Wasteland Read online

  Wasteland

  The Bugging Out Series

  Book Three

  Noah Mann

  Copyright

  © 2015 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.

  www.noahmann.com

  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

  Forty Three

  Forty Four

  Forty Five

  Forty Six

  Forty Seven

  Forty Eight

  Forty Nine

  Fifty

  Fifty One

  Fifty Two

  Fifty Three

  Fifty Four

  Thank You

  About The Author

  Part One

  The Dying Place

  One

  Bones.

  Our boots tread upon them, bleached white, crunching against the red desert as the dust storm swirled around us.

  “It’s gotta be close!” Neil shouted.

  The blow had come from the south. From land once green. Now the fine grit of all things the blight had dissolved mixed with the weathered earth where a cartographer’s line had once marked the border between Wyoming and Utah.

  “Keep moving!” I shouted back, my raised voice seeming swallowed by the screaming wind.

  A hand grabbed my pack from behind, and an instant later Burke’s face was next to mine, his cotton-dry mouth screaming out at me.

  “Where is Elaine?!”

  “I don’t know!”

  He jerked me to a stop.

  “She was right next to you!”

  I pulled my pack from his grip and kept moving, forcing him to keep pace.

  “We can’t stop!” I told him.

  Twenty minutes ago we’d been within sight of each other, all of us, the fine soil churning around us, the wind nearly impossible to stand in. Then it turned unbearable. Biblical. A plague of gritty earth and ground bone pelting us. My lips, cracked and dry, bled, the open wounds caked with parched earth and remnants of people who’d long ago turned to dust.

  “Elaine!”

  Burke screamed into the maelstrom, but it was no use. Elaine might be ten feet from us and she wouldn’t hear his call. Wouldn’t see the staggered, hunched line of us as we trudged forward into the storm.

  A few feet ahead I saw Neil turn back as he walked. In one hand was a compass, the device clutched tight and high, his face bent over it. He looked to me through scratched and scoured goggles and, with his free hand, stabbed a gloved finger at the sandy air in front of us.

  “Up there!”

  I could barely hear my friend, but I nodded. He turned forward again and plowed into the battering gusts. Burke shuffled along just behind and to my right. Every step was pain. Every inch was hurt. It would have been easier to give up.

  None of us had expected this. That we’d be on the verge of failure, of death, just a week after leaving Eagle One.

  Two

  We’d flown out of the Bandon airport seven days ago, the Piper rising easily into the dawn sky. At the airport we’d offloaded our gear from the four-by-four we’d planned to take on our journey, Neil’s decision to join us allowing a mode of transportation that would cut our travel time by weeks, if not more. If things had gone right.

  Over northern Nevada things went wrong.

  The Piper’s engine began to fail, losing power gradually, giving Neil enough time to put us down safely on a stretch of sand that, a thousand years ago, had been the bottom of a lake. The amount of food we’d had when planning to take the truck had been cut down by ninety percent for the plane trip. With a faster mode of transport to Cheyenne we didn’t need as much. It was also a matter of weight, with the Piper having a limited cargo capacity beyond its four passengers and our personal gear. This mix of hope for a quick trip, mixed with some hard numbers, left us poorly supplied in the middle of a wasteland.

  But we’d pressed on. In a small town we found a car that Burke managed to get running. That carried us just short of Salt Lake City until it, like the Piper, gave out. A delivery truck with a top speed of thirty miles an hour got us just past the Wyoming border on Interstate 80, to a town named Evanston where we scrounged, finding little of use, particularly in the matter of consumables.

  That was the obstacle stalking us now. Food. Sustenance. No different than what any survivor faced, except we were running out. The small supply we’d brought with us was nearing exhaustion, and the food caches detailed in the notebook Martin had given me had, so far, been a bust. Three as we followed Interstate 80 east, the earth that covered them swept away, lids opened, the red and rusted interiors looking ominously like coffins, just waiting for an occupant to settle in for eternity.

  Number four, maybe our last hope, lay somewhere just ahead, through the blinding dust storm.

  “Here!”

  I could just hear the voice, thin and familiar, above the blasting winds.

  “Over here!”

  It was Elaine, shouting out from somewhere to my right. Or to my front. I couldn’t be sure.

  “Neil!”

  Barely two yards in front of me, my friend couldn’t hear my call. I reached behind and grabbed Burke, hauling him faster until we were both even with Neil.

  “Neil, stop!”

  He heard me, finally, and paused, looking back, confused.

  “We’re exposed!” he shouted through the wrap of torn cloth covering his mouth and nose.

  “Listen!” I screamed at him.

  “What?!”

  I jabbed a finger off to my right, signaling emphatically.

  “Listen!”

  Burke picked up on my directive, the three of us huddled against the storm now, holding still and silent, if one’s lack of sound could be termed that in the gusting roar.

  “Here!”

  Neil looked fast to me. He’d borne the brunt of the weather’s onslaught, leading us, point man in our trek toward salvation, the lenses of his goggles blasted almost opaque. But through them I could see his eyes widen.

  “It’s Elaine!” he said, and I nodded emphatically.

  “I hear her, too!” Burke screamed into my ear.

  Neil adjusted his direction of travel and started off again, wind pummeling him at an angle. Burke and I followed, the voice ahead, that wonderful voice, calling us in.

  “Elaine!” I shouted, my hoarse voice barely rising above the cacophony.

  But, somehow, it cut through the wind. It reached her.

  “Eric! Over here!”

  We were close. Neil’s course was true. And within a few seconds the most wondrous sight beg
an to resolve through the gritty atmosphere.

  “I see you!” Elaine shouted, waving at us from the partial shelter of an old shed, three walls and the roof of the structure still intact.

  We pushed through the few remaining steps to reach her. One by one she pulled us into the screaming calm, tattered walls breaking the wind enough that we could see, and hear, and breathe again. Each of us collapsed, falling to our knees in the shelter, shedding our packs and dropping our weapons. Elaine came to me first, lifting the goggles from me eyes, unwrapping the makeshift mask I’d wound around my face to filter the dry, choking earth.

  “Eric,” she said, wiping the grit from my eyes, brushing it from my bearded jaw. “Are you okay?”

  I nodded, still catching my breath. She shifted her attention to Neil, then to Burke, making sure they were all right, if any one of us could be termed that after what we’d been through. Her included.

  “How did you find this?” I asked, my gaze sweeping over the open shed as it rattled around us, great streams of dust flowing past the space where the missing wall had once stood.

  “Blind luck,” Elaine said, returning to me, uncapping her canteen and drizzling a measured portion of the contents over my parched lips. “Literally. I got separated and just kept moving. I couldn’t see anything, then I actually ran into this place.”

  “You’re not going to believe this,” Neil said between coughs, folded map on the ground at his knees, compass placed atop the weathered paper. “It has to be right here.”

  “Here?” Burke asked, energized at that possibility.

  Neil nodded, tapping a finger on the map. We moved toward him, surrounding the flattened representation of our present position. On the edge he’d scribbled the coordinates from the book Martin had given me, and the identifying characteristics of the cache’s location.

  “Five yards north of door to old shack,” Neil read to us. “We’re at the latitude and longitude based upon the compass, our starting point. This has to be that shack.”

  “Why?” Burke asked.

  My friend didn’t have to answer. I knew exactly why he was certain.

  “Three walls, no door,” I said. “The one that’s missing had to have the door in it.”

  Burke looked behind, out into the raging red storm.

  “Fifteen feet that way?” Burke asked.

  Neil nodded. But Elaine wasn’t convinced.

  “There could be a dozen shacks out there,” she said.

  “It’s this one,” Burke said. “I can feel it.”

  He slid his googles back on and grabbed the collapsible shovel strapped to his pack, folding the compact tool open.

  “What are you doing?” I challenged him, knowing full well what the man was thinking.

  “We need that food,” Burke said, a mix of desperation and determination clear in his pronouncement. “I need that food. If it’s right out there, I’m going to get it.”

  “Wait until the storm ends,” Elaine told him.

  “It’s been blowing for hours,” Burke said. “What if it blows for two more? Or six? Or ten?”

  “Then we wait,” I said.

  To that the man shook his head emphatically.

  “There’s no reason to wait,” he said, gesturing to the lessened blow in the shadow of the structure. “This shack is blocking a good chunk of the wind where it should be buried.”

  The man had a point. But it was still risky. We’d been out in the dry, hellish storm for hours. Our energy was sapped. Our throats were burning. Our eyes stung.

  “Tell me you’ve been drinking,” I said to Burke, and the man managed a rasping chuckle.

  “Half a pint of gin when you fools weren’t looking,” he said, and gripped the small shovel tight. “Next time you see me, we’ll have food for weeks.”

  Burke turned toward the open space beyond the missing wall and crouch-walked out into the elements, that hot red dust washing past him, the worst of the gust blocked, just as he’d said. He inched forward, sliding each foot ahead and stabbing the blade of the short shovel into the ground every foot or so, tapping, feeling for any anomaly. Any sign of something below.

  Exactly fifteen feet from the missing wall his shovel thudded against something. He jabbed the blunt edge of the tool into the earth once, twice more, a muted metallic clank sounding.

  “Is it there?!” Neil shouted.

  “I think so!”

  Burke dropped to his knees and hunched over the spot. Digging with the shovel now, scraping the earth away with short strokes. Clearing it down to six inches. Eight inches. Ten. Until finally he reached it.

  “Is that it?!” Elaine asked from within the battered shack.

  Burke didn’t answer at first. He just stared down into the small hole he’d made to expose a portion of what lay beneath.

  “Burke!” I called out to him, and finally he looked to us.

  “Something’s different!”

  I began to get up and move toward him, but he held a hand out, signaling me to stop.

  “What is it?!” I asked.

  “It’s not red!” he answered. “It’s green!”

  Every food locker where supplies had been cached, as reported by those who’d come across them, Martin and Neil included, was painted red. The empty ones we’d located on our journey had been red. Why this one was not I had no idea. There’d been no notation in the notebook we’d been provided with locations for the caches. Nothing at all to signal that this one should be any different.

  “Just stay in there until I see what it is!” Burke told us.

  I settled down to the ground again next to Neil and Elaine and watched as Burke scooped dirt away and tossed it behind, the wind grabbing and swallowing it into the dust storm. In a few minutes he had a rectangular hole cleared down to a foot, the entire top exposed.

  “It’s all green!” he told us. “It has the same handle!”

  A small, recessed latch had been on every locker we’d seen, though those had all been picked clean. But from his experience on his journey to my refuge, Neil had shared that you’d simply slip your fingers under the latch, pull, and the lid would release, tilting up with a satisfying hiss as the pressure inside and out equalized. There had been no lock on any we’d come across, or Neil on his trek, and, as Burke described it, there was none here.

  “Green is a hell of a lot less ominous than red,” Neil said.

  “Yeah,” I agreed. “But what does it mean?”

  “Different supplies?” I half suggested, half wondered.

  “Or they ran out of red paint,” Elaine said.

  We laughed lightly, the constant grinding of dried earth against the outside of the flimsy shack mostly muting our brief instant of joviality. In the wind shadow beyond the missing wall, Burke leaned over the exposed locker and gripped the latch, pulling it up, then lifted the lid, swinging it upward. The edge of a gust caught it and threatened to jerk it from Burke’s grip, but he held on, easing it fully open. He swatted at an errant wash of dust swirling past and peered into the locker. For a long moment he stared into it.

  “What is it?!” Neil shouted to him.

  Burke said nothing in reply. He simply looked to us, his eyes smiling behind the goggles, and lifted a hand to give us a thumbs up.

  “Thank God,” Elaine said, her body settling against mine, relief ours at last.

  An instant later, the folly of that belief was made plain before us.

  Burke turned his attention back to the locker and reached in, pulling something out. We glimpsed it for just a second, a brown MRE package, then it, and Burke, disappeared in a flash, some explosion erupting from the locker, literally erasing the man from in front of us. The concussion blasted mostly upward, but enough reached the shack to topple one of the three remaining walls. It crumbled outward and was dragged away by the storm. The roof teetered, then tilted down, leaving us both sheltered and trapped in a tenuous and twisted lean-to.

  “Burke!” I screamed out at where he’d been and
tried to scramble that way, but both Neil and Elaine seized my arms and held me back.

  I jerked free and clawed my way across the earthen floor, beneath the fallen portion of the roof, almost to what remained of the opening when my friend grabbed me, tackling me to the floor.

  “He’s gone!” Neil told me.

  “Burke!”

  I screamed for him and tried to pull away. I’d been charged with leading this journey. Neil, Elaine, and Burke had agreed to come along. That he was out there while I huddled in the shelter churned inside me now.

  “Burke!”

  His name was swallowed by the wind.

  “Fletch,” Neil said, pulling me back inside and against the wall. “There’s nothing we can do.”

  “Eric,” Elaine said, reaching out to take my face in her hands, her calming touch trying to soothe me. “Look at me.”

  Tears wanted to fill my eyes and spill, dragging filthy streaks over my cheeks. But there were none, just as there was no quenching moisture in my mouth. No relief for my dry and splitting lips.

  “I should have been the one out there,” I said to her.

  She shook her head at me, the motion transmitted through the hold she had on me, my own face shifting left and right.

  “He wanted to do it,” she said, offering nothing but the truth.

  But it was a damning truth.

  She eased her hands from my face and I looked back to where Burke had been just a minute before, sand now swirling there, the shattered, heavy lid of the locker flapping in the relentless blow.

  “It was booby trapped,” I said. “Why would they do that?”

  “We don’t even know who ‘they’ are,” Neil reminded me.

  From what Micah had learned, and what his father had shared, it was believed that the government, once it became clear the blight could not be stopped, had planted these food caches in the earth all across the country to aid essential personnel in getting to safety once things began falling apart. In its own twisted way, regardless of the entire populace being abandoned, the idea made sense.

  What we’d just witnessed did not.

  “What’s the point of that?!” I demanded loudly. “What?!”