“Diane and I will take the master bedroom. Tim and Kay can have Emma’s room. Brandon and Gregory will share the last room. Emma and Natalie will sleep on the pull-out couch in the living room.”
Emma sighed heavily, but John didn’t have an ounce of pity for her. She was the reason for the cramped space they were facing. She was lucky John didn’t make her sleep in the truck. She would also be given extra chores. Within a week or two she would feel the full impact of her indiscretion.
Diane had warned him not to go too hard on her. He’d been tempted to bring out the strap his father had used on him. Pre-collapse that sort of thing would have been looked down upon, but John suspected as society slowly clawed its way out of danger, corporal punishment would become the norm once again. In effect, they were witnessing a return to the homesteading days of the nineteenth century. And along with the homesteading came the Wild West mentality that often led to innocent people getting killed. Preventing that was first on John’s list. The cabin needed to withstand a direct assault and have contingency plans in the worst-case scenario.
From here John outlined his ideas for defending the cabin. A hundred-meter gravel path led from the cabin to the country road. There was a slight incline leading to the house. The forest had also been cleared for thirty yards around the cabin in all directions. That meant they had a decent field of fire from every angle.
The first layer of defense would be concealment. Marauders couldn’t attack a place they didn’t know existed. John had made the turnoff to the cabin purposely narrow for this very reason. With John’s direction, the four kids gathered dead leaves and fallen branches and used that to litter the turnoff. The contrast between the color of the gravel path and the surrounding vegetation would be a dead giveaway. It was important that a group moving past, particularly in vehicles, wouldn’t notice the opening as easily.
Afterward they used spades to dig out a series of small holes. With hand saws they cut down a few one-and two-year-old trees and fit them into the holes, filling in the empty space with gravel. The idea was to maintain the illusion that the forest continued on unbroken.
While the kids worked on concealment, John and Tim tackled the next layer of defense, preventing vehicles from driving up to the cabin. That part was simple enough. They used John’s gas-powered chainsaw to fell a tree. They selected a spot fifty yards up the road where the ground sloped. That way the tree would fall across the road as they intended.
A nearly invisible access path through the forest, wide enough for a single vehicle at a time, would lead around the tree.
The idea, however, wasn’t to prevent an assault. History and common sense had already shown that a determined enemy would come regardless of the obstacles in his way. The secret, which had worked quite well back at his home on Willow Creek, was to control where the enemy approached from. If an oncoming force was funneled into a narrow kill zone, they wouldn’t stand a chance against high-powered rifles. Unlike in the movies, high-caliber bullets tended to pass through multiple unarmored bodies, a truth the machine-gunners in the trenches of World War I had learned to devastating effect.
Attackers on foot would try to approach the cabin from the cover of the tree line and this was an advantage John and Tim needed to deny them. Without miles of razor wire, the only other solution was to lay multiple man traps along the edge of the path. These would consist of nail boards and sharpened stakes concealed by brush. Included in the booby traps were shotgun-shell tripwires. The spray of buck shot would certainly mangle a man’s legs, but more importantly, it would send a message that veering off the path was very bad for your health. Finally, the shotgun tripwires would help alert those in the cabin that someone was coming.
John had bought a dozen of them online before the collapse that he stored at the cabin. They were a simple, yet ingenious little device. A mounting plate with a spring-loaded firing pin. Once the wire was tripped, it pulled on a trigger which fired the shell.
After that was done, John and Tim set up prepared firing positions by hand-drilling gun ports in the cabin’s walls. Afterward, they would begin filling sandbags and stacking them around the opening. An average-sized, densely packed sandbag when stacked next to the thick beams of the cabin walls could stop anything short of a .50 cal.
Meanwhile, Diane and Kay busied themselves with planting the garden out back and tending to the greenhouse. They’d already decided to use the greenhouse for tomatoes, cucumbers, squash, zucchini, peppers, peas, and green beans. This would give them a nice range of vitamins and minerals as well as a number of good hearty dishes. Some preppers had a tendency to stick to practical foods which could be easily stored without considering something as basic as taste. Eating the same tasteless slop every day might look good on paper, but living it was another matter entirely. The other often overlooked consideration was a balanced meal with the right vitamins. A diet of homemade bread and meat tended to overlook the human body’s need for vitamin C. The vegetables in the greenhouse would help to solve many of those problems.
In the garden outside, Diane and Kay would plant perennials in much the same fashion they’d done on Willow Creek. John’s mother always said: If something worked well, why mess with it?
The seeds themselves had been stored in labeled pouches inside glass jars and would last three years. Of course, additional seeds could always be cultivated from the existing crop which meant, as long as they weren’t driven off their land, they could maintain a full garden indefinitely.
Everyone understood the need to hurry. The streams of refugees John and his family had seen along the interstate only served to drive the point home further. In spite their best efforts, someone would eventually find their bug-out location. It was important that when that time came, John and the others were ready for them.
Chapter 40
After two solid fifteen-hour days spent erecting the cabin’s defenses, John’s attention turned to firearms training. The Applebys hadn’t been around when John had taken the residents of Willow Creek through a safety and handling course. It was also important that each member of their tiny community became proficient at quick-loading and firing an assortment of weapons. There might be a situation where an AR wasn’t within arm’s reach and so a deer rifle needed to do.
Brandon took to it right away and quickly became the fastest of the children at stripping and reassembling an AR. Not to be outdone, Emma was the fastest at reloading pistol magazines while Gregory was the most proficient with the long-gun reloads. Natalie was a little slower on each, but eager to learn.
Using paracord, nylon sleeving and HK clips, John fashioned two-point slings for each of the ARs. There were only two, along with a thousand rounds of 5.56 green-tip ammo. He would have felt comfortable with more, of course, but for now it would have to do. The shotguns were the toughest for the children, although they found the Kel-Teck KSG easier to use. The double cylinder which allowed a shooter to cycle between two different types of ammo was also a nice feature and one that had served John well when defending his home against Cain’s men.