Ranger (The Bugging Out Series Book 5)

by Noah Mann

  “If I could infect others, that would mean I’m already infected.”

  No one said anything to counter what I’d suggested.

  “Okay, all right,” I said, the weakness causing my body to teeter suddenly.

  “Hold on,” Martin said through his respirator as he took hold of my arm and eased me back into the chair. “Just take a few breaths. Do you want some water?”

  I shook off the offer and looked out at those eyeing me like a specimen under glass.

  “What was in the capsule?”

  “We don’t know,” Genesee said. “We really don’t have the equipment to test it, and keeping it stable was too big a risk.”

  “We had to destroy it, Fletch,” Schiavo said. “Incinerated it. Just in case there was anything left inside. Any pathogen or virus or...anything.”

  There was no arguing with the logic of what they’d chosen to do while I’d been under sedation. I would have made the same decision, had it been mine to make.

  “But some of whatever was in it got into me,” I said.

  Doc Allen nodded without hesitation.

  “Without a doubt,” the doctor turned mayor affirmed.

  I drew a breath, the air spilling sick and warm down my throat. My stomach churned as the reality of what I faced set in.

  “Quarantine,” I said.

  “Just until we see what signs you show,” Genesee said. “If any.”

  “If any? They didn’t put that in me just for kicks. Something’s going to happen.”

  Again I looked to Elaine, trying to dial my burst of panic down. It was one thing to face an external threat, one you could shoot at or run away from. But this...

  “It’s going to be okay,” my wife, my love said. “Everyone’s focused on making sure you’re going to be fine.”

  “She’s right,” Schiavo said, gesturing to Doc Allen and Commander Genesee. “Every doctor we know is on your case.”

  It was an attempt at humor, and it elicited a smile from the older of the two men she’d made note of. But Elaine’s expression didn’t change. Not one iota. It hovered somewhere between terrified and stoic.

  “Right,” I said, acceptance, gratitude, and doubt expressed together in that single word.

  Elaine, I should have suspected, would not miss the gallows sarcasm mixed amongst the other emotions.

  “Hey,” she said, and I looked to her. “You’re going nowhere. Understand?”

  I wanted to. I truly did. But a bleakness had risen within, and, as hard as I willed it, would not recede.

  Nine

  I asked for some time alone.

  Martin shed his protective gear in the makeshift airlock to the left of Micah’s old radio and computer room and departed with the others.

  The others, except for Elaine.

  “Please,” I said, watching her fix an almost angry gaze upon me. “Just a few minutes. You can come back after that. I want you back after that. But I need...to think on my own for a little bit. Okay?”

  She said nothing to my quiet plea. Just stared at me. Then, acquiescing to my wish, she turned and disappeared down the hallway.

  I was alone.

  I stepped close to the plastic divider and put a hand upon it. Micah had existed with this same barrier, had thrived behind it, and he was just a child.

  A very special child, I reminded myself. Brilliant. Precocious bordering on arrogant. But arrogant with a reason. With a purpose. He had saved his town. Had saved me, and Grace, and Krista.

  And Neil.

  I turned toward the bank of electronics arrayed against the wall facing the barrier, walking to them after a moment’s consideration. With a simple flip of a switch the entire collection of devices powered on. Computer screens hummed. Hard drive lights flickered. Radio display screens glowed.

  It all still worked.

  My attention focused on the radios. I’d watched Micah manipulate the controls on occasion, and recalled using Del’s similar amateur equipment back at my refuge in Montana. I knew how to adjust frequencies, but that wasn’t necessary, I knew. All I needed to do was turn the volume up.

  “Ranger. Ranger. Ranger.”

  Neil spoke to me over the airwaves. His recorded voice was clipped and official. As if he was robotically performing some vital task. I’d wondered since first hearing his voice over the radio why it was him broadcasting at all. He’d left us, for reasons I still could not fathom, and some months later had turned up speaking to us, to everyone, in the way I now heard him.

  Why?

  The question nagged. Perhaps I was allowing this maddening curiosity to invade my thoughts if only to push out the wonderings, the fear I had about my own situation. Maybe. That was a true possibility.

  But the need to find some rational explanation to at least this part of his very irrational act gnawed at me. Why was it him? Was he being used? And if so, for what purpose? Anyone could have read the simple repetition.

  “Ranger. Ranger. Ranger.”

  “What are you doing, Neil?” I asked the radio.

  The broadcast repeated again and again without any answer coming to me. Finally I turned the volume down, then flipped the switch which powered off every device at Micah’s workstation. A thick silence filled the space around me as the last whirring fan stopped and the humming displays went dark.

  I was alone.

  “You’re going to be okay,” I told myself, turning to look through the clear barrier to the empty side of the space. “You are.”

  Without any conscious effort my eyes closed and I found my way to the chair a few steps away. My body settled into it. A steady throb built on the back of my arm where I’d been cut open to remove what had been put inside me. It pulsed to the beating of my own heart in a hypnotizing rhythm. I let the discomfort come. Let it settle me.

  But with it came thoughts. Questions.

  Why me? Why had I been taken? Not Elaine, not anyone else, but me?

  “Enough!”

  I half shouted the admonition to myself in the solitude of my quarantine chamber. There had been enough questions already. Too many. Musing on possibilities, torturing myself with unknowns, would do nothing to better my mental state at the moment. For a while, at least, I had to let go.

  My eyes opened and I stared at the empty space beyond the barrier. Just stared and waited for this new nightmare to end.

  Ten

  Commander Genesee came to check on me a few hours after I silenced the radio. Martin returned not long after that, with Schiavo. She was dressed down, in civvies, holding her husband’s hand. They sat with me and talked for a while through the antiseptic transparency that bisected the space, sharing that Doc Allen had returned to his duties as the town’s leader and was, at that moment, coordinating with Sergeant Lorenzen a further increase in Bandon’s defensive posture.

  Elaine did not return with them.

  Each told me that they hadn’t seen her since she’d left to allow me my desired privacy. And as Martin and Angela departed, with night falling and darkness closing in on the room’s lone window, permanently nailed shut, I was alone again.

  But not for long.

  “You’re going to tell me this is stupid.”

  It was Elaine’s voice. The sound of it was wonderful, and close, and unfiltered by the barrier and the electronic intercom in place to allow clear communication through it.

  I turned away from the window and saw her, standing near the exit of the corridor which led to the airlock. She was on the same side of the plastic as I was. In the same space. Breathing the same air.

  My air.

  “Elaine...”

  “It’s already done,” she said, a very faint but very, very real smile upon her face.

  “You have to get out of here,” I told her, backing away.

  She stepped toward me and shook her head.

  “It’s already done. I’m here.”

  There was nowhere I could run to put distance between her and myself. Between whatever had bee
n put inside me and the woman I loved.

  “I’m not leaving you,” she said, her hand taking mine. “We’re going through this together.”

  I shook my head. She put her free hand to my cheek and stopped the gesture. Then she rose slightly on her toes and kissed me, ending any chance that, if I were contagious, she could avoid becoming infected.

  She settled back onto her feet and looked me in the eye.

  “And we’re going to come out of it fine,” she promised me. “Together.”

  * * *

  None of those responsible for quarantining me were even remotely pleased at what Elaine had done. But, aside from turning back the clock with magic and preventing her from joining me, there was no way to fix what had transpired.

  So we waited. Together.

  Commander Genesee had informed us that ninety-six hours would likely be the window in which some symptoms of what I’d been infected with would appear. Four days. That was how long we might have to wait.

  Two days into our quarantine we heard the gunfire.

  Elaine had been on the bedroom floor, expending nervous energy by doing fast pushups, and I’d been occupying myself with a bit of nostalgia, reading through Micah’s voluminous old notes on everything from the food cache lockers he’d learned of, to estimates on how far his signal would travel when he would broadcast as Eagle One. I might have continued exploring the writings of the late child genius had the rapid crack of distant weaponry not invaded the bored silence of our morning.

  “Where is that?” Elaine asked urgently. “South? To the south?”

  She’d leapt from her position on the floor and come fast into the space where I sat near Micah’s workstations. For a moment I didn’t move, taking in the bursts of gunfire, my head angling left and right like a weather vane, attempting to discern their point of origin.

  “Yeah,” I agreed with Elaine, rising. “South. Maybe just outside of town.”

  “There’s a checkpoint there, now,” she told me.

  When Elaine and I had left on our brief getaway where I had been taken, there had been no armed outpost on the coast road. One that had been there during the wary months after our arrival in Bandon had been reactivated just before my return, along with others on the town’s perimeter, with roving patrols to fill in the gaps between. All eyes searching for threats.

  By the sounds coming from the south, a threat had been found.

  “Where’s our gear?”

  Elaine knew what I was asking, and what I was suggesting, and that might have been why she didn’t answer me quickly enough to stop my agitated follow up.

  “If there is a fight out there,” I began, “it could spill into town. Breaking quarantine will be the least of our—”

  I stopped abruptly as her gaze shifted toward the hallway beyond the plastic barrier.

  “You hear that?”

  I listened for a moment, then nodded at her question.

  “It’s quiet,” she said.

  The shooting had stopped. But not all sound had. Quickened footsteps, just shy of all out running, came from the front room beyond the hall, and a moment later Bryson Hunt rushed in, his chest heaving and color flushed. The young man, just shy of his twenty-fifth birthday, had been assigned during daytime to keep watch over the entrance to the place of our quarantine. In the old world he was a fisherman, plying the sea with his father. In the new world, our world, his father was dead and he was playing babysitter to us, ready to respond to us if we called out to him.

  “What’s going on out there?” Elaine asked.

  Bryson took a few seconds to catch his breath, bending forward, hands on his knees, then he looked up to us with widened eyes.

  “I don’t know,” the young man told us. “Sarge raced by in a Humvee and I ran after to find out what was happening, but I couldn’t catch up.”

  “Go find out,” I said. “We’ll be okay here.”

  He turned to leave, but only made it a few steps.

  “Bryson,” Elaine called to him, drawing his attention. “On your way back, stop by our place and get our weapons and gear.”

  Her request kept him from moving.

  “You can’t—”

  “I know,” Elaine said. “Just in case.”

  “You can leave it in the front room out there,” I said.

  After a moment’s consideration and a quick nod, Bryson Hunt was gone again, racing out into daylight.

  I paced away from the barrier and rubbed at the still bandaged spot on the back of my right arm where I’d been cut open.

  “I should be out there,” I said, frustrated.

  The silence behind me reminded me I was nearing a line I’d once crossed. I looked back to see Elaine’s beautiful gaze turned harsh.

  “I know, I know,” I said. “We should be out there.”

  She let my unintentional slight pass without saying anything. I’d made a far more overt and awkward attempt to shield her from harm on our trek north to Skagway, and doing so had almost cost me my life. It was her, my wife, certainly of the fairer sex, who’d saved me when I was staring down the barrel of an assault rifle wielded by a merciless Russian. She’d buried her knife into his brain with cold, silent precision. That necessary and terrible act had taught me one thing with crystal clarity—Elaine Morales Fletcher could not only take care of herself, she could take care of me.

  I went to her and pulled her into a gentle hug. Our arms wrapped each other as we listened to the sounds beyond our quarantine. Vehicles speeding on nearby roads. Distant, muffled shouts. For twenty minutes that was all we could do.

  Then Martin came to see us. His expression was beyond grim.

  “The Hunt kid gave me your things,” Martin said, his face screwed tight, anger and regret working every muscle. “I left it in the front room.”

  “Martin, what happened?” Elaine asked.

  His gaze dipped a bit and his head shook slowly.

  “Mike Riley and Sarah Fredericks are dead.”

  Elaine’s hand gripped my left arm tight, shock rippling through her. And through me.

  “They were on patrol moving from the woods toward the south checkpoint on the coast road when...”

  I had a terrible feeling what he was about to tell us. It turned out I was right.

  “There was confusion at the checkpoint with the patrol schedules,” Martin explained. “They thought that sector should be clear. When they saw movement, they thought enemy.”

  “No,” Elaine said, and she turned to press her face against my shoulder.

  “Friendly fire,” I said.

  Martin nodded, looking up now, a skim of tears over his eyes.

  “We should never, ever lose anyone like this,” he said. “Never. There’s been too much death already. If we have to lose people it can’t be for stupid things like this.”

  “It’s an accident, Martin,” I said.

  “I know.”

  He did know that. And I knew that he accepted it. But, regardless of his position now, having stepped away from a leadership position in Bandon, he still felt responsible in some way. I was certain that in his head he was running over scenarios of things he might have done when he was in charge. Things which could have prepared those at the checkpoint, which could have prepared everyone, to better handle the uncertainties of such a situation.

  That, though, was but a wish wrapped in a dream. He’d done a remarkable job keeping all of Bandon safe, and together. But he couldn’t work magic, or turn back time.

  “I have to go,” Martin said. “The kid will be back in a few minutes if you need anything.”

  He turned, the darkness he’d dragged into the space seeming to envelope him.

  “Martin,” I said.

  He stopped, but did not look back at me.

  “This isn’t on you.”

  Still he did not turn to face me, but the words he spoke were plain and painful.

  “Everything’s on me,” he said.

  Those were the words he le
ft us with. For the moment I knew he believed them. In time, though, he would not. The realities and randomness and dangers of our world, and our current situation, would nudge him back toward some acceptance that his role in this tragedy was not even minimal—it was nonexistent.

  “I thought we could just live again,” Elaine said, easing back from my shoulder and looking up to me. “Just live.”

  I knew what she meant. What she wanted. It was all anyone in Bandon wanted. Just to be allowed to move forward, with the new hope we’d found, and fought for. That was it. A chance at some new, acceptable normal.

  It seemed, though, that we weren’t done fighting for the future we wanted to make.

  Eleven

  We were sprung from isolation two days after the terrible incident on the coast highway. Ninety-six hours of total quarantine for me, and a bit less for Elaine.

  For nothing.

  “It doesn’t make a lot of sense,” Genesee said from his position on the ‘safe’ side of the barrier. “I don’t know what to make of it.”

  Neither did Schiavo, or Martin, or Doc Allen, all of whom had gathered to mark the end of the time period during which something had been expected to manifest. A sneeze. A sniffle. A rash. An ache. Fever.

  But no symptoms arose. Not a one.

  “I doubt we’re looking at something with a longer incubation period,” Genesee said.

  “I agree,” Doc Allen concurred.

  “What about smallpox?” Schiavo asked. “Or something similar? A weaponized agent?”

  “You don’t need an implant to infect someone with anything like that,” Genesee said. “A simple injection would suffice.”

  “One we might never have noticed,” Doc Allen said. “Just a prick in the skin.”

  I looked to Elaine, puzzled. A mix of relief and confusion similar to mine formed her expression.

  “We’re okay,” she said, though there might have been the slightest hint of a question in how she delivered the simple statement.

  Martin stepped to the barrier and gripped the seal that held it in place, peeling it downward so the entire wall of plastic fell into a long, low heap on the floor.