The Provider

by John Hunt

  What people are saying about

  The Alaskan Chronicles

  Honestly, this book kind of terrified me. This book is set at just an uncomfortable distance. Pair that with the fact that the Event could possibly happen at any time, and this story gets scarier than any horror story. I had a tense feeling in my chest throughout most of this book, thinking that there was some huge conflict just waiting around every corner.

  Bailey Randolph, Reading Rabbit Hole

  A modern day Swiss Family Robinson. The author imagines a scenario where solar flares wipe out all the electronics in our world. The story progresses through the first seasons spent in the wilderness, the struggles, stumbles, and triumphs. The ending! Wow! Just when you thought you could see how it was going to wrap up, the author throws a huge wrench into the mix. I was very surprised! I can’t wait for the next instalment!

  Randal White, Randa’s Booklikes

  Elderly Jim Richards takes us back to his teen years in Anchorage where sun flares devastate America and beyond. A quick read, especially from Part 2, young readers will revel in the boy scout hero’s encounters in wild Alaska.

  Julia Anderson, YA Waterstones

  Eight and a half out of ten. It’s a really good teen book because it’s realistic about what could happen, and it’s a story with a moral. But it’s a really good book from an adult perspective – written very well with a really believable story that is relatable.

  Lucy Turner

  The Alaskan Chronicles is an epic tale on one family’s struggle to survive in an unforgiving and unremitting landscape. Breathtaking. Vivid descriptions of the breakdown of society and all the flaws in human nature that brings out. When stripped of our constructs of civilisation, we must get back to nature, or die, and on her terms. A wonderful triumph of a story, epic and detailed, harsh and yet human, a tour-de-force of creative writing.

  Stephen Oakes, author

  First published by Lodestone Books, 2018

  Lodestone Books is an imprint of John Hunt Publishing Ltd., No. 3 East St., Alresford, Hampshire SO24 9EE, UK

  office1@jhpbooks.net

  www.johnhuntpublishing.com

  For distributor details and how to order please visit the ‘Ordering’ section on our website.

  Text copyright: John Hunt 2017

  ISBN: 978 1 78535 689 6

  978 1 78535 690 2 (ebook)

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2017941363

  All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publishers.

  The rights of John Hunt as author have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Design: Stuart Davies

  Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY, UK

  US: Printed and bound by Edwards Brothers Malloy 15200 NBN Way #B, Blue Ridge Summit,

  PA 17214, USA

  Also by John Hunt

  Non fiction

  Bringing God Back to Earth

  We operate a distinctive and ethical publishing philosophy in all areas of our business, from our global network of authors to production and worldwide distribution.

  Contents

  PROLOGUE

  PART ONE: SUMMER

  PART TWO: FALL

  PART THREE: WINTER

  PART FOUR: SPRING

  EPILOGUE

  Map of the Kenai Peninsula and Anchorage

  Main characters

  The Richards family

  Donald: Father

  Mary: Mother

  Jim

  Bess

  The Hardings family

  Matthew: Father

  Jessie

  Sue

  Louise Maclaren: Teacher

  Bob: Handyman

  Paul: Missionary

  Nat: Ferry Captain

  Theo: Mayor

  PROLOGUE

  THE NEAR FUTURE

  I’m old. I’m tired. A husk, a shell, a frame of creaking bones, memories blowing cold in the attic. There’s no sap running through these veins. Sleep comes fitfully – why spend your time unconscious when you have so little of it left? I feel like an old bull moose, energy fading, one winter too many, wolves snapping at its heels, wearing it down, circling, waiting for the kill.

  I’m eighty-two this year. A full twenty years older than anyone else in our settlement. It’s not normal, in these times, to get to this age. “Normal,” now, is different. I guess we’ve regressed a few thousand years in my lifetime, to the Iron Age – Mrs. Maclaren’s history lessons are still with me. I’m wrapped up warm in my bear skins in front of the fire. The fort’s earth and stone walls are five feet deep, two-stories high, and keep out the worst of the winter weather, though the cold wind whistles around the corridors. The guards at the door, with their spears, are there to keep me in as much as to keep enemies out.

  The Council have agreed to let me write down my story. I don’t care what their reasons are. The winters are long, and I’ve nothing else to do. Gor, my faithful personal servant – and I think, my friend, I hope, knowing what I’m going to ask him to do if I finish this – is free to go out to the woods. He peels off armfuls of birch bark, flattens it with stone slabs, dries it, smooths with oil, and then polishes and trims it into book-sized pages. In the light of the tallow candles I’ve cut some pens from goose feathers, soaking them in hot water, cleaning out the membrane from the shafts, undercutting the bottom face to form a curve and slitting back a little to create a reservoir to hold the ink, which I’ve made with blueberries, charcoal, vinegar and oak gall. It’s a good ink, the kind that everyone used till the twentieth century, when we started making it with chemicals, and it will last longer.

  The twentieth – what a strange century that was. After two World Wars, the Cold War, fascism and communism had been defeated, nationalism was in retreat – we seemed to be on the brink of a golden age of peace and prosperity; of free information, renewable energy, driverless cars, bionic people. I was born in the early years of the twenty-first. Of course, we still had problems, but in what we used to call Alaska you were more likely to die from a lightning strike than be killed by terrorists; to die from eating too much rather than too little. Shops were full of stuff you didn’t need, physical work was so rare that people paid to go to gyms to exercise – I don’t know if we were happier back then, but it sure did leave us unprepared for what was about to happen. We took what we had for granted. And now, we don’t know what we’ve lost. We’re heading back to the dirt rather than the stars. Nature sure has taken its revenge.

  But I’m digressing already. I’ve done what I can here – I played the game, and lost. I hear the warriors around here saying that defeat makes you stronger, but sometimes, I reckon it just means defeat. Those I’ve loved have gone. My grandchildren, and great-grandchildren are kept from me. Now I just have my dreams. They come back to me at night, dreams of the world that was, of what it might have been. Anyway, what is still to happen, will happen. As an old Aleut friend used to say to me: “Today is all you have.”

  Will anyone ever read this and tell the stories around the fire at night? We’ve been through bad times before, maybe we can find our feet again? My fear is that we keep going backwards – but how far? Back to the Stone Age? I remember reading about the last of the Neanderthals, holding out in a cave for a few generations at the very extremity of Europe, when we’d driven all the others to extinction. What went through their heads? Did they know they were the end of their line?

  Europe – that rings a bell. I’m sure there must be others, somewhere, who could tell the story, in p
laces that used to be called Africa, India, China…I remember countries like the Philippines, Indonesia, New Zealand: tribes living a pastoral life on the steppes of Asia. Maybe I’m fooling myself, it’s such a long time since I heard those names. But I know there were people living on the earth who weren’t dependent on electricity, so it stands to reason that somewhere they could still be living, much as they always had been. Perhaps flourishing in a warmer climate, rather than scratching a living in this frozen corner of the far North. But we have no contact with them. They could be on a different planet.

  So this is just my tale, for the record. Without a record, there can be no “history.” Without a history, there can be no “people.” Without a people, there can be no “individuals.”

  I am an individual. I have my story, my people, my history. That’s how I see it, and this was my life.

  PART ONE

  SUMMER

  ONE

  The quill scratches the bark, the flames flicker in the hearth. I can hear a Great Gray Owl hooting rhythmically outside in the trees – whoo, whoo, whoo. Do owls change their language over centuries, like people do? I don’t know. There’s so much I haven’t learned. And so few people now to learn from. Learning…it’s so long since I even thought about this. The walls of the fort fade, the years roll back, aches and pains slip away like a snake shedding skin – and I find myself sitting in Mrs. Maclaren’s class on a hot Friday afternoon in June: a nervous, over-tall, gangly and gawky teenager.

  Mrs. Maclaren was my favorite teacher. She lived in the next road from us, though we didn’t meet socially. But when I had a paper round she always left out a couple of dimes for me. She’d been teaching history classes for the 11th grade at Anchorage High for as long as anyone could remember. I enjoyed them. She talked in long, curling sentences that always seemed to be saying something important, explaining how history “worked.” She talked about movements, migrations, trends: about soil being degraded, forests cut down, climate changes. She spoke of the Indians coming to Alaska, followed by the Eskimos – I’d always assumed it was the other way around – and of the Vikings in Greenland, when it still had a touch of “green.” She talked of the explorers who tried to bend a harsh landscape and a reluctant people to their will – people like the Cossack Zhdanko, and Captain Bering – they were my heroes. I’d look at the map in the evening and trace the places they visited, the names telling their own story: Desolation Point, Goodnews Bay, False Pass, Halibut Cove. I guess even “Anchorage” actually meant something, back in those early days.

  Mrs. Maclaren was short, bespectacled, her white hair tied back in a bun. Nobody raised their voice against Mrs. Maclaren. Joss Tinker called her a squaw – behind her back, and she did look part Indian with her light-brown skin and slanted eyes – rumor had it that her Scottish great-grandfather had settled down with a Native woman after he left the Yukon, rich from selling shovels and supplies to the miners. I didn’t like Joss, but then, he didn’t like me. I talked to Dad about him once, when I came back with a black eye after he’d shoved me aside in the lockers and I’d bumped into the corner of an open door, how he thought he knew everything, but didn’t know anything, and didn’t care that he didn’t, and didn’t care who he thumped, either. Dad said that a lot of men were like that, it was why we needed more women in positions of power. That seemed daft to me. Men were leaders, women were followers; at least those were my views at the time, before I really knew any women. Before I met Jessie.

  “Spengler describes history in terms of cultures,” Mrs. Maclaren said, “one of which is ours, the American/European culture. He says they each have a lifespan of around a thousand years, and ours is coming to an end. Was he just depressed by the First World War? Was he right? An essay, one thousand words, with your thoughts on that.”

  Joss put up his hand. “What’s a culture, Miss?”

  They carried on for a while, but it went over my head. Sadie, a couple of desks away, had yawned and was twirling a lock of hair that curled around her ear. The light streaming through the window turned it transparent, like the conch shell I had in my bedroom. I remember wondering, if I could put my ear to hers, whether I’d hear the sea breathing.

  “Jim Richards! Wake up, pay attention,” Mrs. MacLaren spoke sharply.

  Then the school PS system crackled into life – “All teachers to the staff room now please.” We’d never heard that before. It surprised everyone into a momentary stillness, then Mrs. Maclaren got up, and with, “Carry on reading the notes on Decline of the West, class,” she left.

  About ten minutes later, she was back, the noise subsided, we sat straight at our desks or scuttled back to them. She sounded tense, somehow. “School’s closing early today. The buses are at the gate. Something’s happened, and you need to get home. We’ve been contacting those parents who’ll be coming to collect you; you can wait here until they arrive. Tell them that the President will be addressing the nation this evening at six o’clock, if they don’t already know.”

  There was a buzz, a babble, a rise of voices, she patted the air in front of her, waving the noise down. “I can’t tell you, I don’t have any answers. Be calm, go carefully, God bless you.”

  TWO

  Our family were the standard two plus two. I guess people thought of us as a “solid” family, a “happy” one. Dad had a job teaching engineering at the University of Alaska. He was wiry, reserved, someone who made things rather than talked about them. My mom, Mary, had trained as a nurse but gave it up when my sister and I were young. She was plump, hair bushed out in curls; bubbly, mercurial, empathy flowed through her veins – she was always touching, hugging, the warm heart of any room. They were like chalk and cheese, but seemed to rub along well.

  My sister, Bess was in ninth grade; at fifteen she was two years younger than me. She had soft, silky brown hair with a rosebud mouth – looked like a TV weather presenter, with the kind of confidence that radiated. If you were in her circle, you were “in.” We weren’t antagonistic, we didn’t fight or anything, we just lived in parallel worlds. Though to be fair, I did overhear her once saying to her friends, “Look, Janice, he may be a jerk, but he’s my brother, OK?”

  I came home on the yellow bus with her – not that we sat together; she was with her friends at the back, I was up by the driver. I was awkward around girls. And boys, too, for that matter. I couldn’t seem to get on the wavelength as far as joshing went, or carry much of a conversation. I was no jock, clumsy at throwing or catching, the last to be selected for the baseball teams. I was good at cross-country, my long legs seemed to eat it up, and I enjoyed getting into the rhythm of it. But we didn’t do much of that. If you couldn’t measure it on the track, it didn’t count.

  We lived in Fulton Street, on the edge of a smart area of town; middle class, mostly professionals with families. The houses were set back, half an acre each, with long drives, staggered along the rise to keep the views clear. Manicured lawns ran down to the road, shaded by clumps of hemlock, cedar and birch, everything trimmed to within an inch of its life, cars tucked away in garages. Like a million other suburban streets, it exuded a quiet respectability and pride. It felt like the backbone of America. If it could speak, I guess it would say something along the lines of – “We might have come here as immigrants, but we’ve tamed the land, we’ve made it ours, we’ve built our city on the hill, we’re here to stay. And we’re going to keep it this way – no need for fences or gates, we’re all civilized here. We’re prosperous but not showy, stable but not dull. Honest and decent. Other parts of the world might have wars, refugees, but this is a good life, the best there is anywhere, and we vote for it.”

  Bess skipped past me as we walked up the drive. “Mom, Mom,” she began calling out as soon as she got the door open. “What’s going on? We got out early.”

  Mom was on the phone. “I don’t know, Brenda,” she was explaining to someone, “I haven’t heard anything yet. Look, the kids have just arrived, I’ll ring you later, honey, OK?�
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  “I’ll go look on Facebook.” Bess took off up the stair. “Bess…” Mom started to say, but she was too late. “Oh well, now, Jim, before you get into your gaming, you’ve got to tidy that room of yours, it’s a tip.”

  Soon it was all humming with noise; the hoover, the dishwasher running, the AC working away, the boiler rumbling in the cellar, CBS 60 Minutes on the TV, “This is most unusual,” the presenter was saying, “if not unprecedented. We still have no indication of what the President is going to say; the Press Office is keeping a tight lid on it; could it be his resignation?” Our neighbor, Jerry, was mowing his lawn, rush hour traffic roared along Fulton Street, the phone went again, I heard the crunch of tyres on the gravel after a while as Dad arrived home early.

  “Kids, your father’s home,” Mom called out. “Donald, do you know what’s going on?”

  “No idea, Mary.” The doorbell chimed. “I’ll get it.”

  “Jerry, Marcia, how are you?”

  “You’ve heard about the President, Donald? Sounds like an event. Saw you arriving. Rather than watching it next door, could we come and sit with you? We’ve brought drinks.”

  “Of course, great, come on in.”

  Sitting here now, on these winter nights, the only sounds the scratch of the pen, the crackling of the fire, the Great Gray Owl booming away, mice rustling in the straw, it’s those little details that come back to me vividly: the buzz of civilization, of security and convenience, of regulated warmth. The unlimited power dedicated to our comfort, light available at the flick of a switch; hot water at the turn of a tap; communication at the press of a button; food, ready to eat; new clothes and shoes – ready made; the magic of TV – it feels unreal now, a fantasy. I’ve given up trying to describe it to Gor – he looks at me pityingly.

  “People lived in boxes on the wall?”