Free Bugging Out by Noah Mann Page B

froze where he stood. “Take your hands out of your pockets. Slowly.”
    The man complied. His bare hands appeared, empty, and eased away from his body, fingers spread.
    “Turn to face me,” I ordered him.
    He swiveled slowly, my finger drawing back from the trigger as his face came into view.

Twelve
    “E ric,” Marco said as he turned fully to face me.
    I lowered my weapon but made no move toward my former employee. My friend. For a moment I simply stood there and studied him across the five yards that separated us. A thickening beard covered the lower half of his face—a face that had been perpetually smooth since I’d known him, shaved crisp and professional. Beneath the newly sprouted facial hair I could see that he was thinning, cheeks showing bone, eyes above them more pronounced, the slack skin forming hollows around them. The clothes he wore, utilitarian, layered for the weather, also could not hide a frame that was disappearing ounce by ounce.
    It had been three weeks since I’d seen him. In another three there’d be nothing left of him to look at.
    “Marco, what are you doing here?”
    He glanced at the weapon in my hand. I swung it back over my shoulder and slung it, stepping toward him.
    “We’re heading south,” he said, and looked past me, toward the front of the RV just visible past the chain.
    We...
    It hadn’t occurred to me. His family. Judy and their son, Anthony. He was six. I glanced behind. Through the windshield of the RV could just make out two silhouettes, small one close to the larger, mother clutching her son. Their son.
    “You were the only one I could think of who might...”
    I looked back to Marco, a tide of embarrassment rising in him. Maybe cresting in shame. The look of a man who cannot see to his own. Cannot provide for them. Quiet desperation, I would even go as far as saying. Desperation edging toward defeat.
    “You saw this all coming,” Marco said. “You knew it was going down. You prepared. I wish I’d known. I wish you’d...”
    He stopped there, never giving the accusation voice. But it deserved that.
    “I wish I’d told you,” I said. “There were reasons I couldn’t. It involved someone else.”
    Marco nodded, piecing it together.
    “The guy who showed up to see you.”
    “Yeah. If I’d said anything he would have been in danger.”
    “Isn’t he in danger now like the rest of us?”
    Marco had a point. But it didn’t change things.
    “Where are you heading down south?”
    His hand slipped into his pocket and he pulled a folded piece of paper from it, opening the worn square, its edges frayed, creases tearing, as if he’d opened and closed the document again and again like some distant promise he had to convince himself of.
    “Arizona,” he said, pointing to a small map imprinted on the official-looking flyer, FEMA stamped at the top. “They have supplies there. Food and water and doctors.”
    I eyed the language in the instructions. Relocation Centers... No Weapons... Martial Law...
    “Where did this come from? This paper?”
    “There was a plane,” Marco explained. “It flew over Missoula and dropped these everywhere.”
    A plane...
    I’d heard an aircraft to the south earlier in the week, approaching Whitefish, it seemed, flying low and out of sight. I’d tried to zero in on it with my binoculars from the hill to the south of my refuge, but was never able to get a visual on it. Would the aircraft Marco had seen bothered to travel this far north, spreading leaflets to the wind in some effort reminiscent of psy-ops actions from wars past? Psychological operations, in this place and time, not to convince an enemy to surrender, but to herd a populace toward...
    Toward what?
    Then, another question rose—who was actually doing the herding?
    Was it realistic to assume that some entity of the government still existed in a functioning capacity?  I looked at the flyer again. It could have been printed by anyone with enough sense to paste a FEMA