America Offline (Book 1): America Offline [Zero Day]

by Weber, William H.

  Copyright © 2020 William H. Weber

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the author, except where permitted by law.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or, if real, used fictitiously. Any material resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  eISBN: 978-1-926456-33-1

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Books by William H. Weber

  The Defiance Series

  Defiance: The Defending Home Series

  Defiance: A House Divided

  Defiance: Judgment Day

  The Last Stand Series

  Last Stand: Surviving America’s Collapse

  Last Stand: Patriots

  Last Stand: Warlords

  Last Stand: Turning the Tide

  The Long Road Series

  Long Road to Survival (Book 1)

  Long Road to Survival (Book 2)

  The America Offline Series

  America Offline: Zero Day

  America Offline: System Failure

  America Offline: Citadel

  Dedication

  As solitary a profession as writing is, no author does it alone. A special thanks goes out to my editor RJ, to the amazing beta team for all your valuable feedback and to the readers who make all of this possible.

  Book Description

  A devastating cyber-attack.

  A deadly winter storm.

  And a lone man who will stop at nothing to save his family

  The largest snowstorm in a hundred years is barreling down on the northern United States. When it hits it will bring over a meter of snow and numbing arctic winds.

  Some are prepared. Most are not.

  But something infinitely more dangerous is also on its way—a multi-pronged cyber-attack that will destroy the power grid, crippling the country at the worst possible moment.

  Like millions of others, ex-cop Nate Bauer and his family are bracing for the coming storm, unaware that it will test them in ways they could never have imagined.

  For hidden deep within the malignant code lies an even greater threat. One that holds the potential to destroy America forever.

  In the end, only a single question will matter. When the lights go out for good, who will have what it takes to survive?

  From the Author:

  Before you begin this journey, there’s something you should know. Consider it a warning of sorts. This isn’t a story about Supermen or even Superwomen, the kind you’ve read about before, who consistently make head shots at a mile out and rack up body bags the way Imelda Marcos racked up high-heeled shoes. This is a story about regular folks placed in an unthinkable situation. The enormous stress they encounter as they are forced to navigate from one life-altering decision to another is something I pray none of us will ever have to experience. Some of the folks you’re about to meet are truly prepared. Some think they’re prepared. Some have no idea what’s about to hit them. This is the story of what happens when each of them is put to the test.

  Chapter 1

  Nate Bauer came awake chilled to the bone. Next to him, his wife Amy slept soundly, her chest rising and falling in a slow, steady rhythm. There had once been a time she had insisted on cranking the heat to ungodly levels before bed. But somewhere around her fourth month of pregnancy, that particular pendulum had swung in the opposite direction. She didn’t just like things cool now, she liked them downright cold.

  But this wasn’t cold. This was freezing.

  Nate slipped out of bed and hurried across the icy bedroom floor to the thermostat on the far wall. She must have twisted the knob all the way to the left when he hadn’t been looking. But when he got there he saw he had been wrong. The dial was at eighty degrees. The room should have been closer to a sauna than an ice box. His breath pluming out in white clouds, Nate headed for his cellphone, charging on the nightstand. As he passed the window, frosted over with frozen condensation, he skidded to a stop. A steep pile of snow had built up on the window ledge outside.

  They had been warned about the coming storm. The forecasters had said the Midwest was about to get dumped on. There had even been a few inches of accumulation before heading to bed. Still, the sight before him now was something else. The snow that had fallen overnight had come in feet rather than inches, making it impossible to tell where the lawn ended and the road began. All of that was now a single, amorphous white blob.

  Amy stirred and called him back to bed. Nate went, scooping up his phone with one hand as he pulled the blankets over him with the other.

  “Everything all right?” she asked, squinting away the early morning light.

  “The power’s gone out,” he replied, as calmly as he could.

  She let out a long, tired sigh. “It’s probably the snow.”

  Nate didn’t answer right away. He was checking his phone and quickly noticed two things. The first was that his battery level was at sixty-eight percent. It had been closer to forty percent when he’d gone to bed, which meant it hadn’t been charging long before the power had gone out. But the second thing worried him far more. There were five missed calls from his brother, Evan, an engineer at the local nuclear power plant. He normally gave Nate a heads-up whenever part of the grid went down, so hearing from him wasn’t completely out of the ordinary, except his calls had started at two-fifteen in the morning and kept coming every forty-five minutes till now. That was strange. Very strange.

  Nate flicked the screen with his thumb, pulling up his texts. There too, he saw his brother had been trying to get a hold of him. As if in slow motion, his gaze passed over a terrifying message all in caps.

  POWER OUT. SUSPECTED CYBER-ATTACK.

  Evan’s message had erased all doubt. This was no ordinary power outage. The United States was under attack. But it was the sentence after that which sent long, skeletal fingers dancing up the back of Nate’s neck. And he understood in that instant the situation wasn’t only serious, their lives were in imminent danger.

  Chapter 2

  Day 1

  12 Hours Earlier

  The snowstorm that would go down as the worst in over a century began life as little more than a light dusting.

  Nate watched as one of those white flakes seesawed through the night sky and settled on the gas pump before him.
The coming blizzard was forecast to cover a huge swath of the country in several inches of snow and Nate wanted to make sure his pickup was filled to the brim before that happened.

  The sign on the edge of Byron, Illinois, boasted a population of three thousand, but Nate knew the real number was far lower than that. The economic downturn in the previous decade had driven many folks to the nearby city of Rockford, and in a few rare cases, it had even driven some to take their chances in Chicago.

  Most of those who’d stuck it out were employed at the Byron nuclear power plant, situated a few miles south of town. It was one of three plants in the area that not only powered the Windy City, but much of the state. And in another life, the power plant was also where Nate had worked. Head of cyber-security, that was his job title—at least for a while it had been, until he had pissed off the wrong people and found himself left scrambling to feed his family. As far as he saw it, corporate greed had been at the heart of the problem. But why drudge up the past when all it does is leave you seething over the injustice of it?

  A sudden blast of cold wind slapped him back to the present. Nate reached for his wallet, removed his Amex card and slid it into the terminal. Right away, the display flashed an angry error message at him. He removed the card and reseated it, only to find the same thing. Staring around, he saw he wasn’t alone. Others appeared to also be struggling. Like him, they too would soon be buried under a few feet of snow and were aiming to stock up.

  “These things working or not?” he asked a man in a baseball cap standing next to a Subaru.

  Subaru Guy shrugged. “Gotta pay inside, I guess.”

  Nate did just that, heading inside to find a line much longer than he had anticipated. Bundled in people’s arms were candles, batteries, canned goods and in a few cases satchels of firewood.

  This was the countryside, where folks were usually more prepared for the occasional act of God than their more urban counterparts. But even here, signs of complacency were showing themselves.

  Nowadays, most everyone knew the average person’s home contained roughly three days’ worth of supplies. And that was assuming they hadn’t put off a trip to the grocery store in order to binge on the latest Netflix series. In that regard, Nate was something of an anomaly. Perhaps it was his background in security or the fact that he was now somewhere in his mid-thirties or maybe that his wife, Amy, was now eight and a half months pregnant with their first child. Any way you sliced it, three days’ worth of supplies was not nearly enough. Three weeks of food and water, on the other hand, made far more sense. Why not more? Well, as he saw it, only in the most dire circumstances would any emergency last longer than that. And if the worst happened, they could always stretch what they had left.

  He’d tried convincing his younger brother, Evan, an engineer over at Byron Nuclear, to follow suit, but still hadn’t managed to get much through that thick titanium skull of his. Hard to understand why, given his brother and his sister-in-law, Lauren, had twin boys to feed. Maybe if the coming storm was as bad as the weather lady said it would be, Evan might just come to see the error of his ways.

  When the man before Nate finished, Nate stepped up to the cashier.

  “Hi, Nate,” the young woman said, smiling. She was young with fine electric-blue hair and pale sweaty skin.

  “Evening, Candice. Busy night.”

  She glanced down at his empty hands resting on the counter. “No candles or firewood? You know the news says it’s gonna be the biggest storm in a hundred years.”

  He nodded and grinned, dimples forming in his cheeks. “I heard. But I’m already stocked up, thanks. Just need some gas.”

  “Machines are down, I’m afraid,” she told him, the corners of her mouth dipping slightly.

  Nate pulled out his wallet and fished out his debit card.

  “Sorry, Nate. Cash only tonight. Seems everything’s on the fritz, doesn’t it?”

  He frowned. Cash was precisely the thing Nate was light on. He was starting to wonder if he was not nearly as prepared as he imagined he was. The lure of earning credit card points had slowly weaned him off of cash. Ninety-nine percent of the time that was just fine, maybe even smart. But clearly not so fine at the present moment. Nate plucked a lone five-dollar bill from his wallet and handed it over. “The old girl’s thirsty, but I suppose this’ll have to do for now.” He glanced over his shoulder. “Maybe I’ll try the Texaco on my way home.”

  Candice shook her head. “My friend Billy works there and he texted saying they got the same problem as us. Just saying.”

  Nate nodded, thanked her and left.

  Five bucks would barely wet his truck’s voracious beak. By nature, he had always been a pretty positive guy. Glass half-full type. The chances were good, of course, that none of this was a big deal. Once the storm passed and the bank machines came back online, he’d duck out and get the old girl squared away. There would always be tomorrow or the day after, he told himself reassuringly. It was a message steeped in a lifetime of wisdom and experience. Life in America was safe and reinforced by layers of security and redundancy. That was why major catastrophes were rare and when they did strike, they were quickly dealt with.

  Nate filled up the truck as far as he could and headed home, plowing through a cold northern wind already swirling with snow.

  Chapter 3

  Nate pulled into the driveway of the bungalow he shared with his wife Amy and killed the engine. He was about to leave when his eyes flit to the rearview mirror. There he caught sight of a man he hardly recognized. The shaved head and goatee looked familiar enough, but not the crows’ feet forming at the corners of his eyes nor the deep lines etched across his forehead. Nate had recently celebrated his thirty-sixth birthday and couldn’t remember the last time he had taken a good long look at himself.

  Maybe for good reason.

  Like it or not, he was beginning to show early signs of wear and tear. At six-two and two hundred and ten pounds, most assumed Nate was some kind of narco cop—a suggestion that always made him laugh, but also one that wasn’t entirely absurd. Way back, he had enrolled with the Chicago PD to become a cop and after going through the CPD Recruit Academy had soon been patrolling some of the city’s most dangerous neighborhoods.

  And yet the powerful urge in him to help make local communities safer had slowly been eroded in the face of all the suffering and needless violence he’d witnessed in those early days. Poor people murdering each other over the most trivial of offences. It was hard to process a nine-year-old shooting his friend over a comic book, not to mention the hardened criminals stalking the streets with near impunity. Once known widely as the Windy City, Chicago had recently earned a new name: Chi-raq, one that compared parts of the metropolis to a war-torn country. For reasons that were hard to fathom, the community he’d sworn to protect and serve was busy tearing itself apart.

  It was around then he had realized big-city life with all of its dysfunction and rampant crime was not for him. So Nate had left law enforcement and, more importantly, he had left Chi-raq.

  He and his new wife had resettled seventy miles west in Byron. It was here that he had spent time working as head of cyber-security for Byron Nuclear. Following a dispute, the company had let him go and Nate decided it was time to start his own all-purpose security firm. The company’s original role had been in consulting, advising homeowners on how to set up surveillance around their properties. But this new career wasn’t all about burglaries, since farmers made up the bulk of the folks around Byron. For them, surveillance was just as much about protecting livestock from wolves and other predators as it was keeping out burglars.

  It hadn’t been long before he’d begun getting calls from Rockford, a nearby city of a hundred and fifty thousand. The customers there weren’t simply looking for alarm systems either. They were looking for an ex-cop willing to help investigate a delicate problem or two they were having. Nate certainly had the background. A black belt in judo and a brown belt in aikido meant he was j
ust as handy with or without a gun. As it turned out, chasing down cheating spouses was a heck of a lot more lucrative than anything else he’d done to date.

  Nate was out of the truck and halfway to his front door when he felt his knee begin to ache. He swallowed down the pain and hurried through the blowing snow, distinctly aware of his knee’s predictive power over the coming storm. But that particular discomfort had nothing to do with growing older. It was a carryover from the terrible sports injury he’d suffered years ago in college, one that had killed his dream of joining the Olympic judo team. Although the crash itself had been over in a matter of moments, it had forever altered the path of his life. That was the true face of danger, wasn’t it? Sneaking up when you were least prepared to face it.

  Chapter 4

  Amy was waiting for him at the door, her arms crossed over her swollen belly, a worried look plastered all over her face. At nearly six feet, she was definitely on the tall side. She’d been a captain on her college volleyball team. Blonde silky hair ran down just past her shoulders and whenever she turned her head it seemed to flutter like in one of those shampoo commercials.

  Nate touched her belly and gave her a kiss, ignoring a fresh stab of pain in his knee. “How’s my little girl doing?” He knew the reason for her concern. It blew in with him as he opened the door.

  “She’s been kicking up a storm,” Amy said, no pun intended, laying her hand over his, watching as Nate shut the door behind him and stomped his feet on the mat. “Speaking of storms, I see it’s already started.”

  Whipping snow was beginning to choke off any view of the outside world. The sight had an almost claustrophobic quality to it, given that sometime over the next twenty-four to forty-eight hours, they would be buried in their home. And when it was done, the only thing left would be to dig themselves out.