“Are you saying you’ve gone legit?” Andrej asked, not buying it for a second. He nodded at the thick metal door. “What? People trying to make away with your copper ore?”

“Oh, this ain’t the mine,” J.C. said, grinning. “This is the cool part of our operation here.” He nodded at the elevator. “Turns out there’s caverns down there. Underground tunnels and caves, a whole damn maze. Juan swears he even heard a river once.”

Now that was kinda interesting. In a “secret cave system under a survivalist compound, how fucking cool is this?” kind of way.

“No shit?”

“No shit,” J.C. promised. “We’re using parts of it, but mostly it’s a huge, unexplored mess. We don’t know how far it stretches, but it’s possible some of the caves connect to the Carlsbad Caverns.” He hesitated, staring into the dark, and his smile dimmed. “If something happens, grab your friends and get down there.”

So that was what this little field trip was about. Andrej’s mind snapped back to business obediently, but not without disappointment. It had been fun to pretend, for a bit, that this was a social call.

“What if they follow?”

“I’ll give you a cheat sheet.” J.C. patted his arm, but his eyes were serious when he added, “Don’t deviate. You get lost down there, we’ll have a hard time finding you again.”

“Awesome,” Andrej muttered, eying the elevator with trepidation.

Suddenly, exploring the secret underground caves sounded much less exhilarating. “Let’s hope they don’t track us down, then.”

J.C. snorted sardonically. “Yeah, that’s likely.”

A man was allowed to dream, wasn’t he?

“Mostly I’m hoping we’ll be long gone by the time they get here,”

Andrej confessed. “I don’t want to bring this down on you. I just didn’t know where else to go.”