Bitter Cold Apocalypse
T.W. Connor
Copyright © 2021 by T.W. Connor
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Kindle Edition, License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Amazon.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, organizations, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
About Bitter Cold Apocalypse:
A nation in darkness. A bitter Northern Michigan winter. The harrowing journey of survival begins.
Newly married, John and Angie Aikens are on a hunting trip in Northern Michigan when an EMP plunges the nation into darkness. They need to head back to civilization to reunite with Angie’s daughter, Sarah, but quickly discover that not only is their truck inoperable, the wild animals are acting weird…and becoming more hostile and dangerous by the hour.
Now, they must fight not only the elements on their journey back home, but avoid the growing chaos and nefarious forces that are closing in on them.
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Contents
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
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About the Author
1
I was in the woods on the day my world imploded.
The hunting trip had been something Angie and I were doing for fun. Something that we’d decided on right after the wedding—a way for us to get to spend some time together, truly getting to know each other.
A honeymoon. Sort of.
And it was truly just us. Some camping gear, our rifles, and the wilderness. We spent the first day just enjoying the fresh air and quiet of the winter woods. As we sat in the tree stand that morning, huddled together against the bitter cold, I realized that I couldn’t remember a time when I’d been happier. Felt more secure, more safe. More like I thought a person was supposed to feel.
Later, I would look back on those few hours and wonder what would have happened if we had just stayed there. I would wish that we’d been able to do something like that, just to hold onto the happiness of our early days together. Before the lights went out and the Earth started to burn.
Of course I would follow that up with the truth of the matter: It wouldn’t have mattered if we’d stayed sitting on that log. We wouldn’t have been protected by what was coming.
“Easy, John,” Angie had breathed. “Wait for your shot.”
I tracked the deer in the scope of my rifle, enjoying the warmth of my wife’s hand at the small of my back. I also shut down the smirk I could feel growing on my mouth. No need to tell her that those instructions are unnecessary, I reminded myself. No need to tell her that I’ve shot guns more times than I’ve tied my shoes and could do it in my sleep.
Could kill in my sleep.
The thought sent my smile flying into the nether, and I quickly adjusted my focus back to the deer. This wasn’t war. This wasn’t Afghanistan. Those memories had no place here.
They had no place here.
Besides, I would freely admit that Angie was a better hunter than I was, having grown up in the upper peninsula of Michigan in a family that practiced hunting like a religion. She was pretty much an expert, even when you took into account the fact that I’d done three tours in the United States Army fighting insurgents in Afghanistan. I may not have had Angie’s knack for tracking game, but those long months of constant danger in the Afghan hills had taught me how to wait for my shot and make the kill.
I exhaled, my breath ghosting up around the rifle scope. I felt the chill air pushing into my limbs and allowing me to calm the adrenaline rush of the moment. Took a slow breath and held it, readying my trigger finger.
Then the deer jumped out of scope.
“Dammit,” I breathed, moving the rifle smoothly to the left and finding the deer again. It wasn’t uncommon for them to jump, but normally I could see it coming.
Normally they gave some sort of warning.
I had done a little hunting in my day. Seen a deer catch a scent and take off running before, when I didn’t know that anything had happened. But there was a process to it. A widening of the nostrils, a sudden alertness before the deer sprang into action. And there shouldn’t have been anything for it to scent right now. We were downwind from the animal.
Then it took off again, and I realized that it wasn’t running away. Not the way a normal deer would have. Hell, it wasn’t even running straight. The deer had started galloping in a tight circle at the edge of the clearing, staying in one place and digging out a deep circular trench in the snow. It seemed to be running as fast as it could, tossing its antlered head in all directions at random. It would slip and skid to the ground in the snow, then jump back to its feet and keep running. Around and around. Over and over.
“What the hell is going on?” Angie asked.
“Get the binoculars,” I told her on a whisper—not that I thought we had to be quiet anymore. Whatever was going on out there, it had nothing to do with us. “This freaking deer just went nuts.”
Angie pulled a pair of high-powered binoculars from the pack at her feet and brought them to her eyes.
“What the...”
“I know. Have you ever seen one do that?”
If anyone had, it would have been her. She’d spent much of her childhood in the woods, tracking different types of game with her father and uncles. At only twenty-six years old, she was a more experienced hunter than most of the guys I’d grown up with in Indiana. Yeah, I was a couple years older than her, but I still felt like the student whenever we were in the woods together.
She shook her head.
“I’ve never seen anything do this. It just keeps going.”
The deer continued in its frantic circle, its path slowly shifting toward a large tree at the edge of the clearing. We watched in silence, too shocked by what we were seeing to comment further. The deer never paused or slowed its crazed run—until it collided head-first with the trunk of the tree. It dropped to the ground, flopping on the snow until it finally grew still. Half a second later, the sound of its skull impacting the wood reached us, a sharp crack like the breaking of a tree branch.
My eyebrows shot up. “Holy shit!”
We looked at each other, wide-eyed, Angie’s pale blue eyes striking in the early morning chill. She brushed a strand of brown hair away from her long nose with a gloved finger, then turned and stared at the dead deer again.
She might be good in the forest, but I wasn’t going to let her go out there alone. Especially not with what we’d just seen. I didn’t know what the hell had happened to that deer, but I could smell danger like smoke on the wind—and it was my job to protect Angie from whatever was out there.
It was early December, and we’d gotten our first major snow of the season a week earlier. It covered our legs to mid-calf as we plowed our way forward, descending from the small rise that held the tree stand and crossing the clearing toward the fallen deer. The sun had risen on a thin layer of silky gray cloud cover, and a few lazy flakes of snow still drifted down. Everything was quiet in the clearing, the covering of snow absorbing any sound. The world around us seemed frozen in time, apart from the few brittle snowflakes that glittered in the air.
Then I realized that we’d been wrong. Or at least I had been. Frozen fumes of breath were still escaping the deer’s nostrils as we approached it. It was still alive, but had clearly knocked itself senseless when it ran into the tree. One antler had broken off entirely, and I picked it up with a gloved hand as Angie knelt to examine the deer.
“Poor thing,” Angie said. “Whatever it heard, it scared it half to death.”
She stood up, slung her rifle off her shoulder, and put it to her shoulder—but I put a hand out to stop her.
“What are you doing?” I asked quickly.
She gave me a look like she thought I’d lost my mind. “I’m putting it out of its misery, John. The thing has probably got bleeding in its brain, and it might have a broken neck. Would you rather leave it here to suffer?”
I stared at her, shocked once more by how complicated she was. This was a woman who had no trouble hunting, when it came to food and warmth. But if she saw an animal suffering, her heart went out to it. She would have shot this deer in half a second if she’d been the one aiming. But tell her that it might be in pain and she was going to fix the problem immediately, regardless of the danger.
And I envied that humanity. That emotion. It was something I’d never been able to figure out for myself. That didn’t mean this was the right time to be shooting a rifle. We had no idea what was going on out there, no idea what the deer had been reacting to.
“I don’t think—”
A series of crashes broke through the trees above us, cutting me off, and a bird hit the ground not ten feet from where we stood.
I crouched down, my eyes shooting to the sky above us, but I didn’t see anything up there. Nothing that would have struck a bird, at any rate. I moved at a crouch toward the bird, crouching down to look at it when I arrived. It was an owl of some kind, now flapping on its back in the snow. At least one wing was broken, and maybe its neck. It couldn’t seem to turn over. First the deer, now an owl.
Was every animal in this forest losing its damn mind? Something about this didn’t feel right. The instincts that had got me safely through many situations in Afghanistan were absolutely screaming that something was wrong.
“John...”
A note of fear in Angie’s voice pulled my attention away from the wounded bird. She was standing slowly from her place at the deer’s side, eyes trained on the sky to the east, jaw dropping toward the frozen ground. I followed her gaze to see that the silver sky was cut through by a thin, orange-red laceration, slicing a looping path from the sun’s hazy outline, along the horizon and back again. It spread an unnatural discoloration through the clouds, staining the atmosphere with a sickly yellow bruise.
“What is that?” Angie whispered.
I shoved the broken deer antler into my back pocket and took the rifle off my shoulder, chambering a round. The peace of the lovely morning in the woods soured in my stomach, replaced by a rising sense of dread.
“We need to get back to the truck.”
The day darkened quickly after that.
Heavier cloud cover moved in as we traveled the short distance to where we’d parked the truck, and the snow redoubled its efforts. The sky retained its strange yellow hue, tinting the world around us into a strange alien landscape. The temperature seemed to have dropped as well, solid snow crunching underfoot to break the silence of the woods. I found myself searching the shadows at the base of every tree, jumping at the rustle of each small animal that moved through the brush. I was on edge, my skin crawling the way it used to under the Middle Eastern sun, my back itching at the nameless sensation of unseen danger.
This wasn’t who I wanted to be anymore. This wasn’t who I had expected to be here, in the safety of Michigan.
A twig snapped to my left, and I jerked my rifle barrel up, shifting my body to address the threat and moving on instinct to place myself between Angie and danger.
A rabbit hopped out of the underbrush, fat and slow in its winter coat, and I lowered my weapon.
“Easy, soldier.” Angie rested a calming hand on my shoulder. “Wanna tell me what’s going on in that head of yours?”
I passed a rough hand over the dark stubble on my face. The beard was still growing in. It had been Angie’s idea to grow it, a way to keep warm against the bitter Northern Michigan winters, but I still wasn’t used to feeling the hair on my face.
One more thing that made me feel off-balance.
“I just have a bad feeling,” I said. “I’ll feel better after I can make a phone call. Find out what’s going on out there.”
We’d left our cell phones in the cab of the truck, thinking they’d be safer there. Besides, there wasn’t much of a signal way out here anyway. Now I needed to talk to someone who knew what was going on. If I could find a place to get enough coverage, I might be able to get in touch with the local police station. Find out what they knew about that thing in the sky.
“Well let’s keep moving then.” Angie gave my shoulder a final squeeze, then shouldered past me to take the lead. “We’re almost there. Stay with me.”
I followed my wife, grateful for her calming influence, but kept a tight grip on my rifle all the same. Our truck was parked in a gravel parking lot at the bottom of the trail we’d taken up into the forest. It was the only vehicle around—or it had been when we’d arrived that morning, leaving in the darkest hours of the morning to make the three-hour drive from Ellis Woods. We’d been planning on establishing a camp later that evening, after the hunt. Most of our gear was still in the back of the truck, including all our food supplies.
When we arrived, the parking lot was still empty of people. But it quickly became apparent that we weren’t actually alone.
A huge, dark shape was moving around in the open bed of the truck, hunched and fur-covered, rocking the truck on its hinges.
“Holy shit,” I said. I’d thought things were weird already. Now they were about to get a whole lot more dangerous.
“Wait, is that a—”
“Yep.” I put a hand out and pushed her lower. “Keep down. Try not to attract its attention. I don’t want a fight.”
We watched as the bear stood to its hind legs, growling and tossing one of the bags from the truck, then shaking its head wildly before returning to its task. It was a large black bear, shaggy with winter fur. The ground around the truck was littered with our possessions—mostly clothes and the broken pieces of various camping items. It looked like it had just begun digging into our food.
I hoped that was all it was after. But I wasn’t going to take any chances. Given the behavior we’d been seeing from the other animals in the woods, I didn’t think we could count on this bear to eat and run.
I raised my rifle again and sighted down the barrel, but a hand on my arm stopped me.
“John, no,” Angie hissed. “You can’t.”
“I’m just gonna scare it off.”
“It might not scare off,” Angie said. “This guy sh
ould already be sleeping for the winter. And it doesn’t look too happy to be awake. What is it doing here in a place that smells like humans? What’s it doing raiding a truck when it should already be hibernating?”
She was right. There was something seriously wrong with the animals in this forest. First the deer and the bird, and now this bear. And the thing with the sun… I needed to be smart. Use my head, not years of paranoia bred from fighting in Afghanistan.
Angie wasn’t going to be safe if I went around making stupid, dangerous decisions.
I turned to her, seeing that her eyes were wide with fear, her breath coming short and shallow. She was one of the most level-headed people I had ever met, braver than some of the battle-hardened soldiers I’d served with, but she knew as well as I did that something was very wrong here.
We needed to get the hell out of the forest. Not start a fight with a bear.
I took a slow breath, allowing my lungs to fill completely, trying to tamp down on my need for violence and focus on how to get out of there.
“We need to get to phones, Ange.”
I fixed my eyes on the bear. We needed that truck. And the bear was in the way. The question was…what was I going to do about it?
2
I moved toward the truck with slow, heavy steps, nearly stomping, just to make myself louder and scarier. More like someone a bear didn’t want to mess with. I also shouted at the top of my lungs and fired a couple shots in a safe direction, my heart hammering away inside my chest.
Bitter Cold Apocalypse | Book 1 | Bitter Cold Apocalypse Page 1
