Rise From The Ashes: The Rebirth of San Antonio (Countdown to Armageddon Book 3) (13 page)

     Even when Tom and Jordan culled three head from the herd, one at a time, and slaughtered them to fill their freezers with meat and to make jerky to send to San Antonio, the cows didn’t seem to notice their ranks were thinning.

     Or maybe they were just happy that the thinning herd meant they had more hay to eat.

     In San Antonio, the cold nights were a godsend.

     The
Alamo city never had really harsh winters. But this one was marked by an early freeze. The decomposing bodies froze solid and their awful stench largely, but not completely, went away temporarily.

     Since nearly all of the bodies had been collected from
the outdoor areas by this time, virtually all that remained were in private homes or office buildings.

     Shaded from the daytime sun.

     Even though the daytime temperatures rose above freezing, the bodies’ location in the dark shade of unheated houses kept them cool enough to reduce the stench and to slow their decomposition.

     And that made body collection a lot easier to handle.

     There was a downside, of course. The cooler air made the fires go out a lot faster, and each pile of bodies had to be relit four to five times to burn completely to bones, instead of the twice to three times during the warmer months.

     But that was a small price to pay, considering. After all, fuel was plentiful and restarting the fires was easy.

     At first, Scott had nightmares, seeing the bodies of the children he collected in his sleep. He started praying each night that God watch over the littlest victims, and expressed his hope that they hadn’t suffered greatly.

     He also developed a habit of wrapping the
children’s bodies in sheets before he placed them gently on the burn piles. His paramedic assistant was puzzled by the habit, until Scott explained. He just couldn’t bear to see their little faces as he struck a match to their bodies.

     “I
know
they can’t feel the fire,” he’d explained. “I don’t do it for them. I do it for me. It just makes it a little easier to deal with.”

     Word got around, and before long the other teams were doing the same thing. As it turned out, every one of them was troubled by burning the bodies of the children. And wrapping them in linen made it easier for all the men to deal with. Even men hardened by the harsh realities of massive loss of life were loving fathers and husbands at their core. And none of them liked looking into the faces of small children under such circumstances.

     Scott was able to help in other ways as well. Having helped harvest his own crops of corn and wheat the previous spring, he was able to show the residents how to beat the wheat stalks against the inside of a cardboard box to free the edible kernels.

     And also to leave some ears of corn on the stalks to dry out naturally, so they could be used as seed for the next growing season.

     He learned that very little of his time was spent doing actual police work. An occasional thief he had to put in handcuffs and hold in the city jail for a few days before setting free. Sometimes a domestic dispute. The domestic disputes were almost always neighbors pitted against neighbors. And they almost always involved one party claiming the other was eating more than his share of the community crops.

     Once, Scott came racing to back up John, as John was pursuing an attempted rape suspect. They caught the man after a struggle and placed him in cuffs.

     Then they were unsure what to do with him. There was no court system to deal with him. No judges they knew of to try him. No prisons to care for him.

     They finally drove him a hundred miles south of
San Antonio and made him walk back with a stern warning.

     John told him, “It’s going to take you at least a week to walk back. During that time, you need to reflect on your behavior and figure out a way to control your urges. And by the time you get back to
San Antonio, you’d best have a way to control yourself. Because if we ever bring you out here and drop you off again, you’ll be walking back home with a few less body parts.”

     Scott could tell that John meant it
, too. It occurred to him that this was a life not too different than the days of the old west. Once again, lawmen had wide latitude to apply justice as they saw fit.

-23-

     Tony Pike and his friend Kevin finally got the full moon they’d been waiting for. They could see it in the eastern sky in the late afternoon, long before the sky  started to darken. Tonight would be the night they’d go check out the old man’s place.

     They’d gotten two horses and tack from an old couple outside of
Kerrville. They could have just shot them, but the woman reminded Tony of a kindly old teacher he once had in grade school. She’d been one of the few adults who treated him well during his early years, so he cut them a break. He traded a case of spaghetti noodles and a case of macaroni and cheese from an HEB supermarket truck for the two horses and the riding gear.

     It wasn’t much of a trade. But the old couple had no reason to ride anymore and were worried about the horses dying during the coming winter, when food became scarce. So they accepted the offer without hesitation.

     Kevin was an experienced rider. Tony, not so much. He was able to stay on the horse until it started to run at a fast gallop. Then he pulled back on the reins to slow it down. Kevin laughed, but not too much. Tony had a vicious temper, even toward his friends, and Kevin knew not to push him too far.

     They
arrived at Tom Haskins’ old ranch house with a little less than an hour of daylight left, and approached the house slowly. If they encountered Tom, they’d have claimed they were just out hunting and stopped by to give their horses a drink of water. No rancher worth his mettle would deny a horse a drink, whether he liked the man on the horse’s back or not.

     The house was empty, of course. The only things Tom had left behind were a few pieces of furniture that wouldn’t fit in his new bachelor pad, and some old clothes and dishes he didn’t expect to use again. Around back were a shovel, an old wooden ladder, and a generator with the spark plugs missing.

     Tony was disappointed, and about ready to count the mission as a failure, when he remembered the dirt berm blocking the end of the roadway.

     “Come on. There’s got to be a front end loader or a bulldozer out back, for him to build that pile of dirt. Maybe we can steal the
battery and some other parts and use them to get one of the cars in town running.”

     Once again, though, they struck out. The field in back of the
house was as empty as the house itself.

     But Tony noticed a couple of th
ings in the waning hours of daylight.

     The field of hay had been mowed.

     Tony knew that the hay had to have grown during the spring and summer, after the world went dark. It couldn’t have been mowed unless a mower, or a tractor with a cutting blade, had survived the blackout.

     And Tony also knew that a mower or a tractor could not build a wall of dirt. That meant there were at least two vehicles that had survived.

     But where the hell were they?

     Kevin noticed a set of tire tracks headed toward the back fence of the property, and the pair followed them.

     They came to an old cattle fence, three strands of barbed wire evenly spaced twelve inches apart on a fence that rose to a height of four feet or so.

     The funny thing about this fence,
though, was that one of the posts had been removed. The wire had been cut and wrapped around the posts left behind, creating what was in essence a passageway about sixteen feet wide.

     In the middle of the
gap was a downed mesquite tree, laying on its side, with what had been the top of the thorny tree facing the two men.

     They couldn’t go through the tree without getting torn to shreds by the thorns. And they couldn’t go around it, because there were a long line of similar trees laid down in the same manner on either side of it.

     The vehicle tracks disappeared under the tree.

     They sat on the ground and pondered the clues they’d found, and what they meant.

     “The hay in this field didn’t grow until after the blackout. If it’s cut, then they have to have a means of cutting it. That means at least two vehicles. And if they have the smarts and the parts to get two vehicles running, then it’s my guess they have more. That guy with the old car we tried to hotwire didn’t leave. He’s on the other side of these trees, hiding.”

     “But here’s what I want to know. Why in hell would they cut hay? They’ve got livestock over there as well as vehicles. And if they’ve got livestock and vehicles, than what else might they have?”

     Tony had an idea.

     “Did you bring your knife?”

     Kevin took a large Bowie knife from its sheath on his belt and held it up.

     “There was an old fashioned clothesline out behind the old man’s house. Go cut off about twenty feet or so and bring it back.”

     It was dark by the time Kevin returned, but the moon in the sky gave them enough light to work by.

     Tony tied each end of the clothesline into a loop, held in place by a slip knot. Then he carefully placed each loop around the tops of several branches on each end of the mesquite tree. He was careful to move slowly. The inch-long thorns were difficult to see in the darkness, and could cause a painful infection if one of them broke off and became embedded in their skin.

     He pulled each loop tightly around the branches, and they pulled the center of the rope together, dragging the tree slowly out of the way.

     They had just enough moonlight to see the darkened field in front of them. With no city lights to blind them, the night sky was the darkest of blue, the stars a sight to behold. Many would
have called it beautiful. But these hardened men, on a nefarious mission, saw it only as an aid in their quest.

     They slowly
walked across the field before they noticed that the horizon in front of them was slowly disappearing. The stars and tree line they’d seen in the distance was replaced by an unbroken blackness. The blackness seemed to rise up from the ground and get higher as they drew nearer to it.

     They were coming up on a wall.

     But what was on the other side of it?

     Twenty feet from the wall, they sat down and pondered their next move, careful to speak only in whispers. They couldn’t hear any voices or noise coming from the other side of the wall, but it was only prudent to take no chances. They didn’t want to alert anyone on the other side of their presence.

     They had no idea they were already being watched.

-24
-

     Jordan, sitting at the security console, had seen Tony and Kevin not long after they came onto the property. Each corner of the high fence was equipped with two state of the art security cameras, aimed down the fence line in each direction, and capturing everything within a ninety degree field of vision.

     The cameras were equipped with night vision as well. It wasn’t as sharp and clear as the daytime view, of course, and it cast the pair in an eerie gray glow. But they could be seen clearly as they came out of the vast darkness of the corn field and crept slowly toward the fence.

     Jordan knew the drill. As soon as they came into view he called for reinforcements on the radio. Joyce, Tom and Linda came running immediately. Hannah gathered the children, as well as Sara, and herded them toward the safety of the basement.

     When Tony and Kevin stopped outside the fence to confer about the next move, the group inside the house were having their own discussion.

     Linda asked, “Who do you think they are?”

     Tom answered, “I don’t know. But they came from the direction of my old place. I’m guessing it’s the same thugs who tried to steal my old Ford a few months ago. Probably came back to try again.”

     “I wonder how they got through the line of mesquite trees.”

     “We’ll ask them if they survive the night.”

     At that point, almost as though they’d heard Tom’s words, Tony and Kevin turned and crept away again, back toward Tom’s ranch house.