Hell Happened Read Online Free Page B

there was some banter around the table, but tonight the joy of being alive was muted. Tony had fit in pretty well with the group, he played with electronics, and while Jeff was a pain in the ass with counter-views on seemingly everything, he was a good mechanic and now the two of them were missing.
    “Well, the sun has gone down so no one is going out tonight,” Jerry finally said as he cut into the bundt cake. “But what we can do is put up a lookout for them.”
    Jerry, when building the shelter, had spent a lot of time working on how the air would move around the enclosure. He had the main living area, kitchen, dining and bathroom on the main floor and a stairway down to a cellar where there was a storage area with the washer and dryer, central air and filtering set up. He also had a few other essentials for keeping his hole in the ground warm and dry.
    Jerry hadn’t started out to build a fortress, he started just to dig a hole and that turned into a shelter. The shelter was meant for himself and no one else.
    ~      ~       ~
    Everything underground was a slap in the face to any aesthetic architect. The place had no square corners. It was haphazardly put together by someone who had a rough idea and just kept building on it and changing as he went along. Every wall was insulated from the ground with #15 felt, some waterproofing tar and concrete, but the concrete varied in thickness and, where it wasn’t covered by barn wood or plywood, the finish of the concrete was damned ugly.
    The walls that were covered by wood, the wood that had been salvaged off the old barn, and were of varying degrees of age and quality. The lighting throughout was all strings of LED lights which, in Jerry’s mind, gave the place a cheery appeal and saved on electricity.
    Jerry had built this place for himself and had not expected the end of the world as he knew it to be bringing him visitors. The visitors who did come, the ones now at the table with him, didn’t complain. There were worse places they could be.
    A spiral staircase, made from welded plow parts and leftover steel, led upward to three more small rooms which had been turned into sleeping areas now that Jerry wasn’t going to be using them for his hobbies or for storing stuff. They all had inflatable beds with a pillow, sheets and blankets. There were Rubbermaid storage totes for clothes instead of dressers and a radio in each room. The radio antenna was alligator clipped to a wire that went outside and brought in pretty good reception.
    Jerry and Randy had slept in one room, Kellie and Monica in another, Mike, Tony and Eddie in the third. Jeff had bunked down on the couch and Terrill felt most comfortable sleeping in the cellar. It was crowded, but no one was complaining about being out of the Alabama weather every night.
    Above those three bedrooms, at the top of the staircase, were the air ducts for the return of warm air to the cellar and introduction of outside air when the inside air got stuffy. Up there Jerry had put an escape hatch for no other reason that he didn’t want there to be just one opening to his shelter. It wasn’t easy to get to and was covered with a manhole cover he’d picked up at an auction, so it wasn’t easy to open either.
    From the outside, the cover was hidden by shrubbery and only the most serious searcher or luckiest wanderer could have stumbled across it.
    ~      ~       ~
    Jerry suggested that if Jeff and Tony did come back after dark, they’d probably be in a hurry. “I want someone sitting out through that hatch all night. We’ll do it in shifts,” he said. Kellie got up and retrieved the deck of cards from the living room. She’d guessed that everyone was going to whine about whichever order Jerry chose, so drawing cards was the fairest way. Jerry gave her a wink that said he would have suggested something similar to her idea. His favorite was drawing toothpicks.
    She spread them out on the table and everyone