Alone: Book 1: Facing Armageddon

By

Darrell Maloney

Copyright 2014 by Darrell Maloney

-1-

     Dave couldn’t get the tune out of his head. He’d heard it all morning long, off and on, playing quietly in the back of his skull. And it was driving him crazy.

     Oh, it wasn’t unpleasant. It was a happy little ditty. At least it sounded that way. It sounded more like sunshine and smiles, rather than rainclouds and foreboding.

     Finally, he’d had enough.

     “Okay, let’s play a game,” he announced while looking in the
rearview mirror at Lindsey and Beth.

     “I’ll hum you a tune, and the first one to guess the tune gets a candy bar when we get to the airport.”

     Sarah looked at him from the passenger seat. With
that
look.

     “Excuse me, mister? You’re going to get the girls all hyped up on sugar just before I take them on a four hour plane ride?”

     “Not both of them, honey. Just the one who guesses the name of the song.”

     “Uh… no. If that song is still bugging you, just hum it. If any one of us guesse
s it, you can buy each of us a cinnabon.”

     The girls laughed. Beth gave Lindsey a high five
. Lindsey said, “All right! Go, Mom!”

     Dave coughed. At first he had no words.

     Then he found some, and stated the obvious.

     “Why is it okay to get all three of you hyped up on sugar but not okay to do it to just one of you?”

     “Because you know I have a thing for cinnabons. And I’m the mom. So that makes me the boss.”

     Lindsey broke out in uncontrollable laughter from the back seat, and Beth said, “Ooooohhh, Dad, you just got
owned.
”

     “I don’t know if it’s worth it. I mean, those things aren’t cheap, you know.”

     “Oh, we know, don’t we girls?”

     Two heads nodded up and down behind her.

     “But, Dave, they are soooo worth the price. And I’ll give you a bite. And think how sweet I’ll taste when you kiss me goodbye.”

     Beth made a gagging sound.

     “Besides, if you want us to help you with that song, you have to pay the piper. It’s only fair. And if you don’t, it’ll continue to drive you crazy for days. Maybe even the whole week we’re gone. And we’d feel so bad for you if that happened.”

     “Yeah, you’re just oozing with sympathy for my plight.”

     Sarah smiled and blew him a kiss. She was even more gorgeous than the day they’d met thirteen years before. It suddenly dawned on him that he was an incredibly lucky man, to have such a beautiful wife and family. And that the price of three cinnabons wasn’t that great, in the grand scheme of things.

     In other words, he played right into Sarah’s hands
. She knew he would, as soon as she let the kiss fly.

     “Okay, here goes.”

     Dave started humming the tune that had played in his mind a thousand times since the previous evening.

     It took the three of them no more than ten notes. They’d have been “Name That Tune” champions in another era.

     All three of them blurted out, almost simultaneously, “It’s a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood.”

     Then Dave felt incredibly stupid.

     “Of course. How could I have not known that? The old Mr. Rogers theme song. Sheesh! Now I really feel dumb.”

     Sarah said, “Did you know that Fred Rogers was a Green Beret in
Vietnam, and wore his red sweater to hide all of his tattoos?”

     Dave scoffed.

     “Where did you hear that?”

     “On the internet. Why?”

     “That story’s been going around for years. It was debunked a long time ago. Mr. Rogers was a fine man, but he was never a Green Beret.”

     “Oh, yeah? Where did you hear that?”

     “On the internet.”

     It was too much for Lindsey.

     “Gee whiz, would you two stop believing what you read on the internet? Nearly all of it is garbage.”

     She turned to her little sister.

     “Do we have to teach these old people
everything?
”

     Beth said nothing but nodded her head decisively. She was in firm agreement.

     Dave was a man of his word, and after the family checked in at the ticket kiosk and Sarah and the girls got their boarding passes, they made a beeline to Cinnabon.

     “Daddy, are you going to walk us to the gate?”

     “No, honey, I can’t go through security without a boarding pass, so I’ll walk you as far as I can and then you can give me a great big hug and a kiss.”

     “I wish you could come with us.”

     “I know, sugar. I wish I could too. But with two of the guys being sick at work, they just can’t let me take vacation right now. Uncle Tommy will understand, and we can go fishing another time. And you’ll be so busy helping Aunt Susan get everything ready for the wedding, you won’t even have time to miss me.”

     “Bet I will!”

     Sarah looked at him longingly. They were going to be apart for their twelfth anniversary. It would be the first one they’d missed.

     It was as if he could read her mind.

     “We’ll do something special when you get back, I promise. We’ll get a sitter and go spend the weekend at the lake. Just the two of us.”

     “I’d like that.”

     He walked the three special ladies in his life to the TSA checkpoint and got his hugs and kisses.

     He held Sarah close
and told her he loved her.

     Little Beth rolled her eyes and said, “No mush, you two.”

     Dave paid her no mind. He looked Sarah in the eyes and said, “It’ll seem like forever before I see you again.”

     Neither of them had a clue how true those words would be.

-2-

     Dave was a builder by trade, but it was the off season, so he’d taken a second job to help pay the ever-growing expenses of feeding a family of four, and preparing for an uncertain future. They lived in a suburb on the northern outskirts of San Antonio. And even though San Antonio had moderate weather most of the year, it was cold enough in January and February to bring new house construction to a standstill.

     However, cabinet building went on all year around.

     Dave’s second job was at a small cabinet shop. He made some of the cabinets he might later be installing in some of the new homes he built. In fact, the owner of the cabinet shop, Roger Hudson, had been a close friend for years. He made a point to buy Roger’s cabinets whenever he could. They were well made and reasonably priced. And he was a big believer in buying local whenever he could.

     Roger offered Dave the entire day to send his girls up north to
Kansas City. It was the least he could do, he said. After all, they were short handed and in a pinch to complete a couple of contracts by deadline. And Dave had volunteered to stay behind and miss his sister in law’s wedding to help out.

     Dave said no thanks to the full day off. The girls weren’t due to land in
Kansas City until 6:10 p.m. due to a long layover at DFW. He could work the entire afternoon and still make it home in time for their phone call. He was looking forward to hearing all about the trip. It was six year old Beth’s first time on an airplane, and she’d been talking about little else for weeks. Dave hoped she had a pleasant time, because he knew she’d go into great detail to tell him everything about it.

     So working half a day was no big deal, really, and certainly no inconvenience.
Dave liked this kind of work. He’d always been good with his hands, able to fashion pretty much anything out of anything else. Sarah joked that he was a lot like
MacGyver
from the old television series.

     “If anyone could build a submarine out of a couple of paperclips, it’s you.”

     He’d taken it as a compliment. But he was indeed one of those men who looked at a pile of junk and saw promise from it. So this job suited him very well.

     The job also paid well, so it aided Dave and Sarah in another way that no one else knew about. Because they kept it a closely guarded secret.

     Dave and Sarah were preppers. Had been for several years. They were convinced that something catastrophic was about to befall mankind, and would wipe out most of the world’s population. And make it extremely difficult for the survivors to get by.

     It started one night in 2010. They were sitting on the couch eating popcorn and flipping channels when they stumbled across a documentary about the Mayans. It piqued their curiosity, and they watched it to the end.

     The narrator said that the Mayans predicted the end of the world on December 21, 2012. He didn’t say how or why the Mayans made that prediction. But he did point out some astounding facts. Like, for example, that the Mayans had identified all the planets, and each of the planets’ moons, without the aid of telescopes. After the program, Dave and Sarah had gone into their back yard and looked up at the sky. They couldn’t tell the planets from the stars. All of them were just points of light. And they couldn’t see any moons at all, save the earth’s own.

     Dave remembered Sarah saying, “How in the hell did they do that?”

     The narrator had offered other information about the Mayans that was equally intriguing. They knew how to forecast earthquakes and tidal waves.

     Dave had said, “That can’t be. Scientists today can’t even do that, and they have all kinds of fancy equipment.”

     But the pair was curious enough to do their own research, and they found that most of what the narrator had said was true. The Mayans discovered the planets and their moons without telescopes. They did indeed leave behind schedules of coming tidal waves and earthquakes. And they did indeed make such predictions without the aid of any type of machinery.

     The narrator was wrong about one thing, however. The Mayans never said the world was going to end on December 21, 2012.

     What the Mayans actually said was that the “final period of progress” would begin on that date.

     Scientists had been debating for a very long time exactly what the Mayans meant by “the last period of progress.”

     Dave and Sarah wondered too. And that led to even more research. After hundreds of hours on line and at the local library, they believed that they’d finally discovered what the Mayans meant.

     Another thing that intrigued scientists and archaeologists about the Mayans was their success in making other predictions. Predictions that had absolutely nothing to do with earthquakes and tidal waves.

     Rather, these predictions pertained to things like automobiles, helicopters and machines.

     The Mayans spoke of a time in the future when man would travel great distances on wheeled vehicles that would move under their own power. They would also fly, “like great winged birds
in containers of metal” across the oceans to other lands of the world.

     “Wait a minute,” Sarah had said with a shudder. The Mayans were a landlocked society. How did they know about oceans
or tidal waves or airplanes? And how could they possibly know about other lands of the world? This is getting spooky.”

     The Mayans spoke of man building machines that would someday do most of his work for him. But they also cautioned that the survival of machines was subject to the whims of nature.

     Dave and Sarah became convinced that the Mayans’ “last period of progress” would mark the time that all the machines suddenly and permanently stopped working. And they believed it would happen as the result of nature.