“That was French,” Neil said.

  He was right. And it made no damn sense at all.

  Six

  We made our way back to the ruins of my refuge. Grace and Krista stood close to a burning beam, soaking in the warmth, a small collection of items on the ground nearby.

  “I salvaged what I could,” Grace said, eyeing the neat pile.

  A singed blanket. Two metal cups. A knife. Two boxes of 12 gauge shells. That was what remained of the place that had sheltered me. That had sheltered us.

  Neil approached, standing closer to me than to Grace.

  “Do you speak French?” I asked her.

  Grace puzzled at the question for a moment.

  “No. Why?”

  Neil had taken Spanish in high school. I’d opted for German, entirely to be close to a girl who’d later turned me down when I’d mustered the courage to ask her out. Even if I had chosen to go the Francophile route, I doubted I would have retained enough to make a dent in deciphering the few words the crewman had uttered before drawing his last breath.

  “It’s nothing,” Neil told her.

  She wasn’t buying that.

  “Hey,” Grace said, snugging the slung rifle on her shoulder. “You don’t just ask that question now, after what happened, without some reason. I’m neck deep in this with the both of you.”

  She had a point. Neil knew that. I could tell. But, for some reason, he didn’t offer the explanation that Grace sought.

  “One of the crewmen was alive when we got there,” I explained. “And he said something. Just before he died. But it was in French.”

  “French?” she parroted, puzzled.

  I nodded.

  “It was probably gibberish,” Neil said. “He was on his way out.”

  I sensed little conviction in my friend’s words. Or possibly it was a desire to move on from the subject. To keep as much of what we’d seen from Grace, as we had other things.

  “A Quebecer, maybe,” Grace suggested.

  Some murderous mercenary from the French speaking province of our northern neighbor? Possible, I thought. But not likely.

  “The accent was different,” I said. “I know...I knew someone from Montreal. He was a guide I used on a few hunting trips up there. There’s just a difference between someone from Quebec speaking and someone from France. He said as much. His joke was that Quebecers were redneck Parisians.”

  “Does it really matter?” Neil asked, a hint of agitation about him. “What if he spoke Afrikaner? Or Russian? Maybe German?”

  I supposed it didn’t matter. His mini-tirade, though, suggested otherwise. Still, knowing his secretiveness of late, pushing him for some explanation would be pointless. And, besides, there was another question to deal with. One that began to coalesce when I noted the rifle slung on Grace’s shoulder.

  “You grabbed Del’s rifle on your way out?”

  She nodded at my question. I recalled the right side of the Huey’s windshield. Cracked and spider-webbed, those radial fissures emanating from a pair of distinct round holes. Penetrations made by one thing—bullets.

  “You shot it down,” I said, smoke from the remains of my house drifting past us.

  Neil reacted to my assertion, vaguely incredulous. Until he saw that Grace was not scoffing at the notion.

  “I shot at it,” she told me.

  “Two shots,” I specified. “Perfectly placed.”

  “Three,” Grace corrected. “The last one missed. It turned away from us and was shooting at something else.”

  “That was us,” Neil said.

  “I know,” she said. “I found a clearing just down the hill and did what I had to.”

  I stared at her. Krista stared at her. Neil look, a moment ago flavored with doubt, now bubbled with some surprise, bust mostly admiration.

  “My father taught me when I was a kid. When I was Krista’s age. Rabbits mostly. A couple deer when I was a teenager.”

  Krista looked up, processing the morsel of the past her mother had just shared.

  “Will you teach me to shoot, mommy?”

  Grace looked to her child, her joy, and nodded, a subtle sadness in the gesture. As if she knew that, were the world to remain as it was, and if they, if we were to survive, her sweet, precious daughter would not be shooting at rabbits in due course. She would be firing upon predators. The most dangerous kind.

  And that’s when I understood, more than I did a moment before, when I’d doubted within that she’d acquired her degree of marksmanship from dropping bunnies. Crossing the country, maybe before she and Neil had met up, she’d held her own, because that was what she had to do. For herself, and for her child.

  “I imagine you had more practice in the past year,” I said.

  Grace nodded.

  “How did you get out?” Neil asked, the churn of emotions that had been working on him, seeming settled now.

  “I heard the helicopter coming,” Grace said. “And the first thing I thought of was that sound on the radio, and the warning.”

  Neil looked to me and nodded.

  “They zeroed in on the transmission,” he said.

  “That feedback could have been jamming,” I said.

  “Jamming?” Grace asked. “Who would do that?”

  “It was Eagle One,” Krista said, every adult around her considering what she was suggesting. “They knew. They tried to stop us from using the radio because that would lead the bad people to us. They warned us.”

  How the hell a kid on the radio could know some black helicopter was coming for us was beyond me, but I couldn’t find any flaw in what the child was proposing.

  “Why?” I asked. “Who are we threatening?”

  That was a question whose answer none of us could yet conceive.

  “Someone’s willing to kill to keep people from getting to Eagle One,” Neil said, looking to Grace. “I’d say that makes it a place we should find. Don’t you?”

  She hesitated, though not as long as she might have a few hours ago. Finally, Grace nodded.

  “We have to get there,” she said.

  But there was a more pressing move to make.

  “We have to get away from here,” I said. “Fast.”

  “Why?” Grace asked, curious and concerned.

  Neil thought for just a moment on what I’d said, his gaze registering recognition of the facts quickly.

  “Because they weren’t coming after us on their own,” he said. “Someone’s going to come looking when that helicopter doesn’t return.”

  “They might be already,” I added. “If they put out a mayday...”

  Grace drew a long breath and looked to the remnants of the truck, an unpleasant realization rising.

  “We’re going to have to go on foot,” she said, then glanced to the hodgepodge of materials she had pulled from the ruins of my house. “This isn’t much to get us anywhere.”

  She was right. The situation seemed dire. But that wasn’t necessarily so.

  Seven

  Neil and I found a pair of shovels at the back of the barn, partially buried beneath the half collapsed structure. Tools hidden by circumstance.

  Two hundred yards from the smoking rubble of my refuge, we dug for things hidden by design.

  “We need to put some miles between us and this place before dark,” Neil said as he stabbed the spear-like end of the shovel again and again into the cold, hard earth. “But which way?”

  We knew we were going to try and make it to Eagle One, which meant, first, finding Eagle One. With the scant information we had to guide us, a vaguely certain directive to head west, our journey, beginning far sooner than the springtime launch we’d anticipated, would have to be refined as we made progress. But there was no way we could make a headlong rush due west. Mountains, and the building winter accumulation of snow sure to materialize, made that not only inadvisable, but suicidal.

  “South,” I told my friend, scooping and scraping dirt from the hole I was digging, some three yards from his. “Down to Kalispell, past Flathead Lake, and onto Missoula before turning west.”

  “Interstate Ninety?” Neil asked, uncertainty and resignation in his words. “I guess that’s the best play we have. But even the interstate won’t have been maintained. It’s been over a year. No repairs, no plowing.”

  “Life’s tough,” I said, smiling and savoring the mirrored expression my friend gave back.

  “Be tougher,” he said, our high school football coach’s wise words truer now than they’d ever been.

  Cthunk...

  The solid jab of metal against something hard signaled that Neil had hit pay dirt first. A few jabs into the earth later I received the same satisfying sound from the hole before me.

  We dropped to our knees and began clearing the chunky soil from what we’d hit, revealing the hard black plastic lids of barrels I’d buried within the first weeks after arriving at my refuge.

  “Give me a hand,” I said, and Neil joined me at the hole I’d cleared, grabbing at the handles molded into the container’s top.

  “Jeez,” he grunted, struggling with the heft of the fifty-five gallon container. “Did you bury lead in here?”

  “Some,” I said.

  More than some, actually, if one considered the business end of a couple thousand rounds of pistol and rifle ammo to be ‘lead’. Added to that I’d secreted away several small weapons, clothing, food for a month, and various other survival items that would allow me to bug out of my bug out location should it be compromised. Being shot to pieces by some makeshift helicopter gunship qualified as that, I imagined.

  It took us thirty minutes to open and remove the contents of the caches I’d buried. We sorted through the items, prioritizing and choosing only those things that would allow us to make a go at getting far away from our present location. What we’d selected we shoved into two backpacks I’d cached, leaving what wouldn’t fit slung in the sagging hollow of a blanket we held between us as we returned to my rubbled house.

  “I found a few more things,” Grace said as we approached and put what we’d retrieved on the ground. “Krista’s backpack was still in the truck, behind the front seat.”

  She held the small pink pack in hand. Neil smiled and took it, crouching and holding it out to Krista.

  “We’re going to need you to carry some stuff,” he said, firm and, yes, fatherly.

  “I know,” Krista said. “I can do it.”

  Neil handed her the pack and stood, facing me and Grace again.

  “Let’s load up.”

  I nodded at my friend. It was time. Time to burden our shoulders with what would carry us away from this place. From my refuge. My home.

  Twice now since the world spun down toward chaos I’d left the place where I’d built a life. First from Missoula. Now from here. I would walk away, certain to never return. It was like shedding a skin. An outer layer of ‘me’ that I’d come to know. That I’d grown comfortable in.

  Now, as we loaded the packs and readied ourselves for the journey, I wondered for a moment who the next ‘me’ would be. In my old life when the world was green and whole, I’d been the solid citizen, working hard, paying taxes, enjoying the fruits of my labor. When that world disintegrated, I became what I had to, a survivor. A hardened believer in the hope that would carry me through the most difficult times. And now...

  Now I was going to face the new world in a way I never had, with no safe haven to fall back upon. With no knowledge of what existed beyond the horizon. I was about to be a toddler again, stumbling through the unfamiliar, grasping for holds wherever possible to keep from falling.

  “You ready, Fletch?”

  But I would not be alone. That, too, was different. And it was good.

  “I’m ready,” I told Neil, and shouldered my pack.

  “Does that feel alright, sweetie?” Grace asked her daughter.

  Krista shifted the straps of the small pink backpack and gave a solid nod.

  “Okay,” Grace said, the word almost a breath, like some necessity acknowledged with dread reluctance.

  It was my place to lead us away. I knew the most promising route to take through the landscape skimmed with winter white. But for a moment I hesitated, staring at the ground a few yards ahead, in the direction we would soon be traveling.

  “You okay, Fletch?”

  I wasn’t. Neil knew that. The question he posed was almost rhetorical. None of us were ‘okay’ in any sense that was once normal. But it was not some emotional malady that help me in place right then—it was the pull of an unwanted gesture. The desire to look behind. Back to what remained of the home I’d made after leaving my real home. I felt the tug. My head wanted to turn. But I did not let it.

  “Let’s go,” I said, and began walking.

  Grace and Krista followed, Neil close behind them. I heard their boots and shoes crunch lightly through the veneer of early snow. That’s how I knew they were there. Because I never looked, not even once, back as we made our way through the dead woods.

  We were on our way to Eagle One.

  Part Two

  The Lie

  Eight

  We skirted the highway after setting out, a broken ceiling of clouds above. Winter’s bite reached down from them, chilling us as we pressed southward. The afternoon hung frigid, sun still low, south wind at our faces, the cold blow rolling north from the Flathead.

  “How far is it?” Krista asked, bundled against the elements, small pink backpack jostling between her shoulders with each step. “To this Kalispell place?”

  We’d decided to shoot for the next spot on the map past Whitefish to spend the night before pressing on. To go further would mean taxing ourselves beyond what was prudent.

  “Probably ten miles,” I told her. “Maybe a little more.”

  She considered the answer for a moment, then nodded to herself.

  “I can do that,” she assured me.

  Every few hundred yards we’d pause for a minute or so in whatever cover we could find, letting the space around us still as we listened, for any distant chop of rotor blades cutting through the air. For the sound of engines. Gunshots. Voices. Anything that might signal hostility.

  In this new world, just about anything held that potential.

  Krista never complained. She kept the gentle pace we’d set, Neil and I carrying most of the load in two full backpacks. Grace had crafted a large sling that held a portion of the food and extra clothes on her left, Del’s rifle held in her right. She seemed on edge. Vigilant. As a stranger was in wild lands.

  “Christ...”

  Neil’s exclamation stopped us as we crested a low hill. It was a spot I remembered. If I’d wanted to, I was certain I could search the surrounding area and find the handheld radio I’d discarded in the spot just months ago. With it I’d triggered the explosion that turned the tank car I’d sent down into Whitefish into a tool of destruction. A rolling bomb that flattened most of the town, burning it and everyone in it to a cinder, and allowing me to bring a deserving end to Major James Layton.

  “I had no idea,” Neil said.

  Neil had guided Grace and Krista to my refuge from the north after a short detour through Canada. This was his first time laying eyes on the devastation I’d caused.

  I, too, was seeing it with somewhat fresh eyes. At that moment, when I’d pressed the button on the makeshift detonator, I’d been in the grip of a desire for vengeance against the man who’d turned the once picturesque town into an armed camp. His own dictatorial fiefdom. My friend Del had given his life to protect me from Layton’s thugs. The charred hell a mile distant was how I’d satisfied my bloodlust.

  To my right I could feel Grace looking at me, sideways. Maybe wary. Afraid to take in the sight of me directly. I’d wanted to kill every living soul in Whitefish. I might have succeeded. In relative terms, my body count was likely higher than Layton’s. He was Genghis Khan. I was the black death.

  “Did anyone get out?” Grace asked.

  I didn’t look at her to answer.

  “I don’t know.”

  I started off again, moving down the hill, keeping to a snowy trail that kept us clear of the burned out burg. The others followed, but Grace hung back, further now than when we’d set out. She might have just been tiring, but I doubted that. The brutality she’d not thought me capable of, perhaps, was haunting her. Creating an aversion to my presence. Until little more than a month ago I’d been a stranger to her. I’d told her and Neil about what I’d done, but now it was real to her. I was a killer.

  Except for the child, we all were.

  * * *

  We made it two miles past Whitefish. That was when we heard it.

  Boooooooooom.

  The sound was low and thick. Like some distant firework exploding. It rolled in from the south, maybe the southwest, passing over us and dissipating in the hills and mountains behind. The sensation of it clung to us, though, like some auditory stench, dark and ominous. It was no feat of nature. What we’d heard was made by the hand of man.

  “Was that thunder?” Krista asked, squinting at the harsh, flat light bleeding through the grey sky.

  “I don’t think so,” Grace told her daughter.

  “That’s the way we’re heading,” Neil said.

  “Probably.”

  I couldn’t fully agree. The hills, the terrain, they could play with sound. Bouncing it. Twisting it. But my friend was almost certainly not wrong. Something was out there, in our path.

  We moved to cover and stopped, listening, for minutes that seemed like hours.

  “What do you think?” Neil asked.

  The quiet vexed any answer. Nothing had followed the blast. Not a sound.

  “I think someone’s out there,” I said.

  The words weren’t comforting. Grace eased Krista away and helped her out of her backpack, rubbing the child’s shoulders through the thick coat she wore.

  “We’ve got maybe two hours of daylight,” I said, focusing on what I thought was the brightest part of the grey sky. “I think we stop for the night. Keep our ears open. Then move again in the morning.”

 

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