But the alternative… the alternative just wasn’t acceptable.
For if he turned around now and headed east and never found her he’d spend the rest of his life agonizing.
Agonizing that it was his mistake which caused him to lose their trail. That his decision to travel at night for his own self-preservation would doom her to a lifetime of servitude and misery.
Chances were that if they’d turned around more than just a few days before the gap would never be closed, for in a month’s time they could go anywhere.
Or go so close to ground he wouldn’t be able to find them even if he were in the same neighborhood.
That was his game plan, as flawed as it might be. He had word they never made it to Los Angeles. So if he went that far in four days’ time with no sign of them and no additional sightings, he'd make his turn.
It was an agonizing decision and he couldn’t stop debating its merits, even with every turn of his pedals and every mile he put beneath his wheels.
The sad fact of the matter was, he was still indecisive despite his putting the plan into action. That, more than anything else, was why it was imperative he keep his mind busy.
He almost stopped for the night and slept on the desert floor. He’d done it before. Despite the possibility of a deadly snake bite, there wasn’t always suitable shelter available. The tractor trailers here were sparser than normal, since hundreds of them had been stuck in a huge traffic jam just east of the Arizona border.
He’d even gotten off his bike and prepared to bed down for the night when the setting sun caught something large and metal on the highway and reflected off of it.
There was a tractor trailer another mile up.
He almost didn’t go for it. He was exhausted and needed to rest.
But what was another mile, really? He’d already ridden for so many.
And even if the tractor was an oddball, one of the few which didn’t have a sleeper attached… or even if the sleeper was occupied, the trailer itself would provide a comfortable place to sleep.
Rattlers were certainly able to crawl into the back of a trailer. Although forty eight inches from the roadway is a long way to climb, the ICC bar makes it relatively easy for a snake that long to do so.
But they rarely make the effort.
Dave had been on a lot of trailers in harsh desert or semi-desert environments and hadn’t seen a snake on any of them.
It was an easy decision to make, really.
He remounted his bike and went, quite literally, the extra mile.
And he was glad he did, for he’d sleep a lot better on this night for having done so.
The truck turned out to be a White Freightliner, and it did indeed have a sleeper cab.
But that wasn’t what put his mind at ease. What put his mind at ease and helped him sleep better was the huge green highway sign on the shoulder of the highway directly behind the truck.
The sign which read:
ADELANTO – 6 MILES
It took a moment to register.
And then it all made sense to him.
Little Beth was eight years old. She was still getting used to the whole enunciation thing. She mispronounced words on a regular basis.
It was easily to misunderstand something Beth said. And that was especially true of a stranger who wasn’t used to hearing her speak.
Atlanta.
Adelanto.
They did sound somewhat alike.
Chapter 2
Dave suddenly had the confirmation he’d been desperately searching for.
If his hunch played out; if he was right, he was still going in the right direction.
And not only that, he was almost there.
He dismounted and hid his bicycle in the brush just off the highway, lest it be stolen by a night walker.
He went back to the tractor, to the sleeper’s access door, and pounded with the palm of his hand.
It was a procedure all highway nomads knew well.
To try to open the tiny door would have been viewed as a threat by a nomad already inside. It might be answered by bullets flying through the door.
It was highway etiquette in the new world.
Just as one wouldn’t walk through the door of a neighbor’s house unannounced, neither would a highway traveler just barge into a sleeper cab which might already be occupied.
It was just poor form, and could be deadly.
No, the new process, known and accepted by everyone, was to knock first.
If it was occupied, its owner would simply call out, “It’s taken,” or “Sorry,” and the nomad would move on and find other accommodations.
No answer meant it was available. To come on in, and make oneself at home.
In this case, there was no answer.
A weary Dave climbed into the unit, laid his rifle on the narrow floor between the bunk and the back of the driver’s and passenger’s seats, and sprawled across the bunk.
As exhausted as he was, as much as he ached, he now had a renewed sense of purpose.
He found himself smiling for the first time in days.
And he got a great night’s sleep.
He woke up refreshed and chomping at the bits, with a gut feeling something big was going to happen on this new day.
He’d been so excited upon seeing the sign he hadn’t given any thought as to what might be in the trailer.
It was still unlooted.
He’d noticed no pile of unneeded cargo on the highway behind it.
That could be a good sign or bad.
It could mean no nomads had gotten around to searching it yet. It could still be full of treasures in the form of food or water.
But such trailers, called ‘virgins’ in modern nomad lingo, were getting more and more rare in recent days.
It was more likely the trailer had markings which would indicate it had no edibles. Something which would convince the nomads it wasn’t worth their trouble.
For example, most nomads would pass by a trailer marked “Acme Fertilizer Products” or “Ace Hardware” without giving them a second thought. One couldn’t eat cow manure or crescent wrenches.
Not unless they were really really hungry…
A trailer marked with the logo of a national grocery store chain or beverage maker, on the other hand, would likely be rummaged through again and again.
This one, Dave saw when he got out of the rig and examined it, was unmarked. Plain white.
It could be anything.
He walked to the back and noticed the seal had been pried off and was lying on the ground.
At least one person had been curious.
There was something in the trailer. Truckers didn’t seal trailers which were empty.
He was curious enough to unlock one of the doors and to swing it open.
And he laughed.
It was full of caskets.
Dozens of them, stacked floor to ceiling.
A shipping label on the closest said they were from the American United Casket Company in Lynchburg, Tennessee.
They’d come a long way just to be abandoned forever on a lonely California highway.
He almost turned away, then decided to investigate a bit further.
Because he knew something some other nomads perhaps didn’t know.
Several years before, when Dave hung up his Marine Corps uniform, he was out of work for a couple of months.
Between job interviews he helped supplement Sarah’s income by doing day labor.
He reported two or three days a week to a temporary employment agency. They in turn would dispatch him to any one of a number of San Antonio businesses which had walls to paint, ditches to dig, or other non-glamorous tasks.
It was mostly grunt work, and much of it was work a certain type of man wouldn’t lower himself to do under any circumstances.
But Dave had been a United States Marine. He wasn’t afraid of grunt work, and he thrived on physical labor.
He went to each assig
nment with gusto.
Some of the hardest jobs he did were unloading trucks.
When truck drivers deliver goods it’s typically the recipient’s responsibility to do the off-loading.
Some companies, like manufacturing plants and grocery stores, get deliveries each and every day and therefore have people on hand whose duty it is to offload such trucks.
Other businesses, like small mom-and-pops for example, may only get a delivery every week or two. Those places tend to have their clerks and managers pitch in to help.
And sometimes, those clerks and managers are too old or too frail for such labor, and they have to hire someone like Dave to come and unload their merchandize for them.
That’s how Dave knew that looks could be deceiving when it came to unmarked trailers.
Many unmarked trailers belong to independent owner/operators who pack as much cargo into their rigs as possible when making their runs.
And that makes sense. For if a driver can pick up two loads in Charlotte which are both bound for Denver, he can get paid for two deliveries instead of one.
In other words, just because the back end of a trailer is full of caskets doesn’t necessarily mean the front part is.
Dave thought it slightly macabre to climb through the tightly-packed caskets to get to the front of the truck. But not enough to stop him from doing it.
And in the end his effort paid off. For once he made it there… to the front of the trailer, he did indeed discover a second load.
He found four pallets of Tennessee whisky and two pallets of gourmet bottled water.
In the normal world, before everything went black, Dave never would have drank King’s Island Purified Water. It was something he used to see on the supermarket shelf but always passed by.
Back then it cost about four dollars a bottle, and he could buy a whole case of generic brand water for the same price.
These days, of course, he didn’t have to pay for it.
And it tasted oh, so sweet.
There was one last thing he had to do before he left the truck.
It would only take a few minutes, and would satisfy a lifelong curiosity.
He ripped the shrink wrap from one of the caskets.
And cut the plastic bands which held it onto a wooden pallet beneath it.
And raised up the lid.
No, he wasn’t looking for a zombie bride.
He’d always wondered whether the plush caskets he’d seen at funerals were as soft and comfortable as they appeared.
He lifted the lid and crawled inside.
And decided it wasn’t.
Chapter 3
It was a lot of work, lugging that case of water through the tightly packed caskets to the trailer’s open door.
He didn’t have to do it. He could have just taken the few bottles he needed to stuff his backpack and left the rest behind.
But he wanted to let others know there was water in the trailer.
Yes, it was hard to get to. Yes, it required a bit of work.
But there might come a time when a traveler came along who was out of water and desperate for more.
This might be the last trailer they came across before they collapsed and died of dehydration.
If Dave could save a life by doing something as simple as leave some water at the end of the trailer for someone else, he’d certainly do so.
Humanity was quickly disappearing in the modern world. And that was a shame, for it didn’t take a lot to help out a stranger.
At the end of the trailer Dave broke open the case of twenty four bottles and put eight of them in his backpack. That should be plenty to last him until he got to the next “water hole.”
He downed two more bottles and left the empty bottles on the floor of the trailer alongside the empty case.
It was possible the next guy that came along would be greedy enough to take the partial case with him.
But he wouldn’t take the empty bottles.
And they, hopefully, would be enough to indicate to others that there was water in the front of the trailer.
He climbed back on his bike, happy he no longer had to spend valuable time searching for water. At least not for awhile. He was a bit disappointed he didn’t find something to eat, for he was down to his last two cans of Spam.
But he’d gone for a day or two without food several times on his journey and could do so again if he had to.
Water, on the other hand, was something he couldn’t do without in the high desert of southern California.
As he climbed on his bike he checked his watch. It was just past nine a.m. and already starting to get warm.
He rolled away, headed for the city of Adelanto, not having a clue that Beth was heading his way.
It was perhaps the ultimate coincidence that the very day Dave finally closed the gap between he and the kidnappers was the same day Sal Ambrosio set out with young Beth to return her.
Beth had looked forward to it for almost a month now, ever since the day Sal went to her and asked her forgiveness.
“I’ll only forgive you if you’ll take me home,” she adamantly proclaimed.
He agreed. After all, Nellie was gone now. He had nothing to hold him there in Adelanto. He’d miss his brother Benny. Benny had been the most gracious of hosts. But Sal could always come back to Adelanto if he found no place better to settle along the way.
He never was particularly fond of the desert anyway.
“Of course I’ll take you back to your family,” he told her. “I owe you at least that much.”
They had a unique relationship, Beth and Sal did.
At first she hated him ferociously, for he was the man who took her from her mother and sister.
He’d rationalized his reasons for taking her. The man who claimed to be running an adoption agency was feeding him a line of bull. Sal suspected that, even if he didn’t want to admit it to himself.
He saw something else much clearer. His wife, stricken with grief and suffering from Alzheimer’s, genuinely thought Beth was their dead granddaughter. She came back to life at the sight of the girl. She spoke for the first time in days and smiled for the first time in weeks.
As wrong as it was to take the young girl, he did it anyway.
He knew at the time he might have to explain himself to his maker for his actions someday.
But if taking the girl was enough to put life back into his beloved Nellie he was willing to do that.
Slowly, Beth warmed to him.
She accepted that he wasn’t an evil man. He might be confused as to what was moral and right, but he wasn’t evil. In fact, he was very kind to her.
When Nellie passed away he went into a deep depression.
She tried not to feel sorry for him.
She tried to continue to blame him, and to believe he deserved the misery Nellie’s passing brought him.
But Beth wasn’t raised that way.
She finally went to him to comfort him. She held the old man and let him cry.
She gave him a second chance.
After that the pair grew closer.
She made an effort to listen when he talked to her. To really listen.
He wasn’t a bad man. He had trouble making sound decisions sometimes. And perhaps he sometimes put his priorities in the wrong order.
She wasn’t sure whether he was in the early stages of… whatever it was that Nellie had which made her so distant and confused.
Whatever it was, whatever caused his occasional questionable behavior, Sal was a good person.
She finally accepted that, and accepting it made it easier to forgive him.
Forgiving him, in turn, made it easier for the two to bond.
For his part, he stopped insisting on calling her Becky and accepted the blame for taking her.
He started calling her Beth, as she’d always wanted him to do.
He admitted his darkest secret to the other adults at the compound. That Beth wasn’t really his granddaugh
ter. That he loved her but he had no right to keep her.
And that he’d be taking her back.
For almost a month the two had worked together to ready the old rig and make it roadworthy again.
And last night, the night before their departure, Beth finally broke down and told old Sal she loved him.
Chapter 4
Beth was so excited she had trouble sleeping. It had been just over three weeks since Sal told her of his plans to take her back, to reconcile her with her mother and Lindsey.
But three weeks in the world of an eight-year-old might as well be forever.
Unless, of course it’s their birthday party, which breezes by at light speed.
Benny, Sal’s brother who owned the sprawling ranch outside of Adelanto, got up extra early and made Beth a special omelet.
Bacon and pancakes and syrup, all wrapped inside three scrambled and fried eggs.
He only hoped her special request didn’t give her a tummy ache.
While Beth said her goodbyes to friends Thom and Krista and a couple of others, Sal took Benny aside.
“Thank you, brother, for letting us stay here.”
“You sound as though you’re not coming back.”
“I haven’t decided. You know life in the desert has never appealed to me as it does to you. I need to live where there are shade trees and dense woods. Mountain streams. Snow.”
“It snows here. It snowed three years ago.”
“It doesn’t count if it melts as soon as it hits the ground.”
“So you plan to settle where, exactly?”
“I don’t know. Perhaps somewhere close to Beth’s family, so I can still see her occasionally if they’ll let me.”
“She’s grown on you, hasn’t she?”
“Yes indeed. We started on rocky footing, but now I love her as my very own. She can never be a replacement for Becky. And she shouldn’t be. But I’ve come to love her in her own right.”
“Just remember you always have a home here.”
“I will, and thank you.”
Sal and Benny were second generation Italian. In their family men didn’t hug. They shook hands.
A Tearful Reunion Page 2