by Noah Mann
Only there were no more millions to kill. Some calculations performed by a former professor of statistics who resided in Bandon pointed to there being fewer than three million survivors scattered about the entire planet.
Three million.
Down from more than seven billion and change when the blight struck. A nuke might now only kill thousands as it devastated a city, or an area. Oddly, that made using it almost more potent, with a near guarantee that a foe would be obliterated.
“If something happens to me, Fletch, there needs to be another who can do what needs to be done.”
“Did you discuss this with the council?”
She shook her head.
“Only Martin knows,” she said.
There’d been no discussion with anyone as to the specifics of what the president had said, and had given her, during our meeting with him in Columbus. By necessity she’d let her husband in on the secret, if for no other reason than to inoculate him against any surprise should he find the code card amongst her belongings. Beyond him, though, no one else knew what power Schiavo had been charged with, and the colonel hadn’t taken any steps to expand that small circle of knowledge.
“Would the president approve of this?”
“If he takes issue with it, he can let me know when and if he makes contact again,” Schiavo said.
I could continue to resist, but in the end I would take her at her word. And I would do what she thought was best.
“Take it,” she prompted me.
I did, sliding the card out and looking over the mix of letters and numbers, reading them again, and again, and again. Then I closed my eyes and imagined what I’d just seen. Schiavo was right, I had once been adept at quickly seizing measurements and parts numbers and contract dates, and holding each in memory. A length of schedule 40 PVC from my favored supplier was still item 86-8A in my mind.
“Do you have it?” Schiavo asked me.
I opened my eyes and looked to the card again, confirming that what I’d committed to memory was an exact representation of what was printed on the card.
“I have it,” I said.
She reached out and took the card back, slipping it into its sleeve. But she didn’t return it to her pocket. Instead she held it over the fire and let it fall.
“Angela...”
Flames seized the small rectangle of plastic and paper, twisting it. Melting it. Consuming it. In a few seconds it was blackened and unrecognizable. Reduced to ashy embers glowing at the base of the blaze.
“I don’t want what you and I know to exist in any form that can be found, or taken, or given.”
“Given?” I asked, surprised that she’d allowed that as some option.
“We don’t need another BA Four Twelve out there, somewhere.”
She was rightly worried about the unconfirmed existence of the human virus equivalent of the blight. But her suggestion as to its disposition was off base.
“Neil never gave that to anyone,” I told her.
“You don’t know that, Fletch. All he told us in that note he hid was that the sample of Four Twelve was somewhere safe. That could be with someone.”
“I don’t think so, Angela.”
“That really doesn’t matter,” she said. “The code you and I know has to stay that way—with you and I knowing. Understood?”
“Of course,” I answered.
She glanced down to the fire, no remnants of the card and its sleeve remaining. It was gone. For good.
“Do you remember the call sign?” Schiavo asked me.
“Viper Diamond Nine,” I answered.
She nodded, satisfied.
“Let’s hope we die of old age never needing to use what we know,” she said.
“Yes,” I agreed. “Let’s hope.”
Forty Six
I heard the thud in the hallway and cringed. A moment later, Elaine wheeled herself into our bedroom and stopped just inside.
“The bathroom door?”
“I know,” I said. “I know.”
She rolled closer to our bed and slid herself in and under the covers.
“I’m married to a contractor,” she reminded me. “You’d think I could get some work done.”
“By next weekend,” I said. “I promise.”
I’d widened all the doorways in our house, and replaced all the doors. Except one.
“I can live with banging my knuckles occasionally when I come in and out of the bathroom, but every time that happens we have a fifty percent chance of waking you know who if she’s sleeping.”
Hope had entered the ‘terrible twos’ a full half year early, particularly when it came to falling asleep, either for naps or when going down for the night, and staying asleep. One of us coughing in the living room was often enough to wake her. A banging from the bathroom just across the hall from her bedroom was just asking for trouble.
“We can write up a contract if you want,” I offered. “I’ll sign my name and everything. Bathroom door will be widened and replaced by insert date.”
“Funny,” Elaine said, then rolled toward me and snuggled close, nuzzling her head against my shoulder. “What did Angela want?”
She hadn’t asked when I’d returned home from our discussion on the beach. And I hadn’t offered any explanation outright. But I knew, somehow, the question would arise.
“If you wanted to tell me, you would have told me,” Elaine said. “Unless you were waiting for me to ask. So I’m asking.”
I thought for a moment, weighing what I knew against what I needed to keep to myself. Schiavo had told Martin, her husband, though there was some consideration there that had to be given to the existence of a physical item which, if discovered, could elicit more than a little curiosity. Here, though, with Elaine, there would be nothing such as that. All that existed relating to what Schiavo had shared was in my head.
“Was it about the signal?” Elaine pressed.
“No,” I told her.
I knew I could trust her. But could I burden her?
“It wasn’t about the signal,” I said.
“Then what was it?”
I shifted position and rolled toward her so that we were facing each other. Light from the half moon drizzled through the curtains, just enough that we could see each other.
“Eric...”
For the next few minutes I explained it all to her. Not once did I impress upon her the need to maintain complete secrecy. This, I knew, she would do on her own. When I was done, she looked slightly away from me and shook her head.
“That’s what this was about,” Elaine said. “Blowing up the world.”
“In a sense,” I mostly agreed with her shocked realization.
She’d had questions when we returned two years ago from Schiavo’s meeting with the president. Everyone had. But all that had been given in explanation was that the contents of their discussion were classified. That hadn’t sat well with many, who saw a secretive streak suddenly introduced into our community. To some, that smacked of the old world, and of the deceitful traits exhibited by the government which had abandoned its citizens as the blight exploded across the globe.
To Elaine, though, there was a deeper meaning to knowing what she now knew. One closer to the person she’d become, and the broken body she now inhabited.
“She could have used that against the Unified Government,” Elaine said. “Before they ever reached the Rogue River.”
I hadn’t considered the possibility that bringing my wife into my confidence about the matter would lead to where she’d taken it. But I should have.
“She was worried about effects on the town if a nuclear blast went off down the coast,” I explained. “The town was her concern.”
I wondered if Elaine was feeling a sense of anger. Some burning animus toward Schiavo, who hadn’t employed the weapon which would have prevented her from becoming paralyzed.
As it turned out, I was a hundred and eighty degrees incorrect in my supposition.
> “That had to be the toughest decision,” Elaine said. “And she made the right one.”
For a moment I puzzled at my wife’s response, but that reaction was quickly replaced by familiar admiration. She wasn’t weighing what she’d just learned against what she’d lost—she was weighing it against the toll it must have taken on Schiavo to make the choice she had.
“You’re pretty amazing,” I said.
Elaine eyed me, almost amused at what I’d said. She grinned and put a hand gently upon my cheek.
“You’re right,” she said, smiling outright now. “But so are you.”
Forty Seven
Two days after the appearance of the signal, we had an answer as to its origin. A partial answer.
“It’s where?” I asked.
It was Elaine who’d shared the news with me, using the landline to reach me at home during a break in the Town Council meeting called to discuss efforts to investigate the transmission. Westin had, it appeared, found some way to filter out any scatter from the powerful signal, allowing a directional antenna to take readings from multiple points, triangulating the source to a place that we’d known was possible, but unlikely.
Not anymore.
“One hundred and thirty miles west south west,” Elaine explained. “Out in the Pacific.”
“So there’s a ship out there,” I said.
“It looks that way.”
“The Rushmore can have a look then.”
“The Rushmore isn’t due back for another five weeks,” Elaine reminded me.
Every six to eight weeks we would have a visit from the Navy ship, which would offload supplies, food, livestock. All things deemed necessary to supporting the recovery of our town and the settlements nearby. What we needed, though, sooner rather than later, was information.
“What does the council want to do?” I asked.
“We want to send a plane out there to have a look.”
There were two viable aircraft in Bandon, and several pilots. But flying that far over open water would be a challenge for those who’d only recently learned to pilot the aircraft. Not, though, for the man who’d taught them.
“You need Chris Beekman,” I said. “What you’re asking is beyond what Dave, or Jeffrey, or Nicole are capable of right now.”
“We know that,” Elaine said. “That’s why I called you.”
“I’m not following you.”
“Angela wants to be flown out for a look,” Elaine said, and I understood instantly why this wasn’t going to be as straightforward as I’d expected. “We need you to arrange it.”
Years earlier, more than forty residents of Bandon had left the town to found the settlement at Remote. Chris Beekman had almost been among them.
“He will not go for that,” I told Elaine.
If hate was too strong a word for what the fifty-year-old plane mechanic and flight instructor felt toward the town’s senior military officer, it was not by much. Schiavo’s actions during the siege of Bandon orchestrated by the Unified Government, particularly her near confiscation of ammunition held by private individuals, had been seen as a dangerous overstepping of authority by those who’d ending up leaving. And even more so by one who’d stayed—Chris Beekman.
“The only reason he’s even still here is because the people who settled Remote can’t stand him,” I said. “Few can.”
“You’re one of the few,” Elaine said.
I was. And it wasn’t even a mystery to me. The man, minus the caustic persona he wore openly, reminded me of a friend. A friend who was gone. The first friend I’d made after the blight.
Del Drake.
In Chris Beekman I saw an individualist. A man committed to survival who possessed the wherewithal, and the fortitude, to see himself through to an end he might not be able to yet imagine. Del was like that. He’d been prepared to live out his days alone in the woods north of Whitefish. Only my arrival had upended that scenario. We’d ended up fast friends, and remained close until the day he sacrificed himself to weaken our enemy at the time.
I was in no way a close friend of Chris Beekman, but I hadn’t held him at arm’s length, either, as many had. And, most importantly to Elaine, I knew, was the simple fact that I wasn’t Angela Schiavo.
“Will you talk to him?”
She already knew the answer I would give, and as soon as she returned home and took over ‘Hope duties’, as we called it, I headed out.
* * *
Chris Beekman lived in a large house just south of the airport. He’d taken up residence in the abandoned home a few months before my arrival in Bandon. Like many of us he’d followed the beacon Micah had sent out, reaching what we’d come to know as Eagle One with only the clothes he wore and a deer rifle on his back. That same rifle was slung over one shoulder when I found him moving cans of gas just outside the hangar Dave Arndt had helped him refurbish.
“Chris.”
“Fletch,” he greeted me, never stopping the chores he’d set out to complete.
“You have a minute?”
“I have lots of minutes,” he answered.
“Your teachers must have loved your smartass answers in school,” I said.
“Probably why they celebrated when I graduated,” Chris shot back.
He didn’t take crap from anyone, and he appreciated those who acted similarly, I thought, which explained some of the acceptance he’d always shown me.
“You need a hand with those?” I asked.
He set a pair of red cans next to the open hangar door, one of the Cessna 172s within, and slapped the dirt from his hands as he faced me.
“All done. The next minute is all yours.”
I didn’t beat around the bush, and dove right into the request the Town Council was making. He listened, almost smiling when I came to the part about Schiavo accompanying him on the reconnaissance flight.
“What do you say, Chris?”
“You already know what I’m going to say. That’s why they sent you, because I won’t haul off and punch you for wasting my time with such a suggestion.”
“You know we need to figure this out, right? Aircraft in the air without any communication is asking for trouble. This affects you as much as people who can’t use their cell phones.”
“I’m well aware of that, Fletch. I’m also aware that Colonel Schiavo is willing to dictate actions to people who really have no inclination to be dictated to. That’s how juntas in banana republics begin, my friend.”
“Chris, that’s not even close to being fair,” I told him.
“Look, I know you’re close to her, and to Martin. I have no beef with how you live your life, and who you choose to associate with. You’re one of the good ones, Fletch. She, my good fellow, is not.”
I hadn’t any real idea how the exchange with Chris Beekman would go, but I’d hoped it would progress better than this.
“You want me to tell the council that you’re refusing the request?” I pressed him. “That’s what you want?”
“Hell no,” he said. “I’ve got no problem with flying out there to see what the story is. I just won’t do it with her.”
I had half failed, half succeeded, it appeared, and was prepared to report that to Elaine when Chris added something I hadn’t expected.
“I’ll take you out there, Fletch.”
“Me?”
“You know damn well that they’ll go for that just fine,” Chris said. “And you can see whatever’s out there as well as she could. Hell, you’ve practically been her right hand for how many years?”
He was stating an outdated truth, to be sure. But it was still a truth. There would be annoyance at his refusal to take Schiavo, but acceptance that I would fill in for her.
Another truth, though, was that I wasn’t entirely overjoyed at the thought of such a journey.
“That’s a long way out to sea,” I said.
“That’s why you need the best pilot you can find,” Chris countered.
I wasn’t exa
ctly being drafted into service. It was more of a forced substitution.
“I’ve got a suggestion on when we should takeoff,” Chris said. “You probably won’t like it.”
He was right.
Forty Eight
We sped down the airport’s single runway and lifted off heading north, lights of the town ahead until we made a gentle, sweeping turn to the west. Only black water and the night sky lay before us.
“I’m going to level off at three-thousand and cruise to our target,” Chris told me over the intercom. “Then we can head down to the deck if you need a closer look.”
“That’ll work,” I said.
An hour flight lay ahead of us, assuming that the location Westin had calculated was correct.
See you in a couple hours...
That was what Elaine had said to me just before I’d boarded the Cessna, its prop already spinning at idle. I’d leaned down and kissed her, then I’d given both Martin and Schiavo a nod. Despite Chris’s refusal to have her as a passenger, she’d insisted on being present for the flight’s departure. It might have been a way to show the man that she was not cowed by his intransigence, though the official reasoning was that we were departing on a flight sanctioned by both the civilian and military entities that served Bandon. I suspected there was a bit of both in the very overt helping of face time she was serving on the man’s home turf.
“She agreed with you,” I told Chris as we climbed through low, broken clouds. “You know that?”
“I don’t know why she would have disagreed.”
Night. That had been Chris’s suggestion, that we carry out our reconnaissance flight under the cover of darkness, with just under half a moon shining in the eastern sky behind us. Doing so made complete tactical sense, particularly since we had no idea what we were going to find out there. It could be a buoy with a transmitter strapped to it. Or a barge, manned by hostiles, though that made less sense the more anyone entertained the notion. The bottom line was that we had no idea, and ignorance demanded prudence.
“How far can you see with those things?” Chris asked, nodding toward the case on my lap.