Eagle one, p.23
Eagle One, page 23
part #2 of Bugging Out Series
What the man was saying, and what my own feelings toward the stasis I thought prevalent in Bandon had developed into, were aligned in ways I could not have imagined, and would have never believed. Until now.
“Here,” Martin said, taking a small black notebook from his pocket and holding it out to me. “This may help.”
I took it and turned back the cover, flipping slowly through the pages within. Nearly half were covered with precise notations, latitudes and longitudes, accompanied by more generic directions.
“Two hundred meters due west of bridge end,” I read, puzzling at the significance.
“Those are the food storage lockers Micah didn’t tell anyone about,” Martin said. “Some may have been used already by the people they were intended for. But some will certainly be full.”
I would need these. We would need these. Whoever the others in that equation turned out to be.
Forty Six
Virtually all the town was there, watching the handcrafted casket sink slowly into the earth. The simple headstone was already planted in the soft dirt, speckled granite crafted in haste, but not without loving detail, the name Micah Robert Jay chiseled precisely upon it.
I stood just behind Martin, the man dressed impeccably, black suit crisp. It had likely been in a garment bag for years. He didn’t shed a tear as Reverend Morris spoke, talking lovingly of Micah, his challenges before the blight, and how he rose to the occasion to help his neighbors and strangers in the dark times that came. There were stories. Someone, I do not know who, read from a poem, supposedly penned centuries ago by an Englishman. Only a few minutes had passed since the verse had been recited, but I remembered not a syllable of it. Only the sentiment.
This life was but a step toward another.
I didn’t know if that was true. I hoped it was. But then I’d been reduced to hoping for many things. That I would find success in the task I’d agreed to undertake. That there would be a tomorrow beyond the time when the last of the food stored in town ran out. That the earth again would be green.
But mostly I hoped that Neil and I would find a way back to our friendship.
He stood with Grace and Krista across the hole from my position. When the casket was fully lowered and the Reverend had finished, Krista stepped forward and tossed more flowers that she’d crafted into the void. She quickly scurried back to her mother and buried her face against the front of Grace’s dress.
Neil didn’t move. Didn’t flinch. He showed no emotion. But worst of all, he wouldn’t look at me.
When the services were over, Neil turned away and walked off, Grace and Krista with him. The little girl looked behind, in my direction, and brought a hand up, fingers flapping slowly in a quiet wave. I returned the gesture, smiling, and then they were gone.
I strolled across the cemetery, dirt where lawn should be.
“I hear Burke’s going with you.”
It was Elaine. She’d come alongside me without me knowing, her gait improving by the day.
“Doc Allen does good work,” I said.
“Doc Allen gives good drugs,” she countered.
We continued across the patchy earth, weaving between tombstones. She seemed to want to say something. To talk.
“Elaine, do you—”
“I’m going with you,” she said, blurting out the last thing I’d expected to hear.
I stopped, then she did, the both of us facing each other, a twinge of wonder on her face.
“What were you going to say?”
I sidestepped the question and moved to my own.
“Martin’s okay with this?”
“I have no idea,” she said. “I just decided now.”
“Now?”
“Right now,” she said, pointing behind to a spot on the ground. “About fifteen feet that way.”
My thoughts stuttered.
“This isn’t the kind of thing you decide on the spur of the moment,” I told her.
“What were you going to say?” she asked again, putting me on a spot I wanted to avoid, especially now.
“What? Wait. Elaine, you—”
She started walking, away from me.
“Cheyenne’s a long way,” she said without looking back. “We’ll have plenty of time for questions and answers.”
I was at a loss. She’d outmaneuvered my desire to bury any feelings toward her by outright trying to pull them from me like a trout from a stream. And the only thing that could mean was...
The smile came without me trying to summon it. Happiness and hope and possibilities coming on the most unlikely day, in the most unlikely place.
Among the dead, I’d begun to feel alive again.
Forty Seven
The door opened before I ever reached the porch. Grace stood just inside, looking out at me as if I was already a ghost.
“He’s not here,” she said.
I stopped where the walkway ended and the steps began.
“Where is he?”
“I don’t know,” she said, worried. “Eric, don’t try to talk him into anything.”
“Grace...”
“You don’t need him. You have Burke, and now Elaine is going. You have everyone you need.”
She was pleading. Almost begging. Yet still, in her vulnerability, a stoic defiance flourished. She and Neil had come through hell together. They’d found life, and a life together. They had Krista. They had time, no matter how limited.
“I do need him, Grace.”
Tears began to build upon her beautiful eyes. She shook her head slightly and they spilled.
“I need him more. Krista needs him more. If that’s selfish, I don’t care.”
There was little I could say to change her mind. I knew that before I’d taken a step out my door on the way over. But she needed to hear from me that Neil, her husband, my friend, was important. Was needed.
“Will you tell him I stopped by?”
She shook her head again, no tears cascading now. A quiet fury had dried them.
“I’m sorry, Grace,” I said.
She watched me walk away. I could feel her stare. She loved me like Neil did, but, at that moment, I could tell she wished she’d never met me.
Forty Eight
The plan was to head south, just past the California border, then inland, zigzagging our way east on minor highways and back roads until we reached Interstate 80, probably somewhere in northern Nevada. It was a route chosen the night before, during a sit down with Burke and Elaine. I’d returned home from my stop at Neil’s to find them on my porch, maps in hand.
What was the saying? No battle plan survived first contact with the enemy? Well, this might not be a battle in the literal sense, but it would be a fight to reach our destination. The enemy was every obstacle we would come across, most inanimate, but no guarantee that we would not find ourselves facing varying versions of Major Layton, or the Seattle Horde. Or, the vehicle Burke had chosen, and which the town’s best mechanic had prepared, might simply stop working a hundred miles from Bandon. Or run out of gas.
In the middle ages this might have been termed a quest. A journey to seek some fabled treasure. It was not far from that, I thought.
Burke and Elaine arrived just before sunrise as the town slumbered. My gear was ready. Weapons checked. I loaded all but my AR and my pistol into the shell-covered bed of the four by four that would carry us and slipped into the back seat of the crew cab with my weapons, Burke at the wheel, Elaine next to him. But before we pulled away from the curb, Burke looked over the seat back to me and lifted a nearly empty bottle of bourbon. Hardly a sip or two remained within its thick glass.
“Last liquor in town,” he said, holding the bottle out to me. “A final drink for luck.”
I took the bottle and unscrewed the cap, taking a swig, holding it back toward Burke. It was intercepted before he could take it, Elaine seizing it.
“I thought you never touched the stuff,” I said.
“I don’t,” she said, and tipped a swallow back.
She passed the bottle back to Burke and he put it down on the seat.
“Aren’t you joining in?” I asked the man.
“When we get back,” Burke said.
“I thought this was the last bottle in town,” I said, smiling.
“Last, next to last, who knows?” he said.
“You do,” I told him.
“Damn right I do.”
Burke drove away from the curb, taking us past Neil’s house. I wanted to look, but didn’t. It wasn’t sadness, or disappointment, that filled me. Knowing my best friend would be here simply left me feeling incomplete. He’d saved my life by warning me about the coming blight. I trusted him. He trusted me. Facing what I knew we would, and things which I couldn’t yet imagine, was not something I relished without him by my side.
“What the hell?”
Burke’s mild exclamation coincided with the four by four slowing, then stopping, just short of the intersection. I looked through the windshield to see what had brought us to a stop.
It was Neil. He stood in the middle of the street. His Benelli was over one shoulder, backpack the other. He walked toward the truck, down the side where I sat, and stopped at the window. I rolled it down.
“I was at the airport when you came by yesterday,” my friend told me. “There was a plane there I had to get ready for a trip.”
“A trip?” I asked, playing along.
“Little hop over to Wyoming,” he said.
“I hear Cheyenne’s nice this time of year.”
Elaine looked back from the front seat, smiling at me. For me.
“Short flight versus a long drive,” Neil said. “Anyone want to join me?”
Burke looked back to him.
“Hop in. Just so happens we’re heading for the airport.”
Neil nodded, then put his gear in back, and came around the truck to join me in the back seat. Burke pulled away and through the intersection.
We were on our way.
Thank You
I hope you enjoyed Eagle One. Please look for Wasteland, the next book in The Bugging Out Series, coming soon.
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About The Author
Noah Mann lives in the West and has been involved in personal survival and disaster preparedness for more than two decades. He has extensive training in firearms, as well as urban and wilderness Search & Rescue operations, including tracking and the application of technology in victim searches.
Noah Mann, Eagle One
