Bugging Out Read Free

direction, then the other, before fixing his gaze upon me. A wariness swirled about him. Something that wasn’t quite fear. But wasn’t far from it, either.
    “Meet me there as soon as you can,” Neil said, then turned and walked quickly up the block, turning the corner without as much as glance back in my direction.
    *  *  *
    N eil was waiting, sitting at one of the outside tables, ignoring the season, his jacket zipped to his neck. He stood when I stepped from my pickup truck in the adjacent parking lot and approached.
    “I’m sorry about the evasiveness back there,” he said to me, then pulled me into a bro hug and thumped my back before easing away. “It really is good to see you.”
    The statement felt truer than anything I’d heard him say. Ever.
    “Yeah,” I told him, sharing the sentiment. “Neil, what’s going on?”
    He sat at the table and I slid onto the bench across from him. He’d ordered a cup of coffee from the takeout window before I arrived and now wrapped his hands around it, staring at the wisp of steam swirling upward from the drink.
    “I’m going to tell you something, Eric, and then I’m going to leave, and you’ll never see me again.”
    It took me a second to process what he’d just said. To absorb the utter impossibility of the statement. My head cocked a bit to one side and I actually smiled, because this had to be some joke, or the prelude to one.
    But it was not. Even before he uttered a single word of explanation, the air of solemnity hung thick around him. When he looked up from his coffee and met my gaze, there was dread in his eyes.
    “Neil, what the hell...”
    “You still keeping up that property north of Whitefish?”
    “Yeah,” I confirmed to him. My two hundred acre slice of heaven. The serviceable house that sat on it now dated from the 1930s, but I had plans to demolish it and the barn and old outbuildings to put up my dream retreat. The place I would retire to and spend my best days.
    “How far are you there from the main road? Not the highway, but that road splits off from it?”
    I had to do some mental math, and recall the survey reports from ten years ago when I purchased the land. Possibly I should have wondered why he was asking such a thing. He was my friend, and something, whatever it was, had brought him here. Something had raised the importance of seemingly mundane facts for him.
    “From Weiland Road there’s a gravel driveway about two hundred yards,” I told him. He’d been there before on several occasions, mostly to relax, fish in the pond on the property, and send some bullets downrange in the area I’d set aside for shooting. He’d still never joined me for a deer hunt, using the house there as our own private lodge, but I had hope that he still would. Someday.
    He thought on what I’d told him and leaned over the table a bit, narrowing the distance between us. His gaze shifted left, then right, as if clearing the area before proceeding.
    “Neil, you’re kinda spooking me,” I said. There was a hint of levity in my delivery. Some attempt to lighten, or brighten, his mood.
    It didn’t work.
    “You’ve been following this crop disaster in Europe?”
    “It’s kinda hard to ignore,” I said, recounting for him what I’d witnessed near Arlee. The tentacles of the blight sweeping across Europe had reached our shores in ways more sinister than just higher priced steaks and vegetables. That was my opinion, at least.
    “It’s going to get worse,” he said to me.
    “I get that feeling, too. People will gladly submit for inspection by soldiers, but they cry bloody murder when the price of their porterhouse goes through the roof.”
    “They haven’t seen anything yet,” Neil said, some gravity about him. A darkness like I’d never known him to exhibit. “None of us have.”
    “What are you talking about?”
    “You need to start paying attention, Fletch.”
    “To what?”
    “Watch everything you can. Read everything you can.