Avenger (The Bugging Out Series Book 6)

by Noah Mann

  I didn’t actually see what caused my thoughts to stutter. I sensed it. And heard it. Something that penetrated the total silence which had become so normal in the new world. Aside from a slight breeze, barely registering as a whisper, there was nothing.

  Except for the sound. It was indefinable. Ambiguous. But that it had reached my ears at all was the fact that gave it importance. There should be nothing in the woods to make such a hushed disturbance, but there was.

  I turned away from the fallen tree, shaking my head to feign interested disgust with our dilemma. At the same time, as I walked back toward the Humvee, I took hold of my AR’s grip, eyes scanning the dead woods to either side of the highway. Climbing back in next to Schiavo, I pulled the door shut and switched the selector of my rifle from safe to burst.

  “We’ve got company,” I said.

  Behind, I heard Hart shift positions in the back seat, bringing his own weapon up.

  “Where?” Schiavo asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “One person?”

  I shook my head at her probing. And for the first time I noticed something odd about the fallen tree. Many a blighted pine, or fir, or aspen, or any number of trees had toppled over the years, giving in to the rot and wind and shifting soils. We’d encountered several of those after leaving Bandon. This particular tree, though, had been the tallest of a stand just to the left side of the road. Any of the others near it which might have fallen would not have completely blocked the way forward.

  “Someone took that tree down,” I said.

  “We’re getting out of here,” Schiavo said. “Fletch, get on the radio and report our situation and location.”

  I reached for the radio, but never had the chance to follow her directive.

  Seventeen

  My hand was on the mic to put out a warning broadcast when the explosion shook the vehicle, jolting it from the right rear. It was not a direct impact, and there’d been no sound of an incoming rocket or missile. I’d experienced that close up, while defending the northern perimeter from the Unified Government forces. There, an incoming LAW or RPG had taken out the bunker we’d been holding, almost killing Enderson in the process. This sound, and the resultant effect, was not that.

  But it was part of an attack.

  “Ambush!”

  Hart shouted from the rear seat, looking back just as I did, both of us seeing a pair of tall, dead fir trees collapsing across a spot on the road we’d just passed, blocking any route of retreat. Large clouds of dust and dirt billowed at the base of the trees, kicked up by the detonations which had felled them.

  “We’ve gotta get out of here,” Schiavo said.

  She swung the Humvee hard left, searching for a way around the single tree that blocked our way forward. The left side of the bulky vehicle rolled off the asphalt and onto the soft shoulder before Schiavo stopped and shook her head at the wall of dead woods ahead, the spaces between trees too narrow to navigate.

  “Out!”

  She gave the command as she threw herself out the left side of the vehicle. I was ready to do the same on my side, but a volley of rounds peppering the lightly armored exterior sent me left, over the driver’s seat. I found myself on the damp earth, Schiavo to my left and Hart, who’d just bailed from the back seat, to my right.

  “Where are they?” Hart asked, his weapon ready.

  Schiavo didn’t wait to offer any answer, or any guess. She rose quickly up from the cover of the Humvee and squeezed off three bursts from her M4, spreading her fire along the line of grey pines that stepped down toward the Coquille River beyond the road.

  “This is not a great position,” I said, not shouting yet.

  In fact, it was an awful position, for either defense or offense. Behind us the woods stepped up the gentle slope of a hill. Any retreat that way would be a treacherous dash up soggy earth where fire from across the highway could chew us to pieces.

  Bam!

  One of the Humvee’s tires blew from incoming rounds, then another, the heavy vehicle settling toward its passenger side.

  “There goes our ride,” Hart said.

  He and I both popped up almost simultaneously, firing across the highway as Schiavo reloaded her weapon.

  “Reminds me of Mary Island,” I said as Hart and I dropped back down to cover. “Before you all showed up.”

  Rogue Russian forces had laid siege to the lighthouse on that dollop of land off the southern coast of Alaska. We’d been surrounded, outnumbered, facing almost certain annihilation, until Schiavo’s unit had arrived by helicopter, decimating the invaders and saving Elaine, Neil, and me.

  Here, though, there would be no cavalry miraculously appearing out of thin air.

  “We have to move,” Schiavo said. “Textbook says attack into the ambush.”

  “I’m not too fond of that book right now, ma’am.”

  Hart wasn’t disagreeing with his captain. He was simply addressing the reality which often countered standard tactics. This situation was one of those instances. A headlong rush across the road into fire, even if our present position was untenable, made no more sense. We’d simply be dead sooner.

  As it turned out, our situation changed. And not for the better.

  “You hear that?” Hart asked.

  We all did. The absence of sound was just as jarring as the staccato impacts of rounds chewing into the Humvee. The fire from across the road stopped, all at once, multiple points of origin going quiet simultaneously. That was an ominous sign.

  “They’re coordinated,” Schiavo said, voicing the disquieting realization I’d just come to.

  Hart shifted further toward the back of the Humvee, covering as much of the western flank as he could. But it was not from that direction that the final assault came.

  “Behind!”

  Schiavo shouted the warning and brought her M4 up, spinning away from the Humvee to take aim at figures charging in our direction through the ranks of dead trees. She fired a pair of bursts and backed toward Hart, not a lick of cover anywhere for us.

  “Shift west!”

  The captain’s order was clear, but impossible to follow in the second after she’d given it. A volley of fire from the sloping woods tore into the side of the Humvee, spraying me with bits of ricocheted lead, hot metal searing one side of my face. I dropped to the ground and began firing from a prone position, taking aim at everything moving between the trees.

  “Movement across the road!” Hart reported, opening up with his weapon at the rear of the vehicle. “They’ve got us surrounded!”

  We had to move, and we couldn’t move. The only cover we had was bad cover, and it was right where we’d planted ourselves. I was firing north, along with Schiavo, up the hill where a banzai charge could materialize at any moment. Hart was trying to cover west and south, with the rear of the Humvee both cover and an obstacle to his ability to do so. One quick move from the east and we would be overrun.

  PTHUP!

  The sound was almost hollow, but it came from somewhere close, above us and to the east, from the very crest of the hill that overlooked the site of the battle.

  “Grenade!”

  Schiavo shouted the warning and hit the dirt, keeping her weapon in play and directed at our attackers. Hart made himself as small a target as possible. I was already flat on the ground, but scanning the area I could see no evidence of a grenade being thrown at us.

  Then I realized, in a flash of memory, that nothing had been thrown—it had been fired. An explosive round, from a launcher slung beneath an enemy rifle, or fired from a dedicated weapon, such as the venerable M-79, was sailing our way. Schiavo had recognized the sound of the projectile being fired.

  The sound of it impacting both startled and heartened us all.

  BOOM!

  The explosion ripped through the trees on the slope above, screams accompanying the blast. A pair of injured individuals, both men, stumbled toward us, bleeding but still wielding their weapons, an AK-47 and a bolt
action rifle. Hart and I fired, bursts from each of our weapons striking the man with the AK. He dropped to the ground and rolled down the slope until a tree stopped his motion. The man with the bolt action, looking like a plain-Jane hunting rifle topped with a cheap scope, tried to bring his rifle to bear with a grotesquely injured right arm, but a follow up burst from the garrison’s young medic sent him reeling, head flopping backward, what had been his face and head no longer resembling anything human.

  “Who’s shooting at them?” Hart asked.

  Schiavo crawled fast behind me toward the front of the Humvee and took aim with her M4 under the leaning nose of the vehicle.

  “Across the road is taking fire,” she said.

  Someone on the crest of the hill, and from other vantage points was laying into whoever had ambushed us. I’d been wrong—somehow, inexplicably, the cavalry had arrived.

  “North again!”

  It was Hart shouting. Both Schiavo and I redirected to the sloping woods where we’d just dropped two enemy. Three more were racing down the hill toward us, a mix of weapons firing wildly—pistols, shotguns, another AK. We returned fire, but before our volleys could have any effect another grenade detonated, almost dead center along their ragged line, shredding the middle enemy, a woman, from the waist down. Her fellow fighters, both men, each took full sprays of shrapnel, crumbling to the ground and sliding to a stop just beyond the nearest trees.

  More streams of automatic fire poured down from the crest of the hill, sweeping the slope until there were no more sounds of battle. Behind us, on the far side of the Humvee, whoever had been firing at us from the forest across the highway was now silenced. We lay still, covering every direction we could as a few single shots rang out from above. Aimed fire that had a name which Schiavo uttered.

  “Kill shots.”

  Someone above was dispatching any fighters who were wounded and still moving.

  “Don’t move!”

  The voice was male, shouted from the crest, but nowhere we could directly see.

  “We’re coming down to you!”

  We...

  “Captain, what do we do?”

  Hart was asking one of the most basic questions a commander could answer—fight or give up. The difference here, though, was it didn’t seem to me that the actions we’d just witnessed, being saved by unknown forces who could just as easily have killed us, made either option prudent.

  “We wait, Specialist,” Schiavo said, giving the order I would have were I in her shoes.

  A half a minute passed before we heard movement. From behind us, on the far side of the Humvee first. Then from the slope that ran down from the crest of the hill. Schiavo stood slowly, her weapon ready, but held low.

  “Stand up, gentlemen,” she said.

  Hart and I did just that, mimicking her ready, but relaxed posture. As soon as I was upright I glanced behind and saw a line of people, two women and four men, standing near the guardrail just beyond the far edge of the highway. They, too, took an almost casual stance, rifles and one Squad Automatic Weapon slung, no fear about them.

  “Fletch...”

  Schiavo’s voice drew my attention back to the slope we faced. Another half dozen fighters emerged there from the trees, well-armed, not a matching uniform among the ragtag group. But they looked healthy, not thin, which didn’t surprise me. Any who’d lasted this long through the blight had surpassed the time of hunger and starvation. They’d found a way to survive, though not thrive. Their faces, their eyes, told me that. I saw no joy, no relief, even though there should have been some hint of such after a successful engagement. But all there was were stares, fixed on us. Maybe some distrust in them. Or disinterest. I couldn’t tell which, but I suspected we’d be made aware of just what they thought of us in short order.

  “I’m Lo,” one of the men who’d just come down the slope said as his group approached and stopped facing us. “We’re not going to hurt you.”

  “Who was that who attacked us?” Schiavo asked the man.

  He seemed to consider her question for a moment, then wiped a smear of dirt from his brow and pointed toward the east.

  “We’ve got to get you to town,” Lo told us. “It’s a couple mile walk so we should get started.”

  Behind, I heard movement. Taking a quick glance I saw the element of fighters across the road form up in a loose line aimed east, waiting for orders to move, it appeared.

  “You all ready?”

  Lo’s question was more of a suggestion. There were no weapons pointed in our direction to prod us along, but the request didn’t seem all that optional, either. Schiavo, too, knew that, and she looked to Hart, and then to me before nodding toward the road.

  “Let’s get going,” she said.

  Hart led off, Schiavo right behind. I brought up our rear, with the entire group who’d come down the hill falling in behind me. We moved onto the road and followed the other part of the unit who’d saved us, heading east and a bit north.

  “Are we going to Camas Valley?” I asked Lo, who was directly behind me.

  He didn’t offer a reply, choosing instead to keep the pace up, staring past me, his AK held low and ready. One fight might have been won, but I sensed that the man trailing me, and those with him, were ready for another if it came to them.

  Why didn’t they disarm us?

  That question rattled about my thoughts as we moved up the highway. It was a fair assumption to make that they had no intention of killing us, or holding us prisoner. Add to that the fact that they’d risked themselves to save us, and the situation was as confusing as it was strange.

  “Listen, Lo, just who—”

  “Fletch,” Schiavo said, cutting me off as she glanced back. “Let’s just get to where they’re taking us.”

  I couldn’t tell if she was attempting to avoid any escalation of the situation by shutting down my very logical question, or if she had picked up on something that had settled any worry for her. It didn’t matter, though. She was right to interrupt and quash what could have turned into a badgering demand for an explanation. We were outnumbered, and those who held that sway over us seemed to really want us to go with them.

  So we walked, leaving Bandon even further behind than it already was.

  Eighteen

  Not quite a mile down the road, with Camas Valley just out of view, we came upon an overturned truck, lying just off the highway in a gully that ran alongside, the inferno which had engulfed it dying down.

  “Who set the fire?” I asked, momentarily breaking the directive Schiavo had gently given.

  “Not us,” Lo answered.

  It wasn’t a crash, I could tell. The old stake bed, which had probably once hauled apples or pears from some nearby orchard, was missing its driveshaft and one rear wheel, neither of which lay anywhere nearby. The faint stench of old diesel, almost sour in its bite, hung in the air as we moved past on the far side of the road. Someone had doused the vehicle with the useless fuel and set it ablaze. And I had an idea why.

  “Was that meant for us?” I asked.

  Schiavo shot me a warning look, but Lo answered without taking any umbrage at what I was asking.

  “It worked, didn’t it?”

  It wasn’t meant as a slap at the captain, but the way she turned away made it plain to me that she’d taken it that way. Her insistence had led us to seek out the origin of the smoke, and that had brought us directly into the ambush. But that was the risk every leader took when leading. What was worse, though, was making no decision. Schiavo had never suffered from that deficiency, and I was glad for that.

  We left the burning wreck behind. A half hour later we entered Camas Valley, a deserted hamlet we’d patrolled on a few occasions before. Except, it was most certainly not deserted now. From a pair of houses just off the highway, one on each side, sentries stepped out into view. As we continued on those fighters joined us.

  “They’ve reoccupied the town,” Hart said.

  “No,” Lo said, h
earing his statement. “We’ve been here from the start.”

  I looked back to the man making the claim, his tired eyes meeting mine as he allowed only the smallest smile to curl his lips.

  “You just didn’t see us,” he said.

  If that was true, if would have meant a highly coordinated effort to stay concealed from the scavengers who’d certainly come through town, not to mention those of us from Bandon.

  We angled off the main road and followed a narrow street to what was still identified as the town’s school, heading for a door that a tall woman was holding open, semi-auto Remington shotgun slung across her chest. The lead element of our column split off, as did those behind Lo.

  “There’s a room just inside to stow your weapons and gear,” he said. “Gina will show you where.”

  Schiavo stopped us just outside the door and looked to the man who’d led us here. Gina laid a hand loosely atop her shotty’s pistol grip, more than a hint of impatience about her.

  “I’m not exactly comfortable giving up our weapons,” she said.

  “The people in there aren’t real comfortable with you having them,” Lo countered.

  For a very brief moment, hardly more than a few seconds, Schiavo weighed the choice facing her, which wasn’t really any choice at all. Still, she had to voice her displeasure at the requirement. Doing anything less would project weakness, and I was pretty certain that lack of virtue would not serve us well in what, or who, we were about to encounter.

  “I assume they’ll be unarmed as well,” Schiavo said.

  “That’s correct,” Lo confirmed.

  To that she nodded. Lo turned away, leaving us with the armed woman at the door.

  “Logan is good people,” Gina said.

  Logan. Long for Lo. Not Lothario, or some similarly odd moniker. I had to concur with what the woman had shared—he did seem decent, at least on the face of what he had allowed us to see.

  “And everyone else?” Hart asked.

  Gina didn’t answer right away, shrugging after a moment’s consideration.