Castroville: Countdown to Armageddon: Book 7 Read online

  Countdown to Armageddon:

  Book 7

  CASTROVILLE

  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 2015 by Darrell Maloney

  This book is dedicated to

  Lynn Swoboda Zuniga

  Lance Owens

  Doug Downing

  Laura Barrineau Eady

  Thank you for making me work on the days when I really didn’t want to…

  THE STORY THUS FAR…

  Scott Harter was nothing special. Just an ordinary guy living in the suburbs with a typical family and a dog named Duke. He was a successful businessman who owed a group of self-storage units in and around San Antonio.

  Everything about Scott was average, except perhaps for his extraordinary luck. He was a very lucky man.

  It was that good luck that drove him to dig inside a storage locker when its renter defaulted on his contract.

  What he found in the locker didn’t make much sense at first. Some old maps of the heavens. A lot of literature about the Mayans. And a journal, left behind by an old college professor who seemingly vanished from the face of the earth.

  It turned out the Mayans could predict solar flare activity. They discovered that solar storms, like most other things in the universe, run in cycles. Just as earth had seasons of increased storm activity, so did the sun.

  And just as the Mayans had seen the planets and their moons without the aid of telescopes, they knew a lot of other things as well. Beyond all reason, they knew that the cyclic solar activities around the year 2020, give or take a few years, would cause unfathomable damage.

  A big problem, as Scott saw it, was that the Mayans weren’t very specific. The professor said that the solar storms came about every two hundred years. He’d commented in his notes that it was akin to predicting on which day the first snowstorm of the winter might come. It was obviously coming. But pinning it down far ahead of time was a whole lot harder.

  For the better part of two years, Scott and his girlfriend Joyce worked against the clock, praying each day that the sun’s electromagnetic pulses would hold off a little longer. They built a secure compound ninety miles away from San Antonio and stocked it with everything they’d need to survive Armageddon.

  They built a tall security fence around most of the compound, to hide the fact that they were keeping cattle, pigs, chickens and rabbits on the inside.

  And most importantly, Scott built a huge Faraday cage, the size of a two car garage. Inside the cage he’d placed the small things they’d need to carry on the lives they’d become accustomed to. The television sets and microwaves and video games.

  And the important things, too. Batteries. Spare parts to get the vehicles running again. Spare pumps and transformers and surveillance cameras.

  When the solar storm finally happened, it sent electromagnetic pulses toward the earth at half a million miles an hour. Everything, from flashlights to vehicles to pacemakers, stopped functioning.

  At the compound, the group of six was safe. But there was a lot to be done.

  Things went relatively smoothly at the compound. The group transitioned into a farming and ranching lifestyle. With the help of Tom Haskins, their one and only neighbor, they learned to plant and harvest crops, and how to care for livestock.

  Scott developed a close friendship with a San Antonio police officer named John Castro. A war hero, John fought hard to join the SAPD despite leaving half a leg in the burning sands of Fallujah. And he was fighting equally hard to save the city he loved.

  Scott and John talked frequently by ham radio. Scott learned that San Antonio was decimated. Less than ten percent of the city would survive the waves of starvation and suicides. Bodies were stacked in the streets and burned until they were merely piles of ashes and bones.

  But that wasn’t all. The decomposing bodies had created a pneumonia-like plague that was sweeping through the cities. It was treatable only with massive doses of penicillin, and was ravaging what was left of the population.

  John was sure to be infected eventually. He was out among the masses every day, trying to restore order and to bring his city back from the brink. But he was desperate to get his wife and two girls away from the city.

  Tom and Scott made a harrowing trip back to the city and dropped off a load of desperately needed food. In exchange for the food, they brought back something even better: John’s wife and daughters.

  Then John came down with the plague. He went into a coma because he was allergic to penicillin and couldn’t be treated using the normal protocol. San Antonio was out of an alternative antibiotic. But Tom was able to find some in nearby Junction.

  Scott made a second run to San Antonio, to drop off the medication that would save his friend’s life.

  Unfortunately, Scott didn’t make it back safely. In fact, he didn’t make it back at all. He was ambushed by a gang of thugs who shot him and left him to die.

  Scott recovered fully, but in the process was exposed to the deadly plague sweeping through the city. Although he showed no symptoms, he was told he could be a carrier. And that old people and infants were especially susceptible to the infectious disease.

  He opted to stay away from the compound for the few months to a year it would take for the plague to dissipate, instead of endangering his newborn grandson. In doing so, he relied on the men and women he left behind to make do without him.

  And he volunteered to help his new friends in the San Antonio Police Department try to regain order in the city.

  Scott wore the uniform with pride. He knew it was only temporary, and he’d never be a “real” cop. But he was making a difference, and it gave him a sense of accomplishment while he waited for the “all clear” that would allow him to return home again.

  Scott, still in San Antonio, was talking to his family via ham radio when he heard shots ring out. “We’re under attack!” Joyce shouted.

  Scott brought reinforcements and arrived at the compound in the waning minutes of the battle, and were able to help finish off the attackers.

  But the damage had been done. Scott’s girlfriend Joyce was killed instantly when she was struck in the forehead as the battle raged.

  The group cried as one. It was a dreadful loss.

  As it turned out, the gang which attacked the compound was infamous around the Kerrville area for their brutality. After Tom and Scott put the gang’s bodies on display as a warning for others to steer clear, word got around Junction. City leaders decided the grizzled old Tom Haskins might just be the man tough enough to clear the other gangs out of Junction and Kerrville and clean up the towns.

  Tom was offered the job of sheriff, and reluctantly accepted.

  Back in San Antonio, Scott was deemed experienced enough to be given a new partner of his own. Named Rhett Butler, the rookie quipped, “Hey, what can I say? My mom was a big Gone with the Wind fan.”

  Scott laughed out loud in disbelief when he learned that Rhett had managed to find and marry a girl named Scarlett.

  Rhett and Scarlett quickly became two of Scott’s closest friends.

  Scott was injured on the job, and was treated for an infection by a nurse named Becky. She was the same nurse who treated his gunshot wound.

  Becky was an angel of mercy. Not only did she clear up the infection, she also helped him grieve, and taught him to deal with Joyce’s death.

  In the process, Becky’s love for Scott, there since their first encounter but never acted on, grew stronger.

  The story ended as the plague
started to dissipate. Scott was called aside by the police chief and given the first good news he’d heard in awhile.

  “You’ve become a fine officer, Scott, and you should be proud of the work you’ve done for the city of San Antonio. I wish I could keep you around longer. But I know you’ve got loved ones up north of here who need you worse than we do.

  “We expect the FEMA people to issue an all clear within a few weeks. You need to start making plans to go back to Junction and rejoin your family.”

  It was the news he couldn’t wait to hear. But he was conflicted. He now loved Becky and didn’t want to leave her behind. But she was filling a key role as a head nurse in one of the busiest hospitals in Texas. It was also one of the hospitals that was most understaffed.

  “If I pull you away from here, your co-workers will have to work even harder. And they’re being run into the ground already. But please understand, everyone else I love in the world is up north in the compound. I’ve got to get back to them. I’ve just got to.”

  Becky countered, “I’ve already talked to the hospital staff, and all the other nurses agree it’s best for the long-term to let me go.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “In Kerrville, twelve miles from the compound, the old community college has been boarded up since the blackout. They used to teach nursing and medical courses there. They still have the equipment and materials, and they can be used once again. The unemployment situation in both Junction and Kerrville is dreadful. People are out of work and clamoring for something to do.

  “I’m going to reopen that college. Only instead of Kerrville Community College it’ll be called the Kerrville School of Medicine. I’ve already talked via ham with the state licensing board. They’re up for it, provided one of their members reviews and approves the curriculum and testing material.”

  But not everything was rosy.

  One of John Castro’s oldest and closest friends, Robbie Benton, had been driven mad by the monotony of collecting and burning bodies day in and day out.

  He wrote in a private journal, “This isn’t what I signed up for twelve years ago when I became a cop. I think it’s time for me to start generating some dead bodies of my own.”

  Robbie was also driven by his obsession with John’s wife Hannah. For years he’d been trying to insert himself into the family’s lives, so that when John was assassinated by an unknown thug, he could step in to comfort them. And to become Hannah’s new hero.

  In the last book of the series, Robbie Benton went forward with his plans to assassinate John Castro. He laid in ambush for his friend, and fired two shots into him from a sniper’s nest ninety yards away.

  John Castro lay gravely wounded in a field of Texas bluebonnets and other wildflowers.

  In his unconscious state he had no idea what had happened, or how incredibly lucky he was. For despite Robbie Benton’s best efforts, he was still alive.

  Sara, who was Jordan’s girlfriend at the time of the blackout and who was welcomed into Scott’s family, learned that her mother had survived the turmoil and was still out there somewhere.

  She also learned that her mom wasn’t a willing participant in the abuse she’d suffered at the hands of a brutal step-father. That her mother was abused herself. It wasn’t that her mother didn’t try to protect her. It was that she was unable to.

  The hatred she had for her mom turned to empathy, and that grew into an overwhelming desire to find her mother and to bring her back to the compound.

  Tom Haskins, who’d grown close to Sara and was more a father to her than her step-father had ever been, agreed to help her. They prepared for a trip to San Antonio, not knowing where their quest would take them from there, or how long they’d be.

  Meanwhile, big trouble was brewing.

  But it wasn’t in Sara’s old house, or even her neighborhood.

  It was much farther away.

  Ninety one million miles away, more or less.

  On the surface of the sun, great masses of hydrogen, helium and a few other assorted gasses broiled.

  Never quite stable, the monstrous star’s molten plasma was especially turbulent in the months and years just following its massive explosion some three years before.

  In the same way a massive earthquake can cause a fault line to be unstable and therefore more susceptible to aftershocks, a similar effect was happening on the earth’s sun.

  The sun was growing stormy again. And it threatened to wreak even more havoc on earth than the first solar storm had.

  Before the first EMPs bombarded the earth, there was a small subgroup of society who called themselves “preppers.”

  As their name implied, they were preparing themselves for life after a worldwide disaster.

  When the EMPs bombarded the earth and the world went black the preppers survived.

  But not even the preppers expected the sun to give them a one-two punch.

  Sara and Tom made it to San Antonio, only to find that her mother had moved to the nearby city of Castroville. They had a hot lead, and pounced on it. They felt they were within days of being reunited, when they received some disheartening news.

  The city of Castroville had gone bad. The town was overrun by outlaws who ran the sheriff out of town and now ran it by their own rules.

  Suddenly Tom and Sara’s search for her mom turned into a rescue mission.

  They teamed up with a lone Texas Ranger by the name of Randy, who was on a mission of his own to try to clean up the town.

  In San Antonio, Robbie Benton went on the run, and hid out at the abandoned San Antonio zoo. The manhunt was slowly closing in on him.

  And on the surface of the sun, the storms got more and more violent.

  And Now, Book 7

  of the

  Countdown to Armageddon series

  CASTROVILLE

  -1-

  Sheriff Tom Haskins was in a world of hurt. He came to groggily thinking he’d dozed off, but that wasn’t quite true. He’d actually passed out from the pain. And he wasn’t quite sure what woke him back up again.

  It might have been the brilliant sun, just risen in the east and warming anything and everything on the Lazy R Ranch outside of Castroville, Texas.

  And streaming through a knothole in his prison wall to shine directly in his swollen face.

  Or maybe it was the ugly brown rat picking dried blood off that same face and eating it while eyeing Tom and wondering what other part of him he’d eat next.

  He’d seen the rat through his good eye when he cracked it open a couple of minutes before. It was one of the few parts of his body he could move without pain. And as he’d eased it open, there was the rat, a few inches away, his ugly whiskers bobbing up and down as he chewed.

  He had a cocky look on his face, as though he’d won the sweepstakes and the world’s biggest prize, and nothing or nobody was going to take it away from him.

  Tom eased the eyelid closed again. The creature in front of him wasn’t large by rat standards. He was rather diminutive. Barely larger than a mouse, really.

  Still, Tom hoped he didn’t come after his good eye after he tired of dried blood. For one thing, it was the only one Tom had left. And least the only one he was sure of. The other eye was swollen shut and caked with something. Maybe blood, maybe something else. Maybe the types of fluids that ooze from a shattered eyeball. Maybe a combination of both. He wasn’t sure.

  And the other thing, the other reason Tom hoped the rat passed his good eye by… was because as small as the creature was, Tom wasn’t quite sure he’d be able to fight him off.

  They’d beaten him brutally, with baseball bats and kicks to every part of his body he couldn’t cover. His face was swollen to the approximate size and shape of a basketball, and was as black as the devil’s soul.

  His lips were so swollen he had to keep his mouth completely open just to keep a small hole open between them. Just big enough to force air in and out. For breathing through his nose was impossible.

&nbsp
; His nose was broken. Crushed, really. He knew that much for sure because he remembered hearing the sickening crunching sound as a heavy leather boot connected with the bridge of his nose during the beating. It had bled profusely for awhile, then finally stopped. Both nostrils were now completely clogged with dried blood and breathing through his swollen lips was really the only option he had left.

  Even the breathing hurt. He was sure he had at least a couple of fractured ribs, because his lungs were badly bruised. But he didn’t feel the sharp stabbing pain when he inhaled. That was the kind of pain that would have told him a bone shard from a broken rib was trying to pierce the lung. And he was able to inflate both lungs, as painful as that was to do. Those were good signs and meant the lungs hadn’t collapsed. And that the ribs, though surely fractured, weren’t completely shattered.

  So there was that.

  He could wiggle his fingers and toes, although with much agony.

  His left forearm was useless, but that wasn’t his shooting arm.

  In a moment of folly he reached down to see whether his gun was still in his holster. When he found it wasn’t, he was disappointed for a moment. Then he realized how ludicrous the thought and almost laughed at himself for his stupidity.

  Almost. Luckily he didn’t, for even laughing would have hurt.

  He moved his arm toward his face and the cocky rat decided he had somewhere else he had to be. He stopped chewing and scurried off into the darkness.

  Tom closed his good eye and started to drift off again.

  Perhaps to die. Perhaps to awaken later with a little less pain, a little more movement.

  The state he was in at this particular moment in time, he didn’t much care one way or the other.

  -2-

  At their camp a couple of miles away, Sara was perplexed. And almost nauseous with worry.

  She poured a cup of campfire coffee and handed it to “Ranger Randy,” as she’d started calling her new friend. She filled her own Hello Kitty cup with the same coffee. The bright pink kiddie cup looked ridiculous being used by a grown woman at a rustic campsite.