The Last Winter (The Circle War Book 2)

by Matt King

  CONTENTS

  Other Books

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Earth

  Title

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Epilogue

  Author's Note

  The Tria

  Other books in the Circle War series:

  Godsend

  Ascension

  The Last Winter

  Matt King

  Copyright © 2017 Matt King

  Published by Heroic Age Books

  Raleigh, NC

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Cover art by Jörn Zimmermann (joern-zimmermann.com)

  www.kingwrites.com

  To all the writers who inspire me, including Gail Simone, Kelly Sue DeConnick, and Joss Whedon

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  A special thanks goes out to Colleen Vanderlinden for her help in editing The Last Winter. Not only is Colleen a spectacular writer, she’s an excellent (and fast) editor to boot. I know this book was a beast to tackle, and she was a champ about it. Special thanks also goes out to Jörn Zimmermann for his Aeris design on the cover. She looks exactly as I pictured her. Couldn’t be happier.

  Is it weird to thank Starbucks employees? Or the people at BREW in Raleigh? If it is, I’m about to be weird, because I’ve taken up space at those places for many a month while writing these books. They’ve always been good about letting me hang out for hours while I work, so if you want to throw an extra few dollars their way on my behalf, I’d appreciate it. Starbucks, especially, needs your support. They’re down to fifty or so stores in the area.

  Okay, seriously, check out BREW if you’re ever in the Triangle. They’re good people. Also, you’ll probably see me there.

  Finally, an ongoing thank you to my writing cohorts, the Raleigh Novel Group. We’ve been together for years, and their input has been invaluable while writing these stories. Barb, Mitch, Sheryl, Sharon, Michelle, Doug, and Lisa…y’all are the best. Can’t wait to make you suffer through more of my drafts for years to come.

  Now, on to the story. Here’s hoping you enjoy The Last Winter as much as I loved writing it.

  EARTH

  They called it “The Last Winter.”

  It started with a simple communication from the U.S. government, wired to every major news outlet in North America and spread worldwide after that: Anomaly detected in southern United States. That was about an hour before the blast, an hour before Washington, Los Angeles, and most of Canada’s major cities were gone forever, taken in the blink of an eye. Hundreds of millions dead before they knew to be scared. Maybe that was for the best. Maybe it was better that they were spared what was to come.

  Molly remembered her nerves as the crew hurried her through makeup. Molly Nguyen, Live at 5. Assigned to the Jericho Beach beat, she was the one most familiar with the closest military base to Vancouver’s CBC studios, and for once the base was buzzing. She pulled every string she had to get a picture of what had happened in the U.S.—anything she could use when the studio cut to her for a live report. She was given a single page with two photos taken from a military communication between the Jericho base and the Americans in Hawaii. The top picture showed an aerial view of the southern U.S., zoomed in to a section of the mountains. She could make out a white oval, mostly opaque, well north of the only city in the vicinity she knew: Atlanta. That picture was time-stamped at just after four in the morning, a few minutes after the Americans had sent their warning.

  The next picture, the one she swore she’d never look at again after the broadcast, made her stomach seize. Her cameraman, Jerrod, and her producer, Eve, had to help her to a chair. Everything she had ever feared—death, the end of it all—was at her doorstep and she was so unprepared. She wished for things to be back to normal, and she had made that wish every day since, but wishes were a useless currency. The fire inside her, the one holding out for a happy ending, was dying a little each day, growing weaker under the relentless cold.

  Eve had to be the one to hold the picture up for the camera. Molly gave her report sitting down. The only words she could force herself to speak when the cameras went live ended up as the lead-in used by anchors around the world during their broadcasts: “There is nothing left. Nothing. What could we possibly have done to deserve this?”

  The blast originated somewhere around Ohio and spread from there. New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, Toronto—all gone. Forever. Cities had been reduced to cinder, plains set ablaze, and all life had been extinguished. A vast swath of Earth stripped of humankind in only a few seconds. The blast traveled thousands of miles, stretching from Ohio to each of the American coasts. What her viewers saw was the aftermath. An entire country erased. Small white circles dotted the picture in what had been the Midwestern states. She was told they were most likely nuclear explosions from missiles that were above the surface, set off after the blast hit. The ones below ground had gone off too, she learned later, creating giant depressions in the earth. Where there had once been the lights of cities dotting the seaboard, there was only fire now. Fire and smoke and death. So much death.

  The picture was time-stamped at ten minutes past four in the morning on September 25th. Day 1 of The Last Winter.

  And now, on Day 257, huddled in the studio wearing her down coat in the middle of June, Molly was forced to sit once again as she listened to her contact at Jericho, Max Ratner, relay the latest information from the Canadian Brigade.

  “Projections aren’t good,” he said. “The meteorologists are telling me these temps could last another decade at least. Nuclear winter won’t be the end of it, either. Once the ash clears, they say the temperatures will swing the other way. We’ll go from freezing to death to walking across a desert.”

  Molly had heard this already. Every scientist she interviewed gave the same dire predictions—jet streams would carry the ash around the globe, keeping the planet frozen from lack of light, until it settled onto the ground and the sunlight came ripping back through the hole in the atmosphere created by the event, killing everything that wasn’t already dead
. Somehow, those interviews never made it to the broadcasts. As fragile as the population’s psyche was, she couldn’t blame the producers for keeping the facts quiet.

  “There’s one other thing,” Max said tightly. His large brown eyes searched for Molly’s through the video conference screen.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “We’re into the last of it, Mol,” he said quietly, as though someone might overhear. “The emergency supplies that were supposed to be for the base. People are being sent back home with half the rations we were giving out last week, and those were already down from the beginning of the month.”

  “What about the resupply?”

  Max wiped a hand across his closely-cropped hair. “There was supposed to be a boat from Argentina this morning, but it never showed.”

  “GPS is lousy now, Max. You know that. Maybe they just got lost.” For a second, she almost blurted out that they could use the stars to guide themselves, but no one had seen stars in the sky since a few days after the blast.

  “They’re not lost. They follow the coastlines. You ask me, they took a count of what they had left and decided that charity was overrated.”

  The pen in Molly’s hand stilled. This was breaking news he was telling her, and yet she couldn’t bring herself to make the notes. She tapped the end of the ballpoint on the paper in an effort to get herself focused. “Okay, so what are you telling me?”

  “I’m telling you that we’ve only got enough left for one, maybe two more weeks if we tighten things up even more. The water supply’s low too, Mol. Once that’s gone…”

  A sharp voice sounded from off screen. Max lowered the lid to his laptop. While Molly had a view of his keyboard, she tried to listen in to the conversation. The connection cut before she could hear the first word.

  Eve walked into her office chewing the last bit of some beef jerky. “Don’t let me interrupt the genius at work.”

  “It’s okay. We’re done.”

  “Who was it?” Eve closed the door behind her as she took the seat by Molly’s office door. Her red hair still had bits of snow in it from the walk over from the main studio. “Your boyfriend at Jericho calling to ask you out again?”

  “No,” Molly replied. Max’s true motives behind his stint as her informant was an ongoing joke, but right now Molly didn’t feel like joking. Eve must have noticed. She edged forward in her seat.

  “What’d he say?”

  “Plenty. We should probably grab Jerrod and head over.”

  “Why, what’s going on?”

  “Shortages.” That’s the word she used, but her mind was already elsewhere. Something about Max’s behavior nagged at her. His direct supervisor in Base Operations knew he was feeding her information. Department rules weren’t strictly enforced anymore, so they had been fairly open about when they spoke. If Max was worried that someone might see her, he must’ve gotten a visit from someone pretty high up.

  Or something else was wrong.

  “Molly, that’s serious. We need to get this streaming on the site as soon as possible. Radio, too.” Eve wasn’t talking to her anymore. She fumbled with a notepad in her pocket. “I’ll get the script ready. Assuming it’s a ten-minute interview, I can get Jerrod into editing and the video on the site by…two? Maybe sooner. Man, I wish the satellites were working. I’ll have to get Chris on the audio. Maria, too. And the anchors need to be called in…”

  Eve left still muttering to herself as she walked down the hall. We’re all going to be dead soon, Molly wanted to call after her. Did you put that in your notes?

  A water bottle rolled against the wall when she opened her drawer to grab her bag. She took it out and set it on her desk. The bottle was nearly empty. She had four, maybe five more at her apartment. The resupply at the base was supposed to get her through the next month. She tried to recall the statistic for how long a person could live without water. Was it seven days or eight? She got up and walked out before the answer came to her.

  Remember, you’re a rock, she said to herself as she walked down the hallway past the clear glass walls of the studio’s offices. Stone face, Nguyen. Eve was waiting for her at the entrance to the studio. Jerrod was with her, ready with his pack. His angular nose poked through his ski mask. He was looking skinnier these days, and not just from the smaller meals they were all eating. Was he the latest victim of the cancer outbreak? Probably. She wondered if it would console him to know they were all on the clock now.

  The keys to the car jingled in Eve’s hand as she urged Molly on. “Come on, we’ll take the Electric.”

  The icy wind smacked Molly in the face as soon as Eve opened the door. Some of the street lamps were already starting to burn and it was barely after noon. Nightfall wouldn’t be far behind. As she pulled her goggles down, she saw that the marquee on the bank across the street read −9C. Before, temperatures like this would have meant preparing for snow showers during a shoot, but they rarely had precipitation anymore. The snow on the ground was stale, left over after months of accumulation without melting. She buttoned the lower half of her coat’s hood over the breather mask already wrapped around her nose and mouth.

  They trudged through the ash-gray snowdrifts toward the garage, where the maintenance staff ran a block of heaters twenty-four/seven to keep the two electric cars from freezing. They had started out as a station publicity stunt, but the electric cars were a necessity now. Hybrids too. People had all but abandoned traditional gas cars. Gas deliveries were almost as scarce as food. Most of the oil brought in was being used to heat people’s homes.

  Jerrod drove while Eve went over the shoot. They would try to get Max’s supervisor on first to discuss the shortage, but if he wouldn’t commit to going on camera, they could do their standard shoot by the delivery docks, which were as sheltered from the wind as they could get. Molly was to put on her “disaster facade”—sullen look, slow speech, and the occasional shake of the head as though she just can’t believe how bad things have gotten. Eve had coached the same thing the last time there was talk of shortages, but Max hadn’t sounded as worried about things back then.

  The Canadian Brigade base at Jericho Beach was buzzing. Through the mixture of snow and ash that had built up on the window during the short drive, she could see the yellow lights of maintenance vehicles dipping in and out of view as they passed by piles of snow collected by the roadways. There were other lights too that she didn’t recognize, back on what used to be the airfield. White and red lights flashed through the fog, higher off the ground than a typical car. She looked out toward the docks to see if maybe the commotion was due to a shipment coming in. Eve would lose her breaking story, but the sight of a boat would go a long way to relieving the bleakness of Molly’s mood. She frowned when she didn’t see anything in the brief glimpse of the water. The tug boats bobbed lazily in the surf.

  “Isn’t that Max?” Eve asked, pointing to the entrance to the main barracks.

  “Not sure,” Molly replied. “It’s hard to tell from back here. I can’t see out the windows.”

  “Never mind, it’s him. I can see his orange scarf. He’s waving us over.”

  Jerrod pulled the car into one of the parking spaces with an electric motor hookup. He plugged the engine in while Molly and Eve walked to the barracks to meet Max.

  “I’m glad you’re here!” he called out over the wind. “I tried to call you!”

  “Can’t get a signal, I guess. What’s up?” Molly shouted back through her breather. It was always strange to see him after only speaking on video chat for long stretches. She forgot how short he was.

  “I’ll tell you inside!”

  The lobby doors closed behind them, instantly silencing the weather like someone hitting mute on a blaring stereo. They shook off the dirty snow and shed their outer layers. Jerrod tossed the coats on a bench.

  Molly took out her recorder. “So what was—”

  “In a minute,” Max interrupted. He motioned for them to follow him down the hal
lway, past the main barracks. They came to an exit door and walked through what used to be a breezeway that connected the building to the Base Operations office. A plastic tube protected them from the elements, but the air was still cold enough to sting her exposed skin.

  “I don’t like this,” Jerrod spoke in Molly’s ear. “He’s not usually so secretive.”

  “I can hear you, Jerrod,” Max called back.

  “I didn’t say anything. I was just…”

  “It’s all right. We’re almost there.”

  Stepping into the Operations room was like going back out into the raging windstorm. People were flying around the banks of computers, shouting and pointing at computer screens. Through the crowd, a team of three men parted the sea of soldiers. They wore yellow padded suits like she imagined an astronaut might take to the moon.

  “What is all this?” Molly asked.

  “In here.” Max held open the door to an office and closed it behind them once they were inside. He snapped the blinds shut on the window looking out to the floor. “You’re not going to believe this,” he said.

  “Did you hear from the resupply ship?”

  Max shook his head. He actually looked excited.

  “Do you mind if we set up the cameras?” Eve was noticeably less enthused than she was at the station. Molly guessed she wasn’t happy about Max’s gleeful expression. Happy news wasn’t breaking news.

  “Save your batteries,” he replied. “You’ll need them. In fact, I hope you brought extras.”

  “Out with it, Max,” Molly said. “The station’s waiting on a report.”

  “Believe me, they won’t be disappointed.” He took a folder from the desk behind him and handed it to her. “Remember when I said other countries were starting to fly spy planes over the U.S.? This just came in from the Brits about an hour ago.”

  She had a moment of déjà vu as she held the manila folder in her hand. The last time he gave her something like this, she didn’t think she’d ever be able to stop the tears. Back then, though, he’d had a dejected expression on his face. This time he seemed like a kid showing off his Christmas presents.