Chapter 11

Doctor Jorge didn't have Meka's English far enough along so she could say, what the hell is that, but I could see what she meant right away.

"It's a big truck to pull the trailers back down here," I said.

She still didn't understand anything about it, so I told her I'd show her later, and I think she understood later, at least. She wiggled to get back down and I set her on her feet. She grabbed my hand with her good one and started pulling me past Ethel, who'd come out right behind her.

Ethel was only giving George a mild dressing down and she was grinning the whole time, so he probably wasn't in much trouble. Meka didn't give a hoot one way or the other. She had something inside that she wanted to show me, and I was just hoping that it wasn't the bidet.

It wasn't. It was something that George and I had missed earlier. There was a glowing handprint, just like the others we'd seen, but it was at the head of the hall where there wasn't a door. Meka went straight toward it, but she didn't put her hand on it. She looked close and put her hand right below it, and just for a second I could see that there was a dim shadow of a hand her size just below the one that was obviously for me.

Right as she got her hand on it another set of elevator doors opened up. I was looking at the wall this time and I could see that the paneling seemed to sink in on itself, just enough for clearance, and then slide back into the rest of the wall, pocket door style again.

Paneling was a new departure for this version of the house. There'd been a little bit of it in the old house, but it only walled off the bathroom George and Ethel had added.

Of course the house had some real interior walls now and They had used real paneling. When the elevator doors did their little trick, I could see it. No thin sheets of plywood with a dress veneer for my new house; it was normal one-inch-thick boards, one inch being the nominal size of course. The pattern they'd picked was appropriate too; Knotty Pine Pickwick was an old standard in the south.

We entered when the doors were fully open, and for a second I wondered why all the elevators seemed to be freight size. They were nice enough inside but all of them so far had been large.

When the doors opened at the end of our short ride I saw that I had yet another basement, but this one wasn't empty. It looked as big as the house's new size but it had some separate rooms in it, storage rooms I guessed. It also had two big walk-in in coolers. When I went to them and opened the doors I found that they were freezers, not coolers. They didn't have anything in them though, except cold air.

My first thought was that it was going to be a pain in the ass to carry things down to load the freezers and then have to tote it back up when we needed it. Wrong.

Meka dragged me away from the freezers and across the big part of the open space and put her hand under another handprint that was my size. A door the size of the truck elevator's door opened and it led into a sort of rectangular shaped tunnel that ran for about two hundred feet to another big door. At least I figured it out before Meka opened the door on the other end. It opened into the barn's basement.

Damn, there'd been a lot of work and a lot of planning put into my new hacienda. It left me wondering how much of this time traveling I was going to have to do. That made me remember I needed to get Doctor Jorge to teach me a little of Meka's lingo.

We heard Ethel hollering for us from the house's basement then. I'm sure we could only hear it because we'd left the doors open. We closed the one into the barn's basement and walked back toward the house.

Ethel was laughing at me when we got back.

"Has the little stinker been showing you everything she's discovered?" Ethel asked.

"I've been on a tour all right. George and I found the basement under the barn this morning, but we didn't even have a sniff of this one," I said.

"Wanda and I wouldn't have either. In fact I'm not sure that we could have gotten in the house if Meka hadn't found her handprints. She spotted the one by the front door pretty fast though, and after that she's been running around pressing every one she finds," Ethel said.

"She's done a whale of a job I see."

"Yes she has. The only break she's taken from exploring was about twenty minutes to play with her bidet when we showed her how it worked," Ethel said, grinning.

"Did you give her a ride in the Jacuzzi yet?" I asked.

"No, but we filled it up and turned on the jets to let her see them work. I think she's saving that for when she runs out of places to check out," she said.

We were walking back to the elevator to go back into the house, but Ethel stopped and asked a question.

"Did you look in the room that didn't have her handprint by the door?" she asked.

"No, I didn't notice it," I said.

"It's right over there by the freezers," Ethel said, pointing the way.

When I looked I saw my handprint. I started to go right to it, but then decided that there must be some reason to keep Meka out if there wasn't a handprint opener for her. I'd decided that the handprints couldn't be anything but some type of open sesame trigger for the doors they were by.

"I think I'll take Meka back upstairs to see if I can get her in the hot tub. There's probably a reason she can't open that door," Ethel said, echoing my thoughts.

When they were gone I went to the door and it opened with no trouble. The room it let me into was much larger than I'd thought, and it was crammed with weapons.

Well, it was crammed full of articles of mayhem but not all of them were weapons. In fact most of the space taken up was for ammunition. Is ammunition a weapons? Anyway, I now knew that carbon fiber arrows were next on the agenda for my Indian friends.

Reading the label on one big box, I saw that it contained one hundred fletched shafts. A hundred arrows is a lot of arrows, but it was only the beginning. There were at least a thousand boxes like it, and probably more. I didn't take time to count them; I just made a rough estimate. Stacked near them were boxes of broadheads.

The odd thing about the boxes of shafts and broadheads was that though they had descriptions, instructions, and even pictures, they didn't have any brand names. Then it hit me, they weren't brand name. They were supplied by They, whoever or whatever They were. I guess that wasn't so surprising though, considering where they were.

Looking around a little more I found other common hardware for bow hunting. Then I found the bows. I couldn't know what the bows were made of. It seemed like it might be a metal of some kind, but it was lighter than any metal I'd ever encountered, even titanium.

They were compound bows but they seemed pretty simple, without all the crap hanging off them that modern hunting bows usually had, and they also seemed smaller than others I'd seen. They had a straightforward design without any bells and whistles, but the high quality was obvious.

I found dozens of stuffed targets and stands for them and also plenty of plain points to use during practice. There were simple, but nicely designed, quivers and a few other things to help with practice and later while using the bows. It seemed that Doctor Jorge's wish had come true.

The next thing that caught my interest was a rack of weapons that was no doubt meant for me, and there were enough for a few close friends too; so I assumed that sooner or later someone else would be coming with me on a trip.

They resembled normal weapons but there were differences. I found four shotguns that looked like they had three barrels at first. Closer inspection showed me that two of the three tubes were magazines. They were side by side and the barrel was on top of them, like a miniature pyramid. There was also a loading gate on each side of the receiver.

The shotguns weren't in boxes; they were propped on their recoil pads in a normal looking stand up gun rack. I picked one up and it didn't seem a bit heavier than a normal semi-automatic shotgun. It was marked as a twelve-gauge magnum and it said its capacity was eighteen rounds. That was a lot of lead to sling before reloading.

I saw two Colt Diamondbacks and smiled. Diamondbacks are by far my favorite revolver, but closer examination showed me they weren't marked as Colts. They weren't named at all in fact, but there was no mistaking what they were.

The odd thing was they were stamped as 357 Magnum. That was too much power for a Diamondback. Then again, it was already obvious that whoever made this stuff knew more about it than I did. If they said the small framed Diamondback could handle magnum pressures, who was I to argue.

It looked like my semi-auto rifle problem had been solved too, in spades. I spied several rifles that were clearly knockoffs of the M1 Garand, but not exactly. They had removable banana-clip magazines and were chambered for the 270 Winchester cartridge.

They also had synthetic, pistol-grip stocks that looked very easy to handle, and that was no production barrel on them either. It was stainless steel and fluted along its length. It also had a serious 'flash suppressor/muzzle brake' on the business end.

Closer inspection showed me that they weren't all 270s - three were - but there were three in 30-06 and even three in 35 Remington. The 35 Remingtons would probably be the most useful of all if I kept running into bears.

There were also several web belts with holsters and about a dozen Glock 34 look-alikes. I'd have to try them out to see if they worked as well as a real Glock, but I was pretty sure that I wouldn't run into any problems.

Farther back in the room I ran into some serious gear. Five M4 Carbines with grenade launchers attached, and three M224 60mm mortars. I suspected that they were copies, probably advanced copies, of the normal military weapons they resembled.

One thing was certain; I wouldn't be trying out any mortars or grenade launchers on George's ranch. It wouldn't be for lack of ammunition though; there were hundreds of cases of that.

Right on the back wall of the arms room there was another handprint and when I opened the door, I entered a shooting range. It was almost more than I could deal with.

It looked to be about a hundred meters wide and over three hundred long. I wouldn't have to be riding Joe Bob out behind George's house to sight anything else in anyway. It had normal shooting stations and a trolley system for the target racks.

Off to the left, the last thirty meters or so was obviously designed for archery practice. If I was shocked by all this, I could just imagine what it was going to do to Jahedo and his pals, even though it would make it easier for them to get familiar with the new bows.

My war room and its inventory had taken my attention away from the real question. Did They expect me to fight some sort of guerilla war? It was way down on my list of things to do. I might not mind having a go at a few explorers raising hell in North West Louisiana or North East Texas, but I didn't feel up to gathering a platoon and going at it seriously.

I wondered if I'd have any choice at all in the matter. We would see what we saw, but for now I made a graceful exit and headed back upstairs. I found Ethel, Wanda, and Meka in the kitchen. Meka was sipping on a Coke.

"Would you believe it? The only thing down here that's consumable is a six-pack of Cokes. I wonder who they could have been meant for," Ethel said, when I reappeared.

Meka was looking right at her and had the now standard, Cheshire Cat, grin on her face. She was playing with the screw-on cap between delightful sips. I could see that she was completely happy for the moment and it made me happy too.

"At least we have you back from the dungeon now. Let's go up to the house and see about some lunch," Ethel said.

When we got out to the new truck, I saw that every other vehicle had left already.

"Right again, cowboy. We sent the rest of them off so we could have a ride in this big thing. Show us how to get in, and get those eighteen wheels a rollin'," Ethel said.

"Ten. Ten wheels. The tractor only has ten wheels, it won't be eighteen wheels until we hook a dual axle trailer," I said, opening the door and helping them up.

"Our minds are made up, don't confuse us with facts. Let us in there and fire this mother up," Ethel said, and then grinned like a mean little kid.

I saw that Meka understood enough to know I'd been put in my place, and she grinned at me too, even if she didn't know what it was about. It hit me then that older women dressing down a young buck was probably older than time, and that Meka knew I'd been set back on the straight and narrow by the head woman in charge. I couldn't help it, I broke out laughing. It wasn't so bad though, at least I qualified as a young buck to someone.