The Pit (The Bugging Out Series Book 4) Read online

  The Pit

  The Bugging Out Series

  Book Four

  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

  Books in the Bugging Out series.

  Book 1: Bugging Out

  Book 2: Eagle One

  Book 3: Wasteland

  Book 4: The Pit

  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

  Fifty Five

  Fifty Six

  Fifty Seven

  Fifty Eight

  Fifty Nine

  Thank You

  About The Author

  Part One

  Beacon

  One

  The ocean burned.

  “Neil!”

  I shouted to my friend before I was even on my feet. He slept below in one of the cramped crew cabins, shut off from the world above. The world Elaine and I had woken to as acrid smoke and an orange glow invaded the Sandy’s wheelhouse.

  “I’ll untie us,” Elaine said, loud and quick, but not frantic.

  Before I could offer a yea or nay she was heading out, thick blackness rolling in as she opened and closed the door. Neil bounded up the steeply inclined stairs from below a few seconds later. He coughed and covered his mouth,

  “What the hell...”

  “Yeah,” I said, concurring with my friend’s reaction.

  He came forward in the wheelhouse, standing next to me at the helm as I tried to get the big diesel fired up, the both of us staring out the forward windows at the lake of fire roiling atop the almost glassy sea.

  “It’s coming at us,” Neil said.

  He was right. We’d stopped for the night, tying the boat to a channel buoy a few miles off the coast where the Columbia cleaved a border between Oregon and Washington. On the bow, through momentary breaks in the sooty clouds washing past, I saw Elaine, leaning over the forward rail, trying to untie us. Struggling with the vaguely nautical knot I’d made the night before.

  “We’ve gotta get out of here, Fletch.”

  I looked to the east, to where the coast should stand out clear beneath the full moon. Now I saw only that horrid black smoke and a creeping wave of flame closing in.

  “I know,” I told my friend.

  Thirty six hours it had been since we left. Since we cruised slowly out of Bandon’s small harbor and began our journey north. Through night, then day, then into our second night on the water, to the point where we now bobbed on the blazing sea.

  “Got it!” Elaine shouted outside, her words ending in a choking cough.

  I worked the controls again, pressing the button that would, that should, start the big diesel and get us moving. But still it did not.

  “Fletch...”

  Neil’s gentle urging brought my gaze up as Elaine stumbled back into the wheelhouse, dropping to her knees and gasping for clean air. I glanced to her, worried, but she looked up to me and nodded, her face smudged sooty black.

  Then I looked outside. To the water. Huge bolts of orange flame leapt through the smoke, the improbable inferno groping its way toward us as the Sandy bobbed now, free of its mooring. Fire closing in. A dozen yards away. Then ten. Then five.

  And still the engine chugged uselessly.

  “What am I doing wrong?” I asked.

  The question was meant for no one in particular. None of us had any experience in a boat of this type or size. We’d fumbled our way through manuals we were able to find before setting out, logs and maintenance reports. We knew the capacity of the fuel tanks—a lot—and the distance we could travel before refueling from the barrels of diesel in the hold—a long way. But we didn’t understand the intricacies, the finicky tendencies, of a machine like the one that was about to become our tomb.

  “Eric!”

  Elaine’s scream made me turn. The sight past her, out the rear windows and beyond the stern, just beyond the stern, dragged my heart down even further than it had already fallen. Fire billowed there, rolling over the wooden rail at the rear of the vessel.

  We were on fire.

  “Damn!” Neil cursed, grabbing the fire extinguisher, an act more of desperation than hope.

  I held the starter button down hard as my friend scooted past me toward the stairs. He was going out into the maelstrom. Out to fight the unfightable. The world of roiling orange surrounding us left no mistake in the outcome of what he was about to do.

  Then, when I wasn’t even thinking of it, of surviving, the engine coughed to life, rumbling low and steady in the hull beneath. I felt it in my feet, that wonderful vibration. That incessant noise that had been maddening until we’d shut the engine down for the night after a constant run, taking shifts over the day and a half we’d traveled to this point. Sleeping with the hammering pistons transmitting their captured violence through the structure of the Sandy had been impossible. I’d begun to hate the ten cylinder beast.

  Now it was the most beautiful thing I could imagine.

  “Hang on,” I said, with a sudden and certain calm.

  I put the Sandy in reverse and throttled up, backing us away from the massive wall of fire, but into the smaller inferno bubbling at our stern. Flaming seawater rolled over the transom and onto the deck, sloshing forward toward the wheelhouse as Neil stood in the open door, extinguisher in hand. He yanked the pin from the handle and aimed it into the leaping flames below. A bloom of misty white filled the space behind the wheelhouse as I took us out of reverse and jammed the throttle forward. The diesel spun up, fast, screaming, the bow rising as the propeller chopped at the burning water aft and pushed us forward.

  “We’re not gonna miss it,” Elaine said, staring out the windshield from where she stood next to me.

  “I know,” I told her, and kept my hand on the throttle.

  We only had one chance, I thought. One roll of the dice. Either the wall of flame ahead was thin enough to punch through, or I’d be driving us into a vast sea of flame that would consume us.

  “Neil, it’s going to get hot,” I told my friend.

  Behind, he emptied the last of the wheelhouse fire extinguisher
onto the aft deck and then tossed it out, closing the door just as the bow sliced into the leaping flames. The run up we’d made, short as it was, had given us speed, if only a bit, and as the Sandy drove fully into the inferno I began to count.

  One...

  The night outside became day. An orange day, swirling and spitting fire at us.

  Two...

  More fire, thick now, as if we were swimming through it. Waves of it leapt at the wheelhouse. A window to my right cracked, then shattered. Smoke, choking and foul, poured through the jagged opening, stinging my eyes, our eyes.

  Three...

  It had to end soon. Or we would. But all I could see ahead through the blazing see outside and the acrid smoke within was more of the hell that enveloped us.

  Four...

  “Fletch...”

  Neil groped at the wall to my left as he spat the words out, coughing. He’d swallowed too much smoke fighting the fire on the aft deck and now was drowning in the black nightmare filling the wheelhouse.

  Five...

  Black. Not smoke. A different kind of darkness. That was what I glimpsed, what I saw, through the tangle of flames ahead.

  “Eric...”

  Elaine saw it, too. Open ocean. Dark and flat. No fire.

  “We’re through!” I shouted, and the boat emerged from the far edge of the inferno, driving into the clear, just water spraying up from her hull as it cut through the nearly still ocean.

  Neil gasped and vomited on the wheelhouse floor, retching on all fours. Elaine went to him and helped him up. He dragged a sleeve across his mouth and took in the sight ahead. The wonderful sight of the cold black ocean.

  “We’ve got some fire on deck,” Elaine said, calm and driven as she made her way out of the wheelhouse.

  “There’s another extinguisher below,” Neil said.

  I shook my head after a brief look aft. We wouldn’t need it. Just small residual flames licked up from oily pools spotting the deck and the flat rail. Elaine was already dousing the spot fires with buckets of seawater she was hauling over the rail. I leaned over the dashboard, wondering for an instant if it was even called that on a boat, and surveyed the bow. The spray of clear water had smothered any flames that might have lingered there.

  We were okay. We’d made it through. But through what?

  I brought the throttles back and slowed the Sandy until she sat nearly motionless on the water, then left the wheelhouse with Neil to join Elaine on deck, the last of the fires aboard out.

  “What the hell was that?” Neil asked, still catching his breath.

  “Over there,” Elaine said, pointing past the lake of fire behind us, to the shore beyond.

  Smoke rose in the east, a column seeming as wide as the horizon, black and boiling, like a storm cloud spat skyward from an angry earth.

  “The river’s on fire,” Neil said.

  He was right. The whole of the Columbia, spilling into the sea from the dead lands beyond, churned orange and yellow, flames swirling against the dawn.

  “Are there any refineries upriver?” Elaine asked. “Anything that could spill that much?”

  I doubted that there was, but I didn’t know.

  Neil darted back into the wheelhouse and emerged a moment later, binoculars in hand. He scanned the shore and, a moment later, made plain to us the source of the inferno.

  “Oil tanker,” he said, then passed the binoculars to Elaine.

  “Jesus...”

  I looked next, offering no reaction other than the coldly descriptive.

  “It’s split in half,” I said, lowering the binoculars. “It looks like it went broadside into a rock jetty.”

  Elaine looked again through the optics, focusing in, the pulsing light of raging fires illuminating the destruction spreading from land to sea.

  “It could have been aground on that jetty for months,” she said. “Or longer.”

  How many boats, large and small, drifted upon the waters of the earth’s oceans, lakes, and rivers? Their mooring lines rotted. Crew dead. Thousands, it had to be. Just riding the currents until a hunk of land ended their journey.

  But what were the odds that what we’d just survived would happen after we tied up for the night? The beached and battered vessel had been ripped open, its metal hull grinding against stone. A spark rose. Then a flame. All it took then was the rushing current of the Columbia to spread the blazing waters out to sea. Out to us.

  Was it a thousand to one? A million to one? That such an event would occur not in the days before, nor in the days after, but precisely when we were in the path of the fire...

  I did not believe in such things, but a small part of me did wonder, if only in passing, if it might be an omen. Yes, we’d come through the fire. Through this fire. But was it only a harbinger of more tests, more travails, which lay ahead?

  “Let’s get out of here,” Elaine said, passing the binoculars to Neil as she climbed back into the wheelhouse.

  A few seconds later the engine rose from its chugging idle as she advanced the throttles. Neil took a step toward the wheelhouse, then stopped, looking back to me.

  “You coming?”

  I said nothing for a moment, still staring toward the origin of the blaze.

  “Fletch?”

  “Yeah. I’ll be there in a minute.”

  I needed that minute, my friend sensed. He didn’t push the question, or wait for me to follow, joining Elaine by himself and leaving me alone on deck.

  Alone...

  That was how I’d begun this new phase of life. As the world spun toward its blighted oblivion I’d hidden myself away at my Montana refuge. Others had come into my life since then. Del. Neil. Grace and Krista. Then we’d moved on to Bandon where Martin and Micah entered the picture. And Burke. And many more in that seaside town.

  Including Elaine.

  For months now the world that I had come to know on a solitary basis had been boiled down to just her, and Neil, and me. We’d set out on a mission fueled by hope. A mission to find whether there was truly a way to overcome the blight. And we’d found that there was.

  But finding that was no end. We were on the move again.

  Alone...

  I’d thought for a while that I would spend the remainder of my life in that state of singularity. My friends gone. No special person to journey with me through this new and bleak wilderness. But looking to the wheelhouse I could just make out the silhouettes of those who were proving that early fear wrong.

  My friend stood there. My love, as well. Both looking forward. To the way ahead. To the way we all had to go.

  Together.

  Two

  “White. White. White.”

  Neil turned the boat’s radio off and settled into a seat at the rear of the wheelhouse, a few feet from where Elaine stood at the controls. There would be no more tying off and bedding down for the night below deck. Not after what had snuck up on us while we rested. One of us would be at the wheel at all times with the others resting nearby until we reached our destination.

  Ketchikan.

  That was the point on the map we were aiming for. The first major port one would reach in Alaska heading north from the lower forty-eight. If those we knew, and loved, had been spirited off to the great white north, Ketchikan, a lumber town turned tourist trap for cruise ship passengers, was a logical place to think they’d been, or passed through.

  Or passed by.

  I had to remind myself of that. There were hundreds of points along the vast Alaskan coast where those traveling by sea could stop. Maybe thousands. We were sailing in the blind, even more so than when we’d left Bandon in search of salvation in the form of a tomato plant glimpsed over the airwaves. Micah had at least given us a general destination then, Cheyenne, but here all we had were two letters scrawled hastily on a wall—AK.

  “Sorry,” Neil said.

  I shook off his apology. He hadn’t woken me. I’d been trying to catch some sleep as we cruised north in the dark, twisting m
y body awkwardly into another of the wheelhouse chairs, but drifting off had been an elusive desire. The sound of the boat pushing through the light chop, which might have soothed, did not. I was not a creature of open waters. Land, terra firma, was what I knew, and where I belonged.

  “I just have to listen once in a while,” he explained.

  We’d been gone less than two days, and in that short span I’d caught him hovering over the radio at least a dozen times. Listening for a few minutes, then letting the reality of the situation inform his decision to abandon any monitoring. That he kept turning it back on belied that most precious resource, one which he had preached to me in the earliest stages of the blight’s march across the planet—hope.

  There might be some transmission breaking through, as had come from the Denver television station whose satellite feed I watched from my refuge. The White Signal could simply cease overwhelming the airwaves and stop broadcasting, just as the Red Signal had abruptly ended. There was always those possibilities. Or something we couldn’t yet imagine.

  “What do you think happened, Fletch?”

  My friend looked at me, not pained, and not overwhelmed by the separation from Grace and Krista, but confused. That they, and a whole town, could up and disappear, to God knows where, with no time or opportunity to leave anything other than the most cryptic of messages behind, was hard to fathom.

  “I wish I had some solid guess,” I said. “But I don’t.”

  “Martin wouldn’t have left,” Neil said. “Not voluntarily.”

  “No,” I agreed. “He wouldn’t.”

  He would not have left the son he’d only recently buried. Not in a thousand years. Not at the point of a legion of bayonets. Which made me fear that the bloodstain we’d found in the meeting hall could easily have come from him. Because of his resistance to some command to leave. At the hands of whoever might have been behind such a directive.

  “It had to be military,” Neil suggested. “Taking the whole town, the sentries, everyone. It had to be overwhelming force.”

  “Or surprise,” I countered. “Or both.”