The Final Chapter

by Darrell Maloney

“Why?”

  “Because if I outlive you I’ll dance on your grave, that’s why.”

  “But why?”

  “Just for being a big dummy, you big dummy.”

  -10-

  Jason and Jessica Spence were delightful young adults.

  He was just shy of his twenty first birthday.

  She had just turned eighteen.

  And they were nothing like John expected.

  He expected somehow that Julio would have rubbed off on them. That they’d have his sour disposition. That they’d be grumpy and unkind.

  But they weren’t like that at all.

  “They were a godsend,” Jessica said of her adoptive parents. “We were quite literally at the end of our rope. We’d just about given up. Then Julio and Maria came into our lives and returned our hope. Their timing couldn’t have been more perfect.”

  “How did you two meet?” Jason inquired.

  “I was on the river sitting on a bench,” John said. “He started yelling at me from the ninth floor balcony.

  “He called me a moron and told me to get off my dead ass and fill his water containers. He said if I thought they were gonna fill themselves I must be some special kind of stupid.”

  “You know it’s all an act, right?” Jessica said. “Deep down inside he’s really just a teddy bear.”

  “Pardon me,” John said. “But you mispronounced ‘grizzly’.

  The young woman smiled.

  “I just wish they’d come along sooner. We had Maria in our lives for so short a time. She was the sweetest person I ever met.

  “I am so proud we had a chance to call her ‘mom’ while we could.”

  “So am I. I’m sure you brought just as much joy into her life and made her last years good ones.”

  John winked at her before going on.

  “I’m sure you were a refreshing change from Julio.”

  Jason got up and said, “If you’ll excuse me, it’s time to gather the eggs and water the plants.”

  Jessica asked, “Want some help?”

  “No, I’ve got it. You stay and visit. And see if you can talk Mr. Castro into staying for supper.”

  She looked back at John and asked, “Could you possibly? Stay for supper, that is?”

  John was a bit surprised.

  “No, but thank you, though.

  “I stopped by to see my friends on Baker Street this morning and they promised a barbeque in my honor.

  “Why don’t you come with me to Baker Street instead? They told me to bring whoever I wanted. I think it’s time you guys enjoyed some good old fashioned Texas barbeque.

  “You two go without me,” Julio said.

  Jessica wouldn’t have it.

  “No, sir. We can’t leave our Dad behind.”

  Julio smiled broadly at the word Dad.

  John said, “Come on, you grumpy old man. It’ll do you good to get away from here. When’s the last time you actually got out of downtown San Antonio?”

  “I can’t remember, actually.”

  “Okay, then. It’s settled.”

  Jessica stood and kissed Julio on the forehead.

  “I’ll come and help you, Jason. We’ll finish a lot quicker with me supervising.”

  As they watched the pair walk away John commented, “Looks like you got yourself a couple of great kids, Julio.”

  “Far better than I deserve for sure.”

  -11-

  San Antonio, at the time of the first blackout, was a city of one and a half million people and over three million cars.

  About a third of those were sitting idle on dealer’s lots on the day of the blackout.

  For as any resident of the Alamo City will testify to, there is a new or used car lot at practically every intersection in the city.

  Any city resident will also claim that every one of those three million cars is on the freeway, directly in front of him, every time he is on his way to work.

  It’s not just those three million cars.

  The city also boasts (or maybe suffers is a better word) with almost a million trucks of all sizes and types, for a lot of different functions.

  That adds up to almost four million vehicles.

  And on the morning the power went out, every one of them died.

  They became paperweights.

  Roadside attractions.

  Reminders of what used to be.

  Of course, many weren’t on the roads at the time of the blackout.

  Many were on those car lots, where they’d likely never be sold.

  Or at least not for a very long time.

  Many were legally parked on the side of the roadways, where they weren’t in the way.

  Many were in driveways or garages.

  So the city didn’t have to worry about towing all four million of those vehicles.

  Only a little over a million.

  Oh, in that case, it’s a piece of cake.

  That’s what the Army told the city council, anyway.

  Thomas Pope was a one-star Army general who was in charge of the contingent sent by Washington to help the people of San Antonio and Bexar County recover.

  It took them two years to get there, but they finally made it.

  “We’re going to leave you with a fleet of five tow trucks,” Brigadier General Pope told the council.

  “Three are lightweight trucks which will tow any passenger car or pickup out there.

  “The other two are multi-purpose. They’ll tow anything, from those same passenger cars to big rigs or fire trucks.

  “You’re a lot better off than a lot of cities out there, in that you have two loops instead of one.

  “Your inner loop gets the most traffic and is most critical to getting your city running again.

  “Here’s what we’re proposing.

  “Hire thirty drivers and thirty helpers.

  “You shouldn’t have any trouble finding them. Everybody’s out of work, and most are chomping at the bits to get active again.

  “I know that most of your people didn’t survive. That you’re down to less than two hundred thousand survivors.

  “But I guarantee you out of those survivors you can find at last thirty who’ve either driven a tow truck or been a helper on one.

  “Find them and put them to work. Pay them with blue money or real estate points. Whatever they’ll work for.

  “Most of the other cities we’ve been to gave them the option.

  “You should do the same. After all, you’ve got plenty of abandoned properties you can give to your workers in lieu of pay, or you can get blue dollars from the U.S. Treasury.

  “Either way, get those guys to work. It’ll take a couple of years to clear your roads, and the sooner you get at it the better.”

  Finding the drivers wasn’t as hard as it appeared, for it seemed the vehicle towing community was a tight one before the blackout.

  It was a unique trade not suited for everyone, and most of the drivers knew each other.

  Or at least knew several other people in the same business.

  The city council started by going in-house, to the city garage.

  The man in charge, Joe Davidson, was working hard trying to get every Saturn in the city working again.

  The idea was to get them running and to dole them out for official services.

  “I’m overworked already,” Davidson said when dragged before the council.

  “I’ve only got six mechanics who survived, and they’re up to their necks in work already.

  “There’s no way they can start towing vehicles when they’re already working twelve hour days.”

  “Relax, Joe,” the mayor said.

  “We don’t want you or your people to do any more. We just want a list of the people who used to drive tow trucks in the city, and their last known addresses. We’ll contact one of them and put them in charge of this project.”

  From the list Davidson provided, two members of the city council drove one of the Army’s tow
trucks from door to door in search of a qualified operator.

  It turned out to be harder than they thought.

  Eighty-five to ninety percent of the city was dead now, two years after the first blackout began.

  Some estimates went even higher.

  The catastrophe took its toll on tow truck drivers just as it did with everyone else.

  It took the council three days of knocking on doors before they finally made their way to Bane Street.

  They pulled the rig to the curb in front of Monte Cantu’s house and found Monte and his wife Priscilla working the soil in their front yard.

  Monte had been planting corn all morning and desperately needed a break.

  He let out a low whistle when he saw the rig. A broad smile crossed his face.

  He was equal parts impressed and curious.

  Impressed that the United States Army had running tow rigs.

  And curious why one such rig would just show up in front of his house, of all places.

  -12-

  “Are you Monte Cantu?”

  “I am. Who are you?”

  “I’m Joe Santos. This is John Abrams. We represent the city of Lubbock and we got your name from Joe Davidson.

  “We’re here to offer you a job.”

  The rest, as they say, was history.

  Cantu accepted the job on the spot, figuring towing cars in an air conditioned truck beat the heck out of planting corn in the heat any day.

  Monte knew at least half the haulers in San Antonio, as it was a small brotherhood.

  He went looking, and found three of them were still alive.

  Those three had their own contacts, who had theirs as well.

  It seemed the cream of the crop was not only still alive, they were chomping at the bits to get back to work.

  Within a week Cantu had his workforce.

  They were ready to start clearing the streets of dead and abandoned cars and trucks.

  The only question was where they were going to put them all.

  San Antonio has been growing exponentially for decades. It’s a beautiful city with a rich culture and history. The climate is mild, both in winter and summer, and it’s in an ideal location.

  It’s one of the few places in the United States which isn’t in the danger zones of hurricanes, tornados, earthquakes or wildfires.

  In short, it’s a great place to live.

  Many San Antonio residents would have preferred to keep that a secret, but word got out anyway. And up until the first blackout tens of thousands of people relocated to the Alamo City each and every year.

  Traffic began to be a problem in the 1960s.

  The solution was Loop 410, a fifty mile-long circle which encompassed the downtown area and inner city suburbs.

  It was officially completed in 1969 and helped San Antonians get where they needed to be quickly and efficiently.

  Even back then, though, city planners were predicting a population explosion.

  So they planned a second loop, dubbed Loop 1604. The outer loop would encircle the entire city, including those suburban areas outside Loop 410.

  It didn’t take residents long to nickname Loop 410 as the “little donut” and Loop 1604 as the “big donut.”

  Loop 1604 was, at ninety four miles, almost twice as large as its little brother.

  Cantu worked with city planners and came up with an idea.

  “The city needs the inner loop more than the outer. And we need a monumental piece of real estate to park over a million cars and trucks.

  “Let’s close Loop 1604 and put the cars on it, all lined up nice and neat. At some point in the future, when we figure out how to get them working again, we can start to repair them and reopen 1604 a section at a time.”

  The city government didn’t like the idea of closing down a main thoroughfare.

  But Cantu was right.

  At the time, only a few vehicles were working, and they were mostly used by the police and fire departments.

  They certainly didn’t need the big donut and probably wouldn’t for at least a decade.

  There was, therefore, no real reason to keep it open and do maintenance on it.

  “Okay, use 1604 as a parking lot,” the city council told Cantu.

  “We’re going to make one stipulation, though.”

  “What’s that?”

  “We want them all lined up so that the owners can find them and work on them, and drive them away once replacement parts are available to get them running again.

  “That means they can’t be blocked in or buried behind a hundred other cars. If John Doe can find parts for his car, we want him to be able to easily find it. Then when he fixes it we want him to be able to just jump into it and drive away without any hassle.”

  “Done.”

  It took almost two years to get all the vehicles moved.

  Cantu and his crews worked twenty four hours a day, six days a week.

  Each Sunday all of the wreckers were driven to the city garage, where mechanics performed whatever maintenance was needed.

  Such a schedule meant the wreckers were operational during the entire process, save an occasional flat tire or dead battery.

  Meticulous records were kept and stored in laptop computers the Army also provided.

  Tow truck operators logged both the vehicle identification (or VIN) number and the license number for each vehicle they retrieved.

  They then placed the vehicle in the outside lane of traffic, backed into place at a forty five degree angle, with three feet of space between each vehicle.

  All vehicles ended up facing city hall, as though showing their respect to the city managers who came up with such a plan.

  Flyers were made, laminated in plastic to protect them from the weather, and attached to orange traffic cones.

  The cones were placed in the center of busy intersections all over the city, where they would grab the attention of passersby.

  The flyers detailed the process for finding and taking possession of one’s car.

  -13-

  The first step was for the owner to report to one of four tracking stations, set up at due north, east, south and west along Loop 1604.

  Each station was manned from sunrise to sunset by city employees.

  Owners could provide either a VIN or license number for their car and would be told where they could find it.

  An owner looking for the 2008 F-150 he abandoned on Rigsby Road on the day of the blackout might be told he could find in on Loop 1604 West, between Potranco Road and Military Drive.

  Once he found his vehicle he could try to repair it at his leisure once parts became available.

  If he was able to do so, he could merely drive it away.

  The city could have left it at that. The vehicles were now out of their way and no longer a major problem.

  But they went one step farther.

  The Army was conducting a census to determine how many survivors resided in the city and county.

  It was an arduous task, for many of them moved into bigger and better houses which had become vacant.

  That was especially true each winter, as more and more people who lived in houses without fireplaces went in search of vacant houses which were so equipped.

  Census takers couldn’t take it for granted, when they knocked on the home of Fred and Ethel Garcia and got no answer, that the Garcias were dead.

  They had to rely on physical, albeit often circumstantial, evidence.

  For example, they’d break into the house and look for human remains inside.

  Or, in the absence of human remains, telltale signs there had once been such remains.

  Like macabre blood spatters on the walls.

  Or dried pools of blood on the floor.

  They looked in the back yard for graves, or for signs neighbors had buried the bodies of Fred and Ethel.

  They knocked on the doors of neighbors, to see if anyone knew the whereabouts of the Garcias.

 
Once all of that was done they looked at the totality of the evidence.

  They either reported the couple as “missing, presumed relocated” or “presumed deceased.”

  In the latter case, if the couple was presumed deceased, any vehicles registered to them were up for grabs.

  A city employee would drive around Loop 1604 once a week, looking for such cars, and would spray paint “Owner Deceased” across its windshield.

  Such cars were fair game for anyone with a similar make and model of vehicle to help themselves to whatever parts might still be working.

  A cottage industry sprang up.

  It wasn’t cheap, but it was now possible for those who had valuables but no mechanical aptitude to pay someone to find their car, then to scavenge for parts from similar cars, in exchange for a fee.

  Most mechanics who provided such services were legitimate.

  It was an all or nothing deal.

  The mechanic looked at the car in question and quoted the owner a price and a timeline.

  Say, for example, he thought he might be able to get a certain car running again in a month’s time and would charge five hundred dollars in blue money, gold or silver.

  If he couldn’t deliver the running car in one month the deal was off and the owner owed nothing.

  On the face of it, it sounded like a win-win, a good deal for everyone.

  But there are always crooks out to earn an easy buck.

  Some of the mechanics were shady.

  And once they got their cars running, they took off with them, often selling them for several times what their fee would have been.

  Such charlatans relied on the odds an overworked and undermanned police department wouldn’t have time to search for them.

  And they usually provided false names and addresses to their clients.

  Other shady mechanics, after contracting for repairs, found the first car they could that was the same make and model, spray painted “Owner Deceased” across its windshield, and stole the parts they needed from it.

  Despite its problems, though, the policy served to get a lot of cars back on the roads.

  Mechanics who knew their stuff were able to ascertain that the electromagnetic pulses which destroyed the cars did so in a predictable manner.