Breakout (Final Dawn) (22 page)

     John wasn’t finished. Not just yet.

     “I need some volunteers to fill sandbags and
build the barricades. Anyone willing to help please stay behind.”

     No one left, leading John to smile and say, “Oh, I just love it when people volunteer.”

     He sent the strongest of the volunteers to the wood storage area in the back of Bay 17 to gather plywood and two by fours and haul them to the main entrance. They’d taken both of their forklifts to the compound when they evacuated the mine. A tactical error, but it was too late to do anything about it now.

     They did have two utility vehicles that they’d used before to collect gray water from the RVs and transfer it to the water treatment plant. Essentially golf carts, they were made by the Cushman Company and had small pickup-l
ike beds on the back. They could balance six sheets of half inch plywood on the back of each cart without weighing it down too much to move.

     The lifters would ferry
the lumber and plywood to the main entrance of the mine, where they’d use it to build a wall across the overhead door. The wall would be eight sheets of plywood thick, a total of two inches of pressed wood. If that didn’t stop the bullets, a layer of sandbags stacked on the inside of the wall would.

     “Where are the sandbags, Mark? I know we have two pallets of them. I saw them on your annual inventory list.”

     “They’re in the back of Bay 17, just past the stacks of plywood. It’s dark back there, because we didn’t light that part of the bay, but I’ll push a rolling ladder over there and add a couple of bulbs. Each of the pallets has four hundred empty bags on it. That should be plenty after we fill them up.”

     Sarah said, “Pardon me for asking a dumb question, but where are we going to get sand to put in the bags?”

     “We’re taking a road trip to the beach.”

     “I’m serious, smartass.”

     “Oh, sorry. We don’t actually have sand. But it so happens we have a mountain of loose salt, in Bay 24, where we dug the tunnel. Salt actually has more density than sand, so it should do a very effective job in stopping bullets.”

     John said, “O
kay, you lifters load up a few bundles of empty sandbags and take them to the salt mound in Bay 24. Then you can ferry the lumber and plywood to the wall builders at the main entrance. By the time you get everything there, there should be a good supply of filled bags for you to start hauling.

     “Mark, would you head up the hauling crew?”

     “Sure thing, John.”

     Hannah spoke up.

     “I’ll head up the filling crew.”

     “Thank you, dear. I’ll head up the building crew, since I’m the only one here who can hammer a nail in straight.
Bryan, since you’re crippled and damn near worthless, would you mind sitting here and watching the monitors?”

    
Bryan smiled.

     “I’d be happy to, John.”

     “Okay, everybody else latch on to whatever team you want to work with. We’ll need a volunteer to help with the little ones since we’ll have a lot of activity going on.

     “You weapons carriers, keep them on safe unless we get an indication from
Bryan that trouble is imminent. Those of you who have radios, be sure the volume is up and the batteries are fresh.

     “Everybody knows what to do if they hear the alarm go off?”

     He looked around. Everyone shook their heads.

     “Okay, let’s get this done.”

     Mark’s hauling crew finished moving all the plywood and lumber within two hours and the wall was completed a couple of hours after that. The sandbags took a bit longer. Because of the weight, they could only be moved a dozen at a time. It took most of the evening to get a four foot wall of sandbags built, and everyone was exhausted by that time.

     The crew broke for the night to get some much needed rest
, and John asked for volunteers to stay up a little longer for the security detail.

     “Okay, I know that no one wants to hear this, but I need three other people to stand guard with me tonight. I don’t expect anything to happen, unless those thugs over there had backup in the woods that we don’t know about. But it’s better to be safe than sorry. I’d like to have a four man shift pull guard duty
until oh four hundred, and four more to get up then to replace us.”

     Sarah asked, rather meekly, “Um, John… what’s oh four hundred, for us people who don’t speak military?”

     “Four a.m.”

     “Okay, then. I’m good until then. I’ll stay up with you.”

     Bryan said he’d continue to man the desk and Brad agreed to stay up as well.

     Everyone else dragged themselves to their RVs for some much needed rest. It had been a very long day, and they were all anxious for it to end.

Chapter 44

     Alvarez walked through the big house, mostly out of curiosity. But he was also on the hunt. Many years of sitting in a prison cell with practically nothing to his name gave him a propensity to want things he couldn’t have. It had become a habit, therefore, since Saris 7 hit the earth and he was unceremoniously released from prison with all the others, to always be on the lookout for things to loot.

     As he walked down the main hallway of the first floor, he couldn’t help but notice that all of the apartment doors were unlocked. A couple of them were even propped open.

    
He couldn’t believe that such a society even existed anymore. A society so trusting was almost beyond comprehension to Alvarez. He’d remembered that as a kid, growing up in Lubbock, Texas, he visited his grandmother on Colgate Street before and after Sunday church service.

     His abuela never locke
d her house. She told him that was the way she was brought up. That in the barrios of her youth, neighbors didn’t steal from one another. They watched out for each other, and protected their neighbors.

    
When she moved into a nursing home, just before she died, his parents put the house up for sale. And they had to change the locks on the doors. The doors had been left unlocked for so many years nobody could find the keys.

     But in prison, everything was subject to theft.

     No one stole from Alvarez, of course. They were afraid to. He had a reputation for once beating a man near death for stealing a tube of toothpaste, and no one wanted to incur his wrath.

   
Rather, it was Alvarez himself who did most of the stealing. He knew few souls were brave enough to call him out.

     He
walked inside Hannah and Mark’s apartment. Hannah happened to be manning the security desk while Bryan hobbled off to use the bathroom, and she cringed at what she saw on the monitor. The camera only caught activity in the hallway. Once Alvarez went inside her apartment, she lost sight of him and didn’t have a clue what he was doing.

     She felt violated by this strange man. And she hated not only him, but the feeling as well.

     Hannah cringed even more when she saw him stick his head out the door and call out to his henchmen. Without audio, she had no clue what he told them. But he appeared to be calling them into her apartment to look at something. Three men came walking down the hallway and disappeared within her apartment and out of her view.

     She became even more concerned. That was their home.
Hers and Mark’s and little Markie’s. It was their sanctuary. What in the world could these barbarians find so interesting there, and how dare they just barge in like they owned the place?

     She picked up her radio.

     “Mark, are you busy?”

     “No.
I’m not busy at all. I just got Little Sailor to sleep and I’m waiting for you to come back to the RV. Why?”

     “Do you think he’ll be okay if you came by here for a few minutes?”

     “Where’s ‘here’?”

     “At the security desk. I want to show you something.”

     “Okay. He’s out like a light. I’ll be there in a minute.”

    
Mark arrived at the security desk about the same time Bryan returned, and Hannah showed them the monitor where Alvarez and the other men had disappeared into their apartment.

     “They’ve been in there for about
fifteen minutes now. Four of them. One went in alone, and then came out and called in the other three. What on earth could they be doing in our home?”

     Mark was as puzzled as she was.

     And then Hannah felt a slight panic.

     “Mark, tell me you didn’t leave your computer on.”

     “It’s always on. Why?”

     “Those photos you took of me on our honeymoon. You know,
those
photos. Are they on your computer?”

     He knew he was in hot water.

     And he also knew he couldn’t lie to her. She always saw right through him when he tried. And knowing he tried always made her angrier.

    
Bryan interrupted.

     “You have naked pictures of Hannah and you never shared them with me? I would have shared Sarah’s with you.”

     Hannah and Mark, in perfect harmony, said, “Shut up, Bryan.”

     She saw the look on her husband’s
face and said, “Oh, Mark. You told me you’d destroy those when the baby was born. I trusted you to do that.”

     “I’m sorry, honey. They were such great photos. I just couldn’t bear to trash them. And Markie knows he’s not allowed on my computer. He’s never seen them and never will. You know that.”

     “Mark, it’s not Markie seeing them that I’m worried about. How could you?”

     “I’m sorry, honey. But they’re nothing to be ashamed of. You put any model to shame. They’re beautiful. Much too beautiful to just
discard like yesterday’s garbage.”

     She was livid.

     “When we get back over there… when we go back home, I want you to destroy those things. I want there to be no trace of them. No ghost files, no backups. Nothing. I swear, as God is my witness, if you don’t get rid of them once and for all I will strangle you with my bare hands.”

     He looked at her and felt like a chastised little boy. She was bright red, both from embarrassment and from rage
. And he didn’t know if she was more outraged at the men ogling over her photographs, or at her husband for allowing them the opportunity to.

     “I trusted you, Mark. You let me down.”

     “I know, honey. I’m sorry. And you have my word, I will destroy all traces of them as soon as we get back.”

     At that precise moment three of the four men came out of the couple’s apartment and disappeared down the hallway and out of the camera’s view. They appeared to be in good spirits, and Hannah tried not to wonder why.

     But Hannah was wrong.

     She’d assumed that the four men were ogling over risqué photographs of her that her husband had taken years before on their honeymoon.

     In reality, Alvarez had stumbled across a home video of Hannah playing with the basset hound she owned when she and Mark started dating. Alvarez was captivated by Hannah’s beauty, yes. But he was more captivated by the dog. For it reminded him of a dog he had when he was a boy, before he grew up and his life turned to shit. Everything about the dog, from the way his ears dragged the ground as Hannah chased him through the grass, to the way he waddled when he walked, to the markings on his head and body… they all reminded him of his dog Max.

     And in a very rare display of humanity,
Alvarez suddenly felt a need to show some of the others this dog, and to express his memories of his own pet, at another place and time. A place and time that wasn’t so harsh as the present.

     The three men who were summoned we
re just glad not to be chewed out for something they did wrong. They let Alvarez talk, and would let him continue as long as he wanted to. Seeing this unknown, gentler side of their leader was a much better scenario that dealing with him at his worst.

    
Alvarez made an announcement to the others that this was his new home. This was his apartment, and his bed, and the others were to stay the hell out of it.

     O
nce he felt secure enough to get some rest, he’d fall asleep watching a beautiful young girl and a memory from his past frolic together in the tall grass of an unfamiliar city park.

     It would be only a brief respite from the harsh reality of an ugly world, he knew.

     But he also knew his days could be numbered, and he had to take such opportunities as they came.

     He understood that most of his crew thought him a heartless bastard. He’d actually intended it that way. In prison, one had to appear tough in order to survive. People preyed on the weak.