Bugging Out (22 page)

That was when I saw the flash. A bright white pulse erupted around Dell and those who had subdued him, a dusty halo of dirty brown bursting outward an instant after that, billowing upward, some mini-mushroom cloud rising.

The sound reached me next, a sharp
BANG
and fleeting rumble, the sound echoing across the valley, bouncing off hill and mountain, until it was gone. Like my friend.

I lowered the binoculars for a moment, not wanting to see what lay there as the smoke and dust cleared. But I had to look. I had to see what Del had accomplished. Had to know if the sacrifice he’d crafted in secret had played out as intended.

What I saw would have made him smile.

Twenty men had come from Whitefish to hunt us down. Through the thinning smoke I now saw only two that moved, both on the ground, one writhing, the other furiously working some handheld radio. The rest either lay still alone or heaped together, or in pieces strewn about surrounded by red streaks upon the ground.

I could see nothing of my friend. He was simply gone.

T
he door was unlocked. I entered and stood in the quiet for a moment. A quiet I’d become accustomed to since the hum of refrigerators and the whir of a vacuum motors ceased, along with virtually all who had enjoyed their convenience. Even in a strange place the quiet welcomed me. Soothed me. Surrounded me as I mourned.

Forty years Del had lived in the simple, comfortable cabin. A few rooms. Out back, a work shed. An equipment barn. About the only thing even remotely modern in the whole place was his amateur radio setup. He was a proud Ham. Or, as he’d called himself, a ‘
voyeur of the airwaves
’.

I turned the radio equipment on. The frequency was dialed into the one on which Major Layton’s orders had been broadcast from Whitefish. That very station was transmitting, the operator seething, some auditory equivalent to foaming at the mouth.

“You will be hunted down, and you will be killed! All of you! Anyone who aided, or knew, or even laid eyes on the terrorist who attacked our protective patrol today will pay with your life!”

The threat continued. I listened, and I began to smile. Del would be enjoying this immensely. His selfless act had hit the Major, and hit him hard. I wished that it was the man himself unleashing the tirade, but I had no way of knowing.

That wasn’t quite correct, I told myself, eyeing the handheld radio in its charger next to Del’s base station. I picked up the radio and turned it on. Del had it set to some frequency distant from that which Layton was favoring. The small speaker spat silence, and silence only. Next to the volume knob was the squelch control, setting a limit on how much static would be heard, leaving the channel quiet until a signal strong enough came over the airwaves. I adjusted the squelch down and the grating static leapt from the speaker.

Adjusting the frequency and pressing the transmit button on the side of the radio with my thumb would take no effort at all. I could call out to Layton. From right here. Just as I could from the base station. I could let him know that what Del had done was only the beginning.

But that would be a mistake. There was every possibility that the signal would lead them right to me. That was an unnecessary risk.

Still, Layton needed to hear from me. And he would.

*  *  *

“I
want to talk to Layton,” I said, holding the transmit button on the handheld down.

Silence was the response I received. I checked that I had set the correct frequency and shifted my position, to the full crest of the hill now, one of the tank cars visible below, the last one in line and closest to Whitefish. The town itself was mostly dark, just a few open fires visible across dim distance, and, maybe, a splash of artificial light filling the windows of some building. Some important building on generator power. We were nearing the point where stored gasoline and diesel would be losing its ability to reliably combust, putting the usage of generators, and vehicles, and locomotives potentially on shaky footing. I imagined Major Layton knew this as well. He wouldn’t be able to send patrols as far as he had attempted. Wouldn’t be able to move tank cars around to place them for maximum effect. His plan to cleanse the land would, presumably, require the expenditure of fuel. Using locomotives to shuttle tank cars east, west, and south. Vehicles would have to bring men to set charges to blow the chemicals within the steel cylinders. He was going to wait for summer winds, as his man had shared, but he couldn’t wait too long.

“Major Layton, are you out there? I can hear your broadcasts. You should be able to hear mine.”

The half-moon drizzled weak light over the dead landscape. It was still odd to not hear an owl hoot, or a coyote howl. The nights were quiet. As quiet as the day.

I didn’t have to suffer the silence very long.

“This is Major Layton.”

The voice came clear over the radio. Strong, confident, collected. This was not the person who’d spat the threats earlier. This was a leader.

I had to remind myself that he was also a monster.

“Hello, Major.”

“Who am I communicating with?”

I’d already decided how I would answer this question if asked.

“Me? I’m the man who’s going to end you.”

“That’s a fairly arrogant pronouncement.”

“Call it what you want,” I said. “Call me what you want. Tell what’s left of the world I’m a terrorist like your lackey on the radio earlier. The end will be the same—you’re going to die.”

The frequency was quiet for a moment. I could imagine Layton on the other end, smirking at my bravado, conferring with associates, maybe attempting to determine where my signal was coming from.

“It seems to me that you should be the one who worries about being taken out,” Layton said after the silence. “The numbers aren’t in your favor.”

“They’re less in your favor after the damage we did to your men.”

“I’m far from being out of troops. While you, well, one of yours had to blow himself up to take my people out. Wouldn’t that make this ‘we’ you mentioned a ‘you’ now?”

He was still playing cool. In the distance I saw vehicle lights come on. Two, three, four, the convoy speeding away from a single point downtown. Roaring west toward the highway.

They were onto me. My signal had given me away.

“Enjoy the time you have left, Layton,” I said, taking the last word for myself before switching my radio off.

Nearly eight miles I’d traveled from my refuge to put distance from it and the signal. A three hour walk lay ahead of me as I headed home.

I could not have guessed what I would find waiting for me there.

I
t leaned against my front door, butt on the floor of the porch, muzzle touching the old wood slab next to the lock.

“Del...”

I hadn’t returned home since witnessing his sacrifice, having gone straight to his house, then off to speak my piece to Layton over the radio. Standing at my house finally, I understood why the ninety minutes Del had requested me to wait had extended beyond two hours. He’d hustled back here to leave me his rifle before setting off on his last trek. His last act.

The simple bolt action wasn’t much to look at, weathered, scratched, its scope twenty years old and showing wear on the lenses. I climbed onto the porch and picked it up. The old weapon felt heavy in my hands. Much heavier than its mere weight. It bore the spirit of the man who’d carried it. The man who wanted me to have it.

But it was not just a gift Del Drake had left me. I believed he was speaking to me with the gesture. He was telling me not to continue the fight—he was telling me to finish it. In as much as I’d voiced my intent to bring an end to Major James Layton, Del, my friend, was simply reinforcing what, I suspected, he already knew I would do. The rifle was his vote of confidence in me. His blessing of me as a good man unwilling to simply do nothing.

The truth, though, as whole as my intent was, the how of my promise had not coalesced. For certain I could wage a one man guerilla campaign against Layton and his men, picking them off by ones and twos. In that scenario I would likely be taken out before ever getting near the man. To get to him I’d have to get through the others.

Or take them all out at the same time.

I looked to Del’s rifle. He’d left his weapon of choice behind in favor of a way to do maximum damage. Could I do the same?

There would be no sneaking into Whitefish as some human bomb like my friend. We...
I
had four sticks of TNT left. Not enough to level a town.

Or was it?

Maybe, I thought, if it had some help. It could work, I told myself. I could
make
it work. There were pieces to put in place, but nothing seemed insurmountable. Even the way to initiate it I could manage. I slipped my small pack off and took the handheld radio from it, switching it on. Layton’s man was haranguing the world and me specifically over the airwaves again. Turning it off would quiet the annoyance, but, instead, I turned the squelch up until the signal was not strong enough and the speaker quieted. Then I adjusted it down a hair and the screaming man was back. Up slightly, and he was gone.

I smiled and turned the radio off, hiking back to Del’s immediately to retrieve the other handheld and chargers for both. When I returned I set about testing what I hoped would work, disconnecting the wires powering the speaker on one of the radios and connecting the leads to a bright LED flashlight bulb. Outside, I leaned the ladder against the barn wall and climbed to the roof, placing the modified handheld at the peak before switching it on and turning the squelch down fully. Had the speaker still been in place, crisp static would be sounding, but, instead, the power meant to construct sound from the device now set the bright and tiny bulb to shining. Setting the squelch near its maximum, the light went out. From my belt I took the unmodified radio and tapped the transmit button quickly, sending a quick, voiceless transmission. Set to the same frequency, the modified radio received the strong signal and the light flashed on for an instant.

“Right,” I said, and climbed down from the barn roof, leaving the modified radio there and returning its near twin to my pack. It was time for the real test.

In the dark I hiked to a rise nearly five miles from my refuge, peak of the mountain rising another two thousand feet from the spot I’d set out for. It was familiar. I’d camped there before on hunts, the appeal of the level area its elevation for observation, and the more personal fact that, from it, I could look directly across the forest to my refuge. The line of sight was perfect, and I needed to do no more than bring the binoculars to my eyes and tap the transmit button one more time so that, across the distance, I could see the light affixed to the radio blaze bright atop my barn.

I turned off the radio and sat for a moment on a cool rock bulging from the earth. I had my detonator. Now all I needed was a bomb big enough to turn Whitefish to rubble and bring the very cleanse that Layton envisioned right to his doorstep.

In the morning
, I thought to myself. I’d work then on securing the part that would go
boom
.

I
t sat where I remembered, weathered by winter and drenched through the early tantrums of spring. Ten years old, it had to be, the white body work showing patches of sanded rust, logo of the Federal Railway Administration faded on each door. The ungainly small metal wheels inboard of its standard tires seemed out of place where they hung beneath the frame. I’d seen the vehicle, and others like it over the years, driving normally along a roadway, then swinging onto a set of train tracks and lowering the secondary set of wheels, the combination of rubber and steel allowing the old but powerful Chevy to speed along rails meant for behemoths ten times its size.

Porter...

Ed Porter. That was the man’s name. The one who lived out of the way in Stryker, a blip on the map that made Fortine look like Missoula, and Eureka like Las Vegas. He was an inspector for the Railway Administration, or had been. I’d run into him once on a hunt, and shared a conversation over some fresh venison backstrap. His job, as he’d explained it, consisted mostly of tooling up and down the tracks between his home base and Missoula, verifying that the private operators were living up to their commitments to keep the line safe and maintained. All he had to do, as he put it, was avoid being on the track at the same time as some thousand ton monster fully able to obliterate him.

And this was his ride. Parked just outside his small house a few hundred feet from the siding off the main track. A three hour walk through the grey woods had brought me here. I looked through the window and saw the keys in the cup holder hanging from the heater vent, but I didn’t open the most certainly unlocked driver’s door. Not yet. I had something else to do first. Inside.

I turned to Ed’s house, white paint peeling in places. New shingles stark like islands surrounded by old roofing, some personal repair handiwork evident. Hesitation stalled me from mounting the front steps. What I might find inside held me back momentarily. But the horror of Ed Porter in death was not all that stalled me.

I was tired. Exhausted. Not from mere physical exertion. It was beyond that. It was almost...spiritual. Inside I felt increasingly hollow, the emptiness deepening with each step I took away from the man I’d been and toward the person I needed to be.

Or was choosing to be.

I had killed. More than once. And now I was going to kill again, without any moral argument against what I’d planned coming to mind. It was that far I’d come. How much I’d changed. On the hike from my refuge to Stryker I wondered on that, and on just how many degrees difference there were between what Major Layton was, and what I was becoming. He killed. I killed. There was the point of motive to consider. I knew that. But the end result, an acceptance of killing as a necessity, seemed hardly distinct at all. People were going to die at my hand, the Major among them, hopefully, and I was okay with that.