by Noah Mann
“Let’s get out of this,” I said.
I held his shirt with an iron grip as we both trudged toward the edge of the stream. We made it to the bank and clawed our way up the slope, catching our breath at the top of the embankment. Half a football field was a conservative guess as to how far we’d been pushed downstream, and from that vantage point it was made very clear just how precarious our situation was.
“They’re not going to miss that,” Neil said.
My gaze had fixed on the inferno we’d left behind as well. The pickup no longer resembled anything like a vehicle. It was simply a wide, roiling column of hot orange fire spitting flames into the night sky. Neil had said the smoke from it would be easily seen for twenty miles once the sun came up. I didn’t think it would take our pursuers that long to see what we were.
“That boat better be viable,” I said.
I stood and helped my friend up, both of us cold and soaked. The night was mild, so hypothermia wasn’t an immediate concern. Not for me. Neil’s starved body would be more susceptible to those effects, so, at some point, we’d have to deal with that.
Now, though, we had to put some serious miles between us and the burning truck.
It took us only two minutes to reach the boat. I gathered the bag and my weapon from the bank just below it as Neil set his AK down and surveyed the aluminum craft.
“No holes that I can see,” he said.
“The seams could be bad,” I reminded him, running a hand along the riveted sections where pieces of the old boat had been assembled.
“One way to find out,” he said.
“I’ll get it,” I told him, crouching and gripping the edge before lifting and flipping it onto its keel.
“Jesus...”
Neil’s exclamation was quiet, almost reverent. I offered no reaction to what was revealed when the boat was moved.
It was a body. A man, I thought, amazingly intact clothes still shrouding the nearly skeletal frame. He’d died long after the blight had ravaged the world. There was no evidence of animal predation, and no insect infestation. Through the years beneath the boat, as winter and summer repeated, his skin and flesh was dried and frozen repeatedly, leaving a hideously preserved mimic of what he had been in life. It was not unlike the body I’d seen just outside the school gymnasium as Perkins took me to bear witness to the horror he’d concocted, but still I was made uneasy by the sight. And what it meant about this man.
“He was hiding,” I said.
Neil nodded. The man had nothing, just two paddles clutched close to his chest.
“From what?” Neil wondered.
“Does it matter?”
My friend shook his head and picked up his AK.
“Let’s get it in the water,” he said.
I gently slipped the paddles from the man’s grip and set them in the boat, the both of us guiding it down the embankment and into the stream. We climbed in, Neil nearest the bow as we began to paddle away from the blazing wreck. I glanced back to take a final look and was instantly horrified.
“The boat left a mark,” I said.
Neil stopped paddling and turned, the current the only force propelling us now.
“What do you mean?”
“Around the body,” I said. “There’s an impression.”
It was unmistakably the shape of an upturned boat surrounding the corpse, something no one would have trouble identifying.
“If they find the truck, they’ll spot that,” I said.
“Forget it, Fletch. If we stop and go back and try to cover it up, it’s going to look like something was covered up. They’re going to know anyway. Perkins is barely human, but he’s not dumb.”
Neil began paddling again. He was right about trying to cover our tracks. It would be futile. And, with no idea how far behind us any pursuers might be, even making the attempt could prove not only foolish, but fatal.
“All right,” I said.
I began paddling again, joining my friend in propelling the small craft away from the inferno. It was not a perfect situation by a long shot, but we’d rarely had the stars align fully in our favor. And in those instances we’d come through. We’d survived.
Thirteen
The stream meandered, switching back on itself, tracking east, then west again after a sharp bend through flat terrain which had once been thriving farm fields, finally settling on a generally southeasterly course of flow. We let the current do most of the work, paddling only when necessary. By the time the first hints of the new day lay as a blue line on the eastern horizon we’d had to climb from the boat four times and maneuver it over obstacles which had fallen into the waterway, creating mini dams which the stream spilled over.
Not every bridge or pipeline crossing the stream had collapsed, though. One narrow bridge we reached as the sun peeked above the edge of the earth to our left still stood, and, without saying a word, each of us began backpaddling against the current until we were stopped along the shore.
“Welcome to California,” I said, reading the faded graffiti which someone had scrawled upon the edge of the concrete span, just enough of the pre-blight marking left to be readable.
“This is just going to keep heading south,” Neil said. “Until it dumps into a lake or a bigger river.”
The latter was the worse option. All we needed was to be suddenly faced with riding an aluminum boat through whitewater created by unregulated runoff. The land was turning wild again, and with it the rivers which had once raged freely, flooding and menacing those who were foolish enough to test themselves against it.
“Let’s just put a few more miles between us and Perkins,” I suggested. “Then we can hoof it west.”
That would be the beginning of a journey unto itself. One not unlike our return from Cheyenne. We were poorly supplied then, as we were now. But we were also closer to home. And, with any luck, those who now knew that we were missing—that I was missing—would send people looking for us, most likely Beekman in a plane scouring the landscape from above.
That belief presented a particularly vexing problem.
“We’ve gotta be careful,” I said to Neil as we paddled away from the shore and rejoined the current. “Bandon will eventually send someone by air to look, but so will Perkins, I imagine. And then there’s the night flyer.”
“Making ourselves visible to the wrong one could be a fatal mistake,” Neil said. “Or not doing that.”
We could just as easily hide from Beekman as mistakenly signal those certainly hunting us down at this very moment. There was one further question, though, and Neil was the one to bring it up.
“The mystery plane,” he said. “Who flies at night, Fletch? Or who would fly at night?”
“You’re thinking military,” I said.
“Maybe the Unified Government isn’t all the way down and out,” he suggested.
“Beekman would fly at night,” I told him.
“If he didn’t have to?”
I didn’t have an answer to that. This was a world without navigational aids. Flying at night was, literally, flying blind. Seeing the logic of Neil’s suggestion wasn’t difficult, but the point of it was still elusive.
“So what do we do?” I asked as we floated south into California, the rising sun creeping higher to our left. “How do we decide our reaction if we hear a plane?”
I thought on that for a moment, and came up with at least a partial answer.
“If I recognize it, we take cover,” I said. “That’ll be the Cessna Dave and I flew in on.”
“Now part of Perkins’ air force,” Neil quipped.
“He said the same thing,” I shared. “So he’s going to put it to use.”
I could only hope that the man didn’t have time to weaponize the light aircraft with mounted machineguns, as he’d hinted at. Neil and I had been strafed from the air before at my Montana Refuge, by a minigun equipped helicopter. That had ended poorly for the attacker, thanks to an expertly aimed shot fired by Grace.
We had no backup this time, and facing off against an aerial opponent was something to be avoided at nearly all costs.
“Do you remember the plane from the other night?” Neil asked.
I nodded.
“Just different enough from our Cessna,” I said.
“So we hide from that one, too.”
“Agreed,” I said.
That left one consideration and decision.
“One we don’t recognize,” I said. “That could be Chris Beekman.”
I still thought the pilot from Bandon would be days, if not weeks away, from getting one of the aircraft he’d set off to salvage into the air.
“You don’t sound optimistic,” Neil observed, zeroing in on my doubt.
“I’m not.”
“That would seem to leave us in agreement that anything in the air is a potential threat to be avoided,” he suggested.
“Just like anything on terra firma,” I agreed.
That conclusion we’d come to cemented one fact that we were already faced with—we were on our own. There would be no help. The cavalry wasn’t out there.
It was just us. But, despite the danger of that reality, I wasn’t afraid, and neither was my lifelong friend. Whatever lay ahead, we were facing it together. There was an odd satisfaction to that aspect of our situation. Just days ago I could not have dreamed that I’d ever get the chance to have Neil Moore at my side, but he was.
Now all I had to do was get him back to the place we both belonged.
Fourteen
Twenty minutes later the stream flattened out, its waters widened across a shallow delta that had once brimmed with tall aquatic grasses. In my minds eye I could see it, the memory fueled by countless nature documentaries I’d watched over the years. The area we had floated to would once have teamed with waterfowl, ducks and geese moving from place to place up the west coast, stopping in on what must have been a sanctuary for them.
Now, though, the birds were dead and gone, as was the grass which had hidden them, the latter decayed over time to build the soupy muck our boat had bottomed out on.
“End of the line,” I said.
Neil nodded and stood, steadying himself with a wide stance in the relatively stable boat. He looked west, and east.
“I see the tops of some buildings to the northeast,” he said. “A half mile at the most.”
We were in agricultural country, or what had been, so what Neil saw were likely the remnants of some small town left standing amongst the barren landscape. That it would hold any supplies to sustain us was doubtful. And we needed supplies. Food, in particular. For my friend.
Neil lowered himself and sat in the boat again, his upper half teetering for a moment. The meager rations we’d taken from where we’d been held, and from our pursuer’s vehicle, were not enough to sustain him after the self-starvation he’d endured. Weakness still slowed him and dulled his actions. The mere act of standing and sitting again had left him lightheaded. He would not admit that, but he knew that I was fully aware of his condition.
“It’s not bad,” Neil said.
“Not good, either, though, is it?”
He smiled and shook his head.
“The alternative would be worse,” he said.
“Can’t argue with that,” I agreed, then stood, surveying the once swampy area, bulges of muddy earth poking through the dank waters. “We’re heading toward whatever town you saw.”
“After we sink this boat,” Neil said.
“Exactly.”
We gathered our meager gear and slung our rifles and slipped over the edge of the boat into the water. It swallowed us to our waist.
“Just enough to submerge it,” I said.
We rocked the boat onto its side and let it fill with water, holding it there until it began to settle beneath the surface. The aluminum craft had no natural buoyancy in its structure. Simply swamping it was enough to send it to the bottom, barely a foot of water covering it.
“If they fly a plane over...” I said.
From the air, in daylight, anyone looking down from above would have a decent chance of spotting the unnatural shape amongst the meandering waters spread across the delta. Especially if they were looking for a boat. The scene they’d left behind across the stream from where the pickup had burst into flame could easily provide the first, and only, clue needed.
“Fletch, let it go,” Neil said, reading me like he’d always been able to. “We don’t have time to go back. It is what it is.”
He was right. But so was I. The reality, though, was that we had only one choice—keep moving.
“Let’s get out of this muck,” I said.
I began moving toward what appeared to be the edge of the delta, a rise there perfectly dry, the morning breeze kicking wisps of dust just beyond it. Every step was a herculean effort.
“This is like walking through syrup,” Neil said.
It was. But a few minutes after we started we reached the edge and climbed from the foul water. Near the top of the rise we stopped and looked out toward what was, indeed, a town. The kind of burg in the middle of nowhere where a couple thousand people had found a way to make a living. Until the blight. Surrounded by miles of farm fields, the bounty of Mother Nature at its doorstep, places like what lay in the near distance were the hardest hit. What they’d always had available, what they believed they could count upon, was the first thing ravaged by the apocalypse.
“We can’t head straight in,” Neil said.
I saw that his gaze was fixed on the fields that lay between us and the unknown town, an expanse of dusty earth covered by swirls of dried earth shifted by daily winds. Not a living thing had tread across the terrain recently. Possibly not for years. And if we were to do just that...
“We’ll leave a bigger mark than where we got the boat,” I said, understanding.
Neil looked east, scanning the nearly featureless landscape.
“There’s a canal that spills into this,” he said, pointing. “I think I see a bridge over it.”
A bridge meant a crossing. Likely a road.
“We stay on the bank of the canal to the road, then walk into town,” he suggested.
“The canal will give us cover if we need it,” I said.
“Let’s hope we don’t,” he added.
This time my friend led off, taking us to where the old irrigation canal began. Now it was simply an avenue for runoff, the waters of the delta backing up into it when the volume was too great. We stayed low, just our head and shoulders above the berm that defined its northern edge. In twenty minutes we reached the bridge and climbed up from the waterway onto a two-lane road, its asphalt surface severely rutted and cracked, huge chucks of blacktop missing, likely washed away by storms over the years. A vehicle would have difficulty navigating the narrow highway at any decent speed. By foot it would be no problem.
But the town was to the north now. We would be backtracking.
“We could just keep going south,” I said more than suggested.
Neil looked behind. There was little in that direction. A few buildings, likely farmhouses scattered across the landscape.
“We’d be exposed,” my friend pointed out. “If we get into that town we can look for anything useful. Get some rest. Lay up until nightfall.”
“Move in the dark,” I said, nodding.
We said no more. Once again, Neil took the point. That we were thinking of our movement in such tactical terms was not alien, but it was unexpected. The world had been whittled down to the few of us who’d survived, and I wondered frequently, even before this latest encounter with Perkins, how many remained who had chosen the path of domination over cooperation. Those were the forces that still required us to maintain some tactical order. We were not just two friends strolling along a country highway—we were fighters in enemy lands.
And we would be until we found our way back to Bandon.
* * *
We passed collapsed grain silos and a burned-out ranger st
ation, the remnants of the sign near the highway telling us it serviced the Modoc National Forest. Another sign further on, toppled by years of exposure and neglect, remained readable enough to give the town ahead a name.
“Welcome to Tulelake,” I said, reading the lettering.
“Population One Thousand Twenty,” Neil said, noting what was written at the bottom of the sign. “I highly doubt that.”
“Let’s cut across,” I said, gesturing to railroad tracks just west of the highway, and to a series of standing warehouses beyond.
This time I led off, crossing a strip of bare earth before reaching the railroad tracks. In two minutes we were walking across large parking lots behind the warehouses, a few wrecked eighteen-wheelers abandoned near the buildings, each resting on flat tires or bare rims.
“This place has been picked clean,” Neil said.
“There may be something,” I told him. “Our scouting missions have found anything you can think of. Old canned food, whole wine cellars.”
“I’ll drink to that,” Neil said.
We laughed together at that. But only for a few seconds. The sound rising from just north of us ended the brief flourish of joy.
“Car,” Neil said.
Neither of us needed prodding. We ran, making our way between two of the warehouses and slipping into an old equipment shed, its plank walls nearing the point of total collapse.
“Just one,” I said.
We each took a slice of the pie, Neil covering the west and south, while I kept my AK trained at the opening on the north side of the ramshackle building. Door hanging askew on sagging hinges.
“It’s turning,” Neil said. “Heading west now.”
The vehicle we’d heard had come down the very highway we’d been on just moments before, traveling south until it made a right turn, heading into town. I eased myself closer to the north wall and peered through the space between the old siding, catching sight of what we’d heard as it drove past the first warehouse.
“It’s a van,” I said.