James Patterson: Gone

The McMurphy Mountain Compound was actually pretty incredible. Instead of the run-down shack and marijuana fields she was expecting, his home was a sophisticated and elaborate underground bunker. Built almost directly into the side of a hill, his hobbit hole, as he called it, consisted of twenty old school-bus frames welded together in a long corridor with rooms T-ing off to the right and left.

Convinced of an impending nuclear attack, he’d built the complex in the eighties with some friends. Over a few months, they’d brought up the old buses one by one on a 4x4 flatbed, dug out the hill, welded them all together, and then buried them again.

He told her that when the nuclear winter didn’t materialize, he slowly started to move his already flourishing marijuana farm underground, out of sight from the nosy feds. Most of the rooms were currently being used as hydroponic marijuana grow rooms, but there was also a kitchen, a gun room, a workshop, and several bedrooms stacked with bunk beds, where the kids now slept.

It had heat, ventilation, electricity run off propane, fresh water. Even two neat and clean bathrooms with showers and working toilets.

It wasn’t just the compound that was surprising. McMurphy, despite his frazzled, nutty appearance, had been so nice and gentle with the children. Before he had brought the children in, he had closed and securely locked the doors to all the grow rooms. Like any gracious host, he made sure that everyone was comfortable and well fed. He didn’t have any video games, but he had Monopoly and Scrabble and cards and a dartboard.

He’d shown the children the collections on the mantelpiece of rocks that he had found on his wanderings, pointing out the petrified sea creatures in them, put there millions of years in the past when the Sierra Madre had been the floor of an ancient sea.

The bus room in which they were now sitting McMurphy called the library. It was actually quite cozy. A mounted bull’s head hung above a chess set. On the walls were shelves bursting with books, mechanical engineering tomes and leather-bound geology texts beside precarious columns of yellowed paperbacks.

There were also hundreds of framed photographs. McMurphy in wrestling tights, McMurphy in a Green Beret army uniform with his arm around a couple of other soldiers. A lot of them were of hippie people from the sixties. There was a shot of an absolutely beautiful blond woman in a top hat under a tree, playing the flute. One of a young, bearded McMurphy with some other long-haired and bearded blond men wearing Jesus shirts, sitting around a campfire. There was even a shot of some long-haired children in their bathing suits on the shore of a lake, playing with ponies and goats and dogs.

Mary Catherine gestured at the photographs.

“What’s your story, Mr. McMurphy?” she said. “How’d you do all this?”

“Didn’t I already tell you we dug out the side of the hill with a bulldozer and buried the buses one by one and welded them together like Legos?”

“I meant more like why ,” Mary Catherine said. “Why are you here in this place? How’d you get here, if you don’t mind me prying?”

McMurphy sighed and leaned back as he crossed his legs.

“You want my story, huh? Hmmm. Let’s see. I grew up outside San Fran. Five kids in the family. Dad was a plumber. My mom was a night-shift nurse at a mental hospital. I wrestled in high school and got good enough to get a scholarship to Berkeley. I was just about to get my mechanical engineering degree when a fit of conscience made me drop out and hitch up with the army.

“When I returned to the States, I somehow found myself hanging out in Berkeley with a group of writers and artists and drug addicts that would end up being called the Merry Pranksters. I actually stayed at Ken Kesey’s house for a while. I really admired the wild and free, independent way he was living. The parties were a true goof.”

“I can imagine,” Mary Catherine said.

“Wanna bet?” McMurphy said, winking at her. “Anyway, one day in late ’sixty-eight, instead of relaxing and just having some innocent fun, these new people came to the house and started talking about the masses and the classes and starting a political movement, and I got straight right the heck out of there. I eventually ended up here with some friends, living off the grid, off the land.”

“Who’s the pretty lady with the flute?”

“She was my woman for a while. We had three kids. They’re gone now, obviously. Took off in the early eighties, when I started building this bomb shelter. Everybody’s gone. Just me now. The last of the Mohicans. Bilbo McMurphy, the last hobbit, at your service.”

He looked around the room, wincing.

“I know how I must look to you. Like some weird old hippie survivalist, right? You’re thinking this mole-like freak is off his rocker to be living in a hole in the ground.”

“You saved all our lives, Mr. McMurphy,” Mary Catherine said. “What I think of you is that your home is incredible, and that you’re a very good man.”

McMurphy smiled, genuinely surprised.

“You do? Really?”

“Yes, of course,” Mary Catherine said.

“In that case,” McMurphy said, retrieving a Zippo and a pot pipe from his pocket, “do you want to smoke some dope with me?”

Mary Catherine shook her head, disappointed.

“No, Mr. McMurphy,” she said. “Remember our deal with the children here. Unfortunately, your home will have to remain a dope-free zone until we leave.”

McMurphy sighed as he put the pipe away.

“Oh, well. Different strokes and all that,” he said, standing and yawning. “Good night, now. Get the kiddies up early, and we’ll leave at first light.”

Mary Catherine had just laid her head down on one of the bomb shelter’s bunk beds when the beeping sound started.

She went out into the hall area to find McMurphy running like mad toward the front of the compound.

“What is it?”

“Motion detector!” he yelled, more animated than Mary Catherine had ever seen him. “Outside perimeter’s been breached! I knew it. Sector B. It was the CB. They must have picked it up. Dammit! Just like the damn cops. These freaks must have ways of scanning for radio signals.”

She followed him as he ran into the gun room and spun the combo on the green locker’s Master lock. Inside, shining with gun oil, was an arsenal. Tactical shotguns, scoped hunting rifles, several M-16s. McMurphy pulled out one of the automatic rifles and slipped in a magazine with a loud clacking sound. He threw ten or so other magazines into a bag and tossed the bag and rifle over his shoulder.

“What are you doing?” Mary Catherine asked.

“If they find one of the ventilation shafts, they could do anything. Plug it up, smoke us out. Didn’t I see on the news that they’re using some sort of poison-gas chemical weapon? They’ll kill us in a heartbeat. I’m going outside to make sure that doesn’t happen.”

McMurphy started going toward the back of the bus complex.

“Isn’t the front door the other way?” Mary Catherine said.

“I can’t go out the front. Are you crazy? I need to go out through the tunnels.”

“The tunnels?”

“I forgot to tell you about them,” he said as he pulled up the handle of a door at the rear of the main corridor. On its other side was a dirt tunnel about four feet tall, strung with lightbulbs.

“I’ve been digging tunnels for years and years. Out the back of the complex, all through this hill. It’s actually what I did in Vietnam. Cleared the tunnels. They called us tunnel rats. The ones I built are just like the ones I saw in Cu Chi. Hell, better. Just shut the back door behind me. No, wait. Dammit, almost forgot.”