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Loc-tite—if they had it, they used it. Fortunately, Tom Kaminski had been adamant on the need to bring lots of glue even though their original plan had been to camp out in the woods. “Nothing’s handier than glue except duct tape,” he’d insisted, “and you never know when and how you might need it.”
    The old fart turned out to be right. He had a habit of doing that, which Andy had found annoying for decades. Forty-eight years, eight months and two days, to be exact, if you counted from their wedding. Longer than that, if you counted from their first date—when he’d claimed he knew a better Italian restaurant than the one she proposed and…hadn’t been wrong.
    By the time they got all the pallets in position and glued down, Freddy and the youngsters had gotten everything in the vans and trucks onto the roof.
    “The rubber mats next and then the plastic floor mats for whatever the rubber won’t cover,” Freddy ordered. “They all need to be glued down too, because we don’t want any metal—not even nails or staples—connecting us to the roof, and the pallets are already full of nails.”
    A shout came from below. “I need to get up there!”
    Freddy took a deep breath and ran fingers through his hair. “Okay, I guess it’s time to haul up the gorilla.”
    “Don’t call my husband a gorilla,” said Andy. “He’s not that damn big and he’s mostly bald now. Who ever saw a bald gorilla?”
    “He’s big enough to break my poor back,” muttered Freddy. But he was already going down the stairs.
    It took them a while to get Tom Kaminski up onto the roof. They didn’t want to take the risk of using the hoist since they had no suitable rigging. Even as strong as he was, Tom was seventy now, so he needed to take a lot of breaks. Sam tried to help at first, but she was too small to make much of a difference and just got in Freddy’s way. In the end, she got assigned to bring up the wheelchair, the rifle, and the custom-made shooting bench that Tom had had designed for him after he recovered from the accident that took his legs.
    But, finally, it was done. And Tom didn’t take more than a ten minute rest before he started patrolling again—and this time he had a nice flat steel surface to roll around on, along with a helper.
    “Come on, Sam,” he said. “You can be my spotter and set up the bench whenever we need it.”
    “Only if you teach me how to shoot the rifle.”
    “It’s a deal. But you got to carry the rifle too.”
    “What am I, a caddie?”
    “Hell, no. Caddies get paid.”
    * * *
    By sundown, what everyone was starting to call “tent city” had been erected and most of their goods stashed away somewhere. The two vinyl tool sheds were positioned in the center of the roof. By mutual agreement, one of them would be inhabited by Tom and Andy Kaminski and the other by Pedro Vargas and his eighty-one year old mother Yarelis, but they’d both serve as emergency shelters for everyone in case of a thunderstorm.
    Surrounding the sheds were all the tents. Those ranged in size from a couple of eight by twelve foot dome-shaped tents that would hold all four of the Haywoods and Freddy and Victoria and their two kids, to a couple of eight by six tents—one for Luis and Flora Rodriguez and one that had been intended for Jack but got turned over to Rochelle Lewis, Sam Crane and Ceyonne Bennett.
    Jack would have to settle for a two-person tent. They’d brought several of those, figuring they could use them to hold supplies. Assuming that Ceyonne’s father eventually showed up, he could have one of them also.
    The two generators were positioned in the hut they’d constructed with the cases of paper. The roof for the hut was made out of metal shelving Freddy had found in the Office Depot with more cases stacked on top of them. They used the hollow steel tubes that were originally intended to provide the frame for the shelving as a lightning rod that Freddy welded onto the staircase.
    There