FBR chapter 3 scene 3

Hi chicklets! Foreign Body Reaction, Chapter 3 scene 3 is below. Enjoy. As usual it is straight out of my head and only spell checked. As you know I can't read what I wrote for a little while, it makes me CRAZY. Too late you say, well, ya got that right. I'm going to go work on my bow now.

Foreign Body Reaction, Alan McNeill
Chapter 3 Scene 3

It took Ben less than fifteen minutes to find his way past the manifolds on the second level. The three lines had been cut into the very rock of the hill, and each small bore was less than three feet high. At what first appeared to be a power cabinet inset into the rock there were two cabinet latches, top and bottom, that allowed the entire cabinet to pivot out to the left. This allowed technicians access to the wiring from this side, but past the wiring, was another tunnel, this one larger, lit by dim bluish LEDs recessed in the ceiling.

Ben squeezed by the wiring looms – careful to keep one hand in his pocket. He remembered the electrician's basic rule, don't let electricity cross your heart. If you're shocked, it is best, if one can say it is ever good to be shocked, it is best to be connected to earth by some path that does not go through the heart muscle. The wiring was top notch, no exposed hot wires on the looms, no frayed wires. Ben was through in a moment, standing in the large tunnel. Grabbing one of the heavier ground cables he swung the cabinet almost closed.

The pipes turned and followed the tunnel for less than one feet, where one turned left, deeper into the hillside, and the other two continued. A steel door stood beside the divergent pipe. It was a pressure door, but not locked. Ben spun the steel wheel and the door unsealed with a slight whoosh. Ben entered.

Signs warned in several languages against smoking or open flame of any kind. Ben found himself is a large cavern, looking through a thick plastic wall above a bank of mechanical control switches. Light glowed from above, small LED lower power lights. Through the plastic windows Ben found himself looking down at a thick crude sea of oil below him. It was enormously large, the ceiling of the cave curving above him. Passages drilled through the rock were canals of oil leading off from the main pool in front of him. Ben stood there and realized what MIL meant. Millions. Not millions of gallons, millions of barrels.

One hour later Ben had visited two other holding caverns, farther along the tunnel. Each of the three pipes fed lakes separated by over one half mile. The second one was diesel fuel or jet fuel, but by the slight odor permeating the rock, it was one of the other. The third was gasoline. It was a smaller cavern, but still enormous.

Unfortunately that was the end of the tunnel. Ben was wet, his pants were wet where he peed himself, and the air temperature felt like 40 degrees and damp. His damp shirt wasn't up to the task and he was chilled to the bone. Worse, there was no obvious exit on this side.

Ben returned the length of the tunnel and looked for any tool lockers, storage closets, anything. Workers had to have built this, and they would have had to have lunch, brought tools, clothing, something. And, they had to have had a way in and out.

Ben knew that when the Global Security returned for him that they would find their way down here. He had to get out before that happened.

He had about given up when he found himself back at the rear of the power cabinet below the shed. He noticed the fine rock that had been crushed and left of the floor of the bored tunnel. It is seemed more disturbed away from the cabinet, away from the storage lakes of fuel. He followed the scuff marks to where they turned into an alcove, but the alcove had no outlet. There was no light here and he was ten yards off the main tunnel.

Ben got to his knees and followed the scuff marks with his fingers. The came right to the rear of the alcove where larger boulders rose to meet the roof of the tunnel. It appeared to be an older excavation that had collapsed. The floor and walls of this small alcove where not smooth like the bored walls of the tunnel. Perhaps it had been blasted to seal it off, thought Ben.

As he was turning, Ben felt a small tickle of air across his cheek, coming from the back of the alcove. Gently he climbed the precarious pile to the source of the air. cool air was moving into the wall, not from it. Ben found the crack and widened it. He scrambled for better footing and removed many small rocks, widening the hole. Three or four giant boulders had wedged down at the back of the alcove but they left a three foot section that had filled with loose debris. In a few moments Ben made a hole large enough to safely crawl through, though as he did, he could feel the weight of the mountain pressing down on him. he shook his head at his imagination, but did not linger between the giant boulders that formed the support for his hole. He was through and into the dark on the other side.

There was no dampness here, and the floor was level. Except for the dim bit of light permeating from the main tunnel through the small passage way he had just made, it was dark, very dark.

Ben moved forward slowly.

He tripped over something soft and there was a flutter in the darkness. He cursed. While Ben had left everything from his cache behind under brush outside the fenced compound, for fear of setting of some sort of metal detector, he hoped he had been incomplete. Sometimes his Altoid's can emergency tin didn't close very well. He kept two rubber bands around it, but occasionally he found a fish hook or water proof match had escaped. He hoped!

He felt in his rear pocket and felt nothing but dirt from scrambling through the tunnel he had unblocked. Well, and his pants were wet too. He turned cargo pocket of the Carhardt jeans nearly inside out, letting the lint scatter. In the seam near the bottom he found one shortened match, slightly damp.

Holding his breath, Ben bent to the floor, feeling for a dry area to strike. The waxed, strike anywhere match flared on the first scratch. Ben shouted and stepped back in horror. The match flickered dangerously low. Ben forced himself to be still. He looked anywhere but down and in a moment saw rack of mag light flash lights clamped into a charging rack. He made his way carefully to them, the match burning his fingers just as he reached the rack. The first two flash lights were dim, but he left them on. The third light had retained its charge, and it cut a powerful beam illuminated what now was revealed to be a room. Shelving and lockers flanked the rear wall of the room, dented and twisted from the blast that had sealed the room. Ben steeled himself and slowly turned.

Fuck! There were six of them in all. The cold dry air had hastened their drying, their mummification. They were wearing overalls with name labels but no company name. Ben didn't want to touch them, but he was freezing, and even though he was gagging on the enormity of all of this, he was thirsty and hungry too.

He pulled a bench upright in front of the twisted locker bay. sat for a moment on a bench in front of the lockers. He guessed that none of the men had survived the blast that sealed the passage way. Dried dark rivulets traced back to eye sockets, ears, mouths, etc. They hadn't had time to die of starvation or the cold or lack of water. The had died where they were standing, their bodies smashed by the charge that had buried them, and kept them quiet about this place, forever.

Ben set on the bench, shivering, his head in his hand. That was what all this was about. Beyond money, in this new world, fuel was the source of power, political power, and someone, some part of the power elite had gone to a lot of trouble to build, and hide and kill to keep hidden, the secret of this stored fuel. Ben couldn't even think what a billion gallons of fuel what represent in a world that had long pasted peak oil and was headed down into a very much lower energy future. Certainly it didn't represent but a drop compared to what used to be consumed at the peak of oil production in July of 2006. No it would feed a nation or fuel a military, but it would do all those things for a much smaller group of people. People so highly placed that they could cause this to be built, hidden, and fuel diverted to fill it.

I am so fucked, thought Ben as he looked around. One more life meant nothing to these people. They had probably planned to kill him as soon as he went off track today to follow the baby mountain lion. As sorry as he felt for himself, Ben wondered how long Jacob and Emily would have to live. He had seen the woman pistol whip Jacob. Jacob was certain to be disposed of once they found Ben, probably Emily too. Anyone who knew about this was a speck of dirt on a clean operation. Everyone would be dispensable to keep a secret of this size secret.

Ben felt the breeze continuing to move through the chamber. He stood and followed the air to a ventilation shaft above lockers. The locker set was twisted but had been bolted to the rock floor of the cave and was sturdy. Maybe a way out. First though.

Ben pulled open one of the locker doors and found men's street clothes inside. The other locker doors were too damaged to open, but been found a rack of picks, shovels, and mining tools at the end of the locker. The noise was terrific, but Ben had to take the chance. Each of the doors gave up with horrible screeching that echoed out and down the tunnel. Ben cringed but managed to get all of them open. Most of the men had been shorter than him, but square built. Ben guessed that like most heavy labor, illegal aliens from Latin America had been used to build the tunnels. He couldn't bring himself to undress the corpses that lay scattered on the floor, but the lockers did yield Levi jeans, work shirts, jackets and in one case, good hiking boots that actually fit.

There were lunches, and thermos bottles but the food had become mummified too. The only jeans big enough for Ben's waist were too short, but it worked out. However he couldn't find any socks in the lockers. He didn't dare hike without socks and he still had no idea where he would go if he escaped. Now he just felt urgent, driven to get dry, dressed, warm and get out of here. He sucked his breath in and murmured an apology to the largest of the men on the floor. He pulled of the boots and reversed the socks off over the corpse's feet. Thank good the leg didn't come off thought Ben. He was close to gagging as it was.

Ben was warm and dressed now. He had overcome his initial nausea and gone through all the men's pockets. He collected little of value. He had their names though, ID, fake though it probably was. He gathered their names and about two hundred dollars between them. He also found one excellent Gerber three and one half inch folding knife. He put that in his pocket, the money in his levis.

He made a small knapsack out of another coat and filled it with extra shirts and the men's identifications and climbed up onto the locker bank.

He had felt the air moving up a ventilation shaft. A small set of steel rungs worked up the shaft, then there was blackness. Ben climbed up the shaft. it was a steel pipe about fourteen inches in diameter and he was able to make it up without much problem. Tight, but not claustrophobic. Ben reached the top and found himself looking down a right angle square ventilation shaft that ran horizontally for less than fifty feet. At the end he could see dim light.

The louvers crashed out on the fifth kick. There had just been room enough in the horizontal shaft for been to reverse himself to put his feet forward. The louvers were overlapped to prevent seeing anything, and Ben worried that he might be exiting on a cliff.

The louver had fallen out but he could still see it, and now light flooded the shaft. He was on a hillside, facing west he thought, and he was in a depression that was hidden from the rest of the hill below. He worked his way out and crawled to the edge of the bowl. Thick berry bramble was visible below, but here the salal berry carpeted below the Douglas Fir, and he was able to stand and breathe.

Ben knew that if he was able to find his way out, they would find him shortly too. He really didn't feel like pissing his pants again so he began to move off down the hill. The blackberry vines at the border of the tree line presented a problem as they always grow thickest at the sunlight edges of the big trees, but it just took Ben a few moments to find a deer trail through and then to scramble down the remaining few yards to an old logging road.

“Took you long enough,” a laconic voice drawled, “you make a piss poor deer.”

Ben looked up and a smile broke across his face. "Mark!"