Hidden (Final Dawn)

by Maloney, Darrell

  But what angered them the most was that he wouldn’t even try.

  As for President Sanders, he was one of the last to die. In the last hour before he died, he took the lives of his family, with a handgun. He put them out of their misery first, ensuring they were dead, before finally turning the gun on himself. It was perhaps the only decent thing he did during the whole affair.

  Chapter 39

  In those last few months before the world was livable again, the snow once again started to fall. The roads that had been clear during the summer were now once again under a blanket of white.

  Some were discouraged. They felt Mother Nature was teasing them, by giving them a taste of warmth, and then cruelly pulling it back again.

  But those who had been counting the warm weather days from one year to the next knew that the number of warm days was growing more and more each year. And they knew that the following spring, the thaw would bring warmth that would last more or less until fall.

  No, it wouldn’t be balmy. But it would be livable. And it would seem like old times again.

  On Buena Vista Drive in San Antonio, they were making plans for the next stage in their lives.

  “We can dig up the dead grass in all the front yards. Dig up the trees and shrubs too. Dig up all the front yards until they’re nothing but dirt. And that will give us at least two acres to grow crops. If we do the same to the back yards, we’ll have twice that amount.”

  “But where will we get the seeds to plant?”

  Frank had already pondered the question even before it came, and was ready with the answer.

  “There’s a Walmart store a mile away. When the freeze hit, I’m sure it was ransacked. I’ll bet anything edible was taken off the shelves and is long gone.

  “But I’ll make another bet too. I’ll bet that in the Walmart garden center, I’ll bet that stand full of flower and vegetable seeds is still untouched. I mean, who would think to take tomato and squash seeds when the world is freezing over? I’m going to make a trip there tomorrow, before the snow gets too deep to walk again.”

  “Is it wise to walk now that there’s snow on the ground? I mean, it’ll make it too easy for any marauders out there to track you.”

  “I’m going to use that to my advantage. Watching for footprints in the snow works both ways. If there are people still going in and out of the Walmart for food or supplies, I’ll be able to tell before I just walk in there and get ambushed.”

  “What if the seeds won’t grow because they’re so old?”

  Eva spoke up.

  “They’ve got to grow. And they will. God has watched over us this long and kept us alive for a reason. He wouldn’t let us down now.”

  Jesse added, “Before the freeze came, I remember seeing this show once on the Discovery Channel. It talked about what would happen if a virus or some kind of plant disease wiped out all the world’s crops. A bunch of scientists said it was a possibility, so some of the countries got together and built this huge seed repository up around the arctic somewhere. It was buried below ground, in the ice, and they were storing thousands of varieties and strains of seeds in there, in the event such a catastrophe ever happened for real.”

  “I’m not walking to the Arctic, Jesse. It’s way too far.”

  Frank was joking, of course, and the group laughed.

  “My point is, if they store these seeds in the Arctic to preserve them, then wouldn’t the freeze also preserve them? I mean, maybe they go into hibernation or suspended animation or something when they freeze. Maybe they’ll be as good as new.”

  “That is a valid point. And we need to get some before others realize that’s their future food supply and clean all the seeds out.”

  Jesse said, “Frank, I’m going with you. If there are marauders anywhere near Walmart, you’ll need backup.”

  “Okay, Jesse. You’re welcome to come. We’ll take a couple of duffles, in case we see anything else we can use.”

  The next morning, as soon as it was light in the sky, Frank and Jesse set out.

  The going was relatively easy. Since the warm weather months had cleared the roads of snow, the new snow pack was only about four inches. It was no match for the hiking boots both men wore.

  They were careful to watch for vehicle tracks and footprints. But they saw none.

  “I wonder where all the people are?”

  “Mostly dead, I suppose. Or maybe since the weather turned cold again they’re holed up in their houses.”

  They looked around for the telltale chimney smoke that told them which houses were occupied. They could count the number of smoke trails on two hands during their one mile hike.

  There just weren’t many survivors left.

  As they neared the Walmart, they both unshouldered their AR-15s and charged them. They didn’t want to appear as a threat to anyone who might be watching. But they didn’t want to be at a disadvantage either if a firefight started.

  Before they went in, they crept completely around the store. They knew that if anyone was going in and out of the building for supplies or food, they wouldn’t necessarily use the front door. There were plenty of fire escape doors and overhead doors around the building that could be used as well.

  But they saw no footprints. And there was no smoke coming from the building either.

  Frank knew that if there were people hiding inside the store, they’d have to keep a fire going to melt snow for drinking water, and to cook their food and keep from freezing to death. And burning a fire inside a building, of course, would be deadly unless there was a place for rising smoke to exit the building.

  This Walmart was built with dozens of plastic skylights which once helped reduce the building’s electricity costs. They could very easily be punched out to allow smoke to leave the building.

  The pair had watched as they approached the Walmart. There was no smoke coming from the building.

  The lack of smoke and footprints convinced both men that the building was unoccupied.

  When they went inside, they found out why.

  Frank and Jesse entered the Walmart through a fire escape door at the back of the building. It was slightly ajar, and opened to the outside. But the snow that had drifted up against the door told the pair that no one had walked through it since the snow started to fall again a couple of weeks before.

  The door entered into what once was the butcher department. Long stainless steel tables, once used by butchers to slice and package meat, now lay dusty and unused. All the meat that might have been here when the panic started was long gone, of course. So was everything else that might have been edible.

  They paused a few minutes to let their eyes adjust to the semi darkness. They brought flashlights with them, but preferred not to use them unless they had to. Just in case they were wrong about the building being unoccupied.

  Very slowly the pair progressed through a set of double swinging doors and out into the store itself.

  What they saw amazed them. It looked like the store had been hit by a huge bomb blast. There was debris everywhere. But it was easy to see that it was mostly inedible items. Frozen and swollen canned goods by the hundreds. Laundry soap. Kitty litter. A whole lot of everything, but virtually nothing in the way of edible food.

  Most of the shelves had been toppled over, either by angry crowds frustrated because all the food was gone, or by vandals.

  Frank was puzzled to see that dozens and dozens of bags of flour, though, had been thrown around and broken open, and a fine dusting of flour seemed to be everywhere. Were some people actually so stupid that they didn’t know flour and water could keep them alive? Apparently so.

  They also noticed that many of the skylights had indeed been broken out, and much of the debris was covered with a light blanket of snow. Frank could still smell the scent of burned wood, from long ago. He assumed that some people did use the building for shelter from the cold at one time. But he also correctly assumed that they were long gone.

  The b
roken skylights, and the ones that glowed a brilliant white from the sun shining through their snow cover, made it easier to navigate the sea of debris.

  It was slow going, to be sure. Climbing over a pile of twisted shelving units and loose boxes created the possibility of falling and breaking an arm or a leg. There were a lot of sharp edges, too, and a cut meant a risk of infection. And infections could be deadly.

  In the center of the store, in what used to be the ladies wear section, the pair came across an area that had been cleared of all racks and debris. The scent in the air changed from the faint smell of burned wood to the more powerful and repugnant smell of rotting human flesh.

  There, in the center of the clearing, gathered around the remnants of what was once a campfire, were three bodies. Two were in sleeping bags, a woman and a teenaged boy, the bags gathered tightly around their heads and necks as though they were sound asleep in the freezing cold when they were shot in the head.

  The third body, a man in his forties, sat apart from the other two, his head mostly blown apart, and a gun still in his hand. Frank surmised that it was a father who shot his wife and son before taking his own life.

  The smell of rotting flesh came during the two months of thaw, when the bodies started the decomposition process, before they froze again. Frank was becoming all too familiar with the rancid smell as he walked through the neighborhoods around Buena Vista Drive. He knew that literally hundreds of homes in the area still had scenes eerily similar to this one.

  When they made it to the Pharmacy department, they noticed that the steel cage which had been lowered into place the last time the pharmacy closed had been violently pulled to the side to allow entry. Drug addicts, Frank supposed, whose need for drugs was easily as powerful as the one for food.

  They crawled into the Pharmacy and used their flashlights to scan the bottles still on the shelves. It took several minutes to find what they needed, but their patience was rewarded. They found Cogentin, Depakote and lithium carbonate, and threw them into one of their bags. The next day, Frank would take the medicines to a family a few streets over. The husband, he’d found out a week before, was bi-polar and hadn’t had meds to take for quite awhile. He was unable to control his mood swings and was becoming increasingly violent. The medicines would make it easier to regulate his moods and would make it safer for those around him.

  They grabbed a few other items from the pharmacy as well. Penicillin and topical ointments. Pain pills and bandages.

  Then they moved on to the garden section, stopping along the way to get two bags of cat food and a box of kitty snacks for Widow Spencer’s cats.

  And sure enough, there next to the garden tools in the corner of the garden center, was a rack of seeds for every vegetable imaginable, and many fruits and melons as well.

  But even better was the stack of small brown boxes a couple of feet away from the rack.

  This stack, five boxes in all, contained a new shipment of seeds that someone was apparently tasked to put onto the rack just before Saris 7 hit. Saris 7 struck the earth on January 15th, six years before. Apparently the middle of January was when Walmart started preparing for the upcoming growing season.

  And that worked to their advantage. That meant that the seeds in the brown boxes were the freshest seeds available. And perhaps when fresh seeds freeze, they stand a better change of still being good when thawed out six years later.

  At least that’s what Frank and Jesse were banking on.

  They went through each of the boxes, and found that each type of seed came in a bundle of twenty plastic packages.

  Jesse asked, “Should we take them all?”

  “No. Let’s not be greedy. Others will have the same idea, and will come for them too. Let’s take four packs of each. If they’re good, that’s plenty for our needs. If they don’t work, then the others won’t be any good either.”

  They carefully peeled off four packages of seeds from each bundle and tossed them into their bags. Then they filled up their bags with plant food and fertilizer and headed back for home.

  In a few weeks the ground would thaw, and they would start to dig up the front lawns of all the houses on the block. And, if their luck held, in a few months they’d be able to grow their own food supply.

  None of them, of course, were looking forward to living an existence free of meat. Frank had never thought there was much need for vegetables. But it was food, after all, and he’d adapted to a lot worse things since the skies turned brown and the world turned cold.

  He figured he could adapt to this one as well.

  And besides, once the world was more or less back to normal and it was safe to travel, he planned to visit an area up north where he used to go deer hunting. His logic was that if any mammal could find a way to survive a seven year winter, it was a white tail deer.

  His old deer hunting ground was an area just east of Junction, on Highway 83. Near a place they called Salt Mountain.

  Chapter 40

  They knew they shouldn’t have done it. They knew it wasn’t fair to everyone else. But here were two bottles of Jose Cuervo that Bryan had squirreled away all those years beneath the dresser in his RV. Saving them for a special occasion.

  And if being only a couple of months away from finally breaking out of the mine wasn’t a special occasion, then what else was?

  And so it was that Mark and Hannah left little Markie in the care of his cousin Anna and joined the others in the back of the vehicle storage bay.

  On the way, they stopped at the security desk to inform John where they’d be. They didn’t want to be thought of as intruders and shot when they walked back out of the back of the mine.

  John was a nondrinker. He didn’t care. And he couldn’t begrudge the group a little bit of fun.

  John’s only admonition was to keep an eye on his daughter, Sami. He said he didn’t want her to get so drunk that Brad took advantage of her.

  Hannah and Mark both bit their lips as they walked away from John. Fifty yards away and out of earshot, Mark asked if she was thinking the same thing he was.

  Hannah giggled and replied. “Yes. I’m not worried about Brad taking advantage of Sami. I’m wondering who’s gonna protect poor Brad from her.”

  They joined Sami and Brad, and Sarah and Bryan, and they all sat around for the next four hours doing tequila shots and reminiscing.

  At one point, the subject of weddings came up.

  “Shoot,” Hannah slurred slightly. “You guys are next.”

  She was looking at Sami and Brad.

  Sami giggled and then gushed, “Nope. Not this girl. Brad’s just my boy toy.”

  She poked him in the ribs.

  “I’ll use him and abuse him and then I’ll throw him away, just like a snotty old tissue full of boogers.”

  The group roared at Sami’s descriptive claim.

  Sarah spoke up and said, “Oh, bullshit. You’d better not throw him away. Men with Brad’s… attributes aren’t easy to find, you know.”

  The girls giggled even more than they normally would have without the tequila.

  Bryan scoffed.

  “What attributes? Brad has no attributes. He farts and tells bad jokes. What do you mean, he has attributes?”

  Hannah added, “Oh, he has attributes. Why, he has the prettiest… smile I’ve ever seen.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s just because he has no sense.”

  Brad, for his part, let the debate roar on. He was feeling no pain and in fact was close to passing out.

  The group eventually got tired of talking about Brad and went on to other topics.

  “What do you think it’ll be like once we get out of here? Do you think the world will be a better place without as many people?”

  “I don’t know. I’d like to think so. I mean, there will be fewer jerks, sure. But there will be fewer good people too.”

  Hannah said, “I think I’ll miss the mine.”

  Sarah gave her a strange look.

  �
�Really?”

  “Yes. I mean, the routine of it. Or maybe the consistency is a better word. I mean, I always knew where my friends were, and never had to worry about Markie going off with a stranger. It’s become… comfortable here.”

  “The only thing I’m going to miss is the constant temperature. Never having to decide in the morning whether to wear long sleeves or short sleeves, shorts or pants. It was always the same every day. Made picking out a wardrobe much simpler.”

  “Oh, I’m not like you at all. I miss the cold weather. When we went to the mine’s door to meet Rachel and Roxanne, I loved the feel of the cold air on my face. I missed it a lot.”

  Sami turned to the guys and asked, “What are you guys going to miss most about the mine?”

  But she got no response from the men. Brad had finished passing out and was softly snoring. Mark was laying on his right side, his hands folded together and tucked up under his face, sleeping with a sly grin on his face. Hannah wondered what he was dreaming about.

  Bryan’s head was in Sarah’s lap, mouth wide open, a long line of drool coming out of the corner of his mouth and soaking Sarah’s pants.

  The men’s efforts to out drink the women had done them in. The girls all looked at each other and laughed.

  “What a bunch of lightweights we have.”

  Chapter 41

  They entered the tunnel with miner’s lights fastened to their heads. It would make it easier to move around the main building in the compound if they couldn’t get the power turned on and had to work in the dark.

  One by one they went down the steps into the long tunnel. Rachel and Roxanne had never been in the tunnel before and marveled at it.

  “You guys dug this yourself?”

  “Yes. Well, the boys did.”

  “Wow! How long did it take?”

  Bryan said, “About a year and a half, five or six hours a day.”

  “That must have been a lot of work.”

  “Yes, but it was a good thing too. It kept us from getting bored. Gave us something to do to pass away all the hours.”