Wasteland

by Noah Mann

  “No,” I told him. “I’ve been kind of busy. But what I saw down there, the setup the good doc had put together, he was meticulous. He was experimenting. Searching. For an answer. The answer. And we know he found it. Those orange juice stains on your shirt prove that.”

  Ben eyed the vial of seeds.

  “He had those down there,” I said. “In his lab.”

  “Are they immune from the blight?” Ben asked.

  I hesitated. I wanted to say that they were. That I knew without a doubt that the seeds we now possessed would sprout into plants like those we’d found in the greenhouse. But I didn’t know that. Not for certain.

  “They have to be,” I said.

  Ben handed the vial back.

  “So you hope they are,” he said, quenching the moment of optimism.

  “Damn right we hope they are,” Neil said, annoyed. “We can’t haul the bounty in that greenhouse back to our family and friends, so this is what we have.”

  The military man shook his head and waved the notebook gently.

  “No,” Ben corrected. “This is what you have. This is the Holy Grail. If it contains the answer.”

  I took the notebook from him and returned it and the seeds to my pack. We’d gotten off track from what the man had begun to tell us. Getting back, getting answers to gnawing questions, was at the forefront of my intentions for the moment.

  “Why the hell are the French here?” I asked.

  Ben settled back against the sloped edge of the gully and shook his head.

  “Not the French. The Legionnaires. A rogue detachment of them. Former soldiers. Current. A mix that is fiercely loyal to their former commander. A man named Borgier. The men that served under him...they worshipped him.”

  “A cult of personality,” Elaine said.

  “More than that,” Ben said. “He led them through some hellish places. Iraq. Africa. A couple of actions in Asia that were never reported on.”

  “This Borgier,” I said, “he did all this? Released the blight?”

  “Death cults are nothing new,” Ben said. “Jonestown, Aum Shinrikyo, and the lists go on.”

  “Okay, maybe,” Neil challenged. “But offing yourself in the jungles of Guyana with hundreds of your followers, or releasing nerve gas into a Tokyo subway, are not actually ending humanity. They’re just—”

  “Actions of a crazy person?” Ben fired back. “But what would those ‘crazy’ individuals have done if they’d had access to the blight organism?”

  Neil had no logical way to blunt what Ben was suggesting.

  “So this is all because of one man?” Elaine asked.

  “One man at the right place at the worst possible moment,” Ben suggested. “And after that he waited. He planned. He tested. He convinced himself that what the Iraqi had developed would work.”

  “Twenty plus years he waited?” Neil asked, doubting. “That’s one hell of a patient apocalypse nut.”

  “Our people figure he snuck the Iraqi out of the country,” Ben said. “Made a pact with the devil, so to speak. Maybe this scientist was onto something already. There’s really no way to know for sure. What we were able to determine was that Borgier set him up, kept him plied with money and test tubes, until he had something that could fulfill his vision.”

  “And what vision was that?” Elaine asked.

  “To wipe the earth clean and start over.”

  “With himself on the throne,” Elaine said.

  Micah had suggested something similar to me, though he hadn’t been as certain as Ben Michaels appeared to be.

  “Crazy or not,” Ben began, “he’s made most of what he intended actually happen. Genghis Kahn, Stalin, Hitler...they have nothing on him.”

  “You still didn’t explain why the Frenchies are here,” Neil said.

  “Because he’s here,” Ben said. “From Atlantic to Pacific was going to be his promised land.”

  “Why here?” I asked.

  “Borgier is a nom de guerre,” Ben answered. “He’s American.”

  Thirty Six

  “His name is Gray Jensen.”

  “Gray,” Elaine parroted. “How appropriate.”

  “Look, most of this came from a few of his people we captured when all hell was breaking loose,” Ben explained. “The pieces came together slowly months after the collapse. His loyalists bought into this messianic, utopian vision of his. They moved their families here. Arranged a reunion in Colorado to get the rest in place for when the panic struck.”

  “Why do what they did?” I asked, baffled by the string of brutal acts I’d seen. “They massacred people just trying to flee Denver. I saw that on television.”

  Ben scooted forward to an open patch of earth between us all.

  “There are four major west to east corridors of travel across the nation,” Ben said, scratching that number of roughly parallel lines in the moonlit dirt, then drawing fat circles in the middle of each. “Interstate Forty through Albuquerque, Seventy through Denver, Eighty through Cheyenne, and Ninety through Bozeman. If you stop movement at those chokepoints, you prevent ninety percent of movement from the west to the east.”

  “To what purpose?” Elaine wondered.

  “Induce fear,” Ben said. “Panic on top of panic. Accelerate the collapse. Prevent relief from reaching states, counties, cities. If you think what you saw happen east of Denver was bad, you should have seen what went down in Arizona. Borgier’s people had flyers dropped from aircraft promising help at a supposed FEMA facility.”

  FEMA. Exactly what had been stamped on the flyer my foreman Marco had shown me when he, and his family, had shown up at my refuge. A flyer directing them to a camp in Arizona, with warnings to surrender weapons once there.

  “What happened there?” I asked sharply.

  Ben hesitated, sensing he’d struck close to home with what he’d just shared.

  “Again, this is all from fragmentary intelligence,” he said. “Some intercepts when we could still manage that sort of thing. Survivor reports. Prisoner interrogations.”

  “What happened?” I repeated, emphasizing each word.

  Ben averted his gaze from mine.

  “It was a massacre. Tens of thousands gunned down. A lot from the air. Just helicopter gunships standing off and firing at will.”

  “Christ...” Elaine said.

  Neil knew of my interaction with Marco. I’d shared it shortly after he and Grace and Krista had arrived at my refuge. He reached out and put a hand on my shoulder.

  “You can’t be sure that they made it there, Fletch.”

  I looked to my friend. There was every chance he was right. But some had made it there. Men, women, children, just like Marco and his family. And if the description Ben was giving was accurate, those poor souls had suffered the worst of fates, hope shattered precisely where they’d been promised it would exist.

  “How the hell did your people let this all happen?” I asked, a quiet, bitter anger edging my words. “You were supposed to protect. Everyone.”

  It was clear that Ben had no answer to my challenge. Or no good one.

  “It all came apart too fast,” he said. “We screwed up as things were getting bad, and people stopped trusting us.”

  “Shooting airliners out of the sky will do that,” Neil said.

  I recalled those horrific images of Air Force fighters downing civilian jets defying the quarantine as they tried to bring Americans home from abroad during the early stages of the blight. Those were hundreds of deaths. Maybe thousands. But they matched the first death I’d witnessed at the checkpoint near Arlee. The gunning down of a citizen challenging an overbearing authority. That incident had spun out of control, three dead on the side of a Montana highway before it was over.

  “We shot planes down,” Ben acknowledged, disgust plain in his voice. “That made it easy enough for people to think those were our pilots in blacked out helos shooting up civilians. But those were his men in commandeered Apaches.”

  �
��One man,” Elaine said with angry awe.

  “If it’s any solace,” Ben began, “it fell apart for Borgier and his people, too.”

  “Yeah,” Neil said. “That makes it all right.”

  Ben reached down to the earth he’d scrawled upon and wiped away the diagram.

  “All his grand plans collapsed,” Ben explained. “The blight hit too fast and too hard. His units became isolated. They started operating independently. We took a few out. Survivors mopped up the rest.”

  “We saw some of that in a little town in Utah,” Elaine said.

  Emma’s father had certainly exacted some vengeance there. But cleansing his town of these invaders hadn’t righted his world. It had only thrust him into the next phase of survival, turning him into a predator out of necessity. Warping his mind. Staining his soul.

  “He’s a madman,” Ben said. “What he dreamed up was never going to work. It was a fevered fantasy.”

  “So if they’re all dead, who are you supposed to blow to kingdom come?” I asked.

  “I didn’t say they were all dead,” Ben countered. “We were able to locate him. Borgier. And his core unit of supporters. Bodyguards, if you will.”

  “Where?” I asked.

  The military man eyed me for a moment. In his calling, his line of work, the duty to conceal secrets, to take them to the grave if necessary, informed every word he spoke. And every morsel of information he withheld. But, as he’d stated, he needed us, and holding out would not enamor us with that act.

  “Duluth, Minnesota,” Ben answered.

  “And you’re just going to...”

  Elaine didn’t finish the statement. She wanted him to say it. To state his intention openly. We all did.

  “It has to be done,” Ben said.

  An entire city was to be levelled to get one man. I understood the absurdity of the concept, having executed such an action to eliminate Major Layton in Whitefish. But something about this, about what Ben was supposed to do, seemed beyond overkill. Beyond even necessary.

  “He failed,” I said. “You said so yourself. His plan is in tatters. So why bother with him?”

  “Because we don’t know what else he has,” Ben said. “Is the blight just the first nightmare his Iraqi scientist cooked up? Is there more? Something aimed at the survivors? At the few, like us, who’ve hung on? What if there’s something in his bag of tricks that targets humans directly? A virus. A disease. Now that his dream of an apocalyptic nirvana is shattered, would there be anything holding him back from unleashing a final blow that would really wipe out every last soul on earth?”

  There wasn’t anything to say. Nothing to counter what Ben had laid out. The logic was sound, even if the method was horrific.

  “People will survive,” Ben said. “We’re proof of that. Where you came from, where I came from, all the people in those places, they’re proof that we can persevere. What you found in the greenhouse, in that lab, it shows we can beat this thing. But that all matters not a damn if Borgier has a follow up act planned.”

  “You’re operating completely on a ‘what if’,” Elaine said.

  “We have to,” Ben said. “We have to secure a chance for the future.”

  That ‘we’ he was speaking of now clearly included us. I looked to my friends. Some silent contemplation volleyed between us. In the end, I was surprised who spoke first, and by what they said.

  “He saved our lives,” Neil said. “I don’t want to think of what we’d be going through if he hadn’t shown up.”

  My fate would have been horrible. But Neil’s, and Elaine’s, would have been worse. And it would have gone on. And on. For days. Weeks. Months.

  “Where is this place?” I asked.

  Ben let out a breath. Some weight upon him, some dread, had just evaporated.

  “Twenty miles east of here,” Ben answered. “Alpha Flight LCC, Three Hundred and Nineteenth Missile Squadron.”

  “And there’s a way in?” Elaine asked. “You’re sure?”

  Ben smiled, tired and relieved.

  “I’m sure,” he said. “All it takes is a little digging.”

  Thirty Seven

  When morning came we waited. And we listened. And we watched. For the sound of motorcycles approaching. For lines of dust rising in the distance. For signs of those who might pursue us.

  We saw, and we heard, nothing.

  Neil plotted the position of the destination Ben had given us on our map, calculating a distance to travel of just under twenty five miles. With the speed we’d managed on foot after the vehicle’s breakdown, I knew that we had a two day journey ahead of us. Two days of misery measured in steps forward. That was the choice we’d made to help Ben obliterate a city, and the man he believed to be in it.

  The first day passed with relative ease. The second stretched long into the night, Ben’s state dragging us down from the timeframe I’d anticipated, left leg going lame, arm on that side hanging, face slack at times. I was concerned that the blows to the head he’d suffered had resulted in more than just a concussion or temporary balance issues. Something more serious might be happening. Damage to nerves in his neck. The spinal column. Or bleeding in his brain.

  When he slept on the second night of our trip to the LCC, I listened to his breathing. It grew ragged at times, then recovered. And once, not long before we woke, I was almost certain that I heard him stop breathing altogether. I was inches away from trying to rouse him when he drew a great gulp of air and settled into an otherwise normal respiration.

  But I was worried. Neil had seemed to recover from what had stricken him beyond hunger. He’d beaten the virus, or whatever it was, down. Ben was now the concern. A far greater one, I feared.

  * * *

  Two hours after waking we reached our destination and found it in ruins.

  The chain link surrounding the blackened pile of rubble lay askew, the wide gate meant to slide clear to allow vehicle entrance ripped from its supports and bent unnaturally. Halfway between that point of entry and the front door of what had been a ranch house style structure a stout, green HUMVEE rested on flat tires, rear passenger door open.

  “Someone beat you here,” Neil said.

  “Doesn’t matter,” Ben responded. “They don’t know what I know.”

  We walked through the downed perimeter fencing, past a smaller structure that had been leveled by some impact. Deep tread prints in the soil, visible still after many obvious months since being made, hinted at a tank having done the deed, or a bulldozer. Some implement of demolition had ploughed through gate and fence, flattened the outbuilding, then rolled on to the other, larger structure that now lay in ruins, charred remnants scattered about, just a single, rectangular shape rising from the ashes.

  “Elevator shaft?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” Ben said as we neared the HUMVEE.

  “We’re going down that?” I asked.

  Ben shook his head, stumbling slightly, his leg seeming to go fully limp. Elaine and Neil grabbed him and hauled him upright.

  “Even if we could there’d still be a blast door to open, and that can’t be done.”

  We reached the HUMVEE and Ben planted both hands on its slab-like side, keeping them against the hot, thick metal for just an instant before jerking them back and leaning against the vehicle with his clothed shoulder.

  “The armor holds heat like a sumbitch,” he commented.

  I reached out and thumped the side of the vehicle, expecting it to be little more than thicker metal, but my fist felt a solid density upon impact.

  “Up armored,” Ben said. “We never knew what security teams might face here. They came prepared.”

  “Didn’t stop this,” Neil commented, looking toward the remnants of the main building.

  I looked the opposite direction, scanning the way we’d come, and the landscape that surrounded us. A small farm lay a couple hundred yards away across a small road. It was an oddity of this leg of the American strategic triad comprised of bombers,
missile carrying submarines, and land-based ICBMs, that the most powerful pieces of that arsenal were scattered about farms and ranches, many within sight of back roads and barns. As I surveyed the world around us I relaxed, no sign of anyone having followed us apparent. For good measure I took out my binoculars and glassed the farm, noting no movement or signs of life at the clearly abandoned complex of buildings.

  “So where’s this magic way in?” Elaine pressed Ben.

  He pushed off the HUMVEE and stood, testing his leg for a moment, then limped past the battered vehicle to a spot on the grass a few yards away. There he stood, looking to a tall pole with lights mounted atop, each shattered by obvious gunfire. Next he glanced behind, fixing on the exposed foundation of the burned main building, his gaze seeming to find and catalog several points along what would have been its front façade.

  “You’re triangulating,” I said.

  “I am indeed,” he said, then hobbled a few steps to his left and looked down. “Dig here.”

  “I thought the whole digging thing was a joke,” Neil said.

  “It’s not.”

  Elaine approached Ben, doubtful of whatever he had planned.

  “Isn’t the bunker thing—”

  “We call it the pill,” he interrupted. “Or the capsule. Because that’s the shape of it. A big pill, round at both ends.”

  “Pill,” Elaine said. “Fine. Isn’t that hundreds of feet down?”

  Ben shook his head.

  “Fifty feet,” he corrected. “Give or take. But you don’t have to dig that far.”

  “We don’t?” I asked.

  He managed to lift his weakened leg and stomp his foot where he stood.

  “Three feet down, right here.”

  My friends looked to each other, and to me, sharing the same uncertain, puzzled look that I was.

  “Imagine,” Ben began, “that you’re one of the missile crew down there, and war breaks out. Nukes fly. Boom. Everything above you is leveled, including that elevator shaft. How do you get out?”

  I was catching on.

  “There’s an escape tunnel,” I said.

  Ben nodded and held his good arm downward at a thirty degree angle.