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Chapter 1
The Waters’ Homestead
One Week Later
“Jacob? Send down another bag!”
“It’s on the way!”
The sound of grunts and thumps came from down the way and Mark’s face appeared, dripping with sweat as he hauled another overloaded sack of potatoes down through the tunnel. Dianne grinned at him as she took the bag and laid it next to the others, wiping her forehead with the back of her sleeve.
“How many more are there?” Dianne breathed heavily, leaning against the side of the tunnel as she spoke to her son.
“I think that’s the last of the potatoes. The rest are odds and ends.”
“Gotcha. I’ll come up and take a look before we bring them all down. We should try to can anything that won’t keep for a long time down here.”
“It’d be nice if we had more room in the freezer.”
“Yeah, well, the meat’s more important to keep in there for now. Come on, let’s get upstairs and see what’s left.”
Mark turned and headed back through the tunnel, ducking his head to keep from hitting it on the ceiling near the entrance. Dianne lingered for a few seconds longer, turning around to take everything in before she headed out as well.
The last week had been a flurry of activity after she opened the old tunnel beneath the house. Built by Rick years ago but never fully finished, they had sealed off the tunnel ages ago and she had all but forgotten about it until one of her sons mentioned it.
It had been so long since Dianne had been down into the tunnel that she had forgotten what it was like. She remembered it as a dingy, dirty, cramped area filled with dirt and bugs and thick with the feeling of claustrophobia. What she found, though, was more akin to an unfinished basement. In his last few months of work Rick had installed structural supports along the ceiling and walls of the passage for the first fifty feet, widening and deepening it so that even a tall person could stand up inside once they got past the entrance.
The floor for the first section of the tunnel was roughly poured concrete, coarse to the touch but extremely solid and stable. A few hairline cracks were visible if one looked closely enough, but the whole thing had held together remarkably well over the years. Beyond the finished section, out past fifty feet, the tunnel turned into more of what Dianne remembered. The size of the passage shrunk and even she had to stoop over to keep from hitting her head.
Ceiling and wall supports only popped up every ten or so feet and she could see that there were places where the supports were straining thanks to the growth of tree roots and the weight of the soil above. The first section of the passage, in contrast, was in near-perfect condition, and she had rescinded her original command to her children forbidding them from coming down and seeing it briefly.
After much discussion between her and her oldest, Mark, Dianne decided that the best use for the subterranean passage was as extra storage for vegetables from their gardens along with any other supplies they didn’t want to keep in the barns. The house was feeling cramped and being able to move food, fertilizer, emergency food and other supplies down into the newly opened storage space was a boon for Dianne and the children.
As Dianne followed Mark up the stairs she brushed her fingers against a set of initials carved into the wall. R.W. Rick had marked the tunnel as his own creation and seeing the inscription brought a tear to Dianne’s eye. It was easy to forget in the moment that he had been gone for close to two weeks. She had kept herself and her children busy in that time, but as preparations began to slow down she found herself thinking more and more about him every day. A few second’s thought was all she could spare, though, both for the sake of her sanity and because Josie was calling to her from upstairs.
Chapter 2
Nellis Air Force Base
Las Vegas, Nevada
The long, wide dirt field sloped upward as Rick drove along, bouncing uncomfortably in the Humvee. It seemed to stretch on forever, an endless array of sand and scrub with almost no features of note. Occasionally Rick would pass by the shell of an aircraft or some land-based vehicle that had been the subject of target practice which made him wonder about the possibility of mines in the field.
“The Air Force wouldn’t have a minefield out here… would they?” Rick mumbled to himself. While he had only been driving the Humvee for a short period of time he was already regretting the decision to take the vehicle he had chosen. “Damned springs must be shot in this one. Of course it’s the one I picked.”
In actuality all of th
e Humvees were the same way. Rick tried to pull himself up off of the seat with his arms on the steering wheel and bracing his left foot against the floorboards, but all that did was make the bumps harder when he fell back down. After twenty minutes of driving, when his rear end was almost totally numb, Rick crossed over a ridge and slammed on the brakes. Directly in front of him was a set of two chain-link fences topped with razor wire. The fences stretched around the perimeter of the test range and the base property and there was no clear way through them.
On the other side of the fence was a portion of the outer area of Las Vegas, and directly on the other side of the fence from Rick was a junkyard filled with cars, tires and scrap metal piled twenty feet into the air. Rick turned the Humvee to follow the fence and proceeded onward, watching the city to his left as he continued his search for a way off the base. Before long the fence took a turn as well, angling sharply to the right to follow the path of a highway just outside of it. There was still no way through the fence that he could see and he groaned at the prospect of what he would have to do next.
“Watch this thing be electrified and me get electrocuted. That’ll be great.” Rick turned the vehicle sharply, sliding along the ground as he drove away from the fence. A few seconds later he turned the wheel again and pressed the accelerator down to the floor. The engine roared as the Humvee slowly picked up speed, heading directly for the fence.
The chain-link didn’t even slow the Humvee down, but it and the razor wire tore across the top of the Humvee, causing an awful racket and scraping even more paint from the vehicle. Half-expecting the fence to stop the vehicle in its tracks Rick kept his eyes closed as he plowed through, only moving his foot from the accelerator to the brake once he felt the Humvee hit the asphalt on the other side. The tires squealed as the vehicle came to a halt and Rick looked behind him.
The Humvee had torn a gaping hole in both fences and a trail of razor wire stretched from the machine gun on top of the Humvee all the way back to the fence. There wasn’t much tension on the wire but he could see that it was still connected to the fence and feared what would happen if he continued trying to drive without getting free.
“Great. Just great.” Rick looked in all directions, making sure there was no one nearby before he unlocked his door and hopped out to get a better look at the situation. Without thick gloves or tools he didn’t think he could get the razor wire off of the turret so he opened the back door and started rummaging through the bags of supplies.
After a brief search Rick came across a small brown bag underneath the back of the driver’s seat. The bag was filled with a variety of miniaturized tools and Rick grabbed a pair of wire cutters and got back out. “Okay… climb up top, snip the wire, don’t get shredded by it.” Rick climbed up onto the hood of the vehicle and across the windshield, examining where the wire was lodged beneath the gun. Several of the razors were embedded in a thick leather padding beneath the back of the gun’s barrel, and he started by cutting the wire around the barrel first. Working slowly to avoid slicing his bare hands, it took Rick several minutes to cut all of the wire loose. There were still bits and pieces wrapped around the turret but given that he was more concerned with making a getaway than he was with immediately using the massive gun, he decided to get back into the vehicle and keep going.
After jumping down from the top of the Humvee Rick stopped to check the front end. The bumper was dented in one corner from when he had rammed through the door in the hangar, but as he looked closer he could see that the tan paint was stained red and brown. He crouched down and looked closer at the stains until he realized what they were.
“Good grief.” Rick stood up and closed his eyes, feeling sick to his stomach. Blood, brown hair and bits of skin were stuck to the bumper, trapped in the creases in the metal and coated in sand and dirt. The gore was a grim reminder of Rick’s desperate escape from the base and what he had had to do to get out.
A low hum began to fill the air and Rick turned to look back towards the base. Two C-130s were soaring through the air, heading in his direction. As they neared the end of the base property line they tilted sharply in a westerly turn, banking and increasing their pitch to gain altitude. Rick watched the massive aircraft until they were specks on the horizon and the sound of their engines no longer filled his ears, realizing that he was, once again, alone.
“Guess it’s time to go, huh?” Rick got back in the Humvee and looked to the left and right. The lonely road outside the north end of Nellis stretched from east to west and Rick briefly checked his heading before turning the Humvee to the right and setting off to the east. He had no knowledge of where he was going, no map to guide him anywhere and no plan on how to get home but he was, finally, back on the road again.
As Rick drove through the desert a windstorm kicked up swirls of sand, reminding him of the city he left behind. Being locked up for over a week with no knowledge of what was going on had been difficult for him, but he worried more for the safety of the young woman he had met. He and Jane had been so busy trying to stay alive in the city that he had learned next to nothing about her, but their survival through multiple near-death experiences made him feel a sense of caring for her that was hard to explain.
Commander Leslie had informed him that Jane had been sent east on a plane, but Rick had no idea what that actually entailed. He doubted he would ever see her again but he hoped that she was safe wherever she was.
Chapter 3
The Waters’ Homestead
Outside Ellisville, VA
“Mom!” Josie yelled again as Dianne closed the hatch to the tunnel.
“What did I tell you about shouting?” Dianne yelled back, fully aware of the hypocrisy of the act. There was a brief pause followed by the sound of footsteps on the floor above before Josie appeared at the door at the top of the basement stairs.
“Mom, the tablet is beeping!”
Dianne’s attitude instantly transformed from one of slow, plodding reluctance to hasty action. She dashed up the stairs two at a time, grabbing her rifle leaning against the side of the wall as she went. Upstairs, Mark was washing his hands in the kitchen and Dianne tapped him on the shoulder as she dashed by, heading for the living room around the corner.
On the couch, Josie and Jacob were looking at the tablet. Images from the cameras located on the corners of the house appeared on the screen, and one of them aimed at the woods near the front driveway had a red outline that was flashing softly. “Move over, kiddo.” Dianne took the tablet and sat down on the couch in between Jacob and Josie. She wiped her fingers on her pants before touching the screen, ignoring the dirt that was falling to the floor as well as smudging her once-pristine floral couch.
The image on the screen appeared normal and Dianne tapped on it, then tapped on the alert notification at the bottom of the screen. A ten-second clip surrounding the event that triggered the alert appeared and Dianne watched the video replay as she watched for any signs of trouble. Across the room, Mark was peering out the back door, holding his rifle as he watched for anyone out behind the house.
On the screen, nothing happened until halfway through when the branches in the upper section of the trees shook suddenly as a flock of birds ascended. Their action knocked off a large quantity of snow that fell to the ground, offering just enough movement on the camera for the monitoring software to detect. Dianne put the tablet down on the coffee table and breathed a sigh of relief before looking up at Mark.
