“But meteorites don’t just disappear. It’s still out there and it’s still moving. It’s still moving in the direction of earth. We have no way of finding out whether it will hit earth or when.
“And it’s entirely possible that it has already passed us by. That it’s now heading away from us. My question to all of you is, do we want to tell the others? Do we want to risk a panic for something that may be absolutely nothing? Or do we just leave things as they are and hope for the best?”
There were several seconds of stunned silence.
Karen was the next one to speak.
“The mine… we’ve had it in caretaker status for three years now. If the meteorite hit today, how long could we bring it up to operational status again?”
Bryan, the engineer of the group and the one who’d been maintaining the equipment in the mine, answered.
“We could crank it back up immediately and evacuate everyone over there. The generators are still in working order. I overhauled the backup a few months ago and we overhauled the primary right after we left the mine.
“The problem is the fuel. We exhausted most of the diesel reserves when we were in there the first time. If we were to go back in for seven more years we’d run out. We have enough for two years, three tops.”
Mark spoke up.
“Same for the food supplies. We’ve still got ten pallets of MREs over there, but they expired last year. They’re probably still edible, but we don’t know for how long. At some point people might start getting sick from eating them.”
Frank Woodard wasn’t part of the original forty people who’d gone into the mine just before Saris 7 hit. Hannah invited him because he already knew of the problem. And because, as their security expert, he might be able to lend some advice and share his knowledge.
Frank asked, “What about the security systems? All the cameras and monitors? Are they operational?”
Brad answered, “I haven’t checked them lately. I think some of them have stopped working. We’ve got a couple of dozen backups in the stores over there though. I can check them out and replace the bad ones by the end of next week.”
“Any chance we could replace all of them? At least the cameras outside? We could take the old ones that are still working and make them the spares. I only suggest that because if any of them are on their last legs and getting ready to go out it’ll be easier to get to them and replace them before the world freezes over again.”
It was a valid point.
Brad said, “Good idea. I’ll start work on it.”
Mark said, “I’ll give you a hand with them, Brad. Let’s focus on the cameras first. They’re all outdoors. We can replace the monitors after we reoccupy the mine if we have to. Frank, are there any other concerns from a security standpoint?”
“I can think of at least two. There are people out there who know about us now. Specifically Marty Hankins and Lenny Geibel. And the United States Army. If the world gets black and cold again people will be desperate to survive. They’ll do things they wouldn’t ordinarily do. Like try to break into our compound.”
Mark said, “The Army doesn’t know about Salt Mountain or the mine. We told them we hunkered down here in our compound and used a small room inside one of the barns with artificial sunlight to maintain our seeds until the thaw came. We told them our livestock lived inside our insulated barns to stay alive, and we lived off of food we stored before the freeze. There’s no reason for them to believe we’d survive this time around, and if they came to the compound looking for us, they’d find it abandoned. There wouldn’t be anything of value for them and they’d find no reason to stay.”
“Wouldn’t they wonder where we went?”
“Sure they would. But remember last time, just before Saris 7 hit. The world was in chaos and a good percentage of the population was on the move. Looking for a safer place. Looking for lost loved ones. Trying to get to a warmer climate. I suspect the same thing would happen this time, and it wouldn’t surprise them that we’d moved on.”
“What about Marty and Glenna and her kids? They would almost certainly show up at our doorstep, possibly with all their friends and neighbors from Eden. And we won’t have the heart to send them away. Will we have enough food to feed them all?”
“That depends.”
“Oh what?”
“On how much time we have. There’s plenty of food out there. It’s in those hundreds of trailers that were abandoned on the highways. The ones in and close to the cities have been picked through and all their food is gone. But very few people drive anymore. And those who do almost never leave their cities for fear they’ll break down and be stranded in a strange place far from home. So while the trailers in the cities have been picked through, if you go a few miles outside the cities the trailers are mostly still sealed.”
“Can they still be towed?”
“I don’t know why not. The brakes will probably be rusted together, but we should be able to beat them a couple of times with a sledge hammer and knock them apart. The air lines on some of them may be rotten, but they can be easily replaced. We have two working ten ton tractors in one of the bays in the back of the mine. We’ve done routine maintenance on them since the breakout and even driven them occasionally to keep everything lubricated. So we have the means of hooking up to the trailers and hauling them back.”
Brad added, “As far as Marty and Lenny, they’re good men. And they’re both truckers. We can tell them they’re welcome in the mine with us, them and Glenna and her kids, provided they help us stock. With two additional trucks and two additional drivers we can do it a lot faster.”
“What about water?”
“The water tanks have enough to last us for two to three years. Maybe five if we go to severe rationing methods. If the world freezes over like it did last time all the precipitation will be in the form of snow or sleet. And it won’t melt. By the time we run out of water the snow pack will be three or four feet high. All we have to do is go outside and shovel as much as we need, then bring it inside and boil it to make it safe to drink.”
Mark said, “Don’t forget, there aren’t just food trucks out there. There are Coca Cola trucks as well. Each one of them holds twenty four pallets of bottled water or soda. Granted, drinking soda full time isn’t a good thing. But it does have water in it, and it can augment our drinking water to make it last longer.”
“What about the livestock? Is there enough feed in the mine to sustain them for that long?”
“No. Definitely not. That would be a major problem.”
Karen said, “The little greenhouse. The one with the growing lights where I grew plants to sustain our seed stores… we were down to a few bulbs when we finally got out of there. And one of the lights kept getting overheated and going out until it cooled again. Can we replace the lights and get a good stock of the bulbs?”
Brad said, “I’ll make a list of things we need and make a run to the home improvement stores in San Antonio. Those should be items nobody looted, since the power went out just after the meteorite hit. I’ll bet they’re still sitting on the shelf under an inch of dust. Or at least in the back of the store, in their stockrooms.”
“Right. And we can watch out on the highway for any trailers that were headed to those stores. They’re bright orange, so they should be easy to spot.”
This group of people were go-getters. They weren’t the kind of people who liked to sit on their hands when there was a job to be done. They were the type who got up and did it.
It was hard to hold this group back, but Hannah didn’t want to see them waste their efforts on a fool’s errand either.
“Okay, I just want to say once again that I didn’t want to meet with you to make a lot of unnecessary work for everyone, or to cause panic.
“Ten years ago Sarah and I disagreed on the path Cupid 23 would take, and whether it would be a danger to earth. If she were here now, and if she still had her memory, she might just tell you all that I’m a nerv
ous worry wart. That my paranoia is driving all this, and that anything we do to restock the mine would be a waste of time. The only reason I chose to tell you now is to get your opinion on whether it’s something to move forward with. We have the potential, if I’m wrong, of going through a lot of extra work for nothing.”
Karen stated the obvious, “Or… we have the opportunity to save the lives of a lot of people we love, just as you and Mark did the year before Saris 7 hit the earth. To me it’s a no brainer.”
Bryan said, “I have to remind everyone of our by-laws. When we came into the mine we voted on a system of government. One of the basic principles of that government was that any important decision would be decided on by the whole body of adults. If we’re going to press on with this, we’ll not only require the support of everyone. We’ll require their permission. And besides, the six of us can’t do it ourselves. It’s too big a job. We have to meet with everyone and get their consensus before we do anything.”
He looked around the room. Everyone, one at a time, nodded their heads in agreement.
Mark said, “Okay. I’ll get the word out to everyone to meet in the dining room tomorrow morning after breakfast. Rusty, would you help me man the security desk so that everyone else can attend? You can tell Sami how you’d vote and she can do it for you by proxy.”
“Sure.”
“Hannah can cast my vote the same way.”
Frank was curious.
“How are you voting, Mark?”
“I’ve got all the faith in the world in my wife. She saved me… hell, she saved all of us, once. That in itself is reason to put stock in what she’s saying. I’d much rather spend a lot of time and effort preparing for something that never happens, than to watch my family freeze to death because we did nothing.
“I’m going to vote that we go.”
-26-
Joel Hance was fascinated. He’d spent a few days in San Antonio working with a physical therapist who was teaching him how to adjust to his new artificial legs. They sent him home to the compound for a week to practice and to see if they were going to work for him.
When he’d returned to the compound the night before, the joint was buzzing about a meeting Mark and Hannah had called for this morning after breakfast.
There was a lot of tension in the air, and a lot of speculation that it was something very big and something very ugly.
Joel had only been a resident for a short time. He was the crewman who went down on the helicopter with Hannah. The only other survivor. She made a big deal about how he kept her alive until the rescue chopper arrived. But actually, in his heart he knew that she’d saved him as well. He’d have given up and let himself bleed out onto the forest floor had she not given him a mission. The others were gone. There was nothing he could have done for them. But by God, he’d make it his personal mission to save her.
He had to stay alive himself to do that. So in his mind, they saved each other. They were both heroes.
They told Joel he could no longer fly. It was against Army regulations for an amputee to be on flight status. Too many things could go wrong with a handicapped man aboard flight, they said.
Many things changed after the big chill. But one thing which stayed constant were regulations of the United States Army. They were not unlike a giant monolith made of stone. Unmoving, unseeing, uncaring. Unwilling to bend for anyone save God. And they sure weren’t going to bend for a Staff Sergeant who’d had the misfortune of losing both his lower legs in a chopper crash.
Joel had taken it in stride.
“I’ll go back to Atlanta,” he’d told Hannah. “That’s where I’m from. It’ll always be home anyway.”
“But what will you do?”
“I’ll go back to work for the Atlanta Braves. I heard they’ve finally found enough former players to get big league baseball started up again. Only a few teams right now. But the league will grow and will be as big as it once was. You’ll see. America without baseball is like America without… well, baseball. It just isn’t America without it. This country needs something to get its mind off its troubles and to be great again. Baseball can help do that.”
And he may well have been right. The problem was that back in Atlanta Joel would have nobody. His family and friends hadn’t survived, as far as he knew.
That wasn’t acceptable for Hannah. The man who fought so hard to keep her alive would not go back to a place where he’d be alone. In Hannah’s mind that was just too cruel. At least in Texas he had Hannah. And Hannah would make sure he made lots of other friends. Friends who would care for him and take care of him. Friends who would treat him with the honor and respect a hero deserved.
So she campaigned to get him admitted to their group. “He has nobody else,” she argued. “I owe him my life. The least I can do for him is to give him a new family.”
Joel was accepted into the group and became one of them. He found the family and friends he no longer had in Atlanta. And he even found love. And it wasn’t Hannah, despite his insistence to her at the crash site that they had to survive so they could be married someday.
No, Joel fell hard for Rachel, who herself was admitted into the group with her sister after their father was gunned down by bandits five years before.
And so it was that Joel sat at a table in the corner of the dining room, looking forward to his first group meeting, holding Rachel’s hand beneath the table.
She squeezed his hand, then leaned over to kiss him as the meeting was called to order.
Bryan filled in for Mark, who normally ran the group meetings, and addressed the crowd.
“I’ve been asked by three different people this morning whether it’s true we’re going back into the mine. Obviously the word has gotten out, but that’s okay. You were all going to hear about it this morning anyway. Hannah, you wanna take over?”
Hannah stood.
“You all know me. You know I don’t usually jump to conclusions and I don’t overreact. I might be this time. I hope I am this time. It’s up to you… to all of us, to decide whether my concerns are real enough to act upon them.
“You all remember when the news of Saris 7 went public. It was one of the worst days in our lives. But there was more news that was never made public. Saris 7 had a sister meteorite. A piece that broke off of her just after she was deflected and headed our way. It’s what the scientific community calls a tumbler, because its irregular shape causes it to tumble through space instead of flying like a bullet.
“The very nature of a tumbler means that it moves slower than a normal meteorite.
“The NASA designation for this second meteorite was Cupid 23.
“There was some disagreement within NASA at the time about whether Cupid 23 was a threat to earth, or would be in the future. I thought it was possible that it would follow Saris 7 into earth’s atmosphere at some point. Sarah thought that because a tumbler’s flight path is irregular, that it would veer away from Saris 7 and go its own way away from earth.
“NASA never resolved the issue because they had a much more pressing matter: Saris 7. Then Sarah and I went to the media to tell the public about Saris 7 and had to go into hiding. We no longer had access to NASA or its contractors to find out if there were any updates to Cupid 23’s path.
“With all the ensuing chaos, of stocking the mine and going into it, and surviving day to day, I put Cupid 23 out of my mind. I guess I felt safe in the mine, and maybe even a little bit invincible, and figured Cupid 23 couldn’t harm the earth any more than Saris 7 already had.
“I think Sarah did the same thing. We never discussed Cupid 23 after the day we left NASA.
“But meteorites don’t just disappear. Whether it’s a threat or not, Cupid 23 is still out there.”
-27-
At the control center Mark and Rusty watched the monitors for any activity outside the compound and discussed the feasibility of restocking the mine.
“I think it’s a big waste of time and energy,” Rusty op
ined. “What if we stock it and nothing ever happens?”
“Well, I suppose we just unstock it. Or better yet, leave it stocked as an emergency relocation center. It came in handy when the compound was overrun five years ago, remember. If it ever happened again, we’d have a place to go.”
“Yeah, maybe. Just seems to be a lot of work to me.”
In front of them, the ham radio suddenly came to life.
“Bryan, Hannah, whoever’s at the desk, this is Marty.”
Hearing Marty’s voice come over the radio was no surprise. He had his own ham radio set up in Eden now, and it was set to the same frequency as the compound’s. His logic was that if the compound ever needed his help for any reason, he could round up a few able bodies and come running.
Since they were now in communication with one another, Marty sometimes called in to check up on things when he was in his office and got bored.
But this wasn’t one of those occasions.
“Go ahead, Marty, it’s Mark.”
“Hey Mark. How are things going over there?”
“Not bad, sir. How’s the thriving metropolis of Eden, Texas?”
“Oh, it’s still here, such as it is. We have a lot more houses than we have people. But the mayor is encouraging the young folks to have babies by offering to deed an abandoned property for the parents of every baby born for the next five years. I understand it’s given the youngsters something to do at night again. Maybe someday we can revive the population with our own baby boom.”
“Sounds like a good idea. Planning for the future is something we’ve gotten out of the habit of doing.”
“Yep. Kinda hard to think about the future when you’re busy trying to survive from day to day.”
“Anything we can do for you today, or are you just calling to chat?”
A Long Road Back: Final Dawn: Book 8 Page 10
