“There’s gotta be one.” As he bagged up the chemicals he’d found under the sink, he explained. “This shelter was built in the early 1960s, Bay of Pigs era, right? And yeah, some of the smaller shelters of that time period didn’t have a back door, but something of this size, at this depth? Built by someone as wealthy as Uncle Prince Tedric’s King Daddy...? There might even be two alternative exits. Nothing fancy like the concrete stairs at the main entrance—I’m thinking it’d be more of a tube, a pipe. Probably large enough in circumference so that we won’t have to crawl through it—more of a walk-in-a-crouch type size. But considering our depth, and assuming it would be designed to be accessible for royalty of a variety of physical conditionings, I doubt it would have more than a moderate slope—” he angled his arm to demonstrate the mildness of the imagined pipe’s incline “—which means it’d have to be fairly long.”
Tasha had finished transferring the peanuts from jars to baggies, and was now storing them in the daypack he’d grabbed from the utility room. But her eyes lit up as she literally did that math. “And that means the escape hatch’s door to the surface is going to be far away from the pod’s main door.”
Where the hostiles were hunkered down, waiting for them to emerge.
“In theory, yeah.” Thomas nodded. With luck and stealth, he and Tasha would be able to sneak out without being detected.
“Which means they won’t know we’ve left, so they won’t follow us,” Tasha concluded. “Which is great. We’re not trapped anymore. But after we’re out of here...”
“Then what?” He finished for her, seeing her pensive concern and raising it an acknowledged grim reality as he gestured for her to follow him out of the kitchen, toward the utility room. “It’ll take us days to hike down to the airfield where we flew in, but we don’t want to go there, since someone—helo maintenance crew or car rental agency—is absolutely working with the team who’s hunting us. But okay, there’s a town nearby. If we bypass the airfield and find a warm place to hide—someone’s basement, maybe? Then we find a phone.” Assuming landlines weren’t down.
Assuming they could survive the days and nights it would take to descend the mountain.
The temperature had dropped considerably since they’d spent their first night together in that hide he’d built. It was no longer in the balmy fifties. And although they now had access to blankets to layer for warmth, the fleece was bulky and would make it harder for them to move undetected through the mountainous terrain.
Tasha followed him to the back of the little concrete-walled utility room. “FYI, I’ve explored every inch of this place, and I haven’t found anything remotely like an escape hatch.”
He motioned to the metal shelving unit that held a tool kit and other maintenance supplies. The wall behind it had a small, cast-iron door—like an entrance to an old-time coal room—just big enough for a man of his size to squeeze through.
“That?” Tash asked as he started clearing off the shelves to make them easier to move. “No, it’s barely even a closet. It’s only about four inches deep.”
“You already opened it?” he asked.
“Well, yeah,” she said. “One of the times you were out checking for messages. I wanted to make sure it wasn’t a secret passageway to Narnia.”
“So you moved this shelf?” he asked. “All by yourself?”
“Yup,” she told him, already starting to help him clear the shelves, carrying a pile of rags to the work counter over by the gun locker. “It’s not that heavy once it’s empty, and it seemed pretty obvious to me that either that little door led to nowhere, or the shelf was in front of it for a capital-R Reason. Like it contained a stash of jewels or burner cell phones or the recipe to the Queen’s Secret Sauce. But it was empty. Although you should definitely look, in case I’m wrong and it’s got—I don’t know—some kind of false back...?”
“I hope it does.” Thomas nodded as he lugged a heavy tool kit across the room. “A door like that, yet the interior’s only four inches deep...? God, I hope it’s the hatch. If it’s not, we’ll have to spend the next few hours banging on the walls.”
“Ooh, fun,” she said, grabbing an armload of umbrellas. “Oh, wait, no, you meant actually banging, as