by Lou Cadle
Also by Lou Cadle
Gray, a post-apocalyptic disaster series:
Gray, Part I
Gray, Part II
Gray, Part III
Gray, The Complete Collection
Stand-alone disaster novels:
Erupt
Quake
Storm
Crow Vector: Pandemic
41 Days
Dawn of Mammals series, time-travel adventure:
Saber Tooth
Terror Crane
Hell Pig
Killer Pack
Mammoth
Oil Apocalypse series, post-oil near-future survival adventure
Slashed
Bleeding
Bled Dry
Parched
Desolated
Code Name Beatriz: A World War II Spy Thriller
Cadle also writes as Rosellyn Sparks and LC Bard.
Available in audio:
Gray, The Complete Collection
Slashed
Bleeding
Bled Dry
Thank you for reading. If you'd like to know about new releases, sign up for my mailing list at www.loucadle.com, and I'll give you a link to a free ebook short story collection as a thank-you. Turn the page for the opening scene of my best-selling series, Gray.
Gray
Lou Cadle
The midmorning sun lit her way as Coral pulled in near the cave’s entrance. She parked, climbed out of the cab of the motor home, and looked around the small clearing. An evergreen forest stretched down the slope ahead of her and back up to the distant mountain ridges. The woods were eerily still, not a bird singing or insect buzzing.
She shook off a vague sense of unease as she walked over a pad of fallen pine needles to the cave’s entrance. She could see inside to curved walls marked by horizontal striations, carved patterns of water cutting through the rock in centuries past. Beyond the first few feet, the darkness of the cave beckoned.
Returning to her brother’s aging 20-foot motor home, which he kept for hunting getaways and had reluctantly let her borrow for this trip, Coral found a flashlight in the glove box, shoving it into the daypack she always kept ready on the passenger seat for spontaneous hikes. Hauling the pack with her, she crawled back between the bucket seats to the living area. In the propane-powered mini refrigerator were two one-liter bottles of cold water. She made sure the cap of one was tight and tossed it in the pack, then, thinking better of it, grabbed the other, too. From the closet, she pulled her gray sweatshirt off a hook and tied it around her waist.
She had nowhere to be and no one to report to until July 1, when her summer job started. Over the past ten days, she had lost track of days and calendar dates, a loss she found made her nearly giddy with relief after the past year of a rigid and packed freshman schedule at the University of Michigan. She was pre-med, and the classes were tough. This month was her well-deserved reward for a freshman year spent working while most of her friends had spent theirs partying.
At the cave’s low entrance she stooped to peer inside. The floor was flattened by time and wear. She hesitated. She wasn’t afraid of the dark, or of small spaces. And the website had said it was a safe beginner’s cave, right? But caving alone, she knew, was a risk. Maybe she should leave a note on the windshield of the motor home, with the date and time she went in.
Then something—not a sound, but some other sense—made her look up into the sky.
A dense black cloud was boiling up in the southeastern sky. It rose high and fast, like a time-lapse movie of the birth of a thunderhead. But it was no rain cloud. Deadly black, it reached up and loomed over her, blocking out the sun.
What the—? She stood and gaped. The menacing cloud was nothing like any Coral had ever seen before. Nothing natural. Four mule deer crashed through the clearing, running to the west. They disappeared, and Coral stood alone again, staring at the coming blackness.
She had no idea what it was. It looked like some Renaissance vision of the world’s end. It looked like death itself coming, silent and swift. And damned fast, she realized. Coral’s shock turned to fear. Logical thought fled. She stooped and dove into the cave’s maw.
The sky outside went dark. Blackness covered all the world around her. A hissing wind whipped through the clearing, whistling at the cave entrance.
She dropped to the ground, covering her head with her arms. Her bare arms were stung by tiny pricks as pebbles rained down outside and bounced inside. Coral scrambled away from the barrage and farther back into the cave, scuttling like a beetle. She escaped the rain of rocks and curled into a tight ball, her eyes shut, hoping desperately she was having a bad dream.
Her panic may have lasted only a minute. It might have been as long as ten. When she forced herself to raise her head and look around, the world to her right was a bit lighter than to her left. The cave’s entrance was barely visible.
Groping to the sides, she touched a rock wall, rough and cool to her fingertips. That reassured her. Anything solid—anything normal—was reassuring. The outside world had just gone crazy, or maybe she had just gone crazy, but rock walls in a cave were a comforting link to the real world.
She dug out her flashlight, flipped the switch, and a thin beam of LED light came out, enough to illuminate the ground before her feet, to see the sloping ceiling. She crept toward the entrance, shining the beam outside. The flashlight beam reflected back at her, like headlights bouncing off fog.
Black, menacing fog.
What was going on out there? A memory pushed its way forward—a television show on Mt. St. Helens erupting in 1980, clouds of ash, a downwind town turned to twilight at midday.
Was that what this cloud was? A volcano had erupted to the southeast? Something dark and solid was falling in the sky—hanging there and falling both. Not rain. Not hail. So ash?
But the Cascades, the only collection of volcanoes in the lower forty-eight states, were far to her west. What, then, was this black cloud that had come from the southeast? Yellowstone was due east of her, so it couldn’t be that. Her mental map of the country didn’t have any volcanoes in the right direction. But couldn’t new volcanoes pop up? Maybe, but she didn’t think they popped up like this. Not in an instant, without warning, and not this vast.
…
