Once at the bottom, he took half a minute to scan the area. There had to be useful stuff down here. But he didn’t have any use for flower seeds, and while the time might come when he’d enjoy sitting in a yard, lawn chairs wouldn’t justify the real estate they’d take up in the Bronco.

“Focus, Adam,” he said.

The gun vault was really a gun room, protected by a steel door that could have come from a bank. While working here, Adam had committed the four-digit combination code to a mnemonic that mixed his and his brothers’ birthdays. It probably would have made no sense to anyone else, but that was fine.

He spun the dial left-right-left-right, and then turned the handle that disengaged the massive pins that extended into the reinforced concrete wall. Once free, the door swung open easily, as if it weighed nothing.

In the old days, opening the door triggered a ceiling light. Now, as he cast his light through the darkness by turning his head, he illuminated all kinds of toys. The very first rifles he saw were Ruger 10/22s, the same that his mom had bought them for their go bags. Good rifles, they didn’t have quite the power that he was interested in. Palmer’s was a distributer for Bushmaster, and the vault had quite a collection of AR15s. Most were designed exclusively for use with external optics, but Adam wanted to find ones with iron sights, ones that never ran out of batteries.

He found two. He lifted them off the shelf one at a time, checked the actions, then laid them down for later. Putting his rucksack on the floor, he opened its main compartment and expanded it as wide as it would go. He took four 30-round magazines for the AR15s—three for each, counting the mags that were already installed in the weapons, and then he added six hundred rounds of 5.56-millimeter ammunition, two hundred rounds for each of them.

Then it was time to shop for pistols. He chose two Glock 19s because he knew that gun well, and then he dumped eight boxes of nine-millimeter hollow point into the bag. That gave them another two hundred rounds of pistol ammo apiece. The ruck was getting damned heavy now.

He pivoted slowly around his own axis, casting the white disk of light over everything he could see. He was tempted by some of the heavier hunting rifles, but that would mean a lot of extra weight, plus a new caliber of bigger, heavier bullets. It just wasn’t worth the effort.

He did grab a couple of Blade-Tech Kydex holsters for the Glocks. He even took the time to thread his belt through the mounting rings and cinched the holster close to his hip, just in front of the KA-BAR. Then he slid the Glock home. He’d load it later.