'Then why, my friend, do you look so frightened?' Vikram asked quietly.
Clarkkicked the dirt in frustration. Not a terribly efficient way to get out his anger but he was running on twenty-four hours without food and it was starting to get to him. 'Because the warden of this prison may very well have been carrying the virus when he took off on vacation three days ago. All of this,'Clark said, gesturing around at the fences, the helicopters, the mobile labs, 'might just be my way of locking the barn door when the horse has already run away.'
Where is your family's Emergency Meet-Up Point? Where is your personal Go Bag, at work, at school, in the car? How many days worth of water do you have in the house right now? [Emergency Preparedness Update #7, published by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), 1/05]
The kerosene lamp whoofed into life and threw some yellow around the bare plank walls of Bleu's root cellar. Dick could still see moonlight coming through the slats and he wondered how long it would take one of the homicidal climbers to break in. Bleu didn't seem particularly scared. Just anxious to get the job over with. 'What happened to them?' Dick asked. 'What makes people act like that?'
'I was going to ask you the same thing. It has to be some kind of government germ warfare thing gone wrong, doesn't it?' Bleu lifted the lantern and clomped down a narrow flight of stairs cut into the earth. They came into a low space with bowed walls and Bleu hung the lantern on a four-by-four that held up the ceiling like a toothpick holding open the mouth of a predatory cat in a cartoon. Stacks of cardboard boxes and bags full of potatoes and radishes filled most of the space. At the far end from the stairs sat a door wrapped in black plastic of the kind contractors use. Bleu went to the door and stopped. 'I reckoned if anybody would know about that it would be you. Hell, kid, that's what I called you down here for.'
Dick's eyes went wide. 'Me? I'm just a low-level bureaucrat. A livestock inspector! I don't know anything about biowarfare.' He thought about it a second. He was with the government, which must be all that mattered to Bleu. 'Look, I'm on your side, you know,' he said, trying to remember what hippies stood for. Flower power, sure, and they didn't like the Vietnam War. 'Um, peace and love, right? Love is all you need.'
Bleu opened the waterproof door and light spilled over its contents. Five racked hunting rifles, most of them .22 caliber rimfire weapons but also a good old-fashioned thirty-ought-six. Even more insane: one was a heavy-duty big game rifle, a centerfire, bolt-action Weatherby Mark V Safari Custom, something Dick had only ever seen in gun magazines. An elephant gun, to be blunt about it, though most likely the Skye family had planned on using it against bears when they bought it.
Below the rack of rifles hung three shotguns in various gauges and below that pistols and revolvers, high-powered enough to cut a man and half. At the bottom of the closet sat box after box of ammunition, cleaning supplies for the weapons, and sheaves of paper targets, some of them used. On the back of the door someone had taped up one target showing a human silhouette with the bullseye where the man's heart would be. Dick saw an almost perfect grouping, six narrow holes right in the center. In the white space of the target someone had written NICE SHOOTING STORMY and OCTOBER 17 2002, STORMY'S BIG DAY.
Dick couldn't help but stare. He was looking at an arsenal, a survivalist's wet dream, enough guns to hold off an invasion of ATF and FBI agents for a week. He had thought he had been sent back through a time warp toWoodstock . Instead he'd wandered into Ruby Ridge.
Monster Nation
Chapter Eleven