Free Hidden (Final Dawn) by Darrell Maloney Page B

people out there who are hungry and desperate.
         “If there are marauders out there, and if they find out we have fresh produce and livestock that isn’t available anywhere else in the area, they may try to take it from us.
         “Before we came in here, we got the compound ready. It already has a very elaborate security system. If the marauders come two or three at a time, we won’t have any problems fending them off.
         “But if they consolidate forces, and come fifty or a hundred strong, there’s a chance they might overpower us.

     “The tunnel will be our escape hatch. When we leave here we are going to reseal the mine, just like it is today, so that it’s almost impenetrable from the outside.
         “One end of the tunnel will be here, where you’re standing. The other end will be under the feed storage barn in the compound. It will be under a false floor in the barn, and no one will know it’s there.
         “If it ever appears we’re going to be overrun and the compound is going to fall into the marauders’ hands, we will all go to the feed barn, lift up the false floor, and come through the tunnel and back into the mine. We’ll be safe here, and the mine will still be stocked with everything we need to survive. And we’ll begin our plans to take back the compound from the marauders.”
         Sami asked, “But what if they chase us through the tunnel and attack us here?”
         “We’ll gather in the tunnel before they scale the walls. By the time they get in, we’ll be long gone. They won’t know where we went. We will have ladders leaning up against the inside of the wall on all four sides of the compound. Hopefully they’ll just assume we climbed over the wall and disappeared into the surrounding woods.
         “However, if they do get curious enough to look around for us, they’ll have a hard time finding the tunnel. We’ll cut power before we leave and take key components from the circuit panels so that they have no electricity. The feed barn will be pitch black, even in the daytime.
         “And even if they go in there with flashlights, they will have a hard time finding the section of false floor. It blends in very well.
         “But let’s just say, for the sake of argument, that they find the false floor and discover our escape tunnel. That wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing. We’ll have three different places where we’ll have dynamite buried into the tunnel walls, attached to electric charges. The tunnel will be pitch black, but we’ll have infrared cameras spaced throughout it. We’ll be able to see exactly where they are in the tunnel. And when they’re in the center of it, we can collapse the tunnel and either kill them instantly in the cave in, or make them suffer a long slow death as they run out of oxygen.
         “The same infrared cameras are dispersed throughout all the buildings in the compound. Even though the power will be off in the compound, the cameras will work. Because they’re all wired to the mine’s power grid. So after we evacuate the compound and come back here, we can track their every move. We can see how many of them there are, what their habits are, where they’re vulnerable.
         “Using that information, we can make plans to take the compound back. We’ll likely leave you women and children here where it’s safe. And we’ll either attack them en masse once we know how to do it, or we send teams through the tunnel at night to stalk them and pick them off two or three at a time.
         Sami was impressed.
         “Wow, you guys have really put a lot of thought into this.”
         Mark interjected, “Yeah, but the thinking part is easy. The digging is what’s hard. It’s going to take at least a year to dig the tunnel, wire it and plant the explosives.”
         Sami laughed.
         “Seems to me that time is something we have plenty of.”
         Sarah