Wistful thoughts of tools at his forge came to mind, and he froze. He argued on the one hand, the tools weren't his, they belong to the quarry. On the other hand, the tools were a gift, so why not take them? He flipped back and forth, trying to decide which way to go, until a loud pounding on the frame around the door to the shack interrupted his facilitating.
I'm caught! his mind shrieked. He considered pulling his Glock and shooting his way through the door and out of the quarry before the rational part of his mind took over and he tamped down his panic. I'm doing nothing wrong, and I'm not taking anything that's not mine. I just want to leave. Surely they won’t hold me against my will.
"Yeah, who is it?" he called. His voice sounded thick and foreign to his ears.
A disembodied voice he didn't recognize answered. "Will Crandall is calling everyone to a meeting in the dining room at three o'clock. It's vitally important everyone that lives here shows up. Do you have the correct time?"
He pulled a self-winding watch from the pocket of his jeans and peered at the timepiece's face. "A little before two."
"1:57, to be exact. Please be there in an hour and three minutes."
He didn't respond, and after a few seconds, he heard footsteps receding from his front door. He sat down on the edge of the bed and covered his face with his hands. Voices filtered through the air and into his roofless shack. All up and down the tunnel, people knocked on doors and repeated the same message. Community-wide meeting, three pm, dining room. Robert sighed, laid back on his bed, and kept an eye on his watch.
10
* * *
Tunnel nine was one of three on the pit’s north wall. Its entrance was auspicious- a forty-foot-wide, twenty-foot-tall square dug into the limestone bluff decades ago.
Robert followed a stream of tunnel-dwellers tromping across the pit and into the shaft. Electric excitement filled the air, mixed with an undercurrent of trepidation. For most of the folks, any break in the routine that didn't involve the threat of getting eaten alive was invigorating. An element of fear flowed beneath the carnival-like atmosphere, though. They'd never gathered as a group before. To do so now, right after the rumored coming attack, caused trepidation in many.
They entered the tunnel in groups of three and four. The few that still smoked stopped a short distance away from the entrance for one last cancer stick. Smoking in the tunnels was frowned upon and there was no telling how much time would pass before they’d get another chance to light up. Robert quit months ago. The only cigarettes left were dry and tasteless, and the tobacco companies weren’t making any new ones.
He passed the smokers and entered the tunnel. The dining hall looked like someone had mated a junior high school lunchroom with a Starbucks. There were twelve long, rectangular tables with round seats attached to each side, like the kind in a school cafeteria, arranged around the outside edge of the dining room. The interior of the room contained a hodgepodge of seats- the chest-high four-top tables popular at coffee shops, booths scavenged from the break rooms in the cheese plant and one of the big warehouses, picnic tables, and a half-dozen square tables with Formica tops that look like they came from a diner.
The tables were arrayed in the center of the room, in between a pair of support pillars. Rows of covered service tables lined the tunnel walls. On the left, the tables held plates, silverware, napkins, and the other essentials for a civilized meal- salt shakers, condiments, napkin bins, and drinking glasses. Three orange twenty-gallon jugs sat at the end of the row and dispensed water and any other beverages the scavenging teams found. Since Robert’s arrival, they offered lemonade from concentrate, iced tea, and, on one occasion, green Gatorade.
Once you chose your seat and gathered the necessary items for your meal, you crossed the tunnel for a matching set of tables where teens in hairnets served the food. Usually, it was a soup or stew. The scavenging teams brought back canned food by the truckload. Canned fruits and vegetables, soups, SpaghettiOs and ravioli, beans, chili, and an assortment of canned meat. The cooks would open dozens of cans of vegetables and throw them in a cooking pot with meat from one of Coy's hunts. They'd season the concoction with whatever they had on hand, apply the tricks they'd learned during their years in the kitchen, and serve it up to the masses. Robert had to admit that most days, the result was tasty. Maybe not the vegetable soup his mother served on cold winter Sundays when he was a boy, but better than anything he would've come up with if left to cook for himself.
The kitchen manager was a tall and bossy woman in her fifties named Betty fanatically committed to the idea of serving fresh bread every day. Pallets of fifty-pound bags of flour were stacked in the back of the commissary and the silos on the local farms stored enough wheat to feed an army. A team of cave dwellers too stricken with fear of the creepers to be useful outside the quarry milled enough wheat each morning to produce the next day's flour. The problem was the yeast. Yeast just wasn't a common item in most modern kitchens, especially not in the quantities they needed. The grocery stores probably had cases of the stuff, but they were in town and town was off-limits. So the cooks made unleavened bread. In Robert’s opinion, you could put all the herbs you wanted on unleavened bread and it still wouldn't be palatable. A man sitting next to him for the meal one day last week compared eating it to eating tree bark, and Robert agreed.
Will told him they had plans in the works that, if successful, would provide a bounty of food for the community. Enormous vegetable gardens, livestock pens on the quarry floor, and crops raised in the nearby fields were all steps toward a goal of each person or family cooking their own meals in their own homes. But that would happen later. For the foreseeable future supper would consist of soups and stews, interspersed with an occasional beef or venison barbecue or pig cooked in the ground.
A chair crashed against the tunnel floor, jolting Robert out of his food reverie. He looked around again. Everyone faced the same direction, looking at a newly constructed platform pushed back against the west tunnel wall, where the condiment and silverware tables normally sat. Workers had pushed those tables out of the way to make room for the platform- a simple thing, ten feet long and five feet wide, about three feet off the ground. Lanterns on the concrete floor at each corner, along with three more placed in front, bathed it in a yellow light. A set of wood steps sat on the stage’s left side.
Community members filled the dining room to capacity; latecomers had to find an out-of-the-way spot on the floor or lean against a pillar near the makeshift stage. A low hum filled the air as people chattered with one another in quiet voices. Everybody kept an eye on the platform as if a great and wonderful thing was about to happen there and to take your eyes away even for a second might mean 4-27missing it.
With no introduction or preamble, Will walked through the dining area’s rear doors. A furious buzz of whispers followed him as he strode through the room. He spoke to no one, nor made any eye contact; he simply walked a straight line to the stage, bounded up the steps, and turned to face the people.
11
* * *
“My team and I showed up here fourteen weeks ago today. A lot can happen in three-and-a-half months, can't it?" Will paused and gazed out at the crowd. His team, the people with him on the long slog to the quarry, sat together in a clump to his left. They gave him looks of anticipation and encouragement; Becky had shot him a lascivious wink when he first stepped onto the platform. The Judge sat alone in the back, his arms crossed over his chest and a sour expression on his face. The rest of the crowd eyed him with curiosity- not against him, but not with him yet, either.
Advice Jiri passed on in a rushed coaching session earlier in the day passed through his mind. Let your gaze wander and make eye contact with individuals in the audience. Project your voice. Speak from your diaphragm. He recalled the professor's final words. "Everybody that knows you is on your side. You're talking to the people who don't know you yet. Some of them are in awe of you and some ar
e afraid of you. Use that. Speak to that awe- remind them you saved their lives. Talk to them from your heart, and they'll be with you when you're done."
He cleared his throat and clasped his hands in front of him. "Speechifyin' ain't my forte, so if I lose my train of thought or jumble my words, don't hold it against me. I'm used to talking to cows, not two hundred people." A few titters rose from the audience and many of them smiled; the crowd seemed to relax a bit.
"Three and a half months. It feels like longer. That's one thing about this mess we find ourselves in- time seems stretched out. You sit down at the end of the week and reflect on the events you experienced and everything you went through, and you’re amazed it all happened in only a week.
"We've been through a lot in fourteen weeks, haven't we? And this place has changed a lot in that time. Consider what we accomplished in less than four months. We put up the towers and blocked off the rear of the tunnels. Put a kitchen together, a kitchen that can feed two hundred and fifty people at a time. We made sure everyone in here has the weapons they need. Two to four scavenging teams go up that hill every day to bring us a steady supply of food and clothes, and the supplies in tunnel six." He paused and grinned. "If we woke up tomorrow morning and everything was back to normal, we could open a secondhand store with the loot in tunnel six and all get rich." That elicited a decent round of laughter and the crowd relaxed a little more.
"We did all that and more, working together as a team. We defeated every threat that's come against us by responding to it as a community of like-minded individuals working together toward a common cause.
"I don't know if I’ve had a one-on-one conversation with each of you. I hope I did, but I'm not sure. But if we ever talked and got a chance to learn about each other, you understand one thing drives me. One reason I do the things I do. And that's to keep my family and my friends safe." He pursed his lips and appeared to think a moment, another trick of Jiri's. "Today, and for a long time in the future — as long as there are creepers and bad guys walking the earth and nobody in authority to do anything about it — right here in these tunnels is the safest place for my friends and family to be. And it's the safest place for you to be."
He drew a breath and spent a couple of moments looking at them without speaking. When he resumed, his voice carried a note of anger. "But we found out a few days ago that some people want to take our homes away from us. Some folks in a perfectly safe place over on the other side of town want what WE worked and fought for. What we lost loved ones for. They want to take our home. Not because they need it. Not because they're not safe where they are at. No, they want to take the home we fought and bled and lost loved ones for because their leader is a crazy lady who wants to be queen of the whole damn country and taking our quarry is part of her plan to do so.†An angry buzz filled the air- time to go in for the close.
"Let me be clear, so there is no misunderstanding. They are coming here to kill us or drive us away. And we are vastly outnumbered. As sure as the sun will rise in the east in the morning, if we resist, some of us will die. Dying is a risk I'm willing to take. But I can't take it on your behalf. Each one of you has a decision to make." He had them captivated now; they knew what he would ask and were on the edges of their seats, waiting for him to ask it.
"I know where I stand, and I know where the people that came here with me stand. We learned on the road you have to fight for what is yours. Because in the world we live in now, the second you're not willing to fight for it, someone will take it away from you.
“This is my home. I fought too hard and lost too much getting here to walk away from it. We put in too much work and spilled too much blood and lost too many good people to hand it over to some would-be tyrant. I will live here, or I will die here.
"Fight and you may die. Run, and you will live. For a week, or a year, or ten years. And at the end of your time, you will look back and realize that you would trade all those years to come back here to this day and fight for your family and your home."
As planned, Jiri and Danny started it. They leaped up with savage roars and threw their hands in the air. The emotion spread like water rushing through a broken dam and within seconds the entire room was out of their seats, cheering, clapping, and calling for battle. Will faced them with his hands clasped into fists at shoulder level, like an old-time prizefighter. The ovation lasted over two minutes before it slowed. Just as it did, he held his hands up for them to stop. It took several more minutes for them to taper off and retake their seats. When they did, he resumed.
"Now I'm going to call Jiri and Doc Joseph up there with me. The three of us will answer questions, and we’ll let you in on a couple of tricks we have up our sleeves. Ways to even the odds. Because I’ll tell you what, folks- we will win this fucker. Nobody can come into our house and take it away from us." That kicked off another ovation just as thunderous as the first, though it didn't last as long. Doc and Jiri pulled their chairs up to the platform during the commotion and the three of them settled in and waited for the questions to begin.
12
* * *
Danny and Will walked side-by-side across the quarry bottom in comfortable silence. Danny had waited for him for a long time after the assembly broke up; the wait tested his patience and his self-control, two items he was always in short supply of.
It seemed like every person who attended the meeting needed to talk to Will or touch him afterward. The men wanted to shake his hand and the women wanted to hug him or kiss his cheek and they all had an idea for the upcoming battle or good tidings to pass along. Danny waited with his arms crossed over his chest and the toe of his boots tapping out an impatient Morse code on the quarry floor.
After the last well-wisher departed, Will's team surrounded them and walked him back to their tunnel. They chattered happily, told bad jokes, and took turns making fun of the boss's public speaking skills. Once home, Becky pulled her husband aside and they whispered by themselves for a few minutes. She pulled his head down and planted a big kiss on him, cupped his cheek with her hand, then turned away. Will discard his jacket, fished around in a bucket and come up with a couple of bottles of beer, and nodded at Danny.
They met at the mouth of the tunnel and Danny accepted the offered beer. He twisted off the cap and took a long drink, wincing as he finished. The IPA was warm and tasted like mule piss.
"Kind of nasty, huh?" Will said, watching his face.
“The rattlesnake we ate at that little cafe by the Tulsa auction barn was nasty." He held the bottle up. "This shit is better than that."
"It's pretty bad. Maybe we should quit drinking back beer and just stick to sipping whiskey."
"There's no reason to get all drastic. Mad Dog 20/20 tastes like rotten grape juice strained through a pair of Cyrus's dirty underwear, but I drank the shit out of that stuff all through ninth grade. It's the destination that counts, not how enjoyable the journey, my friend."
Will raised his nose and sniffed the March air. It was a beautiful day. The sun hung high overhead in a cloudless sky. The pine trees on the rim swayed back and forth at the command of a cool breeze, but the wind couldn't find its way to the bottom. "Do you smell that?"
Danny took a deep breath, drawing in the scent of turned earth and new grass. "Back home it would be time for spring calves."
Will drained his beer and set the empty bottle on top of an enormous block of limestone. “Yes sir. And the first hay cutting would be right around the corner.†He gave a morose sigh. “I used to complain about the predictable nature of my life. I’d bitch I could stand there in January and tell you exactly what I’d be doing on any day in October. That’s something I’d take in a heartbeat now.â€
They strolled about aimlessly, neither talking. Danny cleared his throat and spoke without looking at Will. "You said a couple of things that surprised me the last few days. You sound like you think victory is preordained."
&nb
sp; "Nah. I don't think that. Things can always go wrong, and you can always get surprised. We learned that when we lost the ranch. But some of the shit we have in store for those folks?" Will shook his head and seemed almost sorrowful. "It'll be ugly."
"That's what you, Jiri, and Terrence huddled up about all night last night? Defending the quarry?"
"Yeah." Will scratched his chin whiskers and chuckled. "Man, I'm glad Jiri is on our side. I would not want to go up against him."
"The man does have a lot going on for an English professor, I'll give you that."
"He may teach English, but his knowledge of the history of warfare is breathtaking. I'm not a military man, but he knows more about sabotage and dirty tricks than me and any other four guys I've ever met combined."
13
* * *
Jiri sprawled across the bed of the three-quarter-ton Ford. He had his hands laced behind his head; since he was taller than the bed was long, the backs of his thighs rested atop the liftgate. He stared at the bright blue sky, his eyes open but unseeing.
Back when he was in college, he taught himself to practice a bastardized combination of meditation and visualization that he called visutation. It was similar to meditation in that he put himself into a relaxed position, controlled his breathing, and worked to slow his heart rate. But rather than clear his mind or contemplate a single idea, he practiced visualization. He recalled great basketball shots he had made remembered important wins on the court, and happy times from his childhood. After the outbreak, he added memorable moves he made while putting down the dead. He imagined future successes and victories, and how they would feel.
Threat Ascendant Page 4