Phantoms

five-pound, vacuum sealed cans of nitrogen-preserved milk powder, freeze-dried fruits and vegetables, freeze-dried soup, powdered eggs, cans of honey, drums of whole grain. An air mattress. And much more. Jake had been busy.
    The first underground room led to another. In this one, there was a naturally formed hole in the floor, about ten inches in diameter, and odd noises were rising out of it. Whispering voices. Menacing laughter. Kale almost turned and ran, but then he realized that he was hearing nothing more sinister than the chuckling of running water. An underground stream. Jake Johnson had lowered one-inch rubber tubing into the natural well and had rigged a hand pump beside it.
    All the comforts of home.
    Kale decided that Johnson was not merely cautious. The man was obsessed .
    On another day at the end of that same summer, late in August, Kale returned to the mountain property. To his surprise, the cave mouth—which was about four feet high and five feet wide—was no longer visible. Johnson had created an effective barrier of vegetation to conceal the entrance to his hideaway.
    Kale pushed through the brush, careful not to trample it.
    He had brought his own flashlight this time. He crawled through the mouth of the cave, stood up once he was inside, followed the tunnel down three doglegs—and suddenly came up against an unexpected dead end. He knew there should be one more short doglegged passageway and then the first of the large caves. Instead, there was only a wall of limestone, a flat face of it that sealed off the rest of the caverns.
    For a moment Kale stared at the barrier, confused. Then he examined it closely, and in a few minutes he found the hidden release. The rock was actually a thin faзade that had been bonded with epoxy to a door that Johnson had cleverly mounted in the natural frame between the final dogleg and the first of the room-size caves.
    That day in August, marveling over the hidden door, Kale decided that he would take the retreat for his own if the need ever arose. After all, maybe these survivalists were on to something. Maybe they were right. Maybe the fools out there would try to blow up the world some day. If so, Kale would get to this retreat first, and when Johnson came through his cleverly hidden door, Kale would simply blow him away.
    That thought pleased him.
    It made him feel shrewd. Superior.
    Thirteen months later, he had, much to his surprise and horror, seen the end of the world coming. The end of his world. Locked up in the county jail, charged with murder, he knew where he could go if he could only manage to escape: into the mountains, to the caves. He could stay up there for several weeks, until the cops finally stopped looking for him in and around Santa Mira County.
    Thank you, Jake Johnson.
     
    Jake Johnson …
    Now, in the stolen yellow Datsun, with the county jail only a few minutes behind him, Kale heard about Johnson on the radio. As he listened, he began to smile. Fate was on his side.
    After escaping, his biggest problem was disposing of his jail clothes and getting properly outfitted for the mountains. He hadn’t been quite sure how he would do that.
    As soon as he heard the radio reporter say that Jake Johnson was dead—or at least out of the way, up there in Snowfield—Kale knew he would go straight to Johnson’s house, here in Santa Mira. Johnson had no family. It was a safe, temporary hiding place. Johnson wasn’t exactly Kale’s size, but they were close enough so that Kale could swap his jail uniform for the most suitable items in the deputy’s closet.
    And guns. Jake Johnson, survivalist that he was, would surely have a gun collection somewhere in the house.
    The deputy lived in the same one-story, three-bedroom house that he had inherited from his father, Big Ralph Johnson. It wasn’t what you would call a showplace. Big Ralph hadn’t spent his bribe and graft money with reckless abandon; he had known how to keep a low profile when it came to anything that might draw the attention of a passing IRS agent. Not that the Johnson place was a shack. It was in the center block of Pine Shadow Lane, a well-established neighborhood of mostly larger homes, oversized lots, and mature trees. The Johnson house, one of the smaller ones, had a large Jacuzzi sunk in the tile floor of its rear sun porch, an enormous game room with an antique pool table, and a number of other creature comforts not visible from outside.
    Kale had been there twice during