Final Dawn: Escape From Armageddon (16 page)

     If these guys were really FBI, they must have come from the dumb squad.

     “No, I’m Mark Snyder. I’m her husband, and her last name is Snyder now. At least I guess I’m still her husband. I haven’t seen her in weeks, ever since she packed some of her things and took off with that guy on the back of his motorcycle.

     “I heard a rumor from some friends that she was going to have our marriage annulled and marry the Harley guy. But I don’t know for sure if she’s done that yet.”

     “Do you mind if we come in?”

     Mark stepped aside to allow them entry.

     “You can go ahead and search the place if you want. You’ll see that all of her clothes and makeup and stuff is gone.

     “I gave the clothes to Goodwill. I threw the rest of her crap away. I say good riddance to her. She couldn’t cook anything except spaghetti anyway.”

     “Odd that you still have her photographs on your wall.”

     “Yeah, well, she is a hot chick. I’ll throw that pic away someday, but sometimes I actually miss her, and then I like to remember the good times. But she’s somebody else’s problem now.”

     “How much did she tell you about this… meteorite thing?”

     “I didn’t know crap about it. She never told me. I found out the same time everybody else did, when I saw her face on TV. And she was long gone with motorcycle and pony-tail boy by then. All of our friends started calling me, and I told them I didn’t know what the hell was going on.

     “But I’ll tell you one thing. When that meteorite hits, if it gets real cold outside like they say it’s going to? Well, I’m changing the locks on my door. When she gets cold and tries to come back, I’m not letting her in. She can go snuggle with
that jerk and his motorcycle to stay warm.”

     “
Sarah Spear. Do you know her well? Do you know where we can find her?”

     “All I know about Sarah Spear is that she used to tramp around with Hannah a lot when we were dating. A lot of nights when I was working late, they’d be hitting the bars. I heard that Sarah had a thing for motorcycle gangs. I think that’s how Hannah met up with the dude she ran off with. I think he was friends with one of the guys Sarah picked up at a biker bar. At least that’s the way I heard it.”

     “Did Sarah ever come over here?”

     “Oh, yeah, she came by a few times. She and Hannah would do tequila and Jack Daniels shots and watch stupid romance movies on TV. A couple of times we had to take Sarah home drunk, and she’d have to find a ride back here to get her car the next day.”

     “When was the last time you saw Sarah?”

     “Well, let’s see… I think it was
the week before I saw the two of them on TV.”

     “Why do you think they did the television interview?”

     “Oh, I don’t know. If you ask me, they’re both a little bit nuts. Especially when they get to drinking. Maybe it was a prank, or maybe a dare. Maybe they just wanted the attention.”

     The men took Mark up on his offer to look around, and verified that all of Hannah’s things were gone. They thanked him for his help and left.

     Mark patted himself on the back and thought he deserved an academy award for his performance. He was tempted to use the house phone to call Hannah and tell her about it but resisted the urge. Just in case it was bugged.

     Instead, he went to the garage and took the rear seats out of his Explorer and left them on the garage floor.

     He took the coolers, filled them almost to the top with frozen pizza slices, Big Macs, burrito supremes, and an assortment of Subway sandwiches that the pair had collected over the previous few months.

     He put the dry ice into a bag and beat it against the garage floor to break it into small pieces. Then he sprinkled the pieces
onto the top of each cooler to keep the food frozen for the fifty minutes or so it would take him to get to the mine.

     He was always careful when going to the mine, ever since the girls went public. But on this day he was extra cautious. He went a different route than usual and kept a constant eye on ev
ery car he passed, looking for Blues Brothers clones or unmarked cars.

     He also pulled over on four different occasions to look skyward for helicopters.

     Back at the mine, he delighted in telling the others about his performance. The group shared a nervous laughter, but deep done inside, each of them started to worry a bit.

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     Across the country, Americans broke into two distinct camps.

     The first believed the girls, and started trying their very best to prepare for the very worst. They started stockpiling food and water. Stores started to run out of things like canned goods and pasta.

     The sale of chest freezers went through the roof. Appliance stores started keeping waiting lists of people who wanted to buy them, and when a truckload came in, they made phone calls. The freezers went straight from the truck to waiting customers, and by the end of the day, most of the customers had the freezers full of supermarket meats.

     The same held true for portable generators and heaters of all types.

     The secondary markets went into high gear. People who didn’t believe Hannah and Sarah saw an opportunity to make an incredible amount of money. They cleaned out their bank accounts and bought everything they could, then sold it at three or four times the cost.

     And the believers
, as they became known, didn’t mind paying that much. They were convinced that after January 15th, money would be worthless anyway. So they cleaned out their savings accounts, took out second mortgages on their houses. Cashed in their equities, and ran up their credit cards. And if they had to pay a thousand dollars for a two hundred dollar generator, then so what?

     At least they’d be warm and have lights while their neighbors were freezing to death.

     Gun sales in the United States quadrupled in the week after the girls’ big announcement. 9 mm ammunition, the most popular ammunition used for self-defense weapons, became almost impossible to get.

     Although illegal in most states, a black market ammunition trade sprang up as a cottage industry. Pushers who two weeks before were selling rock cocaine on street corners wer
e now selling 9 mm bullets for five dollars apiece.

     And people were buying them. When someone is breaking into your home to steal your food and water,
five dollars is a small price to pay to save your life.

     Livestock sales were up. Even some people who lived in the suburbs bought a couple of head of cattle. Their thinking was they’d let them graze in their back yards until the freeze came. Then they’d butcher them and let the freeze keep the meat fresh until they could thaw it and cook it over an open fire.

     Never mind that few of them had ever butchered a cow, or any other animal for that matter. Never mind that the cattle’s’ moos were announcing to their neighbors “Hey, this house will have 800 pounds of beef after the freeze comes.”

     And those neighbors who couldn’t afford their own meat supply readied their weapons instead.

     Mark and Bryan had purchased their livestock two weeks before the girls had their interview. Their cattle, pigs and chickens were safely buttoned up and enjoying their new home in Bay 17.

     Religious leaders all over the country were appealing for calm, and telling people to pray. Their coffers were overflowing, as people who hadn’t been to church in years were filing in, begging to be saved, and trying to buy their way into heaven.

     One enterprising drug company very quickly marketed a self-administered “Euthanasia Pack.” It consisted of two preloaded hypodermic needles. The first contained a large dose of sodium thiopental, would put an individual into a deep sleep within a minute or so.

     The second needle, filled with potassium chloride, would stop the heart within five minutes.

     The company heavily advertised the product as a painless way of achieving death without suffering. They gave specific details on how it was to be administered. One by one, say goodbye to your loved ones. Then put them to sleep, and kill them. Then kill yourself as well.

     The disclaimer, of course, said not to use the method until the meteorite actually hit, and all hope was lost. They wanted to relieve themselves of all lawsuits in case Hannah and Sarah were lying.

     They also didn’t tell the consumer that this was basically the same method some states used to execute condemned murderers. Because that would have cast a bad light on the product.

     People never follow warning labels, though. They can’t even follow instructions on a bottle of aspirin. So who realistically would have thought they’d do in this case either? Bodies were piling up in
morgues all over the country when believers killed themselves and their loved ones in great numbers.

     Others
sat in running cars in their garages and gassed themselves to death, or blew their brains out with handguns.

     Police began noticing an odd occurrence. They would respond to a suicide call and find a body on the floor, brains on the wall, and no weapon. Neighborhood thugs
were hearing the shots and beating them to the scenes. By the time the police got there, the suicide weapon was already on the street corner, being sold at an exorbitant cost. To someone who wanted desperately to protect his family, or to do the same thing.

     Believers were converging on
Washington by the hundreds of thousands. Congress wasn’t in session, but that didn’t deter them from picketing the capitol grounds. And it was impossible to get a car within ten blocks of the White House. The President had tripled the amount of Secret Service agents on the White House grounds, and had equipped them with fully automatic machine guns, in the event the grounds were overrun.

     The President and Vice President could only get to and from the White House by Air Force Two, the official helicopter, and usually in the hours of darkness.

     And it wasn’t just the United States that was going crazy. It was the whole world.

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     The other camp, the non-believers, were going on with their lives as usual. Or as usual as they could, with half the population buying everything in sight and resorting to stealing from their neighbors.

     Non-believers shook their heads, called their neighbors crazy, and swore
allegiance to the United States government. Of course they would tell the truth if the meteorite was really going to hit, they maintained. What on earth could the government possibly have to gain by keeping such a secret?

    
Washington slowly began to regain a semblance of normalcy. The crowds gradually thinned out as the protestors realized that if the world were going to end, they’d be better off spending their remaining months with their families instead of carrying a picket sign.

     And if it wasn’t, they were just wasting their valuable time.

     And a mile and a half away from the White House, on the other side of the Potomac, nobody really noticed the steady stream of trucks coming and going from a large food distribution warehouse.

     It wasn’t
really a food distribution warehouse, of course. It looked like one. But inside this building was an entrance to a tunnel, which connected with another tunnel, which connected to an underground bunker which had been hidden under tourists’ feet for decades.

     The bunker was actually built during the cold war, when hysteric Americans were convinced that the
USSR was ready and willing to launch a nuclear war at any time. It was designed to absorb a direct hit from a nuclear blast. The blast doors were made of reinforced concrete that was eight feet thick.

     The initial purpose of the bunker was to get government officials underground and safe so that they were alive to retaliate. Originally it was barely big enough to hold the President and his staff, the members of the House of Representatives and the Senate. Originally, the family members of all would have perished.

     But over the course of fifty years, the bunker had been expanded, a little at a time. Now it would accommodate thousands of people, for a much longer period of time. It had its own hospital, living quarters, gymnasiums and shopping centers.

     The bunker was perhaps the worst kept secret in
Washington. Locals had heard rumors about it for many years, and most just took it for granted that it was there. They just didn’t know what it looked like. And they never would. The government surely would never share the information with anyone.

     For many years the bunker was stocked and ready to go. But not for more than a few months. Saris 7 changed all that. For many months now, the trucks kept coming. They were doing the same thing Mark and Hannah were doing in
Texas. But it would take a lot more supplies to shelter four thousand people than for forty.

     Officially,
Washington continued to deny anything was going to happen. They knew the chances of diverting the meteorite were slim to none. So they weren’t even going to try.