The Pit (The Bugging Out Series Book 4) by Noah Mann Page B

his shooters to stand down.
    “What did she see?” Neil asked.
    The sergeant turned and thought for a moment, then handed the binoculars over. My friend stepped close to the wheelhouse front window and focused in on the scene. He let his gaze linger on what was out there for just a moment before he, too, wanted to look no more.
    “Neil...”
    He looked to me. More a glance, actually, furtive and grim. I reached out and took the binoculars from him and took my own turn surveying the scene, stepping to the window, Acosta at the wheel to my right, the island with the small fire at its southernmost point close now off the port side of the boat. It took just a moment to do what others had done before me and dial the focus and zoom so that what lay out there in the night became clear.
    I wished it hadn’t.
    A gauzy mist hovering just above the water softened some of what I saw in the grey and white hues imparted by the thermal sensors. They registered heat, and cold, and the reflectivity of the former on pooled liquid. Liquid like blood.
    That, I knew, was what shimmered on the ground near the fire. A wide pool with sparkles of heat twinkling upon its glassy surface. Next to it a saw lay. A bow saw, what someone might use to remove limbs from a tree. Or other limbs.
    Near that cutting instrument a man lay. Even in the digitally enhanced interpretation of his form I could see that he was near wasted away. Skin and bones in monochrome. I could also see that one arm below the elbow was missing, and from that point of amputation a clear path of shining liquid could be traced to the larger pool.
    That was horror enough, I thought. But there was more.
    Over the fire the man had constructed a simple cooking apparatus. A stick leaned over the low blaze, propped up at an angle by a mound of flat stones, its base held in place by still more rocks. At its end, impaled on the sharpened point, the man’s severed arm, charred and shriveled, was suspended above the licking flames.
    Desperation...
    That was the only term I could manage upon seeing what I was. It was the worst combination of what I’d experienced over the previous months. Man turned to cannibal, and the mind twisted to bring that horror upon one’s self. Here the crazed individual had considered his action with some logic, it appeared, preparing a fire, and a manner of cooking a meal, before taking the blade to his flesh and bleeding out before he could find sustenance in his own sacrifice.
    I lowered the binoculars. Lorenzen was looking at me. No, it was more than that. He was watching me. Maybe expecting some reaction. Some overt expression of horror. I don’t know what he saw upon my face as I handed the binoculars back, but the manner about him softened. For that moment, in that exchange between us, he was not a soldier. He was just a member of the human race.
    “Hell of a world,” the sergeant said, his voice cracking slightly.
    I nodded and headed for the stairs.

Fourteen
    I found Elaine in the boat’s cramped dining area, Schiavo in the attached galley, pouring steaming water from a kettle into two cups with teabag strings hanging over their lips.
    “Care for some?” the lieutenant asked when she saw me at the bottom of the steep stairs.
    “No. Thanks.”
    Schiavo took the two cups to the dining area and sat across the table from Elaine, sliding a cup toward her. She eased her hands around the warm mug and stared into the brownish liquid.
    “Why are tea leaves not affected by the blight?” Schiavo asked. “Shouldn’t these be dried and grey like every other thing that came from a plant?”
    It was an interesting question asked for lack of a desire to probe Elaine’s darkened mood.
    “Already dead,” I said, slipping to a place closer to the table, but still standing in the belly of the gently rocking boat. “Picked and dried.”
    Schiavo accepted that with a nod and sipped her tea as she looked between Elaine and me, her expression begging the question