by Noah Mann
He took his rifle from next to the door and left. I watched him through the kitchen windows as he disappeared into the bare, colorless woods, reaching to trees as he passed, grabbing handholds to support his failing form.
* * *
I was lost in a dream of a place I’d never been when pounding rocked me from sleep. Hazy mental images of green-blue water curling onto a white sand beach were scattered as my eyes snapped open and I reached for my rifle, covers flying off. For an instant I was terrified that the raiders had returned. Until a voice rose with the slamming of a fist against my back door.
Del’s voice.
“Turn on your TV,” he said as I let him in.
I did as he said. The static of the Denver station filled the screen.
“Nothing, see?”
“Try another station.”
“This was a bootleg setup,” I told him. “I was lucky to get that station out of the Rockies.”
“You think any subscriber protocols are still being enforced?”
He had a point. But there was still the Red Signal to muck up any broadcast.
Or so I thought.
I scanned through the satellite feed, getting only static, until I reached what should be CNN. No logo appeared on the static-free transmission, but, more importantly, neither was there any large red rectangle. Just some antiquated color bar test pattern showed on screen.
“The Red Signal...”
“It’s gone,” Del Said. “Radio frequencies are clear, too.”
I was surprised there was any signal coming from CNN. But, then, it might not even be from them. It could simply be a placeholder image the satellite was feeding to ground receivers like mine.
“Did you hear anything?”
He looked at me and nodded.
“You should probably hear it, too.”
* * *
I followed Del along the trail to his house and into his radio room. The equipment was already on, speaker spewing static, until...
“Come back if you are in the Kalispell or Whitefish area.”
The transmission was near crystal clear. I looked to Del.
“I flipped the thing on, like I do a couple times a day, just to see if that idiotic signal was still broadcasting, but it wasn’t.” He sat at the only chair and reached toward one of the radios, adjusting a dial. “So I fished around seeing if I could pick up anything, and I heard this.”
“Any survivors in the Kalispell or Whitefish areas, you must report in.”
I looked to Del. He’d keyed in on the same thing.
“Must,” Del repeated. “How’s that for a friendly greeting?”
We listened to the silence for a moment.
“Three possibilities,” Del said. “No one’s listening. No one cares.”
“Or no one is left,” I finished for my friend.
“Survivors, you are ordered to report in by authority of territorial executive Major James Layton. Report in now.”
Del nodded and looked to me.
“He’s still at it. And he likes giving orders.”
“You inclined to follow that order?” I asked, already knowing the answer.
“No. But I am inclined to find out more about this Major. A helluva lot more.”
“If you’re thinking of a return visit to Whitefish...”
My resistance to that possibility was plain. Del turned the radio off and stood.
“I’m thinking we bring the fight to them,” Del said, grinning. “Or them to the fight.”
Some idea was percolating in the man’s crafty brain.
“I say we issue an invitation,” Del said. “And welcome them with open arms.”
For the next hour we formulated a plan. Three days later we had everything in place and were ready to take decisive action.
Thirty Two
Del and I watched the cabin from a hill sixty yards away, concealed behind a knot of felled trees wedged over a sizeable boulder.
“I heard something last night,” Del said. “Something odd.”
I puzzled at his out-of-the-blue statement. He’d mentioned nothing of this on our two hours hiking to our present location. In fact, thinking on it, Del had been unusually quiet. I’d thought the lack of conversation was due to some serious reflection on the action we were about to take
“What did you hear?”
“I couldn’t sleep, so I turned on my radio. I’ve done that for years. Back before all this, I’d tune into some far off station and start up a conversation with a total stranger. Might talk for twenty, thirty minutes. Just jabbering. Now, I have to resist the urge to hit that transmit button.” He nodded, mostly to himself. “I really had to resist that last night.”
I’d thought Del might have been woken by a strange sound outside. An animal that had survived. Or intruders. It appeared, though, that what was troubling him came from somewhere distant. Somewhere unknown.
“So I just listened,” Del went on. “To static, mostly. Then I happened upon a station right at the end of its transmission. All I heard was ‘This is Eagle One, signing off.’”
“Eagle One?”
Del nodded.
“Signal was clear as day. There was some serious wattage behind that station.”
“Eagle One,” I said again. “Is that call sign anything special? I mean, you hear Eagle This or Eagle That and it sounds potentially official. Like some military or governmental thing. Even presidential.”
“Yeah,” Del said.
Del was as subdued as I’d ever seen him. This thing he’d heard really had its hooks in him. Why, I hadn’t a clue.
“It was just someone talking,” I reminded him.
“No,” he countered. “You don’t understand. The voice...it was a boy. It was a kid.”
A kid...
That threw me for a moment. It was hardly likely that a child somewhere was unscathed by the blight. But a child surviving implied an adult had along with them. We knew there were people out there. People like us who had hung on. But, if Del had heard right, a child somewhere had access to a working radio with abundant power supplying it.
“Any idea how old?”
“Not that old,” Del said. “I used to talk to teenage hams all over the country, even the world. This was no teen.”
“Eagle One,” I said yet again, as if its repetition would somehow inform me as to its meaning.
“I’m going to listen in tonight around the same time,” Del said.
“Just listen, right?”
He hesitated. In the few days since the Red Signal ended, Del had heard a few distant stations calling out. All desperate. Most operated by people who’d happened upon a radio with some sort of working power source and were simply crying out like a child might at night, begging for help, pleading for food, supplies, protection. And he’d only allowed himself to listen. Hadn’t transmitted once.
But I could tell he was thinking about it.
“I could listen with you,” I said.
“Hold my hand?” Del asked, humoring me.
“Behind your back.”
He smiled, relaxing a bit. The both of us looked back to the cabin. We’d been watching it for an hour, just to ensure no one else was near. When we were satisfied we ducked behind the heft of the boulder and Del touched the loose end of the wire to the spare ATV battery we’d lugged over, energizing the circuit, the charge ripping through the remainder of the length and reaching the blasting caps. The caps, mini explosives themselves, detonated just milliseconds after Del sent the charge down the wire, their explosion setting off the three sticks of TNT bundled together in the crawlspace beneath the cabin.
In an instant the structure was obliterated. Lumber and tile and furniture and ductwork and everything else contained by the four walls was launched skyward and sprayed out, jagged lengths of splintered two-by-four impaling dead pines. Twisted shards of metal from the cabin’s stove and an old claw foot bathtub chopped through desiccated branches above, the pulverized wood turned t
o powder and chunky grit. Smoldering bits of wood and paneling arced hundreds of feet through the woods, sparking small fires that struggled to smolder on the storm dampened slopes. Debris from the blast spun and tumbled aloft until gravity pulled it earthward, showering the landscape, bits of the home that had been whole just seconds earlier thudding to earth around Del and me. We hugged the back of the sturdy rock until the air seemed clear of debris, then we leaned to look past the obstacle.
The buried foundation of the cabin poked from the earth, smoldering, licks of flame slowly devouring the thick timber supports, a long column of grey and white smoke filtering past the bare pines and drifting into the morning sky like a marker screaming something happened here! to anyone within fifty miles.
That was exactly what we were hoping for.
* * *
It took us fifteen minutes after the blast to prepare for what we hoped would happen next, then we split up. Del moved west about a hundred yards to a position where he could see the narrow lane that allowed access to the otherwise remote cabin. I remained behind the boulders, my suppressed AR ready.
We only had to wait an hour.
The lone pickup rolled to a stop just in front of the destroyed structure. Three men piled out of the cab, and three from the open bed, no machinegun mounted on this truck. They held their arms casually and laughed, admiring the destruction they believed their trap had caused. One made a comment about searching for chunks. Another reminded that Layton wanted something to display, nodoubt as a concrete warning to those who might seek shelter beyond the town.
I listened for just a moment before reaching for the battery. We’d run new wires after the initial explosion, and placed what we’d already prepared for the maximum intended effect. One of the wires was already connected. The other lay on the ground. I picked it up and ducked fully behind the boulders again and touched it to the battery terminal.
The explosion this time came not from below, but from above, three sticks of TNT, each lashed ten feet up on separate trees, the blast surrounding the rubbled cabin on three sides, pressure wave from each snapping the trees they were tied to and rushing outward, slamming into the unsuspecting patrol sent from Whitefish.
I popped up just as the concussion subsided, taking aim through my tactical scope. Three men appeared to be dead outright. Another was rolling on the ground and reaching for his rifle. He got a hand on it as a shot rang out, Del firing from up the road, his aim threading through the trees to take that man down with a round to the chest. Another man already had his weapon in hand and was shaking off the blast, raising it in the direction Del’s shot had come from. I placed the glowing triangle in my sight on the side man’s side and squeezed off two fast shots, only one impacting as he moved, driving in one side of his skull and exiting out the other in a chunky mist the color and texture of ripe watermelon. He crumpled into an unnatural heap, one arm bent at an impossible angle.
The last man had the most brains among his comrades and ignored the weapon that had been blasted from his grip. He scurried away from the house and was just getting to his feet to run for the road when I fired, my aim purposely low. The single shot found its mark in the back of his thigh and he fell, rolling toward the downslope beyond the demolished house.
The man had pulled himself to a sitting position, back against a tree. His sole weapon, an AR like mine but fitted with a hideously unreliable drum magazine, lay a dozen yards from him, far beyond any reconsideration of abandonment. He made hardly a move or sound at all as Del and I approached.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
The man looked up at us, both hands pressed hard against a wound on the front of his thigh. The wound I’d given him. Blood bubbled past his fingers.
“Your name,” I repeated.
Now the man glanced to his rifle. Del backed away and picked it up, heaving it down the slope beyond the trees before returning to his place with me. I shifted the aim of my AR until its suppressed muzzle was pointed at the man’s nose.
“Hank Coggins,” he finally replied.
I lowered my aim.
“Where are you from, Hank?”
He looked between us again, reality setting in. This was not chit chat—it was an interrogation. And he was a prisoner.
“Boise.”
“You’re a long way from home,” Del said.
Hank winced, pain from his wound spiking. His face bore cuts from shrapnel tossed by the blast, and the left side of his coat was shredded, likely by the same. Beneath the tattered garment I could see more blood, a wide smear of it sliding down and over his hip, staining the tan work pants he wore.
“Who is the Major?” I asked. “Where is he from?”
“What do you mean?” Hank asked, genuinely confused.
“Where the hell did he get the rank from?” Del pressed the man, forceful and impatient.
“I don’t know,” Hank said. “I met up with him over in Coeur d’Alene. He was looking for men, and he had food, transportation.”
“Okay,” Del said, dialing the menace in his voice up a notch. “What the hell brought him to Whitefish?”
“I think he grew up here,” Hank answered, his body seeming to press into the tree and away from Del. “I never heard it from him. Just from others who were closer to him. Folks who’d been with him since the shit hit the fan.”
“He’s not Army, Guard, anything?” I asked.
“I don’t know. Honest. I don’t know shit.”
That might actually be true, I knew. But we were going to make damn sure of it.
“What the hell is with the tank cars?” I asked.
“What do you mean?”
Del drew his rifle back, wielding the butt, ready to lay a blow down on the reluctant prisoner. Hank recoiled, shrinking down, bringing a bloodied hand up to defend himself against the threatened strike.
“I don’t know what you mean!” Hank protested as Del held the rifle back and ready, like a coiled snake. “All right! All right! Don’t hurt me!”
“Why did he put them out along the track?” I demanded. “What’s in them?”
A cough rattle from Hank’s mouth. His chest shuddered, and he gulped air. The hand that had risen as a shield lowered again and lay hard against the wound on his leg. It was a bleeder. An artery had likely been affected. He was not going to make it, and neither Del nor I could change that.
“What are they doing on the tracks up here?” I repeated.
Hank didn’t respond, his gaze shifting toward his already dead comrades.
“Why did he put them along the track?!” I shouted.
The dying man looked up, almost quizzically, as if he was offering up the obvious.
“For the cleanse.”
The cleanse...
We’d heard that from the women we’d encountered in Whitefish. Rumor there, now it seemed to be confirmed. But just what was it?
“What is the cleanse?” Del asked, lowering his rifle now.
Hank drew a long breath. His gaze swam as he looked up to us and smiled.
“It’s going to make everything better,” Hank said. “Purify the land. Sterilize it, Major Layton says. Then things will grow...will grow again.”
Some of what Hank was relating began to fill in a new picture. One beyond baiting Del and me into the open. Far beyond.
“What do those cars hold?” I asked.
“Some chemical,” Hank answered, coughing again, one of his hands slipping from its place on the leg wound, his strength fading fast. “Flammable. Really supposed to burn, Major Layton says. When the wind’s right he’s gonna...he’s gonna...”
The man’s eyes fluttered and he looked off to one side, into the grey trees marching down the slope toward a rushing creek. Snow melt from the peaks had fed it, the tiny tributary raging now, soft roar rising.
“Gotta get to the bunker...” Hank said, the statement born of delirium. “He’s gonna blow ‘em up. Start the cleanse. Gotta get to the bunker.”
“
Is that where the Major is going to ride out this cleanse?” I asked, crouching and reaching to turn hank’s face toward mine. “In this bunker he has people building?”
Hank nodded drowsily, smiling.
“We’re all going to see the world when it’s green again,” he said, and then he said no more, his cheek tipping solidly against my hand where it lay against his head.
“Son of a bitch,” Del said, shaking his head. “Sterilize? More like incinerate.”
I pulled my hand back and Hank’s head lolled against his shoulder as I stood. Behind, the damage we’d done to Major Layton’s force was apparent. The men he’d sent were dead. Five in the blast and immediate follow up gunfire. And then there was Hank. Number six.
“When summer hits and he gets his winds,” Del said, needing to add no more.
“Half the state will burn,” I said.
“Including us.”
Thirty Three
“Is this working?”
It was more plea than question that I watched on the television, the Denver station broadcasting again, though the face staring into the camera was no professional anchor. The woman was disheveled. Thin, but not emaciated. Her eyes were clear and wide, gaze darting off camera every few seconds toward some unseen other talking to her.
“Can they hear?”
I thought I heard someone in the background say faintly ‘pick that up’. A second later the woman had a small microphone laying atop the anchor desk in hand. She held it close to her mouth, just below her chin.
“My name is Jennifer. There are seven of us today.” She paused and looked past the camera again. Behind her, the monitors that had once showed the red rectangles infecting other stations were blank and dark, powered down, as was most of the working studio visible over her shoulder, just a few errant overhead fluorescents flickering. “How do we know this is doing anything?”
Someone behind the camera seemed to say ‘We don’t. Get on with it.’
Jennifer nodded and made sure the microphone was in place.
“There are seven of us,” she started again. “A week ago there were nine. We’re trying to make it, but we don’t know where Eagle One is.”
