“You have inside threats?” I asked.

  The man laughed sloppily and gestured to the space around us, sweeping a hand in a 360 like a lasso.

  “Yeah, we have inside threats,” Burke said, the pronouncement almost oozing past his lips, liquid and thick. “You’re a threat.”

  Next to me, Elaine straightened, seeming ready to offer up some defense of me. Before she could, Burke raised a hand and wagged a single finger in her direction.

  “And you’re a threat,” he said, pointing next across the park to woman and a young boy. “They’re a threat. Everybody in this town is a threat.”

  Whatever inebriated logic there was that was fueling his accusations eluded me. Burke seemed like the kind of blowhard whose bravado could be measured and predicted by the fluid ounce. He was used to neighbors and associates letting him have his say, expecting that the moment would pass.

  I was not going to.

  “If I’m a threat,” I began, “why don’t you deal with me now?”

  Burke focused on me, his mouth hanging open with slack amusement. His head tipped backward, the man regarding me like a bully might a potential new victim, trying to pick out a soft spot he could aim for.

  “You’re a funny one,” Burke said. “You and your pal and his lady and that little snot-nosed—”

  “Burke!”

  Elaine’s admonition cut off what the man was about to say. But it didn’t stop me.

  “Go ahead,” I urged him quietly. “Finish what you were going to say.”

  The smile went away now. Drained to nothing. Just a darkness remained, in his eyes, his expression, all for my benefit. After a moment he swung his legs over the bench seat and stood, his balance surprisingly solid. He reached out and snatched the bottle, gripping it by the neck like an upturned club.

  “You’re on the wall tonight,” Burke said to me. “And I’ll see you there.”

  He walked off, a straight line exit through a few residents just arriving at the park, not a wobble or a weave to his step. The man could hold his liquor in that respect, it appeared.

  “Ignore him,” Elaine said.

  “That’s going to be hard for me to do.”

  “It’s just the BS factor,” she told me, and judged by my lack of reaction that I was missing something. “Burke Stovich. His name. BS.”

  So the man was to get a pass because of alcohol and a crudely apt pairing of initials. Clearly, I was quickly coming to understand, the residents of Bandon had learned to look past, way past, the faults in each other for some greater good, which I suspected Burke Stovich was a particularly important part of.

  “Is he former military?” I asked.

  “He’s former something,” Elaine replied.

  “What does that mean?”

  She stood and regarded me for a moment with a casual wariness. It was a trait that seemed natural to her. Not borne of events, such as what Grace had endured, but simply part of her being. It was possible she was alive because of it.

  “It means you’ve been here less than forty eight hours,” she said. “You don’t get to ask questions yet. And you certainly don’t get to judge.”

  She turned away and followed the same path out of the park as Burke, leaving me there among the lush façade of the old world.

  Thirty Two

  Elaine and I waited on the corner for Neil to join us. I’d been informed by a messenger, a kid struggling to sprout a goatee, that I was to meet Elaine two blocks over at seven, armed and ready for duty. It was seven on the dot, night settling full and the first wisps of mist creeping in from the ocean.

  “Is your friend prone to being late?”

  The same messenger had been tasked with rousing Neil from whatever sleep he’d been able to catch that afternoon so that he could join us. I’d managed a full six hours.

  “No,” I told Elaine, surprised myself. “He’s not.”

  Fog rolled across the dark street, washing out the houses beyond like an eraser leaving misty streaks in its wake.

  “Go hurry him up,” Elaine said, the words hinting at some authority she’d once wielded.

  But before I could move, a figure began to resolve through the fog, moving right at us from the direction of Neil’s house, emerging from the damp grey haze, bolt action rifle slung.

  Elaine looked to me, then to Grace.

  “Where’s Neil?”

  “He’s watching Krista,” Grace told her.

  “He’s supposed to be here,” Elaine said.

  “We decided I would go.”

  We?

  The doubting look I laid on Grace pushed some button I was about to wish hadn’t been.

  “I don’t control him, Eric. He’s not some puppet with strings I pull. You, of all people, should know that. If I’m going to be part of this town, then I’m going to pull my weight and do my time, and not just dust and sweep. Okay?”

  My response didn’t come immediately. When it did, a smile of apology accompanied it.

  “You do know he sucks at keeping a house clean,” I said.

  She smiled back, suppressing a laugh.

  “I’m becoming aware of that, yes.”

  Elaine took in the exchange with her own amusement obvious, though it did not erase the impatience that preceded it.

  “We’ve gotta move,” Elaine told us.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Okay,” Grace agreed.

  Elaine started up the street. Grace and I followed close behind, walking side by side. The way good friends did.

  * * *

  The wall was a miles-long barrier of chain link, scrounged from towns up and down the coast as the blight took hold. It surrounded Bandon on the north, east, and south, the ocean providing what protection it could to the west.

  “We’re covering a section of the north wall tonight,” Elaine explained. “The only bridge into town crosses the river there.”

  “It’s the only one?” Grace asked.

  “The only one left standing,” Elaine clarified. “We have an observation post there on the second floor of a structure that we built. It’s reinforced, with good views in all directions. A double gate blocks the bridge just beyond the OP. Our job is to make sure nothing crosses.”

  The task seemed simple enough, though that did not negate any danger. Hand grenades were simple devices, and they could turn a person into hamburger.

  We walked up the highway, once a two lane route numbered 101. The signs that labeled it still stood. One, I saw as we approached, had been defaced. Eyes and a mouth had been scrawled inside the ‘0’ making a face, and each of the ‘1’s to either side had been turned into middle fingers. I wasn’t sure what it was supposed to mean, if anything, but it certainly seemed fitting when I heard the voice call out to us from atop the OP.

  “You’re late,” Burke said.

  We were. Two whole minutes. Elaine tossed a thumb toward Grace. Burke considered the assignment of blame for a moment.

  “I’m coming down,” he said.

  He disappeared from the top of the OP, its four sides open under a sturdy roof, and reappeared at ground level, coming out a door to meet us.

  “Where’s Moore?”

  It was ‘Moore’ to him, I thought. Not ‘Neil’. Elaine was just that to him, but the newbies seemed to be on a last name basis. I was seriously beginning to think the guy had been a drill instructor somewhere, spewing curses at recruits, telling Jones or Pinkerton or Landry to drop and give him fifty. Or he might simply have been a foreman on some construction crew, abrasive to the point of abusive. The truth was, all I knew for certain about Burke Stovich was that I wasn’t going to be having him over for dinner anytime soon.

  “They switched places,” Elaine told him.

  “We don’t do that,” Burke said, focusing on Grace.

  “We didn’t know,” Grace said.

  Burke thought it through, the rigid mask he’d flashed at us seeming to soften, if just by a degree.

  “Relieve Ben and David,” Burke said, looking only to Elaine and me. “I’ll take the lady with me to the river bend OP.”

  “The lady’s name is Grace,” Grace reminded him.

  The oddest thing happened then. Burke smiled. A stone-cold sober expression of admiration.

  “The lady named Grace has some spunk in her,” he said, looking me next. “Enjoy your time on Checkpoint Chuck.”

  I snickered lightly.

  “A play on Checkpoint Charlie,” I said, recalling the name of a road connection between East and West Berlin, a potential flashpoint during the Cold War. “Cute.”

  Only it didn’t resonate with any amount of humor.

  “No,” Burke said. “Guy named Chuck Clemmons was killed here while watching the bridge.”

  I’d walked into that.

  “A Horde sniper got a lucky shot off,” the man told me. “It’d be shame if we had to name something after you.”

  Despite Burke’s abrasive persona, and his drunken reproach of me earlier in the day, I was still an outsider. I knew virtually none of the history of the place, before or after the time of the blight. This verbal misstep I decided was as good a reason as any to listen, and to think, before flapping my gums.

  Burke headed off, taking a worn footpath to the east. Grace followed, flashing a smile back at me as she left. In just a few seconds she was lost in the fog.

  * * *

  “Coming in,” the radio crackled soft at the base of the sandbag wall.

  Elaine picked it up and looked behind the bunker, in the direction of the town. We’d relieved the residents who’d kept watch before us, and were thirty minutes into our shift when the call came.

  “Copy,” she said.

  I tracked her gaze and saw a figure approaching through the drifting mist.

  “Keep your eye on the bridge,” she told me.

  I faced the foggy span again as the sound of boots neared.

  “Hey,” a male voice said.

  I glanced back and saw a familiar face. One from the force who’d met us when we landed. A young face, the kid maybe twenty one, AR similar to mine slung on one shoulder and a bag over the other. His name was Mikey, if I was remembering correctly.

  “Eric, this is Mikey Winthrop,” Elaine said.

  “How ya doing?” Mikey asked, reaching into his bag and removing a thermos and two cups.

  “Just taking it all in,” I said.

  Elaine took the thermos and cups, setting them on a crude wood table in the back corner of the OP’s top floor.

  “We your first stop?” she asked.

  Mikey nodded and gestured off to the grey night to the east.

  “Jeff and Ross are roving the river,” Mikey said. “I’m dropping theirs off with the one for the point.”

  “Roving the river?”

  Elaine opened the thermos and poured us each cups of steaming coffee as she answered my question.

  “The fence has sensors, but we keep a patrol moving at night along the northern line.”

  “The Horde will try swimmers sometimes,” Mikey said. “They all drown. They’re all doped out of their heads, so, what would you expect?”

  “You never know,” Elaine said. “All it takes is one to get across to cause trouble.”

  “Have any gotten into town?” I asked.

  Mikey shook his head, pleased.

  “Micah has this warning system set up,” the kid explained. “Even has sensors hidden on the north side of the river.”

  “There’s been more movement up there recently,” Elaine said.

  “Seattle is a long way from here,” I said. “Wouldn’t Portland be a closer base if they’re into big cities?”

  Mikey looked to Elaine, surprised that I was even asking that question.

  “You didn’t fly over Portland on your way here?” she asked.

  “We were on the coast.”

  “The place is nothing but ashes,” Mikey told me. “Burned to the ground. Everything. Every single thing.”

  Images of what I’d caused in Whitefish flashed in memory. Most everything turned to cinder. Cars. Buildings. People.

  “How did it happen?”

  Elaine hesitated for a moment before answering.

  “We did it,” she said, the barest hint of regret in her voice.

  I didn’t press the issue as to why. If anyone knew that such a thing might be necessary, it was me. As it was, Mikey was in the mood to share.

  “If we’d left Portland standing, the Horde could have done just what you thought—moved closer to us.”

  “Scorched earth defense,” I said, understanding. “You make the survivors from Seattle have to travel all the way down here.”

  “Not survivors,” Mikey corrected me. “The Horde. Survivors are people. Survivors deserve to live. These things don’t.”

  “Things?”

  “He’s being dramatic,” Elaine said.

  “I am?” Mikey asked defensively, fixing on me, wanting to drive some point home. “The Space Needle is an appropriate landmark for the place now. That’s all those psychos do—shoot up, snort. Somehow they landed the mother lode of pharmacopeia and, believe me, they put it to use.”

  “Some people choose to escape from reality rather than accept it,” Elaine offered.

  Mikey shook his head at her, the point she was making not new. There was a history here, not harsh or damaging, just points of view that would never meet.

  “Elaine has a bit too much compassion for the Horde,” Mikey said. “Considering they’d eat her raw if they could.”

  She laid a look on him, signaling that he was precariously close to a line he shouldn’t cross. He seemed to get the mild warning and dialed back the rhetoric as he continued.

  “Every once in a while they send raiding parties down. It’s been happening more lately.”

  “Their food is running out,” Elaine said.

  She sipped from her cup of coffee and handed me mine. I set it on the bunker’s sandbag wall and scanned the bridge, noting nothing through the fog.

  “This one time, they dragged this catapult thing that they’d rigged up onto the bridge and—”

  “The rovers are out in the cold,” Elaine interrupted him, nodding toward his bag.

  “Yeah. Right. You’re right.”

  The young man reached out and shook my hand.

  “We’ll catch up later,” Mikey said. “Lotsa good Horde stories to tell.”

  He made his way down to the first floor, then out, his form dissolving into the thickening mist as he moved northeast toward the point.

  “A thermal sight would be nice about now,” I said, wishing that the piece of optics that could register heat signature through both darkness and fog was available.

  “We have one,” Elaine said. “Just one.”

  “I’d think this would be the best place for it.”

  “You’d be wrong,” she told me.

  So it was somewhere else. The only other ‘someplace’ that made sense for a piece of equipment like that to be utilized would be at the most vital place in Bandon—where the mystery stash of food was kept.

  “Stay alert,” Elaine told me. “It’s almost midnight.”

  “Does that time mean something?”

  “It’s when the Horde prefers to make their moves.”

  She was facing the bridge, scanning, her MP5 held against her chest. I brought my AP up and rested the suppressed barrel atop the sandbagged opening. We watched, saying nothing, until just after midnight when all hell broke loose.

  Thirty Three

  The burning woman emerged from the shifting fog and threw herself at the chain link stretched across it.

  “Jesus!”

  I shouldn’t have let the exclamation slip out, but the sight of a woman, her lower half engulfed in fire, jogging nonchalantly across the span was about the most startling thing I’d seen. Flames licked upward, over her face, hair atop her head smoldering as she grabbed at the porous fence and began to climb it.

  “Take her out!” Elaine ordered, grabbing the radio quickly. “We have contact, Checkpoint Chuck. One—”

  “Elaine,” I said, calm but firm, and she looked to see what had seized my attention.

  A staggered line of people, all on fire, were charging across the bridge, lighting the foggy night like a moving funeral pyre.

  “Take them out!” Elaine shouted, then got back on the radio. “Multiple attackers at Checkpoint Chuck!”

  I drew a bead on the first we’d seen, the woman, screaming now, wailing, her hands just reaching the top of the fence as I fired. A single shot. There was no chance I would miss from the hundred foot distance, and I did not. Her body slipped, feet losing the purchase they’d found on the chain link, hands struggling to hold her up until finally she succumbed to the wound and fell, flopping backward onto the bridge, flames leaping from her body.

  The others rushed toward her. Toward the fence. Toward us. I fired, picking my shots, watching the attackers drop one by one. Some fell to their knees and tried to continue on, crawling even as fire swirled about them.

  “How are they doing this?!”

  “They’re hopped up on every pain killer you can imagine,” Elaine said, firing now, short bursts from her MP5.

  More of the attackers fell, two tumbling from the bridge and into the river, their bodies continuing to burn atop the waters as the current carried them toward the ocean. Then, from the right, more fire joined in, spraying the bridge from the east.

  “The one on the left,” Elaine said.

  I found the mark she was directing me to, a solitary individual, a man, his body a rolling ball of orange about to crest the fence where it doubled back toward land. The sight of him, dying already, was mesmerizing. Two shots from my AR dropped him, his blazing remains tangled with the chain link, hanging there, a dead inferno.

  In less than two minutes there was no more movement and nothing to shoot at. Bodies continued to burn on the bridge, two more caught in the fencing. From below, boots slapped the stairs urgently, followed by softer, though no less urgent steps.

  “What was that?”

  It was Burke, and behind him, Grace, her rifle at the ready. She slipped past the head of security and joined me looking out over the failed, insane attack.

 

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