Bugging Out (16 page)

Del was right. What could the man expect to achieve through destroying his own property to protect it? So maybe...

“How close is Eddie’s place to the road?” I asked. “I mean, is it more accessible than either of our properties?”

“Twenty feet off the road,” Del answered. “You can see it driving by. Plus he’s got this big mailbox he carved to look like a grizzly head with its mouth open.”

I looked away for a moment, convinced that my supposition was likely fact.

“What?” Del asked, seeing the mental gears churning behind my eyes.

“Remember the woman, Sarah?”

“Yeah.”

“She told me that this Major guy wasn’t letting anyone leave Whitefish. He was telling them that if they tried to go anywhere, even to a cabin near town, they’d be killed.”

It was registering with Del. He straightened in his chair, the pain evident in his face, along with something else.

Fury.  Cold, quiet, measured hate.

“He’s penning them up,” Del said. “And if the warnings aren’t enough, he booby-traps a few places where people might hide from him. Boom. What a message that would send.”

If this was true, if I was actually right, there was something that, especially now, didn’t make sense.

“What about me?” I asked Del.

“What about you?”

“The raiders, the ones who hit my place, if they were his...”

“Why haven’t they come back?” Del asked for me.

“They know someone is there. Someone with food.”

“The fact that they were chased off by an old man with a bolt action rifle might inform their decision to steer clear.”

“They had no idea who you were,” I reminded him. “They knew nothing about you.”

“They knew someone on this mountain was prepared to shoot back.”

He had a point. In the classic sense, the Major, and those allied with him, were bullies. When faced with a victim who fought back, bullies tended to reconsider their victim. Or their approach.

“So I get a pass?”

“For the moment,” Del said. “But once he feels secure, once he’s built up his forces from the locals, they’ll be back.”

“Wonderful,” I said, looking to the bottle on the coffee table. “I think I might start not drinking again.”

I held the mug out and Del poured me a splash of courage.

“I think maybe we need to lay eyes on just what’s happening down in Whitefish,” Del said. “Before it comes our way.”

I took a long drink and nodded.

T
he train tracks that had led me out of Whitefish on the day the Red Signal appeared now led Del and I back toward the town. A mile from it, near two in the afternoon, we came upon the first horror that seemed to validate the fear Sarah had expressed.

“Christ,” Del said softly.

Both of us saw it at the same time as we emerged from the trees on the west side of Whitefish Lake, facing a house just inland from Beaver Bay. A galvanized fencepost had been driven into the earth in front of the residence, its upper end hidden somewhere within the man who’d been impaled upon it, his body inverted, pole disappearing into his mouth as if he’d swallowed it. His decaying hands were tied behind his back, feet similarly bound together, the dead holes where his eyes had once been seeming to stare at the sign affixed to the bottom of the post. One word scrawled upon the square placard.

HOARDER

“The new crucifixion,” Del commented.

“Sarah said everyone was supposed to turn in their food,” I recounted.

“He, apparently, did not.”

Cold had helped preserve the corpse somewhat, but it was apparent from the gush of frozen blood spilled down the pole and over the sign that the man had been dealt his fate while alive.

“They watched,” I said.

“My guess is they made others watch, too,” Del added.

I had to believe that he was right. What we were seeing was as much message as punishment.

“Major James Layton appears to be one piece of work,” Del said.

There was every possibility our presence would not be appreciated, particularly being that we were armed and unwilling to follow orders that had been blasted out over the airwaves. Turning back might be the prudent thing to do.

We did not. Both Del and I, as neighbors and friends, needed to know as much as we could about Whitefish. In no small way we were spies on a mission of our own making. And, like intelligence agents in both fact and fiction, were we to be discovered, our lifespan would be measured in minutes, not years.

Another hour it took us, moving from cover to cover, before we reached the western edge of town, beyond the golf course, where houses were spread over large lots of land. The whole of the land before us, dotted with snowy roofs and dead trees stabbing skyward from drifts, gave the appearance of some abandoned alien settlement.

Yet, clearly, what we saw on the road across a barren field proved it had not been rendered lifeless.

Two men, rifles slung on their shoulders, stood in front of a newer pickup, machinegun mounted to a metal framework rising from the bed. They talked, and across the distance we could both hear them occasionally laugh.

Del took his own pair of binoculars out and surveyed the scene, glassing the men, and the road both east and west of them.

“Movement to the east,” he said. “Nothing to the west.”

“They’re sentries,” I suggested. “Controlling access.”

“We’ll find the same on the other roads in and out,” Del said, putting his binoculars away. “This way is a no go.”

“Let’s backtrack, come in from the north through the rail yards.”

Del didn’t seem entirely enthused by that approach.

“We’ll have to chance the rail bridge or the ice to get across the river,” he said.

“Ice, I’d say. It’ll hold.”

“I’m sure it will,” Del agreed. “But if we need to get the hell out fast, there’ll be a river between us and our way home. Unless you want to take a helluva long walk around the east side of the lake.”

It was a risk, to be sure. But we’d come to get information, and we couldn’t accomplish that without getting closer. Much closer. Through the rail yards was the best avenue to making that happen. And the safest, in my opinion.

“It’s worth the risk,” I told Del.

“Okay,” he said, without hesitation, trusting in my appraisal.

We followed the path I’d proposed, skirting the sparse number of dwellings on the west side of town, each and every one we passed seeming left to the elements. Windows smashed. Doors wrenched from their hinges.

“Looks like they don’t want folks even this far out,” Del observed.

“Concentrating the population to control them,” I said, echoes of a history almost forgotten rising. “Like a ghetto.”

Near the golf course we chanced entering a house, to check its interior, no obvious traps set to deter squatters, though the destruction of its barrier to weather made it all but uninhabitable. What we found inside painted still more of a picture of what had happened. Cabinets were cleaned out. Refrigerator empty. A basement dry room, where the resident had once obviously kept preserved goods and home crafted beers, was empty, the machinery to process the foods gone as well, leaving dusty footprints of where they’d been.

“Turn in your food, right?”

“If they had anything left,” I said, mostly agreeing with Del’s rhetorical recollection. Most people would have exhausted the food kept in their house within a week. Some, maybe the people in this house, were keepers of preserved foods. Not survivalists, but just individuals who chose to be prepared.

We left the house and continued, crossing the frozen mouth of the river just upstream from the rail bridge spanning it. Shallow water bubbled beneath a few inches of ice, the footing solid as we hurried to the far side and scampered up the embankment. To our left, Whitefish Lake lay still and flat, iced over, a carpet of snow thick atop that. Ahead, the open expanse of the rail yard stretched for hundreds of yards, the space broken by maintenance sheds, trailer offices, and a mix of train cars and one locomotive scattered about the spur lines feeding the main track. Using the structures and cars as cover, Del and I leapfrogged to cross the yard, one moving and then the other, until we had reached the Baker Avenue Bridge. We passed beneath it and found cover behind the museum at the north end of Depot Park.

“There,” Del said, pointing around the corner of the trash dumpster.

I tracked his direction and saw a few people down the street, congregating in front of the middle school. None appeared to be armed. Two looked to be women, the other a man much older. He leaned on the women, and their arms curled behind his back, supporting him.

“You notice anything else?” I asked Del.

“You mean how clean it is?”

“Not a wreck on the streets,” I said. “Every window I see is unbroken or boarded over.”

“We’re inside their zone. They don’t have to discourage people from being here.”

Del was right in his analysis. We’d easily penetrated their perimeter, which, when one considered the facts, was unsurprising. Most of the citizenry was dead and gone. The force that the Major would have arrived with, and built from any willing residents, would hardly be sufficient to seal the town fully. There were too many ways in and out. Fear and intimidation, with maybe a promise of order and food, was enough to keep most every survivor in place. This we knew.

What we didn’t know was what their reaction to intruders would be.

“Patrol,” Del said, ducking fully behind the dumpster.

I heard the rumble before seeing the two large pickup trucks rumble over the bridge to our right, arriving from the northern part of the town. Each had a machine gun mounted similarly to the vehicle we’d seen at the roadblock. What was different here were the two armed men in the back of each truck, one on the machine gun and the other next to him with an assault rifle at the ready.

“They’ve been scrounging weapons the Guard left behind,” Del said.

From the look of their armament, and what Del described seeing on a scouting trip before we’d met, he was dead on. It made me wonder, with such a display, if they’d tried to disarm the surviving population, maybe taking a cue from FEMA, as indicated on the notice Marco had shown me. No weapons allowed in the camps, centers, whatever they were calling them down in Arizona. If such places existed at all. Or existed anymore. They would have been overrun with refugees, I knew. People just like Marco, desperate for food, and medical care. And stability.

Is that all Major Layton had had to do? Dangle stability in front of the desperate population of a small town, a good portion of which was well armed in their everyday existence? Some had resisted, as Sarah had implied. The firefight I’d watched from a distance now seemed all but certain to have involved the Major’s men and noncompliant townspeople.

And it was clear who had won that skirmish.

The patrol worked its way off the bridge and drove through the snowy streets, nearing the trio of people gathered near the middle school. The two vehicles pulled up and stopped, five armed men exiting the vehicles and approaching the people. One man remained on his truck’s machine gun, covering not the interaction beginning, but their flanks and rear.

“They don’t feel fully secure,” I commented as I watched the machine gunner swivel his weapon slowly, searching for threats.

“Compliance hasn’t been total,” Del said.

The next thing to inform our opinion of the force that had taken over Whitefish was not anything we saw. It was what we heard.

A blood curdling scream rolled up the street from the two women as the older man was pulled from their embrace and dragged toward the lead vehicle. One of the women tried to push past the armed men and she was knocked to the ground, courtesy of a rifle but strike to her back. The other woman dropped to the ground and shielded her companion with her body. The armed men, satisfied that they’d stopped any resistance, returned to their vehicles, the older man heaved roughly into the first truck, only a single man required to keep him subdued as the patrol drove away.

“What the hell was that?”

Del didn’t have an immediate answer to my question.

“That guy didn’t look like he could muster much trouble for anyone to be concerned with,” he observed.

The trucks pulled away and disappeared down the street, the women still huddled on the snowy sidewalk, one hurt and the other sobbing over her.

“They might have some answers for us,” Del said.

He was right. But to seek those answers we’d have to expose ourselves as we hadn’t yet. We’d actually be venturing into the town, with little idea who might be watching from any of the windows. Or who might come around a corner to spot us.

“Everything looks clear between us and them,” I said, scanning the park and buildings ahead.

“We move together,” Del said.

I nodded, and he left the cover of the dumpster first. I followed quickly, keeping up, with just ten feet separating us. For a guy in his mid-sixties with cancer eating at his bones, Del Drake was swift and sharp. He maneuvered from cover to cover. Using poles and signage to obscure our dash to the middle school. When we reached its corner, Del stopped us and took stock of the way ahead. Buildings lined the opposite side of the street. Empty buildings, we hoped, but couldn’t be sure.

“We’re damn exposed,” I said.

“Yeah.”

Twenty yards ahead the women now clung to each other on the ground, hugging and sobbing.

“Let’s get them to come to us,” Del said.

Rather than making a dash to where they sat just in front of the school’s entrance alcove, we needed to draw their attention. And, quietly, urge them to move our way. It was all great in theory, but after what they’d just been through, there was no guarantee they’d have any trust toward men with guns.

Doubts aside, it was our best choice.

I fished around in the snow near the building with my gloved hand until I found what I was looking for—a rock. I leaned out past the corner of the building and hurled the chunk of stone toward the women, but not directly at them. It found its mark against the front side of the school and skidded off the brick façade with a stark scraping sound. The woman who hadn’t been struck looked up at the impact. She was younger, I could see, maybe late twenties or early thirties, though with the physical hardships many had been through a true sense of age was more difficult to come by. The woman she’d shielded looked older, in her fifties, I gauged. The relationship and the situation began to gel in my mind. Daughter and mother, who’d just witnessed their father and husband being taken away. That was what we’d stumbled upon.