Bugging Out (12 page)

Alone...

The idea came to me naturally. I’d made the same offer to Marco. Sarah Elway and her boy, Jeff, needed help. Needed a chance to get through this nightmare. I was well stocked. If nothing else I could give them a chance to get healthy and ready for any trek to the Pacific Northwest.

“Listen, I have food, and plenty of room. It’s safe. You can both come rest up at my place. It’s not that far south of here.”

Sarah had seemed to listen with openness, until I mentioned the direction of my refuge. She shook her emphatically after that.

“No. We’re not going south. We have to head north, and then west.”

“You can still do that,” I assured her. “Just after you—”

“No,” she said, with quiet force. “There’s not a chance in hell we’re moving one inch to the south.”

Jeff nodded agreement with his mother. Total agreement.

“That’s where the Major is.”

I looked between mother and son, puzzled.

“Who?”

“The Major,” Jeff repeated, then he clammed up, seeming to want to visit the subject no more. He tucked his head in against his mother’s shoulder.

“You’re from south of here and you haven’t had any run-in with him?”

I shook my head at Sarah’s question.

“I’m north of Whitefish.”

“Well, my advice is, don’t go south.”

Her words were more warning than suggestion. I wondered if the firefight I’d watched between my refuge and Whitefish had any relation to what might be motivating her fear of the area.

“Who is this Major?”

“That’s what he calls himself,” Sarah explained. “And what his people call him. Major James Layton.”

“Is he in uniform?”

She shook her head at my question.

“He came into town three weeks after everything went to hell.”

“After the Red Signal?” I asked, the timing worrisome. That would have been about the time Marco was heading south from my refuge with his family.

“Yeah,” she confirmed, finishing the last of the energy bar, a bitter exasperation rising. “That damn thing blocked everything. I couldn’t get in touch with Charlie’s—that’s my husband—with his base in Bremerton. I just wanted to see if they knew anything. No one could get through to anyone, anywhere, I think.”

“The police were able to get some radio traffic through,” I told her. “So some allowance for official communication was made.”

“Official,” she said, nearly spitting a laugh after the word. “The ‘official’ people in Whitefish didn’t seem to stick around to do much communicating. After the third day, I didn’t see a cop or firefighter anywhere in town. But I tried not to go out too much after that.”

“Dangerous?”

“A lot of shooting. Fires. By the end of the first week it was chaos. People were killing each other for whatever food they had in their cupboards. All the stores had been cleaned out in the first few days. I was lucky that my husband made a big deal about being prepared. He grew up in the Midwest with a lot of ice storms. No power, no open stores.”

“So you had food,” I said.

“For a while. Until I traded it away.”

“For what?” I asked, unsure what would be worth more than the thing keeping them alive.

“Freedom,” she answered. That, too, was a precious commodity, often taken for granted. “When the Major arrived with his people, he started gathering all the supplies to keep under guard. He was some kind of authority figure.”

“With sufficient weaponry, I imagine.”

She nodded.

“No one was in control,” she went on. “People weren’t even able to control themselves. The few who’d survived, who’d hung on, they gave in. By that time they wanted someone to take charge.”

“You didn’t,” I said.

“My parents escaped from East Germany when there still was an East Germany,” she explained. “I was born here, in America, but they made sure I knew what kind of system they’d lived under. One thing they drilled into me was that you never, ever, allow yourself to live under someone else’s control. No matter what sort of order or utopia they promise.”

“Freedom isn’t free,” I said, and she nodded.

“So I bribed my way out with what was left of our food.” She gave a small, light chuckle. “You don’t have to be a big country like East Germany to have graft and bribery be the way things get done.”

“You made your way up here after that?”

“Yeah. We couldn’t head down toward Kalispell. The Major was telling people that he was securing that as well.”

“He didn’t give any indication where he was from? Anything?”

“No. Just rolled into town with thirty, maybe forty people, all armed to the teeth, and took over.” Sarah quieted, thinking back. “Not everyone gave in. Not everyone had the ability to bribe their way out.”

Some memory was rising. A terrible memory, I could tell.

“That bad?”

She didn’t nod this time. Didn’t respond at all for a moment.

“He told people if they tried to leave, they’d die. My friend, Ellen, she told the Major’s men that she had a cabin she wanted to go to, but they wouldn’t let her leave town. They said if she tried, she’d be killed.”

She was spinning a harsh tale. So harsh I hoped it was at least partly embellished.

“I won’t go south again,” she said. “You shouldn’t either. Not that far. Stay away from Whitefish.”

Some trauma had clearly worked its way deep into her psyche. And that was standing in the way of getting her, and her son, the help they needed.

“You can’t scrounge your way north and then west,” I told her. “Then south again. Washington is a long way.”

“We’ll make it.”

I laid a hard stare on her and, making sure her son wasn’t looking, I shook my head—
no you won’t.

“I just need to find enough food,” she said. “Then we can get one of the abandoned cars running and...”

There was a fairytale quality to how she was expressing her plans, and it quickly caught up with her. Reality set in and she stared at me, a skim of tears glinting over her gaze. She was afraid.

Damn...

“Okay, you won’t come with me,” I agreed. “But will you wait here?”

“Why?”

“Because I can be back here with food for you tonight.”

She puzzled visibly at my plan. At my offer. For an instant as I conceived it, I did as well. To get home and back in the time I was promising I’d have to hustle my ass on foot, then risk putting my truck on the road to get supplies back here. Then I’d return home, in a truck growling along the silent highway. Anyone within earshot would hear it, and, as I’d just learned, even apparently decent people tended now to respond with, at the minimum, the threat of force.

We were long past the time of handshakes as initial greetings.

“You’d do that?” Sarah asked, truly asked, as if expecting I would up and reveal that it was just some sick joke I was proposing.

“I will.”

She glanced down to her son, nuzzled against her, his eyes closed. He was sleeping, the state of rest stealing him fast from the waking world, exhaustion trumping their interaction with a stranger.

“Thank you,” Sarah said, managing a smile as a single tear spilled from each eye.

I rose from my crouch and looked behind, to the door that was not that anymore. Wind pushed dust down the street outside. The day was more than half done, sun already taking aim at the western horizon. In a few hours it would be setting. My trip back here would be in the dark.

I
sensed something was wrong a hundred yards from my refuge as I was about to cross Weiland Road. Night was rolling over the hills, the glow ahead of me to the west dimming by the minute. But not enough that I couldn’t see the collection of empty boxes scattered along the road, cardboard brown, flaps ripped, as if opened with haste. Familiar boxes. Ones that had, until recently, been packed with MREs.

Checking both directions for any sign of life, I jogged to the center of the road and crouched near one of the boxes. On one flap I could plainly see markings that were more than familiar. These marking were mine, done with my own hand while organizing my cache of food soon after settling in. I’d dated and labeled each case. And here one, minus its precious contents, lay in the middle of the road.

I looked across to the vague notch in the forest that was all that remained of the driveway I’d obliterated. Limbs snapped from the dying pines lay haphazardly across the onetime path, several splintered further. As if stepped on.

Forcing myself to move cautiously, I worked my way alongside the hidden driveway, until it lay clear again a distance up from the road. Another box lay there, flaps sealed, the MREs still within. I left it and continued, emerging from the path through the forest to see my refuge in the fading light of day, the barn doors flung open, more boxes of my food cache strewn about.

“Shit...”

My AR at the ready, I approached the barn and peeked past the open door. The shed I’d built within the old structure, crafted to keep half of my food secure from vermin and any encroaching weather, was wrenched open, thin steel walls torn from the metal frame. Whoever had raided my cache hadn’t even bothered with the shed’s locked door.

I entered the barn and surveyed the loss. The shed was empty. Completely. Fifty percent of what I’d stored was gone. A full ninety percent of my MREs. The only thing left was just what I’d kept in...

...the house.

Damn!

I bolted from the barn and across the dusty courtyard, slipping past my truck and onto the porch, my boots skidding to a stop, almost too fast, my balance precarious for an instant as I grabbed the railing and steadied myself. Where I’d expected to find my front door smashed in, it hung intact on its frame. I unlocked it and moved through the house, less wary than a few moments before. Nothing within was amiss. Everything was how I’d left it. Doors and windows were secure. The remainder of my food supply, split between several closets and a spare bedroom, was untouched. The raiders hadn’t bothered with my house.

But why?

I went outside again and headed for the barn, wanting to take a more thorough inventory. But I never made it. Something caught my eye, on the ground just behind where my truck was parked.

Shell casings. A dozen or so. I crouched and picked one up. A .223 caliber. The same as my AR.

I made sure my safety was off and stood, scanning the trees as night began to fill the space between them with shadows. Beyond having a sizable portion of my stores stolen, there’d been gunplay at my refuge. I had no clue as to why.

Until I saw the corner of the barn. Easily missed in my focus on the theft, the pair of holes in the old wood were starkly clear now, about a foot apart, one higher than the other. About head height. The other one lower. Just feet away lay a trio of MRE cases that had been dropped.

It hadn’t been just gunplay, I realized. There was a firefight here. A small one, to be certain. Contained. Seemingly initiated when someone shot at those who were raiding my barn. The other boxes scattered down the driveway and in the road beyond gave credence to this. Those who’d come to steal had run off. Had been driven off.

By someone.

I could have spent hours staring into the woods as darkness set, but I’d made a promise. A promise I now had to reconsider. The plentiful store of food I’d known was now halved. Going forward, every bite I took would matter more, because I was that much closer to the state I’d found Sarah and Jeff in.

You can’t leave them like that...

No. I couldn’t. I knew that. And I wouldn’t.

I set about loading my truck with supplies. As night fell fully on the north of the state I drove slowly down the covert driveway I’d maintained and turned onto the road, headlights blazing, Eureka just a few minutes away.

I
killed my truck’s lights and cruised along the street, weaving slowly around abandoned cars. Blocky bits of safety glass, the remnants of someone’s windshield, crunched under my tires as I rolled to a stop in front of
Keeping It Reel
, lowering my passenger window and shining a flashlight into the store. It was empty.

There was no assurance that Sarah and Jeff would be exactly where I’d left them. There was also no agreement on where to actually meet them. Both facts left me scanning the street ahead, and behind, for any sign of them. But there was none.

I turned off the engine and stepped from my truck, taking my AR in hand as I walked a few yards ahead of the vehicle and stood in the center of the dark road. Streetlamps that once had blazed when the sun was down loomed cold and black now, no power to feed them, the decorative glass fixtures atop broken on near every pole. I’d not wanted to be shut down by the night and made sure the weapon I brought was topped with my one and only piece of night vision optics. I brought the AR up and looked through the stubby scope atop it, the world beyond revealed in shades of greenish grey, the scant ambient light from stars and the fingernail moon amplified to paint an almost cartoonish picture of my surroundings.

My empty surroundings.

“Sarah!” I called out, keeping my eye to the night scope, slowly sweeping the street ahead and behind as I listened for a reply. Listened for anything.

But there was still nothing. No sign of her or her son.

I crept forward slowly, steadily, weapon up, safety now off. A sense of unease rose, the worry hot and bitter in my gut. Something was wrong.

“Jeff!”

I thought the boy might answer if his mother wouldn’t. Or couldn’t. I was met, again, with a deep quietness. Even the breeze had settled. Eureka and everything in it felt dead.

crack

The sound was small and close, off to my right. I swung my AR that way and scanned the interior of an old diner through my scope. Booths and a long counter and dangling electrical lines were painted with the colors of a neon forest. The space, where the scent of bacon and eggs and food that was fresh had once filled the air, looked deserted. But it was where the sound had come from. I was sure.

“Sarah,” I said, almost hushed now, focused hard on the diner. Watching for movement. Listening.

But not closely enough.