“Could you turn any of these people away if they showed up out there?” Kate asked.
“No, but I don’t plan on making it easy for them to find us.”
Kate flashed him an annoyed look, which he could live with for now. He crossed the sludge-covered floor to the small study that Kate and Alex used as a temporary refuge from the noise level created by teenagers and the ever-blaring television in the family room. The floor-to-ceiling bookshelf had been emptied of its contents, with the exception of the top shelf, which had stubbornly held onto several overturned picture frames. Hundreds of books lay in various states of damage at the base of the bookshelf, forming a two-foot high, unstable pile of soggy pulp and wilted hardcovers. The brown leather chairs were covered in half-dried filth, one of them home to a mangled, brushed silver lamp and one half of the window’s plantation shutters. He remembered seeing the other white shutter under the bench in the mudroom. He opened the study closet to take his first real inventory. In all likelihood, they wouldn’t need much more than what he could salvage from the closet—aside from the guns, ammunition and a few select gadgets. Actually, this closet was just the “tip of the iceberg.”
The right side of the closet housed built-in shelves that held a dozen 2.5-gallon jugs of spring water, two 120-serving “grab and go” buckets of freeze-dried vegetables and a black nylon duffel bag filled with twenty military-grade MREs. This stockpile represented more than enough food and water to satisfy the needs of his family during tomorrow’s exodus. He knew that Charlie and Ed kept similar stockpiles on their first floors, so there would be no need to waste time retrieving additional food or water from the basement. Two dark green, metal .50 caliber ammunition cans sat on the top shelf, below the wall’s high-water mark. He pulled both of them down and set them on the antique cherry wood desk against the interior wall of the house.
He opened the canister marked “EG” to confirm that it had not leaked. From what he could tell by visual examination, the waterproof seal had held as advertised, sparing the electronics gear from any water damage. The converted storage can held two Iridium satellite phones, a handheld GPS plotter, a pair of two-way VHF handheld radios, a handheld radio scanner and three thirty-round .223 AR magazines. He reached deep into the canister to feel for water or moisture. Thankfully, it was bone dry. He pocketed the full AR magazines before closing the canister.
The second canister, marked “RG,” held each item’s charging kit and adapter, in addition to a folding solar panel, battery power pack and AC inverter. Ziploc bags filled with loose AA and AAA batteries sat at the bottom of the can. He quickly checked for water damage, finding the same result. No leakage.
Unfortunately, the same couldn’t be said for the individual BOLT (Basic Operations for Limited Time) kits assigned to each member of the family. Stuffed together on the floor to the left of the shelving unit, each rucksack was identified by a strip of duct tape with a name. The mud and water that had reached the ceiling earlier had peeled the tape and faded the lettering, but he still recognized the names. He plucked his pack out of the mud and grunted at the waterlogged weight. They’d have to unpack each kit and scavenge for items they could add to the dry rucksacks hauled out of the sailboat.
He hoped that the national state of emergency had shut down the court system. There was little doubt in his mind that Kate would present him with divorce papers after riding for thirty-five miles with the “three day” pack on her back. Kate was going to kick his ass when she heard the news, but there was little way around it. The larger, infinitely more comfortable internal frame packs he’d chosen for their BOLT kits wouldn’t dry by tomorrow morning, and their commercial hiking packs were buried under ten feet of water in the basement.
He carried the MOLLE II rucksack to the kitchen island, and dropped it onto the granite. Kate, who was in the middle of preparing cheese sandwiches on an area of the counter she had cleaned, stared at the pack with a look of disgust. She shook her head.
“I can’t ride to Limerick with that piece of shit on my back.”
“It’s smaller than this pack. Might be easier to balance while riding,” offered Alex.
“No. We can dry these in the sun on the patio. I’m not putting that thing on my back again. Mayonnaise on your sandwich?” she said, displaying her patented “I’m happy” smile.
“I love you,” he said, unzipping one of the outer sustainment pouches on the pack.
“Really? Even though I fully blame you for ripping my shoulders up with your crappy backpacks?”
“Especially after that,” he said, pulling a compressed, lightweight sleeping bag out of the sustainment pouch.
She eyed the dripping, down-filled ball that once qualified as a sleeping bag.
“I have a feeling those won’t dry by tomorrow,” she said.
He shook his head and removed the other item stuffed in the pouch, expanding the grayish, universal camouflage-patterned Gore-Tex sleeping bag shell and shaking the water from it.
“This is probably all you’ll need if you get stuck overnight. Maybe one of the emergency blankets. I’ll strip the packs down and hang them on what’s left of the deck in the sun,” he said.
“I’ll have some lunch ready in a few minutes. Sandwiches and canned vegetable soup, plus a bag of barbeque chips that I found in the family room,” she said.
“Sounds like heaven,” he replied, turning his attention to the basement door.
He pulled an LED flashlight out of the MOLLE pack and tested it, pleased to find that neither the water nor the EMP had knocked it out of commission. As far as he could tell, most handheld electronics or battery-powered devices continued to function, consistent with the CNI Revised Report’s assessment of the effects of an EMP burst on portable electronics. Then again, the Revised Report seemed to be all over the place in terms of accuracy. The predicted 60% failure rate for automobiles seemed generous at this point. His own observations supported a rate in the high nineties.
Alex opened the door to the basement and flashed the light down the stairwell. The light reflected a Stygian pool that reached the fourth stair from the top and rose above the bottom of the basement ceiling. He extinguished the flashlight and stepped into the stairwell, closing the door behind him. He was immediately cast into absolute darkness and silence. Peaceful, yet suffocating. He let his eyes adjust for a few moments, peering into the water, searching for any sign of light from the basement windows. Nothing. This wasn’t good. He needed a few specialty items locked away in his bunker. Actually, he didn’t really need them, he wanted them. And he wanted them badly enough to consider taking a swim in the blackness beneath him. He opened the door, grateful for the sunlight.
“The basement is a total loss. Water up to the ceiling. Look at this,” he announced, looking back down into the impenetrable darkness.
Kate joined him at the door. “I don’t think you should go down there.”
Alex shut the door. “Who said anything about me taking a swim?”
“I can tell by the way you’re staring down at the water, like your mind was plotting something that it really shouldn’t.”
“My night vision gear is down there, along with most of the weapons and ammunition,” said Alex.
“Uh huh. I thought there was enough ammo in the BOLT kits.”
He didn’t feel like getting into it with her. She was right, sort of. Each pack held two full, thirty-round AR magazines, in addition to two fifteen-round 9mm magazines for the Heckler and Koch P30C pistol. When you added it to all of the ammunition available in the study closet, it equaled far more than enough to handle a worst-case scenario, “guns blazing” transit from Scarborough to his parents’ farm, but Boston presented a whole new level of shit storm to the equation, and he had no intention of underestimating the level of chaos he might need to navigate to find their children.