Eagle One Read online

  Eagle One

  The Bugging Out Series

  Book Two

  Noah Mann

  Copyright

  © 2014 Noah Mann

  Published by Schmuck & Underwood

  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.

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  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  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

  Forty Three

  Forty Four

  Forty Five

  Forty Six

  Forty Seven

  Forty Eight

  Thank You

  About The Author

  Prologue

  I dreamed of things green.

  Leaves. Grass. Avocados. Anything even remotely bearing that soothing shade. That hue of the old world.

  I never set out to sample such things when sleep took hold. It simply happened. My mind, free of the real, let me slip back, back, back. To a time when I walked barefoot upon cool grass. Sat in the shade of a tree spread wide above me. Watched lush pines and firs bend in autumn winds.

  Blue had once been my favorite color. No more.

  Green...

  Each dream of the planet alive came pleasant and warm. The sensations filled me as I slept. I heard sounds. Dogs barking. Crows screeching. The rhythmic stomping of horse hooves on dusty earth. I smelled summer. And winter. The fresh dampness of rain dripping from the broad leaves of oaks. The wafting scent of a Christmas tree in the corner of my living room. Spinach cooking on the stove. The pungent bite of cilantro.

  All things good. All things alive. Things that thrived on the green earth.

  I did not dream of the thing that had robbed me of this color. That had stolen it from the wider world. The blight found no quarter in my sleep. It had come, exploding from its appearance in a Polish farm field more than a year ago, spreading in all directions. Crossing oceans. Relentless as it destroyed every plant. Every tree. Every weed. And with them, all things that depended upon them for sustenance. For survival. Birds. Fish. Animals.

  Humanity.

  Shimmering deep pools of glacial lakes filled my head in the hours before dawn. Moss crept toward the shore. Lichen clung to jagged rocks. The Aurora shimmered green in the sky above. These were things I dreamed of. I suffered no nightmares in my sleep.

  Those were plentiful when I was wide awake.

  Part One

  A New World

  One

  We heard the screams four miles from my refuge.

  The second real snow of the season was threatening. You could feel it in the air. As Del said to me once, people had lost the ability to sense things like changes in the weather. He had been able to sense far more than things meteorological. I missed him.

  Which made Neil’s presence all the more comforting. I was no longer alone. Beyond that, his arrival nearly a month earlier, with Grace and her daughter, affirmed something Neil had said to me before the blight struck, before the Red Signal, before the world that was became what it was now—there was hope. People, good people, could survive.

  Among them, though, there was a darkness. A cancer on what some called humanity. I’d seen it in Whitefish. In the dying eyes of Major Layton. And we were hearing it, rolling up the slope of the hill from a collection of old mining shacks long abandoned.

  “Is that a woman?” Neil asked, instantly worried.

  I watched him glance behind, up the slope. Hours behind us, Grace and Krista were safe at my refuge.

  “A woman,” I said. “And a man.”

  The cries rose from more than one. More than two, even. I thought I could make out three distinct voices calling out in terror. I looked to Neil, his tension dialed back down. It could not be Grace and Krista. But it was someone. Some people. Human beings. And they were being hurt.

  Without any discussion we aimed ourselves at the sound and advanced, weapons ready. I carried my suppressed AR, and Neil a semi-auto Benelli 12 gauge, pistols on both our hips. Neil favored a plain Smith & Wesson .44 magnum, stainless, six shots of heavy lead ready to drop anything dumb or desperate enough to present a threat. I still carried my Springfield 1911. But beyond the armament, we had the will. Neil knew I had killed. I suspected that he had as well, though he’d still not detailed his journey from back east to my Montana hideaway. He’d simply told me that he wasn’t ready to relive what he’d seen, and what he’d done. I could see it in him, though. He’d not come through unscathed.

  Nearing the jumble of old mining shacks, we heard what neither of us wanted to—silence. The screams were gone. We stopped on a low rock outcropping, the leaning and weathered shacks partially visible below us past the naked trees, old timber frames sagging, roofs marked by holes.

  Through one of those openings, the first wisps of smoke were rising from a small fire within. One set for warmth. Or for other obvious and hideous purposes.

  “We don’t have to involve ourselves in this,” I said. “Whatever it is.”

  “We both know what it is.”

  Neil was right. But we still could back away and return to the safety of my refuge. Whoever was down there was unaware of our presence. They would likely soon finish what they were doing and move on.

  And do again what they were, down there inside those four decrepit walls. To someone else.

  “You’ve involved yourself before,” Neil reminded me.

  I had. Sharing the story of Layton, and Whitefish, and Del, had been partly cathartic, and partly instructive. Neil deserved to know what had happened. What I’d made happen. So he was right, I’d stepped in before. To stop something.

  With just a moment’s silent look between us, I knew I’d be doing so again.

  We crept down the slope to a staggered line of trees, their grey bark hanging like scabs, colorless and cracking. Neil shifted left while I followed a gentle arc around the shacks until the weathered door of the one in question was in view. I looked and saw Neil in position at the rear. He gave me a thumbs up and I raised my AR, laying the sight’s orange reticle on the entrance to the ramshackle structure.

  “Come out!” I shouted, most of my body hidden behind a wide old pine. “With your hands empty! Now!”

  There was no response. No sound at all. Just the hint of a low fire crackling within, its greyish ribbon of smoke rising through the roof and dissipating among the barren limbs above.

  “If you need motivation, we can provide some!” I threatened.

  A few seconds later, a rifle barrel poking through the shuttered window gave us our answer. I’d been shot before, and had no desire to r
epeat that event, nor the agony that followed. I adjusted my aim to where I expected the person wielding the weapon would be standing beyond the wooden wall and squeezed the trigger four times, the crack of each shot muffled by the suppressor. A sharp cry sounded from within the shack, followed by frantic scrambling. The person or persons within seemed to be scrambling about, but still did not reply or show signs of emerging.

  Bang! Bang!

  Two shotgun blasts to my left signaled that Neil was firing. Chunks of splintered wood blasted into the air from the back of the shack, the double-ought buck tearing pieces out of the old structure.

  “You’re not getting out!” Neil yelled, signaling an attempt to do so on his side.

  “Come out now with your hands up or we fire everything we have at you!”

  My final warning hung in the quiet woods for a moment, until the inevitability of the situation crystalized for those inside.

  “Okay!” a man answered from within. “We’re coming out!”

  The shack’s front door swung inward and three men slipped through the opening, two with both hands thrust skyward, the third managing to hold a single hand above his head, the other hanging limp, blood dripping from it. My shots had found their mark.

  “Away from the shack,” I ordered, staying behind cover. “Over there. There. Down on your knees.”

  The wounded man seemed to fold to the ground, landing on his knees, weight of his body coming to rest on his heels. His comrades planted themselves next to him, hands still raised. From the corner of my eye I could see Neil approaching the shack from the back, his shotty raised and ready.

  “Keep your hands up,” I reminded the men.

  The wounded one tried, but his uninjured hand sagged and came to rest atop his head. His gaze began to swim as a puddle of blood gathered where his other hand lay on the ground next to his knee.

  “He’s hurt,” one of the men said, spittle flecking the grizzled beard that mostly obscured his mouth. “He needs help.”

  “Yeah, maybe,” I said.

  Beyond the men, Neil appeared from the far side of the shack, standing upright, his shotty slung. He approached the door and stood in the opening for a moment, staring in. The hint of the fire within dappled his face with a warm glow that seemed alien to the surroundings. And to his being at that moment.

  “Neil...”

  He didn’t react to me. Just stood motionless as I covered the men we’d flushed from the shack.

  “Neil,” I repeated, fearing the response to what I said next. “What is it?”

  He finally looked toward me, but just for an instant. His attention shifted almost immediately to the three men, their backs to him. Cold hate raged in his gaze. With a determined, fluid motion, he drew his revolver and walked toward the kneeling men, positioning himself to the side of the line they formed. He raised the six shooter and took aim at the nearest man’s temple.

  “Neil...”

  But there were no words to stop him. He squeezed the trigger once and the left side of the man’s head exploded, spraying blood and brain and shards of skull over his two friends. The wounded man screamed as the body tipped onto him. At the end of the line, his face covered in the horror of what had been his friend, the uninjured man began to sing softly. A hymn of some kind, I thought, his words never halting, even when Neil fired a bullet through the wounded man’s brain, sending another bloody horror upon him. Finally it was his turn. He kept singing right until the .44 hollow point round tore the front of his head off.

  Neil stood over the bodies for a moment. The last man’s feet twitched for a few seconds, then stilled. As easily as he’d drawn the weapon, Neil holstered it again and looked to me.

  I didn’t know what to say. What I’d just witnessed shocked me, though not because of the act’s clear brutality. A sick warmth sparkled in my gut because it was my friend I’d just watched carry out an execution, without a word spoken, to me or to those he’d condemned to death.

  “You want to know why?” Neil asked me.

  I said nothing. He looked at me for a moment longer, then turned and walked back toward the shack. I followed, stopping at the door where he had just a few minutes before. Looking in I could see by the light of a pit fire built at the center of the smallish space. Two rifles lay on the floor. One was leaned against the back wall near the holes Neil’s shotgun blasts had created. Next to it hung the bodies of a woman and a man, stripped naked, their throats slit, hooks and ropes suspending them from old rafters. On a makeshift table next to the fire a third body lay, a man, similarly stripped, deep slice across his throat, his left leg gone.

  But not missing. The long appendage, stripped of skin, sizzled on a wire rack over the fire.

  I backed away from the door and turned toward my friend.

  “There is no more law,” Neil said. “Only justice.”

  Two

  Grace sat next to Neil on the couch in my great room, both trying to suppress laughter as they watched Krista destroy me in a game of jacks.

  “You’re terrible at this,” Krista said.

  She wasn’t wrong, watching as I bounced the small rubber ball and fumbled with the multi-point jacks, trying to scoop up three but managing a big fat goose egg before the ball fell to the floor again.

  “Worst I’ve ever seen,” Neil commented.

  I glanced up to him, the both of us smiling. But there was something else in the look we exchanged. A knowing. An acceptance of what had happened earlier some distance from my refuge. We’d decided shortly after coming upon the horror, and ending those who’d perpetrated it, that we would not share what had happened with Grace. She didn’t need to know what had transpired so close to where we felt safe. Nor did Krista deserve to become aware of it by happenstance. It was something Neil and I would share, alone.

  “Winner!” Krista shouted, thrusting her hands in the air, the last few jacks fisted in them.

  “You wiped me out,” I said. “I need to seriously start training for these matches.”

  Krista picked the ball up and bounced it three times.

  “One bouncy, two bouncy, three bouncy,” she said, mocking me. “Whew! What a workout!”

  Neil and Grace howled with laughter. I grabbed Krista and pulled her into a joking headlock where we sat, the light moment welcome, and normal.

  And fleeting, the levity ending quickly as the lights dimmed, then flickered, then went out with a pop from down the hall. I jumped up and hurried to the back of the house, grabbing one of the strategically placed flashlights, its beam cutting the darkness. Neil followed, as did Grace and Krista, the three entering power central right behind me. It was the bedroom I’d turned into a space to house the deep cycle batteries and their associated equipment, all which worked to power much of my refuge once the sun went down. Except for now.

  “I smell it,” Neil said.

  I nodded and shifted the flashlight beam to the inverter mounted on the wall next to the banks of batteries. We both approached it. Neil glanced back, exchanging a look with Grace.

  “Let’s go clean the jacks up so someone doesn’t impale their foot on them,” Grace told her daughter, the both of them disappearing down the hallway.

  “It’s shot,” I said.

  The heavy electrical scent hanging in the space was all the indication, and confirmation, of the statement I was making.

  “There’s still one at Del’s place,” Neil reminded me.

  I nodded in the near darkness. The backup inverter I’d brought with me to my refuge over a year ago was what we were looking at. Its predecessor had failed just two weeks ago. The one remaining at Del’s, older by years than those that had already failed, would have to do. It was one of the few items of use we hadn’t transferred from my friend’s house a scant mile through the dead woods, following the direction he’d given me soon after we’d met—to use whatever he had if anything happened to him. Still, carting off his radios, his remaining food, seemed some final act of indignity visited upon the man
who’d sacrificed his life for me. Returning there, to the empty space, cold and quiet, devoid of his laugh or his wisdom, was a necessity I did not relish.

  “Yeah, we hook that up and it’ll last how long?” I asked, the question more commentary than query. “There’s something wrong with the distribution controller.”

  That piece of temperamental technology, unfortunately, had no spare, and was putting a strain on the inverter, which took DC current from the bank of batteries and converted it to AC power for the house’s plugs and lights. The life of the inverters, which should be measured in decades, had dwindled to weeks in my failing electrical system.

  “If it lasts a month, that’s thirty days closer to spring,” Neil said.

  Spring...

  That was when we’d decided to move. The winter’s snow accumulation would be melting, and Neil had already sketched out a makeshift plow blade we could weld to the front of the truck he, Grace, and Krista had arrived in, a diesel beast that had seen better days, but had gotten them this far. We hoped it would take us the rest of the way on our journey, however far that might be.

  Still, that journey wouldn’t start in thirty days, if the inverter from Del’s would even last that long. Any time beyond that would have to be survived with candles and fires and only necessary equipment wired directly into the generator, which, itself, was showing increasing signs that its best days were behind it.

  “All right,” I said. “In the morning.”

  “Eagle One, Eagle One, come in.”

  We heard the small voice from the great room, Krista’s voice, and I returned to see her sitting at the collection of radios we’d transferred from Del’s, the equipment wired directly to its own set of batteries charged every day from a dedicated solar panel.

  “Eagle One, this is Big Sky Alpha, come in.”

  Grace lit a candle, then another, smiling at her daughter.

  “Eagle One, please come in. We need your location.”