Hidden (Final Dawn) Read Online Free PDF Page A

couldn’t go forward, and they couldn’t go back.
         Most people trapped in the traffic jam were committing suicide. The method of choice was by firearm. Fathers were shooting their children in the head as they slept. Or sometimes when they were wide awake. Then they shot their wives. And finally, after they made sure their families were gone, the fathers turned the guns on themselves.
         Those in the traffic jam who had no weapons listened intently for the gunshots to stop. Then they forced open the car doors of the makeshift tombs, took the gun and whatever ammunition they could find, and did the same thing with their own families. It was an ugly and grim sight.
         Frank and Eva, when seeing on CNN that the Mexican border was closed, tried desperately to get ahold of the neighbors and call them back. But it was impossible to get through because the cell towers couldn’t handle the workload. Too many people were sharing last words with loved ones.
         Frank hadn’t seen the Martins since the last block meeting three days before. The Martins lived in one of the corner houses, where the blockade of cars began, and were therefore more vulnerable than those in the center or end of the block. They’d told everyone else their plan was to barricade themselves up in their house and fend off the marauders until the marauders killed each other off. Then, when the Martins ran out of food, they’d start venturing out very carefully and search for provisions.
         Frank went to the Martin house and knocked on the front door. No answer. He yelled out to avoid getting shot. “It’s Frank Woodard. Just checking on you to make sure you’re okay.”
         He peeked in the living room window. The lights were on in the house, which made it very easy to see that there was no one moving around.
         Still, he didn’t want to break a window unnecessarily.
         He went to the garage door and pulled on it to see if it was unlocked. It wasn’t.
         Then he looked in the window on the garage door, and felt nauseous.
         “Sweet mother of God!” he muttered to himself.
         He went back to the front of the house, this time having no qualms about breaking the picture window and crawling into the living room. He ran to the garage and opened the door. He knew it was too late. The smell of the exhaust fumes had dissipated by then. There would be no chance to revive them. They had been dead for hours.
         “Why?” he asked himself, but knowing the answer. Some people just weren’t strong enough. Just weren’t up to the challenge of scratching out a meager existence for seven long cold years. They took the easy way out. He couldn’t blame them. But he wished they had given him a chance to try to talk them out of it.
         They all sat in the family car together, the four of them, with the windows rolled down, as they ran the car until it ran out of gas. Slowly relieving their anxiety. Coaxing them to sleep. A little bit of coughing, then blackness. All in all, a relatively painless way to go.
         He looked into the back seat. The two daughters, ages ten and twelve, were holding hands. In the front seat, Ed and Linda Martin were doing the same. Linda had an open Bible in her lap. She’d been reading scripture aloud to them in the last minutes.
         Frank turned away. He’d come back in a few days and drag the bodies out to the back yard. There was no hurry. They were frozen solid already.
         He looked around the garage for things that would come in handy. Things that would help he and Eva, and some of the others, to survive.
         In the corner he found two new 60 gallon garbage containers, stacked one inside the other. He looked at them. Never used. They’d come in handy to hold snow from the back yard, to drag into the house for melting and boiling in their fireplace.
         He dragged the trash cans into the Martin’s pantry and scrounged