An Acquired Taste Read online

  Countdown

  to Armageddon

  Book 10:

  AN ACQUIRED TASTE

  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:

  the best group of readers any author’s ever had.

  I do some very dumb things. I frequently pour myself a cup of coffee, then leave it on the counter to get cold. I sometimes go to the market to buy something, then return home because I forgot what I went to buy. I park my car in a sprawling parking lot and spend half an hour while my ice cream is melting trying to find it again.

  I try my best to keep my books interesting and fun and error-free. I really do. But I’m human, after all, and make way more than my share of mistakes. Most are caught during the editing process, but alas, my editors are human too.

  Sometimes a boo-boo slips through to the final product.

  You, my readers, are the finest people in the world.

  Or my world, anyway.

  Even when I misname a character or do something else remarkably stupid, you forgive me.

  And that’s what makes you all amazing.

  And why I love each and every one of you…

  THE STORY THUS FAR…

  Our story is set in San Antonio, which has changed dramatically since solar storms created a worldwide blackout just over two years before.

  Some, like Scott Harter, had prepared for the disaster and were better able to deal with the chaos. Scott and his group of family and friends weren’t even in the city anymore. They’d evacuated ninety miles to the west and north and now lived in a well-hidden compound outside of Junction.

  Those who were unprepared, or for who evacuation wasn’t an option, tended not to fare as well.

  The once proud and still historic city of San Antonio has been decimated. The city’s been trying to get accurate estimates on the number of residents who’ve survived, but it’s not easy in a place where survivors hide in their homes and refuse to answer their doors. Even to people trying to help them.

  Many of the survivors have become animalistic. For the large part they’re nocturnal now, coming out at night to forage for food, then retreating to the shadows during the day for fear their meager rations will be taken from them.

  It’s a truly miserable way to live.

  The city’s best estimate is that only twenty percent of its residents has survived the second year of the blackout.

  But everyone knows that number is overly optimistic.

  Deputy police chief John Castro guessed the real number to be closer to ten percent.

  Most have died by their own hand. Or at the hands of a loved one. Whole families are wiped out each and every day, usually by the family patriarch, who kills each member of his family and then himself.

  John can no longer count the number of times his officers, alerted by the putrid stench of decaying flesh, have walked into a family home to find a truly bizarre spectacle.

  A group of corpses, frequently holding hands, who’d gone to meet their maker because life on earth was no longer livable.

  In almost all such cases a bible was present. John assumed the family had ended their final act with a wrenching prayer… “God, please forgive us for what we’re about to do.”

  They called it the “killing hour,” the San Antonio police did.

  It was the hour right around sundown each evening, when despair hit its peak and people decided they couldn’t bear another day of suffering.

  That was the hour when gunshots could be heard all over the city.

  That was the saddest time of day for John and the other survivors.

  The coming darkness was the time of despair. The gunshots were the sound of giving up.

  The general consensus was that the suicide victims had it easy. At least they could drift off into an eternal state of rest.

  They no longer had to hide in their own homes in fear of their lives, or dig through garbage in hopes of finding food which wasn’t tainted.

  The city did what they could to help. But in a world where almost no vehicles were running, getting food and supplies to the desperate masses was nearly impossible.

  The residents of the inner city suffered most of all. Folks in the suburbs had plenty of park space and undeveloped land they could use to grow crops. They had easy access to the outskirts of town, where wildlife was still abundant. Lakes and streams that could be fished. Small game that could be trapped.

  Inner city dwellers had no such options. There was precious little green space. People lived in row houses without yards. There was very little soil anywhere. Just plenty of concrete and asphalt.

  And no animals, save family pets.

  They didn’t last long.

  Early on, some urban dwellers left the inner city.

  They never came back because there was simply no reason to. Food was abundant in the suburbs and they moved there to stay.

  The fact they never returned was misinterpreted in the inner city, though.

  Rumors flew that they were being stopped at roadblocks. Roadblocks put up by suburbanites who were intent on keeping them out. So that their limited resources didn’t become more so.

  Rumor had it the inner city refugees were being shot on sight, and burned in huge piles.

  In a desperate world people believe desperate things. Things which normally would have made no sense to them.

  None of the rumors were true. There was still food for everyone in the suburbs and outside the city.

  But the people who lived in downtown San Antonio, or just off it, saw themselves as having two options: they could stay and hope the city would somehow come to their aid. Or they could leave and be shot down like dogs.

  John Castro loved the city. It gave him a lot of opportunities. But he’d repaid San Antonio many times over in so many ways, including with his own blood. He owed it to his wife and daughters to get them out of the city to a place they could relax and live without fear.

  For they’d suffered too.

  In order to leave, John had to find a replacement to take his position as deputy chief of police.

  And he’d found a good one. A man named Rhett Butler, who wasn’t a southern scoundrel and weapons runner but rather a good and decent man.

  Rhett was poised to take the reins from John until three thugs thought they needed Rhett’s horse more than he did.

  Rhett would have handed over the animal upon demand if he were only asked. But he was never given the opportunity.

  He was ambushed and beaten to within an inch of his life.

  Meanwhile, in Scott Harter’s compound outside of Junction, daughter-in-law Sara has returned from her mission to retrieve her mother from San Antonio.

  In tow were two gifts no one expected.

  A young girl named Millicent, who was equal parts precocious and sass.

  And her attached-at-the-hip friend Charles.

  Charles was a troubled young man who’d been abused for years by too many people to count. He had a good soul beneath a thorny and abrasive exterior, but most people had never seen it.

  Sara stumbled across young Millicent at an orphanage in south San Antonio and fell in love with her immediately.

  “Her parents are dead,” Sara was told.

  “Then I’ll adopt her and take her with us to Junction.”

  “There’s a problem.”

  “What is it?”

  “It’s a package deal. She refuses to leave without Charles. If it weren’t for him she’d have been adopted a long time ago.”

  Charles and Millicent had a unique r
elationship. Almost like brother and sister, they were there for one another when no one else was. They trusted no one else but each other. Millicent was the only person in the world Charles opened up to about the things he’d had to endure. She was the only one who could comfort him when he had his night terrors. The only one who could calm him down when he lashed out.

  She wasn’t about to abandon him.

  “No problem,” Sara boldly said. “We’ll take him too.”

  Millicent had no clue her Aunt Tillie, who she absolutely adored, was on her way to San Antonio from Atlanta. Tillie was having a rough go of it. But it would get much rougher.

  She had no idea her only brother and sister-in-law were dead. And that little Millicent wasn’t even in San Antonio anymore.

  And then there was Bill.

  Bill Stewart was, by all accounts, a likeable guy.

  He was also a young man with serious problems; none of them particularly his fault.

  Bill was learning disabled and a cannibal.

  Oh, he didn’t kill his victims; they did that to themselves. He just sought them out by following the sound of the gunshots at the killing hour, and feasting on the corpses until they started to rot.

  The funny thing was, nobody faulted his actions, for Bill was differently-abled. His mind had stopped developing at the age of five. He was, in essence, a little boy in a grown man’s body, unable to think through the implications of eating another human’s flesh to survive.

  John Castro hunted down the cannibal he knew was roaming the streets of south central San Antonio, fully expecting to arrest him.

  Instead he became Bill’s friend.

  And found him a home.

  And now, Book 10 of the series,

  AN ACQUIRED TASTE

  -1-

  He was a rather odd sight indeed, puttering around the Victoria Courts housing project as he did.

  It wasn’t the color of his skin which made him stand out. For while the VC population in recent years had mostly been made up of African-Americans, there was a fair spattering of Hispanics and whites as well.

  No, it wasn’t R.J. Salinas’ brown skin that brought attention to himself. It was his actions and his appearance which made people stop and watch him.

  His actions because it seemed he was always carrying dead rats. Big ones. Some of them were bigger than squirrels.

  His appearance because his button-up shirt was always clean and tucked in. And instead of wearing jeans or shorts as virtually everyone else did, he wore khakis.

  And they were clean khakis.

  Clean clothing of any type was exceedingly rare these days.

  That R.J. took pride in his personal appearance shouldn’t have been a surprise.

  He was a man of great achievement, and with that goes an almost unavoidable sense of pride.

  And rightfully so, for this was a man who was once the executive chef at one of San Antonio’s finest five-stars. In his crisply starched whites he was hailed constantly by the city’s elite. He’d served presidents, ambassadors and kings, and all lauded him for his efforts.

  That was in the old days.

  A lot had changed.

  He’d crossed paths with John Castro some weeks before and offered the deputy police chief a bit of rat jerky to sample.

  John was a bit hesitant. He couldn’t hide his feeling of disgust and therefore didn’t even try. Instead he turned up his nose and said, “no way.”

  But R.J. was destined to win the war of wills that day.

  “It seems to me a man who fought for his country and lost a leg in Iraq, then broke all the records at the San Antonio Police Academy shouldn’t be afraid of trying a little piece of meat. What would your buddies in the Marine Corps say?”

  John had been at a loss.

  “You know me?”

  “Sure I do. I did the main course at your banquet not long ago. When you accepted the Policeman of the Year Award. I wonder how the crowd would have reacted if the mayor took the podium and said, ‘Here he is. Our best policeman but one who’s afraid of eating rat jerky.’”

  It turned out that John Castro was a prideful man too. He’d always been that way. In high school his buddies took advantage of him constantly because word got around he’d do anything stupid. All they had to do was dare him.

  That was how he got suspended for a week during his senior year for streaking during the last football game. And how his school colors got painted on the water tower overlooking a rival school.

  And how molasses got poured all over the windshields of twenty seven police cars while parked for the night at the police vehicle yard.

  John ate the jerky and liked it. Even asked for more.

  “It’s all in the way you season it,” R.J. told him. “I use a variety of spices, as well as some things you’d never think of, like crushed pecans. After I cook it, I dry it out slowly over mesquite embers. That helps take the game out and hide the harsh flavor.”

  John had an epiphany.

  He’d sat in on a city council meeting not long before and been updated on two of the city’s most pressing problems.

  Inner city residents were dying at alarming rates, but not necessarily of suicide. Many were now dying of starvation.

  They’d sent volunteers from door to door, appealing to the residents to listen to reason.

  “There’s more food in the suburbs. There are still tractor trailers which haven’t been emptied. There are parks and vacant lots and alleyways where you can plant things. You have just as much right to all that as anyone. You can squat in one of the empty houses and make a new home for yourself.”

  Their pleas were largely ignored.

  Part of it was a general mistrust of anything the city had to offer them. They were hungry and desperate, and the desperate grew fearful.

  Given the chance of accepting the city at its word and relocating to greener pastures, the populace mostly passed and believed the rumors that suburbanites were shooting urban dwellers on sight so they wouldn’t have to share. Word was that the bodies were piled up as a warning to others to stay where they were.

  As proof, they argued, those of their ranks who’d left had never returned.

  The rumors made sense for those who suffered from hunger-driven paranoia.

  After all, the city had never cared about them before. Had always treated them like cattle, just because they were poor. For them it was easy to believe city leaders finally saw a way to get rid of them, and were therefore asking them to march willingly to their own executions.

  They couldn’t see the forest for the trees. Of course the few who left never returned. Why would they? There was nothing there for them anymore.

  They told the city’s emissaries to go away and leave them alone.

  The city tried a new tactic.

  They sent uniformed officers to try again. Surely they could be trusted.

  They were so naïve.

  In the projects, nobody answered their doors to the po-lice unless they heard the magic words, “search warrant” or “SWAT team!”

  New rumors began circulating that the city was culling the herd.

  That they were sending the cops to round up residents of the projects. That the cops were taking them to an undisclosed location on the far end of Bexar County and then were shooting them in the head.

  Then burying them in mass graves.

  Not because they were guilty of anything, and not because of their skin color.

  But rather because the fewer the number of mouths to feed, the more food there was for those in the suburbs.

  Where the city council and po-lice lived.

  When the cops realized no one was going to answer their doors for them, they gave up and left.

  The emissaries came back to try again.

  Then a couple of them got shot and they gave up too.

  It wasn’t just Victoria Courts. More or less the same thing played out at all the city’s projects.

  Then the rumors spilled out
of the projects. They started to spread to the people living in the row houses not far from the Alamo.

  And the die-hards who still occupied the lower floors of the city’s once-luxury hotels.

  The middle class and well-to-do stubbornly holed up in their midtown condos.

  The city was running out of ideas.

  The people of the inner city were starving and dropping like flies and they didn’t see anything they could do about it.

  When Betsy the elephant was found killed at the Brackenridge Park Zoo, several slabs of meat taken off her, the city realized just how desperate things really were.

  Residents weren’t desperate enough to leave the inner city, for they viewed that as a death sentence.

  But they were desperate enough to kill and eat an elephant.

  Something had to be done.

  -2-

  Another of the city’s major problems was a runaway rat population in that same inner city.

  And the two problems were disgustingly linked.

  For as each human being succumbed to starvation-related heart failure or violence or suicide, he or she became a smorgasbord for the rat population.

  The rat population was thriving. They outnumbered the human population two hundred to one. They were big and ugly and fearless.

  But they were plentiful.

  John Castro didn’t even know it was possible to eat a rat.

  But when he put the two problems together the solution was quickly apparent.

  All he had to do was convince the inner city residents it was a good idea.

  Luckily, R.J. Salinas had a lot of time on his hands.

  And he’d grown up in the inner city, in Philadelphia, on a street not even the police would visit on a Saturday night. So Victoria Courts didn’t faze him.

  He squatted in a house which once belonged to a family of four. They were one of the first families to leave the courts. One of the first families rumored to be murdered at a roadblock going into the suburbs.