Dave looked up at one point to see Sal on the crest of the next hill, perhaps half a mile away, and pointed out to Sarah the sky was darkening behind him.
“Looks like we may be heading into rain,” he said.
Sarah looked up and saw, the same time Dave did, as Sal tumbled off his still-moving go-cart.
Sal rolled in one direction and the go-cart rolled off in the other.
A fraction of a second later they heard the sharp crack of a rifle shot, coming from the same general direction.
The girls hadn’t been paying attention, as they were bickering about something behind their parents.
The bickering stopped, though, at the sound of the shot, and they looked off to see where it came from.
The first thing they saw, and the next thing they heard, was their father as he yelled a panicked, “Nooooo!”
Even as he shouted he was on the run, abandoning the shopping cart he was pushing and sprinting all out toward his fallen friend.
As he ran he kept his eyes on Sal. He wasn’t moving. Not even a little bit. Surely if he was injured he’d be writhing about in pain. Wouldn’t he?
His eyes left his friend just long enough to see where the go-cart wound up. It was wedged against a guard rail, its engine racing but not going anywhere.
A man came out of nowhere and was trying to free it.
He was still more than a quarter mile away.
Dave had a choice.
He could continue his sprint to Sal, and perhaps get there in time to save him.
Or he could take out his vengeance on the man who shot him.
The smart choice, the money choice, would be to let the man go in favor of trying to save his friend.
But men don’t always make the best choice. Especially when rage takes over their very soul.
He stopped and tried to stop his heavy breathing.
The best he could do was slow it down.
His arms were shaking too badly to fire a shot from a standing position. He went to one knee.
Now Dave was an excellent shot. He was a Marine Corps sharpshooter on the M-16.
But then again, when he scored so well in the Corps he was at a firing range, shooting at fixed targets, under no pressure.
His AR-15 was the civilian counterpart to the M-16.
He shouldn’t have missed his first shot.
But he did.
It whizzed past Chad Smith’s left ear, alerting him that not only had he been spotted, he was also under fire.
Chad looked to see Dave lining up his second shot.
If Chad had had combat experience or been a smarter man he’d have hit the dirt. Then he’d have low-crawled into the forest and ran like the wind.
Instead he continued to try to free the go-cart.
Bad mistake.
Dave’s second shot was also off the mark, but at least hit his target.
It went through the lower front of Chad’s left lung, shattered his third rib and drove a good-sized piece of the rib through his back.
Chad went down.
Dave continued his run toward Sal.
When he got to his friend’s side he knew there was nothing he could do.
The shot was through and through. Through one side of Sal’s chest and out the other.
The bullet shredded his heart as it passed through him.
Sal was dead.
There was nothing he could do for him.
He turned instead to a wounded Chad.
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Thank you for reading
ALONE, Part 11: Texas Bound
Please enjoy this preview of
ALONE, Part 12:
A Long Road Home
In his fury Dave forgot that half a mile away his family was waiting, watching in horror.
The wounded animal who lay on the highway bleeding profusely from a mortal wound and cowering before him would have to wait.
He grabbed the rear of the go-cart’s frame and pulled mightily. The accelerator which had been jammed beneath the guard rail came free. The roar of the engine ceased. The drive wheels stopped spinning.
A second mighty yank and the machine itself was free.
It weighed almost as much as he did, and was ungainly. But that didn’t matter, and it didn’t slow him down, for he had to release some of his rage somehow, against someone or something.
He gripped the frame of the machine even harder and, in the same way a discus thrower heaves a discus, he spun his body halfway around and heaved the go-cart over the guardrail and into the deep canyon below.
He couldn’t see it, but heard it bounce from one boulder to another. The gas tank ruptured and a plume of black smoke rose from the canyon floor.
The go-cart would never be ridden again. Nor would it ever endanger another innocent driver. Never again.
Dave’s immediate thoughts went to his family.
He picked up the shooter’s rifle and slung it over the guardrail. Took the pistol from the man’s holster and did the same with it.
He ignored the man’s pleas for help and walked briskly back to Sarah and the girls.
By the time he reached them they already knew the news they were about to receive. It hadn’t gone without notice that Dave hadn’t crouched over Sal’s prone body, trying to stop his bleeding or breathe life back into him.
That implied only one dreadful thing, and they all knew it.
All three were in tears when he made it back to them. Beth was screaming hysterically.
Only Dave was calm, for someone had to be.
“Go ahead and set up camp. I need time to bury Sal, and to deal with the man who shot him. I don’t want any of you going up there until I do.”
Sarah nodded. Lindsey stared blankly ahead. Beth continued to scream and was swept up into her mother’s arms.
Dave did an about-face and walked back up the hill.
Sarah sensed the importance of getting the girls away from the area, and to give them something to do to occupy their minds.
And so they wouldn’t have to watch their father drag Sal’s body off the roadway to bury it.
From her vantage point Sarah couldn’t see the additional problem Dave had to deal with. She just naturally assumed the shooter was dead, as she knew her husband was a crack shot.
She interpreted Dave’s words: “deal with the man who shot him” to mean he had two bodies to bury.
Actually Dave’s dilemma was much more complicated than that.
Dave paused long enough at Sal’s body to close his friend’s eyes and to say, “Rest in peace, buddy. Say hello to Nellie for us.”
Shortly after he stood over Chad Smith’s body.
Chad saw Dave above him, though it was getting increasingly harder to focus through glassed and sticky eyes.
He could only manage a few meager words, in a weak and trembling voice.
“Help me,” he pleaded. “Please help me.”
Dave looked at the man’s wound. Although he’d missed the heart, it was definitely a mortal shot.
In a big city, when the power was still on and vehicles were still running, a fast-acting ambulance crew might be able to dress the wound in time to rush him to a trauma center and save his life.
But the power was off, possibly forever.
Ambulances no longer ran. They were a hundred miles from the nearest trauma center, and it was almost certainly closed anyway.
Dave had no sterile dressings or bandages. Although he’d received extensive training in the military to deal with combat wounds… what the Corps called “buddy care,” he had nothing to work with.
Moreover, he had no desire to try.
In response to Chad’s pitiful cries Dave removed his tactical knife from its sheathe on his belt.
He held it to the man’s throat.
Pressed hard enough to draw a drop of blood and make the man wince in pain.
He said, “I’ll help you, you son of a bitch. I’ll help you go straight to hell.”
But
he stopped short.
He was ready and willing to plunge the knife into the man’s neck, slice open his jugular vein. Perhaps even sever his head and sling it into the canyon.
He stood over the man and debated.
On the one hand, what he was pondering was murder.
He wasn’t a perfect man by any means. And he’d killed several times, either because his country told him to or because his conscience convinced him he had to. Either to save his own life or his family’s.
But there were some lines he’d never crossed.
Murder was one of them.
On the other hand, he was a believer. He knew in his heart of hearts that God was up there watching. And that God was omnipresent and omnipotent. That He knew everything.
If that was true then God knew the evil that was in this man’s heart. And surely He would forgive Dave for taking his life.
It wasn’t often Dave faced a dilemma he didn’t immediately have an answer for.
All his life he’d considered himself a decision-maker extraordinaire. He had a reputation in the Corps for seldom being wrong, seldom regretting the choices he made.
This time he was stumped.
He turned and looked back at the road behind him.
His family was nowhere in sight. Sarah had taken them into the high brush on the highway’s median and put them to work.
He couldn’t see her and didn’t know that Sarah was holding little Beth and rocking her back and forth, trying desperately to soothe her and dry her tears.
No, he couldn’t consult Sarah; Sarah had her own crisis to deal with. And even if she’d been standing there beside him he wouldn’t burden her with this decision to make. It was his choice and his alone.
As Chad Smith begged for his life Dave knelt down beside him again.
He’d made his decision.
*************************
ALONE, Part 12: A Long Road Home
will be available worldwide on Amazon.com and at Barnes and Noble Booksellers in January, 2019
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If you enjoyed
ALONE, Part 11: Texas Bound,
you might also enjoy
COUNTDOWN TO ARMAGEDDON
Available now at Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble Booksellers.
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Scott Harter wasn’t special by anybody’s standards. He wasn’t a handsome guy at all. He wasn’t dumb, but he’d never win a Nobel Prize either. He had no hidden talents, although he fancied himself a fairly good karaoke singer.
His friends didn’t necessarily share that opinion, but what did they know?
No, if those friends were tasked to choose one word to describe Scott Harter that word might well be “average.”
If Scott excelled at one thing, it was that he was a very good businessman. And he was also a lot luckier than most.
And it was that combination – his penchant for making a buck and being lucky, that led him here on this day to the Guerra Public Library on the west side of San Antonio.
To research what he believed was the pending collapse of mankind.
Twenty three years earlier, Scott had done two things that would change his life forever. Even back then, he was just an average Joe. He’d had plans to become a doctor, but his average grades weren’t cutting it. So he dropped out of college halfway through his junior year.
He’d have loved to have married a beauty queen, but his average looks certainly did nothing to attract any. Neither did his average amount of charm. So instead he started dating Linda Amparano, who was a sweet girl but somewhat average herself. They seemed to make a perfect, if slightly vanilla, couple.
The second thing Scott did that year was buy a dilapidated self-storage unit on the north side of San Antonio. It was one of those places where people rent lockers to store their things when their garages have run out of space. Or their kids go off to college. Or when they just accumulate so many things that they’ve run out of room to put them all.
Pat, the guy who sold the property to Scott, was a friendly enough sort, but not a businessman at all. He didn’t understand some of the basic principles of running such an operation.
Not that Scott was an expert. At least back then he wasn’t.
But even back then, Scott knew the value of curb appeal, and that a fresh paint job and a few repairs could attract a few more customers. And a few more customers would help supply money for advertising, and special offers, and long-term lease discounts. No brainers, actually.
So by the end of that year, two things happened. Scott had turned around the business and turned it into a money-making operation. And he married Linda.
The pair said their vows on December 17th of that year. It was bitterly cold that day. The coldest December 17th on record for that part of Texas.
If the cold was an omen, though, neither of them saw it. If either of them had, and had gotten cold feet, their lives would be so much different today.
But they just laughed it off, as young couples in love are wont to do. And they went ahead with their nuptials and started their lives together and never looked back at that cold day in December when they ran headlong into a marriage that shouldn’t have happened.
The marriage lasted nine years. It produced two great sons, so there was that. And Scott and Linda remained friends. That was something else. So there was a good legacy, of sorts, left behind by their mistake that cold December day.
Scott adored his boys. There was Jordan, his oldest, who was intelligent and talented and a bit of a goofball. And there was Zachary, who Scott was convinced would someday become a scientist or a highly successful engineer. Zach was always taking things apart and making other things with them. His curious mind never stopped working, and he loved exploring new things and new ideas. Zach was sweeter than a bucket of molasses. He was everybody’s best friend.
Yes, Scott was lucky as a father. No problems with his boys at all.
He was also lucky in that he lived in Texas at the time of the divorce. Texas wasn’t an alimony state. So he wasn’t saddled with monster alimony payments like his brother in Atlanta was. His brother Mike was divorced the same year as Scott, and was ordered by the court to pay forty percent of his before-tax income to a wife who had cheated on him multiple times.
No, Scott had no such problem. He paid child support, of course, and was always on time with it. And he doted on his boys and bought them nice things.
But since he didn’t have to pay alimony, he was able to take that money instead and use it to build his business.
After the first storage facility was turning a healthy profit, he was able to buy a second. Then a third. And with each one he followed the same business model. He’d do some cosmetic improvements to attract a few more customers. Then he’d turn that additional income into air time on the local radio station, or ads in the local paper. Getting the word out drew more customers, which in turn would supply more money for special deals and discounts. Which would provide more money for another new facility.
It was a business model that had served him well.
And now, twenty three years later, Scott Harter owned a chain of thirty one storage facilities spread throughout San Antonio and nearby Houston.
So even though he wasn’t as handsome as a movie star, and would never be a candidate to join Mensa, he was doing all right. And that was good enough for him.
Linda had remarried within a year. The marriage only lasted two years and was full of problems. She waited a bit longer to marry her third husband, and the third time seemed to be the charm for her. The third husband, Tony, was a good man, who treated Linda and the boys well. At least it appeared that way to Tony. He didn’t know that since their divorce, Linda had gotten very good at putting on airs and keeping secrets. Keeping the ugly truth from Scott made it easier for Scott and Tony to be casual friends. Scott eventually found out that Tony was a con man and a user, who’d taken
Linda for pretty much everything she had.
It was Scott who helped her get back on her feet. She banished Tony from her life, and swore off marriage forever.
From that point on, Linda chose a life less complicated. A life with an endless stream of boyfriends who didn’t provide a sense of stability. But they were a lot easier to get rid of when they didn’t work out.
Their boys had been brought up in a stable environment, which meant they were well behaved and relatively problem free. Neither of them ever got into drugs, or ran away from home. Neither of them had gone to jail, or left a string of broken hearts. Both of them were good kids, who had bright futures ahead of them. Or so they thought. Actually, there were problems ahead, which none of them knew about, but which their father would soon discover.
Yes, all in all, Scott was a lucky man, despite his being just an average guy. And he was living a pretty comfortable life.
That was about to change.
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Coming in October 2018:
Darrell Maloney’s New Series
PANDEMIC
Here’s A Preview…
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Scientists knew it was coming for decades.
At least they claimed to.
And perhaps some of them did.
Most of them, though, were as surprised as everyone else when the ice packs started to melt.
Thus began the great debate on what was causing it.
Those with a certain political leaning claimed it was greenhouse gases, the exhaust from machines and smokestacks, which was causing global temperatures to rise.
Others, with different political agendas, scoffed and said it was a natural occurrence of the earth, going through its normal heating and cooling cycles.
An American vice-president used a poorly thought out choice of words and the term “global warming” was born.
The term made him a laughing stock with nay-sayers when winter temperatures dropped to all-time records all over the globe.
Texas Bound: Alone: Book 11 Page 17