Shelter: Book 2, A Long Days Night (10 page)

Todd and I entered the security room, John jumped up to hug me. “Damn, you’re a sight for sore eyes. I’m very happy you’re back. We missed you, we can use you around here.”

“John, it’s good to see you too. Show me what’s going on outside.”

“OK, but don’t get pissed. Don’t break anything, you of all people know spares are hard to come by.”

John turned on the monitors, I was amazed at the number of cameras and the quality of the images. I sat down with my mouth hanging open. The longer I watched, the angrier I got. I made a mental list of those I was going to slowly kill. The fat fuck, Dutch is number one on my list.

Chapter 5

Big Dutch and his people cut holes in all of our inside walls. They paid special attention to the spaces behind all of our hanging pictures, it's obvious they were looking for a wall safe. If Lacy saw the Swiss cheese they left of our walls, she’d cry and then demand I cut their balls off. We’re going to have to replace almost all of the sheetrock. Damn it, it’s not like we can just hop over to Home Depot to get a truckload of sheetrock.

My mind is reviewing what I’m seeing,
I’ll give Dutch credit for smarts. Looking for a hidden wall safe was a good idea, maybe I should have hidden a false one or two to throw them off track. I don’t think he’ll ever locate our real safes which are hidden under the basement. There’s also three hidden here in the shelter. It’s going to take someone a lot smarter than him to find the sub-basement and if he somehow did stumble across the hidden trap door, he’s still not going to be able to get into the safes. They are secured via biometric and combination locks, unlocking one alone won’t open the safe. The biometrics require four live fingers, if my fingers were cut off, they wouldn’t unlock the safe. The numeric combination uses thirty digits, the possibility of the gang figuring out the right digits and order is almost impossible. The safes are fire and water proof. It’s going to take a large amount of special explosives to blow the safes. That’s if Dutch’s people survive the booby traps that we left behind for anyone who is unlucky enough to find them.

John looks at me, “Jay, I’m sorry about your house, look on the bright side, you said you wanted to change the color of the paint on the inside of the house. When we move back in, we’ll all pitch in to repair the damage and paint the house. Do you think they’re going to be able to find your safes?”

Smiling and shaking my head, “John, it’s very unlikely, and if they did, I’ll bet you a million dollars they’ll never break into them. That’s assuming they live long enough to get past all of the booby traps we built around the safes. We had a sub-basement dug, we placed the safes in the sub-basement. Unless someone knows where the trap door is, and how to open it, they’re not going to find it. I’ve asked a few of our neighbors to go into the basement and find the safes, no one ever found the trap door. I think they’ll be safe.”

John asks, “Jay, I should have asked this before, but, I think we all need to know, what happens to your house if they trip the booby traps near your safes?”

“John, that’s a very good question. I didn’t consider that. I only thought about stopping someone from getting to the safes. Since they’re in an enclosed concrete sub-basement, I hope the reinforced cement will contain the explosions. Most of them are small, antipersonnel rounds. They fire iron cubes and BBs that spread out in a circle. There are enough projectiles to fill the sub-basement many times over. Anyone in the sub-basement, when they go off, will be shredded.”

“Jay, what about a second attack after the first?”

Smiling, “I thought of that, some of the claymore like explosives are armed on a secondary trigger. I only set the traps for two attacks. If there’s a third attempt, they will be able to enter the sub-basement, but they are still going to have issues getting into the safes.”

“Jay, how sure are you that they can’t easily open them?”

Laughing, I respond, “John, very damn sure. I watched a demonstration before I bought them, they tried drilling through a safe, they set off TNT next to the safe trying to blow them open, they brought in five convicted safe crackers, none of them could open the safe. I feel good that they won’t be able to get into them.”

John looks at me with a solemn look on his face, “Jay, is there anything else in your sub-basement that we should be concerned about?”

“John, if you’re asking if I have buried weapons of mass destruction hidden down there, the answer is no. There’s nothing down there that can give us heartburn or hurt us.”

“At least that’s one bit of good news. I was worried that when you went on a buying spree, you shopped internationally, I was worried you bought some toys in Russia.”

“John, I did, but WMD’s are priced out of my range.”

“Great, that’s good news.”

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We’re watching and listening to Dutch holding a council meeting in my dining room where he’s trying to figure out where we disappeared to. If it weren't so serious, it would be funny. We’re almost directly under his nose and he doesn’t know it. We covered the shelter with our fields, there are no air ducts or pipes leading up into the fields to give our position away. All of them exit in the heavy woods on the edges of my property. We insulated the shelter to help keep a constant temperature and to act as sound proofing so no one above us could hear us. The thin internal walls forced us to lower our voices to almost a whisper if we didn’t want everyone to hear our business. We’re watching Dutch on hidden cameras while we’re sitting no more than 200 yards from him.

He’s yelling at his people, “Look assholes, they have to be here someplace. They set off smoke bombs and disappeared, where the fuck did they go? No one, let alone one hundred people, just disappear into thin air. It’s been a month and every day you idiots give me the same bullshit, you don’t know where they are. They have to be here someplace. I want them. I want to know where they are. I want them found and I want them kneeling in front of me to pay for what they’ve done. On a personal note, they must have hidden more supplies than we found. They wouldn’t have made it through the winter and spring with what we found. We need them so we can force them to tell us where their additional supplies are.”

Jack, who replaced Robert, after Dutch shot him, stands staring at Dutch saying, “We’ve been searching for them every day for a month. We’ve searched every house and barn that we can get into and all 1,000 acres, we haven’t found a trace of them. I have no idea where they went or how they disappeared, maybe they had a couple of buses or trucks hidden, they left in the confusion the smoke caused. All I know is they aren’t here.”

Dutch pounds my dining room table, every time his fist strikes the table I shudder, “Listen asshole, we provided the firepower that enabled you and your people to get here. If it hadn’t been for us, you would have all been mowed down, none of you would have made it to the trench, let alone to the houses. You would have had to limp across the street, and when you least expected it, they would have most likely come for you. They would have surrounded you and killed or captured all of you. We saved your asses. We made it possible for you to be living in a house, with a full belly. What do you mean, you’ve gotten access to the barns you can get into? What about the other barns?”

Jack’s face is red, his hands are clenched into fists at his side, he’s trying as hard as he can to hold his anger in, “You’re full of shit. We were working our way around their rear and sides.  We could have done this without you. We might have lost a few more, but, we wouldn’t be on the outside while you keep everything of value. We demand you share the food with us. Some of their barns are built of reinforced concrete, we can’t get into them. The walls must be a foot thick.”

“What do you mean you can’t break into some of the buildings? Have you tried to drill the walls? And what do you mean, you’re making demands on me? Rob demanded too, do you still demand anything from me?”

“I have the right based on the number of people my group lost.”

“Tough shit, I don’t care about the people you lost. The way I see it, I saved your ass, and now I own you. You’ll do as I say.”

“All I want is our fair share of the bounty. We deserve it.”

“Jack, you’re a nice guy, tell you what I’m going to do, I’m going to give you, your fair share.” Dutch looks to his right saying, “Jose, please give Jack over here his fair share.” One shot ring’s out from Jose’s Glock 30S, the sound reverberates in the house, many of the gang members shake their heads trying to clear their ears. Dutch says, “I don’t know what’s wrong with these people, first Rob and now Jack, both wanted their fair share. They’re nuts.” The smell of gunpowder mixed with the release of Jack’s bowels taints the air in my dining room. Dutch laughs, “His fair share. I’m sick of hearing the phrase fair share. Might makes the rules, I have the weapons, I make the rules.”

Everyone in the gang hanging around my living and dining room laughs at Dutch’s joke.

Smiling, Snake says, “I like it.”

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“Jay, I have a suggestion, the next party they have is when we visit them, after their party they will be tired, and full of drugs. The gas will work better when they’re tired. I think tonight’s the best opportunity we’ve had in a while to hit them.”

“Look at what they’ve done to our fields, Christ, I bet they're tearing the rest of our houses apart. We’re going to have to fumigate them before we move back in.”     

“Jay, we haven’t left the shelter while you were out communicating with your demons. I suggest we form a small strike team, there’s no safe way for most of the people to leave the shelter until these people are gone. For now, we have to consider the shelter our home. We’re safe here, we have food, water, and medical support. If we go outside before the gang leaves, we may get captured or shot. If the team gets captured, they will tell the gang how to find us. Everyone breaks under enough pain.”

“John, we have the weapons and we should have the element of surprise on our side, even while they have the numbers. Do you think we can mount a sizable attack to drive them off our land?”

“Jay, do you remember we just barely made it inside the shelter before the invading human waves flowed over our positions? Jay, if you had waited one more second before calling the retreat, I was going to call it for you. Instead of eleven wounded, and two dead, we’d have twenty or more dead. We got off relatively easy. One of our dead was their own fault for getting out of the trench and running, they had their vest on, but not tight, there was too much space between the vest and their body.”

“John, I know you’re right. It’s just I can’t bring myself to accept we lost.”

John knows I’m depressed, he tries to improve my mood by saying, “Jay, we faced at least two thousand people, forty against two thousand. It’s a miracle we did as well as we did. It’s a miracle we didn’t lose everyone.”

“John, it wasn’t a miracle, it was good planning and our defensive positions that saved us. We worked months on our defenses. We used the kids to load magazines and assemble mines, everyone worked their asses off on our defenses. In the end what did it matter? We lost the battle and most likely everything we own.”

Tony holds up his hand to stop John from saying anything, “Jay, I know how you feel, my home is overrun too. I agree with John, your foresight in building the shelters saved us all. Without the shelters, we’d be six feet underground.”

“So now we’re moles?”

Tony puts his arm around my shoulders saying, “Jay, at least we’re alive moles. Come on, let’s check on the wounded. I bet they would be happy to see their fearless leader.”

I look at Tony, “Who said anything about being fearless?”

Tony and I leave John and Todd in the security shelter, we walk towards our medical facility, we pass people leaving the medical facility, all are bandaged in one place or another. I’m thinking to myself, thank God Tony and I got our hands on body armor, without it, many of these people would be dead. The armor and our trench kept us alive. Looking at them, seeing nine of my wounded neighbors, two of them seriously, I know I responsible for their pain and suffering.  Should we have just handed the farms over and left when we first noticed the mobs? What happens now? How can I lead these people back to where they were wounded? Is a house worth the risk of us attacking them? This time, they’ll be the ones in the defensive positions. We’ll be the attackers, the odds usually favor the defenders, unless the attackers have sufficient numbers to overwhelm the defenders, which we don’t. We need to figure out some sort of force multiplier.