At just before nine, Bryan and John went to the livestock bay with a rifle. During their morning feeding, Smokey the bull had been separated from the other cattle, lured into a segregated pen with an extra bucket of feed. He probably thought it was Christmas morning, when in reality it was his execution day.
Bryan and John knew it was important not to get Smokey riled. If he was spooked or frightened, adrenalin would course through his body during the last minutes of his life and would spoil the meat. The same thing would happen if he were merely wounded. So death for Smokey had to come quickly, and out of the blue.
A few minutes after nine, John stood behind Smokey’s left shoulder and Bryan stood in front of him. Smokey looked to Bryan, as though asking for more feed, and never felt the bullet enter his brain from behind his left ear.
It was a painless death, and as humane as any death could be. Smokey collapsed to the ground without hearing or feeling a thing.
At the sound of the shot, of course, several things happened at once. The other cattle spooked and bucked. But they were safely penned and couldn’t hurt themselves or anything else. They calmed down after a few minutes. Bryan wondered if they had a sense of what happened and then discounted it after they went back to drinking their water, or eating what was left of their feed, as though they had no care in the world. Blissfully ignorant, Bryan decided. The day would come when each of them would suffer the same fate, but today was not that day.
The pigs heard the shot and scurried around their pen, squealing and hollering, as though offended that someone had the nerve to interrupt their activities. They, too, calmed down after a few minutes.
The chickens took a bit longer to get back to normal. They clucked and squawked for a full hour after the gunshot. Bryan wondered why they were affected for so much longer, and wondered if they had a concept of death and its finality that the livestock didn’t. He knew from past slaughters that there would be few eggs tomorrow morning. When their shots had rung out in past months, most of the hens were so stressed that they simply refused to pass eggs the next day. Luckily, the kitchen told him they had a pretty good stock on hand from recent days.
When the volunteer teachers in the two one room schoolhouses heard the shot, they took it as their cue to have frank discussions with their students about the cycle of life, and the fact that meat lovers like humans have to kill animals to get that meat.
In the elementary school, Debbie’s little son David asked in all sincerity, “You mean they don’t grow the hamburger meat at McDonald’s?”
In the school for older kids, the shot sparked a lively debate on the morality of man, who on the one hand is very kind to some animals, yet kills others for his food.
When Mark heard the shot from the motor pool in Bay 21, he fired up a forklift and slowly drove toward the livestock bay. By the time he got there, John and Bryan already had chains wrapped around the rear hooves of the carcass that once was Smokey the bull.
They tied the ends of each chain to the forks on the front of the lift, and Mark raised the forks up until the bull was raised completely off the floor. As Mark slowly crept out of the bay and over to Bay 18, where the butchery was, Smokey swung gently back and forth, as though dancing his way to bovine heaven.
In the butchery, John took a long knife and slashed the bull’s throat, freeing several gallons of blood onto the floor. There was no effort to catch it or mop it up. It would soak into the porous salt floor within minutes. All it would leave would be a large pink spot a couple of feet in diameter, which would join several other pink spots already on the floor around it.
After the dark red blood slowed to a trickle, John took the same knife and cut the animal the entire length of its underside. He stepped aside as Mark kicked a huge galvanized tub underneath the beast to catch the entrails. Bryan reached inside the body cavity and did what he liked the least: scooping out all the bloody guts that stayed behind.
The tub was pushed aside for the time being, and John and Bryan each took a smaller knife to start skinning the animal. A cut was made on each leg to the top of the hoof, then completely around the hoof. The head, which weighed almost sixty pounds all by itself, was cut completely away. It wasn’t saved, as the first couple of cow heads had been. They had determined by now that they had plenty of food to get them until breakout. The first couple of heads were saved just in case they ran out of other food and needed them. This one would be tossed out with the entrails.
Native American tribes made a point to save almost every bit of an animal they slaughtered. They would have saved the hide, tanned it, and used it to wrap around a teepee or to make a winter coat.
In the mine, they had no teepees and already had plenty of winter coats. They had no need for the hide, so they would toss it out as well.
Lastly, Mark cranked up a chainsaw and cut the carcass completely in half, so that there were two huge pieces of it hanging free.
Within an hour after the shot rang out, the three men stood back and admired their handiwork. Each side of beef swung slowly, still reeling from the chainsaw’s final indignity.
“Lot of steaks right there,” Mark observed.
“Yes sir, buddy.”
They would leave the carcass hanging for two full days to let it cure. That would make the meat tender and make it taste better. Two days later, they’d come back and hoist each piece onto a butcher’s table, one at a time. There they would use a variety of knives to cut it into steaks, roasts, and ribs, which would be wrapped in butcher paper and stored in the walk in freezer just inside the main entrance, until the kitchen staff called for it.
They figured they’d harvest a bit over three hundred pounds of meat from the animal. Not bad for an hour’s work.
Now, though, it was time to clean up the mess.
Mark rolled over a 55 gallon drum with a removable wicked top. At the bottom of the drum was about twenty pounds of cattle and pig manure that they’d scraped off the livestock bay floor the day before.
Picking up the tub of entrails and intestines, they dumped them into the drum. Then went the bull’s head and his hide.
The drum was now completely full. Mark bolted the lid back on.
By the time they came back to butcher the meat, the entrails inside the drum would have decomposed to the point where they were actively giving off methane gas.
Mark would strike a match to the wick at the top of the drum, and a two inch flame would burn non-stop for forty to sixty days. Until the decomposition was complete and the methane gas burned completely off.
It was a very effective way to dispose of animal waste and animal carcasses. In their early days in the mine, the boys capped the wicks and retained the methane gas inside the drums. At that time, they weren’t sure if they had enough diesel fuel to light the mine for the duration of the freeze. They were holding the drums in case they needed to use the methane drums to provide light after they ran out of fuel.
These days, of course, that wasn’t an issue. More than three years after the freeze, they figured they were well past the halfway point. But they had only exhausted about twenty percent of their fuel supply.
The trio walked back to the main part of the mine to the kitchen.
Mark looked around for his mother Phyllis, but didn’t see her.
“Helen, do you know where Mom is?”
“She went to lay down, honey. She said she was fine, but a little light-headed. Been on her feet too long if you ask me. We kicked her out of here and told her to go relax. Should I put steak on the menu for tomorrow?”
“Not yet. It’ll be a couple of days before we butcher it and package the meat. Plan for Thursday.”
He went off to his mother’s RV to look in on her. This was happening more and more frequently, and it was starting to worry him.
Chapter 22
It was August 14th. They’d been in the mine almost exactly three and a half years now.
Before the freeze, on the outside of the mine, this would have been
one of the hottest days of the year. Scorching hot. One of those days when people tried to fry eggs on the sidewalk.
The crash of Saris 7 changed all that. On this day, at exactly 2:05 in the afternoon, a group of nine curious people stood around the control center at the front of Bay 8, opposite the mine’s entrance.
They’d come running from near and far the minute they’d heard that the outside temperature was nearing 32 degrees. The point at which ice begins to melt.
A Christmas morning-like excitement permeated the air. Smiles were the order of the day. All eyes were transfixed on a particular monitor in the upper corner of the security array. It was the monitor assigned to the camera at the front of the mine. Camera number 1. The one mounted on the outside of the mine face, aimed directly at a thermometer mounted on a snowy post outside the mine’s entrance.
The thermometer that was reading 31 degrees.
The group grew one or two at a time. The teachers at both of the small schoolhouses let their young charges go early to watch. And all of them stood in rapt anticipation for what they hoped beyond hope was going to happen.
Then the thermometer ticked forward, ever so slightly. A roar erupted among those assembled. It was no longer Christmas-like. It was like Christmas and Easter and every birthday they ever had, all rolled into one.
Several of the assembled even found tears. It was that joyful.
It was a tiny step forward, of course. In a few hours the temperature would drop below freezing again. And tomorrow there was no guarantee it would rise to the magical mark again. But here, now, it was a symbol of hope. It was the first time in three and a half years that the world was warm enough to start thawing. And that first baby step toward eventual freedom from the mine was enough to brighten everyone’s spirits.
Bryan, out of the blue, lowered his head. As he began to speak, others followed suit.
“Lord Jesus, we thank you for watching over us for all this time. We have been blessed, where many others have not. We have faith that you have delivered us this far, and that you will continue to protect us, until we can break free from the bonds of this earth and do your good will once again. Thank you for the sign of hope, oh, Lord. And thank you for reminding us that with you as our savior, all things are possible. In your name, Amen.”
Several of those present echoed the last word, almost in unison.
John, the chief of security, was the one sitting at the console when he noticed the temperature rising to the magical number. It was he who’d sent a runner around the mine to alert the others about what was to happen. And it was he, being the one manning the security console at the time, who took great pleasure in logging the event. In a green logbook that contained all the minute details of each day’s activity, he took a black sharpie and wrote:
2:05 p.m.: Recorded outside temp of 32 degrees for first time.
And even though John was a former Dallas police detective and a professional in every way, he let the little boy inside of him come out to play for minute. After the entry, he wrote, “YIPPEE.” Followed by seventeen exclamation marks.
It was a good day for all.
Hannah hugged Mark and then kissed him. She looked at him and mouthed “I love you.”
He took her in her arms and held her tight. Then he looked in her deep brown eyes and said “Thank you, honey.”
She was perplexed.
“For what?”
“For giving me a reason to go on. Without you in my life, I’d have done what most of the people on the outside did and just ended my life and thought nothing of it. But you gave me a reason to go on. Thank you for that.”
Her eyes teared and she held him close.
“It’s really gonna happen, isn’t it?”
“What’s gonna happen, doll?”
“We’re really gonna get out of here someday. We’re going to be able to live normal lives again.”
“Yes, baby. It’s really going to happen. It won’t be normal like it was before. But it’ll be a lot better than it is now.”
Hannah went off to play cards with the girls and Mark went on a resupply run for the kitchen.
He had a “shopping list” of things they wanted from the cold storage area to get them through the next five or six days. He took a look at it, memorized as much as he could, and then stuck it into his pocket.
Directly across the security console was a large entryway which led to the mine’s entrance. It was almost as long as a football field, but had been carefully sealed off into four distinct insulated bays just after the group entered the mine. Each successive bay was accessed by a walkthrough door, which had itself been insulated by gluing heavy duty fiber insulation on with spray adhesive. The first bay was about twenty degrees cooler than the mine. The next bay was about twenty degrees cooler than the first. The last bay, which was separated from the outside world by just a steel overhead door, wasn’t insulated at all. It was the same temperature as the outside world. And that bay was where all the cold food was stored.
There was a large walk-in freezer in the last bay as well, off to one side. The power had been cut when the temperature first dropped below freezing three and a half years before. It was simply unnecessary to run a freezer when the environment surrounding it was already frozen.
The group had thought that the food stored outside the freezer, in freezer trucks, would be used up before the thaw began. And indeed, they had used a lot of it. But they’d have to keep an eye on it. Too many days in a row with temperatures above freezing outside, and the food in the trucks would start to thaw. They’d surely have to restore power to the walk-in freezer at some point, and maybe one or two of the freezer trucks as well.
Today, though, Mark was headed out to the freezer bay to gather things for the kitchen, and would make the stockpile of frozen goods just a little bit smaller.
Before he headed out, he donned a heavy duty blue parka and a pair of heavy gloves. He took a narrow rolling push cart, which he called a “u-boat” because high rails on each end made it resemble the letter “u.” Then he opened the first personnel door and pushed the u-boat into the cooler air of the first bay.
He rolled through the first and second bays, then into the third. In this bay were stacked over three hundred cases of assorted types of potato chips and breakfast cereals. They were here because they required refrigeration but not the colder temperatures of the frozen food bay. He’d grab these items on the way back.
Into the last bay he went. Even though he typically made these runs at least one day a week, he was always surprised by how abrasive the cold air felt against his face.
He supposed it had more to do with the humidity than the cold. The interior of the mine was incredibly dry. So much so that it caused his skin to dry out and crack. He suspected that it was the bitter air, infiltrating and invading that dry skin, that caused it to sting and made it sensitive to the touch.
But he would only be here for a few minutes. He could tolerate it for that long.
He selected the items he’d remembered from the list. Four cases of frozen chicken wings. One case of frozen mixed vegetables. A case of pork chops. Three cases of quarter pound hot dogs, and a case of frozen waffles. Two frozen roasts and four cases of frozen chicken breasts. Two cases of white bread. He was careful to pick the heaviest items first, and to place them on the bottom of the u-boat. He didn’t want to crush anything. Food was too valuable to waste.
Once he gathered everything he remembered, he took off a glove and winced as the bitter cold stung his dried and cracked fingers. He pulled the list from his pocket and made a mental note of the remaining items. Then he gathered them quickly, left the frozen bay as quickly as he could, and enjoyed the rush of the slightly warmer air in the next bay as it washed over his face.
He grabbed a case of Doritos and another case of Cheetos and threw them on top of the frozen food. A case of Cap’N Crunch with Crunchberries, and his task was done.
He wheeled the u-boat through the remaining bays
and back into the mine. Into the kitchen he went, where he stacked the goods into several chest freezers for the kitchen staff.
As he walked through the dining room on his way to the kitchen, he heard Hannah’s very distinctive little girl laugh, and it piqued his curiosity.
Once he returned the u-boat to its assigned storage place across from the security console and returned the parka and gloves to a nearby coat hook, he went back to see what his beloved wife was laughing about.
As he walked up to the girls, he heard Sarah say, “Ooh, ooh, I’ve got one… things you never hear a man say: ‘Let’s forget the football game, honey. There’s a good romance movie on the other channel.’”
Sarah, Hannah, Sami and Beth all laughed uproariously.
“Cute,” Mark said as he kissed Hannah on the top of her head.
She looked at him and said, “Thanks honey. Your lips are cold.”
Then she turned back to the girls and said, “I’ve got one… things you never hear a man say: ‘She’s a pretty girl, sure, but her breasts are just way too big.’”
Another roar of laughter. Mark just shook his head.
Mark said, “Ooh, ooh, I’ve got one! How about… things you never hear a woman say… ‘Let’s just sit around and bash our men. It’s fun and no one will think we’re crazy.’”
The girls just looked at him.
Sami said, “Don’t quit your day job, Mark.”
“Fine. I’m going to go play with my son then.”
As he walked away, he heard Sarah say, “Things you never hear a man say, ‘Hey, honey, let’s go shopping at the mall. I’ll carry your purse and all your bags for you.’”
He went over to the side of the dining room, where little Markie was joyfully playing with a set of blocks. He stacked up five or six of them, then knocked them over and yelled, “Boom!” Then he did it again and again, laughing harder each time.
Mark sat down on the floor beside him. “Hi, little man. What are you doing?”
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