by Noah Mann
I knew better. So did Elaine. When night came and we readied ourselves for bed, the Glock she had been leaving in its holster atop her gear bag now rested on an upturned crate that served as a nightstand next to the bed. My Springfield was similarly close, and my AR, left by the front door since arriving in our temporary home, lay on the floor next to my boots. Neither of us were afraid, but we both knew that Olin would not wait forever.
We slept. In fits and starts. She stared at the curtained window. I tuned my ear to all sounds, both inside and outside our house. She saw nothing. I heard nothing.
But something would come. Olin would not stop. And he would not wait forever. A clock we could not see was already ticking down toward some act we could not anticipate.
“Eric.”
We faced away from each other in bed, back to back, some slight separation between our bodies.
“Yes?”
I felt her hand reach behind and settle upon my hip, palm up, fingers splayed, waiting for me. My hand slipped across my chest and took hold of hers. She squeezed tight, as if wanting to know, and wanting me to know, that we were still us.
“I love you,” she said.
I nodded against my pillow.
“I love you, too.”
“We’re going to be okay,” she told me. “We are.”
“I know,” I said.
What had wounded us as a couple had not been erased, nor forgotten. I didn’t know if it ever would be. And maybe it should not be. Some cuts, the deepest ones, scarred over, making that place of pain tougher than what surrounded it. Marriage could be that way, I supposed, my far from expert opinion willing to accept that possibility.
“We’ll work this out,” I promised her.
Her grip on my hand bore down again, a thankful pressure. I rolled to face her, and she to face me. In the moonlight filtering through the curtained window I could see tears streaming silently down her cheeks. I reached up and wiped them away with the back of my hand.
“Get some sleep,” I told her.
My hand caressed her face, and her eyes closed. We lay there, facing each other now. Her breathing became slow and calm as she drifted off. I remained awake, watching her, my gaze shifting every so often to the window beyond, looking for shadows that should not be there. None appeared. We were safe.
That would all change in less than twelve hours.
Thirty Seven
Just before noon someone knocked on our door.
Elaine held Hope close in our living room and stepped to the side so she could see past the sheer curtains we’d put up over the front windows of our temporary home.
“It’s a woman,” my wife said. “I don’t recognize her.”
I’d shed my sidearm, coming home for a quick bite before returning to work on one of the settlement’s final projects, but my AR, which had been in the bedroom as we slept, now leaned against the wall just beyond where the door would swing when opened. In two seconds I could have it in hand.
“She’s got a shotgun,” Elaine added.
There were a few people it could be, but only one I thought it might be.
“A Remington semi?”
Elaine nodded. I left my AR where it was and opened the front door. Gina from Camas Valley stood in the shallow shelter of the small porch, rain that she’d just come through dripping from her coat.
“I have to talk to you.”
Those were her words. But they seemed more like the declaration of some personal mission. She’d come on her own, on a motorcycle across the hills that separated Remote from Camas Valley, leaving her transport in the woods just north of our town. After a brief description of her travels I invited her in and took her drenched outerwear, hanging it on a hook behind the door.
“Can you take this?” she asked, holding her shotgun out to me.
I did, leaning the weapon next to mine. It seemed that she carried no other firearms. None that I could see, in any case. In all likelihood she had at least one pistol on her person. That near certainty, though, didn’t concern me. Nothing about her unannounced appearance, nor her demeanor, hinted at any threat. At least not from her.
“Sit,” I said. “We have some hot chocolate.”
The offer amazed her slightly as she took a spot on the couch.
“Hot chocolate?”
I nodded. The cream of their supplies had run out some time ago, it seemed. Ours, too, was beginning to run low with the Rushmore being absent from the waters off Bandon.
“Made with water, not milk,” Elaine said.
I caught myself, having failed at both host and husband duties.
“This is my wife—”
“Elaine,” Gina said. “I know.”
It was easy to forget how completely the people of Camas Valley had come to know us through their observation, and though it seemed somewhat creepy at first, it now entered exchanges such as this with almost comical regularity.
“But I don’t know this little beauty,” Gina said, her gaze fixed on our daughter.
“This is Hope,” Elaine said.
Gina smiled. Beamed, actually, the brightness of her reaction to the infant before her bringing a warmth to the room that had nothing to do with heat.
“Would you like to hold her?” Elaine asked, surprising the woman.
“I’m soaked,” she said. “I’m already dripping on your furniture.”
“She’s wrapped up,” Elaine said. “It’ll be okay.”
Gina thought on the offer for a moment, both surprised and pleased by the hospitality, and the trust, we were showing her.
“Okay.”
“I’ll get that hot chocolate,” I said.
I retrieved a cup of the steaming liquid, returning to the front room to find Elaine sitting next to Gina, the woman cradling our daughter as one would something precious beyond measure.
“Do you have children?” Elaine asked, taking Hope back so Gina could accept the hot mug from me.
“No. Someday. Maybe.”
She sipped the chocolatey drink, then drank steadily, savoring what she had not enjoyed for a very long time. But she had not come on a social visit, though we had done our best to make her feel welcome.
“You wanted to talk to me,” I said, nudging the conversation forward.
Gina nodded and set her cup on the side table.
“Dalton and Lo headed north this morning to scout Winston,” she told me.
“And?”
“That leaves Ansel in charge,” she said, seeming to hesitate.
“You mean Ansel and Moira,” I said.
The woman’s relief was plain that I was picking up on the reality of a situation she had to live with.
“They’re bad news together,” Gina said. “But...”
Her reluctance to speak now was more visceral, some fear, either real or perceived, clearly manifesting. I had a reasonable idea precisely what it was driving her concern. Or, more accurately, who.
“It’s Dalton,” I said. “Isn’t it?”
Gina looked between me and Elaine.
“Whatever you say here isn’t leaving these walls,” Elaine assured her.
“He’s kept us alive,” Gina said, an almost awestruck appreciation in her words. “That’s impossible to minimize.”
Just as Martin had guided Bandon through the worst of the blight, Dalton, in Camas Valley, had seen to the survival of his people, though with a more authoritarian edge. Gina, though, wasn’t devaluing his accomplishment because of that, or in any way. She simply was having trouble relating that the man to whom she owed her life was flawed.
“He doesn’t see it,” Gina said. “Ansel is just...he’s wrong. I’ve heard him talking to Moira about how they could run things better. How they could force you all to...”
“To what?” I asked.
“To give them tribute,” she said. “After Dalton made the agreement with you, Ansel told Moira that he could have gotten more just by threatening to destroy your fields and your livestock. He
said paying us off with supplies would be cheaper for Bandon.”
I looked to Elaine. We were both thinking the same thing. Regardless of what Schiavo wanted, or how removed she wanted to remain from the inner workings of Camas Valley, Dalton had to be made aware of this.
“You think Ansel and Moira are going to make a move to topple Dalton while he’s gone today?”
She didn’t signal agreement or otherwise to the question I posed. But her gaze darkened. Grim worry washed over her.
“They went somewhere,” Gina said. “After Dalton left, they did, too. On foot. I followed them.”
“Where did they go?” I asked.
“They went out to this old clear cut grove about two miles south of the highway. Just piles and piles of old dead trees there. The loggers must have been in the middle of harvesting timber when everything went to hell. I mean, why keep working when the world is ending, right?”
“What did they do there?” I asked.
“I didn’t get very close,” Gina explained. “If they’d seen me...”
“You’d be dead,” Elaine suggested.
Gina didn’t dispute that one iota.
“They met with someone,” Gina said.
Neither Elaine nor I had any doubt who she was going to describe.
“Cowboy hat with a scoped lever action?” I asked.
Gina nodded through surprise.
“How did you...”
“We’ve had dealings with him,” Elaine said, looking to me. “You were right—this is bigger.”
She’d remembered what I’d told her in the heat of our disagreement. And she’d kept an open mind about it as I’d trudged off in search of evidence. Evidence which we now had in Gina’s eyewitness account.
“Gina,” I began, “will you tell Dalton this, if I’m with you to back you up?”
The woman hesitated, running through the ramifications of turning on two of their leader’s lieutenants. We’d assured her that she could speak freely with us, and it would go no further. But it needed to, and if it did, it had to happen with her participation.
“Do you know what you’re asking me to do?”
“I do,” I told her. “You’ll be putting your life on the line.”
“So will you,” Gina reminded us.
I glanced to Elaine, and she nodded, willing to accept the risk I would face.
“Dalton has to be told,” I said.
“I know,” Gina agreed, both resignation and determination in her voice as she spoke again. “I know.”
“Any idea when Dalton will be back?” I asked.
She shook her head.
“He’d only share that information with Ansel,” she said.
“You could try to cut him off before he gets back from Winston,” Elaine suggested. “Wait for him on the road north of Camas Valley.”
I thought on that, and could see that Gina was considering the feasibility of such an attempt.
“The bike has the range,” she said.
“Going over land?” I asked. “With a rider and passenger?”
“Yeah,” she confirmed. “Just enough.”
I looked to Elaine again. None of what was about to come was ideal, but we both knew that, if warning Dalton prevented a takeover of his town, it would solidify the nascent alliance between Camas Valley and Bandon. And, if Olin’s connection with Ansel and Moira was as Gina had described, Dalton would have every reason to turn his forces against the man who’d murdered my friend and was stalking me.
“This is the best of a lot of bad options,” Elaine said.
I nodded and looked to the woman who’d risked her life to bring us the information we now had to act upon.
“Can you bring your bike around back?”
“All right.”
I walked her to the door, Elaine with me as I handed Gina her shotty. She stepped onto the porch and hesitated, turning to face me again.
“Dalton was right,” she said.
“About what?” I asked.
“You. He said you have grit. I’ve only heard him say that about one other person.”
“Who was that,” Elaine asked.
“His father.”
I was both humbled and buoyed by the praise she was sharing. The few times I’d challenged Dalton, however mildly, had apparently made some impression upon him.
“I’ll get a light load of gear,” I said, knowing every ounce of weight would burden the electric bike and shorten its range.
“As light as possible,” Gina said. “If we—”
That was her last word—we. At the instant it slipped past her lips a gush of tissue and blood erupted from where her face had been, the crack of a rifle sounding next as her dead body folded, landing with a thud on the porch.
“Get down!”
I shouted the warning to Elaine as I slammed the door shut and scrambled on all fours across the room, away from my AR, rushing to get my Springfield from the belt rig hanging off the back of a chair. Behind me, Elaine had grabbed her MP5 from just outside the closet and was sliding to cover in the hallway, Hope awake and crying.
“Stay low!”
There was no need to instruct my wife in how to stay safe, but instinct made me call out as I reached up from my position on the floor and grabbed a lamp. I heaved the fixture hard at a window I’d repaired the first day we’d arrived, shattering the old glass, creating an opening that I stuck my pistol through and pulled the trigger twice, aiming into the air outside.
* * *
Enderson and Hart were there within three minutes, and a dozen others from the settlement were geared up and patrolling the town’s border.
“He had to be close,” Enderson said, looking down at the body lying in a bloody pool, old boards soaking in the crimson flow as rain pattered on the roof above. “In this weather, his sightline would be a hundred yards, tops.”
His...
I’d told the corporal it was Olin. Without a doubt. The same crack of his rifle had sounded when Neil was shot down, that distinctive .30-30 impossible to miss.
“He’s still out there,” I said.
“Eric...”
I looked past the body to my wife just inside as Hart carried a small tarp from the Humvee and covered Gina. Gina whose last name was a mystery to us, but whose actions had given us some warning as to what was happening in Camas Valley. Or what might have already happened.
“Tell him,” Elaine said.
I knew what she meant. There was no point in withholding anything from Enderson anymore. Moves were being made that could jeopardize the lives of everyone in Remote.
“Olin’s been here,” I said. “For a while.”
Enderson and Hart listened as I explained everything. What I’d found, what I’d seen, and what we’d been told.
“Jesus, Fletch,” Enderson said. “What do you think I would have done if you’d shared this when it all happened?”
“Go after him,” I said. “And send him into hiding.”
Enderson shook his head, annoyed at my actions.
“Mo, be pissed at me all you want, but we have to act. Right now.”
I didn’t have to spell anything out for the corporal. He knew what had to be done, and as Mike DeSantis jogged up to report that the patrols had found nothing so far, Enderson took the first steps needed to bring some order to a chaotic situation.
“Mike,” Enderson said.
“Yeah?”
“Get Rebecca and Nick and meet us at the outpost. We have to talk.”
Thirty Eight
“No.”
Rebecca Vance’s response to what Enderson had just told Remote’s leadership was as simple as it could be.
“We’re not leaving,” she added, just to make clear her insistence.
“It’s not permanent,” I said. “But there’s a real threat. Camas Valley could have just been taken over in a coup.”
“What?!” Mike DeSantis exclaimed, shaking his head. “How can you possibly know that?”
> “We don’t,” I said. “But it’s a certainty that a power struggle is underway, and if it goes wrong, Remote will have a hostile population just to the east.”
“There won’t be time for help to arrive from Bandon if things turn sour,” Enderson added.
Mike looked to Nick Withers, then to Rebecca. The leaders of the Remote settlement wore mixed reactions—resistance, disbelief, fear. Already the settlers had gathered at three houses along Sandy Creek Road, mine included, to maintain a localized defense against possible threats that were seeming more probable by the minute.
“You want to evacuate everyone?” Nick asked, checking that he was following what was being proposed. “Everyone?”
“With the cars, pickups, the Humvee, and the supply truck, we can fit everyone,” Enderson assured them.
The big military truck, which had brought a load of supplies to Remote late the previous day, had overnighted to allow its driver and security rider time to rest. It could be packed with twenty people for the relatively short drive back to Bandon.
“Why not just radio for reinforcements to come here?” Mike asked.
“Because we’re cut off,” I said.
“The repeater in Camas Valley isn’t responding,” Enderson said. “We have no radio link with anyone in Bandon.”
That bit of sobering information sank in for a moment before anyone responded. When they did, it was Rebecca, though her thinking was still far from cooperative and accepting.
“And if we say no?”
“Rebecca...”
Mike DeSantis tried to nudge her gently, his tone concerned. But she was having none of it.
“And if we say no?” she repeated.
“Rebecca,” Enderson began, “it appears to me that you may be the only person taking that position.”
She looked to her fellow leaders and found no ally to support her resistance. Accepting what was being proposed, or ordered, depending on one’s viewpoint, was almost beyond what she could accept. Almost.
“If we’d just done this on our own without this alliance garbage,” she said, suggesting an alternate path the settlers might have taken.
“You’d still be facing what could be coming down that highway at any minute,” I told her. “Without any real way to resist.”