“Oh, relax,” Mark chuckled. “Nothing’s going to happen to him. We’re perfectly benign here. And if we weren’t, look at him- he’s carrying more weapons than we have in the entire place. The Judge will meet you all later, should you choose to stay. But right now he prefers to just meet with your group’s leader.”
Will clapped his lieutenants on the shoulder. “Take care of things until I’m back. Keep your eyes open. Stay sharp.”
The other three had already turned and Will fell in behind them. They walked across the pit in silence, heading toward the tunnels on the side. They entered one two-thirds of the way down the length of the wall. Will took in the opening’s size and the number twelve on a sign over the top. Without a look behind him, he stepped inside.
Danny knew big. He hailed from a land of big places; two-thousand-acre farms were the norm and ten-thousand-acre spreads weren’t unheard of. Back home Jim Willis, Will’s neighbor to the south, planted a single thirty-three-hundred-acre field with corn every spring. Around the fourth of July, Jim would drive you to the middle of his cornfield. You’d get out of the truck and there would be nothing but corn as far as the eye could see in every direction. He was used to being a speck in large places. But he had never felt as insignificant as did when he stood in the bottom of the limestone quarry, staring wide-eyed and open-mouthed with the rest of his group.
The road in took them down a steep hill with bluffs on both sides. The bluff to the east was about thirty feet high; a pair of railroad tracks ran along its base. The bluff to the west was much taller, and the rows of fir trees they drove past on the way in ran along its top. The bluffs angled toward one another until the gap between them shrank to about twenty feet at the bottom of the hill. There, the western bluff curved away and became the southern wall of the quarry.
The pit was about a hundred yards across and long- Danny estimated it was four-hundred yards to the far side. The bluff to the west was a wall of rock two hundred feet high. Large, square openings lined the wall bottom. The passages were twenty feet high, wide enough for two semi-trucks to drive through side-by-side, and cut into the bluff at regular intervals down its length. He counted twelve of these tunnel openings; each was numbered, the numbers painted on a sign hung over the top of the passage. The water tower they saw up top loomed in the distance.
He and Will approached George. Will had a silly smile on his face and kept glancing up as if he was afraid the towering bluff walls would disappear if he didn’t keep an eye on them.
“George, this place is amazing,” Will said. “It’s exactly like you said.”
George beamed like a little boy on Christmas morning. “You ain’t seen but a bit of it. Them tunnels go back for miles, and they have these huge warehouses in ‘em. And, there’s another pit, just like this but smaller, on the other side of the road up top. There are more tunnels over to that one.”
Danny’s face grew warm and he felt a thickness in his throat at George’s happiness. He’d never missed an opportunity to poke fun of the old hick’s speech, appearance, and intellect over the last few weeks. But the fact was if not for him they would still be on the road, fighting to survive and trying to put together a long-term plan. He clapped the old truck driver on the shoulder and gave him a nod. “You saved us, Georgie. I’m in your debt.”
Then everybody was reaching in and talking at once, thanking George, congratulating him, and reaching in to touch him.
Danny looked around the pit again. The quarry floor was paved- poured cement ran from one end to the other. Semi-trailers sat at random places around the bottom; against the enormity of the pit, they looked like a child’s Tonka toys scattered around a backyard.
Will stared off to the north and Danny turned to look as well. A smattering of people stood near the northern wall, watching them, and Will stared back at them. Halfway across the bottom, a group of men exited a tunnel and walked into a different one two entrances down. Further across the pit, four men had the hood up on a Chevy S-10 and poked around at the engine in a desultory manner. Closer, a mixed group of men and women stared at the newcomers unabashedly.
“How many acres would you say, end-to-end?” Danny asked Will. He thought it would be better for everyone if he could draw the boss’s attention away from the people he stared at.
Will ignored his question and asked one of his own. “Notice anything different about these folks, Dan?”
“Different how?”
“Different from every other person we’ve seen since shit turned sideways.”
Danny looked at the folks on the quarry floor. “I don’t know, Boss.”
Will kept staring at the people in the distance. “They all look well-fed.”
“Okay, I guess.” Danny squinted his eyes, confused. Was it bad that the people here were eating well? Wasn’t that the point of coming? He jumped when Jiri spoke up from behind them- he hadn’t even known the professor was there.
“What Will’s saying is these folks haven’t been out in the shit and don’t have any idea what it’s like out there. And they probably have no idea how to keep this place safe.”
Danny looked at Will to see if that was indeed what he meant. In a voice that was soft, yet ominous enough to make the hairs on the back of Danny’s neck stand up, Will answered.
“They’re going to learn, if they want to stay.”
Limestone slabs littered the quarry bottom. Some were the size of a kitchen trash can, some were big as Volkswagens. In places, the bigger slabs were placed side-by-side to indicate parking areas or to act as barriers. A slew of the slabs and boulders were spread across the pit in a random fashion; Danny thought it looked as if, over the decades the quarry was active, whenever a slab fell from a truck or a boulder caromed off a conveyor belt, they were left to lay where they landed.
He and Jiri passed the time by throwing pebbles at the boulders while they waited for Will to return. Danny kept one eye on Will’s family; Becky sat serenely in the passenger seat of the Ford, visiting with a steady stream of group members. Coy paced from the truck to Will and Jiri and back again. He would walk over, stand in silence for a time, then go back and stand beside Becky in the truck and do the same.
Randy and Taylor returned after escorting Will to the tunnel entrance. They stood a short distance from the group, not guarding them, but making no effort to hide that they were watching the group.
Danny’s anxiety increased with each minute that passed without Will’s return. At the half-hour mark, he leaped to his feet and turned on Jiri. "Fuck this!” He kicked a limestone slab, accomplishing nothing but hurting his foot. “It’s been half an hour. We don’t know if he’s alive. They could be torturing him. They could be doing anything. I say we kill those two right now,” he pointed at Randy and Taylor, “then five of us storm that tunnel with guns blazing. Anybody that doesn’t like it can get the fuck out of my limestone quarry.”
Jiri looked at him, his face impassive. He was silent for a time as he bent over and picked up a handful of the fine, white limestone dust that covered everything in the quarry. He rubbed the dust into his hands, still not speaking.
“What?” Danny demanded. “Don’t try your professor mumbo-jumbo mind tricks on me. Say something.”
Jiri bobbed his head, slowly. “All right. This plan of yours- what happens once we’ve killed two or more of their men, gone busting into their tunnel, and found Will, sitting there fine as the hair on a frog’s leg, drinking coffee and getting to know this Judge guy?”
“Then we shoot the Judge guy and anybody who doesn’t like it can get the fuck out of my limestone quarry.”
Jiri laughed.
Danny peered at him, half angry and half amused. He was about to rant anew when Coy called out to them.
“Guys!” Coy smiled and pointed across the bottom.
Danny whirled to look the other way and felt his heart leap in his chest.
Walking toward them, unharmed and smiling, was Will.
Chapter Thirty-
Three
* * *
Seventeen people all spoke at once when Will made it back to the group. He stood with his hands in his coat pockets, a faint smile playing on his lips. He didn’t speak, and the questions wound down until everyone was silent. They waited for him to speak, looking at him with a mixture of expectation and trepidation.
He pointed at one of the entrances. “Everybody head for that tunnel over there, number three. That will be ours, and I’ll fill you in on the rest inside.”
That produced a cacophony of excited chatter and another barrage of questions.
“In the tunnel, in the tunnel,” Will repeated in a loud voice, and turned to walk toward it.
Danny hurried to catch up with him. “Are we really staying, Boss?” Before Will could answer, Danny thought of another. “What’s this Judge guy like?”
Will clasped his hands in front of his mouth as if in prayer. “Buddy, I want to talk about all this one time. Wait until we get inside, okay?”
Danny gave him a thumbs-up and fell back to walk by himself. He focused on the shaft as they walked. It bore into the limestone bluff, a twenty-foot-high by forty-foot-wide opening with precision-straight straight sides and an arched top. It looked like the entrance to the train tunnels he used to see on Saturday morning cartoons, only three times as large.
It grew dark fast once they entered the tunnel, but what little sunlight flooded in revealed that the inside was more impressive than the outside. The light faded before it reached the interior walls- there was no way to tell how wide the inside was. What he could see were enormous support pillars of limestone that ran from the floor to the ceiling. The pillars were around forty yards in circumference and spaced about ten yards apart. They ran in two rows, with a thirty-yard-wide lane between the rows. There wasn’t enough light to tell how much space was between the pillars and the tunnel walls.
Justin peered at one of the enormous pillars with a perplexed look on his face. “There’s no seam where they connect with the floor or the ceiling. How’d they attach them, and how did they get them in here?” He asked no one in particular.
Jiri gave him a narrow look. “They left them for support as they excavated, dummy. They dug around, shoring it up on both sides and leaving the road in the middle for the mining equipment to travel on. Those columns are what they mined; they left them to buttress the shaft.”
“Wow. Cool.”
Will gave them time to gawk- Danny presumed he’d had his chance to take it all in on his way to meet the Judge, and now he was giving everyone else time to catch up.
Tara was the first to speak. “How far back does it go, Will?”
“No telling. From what I understand- and George, speak up if I’m wrong- each shaft is different, and they all go back for miles. Some had factories inside them, they all lead to warehouses, and I guess some of them are a half-mile wide in places.”
“That sounds right,” George said. “Each time I loaded or offloaded here, I had a map that told me where to go in whatever tunnel I was driving into. Each one is different than the others.”
Will lifted his chin in a thank you to George. “Okay, here’s the situation. This quarry is as safe a place as we’re going to find. It’s a close to creeper-free as you can get; most weeks, two or three wander down the hill all the way to the quarry floor. If we place two men in that guard shack up top, we can end that from ever happening. Once every couple of days, one will fall off the top of the bluff. When they land, they become a pile of jelly, so- problem solved. They had trouble with outsiders once. There was a situation with some military guys for a while, but since then they’ve been picky about who they let stay.
“You could fit a football stadium crowd in here. One hundred and thirty people live here now. They all live in the same tunnel. It’s lit with battery-powered lights and they’ve built little apartments with those partition things they found in various offices. The Judge said they’d send some lights up for us in the morning.
“These people have no conception of safety, or what it’s like out there. Most of them have been here since the early days of the outbreak. When creepers come down they hide until they leave, or lead them out if they won’t go. They didn’t know the creepers tend to herd, and have no inkling that a herd of fifty could roll through here and wipe them out. Everything they have, everything they use, comes from inside these tunnels. They’ve never gone out and scavenged.”
Jiri interrupted. “Even weapons?”
Will nodded. “Most of them brought the family rifle with them when they came down, and the army guys left some toys behind, but no, they’ve never gone looking for weapons or ammo. They’d shit pink porcupines if they found out the arsenal we brought in with us.
“This guy ‘the Judge’ is about five foot eight and clocks in at around three hundred pounds. Almost everybody I saw looked soft. There’s a Hostess warehouse in here somewhere and these guys sit around and eat Ding-Dongs and Twinkies all day.”
Several people, including Danny, laughed out loud at that mental image.
Will chuckled and shook his head. “They believe the government will sweep through any day, cure the creepers, vaccinate the living, and put everything back to the way it was.”
That statement created a small furor- people laughing, guffawing, and talking over one another. Danny stood quietly, watching Will. The way he stood- shoulders slumped, brow furrowed, not laughing along with the others- told him that the Boss had more news, and it wasn’t good.
Will waited for them toquietdown. He caught Becky’s eye and motioned for her to come stand next to him. He took her hand, and once he had everyone’s attention, resumed speaking. “You folks are my family, and I love every one of you. I’d do anything in my power to keep you protected.
“Jiri, you’ve been with me for almost eight months. You were the first person to travel with us, two weeks after we left the ranch. Tara and Tess, we met you a week later. We fought our way to Fort Leonard Wood together. Then we met George, and we fought our way here. And my solemn promise to you is that whatever happens next, we will stay together.
“The man said we could stay here for a week. After that, five of us could stay on but the rest have to go.” There was a shocked silence, and they stared at Will in rapt attention. “But that ain’t gonna happen. We’re staying here, together, if we have to take this place over to do it. But it’srealimportant that stays between us. I’ve got some ideas and some cards to play. But if it comes down to a confrontation, I want to take them by surprise.
“So we will rest and relax for a week. And we’ll get along with those folks and keep our ears and eyes open. But mark my words. I haven’t promised you much because I don’t believe in making promises I’m not certain I can keep. But I promise you this- we’re staying here, all of us, together. And we will make this place safer.”
They took a few beats to realize he had finished. When they did, they approached him as a group, and it seemed everyone wanted to touch him. The men shook his hand and clapped him on the back; the women hugged him and kissed him on the cheek; He and Jiri gave one another an awkward-looking man-hug. After everyone had a moment with Will, and as the rest of the group examined the tunnel and chattered with excitement, Danny walked to where he stood, Becky still at his side.
Will smiled at him and roughed the top of his head; Becky cupped his chin with her hand and kissed his cheek. She turned to Will, who embraced her, and they kissed. When the kiss broke she sighed, then looked at her feet with a smile. She looked back up and patted him on the arm.
“I’m going to go gossip with the girls before I throw you on the ground and have my way with you right here in front of everyone.”
“Bring it, darlin’,”hedrawled,andshot her a lascivious wink.
Becky laughed like a school girl, squeezed his hand once more, and walked away.
The two men regarded each other in silence.
“Listen,” Will finally said. “I have plans for Coy thatmeanhe’
ll be gone much of the time. He’ll be out hunting, fishing, and scouting, taking the lay of the land. I’m going need you by my side in the weeks and months to come.”
“That’s where I’ve always been.”
“I know you have Dan, and that’s why you’re like another son to me.”
Danny didn’t trust himself to speak. For a long time, Will had felt like a Dad to him. And he knew Will consideredhimkin. But to hear him say it put a lump in his throat.
“But I’m going to need you here, with me, or where I tell you to be. Not off chasing tail, or trying to pick a fight with someone from the other camp.”
“Yes, sir. I won’t let you down.”
“I know you won’t. You never do. Holler at Jiri, and let’s go make plans.”
Becky stood with Tara and Kathy, listening to them speak but not really hearing the words. Will and Danny held her attention. They had a brief but earnest-looking conversation, then walk to where Jiri stood. Danny spoke to him for a moment, then Jiri nodded and the three walked off together.
They stopped at the tunnel entrance, and Will and Danny went into their pockets for their tins of chew. The sunlight silhouetted them against the backdrop of the quarry bottom. Will’s silhouette in the middle, tall and broad-shouldered; Danny’s to the left, shorter but powerfully built; and Jiri’s to the right, much taller than the others and lithe by comparison. Will and Danny finished taking their dips and replaced the cans in their pockets. Without looking back, the three men disappeared into the sunlight.
For the first time in almost a year she felt a sense of hope. Their journey was behind them, and they’d found their haven.
Journey Page 26
