Relentless

time my courtship of Penny matured to the inevitability of marriage, I had gotten to know her family, and I had on one occasion half-seriously wondered if, to protect their daughter from sexual predators, they had designed for her a wardrobe of cleverly booby-trapped clothing that would sever my hands at the wrists if I put them anywhere they had not been invited.
    Taking every measure that might thwart Shearman Waxx, we had not called ahead to let Grimbald and Clotilda know we were coming. Therefore, even if we lifted the drain grate properly and correctly used the hidden levers to unlock the blast-resistant door, we would be at great risk crossing the threshold. The Booms were in lockdown mode, which meant additional lethal devices had been engaged in the hallway beyond this antechamber.
    Beside the door, a capped pipe protruded from the wall. In the center of the two-inch-diameter cap was a pull-ring that connected to a taut, small-link chain inside the pipe. The pipe—and the chain—led into the main room of the shelter. When the near end of the chain was pulled, the far end swung a miniature brass hammer against a brass bell, producing a single loud, clear note.
    With a series of pulls on the chain, Penny rang out her personal passcode. She waited ten seconds and rang the code again.
    I could hear the notes echoing faintly through the pipe from a distant room of Boom World.
    Half a minute later, mechanically triggered clockwork gears began to turn inside the steel barrier, retracting a series of bolts from the jamb. The door opened.
    Penny confidently led the way across the threshold into the Hall of a Thousand Deaths.

   Grimbald and Clotilda actually called it the Hall of a Thousand Deaths, but they were exaggerating. In the walls of the seven-foot-high, fourteen-foot-long passageway were dark holes like the muzzles of pistols, spaced irregularly and at various heights. In each hole waited a spring-loaded steel rod, blunt on one end and as sharp as a pencil on the other. There were 180 of these lethal projectiles, not a thousand.
    Mechanically rather than electrically controlled, the entire arsenal could be released in a single volley or in clusters of ten. The arming springs were so tightly wound and the rods so sharply pointed that Kevlar body armor would not protect a hostile intruder.
    Electric bulbs brightened the hallway, but if the power failed, backup batteries would take over. The batteries could be recharged by Grimbald or Clotilda riding a stationary bike adapted as a generator.
    To some people, survivalism is a hobby, to others a prudent philosophy. To my in-laws, survivalism was a religion.
    At the farther end of the Hall of a Thousand Deaths stood a steel door, different from the first in that it had a porthole of bulletproof glass. This circle framed Grimbald’s grinning face.
    When he opened his door, he filled the doorway side to side, top to bottom. Six feet six, 250 pounds, barrel-chested, with a head larger than any haberdasher allowed for when producing a line of hats, with a jolly face as flexible as Silly Putty, Grimbald was an embodiment of many myths: a bit of Paul Bunyan, a little Santa Claus, a trace of Zeus, a measure of Mars, a pinch of Odin….
    His bass voice lent an operatic quality to Grim’s greeting: “Children! What a delightful surprise. Welcome to our stronghold.”
    As usual, he wore a vibrant Hawaiian shirt, khaki pants, and sneakers. The shirt presented an acre of lush palm trees silhouetted against a sunset; and one of his shoes could have carried the baby Moses down the river more safely than an ark of bulrushes.
    Milo claimed to be afraid that Grandpa Grimbald—aka Grimpa— would step on him one day and not notice until, hours later, he realized that the icky stuff stuck to his shoe was squashed boy.
    The name Grimbald comes from the Old High German word for “fierce” and from the Old English word for “bold.” I had never seen him fierce, though certainly bold; I had no doubt that were you to attack him, he would have the ferocity to wring your neck till your head popped off.
    In spite of Grimbald’s formidable appearance and eccentricities— or perhaps because of them—adults found him charismatic, and kids found him irresistible. Milo loved his grandfather. Yellow raincoat flapping, he ran to the big man, allowing himself to be scooped off the floor and held in the crook of Grim’s massive left arm, as if he were indeed no bigger than a baby