Bugging Out by Noah Mann Page A

free of assault by vermin.
    And still, I knew I wasn’t fully ready. I doubted anyone could be. Some things I was certain to forget, or be unaware of altogether. There would be failures. Breakdowns. Mistakes. If none of them killed me, I would consider myself lucky.
    But I was here. Safe for the moment. With much to do. I made my way inside and lit a fire in the hearth of the great room, facing it from the old leather chair with a pad and pencil on my lap, ready to make my list for the first day of my new life. Tasks, large and small, to begin or complete. The myriad of necessary actions tumbled about in my head as I tipped it and let it loll toward the window, the day sweeping yellow over the trees and mountains beyond. Before I could stop myself my eyes began to flutter, then close, and I was dreaming. Visions filling the sleep as I fell into it, exhausted. Images and sounds of gunfire and blood and screams.
    The new world.

Eight
    M ore than two years earlier, on a lark, Neil and I had decided to spend a cold Sunday in February watching the Super Bowl at my getaway. All it had taken then was dragging a satellite dish to the property, mounting it, connecting it to an older flat screen I was ready to do away with, and, with Neil performing a little electronic larceny, jacking the converter box so we could ‘borrow’ the signal for a bit. The dish had remained mounted to the roof since, neglected, weather and nesting birds wreaking havoc upon it, but after waking from the exhaustion-fueled sleep that had seized me, a few hours of attention on the receiver as the afternoon crept toward evening gave me a window to the world outside.
    None of the major stations were coming in on the satellite. No CNN, no ABC, nothing. I guessed it was possible that they were already off the air, without staff, some trouble spreading quickly. More likely, though, was a simple reality unrelated to what had happened—our little satellite signal theft had been shut down. The signal once again scrambled.
    One station did come in, though. From Denver. A local network affiliate that displayed nothing more than a solid red rectangle on screen. No different than what I’d seen on my television at home.
    At my old home.
    I left the television on, ignoring what drain it might have on my batteries, and went to the hearth, arranging logs and setting the kindling beneath ablaze. In ten minutes I had a fire licking at the hearth’s blackened interior. The old leather chair that faced it swallowed my still-tired body. To the left a side table filled the space between my chair and another, its emptiness stark and chilling.
    Neil had sat there. With me. In front of a fire no different than the one that blazed before me now. We’d relaxed, tossed back beers, bullshitted after a day’s fishing. Now I sat alone.
    An overwhelming need to reach out to my friend filled me, and I dug my cell phone from my pocket, the act futile before ever seeing the NO SIGNAL displayed on the top of its screen. I knew there’d be no service at my refuge. There never had been. A few miles north of Whitefish things got spotty. Back in the woods, behind hills that rolled toward the mountains, one might as well have been trying to reach out from a black hole. But the desire to connect with him was impossible to resist, and I stared at the phone for several minutes before realizing that the visual representation of the Red Signal still filled most of the screen. Even without reception. Somehow the warning had been downloaded, and, for lack of a better term, lived within the device now.
    I turned me cell phone over and laid it face down on the side table, regarding it warily for a moment, then looking to the fire again as I said a quiet prayer for my friend.
    *  *  *
    I stood in the kitchen and stared at the stove and cursed myself.
    “Idiot.”
    The stove was perfectly good, but, like all stoves, it required fuel, and the propane tank nestled out back beyond the generator shed