Outside the Fire

by Boyd Craven

  With that taken care of, it was a good twenty-minute ride back in the direction of his house. His stop was a mini storage between the more built up portion of Macon and the suburbs. He still had time, if they stayed open as late as he saw on their website. If not, there was one a little bit closer to home, but he wasn’t sure he wanted it closer to home. Closer to home meant more people in the area knew him by sight. He didn’t want that—not yet. He pulled into the storage site with a good half hour before closing time.

  “Hello, sir. Looking to get a storage unit?” The polite twentyish woman behind the counter asked, putting down a romance novel she’d been reading.

  “Yes, I was wondering…would it be possible for me to rent a unit or two?”

  “If you need more than one, we have larger spaces available with our inside storage?” She asked, pulling out a printed map of the units.

  “Oh, let me see…hmm…See, part of it is for my daughter. She’s about your age and going to college. I’ve been meaning to put in a small workout room but she does not want to take all her stuff, and I’d like to get her own unit.”

  “Oh, that’s not a problem,” she said pulling out a log book and set it up next to the map and started flipping.

  “How big of a unit do you want to have for both?”

  “Something big enough to pull in a van and store it for mine,” he told her, “and maybe a ten by twelve for her?”

  “Let me see…”

  She flipped the map around so she could see it better and then flipped through the logbook.

  “Would you like the unit to have power? Some people use them as workshops, all we ask is that it’s kept swept and picked up and nothing left outside—”

  “I might do some work from there,” Steve said hopeful, but trying to hide it. “Yeah, how about power for both?”

  “All I’ve got that are close by each other are these two units,” she said highlighting two on the map and then turned it around so he could study them, “They’re bigger than you were wanting and have power, but they are in a hard-to-back-in-and-out-of area. I could give you a discount if you want both, but being in the very back and opposite sides of the building, you’d have to drive around it to get to both doors.”

  Again, Steve pretended not to be excited. The units themselves on the west side of the building were twenty by twenty. The east side of the building, had units backed up to it that were ten feet wide by twenty feet deep. The smaller unit shared a back wall with the larger one.

  “How much for both? I’ll be paying for a year in advance.”

  “For both…” she turned and started punching in numbers on an adding machine, “with one month’s free rent on each…plus the discount I’m going to give you…plus paying up front…”

  “Do you discount for cash?” Steve asked.

  The woman looked up, a devilish smile on her face.

  “I do,” she said. “What name should I put on the units?”

  “Cash, Steve Cash,” he said with a grin.

  “Welcome to Little Bonnie’s Mini Storage, Mister Cash. I’m Bonnie Sue. Both units with unmetered power, paid in cash a year in advance. Your total will be one-thousand seven-hundred and ninety-eight dollars.”

  I love America, Steve thought to himself and started counting out bills.

  The last stop of the evening turned out to be a dud. He’d gone to the local tractor supply store to look at covered trailers. If he was going to start doing a lot of preparing, he wanted to do so under the radar. He knew he’d have to wait a day or so to get plates and tags, but instead decided that he’d skip to what he had thought of as his fourth stop. He drove back into town and pulled into Sam’s parking lot.

  The door greeter gave him a wave after checking his membership card and headed back towards the aisles that held the dried goods. There’s something magical about a food warehouse like this. It could feed the entire city about one whole meal from everything stocked in there. Ninety-thousand mouths. When you broke that down into smaller numbers you could feed three hundred people eighteen hundred meals, which worked out to one hundred days’ worth of food, if his math was working. Maybe there was more, or less, but as he walked down the spice aisle, where they sold spices by the case, he marveled at how much there was.

  “Sir, do you need a cart or flatbed?” an employee asked, startling him.

  Steve looked him over while he stilled his heart rate some, and saw he was a man who looked to be in his late thirties. His skin tone suggested he was of Hispanic descent somewhere in his history, but the name tag read George. He was probably a transplant, much like Steve, and Steve figured he was as much of an outsider as he was to this area. Hell, he could probably be part American Indian, or a mixture of—

  “I’m not sure,” Steve admitted, “I have a weird request…and I’m trying to wrap my brain how to word it so I don’t sound like a loon.”

  “Just spit it out,” George said. “We get all types here. People running smaller grocery stores, shops, co-ops, churches, doomsday preppers, and then there are the really scary ones. You want to know who they are?”

  “Who?” Steve asked in a quiet voice.

  “Regular people. You have no idea what they are going to do. Regular people scare me,” George said and then broke out into a grin.

  “I aspire to be regular someday,” Steve said, chuckling now, “but not today.”

  “So what can I help you find?” George asked.

  “I just started working with my church, and we’re going to start a mission to Guatemala,” Steve lied. “To start with, I was wondering how I buy in bulk. I mean, not just in the big bags, but by the pallet?”

  “Wow, I didn’t peg you for a church missionary, but good on you.” George said with a grin. “You just tell me what you’re looking for and I’ll start you out on the best way that I can.”

  “That’s great. I think the plan is still to load up a semi piecemeal until it’s full and then send the trailer south, so I don’t think I’m going to have access to something like that…but what do you think about me picking up say, a pallet or two a day until they tell me to quit?”

  Steve knew somewhere, he was probably going to go to hell, but it was the most plausible ruse he could come up with. Plus, a lot of the food would be going to the church first, and then his backup plan—he hoped.

  “Well, if you have an idea on how much you’re going to buy, you might be better off buying it now and then picking it up by the load as needed. The pricing on things is going up and people are already getting upset they can’t buy a monster box of Cheetos for the same price they could a month ago.”

  “Has it gone up that fast here?” Steve asked.

  “Yeah, I do a lot of the ordering checks. Most of the system is automated but people have been buying less lately since we started having to raise the prices. The corporate overlords will only let us eat so much of it, but the transportation costs are killing us.”

  That was something he hadn’t thought of. How long would truckers deliver goods with the rising cost of fuel? Right here was a direct correlation between fuel and food prices. In a discounted warehouse of food….

  “Wow, I uh…I don’t know if I have that much of a plan yet. If I bring my personal truck and trailer, could you guys load it up with a pallet?”

  “Personal truck…unless it’s a one ton, I’d say be careful with the weight. For Guatemala, I’m guessing lots of grains. Rice, wheat berries, corn?”

  “Yeah, some real basics. Probably a ton of spices too but that’s…”

  “Yeah, I’ve done some missionary orders before. I could look up one I did for a couple who were sending food to Haiti a couple years back? Get an idea?”

  “That would be fantastic.”

  “It might take me a few, I have to run to the back. Want me to find you when I’m done or…”

  “I’ll give you my cell phone number. Give me a ring when you’re ready, and I’ll wander around this place and get some ideas?”
/>   “Perfect!”

  They exchanged numbers and George headed towards the back and Steve started walking the aisles. He didn’t mean to, but he overheard a lot of people shopping in there. Some were talking about how the increased pricing to food, fuel and energy costs were making things more difficult. He saw one mother put away a big box of sugared cereal over her kid’s loud protests to only get a big twin pack of rolled oats. It hurt his heart to see them sacrifice what they wanted versus what they could afford, but he was doing much of the same with his preps. He could go out for luxury, but didn’t have that kind of budget.

  Then he wandered into the middle of the store where they had everything from clothing to books, to outdoor equipment. Tables, chairs, picnic benches, camping gear, grills, stoves… and he suddenly knew what he wanted to do with that small ten by twenty foot storage unit, and although it would do storage, if he could pull it off, it would be a place like his storm shelter. A place to temporarily bug out. It would take some work…

  His phone rang and he agreed on where to meet George. He found him less than a minute later and although black marker had blotted out a lot of information, quantities and old pricing was there. The couple’s order was staggering and would have taken most of his chunk of money he withdrew, so he thanked George and asked if he could take it with him and come back in a day or two with a plan of his own. No sense in filling a storage unit to capacity, if construction is needed to make a fortified bolt hole.

  CHAPTER 13

  “Dad, I want you to know something,” Amber said, as they were putting bags of rice on a push cart in the church’s parking lot.

  “What’s that, sweetie?” he asked.

  “I might think you’re a little weird for doing stuff like this, for us I mean…but you’re…I’m proud of you.”

  Steve beamed at his daughter. In the last two weeks since he’d made large strides towards getting the church filled, he soon learned he had physical limitations and his back was absolutely killing him.

  “Thanks kiddo,” he told her. “It’s the right thing to do.” And besides, it’ll keep the community from coming after us if the worst should happen, he finished mentally, knowing it was a selfish thought.

  “Hey, when I start back to school, would you let me get a parking permit?”

  “That was random,” Steve said.

  She grinned at her dad and kept schlepping till the cart was hard to push. She started up the ramp with it and about the halfway point Steve put his weight and muscle behind it. His back had been killing him since he overdid it a couple days ago. It was before he’d ordered the forty-dollar foldable hand cart off of Amazon. This was Amber’s second trip with him.

  “Hey, I was wondering if you two would be in today. Come on in!” Mary said, opening the church doors wide.

  Amber took over the cart now that she didn’t have to fight extra gravity from the ramp and got it over the sill and into the church.

  “Yeah, I sorta fibbed to the guys at Sam’s club and now I have to make good on my promise and take a good chunk worth of a semi-trailer load of food.”

  “Oh dear,” Mary said, her eyes huge. “I don’t think we can fit that much in the classroom.”

  “My dad has a backup plan for his backup plan,” Amber said, and flipped her hair out of her eyes.

  “Hi Amber, want a hand with that?” Joseph called, coming in from behind the altar where he’d been polishing brass.

  “Sure!” Amber said cheerfully.

  Joseph walked up and with each step, he looked between Steve and Amber and then broke out into a big grin.

  “They can get it. You look like you’re beat.”

  “I kind of am,” Steve admitted.

  He followed her and she sat down in the back pew.

  “Where’s James at?” he asked, dropping the “pastor” title in private, which James appreciated.

  “He went to the office supply store. I guess the sermon was so popular that people were asking for more information on doing their own food storage. I just sort of hate that it takes global strife to get people to do something that makes sense.”

  “I wonder what made the LDS churches include that into their doctrine?” Steve asked her.

  “I don’t know, we don’t really study them. James would know more…”

  Mary’s words trailed off as she heard teenage laughter and then the murmur of voices. A second later, both smiling, Joseph and Amber headed past them towards the door.

  “We’ve got this; you rest up,” she called.

  “Ok, I’ll let you young ones do it,” Steve called back.

  “I hate to ask, but you must have sunk a lot of money into this. Are you sure?”

  “Food is the cheap part,” Steve said feeling uncomfortable. Besides, I can use it as a tax write-off if nothing ever happens and we end up having to donate it.”

  “I can actually write you a receipt for that, we are a nonprofit after all,” Mary said with a grin.

  Steve hadn’t thought of that and chuckled. What he told George at the supermarket warehouse wasn’t all that far off from the truth after all.

  “I might take you up on that by tax season,” Steve said, knowing his wife would appreciate the gesture as much or more than he did.

  “You were listening to the radio on your way over?” Mary asked.

  “No, why?” Steve asked.

  “Well, seems that fuel and part shortages are slowing down a ton of refineries, they are expecting huge price increases. It sounds like you and I were thinking a lot alike, planning ahead.”

  “You were the prepper in the family, weren’t you?” Steve asked as the kids pushed another cartload in the doorway.

  “Yes, but James was an easy convert. His family grew up hunting and fishing. He wasn’t a farmer but his grandmother was a sharecropper so there was a lot of things he knew but hadn’t thought of. That’s why what’s going on here is so…”

  “Scary,” Steve finished.

  “Dad…” Amber called from the other room.

  “I think we’re being summoned,” Mary said, standing.

  “Yeah?” he said, and followed her.

  They walked down the short hallway that was left of the main worship hall. The first three doors opened up to Sunday school rooms they were using, the last one on the left was a little larger as it was the back corner of the building that housed the church. At the very end of the hallway, was a bathroom, but it was the last door on the left they opened.

  “What’s up, sweetie?” Steve asked.

  Amber rolled her eyes, but she had half a smile on her face, one arm wiping the sweat off her forehead.

  “Is it safe to stack this all up like this? Won’t it like break the floor and fall into the basement?”

  Steve looked at the room, his eyes squinting. They had quite literally placed a pallet on the floor and had been stacking fifty-pound bags of rice along the back wall, forty pound bags of beans the next pallet to the left, and then lentils, textured vegetable protein, coffee, and a growing pile of canned meat.

  “Oh wow, there’s more here than I thought,” Steve said.

  “It isn’t just you adding to the stockpile now,” Mary said. “We’ve started adding some of ours and a couple trusted members of the church are working on the canned meat.”

  “Trusted members?” Amber asked.

  “People we can trust with a secret as big as this,” Joseph answered for his mother. “Operational Security. That’s why we’re putting a different lockset on it come Sunday before the next service.”

  “Yeah, we’ve had a couple people curious what we’re doing because they’ve seen you and a few other people unloading stuff. I told them we’re working on an outreach project and doing some remodeling,” Mary answered.

  “Huh, well, I hope we can all get the tax credit for this someday. I hope it’s never needed,” Steve told her.

  “Yeah, me too,” Joseph said. “Hey, Mr. Taylor, do you want me to give you a hand unloading thi
s stuff at your house?”

  The problem was, Steve thought, they weren’t going back to their house. He looked over at Amber to see if she had a way out for him. She however, took his look in another direction.

  “He’d be a great help,” she said and Joseph grinned broadly. “I can run him home if that’s ok with Mrs. Johnson?”

  “Oh, I don’t mind. I’m heading out in twenty minutes anyways. I can always swing by there on my way home?”

  “It might take us a little longer than that. Now that we have room for more weight….”

  “Don’t you worry then, I don’t mind. You’ve been driving all summer long now Amber, I trust you’ll treat him with care.”

  “Oh, I will, don’t worry,” Amber said.

  Dry mouthed, Steve said his goodbyes and loaded the kids into the truck.

  “So, you want to see the real secret?” Amber asked him as soon as the truck started rolling.

  “What?” Joseph asked.

  Steve could have almost died. She hadn’t misunderstood at all.

  “Oh, wow. What is this place?” Joseph asked, walking into the big storage unit that was empty, ready for Steve to back the truck in.

  “It’s my dad’s secret room,” she told him, and motioned for her dad to back in.

  He did and she turned on a pedestal lamp. Steve cut the truck off to combat the fumes and then pulled the door closed, leaving them in a gloomy space, empty save themselves and the truck. The room itself was plain, with unfinished green board on the walls and a cement pad.

  “What do you mean secret….”

  His words cut off as Amber pushed on one of the unfinished panels against the back-right wall. It swung backwards into the storage unit behind it. Steve reached in and flicked on the light he’d installed a switch for. With a flicker, fluorescent lights came on illuminating the much smaller room. At the far end, the roll-up door was hidden behind what looked like an unfinished wall. Instead of the green board on the walls in here, there were layers of cement board. It was unfinished, as evidenced of half the walls showing at least three different layers of the hardy building material. A stack of cement board was leaned up against the side with the light switch and had several outlets near the floor.