Final Dawn: Escape From Armageddon (5 page)

     Hannah knew that Sarah had disowned her family many years before. Sarah had been a rebel in her younger days, into drugs and an unhealthy lifestyle. Her deeply religious parents couldn’t cope with that, and kicked her out at 17, carrying the baby of a man she saw only once
.

     Sarah never had the baby, which outraged her parents even more, and she eventually turned her life around. But she never reconciled with her family. Didn’t even know where they were, really, except that they’d moved from
Texas several years before. And she had no desire to find them.

     Her best friend Sami, and Sami’s parents, were the only other people Hannah added to her list. Sami had no siblings, and her only
uncle died the year before.

     When Hannah looked at the list of forty, and saw that her side of it had only four names, it saddened her a bit. She’d never really had much of a family, at least not since her parents died so long ago. She’d done quite well without family support, and knew that she probably owed her independent spirit to all the things she’d had to do on her own over the years. Still, she wondered to herself how different she’d have been as a person had she been surrounded with brothers and sisters, and children.

     And at that moment it dawned on her that the children she so wanted of her own would be born in that mine. And it made her think.

     Hannah looked at Mark and asked “Honey, do any of your relatives have any medical training?”

     “Well, you know my sister Debbie is an EMT. She can handle medical emergencies. And Karen’s husband is a dentist. Why?”

     “I want to quit my job. I want t
o study midwifery. Somebody is going to  have  to know  how to deliver babies.

Just because
we’re going to be in a hole in a mountain for the next seven years doesn’t mean people are going to stop having babies.”

     She started to well up.

     Mark came to her at that point and they held each other close. There was no argument. They’d both talked many times of their love for children, Although they hadn’t discussed it, each knew what a wonderful family they’d make. Of course, the circumstances had changed. But their dreams hadn’t.

     Sarah went to the computer and typed a letter of resignation. She’d turn it in the next morning when she went to work. And then she’d put in for vacation days for her final two weeks. She no longer felt a need, nor a desire, to give her employer any more of her valuable time. There wasn’t any extra to waste any more.

     After her letter was done, she called Sarah Spear.

     “Hey, if you have an hour, can you drop by again tomorrow night?” Hannah asked her. “Mark and I have something pretty important we’d like to discuss with you.”

-10-

     Mark had been on-line for awhile, researching various ways of storing diesel fuel and extending its shelf-life, when it suddenly dawned on him how quiet it was in the house.

     “Hannah?” he called out as he walked down the stairs. “Baby, are you okay?”

     Mark walked through the first floor of the house and finally saw her, through the sliding glass door, sitting on a lawn chair in the back yard. She was alone in her thoughts and looking up at the stars.

     He gathered a heavy patchwork quilt from where it lay folded on
the back of the couch and a sofa pillow and headed for the back door to join her.

     Without saying a word, he walked out into the warm night, flipping off the porch light as he went.

     He kissed his love on the top of her head as he passed by her and spread the quilt onto the soft grass. Then he went back and held out his hand, helped her up, and walked her to the quilt.

     As they got comfortable, neither said a word. Their love was such that it needed no words. Mark laid on the edge of the quilt, and Hannah lay down beside him with her head on his chest.

     It was Hannah who finally spoke.

     “It’s so beautiful up there, and so peaceful. Why does it also have to be capable of causing so much death and destruction?”

     “I don’t know, baby. That’s a question that’s way bigger than either of us. All I know is that in this place, and in this time, I have you by my side. And I’m going to make darn sure I always have you here. I’m not complete without you.

     “I never was, really. I was stumbling through life, thinking everything was okay. Then we met and I realized that the biggest part of me had been missing. Now I wake up each morning and the first thing I think is ‘where’s my baby and is she okay
?’

     “And every night I fall asleep with you in my arms, dreaming of making love to you.”

     Hannah giggled and said “I do that too. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and just lay there, watching you breathe. Last night I was awake at 3 a.m., thinking about what was ahead for our future, and just a little bit worried.”

     Mark said “Baby, you should have woken me.”

     “No,” she answered. “I very gently took your hand and placed in on my naked breast. The warmth from your hand comforted me, and helped me drift back to sleep. I liked the way it felt.

     “Have I ever told you my biggest regret in life?”

     Mark said “No.”

     “My biggest regret is that we waited so long to meet. I hear you talk about your childhood, and the adventures you had growing up, and it makes me a little bit sad that I wasn’t there to share them all with you.”

     He kissed her. Then he said “All of my adventures from now on won’t be just mine. They’ll be ours. Anything we do from now on, we’ll do together. And when we remember them, we’ll remember them together.”

     “Honey, I know we’re busy with everything we need to do, but I want to learn how to dance.”

     He laughed out loud. “You already know how to dance.”

     “No,” she said. “I want to learn to dance close, like they do in the old movies. When people held each other, like it meant something. Like it was part of making love. I want to dance like Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.”

     Mark knew of Hannah’s passion for watching old movies from the 1940s. He didn’t share her passion for the films, but his passion for her held no bounds.

     He asked “You wouldn’t be embarrassed for the other dancers to see us making love on the dance floor?”

     “Oh, no, not at all.”

     “Would you be embarrassed for the stars to watch us making love while they twinkle above us?”

     Hannah giggled, and stood up instead of answering. She slowly unbuttoned her pajama top and let it drop into the grass behind her. Then she took off the pajama pants and stood there for a moment. She knew that Mark enjoyed looking at her naked body.

  
  Mark marveled at her and the way she glowed a fiery orange in the moonlight. Even in the two years since he’d first made love to this beauty, he was still amazed that a woman as perfect as Hannah had chosen him to spend her life with.

     They made love long into the night, then pulled the quilt over themselves and drifted into a peaceful slumber. Regardless of the trials their future held for them, at this place, and at this time, life couldn’t possibly be better.

-
11-

OCT 10, 2013.       27 MONTHS UNTIL IMPACT

     Hannah sat at the kitchen table with a steaming cup of Hills Brothers Hazelnut, trying to shake off her grogginess. She’d decided to double up on her course load at the community college, which meant she had school four nights a week now. It was started to wear on her a bit, with everything else she had going on in the daytime, but she’d get through it. She was a tough cookie, after all.

     Mark walked up behind her and put his arms around her.

     “Do you realize,” he told her, “that you look better first thing in the morning than most women look at the height of their day?”

     She said “Yeah, yeah… I’ll bet you tell that to all the girls, sailor. And if you wanted some, you should have told me before I dragged my tired self out of bed.”

     He feigned a hurt look. “No, my dear, last night was enough. All I want from you today is your undying love.”

     “Oh. W
ell, you don’t have to compliment me to get that. You already have my undying love.”

     He kissed her and said “I don’t compliment you because I want things. I compliment you because you’re
gorgeous.”

     She smiled, which was
what he really wanted most of all. Then she asked “What’s on your agenda for today?”

     “I’m meeting with the contractor today
about the dormitory. The land should be cleared by the end of the week, and they’ll be able to lay out the buildings. I’m hoping they can start pouring the foundations by the end of next week. At least that’s what I’m going to push them for.

     “How about you?”

     “Sarah’s going to meet me at Walmart and we’ll spend the morning shopping again. And by the way, we’re going to have to rent another storage locker, or start moving that stuff to the mine soon. The locker we’ve got now is so full of Walmart bags it’s getting ready to explode.

     “After that we’re going to hit
a couple of used book stores and start buying books and DVDs. I want to build a small library of five hundred to a thousand books. Seven years is a long time, and if we run out of things to do we’ll drive each other nuts.

     “And I’m thinking five hundred is a good number for our DVD library also. We’ll get something for everybody, including the little munchkins.”

     Mark said “See, I always said your talent for shopping would come in very handy someday.”

     She stuck her tongue
out at him and said “Bite me, sailor.”

     He replied “Another time, maybe. Right now I’ve got to run.”

     The three of them – Mark, Hannah and Sarah, had decided early on that they would keep everything as low profile as possible. If word got arou
nd that someone in south San Angelo was stockpiling supplies, some might want to know why. And if they were curious enough, they might resort to such things as spying, or following the girls out to the mine some day.

     And the last thing they would need when the meteorite became common knowledge would be for a large group of people to know that there was a safe place to take shelter just a few miles away, and that it was fully stocked.

     Of course, Mark would make sure that along with everything else, there were adequate weapons and ammunition to defend their shelter if need be. But they all hoped it wouldn’t come to that.

     So the smart thing, the prudent thing to do, would be to keep it all a big secret. At least for the time being. Only the three of them knew what they were up to.

     Hannah and Sarah had the shopping process down to a science. They went several times a week to stock up on basic essentials, always taking two SUVs, and always parking on opposite ends of the parking lot. And never going to the same store more than once a week.

     They shopped mostly at
Walmart, because it had nearly everything they needed. And because it was big enough to allow them to buy five or six carts full of merchandize over the course of a morning without attracting too much attention.

     Each of the girls carried a pocket-sized spiral notebook on each of their sho
pping sprees. They had sat down together with Mark weeks before to decide what each man, woman and child would need to survive for seven years. Then they added them all together and made a list, in pen, of each item, split evenly between the two notebooks.

     Next to
each entry was a number, written in pencil, that represented the total number of that item they would need to survive for seven years.

     On this particular day, Hannah and
Sarah drove the ninety miles to Junction, each in an SUV, and parked on separate ends of the parking lot. They pretended not to know one another, and were careful not to acknowledge the other’s presence even when passing in the store.

     Hannah got her shopping cart and pulled out her notebook.

     The first item on her list was “Coat, Boys, Size 15: 2.” The two had originally been a four, but had been erased the day before when she’d purchased two of them at the north San Angelo Walmart. She found the item in the coat aisle and placed two of them into her cart.

     The next item was “
Sheet Set- Twin Size: 20.” The original quantity for this item was forty. They were halfway finished purchasing twin bed sheets. She found the linen aisle and put three sheet sets into her cart.

     On the other side of the store, Sarah had her own shopping list. HTH Brand Powdered Chlorine, 3 Gallon Bucket: 40. 
She bought one. Printer Paper- Case: 14. She bought one.  Sock, Men’s, Size 9-11: 420. She bought two packages of six pairs each