Ranger (The Bugging Out Series Book 5) (24 page)

“So will I,” Martin added.

A map lay on the table where we stood. Schiavo had marked all the positions and her intended deployments prior to our arrival. Mayor Allen leaned forward, palms on the edge of the map, his aged eyes sweeping across the landscape reduced to two dimensional lines denoting streets and elevation contours. He’d had no time to mourn the loss of his wife. No time even to bury her. Her body, and those of Nathan Chester, remained in cold storage at the town’s morgue. Victory would allow us to give them proper services. But that outcome was still far from certain.

“And what if it fails?” the mayor asked. “When do I step in?”

He didn’t outright say it, but what he was thinking echoed the American principal of civilian control over the military. In essence, he was asking Schiavo at what point he would have to make the decision to surrender in order to save the lives of those who remained.

“You’ll have to make that call, sir,” Schiavo said.

“People won’t follow any such order,” Elaine told the town’s leader. “I won’t.”

“If I have to cross that bridge, Elaine, I fully assume that everyone in this room will already be dead.”

“Except you,” I said.

Mayor Allen nodded soberly.

“And God help me.”

Schiavo stepped away from the table and slipped into her battle gear, taking her M4 in hand but foregoing her Kevlar helmet.

“I’ll be in communications,” she said. “My guess is that radio reception will be interfered with, so use landlines if you can get to one to report anything important.”

“All right,” I said.

We shook hands. We hugged. We said our good lucks, which, we knew, might very well be goodbyes. Then Elaine and I left the town hall and drove north in the old pickup we’d been assigned.

Ten minutes after we arrived at our destination, all hell broke loose.

“O
n the left!” Enderson shouted, his M4 spitting rounds to the northwest from the narrow firing slit of the sandbagged bunker at the northern limits of the town.

“I’ve got movement on the right!” Elaine yelled back, firing controlled single shots from her MP5, trying to conserve ammo.

Between them, facing the bridge directly, I squeezed off double taps at what I was certain were groups of enemy across the span, maneuvering on the far bank of the Coquille River. Every volley we sent toward our enemy was returned in kind, with greater volume than ours, sometimes by a factor of four.

We were outnumbered.

“Where’s the patrol?!” Elaine asked above the deafening ripple of incoming and outgoing fire.

“They pulled back!”

Elaine hadn’t caught the report on our radio, just thirty seconds earlier, that one of three foot patrols, meant to plug the space between our location and the checkpoint three hundred yards to our southeast, had retreated to a more secure vantage point. With that repositioning, and the engagement to our own front, it seemed almost certain that the final assault on Bandon had begun.

Until, without warning, the guns pointed at us fell silent.

It took us half a minute to realize that we were the only ones still shooting. Once we ceased fire, we watched. And we listened.

“What the hell is going on?”

The corporal’s question was well founded. Whatever tactics our enemy was employing, they weren’t from any textbook he was familiar with, nor recognizable compared to any engagement we’d had in any conflict since the blight turned us all into warriors.

“They know we’re low on ammunition,” Elaine said.

“Just getting us to waste what we have,” Enderson said, agreeing. “We need to hold our fire until the real thing comes.”

“I thought this was the real thing,” I said.

The enemy was out there. Moving. Positioning themselves. They hadn’t yet come across the river, which was the natural barrier on our northern flank. For all we knew, the targets we’d been shooting at were just the fodder troops that Olin had spoken of. The real troops, the hardened soldiers, could be right behind them. Or in another area altogether.

“There’s shooting to the south,” Elaine said, listening through the sudden quiet in our area.

Sustained fire, I thought. Heavier weapons. Machine guns. They could be ours, but I was guessing theirs. As yet there had been no explosions, signaling mortar attacks. Or worse.

“You two take a break,” Enderson said, his attention focused through the bunker’s narrow opening.

“Thanks,” Elaine said.

We shifted position to the back of the bunker and sat on the floor. The barrels of our weapons were still warm as we set them momentarily aside. Elaine reached to me and pulled an expended 5.56mm casing from where it had lodged against my collar.

“Glad it wasn’t the other end of one of these that found you,” she said, dropping the spent shell atop the others that had been ejected from our weapons during the firefight which had just ended.

The hint of gallows humor in her words was plain. But so was the truth that bullets would find people. Our people. Our friends.

As we were about to learn, that fact had already come to pass.

“We have two down.”

The report came in over the radio, the voice calm and familiar. Schiavo.

“Jesus...” Elaine said.

There was no more information shared. Captain Schiavo, at the garrison’s command center in town, was taking in reports from the fixed outposts via wired lines and field radios. Whatever was happening elsewhere in and around the town, it all flowed through her. And, when necessary, to us.

“Down doesn’t mean hurt,” Enderson observed.

I knew he was right. Elaine did, as well, I knew. Offering up a running tally of any wounded was meaningless. Deaths, where someone was taken completely out of the fight, was not.

“So much for your friend’s word,” Enderson said, never looking back as he scanned the battered span that traversed the dark waters.

“What do you mean?” I challenged the corporal.

He glanced to me, no apology in his gaze for what he had said, and what his words suggested.

“They don’t want to hurt anyone,” Enderson said. “Wasn’t that his promise?”

“It was
their
promise,” Elaine corrected him. “The Unified Government.”

Enderson snickered lightly and looked back to the river.

“He’s with them,” Enderson said. “And that means he’s against us. It means he now has blood on his hands.”

What the corporal was stating couldn’t be argued on the face of the facts that had become known. But in that moment, as he laid out what seemed obvious, another possibility rose. A possibility which, as I considered it, seemed, in almost every way, more likely that what Enderson was saying.

“We’re going to check the old bunker,” I said, taking my weapon in hand and rising.

Elaine looked up to me where I stood, puzzled. Possibly she was doubting my choice to leave the safety of the intact bunker for the rubbled remnants of what had once been known as Checkpoint Chuck. Or she might have thought it odd that I was retreating from any defense of my friend, however distant and strained our onetime inseparable bond had become.

I reached my hand down and she gripped it, standing with my help. She was weak, still, a combination of exertion from the firefight and the remnants of the bug almost everyone in town had been fighting. Genesee’s magic was working, saving almost every resident who was old, young, or compromised through some chronic illness. The bit of medical magic had also lessened the effect of those who did contract the illness, like my love. That had allowed her, and others, to stay in the fight.

Whether they had another fight in them, I wasn’t certain.

*  *  *

W
e moved through the darkness, bounding to cover each other until we reached the shattered remnants of the old bunker within sight of our checkpoint. I’d fought there alongside Elaine soon after arriving in Bandon, fending off an assault across the bridge by the drug-crazed hordes from Seattle. Then she’d been just a hardened survivor, wary of the newcomers. Now...now she was everything to me. I loved her. I trusted her.

And I needed to share something with her.

“What if we’re wrong about Neil?”

I posed that question to Elaine as we stayed in cover, scanning the river snaking east. In the dim light of the quarter moon I could see doubt registering on her face, then curiosity.

“Wrong?” she asked. “How could we be wrong? You know what he did, and who he’s aligned himself with.”

“I know what we think he did,” I countered. “There’s one very glaring hole in this picture we’ve all painted of him being a traitor.”

“What hole?”

“His family,” I said. “Grace, Krista, Brandon. They’re here.”

“He said it was a goodwill gesture,” Elaine reminded me. “That he wouldn’t send them somewhere where—”

And then she saw it, too.

“Where they’d be in danger,” I said, completing the thought. “Except they are in danger. And he had to know that this would happen. That we wouldn’t surrender. Not after all we’ve gone through to keep this town going.”

Elaine nodded and brought her arm up to cough into the crook of her elbow.

“Why would he send them to a place where they’d be in danger?” I asked her.

She thought for a moment, the revelation coming to her as it had come to me.

“He’d send them if the danger here was less than where they already were.”

It was my turn to nod.

“There’s more to what he did,” I said, feeling, for the first time in many months, that the man I’d grown up with was not the turncoat we’d feared. “There has to be.”

“But what?”

I didn’t have an answer. Just a gut feeling. And as I let all that I’d learned since Neil left run through my head, bits and pieces began to stand out. Inconsequential snippets of facts and moments.

One in particular.

“The Hawks...”

Elaine puzzled at my statement. I looked to her, my heart rate quickening.

“He joked that when this was all over we could catch a Hawks game,” I said, recalling the innocent slice of banter my friend had offered. “On the ATV transmission, he said that to me.”

“So?”

“The Hawks were from Atlanta,” I said, recalling the location of the NBA team in the world before the blight. “But we never were into them. Not into basketball much at all. Football was our sport. That’s what we watched together. That’s what we played together.”

“Atlanta,” she repeated, thinking along with me. “Why would say that?”

I didn’t know. It was doubtful he was sending some covert indicator of where he was. I suspected he was far closer than the south. The activity in our area, and what Grace had been able to recall about where they’d traveled, pointed to somewhere between here and the Rockies.

“Atlanta,” I said again.

“Could be what they are making their capital,” Elaine suggested, almost immediately discounting the thought. “But how would telling us that help?”

“It wouldn’t,” I said.

Elaine eased her head toward the edge of the fallen bunker and peered around, scanning the riverbank to the east. As she took that moment, I focused on my friend. On what he’d said.

It was in those quiet few seconds that pieces began to tumble into some vague order.

“He didn’t just send a message to me,” I said, and Elaine looked back to me. “Olin thinks the Ranger broadcast was meant for him.”

“Maybe it was.”

If that was true, then my friend was using different methods to send messages to those beyond his physical reach. To those people who mattered to him.

To us.

“He’s talking to us,” I said. “There’s more to that transmission than just the obvious.”

I returned to considering why he might reference Atlanta. What could he be pointing us toward?

“Disease,” Elaine said, offering an answer to a question I hadn’t directly posed. “The Centers for Disease Control is in Atlanta.”

“CDC,” I said, using the government organization’s acronym. “They deal with biological threats. Plagues. Anthrax.”

“And viruses,” Elaine added with ominous realization. “They would have samples of biological agents there. Things that could be used. Against us.”

She was right. If money meant anything at the moment, I’d bet on the accuracy of what she’d just suggested.

“He was slipping in a warning,” I said. “About what we would be facing.”

Elaine nodded, puzzling at something after a moment.

“Why not just have Grace tell us?”

I shook my head.

“That would bring her into whatever he’s doing,” I said.

But what was he doing? What was he trying to tell us? To tell me?”

“If you’re right,” Elaine began, “then the person in the most danger may just be him.”

I nodded, beginning to believe she was right. My friend’s leaving was not the act of a traitor—it was a man taking on a mission. Just as he’d done with Olin in their old lives. Here, though, it appeared that Neil Moore might have gone into the belly of the beast to save the very people he’d abandoned.

But how?

“There’s something else,” I said. “There has to be more. He wouldn’t have known about Atlanta or viruses before he left us. He had to discover that once he’d joined up with them.”

“If what Olin said was right, they expected him to join the cause from the beginning.”

Elaine was correct. But he’d grown disillusioned with what they might do, just as he’d grown disillusioned with the rightful government. Only he didn’t tell them he’d changed his mind. He just took off.

To find me.

“What else could he have slipped into that transmission?” Elaine wondered aloud.

We could have mused on what my friend might be trying to say all night. But the rocket fired from across the river ended any speculation we might have undertaken.

I
t was not an RPG. We’d been on the receiving end of that weapon on Mary Island, its screaming approach a distinctive calling card. This was not that.

The projective dragged a fast tail of fire across the flowing waters as it streaked toward the reconstructed bunker.

“Enderson!” I screamed, hoping my warning would reach the corporal in time and allow him to dive clear of the coming impact.