“I didn’t tell anyone. Except Mark.” Hannah said.
Sarah said “That’s good. Don’t tell anyone at work, or they’ll suffer the same fate. Do they know you told Mark?”
“No.”
“For God’s sake, don’t tell them. They can’t threaten him with jail time like they do to us. I don’t know what they can do to keep him quiet, but I wouldn’t put anything past them.”
Hannah suddenly felt chilled. And afraid.
“But why are they keeping this secret? And how long have they known?”
Sarah replied “I don’t know how long they’ve known. But somebody in Washington, and I’m guessing the President, made the decision to classify it and keep it from the public. The rumor I heard is that they fear a worldwide panic if the word gets out. People will start rioting and killing each other and marching on Washington to demand they do something to prevent the collision. And they know there’s nothing they can do.”
Mark spoke up. “So they’re not even going to try? They’re just going to keep it a big secret and let everybody on earth die?”
Sarah went on. “Not quite everybody. I’ve heard that they plan to stockpile food and water into the old underground bunkers that were built under Washington during the cold war. They were built to accommodate the entire Congress and their families, the White House staff and their families. And key members from the Pentagon.
“Word is that they’ve made room for Pacheco, Mize and Unwin - the three stooges, too. And their families. In appreciation for their keeping this whole thing hush hush for them.
“So you have maybe four thousand people in Washington that will be safe. And a similar number in other countries, like China and Israel and England and Japan. Because they all know about it too.
“So worldwide, you have maybe 50,000 people who will survive the collision. And everybody else will die.”
Hannah looked at her friend and said “Why didn’t you tell me all of this?”
Sarah said “For the same reason you won’t tell anyone. Because if you do, they’ll throw you in prison. And you’ll spend the last two years of your life away from Mark and everyone else you love. And that’s where you’ll die when the collision happens, and you’ll spend eternity locked in a cell. It’ll become your tomb. That’s not for me. I want to spend my last months with the ones I love.”
Sarah went on. “Chris asked me to marry him the day after Steve discovered Saris 7. I told him no and then broke up with him. Because I loved him too much to watch him die.
“Most of the rest of us have already decided that we’re going to commit suicide just before it happens. The other options are freezing or starving to death, and they’re both supposed to be very agonizing.
“I’ve already asked Steve to shoot me in the back of the head before he shoots himself. Quick and painless. I’m sure we won’t be the only ones.”
“Oh, my God,” Hannah cried. “How can you even think of such a thing?”
“I’ve had no choice. I’ve lived with this thing hanging over my head for a year now. You think of all kinds of ugly things. You two will think the same things.”
“No.” Hannah stated emphatically. “There’s got to be a way to survive. And we’ll find it.”
-8-
Sarah left an hour later, and Mark and Hannah slept fitfully. While laying in bed looking at the ceiling at 3 a.m., they made a pact to find a way to survive the collision, and to save as many of their loved ones as possible.
Mark didn’t tell her, but he already had an idea in mind. He just had to do some checking first to see if it was feasible. And he loved her far too much to get her hopes up on something that might not pan out. So instead, he held her closely all night, tried to comfort her as much as he could, and told her it would be all right.
And secretly he hoped that he wasn’t just lying to her.
Hannah tanked up on coffee the next morning and considered the possibility of going to work. But her heart wasn’t in it. So it wasn’t hard for Mark to convince her to call in sick, and to take the day off. She’d only gotten a couple hours of sleep, after all, and she wasn’t a woman who operated well in a zombie-like state.
Mark made her breakfast and promised her that if she went back to bed and slept until noon, he’d take her on a road trip in the afternoon. There was a plot of land he wanted to look at, he said, and he wanted her to see it too.
Hannah was much too tired to ask questions, so she accepted the mysterious journey on face value and plodded back to the bedroom.
By the time Mark followed her, five minutes later, Hannah was hugging his pillow and sound asleep on her own. He sat on the edge of the bed for a few minutes, gently brushing the hair back from her face, then kissing her on the cheek.
Then he carried his coffee cup to the den, and to the computer. It was research time, and he had a lot of work to do.
Hannah awoke just after noon to Mark kissing her cheek and nibbling on her earlobe.
“Oh, really?” She said. “Again?”
“Nope,” he said. “I just wanted to get you up, and I knew that would do it.
She asked groggily “What time is it?”
He threw back the covers and said “Time for you to get your beautiful ass up, my dear. We have places to go.”
Hannah took a shower and put on her makeup. She seldom left the house without it, despite Mark’s constantly telling her all it did was cover up her natural beauty.
While he waited, Mark did some more research on his computer, and made notes on a scratchpad.
“Okay, baby, I’m ready.” Hannah said as she walked up behind him and rubbed his shoulders.
“Where are we going?”
He replied “Well, the first place we’re going is to lunch. I’m starved. Then we’re taking a road trip.”
The pair stopped at a Pizza Hut on the south side of San Angelo. While waiting for their pepperoni calzones to bake, he asked if she remembered a temporary job he took when they were juniors at Baylor University.
“Of course I remember,” she said. “You spent practically all of Christmas break working, just so you could buy me that pendant. What a sweetheart you used to be. Whatever happened to that guy, anyway?”
She smiled the mischievous smile that always reminded him why he fell in love with her.
“That was somewhere around here, wasn’t it?”
He said “Yes, about seventy miles southeast of us.
“The job was in an old salt mine they were closing down because it was mostly played out and no longer produced enough salt to make it cost effective. They needed someone to dismantle their old security system and inventory it and package it up to be shipped back to their storage facility in Pennsylvania. I bid for the job and got it, and it took sixteen days to get it all done.”
“So, what does that have to do with us?”
“I don’t know if you remember, but it was very cold that winter. Bitterly cold. The area set records for coldest temperatures almost every day. But inside that mine I, and all of the other workers who were doing various things to shut it down, all worked in short sleeves. A couple of the guys even worked in shorts. One of the mine’s supervisors told me that the mine always maintained a constant temperature of 62 degrees, because the salt and limestone insulated it from the outside temperature above it. And the earth’s core helped heat it from below.”
The light came on in Hannah’s eyes. “Yes, I’ve heard of that phenomenon. Deep caves are the same way. No matter how hot or cold it is outside, they maintain a steady temperature on the inside.”
He looked into Hannah’s eyes. “Honey, this might be the key to our survival. And the survival of the people we love.”
Their next stop was to a local realtor who specialized in commercial properties. Mark had called them and told them he was interested in purchasing the old mine and reopening it. He said he had some potential investors and the means to pay cash for it, but first he wanted to evaluate the mine to see if ther
e was the potential to make some money there.
He told the realtor that the mine didn’t have enough output to satisfy that big corporation back east, but that he and his investors thought it would produce enough to keep a few dozen workers going on a smaller, local scale.
The realtor, of course, had jumped at the chance to show the property. It had been abandoned for nearly four years now, without even a nibble of interest. And it was a huge piece of land. Over a thousand acres, and much of it was developed with outbuildings. The commission would be substantial if he could sell it.
Mark told the realtor that all they wanted to do was walk through the place to make sure it was safe before they brought the investors in to take a look at it.
He and Hannah each signed a “Hold Harmless Agreement” to protect the realtor from lawsuits if they were to get hurt in the mine. The realtor loaned them two hardhats with miner’s lights on them, and additional battery packs in case their lights went dead deep in the mine. And he signed out the key and told them to be careful.
Mark told him they’d return the key within a few hours.
Mark and Hannah drove south from San Angelo to the small city of Eden, then turned west onto highway 83. Another 61 miles, then a mile north on an unmarked two lane road, and they pulled up to the south end of a 300-foot tall mountain.
The south face of the mountain had been blasted away to create a smooth wall a hundred feet high. On the face of the wall was a very large overhead door. It wasn’t unlike their garage door at home, except this one was much higher and wider and obviously meant to accommodate very large trucks.
Adjacent to the overhead door was a small personnel door, locked with a heavy duty padlock. For which they had the key.
But before they went inside, Mark wanted Hannah to get a feel for the whole property, to get the big picture. He’d put a lot of thought into this over the last two days, and in his mind’s eye he had it all laid out.
Immediately in front of the overhead door, and about fifty feet away from it, was a fuel pump. This one was similar to the ones at the Exxon station where they filled their cars with gas, except that it had no dollar meter on it. It merely read the number of gallons that were pumped.
Mark knew, from reading the description on the realtor’s web site, that the pump was in working order, and that in the ground beneath their feet was a 10,000 gallon underground diesel storage tank.
Mark took her to the east side of the mountain and pointed out a small wind turbine a hundred yards north. He said “One day when I was taking a break from the mine job, I took a long walk and noticed the turbine. I asked the mine people about it, and they said it powered all of the lights and equipment in the mine on windy days. And when the wind wasn’t blowing, their system automatically switched back to city power. They said it saved them thousands of dollars a month in electricity charges.”
He took her a bit farther, to the eastern base of the mountain. From here, to the east and north, the land was flat and undeveloped, as far as they could see.
“Here’s where we can build the compound.” He said.
She gave him a puzzled look.
So he explained. “We’ll have to build a place to live when we come out of the mine. And we’ll have to do it before Saris 7 hits, because after we come out there won’t be anyone around to do it.”
She was beginning to understand now.
“So, we modify the mine to turn it into a shelter and we live there until the earth gets warm enough to sustain life again. Then we come out and live here, on this land, when it’s safe to do so? Is that the idea?”
He grabbed her and picked her up in his arms and spun her around in a full circle. Then he kissed her and said “See, that’s why I love you so much. Because you’re absolutely brilliant.”
-9-
When they’d entered the mine for the first time, Mark expected it to be spooky and a little bit unnerving. It had been pitch black, of course, and deathly quiet. But it wasn’t scary at all. Hannah wasn’t spooked, but rather fascinated. It may have been her natural curiosity as a scientist, but she had been mesmerized by the long, pure-white walls of the mine’s corridors, and how just the light from their miner’s lights had lit up the walls for hundreds of feet in front of them.
They’d walked up and down the main corridor and each of the twenty four bays within the mine during the two hours they’d spent exploring it. Each bay was numbered, in huge four-foot black letters, starting with the westernmost. It proclaimed “Bay 1” on each side of its entryway. Each successive bay was numbered in a similar manner.
The bay numbers made it impossible to get lost in the dark mine, as long as you knew that Bay 8 was directly across the main corridor from the entryway.
The entire time they walked they were bouncing ideas off of each other. For her, it was all about how best to make the place a home. Here’s where the sleeping quarters would go, she’d said, and there would be a great place for a large kitchen.
Mark, on the other hand, looked at it from an engineer’s perspective. Here would make a good place to store extra water. And down that long corridor, two hundred yards from the main area, would be the diesel storage tanks. And over there they could place the water treatment plant and generators.
By the time they’d walked back into the bright sunshine, they’d had a pretty good idea how they wanted their shelter and future home to be set up.
The realtor had gone home by the time Hannah and Mark got back to San Angelo. They wrapped the mine’s key in a note and placed it into the mail slot.
The note read “Interested in property, willing to negotiate price. Please call to make appointment. Mark Snyder”
The rest of that evening, Hannah and Mark discussed who would be coming into the mine with them. They decided that it would accommodate no more than forty people or so, once they filled it with food, water and fuel, and all of the necessary items it would take for a group of people to survive for five to seven years.
The hard part, of course, was determining who the forty people were.
“I don’t like this.” Hannah told him at one point. “I am not God. Who am I to determine who gets to live and die?”
He told her “Just because you don’t bring someone in with us doesn’t mean you’re condemning them to death, baby. They still might survive without our help. You’re just picking the people we care most about, that we can make it easier for.”
He knew he didn’t sound convincing. He didn’t even believe his own words. Still, it helped her put things into perspective. And maybe it would help her feel a bit less sad for those acquaintances who didn’t make the list. Maybe it would help her fool herself into believing they’d have a chance.
Deep down inside, though, they both knew better.
By the end of the night, they had their list of forty. It included all of Mark’s family, of course, and his brother and sisters’ spouses and their parents.
It did not include the spouses’ brothers and sisters, though. That had the potential of being a major problem later on, but it was something they’d have to deal with.
If they had allowed these people, who they’d never met, they would have insisted on bringing their own spouses and children and parents and other siblings, who’d insist on bringing their own relatives. Then the forty would turn into four hundred.
It was a problem they knew they’d have to address at some point. But for now they had other things to focus on.
Joe Kenney made the list. He was one of Mark’s closest friends, and had only his mother to bring along. And he could bring his gift of music into the group, and teach it to the children in the mine.
Even if the rest of the world perished, music would survive. And Mark suspected that one of the main enemies of living underground for so long would be the boredom. Learning to play musical instruments would help the children combat that.
Sarah Spear would also be invited. She wasn’t Hannah’s closest friend, but she was a close confidan
t. And she already knew about Saris 7. So there was no reason to hide anything from her. And she could therefore help with the planning and preparations.
Hannah knew that Sarah had disowned her family many years before. Sarah had been a rebel in her younger days, into drugs and an unhealthy lifestyle. Her deeply religious parents couldn’t cope with that, and kicked her out at 17, carrying the baby of a man she saw only once.
Sarah never had the baby, which outraged her parents even more, and she eventually turned her life around. But she never reconciled with her family. Didn’t even know where they were, really, except that they’d moved from Texas several years before. And she had no desire to find them.
Her best friend Sami, and Sami’s parents, were the only other people Hannah added to her list. Sami had no siblings, and her only uncle died the year before.
When Hannah looked at the list of forty, and saw that her side of it had only four names, it saddened her a bit. She’d never really had much of a family, at least not since her parents died so long ago. She’d done quite well without family support, and knew that she probably owed her independent spirit to all the things she’d had to do on her own over the years. Still, she wondered to herself how different she’d have been as a person had she been surrounded with brothers and sisters, and children.
And at that moment it dawned on her that the children she so wanted of her own would be born in that mine. And it made her think.
Hannah looked at Mark and asked “Honey, do any of your relatives have any medical training?”
“Well, you know my sister Debbie is an EMT. She can handle medical emergencies. And Karen’s husband is a dentist. Why?”
“I want to quit my job. I want to study midwifery. Somebody is going to have to know how to deliver babies.
Just because we’re going to be in a hole in a mountain for the next seven years doesn’t mean people are going to stop having babies.”
She started to well up.
Mark came to her at that point and they held each other close. There was no argument. They’d both talked many times of their love for children, Although they hadn’t discussed it, each knew what a wonderful family they’d make. Of course, the circumstances had changed. But their dreams hadn’t.
Final Dawn: Escape From Armageddon Page 3
