Alone, Book 3: The Journey (4 page)

Chapter 5

     An hour later Dave was sitting behind the wheel of his Ford Explorer, his fingers on the key of the auxiliary ignition he’d attached to the dashboard.

     Before he turned it, though, he closed his eyes and bowed his head.

    
“Lord, you know I don’t ask for much. But I’m asking for you to watch over me on the journey I’m about to undertake. And if your will be such, I ask that you help me to find Sarah, Lindsey and Beth, and that they be well and safe.

     “Oh, and please watch over the furballs too. Amen.”

     With his left hand, he crossed his fingers.

     With his right hand, he turned the key.

     After only a second’s hesitation, the engine roared to life.

     Not wanting to push his luck, he waited a few seconds for the engine to warm up enough so he was sure it wouldn’t die.

     Then he climbed out of the vehicle and unlocked the garage door from the electric opener overhead.

     He slowly eased the door open about a foot, then went to the floor and stuck his head out.

     It was a moonless sky, as dark as the devil’s heart. Without his night vision goggles he’d have been able to see only twenty feet in front of him.

     With the googles, however, taking the dim light of the stars above and expanding it, he was able to see the entire length of the block in both directions.

     It was perfectly still. Not a single thing moved.

     Not even the trees.

     He carefully raised the garage door the rest of the way, then walked out to the center of the street in front of his house.

     Still no sign of life in either direction.

     Dave returned to his vehicle, got inside, and slipped it into gear without closing the door.

     He let it creep out into the driveway.

     Then he got out of the still open door and eased the garage door halfway down.

     Now was the tricky part, and one which had troubled him greatly for days.

     The manual lock on Dave’s garage door was broken. It wouldn’t latch from the outside. It had been that way for a couple of years, and Dave never saw it as a problem. Before the blackout, when the door was attached to the electric garage door opener, it couldn’t be lifted from the outside and therefore wasn’t a concern.

     And in all the preparations he and Sarah had made for the disaster they knew was coming, the implications of a broken garage door had never occurred to either of them.

     Until the last few days, when Dave had struggled with a very difficult decision.

     Should he just leave, and risk the chance that someone might try to open his garage while he was gone?

     If they did, they’d stumble upon his Faraday cage and dried food stores. And they’d likely be curious enough to want to see what other treasures the seemingly vacant house might contain.

     Curious enough to break down the locked door leading into the house.

     And there they’d find not only his safe room and water supplies, but also the rabbits he’d worked so hard to protect.

     On the other hand, he could lock the door from the inside, run through his house, through his hidden gate and into the Castros’ yard, through the Castros’ house and back out to his running vehicle.

     And hopefully it would still be there.

     Of course, he could kill the engine and take the keys with him.

     But if he did that, and it wouldn’t start again for some reason, he’d be screwed. He wouldn’t be able to work on it in his driveway, and the driveway had just enough of an uphill slope to prevent him from being able to push it back into the garage.

     And damn it, he wanted to get on the road, and finally start his journey.

     He opted to leave it running.

     And he broke a land speed record, almost, getting through the Castros’ house and back to it.

     Winded, but glad that his garage was secured, he climbed back into the Explorer.

     He was finally on his way.

Chapter 6

      Dave was two blocks away before he dared pull the door closed, holding it shut with his hand to that point.

     Part of it was his paranoid nature, and part just being prudent. If anyone heard the sound of a car door being closed and recognized the sound, he certainly didn’t want it to be associated with his house.

     The automatic door locks didn’t work, of course, since he’d bypassed most of the electrical system. But the buttons, once depressed, were released by the inside door latch.

     He’d already locked the other three doors when he loaded the vehicle days before.

     Now he reached over his left shoulder and depressed the lock on the driver’s door, to prevent anyone from running up on the slow moving vehicle and pulling the door open.

     Of course, that wouldn’t prevent them from shooting Dave through the window.

     But he was relying on God’s good nature to keep that from happening.

     As for the vehicle itself, it made almost no noise at all, as long as Dave kept his foot off the gas pedal. So he let it crawl along at its own pace.

     He couldn’t go any faster than a crawl anyway. At least until he got out of the residential area.

     On each block, there were at least two, and sometimes several abandoned vehicles stalled in the middle of the street. Every one of them were in his way, causing him to mutter, “Geez. Doesn’t anyone drive on the right side of the road anymore?”

     He seemed to forget that when he retrieved his own vehicle, he’d retrieved it from the dead center of the street.

     Luckily all of the vehicles save one gave him enough clearance to get by. For that vehicle, a UPS truck, he merely used a driveway to allow his passenger side wheels to climb onto the curb, and to ride the curb to the adjacent house’s driveway.  

     After five blocks he was on a main thoroughfare, Military Drive. Seeing it for the first time abandoned and completely dark, it looked spooky. Almost like a set from a post-apocalyptic movie.

     Then he remembered he lived in a post-apocalyptic world.

     Military Drive connected with Interstate 35 a few miles away. The I-35 was Dave’s path out of San Antonio and ran in the general direction of Kansas City.

     But Dave had a stop to make first.

     It may have been the way the street signs were designed, with white lettering on a dark blue background. Or, maybe it was just that the stars didn’t allow enough reflective light on this dark night.

     Whatever was the case, Dave found it hard to read the street signs.

     So he went by memory and watched out for the Dairy Queen.

     He knew that the Dairy Queen was on the intersection of Military Drive and Zavala Avenue. He used to stop and get a banana split with the girls on Saturday afternoons, after he picked them up from their “young readers” meeting.

     At the Zavala Branch Library.

     Which was his destination and his last stop on his way out of town.

     But first things first.

     First, he allowed his mind to wander a bit.

     To that Dairy Queen, and to the banana split he always shared with the girls.

     They got one for the three of them. With three cherries. Lindsey sat across the table from Dave and Beth, and carefully used a plastic knife to cut the dessert into three sections.

     “Now you two be careful not to encroach on my section,” she always warned. “I don’t want any of your cooties.”

     The first time she’d uttered the warning, Dave had commented, “Now where on earth did you learn a word like ‘encroach?’”

     She’d replied, “Dad, I’m twelve now. I know words you’ve never even heard of.”

     Dave shot back, “Well, excuse me, Einstein,” causing little Beth to giggle.

     A few seconds later Beth gestured for Dave to lean close, so she could whisper in his ear, “Dad, what’s an Einstein?”

     Dave always requested three cherries so each of them could enjoy one.

     He smiled as he remembered how little Beth always managed to steal his.

     Her fail-proof method never varied. She would point out the window and say, “Dad, look! It’s a pterodactyl!”

     Dave would say, “Really? Where?”

     And he would divert his attention to the window, just long enough for Beth to steal his cherry and pop it into her mouth.

     Beth, convinced she’d gotten away with her evil scheme, would then apologize.

     “Oh, I’m sorry, Dad. I guess it was just a bird.”

     Beth would then snicker, Lindsey would roll her eyes, and Dave would wink at Lindsey.

     Just so at least one of his daughters realized he wasn’t the gullible old fool he appeared to be.

     Dave’s smile faded as the Dairy Queen came into view.

    Now he was back to business.

     He turned at the Dairy Queen and drove north another block to the public library.

     He’d have to go inside. And that provided his next predicament.

     Should he leave the vehicle running, in a strange neighborhood, or risk it not starting when he came back out?

     This time it was a no brainer.

     This time he wasn’t sure if he was spotted. And whether someone might be following his slow moving vehicle.

     He had no choice but to kill the engine and hope for the best.

     Luckily, the Ford Explorer was equipped with a higher ground clearance and oversized tires that gave it much better traction than most passenger vehicles.

     Traction to go off-road, as long as the terrain wasn’t too rugged or too muddy.

     Perfect for driving off the pavement of the library’s parking lot and around to the grassy field at the back of the building.

     At least if he had to tinker with it to get it running again, he’d be able to do so away from the prying eyes of anyone walking down the street in the front of the library.

Chapter 7

     As he suspected, the library had been broken into, but had barely been ransacked.

     The office areas at the front of the building were a shambles. Dave guessed that any snacks, sandwiches or bottles of water the small office refrigerators held at the time of the blackout were long gone.

     The long shelves of books, however, were virtually untouched.

     Apparently great novels weren’t in high demand when one was thirsty or hungry.

     Also as he suspected, there was no card catalog for him to look through. The library system had been computerized many years before. There was no way to look up what he was searching for without a computer.

     But hey, who was he kidding, anyway?

     Dave had forgotten long before how to find a book in a library using the Dewey Decimal system. His method for finding books had been the same method he used for finding something in the supermarket: wander around, and when you got really desperate, ask somebody.

     Only in this case, at this particular library, there was no one to ask.

     So he was relieved to see signs hanging from the ceiling to point him in the right direction.

     The signs had black letters on white backgrounds, and were therefore easier to read than the street signs.

     That was a good thing. His night vision goggles were able to use just the starlight coming through the windows. He didn’t have to use the small flashlight in his pocket, which might have attracted the wrong attention.

     He eased his way through the blackened library until he came across a sign announcing “REFERENCE MATERIALS.”

     His instincts told him to look low, on the bottom shelves. He expected the book he was looking for to be oversized. And the bottom shelf was where he’d store oversized books if he ran the library.