A Day of Reckoning Page 4

  “That’s just it, sir. She’d be in no legal jeopardy. She’s not subject to military laws. She couldn’t be tried for treason because she isn’t subject to jurisdiction under the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

  “And she had no active role in the breach of the bunker anyway.

  “Her role was strictly peripheral. She gave you information the people in the bunker were there illegally.

  “She gave you that information acting in good faith.

  “And you, in turn were acting in good faith when you made a command decision to assault the bunker. You were acting on behalf of the men and women of Joint Base Lackland, to take control of whatever provisions were stockpiled in the bunker.

  “You needed those provisions to feed your troops and keep them from starving, did you not?”

  “Yes. I did. That was my intent.”

  “There is no villain here, colonel. Hannah acted on good faith when she told you about the bunker. She firmly believed the men were in the bunker illegally and she saw herself as a whistleblower doing a good deed.

  “You, in turn, had a duty as base commander to provide for your troops. Breaching the bunker to gain access to its stores in time of crisis was in line with that.”

  “If we can get Hannah’s testimony I think we can convince the panel there was no ill intent. And ill intent is an element of a treason conviction.

  “Do you think it’ll work, Captain?”

  “I think it’s the only chance we have. And there’s another thing.

  “By naming Hannah as an essential witness, we can claim her testimony is paramount to your case. If she can’t be located it’s an excellent reason to request a delay until she can be found.

  “And that could take years.”

  -10-

  Jason Tomlin’s right ear began to twitch.

  Someone was talking about him.

  Actually, he knew that was an old wives’ tale.

  Or in his case an old mother’s tale.

  Jason’s mother, before she passed away a few years before, was always filling his head with the truly nonsensical.

  “Your ears are twitching? It means someone’s talking about you.

  “Your palm is itching? Hallelujah! That means you’re about to come into some money.

  “Having trouble sleeping? Put a bar of lye soap beneath your pillow.”

  Yes, indeed, Mom was full of useless information and tips. She seemed to collect them like other women collected porcelain dolls or salt and pepper shakers.

  Bless her heart.

  He missed her.

  She was all he had left. And then she passed away.

  At least she died peacefully in her sleep.

  With a smile upon her face.

  Jason liked to believe she was dreaming a happy dream when her heart just gave up and stopped.

  Maybe dreaming of his father, who preceded her in death almost twenty years before.

  She’d always said he spoke to her. Said he was in heaven and waiting for her. Said he’d make sure they found a place for her.

  Perhaps that was where the smile came from.

  Perhaps she was right about the whole thing.

  Perhaps as she drew her last breath she had a vision of him, holding his hand out for her. Welcoming her, perhaps, to life’s final great journey.

  That was another thing she taught Jason.

  Besides the whole “lye under your pillow” thing.

  “Don’t fear death,” she told him many times. “Death is but the final step in life’s great journey. Don’t fear it. Enjoy it, relish it, look forward to it.”

  It never made sense to Jason. He’d always viewed death as an end to everything. He was never a religious person. Didn’t believe in God or heaven or hell or any of that stuff.

  He’d always believed that when he died he’d just cease to exist. That was it. He’d just close his eyes as he did every night when he went to sleep, only this time he’d sleep forever.

  He’d go back, perhaps, to wherever he was before he was born. That is to say… nowhere.

  Then again, Mom was right about most things.

  Perhaps she was right too when she said that death wasn’t an end, but rather a beginning to a new world.

  A new world where many speculated, but no one actually knew what was to happen.

  Indeed, the next great adventure.

  He shook off the thought.

  He thought of his mother often, for they’d always been quite close.

  The long freeze which Saris 7 delivered upon the earth had brought them even closer, for they’d had each other and no one else.

  Jason had been a data specialist at the McDonald Observatory on Mount Locke, a few miles to the west.

  That was the part of his job he loved.

  He was also, due to what his superiors called his “dynamic personality,” the man who gave the guided tours to the public whenever a handful of civilians made the long trip up the mountain to check out the odd shaped building they could see from a great distance.

  Jason had always suspected it wasn’t his personality which landed him the job he never volunteered for.

  He’d always suspected management was sitting around in one of their secret brainstorming sessions and the topic of the tours came up.

  “We need a new tour guide,” he envisioned them as saying.

  “But nobody wants to do it. They all say they’re too busy doing their real jobs.”

  “Tell Jason to do it. Jason will do anything.”

  “He won’t like it.”

  “Tell him he was chosen from all the people who wanted the job. Tell him it’s because of his ‘dynamic personality’ or something.”

  Jason didn’t mind the tour guide job – actually, it wasn’t a job, it was an ‘additional duty’ – that way they didn’t have to pay him any extra money.

  No, he didn’t mind it.

  It broke up the routine of his normal work day.

  It was the hum-drum sameness of the questions which got to him.

  Every crowd asked the same questions.

  “How come you’re way out here in the middle of nowhere?”

  “When I look through my telescope everything is upside down. Is it that way on your telescope too?”

  “Who crawls up there and cleans the lens?”

  “Who names the stars and why don’t they give them real names like Charlie and Bill?”

  “Have you ever seen any UFOs through the telescope?”

  “If you look at the moon can you see the rover and the other stuff we left behind?”

  He always heard the same set of questions; he always gave the same set of answers.

  It wasn’t the civilians’ fault. They’d all been brought up hearing their teachers say there was no such thing as a dumb question.

  And to be sure, the questions weren’t dumb.

  They were just monotonous. They were the same questions Jason heard, day after day, from every tour group who came through the observatory.

  He’d always wanted to tell the group, “Yes. We see little green men all the time. In fact, they’ve already invaded your neighborhood back home. They’ve eaten all your neighbors and assumed their human shapes. They’ve got their eyes on you and they’re coming for you next.”

  But he resisted the urge.

  -11-

  Jason never saw the tour groups anymore.

  They’d closed the observatory a month before Saris 7 hit the earth.

  Management said the funding dried up. That they were welcome to stay and work for free if they wanted. Or they could just come back after the thaw and see if there was money then to pay them.

  Everybody left except for Jason. He was settled there, and had enough provisions to last him and his mom for years.

  He’d gone back to the observatory after the thaw, before Cupid 23 struck and everything froze again.

  But the place was still padlocked. He assumed everyone was dead now or had moved to other parts
of the country to be with their families and no longer had an interest.

  Enough of that. Enough thinking of the distant past. He had a job at hand to do so he could get back out of the frozen world and back into his shelter.

  His ear was no longer twitching. He pulled the drawstring on his parka hood a bit tighter to keep out the frigid air and went back to his mission.

  Back to inspecting his solar panels to figure out why his incoming amperage was dropping.

  It was bitter cold, and he’d always hated cold.

  But at least this part of Texas didn’t get a lot of rainfall.

  Rainfall, when the sun was hidden by a heavy cover of dust, equated to snow. Lots of it. Parts of Texas were already under several feet of the fluffy white stuff.

  But the area around Ft. Davis – directly north of the big bend and west of Ft. Stockton, was relatively dry.

  Mostly what Jason dealt with were the wind and the low temperatures. Combined they made life miserable when he had to go outdoors.

  But at least he didn’t have to slog through heavy snow to get around.

  It only took him twenty minutes of searching before he found his problem: an MC4 connector which had worked its way loose.

  He snapped it back into place and would check his feed meter when he got back down in his shelter, but he instinctively knew he’d fixed the problem.

  The solar panel system was relatively simple and easy to maintain. There were no moving parts to wear out. It was much better than his wind-driven water pumps or his thermal heating system. Even the mini-wind turbine he’d installed a year before Saris 7 came along had given him fits lately.

  But he was careful not to complain.

  People were dying out there by the millions. He knew that.

  He knew how lucky he was, not only because he was still alive, but because he had the forethought to plan ahead.

  Those who knew of his prepping activities before Saris 7 became a “thing” had mostly ridiculed him.

  He was right; they were wrong, and they were mostly dead now.

  Those who weren’t dead had all left the area.

  Ft. Davis never was much of a town, really. Now it was deserted. Everyone was gone except for him and another prepper who lived out on Cemetery Road east of town.

  Ft. Davis was a ghost town now. And it would remain that way until after the second freeze was over and the world thawed out again.

  For there was nothing of value in the town to draw people in.

  Its biggest employer, the observatory, was closed and padlocked shut.

  There were no big supermarkets full of food, or abandoned tractor trailers.

  And it was far enough away from Interstate 10 to be off the beaten track.

  Highway nomads who went from one abandoned tractor-trailer rig to the next, sleeping in the cabs and raiding what food and water they could from the trailers… they had no reason to leave the interstate to investigate the tiny berg of Ft. Davis.

  It was too far away and nobody would dare make the trip without knowing for certain there was something worth traveling for.

  And there certainly wasn’t.

  No, the westbound highway nomads would continue toward El Paso, totally ignoring the tiny sign which said

  EXIT 237

  FORT DAVIS

  Nomads headed east already knew Ft. Stockton was less than a hundred miles away. They’d skip what might or might not be at Ft. Davis and press on as well.

  Jason and the other prepper, a hermit named Saul, were it. They were the entire population of Ft. Davis, and would be for quite some time.

  Jason walked back to his shelter and hefted the heavy storm shelter door up and over.

  He walked down the first few steps into what appeared to be nothing more than a big hole in the ground.

  He pulled on a heavy-gage nylon rope to close the door over him, then slapped the hasp and heavy duty Master padlock into place.

  He waited until his eyes adjusted, until the dim light emanating from the interior of his bunker brightened his way and he could safely proceed forward.

  He walked carefully around the false floor he’d installed on the advice of another prepper friend in Idaho.

  It was his first line of defense in the event someone managed to make their way past the heavy door.

  And it was simple, really. A pit full of punji sticks with poisoned tips. Over the pit was a flimsy frame which wouldn’t stop someone from falling into the pit, but would support the brown blanket and thin layer of dirt which covered it.

  The idea was simple. The first man would fall into the pit and suffer a very quick, yet very painful death.

  Any cronies behind him would hopefully think twice before going on and instead would turn around and run.

  If they proceeded they’d die anyway.

  But turning tail and running would save Jason a lot of effort.

  -12-

  Jason checked the feed meter which registered the number of amps per hour coming from his solar system.

  It was back to normal.

  The energy coming in from his solar panels had, of course, greatly diminished since Cupid 23 struck and the atmosphere was once again smothered with a thick cloud of dust.

  But the dust wasn’t as bad as it was in the Saris 7 years because Cupid 23 was smaller.

  Logic would dictate the freeze would be shorter for the same reason.

  And some sun was getting through.

  Not much, for it was only when cloud cover was minimal and even then one couldn’t actually see the sun.

  What they saw instead was a spot in the brown sky that was considerably brighter than the rest of the brown sky.

  Early on, Jason reconfigured his power plan. The wind almost always blew in this part of the country, and the limited sunlight had no affect on that.

  The swivel-headed mini wind turbine provided more than enough power for his main power draw: the central heating system.

  It provided enough for the second greatest draw too: his lighting and water purification systems.

  All the solar panels did was charge the batteries which powered everything else: the TV and DVD player, his stereo sound system, the amp for his guitar and his computer game system.

  Oh, and also the ham radio in the corner of the first shipping container he used to communicate with other preppers around the world.

  Since he and Saul almost never saw each other, the ham was the only human contact he enjoyed these days.

  His underground bunker was nothing more than a long line of shipping containers welded together end to end in a straight line.

  There wasn’t an awful lot of space. The entire bunker was ten feet wide, eight feet high and four hundred feet long.

  He left the doors intact, so that he didn’t have to heat the entire structure.

  Only the first two containers… the first hundred feet or so, were connected to his heating system.

  And that was plenty.

  The wind power his turbine turned into electricity was enough to keep the first two containers at a toasty warm seventy four degrees all the time.

  As for the other six containers, where he stored all his food, where his pump room and mechanical rooms were, and where his private gymnasium was, the temperatures hovered around sixty degrees or so.

  He was surprised the temperature never dropped below that point, since outside temps went as low as ten below zero during the Saris 7 freeze.

  But then again, he shouldn’t have been.

  They were, after all, insulated by the ten feet of Mother Earth’s soil on top of them.

  And any prepper will testify dirt is one of the best insulators available.

  He hung up his parka and gloves and took off the insulated mukluks he’d bought on the internet, then popped a movie into the DVD player.

  Blazing Saddles.

  It was old and he’d seen it five hundred times.

  But it was one of the best movies ever made, in his opinion, and it never f
ailed to make him laugh.

  He’d probably watch it a thousand more times before he left to go on his mother’s “last great adventure.”

  He sat in his chair and cracked open a bottle of beer. It was home-brewed. His other hobby, although he tried to drink it sparingly now since he was down to his last five cases.

  Back in his hard-core prepping days, before Saris 7 came crashing to earth, he’d even gone so far as growing his own hops. He stockpiled a mountain of it, and spent a good portion of his time underground after Saris 7 brewing and bottling his home-made brew.

  Trouble was, he ran out of hops before the world thawed, except for the seeds he had to lay back to start his new crops once he was able to go above ground again.

  When the world grew warm enough he emerged, repaired his damaged greenhouse and planted the seeds.

  But only a handful germinated.

  He blamed himself for not properly storing them and spent a considerable amount of time trying to find another prepper in the area who had some.

  Most other preppers thought him crazy, though, for wasting storage space stocking something as unnecessary as hops.

  Of course, it was all subjective. For a self-professed beer connoisseur like Jason beer was almost its own food group. Hops was, therefore, as important as food or water.

  He never did find any and had to settle for what he could eke out of the ground.

  Which wasn’t much.

  When Cupid 23 delivered Round 2 he was totally unprepared, beer-wise.

  He tried to limit his consumption to one bottle per day, to stretch his supply as long as possible.

  To wean him off his addiction, as it were.

  As the movie started he commiserated his shortage of beer and tried his best to get comfortable.

  Then his ham radio sprang to life in the far corner of the room.

  “Damn it!”

  He knew it was a prepper.

  Preppers were the only ones who had working radios, and who used them on a regular basis.

  Most, like Jason, were living alone or with a handful of family members and longed for word… any word… of the world outside their own.