Ranger (The Bugging Out Series Book 5) (11 page)

“You don’t understand,” Westin said, looking to Mayor Allen, and then to me. “We’re sending. But there’s nothing receiving. There’s no carrier signal.”

Schiavo drew a breath and eyed the town’s leader.

“It’s like a dial tone on a phone,” Schiavo explained. “You pick up the handset and hear that, and you know the system is functioning.”

“There’s no signal from the satellite,” Mayor Allen said, hinting at an understanding.

“Maybe no satellite at all,” Westin suggested.

“Let’s not go there yet,” Schiavo said.

“It could be a simple malfunction,” I said. “Right?”

Schiavo nodded, though there was little conviction in the expression.

“Those things are built to be robust,” Westin told us. “You’d have to shoot it out of orbit.”

For an instant, Schiavo was silent. Until the alternative to what her soldier was suggesting rose to the level of possibility in her thoughts.

“Or shut it down,” the captain said.

“Can that be done?” Mayor Allen asked.

All eyes shifted to Westin, and without any hesitation he nodded.

“If authorized,” he answered.

“We’re way past the powers that be worrying about proper authorizations,” I said. “If there’s a switch somewhere that can cut us off, and someone wants us cut off, they’ll throw it.”

“It appears they may already have,” the mayor said.

No one had said it yet, but the ramifications of this development had effects both near and far.

“We can’t reach the
Rushmore
,” I said.

“No,” Westin confirmed.

“There goes giving them any warning about our needs,” Schiavo said.

She thought for a moment, and I watched her as she did. Watched her too closely, as my interest drew her attention. Her gaze shifted and met mine, some unspoken question in it. Since Martin’s revelation earlier that day that he and his wife were expecting, I hadn’t been able to stop thinking about her. About the very real fear he’d told us she felt. To make the world whole again there would have to be children, but with the burden Angela Schiavo already carried, the weight of command and leadership and lives depending upon her, the addition of a new life to the mix could very understandably add almost crushing stress to her existence. I was concerned for her, and it showed.

“Is there a problem, Fletch?”

It was more than a question she posed. It was almost a challenge.

“Just trying to understand our com issues,” I said, deflecting her concern with a partial lie.

“There’s not a whole lot to understand,” Mayor Allen said, catching on fully now. “We’re cut off.”

“By our side or theirs?” I asked.

“Or some other faction we don’t even know about,” Mayor Allen suggested.

Schiavo eyed me for a moment more, then shook her head.

“No,” she said. “It’s our friends out there. The Unified Government. This is coordinated, not a coincidence.”

Coordination such as this implied planning, on a scale and over a distance which indicated sophistication. And determination.

“They’re starting to turn the screws,” Mayor Allen said.

No one in the communications center could disagree with what the town’s elderly leader had said.

“So what’s their next move?” Westin asked.

Schiavo shook her head, the frustration I’d sensed on her earlier phone call plain now, right before me. Before us.

“I have no idea,” she said.

T
hree people stood on the beach at dawn on a Friday and stared at the ocean. I was one of them.

“How late could it be?” Martin asked.

His wife, the captain at this particular moment, shook her head slightly, her gaze fixed on the calm and clear Pacific to the west.

“A day,” Schiavo said. “Two.”

It had been four days since the
Rushmore
was scheduled to return to Bandon with more supplies to sustain our recovery. Four days with no sight of her on the horizon. With no contact at all, thanks to the sudden disruption of the satellite we’d used for burst communications. With the Ranger Signal still overwhelming all normal transmissions, we’d lost our only link with the ship, and the wider world. As Mayor Allen had said, we were cut off.

And now, it appeared, our supply line had been severed.

Martin took a few steps off the shoulder of the beach road where we’d come to look one last time for the ship, his shoes sinking slightly in the soft sand. He turned to look at us.

“How are we supplied?” he asked, slipping back into the role of town leader, if just for a moment. “Including the animals that we could slaughter, how are we on food?”

“That won’t matter,” Schiavo told her husband.

“We’re surrounded and our delivery service just quit on us,” Martin said. “We have to know how long we can last if not a single can of preserved beans makes it to us again.”

“This won’t go on long enough for that to be an issue,” Schiavo told her husband.

She still expected some direct contact from the Unified Government. Some clear and unambiguous ultimatum to surrender and join. But join what? What were the principles of this new government, other than intimidation by force? How could we possibly go willingly into the arms of an entity we knew so little about?

Martin, though, had lived through uncertain times before Schiavo had arrived. He’d seen attacks, and starvation, and had to lead the town’s residents through it all. He’d had to make difficult decisions. Weigh the good of the town over the wishes of the individual. The survival of the town, even if he’d stepped away from being its leader, still was beyond important to him. And that survival he’d shepherded hadn’t just happened. It had required planning. Calculation. And he wasn’t seeing that sort of precision even considered as his wife spoke.

“You can’t just wing this,” Martin said.

“I’m not.”

He stood there, staring at his wife. The captain. The senior military officer in Bandon. Maybe the last officer left holding allegiance to the United States of America as it had once existed.

“Almost everyone in this town has watched someone starve to death,” Martin said as he stepped close to his wife. “Have you?”

He walked past, leaving her with that question as he made his way up the coast road toward town.

“He’s not wrong,” I said.

Schiavo looked to me. Studied me. That moment when I’d locked eyes with her in the communications center days before came rushing back. That sense that she was probing me. Seeking some understanding of what I was thinking.

Then, her gaze softened. The edge that seemed ever-present about her when she was functioning in her military capacity evaporated as some realization came to her.

“He told you,” she said. “Didn’t he?”

There was no point in pretending, or in seeking clarification as to just what she was referencing.

“He did,” I confirmed.

Schiavo took a breath and nodded, the combination seeming to release something that had been pent-up within.

“Who else knows?”

“Elaine was there when he let on what the situation was.”

She smiled, an almost girlish expression, too awkward to not be among the most honest reactions she could offer.

“Situation,” Schiavo repeated. “I guess that’s a word for it.”

“It’s not a bad thing,” I reminded her.

“No, but it’s definitely not how I saw myself at this point in my career, and at this age.”

“Did you talk to Genesee?”

She shook her head, reacting with mild horror at the thought.

“Doc Allen,” she said. “I don’t want Genesee knowing. Not until there’s no choice.”

I could understand her desire for at least a modicum of privacy on the issue, particularly where the Navy commander was concerned. He’d never seemed fully accepting of Schiavo, as either a person or a superior. It was possible that he saw those two things as inseparable, and, in many ways, they were. Schiavo inhabited her role as a military officer. That she had to do so as a woman with a male subordinate who might hold her gender against her seemed to tighten the grip with which she held onto her often strict expectations and behaviors. She was a hard ass unafraid of being one.

And she was going to be a mother.

“It wasn’t supposed to happen,” she said, a fair amount of resignation in her voice. “We were being careful.”

“If that’s possible,” I said.

Nothing was as easy as pharmacology used to make it in the world before the blight. I wondered if that was a feature, not a bug, of this new reality. Humanity needed to expand if the species, our species, was to survive. The difficulty of preventing new births might be just one way that we would claw back from the brink of extinction.

“I’m not sure how Martin feels about it,” she said.

To our east, maybe a hundred yards, we could see the relief shift, eight strong, moving across a field toward the southern checkpoints. They saw us and waved a greeting. I returned it, but Schiavo did not.

“After losing Micah...”

She was trying to express some imagined doubt. At least I hoped it was just an errant, misplaced reading of what her husband truly felt.

“He’s been distant, Fletch. Since we found out, it’s like his mind has been working on overdrive. Trying to figure out just what a child means for him. For us.”

“When did you find out?”

“The day you and Elaine set off on your getaway,” she said.

The intersection of events, both personal and public, were at play here, I suspected. To be certain, Martin was experiencing unexpected feelings about the sudden news that he was, again, going to be a father. But when thrown into the mix of my being taken, and our town, the town he held dear in his heart, being surrounded, to merely brand his reaction and demeanor as linked only to the child they were going to have was not an accurate read of the man.

“He has a lot on his mind,” I reminded Schiavo. “You, a child, the town, our enemies. Do you want my opinion? My honest opinion?”

She nodded.

“He’s coping,” I said. “Throwing himself into what he can control. Into a way to contribute. The Defense Council, worrying about supplies. The child you two are expecting is going to come. That’s out of his hands. I think he’s concerned about the town it’s going to be born into.”

My words didn’t soothe every worry she had. But she seemed to at least allow the possibility that any distance her husband was exhibiting was tied to what I’d said, and after a moment she let out a small, refreshing chuckle.

“You know what you described, right?”

“No,” I said.

“He’s nesting,” Schiavo said. “The way a guy would.”

I laughed. As severe as she could be at time, the Army captain had an insightful wit about here when she chose to show it.

“The town is the nest to him,” I said.

“It has been for a long time,” Schiavo agreed.

The moment we shared was good. But it was just a moment. As the jovial exchange faded, we both looked out over the ocean again, the empty ocean, no sign of the ship we’d hoped against hope to see.

“If they come at us, Fletch, we’ve got nowhere to run,” Schiavo said, eyeing the waters that were beautiful and vast and blocked any chance of retreat. “We’re going to have to fight.”

“Do you think we can win?”

Schiavo stared out at the Pacific, considering my question in silence for a moment.

“I don’t know,” she answered, with calm and brutal honesty.

“We’ve been up against long odds before,” I reminded her.

She turned and faced me now.

“This is different, Fletch,” she told me. “Despite what those people out there call themselves now, they were us. They were Americans. Maybe even some people I trained with. People I might know.”

She fell silent for a moment, but never looked away from me.

“And I think we’re going to have to kill them to survive,” Captain Angela Schiavo said, making plain what almost certainly lay ahead for every single one of us. “All of them.”

M
ayor Allen sat at the head of the table in the conference room in the town hall.

“We’re on our own,” he said.

The defense council sat with him. All but Martin, who’d chosen to stand, staring out the window at splashes of green against the grey woods in the distance. We’d kept Bandon alive, and set it on the road to thrive. All that, now, was in jeopardy.

“There’s no point in making any announcement to the town,” Schiavo said. “It’s already filtered out there. People know.”

“And they’re scared,” Elaine said.

The loss of communications, and the failure of the
Rushmore
to return as expected, had only increased the sense of dread among the longtime residents.

“What are our options?” Mayor Allen asked the group, looking to Schiavo when no one offered a response to his question. “You said you believe they’ll contact us with an ultimatum.”

“I do.”

“Perhaps we should reach out to them first,” Mayor Allen suggested. “There has to be a way to do that.”

Schiavo shook her head with little consideration of the possibility.

“If we do that, we advance the timetable of conflict,” she explained. “They’ll give us their demands, which we can expect will be unconditional surrender.”

“Join or die,” Elaine said.

“The longer we hold out, the greater the chance we can prepare,” Schiavo said. “Bolster our defenses. Train more to fight. Even learn about their numbers, equipment, and so on.”

“You just want to wait,” I said. “Let them dictate events.”

“Yes,” the captain said, again without hesitation.

Mayor Allen settled back into his chair at the head of the conference table.

“I don’t like waiting,” the doctor turned leader said. “If I see a disease, I treat it.”

“Different worlds, doc,” Schiavo said. “Different rules. But one does apply to both of us—
primum non nocere
.”

He smiled at her recitation of the familiar phrase in Latin.

“First, do no harm,” Mayor Allen translated.

“As troubling as our situation may be right now, we’re still free,” Schiavo said.

“Free...”

The comment came from Martin where he stood at the window, still staring out at the glaring contrast between landscapes, old and new.