Eagle One Page 2

  Neil joined me in watching the child, working the radio’s controls, dialing in frequencies, repeating the calls over and over, using the call sign she’d made up for our location.

  “This is Big Sky Alpha, come in.”

  Del had avoided broadcasting, wary of anyone zeroing in on our little slice of peaceful existence. But Del was gone, and the things that we’d feared had either been eliminated, or likely died from the lingering effects of the blight. When Krista had asked if she could put a call out to Eagle One, which hadn’t been heard from since before their arrival at my refuge, no harm was seen, and so she’d taken it upon herself for the past two weeks to seek out the location of the enigmatic signal. A place we knew we had to find.

  “Eagle One, Eagle One, we know you’re out there. Please come in.”

  Grace eased a candle across the dining table, which had become home to the radios. She watched her daughter, still smiling, but the expression was tempered. Krista was as eager as Neil, and as me, to start west. Her mother, though, seemed to hope that the winter was long and the snow deep. Reaching my refuge had been enough for her. The relative safety she and her daughter now enjoyed dimmed any desire to go further, regardless of the reality requiring that we would have to. The food would run out at some point. Power, as we were realizing, was a more tenuous commodity by the hour. Our time here would not be endless.

  Yet it was here that Grace wanted to stay. In circumstances inching toward dire. What must have happened out there, on their journey here, that would make the certainty of starving and freezing to death in this place preferable to venturing onward?

  “Big Sky Alpha requires your location, Eagle One. You helped us get this far. Please come in.”

  This far...

  Del and I had wondered about the sporadic communications from Eagle One, some requesting that specific items be brought to them, mostly medical in nature. We’d puzzled over why anyone still alive in the wastelands would give a damn about some mysterious transmission seeking supplies. Only when Neil arrived did I learn why.

  Food.

  Mixed with the requests, in broadcasts that Del and I had missed, were directions. Instructions to points on the map where caches of food had been secured. Neil and Grace and Krista had traversed most of the country, from Virginia to Montana, moving from supply point to supply point, guided to coordinates shared over the airwaves. Some that they reached had already been cleaned out by others following Eagle One’s directions. Enough, though, had been untouched that they were well supplied for the journey.

  “We are good people, Eagle One. Big Sky Alpha wants to come to you.”

  I did. I knew that. If for no other reason than to come to some understanding of just what Eagle One was. Why did it need medical supplies? How did it know about the caches of food, mostly MREs, buried in large metal lockers under precisely twelve inches of earth? Not eleven inches, or thirteen, Neil had told me—an exact foot. In lockers that were, as detailed by my friend, freshly painted a bright red both inside and out.

  Colored just like the Red Signal that had announced the beginning of the end.

  “Please, Eagle One, we—”

  A terrible, shrill screeching cut Krista off, the electronic wail screaming from the radio’s speakers, overpowering her transmission. The young girl almost fell backward in her chair, jolted by the sound. I hurried to the equipment, Neil with me as Grace pulled Krista away.

  “Feedback?” Neil asked, the grating sound pitching higher by the second, almost painful.

  “Must be,” I said, nearly shouting.

  Neil dialed the volume down until near silence filled the space, just fire in the hearth crackling low. Bar graphs on the radio’s signal processor display were peaked, something within the device likely failing.

  “It’s like it’s overloaded,” I said, adjusting the controls without any luck, the signal readout still off the chart.

  “Not our day for electronics,” Neil commented.

  “Is it broken?” Krista asked, worried.

  “I don’t know,” I said, about to explain to her what I thought was happening when the signal graph went dead flat.

  Neil looked to me, puzzled, then the signal processor began registering again, tiny spikes showing on the readout. Not anything like what we’d just witnessed. He reached to the volume and slowly increased it.

  “Big Sky Alpha, we hear you.”

  It was the voice. That voice. Of a child. A boy.

  “It’s Eagle One!” Krista nearly shouted, ebullient at what had come from the speakers.

  Her joy lasted but a few seconds.

  “Big Sky Alpha, cease transmitting,” the child on the radio instructed, some urgency clear in their tone. “Cease transmitting immed—”

  The screeching returned in force, even louder, drowning the admonition from Eagle One and spiking the readout again. Krista slammed her hands over her ears as Neil reached toward the radio, ignoring the volume control this time for the power switch. He flipped it off and the radio went dark, a final, electronic hiss leaping from the speakers as it shut down.

  “It’s okay, sweetie,” Grace said, hugging her daughter from behind. “It stopped.”

  Krista slowly slid her hands from her ears and looked to Neil, then to me, her gaze seeking answers.

  “Why did Eagle One tell us to stop?”

  “That sounded like a warning,” Grace said, her gaze shifting between us, worry plain in it.

  I couldn’t disagree with her.

  “Why don’t we leave the radio off,” Neil suggested. “For a few days at least. Okay?”

  Dejected by the suggestion, and by the abruptness from Eagle One, Krista nonetheless nodded, accepting what she knew she could not change.

  * * *

  Three a.m.

  The time glared at me in blue numbers on the travel alarm clock I kept on the coffee table, within arm’s reach of where I lay on the couch. I had one more set of batteries for it, maybe three months of nightly use. After that, with my wristwatch broken while clearing snow from the solar panels, I’d be down to estimating the time of day, or night. Back to eighteenth century living. Or would it be seventeenth? I wasn’t sure, but it was brutally clear that, bit by bit, the blight was stripping away the trappings of the modern world. Progress was creeping in reverse. Maybe the end would be the last few survivors huddled in a cave around a fire, taking turns scrawling messages on the surrounding stone to tell the story of their world, their life, their demise. Little different from lost civilizations that had come and gone before.

  Still, we were here. For now. On the opposite side of the low table Neil slept fitfully on the cot we set up each night for him. Krista and Grace had taken over my bedroom, at my insistence, a week after they’d arrived. I’d healed enough by then, and even in the wake of the horrors the blighted world had dumped upon us, manners and hospitality mattered. At least in my home.

  “Jeez,” Neil muttered softly, rolling on the cot’s slack surface. “Next time I’m in the neighborhood, I’m finding better accommodations.”

  I smiled in the still night.

  “Make sure you fill out a comment card when you check out,” I shot back, our exchange in near whispers reminiscent of children yakking in their bunks at summer camp when they should be sleeping.

  The fire burned in the hearth, stoked by a trio of logs added before we turned in for the night. It cut the chill a little less each night, requiring another comforter this week. The electric blanket system that Del had showed me how to construct still worked in my bedroom, keeping Grace and Krista warm enough through the increasingly cold nights.

  Warmth was a problem. Food would soon be a problem. We could only hope that neither would be concerns when, and if, we reached Eagle One.

  “Beds,” Neil said softly. “That’s what I hope they have there. Real beds. If the only food at this Eagle One place is cat food, I’ll be fine, as long as there’s a real mattress to sleep on.”

  My friend wasn’t
sleeping. I wondered if the same thoughts might be churning in his head as were in mine. Or, was there something else keeping him awake besides the cot? Maybe someone.

  “You know she cares about you,” I said.

  Neil was silent for a moment. The topic I’d introduced finding a nerve. A raw spot that he had thought was hidden from view.

  “It’s obvious,” I told him.

  The looks. The glances. Her gaze finding him in simple moments. I hadn’t noticed it in their first days at my refuge, but as I healed and the fog of pain and medicine left me, the connection that existed between my friend and Grace was beyond denying—at least to me. They tried, Neil more than her. In our silly time earlier, with Krista playing games with me on the floor, I’d glimpsed Grace shifting her eyes toward him. And I’d seen Neil avoiding the same with purpose. A too obvious exhibition of aloofness, making its opposite almost certain.

  “Look, I don’t know what happened with you two on your way here, but—”

  “You’re right,” Neil interrupted, his head angling toward me. “You don’t know.”

  More defensiveness. More confirmation that I was right. In the past I might have taken his resistance as a signal to let it be. To back off. But the past was gone. The here, the now, was what mattered. Opportunities that presented themselves could not be ignored. Every positive had to be grabbed onto, and held dearly. Every chance at living. Every morsel of happiness. Every bit of hope, however small.

  “I just don’t want to see you miss a chance at something good,” I told my friend.

  It wasn’t even like Grace was grieving over a husband lost to the blight. He’d walked out on her and Krista when the girl was still in diapers. That much I’d been able to draw out of her when probing gently about the time before. But, like Neil, she held close most of what had happened on their way to join me.

  And that made me wonder all the more on what they’d experienced. What they’d lived through. What they might have survived.

  “Get some sleep, Fletch.”

  That was the last he said to me that night, and I pressed the issue no further. But his reluctance to even engage in discussion about Grace, and their journey, made me realize that, in one way, Neil had changed. Especially toward me, his oldest and closest friend.

  He was keeping secrets.

  Three

  Del’s near ancient inverter was bolted to one wall in the closet next to his radio room. I removed it with no trouble and returned to the living room where I’d left Neil. He’d said he wanted to have a look around for anything we might have missed, anything more to scrounge, but when I came back into the room I found him standing there, in the center of the space, staring at the recliner Del had favored as the pain from his cancer had intensified. It was something shared with Dieter Moore, Neil’s father.

  As it turned out, it wasn’t the only thing.

  “Got it,” I said.

  Neil didn’t respond. Didn’t move. Didn’t glance my way. He simply stood and stared at the recliner. As if looking back into a memory.

  “I left work and took my father from the nursing home,” Neil said. “Took him home. By the time the signal was blasting everywhere a week later, we were at my camp.”

  His ‘camp’. Neil had never referred to his own small refuge as what it was—a farm. Located in rolling hills and sparse woods of western Virginia, the ten acres were not as isolated as my refuge, but far enough from the hustle and bustle of everyday life to give the illusion of seclusion.

  “We rode it out there for three weeks. He was getting weaker. He was hurting. I’d managed to scrounge enough pain meds, but he hated those pills. He hated feeling foggy, disconnected.”

  Neil glance to me. I had to smile. Not at the situation, but at the memory of what a tough old man he had.

  “So he just swallowed it,” Neil told me. “He took the pain.”

  He looked back to the chair again.

  “Just sat in his big old chair by the window and stared out at the trees. They still had color then. Something other than grey.”

  Neil nodded. To himself.

  “But he knew. He knew it was coming. I’d told him all I knew, but I think he...I don’t know...sensed how bad things were going to get. I thought we were pretty safe where we were, but he didn’t. He kept telling me to get moving. To head out and hook up with you up here. But I wasn’t going to leave him. And he knew that.” Neil considered the simple fact he’d just stated for an instant, the words weighted with some undeniable emotional gravity. “He knew.”

  My friend, my oldest friend, quieted, a darkness welling up from within.

  “He was in bad shape,” Neil went on. “But he could have made it another month or two. Maybe longer. Then trouble from the cities started getting closer and closer to my camp. The town market was looted and six people were killed. That was less than two miles from my front gate. He told me again to leave him and get out while there was still a chance to get clear of the chaos. I said no. So he did what he thought he had to do.”

  I sensed what was coming. For an instant, I considered telling Neil he didn’t have to give the recollection voice. That he didn’t have to relive it.

  But I said nothing. I simply listened, knowing my friend had to share what had happened to set him on his journey here. To let out at least this part of what he’d endured.

  “I was out by the barn splitting wood,” Neil said, a skim of tears upon his eyes. “And I heard it. From inside. A gunshot.”

  Del had walked headlong into danger, sacrificing himself to take out those who’d come to eliminate the both of us. He’d done that so that I might live. Dieter Moore had done the same for his son.

  “I didn’t even run when I heard the shot,” Neil said, some faded judgment in his tone. “It had started to snow that morning, and I stood in it. I’m not even sure how long. Five minutes. Twenty. I don’t know. I think I didn’t want to see what I knew I would.”

  I reached out and put my hand on Neil’s shoulder.

  “When I finally went inside I found a note on the counter by the back door. It was a piece of paper folded over, and on the outside he’d written in big letters READ THIS FIRST. I’d never been one to disobey the old guy, so I did. Do you know what he wrote?”

  Neil glanced back at me and I shook my head.

  “Just one word,” he said. “Go.”

  Shit...

  I was gutted by what Neil had just shared. Imagining what he’d felt, at that moment, was impossible. It was something only he could comprehend. His cross to bear.

  “Go...”

  He repeated the word, soft, like a whispered prayer. The wet sheen that had glistened over his gaze spilled over, quiet tears drizzling down his cheeks.

  “That’s why I’m here. Because my father put a gun his mouth and removed the only reason I had to stay put.”

  “He did know you wouldn’t leave him,” I said.

  “Yeah, he did. And if I’d stayed, I would have never made it. All the hell spilling out of D.C. would have rolled over me.”

  He stopped right there. Said no more about that string of moments in his past. Maybe he’d let it out, finally, so that it was done, no need to ever speak of it again.

  “Neil...”

  “Yeah?” he said, dragging a sleeve across his face.

  “I’m glad you made it.”

  He sniffed away the burst of emotion that had come and allowed a smile.

  “I am, too.”

  Four

  I stopped, Del’s house a few hundred yards behind, the sky an almost painful, brilliant blue beyond the dead trees above.

  “What is it?”

  Neil’s question was tinged with recognition. With understanding that something had made me stop. Some sense of mine had gone on alert.

  “Listen,” I said, and we both quieted.

  For a moment there was nothing. And then the sound rose again. Soft at first, but so alien in a landscape that was drenched in nothingness that it stood ou
t, stark and singular, a hint of familiarity to its rhythmic, distant thrumping.

  “Does that sound like a...”

  “Helicopter,” I said, finishing Neil’s almost incredulous suggestion.

  It did sound like that. Precisely like that. How long had it been since any craft had been seen or heard in the air above? More than a year, in my case.

  “Is that from the south?” Neil asked.

  The mountains and valleys played tricks with sound, but I thought he might be right. I put the inverter down on a rock poking from the calf-high snow and swung my AR around, bringing it to bear. Ready.

  “We should be able to tell from the hill across the gully,” I said.

  Neil nodded, and we left the trail between Del’s house and mine, making our way down the gentle slope, shallow drifts crunching beneath our boots. The sound of the helicopter rose and fell as we moved quickly through the thin layer of snow, leaping the dry gully, last skim of water at its base finally frozen solid. Beyond it, the southern hill rose, steep and nearly bare, decimated woods once thick upon it mostly toppled, leaving a jumble of snapped, grey trunks and limbs for Neil and I to navigate. We rolled and crawled over the biggest, ducking under others which had come to rest at precarious angles, just a stiff wind, or a dump of snow enough to send them crashing to a final rest upon the equally dead earth. As we neared the crest of the hill, the sound of the helicopter grew louder still. We moved now from cover to cover, staying low as we ducked behind the few remaining pines still erect, dead sentinels at attention atop the hill. From behind one just below the crest we looked across the colorless valley.

  Lumbering up it, just above the dead forest, was the source of the noise. A helicopter. And even at the distance it was from us I could see that it was all black.

  “It’s flying low and slow,” Neil said. “He’s looking for something.”

  I took out my compact binoculars and focused in on the aircraft. It was a vintage Huey, workhorse of the Vietnam War era, every inch of it the color of rich coal.

  “Is this like the one you told me about?” Neil asked.