The Battle: Alone: Book 4 (7 page)

WINSLOW COUNTY ELECTRICAL CO-OP

Relay Station

EXTREMELY HIGH VOLTAGE!

REMAIN 50 FEET AWAY AT ALL TIMES!

     A hunter tramping through these woods would have taken heed and steered clear of the big green box.

     He’d have no reason to suspect that the box was anything other than what it appeared to be.

     But Dave lingered to examine it closer.

     It looked official enough. It had the same lightning bolt decals applied to each side that scared the bejeezus out of people and made them think they’d be zapped with a gazillion volts of electricity if they dared touch the thing.

     Instead of a normal door it had an access panel with a handle, not a knob. That checked too. Dave knew instructively that a knob wouldn’t have looked quite kosher.

     He reached out for the handle, which was pointing down, and tried to turn it, all the while knowing that it would be locked.

     But it wasn’t locked.

     That shocked him. Not in the way a gazillion volts would have. But it shocked him that the door wasn’t secured from the inside.

     But he’d worry about the implications later.

     Right now he was running out of daylight.

     And he wanted to see what was in that tunnel.

     And exactly where it led.

     He walked in and found that it was as black as a witch’s heart inside the box. There was no light switch inside the doorway, as he’d hoped.

     But there was a set of steps leading down, complete with a handrail on either side.

     He hadn’t brought his night vision goggles. Hadn’t even brought a flashlight.

     He cursed himself under his breath. “How could I have been so frickin’ stupid?”

     The whole reason he’d come here today was to look for a hidden tunnel. And he wasn’t even smart enough to bring a light source to use to explore it.

     Dumb, dumb, dumb.

     Having no light wouldn’t deter Dave from exploring the tunnel, though. Sarah once called Dave “The unenlightened, blessed with ignorance, stumbling around in the dark looking for a clue.”

     He’d just smiled at the time, not quite knowing whether he’d been complimented or insulted.

     Perhaps she was right. Perhaps it was his destiny that he stumble around in the dark looking for clues.

     But not today, he wouldn’t.

     He walked down the steps very slowly, as he imagined a blind man would, with his left hand out in front of him and the right hand feeling its way along the wall.

     And his right hand bumped into something.

     He felt it and smiled.

     It was a junction box, mounted to the wall.

     With a light switch.

     He flipped the switch, and instantly the overhead lights came on, lighting the tunnel in front of him.

     Before proceeding, he paused just a moment to admire his brother-in-law’s work.

     This wasn’t just something he threw together on a couple of weekends. This was an elaborate structure, properly made with quality materials and expert workmanship.

     And that made sense. For Tommy was a builder by trade.

     The walls were concrete, but weren’t poured on site. They were prefab drainage tunnels, similar to those hiding beneath every city in America. He’d had them trucked in from somewhere in ten foot sections, each section interlocking with the one before it and the one behind it.

     As Dave walked along, he envisioned the massive equipment that would have been required for such an undertaking. A backhoe wouldn’t have done it. It would have required an excavator to dig the trench deep enough to accommodate the sections, then a small crane to lower them into place.

     No wonder they had to clear the forest and dig up the roadway to do the project.

     Dave knew the tunnel was at least a couple of years old, from the size of the saplings and the amount of brush which had grown over the area they’d cleared.

     Yet after all that time, there wasn’t a hint of water in the tunnel. It was bone dry. No seepage from ground water, no indication that rainwater had ever violated the access door’s weather seals. Nothing.

     The tunnel looked as new as the day it was completed. Except, perhaps, that the new concrete smell had been replaced by a musky scent.

     This tunnel would serve its purpose for generations of his in-laws relatives.

     Once the farm was cleaned of the vermin that had taken it over, of course.

     He knew from looking at the lay of the land that it was a straight shot from the fiberglass box where he’d entered the tunnel to the farm house.

     So he was puzzled, at first, to see that the tunnel only went about fifty feet in the direction of the house, and then took a sharp ninety degree turn to the left.

     After turning left, it turned sharply right again after six feet or so.

     And then, after another fifty feet it turned to the right, then toward the house once again.

     Why?

     Dave wondered about the strange design feature as he progressed through the tunnel. Walking upright, it only took him about three minutes to make his way through the meandering tunnel til he got to the far end.

     But just before he got there, he’d solved the puzzle.

     And realized his brother-in-law was a genius at his craft.

     Had the tunnel been straight as an arrow, the people evacuating through it would have been sitting ducks for anyone chasing them. Even if the good guys were at one end of the tunnel and the bad guys were at the far end, all they’d have to do is spray the tunnel with a hail of bullets. The bullets would ricochet off the walls through the tunnel, and would take out anything or anyone at the far end of the tunnel with no problem.

     Designing the tunnel with twists and turns, however, alleviated that possibility. Bullets flying down the corridor would strike the wall fifty feet in front of it, hopefully after the evacuees safely turned the corner.

     Such a design would also discourage the bad guys from chasing the evacuees down the tunnel as well. It would be dangerous, since the evacuees could use the corners as cover to shoot back from.

     Dave was impressed. So much so that he made a point to compliment his brother-in-law on his handiwork when he saw him again.

     “Good work, dude,” he muttered to himself. “The only thing this tunnel ain’t got is a couch, a television and a refrigerator full of cold beer.”

     When he finally got to the other end of the tunnel, he studied it closely. Like at the forest end, there was an access panel instead of a door. It was made of steel, and the opening was about twenty four inches wide and about four feet high. The corners were rounded and a rubber seal prevented those crawling through it from being scratched by the steel edges.

     Dave looked at the door to the access panel and smiled. He had to hand it to his brother-in-law. He really was a master of deception.

     Dave was no electrician, but he’d dabbled enough in it over the years to know what the inside of a breaker panel box looked like. The breaker box in a typical house wasn’t much bigger than an 11” by 14” picture frame. Inside it was an array of switches which would trip any time any of the outlets or switches in the house would over amp. Tripping the switch would break the circuit and cut power to that area, hence the term “circuit breaker.”

     He suddenly remembered, years before when visiting the farmhouse for the first time, when Tommy took him on a tour of the place.

     Dave had marveled at the large breaker box located in the farmhouse’s basement.

     “It’s huge,” Dave had said. “But why? Why do you need a breaker box that extends from the floor to my forehead?”

     “This isn’t just for the house,” Tommy explained. This is common among preppers, who live in compounds that have several outbuildings and several electrical systems going on. This breaker panel includes switches for the outlets and lights in the livestock barn, the feed barn, the pump house, the greenhouses and the tool shed. The switches for all the surveillance cameras all come through here, as well as emergency cutoffs for the solar panels, wind turbine and the primary and backup generators. It includes not just 110 power, but 220 power and trickle power from the solar panels. And, there’s an emergency kill switch for each of the oversized batteries that store solar power for nighttime usage.

     “In essence, this is the command center for everything on the farm that has anything to do with electricity.”

     The panel Dave was looking at was the same size as the one Tommy had shown him that day. Only Dave was looking at it from the other side. And it had no wires attached to the inside of it.

     It was a dead panel. Essentially just a large door attached to the wall, and a panel that was covered with breaker switches.

     Only the door was a decoy, the switches were dead. For in reality, the door Dave was standing behind was simply a ruse. The door to a hidden tunnel that was made up to look like a second breaker box.

     Dave guessed that the panel was installed right next to the real one. To the uninitiated, it would look just like the real one, and would be considered part of the electrical system it took to run the huge operation that was Karen and Tommy’s farm.

     And people who didn’t know a lot about electricity would tend to steer clear of such a box, for fear they’d be electrocuted.

     In essence, it was the perfect disguise for the tunnel’s entrance, and one that wasn’t likely to be examined very closely.

     Unknown to Dave, his wife was standing on the other side of that panel door at that very moment. She was looking on a shelf of jarred fruit and vegetables, not more than twelve feet away from him.

     It was the closest they’d been to each other in more than a year.

     And neither one of them knew it.

Chapter 12

     As Dave made his way back through the tunnel, Sarah made her way back up the basement steps to the farm house’s kitchen.

     John Swain was sitting at a small table in the breakfast nook.

     “I’m sorry, Mr. Swain. We seem to be out of peach jelly. We have grape and apricot in the cupboard if you’d like.”

     “No thank you, Sarah. I’ll just have my biscuits with butter this evening. Thank you for making my breakfast. Do you find it odd, my habits? I mean, most men don’t eat a full meal close to bedtime, and most people don’t eat breakfast foods except in the morning hours.”

     “No sir, Mr. Swain. I don’t find it odd at all. Before the world went black, I served my family breakfast for dinner occasionally. It was always a big hit. My little Beth, she was a pancake fiend… she always loved them for dinner.”

     “You miss her a lot, don’t you?”

     “You’ve no idea. She was always my heart, my soul. Life is so meaningless without her.”

     “Sit here beside me, Sarah. Please.”

     Sarah did as she was told.

     He placed his hand upon hers.

     She cringed just a bit, but tried not to show it. And she knew better than to pull back.

     “Sarah, you know that I’ve developed quite a fondness for you, don’t you?”

     “Yes, sir. I do.”

     “That’s why I’ve respected you more than the others. Why I’ve fought the urge to use your body in the same way I’ve used the others. Why I’ve never let the men in my charge pass you around for their own personal entertainment, as I’ve let them do with some of the others.”

     “Yes, sir. I know.”

     “Ah, but do you know why I’m so fond of you, so much more so than the others?”

     “No, sir.”

     “It’s because you’re special. I knew that from the moment I laid eyes on you. You weren’t meant to be used. You were meant to be treasured.”

     “Thank you, sir.”

     “And there’s another reason too.”

     “Oh?”

     “Yes. You look so much like a woman I very much loved, before I joined the Army. Believe it or not, her name was Sarah as well. She was the most beautiful woman I’d ever met. We fell deeply in love almost from the beginning. We laughed and cried and went on great adventures. I would have married her, but…”

     Sarah looked at him, but didn’t push him.

     “She died in a car accident. On her twenty second birthday. A drunk driver, in the middle of the afternoon, of all times. He crossed the center line and hit her head on. They were both going highway speeds and she never had a chance.