The Quest: Countdown to Armageddon: Book 6 (4 page)

     “Wow, Zach. I am just speechless. Thank you so much for doing this for me.”

     Zachary beamed.

     “You’re welcome. I just wanted to do something to help.”

     Sara hugged her young brother-in-law again.

     “I guess I’m gonna have to stop thinking of you as a little kid. A little kid wouldn’t have gone through all of this. I owe you a big one.”

     “I’ll tell you what. If you happen to come across a hot fifteen year old girl who wants to live in a compound where there’s lots of work to do, but also lots of fun, then bring her back with you. Then we’ll be even.”

     Linda laughed.

     “Well, it didn’t take very long for that little kid to come back.”

     Sara held out her hand and Zachary shook it.

     “Deal! If she’s willing to make the move.”

     “And if she’s hot.”

     “Of course. If she’s hot.” Sara rolled her eyes and everyone assembled around the table had a good laugh.

-5-

     John Castro had always been a very lucky man. He’d always said that he survived the war in Iraq because God was watching over him, and because he was the luckiest son-of-a-bitch in the United States Marine Corps.

     He told anyone who would listen that luck was the reason he found a sweet looker like Hannah Jelinovic and convinced her to be his bride. And that luck brought him two beautiful daughters who looked just like their mother, instead of two sons who might resemble him.

     More recently, he told everyone on the San Antonio Police force that it was luck that brought he and Scott together. They became friends just months before John was infected with the plague. John was allergic to penicillin and would have died, if Scott hadn’t been able to find some amoxicillin and bring it to San Antonio for him.

     John’s luck appeared to be holding. Or, perhaps God was still watching over him.

     It started with Robbie’s twitch, occurring at the same moment John turned his head to watch a jackrabbit. Either act done by itself probably wouldn’t have altered Robbie’s plan much. But both acts done at precisely the same time spared John a center mass head shot that would have been fatal a hundred percent of the time. The wound he suffered at the back of his skull was still grave. But at least it was survivable if he could get treated quickly, by a surgeon who knew what he was doing.

     So there was that.

     And there were other things that worked in his favor as well.

     When he fell into the dirt, he fell face first into a bed of fire ants. The angry ants viciously retaliated by stinging him dozens of times.

     Were he conscious, the stings would have been akin to rubbing salt into his wounds.

     But John was unconscious, and could feel no pain. The stings on the back of his head injected venom which constricted the blood vessels and caused the skin to swell. Both aided in slowing the precious blood that was escaping from his body.

     When the human body falls, its blood pools to its lowest part. In this case, his smaller chest wound, on the front of his body, lay firmly pressed against the dirt beneath him. The pooling blood seeped from the entry wound, as opposed to pouring out of the larger exit wound in his back.

     So there was that.

     Lastly, John had his own bad memory to thank. Since her return to San Antonio, Hannah had gotten into the habit of filling a small cooler for John to take to work each day. The cooler generally contained leftovers from dinner the night before, or a couple of sandwiches and cookies.

     And it always, without fail, contained four bottles of water.

     But John woke up that morning in an amorous mood.

     He’d wrapped an arm around Hannah and whispered into her ear.

     “Hey, honey… you awake?”

     She responded, “Ugh.”

     He waited a couple of minutes and tried again.

     “Hey honey… you awake?”

     Hannah rolled over to face him.

     “I gave at the office.”

     “If you had an office I might be concerned. But you’re a stay at home mom.”

     “Exactly. This
is
my office. I gave here.”

     “When? And to who?”

     “The night before last, and to you.”

     “Would you be willing to give again? I mean, how can you refuse the handsomest man in the world?”

     “Go find him and bring him here. Then I’ll give you my answer.”

     “Cute. Real cute. I was talking about me.”

     “If I give in to you, will you let me get some sleep?”

     “As long as you don’t fall asleep in the middle of it.”

     “No promises.”

     And so it was that when John left for work that morning, he was half an hour behind schedule.

     But he had a smile on his face.

     What he
didn’t
have was the small thermos that Hannah had prepared for him the night before, just before she went to bed. She’d left it on the kitchen counter, just like she always did, and he went right past it on his way out the door.

     He hadn’t even realized he’d forgotten it until it was lunchtime and he opened the trunk to get a sandwich.

     “Oh crap,” he’d said.

     Still, all things considered, making love to Hannah was way better than a couple of sandwiches and some bottled water.

     He bummed a sandwich from one of the nurses at St. Mary’s hospital when he dropped off a transient with a badly sprained ankle.

     But he’d gone through his entire workday without a single drink of water.

     Ordinarily that would have been a bad thing.

     Except he was mildly dehydrated.

     And dehydration slows blood flow and promotes clotting.

     It was a combination of several things… the fact that his worst wound was at the top of his unconscious body… the ant bites and the swelling they caused around his head wound… and his dehydration… that together kept him from bleeding to death that particular afternoon.

     John would have called all those things working together his extraordinary luck. And he could well have been right.

     Others would have called the series of circumstance merely coincidence. Happenstance, as it were.

     But there was one other thing that both would agree was the deciding factor in whether John lived or died.

     An old man named Luther Brown.

-6-

     Luther Brown was a gem. Old men weren’t supposed to have survived the blackout and the plague that followed.

     At least that’s what his friends told him.

     But apparently Luther didn’t get the memo.

     “I’ve been through much worse than this,” he told them.

     “I was born back in the days when black people weren’t welcome where white folks sat down to eat. I once peed in my britches when I was a boy in downtown Dallas. Just ‘cause my momma couldn’t find a black restroom I could use. Plenty of white restrooms around, but they were too good for my pee.

     “But boy howdy, I was damn sure good enough to get drafted and fight in Vietnam. They said they sent so many of the brothers because we were ‘expendable.’ But I survived Vietnam too.

     “I somehow managed to survive the last few decades when rich white men kept passing laws to make them richer and more powerful while stepping all over the common folk. And by making us pay part of their share.

     “And now here I am, pushing eighty. The blackout was a terrible thing for those folks who had something to lose.

     “But when you’re just scratching by without much to your name, it ain’t such a big thing. People what ain’t got much to lose don’t feel so bad when they lose it.

     “I reckon that’s why I survived.

     “Or maybe God just ain’t ready for me yet.”

     Luther took refuge in a sprawling five bedroom ranch style home in the suburbs of south San Antonio. He chose it not because he needed that much space, but because he was familiar with the house and the surrounding neighborhood.

     He’d done yard work and minor maintenance for the rich white folk who’d lived there before the blackout.

     The white folk who’d locked themselves in their den and sedated themselves heavily with sleeping pills and liquor while talking of better times.

     The folk who, emboldened by the liquor and pills, injected each other with massive doses of cocaine, then enjoyed the sensation until they passed out, never to wake up again.

     It happened right under Luther’s nose, so to speak, for while the Palmers were breathing their last breaths, Luther was outside trimming the hedges and sweeping leaves from the sidewalks.

     They promised to pay him in goods, as was the practice in the weeks and months following the blackout.

     Families with means, who were used to having others care for their needs, continued to hire maids, gardeners and personal assistants. But since the almighty dollar had withered and died, they found other ways to make payment.

     Luther had been promised a case of bottled water and a week’s worth of provisions from the kitchen pantry in exchange for his four hours of yardwork.

     And he was looking forward to being finished, for he’d worked up a powerful thirst.

     The Palmers could probably be forgiven for forgetting that Luther was still outside working. They were not of sound mind, after all, in their last hours. The liquor had numbed the parents’ senses. The cocaine had done the same for their teenaged sons and daughter. So they were little more than walking, talking zombies toward the end.

     As they shuffled off to the den to carry out their suicide pact and die what they hoped was a painless and peaceful death, they totally forgot that poor Luther was on the east side of the house, trying to even out a sculpted cypress.

     When he was done, Luther went to the back of the house to the maid’s entrance and rapped on the doorjamb, as he’d done hundreds of times over recent years.

     This time, though, there was no answer.

     Luther cracked the door and rather timidly called out for Tillie, the maid.

     But there was no answer.

     The maid’s entrance led into the kitchen, and Luther knew the Palmers seldom ventured that far. He figured it was safe to wait there for Tillie to finish changing the beds, or cleaning the bathrooms, or whatever she happened to be doing.

     Even without the air conditioning which once kept the house cool and comfortable, the kitchen was a much better place to wait than the heat of the outdoors.

     Luther was a very patient man by nature.

     He waited all alone in the kitchen of that big empty house for almost two hours before his thirst finally drove him to venture out. Even then, he slowly and respectfully moved from room to room, expecting to be challenged at any moment for daring to enter the private quarters of the homeowner.

     He even practiced in his mind how he’d answer the challenge.

     “I’m plumb sorry,” he’d say. “I meant no disrespect. It’s just that, well, I finished quite some time ago and I’d like to be paid and be on my way. If you don’t mind, of course.”

     But Luther never had to use those words.

     He came to the pantry, which had been cleaned out of anything edible.

     He went through the entire first floor of the home, still looking for Tillie, and finding nary a live soul.

     He found five dead ones, though, sprawled all over the furniture in the den. The stench was horrific, in that several of them vomited in their last minutes and one of the boys soiled his pants.

     Luther knew that he’d been had. He’d been promised water and provisions that no longer existed. He never found Tillie, because she’d been released the previous day and told to take what was left of the food with her.