A Stunning Betrayal

by Darrell Maloney

  Dave was opening up several packets of ramen noodles to dump into some water they’d just boiled.

  Fried Spam and ramen noodles: breakfast of champions.

  Beth was busy describing to Sal her mastery at firing a 9mm pistol.

  To hear her tell it, she was already a marksman, ready and able to shoot a bad man off his horse or a rattlesnake a hundred yards away.

  Dave said nothing, but smiled.

  The weight of the weapon would continue to be a problem. But he’d give her some daily exercises to do to strengthen her arms and time would take care of the rest.

  In the meantime he’d continue to stress the fundamentals, and after she was more comfortable with the weapon and a bit more proficient the rest would come around.

  He suspected she’d be hitting her target in no time at all.

  “And when Daddy says I can, I’m going to sit on the bench with you guys whenever you’re driving. You know… riding shotgun for you.”

  Sal caught Dave’s eye with a look that said, in effect, “You created a monster.”

  Dave just smiled.

  The sun was setting now and it was starting to get dark. It was time to head out, and as soon as breakfast was done Sal broke down the camp and Dave hitched up the team.

  Sal typically took the first shift at driving and was a bit surprised when Dave joined him on the wagoneer’s bench.

  “Just wanted to talk to you for a minute if you don’t mind,” he said.

  “Okay. Sure. What’s up?”

  Sal gave the lead horse his slack and made a clicking noise with his tongue.

  Shiloh started forward and they were on their way.

  “Beth and I have both noticed you seem to be in a lot of pain these days. We were wondering if you’re okay. And if you’re not, I want to know what we can do to help.”

  It was the day Sal had been fearing. When he could no longer fool his friends; when they finally realized something was wrong with him.

  He’d been unsure how they’d take it when they found out he was in worse health than they’d thought.

  He was pretty sure they wouldn’t just cast him out and abandon him. They were better people than that.

  But he thought they might try to baby him. To relieve him of his duties and make him lie on the mattress all day long like a patient.

  To a proud man like Sal, that would be just as bad as being cast out.

  Now that the cat was out of the bag, he’d come clean.

  “I suffer from congenital heart disease and high blood pressure,” he said.

  “How bad is it?”

  “Oh, it’s not bad, if treated,” Sal said. “My doctor says if I eat well and get a little bit of exercise I can live another ten years. But…”

  “But? But’s never a good thing. But what?”

  “But I also have to take my medication religiously. And I’m afraid I’m out of it. I was a sap.”

  “How so?”

  “In the early days of the blackout, when all the pharmacies were broken into and people were just going in and taking whatever they wanted, I had the chance to stock up.”

  “So why didn’t you?”

  “I was too kind-hearted, I guess. I told Nellie that other people would need it too and I didn’t want anyone to die because I took more than my share.

  “So I just took enough to last me for a month or so and figured everyone else would do the same. And that there would still be some left when I went back.

  “When we left our home and went out on the road we were able to find it for awhile, but then it started getting harder and harder to find.

  “Now I’m completely out of it and haven’t been able to find it for a couple of months. So now I’m just biding my time until the Lord calls me home.”

  Chapter 39

  That wasn’t good enough for Dave.

  Dave wasn’t the kind of guy who just waited around for something to happen.

  Dave was the kind of guy who made things happen.

  “What medications are we talking about?”

  “I’m supposed to be taking Eledectine. It’s an aldosterone inhibitor. Also Conicor.”

  “And the two of them together are supposed to lower your blood pressure and prevent heart attacks?”

  “Yes. But there’s no place to get them anymore. All the pharmacies have been cleaned out.”

  “Have you been searching the trailers for the big box stores?”

  “I can’t climb up into the back of the trailers. My back is too bad. You’ve seen how hard it is for me to climb in and out of the wagoneer’s seat, and I installed steps on the quarter panel to help me.”

  Dave was undeterred.

  “In my journeys I’ve dug through hundreds of abandoned trailers on hundreds of miles of highways. I’ve learned a thing or two.”

  “Such as?”

  “Such as the trucks for Food World, for example. They’re not marked like regular trailers. They don’t have the Food World logo on them. The only way to tell they’re Food World trailers is the eight digit trailer number in blue letters along the upper left corner of the trailer.”

  “And that’s important why, exactly?”

  “Two reasons. Because when they ship medications to their store pharmacies, they hide them in a large box on the pallet in the number one position on the trailer. The first pallet to be loaded on the trailer and the last one off. Then they pack cosmetics and toiletries around the pallet. Then they shrink wrap it in orange plastic so it’s easy to tell if it’s been tampered with.”

  “So all we have to do is watch out for such trailers and search them for my medications?”

  “We don’t have to search. We passed one such trailer just after sunrise this morning, an hour before we stopped to make camp.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Seriously. We’d have stopped if I’d known there might be something on the trailer you needed. I passed it by because we restocked all our food and water at another trailer last night.”

  “But if we go back it’ll put us farther behind.”

  “We just took a three hundred mile detour that’s going to extend our trip ten days. I don’t think backtracking a few miles is going to hurt us much.

  “Especially if it could save your life.”

  He pulled hard on the left rein and the horses slowly turned around and headed west again.

  That got the attention of Beth, who was lying on the mattress trying to nurse back to health a grasshopper she found with a missing leg.

  “Where we going, Daddy?”

  “We’re going shopping, honey.”

  “Oh. Okay.”

  As they drove slowly back to the trailer Dave explained, “The reason most of the orange pallets have been untouched is because they’re so far out of town. The ones in the cities have been picked clean.

  “But the ones on the open road are only picked from by long distance travelers. And you’ve already seen there aren’t very many of us.

  “Plus, very few drug addicts have taken to the open road. It’s too much work for them, and too much chance they’ll be out in the middle of nowhere and start going into withdrawals because they can’t find their drug of choice.

  “Add to that the way they load the orange pallets on the truck. The only way to get to them is to crawl across the top of all the other pallets. And when you get to the orange pallet there’s very little room to work. You basically have to lie on top of an adjacent pallet and reach down, then lift up each box item by item until you get to the hidden box which contains the pharmaceuticals,

  “And when you get there you have to be lucky. Because there might be eighty different bottles of medicines in the pharmaceuticals, but not the ones you’re looking for.”

  “How’d you learn about all this, Dave?”

  “From a woman I met on the road. Her name was Julie. ‘Repo Julie’ was her nickname. She went from trailer to trailer looking for gold and jewelry, which is shipped in the same manner for one
of the big box stores.

  “She said she discovered the secret of Food World’s orange pallets one day when she was looking for gold and silver.

  “She knew the pallet was special because of its location on the trailer and the orange plastic it was wrapped in. So she took the time to break it down to see what was on it.

  “She said she was disappointed because it didn’t contain any precious metals, but happy that she knew a source for medications if she ever had need for them.

  “And she shared her secret with me.”

  She also told me that IPS ships a lot of medicines.

  “IPS, in the brown trucks?”

  “Yes. Some of the boxes in the brown trucks contain pharmaceuticals as well.

  “The problem with the brown trucks is that all the packages look alike. You might have to open fifty packages full of CD players and books and automobile parts to find one box of medications.

  “But we’ll make a point to open every darned one of them next time we find a brown truck if you don’t have a good supply of medications by then.”

  “Was I a sucker, Dave?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean when I went into a pharmacy and found the medications, and only took a month’s supply. I left the rest for others who might need it as well. But my brother Benny told me I was a fool.

  “He said I should have grabbed all they had. That I left it for others and chances were somebody came right behind me and took it all for themselves.

  “And that I was a sucker, because I was being courteous and I would die when my meds ran out. And that the greedy person would continue to live because he took way more than he needed.”

  “No, Sal. I disagree with Benny. I think that only taking your share didn’t make you a sucker. It made you a human being.”

  Chapter 40

  Things were different in the bunker now.

  Oh, the escaped convicts still ran the place and the women and children were still slaves. That much stayed the same.

  But there was a lot less tension now.

  John Parker stepped easily into the leader’s role. He was always a better leader than Manson anyway; everyone pretty much agreed on that.

  He could have led the group from the beginning. Could have replaced Manson any time he wanted just by staging a coup, and he’d have had the backing of all the men.

  The reason he didn’t was out of courtesy more than anything else.

  The idea to take over a farmhouse was Manson’s idea from the beginning. He’d talked about it way back when the two were cellies at Leavenworth.

  For hours on end.

  “If we ever break out of here I want to take some good men with us,” he used to say. “Men who are willing to work hard. Then I want to make our way to an isolated farm somewhere. This part of the state is covered with them.

  “All we have to do is find a mom and pop farm and kill the owners and take over.

  “If anybody comes by we can tell them we bought out the old couple and they retired down to Florida. Nobody’ll be able to prove otherwise because the old folks will have been burned a long time before. We can assume fake names and nobody will challenge us.

  “Because in a rural setting nobody ever asks you for a driver’s license.

  “I know because I had an uncle who lived on a farm and never even had a license. He knew everybody in the little town there including the sheriff and nobody needed ID. In a small town everybody knows everybody. So nobody ever has to ask you to prove who you are.”

  Of course, Parker was smart enough to see Manson’s plan had more holes than a block of Swiss cheese.

  But he let the man ramble, because it gave Manson something to do and he wasn’t harming anyone.

  As for Manson’s pie-in-the-sky escape plans, all convicts talk about their plans for escape and how they’ll get away.

  In nearly all cases it’s a load of bull, for escape attempts almost never happen in modern prisons.

  When they do they’re almost always unsuccessful, and on the extremely rare occasions a convict does get away he’s usually picked up within hours.

  Yet talk of escape is a popular way for inmates to pass the time. Perhaps because spending time in a fantasy world where they’re free men again helps them cope psychologically with the stresses of prison life.

  Back in those days, when Manson occupied the lower bunk in cell B-106 and Parker the upper one, Parker never gave any credence to Manson’s escape plans because he never thought it would happen.

  The blackout caught everyone off guard.

  By strange happenstance, the door to Cellblock B happened to be open, someone pushing a cart through it, at the exact moment the power went out.

  All the other doors in the prison remained locked, since the electronic locks couldn’t be triggered, but most of the members of Cellblock B scampered through the open door.

  They felt their way around in the inky darkness and were able to overpower staff.

  From the staff they were able to steal good old fashioned keys, which were kept around just in case of a power outage to open doors manually.

  They didn’t get any weapons. Prison guards were prohibited from carrying any.

  But even without weapons they were able to make their way out of the prison and fan out into the countryside.

  And with no vehicles working and most guards and law enforcement officers walking off their jobs to protect their own families in the chaos, no real effort was ever made to round up the convicts.

  As a result Manson’s dream, against all odds, largely came true.

  Parker could easily have taken charge of the band of convicts who’d poured off the prison grounds with him and Manson.

  He was generally more well-liked than Manson. And more respected as well.

  He was certainly tougher than Manson, and had led men in combat while Manson was working at a motor pool far behind the lines.

  Still, it was Manson’s idea to find a farm occupied by vulnerable people and to take the place over.

  It was only fair to give him enough lead to let him try it.

  Manson did find such a farm not long after the escape.

  He didn’t have to murder its occupants, though, because they escaped when they saw a hoard of angry convicts bearing down upon them.

  Manson had viewed that as a victory and made the farmhouse his kingdom. He assigned his men chores to work the fields and tend to the livestock while he spent his days sitting in a recliner and drinking the farmer’s stash of whiskey.

  He was never dethroned simply because the men were afraid of him and Parker didn’t mind playing second fiddle.

  After several months the farmers returned with two dozen of their friends.

  Heavily armed friends.

  They killed six of Manson’s men and sent Manson, Parker and the rest scampering.

  They’d worn out the welcome they never really had, then worked their way south through the town of Ely.

  Just outside of Ely they stumbled across the Dykes brothers’ bunker and took it for their very own.

  By now, though, the men were tired of Manson’s heavy-handed rule and just wanted him gone.

  Santos’ knife accomplished that and Parker’s gang was now much more relaxed.

  They weren’t living in Nirvana. Not quite.

  But the stress that came from being under Manson’s thumb was gone now and they were in much better moods.

  Enough so they weren’t demanding the women perform sexual favors for them anymore.

  Or at least not as often.

  Chapter 41

  Lindsey and her Aunt Karen were chatting in hushed tones in the bunker’s galley.

  “So, Kara tells you two are talking about planning an escape again?”

  “We were talking about it. But we haven’t set anything in stone yet. Do you want to go with us?”

  “Maybe. But you’ll have to have more of a plan than just talking about it. How are you going to get out?
And where are you going to go? And what are you going to do if some of the men come after you?”

  “Well, before Manson died getting out would have been easy. Without anyone being assigned to watch, we could have just waited until all the men were asleep and climbed out through the pillbox.

  “We’d have been careful to walk in the tracks the bulldozer made so we didn’t step on any land mines, and made our way back to your old farm.”

  “Don’t you think that’s the first place they’d look for you?”

  “No. Because they don’t know about it. Santos told me when they came into the area they came through Ely and then found the bunker. They never stumbled across the farm. They don’t even know it exists. They think we were here with the Dykes brothers from the beginning of the blackout.”

  “Okay, let me play devil’s advocate here.”

  “Okay…”

  “Say you do get out. You know they’re going to come looking for you. And since my farm is right up the road, it’ll be one of the first places they’ll look.

  “What are you going to do when they find you there? You don’t have any weapons to defend yourselves.

  “They’ll just find you and drag you back and likely beat the hell out of both of you.”

  “We thought of that. We think the solution is to hide from them until after they come and search the place and then leave again.”

  “Hide where?”

  “In your attic.”

  “You don’t think that’s one of the first places they’ll look?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe not.”

  “Trust me, Lind. It’s one of the first places they’ll look. And you’ll have a baby with you. How are you going to keep Misty from crying if she gets hungry or scared while you’re hiding in the attic and the men are downstairs looking for you?”

  “We thought about that.”

  “And?”

  “We haven’t figured it out yet.”

  “This doesn’t sound like a very good plan, Lindsey.”

  “Well, like I said, we haven’t worked out the details yet.”

  “Can I offer a suggestion?”

  “Sure.”

  “Scrap your plans to escape. No good can come of it.”