The last time Zach had seen him leave so early, he’d asked why, and Tom had grumbled, “Heading to the office, to fill out more damned forms.”
So it was understandable that Zach wasn’t curious at all to see old Tom arming up and heading out so early in the morning. Didn’t challenge him, didn’t even ask why. Merely wished him a good day.
On this particular morning, though, Tom Haskins had no intention of going into the office. On this particular morning, Tom Haskins had a mission to go on. And he wouldn’t take a posse with him. This was something he needed to do alone.
He was careful not to tell anyone in the compound about his intentions. They’d hear about it after the fact, anyway. And Linda would be upset. Actually, she’d probably be furious with him, for going to such a dangerous place alone.
But at least she wouldn’t have to worry about him making it back at that point. She’d rant and rave and probably call him a couple of choice names. But it wouldn’t matter much then.
His mission would be done at that point, and he’d be back safely.
At least, if everything went according to plan.
“I just didn’t want to worry you,” he’d say.
And she’d eventually calm down.
It was the first time he’d gotten the old Ford Galaxy over fifty miles an hour in ten years, but he didn’t worry about her. She purred like a kitten and seemed to appreciate getting the chance to run.
The Galaxy never had air conditioning. Back in the days when it was new, air conditioning was a very expensive option on new cars. It was considered a luxury. Most buyers opted out of it.
He cranked the driver’s side window down, then reached across the bench seat and did the same with the passenger window.
After the air was flowing through and keeping him cool, he chuckled to himself, remembering an old joke from his youth.
One man asked another, “What kind of air conditioning do you have on your car?”
“I have two fifty five air conditioning.”
“Two fifty five air conditioning? I’ve never heard of that. How does it work?”
“I roll two windows down and drive fifty five miles an hour, and I’m as cool as a cucumber.”
As he put more and more miles between himself and Kerrville, he grew serious again.
And wondered what lay ahead of him.
He knew that San Antonio could be a dangerous place. He’d heard the stories that John had told to Hannah, of marauding gangs roaming through the streets, killing and raping and plundering as they went. Most of that should be a thing of the past now, since John and Scott and all the others had been working hard to clean up the city and normalize it again.
And Tom Haskins was afraid of no man, so even if the marauders were still there, it wouldn’t have bothered him much.
Marauding outlaws might have inconvenienced him. Might even have slowed him down a bit.
But they wouldn’t have kept him from his mission.
He wasn’t afraid of a mechanical breakdown either. The old Ford wasn’t what she used to be. But she was still a workhorse. Always had been. Her luster was gone, but her heart still beat strong. The engine was sound. If one of the other parts: the radiator, the starter, the transmission, went out, he was capable of walking back. It might take him a few days, but he could do it.
So the possibility of taking an old car on a long trip and breaking down didn’t bother him much either.
No, the only thing that worried old Tom Haskins was failure. Failure to accomplish his mission. For that would let some good people down. People he cared about. And the thought of that happening was much worse than having to walk ninety miles or face bad men with guns.
So he’d succeed. He had to.
He’d given Dawn Hawkins, his administrative assistant at the Sheriff’s Office, very specific instructions the day before.
“I’ll be going on a road trip to San Antonio tomorrow. I cannot tell you why, and I’m sorry about that. This is just something I have to do. You wouldn’t understand my reasons even if I told you. You’d think I was a crazy old man, which I probably am. So I’ll just keep my motives to myself.”
“No problem, sheriff. What do you want me to do?”
“Just cover for me. I should be back in Junction in the late afternoon. If I am, I’ll call you on the radio and let you know. If you don’t hear from me, you can assume it’s just taking a little longer than I thought.
“If that’s the case, Linda and the folks in the compound will be looking for me. They’ll likely call you on the ham and ask where I am. Just tell them I’m doing sheriff’s business and will be working late, and will just spend the night at the office.”
“Yes, sir.”
Dawn was chomping at the bits to find out more about the sheriff’s mysterious mission. She wanted to ask, but held her tongue. A mere girl of nineteen, she was trying her hardest to convince the sheriff that she was a professional. It was imperative to show him she was capable and worthy, so when she asked him to let her become Junction’s first female deputy he’d have no qualms with granting her request.
-7-
“Okay, I thought the last one would do it. This one will, for sure.”
Rhett wiped a bead of sweat from his brow and picked up the next knotted rope in the line.
This was the fourth in a group of twelve houses they wanted to collapse before winter set in.
It was slow going. But this one was about ready to come tumbling down. When they’d pulled out one of the exterior studs a few seconds before, the house popped, groaned, and swayed.
But it stubbornly kept standing.
Scarlett, standing behind her husband, muttered, “Crap. This is really hard work.”
Rhett turned and looked at her, his muscles sore from tugging on the heavy ropes, but didn’t say anything.
“Oops, sorry,” she said with a sweet smile. “I’ll shut up now.”
She blew him a kiss.
As Rhett and three other men prepared to pull another stud from the north wall of the structure, the house began to vibrate. Then it popped a couple of times, as the support walls weakened and broke. Finally, with all the grace of a dying dinosaur falling to the earth in a heap, it tumbled over, sending up a cloud of brown, choking dust.
Scarlett said, “See! That wasn’t so bad.”
She got another look from Rhett and told him, “But I love you, honey, with all my heart.”
He smiled.
“Four down, eight to go.”
The men decided to take a much-deserved break before they started the daunting task of separating the shingles from the shattered roof and hauling them away in wheelbarrows.
Scarlett asked, “When are you going to start the next house?”
“It’ll take at least a week to go through the debris pile and get rid of this one. Maybe a week and a half. Why?”
“Sami and Toni and I were going to go through them first to see if there was any furniture or anything we could use, before you tore them down and made the furniture all dirty and yucky.”
“Why don’t you go through them now? And then you can do me a favor while you’re at it.”
He tried to take on a “sweet innocent girl” look by cocking his head sideways and batting his eyelashes, like Scarlet did to him whenever she asked for something.
“Forget it, pal. You just aren’t quite cute enough to pull that off. But I’ll try. What favor are you looking for?”
“We broke the handle on one of our sledge hammers, and we’ll need another one to help break up the big pieces of debris. Would you girls go through all the remaining houses and see if you can find one? It’ll probably be in one of the garages.”
“Ew, yuck, forget it! Last time I went into the garage of an abandoned house there was a body in there.”
“Not this time. Rudy and Mike went through all of them a few weeks ago to make sure all the bodies were out. They buried the only two they found.”
“Then, sure, no
problem. I’ll go get Sami and Toni and we’ll go through them now.”
She started to walk away, and Rhett called behind her, “Unless their ghosts came back to haunt the places.”
Scarlett stopped and turned.
“Huh?”
“I said all the bodies are gone. But there might be some ghosts left behind.”
She rolled her eyes, turned on her heels, and went off to find her friends. As she walked away, she raised her right hand and showed Rhett her middle finger.
Tony saw the gesture and said to Rhett, “I guess she’s trying to tell you you’re number one in her book, huh?”
“Yep. Always.”
-8-
Scott walked into the records unit at the San Antonio Police Department.
“Hi, Sally.”
“Hi, Scott. How have you been?”
“Not bad at all. I’ll be doing better if you can help me find some information.”
“I’ll certainly try. What are you looking for?”
“An address, for my son’s girlfriend. The house she lived in before the blackout. My son said it was on Moon Valley, around the sixty one hundred block or so. But he couldn’t remember the exact number.”
“Are you going back to see if his girlfriend is still alive? That’s sweet. I hope she is. I love stories with happy endings.”
“No, the girl is still alive and with us. I’m looking for her parents to see if they made it.”
“Oh, okay. What’s the girl’s name?”
“Sara Stewart. But her mother’s married name was McAllister. Stacey McAllister.”
Sally punched the information into the computer on her desk.
Scott was taken aback.
“Hey, I thought y’all were keeping manual records now.”
“We were, but one of our computer techs is building us new computers from undamaged parts he’s cannibalizing from all the bad ones. It’s a slow process. He’s only able to build one or two a month. But it’s a start.
“And we don’t have all the data. Some of our backup drives had built in surge suppressors that saved the data. Some didn’t. So it’s hit and miss.”
He looked over her shoulder and saw the message the same time she did:
Information Not Found.
“And, unfortunately, Moon Valley Drive was on one of our backup drives that didn’t survive.”
She saw the disappointment on Scott’s face and said, “Oh, don’t worry. We have a backup source.”
“You do?”
“Yep. The good old fashioned phone book.”
She pulled out a three year old copy of the San Antonio telephone directory and scanned it.
“Here you go, Scott. Your son is off by one block. 6018 Moon Valley Drive. Glen and Stacey McAllister.”
He wrote down the address and said, “Thank you, Sally. You’re a real doll.”
“A hungry doll. You can buy me lunch sometime before you leave.”
“Buy you lunch how, exactly? Money’s no good anymore and there aren’t any restaurants open anyway.”
“I know. But a girl can dream, and I tend to live in the past. I’ll settle for you sharing an MRE and a salad with me in the break room before you go back to your family.”
“Deal.”
The following day Scott pulled into the driveway of 6018 Moon Valley Drive.
He noted that the door had been spray painted with a large neon green check mark. It meant either no bodies had been found there, or that they had already been removed.
He hoped it was the first of the two options.
The front door had also been forced open at least once, and was hanging pitifully on only its lower hinge. Looters, he supposed.
Scott rapped loudly on the door frame and called out, “San Antonio Police. Anybody home?”
No answer.
He rapped again, calling out even louder.
“San Antonio Police Department. Is anyone home?”
Still no response, other than a dog barking from the back yard next door.
He paused long enough to consider the sound. Most of the dogs had been killed for food long before. In a world where slaughterhouses and supermarkets no longer existed, people had grown desperate for meat.
The dog barked again. It sounded like a small dog, probably a Chihuahua.
Scott smiled, thinking the dog probably owed its survival to its diminutive size. The owner probably figured it wasn’t worth killing for the small amount of meat it would have provided.
Then he shoved aside the broken door and stepped into the house.
His smile went away immediately.
The smell told him he’d walked into a death house. The stench of decaying bodies lingered, even weeks or months after the bodies had been removed. In all likelihood, the smell would last for years, or until the house was demolished.
Scott had a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach.
He walked into the living room, looking for the tell-tale signs. Although he wasn’t a detective, some of the things he’d seen repeated over and over in suicide houses made it fairly easy to piece together what happened.
In an ugly green plaid recliner, an even uglier reddish-brown stain still attracted houseflies. The chair was in the fully reclined position. Dried blood spatters covered one arm of the chair, and small white chips of bone, more accurately pieces of the victim’s skull, were embedded in the arm’s fabric.
On the floor at the foot of the recliner was a second stain, this one smaller. The dark stain was particularly abhorrent when contrasted with the lighter beige carpet on which it rested.
Next to the second stain a small circle, perhaps ten inches across, was spray painted in the same neon green that marked the front door. The circle marked where the murder weapon was found.
Scott knew the signs because he himself had collected several dozens of weapons, had spray painted several dozen green circles to mark their locations.
The process had always struck him as slightly ludicrous. Yes, this was technically a crime scene, since one person shooting another was technically a homicide. But they were nearly always mercy killings, nearly always done with the deceased’s consent, and there were no homicide detectives to investigate the cases anyway. And even if there had been, there would have been no investigation. In nearly all cases, the suspect was dead also, killed by the same weapon with the very next bullet.
Still, they went through the motions. Department policy required the marking of a “murder weapon” any time one was collected, so they played the game.
Scott looked around. Had this been one of his body collections? Had he and Robbie, or he and Randy, or he and Rhett, dragged these particular bodies into the street to be burned?
He’d done the grisly task so many times that the scenes all seemed to look alike.
He hoped he wasn’t the one who’d worked this house. He’d hate to think that he’d just dragged away the bodies of Sara’s mom and dad, as though they were just like all the others.
If Scott had worked the scene, and had known they were Sara’s parents, he’d have certainly done something special for them. Carried them more tenderly, perhaps. Said a special prayer over them, asking God to watch out for them and to keep them safe.
Perhaps he’d have broken with protocol and buried them in their back yard. Maybe left a small cross to mark their graves, so Sara could visit them later on.
Scott wandered through the house. He came to Sara’s room. He knew it was hers from the eight by ten of Jordan, his oldest son, on the dresser.
He looked around the room and saw Sara’s pom-poms mounted on the wall, above the photo of her in her cheerleader’s outfit. It was something he never knew about her, that she’d been a cheerleader.
He’d have to ask her about it.
Scott was distraught. He’d understood the pain this sweet young child had already felt, unsure whether her parents were alive or dead, and imagining the misery they must have suffered in her absence.
And now he’d confirmed the worst of her suspicions.
In his present state, Scott could be forgiven for overlooking a thing as small as a white envelope, laid upon the pillow of Sara’s neatly made bed and blending into a similarly white pillow case.
“Sara,” was all it said.
If he’d have noticed it, he’d have assumed it was a suicide note, left behind by her parents in the event their daughter survived and returned to the house to find their bodies.
Had he seen the note, he’d have slipped it into the pocket of his trousers and taken it to her. Stood by her side to show his support for her while she read it. Taken her in his arms and held her while she cried on his shoulder. Told her he loved her, and assured her that she was safe in her new home, surrounded by many others who similarly loved her.
But he never saw the note. Never disturbed its place upon the pillow. So instead of collecting it and delivering it to sweet Sara, he gathered up a few things he thought Sara might like. Her teddy bear, a wedding photo of her parents. Her pom-poms.
Then he made his way to the kitchen and wept. Despite Sara’s suspicions that her parents hadn’t made it, up to now they were only that. Suspicions. Now that he knew for sure her parents were dead, he’d have to be the one to confirm those suspicions. He’d be the one to dash any hopes she might have that they’d somehow survived.
He’d have to be the one who would break this young girl’s heart.
And it would be one of the hardest things he’d ever have to do.
-9-
Tom spent the night in the back seat of his old Ford Galaxy, parked in front of an abandoned Walmart Store. A San Antonio Police cruiser rolled through the lot a little after three a.m., and the officer wondered why a Kerr County Sheriff’s unit came all the way to San Antonio just to sit in an abandoned lot.
Then he wondered if it was really a lawman’s car. It was older than he was, after all, and probably was more suited to a museum than street work.
But then he put it out of his mind and moved on, knowing that even if it were stolen, the perps were probably long gone. And even if they weren’t, there was nothing left in the Walmart to steal anyway.
The Homecoming: Countdown to Armageddon: Book 5 Page 4
