Final Dawn: Escape From Armageddon (12 page)

     He showed Hannah and Sarah how to use a box cutter to cut the caulking which sealed the
original toilet, and to remove the two bolts that held it to the floor.

     Then he showed them how to scrape the residue of the old caulking, put the new c
amping toilet in place, bolt it down, and apply new caulking.

     “What was wrong with the old toilet?” Sarah asked. “It was brand new.”

     Mark replied “It was made to be flushed. We can’t afford to waste water by flushing toilets all day long. The camping toilet needs no water. It works by way of gravity. The waste goes from your body to the bottom of the hole, with nothing in the way to stop it or slow it down.

     “The seat on this toilet is just a little bit smaller than the lid, and the lid is twice as heavy as the lid on a normal toilet. After you do your business, you close the lid, which fits over the seat and has a two inch soft foam gasket. The weight of the lid and the gasket work together to provide a good seal that keeps unpleasant smells from drifting in from the septic hole.”

     Hannah said “Pretty clever. But what happens if you forget to close the lid? I mean, you guys can’t even remember to lower the seat.”

     Sarah chuckled.

     Mark said “If you forget, you won’t forget for long. Within half an hour the whole RV will smell like a sewer.”

     “Thank you for the training, sailor. It was fun.”

     “I’m glad you enjoyed it. There are twenty three more to go. I’ll move the new ones into the RVs and take the old ones out if you two can install them. Fair enough?”

     Sarah looked at Hannah and said “Did he think we were serious when we volunteered to help? Silly boy.”

     The girls laughed, but Sarah was teasing, of course.

     By the end of the next day,
each of the twenty four RVs had its own sewer system. The four spare toilets were placed in the back of Bay 22, waiting for Bryan to get around to building a four-hole outhouse for the common area.

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     “Mark,” Hannah asked as they lay snuggled together in bed one rainy Tuesday night. “How do we know when enough is enough? I mean, how do we know when we have enough food and can stop buying it?”

     Mark was perplexed. “I honestly don’t know. I just figured we’d keeping buying food until time r
an out. If we have too much, then that’s not really a bad thing.”

     “But what if we should be buying more than we are? I mean, if we keep buying until the very end and it still isn’t enough, we may not even know until it’s too late. Until we run out of food six months or a year before we can break out. And we all end up starving to death even after all of our planning and efforts.”

     Hannah went on. “There’s another thing that’s been bothering me too. Our scientists estimated that the meteorite that killed the dinosaurs was about four miles long. Roughly the same size as Saris 7. And they estimated that the earth was incapable of growing crops for five to seven years. So that’s what we’ve been basing our plans on.

     “But Baby, what if they were wrong? I mean, there obviously was no one around keeping records back then. They based their estimates solely on the geologic record and by studying fossils.”

     Mark was confused. He wasn’t getting her point.

     So she spelled it out for him.

     “Look,” she said. “Hopefully the scientists were right. Five to seven years in the mine, then we break out into a brave new world. And I want to keep telling everyone that. It’s a lot easier hearing five to seven years and hoping for five, than hearing it could be more than that.

     “But just between you and me, I want to start stocking up for ten. Just in case they were wrong.”

     Mark’s background was engineering. He lacked the keen analytical mind of a scientist. Moreover, he trusted Hannah. So he didn’t argue. Instead, he merely asked “So, how do we figure out if we’ll have enough food and water for ten years?”

     Hannah said “That’s my next project. Sarah has agreed to help me. We’re going to inventory every bit of food we have to this point. We’ll figure out how many calories it will take to feed forty people for ten years with a 2,000 calorie a day diet. And we’ll see if we have enough to do that. And if we don’t, we’ll determine how much more food we need, and get a rough estimate of how much food we need to get in every day that we have left to fulfill that requirement.”

     Mark kissed her and said “What would I ever do without you?”

     She said “I’m never gonna give you a chance to find out.
I also took it upon myself to order 1000 cases of MREs. They weren’t cheap, but I want to put them in back of the mine as our emergency survival plan. Do you know what MREs are?”

     “I’ve heard of them, but refresh my memory.”

     “MRE stands for Meal, Ready to Eat. It has a weird acronym because it was designed for the U.S. Army, and the military is all about acronyms. Anyway, it’s a prepackaged meal that is sealed in heavy duty plastic with a ten year shelf-life. It’s not gourmet, but it’s packed with calories. Just perfect for what we need.”

     “If they were made for the Army, how do we get them?”

     “There are all kinds of companies that make them commercially. They sell them to campers, survivalists, and hunters. They have a variety of menus, including many that contain pasta and lot of carbohydrates. I ordered the ones with super high calories.

     “If we get to that point where we have to use these things, one
per person per day will provide between 2000 and 2200 calories that will keep us alive. For an extra eight months or so.

     “Just consider this an added insurance policy, in case we buy enough food for ten years and still run a bit short.”

     Mark said “Okay, I trust your judgment. It’s always been way better than mine.”

     “Good.” She said. “Because there’s one more thing I want to talk to you about. It pisses me off that the government is going to keep this whole thing secret
. I’ve talked to Sarah and she agrees. At some point we’re going to go public and tell the world so everyone else has a chance to survive too.

     “But Honey, they’ll come after you and throw you in jail.”

     She said “I don’t think so. After our faces are plastered all over the evening news, they’ll have egg on their faces and a lot of questions to answer. I think the last thing they’ll have to worry about is us. And if they try to arrest us, I think the public outcry will be so great that they’ll have to let us loose. I mean, you can’t just shoot the messenger and get away with it.”

     Mark said “How about a compromise?
How about you wait until we get everything finished. Then you and Sarah can hold a news conference, get the word out, and then go into hiding in the mine?”

     “Okay. As long as we don’t have to wait too long. I want to give the rest of the world a chance to prepare also.”

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     “Have you seen Mark?” Hannah asked Sarah.

     “Not lately. Last
time I saw him was a couple of hours ago. He was dragging a bundle of what looked like long pipes up the side of the mountain.”

    
Hannah needed some fresh air anyway, and was curious. So she walked up the pathway that led to the top of the mountain until she came to her fiancé.

     “Hey, baby, you need any help?”

     “Sure thing. Would you hold this into place while I tighten the clamp?”

     Mark had taken twelve pie
ces of six-foot long sheet metal tubing to extend the height of the ventilation shafts for the mine. He removed the rain cover for each existing shaft, placed the extension on it and clamped it into place, then reinstalled the rain cover on top of the extension.”

     Hannah’s curiosity got the best of her. “So… tell me again why we’re doing this?”

     He smiled and wondered why she waited so long to ask.

     “Well, it’s going to be so cold that any precipitation we get will be snow instead of rain, right?”

     “Yep.”

     “And we can get a lot of precipitation in five to seven years. Probably several feet worth. This will keep our vents from being buried and cutting off our fresh air supply
.”

     “Wow, and air is a good thing. Good thinking, sailor.”

     After they had finished up on the mountain, Mark showed Hannah another small project he’d been working on.

     He pointed to a bank of security cameras mounted on the front of the mine face, about six feet over the walk-through door.

     “Those run the gamut. During the day they’re regular cameras. At night they shoot infra red. They can also detect movement within two hundred yards, and body heat. If anything or anybody is out here, we’ll be able to see them clearly, day or night.

He pointed to the camera on the end, w
hich was pointing way off to one side, toward a tall pole.

     “That camera is wired into our security console with all the others. Just before we go into the mine, I’m going to paint that pole with numbered lines, like a big rain gage. It’s how we can keep track of how much snow has accumulated
. I’m also going to mount a very large thermometer on top of the pole, so we can keep track of the outside temperature.

     “It’ll be an old-fashioned
clock-face thermometer that doesn’t require any electricity. We can keep track, as each year goes by, how many consecutive spring and summer days we have moderate temperatures. That will be us decide when it’s safe to break out.

     “I did some research, and it takes ninety two days of temperatures between 45 and 80 degrees for corn to mature to harvest. It takes seventy four days of temperatures between 47 and 90 degrees to mature a field of wheat.

     “So, say, after four years, we record 40 straight days of temperatures over 45 degrees, and after five years it’s up to 60 straight days, then we can break out and assume that in the sixth year it’ll be eighty. We can plant a wheat crop and reasonably assume it’ll survive until harvest.”

     Hannah kissed him. Just as he was impressed of her devising a way to forecast the weather, she was equally impressed with his devising when it was the right time for breakout. The two of them made a very good team.

     They went home that night and ordered ten pizzas from Papa John’s. Mark had been doing this quite often lately. He and Hannah ate their fill, then went to the kitchen and broke the rest of the pizzas into slices. Each slice was slipped into a quart-sized zip lock bag, and then stacked into one of three large chest freezers in the garage.

     Even after they entered the mine, Mark would be able to satisfy his passion for
pizza. At least for awhile.

     While they worked on the pizza slices, the couple talked about their wedding. They’d held off long enough. It was time to make some plans.

     Mark’s father had died a few years before, and his mother was in declining health. She still had some years in front of her, but she wasn’t really capable of planning a large wedding. So she had given the couple her blessing to have a small wedding on their terms. “The wedding isn’t what makes a marriage.” She told them. “Love is what makes a marriage. The wedding is just an expensive party.”

     “So, I’m thinking
Las Vegas,” Hannah said. “I did some research on line and there’s a great chapel in the Circus Circus Hotel. Lots of famous people were married there. Ricky Avalon and Annette Russell were married there. So was Johnny Reno and Lisa Benning, and Darrell Maloney and Jane Waugh. I think it would be real cool.”

     “Cool? People don’t say ‘cool’ anymore, baby.”

     “Yeah, whatever. Maybe I’m gonna bring it back.”

     Mark said “Honey, I don’t care where we marry. I just want to make you mine.”

     Once all the pizza was safely put away, Hannah went back on-line, to make flight and hotel reservations.

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     The wedding party was small. Mark’s mom was there, of course, as well as Bryan and Sarah. Bryan’s sisters Karen, Debbie and Glenda. Hannah’s best friend Sami. A few other casual friends flew in, but not many. It was a sweet, intimate affair.

     Still, even without a huge crowd of people, it was a beautiful wedding. The Chapel of the Fountains was located in the interior of the Circus Circus Hotel, just off the casino floor. It was a beautiful little chapel, and the staff did everything perfectly.
The wedding went off without a hitch.

     And for the next three glorious days, none of the four- Mark, Ha
nnah, Sarah, or Bryan, gave a single thought to what lay in store for them, or the rest of the world, in just a few short months.

     The couple
rented a huge suite on the top floor of the Circus Circus Hotel, overlooking the Las Vegas strip. The suite included a jacuzzi where the four of them relaxed on the last day of the trip, sipping the last bottle of champagne left over from their small wedding reception, and eating banana splits that they ordered from room service.