She’d never be his little Becky, no matter how hard he wished it to be. But she was a girl in need of a grandfather. He was a grandfather who’d lost his own granddaughter. In a perfect world they’d have made a fine match.
But they’d never quite clicked because of the circumstances which had brought them together. That, and the clumsy mistake he’d made in agreeing to “adopt” her.
They had a journey to make together. Just the two of them this time.
The journey would no doubt be long and arduous. The dangers that greeted them on the trip west would no doubt still be there. Perhaps they’d even gotten worse, as surely people out there had gotten even more desperate.
But this trip would give them a second chance to bond.
To become at least friends. And maybe, just maybe, the grieving grandfather who needed a granddaughter and the little girl who had no grandpa could become something of a family after all.
Chapter 13
Dave finished his conversation and walked out of the room.
Tony’s friends were still meeting in the living room, discussing their own personal plans.
Their grief hadn’t lasted long.
Or perhaps they were still grieving, but the harsh realities of the modern world and their own desperate circumstance just pushed Tony’s death into the background.
The man on the roof, the one who seemed to be in charge, told Dave, “We’re trying to figure out how to divide the belongings.”
Dave had to bite his tongue. “The belongings.” Not “Tony’s belongings.”
They’d learned of Tony’s death only a couple of hours before, yet they’d already seemingly forgotten his name.
Perhaps Tony was right all along. Perhaps they were never really his friends at all. Perhaps they were nothing more than business associates, providing him protection in exchange for a paycheck each week.
That possibility saddened him.
“We’ve agreed that Tony probably would have wanted you to have the Polaris. We’ve got no need for it anyway, since we’ve decided to stay here. You have a daughter to find. You’ll need wheels to do it.”
Dave considered the gesture, but only for a moment.
It would be nice to have a backup vehicle, but the Polaris wouldn’t fit into the back of his Explorer. He didn’t have a trailer and didn’t know off hand where he could find one. And most importantly, his ability to move stealthily along the highway depended in large part to his keeping a low profile.
He planned to drive at night, as he’d done before. Each morning just before sunrise, he’d park his Explorer on the highway, where it would blend in with all the other abandoned vehicles.
If someone was camping in the area and woke up not long after Dave parked his vehicle, he’d likely not notice the extra vehicle that wasn’t there when he went to sleep.
However, a black Explorer towing a trailer with a camouflage Polaris wouldn’t blend in quite so well. In Dave’s mind, it would stick out like a sore thumb and lessen his chances of hiding in plain sight.
“I’ll pass on the Polaris, but thanks anyway. I’ve already got another vehicle waiting for me up on the interstate.
“You guys may not need it now, but eventually it’ll come in handy for your supply runs.
“I’d appreciate it, though, if one of you would be kind enough to give me a ride back to the interstate.”
The others conferred, but for some reason didn’t seem to want to grant Dave’s request.
It took him a minute to figure out why.
Tony’s vehicle was unique. A late model Polaris was a rare enough thing in post-apocalyptic Albuquerque.
The unique way it was detailed and accessorized, with a black and gray-tone camouflage paint job and black powder-coated racks and roll bar made it pretty much one of a kind.
The men knew there would be a lot of angry drug users out there. Upset because Tony was no longer bringing their dope.
Many would be in outright withdrawals and either desperate or irrational.
Maybe both.
And many had weapons.
Dope fiends weren’t exactly known for thinking rationally even on their best days.
In the midst of full blown withdrawal they could be downright dangerous.
Many of them carried guns and used them to rob people to obtain the gold and silver they needed to buy their dope.
It wasn’t a stretch to think some of them might see someone riding Tony’s vehicle, put two and two together and come up with five.
They might assume the rider was the one who murdered Tony, perhaps just for his wheels.
It was several miles to his Explorer. Riding there by day on the Polaris might be a suicide run. Driving there by night would be better.
“Never mind, guys. I think I would like to keep it, and thank you very much.
“If you don’t mind, though, I’d like to hang out here until dark. Just so I don’t get shot off the damn thing when I ride out.”
Roof guy looked at the others and shrugged.
“I don’t think anybody’s got any problem with that. You didn’t have to come back here. You could have just ridden away and left us in the dark, wondering what ever happened to Tony.
“You’re welcome to stay until dark if you want.”
Dave whiled away the rest of the afternoon and evening lying on a couch, formulating a travel plan and trying not to get disgusted with Tony’s security detail.
They, on the other hand, used the time to thoroughly search the house and gather everything of value.
Including what appeared to be Kayla’s wedding band which had been holding a place of prominence in the center of Tony’s desk.
They took everything and placed it all on the dining room table, then took turns drawing a piece until it was all gone.
It was all Dave could do to hold his tongue.
Then he realized he wasn’t much better.
He’d be driving away on Tony’s Polaris as soon as the sky was dark enough to provide him cover.
That was one of the things Dave hated most about the new world. Death was accepted far too easily now. People died and their loved ones grieved momentarily and then moved on.
The deceased were forgotten far too easily. Within days, or sometimes hours, their entire life was just brushed away. As though they never existed.
Dave got the sense he was the only man in the house who’d ever give Tony another thought once this day was done.
And since he was the man in the house who’d known Tony the shortest amount of time that was a damned shame.
Chapter 14
Darkness finally fell.
Dave slipped into the front yard and climbed aboard the big ATV and cranked its engine.
He knew from past experience that he could let the Polaris creep along at its own pace, and with his foot off the accelerator it ran virtually silent.
The only discernable sound, really, was the slight noise the oversized knobby tires made rolling along the pavement.
The moon was in its final crescent, the skies mostly cloudy. It was going to be a relatively dark night.
He wished he had night vision goggles.
Without them he’d have to move much slower. Almost at the same pace he’d be moving if he walked.
He thought about just abandoning the vehicle and setting out on foot, but decided against it.
When he made it to the Explorer the night would be only half gone. He could get several miles closer to Beth before the sun started to rise.
But not if he was exhausted from a long walk beforehand.
Driving at night, whether on the Polaris or in his Explorer, was tedious and stressful. He had to be on his toes for every second of every minute. Every time he passed the hulking shadow of an abandoned vehicle there was a chance someone was waiting behind it to attack him.
Around every turn and over every rise was a possible ambush.
He’d found on his trip to Kansas City that night travel exhausted him. Many times a
fter traveling all night he couldn’t wait for the sun to rise. All he wanted to do was to rest his body and mind and to get some desperately needed sleep.
He made it out of the residential area and onto the interstate with no problem.
Then he had a decision to make.
Most of the highway nomads stuck to the highway itself. That was where the trucks were. And the trucks not only provided their sustenance. They provided their sleeping quarters as well.
Running directly adjacent to, and on each side of the highway, were the service or access roads.
There were fewer people there, but more hiding places. Dave not only had to worry about assailants hiding behind abandoned vehicles. He also had to worry about someone rushing him from a nearby building or from behind one of the huge columns which held up the highway each time it passed over a roadway.
It was a tough decision.
He chose the highway, and continued to creep along at the ATV’s own pace.
His foot, although not on the accelerator pedal, was always hovering above it.
It was an agonizing way to travel. Holding his foot just above the pedal was painful. It wasn’t a natural stance. The foot wanted to rest on something.
From time to time he rested his leg by placing his foot on the floorboard, adjacent to the pedal.
But that was only a temporary measure to rest his muscles. For he felt that option would slow his reaction time when he needed to punch the gas to get the hell out of there.
And that happened twice, during the night, when threats arose.
The first time, he heard excited voices to his right, just off the highway. Someone had apparently seen him in the dim moonlight, or heard the tires rolling over debris in the roadway.
About thirty seconds later he heard footsteps. Two or more sets of them, running at him from behind.
He punched the gas pedal and flew away, and didn’t slow down for more than a mile.
That was a harrowing experience, for driving at breakneck speed on a highway littered with abandoned cars and other hazards in limited visibility was its own kind of risk.
One he would only take when he considered himself in imminent danger.
The other time was when he saw a lone figure, directly in front of him and less than thirty yards away from him.
Dave was closing fast on the figure and had no more than a split second to make a decision. He could veer off the highway, but didn’t have a clue what was alongside it. He might plunge down an embankment and crash in an effort to avoid a man who was merely taking a midnight leak on the highway.
He chose to keep going, but at full speed.
All Dave could make out was a silhouette. He couldn’t tell whether the man was watching him or looking in another direction.
As it turned out, the man was walking down the highway in Dave’s direction but didn’t see him in the darkness. From the higher vantage point of the walking man, a man sitting on a vehicle blended in splendidly with the surroundings.
Didn’t see him, that is, until Dave came racing out of the darkness at him.
The startled man leapt out the way in the barest nick of time as Dave roared past him.
Both men cursed the situation first, then thanked their lucky stars they survived it.
The last hour of his journey passed more or less without incident. Dave heard conversations a couple of times, but no indications anyone had heard or seen him.
When he arrived at the Explorer he stopped long enough to retrieve his set of night vision goggles.
“Oh my God, I’ve missed you guys,” he muttered.
Now he could actually see again, albeit it in an ugly greenish-gray tint he once cursed but now loved.
He took the Polaris off the highway and onto a nearby residential street, where he parked it in the garage of a partially burned house. He correctly assumed it was abandoned.
The garage door was already fully opened. He exited the vehicle, pulled the handle on the electric garage door opener, and released the door so it could be manually closed.
It might take days or it might take weeks for the Polaris to be found. Eventually someone would root through the house to see if there was anything worth salvaging. They’d come across the vehicle and find the key tossed haphazardly on the floorboard. They’d be curious enough to try the key and the engine would roar to life.
They’d ride off, happy as a kid on Christmas day.
Hopefully by that time the uproar over Tony’s death would have faded, and the Polaris would be more a gift than a liability.
Chapter 15
The stress of the journey had kicked Dave’s butt. His black t-shirt was soaked in sweat, though the air temperature was rather cool. He was on edge. He was tired, but not willing to waste several more hours of darkness.
Some would call him a fool for going after Tony’s killers. They’d call him a bigger fool for going to Tony’s house to try to get word to his widow and sons.
Some would say his efforts were a fool’s errand. That they’d served no real purpose, except for costing him three precious days. Three precious days he could never get back.
In his mind, he had to do it. He owed Tony that much. And in his mind, it wasn’t a waste of time. It actually saved him some.
In Dave’s mind, if he hadn’t gone in to check on his friend, Tony never would have told him Beth wasn’t in Albuquerque. He’d have wasted more time, maybe weeks, creeping around the sprawling city, shooting and getting shot at constantly, before finally realizing she wasn’t even there.
In Dave’s mind, he’d done the right thing. The responsible thing. He’d repaid a debt to his friend.
And now he was back on his primary mission.
He was much more comfortable in his Explorer, with his goggles on, than he was on the open ATV. For one thing, he was now in a completely closed cabin. That meant he wasn’t vulnerable to someone coming out of nowhere and swinging a baseball bat or large stick at his head.
It also meant he had some heavy steal protection against flying bullets, and a heavy windshield that might deflect them.
At least he could hope.
Lastly, he was protected from the weather. He’d seen lightning flashes on the distant horizon not long before he parked the Polaris and switched vehicles.
He wasn’t able to tell whether the storm was headed his way. It had rained heavily three nights before, and Albuquerque wasn’t exactly a place known for getting a lot of rainfall.
He suspected the storm would likely pass them by, treating them to a distant light show but not giving them any of the benefits.
And that was too bad.
Despite having no working windshield wipers, Dave rather liked the rain.
For although it was a pain to drive through, it was a pain to drive even when dry. The rain added a bit of stress and slowed him down a tiny bit, but in Dave’s mind it also made it safer.
For the highway walkers all sought shelter when the rains came. Those lucky enough to find them were sprawled out on the bunks of the sleeper cabs.
Those who weren’t were huddled in the back of a tractor trailer waiting for the rain to stop.
But none of them… not a single one… was on the highway posing a threat to a blacked-out black Explorer creeping down the highway at fifteen miles an hour.
Albuquerque was a huge and sprawling city. With just a few hours of darkness left, and a top speed of fifteen, it seemed to take forever to escape its confines.
But he did, passing the city limits sign on the city’s western outskirts with less than an hour to go before sunrise.
Of course, the outskirts would stretch on for another hour or more, and he couldn’t push his luck any farther.
At half past four he pulled the vehicle in front of a Roadway Trucking tractor-trailer combination. The brilliant orange tractor was distinctive and identifiable a mile away. The unpainted silver trailer, with “ROADWAY” painted in seven foot high block letters was equally so.
&nbs
p; In Dave’s experience, the sleeper cabs were always cleaner in the rigs of the big trucking companies. The big movers had image standards their drivers were expected to follow. Their trucks had to be kept clean, their uniforms equally so, and their drivers had to maintain acceptable levels of personal hygiene.
Roadway, like Mayflower and UPS and the other big companies, had people who traveled from truck stop to truck stop to keep an eye on their drivers. Their intent was to maintain the public’s perception of the company and its employees. Certainly not to give Dave and other highway nomads a comfortable place to sleep. But they inadvertently did that too.
The sleeper cab of a Roadway truck was much more likely to be reasonably clean. Far less likely to be infested with bed bugs or roaches. And far less likely to stink from human body odor.
Independent truckers and those trucks belonging to smaller companies, on the other hand, were a different story.
Nobody told an independent trucker how often he had to shave or take a shower. Nobody told him how often he had to take time off the road to find a truck wash.
Nobody ever flashed a company ID and told them they wanted to peek inside their cab and sleeper, to make sure it was up to standards.
Most of the independents were fairly clean, their trucks equally so.
But a fair percentage of them were nasty slobs, too, not bathing for days at a time.
Even though they’d been gone from their trucks for over a year now, many of those trucks still reeked.
That was why Dave, and many of the other nomads who’d figured out the same thing, always looked for the big trucking chains to find a place to catch their rest.
Dave was lucky in that this particular truck was unoccupied.
He left the bulk of his weapons hidden in the Explorer’s cargo bay, took his AR-15, handgun and backpack, and crawled inside the orange truck just before the sky began to lighten.
He hadn’t seen the lightning flash in a couple of hours and was a bit disappointed.
Dave always slept better when the raindrops danced the night away on the roof above his head.
Chapter 16
Payback: Alone: Book 7 Page 5