“Oh, I’ll be fine. Don’t you worry about me. I’ve just been feeling a little lightheaded lately, and a bit weak. It’s probably just because I’ve been on my feet a lot more these past few months in the kitchen. And let’s face it. I’m not getting any younger.
“But Helen, bless her heart, told me this morning that she’s going to start filling in for me whenever I start feeling weak. So I’ll be fine.”
Hannah wasn’t buying it. She looked at Mark and Mark recognized concern in her eyes.
Hannah said, “I know what Grandma can probably use more than anything. Little boy hugs! They make me feel better no matter how bad I feel.”
She put Markie down at the foot of the bed, and he promptly crawled up on the bed and under the covers with his Grandma.
Hannah looked at Mark and said, “I’ll be right back.”
Hannah walked out of the room, and Phyllis turned her attention to her grandson.
“My, how you’ve grown. I love you so much. You always make Grammy feel better.”
He snuggled with her, and she took a children’s book off her night table and read to him. Green Eggs and Ham was one of his favorites.
Five minutes later, Hannah returned with Debbie, the mine’s resident medic.
Debbie interrupted Phyllis’ reading long enough to say, “Mom, why didn’t you tell me you weren’t feeling well?”
“Because I knew you’d just fuss over me.”
Phyllis went back to reading. Debbie sat down beside her and took her pulse. She ran a digital thermometer across her mother’s forehead. Then she took the book from her mother’s hands and put it aside.
“Mom, do you feel well enough to walk over to the clinic? I want to take some of your blood and do some lab tests on it.”
“You can do lab tests?”
“Well, not the same array you’d get at a hospital before the freeze. But yes, I can do a limited number of tests.”
“Okay, as long as you walk with me in case I get dizzy.”
Mark picked up Markie and looked at his sister. “Debbie, don’t you take any foolishness from this stubborn old gal about her not needing to be fussed over.”
Debbie laughed and said, “Oh, don’t you worry about that. The apple didn’t fall far from the tree. I’m just as pigheaded as she is.”
Phyllis looked at both of them and said, “Uh, hello! I’m right here, you know.” She gave them a “duh” look that lightened the moment.
That evening Debbie dropped by Hannah and Mark’s RV and gave them an update.
“I ran some tests, and took an x-ray, and she appears to have a considerable blockage in one of her main arteries. I gave her some Heparin intravenously, and will have her take a low dosage of Niaspan for the next few months. I may put her on an aspirin regimen at some point, but I’ll hold off for now.”
Mark was visibly concerned.
“How serious is it?”
“Hopefully not too. I mean, we all have arterial blockage to some degree. We get it from the fatty foods we eat. It only becomes a problem when it starts to restrict the blood flow.
“When it gets this serious, before the freeze we might have considered surgery. That’s obviously no longer an option. But if she watches her diet, I think there’s a good chance the Niaspan will help reduce the blockage over time.”
“Do we have enough Niaspan for her long term treatment?”
“Yes, it’s one of the basic drugs we were able to sock away before the freeze. I checked the freezer, and we’ve got enough to get her and a couple of other people through until the thaw, if anyone else needs it. After the thaw we’ll have to send you guys to a pharmacy to gather some more, if you can find it.
“In the meantime, we need to encourage her to stay active, but to rest when she feels weak or dizzy. Also to eat better foods. I know it’s not easy in an environment like this, but she’s an expert at developing a separate diet plan for the diabetics, and for those with food allergies. Making her own diet plan that still gives her the calories, but with lower fat, should be easy for her.”
Mark breathed easier, knowing that Debbie was on the case.
“What’s her prognosis? For the long term, I mean?”
“Well, let’s just say we should probably pray that there are still heart surgeons left alive out there when we break out of here. And that they still remember how to do arterial blockage surgery. All the medication she takes now, and all the changes to her diet, will extend her life, but they won’t fix the problem completely. They’ll keep it from getting much worse, hopefully. But eventually, she’s going to need to unblock that artery.”
Mark slept fitfully that night. Was that the one thing they had failed to plan for? Should they have found a surgeon and invited him to join them? To bring a portable operating room and all his necessary tools of the trade with him? But then what? Would he need operating room nurses? Would he have to bring a staff of four or five people with him? And if so, which four or five of Mark’s relatives would they have had to leave behind?
Hannah awoke at three a.m. to find him still awake. She wanted to take away his stress, to absorb his worry. But there was nothing she could do.
“I’m sorry, honey. I wish I could do something to help.”
He kissed her and said, “Just pray.”
Mark looked across the room to the portable crib where Markie slept.
“Isn’t it about time for him to wake up?”
“Not quite yet. He usually wakes up around five a.m. But it wouldn’t hurt my feelings if he woke up a little early today.”
She very gingerly touched her left breast, which was swollen and tender.
Mark crawled out of bed and went to the kitchen, then came back with two baby bottles and Hannah’s breast pump.
“Here you go, honey. Fill these up and go back to sleep. I’ll take care of the little squirt when he wakes up.”
“Are you sure, baby?”
“I’m positive. I can’t sleep anyway. No sense in both of us being up. And besides, you know I love to watch you sleep. That’s when you are most beautiful.”
“You say the sweetest things. How did I manage to land such a sweet man?”
He smiled and said, “I don’t know. You must have pissed somebody off big time. I was your booby prize.”
She kneaded her left breast, squirting milk into the first of the bottles.
“Speaking of boobies,” she said matter of factly, “I’m not making as much milk as I used to. Should we start converting him over to cereal?”
“It’s up to you, honey. He’s a guy, after all. It wouldn’t bother him to suck on your boobies his whole life. So don’t wait for him to say he’s had enough.”
She laughed that laugh he loved so much. “You’re crazy, you know that?”
“Don’t tell me you’re just now finding that out.”
“No, your secret’s been out for awhile.”
He grew serious.
“Remember we only have a limited amount of cereal mix. And we don’t know how many more babies are going to be born before we break out. Shoot, we might have five or six more ourselves.”
Her eyes grew big and her eyebrows went up.
He went on.
“The longer you breastfeed, the longer our cereal supply will last. But ultimately, it’s up to you. When you feel the time is right, then we’ll switch over.”
“I think I’ll talk to your mom about it tomorrow, and get her opinion on it. And speaking of your mom, how is she doing on her new healthier lifestyle?”
“Oh, you know mom. She’s hard headed like Dad was. I don’t know how I managed to be so reasonable and level-headed with parents like that.”
Hannah burst out laughing, then shushed herself so she didn’t wake the baby.
“Hey, I resent that. Anyway, she’s hard headed and insisting that she’s just fine. But at least she’s taking her medicine, and is taking Debbie’s advice to change her diet and limit the time she spends on her feet. I thin
k she realizes that this can be serious if she doesn’t make the effort.”
Hannah finished the second bottle and handed it to Mark. He left one on the night table and took the other to the refrigerator. It would be the backup bottle in case Markie was extra hungry.
When he crawled back into bed, Mark wrapped his arms around her and kissed her. Then he held her close and started gently running his fingers through her hair.
“Now go back to sleep, my beautiful bride. I love you, baby.”
“I love you too, honey. Good night.”
She was asleep in no time, and dreaming. He knew because her eyelids were twitching. He kissed her on the forehead. Even after all this time, he couldn’t believe his luck in finding and catching the most wonderful woman in the world.
Chapter 12
Sarah went to Bay 24 to look for Bryan and bring him a bottle of water. She found him and his brother Mark with a tape measure and calculator.
“Wow,” she said. “Isn’t that taking it just a bit to the extreme?”
“Nope. We have to be absolutely precise or we won’t be able to find the rod.”
At that very moment, Sami walked up. She had just finished feeding the livestock in Bay 17 and had seen the others walk past. She wanted to see where they were going.
Sami said, “Hey, you all. Did y’all decide to throw a party and forget to invite me? Should I be offended? Was it something I said?”
Sarah laughed and said, “No way! You know you’re the life of every party. A party can’t happen without you. No, the boys are deciding where to build their tunnel. I just came by because I’m nosey.”
“Tunnel? Don’t we have, like, a door we can use?”
Sami gave Sarah her best “duh” face.
“I’ll let Bryan explain. He’s the engineer. Honey, tell Sami why you’re going to dig a tunnel.”
Bryan rolled his eyes, as though he’d explained the plan a thousand times before. But Sarah was his girlfriend, after all, and she could be moody when she didn’t get her way. So Bryan did what most henpecked boyfriends do and complied with her request.
He told Sami, “When the thaw comes we will move out of here and into the compound a couple of hundred yards east of here. It has a high wall built around it, and will provide us farm land to grow our crops, and grazing land for our livestock.
“The problem is, we don’t know what the world is going to look like when we get out. We may be the only people alive for hundreds of miles. Or, there may be lots of people out there who are hungry and desperate.
“If there are marauders out there, and if they find out we have fresh produce and livestock that isn’t available anywhere else in the area, they may try to take it from us.
“Before we came in here, we got the compound ready. It already has a very elaborate security system. If the marauders come two or three at a time, we won’t have any problems fending them off.
“But if they consolidate forces, and come fifty or a hundred strong, there’s a chance they might overpower us.
“The tunnel will be our escape hatch. When we leave here we are going to reseal the mine, just like it is today, so that it’s almost impenetrable from the outside.
“One end of the tunnel will be here, where you’re standing. The other end will be under the feed storage barn in the compound. It will be under a false floor in the barn, and no one will know it’s there.
“If it ever appears we’re going to be overrun and the compound is going to fall into the marauders’ hands, we will all go to the feed barn, lift up the false floor, and come through the tunnel and back into the mine. We’ll be safe here, and the mine will still be stocked with everything we need to survive. And we’ll begin our plans to take back the compound from the marauders.”
Sami asked, “But what if they chase us through the tunnel and attack us here?”
“We’ll gather in the tunnel before they scale the walls. By the time they get in, we’ll be long gone. They won’t know where we went. We will have ladders leaning up against the inside of the wall on all four sides of the compound. Hopefully they’ll just assume we climbed over the wall and disappeared into the surrounding woods.
“However, if they do get curious enough to look around for us, they’ll have a hard time finding the tunnel. We’ll cut power before we leave and take key components from the circuit panels so that they have no electricity. The feed barn will be pitch black, even in the daytime.
“And even if they go in there with flashlights, they will have a hard time finding the section of false floor. It blends in very well.
“But let’s just say, for the sake of argument, that they find the false floor and discover our escape tunnel. That wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing. We’ll have three different places where we’ll have dynamite buried into the tunnel walls, attached to electric charges. The tunnel will be pitch black, but we’ll have infrared cameras spaced throughout it. We’ll be able to see exactly where they are in the tunnel. And when they’re in the center of it, we can collapse the tunnel and either kill them instantly in the cave in, or make them suffer a long slow death as they run out of oxygen.
“The same infrared cameras are dispersed throughout all the buildings in the compound. Even though the power will be off in the compound, the cameras will work. Because they’re all wired to the mine’s power grid. So after we evacuate the compound and come back here, we can track their every move. We can see how many of them there are, what their habits are, where they’re vulnerable.
“Using that information, we can make plans to take the compound back. We’ll likely leave you women and children here where it’s safe. And we’ll either attack them en masse once we know how to do it, or we send teams through the tunnel at night to stalk them and pick them off two or three at a time.
Sami was impressed.
“Wow, you guys have really put a lot of thought into this.”
Mark interjected, “Yeah, but the thinking part is easy. The digging is what’s hard. It’s going to take at least a year to dig the tunnel, wire it and plant the explosives.”
Sami laughed.
“Seems to me that time is something we have plenty of.”
Sarah said, “You were saying something about finding a rod. What’s that all about?”
Bryan explained.
“Before we locked up the compound and gathered everyone up to bring them into the mine, Mark and I lifted up the section of false floor in the feed barn. Right now there’s just dirt underneath the barn’s wooden floor. The tunnel hasn’t been dug on that end. So to find the spot from here, we had to make some very precise calculations, and we took a long piece of rebar steel and hammered it into the ground under the barn.
“If our calculations are correct, we’ll dig the tunnel exactly two hundred and seventy one yards and ten inches from this end of the mine, and we should come across the rebar that we knocked into the ground. That’ll tell us we’re under the false floor panel, and we just dig straight up from there.”
Sarah said, “And if you miss the rebar?”
“That, my dear, is simply something we choose not to think about. Missing our target is not an option.”
Chapter 13
Frank knew as he trudged through the snow to the Martin house that the girls would be the hardest to deal with. The Martin family had been entombed in the car where they had died, safely tucked away in the garage of what was once their home, for several months now. Frank had stubbornly found one excuse after another to delay the inevitable.
He’d woken up that morning, though, deciding enough was enough. They had suffered the indignity of not being buried for way too long. Today was the day he’d force himself to deal with it.
So here he was, on a Tuesday morning, headed to the Martin house with a snow shovel and a blow torch.
The snow was over two feet deep now, and even higher in the drifts. That was another reason he couldn’t put this off any longer. In a world with moderate temperatures, most of the
precipitation came from the sky in the form of rain.
In a normal world.
But this world, a world of eternal winter, was anything but normal. Every bit of precipitation, all year around, came drifting down slowly in the form of snowflakes. And since the temperatures never went above freezing, it never melted away.
All it did was accumulate. A few inches here, a few inches there. Almost two years after the day Saris 7 collided with earth, it was two feet high. If the scientists were right, it could be as long as seven years before the thaw finally came. How high would it be then?
Certainly over the rooftops. Enough to make it impossible to get around.
Frank was trying to do things the smart way. When he gathered snow to melt for water each day, he carried two five gallon painters buckets. The easy thing would have been to take them into his back yard. There was plenty of snow there, after all.
But no. The smart thing was to remove the snow that was the most in his way.
So he left the snow in his back yard. And he left the snow in his front yard as well. Instead, he got the snow from the pathways he made between each of the houses on his street. And in that way he was able to keep the paths open. To move with relative ease from his house to the vacant houses on the street, where he scavenged supplies and firewood. And to the other houses that were still occupied. So that he could check on his neighbors. Could he keep the paths open when the snow was over his head? He didn’t know. Only time would tell.
He opened the gate to the privacy fence on the side of the Martin house. It creaked a cold moan, like an old man’s joints that moved only because they were forced to.
He walked down the side of the house and into the back yard, looking at the roofline as he went. Even with the slope of the roof discouraging snow from accumulating there, he noticed there was at least eighteen inches. He knew, from watching the roofs of the other vacant houses on the block collapse one by one, that it wouldn’t be long. Perhaps the next snowfall. Or the one after that. Not long at all.
Frank made a mental note to clear his own roof. The snow on his own roof was probably eight to ten inches high again. He’d have to climb up there with a snow shovel again and shove it all down.
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