Alone: Book 1: Facing Armageddon (5 page)

     I
’m out of daylight. I’ve decided to save the candles for the wintertime, so I can use them for heat as well as light. That means working from dawn to dusk, then crashing during the nighttime hours. That’s okay, though, because I’m exhausted.

     Good night, Doll. Kiss the girls for me.

-9-

     Dave awoke to the birds singing from the Sycamore tree outside his bedroom window. The sun was already up and well above the horizon. He’d lost at least an hour of daylight, but he didn’t see it as a major problem. He was exhausted from the day before, and needed the rest.

     He had two items on his agenda today. First, he’d finish up the project he’d started the day before, and when he was finished his perimeter fence would be fortified as an added measure against prowlers.

     After he was done with that, he’d break into his Faraday cage and take out his generator. Then he’d use some of the pre-drilled plywood and two by fours from the lumber pile in the garage and build a small soundproof enclosure for it.

     Once the enclosure was done, he’d be able to run his generator for short periods of time in his garage without his neighbors being able to hear it
.

     If he happened to finish both of the projects
today, he’d move onto a third: putting together his outhouse. But there was no real hurry on that. The hole he’d dug in the back corner of the yard would suffice for now.

     He debated with himself about the pace he wanted to set for himself. He knew that there were a hundred different things to do before he could live a reasonably comfortable existence.

     His initial impulse was to work his ass off and get everything done as quickly as he could.

     But the other side of the coin was, once everything was done his biggest enemy would be boredom. Once he finished all his projects, there would be little to do. And he wasn’t the type of person who could stand still for very long.

     In the end he wound up in something of a compromise with himself. Every day, he’d select a couple of projects to do, based on their order of importance. If he finished those projects, he’d take the rest of the day off and read, or listen to the music on the small boom box in the Faraday cage.

     If he didn’t finish, he’d work right up until sundown, and then crash for the night.

     The previous day, he’d been working his way around the perimeter of his privacy fence, installing screws into holes that he’d pre-drilled months before.

     His fence was typical of all the others in the neighborhood. Fence posts were planted on eight foot centers, and three two-by-four stringers were run horizontally between the posts. Pine pickets, six feet tall and six inches wide
, were nailed to the stringers to complete the fence.

     Months before, Dave had spent the better part of a week with a rechargeable drill, going from one
picket to the next, and drilling two holes into each picket, an inch from the top of the fence.

     Sarah thought he had lost his mind and went out to see what he was doing.

     She said, “Hey, honey, are you okay?”

     “Sure. Why do you ask?”

     “Well, I’ve been watching you work your way down the fence for the last half hour. You’re drilling hundreds of holes, but not doing anything with them. It just seems kind of strange to me, that’s all. Should I call a shrink?”

     “No, smartass. I’m
pre-drilling holes so when the world goes black we can fortify our fence.”

     “Oh, yes! That’s right, I forgot. And how, exactly, is a bunch of holes going to fortify our fence?”

     “Because in the garage is a forty pound box of two inch screws that we’ll screw into the holes, facing the outside, when the stuff hits the fan. Anybody who tries to climb over the fence will shred his hands to pieces, and I’m guessing he’ll go to another yard that’s easier to get into.”

     “But I thought we were going to hide in plain sight, by making the house appear to be vacant.”

     “We are. This is just an added precaution, in case somebody is too stupid to get the message.”

     “Smart. I guess you never can be too careful, huh?”

     “That’s my thinking. This will take a little time, but it’s a really cheap security system. Just some cheap screws and some time is all.”

     “So, you’re going all the way around the yard?”

     “Yep. And not only our yard, but the Hansen house as well.”

    
The Hansen house was a large two story structure directly behind them. They shared a common back fence.

     The
Hansens had moved out more than a year before, when their walls started developing severe cracks. An insurance inspector pulled up the carpet and padding, and discovered that the walls weren’t the only thing cracking. So was the foundation.

     The city condemned the structure as unsafe. The insurance company accused the builder of improperly packing the soil before the slab was poured.

     The builder, in turn, said there must have been an earthquake. He denied responsibility for what he called an “isolated act of nature.”

     The case had been tied up in the courts for months. Dave and Sarah were hoping it took years to resolve. The house was huge, and would provide enough lumber to provide their firewood needs for at least a couple of years. Also, the back yard was three times the size of their own, with an eight foot privacy fence. It would be perfect for growing crops.

     But possibly the best things were the apple and pecan trees in the front of the back yard, close to the house. They were five years old now with established root systems. That meant they’d survive on their own, with only minimal watering needed during an occasional drought.

     “Aren’t you afraid that someone will see you over there, drilling holes in their fence?”

     “Who’s coming? The Hansens have already moved up to Waco. The bank never comes around anymore. They’ve turned it all over to the lawyers.”

     Sure en
ough, Dave was able to spend three days in the back yard of the Hansen house, drilling two small holes in each of the six hundred eighty four fence slats.

     And no one had a clue.

     He was finding now, though, that drilling hundreds of holes was a piece of cake, when compared with screwing in hundreds of screws without the aid of an electric drill.

     Oh, he did have a drill in his Faraday cage. And he had a generator to power it. Or, at least to charge the batteries which would power it.

     The problem was, he couldn’t try his hardest to convince the neighbors and passersby that the house was vacant, and then be working in the back yard with a noisy drill.

     So here he was, with an orange and white Home Depot pocket apron around his waist, right over the top of  his military surplus web belt and holster. Both
pockets on the apron were full of two-inch long black screws, and he was slowly moving from picket to picket screwing the screws into the holes.

     It was a slow process, and a painful one. His forearms were on fire and he frequently
had to stop and rest, when his hands temporarily ceased to function. He was convinced that by the time he finished the task, his forearms would be as big as a bodybuilder’s, and would be so heavy he wouldn’t be able to lift them.

     At a little after three p.m., he was sick of screwing screws into fence pickets.

     He figured that what he needed more than anything was a change of scenery.

     So he took a break, just long enough to eat four barb
acoa tacos. He’d retrieved the food from his Explorer the first night of the blackout, while his Jerry cans were filling underneath Sarah’s Honda. Initially, he’d kept it in the refrigerator, hoping it didn’t spoil before he finished eating it all.

     Once the refrigerator was no longer
cool on the inside, he moved the barbacoa to the chest freezer in the garage. The stuff in the freezer had started to thaw after two days, but was still cold enough to keep his barbacoa from spoiling. At least until he could polish it off.

     Once he finished eating, he went into the garage to start his second project.

     Like many people, Dave and Sarah only parked one of their cars in their two car garage. Usually, people who did that made the second half of their garage into a workshop, or a storage area.

     And technically, Dave
and Sarah did that too. But the stuff in their storage area looked anything but typical. For on the unused half of their garage was a huge pile of lumber and plywood.

     The bottom layer of the stack consisted of four sheets of half inch plywood, laid side by side. There were nineteen other similar layers, for a total of eighty uncut sheets of plywood. After that were two layers of two by fours and four by four fence posts, followed by several pieces of plywood that had been cut into various shapes and sizes. The cut pieces all had holes drilled into them in random places, as did many of the two by fours. On top of all of that, from the top of the stack and stretching almost to the ceiling, was Dave’s Faraday cage.

     Boxes of survival supplies and dried food were   stacked all around the pile.

     They’d tried to plan for everything. And everything meant not only wood for a soundproof enclosure for the generator. It also meant wood for a safe room and an outhouse.

     The cut pieces of plywood and lumber also had vague markings on them in black sharpie, that seemingly made no sense at all.

     But Dave knew what they meant.

     Dave knew because all of the pieces with holes and markings had been prefabricated. Cut for specific reasons. They’d all been assembled to make sure they fit together properly, and then taken apart again.

     Dave took
a propane lantern and screwed it onto a small disposable bottle of propane. He lit it and placed it on the floor next to the lumber pile. So he wouldn’t be overcome by carbon dioxide, he left the door to the house open and opened the patio door on the other side of the kitchen. He hoped it would provide enough ventilation.

     Then he got to work.

 
-10-

     Dave worked fast. He knew the dangers of carbon dioxide poisoning. He knew it crept up on its unsuspecting victims, made them think everything was fine until they passed out. And that sometimes they never woke up.

     He took a pair of wire cutters off a pegboard on the wall where he kept most of his tools. He snipped the heavy chicken wire that covered all six sides of his Faraday cage
, and removed one of the panels.

     Then he grabbed several appliances from it. The three thousand watt generator.
A battery charging station. A small television set and DVD player. A coffee pot and microwave.

     And finally, in the back of the cage, he found what he was looking for. A large cardboard box marked “flashlights, floodlights and batteries.”

     “All right!” he said. “Come to Daddy, so we can get you hooked up. It’s starting to get stuffy in here.”

     Dave
opened the box and took out a large camping light. Made to light a large tent, it worked equally well to light a large room. And it worked on six “D” batteries.

     Most of the batteries in the box were
rechargeable. But there were also some old fashioned disposable batteries that were fully charged and ready to go. Those were the ones he put into the camp light.

     Once the batteries were in, he held his breath and turned on the switch. The light came on instantly, and he breathed a sigh of relief.

     The Faraday cage had worked as advertised. Everything inside it had been saved from the EMP.

     He turned off the propane lantern and unscrewed it from the small propane bottle. He put the bottle back where he’d gotten it, in the corner of the garage with four twelve pack cases of similar bottles. From now on, the propane would be used solely for boiling his drinking water.

     The camp light gave him plenty of light to finish up his project: selecting the pieces for his soundproof generator box.

     Each piece was
marked in sharpie, with the letter “G”. It was followed by more cryptic code that only Dave and Sarah understood.