A Long Road Back: Final Dawn: Book 8

by Darrell Maloney

  He was lost in the music, and in his own thoughts, and didn’t even realize he had company until Marty slapped his feet down from the desk.

  “Wake up, you lollygagger. Do some work for a damn change.”

  His eyes opened, a bit embarrassed that he’d been caught loafing.

  “Damn it, Marty. I do plenty of work around here. I work my ass off, and I don’t even know what a lollygagger is.”

  “You don’t know what a lollygagger is? Go look in your restroom. There’s one who hangs around in the window above your sink.”

  “Yeah, yeah. Why are you here? I thought I got rid of you when you went off to be a keystone cop in that little bitty town of yours.”

  “You’ll never get rid of me. Not as long as I have to come by here occasionally and wake you up. Besides, I have something important to talk to you about.”

  “I wasn’t sleeping, by God. I was listening to music. And what’s so important that you had to come all the way over here when you could have called me on the radio?”

  “This is something I can’t discuss over the radio.”

  Lenny’s ears perked up and he suddenly developed an interest in Marty’s words.

  “Why? What is it?”

  Glenna couldn’t stand dust. She picked up a seldom-used cleaning rag from the coffee table and started dusting the office.

  Marty made himself comfortable on the expansive leather couch and started, “Do you remember Saris 7? The meteorite that crashed into the earth ten years ago?”

  Lenny gave him a “duh” face. Like he could forget such a thing.

  “Yeah. So?”

  “So, we just came from Mark and Hannah Snyder’s compound. Hannah thinks it’s gonna happen again.”

  “Whaaat?”

  Marty’s eyes moistened.

  He remembered the days during the freeze. The days when he almost gave up and ended it all, like so many millions of others had done. The days when it was only Marty’s encouragement, and chiding, that made him go on.

  He barely survived the first freeze. He was almost certain he couldn’t do it again.

  Marty saw the distress his words had caused, and wished he could have coached them differently.

  Or maybe not. Lenny had to know the truth, painful as it was. And there was no way to sugarcoat the news.

  “Don’t panic yet, Lenny. She said that Sarah was just as certain it wasn’t going to happen. Unfortunately, Sarah is in a medically-induced coma in San Antonio and can’t argue her side of the case.”

  Lenny was still stunned, but he found a few words. They were weak, almost unintelligible.

  “When is this supposed to happen?”

  “She didn’t know. And apparently NASA couldn’t tell her because NASA has gone out of business for good. She said if Sarah is right, then it’s already sailed right past us or will eventually. But if Hannah’s right instead, it could be tomorrow, or five years from now. Hell, it could happen five minutes from now, for all she knows.”

  “That’s not very specific.”

  “No shit.”

  “So what do we do?”

  “That’s why I’m here. I’m gonna turn the old prison in Eden into a shelter for the citizens of Eden and for you and our friends here. And I need your help to do it.”

  -44-

  Marty had walked through the abandoned prison methodically, taking stock of what was there and trying to picture the way it used to look.

  Several things struck him as particularly odd. The stench of decaying human flesh was noticeable but not particularly overwhelming. As though the corpses rotted many years before.

  And indeed they had.

  Also peculiar were the skeletons, now completely devoid of flesh and scattered here and there throughout the prison. Some lay in a heap on the first floor, far below the third floor tier, where they’d almost certainly been tossed many years before. They still wore prison uniforms. They were once part of the mob who’d taken over the prison just before the freeze set in, and had apparently had a falling out with the others.

  Two piles of bones lay directly beneath a couple of nooses hung from a crossbeam. They’d hung there long enough for the bones to separate and fall to the floor, yet no one took the time to shove them out of the way or to dispose of them.

  Perhaps the convicts who inhabited the prison during the long years of the chill left them there as testament to their having beaten them. Or maybe as a warning to others not to mess with those now in charge.

  Marty made a mental note to dispose of the bones as a first order of business. No matter how bad the men were when they lived, every man deserved the dignity of a proper burial.

  As he walked around, he noticed other things as well.

  A lack of all things wood, for example.

  Bolts still protruded from walls where bulletin boards had been ripped down. The frames of wooden picnic tables still stood sentry in the recreation yard. Testament to hard and lean years in the past, their metal frames being the only things left. The wooden table tops and benches once attached to the frames were long gone.

  It all made sense when he entered the main cell block.

  The vague smell of decaying flesh he’d encountered in other parts of the prison didn’t exist here at all.

  But the vague smell of burned wood did.

  Then he noticed the concrete walls and ceiling were blackened by years of burning wooden tables, wooden chairs, wooden anything the inmates could find.

  Marty looked around and tried to imagine the hundred or so inmates, huddled in this cavernous room for years, burning whatever they could find to stay warm.

  He knew there were gas or diesel generators, for use in keeping the prison operational during power outages. He wondered why they didn’t use them.

  Then it occurred to him that they probably did. But it was likely they, being the scourges of society and probably not well educated, lacked the forethought to plan ahead.

  They probably saw no need to gather more fuel for the generators until after their supply had run out. And until after the roads were impossibly covered with a thick blanket of ice and snow.

  Until it was too late to get more.

  He surmised that they’d run the generators to heat and light the prison and were reasonably comfortable until the fuel ran out. Then they resorted to huddling together in this huge room, shivering and trying to stay close enough to the fire to keep from freezing to death.

  Along the north wall, standing three to four feet high, was a huge pile of ashes that extended almost the entire length of the room. He wondered why they didn’t take the ashes outside to dispose of them, then realized they probably opened the outside doors as little as possible. Every time they did, a frigid blast of air certainly blew in, eliminating what little heat they had.

  After they arrested Castillo, Glenna’s tormentor, one of the men asked Castillo how he’d stayed alive during the big chill. He’d been the one who’d shared the secrets of this prison, and how he and his friends had survived the cold here.

  One of them asked Castillo how many survived in the prison with him.

  “We started out with over a hundred. Only seven of us made it to the end. Most of the others committed suicide. Decided they’d had enough.”

  Marty could certainly understand why.

  -45-

  Marty’s plan was simple. If a hundred scumbag inmates could live in an abandoned prison as temperatures outside plummeted to below-zero temperatures for several years, the good people of Eden could too.

  Only the people of Eden would do it a little bit smarter. And a whole lot better.

  Marty’s operation had some disadvantages over the mine. The most difficult to deal with was the lack of insulation. The thick salt walls of the abandoned mine did an incredible job of keeping out the frigid external temperatures. So much so that during the years Mark and Hannah and their bunch lived there, most ran around in short sleeves. The constant temperature of the mine stayed around sixty five
degrees, heated by the core of the earth beneath their feet.

  The prison was a series of buildings, some great and some small. There were also three huge cellblocks. Their thick-walled construction would provide some insulation. But they would have to be heated constantly to provide life-sustaining heat for the people on the inside.

  The prison did offer one feature that would play to Marty’s advantage: the grounds. It was built in the days when prisons still had exercise yards.

  More modern prisons were built more compactly. Inmates got their exercise in gymnasiums, or on caged basketball courts.

  In the old days, prisons had huge open ground spaces where inmates would walk, or play ball, or socialize.

  He stood at the corner of the yard and surveyed it to see how much it would hold. It was larger than two football fields, probably close to three acres.

  In his mind’s eye he could envision row upon row of trailers, lined up nice and neat the way a longtime trucker liked to have them.

  His head moved slightly from side to side as he scanned the length and breadth of the yard, counting the invisible trailers in his mind.

  He’d leave just enough space between the rows for men to work, rifling through each trailer and determining what could be scavenged from them. Then moving the material from the yard to the cell block.

  He figured he could stuff seventy five trailers into the exercise yard, and another twenty at various places between the buildings.

  He was an old time trucker who was used to squeezing large things into tight places.

  Could all the people of Eden survive for years, only from what was contained in the trailers they were able to stuff into an abandoned prison?

  Marty knew it would depend mostly on his selection of trailers, and whether they were lucky enough to find enough diesel.

  The prison had not one, but two back-up generators. They were huge, each of them essentially a locomotive engine without the wheels. He’d seen similar generators when he delivered a load to a major league baseball stadium in Atlanta years before during a power outage. The lights had gone off while they were unloading him, and the monster generator kicked in from a room near the receiving dock.

  As the forklift driver removed pallet after pallet of roasted peanuts from the bowels of his trailer, Marty’s curiosity got the best of him and he’d followed the sound.

  The generator, when powered, made everything within fifty feet of it vibrate. It was loud enough to cause deafness without hearing protection. At the baseball stadium in Atlanta, it was powerful enough not only to power the huge banks of overhead lights that turned nighttime to day on the field of play. But also enough to provide all the lights and power to run the stadium’s normal game time operations.

  That was a lot of power. The prison wouldn’t need that much. Only enough to heat the large cellblock where its residents would be housed, and some of the guard shacks which would provide security until the snow cover was high enough to allow them to be abandoned.

  The problem, as Marty saw it, was that the generators weren’t meant to be run constantly. Yes, they were train engines, and when used as such could trek from city to city for many hours at a time. And yes, the backup generator would be able to give the main some occasional relief to rest and receive routine maintenance.

  But how many months or years could these engines run before breaking down? Or wearing out?

  The mine’s generators had a series of oversized batteries to capture extra electricity during the day, so they could sleep at night. After ten years they were still in good shape.

  But the prison had no such batteries. For the heat to be running, the lights to be on, one generator or the other had to be running.

  And that would be a problem.

  Diesel fuel was at the very top of Marty’s wish list. Lots of it.

  Number two was a backup means of power. Construction-grade generators. Light-alls. Forklift or industrial batteries.

  And, if all else failed, flatbed trailers full of lumber.

  For if the generators failed over the long term and couldn’t be repaired, or if they ran out of diesel to fuel them, the group of people huddled within the prison walls just might have to resort to the same desperate measures the inmates had.

  Burning any wood they could find to keep from freezing to death.

  It wasn’t a pleasant thought. But Marty knew it could be done.

  He and Lenny had already been through it once, when they’d positioned two dozen trailers back to back in the field behind the Trucker’s Paradise. They’d left just enough of a gap to provide living space, then covered the roof with heavy truckers’ tarps. Then they’d cut a hole in the tarp to place a ventilation pipe, a makeshift chimney, to vent a diesel-powered stove. A long insulated hose stretched from a diesel tanker in a nearby field provided fuel to the stove, and they burned wood from the trailers for additional heat.

  It was a miserable existence, and worked only because of the four layers of clothing and heavy parkas they wore twenty four hours a day.

  But against all odds, they’d made it.

  Marty shuddered at the thought of having to do it again.

  But it beat dying.

  -46-

  At the Trucker’s Paradise, Lenny was having similar thoughts. Lenny was weaker than his best friend Marty, both in disposition and in stature.

  He wasn’t sure he could survive a second freeze.

  It was only because Marty had strength enough for both of them that he’d made it through the first one. For every time Lenny had felt like giving up, every time he’d wanted to pull that trigger and end it all, Marty had talked him out of it.

  Marty had talked of a post-thaw nirvana, where most of the population perished. But where there was plenty to eat for those lucky enough and strong enough to have survived. Where Lenny could finally find a good woman of his own, something he’d longed for for many years before the freeze. Not necessarily because the women survivors would outnumber the men. But because there would be far fewer good men, like he and Lenny, to compete for them.

  Exactly how he figured that point in particular Marty never explained to him. But it didn’t matter. For Lenny was something besides a lot weaker than Marty.

  He was a whole lot more gullible.

  After a time, after explaining to Lenny countless times how much better life after the thaw would be compared to before it… after a time, Marty began to believe some of his own words.

  Not totally. But enough to make himself wonder if there was any merit to his made-up arguments.

  In the end, some of it did turn out to be true. There was plenty of food for those lucky enough to have survived the freeze.

  Of course, the food was nothing glamourous. Stale breakfast cereals and ramen noodles and pasta of all types.

  But it was plentiful, if one knew where to find it. Shelves in every supermarket were bare except for the things nobody wanted… the vitamins and paper napkins and swollen canned goods.

  The new supermarket was the fully loaded trailers abandoned at the side of every road and highway in the country. Very few of the survivors had the guts to travel outside their comfort zone. And that comfort zone was typically marked by city limit signs. So the prime place to find such goods and supplies was away from the cities. On state highways and especially interstate highways, far away from city confines.

  Such as, for example, the Trucker’s Paradise truck stop and the highways around it.

  The smart survivors, of course, learned to survive without the cargo on the trucks. For they knew it wouldn’t last forever.

  The smart ones learned to grow things. And how to hunt the prey which had managed to survive the freeze.

  There was a surprising amount of it. No one knew how central Texas still had deer and rabbits and possums. But they did. In limited numbers, granted. But they were out there for those lucky enough to find them, and skilled enough to bring them down.

  Marty had found another source for meat
for himself and Lenny. His friends at the secret compound not far from Junction were good about supplying beef and chicken and some occasional pork. In exchange he’d taken them liquor and medicine and two live German shepherds. It had started off as a business arrangement and they’d wound up being close friends.

  He and Lenny hadn’t yet taken up the farming and ranching habits that many of the survivors were transitioning to. They saw no need in it. Not yet, anyway. For in the confounds of the Trucker’s Paradise grounds were still hundreds of abandoned trailers and a fair percentage of them were still filled to the brim with food, fuel and other essential supplies.

  The nice thing about eating stale food was that it didn’t get more and more stale as the years went by. It got to a certain level of staleness and then stayed there. Once a man got used to eating things that were a bit stale it became the new norm.

  And stale food became stable food. Stale crackers didn’t taste as good as they did when they were fresh out of the oven. But they were stable. As long as they stayed dry and were protected from vermin they would last forever. Or at least for a very long time.

  So Marty and Lenny weren’t in danger of running out of food for many more years. And there was plenty of food for the people of Eden as well. It just had to be gathered up and transported the ninety miles or so from the truck stop to the prison walls and parked there.

  The process was easy. The timeframe was the big question mark.

  Nobody knew if Cupid 23 was really coming. But it made sense, since there was little else to do, to prepare for it just in case.

  The question was when. Was it coming tomorrow, or not for a couple of years? Would there be time to gather what they needed, or would they be caught short?

  As Lenny searched through the yard, identifying the trailers worth digging out and taking to Eden, his thoughts were of what the Eden prison might have to offer him for the long term.

  He’d never found the woman he was hoping for after the thaw came. There were a few which came by the truck stop now and then. And some had expressed an interest, either in Marty or in the whole concept of living at a truck stop where food was plentiful.