Hell Happened

by Stenzelbarton, Terry

  “Well, the sun has gone down so no one is going out tonight,” Jerry finally said as he cut into the bundt cake. “But what we can do is put up a lookout for them.”

  Jerry, when building the shelter, had spent a lot of time working on how the air would move around the enclosure. He had the main living area, kitchen, dining and bathroom on the main floor and a stairway down to a cellar where there was a storage area with the washer and dryer, central air and filtering set up. He also had a few other essentials for keeping his hole in the ground warm and dry.

  Jerry hadn’t started out to build a fortress, he started just to dig a hole and that turned into a shelter. The shelter was meant for himself and no one else.

  ~ ~ ~

  Everything underground was a slap in the face to any aesthetic architect. The place had no square corners. It was haphazardly put together by someone who had a rough idea and just kept building on it and changing as he went along. Every wall was insulated from the ground with #15 felt, some waterproofing tar and concrete, but the concrete varied in thickness and, where it wasn’t covered by barn wood or plywood, the finish of the concrete was damned ugly.

  The walls that were covered by wood, the wood that had been salvaged off the old barn, and were of varying degrees of age and quality. The lighting throughout was all strings of LED lights which, in Jerry’s mind, gave the place a cheery appeal and saved on electricity.

  Jerry had built this place for himself and had not expected the end of the world as he knew it to be bringing him visitors. The visitors who did come, the ones now at the table with him, didn’t complain. There were worse places they could be.

  A spiral staircase, made from welded plow parts and leftover steel, led upward to three more small rooms which had been turned into sleeping areas now that Jerry wasn’t going to be using them for his hobbies or for storing stuff. They all had inflatable beds with a pillow, sheets and blankets. There were Rubbermaid storage totes for clothes instead of dressers and a radio in each room. The radio antenna was alligator clipped to a wire that went outside and brought in pretty good reception.

  Jerry and Randy had slept in one room, Kellie and Monica in another, Mike, Tony and Eddie in the third. Jeff had bunked down on the couch and Terrill felt most comfortable sleeping in the cellar. It was crowded, but no one was complaining about being out of the Alabama weather every night.

  Above those three bedrooms, at the top of the staircase, were the air ducts for the return of warm air to the cellar and introduction of outside air when the inside air got stuffy. Up there Jerry had put an escape hatch for no other reason that he didn’t want there to be just one opening to his shelter. It wasn’t easy to get to and was covered with a manhole cover he’d picked up at an auction, so it wasn’t easy to open either.

  From the outside, the cover was hidden by shrubbery and only the most serious searcher or luckiest wanderer could have stumbled across it.

  ~ ~ ~

  Jerry suggested that if Jeff and Tony did come back after dark, they’d probably be in a hurry. “I want someone sitting out through that hatch all night. We’ll do it in shifts,” he said. Kellie got up and retrieved the deck of cards from the living room. She’d guessed that everyone was going to whine about whichever order Jerry chose, so drawing cards was the fairest way. Jerry gave her a wink that said he would have suggested something similar to her idea. His favorite was drawing toothpicks.

  She spread them out on the table and everyone scrambled for a card.

  Monica drew the three of hearts, Mike the five of spades. They’d take the first two shifts. Randy and Eddie both drew sevens and instead of arguing they said they’d both sit the watch together which would be in the middle of the night. Terrill drew the nine of spades and he’d be relieved by Kellie who drew the 10 of clubs. She’d wake Jerry for the morning shift because of his King of hearts.

  To Jerry, it seemed the card draw worked out well because he was always an early riser and no one else complained because maybe everyone was hoping Jeff and Tony would make it back yet tonight, meaning they wouldn’t have to pull their shift.

  That decision made, everyone finished off the food on their plates, leaving enough leftovers for the wayward two just in case, and took their plates and silverware to the kitchen. It was Jerry’s turn to wash dishes, Kellie’s turn to dry and stack. The others finished up any house cleaning chores they had.

  Terrill vacuum-sealed the leftovers and put them in the freezer. He knew the adage of wasting not.

  Monica had climbed the spiral staircase and Jerry could hear her grunting while lifting the manhole cover. He thought about going up to help her, but Mike put his hand out and whispered “She can do it. Let her do it,” then gave a little nod. Several grunts later, the hatch opened and Jerry could look all the way up and out to the stars above his hole in the hill.

  Monica looked down at him, sitting on the rim of the exit after squeezing her teenaged fat ass through the hatchway. Even from 30 feet below he could sense the accomplishment in her smile. Maybe for the first time in her life she was proud of herself for accomplishing something...even if it was just opening a hatch cover.

  Jerry waved and went to finish the dishes.

  Randy and Eddie had already put the night’s movie in the DVD and turned on the TV, but Jerry was pretty sure no one was going to watch the movie tonight. The boys plopped down on a pair of beanbag chairs and pulled out the hand held electronic games. They’d worked hard today and he was sure they’d not play long before going to bed.

  Mike picked up his Galaxy Tablet to read from, Terrill a book to read, while Kellie and Jerry finished the dishes and cleaned the table and kitchen. There was little talk at all.

  With the night’s chores done, Kellie said she was retiring because she’d have to be up early for her watch. She bade everyone a good night. She even climbed all the way to the top of the shelter to say good night to Monica.

  Jerry took the towels to the cellar and threw them in the dryer with a load of laundry Kellie had started earlier. He grabbed a pair of 10x42mm Trailblazer binoculars for the lookouts to use. Coming out of the cellar, he was thinking of what Jeff and Tony must be going through and it made him shiver a little. He knew he had to do something.

  “Boys,” he said to Randy and Eddie, “make sure you get some sleep tonight before your shift on watch.”

  “Okay, dad,” and “Sure thing, boss,” came the acknowledgements from the boys. He then climbed the spiral staircase, not for the first time thinking he should have put more effort into making the stairs wider and easier to climb. He passed by Kellie’s door and heard her humming a Reba song and it made him smile.

  Finishing his climb, Monica moved her big legs out of the way so he could exit through the hatch. He excused himself as he climbed through and stood atop his hill, his shelter, his world.

  He looked up to see the stars. Without mercury and sodium vapor lights glaring around his farm, the view of the sky was unusually clear. Stars were sharper than anytime he could remember as a child and he never tired of looking upward.

  He could see Venus, the bright, shiny blue planet, a hand’s breadth above the horizon, unblinking but brighter than anything in the sky. The moon, which would be near full tonight had yet to come across the horizon and the sun which had set hours ago had left it as dark as it could get without cloud cover.

  Knowing what to watch for, he could see satellites and the International Space Station go overhead. Standing in silence, he wondered what the men and women who had been stranded up there were thinking. They knew earth was dead and that no one down here could reach them. No one left had the knowledge to send anything into space.

  “The poor bastards,” he whispered while looking upward.

  He’d almost forgotten the binoculars around his neck. He took them off and handed them to Monica. “I brought these up for you guys. They’re pretty good, but not at night. But if you see lights in the distance, you’ll be able to get a good look before they get
close.”

  “What do you think happened to them, Mr. Saunders? You think they’ll be okay?” Monica asked before he headed back down. He’d asked her to call him “Jerry” like everyone else, but she insisted on calling him Mr. Saunders.

  “I don’t know, Monica,” he said, carefully saying what would least bother this sensitive young lady. “Jeff is a good man with street smarts and Tony is tough for a guy his size.

  “I’m sure they probably just ran into some trouble and they’ll show up tomorrow if they don’t show up here yet tonight.” This seemed to calm her worries and she took the binoculars and looked around then up at the stars. “I never saw the stars like this when I was growing up. They’re beautiful,” she said with a little bit of awe in her voice.

  “Well, if you start feeling tired, make sure you climb up and down the stairway some,” he instructed. “Keep an eye out and if you see or hear anything, make sure to lock the hatch on your way down and wake up everyone.”

  “Yes, sir,” she said, still looking through to binoculars.

  “Wake up Randy in two hours. You’ll probably have to shake him some because he’s a heavy sleeper, and make sure he gets out of bed, because he will fall back asleep on you.”

  “Okay. I will. Good night,” she said as he climbed back down the hatchway and down the spiral staircase. Kellie had stopped humming as he passed by her door and he hoped she had pleasant dreams.

  Reaching the main floor, the boys were still playing their games and the two older men were reading. Jerry picked up the remote for the TV to turn on the movie but his heart wasn’t into it. He turned the remote over in his hands and popped the batteries out and then put them back in. After a few minutes of thought he just blurted it out. “Tomorrow, we’re going to take the truck and go looking for Jeff and Tony.”

  There, he said it. The decision was made.

  It hadn’t been a good evening and despite making the decision to search in the morning, he didn’t foresee it being a good night to sleep.

  Chapter 2

  J erry rolled over and looked at the clock. The time read 20 minutes after five in the morning. He knew Kellie would be down to wake him up in about 25 minutes like he’d asked, so he decided to get up now and save her the trouble. He wasn’t sleeping very well anyhow. He threw off the covers and pulled on the same jeans he’d worn yesterday. He skipped putting on socks and just slipped his feet into the same worn corduroy slippers he’d worn for the past three years.

  He pulled on a clean tee shirt and a red flannel shirt and made sure he turned off the alarm before he left the room. He had set the alarm everyday for the past 10 or 15 years, but could only remember a handful of times where he hadn’t awakened before it went off. For a moment he wondered if keeping track of time even mattered anymore. With most of the world dead, did it really matter if it was 6 a.m. or 6:15? He ran his fingers through his hair and decided it wasn’t worth thinking about.

  It was very quiet in the shelter this early in the morning. He’d noticed how without all the modern conveniences running like he’d had in the farmhouse the silence could almost be a sound itself. He was able to hear the whisper quiet blower from the air circulator in the cellar and the very gentle hum of the refrigerator in the kitchen. But other than those two pieces of equipment, there was a wonderful silence in the shelter.

  He padded down the stairs to the bathroom where he did his morning constitutional and brushed his teeth. He would shave and put all clean clothes on later this morning, but right now, he just wasn’t in the mood and he didn’t want to wake the others. He also wanted to know if anyone had seen anything, though he knew someone would have woken him if there’d been news.

  Wiping his face with the towel he looked at himself in the mirror. “When did I start making life and death decisions?” he asked himself, not for the first time, as he looked into his own eyes. They stared back without an answer.

  For much of his life, the biggest worries he had was if the farm was going to make a profit, or what could he have done different to keep Andrea, his ex-wife, from leaving him to grow old all alone. He’d never had an exciting life; just a day-to-day running of a farm, hiring helpers to assist him in the busy months and letting them go at the end of the season. He’d made some friends, but only one or two close ones, and they were all dead thanks to the virus that had spared his son and him, and a few others.

  Whenever he looked into the mirror now, he saw a man who was in way over his head and way over his experience. He didn’t see a survivalist, just a farmer who was trying to make the most of what was.

  He hung the towel back on the rack and left his reflection to ponder. He had other things to worry about. As he remembered his ex-wife saying so many times that he just wasn’t an introspective man or a very deep thinker.

  Andrea had divorced Jerry six months after his daughter had joined the Army. She hated the “military machine” and by extension, began to hate Jerry. One morning he came in from the field and there was a note saying she still loved him, just wasn’t “in love” with him anymore.

  They’d had fights in the past, disagreements that lasted days and weeks, but Jerry thought they’d done pretty well raising two kids. They’d been married in their mid-20s and had almost 20 years together when the dam broke and she left him.

  Try as he might, Jerry couldn’t convince Andrea to come back home. She filed divorce papers, took her share of their savings and moved to Seattle to be with her high school sweetheart.

  It’d pissed Jerry off and he lost 28 pounds from not caring if he ate or not, and the farm had suffered some as well. Randy and Jerry’s friends from Horizon Church where he worshipped got him through the hell. It was a slow process, but Jerry eventually found a way to make it through another day without wanting to just curl up and die.

  Just thinking back to those times caused a flicker of pain in Jerry’s chest, but not the thudding like he’d had three years earlier. It was the past. She was also probably dead. So probably was her high school sweetheart.

  Kellie heard him coming and offered her hand as he climbed through the hatch. “Good morning,” she said quietly. He took her hand and lifted himself up. Someone had brought a chair up sometime during the night and Kellie had been sitting in it.

  “Good morning. No one showed up?” She’d had the fore thought to also make coffee. She had a mug beside her and offered him some which he took gratefully. “Nope. Randy and Eddie said they thought they heard some shots that were really far off, but they weren’t sure. No one saw anything,” she told him.

  Jerry sat down on the grass and picked up the binoculars. It was still more than an hour before sunrise, but the eastern horizon was already getting light enough to see five or 10 miles distant. He saw nothing moving.

  They sat in silence for a few minutes.

  Jerry wasn’t sure why Kellie hadn’t gone back to bed. She could still get in a couple more hours sleep before everyone started waking up and making too much noise for anyone to sleep. Maybe she didn’t want to go back down before her shift was really over.

  “You don’t have to stay, Kellie. Go down and get some sleep if you can,” he told her, not as an order, but a suggestion. He pulled a piece of grass and flicked it in the air. It was a cool Alabama morning with a light breeze coming in from the gulf, and the air was moist, but not uncomfortable.

  “I’m not tired, Jerry,” she said as she sat back in the chair and leaned it back on two legs against a Slippery Elm sapling. “It’s peaceful up here and I want to watch the sun come up. If you’re tired, you can go back to bed,” she offered.

  “Nah,” he said absently. “You know me. I’m always up early. It’s that dang farmer’s blood in me.”

  “I am learning a lot about you, Jerry.”

  Jerry, who’d only been half listening to Kellie, took a moment to realize she was saying more than her words. He stopped scanning through the binoculars and looked over at her. “Huh?”

  ~ ~ ~

  Ke
llie smiled at the farmer and watched as he hesitated a moment, thinking of something to say. When he didn’t come up with anything, he went back to looking through the binoculars.

  Jerry was so much like the men she avoided so often in her past. He was a simple man, a man of the earth. He had dirty hands, calloused from hard work and scarred from injury. His face was open and honest, but his nose was already showing veins from too much time in the sun. His eyes were plain green and neither piercing nor expressive. His hairline had already recessed most the way up his head and he had a bald spot that his dirty work hat usually covered.

  There were so many things about Jerry she never found attractive before the fall of the world. She’d always been drawn to the “pretty boy” or the “bad boy” type of man who had money to spend. Her ex-husband was of the type. He had been tall, handsome, a full head of dark hair, muscles that were defined from his time in the gym, athletic, well-dressed and a smile that drove the other female teachers, and two of the male teachers, at her school absolutely green with jealousy. Her friends congratulated her on such a handsome husband, and often told her how lucky she was to have snagged such a kind and caring man.

  The new earrings she wore, the lovely necklace, the expensive bracelet, the car, were all gifts from her ex-husband. He was a successful investment broker who made good money and while she didn’t need to work, she enjoyed her job.

  She was the envy of the other teachers.

  The earrings were an apology for the slap that left a hand print for several days and had to be covered with make-up. The necklace was an apology for throwing a can of beer at her hard enough to leave a bump on the back of her head. The bracelet was his way of saying he was sorry for pulling her hair so hard and bruising her forehead.

  The car…that was when she found out he’d been cheating on her with one of the many women with whom he worked.