Castroville: Countdown to Armageddon: Book 7 Read Online Free

He somehow sensed that Wilford P. was up there in the great beyond watching over him. Rooting for him to do the right thing. That is to say, do the same things that Wilford P. himself would have done. The same way he’d have done them.
         Randy was constantly mindful that he had someone watching his every move, every day and every night.
         It didn’t bother him. Not at all.
         For he didn’t look upon it as an intrusion.
         He looked upon it as a benefit. An insurance policy, of sorts, that would make him think things through before he went off half-cocked on a poorly thought-out plan.
         What he was doing, the line of work he was in, was dangerous. There was no doubt. But as long as he had to impress old Wilford P., he’d take the extra time and precautions he needed to do the job right.
         And he’d pray. Because in his line of work being right wasn’t always enough. Neither was a well thought out plan.
         Some men called it luck. Randy thought luck was all well and good. But he believed there was more at play than just dumb blind luck.
         Randy believed there was a higher power at work. That God had His hand on the shoulder of those who pursued justice and sought to protect those who couldn’t help themselves.
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    -4-
     
         While Ranger Randy galloped down Highway 90 toward Castroville, a small and pathetic creature sat huddled in the back of the giraffe enclosure at the San Antonio zoo sixty miles away.
         Robbie Benton had once been a pursuer of justice too. He, like Randy, wore a badge and swore to protect and serve.  
         Then his mind went south. The stress got to him and he switched sides. He began to believe that his love for another man’s wife was so powerful it gave him license to eschew everything he’d been brought up to believe.
         He was the villain the entire San Antonio Police Department was looking for. He was the one who’d shot their hero. Their golden boy.
         And now he was in hiding, living at the once proud but now abandoned zoo where he used to go as a kid to escape the brutalities of life. Now only one animal remained. But he was as dangerous as any lion or bear. Perhaps even more so. For few other mammals will kill another of their kind, simply out of jealousy or to steal the other’s mate.
         But Robbie would.
         And almost did.
         In Robbie’s twisted mind, he was justified in shooting John Castro. The world had changed drastically since the power grids went out and everything stopped working. Most of the world’s population was dead now. Those who survived lived under a different set of rules. New standards. Standards that made it okay to take what one needed without concern for others.
         Survival of the fittest.
         As a San Antonio cop, Robbie had been told by his superiors not to arrest those caught stealing from the back of trucks or abandoned supermarkets.
         “They’re just trying to survive, like the rest of us,” he was told.
         Sometimes people put two and two together and come up with seven. And that was especially true for people with warped minds, and altered senses of right and wrong.
         Robbie began to believe that if it was okay to steal a case of bottled water to survive, then maybe it was okay to steal weapons as well. If it was okay to take a box of food from a supermarket, then it was okay to take that same box of food from someone else.
         That if it was okay to defend oneself from aggressors and thieves, then maybe it was okay to be that aggressor or thief yourself.
         And from that point, it wasn’t much of a stretch to believe it was okay to just reach out and take whatever you wanted, regardless of who might be hurt by it.
         And if that was true of a case of water or a box of food, then maybe it was also