The Lone Man On The Ridge - Episode 20: The Nickel Tour

0:00 This is the Lone Man on the Ridge Episode twenty The Nickel Tour. Dana was right. By the next morning, the day after Stephen and Jack had finally met, Jack was on his feet. Sore, stiff, his left arm still strapped and aching, moving slower than he'd like, but he was up. He looked in on Rachel first thing.

0:25 She was awake barely, very pale, hollow eyed, in that little converted office they made into her room. Lily curled up asleep in a chair someone had pulled up beside the bed. Rachel found his hand with hers and held it for a moment. She really wasn't able to talk yet, and neither of them had much to say.

0:45 She was alive, Lily was safe, that was enough. Jack then found Stephen to get a tour of the airport. They walked slow, Jack setting the pace, mister Rogers trotting alongside and stopping whenever Jack stopped. And as they walked, Jack saw with his own eyes what he'd only been able to imagine from a voice on the radio.

1:08 It was a real operation, the perimeter fence reinforced and watched with people on it who knew what they were doing. You could tell by how they held themselves, how they scanned, how they didn't bunch up. The hangars turned into housing, storage, and workshops. The old terminal building doing duty as a common hall and medical ward, a garden going in on a stretch of cleared ground inside the wire.

1:35 Fuel stores, a solar bank feeding batteries, rain catchment off the big flat roofs. Somebody had thought about this. Somebody had thought about most of this before they even needed it, which was the only reason any of it was here. It was at the edge of the apron, looking at the runway and the handful of small aircraft parked and tied down.

1:57 Jack finally asked a question that had been sitting in the back of his mind. These planes, he said, any of them fly? Stephen followed his gaze out to the flight line. Well, a couple of 'em. We've only got two that I'll turn over. A little Cessna and an old piper. Simple airframes, nothing fancy. The fancy ones with the newer stuff, all the electronics, Stephen then shook his head.

2:23 Dead where they sit. Whatever came through fried the avionics on anything built in the last thirty years. Same reason your truck ran and the cars on the interstate didn't. Old and simple lived, new and smart died. And you've got fuel for the aircraft? Well, we have some av gas in the tanks here on the field.

2:44 More than you'd think, but a lot less than we'd like. Every gallon we burn is a gallon we don't get back, so we don't burn it for fun. Jack nodded slowly. Have you put them up, actually flown? Twice. Stephen let that sit for a second. Early on, we sent the Cesta up to get a look at the ground around us.

3:05 The roads, the big airport, who was moving where. Best eyes in the world, a man up in the air. You see everything. He then paused. And everything sees you. That's the problem. That's what I was going to ask, Jack said. Safe to fly? Define safe, Stephen's mouth tightened. A plane in the air is the loudest and most visible thing for twenty miles in any direction.

3:34 Every desperate soul on the ground hears that aircraft and looks up, and now they know that somebody has a working plane, working fuel, and a base to fly it out of. That is a billboard. Second time we went up, we took ground fire on the way back in. Nothing hit, thank goodness, but it made the point.

3:53 A plane tells everybody exactly how organized you are. We decided that was a card we would only play when the stakes are worth the entire table. What about helicopters? Jack asked. Had one on the field when we took over, never got it running, and I'm not sure I want to. A Hilo is even louder and even hungrier for fuel, and twice as hard to keep alive.

4:18 More trouble than it's worth, really. What about drones? Jack asked. And at that question, Stephen almost smiled. Now you're thinking like we think, Jack. That's the answer, not the planes. We have a couple of small drones, you know, the hobby kind. Battery, quiet, low. We keep them shielded when they're not up.

4:42 Learned that lesson from everything else that got fried. We put one up at dusk, run the fence line and run the approaches, and bring it home after twenty minutes. Nobody on the ground, here's the thing. You get your eyes up in the sky without lighting a signal fire telling the entire country what you're doing.

4:59 If I had ten more of those and the batteries to run them, I would take them over that Cessna every day of the week. Jack looked back at the planes that still worked and the dead ones beside them and filed it all away. The way he filed everything. So the question I'm really asking, he said, is whether there's anything worth flying to, somewhere, you know, somewhere better than here.

5:24 Stephen was quiet for a moment. We looked, that's what those two flights were really about. Not just the ground around us, but a reason to hope there was something better over the next ridge. Another base that was still running. A city that was still alive. Lights somewhere. He then shook his head slowly.

5:45 We didn't find it. Just more of the same in every direction we had the fuel to look. So he stopped looking up and started building down right here. This is the better place, Jack. We just have to make it one. That landed on Jack harder than he let show. He'd spent four hundred and fifty miles chasing the idea of a safe place over the horizon, and here was a man telling him there wasn't one, that the horizon was empty, and the only safe place was the one you dug in and defended with the people you trusted.

6:18 It was, he realized, the same thing he'd learned on the ridge, just a bigger version of it. And the people. Jack had been right about them from the radio and seeing them confirmed it. Steady, disciplined, a lot of them carried themselves the way men and women carry themselves after years in uniform, and that's exactly what most of them were.

6:41 Stephen's old unit, scattered by the years and pulled back together by the end of the world, plus wives and husbands and kids, and a few strays the group had taken in along the way. This was not a militia playing dress up. It was a community with a spine of people who'd been trained to keep other people alive.

7:00 You really built something here, Jack said. It wasn't flattery. It was a professional assessment, one careful man appraising another one's work. We built it together, Stephen said. That's the only way it holds together. They ended up in the back of the yard near Jack's truck. It still sat where it had died.

7:19 Shot through, windshield gone, one tire flat, the front end scorched and leaking. It had carried Jack four hundred and fifty miles, and taken its death wound six miles short, and looking at it now in the daylight, Jack was quietly amazed that it made it that far. Your people can take whatever's in it, Jack said.

7:40 Stephen looked at him. I mean it, everything in the bed, everything in the totes, the tools, the fuel cans, spare parts, any food that's left. It all goes into the camp inventory. You took us in, you patched up Rachel, you gave me a couch, and my dog a place of the fire. I'm not going to sit inside your wire hoarding a truck bed.

8:01 Whatever's in there now belongs to the camp. Stephen did not argue, and he did not gush. He just nodded the way one man accepts a serious thing from another. That's appreciated. And it gets logged and shared out fair. We keep an inventory. Everybody knows what we have and where it is. You'll be able to see that list.

8:24 There's a few things I'd like to keep, Jack said, if it's all the same to you. Name 'em. My Glock, of course, the shotgun the Remington eight hundred seventy and the three hundred eight with the scope. A man ought to keep his own irons, even inside good walls. Especially inside walls somebody's going to come test one of these days.

8:43 Stephen almost smiled. Nobody here would ask you to give up your guns, we're not that kind of place. You keep your weapons. We just ask you to point them in the same direction the rest of us are pointing ours. Jack nodded. That I can do. He then paused. And one more thing. Under the dash there's a canvas bag, a bunch of silver rounds.

9:06 I carried them out of the cabin when I left. I'd like to hang on to those. Stephen's eyebrows went up a fraction. Not greed. Just a man recognized that real silver was a serious thing to have kept through four hundred and fifty miles of desperate people. Those are yours, he said. Nobody's touching the man's silver.

9:26 Around here what you brought in that's personal stays personal. The supplies in the truck are one thing. That's you buying into a group, and it's a generous buy in. That's how you keep trust. Nobody has to wonder if their neighbors are going through their things. That's fair, Jack said. And he meant it, and it was exactly how he'd run it himself.

9:48 That evening, Jack sat against the terminal building with his back against the sun warmed brick. Mr. Rogers stretched out beside him as they let the day settle over them. The sounds of the compound filtered through the dusk. Voices, an engine somewhere, the clink of tools being put away. Somewhere, a child's laugh that could have been Lily's.

10:11 The ordinary sounds of ordinary people just trying to survive. These are the sounds he had not heard in a very long time. Then he thought about the cost. A truck dead in the yard, four hundred and fifty miles of faithful service ended by a checkpoint six miles from safety. His own blood, more of it than he'd like, a wound that would take several weeks to heal.

10:35 And out there somewhere, a group now that knew this place existed and had a grievance to go with that knowledge. That was the left side of the ledger. That was the cost. And on the right side, Rachel was alive, Lily was safe and spoiled, himself off the road at last in a place with walls and food and a nurse with fifteen years of trauma in her hands.

10:58 A voice from the radio turned into a man on a stool who called his dog family. He'd spent the whole journey thinking in the math of survival. Fuel and miles, rounds and range, water in days. He was good at that math. After all, that math had kept him alive. But this was a different kind of math, and he wasn't sure he'd ever be as good at it as he needed to be.

11:24 The math where you count what a thing costs against what it's worth, where you decide that three lives and a dog are worth a truck and a wound and a war moved up on the calendar. He didn't have the answer to that yet. He only knew the math had changed, and that he was going to have to learn to do it all over again, starting tomorrow, inside these walls with people who were now his to take care of, whether he planned on it or not.

11:53 This has been the Lone Man on the Ridge, Episode 20, The Nickel Tour.