The Pit (The Bugging Out Series Book 4) (34 page)

“Or...”

Her prompting warmed the already true smile upon my face.

“Or it can be
the
ring,” I told her. “The one that really means something.”

She looked again to the simple piece of jewelry, still resting in her palm.

“Which kind of ring do you want it to be?” I asked her.

Slowly, she began to smile. Then her gaze rose to meet mine.

“I want a child, too,” I said. “Children, actually. And I want them with you. I want us to be a real us. Do you understand?”

For a moment she just looked at me, the hard, almost harsh woman I’d known her as when first arriving in Bandon a distant, impossibly inaccurate memory now. She was strong and smart and vulnerable and tough and beautiful. She was everything to me.

“Eric...”

“Yes?”

“Will you ask the damn question already?”

So I did. And she said yes. I slipped the simple ring carried home from Alaska onto the third finger of her left hand. Then I kissed her, and I held her, and we lay in each other’s arms, listening to the fresh rain fall as we drifted off to sleep.

W
e sat in the park, the four of us. Martin, Angela, Elaine, and me. On benches near the field where plastic turf had once spread its manufactured greenness across the space. That was gone, dirt left in its place. An expanse of still infected earth surrounded by yellow tape. Earth that bore the tiniest of green sprouts. Blades of grass, real grass, that were feeling the winter sun upon them.

“I can smell it,” Angela said, the civvies she wore a very purposeful reminder that, for the moment, she was not Captain Schiavo. “That grass smell. Can you?”

We all sampled the air, noses twitching to inhale what was carried on the soft breeze.

“I smell it,” Elaine said.

“It’s been so long since I smelled that,” Angela said.

Martin looked to me and gave a facial shrug.

“Must be a girl thing,” he said. “I smell steak.”

Elaine and Angela smirked at the comment, but Martin was right. Someone was grilling up beef, maybe a street over from the park. An offering to the meat gods in honor of the coming spring. I looked into the wind, toward where the scent originated, and I kept looking. Away from the conversation. Away from my friends.

“You’re quiet,” Martin said.

I turned to him now. I was quiet. It was a silence not born of sadness, but of realization.

“What is it?” Elaine asked, putting her hand gently on the back of mine.

I smiled before I spoke. Because it was a happy thought that had seized me, even if it was wrapped in so much worry and discord.

“She’d be due about now,” I said, and those with me knew who I was talking about.

“Grace,” Elaine said.

We’d hardly spoken about her, or Krista, or Neil in the months since they’d left. For a while after that event, beginning with the stealth chopper rising into the sky and disappearing over the dead woods to the east, I’d obsessed about my friend’s departure. His inexplicable and enigmatic flight from me, and from a place I’d thought, that I’d truly believed, he saw as his home. A depression gripped me. I wondered if there was something I should have seen. Something I should have known. I punished myself for not reading more into the lie he’d told. A lie I still had no full understanding of, but which, I suspected, played a part in the why of his leaving.

My friend, I now knew, hadn’t just been keeping secrets. He’d been cultivating them.

“I hope Krista gets a brother,” Martin said. “That’s what I hope.”

“She’d love a little guy,” Elaine agreed. “So would Grace.”

Angela offered no comment. I suspected she felt incapable of making any relevant observation on the state of my friend’s family. Her interaction with him, and them, had been brief, and mostly official. Only on the transit back to Bandon had she interacted in an informal manner with those we now spoke of, but even those moments had been brief.

“He’d love a son,” I finally chimed in. “His dad would have been a terrific grandfather. What that kid would have gotten from that man...”

And there I stopped. I didn’t want to dredge a loss some distance in the past and sully it with what Neil had done. His father, a man I respected greatly, had died, cancer eating him up as the blight exploded. That was what Neil had told me, at least.

I shook my head, openly.

“You can’t keep doing this to yourself,” Elaine told me.

Spring weddings were ahead for us. Martin and Angela in late March, and Elaine and me in early April. That was a joy that lay ahead for us. I wanted to focus on that. I needed to. I knew that.

But knowing it did not make putting my friend and his family out of my mind easy by any measure.

“Sorry,” I said to her, and to the others. “I just find myself questioning everything he’s told me since...”

I’d tried to move beyond the constant doubt. Some days I was successful in doing that. Most, though, some recollection crept into my thoughts and, again, I would weigh what Neil had said against what he had ended up doing. And when I found reason for suspicion in his statements, a sense of failure on my part would flourish, if only briefly. But every instance of that grated on me. Inside. I had been fooled, been made a fool of, by the very person I’d always,
always
, believed had my best interests in mind when he acted.

“Why did the chicken cross the road?” Martin asked out of the blue.

I looked at him and had to smile.

“Why?”

“To get away from your depressing ass,” he said, offering what had to be the most perfect punchline ever crafted for the clichéd joke.

Angela looked to me and tried not to laugh. She failed, the giddy reaction bursting from her. Elaine joined in. Then Martin. With laughter rolling from the trio of my friends, I could resist no further, and doubled over, the cathartic release almost overwhelming me.

We laughed, and laughed, lost so deeply in the absurd humor of the moment that we almost missed Corporal Enderson racing across the park, small radio in hand. His expression was not frantic, but confused.

“Cap’n,” he called out as he neared and stopped.

Schiavo quieted and stood from where she sat next to Martin. He, too, rose, eyeing the youngish soldier with a hint of concern. Elaine glanced to me, the same vague worry sparking in her gaze, the joy that had filled us for a few moments wiped away.

“What is it, Mo?” Angela asked, addressing him informally in some attempt to ease his obvious tension.

It didn’t work.

“The White Signal,” Enderson said. “It just stopped.”

“Stopped?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Schiavo eyed the radio in his grip.

“Let me have a listen, corporal” she said.

She was Schiavo now. Captain Angela Schiavo. She’d reverted to the formality expected in any interaction when civilians were present.

But Enderson didn’t follow her instruction. Not immediately.

“It stopped,” the corporal repeated. “But something else started right up.”

“A new transmission?” Elaine asked.

Enderson nodded, an uncertainty about the gesture. As though he was unsure just what it was he was confirming.

“Let me see that.”

Schiavo held her hand out and the soldier put the radio in it. She focused on the display, electronic bars rising and falling, indication of a transmission in absence of the volume being turned up.

“What did you hear?” Martin asked.

Enderson thought for a moment, his gaze lost, then he shook his head.

“You all should listen for yourselves,” the corporal said.

I rose, Elaine following, joining Martin where he stood close to Schiavo and Enderson. The captain reached to the volume knob and advanced it slowly.

A faint voice crackled within the static. Repeating a single word again and again.

“Ranger. Ranger. Ranger.”

Then it would quiet. A few seconds later the word would be spoken again. In the same sequence. The same tone.

“Ranger. Ranger. Ranger.”

A familiar tone.

Enderson looked to me. Then Martin did. Then Schiavo. Finally Elaine added her gaze to those fixed upon me. Eyes watching for my reaction. Friends hurting, for me, at what we were all hearing on the radio. At who.

“That’s Neil’s voice,” Elaine said.

“Ranger. Ranger. Ranger.”

I nodded. Then I reached to Schiavo and took the radio from her and shut it off, silencing my friend’s voice.

I hope you enjoyed
The Pit.

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Book 1:
Bugging Out

Book 2:
Eagle One

Book 3:
Wasteland

Book 4: The Pit

N
oah Mann lives in the West and has been involved in personal survival and disaster preparedness for more than two decades. He has extensive training in firearms, as well as urban and wilderness Search & Rescue operations, including tracking and the application of technology in victim searches.