Gary ‘Gearhead’'s Arc

Chapter 8 of 15

Gary woke to the sound of shovels hitting something that wasn't dirt. The crew had started work on the north wall foundation at first light, digging footings where the fence line would anchor into the ground. He pulled on his boots and walked out to find three workers standing in a hole, staring down at what they'd uncovered. The woman crouched at the edge of the excavation, brushing dirt off a steel panel. Gary climbed down beside her. The panel was riveted into concrete, painted military gray beneath layers of rust. He scraped more soil away and found a door frame built into a reinforced wall that ran parallel to his property line. Pre-war construction, buried deep enough that nothing on the surface had marked it. The woman looked at him. "What do we do?" Gary checked the door seam. It was sealed tight, but the hinges were exposed where the soil had washed away. He could pry it open or fill the hole back in and move the wall ten feet west. Opening it meant risking whatever the military had buried here. Filling it in meant wasting three days of work and losing the straightest section of his perimeter. He glanced back at his half-finished walls, then at the woman's people watching from the cistern. They'd come here because he was building something that could hold. He pulled a crowbar from his belt. "We see what's inside." The door groaned open on corroded hinges, revealing a concrete stairwell descending into darkness. Gary grabbed a flashlight and went down first. The stairs opened into a storage vault lined with metal shelves and weapon racks bolted to the walls. Most were empty, but three crates sat stacked in the corner, their seals still intact. Gary pried one open and found rifle parts packed in grease, ammunition boxes underneath. Military surplus, untouched since before the war. The woman came down behind him and whistled low. Gary did the math—enough weapons to arm everyone in the camp twice over, or enough trade value to finish his walls and buy six months of supplies. He looked at the empty racks and understood why someone had sealed this place. Rust Creek didn't need more guns flooding the market, and the Ravens didn't need to know what was buried under his property. He closed the crate and turned to the woman. "We lock it. Nobody talks about what's down here. Not to traders, not to your people, not to anyone who comes asking." She nodded. Gary climbed back up and told the crew to shift the foundation west. The vault would stay buried, and his walls would go up slower. But some things weren't worth the cost of opening.