After the Shift: The Complete Series

by Grace Hamilton

  Nathan spun his head, but all that he could see were tears. He rubbed at his eyes again and, when he lowered his fists, he saw that the doors which Stryker had been about to open were hanging on their hinges at crazy angles.

  Part of the ceiling had collapsed above them. There were sprays of fresh dirt surrounding them, as if someone had dumped the contents of a freshly dug grave on them, and these lay below wisps of smoke rising from laths of smoldering wood. Through the broken doors, Nathan saw a wrecked apartment of overturned tables, busted chairs, and plastic troughs full of vegetation upended and destroyed. Rubber and plastic pipes spewed water across the floor and a small fire had erupted from an overturned Yukon stove that was about to catch light to a pile of firewood.

  Nathan wanted to get to his boy, but the fire had to be a priority on the tenth floor of a building with which he wasn’t familiar. Cyndi was sitting up from the pile of limbs and coughing heads, pulling leaves and dirt out of her hair and shaking her head.

  “See to Tony,” he said, getting up, and Cyndi nodded, still a little disorientated as she reached for their son.

  Nathan’s feet were unsteady, and his knees felt like candy left in the summer sun, but he stumbled forward, through the shattered doors and into the apartment beyond. The fire was small, and all he had to do was pick up one of the free-trickling hydroponic pipes from the floor and douse the guttering flames. The blown over steel box of the Yukon stove hissed and spat as the water doused the growing blaze into acrid smoke.

  Back in the corridor, when Nathan reached it, Cyndi had gotten Tony’s inhaler from her bag and was helping the boy relax his constricting throat.

  Saber sat licking at Syd’s face, trying to clear it of mud. Lucy was being pulled from beneath a section of plasterboard by Freeson, and Dave and Donie weren’t checking themselves for injuries, but peering hard at the screens of their tech for damage.

  Stryker turned out to be the only one who’d been hurt by the blast coming from his apartment, and it was his pride that smarted more than the cuts and bumps from the blown open mahogany doors which had pole-axed the back of his head.

  “Don’t move, Stry; let me check you out.” Nathan bent to look at the blood welling from two deep cuts in Stryker’s blond hair. The wounds were long, but not deep. Given that Nathan knew head wounds bled like bitches, and often looked worse than they actually were, he didn’t find them too worrisome.

  Stryker pushed Nathan’s hands away. “I’m fine, man. No need to fuss yourself…”

  Stryker tried to get up then, but his heel slipped from underneath him in the wet mud and his head crashed back onto the floor, knocking himself completely unconscious this time.

  Nathan surveyed the corridor—his friends, his family, and finally Stryker, prostate, covered in mud and crap, a puddle of blood leaking from the back of his head and his stupid shirt ruffling in the cold breeze from all the windows the explosion had blown out in his destroyed apartment.

  Welcome to the rest of your lives?

  “I don’t think so,” Nathan said to no one and everyone.

  25

  Stryker had been trying to make methane gas from human, animal, and vegetable waste. His cheap and ancient Chinese-made, 1000-watt inverter for converting the DC current from the Masonic Temple’s roof-based wind farm batteries into AC had blown a switch on the circuit board. That electrical fire had fritzed out a burst of flame from the casing, which had blown open the plastic tank of methane. A tank that had been far too near any electrical equipment to be safe—especially given the ancient Chinese inverter. The resultant detonation had torn apart the apartment on a gust of flame and billowing brisance.

  The blast had wrecked all of Stryker’s rudimentary hydroponic frames, too, twisting and snapping the plastic trays, and torching the vast majority of his crop of vegetables, grains, and fruits.

  As the shell-shocked and aching party had helped the still dazed Stryker try to clear up the mess, Freeson and Nathan had done their best with the broken windows, stapling plastic sheeting to the frames, which then bulged in from the wind outside the tenth floor like the fat bellies of sails on a pirate ship.

  Stryker had a spare inverter, but the wires coming from the roof batteries weren’t transmitting any current. “Dammit,” he said. “Happens sometimes. Just have to go up and fix it.”

  Stryker’s overcompensating sense of blind optimism took over. He began filling a rucksack with tools.

  “You’re going up to the roof?” Nathan asked incredulously. “You’ve just been blown up, man. It can wait.”

  Everyone was pooped. They were sitting on Stryker’s singed furniture, looking like refugees from a war zone. Tony lay sleeping on Cyndi’s lap, Saber sprawled over Syd’s. Lucy, who hadn’t said a word since they’d gotten out of the corridor, had her head on Freeson’s shoulder. The tech twins were trying to see if they could get any signal from the base station, but as Dave had said, “We’re on the wrong side of the building for line of sight, and there’s no cell signal.”

  Not being able to get a connection to the internet seemed to have upset him more than being caught in an explosion.

  Stryker pulled the zip closed on his rucksack.

  “We need power or we’re just gonna have to huddle together for warmth and eat raw vegetables, and no one wants to see that happen. Need to run a new line.”

  Stryker picked up a roll of wire and walked towards the doors, which were still hanging on their hinges. His steps were unsteady and, for a moment, Nathan had the very real image of Stryker becoming unbalanced on the roof, falling past the plastic-covered window frames in the apartment and hurtling to his death. Vivid as could be, the scene popped right into the center of his imagination.

  Dammit.

  However angry he was with Stryker right now—and there would be a reckoning, for sure—he wasn’t going to let his friend go up to the roof alone in this state.

  Family and friends first.

  The afternoon was falling towards twilight.

  The roof wind farm above the sixteenth floor of the Masonic Temple could be accessed from one of the two turrets above the façade. The bitterness of the cutting wind and the thrumming of the two dozen turbines were the dominant sensations once they were out in the open.

  Windsor, Detroit’s Siamese twin across the Detroit River in Canada, was even now, in the failing light, alight with fires. It was a broken cityscape of destroyed, burned-out buildings and vast tracks of snow.

  The river, like the Great Lakes at either end of it, was the frozen passage between them. Cargo vessels had been locked into the ice, some raised tail high in the crush of ice, their rusting hulls red and ochre in the darkening light. Nathan could see the lights of a few cars moving down on the waterfront, but nothing else seemed to be moving in Windsor until a gust of flame blew out of a window in a tall building, and the boom of its detonation rolled across the ice to Detroit.

  “Guess I’m not the only one trying to make methane.” Stryker shrugged as they tramped through the snow on the roof.

  Detroit looked less burned out than Windsor, but as their journey in earlier that day had shown them, it was not immune to what had ravaged so many cities they’d seen. Electric lights glowed in many windows across the snowy scene, casting up blue-yellow reflections of the surface of winter. A police siren warped and whooped in on the wind as Nathan and Stryker made their way across the roof to the turbine feeding the batteries meant to provide power to Stryker’s level, six floors below.

  Nathan had been to Detroit just once before. He’d driven there with his daddy to pick up a 1995 Ford F-150 with a custom FlareSide SuperCab. They’d been hired by his daddy’s friend to bring it back to Glens Falls. They’d gone in the Dodge and Nathan had driven it back while his old man drove the Ford. The city then had been dirty and noisy, sure, but it had been alive. Alive with the smells of good food, music blaring from shop fronts, bars sending out gales of laughter, and others blasting out savage hip-hop or barroom rawk. Now
the city below them was like a Shadow Detroit. One cast by the light of a dying sun onto barren land. The city, with its burning twin, was a bruise on the earth.

  Deep and painful to look at.

  They got to the turbine and, instead of getting his tools from his bag, Stryker faced Nathan, putting down the wire and the rucksack. He sighed, and then spoke. “There’s nothing wrong with the wire. Sorry, man.”

  Nathan’s confusion coursed ahead of his sudden anger. Nonplussed, he stared at his friend, feeling the vertigo of the huge dome of sky and long drop below him. “Then why have you brought me up here on this fool’s errand, Stry? I’m freezing my nuts off…”

  Stryker looked at his feet and said something that was whipped away in the wind.

  Nathan moved closer. “What?”

  Stryker looked up. “I might have been… less than truthful. I’m sorry.”

  Nathan bunched his fists, but didn’t punch Stryker—he’d save that for later, once the explanation landed. “We’ve already seen the city, Stry, and it’s nothing like you told us, nothing like the pictures. I came up here to stop you falling off the roof by accident, but now that you’ve brought it up, if you don’t give me a damn good explanation right now, I’ll throw you off, myself. Now get to it.”

  Stryker pushed his hands into his pockets, struggling to make eye contact. When he did, his eyes were watery and his gaze was weak. “We got the ambition, dude. The place is burning with it. Some of the conversions have been made. There are covered-in areas, and we’ve got the wind farms up and running. Power, we got coming out of our ears.”

  “Hospital?” Nathan’s only thought now was the safety of Cyndi, his unborn child, and Tony.

  “Sure, yeah… it might not be the best, but it’s still operating. There are doctors and there are nurses, but…”

  “There’s always a but, isn’t there?” Nathan nails were digging into his palms. If it hadn’t been for the gloves, he’d have drawn blood for sure.

  “Supplies and drugs are difficult to get… we’ve been pretty much abandoned by the federal government now… So, we’re not getting information, and there have been raids.”

  Images of Ski-Doos, burning diners, and carved out foreheads leapt to the front of Nathan’s mind. “Raids…?”

  “Yeah… look…”

  “Raids, as in scavengers? Gangs? We met some of them out on the road.” Had he lifted his family from the frying pan only to drop them into the fire? Or, rather, from the refrigerator only to lock them into the freezer?

  “No… not gangs. This is… official…”

  All the times Nathan had thought Cyndi was being all Paranoid Conspiracy Prepper with her insistence that they not rely on the future governments to look after the population, and here it was turning out to be legit advice. “The government? Stealing your hospital supplies? What craziness is infecting this place, Stry? We trusted you! We believed you!”

  Stryker held up his hands. “They’re calling themselves the government. They could be anyone. Anyone with a tank can be the government these days.”

  “They’ve got tanks?”

  Stryker shook his head, “No, you doofus. That’s just a figure of speech, but you know what I mean. Official looking guys show up, wave around official looking ID, and waltz off with what they want. That’s why the cops set up the roadblocks. We got wise to it now.”

  Nathan had to hold onto the gantry to stop his still shaky legs from collapsing beneath him. He couldn’t believe what he was hearing, but at the same time, he was kicking himself for letting himself be persuaded into this position. He should have seen it coming. Relying on Stryker was like relying on a politician not to tell lies when his lips moved.

  Nathan felt himself being swallowed up in the incredulity of the situation. All this way, all this hurt. For this?

  “Why?! Why did you lie to me?” he demanded, his head hot with rage.

  “Not technically lying.”

  “Technically? Technically?” And that’s when Nathan grabbed Stryker by the front of his jacket. He thumped Stryker back against the turbine gantry. “Come on, you jerk, why did you make me bring my family here? Technically, I’m not going to throw you off the roof. Think of it as a flying lesson.”

  Stryker’s mouth moved quickly, getting his words out in a rush. “We need men like you, Nate. I’m terrible at this stuff. Yeah, sure, I try my best, but look how I screwed up today. I almost blew us up. We need men like you, but more than that…”

  Nathan relaxed his grip on Stryker just enough to stop the neck of the anorak from choking him.

  The pictures sparked in Nathan’s brain again. Tony coughing, his lips blue, the last of the asthma meds keeping him alive until they could find another stock. Cyndi, his hand on her belly, feeling the kick of the uncertain future. The burning cities, Owen’s scavengers, and the Reynolds with their tales of the extinction event.

  A world toppling off its axis, spinning down like a child’s top to a cold death and taking everyone on Earth with it.

  “More than what?” He was shaking Stryker now, and if his eyes had been marbles, they would have rattled around his skull like roulette balls. “Tell me! Tell me!”

  Stryker’s eyes stopped spinning and they fixed Nathan with a stare so chilling that it cut through him deeper and colder than the wind coming off the frozen lake, carrying its cargo of burning and the smell of desolation.

  “More than you… we need… Cyndi.”

  And that’s what finally drove Nathan to hit him.

  End of Freezing Point

  After The Shift Book One

  Blurb

  Nathan and his family are on the run from a catastrophic polar shift—but the bitter cold is the least of their worries.

  Nathan was led to believe that Detroit would be the proverbial promised land, but when his family arrives they find a city struggling just to survive in the frigid conditions. Nathan’s old friend Stryker has made a safe haven in the ancient Masonic Temple, but it soon becomes clear that the comfortable life within its walls is unsustainable. Resources are running out fast, and with a new baby to feed and another son in need of medicine, Nathan and Cyndi face a difficult choice: dig in with the dangerously naïve Stryker, or head west to Wyoming.

  As Nathan debates this fateful decision, he learns the horrifying secret behind Stryker’s success. In his heart, he knows he’s unwilling to pay such a price for his family’s safety, but leaving the city is no easy matter when even the walls have eyes. Now, his family, Syd, and their friends will have to use all of their skills to help each other escape and survive whatever comes next, or die trying.

  1

  The plaster covering the wall six inches from Nathan’s ear exploded before he ever heard the shot. Stryker was dragging him down to the floor of the abandoned store when his legs hadn’t even gotten half a chance to throw him down. Everything happened in slow motion, and Nathan’s tired body slowed down the very reactions he needed to save himself.

  Stryker looked around the counter where they were hunkered down, his tortured breath making fast-formed clouds in the freezing air. “Did you see where it came from?”

  “No,” Nathan said, shaking his head and feeling inside his North Face jacket for the SIG-Sauer he wore in a shoulder holster. Never one to want to be armed arbitrarily, Nathan had nevertheless reluctantly agreed with his wife, Cyndi, that he would carry a pistol when he was out on bartering trips with Stryker.

  Two more shots rang out in the cold air. Footsteps ran by the store front and voices Nathan couldn’t make out shouted things that might have been warnings, or orders. It was difficult to tell. Then came silence.

  The trips out from Detroit’s grand Masonic Temple, where Nathan lived with Cyndi, Tony, his ten-year-old asthmatic son, and his now sickly baby, Brandon, had become ever more dangerous over the past few months—loosely, since Cyndi had given birth to Brandon. This time, it was clear enough that the shots fired hadn’t been meant for Nathan or Stryker, but they did
indicate that the men could easily get caught up in the fights of rival gangs or those of the city’s so-called security force. “So-called,” Nathan thought bitterly, because the only security they seemed to be interested in was their own.

  Nathan hadn’t yet forgiven Stryker Wilson for selling him the con that Detroit, in reality, was. As the Big Winter had bitten hard, and Nathan had been persuaded against his better judgement to travel the icy landscape between his home in New York State and Michigan, the relief he’d felt at finally reaching his destination had been short-lived. Stryker, the blond-haired Walter Mitty of the Post-Apocalypse, had told Nathan and his family Detroit had been ahead of the curve in every respect when it came to holding out against the horror of the Earth tipping over on its axis (or at least the crust shifting – no one was really sure exactly what had happened) and the Mid-Atlantic effectively becoming the new North Pole. The whole of the eastern seaboard of North America had frozen in a sequence of rapidly worsening winters. Many people had lit off southwest to an uncertain future, while some people had gone to Detroit.

  But nothing had been what it had seemed.

  Stryker hadn’t told them the whole story. Sure, there were some glassed-in areas where the streets were warm and the living a little easier, but nowhere near enough to accommodate the ten thousand or so people who now called the mostly derelict city their home. In the Greenhouse Zone, as Stryker called it, a new elite class of haves was growing, but out on the streets, lawlessness was fomenting among the have-nots.

  In fact, the city, although frozen in physical reality, had the hot, sick feeling of a painful boil that was about to burst.

  The other thing that had made Nathan remain was Cyndi’s pregnancy and her needing to be near even the rudimentary medical facilities Detroit could offer. Brandon was a month old now—a sickly little wretch with whooping cough, who had refused the breast almost from the word go. Cyndi’s pregnancy being affected by the stress of the journey—the lack of adequate food and warmth—had taken its toll. Tony, the ramrod straight eldest, had struggled with his asthma, but they at least had access to some medication. But when Brandon was able to travel, Nathan was determined to travel south, however much Stryker and the City Government wanted him to stay.