Next he raised up the book shelf so that it barely cleared the carpet when the door was opened or closed, and bolted the back of the shelf to the door behind it.
The heads of the bolts were hidden behind books so someone standing immediately in front of the shelf would have no clue it was actually an entryway to the basement.
By raising the shelf just over the top of the carpet it didn’t give itself away by pressing down on the carpet when it opened or closed.
When it was finished Dave proclaimed it a masterpiece.
One thing Monica never figured out, though, was how her husband Ronald was able to find the secret entrance after he’d broken into the Spear house to loot it.
Ronald wasn’t exactly the sharpest marble in the bag.
Monica also misunderstood Dave’s plan for the basement.
Dave planned to use the basement to hide his family in should their house ever come under assault.
It was equipped with a soundproofed generator capable of supplying power to everything in the basement.
The ceiling above the basement was covered with reflective foil which successfully protected it from electromagnetic pulses, so everything he’d placed in it still worked.
The generator was vented into the attic crawlspace, as was the entire basement itself.
There were hidden cameras throughout the rest of the house, and a monitor console in the basement. And there were sleeping quarters for three people and food and water for months.
Dave’s plan, were his house ever assaulted, was to remove the trap door in his back fence which led to the vacant house behind him.
Then he’d merely herd his family into the basement and pull the bookcase/door closed and secure it from the inside.
They’d ride out the storm, if you will, and be comfy cozy in the basement with everything they needed to survive, while they watched the intruders’ movements on hidden cameras and waited for them to leave.
Dave did two things to make it more believable to intruders that they’d run away instead of doing battle.
He left three outdated and dented cans of vegetables on the kitchen counter, along with two dented and dirty boxes of pasta noodles.
The food looked as though it had come out of a dumpster.
Dave wanted any intruders to find the food and to think that if this house’s residents were reduced to eating such food, they were as bad off as everyone else out there.
And that surely there was no other, more edible food in the house. And that they shouldn’t waste their time searching for it.
The other thing Dave did, on the slim chance one of the intruders moved some books off the shelf and discovered the bookcase was bolted to the “wall” behind it, was to do the same thing to other pieces of furniture around the house.
By finding other bookcases bolted to walls, he hoped the intruders might assume the homeowners took such precautions to prevent heavy bookcases and other furnishings from tipping over onto small children.
And that maybe they’d go no further than that.
Chapter 9
Ronald once bumped into Dave at a school function and the pair struck up a conversation.
After discovering Dave was a prepper Ronald pretended to be one as well.
Dave, who never was the brightest guy around, loaned him a copy of a favorite prepper book.
Dave was once a United States Marine and should have known better. But that was the one and only time he forgot the old military adage, “loose lips sink ships.”
Remembering that Dave Spear was a prepper prompted Ronald to go in search of Dave’s house and to try to rob him.
He was pleasantly surprised to learn, though, that no one was there.
As he searched the house he saw the outdated and dirty foodstuffs on the kitchen counter and he would have taken them.
Then the clumsy oaf tripped on the living room carpet and bumped into Dave’s bookshelf.
It opened just far enough to reveal what was behind it.
And voila! Dave’s secret was out.
Dave wasn’t perfect, you see. No man is.
He’d finished his masterpiece and left it unlatched, so that his family could disappear into the basement on very short notice if bad guys were coming.
Once in the basement they could secure the door and bookcase from the inside.
The one thing he neglected to include in the project was a means of securing the door from the outside.
To his credit, though, who else would have thought a clumsy looter would fall into the bookcase?
Monica saw the nasty food on the kitchen counter within an hour after walking into the place.
She left it on the counter and tried to understand why it would be there, if there was a mass stockpile of good food stacked in the basement.
She even asked Ronald for his opinion.
Ronald just shrugged and left the room. Ronald wasn’t one to waste time using his thinking skills.
She finally settled on a perfectly logical, but perfectly wrong conclusion: that the family who resided here left the basement door locked as much as possible. That they only allowed access to the basement occasionally, and then to bring up a few days’ worth of food.
Presumably to keep someone stopping by to visit from seeing the open basement door and realizing it was the gateway to their food stores.
Monica further reasoned that the family had eaten everything they’d brought upstairs a few days before except for the tainted and dirty items they’d found mixed in with the good stuff.
“They were probably going to bring up more food when something happened and they had to leave instead.” She told Ronald.
Ronald said, “Okay, whatever.”
When Ronald never came home from one of his runs it was obvious he’d been killed. No way would he live on the streets when this house provided for all his needs.
With him out of the picture Monica decided to adopt the ways of the family which lived here before them.
She and the children lived in the main part of the house and stayed clear of the basement.
The bookcase/door remained off-limits and tightly against the wall all the time, unless they were pulling a bit of food to replenish their food supply in the kitchen.
She wasn’t sure why Dave and his family did things that way, but if it was their way it was probably a good practice to follow herself.
After all, they were experienced preppers.
Monica wasn’t.
Another reason Monica refused to live in the basement, and refused to let the children live there either, was because she knew she was down to her last days.
She hoped to die in her sleep, so her children wouldn’t be witness to her passing.
It would be traumatic either way, of course. But she thought it would be easier on them in the long run if they didn’t watch her take her last breath and feel her hand go limp.
However her death happened, though, she knew at some point they’d have to drag her lifeless corpse from the house to the back yard so they could bury her. She wanted to make that part of the process as easy as she could for them.
She figured that by making the basement off-limits, except when they were retrieving food or something else important, she’d avoid the chance they’d have to drag her up the steps.
In her last days she spent all her time on the first floor, sleeping on a couch in the living room.
It was on that couch she died, in her sleep as she wished.
The couch hadn’t been used since that night, as neither child could bring themselves to sit on it. They likely would, at some point, but for now it was like a shrine to their beloved momma.
Parking their little tushies on it would, in their mind, desecrate their momma’s memory.
Because Monica kept the pair out of the basement in her last months on earth, they carried on with her wishes even after she was gone. They entered the basement only rarely, when they needed to cook something they couldn’t cook on a campfire i
n the back yard or to bring a week’s worth of food upstairs.
Today, because of the rain, was a rare special occasion.
Robert pushed the heavy oak bookcase away from the wall, exposing the doorway to the basement behind it. He was a year younger than Amy, but was beginning to develop his biceps and Amy’s little arms were still skinny like macaroni noodles.
She was way more mature than he, her reasoning skills and judgment far more advanced.
The only advantage he had over her was his strength, and he liked to point that out every chance he could.
As in, “Here, let me do that, so you don’t hurt yourself.”
She knew he was indeed stronger than she was. And she knew he needed to remind her frequently to boost his self-worth.
But she couldn’t help rolling her eyes anyway.
Chapter 10
“Might as well get some food while we’re down here,” Amy said. “Why don’t you pick out enough food for a week and take it upstairs while I mix the pancake batter?”
“Roger Wilco, over and out,” came his reply.
He repeated the phrase all the time. Pretty much any time she asked him to do something. It drove her crazy.
She asked him once what it meant and why he said it all the time.
“I don’t know. I guess I heard somebody say it somewhere. I don’t know what it means, but I like the way it sounds.”
She rightly summed it up by saying, “typical boy.”
He smiled and went on his way.
As she pulled out the pancake mix she made a mental note to herself to go behind him and pull out some dried vegetables to take upstairs when they finished.
She didn’t trust Robert to do it.
Robert despised vegetables, you see.
If Robert had his way he’d never eat another vegetable for the rest of his life.
Monica always had to remind him to eat his veggies, or he’d leave them on the plate.
Amy took over the reminding when Monica passed.
Robert only complained about it one time.
“You’re not Momma! She’s dead. Stop trying to be her.”
Amy calmly came back with, “Of course I’m not Momma. I could never be Momma. But she made me promise her before she died that I’d make you eat your vegetables. That’s how important it was to her.”
He sulked, but he complied.
Later on he asked her if she was serious about what their mother said.
“Yes. She said she doesn’t want you to get sick like she did. And that eating your vegetables would help keep you healthy.”
He surrendered at that point and stopped complaining about having to eat what he called, “that nasty stuff.”
But he didn’t go out of his way to help gather or make them either.
The previous spring and summer Monica had grown enough vegetables in the back yard of the vacant and condemned house behind them to put some away for later.
There were a lot of jarred fruits and vegetables stored in a room in the basement which Sarah and Lindsey canned two years before. But no extra jars to be found anywhere. They’d used them all up.
Monica saw that as an inconvenience, but not a major problem.
“That’s okay. Drying them out takes a bit longer, but they’ll last for many years. It’s probably a better way to do it anyway.”
They had almost a bushel each of tomatoes and squash and about half a bushel each of corn, cucumbers and green beans.
After digging through all the cupboards they were able to find two stew pots and several other pots and pans.
While Monica was having the kids cut the veggies into small pieces she went inside the abandoned house behind theirs and went inside to all the bedrooms.
She unclipped each of the window screens and let them drop to the ground below, then tore the wire screen from each frame and dragged it all back home.
Once all the cut veggies were placed in the stew pots and other containers she placed a piece of screen over the top of each and fastened them in place with several bungee cords she found in the garage.
“Now we just place them all on the picnic table in the back yard,” she said.
“The rabbits won’t be able to get to them on the table. The bugs won’t be able to get into them because of the screens.
“All they have to do is sit in the sun until they’re all dried out.”
She had the kids take each container several times a day and shake it vigorously to stir the food inside. She didn’t want the top of each one to be bone dry while the bottom was still damp.
It took the hot south Texas sun three full days to dry the food to Monica’s satisfaction.
“Now then,” she said, “We’re going to put these in zip-lock bags and then seal them into one of those big plastic paint cans in the garage.
“This food will last for years as long as you can keep it dry. Amy, write down in your folder these instructions.”
“Yes ma’am.”
As her momma spoke, Amy dutifully took down each and every word in her childish scrawl.
Her tongue protruded from the side of her mouth, as it did every time she focused really hard on something.
“When it comes time to cook them, put them into a pot and pour water in the pot to about an inch over the top of the vegetables.
“Then cover it and let it soak overnight.
“The next day heat the water to a rolling boil and let them cook for several minutes. Then take one of the vegetables out with a spoon and make sure it’s soft.
“Once they’re soft you can go ahead and eat them, but don’t drain the water. It’ll have a lot of vitamins in it and some nourishment. Either eat it with the vegetables or drink it, but don’t let it go to waste. It’s too valuable.
“Did you get all that, Sweetheart?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Do you have any questions, Robert?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Amy?”
Amy put the pencil aside and pondered the question.
“Yes. If Robert refuses to eat his vegetables can I beat him?”
“Yes. Severely.”
Amy smiled from ear to ear.
Robert, rightfully so, objected.
“Momma!”
“Yes sir?”
“Momma, tell her you’re joking!”
“Who says I’m joking?”
“Momma!”
Monica turned back to Amy and said with a smile, “Oh, all right. You can beat him, but not severely.”
“Momma!”
Chapter 11
One of the best things they’d found in the basement were four five gallon orange buckets from the local hardware store.
Each was full of gallon-sized zip-lock bags of instant pancake mix.
Two years before Dave scored a major deal when a local supermarket decided to shutter its doors and go out of business.
They had a half-price sale to get rid of their excess stock and Dave bought one hundred boxes of the mix.
It had a long shelf life on it anyway. Dave figured the worst thing that would happen to it, once it exceeded its expiration date, was that it would start tasting like the cardboard box it was contained in.
His thought was that if it was out of the box and stayed dry it would seemingly last forever. Or at least for a very long time.
Beth was always looking for a project to occupy her time. And she loved helping her dad with his prepping efforts. He tasked her with the project, and she did an outstanding job.
One by one she emptied all one hundred boxes into large zip-locks and then stacked them neatly into the air-proof buckets.
On the top of each bucket she wrote:
INSTANT PANCAKE MIX
NO EGGS OR MILK NEEDED
ADD WATER TO DESIRED CONSISTENCY
The words were Dave’s idea, just in case several years later they forgot that they needed no additional ingredients.
Beneath the words she added a smil
ey face wearing a silly hat.
That was her own idea. It was classic Beth.
Behind the four buckets of pancake mix were four buckets of instant mashed potato flakes stored in the same manner.
They’d broken into those too, but on this particular day they were going with the pancakes.
It was the third or fourth straight day of rain. They couldn’t remember how many exactly, but it seemed as though it had been raining forever.
Robert pulled the bookcase shut behind them, using the pull that Dave had installed on the back. He slid the locking bolts into place as Amy pulled the cord to start up the generator in the generator room.
She was sure to close the door when she walked out.
She didn’t really understand why that was necessary, but was very good at following instructions.
Most young girls are.
Dave, in the event he was killed and his family had to go on without him in a post-apocalyptic world, left a series of notes and reminders everywhere.
On the door to the generator room, which was heavily soundproofed, he’d written in black sharpie:
IMPORTANT:
KEEP CLOSED WHEN
GENERATOR IS RUNNING
When he wrote the words three years before he’d drafted Beth to draw a skull and crossed bones next to them.
On the bottom of the door was a rubber sweep. Completely around it was a rubber seal.
Left open while the generator was running, the basement would quickly fill with deadly exhaust fumes.
When the door was closed, though, the fumes would vent harmlessly through the attic.
The generator would charge Dave’s bank of batteries, which would in turn power the lights and everything else in the basement.
Including the hot plate Amy would use to make their pancakes.
Monica told the tykes to watch the power gauge on the bank of batteries when the generator was going.
“When the green light comes on it means the batteries are one hundred percent charged. If you let the generator run after that it’ll only waste fuel.”
She’d had Amy write down the note in one of her survival notebooks. She knew what a fastidious reader her daughter was, and she knew Amy would review the books on a regular basis. Including the note in the book would ensure it wouldn’t be forgotten.
An Unwelcome Homecoming Page 4