A Perilous Journey Read online

  Final Dawn

  Book 17:

  A Perilous Journey

  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:

  Wendy Shoffner

  Rebecca Vance

  Dave Collins

  Nancy Tipton

  Carrie Seagren Schwind

  Lynn Goodrich

  Casey Everett Westling

  Nick Plumer

  Patricia DeLorme

  Joy Crowley

  Muffy Chase

  Thank you for letting me into your lives and loaning me some of your time. And especially, thank you for overlooking my boo-boos and reading my stories anyway.

  Previously…

  By all appearances Frank Woodard had been completely indoctrinated into the group.

  That was surprising, because it was plain to see he was a stubborn old cuss.

  And he was none too pleased with the way he was brought to Plainview, car-jacked and forced to ferry John and Jacob Dykes back to their home in the tiny north Texas town.

  After doing so, he stayed in Plainview… well, because he wasn’t given a choice.

  As far as John Dykes, the leader of the family of outlaws was concerned, he couldn’t be set free.

  He’d been inside the abandoned food distribution warehouse the Dykes were taking refuge in. He knew the number of men they had. Their strengths and their weaknesses. It was key intelligence which would be very useful to any other group of men who’d want to root them from their nest.

  Held captive for several months, Frank seemed to adapt. He seemed to become one of the group; part of the family.

  He even fell in love with Josie, John’s little sister, and started calling himself her husband.

  Yes, by all appearances Frank had become one of them.

  But looks could be deceiving.

  When Frank was a young man he spent several years serving his country as a United States Marine. Later, he served his community as a San Antonio police detective, then a Bexar County Sheriff’s deputy.

  Both professions taught him about the arts of deception and illusion.

  Truth was, Frank really did fall in love with Josie.

  He really did consider himself her husband, and she his wife.

  But that was as much as he wanted to do with the Dykes clan.

  From day one he’d planned to escape when the time was right.

  When he and Josie fell for one another he went out on a limb and shared those plans with her.

  Now she was more than his common-law wife. She was now his co-conspirator and a full partner in his escape plan.

  The coming of the thaw, as subtle as it was, encouraged them to put their plan into motion.

  When we last saw them they finally broke free.

  They finally escaped from the Food World Distribution Center.

  And they still hadn’t realized they’d taken a stowaway along with them.

  In the tiny town of Eden, in the central Texas hill country, every single resident is huddled inside a former state prison.

  The prison has been converted into a shelter and stocked with food and water. The residents think they have it easy. That all they have to do is ride out the freeze. That if they can make it to the thaw they can come out of the shelter and everything will be okay again.

  Not quite.

  The mayor of the town, a likeable lug named Al, is having a medical emergency. Severe abdominal pains. Maybe appendicitis.

  He’s got to get to a trauma center. It’s his only hope.

  But the nearest trauma center is in San Antonio, almost two hundred miles away.

  With several feet of snow still covering the roads, Marty devises a seemingly impossible and very risky rescue plan.

  He’s never driven a snow plow.

  But seriously, can it really be that difficult?

  He’ll be followed closely by a rag-tag team of Hannah, Brad, Debbie and their patient.

  All are volunteers.

  Well, except for Al. He’d rather, given his choice, be back at the old prison, watching a movie.

  Each of the volunteers has a reason for going.

  Brad wants to get away from his wife, Sami. She’s just given birth and is having a rough go of it. She’s taking it out on Brad.

  Debbie is going along to care for Al, because she’s the closest thing the group has to a doctor.

  Hannah wants to attend the court martial of two high ranking Air Force officers; both colonels, both doctors.

  Hannah feels responsible for their incarceration, since they acted on false information she supplied them and were charged with treason as a result.

  She feels bad enough already.

  And she still hasn’t been told that one of the men, Colonel Tim Wilcox, has committed suicide in his jail cell.

  On top of all that, Marty’s wife Glenna has had a premonition that Marty won’t make it back from his journey alive.

  And now the story continues

  with Final Dawn, Book 17:

  A Perilous Journey

  -1-

  Marty had been a truck driver for more than half his life.

  He’d logged over a million miles on the road, doing mostly long-distance hauls across several states at a time.

  It was a job which suited him.

  He hasn’t a loner, necessarily. He enjoyed the company of people and he liked to socialize.

  But he didn’t need people, like a lot of others he knew did.

  Marty was one of those people who was comfortable in any situation.

  At a social gathering he could hold his own with any crowd, whether it was the snotty upper-class who thought they were better than everyone else because they had money.

  Or down home everyday people who lived paycheck to paycheck.

  Left all alone, he was just as comfortable.

  A lot of people aren’t comfortable walking into a restaurant and asking for a table for one.

  Marty didn’t mind at all.

  He wasn’t afraid of being alone. Rather, he relished in it. Alone time gave him a chance to unwind and to put the stresses of everyday life behind him.

  It gave him a chance to relax.

  So back in the days when he was driving five hundred miles a day to earn a living, he was comfortable in his skin despite the situation.

  Whether breaking up bar fights at rowdy truck stops in Wyoming or driving for hours through California’s high desert without encountering a single oncoming truck, Marty was generally a happy camper.

  As a road warrior he was confident and capable, and seldom flinched no matter what Mother Nature threw at him.

  But Marty was driving white-knuckled today.

  It wasn’t just that the plow didn’t have the traction he expected it to have.

  It was also that the steering was much looser than it should have been. He had to fight the wheel every inch of the way. He was under the general impression that if he lost focus for a split second he could lose control and go barreling off the road.

  And that wouldn’t be good.

  On this section of Interstate 10, “off the road” frequently meant drops of several hundred feet into the canyons below.

  And if he went off the road, there was a good chance the Hummer driving close behind him would meet the same fate.

  That Hummer was chock full of some of his very best friends in the world.

  If he were to die while trying to help someone else… well, in Marty’s mind there were worse ways to go.

  But if someone he loved were to die because Marty
made a mistake… well, that was just unconscionable.

  Marty and Ace Boone had fought their way through several city blocks of snow drifts as high as their eyes to get to the Eden City Motor Pool.

  They found the snow plow they needed to clear a path for the Hummer to San Antonio and were able to get it started.

  But they knew nothing about the recent history of the snow plow. If they had they might have tried another method of getting Mayor Al to the Alamo City.

  The reason Marty was fighting the plow every foot of the way, you see, was because it wasn’t roadworthy.

  In late March several years before the town of Eden was clobbered with a late-season ice storm. Then the ice was covered with snow and it found itself in a slippery mess.

  An inch of ice on the roads was topped off by four inches of the white fluffy stuff, and driving was treacherous.

  Toward the end of his run that night the plow operator, a relative rookie, lost control and the plow slid down a six degree grade for about a quarter mile.

  Now, that wouldn’t be so bad except that at the bottom of the grade the driver’s side front wheel slammed sideways into and over a high curb.

  The driver made it back to the garage, where city mechanics took a look at it the next morning.

  They took it out of commission on the spot.

  The wheel was bent. The lower control arm was buckled and the steering link was almost dislodged.

  Some of the parts had to be ordered from Houston.

  But it wasn’t a problem.

  The weather forecast called for the temperatures to warm considerably the following day, and the long-term forecast said it wouldn’t freeze or come anywhere close to it for the next fourteen days.

  That late in the year no one expected any more cold weather. Spring was declared and the snow plow was put on the back burner.

  Oh, it would have been repaired long before the following winter. Everyone knew it was the only such plow Eden had and was therefore pretty important.

  But then Saris 7 happened. City workers started quitting to try to get their families to safer places, and three of Eden’s four mechanics left town.

  The plow? It was never repaired.

  As for the lack of traction, Marty was blaming himself for that.

  When the tractor part of a tractor trailer rig bobtails, or drives alone without the trailer, it has very little weight on its drive wheels. Even with tire chains it has a hard time getting traction.

  Hooking up to a trailer places considerably more weight over those wheels and it’s much easier for the truck to get traction.

  Marty, as an experienced trucker, knew that.

  Although he’d never driven a snow plow before, he should have reasoned that the same principle: more weight equals better traction, would apply here as well.

  The dumper on the back of the truck was empty. There was a mound of salt and sand mix next to the plow, and a front end loader to load it with.

  He should have filled the dumper before he left.

  But he didn’t. And now he was paying the price.

  -2-

  From the Hummer following closely in Marty’s path Mayor Al could see his friend was having trouble keeping the big machine on the road.

  Hannah, behind the wheel of the Hummer, asked, “Al, do you know of any reason Marty seems to be having trouble maintaining his lane?”

  “No, sweetie. I guess he’s just not used to driving something that has to bull its way through heavy snow.”

  Hannah suspected there was more to it than that.

  But then, she’d never driven a snow plow herself, or followed directly behind one.

  Maybe the mayor was right. Maybe the impact of several feet of snow being forced out of the way by an angled blade made the plow difficult to steer.

  Actually, while that might well be true to a certain extent, Marty’s difficulty had nothing to do with the snow being pushed out of the way.

  His problems were all mechanical.

  Mayor Al, for his part, was telling the truth.

  He didn’t know there was anything wrong with the plow.

  Of course it’s not unusual for the mayor of any town or city to be unaware that one of its vehicles is down for maintenance. Really, with all the duties and responsibilities of a mayor, who’d expect him to?

  Whatever the reason Marty appeared to be having trouble driving a straight line, everyone knew and respected him, both as a man and a driver.

  They had full confidence in him getting Al where he needed to be.

  Marty himself?

  He wasn’t so sure.

  At this point, though, they were all pretty much committed whatever the outcome.

  If Marty had taken the time to peek beneath the big wheel before he drove the truck out of the garage and into the snow there’s no way he’d be in it now, tooling down the highway.

  The lower control arm suffered the most damage and was in danger of breaking at any time.

  A deep pothole or a very sharp turn would probably do the trick.

  If it went, the truck would skid to a stop and would be undriveable.

  And the group of six would be stranded between towns with little hope of rescue and no provisions.

  That’s right.

  No provisions.

  Everyone had been in such a hurry to get Al to a hospital that no one considered Murphy ’s Law.

  No one stopped and considered what would happen if they broke down or had an accident en route.

  Everyone ranted and raved so much about Marty’s exemplary driving skills that no one even considered the possibility.

  Now they were starting to worry.

  Now they were starting to ask, “What if?”

  “Hey, Brad?” Hannah asked her good friend who was seated beside her in the Hummer’s passenger seat.

  “Yeah?”

  “Is Marty wipes out up there, and we have to drag him and Ace out of the plow and in here with us…”

  “Will it be crowded as hell in here? Yes.”

  “No. That’s not what I was going to ask. I was going to ask how in hell do we turn this thing so we can go back to the mine?”

  Brad looked out the passenger side window.

  Within arm’s reach was a wall of snow almost as high as the vehicle they were in.

  There was three feet of snow on the highway ahead of them. In some places it drifted to four or five feet.

  The plow blade was shoving it all to the side, creating a wall on each side that was even higher.

  And the plow was only leaving a ten foot wide cleared path behind it.

  That was plenty of room for the Hummer… provided it kept going in the same direction.

  “I mean,” Hannah continued, “How in hell do I turn around?”

  Brad pondered the question and said, “You can’t. If that thing crashes or breaks we’ll have to back all the way back to the tunnel.”

  “You’re kidding. Brad, we’ve gone thirty miles or more.”

  “I know, honey. But look at it. We’ve got eighteen inches of room on each side of us, and a wall of snow and ice several feet high. There’s no way we can turn around.”

  “Turning around isn’t an option anyway,” Debbie interjected.

  “If we turn around Al will die. I don’t have the equipment or the experience to perform an appendectomy, either here or at the mine.

  “And without the proper tests, I can’t even be sure that’s what it is. I could open him up and remove his appendix if it was a life or death thing, but I’d have just as much chance of killing him as saving him. I don’t think he wants that, and I don’t either.”

  Mayor Al’s eyes opened wide and he was in a near panic.

  He said, “I don’t want that. Trust me, I don’t want that.”

  Brad asked, “Debbie, what do you need that you don’t have?”

  “Pretty much everything, Brad. An operating room. Monitoring equipment. Surgical tools. A sterile environment. An anesth
esiologist. Probably the biggest thing is the knowledge. I was a paramedic, Brad. Yes, I could perform an emergency tracheotomy. But I’m no surgeon. Those guys train for years before they remove an appendix from a live patient. And they have half a dozen people helping them. If it comes to doing it I’ll try my best. But I don’t want to kill him trying to save him.”

  Al looked at her.

  He didn’t say a word, but the message she read in his eyes was unmistakable.

  His eyes were saying, “Please help me. I don’t want to die.”

  -3-

  Marty wasn’t the only one having a trying time driving a snow plow.

  Frank Woodard, who by a bizarre coincidence was a friend of Marty’s, was driving his own Hummer, which he’d modified with a crude plow blade of his own.

  Now, one might laugh at the thought that someone would be crazy enough to try to build a snow plow blade out of wood instead of hardened steel. It does sound a little bit ludicrous.

  But then again, wood can be used to fashion all kinds of incredible things if one does it right.

  Don’t believe it?

  Conjure up the ghost of legendary Howard Hughes, builder and only pilot of the also-legendary “spruce goose” and ask him.

  And actually, to be fair to Frank, it wasn’t the wooden part of the plow which was causing him fits.

  It was the lack of hardware he’d encountered when building it.

  His problem when fashioning the plow blade, you see, was mostly because Food World wasn’t a hardware store.

  That probably requires an explanation.

  Okay, here goes.

  The place Josie’s family, the Dykes clan, took over and went to roost in just before Saris 7 struck the earth was the Food World Distribution Center.

  Food World had been a successful grocery chain in the south and midwestern United States since the 1940s.

  In recent years they’d been making strides toward expanding into areas other than groceries.

  Some of their stores were expanded into what they called “supercenters.”