The Most Miserable Winter Read online

  ALONE

  Book 14:

  The Most Miserable Winter

  By Darrell Maloney

  This is a work of fiction. All persons depicted in this book are fictional characters. Any resemblance to any real person, living or dead, is purely coincidental. Copyright 2020 by Darrell Maloney

  This book is dedicated to:

  Johnny Ray

  A “pretty darn good drummer”

  and a very darn good friend.

  Rest with the angels, buddy. Rock on.

  The Story Thus Far…

  He was all by himself. That was the way it started, two years earlier, when Dave was left alone in San Antonio. His family had flown to Kansas City for a wedding and he stayed behind to work.

  He hadn’t planned it that way. It just happened.

  Actually it wasn’t that simple. Mother Nature played a big hand in his dilemma. She had her friend the sun, another mother perhaps in her own right, rain chaos down upon her in the form of electromagnetic pulses. That’s a naturally forming phenomenon, a bi-product of solar storms. Not quite the same as solar flares, which are visible to human eyes.

  At least those with high-powered telescopes.

  Electromagnetic pulses, or EMPs, are invisible waves which disrupt communications and electronics when they collide with the earth.

  If powerful enough, they can do more damage than that.

  The EMPs which struck the earth while Dave’s wife Sarah and daughters Lindsey and Beth were in the Kansas City airport waiting to claim their luggage were bad. Very bad. They short-circuited pretty much everything on earth which used electronics.

  What little still worked mostly belonged to governments and preppers: entities and people who foresaw what was coming and took action to protect their equipment.

  Dave was one such prepper.

  He was cautious and kept tight-lipped about it, for one of the greatest dangers a prepper has are his own neighbors and friends who were caught with their pants down.

  A prepper knows that when the stuff hits the fan he goes from being a smart planner to being a target. When those same neighbors and friends are starving to death or are desperate for clean water, they come to the prepper for relief.

  The problem with that is that most preppers don’t store enough food and water for the masses.

  Or even their neighbors and friends.

  Most preppers store enough food, water, fuel and ammunition to keep themselves and their families alive.

  And they’ll protect it to the death.

  When the power grids went down, so did the communications systems.

  Dave knew his family was due to land in Kansas City at almost the exact time the power went out.

  There was no way for Dave to find out whether they’d landed safely, or whether the plane plunged out of the sky.

  Before Dave set out on his trek to find his family he had to survive a brutal winter. It was the worst winter on record for San Antonio and he almost died.

  But his mind was strong and his determination was stronger and he made it to spring.

  By spring he’d made all his preparations and set out on the thousand mile journey to Kansas City.

  It wasn’t easy. Along the way he was beaten almost to death and shot at several times.

  He found Sarah and Lindsey alive and being held captive by marauders, and had to use his Marine Corps training to rescue them.

  Learning his youngest, little Beth, had been sold to an old couple passing through on their way to California, he set out once again. Against all odds he was able to find her and save her, only to return her to Kansas and find Sarah and Lindsey were captured again by a different band of men.

  Now, finally, his family was whole once again.

  They were making their way on foot back to San Antonio.

  Dave made a vow to Sarah that once they were home he’d never ask her to take another journey again.

  As grueling as Dave’s adventure had been so far, Mother Nature wasn’t done with him yet.

  The brutal winter he’d survived the previous year was just a warm-up. He didn’t yet know it, but the coming winter… the one they’d have to deal with before they could get back home…

  It would make the previous winter look like a walk in the park.

  And now… the 14th installment of Alone:

  The Most Miserable Winter

  Chapter 1

  Sarah’s first day in the little town of Blanco was by far the worst in her life.

  Worse than that day so very long before when her parents died.

  Worse than the day her dog ran away, and she found him crushed on a highway several hours later. He died in her arms, looking up at her and expecting help she could not give him.

  It was worse than the eighteen hours of labor she’d endured when she had Lindsey, and the thirteen hours she went through with Beth.

  Added together.

  It was way worse than that.

  Doc Matlock was just an old country doctor, but he knew his stuff.

  It helped that he had a capable assistant in Red, who’d gone to nursing school several years before.

  As for Sarah, she was at their mercy.

  She could do absolutely nothing to help herself.

  She couldn’t even lift her head.

  She could hear most of the words they were saying, but few of them made any sense. They might as well have been speaking a foreign language.

  Sarah alternated between unconsciousness, delirium and passive acceptance, punctuated by long periods of confusion.

  She understood the basics: that she was ill and the voices were trying to help her. That much was clear. Or at least semi-clear.

  That she was severely dehydrated, or how she got that way, were way beyond her grasp.

  For that reason, and because she really had little choice, she just stared off into space and trusted them to do their thing.

  She was in and out of blackness, struggling to make sense of some of the things she’d heard.

  She heard… didn’t she? She wasn’t sure, a blurry figure say her name was Red. The name Red sounded vaguely familiar, but she couldn’t figure out why.

  She alternated between opening her eyes and trying to follow what was going on among all the images and colors swirling about in the space above her. And closing her eyes. It was easier that way. But when she closed her eyes she somehow felt guilty.

  As though she wasn’t a part of the action. As though she was just lying back and letting everyone else do the work of saving her.

  Other voices came and went. Voices which sounded like ones she’d heard before. One sounded like a person she knew as Dave. But wait a minute… who the heck was Dave? Was he the one who said he was a doctor?

  And why did she need a doctor, anyway? What was wrong with her? Just what in heck was going on?

  She was, quite literally, out of her mind.

  No part of the human body functions as it should when it’s been deprived of water. Sarah didn’t know it, but she was near death. She was standing on a precipice looking down.

  It was up to old Doc Matlock and Red to pull her back, to make her whole again.

  Before the buckboard started to roll Red hung a bag of intravenous fluid and opened it to run full drip.

  Sarah’s body was slower to accept it than Red had hoped. Her veins had to be re-hydrated to fully open. Red had to back off on the drip a bit, and that was a bad thing, since the primary goal in her treatment was to get her body hydrated again.

  It was just a matter of time, Red knew, before her organs would start shutting down one at a time.

  The first bag of saline finally ran out just before they arrived at Doc’s office and she r
eplaced it with another.

  She was able to drip this one a bit faster. Her veins were starting to moisten, to soften a little. A good sign because any fluids which went into her veins could not be thrown up.

  Dave knew that. The rudimentary medical training the United States Marines called “buddy care” prepared him for just such a situation.

  He’d have started an IV and given her saline solution several days before, if only he’d had them.

  Now there wasn’t much he could do except sit back and let more experienced hands work on her. And pray it wasn’t too late.

  The buckboard raised quite a ruckus as it rolled noisily down Main Street. Half the townspeople looked out of their windows or went running to see what the commotion was all about.

  By the time Sarah and Lindsey were placed in separate treatment rooms and Doc Matlock began his work, two dozen people were gathered in the street holding hands and praying together for these two women they’d never met to pull through and be whole again.

  This was the type of town Blanco was.

  It was a town which had seen enough misery and dying since the lights went out.

  A town which wanted nothing more than to be normal again.

  On the treatment table, Sarah was still mostly out of it. Still dazed and confused. Still not certain what was going on.

  Dr. Matlock had a commanding presence which told everyone when he walked into a room that he was a professional. This was a man who, with the skills God gave him and the training he’d gathered, was her last best hope for survival.

  If anyone could save Sarah in the condition she was in it was Doc Matlock.

  “Red,” he said as he assessed both patients, “Give the girl a mild sedative and start her on local anesthetics. Then get a plaster kit ready to start. I’ll be in to tend to her as soon as Mom here is stabilized.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He turned to Dave and said, “You’re hubby, I presume?”

  “Yes. Dave.”

  “Red, before you leave, help Dave scrub up and get a gown on him.”

  He turned back toward Dave and explained.

  “We’re a bit short handed around here. I might need an extra set of hands.”

  Chapter 2

  “Sarah,” Doc said, “My name is Doctor Matlock. Can you hear me?”

  Sarah’s world at that point was a series of vague and blurry images that flashed in and out of her field of vision each time she opened her eyes, and a mess of tangled and disjointed voices carrying words which made very little sense.

  She did, however, catch her name among the cluster and clung to it, trying to assign meaning to it.

  She turned her head in the direction of Doc’s voice and nodded just a tad.

  She didn’t understand his words. Not completely, anyway. But she was desperate to learn what was going on around her. What they were doing to her. Whether she was going to be saved or was standing on the edge of that great precipice, living her last moments.

  Not if Doc Matlock could help it.

  He needed to thin her blood. That was first and foremost, for he knew that at the moment it was much too thick, almost pasty in consistency. It was making the heart work much too hard to pump the blood through the body, and could easily cause cardiac arrest.

  Secondary was to moisten the vital organs. If they started shutting down it would start a chain reaction. As each one failed it would cause more stress on the others and hasten their demise as well.

  That was, of course, if they were lucky and the process hadn’t already started. There was a good possibility the lack of water had already ruined her kidneys. If that was the case the liver wouldn’t be far behind.

  He needed to get emergency fluids into her before he could accurately assess the damage.

  After another bag of Ringer’s Lactate they’d be able to draw blood.

  They’d need a urine sample too, but as dehydrated as she was it might be hours before her body would expel any on its own.

  He couldn’t wait that long.

  For a country doctor, Matlock had a surprising array of laboratory equipment in a back room. Nothing fancy, mind you. But he could do basic blood and urine tests, toxicology tests and tests to detect sepsis or other infections.

  He’d have to take a urine sample directly from the bladder, as he couldn’t wait for hours to collect a sample naturally.

  As for re-hydrating the organs, he wouldn’t wait for the IV drips either.

  He spoke slowly and directly to his patient, not sure how much she would understand or even hear.

  But it was important he relay some of his confidence to her, lest she give up and quit fighting. He knew, from almost forty years in the business, that a patient who has given up hope is a patient which cannot be saved despite his best efforts.

  Conversely a patient who believes in him and fights to stay alive has a success rate which is so much higher.

  “We’ve got to moisten your insides,” he said, speaking in terms she could better understand in her groggy state. “I’m going to use a long needle to pump saline solution directly into your abdomen.

  “Not directly into your organs, mind you. But in the voids surrounding them. It’s a tactic I use only in cases of severe dehydration where time is critical. It will help them recover much faster.”

  To be honest, the tactic of explaining in layman’s terms what he was doing also had a secondary benefit.

  It would keep Dave abreast of what was going on in real time. It would keep the patient’s husband in the loop so he didn’t freak out as he watched the doctor inject fluid from a very large syringe in several places around her abdomen.

  Or thinking the doctor insane and try to stop him.

  Sarah, for her part, seemed to understand.

  Or at least nodded her head to indicate as much.

  Dave, having had a limited amount of medical training in the Corps, had a rough idea of which organs were on which sides of the abdomen and what the purpose of each organ was.

  But he had nothing on the old doc, whose expert hands poked and prodded and isolated the best places where he could inject fluids into Sarah’s gut without doing her even more damage.

  Several times he filled a very large syringe with fluid from a sterile glass bottle. He isolated a part of the abdomen and pinched the skin, lifting it upwards.

  From an angle he inserted the needle deep into the pinched skin, where it would shower down on one of her dried up organs without being injected directly into it.

  The procedure took twenty minutes or so, and emptied almost two one-liter bottles of solution.

  Toward the end of the procedure, on the last two injections. Sarah finally winced.

  It was only then that Dave realized Doc Matlock hadn’t been using any local anesthetic.

  The first time he saw his wife wince he let it pass.

  The second time he objected.

  “Doc,” he said. “You’re hurting her.”

  “I know,” Doc replied. “That’s a sign I’ve been looking for. It’s actually a good thing.”

  He went on to explain.

  “A local anesthetic could be troublesome when she’s this dehydrated. She’s at the point now where pain is the least of her problems. We have to work fast to save her, and anesthesia is an unnecessary luxury.

  “At the same time, her starting to feel the injections during the procedure is a welcome indication the injections are doing some good.

  “We’re going to take a break and monitor her, and may do a second round in half an hour or so. If we do, we’ll give her a local for each of them then.

  “In the meantime, we’ll take the pain as an encouraging sign her nerves are starting to reawaken.”

  Dave wasn’t particularly happy hearing the doctor say it was a good thing he’d caused Sarah some pain.

  At the same time, though, he was convinced this man knew what he was doing. And that if anyone was in a position to save his Sarah’s life and to take her bac
k from the grim reaper’s grasp it was Doc Matlock.

  “Okay, Doc,” he said. “I’m a believer. What do we do next?”

  “Now, we give her a brief break.

  “Including the IV fluids and my injections, she’s had about three liters of fluids we’ve put into her which she wasn’t able to eject. Hopefully that’s enough to get the kidneys working again.

  “We’ll find out in about twenty minutes.

  “I’m going to give her that much additional time. Then I’m going to remove some of the urine from her bladder and test it. We’ll be able to tell a lot about kidney function then.

  “We’ll draw blood at the same time and check several things. The most important is her white cell count. We need to know whether there are any infections in her abdominal cavity. Severe dehydration can sometimes cause internal bleeding or sepsis. We’ll be able to tell if either of those is an additional concern.

  “I’m going to step out of here for a few minutes while she’s taking her break. I want you to monitor her for several things.

  “Watch her blood pressure monitor and her breathing rate. If either alarm goes off, or if you notice her oxygen level drops below ninety, yell for me immediately.

  “Also, stop dabbing her eyelids with a damp cloth. We need to see if they’re capable of lubricating on their own. Tell her to try periodically to open them, but not to force them if they’re too dry.”

  At that moment Sarah winced mightily as her left leg cramped.

  “It’s been doing that off and on since yesterday,” Dave said.

  “It’s a natural reaction to fluids being taken away from muscle tissue. It’s normal and should get better in the coming hours. Just massage her muscles and try to keep her calm. I’ll be back shortly.”

  “But… Doc, where are you going?”

  “I’ve got a broken leg to set in the next room.”

  Chapter 3

  Red took Dave aside when Doc Matlock finally consented Sarah was probably out of the woods.