Frozen (Final Dawn Book 10)

  Final Dawn

  Book 10:

  FROZEN

  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 my friends who accept my flaws, tolerate my foolishness, and love me unconditionally.

  God knows somebody has to…

  The Story Thus Far…

  Hannah Jelinovic and Mark Snyder met by pure accident, when he quite literally fell at her feet.

  For him it was love at first sight, and he told her so before he even knew her name.

  “You’re going to marry me someday,” he blurted.

  She smiled.

  “Are you sure about that?”

  “As sure as I’ve ever been about anything in my life.”

  She was amused and a bit reluctant, but gave him a chance.

  That chance led first to infatuation, then to a lasting love.

  She was his princess, he her knight in shining armor. But they weren’t destined to have a fairy tale ending.

  Rather, their life together was to be a series of ups and downs. Of ecstatic highs and painful lows. They were on a roller coaster ride.

  Hannah was a scientist, as brilliant as she was beautiful. It was early in their relationship when she discovered a meteorite, designated Saris 7, on a collision course with the earth.

  It was still two years out. There was time to do something… anything, to divert or destroy it.

  Washington and NASA officials chose to do neither.

  Instead, they secretly made preparations to protect their own in massive bunkers.

  That wasn’t acceptable to Hannah and her best friend Sarah Anna Speer. The pair went public and became enemies of the state. It turned out the government was more concerned in protecting its little secret than in protecting its citizens.

  They went into hiding, while at the same time procuring and stocking an abandoned salt mine outside of Junction, Texas. They couldn’t save everyone, but they’d save a small group of loved ones. Together they’d survive the impact and the six and a half-year freeze which followed it.

  When the thaw came, they ventured out into a world which had changed dramatically. The survival rate was officially listed as twenty percent, but most believed the number to be far less than that. Bodies were piled everywhere. Most the result of murder-suicides, as people simply gave up.

  Many others were killed by marauders bent on stealing their provisions.

  For the world was now a very violent place, and many found it easier to steal from others than to eek out their own meager existence.

  The group of forty one who’d come out of the mine made their new home in a walled compound, hidden in the woods adjacent to Salt Mountain. They’d been able to keep a limited amount of livestock alive through the freeze. A limited number of plants grown in greenhouses. And they’d been smart enough to keep stores of seeds.

  On the outside, the stock flourished and so did their crops. They no longer had to ration their food. By new world standards, they were doing quite well.

  But it wouldn’t last.

  Their secret hiding place was discovered, first by marauders and then by the United States Army. They had things that each of them wanted. The marauders tried to take the compound by force, the Army by coercion.

  At least the marauders were honest about their intentions.

  The Army, on the other hand, proclaimed they wanted the group’s livestock to feed desperate survivors in nearby San Antonio. The group relented and donated a sizeable portion of their cattle and swine, only to discover the government had deceived them once again.

  The hungry people of the Alamo City weren’t being fed. Once again, they were left to fend for themselves while those in power took care of their own.

  Mark and Hannah discovered that a second meteorite was heading toward the earth, and that their cattle and swine were being slaughtered to stock a huge bunker at the former Kelly Air Force Base in southern San Antonio.

  A bunker built in secret to protect Washington and NASA insiders and their families from the coming strike.

  The second meteorite was designated Cupid 23, but had no love for mankind. It was smaller than the first; its devastation would be lighter. But for many of the survivors already near the brink, it would be their last straw. The tipping point at which they’d finally decide that going on was pointless.

  As we last left Hannah and Mark they were restocking the mine beneath Salt Mountain.

  Good friend and ally Marty Hankins, in his own effort to protect the residents of nearby Eden, was stocking an abandoned federal prison. Alongside him was Lenny, his best friend of many years, and a group of minimally talented but dedicated misfits.

  The trouble was that NASA was no longer operational. Or at least they weren’t responding to calls from the civilian populous.

  Hannah couldn’t, therefore, be certain that Cupid 23 was even still coming.

  Or when.

  Both groups of people did the prudent thing and worked hard to get their shelters ready for the worst.

  If Cupid 23 passed the earth by and the threat never materialized, they’d have lost nothing. For their stockpiles of food, water and fuel would still be used.

  And truthfully, in a world where televisions, restaurants and the internet no longer existed, there was little else to do to occupy their time.

  Cupid 23 did strike the earth, at the tiny town of Spangdahlem in the Eifel region of Germany.

  Within minutes the sky over western Europe was a dirty brown. Within hours it had spread over the Atlantic.

  Survivors could see the cloud approaching them. They knew instantly what it was.

  Many of them knew something else as well. They knew their days were numbered.

  Marty Hankins was on the road on the day Cupid 23 hit. It was a nice day, and he was trying out a new Kenworth he’d taken off a dealer’s lot in San Angelo.

  His windows were down because his air conditioner wasn’t working as he drove west toward Kerrville when his nose picked up something strange.

  The smell of dirt.

  And a haunting memory suddenly infested his mind.

  He remembered that when Saris 7 struck the earth, the oddest thing happened. Something the TV warnings never mentioned. Because they didn’t know.

  They could actually smell the blackout before it arrived.

  He came to a dead stop in the middle of the highway, got out of his truck and peered skyward in all directions.

  A familiar voice came over the radio. It was Lenny, picking up a load eight miles south of him.

  “Hey Marty, I smell something I don’t like. Please, for the love of God, tell me you don’t smell it too.”

  “I smell it, Lenny. But the sky’s already overcast. I can’t tell if it’s darkening or not.”

  Marty and Lenny, when deciding to break away from the group at the compound and go their own way to prepare for Cupid 23, had made a couple of agreements with their old friends.

  The first was to have each other’s backs, in case the people in the Eden prison got into a bind and needed help.

  Of course, it was reciprocal. If the people in the mine ran out of something critical and the prison had it, they’d certainly offer it up.

  The second thing both parties agreed to was to share the same radio channel for their gathering operations.

  It had worked quite well. Bryan, Rusty and Brad had a list of things Marty was looking for that they didn’t necessarily need. On their travels they watched out for them and advised Marty if they came across them.

>   And, of course, vice versa.

  Sharing the same channel also kept everyone abreast of everyone else’s rough location, in case anyone needed help. If a distress call went out, the closest person could respond, even if they were from different operations.

  Neither Lenny nor Marty should have been surprised, then, when Hannah’s voice came over their radios.

  “Pardon me for intruding, but what are you ladies talking about?”

  Marty said, “Hang onto your britches, sweetheart. But we’re smelling dirt. Both of us, and we’re several miles apart.”

  Hannah was amused.

  “Dirt. As in… dirt. Have you guys been drinking again?”

  Marty said, “No. But I may guzzle a bottle of bourbon when I get back from this run.”

  For the first time, she noticed the alarm in his voice.

  “Marty, what’s wrong? What does the smell of dirt have to do with anything?”

  “That’s how it started last time.”

  “How what started? What are you talking about?”

  “Saris 7, sweetheart.”

  Hannah had never known about the dirt smell which preceded Saris 7’s darkened skies. When Saris 7 struck the earth ten years before, she’d been safely tucked into the mine for three full days.

  Out of reach of the meteorite’s wrath.

  And unable to smell the dirt.

  “Oh, my God. Are you sure?”

  “I’m sure that it smells like dirt. That’s the way it smelled just before the sky went dark before. And it continued to smell that way until the thaw came.”

  Hannah called out for her own drivers.

  “Brad, Bryan, Rusty, did you copy that?”

  Only Brad answered. The others, lacking the luxury of the base station and antenna Hannah was using, were too far out of range.

  Brad said, “I smell it too. Oh, crap…”

  Hannah said, to no one in particular, “Is there any change in the sky? It all looks good on my monitors.”

  “It’s hard to say. It was already overcast.”

  Brad said, “It might just be my imagination. But it looks darker than it was just a few minutes ago.”

  And now the story continues with

  Final Dawn, Book 10:

  FROZEN

  -1-

  They’d stumbled across the abandoned mine several weeks before while hunting for rabbits.

  The two of them: brothers Mike and Morris, were the only members of the Green family to survive. They lived on an unpaved road outside of Junction, where the vacant houses outnumbered those occupied twelve to one.

  Most of their friends were gone too.

  At least those they once cared about.

  The friends left were the ones who used to come to them for money or rides or cigarettes. They were high nearly all the time now, using dope as a means to escape the harshness of life. One by one they were dropping too, mostly by overdosing on dope cooked by people who didn’t know what they were doing, or who cut it with dangerous chemicals to stretch it farther.

  Or being shot while robbing people of their gold and silver in an effort to keep the drugs coming.

  Mostly the Green brothers kept to themselves lately. They knew they could trust one another to their dying breaths.

  Trusting anyone else was just too risky a proposition.

  The Green brothers weren’t violent when younger, although they’d fight like wolves to protect themselves or each other. They had that in common with most brothers. Most brothers would dicker between themselves, but would defend the other until their last heartbeat.

  They’d both spent time in the pen; Mike for armed robbery and Morris for drug possession. Morris’s charge had been bogus from the beginning, when he was pulled over for speeding and the officer asked for permission to search his car.

  “Sure,” he’d said, confident he had nothing to hide.

  And he didn’t, not really.

  His so-called friend in the back seat did, however. He pulled an eight-ball of methamphetamines from his watch pocket and stashed it beneath the driver’s seat just before he exited the vehicle.

  Morris was popped as the owner of the vehicle, since he couldn’t prove the dope wasn’t his.

  He hoped his friend would do the right thing, but it wasn’t to be.

  Morris was no stitch. He stepped up, did the manly thing, and served twenty two months of a three year sentence.

  He was released early for good behavior. But still, his time in prison changed him in a lot of ways.

  He was hardened. As a small guy, he was abused by bigger inmates and forced to do things he didn’t want to do. Because he refused to join one of the prison gangs, he had no protection and was subject to occasional beatings.

  His cellie did prison tattoos, using a sharpened paper clip he’d stolen from a prison counselor’s desk and the ink from pens.

  He insisted on giving Morris a tattoo of his choice. Morris resisted for awhile, then gave in. His ill-conceived choice, which he’d come to regret almost immediately, was now permanently emblazoned on the right side of his neck:

  TO HELL WITH THE WORLD

  I DO MY OWN THING

  The biggest change in Morris was his attitude. He went into prison barely a man, and scared to death. His only mistake had been choosing the wrong friends.

  He came out mean.

  A week after his release from prison he met with a court-ordered counselor who was supposed to help him find a job and a place to live.

  “I’ve talked to some of the other boys who were with you the night you were arrested,” he was told. “I know you were innocent, and did hard time just so you wouldn’t become known as a snitch.

  “This is what people don’t understand. They take good kids who made a mistake. Something they can learn from and recover from and put behind them. But instead they place them in prison and create hardened criminals out of them.

  “They come out branded as felons. They can’t find a decent paying job or a good place to live. Their friends desert them and they turn to stealing and volence to make their way in the world. They make new friends just like them. And they wind up back in prison over and over again.

  “And they wonder why the prison system in the United States is broken beyond repair.”

  Morris had bitten his tongue and let the man rail, before commenting, “You really suck as a counselor, you know that?”

  -2-

  But the man was right. Morris was forever branded a felon and an ex-con. Employers didn’t want to hire him. Landlords didn’t want to rent to him. Old friends deserted him or no longer trusted him. New friends tended to be like him: men with troubled pasts or women who were needy and wanted to use him for various things.

  He wound up moving into a trailer outside of town with his brother Mike, who’d gone through the same process a couple of years before.

  Mike had given up on finding a job and started his own business.

  It wasn’t a legal one. Or an ethical one. But he figured stealing cars and chopping them up to sell as parts was as good a way as any to pay the bills and buy his beer.

  He brought Morris into the business as well.

  Mike figured if society was going to brand him a loser, he might as well play the part.

  It turned out Morris was pretty good at boosting cars. But each and every night he had trouble sleeping. Something ate at him almost every waking hour. Something he had to take care of.

  The guy in the back seat, fearing retribution, decided he didn’t want to be around when Morris got out. He moved several hundred miles away, to Shreveport, where he shacked up with an old grade-school buddy. He looked over his shoulder for a time, but eventually let his guard down.

  His carelessness cost him dearly. When he walked out of a strip club at closing time half drunk, he didn’t see the man in the shadows waiting for him.

  Didn’t see the figure walk up behind him, knife in hand.

  Didn’t even see the knife, for that matte
r, until it plunged deep into his chest.

  In the last moments of his life he finally caught a glimpse of Morris standing over him, an evil smile on the former friend’s face.

  He heard the words, “I’ve waited a long time to do that, you son of a bitch.”

  His very last thought was to wonder what took Morris so long to come for him.

  Morris returned to New Orleans and picked up where he left off, stealing cars and removing parts, until he got word from the street the New Orleans PD was onto him. One of the cars he boosted was equipped with Lo-Jack, and was tracked to the garage where they performed their chop operation.

  The NOPD was in the process of getting a warrant, he was told, and would be coming in force within a couple of days.

  Mike and Morris went on the lam that day, and ended up in Dallas.

  They were still there when Saris 7 collided with the earth, and had spent the years since scratching to get by. They stole when they could, killed when they had to, and were a general menace to society.

  The one activity they enjoyed together which was completely legal and above board was hunting.

  By the time Cupid 23 was barreling down upon the earth they’d worked their way from Dallas and into the suburbs, then along the highways to the area around Junction. The abandoned tractor trailers which had become the life’s blood to survivors were played out in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex.

  So were the rabbits and other small game they liked to hunt to supplement their diets.

  In the mountains around Kerrville and Junction, rabbits and squirrels and possums were making a great comeback. Deer weren’t quite as plentiful, but were out there.

  And because Kerr County had a limited population even before the disaster struck, and very few survivors, most of the trailers remained untouched.

  It was a far better place to be than any they’d been to before.

  On one of their hunting trips they happened upon a huge overhead door leading into Salt Mountain.