Alone: Book 1: Facing Armageddon (3 page)

     And then the most curious thing happened.

     His
vehicle died.

-5
-

     He cursed aloud.

     “Damn it!”

     Things like this always seemed to happen at the worst possible time.

     He checked his rearview mirror to make sure no one was behind him, since he was blocking the street. There was a car
in the mirror, but it was a full block behind him.

     That wasn’t a problem. He’d be long gone before it got to him.

     Or so he thought.

     He turned the key and got nothing but silence. No
groan of a starter that told him the carburetor wasn’t getting any gas. No click click click of a loose terminal or a bad solenoid.

     Nothing.

     “Damn it!”

     He pull
ed the hood release and got out of the Explorer. He bent over the engine expecting to find his battery cable had somehow popped completely off the battery. But he could find nothing amiss.

     For a moment he stood there, scratching his head. Then he looked down the street at the car he’d seen in his rearview mirror and saw that it too had its hood up. The driver wa
s doing the same thing Dave was: standing in front of his disabled car looking bewildered.

     Dave got an uneasy feeling. He took his cell phone from his pocket. The screen was black and appeared to be off.

     But it wasn’t off. It was shorted out. It would never work again.

     “No! No! No!”

     He cursed under his breath and started to sprint for home. He was sure he knew what was going on, but was praying it wasn’t so.

     His neighbor two doors down tried to stop him as he ran by.

     “Hey, Dave,” he called out as he lifted the hood of his car. “Do you know anything about cars?”

     Dave ignored him, not because he was a rude sort, but because he was a man on a mission.

     He burst into his front door and tried the lights. None of them worked. The huge wall clock he and Sarah had bought together the month before no longer ticked.

     Maybe it was just a coincidence, he tried to convince himself. Maybe it was a temporary power outage. Maybe a transformer blew out on a nearby power pole.

     At exactly the same time several vehicles mysteriously died, and his cell phone turned into a worthless paperweight.

     Maybe.

     He desperately looked around for something electric that was working. Something. Anything.

     He saw the MP-3 player that Sarah wore when she was on the treadmill every morning, doing her daily run. She always said she couldn’t run without her music. He picked it up and turned it on. Nothing.

     He ran to the kitchen and pulled open the drawer that held flashlights and spare batteries.

     One by one, he turned on each of four flashlights.

     None of them worked, even though he’d replaced the batteries just days before.

     He went down to his knees and began to cry.

     For
more than an hour he sat there, on the kitchen floor, waiting for the kitchen phone to ring. He’d picked it up a dozen times, hoping to hear a dial tone and hearing nothing but silence.

     He’d removed the battery in his cell phone an equal number of times, then replaced it. He seemed to remember
an old saying about a fool doing the same

thing over and over again, and expecting a different result.

     But he had no choice. It was the only straw he had to grasp.

     The only working thing he could find was the old fashioned wind up wrist watch he
bought because the batteries kept wearing out on his old one. It ran off a spring that would keep good time, provided it was rewound at least every other day.

     He found himself
sitting in the kitchen, watching the shadows crawl higher and higher on the bare white walls as the setting sun dipped lower in the sky.

     He was numb. He couldn’t bear to think the thoughts that kept skirting the edges of his mind. Wouldn’t think about them. He’d just take it for granted that yes, his family landed safely
just before the power went out. In fact, they made good time and landed early. By the time the power outage blackened the Kansas City airport, they were surely on their way to Uncle Tommy’s house.

     No, that wasn’t good enough. He couldn’t bear to think they might be caught out in the open. Their flight made
record time. Yes, that must be it. The flight made record time and arrived a full half hour ahead of schedule. They had time to get their luggage and drove to Uncle Tommy’s house. They pulled up into the driveway just before the blackout, and they were safe and sound.

     In fact, they were just ready to call him when everything died.

     That’s what happened. He was as sure of it as he was of anything else.

     It had to be that way. Any other scenario was just too painful to consider.

     On and off over the next few hours he got up and stretched his legs. He knew there was a lot of work to do. He just couldn’t find the motivation to do it. So he got up periodically and stretched his legs, and walked around a bit.

     During one such episode, he walked up the stairs. His subdivision sat upon a hill, and in the distance on a clear night, he could actually see downtown
San Antonio. On those nights, the Hemisfair Tower shone like a beacon in the distance, some nine miles away.

     It occurred to him, while sitting on the kitchen floor, that perhaps the blackout wasn’t a widespread thing after all. That maybe, just maybe, the power lines shorted out in his area alone. Maybe some freakish weather conditions caused the shorted power lines to short out other electronics in close proximity.

     Maybe the rest of the world was okay, outside his neighborhood.

     Maybe his wife and daughters had been trying to call him for hours. Maybe
they
were worried about
him,
and wondering why he wouldn’t answer either phone.

     Maybe.

     But not likely.

     With much anticipation, he’d climbed the stairs, praying that he’d look out that south window and see the downtown
skyline aglow in the distance. And then he could walk toward the lights until he found a convenience store or a grocer that had power. Then he’d use a pay phone to call his wife and tell her he was okay.

     Only the
skyline wasn’t lit up in the distance. The night was crystal clear. He could see twinkling stars in every corner of the sky, and knew it wasn’t clouds that were blocking the city lights.

     There were no city lights.

     And he stumbled back to the kitchen, where he curled into a ball and cried.

     Some
time later he finally began to regain his wits. Regardless of what did or didn’t happen to his family, he had things to do. And perhaps the way to keep from going insane was to stay focused on the tasks at hand. To keep busy. To keep his mind occupied.

     He looked at the face of his wind up
watch, the luminescent hands glowing in the dark and telling him it was almost three a.m.

     He’d have to hurry. The sun would come up around
six thirty or so, and he needed to finish his mission and be back in the house before then.

     He went through the first floor of the house, opening all of the window curtains. He’d use the full moon and cloudless sky to his advantage. There wasn’t much light out there, but he’d let as much of it in as
he could. He’d still be stumbling around in the darkness, but it wouldn’t be quite pitch black.

     Almost, but not quite.

-6-

     Dave found his keys where’d he’d last remembered seeing them. In his panic to get home, he’d left them hanging in the knob on the front door. He kicked himself. If the looters had been out and about, they’d have just walked right in, before he was set up to defend himself.

     From his front porch he sniffed the air. He didn’t smell any smoke. He heard absolutely nothing. He surmised that the residents for the most part probably considered this just a freak power outage. They probably assumed that the lights would come back on at any moment.

     He suspected, and indeed hoped, that the looting and riots wouldn’t start until the next night, as it started to become apparent to people that this was more than a temporary situation.

    
And as more and more people started to panic.

     He walked back into his house and locked the front door. Then he made his way into his garage and felt his way around until he found a red plastic handle hanging
on the end of a short white cord from his electric garage door opener.

     The emergency release. He pulled it, and the garage door popped as it disengaged itself from the motor.

     Dave carefully opened the noisy door by hand, raising it slowly and cursing under his breath with every squeak and groan it made.

     He didn’t know if his nei
ghbors could see what he was doing, or even if they were watching, but he had no choice. This could only be done under cover of darkness, and the second night would be too dangerous. He only hoped he hadn’t waited too long.

     He hopped in Sarah’
s Honda Accord and inserted the key to unlock the gear shift. Then he put it into neutral and slowly pushed it down the driveway and into the street.

     Then he pushed it forward, three houses down the street, and parked it in front of the
Smith house.

     The
Smiths were on a week long trip to Disney World in Orlando, and would surely never be back. Hopefully a car parked in front of their house would keep the looters away for a few days, until Dave had a chance to go over himself and empty the house of anything he could use.

     To
help his cause, He came back ten minutes later and hung a note on their front door. The note, which he’d scrawled on a sheet of white copy paper with a black marker, was barely legible in the moonlight.

     It said:

HEAVILY ARMED AND PISSED OFF

IF YOU BREAK IN HERE, YOU DIE.

     There was still much to do. When he came back to the Smith home the second time, he brought a Phillips screwdriver and four five gallon Jerry cans from a high shelf in his garage.

     He carried the cans to the back of Sarah’s Honda and crawled underneath her gas tank. There, in a neat row, he punctured the bottom of the tank four times by holding the point aga
inst the tank and then hitting the screwdriver with the heel of his hand.

     Four streams of gasoline immediately started streaming from the tank, and he positioned the Jerry cans underneath the str
eams to catch it. He didn’t have a clue how much gas she had in the tank, since the gauge wasn’t working without battery power. But he hoped she had twenty gallons worth.

     If she didn’t, there were plenty of other vehicles on the street.

     While the cans were filling, he went back to his garage and collected a pile of old newspapers from the same shelf he’d taken the Jerry cans from. The newspapers had been on the shelf for months. They were yellow and had started to curl on the edges.

     He tossed them on
to the front porch. Then he took three lawn chairs and two loungers from the patio in front of his house and threw them unceremoniously into the back yard. In another time, he enjoyed sitting on the chairs, sipping iced tea with Sarah and the girls, while waving at the neighbors and watching the world go by.

     Now, he suspected, those times were gone forever.