It was because Terry Vega was a collector of things.
Including personal secrets.
He collected them until he found a way to use them to his advantage.
With Manson out of the way he found such a way.
He boldly went to Santos and threatened to expose him.
“I’ll not only tell the men you’re gay. I’ll also tell them you’re using the soldier’s honor code against them. That you’re pretending to have a relationship with a straight woman to protect your secret and to keep them away from her.”
Santos was terrified. He knew that Vega would make good on his threat, and he’d be likely be murdered by the end of the day.
Or cast out from the bunker with no place to go.
“What do you want?” he asked Vega.
Vega smiled and responded by pointing a thumb in Sarah’s direction.
“Simple. I want her. Anytime, any place I choose.”
Vega knew that Sarah didn’t really belong to Santos. She belonged to Parker.
By making such a move he was taking a great risk.
But Santos had too much to lose by telling Parker.
So did Sarah, for that matter.
And he reminded her of such.
“If you tell Parker what’s going on, you’ll have my death on your head.
“Now that might not bother you much.
“But you’ll have Santos’ death on your head as well. And with him out of the way, with your bogus ‘lover’ gone, you’ll have all the men petitioning Parker to let them have a turn with you.
“I suggest you keep your mouth shut and take what’s coming to you.”
In the days after Manson’s death Sarah and Santos still snuck to the back of the bunker for their daily rendezvous.
By now it was common knowledge. Even Karen and Lindsey knew of their ruse.
What they didn’t know, though, was that Terry Vega was sneaking back there as well.
Knowing none of the others would interrupt Sarah and Santos during those interludes he forced Santos to “watch and learn” how a man was supposed to treat a woman.
For Sarah it was hell.
Perhaps she deserved it for cheating on her husband and dallying with Parker.
At least that’s what she told herself.
What she didn’t know was that Parker already suspected there was something not quite right about the way everyone was behaving.
The subtle glances being traded between parties.
The whispers.
The general atmosphere.
A storm was brewing in the bunker.
Chapter 4
Lindsey hadn’t noticed the glances.
Hadn’t heard the whispers either.
Lindsey was furious with her mother for her infidelity, despite the best efforts of her Aunt Karen to explain away her mother’s indiscretions.
“I’m not a psychologist,” Karen maintained in private talks they had. “But I have heard of situations where captives are so broken and confused emotionally they actually start developing feelings for their captors.”
“If you’re talking about Stockholm syndrome, Aunt Karen, I’m not buying it.”
“I’m surprised you’ve heard of it.”
“They touched on it in American history my sophomore year. I had to do a paper on it.”
“What did you learn about it?”
“Enough to know it’s a very controversial theory. Many professional psychiatrists don’t even believe it exists.
“Still though, there has to be some reason captives and hostages sometimes change sides and start willingly working for or being sympathetic to their hostage takers.”
“Do you think it’s possible your mom has been under so much stress that she’s been susceptible to such a condition?”
“Don’t make excuses for her, Aunt Karen. She’s a married woman who is cheating on the best husband in the world.”
“I’m just asking, that’s all.
“You have to at least think about the possibility, Lindsey. That’s all I’m saying.
“Just consider the possibility she was so grateful to Parker for coming up with a way to keep those animals away from her that in a weakened state of mind she started seeing him as a benefactor instead of a captor.
“And maybe, just maybe, that made it easier for her mind to let her develop feelings for him.”
“Does she? Have feelings for him, I mean?”
“I don’t know, Lindsey. Not as far as I know. As far as I know their relationship is strictly… physical.”
“I don’t mind telling you, Aunt Karen, that if she ever tells me she loves John Parker I will lose my mind and call her some things that would make you blush.”
“All I’m saying, Lindsey, is that perhaps she’s confused and her mind is allowing her to do certain things and feel certain things she wouldn’t ordinarily do or feel.
“Stress is an evil thing, honey. Just remember that. And whatever you do, don’t burn any bridges when it comes to your mother.
“Someday your father will return and will help us get out of this mess.
“At that time we can put it all behind us and heal. All of us. Just don’t say anything to your mom that can’t be taken back, okay?”
Lindsey had been crying off and on for days.
She was confused and angry and frightened for what the future might bring.
Mostly she was tired.
Tired of the situation with Parker and Santos and her mother’s relationships with each of them.
Tired of being asked to overlook her mother’s behavior. Of being asked to somehow justify it.
Or at least to accept it as beyond her mother’s control.
She was tired of talking about it… thinking about it… it was like a thick black cloud hovering just over her head.
Mostly she was just… wholly and incredibly tired.
She started to say something, then realized there was nothing else to say.
Instead she just nodded her head.
Her Aunt Karen was a smart woman, and had never let her down before.
Lindsey owed it to her to at least consider her words.
Karen asked, “Are you and Kara still planning to escape?”
“Yes.”
“When?”
“I’m not sure. Whenever there’s a full moon again and when we can get out without being seen.”
“And there’s nothing I can do to talk you out of it?”
“Nope. This is something I have to do.”
Karen went to her and held her close.
She whispered in Lindsey’s ear, “If this is the last time I see you, please be careful.”
Chapter 5
Monica Martinez was a frail woman even before she got sick.
Now the constant nausea, the frequent vomiting, had her withered away to almost nothing.
She was quite literally skin and bones.
She had no medical training. Neither did her husband Ronald.
Her first guess was cancer. Her mother had died of leukemia when she was a young girl.
She vaguely remembered her mother suffering similar symptoms.
One of the few memories she had of her mom was of her on her knees, retching into the toilet, then standing up too quickly and passing out, falling to the floor at Monica’s feet.
She actually had more memories of the funeral than anything else.
She remembered having to look up at the casket, having to be picked up by her father to say goodbye.
She remembered a gray haired old lady she didn’t even know go to a knee to address her face to face.
“I’ll pray for you, child. A four year old should not have to lose her mommy like this.”
But lose her mommy she did. And now she was grown up and retching into toilets, passing out on the floor.
Just as her mother had.
She’d mentioned to Ronald she might have the same malady as her mom and he scoffed at her.
; “Cancer ain’t hereditary, don’t be ridiculous. If it was I’d have lung cancer, just like my daddy had. I’d be lying out there in the damn graveyard just like him.
“Now you stop it with all that talk of dying. You’re scaring the damn kids.
“All you have is some kind of parasite. I told you to boil that pond water a full ten minutes before you drank it.”
“But I did. I always do.”
“Don’t sass me, Monica. You always do things half-ass. If I say do it for ten minutes you do it for five and think it’s good enough.
“Whatever you have it’ll pass. Just do what I said and keep drinking lots of water. Every time you drink clean water and then throw it back up you’ll wash more of the bacteria out of your system.
“A few more days you’ll be back to normal, you’ll see.”
She was frail and sick and on the verge of collapse.
And she was forbidden to sit.
It was late morning now.
In the early morning hours, long before it became light outside, Ronald had invaded this house.
To be sure, it was a nice house. Two stories plus a full basement.
It was much nicer than the tiny frame house the four of them had lived in for the past six years.
The best part, though, was what this house contained.
It obviously was the home of preppers.
For the basement not only contained tall stacks of bottled water, but more food than they could eat in a year.
And amenities Monica could only dream of.
Electrical power. A television. Movies and video games.
Even, by God, a refrigerator and freezer.
When Ronald came back she was going to fix a glass of ice water.
If she could only last that long.
Ronald left not long after he went home and got her and the kids and brought them to this new and almost magical place.
Monica stopped dreaming long before. She thought dreams were pointless. They never came true and all dreams did was to make one wake up full of hopes and expectations that things were going to change.
That something good happening was still possible.
And all that did was set one up for disappointment.
Because the only thing constant in today’s cruel world was disappointment.
Well, that and pain and misery.
When Ronald said he found a house better than heaven… that was how he described it… Monica had her doubts.
So did the kids, Robert and Amy.
All three were used to Ronald disappointing them. He’d done that so many times of late.
They went along with him, partly because they wanted so much to believe him, and partly because they were afraid to tell him no.
Ronald was so excited to show them the house he even carried Monica part of the way when she faltered.
At the new place, though, he went back to the cold-hearted man he usually was.
“I’m going out,” he said right before sunrise.
“I don’t know how long I’m going to be gone.
“Monica, take this gun and shoot anyone who comes around who isn’t me.”
He could have left it at that, but he had to spoil it by being an ass.
He ordered her not to sit down.
Not only that, but he tasked Amy, the eight year old, with watching her to make sure she stood until he returned.
Amy wouldn’t rat out her mother. She loved her too much, and only tolerated her father because he was bigger than her and hit harder.
But she knew that if Monica sat down, or leaned against the wall, and Ronald caught her doing so Ronald would blame both of them. And Amy would catch the same beating her mother got.
“Mommy, please be strong,” the tiny girl pleaded. “Please don’t sit down. If you do he’ll hit us both.”
The boy, Robert, was a year younger than Amy. He’d have loved to be a hero to his mom and sister and stand up to his brutal father. But he was but a tiny tot. And he was still nursing three broken fingers on his right hand.
Fingers broken intentionally by his father, as punishment for Robert taking more than his share of a box of cookies Ronald had taken from a woman he shot two weeks before.
Monica was in dire straits. She was quite literally seeing stars and occasionally had the dry heaves.
“Stay there just a little longer, Mommy,” little Amy said. “I just know he’ll be back soon. Things will be better then, I just know they will.”
Chapter 6
Monica was in such bad shape she thought she was hallucinating when she heard her husband’s voice calling to her.
“Monica! Monica! It’s me, don’t shoot!”
The door separating the empty front room of Dave’s house from the occupied part slowly opened.
It was the movement of the door and not Ronald’s voice which convinced her it was real.
She took her finger off the trigger and aimed the gun’s muzzle toward the ceiling.
At the same time, though, and for just a split second, a strange thought flashed through her mind.
For just that flash of a second she wondered how much different her life, and the lives of her children, would be if she just blew Ronald away when his head appeared in the doorway.
It wasn’t the first time she’d thought such a thought.
All brutalized wives do at some point.
But she’d never been strong enough to actually carry through with such a thing.
Or to defend herself against his abuse, for that matter.
Her children, watching from a safe distance on the other side of the room, were lost in their own thoughts.
Amy said, under her breath, “Do it! Do it!”
Robert, despite his broken fingers and the pain from them serving a constant reminder to the brutality of his father, hoped she would let the man live.
It was mostly because he was afraid if his father was out of the way he’d be expected to be the man of the house.
And he instinctively knew he wasn’t up to the task.
In the end, Ronald’s return was anti-climactic.
He pushed open the door wide enough to make entry, then closed it behind him.
He said, perhaps as a means of apologizing for taking so long, “It took me forever to find a vacant house with the same sized window. Most of them were way too big or way too small.”
He grabbed the putty knife and the bathtub caulking he’d found in the garage earlier and stuffed them into his pocket, then went back through the door.
“You can sit down and relax,” he told Monica almost as an afterthought. “I’ve got it from here.”
It was a rare display of mercy on his part, for in recent days he didn’t appear to give a damn about his wife’s comfort or condition.
She needed no additional prompting.
She stumbled into the den and placed the gun on the floor next to a recliner, then collapsed into it.
Her head was swimming and she was exhausted.
If it wasn’t for the throbbing deep within both temples she might have fallen asleep immediately.
“Amy, honey, would you go to my backpack and bring me some ibuprofen?”
“How many do you need, Mommy?”
“I don’t know, honey. Just bring me the whole bottle.”
Monica decided, as she sat then and there, to put her plan on hold for now.
When Ronald left the previous night on what he called a “food run,” she’d finally decided things were hopeless.
She’d given up weeks before and decided she was close to dying. She was just waiting until her time was up, until God called her home.
The dying part didn’t scare her. She’d stopped living long before. She was just going through the motions now.
No, dying would be a sweet relief for her. Finally, a chance to rest.
What really terrified her, the reason she was delaying the inevitable as long as possible, was not knowing what would happen to her children after s
he was gone.
They were already enduring beatings and verbal abuse at the hands of their father on a regular basis.
More often, though, Monica was able to shield them, to come between them and Ronald when Ronald was pounding them with his fists, and was diverting most of the punches onto her own body.
She was afraid that with her out of the way he’d quite literally beat them to death.
They had no living relatives to send the children to, no neighbors or friends who weren’t so afraid of Ronald they’d take in his children.
Leaving them behind in Ronald’s care was a prospect which terrified her way more than death itself.
Then Ronald, a couple of days earlier, made a comment that made her think.
“I don’t know how I was so cursed to wind up not only with the stupidest woman alive, but the two stupidest kids as well,” he said. “Maybe I should just put a gun to my head and put myself out of my misery.”
She couldn’t remember what he was so upset about to disparage them so.
So many things upset him anymore she couldn’t keep track of them all.
It was the first time, though, he’d mentioned actually carrying out something she’d thought about many times.
Suicide.
Many of their neighbors had already taken the easy way out.
Five families on their block alone.
The first were the Finleys, next door to them.
They heard the shots, just before sunset a month after the power went out.
Six of them in relatively quick succession.
Then a delay of about a minute, and another single shot.
Ronald guessed they were firing at looters, for in those early days there were a lot of miscreants going door to door and trying to break in.
Then three days went by and a sickening stench started emanating from the Finley home.
Ronald found them in a circle in the living room.
The wife was holding hands with her two little girls. Each had two bullet holes in their heads.
The father lay nearby, a bullet hole in his temple and brains splattered all over the wall behind him.
Ronald wondered aloud how anybody could be so weak, so stupid, as to give up and do such a thing.
Then as it happened more and more he saw it from a different light.
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