Chapter 6

The women and kids went straight to the Camelot Motel to check it out as our future home. This was an unusual situation because it was adjacent to another, smaller motel that I had forgotten about. The Camelot Motel was a two-story affair with something like 70 rooms as I remembered it. The great thing about it was that it had an outdoor swimming pool and an exercise center as part of the motel. The smaller motel next door had about 25 rooms, depending on how you counted the rooms with connecting doors. It had a small indoor pool that could be used the year round.

The kids were taken with the large outdoor swimming pool, and even Samson looked upon it as an advantage. There was water in the pool, but the adults kept the kids away from it because the water had not been chemically treated for the months since the wall of fog disaster. However, there was a large shed next to the pool, and Joan checked it out, since it was not locked. Inside there were what looked like at least a year’s supply of chemicals. That was going to make the pool easier to get back into operation.

The rest of the motel was in excellent condition, and looked like it had already been cleaned for the day before the wall of fog arrived. They spent over an hour going over the structure and had nothing but good to say about us moving in, except for the fact that there were some skeletons in a few of the rooms.

The smaller motel, the Excalibur, was a very up-scale place. It was more of a residence motel for retired people with plenty of money, so it had a large recreation room with a pool table, and a number of card tables. Their indoor pool had a ramp to enter the pool and even an elevator for those unable to use the ramp. The biggest problem with the Excalibur was that it was full of skeletons that would have to be removed before we could make use of it. Nevertheless, every one of the inspectors loved both places, and their thoughts were fixed on “how quickly can we move in?”

That afternoon, after the two new boys, Sam and Earl, were introduced to the group, we listened to their story. This was a case of two boys who had been a part of a church group and were returning from an excursion to the beach. They were the last two passengers who had been on the bus. They were in the last seat at the rear of the bus, and the only other person on the bus was the driver. She had seen the fog ahead and had stopped to figure out what she should do. She must have decided to drive through the fog, because she started to creep forward.

Her window was open and the fog came pouring in through the window. The boys heard her scream, and that was when they looked up from their comic books. They saw her converted into a skeleton in front of their eyes and, of course, were scared shitless. The bus stopped when it ran into a truck that had been hidden by the dense fog.

The boys jumped up, and it dawned on Earl for them to escape by going out the rear emergency exit. In effect, they hit the ground running. They ran the 13 blocks to their church, figuring that their parents would pick them up there after the fog dissipated. That didn’t happen, and the fog continued to advance. They managed to stay ahead of the fog, and started to follow it back when it began to retreat. They spent the night in Sam’s house, which they had come to first.

The house was empty, and the family car was gone. They ate some food they found in the refrigerator and spent the night in the bedrooms. For lack of anything better to do, they visited Earl’s house and found the same kind of thing as they had at Sam’s house. They decided to stay at Earl’s house because it was near a supermarket and Earl had a vast collection of comic books. One day, out of boredom because he had already read the comic books several times, Earl turned on the radio and heard our broadcast. He called our number, and here we were.

The next item up for discussion was the motel situation. Emma gave a glowing description of the two motels, and we decided that we would move as soon as possible. I estimated that would be in about two weeks, but that was when Sarah mentioned having seen the motorcyclist. Wow, that was a bombshell! We immediately decided to move as soon as Bob and I could get water and electricity connected. With all of the teens to help, we might get everything connected in only one day.

The problem was that the water from the motel’s system had to be drained before we connected to the new well, and we had no idea how long that was going to take. For one thing, that swimming pool was not going to empty quickly, and I knew how much static I would collect if that was not one of the first things on the priority list.

Yeah, I was right about the pool. One of the first questions asked about the pool was whether or not we were going to allow skinny-dipping. For once, I was smarter than the average bear and shifted that question to the women. Emma popped up with the statement that they would have a ruling on that by the time the pool was ready to use. “Personally, I will have to think about that before I commit. Also the other adults will have to voice an opinion.” There were a lot of head nods among the other women, and that ended that discussion.

The last item that needed discussion was the question of getting the teens and Jenny qualified with the AA-12. “Folks, as soon as we get moved into the motel, I want to take the time to make sure that everybody, including the teenagers, know how to handle the AA-12. We have enough guns and ammunition for that job, but we don’t have the space for that large a shooting range. I think that we need to visit the Marine base for that training. Does anybody see anything wrong with that?”

Nobody had any complaints, and all of the teens were anxious to have the AA-12s issued to them. We couldn’t do it tomorrow because of getting the motel ready and picking up the man who wanted to join us. Therefore, the last item on the agenda was to schedule the various things that needed to be done right away. Joan, Ann, and Samson were assigned the job of picking up the recruit, Bob was to take the rest of the teens to help with the water wells, I was going to start work on the electrical system, and the remaining women were going to start clearing the skeletons and such other debris from the Camelot Motel and babysit Johnny and Sarah. Jack would probably go with me, but we would leave that up to him.

The women and teens started working on supper while Bob and I made sure we had what we needed to get started tomorrow. My job preparation was simple, but Bob had to move the pipe driving equipment to the motel and pick the place to drive the pipes. Tomorrow, he was going to have to find some larger pipe than what we were using for the house, but not such large diameter pipe that the driving equipment could not handle it. We certainly were going to need large pipe to be able to fill that monster swimming pool in a time the kids could live with.

All I had to do was to find the place where the electricity came into the motel and break those lines. Then I had to hook up the generator to the motel connections. It suddenly dawned on me that the generator we had might not be large enough to carry all of the requirements of the motel. However, if that turned out to be a problem, I had to find a place where we could steal a generator.

The Marine base or the Navy base would be likely candidates. If necessary, I would consider taking the generators from the baseball park in San Diego. Shit, if we did that, we were going to be using a hell of a lot of fuel to keep the generators running. I could see it now, we were going to have to put in solar panels or a wind turbine to meet our electrical needs.

The next morning, right after breakfast, Jack and I left to see what we had to do to connect the electricity to the motel. I took Ann’s car, since I figured that Bob would need the pickup. The other teens would follow him in a van. I walked around to the back of the motel and found a shed-like building with wires running to the nearest utility pole. This had to be where the electrical utility connection was made.