by Noah Mann
“Follow me,” he said, shoving the door open and then, without entering, turning left and walking along the rear wall of the structure. “Stay close to the building.”
I did as he was, our footsteps trampling the low drift of snow against the wall, but leaving no discernable trail. When we were beyond the corner of the building Del led us right, out of view, and down a narrow passage between a series of stores, the walkway here covered, the only trail behind us a non-specific mix of dirty slush mixed in with soil scattered from dead planter boxes. Someone had foraged here, hoping for some greenery to eat. Desperation, plain and simple.
Where the passage ended and spilled onto another street we paused, checking for any sign of life. There was none, but in the distance we could plainly hear shouts, and directives, those chasing us having found our back way out of the office building. The way clear, we ran across the street, stutter-stepping through a mix of tire tracks left by the patrol which had taken the husband and father from Lorraine and Alicia. On the far side we dashed through another mix of businesses, then past an apartment house and between what had once been quaint, compact houses.
“We have to get to the river,” I said.
“My thought exactly,” Del agreed.
The gunfire ahead of us turned that choice of destination to folly.
“Where now?”
Del considered my question. We were stuck between houses. People were shouting behind, from where we’d come. Ahead, some blocking force of armed individuals had taken up a position. Left was too deep into town. To the right was the rail yard, too wide open for a dash to freedom right then.
“There,” Del said, pointing to a pair of rundown houses backing up to the rail yard. “That one.”
I followed him across the narrow street, leaving a trail of tracks as we hurried to the house on the right.
“On the porch roof,” Del directed me, and I climbed onto the porch railing, then hauled myself onto the small roof, an attic window just behind, glass and frame twisted off its mount.
“Here,” Del passed his rifle up, but did not follow, turning instead back toward the front yard we’d just crossed.
A chorus of urgent voices grew. Closing in. To the west, between us and the river, more shots were fired, wild bursts, several rounds striking a power pole on the street corner. Wood splinters showered down.
“Get up here,” I said, reaching down to Del, his plan, to seek cover in the attic, apparent now.
But he was already heading back to the street, retracing our steps, something long in his hand. A tree branch, dead and colorless, snapped from a leaning birch in the yard, itself nothing more than a dried length of wood waiting to topple. All the way to the far side of the street he ran, disappearing between the buildings, before emerging a moment later, dragging the branch behind, sweeping it back and forth, carving precise textures in the snow we’d trampled. From my vantage point above, I could see what he was doing—creating new, tiny drifts to match what already existed on the unused roadway, masking the trail we’d left. He wielded the branch like a sculptor, backing toward the house, erasing his own tracks until he stood below again.
“Come on!” I urged him.
More shots cracked close. And the voices, urgent before, were now near frantic, like some pack of dogs closing in on their prey. Del tossed the branch back beneath the tree and climbed onto the porch railing. I took his hand and pulled him up, both of us slipping g through the small attic window and into the dark space. The last through, I passed our weapons to Del and pulled the attic window until it was secure.
As soon as it clicked into place, a half dozen men appeared across the street, staring at the ground. I eased back from the filthy window and did nothing but breathe for the next ten minutes.
Twenty Six
“They’re gone,” I whispered to Del as I watched from our attic perch, my face to one side of the window, peering out at an angle I hoped would obscure me. Hoped.
“About damn time,” he said quietly.
The half dozen men had turned to two dozen, all pouring over the area where we’d disappeared, any hope of finding remnants of our tracks ended after the first few ran about wildly, charging across lawns and into houses. Including the one in which we had secreted ourselves. For five minutes they’d banged around below before bashing through the attic access with the butts of their rifles. At least one had poked his head into the space and shined a light back and forth, but Del and I were tucked away behind piles of insulation and a low support wall for a dormer at the rear of the house. When they finally left the house we could hear them even down the block, doing a similar number on the abandoned houses there.
Now, hours later, with night falling, it seemed that they had either moved on to seek us elsewhere, or given up on the search entirely. Still, we hadn’t moved more than a few feet inside the cramped attic, crawling on hands and knees when shifting positions. Waiting. For what, we hadn’t yet decided.
“Are we reevaluating this visit to Whitefish yet?” I asked, joking
“I don’t know about you, but I am going to write a strongly worded letter to their chamber of commerce.”
I chuckled. Darkness was settling beyond the window. Minus the minor glow of distant stars and the sliver of moon, it would be total. The new world, nearly powerless, was a stargazer’s delight. It gave me a chance to take in the blackening heavens through the window. Time to take a breath. Time to think.
The latter was not entirely a pleasant endeavor.
“What do you think they did with the man?”
Del looked at me, just enough light left to make it plain I suspected an answer to my own question.
“Are you wondering why they didn’t just work him to death?”
I nodded. It was a half lie masquerading as agreement.
“You want me to say it so you can just stop thinking it?”
What I’d seen in Eureka, next to the makeshift fire on the sidewalk, was at the forefront of what I considered the truth here to be. The terrible, terrible truth.
Still, I couldn’t say it.
“Work a man to death,” Del began, “you work the meat right off of him.”
“These people are cattle to Major Layton,” I said, hating the man I’d never laid eyes upon.
“And slaves,” Del reminded me. “That’s why he needs people here—to build that bunker for whatever that ‘cleansing’ bullshit is.”
I nodded. But only briefly. The spot of harsh white on the underside of the roof beyond Del drew my attention away from our exchange. The soft rumble building beneath and all around then pulled Del away from the subject we’d danced around.
“What the hell is that?” I asked.
“That sounds like...”
He didn’t have to finish. Together we began to move, crawling across the joists until we were at the rear attic dormer, a window set into it, blazing white light spilling through. We eased close to the portal, making sure there was no one outside and below to spot us, and looked out across the rail yard to a trio of locomotives dragging a long train of tank cars to a stop well past the Baker Avenue Bridge.
“Interesting,” Del said. “Any ideas on what to make of this?”
I wondered that myself as we watched groups of men approach the lead locomotive, greeting others as they disembarked from the still rumbling diesel behemoth.
“Food oils are transported by train,” I suggested. “Corn, canola.”
It was a halfhearted offering at best, and convinced neither of us. Del took out his binoculars and dialed in the scene at the lead locomotive. I did the same with my more compact pair.
“Smiling faces,” Del observed. “Handshakes, back slapping.”
I saw it, too. But I also saw something else. Approaching from the east.
“Three vehicles coming,” I said.
Del shifted his view and watched with me as the trio of cars, not pickups or SUVs, sped toward the head of the train, bright rooster tails of snow kicked
up in their wake. As they neared the locomotive, all attention of those already there turned to the new arrivals. Each car stopped, a mix of men and women exiting, all armed.
All but one.
“Hello, Major Layton,” Del said softly.
The unarmed man strode directly toward the locomotive crew and greeted them warmly. He wore no sign proclaiming his name or rank, just a dark brown parka and a mile-wide smile. But all about him screamed authority. His gait. The deference paid to him by those near. He was someone special to these people, and, from what we’d gleaned, only one man fit that description.
“You’d think these guys just delivered the Stanley Cup to their hometown mayor,” I said.
“They did something right, that’s for sure.”
The love fest at the front of the train ended, Layton and his entourage walking back along the track, past the locomotives, to the first of the tank cars. Flashlights came on and swept across the numbering on the bulbous carrier.
“Any idea what the numbers mean?” Del asked.
“None,” I answered. “I bet they know.”
Layton and his people continued back several cars, giving each a quick look, before congregating again. They talked for several minutes, the leader making a few hand gestures, toward the lake, I thought, or beyond. Then he shook hands again and returned to his car, which pulled fast away, the other two that had come with it departing as well. The train crew and those who had greeted them on foot walked together back to the lead engine and continued their conversation.
I lowered my binoculars, as did Del, the both of us looking to the other.
“We should be able to make it out of here when it’s full dark,” he said, that condition probably less than ten minutes away.
“Yeah,” I concurred, but without much enthusiasm.
We had to leave. If the chance presented itself, it was the smart move to get out of Whitefish and back to our homes. But, at the moment, all I felt, all both of us felt, was that we’d come to this place seeking answers, but would be leaving with even more unanswered questions.
Twenty Seven
We skirted the bank of the iced-over river and worked our way north from Whitefish, hugging the western shore of the lake, stopping wherever cover existed again and again. We heard occasional patrols nearby as far north as Dog Bay, just outside of town. Beyond that the night’s light wind was the only sound.
We reached our homes after midnight, Del trudging off to his along the path through the dead woods. I returned to my refuge with the intention of sleeping. The two way trip to Whitefish, and the exertion, both physical and mental, that we’d endured while there, felt as though it had sapped my energy down to the bone. All I wanted was to collapse.
But I didn’t. I couldn’t. Thoughts of Whitefish, of its people, or what its people had once been, grated on me. I was boiling down the entirety of what the blight had wrought upon the whole of the world to this one town in northern Montana. How many other Whitefishes were out there? How many places of horror? How many Major Laytons?
That was what scared me, truly. If somehow I survived, if the plants and the trees and the crops staged a slow comeback at some point, would places like Whitefish be all there was to seek beyond my refuge? Would all gatherings of people have devolved into a similar state?
If that turned out to be the case, then surviving would seem a grand folly.
I couldn’t sleep. Not yet. Not with those cheery musings on my mind. I sat in my great room, the hearth cold, as was the space around it. The warmth I’d know this night waited in my bedroom, the electric blanket I’d had to kill for wired exactly as Del’s was. The chill, though, did not drive me from my place on the couch. I watched my breath, misty puffs in the cold, then reached for the remote and turned the TV on.
The Denver station spat static at me. Electronic noise. But, in that, I saw hope. I was reminded of hope. People there had broken through the Red Signal. They’d persevered. Shined a light on what was happening. For a while.
But now they were gone. Piled in a heap with their loved ones by the side of the road, maybe. I’d seen that. Or, reduced to nourishment for the stronger. I’d seen that, too.
“Enough,” I said aloud, to myself, for myself.
I was going to a dark place. Because I’d just come from a dark place. Just escaped from a dark place.
This was my home. My refuge. There was no darkness here.
“No darkness,” I repeated my own thinking. “No darkness.”
A few minutes later, slumped into the deep cushions of my couch, sleep took me, to its own dark place.
* * *
“—so she just walked into the fire.”
I was dreaming. A hearing dream, with no images to fill the canvas of my drowsing mind.
“She never twitched, never flinched.”
Where was the vision being described? Why was I not—
“The fire embraced her and took her and she let it.”
My eyes opened, leaving no dream behind, because there had been none. There had only been what I saw before me on the television screen—the near hollow shell of a man staring at me from the anchor desk in Denver.
“She set the fire, and let it take her.”
Lights flickered behind the man. The image of him fuzzed, then stabilized. Power on his end was tenuous, it seemed, but he was coming through. The station was broadcasting again, monitors on the wall behind and above him all static but one, a solid red rectangle filling it.
“She wouldn’t go with me,” the man said, his voice seeming faint, the small microphone laying on the desk before him too distant for perfect clarity. “I wanted to go a different way.”
I lifted myself from where I’d tilted onto the couch when falling asleep, sitting now to watch the man, wishing there was some way to reach Del quickly. To have him join me. But the age of instant, ubiquitous communication was past. There was no DVR to record this broadcast. Leaving to get my friend might only result in the both of us returning to find static again. I had to stay, and watch.
Then I realized it—I might be the only one seeing this.
“I worked here,” the man said, letting his gaze play over parts of the studio the camera did not reveal. He lifted an emaciated arm, sleeve of a coat seeming to hang on bone alone, and pointed up to his right. “Over there, in the control room.”
He smiled. Not just some weak expression to match his physical state, but a true, beaming smile filled with memory and happiness and longing.
“Right up there,” he said, his hand coming down to join the other still hidden beneath the desk. “You can run this whole place from right there. Turn the cameras on and come down here and pretend you’re Jim Winters.”
Jim Winters...
I wondered where he was. A man I’d never met, didn’t know, but who became, with his colleagues, narrators of the world beyond my refuge as it descended into the abyss.
“Jim was a good guy,” the man said.
Was...
This man, did he have some knowledge of Jim Winters’ fate? Or was his choice of verbiage just the norm now. Everyone ‘was’. There were few who were still ‘is’. Past tense ruled the new world.
“He was at our wedding,” the man said, no trace of the grand smile he’d flashed remaining. No wistful hint of it. He looked straight into the camera. Right at me. “She chose fire. I don’t know why. I wish she’d gone with me. It won’t be long now.”
That was when the man brought his other hand out from beneath the desk and lifted it to look at the blood dripping from his wrist.
“No...” I said at the sight.
He stood from the chair behind the anchor desk and steadied himself with his good hand atop the flat surface. Blood soaked the left sleeve of his dark coat, the hand at the end looking as if it had been dipped in red paint.
“She should have come with me,” the man said. “No pain. No pain at all.”
He stepped away from the desk, letting go of his handhold, an
d wobbled off camera, still speaking, the microphone registering nothing but wispy mumbles as the distance increased. I stared at the screen, waiting for the stranger to reappear, but he didn’t. For the next two days I watched the station on and off, until, in the afternoon on a Friday, the lights in the studio dimmed and the broadcast went to static. Likely the generator powering the station had run out of fuel, sputtering to a stop. How the man had managed to get the generator and the station up and running in his condition was almost miraculous.
Determination was how, I knew. His overriding need to make some last statement. A valediction breathed out to a world mostly gone, with no certainty that it would be known.
That was one of the true horrors the blight had wrought. Where a big enough rock dropping from space would have made everyone’s exit from this life mostly comparable, this slow motion unraveling of humanity, often one soul at a time, seemed only to hint at what lay ahead for those who were still hanging on.
What sort of hell had the woman this man spoke of, presumably his wife, endured to bring her to a place where in immolation she saw peace and release.
Hell on earth was real. I wanted to tell myself things were going to get better. But I couldn’t.
A few days after what I watched on the Denver station, Del noticed me staring off and asked what my brain was chewing on. I hadn’t told him of what I’d seen, and I crafted an innocuous lie to mask what I was really thinking—how I would end my life if I found myself in a place, a state of being, known by the man in Denver and untold numbers of others, anonymous to me, and to history.
Part Four
Maelstrom
Twenty Eight
Spring whimpered into the north of the state, colorless and cold, drenching rains replacing bouts of heavy snow that had kept Del and me from doing much of anything other than popping in on each other two or three times a week. There’d been no more treks to Whitefish, and only a few hikes longer than a mile or two, mostly to scout houses and cabins between us and town, several of those that were easily accessible by road showing traps set similar to what Del had found at Eddie Martin’s getaway. The ones we could we disarmed, taking the TNT with us. Others, though, remained as dangerous as we’d found them, but, to date, no blast had echoed through the valley. No wayward refugee, from Whitefish or elsewhere, had stumbled upon the empty homes.