One of Our Own: Final Dawn: Book 11

by Darrell Maloney

  He and his men did just that.

  They stormed the orphanage in the dead of night and took it over.

  Mark wasn’t as brutal as he imagined himself to be. He couldn’t bring himself to gun the surviving board members down in cold blood. It turned out they hadn’t had an easy time of it either. They were beaten down and defeated even before being vanquished.

  Once the damage was done, once the facility was in the hands of brutal men who had no regard for human life, Mark Douglas regretted his actions.

  Regretted them so much, in fact, he finally decided it time to join his wife and son.

  He used the same gun as his son to end his own life.

  -41-

  Of course it could be said that if Mark Douglas was truly sorry, that if he honestly regretted his decision to overrun the orphanage, he’d have tried to mitigate the damage.

  He could have tried to convince the others to leave the children and their handlers in peace. To settle somewhere else.

  But he’d created a monster of sorts. The five men he’d recruited had it far too easy to give up their newfound spoils.

  It was, in many ways, the perfect place to settle down. The compound was isolated. Even many of the locals didn’t know it was there. It was off the beaten track, well off the highway, and pretty much surrounded by heavy woods.

  In addition, the board that had planned for Saris 7’s onslaught had done a wonderful job. When the thaw came there was still plenty of food for at least three more years. They were running low on bottled water, but not to worry.

  The well system which had provided fresh water prior to the collision was nursed back into operation.

  Wildlife in the nearby woods found a way to survive, albeit in diminished numbers. Even the fish in two nearby lakes survived the freeze. No one knew how, but they were there.

  The invaders had two choices. They could leave Shady Rest and scratch out a meager existence like the rest of the survivors.

  Or they could stay and live in relative ease and comfort.

  To no one’s surprise, they chose to stay.

  They had an uneasy truce, the captors and captives did.

  The captives were allowed to stay, provided they took care of the children and kept them out of the captors’ hair.

  The captives also had to keep the place clean, cook the meals and do the laundry.

  And in turn the captors let their victims live.

  Most of the girls had turned into women during the long freeze.

  They were offered their own deal.

  They could leave and struggle to survive in a new and vicious world that would give them no breaks, provide them no assistance.

  Or they could stay and help the staff make the lives of the conquerors comfortable.

  “Comfortable” is a relative term, and a couple of the conquerors considered feminine charms to be part of the package.

  Those women who resisted their advances only did so a few times. The beatings were swift and severe, and something none of them wanted to suffer on a regular basis.

  It wasn’t quite hell for the orphans, but it was close to it.

  Still, it could have been much worse. For during the first six months or so, nobody actually died.

  That ended when one of the boys, now 17 years of age, got tired of seeing one woman in particular he was fond of raped, or essentially so.

  He decided to be her knight in shining armor. He mustered his courage, punched the man who’d ravaged her, and told him to get off the property or else.

  “Or else what?” the man asked.

  The man/boy was at a loss for words, for it was a question he’d never expected.

  When he’d planned his rebellion he never expected any resistance. He’d naively expected his target to merely admit defeat and slink away with his tail between his legs.

  “Or else… I’ll kill you.”

  He tried to sound tough, though he only fooled himself.

  The man pulled a gun and fired three times.

  It was in his last moment of life, between the time his foil pulled the gun and pulled the trigger, that the man/boy realized he’d made a dreadful mistake.

  But it was too late.

  The killing changed the dynamic. The orphans now feared for their very lives.

  They realized that as bad as their lives had become it could be worse.

  For those lives could be snuffed out at any moment at the whim of one of their captors.

  On the day Cupid 23 struck the earth outside of the tiny berg of Spangdahlem, Germany, a pungent smell of fresh dug earth overtook the world.

  Everyone at Shady Rest understood immediately what it meant.

  The cold was coming back.

  When temperatures dropped to twenty the following day the captors, the shady men Mark Douglas had chosen to overrun the place, shot every one of the staff.

  Then, in an act which was equal parts brutal and senseless, they shot the boys as well.

  Their logic was simple. If they were going into another long freeze, they needed to thin their numbers to the greatest degree possible.

  The boys were seen as threats who might someday band together to try to overpower them.

  The girls weren’t deemed to be such threats.

  They were therefore spared.

  But that didn’t mean they were welcome.

  Douglas’ band of raiders decided that female company was all well and good. But that it wasn’t worth sharing their food with such company.

  The women and girls were banished from the facility, forced into a white panel van the orphanage once used for field trips.

  “But where will we go?” one of the women asked.

  “Go to hell, for all we care. Just go.”

  They drove off, the eight of them, into a frozen world with dirty brown skies, with no idea what was out there or where they’d find quarter.

  -42-

  Years before, when the world was sane and no one ever heard of Saris 7, the outcast women were adolescent girls or young teens.

  They frequently took field trips to Eden’s public library, or to the tiny fire station to sit behind the wheel of its only ladder truck.

  Sometimes they bypassed Eden and drove another twenty miles to San Angelo, to sit in the T-38 jets at the Air Force base there.

  Sometimes they went to one or the other for shopping excursions, where they got the chance to spend the meager earnings they made by helping out the landscaper or kitchen staff at Shady Rest.

  Their memories were vague because it had been years, but they still knew which direction to take when they left the orphanage and turned onto Highway 87.

  Not knowing where to go wasn’t their problem.

  Getting there was the problem.

  The afternoon they were forced out of the orphanage was the very same day Brad was rescued. The roads were treacherous. Several inches of snow atop two inches of ice.

  It was rough going even for experienced winter drivers.

  For rookies it was damn near impossible.

  Because the women were too young to drive before Saris 7, no one had ever been behind the wheel.

  The woman driving the van was twenty five year old Charlotte. She was elected to do the driving because she was the oldest among them, and was generally well respected as having a good head on her shoulders.

  But she was terrified.

  She knew the basics of driving. She remembered watching Mr. Staley, the kindly old man who used to take them on field trips.

  But this… slip-sliding all over the road like a kid running across a frozen pond was more than she expected.

  She cried, tears rolling down her face as she white-knuckle gripped the steering wheel with both hands.

  The other women prayed or offered their encouragement.

  A couple of them closed their eyes, trying to block out the crash they were certain was coming.

  The orphanage was several miles south of Eden. Eden South, the renovated prison s
erving a second life for Eden’s residents, was between the orphanage and the town.

  The old prison was the first sign of life the women happened upon.

  “Look! That building has lights on!”

  “Hey, there are people outside.”

  “Let’s stop and ask if they can help us.”

  It sounded like a great idea to Charlotte, who’d have promised her right arm and her first-born for a chance to stop driving for awhile.

  She took the turn into Eden South way too fast and slid sideways twenty feet before correcting herself.

  When she came to a stop outside the prison gates she took too long to brake and almost slid into the guard shack.

  The guards went running out into the cold, convinced they were about to die.

  The sergeant of the guard was named Bill Brady. He was one of Richard Sears’ new volunteers who raised his weapon in case they were under assault.

  It didn’t take him long to realize the van full of unarmed women were no threat.

  But he was still a little peeved about almost being run over.

  “What’s the matter with you, lady?”

  “I’m sorry sir. I’m really really sorry. I… I’ve never driven before. I… I don’t really know how…”

  It was partly the woman’s words that caused Brady to soften. That and the sight of Charlotte’s tear-streaked face.

  Women’s tears can soften the hardest of hearts.

  “What are you women doing out here? This isn’t the time to be taking a trip to the mall.”

  “We need help. We don’t have anywhere to go. They killed the boys…”

  That caught Brady’s attention.

  “Who? Who killed who?”

  He reached for the pistol on his hip and looked around, as though afraid that the alleged killers were somehow hiding in the snow nearby.

  “The bad men. They took over Shady Rest months ago, but never really hurt anybody. Then when it got cold again they killed everybody except us. They told us we had to leave. That we couldn’t stay because we’d eat all the food. They sent us out in the cold, and we don’t know where to go or what to do.”

  Now, it wasn’t that Bill Brady wasn’t a compassionate man. And it wasn’t that he didn’t want to help a group of women in a bind.

  No, it was a combination of things that caused him to turn the women away that day.

  It was partly because Bill wasn’t the smartest guy in the world.

  And partly because he grew up under the thumb of a very domineering father. One he tried all his life to please and never succeeded.

  Mostly it was because he was bucking to be named as Richard Sears’ second in command in the new Eden South volunteer militia.

  To obtain such a lofty goal it was imperative he follow all orders to the letter, immediately and without question.

  And Mayor Al, who’d designated himself king of Eden South, had decreed no one from the outside world was allowed into the facility under any circumstances.

  To allow outsiders in would deplete their resources and could cause major problems later if they started running out of things.

  All outsiders, according to Mayor Al, were to be turned away at the gate.

  Bill looked at Charlotte and said sympathetically, “I’m sorry. I’d like to, but we just can’t help you.”

  -43-

  A smarter man would have realized the women’s next stop would be Eden, based on their direction of travel.

  A smarter man would have known they’d get no help in Eden either, since the town had been evacuated and all its relatives now resided with the former prison’s walls.

  A smarter man would have warned the women to pass Eden by. To go elsewhere instead.

  Bill Brady did none of those things, because he wasn’t that smart.

  The tears came back to Charlotte’s eyes. She couldn’t understand why someone would turn them away at their worst hour. They were obviously in great distress. They’d been through a terrible ordeal and then turned out into the cold. How could anyone ignore that and refuse to help?

  Despite the tears, though; despite the anger several of the women were voicing, she had no choice but to pull the van back onto Highway 87 and head north.

  She knew from the field trips she’d taken as a girl that Eden was only a short drive away.

  Surely they’d find someone willing to help them there.

  As they came to the town’s only traffic light, where Highway 87 intersected with Highway 83, she stopped and looked around.

  There was the Dairy Queen where she and the other girls once giggled and gossiped over banana splits.

  It looked different than she remembered it. They’d renovated it at one point. And now there were two year’s worth of weeds grown up in its flower beds.

  It struck her as sad that in all likelihood no one would ever share ice cream or giggles there again.

  “Which way do we go from here?” she asked to no one in particular.

  The answer came from the back seat.

  “Go straight. That’s where Mr. Staley always went to San Angelo.”

  Charlotte rebelled.

  “We’re not driving all the way to San Angelo.”

  “I know. But there’s that motel up the road if you go straight. Surely there’s somebody there. There doesn’t seem to be anybody else.”

  Charlotte pushed the gas pedal a bit too hard and the rear end started to fishtail on the icy road.

  It wasn’t a good day for an inexperienced driver to be out and about.

  It was true. There wasn’t anybody around they could see. And, in the logic of women who’d been sheltered from society for most of their lives, it made perfect sense that the Slumber Inn Motel would be open for business and teeming with guests.

  Only it wasn’t.

  Charlotte half-drove, half slid into a completely empty parking lot.

  The dusty sign taped inside the front window of the motel’s office said:

  CLOSED

  GONE HOME TO FREEZE

  Had the sign been hung the day before it would have been appropriate.

  Actually, it had been hanging there for twelve years.

  Since two weeks before the original freeze.

  “Where is everybody? How come we haven’t seen a single person? There should be somebody out driving around looking for food or going to check on their neighbors. There should be people around.”

  There was no one out and about because the town had been evacuated. But they didn’t know that.

  Charlotte was, by now, exasperated beyond belief.

  “Now what do we do?”

  “Go down that street right there. Where the houses are. We’ll just all get out and start pounding on doors until somebody answers and lets us in.”

  It sounded as good a plan as any.

  But nobody answered their doors.

  The town of Eden was completely deserted.

  -44-

  One woman named Rebecca was particularly bold and wouldn’t take no for an answer.

  She tried a doorknob and to her surprise it opened.

  It wasn’t an oversight on the part of the home’s owner.

  They’d left it unlocked on purpose, in the event a poor soul needed shelter from the cold.

  “Hey everybody! Over here!”

  They converged on the house and searched it.

  There was no water, and precious little food.

  There was no power, a fireplace but no firewood.

  “We can’t stay here. We’ve got to keep moving.”

  “But… where did everybody go? Surely the whole town didn’t die.”

  “I don’t know, Rebecca. But if we stay here that’s what we’ll do.”

  The group piled back into the van. At least it was warm there.

  “Now what?”

  Charlotte made a command decision.

  “San Angelo is just twenty miles away. There’s no way everybody in San Angelo is dead. Somebody there will help us.�
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  As Charlotte saw it, she had little choice. The abandoned houses had little to offer them. The entire town of Eden was a ghost town.

  But San Angelo, a few miles up the highway, was a much larger place. Almost two hundred thousand people.

  Surely there were survivors there.

  Surely there were city services. Someplace which could take them in and feed and clothe them while they rode out the latest freeze.

  The survivors, had there been any around, would have laughed at their naivety.

  “The government? Helping any of us? You can’t be serious!”

  But really, what else would people who’d grown up in an orphanage, who’d never had to live on their own, think?

  Charlotte was getting the hang of accelerating. She was learning that when she started to slide, taking her foot completely off the gas pedal tended to mitigate the skid.

  The steering was another matter. She’d seen Mr. Staley drive the same van lots of times. She knew that when she turned the wheel to the left the van was supposed to respond in kind.

  It just boggled her mind that on the ice the van seemed to have a mind of its own; seemed to go wherever it pleased.

  Still, she seemed to be winning the battle.

  Then she made her first mistake, and it was a huge one.

  She did the same thing winter drivers all over the world do every year when things seem to be running smoothly.

  She got overconfident.

  The girls in the back kept asking her how much longer it would be, and she picked up her speed a bit.

  Both hands on the wheel, in the ten and two positions, she thought she was driving like gangbusters.

  She thought she was kicking the snow’s butt.

  Then something happened. She wasn’t sure what, exactly. Maybe her hands twitched and turned the wheel slightly at the wrong time.

  Maybe she was on a dry part of the asphalt and suddenly hit a patch of ice.

  Whatever caused it, the rear of the van started to fishtail to the right.

  Then she made another mistake. It also was one millions of other drivers do under similar circumstances.

  She overcompensated.