If you spot any glaring errors which ruin this chapter for you, please point them out with a comment.

Might I say how much I hate editing my stories because my rough drafts truly suck! There are probably lots of mistakes this time; sorry.

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Chapter 16: Vincent, Take Me Once Around the Stronghold.

The walls were up and I was actually going to a Council meeting, it was now winter so I guess it’s possible that Hell has frozen over. The meeting was being held in my former garage located next to the machine shop. The flyers had been living there but they’ve since managed to construct crowded yet comfortable homes for themselves, said homes being far away from the noisy machine shop. However, my poor cars were still stuck outside for now but at least they were covered with a couple of tarps a piece.

I was actually early for the meeting; no one else was had arrived as of yet. It seemed like all of my days were filled with never ending work and I was getting kind of wrung out from it all. I no longer needed as much sleep as I used to require but that was true for a lot of us now. However when I did doze off, I would almost immediately fall into an extremely deep sleep which was extremely difficult for me to awake from, so long as I was still tired. If I was awoken from such a slumber I tended to be a bit more of a grouch than was usual for me, which is saying something in my case.

People finally started to arrive and they were certainly surprised to see me. Jennifer was looking at me with a puzzled expression on her face. “Vincent, how did you get here? The last time I saw you, you were in the garage at home and that was less than ten minutes ago. I should have seen you, if you walked over here.”

“I didn’t want to go outside in the cold and wet, so instead I used the tunnel.”

“There’s a tunnel between your house and this garage?”

“There is now, which is one of the reasons I decided to come to this meeting today. Mack and anyone else with construction experience should feel free to comment on my plans. I magically moved a lot of dirt and rock from the moat to build our new walls. I also compressed and altered that rocky soil into something even harder and denser than most natural rock formations. Tunneling is even easier for me to do since I only need to compress the soil to the sides, top and bottom of any tunnel or room that I’m trying to make. That is of course not taking into account that while building our new walls and the moat, I used hundreds of enchanted stones to assist me during that process.

I’ve put in three hours of work today, digging tunnels and rooms. Without the assistance or a boost from any enchanted stones I’ve been able to move and compress approximately 15,000 cubic feet of dirt per hour. The tunnels and rooms that I’ve been excavating are twelve feet wide and ten feet high with arched ceilings.

Because I raised our local water table it isn’t safe for me to make any tunnels that are deeper than twenty feet or so. My current plan is that I will construct a single layer of tunnels and rooms that are ten feet deep and ten feet tall; meaning, that there will be ten feet of earth and compressed rock between our tunnels and the surface. When we fought the krakens I was worried that the squids would simply resort to just dropping boulders and trees on us. We would have had little defense to such a tactic at the time.

My construction plan leaves a little more than five feet of compressed impermeable rock between the tunnel floors and the local underground water table. The new tunnels and underground rooms won’t be a perfect sanctuary for us but they should help to keep us all safe. Of course they can also be used for storage and for additional living space; fire stones and other enchantments should make those areas reasonably comfortable.

But we’ll need to find a way to properly ventilate our new underground areas. Mack and Glen, I would like for you two, to research that matter and come up with a plan for us to implement.” Both men nodded their heads in acknowledgement of my request. “There is now a three thousand square foot basement beneath this garage and the shop. I built a stairway to access the basement, it’s over there in the corner behind those boxes,” I pointed to it with my hand.

“My plan is to continue digging tunnels for the next week. I’ll create a small bunker complex, for each cluster of houses, which people will be able to get to without leaving the safety of their own homes. I’ll also do the same for the infirmary and the barns. I’m pretty sure that I can get that much done in one week. Later on I’ll connect everything together so we’ll almost literally have our own underground city.

Now about our future plans, in one week I would like for us to start sending out daily expeditions. We need to know what’s going on out there and it’s too dangerous for us to send out Lieutenant Wind’s flyers without ground support. There could be things worse than Sky Krakens and Giant Bullet Ants about and we need to take those monsters down now, before they get too strong for us to fight. We also need to gather additional supplies and while I’m a nasty cuss there are probably children out there that need rescuing if they’re not already dead. Our new dungeon could also be used to house any additional refugees that we find and decide to rescue. Doing all of that is likely to draw attention to The Stronghold of Hermit’s Forge and quite possibly attacks from powerful, evil or desperate beings. That is why I want to make the bunkers first before we send out any scouting expeditions. I would like for this Council to come up with plans for such reconnaissance and scrounging missions. Such as what forces should go, what supplies they should look for, where they should explore and what procedures should be followed to maximize everyone’s safety. I’ll be going on at least the first expedition; any comments or questions?”

Clyde spoke up immediately. “I think we should grab that big dump truck that is sitting at the gravel pit and start modifying it immediately. I know that Glen has at least one extra 200 HP engine completed. We’ll need that big truck if we’re going to be rescuing people or gathering a lot of supplies. We should send our first expedition to the County Road Commission building. They’ve got a lot of equipment there that we could use; most importantly they have extra large snowplow blades that we can fit onto our trucks. We’ll need those blades what with the winter season being here and they might help in combat situations too.”

Glen spoke up; “I’ve got two spare two hundred horsepower engines with more almost done. Clyde, Vera and I have been working on getting the crawler crane running again and we’ve already put an engine into it. We thought that what with the new wall and all, that it might be handy to have something that could lift heavy objects to the top of it. That might not be the biggest or most powerful crane in the world but it can still lift in excess of eighty tons, over a hundred feet into the air.

For everyone’s general information, the shop is regularly producing three types of engines now. We are making forty and two hundred horsepower engines, both of which have a conventional type of piston arrangement. Those two engine models have no capability to condense and re-circulate water as is described by the Rankine cycle, and they use anywhere from three quarters to two gallons of water per mile.

We are also making a one hundred horse power engine with an extremely modern and sophisticated piston design and layout. That engine does use the Rankine Cycle and it also has a very sophisticated steam generator. We are currently preparing one of our spare 200 HP engines so that we can exchange it with the 330 HP steam engine that is already in the Priest. While we have some spare parts for our two 330 horsepower engines we have no plans for them, and I sadly doubt that we’ll ever hear again from the manufacturer of those marvelous steam engines. We need to take apart one of those big engines while it still works so that we can reverse engineer it and build more of them for ourselves. By studying the designs of our more sophisticated steam engines, we are trying to determine how we can incorporate their more powerful boilers or steam generators into the older steam engine designs that we possess, as well as adding water condensers to them too. A more powerful boiler will add horsepower to those engines and drastically reduce startup and warm up times. Every morning when I wake up, I wish that Abner Doble, one of the greatest experts in steam powered cars, was alive today and living with us here, because we are still having a hard time figuring a lot of this stuff out. None of us here in the Stronghold, is an expert in thermodynamics and beyond the pure science aspect involved with steam power, there also seems to be an element of artistry, when it comes to designing a reliable and powerful steam engine or boiler.

The shop is currently tooling up to manufacture steam engines that can produce anywhere from fifty, to one hundred and twenty-five horsepower, the amount of power it generates is determined by how much steam pressure the engine is supplied with, which is in turn dependent on the size and power of its boiler. Many engines can produce more power if they are given more steam that is so long as they don’t blow up. Jennifer got us the designs for that particular engine, as well as the plans for the two hundred horsepower model, and their boilers. She also obtained detailed instructions on how to install those steam engines into land vehicles and boats, before the internet failed. I stupidly forgot about those designs during the confusion of our earlier days.” Glen nodded his head at Jennifer, who preened a little bit at the acknowledgement of her success.

I spoke up. “I forgot about them too Glen, so don’t beat yourself up about it. By the way, I think that I’ve figured out a way to make a firestone and its attendant box that will produce three different temperatures. Last time we spoke you mentioned that you wanted a stone that could produce five hundred, seven hundred and seven hundred fifty degrees Fahrenheit. I can do that now but you’ll have to make a slightly different box, we can talk about it later.”

“That will help with both startup time and steam generation. I’ll get you the boxes as fast as I can make them, Vince.”

I had a question concerning another topic. “George, how are the defenses on top of our new walls?”

He answered, “I was just preparing my report to you. We are already mounting Holman projectors up on the wall walk. When the crane is operational we’ll move our large mortars up there as well. We are also installing numerous fixed mounting points for our 20mm and fifty caliber rifles in the battlement’s embrasures. That way one of our sharpshooters can just move their rifle from embrasure to embrasure as needed. The problem we are having right now is the cold; the wind up there is fierce. We’ve set up some dome tents which are being held down with sandbags but they are barely adequate shelters even with fire stones.”

I responded. “Once Glen, Clyde and Vera get the crane working again, it can then be used to lift up the tons of gravel and rock that I need, in order to build block houses on top of the curtain wall. No one else should be able to use Earth Magic to alter that wall; I enchanted it to be that way. I had some concerns about us fighting, in the future, a person or a monster that possessed Earth Magic. Hopefully my protective enchantments will hinder or even prevent an enemy from ever destroying the Stronghold’s walls with mundane or magical powers.”

When the meeting ended, my councilors promised me that they would put together their thoughts about my plans and get back to me with their comments and ideas. George and Clyde planned a morning trip to retrieve the big dump truck parked at the gravel pit.

Chester Fletcher was in the Priest riding back to the land that he used to own and had turned over to the Hermit. He, Ron, Vera and Glen were the crew that was going to get the big gravel rig ready to be towed back to the Stronghold. The semi-truck was a 2008 Kenworth C500 and its dump trailer had a steel bed that was 27 feet long, eight feet wide and just over five feet tall. Chester was kind of proud of his contribution in modifying the T800 and he was looking forward to turning the C500 into a real monster. He and the others just wished that they had another 330 HP steam engine to put into it. A 200 HP engine should have enough power to move the C500, considering that the trailer would now be routinely used with only a partial load. The truck might be a little slow but then again, tests of the T800 had it easily reaching sixty miles per hour, so the C500 might not in fact be a sluggish steel armored turtle.

A flight of two flyers were overhead and freezing their feathers off while keeping an eye out for the emergence of anymore scorpions. Two more flyers were keeping warm and standing by in the T800, ready to switch off with their frozen brethren. The rear of the T800’s dump bed had been further modified with a wall and a large double door, made of half inch thick steel plate. With the new rear wall, the armored ramp could be lowered and those inside the dump bed would still have some protection from both enemies and the elements.

Things went smoothly for once and they never even saw anything dangerous on the trip to the pit. The Priest returned to the compound towing the C500 with another small load of sand onboard. For the heck of it, the T800 towed back Chester’s old Ford dump truck too. They thought that it might be good idea to repair it, so that they actually had a dump truck that could be used for its designed role instead of being converted into an APC.

The Council was worried about Vince’s plan, to go looking for trouble. As a result they were frantically doing everything in their power to prepare the Stronghold for any calamities that might befall it and they were urging others to do the same. Meanwhile, not that deep beneath the Stronghold, Vince was very quietly pretending to be the Mole Man and was busy building his subterranean secret lair, though he was slightly worried that the Fantastic Four might discover his location or worse yet, Marvel Comics might learn of his effrontery and sue his Hermit ass off.

The shop crew and the motor pool overshot Vince’s time line; it took them ten days to get the new truck modified and ready to roll. But those working on the armored rig were quite proud of their achievement when they completed it. The C500 had been armored in the same fashion as the T800 except for two differences. Since its trailer could be disconnected from the semi-truck, the trailer was equipped with its own forty horsepower steam engine with an air compressor to power the trailer’s leveling jacks, powered rear ramp and more amazingly a retractable armored roof. They could have used a smaller steam engine for the task but they just didn’t have any available. The retractable roof was made of three armored panels, all of which were nine feet long. The two rear sections could be slid over on top of the front panel, thus opening up an eighteen foot long segment of the trailer. This was a large enough opening to permit a flyer to take off or land with their wings fully outstretched. The rear ramps on both trucks, if held parallel to the ground like a porch, could also be used as a landing pad for the flyers.

The shop crew was already working on a new toy. It was decided that having a construction tractor with its attached backhoe, which could double as a lifting boom, might come in handy for future expeditions. So they had staged another retrieval operation at the gravel pit. They had come back with a Case 590 backhoe loader. They were busy armoring the hell out of it and readying it for the installation of a two hundred horsepower engine, which had almost twice the rated horsepower as its, no longer functional, modern diesel motor. They thought that with the steam engine’s greater horsepower and direct drive that the modified tractor would be able to easily keep up with the other armored vehicles. There was also a large Caterpillar front end loader at the pit but at the present time they didn’t have an engine large for the huge machine.

I had been digging tunnels, enchanting stuff and awakening abilities in people, for ten days. I needed to do something different. We now had over one hundred thousand square feet of living space underground, which was accessible either by stairs or by wide ramps in some places like the barns and the machine shop. As soon as I found the time I would interconnect all of the separate underground areas into a larger body.

I went to asleep that night anxious to do something different for a change, even if that meant seeing the outside world. I groggily awoke, Grace was shaking me. I heard the sound of gunfire and the shop’s steam whistle.

“Vincent you have to wake up, we’re under attack.”

I grunted and sat up, putting my feet on the floor. My pants were at the side of my bed and bloused over a pair of zippered winter boots, just like the firefighters do. I stuffed my feet through my pants and directly down into my boots. I stood up pulling my pants up and then my suspenders over my shoulders. My eyes felt like they were full of sand. Life was fucking wonderful. I pulled a sweatshirt over my head, strapped on my armor, grabbed my weapons and while yawning, I hauled ass out my home’s front door. Leaving my house, I worried over how long the alarm had been sounding since Grace had time enough to come downstairs to awaken me.

I had made an addition to my personal weapons, after my experience with the bullet ants and the failure of my SCORE wand. I was now carrying, slung on my back, a Winchester Marine Defender shotgun with an extended tubular magazine, in addition to my Remington Rifle and Taurus revolver. The shotgun was loaded with shells filled with buck and ball.

Once I was outside it quickly became apparent that all of the gunfire was only occurring on top of the Stronghold’s curtain wall. Damn it, I knew I should have built some armored pillboxes up there but being lazy, I was instead waiting for the crane to be made functional again. I ran for the nearest stairway which was located by the front gate. Climbing the steps, I was quickly passed by Lieutenant Murphy, who had been avoiding me for weeks. She was carrying my Weatherby which she still hadn’t returned. Rumor had it, that it was the post powerful rifle in our Stronghold, next to the fifty calibers, and that she didn’t want to give up the Mark V because of its power and its accuracy. I was also irritated with her because she had gotten some nice physical enhancements and ran like chipmunk on speed, while I had squat.

Out of breath and with my heart racing, I finally got to the top of the wall. Is it time to puke yet? Candace was blasting the flying Night Stalkers out of the air, as fast as she could work MY RIFLE’S bolt action. I knew that she was a better shot, and that she had telescopic vision as well as faster reflexes; all of which just angered me even more. She went to reload but since the range was fairly short, I took Lady Murphy’s rifle (sob) from her and handed her my shotgun instead. She took my gun with a grateful grin and immediately went back to terminating the giant bats. Damn it, she just did not miss. I had the Weatherby slung, by the time she emptied the shotgun, I then handed her my Remington pump action rifle figuring that at such close ranges that it would be a better firearm than the more powerful Mark V. I was then forced to hand her; a second four shot magazine for the Remington because I didn’t get the shotgun reloaded in time to return to her. Two Night Stalkers got too close to me and I took out my anger on them by incinerating the creatures with a flame strike. I’ll teach those flying bloodsucking fornicators not to disturb the sleep of a GRUMBY HERMIT KING!

We had things under control in our immediate area but there were the sounds of gunfire and screams coming from other sections of the wall. The curtain wall was almost a mile and a half in circumference and the wall walk was twenty-two feet wide, not including the battlements. Parked just twenty feet from me was my Caterham. I ran to it ripping off its cover, using my hands and magic. I hit the four levers popping open the new aluminum roof, “Candace, get in the car!

The car’s water filled boiler was kept from freezing by an auxiliary one hundred degree firestone. All of our vehicles now had such additional firestones since the advent of the colder weather. Lady Murphy quickly got jumped in, assuming a funny position with her left foot on the floor boards and her right knee on the seat. She had the shotgun at the ready. I handed her a canvas bag filled with twelve gauge shells.

I had ridden in this car for over two hundred hours while concentrating and working magic. If there was one thing that I knew well, it was the steam engine in my car. It would normally take fifteen to thirty minutes to get the steam car started up and rolling. I did it in less than twenty seconds.

Cue The Prisoner theme music! I was driving my car again baby! I had a hot looking gun-slinging girl in the passenger seat and she was putting some serious hurt on some flying monsters. I might finally be cool. I refused to acknowledge that thought that she was quite possibly a better driver than I was.

But another problem surfaced, since my car’s steam engine was direct drive; there was no transmission and thus I had no gears to shift, which was lowering my coolness factor. To repair my fragile ego, I used only my right hand to steer and I started to launch flame strikes with my left. Burn and die you filthy flying vampire rats! As far as I know steam engines don’t as general rule accelerate all that quickly. I used my magic to make the Caterham a bit more responsive. We were over forty feet up, on top of a wall that was twenty-two feet wide and there wasn’t a guard rail on the inner side, I should certainly fix that.

Stanley Steam cars, from what I remember hearing, typically had only twenty horsepower engines. Those cars cruised around at thirty-five miles per hour and could get up to fifty or even sixty for short bursts. My car had a forty horsepower engine and it should be able to cruise at sixty, but up here on top of a wall with a 135 degree corner every nine hundred feet, there was no way that I was going to go that fast. Especially with Lieutenant Murphy giving me orders, I had a woman passenger seat driver! “Stop here, slow down, go faster, don’t drive off the edge of wall walk, watch out for the battlements, you almost hit that man!” I don’t why she complained about that last one, he was able to cleanly jump off of the wall, good thing he had wings.

Steam cars are quiet so I could easily hear her words even with the frequent blasts from the shotgun. I need to get the shop to put a steam powered ejector seat in my car, all the cool spies have cars with ejector seats. Then my asshole brain started talking to me. “So Vinnie, you think you’re cool like Simon Templar, John Steed, Number Six, Derek Flint or James Bond? It is to laugh; you’re more like Austin Powers, International Man of Mystery. You know the guy who always has the female sidekicks that are more competent than he is. However you don’t have to worry about any of that with Lady Knight Candace Murphy, like hell you don’t, she would totally kick your wimpy fat ass. But it’s unfair to compare you to Austin Powers because at least he’s got mojo, which the ladies all find dead sexy, and you’ve got jack shit, LOSER!”

“You better shut the fuck up brain or I’ll drive this car right off the edge of this wall. Not only will the two of us go splat but your darling Candace will too.” Fucking asshole brain, I refocused my anger on Candace. If I aimed for the edge of the wall but hit the brakes at the last second, would she be catapulted out of my car, and plummet to her doom? And more importantly would her fall be accompanied by a whistling noise like in the Road Runner cartoons, when the Coyote would fall off of a cliff? I glanced at Candace she gave me a fierce grin in return as she blasted away at the Night Stalkers. No, I better not do it; she’s likely to keep a hold of that shotgun and she would probably somehow manage to twist around in midair like a cat and blow my head off.

We had to stop at the opposite side of the Stronghold, so I could render some emergency healing aid to two Guards. Fucking Night Stalkers had been chewing on them when we arrived on the scene. I had to blast a few giant bats before I could start healing the wounded Guards. After I had them stable and reinforcements had arrived, we departed and proceeded to give assistance to other portions of the wall or any other soldiers that needed it.

I had a new concern now, besides building blockhouses on the curtain wall. Old fashioned vinyl records should work in our new world. I should be able to find an old record player but was The Prisoner theme music ever recorded on vinyl?

Luckily we didn’t have any fatalities that night but we would have without our magical Healers. I would have felt like crap if anyone had died. Our plan now was to build temporary wooden fortifications on all of the curtain wall’s corners, while we were waiting for the crane to be made operational. Lifting tons of rock forty feet high, is far too time consuming for me. I had to really push myself to make the walls as high as I did. There were many better things that I could spend my magical energies on rather than doing a poor and inefficient impersonation of a crane. I just prayed that my decision didn’t get anyone killed.

Candace Murphy was surprised by the Hermit after all the action was over, because he hardly exchanged any words with her except for telling her well done. Vincent let some steam blow off from the car’s boiler, thus cleaning it of any scale deposits. He put the car’s roof back on, and then the Seven’s protective covers. As he was walking away towards the stairs, he said something that had shocked her, “keep the rifle.” She had been expecting for him to demand the return of the Weatherby, so his almost offhand comment had stunned her speechless. And frankly she had been a little bit afraid too because she had been holding out on him for weeks by not returning the rifle to him. She definitely didn’t want him to have any negative feelings about her, none at all; not after the way he built the Stronghold’s walls in only three weeks, and then how that very night he had incinerated scores of those flying blood suckers.

She recalled what happened less than hour ago, when they were forced to stop on the opposite side of the Stronghold. The Night Stalkers had been swarming the two Guards there. There must have been thirty or more of the monsters. Vince had raced the car right into them, telling her to “hold on”. He had braked hard and slid into a sideways stop. The Hermit had then climbed out of the car, extended his hands and, like a blazing searchlight being operated by a demigod, fire had sprung forth and whatever that fire hit, simply exploded into ash. After which he had rushed forward to kneel down between the two severely wounded troopers, he put a hand on each of them and simultaneously healed them both. Sure he had looked a little dizzy for a moment or two there, after he stood back up, but WTF? Candace decided that she did not want to get the Boss angry with her, not one little bit.

As I walked away from Candace I grumbled to myself, because I hated facing reality. The truth was that the world was now a seriously dangerous place. In addition, Candace was without a doubt the best shot in the Stronghold and because of the limitations of even our magically improved black powder, she needed a more powerful rifle as her daily carry firearm. A fifty caliber rifle was simply too big and besides that the Weatherby Mark V was more accurate. I, on the other hand, am not the greatest shot in the world, nor do I have her enhancements. I am better off with my faster firing Remington than the Weatherby, especially if I can get Candace’s dad to make me some larger magazines for the rifle. But reality still sucks.

The following morning, we left on our first exploratory mission. We were going to the County Road Commission building. Our goal was to acquire snow plow blades for our two trucks. The Sherman was leading our tiny convoy, followed by the T800 then the C500 and the Scorpion had the tail. The T800 was pulling a large flat bed trailer. Night Storm and three other flyers were riding in the C500’s armored trailer. We left behind the Priest, the Hellcat and the two armored tractors with their trailers.

We got to the County Building with no problem. The County had a massive parking lot in back, which was surrounded by a fence that was eight feet tall and topped with barbed wire. We could easily see a fleet of county trucks and cars parked back there. There were also three large pole barns within the fenced in area.

The County Building was standing but it looked like it had been through a war, windows and doors were all broken in. The fence was still intact so we decided to use bolt cutters on the lock rather than knocking it down. We might have a use for the fenced in lot at some future date and why destroy anything we didn’t have to. A mixed fire team of humans and craft-makers went to the gate to open it. George was keeping Lieutenant Night Storm’s flight grounded for now; he was concerned that some terrified human with a flintlock rifle might just take a shot at one of her unarmored people.

We pulled into the lot and drove in a big circle so that the C500 was pointed back towards the gate in case we need to make a quick getaway. The gate was closed again and the Sherman positioned itself nearby to guard the entrance.

We started searching the parking lot and the pole barns for things that we could use. We quickly found plow blades both inside and outside the large warehouse like buildings. We also found air compressors and we certainly had a pressing need for them, air had replaced electricity in the Stronghold. There must have been at least six large V-plows which were exactly what we were looking for, for our trucks. Glen, Clyde and Ron were trying to figure out if we should load the plows on our trailer or try to connect one or both of them to our trucks, while we were still in the lot. They finally decided that they would attach one to the T800 and in that way, they could be sure that they would be nearby to any missing parts or manuals that they might need to find. It would be a pain to get back home and learn that we needed to fabricate an unknown part which we could have more easily located here with just a little bit of diligent searching.

Star Astrologer was walking by my side. As a knight she had her choice of firearms and she had selected a shotgun which she seemed to be extremely fond of. I still had to talk to her and Blender about letting me torture them so they could become enchanters. Suddenly she turned her head and focused on the County Office Building. A moment later we heard shouts coming from that direction.

Fred Stone had been a civil engineer for the county for almost thirty years. He was almost due to retire when the first Warning came. He had not been impressed with the County’s response to the message nor for that matter the response from any other governmental body.

The Warning forced him to change his own plans, instead of retiring he decided to keep his job until things settled out. But things didn’t settle out, they only got far worse. The people running the County Road Commission were a bunch of know nothing do nothing political appointees who were only there for a paycheck and free lunches paid for by the taxpayers. The County big shots had tried to make some grandiose plans but they were bunch of fat ass politicians who had very little time to do much of anything. If anyone knew all of the real resources that the Road Commission had it was Fred but they didn’t ask him, and he liked it better that way. He started talking to some of the regular employees that he worked with, people he knew, liked and trusted to a degree. It didn’t hurt that he could see the color of their status screens. Two days before the clock hit three hundred hours all of the big bosses disappeared for their own secret hideaways and families. That’s when Fred made his move. The County Road Commission Building was a huge old edifice that had been built well outside town where land was cheap. It was built in 1958 during the Cold War and as result, when it was built, it was constructed with two basements, the deepest basement was the County’s emergency bunker. It was stocked with hundreds of metal tins filled with survival crackers as well as other supplies. At the time, the County got such things for free from the Federal Government.

Periodically, during the Cold War supplies were replaced with newer things, this practice held true until the end of the Reagan Administration, after that the bunker was almost completely forgotten about. The administrators who had known about the bunker had retired or gone on to other things over the years. Fred was one of the very few people, still working there, that even knew about the second basement. After the Warning message he snuck down to the old bunker and brought up multiple samples of every kind of food still stored there. Using his position as a County employee he sent off the food samples to a food safety testing laboratory. He had his results back in six days. Almost seventy percent of the samples that he had sent off had tested as good. He had already been organizing things with his trusted fellow employees, family and friends. They had acquired additional supplies which were being temporarily stored at Fred’s nearby home. A few very old County work trucks, which hadn’t run in years, were quietly being repaired which would provide them with transportation until the five hundred hour mark.

They had collected bows, spears, and black powder weapons including two small cannons. Livestock was gathered and placed in the County’s garages which Fred’s group planned to use as barns. At the five hundred hour mark they thought that if anyone was prepared for what was coming, it was certainly them. There were one hundred and sixty-eight of them, ten cows, six horses, twenty pigs and forty-three chickens when the monsters showed up.

When Fred woke up that cold winter morning, all of the livestock had been dead for weeks and there were only ninety three people still alive, however he wasn’t sure if four of their number were still human.

While munching on a survival cracker, slathered with peanut butter, he heard some strange noises coming from in front of the building. He picked up his muzzle loading double barrel twenty gauge coach shotgun. It had cost him a small fortune after the first Warning but he thought of it as money well spent.

He went up the stairs followed by four other armed survivors, Fred disarmed three of his booby traps along the way. He didn’t have to disarm any of the other traps because they had all been sprung during the night. He walked past the beheaded corpse of a lion humanoid creature. The kind of monster that had killed so many of his friends and had made four of the survivors so terribly ill, an illness that was either changing or killing them as had happened to too many others. Fred prayed that they died and didn’t turn into a Human Night Stalker variant. He desperately didn’t want to put to sleep four more of his friends but he didn’t know what else he could do. They had slipped up with Jack White, the monsters’ first victim. When he had turned, Jack had killed four and infected two more before he was killed by Fred who had blindly fired his shotgun at his invisible foe.

The group of five survivors snuck into the northeast corner room of the first floor basement and standing far back from the broken basement windows, they cautiously peeked outside. What they saw astonished them. Two armored vehicles and two huge trucks were idling almost silently by the front gate. They saw a small group of humans and humanoids get out of one of the trucks to open the gate. Then all four of the vehicles very quietly, except for the sounds of the tanks’ clanking tracks, drove into the lot behind the County building.

The five observers quickly moved to a basement window that looked to the west, so that they could continue watching the strange people. They were shocked when they saw bird people walking down the ramp attached to the large armored trailer. Jean White a civil engineer and the recent widow of the deceased Jack White noticed that besides the vehicles flying the American Flag, they also had aloft a blue and white flag. The flag made her intensely curious; it didn’t look like the UN Flag. It took her several minutes but she located a pair of binoculars and focused them on one of the strange flags. She told the others, what she saw. Not knowing what else to do, they got very long piece of plastic pipe, tied a white towel to it and started waving it out one of the basement’s broken window. The five knew that without help all of them were dead so why not try and make contact with such impressive people.