A Long Road Back: Final Dawn: Book 8 (17 page)

     “So you don’t plan on just parking them all in the mine? You’re going to send them back out there?”

     “It depends. Like I said, if we can find water or diesel tankers we’ll park them in the mine and use them as storage until we need what’s in them. The miscellaneous trucks, like Walmart trucks, we’ll bring to the mine and have our crews go through them. They can pick them clean of anything we can use, then take them back out to the highway, drop them, and find another.”

     “You know, Mark, I’ve heard an awful lot about this mine of yours, but I’ve never seen it. How big is it, anyway, and how many people will it hold?”

     “Would you like a tour?”

     “Sure.”

     “Grab your jacket. Let’s go.”

-32-

     Glenna was a bit claustrophobic, probably from being locked in a small room each night for two years when Castillo held her hostage. So she was a bit afraid to walk through the long tunnel which connected the big house to the mine. She clutched tightly to Marty’s arm and Hannah held her free hand to help reassure her.

     “The mine will be much more open,” Hannah said. The ceilings are about forty feet high and each bay is about that wide. You won’t feel quite so cramped.”

     They’d left Glenna’s children in Karen’s capable hands, with the promise they’d be no more than half an hour or so.

     It was the first time Hannah had been in the tunnel for more than a year. She noticed that several of the bulbs were burned out along the way, and a few more were flickering to signal their eventual demise. The scent of the mine, a mix between dusky and salty, came flooding back to her, and she was surprised she’d forgotten it.

     The mine had been her home for seven long years while they waited for the world to thaw out again.

     She said a silent prayer to herself that it wouldn’t have to be home again.

     There were a couple of places the group passed where the tunnel was wider than the rest. The sides of the tunnel weren’t cut cleanly, as in the rest of the tunnel. They appeared, rather, to have been blasted out by explosives.

     Those were the areas, now repaired, which had been collapsed by dynamite to trap marauders who were bent on attacking the mine.

     Marauders who were trapped in the collapsed mine and eventually suffocated to death.

     The four finally came to the end of the tunnel, to a set of eleven wooden steps, painted traffic yellow, leading into the mine itself.

     The steps contained blood stains, a permanent souvenir and reminder of the value of the mine. And that as long as it existed, it would be coveted by others.

     Provided they knew about it. The group of forty who’d originally inhabited the mine took great pains, then and now, in keeping it a secret.

    Many of the old timers who lived in the Junction and Kerrville areas, of course, knew of the existence of Salt Mountain.

     Some of them knew that back in the 1940s, a large mining operation carved out most of the mine, until it was determined that it had been played out. It was no longer profitable to operate.

     Oh, there was still salt there. Plenty of it. But not enough to fill the forty trucks per day that it filled in its heyday.

     The mine was closed and abandoned.

     Until Mark and Hannah bought it, fortified it, and stocked it in their preparations for Armageddon.

     Or at least the chaos that Saris 7 brought with it.

     Those happening up to the mine’s entrance would be forgiven in thinking that it hadn’t been touched since it went out of business in 1949. The hard salt ground outside the huge roll-up door didn’t hold tire tracks, any more than hardened concrete would have. The door itself was covered with spider webs and a heavy duty lock which could only be defeated with a blowtorch.

     Adorning the huge overhead door at regular intervals were signs, purported to be from the United States Bureau of Mines, which warned visitors to keep out.

DANGER!

COLLAPSED MINE

EXTREMELY UNSTABLE

     Had one of the visitors talked to some of the mine’s former workers, if any were still alive, they might have learned some interesting things.

     The mine was not unstable. The year before it closed, it was given a thorough inspection by the bureau, and determined to be safe for another two hundred years or more.

     Further, the mine was closed purely for economic reasons. There never was any collapse.

     Had those same visitors investigated further, they’d have noticed something else that seemed rather odd. In the woods, not far from the mine entrance, high in the trees where they were rather inconspicuous, were surveillance cameras. They were aimed at the overhead door itself, and at the approach to the entrance from a local access road which branched off of State Highway 83.

     As for the heavy duty lock, it was merely a decoy.

     Yes, it looked impenetrable.

     In reality, it only looked fierce and forbidding.

     In reality, it wasn’t even locked, although anyone on the outside couldn’t possibly tell.

     The high security lock was welded to the heavy steel door, flush against the door’s frame. But the door was actually held into place by heavy duty bars on the inside. The bars, in turn, were held up by heavy gauge iron hangers. To open the door, one merely had to lift the bars off the hangers and put them to one side.

     And it could only be done from the inside.

     Immediately inside the overhead door were a series of bays which divided a very long tunnel leading deep into the mine’s interior. After just under a hundred yards, the entrance tunnel connected with the main tunnel, which ran for two hundred yards to the north and six hundred yards to the south. It was from this main tunnel that tributaries, or expansion tunnels, were dug farther and farther into the mountain itself.

     Some of the expansion tunnels ran for half a mile before the mine was deemed to be “played out.” But the group of forty never needed that much space. They only used the first two hundred feet or so of each expansion tunnel, which they numbered and redesignated as “bays.”

     It was in these bays the group ate, slept, did their laundry, went to school and amused themselves.

     For seven long years.

-33-

     At the top of the stairs the first thing Marty and Glenna noticed was how dimly lit the mine was.

     “Wait here,” Mark told them. “Let me get the lights turned on.”

     With a flashlight, he made his way quickly to the bay which held two huge diesel generators. As he’d done countless times before, he opened the door to the manual start switch and held a button down to heat the glow plug. At the same time he pressed a tiny pump several times to prime the engine. Finally, when the glow plug glowed a bright fiery red, he pressed the ignition switch and the generator sprang to life.

     He reached for another switch and changed it from “Auxiliary” to “Direct.”

     The overhead lights in the main tunnel of the mine immediately began to glow. They were halogen lights, and would take several minutes to shine at full capacity. But the mine was already light enough to walk through safely.

     The generator automatically throttled higher and higher as more and more electricity was sucked from its bowels.

     It had been programmed to run for only one hour per day. That was enough to keep its own batteries charged, as well as two huge forklift batteries, each one as big as a small desk. It was those two batteries which kept the mine minimally lit during normal operations, when it was essentially in caretaker status.

     When Mark had switched the generator to “Direct,” he told it in effect to light the entire mine, and to start charging the long bank of twenty of the desk-sized batteries.

     When the mine was occupied, the generator provided enough real-time power to power the lights and equipment needed to run the day to day operations. The battery bank was charged so the generator didn’t have to run continuously, and to provide a limited amount of power for nighttime operations.

     The second generator was identical to the first. It was used as backup in the event the main failed or was down for routine maintenance.

     Mark hurried back to the group, where he found Hannah explaining the huge mountains of salt and dirt which filled most of the bay in front of the tunnel entrance.

     “The tunnel was dug by hand, and with the use of pneumatic drills, and took over a year to dig. But that was okay, because we had plenty of time to kill while we were waiting for the world to thaw. The reason why some of it was salt and some dirt was because as we got away from the mine the earth transitioned from pure salt, to a mixture of salt and dirt, to pure dirt.

     “The diggers were happy to see the dirt, but learned to hate it later on. The salt was hard as a rock, almost like concrete, and was hard to drill through. But it was a lot easier to shore up. Once they transitioned to dirt, they found it was softer but much looser. They had to deal with frequent cave-ins, and it was much harder to shore up than the salt was.”

     Marty whistled.

     “So all these tons of salt and dirt were removed by hand from the tunnel?”

     “Yes. They filled dozens of orange five gallon Home Depot buckets at a time with the loose fill and then carried them by hand back into the tunnel to dump. When they got to the far end of the tunnel and had almost three hundred yards to lug them, they finally got smart and built themselves some wagons to pull. But it was still a very long way to walk.”

     Only the first few lights of each bay had bulbs. The rest were removed long before to save electricity.

     Hannah pointed down into the darkness, past the huge mounds of loose salt and dirt and a pile of broken timbers and railroad ties.

     “You can’t see them from here, but past those pallets of lumber down there are the showers where the diggers used to wash off at the end of each shift. It’s also where Sami and some of the other girls played practical jokes on them from time to time.”

     She winked at Glenna and said, “Remind me to tell you a secret about Rusty sometime.”

     But she didn’t elaborate.

     Mark led the group down the main tunnel shaft. Hannah asked if she felt better now, since the ceilings were much higher here, the walls much farther apart.

     “A bit, but I still don’t know if I could live here.”

     Hannah’s eyes caught Mark’s. Both were concerned.

     Along the way Mark pointed out what the various bays were used for during the occupation of the mine.

     “This was our transportation bay. It was where we stored all of our vehicles and did routine maintenance on them. You’ll notice the exhaust hoses hanging from the ceiling. They vent to the outside, and we attached them to the vehicles’ exhaust pipes. That way we could run them for a few minutes periodically without letting carbon monoxide build up in the mine.”

     Marty whistled when he saw, in addition to two forklifts and three pickup trucks, two shiny Kenworth tractors sitting side by side.

     “Are those in running condition, Mark?”

     “Oh, yes. Brad comes over here once a week and cranks them up for ten minutes each. Then he drives them around the mine for a few minutes to keep the bearings and everything else lubricated. They were brand new when we leased them, so they’re twelve years old now. But neither of them has more than six thousand miles on them.”

     “What did you use them for?”

     “While we were stocking the mine for Saris 7, Bryan got his commercial driver’s license and a certification to tow an eight thousand gallon diesel tanker. He used it to make runs to an independent refinery outside of Corpus Christi and hauled all of our diesel back with it. We stored most of it in five thousand gallon tanks in our fuel dump, which is two bays down. You’ll see it in a minute. Once they were filled, he got one last load and then dropped the tanker itself in the fuel dump. It’s still there, but empty now, but he keeps it maintained.”