Rockfall

by William Allen

  He stressed to fortify a safe room in the house for tornado protection, as well as safeguarding the water supply by building simple drainage systems and sandbagging to prevent the wellhead from becoming flooded. This was a less obvious threat, but a very real one where a well source might be contaminated with e coli or worse from a highwater event. Some of it was standard practice while other things, like laying in a supply of Culligan water softener salt, was pure genius. Sodium chloride had many uses and buying it in bulk not only allowed for stockpiling, but also meant the three-day limit on food supplies could easily be circumvented. Likewise, chlorine bleach was mentioned not only as a valuable source for temporarily purifying water but also for its intended use as a cleaner.

  “Mike really sounds like he knows his stuff.”

  Wade’s familiar voice, pitched low, cut through my musings and I turned to see my neighbor’s grinning face.

  “How many of your other siblings are as prepared for this as you?” I asked, speaking low enough so only he could hear. I figured now was a good time to start laying our cards on the table.

  “Well, like I said before, Uncle Doyle’s been getting ready for the Russians to invade since before the first Red Dawn movie came out,” Wade joked. “David’s been getting his place in shape, but he’s only got five acres and he’s too close to town. If things get hairy, he’s already got plans to move out here. Barb and Keith, that’s her husband, are over near Doyle and have the same plans to stay with Doyle and his family. Keith’s a mechanic with the Ford dealership in town, so he’s pretty useful to have around. Good guy, too, or I wouldn’t have let him marry my sister. They’re pretty well all prepared for things. My youngest three siblings, well, they’re pretty clueless. This get-together was intended to educate them up a bit.”

  So they had at least two properties set up, which was good, but twenty miles apart, which didn’t offer much in the way of immediate mutual support. On the other hand, in the event of a tornado, then the odds of losing everything would be reduced. This made me think about our own position, which involved having all of our eggs in one basket, but couldn’t be helped.

  “Yeah, Mike’s in much the same shape as David,” I conceded. “Their place outside Fort Worth is good for short-term, but is too small for a big enough garden or other amenities. My sister in San Marcos is in an even worse situation, but they know to head to my place at the first sign of trouble.”

  Wade nodded his understanding. “My little brother Ethan and his wife Margie are probably the most dedicated survivalist mindset in our generation, but with him driving rigs for long haul, he’s almost always gone. Margie and the kids will be here as part of our plan, too. And I want to talk about that, after. If you think it’s okay with your brother, I’ve invited a few people to stick around after this little pow-wow is done.”

  “Sounds good, as long as there’s more of your mom’s coffee cake left,” I quipped back.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  “A freaking meteorite? Are you kidding me?! And that son-of-a-bitch sat on this?”

  Doyle’s reaction was not surprising. He seemed to be on the same wavelength as Mike when it came to the president, and I let Mike handle that part of the briefing.

  Unlike the just adjourned get-together, the seven of us now sat companionably around Wade’s kitchen table, sipping at coffee and nibbling on the delicious mocha coffee cake. In addition to our hosts Wade and Dorothy, we were joined by Doyle, his wife Bridgette, and finally by Wade’s mother, Esther Husband.

  “Doyle, calm down,” Bridgette chided. “I know you don’t like the man, but think for a second. You saw how those cities exploded with rioting once word of the earthquakes became known. How much worse would it have been if people were running around worried about getting hit by a rock from space?”

  “But all those people on the coast! If he would have warned them before the tidal wave hit, think about how many might have survived,” Doyle persisted, waving his hands. I couldn’t argue with that sentiment either, but Mike was cold-blooded enough to play devil’s advocate.

  “Where would you have sent them, Doyle? I imagine the streets were largely impassible, and no way to clear the mess in time. And what could have been done in the time they had, anyway?”

  “Hiding things like that just goes against everything this country is supposed to stand for,” Doyle persisted, his anger still evident.

  “If it makes you feel any better, part of the standard spiel for earthquakes on the local Emergency Broadcast System includes directions to head to higher ground,” Mike continued calmly. I didn’t know if it was true or not, but I let Mike say what he would.

  “The ones who could pick their way out of the rubble would have headed for the hills. The president just didn’t mention the tsunamis in his national address, and clearly none of the networks were authorized to report on it. Trust me, I don’t like the guy any more than you do.”

  After that, Doyle eventually simmered down, but still grumbled about the censorship. We managed to get to the heart of the meeting, which was to discuss matters of mutual safety and security. Without getting into details on either side, we determined one problem right off, and that was the Husband clan’s numbers exceeded their current capacity to provide housing and shelter. Mike and I expected this, even though we hadn’t anticipated Uncle Doyle’s setup, and Mike, Marta and I had previously decided to offer up spots to Wade and his family as needed.

  Simply put, if we needed to batten down the hatches, we would need the extra manpower. Five adults couldn’t maintain security and still take care of the livestock needs for more than a few days. I think Wade and Dorothy understood this better than the other three.

  “Even with our whole family in residence,” I explained, “that only takes up five bedrooms. Four, if I bunk in the boys’ dormitory, which I sometimes do when the kids are in town. That leaves the two bedrooms in the basement and the three bedrooms over at the bunkhouse.”

  “Doesn’t that take up some of your shelter space?” Wade asked delicately, uneasy at broaching the subject. For preppers, asking about someone’s shelter space was akin to asking them about their private bedroom habits.

  “No, the shelter is separate,” I assured the group, and Mike nodded along with me. “We can take in some of your overflow, if you’ll pardon the expression, and it wouldn’t cause us any strain.”

  “We can’t ask you to do that, Bryan. Wouldn’t be right.”

  “Actually, it would be a great help, Wade.” I explained. “Mike and his family are headed back tomorrow, and our sister Nikki is stuck in San Marcos until her husband can get a day off from the county. He’s an EMT over in Austin, and they have them virtually chained to their ambulances. Heck, I’d take them now just to get some help with the chores. I’m getting too old to get up at five a.m. to milk the cows and feed the animals, then head into the office and actually put in a real day’s work.”

  “Good thing you picked a career that involved sitting on your butt most of the time,” Mike piped up.

  “The real question is when we make the call, or if we do, to bring everybody to the farms,” Doyle observed. “I know Ethan is in a bind, and one of my boys is working construction up in North Dakota.”

  “My Greg is in even worse shape, since he’s still in the Air Force,” complained Esther. “He’s stationed in Qatar right now, and I haven’t been able to talk to him since this all started. Lord knows when he will get home.”

  I could tell the lady was close to tears, so I quickly shifted the subject.

  “Like I said, we can take some of the strain off you guys, if whoever you send will agree to help out, just like they would at your place. That includes getting spots in the shelter, of course.”

  “Does it have to be one of Wade’s brothers and sisters?” Dorothy queried. Wade’s wife had remained quiet thus far, but I could tell something was eating at her.

  “Oh, honey,” Esther sighed, gently patting her daughter-in-law’s forearm. “
Nancy is family, just like you are.” Looking over at me, the matriarch of the Husband family explained.

  “Dorothy’s little sister, Nancy. She was here with us this evening. She’s had a rough go of it lately, and she’s recently moved to the area. Just her and her daughter, Lisa.”

  “Oh, Momma, don’t sugarcoat it,” Dorothy butted in on her mother-in-law. “Nancy came to Albany County because she’s on the run from her ex, and she didn’t have anywhere else to go. On top of the world ending last night, she’s got to put up with that filthy, rapist, meathead, Nolan.”

  “She have legal custody of her daughter?” I asked carefully, not wanting to get into a battle of that flavor.

  “Yes, it was part of the settlement from when they were living up in Texarkana. Nancy got full custody. Her ex, Nolan, got supervised visits. He never paid a nickel in child support without the state forcing him, and there’s a warrant out on him right now.”

  Mike and I exchanged a look. We both had a soft spot for damsels in distress. It was hardwired into our genetic code. I took the plunge and spoke up.

  “If she’ll accept, she and her daughter would both be welcome out here as long as they agree to help out. And I don’t mean they have to cook and clean for me. Just look after themselves and pitch in on the chores. They’ll need to stay in the mobile home, I’m afraid. Wouldn’t look proper, otherwise. Might be a good idea to send her around sometime soon, so she can take the tour and see if she can stand living here if things get dicey in town.”

  I almost said when things get dicey in town, but didn’t want to sound like a complete pessimist.

  “Yeah, and she can get a tour of Bryan’s shelter, too,” Mike added, not being able to pass up the chance to tease Wade now the subject was in the open.

  “I still don’t know how you managed to get the damned thing built right under my nose,” Wade huffed, and I laughed despite the subject matter. That made me think back again about that hard summer.

  Once all the garbage was cleared off the homesite, Wade and his crew got down to construction. First, they dug an enormous hole in the ground and installed the basement. I wanted something that spanned the footprint of the house, so Wade and his crew installed a set of pillars in the middle to stabilize the slab going on top. This was an added expense and not absolutely necessary, but Wade suggested the concrete supports as something to add extra protection. After he asked me to repeat my absolutely true tornado story, none of the three guys working with us on the project gave me any more of their strange looks.

  The walls were composed of concrete block and the floor was poured concrete. Wade, using the detailed plans we’d sweated over, made sure to run all the plumbing before beginning on the walls and floor. Measure twice, cut once. That was Wade’s mantra as he worked, the same as I heard from my father when I was growing up, and because I was free for the summer and willing to put in the long hours, Wade taught me a little about construction as well.

  “I’ll let you in on a little secret, Wade,” I confided, finally willing to share the truth of the matter. “You know that trip you and Dorothy took, the one over the Memorial Day weekend?”

  “Yeah,” he replied, then narrowed his eyes. “We were only gone five days, Bryan. How could you get any kind of shelter in place?”

  “You were finished with the job, so I was hoping you wouldn’t notice. Prefabbed unit, and they dropped it right where I had the drawings set for the septic.”

  “So that’s why you had the piping set up that way with two septic lines, complete outlets on both sides of the house,” Wade exclaimed, and the two of us shared a chuckle as the others looked on in incomprehension.

  “Yes, sir. They came out with everything ready to go on four flatbed trailers, and I had the septic tank installed the day before you guys came back.”

  “Four?”

  “They had to haul in the excavation equipment, too,” I explained, while kicking myself briefly for oversharing.

  Yes, the cargo capacity for one of the trailers was taken up by a blast door, the bulky air handling and filtration system, and the decontamination chamber, but the bulk of the shipment was taken up with the two levels of shelter modules we buried in the red Texas clay. We had beds for sixteen, split into four dorm pods, as well as four bathrooms, two simple powder rooms and the other two featuring showers. In truth, the shelter boasted its own septic tank, a pressurized freshwater tank attached to the well and a gray water holding tank for the sinks and showers. The idea was to preserve that water for the gardens in the event of a nuclear attack.

  Though I’d never told anybody, the total price tag of the fallout shelter equaled the cost of the land and the new house. None of my siblings or their spouses had ever asked, but I’d used half of the insurance money to fund the whole project. I’d found the company that made the shelter online, but before writing the check, I had paid a visit to the manufacturing plant out in West Texas to make sure I was getting what I wanted.

  The founder of the privately-held company had a good idea, using off-the-shelf items that could be easily replaced or overhauled, making easy the process of stocking replacement parts, and combining them with innovative, space-saving designs and aesthetically pleasing features. I now realize I was deep in a period of untreated depression at the time, but the sunny, open space of the manufacturing warehouse actually brought a smile to my face when I took the tour. This was reflected in the attention to amenities included, like an extensive DVD on-demand library with screens in each sleeping pod, comfortable memory foam mattresses, and an exercise room with large flat screens for walls.

  These touches increased the energy budget, but the low wattage lights and other power-saving features nearly made up the difference, and I was happy to add another row of solar panels to help. Nobody wanted to contemplate the realities of a nuclear war, but trust me, after looking at some of the designs on the market, the average prepper would be opening that hatch after a week and taking a deep breath of strontium just to make the monotony end.

  Contracting for the expensive fallout shelter had been a calculated risk on my part. I’d actually created a trust and paid the bill out of that account, but I knew if the Man wanted to find out who was spending the money, the trick was child’s play.

  Paranoid much? Well, I’d known for years about the federal government closely monitoring the prepper/survivalist community. With the number of high-profile mass shootings over the last two decades, the Department of Justice decided to closely scrutinize what they perceived to be a fringe movement. Rather than examine our nation’s insanely-structured mental health system, and the parasitic pharmaceutical industry, they decided to target a group without a heavy lobbying presence.

  Perhaps, secure in their D.C. bubble, the idea of preparing for hard times seemed ludicrous, but out in the real world, the idea had gained more and more credence. All you had to do was survive a hurricane or two and wait for weeks for the lights to come back on to realize that the only person you could rely on was yourself.

  I was living in Houston when Katrina hit, and I was suitably horrified by the scenes out of New Orleans, but it was actually Hurricane Rita that opened my eyes. Striking on the heels of Katrina, Rita cut a massive path of destruction inland, all the way up past Albany and Jasper counties and into northern Louisiana. My father went six weeks without electricity, and nobody in those communities saw a FEMA agent for over two weeks. They lived or died based on local resources already overwhelmed by flooded hospitals, downed trees, and wrecked power plants.

  “What are you thinking about over there?” Mike finally asked, drawing me out of my recollections.

  “Just thinking about Hurricane Rita, and Dad.”

  “You were around for that?” Doyle asked, then flashed red with embarrassment at the impertinence of the question. “I meant, you were living in the area?”

  “I was living in Houston at the time,” I replied. “Mike, were you already in Fort Worth by then?”

  “Yeah.
Remember, we took turns on the weekends running supplies up there to keep the old man going,” Mike replied with a little grin as he reminisced. “It was like we were camping out, cooking on that propane camp stove and sitting on the back porch drinking a few beers with Dad. Marta would never go with me, but I remember Collette…”

  As soon as he said the name, Mike’s face turned white with horror. We’d gone this whole time without mentioning her name, but like a German landmine left over in some Frenchman’s field, sometimes forty years, much less four, wasn’t enough time for the explosives to degrade. Or for the pain to go away.

  From where she was sitting, Esther couldn’t see Mike’s face, or the tension in my face.

  “So, who was this Collette?” she asked innocently, and even Wade winced at the question.

  Despite the reactions of other people, I didn’t get mad. Mike sure didn’t mean to bring up the name, and Wade’s mom wouldn’t know it was still a tender subject for me. Tender, meaning like a sucking chest wound.

  “Collette was my wife,” I explained softly. “She died, going on five years ago now, I guess. Sorry, but it remains a sore subject for me. I killed her, you see. Her and my son Charlie.”

  Well, that brought the meeting to a screeching close.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  I had the dream again that night. No surprise, not with all the death on my mind anyway. The dream was basically the same, every time. I watched the accident from on high, like a vulture circling his prey, though all I had to go on were the notes and reports from the Houston Police Department Investigator assigned to the case. The fine details remained hazy, but I could somehow see Collette’s face through the windshield, her dark hair a halo around her head as she glanced up, checked the rearview for a second, before those big, brown doe eyes flicked back to the road.