People in Timberline thought he was crazy, but he didn’t care. They would be sorry. He wouldn’t be able to help most of them, he thought as he walked toward the porch, built six feet above the snowy ground. He’d built so many traps, fields of fire, and automobile traps, that he couldn’t remember them all. So he’d gotten a computer and begun a small log of the cabin’s military-style defenses; he’d employed a lot of what he’d learned during his three tours of duty in Vietnam with the Marine Corps. The cabin was a state-of-the-art bunker disguised as a cabin.
He’d learned all about computers, their use important to the fortress’s running—that had been ten years ago. Now it was all done and ready for the battle to come. When Armageddon arrived, he would be prepared.
He walked through the snow toward the cabin’s wooden porch. Most of all he wanted to share his achievements with friends, people he liked. Many times he’d stopped his truck in front of Quentin Collier’s ranch and thought about showing Quentin everything he’d done inside the cabin.
He liked Quentin. Quentin was one of a group of friends in Timberline who never looked at him like he was just an old crazy Vietnam vet. Chuck smiled. Every year he’d been invited for Thanksgiving at the Colliers’. Every year he’d gone. Thanksgiving at the Colliers’ was his one social event of the year, and he always looked forward to it.
He’d stop his truck, turning off the engine, and fantasize about telling Quentin and Marie what he’d accomplished at the cabin, how thorough he’d been, the tunnels, the stores of food and ammo, the hidden diesel generator buried ten feet underground, equipped with its own exhaust and thousand-gallon fuel supply. But he couldn’t actually go through with it. Quentin, after all, was the town sheriff, and maybe he would have to tell someone about what he’d done—especially about his collection of fully auto assault rifles (more than fifty). No doubt he’d broken laws in collecting so many weapons of every description, and there were the highly-illegal plastic explosives, the homemade flame thrower, and the black-market hand grenades. Not to mention his newest addition: an M32 multi-barrel grenade launcher given to him by a close friend and fellow Vietnam vet who was developing the weapon for the Marine Corps, and making a fortune in the process.
But even then he’d almost gone on down the gravel road into the Collier ranch and told Quentin because he wanted to tell his friend that his family would be safe—safe when Armageddon came. He wanted Quentin and Marie to know they would be welcomed at his redoubt. He wanted them to know that they could all hold out in the cabin together, that everything for them would be all right. He would share with the Colliers.
When Quentin’s wife, Marie, had gotten breast cancer and passed two years ago, it had hit him very hard. He had cried in the cabin by himself. Marie Collier had been so sweet to him. Marie Collier was a good woman. Even now, two years later, he didn’t like thinking about her passing.
It wasn’t fair, he thought, always the good people die and the evil people live to get old: the Clintons, both Bushes, Dick Cheney, big-time banksters. They all, no doubt, would live forever.
“They all think I don’t like people,” Chuck said out loud. It isn’t that at all. It was just that I had something I had to do. I had to do this for my . . . friends, the people I will invite. He would invite them. He began to tick off the names: Willis Good and his family; the Colliers; T.C. McCauley; the librarians in town, who never charged him for late fees. Farren Webb, the cook at the Copper Penny who always added extra French fries to his order; his uncle Sam, who was in the old-folks home in Reno and had lost an arm at the Battle Of The Bulge. People he cared about. Was it crazy?
Only if I told stupid people.
“No, I like people,” Chuck said, talking to himself, climbing the steep wooden stairs to the top of the porch. He stopped at the front door and wiped his feet. He’d put up a Christmas wreath. He loved Christmas and hated to see it go. He held the wreath in his hand. He’d decorated it himself with bits of colored foil and wooden ornaments, and bits of his first Apple computer. He loved computers, and country music, and Christmas, and he loved people. It was just that people didn’t love him back, since that time in the airport on his way back from Vietnam when a girl had called him a baby killer and spit on him. He’d never forgotten that. What her face looked like. She’d meant it.
I liked people, he thought, looking at the wreath. And if truth be told, he had done things over there that were wrong. He made a mental note: Next year’s wreath would be bigger. If Armageddon didn’t come, it would be bigger and he would buy one of those big plastic red bows he’d seen in a Seagram’s ad in the back of a Time magazine. No, he wasn’t a sad ol’ Vietnam-veteran “Prepper” like he’d seen on TV. He was different. He loved people. He wanted to save his friends from the war he knew was coming.
He pushed the door open, taking the wreath off its nail. He didn’t have the heart to take the decorations off the wreath. He put the wreath on the rough wooden table in the kitchen. The kitchen was clean, its waxed hardwood floor spotless. He’d salvaged the flooring from an old abandoned farmhouse in the valley. The cabin’s living room had an almost feminine sensibility, everything well-scrubbed and orderly. He was a neat freak. The fire in the potbelly wood burner made the living room feel cozy. The big Christmas tree by the small bulletproof windows made it homey, too. He made a mental note to take the Christmas tree down when he got back from his hunting trip.
He walked to the back of the cabin; a small hallway separated the living room from the one bedroom. In the hallway to the bedroom was a long row of gun cases. He walked to the first, unlocked it and took out his .30-30. “The gun that won the West,” his father had told him when he was a kid. He threw the lever back. The magazine was clear and smelled of Hoppe’s oil, a smell he loved. He walked back to the table, laid the rifle down, went back to the hallway.
He crouched in the hall, pulled open the trap door and looked down into the bunker he’d hand-dug—some areas having to be dynamited to clear rocks. It had taken him six years to dig and blast out the space for the bunker, which was twice the size of the cabin. He’d spent whole days with nothing but a miner’s style hat with its puny light showing the black earth as he hand-dug the bunker’s two escape tunnels that ran for over a hundred yards, and ended at the county road.
He hit the light switch on the wall and saw the crude hand-hewn stairs leading down to the lit-up bunker. The bunker held seven bedrooms, two fully-functioning bathrooms, and more rooms that held the bulk of the armory, with tens of thousands of rounds of ammo and more weapons. The redoubt was equipped with a state-of-the-art “control room” as well as a kitchen, larder and dining room. He’d installed a fully-ventilated power plant with a thousand-gallon reserve of diesel fuel. At the very back were the two escape-tunnel entrances, the tunnels laid with tracks for caisson-like carts that could be ridden or filled with equipment and pushed should the bunker need to be abandoned during an attack. The bunker even had its own gravity-fed water system that came straight off the Sierra behind the cabin. Every time he opened the hatch cover, he felt proud of what he’d accomplished.
He took the steps down into the brightly lit bunker designed to comfortably hold a dozen of his close friends.
I’m sure now, sure that it’s coming. I know it, you feel things like that. Feel them in your heart, not your head. We’re there.
He came back up the stairs with two boxes of .30-30 ammunition and closed the trap door. He went to the cabin’s kitchen table and picked up his rifle. Of all the rifles he owned—and he had scores just in the cabin’s top-floor gun lockers—this was his favorite. He’d gotten it as a gift from his father when he turned thirteen. Still the best kind of brush gun there was, and perfect for deer hunting in the Sierras.