“Because these expire in two weeks,” the more intelligent tried to explain to them. “If we eat other things first and then run low on food later, these will go to waste because they might make you sick.”
The net result of such madness was that all the snack foods and canned goods were now gone. What was left were the dry stock and long term foods. The macaroni and cheese, the instant soups, the Ramen noodles, the rice and beans.
It wasn’t glamorous by any means. But there were pallets and pallets of the stuff. Enough to keep the Dwyer gang alive for many more years if they were able to fend off the marauders who came by snooping occasionally.
-3-
The Dwyers had everything they needed, really. By taking a blowtorch and cutting a ten-inch hole in the roof they even had a source of water, for every time it rained water came pouring down in a torrent into rolling trash cans beneath the hole. It had to be boiled, sure, but by their estimation they still had plenty of wooden pallets to burn for at least five more years.
They had food, they had water, and they had fuel.
The one thing that was missing was their brother John.
John was serving time at the Fredericksburg Federal Penitentiary in south central Texas when Saris 7 hit.
Until their power went out the group watched the news non-stop from the administrative office area of the distribution center.
They knew that prisons all over the country were releasing their non-violent criminals so they had at least a fighting chance against the coming freeze.
The trouble was the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, which ran all the prisons in Texas, wouldn’t make a uniform decision regarding such matters.
They left it up to each individual warden to decide whether they had the materials and manpower to ride out the freeze.
As each day went by, more and more prisons opened their doors.
But not Fredericksburg.
Frederickburg was in it for the long haul.
They’d succeeded in getting word to John to stay in Frederickburg if he was released after the freeze. Not in the prison, but in the small town of the same name five miles from the prison’s walls.
That was before they’d finalized their plans to take over the Plainview distribution center, when their own future was still in doubt.
Now that the thaw had come, they knew their brother was a free man hanging out in Fredericksburg waiting for them to come and get him.
The only question was who would go for him.
Justin volunteered.
And so it was that eight and a half years after Saris 7 hit the earth, after the world froze solid and then thawed again, Justin set out from Plainview headed six hundred miles southeast for the purpose of finding his brother.
He wasn’t in any hurry, for all the Dwyer brothers were womanizers and opportunists.
Along the way he stopped several times to shack up with a woman and to bully others to steal their wealth. For days or weeks at a time Justin cooled his heels and enjoyed what he thought were the finest things in life: the affection of a willing woman and other peoples’ gold and silver.
And the things that gold and silver was able to purchase: good food, marijuana, and booze.
John wasn’t upset that his brothers were taking so long to come for him.
For he was doing more or less the same thing in Fredericksburg, living with not one but two women. He offered them protection from looters and marauders and went out each day to steal food and liquor from others.
They in turn provided him with the affection he craved and cooked and cleaned for him.
Because Justin dragged his feet it took him over a year to travel those six hundred miles. Another two months to find his brother, who was holed up in a sleepy farmhouse two miles from town, and another three months spending time with his own woman while the brothers planned their trip back to Plainview.
They had no knowledge of Cupid 23’s impending collision, of course. Broadcast news and cable television still hadn’t come back into being after the first freeze. There was simply no way to spread news like that anymore.
And NASA wasn’t operational to confirm such news anyway.
They thought they had all the time in the world.
When Cupid 23 struck outside the sleepy town of Spangdahlem, Germany, the brothers were shacked up in a town called Welfare, a hundred miles south of Junction on Interstate 10.
They were preparing to leave when John sniffed the air and said to his brother, “Oh, crap. Tell me you don’t smell dirt too.”
They decided to stay in Welfare a little bit longer. After all, there was plenty of time to get back to Plainview. The women in Welfare were friendly and warm and had booze. It appeared a much better option than going out in the cold.
-4-
In south San Antonio a war was brewing.
Washington politicians are among the most despicable creatures on earth.
And, some would argue, the dumbest.
They run for election on lofty platforms. They have only the best interests of the citizens at heart, they say. They will fight for lower taxes and a more efficient government. They will repair our infrastructure and ensure everyone has equal opportunities despite their race or background. They’ll ensure affordable healthcare, lower prices and higher wages for everyone.
Once elected they’ll kow-tow to the K-Street lobbyists and special interest groups that paid to get them elected.
And the only ones they’ll work hard for are themselves.
They’ll spend a small fraction of each year actually doing the jobs the people elected them to do. And eight times that number of days campaigning for re-election.
Maybe as dumb as they are, they’re a bit smarter than the gullible voters who put them into office expecting them to be any better than their predecessors.
Politicians know how gullible their constituents are. That’s why they assume they can get away with darn near anything.
When Saris 7 was barreling down upon the earth, President Sanders openly lied to the American people.
“We are working with China on a joint project to divert the meteorite,” he said with a straight face. “An American nuclear warhead attached to a Chinese multi-stage rocket will roar into space. It will cozy up to the meteorite, just a mile or so away from it, and detonate a huge nuclear blast which will cause the meteorite to change course and miss the earth.”
There used to be an old joke that went something like this:
Q: Who are the most untrustworthy people on earth?
A: Someone who shows up in a suit and says, “I’m from the government. I’m here to help you.”
There was another old joke which went:
Q: How do you tell when a Washington politician is lying?
A: His lips are moving.
The sad fact was most Americans watching President Sanders make his proclamation about Saris 7 suspected he was lying.
But most bought into his story anyway.
It wasn’t because the impending disaster somehow bought him a newfound credence. For he’d always been a lying dirt bag.
It was that the citizens of the United States were so desperate for a solution to the Saris 7 problem they had no choice but to believe them and hope for the best.
The truth was President Sanders was lying from the beginning.
So was his Chinese counterpart, who was telling his people the same story.
Both leaders had accepted there wasn’t much they could do to solve the problem.
Oh, they could have tried.
They likely would have failed.
So they didn’t even make the effort.
Instead, they just accepted analysts’ predictions that seventy to ninety percent of their citizens would be killed during the long freeze. But that their infrastructure would largely remain intact, and there would be enough survivors to repopulate their respective countries in time.
So instead of trying to stop Saris 7 they focused their ef
forts on renovating and updating the huge underground bunker system which had lain beneath the streets of Washington, D.C. since the Second World War.
The system of bunkers was modernized, stocked with provisions and made ready for hundreds of politicians and their families. Also invited in were friends of the President and high ranking NASA officials and their families.
Everyone else was left out in the cold.
Pun intended.
The problem with President Sanders’ charade was that no one trusted him to follow through with it.
They watched him like a hawk.
They also kept a close watch on the members of Congress.
The day before Saris 7 struck the earth all the Washington politicians disappeared.
So did their families.
Air Force One was still in its hangar at Joint Base Andrews.
Marine One was still on the tarmac not far from the White House.
None of the Representatives or Senators got on airplanes to fly home to their districts.
It didn’t take a boatload of brains to figure out where they went.
The citizens of Washington rose up in anger and took to the streets, looking for entry and exit points to the tunnels. It didn’t take long, for as closely as they guarded their secret they overlooked a key aspect.
The drivers who drove in hundreds of trucks full of provisions and supplies to stock the bunker weren’t invited in.
And they weren’t very happy about that.
And they knew exactly where and how to gain entry to the bunker system.
In the end the citizens gained access to the bunker and killed everyone inside.
It was a sad day in American history, and one which no one ever wanted to see repeated.
But the thing was, the people who ran Washington never learn from their mistakes.
And therefore decided to pull the same thing a second time.
They thought that by keeping Cupid 23 a closely guarded secret they could get away with it.
They thought that by moving the bunker to San Antonio, Texas they’d be too far away for the citizens to retaliate once they realized they’ve been had once again.
Did I mention that Washington politicians aren’t very bright?
-5-
Air Force Master Sergeant Wayne Selleck, a Bronx native who’d lost his entire family, had had an epiphany when Saris 7 hit the earth.
He’d seen the worst humanity had to offer. He’d seen bands of murderers and rapists sweep through neighborhoods and leave them in shambles in their wake.
He’d seen armed thugs accost people on the street and demand whatever food they carried.
And sometimes he saw the thugs murder their victims purely out of spite.
It dawned on him after awhile that he was tired of watching the dredges of society prey on the weak. He was brought up in a Christian household, where the strong held out a hand to their neighbors and helped instead of hurt them.
MSgt Selleck was only one man. He couldn’t cure all wrongs or save all of the oppressed.
But he resolved himself to doing what he could.
He was the chief engineer at Wilford Hall Medical Center when Hannah told Drs. Wilcox and Medley that Cupid 23 might be on the way.
He didn’t want to believe it. But the prudent thing to do was to place stock in it, prepare for the worst and hope for the best.
When he heard that Washington was building a bunker in his very back yard, so they could save themselves, he said, “Not on my watch.”
Because of his civil engineering background he seemed the logical person to head up what Colonel Wilcox called the “extraction project.”
“Extraction” meant to quite literally extract the bunker’s occupants from the bunker and to bring them to justice.
MSgt Selleck knew just how to do it. He procured every working bulldozer and front end loader within miles and gave volunteer drivers a crash course on how to operate them.
He set them to work digging soil away from one end of the massive bunker.
And while they were doing that he found “Big Bertha.”
Big Bertha was a massive tracked crane with a four thousand pound wrecking ball which had been demolishing a strip mall in central San Antonio several miles from the bunker.
In the wake of the second freeze there wasn’t much point in finishing Bertha’s operation and she was abandoned.
Selleck procured it and had it driven to the bunker site on the former Kelly Air Force Base.
Tracked cranes move very slowly, having to detour around overpasses and heavily congested roadways. It took the better part of two days to make its journey.
But its timing couldn’t have been more perfect.
It arrived at the bunker just as the dozers and front end loaders were finishing up, exposing one end of the bunker.
It was extraction time.
While Big Bertha set to work beating the reinforced concrete wall with its massive wrecking ball, Selleck huddled with colonels Wilcox and Medley.
“Do you think they’re going to just come out and surrender?”
Wilcox said, “Yes. I honestly do. I don’t expect them to put up a fight. They’d have to be honorable men to do that. And I think they’re anything but honorable men.
“I think they’re cowards. If they weren’t they wouldn’t be in there. They’d be out here, fighting to survive in the elements like we are.”
Medley was less convinced.
“Surely when their backs are against the wall they’ll fend off our efforts. Surely they took weapons in there to protect themselves against assault from the outside. I don’t see them giving up without a fight.”
Wilcox said, “Well, I guess we’ll just wait and see.”
Each swing of the ball did more and more damage.
Occasionally Bertha had to back away while men with blow torches cut away sections of exposed rebar.
Medley was well educated, but in the medical profession. He didn’t know beans about engineering. He asked Selleck, “What do you think? How impenetrable is this shelter?”
“In my opinion, not at all.”
“How so?”
“It’s old school. Old technology. It doesn’t incorporate any of the advances we’ve worked into bunker building over the last forty years.”
“Like what?”
“Like an oxygen generation system. A modern bunker would have a set-up similar to a nuclear powered submarine which can stay underwater for months at a time. They have systems which can recycle oxygen so that it’s used over and over again.
“See those ventilation pipes sticking out of the ground every twenty feet or so?”
“Yes. What about them?”
“Half of them are intake pipes. They suck in outside air. The other half are outtakes. They allow spent air to be sent back out. Inside there’s a ventilation system which circulates the air through the bunker. That’s how they get their air to breathe.”
“And what’s wrong with that system?”
“It makes them vulnerable as hell, for one thing.
“Logically they’d have a filtering system to clean their incoming air before it’s released into the bunker. Hopefully they were at least that smart.
“If they weren’t all an aggressor has to do is poison their air supply. Pump nerve gas or something else into the intake vents to kill them, or tear gas to force them out.
“Let’s say they do have filters to clean their incoming air supply. It may or may not catch and trap the gases an aggressor puts in.
“That still doesn’t save them. If the gases don’t work, all the aggressor has to do is block the air intakes. No air going in means that eventually they’ll have to open the door and come out.”
“Yeah. What about that door? How come we’re not penetrating it?”
“That’s the one thing they did right. It’s a hell of a door. They either trucked one in under the cover of darkness or made one on site.
“It’s made
with super hardened steel. Several layers of it. Filled with heavily reinforced concrete. It’ll hold up to a nuclear blast at close range. Our cutting torches wouldn’t do a thing to it. It would laugh at them.
“The problem with a door like that is its weight. We’re talking forty tons. So heavy it requires special hinges to hold it into place and two or three strong men just to open and close the damn thing.
“But one thing’s for sure. There’s no way we’re just gonna break in that way.”
“So what are our other options?”
“I’ve already identified which pipes are used to ventilate their exhaust. I’ve had them sealed. That may be enough to shut down their generators and boilers, or at least to back up the exhaust so it’s going back into the bunker.
“If they’re smart they’ve already shut everything down, which means they’re operating on emergency backup power. That means they’re draining their batteries to keep their lights and fans running.
“Depending on the battery setup, they may have several days worth of lights and fans left.
“Or… they could already be in the dark.”
“What else you got?”
“As I see it, we’ve got several options. The first is what we’re doing now. Break a hole in their wall and order them to surrender.
“Of course, they’re likely to just evacuate this end of the bunker and cram everybody into the other end.
“That’ll mean we’ll have to arm a team to go in after them, and it could be ugly.
-6-
“Keep going,” Wilcox said.
“Plan B would be to drop tear gas into the intakes and hope they don’t have a way of filtering it from the air stream. If they don’t, it should force them out the front door. However…”
“However what?”
“If they have gas masks or a filtering system that option won’t work.”
“Then what?”
“Plan C is to seal all of their vents. Intake and well as outtake. It might take awhile. Days, maybe even a week or two. But we know they don’t have a means of recycling and reusing their air. If they did they wouldn’t have the system of vents to begin with.
One of Our Own: Final Dawn: Book 11 Page 2