Final Dawn: Escape From Armageddon Read Online Free PDF Page B

very large overhead door. It wasn’t unlike their garage door at home, except this one was much higher and wider and obviously meant to accommodate very large trucks.
         Adjacent to the overhead door was a small personnel door, locked with a heavy duty padlock. For which they had the key.
         But before they went inside, Mark wanted Hannah to get a feel for the whole property, to get the big picture. He’d put a lot of thought into this over the last two days, and in his mind’s eye he had it all laid out.
         Immediately in front of the overhead door, and about fifty feet away from it, was a fuel pump. This one was similar to the ones at the Exxon station where they filled their cars with gas, except that it had no dollar meter on it. It merely read the number of gallons that were pumped.
         Mark knew, from reading the description on the realtor’s web site, that the pump was in working order, and that in the ground beneath their feet was a 10,000 gallon underground diesel storage tank.
         Mark took her to the east side of the mountain and pointed out a small wind turbine a hundred yards north. He said “One day when I was taking a break from the mine job, I took a long walk and noticed the turbine. I asked the mine people about it, and they said it powered all of the lights and equipment in the mine on windy days. And when the wind wasn’t blowing, their system automatically switched back to city power. They said it saved them thousands of dollars a month in electricity charges.”
         He took her a bit farther, to the eastern base of the mountain. From here, to the east and north, the land was flat and undeveloped, as far as they could see.
         “Here’s where we can build the compound.” He said.
         She gave him a puzzled look.
         So he explained. “We’ll have to build a place to live when we come out of the mine. And we’ll have to do it before Saris 7 hits, because after we come out there won’t be anyone around to do it.”
         She was beginning to understand now.
         “So, we modify the mine to turn it into a shelter and we live there until the earth gets warm enough to sustain life again. Then we come out and live here, on this land, when it’s safe to do so? Is that the idea?”
         He grabbed her and picked her up in his arms and spun her around in a full circle. Then he kissed her and said “See, that’s why I love you so much. Because you’re absolutely brilliant.”
     
     
     
    -9-
     
         When they’d entered the mine for the first time, Mark expected it to be spooky and a little bit unnerving. It had been pitch black, of course, and deathly quiet. But it wasn’t scary at all. Hannah wasn’t spooked, but rather fascinated. It may have been her natural curiosity as a scientist, but she had been mesmerized by the long, pure-white walls of the mine’s corridors, and how just the light from their miner’s lights had lit up the walls for hundreds of feet in front of them.
         They’d walked up and down the main corridor and each of the twenty four bays within the mine during the two hours they’d spent exploring it. Each bay was numbered, in huge four-foot black letters, starting with the westernmost. It proclaimed “Bay 1” on each side of its entryway. Each successive bay was numbered in a similar manner.
         The bay numbers made it impossible to get lost in the dark mine, as long as you knew that Bay 8 was directly across the main corridor from the entryway.
         The entire time they walked they were bouncing ideas off of each other. For her, it was all about how best to make the place a home. Here’s where the sleeping quarters would go, she’d said, and there would be a great place for a large kitchen.
         Mark, on the other hand, looked at it from an engineer’s perspective. Here would make a good place to store extra water. And down that long corridor, two hundred yards from