Sennett was worried that if the group was spotted by a sentry in the yard, he’d likely be the first one to fall dead.
But he wasn’t that worried.
After all, the yard was protected by two high fences and razor wire. And a sentry outside the wire.
Why would they post a sentry in a place which was so protected?
He was banking on the probability there was no sentry in the yard.
And his luck held. There wasn’t.
As he expected, the door leading from the yard to the main cell block was locked from the inside.
Again, he wasn’t worried.
He led the group to a massive blower on the north side of the yard. And to the twenty four inch flexible duct which went from the blower to the building directly behind it.
He took a Phillips screwdriver from his pocket and removed the collar which connected the duct to its faceplate.
It wasn’t a hard task, but it couldn’t have been accomplished when the prison was occupied without a tower guard firing a bullet into Sennett’s head.
He made quick work in pulling the duct free and crawled inside it.
On the inside of the building he merely crawled through the ventilation duct and unclipped the vent cover from the inside, then crawled into what he already knew was a supply room.
A supply room which opened into the main cell block.
The rest was easy, for only one man in the block was armed.
The man at the Control Center.
Sennett took him out with a single shot.
-20-
It had been several days since Frank professed his love to Josie.
Frank was an intelligent man with a good sense of judgment.
This wasn’t like him. Not at all.
Josie was indisputably the most pure of the Dykes gang. She’d never been to prison.
Or at least she’d never admitted it to Frank.
Rather, she’d gone to college. She’d worked for the fire department as a paramedic.
She’d saved lives.
Heck, she’d saved Frank’s life.
But despite all that, she was a member of a family of thugs who’d taken something that didn’t belong to them and who’d killed to keep it.
It was like falling for the least guilty of a band of killers.
Least guilty was still guilty.
Frank had no business falling for Josie.
And failing in that regard, he had no business telling her.
Oh, he could kid himself into thinking he did it mostly out of self-preservation.
John Dykes and some of the others constantly debated among themselves whether keeping Frank around was worth the risk.
After all, they knew nothing about him.
Whether they could trust him.
Whether or not he’d try to escape, perhaps killing someone in his effort to do so.
There was one thing they did know.
He was one tough son of a bitch.
They’d all seen the slash Crazy Eddie’s sword had made across Frank’s midsection.
To most of them it looked to be a mortal wound.
Not one of them would have bet money on Frank’s survival, yet Josie brought him back from the brink.
His wound was far from healing completely but was well on its way.
The scar tissue was pliable and pink. And was no longer seeping.
Josie told him that was a good thing; that the chance of infection had passed.
Yes, Frank was tough.
And that made him dangerous, as far as John and some of the others were concerned.
It was easy to keep a pushover in line. They could threaten him with violence if he didn’t follow their rules. If he chose to ignore those rules they could beat the hell out of him.
For someone as tough as Frank it wasn’t that easy.
Oh, sure, they could threaten him with violence.
But if they were to try to beat Frank Woodard he might be tough enough to turn the tables on them.
As John put it to the others, “Frank is a tiger. You don’t poke a tiger in the eye and expect to keep your hand.”
They enjoyed the idea of Frank being their slave. The thought of Frank emptying their port-a-potties and dumping their waste made them feel superior to him.
Being able to order him to do things they didn’t want to do, like gather provisions and clean up after Stacy’s dogs, essentially emasculated Frank and made the Dykes brothers feel much more powerful than they actually were.
But the debate raged about whether having Frank around was worth it.
Or maybe, just maybe, they should rid themselves of a possible future threat and just shoot him.
Frank might try to convince himself he was falling for Josie in the hopes she’d return his feelings.
Surely Josie’s brothers weren’t so cold-hearted they’d murder the lover of their only sister.
Would they?
In the end it didn’t really matter, for Frank couldn’t fool himself.
Despite his inner protestations, he knew damn well his falling for Josie had nothing to do with his own preservation.
And it didn’t have anything to do with what Josie called “the Nightingale effect.”
He didn’t fall for her because she saved his life and then nursed him back to health.
Not at all.
The fact was Frank allowed himself to fall in love with Josie because she was the total package.
Because she was funny, and fascinating and intelligent.
And because she was beautiful.
He was convinced she was falling for him too, although she laughed off the possibility and called him an old fool.
Frank was, perhaps, a wishful thinker.
But he was certainly no fool.
He was moving around again now, though still in a lot of pain and still requiring a bandage change three times a day.
John Dykes had been away for awhile, having been in a south Texas prison when Saris 7 hit the earth.
He hadn’t been around when his younger brothers and their gang took over the Food World Distribution Center, but they couldn’t have made him any more proud.
He was the oldest and the unofficial leader of the clan.
And although he wasn’t in on the takeover of the facility, he was now in charge.
He’d been bugging Josie about Frank’s condition.
Or more specifically, asking when he’d be able to resume his housekeeping duties.
Three days earlier she’d given him medical clearance to work two hours per day.
“Nothing involving human or canine waste,” she stressed to Frank as well as her brother. “He can empty trash and gather food, but I won’t risk him tearing open that wound in the presence of contaminants.”
“Bullshit,” John said. “When can he work full time? When can he pick up dog poop? When can he empty the toilets?”
“When I say he’s damn good and ready,” Josie screamed at John. “I’ll reevaluate him in a couple of weeks. We’ll see then.”
John had left his tent two hours before to empty the garbage cans around the facility.
It took a lot out of him. He was in a very weakened condition.
At the end of his two hours he stumbled back to his tent, exhausted and looking forward to hitting his bed to rest.
As he stepped into the tent, though, he changed his mind.
“Hello, Frank. I was wondering what took you so long.”
Josie was waiting for him, standing in the center of the tent.
She was completely naked.
“Well, if I’d known you were waiting for me like this, I’d have hurried.”
-21-
Mark and Hannah, flashlights in hand, worked their way slowly through the back of the first trailer.
They thought it would be easy. After all, the boxes they were looking for were long, flat and slender.
And they were purchased at the same time. So theoretically they should be t
ogether.
But it wasn’t that easy.
Back in the early days after Saris 7 was discovered they’d fallen prey to panic.
These days pretty much everything they did was orderly and generally well thought out.
But in the weeks after Hannah discovered Saris 7 barreling toward earth they were younger and a bit less disciplined.
Going into the project without a game plan they gathered anything and everything, with no real path or direction.
In fact, those first weeks they changed direction several times.
They were, in essence, learning as they went.
Also, to make their task more difficult, they’d procured what a local trailer distributor called “pallet boxes.”
His named was Sid.
“Short for Sigmund, Not Sidney,” the man had been careful to stress, though neither Hannah nor Mark could understand why that was important.
Sid was the same man they’d bought the used trailers from.
Hannah had asked him what, precisely, a “pallet box” was.
“They’re made of molded plastic and they’re the same width and depth as a pallet. They have feet on the bottom so they can be moved around with a forklift. They have molded lids, and can be stacked two high.”
“And what can they do that a regular pallet can’t do?”
“You use a wooden pallet when you have boxes to load,” Sid explained. “You stack the boxes on a wooden pallet, wrap plastic or shrink wrap around the boxes to keep them from falling, then you use a forklift or pallet jack to put the pallet on a trailer.
“But what if you need to move or store something that’s not in boxes. Say, a bunch of little bitty items. In your case, miscellaneous boxes of food or clothing or pillows or whatever…
“In that case, pallet boxes or “tubs” are ideal.
“You just throw things into a box until it’s full, put the lid on it and put it on the trailer. Then you go on to the next box and do the same thing.”
In those early days, when they were still rookies in the whole “prepper” game and in fact didn’t even know what a prepper was, they were pretty much game for anything.
Back then they were still buying loose boxes of food and supplies at Walmart, one cart full at a time. It hadn’t yet occurred to them they could buy the same food in bulk at a local food wholesale company and have it delivered.
“How do you want to do this?”
“I don’t know. There’s no easy way, I suspect.”
“Well, we’ve got some time.
“Let’s devise some type of system, instead of just going through it willy nilly and taking a chance on missing them completely.”
“Agreed.
“Why don’t I go back and get the forklift? We’ll drop the first four tubs down and go through them on the floor.
“If we happen to find the rifles in the first four pallets, we’re done.
“If we don’t, we’ll at least have some space at the end of the trailer we can use to work the next four.”
“Damn, Mark. That’s a good idea.”
She looked surprised.
“That’s never happened before. I’m gonna have to tell everybody else.”
“Yeah, yeah, very funny. I’ll be back in a jiffy.”
Once the first four boxes were down on the mine’s floor Hannah removed one of the lids.
The container was crammed full of Walmart bags.
Some contained canned goods, some contained clothing.
Still others contained office supplies or video games or children’s shoes.
Hannah stated the obvious when she said, “Back then we were just dumb rookies, weren’t we?”
“Let’s just say we’ve come a long way.”
It took them almost an hour to get through the first container.
They went through it, item by item.
And they sorted it into three piles on the floor of the mine behind them.
The first pile was a garbage pile, for due to their ineptitude they wasted a lot of food.
Most canned goods have a shelf life of two to three years.
In extreme conditions, when one is starving to death, people have taken their chances and eaten canned goods which were out of date.
Sometimes they were lucky and had no ill effects.
Sometimes they became violently ill.
Occasionally they died.
What happened typically depended on several factors, such as how much water was contained in the can.
Also, whether the can had been exposed to extreme heat or cold.
And whether it was swollen or dented.
As a general rule, it’s safe to exceed the shelf-life date by a few months for most items.
But not ten years.
The pair tossed hundreds of cans of food onto a huge pile, which they’d dispose of later.
The cans looked perfectly normal, but could well be deadly.
It just wasn’t worth the risk of keeping them, and both became sullen and quiet as they worked.
Both were thinking the same thing.
In their quest to do as much as possible as quickly as possible they’d wasted a lot of food which could have kept someone else alive.
-22-
A second pile, somewhat smaller than the first, were items they could use for the short term within the mine.
Things like powdered baby formula and disposable diapers, boxes of dried pasta and beans and the like.
Clothing was also set aside, if it appeared to be a size someone in the mine would be able to wear within the next three to four years.
Some things caused them to scratch their heads.
“Hey Mark?”
“Yes, honey?”
“Why would we have purchased thirty bottles of red hair color?”
“Baby, you and Sarah were the ones who purchased this stuff. Did one of you have a secret desire to be a red-head for several years?”
“I’ve never wanted to be a red-head. And as far as I know Sarah hasn’t either.
“Oh, I know why.
“Here’s a sticker. It was on-sale for half price.”
“So… because it was on sale you bought something you didn’t need.”
“Apparently. That’s pretty dumb, isn’t it?”
“Ya think?
“Is it still in date?”
“Nope. It expired five years ago.”
“That’s too bad. I’d kinda like to see you as a red-head.”
“I’m sorry I wasted so much money.”
“It wasn’t your fault, honey. We were panic buying. I bought a pipe-bending machine, remember? When it was delivered you asked me why in the world we needed a pipe bending machine. I told you I didn’t have a clue, but kept it anyway just in case.”
“Have you ever used it?”
“No. It’s still wrapped up in plastic in the back of one of the storage bays, just like it was when it came in.”
“I guess we were pretty stupid back then, weren’t we?”
“Like I said, we’ve come a very long way.”
“It doesn’t seem like twelve years since we first learned about Saris 7, does it?”
“Honestly, it seems like yesterday, despite everything we’ve gone through since then. I can still remember the fear we felt, the panic. I still remember crying myself to sleep at night, thinking I’d never be able to have children. That I’d never be able to grow old with you. That I’d have to watch everyone I loved die.”
“Are you absolutely sure Cupid 23 was the last one? The last meteorite that’ll chase us back into this mine?”
“Yes. I’m positive.”
“Good. ‘Cause I’ll be honest with you, baby, I’m getting kinda tired of hiding out in here.”
“Me too, honey. Me too…”
When they finished removing obvious garbage from the tub, and the things they thought people in the mine could use, there was less than a third of the original contents left.
They were
items they didn’t want to throw away, for they’d have value at some point in the future.
They just weren’t things Hannah and Mark thought would be needed anytime soon.
They repacked the items they were leaving behind in the bottom of the tub so that they took up less space than before.
Then they opened up the next tub.
From that point on they had a system.
After opening up each new tub they threw out the obvious garbage. Anything they thought someone in the mine might use they placed into a “keeper” pile.
Whatever was left was transferred to the first tub in order to fill it up.
Once it was full Mark used the forklift to set it aside.
Then they started filling another tub.
Once they went through all the tubs in the trailer they’d place the full ones back inside.
They averaged an hour or so to work each tub, and by the time they decided to quit that day they felt as though they hadn’t made a dent.
But in fact they’d made quite a bit of progress.
They’d discarded a pile of old canned goods almost as high as Hannah’s head.
She felt bad about that.
But she felt good that they’d found almost a hundred bottles of over-the-counter medications. One of them, antacid tablets, they’d been out of for months.
Another, ibuprofen, was in very short supply.
Of course, the tablets were out of date.
But Debbie, the camp medic, assured them they weren’t dangerous.
“They don’t get poisonous when they’re old, they’re just weaker. It just means you have to take three instead of the usual two.”
To reduce the pile of things they were taking back into the mine, and since they were headed toward the dining room anyway, they filled up one of the tubs they’d emptied completely with “keeper” items.
When it was full Mark climbed onto the forklift and Hannah said, “Hey! You drove last time. It’s my turn.”
“Can you even drive a forklift?”
“Better than you.”
Actually, Mark knew that. Hannah had been the designated forklift driver every time she and David unloaded trucks in the later stages of restocking.
He yielded the seat to her and she climbed on board, deftly picking up the load.
Rest in Peace Page 7