A Long Road Back: Final Dawn: Book 8 (23 page)

     But it was plentiful, if one knew where to find it. Shelves in every supermarket were bare except for the things nobody wanted… the vitamins and paper napkins and swollen canned goods.

     The new supermarket was the fully loaded trailers abandoned at the side of every road and highway in the country. Very few of the survivors had the guts to travel outside their comfort zone. And that comfort zone was typically marked by city limit signs. So the prime place to find such goods and supplies was away from the cities. On state highways and especially interstate highways, far away from city confines.

     Such as, for example, the Trucker’s Paradise truck stop and the highways around it.

     The smart survivors, of course, learned to survive without the cargo on the trucks. For they knew it wouldn’t last forever.

     The smart ones learned to grow things. And how to hunt the prey which had managed to survive the freeze.

     There was a surprising amount of it. No one knew how central Texas still had deer and rabbits and possums. But they did. In limited numbers, granted. But they were out there for those lucky enough to find them, and skilled enough to bring them down.

     Marty had found another source for meat for himself and Lenny. His friends at the secret compound not far from Junction were good about supplying beef and chicken and some occasional pork. In exchange he’d taken them liquor and medicine and two live German shepherds. It had started off as a business arrangement and they’d wound up being close friends.

     He and Lenny hadn’t yet taken up the farming and ranching habits that many of the survivors were transitioning to. They saw no need in it. Not yet, anyway. For in the confounds of the Trucker’s Paradise grounds were still hundreds of abandoned trailers and a fair percentage of them were still filled to the brim with food, fuel and other essential supplies.

     The nice thing about eating stale food was that it didn’t get more and more stale as the years went by. It got to a certain level of staleness and then stayed there. Once a man got used to eating things that were a bit stale it became the new norm.

     And stale food became stable food. Stale crackers didn’t taste as good as they did when they were fresh out of the oven. But they were stable. As long as they stayed dry and were protected from vermin they would last forever. Or at least for a very long time.

     So Marty and Lenny weren’t in danger of running out of food for many more years. And there was plenty of food for the people of Eden as well. It just had to be gathered up and transported the ninety miles or so from the truck stop to the prison walls and parked there.

     The process was easy. The timeframe was the big question mark.

     Nobody knew if Cupid 23 was really coming. But it made sense, since there was little else to do, to prepare for it just in case.

     The question was when. Was it coming tomorrow, or not for a couple of years? Would there be time to gather what they needed, or would they be caught short?

     As Lenny searched through the yard, identifying the trailers worth digging out and taking to Eden, his thoughts were of what the Eden prison might have to offer him for the long term.

     He’d never found the woman he was hoping for after the thaw came. There were a few which came by the truck stop now and then. And some had expressed an interest, either in Marty or in the whole concept of living at a truck stop where food was plentiful.

     But none were particularly interested in Lenny.

     During the first freeze it had been just a handful of them. Lenny and Marty, Tina and Joe. Scott Burley, before Marty killed him.

     This time, if they went into the prison for several long years to survive another big chill, perhaps things would be different.

     Perhaps there would be women there. Single women. Women who’d have a chance to get to know Lenny, and to grow close to him. The thaw didn’t bring him the woman he wanted to settle down with, to spend the rest of his life with.

     Perhaps a second freeze would.

     As he daydreamed, Lenny continued his task at hand. To figure out a way to pull the partially-filled diesel tankers from amid the chaos that was the Trucker’s Paradise parking lot. There were three of them. Together they held about fifteen thousand gallons of diesel fuel.

     It wouldn’t be enough to last several years.

     But it would make a big dent.

-47-

     Marty swore Lenny to secrecy, and intentionally wasn’t planning to tell anyone in Eden about Cupid 23.

     He wasn’t a man who liked keeping secrets necessarily.

     But he was in total agreement with Mark and Hannah. And with his friend Frank. There was no need to cause anyone any unnecessary grief. Not yet, anyway. Not until he assessed the situation and determined what he needed to make the prison operation a go.

     The people of Eden had been through so much already. Even more so, perhaps, than most of the rest of the world.

     For the people of Eden had survived a one-two punch. First, they were under the thumb of the freeze, having to dismantle neighbors’ houses to burn as firewood and to eat all manner of things they hated just to survive.

     Then they were under the thumb of Al Castillo, a brutal dictator of a man who took over the tiny town after the thaw and ran it with an iron fist. He decided who lived or died based strictly on what they could do for him. If they had no value, he had them executed.

     Sometimes in very sadistic and painful manners.

     Marty was trying to avoid two things. First and foremost, the stress and panic that would cause some of the survivors to throw up their hands and give up. Many were on the verge of that now, having to scrape each and every day in vegetable gardens just so survive another sunrise.

     It wouldn’t take much for some of the town’s residents to decide that enough was enough. That life was just no longer worth all that one had to put into it.

     It wouldn’t take much, he knew, for some of the town’s residents to just take their own lives, and achieve the peace and rest which had been kept from them for so long.

     At the same time, he didn’t want anyone to get the impression that he, Marty Hankins, had replaced Castillo as the town’s newest, albeit nicer, dictator.

     He didn’t want anyone to get the feeling that Marty was the decider-in-chief. The man who chose which residents got to go into the prison and live. And which ones were banished to the outside, where an almost certain death awaited them.

     Marty would tell the residents of Eden at some point. He had to, for he needed their help to prepare. But before he told them, he’d have a plan. A solid plan, which would ensure the survival of all of them.

     And when he did tell them, he’d be careful about the words he chose.

     Yes, there was the potential for it to get bad again. Very bad, but probably not as bad as the last time.

     But this time, he’d tell them, was different. This time the citizens would decide their own fate. They’d control their own destiny.

     Marty liked the way the people in the mine set up their government early on. Each adult had an equal say on every key decision that had to be made. Everyone had the right to voice his opinion. It was as far removed from Washington-style politics as it could be. Money didn’t buy influence, there was no one to curry favor to.

     Marty always considered himself a child of the sixties who was born a generation too late. He’d watched all those movies about Woodstock and the summer of love and hippies who didn’t have much to their name but who shared what they had and always seemed to get along.

     That was Marty’s nirvana. A society where everyone got along. Where everyone shared their opinions and then came up with the right solution for everyone. Without violence between sanctions. Without shouting or name calling.

     That was what he envisioned the prison sanctuary to be, and he’d tell the people of Eden that. There would be no more dictators, no one to please. He’d lead the way in stocking the prison and get it ready to occupy, then he’d step aside and let the people run it themselves. He’d be but a bit player from that moment on.

     He’d come up with a game plan, and then get the residents together and pitch it to them. They’d work together to get the prison ready to go. They’d clean up the inmates’ mess and work on the generators. They’d gather insulating materials to cover the cellblock walls somehow so that the generators only had to run a few hours a day.

     They’d furnish the cells so they wouldn’t be so drab and lifeless, and so the residents could fool themselves into considering them home. They’d gather flashlights and batteries and oil lanterns to light the main area during the day, so they wouldn’t have to use the lights as often. They’d try to find some industrial batteries somewhere…
anywhere
, to store electricity for when the generators rested.

     And those who tended to pray would pray they’d get it all done before the world went dark and cold again.

     He walked into a room marked “Pantry.” It was right next to another room marked “Food Stores.”

     He wondered what the difference was. He thought they were one and the same.

     Apparently not in the Texas penal system.

     Strewn about the floor were dozens of empty bags. He picked up one of them.

SYMCO Brand

Instant Potato Flakes

Butter Flavoring Added

25 Pounds Net Wt

     He examined the bag, then threw it at the floor in disgust.

     The bag once held twenty five pounds of instant potatoes, yet was completely clean. No residue, no potato dust.

     Further, it had been turned inside out when he picked it up. And it took him a minute to surmise why.

     Had someone been so desperate for food that he’d taken the time and energy to lick the bag clean?

     There were rice bags as well. Dozens of them. Yet not a single grain of rice anywhere. Piles of empty cans. Hundreds of them. Huge cans. The ones the grocery stores once sold in their bulk sections. The cans which were bigger than a man’s head.

     He picked up one can marked “tuna.”

     All the cans as well had been wiped clean. They couldn’t have been cleaner had they gone through a dishwasher. Someone had taken considerable time in removing every last bit of food residue from each of them.

     He never even knew that tuna came in cans that big.

     What lay before him was testament to a scene in which the inmates were slowly starving to death. He didn’t know it, but that was what finally forced them out of the prison, and into the waist-high snow, a few months before everything started to thaw.

     He didn’t know that Castillo’s original plan was to wait out the big chill, to wait until the thaw came, then to get the hell out of Dodge. To run as fast and as far away from Eden as humanly possible.

     Before Texas changed its mind and locked them back up again.

     But it hadn’t worked out that way.

     They’d run out of food just before the thaw finally came. And they had no choice but to brave the elements.

     In waist-high snow they couldn’t get out of Dodge. They couldn’t leave Eden, for long range travel was impossible.

     That was why they stayed. That was why they took over the town and started brutalizing the residents. They could only make it as far as the houses of the survivors, who were struggling to eke out a meager existence of their own. They invaded those homes, stole the food, and killed any residents who protested.

     Marty and his small group of friends thought they had it rough during the first freeze. They spent several years in a dirt field, their only protection the twenty four trailers which surrounded their compound and provided them sustenance.

     They had it bad. But Marty could only imagine the hell the citizens of Eden must have gone through, both before and after the inmates left the prison.

     He vowed he’d do whatever it took to make it easier on them this time around.

 
-48-

     Mark and Hannah were in the midst of a debate of sorts.