Betrayed by her father, for bringing her into such a ridiculous environment.
Most of all she felt betrayed by Goofy Grape himself, for he was allegedly a friend to all children.
Yet there he was, his stupid face on the wall, mocking her.
She grabbed the oversized poster and ripped it from the wall.
And inadvertently became her father’s little hero.
She pulled the huge poster from the wall, wadded it into a large ball, and stomped on it.
That’ll teach Goofy Grape, she thought.
Then she saw what was on the wall.
What the poster was hiding.
And it confused her.
The poster was almost six feet wide.
Wide enough to cover three of the studs, hidden behind the wall’s sheetrock panels.
Or, more accurately, the spaces between the studs.
Behind the poster were three identical holes, rectangular in shape, each one separated by a few inches of wall space.
Each of the holes was about eight inches wide and about four inches high.
Now, that was strange enough.
What made it stranger, though, was that protruding from each hole was a piece of twine.
A piece of twine that was secured to the wall beneath each hole by a common flat-headed thumb tack.
Now, Amy didn’t curse very often.
That was almost surprising, considering her father dropped the “f-bomb” twenty times a day in her presence.
Her mother, as tiny and as sick as she was, could curse a blue streak as well, and demonstrated the talent often.
Even her little brother Robert could curse like a drunken sailor, although he was careful to do it only when his father wasn’t around.
It was just safer that way.
Amy didn’t like getting beaten by her father any more than Robert did.
So she seldom cursed when he was in the house.
But this… this was all so weird it almost required a less-than-socially-acceptable comment of some sort.
She took two steps back, examined the three holes in the wall, and exclaimed, “What in hell is this?”
Chapter 20
Ronald Martinez was a despicable man in many ways.
He was a thief and a murderer who was too lazy to search for food for his family. He found it much easier to let others forage for food, and then to shoot them down in cold blood and take it from them.
He was a wife beater who cared little that his wife was deathly ill. If she said or did something he didn’t like he beat her anyway.
And the abuse didn’t stop there.
He thought nothing of beating his children for perceived slights as well.
Despite that, little Amy knew he was the only father she had.
Likely the only father she’d ever have.
As such, she still tried very hard to please him.
She was a smart girl. Mrs. Jamison and all the other teachers said so.
She knew her father was a horrible man.
But she also sensed there might be some good in him also.
Buried very deeply, sure.
But that was her hope.
She seemed to remember, when she was a little bitty girl, that he was kinder. She had vague memories of him sitting on the floor with her, sipping make-believe tea from tiny tea cups, surrounded by stuffed animal “guests” at her tea parties.
She didn’t know what changed him.
She’d heard her mother, on several occasions, tell her friends that something happened to Ronald while he was in prison. That he went in a good man.
And came out a monster.
It was because Amy did her best to overlook his anger and to hold out hope for him that kept her from giving up on him.
Despite his frequent flashes of anger and brutality, she never stopped trying to please him.
In Beth’s bedroom, when she removed the ridiculous poster and saw what was behind it, she instinctively knew she was on to something.
Had her brother made the same discovery he’d have run away to hide.
He’d have immediately sensed he’d done something bad, and would be beaten severely for it.
Amy considered herself not just a year older than her brother, but a whole lot wiser as well.
Sure, she was risking a beating, because Ronald was nothing if not unpredictable.
But she thought this was something her father would want to see.
And that he’d be happy about.
She went to the top of the stairs and called down.
“Hey Dad… I found something you’re gonna want to see.”
Now, Ronald being Ronald, several things could have happened.
He could have yelled at her, telling her to be quiet while at the same time raising his own voice to an ear-shattering level.
He could have rushed up the stairs and smacked her across the face for interrupting whatever he was doing.
Even though he wasn’t doing anything particularly important.
He could have ignored her and gone on looking out a window into the back yard and wondering why a handful of rabbits was hopping here and there.
Instead, perhaps because he was happy to have found and conquered such a treasured house, he was in a benevolent mood.
He climbed the stairs and addressed his only daughter with all the love a father could muster.
“What in hell are you jabbering about?”
She led him into the room and said, “Look what was behind this poster.”
He examined the holes from a distance first, as though they were filled with explosives.
Then he looked a little closer.
Finally he got the nerve to remove the thumbtack holding one of the pieces of twine and to pull on it.
Out of the hole popped a quart-sized zip-lock bag, half-filled with rice. The twine was wrapped around the bag twice, and then led back into the hole again.
He got excited and ignored Amy’s plaintive question, “Daddy, what is it?”
Instead he pulled out the next bag… then the next and the one after that and the one after that.
Then he remembered a chapter in Charlie Bennett’s best-selling novel, Prepping on a Budget. The book Dave Spear said he was finished with and gave to Ronald.
Specifically he remembered a chapter that recommended hiding dried food anywhere and everywhere in a suburban house.
Places looters would never think to search.
Nooks and crannies that would keep food stores well hidden and safe until they were needed months or years later.
One of them was in interior walls, which are typically not insulated and therefore provide a wealth of hidden space, if used properly.
Bennett recommended storing dried food in zip-lock bags, tied together and dropped into the walls.
The access holes would then be covered with paintings or posters which would hide them from looters.
Because, seriously… what looter would think to look behind a poster of Goofy Grape when searching for food?
Ronald started laughing hysterically, which was so out of character for him Amy was frightened.
She took three steps backward and pondered the idea of running from the room and directly to her mother.
Then her father did something even more unexpected.
He turned to her and picked her up and twirled her around.
He kissed her on the cheek and said, “Great job, sweetheart! You’ve found the buried treasure!”
She finally succeeded in scoring some kind words from her father.
And she owed it all to Goofy Grape.
Chapter 21
Ronald went from room to room, tearing down paintings, posters and artwork.
He found what turned out to be over four hundred pounds of dried beans, rice, jerky and trail mix.
Enough to keep his family alive for several years, even if they never left the house except to collect rain water.
In the master bedroom he
found an electrical breaker box behind the bathroom door.
It looked out of place because he’d already seen a breaker box in the garage, and had never seen two such boxes in a single house.
The one in the bathroom was a dummy, and once he realized he wasn’t going to be electrocuted he used a screwdriver to pry it away from the wall.
In the wall behind the box were several zip-lock bags containing old United States coins.
They were coins minted before 1964, made of almost pure silver.
And recognized as legal tender for bartering for almost anything.
Included with the coins were several pieces of gold jewelry. It was the entire collection Sarah’s mother had left her when she died years before.
And while it wasn’t a fortune, it was worth a considerable amount. It could be traded for food, ammo, medicine, pretty much anything.
Now Ronald was left scratching his head.
He wished he’d brought that book with him, so he could read through it once more.
Perhaps glean from it other places Dave might have hidden things.
He tried his best to remember.
And he had a vague recollection that the attic crawlspace of any suburban house, or any other house for that matter, was a prime place to hide things for later use.
He seemed to remember something about flexible air conditioner ventilation duct.
And while he didn’t remember the details, it seemed to be a good reason to go up into the attic.
In the upstairs hallway, directly in front of a built-in linen closet, he reached up to the ceiling and pulled the cord to a drop-down ladder.
It was a hot day, and he knew the attic would be even hotter.
But he didn’t plan to stay long.
Just long enough to see if his hunch was correct, and whether there were more treasures hidden above their heads.
He found the central air blower easily enough. As big as an executive desk, it was pretty hard to miss.
Connected to the blower was an aluminum foil-wrapped flexible duct which ran across the attic floor, and over the top of the upstairs rooms, attached here and there to vents which blew air into the interior of the house.
Warm air in the winter, cool air in the summer.
The duct was mostly covered with blow-in insulation that resembled snow.
He could see nothing amiss.
But wait…
There was a second section of duct. One which was bolted to the side of the blower panel, snaked around in a huge meandering circle, and then was attached to the other side of the blower.
It too was mostly covered with blown-in insulation.
Ronald smiled.
If he hadn’t been specifically looking for a dummy section of duct he’d never have noticed it.
He’d have assumed it served the same purpose as the real duct, and provided air flow for the rooms below him.
He could have done it neatly and gone back down to the garage.
He could have taken a Phillips screwdriver from Dave’s work bench and used it to detach one end of the phony duct from the blower panel.
But Ron didn’t care much about being neat.
He pulled an ivory-handled Bowie knife from a sheathe on his belt and used it to slice the duct open.
The knife made quick work of the flexible duct.
It was as sharp as a razor blade.
It was the first time Ronald ever used it. He’d taken it off a scrounger he’d shot a few days before.
The man wasn’t even dead yet and was begging for mercy when Ronald coldly undid his belt and pulled it off him so the sheathe fell free.
The knife made a clean cut all the way around the duct and it fell away from the blower.
He placed it back in the sheathe and reached his arm into the duct.
He took out a box of .556 ammunition.
“Jackpot!” he exclaimed, although there was no one around to hear him.
He reached in again and took out another box of ammo. Then a third and a fourth and a fifth.
9 mm ammunition too.
Three wooden boxes full of flashlight batteries, the boxes themselves wrapped in aluminum foil to protect them from EMPs.
Several bottles of whisky, which Ronald could use to barter for supplies. It was as good as the gold and silver jewelry and coins he’d found earlier.
That was as far as he went.
He’d only emptied the first five feet of a fifty-foot long duct.
There was much more, but it had to be a hundred and twenty degrees in the attic and he was soaked in sweat.
He knew there was plenty more to come, but he also knew he’d risk heat stroke if he kept working in the overbearing heat.
And now that he knew Dave’s secret hiding place, there was plenty of time to get the rest of it later.
He stuffed what he could into the leg pockets of his BDUs and climbed down into the house.
And for the rest of the day he sported a grin the Cheshire cat would be envious of.
Chapter 22
At Karen’s farmhouse outside of Ely, Lindsey and Kara were conducting their own hunt for supplies and provisions.
Lindsey was puzzled at first when Karen slipped her the note and told her to hide it well.
“You mean you left food and supplies behind? But why?”
“Because the Dykes brothers said they had plenty of food for all of us for a couple of years.
“They said that by the time they started getting low on food, the world outside would be a lot more peaceful. And that we could all come out and go back to work our farms without fear of lawless thugs coming along and trying to take what didn’t belong to them.
“We tried to tell them we wanted to pay our own way, and they didn’t want to hear it.
“Truth was, they did let us bring in a little bit of food, but that was just to pacify us and not because they really needed it.
“Most of what we brought in were our own personal possessions and mementos.”
“So where is the food, exactly?”
“Oh, it’s in several places, honey. You have to remember that Tommy and I were preppers for years. And since we were farmers we had the opportunity to grow crops in larger quantities than your mom and dad grew in their garden, and therefore we had a lot less stuff we had to buy.
“Since we’ve been gone for awhile, we don’t have any way of knowing what’s still there and what’s been found and taken by scavengers. But I’ll bet some of it’s still there.”
She handed her the note, written in pencil on a tablet-sized piece of paper.
“I’d recommend you keep it in your bra until you leave here. It’s relatively safe and you don’t have to worry about it falling out onto the floor when you take something out of your pocket.
“If for any reason you think you’re going to lose it, look at it and memorize as much as you can. Then destroy it so there’s no chance of anyone else finding it.
“There are also some other helpful hints that’ll make your stay at the house safer.”
Kara and Lindsey, now confident the farm house was theirs and theirs alone, sat at the dining room table in Karen’s kitchen and read the note in its entirety.
“You hungry?” Lindsey asked.
“I’m famished.”
“Me too. Let’s find something to eat first. Then we can work some of the security items.”
They went upstairs to Karen and Tommy’s master bedroom.
It was the room Swain had commandeered during his stay at the farm, and the room where he tormented Sarah.
And in all the time Swain spent there, he never knew the room was packed with food.
Lindsey reread the note:
Flip the mattresses off all the beds. Then flip the box springs and look on their undersides. You’ll notice they look different than normal box springs.
The message was cryptic, sure. But the women soon saw what Karen was talking about.
A normal box spring consists of m
etal springs, surrounded by a wooden frame.
A normal box spring has a lot of empty spaces, which can be visible from the bottom of the frame.
Sometimes the open spaces are covered with a thin see-through fabric, sometimes not.
This box spring didn’t look anything like that.
This box spring was flat across the bottom.
It was covered by a thin sheet of plywood, cut to the exact measurements of the frame, and hammered into place.
Something else the women noticed was that it was a lot heavier than a typical box spring.
Box springs are typically very light.
Lindsey ran downstairs and got a claw hammer and a small pry bar from Karen’s tool box and they pried off the sheet of plywood.
The frame was stuffed full of Meals, Ready to Eat, or MREs.
Surplus military rations.
Tommy purchased them off the internet two years before.
They still had seven years to go before their shelf-life dates expired.
They took all the MREs out of the frame and put the bed back together.
It took both of them eight trips up and down the stairs to transfer the meals from the bedroom floor to the kitchen cupboard.
It was enough to feed the two of them for several months.
They tore open two of the heavy plastic pouches and dumped the contents on the dining room table.
And they did what American soldiers always do when at war or under field conditions: they wheeled and dealed and traded things they didn’t like for things they did.
“I’ll give you my dried fruit patty for your squeeze cheese.”
“No. I like the squeeze cheese. I’ll give you my peanut butter.”
“I don’t want your damn peanut butter, girl. You know I hate peanut butter. I’ll give you my fruit patty for your candy bar.”
“Only if you throw in your crackers and your gum.”
“Okay, deal.”
To be honest, neither of the MREs was anything to celebrate.
But they weren’t bad.
And they were filling and packed with calories.
The best thing, though, was this was the first meal the women had had in weeks that weren’t eaten under the stares of brutal men who were holding them against their will.
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