Hidden Supplies

"Spies hide guns like squirrels hide acorns. You never know when you'll need a weapon or where you'll be when you need it."

—Burn Notice

People like to be prepared. Some people like to be Crazy Prepared. Some are Properly Paranoid.

If your life is filled with hitmen, supervillains and other unwelcome guests you really don't want to be caught unprepared. You keep your favorite gun in a desk drawer in your home office, but you're not sure you can get to it in time if you are caught in the kitchen. So you keep another gun taped behind the fridge. And maybe just for kicks you keep another gun hidden under the garden gnome in your front yard.

And it may not always be a gun. Duct tape is handy no matter the situation. Keep some in your car, office and work bench.

Although like Crazy Prepared, if you have too many of these "just in case" supply caches you will likely get a few strange reactions.

Compare Hammerspace, Pillow Pistol, Book Safe and Wall of Weapons. See also Survivalist Stash and Emergency Stash.

Examples of Hidden Supplies include:

Anime

• In Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, the Major is shown to have a large weapon stash on the under side of an underwear drawer at one of her safehouses.
• In Darker than Black: Ryuusei no Gemini, Hei is shown to have a spare coat, mask and set of knives hidden under the floor boards of an abandoned house.

Comic Books

• Being Crazy Prepared, Batman does this too, though within the house, he's more inclined to have ordinary objects that just "happen" to be usable as weapons lying about. In an issue of Trinity, Bruce Wayne is attacked in the small woods he has on his estate, and is no more than 30 yards from a fake tree with a full set of Bat-gear inside. (The attackers were non-human monsters, so he wasn't worried about exposing his Secret Identity.)
  • Batman is also known for having another set of Batman gear at the Wayne Enterprises building.
  • Post-Knightfall he goes so far as to set up a dozen duplicate Batcaves all over Gotham, each stocked with everything from a backup database to spare vehicles. The actual locations vary as required by the plot, but it's usually accepted that one of them is somewhere under Arkham, which is a major plot point in Batman: Arkham Asylum.
• The Silver Age Lex Luthor used to be Crazy Prepared in this way for escaping prison (but only for that, not for defeating Superman). At the very least, he would have a stash of equipment hidden (say, in a fake tree) outside every prison he might get sent to (he was also portrayed as something of an escape artist, so getting outside the prison walls usually wasn't a problem). In some cases, he would however go to the length of actually placing henchmen (or possibly hench androids) in the prison general population, just to ensure that he would have access to the few components needed for his getaway gadget (teleporter, disintegration beam, etc.) that he couldn't pilfer from an ordinary alarm clock or radio, should he ever happen to be sent to that particular prison.

Film

• Kind of played for laughs in the 2004 The Punisher movie. Frank was fighting the hitman known as "The Russian" and Frank would grab certain weapons he had hidden around his apartment, but would systematically be either shrugged off or totally neutralized by the hitman. The look on Frank's face when the Russian smashes his revolver with a dumbbell is priceless.
• The Terminator movies usually feature a large supply of weapons because Sarah is expecting a war. The second movie had them buried in the desert and the third movie had them hidden in a mausoleum.
• In Men in Black II with Jay and Kay separated from MIB headquarters, they went to an apartment Kay apparently used to live in to stock up on alien weaponry in a hidden room.
• In Mr. and Mrs. Smith, both protagonists have a hidden cache of weapons in the house - his is under the garage floor, hers is hidden below the oven in the kitchen.
• The main character of RED has a supply cache of money and fake identification hidden under the concrete in his basement, which he accesses by smashing the floor with a sledge hammer.
• In The Road Warrior, Max keeps a sheathed knife hidden under his car, next to the switch that disarms the explosives guarding his gas tank. The Gyro Captain anticipates this and Max doesn't get the chance to use it.

Literature

• A rather charming example in John Wyndham's 1950s alien-invasion novel The Kraken Wakes: the narrator Mike learns that his wife's "hobby" of bricklaying was cover for her bricking up a cellar-full of food supplies in case of disaster. "Did you really think that someone like me would be doing all that bricklaying just for fun?"
• Z for Zachariah has protagonist Ann Burden hide supplies in a cave, in case she needs to hide from the man who's found her valley a year after nuclear war destroys most of the world. Turns out to be a good thing she did, too.

Live Action Television

• Psych- Shawn, Gus and Henry are returning home when they see someone in the living room from the front yard. Henry immediately reaches into the birdhouse and pulls out a stun gun.
  • In another episode, the bad guy was trying to frame Lassiter for killing a criminal already handcuffed and the final confrontation took place at Lassiter's apartment. The bad guy told him that he took the liberty of removing all of the various side-arms Lassiter kept in the apartment, but forgot the one in the candy bowl.
• Burn Notice- In one episode Michael let a supposed bureaucrat into his apartment only to find out the guy was a hitman. Michael's narration explained that you can't be absolutely sure of every variable, but he wanted to have the meeting in his apartment because he had home field advantage. Michael reached under the sink and pulled out a gun he had taped there.
  • In another episode, he heard someone approaching his front door (this was a time when a rival spy was out to kill him) and Michael reached into the fridge and quickly pulled out a gun.
  • It comes up several times that Michael has several storage units with guns and explosives hidden all around Miami (Sadly no fridge for yogurt or beer). Detective Paxson once almost discovered one of these units, but upon getting the search warrant she found the unit empty, with a hole cut out of the back and out of view of her survellaince team...
• A flashback in an episode of Chuck once showed Chuck and Bryce Larkin playing some kind of war game with either Nerf or paintball guns.(I forget.) Anyway, it seemed like Chuck was going to win, but Bryce reached into a bookshelf and pulled out some extra ammo that he had placed there in advance. This memory came in handy later.
• In The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Sarah's house is built for full scale battle: guns in the walls, guns in the umbrella rack, guns in bags, Kevlar lining the furniture... the cops are pretty impressed when they search the place.
  • They even keep guns in the oh-so-handy in-bed compartments on one of the group's Dodge trucks.
  • In the second season, it is revealed that truly sensitive items are kept in a sealed safe buried under the floor of the house. The family also keeps a small warehouse that houses their entire personal armory.
• Star Trek- On various ships there are compartments with phasers, tricorders, and medkits all over the place, just in case people are isolated in a disaster situation.
• The Professionals. Bodie and Doyle encounter a veteran member of CI5 who has weapons stashed all over his house in case he's attacked. This causes problems when he turns out to be corrupt and the two have to take him down.
• In The Office, Dwight is full of this trope. He's hidden knives, ninja stars, and swords under his desk, inside the standard potted plants, in the toilet, under the couch in the office, and even inside a file in the filing cabinent, labeled under "A. Knife." Of course, none of this has been used much due to the fact that there aren't many threats in a paper supply company, but one time he did use pepper spray to stop an attacker.
• Alias: When Jack and Vaughan engage in clandestine activities without CIA approval to help Sydney, Jack takes Vaughan to a secret warehouse he owns that's full of supplies. Vaughan assesses just how many different types of things are in this place (weapons, survival gear, medical equipment, money, you name it) and then realises something even more important: the fact Jack's letting Vaughan see this place means Jack's got more than one of these secret supply bases.

Tabletop Games

• Heavily assumed in the French tabletop RPG Polaris. In this game, the evil Genetician Empire was defeated centuries ago, but they prepared for a comeback by hiding hundreds of weapons stashes everywhere (strange that all those tons of material, including warships and automated weapons, were useless). Knowing that, the good guys oddly did the same, thus letting the world collapse again without a benevolent rule. Makes for nice Dungeon Crawling, anyway.

Video Games

• In Half Life 2: Episode Two you get a neat little gadget on your car half way through which picks up a signal from transmitters left with the rebels' emergency caches (consisting of ammo and health kits). Places include under the floorboards of an abandoned shack, and hanging from a basket in a tree, there's even an achievement for finding them all.
• Halo 3: ODST has the Rookie wandering around New Mombasa and as you unlock the Audio Files you can unlock various supply cache's that have weapons, med-packs and vehicles.
• There are few comforts in Resident Evil games, but most of the save points are decidedly comfortable; hidden out-of-the-way places stocked with supplies that allow you to catch your breath. Even the background music is calming, if still a bit foreboding, enough to make even a battle-hardened player reluctant to leave.

Web Original

• Red vs. Blue: When Tex is fighting Agent Washington and the Meta, she has armament up to and including a mounted gatling gun ready to be blasted out of the ice by explosives.

Western Animation

• American Dad has a poke at this. There are at least half a dozen guns in the spice cabinet in the kitchen, that Francine has never noticed, including a pen gun (mightier than the sword) and a sword gun (mightier than the pen gun).

Real Life

• James «Whitey» Bulger, one of America's most wanted criminals, used to hide 30 weapons, fake ID, and 800,000$ cash in the walls of his flat.