Free No Easy Hope - 01 by James Cook

concrete to make sure the slab didn’t fall on me while I worked. After I secured it, I pulled up the handle that opened the heavy steel hatch.  I climbed down the ladder beneath, reaching up to grab the binder as I went. When I reached the bottom of the ladder, I turned and flipped on the lights.
    Lights in the ceiling of the narrow tunnel illuminated the off-white paint on the galvanized steel walls. The tunnel runs under my garage to the shelter entrance on the supply compartment side. The shelter itself is under my back yard between the back of my house and the front of the garage. I lived on a large plot of land, and my back yard covered nearly two acres. My nearest neighbor was almost a mile away, and the dense forest growth around my property gave me plenty of privacy.
    I walked down the tunnel to the heavy steel security door and pulled a thin chain from around my neck. I used the key hanging from it to unlock the cover to a keypad. After I dialed in the combination, the magnetic lock disengaged. I pushed the door open, then closed the cover to the keypad and locked it. I slipped the chain back around my neck as I entered the shelter.
    As I entered the storage unit, I flipped another light switch and illuminated the interior. To my right was the five hundred gallon water container. It connected to a series of pipes that in turn connected to the gutters on my house and garage. I could use either tap water or rain runoff to fill the tank. I turned a valve to let tap water begin pouring in. My house was not close enough to the main part of town to connect to city water, so I used well water instead.
    The rest of the storage unit was mostly filled with shelves that held containers of canned food, military surplus MRE’s (meals ready to eat), tea, flour, sugar, toilet paper, paper towels, and various other things that I thought might be useful in an emergency. A series of three metal closets with padlocked doors lined the wall at the other end of the unit. One had a small placard that read WEAPONS, the second AMMUNITION, and the third EQUIPMENT.
    While the tank filled up, I went to the bedroom in the living quarters and put the binder with Gabriel’s email in it on the table beside the bed. With the document safely stored in my shelter, it was time to get started moving things into the storage unit. I went back into the storage area and grabbed a heavy electric powered winch from a shelf by the door. I lugged it up the ladder and mounted it onto a bracket on the back wall of the garage. I unclipped the hook from the winch cable and left it dangling over the hatch. I flipped up the cover on an electrical outlet just to the right of the winch bracket and plugged in the winch.
    Picking my crowbar up from beside the hatch, I put it back on its hook in the garage and then rolled a wheelbarrow into my kitchen through the back door. I took the stairs two at a time to the upstairs bathroom, closed the drain, and filled both the tub and the sink up with cold water. I did the same to the downstairs bathroom, but left the sink in the half-bath empty. I wanted to keep at least one bathroom usable. After that, I started loading things into my wheelbarrow. I figured I should start with the heavy stuff first.
    I took a few cases of soda and a case of water, as well as my Sig Sauer 9mm pistol and all of the ammunition I had for it. The Sig was the only gun I kept in the house. Everything else was in the shelter’s armory. I wheeled the load back outside to the shelter entrance and grabbed the cargo bucket out of my garage. The cargo bucket is a round metal contraption about three feet tall and twenty inches in diameter. It has a metal handle with a circular eyehole in the center. I made it not long after installing the winch bracket above the shelter hatch. The eyehole in the handle could latch to the winch, and I could use it to raise and lower things into and out of tunnel. There was a hand truck in the storage room to wheel things