No Easy Hope - 01 (8 page)

“It might be Eric, it might be. God, I hope I’m wrong, but I have a really bad feeling about this.”

 I couldn’t think of anything to say. The line stayed silent for a long, brooding moment before Gabriel spoke up.

 “Listen, my brain is pretty fried right now. I need to go soon, and start getting ready. I need to get you some information. Years ago, back when I first left Aegis, I wrote down everything I knew about Red Plague and how to fight it. Do you have enough ink and paper in your printer for a large document?” He asked.

“Yeah, I do. Are you going to email it to me?” I replied.

“Yes. It’s a fairly long document so make sure you load up the paper tray. Reading it is secondary to you getting your bunker ready, if you haven’t done that already. I don’t know how much time we have until the outbreak makes its way to Charlotte. It may be a few weeks, it may only be a few days, but it will reach you, and if you are not prepared then you may not survive. If you have anyone other than Vanessa that you want to get into the bunker with you, then you need to call them as soon as you get off the phone with me. Your house is a pretty good distance away from the most populated part of the city, so if there is any reason that you can think of for which you need to go into town, do it now. In a few days the roads probably won’t be safe to travel on.”

“Okay, I’ll do that. Jesus, man, this is some heavy shit.” I said.

“I know man, believe me, I know.” Gabe said. He sounded tired. “Just do everything I told you to do, okay? Call me when you get the document printed so I that will know for sure that you have it. Handle whatever business you have to as quickly as you can, then get the fuck into your shelter.”

“Yeah, I got it.” I replied. “Hey Gabe?”

“Yeah?”

“Thanks for calling me, bro. I appreciate you trying to help me.”

“Forget about it. Just do what I asked you to do, okay?” he said impatiently.

“Alright, I will. I’ll call you to let you know when I get your email.”

“Okay. Good luck out there buddy. Before this is over, I think you’re going to need it.”

“I hope your wrong, man, but thanks anyway. Later.”

Chapter 3

Preparations

As I hung up the phone, I turned my attention back to the television. After half an hour or so of watching the destruction running rampant in Atlanta I turned the TV off. I had seen all that I could stand for the moment, and I needed to get moving.  I called Vanessa’s cell phone as I fired up my computer and logged on to my email account. As I opened Gabe’s message, I got Vanessa’s voice mail.

Goddamnit Vanessa, answer your fucking phone for a change.
I flipped my phone open to the keyboard and sent her a text message telling her to call me as soon as she could. I didn’t bother with leaving her a voice mail; she hardly ever checked it.

After sending the text, I downloaded Gabe’s message to my desktop and started printing it. Gabe had not been lying when he said it was a long document. The damn thing took ninety-three pages to print. I pulled a three hole punch out of a desk drawer and started punching holes in the margins a few pages at a time. My phone buzzed right as I finished punching holes in the paper. I picked it up and saw that it was Vanessa calling me back. I answered the phone as I rummaged in my file cabinet looking for a three ring binder.

“Hey, Vanessa? You there?” I asked.

“Yeah, I’m here. Have you been watching the news? What the heck is going on in Atlanta?” her voice sounded a little shaky.  “I’ve been watching on the TV here at work, and it looks pretty bad. There are a lot of fires, and people running around panicking. Some of them are attacking other people. I know it sounds weird, but I think people are like, biting other people to death or something. I had to stop watching it, I was getting freaked out.”

 “Babe, is there any chance you could maybe leave work early and come over to my place? There are some things I need to talk to you about.” I didn’t want to explain everything over the phone.

“Look, Eric, I’m really not in the mood to play around right now, okay. Don’t you ever think about anything other than sex?”

I paused. That one caught me completely off guard.

“I’m not...that’s not what...baby I’m not talking about sex. Believe me, sex is the furthest thing from my mind right about now. Listen, do you remember my friend Gabriel? The kind of tall, dark haired, rough looking guy?”

“You mean that creepy survivalist with all the scars? The guy that lives all alone in the woods, and is probably a serial killer or something? Yeah, I remember him. Why?”

I didn’t realize Vanessa had such a low opinion of Gabe.

“He called me today and told me some things I think you need to know. He used to work with the CDC in Atlanta, and he knows what is causing all the trouble down there. It’s pretty serious, babe. I think you should come over so we can talk about it. It’s the kind of thing that needs to be discussed face to face.”

“That guy used to work for the CDC? Is he a doctor or something?” She asked.

“No, he’s not.” I said. “He didn’t work
for
the CDC, he worked
with
them. He was a private security contractor, and his employer did a lot of stuff for the government.”

“So he’s a mercenary? Why are you friends with him anyway?” Vanessa was very left wing when it came to politics.

“No, Vanessa, he’s not a mercenary, not anymore at least. He doesn’t work for that company anymore. Look, I don’t have time to explain all of this right now. Can you please just come over so that we can talk?”

“Okay, fine.” she said, “I’ll let my boss know, and I’ll be over in about an hour.”

“Alright. See you soon. Bye.” I hung up and put my cell phone in my pocket.

I lived on the north side of Charlotte, and it would take a while for Vanessa to get up there. I had things to do in the mean time. I found a three ring binder in my file cabinet left over from my college days.  It had ‘STATISTICS’ written in permanent marker across the front cover.  I clipped the document Gabe emailed me into it and went out the back door to my garage. I got my crowbar from a hanger on the wall inside the garage, and took it behind the building to one of the two hidden entrances to my emergency shelter.

Shortly after Gabe told me about his work with Aegis, he gave me a brochure for the company that installed a smaller version of my survival shelter on his property. He suggested that I build one of my own. I took his advice. If you were to remove all of the dirt from my back yard, you would see two things that look like oversized shipping containers standing side by side with a short tunnel connecting them, kind of like a giant H. The containers are made of galvanized steel covered with a thick coat of fiberglass to prevent corrosion. They are set into a concrete foundation, and surrounded by gravel up to the roof, which is three feet under the surface of my lawn. One of them is finished to look like the interior of a small two-bedroom house, albeit with exposed wiring and plumbing, and the other is a storage unit.

The company that installed these things dug one hell of a big hole in my back yard to pour in the foundation. The shelter compartments were mostly prefabricated and assembled onsite. It took the workers about two weeks to dig the hole, pour the foundation, install the shelter, wire everything up, and connect the plumbing. They also installed my solar panels and small wind turbines. It had been an impressive operation to watch. I had an identical backup shelter installed behind my other house outside of Morganton, not far from Gabriel’s place. I usually drove up there once every couple of weeks to clean it and update the inventory.

One of the entrances to the shelter was under a shallow concrete slab beneath the back door to the garage. The construction company that installed the slab had designed it to be heavy, but manageable. It had enough bulk to keep most people from trying to move it, but was light enough that I could lift it if need be.  The back entrance was only seven feet from the surrounding tree line, and littered with scraps of wood, metal, broken cinder blocks, and fallen tree limbs.

I set the binder on the ground, and put the lever end of the crowbar under the slab and pushed down. The slab didn’t move, and the crowbar sank into the dirt. I put the crowbar down and looked around for something to use as a fulcrum. Near the tree line, I found a short length of two by four left over from when I had the garage built. I put the two by four under the bar, and this time when I put my weight on it, the bottom edge of the slab lifted a few inches above the ground. I put my foot on the bar to hold it down, and used both hands to lift the slab. It was heavy, but I managed to get it upright. The slab was attached a sturdy hinge that could hold it up once lifted. Underneath the slab was the entrance to the shelter.

The handle used to lift the hatch, and the bar that propped up the slab, recessed into the cover so that the slab lay flush against it. I lifted the bar and wedged it into a notch in the concrete to make sure the slab didn’t fall on me while I worked. After I secured it, I pulled up the handle that opened the heavy steel hatch.  I climbed down the ladder beneath, reaching up to grab the binder as I went. When I reached the bottom of the ladder, I turned and flipped on the lights.

Lights in the ceiling of the narrow tunnel illuminated the off-white paint on the galvanized steel walls. The tunnel runs under my garage to the shelter entrance on the supply compartment side. The shelter itself is under my back yard between the back of my house and the front of the garage. I lived on a large plot of land, and my back yard covered nearly two acres. My nearest neighbor was almost a mile away, and the dense forest growth around my property gave me plenty of privacy.

I walked down the tunnel to the heavy steel security door and pulled a thin chain from around my neck. I used the key hanging from it to unlock the cover to a keypad. After I dialed in the combination, the magnetic lock disengaged. I pushed the door open, then closed the cover to the keypad and locked it. I slipped the chain back around my neck as I entered the shelter.

As I entered the storage unit, I flipped another light switch and illuminated the interior. To my right was the five hundred gallon water container. It connected to a series of pipes that in turn connected to the gutters on my house and garage. I could use either tap water or rain runoff to fill the tank. I turned a valve to let tap water begin pouring in. My house was not close enough to the main part of town to connect to city water, so I used well water instead.

The rest of the storage unit was mostly filled with shelves that held containers of canned food, military surplus MRE’s (meals ready to eat), tea, flour, sugar, toilet paper, paper towels, and various other things that I thought might be useful in an emergency. A series of three metal closets with padlocked doors lined the wall at the other end of the unit. One had a small placard that read WEAPONS, the second AMMUNITION, and the third EQUIPMENT.

While the tank filled up, I went to the bedroom in the living quarters and put the binder with Gabriel’s email in it on the table beside the bed. With the document safely stored in my shelter, it was time to get started moving things into the storage unit. I went back into the storage area and grabbed a heavy electric powered winch from a shelf by the door. I lugged it up the ladder and mounted it onto a bracket on the back wall of the garage. I unclipped the hook from the winch cable and left it dangling over the hatch. I flipped up the cover on an electrical outlet just to the right of the winch bracket and plugged in the winch.

Picking my crowbar up from beside the hatch, I put it back on its hook in the garage and then rolled a wheelbarrow into my kitchen through the back door. I took the stairs two at a time to the upstairs bathroom, closed the drain, and filled both the tub and the sink up with cold water. I did the same to the downstairs bathroom, but left the sink in the half-bath empty. I wanted to keep at least one bathroom usable. After that, I started loading things into my wheelbarrow. I figured I should start with the heavy stuff first.

I took a few cases of soda and a case of water, as well as my Sig Sauer 9mm pistol and all of the ammunition I had for it. The Sig was the only gun I kept in the house. Everything else was in the shelter’s armory. I wheeled the load back outside to the shelter entrance and grabbed the cargo bucket out of my garage. The cargo bucket is a round metal contraption about three feet tall and twenty inches in diameter. It has a metal handle with a circular eyehole in the center. I made it not long after installing the winch bracket above the shelter hatch. The eyehole in the handle could latch to the winch, and I could use it to raise and lower things into and out of tunnel. There was a hand truck in the storage room to wheel things back and forth. The whole system saved me a lot of work getting things in and out of the shelter. After I loaded all of the stuff from the wheelbarrow into the cargo bucket, I hit the power switch on the winch and used it to lower the bucket down into the tunnel entrance. After it hit bottom, I climbed down after it and got the hand truck. I used it to wheel the winch bucket and its contents into the storage unit. I stowed the soda and water in the kitchen, and put the Sig and the ammo in the top drawer of the table beside the bed. I made a dozen or so more trips to load things from the house into the shelter, and then put the hatch back down. As I was fitting the slab back into place, I remembered that I was supposed to call Gabe to let him know that I had printed his email. After securing the slab, and fussing with the dirt and grass around it to make it look like it hadn’t been disturbed, I went back into the house and grabbed my phone.