“You still haven’t said where the heart came from,” I reminded him.

  “A child,” Martin said. “One of our own.”

  His mood turned grim with memory. Some dark moment rushing from the past to the here and now.

  “It could have happened two years ago, three. Just a ten year old boy climbing a tree. Nothing odd about that. Except the tree was like all the others. Dead, brittle. The limb he was crawling out onto snapped and he fell.”

  The rest didn’t need to be told. Head injuries. Brain death. An awful decision.

  “His parents let him go so that Micah could live,” Martin said. “My son had maybe a month left in him when that happened. Now, he has more.”

  I thought on what he’d just shared. The absurd normality of it. When the entire planet was dying, the extremes of saving and extending life still did work. That said something about us as a species. Our resilience. Even our love.

  “You have power,” Neil said, gesturing to the fixture above.

  “We have a hydro setup in the river,” Martin explained. “The Coquille. It’s rudimentary, but we’re improving it. One of our residents was an engineer at the Hoover Dam. We have solar, wind, diesel generators for backup.”

  “You have diesel?” I asked with some doubt. “It’s not contaminated by now?”

  “We make our own. Another resident who came to us with her family worked in petrochemicals. She designed and helped build a processing unit for what we pump from a couple existing wells to the south of town. It’s small, but we have hopes to expand that.”

  “How many people are here?” Grace asked.

  “I believe we are at four hundred and eight,” Martin answered, smiling as he caught a mistake. “Make that four twelve. I’m assuming you want to stay.”

  I’d been master of my own destiny, reliant on myself for more than a year, with Neil and Grace joining that effort to stay alive not long ago. Here I, we, would be assimilating into an already existing band of survivors.

  “Everybody helps out,” Martin said. “Different things. There are committees, all the usual things that crop up when people try to run things together.”

  It was all useful information. All to be expected from a place that had established itself as a sanctuary for those of some moral fiber robust enough to seek out Eagle One and find it. But there was a massive piece of the truth missing from what Martin had shared.

  “And what about food?” I asked.

  “You’ll be well supplied,” Martin said. “Nothing extravagant, but not bad.”

  “And where does it come from?”

  He smiled at my questioning, maybe amused at my attempt to drill down to a nagging fact.

  “I mean,” I began, “you somehow guided people to hidden food caches across the country and—”

  “Micah did that,” Martin corrected, interrupting. “Not me.”

  “Right,” Neil said. “We heard him on the radio.”

  “No,” Martin said, shaking his head slightly. “He didn’t just tell people where to find the food lockers. He found them.”

  What the man was telling us made no sense. It was clear he noticed our reaction, and the extent of our disbelief.

  “Micah,” Martin began, “for all the issues he’s had with his health, he’s a remarkable boy. Brilliant. Even more than that. The only real way to describe him is beyond genius.”

  “So he’s smart,” Neil said.

  Martin shook his head mildly at the gross misstatement.

  “Smart is something that schools try to measure,” Martin said, with the tone of a father marveling at his child. “No one has ever been able to quantify him. They’ve tried since he was four.”

  “He’s a savant,” Grace said, picking a term of art to describe the child.

  “He’s something,” Martin partly agreed.

  “Okay, he’s off any chart of brain power ever conceived,” I said. “How does that get him to knowing where those food caches were?”

  Martin glanced over his shoulder, toward the space where Micah was schooling Krista on the operation and interconnection of computers and radios.

  “He’s spent most of his life isolated in places like that,” the father shared. “Sealed rooms with purified air. By himself much of that time. Thinking, experimenting, probing.”

  Probing...

  The word had a connotation beyond mere acts of curiosity.

  “Remember the NSA snooping scandal a year or so before the blight hit?”

  Who couldn’t? The instruments of the nation’s intelligence apparatus had been turned inward, with the capability to poke into virtually every aspect of a citizen’s life, mostly without restraint or accountability.

  “Micah was infuriated by that,” Martin said. “We talked about it at the time. He’s a child, and his brilliance doesn’t equate with maturity, but he grasped that issue with an understanding that...well, it actually moved me. He seemed like such an old soul when we discussed it, the ramifications to freedom. Even what freedom meant.”

  Then Martin paused, smiling through a slight shake of his head, marveling again, but in a different, a more serious manner.

  “But he was doing more than talking, I learned,” Martin said. “He didn’t tell me until after the blight had hit and things started to get bad. It was a couple weeks before the Red Signal when he fessed up.”

  “To what?” I asked.

  “To hacking the NSA.”

  A look volleyed between us. I half expected a laugh from Neil, one that I would certainly join in on. But there was no hint from Martin that what he’d just shared was anything close to a joke.

  “I didn’t believe it either,” the man said. “Then he showed me. He’d found a way into a secure communications node. The way he explained it, it was like a hub where satellite and radio and land communications all passed through. And I asked him, wouldn’t that stuff be encrypted?”

  “It would,” Neil said. “Everything sensitive from where I worked at the State Department was.”

  “I know,” Martin said. “He showed me stuff from State, from the Department of Defense, the White House, other agencies. From just about everywhere.”

  “Wait, what?” I asked, losing track of just what his son had supposedly done. “You said he hacked the NSA, not those other places.”

  “Right,” Martin confirmed. “He didn’t have to hack them—the NSA already had.”

  There’d been news reports of possible illegal snooping directed at civilians, and even some toward elected officials. But what Martin was suggesting pushed that toward another realm entirely.

  “You’re saying the NSA had routine access to every government communication?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Martin said. “Once Micah had them, he had everybody.”

  “Okay, okay,” Neil said, still trying to get a grip on the one small detail of this that pushed it from disturbing to fantastical. “Micah, your son, that eleven year old kid in there broke into the NSA, and cracked their encryption?”

  “Actually,” Martin corrected. “He was nine at the time he did that.”

  Our silence signaled a mix of disbelief and almost frightened awe.

  “Look, I didn’t actually believe it at first,” Martin said. “I thought maybe that Micah had concocted the whole thing to entertain himself. You know, something because he was suffering from an adolescent version of cabin fever. Being isolated like he was, like he is, it does affect him.”

  “But he did something to convince you,” Grace said, reading the man correctly.

  Martin nodded, the event flooding back, a sense of wonder blossoming for him again.

  “He said something was about to happen,” Martin said. “From all the intelligence he was seeing. That’s how he was acting—like his own little intelligence agency. From all this, he could tell there was a tipping point being reached. Assets were being moved. He said it was like a countdown had started.”

  “To the Red Signal,” I said.

  “As it turned out, yes,” Martin said. “I needed to know how real any of what he was saying was. One of the things he showed me were the locations of the supply lockers. The ones he ended up guiding people to. There was one supposed to be close, just up past Coos Bay, so I drove up there with a shovel, and I stabbed it into the ground, and I hit metal. I cleared it off and opened the red lid up, and it was full. Food, water, chemical light sticks. I didn’t doubt Micah after that.”

  There was no reason to not believe what the man was telling us. But there was every reason to find it completely implausible.

  “How the hell did your nine year old son break the most secure encryption known?” Neil asked. “Governments can’t do that.”

  “You’re asking the impossible,” Martin said. “He tried to explain it to me, but it’s so beyond me, so technologically esoteric, that I realized I’d never had a full grasp on just how special Micah is. Then, I stopped questioning, because it didn’t matter. What he was allowing with the information, the intelligence he’d hacked, was a way for us to survive. For him to survive. It allowed us to save Bandon as a community and to make it a sanctuary for people like you.”

  I let what Martin had told us sink in for a moment. There was no point in trying to discredit what he had shared. The proof was on his side. Except for one thing.

  “You’re the one in charge here?” I asked.

  “People look to me because of what Micah’s done. And what he’s still doing. Sometimes difficult decisions have to be made, and it falls on me to do that.”

  So he was the head honcho. The shot caller. That meant he had to know the answer to the question nagging me.

  “You have four hundred people here,” I recalled. “And you’ve been feeding them for over a year.”

  “Basically, yes.”

  “How?” I asked. “With what? If you gathered every one of those food lockers in the country, maybe. But you didn’t.”

  “No,” Martin said. “We didn’t.”

  “So where does the food come from?”

  Martin considered my question for a moment. Not as if he was deciding how to answer, but how not to.

  “Don’t take this wrong,” he began, “but you’re not entitled to that information just yet. Tomorrow you might be, or the next day, or next month. We just need to see that you’re going to fit in here, first. Fair enough?”

  I didn’t think ‘fair’ had anything to do with it. He could have just said the location of some obviously huge food cache under their control was secret, but he didn’t. He dangled the possibility of knowing out there with a subtle hint to play along if I really wanted to know.

  “We appreciate you letting us stay,” Grace said, sensing there would be no more exchange between Martin and me on the subject at hand.

  “You’re very welcome,” Martin said, then glanced back toward the room where his son and Krista were. “Micah needs to take some medication and get some rest.”

  “I’ll go grab my daughter,” Grace said, and disappeared up the hallway.

  Alone with Neil and me, Martin seemed to study the two of us. I thought he might be making an appraisal of our usefulness to the town.

  I was wrong.

  “No more bullshit from you,” he said, quiet and firm, like a man who didn’t need to raise his voice to get an understanding across. “You lie again like you did to get on the ground here, and I’ll send you out into the wasteland.”

  He didn’t wait for either of us to acknowledge or agree to his admonition. There would be no discussion of it. He’d drawn a line in the sand and warned us to never cross it.

  “Head on out the way you came in,” he said. “Someone will get you set up with a place to stay.”

  He left us then, making his way back into the clean side of the space beyond.

  “Tough love?” Neil wondered aloud.

  I didn’t know if it was that. Or something hinting at a darker part of the man’s nature. Possibly he’d come to believe that an iron fist was sometimes necessary, or that the simple implication of its existence would be enough to avoid trouble down the road. Whether it was either possibility, or something I could not yet see, the fact remained that we were here. We were alive. We were safe.

  I hoped that that would last.

  Twenty Nine

  We came out of the Meeting Hall to find Burke and Elaine waiting for us, all the weapons and personal gear we’d been forced to surrender upon landing before us again, neatly gathered on the sidewalk.

  “Anything still in the plane you can get in the morning,” Burke said, his abrupt officiousness on full display.

  Elaine took the small coat that was bunched with the rest of the items and spread it open, bending slightly as she held it out to Krista.

  “Better get this on,” the woman said.

  Krista slipped her arms into the garment. Grace crouched and cinched it tight against the chill, looking up to the woman who’d just shown a modicum of kindness.

  “Thank you,” Grace said, a wary gratitude about her.

  “Keep your weapons ready and in good order,” Burke instructed, the direction delivered matter-of-factly. “Everybody in town has to be ready at a moment’s notice.”

  “For what?” Krista asked.

  Burke looked to her, then back to each of us, skipping the child’s question.

  “You on your own?” he asked me.

  “Excuse me?”

  Burke gestured to Grace.

  “Do you need a place of your own?”

  I understood his question now. The gist of it, at least. Exactly where it was leading I still wasn’t sure.

  “We’ve all been together, but, sure. I’m flying solo, if that’s what you’re getting at.”

  “And you, ma’am?”

  Grace grinned lightly at the respect he was showing her.

  “Something for the three of us,” she said, taking Neil’s hand in hers.

  “Okay,” Burke said. “I’ll get the three of you set up. Elaine, you get...”

  “Eric,” I prompted him.

  “Elaine will get you situated.”

  I gathered my things, slinging my pack and shouldering my AR. Elaine pulled my Springfield from the back of her waistband and handed it to me. I holstered it and watched Neil and Grace walk off with Krista, Burke leading them through the fog. My friend looked back to me and gave a thumbs up. I wasn’t sure if he was signaling that everything was all right, or that it would be. The difference between belief and hope.

  “You ready?” Elaine asked.

  The woman who’d held a gun on me not an hour earlier was now my guide.

  “I still have some questions,” I told her.

  “I know.”

  Her acknowledgement was just that, and she offered no opportunity for me to seek answers. At least not from her.

  “Come on,” she said.

  She headed off in the same direction my friends had just left with Burke. I stayed close, trying to take in as much of the town we passed through as I could with the misty night blotting nearly everything out.

  But not everything.

  As we crossed a street, a light resolved on the far corner, its beam angled up, into the fog. Drawing nearer I began to understand its purpose. And I began to feel just a bit less apprehensive about the town, and our welcome, and the warning words we’d received from its de facto leader.

  All because of a flag. The flag. Old Glory. Its stars and its stripes flapped lazily atop a pole where two roads met, the gentle breeze moving it.

  The people here, it seemed, still believed in it. Still believed in something I had my entire life. Freedom mattered.

  I only hoped the banner that symbolized it wasn’t being flown just for show.

  Thirty

  Elaine slipped a key into the lock and opened the front door. She reached in and flipped a light switch of before stepping to the side.

  “Welcome home,” she said.

  I looked past her from my place on the porch. A single lamp burned within the space that had been dark just a moment before, its ability to throw much light muted by a thick shade that topped it. The table it sat upon rested next to a wooden rocking chair, paisley cushion tied to the seat. I didn’t actually see any doilies from where I stood, but I was willing to bet that I’d find some once I was inside.

  “It belonged to an older lady,” Elaine said, sensing my mild amusement at the interior décor.

  Belonged...

  As with so many things after the blight, possession had become more fluid. My truck was taken by a woman in the north of Montana trying to get her son to safety. An anonymous elderly lady in Bandon, Oregon had surrendered her house to me.

  “She died?’ I asked, though I was really asking the specifics of her passing.

  “I assume so,” Elaine said. “I was told she left with a son or daughter from out of state. They came to take her with them when things got bad.”

  That moment was when I began to understand Elaine. The quiet compassion she’d shown to Krista while we were being escorted to the Meeting Hall after landing should have been my first clue, but it had taken until now, when she’d shared that she was ‘told’ of the reason for the old woman’s absence. The woman standing with me on the porch of the pretty house was an outsider. She was no Bandon local. Like me, and others, she’d come here. Maybe drawn by Micah’s broadcasts.

  “Try to keep only one light on at a time,” Elaine said. “That way we don’t put a strain on the power system.”

  “Understood.”

  I put my rifle down against the wall just inside the door, then shed my backpack and let it come to rest next to the wooden rocker. The pistol I left on my hip for a moment as I wandered into the space, back through the kitchen, to the pair of small bedrooms and the single bathroom. I turned the faucet over the sink on and water came out. Cool, fresh water. When I returned to the living room, Elaine was still standing there, waiting.

  “You have water,” I said.

  “Cold only, for the time being. If the power stabilizes there’s talk of converting the water heaters to electric that already aren’t.”

  “When you say there’s talk of it...”

 

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