Out of the Dark Read online

  The family had been coming up to the cabin summers ever since Rob and Sharon had been teenagers, although no one had actually lived in it year round for at least fifty years. Describing its amenities as “primitive” would have constituted aggravated assault on a perfectly serviceable adjective, but that hadn’t been a problem, since the family expeditions had been more in the nature of camping trips than anything else.

  There’d always been a risk of vandalism, of course, but there was little traffic in that particular part of the national forest, aside from a handful of hard-core hikers, and most hikers and hunters were actually pretty considerate of other people’s property. More recently, one of the Wilsons’ cousins who was a National Park Service ranger had accrued enough seniority to request—and get—assignment to the Highlands Ranger District a few years back. He’d kept an eye on the place for them since then . . . and especially over the last three years.

  That was when Dvorak and Wilson (who, according to at least some of their friends, were both politically somewhere to the right of Attila the Hun, although possibly still to the left of Genghis Khan) had decided to take Homeland Security’s advice to organize their own plan in case of a national disaster or major terrorist incident. The Chicago subway attack, which had killed three of Dvorak’s cousins, had helped the notion gel.

  So they’d decided to turn the cabin into their bolthole. It was certainly big enough, since Old Mountain Man Wilson had been the father of a sizable brood. In fact, there were proud-of-his-oddities-though-we’d-never-admit-it family rumors that one reason he’d lived so far back in the hills was to avoid neighbors who might have figured out he was a bigamist . . . and that most of the add-ons to the original structure had been for additional wives. Of course, there had been that lack of amenities and modern conveniences, but they’d been talking about remodeling the cabin to modernize it and make it more comfortable for over ten years. Once they finally decided to think in terms of refuges rather than vacations, that talk had turned into action. In fact, Dvorak had to admit, the two of them had gotten carried away and put far more effort (and money) into the “renovations” than they’d ever really intended to.

  His loving wife had occasionally accused him of being OCD. At times, he was forced to concede she might actually have a point.

  The old stone-and-log cabin had been completely reroofed (and that had been a nightmare project for just the two of them and Alec), thoroughly weatherproofed, insulated, and sheetrocked. They’d also considered other requirements, like water and electricity. Fortunately, the headwaters of Little Green Creek lay on the cabin property, so (with Alec once more “volunteered” to assist), they’d built themselves a solid masonry dam to impound a reservoir that was over twelve feet deep at the deepest point. Designing a dam that ambitious had turned out to be more than either of them could handle, but they’d discussed the problem with a friend of theirs who happened to be a licensed (although retired) civil engineer. He’d very carefully failed to ask them about little things like permits, and they hadn’t officially paid him a thing for his “suggestions” (accompanied by detailed blueprints) . . . although he’d wound up, somehow, with a life membership and free shooting privileges in the indoor range.

  There hadn’t been any tearing rush to fill their new holding pond overnight, so they’d installed a base-mounted sluice in the form of four large-diameter, independently valved pipes. The stream’s normal outflow would have driven three of those pipes at full capacity; at high levels after heavy rains, all four of them together couldn’t have carried the full flow, of course, which was why their engineer friend had also included a standard overflow sluice plus a “hundred-year storm” emergency sluice. But leaving two pipes open and two pipes closed had allowed them to gradually fill their reservoir without seriously impacting the stream’s flow to join the Tuckasegee River roughly one mile downstream.

  By that time, they’d been seriously bitten by the “Gee! Wonder how we can make it even better?” bug, and their various children had been urging them on gleefully, since they regarded the entire pond as their own personal, private (and very, very cold) swimming hole. So they’d installed two separate but parallel PVC penstocks to deliver water to a pair of in-line Francis turbines, each coupled to an independent generator. The creek fell over six hundred feet in its run to the Tuckasegee, and the penstocks extended in a straight line for almost five hundred feet down its steep bed from their intakes, two feet below the top of the dam. That gave them a total vertical fall of just over eighty feet to the powerhouse, where each seven-horsepower turbine drove a separate micro-generator before the water was returned to the streambed. Water flow in the stream was generally constant and reliable, and each generator produced around a hundred and twenty kilowatt hours daily. Even one of them would have been a pretty serious case of overkill for a single household, but that only meant they could let one generator stand idle at any given moment. Besides, it was always better to realize you had more power than you wanted rather than discovering you had less power than you needed, and both of them figured redundancy was a beautiful thing.

  The entire project had cost them several thousand dollars, more barked knuckles and calluses than either of them cared to remember, and far too many hours standing in ice-cold water wrestling with mortar and river rocks while their loving families enjoyed picnic lunches and kibitzed cheerfully. In fact, after a particularly lively offering of “advice,” Jessica had ended up unceremoniously dunked by her husband one memorable afternoon. And somehow—no one knew how to this very day, honest!—Sharon and Veronica had likewise tumbled into the water when their loving husbands sought to help them rescue Jessica.

  They’d finished the task—eventually—and they’d also installed a standby emergency generator in a prefab utility building behind the cabin, just in case. (“Redundancy!” Dvorak had said. “Toujours la redundancy!” At which point Wilson had clocked him over the head with a three-foot length of plastic pipe.) Then they’d managed (not without more than a few profanity-laced moments) to truck in three polyethylene four-feet-by-eleven-feet thousand-gallon tanks to provide it with fuel (and act as a reservoir for vehicles, if it should come to that).

  They’d been surprised by how cheaply tanks that size could be purchased. For that matter, they’d been surprised by how cheaply a lot of the things they needed could be purchased—not that the entire undertaking hadn’t ended up costing considerably more than they’d projected when they first launched themselves on it anyway. They’d wound up putting well over fifty thousand dollars into it by the time all was said and done, but relying on their own labor had let them hold costs down remarkably.

  Of course, installing the actual generators and wiring the cabin (with low-power demand, long-life fluorescents instead of incandescent bulbs) had been another interesting task . . . but Joel Skinner, a professional electrician and crony, had also mysteriously ended up with a range life membership and shooting privileges before it was done.

  With electricity in plentiful supply, they’d built a new pump house over the original spring-fed well and installed a new electric pump and pressure tank. Then they’d added a second pump—and another hundred yards or so of buried PVC pipe—from the dam to establish a backup gravity-fed reservoir for the cabin. They’d hauled in another thousand-gallon tank to serve as a cistern above the cabin and installed a primitive water heater by running several courses of pipe (not PVC, this time) through the back of the cabin’s main fireplace and into a holding tank. They probably could have simply settled for an electric water heater and been done with it, but both of them had discovered they’d been deeply bitten by the “belt and suspenders” approach to the project. They’d gone ahead and invested in demand water heater units for the cabin’s bathroom and kitchen, but it was nice to know they had an electricity-independent fallback.

  After the fuel and water tanks, the preplumbed eight-foot-by-five-foot poly septic tank had seemed ridiculously easy to get up that never to be sufficiently
damned “driveway,” but burying the thing (and building the leaching field . . . after finding a place they were positive wasn’t going to affect the local groundwater) had been an even worse nightmare than the roof. And, mysteriously, the shooting range had ended up hemorrhaging still more potential cash flow when Ken Lehman, a plumber who attended Dvorak’s church, had acquired life membership shooting privileges, as well.

  In the meantime, Sharon and Veronica had gotten bitten by the same bug and, with the assistance of their offspring (or, perhaps, despite the assistance of their offspring), they’d replaced every square inch of flooring in the cabin and completely refurbished the old root cellar buried under it. The grout lines in the kitchen weren’t all ruler-straight, perhaps, but the colorful goldenrod-and-white tiles made it a much brighter and more cheerful place to cook.

  Dennis Vardry, the Wilson cousin and ranger, had almost suffered apoplexy when he discovered everything they’d done, but even with the penstocks and the cistern drawing off the creek, water flow below the dam wasn’t significantly impacted. All of the changes and improvements were on property Rob and Sharon jointly owned, so he’d decided he knew nothing—nothing!—about any of it. Besides, he and his wife got to use the cabin whenever no Dvoraks or Wilsons were actively in residence, and they weren’t going to turn their noses up at electrical conveniences, thank you very much.

  The cabin also had a well-stocked pantry to go with the root cellar, but Dvorak and Wilson had decided that since so many of their friends had teased them over their paranoia, they might as well go ahead and be paranoid. Although actually, if Dvorak was going to be completely fair, the suggestion had been made—to his own subsequent regret—by Alec Wilson.

  Alec was the one who’d stumbled across the cave on the north side of the mountain two or three hundred feet above the cabin. In fact, he’d literally tripped and fallen into it, although he continued to stoutly insist he’d intended to go spelunking the whole time.

  It was a good-sized cave, running back over ninety feet into the mountainside, sixty feet wide at its widest, and close to twelve feet high at its highest point. The entrance itself was no more than five feet tall and only twenty feet across, and it was obvious that more than one of Nantahala’s bears had made its quarters there in the past. It was also dry inside and a long way above the local water table, however.

  “Okay,” Alec had said, grinning at his father and uncle-in-law. “You two are so gung ho to go about making us a hidey hole up here in the hills. Doesn’t this just shout ‘bunker’ to you?”

  His grin had gotten even broader, then faded when he saw the matching speculative gleams as Dvorak and Wilson looked at one another.

  “Hey!” There’d been an edge of alarm in his own eyes. “I was just kidding! You two aren’t really thinking—?”

  Alas, they had been. It had taken them (and a grumbling Alec) the better part of another year, but they’d leveled the floor (mostly) and then enlarged the cave opening and closed it off with a timber-and-earth wall four feet thick with a sturdy security door in the middle of it. The outer face of the wall was dirt, shaped to fit the contour of the slope around it and covered in mountain laurel (transplanted from the thickets nature had already provided on the hill above the cave), and the security door was masked by a carefully camouflaged earth-covered panel which had to be lifted out of the way to gain access. They’d provided concealed ventilation, as well, put in lighting and a dehumidifier wired through their own switchboard, and installed a second gasoline-powered backup generator and two three hundred and fifty gallon tanks for fuel.

  That was where the majority of their food supplies were actually parked. The cave was so naturally dry that they probably really didn’t need the dehumidifier, but it was a relatively modest unit without a lot of power demand. It wasn’t that much trouble, and it couldn’t hurt, especially when they’d turned the cave into their primary storage facility. They’d calculated that they had enough canned and freeze-dried food tucked away inside the “bunker” to supply a group of ten people for a year and enough stored vegetable seed for at least three years’ worth of gardens. Even if someone happened along and vandalized the cabin after all, they’d have a fallback position in case of an emergency.

  And it was also where they’d stashed away a complete backup set of all twelve Foxfire books and almost all of their medical and first-aid supplies. Not to mention where they’d now parked the full inventory from The D & W Indoor Shooting Range, plus most of the contents of two serious gun nuts’ gun safes. Not to mention Dvorak’s home loading bench (and supplies) and Wilson’s gunsmithing tools. Taken all together, it would have been enough to make certain federal law enforcement professionals reach for the “dangerous-right-wing-militia-nut” panic button on sight, although possibly not under current conditions, Dvorak thought now, grimly.

  So, yes, the good news was that they had their heads down someplace no one was going to bother them and, for the moment at least, it looked like they’d be able to keep them there.

  The bad news was that their world had been invaded by aliens who didn’t seem to give a single damn how many humans got killed in the process. And at the moment, the Internet was their only way to form any idea at all of how many humans had already been killed.

  When Dvorak and Wilson had first started work on the cabin, they’d put in a satellite dish and bought satellite phones. At that point, they hadn’t been especially worried about things like radio location—largely because they’d been thinking in terms of purely terrestrial threats and, friends’ political opinions aside, neither of them had really mistrusted their own government to the extent that they’d actually given much consideration to hiding from it. They’d both been Boy Scouts in their youth, however. They still took that “Be Prepared” business seriously, so “not much consideration” wasn’t exactly the same as saying they’d given no thought to the proposition, and Alec, as their family computer geek, had been given a homework assignment of figuring out how they could maintain Internet access without betraying radio signatures if, for some reason, that should seem like a good thing to do.

  Alec, who normally regarded his father and uncle with the sort of fond exasperation reserved for lovable lunatics, had decided to take this assignment seriously, and solved it by locating a microwave relay tower a little over a mile from the cabin. He’d pointed out that it would be relatively simple to take a laptop to the base of the tower, plug in, and ride the tower’s signal. His fond father and doting uncle had pointed out in return that hiking a mile—most of which was vertical, although by no means all in the same direction—through cold rain or (worse) snow was not something they looked forward to doing. So Alec, in the spirit of cheerful cooperation, had laid in a couple of miles worth of fiber-optic cable . . . and handed them the bill for it with a smile.

  None of them were feeling particularly cheerful at the moment, and all of them had things like radio location finding very much on their minds under the circumstances, so Alec and his uncle had spent most of yesterday afternoon stringing the fiber optic between the cabin and the tower. They’d laid it along the ground and covered it carefully with deep mountain leaf mold. Dvorak, whose paranoia had shifted into steroids mode over the last couple of days, would really have preferred not to establish any “breadcrumb” trail some ill-intentioned person could backtrack to the cabin, but after some consideration, he and Wilson had agreed that that minor risk was far outweighed by their need to keep track of what was happening in the world as long as the Internet lasted.

  Not that it was proving particularly pleasant knowledge.

  “It’d be nice to at least know what these people want,” he said now, shaking his head as he glowered at Sharon’s display. “I mean, did they just dial in on that idiot Sagan’s ‘Eat at Carl’s’ broadcasts and decide to check the menu? Or did we do something to piss them off? I assume they’ll get around to talking to us sooner or later, but until they do, we don’t have a clue what’s going to happen.”
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  “Maybe not,” Wilson said harshly, “but we sure as hell know what’s already happened. Or enough of it, anyway.” He jabbed a finger at the monitor. “God knows the net’s been full enough of it!”

  Which it had, Dvorak thought. Which it had.

  He didn’t know if the list of destroyed cities was complete yet. He was pretty sure the worldwide list wasn’t, but he hoped—prayed—that the list of murdered US populations had been completed. Washington, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Denver, Spokane . . . Closer to home, Columbia (apparently because of its proximity to Fort Jackson); Sumter (that would have been Shaw Air Force Base); Charleston (because of the Naval Nuclear Power Training Command?); and Atlanta (he didn’t have a clue about that one, unless it had simply been a population center to be taken out). It went on seemingly forever, although—thank God—whoever it was hadn’t hit some of the other major population centers. New York City was still there, even if the panicked exodus of its citizens was busy turning it into a nightmare zone of confusion and looting. Chicago was still intact, and remarkably calm (so far, at least) compared to New York. Boston, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, Houston . . . they were all still there, although they were busily emptying of population as people tried to get away from what might be the next ground zero.

  No one had an estimate of total casualties yet, but it was already brutally evident that the United States of America had suffered more dead—civilian and military—than ever before in its entire history. And it was obvious from the conversation on the Internet that the sheer, incredulous shock of the initial attack was still rippling outward, still gaining strength. It was as if no one, particularly Americans, could believe something like this could truly happen.