Her Name is Beth: Alone: Book 5

by Darrell Maloney

  The three climbed a series of metal rungs that were similar to the ones on the outside of the pill box.

  Mark continued his narration on the way up.

  “In a full-sized generator the steps are on the inside of the tower. This one is a little harder to climb. But then again the climb is a lot shorter too.”

  They reached a maintenance box adjacent to the unit’s gearbox, and Mark removed several access panels to reveal the nuts and bolts of the operation: the generator. It was the size of a small car.

  “You guys keep watch out there for any signs of movement. We’re sitting ducks from several different angles, so it’s important we see them before they see us. If you hear a gunshot, scramble down that ladder as fast as you can. Your life will depend on it.”

  Mark busied himself inspecting wiring bundles, looking for charred parts, changing out filters and applying lubrication oil. After half an hour or so he announced himself finished and screwed the panels back into place.

  They climbed back down and headed back into the bowels of the bunker, to the battery bank.

  “These huge batteries are the same ones which power electric forklifts. The hold a tremendous amount of juice. When fully charged, they will power our entire bunker for more than a week.”

  “So what are we doing to them?”

  “We’re disconnecting one set at a time. Once they’re off-line we’ll pull each terminal one at a time and scrape the corrosion off of them. Then we’ll spray them with a corrosion inhibitor and replace them.”

  “Wow! There’s a boatload of them.”

  “Yep. Ninety six, to be exact. After we clean all the terminals we’ll pull the caps and pour distilled water into the cells. Once that’s done we’ll reconnect this set of batteries and move onto the next one. To do all four sets, it’ll take us about two hours.

  “If y’all don’t do too much talking and work hard, we should be finished just in time for lunch.”

  Chapter 44

  Dave was still a full six miles from the green “Albuquerque City Limit” sign. But he couldn’t take the Explorer any farther. Both sides of the highway were lined with abandoned businesses: storefronts, restaurants, realty offices, motels.

  Many of them were undoubtedly occupied by squatters. People who slept under a roof each night and roamed the area by day.

  People who were familiar enough with the area to notice a vehicle parked alongside the road which wasn’t there the day before.

  He couldn’t risk someone realizing the vehicle was operational and figuring out how to hotwire it while Dave was away.

  He could make the walk back to Sarah and Lindsey without much problem. It would take a while, and it wouldn’t be fun. But he could do it.

  But he wouldn’t put little Beth through that. Couldn’t do it. She’d been through enough already.

  He brought the Explorer to a dead stop in the right lane of the freeway, between a UPS truck and a Trans Am.

  Hopefully no one would happen upon it, scratch their head, and wonder where it magically came from.

  He stepped out onto the pavement and stretched, then looked around in all directions. He took his time, looking not just for people, but for movement. Even the smallest movement… the rustle of bushes, a door opening or closing, a shadow disappearing behind a building… could mean he was being watched.

  Nothing moved. All was deathly quiet.

  After several minutes, he was finally satisfied he was alone.

  But just in case he took an extra precaution. One which should ensure the vehicle he needed so badly would still be there when he returned.

  He opened the hood and removed the negative cable from the battery, stuck it in his backpack, and lowered the hood until the secondary latch clicked.

  Dave was a man who worked things out in his mind ahead of time whenever he could. He was a planner. Some people weren’t. They just flowed with the wind, figured things out as they went. Dave looked carefully at each problem he expected to encounter, ran over several possible courses of action in his head, then selected the best one.

  Before he took the bag of extra weapons from his cargo bay, he already knew where he was going to hide them.

  In every city he’d passed through on his journey he’d noticed the same thing.

  Dumpsters were overflowing. And the area around each dumpster was piled with plastic garbage bags. All sizes and colors.

  It seemed a rather odd sight. Even with the world falling down around them, people still took out their garbage.

  Even though they knew the dumpsters would never be emptied again, and the garbage would stack higher and higher, the residents still went through the motions.

  Perhaps it was the last vestige of civility they could muster.

  Perhaps they were hoping beyond hope that the city would somehow get their trucks running again. And would pick it up and dispose of it. Maybe it was just wishful thinking. Maybe the same people believed that Santa Claus was going to bring back their power, if they could only hold out for Christmas.

  Or perhaps they just wanted to get the trash out of their own way, and knew of no other place to put it.

  In any event, the dumpsters and trash bags were about the only thing that hadn’t been sifted through by looters. It would seem pointless, since there were plenty of other resources far more likely to provide something edible.

  For more than a year the trash bags piled up alongside the dumpsters and nobody had bothered to move them.

  Dave was betting that wouldn’t change anytime soon.

  He took enough ammunition for his rifle and handgun to get him through a firefight. For good measure he took two of the hand grenades Mark had given him and put one into each of his leg pockets.

  Might as well be prepared for anything.

  He left his crossbow in the bag along with the weapons he’d taken from the three dirt bags on the highway and zipped the bag closed.

  Then he stole away toward the parking lot of a strip mall adjacent to the highway.

  A parking lot which had three overflowing dumpsters along its western edge.

  And a pile of garbage bags as high as his head.

  Hiding the weapons was as easy as placing it on the ground next to the pile and covering it with garbage bags.

  As he walked toward the city of Albuquerque Dave went over in his mind what he expected to encounter. Who he expected to encounter. What he planned to tell them.

  He’d come up with the plan the night before. Driving down a lonely highway at night, driving twenty miles an hour and seemingly taking forever to get where he was going, he had a lot of time to think.

  Some industries not only survived the blackout, they flourished.

  The black market, for example, sold guns and prescription medicines to anyone with enough precious metals to pay for them. It was now the only way to obtain antibiotics or pain meds for a sick friend or relative, since few doctors survived and the pharmacies were all closed.

  Prostitutes still worked the streets. He’d seen them, and wanted to ask what they were trading their bodies for these days, since money was now worthless.

  But he suspected they were full of disease and absent of soul, so he’d kept his distance and kept his question to himself.

  The drug trade was another that didn’t die.

  He suspected that the three men who assaulted him on the highway were tweakers. Methamphetamine junkies.

  He’d seen the usual signs in the little one. He twitched almost uncontrollably. He rambled on and on, on the edges of incoherency.

  All three of them were skeletons. All of them had sores on their faces. All of them had hollow eyes, and looked like they’d been up for days.

  That would have explained why they were so desperate to get Dave’s guns.

  He suspected, though no one had told him specifically, that drug dealers now accepted three forms of payment: gold, silver and weapons.

  He’d seen other evidence the drug trade was alive and well.<
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  In the camp where he’d spoken to Tina, Jason and his friends were smoking marijuana out in the open. And that made sense, Dave supposed, in a society now void of law enforcement.

  On one of his morning walks, he’d encountered a couple of nomads who’d asked him if he knew where they could “score some work.”

  Dave told them no.

  And in the back of his mind he seemed to remember, although he couldn’t remember exactly where he’d heard it. “Work” was street slang for speed.

  On one of his morning walks he’d come across the body of a junkie who’d overdosed, sitting on the highway and leaning back against the huge front tire of a big rig. He’d thrown up in his final moments and he still reeked of vomit.

  That he smelled more like vomit than decay told Dave he’d only been dead for a few hours.

  But what was most striking was that a belt was still tied tightly around his arm, a hypodermic needle still sticking out of his vein.

  Drug users were all over the place. And they had to get their choice of poisons from somewhere.

  Dave’s ultimate goal was to find his daughter and get her back.

  But he had something else he had to do first.

  Today he was off to find a drug dealer.

  Chapter 45

  One thing Dave noticed as he got nearer and nearer to the city of Albuquerque was an increasing number of nomads. Transients who had no real home, other than the tents they set up each night, usually in a new place each time. They spent their days foraging for food in abandoned trucks or houses, or stealing things they thought might have value and trying to trade them for food.

  He’d encountered the nomads along the way, of course, but never in such great numbers.

  He wondered if it was because the violent sanctions within the city had forced them out in fear.

  Or perhaps the men holding the city had commandeered all the available provisions for their own use, and let it known there would be no food or water for the survivors who hadn’t chosen sides. Who hadn’t fallen in with one group or another.

  The closer he got to the city limit sign, the thicker the blanket of tents in the grassy median between the eastbound and westbound traffic lanes.

  Most of the parking lots on the sides of the highway were now filled with tents as well. There were literally hundreds of people here, seemingly living a meager existence by scrounging through the abandoned trucks.

  Dave felt an uneasy feeling in his stomach and decided to go talk to some of them.

  He walked up on a young couple in their twenties. The girl was breastfeeding a baby.

  Dave couldn’t help but feel sad, and wonder about the baby’s chances of growing to maturity in a newly dismal and dangerous world.

  “Good morning.”

  The young man jerked, probably more out of habit than anything else. He struck Dave as a nervous type. The girl said, “Hello.”

  “I was wondering if I might ask you a couple of questions.”

  The young man seemed to turn hostile.

  “Whatever you’re looking for, we don’t have any. Or we don’t have enough to share.”

  “Oh, don’t mind him,” the girl said while moving her baby from one breast to the other. “He’s always a grouch first thing in the morning.”

  “I assure you, all I’m looking for is answers. I was walking into Albuquerque, and I was just wondering why so many people are out here. I mean, inside the city there are houses to live in. Room to grow crops. Out here there’s nothing.”

  “Out here it’s safe. In there it’s hell unless you have ties.”

  “Ties?”

  “If you’re a gang member, you live in a specific part of town and your gang protects you. If you belong to a motorcycle gang, you live in their section. They protect you. If you belong to the syndicate, they’ve got their piece. All the factions protect their own. But if you don’t have any ties, you’re on your own. There’s nobody to protect you. The factions won’t protect you because they don’t care about you. There’s no cops anymore. The National Guard left months ago. The factions won’t steal from each other or rape each other’s women, because they don’t want to start wars with each other. So they steal from the unaffiliated. Rape the unaffiliated women.”

  She pulled her baby from the nipple and turned him to face Dave.

  “That’s where Adam came from. He belongs to a member of a biker gang. I don’t know which one. They all took turns at me. But it doesn’t matter. Because Adam is part of me too. That’s the part I’m going to love and raise.”

  The man added, “Everybody here escaped. We got tired of hiding in our homes, wondering when one of the factions was going to come in and kill us or take everything we had. Or take things from the women they could never get back.”

  The woman added, “And some of the men too.”

  “Yes. They raped some of the men as well.”

  “So what do you do when you run out of food?”

  “We move on. Most of these people are waiting it out, hoping it’ll change in the city. But they’re living a pipe dream. It ain’t gonna change. There’s no reason for it to. The factions have it too good in there. They ain’t gonna move out, and they sure as hell ain’t gonna start treating people any nicer. We’re gonna move on as soon as the rest of our friends get out here to join us.”

  The woman added, “If they’re still alive.”

  “Don’t say that, Angie. Don’t ever say that.”

  They seemed like a nice couple. They’d been nice to Dave. He knew he was taking a calculated risk and might alienate them, but he’d gotten pretty much all the information out of them he’d expected.

  He asked them, “Hey, do you know where I can score some dope?”

  The woman looked at him with harsh eyes, as though she were suddenly disappointed in him. Ashamed of him.

  The man shook his head in disgust and said, “Oh, man! Get out of here with that crap.”

  “Sorry. I was just asking.”

  “Well we don’t do ‘em, and don’t know where to get ‘em. Don’t you have enough troubles without that shit dragging you down?”

  He looked the woman in the eyes.

  “Yes. I guess I do.”

  He turned to leave and said, “Thanks for your time.”

  She stopped him.

  “Hey, wait!”

  Dave turned and said, “Yes?”

  “You’re not going in there are you? Into the city?”

  “I have to. My daughter’s in there, and I have to get her back.”

  The man said, “If she’s in there she’s probably dead. Or worse. And if you go in there after her, you ain’t coming back out alive.”

  The woman was aghast.

  “Jesse!”

  “Well, damn it, he needs to know the truth. It’s hell in there. Worse than hell.”

  She turned back to Dave and said, “I’m sorry. Good luck. I hope you can find her and get her out.”

  Chapter 47

  Dave knew he was walking a fine line. If he told people up front he was looking to buy drugs, a lot of them would tune him out. Refuse to talk to him or share and information they might have.

  He had to milk them for information first. Then ask them about the dope. Then the worst they might do was tune him out. Or curse him out.

  He spent the better part of the morning mingling with more of Albuquerque’s refugees. Asking whether they’d seen a red pickup truck drawn by two horses. And whether a little girl was visible inside the truck.

  In that regard, he struck out. No one had seen the rig he was so desperate to find. Many of them told him the same thing.

  “Something like that, I’d darn sure remember.”

  With the other question, the drug question, he had little better results.

  Several of the people, like Jesse and Angie, took exception. A couple of them lectured him. “You don’t need the dope, man. Life’s hard enough without having that monkey on your back.”

 
A couple of others seemed to be looking for a new way to escape the harsh realities of life. “No, man. But if you find some, how about you come back here and share it?”

  By lunchtime Dave tried a new tactic. He went through the crowd specifically looking for people he thought might be drug users.

  And it was while walking through the crowd that something caught his nose.

  The harsh earthly aroma of marijuana smoke.

  It wasn’t hard to find the source.

  Five people were gathered in a circle around a water pipe, passing it from one to another.

  Dave watched from a bit of a distance until one of the men got up and urinated against a tree, in full view of several women.

  He stopped the man just before he settled back in with his group.

  “Excuse me. I’ve been trying to score some weed. Would you mind telling me where I can find your dealer?”

  Dave knew full well that such a question before the power went out would have been extremely risky. He’d have immediately been suspected of being a narc. An undercover cop. Or maybe a snitch looking for information to score favor with the cops.

  But this was a new age. There was no longer any need to fear the police. For there were no longer any police.

  At least not in Albuquerque.

  And pot smokers had a reputation as being a relatively mellow bunch. Much more so than users of harder drugs.

  So Dave asked the man not expecting trouble, and hoping for a little bit of cooperation.

  He got more than that. He got an invitation.

  “Hey, dude. Sit down here with us. We’ve got enough to share.”

  “Thanks, but I’m headed out. I’d prefer to buy my own for the road.”

  Before the blackout, such a refusal would almost certainly mark Dave as a cop. For there was no one more suspicious than someone who claimed to be a part of the drug culture but who wouldn’t partake.