Hell Happened (2 page)

Mike, a former banking executive, and Terrill, a former homeless veteran, were already preparing the evening meal, and came into the foyer of the underground shelter to see what the commotion was all about. They, along with Kellie, were the most recent arrivals at the shelter Jerry had built and accounted for the entire human population of the shelter.

“What’d Jeff do now?” Mike asked, taking Jerry’s AR-15 assault rifle and placing it in the gun safe that was always left open. Even though Jerry was nominally in charge, Mike always spoke in a manner which sounded like he was the leader. His life was a history of management and being in charge. It had been difficult for him to transition from banking executive to survivalist, but he was making the effort, even if his way of speaking didn’t always show it.

Mike and Terrill had been found a few weeks earlier. Jerry had a C.B. radio and a 30-foot lattice tower with antenna.  Mike was a C.B. enthusiast who picked up Jerry’s call out one night while scanning channels. While Mike was driving out of Birmingham, he found Terrill walking in the median of the interstate, looking lost and alone.

Jerry, having handed over the weapon and bandolier to Mike, was pulling off his light jacket and kicking off his boots while shaking his head. “That stupid fool was supposed to be back here an hour ago with the quads. I knew I
shouldn’t’ve
have let them take the quads to Odenville,” referring to both Jeff and Tony. Terrill wiped his hands on the white apron he wore and suggested Jerry tell everyone about it over the evening meal, which he’d just put on the table.

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A war vet, Terrill was injured on his second tour of duty in Afghanistan from an improvised explosive device that killed his lieutenant and a specialist in the HUMVEE in which he was riding. They had been in the front seats, Terrill in back with the communications equipment. The explosion threw the vehicle 20 feet in the air and onto its side. Terrill blacked out for a moment and when he came to, he screamed.

Terrill lost both his right leg below the knee and the hearing in his right ear. He had scars on his right arm and hand and burn marks on his face. He also lost his want to be in the military and took a medical discharge.

Three years after his discharge, he was drinking his monthly allotment from the government and living on the streets of Harrisburg, about 12 miles southeast of Odenville. He was sleeping any place he could find that was out of the weather. He couldn’t, or wouldn’t hold a job because he no longer cared about being alive. He just wanted to drink away the memories of the lieutenant’s brains dripping onto his lap while he waited to be extricated from the damaged vehicle.

He had to drink a lot. He became quite good at it.

When people started dying all around the city of Harrisburg, he stole as much alcohol as he could and walked out of the city, pushing a shopping cart filled with various spirits and several guns. He didn’t think it was fair that so many others died a relatively painless death while he continued to suffer a painful life. He was too weak-willed to commit suicide, but he wasn’t going to let someone else take his life from him either. He had more drinking to finish before he went through the pearly gates.

Terrill was walking along I-20 when Mike in his Escalade drove by. Mike almost drove on without stopping for the dirty, heavily-bearded man who was walking along the side of the road with a cart half filled with bottles and guns. Mike saw the military boots and
camo
pants and took the risk, stopping several hundred feet down the road from Terrill, just in case.

Zombies didn’t drive, but Terrill knew vigilantes did, so he approached the luxury SUV carefully. He may have been homeless for a while, he may be a drunk at the time, but he was also a former soldier and he was armed with an M9 9mm pistol holstered under his dirty ACU (Army Combat Uniform) jacket. From 50 feet apart they introduced themselves.

Terrill took Mike up on his offer to make contact with Jerry. It would at least get him further away from the big city and the vigilantes and the zombies. Where Mike picked up Terrill was only about 10 miles from Moody, Alabama, and the outskirts of where Jerry had built his survival shelter into the back of a hill behind his farm.

There was suspicion from both of the people in the Escalade and they rode mostly in silence, but being alone for Mike was worse than being with someone who was silent. They made several wrong turns before finding the right farm. The last couple miles Terrill was able to help Mike by using the C.B. while Mike navigated around wrecked vehicles. It had been more than a week since Terrill had spoken at all and using
commo
equipment brought back bad memories, but Mike needed all his attention on the road.

They pulled into the long drive. They’d almost missed it, what with the trees that were still in full bloom and Jerry had disguised it a little more to keep others from finding it easily. The dirt drive led up to a farmhouse. There was a barn and garage built into a hill and several outbuildings. The house looked vacant, the barn a little run down and yard and pasture were overgrown. There were some cattle in the distance grazing.

They stopped the SUV in the parking area and climbed out of their vehicle. Jerry called out from the barn, asking if either was armed. Both said they weren’t, but Jerry didn’t believe the soldier and called him on it.

Mike hadn’t known Terrill was packing the 9mm. He raised his eyebrows at the former soldier.

When Terrill pulled out the handgun, Jerry asked him to put it on the hood of the SUV before he came out of hiding. He had to be sure it was safe to come out, and he didn’t expose himself to the men without
someone to cover him. Randy and Monica were both hiding in the farm house with rifles and Eddie was in the loft of the oldest barn with a 12 gauge shot gun loaded with buckshot.

Jerry walked out of his hiding space still carrying his AR-15, but kept it aimed at the ground. He introduced himself and asked a few directed questions to Mike and Terrill before relaxing. The real icebreaker was the cold beer Terrill offered him. Jerry was not a heavy drinker, but he did like a cold beer. That act of generosity was enough for Jerry to allow Terrill to put his handgun back in its holster and invited the men to meet with the others who had been in hiding.

The three men walked up the path that led behind the barns and around the hill to the shelter followed by the three younger adults who kept their guns loaded, but un-cocked. Mike said he could drive the SUV out of sight, but Jerry asked him to leave it where it was for now until he was sure he could trust these two men.

There was being friendly, then there was being reckless and Jerry made sure they were not too much of either.

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Jerry had survived the fall of the government and the world, and he did it without losing his son, which not many people could say. He was alive and fed and had a reasonably secure shelter, not because he had ever believed the world would come to an end, but because he was bored with his life. It just worked out that he had made a self-sufficient shelter.

Jerry was a divorced, moderately-successful soybean farmer. He grew up on his parent’s farm not far from Moody, Alabama and took it over when his dad died in a tractor accident just before Jerry’s 18th birthday. His mom passed on a few years later and everyone attested she’d died of a broken heart even though they found a lot of empty wine bottles and pills in her room.

The basic shelter was built several years earlier after his wife had divorced him, leaving him lonely and pissed. It had started with just digging a big hole in the side of the hill in which he thought he’d bury yard waste. Using his International Harvester tractor and its front end loader, the more he dug, the better he felt.

Jerry liked digging the hole and driving his tractor. The dirt he dug out, he piled as high as his tractor could pile it to form a parapet around the entrance to the hole he dug. He had no real plan, but he realized if the city tax assessor had discovered his hole, his estate taxes would go up, so he spent some serious time camouflaging the entrance.

Jerry wasn’t a survivalist, but he did know how to survive, and over the weeks as the hole became enlarged, Jerry would often ask himself why he was digging it. Sometimes he would spend the entire weekend just digging deeper into the hill and enlarging the hole he dug and think about what he was digging and how he could improve upon it. Every few feet he’d add rail road ties to shore it up and keep it from caving in on him and his tractor.

Randy, his 22-year-old son and video game aficionado, would sometimes come out and check on his dad. He was no farmer and if the end of civilization had not encroached upon his life, he probably would have continued going to community college until he was forced to get a job at a local store in Moody, working as a stocker or cashier and hoping one day to rise to assistant manager. Randy was not a motivated young man, but he loved his dad and his dad loved him, even if they didn’t understand each other and had far different work ethics.

Jerry’s daughter, two years younger than Randy, had gone off to the military the day she turned 18. The farm life was not for her. She needed adventure. She had been an athlete in high school, but not outstanding at anything. She’d inherited her dad’s independence and he’d applauded her choice, which was the final wedge that had driven his wife away.

Jerry hadn’t heard from his daughter since the virus killed off nearly everyone in the world and the phone and internet had gone down, but he thought of her every day and hoped she’d inherited his and his son’s resistance to the virus and was still alive. Someday he hoped to find out one way or the other.

The hole started becoming a survival shelter after Jerry watched some end-of-the-world documentary on late-night cable television. That was a year before the national news started warning people of a new flu being reported. It had interested him and for the next few months, Jerry slowly built a cramped nine-room shelter under the hill in the hole behind his house. As a farmer he had plenty of lumber around from an older barn he’d torn down which he used for walls and floors. There were still 50 bags of concrete left over from the new garage he’d built the previous spring to sturdy up the shelter. He also had the time on his hands which he had to put to work.

He stocked the shelter’s cellar with hundreds of MREs he purchased off the internet, bulk vegetables and canned goods he bought wholesale, installed his own custom-built air filter and water purifier with parts bought off eBay and all L.E.D. lighting because he thought it looked nice. He wasn’t stocking it in case the world collapsed; he stocked it in case another hurricane shut everything down like Katrina had done.

There was a bathroom and shower with a good drain field far from the shelter, an efficiency kitchen that had a freezer for the fish caught, and animals hunted, and a two-burner electric stove, stainless steel sink and a refrigerator Jerry had at one time filled with Budweiser beer, bar-be-cue sauce, mustard and assorted soft drinks.

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Once civilization started falling, he’d also moved in some furniture he had taken out of the farm house. He knew that place would draw attention while the entrance to the shelter was hidden behind the hill.

After the government fell, he moved his weapon’s safe from the office in the old barn to his new office in the shelter for protection and because Jerry knew Alabama Power Company would not be able to provide power to his home and farm now that everyone who worked there was dead or a near-dead body still walking around just searching for human flesh to eat. The farm house without electricity was a liability.

Electricity for his shelter was provided by a waterwheel generator he built out of parts from an old Massey Ferguson tractor and a generator he picked up from Sears in Birmingham. A tributary from the river that fed Lake Joyce ran through his property and was reliable for the generator. He also had two small wind generators on the peak of the hill. For a
back up
he also had a Honda 6500 watt gas generator.

A year after he’d started the shelter, and just a week before the first victims started dying enough to be mentioned on the national news, Jerry had finished installing the 150-gallon water tank and a
Keltech
tankless
water heater. The shelter was as complete as Jerry thought he’d carry the plan.

He hadn’t set out to create an apocalypse shelter, it just evolved to become one because of boredom and something to keep him busy when he wasn’t working in the fields of his farm or tending the 22 Holsteins he and his boy milked twice a day.

His son Randy told him one late night as he came into the farmhouse they shared that it seemed his dad had become obsessed with the shelter and suggested his dad get out and around people more. Randy was a good boy who cared deeply for his dad, but sometimes, Jerry thought
,
the little brat could be meddlesome.

Jerry had taken his son’s advice and went to the Lions Club that weekend. He still had a lifetime membership at the club. There he met up with his long-time friend
Remi
and they ditched the club for a little bar hopping like in the days of old. Jerry hadn’t gone out to meet a woman, still stinging from his wife leaving him years earlier, but meet someone he did. Her name was Sissy, and like Jerry she was divorced and still a little bitter from her divorce.
Remi
had also introduced him to a woman named Mary and promptly took off for the dance floor with the woman leaving him and Sissy at the table.