiencing, did seem odd. Sound odd.
Feel odd.
“I half expected a welcoming committee,” Dave said. “They had to have seen and heard us fly over.”
“They have no idea if we’re friend or foe, Dave. We might hide, too.”
He accepted that with a nod and stayed focused. I remained vigilant, too, because, though I wouldn’t say it to Dave right then, there was that feeling. It was a sensation that we were not alone, but, also, that we might not be welcome.
“I see the treetops,” Dave said.
Ahead, further up the hill, beyond the stands of dead pine and fir trees, living members of their species stood, green tips standing out above the grey and crumbling woods.
“Let’s go off road to the north,” I suggested.
Dave led off without being asked, blazing a path to the right over fields where grass had once stood tall. Just dirt and the remnants of withered twigs and thick stalks remained, crushing to dust beneath our boots. We crossed this open space and entered the woods, ashen trunks rising all around us, snapped limbs scattered about the forest floor.
“Why haven’t they cleared this?” Dave wondered aloud.
“I don’t know,” I said, searching for that very answer myself. “A buffer? Camouflage? They want to stay hidden from the road.”
Dave accepted those suggestions with a shrug. It was possible the survivors somewhere ahead hadn’t anticipated being spotted from the air. This was not a world where technological wonders, like airplanes, still existed in any numbers to be of a concern. They simply might have been unprepared for the possibility. That could also add credence to their reluctance to openly greet us.
“Should we call out?” Dave asked.
“Give it a try,” I said.
We paused between two old, dead lodgepole pines, still surrounded by the grey woods, the place of new growth still a few hundred yards ahead.
“Hello!” Dave shouted. “We saw you from the air! We’re from Bandon! On the coast! We’re here to help!”
For a moment we listened, and we heard nothing. Only the gentle breeze that seemed to fill so many of the empty spaces away from the civilization we’d begun to rebuild.
“Camas Valley hid from us, too,” I reminded Dave.
That group of survivors, advanced in their development, had only become known after the settlement at Remote had been established. Proximity, and a willingness to open up, had exposed them. We had no idea what the survivors nearby, in this place, had been through to make them
hide from contact.
“We’re not an enemy!” Dave added. “Please come out!”
Still there was no response.
“Let’s keep moving,” I said.
That feeling I’d had was changing. The lack of open contact, of greeting, was adding a fair dose of wariness to what was working on me. The unknown was becoming more of a concern, and less of a curiosity.
“We could just head out if you’re not sure,” Dave said.
I shook my head. We were already here, and whatever my gut feeling was, it needed to be backed up by some evidence. Some indication of trouble. But there was none. All that we’d experienced so far were empty woods and silence.
“Let’s check out the growth at least,” I said.
If those who’d tended the greenery didn’t wish to be found, we could not force them to show themselves. But we could at least lay eyes on what they’d managed to grow where nothing had for many years.
“Got it,” Dave said.
We pressed on, walking abreast, a few yards between us as we weaved slowly through the dead trees, slowing, and finally stopping when what we’d come to see lay just before us. Except...
“Fletch, those trees aren’t alive.”
Dave was right. I looked at them, up and down, and at the low shrubs that filled a clearing just beyond them. A few more steps took me to one of the pines and I put my hand against the trunk, which was as green as the limbs. When I pulled it away my palm was stained a bright, unnatural green.
“It’s paint,” I said.
Forty
Dave reached out and dragged his hand across one of the shrubs. It came back covered in the exact wet hue as mine.
“It’s all paint,” he said.
He began to back away.
“Fresh paint,” he added.
“Let’s get out of—”
I never got the last word out. The sharp crack of the rifle shot ended any need for the warning. Worse, it left me with no one to warn.
The bullet, which had been fired from our front, somewhere in the cover beyond the faux greenery, struck Dave Arndt square in the forehead. An explosion of blood and things I didn’t want to think of sprayed from the back of his head as the high velocity round exited. His body collapsed almost straight down, like a puppet who’d lost its puppeteer.
