Eden Bound Read online

  Final Dawn

  Book 19:

  Eden Bound

  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 2020 by Darrell Maloney

  This book is dedicated to:

  The unsung heroes who are keeping this great nation going during the worst time in recent history. Not just the doctors and the nurses, who are sacrificing far more than they should have to, including sometimes their very lives.

  And not just the first responders and the military. They always answer the call, despite the personal risks.

  They are all my heroes in this trying time.

  But they’re not the only ones. The grocery store stockers and the cashiers and order pullers too. They’re all heroes. So are the truckers. The pizza delivery drivers. The people who last year were making automobiles and who are today making ventilators.

  No one knows what our country will look like when this whole thing is over. It’s said that every one of us will lose someone we know before the end. Those of us who survive will have a newfound appreciation not just for the traditional heroes, but for the little guys too. For many of them are walking into phone booths in street clothes and emerging as superheroes.

  This book is dedicated to all of you, along with my humble thanks.

  Bravo!

  Previously…

  Last time we saw Hannah Snyder she was in San Antonio, on the sprawling Joint Base Lackland military base. It was called Lackland Air Force Base for generations, but recently underwent a name change.

  Occasionally a Secretary of Defense or a high ranking general sees a great need to waste taxpayer money so they can “leave their mark” on something. It’s no different and perhaps no more classy than when a graffiti artist tags a railway car or a brick wall with a unique design of his own creation.

  Just so he can step back and say, “Look, everybody! I did that!”

  The military is particularly bad about things like that.

  A general might come in and say, “I don’t like the color scheme at my bases. Olive drab green was good enough for the last general, but I want my buildings to be desert brown. And I want them to have a dark brown stripe across each of them, just for visual effect.”

  On the face of it, the whole thing sounds ludicrous. No one other than the general sees a need to waste thousands of man-hours and several million dollars to paint hundreds of perfectly good buildings a different paint scheme.

  But a general gets what a general wants. So vital programs are taxed and other missions axed to find the money for the general’s new paint job.

  Secretaries of Defense sometimes do the same thing on a grander scale, as was the case when Lackland Air Force Base was renamed Joint Base Lackland. Dozens of other military facilities around the world were renamed in similar fashion around the same time. It didn’t enhance the military’s ability to do its job. It didn’t make our soldiers more capable, or more secure, or safer.

  All it did was waste hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer money. Signs had to be remade by the thousands. Buildings and water towers had to be repainted. Stationary had to be thrown out and reordered. Phone books and directories had to be republished.

  It’s the way of the American military. If you have money, you must spend it. If there’s nothing important to spend it on, you must waste it. Otherwise you won’t get as much when the next fiscal year rolls around.

  It’s the same reason military units do their annual “September scramble.” All units must spend their leftover funds by the end of September, for fear their allocation might be cut when the new fiscal year begins on October 1st. That’s why September is “buy anything” month. That’s the month units all over the Department of Defense spend like drunken sailors on payday. They buy new office furniture they don’t need, office supplies they don’t need, equipment they don’t need, even safety gear they don’t need. Units will order two pairs of steel-toed boots for every one of their workers. The workers then take the boots home and toss them into a closet, atop a pile of eight other pairs they’ve never worn, the product of previous years’ buying sprees.

  It’s the military way.

  Anyway, Hannah was on Joint Base Lackland to plead with General Lester Mannix to free her friend and former doctor Colonel Morris Medley. Medley had been railroaded on a charge of mutiny when he was guilty of no such thing.

  He was guilty only of ignorance: of not enforcing an order he had no idea existed. And of embarrassing the general by herding him out of a secret bunker in front of his wife and children.

  Hannah had gone to JB Lackland believing the general was a pompous, overbearing, unreasonable and narcissistic man.

  And he was indeed all of those things.

  But he had another side which his people never saw.

  And Hannah, who didn’t work for him and wasn’t accountable to him, was able to draw out that side. She talked common sense to him, and he listened.

  He buckled and Colonel Medley was set free.

  That didn’t mean Hannah was free to go home though.

  Al Petrie, mayor of the city of Eden, was the other reason Hannah and her team made the trip.

  He was stricken with appendicitis and was admitted to Wilford Hall Regional Medical Center, the sprawling hospital on JB Lackland.

  He was pretty much recovered by the time the charges were dropped and was ready to go home.

  But he, like Hannah, wasn’t going anywhere.

  Seems the entire base was encircled by a double ring of disabled automobiles. They were placed there by a group of local activists in support of Colonel Medley and his plight.

  The activists mistakenly believed that by blockading the base and isolating it from the rest of the world they could disrupt the popular colonel’s court martial and the general would have no choice but to free him.

  In other words, they had no idea how the military works.

  But it was what it was. By the time Medley was released the base was locked down and no one could get in or out.

  It was an ugly situation.

  Lastly, on a lonely Texas highway halfway between Lubbock and Big Spring, a low-life named Johnny Connolly was planning three murders.

  Johnny was never burdened with things that make decent people decent. Things like a conscience or a sense of right and wrong. He was never held back by a respect for the law like good citizens are.

  Johnny was guided only by greed. That’s why, while others might choose honorable and lawful professions, he chose to deal drugs. The money was good, and it had tangible rewards in that he was able to get women who’d normally be out of his league.

  And because he had better bling than they did.

  Flashier wheels, too.

  So Johnny was a scumbag of the highest order. He was used to taking what he wanted. His girlfriend Tina was something akin to a 1930s gangster’s moll. She was just a girl trying to get along and hooking up with the wrong kind of man to help her get there.

  Tina, unlike Johnny, did know what scruples were and actually had some. She occasionally tried to keep Johnny on the straight and narrow path, but didn’t try so hard she was ever able to actually talk him out of his dastardly deeds.

  She and Johnny had stumbled across Frank and Josie, creeping along through the snow in their big Hummer.

  Johnny decided he wanted the Hummer and was scheming to shoot Frank down and take it from him.

  And then, of course, he’d have to murder Josie and Eddie too, because…

  Well, as the pirates used to say, “Dead men tell no tales.”

  And now the story continues

  with Final Dawn, Book 19:

>   Eden Bound

  -1-

  One would think that in times of crisis, people would want to read to take their minds off the bad things.

  One would think the Guerra Public Library, on Military Drive in San Antonio, would be a popular place for people to go when the second freeze came.

  Not so.

  When the coming of Saris 7 several years before turned the entire earth into a chest freezer, the library remained open for a time. Librarians fought the bitter cold and opened their doors, expecting an onslaught of customers wanting something to do while they were cooped up in their homes for days at a time.

  It didn’t happen.

  Those same librarians saw, on average, four customers a day. Some days they only saw each other. And as much as they liked one another, that was no way to run a library.

  After a little over a month the city of San Antonio decided to shut down their libraries until the freeze was over.

  There was a brief respite, almost two years, between the freeze Saris 7 brought with it and the second freeze. The survivors spent those two years trying to restore a sense of normalcy to their lives. They’d lost friends and loved ones… everybody had. Many had lost their homes to the fires which swept through the city, caused by careless people unaware that fireplaces could not be used month after month, year after year, without creosote buildup which had to be cleaned from the chimney walls.

  Over two thousand fires were started in Bexar County by homeowners’ unwillingness to put their fireplace fires out occasionally and to do the maintenance. Those fires sometimes spread out of control when firefighters couldn’t respond quickly on icy and snow-covered streets. Add to that the problems of fire hydrants being covered with two inches of ice and water mains frequently freezing and breaking, and many fires became unmanageable. Entire blocks burned down all over the city, and when the city finally thawed it looked as though it had been the target of a prolonged aerial bombing campaign.

  Many people died in the fires. Their numbers, added to those murdered and those who committed suicide, made San Antonio a much smaller place.

  People wise, anyway.

  And then, of course, the natural deaths which would have occurred over the seven and a half year span, made worse by difficulty getting sick people to the hospitals and the fact that many who could have been saved just didn’t want to be.

  They gave up. They didn’t want to live anymore.

  When the numbers were run, the tally taken, only about thirty percent of San Antonians going into the first freeze made it out the other side.

  Still, that was better than the national average, for the northern cities took the brunt of the abuse as they always do in wintertime.

  Only eight percent survived in Detroit. Nine in Boston, eleven in Philadelphia.

  The national average was fifteen percent, and San Antonio boasted twice that many. Yahoo.

  Still, the thirty percent who survived wore it, for the most part, as a badge of honor. They were the toughest, and were even stronger for the experience.

  During the two year thaw they tried, more than anything else, to get back to normal.

  Everyone took a step up, meaning the rich took over even bigger mansions on the north side of the city. And the city saw nothing wrong with that. As far as they were concerned, all the homes made empty by their owners’ deaths were free for the taking.

  They weren’t collecting taxes and wouldn’t be for awhile. But eventually they’d show up at every doorstep to find out who lived where now, and they’d hold out their hat at the same time.

  In their view it was a good thing that the city’s mansions be occupied, for when the tax rolls were reestablished they’d be able to charge more taxes on the higher value properties.

  As for the mayor and the city council, they followed everyone else.

  The mayor moved into a multi-million dollar mansion on a hill in the Stone Oak neighborhood. Before the freeze the home belonged to the star forward on the city’s professional basketball team, but no more. The mayor had the city deem it abandoned and available for occupancy by whoever laid claim to it, which of course he already had.

  Nobody knew for sure what happened to the basketball star, though rumors were he was holed up in an abandoned missile silo in Wyoming which was turned into luxury condos.

  When the available mansions were taken, the upscale homes left behind were made available, and middle class families moved into them. Those in modest homes moved into the middle class vacancies.

  It was a bizarre twist on “trickle down economics,” and for the first time in eighty years San Antonio officially had no homeless population.

  None.

  Most of the homeless perished, of course. But those who survived the freeze got a step up too. They moved into the newly vacant modest homes made available when their owners moved into the middle class homes.

  During the thaw the Guerra Public Library reopened its doors, but only for a few hours a day. That was because only one of its five librarians survived the first freeze, and she was rather old and frail now.

  She trained her two daughters on library procedures, and bless their hearts, they helped her run the library even though the city never paid them, just to have something to do.

  Their mom died just before the second freeze and they were able to bury her before the ground grew hard again.

  Cupid 23 was much smaller than its mother. And it moved slower through space because it wasn’t sleek and worn smooth as Saris 7 was. Cupid 23 was ragged and jagged and rough, and had a very odd shape. It tumbled along rather than streaked.

  Because Cupid 23 was smaller and tumbling and moving much slower, more of it burned as it entered earth’s atmosphere. When it impacted with the earth in the tiny town of Spangdahlem, Germany, it kicked up much less dust than its predecessor.

  Less dust in the atmosphere meant the second freeze would be much shorter than the first. Two to four years, scientists estimated. And that was good news.

  But it was still bitterly cold.

  -2-

  It was because of that bitter cold that few San Antonians felt the urge to get out and go to the Guerra Public Library. Or if they felt the urge, the bitter cold breeze and below-freezing temperatures talked them out of it.

  The same thing that happened during the first freeze repeated itself the second time around.

  The two daughters who now ran the library pro bono were seeing no more than two or three customers on most days, and many days there were none.

  They finally decided to give up. They were tired of getting out in the cold and fighting their way in each morning if so few people valued their services and recognized their sacrifices.

  One of them, a woman of thirty named Melissa, was sitting at her desk putting the finishing touches on a sign she’d fashioned.

  The sign read:

  GUERRA PUBLIC LIBRARY

  WILL BE CLOSED UNTIL

  THE THAW.

  STAY HOME. BE SAFE.

  SEE YOU WHEN

  THE WORLD WARMS AGAIN.

  GOD HAVE MERCY ON US ALL.

  It needed something, but she didn’t know what.

  She held it up for her sister to see.

  Katie was the baby of the family, and the artistic one. And although now, at twenty six, she was no longer a baby, she was a talented painter and sculptor and one who’d know what to add to the sign to make it a bit less gloomy.

  “What do you think, Katie? What does it need?”

  “Hand it here, I’ll think of something.”

  An hour later she handed it back.

  On the top of the sign she drew a snowman with a very sad face, casting an evil eye at snowflakes falling down upon him.

  On the bottom she drew the snowman’s hat and carrot nose, and all his buttons, sitting forlornly in a big puddle of water. Standing over the puddle were three children with huge grins on their faces, open books in their hands as they happily read. Behind the children was a sketch of the
front of the library with a big “OPEN” sign on its door.

  “Perfect,” Melissa said when Katie handed the sign back to her.

  They were an hour away from closing that day.

  It would have been their last day. Their plans were to spend the rest of the freeze warm and cozy in the house they now shared half a mile away.

  Then Mike Suarez walked in.

  And everything changed.

  Now, there was nothing odd about Suarez walking into the library.

  He was the only real regular they had, for he was one of the ten or so people who showed up at the library every week. He was a voracious reader, you see, and the sisters bent the rules for him by letting him take more than three books at a time.

  They let him take as many as he wanted, and he was in the habit of taking half a dozen or so. But he was as honest as the day is long, and he always brought them back to exchange for others.

  The other thing about Mike Suarez: he was what older people called a “social butterfly.” He had a wide range of acquaintances and seemed everybody’s friend.

  He was one of those people who walk into a bar and the whole place shouts “Norm…”

  Only they didn’t say “Norm.” That would be weird, for his name was Mike. But you get the point.

  Mike collected friends like an old man collects wrinkles. He liked the library ladies and they liked him.

  One of the reasons they liked him was because he always filled them in on the local gossip he collected by circulating with his friends every day.

  And today, the last official day the Guerra Public Library was in operation, was no exception.

  “Did you hear what’s going on at the base?” he asked.

  “No. What’s happening?”

  “They’re trying Colonel Wilcox and Colonel Medley for mutiny.”