Ranger (The Bugging Out Series Book 5) (18 page)

“Maybe I’m overreaching,” I said.

“Maybe. That doesn’t necessarily mean you’re wrong.”

“But you think I am.”

To that, Martin nodded.

“I watched him most of yesterday,” Martin said. “He was dealing with sick people for twenty hours. If somewhere in there he was able to slip away, record a Morse message, then get it to a hidden transmitter, then he’s some super being.”

“There was another message?”

“Reporting on the sickness and the progress in shifting our ammunition supply to the new armory,” Martin said.

“He couldn’t have managed sending that?”

Martin shrugged.

“It’s possible.”

We were fighting a mostly unseen enemy, a virus, and a shadow. And we were losing to all three.

“So if it’s not him, then who?”

Martin said nothing to my question. A telling lack of response.

“You have a suspect,” I said.

Still, he said nothing, neither confirming nor denying my assertion.

“Martin, if there’s someone we should be wary of...”

“Proof, Fletch,” he said. “When I have proof.”

W
e had to do something. The illness was spreading. No one was on death’s door yet, but those infected, now nearing half the town, were laid up, most in bed, not a one of them functioning at more than fifty percent ability. Maybe less. In a few days it could be the entire town, minus those who’d been granted some immunity from the virus.

Including me.

“There is an option,” Mayor Allen said.

He’d stepped back into his old vocation, assisting Genesee at the town clinic. Taking five minutes away from his medical duties to talk to Schiavo, Martin, and me outside the front door of the town hall.

“Olin,” the mayor said.

“This isn’t what he told us about,” I said. “He said it wiped out an Iraqi town in days.”

“Do we know that?” Schiavo asked. “Does he?”

“He just described it as deadly,” Mayor Allen said. “But he didn’t specify the mechanism of death.”

“This can’t be Four Twelve,” I said.

“He’s a liar,” Schiavo said. “He’s trained to be.”

“What if death doesn’t come for weeks?” Martin suggested. “Or months? That would still give them time to introduce a vaccine and bring people back from the brink after any surrender.”

I was beginning to get the gist of where they were going with this. My assumption was that the idea began with Mayor Allen, while he was pondering the spreading effects as Doc Allen. He’d likely run the idea by Schiavo next, who’d then sought Martin’s counsel on the likelihood of me going along with what had been conceived.

“You want me to find Olin,” I said.

“He said he’d be close by,” Schiavo reminded me. “We know which way he headed when Sergeant Lorenzen dropped him at the checkpoint.”

There were many factors to consider in what they were asking of me. I would have to head into and, possibly, through enemy controlled territory. I would be looking for something akin to a needle in a haystack. And, was there really a realistic chance that the man, if I was able to locate him, would be able to provide any assistance that would matter—if he was even open to doing so?

But, foremost in my concerns, and paramount in my thoughts, was something else entirely. Someone.

“Elaine is sick,” I told the members of the Defense Council who’d been able to make the hastily called meeting. “Very sick.”

Schiavo was getting worse by the day, but was pushing through. Martin was beginning to exhibit the first symptoms of the bug that had been airdropped upon us, congestion and body aches, but no fever as yet. Mayor Allen was still holding strong, with no symptoms—or none that he would admit to.

But Elaine...

“I can’t leave her,” I said. “I’m already doing patrols while she’s home by herself.”

“I will make sure she’s taken care of,” Mayor Allen said.

“She would tell you to go, Fletch,” Martin predicted, accurately, I was certain.

Schiavo turned away and began coughing, planting her hands on the conference room table for support as the respiratory fit ran its course. After a full minute she looked back to me, Martin’s hand rubbing slow circles upon her back.

“I can’t order you to do this,” Schiavo said. “But I can beg.”

I shook my head at what she’d said.

“No,” I said. “You won’t do that. It’s not in you.”

She knew I was right. Even in desperation, Captain Angela Schiavo would not plead. Would not bow her head to another in submission. Would not fall to her knees.

But for her to suggest that she would in the face of all I knew about her, to me that spoke of the seriousness with which she saw our situation.

“I need to see Elaine first,” I said, acquiescing to the request.

“Of course,” Mayor Allen said. “Of course.”

*  *  *

E
laine, my love, lay in bed, curled into a ball, the covers pulled tight as she shivered beneath them. I watched her from the doorway to our bedroom, a memory flashing back. A memory of Colonel Ben Michaels, his body wrecked by starvation and illness, wasting away, unable to take another step. But in that instant he had made a sacrifice unthinkable in the world as it was before the blight. He had given his life so that another might live.

So that Neil, my friend, might live.

Whether that offering now seemed worthy of the man who had squandered it, I did not care. Looking upon my wife as she suffered through the effects of the illness brought to our town, I knew that I would make any sacrifice, bear any burden, suffer any threat, if there was a chance that it would heal her.

“Hey,” I said, entering the room and coming around the bed.

Her eyes opened and angled up to me, a smile building, bare and brief, but a smile nonetheless.

“Hey, yourself,” Elaine said.

I crouched and then sat on the floor so that I was even with her face. The heat from her bled across the small space that separated us. Her fever was spiking, and she wasn’t sweating. There would be no breaking of this sickness.

“Listen...”

I stopped there, trying to think of how to say what I had to say. How to tell her that, in this moment, when she needed me, truly needed me, I could not be there for her. I would not be there for her.

“You have to do it,” she said before I could craft any explanation.

“How do you know? How could you know?”

She coughed and tried to lift her head off the pillow. I put my hand to her cheek and eased it back down.

“I don’t know what, but I know that look.”

“They want me to find Olin. They think he might know more about what’s affecting us than he let on.”

She thought on that for a moment, her gaze half swimming, half focused, some fitful, fevered sleep threatening to drag her down.

“What do you think?”

I shook my head and heard a quick knock at the front door.

“Fletch?” Mayor Allen called out from just inside our house.

“Back here,” I directed him.

A moment later the old doctor appeared, old fashioned black medical satchel in hand. He approached the bed and sat on the edge, leaning so that Elaine could see him.

“How’s our patient?”

“I’ll beat it,” Elaine told him.

“We’re going to see that that happens,” Mayor Allen said, his words sounding much like a promise.

Elaine nodded, her cheek sliding across the pillow. Once more she looked to me. The beauty about her, in her eyes, in every line and contour of her face, both warmed and pained me.

“What do you think?”

She repeated the question that she’d posed as the mayor’s arrival interrupted us. I knew what she was asking—whether I thought the mission was worthwhile. The truth was, I didn’t think so. But I also had to admit that, as Schiavo had said, Olin had been schooled in using the art of deception. Of inhabiting a lie so completely that what was real and what was manufactured for his own purposes might seem indistinguishable.

There was another truth, though, that made me wary of seeking the man again, and this was what I shared with Elaine as Mayor Allen slid a stethoscope over her back, listening to her rattling breathing sounds.

“I don’t think he cares about us,” I told my wife.

The mayor’s gaze angled toward me as I spoke those words, some worry in it that I might still back out of what I’d agreed to do.

“He’s here for his own reasons,” I continued. “On his own mission.”

“But he came to help Neil,” Elaine said, her words wet and raspy. “If he’s right about Neil sending the Ranger Signal for him. To tell him he was in danger.”

“That’s his story,” I said, my internal emphasis on the word ‘story’.

Elaine quieted for a moment as Mayor Allen slipped the stethoscope from her back to her chest and continued listening.

“Is there a one percent chance he might know something that will help?” Elaine asked me. “Five percent?”

“Somewhere north of zero,” I told her.

My wife coughed, her body trembling beneath the thick blankets atop her. Mayor Allen eased the stethoscope away and put a hand on her shoulder to calm her through the hacking fit.

She could say no more, left gasping by the bug attacking every cell in her body. If something didn’t change, if no progress was made, there was a very real chance that I could lose her. I could not let that happen.

“North of zero isn’t zero,” I said, leaning close and kissing her softly on the side of her forehead. “So I’m going to go make this happen.”

Elaine closed her eyes, drifting off, some peace coming in sleep that eluded her while awake and battling the monster within.

“Take care of her,” I told the old doctor sitting on the edge of the bed. “Please.”

“Count on it.”

I stepped away from the bed and crossed the room to the door, passing through without looking back. Without thinking of my love. My thoughts were focused now on one thing. On one man. He was out there, and I was off to find him.

O
lin had left town on a slightly northeast course, as reported by Sergeant Lorenzen. That was the direction I headed as I began my search for the CIA man.

I left the northernmost checkpoint on our eastern border just after noon, a thick and welcome fog masking my movements as I blazed a slow, methodical trail through the dead woods. Every five minutes I would stop and take a knee next to the fattest tree I could find. From each spot I listened. Tuning my ears to the hush of the misty woods. Sampling the nothingness which used to be filled with the flutter of bird wings. The melodic chirp of jays. The quickened patter of prey scurrying toward burrows.

There was no more of that, but there was still prey. The prey that I sought, and myself, most certainly a target for the Unified Government forces somewhere in the damp haze.

My load was light, just the basics to survive a night or two in the elements, plus my AR, its slender suppressor affixed to the muzzle, and the Springfield on my hip. I wanted to use neither on this journey, which I had to complete quickly. Either Olin would be found by dawn the next day, or I would be making my way back to Bandon. To my home. To Elaine.

Two hours it took me to cover a mile. The air stank of wet death, the blighted trees soaking up the moisture and seeming to bleed some grey pus. It smeared on my coat as I brushed past stands of once mighty pines and firs, marking the stench upon me.

Once more I paused, just shy of a pair of fallen trees. The blight had taken them down, and, bit by bit, they were dissolving into the forest floor. Beyond them the fog swirled, pushed by a breeze that was funneled into a wide, low gulley, revealing more distant features in brief glimpses as the weather was momentarily parted.

Nothing. That was what I saw in the few seconds of clearing. Just a gentle slope rising toward the crest of a low hill, trees thinning out as the terrain angled upward. I thought I recognized this particular bit of the landscape, having patrolled, then simply hiked, the area around Bandon often since coming to the community. Before the top of the hill there was a shallow ravine that peeled off to the left, and a stream that drained to the north toward the Coquille River. Following that would give me excellent cover should the fog lift. It was also where I would have chosen to go had I needed a place to hole up—isolated, yet near enough to town that it could be reached in a few hours.

I decided to follow that route, hoping that, along the way, I would find some sign of Olin. Some marker of his presence. Tracks on the ground. A sound. A smell. Rising from where I’d stopped, I moved toward the fallen logs and stepped over the first, then the second, a thinner pine.

Immediately, I knew I was in trouble.

I felt no tripwire as my boot planted itself on the opposite side of the smaller log, but a sharp
twang
told me that I’d triggered something. Something that very well could obliterate me in the microseconds that followed.

But there was no explosion. No blast of shrapnel. Instead I heard a
snap
and then a whipping sound as something ripped fast through the air. I turned toward the sound and caught just a glimpse of the tensioned length of dead wood swinging toward me. There was no time to duck or roll clear. No chance at avoiding the trap I’d stepped into. All I could do was draw a fast breath as the fat limb struck me on my left side, just below my hip, the impact launching me into the air, tumbling end over end until my body slammed back to earth like a discarded ragdoll.

The wind had been knocked out of me. Worse, my AR had been whipped out of my hands and jerked free of its attachment to my chest sling. As I gasped for breath and groped for my weapon, I heard something. Something different than what had just cut through the silent forest.

I heard a man.

The Unified Government soldier stood over me, clad in black, his face masked by a balaclava, only his eyes showing through an oval hole in the garment. Just beyond him, lying against the slope, was my AR, maybe five yards away. My only other weapon, other than a knife sheathed on my belt, was my Springfield, but the very capable .45 was pinned beneath me as I lay on my right side.