Further, a typical layman is sufficiently afraid of getting electrocuted to pull any panel covers to investigate closer.
It was a simple ruse which worked remarkably well. For Swain and his men had occupied the house for the better part of a year and never suspected that the breaker switches in the second box were all dummies. And that behind the second panel was a secret tunnel which led to the forest outside the compound.
Dave walked carefully through the inky blackness of the basement, holding one hand in front of his face to protect it from… whatever.
The other hand he waved back and forth before him, trying to make contact with something… anything, that he’d recognize and help him get his bearings.
Finally, his hand made contact with something. And as luck would have it, it happened to be the open panel to the huge breaker box. The one he’d left open after he walked from the tunnel and into the basement.
He stepped through the opening at the back of the box and into the tunnel, then pulled the panel closed behind him.
He ran his fingers around the panel until he found all eight thumbscrews, four on each side of the huge box, and then tightened them. The panel was securely in place.
Now he just had to make his way out of the tunnel and into the forest.
Chapter 15
The tunnel changed directions every fifty feet or so. After the first fifty feet it turned ninety degrees to the right. Then after ten feet or so it turned back ninety degrees to the left. Then it would go on for another fifty feet and repeat the same pattern.
When Dave first entered the tunnel a week before, he wondered why it was designed in essentially a zig-zag pattern. Then he figured out why, and admired his brother-in-law’s genius.
Tommy had the foresight to think there might be a day when he and his family might have to evacuate through the tunnel.
And the possibility that they might have bad people chasing behind them.
Shooting at them, perhaps.
In a straight-line tunnel, the bad guys would simply spray the tunnel with a hail of bullets. With no place for his family to duck or hide, some of the bullets would inevitably find their mark.
In a zig-zag tunnel, though, his family could duck around a corner every fifty feet or so, leaving the bullets to expire harmlessly against the concrete wall where they’d made their turn.
It was also far less likely the bad guys would enter the tunnel in pursuit, since they wouldn’t know if Tommy and the good guys were waiting around the next corner to ambush them.
Dave wondered whether Tommy had thought up the zig-zag tunnel himself, or whether he’d learned of it in one of the prepper magazines he used to subscribe to.
Along his way down the darkened corridor Dave had time to think about other things as well.
And he was none too pleased with himself.
In fact, he was cursing himself under his breath.
In his zeal to get the job finished, he’d committed a cardinal sin.
He’d left his weapon behind.
Actually, not all his weapons. He still had his sidearm on his hip and four ten-round magazines in his leg pocket.
But back in the Explorer were his sniper rifle, his AR-15 and his crossbow.
If he got back to the farm house to find it had been overrun, he’d have a hell of a time getting his Explorer back with almost no firepower.
“Damn it!”
He wanted to rush through the tunnel, run back to his vehicle and get the hell out of Dodge.
He had a vital mission to perform and a daughter to find. He didn’t need to waste any more time fighting a battle that didn’t need to be fought.
Dave approached the darkened farm house with extreme caution after securing the fiberglass box from the outside.
The Explorer was still there. There was a half moon, hidden by mostly cloudy skies. But there was enough light to tell him that the hulking shadow in the front yard was indeed his vehicle.
Whether the weapons were still in it remained to be seen.
Another thing he wished he had were his night vision goggles, beneath the front passenger seat. He swore under his breath.
Rookie mistakes. He should have known better. His mind went back to his days in the Corps. He remembered how big the Marines were on training. The same things over and over again, until they became so monotonous he wanted to scream. But he understood the reasoning. Marines who performed a task so often it became a habit could do it by rote. They didn’t have to do any conscious thinking, so they wouldn’t make mistakes. They would just react to a particular situation the way they were trained. The Marine way. The right way.
Dave remembered something else, too.
Those Marines who deviated from their habits, who forgot their training and did things their own way… those were usually the ones who got killed.
He’d gotten stupid and sloppy. He might get lucky and get away with it. Or he might pay a heavy price.
Worse, so much worse was that Beth might pay a price as well. If his weapons and ignition keys were gone, he’d have to find them and get them back. And that was precious wasted time. More time for little Beth to have to endure whatever hell her sadistic captors were putting her through.
He put that part out of his mind. It would do him no good, nor help in the current situation, for him to get distracted about how his youngest daughter was being treated. Instead he tried to focus on his task at hand.
His gun out of its holster, he moved forward. Ready to confront whoever he had to. Fight whatever fight he had to fight to get his things and get out of there. So he could get down to the business of finding and rescuing his baby.
Slowly, step by step, he worked his way toward the Explorer. When he was finally close enough to touch it he peered inside the windows to see if his weapons were still there. It was a dumb move, because the windows were heavily tinted. Even in the daytime he’d have had trouble peering into them.
He worked his way around to the passenger side and very carefully opened the door.
The dome light didn’t come on. During the assault of the EMPs upon the earth a year before, all of the vehicle’s fuses had blown. He had protected spares and replaced the ones he really needed. But he purposely didn’t replace any which would shine light of any kind. It would have defeated his plans to move completely blacked out in the dead of night.
He grabbed his night vision goggles from beneath the seat and donned them quickly. He scanned the interior of the vehicle to find no one there.
He grabbed his weapons and retreated quickly back to the forest, leaving the passenger side door still ajar and the rear hatch completely open.
Chapter 16
Once back in the tree line Dave felt a little less vulnerable. He could move back and forth and scout the entire property without exposing himself to enemy fire.
He could see nothing. No shadowy figures in the distance. Nobody pulling sentry duty. Nobody examining the Explorer or wondering why it wasn’t in the same position it was in the previous day.
And why all of a sudden the doors were open.
What he couldn’t figure out was who might have come upon the property? Was it some of Swain’s men who’d ran away when the fighting began? Did they have a change of heart and come back to help? Maybe bring reinforcements? And why in the world would they douse the lights? Had they heard him in the basement? Were they at that very moment tearing down the wall beside the bookcase?
The thought troubled Dave. But at the same time he was encouraged by the lack of movement.
There seemed to be no activity at all.
After surveilling the farm from long distance for over an hour he decided he’d wasted enough time.
It was now or never.
He crouched down once again and made his way to the west wall of the house.
He couldn’t see in the windows of the darkened house, any more than he was able into his vehicles. Not even with the night vision goggles.
For those hou
ses lucky enough to have working generators after the blackout, it was common practice to cover downstairs windows with heavy draperies or thick curtains. It made it a little bit harder for marauders to peek in at night and case the place for a possible attack.
For all Dave knew, there were people at that very moment peering through the curtains at him. For all he knew, there could be a gun pointed at his head, and a finger could be pulling back on the trigger at that very instant.
It was a troubling thought.
He backed away from the house and worked his way around back to the small shed which contained the generator. The door was ajar, and he couldn’t remember whether he’d left it that way or not.
Another troubling predicament.
Still, there was considerable starlight and moonlight available. Their light was amplified by the goggles upon Dave’s face, and he could see through the door and into the shed.
There was no one inside.
He stepped into the tiny shed and noticed that the generator’s key was still turned to the “run” position.
Then he removed the fuel tank’s cap and stuck his forefinger inside.
He felt nothing, so he took a tank dip stick from a shelf beside the generator.
The stick touched the bottom of the tank and came up dry.
“Shit!”
There was that word again. But this time, as before, no other word really sufficed.
He’d cranked up the generator without checking its fuel level.
It had run out of gasoline.
Another rookie mistake.
But still, it beat the heck out of the alternative. There was no one in the house. No one had heard him working in the basement. No one had killed the lights or laid in wait to ambush him.
He’d wasted a lot of precious time due to his own stupidity.
Time he’d never get back.
But he’d damn sure waste no more.
He turned the key to the off position and removed it from the generator. He tossed it onto the roof of the tiny shed and quickly made his way back to his Explorer.
All his provisions were still in the vehicle, exactly where he’d left them. So were his atlas and journal, the bag of hand grenades, his back pack of personal items.
Now, finally, it was time to get on the road.
And he’d spend the next several hours chastising himself for being so sloppy and careless.
Chapter 17
There were two ways to get from the Kansas City area to Albuquerque.
One was to head south on Interstate 35 to Oklahoma City and head west from there. The other way was to head west first, on Interstate 70, and then turn south on Interstate 25 at the foothills of the Rocky Mountains.
Dave made some practical assumptions and guessed the couple who’d bought Beth would forego the Rocky Mountain route. At least he hoped they did for Beth’s sake. He couldn’t think of anything more dangerous than driving a two horse team down a forty percent grade with nothing but a homemade brake to control them.
Of course, they could travel on a myriad of smaller roads. But few travelers did so. The trucks which provided lifesaving food and water to long distance travelers were pretty much restricted to the interstates. On the day the power went out and all the vehicles died, thousands of over-the-road truckers were busy plying their trade on the nation’s highways. And they almost never traveled the smaller roads. They would have slowed the truckers down, and their bosses would have jumped dead on their asses.
Truckers didn’t like it when their bosses jumped dead on their asses.
So the truckers stuck to the interstates, where they could move their rigs much faster. And that’s where they were when the power went out. Their trucks died and coasted to a stop. Then they, for all practical purposes, became very gangly and very dusty monuments to a world that would never exist again.
Highway travelers knew this. They knew that by taking the back roads they’d forfeit a gold mine in food and water and other supplies.
So few of them did it.
Of course, Dave might have been totally off the mark. Perhaps he was dealing with people who shied away from the main highways. Maybe they were skilled hunters and fishermen and chose to live off the land. If that were the case, taking the back roads would make good sense. By doing so they would avoid the sometimes very violent men who roamed the nation’s interstate system.
But then again, they’d ridden onto a heavily armed farm, crawling with bad men with guns. They’d taken a great risk that the men at that farm would shoot them and steal their horses and the stripped-down pickup truck in tow.
They seemingly weren’t afraid then.
Perhaps they also wouldn’t fear the occasional hostile highway nomad.
Or perhaps they would.
Dave was conflicted. Everything was a guess. It was possible he was going on a wild goose chase.
But he was committed. Too much time had passed since the nomads had disappeared with his daughter. He couldn’t afford to lose any more. So he made his decision based on a gut feeling. The route he would take were he looking for the best way to Albuquerque.
Then he crossed his fingers and hoped for the best.
And he prayed each morning and night, asking for divine intervention to aid him in his quest. If Lady Luck wouldn’t help him, perhaps God would.
The one thing Dave had going for him was speed.
A horse drawn wagon could cover maybe twenty miles a day, tops. Maybe longer, for Albuquerque was a long way away. If one of the horses came up lame the remaining horse would struggle. And given the same load to haul would slow down considerably.
Dave, on the other hand, could cover a hundred and fifty miles a night, as long as his luck held. He’d drive after dark, when virtually all the highway travelers were asleep. The night vision goggles would aid him along the way. Through the goggles, the abandoned cars and trucks would loom large in the darkness and be easy to avoid. But he’d still manage a top speed of twenty miles an hour or so, since dodging the vehicles would be tantamount to skiing a slalom course in the darkness.
The first night would be a short one, since he’d wasted a good chunk of the darkness at the farm house. He made it to the southern outskirts of Kansas City before his windup watch told him it was just after 4 a.m. The early risers would be getting up soon.
The big green highway signs had reflective lettering, so it was ridiculously easy to read them through the goggles. He was at a place called Overland Park. He pulled past a sign which said
Junction, Interstate 35: 6 Miles
Things went smoothly the first night despite the late start. He’d seen only two people along the way, zooming past them at eighteen miles an hour. He could tell from the way one of them jumped that he’d startled them, and he got a much-needed belly laugh out of that.
The absence of pedestrians confirmed his suspicions that night travelers would be a rare sight indeed.
The two men he’d passed were twenty miles behind him now. There was no way they’d catch him while he slept. They’d probably be sleeping themselves.
And even if they could catch him, they’d likely just walk right past the Explorer parked nonchalantly in lane number three.
As he’d done on the way from San Antonio the week before, Dave chose not to park the car along the shoulder. It would actually look more suspicious there, since virtually every other vehicle on the road sat where they died.
Half an hour before sunrise he took a day’s worth of food and water from his vehicle and placed it in a backpack. He threw the pack over his shoulder and removed his weapons as well, then hiked two hundred yards to a GMC tractor which had been towing a flatbed of lumber to a construction site. He hoped the truck was unlocked so he could check out the sleeper cab behind the driver’s seat.
If the door was locked, or if the sleeper was dirty, he’d try his luck at another tractor trailer another hundred yards down the road.
Either rig would provide an unobstructed vie
w of his Explorer through the windshield. He’d eat his breakfast and watch his vehicle until he got tired enough to sleep. Then he’d crawl back into the sleeper and stretch out on the bunk.
He’d done it often enough to be a habit now. And he expected to have to do it for some time to come.
Chapter 18
Dave dozed off in the driver’s seat and was jarred awake just shy of ten a.m. by two men talking.
At first he thought it was a dream, but he awoke just in time to see the men a few yards in front of the truck, debating about who was the NBA’s best power forward of all time.
They’d approached from the south and had walked past the Explorer while Dave slept. Had he not fallen asleep, he’d have been able to watch them walk toward him from half a mile away. He could have locked the truck’s doors and retired to the sleeper just before they arrived, so as not to be spotted.
But that option was taken away the moment Dave fell into a deep slumber.
He watched as the men walked past. One of them, the one closest to the truck, made eye contact and eyed Dave suspiciously. But he never broke stride and didn’t appear hostile. Looking at strangers with suspicion had become the norm. The world had become a miserable place, and the prudent thing to do was to view all strangers as potential threats until they proved themselves not to be.
In this case, Dave got lucky. As he had the night before, he’d been woefully unprepared for a firefight. His sidearm was in his holster within easy reach. But his rifles were lying on the sleeper’s floor behind him.
Further, he was in full view of the approaching men, on the other side of a surprisingly clean windshield, long before they’d passed by the truck. Had they been so inclined, they could have easily picked Dave off with a single rifle shot while he slept.
Another blunder.
Dave watched in the truck’s driver’s side mirror as the two men disappeared over the horizon behind him.
He knew it wasn’t an uncommon sight for nomads to encounter people sleeping in the abandoned big rigs. They likely found one themselves to spend the night in as each day drew to a close.
Her Name is Beth: Alone: Book 5 Page 6