Lady Grace & the War for a New World (Earth's End Book 2) (18 page)

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“I believe Sam when he says he
and the others
, the non-Bigs, did what they did do stay alive,” Grace said, looking into the eyes of each member of the reconvened group. “I ask you to give him the benefit of the doubt until you see what they were up against for yourselves. Until then, you don’t have to worry. He’s sleeping with me; he’ll eat me first.

“Despite what I said earlier about the impossibility of our task, I want to save those kids. I also want to neutralize the Bigs. We need to vote on what we are going to do. Time is of the essence. And we need to appoint a commander. We cannot run a campaign by committee. Nominations are open.”

“Grace, you’re the only one who can do it,” Henry said. “How can we sit here and let children die? Let’s take a vote.” The vote was unanimous.

“Now that you’re our chief, what do we do?” Henry said.

“We contemplate. We need to marshal our resources,” she said. “We need to think about every asset we’ve got. Stuff we have going for us that isn’t guns and ammo. What skills do we have, and how can we use them now? We need to get there with supplies and weapons. We need to break into the underground, kill the Bigs, and save the kids. We need to take care of them and get back. Sam, you know most about the place. What do we need?”

“We need to get there,” he said.

“We need a bunch of trucks,” James said.

“Sorry. Don’t have them. Here’s a bigger question: How do we get in once we’re there? How many levels are there in the shelter, Jeremy?”

“Seven, with six foot-thick steel doors between them. They were strong enough to withstand the nuclear war.”

“To rescue anyone from the main shelter, we’d have to fight through six impregnable doors. Down how many feet, Jeremy?”

“Two hundred and eighty feet.”

They looked at each other.

“It’s impossible, Mom, unless they open the doors for us. There is the hole for the canaries that they shoved Sam out. That has six locked doors, too.”

“Sam, can we get the kids from the outside of the shelter?”

“Yes, lady. By digging. They are by the solar fields, but outside the shelter. They’re here, in a room here.” He pointed at the printouts, indicating an area outside the shelter’s concrete shell. “It’s much higher than the fields.”

“How did you get them there, Sam? That’s not in the original plan,” Jeremy said.

Sam ran his finger along the photo, indicating the shelter’s concrete edge. “Many generations of diggers made a tunnel from here.” He pointed to a place inside the shelter.

“That’s one of the cells where Sam Baahuhd thought we were going to lock up the villagers,” said Jeremy.

“Yes. The cells. The villagers were locked up in them, but by each other. A digger broke through the concrete long ago. We kept digging, secretly. We made the tunnel go up, toward the outside.”

“Why do the diggers dig, Sam?”

“To keep from going crazy. To do something against the pain here.” Sam rubbed his chest. “Sam Baahuhd was the first digger. Some said he was crazy, he dug so hard. I know he was not. It was all he could do.”

Grace blanched, thinking of her dear friend locked in a cement dungeon. “Oh, Sam. That’s so awful.”

“Yes,” he said without inflection. “The tunnel went outside the wall around the fields, and up. We were going to escape through it. We could have dug all the way out many years ago, but we didn’t because the computers said the radiation would kill us. What they said never changed.” A tiny smile curved his lips.

“Now I know the computers were wrong. But as time went on, fewer of us were strong enough to dig. I am the only one now.” He shrugged. “The water for my children comes from the big pipes at the top that go to the main tanks. It flows down to the children’s room.

“I thought I could finish the tunnel in my life, dig all the way out, so that we could escape, even if it meant dying from the radiation outside. But when the Bigs took over, I needed to save the children. I made a room for them at the end of the tunnel. I used wood and things I could find to hold up the roof and walls.”

“So you dragged those kids through the tunnel and left them there?”

“Yes. In the dark. Alone.” His voice broke. “Oh, please. We have to save them.”

“We will save the children,” Ellie said in that man’s voice so like Sam’s.

Sam stared at her, mouth a little open.

“We will save them, Ellie, don’t worry,” Grace said. “And then you brought food and water to them?”

“Yes. I put in a pipe for water and brought them food. I stayed with them as much as I could.” Sam’s shoulders drooped and his face screwed up into a mask of pain. He looked like he’d dug the whole tunnel himself that afternoon. “Please … I can’t talk of this.”

“OK, Sam. One more question. Any idea how close you were to the surface?” Jeremy asked.

“Close. At the beginning, the tunnel is mostly rock. Now, it’s much easier to dig. But the dirt is very heavy in winter. And slippery.”

“Take a break, Sam. We’ll work on it,” Jeremy said. “It sounds like he’s digging through clay. The field where the shelter is was once a river valley. There’s a deep layer of clay over the bedrock, then lots of topsoil. That’s why the estate’s garden was so great. Might be easy to dig out the rest of the way. On the other hand, clay can be very unstable. The roof could cave in.”

Sam groaned. “Aye.”

“So we bring shovels,” Grace remarked.

James mumbled, “And a backhoe.” He smirked, shaking his head.

“Cynicism doesn’t help, James. Though if you can find a backhoe, that would be great.”

“Mom! I may know where one is! Remember that I told you on my first night here, I found the equipment barn and slept there? It was underground, totally covered with dirt. I found a pipe sticking out of the ground and dug down to the barn’s roof. I pulled a piece of the tin roof up and got in. There was equipment in it—tons of equipment. And barrels of stuff, maybe fuel. The plastic fuel we use wouldn’t explode.”

“Would the equipment still work? We don’t know how long it’s been there.”

“I don’t know.”

“Anybody?

”Car batteries die when they sit less than six months,” Henry said. “The vehicles are probably frozen solid with rust. The rubber hoses will need replacing. The crud in the fuel is probably solid in the bottom of the tanks …”

“Do we have any mechanics among us?”

“I can change a car’s batteries,” Mel volunteered.

“I watched my granddad do any number of things with the equipment on our farm,” Lena said. “I watched him real good.”

“OK, these are assets we didn’t know we had. This is what I wanted to get out,” Grace said. “The barn is near the shelter. It has water. I think we should use that location as our headquarters. We’ll spend the first night there. We can check out the machine barn and see what’s in it. If we could get there tonight, that would be best.”

“Only thing, Mom. I couldn’t find the pipe the second night when I came back with Sam.”

“But you’re sure you were somewhere near it?”

“Yeah.”

“OK. That’s good enough. Sam, what are they afraid of in the shelter? What will make them stay inside?”

“The hant, lady. They are afraid of the hant, Shack.”

Grace thought back to the story Lena had told her about the dog that had killed itself to protect Eliana and had been a powerful protector of the village in its last days. Grace had thought the story was nonsense. “The little dog that died to protect Ellie is protecting the village
now?
”

“The village of Sam Baahuhd, lady. The hant knows that what is inside is not what Sam wanted. It sends terrible thunder and lightning storms. Even the Bigs lie on the ground and scream when they come.”

“They think thunderstorms are caused by the ghost? If we could get a thunderstorm going, we could scare the crap out of them. And keep them inside. Do you know how to contact the haunt, Sam?”

“No, lady.” His eyes widened talking about it. He shot a look at Eliana, who was stuffing down roast fish with a sharp expression on her face. “Only the angel could reach him. He became a hant to save her.”

“How can she do that?”

“I don’t know. He lives by the village. We are here.”

“We’ll work on that.” Grace glanced at Ellie, who seemed oddly irritable. Like she might bite. Why was she eating so much? And fish? She was a vegetarian. She’d found all sorts of plants to eat by the river. “Ellie, if you can think of any way of contacting Shaq, go for it. Tell him our plans and that we need to keep the Bigs inside.”

“Rain will also make the water flow to my people,” Sam said. “More will live if it rains.”

Ellie kept eating. She hummed, an unpleasant vibration. She didn’t answer.

“What we really could use is a couple dozen well-trained horses. They would be our greatest asset, aside from the weapons. Can you train them fast, Lena?”

“I can try. Do you have a lariat?”

“What’s a lariat?”

“It’s a stiff rope with a loop at one end. You throw it to catch horses or cattle. Or anything that needs catching,” Lena explained.

“I don’t think we have a lariat, but we’ve got halters and lead ropes.” Grace looked hopeful. “Will those work?”

“If I can get a wild horse to stand still long enough for me to put it on.” Lena frowned. “This isn’t going to be so easy. We don’t have any corrals or places to snub them down so we can sack them out. I don’t have Grandpa here to help me. I guarantee you, they’re not going to be happy when I put saddles on them, assuming I can get that far. And riding them will be another matter. I think I might go ‘splat’ if I go off now.”

The wild horses had been milling around below the cliff since they’d been there. They’d take off for a while, then return. They didn’t seem all that wild, other than moving away when a human approached them.

“Just because they look tame, doesn’t mean they are tame,” Lena warned. The group peered glumly over the rock face.

“Mom, I’m going to search the satellites. Maybe there’s something there that will help us.”

“Do what you can.” Grace thought his search silly, but if anyone could find something useful with a computer, Jeremy could. “Do you have a computer to take with us that can relay between the shelter and our field location? And to the satellites?”

“Sure. Let me work on it.”

“Let’s start getting ready to go. I’ll work on ordnance. We have special clothing, courtesy of the general. Commando suits with all the trimmings. I’ve got the most advanced bulletproof everything on the planet. We’ll look like medieval knights—actually, not too much. It’s all very lightweight. But we have helmets. Night glasses. I’ll go looking for them. And start packing the weapons.”

“What if they don’t shoot, lady?” Sam asked. “What if they fight us, hand-to-hand? They are very fast. I can show you. What if the weapons get in the way?”

They turned to him. How could a wrestler stop an armed warrior in Russian commando clothing?

“OK, show us, Sam. I’ll be the warrior. Take me down. Let me go get dressed first.” Grace slipped into the munitions container.

“I’m here,” she said, emerging in the circle. No one had seen her. Her face and head were covered with a black sock-like mask. It flowed smoothly into a black suit that covered her completely. Her molded cloth shoes were soundless and supple gloves disguised her hands. She was like a black shadow.

“Grace! How did you get here?” Henry asked, followed by exclamations from the others.

“You’d better wonder about that, because if this were a battle situation, you’d be dead. There’s a rear entrance to the container. I used it.
Always look for the rear entrance. Expect the unexpected.
” She began stretching her legs prior to the contest. “I’m sloppy now. Let’s put some mats out so no one gets hurt.”

They got their bed mats and arranged them in a square.

Grace and Sam stood on the mats, facing each other. She feinted. He dropped into a wrestler’s stance with a fluid, graceful motion that was almost feminine, an alert, soft look on his face. She took a step toward him, hands raised in a karate position.

He grabbed a hand, spun her toward him, and had her on her back in an instant, his elbow to her throat. He made sure that everyone saw she was completely helpless, then he let her go.

“I am sorry, lady, if I hurt you.”

She was surprised more than anything. “I have a black belt, Sam. How did you do that?”

“I am fast, lady. I used to wrestle with them.”

“Are they faster than you?”

“No, but stronger. I cannot beat them now.”

“Holy shit,” said Mel. “He could make mincemeat out of us. And there’s only one of him.”

“Should we even try this?” Henry asked.

“I don’t know,” Grace said. “The general’s solution is looking better to me again. If we could aim a pinpoint strike and miss where the children are—you said they’re outside the shelter, Sam?”

“Yes.”

“But can anyone really do a pinpoint that’s that well aimed? Isn’t a ‘surgical strike’ sort of point and splatter?” Mel asked.

“It would be hard. Especially with equipment that’s been sitting as long as ours has. That’s another factor we need to consider. The farm equipment’s hoses are sure to be shot. What about the missiles’ wiring?”