Alone: Book 1: Facing Armageddon Read online

  The second thing they hadn’t counted on was Dave falling in love with his part time job. He hit it off very well with the other workers. He had fun. It was more a hobby than a job, since he loved working with his hands.

  At the end of the year and a half, he and Sarah sat down and discussed whether it would be a wise move for him to quit.

  He still had a list of things he wanted to buy for their prepping mission.

  Sarah said, “Well, I’ll admit it hasn’t affected your quality time with the girls. I mean, you gave up your softball and bowling leagues, so you’re able to spend at least as much time with them as before you took the job.

  “And as for me, I still get plenty of quality time with you. Even on the nights you work, you still make it to bed on time.”

  She giggled.

  “And it darn sure hasn’t affected our love life. Almost every night you work, you come home ravenous, anxious to make love to me.”

  She looked him square in the eye.

  “And by the way, why is that, anyway?”

  He shrugged his shoulders.

  “I don’t know. Maybe hanging around that small shop with all those guys for four hours makes me hunger for female company. Are you complaining?”

  She purred like a kitten.

  “Who, me? Oh, no, baby. Not at all.”

  So for a variety of reasons, Dave kept his part time job and continued to spend every dollar he earned there for prepping.

  Right up until the day Sarah and the girls got on that airplane.

  -4-

  Dave checked his watch when he walked out of the cabinet shop. It was 4:35. He hadn’t eaten anything since the cinnabon at the airport that morning, and he was famished.

  He figured he had just enough time to stop by the Taco Cabana on his way home.

  It was the closest he’d ever come to cheating on Sarah. His father had died prematurely, as had his grandfather. Both from heart attacks. Clogged arteries, his father’s doctor had said.

  He admonished Dave, “If you want to live longer than your father did, eat a low fat diet.”

  In most cases, Dave followed the doctor’s advice. But there were certain things he just wasn’t willing to give up.

  Like barbacoa.

  Barbacoa was slow roasted shredded beef. For hundreds of years, the vaqueros of old Mexico took the head of a cow and spit-roasted over a very low heat until the meat just peeled off the bone. They knew that the most tender and most flavorful of beef came from the cheeks and jowls.

  And it made excellent tacos.

  He stepped up to the counter at Taco Cabana and placed his order.

  “I’d like two pounds of barbacoa to go, with refried beans and an extra dozen tortillas.”

  In the back of his head, he could almost hear Sarah admonishing him:

  “David Wayne Speer Junior, what are you doing to yourself? You know that grease is going to go straight to your arteries!”

  As the cashier handed him his change, he smiled in the knowledge that he’d be able to eat all the barbacoa tacos he wanted for at least the next four days. And as long as he got rid of the evidence, he’d get away with it. Sarah would never know.

  For a brief second he felt guilty. He hated keeping secrets from his beloved Sarah. But, he reasoned, it could be worse. He didn’t drink, like a lot of men did. He didn’t do drugs either. Never had, not even as a kid. He didn’t gamble or chase other women like some others did. Sarah was the most gorgeous woman he’d ever seen. He’d never seen another woman who could hold a candle to her. And even if he had, he wouldn’t have strayed.

  He enjoyed sports, but he wasn’t one of those men who was addicted to sports and spent every waking moment in front of the television screen.

  No, he decided. This was a relatively harmless vice, and really the only one he had. He might not be perfect, but all in all he was a pretty good husband.

  After he got his order, he rewarded himself for being a pretty good husband by opening up the box and making himself a taco for the road.

  Dave put the box of barbacoa and the trimmings onto the passenger seat of his Explorer and noticed that his right rear tire was low. He’d always had a bad habit of picking up nails on construction sites, so it didn’t surprise him. In fact, he half expected it to happen regularly. Two days before he’d been scouting out a tract of land where he’d just signed a contract to build three single family homes in the summer.

  It was a minor inconvenience, and no more. He knew the guys at the Zarzamora Tire Shop quite well, and they’d plug it for a six pack of Corona. He’d swing it by there on his way to the cabinet shop in the morning, he figured. And if it went flat before then, it was no big deal. He always carried a portable air compressor behind the driver’s seat.

  He checked his watch again as he drove down Royal Valley Drive. He was a block and a half from home. The girls should be landing any time now. In fact, if they had a tail wind, they may already have landed. And any minute now his cell phone would ring, and the girls would announce they were in Kansas City.

  Little Beth would be all giggles and have stories to tell of their great adventure so far. And he couldn’t wait to hear them.

  And then the most curious thing happened.

  His vehicle died.

  -5-

  He cursed aloud.

  “Damn it!”

  Things like this always seemed to happen at the worst possible time.

  He checked his rearview mirror to make sure no one was behind him, since he was blocking the street. There was a car in the mirror, but it was a full block behind him.

  That wasn’t a problem. He’d be long gone before it got to him.

  Or so he thought.

  He turned the key and got nothing but silence. No groan of a starter that told him the carburetor wasn’t getting any gas. No click click click of a loose terminal or a bad solenoid.

  Nothing.

  “Damn it!”

  He pulled the hood release and got out of the Explorer. He bent over the engine expecting to find his battery cable had somehow popped completely off the battery. But he could find nothing amiss.

  For a moment he stood there, scratching his head. Then he looked down the street at the car he’d seen in his rearview mirror and saw that it too had its hood up. The driver was doing the same thing Dave was: standing in front of his disabled car looking bewildered.

  Dave got an uneasy feeling. He took his cell phone from his pocket. The screen was black and appeared to be off.

  But it wasn’t off. It was shorted out. It would never work again.

  “No! No! No!”

  He cursed under his breath and started to sprint for home. He was sure he knew what was going on, but was praying it wasn’t so.

  His neighbor two doors down tried to stop him as he ran by.

  “Hey, Dave,” he called out as he lifted the hood of his car. “Do you know anything about cars?”

  Dave ignored him, not because he was a rude sort, but because he was a man on a mission.

  He burst into his front door and tried the lights. None of them worked. The huge wall clock he and Sarah had bought together the month before no longer ticked.

  Maybe it was just a coincidence, he tried to convince himself. Maybe it was a temporary power outage. Maybe a transformer blew out on a nearby power pole.

  At exactly the same time several vehicles mysteriously died, and his cell phone turned into a worthless paperweight.

  Maybe.

  He desperately looked around for something electric that was working. Something. Anything.

  He saw the MP-3 player that Sarah wore when she was on the treadmill every morning, doing her daily run. She always said she couldn’t run without her music. He picked it up and turned it on. Nothing.

  He ran to the kitchen and pulled open the drawer that held flashlights and spare batteries.

  One by one, he turned on each of four flashlights.

  None of them worked, even though he’d repla
ced the batteries just days before.

  He went down to his knees and began to cry.

  For more than an hour he sat there, on the kitchen floor, waiting for the kitchen phone to ring. He’d picked it up a dozen times, hoping to hear a dial tone and hearing nothing but silence.

  He’d removed the battery in his cell phone an equal number of times, then replaced it. He seemed to remember an old saying about a fool doing the same

  thing over and over again, and expecting a different result.

  But he had no choice. It was the only straw he had to grasp.

  The only working thing he could find was the old fashioned wind up wrist watch he bought because the batteries kept wearing out on his old one. It ran off a spring that would keep good time, provided it was rewound at least every other day.

  He found himself sitting in the kitchen, watching the shadows crawl higher and higher on the bare white walls as the setting sun dipped lower in the sky.

  He was numb. He couldn’t bear to think the thoughts that kept skirting the edges of his mind. Wouldn’t think about them. He’d just take it for granted that yes, his family landed safely just before the power went out. In fact, they made good time and landed early. By the time the power outage blackened the Kansas City airport, they were surely on their way to Uncle Tommy’s house.

  No, that wasn’t good enough. He couldn’t bear to think they might be caught out in the open. Their flight made record time. Yes, that must be it. The flight made record time and arrived a full half hour ahead of schedule. They had time to get their luggage and drove to Uncle Tommy’s house. They pulled up into the driveway just before the blackout, and they were safe and sound.

  In fact, they were just ready to call him when everything died.

  That’s what happened. He was as sure of it as he was of anything else.

  It had to be that way. Any other scenario was just too painful to consider.

  On and off over the next few hours he got up and stretched his legs. He knew there was a lot of work to do. He just couldn’t find the motivation to do it. So he got up periodically and stretched his legs, and walked around a bit.

  During one such episode, he walked up the stairs. His subdivision sat upon a hill, and in the distance on a clear night, he could actually see downtown San Antonio. On those nights, the Hemisfair Tower shone like a beacon in the distance, some nine miles away.

  It occurred to him, while sitting on the kitchen floor, that perhaps the blackout wasn’t a widespread thing after all. That maybe, just maybe, the power lines shorted out in his area alone. Maybe some freakish weather conditions caused the shorted power lines to short out other electronics in close proximity.

  Maybe the rest of the world was okay, outside his neighborhood.

  Maybe his wife and daughters had been trying to call him for hours. Maybe they were worried about him, and wondering why he wouldn’t answer either phone.

  Maybe.

  But not likely.

  With much anticipation, he’d climbed the stairs, praying that he’d look out that south window and see the downtown skyline aglow in the distance. And then he could walk toward the lights until he found a convenience store or a grocer that had power. Then he’d use a pay phone to call his wife and tell her he was okay.

  Only the skyline wasn’t lit up in the distance. The night was crystal clear. He could see twinkling stars in every corner of the sky, and knew it wasn’t clouds that were blocking the city lights.

  There were no city lights.

  And he stumbled back to the kitchen, where he curled into a ball and cried.

  Sometime later he finally began to regain his wits. Regardless of what did or didn’t happen to his family, he had things to do. And perhaps the way to keep from going insane was to stay focused on the tasks at hand. To keep busy. To keep his mind occupied.

  He looked at the face of his wind up watch, the luminescent hands glowing in the dark and telling him it was almost three a.m.

  He’d have to hurry. The sun would come up around six thirty or so, and he needed to finish his mission and be back in the house before then.

  He went through the first floor of the house, opening all of the window curtains. He’d use the full moon and cloudless sky to his advantage. There wasn’t much light out there, but he’d let as much of it in as he could. He’d still be stumbling around in the darkness, but it wouldn’t be quite pitch black.

  Almost, but not quite.

  -6-

  Dave found his keys where’d he’d last remembered seeing them. In his panic to get home, he’d left them hanging in the knob on the front door. He kicked himself. If the looters had been out and about, they’d have just walked right in, before he was set up to defend himself.

  From his front porch he sniffed the air. He didn’t smell any smoke. He heard absolutely nothing. He surmised that the residents for the most part probably considered this just a freak power outage. They probably assumed that the lights would come back on at any moment.

  He suspected, and indeed hoped, that the looting and riots wouldn’t start until the next night, as it started to become apparent to people that this was more than a temporary situation.

  And as more and more people started to panic.

  He walked back into his house and locked the front door. Then he made his way into his garage and felt his way around until he found a red plastic handle hanging on the end of a short white cord from his electric garage door opener.

  The emergency release. He pulled it, and the garage door popped as it disengaged itself from the motor.

  Dave carefully opened the noisy door by hand, raising it slowly and cursing under his breath with every squeak and groan it made.

  He didn’t know if his neighbors could see what he was doing, or even if they were watching, but he had no choice. This could only be done under cover of darkness, and the second night would be too dangerous. He only hoped he hadn’t waited too long.

  He hopped in Sarah’s Honda Accord and inserted the key to unlock the gear shift. Then he put it into neutral and slowly pushed it down the driveway and into the street.

  Then he pushed it forward, three houses down the street, and parked it in front of the Smith house.

  The Smiths were on a week long trip to Disney World in Orlando, and would surely never be back. Hopefully a car parked in front of their house would keep the looters away for a few days, until Dave had a chance to go over himself and empty the house of anything he could use.

  To help his cause, He came back ten minutes later and hung a note on their front door. The note, which he’d scrawled on a sheet of white copy paper with a black marker, was barely legible in the moonlight.

  It said:

  HEAVILY ARMED AND PISSED OFF

  IF YOU BREAK IN HERE, YOU DIE.

  There was still much to do. When he came back to the Smith home the second time, he brought a Phillips screwdriver and four five gallon Jerry cans from a high shelf in his garage.

  He carried the cans to the back of Sarah’s Honda and crawled underneath her gas tank. There, in a neat row, he punctured the bottom of the tank four times by holding the point against the tank and then hitting the screwdriver with the heel of his hand.

  Four streams of gasoline immediately started streaming from the tank, and he positioned the Jerry cans underneath the streams to catch it. He didn’t have a clue how much gas she had in the tank, since the gauge wasn’t working without battery power. But he hoped she had twenty gallons worth.

  If she didn’t, there were plenty of other vehicles on the street.

  While the cans were filling, he went back to his garage and collected a pile of old newspapers from the same shelf he’d taken the Jerry cans from. The newspapers had been on the shelf for months. They were yellow and had started to curl on the edges.

  He tossed them onto the front porch. Then he took three lawn chairs and two loungers from the patio in front of his house and threw them unceremoniously into the back yard. In another ti
me, he enjoyed sitting on the chairs, sipping iced tea with Sarah and the girls, while waving at the neighbors and watching the world go by.

  Now, he suspected, those times were gone forever.

  He walked back to the Honda to check on the progress of the Jerry cans. They were only half full. Obviously filling a five gallon can with a stream of gas no wider than a screwdriver tip was a slow process.

  He went back to the house and stumbled around in the darkness until he made his way to his office, then removed a file from the very back of the bottom drawer of his filing cabinet.

  In the same drawer was something else he’d need. Several decorative scented candles. The scent didn’t matter to him. He couldn’t have cared less what they smelled like, as long as they gave him the light he needed to finish this part of his plan.

  Back to the kitchen he went, lighting the candle on the kitchen counter with a box of long kitchen matches in the back of the silverware drawer.

  He opened the folder and took out three copies of a fill-in-the blank foreclosure notice. He’d downloaded it off the internet several months before.

  All three copies were already filled in, with their home address and a fictitious bank. They were signed by an equally bogus “loan officer,” someone named Jack Green, on the bottom right corner of each document.

  All that was left to do was fill in the date block at the top of each form. Then he took a roll of clear packing tape and taped one copy on the garage door, one on the front door, and one on the inside of the picture window in the front room.

  His goal was for any looters who came around to see the foreclosure notices and think the house was vacant. Vacant houses contain no food or other pilferable items. Hopefully the looters would move on to another house and loot it instead.

  The lack of cars in the driveway and lack of lawn furniture on the front patio would, he hoped, provide further proof that the house was unoccupied.