Chapter 32

This was the worse place we had used to hole up. It was a complete dive in the Puyallup area. We had what was left of another warehouse. There was lots of rubble and such all around the warehouse as other building had been knocked down. We had a good field of fire in all directions if it came to that. Concealing the cameras on the roof we soon had our monitoring station set up and the other sentries posted.

Blake told me not to worry about setting up as while there was power still here there were no comlines in this place, they had been pulled out earlier. "Then what are we doing here? This place is a dump, if there're no telecom lines I can't help us any, it's on the back side of nowhere, so why are we here?" I asked.

"We here because it's easy to defend and it's time to bring this thing to a close. This run has gone on long enough, I'm tired of running scared and I want to end it. Thunder will be needing your help to run remote lines and things so don't get too far away."

"Youse jest don't see the beauty o' dis place. Dem slab laying around? Prop 'em up again da wall and whatta ya got? It's lack a fortress den," chided Thunder.

He no more than left than Helen came up to me. "I left the package in the secured storage like you asked, now let's get to work."

She and I ran remote lines to several points around the area. We set up both cameras and guns. I don't know where all the guns came from but we seemed to have many that we didn't have earlier. While we were doing that I could see others that appeared to be doing the same thing. If that were the case then we would be completely surrounded by remote pillboxes. We had dug out some of the knocked down buildings to set up the sites. They would be both sheltered and protected. It would make it very hard to attack through the overlapping fire of the machine guns.

When darkness finally came I was exhausted. I had been dragging wire all day. That was bad enough over the ground that we were covering but we had to cover all of the wire as well. None of the wire could be exposed. It needed to be shielded so that a stray round couldn't clip the wire and knock out the gun site. I had been moving and shifting slabs of cement, shoveling and covering, digging out and planting until my muscles ached. This was not the kind of work that I was used to doing.

After I crawled over the tumbled and sprawling slabs one last time I got back to the warehouse. Now that it was too dark to work outside we set about making the inside livable. By this time I didn't care, I just took my mattress and covers and moved into a quiet corner and went to sleep.

It seemed like ten minutes later when someone was shaking me awake. The sun was just coming up and there was enough light to see Blake standing there. "What do you want? Leave me alone, I need some rest."

"Time to get up, laughing boy. A new day is upon us and it's time to go to work."

"Laughing boy my ass, I don't have any work to do remember? No comlines? Leave me alone."

"Come on 'Coon, time to get up. I need you."

I stumbled out of bed and over to the monitoring room where he was waiting. "My mouth tastes like I ate the south end of a north bound skunk. You bother me any more and I'll breath on you. What do you want?"

"I need some kind of board set up for each of the remote gunsites. There're twelve of them surrounding us. We need monitors hooked to each one and some way to control them if we need to fire them. I know it's asking a lot but we need them yesterday."

"Are all of them set up like the ones that Helen and I were doing?" He nodded. "Then there's only going to be very limited movement up and down, side to side, right?" Another nod. "Then it should be simple. I'm going to need some things but that's not going to be a problem. Do we have enough remotes for each site, enough cameras and monitors, were they all installed yesterday?"

He told me how many cameras were install, how many monitors were set up and so on. I sat down and started to make up a list of the number of monitors, cameras and other pieces of equipment we would need for me to make up the remote control firing stations.

"I'm also going to need a work station. Do we have something here that I can use? You know a work bench like I've had at each of the other places?"

"Yeah, there's something like that over in that corner. You can use it. I'll send someone out for this stuff now while you get your tools and get set up."

I started to dig through the carry sacs looking for the ones with my tools and the other extra parts that I had. When I finally dug them out from under everything else I took them to the corner that he had indicated and looked over the bench. It was covered with all kinds of drek which I just pushed off onto the floor. After a large enough space had been cleared I pulled out my tools and started to get set up.

The remotes themselves would be simple. Remote controls have been around for nearly a hundred years. Kids used them to pilot model planes, cars and boats. They raced them all over the place and over all kinds of terrain. I would be hard wiring a remote board into the wires leading to the gunsites and then hard wiring the guns to the receiver set on the other end. By using a hard wire on each one we didn't need to worry about the radio frequencies, crossing them or having them jammed. It was a little more work but would give us better utilization in the long run. I was set up on this end, all I needed now was the remotes.

I found the sacs with my clothes and things in them and carried them over to where I had dumped my mattress. I pulled out my toothbrush and went in search of a place to clean up some while waiting. With that out of the way I looked until I found the site for the kitchen and fixed myself some breakfast. I even brewed up a fresh pot of soykaf. While it was brewing I had someone point out where each of the others was sleeping and when the 'kaf was ready took a cup over to each of them. That's a much easier way to wake up in the morning than the abrupt shaking that Blake uses.

I was at the monitoring station checking out the different gunsites when the van pulled in. Using the cameras on full zoom I couldn't see any signs of wires, guns or anything else. You could see where some of the ground had been disturbed but not much. I was pointing this out to Blake so it could be repaired when the van made its way into the warehouse with the parts I had ordered.

I had everything taken to my work bench and set to making the control boards. The first thing I did was remove the battery packs and solder the necessary leads to the terminals. These ran to a simple converter that would power the entire rig. The hard part was going to be matching the receivers with the camera and gun at the site. When the control boards were all hooked to the power converters I used the work bench to set up the twelve monitors. I had made a simple diagram of our warehouse, the road and the surrounding terrain on a large plot board. I then numbered each of the gunsites starting with the one in front of us as twelve and working on around in clock fashion.