Long Road to Survival: The Prepper Series (Book 2)

by Lee Bradford

  “What’s wrong?” Autumn asked.

  “I was wondering why you mentioned your grandfather being upset. Most girls warn you about their dads.”

  Her chin dropped. “Most girls?”

  Brett blushed and tried to backtrack. “You know what I mean.”

  “I don’t know. I guess my dad’s kinda laid-back. Sometimes I wish he’d been a little stricter. Sounds weird to say it, but I do.”

  “Not weird at all,” Brett told her. An eyelash was on her cheek and he blew it away. “It woulda made you feel more protected.”

  “Who wouldn’t want the freedom to do whatever they wanted? But there’s something about boundaries that help. Sorta like the Ark.”

  That got his attention. He was still wearing his fatigues and she straightened his collar as he asked her to explain what she meant.

  “Well, there are clearly rules in here people must follow, but if they don’t, not much happens.”

  “Really?”

  “A friend of my grandfather’s named Earl or something didn’t think he or his family ought to work and left in the middle of the night.”

  Brett’s eyes dropped.

  “Trust me,” she assured him. “That’s the last thing I’d want to happen. In fact, the very idea terrifies me.”

  “If they wanted to go, would you follow them?” he asked her.

  She hesitated and then took his hand. “I really like it here.”

  “Me too.” He swallowed. “But there’s something I have to tell you.”

  “It’s not something bad, I hope.”

  “Your dad and Grampa Buck have been stirring up a lot of trouble lately.”

  “Why doesn’t that surprise me?” she said, trying to laugh it off.

  “I’m serious. I’ve had to vouch for them on a couple of different occasions, but I’m worried I don’t have any more get-out-of-jail-free cards. You need to talk to them. Explain how important it is that they fall in line. If I was a higher rank, my word might have more weight, but as it is…” His voice fell off. “I’m worried something terrible might happen and all of you will be punished.”

  “I won’t leave, Brett. I know I wasn’t clear when you asked me the first time, but I want to stay here, at least until things get better out there. Then we can decide what’s best.”

  “No, I don’t think you understand.” He was emphatic and the tone of his voice was making her nervous. “This isn’t about packing your things and going away. If there’s one thing about the Ark you need to understand, it’s that no matter what they tell you, no one leaves here alive.”

  Chapter 26

  The following morning, Paul and Buck headed off to work, a cloud still hanging over them. A digital readout on the wall by the elevator told them the air outside continued to be deadly, leaving both men to wonder if this had become the new normal. The mood the evening before had been quiet and subdued. Even Autumn, who was normally full of energy and eager to discuss anything and everything Brett-related, had little to say.

  Donning their now dirty yellow coveralls, the two men assembled for the assignment of daily responsibilities. Today was their turn to push the giant collector bins around, gathering trash from the other maintenance workers and bringing it to the incinerator on sublevel one of Ark Two. That meant they would spend the day stinking of garbage since they would need to dump the trash into sorting piles before being burned. Nothing that could be reused would go to waste. Before someone threw out a tube of toothpaste, it had to be squeezed dry. A comb missing a few bristles could still be used. It was nasty work for sure, but Paul saw a certain amount of logic in it.

  Paul and Buck signed out their collector bins and set to work in the atrium, following maintenance workers ready to offload what they’d already gathered.

  But their silence had a more practical reason: the possible presence of listening devices in their room. Generally speaking, the mood among the civilians inside the Ark was at an all-time high and Paul expected much of that had to do with the arrival of the president. The unspoken expectation was that his arrival might signal a shift in the growing inequalities.

  A short loud-mouthed Italian worker named Gabby stopped to offload his container into Paul’s bin.

  “I don’t know,” Gabby said, with the slightest hint of a New Jersey accent. “I kinda expected him to be taller.” That last word he pronounced ‘tallah’.

  Buck glanced over and kept on going, not wanting to waste another second talking about a leader he considered illegitimate.

  “I see what you mean,” Paul replied. “Now we gotta wait and see how he shakes things up around here.”

  Gabby’s face lit up. “First things first, he better end these work details. I mean, what are we, a buncha slaves?”

  “Not us,” Paul said, not believing a word of it.

  A final bag of trash flung into the bin and Gabby was off, leaving Paul to wonder if anyone here had any idea what was really going on. There wouldn’t be any changes, at least none in the direction they were hoping for.

  He crossed the atrium and caught up with Buck.

  “How’s your load?”

  Buck smacked the side of his bin, listening for the echo. “Sounds like she’s about half full.”

  Almost on cue, a maintenance worker appeared and offloaded another bag.

  “Make that three-quarters,” Buck amended.

  “Listen, I’ve been meaning to ask you about something.”

  Buck suddenly looked unsure.

  “Your dishonorable discharge.”

  Groaning, Buck kept pushing his bin.

  “Listen, I get you don’t wanna talk about it, but you know there’s a lot about each other we don’t know.”

  “And I’d like to keep it that way,” Buck snapped.

  Paul smiled and tried to keep up. The bin was getting harder to push. “I’ve got something I want to confess,” he told his father-in-law.

  “If it’s got anything to do with dressing in women’s clothes, I don’t wanna hear it.”

  “What? Of course not. Buck, I don’t even know where you get these ideas.” Paul collected himself. “In the 2000 presidential election, I voted for George W Bush.”

  Buck stopped cold.

  “I know, it’s hard to believe, but I did.”

  “A dyed-in-the-wool liberal from the far left like yourself?” Buck said in shock. “I’m speechless.”

  “Fifth-generation liberal, I might add, although I wouldn’t say I’m far left.”

  “I know about your past. You’re far left.”

  The two men continued through the atrium. “When I was younger, that might have been true. But this is my point, Buck. As a man gets older, he tends to see the world in a different light.”

  “That so? What about 2004?” Buck asked.

  Paul grinned. “Same. Listen, when I saw George W, able to cast doubt on John Kerry’s bravery, a decorated war hero, and Kerry didn’t fight back, well, I realized right then this wasn’t the kind of guy I wanted at the helm.”

  The subject of war heroes wiped the grin off Buck’s lips. He grew quiet for a moment. Two more workers dumped their trash and now both bins were full. They turned and headed for the lift and sublevel one where they would sort and burn what they’d collected.

  “That discharge wasn’t what it looks like,” Buck said. “A quaint little village in the Iron Triangle called Ben Suc. I was with the 1st Infantry. About thirty thousand American forces in all. 173rd Airborne Brigade, 11th Armored Cav among others. We were out on an operation codenamed Cedar Falls. The objective was to encircle and destroy the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese regulars in the area. Deny them bases from which to launch attacks. Safe havens, we call ’em now. Major-General William DePuy was our commander. Short man with a slight build, normally the kinda person I don’t have much use for, but this guy had cojones the size of cantaloupes. A real scrapper. See, I thought we were going in to kick some Commie butt. That’s what I’d signed on for. Turns out we h
ardly found any butts worth kicking. Most musta heard the attack was coming and fled the area. And that’s when things started turning ugly. A major phase of the operation involved taking locals into custody for resettlement and burning their villages to the ground. Stories started circling around about atrocities, soldiers taking out their frustrations on innocent civilians. My platoon had already reduced two villages to ash when we were ordered to hit a third and that was when something inside me just snapped.”

  Both men were standing by the elevators, Paul hanging on his every word.

  “Went up to DePuy myself and told him I wasn’t gonna do it. That it was wrong. These people were innocent and we were only making ourselves look worse than the Viet Cong we’d sworn to destroy. Even with a French name like DePuy, our commander wasn’t a hothead. He made it real clear. Get back in there and destroy those villages and put the inhabitants into camps or face a court martial.”

  “So what’d you do?”

  “I went to jail, Paul. That is until a media firestorm blew up bigger than an atom bomb over the whole campaign. They knew a court martial would only draw more negative attention and turn me into a martyr, so they set me free. The next day I was given a dishonorable discharge.”

  The elevator doors opened and with some difficulty, both men squeezed their bins inside.

  “But how could you be ashamed? You did the right thing.”

  Buck scoffed as he tapped sublevel one with the side of his fist. “I suppose it depends which end of the barrel you were looking down. The left-wing hippies approved, but the truth was I disobeyed orders.”

  Shaking his head, Paul said: “You never could take being told what to do. You stood up for what you believed in.” He paused. “If you could go back, what would you have done differently?”

  Buck regarded him thoughtfully. “I called foul after our platoon had already torched two villages. As far as I’m concerned, that was two too many.”

  Chapter 27

  The elevator doors opened onto a corridor. Arrows on the wall before them pointed in both directions. To the left was Waste Management and beneath that words in bold red lettering: Restricted Access. To the right was Trash Incineration. Two men in purple coveralls, white keycards clipped to their breast pockets, were waiting to head back up. Their purple outfits along with their access to restricted areas signaled that they had seniority and high-level clearance.

  Grunting from the strain of pushing the heavy bins, Paul and Buck exited, heading to the right.

  “What do you think they were doing?” he asked Buck after the men in purple disappeared into the elevator.

  “How should I know?”

  “I just don’t see why the Waste Management area would be restricted.”

  “That’s simple,” Buck said, coming to a pair of swing doors and pushing them open with the front of his bin. “They don’t want anyone messing with the pipes. You know, backing up toilets. Besides, what’s one more secret area in a place like this?”

  Upon entering, they came to an open pit where the trash was emptied and sorted with the help of other workers in yellow coveralls. From there it was placed on conveyer belts which fed it into one of three furnaces. Part of the heat generated was apparently fed back into the system. It was designed to maximize efficiency, but it didn’t do much to keep the place from smelling awful. After an hour of this, Paul and Buck headed back toward the elevator.

  As they waited, Paul stood staring down the corridor, willing the Waste Management doors to swing open so he could get a glimpse of what was going on in there.

  When the elevator arrived this time, two different workers in purple appeared, each behind a smaller, open-topped bin. Inside were what looked like old towels and scraps of torn beige cloth. One of the men swore as the wheel of his container got jammed in the gap between the lift and the floor. He yanked it back and tried again, a thick vein in his forehead protruding. Buck stepped in to help him. The trick was to pull the bins out rather than push them from behind. Buck grabbed hold of the sides and pulled. With a jerk, the bin shot forward and over the elevator lip.

  A human hand rose up from beneath the pile of shredded cloth and hung in the air for a moment—discolored fingers curled into a claw—before settling back out of view.

  The whole thing hadn’t lasted more than a split second, short enough that neither of the men in purple had noticed a thing. But Buck had and so too had Paul.

  The workers in purple nodded in thanks and went off down the narrow corridor, the wheels of their plastic bins echoing as they faded in the distance.

  “I know I ain’t going crazy,” Buck said, slowly.

  “If that was an illusion then we’re both going nuts.”

  Buck’s hand hovered over the button to recall the elevator. “People die,” he said.

  “Every day,” Paul added.

  “That’s right, every day, and when they do their bodies need to be disposed of.”

  “Uh-huh. Can’t be buried. Not here.”

  “Burned. That’s what I was thinking too.” His finger inched closer to calling the elevator. Buck’s finger did a little dance before he pulled it away. “Can’t shake the feeling that was something neither of us were meant to see. People who die aren’t carted away under a heap of old rags.”

  “Your logic is sound,” Paul said. “Shall we?” he asked, aiming a finger down the corridor at the restricted area labelled Waste Management.

  “We shall,” Buck said, squaring his shoulders and leading the way.

  And as they set out, Paul couldn’t help remembering those villages in Vietnam Buck had told him about. How so many had simply done what they were told to do. Had he been present, Paul might have done the same. Followed orders and destroyed the lives of innocent people. But that was before he’d known Buck. Before he’d seen there was another way.

  Chapter 28

  A small janitor’s closet at the end of the hall stood less than ten feet from the double doors securing the Waste Management area.

  Paul stopped and tried the door handle. It was open and he let himself inside.

  “What’re you doing in there?” Buck barked. The old man was standing by the double doors, examining the keypad.

  “Unless you know the code to get in,” Paul replied, “I suggest we hide in here until those two come out. We might be able to catch the door before it shuts.”

  Buck gave one last look at the keypad and grunted. With obvious reluctance, he followed Paul’s advice and both men squeezed into the small closet. Inside was a mop bucket, a hose jutting out from the wall and shelves filled with cleaning products.

  Buck’s large girth meant there was even less room. The stale air reeked of bleach and Pine-Sol.

  “I think the military owes you an apology,” Paul said, trying to break the uneasy silence.

  “They don’t owe me a darn thing.”

  “Well, that’s not fair. You stood up for what was right.”

  Buck chuckled. “No one ever said life was fair.”

  A sound from outside. The clanging of doors swinging open. Buck opened the door less than an inch and peered out. The two men in purple were pushing their now empty containers through the doorway. When they moved out of sight, he moved fast but silently and caught one of the double doors before it closed, waving at Paul to follow.

  A moment later they were inside, both of them not entirely sure what they were about to see. They soon found themselves moving down a long tunnel, thick steel pipes overhead, heat hitting them in waves. Another group of men in purple coveralls might appear behind them at any moment. If there was anything to see here, they’d have to find it fast.

  Heart racing, Paul took the lead. Soon, they reached a set of swivel doors, each centered with a small porthole. They peered through and what they saw made the breath catch in their throats. A dozen men in purple sorting through mountains of personal possessions, tossing items left and right into smaller piles. Watches, pants, t-shirts, pots and pans, paintings, s
ilverware. The list went on and on. It didn’t take long for Paul to realize what he was seeing. These objects had once belonged to the civilians living in the Ark. These were the things they’d been forbidden from bringing inside. Now they were being inventoried like war booty.

  He and Buck exchanged a look. Further down they saw more swing doors and headed in that direction. There, the sight was even more disturbing. In the corner of another sorting room was a wheelchair that Paul recognized. It had belonged to the woman he’d seen in the park. She’d been exempted from work duties and he hadn’t seen her or her husband after that. At the time, Paul hadn’t thought much of it. The truth was he’d had his own troubles to worry about, but now the thought of what had become of them made him sick.

  On a table nearby, other disturbing items were stacked. Mounds of false teeth, leg braces and then a prosthetic arm he’d seen before.

  He pointed, his finger shaking. “Didn’t that belong to Earl Mullins’ son?”

  Then further along, barely out of sight, they saw a row of furnaces where men in purple were stuffing bodies inside.

  They’d been told those unable to work would get a pass, that Earl and his family had been allowed to leave, but now it was clear all that had been a lie.

  The only anyone ever left the Ark was through the chimney.

  Chapter 29

  President Perkins found Victor Van Buren’s office warm and inviting, a stark contrast to the man himself. The overall impression was that the room had been carved from a block of stained mahogany. Behind the eighteenth-century Chippendale desk were bookshelves which reached fifteen feet to the ceiling. A single ladder sat on a brass track that ran the length of the room.

  Van Buren reclined in the tufted brown leather chair, framed by a print of Van Gogh’s famous painting Irises.