The Harvest (Book 1)

by Ferretti, Anne

  After discussing weapons for a half hour or so, they went back up to the control room where the outside video cameras were now dark, but the interior cameras continued to scan the hallways and other common areas. Zack sat and gestured for Austin to join him. Austin wasn’t in the mood for chit chat, but he sensed Zack had something to say and out of politeness he sat on the edge of the recliner.

  Zack kicked all the way back in his chair and closed his eyes. Austin waited a minute, but the only sound was Zack’s steady breathing. Austin was on the verge of getting up when Zack opened his eyes and cleared his throat. Austin sat back in his chair.

  “My dad was a big shot in the Boston mafia.” Zack began slowly. “He had a bad reputation and a bad temper. He wasn’t around much, but when he was, he left a lasting impression. One of those impressions landed me in Boston General Hospital. The old man thought it would be appropriate to smack me in the head with the stock end of a double barrel shot gun.” Zack absently rubbed the side of his jaw. “When I was seventeen, someone did the family a favor by sticking the right end of a double barrel shot gun to ole Bobby Londergan’s head and pulling the trigger. I guess you’d call that poetic justice.” He chuckled.

  “My mom was handed a fat insurance check and we moved to Colorado the next day. Anything that didn’t fit in the old dodge mini-van, was left behind. She said she was afraid the mob would come after the insurance money. In truth, she was afraid they would come after me and my brother. She wasn’t far from being right. Only she was a few years too late. I’d been doin’ jobs for the Mob since I was ten. Started out as an errand boy. I’d just moved up to driver when the old man bought it. My mom never knew.”

  “So I was seventeen and had this thing goin with the mob. I was a real big baller. At least that’s what I thought. And if it hadn’t been for Colin, I would have stayed in Boston.”

  “Why are you telling me this?” Austin asked.

  “Because you look at me the same way my mom used to. Like I’m a total loser who sells pot for a living. Like I’m not worth your time.”

  “Just a dumb kid who sells pot for a living.”

  “Huh?”

  “I was thinking you were just a dumb kid who sold pot for a living. But not a loser.”

  “Hm. You’re honest too. Do you have any faults?”

  A dark shadow passed over Austin’s face. “You were saying.”

  Zack sat up and turned to look at Austin. “I cleared a million dollars the first year in business. I was only twenty. I invited my mom to dinner at this fancy restaurant, so I could tell her the big news. She spent the first hour talking about Colin. All his accomplishments, what a great kid he was turning out to be. A fine upstanding person she could be proud of. You know the blather.”

  “So I lied and told her I been accepted into the University on full scholarship. She was ecstatic. Three days later I was arrested for giving a joint to an undercover cop. The media painted a nice picture on the evening news of the millionaire kid who sold pot for a living.”

  “I thought selling pot was legal.”

  “Only in the context of a business setting, not on a street corner to an undercover cop. And I didn’t sell it to him. I gave it to him. It was all bullshit, but the cops didn’t like my line of work or that I was only twenty and already made more than they would in a life time. And after that my mom hated me as well.” Zack paused, waiting for Austin to comment, but he remained silent.

  “So I kept making all this money. Ten million by twenty two. Twenty million by the next year. It was crazy the amount of pot people would buy. I was invited to celebrity’s homes for weekend parties. I had front row seats, box seats, the best seats in the house to anything I went to. I was on the cover of Forbes.”

  “Sounds like a rough life.” Austin commented dryly.

  “It wasn’t. But the name Londergan was like an albatross. A magnet for the deleterious. After the Forbes cover, the old man’s mafia buddies come lookin’ for me. They thought they had some sort of claim over my money. I got threatening calls in the middle of the night. My apartment was trashed while I was on vacation. My car was blown up. Fortunately, I wasn’t in it.” Zack smirked. “I installed security cameras and hired a few armed bodyguards. They shot one of my bodyguards. The wound wasn’t fatal, but he decided to try another line of work anyway.”

  “Shit dude. Sounds like a Hollywood movie.”

  “Right. But I wasn’t worried about myself. I knew how these guys worked. They were true sleaze and I knew they would go after my mom and brother. They hadn’t found her yet because she’d spent some of that insurance money on a new identity. It was then I started building the bunker. I spent every cent I made from the pot business to build this place and to keep it a secret. I thought if nothing else, I could hide my family down here until the Mob was dealt with. Of course I was being naive. The Mob is never dealt with.” He frowned. “Then some dumbass reporter showed up at the construction site entrance. My guards ran him off, but he did an article about the bunker anyway. So, I did an interview with Forbes. I made up a bunch of crap about the bunker, but I knew it was only a matter of time before the break your legs brothers showed up again. Turns out something worse showed up to the party.”

  “My mom was out of town when the Sundogs arrived. We never got a hold of her. Two days before that shit happened I’d signed a contract for the sale of M.J. Inc. One day before that I sold my design for the Eco Burst Power system to the government. I was going legit.”

  “That’s what runs this place.”

  Zack nodded. “So you were listening.”

  “And you designed it?”

  “Yeah. Seems I’m what the academics call a genius. Particularly in the matters of engineering and math shit.” He replied.

  “Latent abilities?” Austin asked, although he was genuinely impressed.

  “Nah. I knew I was smart. But a kid growin’ up on the streets of Boston doesn’t let on he’s smart. Hell my mom didn’t even know. Smarts was a sure way to get a beat down. I got plenty of those anyway. And I know I don’t look it, but I won more fights than I lost.” Zack breathed in deep and let it out. “I had this big reveal planned. It was gonna be my redemption.”

  Austin stared at him for several minutes. “What do you want from me?” He finally asked.

  “I don’t know.” Zack suddenly looked tired. “A good opinion maybe.” He leaned back and closed his eyes. “Trust.”

  Austin stared at the skinny kid lounging next to him and chuckled.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “My old man and Bobby would have made good company for each other.”

  “A mean bastard?”

  “A mean drunk bastard who had a talent for landing that belt buckle exactly where no one would see the bruise.” Austin stopped at that. He had new found respect for Zack, but he wasn’t going to share his life story with him. In that one little sentence, he had already told him more than he had told Luke in the five months they’d been together. But Luke had a different upbringing, one that Austin knew nothing about. Luke’s childhood was birthday parties, football, and prom. He would never understand having to dodge a fist, being locked outside in subzero temperatures, or begging for food. Austin smiled to himself. Roxi always said not to judge. If you let em, people will sometimes surprise you. After all he had surprised her she would remind him.

  “Can I show you something?” Zack asked.

  “Sure.”

  Zack pointed a remote control at one of the screens and turned it on. A video of the exterior played. “This is video from two weeks after the drop. You see the suns.”

  Austin leaned forward, watched as the camera scanned the landscape. Zack fast forwarded through three days of video, slowing at the moment the three suns appeared in the sky.

  “They don’t rise.” Austin said.

  “Doesn’t seem so. It’s like they materialize through the clouds. Or whatever the gray shit is hanging over us.” Zack turned on the screen adjacen
t to the first screen. “This is video of the west. The timing coincides with the appearance of the suns in the East.” The camera slowly scanned the horizon. “You don’t see anything right? But watch this.” Zack played it over in slow motion. The camera scanned across the frozen land. “Right there.” He pointed at the screen.

  The sky turned from black to gray to a grayish white. Other than that, there didn’t appear to be anything to see, but Zack persisted, so Austin tried again. Zack rewound the video two more times, playing it back in slow motion. On the third viewing Austin saw it. For the briefest moment there was a blip of bright light on the very edge of the horizon. Zack paused on the light.

  “On March twenty eighth sunrise was at six fifty and sunset was at seven nineteen. A difference of nineteen minutes in the times.”

  “You mean twelve hours and nineteen minutes don’t you?”

  “Generally yes, but look at the time when I paused the video on the East at the moment the suns appear.” Zack pointed to the lower left corner of the screen. “Seven seventeen pm. And here in the West when you see the flash of light, seven eighteen pm.”

  “Shouldn’t that read am?” Austin asked, indicating the East video.

  “It should. And for a while I thought maybe it was the clouds interfering with our satellites, so I checked out the cameras. They run on a computer chip, not satellite. You can link em to satellite, but it’s not necessary for operation.”

  “Maybe the cold interfered with the accuracy.”

  “Possible, but I checked three weeks worth of video. It’s always the same. The camera time matches back to my data on sunrise and sunsets.”

  “So what’s your theory?”

  Zack shrugged. “There was this one time I was in New Orleans for Mardi Gras. It was Fat Tuesday. Well actually it was around two thirty the Wednesday morning after. Me and this chick… Simone. I think that was her name.” Zack paused to think. “Yeah Simone. So Simone was a little on the crazy side. Wild crazy, not psycho crazy. Anyway, she got the idea to break into the Superdome. And I figured why the hell not. So we did. I’ll leave out the raunchy details, but later Simone wandered off to find a bathroom and I was lying alone on the fifty yard line. It was pitch black dark in there, and super quiet, but you could feel the dome around you. Like you knew there wasn’t open sky above. I didn’t think you could feel claustrophobic in a place that big. But that’s exactly how I felt.” Zack glanced at Austin. “We were comin’ back from Colorado Springs a few weeks back and pushin’ it to get here before dark. We were in such a damn hurry to get inside I forgot to close the barn doors. So I came back up. But by then it was dark. I stood in the barn staring into the darkness. But it was like staring into a great abyss. You can’t see a damn thing. You know what I mean?” Austin nodded. He knew exactly what Zack meant. “I couldn’t decide which was the bigger risk. Closing the doors would make a shit load of noise. Noise that would echo twice as loud. But if I left em open someone, or something, might notice. I decided to close em, but not all the way.”

  “The next day I oiled the hell out of those hinges. I don’t know why I hadn’t done that already. It wasn’t until a few days later, when I was thinking about the barn doors, that I realized being out there felt just like that night I was in the Superdome. And, when I stopped to think about it, it feels like that all the time.”

  “Like we’re under a dome.” Austin said. “So you think the Sundogs are somehow controlling the atmosphere?”

  Zack nodded slow and thoughtful. “But that doesn’t really make sense. Right?”

  “Why not?”

  “If they have the ability to control the atmosphere of an entire planet, I assume then that their technology is so advanced it makes ours seem primitive.”

  “Yeah, but so.”

  “So, even our doctors can remove a person’s organs without ripping them apart. These things should be able to do that much at the very least. But they ripped people open like a starving man tearing into a fried chicken leg.”

  “Intelligence sometimes eclipses compassion.” Austin pointed out. “And you’re assuming they give a damn. Which obviously they don’t.”

  “I’m not buying it.”

  “Why not? Our own history’s full of intelligent, but ruthless leaders. Do you think if Hitler had today’s advancements at his disposal he would have treated the Jews any different?”

  Zack shook his head. “Good point.”

  “Somethin’ else botherin’ you?”

  “Why they’re here.” Zack replied. “Even Hitler, despite the insanity of it, had a reason for what he did. These things, the Sundogs, they must have a reason.”

  “Would it make a difference knowin’ what it was?”

  Zack shrugged. “I’d feel better knowin’.”

  “You might feel worse.” Austin commented. “A whole lot worse.” He added with the conviction of knowing this was true. Austin thought of the warlord he met in Africa, who admitted to murdering and mutilating for fun. Not a good reason by any standard, but it was his reason and he didn’t care what anyone thought. And when the Marines dared to challenge his reason, he ramped up his campaign of killing. Entire villages were decimated by the man and his army of murderers. It was with extreme pleasure they had executed the warlord and his army.

  Austin assumed the Sundog’s reason was as inane as the warlord’s. The question that remained to be answered, in his mind, was who would show up to stop them? No one was the only answer he ever came to.

  18 BUNKER LIFE

  Over the next few days, the group settled into an easy routine. On the morning of the fifth day they gathered in the diner for breakfast. Everyone was looking refreshed and relaxed. The road was starting to wear off the new comers.

  Colin manned the grill with help from Edward. They cooked eggs, bacon, and biscuits with gravy. Hot coffee, orange juice, milk and water were available to wash it all down. The eggs were poured from a carton, but tasted just as good as the real thing that anyone could remember.

  Conversations flowed freely, but topics were kept on the light side. Zack made fun of Colin’s attempt at working out. True to his word, Austin was at the gym at five am sharp every morning. And as Zack guessed, Colin was usually too hung over to lift his head let alone the weights. Austin smiled, but remained silent. He kept to himself and seemed more solemn than usual.

  After running the gamut of jokes on Colin, they moved on to talk about the bunker’s unique design features. Zack had given them the run down on the facilities heating and cooling system, another feature he had personally helped design, but he didn’t share this with the group. He glanced over at Austin, who was preoccupied stirring his coffee.

  Zack wasn’t the only one to notice Austin’s lack of participation that morning. Across the table, Madison couldn’t help glancing Austin’s way every few minutes. But he never looked up from his coffee and he’d barely touched his breakfast. Something wasn’t right, but she had no idea what that could be and wasn’t sure if she should care. It was the first time she’d felt safe in months and, as far as she was concerned, things weren’t going to get any better than they were right then. She didn’t want to think about two weeks or two years down the road. The moment they were in was all that mattered to her right then.

  Across the table Austin’s feelings were quite the opposite. Madison’s attitude might work for her, but living in the moment was a luxury Austin couldn’t afford. Time was getting away from him. By now his son would be close to seven months old. Seven months already gone. He stared into his coffee not hearing the happy chatter around him. The only sound he wanted to hear was Roxi’s voice. The only vision he wanted to see was Roxi holding their son, but instead it was Eve who appeared. She beckoned him more insistently, urging him to hurry. He set his cup down and looked up across the table into Madison’s concerned eyes.

  Madison didn’t mean for Austin to catch her staring at him, but he looked up so unexpectedly she didn’t have time to look away without being obv
ious. Rather than embarrass herself further, she held his gaze. For the briefest second the steel curtain was left open and the eyes of a haunted man stared back at her. Before she could react, Austin pushed away from the table and headed for the door.

  “I’m going to check on Luke.” He said to no one in particular.

  The room grew silent after he left. Madison stared at the door unsure what to make of the look she’d seen in his eyes. Unsure except knowing it frightened her.

  ***

  German stood and barked before the knock came on Luke’s door. “Come in.” He answered. The door opened and Austin stepped inside. A wide grin spread across Luke’s face, but quickly faded when he saw Austin’s solemn expression.

  “Hey Austin. What’s goin on?”

  “How ya doin kid?”

  “Much better.” Luke responded. “Sorry I messed up your plans.”

  Austin shook his head. “That’s what I came to talk about.” He pulled up a chair. “And you didn’t mess up anything.”

  “Is somethin wrong? Maddie. Is Maddie ok?” He sat up.

  “Maddie’s fine, but she’s also part of what I want to talk to you about.”

  “Oh.”

  “I’m leaving tomorrow for the Mountain--

  “But Maddie said it was destroyed. Shit.” Luke stopped and glanced at Austin. “I wasn’t supposed to say anything.”

  “It’s ok. I already knew.” Austin half smiled. “Most of the base was destroyed, but there’s a section that wasn’t. A section buried deep underground.”

  “How do you know the Sundogs haven’t found it yet?”

  “There’s six hundred feet of granite surrounding the section and the interior is encased in steel. The Sundogs wouldn’t have been able to see through the steel,” he paused, “and I just know.”