Nuclear Dawn Box Set Books 1-3: A Post-Apocalyptic Survival Series

by Kyla Stone

  “People are instinctive. They’ll go north or south. Fewer people will go through the Glades toward Naples. It looks like it’ll take longer, but it’s less likely to become a parking lot, and it’s free of radiation.”

  “A win-win, then,” Logan said.

  She shrugged. “It’s the least worst option out of a dozen terrible options. You’re welcome to head out on your own.”

  Shay and Julio exchanged a look.

  “My aunt lives in Naples,” Shay said. “My mom’s on a work trip in Tallahassee, thank goodness. She’ll be okay until I can get to her. So that works for me.”

  Julio shook his head, his eyes dark with worry. “My wife, Yoselyn, is in West Palm Beach visiting her sister. I’ll stay with you until Miami International, then I’ll head north.”

  “Fantastic,” Logan said flatly.

  He watched her, a hard alertness in his eyes, like he was waiting for her to bring up the safehouse.

  That wasn’t going to happen. She didn’t trust any of them, not even Julio.

  They’d keep each other alive until the Tamiami Trail. That was it. Then she’d lose all of them. She and Eden were better off on their own.

  “We’re all on the same page,” Logan said. “Let’s get this show on the road.”

  Shay wrapped her arms around herself and shivered despite the heat. “It’s safe out there, right?”

  “Nowhere is safe,” Dakota said.

  The world had never been safe, not for people like Dakota. Shay—with her fancy college education, cute clothes, and soft life—had no idea what the real world was like. Not then, not now.

  She pushed down a flush of anger and resentment. She didn’t like being that person—jealous and petty.

  Dakota moved to the shattered doorway of the movie theater and pointed at the Old Navy a few storefronts away, holding the roll of duct tape Shay had rescued from the employee supply room earlier that morning.

  “We need to cover ourselves from head to foot with clothes,” she said. “That will help some. It won’t protect us from the gamma rays, but from the beta and alpha particles at least.”

  She did a quick calculation in her head. “We could have been exposed to half a gray over the last forty-eight hours inside the theater. Acute radiation syndrome sets in between one and two gray. There’s still some fallout in the air. Maybe five rem an hour. Maybe more.”

  “Which means we have to get out of the fallout zone by tonight,” Logan said.

  “We can do that,” Shay said brightly. “I power-walk every morning for exercise. I can do four miles in an hour. Should be easy.”

  “Easy isn’t the word for it.” Dakota hesitated in the jagged doorway, dread coiling in her gut.

  Over two miles of destroyed city stood between her and Eden.

  What terrors awaited them out there? Would she be up to the task?

  She had to be. She had no choice.

  Logan strode past her. “Let’s get this show on the road then, shall we?” He tapped his wrist. “Don’t forget to start that timer of yours.”

  Dakota looked at her watch. 12:40 p.m.

  Forty-eight hours ago, the first bomb in D.C. detonated. How much unimaginable suffering had millions of people endured in the seconds, minutes, and hours since?

  She pushed the thought from her mind. They needed to find Eden before nightfall. Sundown was around 8:15 p.m. Less than eight hours, but they had to be out of the hot zone long before then. There wasn’t a second to waste.

  She stepped out into the daylight. Humidity blasted them like every other day in South Florida. Instantly, sweat beaded her forehead and lower lip and congealed beneath her pits.

  The clouds were thick and dark as wounds. Tiny particles like grains of sand or salt covered everything. But no fallout fell from the sky.

  At least, none that they could see.

  An eerie silence wrapped around them like a thick, woolen blanket. No car engines or alarms, honking horns, or people. No birdsong, even.

  Nothing but the rapid flutter of her own heartbeat in her ears. Everything was dulled, like the morning after a fresh snow.

  She’d seen snow once on a road trip to southwest Michigan with her real parents when she was young—maybe five or six.

  She remembered snowball fights and snow angels, scarves and mittens, the feeling of the cold eating her nose and fingers, needing to pee but being too bundled up in her snowsuit to make it.

  She remembered her father’s booming laughter and her mother’s smiling, cold-reddened face.

  But that time was dead and gone.

  Dakota shoved down the memory.

  Now, the only things that mattered were survival and saving Eden.

  33

  Maddox

  Maddox Cage believed in hell. He hadn’t known quite what that hell would look like until today.

  Smoke shivered, gusting, thick as fog. Ash and fine, sand-like grains fell swirling from the darkened sky like poisonous snow, sheeting everything in gray. The air smelled sulfuric, poisoned.

  Blackened skeletons of fire-rotted cars scattered across the crumbled, buckled asphalt. Palm trees not already toppled were sheered of their fronds, jutting trunks blackened with char.

  The further into the heart of downtown he staggered, the worse the devastation.

  Everything around him had been torn from its moorings and flung apart. Buildings were unrecognizable, their roofs caved in, their insides gutted, collapsed structures with exposed skeletons of metal and beams.

  His shoes crunched over piles of debris—bits of metal, rocks, and glass, chunks of twisted, deformed plastic, charred wood, and concrete ground to powder.

  He couldn’t walk a straight line but was forced to climb over small mountains of rubble, zigzagged past hunks of twisted, melted hulks of metal the size of houses.

  He passed bodies—not people, bodies. So many bodies. Hundreds. Maybe thousands.

  Bodies broken and crushed and charred. Bodies covered in ash and soot, missing legs or arms, pulverized beneath fallen ceilings and walls and cars.

  Some were vaporized instantly, leaving only shadowy stains on the walls.

  Some were charred where they stood, like coal statues. Others were burnt and ravaged beyond recognition—no longer human.

  A man and a woman in their fifties writhed and groaned on the sidewalk outside a boutique purse shop, their torsos, necks, and faces stippled with dozens of shards of glass—they’d been standing at the window during the blast.

  One figure—man or woman, he couldn’t tell—limped ahead of him, its leg below the knee crushed and shattered.

  Gratitude filled him. He was bruised but hale and whole. He still had his limbs. He could walk out of this carnage on his own two legs.

  God had blessed him. He recognized that much.

  Survivors lurched past him, almost inhuman creatures, deformed by burns, punctured by spears of glass or javelins of metal. First a few, then a dozen, then a regular stream of them.

  There, a few dozen yards up the street, the blue sign for Miami North Medical Center appeared out of the haze of ash and smoke.

  The street was crammed full of hundreds of bodies, all clamoring for help, for healing, for salvation that wasn’t coming.

  He could barely make out the building itself—damaged but still standing—for the crowd surging around it, filling the parking lot, spilling through the broken doors and windows.

  It had already been overrun.

  He saw no lights anywhere. For whatever reason, their generator was out. What could they possibly do for those patients they could reach without power?

  The hospital could save no one, he realized dimly. Not him, not anyone. Salvation resided elsewhere.

  A church rose on the left, looming above him. It was an old Catholic cathedral, the stone walls upright but listing, the roof mostly intact but for the caved-in steeple.

  His gaze came to rest on a charred, life-sized statue of St. Peter. The shockwave had knocked i
t clear out of the sagging building. Now it lay at the bottom of the cracked stone stairs.

  Vindication swelled in his chest. It served them right for worshipping graven images.

  He looked at the desolation, at the fractured, ruined city.

  God had done this.

  What else could this be but God’s wrath, descending upon the country for its sins, its worldliness?

  His father had always warned him that God would destroy the polluted cities just as He’d once destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah.

  That the appointed time was nigh. That they must always be ready.

  God would choose the Shepherds of Mercy to enact his judgment. Earthly angels handpicked to empty the bowls of wrath upon the wicked.

  Maddox was not afraid. He knew what this meant, what they’d been preparing for all this time. For the Lord shall execute judgment by fire…

  The judgment had begun.

  34

  Dakota

  Dakota led their small band along the road parallel to the storefronts, careful not to slip on the slick fallout particles or trip on debris. Glass shards littered the asphalt; even the car windows were all shattered.

  Julio gestured at a brand-new Ford F-150 taking up two parking spaces. “You sure none of these will work? Our trip would be a heck of a lot faster with wheels.”

  He pointed to a sleek, burnt-orange sports car. “Or better yet, how about this beauty? A 2012 Mazda RX-8. I’m sure her owner won’t mind if we borrow it.”

  “The EMP rendered everything within three miles useless,” Dakota said. “Once we get out of the hot zone, we can try to find something to drive.”

  Julio studied the vehicles as they passed by. “If we can find an old model without any computerized gizmos, I can hotwire one.”

  “Really?” Logan asked, impressed.

  Julio blushed. He ran a hand through his graying hair. “I spent a few summers hanging with a rough crowd as a kid. And I like cars. Especially the classics. Give me a 1961 Jaguar E-Type or a 1969 Ferrari Dino 246 GT and I can die a happy man.

  “I wanted to be a mechanic once. I like to rebuild the engines and tool around. I can fix most mechanical issues myself, could since I was thirteen. But the old man needed help with the Beer Shack. The rest is history, you know?”

  “What about bikes?” Shay asked eagerly. “We could travel so much faster.”

  Dakota gestured at the asphalt. “There’s glass and debris everywhere. You can barely see the ground. We’re more likely to fall and crack our heads open five minutes in than to get where we need to go. It’s too dangerous. For now.”

  Shay popped her gum. “Walking it is, then. At least we’ll get some exercise, right?”

  “That’s one way to look at it,” Dakota said archly.

  Julio crossed himself. “The sooner we get out of here, the better.”

  “I didn’t know you were Catholic,” Logan said.

  He shrugged. “Lapsed. But I guess it all comes back when the crap really hits the fan.”

  Dakota gave him a sharp look. “How could God allow this?”

  “I don’t have those answers.” Julio touched the gold cross he wore around his neck as he walked. “But I know God didn’t cause this evil.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because God is love,” Julio said simply. “We must have faith, now more than ever.”

  “Faith? After this? What about the hundreds of thousands of people who had faith God would keep them safe? What good is their faith now?”

  “Death is not the end for them,” Julio said slowly. “They’ll be in heaven.”

  Dakota snorted. “I’d rather have my life, if it’s all the same to God.”

  “Dakota,” Shay chided gently. “I don’t know about God, but this sure isn’t Julio’s fault. Shouldn’t we respect other people’s faith, even if it isn’t our own?”

  “We’ve all got to believe in something,” Julio said, “especially at a time like this.”

  “No, we really don’t.” She’d had enough of religion to last several lifetimes. She believed God existed, but the only God she’d known was a God of wrath and vengeance.

  The only faith she had left was in herself.

  “I have faith in something.” Logan veered left toward a Walgreens sandwiched between a Party City and a Chinese take-out place. “I’ll catch up.”

  “Where are you going?” Dakota asked. “We need to find protective clothing ASAP.”

  “I’m…worshiping.” Logan waved a hand without turning around. “Need something holy to drink.”

  Dakota’s gut tightened. Her first foster mother had been a drunk. She’d hated the stink of it on her breath, the glassy cruelty in her eyes when she came after one of the other, more vulnerable kids.

  Dakota had stepped in, given the woman a black eye for her troubles.

  That foster placement hadn’t lasted long.

  She cursed under her breath. Did she make the right choice to bring Logan along?

  Maybe she should’ve tried harder to steal the gun from him. She should’ve just set out on her own with a plan to find the closest gun shop and confiscate a new XD9 with a fine leather holster for herself.

  A man with a gun was dangerous to his own group if he was a drunk or otherwise unreliable. Even though she worked in a bar, Dakota never drank.

  She hated the thought of losing control for even a minute.

  She wouldn’t have chosen the Beer Shack if she’d had a choice, but Julio was the only boss willing to overlook her paranoid idiosyncrasies and pay her under the table.

  “We’re not waiting for him,” she snapped at Julio and Shay, who had both stopped. “Let’s go.”

  They picked their way across the parking lot and entered the store, careful to avoid the jagged chunks of glass still embedded in the metal frames of the front doors. The interior was deeply shadowed. Dakota pulled her flashlight out of her pocket and flicked it on.

  Near the front, all the racks of clothing had been knocked over. The huge display sign hanging from the ceiling had fallen and fractured, huge chunks of plastic scattered across the floor.

  A dozen mannequins littered the glossy cement floor, some without arms, legs, or heads, but dressed in bright screen T-shirts and acid-washed skinny jeans.

  Further inside, the white checkout counter gleamed dimly, surrounded by dark hulking racks that loomed out of the shadows like crouching monsters, predators just waiting to attack.

  “Hey, Dakota.” Shay stood before a rack of striped long-sleeved shirts, her arms crossed over her chest, chewing her lower lip nervously. “Should we touch these? Haven’t they been exposed to radiation?”

  “Yeah, they have. Check the back storeroom for clothes still sealed in boxes,” Dakota said as she moved toward the checkout counter. “They’ll be the safest.”

  “Looks cozy in here.” Logan came up beside her, so quietly she’d hardly noticed. He clutched a bottle of gin by the neck. It was half-empty. “It was the only one I could find that wasn’t broken. Such a pity.”

  “Did you already drink all that?”

  He took a long swallow and wiped the back of his mouth. “Isn’t that what it’s for? What better time to drown your sorrows than the apocalypse?”

  “I can’t think of a worse time. You need your wits about you.”

  He glanced down at her, his eyes already a bit shiny, but there was an alertness there, too. “Something you’re extra worried about?”

  She tensed. She didn’t like how he was looking at her, like he could see the secrets she held tight inside herself.

  She wasn’t telling him a thing. Not about her past, not about Maddox—not unless she had to. She didn’t trust him as far as she could throw him.

  Right now, she wished she’d left them all behind.

  35

  Dakota

  “As if all this isn’t enough?” Dakota stared at Logan, daring him to challenge her further.

  Logan met her gaze for another mo
ment, his jaw working like he wanted to say something else, like maybe he suspected she had an ulterior motive.

  He dropped his eyes first. Logan gave a careless shrug and took another swig. “The world’s been a dumpster fire for a long time.”

  “So, you should know better.”

  His mouth tightened. “I know to take pleasure where you can find it. And I don’t take orders from anyone—least of all you.”

  Irritation flared through her. “You’re in this group, you answer to me.”

  He let out a sharp bark of laughter. “You think you’re the leader?”

  “We sure as hell aren’t following a drunken idiot,” she shot back.

  “Guys, let’s just take a breath.” Julio stepped between them, hands out. She could just make out his tense, pleading expression in the glow of the flashlight. “We’re on the same side here, right? Time is the enemy, not each other.”

  He was right. Damn it.

  Logan gestured with the gin bottle. “Fine by me.”

  “Fine,” she grumbled.

  “Here.” With his free hand, Logan pulled his Glock 43 from beneath his shirt. He kept it angled down but held it out. “Happy now?”

  “You have a gun?” Shay squeaked. She took a step away, bumping into a sunglasses stand, lifting her palms, as if Logan had just brandished a live grenade.

  “Sure looks like it,” Logan said.

  Her eyes went wide. “All this time—in the theater, with kids around—you had a gun?”

  “He already answered the question,” Dakota snapped.

  “Guns are dangerous! What if a kid had gotten ahold of it? Or it discharged accidentally? Someone could’ve gotten hurt!”

  “Hold on a minute.” Logan took another swig of gin. “I know what I’m doing. A gun is a tool, just like anything else. It’s not a bomb waiting to go off.”

  Julio flinched.

  Logan only gave an indifferent shrug.

  “I’m not trying to cause a fight or anything, but…” Shay pursed her lips, staring at them reproachfully. “But you hid it like—like a criminal!” Her voice rose. “You should’ve told us you had it!”