A New Start: Final Dawn: Book 9 (Volume 9)
Page 18
Brad, the King of Bad Luck, was a pretty good driver. Even in icy conditions.
But when he encountered the abandoned rig, on a downgrade and hidden behind a curve, he had but one option:
Jam on his brakes and hope for the best.
Perhaps other men would have gotten the best. Been able to skirt the abandoned rig in the narrow passage it left for through traffic.
Not King Brad.
No, the bad luck gods weren’t done with him yet.
Brad slammed on his brakes as he rounded the curve and saw the blocked road in front of him. His wheels locked up, and the trailer he was towing had nowhere to go except sideways.
The rear of the trailer slid off the roadway. Then the sheer weight of the trailer pulled Brad and his tractor backwards, down an embankment and into a stand of trees some fifty feet below the roadway.
When it came to rest, Brad’s rig was still upright, though leaning badly to the driver’s side.
Brad was shaken but uninjured.
After he caught his breath, he cursed a blue streak and pounded on his steering wheel.
He had absolutely no hope of driving back onto the roadway.
He wouldn’t have been able to do that even on a dry sunny day. Not without a wrecker and a very long wench cable.
He could try to drop his trailer and then try to drive out. But with the trailer leaning that would be next to impossible. And he wouldn’t get enough traction on the icy ground, even with tire chains, to get back up the steep hill to the highway.
There was only one bright spot to his dilemma.
He’d filled both saddle tanks with diesel that morning, and this was his first run of the day.
As long as he stayed in his rig, he could run his engine periodically and stay warm. He was in no danger of freezing to death. Not anytime soon, anyway.
The security control center, he knew, would send out a search party to look for him when he failed to return and failed to answer his radio. The searchers would likely be driving weighted pickup trucks instead of the slower big rigs. And they’d be able to maneuver around the jack-knifed trailer on the highway without sliding off the road as Brad had.
And they’d see Brad’s skid marks and know exactly where to find him.
But there were a couple of flaws in King Brad’s thinking.
The control center would dispatch a search team for him, sure.
But they wouldn’t be looking on State Loop 481 for him.
Brad’s last reported location was Interstate 10 twenty miles west of Junction. That’s where they’d begin their search for him.
Also, he hadn’t told them whether he was headed west, looking for a load, or east, returning with one. They’d have to search in both directions.
On icy roads, in semi-darkness. For even though the skies weren’t quite as dark as they were after Saris 7, it was still painfully hard to see any farther up the road than a vehicle’s headlights would reach.
Worse, they were in mountainous country. Where every curve provided an opportunity for a big rig to slide off the road and virtually disappear.
There was something else, too.
Brad sat in his cab and fumed. It was his fault he was even on the road today.
When the skies went dark, some in the group wanted to seal themselves in the mine immediately.
Brad had led the group which saw folly in that idea.
“Right now it’s dark and cold, yes. But we haven’t had any precipitation yet. When we get some, the ice will start to coat the roads and the snow pack will start to build. But that hasn’t happened yet. We can still go out and find trailers and keep bringing them in until the roads become impassible.”
Brad got his wish. The other drivers agreed with him. As long as they could they’d be on the roads, dragging in load after load. Their thinking was that in uncertain times such as this, the more they brought back the better their odds of surviving the new freeze.
“Damn it,” Brad said when he realized he’d put himself in this predicament.
He cursed again when he noticed through his windshield that it started to snow.
When the searchers came for him, the only clue they’d have to his location would be the huge set of skid marks on the roadway above him.
Skid marks which were very soon to be hidden under a blanket of white.
Brad was in a world of hurt and didn’t even know it yet.
Final Dawn Book 10:
FROZEN
will be available at Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble Booksellers, Hastings Books, and more that two dozen on line book stores in January, 2017.
If you enjoyed
A NEW START,
you might also enjoy
ALONE Book 1:
Facing Armageddon
Dave and Sarah Anna Speer had been preparing for Armageddon for years. They thought they’d covered all the bases, and had planned for everything.
It never occurred to them that the single thing they had no control over was the timing.
Sarah was on an airplane with her young daughters when solar storms bombarded the earth with electromagnetic pulses. Everything powered by electricity or batteries was instantly shorted out and would never work again.
Dave was suddenly alone.
He was also unsure whether his family was dead or alive. He assumed that the airplane stopped working and plunged from the sky. But it was scheduled to land in Kansas City at almost the exact time everything stopped working.
Had they landed in time? Was it possible they survived?
This is the story of a man facing Armageddon alone. It chronicles the things he does to survive in a newly vicious world.
It also includes Dave’s desperate and poignant diary entries to his wife. Just in case she did survive, and somehow makes it back to him to find he didn’t make it himself.
From the author of last year’s best sellers “Final Dawn” and “Countdown to Armageddon” comes a new tale of one man’s journey through hell… alone.
Chapter 1:
Dave couldn’t get the tune out of his head. He’d heard it all morning long, off and on, playing quietly in the back of his skull. And it was driving him crazy.
Oh, it wasn’t unpleasant. It was a happy little ditty. At least it sounded that way. It sounded more like sunshine and smiles, rather than rainclouds and foreboding.
Finally, he’d had enough.
“Okay, let’s play a game,” he announced while looking in the rearview mirror at Lindsey and Beth.
“I’ll hum you a tune, and the first one to guess the tune gets a candy bar when we get to the airport.”
Sarah looked at him from the passenger seat. With that look.
“Excuse me, mister? You’re going to get the girls all hyped up on sugar just before I take them on a four hour plane ride?”
“Not both of them, honey. Just the one who guesses the name of the song.”
“Uh… no. If that song is still bugging you, just hum it. If any one of us guesses it, you can buy each of us a cinnabon.”
The girls laughed. Beth gave Lindsey a high five. Lindsey said, “All right! Go, Mom!”
Dave coughed. At first he had no words.
Then he found some, and stated the obvious.
“Why is it okay to get all three of you hyped up on sugar but not okay to do it to just one of you?”
“Because you know I have a thing for cinnabons. And I’m the mom. So that makes me the boss.”
Lindsey broke out in uncontrollable laughter from the back seat, and Beth said, “Ooooohhh, Dad, you just got owned.”
“I don’t know if it’s worth it. I mean, those things aren’t cheap, you know.”
“Oh, we know, don’t we girls?”
Two heads nodded up and down behind her.
“But, Dave, they are soooo worth the price. And I’ll give you a bite. And think how sweet I’ll taste when you kiss me goodbye.”
Beth made a gagging sound.
“Besides, if
you want us to help you with that song, you have to pay the piper. It’s only fair. And if you don’t, it’ll continue to drive you crazy for days. Maybe even the whole week we’re gone. And we’d feel so bad for you if that happened.”
“Yeah, you’re just oozing with sympathy for my plight.”
Sarah smiled and blew him a kiss. She was even more gorgeous now than the day they’d met thirteen years before. It suddenly dawned on him that he was an incredibly lucky man, to have such a beautiful wife and family. And that the price of three cinnabons wasn’t that great, in the grand scheme of things.
In other words, he played right into Sarah’s hands. She knew he would, as soon as she let the kiss fly.
“Okay, here goes.”
Dave started humming the tune that had played in his mind a thousand times since the previous evening.
It took the three of them no more than ten notes. They’d have been “Name That Tune” champions in another era.
All three of them blurted out, almost simultaneously, “It’s a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood.”
Then Dave felt incredibly stupid.
“Of course. How could I have not known that? The old Mr. Rogers theme song. Sheesh! Now I really feel dumb.”
Sarah said, “Did you know that Fred Rogers was a Green Beret in Vietnam, and wore his red sweater to hide all of his tattoos?”
Dave scoffed.
“Where did you hear that?”
“On the internet. Why?”
“That story’s been going around for years. It was debunked a long time ago. Mr. Rogers was a fine man, but he was never a Green Beret.”
“Oh, yeah? Where did you hear that?”
“On the internet.”
It was too much for Lindsey.
“Gee whiz, would you two stop believing what you read on the internet? Nearly all of it is garbage.”
She turned to her little sister.
“Do we have to teach these old people everything?”
Beth said nothing but nodded her head decisively. She was in firm agreement.
Dave was a man of his word, and after the family checked in at the ticket kiosk and Sarah and the girls got their boarding passes, they made a beeline to Cinnabon.
“Daddy, are you going to walk us to the gate?”
“No, honey, I can’t go through security without a boarding pass, so I’ll walk you as far as I can and then you can give me a great big hug and a kiss.”
“I wish you could come with us.”
“I know, sugar. I wish I could too. But with two of the guys being sick at work, they just can’t let me take vacation right now. Uncle Tommy will understand, and we can go fishing another time. And you’ll be so busy helping Aunt Susan get everything ready for the wedding, you won’t even have time to miss me.”
“Bet I will!”
Sarah looked at him longingly. They were going to be apart for their twelfth anniversary. It would be the first one they’d missed.
It was as if he could read her mind.
“We’ll do something special when you get back, I promise. We’ll get a sitter and go spend the weekend at the lake. Just the two of us.”
“I’d like that.”
He walked the three special ladies in his life to the TSA checkpoint and got his hugs and kisses.
He held Sarah close and told her he loved her.
Little Beth rolled her eyes and said, “No mush, you two.”
Dave paid her no mind. He looked Sarah in the eyes and said, “It’ll seem like forever before I see you again.”
Neither of them had a clue how true those words would be.
ALONE, Book 1:
Facing Armageddon
is available now on Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble Booksellers, selected Hastings book stores, and at other fine booksellers.
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