Bugging Out (13 page)

“Put your weapon down,” Sarah said, from behind me.

I glanced slowly, cautiously over my shoulder and saw her, on the opposite curb, maybe fifteen feet away, the night’s din not enough to hide the lever action pointed at my back for the second time in less than six hours.

“What are you doing, Sarah?”

“Put the weapon down,” she repeated. “Right now.”

“Okay,” I said, and eased my AR down, letting it hang from the sling. “There.”

“Show me your hands and turn around.”

Again, I followed her instructions, hands held before me, gloved fingers splayed wide.

“Jeff, come on out, honey.”

From the diner now behind me, Jeff emerged and walked casually past, tossing a look up at me before joining his mother.

“You did good,” Sarah told her son, then she focused on me. “Put your weapons on the ground. All of them.”

I unclipped the sling from my AR and placed the rifle on the asphalt at my feet, then took the 1911 from the holster on my hip and did the same.

“Why are you doing this?” I asked her. “I have the food for you. Exactly what I promised. I didn’t have to come back here.”

“I know,” she said, then gestured with the muzzle of the lever action for me to back away from my weapons.

“Then why?” I pressed, taking two steps backward as she and her son took twice that many toward me.

“Are the keys in your truck?”

That single question gave me at least part of the answer I sought.

“You’re doing this for my truck? There have to be a dozen cars on this street you could get running. You said that was your plan.”

For a moment she said nothing. Just fixed an uncomfortable stare on me.

“Jeff, take his guns and put them in the alley behind the diner.”

Her son approached me as instructed and crouched to retrieve my weapons.

“The safeties are off, Jeff,” I warned him. “Keep your fingers off the triggers.”

“I will,” he assured me, then gathered up my rifle and pistol and disappeared back into the deserted eatery.

Sarah took another few steps toward me, the lever action now directed squarely at my gut.

“You’re right,” she said. “I could have taken another car, but how long would it run? And what would I do if it broke down in the middle of nowhere. There’s a lot of nowhere we’re going to have to travel through cutting across Canada to get to Washington. It’s winter. I can’t chance letting my son freeze to death.” She nodded toward my truck. “You were prepared for this. More than I was. Your truck has to be in good shape, probably full of gas.”

“Diesel,” I corrected her.

“I’m sorry.”

Jeff returned through the diner and walked toward my truck—now, apparently,
their
truck, and waited.

“Food’s in the back,” I told Sarah. “There’s a good three weeks in there. Plus three five gallon water cans, light sticks, a few other things I thought you might need.”

The shame showed plain on her face as I ticked off the things I’d brought her.

“You didn’t have to do this.”

“Really?” she asked quietly, wanting the exchange to be between just the two of us. “You would have just handed over the keys to your transportation if I needed it?”

“Yes,” I said, nodding lightly.

On her face I saw the sense of shame double. She was taking this hard, what she felt she’d been forced to do.

“I hope you make it,” I said, and even in the weak light of distant stars I could see her eyes begin to glisten. “I truly hope you get to Bremerton and find your husband. Families should be together.”

She didn’t move. The lever action seemed to sag in her grip. I probably could have made a move for it. More than likely could have seized it and taken my truck and its contents and left the woman and her son to fend for themselves.

But I didn’t.

“Your son’s waiting,” I said. “Get him out of the cold.”

The lever action lowered completely now, muzzle pointed at the dirty roadway. Sarah stood silent, barely holding it.

“Go,” I urged her.

“I’m...”

She couldn’t manage another apology and simply turned away and climbed into the truck, her son following. Its engine rumbled, the lights came on, and Sarah steered it through a tight one-eighty, putting the left front tire over the curb, and headed off, disappearing down the street and around a corner.

I made my way through the diner and retrieved my weapons. I’d hiked home once already from Eureka. Doing the same in the dark would likely halve the pace I could manage, unless I stuck to the highway.

That wasn’t an option. If half of what Sarah had hinted at happening in Whitefish was true, I wanted no chance that some patrol from there might spot me. My refuge had already been raided. If it was some group from down south, affiliated with this Major character, a return visit wasn’t out of the question. Neither was an ambush as I returned home. So the woods, thinned and dying, were the way I had to travel. Whatever cover they would provide was more than I could expect on or near the two lanes of asphalt between Eureka and points south.

As I began my trek home, though, I reminded myself that, even without some party waiting to ambush me, there was still at least one someone in the vast, greying woods surrounding my refuge. Someone who’d watched me, and, if indications were what they seemed, used force to, in essence, protect me. The human race was in full retreat, dying off, even killing itself, so it seemed. But in no way could I consider myself alone.

I wanted to believe that was a good thing.

––––––––

Part Three

Del

I
t had begun to snow as I reached my house near daybreak, the building layer of white showing no hint of tracks, human or other, prowling around my refuge. A full thirty minutes I’d waited on the hill to the north, watching, searching, trying to pick out any hint of movement, before entering my house and collapsing onto my bed. I knew I had to sleep. But every sound I heard, inside and outside, screamed ‘intruder’ to me. The wind whipping bare branches against one another set my nerves on edge. The rustle of snow tossed against the windows by the stiffening breeze. In the end, pure exhaustion dragged me down, and I slept the day away, waking as the blizzard darkened with night descending.

The embers I’d left in the hearth sparked a fast fire once I awoke, the fresh logs I fed it catching quickly. The blight had turned the forest to kindling. That was good for the purpose of maintaining warmth. It would be far from welcome should a bolt of lightning strike in the dry season.

I stirred a mix of dried chicken and vegetables into a pot, added some water and a can of broth, and set it on the stove. Next, and maybe more importantly, I plugged the coffee pot in. With the storm blotting the day’s sun, and snow skimming my solar panels to further reduce their output, I had to be mindful of my power usage and the drain it would have on my battery array. But coffee was coffee, and as long as my supply lasted, I was going to indulge, especially after the previous day and night I’d endured.

The dinner finished cooking and I ate it from the pot, a half-civilized routine I’d gotten into to save water. There was little point in dirtying a plate, which would then have to be washed, preferably with hot water, something that consumed even more power. The spoon I could lick clean like a ravenous child and then wash thoroughly in the morning when powering up the water heater for a shower. I was trying to be smart about things.

Of course, letting a stranger steal my truck during an act of kindness might count against me in the brains department.

Beep.

The alert sound was light and just audible above the boiling dinner and percolating coffee. I stepped toward the doorway between the kitchen and the front of the house and immediately saw the alarm panel, a single light flashing on the outer perimeter sensors. A thermal one. Something big and warm had encroached upon my property.

Beep.

A second sensor tripped, this one detecting motion. The flashing light on the panel told me it was closer in than the first.

Someone was coming.

I quickly killed the lights inside, not wanting to be silhouetted in the fading day outside. My AR with the tactical scope leaned against the back of a chair facing the hearth. I grabbed it and moved to the front door.

Beep.

Yet another motion sensor was registering a presence, now passing through my inner ring of alert, in a direct line from the previous locations. If I drew a line through them, it would lead right to my house.

I had company.

Weather be damned, I ignored the cold and stepped onto my porch, a steady dump of snow drifting down from above. I advanced to the edge of the porch where it turned to wrap around the south side and crouched, leaning my AR and a portion of my upper body around the corner to scan the near whiteout beyond. Full darkness had not yet settled, and the veil of snow took on a thick, opaque quality, like drizzling flakes of fog floating in the half light. It obscured almost everything beyond a few yards. I could just make out the edge of the dead woods.

And the man emerging from the trees.

“Hello!” he said.

I zeroed in on him through the scope, bright reticle on his chest. The slim barrel of a rifle pointed upward from his back, and his hands were empty, one raised in greeting.

“Who are you?” I challenged the man.

“My name is Del Drake,” he answered. “I’m the one who put a couple holes in your barn.”

This was my visitor. My watcher. And, it seemed, my protector.

“All right if I come on over?”

I eased my eye from the scope and looked to the vague shape with my naked eye. It seemed some moment of truth was at hand. I’d been waylaid and robbed by strangers twice in the previous days. Now, here was another unknown presenting himself. Wanting to enter my refuge. Neil might advise me to tell the armed enigma to do a one-eighty and make his way back to wherever he’d come from, and my friend might be right.

Might be.

Could I risk more contact with an outsider? Or was it just as much a risk to turn this outsider, who had done what he could to salvage a good portion of my food from being appropriated by the raiding party?

The truth be told, the man standing in the snow might be the closest thing to a friend I had at the moment.

“Yeah,” said, standing and lowering my AR. “Come on.”

Del tramped the dozen yards or so to my porch and found shelter from the storm, tossing back the hood of his parka and smiling at me through a trimmed but full beard. He offered the hand he had waved with, and the other I now saw was not empty, but cradled a medium-size clear jar, a mass of bright orange something within.

“An apology for drilling those shots into your barn,” Dell said as he handed the jar to me. “Peaches I canned before...before everything went to shit.”

I eyed the jar and its clearly delicious contents. It had been weeks since anything truly fresh had slipped past my lips, and I was already imagining the glorious taste to be had.

“No apology necessary,” I told Del. “You saved me from starving. If they’d gotten in my house...”

“Well,” he began, “I wasn’t going to let that happen.”

Again he smiled, sincere and warm. I felt instantly at ease with the man.

“You up for some bad coffee?” I asked him.

“Exactly what I make myself,” he said, laughing a bit.

“Come on in.”

*  *  *

D
el leaned his rifle against the wall and eased himself into one of the chairs facing the hearth, smiling against some discomfort as he settled into the cushions. I took the other chair and eyed him.

“You okay?”

He shrugged off the concern with a nod and sipped at the mug of coffee I’d poured him.

“Cup of Joe and someone to talk to,” he said, smiling. “What more could a man ask for. Especially these days?”

He had a point. But he was also lying. There was something wrong. The pain he’d tried to mask was too obvious. Too familiar. I’d seen the same in Neil’s father during a quick trip I’d taken to see my old friend not quite a year ago. It was right after the man had been diagnosed with the big C, and it was already bad for him. He, too, smiled through the discomfort. Gritted his teeth behind tight lips, not wanting to be a bother. So I knew.

After a moment, maybe seizing upon the hint of doubt in my gaze, Del realized I wasn’t being fooled.

“In the bones,” Del said. “Found out just before everything went to hell.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I tell you what,” he said, sipping from the mug before continuing, “some oncologist somewhere is going to lose out on a boatload of cash from Medicare.”

He laughed. A true laugh. Some ability to make light of his mortality flavoring the gesture.

“I’ve had sixty-seven years, so far.” He wrapped the side table with his knuckles. “If I make it to sixty-eight, that’s just gravy. Life’s been good.” Then his mood darkened, almost instantly. He stared at the fire crackling in the hearth. “Life’s different now, though. A year doesn’t mean the same thing. Hanging on another three-sixty-five is a lifetime, considering so many are dead and gone.”

I leaned forward, cupping my coffee in both hands. We talked for the next twenty minutes about our lives. Where we’d been and how we’d gotten here. Del had moved to his remote hideaway forty years ago, and worked logging crews in both Montana and Idaho for the better part of the last thirty years, until retiring a few years back. He’d been married once, for a short while, but the isolation, which he favored, wore on her, and on their union. It was odd—here was a man nearly twice my age, who lived a mile away over a stubby mountain, and, without ever laying eyes on him before this, I felt I knew him, I understood him, better than most people I’d called friends for twenty years.

All but Neil.

“How’d you figure it out?”

“Figure what out?” I asked, and Del smiled, which was enough to set me on the right path. “Yeah, this.”

“Tell you how I knew,” Del began. “Toilet paper.”

I chuckled.

“Go ahead and laugh, but a readily available supply of toilet paper is the indicator of a stable civilization. When I saw folks hoarding that on a trip to town before I hole up, I knew. People were worried about this.”