The Search

by Darrell Maloney

  “Okay. So that last one wasn’t serious. But I couldn’t resist.”

  Sami said, “Is it my turn?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re right. I have been through hell. And I haven’t been able to escape it. Almost everyone else in the compound has been outside those gates, either to visit you or to search for Sarah. I’ve been stuck here, and I’m going stir crazy. I need desperately to get out of here, even if it’s only for half a day. Because if I don’t get out of here soon, I’m going to be as crazy as you.”

  Then she smiled a sweet smile to let Hannah know she still loved her.

  Rachel turned to Hannah and said, “She does have a point. If she became as crazy as you, the world would never be the same again.”

  Sami continued.

  “Besides, you’ve been through an awful lot yourself. I’ve been watching you. Partly because I’m nosy by nature, but mostly out of concern. I’ve noticed that you still have to reach out for the wall occasionally when you have a dizzy spell and need to support yourself.

  “What happens if you have a dizzy spell when you’re driving to San Antonio? There are very broad stretches when you have cliffs on the side of the highway, and you might get dizzy and drive over one.”

  Rachel looked at Hannah and said, “Another good point. I don’t want to ride with a dizzy broad who’ll drive me over a cliff.”

  “Uh… that’s not quite what she said, Rachel.”

  “It was close enough.”

  “Besides, honey, Markie has been missing you a lot. He had a rough time of it too. Now that you’re finally home, you need to stay home and spend some makeup time with him.”

  “Oh, sure. Pull the Mommy card on me.”

  “Hey, if it’ll help get me out of here I’ll pull it in a heartbeat.”

  Finally, Hannah relented.

  “Okay, okay. I’ll stay here and let you go. But only under one condition.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You watch this one like a hawk. Don’t leave her alone with Joel under any circumstances until we have time to set her aside and have the talk.”

  Rachel asked, “The talk?”

  “Yes. The talk.”

  Sami laughed.

  “Deal.”

  Chapter 39

  Sarah lay chained to her bed for two long days, patiently waiting for Nathan to come back for her.

  Halfway through the second day she was out of water. She wondered if he left too little on purpose.

  She tried to give him the benefit of the doubt, as so many abused wives are wont to do. She tried to convince herself it was her fault. After all, she reasoned, he saved her from certain death. He provided her food and shelter and security. Was it too much for him to ask for her to cook and lean and hold her tongue?

  Another side of her suggested that maybe she wasn’t so secure after all. How safe could she be, really, if she had to purse her words for fear of being beaten? And what kind of marriage was she in, where she spent a good portion of her time rolling around in her own urine and feces?

  She felt trapped.

  Surely, if she struck out on her own, the evil neighbors would kill her on sight. She had no doubt about that. For as vicious and moody as Nathan was, she’d never caught him in a lie. She had no reason to doubt him, as he’d seemed a man of his word.

  As difficult as it was to accept, she decided it was up to her. She’d have to modify her own behavior. She’d have to be careful to watch her words, and to follow his instructions to the letter.

  For as miserable as she was, she wanted to continue to live. She recalled someone telling her once that one had to make the most of life, regardless of the circumstances.

  She could very clearly see a face in her mind. A pretty face of a woman about her age, laughing as she said, “Live as long as you can. There’s plenty of time later to be dead.”

  It was Hannah’s face she saw. It was one of Hannah’s favorite silly sayings.

  As she lay in her own waste, shivering against the cool air of her bedroom, she wondered about the woman in her mind. She looked vaguely familiar, yet she couldn’t place her.

  Was she one of the relatives who Nathan said didn’t make it? A sister, perhaps? Maybe it was her dead sister sending her a message: “Don’t give up, Becky. Life sucks, but at least you’re still alive. Hang in there until it gets better, and remember that Nathan has a good side too.”

  She tried to focus on that. Yes, she decided. Nathan did have a good side. He saved her life, after all. He said so, so it must be true.

  And he protected her from the neighbors who would gang rape her or kill her. So there was that.

  And he went out and got the food and shot the meat so she wouldn’t have to.

  Her stomach growled again, reminding her that she was very hungry. But she dare not eat more trail mix. It would fill her gut for a while, sure. But it was dry and salty and made her even more thirsty.

  She wondered why Nathan had chosen to leave her trail mix to eat, and not something else.

  She wondered if he did it intentionally, to torture her. She’d already decided he left her just half the water she needed. Perhaps he wanted her to run out of water, and wanted the salty trail mix to make her thirst unbearable.

  Perhaps his plan was to torture her so she’d never forget the two days he was gone in search of his deer.

  Maybe to drive home the way she’d disrespected him, and to make her vow to herself never to do it again.

  But she’d already done that… vowed never to sass him again, that is. She swore it before him, before he left, and she’d been chained up anyway.

  She began to wonder whether he was a sadist.

  Or a psychopath.

  She didn’t want to believe it. It would have said as much about her as she did him. For what kind of woman married a sadist or a psychopath?

  A pathetic and insecure woman, maybe?

  She heard the back door close.

  And footsteps on the stairs.

  She was half filled with joy, for her husband was finally home.

  And she was half filled with dread. For she feared another beating.

  Chapter 40

  Mark was filled with guilt for spending several days at Wilford Hall at Hannah’s bedside. He shouldn’t have felt guilty, for as her loving husband that was his place. But he couldn’t help it. Sarah meant just as much to his brother Bryan as Hannah meant to Mark and she’d been missing.

  A big part of Mark’s brain kept telling him that Hannah had plenty of qualified medical people watching over her.

  And that he should be out helping in the search for Sarah too.

  He’d remedied that by joining the search team as soon as his Hannah was back home in the compound and settled in.

  Now he was on his fourth day, paired with Rusty, driving a brand new Land Rover from ranch to ranch in southern Kerr County.

  Actually, that wasn’t quite true. The vehicle had been brand new before Saris 7 collided with the earth, and was sitting on a dealer’s lot in Kerrville. For almost ten long years it sat there unused, gathering dust, waiting for someone to come along and drive it away.

  Mark and Rusty did just that, after replacing a battery that no longer worked and a tire which stubbornly refused to hold air.

  So the Land Rover, almost ten years old, couldn’t technically be called new anymore.

  But with only seven miles on its odometer, it couldn’t exactly be called used either.

  And it ran like a champ, taking the rutted and cratered dirt roads of Kerr County with ease.

  “It’s funny how it still has the ‘new car’ smell, even after all these years,” Rusty observed.

  “Yeah,” Mark agreed. “I like it. After it wears off, let’s take it back to the lot and trade it in on one of the forty others still there.”

  Then Rusty turned serious.

  “Mark… what do you think happened to her?”

  Mark hesitated, then chose his words carefully
.

  “I’ll give you my opinion if you’ll keep it to yourself. Bryan’s having a hard enough time coping as it is.”

  “Of course.”

  “I know that Bryan is convinced she’s still in the woods. At least he can’t bring himself to leave the woods and abandon her just in case she’s still out there. And I admire him for doing so.”

  “But…”

  “But, I think he’s wrong. All the signs say she left the woods with someone else. The blood drops stopped at the roadway where the dog lost her scent. That can’t be a coincidence. So far Bryan hasn’t found a single drop of blood beyond the roadway, or any sign that she’d gone past that point.

  “So I subscribe to the theory that someone picked her up.

  “But… and don’t you tell anyone else this… but I don’t think she survived.”

  “Really? I was thinking the same thing. But I didn’t want to say it out loud.”

  “I think many of the other searchers are thinking the same thing. That a Good Samaritan picked her up and either took her somewhere for treatment, or treated her themselves. And she was too badly injured. And maybe she died, and hopefully they gave her a Christian burial and prayed over her.

  “But because of the way the world is today, so many of the survivors have isolated themselves and are afraid of other people. It may be that they don’t have access to a ham radio, and never see anyone else to hear of her because they never leave their ranch or farmhouse. They spend all their time hunting and growing their crops, and haven’t come forward to offer information about Sarah because they haven’t heard she’s missing.”

  “That’s pretty much the same thing I’ve been thinking lately, and it breaks my heart that we may never find out what happened to her.”

  “There’s only one thing that keeps my hope alive.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The other possibility. That someone found her and took her home, either because they didn’t know of any doctors or clinics out there, or were afraid to take her into town. So they took her home to nurse her back to health, and then will bring her home when she’s able to travel.”

  “I sure hope that’s the case.”

  “Yes. I think it’s a good possibility, and we can’t give up on that until we visit every single ranch house and farmhouse we can find.”

  “But how far out do we go? I mean, before the world went cold hunters came from two hundred miles in every direction to hunt in those woods. What if they still do so out of habit, or because they had good luck there? That’s a hell of a lot of ground to cover.”

  “Sure it is. But she’s worth it, and if we can find her and bring her home alive it’s worth the effort no matter how far we have to go. So we search all of Kerr County and then expand the search to surrounding counties.

  “And we keep searching until we find her, or until we find someone who says they tried to save her but had to bury her instead.”

  It was slow going. The road they were on was rutted and worn from heavy rains the previous spring. This stretch was on a thirty degree incline, as they progressed toward an expansive ranch house built on a hill overlooking the Lower Llano River.

  “I’ve always wanted to go inside this house,” Rusty said. “You can see it for miles. The word I heard is that a pro football player retired and built his mansion on the hill, so he could look out at the Texas hill country every morning when he had his coffee.”

  “Well, I don’t know who lives here. But they must have a hell of a time going anywhere, unless it’s on horseback.”

  They rounded a bend and came to a dead stop.

  Posted on a sign in front of them, in the center of the roadway, were the words.

  NO TRESPASSING

  IF YOU NEED HELP,

  WE’LL TRY TO HELP YOU.

  IT’S THE TEXAS WAY.

  BUT IF YOU COME TO DO US HARM

  YOU’D BEST SAY YOUR PRAYERS NOW.

  BECAUSE YOU WON’T LEAVE

  THIS PLACE ALIVE.

  It wasn’t the first warning sign they’d encountered.

  They were quite common, in fact. Most were weather-beaten and faded now, dating back to the days when it was common for bands of marauders to go from house to house, raping and pillaging as they went.

  The world was a safer place now, since most of the marauders had been shot or had retired. But the ranchers and farmers in the area still remembered those days.

  And most of them were still suspicious of uninvited strangers.

  Chapter 41

  Mark put the Land Rover into park and set the parking break.

  “We’d better hoof it from here on out.”

  Mark was new to the process, but the searchers who’d been looking for Sarah since the beginning shared what they’d learned with him.

  The survivors of Kerr County saw an incoming vehicle as a serious threat, and often subscribed to the Wild West mentality of “shoot first and ask questions later.”

  Men on horseback were considered less of a threat, since the residents could clearly see their hands and had plenty of time to react if the riders went for a gun.

  Men on foot were the least threat of all.

  Especially when they were unarmed and held their hands out as they approached to prove it.

  It was rather unnerving, the first few times he’d done it, for Mark to walk onto someone else’s property with no way to defend himself. Especially when he knew that at least one, and possibly several, loaded weapons were aimed at various parts of his body.

  All it would take would be one itchy trigger finger to send him to meet his maker.

  Unfortunately, there was no other way to do a thorough search for Sarah, than to contact the reclusive survivors on their own turf.

  And after they’d done it several times, Mark began to relax a bit.

  Sure, the potential was there for him to be shot accidentally.

  But the survivors as a whole weren’t mean or vindictive. They were for the most part good people just intent on protecting what was theirs. It was how they’d managed to survive the meteorite and its aftermath. And they’d continue to protect their families and their land until their dying breaths.

  Most of the survivors were good Christian people, stuck in a newly harsh world. They were cautious and suspicious not because they wanted to be, but because they had to be. But they were Texans at heart, and as Texans still wanted more than anything to be civil and welcoming.

  Whenever possible.

  Mark and Rusty left their weapons in the car and walked the quarter mile to the ranch house.

  They were careful not to go too close. To do so, they might appear to be trying to sneak up on the residents.

  And good guys didn’t use sneaky tactics.

  Instead, they stopped fifty yards in front of the house.

  Mark was positive they were being watched.

  Most of the survivors had gotten quite good at spotting outsiders long before they themselves were seen.

  After they’d stopped, Mark called out, “Hello in the house! We are unarmed and mean you no harm.”

  An unseen man’s voice came from somewhere inside the house. All the front windows were opened but covered with black screens, and it was difficult for Mark to tell which window the voice was coming from.

  That was by design, Mark was sure.

  The voice said, “State your business.”

  “My name is Mark. My friend here is Rusty. We are looking for a woman. Her name is Sarah. She was injured and lost in the woods near here, and we have reason to believe she was taken in by someone and is being cared for by them.”

  There was a pause for about fifteen seconds.

  Then the voice responded.

  “We haven’t seen her. We don’t leave the property, not ever. If she comes to us, we will help her until she is well enough to travel, and will give her provisions for her journey back home. But that’s all the help you can expect from us.”

  That was good enough fo
r Mark.

  He really had no choice.

  “Thank you for your kindness.”

  He and Rusty turned to leave, but the voice stopped them.

  “Do you men need water? Or food?”

  Mark turned around to face the house again.

  “No thank you, sir. We have both.”

  “Good luck. I hope you find her.”

  Chapter 42

  A few miles away, Brad and David weren’t quite so lucky, in that the man they were conversing with wasn’t as accommodating.

  Matt Hancock had gone out alone the day after Saris 7 hit the earth. He’d been warned on the news for several days it was coming, so the darkened skies and rapid drop in temperatures were no surprise to him.

  Like everyone else on earth, Matt had been struggling, trying to figure out how he and his family of five could survive a seven year winter.

  He and his wife Sharla had hatched a plan.

  “We’ll have plenty of water,” he’d reasoned. A seven year winter means plenty of snow. We can collect it off the ground and boil it to make it safe to drink. The food will be the problem.”

  “How will we deal with that?”

  “I’m going into the forest. Now that the temperature has dropped below freezing, I can shoot several deer and hide them in the forest. I’ll gut them on the spot and let them freeze. I’ll cover them with pine boughs so only I can find them later on. And I can periodically go back and hack off a section of meat with an axe to bring home to thaw.”

  “What about the cattle and pigs in the fields?”

  “They’ve got hay and feed to eat. That’ll keep them alive until I return. Then I’ll kill them the same way and leave them in the fields to freeze. If I can take three or four deer, combined with our six head of cattle and ten pigs, we should have enough meat to survive until the thaw.”

  It had been a pretty good plan, on the face of it.

  Matt had bundled up and spent six days in the woods. He’d taken two good sized bucks and four does. He’d hidden them well, and was confident that only he could find them when the time was right. When he needed more meat to feed his wife and kids.