A Day of Reckoning Read online

  Final Dawn

  Book 14:

  A Day of Reckoning

  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 2018 by Darrell Maloney Publishing

  This book is dedicated to:

  Beamon Bryson

  Thanks for the suggestion, my friend.

  Hope you enjoy the book.

  Previously…

  Frank Woodard was in a bit of a tight situation.

  He was wounded and living vicariously in a hostile environment.

  Sure he was tough. He was a former United States Marine, a combat veteran and a former cop.

  Any other time he wouldn’t have worried he was up against seven younger and stronger men. But his weakened condition evened the odds.

  His escape plans didn’t pan out. He was flat on his back and near death. He would have gone into that great darkness were it not for the efforts and talents of Josie. And while he was recovering Plainview was buried beneath several feet of snow, making his escape impossible.

  Josie was one of them, the only decent one among them it seemed.

  So how was it he could develop feelings for her? He, a man who’d always fought hard for what was right?

  How on earth could he fall in love with Josie?

  It made no sense.

  But then again, she was one of them, but at the same time so different.

  He finally admitted his feelings to her; she did likewise.

  Now he was in a pickle.

  If word got out among the others his feelings might be misinterpreted. Maybe he professed love for their sister, they’d say, as a means of getting out of doing forced labor for them.

  Or maybe it was part of an escape plan.

  They decided to keep it under wraps for the time being.

  The one person they told was Crazy Eddie, for his brain was damaged and he’d need time to process the whole thing.

  They swore Eddie to secrecy.

  And he told everyone within hours.

  In the tiny town of Eden the old federal prison was overrun.

  It was perhaps a terrible place to turn into a shelter for the town’s eighty one residents. Its past was one of misery and death. Surely what went on there, some residents said, left behind a stench of permanent pain, permanent sadness.

  At the same time, others said, it was built to keep conniving and capable men in. Surely it would serve equally well to keep such men out.

  It didn’t work out that way and a good man, Lenny Geibel, died.

  So did the only son of Richard Sears, the security chief who perhaps didn’t do his job quite well enough.

  The prison was now under the control of a sadistic thug named John Sennett.

  Richard and three of his men were stuck on the outside.

  On the inside Marty Haskins led two others.

  Working together they had to find a way to overpower the heavily armed invaders and take back their home.

  On a military base in south San Antonio two Air Force colonels sit in their cells, awaiting their fate.

  They thought they were doing the right thing in overtaking a top secret underground bunker.

  They thought they were flushing out rats who knew the freeze was coming and took steps to protect their own while most others would die.

  What they did instead was expose the continuity team tasked to reconstitute the United States military and the federal government once the freeze finally ended.

  And the government was none too happy about it.

  It was a time of national emergency, declared so by the President of the United States.

  It was a time of martial law.

  Standard rules didn’t apply.

  What colonels Tim Wilcox and Morris Medley did was considered an act of peacetime treason.

  And it was punishable by the death penalty.

  They were acting in good faith, on behalf of those left behind.

  They’d made a dreadful mistake; one they’d likely pay for with their lives.

  Lastly, in an abandoned salt mine just outside of Junction, Texas, most of the original forty one took refuge from the bitter cold.

  Sami was due to give birth any day now.

  She’d add another mouth to feed; another happy baby to bring new life and new joy into an otherwise dismal situation.

  Mark Junior was growing up now. He’d always been called “Little Markie,” and now he was starting to hate the name.

  “It makes me sound like a little kid,” he maintained. “I’m not a little kid anymore. I’m ten years old.”

  And indeed he was. That was practically grown up in a world where people lived hard and often died senselessly.

  His mother Hannah and the others didn’t yet know it, but another crisis was looming on the horizon.

  One which had nothing to do with their current situation, but which would rock them to their core.

  And now the story continues with Final Dawn, Book 14:

  A Day of Reckoning

  -1-

  Frank stood in the doorway looking out into what others might view as a winter wonderland.

  He didn’t see it as such.

  He saw the four feet of snow on the ground as Mother Nature’s personal vendetta against him.

  Frank never was much of a snow kind of guy, in that he spent most of his life in warmer climes.

  Born in San Antonio, he spent summers on the Texas gulf coast, in Corpus Christi, with his grandparents.

  Neither city was a place which saw an appreciable amount of the fluffy white stuff in any given year.

  He’d joined the United States Marine Corps fresh out of high school so he could see the world.

  And spent most of his initial four year enlistment at Kaneohe Marine Corps Air Station.

  On the island of Oahu, Hawaii.

  Again, not exactly a bastion of winter activity.

  Oh, he did see action overseas, during Operation Desert Storm.

  In the scorching deserts of Iraq and Kuwait.

  Then he got out, returned to San Antonio and went back to school, got a degree in criminal justice and became a cop.

  As he stood in the doorway of the Food World Distribution Center, looking out at the remnants of a blizzard more suitable for the arctic than north Texas, he tried to remember.

  Remember when the last time he saw such a tremendous amount of snow.

  Or looked out at a scene so devoid of life, of hope, of promise.

  The short answer, of course, was that he’d never seen this much snow in one place and time.

  And never before had he felt so helpless.

  For he knew he could not escape this frozen world; in fact he didn’t want to, not anymore.

  And that presented a problem, for if he was stuck here in his present situation he was in great peril.

  Josie’s brothers might not see his love for their sister as a good thing. They might see it as something he’d dreamed up to curry their favor. Or even worse, as part of an elaborate scheme to buy him time, to keep himself alive until the snow melted away and he could escape.

  In essence he was afraid they might think he was trading his “love” for a chance at freedom. And that someday he’d leave her in his lurch; would abandon her, all alone and humiliated.

  There was nothing he could do, of course, to convince them his love for Josie was real.

  Even if he could, he felt he shouldn’t have to.

  Frank Woodard was an honorable man. His word was his bond. He’d never cheated or lied in his life. If anyone in the world should be taken at his word it should be him.

  But they didn’
t know that about him.

  They couldn’t have known.

  To them Frank was just a means to an end.

  Just a driver with a running vehicle who happened to come along when they needed a ride up north.

  He marveled at how long ago that seemed, when he was carjacked and forced to drive them four hundred miles north into this wintry hell.

  It was only a few weeks, but it seemed like forever ago.

  “It’s pretty, isn’t it?”

  Josie walked up behind him and wrapped her arms around his waist.

  He grunted before responding, “No. It’s ugly as hell. It’s as ugly as that mole on my ass. Why in the world would you think something so frigid cold and colorless is pretty?”

  Instead of answering she asked her own question.

  “You’re not a fan of winter, Frank?”

  “I am most certainly not.”

  He turned around and brushed her hair away from her eyes, then pulled her stocking cap a bit lower on her forehead.

  “I am, however, a fan of yours. If I have to be here in this God-forsaken place at least you’re here to help make it tolerable.”

  “I’m surprised you were able to get the door open. I tried to get a couple open on the other side of the building and they wouldn’t budge. The snow was packed up against them, several feet high.”

  “My guess is that the storm came out of the east, and that the drifts on the east side of the building are head high.

  “This being the west side, most of the snow blew right over the roof and kept on going.

  “The drifts on the west dock are only ankle-deep.”

  Josie stood beside him and held his hand as they looked out into the massive parking and staging lot where tractor trailer rigs used to come and go around the clock every day of the year except Christmas.

  Now it was four feet deep in snow and even higher in drifts.

  “What are those?” Josie asked as she pointed out into the lot at several rectangular structures atop the snow pack.

  Frank chuckled.

  “Now I don’t feel bad. It took me a minute to figure them out myself.”

  “That’s all that’s left visible in the area where employees parked their cars.

  “The cars are completely buried beneath the snow.

  “Those are the roofs of the cabs of the pickup trucks. I’m guessing they’ll disappear beneath the next new snow the next blizzard adds to the pack.

  “Then they’ll all be gone until the thaw.”

  There was something he wanted desperately to ask her. It was a three hundred pound white gorilla sitting on the end of the dock, blending in with the snow and almost invisible.

  “Go ahead, Frank. Ask her,” the gorilla said.

  Despite the encouragement of his big smelly white friend, though, Frank couldn’t bring himself to do it.

  He didn’t want to seem too eager.

  Didn’t want to appear desperate to know.

  The gorilla looked at Josie and held his hands out to his sides, as if to say, “Well…”

  She couldn’t see him, for he was a figment of Frank’s imagination and not hers.

  But she seemed to get the hint anyway.

  “Frank, honey… let’s go inside and talk. I need to fill you in on what we discussed.

  -2-

  Josie’s oldest brother John called a meeting of all the Dykes family members a couple of hours before.

  By specifying family members he made it very clear Frank wasn’t invited. For he was the only living soul in the sprawling warehouse complex who wasn’t related to Josie.

  Other than Aunt Stacy’s dogs, that is.

  And Crazy Eddie. He was still part of the family in a technical sense, being Josie’s former husband. He was little more than a child after tainted drugs did irreparable damage to his mind, and the family more or less adopted him since he had no one else in the world to care for him.

  It was, perhaps, the only benevolent thing the Dykes family had ever done and was done mostly because Josie had insisted on it.

  John was the patriarch of the family and its undisputed leader.

  His intent in calling the meeting was twofold: first, to remind Frank in no uncertain terms that despite his being taken into the fold he was an outsider. And that he would always be such, regardless of how the second part of the meeting turned out.

  As for the second part of that meeting, it was, in essence, to determine Frank’s fate.

  There were some who insisted at the meeting that Frank ingratiated his way into Josie’s heart in an effort to save his own life. That he’d seen the writing on the wall and suspected he’d be shot at some point.

  After all, it was easier to just shoot a prisoner than to risk his gaining control over the place and perhaps causing serious damage to their operation.

  Josie’s Aunt Stacy was the chief proponent of this theory, though her motives were more than a little suspect.

  Josie and others saw her as a scorned woman, since she let it be known early on she’d had eyes on Frank herself.

  Now, Josie maintained, she was merely upset that Frank chose Josie over her and was out to even the score with him.

  The other camp liked the idea that Frank was around to do their grunt work for them.

  He was on limited duty now, due to the wound he suffered at the tip of Crazy Eddie’s sword. But even on light duty he could empty the garbage, gather food from the warehouse and prepare the group’s twice-daily meals.

  Once he got the okay from Josie to work longer he’d go back to cleaning and emptying the port-a-potties and collecting the dogs’ waste.

  “If you shoot him,” brother Jason rightly stated, “we’ll have to go back to doing all that stuff ourselves.”

  “And don’t forget he also picks up the crap those stupid little mutts leave all over the place for us to step in,” cousin Tim added to the mix.

  That riled up Aunt Stacy, who thought more of her dogs than any human in attendance.

  “You call my fur-babies names again,” she growled at Tim, “and you may not wake up to see tomorrow morning.”

  Tim promptly shut up and sat down.

  Everybody, including John, was scared to death of Stacy and her wrath.

  Frank finally got his reprieve at the hands of Crazy Eddie, of all people, and backed up by Josie.

  Eddie stood and addressed the group sincerely, but rather sheepishly.

  “I didn’t mean to hurt Frank. He was my friend. He was the only one who really listened to me. And before I poked him with my trusty sword he was the only one who would play with me. Nobody else wanted to but he usually did if he wasn’t busy picking up poop.

  “I don’t want you to kill him. I want him to be my friend and play with me again.”

  The “shoot him immediately” camp was on the ropes and Josie threw the knockout punch.

  “I love him. If you shoot him you’ll be killing me too. Because I’ll walk out that door into the blizzard and you’ll never see me again.”

  “But Josie, you wouldn’t stand a chance out there,” John said.

  “I probably wouldn’t. But I’d rather die trying to find another place to live than to stay here with the heartless people who murdered a man for the crime of falling in love with their sister.”

  Josie sat with Frank in their tent and gave him the details of the meeting.

  “They agreed not to shoot you. That’s the good news.”

  “And what’s the bad?”

  “The bad news is they decided it’s time for you to come off of light duty and start doing your chores again. No more two hours a day.

  “They overruled my medical recommendation. I think some of them are hoping you’ll strain yourself from slinging the mop or climbing up and down the storage racks and start your wound bleeding again. Or that you’ll get an infection from handling the dog waste or emptying the port-a-potties.”

  “Well, if it happens it happens. It still beats the heck out of being sh
ot. I’ll just try to be careful.”

  “Not good enough, Frank.”

  He smiled.

  “Look, honey. You tried your best. As far as I’m concerned you saved my life a second time. Things will be okay, you’ll see. I’m a tough old bird. People have tried to kill me before and I’ve survived. I’ll survive this too.”

  “You’re not listening, Frank. What they conceded to isn’t good enough. I worked hard to keep you from dying and I’m not going to roll over and give into this and watch your wound get infected and take you away from me.”

  “Seems to me we have no choice.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong, honey. That’s where you’re very wrong.”

  -3-

  Marty Haskins and Bob Ashton were close friends, yet their friendship was enigmatic.

  Ashton was in many ways a very private person.

  On the surface he was a gregarious and outgoing man. The life of every party. A practical joker extraordinaire and everybody’s friend.

  But there were many things about his life; many secrets, that he kept to himself.

  Nearly everyone else in Eden called him “Ace.”

  But not Marty.

  Marty wasn’t quite the social beast Ace Ashton was.

  Oh, he could hold his own at a cocktail party or backyard picnic. He was a friendly sort people gravitated to in much the same manner they ran to Ace.

  Under other circumstances they might easily become competitors in a social scene.

  It was the whole “Ace” thing that bugged Marty. Not Ace the man, but rather Ace the nickname.

  Marty asked him early on where the name came from.

  “That’s something I don’t share with others.”

  Now, Marty was a great guy. He was not only the first one to help out a friend in trouble; he was there to help strangers as well.

  He was always ready to give a hand up to the downtrodden. His wife Glenna liked to say Marty was the most kind and generous person she ever met.

  But Marty had his quirks.

  One of his biggest was he hated when people kept things from him.