Mike went to work on the deer and soon had it cut up into nice manageable pieces. It would make great pemmican, but the meat had to age first. Ordinarily, he would not have done the butchering so soon and would have preferred to let it hang, but there was no opportunity at times like these. It would have been difficult to haul the whole carcass on just one bike and he wasn’t about to let the meat go to waste. They carefully wrapped the useable meat in a garbage bag.
Mike knew that in the grand scheme, things had just begun and that wildlife would be heading for the high country just as they were. If anyone expected to live off the land when the balloon went up, they would be in for a hungry surprise. Animals were not as stupid as some people might think; they would also be in survival mode once humans started coming for them. This one had simply stumbled into its death.
Chad and Linda did the cooking, which was a benefit to all since they were both professional chefs. His specialty was meats; hers was pastries. She had graduated from a school just outside of Paris about ten years back and he attended and graduated from a school in Naples Italy around the same time. The cave filled with mouth-watering smells, despite their limited resources. Mike was hungry and so were the rest of them.
In selecting group members, however, simply being a chef wouldn’t have been enough, so it was helpful that Chad was a national Pistol Shot Champion and Linda was an archery shooter of some note. She had competed in the Olympics and did well, and even though she didn’t win any medals, she was selected to be a judge at another Olympic Games a few years later.
The two of them first met at a chili cook off and their quick wit, great looks, and personalities had them dating for a couple of years. When asked what brought them together, Linda always attributed it to their love of and expertise in cooking. Chad always told his close friends it was her smile and perfect legs that did it for him.
They were amazing to watch. When someone knows what they’re doing, they make it look effortless and this time was no different; everyone was eating in short order. Mike suggested the guards stay put until a relief could take their place. These were unpredictable times so they couldn’t let their guard down for one minute.
Chad had actually brought a small cooler loaded with meats and Linda had other foodstuffs in the one she was carrying, along with several normal accoutrements. Chad joked that the apparent end of the world didn’t mean he had to act uncivilized by wasting the filet mignon he had bought earlier that day. He had thrown a few loaded clips of ammo on the top of it, along with his personal set of knives. Linda’s bow, a sixty-pound compound, was always at the ready and Mike was fairly certain she could easily take out a sentry from three hundred feet in near silence.
One of the decisions they had made years ago, when these people met and formed the initial members, was that everyone would have at least two side arms… either 9mm or .45 ACP in order to reduce confusion. Their battle rifles would be the standard .308/7.62 NATO, with a backup of something in a .223 caliber. The decision was based on the billions of rounds available in those calibers worldwide. Other weapons in their stockpile consisted of 12 gauge shotguns. The pistols and rifles they used for practice were .22 rimfire because the ammo was cheaper to shoot than standard center-fire cartridges and easily transported in bricks of 500.
The group agreed that each person would purchase and bring to the retreat 10,000 rounds of each caliber to ensure there was adequate ammo to go around. Some of them opted to bring additional weapons, and that wasn’t discouraged, but by adopting a standard, they were able to buy the reloading components in large lots, which saved them money.
They had several hunting rifles amply fitted with scopes for more accurate shooting. Each rifle had the see-through-type scope mounts installed on them, which meant the shooter had the use of iron sights in addition to the scope. Flip over scope mounts were discouraged because it was hard to keep a scope properly sighted-in every time there was a need to flip the scope over to one side.
The scope made for more accurate shots each and every time. Waste not, want not, or so it went. There were also a couple of .458 Winchesters, which were referred to as the “car stoppers.” One shot in the motor with one of those cannons and a vehicle was not going anywhere ever again.
Every person in the group had copies of the Ingram MAC-11 sub-machine gun in 9 mm. It had been a favorite of the Green Berets and Navy SEALS “way back when” and was still a formidable and robust assault weapon. This baby was perfect for patrolling and working in close quarters such as in a house-to-house search, and for what was often referred to as “up close and personal” type work.
Over a period of months, a reliable machinist had copied these weapons piece-by-piece and made all the proper heat treatments to factory perfection. One other nice thing about these arms, other than their superb functionality, was that they were as sterile as it got; there were absolutely no stampings anywhere. The group found these weapons to be very reliable and acquired enough handmade spare parts to last quite some time.
When they were all done, a few had been stashed in the caches and many more in the armory at the retreat. Other goodies were acquired in a similar manner, having been fabricated from the originals. Once in a great while, the real McCoy was sought and found but that always ended up being a chancy business. Every transaction was extremely dangerous.
With everyone well-fed and the clean-up done, they took time to make the cave secure again. Several of the men stacked rocks against the cave entrance, giving the appearance of a rockslide, while others cut branches to stack near it to hide the access. Mike had replaced the safety pins in the Claymores, put them away, and carefully wrapped up the trip wire.
They all worked together to hide the tracks that led up to the cave’s opening, including the deer’s last stand. It was unlikely that someone would stumble upon it unless they already knew where to look, but they wanted to be certain.
The venison was divided up among several people for transport and Mike took a minute to outline the travel rules they would follow. They would ride single file, with spacing of at least two hundred foot intervals. No chatter, and no one was to stop unless they all stopped together. If the last person in line didn’t show up after two minutes, they were to assume a battle ready position. Their next stop would be at the last cache, which was about forty more miles down the trail. As he talked, Mike’s breath appeared and dissipated; it was chilly and they were steadily going up in elevation.
“Everybody ready?”
They all nodded and rolled on the power, following the leader with a roar.
Chapter 5 Forgotten Trail
They traveled cross-country for fifteen uneventful minutes through off-road areas before they arrived at what they knew to be an old railroad bed. It no longer looked like one, however, and had taken on the appearance of an old animal trail. There were lots of overgrown bushes and other weeds, but the path didn’t appear to go anywhere.
Large portions of it were covered by landslides from years ago and most people who came this way didn’t bother to go any farther because of the difficulty required in getting past them. The old railroad bed was bordered by a steep mountain face on one side and on the other by a sheer drop off to the valley below, which got progressively higher as the path ascended the mountain.
At first glance, it looked like the end of the road but they knew there was a way around it. They had to find it and that wasn’t easy because members of the group had hidden it years ago. They had to clear it now, just as on every trip up, before they could go any further.
They dismounted and worked in a chain to clear the obstacles that prevented access to the small opening through the huge pile of rocks and dirt. Once it was unblocked, they all went through and painstakingly blocked it again so no one would know they had passed through.
The railroad company had come through decades ago and removed the ties and tracks, long before any of the group discovered this place. The firmly-packed rock bed still existed and provi
ded a steady, but gradual, upward grade that was a perfect weed infested trail used only by animals and the group. It was long ago forgotten by all and simply sat there, year after year, unnoticed and unused. As they climbed, the bed switched back and forth as it went up the grade in a long, winding pattern that hugged the side of the mountain.
There was no longer any industry in this area; there hadn’t been any for nearly a century. The railroad, in previous years, hauled out coal, cattle, and lumber. That was during the heyday when coal mines were king in these parts; now they weren’t even a flickering memory. The last coal and lumber taken out of these mountains was in 1918 and had remained bereft of activity since.
That is, until Mike and his best friend Daniel discovered this access several years ago while out riding. Over the years, it had become increasingly difficult to find good places to ride and this area was a great find. It was remote enough to serve their needs, yet close enough to access during a weekend outing if they wanted to camp out.
Mike took out his GPS and read the waypoint he had saved months ago. The way to the retreat was firmly planted in his memory, but he liked to extract the GPS or a compass so that his companions would see repeatedly how it worked. If they ever found themselves alone it might be necessary to do this themselves, even though he was fairly confident that all of them knew the way by heart after all these years. Still, all of them had the same make and model GPS unit in order to assure that everyone was doing the same thing. He noted that they were less than halfway to the next stop and still a bit farther from the retreat itself.
They topped off their bikes during the break and headed for the final cache and then their ultimate destination, the retreat. It would be home sweet home for all of them now and none of them knew for how long. As they got closer, the rising excitement in the group could be felt. Mike wasn’t the only one who liked where they were headed.
Travel on the old railroad bed was bumpy, but no more so than any other off-road ride on unimproved trails. They were making good time but when Mike noticed more large rocks lying on the old bed, it suddenly made him wonder why those boulders were there. The first time they came down this path years ago, Mike and Dan were riding together and there weren’t that many slides. There had only been the occasional slide and those were minor. He concluded that they were a result of some of the earthquakes that had occasionally happened.
They rounded a bend in the rail bed where they could look down to where the main highway turned to the east. From there, it winded out of sight through more interlocked mountains far off in the distance.
The vista here was awesome, making it easy for each of them to stare off into the valley below and get lost in their own imagination. The sky had begun to clear, but many cumulus clouds continued to roll by and surround the tops of the distant mountains; they appeared to be staked to the peaks as a collar on a coat.
Higher up were the long, spreading clouds that were referred to as “Mare’s Tails,” or stratus clouds in the proper nomenclature. They stretched across the blue sky for miles and Mike guessed the winds up there were strong, given the span. Where they were on the ledge, the breeze was slight… just enough to stir the hair of the women that accompanied his group.
Mike made a mental note that this would be an excellent place for a “Look-out Station.”
They continued to climb for quite some time. The dirt bikes had more than enough power, but the terrain and cliff face warranted a respectful and cautious speed. It was a long way down to the valley floor from their vantage point. The river could be seen as it paralleled the road but it was still too far for any serious recognizable details.
There were large campfires down there that sent smoke into the clear mountain air. He counted twenty-five or thirty of them altogether. It wasn’t possible to see what the people who made them were doing, just that they were there, their fires giving them away. The vehicles appeared smaller than grains of salt from where Mike and his companions had stopped; people didn’t register in their vision.
It was clear that something was going on below and it sparked his imagination as to what it might be. It had stopped drizzling a half hour before and the sun was already out. A glint from one of the windshields occasionally sparkled as the sun’s position moved ever so slowly from east to west, or when a vehicle moved and caught the sun’s rays.
Linda had a Grundig transistor Satellite Radio and tuned it to a man saying,
Casualties are rising by the hour, FEMA estimates more than three hundred thousand are dead or horribly burned in and around each of the two cities struck by the Terrorists. Others are getting sick from the radiation and accidents are happening by the hundreds, adding to the staggering numbers of casualties.
Hospitals, emergency services, and authorities have been overwhelmed. Atlanta is devastated, as is Washington, D.C., and there are widespread reports of huge, blackened holes at the two ground zero areas. Helicopter flights are not possible because of the nuclear clouds hovering over those areas and we have been told that the entire area is being evacuated. As I speak; the traffic jams are monstrous.
All surviving members of Congress and the Supreme Court were relocated early this morning to a secure location for their safety and there were surprisingly few casualties among them. Several members are still unaccounted for, but authorities are searching for them to protect them from what is being called the worst attack on the United States in the entire history of our great nation.
The President and his Cabinet, along with their general staff, have been relocated to an undisclosed location, as well. Government officials have assured us that the President will address the nation this evening at six o’clock, Eastern Standard Time. It is believed that he will, at that time, ask Congress to declare unconditional war on…
Static…
The message cut out for a moment before squelching back …again, that will be about twelve hours from now. Fires are raging everywhere.
Suddenly the radio station went silent again. They waited, but it didn’t come back.
Linda moved the dial and almost instantly found another station that had someone with an Arab accent speaking …that you evil Americans have felt the wrath of Allah, the magnificent, and it is not done. We will kill all of you infidels…
She turned the radio off and said, “Well, I guess we know who did this, don’t we?” She had taken her helmet off earlier to hear the radio better and her blonde hair was swaying in the slight breeze.
“Any comments before we shove off?” Mike asked. He wanted to get the show on the road. They were not in any danger here and the chance of anyone else being in this place was extremely remote. Nonetheless, he cautioned them to stay alert anyway, having told them often enough.
“Expect the unexpected, and you can count on it happening. If you anticipate something will happen, it won’t catch you by surprise.”
They put their helmets back on and cranked up their bikes. In less than a minute, they were single filing it down the old right of way. As the long, winding turn developed it swung them to the left and then came to an abrupt halt. In the middle of the bed was another landslide.
It would take a bit of an effort, but they could easily get over it by removing some of the larger debris and rocks. Mike parked his bike and asked someone to set up a guard behind them while two others went over the top on foot to watch in that direction.
He took note that the sheer drop to the east was now at least three thousand feet straight down to the river valley below. The small looking ribbon of water sparkled in the sunshine and gave off small, bluish hued, brilliant flashes that looked like diamonds for just an instant when they caught his eye at the right angle.
To the west was a sheer cliff that had been carved from the side of the mountain more than a century past. Above the granite rock were evergreen trees that grew defiantly in profusion and topped the crest of the sheer rock face all along this side of the mountain.
They began by removing a few of the me
dium sized rocks and then moved the large ones back and forth until those, too, were out of the way. One by one the smaller debris that surrounded them came loose and fell off the edge, down to the valley below.
As he worked, Mike accidentally bumped into Caroline’s chest and it was not lost on him that it felt soft. He quickly said that he was sorry but she paused, looked into his eyes, and said,
“Why?”
He worked a little faster on the next rock.
In fifteen minutes, a path was cleared and Mike caught the glimpse of something off in the distance coming up through the valley. He noticed the familiar shine of it well before he heard it.
He grabbed his machete and began hacking at some of the various bushes growing randomly along the bed. He yelled for them to bring their bikes over and when they did, he began stacking the cut brush over them. It went fast, luckily for them.
The whine and clacking of the rotors was turning toward them. They scurried under an end of the brush and waited. The chopper veered off and circled back toward the river valley again and Mike didn’t think anyone had seen them. Why would someone think that anyone was way up here?
He thought it in silence; why cause alarm in the others?
One by one, they went over the slide area and waited on the other side for the last person to complete the group. When they were together again, Mike changed the standard travel orders to maintain better control.
“The distance separating each of us needs to be closer, so make it fifty feet. Follow my lead. Everyone ready?”
They nodded their heads, and as he rolled on the power, each one fell in behind the other at the proper intervals as they eased their clutches to engage the gears. They rode single file for another ten minutes and came to yet another slide area.
Avalon: The Retreat Page 4