The Grim Reaper Comes Calling Read online

  ALONE

  Book 13:

  The Grim Reaper Comes Calling

  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 2019 by Darrell Maloney

  This book is dedicated to:

  My editing and research team of Allison Chandler, Stephanie Salinas and Jennifer Lake

  Thank you all for all the hard work you do…

  The Story Thus Far…

  It’s been more than a year since Dave Spear left Texas in search of his family.

  He had no idea, when he set out on his journey, just how difficult his mission would be.

  Had he known he’d have gone anyway.

  He was a former United States Marine and a devoted husband and father.

  He’d have crawled through the pits of hell to find those he loved and bring them safely home again.

  And he pretty much did.

  He found his wife Sarah and daughter Lindsey in a bunker outside of Ely, Kansas. But his youngest daughter Beth… his baby… was gone. Kidnapped, supposedly, by a vicious old man and woman, and taken somewhere west.

  To California, perhaps, to become a slave.

  He didn’t have much to go on, but he’d have gone with much less to guide him. The journey was treacherous. He lost his vehicle and found himself afoot. He was almost killed not once, but twice. And he had to battle fierce gangs of outlaws who’d taken over the city of Albuquerque.

  Against all odds, though, he found her.

  The old woman had died. Dave almost killed the old man, until little Beth stopped him.

  Beth set him straight. She told him the information Dave was given was wrong. That the old man had no ill intentions toward her. He and the woman were told she was orphaned and that they were adopting her. They were trying to provide her a new home.

  The old man’s name was Sal… Beth called him “Grandpa Sal.”

  They’d adopted each other, it turned out.

  The three of them started a new journey: back to Kansas, but with different missions.

  Dave was still intent on getting his entire family back together again, and to take them back to their home in San Antonio.

  Sal, when finding out he’d been had, thought it supremely important he apologize to Beth’s mother for taking Beth away from her. He was old and nearing the end of his life, he told Dave. He felt he couldn’t meet his maker without begging Sarah for forgiveness.

  Besides, the love of his life, Nellie, had died a couple of months before. He’d grown to love Beth, and she him.

  By Sal’s reckoning his place was with her, and with her family, if only they’d have him.

  And that, according to Dave, was a decision Sarah deserved to make.

  The journey east was just as treacherous as Dave’s solo journey to California. The situation in Albuquerque had changed, but was just as dangerous. Getting past the sprawling city was no piece of cake, but they made it.

  The situation in Ely, Kansas, had changed as well.

  The bunker had been overrun in Dave’s absence and was now under the control of very bad men.

  Dave left Beth and Sal in a safe place and used every trick he’d learned in the Marine Corps, and a few he improvised himself, to free his loved ones from the bunker.

  Once they were out, and he confirmed only bad men were left inside, he punished them for their deeds by collapsing the bunker on top of them.

  He didn’t know for quite some time why daughter Lindsey was distant and seemed upset with her mother. But he let it pass. They’d been through enough already, he reckoned, and if it was something he needed to know, someone would tell him in time.

  Sarah did tell him a few days later, as they walked along the highway in Oklahoma.

  It was a shameful secret.

  But he forgave her, and together they agreed to work past it.

  Dave hoped the trip back to Texas would be uneventful, but in his heart he knew better.

  Sal, the old man Beth had come to love and had adopted as her grandfather, was shot by a coward with a long rifle and a deadly aim.

  He didn’t even have a chance to say goodbye.

  Sarah was stricken when she accidentally drank tainted water.

  As they neared Blanco, Dave hoped to reconcile with an old friend, Red Poston.

  Red once pulled Dave back from the brink of death after he’d been severely beaten.

  He hoped she could do the same for Sarah.

  And now… the 13th installment of Alone:

  The Grim Reaper Comes Calling.

  Chapter 1

  Sarah was in misery. She knew it was imperative she stay hydrated. But everything she drank came right back up.

  Dave was trying to convince her that as painful as it was, that was a good thing.

  “I know it hurts, honey. But every time you throw up, you wash some more of the parasites out of your system. Eventually you’ll get them all out. And then your body will start to retain the water instead of rejecting it.”

  She was desperate to believe him. What he said sounded logical. It made sense.

  But he didn’t have to deal with the painful retching. Her stomach cramps were the worst pain she’d ever dealt with. Maybe even worse than her labor pains.

  Maybe.

  And they’d gone on for several days. Far longer than labor.

  It was a cruel cycle now.

  As soon as she felt herself able, as soon as the wave of incredible pain had passed from her most recent vomiting spell, she would down a bottle of water.

  It felt good going down, for she was incredibly thirsty.

  Even as she knew what was to come next, the water felt so good as it soothed her raw throat.

  Then she tried to relax.

  She knew that as painful as the cramps were, they hurt a little bit less when she didn’t fight them. When she didn’t let herself tense up.

  “They’re coming, whether you fight them or not,” Dave told her. “Try to relax. It’ll go a little bit easier on you.”

  Easy for you to say, she thought but never said aloud.

  What she wondered about… what she couldn’t figure out… was that when she drank the tainted water nothing happened for more than hour. Eventually her body rejected it, but it took awhile.

  Now, though, she could almost set her watch by the regularity.

  When the vomiting wave ended, when the cramps stopped coming, she enjoyed a short period of relief. Perhaps half an hour or so.

  Dave pushed her to rush it.

  But she just couldn’t.

  Twenty to thirty minutes of relative freedom from pain was all that she would give him.

  Then, when she decided it was time to go again, she’d wince and hold her breath while downing another bottle. And oh, that bottle tasted so good.

  The bottle would no sooner be cast aside when her stomach started up again.

  First growling, then churning, then churning painfully.

  Within three or four minutes, with no warning at all, she heaved. Once, twice, three times.

  The water came out much quicker than it went in, came up much faster than it went down.

  After retching three times her stomach was empty again.

  That’s where the worst part came in.

  For even though her stomach was empty, it seemed not to know it.

  The retching kept going.

  Five, six, seven more times.

  Nothing, of course, came up, other than a sticky spittle which seemed to fly everywhere.

  The dry heaves were the worst kind of torture, presenting Sarah with truly agoniz
ing pain and forcing her into the fetal position, arms wrapped around herself in a failed attempt to mitigate the cramps, to chase away some of the agony.

  When the last dry heave finally came and went she was spent, tears pouring down her face.

  That was the only time the tears came, though she hurt enough to cry even during the brief respites she took between water bottles.

  During the breaks she felt like crying, wanted to cry, but the tears wouldn’t come. Dave told her it was because of the dehydration. For the same reason her throat was parched and her lips were cracked, her tear ducts were dried out from lack of water.

  “Oh, yeah, you dolt!” she wanted to scream at him. “Then where in hell do they find the tears when my gut is twisting me around like an old dish rag, huh? Where do the tears come from then, tough guy?”

  But she said not a word.

  He didn’t deserve to be abused. This wasn’t his fault.

  He was trying his best to fix it, with the limited knowledge he had and the limited resources available to him.

  And truth be known, he’d take away her agony himself and suffer through it for her if only he could.

  She knew that.

  She could see in his eyes that he was suffering too.

  A different kind of pain, sure. But he was suffering in his own way.

  He was suffering in the same way a parent suffers when a child is broken or gravely ill and there’s nothing they can do to help.

  A different type of suffering, but suffering nonetheless.

  If a hospital was nearby and it was still open Sarah would immediately be placed on intravenous fluids. The fluids would go into her arm and directly into her bloodstream, bypassing her stomach and stopping the retching.

  The dehydration would be conquered within a couple of hours.

  She’d be given medication to combat the nausea and to kill whatever parasites she’d ingested.

  But Dave had none of that.

  All he had was twice-boiled water.

  And since he had no option of bypassing the stomach he had but one choice for treatment.

  He had to flush the stomach until enough of the parasites were gone to allow her body to get the upper hand against those which were left.

  And hope they got there before the constant dry heaves caused irreparable damage to her abdomen and started the internal bleeding which could kill her.

  Or, they could no longer hold the dehydration at bay and her organs started shutting down.

  Neither of them would admit it.

  But both knew the odds were getting more and more slim that Sarah would walk away from this unscathed.

  Even the girls, watching all this from a distance, knew things were looking pretty bleak.

  Chapter 2

  Sarah’s legs had given out five days before.

  At first Dave carried her for short distances.

  Lindsey, bless her heart, took up the slack.

  She’d hurriedly push her father’s shopping cart a hundred yards or so up the highway and park it there, the front wheels just off the pavement and in the grass so it wouldn’t roll.

  Then she’d walk quickly back and get her own shopping cart, playing catch-up until she caught up again to Dave’s cart.

  Beth did her part by trading carts with Lindsey and giving Lindsey the lightest one.

  The cart she took from Lindsey weighed easily fifty pounds heavier than the one she gave up.

  She didn’t complain. Didn’t even comment. But her little spaghetti arms were no match for the added weight.

  After several hours of traveling in such a manner they were all worn out.

  The only thing keeping them from collapsing were the frequent stops they took for Sarah to drink a bottle of water and then vomit it back up again. The stops gave them time to rest a bit, catch their breath, massage their sore muscles and coax a little bit more from their bodies.

  There had to be a better way.

  Their latest stop just happened to be in front of a Walmart tractor-trailer rig.

  On the driver’s dashboard Dave saw a familiar sight.

  A sky blue Beanie Baby puppy dog.

  He knew he’d seen it before but took a minute to place it.

  Then it dawned on him.

  This was a tractor he’d slept in on his way to Kansas to meet up with his family, a few days after he left San Antonio the previous year.

  God, that seemed so very long ago.

  Back then he still had his Ford Explorer. Black, with tinted windows, it was the perfect vehicle for night travel.

  There weren’t a lot of working vehicles on the road back then. And by driving at night with his lights off, wearing night vision goggles as he went, he was able to drive along at fifteen miles an hour relatively safely.

  He wasn’t completely unseen, but few people had the wherewithal to line up a shot as he came out of the darkness and rushed past them.

  They were mostly surprised, being caught with their pants down, for a working vehicle almost impossible to see from ten feet away in the dark night was certainly something few ever expected to encounter.

  It was his habit back then to sleep in abandoned big rigs at night, his Explorer parked a hundred feet in front of him where he could keep an eye on it.

  He slept during the daylight hours, for he couldn’t drive during the daytime.

  In the daytime he’d be spotted from half a mile away.

  And since a working vehicle was worth more than its weight in gold, a lot of people would have tried to take it from him.

  They’d have shot him as he drove by, then hoped the vehicle wasn’t wrecked too badly when it crashed into a tree or a guardrail or another vehicle.

  Dave would have been dead his first day out.

  That was why he drove at night and slept by day, his vehicle parked not far in front of whatever sleeper cab he was camped out in.

  Very few highway nomads traveled at night.

  On any given night he’d pass two, maybe three.

  And as long as he parked before daylight, and not right after he’d passed a nomad, he was reasonably certain none of the day travelers would discover his was a working vehicle.

  It would blend in with the thousands of other abandoned vehicles which had all rolled to a stop when the power went out.

  The Explorer was long gone, stolen by a miscreant in Arizona.

  But this abandoned tractor trailer rig hadn’t moved an inch since he passed this way the first time.

  Dave was tempted to climb inside the rig, to see how well it held up since he’d last seen it.

  But there was nothing inside for him there.

  It was probably full of lice and bed bugs, like all the other rigs had collected from a steady stream of unwashed squatters.

  It was probably stripped clean of all blankets and pillows and anything else of value.

  It was probably good only as a respite from the rain, as long as one sat in the driver’s seat and stayed away from the sleeper area.

  No, Dave wasn’t curious enough to crawl inside to see what kind of disgusting critters inhabited the place full time.

  There was nothing in the cab he needed.

  There might be in the back, however.

  Like every other tractor trailer rig abandoned on the highway, this one had been rifled through a hundred times.

  The looting for this one followed a very familiar pattern.

  Dave had seen it a thousand times before, and it seldom varied.

  The very first looter, the one who cut off the padlock and broke the numbered seal and opened the door for the very first time, was probably looking for valuables.

  This would have been in the first few days after the blackout, when thieves realized they could steal from the trucks with impunity, since the police couldn’t be contacted and couldn’t give chase.

  There was also a lot of debate at the time whether the power would ever come on again. Most believed it would. So the first looter wasn’t looking
for televisions, which were too large and heavy to carry away by hand.

  But he was looking for smaller electronics. Laptop computers and tablets, mostly. And expensive watches and jewelry.

  Next came the dopers… the drug users who were growing increasingly desperate. Their dealers were no longer getting their drugs from Mexican cartels. Their supply lines were cut, and the junkies were starting to go into withdrawals.

  They were looking for anything and everything destined for big box store pharmacies. Even if they didn’t know what a particular medicine was or what it treated, they were willing to pop a few to see if it made them high and took away their worries.

  Some of them started showing up on the highways dead because they popped the wrong combination of this and that.

  But at least they were out of their misery once and for all.

  Chapter 3

  It took about a week or so for the cities to start running out of food and water.

  First the supermarkets got looted. That started on the very first night.

  Back in those days the employees of big box stores and supermarket chains were still loyal enough to come to work.

  There was no work for them to do. They couldn’t open with no lights and no working cash registers, but they still showed up and deterred the looters.

  At least during the daytime.

  After a handful of employees got shot the first and second nights the rest came to a sad realization.

  Whatever promises their employers made to them to “work now and get paid eventually” probably wouldn’t come true.

  And even if they eventually got paid, money would do them no good if they were dead.

  At that point the employees, by and large, quit their jobs and joined the looters.

  They filled shopping carts with bottled water and food and pushed them toward home.

  Sometimes they made it there.

  Sometimes they didn’t.

  Sometimes their booty was stolen by more aggressive looters, or by gang members who lay in wait for targets of opportunity to happen by, then shot them dead for their efforts.