Final Dawn: Escape From Armageddon

by Maloney, Darrell

  Sarah went to the computer and typed a letter of resignation. She’d turn it in the next morning when she went to work. And then she’d put in for vacation days for her final two weeks. She no longer felt a need, nor a desire, to give her employer any more of her valuable time. There wasn’t any extra to waste any more.

  After her letter was done, she called Sarah Spear.

  “Hey, if you have an hour, can you drop by again tomorrow night?” Hannah asked her. “Mark and I have something pretty important we’d like to discuss with you.”

  -10-

  Mark had been on-line for awhile, researching various ways of storing diesel fuel and extending its shelf-life, when it suddenly dawned on him how quiet it was in the house.

  “Hannah?” he called out as he walked down the stairs. “Baby, are you okay?”

  Mark walked through the first floor of the house and finally saw her, through the sliding glass door, sitting on a lawn chair in the back yard. She was alone in her thoughts and looking up at the stars.

  He gathered a heavy patchwork quilt from where it lay folded on the back of the couch and a sofa pillow and headed for the back door to join her.

  Without saying a word, he walked out into the warm night, flipping off the porch light as he went.

  He kissed his love on the top of her head as he passed by her and spread the quilt onto the soft grass. Then he went back and held out his hand, helped her up, and walked her to the quilt.

  As they got comfortable, neither said a word. Their love was such that it needed no words. Mark laid on the edge of the quilt, and Hannah lay down beside him with her head on his chest.

  It was Hannah who finally spoke.

  “It’s so beautiful up there, and so peaceful. Why does it also have to be capable of causing so much death and destruction?”

  “I don’t know, baby. That’s a question that’s way bigger than either of us. All I know is that in this place, and in this time, I have you by my side. And I’m going to make darn sure I always have you here. I’m not complete without you.

  “I never was, really. I was stumbling through life, thinking everything was okay. Then we met and I realized that the biggest part of me had been missing. Now I wake up each morning and the first thing I think is ‘where’s my baby and is she okay?’

  “And every night I fall asleep with you in my arms, dreaming of making love to you.”

  Hannah giggled and said “I do that too. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and just lay there, watching you breathe. Last night I was awake at 3 a.m., thinking about what was ahead for our future, and just a little bit worried.”

  Mark said “Baby, you should have woken me.”

  “No,” she answered. “I very gently took your hand and placed in on my naked breast. The warmth from your hand comforted me, and helped me drift back to sleep. I liked the way it felt.

  “Have I ever told you my biggest regret in life?”

  Mark said “No.”

  “My biggest regret is that we waited so long to meet. I hear you talk about your childhood, and the adventures you had growing up, and it makes me a little bit sad that I wasn’t there to share them all with you.”

  He kissed her. Then he said “All of my adventures from now on won’t be just mine. They’ll be ours. Anything we do from now on, we’ll do together. And when we remember them, we’ll remember them together.”

  “Honey, I know we’re busy with everything we need to do, but I want to learn how to dance.”

  He laughed out loud. “You already know how to dance.”

  “No,” she said. “I want to learn to dance close, like they do in the old movies. When people held each other, like it meant something. Like it was part of making love. I want to dance like Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.”

  Mark knew of Hannah’s passion for watching old movies from the 1940s. He didn’t share her passion for the films, but his passion for her held no bounds.

  He asked “You wouldn’t be embarrassed for the other dancers to see us making love on the dance floor?”

  “Oh, no, not at all.”

  “Would you be embarrassed for the stars to watch us making love while they twinkle above us?”

  Hannah giggled, and stood up instead of answering. She slowly unbuttoned her pajama top and let it drop into the grass behind her. Then she took off the pajama pants and stood there for a moment. She knew that Mark enjoyed looking at her naked body.

  Mark marveled at her and the way she glowed a fiery orange in the moonlight. Even in the two years since he’d first made love to this beauty, he was still amazed that a woman as perfect as Hannah had chosen him to spend her life with.

  They made love long into the night, then pulled the quilt over themselves and drifted into a peaceful slumber. Regardless of the trials their future held for them, at this place, and at this time, life couldn’t possibly be better.

  -11-

  OCT 10, 2013. 27 MONTHS UNTIL IMPACT

  Hannah sat at the kitchen table with a steaming cup of Hills Brothers Hazelnut, trying to shake off her grogginess. She’d decided to double up on her course load at the community college, which meant she had school four nights a week now. It was started to wear on her a bit, with everything else she had going on in the daytime, but she’d get through it. She was a tough cookie, after all.

  Mark walked up behind her and put his arms around her.

  “Do you realize,” he told her, “that you look better first thing in the morning than most women look at the height of their day?”

  She said “Yeah, yeah… I’ll bet you tell that to all the girls, sailor. And if you wanted some, you should have told me before I dragged my tired self out of bed.”

  He feigned a hurt look. “No, my dear, last night was enough. All I want from you today is your undying love.”

  “Oh. Well, you don’t have to compliment me to get that. You already have my undying love.”

  He kissed her and said “I don’t compliment you because I want things. I compliment you because you’re gorgeous.”

  She smiled, which was what he really wanted most of all. Then she asked “What’s on your agenda for today?”

  “I’m meeting with the contractor today about the dormitory. The land should be cleared by the end of the week, and they’ll be able to lay out the buildings. I’m hoping they can start pouring the foundations by the end of next week. At least that’s what I’m going to push them for.

  “How about you?”

  “Sarah’s going to meet me at Walmart and we’ll spend the morning shopping again. And by the way, we’re going to have to rent another storage locker, or start moving that stuff to the mine soon. The locker we’ve got now is so full of Walmart bags it’s getting ready to explode.

  “After that we’re going to hit a couple of used book stores and start buying books and DVDs. I want to build a small library of five hundred to a thousand books. Seven years is a long time, and if we run out of things to do we’ll drive each other nuts.

  “And I’m thinking five hundred is a good number for our DVD library also. We’ll get something for everybody, including the little munchkins.”

  Mark said “See, I always said your talent for shopping would come in very handy someday.”

  She stuck her tongue out at him and said “Bite me, sailor.”

  He replied “Another time, maybe. Right now I’ve got to run.”

  The three of them – Mark, Hannah and Sarah, had decided early on that they would keep everything as low profile as possible. If word got around that someone in south San Angelo was stockpiling supplies, some might want to know why. And if they were curious enough, they might resort to such things as spying, or following the girls out to the mine some day.

  And the last thing they would need when the meteorite became common knowledge would be for a large group of people to know that there was a safe place to take shelter just a few miles away, and that it was fully stocked.

  Of course, Mark would make sure
that along with everything else, there were adequate weapons and ammunition to defend their shelter if need be. But they all hoped it wouldn’t come to that.

  So the smart thing, the prudent thing to do, would be to keep it all a big secret. At least for the time being. Only the three of them knew what they were up to.

  Hannah and Sarah had the shopping process down to a science. They went several times a week to stock up on basic essentials, always taking two SUVs, and always parking on opposite ends of the parking lot. And never going to the same store more than once a week.

  They shopped mostly at Walmart, because it had nearly everything they needed. And because it was big enough to allow them to buy five or six carts full of merchandize over the course of a morning without attracting too much attention.

  Each of the girls carried a pocket-sized spiral notebook on each of their shopping sprees. They had sat down together with Mark weeks before to decide what each man, woman and child would need to survive for seven years. Then they added them all together and made a list, in pen, of each item, split evenly between the two notebooks.

  Next to each entry was a number, written in pencil, that represented the total number of that item they would need to survive for seven years.

  On this particular day, Hannah and Sarah drove the ninety miles to Junction, each in an SUV, and parked on separate ends of the parking lot. They pretended not to know one another, and were careful not to acknowledge the other’s presence even when passing in the store.

  Hannah got her shopping cart and pulled out her notebook.

  The first item on her list was “Coat, Boys, Size 15: 2.” The two had originally been a four, but had been erased the day before when she’d purchased two of them at the north San Angelo Walmart. She found the item in the coat aisle and placed two of them into her cart.

  The next item was “Sheet Set- Twin Size: 20.” The original quantity for this item was forty. They were halfway finished purchasing twin bed sheets. She found the linen aisle and put three sheet sets into her cart.

  On the other side of the store, Sarah had her own shopping list. HTH Brand Powdered Chlorine, 3 Gallon Bucket: 40. She bought one. Printer Paper- Case: 14. She bought one. Sock, Men’s, Size 9-11: 420. She bought two packages of six pairs each

  The girls shopped in small quantities because that’s how they would do it if they were a typical mom doing the weekly shopping. If they were to purchase twenty sets of sheets at one time they would attract attention. This way they wouldn’t. Over the course of a couple of weeks, they would get all the sheets they needed, change the penciled number to zero, and line the item off their list. Then they’d move on to other things.

  Once her cart was full, Hannah would check out and take her haul to her SUV, packing it in as tightly as she could.

  Then she would sit in the SUV and take a few minutes to update her shopping list. She would erase the number needed for each item, subtract the number she’d just purchased, and enter the new number in its place.

  Once her list was updated, she would walk completely across the parking lot to enter through the door opposite the one she’d just come out of. She’d get a new shopping cart and repeat the process, taking the precaution of going to a different cashier each time.

  It was a tedious way of stocking up on their essentials, but it was very effective, and in the end would allow them to have what they needed without arousing any suspicion.

  -12-

  While the girls were shopping on this particular day, Mark was meeting with his construction contractors on the east side of Salt Mountain.

  The ruse they had very carefully dreamed up was that they were representatives of a large addiction treatment conglomerate based in Los Angeles. They would be building a drug and alcohol treatment facility that would treat Hollywood celebrities, family members of the rich and famous, and the Washington elite.

  Part of the treatment program, they said, was to get the patients far away from their normal environment, where they wouldn’t be susceptible to their friends trying to sneak in drugs or alcohol for them, or encouraging them to leave the facility.

  They explained to the construction firm that, for the privacy of the people who would be treated at the facility, they wanted only the people involved in its construction to know it was out there. They even offered the contractor a fifty thousand dollar bonus if the project didn’t show up in the San Angelo newspapers or local news broadcasts.

  The contractor said keeping a large scale construction project a secret would be tough, but they were game to try. They had several things working in their favor, of course. The construction site was on a lightly traveled road. That stretch of Highway 83 never had more than a handful of cars on it, even on its busiest days. And the construction site itself, like the adjacent mine, was several hundred yards off the highway, and out of view of the highway traffic.

  The contractor was careful not to put up any signs to mark the turn. Only a large surveyor’s stake with three bright orange flags on it. Most of the drivers had been there enough times to know where the turnoff was, and each of them, like all the other construction workers, were instructed to tell anybody who asked that they were building a warehouse for a feed company out of San Angelo. Another warehouse in the middle of nowhere would not be a newsworthy item for local media outlets.

  Mark stood at the south end of a cleared and leveled field four hundred yards long and four hundred yards wide. Just inside the entrance to the compound would be an L-shaped three story dormitory building, which would have eighty one, two or three bedroom apartments.

  All of its upscale apartments were accessible only from interior hallways, and there would be large meeting areas, a kitchen and dining room, recreation rooms, and storage rooms near the center of the building on the first floor. At the center of the building, where the two wings connected, there would be a huge lounge with a stone wood-burning fireplace.

  Each apartment would have its own wall-mounted heating and cooling unit in each room, which the occupant could easily adjust. Just like in mid-range hotel rooms. And the building would have a full basement, which would be used later to stockpile goods and supplies.

  To the west of the dormitory would be two greenhouses, constructed side by side, with a connecting breezeway so they could share equipment. Each greenhouse was one hundred feet long and fifty feet wide.

  North of the greenhouses was a large barn, separated down the middle by a floor-to-ceiling wall. A little farther north was a large chicken coop.

  On the other side of the apartments, on the east side of the compound, was a similar setup, excluding the greenhouses. A second large divided barn, another large chicken coop. On this side, there would be a large concrete pad, fifty yards square.

  In the northeast corner of the compound would be a small fishpond, stocked with catfish and perch. Although it would only cover half an acre or so, specifications called for it to be thirty feet deep.

  The contractors weren’t by nature a curious lot. They were used to building things for people with odd requirements. But when they did ask, Mark had the answers readily available.

  No, he would tell them. They didn’t really expect to use all eighty apartments in the building for their patients. At least not initially. But as their reputation grew, and their success rate became well known, they just might start filling them up. And building the extra rooms now would avoid a renovation five years or ten years down the road.

  The two and three bedroom apartments were for those patients who did better when they had one or more roommates with similar addiction problems, so they could encourage each other.

  As for the double set of barns and hen houses? Mark explained that part of the treatment for any addiction was to keep a patient busy with a rewarding task. Their patients, while at the facility, would be expected to grow their own food, either in the greenhouse in cold weather months, or in the large open field north of the buildings in the warm months.

  Another aspect of
patient care was giving them a goal, and nothing encourages such goals like a little bit of healthy competition.

  So Mark would tell them that all of the patients would be assigned to one of two teams. The red team would compete with the blue team, and would be judged and rewarded on how well they took care of their livestock, how well their crops grew, and how self-sufficient they became. Whichever team scored the best each week would be rewarded with extra desserts, or more telephone time, or even the ultimate reward in any treatment setting… an early release.

  So the compound, Mark would explain, was set up to allow for the red team to have its own greenhouse, a barn for cattle and pigs, and a chicken coop. The blue team would have the same.

  It was all bull, of course. Mark and Hannah had decided early on that redundancy was the key to survival. They wanted two greenhouses so that if one were damaged in a storm, they wouldn’t starve while trying to repair it.

  Further, each herd of livestock would be split in half and always kept separated. The cattle would be split into two small herds and would be kept in half of each barn. The pigs would be split in half and kept on the other sides of the barns.

  And half of the chickens would occupy each chicken coop.

  Their reasoning, of course, was to divide the stock in case there was a disease outbreak. A case of hoof and mouth disease could wipe out a herd of cattle within weeks. But a second herd, which never mingled with the first, might be spared the same fate.

  The same held true for pigs and poultry as well. Separating the herds wouldn’t guarantee they wouldn’t all die from disease, but it greatly improved the odds of at least half their livestock surviving. And since they’d likely have the only such livestock within a thousand miles or more, it was essential that they take extra precautions to keep them alive.