Inception of Chaos
J.J. Holden
Henry Gene Foster
Copyright © 2020 by JJ Holden / Henry Gene Foster
All rights reserved.
www.jjholdenbooks.com
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.
Cover design by Christian Bentulan
About Inception of Chaos:
A solar flare sends the country back to the Dark Ages, and the journey of survival has only just begun…
Christine, a single mother of two, is dealing with everyday life as a paralegal while keeping her conspiracy-theorist mother at bay. David, a Denver cop, is in the middle of training a rookie while handling an increased number of domestic disturbance calls. Wiley, a recently-convicted serial killer, is being transported to Denver for final sentencing. When a solar flare renders all modern technology inoperable, their paths converge as America descends into chaos.
Will Christine and her family make it to the safety of her mother’s small town before the city becomes uninhabitable? And will David discover the truth about Wiley before it’s too late?
Inception of Chaos is a story of survival featuring regular people struggling to endure a modern-day disaster.
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Contents
Part One
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
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Part Two
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
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Part One
1
Tuesday, May 26th
Christine kept glancing at the manila folder on the kitchen island as she spread ketchup on her son’s sandwich. Though Hunter was fourteen, he had never grown out of his bizarre taste for ketchup on everything. “Hunter?”
He looked up from his phone—a minor miracle—with furrowed eyebrows and pursed lips. “Yeah?”
“Don’t look at me like that. Are you ready for school? Don’t forget, it’s Tuesday.”
At that, Hunter’s face lit up. “Sick, that new book I wanted comes out today. I’ll be late coming home, Mom, so I—”
Christine’s head whipped up from packing his lunch, to look him square in the eyes. “You aren’t going to the bookstore until you pick up your sister. You know she hates walking home alone, and I hate it, too.”
“God, Mom. She’s eleven. She can walk herself home.”
Christine looked up at the ceiling and took a deep breath. Then she finished cutting the crust off his sandwiches and tucked them neatly into ziplock bags, along with a little note. All just part of her daily routine. He pretended to hate the sappy notes, but the one time she’d neglected to put it in, he had asked if she was going senile in her old age. His horrible-teenager way of asking her to keep doing it.
Once his lunch was packed, she put her palms down on the kitchen island and smirked at her son at the kitchen table. His love of reading was fantastic, but his attempt to use it as an excuse to break the rules was not. Rules existed to keep him safe. “You know you can order those things online, right? I do have Bibo Primo. It’ll be cheaper, and you only have to wait a couple days.”
Hunter rolled his eyes. “Why would I want to support the Evil Empire when I can support a local bookstore? And all that packaging… It’s wasteful. The planet doesn’t need one more useless box in the landfill. And just have Dad pick her up. Nana says he’s always talking about spending more time with us.”
Ugh. He’d been talking to his grandmother again, it seemed—Fran and Hunter had a close connection, but God only knew how he could stand listening to her “sermons” on everything and anything. And there was no chance of Bryson picking them up on time, or doing anything important on time.
She couldn’t say anything bad about the kids’ father in front of them, so she instead decided to take another task onto her already-full to-do list. “All right, grab your sister and then go to the book shop. I’ll leave work a bit early and pick you up at five. You should be done gawking at books by then.”
She jotted down a note to let her boss know she was leaving on time, that day. As she was the best paralegal at the law firm, he’d be ticked off, but as the best paralegal at the law firm, she was too indispensable to fire. He’d just have to live without her free overtime, for once.
Hunter stood, grabbed his lunch, gave her a hug, and headed for the door. “I’m fourteen, Mom. I can walk, too.”
“No way you’re walking home. What if you get hit by a car, or fal
l and break your leg? It’s a long walk from that store you like. And don’t forget to pick up your sister. She’ll just have to go with you to the bookstore.”
A higher-pitched voice, sweet as an angel’s as far as Christine was concerned, came from the stairwell just outside the kitchen. “That’s what cell phones are for, Mom. ‘Safety first,’ isn’t that what you tell us? We can be safe walking home, because of the miracle of cell phone technology.”
Christine smiled as her daughter, Darcy, swished into the kitchen in her newest outfit, spinning to show it off, and asked, “How do I look? Hot, right?”
It looked like every other outfit her daughter wore. “Yes, and that’s why you aren’t walking home. Why can’t you buy something other than yoga pants and tank tops, Princess?”
It was Darcy’s turn to roll her eyes, a nasty habit the tween-ager had picked up from the teenager. “No one wears jeans anymore, Mom. Just old people and cowboys.”
“I’m not old, dearest daughter.” Christine stifled her irritation at her daughter’s smirk in response. “Are you finally ready to go?”
She eyed her daughter’s jacket hanging up on a hook by the front door. It wouldn’t block a slight breeze. Fortunately, Darcy wasn’t likely to freeze in late-May. She had been likely, however, to put up a fight if Christine had objected to buying it—and the rare smile she gave in return had been worth the fifty bucks, even if that little patch of fabric wasn’t.
“Can’t I walk?” Darcy was already turning to head for her jacket without waiting for a reply. They had similar conversations most mornings, and by now, it was almost a ritual.
“No,” Christine growled. In a nicer tone, she added, “We’re leaving in five. Make sure you have your backpacks, kids.”
Hunter blinked twice, then spun to run upstairs. “Oh crap, thanks. My English paper is due today. Homework is stupid; why can’t we just do it at school?”
Christine smiled as her prince disappeared up the stairs. She’d only have a few more years of this before he ran away from her to college and bad decisions. It was frustrating now, but she knew she’d miss it, and—
The phone on the wall rang, startling her. No one used a landline phone anymore, but she’d kept it for emergencies—mostly to stop her mother’s nagging.
Only one person would be calling her on that number.
Darcy headed out of the kitchen. “That’s my cue to leave. Good luck with Nana, Mom.”
Ugh. Christine reached out toward the phone, but it rang two more times before she finally picked it up. “Hello?”
Fran’s slightly high-pitched, sugary-sweet voice replied, “You know very well it’s your mother, Chrissy. You didn’t call me yesterday like you promised.”
“I said I would try, Fran; not a promise. But you’re worried about nothing, as usual.”
“Dammit, Chrissy, call me ‘Franny.’ I swear you do that just to irritate me.” Fran paused for the briefest moment, then her voice dropped an octave and got raspier as she continued, “Stay there, and I’ll come get you and the kids. The roads won’t be safe, soon.”
Dammit. Apparently, Fran wasn’t going to let go of her latest conspiracy theory. Christine didn’t have time for it just then, and she had to get the kids to school. She took a deep breath. “You’re overreacting, as usual. Do not come get us. I do know how to drive, Fran.”
The relationship had been tense for a while now, ever since she’d first told Fran she was leaving Bryson. What a shit-storm argument that had been. Even though Fran had never been very involved in Christine’s life, she had plenty to say about her daughter’s now ex-husband and decision to divorce him.
But Fran never talked about it in front of her grandkids and had never treated them badly over her frustration with Christine. If anything, she had treated them better, since then. If she had treated her grandkids even remotely like she had treated Christine growing up, she wouldn’t have been welcome to the kids’ visits every summer break, short as they were. Much less, been a part of their lives.
Once again, Christine told herself that her kids deserved to know their grandmother, even if it meant she had to deal with Fran being in her life—if she truly meant what she often told the kids about the value of family.
…Hopefully, Christine’s own kids wouldn’t someday have the same thoughts about their mom…
Fran’s case had also been helped by Bryson, before the divorce, as he had pushed hard in Fran’s favor when the question of sending the kids to spend their short summer breaks on her farm first arose.
“I am not overreacting, kiddo. You should listen to The Truth of the Day with Danny Domino. If you had, you’d know this isn’t normal solar activity.” Fran’s agitation came through, even over the phone, tearing Christine back to the conversation.
Christine caught herself before she laughed out loud, trying to avoid yet another fight between them. “Solar activity runs in cycles. It’s just another peak activity.”
“On his podcast, Danny Domino said this won’t be a normal solar flare.” Fran’s tone suggested this was somehow a bulletproof argument. “His guest was a scientist who talked about something called a coronal mass—”
“Fran, gotta go. Darcy needs me, and they can’t be late for school. I’ll call you on my lunch break, if I get the chance.”
Yeah, right.
“Missy, you had better not flake out again on—”
Click. Christine hung up without saying goodbye or waiting for a response.
She left the kitchen with two lunches in hand, shouting up the stairs, “Come on, kids. We have to go.” Ideally, before Fran called back.
She headed for the front door to wait for them, but someone had left the TV on. “Every morning?” she asked no one, incredulous. With a sigh, she walked through the living room.
“…this breaking news: Accused murderer William Johnson has been found guilty of four counts of murder in the first degree, after a killing spree in Aurora, Colorado, in January of this year. Due to the brutality of the killings, the jury agreed with the prosecutor’s death-row recommendation—”
Christine sighed again as she clicked it off. The news was always terrible. If people were simply nicer to one another, so many of society’s problems would go away.
2
Wednesday, May 27th
David Kelley clicked the handheld mic to the radio unit hard-mounted to the patrol car. “Copy that, ten-sixteen in progress. Unit One-One-Zero is ten-seventy-six.”
His trainee, Orien Parker, turned the flashing red-and-blue lights on without being told. Orien was turning out to be an outstanding officer, and barring some unforeseen catastrophe, David had already decided to push for Orien to get his own squad car the day his training year was up—though he’d be sorely tempted to keep him in training for six more months…
David accelerated hard in the stretches between lights.
Orien pulled up data on the patrol car’s on-board computer. “Turn left on West Colefax, then the first right, on King Street. The house is behind the car wash, I think.”
“Roger that.” David knew that neighborhood pretty well after so many years on patrol, as he knew all his sector’s neighborhoods, both the wealthy and the poor like the one they were heading into.
Orien was silent until they crossed 14th Street, a few blocks later. “How many domestic disturbance calls is this for the night?”
Orien knew very well how many, so David didn’t answer, focusing instead on traffic as they approached the light at ever-busy Colefax. It had just turned green, so of course, no one was going to pull over for a cop car with lights flashing. God forbid someone had to sit through a light cycle…
Orien continued, “We’re getting more than we did on Memorial Day. Is that normal?”
David spotted a gap in the traffic flow and stomped the accelerator pedal, darting into oncoming traffic for a couple of seconds before jerking right again halfway through the intersection, and ignored the guy in the old, beat-down car behind
him, flipping him the middle finger.
“Not normal at all. Holidays are always the worst, and everything from two days before Thanksgiving to two days after New Year’s is just screwed. But to have so many ten-sixteens in late-May? I’ve never seen it like this.”
Orien grunted acknowledgment.
A couple seconds later, looking at the computer, Orien said, “A juvenile neighbor called us because ‘the mom and dad are fighting again, but worse.’ No weapons in the house, no assault. Yet.”
“Good. I hope we get there before one of them does something stupid, like at the last Domestic we got.” David spotted a blue house at the listed address. It was run down, with a short wooden fence that tilted so far inward, toward the house, that it was a wonder it hadn’t collapsed completely.
Inception of Chaos: A Post-Apocalyptic EMP Survival Story Page 1
