by Noah Mann
“I’m going to tell you something, Eric, and then I’m going to leave, and you’ll never see me again.”
It took me a second to process what he’d just said. To absorb the utter impossibility of the statement. My head cocked a bit to one side and I actually smiled, because this had to be some joke, or the prelude to one.
But it was not. Even before he uttered a single word of explanation, the air of solemnity hung thick around him. When he looked up from his coffee and met my gaze, there was dread in his eyes.
“Neil, what the hell...”
“You still keeping up that property north of Whitefish?”
“Yeah,” I confirmed to him. My two hundred acre slice of heaven. The serviceable house that sat on it now dated from the 1930s, but I had plans to demolish it and the barn and old outbuildings to put up my dream retreat. The place I would retire to and spend my best days.
“How far are you there from the main road? Not the highway, but that road splits off from it?”
I had to do some mental math, and recall the survey reports from ten years ago when I purchased the land. Possibly I should have wondered why he was asking such a thing. He was my friend, and something, whatever it was, had brought him here. Something had raised the importance of seemingly mundane facts for him.
“From Weiland Road there’s a gravel driveway about two hundred yards,” I told him. He’d been there before on several occasions, mostly to relax, fish in the pond on the property, and send some bullets downrange in the area I’d set aside for shooting. He’d still never joined me for a deer hunt, using the house there as our own private lodge, but I had hope that he still would. Someday.
He thought on what I’d told him and leaned over the table a bit, narrowing the distance between us. His gaze shifted left, then right, as if clearing the area before proceeding.
“Neil, you’re kinda spooking me,” I said. There was a hint of levity in my delivery. Some attempt to lighten, or brighten, his mood.
It didn’t work.
“You’ve been following this crop disaster in Europe?”
“It’s kinda hard to ignore,” I said, recounting for him what I’d witnessed near Arlee. The tentacles of the blight sweeping across Europe had reached our shores in ways more sinister than just higher priced steaks and vegetables. That was my opinion, at least.
“It’s going to get worse,” he said to me.
“I get that feeling, too. People will gladly submit for inspection by soldiers, but they cry bloody murder when the price of their porterhouse goes through the roof.”
“They haven’t seen anything yet,” Neil said, some gravity about him. A darkness like I’d never known him to exhibit. “None of us have.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You need to start paying attention, Fletch.”
“To what?”
“Watch everything you can. Read everything you can. What you’re hearing now is what they want you to hear. The governments over there, our government here, they’re saying the situation is being managed.” Neil eased back a bit and chuckled lightly, no humor in the expression at all. Just comical disdain. “Managed.”
What he’d said to me sounded more than vaguely like a warning. But a warning of what?
“Okay,” I told him. “I’ll keep tabs on it. But what does any of this have to do with my property?”
“How are you stocked there? Water, consumables, food? Not the perishable crap, but stable supplies. Things that will last. Things that will sustain you.”
I saw suddenly where he was going with this, and it reminded me why we’d meshed so easily back in our younger days. We thought alike in many respects. Appraised the world and the ways of its various institutions similarly. We trusted ourselves, and expected others to earn the same. Be they individuals, or those elected to lead.
“I started stocking up a while back,” I told him. “After that insanity up near Arlee, I knew things were going to hit a boiling point sooner or later.”
“Sooner,” Neil told me. “Sooner.”
I nodded. I’d suspected as much.
“I laid in enough for a few months, just in case,” I explained. “MREs, barrels for water. I made sure the batteries for the solar system were good to go. And I picked up ammo. Lots of ammo. If things get dicey, I’ll be able to ride it out up there.”
For a moment he said nothing. Gave no reaction. No nod of approval, or ‘good thinking’. He just looked at me, silent, as if he didn’t want to tell me what he knew he’d have to.
“You’re not ready.”
I let his observation hang for a moment between us, wondering how he could so openly state such a thing. Then, that which should have worried me became apparent—what did he know that made him offer such an appraisal?
“Neil, what the hell is going on?
“You need to think in terms of years, Fletch. Not months.”
“Years?”
He nodded. “Two or more.”
“Years?” I pressed him, struggling to grasp what he was suggesting, or the reason behind it. “Two years?”
“At least.”
It had to be plain on my face, that I wasn’t fully processing what he was telling me.
“This isn’t some storm you’re going to just casually avoid by an extended stay at your getaway. Not just a few knuckleheads rioting until order is reestablished.”
“Okay. Then what the hell is coming? You seem to be tiptoeing around it, whatever it is you’re trying to share with me.”
This was the thing that worried me the most. We’d never been bullshitters, especially with each other. And we’d never pulled our punches, physically or otherwise. We knew each other could handle whatever needed to be done, or said.
“It’s all tumbling down,” he said, almost matter-of-factly.
“What do you mean ‘all’?”
His gaze swelled a bit. “All. Everything. Government, countries, economies, societies.”
It was my turn to lean forward. My stare narrowed down on my friend. The empty space around us outside the restaurant seemed suddenly claustrophobic. As if everyone inside was also leaning in for a listen.
“What do you know, Neil?”
“Six weeks ago I’m attached as a liaison from State to a team going down to Brazil.”
“What kind of team?”
He hesitated for just a moment as a car cruised slowly by, then turned at the nearby corner, disappearing around it.
“A joint mission from Department of Agriculture and USAMRIID.”
The glazed-over look I gave him at the acronym prompted some clarification.
“United States Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases.”
The expansion of the letter jumble into real world terms didn’t completely wipe the fog from my comprehension.
“Agriculture and Army disease specialists?”
“Yes.”
“I was the go-between for them and the Brazilians.”
“Okay...”
Maybe Neil was waiting for me to come to an understanding myself. To piece together what he’d shared. But I was still drawing a blank.
“It’s bad there, Fletch. Brazil has a huge agricultural industry, and the blight is spreading like wildfire.”
A sick warmth stirred in my gut. Word that the blight had crossed an ocean wasn’t new, though it took the involved governments weeks to admit as much after an equal amount of time issuing stern denials.
“Plant geneticists from Ag were there to verify the strain,” he said. “Same as Poland. No mutation. The thing is a monster.”
“All right. That explains one side of your team. Why the hell was the Army tagging along?”
“Because the blight is behaving like a disease,” Neil explained. “That’s what I picked up from the discussions they were having. I wasn’t supposed to know any of this, but... Fletch, it’s moving through vegetation like the plague rolling over a population.”
“Wait...ar
e you saying this is like some weapon?”
He shook his head.
“No. No one knows, really. Nature is fully capable of screwing us over if conditions are right. And here it looks like conditions were just right for this to begin. First in Poland, and then all it took were a few spores from a contaminated crop to hitch a ride on a plane, or boat, and what was something isolated to Europe and Asia is now a continent hopper.”
“How widespread is it in Asia?” I pressed him.
“Russia, into China, Vietnam. Some of those places haven’t become part of the wider conversation yet, but they will be. Soon.”
I sat back, leaning away from the table. The gravity Neil had brought with him had now infected me. A realization rose as to the timing of this get together we were having.
“It’s here,” I said. “Isn’t it?”
Neil took a stuttered breath and nodded.
“In a cranberry bog, of all places. In Oregon. And if it’s there, it’s going to be everywhere.”
“Okay,” I said, my head spinning, but still trying to grasp the totality of the situation. “So it kills some crops—”
“No.” Neil shook his head. “Not some...all. Everything. It kills every single plant it comes in contact with. Not just crops. Trees, bushes, even damn weeds. And when the plants die, the animals aren’t far behind.”
“And the recovery time?” I asked, fearing what the answer would be.
“The Ag scientists were scared. One of them made it pretty clear he didn’t see any sort of recovery.”
We sat there in silence for a moment, staring at each other, me absorbing all that Neil had shared, and him waiting, just waiting, to let me process the same.
“It all comes tumbling down,” I said, recounting his earlier statement. “I understand what you meant now.”
“You can tell people there’s a shortage of rubber so they can’t have tires for their car. Or heating oil, so they’re going to have to throw extra logs on the fire instead of run the furnace. But you can’t tell them they’re going to go hungry. You can’t tell them they’re going to watch their children starve. No government has the guts to tell that truth. There’s a dam of denial built around what’s happening and it’s going to burst. When it does...”
It was part sermon, part indictment. And it was scaring the hell out of me.
“How is it possible that this isn’t news already?” I wondered aloud. “I mean, it’s not as sexy as a meteor hitting the earth, but the aftermath won’t be too different.”
“There are rumblings,” he told me. “I’m not the only one asking questions. Agencies are starting to lock down information. Even things that have nothing to do with this. They’re just getting ready for when everything does have to do with this. There’s enormous pressure on news agencies right now to hold damning stories.”
“But the shoot down...”
“That’s a gimme,” Neil said. “The power structure would rather have the population fixated on a horror like that than the real shit coming down the drain at everyone.”
This was as far from what I’d anticipated we’d talk about as anything could be. I’d expected some generally friendly jawing with my friend. Thought we might inhale some burgers and share a plate of onion rings. Not talk about the end of everything we’d come to know.
“Fletch,” Neil began, sliding the now chilled cup of coffee aside as he leaned on the table, “you have to get ready now. Really ready. This is all going to leak. It could be ten days, or ten hours, but the rumblings are going to become a roar, and when that happens it will be too late to prepare.”
“My getaway,” I said, that thread connected now. “You think we should head up there.”
I didn’t expect what Neil did next—he shook his head.
“You,” he corrected. “You have no encumbrance. No wife, no girlfriend, unless things have changed. Your parents are gone. No brothers or sisters. All you have to leave behind is a building, a bunch of trucks, and people who are good and dead no matter what you do.”
“Neil...”
He smiled, and it seemed to me that he’d accepted some fate rolling toward him in slow-motion.
“I can’t leave my father,” Neil said.
His father—one hell of a man who I’d spent nearly as much time with as my own dad while growing up. Dieter Moore, or as I’d called him on every occasion we’ve been together, Mr. Moore. Once he’d been a tank of a man. Strong, self-reliant. He’d give you a hand up, but not a handout. And now...now he sat wasting in a nursing home recliner, cancer chewing away at what was left of his insides. A year ago the doctors had given him six months to live, but the stubborn old man was flipping their educated approximations the bird by hanging on. Neil, I knew, could no more abandon his father and run for the hills with me than I could mine if he was still alive.
“Damn, Neil.”
“Right now, Fletch, you have to stop thinking about me. About anything. You have to look past any distractions. While everyone else is still thinking the limit of this is paying more in the checkout line at the grocery store, you have to get ready. Before they get wise.”
But how the hell did someone get ready for this? This wasn’t running to the store to stock up on canned goods because a blizzard was coming. If what Neil was predicting was true, the Almighty might as well drop a rock from space on the planet and end everything quickly.
“Hey,” Neil said sharply. “What are you doing?”
He’d caught me. Mentally going to a dark place where giving up was an option.
“What did Macklin always yell at us?” Neil asked. “When we were beat down, by him, the other team, whatever? You remember what he’d scream at us?”
I did. No way I could ever forget the words of that lovely bastard.
“Life’s tough. Be tougher.”
He nodded, a sober smile creeping onto his face.
“You’re going to need to be as tough as you’ve ever been.”
“And you?”
He thought for a moment.
“I’ll take it when it comes.”
That was it. My friend had just come across the country to, among other things, say goodbye. He stood first, then I did. We came around the outdoor table and hugged each other in the cold. After a quick moment Neil stepped back. A sheen glistened his eyes slightly.
“I had to tell you,” Neil said. “I’m violating maybe a dozen laws doing this, but how’s that going to matter when it all hits the fan?”
“You don’t trust the phones either, do you?”
He shook his head.
“They’re listening. For key phrases. They’d be all over me, and you, an hour after we hung up.”
“I can’t believe this,” I said.
“A lot of people won’t. Then they’ll die.”
“Will it matter?” I asked. “If it’s like you say, with no recovery, then eventually...”
Eventually even those who’d prepared would turn to dust. There was only a finite amount of stored food on the planet. If the stuff that was processed and jammed into cans ran out, so would the cans.
But Neil held the trump card in this musing on futility. It was not a question of being tough where an absolute obstacle intervened, but it was a question of something beyond the plans, the preparations, the determination to survive.
“There’s always hope,” he said. “Someone might figure this out. After everything’s gone, in some bunker somewhere, maybe some genius kid with a chemistry set will put the pieces together.”
Maybe...
That was a hell of a thin hope for saving the human race.
“Where do you go from here, Neil?”
“Back to D.C.” he answered. “Back to the job. For a day. Then I’m outta there. I’m going to bring my dad to my place and...”
I nodded. Then I half chuckled, the rest a shocky gasp. Ten minutes ago a dear friend had shown up unannounced. Now I was saying goodbye, forever. And not just to him. To life as it was known.
>
“Don’t delay,” Neil said. “Don’t think you have time just because it’s relatively quiet. By the time they give the signal, it will be too late.”
He could tell by the look on my face he’d tossed me a curveball. With a helluva a lot of topspin.
“When the tipping point is inevitable, there’ll be a signal,” he explained. “So essential personnel will know to head for collection points. From there they’ll be transported to secure locations to carry on. Senators, representatives, other bureaucrats. Military leadership. They’ll all gather and keep what’s left of the country running. Until there’s nothing left to run.”
“What sort of signal?”
He shook his head.
“I don’t know. They don’t even know. This is longstanding protocol for emergencies that require the evacuation of the government. The principals are told to stay aware, and when the signal is given, there’ll be no mistaking it.”
“And everyone else?”
“It won’t matter,” he said, then took a slow breath and fixed a hard gaze upon me. “You’ve gotta hang on, Fletch. Okay? You have to. Stay alive.”
“Jesus, Neil...”
He stepped back.
“Take care of yourself.”
Then he was gone. Speeding out of the lot in his rental and down the street. I stood there in the chill for a moment, alone, wanting what had just transpired to be just some dream. Some waking hallucination. But when I looked back to the table we’d sat at, my friend’s cup of coffee was still there.
This was really happening.
Three
Back at work I watched trucks roll in and out of the yard. I watched employees scurry about, performing their duties. Taking moments to socialize as everyone did occasionally during the day. These were people who depended upon me, and I upon them. Almost every single one of them was a friend. Not close like Neil, but we’d shared joy and sorrow together. Birthdays and funerals. I saw them five days out of seven, sometimes more.
And, most likely, they were all going to die if what Neil had told me was right.
