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EXCERPT
Chapter one
The calm aqua blue waters on this side of the island were mesmerizing. It was strange, surreal even, for Regan to find herself living in what looked to be an island paradise. If only it was paradise. It could have been, of course, if the world beyond the beach hadn’t been in turmoil.
“Makes it look like there’s not a problem to be thought of, doesn’t it?” she asked Tabitha.
“Ha. Not if you ask Geno—the way that man talks about missing the city! Don’t get me wrong, I’d love some air conditioning, but I’d rather be here on Wolf’s little island than there, the world the way it is now.”
Nodding absently, Regan stared north as she strained to see the beach on a nearby island. All she could see were bald cypress trees mingled with palms stretching for the sky. Intermingled with the tall trees were slash pines, a variety of smaller brush plants that climbed between the tall trunks and covered the area with dense foliage. Her favorites, though, were the gumbo-limbo trees that grew sporadically on all of the islands. From what she could see of them, anyway.
“Have you thought about exploring the other islands around here?” she asked.
“Not really. You?”
“Some,” Regan admitted. That was something Regan had never known before showing up here to Wolf Henderson’s secret island fortress. There were hundreds, no, thousands of little islands out here. Off to the north, she could see numerous tiny dots of land, each one indicating another island. They ranged in size from nothing more than a couple of acres to much larger.
Wolf couldn’t tell her for sure whether the other islands had inhabitants, but she suspected they did. He’d said a lot of them had been made into state parks, and it made sense that there would have been people camping out when the EMP hit, and all of them would ultimately have been stranded. She supposed they might have left, but imagined the smarter ones would have stayed put. If the world as a person knew it was falling apart, her instinct would be to get as far away as possible from city centers; to seek refuge far away from others. An island seemed like a safe bet, which was exactly why Wolf had bought his own island and slowly transformed it into his own doomsday bunker of sorts.
On walks just like this one, she had traveled the full perimeter of the island several times. Wolf had told her it was in the shape of a comma. The tiny end pointing east, toward the mainland, about fifteen miles south of Naples. The house was built in the center of the round part, with the south- and west-facing beaches opening into the ocean. That was where there was a small boat dock, out of view from anyone who could be fishing off the beach of the mainland.
Pausing now, Regan stared at the inviting water, wanting to dive in to seek relief from the sweltering Florida heat. Even this early in the morning, it was already unpleasant—despite the lovely breeze blowing off the water. The sun had only just gotten to be full in the sky, but it was uncomfortably hot.
“That’s something else I can’t get used to,” Regan commented absently. “I never thought about the gulf waters being so calm.”
Tabitha reached down and picked up a stick that had washed up onto the beach, and banged some of the sand from her shoes. “Yeah? That was why I always wanted to come to the gulf, knowing the waves wouldn’t be so scary as those you see in the movies,” she answered, gesturing out at the lake-like stillness beyond the beach.
As per usual, the water offered none of the large waves that would have been seen on the other coast.
Tempting as a dip was, though, both women knew this wasn’t the time. Regan nodded at the path leading back to Wolf’s and Tabitha clapped her on the back as if reading her thoughts and giving her a push away from the water. Wolf was holding yet another meeting back at the house in what had become their morning ritual. Apparently, much to Regan’s displeasure, they had arrived on the island just in time for the kick-off to hurricane season. Another black mark against the island paradise that wasn’t quite so idyllic.
Regan took a second to wipe at the sweat dripping into her eyes. She’d become accustomed to using the hem of her shirt to wipe her brow. It wasn’t the cleanest, but it worked. Her hand brushed across the butt of the Glock 19 she had in a small holster attached to the belt she was wearing. It was strange to be carrying a gun in paradise, but Wolf insisted. One of them was always carrying when they left the house, even though they were on a deserted island. Actually, every one of them carried a gun whenever they moved around the island. After all the trouble they had in the city, she knew why he insisted and tried not to protest overly much—even if she hated the extra weight.
The two women began heading back through the trees, focusing on weaving through the variety of bushes, some with thorns and vines, and heading on up to the house Wolf had built with this very situation in mind.
Following Tabitha into the living room, she pushed one of the windows open wider to let in as much breeze as possible and then took a seat beside her friend, realizing they were a few minutes late. It was a little tough to tell time without an actual working watch, and time passed easily on the walks she and Tabitha had gotten in the habit of taking together as they patrolled the island. The woman knew how to enjoy companionable silence—not a surprise, Regan supposed, given how much her husband talked.
Still, it was hard to tell time, and she didn’t know how Wolf expected them to keep to any sort of schedule. It was all about just knowing, which she really sucked at. Time’s a work in progress, like so much else about this post-EMP world, she silently mused.
“Glad to see you made it back,” Wolf quipped as he slid a piece of notebook paper into her hand.
She smiled and shrugged a shoulder in apology before turning her attention to the checklist Wolf had handed her. He’d copied out notes about hurricane preparation for each of them, it appeared, and then listed particular things needing attention at the bottom. There were even page references, gesturing back to the big binder of information Wolf used as a reference and had told them all to make use of. In fact, the heavy three-ring, four-inch-wide binder he had shown them was genius. He had checklists for preparing for hurricanes, power outages, flooding, tornadoes, and even an earthquake, which she wasn’t even sure was a possibility on the small island. However, in this day and age, she wouldn’t have been surprised by much of anything.
The binder itself was neatly organized with colored tabs separating each disaster scenario. There were sections on what do in case of an emergency arising from one of Mother Nature’s temper tantrums along with a first aid manual. Regan had leafed through the resource during the first few days she had been on the island. It was a lot of information, which explained why he had felt the need to organize it all. She couldn’t imagine trying to remember every detail in the face of an emergency.
“Does anyone have any questions?” Wolf asked, his hair blowing a little with the breeze coming through the large open window.
Looking around her, Regan noticed that Fred was already at the side of the room, comparing something on his list to a page in the binder itself, while Lily and RC were chatting in a corner. The bulge of the large gun holstered at Fred’s side looked out of place on his lanky body. She didn’t know why, but seeing Fred with a gun on his hip was funny to her. She couldn’t imagine him in any quick draw situation. A little cartoon of him trying to pull the gun and it flying through the air with his awkwardness had her smiling.
Her eyes moved to Lily. There was a rifle propped up in a corner, close enough for RC to grab, but Lily was the only one not carrying a firearm fulltime. Wolf had taught her to shoot, but he didn’t want his little girl carrying a gun with her. He had told Regan it stole her innocence. There was enough of them to protect her and if she absolutely had to, Lily could defend herself. Regan could understand his reasoning. Children should be allowed to be young and carefree for as long as possible. She’d been thrust into a dangerous world and it had nearly broken her. Lily’s innocence was a small fraction
of what motivated Regan to keep the gun on her at all times. She never wanted Lily to be in a position where she had to shoot another human. Not yet.
Tabitha and Geno had their eyes on a shared copy of the list, Tabitha pointing out various line items and quietly whispering to her husband.
Geno raised his hand. “Are we expecting a hurricane? How do you know it’s coming? It isn’t like we can watch the weather channel.”
Wolf drew in a deep breath, his eyes shooting out to the clouds hovering above the tree line. “We feel the air. We look at the sky. I don’t know that a serious storm is coming tomorrow, and we won’t, which is why we are prepping now. We don’t want to get caught off-guard. Some big storms are bound to come, though.”
“I told you all that we’re fairly insulated here. We don’t typically see the really strong hurricanes that slam into the east coast and islands in the open water. Florida itself buffers us. We generally get the tail end of a storm or some strong winds. However, that doesn’t mean we don’t always prepare for one, because stranger things have happened,” Wolf explained. “And, things being what they are now, we’re not going to get any warning. Any storm could be your average afternoon thunderstorm, or it could be a lot worse, and we won’t know the difference until we’re in the heat of it. We have to stay prepped at all times.”
Regan looked over and watched as Lily busily doodled in one of her notebooks, not paying any real attention now that RC had turned to help Fred with something. Over the last few days, Regan had noticed that the girl had been quieter than usual. She assumed it was because the teen was bored and lonely. Regan imagined hanging out on an island with a bunch of adults wasn’t exactly a fun time for a twelve-year-old. It wasn’t exactly Regan’s idea of fun either, for that matter, but these were different times they were living in. Fun wasn’t a priority; surviving was.
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Available 11 April 2019
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BLURB
In the dawn of a new Ice Age, families everywhere are taking to the road to escape the frigid landscape—but you can’t outrun the cold.
No one could have predicted the terrifying impact of human interference in the Arctic. Shifts in the Earth's crust have led to catastrophe and now the North Pole is located in the mid-Atlantic, making much of the eastern United States an unlivable polar hellscape.
Nathan Tolley is a talented mechanic who has watched his business dry up due to gas shortages following the drastic tectonic shifts. His wife Cyndi has diligently prepped food and supplies, but it’s not enough to get them through a never-ending winter. With an asthmatic young son and a new baby on the way, they’ll have to find a safe place they can call home or risk freezing to death in this harsh new world.
When an old friend of Nathan’s tells him that Detroit has become a paradise, with greenhouses full of food and plenty of solar energy for everyone, it sounds like the perfect place to escape. But with dangerous conditions and roving gangs, getting there seems like an impossible dream. It also seems like their only choice.
Grab your copy of Freezing Point here.
EXCERPT
Chapter One
“What’s that?” Freeson asked, pointing beyond the wrecker’s windshield.
Nathan squinted through the swirling snowflakes peppering the glass, but the wipers were struggling to give meaningful vision beyond the red expanse of his Dodge’s hood. He thought they were on the spruce-lined Ridge Road running between Lake George and Glens Falls but he couldn’t be sure. The cone of light thrown out by its headlights only illuminated the blizzard itself, making it look like a messed up TV channel.
Without any real visibility, the 1981 Dodge Power Wagon W300 4x4—with driver’s cab, a four-person custom-sized crew cab behind that, a wrecker boom, and a spectacle lift—grumbled deep in its engine as Nathan slowed the truck. To stop the tires fully, Nathan had to go down through the gears rather than by the application of the discs. There was a slight lateral slide before the tires bit into the fresh snow. The ice beneath was treacherous enough already without the added application of fresh flakes.
Who knows how thick the ice is over the blacktop, Nathan thought.
With the truck stopped, he tried to follow Freeson’s finger out into the whirlpooling night.
For a few seconds, all he could see was the blizzard, the air filled with fat white flakes, which danced across his vision like God’s dandruff. Nathan was about to ask Freeson what the hell he was playing at when he caught it. He saw taillights flicker on and the shadow of a figure move towards the truck’s headlights.
Sundown for late April in Glens Falls, New York State, should have been around 7:50 p.m. The Dodge’s dashboard clock said the time was 5:30 p.m. and it was already full dark out on Algonquin Ridge.
The world had changed so much in the last eight years since the stars had changed position in the sky and the North Atlantic had started to freeze over. The pole star was no longer the pole star. It was thirty degrees out of whack. Couple that with the earthquakes, volcanoes, and tsunamis wrecking countries around the Pacific Rim, and the world had certainly been transformed from the one Nathan had been born into twenty-eight years before. And this year, spring hadn’t come at all. Winter had spread her white skirts out in early December and had left them there. It was nearly May now, and there was still no sign of her fixing to pick them up again.
A face loomed up in the headlights, red with the cold, hair salted with snow, the flakes building up on the shoulders of the figure’s parka. It was Art Simmons.
Nathan zipped his own puffy North Face Nuptse winter jacket up to his chin, opened his door, and jumped down into the powder. The snow came up to his knees and he could feel the hard ice below the chunky soles of his black Columbia Bugaboots.
Even through the thermal vest, t-shirt, and two layers of New York Jets sweatshirts, the cold bit hard into Nathan. Without the meager, volcanic-ash-diluted sun in the sky, the early evening was already steel-cold and the blizzard wind made it near murderous. He rolled his hips and galumphed through the snow towards Art.
“Nathan! Is that you?”
Art had, until recently, been a Glens Falls sheriff. He’d been a warm-hearted gregarious man whose company Nathan enjoyed a lot. But since being laid off when the local police department had shut down, he’d become sullen and distant. Seeing Art so animated now offered the most emotion Nathan had seen coming from the chubby ex-cop since before Christmas.
“What’s the trouble, Art?”
Art’s words tumbled in a breathless rush. Sharp and short, it was clear that the cutting air had begun constricting his throat. “Skidded. Run off the road. I couldn’t even see the road… I’m in the ditch… Been here an hour...”
“Run off the road?”
Art nodded. “Glens Falls has been overrun, Nate. Scavengers tracked me. If I wasn’t trying so hard to outrun ’em, I wouldn’t be here now. Hadn’t driven so fast, when I lost them through Selling’s Bridge…”
Nathan had heard the rumors of small packs of raiders using snowmobiles to hold up residents in their cars, stealing supplies and invading homes. But he hadn’t seen evidence of them himself. He’d only been told by neighbors and friends they were operating in other parts of New York State, fifty miles further south than Albany, but not until now had he gotten any notion they might be as far up in the state as Glens Falls. But now that they were here, the lack of an operational police department in town might just make them bolder and more likely to try their luck with what they could get away with.
“Where did they go?” he asked.
Art shook his head. “Guess they lost me in the blizzard when I came off the road. Maybe gone off to track some other poor bastard. They won’t be far.”
Freeson joined them in front of the truck, banging his arms around his own parka to put feeling into his fingers. His limp didn’t help him wade through the snow and his grizzled face was grim, but Nathan knew the dete
rmination in Freeson’s bones wouldn’t allow his physical deficiencies to stop him doing the job Nathan paid him for. The cold might freeze and ache him, but the fire in Freeson’s belly would counter the subzero conditions for sure.
Freeson hadn’t been right since the accident, maybe. Quiet at times, and quick to anger at others, but he was always one hundred percent reliable.
Together, they walked the ten yards down through the snow to the roadside ditch beneath the snow-heavy trees.
An hour in the blizzard had made Art’s truck almost impossible to recognize. Nathan only knew it was a white 2005 Silverado 1500 because he’d worked on it a dozen times in the past ten years. The last time had been to replace a failed water pump that had fritzed the cooling system. Nathan smiled wryly. No one needed their cooling system fixed now—not since the Earth’s poles had shifted. Since that unexplained catastrophe, the Big Winter’s new Arctic Circle had been smothering Florida and the eastern seaboard, all the way up to Pennsylvania and beyond. It had frozen the Atlantic clear from the U.S. to North Africa.
Art told them he’d been turning the taillights on and off every ten minutes to signal to anyone who might be passing, trying to preserve battery life at the same time. He said Nathan’s wrecker had been the first vehicle to show up since his slow-motion slide into the ditch.
Nathan scratched his head through his hood and looked up the incline of Algonquin Ridge. The Silverado was trapped between two spruces on the edge of the ditch. The tail had kicked up as the front end had dropped, leaving the back wheels floating in space—or, would have done that if the snow hadn’t already drifted beneath them and begun to pack in.
There was no leeway in the tree growth to get the wrecker onto the downslope of the road, either, though the easiest way out of this would have been to pull the Silverado down the thirty-degree incline. Instead, they were going to have to pull Art’s truck up the slope and fight gravity all the way.
Surviving the Swamp (Survivalist Reality Show Book 1) Page 27
