Radio Silence

by Alyssa Cole

  Radio Silence

  By Alyssa Cole

  No one expects the apocalypse.

  Arden Highmore was living your average postgrad life in Rochester, New York, when someone flipped the “off” switch on the world. No cell phones, no power, no running water—and no one knows why. All she and her roommate, John, know for sure is that they have to get out, stat. His family’s cabin near the Canadian border seemed like the safest choice.

  It turns out isolation doesn’t necessarily equal safety.

  When scavengers attack, it’s John’s ridiculously handsome brother, Gabriel, who comes to the rescue. He saves Arden’s life, so he can’t be all bad…but he’s also a controlling jerk who treats her like an idiot. Now their parents are missing and it seems John, Gabriel, their kid sister, Maggie, and Arden are the only people left alive who aren’t bloodthirsty maniacs.

  No one knows when—or if—the lights will come back on and, in the midst of all that, Arden and Gabriel are finding that there’s a fine line indeed between love and hate. How long can they expect to last in this terrifying new world, be it together or apart?

  Book one of Off the Grid

  69,000 words

  Dear Reader,

  Hi, my name is Angela and I am an unapologetic reader of romance. I love a happy ending and I’m happy to ignore the people who say that requiring a happy ending makes my reading predictable, boring, silly, embarrassing or whatever other adjective they use. The people who think that are the people who’ve never actually read all of the amazing romances available. This month, we have eight diverse, non-boring, fantastic romances to offer all of you who are unapologetically #TeamRomance along with me!

  For those who are extra unapologetically happy to have their romances on the erotic side, Game Play is the exciting first book in Lynda Aicher’s new erotic romance series. When hockey golden child Samantha Yates is called in to help Minnesota Glaciers defenseman Dylan Rylie get his game back on track, it doesn’t take long before their on-ice competitiveness turns into rough, aggressive off-ice sex. The kind Sam likes but Dylan wants to change.

  Also delivering a sexy erotic romance this month is Solace Ames’s The Companion Contract. When Amy’s offered an unusual contract—sexual companion to an eccentric legendary rock star—she accepts. She falls into an easy rhythm of control and submission—but it’s not her client who keeps her up at night and soon the price of submission might be too high...

  Eleri Stone offers up an erotic romance in the fantasy genre. In The Shape of Temptation, an artistically gifted mage forced to play the pawn in her mentor’s bid for power comes to crave the sensual, hard-bodied—but lowborn—soldier she spends her days sculpting. Revisit this world in Threads of Desire.

  Also in fantasy comes this alternate history mystery from April Taylor. Luke Ballard, now Henry IX’s Privy Inquirer and a Dominus Elemancer, falls victim to the seductive charms of a darkly mysterious beauty in Mantle of Malice.

  You might like All for You by Christi Barth if contemporary romance is what you crave. When a straight-laced park ranger falls in love with a sexy professor hell-bent on exposing her darkest secret, she’s torn between a future with him or a past that must stay hidden.

  This month, we welcome Alyssa Cole to Carina Press with her new adult post-apocalyptic romance Radio Silence. Arden Highmore doesn’t know if the world is really ending, but one thing’s certain: she’s falling for her best friend’s brother as they struggle to survive.

  On behalf of the Carina Press team, I’m pleased to introduce two debut authors who have their first releases in February. First, in contemporary romance is Elizabeth Harmon’s Pairing Off. A scandal-plagued American figure skater’s last chance at gold means pairing up with Russia’s sexiest male skater...who happens to be the first man she ever loved.

  Caitlin Sinead debuts with a new adult mystery romance, Heartsick, in which a terrifying plague sweeps across a small liberal arts school and the surrounding community, bringing town/gown relations to a head and forcing an artsy undergrad to team up with an older, secretive detective.

  Coming in March 2015: HelenKay Dimon returns to Carina Press with a dirty-talking ex–Special Ops Marine, a prostitute and a street fighter find love in Victorian London, and we begin our love affair with a new space opera male/male series.

  Here’s wishing you a wonderful month of books you love, remember and recommend. And a lifetime of enjoying romance without apology.

  Happy reading!

  ~Angela James

  Editorial Director, Carina Press

  Dedication

  For Nicolas, awesome husband and number-one draft pick for my post-apocalyptic survival squad.

  Acknowledgments

  Colleen, Derek and Krista, three amazing writers and friends who happily share their knowledge and their insights and don’t mind me dampening their shoulders when I’m in the writerly dumps.

  My parents, Clyde and Earline, who’ve always supported me, even when I was an insufferable teenager. Especially when I was an insufferable teenager.

  Maya FL, for being the best writing bud and for reminding me that getting the words on the paper is the most important thing. This book, and all my books, might still be in my head if not for you.

  Alexis and Erin, for befriending a nearly mute weirdo at a NaNoWriMo meet-up and helping her find her place in the romance writing world.

  Awesome editor Rhonda Helms, who whipped this novel into shape and loves my characters as much as I do. I couldn’t have lucked out more in finding someone who gets my drift and goes with my flow, redirecting it as needed. You rock.

  Finally, Angela James and the Carina Press team, for being so supportive. It takes great skill and kindness to make a writer feel special.

  Most people are perfectly afraid of silence.

  -e.e. cummings

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Epilogue

  Teaser

  Excerpt

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  So much blood.

  The Louisville Slugger stung my palms as it was ripped from my hands. I felt my backpack being pulled off and my arms yanked roughly behind me, but my gaze was fixed on John, who lay unmoving on the frozen ground.

  The snow around his head was a slushy pink corona, growing at an incomprehensibly fast rate as blood seeped from his wound. His thick black hair had fallen over his face; in the fading afternoon light I could see it was slicked down, his blood serving as a ghastly pomade.

  Even though it was well below freezing and I had been chilled to the bone for days, I broke out in a sweat. After the sweat came the nausea and the dizziness. The snow glared blindingly white, and the tall conifers that had so recently provided shelter now seemed to be closing in on me.

  When the electricity had gone, followed by the heat, plumbing and water, I’d been worried. When our food supply had begun to dwindle and we’d decided to trek a hundred miles to John’s parents’ cabin near the Canadian border, I’d been scared shitless. What I felt as I watched my best friend bleed out before my eyes was terror, pure and undiluted.

  I shook my head and gulped in mouthfuls of cold air. I couldn’t faint
, despite the ever-increasing pool of blood around John’s head and the way his arms and legs were unnaturally splayed.

  It was unbearable seeing him so still. I was used to his constant motion; John was like a windup toy whose gears never stopped moving. It annoyed some people, but I’d loved it about him from the instant he showed up at my front door, sizing me up as if I was trying to move into his apartment instead of the other way around. He had smiled and extended his hand to me, his grip much stronger than his birdlike frame let on.

  “I’m a complete control freak, so I’ll probably want to handle the utility bills and may pick out your shoes for you, if the mood strikes,” he’d warned me. “But those things aren’t going to happen because I’m gaysian.”

  “Well, I sometimes get irrationally angry and I love fried chicken,” I’d replied. “But that’s not because I’m black, it’s because people are annoying and chicken is delicious.”

  “Oh, Arden, we’re going to be the best roommates ever,” he’d gushed, flashing me his Cheshire cat grin. “Our memoirs will be called Collard Greens and Kimchi: A Love Story. I can see it now.”

  “Looks like you and your friend made a wrong turn.” The man who’d taken John down spoke, pulling my mind back to the horror show we had unwittingly become a part of.

  The blond hair that stuck out from under his blue woolen hat was stringy and unwashed, and although he was a big man, his coat looked about a size too large for him. He unstrapped a foldable slingshot from his arm, shoving it into one of his deep pockets. It seemed impossible that the flimsy neon contraption had hurt John, but the large rock that had rebounded off his skull had been sturdy enough.

  Blue Hat nudged John with his boot-clad foot, rolling him onto his side. John’s lips were blue, and snow clung to the scraggly tufts of hair that were the closest he would ever get to a beard. Minutes ago his cheeks had been ruddy from exertion; now he looked like a frozen corpse.

  Panic welled up in me and I struggled against the other man, the one who held both of my arms twisted behind my back. He grunted and kicked at the back of my knees, activating a reflex that made my legs buckle. My knees hovered just above the ground, arching my back at a painful angle, but my captor refused to loosen his grip. I struggled, despite the pain in my shoulders.

  I finally spoke.

  “A person’s sense of direction tends to get fucked up when they’re freezing and starving.” A long beat had passed between Blue Hat’s observation and my response. My mind was operating on a delay, looping back to the need to get to John at the expense of my other functions.

  Blue Hat graced me with a sharp look. Now I had his attention, but not for the reason I wanted. The way his eyes skimmed over my body revealed that my voice had given away what my bulky down jacket and large hood had been hiding.

  “We’re well acquainted with freezing and starving both, sweetie,” he said. His words were bleak, but there was something liquid and insinuating in his voice that hadn’t been there before. “We’ve gone without a lot of things since the lights went out.”

  “We don’t have anything valuable,” I said, slowly snapping out of my stupor. “We’ve got nothing but peanut shells. Why don’t you just let us go and we can all pretend we never crossed paths?”

  John’s head lolled from side to side as Blue Hat grabbed his backpack and shook it free. John performed a sickening version of a marionette dance before crumpling back to the ground. Anger flared bright and fast in my chest, fueled by the knowledge that there was nothing I could do but look on impotently. I held my body still, although I longed to fight my way free. Struggling only made the man behind me tighten his hold.

  “We’re just two people trying to survive, like you,” I continued, hoping to appeal to their sense of humanity, but Blue Hat ignored me and busied himself with unzipping John’s backpack and rifling through it.

  John and I had known things were bad, had purposely avoided other people during our trek, but it still seemed unreal that these men were so comfortable with assaulting us. The blackout had only happened three weeks ago. Was that how little time it took for a man to lose his moral compass?

  “Just like us, except you have provisions and we don’t.” The man pulled a peanut out of John’s bag, cracked the shell and tossed the nut into his mouth. He looked up at me and grinned. “Well, that’s not true. Now we do.”

  He held my gaze, and I felt my stomach flip. There was something in the way his grin kept going, widening into the unnatural toothiness of a shark that’s scented blood, that alerted me to the change in his thought pattern. An instinctive female warning bell sounded in my head when he graced me with that smile.

  “I’ll bite your dick off if you even think about it,” I snarled. My voice sounded strong, but my stomach twisted with fear when the man behind me pulled me closer to his body.

  Blue Hat chuckled; he seemed to get a rise out of the challenge, so I tried another approach. He was likely the kind of guy who would be more amenable to a woman who made him feel big. I hated to do it, but I dropped the brashness from my voice, pleading with him. I didn’t have to fake the tremor in my voice. “John’s family lives around here. They could be your neighbors or friends.”

  I regretted the words even as they slipped out of my mouth. John’s parents owned a grocery store in the area, and given Blue Hat’s fixation on getting supplies, it was probably best he didn’t associate us with the Seongs.

  “You hurt him really badly.” My voice cracked, and I had to swallow hard around the lump in my throat before I could continue. “Please just take our stuff and let us go so I can help him.”

  “I don’t think so, sweetheart. The way I see it, you and your little friend count as provisions too.”

  “What?” I couldn’t help the strangled, ugly noise that came out of my throat. He couldn’t mean what I thought he meant, could he?

  John, please get up! You would know what to do right now. He had a knack for sizing up a situation and acting accordingly, whereas I endlessly annoyed him with my impulsive, occasionally irrational decision-making.

  But John remained still and, for the first time, I allowed the possibility that he might be dead to take root. My best friend could be dead or dying, these men had no intention of letting us go and we were in this position because of me. Because of the impatience John always chided me about. I glanced at him and wished I’d listened to him for once, but I figured even he would have agreed that logic couldn’t help us at this point.

  Before I had time to dissuade myself, I rocked onto the balls of my feet and sprang back, using every ounce of force I could muster. White-hot pain seared through my back when my arms tore from the man’s grip, but I achieved my goal of knocking my unseen captor off his feet. I scrambled to my feet and turned quickly, landing a solid kick to the man’s face as he tried to get up, and then another, and another, ignoring the sickening crunch of his nose giving way beneath my boot. I channeled the sick anger and fear that roiled my gut into those kicks, and they had the intended result. The tread of my Doc Martens left a visible imprint on the man’s bloody face, and he’d stopped trying to get up. I was turning to deal with Blue Hat when I was tackled from behind.

  “You little bitch,” Blue Hat snarled into my ear while I struggled to stay on my feet and free myself from the bear hug that locked my arms at my side. My bulky jacket didn’t help matters, and I wished I’d kept my pepper spray handy like I had for the first part of the hike, before we got to this more sparsely populated area where I became complacent.

  I tried to remain upright, panic surging through me at the thought of being on the ground under this man. He overpowered me using brute force, though, pulling my legs out from under me and falling forward. Gravity did the rest. My face smashed into the icy shards of snow as Blue Hat’s weight crashed down on top of me. The wind was knocked out of me, and for a long, terrifying moment I couldn’t breathe as my lungs constricted with pain.

  But then I was able to manage one breath, and
a larger one after. The shock of the impact faded, and I began thrashing like a fish on a hook that has no intention of being anyone’s dinner. I couldn’t break his iron hold or escape from the sour smell of his hair and the rancid odor of his breath. He panted from the exertion, and each foul cloud of condensation was a reminder of what he would do to me if I gave up. I struggled, powered by a fresh surge of panic, but it was fruitless; in this position, there was nothing I could do to escape his grasp.

  “Get off me!” I managed to raise my head and bellow, hoping it would throw him off guard. My voice rang out into the silence of the snow-covered trees and then disappeared, with no effect on him. Instead, he flipped me over onto my back and sat on my chest, crushing my already aching lungs. His knees pinned down my arms and when I tried to scream again, in spite of his weight on top of me, he punched me so hard that I saw little pinpricks of light dancing before my eyes. A double whammy of pain flared in my skull, radiating from my jaw and overlapping with the pain surging from where the back of my head slammed into the ground. Tears formed in my eyes and were already ice-cold before they slid down my cheeks.

  “The little ones are always feisty,” he said with a chuckle, and then hauled off and punched me once more, for emphasis. “Now quit squirming. Unless you want me to do that again.”

  He loomed over me, backlit against the darkening winter sky. His mouth was twisted into a sneer but his eyes were bright with what seemed like enjoyment. I thought of experiments I’d read about, where people were told that if they pushed a button they would cause someone in another room extreme pain. So many seemingly normal people had pushed that button, repeatedly and with delight.

  I’m sorry, John. Maybe it’s better if you don’t wake up.

  Blue Hat’s eyes moved from my face to the stand of trees John and I had emerged from. I heard movement, the muffled crunch of heavy boots on snow. A deep, rich voice, tinged with horror, sounded from somewhere out of my line of sight.

  “John?”