He chuckled and blocked a sob before it squeaked out. “I fell down the steps with her. We’re both bruised, but we’ll be fine. Now, we have to get you some help—”
“Forget it, bub. I feel like one of those paper cone thingies blowing around inside a cotton candy machine. I can’t feel my legs. I think my left arm is broken.” She wheezed in a way that sounded like a laugh. “On the bright side, my right arm is working, so I can do this.” She reached around and tapped her left hand. When she smiled, there was blood on her lips.
His eyes blurred. Twenty years of jovial back-and-forth in their clapping game was about to end, and there wasn’t anything he could do to stop it. There were a million thoughts flooding his brain, like her life played before his eyes, but she kept talking before he could formulate a sentence.
“When that girl needed me, I didn’t freak out, honey. I didn’t panic. I think I’ve beaten my demon.”
It broke him in half to know she’d been saddled with the burden of that convenience store robbery for the past twenty years. He didn’t want to use up what little time he had talking about the bad times, so he got past it as fast as possible.
“I’m so proud of you for doing that, Suze,” he paused, struggling to think of how to shift back to humor, for both their sakes. “Truth be told, this isn’t how I want to win our game. I always thought I’d be the first to go.”
“Me too,” she said dryly. “Have you seen your parking job with our boat? Jeez.”
He laughed, sending tears down his cheeks.
“Get to Gracie,” she added, sounding serious again. “Please tell her I love her, and that my last wish was to send you to rescue her. I’m sure she’ll give you guff about being too old to need rescuing by her father, but I’m old-fashioned and this mama grizzly can’t make the trip herself. Will you do that for me?”
He had no idea what was over the next hill, or if Wyoming still existed, but he was willing to pledge his undying loyalty to her last wish. “I’ve got Roger’s Jeep,” he said, before looking up and not seeing it. Or the garage. “I mean…I’ll get a car and get out to her. I promise.”
“Never leave her. Protect our baby. Okay?” Her words kept getting quieter. “It’s a dangerous world. Always has been.”
He gripped her good hand. “Don’t leave me, babe. I don’t want to do this alone.” They’d been together for twenty years; he couldn’t easily remember a time when she wasn’t by his side, from their brief time in the city until their happy life on the lake. She was always there providing checks and balances against his worst ideas while being the loudest to celebrate his good ones. Hands down, their best idea was Gracie.
“You won’t be alone. I’m sure Babs survived…”
For a second, given the gravity of the moment, he thought she was serious. When she smiled and winked, he let go of some more tears. How would he make it without their shared sense of humor? He sniffled as he spoke. “I’m going to say hard pass to that one.”
They laughed together.
She looked in his eyes. “I have one last request, if you don’t mind.”
Time seemed to slow down. “Anything, babe. You name it.”
She pulled her hand free and held it up to him, palm out. “I really hate losing. Can we share the last clap and call it a tie?”
He chomped on his lip, desperate not to break down in tears like a toddler. It proved impossible to hold back. Ezra sat on his haunches and lined his hand with hers, sobbing uncontrollably. “I love you with all my heart, Susan Anderson.”
“I love you, too, Ezra Anderson.” Their hands met in a gentle clap, and for a couple of seconds they pushed against each other as if to make sure the judges saw and confirmed its validity for their game, but then Susan’s fell away.
Fires burned and the sky bled orange, while Ezra’s water-filled eyes were only for his wife. He collapsed on her chest, letting all his sorrow spill out, but he never lost sight of his solemn promise to her. Tomorrow would begin a new game.
I have to save Grace.
###
IMPACT Book 2
Available Here
Author Notes
Thank you for reading Inbound. As I write this note, I’m already banging on my keyboard for book 2, Bounce. The disaster never sleeps, so we, as the authors, must always be working on the next adventure.
As of this writing, it’s been almost five years to the day I typed “Chapter 1” in my first novel, Since the Sirens. It was a post-apocalyptic yarn about a teen boy and his one hundred-four-year-old grandmother who must survive the collapse of civilization due to a pandemic. The boy’s grandmother survived the Spanish Flu of 1918, giving her and other centenarians immunity to the new plague. Over the course of the series, while society at large discards its oldest and weakest members, the young man must take up the mantle of protecting them. I tried to make it epic in scope, with likeable heroes, set in a realistic modern-day world, and with moral dilemmas we all might face.
Five years later, after a few side projects, I’m blessed to be writing post-apocalyptic novels again. The major difference now is that I’m no longer on my own; I’ve got Mike Kraus as a partner. Writing can be a lonely profession, and it doesn’t help that many of us are introverted and more at home in the soft glow of a computer monitor than out in the world at social meet-and-greets. That’s why I’m grateful for the opportunity to team up with him. Mike gives an extra set of eyes to each chapter, adds valuable life experiences to characters’ motivations, and he doubles the opportunities for penning compelling action sequences. He also provides live feedback and personal interactions which make writing more social and enjoyable.
I’ve had a couple beta readers ask where I got the idea for Ezra and Susan to clap back and forth as part of their long-running game. I actually got it from a birthday party I attended last spring. After the birthday boy blew out the candles, the small crowd of attendees clapped in celebration. I, thinking it would make my wife chuckle, clapped a few extra times after all the others had stopped. Sadly, all I got from her was “the look.” Then, one of my son’s buddies added an extra clap after I stopped, forcing me to one-up him. That went on for far too long for my wife’s liking, “the look” went into dangerous territory, and I had to give up. Down, but not out, every so often I’ll send my son to school and tell him to give his friend a clap for me. I’ll always get one back; the lesson is you can’t beat teen boys at a game involving self-embarrassment.
My background is pretty typical for an indie writer. I graduated from a Midwestern college with degrees in history and geography. I then went into IT for twenty years. Finally, on a whim, I wrote that first book to add some adventure to my mouse-scrollingly boring work weeks. Today, I’m wrapping up book twenty-two. My life didn’t follow a script or a plan, and where I ended up was nothing like what the kid version of me imagined it would be.
That sense of open-ended life adventure is what I try to instill in my stories, but I also like them grounded in facts, realism, and, where possible, science. My background in cartography and geography helps me accurately describe landscapes for my scenes, and I almost always write about places I’ve visited in real life. I’m one of those people who makes plans to travel miles out of their way just so they can bag a particular state, capital, or natural wonder. This past summer I dragged my wife and family one mile into Minnesota so I could say we were there, then I did it again by driving a hundred yards into Idaho after touring Yellowstone.
Speaking of maps, it’s fair to say my whole educational career in geography probably had its origin in JRR Tolkien’s unforgettable map of Middle Earth, from the Lord of the Rings books. As a youngster, I taped a giant version of his map on my bedroom wall because I thought it was so cool, and it made me want to explore those lands inside his novels. I hope I can convey that same special sense of place in my own books, even though mine are set here on Regular Earth.
I’m not just a writer of post-apocalyptic books, I’m also a reader. I love t
o read stories with disaster themes; some notables being Earth Abides, Alas, Babylon, The Stand, One Second After, and Lucifer’s Hammer. If you’ve read that last book, you’ll undoubtedly note some similarities with Inbound. It’s probably impossible to write about a meteorite striking the Earth without drawing comparisons to that title. Heck, who could forget the scene of the surfboard dude riding that giant wave over Hollywood?
There are no tsunami-riding surfers, or guys named Trashcan Man, but I hope you found something memorable about this story and will stick around for the next books in this series. Mike and I have an epic disaster unfolding in front of us; we’ll see how our challenged heroes fare as the dust settles in book 2, Bounce. For now, I’ll ask that if you enjoyed the novel, please give it a quick review on Amazon. I know every writer asks that question, but it really does help independent authors such as Mike and me to break through the noise of the 5000+ other books published on Amazon each day.
For now, I’d like to personally thank Mike for inviting me to join him on this journey, as well as thanking you, our reader, for spending a few hours in our shared world.
*Last clap*
EE
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Impact (Book 1): Inbound Page 20