My Shelter, My Heart

My Shelter, My Heart

By Barry Hess

What little sunlight there was, was almost too much for Charles to take as he stumbled from his underground shelter. Even with smoke in the air, it was brighter than he remembered. The smoke from unchecked fires that had filled the air thinned quickly when the winds and rain kicked up. It was Fall, and the sprinkle turned quickly into a downpour. It was with great appreciation that Charles took in great gulps of the rainwashed air. It’d been almost 2 years since he had talked to or seen anyone, and his lair wasn’t dark, but it wasn’t bathed in bright light either. He had plenty of food and water and he had even built a septic system into his fallout shelter. He was very careful to anticipate everything he could if he ever had to resort to using it.

His wife hadn’t encouraged him, and thought he was overdoing it in even building his end-of-the-world shelter, but she didn’t discourage him either. It was something that kept him busy and he enjoyed it, as much as she enjoyed keeping her gardens in top shape.

Now that he was out, his first instinct was to go to find his family, but where would he look, and how could he get anywhere without electricity to run the gas pumps? He was stuck and frustrated; he didn’t know where to look, or how to get there, so he just had to wait and pray that they could all make their way home. He spent hours in prayer every day, just like he had in the shelter.

They were fortunate because just one of Charlie’s many inventions had made them a substantial fortune, the rest were negligible in comparison. He had invented a personal laser, for protection. He managed to do the impossible and put enough energy into it to cut a person in half from 10 feet away.

At first, the authorities didn’t know what to do. He was openly selling them on the Internet and using crypto currencies for the transactions. They weren’t firearms; those depend upon combustion and a projectile, and while the authorities wanted to control them, there was no lrgal way for them to do that.

Charles had quickly turned most of his assets into gold to put them out of reach of the central banks. The original reason for the shelter was as a safe storage for his gold. He had several tons of it, mostly in 1-ounce slugs. Once his vault was completed, Charles took his project further and decided to put in an apocalypse shelter. He wasn’t as paranoid as some would think, to him it was more of a fanciful, “what the hell?!” It gave him the opportunity to think of what would be needed if there were ever such a need. Charles loved to think things through.

He spent hours and hours in his 30-foot deep hole. It was going to just be a conduit with a steel ladder built in. But that changed when he figured there was no use letting a good hole go to waste. He made it much bigger, and let his imagination go wild. His fake window above the sink was really something interesting, it was just a television screen that very convincingly mimicked the sun coming up each morning, in regard to each season that was in progress on the surface. It was like looking out the kitchen window with a mountain view. He built storage cabinets everywhere, and cleverly hid them so that only the obvious ones would get a second look.

He’d have to make sure he had water and electricity, but the most fundamental challenge had to be an effective septic system for waste disposal. For this he dug four tunnels sideways on all four sides. And he inserted large plastic pipes that he had meticulously drilled half-dollar sized holes in all the way down their length, to allow liquids to be absorbed into the surrounding Earth. He connected the pipes to a common drain, and was very careful to run a one-way gas vent up to the surface. Just to be sure, he split the gas relief vent into four vents that he affixed at different heights to trees in the woods surrounding the site of his underworld man cave.

He was fortunate to have several natural springs on the property and it was less than a challenge for him to trench pipelines to service his building.

Electricity wasn’t difficult to produce, or store in his new hemp batteries. His primary electrical source was a fairly good sized solar photovoltaic array that necessarily had to be on the surface so he cleverly disguised his panels from view. He didn’t stop there; he realized that he could also capture the fall of the spring water to drive a nominal generator to provide at least some electricity. Then he thought he would add thermal-electric systems to generate electricity from the disparity between surface temperatures and that down below his shelter’s footer. He didn’t have a lot of faith in new technologies, so he also put in a bicycle generator. The latter proved to be the most useful.

He stocked his shelter with all kinds of board games, video games, and lots of books. He even had a dartboard, a pool table, and a chessboard all set up. His fake window was also a television monitor so he could watch some of the many videos he had copied to a hard drive. Each of the large distractions could be turned into beds, and there were several canvas army style bunks mounted to the walls that could be pulled down if necessary. He knew that in an emergency he would have to make some allowance for other people to benefit from his preparedness, but in the end, it was just his man cave/fallout shelter. He enjoyed building it, and didn’t think twice about the cost.

His final concern was being able to communicate with the surface, and for that he installed several closed-circuit cameras around his property and his home, as well as the immediate area surrounding his underground home. He was thorough, and set up an array of antennas, and satellite dishes cleverly hidden in his trees, in hopes that he would be able to pull an active signal from one of them.

Charles believed in redundancy, and almost always had a backup plan for his backup plan. That’s why he had ordered five-year food supplies from several of the patriot provider websites. His motto was ‘better overkill; then under kill’.

It was three years in the making before he finally tamped the last of the dirt over his now completely hidden underground escape hatch. The entry was his pièce de résistance. It was a convincing, old rotting shack where no one would guess the large twin fireplaces that stood exposed through the holes in the walls, were actually a cleverly-designed elevator that could be run by hand crank down to the underground vault. No one would ever have guessed it was there. Only he, Mary, and their children knew the combination of bricks to push and pull, and slide to open the door.

His 2 years of solitude wasn’t spent entirely in dark desperation. He kept hoping his wife and children would soon be coming down to join him. All the while, he couldn’t let go of the only remnant he had to remind him of his girls. The small heart-shaped gold locket held their pictures, and he clutched it in his hand every day, all day, since this whole thing started.

What he hadn’t counted on his family being too far from the shelter if it was ever needed. He had always imagined them all being safe in his shelter. Now he was just lonely; there was no getting around that.

The timing couldn’t have been any worse; Mary and Jan were off on a shopping spree, and his son Zelig was camping in the Rockies. Most people had either gone underground, or to the mountains when everything went to hell. He was sure Zelig would be fine.

It was 2 long years, and the closest he’d come to talking to another human being all the while, was talking back to the movies he watched. For a while, he could hear that there was some sort of chatter over radio waves, but he couldn’t make out what was being said, and then the chatter stopped altogether. That’s what made him figure that whatever happened on the surface, was finally over.

His home was untouched, but overgrown and neglected. That made him happy. At least there didn’t appear to be any nuclear fallout.

Over the two years he barely noticed that he was permanently clutching the small gold heart-shaped locket. He had grabbed it from the dresser where his wife had left it; she was worried it might tempt a mugger in the big city. It was in his hand from the time he picked it up until now. It was as if his hand had grown around it. He held it even as he did other things with his hands.

Mary and Jan’s trip was a big deal, it was their first, real mother daughter shopping spree, where the idea was to go to a far-off place just to shop. At 12-years old his daughter had become a blessing of a young woman. He figured the shopping spree was a rite of passage for women. More importantly, it made Mary happy, and that’s all that mattered.

The EMP’s had destroyed virtually all of the photovoltaics and his antennas, but they hadn’t reached his underground generators or batteries. He had prepared for that possibility.

The destruction began to unfold after the political scene had gone from sour to violent. The public had been so misinformed by their trusted news sources that there was a great deal of confusion as to what was true. Fear became the political mainstay, while political powers wrestled with one another for control of an out of control economy, social mandates, and control of the military.

The escalation began, and many of the political leaders from one of the two dominant parties began to fear their own criminal prosecution for crimes against the public and against the Constitution itself. And then the skies went dark; satellites shut down; the electrical grid went down; water supplies were no longer pumped; telephones didn’t work; everything just stopped.

Aircraft within range of the EMP’s almost immediately fell from the sky when all of their equipment failed to operate. Mary and Jan were in the air on the last leg of their flight to New York City when everything shut down. There was no way to know what became of them. But Charles had hope.

Over time more and more people began to emerge, and they discovered that many of their family members friends and acquaintances had long-since died painful in horrible deaths. It was a year from the end of hostilities before productivity began again and people began to socialize and to trade among themselves. They were rebuilding.

Charles had taken to gardening and had turned Mary’s garden of beautiful flowers into a vegetable garden that just seemed to flourish. He hoped to surprise Mary when she came home. He spent the rest of his time in his rocking chair on the porch clutching the locket, watching anxiously for his family to come up the drive.

He could never resign himself to not finding them or even fathom the thought of his family not being together. Maybe that’s why God saw fit to take him home to be with his family.

Charles died on his porch praying to be rejoined with his family. His prayers were answered. He went to be with his family. He slumped slightly, his heart was broken for the final time, as the locket fell from his hand, for the first time in 5 years.