Final Dawn: Book 12: Where Could He Be?

by Darrell Maloney

  No, the excuse the State of Texas was going to reopen the prison just made no sense.

  Most outsiders who’d noticed all the trucks didn’t worry too much about them. It was none of their business. They just went on their way.

  Those who were curious about it finally decided it was just the people of Eden trying to grab all the trailers off the highway they could before they were all empty.

  That they were hoarding food and supplies before somebody else got them.

  That made much more sense.

  And, truthfully, no one could blame them.

  Then Cupid 23 impacted the earth in a little town in the Eifel region of Germany.

  And things changed.

  -55-

  Suddenly things made sense to residents of nearby San Angelo and Brady, and to those who lived more or less off the grid between both cities.

  They’d been the ones competing with the Eden Prison project for the food abandoned all over nearby highways. When the skies went dark again and the freezing weather returned it became obvious the people of Eden knew it was coming.

  Many of the outsiders were outraged that they didn’t share whatever insider knowledge they had. It just wasn’t right, they believed, that the Edenites knew another freeze was coming and didn’t share that information with everyone else, so everyone else would have a chance to prepare as well.

  Of course the good folks of Eden saw it from another perspective. They’d put a lot of time and effort into preparing their shelter in the event the freeze really did come.

  They didn’t know for sure a freeze was coming; all they had was a “maybe.”

  And they didn’t want to be responsible for a panic, which would be blamed on them if it got ugly, in the event the freeze never happened.

  Besides, they were convinced they were doing an exemplary job of keeping the whole prison project a tightly guarded secret.

  As it turned out, it was the best secret in central Texas that everybody and their brother within a hundred miles knew about.

  Although angry, most outliers were far too busy to do anything about it.

  Too busy searching for their own suitable place to ride out the cold.

  Too busy gathering as much food as they could before the snow pack forced them into their homes for the duration.

  In many cases, too busy giving up. Too busy saying, “not again” and deciding it wasn’t worth having to suffer the same miseries they’d suffered before.

  People all over central Texas, and the rest of the world as well, were placing guns to their temples, hanging themselves, or locking themselves into their garages with their engines running.

  Since this was Texas, where the Second Amendment to the Constitution was a religion, the method of choice for suicide was blowing one’s brains out.

  It was quick, it was efficient, and there was little possibility of an error which would make one suffer in his last moments on earth.

  Most of the people near Eden who weren’t in the prison were busy.

  But not all of them.

  There is always an element of any society who are unadulterated dirt bags. Crooked self-serving liars. Pure evil.

  In the United States most of them become politicians.

  But those who cannot get elected take advantage of others by stealing and creating general mayhem.

  These were the people who, during the first freeze, chose to steal from others instead of gathering their own food and water.

  They were the animals who were too lazy to fend for themselves, and took from others by gunpoint.

  They came to be known as marauders and were universally despised by the good folks who worked hard or scavenged to keep themselves and their families alive.

  Most of the marauders didn’t survive the first freeze, for Texans are a hardy people who don’t much cotton to having their things taken away from them.

  But a few of them did survive.

  During the thaw they stole whenever they could and worked when they had to.

  Now, since the cold was back, they were returning to their old ways.

  John Sennett was such a man.

  He’d actually been inside the Eden Correctional Facility.

  On the wrong side of the bars.

  He was released a year before Saris 7 came crashing down after serving seven years for aggravated robbery.

  He never left the area because quite honestly he had nowhere to go.

  After his release he thumbed rides to nearby San Angelo, where he was homeless.

  He found the life of a homeless man suited him. There was no place he had to be every day. He could unroll his sleeping bag beneath the trees of a different park each night.

  And when the weather was bad he could check into the local Salvation Army shelter for a warm bed to sleep in.

  Sennett had led a hard life anyway, so not having much besides the clothes on his back was nothing new to him.

  Another good thing about being homeless: he was beholden to no one. Since his family disowned him he figured he didn’t need anyone.

  Although he was a good looking man, tall and rugged, he shied away from the women in the tent city camp who wanted to tie themselves to him.

  He needed nobody or nothing.

  He spent his days in front of the Walmart or the Food King begging for money for food.

  Many people wouldn’t give him money. They were suspicious about what he might buy with it.

  The more kind-hearted among them, though, would bring him a burger from McDonald’s or a sandwich from Subway.

  He always made a point to smile and to express his appreciation.

  Always said, “God bless you,” even though he didn’t believe in the Almighty.

  And to be sure he didn’t mind getting the food.

  Every dollar he didn’t use to fill his gut could go instead for a bottle of gin or a dime bag of weed.

  No, he didn’t mind being homeless during normal conditions.

  He absolutely hated it when the world was frozen.

  He’d survived the first freeze by moving into a doctor’s house.

  And he was quick to point out to anyone who asked later, he did not kill the doctor and his family.

  The doctor did that himself, deciding it would be too difficult for any of them to go on. They took the easy way out.

  He knew the signs.

  All of them did.

  A series of gunshots coming from a semi-darkened house, likely lit only by candles or oil-burning lanterns.

  A series of shots, followed by a long pause.

  Then a final shot, to the head or heart of the shooter, after he paused just long enough to make sure the family was dead.

  It would be inhumane to wound a loved one instead of killing them outright.

  No sense making them suffer.

  He’d heard the shots while casing the next door neighbor’s house, then chose the doctor’s house instead.

  He knew he’d have no resistance there.

  The bodies were still warm when he dragged them, one by one, into the heavy snow in the back yard.

  He never had the decency to burn or try to cover them. They were still there when the thaw came, and slowly rotted away to bones.

  It was tough, going through the long freeze even in a nice house. He burned every stick of furniture to stay warm, then cut every other rafter from the attic. He tore the sheetrock from most of the house so he could rip out every third wood stud, leaving only the den intact.

  The den was where the fireplace and his sleeping bag were.

  It was hell, eating whatever he could find and melting snow for drinking water.

  He wasn’t going to go through that again.

  Not when the former prison in Eden was chock full with enough food to feed an army.

  Thank you for reading

  WHERE COULD HE BE?

  Please enjoy this preview of the next installment in the series,

  Final Dawn Book 13:

  RES
T IN PEACE

  Lenny Geibel was a good man. He was one of those men who went mostly unnoticed, but who was always around.

  He wasn’t flashy or particularly good looking. He was a fairly smart man, but he didn’t go out of his way to show anyone his capabilities.

  He was quite capable of doing many things, but he did them quietly and without fanfare.

  He wasn’t, as many other men were, one who craved limelight, or attention, or praise.

  One of Lenny’s biggest attributes was his loyalty. He was the best of friends to almost everyone he knew, because he was dependable. When something needed to be done, Lenny was there to do it. When someone needed a friend, they could count on Lenny to help see them through.

  When something was broken, Lenny was there to fix it.

  That was Lenny. If one were to sum up Lenny’s very existence given just a handful of words they likely would have said, “Lenny is always around when I need him.”

  Marty Hankins and Lenny Geibel were best friends for more than thirty years. They’d started out as partners in Marty’s fledgling independent trucking company.

  Marty grew tired of living in the tiny town of Chickasaw, Oklahoma and decided he wanted to be an over-the-road trucker. He went to driver’s school to obtain his commercial driver’s license.

  His best friend Lenny, who’d graduated from high school two years before and was wandering through life with no real goal in mind, went along too.

  Marty talked his mom and dad out of the college money they’d been setting aside for him for years.

  “I’m not a college kind of guy,” he told them. “I want to be a businessman. I want to make my own way. I want to work for myself, because then I’ll have the best boss in the world.

  “I want to succeed or fail on my own merits and talents.”

  He took the money and used it as a down payment on a two-year-old Kenworth.

  As an independent trucker he had to log four hundred miles a day, five days a week, just to make his truck and insurance payments and have enough money to live on.

  With a partner at his side he could log twice as many miles and make enough money to put aside for later.

  And Lenny was game.

  Lenny considered Marty more than a friend.

  To Lenny, Marty was a big brother and someone he could easily look up to.

  For Marty was everything Lenny wasn’t. He was tall and handsome; Lenny was squat and average.

  Marty exuded self-confidence. Women flocked to him.

  And sometimes those women had friends they set up with Lenny.

  Marty was a go-getter; Lenny was a follower.

  And while Lenny certainly had the tools to make it on his own, he was just as content in following Marty through life.

  They made a good team.

  They augmented one another.

  They succeeded together.

  They were the two musketeers.

  Three years before Saris 7 delivered her anger on planet earth, Lenny developed deep-vein thrombosis in his left leg.

  “You need to find a new line of work,” his doctor told him. “Sitting in the cab of a truck for fourteen hours a day will kill you.

  “You need to find a job that will get you off your butt and on your feet.”

  For the first time since high school Marty and Lenny parted ways.

  But not completely.

  Lenny loved the trucking business, and could never leave it completely.

  He took a job as the yard man at the Trucker’s Paradise Truck Stop, on Interstate 10 just outside of Kerrville, Texas.

  As yard man, he was responsible for telling truckers where to park their rigs for a night of rest.

  He showed them where to drop their loads if they were passing their trailers onto relay drivers, and provided security for said loads until the relay drivers arrived to pick them up.

  Finally, he was a jack-of-all-trades and a better than average mechanic, helping drivers fix whatever issues they had with their rigs and getting them back on their way.

  Marty, still an independent trucker, landed contracts for two milk runs: regularly scheduled pickups and deliveries for two different companies.

  On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays he hauled a trailer of cargo for one of the big transfer companies from San Antonio to Dallas.

  Each time he arrived in Dallas he dropped his trailer and drove eight miles to Texas Pride Freighters, where he picked up a different trailer bound for San Antonio.

  One of the perks of the job was he got to have breakfast with Lenny every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, and a late dinner with him every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.

  On Sunday nights they typically double-dated with their girlfriends.

  They were, as the old saying goes, “thick as thieves.”

  In the chaotic days leading up to Saris 7, over-the-road truckers were abandoning their loads by the thousands and bobtailing it home to be with their families.

  The twenty acre yard at the Trucker’s Paradise Truck Stop filled up fast with abandoned trailers no one would ever be coming back for.

  And as the yard man, Lenny had a reason to talk to each of the truckers as they departed.

  He had a pretty good idea what was inside each locked and sealed trailer, and kept copious notes.

  Together, they concocted a plan to ride out the freeze.

  Their plan required quite a bit of real estate. So they made a deal with a farmer who owed a large piece of land adjacent to the truck stop.

  In exchange for setting up their camp in his hay field, they’d bring him a trailer full of food bound for a supermarket chain. And park it right outside his back door.

  They took thirty trailers and configured them into more or less a donut shape. They’d live inside the donut’s “hole” and each of the trailers’ doors would open up into the hole so they had a constant source of food and supplies.

  They used a hundred sheets of plywood from an abandoned flatbed to cover the spaces beneath the trailers and between them to make their camp free from bitter drafts.

  Huge tarps covered the top of the donut hole.

  Three rigs: two Peterbilts and Marty’s Kenworth, were parked in the hole, their smokestacks protruding through portals cut in the tarps.

  The sleeper cabs provided living quarters and sleep space for the group. On the coldest of days they provided a warm refuge where they could hang out, talk and watch movies or play cards.

  Most of their time, though, was spent in the common area or in a trailer they emptied out and turned into a fifty-three foot long lounge.

  They insulated their lounge with mattresses on both sides, floor and ceiling, and heated it with an industrial heater which blew hot air into the space and made it quite comfortable despite a door that was left partially open most of the time.

  For fuel they parked three tankers of diesel just outside the camp and tapped into them one at a time with a quarter-inch thermal hose. It provided just enough fuel to cover all their needs.

  There were five of them when the ordeal started.

  There were Marty and Lenny, their good friends Joe and Tina Koslowski, a husband and wife driving team, and a man named Scott Burley.

  Burley was one of those people who was barely tolerated. A good worker and average guy, but a man who tended to fray the nerves of the others.

  He was the first casualty among them.

  Five years into the freeze Burley started sneaking out of camp.

  No one knew where he went until the farmer on whose land they squatted came to call with his teenaged daughter in tow.

  “That’s him. That’s the man who raped me.”

  Finding Burley was ridiculously easy. The footprints he left in the snow led right back to the camp.

  On behalf of the others, Marty apologized to the farmer and the girl for bringing Scott Burley into their midst.

  Then he shot Burley in the head.

  “Some things cannot be tolerated,” he stated without re
morse. “Raping a young girl is at the top of that list.”

  It was Lenny who helped Marty drag Burley’s body away from the camp, where the coming thaw would allow it to thaw out and then rot.

  He didn’t deserve a proper burial.

  His last miserable act would be to provide a tasty meal for hungry buzzards.

  Eventually the thaw came and the group went their separate ways.

  Marty and Lenny remained partners, though, and took on the responsibility of running the truck stop in a new world trying desperately to regain some semblance of order.

  They got to know Mark and Hannah and their bunch in their compound a few miles away near Junction.

  And they got involved in a major skirmish in the tiny town of Eden, halfway between the truck stop and San Angelo.

  They’d learned that Eden’s prison had been emptied of the worst of society’s bottom-feeders just before the freeze came. By a soft-hearted warden who couldn’t stand the thought of keeping the men locked in their cells to freeze to death.

  Many of the men scattered into the wind.

  But many others, led by a brutal man named Castillo, stayed in Eden and ran roughshod over the town.

  They raped the town’s women and girls. Used the boys for slave labor.

  And shot any men who protested.

  Marty led a posse of volunteers into Eden and cleaned it of the evil men.

  In the process, two things happened.

  He met Glenna, who attacked and killed Castillo in a well-justified act of vengeance.

  And he was hailed as a hero by the townspeople of Eden, and subsequently offered the position of police chief.

  Marty and Glenna fell in love.

  He accepted the position of police chief.

  And all was right with the world.

  Until, that is, Hannah came to call with her news a second meteorite might be headed their way.

  Marty was the one who headed up the project to turn Eden Prison into Eden South, a shelter large enough for all the town’s eighty-one residents.