by Tate, Harley
Bear the Brunt
Nuclear Survival: Western Strength Book One
Harley Tate
Copyright © 2019 by Harley Tate. Cover and internal design © by Harley Tate. Cover image copyright © Deposit Photos and NeoStock, 2019.
All rights reserved.
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.
The use of stock photo images in this e-book in no way imply that the models depicted personally endorse, condone, or engage in the fictional conduct depicted herein, expressly or by implication. The person(s) depicted are models and are used for illustrative purposes only.
Contents
Bear the Brunt
Prologue
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
Also by Harley Tate
Acknowledgments
About Harley Tate
Bear the Brunt
Nuclear Survival: Western Strength Book One
A looming threat. A reporter on the edge.
Lainey starts her day like any other, preparing to host the midday news on a local TV station. When her younger sister calls, spouting off about an imminent terror attack, she’s skeptical. Midge might be a top-notch computer hacker, but that doesn’t mean she’s a reliable source.
An entire country thrown into chaos.
Keith takes his dog for a run and heads into work, expecting an uneventful eight-hour shift behind a video camera. When his ex-girlfriend busts into the boss’s office with news of not only a massive blackout, but potential nuclear bombs, he doesn’t believe it. A glimpse at her sister’s information changes everything.
Could you chase the story despite the risks?
Lainey and Keith are thrown together in a race-against-time to uncover the truth and broadcast the facts to the American people. They’ll have to trust each other, their instincts, and their wits to survive.
The attack is only the beginning.
Bear the Brunt is book one in Nuclear Survival: Western Strength, a post-apocalyptic thriller series following ordinary people struggling to survive when a nuclear attack on the United States plunges the nation into chaos.
Subscribe to Harley’s newsletter and receive First Strike, the prequel to the Nuclear Survival saga, absolutely free.
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Prologue
LAINEY
2347 Antioch Blvd., Unit 3A
Los Angeles, California
Friday, 8:00 a.m. PST
The phone buzzed and hopped on the counter and Lainey rushed to turn the shower off. The only people who called at eight in the morning worked in the news industry. Maybe Kaitlyn was sick or out on assignment and Lainey would finally get a chance to lead the first hour of midday news. She reached out a dripping hand and swiped to answer.
While squeezing out her hair, she shouted into the phone. “Lainey Sinclair!”
“Hello?” The voice on the other end barely carried into the room.
Lainey jabbed the speaker button and tried again. “Lainey Sinclair.”
“Sis? Are you there?”
“Midge?” Lainey patted her skin dry and stared at the darkened phone screen. Her little sister never called and definitely not before ten. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine, but you need to get out of the city.”
“What?”
“It’s not safe in LA right now.”
Lainey flipped her hair over and wrapped it in a towel before twisting open a jar of lotion. Midge wasn’t making any sense. Why would she be in danger in the middle of thirteen million people? “I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about.”
“You need to leave. Head to Yosemite or the desert.” Midge’s voice cracked.
Lainey froze, a glob of lotion on her fingers. Is she afraid? Lainey shook it off. Midge wouldn’t call her even if she were. She smeared the lotion over her arm. “You don’t sound fine. What’s going on?”
Midge hesitated, and Lainey’s reporter instincts kicked into overdrive. She pounced on the silence. “Out with it. Did you screw up? Did someone finally catch you snooping around in their computer system?” It was only a matter of time before her sister’s hobby of hacking into corporate giants would land her in trouble.
“This isn’t about me.” Midge’s voice grew quiet and Lainey eased closer to listen. “Los Angeles is a target. You need to go.”
Lainey rubbed more lotion down her leg. When her sister wasn’t complaining about the perils of mainstream consumerism, she was chastising Lainey for being part of the establishment. But a warning about some danger in Los Angeles? That wasn’t like Midge at all.
“Does this have to do with the protest downtown? Please don’t tell me you have friends who are involved. Those thugs are nothing but trouble.” Plenty of anarchists trolled the same parts of the web her sister loved. If Midge was now tangled up with them, Lainey would have to tell their mother.
“I don’t know anything about a protest. This is worse. Way, way worse. You aren’t safe in the city. No one is.”
Lainey finished with the lotion and plucked the phone off the counter. She walked into her bedroom with her hair still up in a towel. “Is this some sort of a tip you’re bringing me? Did you stumble across something online?”
“Sort of.”
She rolled her eyes as she fished clothes out of her dresser. Midge didn’t understand the first thing about TV news. “You’re going to have to give me more than ‘Get out of LA.’ I can’t do anything with that.”
“You could leave.”
Lainey scoffed. “And miss a scoop? If there’s something going on, you need to spill so I can check it out.” She glanced at her bedside clock. “If we hurry, I can make the midday news.”
“I didn’t call you for a reporter shakedown, Lainey. You’re my sister. I want you safe.”
That’s it! Lainey tugged on a sheath dress and slipped her feet into a pair of black pumps. Pulling the sister card after being MIA for months wouldn’t work this time. “I don’t know what you were expecting, Margaret Anne, but I can’t leave town without knowing the details. Give me something, otherwise I’ve got to go to the station.”
After a moment, her sister sighed. “Fine. Get online. There’s a secure site where I’ve uploaded the data. I’ll walk you through how to get to it.”
Lainey frowned, but did as her sister asked. Hustling into the dining room, she opened her laptop and pulled up a browser. “I’m ready.”
Her sister guided her to a site she’d never heard of where she entered a string of letters and numbers. A new window popped up with a list of files. She clicked on the first one and a page full of half-garbled messages appeared. “What am I looking at?”
“Chatter from across the net. A friend of mine saw the connection th
is morning and pulled it all together.”
Lainey scanned the partial statements, glossing over shipping routes and cargo holds and ports of call. “I see a bunch of data about imports into the US, that’s it.”
“Keep reading.”
With a scowl that deepened every minute, Lainey did as her sister asked, opening file after file and reading what she could. Some included data on the size of shipments and regularity of transport into the Port of New York and New Jersey. Others were truck routes out from the Port and across the US.
On the fifth one, something caught her eye. She opened another window and ran a quick search to confirm. “I keep seeing the same codes over and over. Are they… airport codes for cities?”
“The twenty-five largest to be exact.”
“Why?”
“Because they’ll suffer the most.”
Lainey went back to the data. “I don’t understand. It’s all just talk about shipment dates and times and cargo routes and these cities. It could be the transportation map for a mass importation of jeans for all I know.”
“Denim isn’t measured in kilotons.”
“So what is? Gravel? Dirt?” Lainey shook her head. “Maybe these are all slabs of Italian marble going to fancy houses in major cities.”
“There’s only one thing measured in kilotons that matters, and it isn’t marble.”
Lainey thought back to high school chemistry. Kilotons… something was typically measured in it, but what? At last, her mouth fell open. “These are shipments of bombs? Are you talking about a terrorist bombing like Oklahoma City or the World Trade Center in ’93?”
“No.” Midge’s voice grew quiet. “Nothing like that will produce enough yield. Think bigger.”
Lainey clicked on another file. This one held a listing of all the nuclear weapons supposedly unaccounted for in the nuclear drawdown agreements between the United States and Russia. She leaned back in her chair. “No way. That’s impossible, Midge. No one can smuggle nuclear weapons into the United States.”
“Are you sure about that?”
After shutting her laptop, Lainey walked back into her bedroom, pausing after every word as she disagreed with Midge. “One. Hundred. Percent. Positive. There is no way our government would let something like that happen. With what we know about the NSA and all the eavesdropping they’ve been doing lately, a plot like this would be snuffed out in the beginning. It would never happen.”
Midge’s voice cut across the line. “So you don’t believe me.”
Lainey tried to make her sister understand. “It’s just not credible. Twenty-five bombs smuggled through New York City, chatter all over the internet from crazy conspiracy theorists, and not one law enforcement person is aware?”
“I didn’t give you everything. Only what Baker sent me via FTP and what I found on my own that seemed legit.”
“Do you have anything concrete? Anything more than theories from strangers on the internet?”
Her sister didn’t answer and Lainey shook her head. She needed to get off the phone and get to work. No more chasing anarchist fantasies on the dark web. She walked into her bathroom and opened up her makeup drawer. “If you get something more, call me, Midge. Otherwise, I’ve got to go.”
“So you aren’t leaving?”
“In five minutes or I’ll be late to work.”
“I meant Los Angeles.”
Lainey laughed. “No. I’ve got a job. You know, one of those annoying things that pays rent.” She pulled out a stick of eyeliner. “I’m supposed to be on in less than four hours. I can’t run away because you read something scary online.”
“That’s not fair.”
“Life isn’t fair.”
“Don’t you have some contact in law enforcement? Some guy in NYC?”
Lainey finished lining her lashes and picked up her eyeshadow. “You mean Rick? I can’t believe you remember him.”
“He used my head as an armrest at your pool party last year.”
Lainey snorted. Sounded like Rick all right.
“Will you call him?”
Lainey paused to consider it. “I don’t know, Midge. We had a bit of a falling-out after I ran that piece on corruption in the police department.”
“Why would he care?”
“He used to be a cop. And… I might have gotten the scoop from him.”
“Ouch.”
“Tell me about it.” Lainey remembered the fight they had over the phone when Rick accused her of taking advantage. It had crushed her and their relationship. But if anyone could sniff around New York City without raising alarms, it was Rick. “You really think there’s something to all this chatter?”
“I wouldn’t have called you if I didn’t.”
Even if the story couldn’t possibly be true, she hated to offer her sister nothing. Lainey finished her eyeshadow and mascara before making up her mind. “All right. I’ll call him, but I won’t make any promises. He might not even answer the phone.”
“Will you leave town?”
“If Rick tells me to, sure. Until then, I have a job to do.” Lainey finished her makeup and stepped back to assess the end result. Approachable, professional. Nighttime news anchor-worthy. Maybe someday. She smiled. “I’ll let you know what he finds out.”
“Good. I’m going to Chicago to meet up with Mom. I told her to head to Suttons Bay. She should be out of the blast radius there.”
Lainey stared at the phone. Midge wouldn’t leave college and tell their mother to flee the city unless she truly believed the threat was real. I can’t ignore this. Lainey put love for her sister into her voice. “Take care of yourself, Midge.”
“You, too.”
Lainey ended the call and scrolled through her contacts. She hesitated before dialing Rick Easton. The man carried a grudge like other people carried loose change. But she promised Midge, and no matter what people thought of her scruples, Lainey didn’t back out on a promise.
She tapped the phone and waited for the call to connect.
He picked up on the fourth ring. “I’m dead to you.”
“I know and I’m sorry.” Lainey glanced at her reflection in the mirror and tried to sound contrite. “I wouldn’t have called if it weren’t important.”
Rick snorted. “What? Did you screw some other naïve bastard over and need a little protection? Or are you hoping I’ll give you a life raft to keep your career from circling the drain? I heard the city water department’s as corrupt as the police. Maybe they’ll float you a story.”
“My career is fine.” Lainey couldn’t keep the irritation out of her voice. “And I don’t need a bodyguard.”
“Then this call is over.”
“Wait!”
“What?”
“It’s about Midge.”
Rick’s tone softened. “Your little sister? Is she okay?”
“She’s gotten mixed up in something.” Lainey chewed on her lip. How much should she tell him? How much did she even believe?
“Here in New York?”
“Not exactly.”
Rick cursed. “I don’t have time for one of your games, Lainey. I’m on a job. I can’t help your sister without the facts.”
She exhaled and dropped her voice. “She’s in college now, working on a computer engineering degree. She’s a real wiz with coding and website-building and even some, well, not-so-legal stuff.”
“You mean she’s a hacker.”
“Yes, and she’s come across some chatter on the dark web.”
“That place is full of criminals and crazies. Nothing reliable ever comes from sources there.”
“Believe me, I know. But she’s terrified, Rick, and she mentioned you specifically.” Lainey pressed on. “I promised to call you.”
Rick clicked into business mode. “Tell me what you know.”
“She claims there’s evidence of a coordinated attack on the United States involving the top twenty-five cities.”
“Bombs? Gas? What are we talk
ing about here?”
Lainey swallowed. “Nuclear weapons.”
“Who’s the perpetrator?”
“Midge didn’t know. But they’re supposedly smuggling the weapons through the Port of New York and New Jersey.”
“That’s ridiculous. The Port’s got to be the most secure import-export hub in the world.”
“She’s convinced something’s going on, Rick. I know it’s a long shot, but can you do some digging?”
“Do you have anything else? That’s not much to go on.”
“It’s happening soon. That’s all I know.”
As the silence stretched on, Lainey’s hope in Rick faltered. Had she really burned the bridge between them? At last, she pressed him. “Rick?”
“Hold on.”
Lainey waited as the sound of a camera clicking carried across the line. As she listened to Rick live the life of a PI, she reapplied a coat of lipstick. She finished and counted to ten. Then twenty. She couldn’t wait around forever. As she headed to the front door, Rick finally returned. “Lainey, you still there?’
“Yes.”
“I’ll look into it. But don’t get your hopes up. It’s probably nothing.”
She exhaled in relief. “Thank you.”
“You can thank me when you pay my bill.”
Lainey laughed and ended the call. Same old Rick Easton, that was for sure.
Chapter One
KEITH
South La Brea Avenue
