One of Our Own: Final Dawn: Book 11 Read online

  Final Dawn

  Book 11:

  ONE OF OUR OWN

  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 editors:

  Jennifer Windham

  Stephanie Salinas

  Allison Chandler

  Jennifer Lake

  Without your efforts I wouldn’t be writing. I’d be flipping burgers in a McDonald’s somewhere.

  Writing is much more fun

  The Story Thus Far…

  Life had never been easy for Hannah and Mark, or for Mark’s brother Bryan and wife Sarah.

  Bryan jokingly told Hannah and Mark they were cursed. Or at least incredibly unlucky. He professed a false anger they’d taken Bryan and Sarah on a spiraling journey straight into hell itself.

  As ludicrous as it was, though, Mark had a hard time arguing the point.

  Theirs had begun as a storybook romance. Hannah seemed the perfect girl for Mark. Theirs, they believed, was a match made in heaven.

  Or at least in Hollywood.

  But instead of enjoying a life of bliss, it seemed they’d battled something… or someone… every step of their relationship.

  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 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.

  The mine was their sanctuary as well as their prison.

  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.

  Many of the survivors had made it by stealing from others. When their presence became known they were attacked by a brutal band of marauders.

  They succeeded in fending off the attackers, for it’s always easier to defend a piece of ground than to seize it, and because they were well prepared for such an attack.

  But they lost some of their own.

  Next 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. The Army, as they saw it, was part of the United States government which had already betrayed them once.

  “If you want all of our livestock you’ll have to fight for it. And we’ll destroy it all as soon as you try.”

  The Army tried a different tactic and negotiated with the group.

  They were given a sizeable portion of the stock and agreed to let the group be.

  Hannah later made a startling discovery. The people of San Antonio and Bexar County weren’t receiving any assistance from the Army or the federal government.

  They’d been lied to once again.

  She made another discovery as well.

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

  They already owned the airspace. After declaring martial law, the government had restricted all flights over the area except for U.S. Army helicopters.

  Keeping their secret was easy. They already owned the skies. They restricted all movement to within a mile of their construction site by putting up perimeter fences and armed guards.

  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 the small piece was given the name Cupid 23. NASA wasn’t sure what it would do. It might follow the same course, they said.

  Or it might veer off and pass the earth by.

  NASA no longer existed.

  Or pretended not to.

  Hannah believed they were still there, but had gone silent on orders of the government.

  And everything suddenly made sense.

  The massive construction project was a bunker. It was being built to protect Washington insiders and their families.

  And the meat the Army was processing in great quantities… the crops they were growing in huge greenhouses? It was all going into massive stores.

  To feed those same Washington insiders during the long freeze they knew was coming.

  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 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, has gone missing with his family.

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

  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 are icy and impassable.

  Then one of their own goes missing.

  And now the story continues with

  Final Dawn, Book 11:

  ONE OF OUR OWN

  -1-

  Plainview is a little spit of a town in the Texas panhandle. It’s been there for a very long time, having been founded in 1888, but has never boasted more than 2,500 citizens.

  Plainview’s biggest claim to fame was native son Jimmy Dean. He was most famous for the breakfast sausage he created in 1969 and later sold to a large food conglomerate.

  Natives of Plainview, though, knew Mr. Dean as a very successful country music singer who once shared the Nashville stage with the likes of Jim Reeves, Ernest Tubb and Bob Wills.

  In recent years Plainview had become hom
e to a huge Food World Distribution Center, which had become the town’s biggest employer.

  It was also home to the Dwyer family.

  The Dwyers were an unsavory bunch going back at least four generations, when Grandpa Willis “Bud” Dwyer shot the Hale County Sheriff and was hanged in the town square.

  The murder marked the Dwyers as outcasts in the county, and they certainly did nothing to dispel their unsavory reputation. Each successive generation produced more felons than reputable citizens, and more prison time than church time.

  The present generation consisted of three boys and two girls. Brothers Justin, Jordan and John; sisters Josie and Jill. Most had seen the inside of the Hale County Jail and John was doing hard time in state prison.

  He was scheduled for release six months after Saris 7 collided with the earth.

  What the Dwyers lacked in morality they made up for in cunning. They thought outside the box. And although their schemes were almost always illegal, they were frequently ingenious.

  When Hannah Jelinovic and Sarah Anna Spear went on television to announce the meteorite’s impending collision it was still two years away.

  “Don’t worry,” the government said when the women called it out and placed it on the spot. “There’s still plenty of time to consider our options. We can destroy the meteorite or alter its course.”

  Most citizens took the government at their word and left their fate in the hands of the U.S. Congress.

  The wisest citizens suspected they couldn’t trust the government to do anything and started making plans of their own.

  Jordan and Justin, the Dwyer brothers who weren’t in prison at the time, never trusted anybody with anything.

  They put their heads together and developed a plan to take a small army into the Food World Distribution Center just before Saris 7 hit.

  And to ride out the long freeze not necessarily in comfort.

  But at least in a place that was well-stocked with provisions.

  The Food World Corporation had, in recent years, built at least one big box store in every city of any size in the country.

  Even Plainview had one.

  Despite its name, the Corporation’s “Super Centers” stocked anything and everything in addition to groceries.

  To the Corporation’s credit, they refused to just shut down their operations when the world went into all-out panic mode.

  They realized people would need their goods to prepare for their survival, and to sustain them during the long freeze.

  Where other retailers shut down their operations and sent their employees home to be with their families, Food World kept working. Kept driving their trucks. Kept filling those shelves.

  As a result, their distribution centers were still pretty well stocked when Saris 7 met the earth in Eastern Siberia.

  Just a few hours before the scheduled collision, eight heavily armed men emerged from four different vehicles and stormed the distribution center in Plainview.

  By the time the cops got there they’d already forced every employee from the premises. Three of the men held police at bay while another stalled for time by pretending to negotiate a surrender.

  In reality, the group had no intention of surrendering. They were there for the duration.

  They had everything they needed to ride out the freeze. And they’d planned well. They outnumbered the entire police force of little Plainview two to one. There was no way the tiny force could waste days trying to negotiate with armed men. Not when the world was beginning to freeze over.

  It only took two hours for the cops to back away. They went home to protect their families against the long freeze they knew was coming.

  And not a one of them knew whether they or their families would survive.

  The Dwyers, though, had no doubt in their minds.

  Their plan had worked flawlessly; their timing was perfect.

  By waiting until the proper moment to storm the center they’d taken control of enough food, water and supplies to sustain them and their families for years.

  That evening, as pre-arranged, a Ford 250 pickup truck pulled into the center’s receiving yard.

  It was towing a goose-neck trailer loaded down with twenty two drums.

  Just over twelve hundred gallons of diesel fuel.

  In the Dwyers’ estimation, it would be heating fuel they ran out of first.

  The trailer fuel of diesel, operating a diesel stove, wouldn’t last the duration of the freeze. Scientists were all over the television saying the freeze could last up to ten years.

  But the brothers estimated it would last them at least eighteen months.

  Two years if they were lucky.

  And then they’d switch over to a wood burning stove.

  In the cab of the pickup were the group’s women and children, kept out of the fray and safe in case the police had opened fire upon them.

  Then, reunited in the very early days of the first freeze, a group of seventeen men, women and children hunkered down for what promised to be a very long ordeal.

  -2-

  Within hours the Dwyer gang had made the distribution center virtually impenetrable.

  It wasn’t easy because of the design of the building.

  On the east side, the receiving docks boasted thirty two overhead doors. On a busy day before Saris 7 almost every door would be occupied by a tractor trailer combination carrying fifty three feet of incoming cargo from manufacturing plants and container ships.

  On the west side were an equal number of shipping docks, where similar rigs would be dispatched daily to Food World Super Centers throughout a five-state region.

  Each of the sixty four overhead doors had to be secured, and quickly, lest they come under gunfire from the outside or be assaulted by drivers trying to break them down with fast-moving heavy vehicles.

  Not by the Plainview Police Department, for they’d already given up on the building.

  But rather by desperate citizens of Plainview and beyond, wanting to get in to share in the provisions they knew were there.

  The Dwyers’ planning didn’t stop at seizing the building.

  They’d also developed plans for securing each of the doors and making the building safe from attack.

  Four of them had taken jobs at warehouses in the months prior to Saris 7, expressly for the chance to learn how to drive a forklift.

  The massive building was the size of three football fields laid side by side. Huge storage racks lifted thirty feet off the ground. Each rack had five shelves, and high lift forklifts stacked pallets of goods on every shelf available.

  There were a lot of pallets in the center. Over eight thousand, in fact.

  Many of them were perfect for blocking the overhead doors.

  They looked for anything heavy that they didn’t necessarily need.

  Just in case it got shot up.

  Pallets of canned dog food, for example, were ideal for their needs.

  Pallets of kitty litter.

  Of paper plates.

  Of damn near anything they didn’t think they’d need and couldn’t eat.

  It didn’t take long at all, really. With four men on forklifts to pull the pallets down from the racks, and several others using pallet jacks to put them into place, it took no time at all.

  In just four hours all the overhead doors were blocked.

  And they’d remain that way for ten long years.

  At the Plainview Electrical Coop, managers promised to keep power on to the city for the duration of the freeze.

  “The power plant runs on diesel fuel,” they said. We have a generator that’s only two years old and a backup that’s brand new.

  “We have a contractor committed to bring us a fuel delivery from the refinery in Corpus Christi twice a week, every week.

  “Even running one generator for twenty four hours a day, we’ll have plenty of power for our customers. Guaranteed, no question.”

  The lights were on for four more days after Saris 7
hit.

  Oh, the managers at the coop had good intentions.

  So did the trucking company which signed the fuel delivery contract with them.

  The problem was the truckers- the drivers whose job it was to get behind the wheel and drive those tankers seven hundred miles north.

  They decided they had better things to do.

  Like stay at home and protect their families from rioters and looters.

  And men who were committing even worse crimes.

  When the first fuel truck failed to show the day after the blackout, Plainview Electrical was on the phone.

  There was no answer.

  Just a message on the answering machine:

  “Acme Trucking is closed for the duration. We apologize for any inconvenience this might cause our customers.”

  Still, for the Dwyer gang, four days of lights was plenty to get their new sanctuary set up. By the time the lights went out, they’d found the four pallets of decorative candles.

  The thirteen pallets of charcoal briquettes.

  The three pallets of lamp oil and pallet of oil lanterns.

  The portable generators and stoves and everything else they needed to live fairly comfortably for as long as the cold lasted.

  It wouldn’t be a picnic by any means.

  But compared to those on the outside, freezing to death or blowing their own brains out, it was close to paradise.

  By the seventh year they were comfortable enough in the center to call it a permanent home.

  The world was thawing now. People were out and about again. Some of the more brazen were pounding on the doors, trying to determine whether anyone was still alive inside.

  A couple of shots fired through the doors was usually enough to answer their question and send them running.

  They’d done a good job of conserving their food, inspecting each pallet closely and taking those with pending shelf life expiration dates first.

  At first it caused dissention in the ranks, as some of the less intelligent wondered aloud why they must eat potato chips exclusively for days at a time.