by Noah Mann
“We just got back,” I said.
“So you want to stew over this for a couple days? A few weeks? A month or two?”
I didn’t, but that would be the likely avenue I’d choose. The path of resistance to looking my friend in the eye and confronting him with the lie he’d told me. The lie that informed so much of the experiences he’d shared from the moment he came to my business nearly two years earlier to warn me of the coming blight.
“He could have a good explanation,” Elaine told me, though the hint of doubt about her as she gave the possibility voice did nothing to bolster any belief in it.
“I can’t imagine one.”
“All you’re doing is imagining,” she said. “Stop that and get the truth from him.”
It was a simple enough direction. One that made sense. Except for the fact that having to pry for facts and reality from my friend was an alien endeavor. There was no way he could have lied to me about his presence in South America before the blight exploded northward, but he had. The lack of any stamps in his passport backed that belief.
“Go already,” Elaine urged me.
“It’s early,” I said, trying to delay the inevitable.
She fixed a look on me. One that called out the BS I was shoveling better that any words could.
“Okay,” I finally said, swinging my legs over the side of the bed. “I’ll go.”
I wasn’t looking forward to any of what was about to come, but I couldn’t avoid it. Not if our friendship meant anything to me. And it did.
It meant the world.
Fifty Five
The door was closed and the curtains were drawn. The new day was being shut out, morning denied entry to the home of my friend, his wife, and their little girl. All was quiet at the quaint house beyond the wide porch. Very quiet.
Too quiet.
I knocked, the screen door rattling with every tap of my fist upon it. Soon a press of the doorbell button would once again raise a tinny chime within. A porch light might still glow in the early wisps of daylight. But not now. At this moment, as I stood on my friend’s porch, the house was as dead as it had been in our absence.
Something was wrong.
I pulled the screen door open and tried the knob beyond. It turned, the latch clicking as I pushed the front door inward.
“Neil...”
Silence. That was what greeted me.
“Grace...”
An unsettling stillness filled the front room. I stepped in, letting the screen door slap shut behind. Nothing appeared out of place. No furniture was disturbed. No items toppled. But something was there. Something that should not be.
Neil’s AK. It lay on the coffee table, magazine attached. I stepped close and looked down upon the weapon. Its safety was on.
My hand shifted to the Springfield on my hip, hand resting atop the pistol, at the ready.
But ready for what?
“Neil, are you back there?”
I looked down the hallway as I asked the question in the emptiness. The bedroom doors were open, one on the left, and one on the right. The bathroom door, too, was not closed.
“Neil, I’m coming back there, okay?”
I expected no answer, and received none. My words were out of an abundance of caution. I didn’t want to surprise my friend or his family if they were back there, unable to respond. Restrained. Even hurt.
Please, no...
The floorboards creaked lightly as I entered the hallway. I passed the bathroom first, its simple confines empty. Towels were draped neatly over a rack.
I moved on. To the next door. Krista’s room on the right. I peered around the edge of the door jamb and saw the room empty, the bed unmade. It had been slept in. No clothes were strewn about. No mess other than that pink comforter peeled back and hanging over the edge of the mattress.
“Neil...”
I spoke my friend’s name again simply because I wanted to hear his voice in return. I was wishing for that very thing. Worry was filling me now, and it crept into my throat, nearly choking me, bile-like. Impatience overpowered my sense of caution and I rushed to the next door, the final door, and looked into the room beyond. Neil and Grace’s bedroom.
There was no one there. The covers on the bed were similarly dragged to one side, as if they’d been roused in a hurry. I stepped into the room and moved about the space. There was no sign of a struggle. No blood. No broken lamps or furniture.
“What the hell...”
I moved back through the house, through every room, opened every closet. Then I crossed the back yard to the garage and looked within, only to find nothing.
Nothing.
I almost cupped my hands around my mouth and shouted out my friend’s name through the makeshift megaphone. Almost.
Only the odd, soft sound from the east stopped me.
It rose like a whisper. As if huge feathers were being whipped through the air. Loud enough to notice, yet hushed to the point that anyone still slumbering would not be jolted from sleep.
I scanned the sky over the neighborhood rooftops in the direction of the sound, which began to take on a rhythmic quality. Like a soft fluttering. A heartbeat with no low register. Wind pulsing.
Whoo... Whoo... Whoo... Whoo...
It almost sounded like...
“A helicopter,” I said to myself.
It did sound like that, but with the volume dialed down to almost nothing. The recognition of what I was hearing, or thought I was hearing, registered both concern and wonder. I’d had experiences with rotorcraft that were both deadly, and welcome. One had tried to turn Neil and me to Swiss cheese at my Montana refuge. Another, of a slightly different kind, had very unexpectedly saved our asses on Mary Island.
If this was another visitor come by air, it might mirror either event I’d previously been party to. Or it might have come for reasons entirely different.
I left the back yard and moved onto the street, straining to catch a glimpse of the craft, its form still obscured by the low peaks of houses and the taller points of dead pines beyond. But the throb of its rotor was coming from the east. That much I could tell. And that made me wonder if Neil had somehow heard it, earlier than I had. Had he roused Grace and Krista to investigate?
No. I discarded that possibility almost immediately. He would not have taken them toward some unknown to investigate. And he would not have left his rifle at home if he’d gone on his own. With only the Springfield on my hip I felt half naked, but I’d only left the house to go to Neil’s home. Lugging additional firepower hadn’t seemed like a necessity at that point.
I hoped that it would not be now.
A door opened near the end of the block, Mrs. Amelia Shand, all eighty years of her, stepping onto the porch in her robe, narrowed gaze finding me as I passed.
“What is that noise, Eric?”
If the years had dulled any senses the aging widow possessed, hearing was not among them.
“I’m going to have a look, Mrs. Shand. Don’t worry.”
She nodded, annoyed at the early morning disturbance, and stepped back into her house. I moved past her residence, and the last two on the block, then started across a field that had long ago been covered with tall grass and flourishes of wildflowers when the spring rolled around. It would again, I was starting to believe. Soon, I hoped.
For now, though, it was dirt. An expanse of dried earth that I crossed to reach the dead woods beyond. I worked my way through the barren trees and over snapped logs and tangled branches. A clearing lay ahead. I knew this from numerous walks I’d taken and patrols I’d been part of after first arriving in Bandon. Through the grey trunks rising from the equally monochrome earth I could just glimpse that open area, the size of two football fields. More woods lay beyond, and the remains of a brushy hill hemmed the clearing in to the south. All in all, the wide space had once been a place where deer grazed, and where the adventurous rode dirt bikes.
Now, though, it was very plainly a landing field. T
he slate grey helicopter cruising toward it left no mistake about that.
With a whisper the craft sailed over the crumbling woods in the near distance, the wash of its spinning rotors snapping the tops from dead pine and fir trees as it passed over them. Low. Hardly a few yards between it and the barren peak of the once proud woods.
A helicopter. Different from any I’d ever seen.
No...
I corrected myself. I had seen it. Seen something like it. In the days and weeks after the raid that eliminated Osama Bin Laden in the middle of a Pakistani city, images of the once secret craft were splashed across news programs. It was a stealth version of the venerable Blackhawk helicopter, workhorse of the military. This one bore none of the rounded contours of its ancestor, though, sharp angles and geometric slabs forming its skin, tail rotor encased in an equally odd housing.
It settled onto the flat meadow as I came out of the woods. Its side door slid open and two men in dark military uniforms hopped out, suppressed ARs in hand, weapons sweeping the area and zeroing in on me. I made no move from my position thirty yards from the craft, and, more puzzling than their appearance from the sky, the troopers made no move toward me. From the corner of my eye I saw the reason why. They were waiting for what they’d come for. For who they’d come for.
Neil.
He jogged across the field with Grace and Krista at his side, each carrying just a small bag. Moving quickly until they were all at the helicopter. A crew chief within helped them climb in and began securing belts that would hold them in the simple seats.
That was when Neil glanced out the open door and saw me.
He hopped from the helicopter’s cabin and put a hand to the arm of one of the soldiers. The trooper lowered his rifle, the other following his lead. My friend walked past them. Toward me. Meeting me where I stood in the dusty field, rotor wash spinning a whirlwind of parched earth around us.
“Neil, what the hell is going on?”
He looked at me for a moment. A stretch of silence that was so uncharacteristic for the man I knew. The man I’d known. My friend did not mince words with me. He never had.
But here, standing in the maelstrom of man-made wind, he seemed, if not at a loss, at least restrained in what he wanted to say. Or what he could say.
“Fletch, someone tells a story. Then someone repeats it. Then someone else does the same. By the tenth person, black is white and white is black.”
“Neil, I don’t understand.”
“I know,” he said. “I wish I could change that, but I can’t.”
I looked past him through the dirty haze. Grace and Krista were now belted into seats within the stealthy chopper. The former’s gaze was fixed out the open door at me, a mix of regret and hope about her. She was sorry, but necessarily so. As if what was transpiring, though enigmatic, was not optionally avoided.
“Fletch...”
I faced my friend again. There was so much to say. Too many questions to ask. But, I suspected, there would be few, if any, answers offered. And, even worse, no time in which any explanation could be given.
“We have to go,” he told me.
“Where? Why?”
I had to ask. Almost demand to know. None of what I was seeing made sense. And nothing that my friend was doing or saying gave me any insight, or any comfort, whatsoever.
“They wanted me to leave in Skagway, but I wouldn’t. I wanted to get home. I thought it would be okay once we were here. That everything would work. But...I was wrong.”
In Skagway? Was that what the fifth Osprey had been there for? To take my friend and his family away, as this sleek helicopter was about to do now, right in front of me?
“I’m sorry, Fletch.”
He turned to walk away and I grabbed him by the arm. The two troopers advanced toward me through the dust. Once again my friend signaled for them to ease up. And once again they complied. They followed his direction. His command.
He was someone to them.
“Fletch, you have to let go. You have to let me go.”
“Neil, how am I supposed to do that? After...”
After all that had happened. All that we’d been through. Suffered through. Overcome. I didn’t have to voice those particulars. He knew.
“You’re just going to leave?”
I thought I saw the beginning of a nod. But it never fully formed. Instead my friend gripped my arm now, and drew me close.
“Get out, Fletch,” Neil said, keeping his back very purposely to the troopers. “Find a hole and bury yourself while there’s still time.”
I puzzled obviously at my friend’s warning.
“What are you talking about?” I pressed him.
Neil chanced a glance behind and the troopers inched closer. He looked back to me, a deep, ominous worry in his eyes.
“Black is white,” he reminded me. “White is black.”
“Neil...”
He let go of my arm and eased his from my grip.
“You can’t trust anyone,” my friend said. “Anyone.”
My mind raced, chasing explanations as to what had happened to put my friend in this state. This state of vague warnings and some secretive plan to flee with his family, leaving all else behind. Me included.
“You don’t have much time,” he said.
I wanted to reach out and grab him again. Grab him and throw him to the ground and pummel him until some sense returned and he told me, without any crypticism, just what the hell was going on. But the firepower and muscle standing just yards away would make that a foolish act on my part. Maybe even a fatal one.
“That’s it?” I pressed my friend. “You’re just going? Leaving me here with no explanation?”
A warning horn sounded from the helicopter.
“We’ve gotta move!” one of the troopers shouted to Neil. “Now!”
My friend nodded and looked to me, a finality to the connection. As if he was severing all that we had ever been with a parting glance.
“I tried, Fletch,” Neil said. “I really did.”
“Tried what, Neil?”
All about him saddened right then. His face turned grim. Apologetic.
“To save everyone,” my friend replied. “I couldn’t.”
Save? From what? The questions were bursting in my head like blinding fireworks, popping off painfully close.
“I have to save who I can, Fletch.”
He gestured with a sideways nod toward the chopper. To Krista, and to Grace, and their unborn child.
“I’m sorry,” Neil said, his last words to me.
Then he turned away and jogged back toward the troopers, passing between them and climbing into the helicopter next to Grace and Krista. The armed duo kept their weapons low, but their eyes stayed focused on me as they backed toward the chopper, joining the others inside. The side door slid shut, leaving just a small window through which I could see inside. Neil looked out, meeting my gaze as the rotor spun up, wind blasting across the dirty field, a muffled whop whop whop rolling across the landscape as the chopper rose into the air, floating upward, finally banking right, its nose diving as it sped west toward the rising sun.
He was gone. My friend was gone.
And I was left to wonder why.
Part Six
Voices
Fifty Six
Much happened in the following months as summer spilled into fall, and fall into winter.
The fruit trees that were waist high when we returned from Skagway now reached higher than Bandon’s tallest person, Greta Beane, a former national volleyball standout who towered gracefully over the townspeople at six feet and six inches. They sprouted fruit by Thanksgiving and, in defiance of what had been some natural seasonal order, produced even as the chill of the season took hold. Similarly, the vegetables, both root and stalk, flourished, adding to the plain and preserved foodstuffs all had become accustomed to. Grass seeds that we’d planted prior to heading north in search of our friends had sprouted and spread, carpeting t
he fields beyond the cemetery with a green that was natural and gorgeous and cool underfoot.
The seeds we’d brought home from Cheyenne, seeds which had been crafted through trial and error while the master of the process was slowly starving to death, had germinated and thrived at the accelerated speed we’d expected after seeing the growth in the Wyoming greenhouse, and confirmed upon our return to Bandon. There had always been that fear that, out of a controlled environment, we’d find that they would mature at a normal pace, denying us of any usable bounty for many months, if not years. Or, worse still, that no growth would happen at all. The blight, we knew, had not gone away. It surrounded us still. It infected the soil. The air.
But it had been beaten. At least here. This land, our land, was turning green again. The fields were alive, if silent. Hills once grey and barren were sprouting wildflowers and weeds from generational seeds carried on the ocean breezes, offspring of the first plants. And the cycle had begun. Life, which had been absent in this form for more than two years, had returned.
Then, a week before Christmas, the boat came.
It was large and squat and grey, approaching from the north to anchor a mile offshore. Navy was my first thought. Nearly everyone’s first thought. The real Navy. Our Navy.
A trio of Air Cushion Vehicles, what were commonly referred to as hovercraft, spilled out of its open stern well and ran toward the beaches south of town, dragging roostertails of sea spray behind. Most of Bandon’s residents gathered on the coast road to meet the vessels. Arms were plentiful. But no one harbored any illusions of resistance against what was charging toward land.
Then again, no one expected that this was any sort of hostile act requiring a coordinated defense. What we were witnessing, we believed, was the fulfillment of a promise.
Schiavo hadn’t been blowing smoke after all.
“LSD Forty Seven,” Doc Allen said, lowering the binoculars through which he’d been surveying the operation unfolding offshore. “Landing Ship Dock.”
“Dock Landing Ship,” Ken Petrie corrected from behind. “That’s the Rushmore.”