Missing (4 page)

     “Come on Lenny. There must be something he’d like to have.”

     “Well, now that I think about it, he did say something awhile back about how nice it would be to have a ham radio. He’s got a lady friend he sees occasionally. Her name is Glenna, and she lives not far from here. I think he wanted to be able to converse with her on the radio.”

     The morning of his birthday, Lenny distracted Marty by taking him into the parking lot to help him change a tire on an abandoned big rig.

     A team of stealthy friends invaded the truck stop in their absence to hook up a shiny new ham radio they’d boosted from the old Radio Shack in Kerrville.

     One of them strung antenna wire to an eighty foot tall billboard behind the truck stop, and the bravest one installed an antenna on the billboard’s top.

     Since that day, Marty had gotten into the habit of calling Glenna each evening to tell her goodnight.

     They’d grown quite close since he’d helped to rescue her from a brutal ex-convict who’d been holding her and her young children as slaves.

     Now most of the people in the compound considered them a couple, although they’d been trying to take it slowly. And to be sure, they had planned a picnic in the woods the following afternoon.

     But this particular afternoon, Marty sat at the manager’s desk, his feet propped up and trying to decide whether he wanted to move over to the couch for a couple of hours’ sleep.

     The radio suddenly sprang to life, startling Marty and almost making him fall back out of the chair.

     There was something in Sami’s voice. An air of urgency.

     Marty knew instantly that something was terribly wrong.

     And he was instantly wide awake and alert.

     “Saint Marty, this is Sami. Can you hear me?”

     Normally he’d have groaned and asked her, “Please don’t call me that.”

     But this time he’d let it fly.

     “This is Marty. What’s wrong, honey?”

     “Marty, Sarah’s missing. No one has seen her since this morning when she went into the woods to pick flowers. Do you have anyone there who can help us search for her?”

     Marty hadn’t known Sarah for long. He hadn’t gotten to know her as well as he did Sami and some of the others. But she struck him as a very responsible woman with a good head on her shoulders.

     Certainly not the type of woman who would just wander off on her own and get lost.

     “Let me round up some volunteers and I’ll be there within an hour. It’ll be dark soon. Do you have enough flashlights and batteries?”

     “We’ve got a few but not enough.”

     “I know where there’s a case of each on a trailer in the yard. Anything else you need?”

     “No, just bodies. Please hurry.”

     “You got it.”

     Marty raced through the place, drafting people as he went. Some of the regulars knew Marty well enough to know he always kept a level head. For him to look so worried told them this was serious.

     Marty’s thoughts echoed Frank’s. He was concerned that with the darkness would come a severe drop in temperatures. And he doubted that Sarah had the training to know how to survive a night alone in the woods.

     Even Lenny, who seldom left the truck stop, climbed into the bed of one of the three pickups that burned rubber out of the parking lot, headed toward the compound.

     The truck stop was completely abandoned, save old Walt, who’d lost a leg in Vietnam and was confined to a wheelchair.

     Even Walt volunteered to help, although he’d have been more a hindrance.

     Marty tried to be gentle, but his words were more blunt than they were intended.

     “I’m sorry, my friend, but you can’t roll yourself through the woods. And the man pushing you can move much faster on his own.”

     Like many older veterans, Walt needed more than anything else to feel included. To be part of the effort.

     So Marty offered him a concession.

     “We need someone to stay back here and hold down the fort,” Marty said.

     “I can handle that.”

     “Good. You’re in charge. We’ll be back when we can.”

Chapter 5

     Major Davis had been flying choppers for the United States Army for many years. Before the freeze he was the personal pilot for the Secretary of the Army, and later the Secretary of Defense.

     They were both dead now, but not because of anything Davis did. Actually, he took great pride in knowing he was never late for a mission, and he flew in all kinds of adverse conditions all over the world.

     That was why they personally selected him.

     Because he was the best.

     Like many others, he resigned his commission when word about Saris 7 leaked out.

     The Army wasn’t his only family, he’d explained. He had another family as well. And he wanted to spend some time with them before they all perished.

     But that was not meant to be.

     On the very day Major Davis signed his papers, the day before he’d become a civilian again, his young daughter died of a massive overdose of sleeping pills.

     She left behind a note saying she didn’t like the idea of freezing to death because of some stupid asteroid. She wanted to leave this life under her own schedule.

     She was only twenty years old.

     His wife, Julie, wailed. She couldn’t understand why anyone she loved would take their own life when there was some chance, any chance, of survival.

     Then, eight days later, she did the same thing.

     With a bottle of pills identical to the ones her daughter used.

     Major Davis no longer had his other family. What he had was a huge hole in his heart.

     And the United States Army.

     The Army welcomed him back, and he’d been through hell with them, both before the impact and during the freeze.

     The thaw brought renewed hope, sure.

     But the stress of losing his family, and all the havoc that Saris 7 had wrought, had taken its toll on his body.

     Davis had assumed that the pains which started in his back and then gravitated to his shoulder were routine. And he could be forgiven in thinking so. Being a helicopter pilot was not unlike a lot of other jobs. Sitting in one place for longs periods of time, using only certain parts of your body to operate controls, while most of the rest of the body sat idle.

     All those things caused limbs to fall asleep, cramps to form, and muscles to ache.

     He asked his co-pilot if he had any ibuprofen on him.

     “No, buddy, I’m sorry. Want me to take the controls?”

     But Davis was Army tough and one of the best. He’d ride it out.

     “Nah, I’m okay. I’ll let you take the return trip.”

     He never stopped to think that this might be something else, something more serious, than just a few aching muscles.

     Colonel Travis Montgomery, chatting amiably in the main compartment with his guests, also had no clue that anything was amiss.

     Montgomery was a top flight chopper pilot himself back in his day.

     He was once called a “hot dog,” and many right-seaters refused to fly with him. They said he was too loose with the safety rules and took too many risks.

     Major Davis was as fearless as Colonel Montgomery. When the colonel heard that Davis was still alive and back in the Army, he wasted no time in recruiting him.

     Now he had a pilot who was gutsy, and who didn’t mind skimming the treetops with the helicopter skids at fifty knots.

     As Montgomery told everyone who questioned the altitude, “Two hundred feet is for sissies and rookies. This is the only way to fly.

     The only problem with flying so low is that there’s little time to react in the event of an emergency.

     Especially in heavy woods, which can be very unforgiving.

     There’s also too little time for the co-pilot to take over the controls if the pilot should suddenly become incapacitated.

     The heart attack came with plenty of warning.

     But Major Davis misread the signs.

     By the time he realized what was really causing the pains across his lower back and shoulder, it was too late.

     He couldn’t call out.

     He couldn’t ask for help.

     He couldn’t ask Captain Julian to take over.

     All he could do was clench his left hand into a fist and clutch it close to his chest.

     And suddenly slump forward against the stick, causing the chopper to nosedive into the ground.

     At fifty knots an hour.

     Military accident investigators never used the term “crashed.”

     They preferred to use the words,
impacted with ground.

     It seemed to somehow sound a bit less… violent.

     The Huey was lighter than some other choppers, but with fuel and bodies totaled more than nine thousand pounds of dead weight.

     And that much weight
impacting with ground
could cause a lot of damage to those bodies.

     Major Davis blacked out from pain before realizing his body was falling forward onto the stick, and taking the bird down with him.

     It happened so quickly that Captain Julian had no time to react. The only response he had time for was saying, “Oh, Jesu…”

     His last word was really only half of one.

     As for the passengers in the back of the chopper, none of them had time to do even that much. One moment they were laughing and conversing.

     The next moment everything was black.

     And they were all changed forever.

     It happened that fast.

Chapter 6

  
 
Frank was sitting alone whe
n
Glenna very timidly approached the control center.

     It wasn’t that she was afraid of Frank, although others claimed he could be a grumpy old man when he wasn’t in a good mood.

     No, Glenna was timid because she was that way by nature, and because she had lived under horrific conditions during and after the freeze.

     Just prior to Saris 7’s collision with the earth, the kind-hearted warden at nearby Eden Federal Correctional Facility opened the gates to the prison and set the inmates free.

     “If we leave them there and abandon them, they’ll be locked in their cells and die of thirst and starvation. I refuse to meet my maker after having been party to the deaths of four hundred men. No matter what they’ve done.”

     The problem was, the warden’s kind heart doomed many of the residents of the nearby town of Eden instead.

     Many of the more brutal inmates of the prison took refuge in the town. If the residents didn’t give up their homes willingly, they were shot dead. Those residents who survived were forced to care for the convicts, by gathering food and water and cooking and cleaning for them.

     Those who refused were beaten or killed, or forced to watch their loved ones tortured before their very eyes.

     And the women suffered an even more horrible fate, forced to accommodate the men sexually in addition to everything else.

     Many of the residents managed to escape from Eden, although most perished while trying to make it to the nearest civilized city a hundred miles away.

     Those who remained led a truly terrible existence for seven and a half long years, until the world thawed again.