Alvarez had taken charge. He considered himself the conquering general. This compound was the spoils of war. They’d captured it fair and square, and now it was theirs. And woe be anyone who tried to take it away from them.
He took a head count. He had twelve men left. It would be enough to hold the compound, unless the original owners came back with an army. And even then, he’d have the upper hand. It was much easier defending such a place than it was attacking it.
Now that each member of his crew was gainfully employed, Alvarez went to the kitchen, made himself a sandwich, and propped his feet atop one of the dining room tables.
It was nice being the general.
Chapter 42
Alvarez didn’t know his every move was being closely watched.
In the mine, Mark, Hannah and John shared space at the security console, and watched Alvarez take a bite from his sandwich. They hated this man for what he and the others had done to them. And they would get even. They didn’t know how yet. But they’d figure something out.
Mark noticed that in the background, over Alvarez’ left shoulder, the blacked out monitors at the security desk were visible.
“I’m glad you turned off the monitors, John. Hopefully it’ll never dawn on them that we’re watching. Did you log off the computer too?”
“Yes. And I did one better.”
He took the cable from his pocket and placed it on the desk in front of Mark. It meant nothing at all to Hannah, and she gave John a puzzled look. Mark understood its significance immediately and laughed.
He told Hannah, “If they try to get the computer back on, they’ll have a hell of a time breaking into it. The password is a mile long. But even if they have a computer guru who’s able to get in, the monitors still won’t work without that cable.
“And that gives us a distinct advantage. We can see them, but they can’t see us.”
Before Saris 7 hit the earth, Mark installed surveillance systems for a living. Security was his game, and he was good at it. After he set up the systems in the mine and the compound and wired everything together, he took another step he never told anyone about.
And it was such a minor detail, no one ever noticed.
Hannah asked him, “What if the notice the cameras and break them, or put bags over them or something?”
“Well, they might. But I doubt it. See, most surveillance cameras have a red light that shines when the power is on. Sometimes they flash, sometimes they’re steady. But it’s like a big neon sign that says, ‘hey, you’re being watched.’
“But I took the bulbs out of all the cameras in the compound. They’re all actively working, but they look as dead as the monitors. I’m hoping they think the whole system is down.”
“Wow! So you foresaw this whole thing?”
“I knew it was a possibility. I didn’t want to alarm anyone. But in the security game, you always take a step back and try to figure out what might happen and then take measures to counter it. That’s the same reason we planted explosives in the tunnel. If they had chased us, we could have collapsed the tunnel right on top of them.”
John said, “Speaking of security, we need to get everyone together for a meeting. Let’s do it here, at the security desk, after dinner. We should consider ourselves at war now, and we need to take extra precautions.”
“Okay. I’ll make an announcement at dinner, for everyone to assemble here after they finish eating.”
“And something else bothers me too.”
“What’s that, John?”
He pointed to the monitor that still showed Alvarez, now enjoying a piece of Helen’s fresh baked zucchini bread.
Over Alvarez’ shoulder, on the now vacant security desk at the compound, John pointed out a radio they’d left behind.
“We need to keep everyone off the radio for the time being. I think that may be the one Sarah dropped and broke last week. But we need to maintain radio silence, at least until we inventory the radios and make sure no more are missing.”
After dinner the group assembled around the security desk. Debbie briefed everyone on the status of her patients. Sami was sleeping peacefully and would fully recover. Bryan’s ankle was sprained, but not broken. He’d be hobbling around on crutches for a few days, but would be fine after that.
John said, “I know you’re all worried about what this bunch will do in the future. I want to put your minds at ease to a limited degree. For now, at least, they appear to be happy that they’ve chased us out of the compound, and seem to be making themselves at home over there. They’ve already discovered the cache of wine and whiskey that Mark had stashed in the back of the food storage room, and have sampled both of them.
“They have posted guards at the gate and on the roof, though. They might think that we’re going to make an attempt to take back what’s ours. And they’re right about that. But we’ll do it on our own time, when we decide to do it. And it won’t be soon. We’ll wait until our wounded heal, and until they get complacent over there.
“Mark, Hannah, Sarah? Do you have anything to add?”
Mark took over.
“Like John said, there are no indications they are going to attack us again. In fact, they probably don’t have a clue where we are. They’ve probably seen the ladders we posted on the inside of the wall, and they probably assume we’ve scattered into the woods. But since we placed a ladder on all four walls, they won’t know which direction we went. So we want everyone to relax and to consider yourselves safe for now.
“We need to know who has radios with them. We know we left at least one behind. We believe it is broken, and of no use to them. But if there are any more missing, we’ll have to stop using the radios until I can reprogram them all. We don’t want them to find a radio and start monitoring it. They probably couldn’t pick up anything on it now, but later on when we go outside to take the compound back we don’t want them hearing what we say.”
John read off a radio inventory list that was always maintained at the security desk.
As he called out the names of people who were assigned radios, they affirmed one by one that their radios were still working and still in their possession. None were unaccounted for or missing, except for the broken one left in the compound.
“Good. That’s one less thing to worry about. For the time being, we should consider ourselves on a wartime footing. You men and women who have been trained on the use of side arms, we want you to wear them in case they figure out where we are and decide to attack us. We want everyone to stay away from the front entrance. The steel overhead door will not stop bullets. We’re going to fortify it today with several layers of plywood and sandbags that will. We’re also going to post armed guards at the entrance and at the tunnel”
Mark added, “Right now our best ally is the camera system over there. It’s still working, and we don’t think they realize that they’re being monitored. As long as they don’t figure it out, that gives us a big advantage. We can see them and they can’t see us. So if they do figure out where we are and decide to attack, we should have plenty of warning. We should be able to see them coming in plenty of time to prepare, and that’ll take away their element of surprise.”
He looked at Hannah and Sarah.
“You girls got anything to add?”
Hannah spoke first.
“Right now we’ve got everything we need to survive over here. The RVs we used to live in are just like we left them. We still have water, and power, and food. And most importantly, we have each other. We were lucky not to have lost anybody. It’ll be tough, but we’ll get through this. This is no worse than our first days in the mine. We made it then, and we’ll make it now.”
Sarah looked at Mark and shook her head. She didn’t have anything to add.
John finished up.
“We’ve never used the panic button, and I’m not going to demonstrate it right now. The kids have been through enough. It sounds like a fire alarm, and it’s activated right here, from the
security desk. If it looks like we’ll be coming under attack, we want you women and children to evacuate to the back of Bay 12. There are a lot of stacks of pallets and supplies and stuff back there where you can hide. As soon as it appears they’re going to leave the compound, we will hit the panic button and give you as much time as we can to get to the back of Bay 12. Then our shooting team will don night vision goggles and we’ll kill the lights. If they’re coming in here after us, we want the advantage on our side. Any questions?”
There were none.
Sarah elbowed Hannah and nodded toward Rachel and Roxanne, who were holding each other at the corner of the group. They both looked absolutely terrified.
“What went on today probably brought back memories of the day their dad was killed. I want to spend some time with them to try to comfort and calm them. Let me know if you need me.”
Chapter 43
John wasn’t finished. Not just yet.
“I need some volunteers to fill sandbags and build the barricades. Anyone willing to help please stay behind.”
No one left, leading John to smile and say, “Oh, I just love it when people volunteer.”
He sent the strongest of the volunteers to the wood storage area in the back of Bay 17 to gather plywood and two by fours and haul them to the main entrance. They’d taken both of their forklifts to the compound when they evacuated the mine. A tactical error, but it was too late to do anything about it now.
They did have two utility vehicles that they’d used before to collect gray water from the RVs and transfer it to the water treatment plant. Essentially golf carts, they were made by the Cushman Company and had small pickup-like beds on the back. They could balance six sheets of half inch plywood on the back of each cart without weighing it down too much to move.
The lifters would ferry the lumber and plywood to the main entrance of the mine, where they’d use it to build a wall across the overhead door. The wall would be eight sheets of plywood thick, a total of two inches of pressed wood. If that didn’t stop the bullets, a layer of sandbags stacked on the inside of the wall would.
“Where are the sandbags, Mark? I know we have two pallets of them. I saw them on your annual inventory list.”
“They’re in the back of Bay 17, just past the stacks of plywood. It’s dark back there, because we didn’t light that part of the bay, but I’ll push a rolling ladder over there and add a couple of bulbs. Each of the pallets has four hundred empty bags on it. That should be plenty after we fill them up.”
Sarah said, “Pardon me for asking a dumb question, but where are we going to get sand to put in the bags?”
“We’re taking a road trip to the beach.”
“I’m serious, smartass.”
“Oh, sorry. We don’t actually have sand. But it so happens we have a mountain of loose salt, in Bay 24, where we dug the tunnel. Salt actually has more density than sand, so it should do a very effective job in stopping bullets.”
John said, “Okay, you lifters load up a few bundles of empty sandbags and take them to the salt mound in Bay 24. Then you can ferry the lumber and plywood to the wall builders at the main entrance. By the time you get everything there, there should be a good supply of filled bags for you to start hauling.
“Mark, would you head up the hauling crew?”
“Sure thing, John.”
Hannah spoke up.
“I’ll head up the filling crew.”
“Thank you, dear. I’ll head up the building crew, since I’m the only one here who can hammer a nail in straight. Bryan, since you’re crippled and damn near worthless, would you mind sitting here and watching the monitors?”
Bryan smiled.
“I’d be happy to, John.”
“Okay, everybody else latch on to whatever team you want to work with. We’ll need a volunteer to help with the little ones since we’ll have a lot of activity going on.
“You weapons carriers, keep them on safe unless we get an indication from Bryan that trouble is imminent. Those of you who have radios, be sure the volume is up and the batteries are fresh.
“Everybody knows what to do if they hear the alarm go off?”
He looked around. Everyone shook their heads.
“Okay, let’s get this done.”
Mark’s hauling crew finished moving all the plywood and lumber within two hours and the wall was completed a couple of hours after that. The sandbags took a bit longer. Because of the weight, they could only be moved a dozen at a time. It took most of the evening to get a four foot wall of sandbags built, and everyone was exhausted by that time.
The crew broke for the night to get some much needed rest, and John asked for volunteers to stay up a little longer for the security detail.
“Okay, I know that no one wants to hear this, but I need three other people to stand guard with me tonight. I don’t expect anything to happen, unless those thugs over there had backup in the woods that we don’t know about. But it’s better to be safe than sorry. I’d like to have a four man shift pull guard duty until oh four hundred, and four more to get up then to replace us.”
Sarah asked, rather meekly, “Um, John… what’s oh four hundred, for us people who don’t speak military?”
“Four a.m.”
“Okay, then. I’m good until then. I’ll stay up with you.”
Bryan said he’d continue to man the desk and Brad agreed to stay up as well.
Everyone else dragged themselves to their RVs for some much needed rest. It had been a very long day, and they were all anxious for it to end.
Chapter 44
Alvarez walked through the big house, mostly out of curiosity. But he was also on the hunt. Many years of sitting in a prison cell with practically nothing to his name gave him a propensity to want things he couldn’t have. It had become a habit, therefore, since Saris 7 hit the earth and he was unceremoniously released from prison with all the others, to always be on the lookout for things to loot.
As he walked down the main hallway of the first floor, he couldn’t help but notice that all of the apartment doors were unlocked. A couple of them were even propped open.
He couldn’t believe that such a society even existed anymore. A society so trusting was almost beyond comprehension to Alvarez. He’d remembered that as a kid, growing up in Lubbock, Texas, he visited his grandmother on Colgate Street before and after Sunday church service.
His abuela never locked her house. She told him that was the way she was brought up. That in the barrios of her youth, neighbors didn’t steal from one another. They watched out for each other, and protected their neighbors.
When she moved into a nursing home, just before she died, his parents put the house up for sale. And they had to change the locks on the doors. The doors had been left unlocked for so many years nobody could find the keys.
But in prison, everything was subject to theft.
No one stole from Alvarez, of course. They were afraid to. He had a reputation for once beating a man near death for stealing a tube of toothpaste, and no one wanted to incur his wrath.
Rather, it was Alvarez himself who did most of the stealing. He knew few souls were brave enough to call him out.
He walked inside Hannah and Mark’s apartment. Hannah happened to be manning the security desk while Bryan hobbled off to use the bathroom, and she cringed at what she saw on the monitor. The camera only caught activity in the hallway. Once Alvarez went inside her apartment, she lost sight of him and didn’t have a clue what he was doing.
She felt violated by this strange man. And she hated not only him, but the feeling as well.
Hannah cringed even more when she saw him stick his head out the door and call out to his henchmen. Without audio, she had no clue what he told them. But he appeared to be calling them into her apartment to look at something. Three men came walking down the hallway and disappeared within her apartment and out of her view.
She became even more concerned. That was their home. Hers and Mark’s and lit
tle Markie’s. It was their sanctuary. What in the world could these barbarians find so interesting there, and how dare they just barge in like they owned the place?
She picked up her radio.
“Mark, are you busy?”
“No. I’m not busy at all. I just got Little Sailor to sleep and I’m waiting for you to come back to the RV. Why?”
“Do you think he’ll be okay if you came by here for a few minutes?”
“Where’s ‘here’?”
“At the security desk. I want to show you something.”
“Okay. He’s out like a light. I’ll be there in a minute.”
Mark arrived at the security desk about the same time Bryan returned, and Hannah showed them the monitor where Alvarez and the other men had disappeared into their apartment.
“They’ve been in there for about fifteen minutes now. Four of them. One went in alone, and then came out and called in the other three. What on earth could they be doing in our home?”
Mark was as puzzled as she was.
And then Hannah felt a slight panic.
“Mark, tell me you didn’t leave your computer on.”
“It’s always on. Why?”
“Those photos you took of me on our honeymoon. You know, those photos. Are they on your computer?”
He knew he was in hot water.
And he also knew he couldn’t lie to her. She always saw right through him when he tried. And knowing he tried always made her angrier.
Bryan interrupted.
“You have naked pictures of Hannah and you never shared them with me? I would have shared Sarah’s with you.”
Hannah and Mark, in perfect harmony, said, “Shut up, Bryan.”
She saw the look on her husband’s face and said, “Oh, Mark. You told me you’d destroy those when the baby was born. I trusted you to do that.”
“I’m sorry, honey. They were such great photos. I just couldn’t bear to trash them. And Markie knows he’s not allowed on my computer. He’s never seen them and never will. You know that.”
Breakout (Final Dawn) Page 15
