A Long Road Back: Final Dawn: Book 8

by Darrell Maloney

  Mark looked at them and wondered why they were so sullen. They were staring at their cups of coffee and conversing very little. When they did say something they appeared to be talking in very hushed tones. Almost like they were whispering.

  Hannah brought him back to the problem at hand.

  “I think I’m going to try to raise NASA and see if there’s anyone still there I know.”

  “By ham radio?”

  She gave him a look that said, more or less, “duh.”

  “No, by cell phone, silly. Of course by ham radio. How else do people communicate by long distance?”

  “Won’t Karen, or whoever is at the desk, wonder why?”

  “Probably. And I’ll tell them why, but I’ll ask them to keep it under their hat until NASA either confirms my fears or shoots them down.”

  “And if they confirm your fears? If they tell you that Cupid 23 is still a threat?”

  “Then we’ve got a lot of preparations to do.”

  -17-

  Marty Hankins sat behind a big wooden desk with his feet propped up and pondered the way his life had changed in the ten years since Saris 7 collided with earth.

  For most of his adult life he’d been a truck driver. Nothing more and nothing less. He loved life on the road. Other drivers hated their nomadic way of life. Eating greasy hamburgers at out-of-the-way truck stops, then grabbing a few hours of sleep in a cramped sleeper that rocked every time a fellow trucker flew by. Struggling with the balancing act of keeping on the company’s schedule while getting enough sleep to stay alert.

  Trucking had changed so much over the years. As much as he hated keeping mileage logs, popping little white pills and dodging the highway patrol’s speed traps, it was better in those times.

  It was when the big companies developed the capability of tracking their rigs through GPS transponders that a trucker’s life really became a living hell.

  Many truckers chose that time to get out of the business.

  The big companies became overbearing micromanagers, demanding that each trucker drive a certain amount of miles per day, and no more. They couldn’t understand that on the nights when truckers couldn’t sleep they saw no need in wasting valuable time cooling their heels at a truck stop when they could be putting miles beneath their rigs.

  They couldn’t understand that truckers planned ahead, to see what weather and road conditions would be like two, three, four days into the future. And when they saw a storm front coming in, they hauled ass to get ahead of the game while the roads were still dry and clear.

  So that they could slow down and be safer when the roads got icy and dangerous.

  Marty hadn’t gotten out of the trade. He took that opportunity to buy his own rig and be his own boss. As an independent trucker he could still set his own hours, more or less. Drive when he wanted and take a day off when he didn’t. He could choose his own loads and own routes instead of having big brother direct him every hour of every day.

  He could stop and shack up for a night with one of several girlfriends he had stashed all across the western states, and could easily avoid those who were mad at him for whatever reason.

  There was no better excuse for not wining and dining a woman in Phoenix than having to haul a load of corn across Iowa.

  The trucking industry changed in a lot of ways in the years leading up to Saris 7.

  And of course, Saris 7 changed it even more dramatically. It brought trucking to a screeching halt.

  When word got out that a meteorite was going to collide with the earth and freeze it solid for seven to ten years, it understandably got people’s attention.

  Most of them panicked. Truckers dropped their trailers at the roadside by the tens of thousands and bobtailed it home, even if home was two thousand miles away. Truck stops became graveyards for rusty fifty-three foot steel caskets, most of which would slowly die as their tires flattened and their brake lines rotted.

  Looters would have emptied most of them, in time. Except that in a world where almost ninety percent of the population didn’t survive to the thaw, there simply weren’t many looters left.

  Nearly all of them were stranded in the cities, with no desire to venture out.

  Some of the interstate highways were practically bumper to bumper with abandoned trailers.

  At the Trucker’s Paradise truck stop on Interstate 10 near Kerrville, Marty happened to be cooling his heels waiting to see how Saris 7 played out. To see if the whole thing was a hoax, the way the idiots on talk radio were claiming. A government conspiracy intended to convince mass numbers of people to commit suicide so the government could seize their land. Or grab their guns. Or drop them off the social security rolls.

  Or whatever conspiracy theory was most popular on that particular day.

  When the talking heads were proven wrong, and Saris 7 really did collide with the earth, the radios suddenly fell silent. It was as though the manufactured conspiracy industry said a collective “ruh-ro,” in Scooby Doo’s voice at that, and went into hiding like everyone else.

  The manager of the Trucker’s Paradise told Marty he was getting out of Dodge himself, tossed Marty the keys, and told him to do what he wanted with the place.

  So Marty did.

  He and some friends gathered a couple of dozen abandoned trailers, arranged them into a compound, covered the top, and weathered the seven year freeze. They ate food from the back of the trailers, guaranteed never to go bad in temperatures that never went above freezing. They burned what they didn’t need and kept a fire going non-stop for years, twenty four hours a day, to keep from freezing.

  When the thaw finally came, the small group emerged from their self-imposed prison to a whole new world. A world where the dead vastly outnumbered the living. Where the survivors had gotten used to taking what they needed without regard for others.

  It was a new world in so many ways. A newly violent world, devoid of most of the luxuries humans had become accustomed to before the big chill.

  Marty’s group disbanded, for the most part, and went their separate ways. Marty reopened the truck stop in a limited capacity, giving free gas and supplies to travelers and helping as much as he could.

  He was aided by Lenny Geibel, his good friend of many years. Lenny stuck around simply because he had no other place to go.

  Marty would have been content to live out the rest of his years at the Trucker’s Paradise, until he befriended a group of people in a hidden compound a few miles east and north of him.

  It began as an uneasy friendship, then grew into so much more. They traded him livestock for the goods off his trailers. They invited him into their home and he showed up with a pair of German Shepherds and liquor.

  They’d given up on ever seeing live dogs again. But Marty surprised them and won their hearts.

  When the group in the compound learned that the nearby town of Eden was under siege, they called on Marty for help.

  And help Marty did.

  He wasn’t a lawman. Nor was he a soldier. But he was a man of high intelligence and an impeccable planner. He devised a plan to take back the town from convicts who were released from the local prison by a softhearted and even softer-headed warden.

  Marty and his crew succeeded in liberating the town and in rounding up some very evil men.

  In doing so he’d accomplished two more things.

  He’d fallen in love with a lovely woman named Glenna, who he’d helped rescue from the clutches of a cruel and vile captor.

  And he’d been given an invitation from the people of Eden to be their town’s police chief.

  Really to be their only police officer. For they had no way to pay any additional officers. The dollar was still worthless, the Federal Reserve having gone out of business many years before.

  “You’ll have to work for free,” they told Marty when offering him the job. “At least for the time being. Keep track of the hours you work, and when the time comes we’ll make sure you’re generously compensated.�
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  A lesser man would have laughed and walked away.

  But Marty wasn’t a lesser man. He accepted the offer and took Glenna and her children from the compound where they’d taken refuge.

  These days Marty stayed mostly in Eden when there was police business to do. And on the slow days he drove to the Trucker’s Paradise to help Lenny restock the shelves and sweep the floors.

  He got paid for neither job. But he was content in knowing that he was doing good for others, on both fronts.

  He took his feet off the desk and placed them back on the floor when his left leg fell asleep.

  He was still deep in thought until interrupted by someone walking into the door marked “Eden Police Department.”

  It was a man he knew well. A man who lived three doors down from Marty on Elm Street. The only other survivor on the block. His name was Shane Allen and he looked like a man with a terrible problem weighing on his mind.

  “Hey Chief, I found a body out east of here a bit. You got time to come and look at it?”

  Marty sighed heavily. Eden was a small town even before the big chill. Now, ten years plus later, it had shrunk even smaller. Not in terms of area, but population. Only a couple hundred people survived until the thaw. Many more were murdered by freed convicts who took over the town. Still others escaped the town for greener pastures to avoid the same fate.

  Lastly, when Marty and his friends liberated the town they either arrested or ran off some thirty of the convicts and their hangers-on.

  At last count, there were only seventy one people left.

  Eden was on the verge of extinction as a people and as a town.

  It was Marty’s job to protect the townsfolk from being murdered whenever he could.

  And to track down and punish the killers when he failed to.

  The worst part of the job was that he was getting to know the townsfolk. He was starting to consider them friends. There hadn’t been a homicide within the city limits since he took the job, and he cringed to think the first victim might be someone he knew.

  He got up and took his cowboy hat off his desk, perched it atop a thinning crop of salt and pepper hair, and headed for the door.

  “Let’s go,” he said. “Show me.”

  -18-

  Marty and Shane stood over the body of a man in the woods. He looked to be dead for about a week or so. His body was horribly swollen and decaying badly. But some things were easy to assess.

  The cause of death were several gunshot wounds which entered his forehead and blew the back of his skull completely off.

  His hands and feet were tightly bound with duct tape.

  A few feet away from him was another piece of duct tape, three courses thick. Marty guessed had been a gag and had been cut off with a knife.

  Marty wondered if the killer had removed the gag so the victim could plead for his life. Or to try to negotiate his release.

  If either was the case, he’d failed miserably.

  “Do you know him?”

  “Nope. Never saw him before.”

  In a way, Marty was relieved. He didn’t have to bury a friend. On the other hand, though, the murder of a stranger would be much harder to solve. These weren’t like the old days, where everything worth knowing about a homicide victim was available by a few strokes on a keyboard.

  This would be a tough one for sure, and for a variety of reasons. First of all, Marty wasn’t a real cop. At least not in the true sense of the word. He was hired by the people of Eden to protect them and given the title of Police Chief, sure. But that was partly out of gratitude for risking his ass to save them.

  And partly because there was no one else willing to accept the position.

  But he wasn’t a policeman by trade. He was a trucker. And just as he wouldn’t expect a beat cop to hook up a fifty three foot trailer and back it up to a loading dock, he didn’t expect to learn how to be a cop overnight.

  There was a training curve involved.

  He was reminded of that daily, as he continued one of his ongoing projects of clearing out a mountain of old records at the police station. Trying to decide what was important enough to keep and to type into a new database he was building. And which items he thought he could safely discard.

  He kept coming across unfamiliar terms. Things like APB, EOS, BICJ, and AOS. Acronyms which meant something to the officers who’d filed the reports years before, but were little more than a foreign language to Marty.

  And that didn’t include the criminal codes, which used equally alien numbers. He’d come across a reference that a suspect was charged with Title 29, Sec. 29-03 of the Texas criminal code. Then he’d have to go find a bound copy of the code to find out what the reference meant.

  He frequently found himself muttering.

  “Jeez, why couldn’t they have just said aggravated robbery? It would have made this so much easier.”

  At least he didn’t have to memorize the phonetic alphabet or the radio “10-codes” that police officers tend to use.

  For he was the only officer on the force. There was no one else to communicate with, via radio or otherwise.

  He knew this was going to be a tough case for him to crack.

  But he had several things going for him as well. Not the least of which was his desire to do his job well. This was the first homicide under his watch, and he’d do his damnest to make sure it didn’t get filed in his “unsolved case” file. That would be a terrible precedent.

  Marty had the tenacity of a bulldog when he was working on something important. And this was to be the most important case to date in his fledgling law enforcement career.

  Another thing he had going for him was a wide circle of friends. Not only had he personally met with nearly every one of Eden’s residents. But while working at the Trucker’s Paradise he’d gained a widespread reputation as a good man. He’d done a lot of good for an awful lot of people in a variety of ways.

  He knew that when the time came, most of the residents in the surrounding counties as well as his own would aid him in his investigation as best they could.

  One of his best resources would be Frank Woodard. Frank was a lawman back in the days when citizens still respected cops and regarded them as heroes. He served stints in the Bexar County Sheriff’s Office and the San Antonio Police Department and rose to the rank of Chief Homicide Detective in both agencies.

  He had a reputation for always catching his man.

  Marty planned to visit Frank as soon as he finished processing the crime scene and took the body to Doc Halliway’s office.

  He bent down and rolled the victim over to check his pockets.

  Nothing. No wallet or other type of identification that would make his job easier.

  A great start to his most important case so far.

  Of course, it wasn’t uncommon for men not to carry ID anymore. There was no longer a DMV to issue driver’s licenses. There would be no need for them anyway, since there were precious few law enforcement agencies even in existence anymore.

  And those which were couldn’t have cared less about writing tickets or enforcing seatbelt laws.

  A credit card with a name on it or a social security card would have been nice. At least to give the victim a name.

  But credit cards were worthless now, and the Social Security Administration had gone the way of the dinosaurs.

  Extinct at the hands of a rogue meteorite.

  Even Marty, the police chief with no police experience, knew that the first and most crucial step in solving a homicide was knowing the victim.

  The lack of identification would be a big problem.

  Then, as he was getting ready to roll the victim onto a canvas tarp for transport, he saw something.

  On the man’s back, just below the neckline, appeared to be a tattoo of some type.

  Even on the hideous gray-brown color of a decaying body it was visible, in heavy black ink, the type of tattoo one gets in prison. In heavy old English script.

/>   He held his nose and peeled back the man’s shirt just far enough to read the tattoo.

  One word. Or, more accurately, a name. A Surname, it appeared.

  Martel.

  Hey, it was a start.

  -19-

  Hannah paused as she walked down the main hallway toward the control center. She reached out and pressed her hand against the wall beside her, waiting for a dizzy spell to subside.

  She’d pushed the doctors to release her from Wilford Hall Regional Medical Center against their wishes and recommendations. She’d said she missed her family and wanted to get back to them. And that she wanted to console her good friend Sami, who lost her father in the crash.

  And all of that was true.

  In a way.

  For although she missed her family horribly, she knew she wouldn’t do them much good to be released earlier than she should have and suffered a dizzy spell and passed out. Or a blood clot. Or a severe infection.

  She knew she could have waited a few days longer to go back home to them.

  And it was true that she wanted to console Sami.

  But there were lots of other people at the compound who were smothering her with sympathy and consolation.

  No, the driving factor for her demanding an early release was a desperate desire to talk to Sarah about Cupid 23.

  And now that was impossible. At least for the time being.

  She wondered why it took ten years for her memory of Cupid 23 to resurface.

  Was it, perhaps, her subconscious mind’s way of warning her? Had she repressed the knowledge of Cupid 23 for all this time, and was her brain telling her it was time to warn the world?

  Had Sarah forgotten about Cupid 23 too? Or had she just discarded it as a non-threat? She was of the opinion, even way back then, that Cupid 23 was a nonplayer. Of course, that may have been just because Saris 7 was undeniably a more immediate threat and threatened to wipe out all of mankind.

  Was it possible that Sarah, like Hannah, had put Cupid 23 so far back on the back burner that she’d put it out of her mind completely?