Final Dawn: Book 12: Where Could He Be? Read online

  Final Dawn

  Book 12:

  Where Could

  He Be?

  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 2017 by Darrell Maloney

  This book is dedicated to:

  Frances E. Maloney

  April 27, 1932 – Sept 29, 2017

  Rest in Peace, Mom. You will be greatly missed.

  The Story Thus Far…

  It seemed Mark and Hannah Snyder were always battling someone or something. Since the early days of their relationship, they were always facing a threat.

  The first and most brutal assault came from the heavens.

  A meteorite designated Saris 7 was flying through the cosmos, minding its own business, merely doing what meteorites do. It wasn’t at fault, really, when another meteorite appeared in its path and collided with it, breaking it into two pieces and causing it to veer off a path it had followed for thousands of years.

  The United States government wanted to hide the fact that Saris 7 was now headed toward earth. Instead of dealing with a worldwide panic, they chose to do what politicians have always done.

  They abandoned their duties and the American people and took steps to protect their own.

  It was up to Hannah and best friend Sarah to tell the world.

  Mark and Hannah procured an abandoned salt mine near Junction, Texas and began stocking it. Shortly before the collision they took a group of forty of their family and friends into the mine.

  It would be six and a half long years before the world was warm enough to come out again.

  They came out into a world that was vastly different. Only about ten percent of the population had survived. Many were hostile. All were suffering.

  The group moved their livestock from the bowels of the mine. They moved into a nearby walled compound and began a simple life as farmers.

  But their battles weren’t over.

  When their presence became known they were attacked by a brutal band of marauders.

  They won the battle, but lost some good friends in the process.

  And the experience changed them forever. It made them hardened. And suspicious of others.

  Then came the United States Army, who demanded their livestock under the pretense it would be used to feed the starving people of San Antonio and Bexar County.

  They didn’t trust the Army.

  But they wanted to help.

  So they donated a sizeable portion of their livestock and their seed stores.

  On the former Kelly Air Force Base south of San Antonio, the Army was building something of massive proportions.

  They were keeping an even more massive secret.

  It turned out the second piece of Saris 7, the piece that had broken off during the collision with the meteorite, was still out there.

  And just as a duckling follows the path of its mother, so did Cupid 23 follow the path of Saris 7.

  Hannah remembered in the days just after that collision, when NASA downplayed Cupid 23 as a non-player. It was shoved to the background and essentially forgotten.

  It was Hannah who put two and two together. Cupid 23 was still out there, and was headed for earth.

  The Army was building a bunker to protect the same Washington insiders who betrayed the American people the first time.

  And everything suddenly made sense.

  It turned out their initial mistrust was warranted.

  Hannah once again raised the alarm.

  She told her group she couldn’t be sure without verification from NASA, but there was a good chance another strike was pending.

  “It may not happen,” she told them. “But we’ve got nothing to lose by preparing. It’s better to prepare for an event that doesn’t happen than to be caught short.”

  At Joint Base Lackland, not far from the Army’s secret bunker, Hannah notified some friends. They were doctors at a huge military hospital called Wilford Hall Regional Medical Center.

  “You’ve been deceived,” she told them. “Congress is building a bunker right under your noses. But it’s not for you or your families. It’s for them and their own. Don’t let them get away with it.”

  The doctors were skeptical at first. Then Cupid 23 collided with the earth. Once again the skies grew dark and the world grew cold. The doctors discovered their base commander, a one-star general named Swain, had gone missing with his family.

  There’s no doubt he’s gone into the bunker and left his people to die.

  Two Air Force colonels refuse to stand by and accept such a betrayal.

  Colonels Medley and Wilcox are surgeons, not warriors. But they recognize an injustice when they see one.

  They order the bunker be breached.

  Word gets around and hundreds of military members and their families gather to witness the process. They’re tired of being lied to by those in leadership positions and want to see for themselves that the cowards in the bunker are rooted out and punished.

  Finally, the bunker’s door opens just wide enough for a simple white flag to come poking through.

  The occupants are ready to surrender.

  And neither the colonels nor the spectators have a clue what shocking revelations will present themselves in the days to follow.

  In the tiny town of Eden, ninety three miles from the compound, Marty Haskins has turned a deserted federal prison into a sanctuary for Eden’s seventy citizens. Built to keep people in, it would serve equally well for keeping people out. The prison was stocked with food and fuel and the people of Eden are prepared to ride out another long freeze.

  Hannah and her people are scrambling to gather as many provisions as they can before the roads become icy and impassable.

  Then Brad goes missing. A day later so does Frank.

  All kinds of theories arise, including thoughts of a conspiracy. But Brad is found safe and sound after a few days. It turned out he’d jackknifed his rig and slid off a lonely stretch of highway while gathering provisions.

  He’s cold but still alive.

  Frank’s disappearance is a result of something more sinister. He’s car-jacked while searching for Brad and forced to drive brothers John and Justin Dwyer some four-hundred miles north to Plainview.

  In Plainview he is forced to perform slave labor in a huge food distribution center the Dwyer family has taken as their own.

  Frank makes plans to escape but never gets the chance.

  A borderline-insane member of the Dwyer clan, clad in an aluminum foil costume and wielding a Samurai sword, lunges at Frank and slices open his abdomen.

  Frank goes down and calls out to Eva, his recently departed wife of many years, and tells her he’s coming to see her. Then he blacks out.

  Marty, on his way back to the mine after searching San Angelo for Frank, comes upon a half-frozen woman stumbling down the highway.

  She’s almost dead from exposure and cannot speak at first.

  Then she has a harrowing tale to tell.

  She was the leader of a group of eight women cast out into the cold from a vanquished orphanage south of Eden.

  Marty found the others, all dead from carbon monoxide poisoning.

  The lone survivor, a woman named Charlotte, tells Marty they sought help from the old prison in Eden… the one Marty worked hard to convert into a shelter… and were turned away.

  He promised her that someone’s head would roll.

  And now the story continues with

  Final Dawn, Book 12:

  Where Could He Be?

  -1-

 
It just made no sense at all.

  Frank, of all people, should have been the last one to disappear without a trace.

  He was a retired cop, of all things. A homicide detective who’d dealt with the dredges of society.

  And he was a former Marine to boot. He’d survived the battle for the tiny island of Grenada and Desert Storm a few years later.

  By all accounts he was a man’s man. And not someone who was either careless or stupid.

  “Where the hell is he?” Mark demanded of no one in particular as he stood before a huge map on the control center wall.

  “Where haven’t we searched?”

  The map was covered with over three hundred pins, placed there over the course of the previous few days.

  Hannah placed the first of the pins. It went on Interstate 10, between intersecting county roads 2534 and 2568.

  She placed it there when Rusty called in to report he’d searched that particular section of road.

  When he called in half an hour later to report he’d continued west on Interstate 10 to County Road 2580, she placed a second pin between CR 2568 and 2580. Then a subsequent string of pins on Interstate 10 stretching west for another eighty miles.

  Every tributary, every county road, every residential street, was now marked by a pin.

  And he still hadn’t been found.

  Mark searched desperately on the map for a stretch of road they hadn’t yet marked. A piece of road they’d somehow missed. A piece of road where they’d surely find their friend.

  But there were none.

  They’d finally covered every piece of pavement within an eighty mile radius.

  “This can only mean one thing,” Bryan said. “He went down one of the roads after we searched and marked it.”

  It was a logical conclusion for a team of people who refused to believe Frank had left the area. For they knew he wouldn’t leave on his own. He had no reason to, first of all. All his friends were in Junction. So was his home.

  And even if he was tired of living at the compound, even if he had no desire to go into the mine to escape the freeze, he just wouldn’t leave without telling somebody.

  He just wasn’t that way. It wasn’t in his nature.

  No, his leaving the area without telling someone wasn’t a possibility.

  That left only three options.

  And none of them were palatable.

  The way the security team saw it, he more than likely slid off a road somewhere, just as Brad had.

  Or, he was shot dead, probably by someone wanting to steal his vehicle.

  Or that he was kidnapped and taken out of the area by force.

  “That one makes no sense at all,” Hannah said. “I mean, Frank’s a wonderful man. But until you get to know him he can be an awful grouch. He can be very demanding and his feet stink. Who would want him enough to kidnap him?”

  She was only half joking.

  And she had a point. It just made no sense to anyone that someone would take their friend.

  No one wanted to think about the possibility Frank was shot and his vehicle stolen. And if that was what happened to him – if he was lying dead in a ditch somewhere, slowly being covered up with snow, they’d likely never find him.

  That left only one option. That he’d lost control of the Hummer on the heavy ice and slid off the pavement somewhere, on a road which had already been searched and was therefore not revisited.

  “So what do we do?” Bryan asked.

  Mark said, “I don’t think we have any choice. We start again from scratch.”

  Hannah stood on a step stool and started pulling the pins from the map.

  She didn’t like the idea of having to search all the roadways a second time.

  But there was simply no other way to find their friend.

  “Let’s do some things different this time, though,” Bryan suggested.

  “Instead of covering all areas at once, let’s focus everybody on Interstate 10 West. That’s where he was assigned when he disappeared.

  “We can leapfrog, hitting the first county road which intersects with the I-10 west of here. Two search teams can take that exit. One team can follow it north for maybe twenty miles and the other can do the same to the south.

  “The next two teams can take the next county road and do the same thing.

  “When the first two teams finish their road they can leapfrog over all the others until they get to the next one which hasn’t been searched yet.”

  It made sense for a couple of reasons.

  First of all, Frank was a by-the-book man. He followed instructions to the letter, and if he was assigned to search a particular highway he’d do it without deviation.

  He was last heard from searching the I-10 west of them. Therefore it would be the logical place to start.

  There wouldn’t be any teams searching other areas of the county where there was no reason to think Frank might be.

  Also, by following Bryan’s suggestion, all search teams should be within radio contact with one another.

  The county roads which intersected with the I-10 were typically several miles apart, but ran more or less parallel to one another.

  Therefore a search team working on CR 2508 might be twenty miles away from the I-10, but only three or four miles south of another crew working CR 2509.

  If anyone encountered trouble, someone would be close enough to respond to a mayday call.

  They had a course of action.

  Nobody wanted to head back out into increasingly worsening weather to drive on increasingly worsening roads.

  But they did anyway.

  Because they wanted Frank back.

  Stinky feet and all.

  -2-

  Marty called into the control center.

  “We’re just a couple of minutes out. Can somebody let us in?”

  Sami picked up the microphone.

  “Roger, Marty. Rachel is standing by to open the door as soon as you’re in position and I verify the coast is clear.”

  “Have you seen Debbie?”

  “Roger. Debbie will be waiting for you with a wheelchair as soon as you get parked.”

  “Ten four.”

  Two minutes later a big Kenworth tractor-trailer combination rolled into camera view and pulled up to the mine’s massive overhead door.

  Sami checked the monitors for all the other cameras to make sure there wasn’t anyone lurking in the area, then said, “Okay, Rachel. You’re clear to open up.”

  The door started to roll.

  As soon as it cleared his smokestacks Marty pulled the rig into the mine’s entrance and parked it.

  He killed his engine, applied his brakes, and quickly exited the cab.

  Rachel offered him a quick hug, as she did all the searchers these days when they returned from what was undoubtedly a very dangerous mission.

  He accepted her offer because… well, because he was Marty. And Marty never turned down a hug from a pretty girl.

  He quickly went around to the other side of the tractor and joined his search partner, Art. As Debbie stood by with a wheelchair the two men helped a young woman named Charlotte climb down from the cab.

  She sat in the chair and Debbie started an assessment on her.

  “Hi, I’m Debbie. I’m neither a doctor nor a nurse, but I was a paramedic for many years. I’m afraid I’m the closest thing we’ve got.”

  Charlotte managed a smile.

  “Hello, Debbie. My name is Charlotte.”

  “First of all, Charlotte, I’m sorry for your loss. I understand some of your friends died out there.”

  “Every friend I had in the world. Now I have no family or friends.”

  Debbie sensed that most of Charlotte’s injuries weren’t to her body but rather her mind.

  She wrapped her arms around her for a moment and said, “Don’t worry, honey. I suspect you’ll have more new friends than you can handle in no time at all.”

  “It won’t bring them back.”
<
br />   “I know. But you survived. They’d want you to go on and thrive. Do it in their memory, if for no other reason.”

  As they spoke Debbie examined the woman’s ears, fingers and toes. She wrapped a blood pressure cuff around her upper arm and used a stethoscope to listen to her heart.

  “You know, Charlotte, death by carbon monoxide poisoning isn’t a bad way to go. I mean, they just drifted off to sleep. They were in no pain whatsoever.

  “They just got drowsy and thought they were in need of a nap. I know that doesn’t make your pain better, but maybe it’ll make it a little easier to cope with your loss.”

  “I know. The truck driver… I’m sorry, I don’t remember his name.”

  “Marty.”

  “Yes. Marty, he told me they were curled up and looked like they were sleeping. Like they hadn’t a care in the world.

  “He said one was even hugging a teddy bear. That would be Melissa. She’s twenty-one now, and still sleeps with a bear. His name is Mister Ted.”

  She paused for a moment and then corrected herself.

  “I guess I should say she was twenty-one.”

  Her eyes started to well up and Debbie held her again.

  “How long were you out in the cold, Charlotte?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. It was still daylight when I started walking. And I guess I walked all night, although I can’t remember it. The next thing I know there was a bright light in my face. So bright it blinded me. I held up my hand to block the light, and then I felt someone beside me. Putting a coat over my shoulders.

  “He told me it would be all right, that he was there to help me.

  “It was Marty.”

  “Do me a favor and put this under your tongue, okay?”

  While the thermometer was recording her temperature, Debbie said, “It looked like the gloves you had on saved your fingers. Your toes are still up in the air. A couple of them look like they’ve suffered an awful lot of damage.

  “I’m going to try my best to save them, but if I have to I’ll amputate them to keep you from getting gangrene.”