THE ALEX FLETCHER BOXSET: Books 1-5

by Steven Konkoly

  From what he could tell, the water pushed up against the basement ceiling. He might find a pocket of air between ceiling joists if the water level was a few inches below the floorboard, but the air would be limited. Using the snorkel to access the air presented a few risks. With only a few inches of dry space, he would have to be extremely careful not to tip the snorkel and inhale water. Low on air deep inside the basement, a panicked moment could kill him. This assumed he could find a few pockets of air. If not, he’d have to take the entire operation slowly, making multiple trips to unlock doors, safes, clear debris—all culminating in a few long, unobstructed trips to haul out his perceived bounty. Fortunately, everything he needed was clearly labeled and conveniently located in one place inside the “bunker.”

  “Are you sure you don’t want to attach a line or something?” asked Kate.

  “Are you coming in after me if something goes wrong?”

  “Why wouldn’t I?”

  “Then I’m definitely not attaching a line. One of us has to survive this,” he replied.

  “I think I’m capable of swimming twenty feet and dragging your ass out of there. I’m a better swimmer than you,” she pointed out.

  “Then maybe you should be the one making the dive,” he said, raising his eyebrows.

  “I’m not familiar enough with your system down there.”

  “Having a line attached is just one more thing I have to worry about. I’ll be fine. If I’m having trouble, I’ll come right up. Promise.”

  “All right, but I wish we had a way to communicate,” said Kate.

  “I’ll check the first few joists for an air pocket. If I don’t find air, you’re going to see me back here every thirty seconds or so. If I find air, I’ll try to use the snorkel to clear the whole path in one trip. You can sit in the water with your goggles and watch my light. The water’s pretty warm,” he said.

  “You always say that,” she said, taking a transparent pair of goggles off the kitchen island.

  “It’s at least ten degrees warmer than the beach water. Probably heated up over land,” said Alex.

  He heard a knock from the mudroom, followed by Charlie’s voice. “You guys here?”

  “Come on in, Charlie,” Alex called. “I’m about to take a swim.”

  Charlie walked into the kitchen with his AR suspended at chest level by a one-point tactical sling. Alex noticed that he had completely rearranged the attachments on his rifle since he’d last seen him. Instead of a long-range scope, the rifle now featured an EOTech holographic sight with flip-up magnifier, a laser/flashlight combination and a bipod. Alex’s rifle lay on the recently cleaned granite island, along with the rest of his tactical gear. Charlie’s eyes immediately diverted to the rifle.

  “You sprang for an ACOG? Dammit. Now I feel like I cheaped out on this,” he said grumpily.

  “I think that EOTech combo costs the same. I almost went with that,” said Alex.

  “But you didn’t,” said Charlie, still staring at Alex’s rifle.

  He finally broke the attachment-envy-induced trance and joined them at the basement doorway.

  “Christ, it’s dark down there,” Charlie remarked. “Did you open the bulkhead door?”

  Alex looked up at Kate and shook his head. “We’re fucking idiots.”

  “I’m not saying another word,” said Charlie, winking at Kate.

  Five minutes later, the underwater world below looked vastly different. With mostly clear skies and fierce sunlight penetrating the southeast corner of the basement, he could see the outlines of the bottom stairs and a few of the shelves along the submerged facing wall. He felt better about the situation, though it did nothing to alleviate the oxygen situation.

  “You think I should be able to find some air?” said Alex.

  “Definitely. I’ve been marking the water progress on the wall next to my stairs,” said Charlie. “It’s dropped at least six inches in the last three hours. Before that it didn’t move. There has to be a pocket of air. You could always wait until later.”

  “We don’t have another three hours. I need to know if the gear is part of our plan or not. It’s almost three. We’ll get everyone together when I’m done with this.”

  “You could always use one of the garden hoses to breathe. I assume it’s still connected to the house,” said Charlie.

  “I’ll take my chances holding my breath. That hose has been there for fifteen years.”

  “How about I stick around while you go swimming—just in case?”

  Alex nodded and activated the LED light attached to his mask. He’d used over a dozen rubber bands to tightly affix the waterproof flashlight. He had the option of using several head-mounted lamps scattered throughout their rucksacks, but couldn’t convince himself that they would continue to work submerged. He knew for a fact that this light would work, and in the environment below, he needed one-hundred-percent reliability. The light from the bulkhead opening would illuminate his path to the bunker door, but the area inside the bunker would be pitch black. He wasn’t taking any chances. He fitted the mask and adjusted the light to face directly forward.

  “I always wanted to go cave diving,” he said and slid into the water after a deep breath.

  The first thing he noticed was the cut on his forehead, which burned like someone held a match against it. A dozen other cuts and scrapes sounded off for a moment, but nothing could compete with the exhilaration of swimming through salt water in his basement. The cuts were a distant memory by the time his feet touched the concrete flooring.

  He propelled himself forward, glancing around for a moment. He was surprised by the clarity of the water, which allowed his LED flashlight almost unlimited range in the basement. It made sense. The basement had more or less been a closed, undisturbed system for the past eight hours, giving most of the sediment time to settle. Alex propelled himself upward, just under the lip of the ceiling, and searched the area between the first two joists. He pressed the mask lens as high as possible, finding a three-inch pocket of air. Craning his neck backward, Alex grabbed the joists and attempted to bring his mouth above the waterline, but found the position to be too unstable. His lips barely breached the surface, which wasn’t enough.

  He put the self-clearing snorkel in his mouth and used his hands to align the top of the snorkel with the floorboard between the joists. Once nearly flush with the ceiling, he expelled the air in his lungs, purging the snorkel through the valve below the mouthpiece. He tentatively sucked air back into the snorkel, encountering little resistance. Alex breathed deeper, bringing nothing but air into his lungs. He took several breaths, alternating the position of his head and snorkel, until he was comfortable using both hands to steady himself on the joists.

  Nothing to it.

  He popped up in the stairwell and gave his audience a thumbs-up. “I found air. Three inches at least. No problem. I’ll be done with this in ten minutes. Why don’t you start gathering the troops, Charlie. Is Ed’s house any cleaner than ours?”

  “His and mine. We’ve been moving slop for hours,” said Charlie.

  “Let’s go with Ed’s. That way Kate and I can sneak around back so it doesn’t look like we’re having a big meeting. You’ve been going back and forth all day. Linda needs to be there. Can you leave the girls behind?”

  “I sure as shit have no intention of leaving my house unguarded. They can hold their own.”

  “Good. I’ll haul some extra ammunition and magazines up for everyone,” said Alex. “If we have time later, I’ll fetch your thermal scope.”

  “You won’t be disappointed with that thing. It’s unbelievable. Can’t see through walls, but it can pick up heat signatures inside windows, which more or less accomplishes the same thing,” said Charlie.

  “Infrared reflections or ambient shadowing,” Alex corrected. “Unless the windows are closed. IR signatures can’t transmit through glass.”

  “Snipers don’t typically fire through closed windows,” countered Charlie.


  “You guys are out of your minds. Can we get on with this?” Kate snapped, descending the stairs into the water. “Warm water, my ass,” she added.

  “What a lovely couple. We’ll start making our way over to Ed’s in about thirty minutes,” Charlie said and disappeared.

  “Ready?” Alex asked.

  “Play it smart. I won’t be able to see you very well in the bunker,” she said, illuminating her own waterproof flashlight.

  Alex sank into the water and swam toward the bunker door. He arrived several seconds later and questioned why he had been so worried. He had two locks to open, which shouldn’t take much time. He considered trying to open the door before his next oxygen break, but decided against it. Before committing to any kind of task, he needed to verify that another pocket of air existed above him. He’d do the same when he reached the gun safe.

  Repeating the process used near the stairs, he relaxed and breathed through the snorkel, flooding his system with oxygen. Kate floated lazily underwater near the bottom of the staircase, pointing her flashlight in his direction. He smiled with the snorkel in his mouth and gave her another thumbs-up sign. She broke for the surface and returned several seconds later. When she returned, Alex used one hand to retrieve the keys from the zippered pocket on his right thigh. He had removed the keys from his larger key chain and put them on a separate ring, wrapping duct tape around the base of the deadbolt key for quick identification. The third key on the ring was the circular gun safe key, which was easily distinguished from the traditional flat keys used to lock the bunker door. With the duct-taped key in hand, he descended a few feet and unlocked the deadbolt. A few seconds later, he had opened the doorknob lock and gained entry to the bunker, which was pitch black as expected.

  The sole window to the backyard was blocked by mud, and the light from the bulkhead door barely penetrated more than a foot or two into the abyss. His flashlight cast a bluish-gray beam across the room, spotlighting the oil tanks, which he suddenly suspected were leaking. Another thing he hadn’t anticipated. He swept the beam over the room, taking in the eerily monochromatic scene. Unlike the first floor, the water must have filled the basement slowly through the single one-foot-tall by two-feet-wide window in front of him. Aside from the packages of dehydrated food, MREs, and medical supplies bobbing between the joists in the far northwest corner of the bunker, very little had been disturbed by the tsunami.

  He turned to his right to face the gun safe and nearly bit his tongue. All of his air vacated in an attempt to scream, and he bolted out of the dark chamber, swimming as fast as possible toward Kate. He scrambled past her and surfaced, grabbing hold of the handrail and ripping the mask off. He coughed violently as the mask drifted away toward the bottom of the stairs. Kate enveloped him, turning his face toward her.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked urgently.

  He coughed a few more times to clear his airway. “There’s a body down there. I wasn’t expecting it, and I panicked. It was a little girl, or boy—I couldn’t tell. Ripped apart pretty bad—fuck.” He exhaled.

  “You don’t have to go back down there.”

  “I’m going back down. That won’t be the last body any of us sees close up. It was just bad timing. Like a horror movie. One second I was surveying the room, the next I’m staring into a dead child’s eyes. It’s all good. At least I didn’t drop the keys,” he said, showing them to her. “I’m fine.”

  “You don’t sound fine.”

  “I’m good. Seriously. Seeing that body gives me all the more reason to get everything I need out of there. Ryan needs me to have every advantage possible entering Boston. That’s what I’m doing down there,” he said, glad that the salt water gave him an excuse to continuously wipe his eyes.

  “All right. I think you should move the body to the bulkhead. Get it out of your way and up so the authorities can find it. Someone will be looking for that kid,” said Kate.

  He didn’t want to break the bad news that nobody would be looking for the kid floating around in their basement. At least nobody in her immediate family.

  “Back down. You don’t have to keep an eye on me. I think I’ve got the technique mastered at this point,” Alex said.

  “I can handle seeing a dead body,” Kate said, “and you missed hitting your head on the doorframe by about a centimeter. I can’t rescue Ryan, Alex. You’re the only option we have.”

  He kissed her forehead and dove into the water to retrieve the mask. Ten minutes later, he had returned with four sealed ammunition cans, an M4 carbine and a 9mm HK USP pistol. One of the cans contained a pair of generation two, head-mountable dual night vision goggles, a small, rifle-mountable generation two, night vision monocular, and a dual-beam IR aiming laser. The other cans contained ammunition and magazines compatible with his rifle and pistols.

  He was surprisingly tired from the brief underwater foray. “This should do it.”

  “I’ll start hauling this stuff up,” Kate said.

  “I’ll get the body out of there. I think it might be better to leave it inside the bulkhead doors. Tie it to the stairs or something. I don’t like the idea of it sitting in the sun where the animals can get to it.”

  “I’m not sleeping in a house with a dead body in it. I’ll help you drag it to wherever they’re putting the rest of the bodies.”

  “Fair enough. I’ll get it out of the house and have Charlie help me move it. You don’t want to see this one, Kate. It’s someone’s baby.”

  Kate’s face softened, and she held him for a minute. “They’re all someone’s baby,” she whispered.

  Chapter 12

  EVENT +10:47 Hours

  Scarborough, Maine

  Alex sat in the empty seat left for him at the head of the kitchen table. Ed sat directly across from him, in front of the missing slider door. He was slightly concerned with privacy, since all of the windows had been blown out, but none of their options were optimal. He needed a table to lay out a few maps, which limited them to the dining room or kitchen. The dining room faced the street, exposing their conversation to anyone passing in front of the house.

  He took a sip of ice-cold beer and observed his team. This wasn’t going to be an easy journey. They were probably thinking the same thing about him. He knew he looked worse than all of them combined. The slash across his forehead was held together by a butterfly bandage and slathered with antibiotic ointment. The cut wasn’t deep, but it was surrounded by a mean-looking bruise and could easily become infected if ignored. Several smaller, less urgent looking bruises had developed on his arms, face and neck, giving the impression that he had been worked over by a bar mob.

  The bruise on his right tricep muscle was by far the worst. Partially hidden by his gray T-shirt, the deep purplish-red contusion drew stares from everyone. His arm had felt markedly better since taking ibuprofen and applying ice, but he strongly suspected that tomorrow would be a rough day. He could shoot right handed or left handed, but there was no comparison between what he could do with the right versus the left. He’d have to deal with it the best he could. That’s all he could ask of himself and the ragtag group sitting around Ed’s kitchen table.

  He glanced at Kate and winked. Her normally lustrous black hair, now matted and dull, was hidden under a light blue ball cap. Despite the added trials of the Fletchers’ day, she exuded a confidence that he didn’t see in Linda or Samantha. She’d changed since the pandemic. The Sig Sauer P228 seated in the drop holster on her right thigh was one of many testaments to her sharply honed commitment to the Fletcher way of life. She would lead the women and children to his parents’ farm. God help anything that got in their way.

  The Thorntons and Walkers had readily accepted his offer to weather the storm in Limerick. Charlie and Linda owned a fully stocked camp on the Great Pond near Belgrade, Maine, but didn’t have any way to get there. With Charlie accompanying Alex and Ed to Boston, it made sense for Linda and their twin seventeen-year-old daughters to travel with Kate. Running
water would fail shortly, and electrical power wouldn’t be restored for months, turning their homes into little more than three-thousand-square-foot tents.

  Once power returned, a multitude of complicated challenges would surface. They would have to replace all of the electrical components in their furnace, if the furnace was even salvageable after sitting in salt water for several days. Not to mention the fact that they would be competing for parts and service with millions of other households. They all had wood-burning stoves, which could carry them through the winter if they could scrounge enough wood. Most of Alex’s wood stack had been washed away by the tsunami. The cord he kept in the garage wouldn’t last him through December.

  Windows were another issue. How long would it take for them to get replacement windows? Two years ago, Alex had accidentally cracked one of their family room windows with the back of a shovel while digging in a flowerbed. The replacement window arrived two weeks later. With several million windows shattered in New England alone, it could take over a year. Most people would be forced to contend with plywood, plastic sheeting and duct tape, which would be no match for a Maine winter.

  Households would compress their lives into one or two rooms and cannibalize unbroken windows from unused spaces. Depending upon the orientation of the house, this could work. For the three families gathered here, it would be a less than optimal experience. They all lost large sliding glass doors, which opened directly into large, combined kitchen and family areas. No amount of makeshift shuttering could keep the cold out, even with a wood-burning stove blazing at full strength.

  Mold was another issue, but now he was just pig-piling the list of reasons why their friends should join them at the farm. Especially since everyone agreed with Alex’s assessment that the situation on the “outside” would explode within the next seventy-two hours, once again sending the hordes north from Connecticut and Massachusetts to pillage the less populated, resource-rich suburbs.