The Final Chapter Page 5

  The EMPs shorted out the battery first, causing a surge of power so strong it went through the fusible links meant to protect the electronic components from such surges and fried everything anyway.

  It quite literally broke the fusible links and then arced across the gaps with great force.

  How far it went, though, varied depending on several things.

  The design of the car, for example, and the quality of the parts.

  Also whether the vehicle was out in the open or in some kind of shelter.

  Those vehicles in buildings or garages which were made mostly of metal fared better than those predominantly made of wood.

  Scientists believed the metal buildings provided more protection because much of the force of the EMPs “danced around” the metal shelter instead of penetrating it.

  It was maddening, and at the same time quite rewarding.

  For sometimes mechanics raised a hood and found that once they replaced the battery and all the fuses, no other damage was done.

  As for the batteries, the Army provided enough personnel to get two battery manufacturing plants operational again, one in Dayton and the other in Albuquerque.

  Each factory had a quota of two hundred batteries a day, which were rationed out and delivered on U.S. Army trucks to cities all over the country.

  All that together meant that the streets of San Antonio, except for the aforementioned Loop 1604, were practically devoid of abandoned cars seven years after the blackout.

  But running automobiles were now seen on city streets each and every day.

  There weren’t a lot of them.

  But they were out there.

  -14-

  Of all the people John Castro left behind when he left San Antonio, he thought of Bill the most.

  Bill was a remarkable man. A man with a disadvantage the other survivors didn’t have to deal with, and which made his life so much harder.

  Bill had a condition called Pervasive Developmental Disorder, or PDD. What that meant was that his body developed faster than his mind.

  It wasn’t debilitating, in that Bill could be taught to do most things other men could do.

  But some things he had a hard time dealing with, for he was a five year old boy trapped in a twenty-six year old man’s body.

  Bill was lucky enough to have survived at all once his brother and caretaker passed away.

  To be sure, it wasn’t easy for him. He’d only made it by eating the dead corpses of people in his neighborhood who’d committed suicide or fallen victim to marauders.

  John Castro first met him when he was hunting a man he thought to be a sadistic murderer and cannibal.

  Instead he found a man-boy who was eating human flesh because he simply knew no other way to stay alive.

  Instead of arresting Bill, John found him a home on Baker Street.

  The people of Baker Street welcomed him and made him one of their own.

  They recognized that his was a lifetime of struggle from the very beginning.

  He’d not only had his medical conditions to deal with; he’d also been the subject of bullying for most of his life.

  For kids can be cruel to someone they view as being different than themselves.

  Adults can be even more cruel to someone they view as flawed.

  The people of Baker Street overlooked his flaws and disabilities.

  They focused instead on his strengths and his talents.

  John never worried Bill would find a home on Baker Street.

  Rather, he worried about Bill for another reason.

  A reason only he and Scarlett knew about.

  Bill made a random comment one day to John as the two were out riding.

  It was out of the blue, and had nothing to do with anything else they were talking about.

  But that was how Bill was.

  Bill’s mind was a mishmash of ideas and random thoughts, and he had a habit of saying whatever popped into his mind at any given time.

  “My brother told me once that people in my family die young,” Bill had said that day.

  It caught John off guard and he didn’t know what to say.

  And that was unusual for John, for John always had something to say.

  Too much, according to some of his friends.

  “What do you mean,” he’d asked his young friend.

  “Oh, we get cancers and stuff. He told me I probably won’t live until I’m thirty years old.”

  Bill looked at John that day and said, “How many is thirty?”

  He looked at his fingers, knowing he couldn’t count as high as thirty and not having a clue what the number meant.

  John remembered thinking that Bill had little concept of numbers, and didn’t know thirty from thirty million.

  He’d shelved the conversation and asked his good friend Becky to check into the matter.

  Becky was a registered nurse at Santa Rosa Hospital.

  John was hoping she could find out a bit about Bill’s family history, and whether it did indeed include terminal cancers.

  “I’m sorry,” she told him. “I couldn’t find anything. His brother was never treated here.

  “It’s possible that if they were so afflicted they were treated by an oncologist not affiliated with Santa Rosa.

  “If that’s the case the records would be tied up in a system I have no access to, even if the system still worked.

  “Remember that before the blackout medical records were maintained in strict accordance with government regulations, meaning only the patient, his doctor and any relatives he specifically listed had access to them.

  “Getting medical information about someone back then without their express written permission was almost impossible.

  “Now, with such information on computers which are no longer working, I’d say it’s surpassed almost impossible.

  “I’d say you’re out of luck.”

  “Any ideas? And don’t say interrogate Bill. He gave me all the information he had, just some vague reference to a family history of cancer his brother made in passing.”

  “I can only make one suggestion.

  “Go back to Bill’s house. You said he and his brother lived there for a long time before the brother died.

  “In all likelihood, if the brother had cancer, there are bottles of medication left behind.

  “Collect those bottles or write down the name of the medication and the name of the doctor who prescribed it.

  “I can look up the doctor’s name in our physician’s directory to see if he was an oncologist or cancer specialist.

  “I may already know off the top of my head. I’ve met a large percentage of the doctors in San Antonio just from treating their patients who came through Santa Rosa.”

  John laughed.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “There won’t be any medications left.”

  “Why not?”

  “The house will have been cleaned out by the druggies by now. They’re all desperate to get high now that the dope manufacturers are mostly out of business and the dealers are mostly dead.

  “Street drugs are very difficult to get these days.

  “Desperate addicts are sweeping through abandoned houses, grabbing every pill they can find and trying to get high with them.

  “The best I can hope for is that they left behind some empty bottles.”

  “Then look for those.

  “Also, look for bills from the doctor’s office. Appointments written on calendars. Anything in the house that’ll provide you either a doctor’s name or the name of his medications.”

  “Okay,” John conceded. “I’ll give it a shot.”

  -15-

  The only problem was, John didn’t give it a shot.

  Oh, he fully intended to.

  But as deputy chief of police he was a very busy man.

  He was already working twelve hour days, and his workload was such that he very easily could have worked twenty four hours a day and still lef
t some things undone.

  One distraction led to another and then another, and before long he’d placed the question of Bill’s family medical history to the back of his mind.

  Then he forgot about it completely.

  It wasn’t until some time later, after he’d moved to Junction, that he saw a man on the streets of Kerrville who reminded him of Bill.

  And it gnawed on him, day and night, for over a week.

  He just knew he was supposed to have done something relating to Bill and had never done it.

  He just knew it.

  The trouble was, he couldn’t remember what it was.

  Then, as forgotten memories sometimes do, it chose the middle of the night to resurface.

  In this case it came to John in a dream.

  A dream in which he finally made it back to San Antonio to visit his old friends, just in time to find them burying Bill in a shallow grave in the back yard of one of the Baker Street homes.

  “It all happened so quickly,” Scarlett told John in his dream.

  “He was fine until just a few months ago.

  “All of a sudden, out of the blue, he started losing weight.

  “At first we teased him.

  “We told him he didn’t have to lose weight to find a girlfriend. The girls already loved him, we said. All he had to do was be himself.

  “We made a point to feed him extra. We baked him cookies and cakes and lasagna to fatten him up.

  “But he was still shedding pounds like crazy, even when eating twice as much food as any other man on the block.

  “That’s when we knew something was wrong. We took him to the hospital, but they couldn’t test him with all their machines and lab still down.

  “They confided to us it might be some type of cancer. But they no longer had the capability of doing either radiation therapy or chemotherapy and wouldn’t know where to apply it anyway without isolating it and determining the specific type of cancer.”

  John asked Scarlett, in near desperation, “And there was nothing they could do to help him?”

  “No. They said they were sorry, but there was nothing they could do.

  “They said to make him comfortable, and to prepare him for his passing.”

  “How did he take it?”

  “John, I was amazed at how strong he was. He said his brother had always told him he would die early. He was prepared for it.

  “He seemed happy he was finally going to go to heaven and see Eddie again.

  “He said he missed Eddie even more than he missed his parents.”

  “Was he in a lot of pain?”

  “Not at first. In his last couple of months he got weaker and weaker.

  “Then came the dizzy spells and the unsteadiness.

  “It wasn’t until the last month or so he started to get headaches.

  “Rhett pulled some strings at the hospital and got him some pain medicine and sedatives to help him sleep.

  “He kept his great attitude right up until the end.

  “Picture it, John. He was comforting us instead of the other way around.

  “He said he dreamed every night about Eddie and his parents, holding their hands out to him, encouraging him to join them.

  “When he finally died, it was in his sleep.

  “And he died with a smile on his face. I think he was dreaming of his family when he finally went to them.”

  John awoke at three in the morning and stumbled out of bed, then made his way to the kitchen of Tom Haskins’ old ranch house to make himself some coffee.

  He seemed to sense he’d get no more sleep on this particular night.

  He had access to a ham radio the Kerr County sheriff had bartered from a prepper some time before.

  But it was currently out of commission.

  A fuse had blown a week before and a replacement couldn’t be found.

  One could no longer just go on the internet and purchase any fuse they wanted and have it shipped in.

  The radio maintenance man was looking high and low at every electronics store in the area and was having very little luck.

  It was John’s dream, and the radio outage, that prompted him to finally visit his old friends in San Antonio.

  He’d talked about doing it many times, but things kept getting in the way.

  Agreeing to serve as Tom’s undersheriff took away most of his free time.

  So did the complete overhaul of Tom’s ranch house.

  They’d worked together, the two of them did.

  Tom was much older than John but they got along famously.

  Each morning they went to work together and served the people of Kerr County.

  In the evenings and on the weekends they hauled lumber and swung hammers, completely restoring the ranch house. They brought it out of the 1960s and into the new millennium.

  They even wired it for cable TV and internet access, just in case either became operational again in their lifetimes.

  After awhile John simply forgot about his desire to go back to San Antonio.

  The dream and the broken radio changed that and finally spurred him to go.

  -16-

  John already knew that Bill was still alive and seemingly well.

  He’d visited Baker Street first, before going downtown to see Julio, and was going back later that evening to a barbeque in his honor.

  Actually, he teased Tony Martinez, “You guys are always looking for any excuse to throw a barbeque.

  “If I hadn’t shown up,” he said, “You’d have thrown a barbeque to celebrate Rhett’s socks matching for a change or somebody seeing a lightning bug for the first time this season.”

  “That’s absolutely true,” Tony had countered. “But making it in your honor makes you think we like you, even though we don’t.”

  John had only stopped by for a few minutes, not long after sunrise.

  He hadn’t actually seen Bill, for Bill tended to sleep late each morning.

  But he’d inquired about him and Tony assured him he was healthy and well.

  “Why? Did someone tell you he was sick?”

  “No, not really. I just dreamed he wasn’t doing so well, that’s all.”

  “Quit being a worry-wart old biddy, John. He’s fine. He’ll outgrow you and I both.”

  “I sure hope so.”

  Now, just before sunset, Bill was the first one to greet his old friend when John pulled his Kerr County pickup truck onto Baker Street.

  In fact, Bill saw him pulling in from half a block away and ran to greet him, arms outstretched in anticipation of a hug.

  Like many of the learning disabled, Bill loved hugs.

  He seemed to thrive on them.

  John was happy to comply.

  He didn’t have to ask Bill how he was doing.

  He never got a chance, before Bill started up about everything he’d missed in the five years since he’d been gone.

  Every relationship Baker Street residents had in his absence. Every illness someone suffered.

  Every broken limb.

  Every death and birth.

  John finally had to bring him to a stop by placing a finger before his lips to shush him.

  He normally would have just let the man ramble until he rambled himself out.

  But John wanted to introduce Julio, Jason and Jessica.

  And if he’d waited for Bill to stop talking it might never have happened.

  The barbeque went famously.

  The Baker Street crowd was fascinated by Julio and his story.

  They were impressed by his and Maria’s decision to adopt Jessica and Jason.

  They loved the nicknames “Kibbles” and “Bits,” and made the pair promise if things ever went south on them again they’d come to Baker Street for help before resorting to eating dog food.

  Julio, in turn, got a grand tour of the place, and was impressed with the way it was set up.

  Their little community encompassed three city blocks now.

  Every
property which wasn’t occupied was used for something. Not an inch went to waste.

  Those houses which once belonged to suicide victims or those who left the area with no intention of returning were razed.

  The concrete foundations fell victim to United States Army jackhammers.

  Every resident was responsible for something.

  Those with green thumbs were growers. Each grower had a specific berry or vegetable or melon and grew those exclusively.

  Those not adept at growing things helped with security.

  Or helped take care of the livestock, for they now had cattle, pigs and chickens.

  Still others were detailed to the maintenance supervisor.

  They performed routine upkeep on all the houses and livestock structures. When something broke they found a way to fix it.

  A year before they’d disbanded their group of ten “gatherers.”

  The gatherers, before that point, left each morning in search of abandoned tractor trailer rigs in the area.

  They all left together, on bicycles, each morning about sunrise.

  Each wore an empty backpack upon their backs.

  They all came back together after their packs were all full.

  Traveling to and fro together helped ensure their safety.

  In the early days they were always back before noon, their packs bursting with food items, shoes, clothing and other things someone in their midst might be able to use.

  As time went on, though, more and more of the trailers they gathered goods from emptied out.

  They had to go farther and farther to find things worthy of carrying back.

  Eventually they and others cleaned out all the trailers in a five mile radius.

  Four years after the blackout they weren’t coming home before sundown, and being out after dark was a security concern.

  They decided to end the practice.

  But that was okay.

  For as time went on they were becoming more and more self-sufficient.

  By the time the gatherers stopped going out they no longer needed food from the outside. They were growing more food than they needed.

  They had extras to barter for the things they couldn’t grow.

  The gatherers transitioned into barterers.

  As barterers they still went out, but only on Saturday and Sunday and only to the local farmer’s market.