Deadfall: Survivors

by Richard Flunker

  I know my father has a beer brewer in here somewhere, he mentioned it many times. I was never much of a drinker, but it might really help morale to find it and get something going. Of course, I have never brewed beer, so it better have a manual.

  Everything had a manual. Tague found that rather quickly. He was up before anyone else, and using the one of the three computers located on the main floor. They were set in three separate booths that were recessed into the wall. I was never sure why the design was like that. He quickly started digging through the digital archives, as he put it, and found something that made reference to a folder containing manuals and instruction guides for every device in the house. He says he only recognized a few things, but that there were thousands upon thousands of files. At some point, we would have to go through that. I hope that it’s possible for the three computers to work at one time, and then three of us could filter through it all to see if we could find anything useful.

  I made pancakes, along with some maple flavored syrup. It’s mostly just sugar. It’s one of those meals, breakfast meals, that just seems to hit the spot. Pure carbs and sugar, but, really gets you going in the morning. Well, I can really only speak for myself, but everyone ate up and I just kept pouring batter and making more. About an hour later, everyone emerged showered, shaved, clean and brushed, and was ready for the tour.

  I led everyone back out the front door and explained that there were no keys, just a keyed entry, and that I’d get everyone the code once I figured out how to make new codes. I showed them the small trail that led, rather stealthily, back towards the parkway, the road. I mentioned to them, as a reminder, how we were in a National Forest, so typically construction was not allowed. I'm not sure how my father had managed it, but he built this out here without making it seem like he was building, and there is practically no hint or clue that the house exists. I think the reasons for this are clear. Not only did he want to maintain the status of the forest, something he was keen on, but it was important that this location remain as secret as possible.

  So, back in through the door, that goes into a hallway that leads slightly downward into the main level. Here, the main room formed a semi-oval. On the right hand side as you walk in, is the kitchen and dining room area. There are two grills, a wood stove and an electric stove. I have yet to use the electric stove, and have only used the wood stove a few times. One thing I begin to point out is that while there is obviously electricity in the house, the design leads to minimal use of it, or even none of it, if it came to that. One of the grills is electric and the other wood heated. The main refrigerator works on electricity, but my father made it a habit of only having it on when there was a need to keep fresh items cool. Otherwise, it was kept off. We didn’t have things like milk or eggs that needed to remain constantly chilled, and whatever meats or vegetables we brought up from the freezers were to be eaten right away anyways. A few feet down from the fridge was a freezer, small, but right under a small chute that led down into the lower levels; level five, where the main freezers were. Food down there could be loaded into the small wheel turned elevator and brought up here for cooking and eating.

  To the left was the common area, where everyone had slept last night. About seven couches lined up the walls and formed a semi circle. As mentioned earlier, three little booths built into the walls held three separate computers on small desks built into the walls. There were two small coffee tables in between the couches. Between the couches on the walls were three doors, spaced out. These led to individual rooms, the boarding or sleeping rooms. They were mostly empty, except for pull down beds and a closet. I'm sure that would change.

  Facing the entrance into the main room, on the opposite side of the room, was another hallway. On the left side, there was a small staircase that led up to a balcony above the area and two more rooms. The opposite side had a similar staircase, but that one led to a singular room that housed a few computers and some other equipment. Two of the sunlights poured their light into this room. It was a master control room, from what I understood. I know most everything was run automatically by the computers. The computers themselves ran in sleep mode most of the time to conserve energy, only waking up from time to time to check on everything, give out commands, and then go back to sleep. I know there are far more technical terms for that, but that’s the only way I could explain it.

  Down the opposite hallway led to two more rooms, each with doors on the right side, and then the main house staircase. This staircase spiraled down all the way to the seventh level. It was wide enough for two people to walk side by side, but not much more. Next to the staircase entrance was an elevator, but that was only to be used for moving large objects from different levels. Someone joked that we would continually keep getting our workouts every day. I did point out that there really wasn’t any reason to go down into the lower levels, except to get things we needed.

  Each level, except for the fifth and seventh levels were divided into two crisscrossing hallways, each with many rooms attached to them. At the opposite end of the hallway, linked to the staircase, was a single bathroom and storage closet. The closet also allowed access to a ladder tunnel that linked all the levels, as well.

  The fifth level held the freezers. There is one single hallway, also with a bathroom and a closet, with four large doors, two on each side of the walls. Two of them, on the right facing down the hall, contained the food. The other two contained other items; seeds, medicines, biological “stuff”. I can only assume that we’re talking DNA samples, hopefully, no frozen animals or God forbid, people. All four of the rooms were like mini warehouses, all held at just below freezing temperatures. In the real world, or better yet, the world that had huge amounts of electricity, the megawatts used to power these rooms would be great. I know there was electricity here, but I had always understood from my father that this place was always meant to run on minimal or no power. How these freezers functioned was unknown to me. Something that might remain a secret or information we might come across later.

  The seventh level was the power level. The staircase emptied out into a large cavernous area. Three small caged sections held the deep cold storage batteries. A fourth caged section held capacitors, from what I had understood, for quick high power needs. The center of the room held all sorts of monitors, and the two computers running everything. Between the capacitors and one of the battery cages on the left, was a door that gave access to the wind tunnel. I took everyone in here because, while the house was an awesome sight, the wind tunnel was by far the most impressive thing in the house, at least, that I had found.

  The small tunnel led down a ways, but then slightly up after about six hundred feet. It was a longer walk, strictly single file, but opened up into a small balcony, where about five of us could stand at one time. It opened up into a large tunnel that went straight up and down, sloping downward and out of sight. LED lights lit up the tunnel down below, but up above, you could see the sunlight coming in at a speck above. From this point, three large fans could be seen spinning slowly above us, and a few more below us. They stretched out across the entire tunnel. The breeze was noticeable, flowing up through the tunnel. The sound of the wind slowly moving through the tunnel was impressive.

  (Audio transcript)

  Lucy “What’s this?”

  Tague “Is this a solar tower?”

  “A type of draft tower, yes. This tunnel, where we’re at, is almost at the top of it. I haven’t gone all the way down, but it curves out for about five miles, where it picks up the warmer air down in the valley, not too far from where we began hiking up. The warm air travels up through the tunnel, moving the fans, which in turn, generate electricity.”

  Tague “I don’t see any turbines attached to the fans themselves though.”

  Heather “Are those fans, just….floating there?”

  “Ok, they are, kind of. See, how they’re grooved into the sides of the tunnel? In the grooves, the fans have magnets in them, or the wall does, some
thing like that. And that’s how they float. Now, as the wind turns them, the magnets in the wall react with the magnets in the fans and that creates the electricity. I think that’s how it works.”

  (Some silence)

  Aaron “That powers everything?”

  “I really don’t know. I tried reading about these tunnels, and while they don’t generate obscene amounts of electricity, I still don’t know how much the house uses. Except for the freezers, everything is usually turned off.”

  Tague “There were a lot of batteries in that other room.”

  “Yeah. If that means there should be more, I don’t know. It could be that the house isn’t meant to keep us here all the time. So while we’re out, doing I don’t know what, saving people, the tunnels keep charging up the batteries.”

  Aaron “You said five miles?”

  “Yeah, five miles. In the wintertime, the air flow reverses, too, but I'm not sure why. I know all these different vents open up, and then the fans start spinning the other way. I can’t explain that one. I understand the updraft, but not that way.”

  “Also, since the tunnel is accessible, it makes one hell of an escape exit.”

  Chris “Let me see.”

  Evan “Does stuff ever fall in here?”

  “Don’t know. Probably. I know the top is grated, but probably some leaves and dirt debris.”

  “Also, I do know there are more fans along the tunnel that aren’t on. I saw that in one of the computers in that main battery room. But I don’t know how to turn them on, or if I even should. Maybe there’s something automatic, some kind of parameter, that turns them on.”

  “Now, I’ve never had power issues here. But the key is, never use too much. Always keep things off.”

  Lucy “Simple enough.”

  (End recording)

  We all went back up into the main room, up above, talking about the different things we saw. Evan pointed out that everything had a military feel to it, yet at the same time, didn’t. He smiled and laughed when everyone asked him to explain that statement, which he couldn’t.

  I managed to find some loaves of bread, which I took to the kitchen and allowed everyone to make their own sandwiches from leftover pork from the night before. We talked about counting up the food and the first thought was meat. Evan quickly pointed out that he knew how to hunt, and I reinforced that idea by talking about the increase in wildlife I had witnessed in my hiking. There was talk of raising animals for food, but none of us had even the remotest experience with that, although, if we were able to raise them, Evan did have experience butchering animals. With that said, Evan took it upon himself to look into the viability of raising animals for food.

  Crops on the other hand, would be far harder to manage. Growing vegetables would be possible, although a little harder up in the mountains, but growing wheat or corn would take substantial amounts of work. We would have to research alternatives.

  A lot would depend on the actual food stores. Since I had been here, I had only been taking food from the first freezer, what my dad had called the short term food stores. In this room were the bread loaves, and the already made items. Next to the freezer was a room with tons and tons of canned goods. Most of them had a long shelf life, but were intended to be used first. I'm sure the deep freeze storage areas had more basic food items; flour, beans, cornmeal, and things of that nature. Just how much of it was up to Aaron to find out. From there we could determine just how desperate or not our food situation was. I know for sure that we would have enough food for a year or two, but from that point we would really have to manage.

  One thing I did know, and I mentioned this to everyone, was that this place wasn’t meant as a hideout for the filthy rich to survive. Instead, it was a storehouse for surviving, and then restarting civilization, if needed. The biggest resource we had here were the digital books archived in the computers, from the simple process of baking bread with sourdough yeast, to the specs for building nuclear reactors. Obviously, making a nuke power plant was a big deal, but there were simpler things, like steam power plants, or the making of medicines from commonly found chemicals and botanicals. What worried me the most was if these were “dummy” versions of these books, or the highly technical manuals only PhDs would be able to read, figure out, and actually do.

  Tague has already headed up into the main computer room to dig around. Evan asked for permission to go outside the house, to get a feel of how the terrain was outside. He mentioned setting up posts for watching animals, or people, living or otherwise. Heather said she’d come along. The rest seemed content for the moment to sit around the living area and discuss how they were going to go about their “chores”.

  I’ll have to figure out something to eat tonight. Hopefully the food situation will be figured out by tomorrow, so that I don’t have to run a cafeteria anymore.

  Entry 27 – Food Stores[26]

  These are the food reports given to me by Aaron. He spent the better part of the last two days gathering all this information, although he himself admits that there still might be more, and that his count is most likely not one hundred percent accurate. In either case though, he thinks he's about as accurate as needed to get a good understanding of the food contained in the freezers and storage rooms.

  He has written these down, so I’m transferring them all to the computer. I have put my comments in Italics as well as his comments in Bold.

  First Freezer. Main Freezer.

  1,320-20lb vacuum packed boxes. Half wheat flour, half rice.

  90-20lb vacuum packed boxes of beans. Not sure what kind.

  90-20lb vacuum packed boxes of soy beans. Only because it said so on the box.

  6-100lb bags of powdered milk.

  60-10lb bags of powdered cream. For coffee?

  250 assorted blocks of cheese. Wrapped up. Approximately.

  75-50lb bags of sugar. Both white and brown.

  12-10lb bags of powdered eggs.

  52-10lb boxes of powdered potatoes.

  275 vacuum packed meats. All different kinds. Steaks, pork, whole chickens and turkeys. Not sure about total weight. It would need a scale. Each package is large, maybe, 20 to 30 pounds each.

  300-5 gallon bottles of frozen tomato pulp.

  315-5 gallon bottles of frozen orange concentrate.

  Main food storage room.

  2570 cans. Between 5-10lbs. Assorted vegetables. Peas, corn, beans, spinach, yams, and sauerkraut. Seriously? Sauerkraut? Why? Is this needed for the survival of mankind? I agree.

  7-100lb bags of salt.

  12-200lb bags of coffee.

  4 large crates of baking soda. Not sure about the weight of each crate, but, must be over 100 pounds.

  102 bottles of honey. Maybe about two quarts each?

  2 barrels with what appears to be salt cured meat. Beef jerky?

  150-16oz bottles of fruit preserves.

  17 large crates full of peanuts. Pb&j for the end of the world?

  12 crates that hold about 20 plastic bottles each, containing peanut oil.

  7 boxes filled with small bottles; pepper, garlic powder and other spices. This is a great find. Wouldn’t want to live in the apocalypse without pepper on my eggs.

  These are as accurate as I can get. From those numbers that we talked about last night, it seems like we have more food here than we thought about at first. Instead of the two years supply, I calculated that we actually have over seven years worth of food. That is a great relief. It allows us to really take our time, or, it gives us room to expand just in case we do find more people.

  There’s a section in the freezer that’s empty. I talked to Aaron about this. The freezer had rows and rows of poles that hung about a foot off of the ceiling, and ran across the entire ceiling lengthwise. It looked like an elaborate walk in closet. When we mentioned this last night, Evan, ever the hunter, quickly pointed out that this would be the place to hang up meat that we had hunted. This makes perfect sense. We need to find just where meat hooks are,
if this is indeed what it’s for.

  After showing everyone Aaron’s food report, there was an air of relief among everyone. It’s not every day, especially in the apocalypse, that we get the reassurance of having plenty of food. It was already understood that we had enough for a while, but seven years is a long time. One thing I think I will stress though will be that we shouldn’t rely on this food, and that we should try our hardest to get our own supply of food going as soon as possible, for freshness and just to keep us busy.

  Entry 28 – No Toilet Paper[27]

  Work has progressed to get an idea of just what is available within the house. Last night, while eating rice, we had a discussion about the things that we found.

  (Audio begins)

  “Pass me the…”

  Aaron “There was only a small amount.”

  Evan “But that small amount is actually quite a bit, if you think of it.”

  Aaron “Yeah, but we still better not use it.”

  “Thanks. Hold on, I don’t think this started recording. Oh, yeah, it did. Ok, so Tague, start with the tower, the radio thing.”

  Tague “Ok. I’ve found out a way to see just everything that is electronically connected to the computers here. It seems that it was designed to have satellite connection, but I can’t find a way to uplink to any satellite. I'm not sure what that means, but to me it just seems like a way to stay connected to the internet. The tower is something else, though. It looks like there’s a way to broadcast a radio signal, most likely to inform people of anything, most likely our location. The issue is that this broadcasting tower is not located here, but somewhere off of the house itself. Evan thinks that he knows where it might be.”

  Evan “Yeah, so I was walking up along a trail just north, and I can see a tall tower off in a peak northeast of here. It’s really tall, not like the short cell towers, but just like a radio tower. Think that might be it?”