Final Dawn: Escape From Armageddon

by Maloney, Darrell

  “Are you feeling okay, Mister Workaholic?” Hannah asked.

  “Yeah, of course. I just think we need a break is all. Heck, I’ll even buy lunch, and I’ll take you all to Boudro’s on the Riverwalk. Best food in town, and it’s my treat.”

  “Are you sure you’re not up to something”

  “Oh, no, I’ve got nothing up my sleeve, baby, I swear. Just want to take y’all to lunch. Trust me.”

  Hannah didn’t trust him. Mark always had something up his sleeve.

  -21-

  After they got the RVs safely delivered to the mine and parked them in Bay 1, Bryan and Sarah left and took the afternoon off.

  Mark had been in a particularly good mood lately, and had a surprise for his beauty.

  He told Hannah “Wait right here. I forgot something. Don’t move.”

  Hannah could tell by the look on his face that he was up to something. She giggled. “Okay, but don’t take too long.”

  Mark climbed back onto the RV, put in a CD he’d hidden under the driver’s seat, and cranked up the volume.

  The music of Anne Murray singing “May I Have This Dance” wafted through the mine.

  He returned to sweet Hannah, took her hand, and waltzed with her. It was only a few nights before that they had finally finished the last of their ballroom dance classes, and it was quickly becoming a passion for both of them.

  Hannah’s favorite, one she couldn’t get enough of, was the foxtrot. But Mark liked the closeness of the waltz. He liked the feel of Hannah’s body against his own, and each waltz reminded him how incredibly beautiful this woman was, and how lucky he was to have her in his life.

  Anne Murray was followed by Henry Mancini’s “Moon River” and Johnny Mathis singing “Foolish.”

  By the end of the third dance, Mark could no longer contain himself.

  “Honey, I have something else for you, but I need your promise that you won’t say no.”

  “I know what you have for me, sailor. I felt it several minutes ago when you were holding me close. I just made you wait because the dancing was so much fun.”

  Mark laughed. “No, that’s not what I meant. I mean, yes, that’s for you too. But that’ll have to wait because there’s something else first.”

  Mark reached into his pocket and pulled out a small red box marked Jared in gold letters.

  He went down to one knee. And looked up into the beautiful and rapidly moistening eyes of the love of his life.

  “I wish the circumstances were different.” Mark said. “I wish we could take our money and buy an island somewhere, and spend the rest of our lives sitting on a beach and skinny dipping in the ocean and sipping pina coladas, instead of preparing for the end of the world.

  “But whether we’re dodging jellyfish or dodging meteorites, whether we have seven years left or seventy, the fact is that you are the one woman in this world that I could never live without. Will you marry me and be my wife?”

  Hannah was seldom tongue-tied, but she was on this occasion. It was all she could do to muster two words: “Sure, sailor.”

  They sealed the occasion with a kiss. And for a long time they stood holding each other in the middle of Bay 1, surrounded by all the trappings of a pending disaster, and saw only hope and happiness. The next few years would be hard on them and everyone they loved. But as long as they were together, as long as they had each other, they would survive.

  -22-

  Now that Hannah had finished her midwifery courses and had gotten her certification, she had most of her evenings to herself.

  She spent the majority of them at the computer, keeping Amazon.com and UPS in business. Mark placed large orders to Symco Foods every Saturday, Sunday and Monday nights, for delivery to the feed store on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday mornings.

  But there were a lot of products that Symco just didn’t carry. So any time something would get rejected from Symco with the annotation “Do Not Stock,” he had a bad habit of just dropping it in Hannah’s lap.

  She didn’t mind. He was working as hard as anyone to ensure their survival, and she was more than willing to help. Besides, this was the man she loved, and who would someday be the father of her children. They would grow old together, and she’d be holding his hand when he drew his last breath. Or vice-versa.

  So tonight, it was no problem, really, to order Pampers and baby bottles.

  He left no quantities, of course. He left it up to her to do some math, and try to calculate how many of each they’d need.

  Again, no problem. Hannah was better at math than Mark was anyway. And if he tried to figure it out and screwed it up, it wouldn’t be good to have little Markie Junior running around the mine with no diapers and three years to go until breakout.

  So she did some calculations and decided she needed 220 cases of each of the four sizes of Pampers, thirty baby bottles, and seventy cases of disposable bottle liners. And although Mark hadn’t thought of it but should have, she added baby powder, diaper rash cream, baby food and powdered formula to the list as well.

  Hannah had found that Amazon sold pretty much anything except the kitchen sink. Actually, they probably sold that too, but she never really checked.

  So she logged on and ordered 50 cases of each diaper, and all of the other items. She made a note to herself to order the rest of the diapers in three or four more shipments over the next couple of weeks. She had everything shipped to the feed store, and didn’t want to burden Bryan all at once. Or the UPS driver, for that matter.

  She also ordered twenty cases of heavy duty paper plates, twenty cases of hot cups, twenty cases of cold cups, and ten cases each of disposable knives, forks and spoons. This was a decision she made on her own without consulting anyone else.

  Her logic was sound, of course. It always was. She was a scientist, after all.

  Buying and using disposable products in the mine would save a lot of work. Washing dishes for forty people three times a day would get old very quickly.

  It would also save a lot of water. And water, along with diesel fuel and food, made up the three essentials of their survival.

  And finally, using paper products would give them a lot more burnable items to use should they ever run out of diesel.

  Once all of her ordering was done for the night, Hannah went back to her current project.

  She logged on to the National Weather Service website and researched historical weather data for Junction, Texas.

  The records dated back to 1907, long before there was a National Weather Service. A disclaimer on the site stated that information on weather prior to 1972 had been collected from local Farmer’s Almanacs. Thank God for farmers, Hannah thought.

  The project was a tedious one. She went to where she’d left off the night before: June 2, 1945. The low temperature in Junction, Texas that day was 72 degrees. The high was 91. There was rain that day.

  Hannah recorded all three items of data into a logbook. Then she went on to the next day, June 3, 1945, and did the same thing.

  After two hours she had finished with 1945 and had made it halfway through February, 1946 when Mark came in and kissed her on the back of the neck. He asked if she were almost ready for bed.

  She thought that would be a good time to wrap things up. Besides, looking at all those numbers was starting to give her a headache.

  Mark noted her progress and said “Have I ever told you how brilliant you are?”

  “Not nearly enough.” She said.

  Shortly after she’d started this project, Mark had asked her what she was doing.

  She explained to him that once they broke out of the mine, and started growing their own crops, that they would need someone to forecast the weather. To tell them the optimal time to plant, what the chances of rain were each day, and how hot or cold they could expect it to get.

  “I’m going to be the weather girl.” Hannah had said.

  She explained to Mark that in the old days, before TV weathermen and Doppler radar and nation
wide weather alerts, farmers used their own records and records of the Farmer’s Almanac to keep track of weather data.

  “Let’s say it’s March 15th, and it’s sunny and bright and 78 degrees. You want to know if it’s too early to plant our corn crop. So I go back through the records and discover that in the last fifty years, Junction had a late freeze seventeen times between March 15th and April 1st.

  “So I tell you to go ahead and plant the corn if you want to, but you have a 34 percent chance of losing it. Then I tell you that if you wait until after April 1st, you’ll only have a 4 percent chance of losing it. I suspect you’ll wait those extra two weeks.

  “And by logging all the data into my computer once we’re in the mine and I have time to do so, I can write a program that will give us a fairly accurate weather forecast every day. Not based on what the sky looks like or what the weather radar says, but rather by historical data only. And while it won’t always be right, in most cases it’ll be pretty darn close.

  “Say for example, it’s December 1st. My program will look back at the last hundred years of data and figure that the average low temperature was 26 degrees, and the average high was 60. It will also note that on 5 of those hundred years, it rained on December 1st. On 16 of the hundred years, it snowed.

  “So your weather forecast for that day will be a low of 26, a high of 60, with a 5 percent chance of rain and a 16 percent chance of snow. It won’t always be accurate, but it’ll be darn close most of the time.”

  And of course Mark felt stupid, because it never would have occurred to him to gather such data. And even if he’d wanted to, he wouldn’t have a clue how to do it.

  He’d walked out of the room that night amazed at how analytical his girl could be. And he was reminded once again how lucky he was to have her.

  -23-

  NOV 9, 2014 14 MONTHS UNTIL IMPACT

  The girls had finished furnishing and decorating the game room, television room, the two one-room school houses and the clinic. They were been bugging Mark for something more productive to do, but Mark, being a man, was balking a bit.

  He maintained that moving heavy kitchen equipment, installing livestock fences and building things was man’s work. Hannah and Sarah both told him he was a chauvinist pig.

  Coincidentally, at that very moment, Bryan called from the feed store. He had loaded up a delivery of cattle feed that came in the day before. He was getting ready to bring it over to the mine, when another delivery truck, from a plumbing supply wholesaler, came by to deliver twenty eight camping toilets.

  “It had your name on it, so I went ahead and accepted them.” Bryan said. “But what in hell is a camping toilet, and why do we need twenty eight of them?”

  “Can you fit them on the truck along with the feed?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then bring them along, and I’ll show you when you get here.”

  Mark looked at the girls and said “Well, if you girls want to get your hands dirty and play with the big boys, then I’ve got just the job for you.”

  Hannah and Sarah looked at each other. He was up to something again.

  Mark had spent two whole days the week before working on the sewage disposal systems for the RVs. He crawled underneath each one, disconnected the water line for each toilet, and marked the spot on the mine floor directly underneath it.

  Then, one at a time, he moved the RVs out of the way, brought in a twelve-foot long auger drill attached to a multi-purpose Bobcat, and drilled a drain hole into the mine floor.

  Each hole was ten feet deep and twelve inches wide. It would be a makeshift septic tank for the RV parked above it.

  Once the hole was drilled, he carefully repositioned the RV back in its original location. Then he crawled under the RV a second time to attach a piece of flexible duct from the bottom of the RV into the septic hole. To reduce odors, he attached a soft plastic seal to the duct where it entered the hole.

  Hannah and Sarah had been watching his project off and on during those two days, fascinated. But they never offered to help. Now they’d get their chance.

  After Bryan arrived, the boys unloaded the camping toilets and set them aside. Then they spent the next hour unloading the feed and stacking it in the feed storage area. Bryan let the girls take turns driving the forklift. For the sake of redundancy, it never hurt to have several people proficient in each task.

  Once done, Mark put one of the toilets onto a hand truck and took it to the first RV in Bay 1. Then he manhandled the 90 pound monster into the RV’s lavatory.

  He showed Hannah and Sarah how to use a box cutter to cut the caulking which sealed the original toilet, and to remove the two bolts that held it to the floor.

  Then he showed them how to scrape the residue of the old caulking, put the new camping toilet in place, bolt it down, and apply new caulking.

  “What was wrong with the old toilet?” Sarah asked. “It was brand new.”

  Mark replied “It was made to be flushed. We can’t afford to waste water by flushing toilets all day long. The camping toilet needs no water. It works by way of gravity. The waste goes from your body to the bottom of the hole, with nothing in the way to stop it or slow it down.

  “The seat on this toilet is just a little bit smaller than the lid, and the lid is twice as heavy as the lid on a normal toilet. After you do your business, you close the lid, which fits over the seat and has a two inch soft foam gasket. The weight of the lid and the gasket work together to provide a good seal that keeps unpleasant smells from drifting in from the septic hole.”

  Hannah said “Pretty clever. But what happens if you forget to close the lid? I mean, you guys can’t even remember to lower the seat.”

  Sarah chuckled.

  Mark said “If you forget, you won’t forget for long. Within half an hour the whole RV will smell like a sewer.”

  “Thank you for the training, sailor. It was fun.”

  “I’m glad you enjoyed it. There are twenty three more to go. I’ll move the new ones into the RVs and take the old ones out if you two can install them. Fair enough?”

  Sarah looked at Hannah and said “Did he think we were serious when we volunteered to help? Silly boy.”

  The girls laughed, but Sarah was teasing, of course.

  By the end of the next day, each of the twenty four RVs had its own sewer system. The four spare toilets were placed in the back of Bay 22, waiting for Bryan to get around to building a four-hole outhouse for the common area.

  -24-

  “Mark,” Hannah asked as they lay snuggled together in bed one rainy Tuesday night. “How do we know when enough is enough? I mean, how do we know when we have enough food and can stop buying it?”

  Mark was perplexed. “I honestly don’t know. I just figured we’d keeping buying food until time ran out. If we have too much, then that’s not really a bad thing.”

  “But what if we should be buying more than we are? I mean, if we keep buying until the very end and it still isn’t enough, we may not even know until it’s too late. Until we run out of food six months or a year before we can break out. And we all end up starving to death even after all of our planning and efforts.”

  Hannah went on. “There’s another thing that’s been bothering me too. Our scientists estimated that the meteorite that killed the dinosaurs was about four miles long. Roughly the same size as Saris 7. And they estimated that the earth was incapable of growing crops for five to seven years. So that’s what we’ve been basing our plans on.

  “But Baby, what if they were wrong? I mean, there obviously was no one around keeping records back then. They based their estimates solely on the geologic record and by studying fossils.”

  Mark was confused. He wasn’t getting her point.

  So she spelled it out for him.

  “Look,” she said. “Hopefully the scientists were right. Five to seven years in the mine, then we break out into a brave new world. And I want to keep telling everyone that. It’s a lot easier hearing five t
o seven years and hoping for five, than hearing it could be more than that.

  “But just between you and me, I want to start stocking up for ten. Just in case they were wrong.”

  Mark’s background was engineering. He lacked the keen analytical mind of a scientist. Moreover, he trusted Hannah. So he didn’t argue. Instead, he merely asked “So, how do we figure out if we’ll have enough food and water for ten years?”

  Hannah said “That’s my next project. Sarah has agreed to help me. We’re going to inventory every bit of food we have to this point. We’ll figure out how many calories it will take to feed forty people for ten years with a 2,000 calorie a day diet. And we’ll see if we have enough to do that. And if we don’t, we’ll determine how much more food we need, and get a rough estimate of how much food we need to get in every day that we have left to fulfill that requirement.”

  Mark kissed her and said “What would I ever do without you?”

  She said “I’m never gonna give you a chance to find out. I also took it upon myself to order 1000 cases of MREs. They weren’t cheap, but I want to put them in back of the mine as our emergency survival plan. Do you know what MREs are?”

  “I’ve heard of them, but refresh my memory.”

  “MRE stands for Meal, Ready to Eat. It has a weird acronym because it was designed for the U.S. Army, and the military is all about acronyms. Anyway, it’s a prepackaged meal that is sealed in heavy duty plastic with a ten year shelf-life. It’s not gourmet, but it’s packed with calories. Just perfect for what we need.”

  “If they were made for the Army, how do we get them?”

  “There are all kinds of companies that make them commercially. They sell them to campers, survivalists, and hunters. They have a variety of menus, including many that contain pasta and lot of carbohydrates. I ordered the ones with super high calories.

  “If we get to that point where we have to use these things, one per person per day will provide between 2000 and 2200 calories that will keep us alive. For an extra eight months or so.