Page 23 of Following Their Heart

“Thanks, professor.”

I chuckle and squeeze her hand. “I don’t mind the low clearance. It helps disguise the route to the shelter.” I switch my head to the other side so I don’t get a crick in my neck. I look at the rock walls and ceiling as if I’m seeing them for the first time, and I realize how shoddy it all looks. “Don’t worry. This tunnel is sound, even though it doesn’t look it. It’s by design. The other two ways in are riddled with booby traps. If anyone goes in the mine looking for you, they’re not coming out again. I can promise you that.”

For a while, the only sounds are the scuffing of our boots in the dirt. After a while, Cora squeezes my hand and says, “Thanks, Jud.”

“For what?”

“For bringing me here today. For letting me tag along. I hope I’m not slowing you down too much. I know you have a ton to do.”

“My biggest job is taking care of you,” I say. That’ll always be my biggest job. That and taking care of any kids we’re lucky enough to have on this mountain.

“I’m sorry I’m so much work.”

“Hey.” I don’t like the insecurity in her voice. I stop and drag her into my arms. Her helmet clunks against my chest, and the light practically blinds me, but I don’t give a shit. “You’re not work, honey. You’re a pleasure. You got that?” I rock her gently side to side, soothing her worries, I hope, and hating myself for making her have them in the first place. “You’re the best thing to ever happen to us, and not just since Week Zero. You’re the best thing, period.” I mean every word.

My finger under her chin makes her look at me. I slip her helmet off and let hers and mine drop onto a pile of dirt. With our heads free and clear, I kiss her soundly.

“If it wasn’t for me, you wouldn’t have to do all this.” Our headlamps now send competing beams in opposite directions, causing a diffuse glow around us. She circles her hand in a gesture I understand to encompass more than just the mine. “All this preparing for an invasion. You could just be living your lives like normal.” In the tight, rock-encompassed space, her voice is close and clear. I hear the regret in it, and I won’t tolerate it.

“If it wasn’t for you, all we’d be doing is going through the motions of surviving. Without you, we had no reason to survive. You’re the purpose we’ve all been looking for. You’re our reason for living.”

Jesus. I’m laying it out for her, and it’s like flaying off my own skin. But she needs to know. I can’t have her thinking any part of this mess is a problem we’d rather not have. If she came with a thousand problems, we’d tackle each one cheerfully just to have one more day with her.

She looks up at me with wide, wet eyes. Christ, she’s beautiful.

I clear my throat and reach for our helmets. “Come on. We’re almost to the tricky part.”

The half-way point is a tunnel entrance camouflaged so you can’t see it. It lies behind a knee-high slope of what looks like loose gravel against the side of the tunnel. We designed the pile to look like it was just extra material that no one bothered to excavate out of the mine. But it’s an illusion. The rocks are cemented to look loose, but they’re solid. They’re also not flush against the wall, as they appear at first glance. You climb the slope, and when you’re at the top, you look down and you see a couple of narrow, stepped platforms between the back of the slope and the tunnel wall.

You step down the platforms and pull aside a curtain painted to look like the rock and dirt the mines are carved out of. Behind the curtain is a three-foot wide, four-foot high, buttressed hole you’ve got to crawl through to continue on to the shelter. When we installed the shelter, we used a lower passage to bring in all the materials and to get in and out. When construction was complete, we built the traps, leaving this passage with its narrow, disguised bottleneck as the only way in.

Cora navigates the obstacle with ease, and after five more minutes of walking, we arrive at another fake pile of gravel. This one is a small, pyramid-shaped plywood structure with pea stone glued to make it look like a solid mound. You lift the lighter-than-it-looks “cover” to expose the hatch to the bomb shelter. With the cover up and latched onto the trigger that will lower it once we’re inside, I yank on the bar to open the hatch. The lid sighs open on nearly soundless hydraulic hinges, revealing a manhole lit with yellow emergency lighting.

“I’ll go first.” I climb down the twenty-foot ladder and into a staging area lined with ballistic-proof concrete. When Cora reaches the bottom, I point out the shower head for rinsing off radiation and other contaminants, and the hazmat suits hanging on the wall.

Across from the shower is a steel handle that looks like the steering wheel of a boat. Before it’ll budge, you have to enter the correct code on the security panel. I tap in the code and turn the handle. It takes some strength, and when the lock unseals, you can hear the hermetic hiss of air escaping.

“The shelter’s designed to push air out upon opening the portal. Nothing gets in that way. Germs, radiation. You’re protected from it all.”

“This is crazy,” Cora says as I push the door inward. It opens like a portal you’d see leading from section to section in a submarine. In fact, I think it’s exactly that. The manufacturer that designed and sold these things was right down the road from a base where they built military-grade sub parts. “How did you get all this down here?”

“Took some doing,” I tell her. “But we didn’t have to dig any of this out. The tunnel we came in through is the highest tunnel in the mines. This is the next level down. The tunnels down here were much bigger, so we used those for construction. Once everything was in place and welded together, we just backfilled the lower tunnel to create a new floor to the upper, and either caved in or boobytrapped every other way in.”

“Sounds complicated.”

I shrug. “Had a lot of manpower to make it happen.”

“Someone had to plan it all. Was that you?”

“Rev and Doc helped.”

She studies me in the doorway to the shelter. “You know, Jud. I think you might actually be smarter than you look.”

I bark a laugh. “I have my moments. Unfortunately, they’re few and far between.”

She snorts as I step through the portal into the shelter and swipe at the lighting panel. Harsh, LED lighting floods the space. Following behind me, she says, “Okay, now Iknowyou’re an imposter. Where’s the real Jud? The oneIknow is too full of himself to make jokes about his shortcomings.”

Once she clears the portal, I push the door shut and spin the handle. We’re sealed in, just like she will be when she comes down here with Grim.

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