With all the talking out of the way for the moment, I took Nancy’s hand in mine, much to Mike’s surprise, and led the two of them around the side of the house and back toward the mudroom. With details left to puzzle out, at least we could start making plans for the coming excursion. Or as Mike joked, Star Trek geek that he was, preparing for our next away mission.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
After pitching in with Saturday’s morning chores, I spent a few hours trying to pick out a new long gun for the trip. After the Fred fiasco, as I privately labeled that little misadventure, I retired my trusty Marlin 30-30 back to the gun safe where I would only remove it when needed for hunting. Maybe shooting wild dogs, if such was needed.
After some thought, I hauled out the FN FAL, another pickup I’d made years ago as a private sale from a gun show. A middle-aged man, some relation to a local widow, had rented a table for a single weekend at the Ft. Worth gun show and he was there liquidating her late husband’s gun collection. The man hadn’t known much about firearms but with the Internet, he’d been able to price most of the offerings at close to market value. The FALs had been available for about ten years by that point, as imports that had been properly altered by the importer or as kits pieced together by that same company. Most of those weapons were regarded as decent rifles, and reliable despite the company’s tendency to have the kits assembled by drunken, nearsighted chimpanzees. Or so the stories were circulated.
I’d picked up the rifle in question, checked the price tag, and turned it over to look at the condition. I’d been killing time, really, and taking a wander away from Mike’s booth. When I couldn’t find the expected importer’s mark, I got excited but kept my cool. After getting Mike out of his chair, I had him take a look and I could tell he was as interested as I was. After getting Mike’s nod, I haggled with the guy a little bit and got him to drop the price fifty bucks before getting out my cash money.
After doing a little research, I discovered what I had purchased was a rifle out of a batch of Belgian-made FN FALs imported by Steyr back in the early nineteen-seventies, and it had what gun fans called a ‘sear-cut receiver’ that made it highly prized. With one trip to the gun range, I knew I had a rifle that was accurate out to 400 yards with just the iron sights and was just fine with using dirty or corrosive Russian ammunition as long as I kept it clean. Mike fiddled with the gas piston to improve performance and polished the feed ramp and afterward, I counted this battle rifle as a jewel. Before, I was too worried about what the neighbors might think to take the FAL anywhere but shooting here on the ranch, but now, I was seeing things in a different light.
Now I was doing a little shooting to shake off the rust with the rifle, and like Mike said, nobody would be confiscating this one from me after a fight. I located six more magazines that fit the FAL, thankful that almost all the magazines from the FAL, CETME and related family proved to be interchangeable. Sadly, I couldn’t use Mike’s AR-10 magazines or vice versa, but they did chamber the same rounds, the 7.62x51mm, or .308 Remington, so we had that going for us.
Digging into my closet, still half full of my clothes even though I’d given up the room to move into my office, I uncovered my Level III body armor before pulling out the bag that held the ceramic plates to be inserted in the front and back to make it Level IV, capable of withstanding a 30-06 round, or so the manufacturers claimed. Coupling this setup with a load bearing vest with magazine pouches suited to the larger magazines, I hauled both rigs into the dining room along with the now-cased rifle.
“Not messing around this time, are you?” Mike teased me when he caught sight of me heading for the cleaning station we’d set up in the dining room. That was one of the project areas where Mike did his gunsmithing work, and he had a nice little setup with his tools laid out in small wooden caddies. The kids liked to watch him doing work in there, especially when he wore his magnifying spectacles, but they knew better than to touch anything.
“Can’t take any chances with Marta going with us,” I quipped.
“What am I, chopped liver?”
“Can you make a cherry pie that would make the angels sing?” I countered with a smirk. I really liked the cherry pie my sister-in-law baked, and that was an opinion widely shared in the family.
“Well, you have a point,” Mike conceded. “What else are you thinking about taking?”
“Got any grenades? How about a rocket launcher?”
Mike shrugged apologetically.
“Sorry, I buried them in the backyard at my house, but we can pick them up when we go back,” he joked. At least, I thought it was a joke. He then held his hand out for the FAL. I knew he was going to break it down well beyond my capabilities and give the component parts a thorough cleaning and inspection. I surrendered the weapon and then wandered off in search of Sally, finding her in the pantry.
“How you doing?” I asked innocently.
“No, I won’t go with you to Ft. Worth and hold your hand if the bad men come,” she teased, taking a break from stacking filled canning jars up onto a shelf in the back. It had taken nearly two weeks to finish canning all the produce we’d salvaged from the garden before the rains made the rest unusable in the flood, but this was the last batch that needed to be stored.
“No, that’s all right,” I replied, holding up my hands in supplication. “I was just going to ask if you wanted to tag along for a much shorter trip, that’s all.”
“And where would this little venture take us, and shouldn’t you be asking that pretty young thing of yours to be going with you?” she responded with a grin.
Getting Sally to join us had been one of my better ideas, and the lady had blossomed on the farm. Now that she wasn’t constantly worrying about Billy’s safety, and once she realized he was not only being treated well but doing what he loved, she had taken to the changes with gusto.
I grinned back at her before responding.
“Actually, that sounds like a great idea. I’ll see if she’s free to join us this afternoon. Say two o’clock, and we can meet at the stables?”
“What are you planning, Bryan?” Sally asked pointedly, and I gave her a little wave as I stepped out of the little room.
“It’s a surprise,” I teased, “so I can’t be telling you ahead of time, now can I?”
I exited to the sounds of Sally muttering under her breath and I headed out to find Nancy. I decided not to torment Nancy as much as I had Sally, but I would still keep our destination a secret. All joking aside, this was a trip the two women needed to make, and after discussing it with my siblings over the last week in private, they agreed as well.
Some things, even your closest allies didn’t need to know about, so by showing this last secret to Sally and Nancy, we would be making them part of the family, whether they knew it or not.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
“Okay, I have to say, I didn’t see this one coming,” Nancy admitted as I led her to the dilapidated-looking building. We were two miles north from the homestead, having followed a winding game trail that the horses complained about as the tree branches snagged their reins. The rains had held off for a few hours, but a faint tracery of ground fog gave the entire trip a vaguely otherworldly aspect to it. Sally had commented about expecting to see smoke monsters explode out of the lush underbrush, and Nancy wanted to know where the plane had crashed.
“Sorry, this is East Texas, not Hawaii. You’ll have to be satisfied with the Monster from Boggy Creek,” I sniped back.
“That’s actually the Wooly Booger,” Sally replied confidently, and I jerked my head around in her direction.
“Seriously?”
“What are you talking about?” Nancy asked, her tone hesitant as she was picking up on my surprised reaction, but not the reason.
“Sally’s claiming there’s a Bigfoot creature in these woods,” I replied over my shoulder. As I was leading the way, I figured Azure and I would be first to confront any hairy forest dweller with a bad attitude. I had the FAL i
n a scabbard at my knee and four loaded twenty-round magazines in my vest, so I had to like our chances.
As I listened to Sally regaling Nancy with tales of unexplained footprints in the woods and strange howls pestering camping hog hunters, I was busy watching the trail for more likely signs of recent human passage, but I couldn’t make out anything that signaled others in the forest, or at least, nothing showed on our trail.
After a few more minutes, the deer track widened a bit more and deposited us into an opening in the forest, a small meadow approximately a hundred yards wide. The grass here had taken advantage of the access to the sun and sprang up to near shoulder height, though recent heavy winds had knocked most of them down in wide swathes. No signs of a tornado here, and even if there had been, the building in the middle of the clearing looked like it was up to the challenge of resisting all but the most ferocious attacks from Mother Nature.
“If this is your idea of a love shack, Mr. Hardin, you need to seriously rethink your standards,” Sally joked as we drew nearer to the cinderblock cube. The building was a windowless square, looking more like a vault than any kind of residential structure. Green creepers extended halfway up the sidewalls, wrapping the lower portion of cinderblocks in a gauzy covering that nearly obscured the heavy metal door.
“What the heck is that?” Nancy asked as we walked the horses closer to the abandoned-looking building.
“It was a telephone switching station until it was decommissioned some years back,” I explained. “Underground cable runs through here, and this building was some kind of maintenance structure for the system. I don’t know all the details, but Mike explained it to me one time. Sorry, my liberal arts degree wasn’t capable of deciphering the technospeak.”
Sally snapped her fingers, the sharp sound projected easily through the quiet, the only other sound being the slow steps of the horses.
“That’s where I’ve seen this kind of building before. Saw one out near the base when I was at Camp Bullis for Ground Defense School. Funny, I thought it was some kind of security bunker, and my sergeant laughed at me.”
“You were more correct than you know,” I replied with a little chuckle at Sally’s outburst as I continued. “These things were constructed back when the people in power thought an all-out nuclear war was in the cards. They are crazy reinforced and built into the ground.”
“Isn’t this still paper company land?”
Nancy’s question was a good one, and I gave her a nod of acknowledgement.
“All around, you are correct. Right here, though, this ten acre plot was still owned by the phone company, even though they stripped the building clean years ago when they decommissioned it.”
“So what are we doing here, besides sightseeing?” Sally asked with a knowing look in her eye, as if she suspected the truth.
“One of the basic tenets of preparedness is not putting all your eggs in one basket,” I started, then dismounted from my horse. I felt my boots sink into the wet grass, and I waited while the two women followed suit.
When Sally and Nancy drew near, I stayed still and pointed instead on proceeding ahead.
“Like you both know, this place is surrounded by paper company land, so poachers around here have a field day hitting these woods. And they know about this old phone building being here, and they use it as a navigational landmark. The thing is pretty much fireproof and that door is like what you’d find on a bank vault.”
“But why…”
“Because Mike and I mounted that door ourselves not long after I bought the Ferguson farm.”
“What?”
“How?”
I laughed at their shocked reaction, but I held up my hand to signal I wasn’t done.
“This is a family secret, ladies, and you are both now part of the family. I actually bought this ten acres about two months after picking up the Ferguson place, using a shell company I created just for that purpose. Been paying the taxes via that same front company, but only a few people know the truth.”
“But why? We can’t all fit in that building,” Nancy insisted.
“Not its purpose,” I explained. “And you might be surprised. It’s bigger than you might think just looking at it. Two floors in there. No, that building is not just our bolt hole, it is also a supply cache. Long term food storage, spare tools, weapons and ammo sealed in vacuum packaging. In short, if the farm gets overrun, the plan is to retreat here and shelter while working to reclaim the farm.”
“You mean nobody else knows about this place?”
“No, and we hauled everything up here along that trail we just rode in on, which in case you were curious, was a huge pain in the ass. I stopped us just short of the building because I didn’t want any tracks going up to the door, or too close to the building. If some Daniel Boone is out here in the woods, they might see our horses just rode around and kept going. Just another group of poachers on the prowl.”
“How are we even supposed to get in, Bryan? Biometric lock, or retinal scan?” Sally teased, but I could also hear the respect in her voice.
I led the two women around the building, letting Azure graze a bit from the lush grass as we walked a circuit, before answering the older woman. I kept my voice down so no one lurking in the woods would overhear. Paranoid much, I thought to myself even as I did it.
“The lock isn’t that complicated. Mike and I couldn’t afford something that elaborate. But the door is solid steel and the lock is sufficient that it would take explosives to get through it. There’s a key to this place hanging in the pantry back at the house, and another one stashed in a hidden spot back about halfway between here and the house.”
“Is it in a plaster garden gnome?” Nancy asked, getting into the spirit. “Please say you hid it in a garden gnome.”
“No, let me guess,” Sally added, joining in the speculation, but also keeping her tone low. “Fake rock. Am I right?”
“I’ll show you two comedians while we make our way back. But I want to stress, this is a secret. I’m sorry, Nancy, you can’t even tell Dorothy about this, okay?”
“I got it,” Nancy replied, a serious expression on her face as she worked out the implications. “You think we’ll ever have to use it?”
“I pray not,” I replied, “but this is like insurance. You don’t ever want to have to use it, but having the backup gives you a little peace of mind. And if it makes you feel any better, I’m sure Wade or Doyle, or both, have something similar set up.”
“Why would you think that?”
“Because we all read the same books, recommending something like this, and you know you can always believe what you read in books,” I said, and this bit of humor chased a smile out of Nancy once again.
“But seriously, no word of this to Billy or Lisa, either. This is part of what we call our go-to-hell plan, and as the name implies, not something we want anybody else to know about.”
“In addition to you and Mike, who else is in the know, and why tell us now?” Sally asked.
“Me, Mike, Nikki, and their spouses. That’s it. And the reason is because those of us in the know agreed that you two needed to be brought in. Going to back to Dallas wasn’t something any of us planned on, and I think Mike and Marta were willing to just walk away from their house, but this is an opportunity to secure more money before the whole thing comes crashing down.”
“And you have plans for the money before it becomes worthless,” Sally noted astutely. “Otherwise, you wouldn’t take the risk.”
“That’s right,” I conceded, and the next few minutes were taken up with remounting our rides. I could have left the conversation there, but I felt like Nancy and Sally would appreciate being let in on the plans Mike and I had hatched.
“When Mike and I went over to see Mr. Lovett the other day, we had a chance to see more of his horse breeding operation, and I gotta say, we were impressed. Earl and Lynette have a first-class setup, and we decided to explore the possibility of expanding our horse herd her
e. That was always the idea, but as with many things, the limiting factor has been the cost.”
“And now somebody wants to buy Mike’s house in Ft. Worth,” Nancy observed, piecing the puzzle together.
“That’s correct. We think the buyer is a real estate speculator, and with so many houses damaged by the storm, he thinks he’s going to make a killing in the short term. And he might just do that,” I conceded, “but Mike has other ideas. He thinks the fuel deliveries will stop sooner than we first anticipated, and we’ll be doing a lot of the farming with horses. He also doesn’t think their neighborhood in Ft. Worth will be survivable, long-term.”
“Well, bringing in more horses will just tickle Billy all to pieces,” Sally observed with a wry chuckle. “The more the merrier for him. Can we feed more through a bad winter, though?”
“Looking into that, as well. If we can’t feed them, we won’t do the deal.”
After riding for another fifteen minutes, retracing our trail, I pointed off to the left but didn’t say a word as we rode past a weather-worn birdhouse suspended from a limb about seven feet off the ground. The unpainted wood blended nicely into the tree trunk, making the small box nearly invisible if you didn’t know where to look for it.
As we neared the fence line and the carefully concealed gate, I swung down from Azure’s back and pulled the post free, opening the path back up for Nancy and Sally. As she rode by, Nancy asked the question that had been nagging at her for nearly half an hour.
“Why haven’t you told Charlie and Mary about that place?”
Looking up, I caught her eyes with my own.
“They still haven’t decided if they’re staying or going. If they’re going, they don’t need to know.”
“And what about me? Why tell me?”
I thought about our conversation from the night before and gave her my best smile.
“Oh, I don’t think you’ll be going, Nancy Prentiss. I think you’ve found your home.”
Tertiary Effects Series | Book 2 | Storm Warning Page 18
