by Noah Mann
“Has Elaine come back yet?”
My friend shook his head, his gaze never lifting from the spot on the porch it had fixed on.
“You sure?”
He nodded. I turned away and looked back to the street, then up and down the block. Elaine’s trip into town was a shorter trip than mine. I’d expected her to beat me back.
“It’s not right,” Neil said. “How can I lose her? And Krista? After what we just...”
“We’ll find them,” I told my friend, the words not just puffs of inflected breath. “I promise.”
He looked to me, no hint of belief at all in his gaze.
“Eric!”
Elaine sprinted around the corner, pack and weapons seeming not to slow her at all. Some excitement driving her. Neil stood, both wary and hopeful as she ran up the walkway and stopped at the bottom of the steps to the porch, breathing hard.
“There’s something you two should see,” Elaine said.
“What is it?” I asked.
“A message,” she told us. “At the meeting hall.”
“From who?” I asked.
“From them,” she said.
Neil didn’t wait for anything. Didn’t grab his pack or take his weapon in hand. He simply ran, past both Elaine and me, retracing the way she’d just come.
“What the hell did it say?” I asked her.
“I think it tells us where they went,” she said.
* * *
Elaine and I reached the meeting hall a few minutes after our friend. The last light of day was slipping past the door that had been left open, swinging back and forth in the soft breeze.
“Neil...”
I called out to my friend as we entered the dim, almost dark space.
“Here,” he said from the shadows.
Elaine turned her flashlight on and found him standing in the center of the space over a large, dark stain on the concrete floor. I thought, as I was certain he did, that it looked like blood.
“Someone died here,” he said.
By the amount that seemed obvious, I couldn’t disagree with him.
“We don’t know who,” I said.
“Does it matter?” he pressed me. “It means that there was violence here. Before they all disappeared.”
It was more than troubling, but I wouldn’t say that to my friend. He didn’t need to hear that after the crushing low he’d been thrust into from the anticipatory joy of returning home.
“Over here,” Elaine said.
She stood in the far corner, flashlight directed at a spot on the wall, some scratch gouged into its painted surface about waist high. Two letters.
“AK,” Elaine read.
“They were armed,” Neil said, reading into it.
“I don’t think that’s what it means,” Elaine disagreed. “This was written surreptitiously. Quickly. Otherwise, why not just spell out a message that was easily understood.”
I thought for a moment, turning back toward the rest of the meeting hall, letting my mind take what Elaine had just suggested and add it to some conjecture based on what I was observing.
“They gathered everybody in here,” I said. “Whoever took them had them all in here. There was some disagreement. Someone was killed. They were forced to leave, right then and there.”
“To where,” Neil asked, fear, and rage, plain in his voice.
“AK,” Elaine said. “Alaska.”
Neil considered her supposition, wondering.
“Think about it,” Elaine said. “White. White. White. Isn’t Alaska part of the great white north? If the Red Signal was the warning that the blight had pushed things over the edge, maybe this White Signal is some sort of evacuation order. A forced evacuation order.”
“Order from who?” I asked.
Elaine shook her head, the theory extending only as far as she’d presented it, and no further.
“Alaska,” Neil repeated, looking to Elaine, and then to me. “I buy it.”
“You do?” I questioned him.
“Why write that?” he asked, pointing to the pairing of letters. “Elaine is right—someone was trying to let us know where they were going without their captors knowing.”
Captors...
“We have to go,” Neil said, accepting the possibility as gospel far too quickly for my liking. “That’s where they have to be.”
“I’d like some more confirmation before we head off on what could be a wild goose chase,” I said.
Next to me, Elaine shook her head, siding with Neil.
“I don’t think we should wait,” she said. “If they had gone somewhere else, without any duress, there would have been a note, somewhere, from someone. But all they managed to leave us was two letters—AK.”
I thought for a moment. A too long moment, it turned out, as Neil moved past both Elaine and me and hurried outside.
We followed and found him jogging slowly down the road toward the harbor.
* * *
There was no point in trying to stop my friend. We simply followed, keeping pace, catching up with him on the dock where fishing boats were normally tied. Every vessel but one was now underwater across the channel, the lone survivor of the mass scuttling, the Sandy, drifting free on the far side of the small harbor, bouncing off the rocks below the lighthouse, current of the Coquille River capturing her in a slow, swirling eddy.
“What’s the best way to travel to Alaska from here?” my friend challenged me. “By sea. You know that.”
It was. And here it appeared from the carnage that room had been made in the harbor for boats of another kind. Boats belonging to another entity. Boats that could have been used to shuttle our friends and neighbors to a larger vessel offshore, just as we had used the skiff to reach the Groton Star when it served as secure storage for the town’s food supply.
Something had happened at the meeting hall. And something had happened here. The result was that we stood in a town emptied out. By force, it could be assumed. Everyone taken.
“Alaska,” I said, allowing that destination as likely.
“We still have a boat,” Neil said, gesturing to the Sandy, battered but afloat.
“She’ll take some work to get ready,” I said.
Neil nodded.
“So we’re going,” he said, seeking confirmation.
“We’re going,” Elaine said.
I gripped my friend behind his neck and looked him in the eye.
“Let’s go bring your girls home,” I said.
Fifty Four
Three days it took to repair the Sandy. To make her as seaworthy as possible, though we had no intention of straying far enough from the coast to lose sight of land. We provisioned her from what the people of Bandon had left behind, stocking up enough food and fresh water for two weeks and leaving the rest secured in the locations it had been moved to after its transfer from the scuttled Groton Star. A few months for the entire town still remained.
If only the people who’d subsisted on it did.
We were coming back. That was the intention. Our intention. We were going to travel north, to Alaska, and find them, all of them, somehow. And we were going to bring them home.
A fool’s errand? Tilting at windmills? Most likely, I had to admit. The three of us could last for years on what remained in town. For pure motives of survival, that would be the best course of action. But that would, literally, be doing nothing. Writing off those we’d lived with. Erasing them from our slice of the world. Grace and Krista among them.
Neil would never do that. He would make the journey alone, if necessary. I knew that. I also knew that I would not let him. And Elaine would not let me leave without her.
We’d left Bandon on a quest conceived by a dead child and shared by his grieving father. This time we would leave the once bucolic town on our own accord. To do what we had decided we must.
But first we had to prepare for that return we envisioned with an act of hope.
Neil carried water from the town�
��s supply and soaked the dirt in the bare earth between the headstones. When he had emptied half of the buckets he stopped and I crouched at the moist patches, using my finger to poke holes in the ground about ten inches apart. Elaine followed my lead and positioned herself a few yards away, making similar holes in the earth, more widely spaced among the graves. A second trip for water allowed Neil to soak each of the narrow holes Elaine had gouged in the ground.
“Here,” I said, handing several vials of seeds to Neil.
He took them, eyeing each, thumb rubbing over the labels that read pear, and peach, and apple, and more, before handing them to Elaine.
“We don’t even know if these trees will grow here,” he said.
“They shouldn’t have grown in Wyoming, either,” I said.
“That was in a greenhouse,” he reminded me.
“This is all we’ve got,” I countered.
Then we planted. Plunging seeds into the holes we’d made for them and covering them over, Neil adding a splash of water to each. When we’d finished I stood and surveyed the mounds of damp, fresh earth dotting the morose landscape. I don’t know why I’d suggested placing our garden, the first this side of the Rockies since the blight, in the town cemetery. Was it some yin and yang thing? Or a sharp stick in the eye to death? The death that had become so very, very normal. That was it, I realized. I wanted there to be life here in a place where none existed. I was giving the middle finger to the destruction, the waste we’d all endured.
This place, when we returned, would be green. And it wouldn’t be only in my dreams.
“That’s half the seeds,” Elaine said.
I looked to the vials, each empty by the half she mentioned. Or still full by the same measure, the optimist in me thought.
“I’m ready now,” I said, brushing the cool, wet earth from my palms. “Let’s go find them.”
* * *
The Sandy chugged out of the harbor, past the darkened lighthouse, no cry of gulls, no squeak of leaping dolphins to mark our departure. We were on the water, riding low, tanks designed to once hold fish on return trips to town now stocked with barrels of diesel, cans of water, cases of food. I stood at the wheel, steering us away from shore, Neil beside me.
But not Elaine.
“Take the wheel for a minute,” I said.
My friend stepped in and took over. I left the wheelhouse, dropping down the steep steps just outside to the deck and crossing its gently rolling surface toward the stern where the third of our group stood, staring at the town as it grew smaller, and smaller, and smaller.
“We’ll be back,” I told her.
She nodded at the churning water in our wake.
“What are you thinking?” I asked her.
“Is this always going to be it?” she wondered, turning to face me. “Just picking up whatever roots we put down to head off on another mission, or quest, or search?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
She cocked her head quizzically at me, a half smile flashing.
“How about ‘no baby, we’ll settle down’,” she said, chiding me mildly for my honesty. “I’m never asking you if I look fat.”
I reached out and pulled her close, watching Bandon disappear in the early evening fog. Leaving at sunrise would have been the preferable course of action, but Neil would have nothing of any delay. He wanted to be in Alaska now, finding Grace and Krista. Holding them and never, ever, letting them go again.
“We’re starting from zero,” I told Elaine. “When we get back, our future is what we make of it. Stay, go, whatever happens, it’s because we’ll choose it.”
“I can live with that.”
She glanced toward the wheelhouse, the silhouette of my friend there against the darkening sky, his steady hand guiding us.
“He’s a good man,” Elaine said.
“The best,” I agreed, looking to her.
In three months, that opinion, which I’d held since Neil and I were the closest of friends in high school, would be changed by circumstances, by revelations, that I could never, and would never, have imagined.
Thank You
I hope you enjoyed Wasteland.
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Book 1: Bugging Out
Book 2: Eagle One
Book 3: Wasteland
About The Author
Noah Mann lives in the West and has been involved in personal survival and disaster preparedness for more than two decades. He has extensive training in firearms, as well as urban and wilderness Search & Rescue operations, including tracking and the application of technology in victim searches.