Payback: Alone: Book 7 Read online

  ALONE

  Book 7:

  Payback

  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 Ava McKnight.

  I speak on behalf of many who love you and are praying for you each and every day.

  You’re tough. Way tougher than cancer.

  Stay strong. We’re rooting for you to beat this thing.

  The Story Thus Far…

  They say even the best of plans sometimes go awry.

  Dave and Sarah were modern day preppers. People who saw a great disaster coming and planned for it.

  They were ridiculed by their family and friends, but it didn’t deter them.

  Dave took a second job. They made room in their budget for things like food stockpiles, weapons and ammunition, generators and spare vehicle parts.

  They protected their electronics in a huge Faraday cage. Started raising rabbits not as pets, but as a future source of food.

  And they took great pains to make their house look vacant.

  Because looters never waste their time and energy breaking into an empty house.

  They thought they were set, but fate played an evil trick on them.

  For the one thing they had absolutely no control over was the timing of the catastrophe.

  While Sarah and their daughters were on a plane headed for a wedding a thousand miles away, a massive solar storm took place on the surface of the sun. Electromagnetic pulses bombarded the earth and shorted out nearly everything that ran on electricity.

  Dave’s equipment was protected and survived the onslaught. But it was of little consolation to him. For even though he still had lights, his family was gone. And there was no way to determine whether they were alive or dead.

  He got his vehicle running again. But if he broke down en route, he’d be afoot, averaging ten to fifteen miles a day. He wouldn’t make it before winter set in. And winters in the Kansas City area could be brutal.

  He had no choice but to endure a winter in San Antonio without his wife and girls, and to set out in the spring instead.

  The winter in San Antonio was the worst in recent history. It was as though Mother Nature was telling the survivors, “The worldwide blackout isn’t enough for you. Here’s some harsh winter weather to make it ten times worse.”

  Dave had a rough go of it, but he survived.

  The trip to Kansas City wasn’t an easy one. He was beaten almost to death for stealing a car battery, of all things, almost killed a second time by bushwhackers, and arrived at his final destination only to find out the camp had been overrun.

  It seemed there was a massive prison break from the military prison at nearby Fort Leavenworth.

  The inmates didn’t have the option of stealing cars and driving away. No freight trains to hop. No busses to ride.

  Only their feet to put miles between themselves and Leavenworth, and the hundreds of law enforcement officers watching out for them.

  Many used the logic that the authorities were hampered too, by the same lack of communications and vehicles. They reasoned that by staying off the main roads and moving overland, they could travel great distances without being seen.

  And many of them made their way to freedom that way.

  Many others went to ground. They squatted on vacant properties or took over farms and ranches by force.

  Sarah had taken Lindsey and Beth to her sister Karen’s farm. Karen and her husband Tommy were preppers themselves and therefore should have been able to provide for their needs.

  And they would have, except that a brutal double murderer named Swain brought his band of thugs in to take over the place.

  Tommy and the other men were deemed major threats and shot dead. Swain held the women and children under his thumb, turning them into slaves.

  Swain held a special fondness for Sarah, telling her she looked remarkably like an old girlfriend. A woman he’d never stopped loving.

  Sarah tried to hide it from her daughters, but Swain brutalized her in so many ways. Her daughters knew. Everyone knew. But no one had the power to stop it.

  Dave arrived at the compound and waged a one-man guerilla war against Swain’s army.

  He managed to kill them all, one or two at a time.

  All except Swain. He didn’t ask Sarah why she hated the man so. He had his suspicions, but respected her enough to allow her secrets to remain so.

  “I want to kill him myself,” she said. “I’ve earned that right.”

  Indeed she had; and indeed she did.

  The saga would have ended then, except that youngest daughter Beth was gone. She was sold to an elderly couple who was passing through looking for a horse.

  Beth looked and acted remarkably like the couple’s only granddaughter, lost just weeks before. The woman, already suffering from Alzheimer’s, was hit especially hard by the loss.

  And no one… not her husband Sal, not little Beth, not God Almighty Himself, could convince her Beth wasn’t her little Becky.

  The old couple, Sal and Nellie, took Beth and headed west. To Albuquerque, they said.

  Dave followed suit, several weeks behind them.

  Albuquerque had descended straight into the pits of hell. Police officers deserted by the hundreds. They felt that protecting their families was more important than protecting strangers. Once a skeleton crew, the last remaining officers simply gave up. The department collapsed, the county sheriff’s office not far behind it.

  What followed was chaos.

  Gangs had infiltrated the city in recent years in a big way.

  And they took the opportunity to simply take over.

  Within weeks boundaries had been drawn. The city was divvied up into sections, each one controlled by rival factions.

  Many of the gangs were in a state of perpetual warfare.

  Citizens with no gang affiliations were forced to leave. Usually with just what they could carry.

  Outside the city limits, huge tent communities sprang up. They resembled refugee camps. And in essence, that’s what they were. Hundreds of thousands of refugees, cast out from their homes and killing time, simply because there was nowhere else for them to go.

  Dave teamed up with a drug dealer named Tony. Together they infiltrated each of the sectors which fronted Interstate 40 in a desperate attempt to find Sal and Nellie and little Beth, and to rescue the girl from her captors.

  In the process Tony was killed.

  It was the one and only time he’d left Dave behind on a mission he felt he had to go on alone.

  His dying words to Dave:

  “Dave, listen to me. They never made it inside. The sentries laughed at them and sent them away. They told the old man his pickup truck looked ridiculous pulled by two broken down old horses. The last time they were seen they were headed west on the interstate away from the city.”

  Dave could have left then and there. Probably should have. Nobody would have blamed him if he’d left Tony’s body there in the mud and went off immediately in search of his daughter.

  But it wasn’t Dave’s way.

  Dave left his friend, but came back two nights later.

  Loaded for bear. And ready to avenge his friend’s death and to take no prisoners.

  His operation was dicey at best.

  He was aided by the most unusual of allies: battle-tested members of the Aryan Brotherhood who just found out Dave’s enemies had executed the best drug dealer in Albuquerque, and were none too happy about it.

  Dave was assaulting the headquarters of the Dalton’s Raiders gang when the Aryan
s came out of nowhere, firing wantonly with automatic weapons.

  He was lucky he wasn’t killed in the process, and took the opportunity to make his getaway.

  And now,

  Book 7 of the series,

  PAYBACK

  Chapter 1

  Dave Speer had always had a problem with basic common sense. Sarah liked to tease him about it, calling him “thinking challenged” from time to time. His own mother, God rest her soul, once told him he should let others do the thinking for him whenever he could.

  “Because they do it way more often than you do,” she explained. “Therefore they’re much better at it than you are.”

  That was the week after Dave’s sixteenth birthday, while he was in a hospital bed recovering from one of his more bone-headed schemes.

  He’d tied a loop on one end of a fifty foot section of rope, then dropped the loop over the trailer hitch on the back of an old Apache pickup truck.

  While the truck was stopped for a red light.

  When the light changed the truck took off, towing Dave on his skateboard behind it.

  “It was fun at first,” he’d told his mom.

  The trouble was, the truck hit the next three lights green, and got his speed up to forty miles an hour, before the fourth light turned yellow and he jammed on his brakes.

  “He was going so fast I was afraid to let go,” Dave explained. “Then when he hit his brakes I had no way to stop.”

  “Oh, you found a way,” his father told him. “It just wasn’t a very good one.”

  Dave had indeed found a way to stop that day.

  And to be sure, it wasn’t a very good one.

  He flew over the bed of the ’55 Chevy truck, collided with the back of the cab, and broke the small window with his knee. His momentum carried him over the cab and he came to rest on the truck’s hood.

  The driver of the truck was a grizzled old biker on his way to the Harley Davidson shop to price a new motorcycle.

  His line was the best one of the day, and one which Dave still remembered many years later.

  “I heard a loud crash and looked out my windshield and all of a sudden there was this punk kid on my truck. I thought, ‘By God, it’s raining dumbasses.’”

  In addition to shattering his kneecap, Dave broke both legs but made a full recovery

  He never stopped doing dumb things, though. Usually on a whim without any planning ahead of time.

  Everyone in his family knew the way he was and accepted it. Until they passed away, Dave’s parents adopted the strangest of habits every time Sarah called.

  The word, “Hello” was always followed by, “What did Dave do this time, and is he okay?”

  When Dave was in the Marine Corps, his supervisors were well aware of his habits and weren’t so sympathetic. His gunnery sergeant once told him, “Corporal Speer, you’re as dumb as an asphalt shingle, but you’re a damn fine Marine. The reason you’re a damn fine Marine is because you have more guts than anybody else in the Corps. That’s because you’re too dumb to realize you should be afraid.”

  Dave sat beneath a tree, trying to make sense of what had just happened.

  The sun was just breaking on the horizon and a new day was dawning over the city of Albuquerque.

  All over town people were waking up and crawling out of their sleeping bags. Or beds, for those who were lucky enough to have them.

  They were drinking campground coffee, made from boiling river water and dipping a sock full of coffee grounds into it until the water turned black enough to mask the water’s nasty taste.

  Or they were stretching and setting out on another miserable day, trying to find the food they’d need to see that same sun set again.

  Dave, he just sat there confused.

  He’d gone into the part of Albuquerque Tony had called “Crazy Town.”

  He’d gone single-handedly against the Dalton gang, reputedly the most unstable and dangerous band of thugs within a thousand miles in any direction.

  He’d gotten the upper hand, and was winning his personal war, when suddenly a band of allies appeared from nowhere.

  A band of allies who took over the fight and allowed Dave to slip away.

  Dave still didn’t have a clue what had just happened.

  He had no way of knowing he was aided by the Aryan Brotherhood, furious because Dalton’s Raiders had just murdered their favorite drug dealer.

  He had no way of knowing as soon as the shooting was done the Brotherhood went looking for Dave. To find out who he was and why they had a common enemy.

  They’d have almost certainly killed him, if for no other reason to steal the weapons he carried.

  But Dave was lucky.

  He was already out of Crazy Town, on the seat of Tony’s Polaris, riding hard toward a safer place.

  He’d thrown logic out the window when he went to war with the Raiders. They’d already taken the life of a friend. Tony had told him just before he died that Beth wasn’t even in Albuquerque. She was somewhere west of the city.

  Tony had appealed to Dave to abandon his urge to avenge him. To go after his daughter instead.

  Most men would have taken that advice and cut their losses.

  But not Dave.

  Dave wasn’t that way.

  To Dave friendship and loyalty were things he couldn’t ignore.

  Maybe even to the point where they trumped common sense.

  Tony had been someone Dave never would have associated with under normal circumstances. He proved to Dave that even a drug dealer could have a good side.

  He started as an acquaintance, then became a friend.

  Then became a friend who died trying to help Dave find his missing daughter.

  Dave would not let his death go unpunished.

  Dave didn’t have a choice.

  He had to go in. Avenging his friend's death might have been stupid. But it was something he had to do.

  He’d faced great odds and still came out alive. So many things could have gone wrong but didn’t.

  He should have called it a day. Considered Tony’s debt repaid.

  But now there was something else he had to do too.

  Not as a drug dealer’s ally and not as Tony’s friend.

  But rather as a father and a husband.

  Tony let it slip his last day on earth that he had a young wife and two sons.

  They were living in Georgia somewhere.

  And they needed to know about Tony.

  Not just that he was dead. But that he missed them and thought of them often. That he had plans to move east to be with them.

  Mostly Dave wanted to tell Tony’s family he was a good man. That he might have lived an unclean life, but he died an honorable death.

  He died helping another desperate family with absolutely nothing to gain for himself.

  In Dave logic, his debt to Tony still wasn’t paid.

  In the end, Dave would do what he was famous for. What all his friends and family had seen him do again and again. Faced with two very distinct and different possible courses of action, he’d discard the logical one and go with his heart.

  There wasn’t a cloud in the sky over Albuquerque. The day promised to be crisp and clear.

  But where Dave sat, it still appeared to be raining dumbasses.

  Chapter 2

  Getting back to Tony’s place wouldn’t be hard. What Dave lacked in the application of common sense he made up for in other ways.

  He was one of those guys who could visit a place once, then years later remember how to get back there.

  It wasn’t so much that he had a photographic memory. It was that he was very attentive. As he traveled he tended to notice subtle things that most others would miss.

  How a particular street sign might remind him of a like-named street he played on as a boy.

  How a water tower stood a hulking sentinel over an aging apple tree.

  How a blue cement mixer happened to die smack dab in the middle of an intersect
ion, and would likely still be there, ten thousand years from now, slowly turning into dust.

  He was a passenger on Tony’s Polaris the one and only time he ever visited his friend’s house. He didn’t know the address, or even the name of the street he was headed to.

  But he’d seen enough landmarks, had made mental notes of enough details, to find his way back there.

  Getting there wasn’t the problem, however.

  Getting there without being shot was the problem.

  Tony told Dave he didn’t have a lot of friends.

  That struck Dave as rather odd, since people came from near and far at the sound of Tony’s approaching vehicle.

  “Oh, bull,” he’d told his friend. “You have people coming out of the woodwork vying for your attention wherever you go.”

  “No. They’re not friends. They come clamoring to me because I have something they want. Every one of them. Most of them want the dope I’m peddling. Or they want me to share my food and water with them. They know from past experience that I’m a soft touch and will share with them when most others won’t.

  “The guys who guard my house aren’t my friends either. They’re merely doing a job. Oh, they’re friendly enough, but only because I pay them in gold or silver, and gold and silver are very hard to find anymore.”

  “I find that hard to believe, Tony. You’re a pretty likeable guy. I didn’t think I was going to like you at first, but I do.”

  “Don’t you go proposing to me or think about making out with me, Dave. I’m very strongly devoted to the fairer sex.”

  “Me too, I assure you. I’m just saying you weren’t what I expected. I expected…”

  “Me to be a dirt bag, a low-life?”

  “Well… yeah. I apologize for thinking that, but I pretty much did.”

  “Don’t apologize. Most drug dealers are low-lifes and dirt bags.”

  “So what makes you different?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe because I never thought about making it a permanent career. We were in a financial bind, in danger of losing our house and everything else we owned. I saw an opportunity to make some ridiculously easy money and took it.