Ranger (The Bugging Out Series Book 5) (21 page)

“And what if they don’t make contact?” I asked, glancing to my left where Schiavo, Elaine, and Mayor Allen stood just out of view of the camera.

“It’s only a few minutes after one,” Elaine said.

Watches with computerized brains kept precise time even in the world the blight had left us. But beyond that truth, she was simply trying to calm me. If I was right, I was about to see my friend, for the first time in months. The friend who’d abandoned us, presumably to throw in with a government which rivaled the one to which we still bore some allegiance.

“I’m afraid of what I’ll say to him,” I said.

“Be calm,” Schiavo said. “You’re our face and our voice for this.”

“And don’t give him anything,” Mayor Allen added. “He doesn’t need to know what we know. About his past, or anything else.”

“Stay focused on our situation,” Schiavo said.

I nodded and looked around the space. Micah’s space. For a moment I had an overwhelming need to have Martin there. He’d guided his late son through so many discoveries in this very space. Now, he was off serving his town, serving all of us, still. Seeking the one who was betraying us on a nightly basis. But I wanted him here. Not as some father figure, but as a true friend as I faced the one who had deceived me.

Beeeeeeeep.

The singular alert sounded from the speaker. It was followed by a three note tone. High, low, high. Like one might play on an electronic keyboard.

Then, the display fuzzed to life, an image replacing the static, grainy and uneven, but beyond familiar.

“Hello, Fletch,” my friend said to me across some unknown distance. “How are you?”

I was certain that my expression did not match his. Some degree of a smile lay across his face. I could manage nothing of the sort as I reached to the controls and turned on the audio portion of our transmission.

“I’m all right,” I said.

To my side, Elaine coughed, a reminder that not everyone bore the immunity I’d been granted against the virus. The medicine Genesee had given her had blunted the effects of the virus for the moment. But that moment would not last.

“Not everyone is, though,” I added.

On the monitor, Neil Moore nodded, seeming both determined and embarrassed at the same time.

“It wasn’t my decision,” my friend said. “But it was deemed necessary.”

“By your Unified Government?” I challenged.

“Everything will be all right, Fletch.”

“People are sick, Neil. People could die.”

He shook his head.

“Not if you do what’s inevitable. Just join us.”

I didn’t shake my head. Didn’t react visibly at all. But inside I was raging.

“Force? Is that the way your people operate, Neil? By threats and violence and...”

I stopped myself there, not wanting to let my anger allow anything to slip. Anything about Olin, or the biological agents. Schiavo and Mayor Allen were right—we needed to maintain our secrets for the moment. We needed him, and those he’d allied himself with, to be as ignorant of our plans and actions as possible, a state that was difficult to create with a traitor in our presence.

“Do you think I’d send my family, my wife, my children, back to Bandon if I thought they’d be in danger?” Neil asked, his certitude plain even over the sketchy connection. “I’d never place them in harm’s way. You know that.”

I did. Or I wanted to believe that.

“They’re a goodwill gesture, Fletch. To prove our intentions.”

“Then why did you leave in the first place?” I asked my friend. “Why didn’t your pals just reach out to the town? Send an emissary?”

He had an answer. I could see that in his expression. Still, he hesitated, just for a moment.

“Trust,” Neil finally answered. “There’ve been incidents of resistance in other colonies. The government needed to regroup. Pull in its people.”

“People like you,” I said.

My friend nodded soberly at me. I glanced to my left. Elaine, Schiavo, and Mayor Allen eyed the screen from an angle with plain wariness.

“Fletch, I didn’t want it to be this way.”

I fixed on the display again.

“The Unified Government has a plan to bring all survivor communities back into the fold. To get the country moving forward again.”

I tried to process the propaganda my friend was spewing like some coopted talking head. Some functionary insisting that indefensible actions were more than defensible—they were proper.

“Fletch, think about it. We can be together again. All of us. The world can start back up. Who knows, maybe in a few years you and me, we could be sitting courtside at a Hawk’s game, drinking a beer.”

“You’re delusional,” I said.

“No, I’m realistic,” Neil countered. “We can get to that place, but we have to do it together. Not scattered everywhere with no central power structure.”

I nodded at what he’d said, but not in agreement. In understanding of the motives he’d expressed, either inadvertently or by design.

“Power,” I repeated. “Power.”

My friend stopped there. Stopped attempting to convince me of the rightness of his actions. The purity of his motives. Instead, he looked to me, in ways that he had from our old times, our good times. He wanted to say something. Maybe say too much. In the end he defaulted to pleasant talk which could only mimic the closeness we’d once shared.

“How are Grace and our kids?”

I made myself smile at my friend.

“They’re doing all right. You have a good looking boy there.”

“He’s a bruiser,” Neil said, chuckling lightly. “Grace is a saint for pushing that kid out. A nine pounder.”

We quieted there. Both of us. Searching for something to say. It was Neil who found the next point in our exchange.

“Krista made you a drawing while she was here,” Neil said, the transmission chopping his voice into a staccato, almost faltering cadence. “She spent hours on this red rhinoceros thing. Did she show it to you?”

I shook my head at the screen, the camera mounted above relaying my reply. Relaying that I was now at a complete loss for words. Whatever this conversation’s intent had been, it was not about us. It was pure prelude. This I saw plainly as the look on my friend’s face shifted, from personal to professional.

“Fletch, the leader of the Unified Government forces wants to speak to Mayor Allen,” Neil said. “Is he there?”

I looked to my left. Mayor Allen stepped into view. I stood and let him take the chair. Before I could move from in front of the camera, Neil called out to me.

“Fletch...”

“What is it?”

“Everything will be okay. Trust me.”

Trust...

That was what my friend was asking for. A man who’d expressed an undying belief in hope had abandoned that and replaced it with plans for a future based on compliance and subjugation. How was this possible? I still, especially when watching and listening to my friend at this very moment, could not fathom what had driven him to this.

I said nothing to his promise and stepped clear of the camera, standing with Elaine and Schiavo as Neil, too, left his place on the other end of the transmission. For a moment the chair my friend had occupied sat empty, then a man came into view and sat down, his posture rigid and proper.  He wore a uniform reminiscent of the old Army. Plain and crisp, green from head to toe. It was as if he’d stepped from central casting of some Vietnam War movie.

“I’m General Harris Weatherly,” the man said. “And these are my terms.”

Mayor Allen listened for several minutes, we all did, as the man outlined a future none of us could fathom, much less embrace. Centralized rule from a government headquartered on the opposite coast. Requirements to raise and transport supplies to Unified Government outposts. Civilian and military leaders of the town would be approved by Unified Government representatives. The current garrison would be disbanded and its members sent east for ‘retraining’. And, finally, all arms must be surrendered to the occupying Unified Government forces.

“Your acceptance is required now,” General Weatherly stated, waiting for the reply he expected.

He was going to be sorely disappointed.

“General Weatherly,” Mayor Allen began, “I’m a doctor by trade, and I can give you some very clinical and anatomically correct directions on just where you can stick your terms.”

The man on the monitor showed no visible reaction to the response he’d just received. He said not a word. He simply reached forward to some control box and killed the transmission, the screen flashing to static.

Mayor Allen leaned back in the chair and looked to us.

“Do you suppose that counts as a declaration of war?”

“I’d say so,” I told the mayor.

The man looked to his military counterpart.

“It had to be done, Angela.”

“Yes, it did,” Schiavo agreed, drawing a breath. “I’d better talk to my sergeant. Things are liable to get busy.”

She left us, Mayor Allen rising from the chair once she was gone.

“Interesting that Neil knew I was the town’s leader,” the mayor said. “He left before I took over for Martin.”

“Our traitor has kept them well informed,” I said.

“I believe I should probably take a few minutes and tell Carol what I’ve done.”

“How is your wife?” Elaine asked.

The woman, elderly like her beloved husband, had been down with the virus almost since it had hit.

“She is...”

He tried, multiple times, to say more. To continue. In end, with emotion choking his words, he simply managed a hopeful smile that reeked of hopelessness and left us to fear the worst.

“This isn’t right,” Elaine said. “It’s not right, and it’s not fair. She’s such a sweet woman.”

Sweet. Devoted. Never complaining when her husband took on the mayor’s role. It wasn’t the way their life should have played out.

The blight, defeated now, even as its scars lay plain upon the planet, still rippled through every action, every happening, as the world spun on. Taking lives through events it had caused. By individuals and entities its appearance had created.

“I’m about ready to hate this world,” Elaine said.

“No you’re not,” I told her.

She looked to me, bitterness in her gaze. Anticipating, maybe fearing what I was about to say.

“Don’t,” she warned me. “No lines about hope. Not now.”

She’d misread me. I wasn’t going to say any such thing. Wasn’t going to appropriate the mantra my friend had ingrained in me. Because I could not bring myself to buy into anything he’d espoused, even if it was a universal truism. Mostly, though, it rang hollow at the moment.

We were entering a time where actions would matter. Not platitudes.

A
t one in the morning, just hours after refusing the Unified Government’s demand that Bandon submit to central rule, it was made clear that our resistance would come with consequences.

Elaine was asleep in our bed, but I was not. I sat in the living room with a single light burning, thinking about my friend. Trying to piece together the ‘why’ of his actions. But that act, which had infected nearly every waking moment I had, and many while I slumbered, was ended by a flash of light beyond the curtained windows and a sharp, thunderous crack that shook the house and knocked fragile glass knickknacks inherited from the previous owners from their shelves.

I bolted up and grabbed my rifle, slipping into my vest as Elaine came fast up the hallway from the bedroom, her gear in hand and eyes wide after being jolted from sleep.

“What was that?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Sounded like it came from the north side of town.”

In less than thirty seconds we were both geared up and heading out. We jogged up the block, others joining us, ready to respond. But respond to what?

BOOM!

Another explosion shook the very ground beneath us, a pulse of yellow light expanding to the north. A distant fire at the point of the blast illuminated a billowing black cloud rising into the dark sky.

“What’s going on, Fletch?” Dave Arndt asked as he ran alongside, untied boots flopping on his feet and the pump action Remington shotty harnessed to his chest bouncing hard with every quickened step he took. “Is this the attack?”

“I don’t think so,” Elaine answered for us, keying in on something sounding off in the distance. “Those are secondaries.”

Secondary explosions. Collateral damage of the initial blast. Ammunition was cooking off. That meant only one thing to all of us.

“The armory,” I said.

*  *  *

W
e reached the area of the blazing building in five minutes, continuing explosions keeping those of us who’d responded back. Only the town’s small fire department with its aging diesel pumper truck had closed in on the inferno, laying a stream of water on nearby buildings with the nozzle mounted atop its thousand gallon tank. Volunteers were dragging a feeder hose from the vehicle to a nearby pond to extend the supply of water that would be needed to keep the fires from spreading.

“I’m going to give the hose crew a hand,” Dave said, and ran off toward the pond.

BOOM!

Another large blast ripped through the remnants of the old auto shop which had been appropriated as the town’s central ammo dump, its already shattered walls toppling fully now as orange and white flames rolled outward from the origin of the explosion. The fire crew ducked behind their rig for cover, but kept the stream of water going.

“Stay sharp,” Schiavo said as she ran past us in full battle gear.

So much for the desk riding bureaucrat
, I thought.

Elaine and I followed as she moved past the cowering crowd to reach her sergeant near the pumper truck, Private Quincy at his side.

“Paul, what happened?”

Lorenzen stood tall, ignoring the secondary explosions popping off from the burning collection of ammunition for small and large arms.

“A missile,” Lorenzen told her, pointing skyward into the night. “From up there.”

“A drone strike,” Quincy said.

Schiavo nodded at the private.

“I was just coming out of the town hall when I saw the streak of light,” Lorenzen said.

“That’s most of our ammunition,” Elaine said.