Constant Fear (11 page)

He had waited until the hazmat crew had shown up at the tanker crash before phoning the police to report an ammonia smell at the school. He could wait a little bit longer before he blended his crew in with the actual emergency responders.

CHAPTER 17

Prepping wasn’t about having a supply of food to last a few days. It was about how to survive for the rest of your life. Jake believed that when The Day came, society would cease to function, and he’d have to hunker down for the long haul. It was as simple as that. The larder in his bug-out location, and the other provisions he stockpiled, were the means by which he would endure the coming collapse.

Now Andy wanted it gone, and Jake had to give this serious consideration. He made a promise. Jake was prepared for everything, except to say good-bye to this part of his life. It was like ripping a security blanket from the hands of a young child or taking a teenager’s cell phone. He’d feel naked without it, lost, alone—and, worst of all, vulnerable.

Jake slumped down on a stack of bags filled with brown rice. He had come down here not just to check on his supplies, but also to connect with the space, to think. He’d built this from nothing, and the sweat equity made this more than just a storage area.

When Jake first discovered this underground room, it was filthy, in complete disrepair, covered in cobwebs and infested with rodents, as were most of the abandoned tunnels. It took hours of work to clean it up, and countless lost weekends to get the rooms suitable for storing his supplies.

The rooms and tunnels were still connected to the school’s power supply, so getting light down here was as simple as replacing and reconnecting lots of forgotten wiring. Jake thoughtfully selected natural daylight fluorescent bulbs to bring a bit of artificial sunshine down below. Now the space was lit, clean, and organized as any general store. It was massive like a store, too: almost seven hundred square feet with eight-foot-high ceilings. Thick, concrete brick walls and a lack of windows made the room a bit dungeon-like, but posters of the outdoors—mountains, lakes, and forests—lightened the dreariness.

Jake looked at the freestanding shelves and could recall loading and stocking each item there. The twenty pounds of salt, bags of brown sugar, and raw honey would give the food some needed flavoring. He’d thought about keeping flour down here, anticipating that Andy would want his famed pancakes, but the grain stored poorly and rotating it was more than a bit cumbersome. Andy would get used to wheat berries, and it was a more nutritious breakfast anyway.

In addition to other grains, like buckwheat, dry corn, and quinoa, he had plenty of canned fruit and vegetables, beans (stored, like the grains, in pails certified for food), peanut butter, coffee, tea, powdered milk (nitrogen-packed from Walton Feed), as well as tins of olive oil. He had cans of meat and tuna and other supplies such as toilet paper, soaps, lighter fluid, and bottled water.

The temperature never got much above sixty-five degrees in the summer, and Jake siphoned off heat from the preexisting ductwork so nothing ever froze in the winter. In the event of a power failure, kerosene heaters would keep the larder and sleeping quarters toasty warm. Jake kept careful records of his inventory, and any food item close to expiring would be moved from the larder and brought to his home so nothing went to waste.

If it came to it, most of the equipment could be sold, Jake supposed. Items like his hand-cranked grain mill, home dehydrator, and the vacuum-packing machine (great for sealing plastic bags and evacuating the air from mason jars) would probably sell for close to what he paid on sites like craigslist.

The real money would be in the guns and ammo. Jake had chosen his weapons carefully for their versatility. No single firearm could be counted on to do every job, plus he had to limit the cartridges to what was readily stocked in most places that sold ammo. If he needed to go scrounging for bullets, it would be better to look for .22 LR ammunition, by far the most common in the world.

For hunting small game, Jake had a Ruger 10/22 with a ten-round rotary magazine. The recoil and noise were minimal, making it a good gun for Andy to shoot as well. Newer shooters, afraid of noise and kickback, often developed bad habits such as poor shooting posture and flinching when firing a higher-caliber weapon. Jake had recently added an AK-47 to his arsenal. The AK-47 shot a 7.62x39mm round, and Jake would use that gun for hunting larger game as well as defense. When the collapse came, he’d need to be able to fight force with force.

The long guns had better velocity and a longer sighting radius, but they were not always practical to carry, which was why Jake had pistols down here as well. The SIG SAUER he kept at home, but here Jake’s Glock 19 served him well. It was a reliable gun, and the 9mm round was a popular choice, useful to have on hand when bartering with others who survived the coming collapse. Jake also had a Smith & Wesson .22 LR rimfire pistol, with a ten-round capacity, and a Ruger LC9 in his arsenal. The Ruger was an easily carried backup pistol, and at one pound fully loaded could be worn day and night without second thought.

For mobility, Jake used a Condor H-Harness chest rig with a battle belt. He could carry plenty of mags on the move. If he had to, Jake could slip a mag into his back pocket, just in case. Even though he had refinished the rifles using Cerakote H-Series materials finish, Jake still stocked plenty of RIG (rust-inhibitive grease), and he maintained his guns with the same thoroughness as he rotated his inventory.

If the larder went, though, the guns would go, too. Jake knew he couldn’t keep a window to this part of his life open even a sliver. Just like with baseball, it would be too tempting to open it all the way and climb right back in.

The brown rice shifted and made a rhythmic sound as Jake stood. He walked to the back of the larder, where a thick metal door opened into a smaller adjacent room. Jake flicked the light switch and made a quick inspection of his fuel and power supplies. The storage room, half the size of the larder, locked from the inside and doubled as a safe room, but Jake wouldn’t want to stay in there for long. He had a stockpile of rechargeable batteries for various electronic devices, including his communication equipment, and rechargers for each type. Two solar-powered rechargers would serve as backup, should the electricity go out. The underground tunnels and many of the rooms were wired to run off the school’s generator; and if the grid went down, Jake had a fuel-transfer pump to keep that generator humming. The pump ran off a 12v motor that could siphon ten gallons of gas per minute. He could get gas from abandoned cars, or even dig up a tank at a gas station if necessary.

In here, Jake kept his water-treatment filtration system, medical supplies, and bags of seed. How could he let it all go? Laura showing up the way she did was another reminder that uncertainty was life’s only certainty. Since seeing her, Jake had thought of little else. Every detail of the encounter had been etched upon his mind. How could he still have feelings for her? It was illogical, nonsensical, and yet undeniable.

A thought struck him. Was it really Laura he wanted, or just the idea of Laura? Was his bug-out location a way for Jake to cling to a time in his life when he felt most secure? Was all this planning and prepping just a means to find a safe haven after all his losses? Displacement, Andy had called it. All these years, Jake simply accepted what he did without truly understanding where the behavior came from.

He wondered if now was the right time to step off the path. Maybe Laura was like a cool breeze, telling Jake it was time to close that window to his past once and for all. He knew Ellie well enough to know she’d never embrace his ways. It was foolish for him to think otherwise. Perhaps letting go of Laura, Jake could find it in himself to dismantle his bug-out location. The possibility intrigued him.

Andy had gotten Jake thinking. He’d achieved that much with the promise he’d extracted.

Laura had been in town only a couple of days, and the urge to see her felt sometimes overpowering. They had met for coffee the day after her arrival and enjoyed a pleasant conversation, albeit one tinged with sadness. Jake didn’t offer any details about Andy because his son should have the prerogative to choose what information to share. What he did talk about was his life after she had left, and she of hers, but for the most part the conversation didn’t dip below surface level.

Either way, Jake would see Laura again, but first Andy had to meet his mother. Jake had offered to be there, but Andy wanted to confront her on his own. Confused as Jake was, he could only imagine how his son was processing everything. Jake had tried to get Andy to open up, but that conversation had gone nowhere. Jake only knew that Andy and Laura were going out to a late lunch.

Poor kid. His head must be spinning, unsure what to feel.

Jake snagged the clipboard he kept tacked to the wall, thinking he’d do some work on the inventory, when he heard the fire alarm. Usually, the alarms were nothing and Jake was inclined to ignore them, but he had a Uniden scanner and figured he might as well check. Sometimes he turned on the scanner while he worked, and would smile when he heard Ellie’s voice.

The Winston PD was already preset. With a push of a button, Jake dialed the scanner to that channel. Between bursts of static, Jake listened to the chatter.

“How many ambulances can you get there?” The male voice was professionally calm.

“We got three en route, but I’m looking for more.”

“There is a big team from Clean Air here. They’re going to help with the evac.”

Jake’s head began buzzing. What were they talking about?

“Buses are already at Pepperell Academy. We can load them and move out quickly. We’ll take them to the regional high school.”

“I’m not smelling the ammonia.” This was a new voice. The people communicating knew each other, but Jake didn’t know any of them.
What ammonia? Ambulances? Buses? What the hell is going on?

Jake shut off the radio and raced for the tunnel. Something big was happening at the school. Like any father would feel, his concern was for his son.

CHAPTER 18

T
he upper hallway of the Terry Science Center was jammed with kids making an orderly exit. Andy was somewhere in the middle of the pack. Students shielded their ears from the piercing alarm while blinking strobes cast everything in a light of urgency.
Is this a drill or the real thing?
Andy overheard someone say something about a shooter, but he looked and saw it was that kid who was always talking trash. This was probably just another drill. With the recent rash of school shootings, they had drills every few weeks, or so it seemed.

Andy was walking behind Beth MacDonald. It was impossible to ignore the sway of her hips. Some girls wore the uniform especially well, and nobody could rock a pleated skirt and red cardigan like Beth MacDonald. Andy was completely inexperienced in the ways of women, and he had no idea how to make something happen with Beth that didn’t involve a quadratic equation.

As it happened, Lydia Dyer said something funny, which made Beth throw her head back with a hearty laugh. Of course Andy noticed everything about the moment—the perfect lines of Beth’s arched back and neck, her dancer’s physique, the
swoosh
of her long ponytail sliding from shoulder to shoulder, the sweet timbre of her voice. For a fleeting instant, Beth unwittingly helped Andy forget about his troubles.

Of the two brontosaurus-sized issues confronting him, the missing bitcoins and Laura, it was Andy’s mother who occupied most of his waking thoughts. What would he say to her? Would he even speak? Could he? Should he have let his dad come along, like Jake had wanted? Andy contemplated canceling; but in his heart, he wanted to meet her, get to know her, and maybe even come to know more about himself. He wasn’t even angry that she had created a bogus profile to reach him.

The messages exchanged with Andy when Laura wasn’t being Laura were innocuous, limited mostly to talk about cool bands and interesting or funny websites. Ironically, it was the effort that went into pulling off the ruse that made Andy feel as if his mother cared. The same night Laura showed up at Andy’s house she sent a new friend request that also confessed to her deceit. The Facebook messages she sent him as Laura were cordial, but nothing more. Unless they met in person, a hole in Andy’s history would remain, and what he wanted was a complete picture.

Beth turned and saw Andy walking behind her, which brightened her smile even more. The hormone soup swimming about Andy’s body made him momentarily clumsy. He stumbled in the stairwell and had to grab a railing to regain his balance. Instead of tumbling down the stairs and into the throngs of students marching below him, Andy’s fast footwork put him in lockstep with Beth. She reached out and touched his arm. The contact sent bolts of electricity shooting through his veins.

Lydia rolled her eyes. Like a lot of the students making their way to the exit, she turned her attention to her smartphone. Andy figured Vine was probably already full of posts about the fire drill, with captions like,
Here we go again.

“Do you think Mr. Forbes will notice if I don’t come back to class?” Beth said. The stairwell amplified the noise level, and Beth shouted to be heard over the persistent din. Andy didn’t mind leaning in close to hear her more clearly. He was thinking about a joke he could make that would get her to laugh again, when he caught a flash of something yellow at the bottom of the stairwell.

It took a moment to register, and even after the yellow-clad figures came in full view, he still wasn’t quite sure what to make of it.

“I don’t think we are going back to class.” Andy pointed at the three figures encased in chemical suits stationed at the bottom of the stairs, urging the students to hurry. A fresh surge behind Andy came like a tide picking up speed as more students saw what he did, and the realization set in that this might not be a drill.

Andy was glad to have his backpack with his insulin, glucose tablets, and emergency glucagon kit with him and not in the classroom. In the fracas, Andy became separated from Beth. He was looking for her when a strong tug on his arm refocused his attention. Andy turned to see who had pulled on him. His eyes narrowed on Ryan Coventry’s snarling face.

Ryan gave another hard yank. There was no resisting. The only direction Andy could travel was the one Ryan wanted him to go: up. Like a salmon fighting a steady current, Ryan shoved students aside to make a space large enough to drag Andy up the stairs with him. Andy fought for a foothold, but Ryan exploited his advantage and Andy could do nothing but stumble along behind him.

The bodies thinned at the second-floor landing. Ryan tossed Andy through the stairwell’s open double doors. Andy’s arms spun for balance as his legs kicked out like a boy on ice skates for the first time, but there was no stopping his fall.

Ryan charged as Andy, still a bit dazed, staggered to his feet. Lowering his shoulder like a battering ram, Ryan plowed into Andy’s exposed right side with the full force of his two-hundred-pound frame. The blow flattened Andy against the unforgiving wall. He made a loud wheezing sound when the breath left him.

“Bet you’re not feeling like a big shot now,” Ryan said, standing over Andy’s crumpled body.

“Ryan, what the hell?” Andy said, still gasping for breath. “We’ve got to get out of here. There’s some chemical spill or something and we’re all being evacuated.”

Ryan’s expression suggested a different plan. “Yeah, that’s why I’m leaving and you’re not.”

 

Concealed inside a bright yellow chemical suit, Efren moved freely among the real employees from Clean Air Environmental Services. As Fausto had predicted, all it took to look like a person of authority were the proper uniforms and attitudes.

Efren had come to the Terry Science Center, knowing which exit was closest to Andy Dent’s classroom. Fausto had given his team everything they would need to accomplish their mission. They had building plans and, thanks to the help from a man called The Lion, they also had class schedules of all six targets. Efren had memorized Andy’s face, and it was easy to spot the boy on the stairwell behind a pretty blond girl with a long ponytail. Fausto was right, as usual. The chaos was ideal for concealing the abduction; the smile beneath his faceplate was not so easy to hide.

Efren directed a mob of students to the nearest exit, but mostly he was mindful of the classroom down the hall, its door intentionally left open. As Andy passed, Efren would follow. Within a second, he would have his target trapped inside that room, where they would wait for the evacuation to conclude.

That was the plan, until another student had intervened.

Students asked questions as they flooded down the stairs.

“What’s going on?”

“Are we in danger?”

Efren didn’t respond. Instead, he tapped the suits of the two men stationed with him. They were contract employees of Clean Air, and each thought Efren was the same. Efren pantomimed his intention to go upstairs to have a look around. The other men nodded their understanding and consent. Soon Efren was on the move. Students alarmed at the sight of a man in a yellow chemical suit parted to make room for him to pass. Efren found it cumbersome to walk in the suit, and the guns and knives he carried didn’t make it any easier.

 

Hilary followed the herd, walking with her head bent and eyes fixed on the marble floor. She had barely been paying attention to her French teacher; the break could not have come at a better time. Her thinking was addled, and she worried about her upcoming midterms.

Before joining The Shire, Hilary had been a straight-A student who had no clue where the dean of students’ office was even located. Now she was a felon, several times over.
Stupid! Stupid! Stupid!
Hilary couldn’t believe how quickly her life had come undone. She was the third and youngest daughter of Sam and Renee Eichel, of Westport, Connecticut. Nothing in her background even hinted at a future life of crime. No abuse. No neglect. Hilary’s parents were pillars of the community, and both loving and devoted to their daughters.

By any measure, Hilary had enjoyed an enviable childhood. She got along well with her two sisters and partook in lavish family vacations, including trips out west to ski and April vacations spent under the Caribbean sun. Her mother was a big corporate attorney and her father ran a hedge fund, so she had grown up knowing nothing of financial hardship.

All that changed in middle school. In some ways, Hilary had Mrs. Lewis, her seventh-grade social studies teacher, to blame for her recent criminal behavior.

Each year, Mrs. Lewis taught a segment on poverty. For her class project, Hilary pretended to be an unemployed single parent. She was given a fictional minimum-wage job and each day scrounged the Internet looking for an apartment she could afford, a car, day care for her fictional kids, and, of course, a better-paying job. Hilary had found it impossible to get by on such meager earnings. During the project, she learned about various federal-assistance programs; but even with those, her imaginary kids went hungry most of the time. In a few months, Hilary had come to know a good deal about affordable housing, welfare reform, and, most devastating of all, poverty’s heart-wrenching effect on children.

While her sisters seemed bent on following Mom and Dad’s footsteps into the world of law and finance, Hilary had visions of using her passion for technology to cure global poverty. She had been ignoring her class assignment, looking on the Web at internship opportunities with socially conscious companies, nonprofits mostly, when Andy Dent sent her a Facebook message that ultimately changed her life.

The first line of Andy’s message had been intriguing:
Your Test
. Somehow he’d known that would be an irresistible lure. Hilary read the rest of the message without knowing much about the sender. Andy was in her computer science class, but they hadn’t spoken often. They were friends on Facebook, but didn’t hang in the same circles in real life.

You have been kidnapped by an alien
, the message continued. Hilary read on.

Hilary tried to get Andy’s attention, but he refused to look her way. He was sending a message:
Either do it, or don’t
. He had nothing more to say on the matter.

The computer lab was crowded as usual and most everyone had headphones on, gazes fixed to the monitors in front of them. Hilary smiled and thought only of winning. She wanted to prove herself. Impressing Andy meant nothing to her, but perhaps he knew she wasn’t the type to back down from a direct challenge. All that mattered now was that she accomplished the task.

Ten minutes later, Hilary sent Mr. Rubin an e-mail that contained an embedded link. She approached his desk and asked him to check her code. Mr. Rubin clicked the link in Hilary’s e-mail and frowned when the requested webpage came up blank.

“You’ve got to do better than that, Hilary,” he had said.

Hilary did not agree. She had done perfectly well, but for a different assignment. Returning to her desk, Hilary opened a Web browser and from there launched the remote access tool she had just secretly installed on Mr. Rubin’s computer via the link he had clicked. The tool gave Hilary control of Mr. Rubin’s desktop from her workstation without her teacher’s knowledge. It was a matter of Hilary making a few clicks of her own before Andy started to laugh.

When he turned and smiled at her, Hilary felt a rush like never before. She had gone bungee jumping, parasailed, and skied double-black-diamond runs, but this was an entirely different sort of thrill. It was utterly intoxicating. She didn’t give boys much attention or thought, but suddenly Andy was quite attractive to her. Later, she would fall in love with him. But that moment was the start of Hilary seeing Andy in a different light.

They talked after class. As it turned out, they had English together, and that was how he’d learned of Hilary’s passion to fight global poverty. She’d shared an essay with the class that had stuck with him. Andy made her an offer, a secret club he wanted her to join. Hilary was intrigued.

After they pulled off their first theft—$1,000 from a kid’s dad who ran a shipping company—Hilary was hooked. It was like Mr. Rubin’s e-mail trick, but on steroids. This was a street drug of a different variety. She justified her actions by convincing herself she was making a real difference in the world, but the thrill of the hack was never too far behind. Besides, her victims were wealthy.

They didn’t notice what was missing. It was all harmless fun, until they took those bitcoins. Now Andy believed someone would notice, and Hilary did not disagree.

As the students marched along, Hilary thought about Andy and his never-ending fascination with Beth MacDonald. Why didn’t he notice her the way he did Beth? She was pretty in her own way. Maybe she and Andy were destined to be the dreaded “friends,” Hilary thought glumly. But perhaps there was another way to Andy’s heart.

If those missing bitcoins were suddenly found, and if
she
were the one to find them, maybe then Andy would notice her. These were Hilary’s thoughts as she headed toward the rear stairwell of Richmond Hall. Ahead, Hilary heard several loud gasps. Over the din, she heard someone shout, “Chemical spill!”

It was then Hilary saw a man in a bright yellow chemical suit emerge from the stairwell to help direct traffic. There was a crush of bodies as students rushed to be first down the stairs. What had been an ambling march turned into more of a sprint. Whoever was cocooned inside the yellow suit helped the students maintain some order.

Hilary fell into step behind a group of girls she didn’t know. The man in the yellow suit followed close behind her. More kids were coming down the hallway, and Hilary wondered why this suited man didn’t stay up on the landing to help direct them.