Secrets of Liberty Mountain (Final)

Her smile froze in place and faded into a frown. "Dios mío, you haven't been informed? Charlie Masterson passed away suddenly last week. His funeral was yesterday." The receptionist dabbed at a tear as she spoke into the intercom. "Mr. Fitzwater. There's a Sheila Carson here for Charlie, should I send her in?"

"Carson? As in Sheila Carson of Liberty Mountain?"

My boss and I exchanged puzzled glances as the intercom crackled into silence. A few moments later, we stood before the ornate oak door without a name tag. Sheila knocked twice on the entrance to the inner chambers of her departed friend.

"Enter," the answering voice spoke in a deep baritone rumble.

Ponderous sets of Mission Oak furniture crowded the large office. Particles of dust floated like fireflies in the solitary beam of sunshine streaming through the gap between the heavy burgundy velvet drapery covering the picture window. The light from the outside slashed across the expansive surface of Mr. Fitzwater's empty desk. With the exception of a pair of gleaming eyes peering at us from the shaded recess behind the desk, the assessor himself was as invisible as the lurking trolls who live under the bridges in fairy tales.

For several seconds, Sheila and the assessor exchanged glances without speaking. Finally, the colony's director stepped forward and extended her hand in greeting. "It's a pleasure to meet you, Mister Fitzwater."

"I don't shake hands with queers," the owner of the unblinking eyes said.

"Excuse me?" Sheila's body tensed, and her eyes blinked and narrowed as she took a step backward.

"You heard me, Ms. Carson. I will not shake your hand. You and your kind are an affront to God. I am a general in the righteous army of the Lord."

Fitzwater's eyes flashed with fury as he rose from his chair and took a step forward. The man emerging from the shadows looked to be in his mid-forties and stood about five feet, five inches tall. His cloud of unruly white hair glowed like fire when he entered the light. His hands knotted and gnarled with the effects of late-stage Rheumatoid Arthritis held a manila file folder marked with the handwritten inscription, "Confidential: Sheila Carson."

"I knew your father, and I remember his excitement when he found that shit-hole of an abandoned shack out in the mountains. I often watched you take female lovers out to that sinful place," he said as he emphasized the last word and opened the folder to scan the papers within the packet of documents.

"You are not rendering unto Caesar that which is Caesar's. Your taxes have not been paid, and the property has not been properly appraised. Although you neglected to secure a building permit, I'm sure you've made unlawful improvements since you acquired the land," the little general said with an almost gleeful snicker. "Since you're here, let's schedule a time for me to inspect the property. Is next Tuesday convenient?"

The assessor asked as he reached for the calendar and held his pen at the ready, prepared to write. The CEO of the Society of Sisters blanched at the suggestion of a visit and inspection. Sheila looked like a goldfish gasping for breath as she opened her mouth to speak, closed it, and opened it again. No words came out.

"Next Tuesday?" he repeated.

"I'm sorry sir, but our holy place is forbidden to you," I said as I set the case of spirits on the floor and stepped forward.

"Forbidden?" he snarled as rage twisted his face.

"Yes, sir. You are prohibited from trodding upon the goddess's sacred soil. It is not allowed."

I was using a trick I had learned from my grandfather. When you're engaged in a nasty two-on-one debate, surround your adversary and force him to divide his attention.

"S-sacred soil? Forbidden?" he sputtered as his voice rose in volume as he turned to face me.

Behind him, Sheila's puzzled face silently mouthed the words, "What the fuck?"

"My lady is the high priestess of the Holy Order of Athena. We are a religious institution, and as such, we are exempt from Colorado Property Tax. It says so right here, I held open the law book and pointed to chapter and verse.

"You have no standing in this matter. It's up to the courts," I grinned.

"And a higher power," I did my best Friar Tuck impression as I clasped my hands in prayer and gazed heavenward in reverent devotion before bowing to Sheila. My wink at the end might have been over the top, but what the hell; the Society had enough attorneys and money to keep it in the courts for eternity. I knew how the justice system worked; Mister Pisswater would be an old man before he could win a judge's mandate to inspect the sister's sanctuary.

"My associate is correct, and we are here to file the necessary forms to register our society as a religious institution. We are beyond your authority," Sheila said as she embraced my deception with embellishments of her own.

The meeting did not end well. As far as he was concerned, we were triply damned as immoral, tax evading heathens with no place in civil society.

"I will not allow you to mock the faith of righteous and decent people," he said as he snatched the application for exemption from my hands.

"You!" he shouted in a spray of spit as he jammed his finger in Sheila's face.

"And you!" he sputtered with fury.

"You're pretending to be something you are not. I will have none of it," he growled as he ripped the application into confetti-sized shreds.

"If the Lord will not put an end to your wicked ways, I will!" Fitzwater snarled as we exited his office and I shut the door behind us.

"I'm coming for you," the elevator's decent muffled his rage.

~~~

We missed the deadline for the rally point by an hour. A trail note pinned to a tree told us the others had gone on ahead.

Twilight was falling, and the Sisterhood was out in force as we rolled to a stop amid a chorus of good-natured catcalls. Accompanied to laughter and cheers, the Frost Queen danced to victory with her fists held high above her head.

"I won. You lost. It's going to be my pleasure to settle our bet," the Lady of Ice taunted us as she wiggled her ass.

I winced at the thought of meeting her needs. I would rather sleep with the serpents.

"Boss, she's joking? Right?" I asked.

"Should it be so. But, a deal is a deal," Sheila answered without enthusiasm; the skipper hated to lose.

As we stepped out of our truck, Sheila faced Frosty and the gathering and put her hands on her hips.

"Business before fun. Status report?" she said as she resumed the role of a military commander.

Silence descended on the women of the balcony. They assumed the posture of loose attention as Belinda replied, "All present or accounted for. We ran into Darlene and Alice at a Starbucks on our return. They're spending the night in town. Paperwork problems with the titles; they'll be back tomorrow."

"It figures. I swear paperwork will be the death of us all," Sheila said with a chuckle.

"That it will," Frosty winked with a lecherous grin.

As I started to reply, the sky above us shimmered and caught fire, first as a flickering glow, and then as sheets of colored lights rippling across the heavens. As we watched, slack-jawed and speechless, the auroras intensified into brilliant rainbow displays of silent beauty.

I felt the hairs on my arms rise. My arms bristled like a porcupine. To my left, Sheila looked like a tumbleweed. Her close-cut hair stood straight out. On the far side of the valley, trees shimmered with Saint Elmo's Fire. Beneath the rainbows of the night, the very atmosphere glowed like the inside of a fluorescent tube.

What the hell?

We later found out we had just witnessed what would be known as the Sky Fire Event, actually a series of three coronal mass ejections which ripped from the sun's surface as a trio of sunspots aligned with our planet and erupted at random intervals over thirty-six hours. Mankind got a duck's eye view of cosmic shotgun blasts as one solar storm after another sent trillions of tons of solar mass slamming into the earth's magnetic field at several thousand miles per second.

Each impact weakened our planet's protective magnetic field and deposited charged particles in the outermost part of the magnetosphere, a four-thousand-mile thick protective bubble created by our planet's magnetic field. The charged particles acted like a buildup of propane gas in a closed BBQ grill. The next storm fell from the sky like a lighted match.

Radio communications were smothered beneath an avalanche of energy as the resulting electromagnetic storms overloaded electrical transmission lines with millions of volts of unwanted power. In some places, high-voltage lines sagged and melted under the influx of energy. All around the globe, millions of transformers exploded like Roman candles and everywhere, microchips in unshielded circuits sparked into oblivion as power beyond their capacity ate them alive from the inside out.

The shit had hit the fan.

Chapter 34

Like sailors clinging to a raft on tempest-tossed seas, Sheila and I held tight to each other as an ocean of rainbows flooded the sky.

"Oh, my God! What is it?" she cried as glowing waves of light thundered silently across the firmament.

The heavens blazed with a kaleidoscope of color.

"I don't know," I said as I watched the glowing pastel streamers of brilliance slither along invisible magnetic lines of force like undulating serpents.

"I think we're looking at the mother of all solar storms. We need to assess the damage."

Sheila broke away from me and twisted the key in the truck's ignition. Dead. Not so much as a click. The circuitry was fried.

"Everyone, inside, pronto!" she commanded as she turned and raced across the meadow for the safety of the cabin. "I have no idea what this is doing to the background radiation, probably off the charts," our leader screamed as we scrambled to seek sanctuary from the fire in the sky.

I'm not an expert on radiation, but the idea frightened the crap out of me. Not knowing the details, I allowed terror and my paranoid imagination to fill in the blanks. What we don't know can kill us. I ran like the hounds of Hell were on my tail.

"Keep going! Move! Everyone, take cover in the cavern," Sheila said as she directed us to the emergency stairway next to the kitchen elevator.

The interior of our home was shrouded in smokey shadow, illumined only by the sky glow pouring through the windows at the front of the Great Room. The air was thick with the stench of burned wiring and charred insulation.

As I turned the corner into the pantry, I nearly collided with Martha.

"Out of my way!" she yelled as she directed a cloud of CO2 and fire suppressant chemicals into the flickering flames emerging from beneath one of the kitchen's refrigerated food storage lockers.

"Keep moving! The fire's out," Sheila commanded while pushing everyone toward the underworld's entrance.

The reverse fire drill was a well-executed route as we dashed inside away from the fire in the sky. I fought against a rising tide of dread as I scrambled down the rattling cast-iron staircase. Having a nightmare dream is one thing. Waking up next to the monsters under my bed was another.

When Monty Python declared, 'no one ready for the Spanish Inquisition,' he wasn't kidding. If we ain't ready to cry havoc and nuke our neighbors, we sure as shit ain't prepared for the technology-killing chaos raging in the heavens above; just another random event dished out by a disinterested universe. Nothing personal. Shit happens.

"Stay calm and carry the fuck along. Deal with it and get over it," I said aloud to myself as I took the stairs two at a time.

"Excellent advice," Sheila's voice echoed from above as an "Amen to that," sounded from below.

Next time I talk to myself, I gotta remember to whisper.

The winding descent into the cave took forever as terror and adrenaline compressed focus and extended my perception of time. The second hand on my watch refused to advance as moments oozed into minutes which stretched into hours.

The rattling clatter of scores of human feet pounding on the metal treads echoed like thunder from the musty-damp granite walls of our pitch-black corridor. Whatever had lit up the sky had eclipsed our electricity.

My terrified guess? We had a grandstand seat to an epic Carrington event of biblical proportions. I'll leave it to the scholars to sort out the theology. I prayed we weren't pawns in some demonic chess game. If you have any doubt Mother Nature plays a wicked game of chance, ask the citizens of Pompeii or the children of Krakatoa.

The palms of my hands were slick with sweat. My mouth was dusty dry, and my head spun with every twisting turn as I lept down the spiral stairway into the darkness. A thundering boom sounding like a cannon in a trash can illuminated our vertical tunnel with a bluish-white radiance. Someone underneath me had kicked open the rusty steel door to the cavern under our cabin.

The light was a welcome sign. Whatever had eaten the guts out of the electronics in the building above us hadn't stopped for lunch in our underground grotto. As I emerged from the exit, I bent down with my hands on my knees and gasped for breath, short pants followed by deep inhales. Stinging trickles of sweat ran into my eyes as I fought to get my breathing under control.

"What's going on?" Jennifer yelled from the second story doorway of the ranch-style control center.

"Solar storm!" the commander shouted before she turned to face me. "Sky, please see everyone is settled in and accounted for. Assemble the sisters by the lake."

Sheila brushed her hair from her eyes and pointed to the cozy bench beside the mist-shrouded lagoon of hot water. The dark pond was fed by geothermal hot springs. It was the same place where we had talked so long ago.

Fear hits different folks in different ways. Two sisters were bent double as they vomited on the cave's stone floor. Several women of the clan offered comfort as they gathered around their stricken comrades. The rest of the society milled about in stunned silence and tried to process the impossible.

"Listen up!" I called as the last of the clan emerged from the door at the bottom of the staircase. Waving my arms like a windmill, I motioned for the ladies to gather around. "The chief is checking with Jennifer. I presume she's getting an update and status report," I told the news-hungry gathering. "Sheila has asked me to get everyone settled in and accounted for. Martha, can you do the honors?"

The terror in the Captain of the Kitchen eyes abated as she focused on the task at hand. Busy people don't have the luxury of panic. As Martha attended to the women, I assumed a seat on the stone bench and took a moment to gather my wits and clear my mind. I was terrified. Fear can be a useful servant, unlike his kissing cousin, Panic. Fear strengthens the scenes and sharpens the mind. Panic smothers reason, and we flee without purpose.

Trembling like an old man, I tapped a smoke out of my pack of cigarettes and flicked my Bic. It sparked to life on the second flick. I inhaled and held each breath for a moment before exhaling. As the pace of my breathing slowed, the knot of muscles in my jaw and neck gradually softened. Nicotine seduces every smoker, and we'll continue to love her still even as she becomes our assassin.

"Now what?" I questioned myself.

Before I could answer, I was on my feet and trotting toward the control center. My body had decided while my mind dithered. Time to make the donuts and earn my keep. I took a drag and tossed the butt to the side of the path.

"Ahoy, the center," I called out as I climbed the stairs to the second story balcony.

Sneaking up on comrades in combat is never a great idea. A benign surprise is an excellent way to get killed by friendly fire. Sheila waved a welcome without taking her eyes away and from the computer screen. I entered and stood behind them as they frantically clicked from one screen to the next as they checked system status reports.

"Is it bad?" I asked.

"Well, it's not good," Sheila answered as she called up a system summary. "It looks like we've lost power in everything above ground. Solar's dead, as are the remote sensors. We won't know the extent of the damage until we go topside and do an inventory.

"At least we've got plenty of power down here."

I waved at the computer screens and the lights on the ceiling. Our subterranean settlement was unchanged from the day Sheila, and I had toured the facility a few weeks ago.

"Yes, we do. Up to six megawatts if need be," Jennifer laughed.

I smiled a half-grin. Considering the size of the dark cloud above us, we needed every silver lining we could find.

"What about radiation?" I asked as I glanced upward toward the cavern's domed ceiling.

"I don't know. I may have overplayed the hand. I read somewhere especially bad solar storms, and CMEs can kick the crap out Earth's magnetic field protecting us from most cosmic rays." Sheila shrugged her shoulders and licked her lips. "Better safe than sorry."

"What do you think?"

Sheila put her arm around Martha's shoulder and led her to the picture window overlooking the canter's courtyard. I moved to the commander's side and pulled out my pen and back-pocket notepad and prepared to take notes.

Below us, the woman of the sisterhood gathered about in various postures of shocked dismay and uncertainty. Several ladies were huddled in conversation, and about a dozen were seated on several of the benches facing an arrangement of rocks positioned like islands in an expanse of sand raked to represent ripples in the water. The Zen garden did little to calm the mood of dread which had settled over the inhabitants of Liberty Mountain.

"Do we have enough to feed the multitude?" the leader asked as she scanned the worried faces of the sisters.

"Thankfully, we've got enough for a feast. No one need go hungry; the pantry is full, and we just filled the freezer on Monday," Martha replied

"What a wonderful idea! I love it."

Sheila dark expression of concern slowly brightened into a smile as she took Martha's hand and they stood together on the second story deck.

"Hear ye! Hear ye!" Sheila sang out as she raised her hands over her head in a sign of prayer. "Tonight is the first night of a new world. By the authority of my office, I hereby declare a feast of gratitude and thanksgiving. Spread the word to gather, rejoice, and be thankful. We are alive. We have survived, and we will continue to survive. Blessed be."'

I couldn't keep myself from smiling. It was as corny as all hell but might work. Her declaration of a feast in defiance of fate and everything going on around us was a cheeky and masterful distraction from the anxiety and apprehension we were all feeling.

Hmm, the first night in a new world? I might as well play historian. I scribbled the date on my notepad followed by, "Day One, Year One: Chief orders we start the new age with a celebration of gratitude and thanksgiving."

With a few commands and several suggestions, Martha organized the society into a scrumptious scavenger hunt.

"Please put everything over there," the kitchen maestro said as she instructed us to transfer the contents in the freezer to the dining table.

She scratched her head as she examined the freezer wrapped contents and sorted them into several piles while also scanning the pantry shelves for additional fixings. Martha closed her eyes in intense concentration as she matched her inventory of recipes with available ingredients. After about a minute heavy thinking, her face relaxed into a smile and her eyes flashed open.

"Got it!" she exclaimed with a wide grin as she slapped the palm of her hand on her thigh.