The Quest: Countdown to Armageddon: Book 6

by Darrell Maloney

  “Wow, Zach. I am just speechless. Thank you so much for doing this for me.”

  Zachary beamed.

  “You’re welcome. I just wanted to do something to help.”

  Sara hugged her young brother-in-law again.

  “I guess I’m gonna have to stop thinking of you as a little kid. A little kid wouldn’t have gone through all of this. I owe you a big one.”

  “I’ll tell you what. If you happen to come across a hot fifteen year old girl who wants to live in a compound where there’s lots of work to do, but also lots of fun, then bring her back with you. Then we’ll be even.”

  Linda laughed.

  “Well, it didn’t take very long for that little kid to come back.”

  Sara held out her hand and Zachary shook it.

  “Deal! If she’s willing to make the move.”

  “And if she’s hot.”

  “Of course. If she’s hot.” Sara rolled her eyes and everyone assembled around the table had a good laugh.

  -5-

  John Castro had always been a very lucky man. He’d always said that he survived the war in Iraq because God was watching over him, and because he was the luckiest son-of-a-bitch in the United States Marine Corps.

  He told anyone who would listen that luck was the reason he found a sweet looker like Hannah Jelinovic and convinced her to be his bride. And that luck brought him two beautiful daughters who looked just like their mother, instead of two sons who might resemble him.

  More recently, he told everyone on the San Antonio Police force that it was luck that brought he and Scott together. They became friends just months before John was infected with the plague. John was allergic to penicillin and would have died, if Scott hadn’t been able to find some amoxicillin and bring it to San Antonio for him.

  John’s luck appeared to be holding. Or, perhaps God was still watching over him.

  It started with Robbie’s twitch, occurring at the same moment John turned his head to watch a jackrabbit. Either act done by itself probably wouldn’t have altered Robbie’s plan much. But both acts done at precisely the same time spared John a center mass head shot that would have been fatal a hundred percent of the time. The wound he suffered at the back of his skull was still grave. But at least it was survivable if he could get treated quickly, by a surgeon who knew what he was doing.

  So there was that.

  And there were other things that worked in his favor as well.

  When he fell into the dirt, he fell face first into a bed of fire ants. The angry ants viciously retaliated by stinging him dozens of times.

  Were he conscious, the stings would have been akin to rubbing salt into his wounds.

  But John was unconscious, and could feel no pain. The stings on the back of his head injected venom which constricted the blood vessels and caused the skin to swell. Both aided in slowing the precious blood that was escaping from his body.

  When the human body falls, its blood pools to its lowest part. In this case, his smaller chest wound, on the front of his body, lay firmly pressed against the dirt beneath him. The pooling blood seeped from the entry wound, as opposed to pouring out of the larger exit wound in his back.

  So there was that.

  Lastly, John had his own bad memory to thank. Since her return to San Antonio, Hannah had gotten into the habit of filling a small cooler for John to take to work each day. The cooler generally contained leftovers from dinner the night before, or a couple of sandwiches and cookies.

  And it always, without fail, contained four bottles of water.

  But John woke up that morning in an amorous mood.

  He’d wrapped an arm around Hannah and whispered into her ear.

  “Hey, honey… you awake?”

  She responded, “Ugh.”

  He waited a couple of minutes and tried again.

  “Hey honey… you awake?”

  Hannah rolled over to face him.

  “I gave at the office.”

  “If you had an office I might be concerned. But you’re a stay at home mom.”

  “Exactly. This is my office. I gave here.”

  “When? And to who?”

  “The night before last, and to you.”

  “Would you be willing to give again? I mean, how can you refuse the handsomest man in the world?”

  “Go find him and bring him here. Then I’ll give you my answer.”

  “Cute. Real cute. I was talking about me.”

  “If I give in to you, will you let me get some sleep?”

  “As long as you don’t fall asleep in the middle of it.”

  “No promises.”

  And so it was that when John left for work that morning, he was half an hour behind schedule.

  But he had a smile on his face.

  What he didn’t have was the small thermos that Hannah had prepared for him the night before, just before she went to bed. She’d left it on the kitchen counter, just like she always did, and he went right past it on his way out the door.

  He hadn’t even realized he’d forgotten it until it was lunchtime and he opened the trunk to get a sandwich.

  “Oh crap,” he’d said.

  Still, all things considered, making love to Hannah was way better than a couple of sandwiches and some bottled water.

  He bummed a sandwich from one of the nurses at St. Mary’s hospital when he dropped off a transient with a badly sprained ankle.

  But he’d gone through his entire workday without a single drink of water.

  Ordinarily that would have been a bad thing.

  Except he was mildly dehydrated.

  And dehydration slows blood flow and promotes clotting.

  It was a combination of several things… the fact that his worst wound was at the top of his unconscious body… the ant bites and the swelling they caused around his head wound… and his dehydration… that together kept him from bleeding to death that particular afternoon.

  John would have called all those things working together his extraordinary luck. And he could well have been right.

  Others would have called the series of circumstance merely coincidence. Happenstance, as it were.

  But there was one other thing that both would agree was the deciding factor in whether John lived or died.

  An old man named Luther Brown.

  -6-

  Luther Brown was a gem. Old men weren’t supposed to have survived the blackout and the plague that followed.

  At least that’s what his friends told him.

  But apparently Luther didn’t get the memo.

  “I’ve been through much worse than this,” he told them.

  “I was born back in the days when black people weren’t welcome where white folks sat down to eat. I once peed in my britches when I was a boy in downtown Dallas. Just ‘cause my momma couldn’t find a black restroom I could use. Plenty of white restrooms around, but they were too good for my pee.

  “But boy howdy, I was damn sure good enough to get drafted and fight in Vietnam. They said they sent so many of the brothers because we were ‘expendable.’ But I survived Vietnam too.

  “I somehow managed to survive the last few decades when rich white men kept passing laws to make them richer and more powerful while stepping all over the common folk. And by making us pay part of their share.

  “And now here I am, pushing eighty. The blackout was a terrible thing for those folks who had something to lose.

  “But when you’re just scratching by without much to your name, it ain’t such a big thing. People what ain’t got much to lose don’t feel so bad when they lose it.

  “I reckon that’s why I survived.

  “Or maybe God just ain’t ready for me yet.”

  Luther took refuge in a sprawling five bedroom ranch style home in the suburbs of south San Antonio. He chose it not because he needed that much space, but because he was familiar with the house and the surrounding neighborhood.

  He’d done yard work and minor maintenance f
or the rich white folk who’d lived there before the blackout.

  The white folk who’d locked themselves in their den and sedated themselves heavily with sleeping pills and liquor while talking of better times.

  The folk who, emboldened by the liquor and pills, injected each other with massive doses of cocaine, then enjoyed the sensation until they passed out, never to wake up again.

  It happened right under Luther’s nose, so to speak, for while the Palmers were breathing their last breaths, Luther was outside trimming the hedges and sweeping leaves from the sidewalks.

  They promised to pay him in goods, as was the practice in the weeks and months following the blackout.

  Families with means, who were used to having others care for their needs, continued to hire maids, gardeners and personal assistants. But since the almighty dollar had withered and died, they found other ways to make payment.

  Luther had been promised a case of bottled water and a week’s worth of provisions from the kitchen pantry in exchange for his four hours of yardwork.

  And he was looking forward to being finished, for he’d worked up a powerful thirst.

  The Palmers could probably be forgiven for forgetting that Luther was still outside working. They were not of sound mind, after all, in their last hours. The liquor had numbed the parents’ senses. The cocaine had done the same for their teenaged sons and daughter. So they were little more than walking, talking zombies toward the end.

  As they shuffled off to the den to carry out their suicide pact and die what they hoped was a painless and peaceful death, they totally forgot that poor Luther was on the east side of the house, trying to even out a sculpted cypress.

  When he was done, Luther went to the back of the house to the maid’s entrance and rapped on the doorjamb, as he’d done hundreds of times over recent years.

  This time, though, there was no answer.

  Luther cracked the door and rather timidly called out for Tillie, the maid.

  But there was no answer.

  The maid’s entrance led into the kitchen, and Luther knew the Palmers seldom ventured that far. He figured it was safe to wait there for Tillie to finish changing the beds, or cleaning the bathrooms, or whatever she happened to be doing.

  Even without the air conditioning which once kept the house cool and comfortable, the kitchen was a much better place to wait than the heat of the outdoors.

  Luther was a very patient man by nature.

  He waited all alone in the kitchen of that big empty house for almost two hours before his thirst finally drove him to venture out. Even then, he slowly and respectfully moved from room to room, expecting to be challenged at any moment for daring to enter the private quarters of the homeowner.

  He even practiced in his mind how he’d answer the challenge.

  “I’m plumb sorry,” he’d say. “I meant no disrespect. It’s just that, well, I finished quite some time ago and I’d like to be paid and be on my way. If you don’t mind, of course.”

  But Luther never had to use those words.

  He came to the pantry, which had been cleaned out of anything edible.

  He went through the entire first floor of the home, still looking for Tillie, and finding nary a live soul.

  He found five dead ones, though, sprawled all over the furniture in the den. The stench was horrific, in that several of them vomited in their last minutes and one of the boys soiled his pants.

  Luther knew that he’d been had. He’d been promised water and provisions that no longer existed. He never found Tillie, because she’d been released the previous day and told to take what was left of the food with her.

  Luther was pissed and had good reason to be. But he was a decent man, and took the time and trouble to drag the bodies out the back door and to bury them in the back yard. It was a lot of work for a man of his years and took the better part of two days to complete. They weren’t buried very deeply. But they were far enough below ground to keep the flies off of them. And it was more of a burial than they deserved, in Luther’s mind.

  The old man took refuge in the house after that.

  He felt he was entitled, and there wasn’t anyone left alive to argue the point anyway.

  So now he had a safe and comfortable place to stay. But he still had no food, and had to boil the water from the swimming pool out back to have something to drink.

  Those days were way past him now. It had been more than a year and a half since he buried those bodies, and Luther’s life had become more or less a dull routine.

  He’d been paid a visit by the San Antonio po-lice one afternoon, who believed his story about how he managed to be in possession of the huge home. The officers who came to call were going door-to-door, looking for bodies, and even took the time to thank Luther for disposing of the Palmers’ bodies for them.

  One of the officers came back not long after to help Luther dig a small plot for a garden in the Palmers’ back yard, and provided him with several packets of seeds.

  Luther never had much need for the po-lice until that time. He’d been hassled and harassed by them many times over the years.

  But this particular officer seemed to be different. He seemed almost… human.

  Luther would never consider John Castro a friend. His ill will toward the po-lice went far too deep for that. But he did have to admit that maybe some cops weren’t so bad after all.

  On the day John was shot, Luther just happened to be walking down Marbach Road on his way to an abandoned liquor store. He’d run out of Jim Beam and needed a bottle or two to dull the pain from his arthritis.

  So it was a coincidence, and nothing more than that, that he saw John in the distance, half a block away, leave his patrol car and start picking flowers.

  He was too far away to see John’s face, but he knew who it was. He’d encountered the officer a couple of times before while on his liquor runs, or when going to his friend Marco’s house to play dominos or checkers.

  He would have yelled a greeting to John Castro and waved to him as he passed by. Maybe even have said something civil like, “Have a good day, officer.”

  But he never had the chance to do that.

  He was still fifty yards away when the first shot rang out, knocking John Castro to the ground.

  By the time the second shot pierced John’s chest a second and a half later, Luther was already on the ground.

  He’d heard enough gunshots in his time in San Antonio’s vicious Victoria Courts project to know the drill.

  So he hugged the ground for several minutes before raising his head and looking around to see if it was safe to go on.

  Now Luther had a dilemma.

  He’d been raised by his parents to fear and spite the po-lice. And they’d certainly done nothing in his adult life to show they deserved any respect or quarter.

  Until John Castro came along to help him with his garden.

  Part of him said to go the other way. To forget the liquor. To go home and wash his hands of… whatever had just happened. Not to give the po-lice the chance to blame him for the shooting. To railroad him into prison on trumped up charges just to clear their case.

  But Luther Brown was better than that.

  He’d led a hard life, sure. He’d seldom been given a fair shake by the man, no doubt.

  But he’d brought a lot of it on himself with his poor decision-making over the years.

  And there on the ground, fifty yards away, was the only member of the San Antonio po-lice who’d ever been good to him.

  Once he was sure the threat was gone, Luther made his way over to the fallen officer to see if he was still alive.

  John Castro’s luck was holding.

  -7-

  “Hello… hello…”

  Luther Brown had seen his share of cop shows. In his youth, he actually liked Adam-12 and Dragnet. Although even back then they represented “the man,” they nonetheless caught his interest.

  In later years, he even watched Cops occasionally, alth
ough he abruptly stopped one day when he watched an episode taped in Dallas and saw an old friend get arrested.

  He knew how to use a police radio from watching the shows, although he had no clue how to speak the language.

  Timidly, with the air of a kid who knew he was going to be chewed out for doing something wrong, he keyed the microphone and called out the only way he knew how.

  “Hello… hello… is anybody there?”

  “Sir, you’re on a frequency reserved for the San Antonio Police Department. Do you need to report an emergency?”

  “Yes, that’s right. I want to report a ‘mergency. One of your officers has been shot.”

  All over the city, ears perked up and heads turned. Every officer stopped what they were doing and listened.

  “Sir, can you tell us your name and your location?”

  “My name is Luther. I’m on Marbach Road by the old Valero Station. The street sign is gone but I think it’s South Ellison. You better hurry. He’s shot up pretty bad.”

  “All units sector six. Respond to call of officer down at South Ellison and Marbach Road.”

  They were wasted words. Every officer who’d heard Luther’s plea was already rolling.

  “Sir, do you know who did the shooting?”

  “It wasn’t me, no sir. I didn’t see who it was. It came from a distance, like a rifle.”

  “Has anyone else been shot?”

  “No, sir. Nobody I can see. It was just them two shots and then nothing.”

  “Is he conscious?”

  “I don’t know. He ain’t moving. He looks to me like he’s dead.”

  Robbie smiled at Luther’s words. He was rolling, but at a much slower speed than the rest of the force.

  It was important that he not be the first to arrive on the scene. Others might wonder later how he happened to be in such close proximity to the shooting.

  “Sir, can you tell us where the officer was hit?”

  The dispatcher was wasting his breath.

  Luther was gone, running up South Ellison to the nearest alley.

  He knew the drill. As the only one in the area, and a black man at that, he’d be instantly suspect. They’d have him face down in the dirt, and if their officer really was dead they’d take it out on him.