Bugging Out Read online

  Bugging Out

  Book One

  Noah Mann

  Copyright

  © 2014 Noah Mann

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, events, locations, or situations is coincidental.

  Table of Contents

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty One

  Twenty Two

  Twenty Three

  Twenty Four

  Twenty Five

  Twenty Six

  Twenty Seven

  Twenty Eight

  Twenty Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty One

  Thirty Two

  Thirty Three

  Thirty Four

  Thirty Five

  Thirty Six

  Thirty Seven

  Thirty Eight

  Thirty Nine

  Forty

  Forty One

  Forty Two

  Thank You

  About The Author

  Part One

  The Blight

  One

  Just south of Arlee, at the checkpoint on Route 93, I watched two soldiers from the Montana National Guard shoot a man who refused to disarm after stepping from his ten-year-old pickup.

  I saw it from three cars back, my window rolled down, enough of the exchange drifting past the idling engines ahead that it was clear the man, who looked about fifty and was as anonymous to me as his killers, had reached some tipping point. One too many roadblocks, it might have been, having to exit his vehicle and have his shoes checked for spores, his tires sprayed down with chemicals the public had been assured were harmless to all but the invasive blight the concoction was designed to eradicate. Or one too many times having to surrender his sidearm, worn open instead of concealed, a practice that was either a longstanding preference of the man, or a statement of defiance.

  He could just as easily have kept his weapon concealed beneath a coat or untucked shirt, as mine was while the incident unfolded, and the part-time soldiers would have never exerted the authority they’d been granted to ‘Temporarily Disarm Travelers of Visible Weapons’ while operating the checkpoint. The edict had come down from some federal bureaucracy with exactly that wording, and was stated explicitly on signage visible as one approached any one of the dozen checkpoints I’d passed through in the west of Montana, sometimes on a daily basis. Checkpoints that dotted the whole of the nation now like way stations where freedoms the populace had taken for granted were suspended. Most surrendered their rights willingly in the belief they did so for some greater good.

  The man near Arlee was no longer one of those people.

  He became the immovable object standing against the unstoppable force, a collision that ended with the FDA agent supervising the checkpoint screaming at the Guardsmen to ‘secure the troublemaker’.

  Secure the troublemaker...

  They moved toward him, he reached for his pistol, rifle shots cracked sharp, and the man went down. Drivers in their cars ducked down, terrified. I didn’t. I should have, but I didn’t. I couldn’t. The event held me rapt. Playing out like some slow motion human tragedy, lifeblood spilling from the man and puddling on the dirty shoulder of the road beneath the endless blue summer sky.

  It was terrible enough to witness that, but what happened next cemented the belief I held, one that had been building over the past several weeks, that things had fundamentally changed. The benign distrust and disgust that had been simmering between citizen and government for more than a decade now manifested itself as something not external to the power structure, but within it. The organs of the state were rotting from the inside. I knew this for certain when one of the Guardsmen, after standing over the body of the man he’d shot, turned to face the FDA official and leveled his rifle at the incredulous man, eyeing him with withering contempt before emptying what remained in his magazine into him. The functionary from Washington spun and crumpled onto the hot asphalt as other Guardsmen rushed their comrade, taking him to ground in what looked a rugby scrum decked in woodland camouflage.

  Screams rose. The killer Guardsman broke free of the attempt to subdue him, abandoning his empty rifle and drawing his sidearm. He chambered a round and waved the pistol at his fellow Guardsmen. Young men who were most likely friends. Possibly even close friends. They held back and tried to talk him out of his weapon as a National Guard lieutenant raced toward the scene from the checkpoint’s command post some hundred yards up the road.

  The killer Guardsman, who news reports would later identify as twenty-four year old Kyle Ames of Bozeman, saw his superior rushing his way, drawing his own sidearm, screaming at the young man to drop his weapon. But he didn’t. In an act that might have been the most honorable thing I witnessed while stopped at that checkpoint, Kyle Ames raised his pistol and put it under his chin and pulled the trigger.

  The maelstrom of screams that began with the first volley of shots spun loud and desperate now, from cars where travelers huddled in fear, and from uniformed young men and women paralyzed by what they’d just witnessed. Orders were shouted. Radio calls went out. It was chaos.

  But in my pickup, some sense of calm filled me. I didn’t know how to explain it right then, but in the days and weeks that followed I was able to think back to that moment and began to realize that that I’d been, oddly, fortunate to witness what I had. In an instant, there, on that lonely stretch of highway, my eyes were opened to accept what was going to come. Had I not seen that, up close, without the filter of a television screen and talking head journalist between myself and the truth, I might never have believed what an old friend, my oldest friend, was going to tell me after summer turned to fall.

  Two

  My foreman stood with me in my office and stared at the TV mounted to the wall, the both of us quietly incredulous at the images being broadcast, the same on every channel, talking heads trying to give context to what the audience was seeing. None was needed. What had happened was as plain as day. The amateur video told the story.

  “Can you believe this?” Marco asked, expecting no answer. “This is insane.”

  The truth was, I could believe it. It had been two months since the shooting at Arlee. There’d been other incidents around the nation, if reports sneaking past official attempts to quash them were accurate. There were no reasons to think they weren’t. Especially for me. I’d seen it happen.

  And now it was happening again. On a larger scale.

  “How could they do that?” Marco asked. The question, this time, seemed directed to some higher power. One that might, in some infinite wisdom, be able to explain, if not justify, what we were seeing.

  And what we were seeing was clear. Horrific and clear. Recorded from an Arizona highway by a motorist stopped to document a glorious sunset on his phone’s camera, the twenty second video began with two bright spots against the darkening sky, one small, one large, both moving fast and low. Aircraft, it was clear, the larger one seeming to be leading the smaller one. Or, what it was in actuality, the smaller one chasing the larger one.

  Hunting it.

  An exclamation from the man recording the incident preceded a stream of hot white specks spewing from the smaller aircraft. Then a curse from him as he realized that he was watching cannon fire f
rom an Air Force fighter slice into a passenger jet, sending the larger plane into a wobbling descent as a wing sheared off, trailing fire, the whole of the fuselage disappearing behind a hill where a fireball bubbled skyward just before the sickly crack of an explosion reached the cameraman.

  Every station was playing the footage detailing the final seconds of Flight 82. The final seconds of the one hundred and ninety souls aboard. People who had been trapped on the wrong side of the southern border when it was closed a week earlier. American citizens just wanting to get home to their families. Unrest spreading north from Central America had forced them into a desperate act, with the full cooperation of the flight crew. The story being reported indicated that the veteran pilots had filed a flight plan from Mexico City to Jamaica, but shortly after takeoff deviated from that and flew north toward the United States. Radio communications with the plane revealed that neither pilots nor passengers believed they would face any serious resistance to their return.

  They were wrong.

  “This is all kinds of crazy,” Marco commented, shaking his head, as angry as I’d ever seen him. The kind of anger that couldn’t be directed at any one thing, or person.

  Things had gotten worse. Worse than checkpoints where citizens were shot down for doing nothing more than going about their daily lives. Now they were being shot out of the sky. Terrorists could fly jets into buildings, but Americans who just wanted to come home were dropped like some sort of enemy invaders.

  Marco was right to be incredulous at everything. The checkpoints. The federal raids on warehouses holding ‘unapproved imports’. Corn chips and cereal, for God’s sake. They were sending in SWAT teams to confiscate snacks and breakfast foods simply because a single ingredient in them had come from a country where the blight had later set in.

  It was hard to believe this had all started almost a year ago in a potato field in Poland, a hundred miles from the capital, Warsaw, when a farmer saw a spot on a leaf. A small patch of grey that might have been a gathering of dust clinging to morning dew.

  But it wasn’t.

  The farmer had first noticed the blemish when it was no larger than the tip of his thumb. He paid it no great attention, and only recalled that he’d seen it at all a week later when his entire crop, nearly a hundred acres, was little more than a wilting landscape of grey death, rotting and reeking. Local officials from the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development examined the field, took samples, but could offer no explanations to the farmer as to why a field that had been in his family for nearly two hundred years seemed suddenly afflicted with some terrible disease. They promised to look into it further, but had little more they could offer him beyond sympathy and vague assurances.

  One of the visiting officials left the site and traveled 30 miles to his next appointment. A routine stop at another farm where cabbage grew as far as the eye could see. He was there to deliver an inspection report to the farmer approving his use of a new automated bundling and baling system. He’d known the man for several years and on this visit spent an hour talking with him as they strolled between the rows of bright green cabbage, microscopic spores shedding from the official’s boots with each step he took.

  A week later not a head of cabbage was left viable on the farm. Ten days after that, not a single crop of any foodstuff within 100 miles was anything more than a pile of noxious organic waste. Government functionaries from Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, and Lithuania struggled to understand the relentless disease spreading across their lands. They tallied the damage in lost product and increased cost of imported food for their population. But, to a person, every single brain the affected governments were throwing at the problem insisted the agricultural malady could, and would, be alleviated.

  Then the pine trees began dying.

  The story of how the blight had been discovered, and how it had spread in less than a year across Europe and Asia, finally arriving in South America, had been blasted across news outlets with the urgency of some approaching asteroid. One savvy network had even branded the unknown disease ‘The Blight’ in a stroke of marketing genius. And, with every story that told of the consequences a worldwide spread of the affliction would bring, equally vehement reassurances came from governments near and far. The United States, in particular, provided expert upon expert to detail the steps being taken to contain, identify, and, eventually, eradicate the blight.

  But experts had no sway over the effects already being felt. Food prices had skyrocketed. And not just things that grew in the ground or on trees. The steaks people loved to hear and smell sizzling on their grills had legs before slaughter, and wandered fields chewing on grasses that, in many countries, were now dead or dying. Beef, chicken, pork—all depended in some form on plant life to survive and thrive. In countries where the blight had struck, creatures, be they domesticated for food or wild for hunting, were dying.

  Maybe, though, the worst byproduct of the blight was fear. Fear that was edging toward panic. Governments were shooting their own citizens out of dazzling skies, and individuals, too, were taking extreme measures. Farmers across the nation’s grain belt stood guard 24/7 to keep anyone from approaching their fields, despite leaked word that the primary way the blight’s infectious spores were transmitted was on the feet of birds. All it would take was a flock of geese sunning themselves in some dying field in Brazil and then winging north to Canada, stopping along the way to eat, rest, and spread the death before continuing on their migration.

  “I don’t see a good ending to all this,” Marco said.

  “Neither do I,” I said, the image of the crash’s fireball bright on the screen.

  The phone on my desk buzzed. I snatched it up and stayed focused on the television. “Yeah?”

  “There’s a man here to see you,” my assistant, Marjorie, said.

  “Do I have an appointment I forgot?”

  “No.”

  “Who is it?”

  For just an instant she hesitated. “He didn’t say. I mean...he wouldn’t say.”

  I took the remote in hand and muted the TV. “Okay. Send him in.”

  “That’s another odd thing,” Marjorie said. “He said for you to meet him out front. He didn’t want to wait inside.”

  “Okay. I’ll be out in a minute.” I hung up and looked again to the TV screen, Marco shaking his head as the fireball rose against a darkening sky, lives ended in high-definition.

  “Christ,” he said in a soft exclamation.

  “Yeah,” was all I could say as I headed out.

  * * *

  Son of a bitch...

  That was my first reaction when I saw the man pacing on the sidewalk in front of my building. I gave it voice with a slight degree less coarseness.

  “I’ll be damned.”

  Neil Moore heard my voice and turned.

  “How are you, Fletch?” he asked, choosing, as he had for the past two decades, the truncated nick over my given name. I doubted he’d ever spoken the words Eric Fletcher since I’d know him.

  “I thought you were dead,” I said. It had been six months since I’d heard a peep from him. “Or worse.”

  Neil snickered, the expression of humor light and tired, some effort seeming necessary to manage it. “What’s worse than dead?”

  “I’d say D.C., but you’ve been there.”

  It had been a point of joking contention between us, our friendship stretching back some twenty years to days charging tackling dummies at U.S. Grant High while Coach Macklin screamed at us. There we’d learned to hit hard, and to take a hit. We also learned how to play hard. And, most importantly, to work hard. Each of us had done just that, me skipping the books and frat parties to build a contracting business from the ground up, while Neil aced two degrees at college and bulled his way through department bureaucracy to a position of near-importance at the State Department.

  “What are you doing back in Missoula?”

  He thought for a moment, as if searching for the right answer. Or any answer
at all. In the end he skipped replying altogether and posed his own question.

  “You got a few minutes you can spare for me?”

  It was an absurd question, I knew. I would always make time for Neil. Still, it was nearly as absurd that my friend would show up unannounced. A simple phone call prior to his arriving would have allowed plans to be made, as we had during past visits to the city we grew up in.

  “You know I do,” I said, sensing something in the silence that followed. Something beyond hesitation. “Neil, is everything all right?”

  “Remember the burger place where you spilled your shake on Mary?”

  Mary Derek. I hadn’t thought of her in over a dozen years. Neil had been there, and had seen the apoplectic mess that Mary became when the cup of soupy vanilla tipped over on her lap. He knew the name of the Burger place—Astro Burgers—but didn’t say it. He was being cryptic. Intentionally, it seemed.

  “Yeah,” I said. Behind me, gravel trucks rolled past on their way to a construction site.

  Neil looked up the street in one direction, then the other, before fixing his gaze upon me. A wariness swirled about him. Something that wasn’t quite fear. But wasn’t far from it, either.

  “Meet me there as soon as you can,” Neil said, then turned and walked quickly up the block, turning the corner without as much as glance back in my direction.

  * * *

  Neil was waiting, sitting at one of the outside tables, ignoring the season, his jacket zipped to his neck. He stood when I stepped from my pickup truck in the adjacent parking lot and approached.

  “I’m sorry about the evasiveness back there,” he said to me, then pulled me into a bro hug and thumped my back before easing away. “It really is good to see you.”

  The statement felt truer than anything I’d heard him say. Ever.

  “Yeah,” I told him, sharing the sentiment. “Neil, what’s going on?”

  He sat at the table and I slid onto the bench across from him. He’d ordered a cup of coffee from the takeout window before I arrived and now wrapped his hands around it, staring at the wisp of steam swirling upward from the drink.