Bugging Out

by Noah Mann

  He didn’t go on. Or couldn’t. After a moment to regain his composure, he simply glanced to Stephanie, and she took over.

  “We have verified eyewitness reports that highways in and out of the Denver metropolitan area have been sealed by law enforcement,” she said, a stern directness about her now. She seemed to sit straighter. To speak clearer. Like an elder delivering uncertain news to an extended family, telling them all hope was not lost—yet. “There have been incidents of force being used against people trying to both leave and enter the city.”

  So it was happening in Denver as well. Northern Montana did not have the monopoly on the first taste of a government tightening its grip. But wasn’t that, if all that was supposedly coming turned out to be true, an endeavor no more useful than a man strangling himself?

  I turned away from the TV and returned to the kitchen, making my dinner, some sausage and peppers, as the broadcast continued. Snippets of the new normal drifted in. Man and woman on the street interviews, people more confused than frightened at this stage. Video from a distance of muzzle flashes and the quickened crack of small arms fire, followed by a concussive explosion. Police tactical teams had been deployed, and were being used.

  Then there was the looting. I returned to the great room with dinner plate in hand to watch this, sitting in front of the television now, picking at my food, taking in the images of windows being smashed, televisions being carted off, armfuls of clothes, cell phones and cameras. It had come to this quicker than I’d expected. Two, three days of worry I’d thought, then the breakdown would begin in earnest. But here, unmolested, the foul nature of some was surfacing, in concert with its accompanying idiocy. Televisions? Cameras? These were prime examples of what Darwin had suggested. While they should be stripping shelves of foodstuffs, these people were grasping at worthless baubles of infotainment. The value of yesterday, of last night, still rang true in their thoughts, their desires. They lived for the moment. They would die for it, as well.

  And some already had. More video of store owners firing indiscriminately into crowds of looters and onlookers was shown. Bloodbaths unfolded across Denver, at the hands of authorities and terrified citizens fighting to protect what they’d worked for.

  But it was all dust. Or soon would be. Fires raged into the night. Long after my dinner was eaten and the plate quickly washed, the news focused on infernos spreading downtown. Fire crews, stretched thin by the sheer mass of conflagrations, and by dwindling numbers as firefighters chose to protect their own families, were unable to stem the roiling orange tide that leapt from commercial areas to residential neighborhoods.

  Denver was a city consuming itself. Civilization on a pyre. A beacon atop the Rockies to mark the beginning of the end.

  Long past midnight, into the second full day after the Red Signal, Jim and Stephanie were still on the air, the anchors and those behind the scenes doing what news, regardless of bias, had always done well—bring the scope of a disaster into one’s living room. I sat with them as their city, their home, smoked and screamed. Gunshots echoed even through their microphones. Close to the studio. After the first few times, neither flinched at the sound. They were exhausted. And numb.

  What law there was had been tasked with sealing cities, blocking entrance and exit. Controlling movement. Or just plain controlling. For as long as they could. Their normal duties, protection, enforcement, prevention, had been set aside.

  “All tumbling down,” I said aloud, then said no more. I just watched. And listened.

  “We’ll be leaving you in a few minutes,” Jim said, nodding to his co-anchor. “Ed Mills and Terry Goodwin will take over for us. Obviously we’re not going back to any kind of regular programming. I’m not sure...” He hesitated, as if reconsidering the gravity of what he’d chosen to say. After a moment, he steeled himself and finished the thought. “I’m not sure we ever will.”

  It might have been the truest words ever spoken by a journalist.

  Ten

  Seven days passed before the Denver station went dark.

  I spent that week completing tasks both large and small to prepare myself, and my refuge, for what lay ahead. Patching suspect areas of the barn roof. Weighing myself and making a chart of calories needed to maintain my weight at various levels of activity. Cutting felled trees and stacking the wood for the winter just around the corner. Running my truck, the generator, my ATV, all to make sure they were in working order and keep the internals lubricated.

  But always the television was on. Twenty-four hours a day. Whether I was outside or in. I’d even taken to sleeping on the couch in front of it, fire burning in the hearth off to the side of the great room. A succession of names and faces rotated in and out of the anchor chair, the numbers dwindling over the days that followed the Red Signal. Jim Winters, though, was there to the end.

  It happened on Thanksgiving, of all days. The last of my fresh food had been eaten two days earlier, and for the day, the holiday, I’d concocted a spread for myself cannibalized from both MREs and a portion of dehydrated chicken. Surprisingly, it wasn’t bad, which didn’t make it good, but, in the end, it was to mark the fact that I was alive. And I had that to be thankful for.

  Jim Winters, though, was looking haggard and hungry, his face thinned, eyelids slack as he looked into the camera. I’d read somewhere once that there was just an eight day supply of food in the huge warehouses that supplied the supermarket chains. Store shelves would have been bought out or looted in the first few days after the Red Signal, and what was intended to replenish them had likely never made it out of the cavernous storage facilities that contained everything from canned corn to frozen slabs of ribs. Jim Winters himself had reported on just such facilities being raided by a panicked public, stripped to the rafters, nearly half of the food within destroyed in fights and fires that erupted over it. There simply was no more. The man looking out at me from the television was living proof of that.

  “We are on generator power here at Network Five,” Jim said, the heft of his voice seeming withered. What authority he could muster was fading. A sign of stoicism in the first few days after the crisis exploded, he now was little different than the tattered populace he served, wasting slowly physically, nearly shattered emotionally. There was no hope in his manner. He was going through the motions. “I am assured that we have adequate supplies for at least six days. Hopefully there will be some relief by...by then.”

  I’d finished my dinner. Hunger was nowhere in my thoughts. I’d prepared, and I’d been lucky. But I was the exception, not the rule.

  “If you have food, ration it,” Jim told his audience. “Stay home. Stay inside. If you have firearms, be ready. The police are not responding to any requests for help. As a captain told us in Mary Crane’s interview yesterday, they have been tasked with containing residents to the city so that relief efforts can be centralized efficiently.”

  For a moment, Jim quieted. No co-anchor sat next to him. Stephanie hadn’t been seen with him for two days. Behind, the hive of activity that had accompanied the station’s breaking through the Red Signal was no more. Twenty staffers had become ten, which had become five, and which now, at most, was two. Silence embraced Jim during his pause, which only served to add gravity to what he said next.

  “There will be no relief. We have been fed, and are being fed, lies. From where the decision to do this originated, I do not know. But it has come from higher authorities. This we can be certain of.” He cleared his throat, openly and without any vanity, choking back emotion. “We are on our own.”

  Again he was quiet, then he glanced slightly off camera and gave a single nod.

  “We’re now going to play something recorded just this morning,” Jim said, the statement coming as if he was releasing a breath he’d held for some time. “We debated showing you this, but you have a right to know the extent of what has begun happening. It came to us from a family returning to Denver after attempting to join relatives in Missouri.”

  Ji
m sat motionless for a moment as the segment queued up. Then he was gone, replaced by video of a long line of vehicles creeping eastward on Interstate 70, fleeing Denver in slow motion, brake lights blazing, something ahead impeding the flow of traffic.

  Then it appeared. The reason for the slowdown. A helicopter, sweeping low in the distance ahead, seen through the windshield of the car from which the images were being recorded.

  “Daddy, what is that?” a little girl asked, unseen in the video being shot from the front seat of a vehicle.

  “It’s just a helicopter, baby,” her father said, a conflicting mix of reassurance and worry in his voice. “Keep recording, Jess.”

  “Okay, okay,” a woman answered, her voice mostly breath.

  Beyond the windshield, the helicopter lumbered off to the side of the road and swung sharply around, its nose pointed at the line of cars, the whole of it hanging there like some menacing insect.

  “What’s it—”

  The woman never got the rest of the question out as the helicopter began to spit fire, a glowing jet of tracer rounds arcing over the line of cars. The woman screamed and the video jumped, just glimpses now showing the helicopter slipping back and forth, spraying fire from the cannon that hung beneath its nose like a misplaced stinger.

  “Daddy!”

  “Stay down!”

  More quick flashes of the moment, recorded for whatever posterity mattered. The car lurched forward and bounced off the road, across the dirt median, turning fast and accelerating back toward Denver. The camera swung around now, shooting past a bawling child in the back seat, capturing the line of cars set afire, the helicopter laying a deadly carpet of shells along the roadway, cutting off any hope of escape from the city.

  And then the video ended, and Jim Winters was back on screen, looking into the camera, quiet rage in his gaze, the cut of his jaw quivering slightly. He was gritting his teeth. Holding back. Crafting some measured commentary.

  In the end he simply spoke more of the truth.

  “Whatever happens,” he began, “there can be no doubt after seeing what you just have that the government, our government, no longer represents the people. It no longer—”

  A sharp hum interrupted Jim. He quieted and glanced upward, then behind, just in time to see the monitors that displayed the bright red rectangle still blocking other stations go dark. Then the space around him dimmed. Lights were going out. He turned and looked into the camera again, but said nothing as the feed from Network Five turned to static. All that remained of my connection to the outside world was electronic snow on the television.

  For half an hour I sat and stared at the interference, waiting, hoping, even praying that the station would be back up. A simple power failure it could have been. Or...

  Or, possibly, the fact that Network Five had broken through the Red Signal had piqued the interest of those pulling the strings. Men and women of power who watched as the rogue station broadcast what could not be allowed. What could not be disseminated.

  Slaughter.

  But it was worse than that, I thought. Maybe the station had been put out of commission by the government, but what it had shown, what had been recorded on the highway east of Denver, told more than just horror. More than sanctioned murder. Because I saw something in it that Jim Winters had not mentioned.

  The helicopter strafing the road bore no markings. It had been painted solid black.

  Eleven

  I walked down my driveway to check the chain I’d secured across it and caught sight of something as I tugged on the sturdy barrier. Something through the trees. On the distant slopes, bolts of light from the setting sun painted the mountains as they did every day. But not like this.

  A ten minute hike and climb up the hill to the south of my driveway brought me to the crest of the rise, the trees thinned naturally in one spot so I could stand and look across the valley to the peaks soon to be lost in shadow. For now they were still bathed in that warm glow from the fading day. A glow that usually set them alight with bursts of color, pines vibrant green, aspens glittering in what fall color they still retained this late in the season.

  But I did not see that. What lay upon the mountains was a muted mask akin to cold granite, as if an avalanche of grey had swept down from the jagged tops more than halfway to the flats below. Wisps of color still remained low on the slopes, but above them to the crest of the peaks was little more than a colorless canvas, nature robbed of its beauty.

  From my coat pocket I took the small pair of binoculars I always carried and brought them to my eyes, dialing in the distance as best I could with the compact optics. The view I found was more startling that what the naked eye had presented me.

  It was death. Every tree and every bush in the dead zone was drained of their natural hues. They stood and squatted now as grey sentinels marching down the mountain toward the valley. Moving west. Coming my way.

  I lowered the binoculars and stared at what was soon to be upon me. Yet it didn’t make sense. A week before there’d been no sign of the blight across the valley. Now it had swept over and down the mountains, covering tens of miles in just days. How that was possible I didn’t know, but possible it was. No, certain it was, because there was no denying what my own eyes were witness to.

  “What the hell is this?” I asked the emptiness, but soon realized the land before me wasn’t quite as empty as I’d thought. The rumbling engine beyond the trees below told me that.

  I stowed my binoculars and moved quickly down the hill, driveway ahead, road to the right, though I could see neither through the still-green woods surrounding my refuge. My ears told me that the vehicle, the engine powering it having seen better days, was chugging along the road a few hundred yards to my east, heading north.

  Until it slowed and turned. Moving slowly east. Up my driveway.

  The AR swung easily from my shoulder as I brought it to bear, slowing my pace. I flipped the selector to fire and kept my finger against the side of the receiver, just above the trigger. Ahead, maybe fifty yards now, I could just make out the unnatural line cut through the forest—my driveway. And I could hear the vehicle chug to a stop, right about where my chain was. A door on the vehicle groaned open and then closed with a heavy thud.

  Who the hell is out there? I asked myself. They’d taken the turn from the road to my driveway like they’d expected it. Like it was a known, not just some chance track off the way they were traveling. A half-dozen other driveways split off the road heading north to Whitefish, but the vehicle that now idled loudly some thirty yards from me had turned onto mine. With some purpose, it seemed.

  Ten yards now, and I could make out the rough shape of small RV, not sleek and new, but boxy and well-traveled. A figure moved forward of it. Up my driveway. A man. He stepped over the chain that blocked his vehicle’s path and continued.

  Five yards now. I shifted left and skirted the edge of the driveway, keeping some cover of the woods between us. A sweatshirt covered his upper half, hood pulled over his head, hands jammed deep into the garment’s from pockets. Just to keep warm, maybe.

  Or gripping something within.

  I raised the AR and stepped from the woods, taking a position in the middle of the driveway, lining the tactical sight on the hooded stranger, its illuminated reticle superimposing a glowing orange triangle on the man’s back. At this distance I would not miss. That reality didn’t make the possibility of having to do so any more palatable.

  My finger eased onto the trigger, heart racing.

  “Don’t move,” I said, and the stranger froze where he stood. “Take your hands out of your pockets. Slowly.”

  The man complied. His bare hands appeared, empty, and eased away from his body, fingers spread.

  “Turn to face me,” I ordered him.

  He swiveled slowly, my finger drawing back from the trigger as his face came into view.

  Twelve

  “Eric,” Marco said as he turned fully to face me.

  I lower
ed my weapon but made no move toward my former employee. My friend. For a moment I simply stood there and studied him across the five yards that separated us. A thickening beard covered the lower half of his face—a face that had been perpetually smooth since I’d known him, shaved crisp and professional. Beneath the newly sprouted facial hair I could see that he was thinning, cheeks showing bone, eyes above them more pronounced, the slack skin forming hollows around them. The clothes he wore, utilitarian, layered for the weather, also could not hide a frame that was disappearing ounce by ounce.

  It had been three weeks since I’d seen him. In another three there’d be nothing left of him to look at.

  “Marco, what are you doing here?”

  He glanced at the weapon in my hand. I swung it back over my shoulder and slung it, stepping toward him.

  “We’re heading south,” he said, and looked past me, toward the front of the RV just visible past the chain.

  We...

  It hadn’t occurred to me. His family. Judy and their son, Anthony. He was six. I glanced behind. Through the windshield of the RV could just make out two silhouettes, small one close to the larger, mother clutching her son. Their son.

  “You were the only one I could think of who might...”

  I looked back to Marco, a tide of embarrassment rising in him. Maybe cresting in shame. The look of a man who cannot see to his own. Cannot provide for them. Quiet desperation, I would even go as far as saying. Desperation edging toward defeat.