She gave the tilt of her head that I was beginning to realize that meant she was thinking and disagreeing with me. “So, that is not really a silencer, but a shrinker. It reduces the sound, but it is still loud?”
I couldn’t argue. Without testing the homemade item, shrinking the sound was okay with me if that’s all it did.
Sue said, “If someone is close, they will hear it?”
“If they would hear a balloon popping at the same distance, yes.”
She gave a slight nod. “It won’t bring people hunting for you from miles away, and that’s good. Will it kill? Yes, I suppose so, especially if you shoot them four or five times, huh?”
Again, I couldn’t argue.
She had a far-away look in her eyes. She shivered and looked back at me. “I didn’t really bury them in our yard, you know. None of them. I lied about that. My father said to get as far away as fast as I could and leave everyone there where they were. Him included. He insisted and I agreed to do it.”
“He told you the right thing.” It was all I could think to say.
She continued as if she hadn’t heard, “Do you think we could go back and do that someday? Bury my family?”
It only took a microsecond to realize what a good-intentioned idea that was, and another microsecond to realize in practical terms, that it was a terrible idea. Rotting bodies of her family couldn’t be good for her to see. Worse were ones strewn about while animals ate the flesh. There would be maggots for sure. My eyes met hers. She was waiting for an answer. “Not right away. Too dangerous.”
“Maybe later?”
My voice choked up. I nodded slowly, knowing my nods were lies.
CHAPTER THREE
Our basic plan, meaning my plan which I hadn’t yet fully discussed with Sue, was to wait safely in the tunnels until the spring thaw. It was a good plan until the middle of the night when a shotgun blast erupted and echoed down the mountain and through the quiet valleys. We woke and leaped from the sleeping bag. With my little twenty-two in hand, I rushed down the tunnel in the dark wearing my underwear, too afraid to use the LED flashlight.
A wolf, or better said, the bloody, shattered remains of a wolf greeted me. The animal was nearly decapitated from the buckshot. My ears were still ringing from the blast when Sue came up behind me, a kitchen knife taken from the cabin held at the ready.
Her first words pulled me back to reality. “Do you think anyone heard?”
I thought everyone within five miles had heard the blast.
A glance outside the mouth of the tunnel revealed it was no longer snowing. The entrance was hidden by the small cedars and firs, but a thorough search of the area by anyone hearing the shotgun would find it. My only weapon to protect us was the small handgun, and of course, the shotguns. I’d decided that carrying a larger caliber would tempt me to use it and that would put me in more danger, so I had ignored the temptation.
The pair of shotguns was the result of a search of a single-wide mobile home hidden in the trees, down an overgrown driveway near where I’d parked my car. It was an accidental find. The scattered remains of a man and a woman were in the yard and I chanced slipping inside to the bedroom. That’s where most valuables are usually kept, and the shotguns hung on pegs attached to the imitation wood wall. A nearly full box of shells was on a dresser.
I grabbed the guns and shells and raced outside where I let the air escape from my lungs. Breathing inside didn’t seem a good idea. The bodies were outside, and nobody had definitively proved how the flu was transmitted, so I’d made the entire venture inside on one breath. Right now, the shotgun traps I’d set didn’t seem like as good an idea as when I’d set them. Neither did being attacked by a wolf, but it was too late to second-guess my earlier actions.
“We can stay here,” Sue said with a ring of desperation. “Rig a few more alarms, reload the shotgun, and if they get past that, you have your little gun. We’ll get some more guns, too.”
She had me almost convinced until she said the last two words along with mentioning my little gun. If an enemy made it past the shotguns, he or they would carry heavier firepower. Enough time had elapsed since the flu struck that many people would have secured weapons such as Sue had carried. Maybe leaving hers in the snow had been a poor idea. Maybe choosing to live in a mining tunnel with only one entrance was a mistake. There was no back door.
The few people who had survived the flu, and who were living nearby were most likely local residents, people who lived in and around Darrington. Almost all of them hunted deer, elk, and bear. They fished the rivers and were happy living in the dense wet forests at the edge of civilization. Most were uncomfortable on their rare trips to Everett, let alone Seattle, and all the people they would encounter there were exactly what they’d tried to escape. They would have scurried back to their mountains, trees, and privacy as quickly as possible, where they knew how to survive using techniques held over from the last century.
At the time I had first moved into the tunnel, locating where the smoke exited should have been more important to me. It may have provided another way out, a bolt-hole. The downside was that if I found it, I’d know of another entrance to worry over and try to protect. I’d rejected doing anything—a stupid decision, it seemed. I’d just wanted another basement to hide in—and if somehow there was Internet access, I’d have willingly stayed for months.
“No, we have to leave here,” I reluctantly told her, as my mind raced with details that I should have thought about two weeks ago. Prepared for. Only an idiot would not have had a “go-bag” considering the circumstances. I should have been prepared to run off in minutes, taking only what was critical to my survival. That’s the problem with being lazy by nature. I put things off until they became critical.
“How long do we have to stay away?”
She asked the damned hard questions. Her thinking was that we’d return after a few days and things quieted down. I wasn’t so sure. I didn’t know anything as a fact, so I ventured, “Two days? Three? Maybe more.”
Before asking for an explanation of my estimate, she gathered two sleeping bags, a little food we could eat cold, her boots, a warm coat, and I stood and watched like an invalid. She hissed at me, telling me to get my ass busy in a way that got me moving.
I got my boots on, a coat, and other warm clothing. On the way out, I grabbed two more shotgun shells, replaced the spent ones, and reset the tripwire. Then, because we wouldn’t be there and I didn’t want to be responsible for killing an innocent person a month or even a year from now, I disabled them both. We reached the entrance, but instead of rushing out and leaving fresh tracks across the clearing, we edged along the face of the cliff with our backs to it. The melt running down the rocks would soon dissolve our footprints. The warmer weather was already melting the snow, so it was only six inches deep.
Where a heavy stand of trees began, we hunched over and entered the forest, so it wasn’t quite leaving an obvious trail of footprints. A game path wound around the side of the hill and then upward. When we reached twenty feet of elevation and a small ledge, I unrolled an eight by ten sheet of tan plastic and placed it on the ground.
Since nobody was in sight in the predawn, I told Sue, “Move around and gather green branches from the backside of the nearby trees. Slice the limbs off, don’t hack. It will make less noise.”