A Perilous Journey

by Darrell Maloney

  “It so happens I’ve got a couple bundles of disposable diapers in my basement. They were left over when my youngest grandson finished potty training several years ago. They’ve probably got an inch of dust on them, but I’m sure the diapers inside the packages are still good.

  “Thing is, though, getting here was hard enough. I can’t imagine fighting through the snow all the way over to 10th Street to donate them.”

  Another man Pete didn’t know, who’d just walked in and was stomping the snow from his feet, said, “You don’t have to.”

  Pete turned to face the man, and he continued.

  “Just fight your way here a few more times to check the board, and soon you’ll have a path worn into the snow. Then bring the diapers here and drop them off. Somebody headed toward 10th Street can take them the rest of the way for you.”

  Pete looked again to Mary, who smiled.

  “My little relay station doesn’t only work for news and information. It works for moving all kinds of stuff as well.”

  -30-

  The following afternoon Pete and Sid hiked to a house on Hein Road, four blocks away from their own street.

  For part of their trek the going was treacherous.

  Other parts were much easier to deal with, as they followed the paths others had made on previous journeys.

  None of it was easy, for the snow pack had melted very little during those precious few hours temperatures went above freezing.

  But walking along the same path over and over again packed it down a bit, and some travelers helped a little by bringing shovels on their journeys and tossing some of the snow out of their way.

  Pete and Sid seldom left their houses, except to go to their alleys to retrieve food packages which FEMA left them twice a week.

  Neither of them knew there was a whole other world out in front of their houses, as survivors went here and there to conduct their business.

  Once he was sure no one else was coming, Mike Suarez called the meeting to order.

  “For those of you who haven’t been here before, my name is Mike.

  “I’m a retired Air Force major. Lackland was my last assignment, and I loved living in San Antonio so much my wife and I decided to stay.

  “My wife was murdered by marauders in the early days of Saris 7. She was walking down the street carrying a few cans of food when someone shot her. They took her food and left her there to bleed to death.

  “The police never found out who did it.

  “I’d like to think her killer is rotting in hell now, but I know there’s a good chance he’s still out there. In any event, she’s gone, and now it’s just me.

  “Kayla would want me to put aside my hatred for that man, whoever he is. I can’t do that.

  “The best I can do is to try to make my community a better place in other ways, and I hope and pray she’ll settle for that.

  “These days I spend my spare time trying to save the lives of others who’ve been wronged.

  “I know Morris Medley. We were both doctors at Wilford Hall. I like him a lot and consider him a friend.

  “I knew Tim Wilcox as well. I didn’t like him. He was a good doctor, but an insufferable jerk. We butted heads several times. But he was a brother in arms. He did not deserve to be jailed on trumped-up charges. He did not deserve to be driven to suicide.

  “We’re here today to do two things. To avenge the death of Tim Wilcox, and to save the life of Morris Medley.

  “With that I’ll turn it over to Mason, who will bring everyone up to speed with our plan and the things we still need to do to implement it.”

  Another man stood up, took a deep breath, and got started.

  “Okay, for those of you who are new, we are going to block traffic at every gate at Joint Base Lackland. We’re going do it methodically and peacefully. We will not cause any fights and in fact will walk away from them. The people of the base are our friends, and we wish them no harm.

  “All we want to do is send a message to General Mannix. If he wants his base back he will stop the insanity and drop the charges. Until that happens we will hold his base hostage.

  “The people who are on the base when we start our blockade will stay there. The people who are off the base will not be able to drive on.

  “We’ve had a lot of discussions about things we could do and things we couldn’t do. A lot of them were good ideas, but we couldn’t implement them because they required access to the base, and we didn’t have that.

  “Now then, here’s where we are at this point in the project…

  “We’ve decided to move ten cars at a time.

  “They won’t be our own cars. Our own cars are mostly snowed in, inside our garages or on our driveways. Getting them to the thoroughfares where the gates are located would require far more people than we have.

  “Any questions so far?”

  Pete raised his hand.

  “How many people do we have, exactly?”

  “Twenty two.”

  “That’s not many.”

  “No, it’s not.”

  -31-

  Mason continued, “But we hope to gather more helpers once we start rolling.”

  Another newcomer asked, “If we’re not going to use our own cars, which cars are we going to use?”

  “There are hundreds of cars in the parking lots that line Military Drive. The parking lots of the shuttered supermarkets, the motels, the fast food restaurants. They’re all fair game and they’re right next to streets that have been plowed, so we can move them rather quickly.”

  “Do we have keys to them?”

  “No. But we have the promise of the San Antonio Police Department all the cars are considered abandoned. They will not arrest us for starting or moving abandoned cars. They also will not charge us or arrest us for blocking the roadways.”

  Sid stood and asked, “Are you sure?”

  Mason smiled. He turned to a man sitting in the back corner of the room and said, “Mike, would you care to answer that question?”

  A tall and distinguished man stood up.

  “We’re sure. In order to arrest someone for vehicle theft we’d have to have a complainant who swore to owning the car come forward. We really do believe these to be abandoned, so we don’t expect that to happen. If someone comes forward and says, ‘Hey, that’s my car you’re taking,’ we’ll simply move on to another car.

  “As for issuing tickets for blocking traffic, that’s a traffic violation. The traffic courts are closed and may not open again for years. We’re no longer writing tickets.”

  The distinguished man took his seat again.

  Mason, just for clarification, announced, “I’m sorry. I forgot to introduce Mike Martinez, the San Antonio Chief of Police. Thank you, Mike.”

  That was that.

  With the police behind their efforts Sid had only one other concern.

  “How will we start the cars, if we have no keys?”

  It was a valid question, but one Mason had an answer for.

  “We’ve got a couple of vehicle mechanics in our group who will show us how to strip the ignition wires and arc them to start the cars. It’s a trick commonly called hot-wiring.

  “Now then, I want to stress that I don’t know how to hot-wire a car. But these guys do and will share their knowledge.”

  A few people laughed at Mason’s efforts to distance himself from the popular car-theft tactic.

  Pete raised his hand and offered, “I’m a mechanic and know how. I can help train the others also.”

  “Very good, and thank you…”

  “Pete. Pete Martinez.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Martinez. Any relation to the police chief?”

  “Not as far as I know. But maybe. There’s a lot of us Martinez guys around San Antonio.”

  A few more laughs. The surname Martinez was indeed quite common in the Alamo city.

  Mason moved on.

  “The thing which seems to be holding us back is the battery pro
blem. Every single one of the cars we’ve tried to start so far have had dead batteries. We’re trying to find batteries which will start that we can move from car to car.

  “So far that’s been a major endeavor.”

  Pete raised his hand again.

  “Has anybody tried visiting the industrial equipment stores?”

  “Pardon me?”

  “The places that sell industrial equipment. Like forklifts and bulldozers and cherry pickers and such. They’re usually located on the outskirts of town. They have permission from the federal government to sell unsealed batteries. When Congress passed a bill years ago making retail stores sell sealed batteries only, they gave a pass to industrial equipment and agricultural stores.

  “Those are the only two places where you can still find dry batteries and the acid to put in them. They’re not active until you pour the acid into them. Then they’re ready to go.”

  Mason turned to the police chief, who shrugged and said, “As long as an honest effort is made to contact the owner of the store, and if he can’t be reached, money is left behind on the counter, I don’t see a problem.”

  Someone else asked, “How many batteries will we need? Surely the store won’t have enough, or we won’t be able to pay for them all.”

  Pete spoke again.

  “If we’re really gonna do this, we’ll only need a few batteries. We’ll put one in the car we’re moving, hotwire it, take it where we want to leave it, then take the battery with us for the next car. Installing it and starting the car takes ten minutes each time, tops.”

  “Awesome,” Mason said.

  “Anybody else?”

  A man in the back said, “Once we install a new battery on one car, can’t we use that car to jump-start several other cars?”

  Pete said, “Can I answer that one, Mason?”

  “Sure. Go ahead.”

  “Theoretically that’s correct. But that’s when the gas is going to become a problem.”

  “How so?”

  “Well, the gas has been sitting in the tanks for months, maybe years. It’s degraded and very poor quality.

  “The car won’t idle smoothly. It’ll be very rough, and may not run at all unless you keep your foot on the gas pedal.

  “It may even die several times while you’re moving it. And with the jumper cables removed it won’t restart.”

  “Solution?”

  “I’d just move as many as we have new batteries for. It’ll take longer, but it’ll go much smoother.”

  -32-

  Marty and Ace had been plowing a single lane of Interstate 10 for almost a hundred miles and broke into cleared roadway about the same time they passed the sign which said:

  San Antonio City Limit

  Pop: 1,526,550

  “Holy cow,” Marty shouted with more glee than he could disguise. “They’ve plowed the city! We’re home free!”

  The city of San Antonio had the foresight to keep three types of city employees on the payroll: policemen, firefighters and road crews.

  And the city did indeed dispatch the road crews after every new snowfall.

  They did indeed plow the city.

  As for Marty’s last claim: that they were home free…

  …maybe not.

  Five minutes after he yelled out in jubilant triumph, the snow plow Marty was driving came to a jarring stop. The driver’s side front wheel, which Marty had been fighting since they left Eden, finally collapsed. The lower control arm snapped, the steering link dislodged and the bent wheel buckled, lying horizontally on the icy roadway.

  The big International dump truck and snow plow had done her duty. She had cleared a path in front of them to get to San Antonio, and she’d done it well.

  Now she was toast.

  Or, maybe not toast. But she wouldn’t be on the road again until serious repairs were done.

  Marty started cursing a blue streak, wondering aloud “how in hell” they were going to continue on their way and get Mayor Al to the hospital, without the plow.

  His friend Ace Boone was a former minister and an eternal optimist.

  He overlooked Marty’s language and bad attitude.

  He tried to explain that yes, it was a shame the plow was out of commission.

  But it wasn’t the end of the world, or even their mission.

  “Marty, the roads here are clear. We can pile into the Hummer and get around the city easily. When it comes time to go back, we’ll just drive west in the eastbound lane. The one we just cleared. Piece of cake.”

  When optimists butt heads with pessimists, though, nothing is a “piece of cake.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Marty argued. “What if we meet somebody coming this way? The lane isn’t wide enough for two vehicles to pass. And what if we get a big snowfall before we leave and it covers the lane back up again? What then?”

  None of Marty’s pessimism, though, deterred Ace.

  “Just have faith, Marty. All you gotta do is have faith.”

  “Oh, I have faith,” Marty grumbled. “I have faith that when I think I’ve hit rock bottom, the bottom falls out again. That’s what I have faith in.”

  The Hummer behind them pulled alongside. Brad was taking his turn at driving, and Hannah stuck her head out the passenger side window.

  “You two sexy guys want a ride?”

  Marty had had a major crush on Hannah forever.

  He couldn’t fight the smile which crossed his face at her comment.

  “I reckon we’ve got no choice. Are you sure you’re going our way?”

  “Nope. But you’re going ours. Get in.”

  They abandoned the massive piece of equipment in the left lane of Loop 1604, near Helotes. Not because they wanted to, but because they had no choice.

  They made much better time since they no longer had to push three feet of snow out of their way, and they pulled up to the Joint Base Lackland military gate a mere forty two minutes later.

  It helped that there was only a handful of other cars on the road.

  “May I help you, sir?” a Security Forces sergeant asked Brad.

  “I’ve got a medical emergency. I need to get this man to Wilford Hall right away.”

  The sergeant took a look in the back seat and saw Al, sweating and in great pain, and accepted that as confirmation the situation was dire.

  “Do you know how to get there?”

  Brad said, “No.” He’d never been to the sprawling base before.

  The sergeant wheeled around and whistled to another policeman, standing near an idling patrol car.

  “Bennett! Give these guys an escort to the emergency room!”

  Without a word Bennett jumped into the patrol car, turned on his light bar and siren, and pulled forward.

  “Follow him,” the sergeant instructed. “I’ll radio ahead and let them know you’re coming.”

  Four minutes later they pulled beneath an overhang at the Wilford Hall Regional Medical Center. It was the Air Force’s premier trauma center. And they wasted no time getting Al first into triage, then into an operating room.

  The surgical teams at Wilford Hall were used to taking human bodies blown apart by bullets, mortars and improvised explosive devices and making them whole again.

  Or at least as whole as humanly possible.

  Furthermore, they were the best at what they did, saving hundreds of lives each and every year.

  Removing a damaged appendix was easy. It was a walk in the park.

  It was something they could do blindfolded, one of the triage nurses told Al.

  “If it’s all the same to them,” Al told her, “I’d prefer they didn’t use the blindfolds.”

  -33-

  The entire crew was worn out. Their journey took the best part of a day, from morning until late evening.

  And as any trucker will attest, white knuckle driving on slippery ice is the most harrowing type of journey. Even a short trip can leave one frazzled and exhausted beyond belief.

  They were offere
d Visiting Airman’s Quarters, or VAQ.

  The military has acronyms for everything. It just makes speaking quicker and easier. Of course, for someone not familiar with the acronyms, it’s like being thrown into a conversation in a foreign language you don’t understand. It requires some interpretation as well as some explanation.

  Visiting Airman’s Quarters, or VAQ, is Air Force Speak for an on-base hotel. It differs only by degree from Visiting Officer’s Quarters, or VOQ.

  Officer’s quarters are fancier than airman’s quarters because… well, because they’re officers and insist on it.

  Either option is open to civilians under certain circumstances, and either is cheaper than an off-base hotel because they’re not out to make a profit.

  A VAQ room typically runs around fifteen bucks a night. A top-of-the-line fancy VOQ room runs about twenty.

  Wilford Hall’s patient affairs department offered Mayor Al’s transport team complimentary rooms at the VAQ for ten days.

  That was the estimated recovery time for anyone undergoing a laparoscopic appendectomy at the hospital.

  If Mayor Al was a problem patient or took longer to recover, they were told, their lodging would be extended accordingly.

  The crew thanked the patient affairs staff, was given a map to the VAQ facility, and dropped their bags in their rooms.

  The only time they’d see the rooms, though, was at night.

  During the daytime they spent most of their time at the hospital… first waiting for their friend to come out of surgery, then recovery.

  Then waiting for him to regain consciousness.

  Lastly, they waited on him hand and foot, after learning something they never knew about him.

  He hid it well, but Mayor Al was deathly afraid of hospitals.

  “My sister died of cancer… in a hospital.

  “My father died of heart failure brought on by liver disease… in a hospital.

  “My brother was critically injured in an automobile accident… and died in the hospital.