Alone: Book 1: Facing Armageddon Read online

  ALONE

  By

  Darrell Maloney

  Copyright 2014 by Darrell Maloney

  -1-

  Dave couldn’t get the tune out of his head. He’d heard it all morning long, off and on, playing quietly in the back of his skull. And it was driving him crazy.

  Oh, it wasn’t unpleasant. It was a happy little ditty. At least it sounded that way. It sounded more like sunshine and smiles, rather than rainclouds and foreboding.

  Finally, he’d had enough.

  “Okay, let’s play a game,” he announced while looking in the rearview mirror at Lindsey and Beth.

  “I’ll hum you a tune, and the first one to guess the tune gets a candy bar when we get to the airport.”

  Sarah looked at him from the passenger seat. With that look.

  “Excuse me, mister? You’re going to get the girls all hyped up on sugar just before I take them on a four hour plane ride?”

  “Not both of them, honey. Just the one who guesses the name of the song.”

  “Uh… no. If that song is still bugging you, just hum it. If any one of us guesses it, you can buy each of us a cinnabon.”

  The girls laughed. Beth gave Lindsey a high five. Lindsey said, “All right! Go, Mom!”

  Dave coughed. At first he had no words.

  Then he found some, and stated the obvious.

  “Why is it okay to get all three of you hyped up on sugar but not okay to do it to just one of you?”

  “Because you know I have a thing for cinnabons. And I’m the mom. So that makes me the boss.”

  Lindsey broke out in uncontrollable laughter from the back seat, and Beth said, “Ooooohhh, Dad, you just got owned.”

  “I don’t know if it’s worth it. I mean, those things aren’t cheap, you know.”

  “Oh, we know, don’t we girls?”

  Two heads nodded up and down behind her.

  “But, Dave, they are soooo worth the price. And I’ll give you a bite. And think how sweet I’ll taste when you kiss me goodbye.”

  Beth made a gagging sound.

  “Besides, if you want us to help you with that song, you have to pay the piper. It’s only fair. And if you don’t, it’ll continue to drive you crazy for days. Maybe even the whole week we’re gone. And we’d feel so bad for you if that happened.”

  “Yeah, you’re just oozing with sympathy for my plight.”

  Sarah smiled and blew him a kiss. She was even more gorgeous than the day they’d met thirteen years before. It suddenly dawned on him that he was an incredibly lucky man, to have such a beautiful wife and family. And that the price of three cinnabons wasn’t that great, in the grand scheme of things.

  In other words, he played right into Sarah’s hands. She knew he would, as soon as she let the kiss fly.

  “Okay, here goes.”

  Dave started humming the tune that had played in his mind a thousand times since the previous evening.

  It took the three of them no more than ten notes. They’d have been “Name That Tune” champions in another era.

  All three of them blurted out, almost simultaneously, “It’s a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood.”

  Then Dave felt incredibly stupid.

  “Of course. How could I have not known that? The old Mr. Rogers theme song. Sheesh! Now I really feel dumb.”

  Sarah said, “Did you know that Fred Rogers was a Green Beret in Vietnam, and wore his red sweater to hide all of his tattoos?”

  Dave scoffed.

  “Where did you hear that?”

  “On the internet. Why?”

  “That story’s been going around for years. It was debunked a long time ago. Mr. Rogers was a fine man, but he was never a Green Beret.”

  “Oh, yeah? Where did you hear that?”

  “On the internet.”

  It was too much for Lindsey.

  “Gee whiz, would you two stop believing what you read on the internet? Nearly all of it is garbage.”

  She turned to her little sister.

  “Do we have to teach these old people everything?”

  Beth said nothing but nodded her head decisively. She was in firm agreement.

  Dave was a man of his word, and after the family checked in at the ticket kiosk and Sarah and the girls got their boarding passes, they made a beeline to Cinnabon.

  “Daddy, are you going to walk us to the gate?”

  “No, honey, I can’t go through security without a boarding pass, so I’ll walk you as far as I can and then you can give me a great big hug and a kiss.”

  “I wish you could come with us.”

  “I know, sugar. I wish I could too. But with two of the guys being sick at work, they just can’t let me take vacation right now. Uncle Tommy will understand, and we can go fishing another time. And you’ll be so busy helping Aunt Susan get everything ready for the wedding, you won’t even have time to miss me.”

  “Bet I will!”

  Sarah looked at him longingly. They were going to be apart for their twelfth anniversary. It would be the first one they’d missed.

  It was as if he could read her mind.

  “We’ll do something special when you get back, I promise. We’ll get a sitter and go spend the weekend at the lake. Just the two of us.”

  “I’d like that.”

  He walked the three special ladies in his life to the TSA checkpoint and got his hugs and kisses.

  He held Sarah close and told her he loved her.

  Little Beth rolled her eyes and said, “No mush, you two.”

  Dave paid her no mind. He looked Sarah in the eyes and said, “It’ll seem like forever before I see you again.”

  Neither of them had a clue how true those words would be.

  -2-

  Dave was a builder by trade, but it was the off season, so he’d taken a second job to help pay the ever-growing expenses of feeding a family of four, and preparing for an uncertain future. They lived in a suburb on the northern outskirts of San Antonio. And even though San Antonio had moderate weather most of the year, it was cold enough in January and February to bring new house construction to a standstill.

  However, cabinet building went on all year around.

  Dave’s second job was at a small cabinet shop. He made some of the cabinets he might later be installing in some of the new homes he built. In fact, the owner of the cabinet shop, Roger Hudson, had been a close friend for years. He made a point to buy Roger’s cabinets whenever he could. They were well made and reasonably priced. And he was a big believer in buying local whenever he could.

  Roger offered Dave the entire day to send his girls up north to Kansas City. It was the least he could do, he said. After all, they were short handed and in a pinch to complete a couple of contracts by deadline. And Dave had volunteered to stay behind and miss his sister in law’s wedding to help out.

  Dave said no thanks to the full day off. The girls weren’t due to land in Kansas City until 6:10 p.m. due to a long layover at DFW. He could work the entire afternoon and still make it home in time for their phone call. He was looking forward to hearing all about the trip. It was six year old Beth’s first time on an airplane, and she’d been talking about little else for weeks. Dave hoped she had a pleasant time, because he knew she’d go into great detail to tell him everything about it.

  So working half a day was no big deal, really, and certainly no inconvenience. Dave liked this kind of work. He’d always been good with his hands, able to fashion pretty much anything out of anything else. Sarah joked that he was a lot like MacGyver from the old television series.

  “If anyone could build a submarine out of a couple of paperclips, it’s you.”

  He’d taken it
as a compliment. But he was indeed one of those men who looked at a pile of junk and saw promise from it. So this job suited him very well.

  The job also paid well, so it aided Dave and Sarah in another way that no one else knew about. Because they kept it a closely guarded secret.

  Dave and Sarah were preppers. Had been for several years. They were convinced that something catastrophic was about to befall mankind, and would wipe out most of the world’s population. And make it extremely difficult for the survivors to get by.

  It started one night in 2010. They were sitting on the couch eating popcorn and flipping channels when they stumbled across a documentary about the Mayans. It piqued their curiosity, and they watched it to the end.

  The narrator said that the Mayans predicted the end of the world on December 21, 2012. He didn’t say how or why the Mayans made that prediction. But he did point out some astounding facts. Like, for example, that the Mayans had identified all the planets, and each of the planets’ moons, without the aid of telescopes. After the program, Dave and Sarah had gone into their back yard and looked up at the sky. They couldn’t tell the planets from the stars. All of them were just points of light. And they couldn’t see any moons at all, save the earth’s own.

  Dave remembered Sarah saying, “How in the hell did they do that?”

  The narrator had offered other information about the Mayans that was equally intriguing. They knew how to forecast earthquakes and tidal waves.

  Dave had said, “That can’t be. Scientists today can’t even do that, and they have all kinds of fancy equipment.”

  But the pair was curious enough to do their own research, and they found that most of what the narrator had said was true. The Mayans discovered the planets and their moons without telescopes. They did indeed leave behind schedules of coming tidal waves and earthquakes. And they did indeed make such predictions without the aid of any type of machinery.

  The narrator was wrong about one thing, however. The Mayans never said the world was going to end on December 21, 2012.

  What the Mayans actually said was that the “final period of progress” would begin on that date.

  Scientists had been debating for a very long time exactly what the Mayans meant by “the last period of progress.”

  Dave and Sarah wondered too. And that led to even more research. After hundreds of hours on line and at the local library, they believed that they’d finally discovered what the Mayans meant.

  Another thing that intrigued scientists and archaeologists about the Mayans was their success in making other predictions. Predictions that had absolutely nothing to do with earthquakes and tidal waves.

  Rather, these predictions pertained to things like automobiles, helicopters and machines.

  The Mayans spoke of a time in the future when man would travel great distances on wheeled vehicles that would move under their own power. They would also fly, “like great winged birds in containers of metal” across the oceans to other lands of the world.

  “Wait a minute,” Sarah had said with a shudder. The Mayans were a landlocked society. How did they know about oceans or tidal waves or airplanes? And how could they possibly know about other lands of the world? This is getting spooky.”

  The Mayans spoke of man building machines that would someday do most of his work for him. But they also cautioned that the survival of machines was subject to the whims of nature.

  Dave and Sarah became convinced that the Mayans’ “last period of progress” would mark the time that all the machines suddenly and permanently stopped working. And they believed it would happen as the result of nature.

  “But what in the world could Mother Nature do that would knock out all the machines of the world? A hurricane or a tornado could certainly destroy a city, but it would have no affect on the machines in another country, or on another continent.”

  Sarah believed she found the answer when she was at the library one evening, looking through a picture book of the ancient Mayan temples. She noticed that many of their carvings portrayed the sun. So many, in fact, that she got the impression they worshipped it.

  “Okay, just hear me out,” she’d said when returning home that night.

  “We know that they believed there would come a time when something would stop all the machines in the world, presumably all at the same time. And they said it would be a naturally occurring event of some type.

  “But they never said it would originate on earth.”

  She smiled an accomplished smile, certain of her discovery.

  “So, what are you saying? A meteorite or an asteroid hitting the earth? That would send a lot of dust and particulates into the atmosphere, and the earth would cool, possibly for many years. Most of the animals and plants would die. But how would that keep a gasoline engine from working?”

  “No, honey. I said nothing about asteroids or meteorites. I think the threat is our own sun.”

  Dave scratched his head.

  “Okay, I’m lost. I don’t follow you at all.”

  She pulled out a book called Electricity and the Cosmos. On its cover was a rather magnificent photograph of a lightning filled sky setting a tree on fire.

  “Still lost.”

  “Be patient, my love.”

  Sarah turned to a page she’d marked with a post-it note. And she read aloud to him.

  “Electromagnetic pulses, or EMPs, are brief discharges of electricity which by themselves pose no health threat to man. However, they have the unfortunate effect of sending electrical current across positive and negative poles of batteries, across oppositely charged electronic components, across oppositely charged wires. The effective result is that anything an EMP touches is permanently shorted out.”

  She looked at him as his jaw dropped.

  “Now you tell me, honey, what all modern machines have in common.”

  Dave thought for a moment and replied, “They all have batteries, or circuit cards, or some type of electronic components.”

  -3-

  Sarah spent a whole week of her vacation time that year at the public library. The internet was a valuable source, but much of the reference material on the Mayans was not digitized. She felt almost like an antique as she pored over old fashioned hardback reference books and encyclopedias dating back to the 1950s.

  Every evening, after the homework and chores were done and the girls were tucked safely in bed, the couple did more research on the internet.

  In the end, they were convinced the earth was due a massive EMP, generated by a huge solar storm on the surface of the sun.

  But when? The Mayans merely said the window opened for the event at the end of December, 2012. They didn’t say how long the window would remain open.

  The only clue they had was the Mayans’ fascination with the number twelve. For some reason, the number was almost Biblical in Mayan seer and scientific circles. Most of their earthquake predictions went something like “On the one hundred and twentieth day after the twelfth day before the summer solstice.” It seemed almost nonsensical, yet it obviously made great sense to the Mayans.

  “What if they estimated the date of the EMP, and then counted back twelve months? That would mean the EMP would be December 21, 2013.”

  “Maybe. But then, they could just as easily have estimated the day and counted back twelve years. That would make it December 21, 2024.”

  In the end, they just didn’t know.

  But they did believe.

  They believed the Mayans had proven themselves capable of many amazing things.

  They believed that a primitive civilization that was familiar with the planets and their moons might also have a fascination with the sun.

  They believed that a civilization intelligent enough to predict earthquakes with no modern equipment could do other things equally as amazing. Say, for example, have the ability to predict cyclical storms on the surface of the sun.

  Lastly, they believed it was their duty to protect themselves and their family from
the turmoil they were sure was coming.

  It was on that day, in the spring of 2010, that they made the decision to be preppers.

  Over the weeks that followed, they shared their findings with Sarah’s brother and sister-in-law in Kansas City. They were cable television junkies and had already seen the prepper shows. It didn’t take much to convince them to start prepping too.

  They also discovered something the Mayans never mentioned. There was a way to protect some items from the effects of the EMP. It was called a Faraday cage, named after its inventor. The Faraday cage was basically a frame with a wire enclosure built around it. Items inside the cage were safe from electrical discharge even when electricity came into direct contact with the outside of the cage. The electricity didn’t penetrate the cage. It simply encased the outside of the cage itself.

  In 1961 a University of Texas student named Kit Foley discovered that the Faraday cage wasn’t infallible. Metal items placed too close to the wire exterior of the cage could allow a small arc of electricity to fly across the space between the items and the outer skin of the cage.

  Foley solved this problem by modifying the Faraday design, and lining it with foam rubber or with plywood. It was a more efficient, but costlier way to protect items from electrical surges. He called it a Foley cage.

  Dave and Sarah knew how to protect the items they deemed essential.

  And they had a plan in place to start prepping by stockpiling supplies that would help them survive after the EMP.

  The only real obstacle they had left in their path was funding. Dave made a pretty good living in the construction trade, and Sarah made a pretty good salary as a fifth grade teacher. But in a troubled economy there just wasn’t much left over for prepping.

  So Dave started looking for a second job.

  “It’ll just be for a year, maybe a year and a half,” Dave had said. “All the pay from the part time job will go to buying supplies and prepping materials. After we have everything we need, I’ll quit.”

  They weren’t counting on two things, though. First, prepping is an endless process. Every time Dave bought a new weapon or tool or generator, he saw something else he wanted. Like dried food, or night vision goggles, or a few cases of MREs.