An Unkind Winter (Alone Book 2) Read online

  Alone: Book 2

  AN UNKIND 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 2014 by Darrell Maloney

  A Recap of Book 1 of This Series,

  ALONE: Facing Armageddon

  Dave Speer had always been a planner. Dating back to his Boy Scout days, he took the motto, “be prepared” to a whole new level.

  When he was twelve and a sudden cloudburst flooded the campsite at the annual camporee, scout leaders considered packing up and going home. Everything, including the matches, were soaked and heavily damaged. Leaders weren’t allowed to smoke at such events, or even carry lighters.

  It was Dave, and not the leaders, who saved the day. He laid a sheet of glass over a pile of dead grass tinder, so the afternoon sun would dry it while they were cleaning up from the rains. He climbed a tall tree and cut down a dead branch. A branch that had been hardened for so long it soaked up very little water. He used his Boy Scout hatchet to cut some of it into chunks of kindling. Some very thin, some a bit thicker.

  The rest he made into firewood.

  When the day drew to an end and the air turned cool it was Dave, and not his leaders, who used two sticks to spark the tinder. He built a roaring fire as though he’d done it every night of his life.

  It wasn’t until the last day of the camporee, after he’d pretty much become everybody’s hero, that he made a confession:

  “I smuggled in a lighter, just in case. It’s in my pack, in a waterproof zip lock bag.”

  The Scoutmaster asked him, “Why didn’t you pull it out? It would have made things so much easier.”

  He answered, “But then we wouldn’t have had such a great adventure.”

  That’s the way Dave was.

  Many years later, when he and his wife Sarah became convinced there were dark days ahead, he joined a subculture of society whose main mission in life was to prepare for Armageddon.

  And to survive it.

  They called themselves “preppers.” Every spare minute was devoted to talking through an endless series of “what if” scenarios.

  “What if terrorists get ahold of nuclear weapons? What can we do to survive?”

  “What if the economy finally comes tumbling down, once and for all, and the dollar becomes worthless? What will we eat?”

  One of their scenarios seemed much more plausible that the others. They’d seen a show on one of the cable channels and it piqued their interest.

  It was about the Mayans, and the incredible things they were capable of doing, without modern machines or technology.

  Sarah was puzzled.

  “How could they have identified the planets and their moons without telescopes? I look up and all I see is a bunch of lights. I can’t tell the stars from the planets. And most of the planets are too far away to see anyway.

  “And how in the world did they predict earthquakes? Scientists can’t even do that today, even with all the fancy equipment they have.”

  She was fascinated. And she had to find some answers.

  For weeks, Sarah spent her evenings at the public library, researching the Mayans and their accomplishments.

  In the end, she discovered two things. The first was that, contrary to what the public believed, the Mayans never said the world was going to end on December 21st in the year 2012.

  What the Mayans actually said was that date would start a new era. An era they called “the last period of progress.”

  The second thing Sarah discovered was that the Mayan’s predictions of some type of cataclysmic event had something to do with the mass failure of machines.

  Mayan prophets had predicted the coming of modern technology. They’d described automobiles and airplanes and “things of metal that would do the work of a hundred men.”

  And they also predicted that at the end of their “last period of progress,” all such machines would suddenly stop working.

  Dave was at a loss. Even a nuclear war wouldn’t stop the world’s cars from running. Even a meteorite wouldn’t shut down power plants.

  Then Sarah came up with the answer. It was the earth’s own sun that would do them in.

  Sarah believed that, like most other things in the universe, major solar storms ran in cycles. And that somehow, despite their lack of technology, the Mayans had devised a way to record such cycles, and to predict the next major solar storm.

  At the end of their “last period of progress.”

  She explained to Dave, “The sun periodically has massive storms on its surface, which send huge electromagnetic pulses, or EMPs, to bombard the earth. The EMPs are invisible and harmless to most people. A strong one might cause a feeling of unease or even nausea among very sensitive people, but it’s only temporary and does no permanent damage.

  “However, what it does to machines and electronics is something altogether different. Anything that has electronics or batteries will be shorted out forever. Anything with electrical wiring that is plugged into a power source will as well.

  “I believe the Mayans somehow devised a way to predict the solar storms, just like they learned how to identify the planets and their moons, and how to predict earthquakes. And I also think that the last day of their ‘last period of progress’ is the day they think a massive EMP will strike the earth and send us all back to the stone age.”

  It was that day, three years before, that Sarah and Dave became preppers.

  They’d seen the shows on the cable networks, but never paid much attention to them. Now they watched them with a passion. Not for entertainment, but for tips.

  They began hoarding food and supplies. They discovered that by building something called a Faraday cage, they could protect a limited number of batteries and electronics.

  They soon realized that prepping was a costly affair. So Dave took a part time job, and devoted each of the additional paychecks for the cause.

  The one thing they couldn’t control, though, was the timing of the event. It never dawned on them that when the EMP finally came, they might not be together.

  And fate would deal them a cruel hand.

  On the very day Sarah took their two young daughters, Lindsey and Beth, on a trip to Kansas City, everything suddenly went dark.

  Even worse, it happened at almost the exact minute their airplane was due to land at the Kansas City airport.

  Dave was suddenly alone, in his suburban home in San Antonio, a thousand miles away.

  He had no way of knowing whether his family was on time and landed safely. Or was running late and fell from the sky.

  Over the following months Dave struggled to implement all the processes and projects that he and Sarah had planned to do together.

  As people all around him were killing each other as well as themselves, Dave managed to stay alive. Hunkered down in a house he’d modified to look vacant. Whiling away the hours and days, trying not to think of the possibility his family might not have survived.

  He also had to fight off his own inner demons, who tried to tell him his family was dead, and that he should join them.

  He struggled with the thought of ending it all.

  But there was one thing that kept him going. It was the possibility that they were still alive. And that someday, somehow, they would all be reunited.

  Dave kept a journal, in which he wrote to Sarah every few days. It was a diary, of sorts, and a testament to his love for her. Somehow, writing to her seemed to make him feel closer to her. As though her spirit was there with him when he wrote.

  The journal had another purpose as well. If she
and the girls somehow made it back to him, only to find out he hadn’t survived, it would tell them of his struggles. And let them know he never forgot them.

  Dave had already resolved to set out in the spring to look for his family. It would be a long and arduous journey, and one which might have a heartbreaking conclusion.

  But he had to do it. He’d plan well, be cautious and careful, and hope for the best.

  First, though, he’d have to survive the worst winter in modern history.

  And now, Book 2 of the series,

  AN UNKIND WINTER

  -1-

  Dave stood at the back door of his house, coffee cup in hand. The coffee had gone stale long before, despite all their efforts to preserve it.

  He remembered laughing at Sarah the day he walked into the dining room and found her with two dozen bricks of Folgers coffee and two boxes of very large zip lock bags.

  “What on earth are you doing?” he’d asked.

  “Hey, I can live without my television. And I can darn sure live without my treadmill. But there’s no way in the world I’m going to live without my coffee. When the world goes black and they can no longer process coffee beans, I’m gonna have enough to last until we can grow our own.”

  He counted the number of bricks.

  “Well, twenty four packages should last us a year or more. But what are the zipper bags for?”

  “They’ll help preserve it. The only reason coffee has an expiration date on it is because air will inevitably seem into the package through the seams. Every layer of plastic we put between the coffee and the outside air will delay that process.

  “I ordered some raw coffee beans on the internet that are guaranteed to grow for a year. I’ll grow just a couple of plants in the garden every year, not to make coffee with, but to get fresher beans to put aside for the following year. Then when the EMP hits, we’ll be able to grow and grind our own, plus extra we can barter for other things we need.”

  Sarah had a good head on her shoulders. She thought of many things Dave never even dreamed of.

  She made an excellent prepper partner.

  But even Sarah wasn’t infallible. Despite her best efforts, the zip lock bags hadn’t kept the coffee from going stale.

  Dave suspected that it was the eventual chemical breakdown of the coffee inside the bag, and not the air on the outside, that determined its shelf life.

  And the coffee beans she’d ordered on the internet?

  Dave couldn’t find them.

  The previous spring, right after Sarah and the girls vanished from his life, he planted a large garden in the yard of a vacant house behind him. Sarah had done a great job of buying and cataloging the vegetable and berry seeds she’d collected in the months prior to her fateful flight.

  But the coffee beans weren’t among them.

  He’d searched high and low for two full days, in every nook and cranny he could think of. He still couldn’t find them.

  He tried to remember her exact words. Had she said she bought some on the internet? Or did she say she was going to? Perhaps she never got around to it. Or maybe they were lost in shipment. He’d remembered her getting all excited when some seeds came in the mail one day. He’d thought they were coffee beans. But maybe they were something else.

  Wherever they were, he was confident they weren’t in the house.

  In any case, stale coffee was better than no coffee at all. He conserved it as much as he could, only boiling a small amount each morning in his campground coffee pot.

  This would be his last cup of the day before he started work. As he stood at the back door, he watched the leaves fall off the peach tree in the corner of the yard. One of them floated down and landed squarely on the top of the head of one of the rabbits he raised for food.

  The rabbit was startled and jumped, running all the way across the yard.

  Another of the rabbits, this one not so timid, went to the leaf to check it out. He sniffed it, then nibbled on it, then decided he didn’t like the taste.

  He went back to nibble on the grass.

  Dave started each of his days with a designated mission. It was a way to trying to maintain a sense of order in his newly turbulent life.

  Today’s mission was to slip through the passageway he’d cut in the fence between his house and the old Hansen house and do some gardening. The Hansen house was the vacant two story directly behind his own. He was lucky in that the Hansens, when they’d lived there, were extremely reclusive and valued their privacy.

  So much so that they had an eight foot privacy fence built around their entire back yard.

  The fence had been perfect for hiding the rows of tall corn and other food he’d grown in their back yard during the spring and summer months.

  But now growing season was over. Fall was setting in, and the plants in the Hansens’ back yard were withering and dying.

  But that was okay. It was part of his plan.

  He’d already harvested all of the food he could use from the plants.

  His garage was full of dried corn, sun-dried tomatoes, and other vegetables he’d chopped into pieces and then dried in the sun for consumption later.

  And he’d filled his belly every day of the late spring and summer with nutritious food, even as many in the neighborhoods around him were starving to death.

  So the plants had served their primary purpose.

  But there was still more they could do. After he’d removed the corn and the wheat and the other assorted vegetables, he’d stopped wasting valuable water on them and let them wither and die.

  Now they made perfect rabbit food to get his furry food source through the winter months.

  He planned to cull the rabbit population considerably before the weather turned cold. He didn’t want it to get out of hand and run out of food before spring came. Also, he knew that any cooking he did in the cold weather months would use two or three times as much fuel as it would to cook the same food in warm weather.

  So he planned to use his charcoal powered camp stove to make as much rabbit jerky as possible before the winter set in.

  He expected it to be a brutal winter. The winter two years before the blackout broke all kinds of records. The previous winter broke them again. That puzzled Dave, because all over the news they were talking about the world getting warmer.

  He finally wrote it off as a bunch of angry scientists arguing with each other just for the sake of arguing. He decided that if the world was warming, it sure wasn’t doing a very good job of it.

  At least not in San Antonio, Texas, and not during the wintertime.

  So he’d do what was prudent. He’d plan for the worst winter of his life.

  And he’d cross his fingers and hope it was something less than that.

  -2-

  Dave crawled through his makeshift gate and into the Hansens’ yard. He hadn’t been there in several weeks, since he’d finished his harvest.

  He was surprised to see that as wilted as the upper stalks of corn were, the lower part of each stalk was still green and supple.

  That made sense, he guessed. The first part of the plant to die would naturally be the part farthest away from the water source.

  And the late summer thunderstorms they’d had in recent weeks certainly helped.

  He checked his rain barrels against the Hansen house.

  Most of them were half full or better. He’d managed to make it through the spring and summer months without running low on water, by conserving where he could and by gathering as many of his neighbors’ trash cans as he could find.

  He’d installed rain gutters on his house and on a house next door, and made makeshift gutters out of two by fours for the Hansen house.

  He could now put his earlier concerns to rest. He was now confident that as long as it rained periodically throughout the year, he’d never run out of water to drink and to irrigate his crops with.

  He felt accomplished for that. He knew there were hundreds around him who’d run out o
f water, or food, and had given up.

  He could hear the gunshots on a nightly basis. And sometimes during the day too.

  But he had plenty of food, and plenty of water. He would survive, where many others wouldn’t.

  And his survival would enable him to pursue his real passion, and the only thing left in his life with any value to him.

  His being able to survive the coming winter would enable him to embark on a mission to find his family.

  Whether they were alive or dead, he was determined to reunite with them.

  It had started out as an impossible dream, really. After all, they were almost exactly a thousand miles away, and farther north where the winters were harsher. Dave thought he’d protected enough vehicle parts in his Faraday cage to get the Explorer running again. So that much wasn’t a problem.

  The problem was, Dave had no earthly idea what the world was like out there. Whether the roads were even passable now, after being littered with tens of thousands of ruined and abandoned vehicles.

  And if the roads were being used by an occasional prepper who, like Dave, had preserved the capability to restore his vehicles, then what?

  Surely they would be targets for outlaws who’d want to take their vehicles away from them at gunpoint. Would the outlaws set up roadblocks along the way and ambush the preppers, then steal their wheels?

  Or would the highways be forgotten and abandoned now? Would he be able to just cruise up to Kansas City, retrieve his family, and then come back unmolested?

  He wasn’t naïve enough to believe that, but it was a nice thought.

  What had started out as an impossible dream turned into more than that.

  He lay in bed at night trying to imagine all the various scenarios he might encounter along the way. What would happen if the Explorer broke down, and he had to proceed on foot? What would happen if he was shot and wounded, a hundred miles from nowhere? What would happen if he was stopped and held up at gunpoint, and was left stranded on the highway with no food and water?