2020: Emergency Exit (24 page)

In the end we had a twenty-five-by-forty-foot main area with about an eight foot ceiling, two small rooms about 150 square feet each with six foot ceilings, and a small ascending tunnel that was only about five feet tall but nearly forty yards long with a back entrance to our best vantage point of the area. It was about 150 yards west to the Roaring River from our front door, most of it under the cover of trees except for the last thirty yards or so, where we had to cross the main path to get to water. That was our point of greatest concern.

Our path came out next to a large pool, a small waterfall, and another smaller pool above a giant waterfall. The smaller pool had two large rocks hanging over it, with a small natural shelter carved underneath. Danny sank four nylon fish cages to the bottom of the pool beneath that rock, well hidden, and we used those cages for ‘refrigeration.’ We cleaned whatever food needed to be cleaned there as well. It was a natural ‘kitchen.’ Beyond the kitchen and the couple holes we’d dug as restrooms in the woods, the rest of our Horseshoe Park existence was confined to the cave.

We were a ways from the center of town, about a seven-mile walk, but we couldn’t risk staying any closer. From where we were we could see every helicopter come in and every drone pass overhead. It would be difficult for anyone to sneak up on us from below and impossible to come in from above. Our “backyard” was nothing more than steep, rugged rock. It was called Bighorn Mountain for the terrain. Sheep loved it. People not so much.

Given the circumstances, life in Horseshoe Park was near perfect until the last week of November, when two helicopters landed at the base of the waterfall and deposited forty men a little more than a mile west, between us and the Alpine Visitor Center. They set up a camp where the pavement and dirt roads converged, at what we knew as the Endovalley campsite and picnic area. The helicopters made several more runs, depositing loads and loads of supplies, and then they were gone.

It seemed the soldiers below and west of us were going to be there for the long haul. They set up small tent-like shelters around the existing main building and started chopping down trees for firewood. Chasm Falls right next to them provided a water supply, and with all the elk in the valley they had plenty of food. They wouldn’t need to come our way. At least that much was a relief.

They seemed to have been placed there for no other reason than to guard one of the last routes out. At some point, we figured we’d have to deal with someone wandering around our space, either for curiosity’s sake or because we had drawn their attention. In any case, we knew if we hadn’t arrived here when we had and made all our supply runs, we’d be locked in a cold cave with little chance of survival. Timing and preparation were indeed everything.
Okay…and luck.

In one day we’d gone from unfortunate but acceptable circumstances to being stuck in a bad spot with bad neighbors. Unfortunately, it didn’t take long for the soldiers to have a direct impact on us. The very first night they arrived we had a visitor.

FORTY: “The Visitor”

It was a squirrel. But it scared the crap out of us. It turned out we had destroyed his nut cache, and he was trying to rebuild it. He found out quickly he wasn’t welcome, but the rodent served as a clear sign our defenses weren’t impenetrable, putting our nerves on high alert. Before the soldiers arrived, we would have found it funny. Not now.
Squirrels
.
Dang animals.
However, we were relieved the critter didn’t even know we were in the cave when he entered. It seemed we’d done a satisfactory job of limiting our visible existence.

It was nice we didn’t have to build a fire to stay warm. At this point there would have been no way to conceal it. We only ran the space heaters in the two sleeping rooms to keep the heat sources as far from the doors as possible. We had collected about sixty new car batteries and figured each battery could power our four space heaters and two lamps for a week or two, running nonstop. At worst we had twenty weeks of heat, at best double to triple that. It should be more than enough. It would have to be.

We had tons of pasta, rice, crackers, chips, dressings, sauces, M&M’s, and soup. We were well stocked on the essentials. You could barely call what we were doing “roughing it.” The concern was the cooking smell. We used the propane grill just for boiling, fearful any cooked meat scent could be carried down to the base of the mountain and towards the enemy camp. We weren’t going to be cooking any meat. That left us with summer sausage and beef jerky.

For most of us, this would be the first Thanksgiving in decades without actual turkey—not sure there’s any in turkey jerky—the first time we wouldn’t have to fight a tryptophan-induced nap while pretending to care about another Lions loss.

This week had always been the nation’s biggest shopping week, with Marigold Monday, Technicolor Tuesday, Whiteout Wednesday, and Black Friday. Retail lost respect for Thanksgiving and family time nearly a decade ago. The entire week had since morphed into one long drawn-out Black Friday. This was the week people who didn’t need anything went out in droves, at all hours, to buy it. I certainly didn’t miss the chaos. Quite frankly, it was a valid reason why the rest of the world wouldn’t miss America. Sometimes we acted like idiots!

Then again, in times like these, a little materialism was a helpful and welcome convenience. We had a small television, powered by another big battery, in the back room of the cave mostly for Emily’s entertainment, with hundreds of kid-friendly DVDs. And we had our shortwave radio. We hadn’t picked up any new messages, but that didn’t keep us from trying to find one.

Grandpa Dan attached a forty-eight-inch monitor to the wall next to the front entrance of the cave. From it we ran a wire through a small hole in the base of the entrance, through a deep but narrow trench, and up the inside of a tall hollowed-out tree. Cameron climbed the tree one night and attached two quarter-sized, high-tech cameras to the highest point he could reach.
Valuable gifts from Wes
. Both had infrared capability and incredible night vision resolution. One pointed toward the entrance to the cave, giving us a wide-angle view of the area within sixty or so yards of the entrance. The other was a remote-controlled camera panning from the waterfall immediately to our right—150 yards or so away—to the limits of the Endovalley base—below us, and a mile to the right—all the way over towards Estes Park. The screen and cameras were powered by their own battery source, and each camera view took up half the screen on the monitor. That was the extent of our exterior security. No one was going to find those cameras.
Other than maybe a vengeful squirrel
.

Our initial suspicion was that the men below us were Captain Eddie’s. He knew we were up here somewhere. Surely he’d regrouped, assembled a small army, and managed to get his men stationed here.

After a couple nights and early mornings of scouting, Danny determined that wasn’t the case. There was no sign of the giant captain. The troop below seemed to be entirely from the Middle East. No Africans. While that news, in and of itself, was cause for some relief, it did beg the question: Where was Eddie?

FORTY-ONE: “The New America”

After several weeks of frenetic construction, the new Qi Jia government had fortified and completely shut off Colorado from the other states. The Great Wall of Colorado was rapidly nearing completion. Huge iron gates were set up at every main entry road into the state. Smaller roads were redirected along the walls to the larger entrances and anywhere from twenty to forty soldiers were encamped at each gate.

Qi Jia set up its command headquarters in Denver. They hadn’t been able to penetrate NORAD in Colorado Springs, but there had been no missile activity there. Either there was no one inside, or there were no missiles left to fire. Qi Jia’s forces had wired all the area silo openings with explosives, just in case. If they were opened, they would blow up whatever was inside, providing an entry into the otherwise impenetrable Cheyenne Mountain Bunker tunnels. Beyond NORAD, there was no threat to the Denver command center. No one anywhere else in the world would be able to attack without it being visible from far away. Any launched attack would first have to make it past Qi Jia’s missile and military posts up and down the coastlines, as well as across the northern and southern borders of the former U.S. The Seven commanders didn’t believe there was a force still out there in the world with this capability. They were permanently secure in Colorado, and this fortress, here in the middle of America, was the idyllic perch to rule from.

Qi Jia’s troops had completed two tours back and forth across each state and a large portion of Canada. Qi Jia had no real interest in Canada, but went five hundred miles north of the border in their sweep to cut off any fleeing Americans and wipe out whatever residential presence remained. Their men pushed up towards Alaska where they met up with the Russians. The Russians had come in from the west and worked their way south and east. When the two forces met they each turned back. The Qi Jia army headed south towards Denver and the Russian forces spread out across the former state of Alaska.

Most of Qi Jia’s naval fleet had been assembled down the former Southern California and Baja coastlines. That fleet consisted of preserved American ships—a half-dozen destroyers, an aircraft carrier, and a few dozen former Coast Guard vessels. The third wave claimed hundreds of thousands of casualties on the American side. Impressively few from the Qi Jia army. The entire plan had been executed nearly flawlessly. In America at least. The same couldn’t be said for back home. Other than Mexico, the native lands of The Seven commanders weren’t at all supportive.

Word had spread rapidly across the continents of what these seven leaders had done, and most of the world was furious. Qi Jia’s attack on America would have been hard enough to endorse on its own. The United States’ commitment to assisting the needy was generally and genuinely appreciated by many nations. America’s defensive countermeasures were understandable, but had tragically decimated the planet. And it was that decimation that had the planet vowing to cut off the seven commanders. They had sacrificed a billion innocent lives selfishly and unapologetically. That was unacceptable. The commanders and their men were now outcasts, powerless back home, and would be imprisoned or killed if they ever tried to return to their native countries. That, admittedly, was an unfortunate result to the Qi Jia commanders. They had incorrectly anticipated having more support from the countries America hit back. But, in truth, it was also inconsequential. The commanders had no intent of returning to their homelands, or allowing any of their men to do so. Thanks to America’s counterattack there were no countries on the planet with nuclear arsenals or military numbers greater than theirs was here. This was their home now. North America was all theirs.

While true that there were no stronger forces left in the world, there were a few countries that were not targeted by any of the attacks or counterattacks. The United States still had a few strong military allies in the United Kingdom, France, Brazil and Australia. Those nations began immediately broadcasting to any American tourists—or survivors who could escape—that they would be granted asylum and even dual citizenship in their countries. Israel, the United Arab Emirates and even Switzerland had similarly pledged their financial support to surviving Americans.
So much for neutrality, eh?
Qi Jia couldn’t afford for their own troops to know about the sentiments back home. It could easily divide the ranks and derail the grand agenda.

Qi Jia had successfully managed to take over the entire American communication grid. From Denver they controlled every message on the airwaves. They had traced a few military codes to a remote part of Montana and killed the source. No one in America was going to be telling their soldiers, or any remaining Americans, any message other than the one The Seven commanders wanted out there. “We are almost done. America must pay for killing our families. Keep up the great work!”

Down the road, those few countries America hadn’t retaliated against would have to be dealt with. The Seven commanders worried that splitting their focus and forces now could undermine their mission. “North America first, then the world.” But these other nations were giving them plenty of cause for concern. They had built walls along their borders, similar to the one around Colorado, and had sealed themselves off from their neighbors. They were communicating with each other and could soon begin planning together and pooling their resources. They were the only countries that still had airports, militaries, and functional economies. That was unacceptable. There could be no other world power. Should they be allowed to exist and someday merge, they just might pose a threat to Qi Jia and potentially try to take America back. The Seven commanders needed to make sure that never happened. Taking over NORAD’s bunker, and Hawaii, were the means to that end.

The Qi Jia government had re-divided the fifty former United States and Canada into eight new, more regional states: New York, Florida, Texas, Dakota, Colorado, Alaska, Canada, and Washington. Each nation owned a share of the Qi Jia Capitol, Colorado. Russia had moved two hundred thousand troops into Alaska a few days before the first wave of chemical attacks. When most of Russia was destroyed by the American retaliation launch, the coastal land from Alaska to the Washington state line became “Alaska” and belonged to Russia exclusively. The Pacific Northwest was now merely “Washington” and belonged to North Korea. Mexico laid claim to “Texas”—formerly New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, California and the Longhorn state. China took the rest of “Canada,” Japan took the upper Midwest—“Dakota,” Libya took the southeast—“Florida,” and Colombia took the northeast—“New York.”

For now, the Qi Jia government used the former American names for mapping purposes, but that too would eventually change. The leaders fashioned themselves as modern-day Columbuses or the Pilgrims, discovering a “new land” that was already occupied and taking it over as if it wasn’t. A small command base was set up in a central city in each of the states—the only cities left intact and with electrical grids—and a communication line was set up exclusively between Denver and each of those command cities: New York City, Miami, Dallas, Chicago, Anchorage, Toronto, and Seattle. All other communication on the continent was restricted to proximal two-way radios and handwritten, air-transported messages. It was far more primitive than they liked but necessary due to the threat of international communication.