A New Start: Final Dawn: Book 9 (Volume 9)

by Darrell Maloney

  “So I wouldn’t spend eternity burning in hell like Scott Burley is surely doing right now.”

  “It doesn’t have to be that way, Marty. If heaven and hell are real, then by default so is the Bible and every word in it. Glenna is a believer. I know. I saw her sitting in the lounge of the big house reading her Bible every day she was there. Spend time with her. She can help you repent. She can help you cleanse your soul

  “And as for Martel and the men who did him in… he’s surely in the fires of hell, sitting next to Scott Burley and wishing they’d been more respectful of others while they were here on earth. The men who did him in will have to answer to their own God when their time comes. All I’m asking is that you leave their punishment up to God. If He sees fit, they’ll join Scott and Martel. Let Him be the judge and take a pass on this one. Right now they’re needed here on earth, to be with their families and loved ones, and not locked up in a prison for ridding the earth of a dangerous man.

  “I know you have a duty, Marty. I took the same oath many years ago. I violated mine for the good of all concerned. I’m asking you to look the other way on this one.”

  At that moment, Lenny walked up to the pair.

  Marty was no longer furious with him. No longer had any desire to strangle him. He had a defeated look on his face as he asked the man, “Lenny, do you remember Scott Burley and what happened to him?”

  Lenny’s face skewed and he struggled to speak, as though his mouth suddenly contained something very bitter.

  “Yes Of course I do. Why?”

  “Did you ever tell anyone that story? Anyone?”

  “No. Of course not. We all took a pact, remember? We all agreed that it had to be done and we’d never discuss it again. And I haven’t, I swear.”

  Marty looked back to Frank and held out his hand. Frank took it and they shook.

  “Okay, Frank,” Marty told him. “I don’t understand it all, but I’ll accept it. And I’ll honor your request. Consider the case closed.”

  -49-

  The earth is a very big place.

  So big, in fact, that when Saris 7 struck China ten years before, it caused the biggest explosion ever heard by man. An explosion equivalent to ten thousand times the impact of the atomic bomb at Hiroshima.

  Ten thousand times.

  Yet in the United States of America, on the other end of the planet, it wasn’t heard at all.

  NASA had tracked Saris 7’s path, in the hopes that it would land in the middle of the ocean. It was hoped that the ocean’s water would lessen its destructive power. Would cushion the blow, as it were. And since the bulk of the earth’s surface was ocean, the odds were Saris 7 would end up in a watery grave.

  But the meteorite bucked the odds and landed in China instead.

  Hans Gerber sat atop a rickety tractor just outside of Spangdahlem, Germany.

  Hans was an old man now, one of the few left who could remember World War II and the damage it did. He was but a young boy when Hitler had been in power, and could vaguely remember being lifted up on his father’s shoulders when the fuehrer held a rally in nearby Ramstein. Could barely remember getting a glimpse of the mustachioed little man as he rolled by in his open-topped Mercedes touring car.

  Hans didn’t understand the event back then. To him it was merely vivid flashes of color, of cheering, of hero worship. For he was only three years old at the time.

  Later, when he was a student, it all made sense to him. His parents had been caught up in the insanity of the time. Germany had been hurting, economically as well as in world status. Its people were desperate for a savior. Someone who could validate the worth of the Fatherland. Someone who could return honor and status and wealth to the German people.

  Hitler rose to power at just the right time. He was an oratory dynamo. He knew how to seduce the suffering populace and to sucker them into believing he was their messiah.

  When Hans was a teen he tried to talk to his parents about Hitler and the trance he put upon the Germen people. His parents refused to discuss it, except to deny that they’d been an active part of it. To hear them tell it, it was their friends and neighbors who’d been caught up in the frenzy.

  But not them. No way, no how. Never them.

  Hans knew better. One of his more vivid memories of that day so long before was of his mother, standing at attention and offering a Nazi salute the Wehrmacht would have been proud of, tears rolling down both her cheeks as her god rolled by, not even aware of her presence.

  He remembered a Nazi flag mounted over their living room mantle, a place of honor. And a framed photo of the fuehrer beside it.

  Hans encountered what many have called statewide denial in the years following the Second World War. Germans denied en masse that they had an active role in bringing Hitler to power and then keeping him there. It was always “the others”… the neighbors, the politicians, the friends, who were caught up in all of it.

  But not them. Never them.

  If one were to believe the typical German citizen in the years following the war, the country was filled with allied sympathizers. People who knew Hitler was insane, and who wanted to stand up to him, but who couldn’t because they were afraid of the SS.

  Revisionist history at its finest.

  As Hans drove his tractor back and forth across his field, plowing under what was left of his wheat stalks, he worked his way around the wreckage of an American F-16 fighter jet crashed there two years before.

  The jet was deposited there by a former Luftwaffe pilot who’d visited the abandoned American air base at Spangdahlem just after the thaw.

  The base was located just west of the old man’s farm. It was no longer active, although all its jets were still there. Lined up in neat rows on the tarmac or tucked away in their hardened revetments.

  It had been too tempting to pass up for the former pilot, perhaps too full of the bravado common among military flyers.

  In any case, he’d had more bravery than common sense, thinking it was possible to take one of the old birds up for a joy ride.

  He’d been able to get the thing started, with the help of a couple of friends who’d worked the ground crew at the Ramstein Luftwaffe base. And he was able to fulfill his dream of flying the F-16 when he lifted off the end of the runway and tucked his wheels beneath his wings.

  English was a required course in German high schools. It had been since the end of the war, when the German government accepted that the yanks would occupy their country for the long term. School boys and girls had to take two years of English classes whether they wanted to or not, in the hopes that they could communicate to some degree with their American liberators.

  As a result, all Germans knew at least rudimentary English when they finished their schooling.

  The young former hauptmann, or captain, who sat behind the controls of the screaming F-16 falcon, was able to read the words on the control panel. That much wasn’t a problem.

  What was a problem was his lack of understanding of the effects a long freeze had on JP-8 jet fuel.

  It destabilized it.

  Flying high over the countryside, the jet’s single engine first coughed, then sputtered, then cut out completely.

  Not a major problem, the fearless if not smart young aviator figured. He’d thought to pack a parachute, and he wasn’t over a populated area.

  He’d merely punch out and float back down to earth.

  Another thing he’d never considered was the effect the long freeze would have on other things.

  Like the explosive charges beneath the fighter’s ejection seat.

  In better times the charges would have blown the canopy off the aircraft. A split second later additional charges would have blown the seat clear of the dying bird.

  The canopy was blown free as soon as the pilot pulled the ejection handle.

  The seat charges failed to fire.

  The young pilot’s last act on earth was to curse his luck as the jet plunged into the field and explod
ed into a fireball.

  Hans, working in his barn at the time, heard the explosion and drove out to the smoldering wreckage.

  He removed what was let of the pilot’s body and buried it in the field, alongside the wreckage. The crushed and charred vertical stabilizer would forever serve as the hapless flyer’s headstone.

  These days, the skies were quiet over the countryside. No other brash former pilots would dare try to repeat the stunt, and life had gone on to somewhat normalcy for those lucky enough to have survived the freeze.

  Hans didn’t expect to live much longer. He had a bad heart, and since Gretchen passed away the year before he’d pretty much lost the will to live.

  Of course, he didn’t necessarily expect it to be today.

  Hans plowed carefully around the wreckage of the fighter jet, careful to avoid the spot where he’d laid the pilot to rest, then continued his way east.

  He never saw the brilliant flash of light in the skies behind him.

  There wouldn’t have been time to do anything anyway, even if he had seen it.

  No time to pray.

  No time to ponder.

  Just time to die, as the fireball which was the remnant of Cupid 23 obliterated him and everything around him.

  -50-

  The survivors all across Europe, of course, had known nothing of Cupid’s coming. Unlike the United States, the German government had no version of NASA’s tracking system. They’d only known of Saris 7 years before when the U.S. government told them in a top secret memo to start preparing themselves and their loved ones for a seven year winter.

  Not the citizens of Germany. But only those who had an “in” with the Bundeskabinett. For it turned out that the governments of the world were all pretty much the same. They all focused on protecting their own, the regular citizens be damned and left to fend for themselves.

  In the end, the survivors found those privileged few and punished them for their arrogance, much like the survivors of Washington D.C. killed President Sanders and the rest of his ilk.

  The German government, like its counterpart in the United States, pretty much ceased to exist in the wake of Saris 7’s assault against the earth.

  And even if it had existed it had no way of knowing Saris 7’s little sister was bearing down on them.

  The strike at Spangdahlem sent a shock wave overland, in much the same way a nuclear weapon does. The Eifel region of Germany was hilly but not mountainous. There was little to stop or even slow down the wave, and it spread for hundreds of kilometers within seconds.

  The shockwaves obliterated nearly all of the structures in its path. Even castles with stone walls four feet thick, which had stood the test of time for three hundred years or better, toppled over like children’s erector sets.

  The dust cloud was massive and instantaneous. Had the shock wave not killed everyone within four hundred kilometers already, they’d have been done in by the thick dust. It was impossible to breathe in oxygen without filling one’s lungs with dirt, dust and muck.

  Within minutes the sky over western Europe was a dirt brown. Within hours it had spread over the Atlantic.

  Survivors could see the cloud approaching them. They knew instantly what it was.

  Many of them knew something else as well. They knew their days were numbered.

  Marty Hankins was on the road on the day Cupid hit. It was a nice day, and he was trying out a new Kenworth he’d taken off a dealer’s lot in San Angelo.

  His windows were down because his air conditioner wasn’t working as he drove west toward Kerrville when his nose picked up something strange.

  The smell of dirt.

  And a haunting memory suddenly infested his mind.

  He remembered that when Saris 7 struck the earth, the oddest thing happened. Something the TV warnings never mentioned. Because they didn’t know.

  They could actually smell the blackout before it arrived.

  He came to a dead stop in the middle of the highway, got out of his truck and peered skward in all directions.

  A familiar voice came over the radio. It was Lenny, picking up a load eight miles south of him.

  “Hey Marty, I smell something I don’t like. Please, for the love of God, tell me you don’t smell it too.”

  “I smell it, Lenny. But the sky’s already overcast. I can’t tell if it’s darkening or not.”

  Marty and Lenny, when deciding to break away from the group at the compound and go their own way to prepare for Cupid 23, had made a couple of agreements with their old friends.

  The first was to have each other’s backs, in case the people in the Eden prison got into a bind and needed help.

  Of course, it was reciprocal. If the people in the mine ran out of something critical and the prison had it, they’d certainly offer it up.

  The second thing both parties agreed to was to share the same radio channel for their gathering operations.

  It had worked quite well. Bran, Rusty and Brad had a list of things Marty was looking for that they didn’t necessarily need. On their travels they watched out for them and advised Marty if they came across them.

  And, of course, vice versa.

  Sharing the same channel also kept everyone abreast of everyone else’s rough location, in case anyone needed help. If a distress call went out, the closest person could respond, even if they were from different operations.

  Neither Lenny nor Marty should have been surprised, then, when Hannah’s voice came over their radios.

  “Pardon me for intruding, but what are you ladies talking about?”

  Marty said, “Hang onto your britches, sweetheart. But we’re smelling dirt. Both of us, and we’re several miles apart.”

  Hannah was amused.

  “Dirt. As in… dirt. Have you guys been drinking again?”

  Marty said, “No. But I may guzzle a bottle of bourbon when I get back from this run.”

  For the first time, she noticed the alarm in his voice.

  “Marty, what’s wrong? What does the smell of dirt have to do with anything?”

  “That’s how it started last time.”

  “How what started? What are you talking about?”

  “Saris 7, sweetheart.”

  Hannah had never known about the dirt smell which preceded Saris 7’s darkened skies. When Saris 7 struck the earth ten years before, she’d been safely tucked into the mine for three full days.

  Out of reach of the meteorite’s wrath.

  And unable to smell the dirt.

  “Oh, my God. Are you sure?”

  “I’m sure that it smells like dirt. That’s the way it smelled just before the sky went dark before. And it continued to smell that way until the thaw came.”

  Hannah called out for her own drivers.

  “Brad, Bryan, Rusty, did you copy that?”

  Only Brad answered. The others, lacking the luxury of the base station and antenna Hannah was using, were too far out of range.

  Brad said, “I smell it too. Oh, crap…”

  Hannah said, to no one in particular, “Is there any change in the sky? It all looks good on my monitors.”

  “It’s hard to say. It was already overcast.”

  Brad said, “It might just be my imagination. But it looks darker than it was just a few minutes ago.”

  Thank you for reading

  A NEW START

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

  Final Dawn Book 10:

  FROZEN

  Sami always teased Brad that he had the worst possible luck.

  He always countered that it wasn’t true. Sure, he’d always been the kind of guy whose life was full of pitfalls.

  “But my luck changed the day I met you.”

  That worked well on the days when he was in a particular mood and wanted to get lucky. For it always melted Sami’s heart and made her more receptive to his advances.

  But in reality, he considered his luck to be atrocuiously bad.

 
; It didn’t necessarily surprise him, then, when he dropped his radio on the highway while he was tightening his chains.

  It hit the highway hard, and didn’t fall in the snow drift, where it might have been saved.

  No, it hit hard on the ice pack, and broke something inside.

  It was worthless.

  Still, it wasn’t the end of the world. The storm appeared to be breaking up. The driving winds seemed to lessen a bit, even as the bitter cold showed no signs of breaking.

  If he left Interstate 10 and took State Loop 481, he could avoid the steep grades which had been playing hell with the guys all week, and cut five miles off the trip to boot.

  Had he thought the idea through, it might have dawned on him that deviating from his last recorded location with no radio to report his plans might be a bad idea.

  One of Brad’s worst habits was diving into things without thinking them through.

  Of course, he had no way of knowing that one of Marty’s rookie drivers had spun out on the ice a couple of days before on the same stretch of road, a few miles up.

  The rookie had been doing just fine before the sky went dark. And even days after the darkness, when it grew bitter cold, but the roads were still dry.

  But on the fifth day of darkness, what should have been a moderate rainfall turned into a heavy dose of sleet. Because, well, it does that when it’s twenty two degrees outside.

  He didn’t have any chains in his box and wouldn’t have known how to put them on anyway. He’d never driven on anything other than dray roads, and was just barely getting the hang of the whole truck driving thing. So he couldn’t be blamed, really, when he lost control on the ice and jack-knifed his rig.

  Half on the highway and half off.

  He’d radioed for help and another driver picked him up.

  But there was no way the second driver could pull him back onto the roadway. Not as heavy as the rig was and not on a sheet of ice.

  They abandoned the jack-knifed rig, not bothering to warn any others of its presence.