Yesterday's Tomorrow - Nathan Wolf, Wolf (inspirational books to read txt) 📗

and my mouth filled with liquid as she squirted and urinated. She pushed my face away with her hands. I loved the sight of her contractions as Darlene's clit pulsed in climax and streams of liquid trickled down the inside of her legs.

I looked at my watch again and announced, "One minute, thirty seconds. I think that we have a new land speed record. Now we've got to hustle if we're going to be on time."

Darlene stood naked before me and tilted her head. With a woe-is-me face, she asked, "What about my afterglow?"

"Take it with you," I said, patting her bare behind.

Sheila was waiting for us with a warm smile when we arrived on the cabin's front deck more or less on time. I returned Sheila's smile as I gave her a pack of hand-rolled cigarettes and a red Bic lighter. The shadows still held a hint of last night's frost despite clear blue skies and bright sunshine.

"Follow me," Sheila said as we set out on our tour of the Colony.

Our first stop was a utility building built into the base of the mountain with only the outer garage doors visible.

"This structure is designed to minimize the colony's visual footprint. We don't want to draw undue attention to our presence because of Google Earth and the plethora of available satellite imagery. Our continued survival is dependent upon us keeping low visibility, and we do our best to be invisible to the outside world," Sheila said, as she opened a set of outer doors to reveal a long dark tunnel blasted into the mountain's bedrock.

When Sheila entered the darkened corridor, motion sensors activated banks of overhead LED lighting which in turn illuminated the passageway for as far as the eye could see.

"Holy crap! You guys build this?" My words echoed off the walls.

The tunnel was a twenty-by-twenty-foot wide box ramping downward into the mountain's interior. The rough-hewn rock walls glistened with seepage and condensation. Drainage ditches lining each side of the corridor's crushed gravel roadway carried the excess water into the depths.

"The Liberty Mountain Mine was one of the several thousand hard-rock gold mines dotting the Rocky Mountains back in the 1860s. The claim, like many, never much amounted to anything. It went bust after three years. We took the existing mining shafts and adapted them to accommodate our vehicle fleet," Sheila explained.

The temperature gradually rose as we descended. About five minutes later we found ourselves in a large cavern. The cave contained a full-service automotive center, complete with a dozen vehicles of various descriptions. I spotted several snowmobiles, Jeep Cherokees, trucks of various makes and years, and ATVs, along with a few front-end loaders and small Bobcats. I saw our Toyota Rav4 parked off to one side.

"Several sisters are excellent mechanics and skilled operators. They do a fantastic job keeping our fleet up and running," Sheila said as she led us to a tunnel at the back of the cavern.

We followed the lighted passageway for a few thousand feet into another expansive cavern so large that the roof and far walls were lost in darkness. The hot and humid air in the grotto hummed with energy; the distinct whine of three-megawatt steam-driven turbines filled the chamber with the low rumbling hum of power.

I was slack-jawed in disbelief. It looked like a scene out of the science fiction movie Journey to the Center of the Earth. Piping and heavy machinery at the middle of the cave surrounded a huge complex of hot springs and heated pools of water on three sides. A single story control center occupied space on the side of the pond nearest to where we stood.

Looked like waterfalls frozen in time, Flowstone oozed down the walls of the cavern behind us. Stalactites reached down from the darkened ceiling, and thousands of stalagmites grew from the floor, some as massive as trees. We followed a well-worn path through the stone forest while batteries of strategically placed LED streetlights bathed the area around the lagoon in a glow of whitish-blue illumination. I noticed that motion detectors kicked the lights nearest us into high power when we came into the range of a lamp; it was like walking beneath a searchlight's moving beam.

"Let's stop by and say hello to the technicians on duty. We'll have a cup of coffee and some conversation. I'll tell you more about this amazing place." Sheila pointed to a two-story building about the size of a raised ranch and motioned for us to follow her. She climbed the exterior stairway and entered the building without knocking.

"Surprise!"

"No way, Sister. We've been watching you three on camera for the last twenty minutes," said a thirty-something brunette as she gave Sheila a warm hug.

The slender technician was dressed in a loose-fitting one-piece coverall. The zipper of the hunter green outfit was pulled down to her navel, and it was clear at a glance that she wore nothing under her outer garments. I recognized the woman as one of the sisters from last night's meeting.

Thanks to air-conditioning, the interior of the control center was ten or fifteen degrees cooler than the cavern's tropical humidity. Wraparound observation windows provided three hundred and sixty-degree field-of-view.

A control panel filled with switches and dials below the window monitored the performance of the turbines and generators. Several large screens displayed different views of the underground labyrinth of caverns and passageways. Images of various views of the area around within the cabin dominated one bank of displays. Big Sister was watching. Security cameras doth make saints of us all.

Sheila said a quick hello to the two women on duty before leading us to a large conference table on the Center's first floor. Three K-cups worth of hot steaming coffee awaited our pleasure.

"What is this place?" I took a sip of coffee.

"It's incredible, whatever it is. Never seen anything like it. How on earth did you manage to build that?" I pointed out the window to the maze of generators and machinery at the center of the cavern as I shook my head in disbelief.

"It wasn't as easy as we thought it would be. More like an engineering nightmare. We hired a Swiss engineering firm to design and construct the entire system. Everything and everyone needed to build this facility were brought in by their heavy-lift air service When they finally finished, we gave them a ten percent bonus to forget we ever existed. Lucky for us, their banking secrecy laws encourage financially induced amnesia," Sheila laughed.

"This facility," Sheila tapped her finger on the conference table, "doubles as the control center for our geothermal generating capacity and also serves as a security command center in the event of an intrusion. We've wired every conceivable approach to our valley for sight and sound. We have acoustic sensor arrays and remote video cameras to alert us in the event of any intrusion."

Floor to ceiling maps of the valley and surrounding area covered one wall of the center, and banks of radio equipment filled another wall. I hadn't seen anything like it since I completed my tour of Vietnam. I had worked in the Out-Country Air Operations command center at MACV back in the day. We tried in vain to interdict the flow of enemy supplies coming down the Ho Chi Minh trail.

The Seventh Air Force dropped tens of thousands of seismic and acoustic sensor arrays along the length and breadth of the trail system. The enemy couldn't fart without us smelling it. It didn't do much good. Charlie had more gas in his gut than we had aircraft and bombs. Still, we wired the trail like a pinball machine and played it every day.

"Our sensors are solar powered and have a ninety-nine percent uptime. Yesterday, we picked you up on surveillance when you were still ten miles out. Our response teams didn't go on high alert since we expected your arrival. On ready-alert maybe, but they didn't deploy to prevent your entry into the valley," Sheila said, as she pointed out the greasepaint marking which indicated our route of travel.

"How often have you had a problem with intruders?" I asked.

"We've only had two incidents since we opened the cabin. The first was a troop of lost boy scouts. We intercepted them and redirected them back to civilization. The second time was when two escaped convicts wandered into our valley," Sheila said.

"How did that turn out?" I asked.

"Not well for the convicts. They happened upon three sisters skinny-dipping in the river and decided to have some fun. They almost beat one girl to death and tried to rape the other," Sheila said, as her eyes narrowed and her expression hardened.

"The third woman got away and radioed security. We got there before they could do more harm than they had already done," she said.

I remembered the hullabaloo over the escape of two men from the federal prison in Englewood. It eventually died down. No one ever found the escapees, and folks assumed that they had made their way to Mexico.

"What happened to the men?" I asked.

"I executed them and left their bodies for the animals. No trace of them remains," she said without elaboration. I noticed her hands were shaking as she spoke.

The phrase uttered by Robot B9 from the TV series "Lost in Space" rang like an alarm in my brain. "Danger Will Robinson, danger!" I had an increasingly uneasy feeling.

Sheila was a first-class security freak, and she was telling me way too much and sharing far too much information. If I couldn't earn her trust, there was no way she would ever allow me to leave this place alive. In her mind, millions of dollars and fifteen years of labor depended upon Liberty Mountain staying off the grid and a secret from the outside world.

She was a competent and capable commander, and the security of her family of sisters was clearly her number one priority. My mission was to figure out a way to become a fully-vetted member of the colony and to earn Sheila's complete acceptance.

Shit! She'd just confessed to murdering two men in cold blood. I tried to hide my involuntary shiver. I pulled my pack of smokes out of my shirt pocket, offered a cigarette to Sheila, and took one for myself.

I felt a surge of sympathy as she smoked in silence. It wasn't for the dead rapists that I grieved, but for Sheila. Necessity forced her to take two lives to protect her community. She would carry the memory to the grave. I shuddered as I realized she wouldn't hesitate to put a bullet into me if she thought it necessary to protect the colony. Having a cup of coffee with someone who one day could be your executioner was weird. Stranger still was the fact that I liked and respected her.

Memo to self: Don't piss Sheila off.

"This is one of the secrets of Liberty Mountain. We decided to expand the network of tunnels leftover from the days when this site was a gold mine when we built the cabin. Imagine our surprise when we busted through into this cavern. It's a geothermal treasure. It took us almost five years to engineer and design this system. Construction was a three-year process which cost us nearly seven million dollars to complete," Sheila explained.

I looked around in amazement as Sheila spoke and tried to imagine the kind of mind which dreamed all this up. I had the dizzy feeling I had woken up in the middle of someone else's science fiction novel. Darlene had told me that Sheila had been a college professor back in the day and she was reverting to form. Her eyes sparkled with enthusiasm as she warmed to her subject.

"We've pretty much run the generators nonstop for the last ten years. We keep one generator active and the other in reserve. Every few months we switch them out to perform routine maintenance."

While she talked, Sheila moved from one window to the next as she pointed out the different aspects of the underground