SUNFALL: A Post-Apocalyptic Survival Fiction Series: Book 2: ADVENT
Page 1
Sunfall
Book 2: Advent
Drew Gideon
Contents
Prologue
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
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Epilogue
Back of the Book Stuff
About the Author
SUNFALL
BOOK 2: ADVENT
Drew Gideon
Copyright © 2017 Drew Gideon
Cover Art by Muhammad Asad
Editing by Shirley Linn
All rights reserved.
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.
www.DrewGideon.com
Created with Vellum
For my boys.
Never become complacent.
Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, vision cleared, ambition inspired, and success achieved.
~ Hellen Keller
You never know how strong you are until being strong is the only choice you have.
~ Bob Marley
Prologue
A grid-killing CME.
NASA had warned that it could happen anytime, without warning, just as it had in 1859. Congress held hearings, set up studies, and generally came to the conclusion that preparing would just be too expensive. The infrastructure was too vast, the cost of labor too high. Besides, there were pet projects that needed funding, and that took precedence over something that may never happen during their terms in office. Presidents came and went, doing nothing with the knowledge other than adding notes to their Executive Orders that would give them sweeping powers should it ever occur.
But no one actually thought it would.
The sun, doing something to knock out the power grid worldwide? That was crazy talk. That was for people who had disaster fantasies, or who had something to sell. Most people had never heard of the term coronal mass ejection, and even among those who had, there was a wealth of misinformation.
Guided by Hollywood blockbusters and fiction novels that focused on over-the-top drama rather than facts, they argued what they thought was true on internet forums. Cars and small electronics would stop working, some said. The magnetic field, Earth’s natural protection from the sun, would be stripped away and anyone outside would get a lethal dose of sun poisoning, said others. Some even thought the sun would light everything on fire, boiling the seas and cleansing the Earth until it resembled the scarred surface of Mars. Hardly any of them bothered to research what had happened during the Carrington Event, learn the truth about the Earth’s magnetic field, or read actual publications from scientists who dedicated their lives and careers to the subject.
And why would they? Normal people chalked a CME right up there with alien invasions and asteroid impacts on the list of Bad Things That Could Happen. Meaning, probably never.
Any warnings and actual facts the scientists put out were lost in the noise of the latest binge-worthy Netflix show, the President’s latest drama fight on social media, 24/7 sensationalist news, and the breakneck pace of staying afloat in a struggling economy.
The Friday that kicked off Labor Day weekend was a flurry of activity. Families headed to the beach for one last opportunity of fun in the sun before school started. Those relying on government assistance scraped the bottoms of their wallets, cursing the Federal holiday that created a three-day weekend and delayed their September bank deposits. College students arrived at campuses far from home, checked into their dorm rooms for the fall semester, and reunited with old friends.
At the University of Maryland, Ripley Miller and her small group of close friends were looking forward to their senior year. They gathered on the roof of their dorm building to ring in the new semester and catch up on what everyone had done during their summer internships.
They had a front-row, ninth-story seat when a massive CME, traveling fast enough to reach the Earth in a mere eighteen hours, slammed into the planet’s magnetic field.
Within minutes, all of the electrical transformers worldwide were overloaded with charged particles of energy, and melted into slag. Long transmission lines, shielded only enough to negate the normal daily amount of solar energy, were bombarded with thousands of times that amount. Overheating, melting even, they stretched and sagged under their own weight. Many caught fire.
Hundreds of thousands of planes across the world were forced to make emergency landings with their GPS and radar systems offline. Travelers were stranded hundreds, even thousands of miles from home. Without radar and radios, some planes collided in mid-air. On the night side of the planet, they landed using manual navigation on strips lit with portable emergency spotlights, floodlights, and the headlights of rescue vehicles. Many weren’t able to find their way to a landing strip without brightly-lit landmarks, highways, and glowing cities to guide their way. They crashed into fields, forests, and even darkened cities.
Some satellites put themselves into protective shut-down mode. Others, relying on telemetry and altitude data that was suddenly wildly incorrect, steered themselves into collision courses with the atmosphere. They broke apart and burned up on re-entry, with a few larger pieces making it through to splashdown in the oceans.
Military bases went “dark”, finding that their communication devices couldn’t transmit or receive signals. Those devices had been hardened against a split-second shock from an Electro-Magnetic Pulse that could be launched by an enemy, but this wasn’t an EMP. It didn’t work the same way. The devices’ circuit boards hadn’t been overloaded and fried; the atmosphere itself had turned into a giant sea of interference. So even though those devices could still power on, they were rendered useless. Carrier groups at sea communicated to their protective armada with flags and flashing lights. Drone pilots, sitting in metal trailers surrounded by electronic gadgetry and screens, found themselves in the dark. Their drones, high above the ground with no one at the helm, became gliders. Even their auto-pilot homing systems failed to function with no geopositioning data available. Those that weren’t already on the ground soon would be, deep inside enemy territory.
The dark night sky turned a foreboding red, with streaming bands of colored lights cascading to the horizon
. Both the Northern and the Southern Lights stretched all the way to the equator. From the International Space Station, it looked as if the entire world had been engulfed in a swirling, shifting rainbow.
Ripley and her best friend, Corey, had some preparations with them for a common occurrence: the infamous East Coast hurricanes. Not sure of what had happened, but knowing if the power stayed out too long it wouldn’t be good, they readied themselves to head home. It was only a couple of hours away; if the power returned, they could simply drive back in time for classes on Tuesday. Their schoolmate Josh, who was only sixteen and the son of parents who were preppers, had a plan in place to wait for his father to retrieve him. If his father wasn’t there after twenty-four hours, he was to make his own way home on foot. Not wanting to leave their young friend to walk alone through what could become a dangerous situation, Ripley and the gang decided to wait with him. If his father didn’t show, they could use the rental truck of Ripley’s roommate, Melanie, to drive Josh home and then continue on their way. It was a small delay, and worth it to know that Josh would be safe.
But when the time came to leave Saturday night, someone had pierced a hole in the gas tank of Melanie’s rental truck and stolen the fuel. Josh had no choice but to strike out on his own. Without transportation, and warned by the National Guardsmen—who were blocking the campus entrances—against walking through a dark city on the verge of rioting, the group decided to wait until morning. Even frightened, people were less likely to attack travelers in broad daylight, they reasoned.
Minutes before they were set to leave on Sunday, a new obstacle appeared: Secret Service agents looking for Melanie. All across the country, Senators and Legislators were being rounded up and taken to safe, undisclosed locations. Mel’s mother, Congresswoman Rhodes from California and Speaker of the House, had bent the President’s ear and received permission to have Melanie retrieved from the University. Not wanting to leave her friends, whom she was closer to than her family, Mel was forced to hide for hours while campus security, local police, and Guardsmen scoured the campus for her. Knowing that Ripley, Corey, and Marco—Corey’s roommate from Portugal, who turned out to be more than he’d let on—would not leave without Mel, the Secret Service held the small group in an effort to force them to give up Mel’s location.
When the Guard pulled out late that night, the Secret Service agents had no choice but to leave also, or be overrun by the city’s residents who had been gathering at the gates demanding food and water they assumed the Guard was giving to the college students.
Finally freed, Ripley and her three friends escaped the campus just as the city’s desperate, angry inhabitants came pouring in, and the University went into lockdown.
It was 130 miles from the University to Ripley and Corey’s little hometown of Snow Hill. The journey would require them to pass through many cities and cross the Chesapeake Bay. They didn’t have enough food to make the trip, and hadn’t expected another hungry mouth to join them in the form of a large dog. They had only one knife to defend themselves. They’d been able to “borrow” a diesel truck, but it was nearly out of fuel.
When they saw a large group of looters readying to storm a shuttered department store, they took the opportunity for what it was—a chance to fix all of those problems. But only if they could make it in and out of the raving mob in one piece.
Back home in Snow Hill, Corey’s grandmother, Dotty, worried and prayed for her little mismatched family, scattered to the winds. Her neighbor, relying on delivered frozen meals, was already out of food. Holiday travelers running out of gas swarmed into the town, blocking roads, filling parking lots, and causing a riot at the gas station. Local teenagers, bored and restless, were already starting trouble. Dotty consoled the Sheriff, who was faced with the problem of what to do with 500 inmates from the Federal Prison at the edge of town. The Wardens had taken off, the prisoners’ psych meds hadn’t been delivered, and there was no word from the government on when help would arrive. Townsfolk who relied on power to keep their medical issues at bay were dying. Dotty watched her peaceful little town nearing the boiling point.
The Mayor called a Town Meeting in the local park, promising to answer everyone’s questions and give them solutions. But Dotty had just found out that the information he was about reveal to the town’s residents was likely to send them into a dangerous panic. The Mayor was on stage, oblivious to the spark he was about to set to the powder keg.
All over the world, without power for the pumps, the water had stopped running. The toilets wouldn’t flush and were backing up. Trucks weren’t coming to pick up the trash. Food in refrigerators and freezers had spoiled, and all of the stores were closed. In the summer climes, there was no air conditioning to escape the heat. In those areas going through winter, there was no heat to keep the freezing temperatures at bay. Hospital generators were running out of fuel, and patients were dying. Being the end of the month, people were running out of the medications that either kept them alive or kept them mentally stable. Without the trucks making deliveries to the pharmacies—pharmacies that weren’t even open for business—there wouldn’t be any refills coming.
The CME had decimated the power grid, and all of the fragile, just-in-time infrastructure that relied on electricity collapsed. People hadn’t been cooked inside of their own skins. The oceans hadn’t boiled away. Small engines and electronic devices still worked, if they could get power.
Through it all, the populace thought this was a temporary blackout. The governments encouraged that line of thinking to keep them from panicking. It had been the only thing, so far, that had kept them relatively calm.
Tomorrow, they thought, the power company will have fixed this and everything will be back to normal. Tomorrow.
That assumption, that fragile hope holding up the thin veneer of civility, was crashing down. Normal had left the building, and Reality was about to arrive.
Chapter 1
Monday, September 3rd
Bowie, MD
As we stepped over the mounds of shattered glass into Target, people were already running out with boxes of shoes, armloads of clothing still on hangers, anything electronic they could carry, and food. One man had a cart with an up-ended large screen tv leaning out of it. He was trying to keep the cart from flipping over due to the weight of the huge television, keep the box from falling out of the cart, and push his way through a mass of people that were battering him from every side. A woman ran by me with at least a dozen high-end purses hanging from each arm, screaming and whooping like she’d just won the lottery. Flashlight beams swung in every direction all throughout the store. The atmosphere was more that of a rave than a looting.
“I’ll find the boots and catch up to you. Don’t wait for me. Go. Go!” Marco yelled over the crowd, and dashed off down the main aisle, dodging two women who were throwing armloads of bras into a bright red cart. They were just pulling them off of the rack and throwing them in without even checking the sizes.
“There. That sign down there says Grocery,” Corey said, pushing us to the left. We moved as quickly as we could, with random people pushing past us to get there faster. Mel was nearly knocked over by a man running straight at her with a cart full of beer. He didn’t swerve to go around her; simply kept barreling along. She jumped out of the way at the last minute, and the man sped by without even looking at her. The people around us must have been locals; they’d head straight for a particular aisle and disappear into it. We had to stop and look down each aisle with our flashlights, trying to look around people to see what was there. There weren’t even any signs above the aisles.
“Here, here! And hurry the hell up, they’re cleaning it out!” Mel yelled from ahead of us. We hurried to catch up.
I had thought we’d have the baking aisle to ourselves. I thought wrong. There were people shoveling spices into reusable bags they’d grabbed from the checkout lines. There were people throwing bags upon bags of baking chocolates and candies into carts, stuffing them
into pockets and down their shirts. One woman was squeezing as many cake mixes as she could into the arms of a little boy. There was no way he could see over the mountain of boxes in his arms.
“Run outside to the car and wait for me. I’m right behind you!” She said, giving him a push. He staggered a bit, then hurried away. The woman turned back and held her arms out wide, trying to scoop as many boxes as she could from the entire shelf. The boxes cascaded over her arms and scattered onto the floor. She cursed in frustration and tried to do it again on a lower shelf, with the same result.
We wove through these people, heading for the cooking oil at the end of the aisle. There were already two women there, each racing the other to put as many quarts and gallons of oil as they could into their own cart so that the other couldn’t get it. The carts already had to be too heavy for either of them to push, but they were grabbing jugs off of the shelves in double handfuls as quickly as they could.
“What the hell?” Mel said.
“I’ve got it,” Corey said. “Hold on.” He stepped up behind the woman closest to us and reached over her head, picking a jug of canola oil off of the top shelf. After I pocketed my little flashlight, he passed it down to me and quickly grabbed another, then another. I passed the first two down the line to Mel. Corey grabbed another jug, filling my hands. He pulled down a fifth and reached for a sixth. The woman he was standing behind bent over to reach a lower shelf, and ended up shoving her large bottom into Corey. She straightened and turned on him, her face furious.
“What you think you’s doin’? Gimme that!” She yanked one jug out of his hand and reached for the other. Corey hopped back, holding that one up high.
“We just need one or two more,” I started, catching her attention. She saw the oil in my hands and screeched. Dropping the one she’d taken from Corey, she lunged for the two I held. I tried to dodge but she latched on to one and pulled hard.