Rise From The Ashes: The Rebirth of San Antonio (Countdown to Armageddon Book 3) (10 page)

     “I’m sorry, Robbie.”

     “Thank you, Scott. I appreciate that. Now, then. I’m going to tell your family that you can’t go home for awhile, so you’ve decided to become a cop instead. Anything else you want me to tell them?”

     “Yes, please. They’ll be worried that I’ll get shot again. Would you tell them what you told me about most of the violent bad guys being gone?”

     “Sure. Anything else?”

     “Yes. Tell them I love them and miss them.”

-17
-

    Four days later Scott was suddenly mobile. All of the tubes had been removed from his body, and he was walking to and from the bathroom unassisted. He was still incredibly weak, but getting stronger by the day.

     He had Nurse Becky to thank for that. She was nagging him unmercifully to eat every last bite of whatever food they brought him, no matter how disgusting it was.

     “I’m sorry. There’s just something wrong about forcing humans to eat broccoli soup,” he’d protested.

     “You’ll either eat it or I’ll put it in a syringe, and inject it into your backside. And not only will you eat it, you’ll enjoy it and then ask for more.”

     She was making him walk to the end of the hallway and back, three times a day, always at his side to support him and catch him if he got dizzy or lost his balance.

     They were becoming fast friends, and he was learning a lot about her. Her name was Becky Tomlin. And she, like Robbie, had lost her entire family. She’d enlisted Robbie’s help, and the help of John Castro, to bury them all in a mass grave, in her back yard. In that regard they were luckier than most. At least they had three people to say prayers over their grave, instead of just being dragged into the street and set on fire.

     Becky said the hardest thing she ever had to do was to watch as John and Robbie shoveled dirt upon the body of her three year old son and nine year old daughter. They’d placed the body of her husband in the grave first, so that his body wouldn’t crush theirs. But that meant the children would suffer the indignity of having dirt thrown in their faces.

     Becky said she saw that vision in her mind for weeks following the burial, and it tormented her.

     She finally left the house. It was just too painful to walk through that doorway every day. And the two mile walk to and from the hospital every day was wearing her out.

     Now, she slept on an extra mattress on the floor of the hospital’s cafeteria.

     “It was once a bustling place to be,” she told Scott. “Full of laughter and conversation and gossip. Now, even though we have our generators working, we keep it dark in there on purpose. It’s become a place to sleep, no more and no less. There are twenty one of us in there now, and since we run three shifts, someone is always sleeping. The laughter and gossip is long gone. All that’s left is soft snoring and an occasional nightmare.”

     “Have you thought of moving into one of the vacant houses nearby, with some friends, so you can at least get away from this place and unwind?”

     “Actually, I have thought about it. Many of us have. But the sad fact is, we don’t know what we’d do away from the hospital. It’s all we have left. It has replaced our families, our homes, our very lives. Without the safety and security of this hospital, we’d be lost. And many of us would give up.”

     She’d paused in their walk down the hallway long enough to look Scott in the eyes.

     “The day I buried Eddie and Lisa and Johnny in my back yard was the worst day of my life. There were many days in the weeks that followed when I wanted to join them. To just take an overdose of something, or blow my brains out. I think the only way I got through that was knowing I could still do some good. I could still help save some of the others. It gave me a mission. A reason to go on.

     “I’m afraid if I ever tried to break away from the hospital, I’d remember how easy it would be to join my family and let someone else do this. And I’m afraid I’d just give up and stop, when there’s so much left to do. Like it or not, this damn hospital is the only thing keeping me alive. And the only thing keeping me from going insane. I know it sounds ridiculous, and you probably think I’m crazy, but in a way, this hospital and the people in it has become my new family. It’s now my support system, and patients like you are my new mission in life.

     “Instead of raising my children and then pushing them out of the nest to do some good in the world, I’m helping patients get better. Then I’m pushing them out into the world to help others. To grow crops, or burn bodies, or become cops. It’s become my new mission in life.”

     Scott almost asked her how her family died, but caught himself. It didn’t really matter, and might cause her additional pain. If she’d been able to accept it as it was, then he certainly could as well.

-18-

     Tony Pike was a scumbag by anybody’s standards. He’d grown up in Kerrville to a single mom who didn’t care if he ran the streets and got into trouble. In fact, she preferred it that way, because she felt safer when he was gone.

     By the time he was seven, he’d already learned he could bully others into getting the things he wanted.

     It was ridiculously easy. He already towered over every other one of his classmates. He simply demanded their lunch money, and threatened to beat them to a pulp if they refused.

     Early on, a couple of the kids told their teachers. After Tony waited for them after school and left them beaten and bloody in the streets, the other kids took note. After that they accepted it as an unfortunate inevitability. They’d avoid Tony as much as they could, but if they were one of the hapless
few he’d stumble across when he made his daily rounds, they’d pay up without complaint.

     He graduated from that, of course, to shoplifting from retailers in the neighborhood. After he’d been banned from all the mom and pops, he stole a bicycle with saddlebag baskets to carry his spoils, then started biking to the big blue and red box stores half a mile away.

     It was a little bit of work, but the payoff was much better.

     By fourteen he’d been in and out of juvey three times. He’d heard it was hard. In reality, it was laughable. He was just as big a bully in juvey as he was on the outside. If anything, it just made him tougher.

     His mother made a cake for his fifteenth birthday. But he never saw it. He’d been on a drinking and terror binge for three days with his running buddies already, and wouldn’t come home for two more.

     His mom ate a piece of it herself, sitting alone at their small kitchen table, and gently placed the rest into the garbage.

     When he was seventeen, Tony stumbled across his father at a strip mall he was casing. His father didn’t recognize Tony, but Tony knew who he was. Even though he hadn’t laid eyes on the man in almost ten years.

     He beat his father into a bloody pulp, and probably would have beaten him to death if a patrol car hadn’t happened by and intervened. He was still pounding the unconscious man when three cops pulled him off.

     He was threatened with adult jail for the first time for the incident, but Tony had scoffed.

     “Ah, he’s my father. He won’t press charges against his own son.”

     But he was wrong. His father was only his father through happenstance. To hear the man tell it, “That bitch lied to me and said she was on the pill. If she hadn’t lied, Tony wouldn’t have ever been born.”

     That statement, more than any other, explained Tony’s miserable life quite nicely.

     And he did indeed press charges, but Tony got the last laugh. While serving a two year sentence for felony assault, Tony met some powerful people.

     One of them got out a few months before Tony and arranged for Tony’s father to disappear permanently. In several different pieces, in several different places.

     They never found the body, and even if they had, they couldn’t have pinned it on Tony. He was locked up at the time.

     To repay his debt, Tony ran drugs for the Castroville syndicate after he got out. It was low risk, because most of the local cops were paid off, and it paid well.

     But old habits die hard, and even with eight hundred dollars in his pocket, he still tried to walk out of Kohl’s wearing three new polo shirts underneath his jacket.

     He was out on bail when the power went out. He walked to his lawyer’s office to find it locked tight. So was the courthouse across the street. He took that to be a sign from God that he was permanently
reprieved.

     In the days following the blackout, Tony was in his element. The whole world was stealing and plundering to get what they needed to survive. But he did it better than anyone else he knew. So while most of the neighbors were starving, Tony was eating well. He was even taking some home to his mom.

     At least, until the day he walked into her tiny apartment to find her dead on the couch.

     She’d found one of Tony’s guns and put into her mouth, then pulled the trigger. Her miserable life ended much as it began. For she too, was unloved and unwanted as a child. She too, like Tony, had stumbled through life needing guidance and support and never finding it.

     Tony didn’t try to bury the body. He didn’t even cover it. He merely pried the gun from her cold fingers and left her there to rot.

     Tony found himself stuck in
Kerrville when the power went out. With no way to make it back to Castroville, he was out of the drug dealer business.

     But that was okay. H
e found an even more lucrative pursuit.

     Tony and a band of hoodlums took over a Walmart store and deemed it their very own. The
Kerrville city cops were decimated by deserting officers, and the few cops left were way outgunned by Tony’s men. They were sworn to uphold the law, sure. But even they weren’t stupid enough to go up against illegal, fully automatic AK-47s with their service weapons. So instead they asked the Kerr County Sheriff’s Department for help.

     “Are you kidding me?” asked the sheriff with a sarcastic chuckle. “I’ve only got four deputies left. All the others have gone off to die with their families or lit out for
Mexico.”

   
So Tony Pike and his bunch went unchallenged.

     They knew the dollar was no longer worth anything. So they began a lucrative trade: food and bottled water for silver or gold.

     They stopped people as they walked into the front doors.

     “What do you have to trade?”

     “I brought my mom’s wedding band. And my grandfather’s gold pocket watch.”

     “I don’t know. Looks like
it’s gold plated to me.”

     “No, it’s real gold, I promise. We had it appraised a couple of years ago. It was worth over two thousand dollars.”

     “Well… okay. Half a cart full of stuff, no more. I’ll be watching, and if you try to leave the store with more than half a cart, I’ll beat your ass and make you put it all back on the shelf.”

     “Yes, sir.”

     The Walmart was empty of anything edible within two weeks. Then Tony and his crew took over a truck stop on I-10 in Kerrville. Again, they claimed it was theirs, knowing full well that no one would challenge them.

     The truck stop itself didn’t mean much to them when the trucks stopped running. But the thirty trucks packed into its back lot sure did.

     Most of the truckers were gone now, either by suicide or because they simply walked away. Those left behind were given an offer they couldn’t refuse: either start walking and don’t look back, or die trying to protect somebody else’s truck.

     Once they owned the trucks as well as the truck stop, they again had a very lucrative business.

     “What did you bring me today?”

     “My silverware collection. I paid eight hundred dollars for it a year ago.”

     “How do I know it’s real silver?”

     “By the markings on the back of each piece.”

     “Okay. I’ll trust you. You have an honest face. I’ll give you a case of soup or a case of tuna fish. Since I’m in a damn good mood today, I’ll let you choose.”

     “Can’t I have both? This is the last thing we have of value.”