Tempest
Page 1
TEMPEST
Weathering the Storm Series
Book 1
By
Kenny Soward
Mike Kraus
© 2019 Muonic Press Inc
www.muonic.com
www.kennysoward.com
kenny@kennysoward.com
www.MikeKrausBooks.com
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No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, without the permission in writing from the author.
Table of Contents
Preface
Introduction
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
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
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Special Thanks
Special thanks to my awesome beta team, without whom this book wouldn’t be nearly as great. Thank you!
WEATHERING THE STORM Book 2
Available Here
Preface
“Have a very digital day,” the pleasant woman at the door to the Boston Conference Center said, “and a sequential weekend.” Her smile was cheeky as she delivered the cheesy line, though Jake suspected she was just as anxious to get out of here as he was.
“You, too.” Jake smiled as he walked by, loosening his tie and breathing a sigh of relief.
The Future Tech convention was over, and he was exhausted. While beneficial to his professional life, the conference had burned him out. He’d sat through the endless presentations and participated in many heated discussions about what the next big application would be to take over the market. It seemed no one could agree. Would it be database restructuring, Big Data, or cloud services? Or was information security going to rule the market over the next decade?
He wove between the men and women leaving the convention, each of them wearing collared shirts with the logos of their companies on their breasts. He nodded and smiled at those he knew, wishing them a good flight or promising to contact them soon. He’d made a lot of new connections over the past week and he intended to make them count, both for his company and his upcoming performance review.
The Boston Convention Center was a huge building with cavernous exhibition spaces and a modern look, but most of the exhibition halls had remained empty. The Future Tech conference had just barely filled the Junior Ballroom on the second floor, an eerie and subtle indication of a significantly weakened US economy.
Don’t think about it, Jake thought with grim determination. Keep your head down and your eyes focused forward. Things will take an upturn soon.
He walked down a long hall, past escalators crowded with people, and then took a right until he stood in the North Lobby.
The entire wall facing Summer Street was made of glass. Gray clouds and fluttering decorations outside filled it like an ominous painting. It was early evening, but it wasn’t supposed to be so dark. Jake pushed through the revolving door and was hit with a warm, almost tropical wind that brought the scent of rain with it. It was the middle of May in Boston, so it should have been much cooler. In fact, it had been so cold earlier in the morning that Jake had jogged from his hotel to the convention center just to get warm.
Jake looked up at the sky and squinted. Light streaks of clouds spread across the sky, and splotches of dark gray loomed above those, lit up by sporadic bursts of lightning. A slow rain had started to fall, and the drops were big and fat.
“So weird,” Jake mumbled to himself as his eyes lingered on the sight. The area was already bracing for a massive hurricane that had slowly turned its eye on the northeastern corridor, despite the calm and serene weather that morning.
After a moment, he turned right and followed a sidewalk that would eventually take him to the Westin Hotel. He noticed others glancing up as they walked, looking at the ominous sky. Strange weather for Boston, but he’d seen way worse living in the Midwest. Growing up in Louisville, Kentucky had shown him just how fickle Mother Nature could be. He’d seen snow in May, and seventy-degree weather on Christmas Day, so nothing could really surprise him anymore. He’d once stood on his porch during a tornado warning and listened as the twister passed within a quarter mile of his house.
“They” were right. Tornadoes did sound like freight trains. Big, frightening, nightmarish ones, accompanied by clouds like those currently swirling above his head.
Jake shook himself out of his thoughts and followed a herd of people over to the hotel as the rain picked up and grew more intense. It was annoying to be caught outside without an umbrella, but he’d be inside in another thirty seconds.
The Westin Hotel loomed large above them. It was a newer-looking building with eighteen floors stretching upward into the dismal sky. By now the pavement was wet and the smell of hot, steaming cement rose to greet him. Jake walked faster, passing several people and heading toward the hotel door where people were rushing to get inside before the rain began to pour.
Halfway across the street, a gust of wind kicked up and knocked him a little off balance. Hats and other loose articles began to skitter across the pavement, and Jake chuckled internally as people scrambled to pick up their things. He felt a slight pang of guilt immediately after, so he bent down and retrieved some flying papers for a woman who thanked him profusely for saving her project.
A heavy burst of rain thundered down, chasing him through the revolving door as he pushed his way inside the hotel. Jake shivered and then moved across the lobby toward the elevators. He flashed the lady behind the front desk a smile. She looked up and absently returned it, then went right back to her cell phone. She was looking at something so intently that she appeared almost spellbound.
Must be something pretty important, Jake mused.
Other people stood around looking at their phones, too. Not an uncommon occurrence, yet strangely unsettling for some reason. Probably some viral clickbait news item or celebrity death. Never having been one to stay glued to his phone, Jake didn’t condemn others for it, but he admitted to a small bit of pride in rarely looking at the screen whenever he was out and about. Whatever was going on, he’d figure it out once he got back to the room.
Jake never took the elevator if he could help it. It was something his wife, Sara, had seared into his brain. She often said easier wasn’t always better, and Jake had grown to agree. Walk whenever possible. Take the stairs instead of the escalator. Stuff like that. The cardio was good for him, and her advice was solely responsible for helping him lose twenty pounds and keep it off.
He opened the door to the cement stairwell and hit the steps two at a time, challenging himself to get his heart rate up. On the second floor, the halogen lights flickered and win
ked, but he hardly noticed. By the time Jake reached the third floor, he was breathing heavily, and his heart rate had picked up. Once out of the stairwell, he strode down the soft, carpeted hallway until he came to room 329. He slid his key card in and waited for the click before he grabbed the handle, turned it, and went inside.
The cool, dry air of the room greeted him. He tossed his key, wallet, and badge on the desk and flipped on the TV so he could listen while undressing. It was tuned to the local news channel already, and a pretty newswoman with a stern—or was it fearful?—expression addressed him while a “Breaking News” ticker flashed across the bottom of the screen.
“A series of tremendous storms have increased in ferocity all along the Eastern Seaboard,” she said from her seat at the news desk, “and weather authorities are wondering how they missed the signs. What had been predicted as a Category 3 hurricane hitting in the late evening hours has now been upgraded to Category 5, with similar predictions forecast for the two storms already blowing in across the Atlantic and predicted to hit over the next week. The National Weather Service says that the unexpected turn might be due to a shift in two high-pressure systems that—”
Jake stepped away from the TV and into the bathroom, only slightly worried. The authorities would be prepared for this, right? The people of Boston were accustomed to storms, so they’d be ready.
He just hoped his flight wouldn’t be delayed so he could get out of the city tonight before the worst of it hit. Sara and the kids were no doubt already in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, waiting at the cabin. By tomorrow night, they’d all be cozied up beside the fire, roasting marshmallows. These big storms and the Future Tech Conference would be all but forgotten.
He turned on the bath water to test the temperature. As soon as he turned the knob to the left, the pipes groaned and shot water out of the spigot in cold bursts. The groaning and complaining pipes continued, so Jake turned it off.
Strange. Last time he’d experienced something like this was back at his parents’ house. The old plumbing had never been right, and it always had hitches and sputters like it was trying to figure out what to say. His father chalked it up to the city’s water pressure problems. Jake wasn’t a Boston native, so he couldn’t say whether this was normal for here, although a modern hotel shouldn’t have such problems.
“That’ll be a half-star reduction on Yelp,” he said with a shake of his head. “No shower for me, it seems.”
He went back into the room and started to gather his things, glancing at the news as he did so. This time, a slick-looking weatherman stood in front of a weather map as he made sweeping gestures with his hands.
“This highly dangerous hurricane has already reached windspeeds of a hundred miles per hour,” he said, “and it doesn’t appear to be slowing down. You are advised to take hurricane precautions, and if you’re in the Boston downtown area, stay inside and away from windows and exterior walls.”
Done packing, Jake laid down on the bed and put his hands behind his head as the news rolled on. Despite the growing tension in the reporters’ voices, his eyelids grew heavy, and he fell into a dark, dreamless sleep.
Something slammed into Jake’s window, sending spiderwebs racing across the glass and causing him to sit up stiff and alert. The newswoman was in the TV studio, looking at Jake with a mixture of agony and terror.
“The Eastern Seaboard is now in a severe state of emergency.” She spoke through tight lips, barely controlling her emotions. Wisps of hair had come loose from her previously tight bun. “Rescue crews are converging on the most hard-hit areas, but weather conditions are making it impossible to get to those needing help.”
The screen switched to camera footage of the storms with their locations written in white text on the bottom left of the screen. Trees bent nearly double in Charleston, South Carolina. Cars being tossed up twenty or thirty feet into the air to smash against the sides of buildings in Virginia Beach, Virginia. A helicopter view of a huge cyclonic funnel ripping through buildings in the south part of Boston, Massachusetts like a child traipsing through a field of dandelions. Jake’s stomach leaped into his throat as he watched Boston Harbor swell with water and flood surrounding buildings up to the first and second floors. Cars and trees were swept inward, along with small black dots he refused to admit were people.
“The Red Cross and FEMA are standing by. The death toll is estimated in the tens of thousands. The structural damage is catastrophic. The President has declared a state of emergency for—”
The hotel gave a huge shudder and the TV flickered. Jake felt a dangerous vibration running through the building that he hadn’t noticed before.
He sprang up and moved carefully to the window, throwing the curtains aside before he stepped back in shock. Rain and debris were hitting the window so hard that he could barely see out. It was like a giant throwing buckets of water against the glass. He put his face closer and saw the street below through lulls in the wind.
There was still some traffic, but the cars moved cautiously. Across the street, a car drifted from its parking spot and slid across the wet cement and out into traffic. Jake’s shoulders clenched as a vehicle coming the opposite way collided with it and jerked upward. The wind caught it and flipped it completely backwards, where it landed with a crash.
“What the…,” Jake mumbled in astonishment. His eyes went wide as he watched trees from a nearby park go sliding by and debris started to rain against the sides of buildings. Glass shattered and fell from the windows of the convention center across the street as cheaper pieces of construction were torn off and tossed into the air.
Jake rushed over to the desk to grab his key, wallet, and phone. He didn’t feel safe on the third floor any longer. Not with winds like that. Living in the Midwest his entire life had taught him never to underestimate them. When the twisters came, you were supposed to find the lowest, most well-constructed place and hunker down.
He needed to go down right now.
Jake was changing into his sneakers when the TV flickered and went out, along with the lights. There was a brief moment of panic as he stood in the gray silence, listening to his quiet breathing and the sound of the wind. Then something screamed outside, and his window shattered into a million pieces.
Somewhere over Tennessee in a Cargo Plane
"Yi."
"What." The response wasn’t a question, but a statement, spat out in Mandarin Chinese in a mixture of aggression, exhaustion, and frustration. They’d been in the air for twelve hours, waiting for base to provide the perfect attack vector.
"Transmission from base." Chen's quiet, determined demeanor was unshaken. "YAWTS confirms that the storms made landfall an hour ago and are ravaging the East Coast, as predicted.”
A slight smile creased Yi's craggy features at the success of the Yazi Advanced Weather Tracking System. "Our light is green? No more waiting in this accursed metal tube?"
"The enemy was woefully unprepared for such weather." Chen nodded as the plane shivered with turbulence. “We intercepted a government transmission. Within twelve hours they'll send much of their emergency services east to help with the rescue and cleanup, leaving their middle exposed. We have the go-ahead to land.”
Yi's smile broadened as he stretched out his camo-clad legs, flexing his muscles. The assault team had grown cramped from two weeks spent curled up with their communications gear and weapons. Now it was time to do what they’d been trained to do.
"Inform the others,” Yi said. “Ensure they're ready. We take out any leftover resistance first, then go for the grid and the main targets."
Chen nodded and slunk back into the shadows, bracing himself against the side of the aircraft as it jostled mid-flight.
Yi looked across the cabin to his Russian counterpart, Ivan Polyansky, and nodded. This joint venture was going to pay great dividends for the Red Block and its allies, opening the way for a new world order. They would go down as heroes in the eyes of their countrymen.
Ivan’
s chiseled face nodded in reply, brow furrowed with satisfaction. The big Russian took up his rifle and checked it for the hundredth time. Yi's eyes drooped shut to the sounds of clicking gun parts, his smile lingering as he contemplated the day when the dragon's awakening would come to full fruition.
Introduction
During the Atlantic Hurricane Season, an average of almost three storms per year end up turning into “major hurricanes”—ones that are Category 3 or above. While tropical storms can be monitored and tracked by satellites, predicting where these storms will go and how powerful they’ll become is still far from being an exact science.
Over the last few years, the United States has seen a surge in storms that quickly change direction and intensity at the last second. Sometimes these changes are for the better and sometimes they’re for the worse. Whenever one of these storms hits the mainland, tens of millions of dollars’ worth of damage is done in the blink of an eye, and the total is often far worse. Beyond that, our federal and state emergency response agencies have showed multiple times that they simply are not funded or prepared at the level needed to survive such a storm.
Imagine, then, a near-future that mirrors parts of our recent past. Jobless rates are near double-digits, trade has slowed, and a deep economic recession has taken hold across the width and breadth of the United States. We’ve seen such downturns rise to alarming levels within the past decade, and with civil unrest and divisiveness growing by the day, it’s easy to imagine it happening again within the next decade, if not sooner. We’ve been in several such spirals in the past, and each time have barely pulled out, recovering just before the situation became truly dire.
What if there was no coming back, though?