by Noah Mann
“Just a place I’ve been,” I said. “One place of many.”
And that began a conversation, a long retelling of all that had transpired since my friend’s absence. Mostly it was I who spoke, sharing details of people, and places, and events as we paralleled the train tracks heading south, then split off from them as they crossed the highway we’d purposely avoided. For hours I talked, and for hours he listened, until the day that had seemed so long when we’d fled Tulelake began to show the first hints of ending with a wash of reddish light upon the clouds hovering over the peaks to the west.
“What do you want to do, Fletch?”
We’d stopped just past a collection of rubbled buildings, bits of their blue metal roofs still bright amongst the charred and collapsed structures. It had been some highway maintenance yard, I suspected, a backhoe abandoned near mounds of gravel and crushed stone at one end of the facility’s yard.
“Not here,” I said, answering the unasked question as to what we should do for the night. “Too close to the highway, and it’s the only meager shelter for twenty miles.”
We could fashion bits of the wrecked buildings into a lean-to of sorts, though no inclement weather seemed likely to threaten. It would be cold, though, once night came fully, so some protection was preferable to none.
“Keep going south then?” Neil asked.
We’d come a fair distance. Maybe twenty miles. The bleeding had stopped where my finger had been severed, and Neil had gotten some calories into him, but walking just shy of a marathon had taxed us both. More than the fatigue, though, was the thirst. We needed water.
I slung my AK and slipped the pack off, fishing something from within. The binoculars.
“Let’s just see what our options are,” I said.
The optics Neil had taken from the van were mediocre at best, but it was what we had to work with. We stood on a slight rise in the landscape near the destroyed buildings, and from that spot I began scanning to the east, and the south, and the west, searching for any hint as to our best option for cover as darkness began to settle.
“Anything worth considering?” Neil asked.
There wasn’t. But there might be. I zeroed in on that very possibility as I scanned the road as it ran southeast of our position.
“There’s a sign,” I said, handing the binoculars to my friend so he could look. “Five hundred yards up there. It might be an intersection.”
It looked vaguely like a smaller road split off from the highway and traveled west, crossing in front of us. But the sign was most important. It might tell us where we were, or what lay ahead.
“Let’s check it out,” Neil said.
I waved off his suggestion and slipped back into the pack.
“You stay back and cover,” I said. “I’ll check the sign. If Perkins’ people come rolling up that highway you can hit them before they roll up on me.”
“I don’t like splitting up,” he said. “I did that before and what came after sucked.”
“You did what you had to,” I said. “Now it’s my turn. It’s totally exposed out there. We’d both be sitting ducks.”
He knew I was right, but still it took him a moment to acknowledge that with a nod.
“Do it quick,” Neil said, then he left where we’d stopped and moved toward a position near a flattened building to cover the road to the north.
I didn’t hesitate, moving with purpose myself, jogging toward the sign. Every step jolted my body and resonated where my left hand had been violated by a wild round of enemy fire. Along with that pain was the grating dryness in my mouth. It was minor suffering compared to what others had gone through, but it would get worse unless we located a place where some relief could be found.
As I neared the point I’d jogged toward I noticed something I hadn’t seen through the binoculars. There wasn’t one sign—there were two. The second was bent forward, obscured by the other, and both looked to be just one good winter away from being torn from the posts supporting them. At twenty feet I could make out most of the bottom sign, faded arrows on it pointing west toward recognized symbols for camping and boating. When I stood at it I tipped the upper sign so that it was readable, the weathered lettering clear enough to tell me that this was the way we had to go.
Four minutes later I was back with my friend, breathing hard but excited at what I’d found.
“There’s a road going west,” I told him. “It goes to a lake.”
A lake meant water. Even if we had to find a way to make it safe through boiling, it was more than we had now.
“Close?” Neil asked.
I shook my head.
“Twenty-five miles.”
The brief flourish of relief he’d felt waned rapidly.
“We don’t have much of a choice,” I said.
“I know,” Neil agreed, accepting what we had to do. “Does this lake have a name?”
“Medicine Lake,” I told him.
“That’s either promising or cruel,” he said, taking stock of the daylight we had remaining. “We sure aren’t making it there tonight.”
“Like you said, this place won’t work,” I reminded my friend.
He looked southwest, where the road would lead us. There were hints of dead woods there, trees which had been decimated by the blight still standing, grey sentinels robbed of their vibrance. They would fall at some point with a strong enough storm, but, for now, they could provide cover.
“Those woods are two miles,” Neil said. “Maybe three.”
“I’d say so,” I agreed.
“We can make that with plenty of light left,” he said.
“Plenty.”
He started walking, taking a course across the open terrain that would intercept the road I’d found. From there we’d follow that to the only cover we felt comfortable with.
There was no talking this time as we walked. No sharing of events. We were both worn out and hurting. Beyond that, though, I was sensing something from Neil that was almost alien—a sense not of defeat, but despair.
It was a hint at best. Just a flicker under his voice and a dulling of his gaze. Part of me wondered if it was less the struggle to get home that lay ahead, and more the reality that he might actually see Bandon again. Might actually have to face the woman he loved, who now loved another. Every step he took was both toward salvation and toward an emotional agony I could not imagine.
My friend was tough. As tough as anyone I’d ever known. But what awaited him beyond the hard miles ahead was more than a test of his mettle. Facing this future that had been made real in his absence could very well crush him.
And, I feared, he knew that.
Seventeen
It was more than a stand of dead trees. It was a campground, with spaces for tents and recreational vehicles, and a small store to provide for those patrons who’d frequented the rustic oasis when leisure activities of the sort were common.
“I see cabins,” Neil said, pointing through the trees.
There were at least two that I could make out in the waning light. With them, off to the left about a hundred feet, was a fifth wheel trailer, its side screen door in tatters and flapping in the stiff breeze which had built in the past twenty minutes.
“Let’s check the store,” I said.
Neil nodded and followed my lead, both of us with weapons ready out of habit. I gripped the forestock of mine with my injured hand, the sharpness of the pain I’d experienced in the previous hours dulled now, a hot throbbing having replaced it. I remembered that sensation as similar to how the wound in my jaw felt, when it turned toward infection. That, though, was nothing I could worry about at the moment. When it became possible I would bear the pain and clean the space where my finger had been.
Now, though, I was focused on our search for supplies and a place to rest for at least part of the night.
“Clear,” Neil said as he swept the small front space of the campground store.
I moved past him and stepped behind the
counter, its cash register upturned on the floor in some pointless theft long ago. A small office was connected to the sales floor, and I cleared that and a storage closet in under a minute.
“Good back here,” I reported as I rejoined my friend.
Surveying the smallish space it was hard to imagine that anything useful would be found. But that supposition was wrong. Neil demonstrated that to me by lifting an old plant pot from where it lay on its side next to the front window. It had likely once held some interior greenery, but now contained only crusted dirt which had dried over the years. He dumped the dusty contents and tapped the steel container.
“Now all we need is some water and something to boil it over,” he said.
The former was the issue in the arid landscape. And, with night rapidly descending, heading out to search for a source of water, either some trickling stream or leftover pool of rainwater, was ill advised.
As it was, the sound we heard next ended any thought of leaving the shelter of the old store.
“Airplane,” Neil said.
I nodded and listened. We’d discussed the ability to differentiate between the plane I’d come in on, which Perkins now possessed, and the unknown craft which had overflown Klamath Falls in the night, as well as our response to either—hiding. Only an unknown, which could be Chris Beekman out searching for us, would have us take the chance of being seen.
But it was still too soon for any aircraft from Beekman’s salvage mission to be in the air. And, as it was, I recognized the sound approaching from the east.
“That’s the same as the night flyer,” I said.
It was the same plane from just days ago. And it seemed to be coming straight at our location, climbing to match the rise in elevation from where we’d left the highway.
“It’s not dark yet,” Neil said.
That was both good and bad. It meant that we would be visible if we stepped outside in the waning daylight. But it also meant we might be able to glimpse the aircraft as it neared.
“We need to get a look at it,” I said.
“And they might see us doing that,” Neil cautioned.
I shook my head and leaned my AK against the old counter.
“We have windows and binoculars,” I said. “They’re not going to spot us inside from the air at a hundred knots.”
My friend understood. He dropped the pack and retrieved the binoculars from it, handing them over and taking a position with me at the side of the store’s intact front window. I crouched and brought the cheap glasses up, focusing in on the darkening sky above the dead trees, scanning east and north. As I did, without getting a good look, the aircraft passed nearly overhead.
I looked behind, through the open door past the counter.
“There’s a window in that office,” I said.
I began to head that way, but my friend stopped me.
“It’s turning,” he said.
He was right. The receding sound of the small plane’s engine changed, shifting slightly south before angling at us once again.
“Get ready,” Neil told me.
I crouched next to the window again and aimed the binoculars at the sky above where the aircraft should pass over. Twenty second later it did just that, seeming even lower than before as it gave me a quick glimpse of its familiar underside.
“It’s a Cessna,” I said. “A One Seventy Two.”
The high wing aircraft was a near twin to what Dave Arndt had piloted on our trip to Klamath Falls. But not exact. There was one striking difference.
“And it’s grey,” I said. “Military grey.’
The plane continued on, heading east, no turn this time to bring it back our way. Whatever it had come for, or to see, it had apparently been satisfied and was returning to where it had come from.
“Military,” Neil said, the word partly a question.
“It looked that way,” I said.
Like the Marine Osprey which had brought our party home from Kansas, or the helicopters stationed aboard the Rushmore, the dull coloring was indicative of the low observability desired by military vehicles. It was impossible to know if some survivor somewhere had simply painted an aircraft to match its military brethren, or simply acquired the abandoned plane and restored it to working condition, or if it did actually belong to a still-functioning military unit. None of those considerations, though, were the most curious part of what we’d just witnessed.
“Two times we get stalked by that thing,” Neil said. “Do you believe in coincidences?”
“Not that much,” I answered.”
We backed away from the window and I took my AK in hand again, suddenly unnerved. By a possibility we’d worried about earlier, but discarded as we moved further from our last encounter with Perkins’ people.
“How much light is left do you think?” I asked.
“Twenty minutes,” Neil estimated. “Maybe.”
I moved toward the door we’d entered through, leaving my friend puzzled.
“What are you doing?”
I stopped and looked back to him, an urgency about me. There was a potential answer out there, for both of us, and we needed to know. Our safety, and our lives, might depend upon it.
“The plane is gone,” I said, draping the binocular strap around my neck and bringing my weapon up, throbbing hand supporting the business end of it. “And there’s something we’ve got to see.”
“What?”
“If we came all this way for nothing,” I said.
Eighteen
Neil joined me as we backtracked through the crumbling woods to the road we’d followed to reach the campground. Where its driveway split off from the road we stopped and looked out at the way we’d travelled to reach that point. The elevation gain positioned us a few hundred feet above the barren landscape we’d crossed, long shadows from the mountains fading into a deepening carpet of darkness. But still it was possible to see. To note landmarks in the distance. The highway. The rubbled collection of buildings near it.
And a faint line drawn across the dusty terrain, first to those collapsed structures, and then toward the road which had led us here.
“Dammit...”
Neil swore and held a hand out. I placed the binoculars in them and he raised them to survey the trail we’d left with nothing more than our boots. But what more was needed in the windswept expanse that was devoid of animals to carve game trails, or people who might hike through the bleak beauty.
“We might as well have drawn a map,” Neil said.
“That plane wasn’t theirs, though,” I reminded him.
He lowered the binoculars and handed them back.
“We don’t know who they are,” he said. “Or who they represent.”
Something had drawn that aircraft to Klamath Falls, and then to where we had come. But its purpose was not anything we could worry about at the moment. We had bigger problems, literally, on the horizon.
“Fletch...”
“I see it.”
Lights. Lights that were moving along the road to the north. A collection of vehicles heading south.
Heading toward us.
“They can’t know we’re here,” Neil said. “They can’t see that trail from where they are.”
They were maybe seven or eight miles distant. Spotlights from the caravan were sweeping the open fields to the left and right of the highway.
“That’s not just a couple search parties,” Neil said.
“No,” I agreed.
It was clear from what we were seeing that Perkins had committed all of his resources to hunt us down in this direction. Our initial foray south had planted in his head that we were going to continue in that direction. We’d swung west now in search of water, but would they?
“They’re just groping,” Neil said. “Hoping to catch sight of us.”
“Yeah, well they’re groping awful close,” I told my friend.
We backed up a bit and crouched next to a small knot of splintered fir trees, using th
e dead stand as cover. There was almost no chance we could be spotted by them yet, but that was not as comforting as it should be.
“So now we have Perkins and some rogue military aircraft zeroing in on us,” Neil said. “I guess we pissed in everyone’s cornflakes.”
The aircraft was still an unknown, which, in our eyes, made it a threat until we could confirm otherwise. The force moving south along the highway was a definite known. One that we had to steer clear of.
It took the motorized posse ten minutes to reach the old maintenance station, nearly full darkness spread across the landscape now. The convoy stopped for a few minutes, flashlight beams sweeping the collapsed buildings.
“They’re not shooting,” Neil observed.
The patrol which had raced to where we’d ambushed their fellow fighters at the warehouse complex had fired wildly, performing an act of reconnaissance by gunfire. This much larger group wasn’t doing anything of the sort. To both of us, that meant one thing.
“Perkins is with them,” I said.
Neil nodded. For all the idiocy that the man possessed, he had moved an entire population from Yuma to Klamath Falls. That required force, but also planning.
“He’s listening to Sheryl and Bryce,” Neil said.
“Why Bryce?”
Sheryl Quincy had been a soldier before shedding that honor to become a turncoat in service of the Unified Government. She’d had training in combat tactics. But what made Perkins’ right-hand man as capable in Neil’s estimation?
“He was a PJ,” my friend said. “Air Force Para Rescue. Badass dudes. They can kill you or save your life—their choice.”
Neil looked to me as I processed what he had just shared.
“Judge him for joining Perkins,” he said. “Not for turning his back on the government that left all but a few elites to fend for themselves.”
Once more he was reading me, as no one else could. We couldn’t have been closer than if we’d been born brothers. What we’d faced before, and what we were facing now, had only solidified that bond.
“He still threw in with a maniac,” I reminded my friend.