by Noah Mann
Harker looked at me for a moment. Just looked. But there was no hint that he was even slightly entertaining the possibility of what I’d suggested.
“The Rushmore has its own mission,” the SEAL officer said. “Once we’re back aboard, she’s heading out to sea.”
“Lieutenant,” Lorenzen said. “Pardon, but if Captain Schiavo getting to Portland is so vital, why are you all running for open water?”
“I’m not at liberty to discuss why the Rushmore and its crew is doing whatever it is it’s doing,” Harker answered, providing no answer at all. “Now if you’re clear on what Commander Genesee is tasked with doing, can you transport us back to the beach so we can return to the ship?”
And that was it. Genesee stood there, seeming in a state of mild shock.
“Good luck, commander,” Harker said, then led off toward the door.
Outside, Lorenzen told Enderson to take the ATV back to the garrison headquarters at the Town Hall as the SEALs climbed back into the Humvee.
“Looks like it’s gonna be a party of three,” Lorenzen said to me before we joined our guests in the vehicle.
That was not an unreasonable assumption to make, particularly after the briefing we’d just been privy to. But I didn’t hold with that belief, and, after we’d seen the SEALs off back at the shore, I suspected that the sergeant would agree with me, though I was dead certain he would be furious at that forced reality.
Three
Lorenzen stopped the Humvee on the sand and left the headlights on. What should have been a beach basking in the glow of the new day was, instead, a strip of shore under false night, the first gritty bits of ash beginning to fall near the water.
The sergeant and I got out of the Humvee along with Harker and Nguyen, walking the two SEALs down to the waterline. Two hundred yards out, their boat still circled, waiting to return them to the Rushmore, which was anchored a good two miles off shore.
“Lieutenant,” Lorenzen said as Harker took his swim fins from where he’d stowed them on the side of his compact rebreather.
“Yes?”
“What team are you? What unit?”
“Unit?” Harker repeated, regarding the sergeant with a bit of surprise for even needing to pose such a question. “You’re looking at the unit.”
Lorenzen nodded and gave the SEAL a salute. Harker returned it, then began wading into the surf with Nguyen. Only after they were chest deep would they put their fins on and begin the cold swim back to their launch.
"They’re decimated,” Lorenzen said.
“By what?” I asked rhetorically.
A strobe began to flash on the launch, guiding the SEALs as they swam through the surf toward the nimble boat. A few minutes later they climbed aboard and the small craft went dark as it turned away from shore and raced over the rolling surf toward the Rushmore, its mothership.
“Paul...”
The sergeant looked to me, the drizzle of grit from the sky increasing. Soon we would need dust masks, or bandanas over our mouths, to filter what we could of the damaging particles. But whatever the ash fall was like here, it would be ten times worse closer to the eruption. Precisely where our friends were.
And where Lorenzen would not be traveling.
“What is it, Fletch?”
“You have to stay here,” I told the man.
“What?”
He was surprised by my statement, but more curious, I thought.
“Clay and I will go find them in Coburg,” I said.
Lorenzen almost chuckled.
“Where is this coming from, Fletch?”
“Look out there,” I said, tipping my head toward the Rushmore. “That ship has damage to the bow. I saw it when she made her brief appearance last week. And the SEALs aboard are down to two men. In ten minutes the ship will be running. Running. From what, Paul?”
What I was saying was hitting a nerve, but could not elicit a truth neither of us yet knew.
“I don’t know,” Lorenzen answered.
“Exactly. What if that trouble is coming here, and you’re off chasing down our people in the middle of a volcanic eruption? You know what the captain would say about that.”
“I do,” he said, nodding, and angry that there was no way he could dispute the logic.
“You, Enderson, Westin, and Hart may be needed here.”
“May,” Lorenzen said, shaking his head. “That’s what rubs me wrong about this. It’s all a hypothetical.”
“What isn’t?”
The sergeant looked to the dark sky and held his hand out, ash dusting the palm of his glove.
“This,” he said.
I don’t believe he could have been more right about anything right then. We were facing a possible threat, and a definite one. If the first became a reality, the town might, once again, need to defend itself. The garrison’s second in command would be an integral part of that.
“Genesee is gonna be a terrific traveling partner,” Lorenzen joked, dumping the ash from his glove. “He’s a civilian who ended up in khakis.”
“You’d better talk to the mayor and let him know he’s going to be Doc Allen again until we get back.”
The elderly leader of our town, who’d been its sole doctor through most of the blight’s aftermath, had soldiered on after the death of his wife almost a year ago. He’d slowed, both physically and in spirit, but his mind was sharp.
“Hart will help,” Lorenzen assured me. “And we have Grace.”
My late friend’s wife served as the head nurse at our small hospital, with two other nurses assisting her. Truly, though, the realities of the blighted world had forced her to perform procedures that, normally, would have been handled by doctors. At my refuge in Montana, shortly after she and Neil and her daughter, Krista, had arrived, Grace had patched up the gunshot wound in my jaw, almost certainly preventing infection from settling in.
In short, she’d saved my life.
Now, another life needed to be saved. Schiavo’s? Martin’s? Carter’s? The only way to know would be to reach them and render what assistance we could. The preparations we’d begun, including loading the Humvee with supplies, were almost complete when this new wrinkle arrived through the pounding surf. Now, with the SEALs almost back to the Rushmore, those preparations had to be completed—and altered.
“Can you get Genesee ready?” I asked. “Maybe Grace can help with any medical supplies that might be necessary.”
Lorenzen nodded, understanding.
“Go home, Fletch. Spend a while with your family. I’ll swing by and pick you up when it’s time.”
When it’s time...
Two hours from now. That’s when we’d planned to set out. There was no reason to delay that timetable, but two reasons I wanted to.
“I’ll be ready,” I said.
Four
My little girl smiled at me as I held her on my lap, facing me, hands supporting her back, her neck. Hands that, in a few short hours, would be out there again, in unknown lands, ready to do what needed to be done.
Even kill.
“You’re going to need to see that the ash gets raked off the roof,” I said to Elaine.
She sat a few feet away, in the comfortable rocker, watching the moment I was sharing with our daughter. With our Hope.
“Don’t try to do it yourself,” I reminded her. “Dave Arndt said he’ll come by and keep you from breaking your neck.”
“I can climb a ladder,” my wife assured me, but offered no real protest toward my admonition. “But I’ll let him handle it.”
The ash fall, if it kept up, would add tons of weight for the roof structure to support. If it could. Across Bandon, some houses would fail. The trick was keeping that number low, and, more importantly, making sure no people were inside buildings that were at risk of collapse.
“I won’t make a fuss about this,” she told me.
“Thank you.”
In another time, at another place, she would have challenged my desire t
o keep her out of harm’s way. Now, with the world which had been recovering shrouded in darkness, she knew that her focus had to be on our child.
“As soon as you’re back, you’re on dish duty.”
“Gladly,” I said.
How many more minutes did I have with my daughter and my wife? Ten? Five? Lorenzen would soon be here to take me to the town hall, where Genesee, I assumed, would be waiting. We would leave from there and return...
“I don’t know when I’ll be back,” I told Elaine. “I just have no idea what’s out there.”
“I know.”
She’d been with me on our trek across the wasteland to Cheyenne and back. The feelings we’d had for each other had come out into the open on that journey. What we’d survived had strengthened us, and softened our hearts. What I was about to face, out there, in the hellfire of a most unexpected disaster, could only be imagined. And, though each of us knew that there was no certainty to my return, we would not entertain that possibility aloud.
I was coming home. I was.
“But I will come back to you,” I said, looking to our Hope on my lap. “And to you, too.”
Headlights swept across the curtains, cutting through the daytime darkness outside. That would be Lorenzen. In a moment he would park and come up the walkway and knock on our door. And I would leave with him.
But I had that minute, still. That brief bit of time with my family.
I stood, as Elaine did, and we stepped close, our daughter in the embrace between us. I kissed Hope, then my wife.
“I’m gonna say it,” Elaine said. “Be careful. Really, be careful. This isn’t like anything we’ve seen. Okay? You promise me.”
It was a command she was giving me, not a request.
“I promise,” I said, looking at her for a moment as the heavy steps of boots came up the front walkway. “I love you, Elaine.”
“I love you, Eric.”
The knock sounded at our door. Elaine’s arms slipped around our daughter, taking her from me. She stepped back and managed a smile. For a moment I couldn’t look away. Couldn’t turn and go to the door.
Another soft flurry of taps forced the issue, and I turned away from my wife, and my daughter, and I took my AR and backpack from where they waited near the door. I didn’t look back as I stepped out to the porch and pulled a bandana up to cover my mouth. Didn’t look as I followed Lorenzen down the walkway to the waiting Humvee near our pickup, breathing through the thin material to filter out the still light ashfall.
But when I took my place in the passenger seat next to the sergeant, I did cast my gaze toward my house, and in the window next to the closed front door I saw my girls. Elaine lifted our daughter’s tiny hand and moved it in a small wave. I smiled, my heart both warmed and pained by what I saw, because I wanted to see it again. Wanted to see them again.
That, though, was not a certainty, however confident I wanted to be toward the evolving mission I was about to set out on. That we were about to set out on.
“Is Genesee ready?”
“As ready as he’s ever going to be,” Lorenzen answered, a hint of doubt in his answer.
“Let’s go,” I said, and looked away from my wife and daughter as the sergeant drove us away into the black morning.
* * *
One of the garrison’s Humvees had been loaded with supplies, including every medical device that could reasonably be taken with us. Grace was arranging the last of those items as Lorenzen and I pulled up outside the Town Hall. I stepped from the vehicle and approached, the sergeant disappearing into the building to find the man who would be joining me.
“Fletch,” Grace said, lowering her white dust mask to flash me a smile that was bright beneath a worried gaze.
“Grace...”
I could think of no more to say than just to utter her name. To speak what my friend, her late husband, could no more. And it was a fitting name she bore. Much as my daughter personified the hope we all felt, Grace exemplified a manner of living, a way of surviving, that was, at its core, quiet intensity. Few would know what a fighter she could be, one who’d shot a helicopter out of the air to save her future husband and me. More would know the healer that she was. The mother. The wife and friend. Those parts of her were never in conflict. She was strength and steadiness in all that she did, and all that she’d suffered through.
“Everything the commander needs is already packed,” she told me.
I nodded and studied her for a moment. That strength was there. That poise. That confidence. But another indicator of some thought or feeling shone through, from within. From someplace close to the surface. A place where things once hidden were slipping through cracks in the walls built to contain them.
Without much thought, I knew what it was that was revealing itself despite her best efforts to conceal it.
“You can call him Clay, you know,” I said.
She looked me with eyes that registered both relief and terror. I’d sensed something in the way she related to the man who ran our town’s hospital. The Navy man who was as ill at ease in the uniform as he was at the very idea that he was posted to a place like Bandon. Or had been, I reminded myself. Commander Clay Genesee had grown on the residents, slowly, inasmuch as he’d begun to feel part of the community himself. Part of that growing comfort and acceptance I attributed to the woman standing before me in the world so dark that it seemed impossible some light of promise could shine through.
But it was. From her, and through her, because of him. A flicker, at least, of something good. Something possible.
“I’m sorry, Fletch...”
I shook my head at her apology. Neil, my friend, her husband, had been dead just shy of a year. Were she to continue to grieve indefinitely, to shut herself off, there might never be another chance for happiness in the world that had been hollowed out of those sorts of joys.
“Grace, there’s no reason to be sorry.”
She managed a timid smile at my expression of acceptance.
“Neil hasn’t even been...”
“You’re not on some clock,” I told her, searching for the right words to express what I wanted to say. “The Neil that I knew, that I really knew, wouldn’t want you to let grief overshadow happiness. He wouldn’t want you to mourn forever. He’d want you to live, and to laugh.”
Without more prompting, she let out a soft giggle.
“He makes me laugh,” she said. “Clay.”
“I find that hard to believe,” I teased her.
That smile that had been mostly suppressed blossomed a bit more, and she fixed a thankful gaze on me.
“When you two get back, we’ll all get together for dinner. Elaine, the children, Clay.”
“I’d like that. I know Elaine would, too.”
The door behind Grace opened, Genesee and Lorenzen coming out. The Navy man held an M4, one clearly issued to him from the garrison’s small armory. The sergeant had also outfitted him with a set of Army BDUs, and a load bearing vest stuffed with magazines and every item that a fighting man would bring into battle. On his belt a holster hung low, strapped to his thigh, a Beretta M9 secured within.
“Paul insists I be ready to face some zombie attack,” Genesee said.
“Going blue to green?” I asked the man playfully, referencing a term used when someone serving in the Navy transferred to the Army.
“If the benefits are better, who knows?”
Genesee opened the back door of the Humvee and put his vest on the back seat, and was about to stow his rifle when I stopped him.
“You’re riding shotgun first,” I said. “There aren’t zombies out there, but there are other things.”
The Navy commander looked to his rifle. He was uncomfortable wielding the weapon of war. Scalpels and sutures and stethoscopes were the instruments of his calling, but he had raised his hand and taken the oath to support and defend the constitution. That document might be nothing more than ashes now, but its ideals endured.
�
�You’d better hit the road,” Lorenzen said.
“Before it gets dark?” I asked him, glancing to the false night raining down around us.
“Get there, and get back,” the sergeant said.
I nodded. Genesee looked to Grace, and she to him. Whatever existed between them, it was too new to allow an overt expression of affection. But it did not preclude everything.
“Be careful,” Grace said, directly to him. “Please.”
Lorenzen, who clearly hadn’t noted the hints of some budding emotional connection between them, flashed a mildly surprised look my way.
“We will,” I told Grace, then looked to Genesee. “Ready?”
He gave Grace a last look, then walked around the Humvee with his rifle and climbed in. I took my place behind the wheel and closed the door, listening to the gritty ash fall upon the vehicle, its sound akin to some sort of sizzling rain.
“This isn’t going to be easy,” Genesee said, staring out into the swirling blackness cut by the headlights.
“No, it isn’t,” I agreed, then started the Humvee and pulled slowly away.
We drove out of town, passing masked residents raking ash from rooftops, and the ranch crew leading livestock to a group of empty buildings downtown that had been hastily repurposed as sheltered pens. An additional supply of food for the animals had been hastily processed and stored, as had water, taken from the Coquille River and stored in a pair of tanker trucks before it could be contaminated by ash and debris.
“If this keeps up, Fletch,” Genesee said, shaking his head at the disaster raining from the black sky above.
“The wind will shift,” I said, and he looked to me with little hope, but brimming doubt.
“You a weatherman?”
I shook my head.
“People can’t breathe this indefinitely,” Genesee said, lifting up one of the many flimsy dust masks we’d brought with us. “These will only do so much. And the water is going to be undrinkable.”