Destroyer (The Bugging Out Series Book 9) Read online

  Destroyer

  The Bugging Out Series

  Book Nine

  Noah Mann

  Copyright

  © 2018 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

  Prisoners

  One

  “Neil...”

  I called softly to him after an hour of silence from his dim cell. He’d passed out after our initial interaction, wet breaths seeming almost ready to choke the life from him as he slept.

  “Neil...”

  He continued to sleep. And I continued to think.

  How was it possible that my friend, my best friend, was here, just yards away, talking to me years after he’d been shot dead right before my eyes? I’d held his lifeless body in those moments, and had stood at the rectangular hole in the earth as his handmade casket was lowered in at Bandon’s cemetery.

  I was living in an impossibility. And yet, it was not just possible—it was real. It was fact.

  Neil Moore was less than ten feet from me, as alive as I was.

  “Neil...”

  I noticed the first stirrings from him since exhaustion had dragged him down from the waking world. He shifted where he lay, responding to my voice. I hoped it was that which was beginning to rouse him. The connection we had once shared as the best of friends had been ended by his death, and I wanted it now to be rekindled by his inexplicable resurrection.

  “Come on, wake up,” I urged him quietly.

  His head rose just a bit from where it had rested on his arm.

  “Fletch...”

  I scooted closer to the bars of the cell, just a few inches space between each. I tried to slip my arm through, to reach across the aisle that separated our enclosures, but it was a gesture of support at best. The distance to him was too great to cross, and my muscled forearm, toughened by the daily duties of surviving in a still recovering world, made it only past the wrist, leaving just my hand waving back and forth as I struggled to reach out toward my friend.

  Finally I gave up and withdrew my hand, pressing my face against the bars instead, peering through the space between them.

  “How are you?” I asked.

  “I’ve been better,” Neil answered.

  He reached to the bars, gripping one with bony fingers and hauling himself slowly toward the barrier. It was night outside, and just as dark in our small part of the old bank building, but light from the guard’s fire beyond the vault trickled in. Enough that I looked upon my friend’s shadowed face with both sadness and fear.

  “Worse than on our way back from Cheyenne?” Neil asked me, noting my silent reaction to his gaunt appearance.

  I didn’t know, though. That time, that journey, those obstacles had tested him, and Elaine, and me in ways none of us could have imagined. He was, I thought, referencing his lowest point. That brief moment when, on the brink of starvation, with sickness wracking his body, he had been forced to do what would have been inconceivable before the time when some chose cannibalism to survive. Neil had succumbed to necessity at that time, in that place, and he had survived.

  Only to die again.

  “You’ll be okay,” I told him.

  He nodded weakly, his eyes closing briefly as his head bowed.

  “It’s been a long time,” Neil said. “I didn’t know if you were even alive. If anyone was still alive.”

  He was professing ignorance of the situation in the town he’d left so that it might be saved. But how could that be? Despite the folly of his dying before my eyes, I’d seen him on the broadcast from the Unified Government, with General Weatherly standing near his bound prisoner. He’d known then that we’d thwarted the siege of Bandon. That we’d driven the enemy off. He’d heard me trade Sheryl Quincy for him.

  Yet he seemed as in the dark about what had become of our town as I was about his being alive.

  “Neil, you have to tell me what happened.”

  His face rose again and he looked at me, puzzled.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean with Weatherly, and the trade for Sheryl, and...”

  He scooted himself up to the bars, pressed against them now, his utterly confused gaze fixed upon me.

  “Fletch, what are you talking about? What trade?”

  What was happening? How could he be claiming no knowledge of the exchange I’d initiated, swapping his life for the traitor we’d discovered in our midst?

  “You for Sheryl Quincy,” I said.

  Neil stared at me, his weary gaze narrowing with almost painful confusion. Still, I couldn’t fathom how what he was experiencing could match my own lack of understanding at the moment.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” my friend said.

  I pressed myself close to the bars and fixed a hard gaze on him.

  “Neil...I watched you die. You died in my arms.”

  Whatever shock he’d expressed to this point was more than matched by the reaction I saw on his face. He eased an inch or so back from the bars, his head turning a bit as he stared into the deeper darkness at the back of his cell. It seemed to me that he wasn’t just reacting to what I’d just told him—he was processing it. Attempting to understand the impossibility. Except...

  Except it appeared to me that my friend was not approaching that mental exercise from a place of expected failure. He was, instead, trying to fit known pieces into an unknown scenario. Pieces known only to him.

  After a moment he turned back to face me, the confusion gone from his face. From his eyes. In its place was regret. And realization.

  “Fletch, I’m so sorry. I—”

  “Hello, gentlemen.”

  The voice interrupted our fledgling conversation. His voice.

  “Have we become reacquainted?” Earl Perkins asked.

  I looked into the aisle between our cells, to where that short corridor began at the entrance to the vault. Perkins stood there, long revolver holstered diagonally across the front of his belt, Sheryl and his apparent right-hand man, Bryce, at his side. Behind them, a key ring spinning on one finger, stood Jake, the man charged with guarding us.

  “They’ve been doing some jawing, Earl,” Jake said.

  Both Bryce and Perkins turned to fix a disapproving gaze on the seemingly simple man charged with guarding us. He hadn’t committed some unforgivable sin, but he clearly rec
ognized that his transgression was not far from that.

  “I mean Mr. Perkins,” Jake corrected, humbling himself. “They’ve been talking a bit. Not a whole lot, but...”

  Jake stopped, the uncomfortable attention directed at him muting any further narrative he could offer of the short time Neil and I had been together. Perkins and Bryce let their stares linger a few seconds longer, and in that brief span of time I noticed something. While attention had shifted to the man guarding us, one had not turned to look at him—Sheryl Quincy. The former Army private and forever traitor hadn’t looked away from Neil and me.

  From me specifically.

  I couldn’t judge the look she had fixed on me with any certainty. It wasn’t overt anger or hatred. Nor was it pity. But it was something, with a hint of animus simmering just below the surface. It seemed odd, I thought, that any overt disgust would be reserved for me. I had been the one who’d seen to her trade for Neil.

  For who I’d thought was Neil.

  I was the reason she was free. The reason that she was here. Maybe, I thought, that outcome hadn’t been all she’d hoped it would be.

  That was wishful thinking, I realized. She’d thrown in with the Unified Government and had done the same with Perkins when the former was no longer a viable entity to align herself with. She was, I was coming to understand, a parasitic person, attaching herself to whichever power structure could most benefit her at the moment. That made her scum, in my eyes. It also made her dangerous.

  I wondered if Earl Perkins realized just who, and what, he’d brought into his inner circle.

  “Have you all gotten down to the meaty part, yet?” Perkins asked as he stepped closer, equidistant between the cells Neil and I occupied. “Well?”

  I saw Neil’s head dip a bit, as if he didn’t want to acknowledge either the question, or the answer which would satisfy it.

  “Utterly precious,” Perkins said, nodding toward my friend. “He can’t bring himself to clue you in.”

  My gaze shifted between our dictatorial captor and Neil. There was something known between them. Something shared that I was not privy to.

  Yet.

  “Too bad,” Perkins said, clapping his hands together once with glee. “How about we play a game?”

  Now Neil looked up, to Perkins first, then to me. All emotions on the darker side of human nature were present in his gaze right then—fear, apology, desperation most prevalent.

  “Let’s get them outside,” Perkins said.

  He turned, Sheryl taking hold of his hand as he stabbed it toward her, following him out.

  “On your feet,” Bryce said to me.

  Next to him, Jake eased the double-barrel shotgun from where it was slung behind, leveling it at me.

  “Any trouble, and Jake will give you each a barrel,” Bryce cautioned as he took the key from our guard. “And that would mean you’d miss the fun to come.”

  I didn’t know what that meant, but I was certain both Neil and I were about to find out.

  Two

  We were trussed up and led out into the night by Bryce and Jake, the pair marching us down the center of the street toward a large group of people lit by the dancing glow of flames leaping from steel barrels. They parted as we neared, enough that what lay beyond them—a flatbed truck placed in the intersection, Perkins standing atop it like the master of ceremonies upon a stage—became visible. As did the fact that the holstered revolver was now in his hand, held at his side, its long barrel reaching past the diminutive dictator’s knee.

  Twenty yards from the ominous gathering Neil stumbled, collapsing to his knees. I halted instinctively, but Bryce, who’d focused his attention on me, kept me moving with a solid jab from the stock of his Remington pump. Just behind us, Jake struggled to get my friend back on his feet.

  “Time’s a wasting!” Perkins shouted toward us, a chuckle rolling lightly through his assembled followers.

  I chanced a quick look behind without slowing and saw Neil on his feet again, Jake propping him up with a grip on where his hands were bound behind his neck, using the ‘angel wings’ to march my friend forward.

  My living friend.

  The opportunity to probe Neil as to the impossibility of his presence hadn’t fully presented itself. Just as I’d begun to lead him toward that subject our captors had appeared, interrupting what might have come. Looking forward again, to the truck where Perkins stood with his long revolver in hand, I began to wonder if answers were a luxury neither of us would have time to behold.

  “Bring our guests up here!’ Perkins shouted with smarmy glee.

  His followers heeded his directive, dozens pouring from the crowd to grab Neil and me from our escorts and manhandle us up onto the truck’s flat bed. Bryce climbed up and lashed us to a mesh of metalwork protecting the cab from any load behind. This wasn’t the truck I’d been brought into town on, lacking the throne Perkins had sat in, but it was similar and appeared in working order. That the Yuma colony had at least two working vehicles, and likely more, was an impressive accomplishment considering their physical appearance. They were a driven, scrappy, tired collection of humanity. They were survivors.

  And they wanted blood.

  “Kill them!”

  That was only one of the cries that rose from the crown surrounding where we’d been put on display upon the truck. More shouted out for us to be tortured in various ways. Burned alive. Drawn apart between vehicles. Chopped up with axes. Through it all, standing alone with us near, Perkins soaked in the fervor. As the fury built, he walked over to where Bryce had left Neil and me tied to the back of the cab, eyeing us from just a foot away.

  “Do you hear that?” Perkins asked us, smiling. “Do you see that?”

  It was impossible for us to not, and he knew that. It was, to him, a moment of glory we were witness to. His glory.

  “I created this,” Perkins gloated to us. “I made them. They will do anything for me. All I have to do is give them what they want.”

  Perkins stepped away from us and faced his people. They roared at him, fists pounding the air. One woman bolted from the group and tried to scramble aboard the flatbed, Bryce and Jake grabbing her before she could. As they pulled her away I could see in her eyes something more than hatred. More than fury.

  I saw bloodlust.

  She, and the others, had been promised all that they felt they been denied. Things that I’d received, and Neil, as well, when he’d been part of us. Part of Bandon.

  When I’d first been hauled into town just hours earlier after the ambush which had killed Dave Arndt, I’d been received with quiet animus. Whatever had been held within had been released, summoned by Perkins in pursuit of his greater goal.

  “Bandon will be ours!” he shouted, thrusting his revolver into the air.

  I looked past him, to the nearly frothing crowd, sampling their belief in his promise. But just for a moment. My gaze found an island of calm among them—Sheryl Quincy.

  She stood near the back of the truck, mixed in with the riled survivors, staring up at me. Something just short of a smile curling her lips slightly. There was anticipation in the expression. I was not eager to know what it was that was fueling that look about her.

  But I was about to find out.

  “These men represent Bandon,” Perkins said, shifting the revolver toward us, its muzzle wide and threatening.

  “Forty-four isn’t a bad way to go,” Neil said weakly.

  I looked to him and nodded.

  “I suppose not,” I said. “I’d prefer a forty-five.”

  “God bless John Browning,” Neil said, a hint of chuckle trailing off his offering of gallows humor.

  “Gentlemen,” Perkins said, drawing our attention as he stepped toward us again, leaving a few feet distance this time. “We’re going to play a game.”

  With those words, I knew what was coming.

  Perkins tipped the revolver upward and opened its cylinder, dumping a number of shells from the six shooter. He cl
osed the cylinder and opened his palm, five fat .44 magnum rounds showing on its rough surface.

  Next to me I sensed my friend straightening where he’d been bound. Since we’d been tied to the back of the truck’s cab, he’d slouched severely, almost hanging from the bindings. He was incredibly weak, malnourishment and other horrors having wreaked havoc on his body. But he wasn’t going to let Perkins do what he’d planned without facing the man straight on, standing tall, unafraid.

  Neither was I.

  The man noticed our defiant posture, his gaze shifting between us, whatever macabre joviality he’d displayed fading as if never there. His face hardened, and he brought the revolver up, pointing the barrel at my face. It remained there for a moment, the crowd quieting, watching intently now. Waiting for the show to begin.

  “Which...” he said, shifting his aim to Neil’s face.

  “...one...” he said, taking aim at me again.

  “...will...”

  Back to Neil.

  “...I...”

  And to me again.

  “...shoot...”

  Neil.

  “...to...”

  Me. He held his aim for a moment, then finished his method of selection.

  “...day?”

  The long barreled .44 magnum revolver shifted from me once more and found its mark on my friend as Perkins grinned darkly and squeezed the trigger.

  Click.

  Neil never flinched as the hammer came down on an empty chamber.

  “It’s your lucky day,” Perkins said. “For now.”

  He altered his aim to me and, without hesitation, squeezed the trigger again.

  Click.

  “Fortune smiles on you, Fletch,” he said, then once more pointed the revolver at Neil.

  Click.

  “I was never a math whiz, but I’s say your collective luck is about fifty percent used up,” Perkins mocked us.

  “Do it!”

  The urging came from the crowd. From one person in the crowd—Sheryl Quincy. She was no longer a silent observer. The moment had come for her to take ownership of what was happening, and she was doing so without hesitation.