Hidden (Final Dawn) (20 page)

     Sarah, as many other brides are wont to do, decided she wanted to shed a couple of pounds prior to her wedding. So she made a deal with the kitchen staff. She knew, of course, that the kitchen kept a tight control on the calorie count. They had to, to extend the food stores.

     Sarah offered, “I’ll tell you what. I will forego a hundred fewer calories on my diet each day for the next twelve weeks, if you can take those calories and put them toward a small wedding cake.”

     The kitchen staff agreed, and it wouldn’t have gone any farther than that. Except that ladies do talk, after all. Before the next day was out, every woman in the mine had heard of the deal and had agreed to donate a hundred calories a day as well. Bryan fell in line too.

     Mark rebelled until Hannah threatened to withhold her feminine charms until after the wedding. Then he came around quickly and joined the rest.

     As a result of the effort, the kitchen was able to prepare a fabulous cake, with decadent whipped icing, and ice cream to boot.

     It was a beautiful wedding and a joyous and very happy reception.

Chapter 33

     Within two weeks Frank Woodard had managed to find more than a dozen families or small clusters of survivors in the neighborhoods around
Buena Vista Drive.

     His days had become a routine. He’d leave his house with a duffle bag full of food for the hungry, and would seek them out by looking for telltale smoke coming from chimneys.

     Once he gained the trust of those he helped feed, he took them to the Symco warehouse and helped them select food that was still safe to eat. He showed them there Symco stored their flashlights, and batteries, and a dozen other things that would help their situations. And he’d encourage his new friends to come back daily, to build up their stocks of food at their homes, in case bad people ever took control of the Symco warehouse and cut off the food supply.

     Frank didn’t know it, but some around the neighborhood had taken to calling him “Saint Frank.” It wasn’t a sarcastic title. He was seen by many as an angel from heaven.

     For Frank’s part, he was happy to be able to help. But he was also disheartened. By his count, only fifty nine people survived in a neighborhood of several thousand.

     Frank’s friends Jesse Martinez and Joe Smith started on their own new mission. The snow pack was just two feet high now, and the two of them began getting help from volunteers to bury the dead in rather macabre above ground burial mounds.

     They went methodically, one street at a time, then one house at a time.

     The routine was the same. They knocked loudly on each door, and Joe yelled, “Hello in the house! We mean you no harm! We come to help you! If you do not want us here, make a loud noise and we will leave you in peace.”

     The volunteers would wait for about thirty seconds. Then Jesse repeated Joe’s words in Spanish.

     After another thirty seconds, the group broke into the home and conducted a room by room search. Any bodies they found, including the bodies of pets, were carried to the back yard and laid in the snow with as much dignity as they could manage.

     Then the group took sledge hammers to the bottom few courses of bricks on the house, causing the bricks above to collapse into a pile at their feet.

     The broken bricks and chunks of mortar were then used to cover the bodies. It would allow them to decompose slowly, without being left to rot in the open or picked apart by buzzards or other birds that might have found a way to survive.

     It would also lessen the chance of human survivors being stricken by airborne disease, spread because of the decomposing bodies.

     By the time spring came around, all of the survivors in the area had enough food to get them to the thaw, and nearly all the bodies were buried. Families from the different streets began getting out and following the paths in the snow to the others’ houses. A sense of community was starting to build again.

     No one knew what became of the marauders. They appeared to be long gone. Some worried, though, that they would be back.

     Others believed that the marauders were within their midst, and had merely stopped their terroristic ways because they grew tired of it, or finally stole enough to survive and decided they didn’t have to rob and kill anymore.

     In Frank’s mind, the marauders moved on after they decided that this particular neighborhood didn’t have much left to steal. Perhaps they found more lucrative neighborhoods to attack, or took over a Walmart or some other large food source.

     There was an ongoing debate about why the
Symco Distribution Center was spared the wrath of the marauders. Some of the neighbors thought it was just a fluke. That it slipped through the cracks simply because the marauders didn’t know what it was. They thought it was the simple fact that it didn’t say “food” on the side of the building. That it could therefore be anything. A carpet distribution center. A lumber distribution center. Anything.

     This faction of the neighbors believed that if it had said “Symco Foods” on the side of the building, it would have been scavenged and occupied by armed killers long before Frank, Joe and Jesse ever made their first trip there.

     There were others among the neighbors who believed that the Symco warehouse was a gift from God Himself, left intact so that they could survive and carry on.

     Frank didn’t know which story to believe. He just took it for granted that they were lucky to be alive, and blessed with the food that would help them stay that way.

     Frank was on his way back from Symco one day that spring, taking delight that the top of the snow pack was shiny. That meant that the temperature was above freezing, and that the pack would melt a tiny bit that day.

     He and the others stopped to catch their breaths, when one of them looked skyward.

     “Look! Right there! To the right of the sun!”

     Frank looked up and, to the right of the yellow marble in the brown sky, he was able to catch a glimpse of a cloud.

     Granted, it was just a slightly darker patch of brown in a lighter brown sky, flying through the haze. But it was the first time they’d been able to make out a cloud in almost six years. It was a good start, and a good sign. It meant the sky was clearing.

Chapter 34

     In a large field behind the Trucker’s Paradise Truck Stop, Joe Koslowski was laying on a couch in his compound taking a nap when a drop of water hit the side of his face.

     It wasn’t enough to wake him, but he did raise a hand to his face to wipe away the water. It was a subconscious reflex he’d repeat several more times before the dripping water finally woke him up.

     Joe looked up and saw the drops falling from the heavy canvas tarps which covered the compound, saying, “What the hell?”

     Then he rolled off the couch to find his parka soaked with water.

     “Hot damn!”

     In previous thaws the snow on top of the canvas canopy thawed so slowly that the water was whisked away and evaporated into the wind. This time it was melting much faster than that. Fast enough to pool beneath the snow and actually soak the canvas, until the canvas became so saturated it began to drip through it.

     He scrambled into his truck’s sleeper cab and changed into a dry coat. Then he cranked up his rig so he could see what the outside temperature was.

     The light on his panel said it was 44 degrees.

     He went back outside and cheered.

     Marty and Lenny came running from Lenny’s trailer shack, where they’d been playing cards. Tina, on guard duty in the north lookout trailer, stuck her head out the door to see what was going on.

     What they saw was Joe laying down the four sheets of plywood leaning up against one of the trailers on the western wall and crawling out of the compound.

     Lenny and Marty followed.

     They looked out across the field at the rapidly dissolving snow pack. Once almost five feet deep, it was now down to less than a foot in some places. A couple more days like this one and they might be able to see the ground peeking through here and there.

     It was truly a joyous sight.

     Fifty yards away from the trailers, though, Marty and Lenny spotted something that troubled them.

     The pile of snow they’d shoveled over Scott Burley’s body the day Marty shot him in the head had mostly melted away. His entire torso was exposed, now, and his head and face soon would be.

     “Don’t worry about it,” Lenny told his friend. “I’ll take care of it.”

     It had been a monumental undertaking, getting Scott’s body that far. He wasn’t a small man, weighing in at over 260 pounds. They’d gotten him out of the compound by typing ropes to each of his feet and dragging him, a few inches at a time, until he was fifty yards away from the camp.

     Under other circumstances, they’d have buried him so they would have been rid of him forever. But when the ground was frozen hard as a rock, that wasn’t an option.

     So they did the next best thing. They covered him with snow, knowing full well that someday they’d have to find some way to dispose of him in a more permanent manner.

     Today was that day.

     Lenny walked over to the truck stop’s garage and cranked up the yard tractor, thankful that the six heavy duty batteries still had enough cranking power to turn over the engine.

     There had been a time, five years before, in the early days of the freeze, when he’d toyed with the idea of blocking the entrance of the truck stop to help keep marauders out. Looking back, he wondered why he’d never actually done it. Pity, he guessed, for those pour souls still out there who weren’t marauders.

     In any event, he knew that parked in the fifth row of trucks in the west parking lot, among the hundreds of trailers dropped by truckers so they could bobtail it home to their families, was a drop bottom trailer full of landscaping rocks. These were the rocks he’d once planned to use to block the entrance, before he had second thoughts.

     Lenny had driven dump trucks in his youth, and had made good money at it. For a time, he’d driven drop bottom trailers too, which were really just large dump trucks that discharged their loads from the bottom. Used mainly for road construction, he’d driven hundreds of them on various road projects all over Texas and Arkansas.

     He’d given up long haul trucking years before, when his left knee started bothering him. It just wouldn’t stand up to the strain of depressing the truck’s clutch five hundred times a day any more. He’d given up long hauling for the more stable work of truck stop yard manager.

     But by God, some things you just never forget. You never forget how to ride a bike, and you never forget how to drive a damn truck.

     He backed the yard rig into the rock trailer, then hopped out of the cab to lock the pin and hook up his pigtail and air lines.

     Then he climbed back into the rapidly warming cab and watched his gauges to see if his air pressure was building. After all this time, there was a good chance the air lines were shot and he wouldn’t be able to release the trailer brakes. He crossed his fingers as he saw the gauge slowly creep up.

     When the pressure hit 85 psi, he shoved the tractor into reverse and nudged it backwards a couple of inches to break it free from any ice holding the tires in place.

     Then he shifted into his lower second year and inched forward, watching in his mirrors to make sure the trailer’s tires were turning.

     “Damn!” he muttered to himself when he saw the left rear set of tires dragging across the ground instead of turning. The brake was frozen.

     Lenny crawled out of the cab and took a small sledge hammer out of the tool box, then crawled underneath the trailer to beat the brake free.

     Once back in the cab, with all wheels rolling, he crept across the yard and into the field where Scott Burley’s body lay. Then he parked the trailer over the body and opened the bottom door, burying the body with seventeen tons of rock. They’d never have to look at Scott Burley again.

     Lenny dropped the dumper where it sat, and since he was in a tractor anyway, he went back to the yard. There he went from trailer to trailer until he found one that had been headed for a supermarket chain before it got parked. In the trailer were dozens of cases of frozen meats and various types of shelf-stable foods.

     He hooked up to the trailer and crossed his fingers again. This one rolled free with no problem.

     Lenny drove out of the compound to the dirt road north of the field, which led back to Mason Bennett’s farmhouse.

     The Bennett family had visited the compound many times since the day Marty shot Scott dead in front of them. Most of the time they came for provisions. But sometimes they just came to visit. The truckers had been the only other people they’d seen in several years, after all. The group had become good friends.