Read Online Final Dawn: Escape From Armageddon by Darrell Maloney - Free Book Online Page B

them about the ethics of gathering provisions and supplies from a desolate world.
         “Wouldn’t that be looting?” Sarah had asked.
         Hannah responded first. “But who would you be looting from? I mean, if we were the only people alive for hundreds of miles in any direction, and the owners of the stores were all dead, who exactly would we be looting from?”
         Bryan, in his teen years, had kicked around the idea of going to college and majoring in theology, then becoming a minister. He never did it, because by the time he graduated from high school he was tired of studying and wanted to enjoy life a bit.
         Still, he was more deeply religious than any of the other three, and they looked to him for guidance.
         “I would think that God would forgive us. If he allows us to survive, I would think he’d want us to help repopulate his earth. I don’t think he’d want us to starve to death by ignoring things that were readily at hand, just because they once belonged to someone else. Especially if they were now dead.”
         It was after that conversation that Bryan decided to go to a local commercial driving school. He signed up for a twelve week course to learn to drive a tractor trailer, and to get his commercial driver’s license.
         It would be useful after the breakout, he explained to the others, because then he could drive a truck to area supermarkets and department stores to collect supplies and food.
         And it would also solve another problem they had been wrestling with.
         They determined early on that the girls’ method of stocking up on clothing and other supplies worked fine for blue jeans and blankets. But one of their biggest requirements would be for food.
         And eight shopping carts of food each day from Walmart wouldn’t provide enough food for forty people for seven years.
         No, they needed a bigger plan to collect their food stores.
         They struggled for weeks for a solution to this dilemma. They had less than two years to go now, and the longer they waited the harder it would be.
         Then Bryan came up with an idea.
         “There’s an old feed store four miles west of here, on the other side of Highway 83. It has a big ‘For Sale or Lease’ sign on it. What if we leased that building and set up a phony business in it? We could say we were a food distributor for some of the area churches. That we supplied the food and supplies for all of their summer camps and year-round retreats. There are a lot of those going on in this area, so it would be believable.
         “Then once we had a business license, we could set up an account with one of the big food distribution companies. Like Symco, or U.S.A. Foods. We’d be able to buy food by the truckload instead of the grocery cart. And they’d deliver it.
         “And we wouldn’t have to worry about word getting around that we were putting all of this food into the mine. Because the drivers would never see the mine. We’d have them deliver it two or three days a week to the feed store.
         “And the other two or three days a week, I could load it up onto our own truck and drive it over to the mine.”
         None of the group could see any flaws in Bryan’s plan. So they agreed to it.
         The next day Bryan talked by phone to a commercial property company out of San Antonio, which was about a hundred miles to the southeast. He was interested in leasing the property, he said, but first he wanted to find out a little bit about it.
         Two days after that Hannah and Bryan met with a company representative at the feed store.
         They toured the old store, and were happy to see that it met most of their needs. An overhead door at the front of the building and a truck pit, that would allow a tractor trailer a place to off-load. Two thousand square feet of open floor space. An office area that the girls could furnish and