The Pit (The Bugging Out Series Book 4) (27 page)

“You’re missing one hell of a party,” I said as I joined him on the porch.

“Sounds like it,” he said, looking to me. “Someone from San Diego ran by shouting like the town crier.”

“So you heard.”

My friend nodded, his confirmation subdued. More than that, actually. It was almost as if some doubt had risen within.

“Home,” he said.

“Yeah.”

Across the rooftops of what passed for Skagway’s downtown, the engine and rotor noise of an Osprey grew louder. Just one. The aircraft rose into the air, higher and higher, its rotors tilting forward. It gained speed and banked, in full airplane configuration now, and flew over the town, threading its way through the peaks to northeast.

It was the lone Osprey that had seized my interest, gone now. Why it had come with the rest a mystery for now.

“How is Grace?” I asked, glancing toward the house.

Neil watched the aircraft for a few seconds more until it was completely out of sight beyond the sharply sloped mountains.

“Resting,” he said, smiling as he faced me now. “Doc Allen wants her lying down every few hours.”

My friend looked preoccupied. Worried, even. There seemed to be little of the relief or joy that he’d expressed since we’d freed Krista. I supposed he was entitled to swings in his mood with all that was on his plate. A wife carrying a child he’d not known of until reuniting with her. A step daughter, as loved as any flesh and blood offspring, in danger but now safe. The journey home still to come, with memories of the perilous trek we’d made here fresh in his thoughts.

“She’s going to be fine,” I told my friend.

He accepted that assurance with a tepid nod.

“You okay?”

“Life is funny, Fletch,” he said to me. “Even in this world. We had a place in Bandon. A home.”

“We still do,” I reminded him.

“Yeah,” he agreed, but with vague concurrence.

“We’re going to get there, Neil. Schiavo said we’re going to be supplied. They have actual livestock they’ll be bringing to us sometime after we’re back.”

He seemed to brighten a bit at hearing that. By a degree or two.

“Real food, Fletch. That will be...something.”

I began to wonder if my friend was suffering something not very different than what was affecting Grace. Stress, fatigue, worry. It had come like an avalanche and receded like a tsunami racing back to sea.

“You need a rest, Neil.”

To this he nodded, the gesture true.

“I am tired.”

“Go spend some time with Grace,” I said. “If you need a break later, Elaine and I will watch Krista for a while.”

My friend smiled at the offer. At my concern.

“You’re my best friend, Fletch.”

“Right back atcha,” I said.

Neil gave me a quick, friendly pat on the shoulder, then went inside to be with his wife and daughter. I left the house and walked back into town and joined the celebration.

W
e sat on the dock, the four of us, relaxing while Krista played with a pair of girls nearby, and while three dozen men and women worked on the far side of the bay, as they had for a full week now, attaching pumps and fat hoses to the half-submerged
Vensterdam
. With some luck, and an equal amount of effort, the transfer of fuel from the grounded cruise ship might begin to her brethren within days. And then, with a bit more luck, and some divine grace thrown in for good measure, the
Northwest Majesty
’s engines would rumble to life again and we’d be on our way to Bandon.

On our way home.

I did think of it as that now. In the time before we’d set out from there in search of the almost mythical tomato plant, the town, and those who called it home, had begun to seem too much a place stuck in neutral. A place hoping for the best without taking steps to ensure its long term viability as a sanctuary for survivors.

But that had changed. That doubt I harbored had been ground down on our journey to Cheyenne, on our trek to and from a living hell. Bandon now did not seem like home—it was home. My home. And Elaine’s. For as long as she’d have me.

I wanted to return there, with her, with all who’d been spirited away. I wanted to stay there. I wanted a life there. Because I believed we now had a chance to turn things around. If not for the whole human race, then at least for what part of it had found safe harbor in the seaside town.

“You cannot be thinking serious thoughts,” Neil said, catching me off guard.

“What?”

He tipped a swallow of beer back and smiled, his hand laced with Grace’s. They sat close, in patio chairs pushed together, his gaze probing me. Knowing that I’d drifted off into some musing of a serious nature.

“It’s all good, Fletch,” he said, no slur in his words, but a warm glint in his eyes from the building buzz. “No more worries. We top off the tanks in this bad boy and head for home.”

“
We
?” Grace pressed him. “We, especially
you
, aren’t on that wreck over there covered in grease and oil so the tanks can be topped off.”

“It’s a collective effort,” Neil said, accepting her ribbing with good nature. “Whose idea was it?”

My friend extended his finger toward me and raised his beer.

“Fletch,” Neil said. “The man of the hour, the week, the year. The man with the plan.”

Elaine leaned close and kissed me on the cheek, soft, warm, and quick.

“He’s not wrong,” she said.

One of the first teams aboard the
Vensterdam
had located which fuel tanks hadn’t been punctured and polluted with seawater. A team that followed them in had stumbled upon fifty cases of beer, far past its ‘sell by’ date, but with a dip in the harbor’s water to chill the bottles, our small group was enjoying its first ‘cold one’ in a long, long time. And maybe the last for the foreseeable future.

“I’m not sure which I’m happier about,” I said. “That they found useable fuel, or these longnecks.”

I sipped at mine, still on the first bottle. Neil was well into his fourth.

“What were you thinking about?” Grace asked, her beverage a straight up glass of tea that one of the men from San Diego had brewed in a huge batch. “Just a minute ago.”

I’d thought we’d slipped past my friend catching me in thought. But the reprieve had only been momentary.

“I was thinking about home,” I said. “That’s it.”

A dull ache spiked suddenly on my chest, right where a chunk of concrete had bounced off of me during the pit’s collapse. The tactical vest I’d worn then had provided enough of a buffer to save me from any broken ribs, but not a serious bruising. I reached to the spot and rubbed hard against the pain that came in intermittent waves.

“Your chest?” Grace asked, noting my discomfort.

It was the nurse in her zeroing in on symptoms.

“Not a heart attack,” I assured her. “Just something to remind me of being buried alive.”

As I massaged my sore flesh I felt something else that was a reminder. A talisman that took me back to Mary Island. Something in my shirt pocket. I reached in and retrieved the small round of reddish metal.

“What’s that?” Grace asked.

I held the plain medallion between my thumb and finger and stared at it.

“Kuratov gave one of these to each of his men,” I said.

“One of Schiavo’s men took that off a dead Russian on Mary Island and gave it to Eric,” Elaine explained.

Grace’s expression soured at what she’d just heard.

“You’re going to keep it?” she asked.

I held the keepsake. I felt it. Then, I wanted it no more.

“No.”

I flicked it over the edge of the dock and into the harbor. It disappeared silently and unseen into the cold, dark water.

“Not a place I want to remember,” I said.

Neil leaned forward in his chair, a sappy, buzzed smile on his face.

“In high school, this guy never threw anything away,” my friend shared. “He had gym socks from his freshman year still in his locker when we graduated.”

The mocking laughter that sprang from that revelation was deserved, I knew.

“Hey, I’m not the only one hanging onto things that have no use anymore,” I said. “Am I, Special Agent Elaine Morales?”

“Oh, please,” Elaine protested. “My FBI credentials are not equivalent to old gym socks.”

“You think that’s over the top?” Grace asked, nudging Neil with an elbow. “Show them what’s in your cargo pocket. Go on.”

My friend fumbled with the button on the pocket that sat mid-thigh on his pants. After a few inebriated seconds, Grace leaned over and retrieved what she’d only hinted at.

“His passport,” she said, holding up just that. “Mr. State Department world traveler still carries it with him. Everywhere. Like he’s expecting some customs agent to pull him aside and ask for his papers.”

“Some of those customs guys are pretty scary,” Neil said.

Elaine reached out and took the passport, flipping through the pages, eyeing all the entry and exit stamps from points around the globe.

“Oh, to be able to travel as you did,” Elaine commented.

Grace stood right then and took Neil by the hand, easing him up from where he’d sat. She took the nearly empty bottle from him and set it down on the dock.

“Mr. World Traveler here needs to walk some of his celebration off,” Grace said, pulling him along.

Neil reached unsteadily back toward his passport, missing the stiff document by at least a foot.

“You live vicariously through that for a while, Elaine,” Grace said. “A more sober representative of our government will get it from you later. Keep an eye on Krista for a bit?”

“Of course,” I said.

Grace led Neil up the dock and toward town.

“He’s letting loose,” I said. “He needs to.”

“He’s definitely feeling little pain,” Elaine said, handing my friend’s passport over to me as she, too, stood. “I need to hit the little girls’ room. Be right back.”

She crossed the dock to a shed where some portable facilities had been brought back to working order. Left alone I watched Krista play, and saw the first stages of supplying the
Northwest Majesty
begin, workers stacking pallets of supplies retrieved from the pit near the ship’s loading ramp. Sitting there, taking it all in, the sights and sounds and feel of the day’s waning hours, I opened my friend’s passport and flipped through it, marveling at the places he’d been.

Russia. Japan. Ukraine. England. Egypt. South Africa. China. Thailand. And on, and on. Country after country that his midlevel position at the State Department had afforded him the opportunities to visit.

Except...

Except there were some countries not listed. No entry and exit stamps for places he should have gone. For one place I knew he had gone.

Brazil.

It was where he had traveled with a US team to consult on the blight. Where he’d learned enough information to convince him that warning me was a prudent, if illegal, thing to do.

“Brazil,” I said aloud, confused.

Certainly a country suffering through the early stages of the blight would have tracked who entered and exited their domain with extra vigilance. Wouldn’t they?

But there was more. There was not one stamp in his passport from any country south of the border. No Mexico. No Central America. No South America. None. Yet, as he’d told it, he was a state department liaison between the Brazilians and American agricultural officials. Why would that job fall to him, someone with no apparent expertise in that part of the world? Wasn’t that the point of being a liaison? To be the expert on the place you were traveling to?

I looked back through the stamps in his passport, just to make certain I hadn’t missed something obvious. But I hadn’t.

“You okay?”

I looked up. It was Elaine, back from her bathroom run.

“You look like someone just stole your puppy,” she said, then sat down next to me.

I closed the passport and handed it to her.

“You can give that to Grace when you see her,” I said.

Elaine opened the front cover and again perused the places my friend had been, her attention fixed on thoughts of those faraway lands. Lands that were now dead places on a once green world.

Neil...

I didn’t know what to think about what I’d seen. And I didn’t know what to do. Broaching the discrepancy between his documentation and the narrative he’d shared with me might be the simplest thing to do. But was it the right thing to do?

Grace, while not fragile, had begun her pregnancy under trying circumstances. If there was some reason why Neil had concocted a story about visiting Brazil as the blight began its spread, I had no way of knowing if its revelation would bring an unnecessary strain upon Grace. And upon them. She needed him. Krista needed him. And he needed them.

And what was there to gain if I did confront him with what I saw as evidence of a lie he’d told me? A rather large and important fabrication. Would any good come of it? Was it even important right now, as we prepared to leave Skagway for home?

No. It wasn’t. I knew that. When we’d returned, and had a chance to adjust once again to life in Bandon, life as a community of survivors, then, maybe, in a casual way I could ask my friend about it. For now...

“It’s going to be a nice night,” I said, reaching to the chair next to me and taking Elaine’s hand in mine.

“Yeah,” she said. “It is.”

We sat there and let the day dwindle away. Watching Krista play. Letting the world spin on.

I
n five days, two less than what Martin had estimated, we boarded the
Northwest Majesty
and maneuvered cautiously out of Skagway’s harbor, down the Taiya Inlet, and past Baranof Island and Port Alexander to open water. There would be no creeping along the inside passage, down narrow channels between the mainland and rugged islands.

Our voyage home would be on the ocean. On the Pacific. That word translated roughly to ‘peaceful’.

Not every day that followed, though, could be described as such.

T
wo days after leaving Skagway I stood at the starboard rail as the
Northwest Majesty
sailed through calm seas, the vast Pacific to the west, islands and the mainland to the east. The ocean faced me, and I it. Across it there were almost certainly people like me, like us, who had hung on. Who had survived. Maybe some who were thriving. Men, women, and children who’d been through similar hells to those we’d faced and come out more than alive.