“Pardon me for saying this, Dave, but you were a fool to come here. You’re lucky you didn’t get shot.”
“I know. But I had no choice. I had to come here to accomplish the third thing.”
“Which is?”
“I need to use his radio to try to get ahold of his family in Georgia. They need to know.”
“Tony tried many times to get ahold of his family. He never had any luck. He didn’t even know whether they survived.”
“I have a friend who may know someone who can help.”
“Well, it’s there in the back room if you want to give it a shot.”
“Did any of you know his family?”
One man sitting morosely on the couch spoke up. To that point he hadn’t said a word.
“I did,” he said.
Dave said, “Can you give me their names? And Tony’s last name too?”
It suddenly struck him as odd he didn’t even know Tony’s full name.
But the man on the couch did.
“Their last name was Alexander. Tony Alexander and his wife Krista. The boys were Joey and Nathan.”
Dave made his way into Tony’s guest room. It was the same room he’d slept in just a couple of nights before.
The same room where he’d almost been brought to tears when he used the ham radio to talk to Sarah and Lindsey.
The same room where he’d noticed an eight by ten photo of Tony and his family.
The photo was gone now. Tony had taken it and placed it in his own room. Perhaps to avoid having to answer any further questions about his loved ones.
This was going to be an awfully hard call to make.
But he owed it to his friend.
And Dave always paid his debts.
Chapter 6
Dave took a wadded up piece of paper from his pants pocket.
He thought he’d lost it. It had been quite some time since he’d seen it. He’d torn his gear apart earlier that morning looking for it. Just as he was ready to give up, he found it in one of the zippered pockets on his backpack.
On the paper was scrawled a frequency number. It was starting to fade. He made a note to himself to transfer the number to something more permanent before it was lost forever.
He sat in the chair in front of the ham radio and turned it on, then dialed in the frequency.
He took a deep breath, keyed the microphone, and hoped for the best.
In a middle class neighborhood in San Antonio, it had been raining all day.
Eva Woodard sat on her covered deck, watching the rabbits in her back yard. Several of them cowered beneath a patio table, trying their best to stay dry.
Others were more playful, chasing each other around the yard, jumping in and out of puddles, even rolling around in the water as though trying to bathe themselves.
Still others were rather indifferent to the rain, as though it were a minor inconvenience which wouldn’t distract them from doing what had to be done. They continued doing what rabbits do: eating the green grass, eyeing Eva suspiciously, hopping here and there and everywhere.
In the corner of the yard two of them were mating, ignoring everything else including the rain and focusing on their task at hand.
Because… well, because that’s what rabbits do.
It occurred to Eva that rabbits are not unlike human children. They all have their own unique personalities. Some are playful, some are strictly business.
She’d gotten quite attached to the rabbits since Dave left them. She’d been opposed to the idea at first, of her and Frank taking over Dave’s breeding operation. She was afraid of getting too attached to the furry creatures, and would consider them pets more than a food source.
And to be sure there’d been more than one occasion when she’d appealed to her husband to spare one rabbit over another.
“Don’t take him,” she’d say. “He’s so sweet. Take that black one instead. He’s got an attitude and tried to bite me the other day.”
Frank tried to explain to her that they’d all be killed for their meat at some point, and she should try harder not to develop a fondness for them.
It was Frank who came up with a solution to their problem.
“I’ll tell you what. When you feel yourself getting attached to any of them, we’ll give those out as breeders. Whoever gets them will keep them alive for awhile. At least until they get several litters. Eventually they’ll meet their fate, but you won’t know when so it won’t affect you.”
It was a good plan and it worked.
But she still couldn’t help but have her favorites.
Dave and Sarah had been preppers for several years before the lights finally went out and justified their efforts. They foresaw the time when grocery store shelves would be empty and trucks would be as well.
They knew that at sometime in the future meat of all kinds would simply cease to be available. No more butcher shops. No more long lines of juicy red steaks at the neighborhood Walmart. No more KFC. No more meat of any kind.
It bothered them to think that someday the survivors of whatever calamity was coming would eventually eat their family pets out of desperation.
But they fully expected it to become reality.
Actually that concept bothered Sarah a lot more than it did Dave.
When the family’s black Labrador retriever Sally had a litter of three pups, Dave named them Pork Chop, Rib-eye and T-Bone.
He thought it was funny until Sarah announced she was declaring an occasional “sex-free night” at the Speer house.
“Which night are you talking about?” he’d asked.
“Every night until you give those puppies new names.”
It didn’t take long.
In preparation for the catastrophic event they were certain was coming they turned over three hundred pounds of beef into jerky.
They jarred much more. And stocked up on canned meats with long shelf-lives like Spam and tuna.
Still, all those meat sources would be gone in just a few short years.
Rural survivors would have more options for meat. They could hunt, fish and trap game.
The Speers lived smack dab in the middle of the city, where deer and wild hogs were scarcer than scarce.
Their solution was to get their girls pet rabbits: two males and two females, kept in separate pens.
When the proverbial stuff hit the fan they were turned loose in the back yard.
“I researched it,” Dave proudly announced. “One pair of healthy rabbits will produce a herd of six hundred rabbits in a year.”
“That’s nice, honey. But I don’t think a bunch of rabbits is called a herd.”
“What’s it called then?”
“I don’t know. A flock, or maybe a boatload. Or maybe it is a herd. I don’t know. All I know it that’s a lot of rabbits.”
It was indeed. More rabbits than Dave needed.
Before he set out for Kansas City to find his family, Dave started passing them out to other survivors in his neighborhood.
“Remember the old saying, Give a man a fish and feed him for a day, teach him to fish and feed him for life?
“This is kinda like that. I’m giving you one male and one female rabbit. You can kill them today and eat well for a couple of days. Or you can do the smart thing and let them fall in love and make babies. And before long you’ll have more rabbits than you can possibly eat. I hope you’ll choose wisely.”
People started calling him the “Rabbit Man.” Others called him a saint.
When it came time to leave he let some of the rabbits free, knowing they’d soon meet an untimely end at the hands of starving neighbors.
A few he gave to his friends Frank and Eva Woodard.
“Please breed them and pass them out by the pairs to the neighbors. If everyone uses their heads and resists the urge to kill them outright, soon there will be enough protein to keep everyone alive.”
Frank Woodard was a retired Bexar County Sheriff’s Deputy. As a law enforce
ment officer with more than thirty years’ experience, he had peace officer friends all over the United States.
Many, like Frank and Dave, were also preppers.
Many, like Frank but not Dave, had thought ahead and protected a ham radio from the onslaught of the EMPs.
Frank not only had a working ham radio. He also had a lot of contacts.
Contacts who, for the most part, were prior law enforcement officers.
Presumably men and women who had a calling to help others.
The desire to help others is a trait which doesn’t go away merely because the world goes to hell in a global power outage.
If anyone could call in some favors and get a message to Krista Alexander, somewhere in or around Smyrna, Georgia, it was Frank Woodard.
Chapter 7
Eva heard a voice and thought it was Frank calling out to her.
Probably to bring him a bottle of water or a couple of ibuprofen tablets.
He’d had a headache a couple of hours earlier and plopped himself down on the living room couch. Within ten minutes he was snoring loudly enough to wake the dead.
That was why Eva went outside to begin with. Not to watch the rabbits or the rain, but rather to escape his snoring.
She got up, partly to cater to his needs and partly to lecture him. She would have asked him why it was that men equated a headache to having one foot in death’s door, a cold to pneumonia and a minor cut to a major trauma.
When she slid open the patio door, though, and walked into the house she realized the voice wasn’t coming from the living room at all.
It was coming from the ham radio.
And it sounded vaguely familiar.
The caller repeated his first request.
“Frank Woodard, if you’re listening, please come in.”
Eva picked up the microphone and said, “Frank’s asleep at the moment. If you’ll hang on I’ll wake his sorry butt up for you.”
Dave smiled.
“Eva? Is that you?”
“Yes. This is Eva,” came the slightly indignant reply. “Who are you?”
“Eva, this is Dave. Dave Speer.”
“Dave! Oh, my goodness! I thought your voice sounded familiar. How are you?”
“I’m fine, Eva dear. It’s nice to hear your voice and to know you two are okay.”
“Where are you, Dave? Did you find your family?”
“I’m in Albuquerque. And I found most of them. Little Beth was taken against her will and I’m tracking her down. I’ll get her back, though. Don’t you worry.”
“Are you still planning to return to San Antonio? Remember you promised us a chance to meet your wife and girls.”
“And I fully expect to make good on that promise someday. I just don’t know when.”
“I will hold you to it, young man. Now then, you didn’t call to talk to me. You called to talk to Frank. Hold on a minute and I’ll get the old buzzard.”
“Don’t bother,” Frank said from the doorway. “The old buzzard’s awake. How can a guy sleep with all the yelling going on? ‘Oh, Dave! Oh, my goodness!’”
“Oh you hush, you big old grouch!”
“Dave, I’m giving the microphone to Frank. Tell him to quit picking on me, will you?”
Eva yielded the chair to Frank, who said, “Dave! How are you, my friend?”
“I’ll be doing a lot better if you’ll tell me you’ll stop being mean to my number one girl.”
Eva stuck her tongue out at her husband and tussled his hair.
“Oh, don’t listen to her, Dave. I spoil her so rotten she wouldn’t know what to do without me. Putting up with my grumpiness is the price she has to pay for waking me up.”
He looked at her and finished, “When I’m having a great dream about me dallying with Sophia Loren.”
Dave started to make a comment and then realized he didn’t have a clue who Sophia Loren was.
A brand of perfume, maybe.
But that didn’t make sense. Perhaps Frank had been nipping at the bottle.
No matter. It was time to get down to business anyway.
“Hey Frank, I have a favor to ask.”
“You can’t have my virginity, my money or my mind. I lost all three a long time ago. Anything else is up for discussion.”
“I need to get a message to someone who lives in Smyrna, Georgia. Do you know where that is?”
“Sure I do. It’s a suburb of Atlanta. On the northeast side if I remember right.”
“Do you know anybody there who can get a message to her?”
“Butthead.”
Dave said, “Excuse me?”
Eva said, “Frank, don’t you dare call him names just for asking a question!”
Frank said to Eva, “Hush, you.”
He said to Dave, “Marty Butterfield. Everybody calls him Butthead Butterfield. Great guy. He was a motorcycle cop for the San Antonio PD for many years. Retired and moved to Georgia. I talked to him just last week.”
“And he lives in Smyrna?”
“No. He lives in Marietta. But they’re both in Cobb County. Probably share a common border.”
“How much does he love you, Frank?”
“Well, we’re not kissing cousins, if that’s what you’re implying. But he’s a nice guy.”
“Do you think you can talk him into going into Smyrna and getting a message to a young widow there?”
“I’ll have to check. It probably depends on how far and whether he has transportation. But he’s a guy who can get things done for a good cause. If he can’t do it himself he’ll find someone who will. What’s the story?”
“As I told Eva, my youngest daughter was kidnapped. I’m hot on the trail of the kidnappers, and I’ll get her safely back. But a friend of mine was killed helping me search for her.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. Both about your daughter and about your friend. And the widow you need to contact is your friend’s wife, I presume?”
“Yes, sir. I suspect that at some point she’ll come back to Albuquerque looking for him. And I don’t want her to do that. It’s not the place it used to be.”
“I’ve heard rumors to that effect. I heard it’s hell on a plate.
“Yes. That’s a mild way to describe it.”
“It’s not the only one, Dave. Chicago, Houston… Los Angeles. They’re the same way. Turns out the gangs had a lot more power and influence than anyone thought. When law enforcement shut down they stepped in to fill the void.”
Los Angeles was west of Albuquerque, in the direction the old couple was going with Beth. That gave Dave even more resolve to get back on the road and to find her quickly.
“I’m sorry to hear that. But I have to assume it won’t be that way forever.”
“It won’t be. It can’t be. I’ll need the name and address of the woman, and the message you want to give her.”
“That’s just it, Frank. I don’t know her address. Her name is Krista Alexander. She’s supposed to be living with her mom in Smyrna.”
“Let me guess. Alexander is her married name.”
“Correct.”
“And let me go out on a limb and say you don’t know her mom’s name.”
“Correct again.”
“Geez, you’re not gonna make it easy on old Butthead.”
“I’m sorry. I tried to find out her maiden name, but most of their friends have left the area. The ones who are left didn’t know.”
“That’s okay. Don’t worry about it. Butthead’s like an old bloodhound. He’ll do whatever it takes to track her down. Most of the larger city libraries have binders of city records that list addresses and public records like marriages and divorces and such.
“Like I said, he’ll get the job done. Do you have a physical description of her? There’s probably more than one Krista Alexander in the area.”
“I’ve never met her. All I’ve seen is a single photo. White, blonde, thin. In her thirties. Very pretty.”
“Maybe I’ll just
bypass Butthead and go looking for her myself.”
Eva slapped him on the back of the head.
“Or maybe not,” Frank continued. “What message do you want to give her?”
“Tell her not to come back to Albuquerque under any circumstances. It’s not safe for her or her boys. And tell her Tony is dead. But that he loved them to the end and was making plans to go find them.”
“Anything else?”
“Yes. Tell her to tell his boys they can be proud of their dad. He died a hero.”
Chapter 8
Sal Ambrosio sat on a lawn chair looking into a blazing sun.
He’d gone to the edge of the property to be alone.
But he wasn’t going to get any solitude on this particular day.
His older brother Benny saw him wander off, carrying the folding chair, from an upstairs window of his sprawling ranch house.
It wasn’t that he was worried about Sal getting lost. The ground was flat and the house could be seen for more than a mile in every direction.
He wasn’t worried about his being unfamiliar with the high desert’s various hazards.
He’d been briefed that the rattlers came in a variety of colors and that some of them blended in quite well with the sand and the rocks and the desert flowers. He’d been told to watch out for them and to avoid them when possible. Especially when he came upon one that was coiled.
He was briefed that if bitten he was to call on his radio for help, then use his snake bite kit while waiting for the cavalry.
He knew by now that coyotes weren’t a problem. They’d chow down on a small dog or a cat of any size. But they never attacked humans.
The scorpions were mostly a pain in the ass. Their sting was no worse than a bee’s, and they always got the worst end of the deal. They couldn’t run fast enough to avoid being stomped by their victim’s boot and ground into the earth. The ugly pests were winners of battles, losers of wars.
No, Benny decided to follow his brother not because he was unfamiliar with the desert’s hazards, but rather because of what he took with him besides the chair.
Not a couple of bottles of water, as Benny would have taken if he was wandering off to meditate in the scorching desert.
Payback: Alone: Book 7 Page 3