End Days Series Box Set [Books 1-4]

by Isherwood, E. E.

He wasn’t sure if she was serious.

  “It’s true.” She poked him in the side. “At least, I hope it is.”

  “Well, uh, let’s go get him. Where is he?”

  “This sounds insane, but I thought he was there when you drove through the fence the first time. The soldier waving the American flag looked like him, but I didn’t think about it until after I had those kids out of your trailer. It got totally crazy for a few minutes, and when I finally got around to looking for him, I thought I saw him disappear in the blue electricity. I passed out when it happened, and he wasn’t there when I came around.”

  They’d all fainted when the final pulse shot out of the ground.

  He gave her a hug, not sure he totally believed her, but ready to back her up no matter what. “The Army guy?”

  She smacked him harder.

  “I just want him back,” she said sadly.

  “We’ll eat and then go, okay? We’ll spend all day if we have to. Talk to every person here.”

  He looked into her teary green eyes and took the conversation in a new direction.

  “I’m glad you didn’t fade out of existence. When I drove over that fence, all I thought about was you and Garth getting sucked away by the blue light.” He chuckled. “Of course, it shouldn’t surprise you that it was Garth who gave me the heart attack. He and Lydia almost didn’t make it back.”

  “Thank God for Mac, right?”

  “Amen.”

  The pup had gone out and brought back his son. He was now convinced that the dog was much smarter than he was.

  They hugged. Then, for much too brief a time, they kissed.

  “Shall we go back to the family?” he asked.

  “I like the sound of that.”

  “That reminds me, there’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you.”

  His guts quivered. He’d only known her for a little over four days, but everything had changed. It appeared as if all of existence on Earth was now different. Connie was an anchor to the old world, but also a sail to guide him into the new. There was nothing that could make him think otherwise about her.

  “I can’t let my son marry his girl before I do…”

  Formerly Sedalia, CO

  Phil was thrilled to still be in Colorado. After the blue light had washed over him and all the people on the fence line, he had assumed he would be beamed back to Switzerland or spat out of existence. The only thing that had kept him from running out of the wall of blue at the last moment was a young boy, a strangely dressed girl, and their shaggy dog.

  They ran by him as the blast knocked him on his ass.

  When he woke up, the people and cars across the street were gone.

  The soldiers didn’t bother him. They had regrouped, and were offering water and bits of food to the survivors as if the battle was over. He was going to get to the bottom of who they were, and how a ghost unit like the 130th could even exist here, but once he got to his feet, he had another mission on his mind.

  “That lady looked familiar…”

  The first truck through the fence had had a woman who was the spitting image of his mom. She was young, like the year he had last seen her, so it couldn’t have been her. However, the mere act of seeing the lookalike stirred feelings of loss and guilt he needed to stomp out. He could only do that by finding the woman.

  He saw the truck right away. The bug-covered mess of a semi was easy to spot, even in a field filled with hundreds of cars and thousands of people. However, being a lieutenant colonel worked against him. It took him a long time to get across the makeshift camp because everyone saw him as a person in charge.

  It was lunchtime before he got to the far side of the crowd. During his delay, the trucker had re-attached his trailer and driven it and two other trucks farther across the field, all the way to the rocky outcrop before the start of the hills.

  I should have had Grafton drop me off.

  His partner had taken the pickup truck to go find the other members of Task Force Blue 7.

  He recognized the over-the-road driver the second he came around the back of the trailer. The guy sat at a cooking fire along with a small group of friends. The two young people he had seen in the street were there with them. Even the dog was there. The Golden Retriever cocked its head as he neared.

  The redhead was also seated at the fire, as he suspected, but she had her back to him. The woman wore blue jeans and a white shirt and a fancy belt with lots of bling, as his cowgirl mother would have called it.

  Might be a coincidence.

  “Excuse me. I don’t want any trouble,” he called.

  The truck driver was the first out of his seat. “Can we help you, soldier?” He wore a hideous Hawaiian shirt, but he stood tall in front of his people as if to protect them. Probably military.

  The man waved him in. “Want a bite to eat? We’re cooking rabbit. I picked it up on the California-Nevada border when the world went to shit, and I’ve been saving it for a special occasion.”

  “Nevada, you say?” That was where Mom had gone missing.

  Another weird coincidence.

  “Yeah, shot it in the woods. Hell, I have a truck full of chili, but we can’t let anything go to waste now, can we?”

  “No, I guess not. Thanks for the offer, but I can’t stay. I actually came up here for the dumbest reason you’ve ever heard. When you broke through the first fence, I saw a woman in your passenger seat who looked a lot like someone who went missing a few years back. I figured it was a long shot, but I had to know for sure.”

  The man lit up with excitement. “I recognize you! The Army guy! That was some nice work you did at the fence line. Too bad you needed a Marine to come in and show you how to finish it.”

  It had to be a devil dog.

  Phil let his guard down a bit. “Next time, you drive the little truck, and I’ll take the big one. Good work yourself. You saved most of the people on this field.”

  “It was a team effort,” Hawaiian Shirt said with real humility. Then, in a weird change of attitude, he backed up to the woman and put a hand on her shoulder. She still hadn’t turned around.

  The Marine spoke in a low voice. “Talk about luck. We were about to search for you for the same reason.”

  His pulse quickened as tumblers fell in the lock inside his heart.

  “Is that your passenger?” Phil pointed to the woman.

  “Can I tell her who’s asking?”

  The lady pulled at the Marine’s hand to get his attention. Almost too low to hear, the woman spoke.

  The Marine looked at her in surprise. “You can tell by his voice?” He peered at Phil like he’d just beamed down from an alien ship.

  “Are you Phil Stanwick, by chance?”

  There was no possible way anyone could know who he was. He still had Sargent on the name tape of his borrowed uniform. Phil bit his lip to control the turbulent emotions he’d been holding in for the past seventeen years.

  He straightened. “I’m Lieutenant Colonel Philip Stanwick, 3rd Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment, United States Army.”

  The Marine gave him a proper salute, then spoke to the woman. “Connie, you were right, of course. You can finally stop trying to call your boy.”

  When the woman stood up and turned around, he saw his mom as she had been at the time of her disappearance. The exact style of long red hair. The same green eyes. Even the same style of clothing. It couldn’t be anyone else.

  “I don’t believe it,” he said, shocked. “Mom?”

  The Golden Retriever ran over to Phil and got up on his hind legs to unleash a massive canine hug. The big dog made him stumble a few steps back and he suffered a barrage of dog kisses, but he managed to hold his ground.

  “Big Mac knows family,” his long-lost mother said through a sea of tears.

  The Marine came forward with his hand out. “Welcome home. I’m Buck.”

  To Be Continued in End Days, Book 5?

  If you liked this book, please leave a review. This
is a new series, so the only way I can decide whether to commit more time to it is by getting feedback from you, the readers. Your opinion matters to me. Continue or not? I have only so much time to craft new stories. Help me invest that time wisely. Plus, reviews buoy my spirits and stoke the fires of creativity.

  Don’t stop now! Keep turning the pages as there’s a little more insight and such from the authors.

  Copyright

  End Days Complete Omnibus Edition Copyright © 2020 by E.E. Isherwood & Craig Martelle

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of E.E. Isherwood & Craig Martelle

  Blue Apocalypse © 2019 by E.E. Isherwood & Craig Martelle

  Broken Arrow © 2019 by E.E. Isherwood & Craig Martelle

  Broad America © 2019 by E.E. Isherwood & Craig Martelle

  Begin Again © 2019 by E.E. Isherwood & Craig Martelle

  Cover Illustration by Heather Hamilton-Senter

  Editing services provided by Lynne Stiegler

  Formatting by Drew A. Avera

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  We couldn’t do what we do without the support of great people around us. We thank our spouses and our families for giving us time alone to think, write, and review. We thank our editor (Lynne), cover artist (Heather), and insider team of beta readers (Micky Cocker, Kelly O’Donnell, Dr. James Caplan, and John Ashmore). It’s not who we are as authors, but who we are surrounded by that makes this all happen. Enjoy the story.

  The End of the End Days Saga

  If you liked this book, please leave a review. Your opinion matters to us. Plus, reviews buoy our spirits and stoke the fires of creativity.

  Don’t stop now! Keep turning the pages as there’s a little more insight and such from the authors.

  Author Notes – E.E. Isherwood

  Written January 15, 2020

  Thank you for reading the End Days omnibus edition. Without your generous purchases and fantastic reviews, this book series would never have gotten as far as it did. I’m grateful for every reader who makes it through one of my books, much less four at a time.

  It has been a little over a year since Craig invited me to write the first book in this series, and when I look back on these four novels, I rate them among my favorites. As the author, you might believe whatever we write becomes our favorite, but I’ve got 25 books to my name, and pound for pound I think these four are near the top on my list. I love my current series, Minus America, too, largely because it was inspired by the lessons I learned with Craig in End Days.

  Give the readers characters they care about. That was his first piece of advice. To that end, he suggested we write about a father and son trying to get back to each other across a broken world. It seems so ordinary for a genre filled with books about family members struggling to find each other in post-apocalyptic disasters, but I have a son about the same age as Garth. It was easy for me to think about what he might do if the planet went crazy, and what I would do to reach him if I’d been stuck in my truck a continent away.

  I think we got the setting correct, as well. Many reviewers commented how the story was set in a world unlike any disaster they’d read before. Using a science experiment gone wrong, and a supercollider based on those in real life, the unfolding disaster felt believable as we wrote it. Of course, we followed the tropes of government conspiracies and scientific cover-ups, but we always shot for characters worth caring about.

  That brings me to the biggest surprise of the series. A good number of reviewers noted how the book turned out to be an excellent romance. I’d like to take credit for that, but it was the characters who weaved the attraction into their interactions over the span of the books. When you spend so much time in confined spaces with time-traveling women, I guess you can’t be surprised when sparks begin to fly. Craig didn’t demand it as part of our planning, nor did I think the word romance would ever describe this series, but End Days is so much better for how a bit of romance snuck its way in there.

  With everything that went right with the series, including becoming one of my personal favorites, it naturally begs the question: will there be a fifth book? The short answer is probably not. The long answer is, well, longer.

  One of my favorite movies is Spaceballs, by Mel Brooks. In one of the lines he hopes he and his other actors will be asked to come back for Spaceballs 2, The Quest for More Money. Interestingly enough, he was predicting how the sequels to the original Star Wars trilogy would end up. While the original three movies created a wonderful story arc, which wrapped up in a satisfying and logical fashion, each sequel made after them (including the prequels) have been ghosts of the originals, that is, money grabs without any heart. Maybe this is because I grew up in the 70’s and 80’s, and the first trilogy was so much a part of my childhood. Nonetheless, based on this understanding of possibly ruining an already-great story arc, there is a fear of jumping back in.

  On the other side of the argument, the reason all those other Star Wars movies failed, in my humble movie aficionado opinion, is that they broke Craig’s number one rule for storytelling: caring about the characters. When we first met Anakin in Episode I, he was impossible to like. It didn’t get better in Episodes II and III. Even worse, he never became a convincing bad guy. I didn’t believe for an instant he was the same evil man inside the Darth Vader suit. In Episodes VII and VIII, I hated Rey. She was all-powerful and boring with the charisma of a mop and bucket. As a character, I didn’t care a fig what happened to her. Episode IX was the first Star Wars movie since 1977 I didn’t bother watching in the theater. There were no characters I wanted to spend time with.

  Craig ensured we wrote about interesting people we cared about as authors, and it seems many readers share our enthusiasm for Buck and the gang. Would those same characters work if they went out into the now-shattered world to see what’s happened to it? Is that something you would want to read about? Would you invest more of your time in this world? Why am I asking you? (apologies to Hedley Lamarr from Blazing Saddles)

  Luckily, Craig and I don’t depend on big-budget movie production companies to decide if we should do another book. The main thing you can do to make this happen is write a review for this omnibus and mention you’d like to read more about these characters. If there is enough interest, perhaps Craig and I could team up for another book. I haven’t asked him, mind you, but I can show him the reviews as supporting evidence. He’s all about metrics.

  In the meantime, I would be honored if you’d check out my other series, Minus America. It was written after End Days and I took all the lessons Craig shoved in my head and put them into practice in my books. As of this writing, three novels have been released, with one more in pre-order. The story’s premise is simple. What would the world be like without America? When a superweapon is unleashed on the population of the United States, almost everyone disappears in an instant. Only a lucky few are left on the entire continent. These last Americans must survive the empty lands, but also prepare themselves for the inevitable invasion. When American cities are free for the taking, you can bet someone is going to swoop in to grab them.

  The story is built around Ted MacInnis, a backup pilot on Air Force Two. His mission is to investigate what happened to the country while protecting Ms. Williams, the vice president. At the same time, he’s been tasked with saving his sister’s daughter—who also managed to survive the initial attack. Over the course of three books I’ve come to really love writing about these characters, and the reviews have been excellent and encouraging about their unique personalities, too. If you’ve enjoyed End Days, I believe you’ll also dig Minus America.
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  I can’t say it enough how thankful I am to Craig Martelle for inviting me along on this journey. His creative guidance and advice were directly responsible for the four great novels of our shared universe, but I also attribute that feedback to helping me launch my own successful series of post-apocalyptic books. It goes without saying you should check out all his wonderful novels, too. If you think my 25 books sound like a lot, wait until you see how many he’s written.

  Finally, and I’m definitely repeating myself, I want to thank you again for reading these books. Authors and novels only thrive when there are readers. End Days has had plenty. Craig and I can’t say it enough how grateful we are to have you with us on this journey.

  Until next time.

  EE Isherwood

  E.E. Isherwood’s other books

  End Days (co-written with Craig Martelle) – a post-apocalyptic adventure

  Sirens of the Zombie Apocalypse – What if the only people immune are those over 100? A teen boy must keep his great-grandma alive to find the cure for the zombie plague.

  Eternal Apocalypse – Set seventy years after the zombies came, a group of survivors manipulates aging to endure their time in survival bunkers, but it all falls apart when a young girl feels sunlight for the first time.

  Amazon – amazon.com/author/eeisherwood

  Facebook – www.facebook.com/sincethesirens

  My web page – www.sincethesirens.com

  Once you’ve signed up for Craig’s newsletter, I would be thrilled to have you also join mine.

  That’s all the time I have. The next book calls to me!

  Author Notes - Craig Martelle

  Written January 7, 2020