Final Dawn: Book 12: Where Could He Be? Read online

  Charlotte winced at the news.

  “I know, honey, and I’m sorry. But if it comes to that you can recover fully. You’ll feel a little awkward at first when you walk, but in no time at all you’ll be dancing again. No one will ever know you’re missing a couple of toes unless you take off your shoes.”

  She took the thermometer from her mouth and checked it.

  “I told Marty and Art to let you sip warm water on the way back. Did you do that?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “I’m going to admit you into our clinic. It’s not much of a clinic, really, and you’ll be the only patient. But I’ll check on you frequently and I’ll give you a device that will allow you to call me at the push of a button.

  “I’m also going to give you an IV of normal saline, just to make sure you’re plenty hydrated. That’ll help scare away any infection and promote healing. And I’ll give you a course of preventive antibiotics. Are you allergic to anything?”

  “No ma’am.”

  “Do you have any questions?”

  “No ma’am.”

  Debbie stood behind the wheelchair and said, “Hang on. I’m not the best driver in the world, but I’ll try to get you there in one piece.”

  It was only half a smile which crossed Charlotte’s face.

  But at least it was a step in the right direction.

  -3-

  While Debbie assessed the degree of Charlotte’s injuries Marty walked over to Rachel and told her, “Don’t go anywhere, honey. I’ll be leaving again in just a few minutes.”

  “Leaving again? But Marty, it’s almost dark outside. Another ten minutes and you won’t be able to see out there.”

  He laughed.

  “Honey, it’s too dark to see even in the daytime. Night driving really isn’t that much worse.

  “Besides, that’s why God created headlights.”

  “But… but Glenna made me give her a sacred oath I’d watch over you and make sure you didn’t do anything stupid. You know she worries about you when you’re out late in the afternoon. What should I tell her?”

  “Tell her to change into something comfortable. That I’ll be there in a couple of hours and I’ll stay the night in Eden. Tell her if she’s sweet to me she might get lucky. I might show her my…”

  She cut him off.

  “Ewww! Don’t say any more.”

  Marty smiled.

  “I was going to say that if she’s sweet to me I might show her my bag of goodies the guys at the fire station in San Angelo gave me. A bag of marshmallows and some graham crackers and Hershey bars. If she’s nice to me she and I can make s’mores in the fireplace before we go to sleep tonight.

  “And you, young lady, need to take that dirty mind of yours and scrub it with some soap and water.”

  Rachel suspected he was giving her a line of bull, that he didn’t really mean what he said he meant.

  But she wouldn’t push the issue.

  Instead, she asked, “Why in the world are you going to Eden tonight?”

  He coyly replied, “I’ve got some business there that can’t wait until morning.”

  “So what are you now, an international man of mystery? What kind of business?”

  “This woman and her friends went to Eden South for help. But they were turned away. As a result seven women died and Charlotte’s life has been shattered forever.

  “I want to find out who turned her away and why.”

  “Oh, my God. Please tell me you won’t get violent.”

  “That depends on the circumstances.”

  “Please don’t do anything stupid.”

  “I won’t do anything stupid. I’ll only kill somebody if they don’t have a good reason for doing what they did.”

  She said nothing, choosing to glare at him instead.

  “Okay, okay. I won’t do anything stupid. But somebody needs to answer for them being turned away in their time of distress.”

  “And if Glenna calls, should I really tell her about the s’mores?”

  “No. Just tell her I’m missing her and I’m on my way to pay her a visit.”

  He looked at his watch.

  “Tell her I’ll be there about midnight. And tell her I’d like to visit with the mayor, if he’d be kind enough to stay up and wait for me.”

  A couple of minutes later, as Debbie pushed Charlotte toward the mine’s one-room clinic, Marty kissed Rachel on the forehead.

  “Thanks for understanding, sweetie.”

  “I don’t understand, Marty. Not at all. But I trust you to know what you’re doing. And I’ll only let you out if you promise to be careful. I may only be nineteen and you may be a thousand, but you’re still my friend and I still love you.”

  “Gee, thanks, Sugar. I love you too.”

  “Call in when you get there and tell us you made it okay.”

  “I will.”

  “You’d better not forget. Last time you forgot and I worried about you for hours before I finally called Eden and they said you were fast asleep. You do that to me again and I’ll kick your big dumb ass.”

  He smiled.

  “I’m sorry. I promise I won’t forget this time.”

  “Can I ask you one last question before you leave?”

  “Sure thing, honey. What is it?”

  “The bodies. Are they in the back of your truck? Did you bring them back with you?”

  “No. We probably should have. But Charlotte was in bad shape. It certainly wouldn’t have done her any good to see us loading the frozen corpses of her friends into the back of the rig.

  “We talked about it on the way back.

  “I told her the ground is freezing fast. That it’s already too hard to dig any graves.

  “I told her I would talk to Mark and Bryan. That I heard a story their mother died in the mine during the first blackout, after Saris 7 hit years ago.

  “The story I heard was that they were able to preserve her body in the back of the mine until the thaw came. Then they buried her in the back of the compound.”

  “I didn’t get here until after she died. But yes, it’s true. They had a service for her and placed her on a blanket, then placed a mound of powdered salt on top of her.

  “After the world thawed out and we were able to leave the mine they uncovered her and found out the salt preserved the body very well. She almost looked like she was sleeping.”

  “I’m going to bring Charlotte’s friends back here and ask Mark and Bryan to do the same thing to them. And then when the next thaw comes I’ll bury them at a place of Charlotte’s choosing.

  “It’s the least I can do for allowing them to die.”

  “You didn’t allow them to die, Marty. The people of Eden did.”

  “I know. But I should have read them the riot act. I should have told them not to send people away if they needed help. At least not defenseless women with nowhere else to go. They were my people. I feel responsible for their actions.”

  “Well get off it. They condemned eight women to death. You managed to save one. Don’t you dare blame yourself for their stupidity.”

  He said, “I’d better run before the weather gets worse.”

  “Drive safe, my friend.”

  “I will.”

  “Control, this is Rachel. Marty’s heading back out. Are we clear to open the door?”

  Rachel wasn’t in the mine from the beginning.

  She was brought in after Saris 7 already struck the earth and the mine was sealed.

  She and her sister were with their father, searching for food in the frozen world when they came across a deer carcass.

  They sawed off a hindquarter and were preparing to take it home to thaw when a car pulled off Highway 83 next to them.

  Without saying as much as a single word, two men stepped out and shot the girls’ father dead, then stole his pickup truck.

  Hannah and Bryan watched the whole thing on the surveillance monitors from inside the mine.

  There was nothi
ng they could do to stop it. By the time they armed up and made it out to the highway the killers were long gone.

  The girls were hysterical and uncontrollable.

  The car the killers came in was overheating and pouring anti-freeze all over the highway.

  “All they had to do was ask. We’d have given them a ride. Daddy was always helping people out.”

  In the new world, though, some people no longer asked. They just took.

  Since that day Rachel had occasional premonitions. Usually they foretold bad things.

  And as Marty drove off and the door started rolling down she saw something she didn’t like.

  She saw dead bodies.

  Lots of them.

  -4-

  There was light snow falling, adding even more to a pack which was already over eight inches thick.

  The snow covered three inches of pure ice, and all of it together made driving treacherous.

  It took Marty almost four hours to make the ninety-three mile trip from the mine to the old prison.

  By the time he made it to Eden’s only stop light and turned south onto Highway 87, Mayor Al was nodding off.

  It was Mayor Al who’d hired Marty to be the town’s police chief a little more than a year before. Since then they’d become good friends.

  Marty thought Al to be a bit of a braggart, a bit of a blowhard, and a bit self-serving.

  But he could overlook all that, because deep down inside Al was a nice guy. And he genuinely cared about his townsfolk.

  For his part, Al thought the world of Marty. He’d told a couple of people he considered Marty the son he never had, even though there were only three years separating the two.

  Al would do darn near anything for Marty.

  So when Marty called in to the control center and said he was coming in and needed to see Mayor Al, Al didn’t question why. Didn’t raise a fuss. He merely told the control center to get word back to Marty he’d be waiting.

  The radio at the control center came to life just before midnight.

  “Eden South, this is Marty. How do you read?”

  The controller was as bored as the mayor and had to shake the cobwebs from his own head before answering.

  “Loud and clear, Marty. You getting close?”

  “Two minutes away. Is the mayor still up?”

  Mayor Al took the microphone.

  “Right here, Marty. I’m heading to my office to fix us each a drink. You can find me there.”

  “Ten-four. Thanks for waiting up for me.”

  As it turned out, Mayor Al didn’t know anything about a van load of helpless women being turned away at the gate two days before.

  “Are you serious? Where did they come from? This is not the kind of weather for women to be out driving around in.”

  “No shit. They said they were from some kind of orphanage between here and Brady.”

  “The Shady Rest?”

  “Yeah. That sounds familiar. What’s the story behind it?”

  “Not much to tell, really. I’ve heard of it. A private place, financed by some rich woman’s estate, I think. It’s south on Highway 87 about halfway between Eden and Brady. Well hidden though. It’s far enough off the highway not to be seen by passing traffic.

  “I figured they closed down when Saris 7 hit the earth.”

  “Apparently it was taken over by marauders a few days ago. They shot all the men and banished the women. Put them in a van and told them to hit the road.”

  “Wait a minute. Men and women? You mean boys and girls, don’t you?”

  “Well, maybe a few teenagers. Most of them grew up in the ten years since Saris 7 hit, though. They stayed there because there was nowhere else to go.”

  “Why’d they kick them out of there?”

  “The girl we picked up said they didn’t want the orphans to eat up all their food.”

  “Damn.”

  “My sentiments exactly.”

  “So it sounds to me like the damage is done. What do you want me to do?”

  “I’ll take care of the men at the orphanage. I need your help to identify the man who turned them away from here.

  “And I need for you to establish new rules to prevent anything like this from ever happening again.”

  “What are you going to do with our guy once we identify him?”

  “I’d like to hang him by his thumbs and skin him like a rabbit. But that’s too easy for him. Let me think on it and I’ll come up with something that’ll cause him even more pain.”

  “Marty…”

  “Oh come on, Al. You know me better than that. I’m not gonna kill him. I might punch his lights out. But I’m not gonna kill him.”

  “Any idea who he is?”

  “No. I know he’s one of Richard’s militia members. The surviving girl said he was wearing some type of military uniform.”

  “Most of the militia is at the mine, helping with the search. And oh, by the way, have they found Frank yet?”

  “No. They’ve covered every single road within eighty miles, but some of them were searched before he went missing, when we were all looking for Brad. They’re making plans to sweep through a second time.”

  “Have you seen Glenna yet?”

  “No. She’s waiting for me in our cell.”

  “Damn it, Marty. I wish you’d stop calling it that. I’ve been trying to downplay that this used to be a prison. I’ve got almost everybody else in here calling their places ‘apartments’ or ‘cubicles.’ Now you come in here ready to undo all the work I’ve done.”

  “What difference does it make what we call them? They don’t get any bigger or fancier when we call them apartments.”

  “Darn it, I know that Marty. But I’m trying to improve morale around here. And it discourages people to think they’re living in the same room a dozen robbers or killers have shared over the years.”

  “They should be happy they’re in a warm safe place. Most people out there aren’t so lucky.”

  “Yeah, I suppose.”

  “You wanna know a secret, Al?”

  “What?”

  “I don’t have any problem calling it an apartment. I just call it a cell to irritate you, because I know you don’t like it.”

  “Why am I not surprised? I’ll tell you what, troublemaker. Why don’t you go see your wife? I know she’s been missing you, though for the life of me I don’t know why.

  “Meet me back here at seven a.m. and I’ll have Richard here too. We’ll get to the bottom of the whole thing.”

  -5-

  Marty tried to sleep that night but didn’t have much luck. Every time he closed his eyes he saw the bodies of seven young women, who likely never harmed anyone in the whole of their lives, and who died needlessly.

  All because some very bad men decided it was acceptable to steal their food and accommodations and to toss them out in the cold.

  And because someone else was too stupid to recognize their plight and to try to help them.

  At three in the morning Glenna got up to go to the bathroom and caught Marty wide awake and staring at the ceiling.

  “I can’t help it,” he said. “I keep seeing them lying there, frozen stiff, looking as though they were merely napping. It’s such a senseless waste of life.”

  She massaged his shoulders until he finally drifted off.

  But he didn’t sleep long.

  At a quarter of seven Mayor Al knocked on their cubicle’s door.

  “Wake up call,” he shouted.

  Marty was jolted awake, and his first inclination was to yell back, “Go away Al!”

  But that wouldn’t have been proper.

  After all, it was he who requested the meeting to find out who their culprit was.

  He was on his feet in seconds, apologized to Glenna and kissed her goodbye, and was on his way to Al’s office.

  Richard Sears arrived a couple of minutes after he did, carrying three steaming hot cups of coffee from the canteen.

  “He
llo, Marty.”

  “Hi, Richard.”

  “Al told me why you’re here. I’m sorry. It sounds like one of our guys screwed up big time.”

  “Any idea who it was?”

  “I have a pretty good idea. Al says it happened the day before yesterday?”

  “Yes. I’m not sure of the time, though.”

  “Shouldn’t be hard to find out. I only have three uniformed militia members left. Most of the others are at the mine helping out with the search effort.

  “How’s that going, by the way?”

  “Not too good. He managed to slip through the cracks on the first sweep. They’re starting a second.”

  “Sheesh. They’d better hurry up. The roads are going to be pretty much impassable pretty soon.”

  “I think they passed impassable a couple of days ago. Now they’re getting close to suicide.”

  “And Frank Woodard is the one who’s missing?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ve never met the man. I talked to him a few times on the radio, though. He sounded like a good one.”

  “He is. All rough and tumble, smart about all things tactical. He’s the last one you’d expect to disappear without a trace.”

  “Think he had some help? Disappearing, I mean.”

  “I don’t know. I suspected foul play from the beginning. I didn’t want to say anything though, because that would greatly increase the odds of him being found dead later. I just kept my mouth shut and prayed I was wrong.”

  “Back to our guy. Are you sure she said he was wearing a uniform?”

  “She described it perfectly. A military uniform, she said, except it had no patches or nametags.”

  “As I said, I’ve only got three uniformed men who aren’t on the search team. Coincidentally, all three of them worked the day before yesterday. Two on one shift, the third on another.

  “I’ve got them coming in at oh-seven-thirty. We’ll have a chat and see what we can find out.”

  “Thank you, Richard. I appreciate this.”

  “Hey, if one of my men screwed up and got innocent people killed, I want to know about it as much as you do. There’s been way too much dying. We all need to start thinking smarter.