When Sarah walked into the galley for breakfast Lindsey got up and walked out without a word.
Sarah watched her walk past but didn’t try to engage her.
She knew her daughter was furious with her and didn’t blame her.
She determined the best course of action was to wait for Lindsey to cool off. To give her a few days to think things through.
By the end of those few days she’d have noticed that Sarah and Parker were no longer disappearing together to the back of the bunker.
She’d see for herself that her mom, in fact, was avoiding Parker like the plague.
In Sarah’s mind, that was the best time to take her aside and to talk to her one on one.
After she could see for herself her mom was sorry for what she’d done and had taken steps to stop it.
She didn’t know she had only a few hours before Lind was going to walk out of her life.
Sarah had another problem to deal with besides Lindsey.
As was their normal habit after breakfast, Sarah and Santos went to the farthest reaches of the bunker for some alone time.
They used to go back to play cards or dominoes.
It used to be a relaxing and enjoyable time for both of them.
Not anymore.
Now there was a better than even chance Terry Vega would join them.
That he would use the relative solitude of their interlude for his own devices.
That he would force himself upon Sarah and have his way with her, threatening to expose her and Santos’ relationship as a hoax should she refuse him.
This was Sarah’s new reality.
More often than not, it was the new routine she had to endure each morning.
And in her mind, she deserved it.
In her mind, it was perhaps the penance she had to pay for her dallying with John Parker.
And she saw no way out short of suicide.
She told no one of her plans, except Santos.
The two people in the bunker she loved the most, Lindsey and Karen, would be the most hurt by her actions.
But they’d get over it.
They were strong women, both of them.
They’d hurt, they’d mourn, and they’d survive.
Only Santos knew of her plans.
He didn’t ask how or why; the how was irrelevant. The why was obvious.
He just asked when.
“It’ll have to be after John and I have stopped our relationship.
“And after Lindsey sees for herself it has ended.
“Only then can I approach her and ask for her forgiveness.
“I’ll ask Karen for hers as well.
“Once I make peace with them both, I’ll tell them I love them.
“Then I’ll do it.”
She and Santos, against all logic, had grown close in recent weeks.
She considered him almost a friend.
It surprised her, therefore, when he offered to help.
“When it comes time I can make sure I leave a weapon unattended. Back here. Where your daughter and your sister can avoid seeing the aftermath.
“I’ll even clean up the mess so they won’t have to.”
He saw a strange look in her eyes at that moment.
Sadness… no. Disappointment that he’d so readily offer to help her end her life.
“Oh, don’t look that way,” he said. “You’ll be helping me too. With you out of the way Vega will no longer have a means of blackmailing me.”
Sarah felt many things since that conversation.
Disgust and despair, disappointment and betrayal.
Mostly, though, she felt a deep sense of shame and a desire to end it all.
Chapter 14
Lindsey, of course, knew nothing of her mother’s plans.
But she was unwittingly getting ready to throw a monkey wrench into them nonetheless.
That night about eleven p.m. she made her way to the front of the bunker.
It was the place where the bunker connected with the pillbox. The place where the battle for the bunker took place and where the Dykes brothers were slaughtered.
It was normally a place of great sadness, and a place few of the bunker’s occupants frequented.
Lindsey went there occasionally to meditate and to pray.
And to feed stale MRE crackers to a little gray squirrel that popped into the bunker through the pillbox’s firing ports almost daily.
Karen went there too sometimes, although she hated the place for the memories it held.
She came by to talk to Lind whenever she noticed her niece had disappeared.
There weren’t a lot of places to hide in the bunker, and she knew this to be Lind’s quiet place.
Tonight, though, Karen was nowhere in sight.
Tonight Karen was sound asleep in her cubicle in the third shipping container, just a few feet away from where Sarah herself was sleeping.
Parker and all his men were asleep as well, except for Vega and Woods. They were in the TV room watching an old western they’d each seen a dozen times.
Lindsey had with her a backpack which was overstuffed almost to the breaking point.
Most of the things weren’t hers, though.
She was taking a couple of outfits, but most of the space was reserved for powdered baby formula and diapers for the baby.
Kara had a similar backpack, similarly stuffed.
Lindsey had several changes of clothes back at Karen’s farmhouse. She’d left them behind when they occupied the bunker because she was told to pack lightly.
The bunker, Karen told her, was cramped and crowded and there wasn’t a lot of extra space.
Kara had been in the bunker since the first days of the blackout and had a considerable amount of clothing there, but chose to leave most of it behind.
She could sneak over to the Dykes spread to see if it was occupied. If it wasn’t she could grab some of her old clothing.
If that wasn’t a possibility Lindsey promised to share some of her own clothing until Kara could find some.
They were almost exactly the same size.
And that would leave most of the space in the backpacks for formula and diapers, both of which would likely be hard to find outside the bunker.
The baby was just over a year old now by Kara’s reckoning.
She didn’t know for sure, though, because she was just guessing at the date.
It turned out it was easy to lose track of time when one resided ten feet underground for a year and a half with no calendars.
While she waited for her escape partner Lindsey was a little nervous.
She’d already crawled up the rungs into the pillbox and had already peered out of the firing port into the night sky.
She relished in the purity of the air.
When she first entered the bunker months before she was almost nauseated by the smells: the mildew, the sweaty bodies, the smell of dirt.
She never in a million years thought she’d get used to it but she did.
Now, whenever she went into the pillbox and smelled fresh air it was a slice of paradise.
She couldn’t inhale it fast enough, and it almost pained her to leave it behind and return to the stale and putrid air below.
Tonight was a bit different.
Tonight when she peered out the firing port to verify there was a full moon in the sky she didn’t much mind returning below.
She knew that in just a few minutes Kara and the baby would make their way down the corridor and they’d leave the bunker forever.
That made going back down a lot easier to deal with.
The butterflies in her stomach had nothing to do with any doubts in their escape plan.
The light from the moon would allow them to see the scars left in the earth by the big Caterpillar bulldozer’s tracks.
The tracks represented safe passage for them through the mine field, for they knew the heavy machine had already detonated the mines it encountered along its way.
Once away from the bunker Lind would have no problem finding Karen’s farm. It was due west.
All they had to do was keep the moon over their left shoulders as they made their way through the woods.
As far as travel time, that would depend on how thick the woods were.
Karen told her the farm was about half a mile away as the crow flew.
In a more or less straight line they couldn’t miss it.
No, the butterflies weren’t flying around the pit of Lindsey’s stomach because she had any doubts in the success of their escape.
They were there because she had some reservations about leaving her mom and Aunt Karen behind.
She wondered if this was the right thing to do: leaving her mom with so many things left unsaid.
She wondered if she should at least write her mother a note.
Then she decided it was better not to.
Her mom knew that Lindsey felt betrayed. That she was so angry with her mother she almost hated her.
Perhaps in time she would forgive her.
She’d think about Karen’s contention it was never something Sarah intended to do. That it was something deep within her psyche which caused her to act out in such an irrational manner.
Karen also contended that Dave would understand, and would forgive her.
Lindsey wasn’t so sure.
She almost broke down and looked around the bunker’s entrance for something to write a note with.
She didn’t find anything.
And she decided that was okay.
She decided her mother didn’t deserve a goodbye.
Chapter 15
Lindsey heard a rustling in the corridor and looked up to see Kara, carrying a sleeping Misty, and trying her best to be stealthy.
She’d intentionally kept the baby awake after the evening meal when she typically took a nap.
The plan was to make her tired so she’d sleep through the escape, and thus far it appeared to be working.
That was one of the stickiest parts of the plan: the possibility the baby might start crying and wake somebody up.
But Misty was an awesome baby; everybody said so.
She seldom cried.
That was a good thing in a crowded bunker where a baby’s wails echoed off the cold steel walls.
It was an even better thing when such wails could spoil an escape plan.
Lindsey whispered, “So far, so good. Wait here.”
At the top of the seven iron ladder rungs embedded into the concrete wall was a square portal which led into the pillbox.
Lindsey tossed first hers, then Kara’s backpack through the portal and into the pillbox, then climbed up the rungs.
Once in the pillbox she shoved both packs through the firing port on the north side of the structure.
It was the north side that the big yellow bulldozer crept up the earthen incline the day Manson and his men made their assault.
The tracks the dozer made in the dirt were mostly overgrown now, but their path was still easy to see because the grass and weeds were lower on this side.
Lind probably could have squeezed through the firing port to the outside. They’d all lost weight since the blackout and most of them were skinny as rails.
Just to be on the safe side, though, she climbed up the metal rungs to the trap door and pushed it open.
It squeaked just a bit, since it hadn’t been used in awhile. That startled her a little, but it wasn’t loud enough to wake any of the men in the bunker.
She carefully stepped down onto the Caterpillar’s track and waited.
The fresh breeze both comforted her and chilled her just a bit.
She’d forgotten how stuffy and putrid the air was in the bunker.
And she wondered how much of the sweetness of the air was because it was clean, and how much of it was sweet because it represented freedom from her captors.
She couldn’t help but smile.
As much as she hated leaving her mom and Karen and her three little cousins behind, she was anxious to make good on her escape and to put this miserable place behind her.
Without making a sound, Kara made her way up the rungs.
Her head popped up through the trap door and Lind jumped with a start.
She reached out and took the baby, who was wrapped completely in a blanket and was sound asleep.
Lindsey backed up on the tracks and said, “Step down right here, then follow right behind me.”
Kara placed one backpack upon her back and carried the other in her right hand.
She placed her left on Lind’s shoulder as they made their way slowly through the semi-darkness.
Feeling their way along was easier than they thought, for the ground was still chewed up beneath their feet.
That made sense, because they hadn’t had a lot of rain since the assault on the bunker. The ground was overgrown with weeds but hadn’t had a chance to be packed down again like the ground around it.
It was almost eerie, walking into the heavy woods and hearing the rustling all about them.
Smelling the smells one only encounters in such places. The musky scent of rotting wood mixed with the subtle scent of pine and fir and a dozen other things.
Neither said a word until the woods swallowed them up, then they spoke only in whispers.
The woods were heavier than they’d expected and blocked sight of the moon most of the time.
They switched places once in the forest. Kara took point, moving slowly with a hand out in front of her, lest she walk right into a tree.
Lindsey, baby in one arm and the other on Kara’s shoulder, matched her step for step.
Occasionally the wind blew the tops of the trees aside and they caught a glimpse of the moon, shining high and bright above their left shoulders.
As long as they kept it there they’d walk onto Karen’s farm without any chance of getting lost.
It took considerably longer than they’d expected because they were moving so slowly.
But once they broke into the clearing on the eastern edge of Karen’s property they felt a sense of relief.
Relief and confidence, for they’d succeeded.
They’d escaped.
They were free.
Lindsey had read the note Karen made out for her a dozen times.
It was a list of instructions and helpful hints.
She’d read it so many times she had the first part of it memorized.
The first part was an admonition:
“Do not approach the house if there are any indications it might be occupied.
“Don’t assume that if there are no visible lights there’s no one in there. They might be sleeping.
“Stay in the barn until well after sunrise.
“You can clearly see the house from the hayloft. Watch for any signs of movement.
“Don’t go near the house until you’re absolutely certain no one is inside.”
There were other clues as well.
They’d kept their fuel supply in the barn to reduce the fire hazard.
In the barn were six 55-gallon drums of diesel fuel.
And three fuel cans which were used to ferry the fuel into the basement’s generator room.
“Check the fuel cans,” Karen advised her. “If any of them are missing, someone has filled the generator since we left.
“Also, the north side of the house is where the generator is vented. If the generator has been run recently that whole side of the house will smell of exhaust.”
Before they went to the hayloft Lindsey visited the north side of the farm house.
She sensed no sign of exhaust fumes or burned diesel fuel.
All three fuel cans sat next to the diesel barrels.
All three were covered with dust.
They made their way up wooden ladder rungs on the east side of the barn’s wall into the hayloft and bedded down in the soft hay, just as Misty awoke and decided she was hungry.
They weren’t out of
the woods yet.
But things were looking good.
Chapter 16
Misty was a jewel of a baby.
She loved being held and didn’t mind being passed from one person to the next.
She seemed to enjoy a variety of faces cooing at her and speaking to her in soft tones.
She seldom cried except when she had gas, and her mother’s milk seldom gave her any.
On this particular night Kara was feeling a lot of stress due to the escape.
She was worried the stress would cause her milk to sour and the baby would notice; she might rebel just a bit.
But that didn’t happen.
Once safely in the loft Kara fed her and to her great relief Misty drifted back to sleep again, satisfied that her belly was full and she was being held by someone she loved.
Another of Kara’s concerns was that she felt herself drying up and would soon have to transition the baby onto formula.
But she and Jacob had worked together to stock the bunker and had made sure there was a good stock of both diapers and formula.
The formula was the powdered variety which would last for several years as long as it remained dry.
And they’d brought enough to last several months if they needed it to.
They’d left the disposable diapers behind and brought cloth diapers and training pants instead.
Their logic was that disposables would have taken up much more space in the backpacks than they had.
At the farm they had access to plenty of fresh water from the well, or from the fast-moving stream which ran near the house.
Karen’s washer and dryer, because they were located in the farmhouse’s basement and didn’t have a lot of electronic parts, survived the EMPs.
They’d do it the old fashioned way and wash and dry the diapers, then potty train Misty as soon as she was ready.
“Why don’t you try to get some sleep,” Lind suggested. “I’ll take first watch. When you wake up, feed her and then come get me. I’ll take her off your hands and you can take over the watch.”
Lindsey moved to the hayloft window, which was in line of sight of the front door of the farmhouse.
It was still several hours before sunrise, she knew, but the rising sun would shine bright on the farmhouse door.
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