by Tom Abrahams
He passed the garden and looked to the far end of the backyard, near the woods that crept close to the house. Lola was there, her back to him, swaying with Penny in her arms.
Battle stopped and listened.
“I need your help,” she said to the headstones in the ground in front of her. “I want to love him. I want him to love me. I want us to be a family. I truly believe he wants that too.”
Lola stopped swaying and carefully lowered herself to her knees. With one hand she wiped the black soot and ash from atop the headstones.
“I’m never going to replace you in his heart,” she said. “But I need his mind now. I need you to help him see that.”
She started whispering and Battle couldn’t hear her. He started walking again.
“Hey,” he said, startling Lola. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to scare you.”
“Hi,” she said and pushed herself to her feet with one hand, holding Penny tightly in the other. “Just saying hello. I hope that’s okay.”
“It’s good,” he said. “It’s okay. We’re gonna be okay.”
“What if Paagal comes looking for us?” she asked. “What if she finds us?”
“She won’t find us,” he said. “If by chance she does, I’ll shoot first. I won’t ask questions.”
THE END
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EXCERPT FROM SPACEMAN: A POST-APOCALYPTIC/DYSTOPIAN THRILLER
MISSION ELAPSED TIME:
72 DAYS, 3 HOURS, 5 MINUTES, 31 SECONDS
249 MILES ABOVE EARTH
The alarm sounded without warning.
It was shrill and echoed though the station until Clayton Shepard typed a series of commands into the computer to disarm it.
He ran his finger across the screen, not believing what was he was reading, what the alarm was warning. It was outside the bounds of what was reasonable or even possible.
WARNING: GEOMAGENTIC K-INDEX 9 OR GREATER EXPECTED
SPACE WEATHER MESSAGE CODE: WARK9<
SERIAL NUMBER: 476
ISSUE TIME: 2020 JAN 25 0225 UTC
VALID TO 2020 JAN 25 2359 UTC
He pressed a button that keyed the microphone nearest his mouth. “Houston,” he said, “station on space-to-ground one. Are you seeing the alarm?”
“Station, this is Houston on space-to-ground one,” the call replied. “We see it. We have a team looking at data. Stand by.”
He rolled his eyes. “Are you kidding me?” Clayton said, keying the mic. “Houston, this is station on space-to-ground one. I don’t think we have time for that. I’m asking we abort the EVA now.”
He looked through the window to his left. Astronaut Ben Greenwood stopped his work, turned around to face Clayton through the mask on his helmet, and joined the conversation.
“Shepard,” said Ben, “this is Greenwood station-to-station one. What alarm?” Greenwood’s helmet reflected a fisheye view of The Cupola in which Shepard was monitoring the first spacewalk of their expedition.
Clayton read the alert again. A severe magnetic storm was coming. He swallowed and cleared his throat. “Greenwood, this is Shepard on station-to-station one. The onboard coronagraph is giving indications of large, transient disturbances on the Earth-facing side of the Sun.”
“Shepard, this is Greenwood on station-to-station one. You mean solar flares?”
“Station,” the radio call from mission control interrupted, “this is Houston on space-to-ground one. We’ve checked with SELB in Boulder. They confirm the alarm, as does Marshal in Huntsville. Loops are growing in intensity. There is a CME within striking distance. Our original assessment may have been incorrect.”
The third member of the expedition, Cosmonaut Boris Voin, spoke through his mic. He was ten yards from Greenwood, tethered to the exterior of the station. “Shepard,” he said, his English barbed with his native Russian accent, “this is Voin, station-to-station 1. Are we killing EVA?”
Shepard took a deep breath before answering. Two days earlier, they’d seen evidence of a coronal mass ejection, what they’d believed was a part of the corona tearing away from the Sun. After looking at the data, and considering the urgency of the spacewalk, Mission Control determined the reading was an anomaly. CMEs, as they were called, happened nearly every day. This one, they concluded, was no real threat. Despite the coronal halo visible around the sun forty-nine hours earlier, the numbers seemed so far beyond anything they’d ever seen they concluded there was a system malfunction and the sensor was offering incorrect data.
They were wrong.
Clayton keyed the mic. “Houston, this is station on station-to-ground one,” he said, knowing the spacewalking astronauts could hear him. “It’s my recommendation that we immediately kill the EVA.”
“Station, this is Houston on station-to-ground one. We agree that out of an abundance of caution the best course of—”
The line went dead. The station went dark.
Clayton pressed the mic. “Houston,” he said, a hint of panic in his voice, “this is station on station-to-ground one. Do you copy?”
No answer.
“Greenwood, this is Shepard one station-to-station one. Do you copy?”
Nothing.
Clayton tried Voin. He tried Shepard again. He switched to channels, two, three, and four. He tried the Russian channels. None of them replied. He wasn’t even sure his radio was working.
“This cannot be happening.”
Astronaut Clayton Shepard was ten weeks into his first mission in low Earth orbit when the impossible happened.
The CME experts thought couldn’t exist carried with it sixteen billion tons of hot plasma and charged particles. It outraced the solar wind at an astonishing two million kilometers an hour, creating a blast wave ahead of its impact with the Earth and its orbiting satellites. The cloud, larger than any ever recorded, collided with the Earth’s magnetic field and created an enormous surge.
High energy protons peaked at over two-hundred and fifty times the norm and slammed into the Earth where the effect was instantaneous. Electrical currents in the atmosphere and on the ground surged repeatedly at varying degrees.
Within ninety seconds of impact, chain reactions had begun to shut down power grids and damage oil and gas pipelines across the entirety of the planet. Satellites orbiting the Earth absorbed the electrical surge and those that had not shut down the high voltage on their transceivers were destroyed or significantly damaged.
Unlike solar flares, the CME had left the Sun slowly, gathering speed as it accelerated outward and away from the star’s surface. It traveled nearly twice the speed of any previously recorded CME and carried with it sixty percent more material than the typical value of a CME cloud.
By the time it hit the ISS, the station was in the worst spot possible, racing above the Atlantic Ocean in a highly magnetic region of the planet called the South Atlantic Anomaly. It only worsened the impact on the station, which was radiation hardened to withstand minor event upsets. It couldn’t handle anything like the invisible tsunami that had just surged and crashed over it.
Without knowing exactly what had happened, Shepard knew what had happened.
He steadied himself in the darkness of The Cupola, a dome shaped module with seven panoramic windows, and pressed his hands against the glass. It was almost five feet tall and a little more than nine feet across, but it felt like a coffin.
He looked to his right, out window three, and saw the Canadarm 2, the station’s large robotic arm used to build parts of the station and to grab incoming cargo vehicles. Beyond the arm was his home planet.
From the underside of the station, the Cupola was the perfect spot from which to watch the Earth as the ISS moved at five miles per second around the globe. He was speeding past North America.
It was dark. The familiar spider webs of lights that marked large metropolitan areas across the continent were missing.
Like the ISS, the planet was virtually powerless.
“Jackie,” he said aloud, looking toward the area he thought was Texas. A thick knot grew in his throat as he suppressed his emotion. “The kids.” His lips quivered, his eyes welled, but Clayton Shepard, the mechanical engineer and astronaut, steadied himself. He’d have to worry about them later. His own survival and that of his crew were paramount.
Shepard gripped the sides of the laptop display directly in front of him. The screen was black. He thumped the spacebar with his thumb. He hit the power button as if he were trying to score a point on a video game.
Nothing worked.
To his right, facing the Canadarm2 underneath window three was a joystick. It controlled the arm. He jockeyed it back and forth and then slapped at it with his hand. Nothing. Not that he expected it.
Shepard spun one hundred and eighty degrees. Cosmonaut Boris Voin was still there. He was tangled in the tether than connected him to the ISS. Feet away was veteran Astronaut Ben Greenwood. Ben had his hands up in surrender. He couldn’t know if they were dead or barely clinging to life.
Shepard took a deep breath and closed his eyes. “Tell me this is a dream,” he said aloud. “This has got to be a dream.”
He opened his eyes and reaffirmed what he already knew to be true. If he couldn’t restore power, he was screwed.
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EXCERPT FROM CROSSING: PART ONE OF THE PILGRIMAGE SERIES
EVENT +30:56 Hours
Acton, Maine
James Rockwell wrapped his lips around the barrel, still warm from the last time its owner pulled the trigger. It tasted like a mixture of fireworks and the sensation one gets when testing a battery with his tongue. His fingers were linked behind his head. He was on his knees, a rock buried in the thick grass digging into his left shin.
His wife Leigh knelt beside him. She was sobbing, tears streaking down her face. James could tell she was on the verge of hyperventilating. He tried to reach for her, hoping to offer some small comfort, but the psycho with the gun jammed the barrel past James’ teeth, gagging him.
He could not see his children, Max and Sloane, but he could hear them whimpering. They were on the other side of their mother, forced into the same awkward positions.
They’ve already been through so much, James thought. After everything…the pain and growth of the last six years…the life-altering chaos of the last day and a half…this is how they will die?
“You don’t need to kill us,” Max said, his voice sounding like the strong young man he was becoming. “You have our car. You have our food. Just let us go.”
“Shut up, runt,” said the would-be executioner. He was dressed in military camouflage fatigues and a matching boonie hat, the strap pulled tight under his chin. An AR-style rifle was slung across his back. His face was drawn thin, his eyes deep set. “You’re not going anywhere. This is where your road ends.”
“What are you waiting on?” a voice bellowed from behind the Rockwells. James could hear the man’s boots marching through the wet grass. “If you don’t have the stomach for it, I’ll handle it.”
“I got this,” replied the executioner. “I’m just deciding how I want to do it. Handgun or rifle.”
“You use that nine millimeter, you’re gonna get blood all over that nice new MultiCam uni you’re wearing.” The jackbooted thug walked around James and stood next to the executioner. He was older, thicker in the middle, and though he wore the same fatigues and hat as his younger comrade, his rifle and tactical gear were different.
“I just figured.” The executioner slid the barrel out of James’s mouth and held it up, the gray gunmetal wet from the rain.
“You’re an idiot,” said the thug. “Plus, you can’t do it out here in the grass. We need to get them into the woods.”
The rain had started again. It was loud, slapping against the canopy of trees and the pavement nearby. The executioner grabbed James by his elbow and forced him to his feet. The thug went to grab Leigh, but James stepped in front of him.
“Don’t touch her,” he snapped. “And don’t touch the kids!” James helped his wife to her feet as he coughed. Both kids jumped up and wrapped their arms around their parents.
“You’re not in a position to demand anything,” the thug snarled, swinging the butt of his rifle into the side of James’ head, knocking him back to the ground.
“Don’t hurt him!” cried Leigh, huddling with the children. Sloane was knuckling the tattered shell of her stuffed bear, pressing it into her chest.
The thug glared at her, inhaling and spitting onto her husband’s neck. “Get up.” The thug kicked James in the gut with his boot. “We’ve got more important business.”
James, dizzied by the hit and winded by the kick, pushed himself onto one knee. He wiped the spit from the back of his neck and looked up at the thug, keeping his gaze affixed on him as he stood.
“I said,” James wheezed, his voice thick with mucus, “don’t. Touch. Her.”
“Stop it, Rock,” Leigh pleaded, touching his shoulder. “Enough.”
“Rock?” The thug laughed. “Did you just call him Rock? That is wicked awesome.” The thug took his thick mitt of a hand and thumped it square in the middle of James’s back. “She called him Rock.” He laughed again for the benefit of the family and the executioner. “Like he’s Dwayne Johnson or something. Like he’s some big movie star.”
“His name is Rockwell,” said the executioner. He pulled a brown leather billfold from his pocket and tossed it at the thug. “Says so on his driver’s license. He’s from Maryland.”
The thug opened up the wallet and thumbed out the license. He flipped it over and slipped it back into place before shoving the wallet into his own pocket. “What are you doing here?”
“Vacation,” James said, his hands on his knees. He couldn’t catch his breath. “Family vacation.” His voice rattled.
“Not the R and R you were hoping for, eh, Rock?” the thug snickered. “It’s over now. Let’s march.”
The executioner holstered his nine millimeter and swung his rifle into his hands. Alongside the thug, the two of them pushed the Rockwells toward the woods fifty yards away.
James’s mind, cloudy as it was from the rifle butt, was spinning for a solution. How could he save his family, even if it meant sacrificing his life in the process?
Their captors, armed as they were, seemed sloppy. The younger one was in over his head. The older one was power happy.
There has to be a way…
James looked over at his wife, his children. He swallowed hard.
“Pick up the pace, Rock,” said the executioner. “Keep moving.”
A wet breeze blew across James’ face, a sign of the approaching fall. He could hear it whispering its way through the trees ahead of him.
Do something! it was telling him. Save your family.
He shook his head as he trudged forward, certain the blow to his head had him hearing things. It was that or the lack of sleep.
You can’t let them die here.
They were twenty-five yards from the beckoning woods, crossing the pavement of a parking lot entrance, when James wondered if his eyes were playing tricks on him too.
Facedown in the trampled weeds marking the entrance to the woods were five bodies. Two big, three small. He couldn’t make out whether they were men or women, boys or girls, but that was irrelevant.
Hallucinations or not, James knew they wouldn’t be the first family to die here. They wouldn’t be the last either, unless he acted quickly…unless he killed first. It was a notion to which the high school physics teacher from Maryland had grown alarmingly accustomed in the last thirty-six hours.
He was running out of time.
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thanks to my wife and kids, who always have my six. They support me, my dreams, and the long hours required to produce stories I hope people will read and enjoy. I love them and couldn’t imagine a world, post-apocalyptic or otherwise, without them.
Thanks to my editor, Felicia Sullivan. Her deft hand always finds the right way to turn a phrase. She is blunt. She is on point. I am thankful to work with her.
Pauline Nolet is a fabulous copy editor. She finds the things everyone else misses and makes the finished product as clean as it can be.
Hristo Kovatliev is a gem. My author friend Murray McDonald (go Google him and buy his books) recommended the gifted cover artist. He artfully crafted the covers for this series. I’m grateful.
Steve Kremer, Stephen Stewart, MD, and Mike Christian all provided valuable expertise in a variety of areas. Kremer helped polish an early edition of HOME and removed the weapons errors and typos. He’s been patient and kind in teaching me about guns and HAM radios. Stewart aided with medical information, ensuring I wasn’t off base. I’ll be leaning on them again in my next series. Christian proofed the Syrian chapters in CANYON. He was fantastic with suggesting changes that made the critical scenes ring true. I appreciate all three of them.
I also am indebted to several authors who’ve guided my journey thus far or who are zealous in their promotion of my work: Steven Konkoly, Murray McDonald, A.R. Shaw, Franklin Horton, ML Banner, Jay Falconer, William H. Weber, Russell Blake, Lisa Brackmann, and Ian Graham.
Thanks to my parents, Sanders and Jeanne, my siblings, Penny and Steven, and my in-laws, Don and Linda, for constant encouragement and support.