“At some point the air inside the bunker will become very stale.
“At some point people will begin to pass out.
“Then they’ll have two choices. They can come out, or they can suffocate.”
Colonel Wilcox was prone to rash judgments and decisions.
Medley, on the other hand, was a logical thinker.
“Wayne,” he began, “Why on earth would they spend so much time and energy building a bunker with so many vulnerabilities?”
Selleck scratched his head, then smiled.
“You know, sir, I’ve been wondering about that myself.
“One option is that they were so confident they’d pulled off their ruse they thought they’d get away with it. That no one would come out here looking for a secret bunker. That we’d all be freaking out and spending all our time scavenging for food and it just wouldn’t occur to us they were even out here.
“They may have figured nobody would come out to this side of the base until after the thaw. And even then, if a hunter came out here looking for game and stumbled across their vents, they wouldn’t think anything of them. They’d just think it was an abandoned underground munitions storage facility or something.
“The other option is that they took all their engineering experts… their bunker builders… into the Washington bunker and they were killed with all the other animals there. Maybe they just no longer had the people available who knew how to make a modern facility for them.
“And this ain’t it. I mean, a bunch of high school kids of average intelligence could design this bunker. This is Korean War technology.”
“I still don’t think we’ll have to go as far as gassing them to get them out,” Wilcox maintained.
“They’re cowards. They won’t fight like men. They’ll come out with a white flag as soon as they realize the gig is up.”
“And what will we do to them then, Colonel?”
“We’ll take them all prisoner. I’ve got my transportation people standing by at the motor pool. They’ve got ten buses running and ready. Four armed guards for each bus.
“We’ll take them to the old basic training area and house them there.
“I plan to separate them. Innocent family members in one area. Military members and politicians in another.
“We’re still technically under martial law. They’ve never rescinded the order.
“That means we can convene a military tribunal to try military and civilians alike.”
“Try them for what?”
“Treason, to start.”
After another twenty minutes the final swing from Bertha’s big ball finally broke through.
And seconds later a gun shot rang out from within the structure. A bullet went whizzing past Colonel Wilcox’s right ear.
The operation came to a screeching halt.
“Well, this changes things,” Selleck told the colonels after they ducked behind the bucket of a front end loader.
“This changes things considerably.”
-7-
Although John and Justin Dwyer saw no real need in getting out in the cold and doing something productive, the people in the Junction compound were making every minute count.
They’d been working for months to get the abandoned mine at Salt Mountain stocked and operational once again.
And while this time they were hoping the freeze wasn’t quite as severe as the first one, and that they could stay out of the mine and in the compound, they had to face a brutal fact:
Up to this point their luck hadn’t exactly been good.
To put it more bluntly, their luck had always sucked.
Just as even the worst gambler occasionally has a good day or makes a lucky bet, they were hoping they’d have an easier time this time around. That the freeze wouldn’t be much worse than a bad winter storm. That they could ride it out at the compound simply by bundling up and only going outside when they had to.
And by placing their livestock into the mine and running back and forth through the tunnel each day to care for them.
Psychologically such an operation would benefit them tremendously.
For being imprisoned in an underground mine for over seven years had had a profound effect on them.
It took away their joy for living. It made them surly and miserable. Many of them had severe bouts with depression. Some of them pondered suicide.
All of them suffered from cabin fever. They became listless and stopped smiling.
To a large degree, they’d stopped living life and became borderline zombies.
By Hannah’s calculations, the freeze this time would be shorter and not quite as cold.
That sparked a hope that maybe, just maybe they could avoid going into the mine altogether.
Except to care for the animals, but that was an acceptable trade-off.
For although being in the mine had almost certainly saved their lives the first time around, none of them wanted to do it a second time.
The biggest thing keeping their hopes from becoming reality was diesel fuel. Mark and Bryan crunched the numbers and determined that to stay in the compound they’d need much more of it.
The difference was that the mine was naturally insulated from the outside by the earth. It stayed a constant sixty three to sixty five degrees regardless of the temperatures outside. The rock-hard salt walls a hundred meters thick ensured that.
The buildings in the compound were well insulated. But they’d still require massive amounts of diesel fuel to heat them and make them comfortable enough for living.
Cupid 23 had already done its damage. The outside temperature was hovering around twenty degrees. But there hadn’t been an awful lot of precipitation and the roads were still passable.
Passable enough to allow the residents of the compound to scramble madly about the area, up and down the highways of central Texas, in desperate search of as much diesel fuel as they could possibly gather.
Before their time ran out and they had to hunker down for the duration.
Brad was one of the more experienced drivers. He’d driven a truck for a moving company long before the world ever heard of Saris 7. Back in the days when people went happily about their daily lives convinced they’d live forever.
Under normal conditions Brad wouldn’t have spun out. The roads were icy but he’d driven on worse.
In a way it was a perfect storm, in that everything was lined up neatly against him. The ice on the roads made it just slick enough to amplify any error a hundred fold. The highway was littered with abandoned vehicles.
There was a steep curve on a down grade.
And worst of all, when Brad rounded that curve he came across another tractor trailer which had spun out and been abandoned a couple of days before.
When it had spun out it had blocked nearly the entire road.
A tractor towing a fifty-three foot trailer cannot stop or turn on a dime. And it can’t maneuver through a tiny passageway that’s narrower than the tractor’s bumper. Not even when driving in a straight line, and much less so on a curve.
All Brad could do was jam on his brakes, knowing full well he’d jackknife his rig.
And jackknife he did. The trailer went off the highway and down an embankment; the sheer weight of it dragged the tractor howling and screaming down the embankment with it.
There was a bright side or two. The rig remained upright, though hopelessly stuck. It came to rest against a sturdy tree which kept it from being dragged all the way down the mountain.
And both his saddle tanks were almost full of fuel.
He was in no danger of freezing to death anytime soon.
Brad wasn’t one to panic in a crisis situation. Some men tend to freak out when faced with difficult circumstances. Brad wasn’t like that. Brad kept his wits about him. He looked at his situation logically. He realized it could have ended much worse. He could easily have died.
The fact he didn’t meant he already won.
But he was still i
n dire straits.
He took four fluorescent orange warning triangles out of the tractor’s gear box and lugged them up to the highway.
Each side of the triangle measured twenty four inches, and each triangle had plastic feet which folded out to hold it up.
Then he went back and retrieved a can of black spray paint.
He picked up two of the triangles and painted them with the letters “B” on one side and “D” on the other.
He adorned the other two triangles with the letters “R” on one side and “A” on the other.
Then he replaced them, spacing them several feet apart, so that from either direction a passing trucker would see the triangles and the name “Brad” painted on them.
Ordinarily that would have been all Brad needed to do to guarantee his rescue.
But a couple of hours before his crash Brad made a very stupid mistake.
He’d changed highways to shorten his trip back to the mine.
He’d left his last reported location, On Interstate 10, and taken the less-traveled State Loop 481 to save a little time.
Now, that wouldn’t necessarily have been a crucial decision.
Except that he was unable to report his decision to the girls back at the control center, or to the other drivers within range of his hand-held.
Because he’d dropped that hand-held radio and broken it.
Hindsight is twenty-twenty. It really is. And as Brad sat in his rig with the heater running full bore, pondering his plight, he cursed himself.
Without a working radio, the very last thing he should have done was deviate from his last known location.
He knew that now.
But it was too late to change it.
As darkness fell across a sky already choked with dust, Brad turned off the big Kenworth’s engine to conserve fuel.
He needed to get some rest, for he’d spend a good portion of the next day standing on the highway in the freezing cold, waiting to flag down anyone who happened by.
He stretched out on the sleeper’s bunk, covered himself with three blankets.
At some point, probably in three to four hours, the sleeper would be so cold he’d wake up shivering. He’d climb back into the driver’s seat, crank the engine again, and heat his living space back up again. Then he’d repeat the process, get a bit more sleep.
Meanwhile, back at the compound, everyone was in full panic mode.
-8-
When all the other drivers returned except Brad Hannah got a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach. When he’d pulled out of the mine three hours before he said he’d already had a line on his last load of the day.
It was a fully-loaded Walmart trailer he’d crawled into to inspect that morning. Fully loaded with items which were always on their “wish list.” Medications and first aid supplies. Several pallets of dog food which could be fed to the livestock. Several other pallets of fertilizer which Karen could use in her greenhouses. Lastly, a pallet shrink-wrapped in orange plastic to mask its contents.
Such pallets almost always contained ammunition.
It was a choice find by anybody’s estimation, and Brad told Hannah it would be “the best load of the day.”
Then Bryan announced over the radio he was bringing back a tanker with four thousand gallons of diesel on board.
“Okay, second best,” Brad said rather dejectedly. “But I’ll bet I beat him back.”
“That was the only clue anyone had of Brad’s whereabouts: That it was on I-10 and closer than Bryan’s tanker twenty miles east of Ft. Stockton.
It wasn’t much to go on. “Twenty miles east of Ft. Stockton” was more than 150 miles west of the mine, and even if Brad was closer than that, it was still a lot of ground to cover.
Further, nobody had been able to raise Brad by radio for hours. That was because he dropped his radio on the ground while tightening his tire chains.
When darkness fell Mark called an emergency meeting. Every adult gathered in the expansive dining room.
Everyone except Sami and Karen.
Sami had miscarried two years before.
She’d gone through a long bout of depression and was about to give up on her chances of being a mother.
Then she got pregnant again. Now, going on seven months, she was closer than ever before. And no one wanted her to suffer any more undue stress than she had to.
She and Karen shared a special bond. For Karen, way back when, miscarried twice in her early twenties. She went on to have two healthy children. She knew how Sami felt, and was perhaps the only one in the compound who could relate to her and provide her the comfort she needed.
While the others gathered in the dining room to plan Brad’s search and rescue, Sami and Karen sat in front of a roaring fire in the lobby area of the big house.
Karen wrapped her arms around her friend and rocked her back and forth. They talked about anything and everything, wherever Sami’s mind happened to go.
Everything except trucks and the weather and whatever might have happened to Brad.
Once everyone else was assembled, Mark wasted no time.
“I’m going to hand this right over to Frank. He’s got more experience in this kind of thing than the rest of us put together. Frank, the floor is yours.”
Frank stood and addressed the crowd.
“First of all, those of you with coats on ready to rush out the door, take them off. We’re going to do this thing smartly and methodically. And we’re not starting out until morning.”
Someone in the back of the room started to object.
“But…”
The objection went no farther. Everyone present recognized Frank’s experience in such matters. And the fact that Frank was probably the most level headed and logical man in the group.
Frank could have let the moment pass, but chose to explain his statement. Just in case there were others in the group who wanted to know why it was a bad idea to rush out in the dark.
“Brad is a smart man,” Frank started. “He knows winter survival as well as any of us. He won’t be out there walking along a lonely highway in the darkness hoping to be rescued. He’ll hunker down. If his tractor is working he’ll be running his heater periodically to stay warm. If he’s short of fuel he’ll take some from another rig. He knows to stay put until we come to him.
“And he knows we won’t come at night.
“If we go out there tonight we’d have almost no chance of finding him in the pitch darkness. We don’t even know where he is. We’ve got two hundred miles of highway to search for him, and it has to be done slowly in case he’s off the road.
“Spotting a rig that’s slid off the highway is hard enough even in daylight. At night it would be damn near impossible. Even if his lights are still operational there’s no guarantee we’d see them if he was on an embankment or in heavy woods.
“Finding him tonight would be like finding a needle in a haystack. And then by the time the sun came up and it was a little bit lighter out there, we’d be too exhausted to conduct a more thorough search.
“Trust me, gentlemen. We’ll do Brad a lot more good if we get some rest and strike out at first light. By that time I’ll have had the chance to make out some grid maps. We can break into teams and cover our ground methodically instead of willy nilly.
“In other words we’ll do things smarter, not harder.”
“But Frank, what if he’s hurt?”
“Same answer, Hannah. He knows the basics of self-aid. He can dress a wound, splint a fracture. He knows to stay hydrated and the warning signs he might be going into shock. He knows to hunker down and stay there and wait for help instead of getting out and exposing himself to the elements.
“And even if his rig is out of commission he knows his winter kit will keep him alive.”
Three weeks before, when the skies went dark again, Brad led a group of drivers who wanted to keep gathering loads until the roads became impassible.
Frank was against the idea at fir
st, but finally signed on after getting a commitment from all the drivers they’d pack a winter kit on all of their runs.
The kit consisted of blankets and first aid kits, several cans of food and water. Also two small propane bottles and a one burner camp stove that would also act as a heater.
Even as Frank addressed the group, Brad was in the toasty warm cab of his truck, opening up a can of Ravioli and appreciating Frank’s insistence he took the kit along.
-9-
Richard Sears was a plumber by trade, and had been instrumental in helping builder Tom Tuttle renovate the Eden Correctional Facility to make it hospitable for Eden’s seventy residents.
Thanks to his efforts, the old prison was no longer a place of misery, but a place where Edenites could ride out the freeze in relative comfort.
But that wasn’t why Marty Hankins asked him to form and lead a ten man militia to help defend the former prison.
No, that was because Richard was a natural leader of men. He had a friendly nature and exuded a quiet confidence that made people want to be his friend.
In addition, he possessed certain skills that none of the other sixty nine townsfolk had.
As a teenager he’d developed a fascination with the martial arts. Now in his late thirties, he was still active, possessing a brown belt in karate and being proficient in judo as well.
“I’d like for you to train and lead the team,” Marty told him. “Don’t try to make them experts. Just teach them how to overpower an aggressor with a gun and any other little tidbits that’ll make us safer as a whole.”
As his second in command, Richard chose Arthur Benitez, who’d retired from the Dallas Police Department a couple of years before the first freeze. He’d taken a job in the facility when it still held the bottom-feeders of society, and was one of the few people who’d seen the building from both sides of the bars.
Together Richard and Arthur had chosen eight volunteers from twelve who raised their hands. They would be the primary militia. All the volunteers would be trained; the extras to be designated as standby personnel and subject to call-up depending on what type of emergency arose at any given time.
One of Our Own: Final Dawn: Book 11 Page 3