A Perilous Journey

by Darrell Maloney

  They were content to consider him flawed and write him off as irredeemable.

  Frank had a bigger heart than all of them put together.

  -13-

  At the corner of Broadway and Avenue L a hulking structure stretched high into the thick gray sky.

  At twenty stories it wasn’t much by big city skyscraper standards. But it was easily the tallest building in Lubbock.

  Two hardscrabble men stood outside the main entrance on the south side of the building, their collars raised against the bitter cold and smoking old cigarettes.

  They watched as Frank parked the Hummer in front of the building and took his tool bag from the cargo bay.

  They watched as he crawled into the engine bay and removed the cable which led from the battery to the starter.

  They watched as he rolled up the cable and slipped it inside the pocket of his field jacket.

  When he looked directly at them and glared, as though challenging them to try to take the cable, they lost interest.

  Both of them were armed.

  Frank had nothing but his toughness and his confidence.

  His toughness and confidence were enough on this particular day.

  The men didn’t challenge him.

  Instead they tossed their cigarettes to the sidewalk and slunk back inside.

  Frank followed them, Josie and Eddie close behind.

  The building had been quite grand in its heyday. But lately it had lost its luster, like every other building in the wake of Cupid 23. The power had been off for years. It was dank and dusty.

  Several people milled about with not much to do.

  Some lay sleeping on the bare floor. Others sat close to the windows and played poker with frayed and faded cards, using wadded up hundred dollar bills for ante.

  The money people once worked and fought so hard for was now worthless, declared so by the federal government just before Saris 7 struck.

  The announcement was meant to deter looting by people looking for the stuff. As though thirsty and starving, desperate people would care about such things.

  Now, after all this time, currency in any denomination was seldom seen. Most of it was long gone, used as fire starters or tinder or toilet paper.

  This batch survived by being used over and over again, a thousand times or better, in a more or less ongoing poker game. Players came and left, stopped to nap and continued play. But the game itself was pretty much constant. A sad fixture at an abandoned building where people lived by barely living, more or less awaiting their turn to die.

  The sign pointing the way to the staircase was covered in spider webs, which struck Frank as rather odd.

  Did spiders continue to live in frozen conditions? He thought spiders went below ground in the winter to hibernate. Or at least to ride out the cold weather.

  He didn’t know the building was vacant and shuttered for several years before the freeze. The spiders which had spun the webs had long ago gone to spider heaven.

  Or spider hell.

  Or wherever dead spiders go.

  In any event, the web-covered sign did its job and directed the three hapless travelers to the north side of the building.

  None of them realized how out of shape they were until faced with the prospect of climbing ten flights of stairs.

  Josie made it farthest, being the youngest and the lightest.

  She petered out on the eighth floor, which embarrassed Frank. Frank stopped on the sixth floor and wheezed mightily trying to catch his breath and making a mental note to get in better shape once he made it back to the mine.

  He wasn’t a resident of the mine when Mark and Hannah’s group first went to ground. Frank and Eva came later. But Hannah and Mark thought to place a fully-equipped gym in one of the mine’s bays.

  Frank seldom saw anybody use it, but he made a silent vow to himself he’d visit it every day until he could outrun his wife.

  At least he was better off than Eddie, who stopped at the third floor and told the others to go on without him.

  “Y’all can pick me up on your way back, okay Josie?”

  She, of course, was having none of that.

  “We’ll wait for you to rest, Eddie. We need to stay together.”

  She looked at Frank, who nodded his agreement. In a building full of armed and sometimes shady looking people it was best to assume everyone was hostile and could strike out at any time.

  It took a full ten minutes to get Eddie up the ten flights of stairs.

  By the time they finally reached their destination Frank had a commitment from the younger man.

  He promised he’d let Frank drag him to the mine’s gym each and every day until he could run a mile at Frank’s pace.

  Which, Josie chided, wasn’t much more than a walk.

  Josie had an epiphany as they reached the tenth floor, and neither of her partners liked it much.

  “What if he’s not home? What if we have to come back and do this again?”

  They needn’t have worried.

  The tenth floor stairwell opened into the elevator lobby, prompting Eddie to say, “Hey, why didn’t we just take the elevator?”

  It was darker here than on the first floor, since there were fewer windows to let in light. Also, the sky seemed to have darkened a bit since they walked into the building.

  Frank approached the main door leading to the floor’s office area. A faded sign, probably hung many years before, said “Smith and Sons, Attorneys at Law.”

  They weren’t here to sue anybody today. An adjacent sign, hand-made and obviously newer, read:

  HOME OF RONNIE ROSCO, ESQUIRE.

  IF YOU KNOW ME, CALL OUT MY NAME.

  IF YOU DON’T KNOW ME,

  GET THE HELL OUT OF HERE

  “You have such sweet friends,” Josie commented.

  “Uh, huh. Only the best.”

  -14-

  Once Eddie caught his breath, Frank called out loudly, “Ronnie, it’s Frank Woodard, from the San Antonio PD.”

  There was no response from behind the door.

  He started again, “Ronnie, it’s Frank…”

  A loud voice from the other side interrupted him mid-sentence.

  “I heard ya, you old fool. Be patient! I don’t move as fast as I used to, you know.”

  The door opened and a disheveled man with a mop of gray hair stood in the doorway.

  He stared at Frank for a second, perhaps to satisfy in his own mind he was who he said he was.

  Then he planted his gaze on Josie and kept it there.

  “Damn it, Frank, if I knew you was bringing your daughter I’d have combed my hair or used some mouthwash or something.”

  “She’s not my daughter, Ronnie. Josie is my wife.”

  Ronnie wasn’t buying it.

  “Oh, bullshit. There’s no way you could land yourself a woman as young and as beautiful as this one.”

  He lowered his voice to a near whisper and said to Josie in a conspiratorial tone, “Honey, if you wanted to marry an old man you didn’t have to settle for an ugly one like him. You could have had a handsome one, like me. You’re much too beautiful for Frank.”

  Josie smiled and blushed and turned to Frank.

  “I really like this guy, honey.”

  Frank grumbled. “Yeah, yeah… Ronnie, are you gonna invite us in or make us stand out here all day?”

  “Can I just invite her in and leave you out here?”

  “Nope. It’s all or nothing.”

  “Dang it. Well, I guess you might as well come in then.”

  As the three walked past him Ronnie held out his hand to Eddie and introduced himself.

  “Hello young man. My name is Ronnie. What’s yours?”

  “I’m Eddie.”

  “Hello, Eddie. Are you Frank’s son?”

  It was an honest question, but Eddie found humor in it.

  “Shucks no,” he said. “I’m Mister Frank’s partner.”

  “Well, any partner of Frank’s is a
friend of mine.”

  He turned to the others and said, “Y’all have a seat and make yourselves comfortable. I’ve got a pot of coffee I just happened to be brewing. It’s not gonna be as fresh as I’d like. But it’s coffee. If you drink it strong enough you don’t notice the staleness.”

  They looked around in disbelief at the wonderland Ronnie had created out of the tenth floor of the building.

  The floor originally had an open layout, meaning one could look into it and see a panorama of windows.

  Other than a few structural columns to keep the building from collapsing, one could stand in the center of the floor and have views of the entire south, east and west sides. It was the north side which was walled off and opened into the elevator lobby.

  Back in the days when this was an office building the view would have been mostly hidden by modular furniture, more commonly called cubicles.

  Ronnie had no such cubicles. What he did have was the entire open floor of an old office building, all to himself.

  That wasn’t to say he was swimming in space, though.

  There were furnishings here and there, as he’d obviously tried to turn the place into a comfortable living space.

  Where there wasn’t furniture, there were boxes. Hundreds and hundreds of boxes. Some were stacked neatly in rows, some were strewn about haphazardly.

  Several were open, as though someone had recently gone through them.

  Ronnie padded off in socked feet to check his coffee while his visitors relaxed on a couch and easy chair.

  He brought back a steaming pot and a sleeve of white Styrofoam cups.

  “We don’t do fancy around here. Actually I almost never get company anymore. Most of my friends are dead or gone to roost in other parts of the country. I have a few friends still active at LPD but that’s about it. Most of them aren’t willing to climb ten floors to see me, the lazy bastards.”

  “So tell me, Ronnie. How in the world did you manage to score a whole floor in an office building?”

  “I’m a prepper, Frank. You know that. Preppers know how to get things others want but don’t know how to get hold of. That’s why they come to us.”

  “Yeah, but the whole floor of an office building? That’s pretty impressive, even for a prepper.”

  “Actually it was pretty easy, Frank. When they announced that Saris 7 was getting ready to strike everybody was looting like crazy. While they were looting we were moving.”

  “Who’s ‘we?’ You got a mouse in your pocket?”

  “My son. David. He died a couple of years ago.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “No need to be sorry, Frank. You didn’t kill him. Some other bastard did. If I knew who he was I’d kill him a hundred times over. The Bible says an eye for an eye, a life for a life. Of course, it also says that vengeance is the Lord’s to handle. But I don’t reckon he’d mind me helping him out a bit.

  “Anyway, in the last three days before the world got dark and cold we moved most of the stuff from our compound to here. I figured it would get ugly, and I wanted to be close to my friends on the police force.

  “Plus, I had some customers who live not far from here. I knew it would be hard for them to get all the way to my compound outside of Tahoka, forty plus miles away. Once the snow started to pile up, I mean. So I brought my goods to them, so to speak.”

  “What do you sell to them?”

  “Oh, I don’t barter any more. That stopped when David died. You see, I used to trade my excesses to them. Things I had but didn’t really need. Guns, mostly, and ammo. I stocked a lot more than I needed, it turned out. Batteries, radios, that sort of stuff.

  “Fools would bring me cash and I’d laugh at them. I’d say ‘Don’t you know that stuff is worthless now?’

  -15-

  Ronnie took a long drag from his coffee cup and continued.

  “I accepted gold and silver jewelry and coins, that was all. I figured that some day the world would thaw for good and it would be a safe place again. I knew that gold and silver would still have value then.

  “I’ve only got a few years left in me, but I wanted to leave David enough precious metals to feed him and take care of him for his lifetime.

  “Then that fool shot him.

  “That’s when I stopped trading. Didn’t have no reason to after that. The gold and silver I’ve collected so far is worthless to me. Now I’m just living up here on my own, waiting for my heart to give out.”

  “That’s so sad,” Josie said.

  She stood up and walked over to him and hugged him.

  The tender moment didn’t last long.

  “You’re the prettiest girl I’ve ever had a hug from. You sure you don’t want to dump that old codger and move in here with me?”

  Josie laughed.

  Thanks but no thanks. Frank may not be as young as he used to be, but he’s still the perfect man for me.”

  “I’m surprised you were able to get all this stuff in here without somebody robbing you.”

  “Oh, it wasn’t easy. I hired a couple of homeless guys to actually move the stuff up while David stood up here with a fully automatic rifle and I stayed down on the street with another one.”

  “Um… fully automatic weapons are illegal.”

  “So call the ATF, you putz. Good luck getting ahold of them. They’re all scattered or dead, like everybody else.”

  “No. I mean where on earth did you get them?”

  “What part of preppers can get things other people can’t don’t you understand, Frank?”

  He smiled so Frank would know he wasn’t as angry as he sounded.

  “Anyway, any time somebody on the street started getting too close or too ugly I just let loose a burst in the air. You wouldn’t believe how fast a burst of six or eight rounds can make people scatter.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  “But how do you have lights and power to make your coffee if the building is abandoned and all the power is out?”

  “I’ve got a generator in that mechanical closet, vented to the outside. You haven’t heard it because it only runs intermittently. It’ll come on for a couple of hours, charge my battery bank and then go off again.”

  “Where do you get the fuel?”

  “I got a deal with a guy who hauls ten gallons of diesel up the stairs every Saturday. Takes him about an hour to get it up the ten flights, the lazy cuss. I give him a silver dollar for his trouble.

  “Say, what brings you all the way up here from San Antonio, anyway?”

  “It’s a long story, Ronnie.”

  “So give me the short version then, ya dummy.”

  “I was carjacked awhile back. Made to drive from south Texas to Plainview. That’s where I met Josie and fell in love and decided to marry her.”

  “I still say she’s better off with me.”

  “We escaped and now we’re headed back to south Texas. I had to stop here to get some hardware, and I figured I’d look you up and see if I could borrow your ham radio.”

  “Ham radio? Why in the world do you need a ham radio?”

  “To call my people down there and let them know I’m still alive and headed back.”

  “I’ll tell you what, Frank. I’ll trade you a ham radio for your wife.”

  “I don’t want a ham radio. I just want to borrow one for half an hour or so.”

  “All right then, damn it. I’ll let you borrow my ham radio for half an hour or so if you’ll let me borrow your wife for half an hour or so.”

  He turned to Josie and said, “You do know I’m kidding, don’t you, honey?”

  “Well, I hope so.”

  “I am. Truth is, Frank can use my radio all he wants. Maybe he’ll use it so much he’ll fall over dead with a heart attack. Maybe then you’ll marry me.”

  His ear to ear grin told them both he was teasing.

  Then something Frank said in passing finally connected.

  “You said you stopped for hardware. What kind of hardware do
you need?”

  Josie was tired of sitting quietly and had a sneaking suspicion Ronnie would rather hear her talk instead of Frank anyway.

  “Oh, for his homemade snowplow. You should see it. It’s amazing. It’s made almost completely of wood. And he designed it and made it all himself.”

  He seemed less than impressed.

  “He made a snow plow… from wood?”

  Frank stepped in.

  “Well, not the whole snow plow. Just the blade and the frame.”

  “And you expect it to stand up to the pressure of pushing several feet of snow? Seriously?”

  “What are you now, Ronnie? An expert on snow plows?”

  “Well, no. Not completely. But enough to know a wooden blade won’t hold up for long under all that pressure.”

  “It held up well enough to get us here from Plainview.”

  “Then why do you need hardware to repair it?”

  “Not to repair it, Ronnie. It’s not broken. I just didn’t have locking nuts and washers when I built it, and the nuts have been vibrating loose. Now that I can lock them down it’ll work as designed.”

  “I’ve got to see this wooden plow blade. Can I see it?”

  “Sure. I guess. It’s parked downstairs.”

  -16-

  Before they left, Ronnie attached a rather large sign on his doorknob, next to a numbered cipher lock.

  The sign said:

  NOTICE:

  This lock has over 4,000 possible

  combinations and is wired to

  four sticks of dynamite. If

  you know the right combination, come

  on in. If you put in the wrong

  combination you’ll be blown to bits.

  GOOD LUCK!

  He strapped on a military web belt with two holstered .45 caliber handguns, three ammo pouches and four hand grenades.

  Over his shoulder was the gnarliest-looking AK-47 Frank ever saw, with a drum magazine attached.

  He looked like Rambo.

  On steroids.

  “You expecting a war out there, Ronnie?”

  “I expect a war every time I go out, Frank. That’s the only reason I’m still alive.”