He quickly did as she asked, placing the tray next to the barbecue.
“Now my hands are free, let me see my handsome nephew,” she said, taking the baby from Rosie's arms. “I've missed you buddy. We'll be home soon,” she said, snuggling his head.
Megan looked around. “Where's Duke? I thought he would’ve greeted us.”
As if on cue, Duke popped his head out the door. Megan smiled and squatted down to greet him. He ambled over and waited for her to rub his ears.
“We've missed you, big guy. We can't wait for you to come home,” she told him. The dog wagged his tail in response. He was happy to be wherever his people were.
“All okay at the house?” Willow asked.
“Yep, all good,” Megan told her.
Once they all settled down about four years ago, Wyatt had begged Willow to stay close to him. Megan knew it was his way of protecting his brother's children and looking after his wife. They bought a large property, divided it in two and built Willow a house. They were neighbors, but still had their privacy. It made Rosie's visits much easier.
“Are you ready for your first day?” Tara asked Willow.
Willow smiled. “I am crazy nervous to start teaching again, but my job will put me in the same school as JJ. I'll get to be close to him and make some money,” she laughed.
Megan went inside to help Rosie with the meal prep. Brenda and Albert were in the kitchen, chopping vegetables in peaceful harmony. Despite their outward appearances, each with matching frowns, Megan could see they were very happy. Albert groaned on occasion, mumbling about something. Brenda would shush him and they carried on.
It wasn't long before their meal was ready. The kids set the table. Everyone took a seat at the long table set up outside. Ryland had arrived only moments before the meal was served.
“I will never miss a meal,” he joked. He’d grown into a fine young man that would make Jack very proud. He bore a strong resemblance to his father as well. Megan got teary-eyed watching him play with little Chase knowing that one day, he’d be a fantastic father, like his dad.
Once the plates were filled, Wyatt stood, holding up his glass of wine. “I know everyone is busy and I want to thank you for making the trip out here. I hope we can do this more often than once every five years,” he joked, earning a chuckle from his rapt audience. “We all went through some pretty terrible things back then, but I have to say, I wouldn't have wanted to go through hell with anyone else. Without those hard times, we would’ve never found each other. We’re family by bond. You’re all stuck with me and mine for the rest of your lives!”
Megan smiled through tears of joy. Looking around the table, she wasn't the only one. Everyone stood, raised their glasses and toasted, vowing to all return again in the spring. The meal was filled with lively conversation. They talked about those they’d lost and reminisced about the celebratory meals they had back then. It was full circle to be back at the lodge, sitting at the table once again. As Megan and Wyatt lay in their old bedroom, she couldn't help but think fondly about that first night she’d laid in this bedroom with her sick daughter. This was where it had all began. It felt right to be back here with Wyatt. It was where she belonged. With her family.
End of ‘Dark Revival’
EMP Lodge Series Book Six
I really hope you enjoyed this series. Keep reading to find a sneak peek from my next series, 911.
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Grace Hamilton is the prepper pen-name for a bad-ass, survivalist momma-bear of four kids, and wife to a wonderful husband. After being stuck in a mountain cabin for six days following a flash flood, she decided she never wanted to feel so powerless or have to send her kids to bed hungry again. Now she lives the prepper lifestyle and knows that if SHTF or TEOTWAWKI happens, she’ll be ready to help protect and provide for her family.
Combine this survivalist mentality with a vivid imagination (as well as a slightly unhealthy day dreaming habit) and you get a prepper fiction author. Grace spends her days thinking about the worst possible survival situations that a person could be thrown into, then throwing her characters into these nightmares while trying to figure out "What SHOULD you do in this situation?"
It’s her wish that through her characters, you will get to experience what life will be like and essentially learn from their mistakes and experiences, so that you too can survive!
You can also follow Grace on Facebook, Goodreads and GraceHamiltonBooks.com
BLURB
911 operator Jim Parker wants—more than anything—to be useful again. When a catastrophic EMP strikes, and he’s the last person a kidnapped girl speaks to before the lines go dead, he knows he can’t let her down. Especially when the circumstances are so similar to his own daughter’s disappearance. With the world falling apart around him, he wants to do nothing more than retreat to his prepper cabin. But with a fresh lead on his daughter, and another innocent girl’s life on the line, the disgraced cop will do everything in his power to track them down.
Finn Meyers has lost Ava, her best, and only, friend in the world, but she knows where the missing young woman might be—and perhaps Parker’s long lost daughter. Now, Parker must form an uneasy alliance and tackle his own internal demons as the two begin a perilous journey that will take them to the headquarters of a mysterious cult in Indiana.
But what they find along the way will shatter all their preconceptions—and threaten the world as they know it. Can a has-been and a has-not save the innocent, and stop a disaster from happening?
Pre-order your copy of Dead Lines here!
EXCERPT
Southern Indiana, 2306 hours
Countdown: 25 seconds until Event.
James Parker rubbed the sandy grit out of his eyes and stared at the monitors in front of him. Three screens—low light, supposedly easy on the eyes—sat at his station along with a computer, telephone, and emergency communications radio. But he was suffering from a hangover headache pounding dully behind his temples, and it hurt to use his eyes, even in such dim lighting.
His hand, big and calloused, massaged a five o’clock shadow rapidly heading towards full-on homeless scruff. He wanted another Vicodin, but had promised himself not to take too many at work. Mostly, he kept that promise. Mostly.
The light in the room was muted, more a soft ambience with the illumination designed to be easy on an operator’s eyes, and the soft glow of computers reflected like silvered mirrors from each station. From all around him, the white noise of the call center was a light murmur of background conversations punctuated by the alerts of incoming calls. Parker leaned back in his comfortable chair and eyed the clock.
Fifteen minutes to quitting time.
He lifted a hand to Kevin Oaks in a lazy gesture of greeting as the man, his relief, came in through the door of the “vault” and meandered towards the coffee maker on the table in the corner.
Right behind him, though, Parker’s supervisor Annie Klein burst through the door, resembling a squat lead ball fired from a musket. An old, not well taken care of musket. Her arms, pudgy bowling pins topped by raptor claws of fingers, clutched her iPhone and a thick pile of official manila folders.
Avoiding eye contact, Parker sat up and spun around to more fully face his row of monitors. His conversations with the indefatigable Ms. Klein inevitably ended in a poor fashion. He’d already earned two written warnings for insubordination, and HR had informed the union that he was currently under investigation. Yay.
He couldn’t afford to lose another job. His pension and retirement benefit
s were closely tied to his employment with the city. After how he’d left the department, getting fired from this job would vastly reduce his options. Besides, when the factories had closed down and moved to Mexico, they’d taken the greater part of employment options with them. Try as he might, he couldn’t see himself working as a barista, jumping to fetch absurd coffees for uppity IT techs half his age.
He sighed. “Because I’m old,” he muttered.
An indicator light blinked on. He moved his foot and nudged the pedal, opening the line.
“911,” he said into his headset mic. “What is the nature of your emergency?”
“Please help!” a young woman’s voice cried into the line. “Please help, something horrible is going to happen!”
“Calm down, miss,” he said. “Let me help you.” He’d taken enough calls by now to know whether it was the real thing or not. This felt real.
Automatically, his voice went down a register, sliding from gravely baritone to an almost basso profundo. It was a habit left over from working domestic disputes and suicide interventions as a law enforcement officer. It helped in his new career.
He went on, “I need your name, ma’am.”
His eyes went to his screen and he quietly cursed. She was on a cell; the caller locator software had the 812 area code, but that was it so far. He could have figured that much out on his own by her southern Indiana accent alone. Go Hoosiers, he thought.
“They’re going to do something at Stapleton Mall, the Church!” the girl half-sobbed.
He winced internally at the location, the reminder of his daughter, but pushed the feeling away quickly. He possessed an instinct, a residue left over from working patrol. This girl was fighting to hold it together; he could hear it in the timbre of her voice. She wanted to be brave, she was fighting to be brave, but she was utterly terrified.
“They’ve already killed a girl... I guess you’d call them a cult,” she went on. “But the Church kidnapped me, and Casey, Jesus, they killed Casey!” The words burned through the signal into his ear and he heard the raw anguish and terror in her voice.
Parker’s stomach clenched. This was no hoax.
He eyed the caller ID screen—nothing. Goddamn satellites. He frowned. He inhaled through his nose, calming himself. Since Sara had disappeared, such actions were only effective at work. Outside of the call center, it took Ativan, 4mgs at a time, to calm him. Usually with a Steel City Lager chaser. Sometimes something stronger.
“Tell me your name,” he repeated. His voice remained steady, calm. He might be all this girl had until he could dispatch officers to her 20. He didn’t want to fail her. Didn’t want to fail another girl the way he’d failed Sara.
“It’s Ava,” she choked out. “It’s Ava Tablot—”
The line went dead.
Everything went dead.
“No! No, no!” he shouted, turning towards the screen. “Hello? Ava, hello!”
He was sitting in the dark. Not the low illumination ambience he was used to, but dark. Every light in the room was out, all screens dead, overheads down, his headset utterly silent. He felt frustrated rage building up in him.
“Goddamn,” he swore.
He began breathing faster as he thought about that crying girl out there, alone. Unbidden, tears of impotence burned the backs of his eyes. He scowled, almost snarled, and pushed everything back. Why hasn’t the auxiliary power kicked on? he suddenly wondered.
“Why hasn’t the auxiliary power kicked on?” he bellowed.
He heard the two other 911 operators who were sitting beside him and still on shift also cursing. No one answered his question. In front of him, set off to the side since it was never used, the back-up ham radios kicked on. They were old redundancy systems, designed for use during cell tower incapacitation by inclement weather. With them suddenly being used... well, if he’d needed more proof that the shit had surely hit the fan, this by God was it.
“Able Seven,” a patrolman Parker knew as Mark Denham said into his radio. “Be advised, Dispatch, we have complete power outages in my vicinity. Stoplights went out—I need Fire & Rescue to Harp and Neilson Avenues. Multiple MVAs; multiple vehicle versus pedestrian!”
Parker knew Denham. He was a 12-year veteran, calm and collected under pressure. He sounded more than excited, more than under pressure. He sounded shook. One of the other operators took the call and began trying to roll Fire & Rescue.
“We’ve got a, wait… Jesus Christ!” another officer broke in. “We’ve got a plane down on Baker and Freemont! It just slid into a row of houses! Everything’s burning!” The line clicked off, and for a moment there was silence. Then the officer clicked over again, his voice hard and flat. “Dispatch,” he said. “We need everyone. I’ve got six large residences fully engulfed. There are people trapped; I can hear them screaming from here.”
Like a dam breaking, more calls began coming in. Just like that, in a handful of seconds, the system overloaded and Parker realized that the city was done. Traffic lights being out were one thing, but a plane down? That meant only one thing: an EMP detonation. It was no longer about his little local 911 sub-station in a middle-sized suburb north of Louisville; this situation was going to be managed at State level now, or not at all. At least until FEMA rolled in.
There were not enough available officers to handle this kind of volume. The ones off duty were most likely busy scrambling to protect their families. When the officers came in, if they came in (because if this was Katrina level bad, they might not, he realized), it’d be to find themselves under a unified emergency command system.
And one girl, lost and crying on the phone with no GPS lock, was not going to get help. In the big picture, she wasn’t even going to matter. He’d failed her. Just like he’d failed Sara. That rage—that old red rage that burned hot, the one he’d tried to kill with Ativan and Zoloft and Pendleton drunk neat—stirred up in him, and he was galvanized.
“Think, goddamnit, think,” he told himself.
His eyes rapidly adjusted to the dark; probably because his pupils were already blown up big from the opiates, he thought with a touch of self-recrimination. He had no way to find her. Ava, he told himself. Her name is Ava, she’s not a problem, she’s a girl, and she needs me.
What did he know? What had he learned during that call?
She was a Hoosier, born and bred by that accent. He knew her area code, though that was a pretty open-ended clue. But what he really knew, the thing that shook him in his belly, was that he knew the Stapleton Mall area very well. Sara had been involved there, and emergency or not, this was the closest thing to a clue about her disappearing he’d had in a long while.
They’d kidnapped girls, Ava had said. Maybe murdered one. When a teenage girl went missing, there was a pretty short list of possibilities. When they disappeared in the vicinity of known kidnappers, the list got shorter.
He knew what he had to do.
And with that simple certainty of purpose, he felt something inside him shift. Something that had lain dormant since Sara had disappeared, something withered from the pills, a thing beaten silent by the accidental shooting of that boy and the end of his law enforcement career and by his wife leaving—by every shitty thing that’d stacked up in his life.
All of that fell away for a moment and a part of who he was at his core, a part marginalized and smothered, stirred. It twisted and merged with something else that he’d suppressed; a thing called hope. Hope for answers about Sara.
And there was something else.
Something secret, something he hadn’t shared with anyone except one person, and only in passing, during the mandatory psychologist interview he’d undergone after the shooting. He was ready for something like this, ready for things to fall apart. The doctor, an ex-cop with knowing eyes and a firm manner, had gently chastised him for it at the time.
Told him prepping for the end, for doomsday, and the whole survivalist shtick, in fact, was his way of compensating for how much his ow
n life was spiraling out of control. The guns, the meds, the gear, all of it just a big security blanket to sooth his battered psyche.
“Jim,” the doctor had said, voice grave and more than a bit scholarly. “There is no end of the world; this is just a manifestation of your grief. The world is not going to end.”
“Who’s compensating now, Doctor?” Parker whispered softly, and then he made for the door.
He came up short as Shift Supervisor Klein stepped into his path, a scowl on her overly made up face.
“Where in the hell are you going, Parker?” she demanded. “Everything falls apart and you want to take off? I don’t think so.”
He resisted the strong urge to just walk through her and out the door.
“It’s not like that,” he said. “There’s been an EMP detonation. Communications are going to have to be brought online from outside the area. We won’t be up and running for, hell, possibly days.”
“You are a municipal employee,” she shot back. He could almost literally see her warming up to the ass-chewing she was about to unleash. “We are in a state of emergency and I haven’t released you.”
“No state of emergency has been initiated,” he said, forcing himself to remain calm.
Truth was, he was starting to crave his Ativan. He usually popped one as soon as he clocked out, for the drive home. It was quitting time and his body wanted its fix.
He inhaled and continued. “It’s quitting time and my relief is here. Unless we get word otherwise in the next few moments, I have something to take care of.”
“I thought you didn’t have any family,” she said.
The bitch had almost smiled when she gave him that shot. He felt his heartrate speed up at the dig. He willed himself to remain calm. As they said: Serenity now, he thought.
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