Breakout (Final Dawn) (7 page)

     “What do you think is going on?”

     “I don’t know. But it looks like it goes on for miles.”

     “Isn’t there a truck stop up ahead somewhere?”

     “Yes, two or three miles up. Do you think it goes that far?”

     “That’s my guess, yes.”

     “Holy crap!”

     The pair looked in amazement out the front windshield of the Hummer, at what appeared to be a graveyard of abandoned trucks. For as far as the eye could see, both shoulders of the highway were lined with trailers. A few still had tractors attached. But most
of the trailers were simply dropped and left behind.

     They started again, and
drove slowly past the trailers. There were hundreds of them, marked with all types of company logos. Home Depot. HEB Supermarkets. Walmart. Rooms To Go. It seemed endless.

     When they drove past the truck stop, they figured out what happened in the
days following the collision of Saris 7.

     The parking lot at the truck stop was packed with the same kinds of trucks. So much so that even the entry and exit were no longer accessible.

     “I guess the truck drivers were abandoning their trucks and making their way back to their families. They were probably trying to do so at the truck stop, until there was no more space. Then they had no choice except to abandon them at the roadside.”

     “That would make sense. That’s why most of the tractors are missing. They dropped their trailers and then bobtailed it back to wherever home was.”

     “I wonder why some of them left their tractors.”

     “Just a guess, but I’ll bet if you checked their fuel
tanks, they were short on fuel. Remember, CNN did a story a day or two after the meteorite hit that said all the gas stations were running out of fuel. A lot of people were tanking up trying to get down to Mexico, or to be with their families in other parts of the country. I’ll bet the same thing happened with diesel. Either the truck stops ran out of it, or they were so blockaded like this one, nobody could get to the pumps.”

     “So instead,
I’ll bet the drivers who were low on fuel just parked their rigs and hitched rides with other truckers going in the same direction.”

     “Makes sense. And that would also explain those two rigs we passed that stopped dead in the roadway. I’ll bet they ran out of fuel trying to make it to the truck stop.”

     “It must have been chaos.”

     “And hell, rolled right in together. Kind of makes you realize how easy we had it, compared to the rest of the world.”

     They arrived at the farm implement company without incident, and drove into its yard. The chain holding the gate shut had been cut with bolt cutters, its padlock still attached and now worthless.

     “Looters, probably.”

     The implements were arranged neatly in rows, and the pair drove up and down each row looking for a planter.

    
Bryan, meanwhile, parked his rig in front of the sales office and stepped through a shattered picture window to gain entry.

     He emerged a minute later with the key for a Case swivel bodied diesel forklift. On the side were stenciled the words
LIFT CAPACITY: 10,000 LBS.

     “Yep,” he said to himself.
“That’s plenty of power.”

     He climbed on board, put the key in the ignition, and turned it halfway to the right. Through a small port, he could see a glow plug indicator. He was hoping to see it turn bright red.

     Nothing.

     He started to climb off the lift and open up the hood to check the battery, when he remembered something. Case equipment sometimes had a battery kill switch located in the frame in front of the driver’s seat.

     He sat back down and reached in front of the seat until he found a lever, and switched it to the left.

     Then he tried the
key again.

     After five seconds, the glow plug indicator glowed a pretty red color.

     “Well, I’ll be damned. After all this time, you still work.”

     But he spoke too fast. He turned the key the rest of the way, and heard the starter groan. It tried to start, but the battery was just too weak.

     At that exact instant, Mark and Brad pulled up in the Hummer.

     “We found one, in the third row. Looks like it’ll seed twelve rows at a time. Just the right size for our operation.”

     “Great. Get the jumper cables and give me a boost, would you?”

     “Oh, crap.”

     Mark’s words said it all. They’d remembered to bring a spare battery and tools to install it. But they’d forgotten jumper cables.

     Brad scrambled inside the building and looked around the service bay, but couldn’t locate a pair.

     “We’ve got no choice. We’ll have to swap out the battery.”

     F
ifteen minutes later Brad was on the lift, following the Hummer to where he and Mark had found the planter. Bryan was close behind in the truck.

     Fifteen minutes
after that, the planter was sitting on the front half of the trailer, and the three of them were applying cargo straps to hold it in position.

     And ten minutes after that, they were back on Highway 83, headed back toward the compound.

     They still hadn’t seen a soul. They thought themselves lucky.

     But maybe not.

Chapter 13

     Just as they pulled back onto Highway 83 and headed east, a lone rider on a Yamaha quad runner came out of the brush to the west. It was late afternoon now, and the sun was low enough in the sky to obscure the rider as he followed the truck down the highway.

     The rider’
s name was Pete Skully. He’d been out hunting for rabbits. They seemed to be one of the few creatures who was able to survive the long freeze, and had become a primary source of fresh meat.

    
Skully had two cotton tails tied to the front rack of his wheeler and had been heading back to the firehouse in Eden where he’d lived since he and his crew abandoned the prison.

     But now, he had something else to do.

     “What the hell…” he’d muttered to himself when he pulled out of the brush and saw the Hummer and truck pull out of the implement yard with a piece of farm equipment on the back.

     And he wondered… if these fools were stealing a trailer, there were plenty of empty ones parked and abandoned along the roadway. Why steal one that was loaded down with a piece of farm equipment?

     Skully wasn’t a smart man by any means. He’d never been able to use his head to earn an honest living. Besides, it was a lot easier just to take what he wanted from others.

     But even though he’d never be considered one of the great minds of the world,
Skully could still reason. And he figured that if these guys intentionally passed up empty trailers to steal one with a piece of farm equipment, then they must not be after the trailer itself.

     And that meant they were after the equipment instead.

     And if that was the case, they must have figured out how to do something that no one else in the area had been able to do.

     Plant a crop.

     Skully knew that the sun was at his back. He also knew that if the people in either vehicle looked in their rear view mirrors, they probably wouldn’t see him because of the sun’s glare.

     So even though he was outnumbered by at least two to one, he considered it relatively safe to follow these clowns to see where they were going.

     His wheeler had a top speed of about forty miles an hour. At that speed, the front end wobbled a bit, and it probably wasn’t safe to drive. But Skully wasn’t worried. He’d taken worse chances than this for less of a potential payoff.

     So he gunned it and ran full throttle in an effort to keep up.

     Fortunately for Skully, the truck didn’t seem to be in that big a hurry. They were definitely pulling away from him, but by only a couple miles an hour. Mile after mile, the space between him and the truck widened.

     But it was always in his sight.

     Eventually, the truck was a mere speck on the distant horizon. Skully had decided that once he lost sight of it, he’d give up and head back.

     But just before that happened, he saw what he thought were brake lights. And the spot on the horizon appeared to be getting just a tiny bit bigger.

     The truck was slowing.

    
Skully was still a full mile behind the truck when it turned off the highway. But he locked in the turnoff point in his mind, and continued to focus on it. And when he passed the turnoff a minute and a half later, the truck was long gone.

     But he knew where it went. It went down an unmarked narrow road heading toward a small mountain in the distance.

     Skully lit a cigarette as he gazed down the road, wondering in his own mind what to do with this information.

     And, since he wasn’t exactly a rocket scientist, he wasn’t even sure what it meant. Aside from the fact that these people, whoever they were, needed farm equipment.

     Skully was damn tired of eating Ramen noodles and rabbits. He’d never been much of a vegetable eater before the blackout. But he sure would love some fresh tomatoes or strawberries.

     Then he smiled, turned his wheeler around, and rode back to
Eden.

Chapter 14

     Frank and Jesse had three houses to go to finish up their gutter project. They’d wanted to get them all done before the next storm hit. But when they came out a couple of hours earlier they both looked up and saw rain clouds.

     “Today will be the day we
finally get a payoff for all our hard work,” Frank said.

     Every house on the block had gutters now, except for these last three. And the
remaining gutters were laying in the yards of the last houses, waiting to be installed. They could have been finished days ago, but they could only move as fast as their electric drills could hold a charge. And their drills were being charged on generator power. One at Frank’s house, one at Jesse’s.

     They only ran their generators in the daytime.
Typically, they were able to drill holes through the gutters and mount them every other day. By the end of those days, the drills would be dead or going there fast. And it would take all the next day on the chargers to recharge the batteries again. They used their off days to gather supplies, or to help the others bring down trees or till the yards. Or plant the seeds. Finding things to do every other day wasn’t hard. There was always work to be done.

     The decision to only run their generators in the daytime was one
they’d made early on, when the world finally grew warm enough for them to come out of hiding.

     It had been Jesse who’d suggested it.

     “We don’t know how many marauders are still out there. Just because we haven’t seen them in awhile doesn’t mean they’ve all moved on. If we use lights in our homes at night, they’ll be able to come right up to the windows and look in. And we wouldn’t even know they were there. They could pick us all off before we ever drew our weapons. Before we ever knew what hit us.”

     It was a sound argument. But it didn’t sit well
with everyone. Mike, nineteen years old and full of attitude, countered it.

     “I’m tired of living in the dark. I’m tired of going to bed at sundown because there’s nothing to do. I want to be able to stay up late occasionally and watch a movie, or read a book, or play a video game. Who am I hurting by doing that? I mean,
seriously?”

     In the end, though, he yielded to the wisdom of his father. And it was a good thing.

     Because less than a week later, the group heard a flurry of gunshots from another group of survivors three blocks over.

     Frank, who’d earned the nickname “Saint Frank” during the early days of the thaw for spreading the word that food was available at the
Symco Distribution Center, went to investigate.

     An entire family had been wiped out.

     Frank walked up as the neighbors were digging their graves.

     “Apparently the
marauders knew they had food. Probably saw them eating it at night. Killed all of them. It’s a damn shame, too. They were one of the few families who’d come through the whole thing intact. And they’d gone through the same hell as the rest of us, only to be blown away when things were getting back to normal.

     “And what kind of man can bring himself to shoot a seven year old girl, anyway?”

     Frank pondered the question for only a moment.

     “They’re not men. Not any more. Maybe they were when this whole thing started. But now they’re no better than animals.

     “How many are left on your block?”

     “There’s only five of us now. And only three who can shoot.”

     “Go see Mark Garza on the next block. Second house from the end on the even side. Has a blue truck in his driveway. But be careful when you approach the house. They’re suspicious of strangers. Go unarmed and hold your arms out so they can see that.

     “Mark’s numbers have dwindled too. Talk to him about getting together for your mutual protection. There are a lot of empty houses now on your street, as well as his. If your people moved over there, or they moved over here, you’d all be a lot safer.
     

     They thought they had time to hang gutters on one more side of the Johnson house, but they’d miscalculated. Frank was on the ladder, screwing in the corner piece of gutter, when a raindrop hit him square on the forehead. For a flash of a second he thought it was a bullet. Then he realized he was still alive, and he felt foolish.

     Another raindrop grazed his left ear.

     He looked at Jesse, and they had the same thought.

     Jesse said in a panic, “The lids!”

     They stashed their cordless drills in the doorway to the Johnson house to protect them from the rain.

     Jesse looked across the street, to see his sons and Tony Pena gathered under
neath the Widow Spencer’s carport.

     He yelled, “Get the lids off the trash cans!”

     When it rains in San Antonio in the springtime, it rains in torrents. Sheets of water, for an hour or more at a time. Enough to flood the streets, and to wash away all the ugliness of the world.

     Jesse went in one direction, Frank in the other. Between the two of them, they managed to get all the lids off the trash cans on their side of the block while Tony and Jesse’s sons did the same on the other side.

     They managed to get them off just in time for the glorious rain to come washing down the gutters, into the down spouts, and then into the trash cans.

     Then they gathered together, underneath the carport, and laughed. Laughed in unrestrained joy. They didn’t have a lot of things these days to
celebrate. But a good downpour was one of them.

     The celebrations didn’t last long, though.
They’d learned during earlier thaws during the previous two years that water was too precious to waste. It had to be gathered, as quickly and as much as possible. That was doubly important now, since they were gathering it not only to drink and to cook with, but also to irrigate their crops.

     The women, and Joe, and Tony’s son
s, started coming out of their houses with black plastic bags, stuffed to capacity. But they didn’t hold garbage. They held empty plastic soda bottles. Hundreds of them.

     When there was snow on the ground, water was easy to gather. But as the world gradually warmed and the snow went away, they’d had to develop a new system. They’d taken several plastic tarps from the Walmart down the street, and nailed one end of those tarps to the top brace on their privacy fences.

     And then they’d installed fence posts in their yards. Two of them, with nails sticking out of the tops.

     The fence posts were spaced out almost as wide as the tarp. But not quite. If the tarp was twenty feet wide, the posts were eighteen feet apart. The idea was to unroll the tarp from its ready position against the fence, and to hook the corner grommets onto the nails at the top of the posts. And since the posts were eighteen feet apart and the tarp was twenty feet wide, the open end of each tarp formed a “v” shape in its center.

     And that was where the water ran. To the lower part of the tarp, and into a plastic tub that was placed there to catch it all.

     During
the rains of the early thaws, it had been a mad scramble to fill cooking pots, iced tea pitchers, and anything else that would hold water. There was no method to their madness, and their inefficiency caused them to let a lot of the water slip through their fingers.

     Then
Tony's wife Sally and Frank’s wife Eva had a better idea.

     Back when the world was normal, the pair would take their recyclables a mile away to the
Marbach Road Recycling Center.

     They pitched the idea to their husbands one afternoon over a game of hearts.

     “This facility, it took all of its donations and sorted them into huge piles. Aluminum cans in one pile, plastic bottles in another. Thousands and thousands of plastic bottles.”

     “Plastic bottles that other people drank out of?”

     “No, Tony. Not the little ones. The big ones. The two or three liter bottles. If we filled the back of the pickups with those things and brought them back, we could fill them after each rainstorm. If we collected the ones with caps, they could be sealed and stored by the hundreds. And we wouldn’t have to run in and out of the house a hundred times every time it rained to dump the water into the bathtubs and sinks. We’d be able to stay outside and fill all those bottles. And even if it was a short rainfall, we’d be able to collect a lot more.”

     No one could see any flaws in their logic. So Frank and Jesse did what husbands usually do, and followed instructions. They took
two pickup trucks to the recycling center and collected hundreds of the bottles. They chose only the ones that appeared relatively clean, and only those with caps. And they stuffed them into oversized lawn and leaf bags and stacked the beds of both trucks full of the bags.

     And the system worked quite well. During subsequent rainstorms, the tarps were rolled out from the fences, and huge plastic tubs were placed to collect the rainwater flowing off the tarps. Everyone who was available joined in to plunge the empty soda bottles into the tubs
of rainwater to fill them. Then they put the caps on the bottles and set them aside.

     The process was repeated until the rain stopped.

     After each rainstorm, all of the bottles were carried to Tony’s house. Eva would go there daily, and she and Sally would boil the water over an open fire one large cook pot at a time, for ten minutes’ duration, until it was safe to drink. When one cook pot of water was boiled, they put it aside to cool, and put another cook pot on.

    
After the water cooled, it was repoured into other bottles which had the labels removed. And everyone knew the drill. Bottles that still had labels on them held unpurified rainwater, and was only to be used for washing up. Bottles without labels were safe to drink from.

     It was a good system, and seemed to work well. No one had gotten sick from drinking unpurified water, and there was enough water between rainstorms to keep everyone supplied. In fact, it worked so well that on rare days when “Saint Frank” had no other chores to do, he collected tarps and plastic bottles to distribute to other groups of people around his neighborhood.