by Dana Fraser
Long Haul Home Collection
Books One - Three
Dana Fraser
Contents
Description
Blind Spot
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Down Shift
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
Dead Head
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
Copyright
Description
This collection contains Blind Spot, Down Shift and Dead Head which combine to form a standalone novel in the Long Haul Home series. Also available as individual titles.
BLIND SPOT
Army veteran Cash Bishop chases little white lines around the South and Midwest, working as a long haul trucker to make ends meet until the homestead he is building with his mother and sister can support the family.
When a security breach at Hoover Dam takes all the U.S. hydroelectric power stations offline the day after a category five hurricane hits the Gulf of Mexico, cutting off electricity to millions and threatening an already compromised fuel supply, Cash figures it's time to chase those white lines home to Tennessee.
By the time he hits Chicago, the lights are out across the country, throwing America into a new dark age in which only the strong and the prepared will survive.
DOWN SHIFT
More than two days go by before solar scientist Hannah Carter realizes that the power and communication systems have gone out across America.
Obtuse? No — her state-of-the-art research facility has all the power it needs and Hannah is elbows deep in a patent application.
When she does wake up to the New America, her first thought is of her teenage brother, Ellis — stuck on his own in a boarding school with similarly troubled boys.
To reach him, she’ll have to escape everything from riots to solitary killers on the road.
First she has to escape her employer.
The research company isn’t what she thought it was.
And the men in the shadows know her name.
DEAD HEAD
After weeks of traveling dangerous roads, Cash Bishop is almost home. But other forces are converging on Dover, each with their own plans for Cash and those he is sworn to protect.
In a contest of who will live and who will die, sometimes it’s the lucky who win.
danafraser.com/alerts
Blind Spot
Long Haul Home
Prologue
Standing at the window of his Brussels hotel suite, Thomas Sand stared at his shaking hand as he lit his first cigarette in over a month. He blew on the match, extinguishing its flame, then pulled a long drag of nicotine filled smoke into his lungs.
Closing his eyes, he tilted his face upward and exhaled slowly.
"Sorry, Becca," he said, the room empty and the woman named thousands of miles away in South Carolina.
He took another pull, promising himself he would snuff out the cigarette before it was half finished then toss it and the rest of the pack down the trash chute. He had broken too many promises to his wife during the last three years of building his company. Quitting smoking would not be one of them.
But damn him if his technical team wasn't grinding away at his self control, their latest screw up coming mere hours before he was scheduled to demonstrate his threat assessment software to a dozen NATO representatives. He wouldn't get another chance for months. With the thirty-two million in venture capital he had won from flashing his Army medals all but depleted, he wouldn't get another chance, period.
Savoring his last smoke-filled breath, Thomas flicked his middle finger against the cigarette's cherry. The burning clump of tobacco landed in the ashtray's center as he mechanically placed the remaining half of the cigarette in its pack.
Turning back to his laptop, he refreshed the display. The numbers and charts that had driven him to having the concierge send up a pack of smokes had changed, only slightly but for the worse.
He fished his phone from his pocket and tapped out the number to Mara Grant. She picked up on the third ring, her voice low and seductive as she greeted him.
"Good morning, Thomas. Do you want me?"
The playful twist to her question heated his cheeks. He looked up at the paneled white ceiling, his mind broadcasting yet another apology to his wife. Becca had warned him months ago that the blonde in charge of herding his development team had her sights set on a completely different position. He had been too caught up in getting a working beta finished and arranging the meetings in Brussels to take Becca seriously.
If he was being honest with himself, he hadn't taken his wife seriously or spent much time with her for the better part of the last two years, ever since development on the threat assessment app had begun in earnest.
"The beta is supposed to be live," he answered tersely. "I'm looking at a simulator instead, a version I haven't seen or cleared."
A few seconds of silence passed and then he heard Mara switch her phone over to speaker followed by the tapping of her fingers with their long red nails against the screen.
"We don't have any uncleared simulators," she started. "And I have email confirmation that they uploaded the beta and finished testing yesterday at eleven p.m. Pacific."
"Then the server reset the app — again."
"Thomas, I..."
"Wake them up," he growled. "Now!"
He hit the power button, ending the call as he simultaneously resisted the urge to fling the device and snatch up the pack of cigarettes.
His gaze jumped around the room in search of a calming distraction. The suite he had booked for the week was grotesquely expensive, the fine furniture and impressive views meant to relax and instill confidence in the NATO representatives attending his sales pitch.
At his request, hotel staff had rearranged the seating to ensure that the ten men and two women of the Security Committee's working group would be facing the room’s picture window. Thomas would stand in front of the window, his position memorized down to the inch so that his guests would see the Hôtel de Ville's statue of St. Michael perched on Thomas's shoulder, the archangel eternally frozen as he pierced the devil with his spear.
Like St. Michael, Thomas was in the business of defeating evil. Nominally, so were his guests. In terms of subtle persuasion, the strategy was as golden as the statue.
Mara's signature knock sounded at the suite's door, her fingernails softly striking the wood three times in rapid succession
"Come in," he barked.
Mara slid the access card he'd given her through the reader then entered, her thin figure wrapped in a red, sleeveless sheathe dress.
"Wear the navy," he corrected. "The red distracts."
Her painted lips curved in a smile suggesting she had misinterpreted his statement.
"When will the beta be up?" he snapped, his baritone rumbling in his chest. Had the woman been this obvious before Brussels or was she dialing up now that his wife was an ocean away?
"Koji assured me it already is." She breezed by Thomas to wrap her hands around his computer and walk it over to the coffee table. "I'm checking to see if you have a caching issue. That's when—"
"I know what it means."
Mara smiled again, all signs of predation wiped from the expression and replaced with a tremor of worry. She hadn't earned the role of technical supervisor because of her expertise with building applications. She was a pretty piece of meat who would unerringly follow whatever script he handed her when it came time to woo the venture capitalists. The actual coders on her team, every last one of them male, also competed to impress her in the way all geeks compete — in timely delivered hexadecimal notation.
Her gaze dropped to his computer display then bounced back and forth between the laptop and her smartphone.
"I can confirm this is the beta," she said, flashing her phone at him.
Her words lifted the fine hairs along the back of his neck.
"Get out," he ordered.
His sharp tone narrowed her features.
"Get out," he repeated more calmly. "Change into the blue."
He nodded at his laptop. "I need to look at this alone."
Thomas waited until Mara stiffly shut the door behind her, then he carried the laptop to the windowsill where the sun warmed the room. He was fifty-six years old, no longer interested in running around the globe or being away from his familiar creature comforts. He was supposed to be on a Hilton Head beach with Becca after having twice postponed their annual vacation to the island to deal with a crisis at his start-up.
Now the crisis was not his company.
It was his country.
Absently, he reached for the pack of cigarettes, his fingers plucking out one that still had its full length. Lighting it, he kept his gaze on St. Michael then took his first few drags contemplating the statue that looked more alien than angel.
When he'd sucked enough nicotine into his body that his nuts didn't feel quite so tight, he lowered his gaze to the beta display. On paper, the application was simple. First construct a set of threat assessment algorithms that covered everything from current and upcoming weather patterns to the number of visits a certain website received or how many times a certain phrase appeared on the internet and in text messages for the last few weeks. Then provide a constant, real-time feed to the application of all data sources available to the subscriber (from public to top secret). Individual users could then define their area of responsibility — ground traffic, disease control, power grid, terrorism — and receive real-time threat assessments with compiled summaries and an ability to drill down to discrete data points.
The beta in front of him represented two years of actively developing the necessary algorithms and AI-assisted search spiders, plus amassing a huge server farm capable of handling the constant deluge of data. Until he secured any government contracts, only public data flowed into the servers.
Even without access to the government's secured data, the beta was bathed in red and orange for the Americas feed. Hurricane Otto had made landfall, its eye and Category 5 winds hovering over Galveston. Power was out from the storm as far west as San Antonio and, to the east, the still beleaguered New Orleans. The fuel gathering centers and processing plants along the coast were offline with reports of structural damage at some of the plants.
The National Weather Service was predicting that Otto would swing east, hugging the coast with no reduction in winds. Tampa was painted with the next bull’s eye. If it hit there, all of Florida could go dark.
Thomas stubbed out his cigarette and lit another. Touching his lips to the butt, he thought of his wife again. He had missed calling her the night before and she hadn't corrected his lapse by at least texting him.
He stared at his phone sitting on the windowsill.
Too early to call her.
Too late to say he was sorry.
Scowling at the computer's display, he clicked on the west side of the country where a fat red dot blinked along the Arizona-Nevada border, a ring of light pink spreading all the way into California. Hoover Dam, capable of generating four terawatts and serving over a million homes and businesses, was offline.
He clicked the red dot and quickly scanned the summary. A security breach had been detected, a computer virus loaded from inside the facility with a countdown timer. Once activated, the power would go out, but not until after surges had damaged the transformers, turbines and control gates. The virus had been caught in time but had to be scrubbed from the servers before the dam resumed operations.
Seeing that the authorities had already taken a suspect into custody, he clicked on the woman's name. The threat assessment application offered more links, their priority evident by whether they were red, orange, yellow, blue or green. Figuring the red would be coverage of the arrest, he clicked orange to find her LinkedIn profile.
The woman, Amy Pike, was a Bureau of Reclamation Safety Inspector! That gave her access to more than one dam. Clicking the yellow link gave him the last three months of her social media shares, which was about the time when she had suddenly started criticizing the U.S. government's actions in the Middle East. She had also gotten engaged to one Abdul Rafi Khayat shortly before the tone of her posts had changed.
Clicking back to the main map on the threat assessment application, he found more of the western portion of the country lighting up with yellow dots. He recognized the location of the Grand Coulee and John Day dams and figured the other dots were hydroelectric stations as well, ones that Amy Pike had visited in the last three months.
With a slow blink, he moved on to the orange shaded zones he had bypassed earlier.
A surge in attempts by individuals on the no-fly list to buy plane tickets...
An increase in pro-ISIS chatter by American residents and visa holders…
A spike in assault rifle sales...
Over three dozen loitering arrests in the last two months at various airports by young men and women of Middle Eastern descent who could demonstrate no legitimate reason for being at the airport...
His pulse slowed, more than two decades of combat training and field experience narrowing his focus for survival.
Family first.
He covered the distance from the couch to the windowsill in three long strides, his arm reaching out to snatch up the phone. Two taps and the phone dialed Becca’s number.
No ring, no voicemail.
Nothing.
He checked the signal on his phone to see all five bars at full strength. He tapped through his contacts to reach his son, Ellis.
A measure of relief eased into his chest as the phone rang on the other end.
Then the voicemail kicked in.
"I'm not answering the phone now because everyone sucks. If you mistakenly think you're one of the few people who don't suck, go ahead and leave a message. Just don't expect me to listen to it or reply."
Thomas forced his grip on the phone to relax as he waited for the beep. He'd already popped the glass out of one on a call with his son. He had a deep concern that getting the phone fixed or replaced was about to become extremely problematic, if not impossible.
"Get your shit together," he growled into the phone after the beep. "Start with your bug-out bag. I will be on a flight out of Brussels today. Becca or I will be at the school to pick you up. This is not a drill. Do not fuck around."
Thomas hung up before remembering to tell the melodramatic, juvenile delinquent he had fathered and raised that he loved him. He tapped through to redi
al, a knot blossoming in his chest as he got the same static silence as he had in calling Becca’s number.
Racing to the laptop, he refreshed his screen. Outage reports for cellular services were popping up all over the map.
Opening his administrator account for the application, he went to the "invite" tab and typed in the private email addresses of the top U.S. government and military officials who knew him personally and were in a position to get things done.
Next he opened up his email server and repeated the list of addresses before turning his attention to the subject line.
IMMEDIATE ATTENTION - MASSIVE ATTACKS IMMINENT
He pasted in the application's three-page summary of current threats and the link to the beta, then signed off with a final warning.
This is not a joke. This is not a sales pitch. Ignore this at our country's peril.
He dialed Mara again and put her on speakerphone as he drafted an email to his wife, son and stepdaughter. He had told Ellis to expect him or Becca, but Hannah was geographically closest to Ellis at the moment and was also on the boarding school's emergency contact list.
"Thomas?" Mara asked hesitantly.
"Pack your things," he ordered, fingers continuing to skim across the keyboard of his laptop as he directed Hannah to retrieve her stepbrother and for both of them to head home to Evansville, Indiana. "I'm getting us flights back to the States today."
"After the NATO—"
"Now!" he interrupted, pressing send on the email to his family. "Be prepared to leave in the next thirty minutes."
Carrying his phone and laptop into the bedroom, he dialed the airline and began packing his carryon bags. Despite the worry building inside his chest, he found a moment's amusement remembering Becca as she had helped him ready his luggage for the trip to Brussels. Coming out of their walk-in closet with ties she considered better matched than the ones he had selected, she had rolled her eyes to see him stuffing in things like his compass, protein bars and an empty water bladder.