Avenger (The Bugging Out Series Book 6)

by Noah Mann

  I stopped and faced her. Her arms were drawn tight across her chest, a look of mild anger and raging fear about her. There was nothing I could say to convince her that this was even close to a good idea, even if what the evidence suggested was unfounded. In the end, I decided to say nothing, and grabbed my coat from the closet and walked past her, onto the porch and down the walkway. As I reached the sidewalk, the front door slammed behind me.

  * * *

  We’d had disagreements, but nothing I would have termed a fight. Until now.

  I walked down our block and followed a path that would take me to the coast as it meandered through an orchard which had been planted near the south side of town. The pear trees were naked, their limbs fully bare since late autumn. Nearly full, the moon above cast twisted shadows from the gangly branches that would bear fruit in spring and summer. There was enough confidence now to believe that the trees and fields would again bloom and sprout and provide Bandon with the bounty it needed.

  There were times, though, when such confidence came second to what my friend had espoused so plainly—hope. As a town we still embraced the ideal of that. As a man, it had become the thing that drove me. Hope for a better future for my child. And for my wife.

  She was rightfully upset at the possibility I’d brought into our home. Absence, my absence, would introduce fear into our home. Into our relationship. She would fear for me, and I would fear...

  “For her.”

  This was a two way street, I realized as I reached the shore. That, though, did not negate the necessity of what had to be done. Of what I had to do.

  I walked on the beach, thinking. Trying to find some solution. Waves crashed to my right, the moonlight painting the foaming surf a ghostly white. It also highlighted in silhouette a man standing on the low bluffs to my left.

  I stopped and fixed on the figure, less than a hundred feet from me. We were just beyond the southernmost part of town, the last of the inhabited houses a few hundred yards to the north. Two of us had, apparently, decided to take a stroll in the moonlight. But who was my unknown companion? I had no idea. Just some fellow resident of Bandon whose identity was lost in shadow.

  “Hello!”

  My greeting easily carried the distance between us, and the hand I raised and waved would be perfectly visible in the bright light of the moon. There was no way the man could miss either.

  But he did not call out to me with a greeting of his own. He did not wave. He made no move, in fact, until one of his hands came up and placed a cowboy hat upon his head.

  Olin...

  There was nothing more than that image in silhouette to indicate that the shadowy figure a third of a football field away was him. I could not see his face, nor any telling features. Only that hat.

  In my gut, though, I felt him. Standing there. Staring down at me from the bluffs.

  “Olin!”

  I shouted at the man and put my hand on my holstered Springfield. He still made no move. Gave no reaction at all. His blacked-out form simply stood there, facing me, until he turned without a word and began to walk away.

  “OLIN!”

  This time I nearly screamed his name as I took off running, reaching the base of the bluffs as he disappeared beyond the rim above. I scrambled up the damp slope, clawing with my hands and digging with my feet, finding purchase wherever I could, climbing higher, and higher, and higher. Finally I reached the top and bolted onto flat earth.

  But he was nowhere to be seen.

  I drew my pistol and took a ready stance, sweeping left and right. The only place he could have found cover was in an old, leaning shack between the bluffs and the woods beyond. There was no way he could have made it into the thick stand of dead pine. Not without me seeing him.

  It had to be the shack.

  The muzzle of my Springfield stayed locked on the small building as I approached it, each step slow and deliberate. At one time the structure had housed a tiny shop which sold drinks and candies to tourists who came to walk along the picturesque shore. Or so I’d been told. As long as I’d been in Bandon, the teetering shack had seemed ready to fall, and clearly almost had in the recent blizzard. But for now it stood, harboring the man who’d murdered my friend.

  An opening where a window had once been came into view, not a sliver of glass remaining in its frame. I eased close to it and paused, listening. For movement. Breathing. For anything.

  But I heard nothing.

  I crouched and moved below the level of the window, staying out of sight to anyone within, coming to the front corner of the dilapidated structure. My weapon low and ready, I moved quickly around the corner, light of the moon bathing the front of the building with a harsh, ashen light which revealed the entrance. It was nothing more than a space where a door once hung. Blackness lay beyond its threshold. That and the man I’d pursued here.

  With my off hand I retrieved the small flashlight I always carried from my pocket and pressed its lens against my coat before switching it on, keeping the beam hidden as I approached the door. I was ready. The plan was to step fast through the doorway, both light and weapon coming up at the same instant to sweep the interior and find my target, keeping in mind that there very well could be return fire. Almost certainly would be, I corrected myself.

  That didn’t matter. I was not going to pass an opportunity, maybe the only one I would have, to end the man who’d killed Neil. I had him cornered. Leaving to bring reinforcements would only allow him the chance to slip away. Why he’d come back was something I might never know, and I didn’t particularly care. This was a confrontation, a reckoning, that had to happen.

  I gave myself no count. The time simply came, I drew a breath, and made my move, spinning away from the exterior wall and through the doorway, finger on the trigger, beam of my flashlight arcing across the cramped interior.

  The cramped, empty interior.

  There was nothing. And no one. Not a stick of old furniture. No broken pieces of a chair or table. And no Tyler Olin.

  I killed my light and stepped back outside, trying to make sense of what I’d just seen. And what I hadn’t. The only other cover besides the old shack were the dead woods, another seventy yards in the distance. There was no way the man could have made it that distance before I reached the top of the bluff. No chance. I would have seen him.

  Would I have?

  The sudden doubt was not limited to any estimation I’d made about Olin’s ability to cover some arbitrary distance. It extended to the very encounter itself.

  He was there, I told myself with waning conviction. Right?

  There’d been a man atop the bluffs. A man who’d donned a cowboy hat. A figure in silhouette who looked like Olin.

  A shadow...

  I wondered, suddenly, if the man I’d seen had been just that—a shadow in my mind.

  “Dear God, what’s happening to me?”

  Something was wrong. Something had been wrong for a while. That realization raged now, setting my head to spin and my knees to go wobbly.

  I crouched down, the Springfield dangling in my grip until I let it slip to the ground, my own body settling further until I was sitting on the damp earth outside the shack. My face tipped toward the moon and I began to weep.

  Twenty Seven

  The leader of our town switched on the porch light and opened the front door to find me standing just outside.

  “Fletch...”

  “Doc, I...”

  When my hesitation lingered the elderly man pushed the screen door outward and stepped out onto the porch, robe and pajamas covering his wiry frame. He seemed almost too thin, too frail, but I’d chosen to come to him. I’d run, in fact, from the bluffs to his door, standing outside in the chill for a full five minutes to catch my breath before knocking and waking him. All because I was terrified.

  “I think I may be losing it.”

  Doc Allen put a hand gently upon my shoulder and tipped his head toward the door.

  “Come on in and le
t’s talk.”

  * * *

  Doc Allen hung up the phone and joined me in his kitchen, taking a seat at the small table. He’d made a pot of coffee and poured me a cup.

  “Elaine is fine,” he told me. “I just let her know you stopped by here.”

  “This is going to be fun to explain to her,” I said.

  “Why don’t you fill me in first?”

  I spent the next ten minutes doing just that. Everything from spotting rocks used by Olin in a building in Remote, to what I saw on the bluffs just a thirty minutes earlier—or what I thought I’d seen. For good measure I threw in the suspicions I had about Ansel and Moira, hoping to complete the picture of paranoia even I was beginning to see in myself.

  “Am I cracking up?”

  The old doctor smiled lightly and shook his head.

  “I’m not trained as a psychiatrist, Fletch. But I’ve come across hundreds of people in my years of practicing medicine who believed that they were going crazy. Not a one of them was.”

  “Then what is this?” I pressed him.

  He considered the question for a moment

  “I think it’s a few things. Stress from the responsibility you feel to this town, and now also to your growing family. Fear, a righteous fear, because your house was broken into. And grief.”

  “Grief about Neil,” I said, cluing in on where he was going with his analysis.

  “You couldn’t save him, so you obsess over the man who killed him, both consciously and subconsciously. Those feelings inform all the other things you have to deal with. The new settlement. The intruders. Everything to you right now is magnified tenfold.”

  “All because of Neil,” I said.

  Doc Allen reached across the table and put a hand atop mine.

  “Fletch, he betrayed you by lying to you, and then he up and got himself killed before you could work that out together. For you, he’s still dying.”

  I nodded, both relieved and ashamed at the same time. Doc Allen eased his hand off mine and sat back in the chair, his gaze settling on the table, fixed on a spot right before me.

  “I still talk to her,” the man said. “Every morning. She doesn’t answer, but I wish she would.”

  He was speaking of his wife. His Carol. The virus released by the Unified Government had taken her, but had not, and could not, wipe her memory away. That was mostly a blessing.

  “Her coffee cup would sit right there,” Doc Allen told me, gesturing to a spot near where my hand lay on the small kitchen table. “Mine was right here. We’d drink, and talk, every morning. Sometimes every night.”

  The old doctor quieted for a moment, looking off toward the darkness in the hall beyond the kitchen.

  “I think if I let myself, Fletch, I could see her, maybe standing in that doorway, smiling at me. That would be nice. But it wouldn’t be real.”

  “You think I didn’t see him,” I said. “That I let my mind make him up.”

  “I don’t know who, or what, you saw, or didn’t see. I do know that you have to start letting yourself off the hook. You couldn’t have prevented what happened. Neither could Neil.”

  The doctor was right. But I still viewed myself harshly for allowing the person my mind had almost certainly conjured on the bluffs be the man who killed my friend, and not my friend himself.

  “I don’t know how to do that,” I said.

  “You don’t have to figure it out,” he told me. “Not on your own. Because you’re not alone. Someone else is invested in you figuring this out. Two someones, actually.”

  Elaine. And Hope. They were my reasons for living. And more.

  “You might just find the answers with them,” Doc Allen said.

  * * *

  I thanked the doc and walked home in the moonlit darkness. My wife was waiting for me when I came through the front door.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “I’m more sorry,” I told her.

  The half mile I’d covered from Doc Allen’s hadn’t passed without rumination. I’d thought on what the wise man had told me, but mostly about one possible cause of my distress that he’d mentioned—fear.

  He wasn’t wrong, but one aspect of that emotion he’d missed. And I was looking at her right now.

  “I was thinking,” I began, but she did not let me finish.

  “You have to go,” Elaine said, and for an instant my heart skipped a beat before I realized that some greater divide had not opened between us. “You’re going to be needed in Remote.”

  “So are you,” I said.

  She quieted, her gaze narrowing down on me.

  “Remote doesn’t need me.”

  “No,” I said. “But I do. And I will, especially when I’m there.”

  Once again, she regarded me through a silence that lingered as she tried to understand the ‘why’ of what I was saying.

  “If you’re here, you and Hope, half of my thoughts will be about you. And a hundred percent of my worry. I can’t function like that. At least not right now.”

  “What happened, Eric? While you were with the doc?”

  “Some things that weren’t apparent to me got a little more apparent,” I said.

  “That’s as clear as mud,” Elaine told me, with honesty that was anything but unclear.

  I stepped close and took her hands. Behind, down the hallway, our daughter made the kind of sound we’d gotten used to hearing while she slept. Reassuring little cooing that warmed our hearts.

  “I can’t go without you,” I said.

  She squeezed my hands and looked at me with eyes that were filled with both love and her own concern.

  “Of course we’ll go with you,” she said. “There’s no question about that. But...”

  She wanted to press, I could tell. To dig out of me what I’d talked with Doc Allen about. And I would open up to her if she asked, sharing my fear that Neil’s death was still weighing on me, in disturbing ways.

  But she did not pry anymore. I did not have to tell her that there was every chance I’d imagined seeing Olin on the bluffs. That I’d chased a shadow with my weapon in hand. The murderer of my friend, I didn’t have to share, was not only invading my dreams, but appearing in my waking world.

  “We’re a family,” she said, wrapping her arms around me and pulling herself tight against my chest. “We should be together. No matter what.”

  No matter what...

  I held my wife and thought on those words. There was commitment in them, but there was also risk. The risk that she, and Hope, would be with me if something went wrong.

  But nothing was going to go wrong. We were going to go to Remote, I was going to do my job, and we would return home to Bandon. The fears I’d let get under my skin had been both natural and irrational. I was moving beyond them. Moving forward. The past was not my future.

  Not if I could help it.

  Twenty Eight

  The convoy pulled out of Bandon early on a Thursday under a steely sky that spat showers at the short train of vehicles heading inland. Three of the heavy trucks which had been left during one of the Rushmore’s supply visits, along with a Humvee, made up the bulk of the train of vehicles, with a few pickups and sedans filling out the parade rumbling out of town. Friends and neighbors of those striking out stood along the roads, waving and smiling, wishing these new pioneers good luck.

  They would need that luck. But I believed they had amongst them something more important—determination. And I didn’t mean just the desire to get things done. No, it was more the act of determining their purpose. Their present. The destiny they sought collectively. The decisiveness they’d exhibited in their meeting with me, and in the preparations for the move, was nothing short of admirable. Here were people taking on the very act of survival, leaving behind a support system that was there at a moment’s notice, which would now be more than an hour away.

  I didn’t agree with everything they had expressed, nor fully with what they were doing, but they had earned my respect,
and I wanted to help them have the best shot at succeeding.

  “Hope’s first road trip,” Elaine said, holding our daughter in the passenger seat of our pickup.

  “When she’s a little more mobile we should take her to the cottage on the coast,” I said.

  There were painful memories there, at the place from which I’d been snatched during a getaway with Elaine. But I’d moved past that, and it was such a beautiful spot south of Bandon. Beautiful and peaceful. Being there, with Elaine, with Hope, listening to waves crash with a fire in the hearth, would be a slice of heaven on earth.

  “That sounds amazing,” Elaine said.

  Just ahead, standing at the curve, Grace stood, Krista at her side, the growing girl holding her beefy brother. I pulled to the side, letting the tail end of the convoy pass me. Elaine rolled down the window and reached a hand out, our friend taking it and smiling through a sheen of tears.

  “It’s just a couple weeks,” Elaine said.

  “I know,” Grace said, reaching with her free hand to wipe her eyes. “It’s just...”

  “What?” I probed, leaning toward the passenger window.

  “You’re the people I know best,” she said. “You’re the ones I missed most when we were gone.”

  I understood. When she and Neil and Krista had boarded the chopper to be spirited away from Bandon, her worry was obvious. She trusted her husband, but she was still leaving those who’d supported her, and who would continue to do so as she carried the child that grew inside her at that time. Now, that bruiser of a boy squirmed in his big sister’s arms, pulling at her hair as she blew raspberries at his giggling face.

  “We’re going to need you to sit with Hope again when we get back,” Elaine told Krista.

  “Really?”

  The girl looked up to her mother, who rescued her from being mauled by her sibling and lifted Brandon to a one armed hold on her hip.

  “Can I?” Krista asked, just shy of begging. “Please?”

  Grace had let her daughter, less than a year shy of being a full-fledged teenager, watch over Hope across from the Defense Council’s meeting a just two weeks earlier. That allowance was made due to the proximity of both mother and father. Any near term sitting for us, Grace knew, would fall under similar circumstances, with Elaine and me in the backyard doing work, or enjoying an evening together on the porch. There would come a time when we would actually venture away from the house while someone sat with our child, so grooming Krista was an act of preparation, in addition to giving the sweet girl something to do beyond her schoolwork and duties working Micah’s transmitters.