Destroyer (The Bugging Out Series Book 9)

by Noah Mann

  “They’re turning,” I said.

  The aircraft was banking sharply right in a deliberate manner until it was pointed directly at us.

  “Gunny,” Mason said, holding out a hand.

  Below, Gunny Pompana, whose first name I’d learned was Zeke, tossed a pair of binoculars up to his commander. He brought them to his eyes and zeroed in on the approaching craft.

  “It’s a Cessna,” he said. “A Two Oh Six.”

  I wasn’t an expert on aircraft, but in my gut I knew I was looking at one of the planes Chris Beekman had salvaged from Ward Field after Dave Arndt and I had set out to scout as far as Klamath falls. And, also in said gut, I knew that the man himself would be piloting it.

  “It’s going to be upside down from the direction he’s coming,” Mason said, still focused in on the aircraft.

  I glanced at the large block lettering on the roof near our feet, blazing white against rusty yellow, and smiled.

  “If he can’t figure out what nodnaB means, I don’t want to be rescued by him,” I said.

  Less than a minute late the 206 buzzed right over our heads, then circled back and passed three more times, tipping its wings each time as we all waved madly at it. Then, for a few minutes, it orbited out over the lake before approaching again, slowing appreciably as it sailed above, something falling from the passenger side and landing fifty yards ahead on the track.

  “Kiplinger,” Gunny Pompana said.

  Lance Corporal Dennis Kiplinger hopped down and raced to where the object lay, retrieving it and bringing it up to Lt. Mason as the aircraft resumed orbiting just over the bay.

  “It has to be a message,” I said.

  “It is,” Mason confirmed, unwrapping a slip of paper from a light stick it was tied to. “Fletch, is that you? If so, give a crossed arms on our next pass. If you need a radio, have man next to you give crossed arms. If radio required, will return tomorrow and drop one. Remain on same track if possible once you are moving. Beekman says nowhere safe to land. Martin.”

  Martin...

  I looked to the aircraft and smiled. The man who’d led Bandon through its most trying times was riding shotgun with Beekman, serving as observer. As the 206 turned back toward us, both Mason and I held up crossed arms. It passed over once more, tipping its wings to acknowledge our reply, then gained altitude and headed north over the mountains.

  Mason looked to me, smiling, then faced his men and Heckerford from his perch atop the box car.

  “Bandon will be waiting for us,” he said.

  A cheer erupted, hugs being shared and backs being slapped. It was a moment of joy, but within it was a reality I now had to face—returning to Bandon meant sharing what had happened. And with whom.

  “Nathaniel,” I said, and Mason turned toward me. “I have to ask a favor.”

  “If I can make it happen, I will,” he said.

  “I believe you can,” I told him.

  When I was done he agreed, then moved among his men, speaking to each individually, finishing with the man driving us toward Bandon. When he was done he looked to me from the flat car and gave me a thumbs up.

  As simple as the request turned out to be, a sense of relief came over me. Our arrival in Bandon would be an event. My return would carry with it a combination of difficulties and responsibilities. One responsibility in particular. It was that which I was hoping to manage with Mason’s help.

  All that remained was for me to do what had to be done.

  Thirty Three

  The next day, ten miles north of where we’d been spotted by the aircraft from Bandon, it came again as we worked to repair a fifty-foot length of rails knocked askew by an old landslide. Work stopped as the same Cessna 206 circled, then slowed and flew low, dropping another object, this one slowed by a small parachute affixed to it. A few minutes later, after unwrapping the protective cushioning applied to the contents, we had a working radio.

  “You know them,” Mason said, passing the handheld unit to me.

  I turned the unit on and entered the frequency an attached note had specified.

  “Martin, do you copy?”

  I released the mic key and listened, waiting. The voice that replied was both welcome, and a surprise.

  “You’re late for dinner,” Elaine said.

  My eyes filled with tears, and I laughed softly before keying the radio again.

  “Did you keep some warm for me?”

  We exchanged small talk for a moment as the aircraft carrying my wife circled above, then I relayed the information about Dave Arndt’s fate. That terrible event covered, we moved on to the particulars of how we would manage to reach Bandon. She reported that Beekman had surveyed the tracks that lay ahead and we were good until Medford, Oregon. Trucks from Bandon would be waiting there for us. I told her of the injuries of Private White’s that would have to be treated upon our arrival in town, and, with Mason making a gesture to my own hand, I shared my own misfortune. She took the news well, but informed me I would be paying for any replacement wedding band. I said that was fair, as long as she sprung for a replacement finger.

  It was difficult to end our conversation, but she and Beekman had to return, and we had to get the train moving again. I ended the exchange asking her to kiss our daughter for me.

  “You could have talked longer,” Mason said. “There are extra batteries in the drop they made.”

  “It’s all right,” I said. “We have our whole lives to talk when I get back.”

  What I didn’t tell him was that, the longer we spoke, the harder it was to not tell her about Neil. That would have to wait, and I knew she would understand.

  * * *

  It took us three days to cover the hundred miles from our position north of Shasta Lake to Medford. Two trucks and a Humvee were waiting for us, with Martin, Schiavo, and Sergeant Hart, the medic bringing medication and fresh supplies so he and his Navy counterpart could begin prepping Private White’s leg wound for eventual surgery.

  “It’s damn good to see you, Fletch,” Martin said after the introductions were complete.

  “You, too,” I said, gesturing toward the now silent locomotive and the bearded man standing near it. “Go say hi before he loses it saying goodbye to his train.”

  Martin gave me a pat on the shoulder, leaving me with Schiavo. She had as much reason to greet Heckerford as her husband. Both had ridden with the man in Kansas. But, for some reason, she stayed with me, a concern about her.

  “Perkins,” she said, and I nodded. “Can’t say I’m sad to hear he’s gone.”

  “If anyone deserved it...”

  “Was it you?” Schiavo asked. “Did you take him out?”

  I hesitated, the line of her innocent question taking me by surprise. She seemed to notice the delay in my response, but I recovered as quickly as I could.

  “No,” I said, choosing a partly honest answer. “Someone else did.”

  She considered my answer for a moment, some wonder clearly bubbling beneath her reaction. But she didn’t press me on the oddity she’d rightly sensed. She simply let it be.

  “Well, whoever it was, they deserve a medal,” she said.

  I couldn’t disagree with that, though a medal truly seemed an inadequate expression of gratitude for what Neil Moore had done. Maybe for this one action, and the price he’d paid, it was. But there was so much more that my friend had done, both for the town, and for me.

  * * *

  We left Medford and drove north, turning toward the coast and passing through Camas Valley and Remote before nearing the place which had seemed a beacon to the Marines from Kansas, and, much earlier, to me in Montana. Eagle One, Bandon—what the place was called didn’t matter. What it had become did.

  It was where survivors had fought against all odds, had confronted enemies and Mother Nature, only to grow stronger with each test. When it ultimately was split into scattered settlements, the physical town would remain, but the spirit that made it flourish would be planted in multipl
e locales. I knew that, when it was presented to them, the new arrivals from Kansas would embrace the change.

  But that would come in time. As the vehicles turned into town and drove toward the hospital, I mentally prepared myself for what had to be done. For what I had to do.

  I owed my friend Neil nothing less.

  Part Five

  The Return

  Thirty Four

  I’d sworn Heckerford and Lt. Mason and his troops to secrecy in regards to Neil. Not because I didn’t want his story told, but because I had to be the one to tell it to those entitled to hear it.

  “The stitching isn’t bad,” Clay Genesee said. “The corpsman did all right.”

  “It wasn’t him,” I said, my gaze cast slightly away from the wound he was examining. “There was a family we stumbled upon. The father was a veterinarian.”

  Genesee stopped his gentle probing and looked to me, puzzled.

  “Why would the corpsman let a vet handle this?”

  I looked him in the eye and shook my head.

  “It was before the Marines showed up,” I told him.

  For a moment he just stared at me, trying to reconcile one particular aspect of what I’d said with what he understood about what I’d experienced. An understanding that was both right and wrong.

  Very wrong.

  “You said ‘we’,” Genesee said. “Dave was already dead, from what I was told.”

  He’d received a rudimentary briefing from Elaine after our radio contact north of Shasta Lake, with the particulars on incoming injuries requiring treatment. That information hadn’t included what I’d withheld for very specific reasons.

  “He was,” I confirmed. “But someone else wasn’t.”

  It took me ten minutes to share with him the story of Neil Moore, who’d died and come back and died again. He listened without saying a word, letting me talk until all that needed to be said was said.

  All but one thing.

  “Grace needs to hear this,” he told me.

  That had been what I’d planned to say in my very next breath, but he did so before I could, understanding the totality of the revelation instantly. I hadn’t expected resistance from him, nor any burst of jealousy over the man who’d been loved by Grace before she loved him. What he understood intrinsically, though, was that that love had never ended. It had only changed.

  “She deserves to know,” Genesee said, taking a moment to rebandage my hand. “She deserves to know now.”

  * * *

  Grace was tending to Private Ian White, cleaning his gunshot wound in preparation for surgery to remove some deeply embedded bullet fragments when her husband led me into the hospital’s second treatment room.

  “Did I hear correctly, Fletch?” Grace asked, smiling as she looked to me, fixing on my hand. “You lost your wedding ring?”

  She’d reduced the wound to a friendly ribbing, something to keep my reunion with her and all who’d worried about me on the positive side. It was a simple quip to lighten the moment.

  “Private White here got shot and didn’t lose anything, so I don’t know what your problem was,” she added, drawing a smile from the young Marine she was tending to.

  “Grace, Fletch needs to talk to you for a minute,” Genesee said.

  She nodded and kept working on Private White.

  “Of course,” she said. “Just let me debride the exit wound. Should be ten minutes.”

  Genesee stepped forward and gently slid the instrument tray aside as Grace looked up to him, puzzled.

  “I’ll finish up here,” Genesee said, managing a smile that was flavored with both concern and reassurance. “Go have your talk now.”

  Her gaze lingered on her husband for a moment, then shifted to me, an odd wisp of wondering in it. She snapped her gloves off and dropped them in a bin by the door.

  “Okay,” she said. “Break room, Fletch?”

  “That’ll be fine,” I told her.

  * * *

  Hot water sizzled in an electric kettle and a collection of teabags were arranged in a basket near a stack of mugs on the small room’s counter. Neither of us wanted a drink. Not that kind of drink, at least.

  “Fletch, have you seen Elaine yet?”

  “Briefly when we pulled in,” I told Grace as she stood next to a chair at the room’s only table.

  “Briefly,” she parroted.

  I nodded and sat down. She didn’t.

  “So you could be out of here right now with your wife and daughter and you choose to stick around so you can talk to me.”

  “Grace...”

  “What is it, Fletch?” she pressed me, seeming to sense something more than simple conversation was about to take place. “What’s going on?”

  I’d thought about how to tell her on the journey home. I’d run through mental scripts of the exchange we would have. Every word required was one I’d practiced a dozen times in my head.

  But all those words failed me.

  “Neil is dead,” I said.

  Her gaze skewed at me, head cocking slightly.

  “Right,” she said. “He’s been dead for years.”

  I shook my head and I saw the color drain from her face. She reached out and steadied herself on the back of the chair before her.

  “That wasn’t him,” I said. “He was alive the whole time.”

  She smiled oddly at me and shook her head.

  “Fletch, this is crazy. Why would you even...”

  I stood now and walked to her, taking her free hand in my unbandaged one.

  “He was alive, and I was with him,” I told her.

  “Was,” she repeated, her breaths stuttering, little gasps of disbelief escaping.

  Then, I told her. Within the first minute her knees went weak and I helped her into the chair and pulled mine close to face her. I’d spent ten minutes telling Genesee about all that had happened, but I sat with his wife for a half an hour, sharing every last detail. Answering every question she had. Reassuring her in every way I could.

  “He knew about you and Clay,” I said.

  “You told him?”

  I nodded and she squeezed my hand, the gesture one of comfort. She knew how difficult that had been for me.

  “Even knowing that, he wanted nothing more than to get back here,” I said. “He wanted to get back to you, to make sure you were all right.”

  She hadn’t cried at all. Not yet. But when I told her about his concern, her eyes began to glisten.

  “This is like a dream,” she said. “It’s like I’m floating.”

  “You’re in a bit of shock,” I said. “I was, too.”

  “But he was there for you,” Grace said. “In front of you.”

  “I’m so sorry, Grace.”

  She’d been robbed twice of having some final moments with the man she’d loved. And lost. It wasn’t fair. In many ways we’d become accustomed to the inequity of life in the blighted world, but some realities, such as this cruel one, still stung.

  “What was the last thing he said?” she asked. “You were with him, you said. Did he say anything?”

  “It didn’t make any sense,” I said. “Some name.”

  “What was the name?”

  “Johnny Tartek,” I said, recalling my friend’s final words.

  “The football player?” Grace asked, more curious than troubled.

  Johnny Tartek...

  It wasn’t a name from nowhere, I suddenly realized. It was a name from our collective past.

  “Neil said he took a hard hit from that kid in a high school football game,” Grace said.

  “That’s right,” I confirmed, more puzzled now than I’d been when the name was simply nonsense.

  “Why would he use his last breaths to tell you that name?” Grace wondered.

  Perhaps his dying mind was simply grasping back in time at memories, and that was what his madly firing synapses had dredged from deep within his fading consciousness. That was only conjecture, though, as likely as it wa
s to be accurate. The ultimate truth lay somewhere beyond my ability to grasp.

  “I don’t know,” I told Grace, offering the only truth I could right then. “I honestly don’t know.”

  Thirty Five

  What to do with those followers of Perkins who might remain in the area of Klamath Falls was dealt with in a meeting of the town council called the day after my return to Bandon. There was discussion about doing nothing, which centered around the hostility expressed toward our town, as well as the not insignificant fact that they had killed both Dave Arndt and Neil Moore.

  “Let them rot,” was Stu Parker’s suggestion.

  The Council’s newest member, elected just weeks prior to our fateful scouting mission to Klamath Falls, was unequivocal in his harshness. He’d been a close friend of fellow Council member Dave Arndt, a man who would now be replaced on the governing body. That Stu was letting emotion color his judgment in the matter up for discussion did not surprise me.

  That much of the remaining Council entertained the idea did.

  “Fletch...”

  Hannah Morse was the one who sought my input. I’d been asked to sit in on the meeting to provide any insight into the wayward colony of survivors from Yuma. I looked to her, then to Stu, then to Joel Matthews. Finally, I set my gaze on my wife, Mayor of Bandon and head of the now short-staffed Town Council. Two chairs were empty at the table, though—that which would have been occupied by Dave Arndt, and the seat next to my wife which would normally be filled by Schiavo as military advisor to the Council. She had found herself assisting Lieutenants Paul Lorenzen and Nathaniel Mason begin discussions on what should be done with the Marines who had joined their Army counterparts in our now peaceful town.

  Peaceful at the moment, I reminded myself. Had Perkins had his way, we would be in the fight for our lives in the coming weeks and months. That had not come to pass, though the people he’d prepared for just such a battle still existed in some numbers. What their intentions and motivations were at this very moment was impossible to know.