For the first time since they entered the mine, they were approaching a break in the shaft. With his eyes, Ben followed the loosely strung lights around to what must have been the room with the generator. But why go through the effort to energize and light an empty mine shaft? There had to be something worth the trouble down here. Ben glanced past the opening on his right for a moment. The shaft continued down into the earth. The lights did not, however, and Ben could only see several feet into the pitch-black hole. He was tempted to check a little farther down the shaft using the flashlight, but they didn’t have time for that, and he didn’t have the energy.
He sliced his way around the corner, clearing sections of the room as he moved. Ben did his best to ignore the cache of gear, guns, and ammunition that lined the walls and remained focused on making sure nobody else was down there. But as soon as he had done that, he let his eyes wander to the piles of what could be best described as treasure, given their current situation.
Ben smiled. “Joel, come here. Quick.”
“Whoa.” After rounding the corner, Joel froze with his mouth wide open. Gunner was less impressed and proceeded to push through the assortment of things, investigating anything of interest along the way.
Discovering the cache was a load off Ben’s mind, and although they weren’t in the clear by any stretch, he could finally see a little light at the end of the tunnel. Realistically, he’d hoped to get lucky and find some of their things. Not only did it look like most of their missing gear was in the pile, but there were also countless other things in here. The old man must have been stockpiling this for years, although Ben was sure he’d added to it exponentially over the last few weeks.
As the initial joy about the discovery faded, reality set back in, and Ben was reminded that they had an imminent threat to concern themselves with. Not only that, but they needed to let the others know that the camp, for the time being, was theirs. That meant that they could stop constantly looking over their shoulders and focus on moving this gear out of here and into the vehicles.
That was the other thing that gave his morale a boost: being fairly certain that they had eliminated all the moonshiners in the camp. Ben wouldn’t let his guard down completely and didn’t want the others to, either, but they could breathe a little easier once he, Joel, and Gunner climbed out of here.
But he wasn’t leaving empty-handed and immediately started looking through the piles for rifle ammunition and some of their other weapons.
“We need to take whatever we can carry. We might not get a chance to come back down here, at least not for a while.” Ben didn’t elaborate on that statement, but he was thinking that if the other moonshiners showed up, they better take what they needed to defend themselves now.
“Dad, look.” Joel was on the other side of the room near the entrance.
“Joel, we don’t have time for that right now. Give me a hand, will you?” Ben wasn’t concerned about anything but taking what they could carry and getting back to the others.
“No. Dad, look!” Joel insisted. Ben turned toward his son just in time to see him flip a switch on the end of a black cord that hung from the ceiling. He was about to tell him not to touch it, but it was too late.
The lights grew dim, and almost immediately, a series of squeaks and groans came from outside the room. Then Ben heard a metallic clicking noise behind him. He turned to look and saw that it was coming from under the generator housing. The large wooden box, built over the generator to reduce noise, also had a set of cables running through it. The cables went up to a pulley on the ceiling, then followed a support beam along a few more sets of pulleys before heading out of the room and into the main shaft. Joel was already in the shaft, and Ben rushed to join him. He struggled to get his light to work and had to smack it against his hand a couple of times.
“It’s a mine cart.” Joel laughed as he kept his light trained on the approaching contraption. A series of cables and pulleys turned overhead, bringing the cart right to them and outside the door to the supply room.
“Throw the switch back to the middle,” Ben said.
Joel did as his father asked, and the cart slowed to a stop almost immediately.
“Well, that’s going to make things a whole lot easier.” Joel was proud of his discovery, and rightfully so. Ben studied the cables in the ceiling and inspected the heavily greased connections on the cart, using the faint beam from his newfound flashlight. As far as he could tell, it all looked to be in good shape. That was unexpected, considering the state of the rest of the compound. But they’d find out for themselves soon enough when they loaded it up with gear and rode it topside.
The cart wasn’t very big, but if they put a couple of people down here and a few up top, they could have this place cleared out in an hour or two at most. Sorting through it all and loading the trucks was another story entirely. He and Joel moved around the room quickly, gathering the things they wanted topside first. Among them were enough MREs for everyone to have a quick meal. It would have been smarter to eat some of the perishable food, but Ben didn’t want to waste time cooking something elaborate. The MREs would be fast and contain
