On Desert Sands: Alone: Book 6 Read online

  ALONE

  Book 6:

  On Desert Sands

  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 2016 by Darrell Maloney

  This book is dedicated to:

  My mother and father, Frances and Troy Maloney.

  The finest people I’ve ever known.

  Thank you for everything.

  The Story Thus Far…

  Dave and Sarah Anna Speer had been preppers for years. They didn’t know what was coming, exactly. But they knew it was big, would be felt around the world, and would last forever.

  Or at least a very long time.

  So they prepared. They planned for everything, with backup plans for their backup plans.

  The one thing they couldn’t plan for was the timing of the event, whatever it was.

  And their timing couldn’t have been worse, for on the day when the electromagnetic pulses struck the earth and brought everything to a screeching halt, they weren’t even together.

  It happened on the very day Sarah took their daughters a thousand miles away, to Kansas City, for a wedding.

  Dave was alone, and didn’t even know if his family had survived their trip.

  He traveled to Kansas City to find them, only to find out they were being held captive by a brutal escaped convict named Swain.

  Dave went to war, using guerilla techniques he learned in the Marine Corps to whittle down Swain’s private army one by one.

  As well as tactics which were his alone. Things not even the Corps would dare try.

  He was successful in killing all of the captors, except for Swain himself.

  Dave would never ask what Swain did to Sarah. He respected her enough not to. But he could see from the fire in her eyes how much she hated the man. And he was certain of two things. He didn’t want to know what had happened between the two. And Sarah deserved the right to exact her own vengeance.

  “I want to kill that bastard myself,” Sarah told him. “I deserve the pleasure.”

  And dispatch him she did, directly into the fiery pits of hell.

  The siege was over.

  But not the sorrow.

  “Where’s Beth?” Dave asked about his youngest daughter.

  “They took her. Several months ago.”

  “What do you mean, they took her?”

  “An older couple. They had a Red Ford Ranger pickup they took the engine out of. They built a floor and bench into the engine compartment and turned it into a horse-drawn vehicle.”

  One of Swain’s men sold her into slavery.

  For seven pieces of silver.

  Little Beth, now eight years old, was out there somewhere.

  And it was up to Dave to find her.

  Once again he was all alone, and back on the road. This time following the only lead he had.

  That the couple had headed toward Albuquerque several months before.

  He left Sarah and Lindsey with trusted neighbors before he left. He didn’t have to worry about them. At least not for now. They were in a heavily fortified underground compound. One seemingly impenetrable.

  He could focus on finding Beth, taking her back, and punishing those responsible for taking her.

  Dave knew nothing about them. But he planned to kill them.

  For they’d taken his baby and were doing God-only knew what kind of horrific things to her.

  That was all he really needed to know.

  As the last chapter drew to a close, Dave arrived at the outskirts of New Mexico’s largest city to find it had been taken over by gangs and thugs. He was told he could go in. But he’d never be allowed to come back out again.

  He had a plan. A plan not only to get into the city, but to be introduced to the movers and shakers who ran the place.

  Those who could help him find the kidnappers and get his daughter back.

  But he needed the assistance of someone to make his plan work.

  Someone he’d never have associated with before the power went out.

  Someone he’d once have despised.

  But who now would be his closest ally.

  It was, as he saw it, the only chance he and little Beth had.

  And now, Chapter 6 of the Alone series…

  On Desert Sands

  Chapter 1

  Three months before, when Dave Speer was still in San Antonio, preparing for his journey to find his missing family…

  They’d just left Albuquerque and were headed west, their final destination the high desert of California.

  Old Sal hadn’t been home in almost forty years. Nellie a bit longer than that. She hadn’t gone with him the last time because she was pregnant with their first child and had been visiting her mother in Dallas when she went into labor.

  “It can’t be labor,” she protested to everyone within earshot. And even some not. “I’m only seven months along!”

  But babies come when they want to. At least they did back then. In 1976 there weren’t as many fancy gadgets to tell doctors when to induce labor and when to try to delay it.

  And seventy tortuous hours later Salvatore Ambrosio Junior was born. All ten pounds one ounce of him. With a full head of jet black hair, just like his father. And the cutest dimples he got from his mom.

  Nobody told Vito, as he came to be called, that babies aren’t supposed to be two months early. And it wouldn’t have mattered much anyway. Vito was as hard-headed as his father and high strung as well.

  The doctors told Nellie it was a good thing she did have him early. If she hadn’t he’d have been thirteen pounds, maybe more. And she’d wear a C-section scar the rest of her life. If she survived the procedure at all.

  As it was, the strain of baby Huey did its own damage, and she was told immediately after the birth not to expect any more.

  That saddened Sal and Nellie, but they learned to accept it.

  Little Vito, with no brothers or sisters to share his parents’ attention, was raised with everything he needed. And most of what he wanted. He was a bit spoiled, but not so much it hampered his ability to make others like him.

  At twenty two, fresh out of college and ready to conquer the world, he met and fell in love with a girl named Melissa.

  Both were journalists, he in print media and she in television. Both were considered rising stars in their respective professions. Their bright future seemed assured.

  In 2007 their one and only child was born. A girl, as smart as she was pretty, with curly hair and a smile that would melt even the coldest heart.

  Her birth certificate said Rebecca. But everybody called her Becky.

  The story of Salvatore Ambrosio Jr. and his lovely wife and daughter would likely have ended in fairy tale style were it not for a series of tragic events.

  The first was a series of massive storms on the surface of the sun on, of all days, Becky’s seventh birthday.

  The exceedingly rare storms were the worst in more than two hundred years. And the first since planet earth had gotten technologically advanced.

  That in itself wouldn’t have affected humans much were it not for the massive electromagnetic pulses it sent streaming toward the earth.

  Similar storms in the early-1800s sent an almost identical array of pulses. They did almost no damage at all. Some sensitive farm animals fell over and threw up. Some sensitive humans felt nauseated or dizzy.

  But it didn’t affect machines because machines weren’t yet powered by electricity.

  In 2014, however, darned near everything was.

  That was the first tragic event which changed the Ambrosio family�
��s fairy tale existence.

  The second was the murder of Vito and Melissa, by a band of marauders a few months into the blackout. Someone had told them the house on the corner of the street had a hoard of gold coins worth tens of thousands of dollars.

  The trouble was the informant wasn’t very good with directions. He sent the thieves to the southwest corner of the block. Vito tried to reason with the men. To explain that no, they had no gold. They had never thought to keep any. They hadn’t foreseen the blackout and thought their money was safe in the bank.

  Vito was shot in the back of the head, execution style. The band of thieves thought that would loosen Melissa’s tongue and she’d turn over the gold.

  But there was no gold to turn over. They settled for abusing her in a dozen different ways before mercifully putting her out of her misery by shooting her too.

  The man across the street on the southeast corner of the block was tucked safely in a barricaded basement and unable to hear the gunshots as he blissfully counted his gold coins.

  The third and final insult to the Ambrosio family was perhaps the most heartbreaking.

  Young Becky, not sure what to do or who to trust, covered the bodies of her parents with blankets and continued to reside in the house.

  As the days went by, the stench of decaying human flesh forced her to camp in the back yard. That was a relief, but not much. For there were corpses rotting all over the neighborhood.

  The days turned to weeks, and each day young Becky read to pass the time and prayed that her grandparents would come to rescue her from that vile place. Her water supply ran out, and she drank water from a small stream in a nearby park. It made her throw up and gave her diarrhea, but she didn’t associate the two to have a connection and drank even more water to quench her thirst.

  She was afraid to venture away from the house. She knew the world was full of very bad people. When her food ran out she started eating cans of dog food she found in the garage.

  One night she was stung by a spider and her arm began to swell. She developed a fever and grew lethargic. She stopped eating and stopped going to the creek for water.

  The infected bite was a vicious thing. It raised her temperature to an almost comatose level and made her hallucinate. She dreamed her mother was leaning over her, caressing her, telling her everything would be okay.

  In her last moments she tried to cry. But her body was too dehydrated to form the tears.

  Instead, she made a final prayer. For God to take her wherever her mommy and daddy were.

  Chapter 2

  Sal Senior and Nellie lived only forty miles away. They were old now and hadn’t exercised in years. But they could have covered five miles a day on foot, and would have been there in a little more than a week.

  They simply didn’t know they were needed.

  They, like everyone else, tried to wait patiently for the electric company to restore the city’s power. For someone to come out and explain to them what kind of power outage could short out their vehicles too.

  And then to tell them how to get their vehicles started again.

  Word traveled painfully slowly with no television, no radio, no telephones.

  It wasn’t until the fifth day that old Sal finally admitted what Nellie had accepted two days before: that the power was likely never coming back on.

  Under other circumstances Sal and Nellie would have felt an overpowering need to get to the children and to help them get through whatever had caused this catastrophe.

  They’d have packed a couple of bags with food and water, and perhaps a spare pair of shoes. And they’d have struck out toward Vito’s house a few painful miles at a time.

  But Vito was a strapping man. He was in the prime of life and in wonderful shape. Melissa saw to that. She made him eat healthy foods, and in reasonable amounts. She took him jogging at night while Becky followed close behind on her bicycle. He had a good head on his shoulders.

  Sal and Nellie had every reason in the world to believe that Vito could keep his family safe and provide for them during this terrible time.

  It just never dawned on them that six heavily armed men might rush the house and overpower their son.

  They were making plans to join Vito and his family, but thought they had all the time in the world to get there.

  Sal Senior had been a backyard mechanic his entire life. And he and Nellie happened to live on a farm just outside the city limits. So they had a couple of horses.

  They also had a Ford Ranger pickup truck in candy apple red.

  Once Sal finally admitted that his pickup truck would likely never run again, he decided to give it a second chance at life.

  It wasn’t easy. Without power tools to aid him he had to do things the old fashioned way. With hand wrenches and a whole bunch of elbow grease.

  He had a manual hoist out behind the barn, and with the help of a neighbor was able to get the engine out. Then the transmission. He concocted a handy little pivot which made the front wheels turn with the horses. Then an outrigger to fasten the horses to.

  On the floor of the engine compartment went two sheets of plywood, cut to fit perfectly. A bench seat atop of that, and a homemade braking system.

  Oh, and he kicked out the windshield too.

  Nellie threw a fit about that part, but he explained.

  “We’ll be traveling in hot weather. I could break out the side windows to give you a breeze, or I could break out the windshield. The window on the back of the cab slides open, so you can adjust it accordingly. And this way I can talk to you, my dear wife, while I drive the rig.”

  “Is that what you’re calling this thing, Sal? A rig?”

  “Well, it ain’t really much of a truck anymore, now is it?”

  “No. I suppose not. But what about when it rains?”

  “Well now, if it rains, I damn sure ain’t gonna be sittin’ on that bench driving. When it rains we’ll cover the open windshield with a plastic tarp and wait for it to stop.”

  In the end, Nellie was impressed. The rig certainly wasn’t much to look at. But it would get them where they needed to go.

  And it certainly beat walking for forty miles.

  It turned out that everyone else who saw the rig was impressed with it as well.

  Several offered to buy it and the team of horses.

  “No thank you,” Sal said each time. “I’m too old to walk. Besides, my granddaughter will get a kick out of helping me drive it.”

  Chapter 3

  As they’d turned up the street that fateful day so many months before, Sal had been beaming with pride. A father is always proud of the things he can do to impress his son, and he couldn’t wait to take Vito around the block in his new pride and joy.

  But it wasn’t meant to be.

  Sal knew the moment he stepped onto his son’s front porch.

  Looters had kicked in the front door to see what goodies were inside, then were repelled by the stench.

  The horrific smell still permeated everything, and wafted out the broken door as though it were a great monster forbidding entry into a vile and truly evil place.

  The smell of three bodies being slowly turned into dust.

  It was a disgusting task for the old man. Especially his son and daughter-in-law, for they were mostly bones now. Bones and an indiscernible pile of muck. Becky was a bit easier, because her bones didn’t fall free when he went to pick her up. And because she’d had the courtesy to wrap herself up in a blanket just before she died.

  Yes, it was an incredibly disgusting task. But the old man would do no less for them. He failed them in life, not being there to help protect them. He wouldn’t fail them in death.

  Digging the graves put a toll on him. At that point, all the dogs hadn’t been eaten yet. But many were set free just before their owners committed suicide and were now running around in packs.

  There was no way any damn dogs were digging up his loved ones. So even though he risked a major heart attack, he spent s
even hours on that unusually hot summer day, digging two graves that were six feet long, three feet wide, and six feet deep.

  Little Becky’s went a little quicker because he cut the dimensions by half.

  They sang Amazing Grace and Shall We Gather at the River and he prayed over the graves.

  It was just after that when Nellie’s mind went. She fell into a funk, not saying a single word. All the time staring into space, into nothingness. Even when Sal held her face in his hands and looked into her eyes he saw nothing. A living, breathing person, sure. But one whose soul seemed to have left her.

  That phase lasted roughly two weeks. Sal didn’t want to return home. There were too many memories there. Everywhere he looked, he’d see visions of better times. Every time he walked up the stairs, he’d remember how little Vito would haul out his G.I. Joes and use the staircase to play war games. Every time he sat at the dining room table he’d remember playing Old Maid with little Becky. Every time he’d go to the back yard pool to fetch more water he’d remember the pool parties. All the laughing and fun and the neighborhood kids playing Marco Polo.

  No, they’d never go back. It would be too painful now.

  So they wandered, as many others started to do. During the days, they rode their rig down the nation’s interstates, heading in no particular direction. He on the wooden bench in the Ranger’s engine compartment, not unlike an old west wagoneer. She sitting quietly on the driver’s seat, staring at nothing and feeling nothing. Sometimes resting her head on the now-worthless steering wheel to nap.

  Nellie eventually came back to the world of the living. But she never came back to being normal. Her madness simply entered a new stage as she wept at the drop of a hat and constantly called out for Vito and for Becky. Strangely enough, she never called for Melissa, though they’d been as close as two in-laws could be.

  It was during this stage that Nellie became delusional and was convinced they’d never found the bodies or buried them. That they were still on the road, on the way to Vito’s house in the city.