Ranger (The Bugging Out Series Book 5) (3 page)

He very well could be hunting. And the only prey that remained walked on two feet. Like me.

I didn’t move a muscle as the man stood and let his gaze play over the meadow that lay between us. He didn’t seem to focus on any one spot, the woodpile holding his attention just for a few seconds before he looked to the grey woods that surrounded the clearing. Then, without word or fanfare, he turned and made his way past the cabin, heading back up the trail that had brought him, and me, to this place.

For several minutes I waited. Not moving. My own gaze playing over the woods beyond the meadow, scanning for any movement. If the man had suspected a presence near the cabin it would be logical for him to approach through the forested land surrounding it and take up a position to surveil the area unseen.

But I saw no movement. Heard no sloppy footsteps through the mud. When I was certain I was alone, I stayed put. Watching more. Listening more intently. Even as the soaking cold bit deeper into my body. Through skin and flesh down to bone.

Finally, I had to move. Had to make an attempt to get out of the weather. As quietly as I could, I rose, the chainsaw and knife in my hands, and walked across the meadow toward the cabin. With every step I expected to hear a voice order me to stop. Or, worse, a rifle safety clicking off. If I was to be shot, I’d never hear the bullet fired. I’d be dead before the crack of the shot reached me.

There was no voice that called out. And no shot. I reached the cabin and moved into the meager shelter it provided.

Drenched without rain washing over me, the chill hardened upon my body. I had to work quickly, but with my coordination dulled by the creeping effects of hypothermia, every action was doubly difficult. I placed the chainsaw on the dry stone edge of the hearth and began working the knife along a length of its magnesium frame, working back and forth with the dull blade, a pile of shiny shavings building beneath it. Slowly. My fingers began to ache and then tingle, feeling leaving them. I pressed on, ignoring the sensations and focusing on what I was thinking about. On who I was thinking about.

Elaine.

I had to get back to her. Back to Bandon to make sure she was all right. That she hadn’t been spirited off from our getaway as I had.

I shaved the frame. More. Harder. The mound of magnesium grew. And grew. I imagined I would need as much as possible, thinking that what I was dealing with would not be as pure as the magnesium firestarters most outdoorsmen were familiar with. I would have to make up for insufficient quality with abundant quantity.

Finally, when my hands were nearing a point of uselessness, I stopped, satisfied with what I’d managed to shave from the old saw’s frame. I gathered logs that had been tossed about the cabin and arranged them around the pile of magnesium in the hearth. They were thick, as beefy as my forearms and larger, and would not be easily lit just by a brief flaring of intense heat that I hoped to generate. No, I needed actual kindling.

Just above my head I found it.

Jutting from the structure of the stone fireplace was a length of thick, seasoned lumber that functioned as a mantle. The rustic beam predated the blight by decades and, most importantly, was dry as a bone.

I stood and worked the knife along its lower edge, the dulled blade carving long slivers of the rich wood with difficulty. My fumbling hands did nothing to ease the effort, but my determination to live would not allow me to stop. I’d been soaked and cold now for hours. The temperature had to be hovering in the mid-forties. After sundown it would creep into the upper thirties. The hunk of wood I was attempting to slice and dice might be the only thing that would allow me to make it through the night.

Piece by piece I cut slender lengths of kindling, gouging the once lovely mantle. Once again, when my hands and fingers and arms were left trembling and weak, I stopped, awkwardly gathering the strips of old wood and arranging it above the pile of magnesium shavings.

For a moment I cupped my hands in front of my mouth and exhaled, warming my fingers as best I could so that some dexterity would return to them. I would need that ability to hold and manipulate something small. If I could not manage that, then my time would run out.

I looked to the box of matches on the mantle, stretching my fingers as I continued to breathe upon them. They moved without excessive tremoring, and they did what I wanted them to do. It was time.

This had to work.

I took the box and slid it open, removing one match as I crouched near the makings of a fire I’d collected and made. Behind me, rain hammered the world outside, small streams penetrating the roof overhead, nearby but not close enough to threaten what I was about to attempt. Darkness spilled into the damaged cabin, night coming fast. The cold was building by the second, it seemed. My mind and body craved warmth.

“Come on,” I said to myself and I dragged the match head along the abrasive strip on the side of the box.

A lovely yellow flame bloomed at the end of the match. For a moment I did nothing with it. I didn’t put it to the magnesium shavings. Didn’t move it an inch. I just stared at it.

Then, I eased it toward my kindling and the accelerant I’d scavenged from the chainsaw. The tiny flame licked close to the silvery shavings. Closer. Closer. The precious fire was almost in contact when a sudden gust of damp wind ripped through the open front of the cabin, snuffing the match out and scattering the pile of magnesium.

“Damn...”

My hands trembled, iced to the bone now, knuckle joints almost locked by the penetrating cold. I used my left hand to brush the magnesium back into a pile beneath the kindling and shifted my body to better protect the makings of my fire. Then, I struck another match.

I felt the wind rushing over my hunched back as I hovered over the tiny flame I held. The almost comically small bolt of hot yellow danced as the gust swirled past and into the hearth, but it held. It had to. Still one more remained, but I seriously doubted if I would retain any dexterity to manage a proper strike to ignite it.

This one had to take.

I guided it gently toward the low scoop of shavings, bringing the flame to the bits of magnesium. In contact with them. A few glowed. A few more sparked. Would there be enough purity in the likely mixture of metals in the alloy to allow a full and satisfying burst of heat and fire?

“Yes...”

I breathed the word as the pile began to blaze, a slow-motion inferno building. A blinding pulse of hot white erupted, spreading to the kindling. Bits of wood from the mantle blackened, then began to burn.

I had a fire. I had made a fire.

For the next ten minutes I nurtured it, feeding small lengths of kindling and scavenged wood into the growing fire until the larger logs I’d arranged began to smolder. Then burn.

I spent no time warming myself further right then. Instead I did what any outdoorsman would do—gathered more wood. More than I thought I would need. When I had a stack half as tall as me I let myself huddle close to the hearth, stripping my clothes off and hanging them from a jagged bit of wood on the mantle. They dried as the chill was slowly driven from my body.

Lightning struck outside. Thunder followed. Rain poured. I listened to the storm and curled up on the stone extension of the hearth, bathing in the wonderful warmth. Giving thanks that I was alive. And that I might stay alive.

Great flames leapt into the chimney. Smoke would be jetting from its outlet above. There was a chance I would give my presence away to the stranger I’d seen, but I thought it a small chance. The downpour would smother and prevent the spread of the scent beyond a few dozen meters. If he was closer than that, then he already knew exactly where I was.

“Who is he?”

I asked myself the question as I tried to stay awake long enough so that I could put my clothes on again when they had dried. Whoever he was, was it possible that he was unrelated to the situation I now faced? Could he not have been involved in my abduction?

“It doesn’t make sense,” I said to the fire.

And, I realized, at the moment, it didn’t matter. And if it did, if
he
did, what mattered more was making it through the night and finding my way back to Elaine and my friends in the light of a new day.

I took my now dry clothes from where they’d hung and slipped into the meager protection they provided from the elements. Outside, the storm built. Rain sprayed at a severe angle into the cabin, drenching the floor just a foot from where I’d found refuge close to the hearth. I hugged my body and pressed against the warming stone surrounding the fire, feeding fresh logs into it as the night took hold.

“You’ll make it,” I told myself. “You’ll make it back to her.”

The words were both encouragement and promise. Sleep began to summon me. My eyes grew heavy. I was cold, but not in danger of succumbing to the elements anymore.

You’re going to wake up in the morning...

That further assurance came without spoken word. Existing in my thoughts. Precisely where other musings raged.

What happened? Is Elaine all right? Who did this? Who was the stranger?

I fell deep asleep with my mind screaming dark thoughts and fears.

S
ometime just after dawn my eyes opened, snatched from a dream abruptly. So quickly that what had lived as I slept seemed to exist in my waking world for a moment.

Ranger... Ranger... Ranger...

I had been dreaming about Neil.

Ranger... Ranger... Ranger...

The words repeated in my head as I lay there, shivering, the fire reduced to small licks on the glowing remains of the logs. I pulled myself into a ball and slid as close to the shrinking fire as I could without being burned.

Black is white. White is black.

More words from my friend. He’d said that to my face in the moments before he’d been spirited away in a stealthy chopper with Grace and Krista at his side.

You can’t trust anyone.

That, too, he’d emphasized. The entire exchange between us, our last in person, maybe forever, had been a very clear warning from my friend to me.

But a warning about what?

He’d urged me to get out. To find a hole somewhere and hide.

“Bandon,” I said, the word drowsy and dry.

My body trembled as I thought on that. On the place I’d come to believe was home after some initial, fleeting doubts. Thinking that it was somehow the focus of Neil’s warning and worry, and that my friend, my lifelong friend, was somehow privy to knowledge of a danger facing it, both troubled and vexed me.

More questions. That’s what I was left with. After what he had done. And after what had happened to me in the past forty-eight hours. Questions whose answers would have to wait as something else drew my attention.

A noise. Tickling my ears through the softly falling rain. A sound from beyond the cabin walls, faint, rumbling in the distance, low and rhythmic.

It was real. Not some phantom sound spiking up from my nearly hypothermic brain. It was there. It was faint. And it was familiar.

“A diesel,” I said.

I pushed myself up. Next to me the fire was crackling down, the last of the dry wood fueling it almost consumed. But out there, through the weather, beyond the grey woods...

“A truck,” I said.

A burst of energy powered me as I came to me feet and stumbled through the space where the blasted wall had once stood. The throaty growl grew louder, out on the road somewhere to my front. I pushed myself and began to walk down the dirt path that had brought me to the ramshackle cabin. Then I began to run. And stumble. Three times I fell into the mud before I came within sight of the road. And within sight of the most wondrous thing I could imagine.

Vehicles. A large military truck following a smaller Humvee, both of which I recognized. Each left by the
Rushmore
. Each from the place I now knew as home.

“Hey!”

I shouted as I scrambled up the path, my voice weak and raspy, drawing no notice. The vehicles lumbered on. In each I could make out silhouettes. People. Drivers and passengers. There was no definition to them. No features that gave me any clue as to who they were. And for an instant I wondered if, along with what had happened to me, the town itself had suffered some attack. And with that musing rose the fear that the people in the vehicles might not be those I wanted desperately to see.

Then, I heard my name.

“Fletch!”

It was the nick Neil had given me so long ago, when we were just goofy kids. Now it was being called out by one of those I’d come to know, and respect, from our adopted hometown.

“Martin!”

I screamed his name as I lost my footing on the rutted shoulder of the road, the pair of vehicles a hundred feet past my position now. They weren’t stopping. My hands grabbed at the edge of the asphalt and pushed off, lifting my body so that I stood now, unsteadily, waving my arms as I shouted again through the rain falling lightly.

“Help!”

Brake lights bloomed suddenly red, both vehicles slowing. Then stopping.

“Hey!”

I began to stagger toward them as the passenger doors of both opened, Martin emerging from the Humvee and Sergeant Lorenzen from the truck, each geared up and armed as they jogged toward me.

“Fletch!”

Martin shouted my name and I stopped, relieved, the strength I’d managed to summon draining instantly away. I fell slowly to my knees on the harsh surface of the road.

“Are you okay?” Martin asked as he reached me and crouched to support me.

I nodded and looked past him, Private Quincy stepping from behind the wheel of the Humvee and Nick Withers, one of the town’s three mechanics, leaving the same position in the truck to join those already surrounding me.

“Just cold,” I said.

“Let’s get him in the Humvee,” Martin said.

He and Lorenzen took my arms and eased me off the ground.

“Send a signal, private,” Lorenzen said.

Quincy jogged ahead to the truck and retrieved a stubby grenade launcher from the cab, loading it with a short, fat shell before bringing it to her shoulder and taking aim at a point in the sky roughly northwest of our position. She squeezed the trigger and the weapon bucked with a solid
POP
. A few seconds later, lost somewhere in the cloud cover, a rattling explosion rippled, sounding like a thousand loud firecrackers going off in quick succession. The military grade noisemaker, meant to be used to disorient and discourage unruly crowds, sent a series of sharp cracks echoing across the landscape in every direction. In this weather the signal might carry only a few miles, or twenty, depending on the terrain. But without having to be told, I knew what message it was meant to convey—they had found me.