I could tell Wil was holding back something, so I gave him a get ‘on with it’ gesture.
“Shawn’s black, and he doesn’t always get along with all the whites around here. He grew up here, but he didn’t move back until his mom got sick and he came home to take care of her. He lives in town. His mom passed in the spring, and I know he was looking to get out. Maybe move back to Houston. At least, that was his plan before.”
“You mean, he’s gotten a belly full of the institutional racism that still exists around here. He grew accustomed to not being called ‘boy’ by the old white men at the grocery store even though he’s a grown man, with a family, and a history of proudly serving his country? In a county with a forty percent black population that has never managed to elect a county-wide official? Yeah, I get that,” I replied with a snort.
“Yeah, something like that,” Wil admitted ruefully. “If it helps, Landshire didn’t like him one bit.”
I chuckled and nodded at that backhanded endorsement.
“How many does he have in his family? I haven’t even seen the house over at Mr. Fitts place, so I don’t know if they will have enough room.”
Wil gave me a funny look at my response, then it was his turn to laugh. “You guys were thinking about buying a house you’ve never seen? Maybe you need to let me or Wade handle that part of the deal. Inspecting the home, I mean. The house was built in the 1950s, but updated in the 1990s. Two story brick construction with five bedroom, three bathrooms. It has formal living and dining rooms, and a large game room upstairs. It even has a basement, which as you know was unusual for around here.”
I thought about it for a moment. Geez, that was a lot more room that I was expecting for a hermit, then I remembered that he only turned into a recluse when his wife died.
“Why such a big house for a family with just one son?”
“Byron originally had three sons, but one was killed in Vietnam and I heard the other one died of a reaction to some medicine he was taking. That was the official story, but I think he actually died of AIDs. Anyway, not any of my business, but Wally was the baby.”
“And now the whole family is gone,” I said under my breath. “How do you know so much about it? The house, I mean?”
“Worked on that project back in the ‘90s with Wade’s dad. Me and Wade did. Probably got in the way as much as we helped at first, but we learned.”
“That how you ended up marrying Susanne? Girlfriend since first grade?”
“God, no!” Wil exclaimed. “Our folks were close friends when we were growing up. Got some pictures of Susanne and I taking a nap in the same play pen when we were babies. But I mainly hung out with Wade and Ethan, then we got a little older and formed our own little gang. No girls allowed.”
“You seemed to have gotten over that little phobia,” Mike jabbed lightly, and Wil chuckled.
“Asked her out on our first date when I got back from my first deployment. Realized what I had been overlooking all that time.”
“Well, write it up as a screenplay and we’ll try to sell it to the Hallmark Channel. Otherwise, next time you’re in town, look up your friend and see if he is still thinking about relocating. Try not to say anything more, yet. Mike and I, we’ll talk to Pat and Nikki about financing. He got anybody else in his family you think can stand watch?” I inquired, wondering about how to integrate new people into our group. I also came to the conclusion that our family needed to have a long-overdue discussion with my niece and her husband. Either Mary and Charles fully committed to our efforts or we would need to find some way to further isolate them from our plans.
“His oldest son is fifteen, maybe sixteen, and he takes after his old man. William is well over six feet tall already and he was already penciled in to start next year at power forward. Also, a hunter like his dad. Daughter is thirteen, fourteen, somewhere around there. His wife worked at the dry cleaners, but the store closed when Debbie flooded the place, so I’m not sure about what she’s doing now.”
“That sounds like a good start, but we may need to get more people in there to hold the buildings. Let’s think about it, but no, I don’t care if they’re green as long as they’re people you trust and who will have our backs. I think Sally might know some more people, but its hard to know who you can depend on.”
“Tell me about it. Susanne’s Uncle Doyle’s having a heck of a time finding steady hands for the chickens. He had to run a couple of guys off the other day at gunpoint. They wanted to just take some eggs and didn’t want to do any work. You know, the ‘you have it and we deserve our share’ crowd.”
“I didn’t expect Doyle to fall for that crap.”
“Oh, he said they talked a good game, until it came time to clean the cages. Then it was demeaning and they refused to be exploited. They grabbed a ballcap full of eggs and just walked out.”
“He didn’t shoot them where they stood?”
“Their wives were standing there at the gate to the coops, filming everything with their phones,” Wil explained, his voice tense. “Doyle and David escorted them off the property at gun point though, and David said threats were exchanged.”
“You know they’re probably going to come back. Has Doyle managed to recruit anybody out of that soup kitchen his wife set up that they think will actually stick?” I asked with a touch of anger in my voice. Not at Doyle or even his wife Brigitte, who was a bit too much of a bleeding heart for me. No, my anger was directed at the idiots who took advantage of the farmer’s generosity.
“A couple. But Doyle is thankful he’s got the bunkhouse already filled with family. Between David and Barbara’s families, they have five other adults who can pitch in and be trusted.”
I knew David and Barbara were two more of Wade and Ethan’s siblings, who were bunking at Doyle Husband’s farm along with Doyle’s three kids and their spouses. It sounded like a sizable group, but I worried that Brigitte’s humanitarian tendencies, no matter how laudable, might get some or all of them killed. Not my monkeys, not my circus, I told myself.
Changing the subject, I filled Wil in on everything else dead Kyle had shared with me. Well, he got the short version, but I saw him jerk when I mentioned the militia group from Baytown.
“You know something?”
“No, but I’m connecting the dots,” Wil said with a sigh. “Take care of one problem, and another rears its head. Why don’t you check that map of the county you ‘appropriated’ from Landshire? If there’s anything like a militia compound set up in our county, that old bastard would’ve known about it.”
“That’s a darn good idea, Wil. Say, you know Nancy told the sheriff we’re keeping these weapons, right?”
“Yeahhhhhh…”
“Well, don’t turn in the serial numbers on,” I paused, then pointed to the two men I’d picked out earlier. “I think their weapons are select fire. If those numbers get passed up the line, it could cause trouble. Same goes for any of the others that have any kind of official state or federal organization stampings.”
Wil gave me a side-eye glance in the growing dark. An appraising look, like he was measuring me.
“That’s mighty paranoid of you, Bryan. Good thinking, but you know, if we get raided by anybody official, that could end up biting us in the ass if those weapons show up.”
Walking with Wil, I moved over to where one of the bodies had already been processed. Picking up the carbine, I turned it on its side. PROPERTY U.S. GOVERNMENT was stamped right below the Colt logo. I held it out for Wil, who nodded. No doubt, he’d noted this earlier.
“There’s a database. You know that, from your time in the Marine Corps. How likely is it that Sheriff Bastrop or his people will run these serial numbers and this one pops with a red flag?”
“Pretty sure that’s standard procedure, back before. Now? Still too much of a chance. I see where you’re coming from. So, leave these off?”
“Yeah, or substitute something claimed from other raiders,” I suggested.
“And you happen to have something that fits that criteria? ‘Cause I know you and Mike didn’t take anything from that house outside Fred,” Wil noted with a sly grin that just touched his features in the dark.
“I just might indeed,” I agreed, thinking about the weapons we’d picked up in Fort Worth. I’d initially planned to use the Marlin Camp Carbine on the old sheriff, but Deputy Bailey’s habit of jumping the gun worked out in our favor. We’d managed to frame him and his two idiot sidekicks for the old Sheriff’s murder, using their own weapons. Those, too, were now safely tucked away. Just awaiting the Mad Max declaration from yours truly, when we figured the situation had devolved to such a state that forensics and shell casing marks would be the least of our problems. Strangely enough, I wasn’t looking forward to that day ever arriving.
“Well, take these,” Wil decided. “I don’t need a bullet hose, and nobody else here has any experience using anything fully automatic. I trust you have a sneaky hideaway vault somewhere that can take a few more rifles and such.”
“Something like that,” I allowed, and then went with him to collect the firearms in question. I trusted Wil to an extent, but some things were only to be known to family. That thought triggered another, and I decided it was time for one of those secret family meetings I hated so much.
CHAPTER SEVEN
“So where are we going?” Nancy asked, trailing along behind me as I descended the steps into the basement, and on into the shelter.
“That’s a secret,” I replied mischievously as I led her through the airlock doors, now propped open, and deeper into the shelter itself. Down here, the lights were on, but switched to low usage, and only every other LED bulb was lit. This made for a dim space, with shadows climbing the walls and pools of darkness consuming the corners.
“I swear, if this is some kind of joke, Bryan,” Nancy half-whispered, but I could tell she was nervous.
I turned to her, taking her awkwardly in my arms for a hug. It was only awkward due to the long, carefully wrapped packages slung over my shoulder.
“Not a joke, Nancy,” I reassured her, “but something I need you to see. But afterwards, we can play ‘Spin the Bottle’ down here if you like.”
“So this is a date?”
“What? A date? I thought we were just going to mess around.”
My lecherous leer might have been creepy in the poor lighting, but Nancy picked up on my effort to be funny and slapped my arm. She didn’t do it hard, and she rewarded me with a smile with much more wattage than these weak bulbs displayed.
“You just watch yourself, buster. You know that’s what gets the horny teenagers killed in all those slasher movies, right?”
“I stand corrected,” I replied with obviously false contriteness. “No bottles will be spun, and no frontal nudity will be wantonly displayed, ‘lest the ghosts of Freddy and Jason get a little too frisky.”
“That’s better,” Nancy said with a consoling tone. “Maybe we’ll see about that nudity part, though, if we can finish up down here quick enough.”
“Well.” I said, suddenly at a loss for words. Then, after a heartbeat, my brain re-engaged. “What are you waiting for? Let’s get this chore done and done.”
It was late, far later than I intended to take care of this chore, but Mike and Pat both concurred that we needed to be clean before the sheriff or any of his deputies showed up in the morning to collect our statements. That wasn’t surprising. Both my brother and my brother-in-law shared in my concerns about security. No, the shocking part was their insistence that Nancy needed to know the location of our secret weapon stash, which we all referred to as the Deep Freeze.
I continued on past the kitchen and massive pantry in the shelter, then followed the hall leading off to the bunkrooms, but turning left at the T-intersection instead of right where the bathroom and sleeping area lay. I was headed for the mechanical room, and the location of our hiding spot for all things to be kept off the books. Well, most things, I corrected myself.
With the shelter on low usage settings, the mechanical room was strangely silent. The name was really a misnomer, for the space actually consisted of several rooms linked together in a series, with pipes and conduit running back and forth. The entire section of the shelter came pre-assembled, and while I’d spent some time memorizing the maintenance manuals and familiarizing myself with the subsystems, the engineering know-how that went into designing the cramped space still left me amazed.
I headed for the back corner, finally turning on the headlamp I was wearing as I knelt down on the metal decking. Nancy hung back, but I could feel the curiosity of her gaze as she observed the process. The deck plates were secured with bolts sunk flush into the metal, forming a gridwork of metal, skid-free flooring that remained uniform through the mechanical spaces.
I knew there were crawl spaces underneath, accessible by the removable plates to reach the subfloor below. Those sealed spaces hosted additional stored goods and supplies, squirreled away for a rainy day. Instead of fiddling with those bolts, though, I removed a rectangle of black metal from the cargo pocket of my pants and touched it to the aluminum wall in front of me, moving the block slowly upward until I reached the next panel above. Unlike the floor plates, these wall sections appeared to be welded into place, but as I reached the upper level, I felt the three foot by three-foot section of wall rotate inward on concealed hinges.
“What the heck, Bryan? I thought you were going to unbolt the flooring there,” Nancy muttered as I pushed the hidden door open wider.
“Nope. Somebody looking would find those subfloor spaces. We use them for storage anyway, be a waste to ignore that extra square footage, but not for sensitive items like these,” replied, holding up the rifle sleeves.
“And how did you get that hatch open?”
“Magnetic lock. The wall is aluminum, the lock mechanism is not,” I observed, and I caught Nancy’s slight grin.
“Slick,” she confessed. “I didn’t see that coming at all.”
Then she gestured.
“Those the rifles Wil and Wade told you to get rid of?”
“Yeah. And they are going down there,” I said, gesturing through the open portal.
“What’s down there? And why the secrecy?”
“Nancy, this is one of our family secrets. Like the house in the woods,” I replied seriously. “You and Sally are the only ones outside of kin who know about that, and I meant to show this to both of you, but we got side-tracked. This is where we store items that we don’t want anybody else to find. Not the government, not our neighbors. Nobody.”
As I spoke, I slid my lower body through the hole in the wall, extending my legs to reach for the treads of the short ladder Mike and I had installed.
“Illegal stuff?”
I nodded as I continued backing down the ladder.
“Some of it, and only because we don’t have a tax stamp for certain things. Other stuff, we don’t want laying around for anyone to find.”
“What does that even mean?” Nancy complained, but I paused and gave her a little ‘come on’ gesture.
“Climb down here and you will see.”
It was only six rungs on the short ladder, and then I was standing atop the Deep Freeze. The space was only a little over two meters tall and wider at the top than the bottom, which was natural given the tapered design of the area in question. We were surrounded by metal, and the hatch at my feet was also designed to blend into the background. I wasn’t sure if Nancy even realized it was there.
“Okay,” Nancy conceded once she joined me on the metal plating of the Deep Freeze. “What is this place, and why down here?”
“Ever hear of ground-penetrating radar?”
“Yeah, that’s what the cops use to find bodies. And buried treasure,” she added that last part in a tone of dawning understanding.
‘Ah-ha. This is something blocked by the shelter itself. Nobody could find this place unless they knew about it.”
“That’s
right. When this pig of a shelter was delivered, Mike was the first to realize the four stabilizers that were going into the ground might offer some extra capabilities. This is one of the four stabilizers, or legs, that project down three meters beyond, even deeper than the lowest subfloor and act as anchors for the rest of the shelter. Let me tell you, that was a bear digging out these holes for the legs, but as I said, Mike saw the utility immediately.”
“Are all four legs hollow like this?”
“Yes, but we aren’t using all of them for storage,” I replied, following her line of reasoning. “We just wanted to make sure that they all look the same if somebody checked with radar. With all four being somewhat equal, and with the hatch hopefully camouflaged, the idea was to create not just a hideout for our potential contraband, but also as a last ditch refuge should the shelter be breached.”
“Now you have me curious. What else are you hiding in this Deep Freeze, and where are you keeping it?”
“Oh, you’re standing on it,” I replied in a teasing tone, looking down.
“Don’t tell me. Another hidden panel?”
“You guessed,” my tone was a mock pout, but I didn’t hesitate to kneel down and use the magnet again to disengage the lock on this trapdoor. The hinges were on the inside, and the door itself was three feet across and two feet tall. Even using aluminum to fashion it, the metal was thick and dense, requiring both my hands to lift it up and lean against the wall.
Reaching inside the cavity, I felt for the battery powered LED lantern and flicked the switch. The bulb wasn’t much, casting a 20 watt cone of light, but with the darkness and the limited space, the illumination was sufficient to show off the contents of the Deep Freeze.
Guns. Lots of them. Laid out on racks in rows, with a built-in crossbar to hold the rifles and shotguns in place. Other racks held boxes of items. Some were clearly pistol sized, while others defied easy identification.
“What the hell, Bryan? You guys planning on arming a company?”
I shrugged, then sat down on the edge of the Deep Freeze and lowered myself into the hole, carefully turning the slings on the cushioned rifle sleeves to avoid hanging myself up on the edge. Did that once before, and it wasn’t as funny as one might think when I managed to tweak my shoulder socket that time.
Tertiary Effects Series | Book 3 | Bite of Frost Page 7
