“Perhaps,” she’d responded. “But the question is, are you ready to make that step?”
“I don’t know, honey. I honestly don’t know.”
-31-
Hannah waited until Marty and Glenna finished eating their dinners. She had the sense that after she shared her news with them they’d have no more appetite.
“I have something to talk to you guys about.”
Marty smiled and said, “Wow. The way you said that makes it sound like bad news.”
But Hannah didn’t return his smile. And Marty’s own smile quickly left his face. He’d said it in a joking way, but he was absolutely right. He saw the serious look on Hannah’s face and knew that whatever she had to say wasn’t going to be good.
Marty looked to Mark and saw the same look.
“What? What’s the matter?”
Hannah looked at Glenna and saw that her eyes were moistening. Glenna was a very sensitive woman by nature and had been through a lot of heartache and misery in recent years at the hands of some very bad men. And she had two small children to protect. She was likely to take the news a lot harder than Marty.
She took Glenna’s hands in hers.
“I have reason to believe there may be another meteorite headed our way. And there’s a chance it could collide with the earth in the same way Saris 7 did.”
Marty and Glenna looked at each other. Glenna’s jaw quite literally dropped. Marty was never at a loss for words. But he had nothing to say. He put his arm around Glenna and pulled her closer to him.
Hannah went on.
“It’s called Cupid 23. It was a piece that broke off of Saris 7 in the collision that diverted Saris 7 toward the earth. At one time they were following the same path toward earth, but that may have changed. NASA no longer exists and there’s no way of finding out one way or the other.”
Glenna found her voice. It was shaky and full of fear.
“But… how can that happen to us twice? I mean, they said the first time was a one in a million chance…”
“As I said, it may not happen. I might be jumping to conclusions. I hope I am. But it’s possible, I believe, because heavenly bodies that break apart sometimes continue to follow the same paths.”
“But… wouldn’t it have hit us already? I mean, Saris 7 hit us so many years ago.”
“Cupid 23 was moving much slower, and was much more erratic. That tendency- the tendency to be erratic, may have caused it to change course. To veer off its original path. But I’m afraid it’s impossible to say without NASA’s help.”
Marty asked, “Is there any way to stop it?”
“No. All we can do is prepare for it and hope it never happens.”
Mark said, “That’s why we’re telling you. We’ve decided to start restocking our mine. To build up our reserves of food and water and fuel. So that if it didn’t veer off, and if it does impact the earth, we have someplace to go.
“We wanted to give you the opportunity to help us. And to tell you that if Cupid 23 does hit the earth, you are welcome to come into the mine with us to ride out the next freeze.”
“To help you how, exactly?”
“Help us gather. Bryan and Brad are both qualified truck drivers. But they don’t have the experience or the speed that you and Lenny have. We want to cruise the interstates and state highways, looking for trailers and tankers we can use. A ten-thousand gallon water truck would be nice if we could find it. We could just park it in the back of the mine and use it as we needed it. Trucks full of diesel would be great too. And any box trailer that might contain bottled water or soft drinks or food. We’re thinking that if we have four truckers who are out there finding trailers, making them serviceable, then hooking up to them and bringing them here, we can gather what we need in just a few short weeks.”
Marty was skeptical.
“I hate to rain on your parade, Mark. But ten thousand gallon trucks full of potable water were hard to find even before the freeze. I mean, the highway department or construction companies used them during ground preparation, but it would be a miracle to just find one sitting around full of water. Diesel is the same way. For every twenty tankers of gasoline out there on the highway, there may be one tanker of diesel. And odds are fifty-fifty that it’s empty, and was on its way back to the refinery for refill. Any chance you could use gasoline instead?”
“No. We decided early on that having large stores of gasoline was too risky. Diesel was much safer to store. So we bought diesel generators instead.”
“Also, Mark, most of the trailers out there aren’t road worthy. They’ve been sitting there for better than ten years. All the rubber air hoses are probably weather-cracked and leaking. Same with the seals, and many of the tires.”
“We expected that. But the air lines are easy to replace. You should have a lot of them at the truck stop. And if we run short we can pull them off the trucks we pick clean and use them over and over again.”
“So you don’t plan on just parking them all in the mine? You’re going to send them back out there?”
“It depends. Like I said, if we can find water or diesel tankers we’ll park them in the mine and use them as storage until we need what’s in them. The miscellaneous trucks, like Walmart trucks, we’ll bring to the mine and have our crews go through them. They can pick them clean of anything we can use, then take them back out to the highway, drop them, and find another.”
“You know, Mark, I’ve heard an awful lot about this mine of yours, but I’ve never seen it. How big is it, anyway, and how many people will it hold?”
“Would you like a tour?”
“Sure.”
“Grab your jacket. Let’s go.”
-32-
Glenna was a bit claustrophobic, probably from being locked in a small room each night for two years when Castillo held her hostage. So she was a bit afraid to walk through the long tunnel which connected the big house to the mine. She clutched tightly to Marty’s arm and Hannah held her free hand to help reassure her.
“The mine will be much more open,” Hannah said. The ceilings are about forty feet high and each bay is about that wide. You won’t feel quite so cramped.”
They’d left Glenna’s children in Karen’s capable hands, with the promise they’d be no more than half an hour or so.
It was the first time Hannah had been in the tunnel for more than a year. She noticed that several of the bulbs were burned out along the way, and a few more were flickering to signal their eventual demise. The scent of the mine, a mix between dusky and salty, came flooding back to her, and she was surprised she’d forgotten it.
The mine had been her home for seven long years while they waited for the world to thaw out again.
She said a silent prayer to herself that it wouldn’t have to be home again.
There were a couple of places the group passed where the tunnel was wider than the rest. The sides of the tunnel weren’t cut cleanly, as in the rest of the tunnel. They appeared, rather, to have been blasted out by explosives.
Those were the areas, now repaired, which had been collapsed by dynamite to trap marauders who were bent on attacking the mine.
Marauders who were trapped in the collapsed mine and eventually suffocated to death.
The four finally came to the end of the tunnel, to a set of eleven wooden steps, painted traffic yellow, leading into the mine itself.
The steps contained blood stains, a permanent souvenir and reminder of the value of the mine. And that as long as it existed, it would be coveted by others.
Provided they knew about it. The group of forty who’d originally inhabited the mine took great pains, then and now, in keeping it a secret.
Many of the old timers who lived in the Junction and Kerrville areas, of course, knew of the existence of Salt Mountain.
Some of them knew that back in the 1940s, a large mining operation carved out most of the mine, until it was determined that it had been played out. It was no longer profitable to operate.<
br />
Oh, there was still salt there. Plenty of it. But not enough to fill the forty trucks per day that it filled in its heyday.
The mine was closed and abandoned.
Until Mark and Hannah bought it, fortified it, and stocked it in their preparations for Armageddon.
Or at least the chaos that Saris 7 brought with it.
Those happening up to the mine’s entrance would be forgiven in thinking that it hadn’t been touched since it went out of business in 1949. The hard salt ground outside the huge roll-up door didn’t hold tire tracks, any more than hardened concrete would have. The door itself was covered with spider webs and a heavy duty lock which could only be defeated with a blowtorch.
Adorning the huge overhead door at regular intervals were signs, purported to be from the United States Bureau of Mines, which warned visitors to keep out.
DANGER!
COLLAPSED MINE
EXTREMELY UNSTABLE
Had one of the visitors talked to some of the mine’s former workers, if any were still alive, they might have learned some interesting things.
The mine was not unstable. The year before it closed, it was given a thorough inspection by the bureau, and determined to be safe for another two hundred years or more.
Further, the mine was closed purely for economic reasons. There never was any collapse.
Had those same visitors investigated further, they’d have noticed something else that seemed rather odd. In the woods, not far from the mine entrance, high in the trees where they were rather inconspicuous, were surveillance cameras. They were aimed at the overhead door itself, and at the approach to the entrance from a local access road which branched off of State Highway 83.
As for the heavy duty lock, it was merely a decoy.
Yes, it looked impenetrable.
In reality, it only looked fierce and forbidding.
In reality, it wasn’t even locked, although anyone on the outside couldn’t possibly tell.
The high security lock was welded to the heavy steel door, flush against the door’s frame. But the door was actually held into place by heavy duty bars on the inside. The bars, in turn, were held up by heavy gauge iron hangers. To open the door, one merely had to lift the bars off the hangers and put them to one side.
And it could only be done from the inside.
Immediately inside the overhead door were a series of bays which divided a very long tunnel leading deep into the mine’s interior. After just under a hundred yards, the entrance tunnel connected with the main tunnel, which ran for two hundred yards to the north and six hundred yards to the south. It was from this main tunnel that tributaries, or expansion tunnels, were dug farther and farther into the mountain itself.
Some of the expansion tunnels ran for half a mile before the mine was deemed to be “played out.” But the group of forty never needed that much space. They only used the first two hundred feet or so of each expansion tunnel, which they numbered and redesignated as “bays.”
It was in these bays the group ate, slept, did their laundry, went to school and amused themselves.
For seven long years.
-33-
At the top of the stairs the first thing Marty and Glenna noticed was how dimly lit the mine was.
“Wait here,” Mark told them. “Let me get the lights turned on.”
With a flashlight, he made his way quickly to the bay which held two huge diesel generators. As he’d done countless times before, he opened the door to the manual start switch and held a button down to heat the glow plug. At the same time he pressed a tiny pump several times to prime the engine. Finally, when the glow plug glowed a bright fiery red, he pressed the ignition switch and the generator sprang to life.
He reached for another switch and changed it from “Auxiliary” to “Direct.”
The overhead lights in the main tunnel of the mine immediately began to glow. They were halogen lights, and would take several minutes to shine at full capacity. But the mine was already light enough to walk through safely.
The generator automatically throttled higher and higher as more and more electricity was sucked from its bowels.
It had been programmed to run for only one hour per day. That was enough to keep its own batteries charged, as well as two huge forklift batteries, each one as big as a small desk. It was those two batteries which kept the mine minimally lit during normal operations, when it was essentially in caretaker status.
When Mark had switched the generator to “Direct,” he told it in effect to light the entire mine, and to start charging the long bank of twenty of the desk-sized batteries.
When the mine was occupied, the generator provided enough real-time power to power the lights and equipment needed to run the day to day operations. The battery bank was charged so the generator didn’t have to run continuously, and to provide a limited amount of power for nighttime operations.
The second generator was identical to the first. It was used as backup in the event the main failed or was down for routine maintenance.
Mark hurried back to the group, where he found Hannah explaining the huge mountains of salt and dirt which filled most of the bay in front of the tunnel entrance.
“The tunnel was dug by hand, and with the use of pneumatic drills, and took over a year to dig. But that was okay, because we had plenty of time to kill while we were waiting for the world to thaw. The reason why some of it was salt and some dirt was because as we got away from the mine the earth transitioned from pure salt, to a mixture of salt and dirt, to pure dirt.
“The diggers were happy to see the dirt, but learned to hate it later on. The salt was hard as a rock, almost like concrete, and was hard to drill through. But it was a lot easier to shore up. Once they transitioned to dirt, they found it was softer but much looser. They had to deal with frequent cave-ins, and it was much harder to shore up than the salt was.”
Marty whistled.
“So all these tons of salt and dirt were removed by hand from the tunnel?”
“Yes. They filled dozens of orange five gallon Home Depot buckets at a time with the loose fill and then carried them by hand back into the tunnel to dump. When they got to the far end of the tunnel and had almost three hundred yards to lug them, they finally got smart and built themselves some wagons to pull. But it was still a very long way to walk.”
Only the first few lights of each bay had bulbs. The rest were removed long before to save electricity.
Hannah pointed down into the darkness, past the huge mounds of loose salt and dirt and a pile of broken timbers and railroad ties.
“You can’t see them from here, but past those pallets of lumber down there are the showers where the diggers used to wash off at the end of each shift. It’s also where Sami and some of the other girls played practical jokes on them from time to time.”
She winked at Glenna and said, “Remind me to tell you a secret about Rusty sometime.”
But she didn’t elaborate.
Mark led the group down the main tunnel shaft. Hannah asked if she felt better now, since the ceilings were much higher here, the walls much farther apart.
“A bit, but I still don’t know if I could live here.”
Hannah’s eyes caught Mark’s. Both were concerned.
Along the way Mark pointed out what the various bays were used for during the occupation of the mine.
“This was our transportation bay. It was where we stored all of our vehicles and did routine maintenance on them. You’ll notice the exhaust hoses hanging from the ceiling. They vent to the outside, and we attached them to the vehicles’ exhaust pipes. That way we could run them for a few minutes periodically without letting carbon monoxide build up in the mine.”
Marty whistled when he saw, in addition to two forklifts and three pickup trucks, two shiny Kenworth tractors sitting side by side.
“Are those in running condition, Mark?”
“Oh, yes. Brad comes over here once a week and cranks them up for ten minute
s each. Then he drives them around the mine for a few minutes to keep the bearings and everything else lubricated. They were brand new when we leased them, so they’re twelve years old now. But neither of them has more than six thousand miles on them.”
“What did you use them for?”
“While we were stocking the mine for Saris 7, Bryan got his commercial driver’s license and a certification to tow an eight thousand gallon diesel tanker. He used it to make runs to an independent refinery outside of Corpus Christi and hauled all of our diesel back with it. We stored most of it in five thousand gallon tanks in our fuel dump, which is two bays down. You’ll see it in a minute. Once they were filled, he got one last load and then dropped the tanker itself in the fuel dump. It’s still there, but empty now, but he keeps it maintained.”
Glenna sniffed the air and asked, “What’s that smell? It smells like cow poop.”
-34-
Hannah laughed.
“That’s exactly what it is. When Colonel Montgomery first paid us a visit a few months ago, he wasn’t very friendly. He demanded all of our livestock to help stock his breeding operation in San Antonio. He said he had the right to take them by authority of the United States government, but that we should be happy because we would be helping to feed the survivors in San Antonio and Bexar County.
“We made the colonel a counter offer. We told him we didn’t mind helping the people of San Antonio and Bexar County. But that we weren’t going to give up everything we’d worked so hard for, for nine long years. We said we’d give him half of everything. Half the cattle, half the pigs, half the chickens.”
“What did he say?”
“He didn’t like the offer. He said he’d just come in here and take them by force. So we convinced him that we had armed men in all the barns, and would shoot every last animal, every last chicken, if he tried to take them by force.
“He finally relented. He sent trucks to pick up half of everything. But he never knew that he didn’t get half. He actually got a quarter. Because they didn’t know about the mine. They also didn’t know that we put half the livestock and poultry into the mine before they even got here. They’ve been here ever since.”
A Long Road Back: Final Dawn: Book 8 Page 12