Bugging Out (25 page)

When I woke two days later I found a few sheets of paper and penned my last testament, no point in calling it a will. There was nothing to pass on, and no one to pass it on to. Somewhere in the rambling document I asked God for forgiveness. That night the sky turned black and stabbed at the earth with lightning and shook all around me with thunder.

It seemed to me I’d received the answer to the pardon I’d sought.

S
ummer came and went. I mashed food as I prepared it, slipping ever smaller bits past my lips. What I managed to swallow kept me alive. Barely.

Heat sizzled across the parched landscape. The winds that Layton had waited on ripped through the mountains. Dry lightning set patches of the matchstick woods ablaze across the valley. I watched smoke rise, a dark grey column climbing into the sky. For days I wondered if the wildfire might blow my way and visit upon me what I’d arranged for Whitefish, but soon the smoke tower laid down to the east as the flames were dragged that way by the winds. I was spared.

For the moment.

Every day I grew weaker. In the high heat of the season I found that I needed a fire even mid-day. My bones ached with a persistent chill. When I had the strength I cut wood. When I didn’t I broke pieces of furniture. Once or twice a week I turned the television on and listened to the static where the Denver station had been.

The first week of September, the static went quiet and a darkness appeared on screen. Not total, some faint light hinting that I was still seeing the news studio. The chromed edges of the anchor desk gleamed weakly. One of the monitors mounted high on the wall beyond flickered slightly. It seemed empty as I stared at it.

It was not.

The figure slouched about in the near distance, weaving between desks in the working newsroom behind where the anchors once sat. Man or woman I could not tell in the dim space. They pulled drawers open and pawed at the contents, their form and actions lost in complete shadow more often than not. Still, I knew that they were there. I could hear them.

A microphone somewhere in the studio was picking up their movement. Their breathing. Even their voice. So thin and distant it was, though, that little could be determined from it. I turned the volume all the way up until the television speakers hummed, but all that did was make the unintelligible loud. Slipping from my place on the couch I slid across the floor until I was just inches from the screen, my hollowing eyes trying to peel through the darkness a thousand miles to the south.

The figure stepped from the full shadow and into some semblance of light. A wisp of it, at least. It was a man, I thought. Or at least the features of the head made me think so. And the voice now, it came through louder, closer to some microphone, the words breathy, but also sounding male beneath the vacant tone. And they were saying something I could just make out.

“I need my script.”

The man staggered from the working newsroom to the anchor desk and tipped against it, single piece of white paper in one hand, the other grasping at the edge with fingers that were near skeletal. He leaned forward, face over the desk, more light angling upon him now, revealing his harsh features, skull chiseled down to thin skin draped upon bone. He was unrecognizable.

Except for the eyes.

“Jim,” I said, and let my hand drift to the screen and lay upon the face of the veteran newsman.

“Thank you,” Jim Winters began, swallowing dryly. “Thank you for joining us. In today’s news...”

He hesitated, lost, eyes glancing down at the blank sheet of paper in his hand, an anger building, setting the blue in them afire as his gaze shifted, looking past the camera.

“Dammit, Mark! Why is the script not on the prompter?!”

The question, sharp and loud, was accompanied by a trickle of white froth at the corner of Jim’s mouth, the bubbles soon turning pink, then red. A thin, dark trickle of blood dribbled from his nose and over his lips.

“Dammit!” he swore again, spitting the blood draining over and from his mouth, hand that held the paper bunching it into a fist that he slammed down upon the desk. “We need to be professional! People are counting on us!”

I drew my hand back from the sickening image on the screen as Jim Winters looked again into the camera.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I apologize for the difficulties we are experiencing. We will endeavor to...to...”

He quieted, his gaze drifting upward, to the darkness looming above.

“We need more light,” Jim said. “More light and...”

Then he said no more. The fist he’d planted on the desktop opened, letting the paper slip out. He straightened with effort, standing behind the desk, running a hand over the few strands of hair that remained atop his head, grooming a memory. His body turned unsteadily, back to the camera, and he made his way back into the working newsroom, shadows swallowing him as he appeared to sit at a desk and let his head come to rest upon it.

I scooted away across the floor until my back was against the couch, watching for hours, past the time the sun disappeared in the west, my eyes tuned to the distant, dim studio, trying to seize on any movement. There was none. Not at nine o’clock. Not at midnight. And not at half past one in the morning when, once again, the Denver station went to static.

After a few minutes I turned the television off, muting the slight glow it had spread about the room around me. Night flooded in through the windows, dark and full. Out there, somewhere, I wanted to believe that there was hope. The hope that Neil had told me had to exist.

But I no longer thought that possible. The blight had wiped the world nearly clean of our kind, and we were fully capable of finishing what it couldn’t. Hope was an illusion. Once it had been real. But no more.

I turned away from the television and faced the fire.

Stay alive...

Stay alive...

Neil’s admonition haunted me as the fire spat embers.

Stay alive...

“I can’t,” I said, swollen and stiff jaw barely letting the two words out. “I can’t.”

Beyond that near certainty, I wasn’t sure I wanted to.

As fall settled in, and the world remained grey, devoid of any brilliance nature had once allowed to soften the death that came with the season, I felt my energy and my body accelerate toward an end. I was ready to go, quietly, my flesh and spirit nearing the moment when they would begin to fade. The time to let the blight finally claim me was almost at hand.

Fate, though, crept forward on its own line of time, serving its own agenda. It was not done with me.

I
stared at death through the front window.

The pines stood like splintered matchsticks, poking from the dead brown earth. Where once stood a lush forest creeping toward green slopes and rocky peaks there now was a graveyard of mighty woods. My house, my safe place, was surrounded by a grey, silent end, that inevitability creeping closer to my own situation.

Eating had become torture, what I could get down coming up more often than not. Some infection, I suspected, had settled it. A parting gift from Major James Layton and the bullet of his that had found me. I’d exhausted my supply of antibiotics to keep any ill effects of the injury at bay. Now, I was at its mercy.

The last chirp of a bird or stomp of a rutting moose had long since faded. I hadn’t seen a single living thing above ground since the random attack by a starving grizzly. Just the earthworms were left, I suspected, safe and waiting beneath those who had, somehow, stayed alive. And how appropriate was that? We all went back to worm food eventually.

Beep
.

My head angled slowly toward the alarm panel. As long as the sun shined my security system would trundle on, giving false warnings. A branch falling and tripping a motion detector. A glint of reflected sunlight confusing a thermal sensor. Perhaps what I’d built here to alert for intrusions would offer up its beeps and buzzes in some manner of truncated perpetuity. Perhaps.

But I would not be here to notice. Or to care.

“If a tree falls in a forest,” I muttered and tried to focus in on the alarm panel from across the great room. A fire roared in the hearth, no fear of marking my presence quelling the desire for heat anymore. I’d weighed myself that morning. The number that stared up at me from the old scale was a terrible truth. A hundred and seven pounds.

I’d topped out at one ninety the day the red signal had come.

Blankets wrapped me as I huddled near the blaze. Fall hinted hard at winter. Another winter. I couldn’t shake the chill, light as it was. It seemed colder this year. Maybe it was, but I knew it was likely that my deteriorating physical state was responsible for the heightened discomfort. As it was for my fading eyesight. Straining to see across the room, I could hardly make out the boundaries of the rectangular alarm panel, even less so whichever specific warning had been tripped. It would reset in a minute, I knew. The sensor would realize that a fallen limb from one of the withered trees was responsible, the offending length of desiccated wood lying motionless on the ground. Moving no further through my secure perimeter.

Beep.

I turned back to the fire, staring into its shifting yellows and swirling oranges. On the hearth before it a charred pot rested. In it I’d cooked yesterday’s meal, a mixture of rice and potato flakes. Calories, pure and simple. Taste didn’t register anymore, and that which did was muted by the pain that registered in my wounded jaw with every small swallow. The joy that food once held, the pleasure, had long since left me, every morsel I consumed a reminder of what had brought me to this state of being. What had brought the world to its knees. Brought mankind to its end.

Beep.

Again I looked to the alarm panel, a small rectangular light pulsing, off and on, clear to red. The sensor had not reset, some electronic glitch preventing the alert from quieting.

Unless it wasn’t a glitch.

Beep.

I planted my hands on the arms of the chair and pressed myself out of the seat, rising unsteadily, blankets shedding from my shoulders and mounding at my feet. A step took me just past the chair and I grabbed onto the edge of the mantle for support, logs spitting embers in the hearth as I passed. Another few steps brought me to the back of the couch. I gripped it with both hands like a railing and drew nearer to the alarm panel, still beeping, light flashing, close enough to see that it was an outer sensor that had tripped. One just inside my property line not near the driveway, but further into what had once been the deepest of woodlands, beyond the pond and stream, where the hills began to step toward mountains.

Beep
.
Beep
.

A second alarm sounded, light flashing with it, nearer my house now. Closing in on me.

“I’m not checking out,” I muttered to the empty space and grabbed Del’s rifle where it leaned against the wall, nearly stumbling as I took control of the weapon. My friend’s weapon. “Not walking into the fire. No way.”

My thoughts tumbled about in a hazy waking state, recollections mixed with intention. The past with the here and now. Rendered images of a woman’s suicide filtered through my tenuous consciousness. A pyre of flame, and me striding into it. Consumed.

Beep.

They were closer still.

“Distance is your friend,” I said, borrowing my friend’s tactical mantra.

The door lay just a few steps away. It twisted and warped in the grip of my mind’s eye. What hold I had on the real was slipping. If I was going to confront the intruders, if I was going to make a stand, make a last stand, it had to be now.

I pushed off the wall with my free hand and aimed my body at the door. It tipped that way, feet shuffling to keep up as gravity pulled my upper half forward and down. Only the heft of the door absorbing the faint weight of what I’d become stopped me from toppling to the floor.

Another beep sounded behind. I cared no more where they were coming from, only that they were coming, and only that I would be waiting, ready, eager to see some end come. Hopefully to them before me.

I shifted to the right and planted myself against the wall, reaching to the door. With a breath and a guttural grunt I jerked it open. The cold inside was eclipsed by what washed in, whipping around me. With effort I brought Del’s rifle up and worked the bolt, chambering a round as I stumbled forward, foot catching on the threshold, my body collapsing onto the porch’s old floor boards. The impact punched the breath from me and left me gasping as I clawed my way toward the front steps.

The rifle bucked in my grip, just one hand holding it, finger squeezing the trigger as I lay atop the weapon. It thudded against my chest, then settled, and I rolled slightly off it to cycle the bolt again as I caught my breath.

“I’m ready for you,” I tried to shout, but a voice hardly raised was all I could muster, the warning surely lost in the wind. “I’m taking you with me.”

I fired again, not even bothering to aim. Little chance that I could have if I’d wanted to. My vision had degraded, through fatigue, malnourishment, or some internal malady, to the point that objects at any distance beyond a few yards seemed to be drifting beyond some gauzy veil.

“Keep coming,” I challenged the intruder as I worked the bolt, and readied still another round.

Through the mental fog filling my head I wondered, though, why there was no return fire coming my way. No wood was splitting from the impacts of near misses. I had not been struck. There was no sharp report of shots cracking in the woods.

“Come on!” I yelled, the sound carrying this time, another shot following to punctuate my words.

But there was no assault in reply. No sound at all. Until...

Fletch...

The memory came from nowhere, Neil calling to me. Maybe I was already dead, I thought, in the place where my friend had been since succumbing in the early days of the world’s slide toward the abyss.

Fletch...

Why he was calling to me I didn’t know. I wanted to see him. To feel his presence again, even if only in some ethereal plane where souls gathered.