Gone (Michael Bennett)

leave.”
    McMurphy sighed as he put the pipe away.
    “Oh, well. Different strokes and all that,” he said, standing and yawning. “Good night, now. Get the kiddies up early, and we’ll leave at first light.”

CHAPTER 101
     
    MARY CATHERINE HAD JUST laid her head down on one of the bomb shelter’s bunk beds when the beeping sound started.
    She went out into the hall area to find McMurphy running like mad toward the front of the compound.
    “What is it?”
    “Motion detector!” he yelled, more animated than Mary Catherine had ever seen him. “Outside perimeter’s been breached! I knew it. Sector B. It was the CB. They must have picked it up. Dammit! Just like the damn cops. These freaks must have ways of scanning for radio signals.”
    She followed him as he ran into the gun room and spun the combo on the green locker’s Master lock. Inside, shining with gun oil, was an arsenal. Tactical shotguns, scoped hunting rifles, several M-16s. McMurphy pulled out one of the automatic rifles and slipped in a magazine with a loud clacking sound. He threw ten or so other magazines into a bag and tossed the bag and rifle over his shoulder.
    “What are you doing?” Mary Catherine asked.
    “If they find one of the ventilation shafts, they could do anything. Plug it up, smoke us out. Didn’t I see on the news that they’re using some sort of poison-gas chemical weapon? They’ll kill us in a heartbeat. I’m going outside to make sure that doesn’t happen.”
    McMurphy started going toward the back of the bus complex.
    “Isn’t the front door the other way?” Mary Catherine said.
    “I can’t go out the front. Are you crazy? I need to go out through the tunnels.”
    “The tunnels?”
    “I forgot to tell you about them,” he said as he pulled up the handle of a door at the rear of the main corridor. On its other side was a dirt tunnel about four feet tall, strung with lightbulbs.
    “I’ve been digging tunnels for years and years. Out the back of the complex, all through this hill. It’s actually what I did in Vietnam. Cleared the tunnels. They called us tunnel rats. The ones I built are just like the ones I saw in Cu Chi. Hell, better. Just shut the back door behind me. No, wait. Dammit, almost forgot.”
    He suddenly ran back toward the gun room, where he began flipping through a CD-filled shoe box.
    “Give me five,” he said, suddenly handing Mary Catherine a disk, “and then put this on the CD setup there and crank it!”
    “What? Why?”
    “I got speakers strung up in the trees all along the slope, strobe lights. We used to use it for parties, drop a couple of tabs and go on nature walks. We were really into mind expansion for a few years. Anyway, we can use it now. It’ll wake these murdering bastards right up! Ha, damn right this’ll teach them!
    “Remember, lock the door behind me, now,” the merry prankster called as he ran off and disappeared around a corner of the tunnel.
    Mary Catherine closed the bus door behind him before she looked at the CD case.
    AC/DC.
    Highway to Hell.

CHAPTER 102
     
    IT TOOK THEM TWENTY minutes to find the clearing with the double-wide trailer. Looking down at it from the rim of a ridge, Vida found the pale, low structure, sitting there all by itself in the center of the flattened hillside clearing, strangely iconic. Like a temple. Like a tomb.
    It’s a tomb, all right , she thought, going down the pitch-black slope on the rocky, narrow trail behind Eduardo, Estefan, and Jorge. The Bennett Tomb.
    It was when they neared the bottom of the trail that she felt it. There was something subtle and subliminal, like a kind of ground hum in the air. Or is it me? she thought. Some kind of pressure change on her eardrum from the altitude?
    When the sound came a moment later out of the dead silence, she fell immediately to her knees, thinking she’d literally been hit with something, a rocket or a bolt of lightning. Then, from all around her, the buzz-saw electric guitar chord repeated again, speeding faster as drums kicked in.
    Living easy, living free, season ticket on a one-way ride , shrieked a rough, joyously unhinged voice.
    Rock music? But from where? she wondered, trying to think. She scanned around. Were there speakers in the trees? In the ground?
    The first “Highway to Hell” refrain had just started when the lights came on. Floodlighting from the trees beside the trailer suddenly bathed the entire slope they were standing on, completely exposing them.