The Pit (The Bugging Out Series Book 4) (2 page)

Alone...

That was how I’d begun this new phase of life. As the world spun toward its blighted oblivion I’d hidden myself away at my Montana refuge. Others had come into my life since then. Del. Neil. Grace and Krista. Then we’d moved on to Bandon where Martin and Micah entered the picture. And Burke. And many more in that seaside town.

Including Elaine.

For months now the world that I had come to know on a solitary basis had been boiled down to just her, and Neil, and me. We’d set out on a mission fueled by hope. A mission to find whether there was truly a way to overcome the blight. And we’d found that there was.

But finding that was no end. We were on the move again.

Alone...

I’d thought for a while that I would spend the remainder of my life in that state of singularity. My friends gone. No special person to journey with me through this new and bleak wilderness. But looking to the wheelhouse I could just make out the silhouettes of those who were proving that early fear wrong.

My friend stood there. My love, as well. Both looking forward. To the way ahead. To the way we all had to go.

Together.

“W
hite. White. White.”

Neil turned the boat’s radio off and settled into a seat at the rear of the wheelhouse, a few feet from where Elaine stood at the controls. There would be no more tying off and bedding down for the night below deck. Not after what had snuck up on us while we rested. One of us would be at the wheel at all times with the others resting nearby until we reached our destination.

Ketchikan.

That was the point on the map we were aiming for. The first major port one would reach in Alaska heading north from the lower forty-eight. If those we knew, and loved, had been spirited off to the great white north, Ketchikan, a lumber town turned tourist trap for cruise ship passengers, was a logical place to think they’d been, or passed through.

Or passed by.

I had to remind myself of that. There were hundreds of points along the vast Alaskan coast where those traveling by sea could stop. Maybe thousands. We were sailing in the blind, even more so than when we’d left Bandon in search of salvation in the form of a tomato plant glimpsed over the airwaves. Micah had at least given us a general destination then, Cheyenne, but here all we had were two letters scrawled hastily on a wall—
AK
.

“Sorry,” Neil said.

I shook off his apology. He hadn’t woken me. I’d been trying to catch some sleep as we cruised north in the dark, twisting my body awkwardly into another of the wheelhouse chairs, but drifting off had been an elusive desire. The sound of the boat pushing through the light chop, which might have soothed, did not. I was not a creature of open waters. Land, terra firma, was what I knew, and where I belonged.

“I just have to listen once in a while,” he explained.

We’d been gone less than two days, and in that short span I’d caught him hovering over the radio at least a dozen times. Listening for a few minutes, then letting the reality of the situation inform his decision to abandon any monitoring. That he kept turning it back on belied that most precious resource, one which he had preached to me in the earliest stages of the blight’s march across the planet—hope.

There might be some transmission breaking through, as had come from the Denver television station whose satellite feed I watched from my refuge. The White Signal could simply cease overwhelming the airwaves and stop broadcasting, just as the Red Signal had abruptly ended. There was always those possibilities. Or something we couldn’t yet imagine.

“What do you think happened, Fletch?”

My friend looked at me, not pained, and not overwhelmed by the separation from Grace and Krista, but confused. That they, and a whole town, could up and disappear, to God knows where, with no time or opportunity to leave anything other than the most cryptic of messages behind, was hard to fathom.

“I wish I had some solid guess,” I said. “But I don’t.”

“Martin wouldn’t have left,” Neil said. “Not voluntarily.”

“No,” I agreed. “He wouldn’t.”

He would not have left the son he’d only recently buried. Not in a thousand years. Not at the point of a legion of bayonets. Which made me fear that the bloodstain we’d found in the meeting hall could easily have come from him. Because of his resistance to some command to leave. At the hands of whoever might have been behind such a directive.

“It had to be military,” Neil suggested. “Taking the whole town, the sentries, everyone. It had to be overwhelming force.”

“Or surprise,” I countered. “Or both.”

The question beyond that which clearly nagged at my friend was
which
military? From
what
nation? Or was the force aligned with some self-styled ruling entity?

“Neil, we’ll know for sure when we find them. Everything else is just guesswork.”

He nodded, knowing I was right. But my assurance did not erase his worry or his wondering. It only forced it into the quiet place within, where it gnawed at him as the ocean rustled around us.

“Fletch,” he said, hesitating as he looked across the space to where Elaine stood at the controls of the
Sandy
, keeping us moving.

“Yeah?”

He stared at her, then looked to me again. In the dim mix of moon and starlight drizzling through the wheelhouse windows I saw his expression. And I saw it change, shifting fast, almost too fast, from a mask of uncertainty to a quick, oversure smile. Like a camera flash going off. There and gone.

“Nothing,” Neil said.

Whatever thought it was that had compelled him to seek some conversation with me, it was gone. Forgotten or buried.

I suspected the latter.

Neil pulled his body into the seat and turned half away from me, closing his eyes and seeking that slumber which eluded me. I wondered while I watched him what it was he’d wanted to say. Something about Elaine, I imagined, considering his brief focus on her at that moment. Was he about to express some doubt to me about her? About the bond, the love, that had developed between us?

No. He wouldn’t. He’d expressed the exact opposite of that to me on several occasions since Elaine and I had breached whatever barrier had kept us apart. His opinion would not have shifted a hundred and eighty degrees. Not this soon, and not without reason.

It was something else.

If it was important, he would tell me when the time was right. If it was not, it wouldn’t matter. That’s what I told myself.

But still I wondered. For a while. The thought, the curiosity, faded as we pressed north, and by the second day after Neil had sparked that wondering, it was gone. Out of my mind as we kept moving. Slowing not a bit.

Until we saw the graveyard.

T
he hulking ship lay upside down on the water, capsized fully, rust red belly swamped each time a wind wave rolled in past the islands. Its rudder and the tip of one propeller blade rose a few feet above the surface of the gently curling sea. Stern high was how she had come to rest, deck planted solidly on the sloping shallows below. A good storm might shift the dead vessel further down that submerged incline, burying her forever, surviving microorganisms in the briny ocean attacking every bit of exposed metal. Consuming what remained over the millennia to come.

“There’s more ahead,” Neil said. “A lot more.”

I slowed the
Sandy
and brought us alongside the capsized ship, creeping forward. I looked ahead, to what Neil was seeing through the binoculars. Even unaided I could make out what he was seeing in the day’s waning light—lines of ships, large and small, sunk and scattered along the shore to either side of the Hecate Strait. Freighters and fishing boats and bulk carriers abandoned upon the unforgiving shores of Graham Island to the west, and those splits of land to the east.

“Does this look random to you?” Neil asked.

“No,” I answered.

“That hull’s been breached,” Elaine said, pointing through the wheelhouse windows.

She was right. The capsized ship we were cruising slowly past had a pair of jagged holes in her bottom. Folds of thick steel were peeled outward, like the blooming petals of some rusty flower.

“From inside,” I said.

Neil lowered the binoculars and looked to the ship we’d pulled alongside. Just one in a massive nautical boneyard. Where craft after craft had been sent to their final resting places with intentional violence.

“She was scuttled,” he said. “They all were.”

Intentionally sunk. But not just that. They’d all had their seaworthy lives ended along the shores of the strait, out of any lanes that ships might still pass through. Keeping the way ahead clear.

But the way ahead to what?

“I think we’re on the right track,” Neil said.

I nodded and steered us away from the capsized freighter. Back into the strait. None of us said anything about the most obvious part of what we’d just come upon. Obvious and welcome. Something good because of its absence.

Bodies.

Neither beached and bloating, nor floating upon the water. There was no sign of death. No equivalent to the bleached bones we’d tread upon on our trek across the wastelands to Cheyenne. Whatever souls had been upon the sunken ships, they were not here. They had gone on.

That gave us hope.

Night came. The water ahead sloshed black in the darkness. To either side, land rose as shadows that blotted out stars low in the sky. My shift at the wheel was nearly up. Fifteen minutes more and it would be my turn to make an attempt at sleep. But that was not to be.

Two minutes after I turned the wheel over to my friend we saw the light.

W
e should have only seen night. Instead, we saw a speck of white, off to our left, sweeping across the water and land in the distance. A spoke of bright, almost blinding white that revealed features along the shore. Low, craggy hills. Shallow, jagged cliffs.

And a short jetty reaching out into the sea.

“A lighthouse?” Elaine wondered aloud, more disbelief than doubt in the question she posed.

I looked to Neil. He brought the throttles back and turned us toward the origin of the beam. Toward land.

“A lot of these were automated,” he said. “Almost all.”

“And it would still be operating?”

The doubt in my question was clear. No, it wouldn’t. It couldn’t. Even the most automated machinery, save the satellites that hung invisibly above in orbit, required maintenance. Care. Repair. Gears needed lubrication. Wires corroded from the salt air. Bulbs burned out.

What shone in the darkness before us shouldn’t be.

“I see someone,” Elaine said, binoculars zeroing in on something. “Just a shadow, but they’re there.”

I lifted my smaller pair of binoculars and focused in through the windshield, scanning the looming structure as its light swept across my field of vision, drizzling a glow to the ground at its base. That was where I saw what Elaine did. A figure in silhouette. A man. Standing there. Waving his hands back and forth above his head.

Beckoning us.

“Mary Island,” Neil said, glancing away from the ship’s controls to a map we’d taped to the wall above the side window. “There’s a lighthouse marked on here.”

Elaine looked to me, uncertain.

“Why would anyone be set up on an island?” she asked.

“Same reason Bandon kept its food on a ship offshore,” I suggested. “Isolation and protection.”

“Announcing your presence with a big ass light isn’t exactly hunkering down,” Neil countered.

He was right. But so was I. Both of our estimations were made in the blind, however. The truth, I suspected, would only come from the man in the shadows waving us toward shore.

*  *  *

W
e tied the
Sandy
off to posts rising from the makeshift dock in a cove out of view of the lighthouse and looked toward land.

“I don’t see him,” I said.

“I don’t see anyone,” Elaine added.

“I see something,” Neil said, gesturing toward the rocky shore to our right.

We looked, the high sweep of the unseen light spinning beyond the terrain drizzling enough from above to reveal a boat wrecked on the rocks. It was small, with an outboard motor swinging free against the gentle waves washing in from the channel. The same waves that had swamped it, submerging its left side, the opposite still visible above the water’s edge.

“That thing took some fire,” Elaine observed.

Its wooden hull, dirty white, was marred by darker splotches. Bullet holes.

Neil stepped past us, his AK at the ready, even more so than a moment before. We’d come off the boat with our weapons and packs. Circumstances had taught us to always be prepared to leave at a moment’s notice, with everything necessary to survive on our person. If the
Sandy
should blow up as we transitioned from dock to solid ground, we could still survive. For how long wasn’t entirely up to us.

“I have movement,” Neil said.

Looking past him we saw the same. Motion. A certain frenetic quality to it. An urgency. That could accurately be said about the slim man running toward us down a rocky path that ended at the dock.

“Hold it right there,” Neil told the individual, bringing his AK up to punctuate the command.

The man slowed, then stopped, the light spinning above beyond the terrain scarred with dead woods and toppled trees. His sunken gaze regarded us with utter surprise.

“What the hell are you doing?” the man asked us, breathing fast. “Are you crazy?”

I gripped my AR just a bit tighter and stepped past Neil. His gaze, I could see, was sweeping the darkened shore to either side of the dock. Elaine, too, would be doing the same, scanning for threats. This could be nothing more than an ambush. A performance to lure us to a place of vulnerability, not unlike the sirens of mythology beckoning ships to their demise on jagged shores.

“You turned on the light,” I said, my own gaze drifting on and off the man, fearing a nasty surprise that might emerge from the shadows.