Life After War: Books 1-3 Read online

  2

  Only two White House security tapes survived the blast, thanks to the quick instincts of a well-connected reporter with a shark’s reputation, and they were what most of the watching people saw when the President’s voice disappeared so abruptly. The first was a ten second clip, and in that short time, one perpetrator of the apocalypse was revealed.

  Former President Robert Milton slid the disk into the main computer with a look of hatred that few would have recognized from his time in office. Once exalted, he was now reduced to massage-boy for the current administration and he’d volunteered for this part of covering the centuries old lie.

  Clearly trying to hurry, the man looked over his shoulder repeatedly while typing in codes. He placed his hand on the scanner and the lights in the room flashed to deep red. Stepping over what was obviously a body, the broken man took a marker from the neat desk and began to write on the wall before the screen went to black.

  The second tape was shorter. Only four seconds, it was a brief flash of the same traitor, now putting the shiny black barrel of a gun in his mouth. Hands already stained with blood, there was a violent, crimson flash and the former President slumped to the floor. His message glared at the crimson-streaked camera lenses.

  "I did it for my country, because my country would not.”

  These two clips only circulated for a few minutes before the stations airing them went to static and didn’t return, but it was enough. The people knew the truth. There hadn’t been a terrorist attack, the government had caused it. America, and the world, had been betrayed!

  As to why - that didn’t become clear for a long time after the War, and even then, only a select few discovered the secrets…there were bigger atrocities to be faced.

  3

  In northern Florida, a twenty megaton ICBM caused the swampy shelf to begin cracking like window glass. The blinding flash was felt as far away as the Virginias, where fleeing citizens were stuck in crammed lanes of traffic on Interstate 81, with no way to avoid the danger. Nor could they escape the long convoy of draft trucks that were battering their way through the wrecks and vehicles in the grassy median, following orders with no exceptions.

  Brady - Virginia

  “All males will surrender to the Draft! If you resist or run, you will be shot!”

  The faint bullhorn woke those who had been dozing in the uncomfortable seats of the cold Greyhound bus, and a ripple of warning went through the armed man sitting against the frosty window. People were standing to look, muttering among themselves, but the grunt remained still, waiting to see how he should react.

  “Hey!”

  “He hit an old guy with his gun! They can’t do that!”

  “They just shot a woman! Murder! Call 911!”

  Sergeant Brady used his military voice to be heard over the din, “Everybody out! Make room!”

  The others stuffed into the crowded bus shifted toward the doors at the clear order, but they were panicked, shoving and yelling. Brady hefted himself up onto the vinyl seat and dove out the open window as more gunshots and screams exploded from the stuck traffic behind the bus.

  People were pouring from their vehicles now, running for the nearby homes and businesses of Wytheville as the MRAPs3 full of heavily armed soldiers followed, firing M16s at the citizens who refused to turn themselves over. Back-dropped by thick, black smoke and an angry, red sky, they remorselessly shot fleeing males, and anyone else who happened to get too close to their intended targets, only a few bothering with the bullhorns or their aim.

  Recognizing bloodlust, the Sergeant rolled through the slush, moving under the bus, and he stayed there as the chaos got closer, arms and ankles locked tight around the greyhound’s icy frame. The War had cancelled his leave, but he had to get home and he was going - a decision these Draft enforcers would shoot him for. Gun in hand, Brady stayed still as the trucks rolled by, and the citizens he was sworn to protect, were gunned down.

  A second later, the air shifted, thickened, and he instinctively shut his eyes and buried his head against his arm as the sky lit up and the sun fell on him.

  4

  The electro-magnetic pulse shot out brutally. The devastating wave traveled the same path as the radiation and pressure blasts, and then went farther. Moving through the air and over the land, it traveled like electricity - surging through train tracks, electric lines, and low band communication equipment. The power surge short-circuited everything it touched - sparking fires, making pacemakers stop, causing engines to stall… and planes to fall from the smoke-filled skies.

  Samantha – Wyoming

  “Please, can’t you just tell us where we’re going?”

  Samantha’s pretty blue eyes and calm demeanor allowed the grim-faced young soldier to answer her, when he hadn’t any of the others crammed into the chopper around them, but the deadly rifle in his hands didn’t lower as the loud blades struggled to cut through the thick haze.

  “We’ve been diverted to NORAD. The Essex Compound is now under evacuation.”

  The chopper suddenly lurched sideways, and Samantha stifled her scream, but not a low groan, as it was hit by an invisible wave of force and lurched again. The other Seattle civilians aboard the struggling aircraft echoed her noise of near panic.

  Taken together, they’d been "removed" from the Environmental Protection Agency by big soldiers with clipboards, government passes, and guns. After seeing a coworker shot in the back when he tried to run, none of them had rocked the boat despite obviously being kidnapped by their own government.

  The need to fight back warred with her survival instincts and Sam brushed only a quick glance over the other well-dressed, “lucky” few on board with her. In their faces, she saw the same dismay and slowly-dawning terror, and yet, she could have been alone - didn’t feel a connection with them. She was different.

  Samantha fingered the badge around her neck, wishing she didn’t have it. If her alarm hadn’t worked, the former President, Robbie Milton of the infamous suicide video, would have died four years ago in Nebraska, and none of this would be happening. Sam had been horrified to recognize the “terrorist” in the two short security videos. Did her saving his life all those years ago make some of this her fault?

  Sam assumed they were flying low to avoid Star Wars and stifled another sound of misery as the cities rolled by, unable to believe that was her country down there tearing itself apart. Shootings, fires, assaults, murders. Bodies everywhere! In cars, on streets, even on playgrounds! Moreover, no one was coming to remove them! Samantha swallowed her panic. This wasn't happening. Just a horrible nightma…

  She watched in terror, forgetting to breathe, as an unending line of destruction rushed over the land, eating everything in its path. Power lines lit up, sparking violently; gas lines ruptured, exploded, and homes and cars disappeared under the rapidly advancing brown and gray avalanche of death that was now drawing even with the military transport chopper. They were out of range, weren’t they?

  "Get higher!"

  Even as Sam finished the shout, she saw the blades stop spinning, her ears registering the sudden, deafening silence, and then they were plummeting to the earth in a sickening blur of swirls and screams.

  The government bird slammed into the rocky, Wyoming ground at a hard angle and flew back up, flipping and twisting into new shapes. It blew through a thick tree and began to roll, scattering awful debris. Huge flames and thick smoke blanketed the crash site.

  Her hurting body checked in as bruised and ready to hide, but otherwise uninjured, and Samantha groaned, not opening her eyes. The lack of noise (not even a whimper or scream) told her that the rest of her traveling companions had not been so lucky, and she moaned again, dazed.

  Forgetting for a second about all that had happened, she hoped someone had already called 911.

  “See! Told ya it’s a woman!”

  The male voice released her tears. Help was here!

  “I’ll hold her down ‘n you can go first this ti
me, but let’s pull her away from all that metal and fire.”

  As hands closed like iron bands around her slender ankles, Samantha started screaming again.

  5

  Less than half a minute had passed when another wave of destruction rushed out - one of pressure and wind at levels not even buildings, let alone people, could withstand. Those who had time to get below ground were not as safe as they thought, especially in California, where the ‘Big One’ finally came and went mostly unnoticed. People were already busy dying.

  Adrian - California

  "Is it true? Are you his son?"

  Adrian opened his mouth to confirm the lethal secret he’d just been confronted with by his fellow Greenpeace members, but snapped it shut as the neighborhood sirens began to wail again. The static-filled radio blared a reporter’s shocked words.

  “…has been unlike anything my generation has ever experienced. We are watching in horror as each of these bombs hits and… it’s so ugly! Huge fireballs instantly create gaping, fifty-mile wide craters around the point of impact and blasts all those buildings, cars, and people into the sky. As it rises, it forms a gigantic, toxic black mushroom cloud that immediately begins to spread with the wind.

  “Instantly following these explosions, are huge rushes of thermal heat and light that shoot out in every direction, peeling skin away from bones and blinding every living thing facing in that direction. The temperatures are in the hundreds of degrees, and those in the path have no chance of escaping as our way of life begins to crash down…”

  The station faded into a national anthem as a city siren reached its peak. Ear-splitting, it overwhelmed, just for a brief second, the horrible noises going on outside the small, San Bernardino ranch home, and across the riot-ravaged country. Adrian’s patriotic heart bled for people he didn’t know, and the powerful secret he had kept suddenly seemed tiny in comparison. But it wasn’t. It was the sum of all secrets, and likely the reason their world was ending.

  The radio on the basement steps wailed suddenly, mirroring previous sounds of impending arrival. The stepped under the thick planks next to the Christmas tree as a dozen other surrounded him, shock and outrage on their faces.

  “You caused this!”

  Adrian had a brief moment to think he was glad that most of those here for the meeting had already fled at the reports of a bomb hitting the West Coast, but even this dozen was too many to fight unarmed if things got ugly. Good thing he wasn’t. How had they found out?

  “Answer the question!”

  "Tell the truth!"

  The furious men moved closer, and the plastic tree and presents went flying when he tried to use them for a shield.

  “We'll beat it out of ya!"

  “Did you know?”

  Their eyes and voices were full of hate, demanding answers. Again, he started to answer and was cut off - this time by a huge, vicious rumbling under their feet.

  It came hard and fast, sawdust from the stairs falling over them as it pounded closer through the rock and stone. Adrian had been in enough hot landing zones to recognize the danger, and threw himself to the tiled floor, putting a hand on the gat4 in his pocket, as some of the men followed his lead. Others lunged his way, thinking he was trying to escape.

  “Get him!”

  “Incoming! Get down!”

  The walls above them exploded an instant later, blown away like brittle leaves in the fall, and then the small, neat house above them was crumbling, burying them alive.

  6

  These were the first and most direct effects of the War on American soil, the beginning of a hard new world where all authority disappeared. In less than one day, calm, arrogant safety vanished and took with it, the rest of society’s perceived protections that had always been taken for granted…like calling 911.

  Angela – Ohio

  “He didn’t say Ft. Defiance. He didn’t.”

  The very pale woman dropped the stained hospital scrubs she'd just changed out of and gripped the back of the kitchen chair. Oblivious to the gunshots and screams outside, and to the pains tearing through her slightly rounded belly, she watched the CNN report on the plasma T.V., listening to them tell of an impact over 1200 miles from her Cincinnati home.

  “.. latest word is five million dead, another two million injured or exposed, and the cloud is moving west, northwest towards the Alabama State line at 37 mph. Camp David is gone, Houston, all the coastal oil refineries…”

  “Charlie?”

  The woman slid to her knees on the plush carpet of the two-bedroom apartment, the agony in her chest worse than the bands of pressure clamping around her stomach, pushing down. Footsteps thudded in the halls outside her door, followed by more shouts. Both went unnoticed.

  “It can’t be!”

  The cell phone slid out of her hand, liquid suddenly oozing down her thighs and swollen legs as Christmas lights flashed mockingly in place of emergency blinkers.

  “I would know!” she cried suddenly, doubling over, “I would know!”

  The door in her mind rattled and she grunted in pain, trying to draw on a gift (curse) she had locked away over a decade ago, but she was weak and those magic halls remained closed.

  Her forehead thumped on the carpet as pain, raw and sharp, tore through her stomach. Darkness flooded her mind.

  Now unheard, an emotionless voice echoed calmly: “Please hold and the next available operator will assist you. 911 estimated wait time... Two hours, 14 minutes…The system is currently experiencing heavy call volume. If this is not an emergency, please hang up and try your call again later. Service outages can be expected in some areas. Please continue to hold and the…”

  Behind her, the horrified reporter continued to tell the rest of the world what was happening, but few were listening. The end had come.

  “...Chicago barrier gave way instantly and millions of gallons of debris-filled water barreled downstream, overwhelming towns and cities for 40 miles before joining the Wabash River, swelling it even more. It has poured down every stream, sewer, creek, and river it touched, sweeping away thousands in each state.

  “This merciless torrent split briefly between the Wabash and Mississippi Rivers, widening the path of damage, then merging again in Louisiana, where it finally punched a hole through the city of Baton Rouge and emptied into the already flooded Gulf.

  “The pressure of the bombs, coupled with the pounding of the raging water, has triggered the ancient New Madrid fault line under St. Louis, causing a 7.7 earthquake that is leveling untouched areas, and is being felt as far away as Kansas City and Louisville. Places like Humboldt and Jonesboro have simply collapsed like dominoes, already weakened by the surge of debris-filled waves…."

  7

  Once again a target for the government they represented, the military was especially hard hit. Most of the service men and women who survived, later denied they were ever a part of any armed force. As few as one out of every ten came through the War alive despite being so well-trained...

  Kenn –Arizona

  “Damn!"

  The Lance Corporal ducked down, pushing the muddy hardback5 as fast as it would go.

  Ft. Defiance was under siege. Furious and terrified citizens were trying to get over and through the electrified, ten-foot-high fence that surrounded the 17-mile compound. It sounded like a giant bug zapper - poles, cars, furniture, and even people were being used to try to break the live wires - but so far, the strong magnetic force had held.

  It didn’t keep out the bullets, though, and the Marine pulled his cover farther onto his head as the popping grew steadier, almost rhythmic. Someone out there was firing an assault rifle. Kenn’s grip on the wheel tightened, knuckles white - he hated the feeling of near panic that lurked just under the surface. He had to get there first! Choppers were swarming over the grounds of the base, trying to evacuate the Marines and "Draftees", but the violent winds gusting from the direction of Houston made landing difficult, and might give him a chance.
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br />   In the past, the weather was the worst challenge the Pilots had to face here. Now, it was the least of their worries. Arriving Birds were being blown out of the smoky skies before they could descend to safety – crashing, exploding, flinging twisted metal debris flying into the screaming mob of rioters. Some aircraft were only damaged, and would crash later in remote locations, but many had already fallen on the scene from ambush - telephone poles and grenade launchers were hard for the overloaded choppers to avoid. In short, it was mayhem.

  "Yes!" The cadet barracks came into full view through the thicket of trees. “He has to be here!"

  Men shouted, hungry rioters screamed, guns fired, and gust after violent gust of stomach-churning wind pushed against the truck, slowing it down. The sky above the base rolled with thick red clouds that flashed angrily, and black flakes fell like a blizzard, coating everything with a heavy layer of soot that looked like ash from a volcano.

  Kenn looked up suddenly, the shadow of the chopper passing overhead not what drew his attention, but the silence of its engines. He stared in shock as the big Bird began to freefall, spiraling toward him.

  Not realizing the truck’s engine had died too, Kenn mashed the pedal and ducked, as the chopper spun past. He met the eyes of the horrified pilot for a brief second, before it hit the main dorm, exploded through it.

  Orange flames and thick black smoke billowed upward, and Kenn’s heart froze as the cheers and screams of those outside the fences grew louder, hungrier. If the boy had been in there, he was dead now. No one could have survived that.

  Falling apart at the seams