Breakout (Final Dawn) (5 page)

     Five minutes later Brad called in.

     “John, this is Brad. I’m in position.”

     “10-4. Mark or Bryan, this is John. Come in.”

     “Go ahead, John.”

     “Mark, your cover’s in place and so is your gate monitor. You guys about ready?”

     “Yep. We’re heading for the gate now. Thanks, John.”

     “You bet. You guys be careful out there.”

Chapter 8

     Hannah and Markie walked down a flight of stairs to the basement and to the room they’d designated for their resupply center. She needed some bubble bath for Markie. He’d never had one, because he never had a bathtub before now. But she remembered that they had stocked some Mr. Bubble, knowing they’d be able to use it once they broke out of the mine.

     Now all she had to do was find it.

     “Hi, Sarah. Hi, Sami.”

     “Hello, sleepy head.”

     “Hey, it wasn’t my fault. Somebody woke me up in the middle of the night because he was afraid of monsters getting into his bed.”

     Sarah looked shocked.

     “Seriously?”

     “Yep. Took me forever to get back to sleep.”

     Sarah looked at little Markie and said, “Markie
!”

     “Uh, huh?”

     “You tell your Daddy there are no such things as monsters, and to quit waking up your Mommy.”

     Markie giggled for just a moment, before a toy grabbed his attention and he went off to play.

     Hannah looked around and commented, “What a mess.”

     “Yes, and this isn’t even all of it. There are thirty or forty boxes still in the mine that they didn’t have room in the truck for. Brad was going to help us put the racks together, and then he was going to put the rest of the stuff on a hand
truck and roll it through the tunnel a few boxes at a time. But then he went off to help the other boys, as usual.”

     “Are the lights still on in the mine?”

     “Yes. Bryan’s going to leave them on until we get everything out, and then he’s going to switch it to emergency power, with just a few lights on for evacuation purposes.”

     “Well, let’s get the racks put together and then y
ou guys can start putting things on them while I go back for the rest of the stuff. Do you know how the racks go together?”

     “Oh, yeah. They just snap together. We could have done it ourselves, but I like watching Brad work when he’s wearing a tight t-shirt and I can see all of his muscles flexing.”

     Hannah rolled her eyes and said, “Oh, brother.”

     Then she looked over at her son.

     “Markie, honey, you stay over there and behave yourself, and don’t get into things while we’re working, okay?”

     “Okay, Mommy.”

     “Hey, keep an eye out for the Mr. Bubble, will you?”

     Karen, the resident artist and plant expert, called out from the hallway, where she was painting “Welcome to Walmart” on the door. It was an inside joke, owing to the fact that nearly everything they’d purchased for their resupply center came from the big blue retailer.

     “The Mr. Bubble is in one of the big blue plastic containers where we keep our long term storage stuff. I took it off the shelf in the mine because it was taking up space, and nobody used it because we had no bath tubs.”

     “Thank you, Karen. Do you remember which blue tub you put it in?”

     Karen chuckled.

     “No clue. But there are only sixty of them, so it shouldn’t be too hard to find.”

     “Thanks
a lot
. I owe you one.”

     She went to the hallway to check out Karen’s sign.

     “Nice sign, but doesn’t Walmart only have one ‘l’?”

     Karen looked up at her work in mild panic, and was very relieved to see that she had indeed spelled it correctly.

     “Ha! Made you look. Now we’re even for you hiding the Mr. Bubble on me.”

     Karen smiled.

     “Hey, are you going to need any help in the greenhouses today?”

     “I don’t know. I’m going over there after I finish here. Mark said he found two volunteers to help me. He wouldn’t tell me who they were, but they’re supposed to meet me there at ten. You’re welcome to come over, though. The more the merrier.”

     “Okay, I’ll work here until I get tired of looking at Sarah, or get tired of Sami’s dumb jokes. Then I’ll come over and help.”

     A large sponge went sailing past Hannah’s head, but she didn’t know where it came from. By the time she turned around, both Sarah and Sami were both hard at work, as though they hadn’t heard a word.

     It was going to be a fun morning.

Chapter 9

     “Nope. Hold on, it’s not budging. We need to dig some more!”

     Frank gave a signal by waving his hand across his throat to tell
Jesse, Bobby and Mike to stop pulling. Each of them was in a different vehicle, trying to pull over the stump of an oak tree that had been gracing Widow Spencer’s front lawn for over twenty years.

      And
all three vehicles together were having a tough time toppling the stump.

     The group reassembled at the stump to talk strategy.

     “I think we made a mistake by not pulling it over first,” Bobby suggested.

     His brother wasn’t so sure.

     “Why do you say that?”

     “Because we no longer have any leverage. All three of the ropes go
around the trunk two feet off the ground. What we’re essentially trying to do is pull it sideways. And it doesn’t want to go sideways.”

     So how should we have done it?

     “We should have climbed up the tree instead of cutting it down. And tied the ropes around the trunk ten or twelve feet above the ground. Then the leverage would have been on our side, and we could have pulled the whole thing over. And then cut it to pieces, after it was laying in the street.”

     “Okay, so we’ll try your theory on the next tree. But meanwhile, what in hell do we do about this one?
”

     “We have no choice. We dig some more. And we use hand saws to cut s
ome more of the roots. Sooner or later we’ll get it. It’s just a matter of how much crap we have to dig through before it breaks free.”

     “I hope not too much more. I’m already tired of digging, and we haven’t even
started digging up the yards yet.”

    
Frank said, “The package on the corn said not to plant it until we had two straight weeks above fifty degrees. We’ve only had seven so far. So we’ve got another week at least before we can plant. More if the temperature drops again.

     “Why don’t we get this sucker out of the ground, and one more next door. That’ll give Tony a whole tree to cut up, which will take him at least two days. While he’s doing that, we’ll focus on getting the first two yards dug up. Then once we hit the fourteen day mark, the women will have a place to start planting while we move on to the rest of the trees.”

     “Works for me.”

     Tony volunteered, “And just for the record, I’ll be happy to take my turn at digging. I’m getting just as tired of the chain saw as you guys are from the shoveling.”

     “You’re on!” Bobby said, while handing Tony his shovel. “I’d rather use a chain saw any day.”

     “Yeah, you say that now. In four hours, when your forearms go numb
from the vibration and your back starts to break, you’ll be begging to give it back.”

     Tony and Mike spent another two hours digging completely around the stump. It was a dirty, nasty job. Especially when they had to get down on
their hands and knees and reach down into the hole to saw off a root.

     Finally, they declared it time to try again. The three of them got back in the vehicles, pulled the ropes taut, and then floored it.

     The stump came out with ease this time, and laid in the street like a dead soldier who’d finally met his fate.

     The brothers, Bobby and Mike, high fived each other. Bobby then turned to Tony and said, “As much as I hate to admit it, you were right about the chain saw. I didn’t realize how heavy it would be after a couple of hours. Whenever you get tired of digging, I’ll switch back out with you.

     Tony Pena smiled.

     “You’re much too soft, young whippersnapper.
I’ll take it off your hands for the rest of the day. Tomorrow you can take it back for a bit. Build up your stamina a little bit at a time. Maybe using it’ll make a man out of you.”

     Mike countered, “That’ll never happen. He’s been a big sissy all his life. He’ll always be a sissy.”

     “Shut up, you big jerk. I’ll show you big sissy.”

     The brothers were grown up now, but still liked the banter of their youth. In a cruel and chaotic world, it somehow made them feel a little more normal when they battled. So many things had changed in the world in recent years, but one constant they’d enjoyed since their childhood was the joy they derived from giving each other grief. And it was all in fun, every bit of it. For they were as close as two brothers possibly could be. No damn meteorite could take that away from them.

     Now that the tree was out of the way, Bobby and Mike began digging up the front yard of Widow Spencer’s home as she sat in a rocking chair on her porch, cat in her lap, and watched them.

     Other men might have taken offense at her presence on the porch, or might have insisted that she do something… anything, to help them.

     But these were good boys, raised proper. Their parents had seen to that. They were respectful and helpful to their neighbors. They knew that Widow Spencer was all alone since her husband had died the year before Saris 7 hit. Most of her relatives were dead and those who weren’t lived way up north somewhere. She and Walter never had any children. So now it was just her and her cats, and she was old and frail and just a tad bit senile.

     She would never have survived on her own for those six long years. Not if the
Pena family hadn’t stepped in to care for her. Actually, it was the boys’ idea. They looked in on her daily, and brought her food. Even scrounged the abandoned houses in the neighborhood for cat food for her tabby Monica and her calico Chelsea.

     Their own grandmothers had died years before, and Widow Spencer took on that role. So it was therapeutic for all of them.

     They started at one end of the front yard, where it connected with the driveway of the adjacent house. And they took their shovels and dug down ten inches, turning each shovel full of dirt. Then they took the sharp shovels and broke up the dirt to make it looser, so it would be easier to rake through and pull out as much of the grass and roots as they could.

     They planned to turn the dirt and repeat the process at least twice more. It would be a tedious process, and they weren’t looking forward to it.

     They stopped to take a break.

     “This is gonna take forever.”

     “No joke.”

     But they had a surprise coming around the corner at the end of
the block. It was Jesse, and their neighbor Joe, returning from a run to the local Home Depot. In the back of their pickup was another load of rain gutter and fifty gallon garbage cans.

     And a very large box that said “Garden Tiller” on the side.

     “Woo-hoo!” Mike yelled. Then he looked at his brother. The look on his face said, “Why didn’t we think of that?”

     Joe backed the truck into Widow Spencer’s driveway and the boys took the tiller off the back. Within an hour they had it assembled and running. Within another hour they’d worked their way halfway through the front yard.

     Joe, Jesse and Frank, meanwhile, picked up their own project where they’d left off the day before when they ran out of gutter parts. They were installing gutters on every house on the block. On every side of the house. And on each corner of every house, they were installing a rain spout that would pour water directly into a fifty gallon trash can.