Ranger (The Bugging Out Series Book 5) Read Online Free Page B

entire exchange between us, our last in person, maybe forever, had been a very clear warning from my friend to me.
    But a warning about what?
    He’d urged me to get out. To find a hole somewhere and hide.
    “Bandon,” I said, the word drowsy and dry.
    My body trembled as I thought on that. On the place I’d come to believe was home after some initial, fleeting doubts. Thinking that it was somehow the focus of Neil’s warning and worry, and that my friend, my lifelong friend, was somehow privy to knowledge of a danger facing it, both troubled and vexed me.
    More questions. That’s what I was left with. After what he had done. And after what had happened to me in the past forty-eight hours. Questions whose answers would have to wait as something else drew my attention.
    A noise. Tickling my ears through the softly falling rain. A sound from beyond the cabin walls, faint, rumbling in the distance, low and rhythmic.
    It was real. Not some phantom sound spiking up from my nearly hypothermic brain. It was there. It was faint. And it was familiar.
    “A diesel,” I said.
    I pushed myself up. Next to me the fire was crackling down, the last of the dry wood fueling it almost consumed. But out there, through the weather, beyond the grey woods...
    “A truck,” I said.
    A burst of energy powered me as I came to me feet and stumbled through the space where the blasted wall had once stood. The throaty growl grew louder, out on the road somewhere to my front. I pushed myself and began to walk down the dirt path that had brought me to the ramshackle cabin. Then I began to run. And stumble. Three times I fell into the mud before I came within sight of the road. And within sight of the most wondrous thing I could imagine.
    Vehicles. A large military truck following a smaller Humvee, both of which I recognized. Each left by the Rushmore . Each from the place I now knew as home.
    “Hey!”
    I shouted as I scrambled up the path, my voice weak and raspy, drawing no notice. The vehicles lumbered on. In each I could make out silhouettes. People. Drivers and passengers. There was no definition to them. No features that gave me any clue as to who they were. And for an instant I wondered if, along with what had happened to me, the town itself had suffered some attack. And with that musing rose the fear that the people in the vehicles might not be those I wanted desperately to see.
    Then, I heard my name.
    “Fletch!”
    It was the nick Neil had given me so long ago, when we were just goofy kids. Now it was being called out by one of those I’d come to know, and respect, from our adopted hometown.
    “Martin!”
    I screamed his name as I lost my footing on the rutted shoulder of the road, the pair of vehicles a hundred feet past my position now. They weren’t stopping. My hands grabbed at the edge of the asphalt and pushed off, lifting my body so that I stood now, unsteadily, waving my arms as I shouted again through the rain falling lightly.
    “Help!”
    Brake lights bloomed suddenly red, both vehicles slowing. Then stopping.
    “Hey!”
    I began to stagger toward them as the passenger doors of both opened, Martin emerging from the Humvee and Sergeant Lorenzen from the truck, each geared up and armed as they jogged toward me.
    “Fletch!”
    Martin shouted my name and I stopped, relieved, the strength I’d managed to summon draining instantly away. I fell slowly to my knees on the harsh surface of the road.
    “Are you okay?” Martin asked as he reached me and crouched to support me.
    I nodded and looked past him, Private Quincy stepping from behind the wheel of the Humvee and Nick Withers, one of the town’s three mechanics, leaving the same position in the truck to join those already surrounding me.
    “Just cold,” I said.
    “Let’s get him in the Humvee,” Martin said.
    He and Lorenzen took my arms and eased me off the ground.
    “Send a signal, private,” Lorenzen said.
    Quincy jogged ahead to the truck and retrieved a stubby