I sighed and regarded my family with a tight smile. “Well, at least we’re finally taking a family vacation, right?”
Alex snorted at that, and shook his head. “With no Playstation, no Internet, and no TV? Nice vacation, Dad.”
“It’ll be fun,” Kate said. “Like camping.”
“Yay! Can we roast marshmallows?” Rachel asked.
“Sure, honey,” I said, and kissed the top of her head. “We can roast all the marshmallows you like.
Chapter 12
It was a short flight from Dallas to San Antonio. Once we collected our bags and got outside, I hailed a cab and gave the Latino driver the address to Richard’s place before getting in. The driver couldn’t say no to a fare, but his appearance made me hesitate before loading my family into his car. He had a buzz cut and patterns etched into what was left of his hair. It made him look like he was moonlighting for a local gang. The driver flicked a glowing cigarette butt out the window of his car and arched an eyebrow at me. “Calaveras lake...” He blew out a stream of smoke. “In this traffic, you going to pay a lot.”
I patted my laptop bag. “I’m good for it.”
The driver glanced at me, seemed to notice my designer clothes, then nodded and hopped out to help us with our bags. I climbed in the front while Kate got in the back with the kids.
“What’s your name?” the cab driver asked as he pulled away from the airport.
I glanced at him. Unlike Cowboy Bill, who thankfully I hadn’t seen since de-boarding the plane in Dallas, the cab driver didn’t put me on edge.
“Logan,” I said. “And you?”
“Carlos. What you think of all this mierda about that star?” He gestured vaguely to the roof of his cab. “You think we’ll see snow in San Antonio?”
I pressed my lips together. “Maybe.”
Carlos grinned. “Mis hijos van a volver locos en navidad.”
“I’m sorry?”
“My kids. They’re gonna go nuts at Christmas.”
I nodded, smiling tightly.
“You got a place down here?”
I hesitated. This conversation was taking an uncomfortable turn. “Just visiting,” I said.
“Oh, yeah. That’s good.”
The conversation lapsed. Someone cut Carlos off in traffic. He slammed the horn with both hands and yelled out the window in Spanish. I heard something that sounded like poohto, and guessed it must be a swear word.
It took an hour and a half on the clock just to get out of the city, but after that it was smoother sailing. The wall-to-wall buildings and strip malls of the city faded to acreages and dry brown fields with clumps of green trees. Barbed wire fences walled-in Route 181 on both sides.
“That’s Calaveras Lake,” Carlos said as a big body of water appeared to our left. He drove on down the highway for another five minutes before stopping at a left turn light beside Cactus Country RV Park. The light turned green. “We’re close now,” Carlos said, and turned left off the highway. More brown grass and trees rolled by. The sky was carpeted in blue. The barbed wire fences closed in from both sides as the road narrowed down to just two lanes. Another five minutes passed. Carlos slowed at an uncontrolled intersection, turning left again. The street sign read Stuart Rd.
Just a few seconds later we passed a housing development with big homes on what looked to be half-acre plots. This was definitely the country, but I was relieved to learn that it was not completely isolated. A few blocks past that development Carlos pulled off the road in the entrance of a dusty side street. The way was blocked with a barbed wire gate and a no trespassing sign.
Carlos lowered his window and popped his head out. “You sure this is the place?” he asked.
I spied a mailbox in front of us with the number 13241 on it. “Yeah, this is it.”
Carlos looked back to me with a frown. “You got a key for the gate? Looks like a long, hot walk.”
I noticed that there was a chain and heavy-duty padlock to secure the gate. “Nope, no key, but we’re expected. You can just drop us here.”
Carlos looked dubious. “There’s no cell reception out here. You want me to wait? Maybe nobody’s home.”
“That’s a good idea,” Kate chimed in from the back. “If Richard got the address wrong we don’t want to be stranded out here.”
“All right. I’ll go take a look around.”
I opened my door and walked up to the gate. Grabbing it with both hands, I stepped on the wooden beam at the bottom to test it with my weight. It seemed sturdy enough. Careful to mind the barbed wire inside the frame, I pushed myself up and over, dropping down on the other side with a crunch of gravel. Casting a quick look over my shoulder, I waved to my family and then ran down the dirt road on shaky, travel-weary legs. In just a few seconds my black leather Oxfords turned white with the dust. Crickets sang loudly from the bushes. The sun glared down on me, prickling my skin with an instant sweat. The air was stifling and drier than chalk. It squeezed the moisture from my body like a sponge.
I ran on for long minutes, but there was nothing and no one in sight, just more green bushes, trees, and dry brown grass.
Before long my lungs and legs were burning, but it was my feet that convinced me to stop. The pebbles were like spikes driving through the soles of my shoes. I should have worn my runners. What was I thinking wearing city shoes on a trip to rural Texas?
Five minutes later I caught a glimpse of something shining in the sun. I wiped the sweat from my brow and held a hand to my forehead to shield my eyes from the sun. There was a massive pickup truck parked at the end of the road. I broke into a run once more, ignoring the stabbing pains in my feet. The pickup was parked in front of an old wooden house. I stopped there, beside the truck—an old F350—puzzled by the sight of the house. This was Richard’s shelter? It couldn’t even properly be called a house. It looked like a hundred-year-old shack.
I walked up to the front door and looked for a doorbell. There wasn’t one, so I knocked and waited. No answer. I tried the door handle. It was unlocked. “Hello?” I called as I eased the door open with a noisy groan of rusty hinges. The house was dark and shadowy inside, but the car in the driveway gave me hope that we were in the right place. “Is anyone home?”
I heard the chuk-chuk of a pump-action shotgun followed by, “Hands where I can see them!”
I thrust both hands up. “Don’t shoot! I’m looking for Richard Greenhouse!”
The silhouette of a man approached the door, the barrel of his shotgun dropping as he did so. “Logan?” The man stepped into the light, and I recognized my brother-in-law by his full brown beard, thinning hair, and oval face.
“You got my e-mail,” he said, breathing a sigh, and pulling me into a one-armed embrace. He withdrew just a second later to peer around me. “Where’s Kate and the kids? They’re not...”
My mind filled in that blank, and I hastily shook my head. “They’re fine.”
Richard breathed a sigh, and I jerked a thumb over my shoulder. “They’re waiting in a cab at the end of the driveway.”
Richard’s eyes pinched into angry slits. “You took a taxi? I thought I told you—”
I waved a hand to cut him off. “We didn’t have a choice. Our wallets were stolen back in Jersey. We lost our driver’s licenses.”
“Well, I guess the driver can’t have seen much from the road.”
I snorted. “I can’t even see much from here. Are you sure there’s anything to see?”
Richard’s expression became sly. “Oh, there’s plenty. He walked out onto the porch with me and pointed to a dense clump of trees to my right. “Nestled in that stand of trees over there is my compound. This is the decoy house. Came with the property.”
I nodded slowly, unconvinced.
“We’d better go get the others,” Richard said, walking down the steps to his pickup. “You guys brought luggage I hope?”
“Yeah,” I said.
Richard climbed in and stowed his shotgun in the back. I g
ot in on the passenger’s side. He fished his keys out of his pocket, started the car, and pulled a gravel-spitting turn to head back up to Stuart Road.
“You didn’t tell the taxi driver why you were coming out here, did you?”
“No details.”
“So no one knows you’re here?” Richard pressed.
“Well...” I thought about Cowboy Bill and his strange behavior on our way down from Newark.
“Well, what?” Richard demanded. “What’s well mean?”
I explained what had happened.
“Shit. That doesn’t sound good. You think he read the whole address off your phone?”
I shrugged, and nodded. “He asked about Calaveras Lake. That’s the last part of the address, so he definitely read the whole thing.”
“Damn it! I knew it wasn’t safe to send the address in an e-mail!”
I regarded him with a frown as we pulled up to the gate on Stuart Rd. Gravel crunched under the truck’s tires, grinding to a stop. After watching the president’s latest speech back in Dallas I was wondering if all this paranoia was even justified.
“Well, nothing to do about it now,” Richard said. “If Billy The Kid comes poking around here, he’s going to regret it.”
Billy the Kid. I smiled. Why hadn’t I thought of that?
We both got out of the truck. The taxi doors popped open and Kate and the kids spilled out, followed by Carlos. He walked around back to get our bags.
“Richy!” Kate called out, sounding suddenly like a young girl.
“Katsup!” he replied.
Siblings and their nicknames. Being an only child, I couldn’t relate.
Richard opened the gate and I looked on as he greeted Kate with a big spinning hug. Alex stood off to one side looking unimpressed, but Rachel ran in and wrapped her arms around Richard’s legs to make it a group hug.
“Uncle Richy!” she squealed.
“Hey there, Rach! You remember me?”
“Yes,” she said.
Carlos deposited our bags beside us in two trips, then he came up to me with an expectant look on his face. “That’ll be two hundred and ten.”
I could feel my eyes bulge with the price he’d quoted. I was tempted to go check his meter, but thinking back over how long the trip had been, and taking into account that this was an airport taxi, I decided to trust him. Even if he’d tacked something onto the price, it couldn’t be much. Fishing the bills out of my laptop bag, I handed them over with a grimace. “Thanks, Carlos.”
He flashed a grin with a gold tooth in it, and took off like a pirate with his treasure. His tires spat gravel at us as he pulled away.
Richard led Kate and Rachel back to his truck with an arm wrapped around each of their shoulders.
On the way down the driveway, I had to hold Richard’s shotgun to keep it out of reach of the kids. I flicked the safety on—privately horrified as I did so that Richard hadn’t already done so, and then I hit the action release and pulled back on the action four times fast to eject all the rounds. They fell with metallic thumps at my feet and Richard glared at me.
“You could have just put the safety back on.”
“I did, but having a loaded gun around kids is not a good idea—or didn’t you know that?”
“I guess I’d better not show you my armory, then,” Richard quipped.
“You have an armory?” Alexander said in an awed voice.
“You bet,” Richard replied. “And now that you’re going to be living here, you’re going to have to learn how to shoot.”
“All right!”
I frowned as I listened to their exchange. Richard made it sound like we were here to stay. I was just about to ask about that, but Kate beat me to it.
“Don’t you think this is all being overblown by the media?” she asked. “The president said the temperature is going to drop by twenty degrees. That doesn’t sound so bad. So we go down from eighties in the summer to sixties.”
Richard pulled to a stop in front of his old wooden ‘decoy’ house and unbuckled. Twisting around in his seat to face his sister, he said, “We’re talking about a twenty degree drop in the global average temperature. The farther north and south you go, the more pronounced that drop will be. Some places around the equator will only be ten degrees colder. Others will be thirty or forty, and when the snow accumulates, we’re going to start reflecting more sunlight back into space than usual. At that point, the temperature will drop some more. The oceans will cool, and then things will get much, much worse.”
Kate shook her head. “Even thirty degrees less in the middle of summer isn’t cold enough for ice and snow to stick around.”
Richard’s eyes beamed his patented know-it-all look. “During the last ice age global average temperatures were only nine degrees Fahrenheit less than they are now. Twenty degrees less puts the glaciers as far south as Northern Texas, hence why I’m in the southern part. Trust me, we ran all the data a thousand different times, looking for any excuse to hang onto hope. We didn’t find any excuses.”
“But the president—”
“Is lying,” Richard said. “Just like she lied when the news of the rogue first broke. If she told people the truth, the country would burn itself to the ground before the rogue even gets here.” Richard opened his door and jumped out. “Come on,” he said. “It’s time to take a tour of your new home.”
Our new home. That resonated, making my stomach churn. What little hope the president had sparked with her latest speech fizzled as Richard’s arguments found purchase in my brain. Like most know-it-alls, Richard had an annoying habit of being right. That meant things weren’t going back to normal anytime soon.
Chapter 13
I soon found out why Richard called his place a compound. A chain-link fence with coils of razor wire ran all the way around it. Cameras peered out from the corners of the fence, each one sheltered by a small overhang of aluminum roofing. Three long, rectangular buildings with sloping roofs of glass sat inside the fence, and a concrete tower rose between them with a metal door in the base.
“How did you build all this?” I asked wonderingly, as Richard unlocked a gate in the fence and led us through. I spied a giant propane gas tank, another smaller tank beside it, as well as a vast wood pile. A gleaming platform full of solar panels lay nestled between the greenhouses and behind the tower. I turned to study the greenhouse next to me. It looked much sturdier than the standard glass and aluminum shell. Solid walls rose three feet up, and the sloping glass roof was double-glazed.
“I built it with my government pay-off,” Richard said.
“Your what?” I asked.
“You can’t silence people for free—well, not without killing them, anyway.”
I shook my head wonderingly. “How do you sleep at night?”
Richard’s eyes flashed. “Don’t judge me. They didn’t just threaten me. They also threatened you and Kate—your kids, too.”
“You can’t be serious,” Kate said.
I blinked, taken aback. “Who’s they?”
“Who do you think?” Richard snapped. “Anyway, it’s too late for regrets now. Come on, let me show you to your rooms.”
“Please don’t tell me we’re going to live in a greenhouse,” Kate said.
Richard grinned. “Who better to live in a greenhouse than the Greenhouses?” He laughed, but no one else joined in. “Don’t worry. The living area is below the lookout tower.” He pointed to the solar panels.
That was when I noticed that those panels were mounted on top of a two-foot-high concrete structure. It was a roof. Windows with square panes of glass and thick metal frames ran around the base. The structure was at least as big as one of the greenhouses. I estimated it to be about fifteen hundred square feet. “That’s a big basement.”
Richard nodded and produced a ring of keys from his pocket. He opened the metal door in the base of the tower with a groan of metal hinges that were badly in need of oil.
We followed him in
side, and Richard shut the door behind us. He led the way down a spiral staircase into a semi-finished basement. A long hallway stretched before us, lined with doors to either side, some of them shut, others open to reveal small bedrooms with mattresses lying directly on the floor. The floors were finished, but the walls were not. Yellow insulation packed behind plastic glared at me between wooden beams. Wires and pipes ran along an equally unfinished ceiling that was also packed with insulation. Light sliced in through sky lights and the windows that I’d seen running around the perimeter of the above-ground portion of the structure. The bare bulbs of overhead light sockets hung between the skylights.
“It’s not pretty, but it will keep us warm,” Richard explained, walking down the hallway.
I passed beneath one of the skylights as I followed him, and noticed that they weren’t traditional glass windows, but rather reflective shafts of about a foot in length that ran through the ceiling and had a pane of glass at each end.
Richard saw me examining the skylight and nodded to the ceiling. “Light tubes,” he explained. “So we don’t need to use the lights during the day.” From there he pointed to the nearest open door in the hallway. “There’s four bedrooms,” he said, turning in a circle to indicate all four doors.
He’d built in just enough space for my family and him. That realization warmed my heart. He wasn’t crazy uncle Richard anymore.
“There’s a shared bathroom over here,” Richard said, moving on. “And this—” he turned to indicate the door opposite the bathroom. “— is the panic room.”
Richard led us inside, and I noticed that there were no windows or light tubes in here, just an overhead light bulb.
Richard drew our attention to the door. “It’s the same door as the one leading outside. You can’t cut it, and it can repel a 12-gauge shotgun blast with barely a dent.” Richard pointed to a chip in the door’s red paint. “I know, because I already tested it.”
The panic room had a couple of mattresses on the floor inside, as well as a toilet and a sink, but no privacy to speak of. We’ll just have to turn our backs whenever someone has to go—if we end up in here, that is. I hoped we never would. Shelves full of canned food and bottled water lined the wall opposite the toilet. A second metal door was at the back of the room. “What’s behind there?” I asked, pointing to it.
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