Nuclear Winter Desolation: Post Apocalyptic Survival Thriller (Nuclear Winter Series Book 5)
Page 24
She shoved Jock forcefully in the chest, causing him to lose his balance. He stepped back a couple of steps until he was near his line of armed SWAT team members. With fire in her eyes, Lindsey followed him, her finger pointing toward his chest as if she were prepared to shove him again. Instead, she caught everyone off guard.
Lindsey abruptly turned and reached for the barrel of one of the deputy’s rifles. He deftly pulled it away, but she wasn’t deterred. She grabbed for another. And another. All of the men were protecting their weapons as the wild-eyed Lindsey tried desperately to grab a rifle. Then all at once, the SWAT team and Sheriff Jock turned their attention back toward the Albrights and Frees.
Less than a quarter mile away, the sound of shuffling feet approached. Then muffled voices filled the deathly silence that had come over the Seven Mile Bridge. Everyone turned to focus their attention on the heads and shoulders that rose above the hoods and trunks of the cars blocking their advance. People turned sideways to slide by. Others used the bumpers to climb up and over the obstacles.
Hank Albright began to cry. Erin hugged him, and then the rest of his family gathered around. Tears flowed. Nervous laughter poured out of their mouths, stifled by some as they clamped their hands over grinning lips. Smiles and hugs were generously shared.
For as far as the eye could see, the people of the Middle and Upper Keys were coming. Hundreds of them. More likely, thousands. Some looked disheveled. Others appeared injured in some way. A few needed the assistance of a friend or family member to join the rest.
They were coming to stand up to Lindsey and the sheriff. They were holding their heads high with confidence and pride to support Hank and his family. Those who could manage a smile did. Those who still had tears to shed let them come out without any misgivings.
This was their fight, too.
In the middle of the pack, County Commissioner Bud Marino walked alongside the other two commissioners who would oppose Lindsey. They were accompanied by the attorney Mrs. Morton, who would provide them the legal means to oust the tyrannical mayor.
Near them were members of the clergy led by Reverend Deb. They were from all denominations, creeds and colors. They were calm, carrying the power of God in their hearts.
Mayor Juan Ramirez, his wife, Lisa, and the mayors of Islamorada and Key Largo were next. They smiled and nodded at Hank, giving him a thumbs-up and fist pumps.
The emotional scene swept over the residents of Driftwood Key. Weeks of trial and tribulation had come to a head. They’d set out to confront Lindsey, fully expecting that this might be a fight they couldn’t win. They’d expected Jock’s deputies to raise their weapons and even kill them on her orders.
However, today was not their day to die. It was their day to start a new life. As the new arrivals surrounded the Albrights and Frees, the power of their spirit and energy engulfed Hank. He accepted their gracious show of support.
He set his jaw, took a deep breath, and turned to Lindsey. He was about to speak when something remarkable happened.
Sheriff Jock Daly walked away from Lindsey and joined Hank by his side. He adjusted his uniform and confidently turned to face his soon to be former lover.
“Enough is enough, Lindsey. No more.”
Next, Sergeant Rivera crossed the imaginary line in the sand that stretched from one side of U.S. 1 to the other, pointing directly at Fred the Tree, the symbol of the Florida Keys’ resiliency. He was followed by the entirety of his elite SWAT team who’d carried out Lindsey’s demands.
With a defeated look on her face, yet still unabashedly proud enough to hold her head high in utter defeat, Lindsey spun on a dime and marched away between the massive blades of the front loaders designed to clear a path for her. Now, the only path she could follow was back to Key West, where she would resign in disgrace.
As soon as she got in her car and drove off, the tensions eased, and everyone, all thousand-plus, cheered. They cried. They celebrated. And for an afternoon, they forgot they were in the midst of the apocalypse.
They were Conchs once again.
THANK YOU FOR READING NUCLEAR WINTER: DESOLATION!
If you enjoyed it, I’d be grateful if you’d take a moment to write a short review (just a few words are needed) and post it on Amazon. Amazon uses complicated algorithms to determine what books are recommended to readers. Sales are, of course, a factor, but so are the quantities of reviews my books get. By taking a few seconds to leave a review, you help me out and also help new readers learn about my work.
Sign up to my email list to learn about upcoming titles, deals, contests, appearances, and more!
Sign up at BobbyAkart.com
VISIT my feature page at Amazon.com/BobbyAkart for more information on my other action-packed thrillers, which includes over fifty Amazon #1 bestsellers in forty-plus fiction and nonfiction genres.
READ ON for my AUTHOR’S NOTE as I share some final thoughts on the NUCLEAR WINTER series and to see what’s coming next—BLACK GOLD, book one in the TEXAS FOREVER series, available on Amazon.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
June 14, 2021
It has been six years to the day since I published my first novel, THE LOYAL NINE, book one of the Boston Brahmin series. I have written about a wide variety of potential catastrophic events, all of which have a basis in scientific fact or have occurred in our planet’s history. With the Nuclear Winter series, like my other novels, my goal was to introduce readers to the potential threats we face following a nuclear exchange and what to expect as the events unfold. Through the experiences of my fictional characters, I hoped to let you imagine the scenario for yourselves and play it out in your mind so that you’ll be prepared when catastrophe strikes. Each event is unique in its own way, and nuclear winter ranks alongside the eruption of the Yellowstone supervolcano in its potential to devastate the planet.
I started this series with a basic premise, a warning of sorts:
Nuclear war may kill millions.
Nuclear winter will kill billions.
Preparing society for something of this magnitude would be near impossible. It’s the kind of worst-case scenario that politicians talk about in hushed tones while in private and the general public cannot fathom. As a result, the potential for nuclear winter is accepted as scientific fact. However, like so many other catastrophes I write about, the world crosses its fingers and prays it never happens.
Here are the salient points of my research that I hoped to have conveyed to readers in the Nuclear Winter series.
While it is true that millions at ground zero of the detonation would perish, in the aftermath, hunger and starvation would plague the survivors of a nuclear war. Millions of people would starve to death in the first few years following an all-out nuclear war.
World food reserves at any given time would be frighteningly small should production fail. They have amounted in recent years to about two months’ supply at present consumption rates. In the United States, food stores would feed the population for less than a few months subject to distribution constraints.
The means to transport the food from sites of harvest or storage to the consumers would no longer exist. Transportation centers would be shut down. Roads, bridges, as well as rail and port facilities, would likely be rendered inoperable.
A breakdown in agribusiness would be an inevitable consequence of a nuclear war. Without the means to harvest, process, and distribute those crops that survived, there would be much spoilage.
So much of the social and economic structure of society as we know it would be destroyed. Relationships that we take for granted would disappear. Money would have little or no value. Food and other necessities would be obtained, when available, by barter.
More likely, as people became desperate with hunger, survival instincts would take over. Armed individuals or marauding bands would raid and pilfer whatever supplies and stores still existed. Those fortunate individuals who had the means would hoard their resources and soon become the victims of the
crazed behavior of starving and desperate survivors who would ransack warehouses and attack individual homes.
Law enforcement would not exist, and many would be killed in the fighting between those trying forcefully to obtain possession of food and those trying to protect their own homes, families, and food supplies.
A reduction in average temperature by even 1°C at the Earth’s surface because of the absorption of solar energy by soot and dust in the atmosphere would shorten the growing season in northern latitudes and markedly reduce or prevent maturation and ripening of grains that are the staple of human diets.
But the debates that have been heard are not of whether a nuclear winter would occur but how many tens of degrees the temperature would be reduced and for how long. During most of the growing season, a sharp decline in temperature for only a few days may be sufficient to destroy crops. The lack of rain that has been predicted after nuclear winter settles in would contribute to crop failures. Since most of the wheat and coarse grains are grown in the temperate regions of the Northern Hemisphere, which would be the zones most affected by a nuclear winter, it is evident that a nuclear war, especially during the spring or summer, would have a devastating effect on crop production and food supplies for years.
After the atmospheric soot and dust finally clear, the destruction of the stratospheric ozone would allow an increase in hard ultraviolet-B (UV-B) rays to reach the Earth’s surface. In addition to the direct harmful effects to the skin and eyes of humans and animals, these hard ultraviolet rays would be damaging to plant life and would interfere with agricultural production. If the oxides of nitrogen increase in the troposphere, there may occur an actual increase of ozone at the lower levels of the atmosphere. Ozone is directly toxic to plants.
There would likely be a deterioration of the quality of the soil following a nuclear war. The death of plant and forest coverage because of fire, radiation, the lack of fertilizers, and the probable primitive slash-and-burn agricultural practices of survivors would leave the soil vulnerable to erosion by wind and rain.
Water supplies would be seriously reduced after a nuclear war, especially if there is a corresponding collapse of the electrical grid. Dams and large irrigation projects may cease to function. Reduced rainfall, which is predicted in some models of the climatic effects of a nuclear war, would interfere with agricultural productivity. If freezing temperatures actually were to occur during the warm season, surface waters would be frozen and unavailable.
Radioactive fallout would contaminate reservoirs and surface waters with long-lived radioactive isotopes, primarily strontium-90, which has a half-life of twenty-eight years, and cesium-137, which has a half-life of thirty-three years. These elements in the groundwater would soon be taken up by plants and would enter the food chain. Eventually they would become concentrated in humans; the strontium would accumulate in bones and the cesium in cytoplasm, where they would contribute to the long-term burden of radioactivity in survivors.
Not only would food be scarce, but it would likely be unsanitary as well. The destruction of sanitation, refrigeration, and food-processing methods, especially in the remaining urban areas or population centers, would result in the contamination of food by bacteria, particularly by enteric pathogens. Spoiled meat, carrion of domestic animals and even human corpses are likely to be eaten by starving persons, as has happened in major famines in the past. Pathogens to which civilized man has lost resistance would be acquired from foods and water contaminated by excreta and flies, other insects, and rodents, which would likely proliferate in the aftermath of nuclear war.
But the hunger and starvation would not be limited to the combatant countries alone, or even to just the Northern Hemisphere. It would truly be a global occurrence. Even without the spread of the possible climatic effects of a nuclear winter to the Southern Hemisphere, millions would die of starvation in noncombatant countries. Today a large portion of food exports goes to parts of the world where millions of people suffer from undernutrition and hunger.
It is evident that hunger and starvation would decimate the survivors of a major nuclear war. Millions of deaths would result not only among survivors in the warring nations but throughout the world. The developing countries, in fact, would possibly be the main victims of this famine, as their populations may not be reduced as immediately as would those in the combatant countries. Starvation would be essentially global.
My initial research into this topic began with a book written in the early eighties by Paul Ehrlich and Carl Sagan titled The Cold and The Dark: The World after Nuclear War. This book was a record of a conference held in 1983 during which the scientists introduced the world to the concept of nuclear winter. For the first time, world leaders took note of the climatic and atmospheric consequences of nuclear winter as well as the profound effect it would have on all living things on Earth.
Forty years later, their warnings have been acknowledged, but one has to ask, have we done all we can to avoid a nuclear holocaust?
BLACK GOLD, book one in the TEXAS FOREVER series,
available on Amazon by clicking here.
Other Works by Amazon Charts Top 25 Author Bobby Akart
Perfect Storm (a standalone disaster thriller)
The Texas Forever trilogy
Black Gold
Black Swan
Black Flags
Nuclear Winter
First Strike
Armageddon
Whiteout
Devil Storm
Desolation
New Madrid Earthquake (a standalone disaster thriller)
Odessa (a Gunner Fox trilogy)
Odessa Reborn
Odessa Rising
Odessa Strikes
The Virus Hunters
Virus Hunters I
Virus Hunters II
Virus Hunters III
The Geostorm Series
The Shift
The Pulse
The Collapse
The Flood
The Tempest
The Pioneers
The Asteroid Series (A Gunner Fox trilogy)
Discovery
Diversion
Destruction
The Doomsday Series
Apocalypse
Haven
Anarchy
Minutemen
Civil War
The Yellowstone Series
Hellfire
Inferno
Fallout
Survival
The Lone Star Series
Axis of Evil
Beyond Borders
Lines in the Sand
Texas Strong
Fifth Column
Suicide Six
The Pandemic Series
Beginnings
The Innocents
Level 6
Quietus
The Blackout Series
36 Hours
Zero Hour
Turning Point
Shiloh Ranch
Hornet’s Nest
Devil’s Homecoming
The Boston Brahmin Series
The Loyal Nine
Cyber Attack
Martial Law
False Flag
The Mechanics
Choose Freedom
Patriot’s Farewell (standalone novel)
Seeds of Liberty (Companion Guide)
The Prepping for Tomorrow Series
Cyber Warfare
EMP: Electromagnetic Pulse
Economic Collapse
"sharethis-inline-share-buttons">share