After the Fall: A Post Apocalyptic EMP Thriller (Surviving the EMP Book 2) Read online

  After the Fall

  Surviving the EMP, Book Two

  Ryan Casey

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  Contents

  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

  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

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  Chapter One

  Brianna Rutherford always told her son James not to run too far.

  It was a stunning spring day. The kind of day where before the event, Brianna would take her son to the nearby park, buy him an ice cream, watch him play on the bouncy castle or play crazy golf with him. The kind of day where she’d wake up and feel all the weight of the world lifted from her shoulders because she knew the sun could heal everything.

  But there was no time for fun anymore. Seven long days and everything had changed.

  And Brianna wasn’t sure things would ever be the same again.

  She looked at the mass of people standing before her, and her stomach sank. They were shouting. Angry voices everywhere. In front of them, the police officers stood. Three of them, one of them with a rifle.

  She knew she was supposed to trust them. Everyone was. After all, they’d been good to the people here, really. They’d supplied them with food and water, and while it wasn’t exactly a feast, it was enough to survive on.

  Brianna had been here since the third day. The first two days were hell. There was confusion. Chaos. She’d been forced to leave their home with her son in search of some kind of safety, but that had looked like it was in vain for a while.

  Until they found this village.

  It was small and cordoned off. Nobody passed through without proper approval anymore. There weren’t many people here in the grand scheme of things, but there were promises by the police that there would be other places like this.

  And they were the kind of communities they needed to cultivate until the power came back.

  But as the days rolled on, the doubts about the power coming back grew.

  And those limited rations and that strained order was starting to take its toll.

  That was part of the problem, in a sense. The police promised that things were going to get better. Someone would step in and save them. Eventually.

  They just had to be patient.

  But not everybody in this group was willing to bide their time.

  Brianna could smell the heat in the air, the sweat from the bodies of the unwashed masses. She knew the power outage was going to bring even more problems the longer it went on. People were already starting to die of the flu. There was no official quarantine, but it was getting that way. People avoided others who sneezed. They “advised” them to keep to their homes, to avoid contact with others.

  And Brianna knew all too well it was only going to get worse.

  In the days before this crazy week, she used to be a nurse. Right at the front line of the NHS, which was like a war-zone itself these days. She saw how quickly virus and disease could spread, and how poor sanitation increased the chances of its spread tenfold.

  She couldn’t help fearing for every single person in this group.

  But she had an even more pressing concern right now.

  Her son, James. He had a habit of wandering off. He always loved exploring. Right from the moment he could walk, he’d let go of her hand in the supermarket and go exploring, or disappear out into the garden when Brianna wasn’t looking, all of it a big adventure game to him.

  He was eight now, and that streak hadn’t gone away. If anything, the power outage had only enhanced his lust for exploration. There were new corners to explore. New places to see. New things to discover.

  And as much as an illusion of safety had rested over this place for the last few days… Brianna knew it wasn’t real.

  There was tension there, and it was just waiting to surface, biding its time.

  Brianna heard the shouts and saw the outcry, and she felt it was happening right now.

  And there was no sign of James.

  She knew what she was looking out for most. A red balloon he’d been gripping onto for the last day or so. He clutched it tight like it was a teddy bear; something he never wanted to let go.

  If she found that, she found him.

  She pushed forward, through the crowd, past the people she had grown to know since she got here. She remembered her arrival well: facing up to the possibility of another day on her own without help. Then seeing the police on the road, rounding people up, telling them they’d set up a safe place. Somewhere they’d be able to provide rations and equipment and everything they needed until “things got back to normal.”

  And there’d been a half-hearted belief that maybe things really could get back to normal, at first. That the power outage really was a temporary problem with an imminent solution.

  But it didn’t take long for that illusion to die.

  And when an illusion that powerful died, there was only one direction things could go.

  She pushed through more of the crowd, past more people, edging closer to the front. “Have you seen James?” she asked. But nobody was listening. Everyone was caught up in their own dramas. Some mad. Some crying. Some turning away.

  Some inching ever further forward.

  She heard shouting up ahead, but she couldn’t see the source of it. Voices around her picking up. Like she was balancing on a tightrope that was on the verge of snapping.

  And then she heard something else.

  Something that sent chills down her spine.

  Out of nowhere, Brianna heard gunfire.

  She froze. Everything went still.

  First, silence followed.

  Then, the screams.

  And then there was the rush. People racing around her. Banging into her. Falling to the ground. Some racing forward. Some running back.

  She tried to stay
on her feet, tried to keep her composure. Because she had to find James. She had to know where he was.

  And then she felt a smack to her right, and she hit the ground.

  She lay there as people lumbered over her, their heavy feet kicking into her ribs, stamping on her stomach, booting her head as the chaos continued to unfold.

  And through all of it, Brianna could still hear those gunshots.

  She knew this was the moment she’d been waiting for; the moment she’d feared.

  The moment where everything changed. Where that glimpse of hope of things “getting back to normal” died for good.

  When the footsteps scattered, and she finally got a chance to push herself to her feet, beaten, bruised, and bloody-nosed, she saw something.

  There was a body on the ground.

  A small body.

  Lying flat.

  She felt every kind of fear flood her system. Total dread crawled across her skin, seeped into her bones as she walked closer towards it, past the people who had stopped to look, eyes wide, tears streaming.

  She pushed past them, and she heard the voices telling her to stay back. To turn away. But hearing those made her want to walk forward even more. It made her want to see.

  Because it felt like they were hiding something.

  She reached the front of the crowd, and she saw it.

  First, the bodies. The men. The women. Eight of them. Lying in a pool of blood.

  The police officers standing there. The police sergeant, Jeff Ford, holding the rifle. Pale-faced.

  Staring down at one body in particular.

  He looked up at Brianna with total regret in his eyes.

  “I didn’t mean… He just ran…”

  But she didn’t hear a word.

  Not when she saw the red balloon climbing out of his little fingers and up towards the sky.

  Chapter Two

  One Week Earlier

  When Jack saw the country road leading towards his home, he stopped and smiled.

  The sun was setting. It was hard to believe it was still the first day of the blackout. Jack knew he needed some sleep to try and process everything that had happened—the EMP, the plane crash, the run-in with the shopkeeper, and the stand-off with the police.

  And now heading back to his home with a co-dependent man-child who didn’t know a thing about surviving in a world like this.

  Yeah. Things had really changed. Really fast.

  It scared Jack to even think about it. Because he knew things were going to keep on changing at a rapid rate.

  But whatever. He had to get home. And then he had to focus on the next step.

  Surviving.

  That’s all it boiled down to now.

  Riding this out until help came.

  And if it didn’t…

  Well. Riding it out.

  At least he knew how to survive this thing. Even if he were stranded on the road, he was confident he could find ways to survive that the average person wouldn’t even think of. He knew how to create various kinds of traps to catch animals. He knew how to manually filter water to make it more drinkable. And he knew how to create a wilderness survival shelter if he was desperate, out of natural debris and tree foliage.

  But right now, he didn’t have to worry about any of that.

  Because Jack had his home.

  “You could’ve told me your house was right at the top of a bloody hill,” Bill said. “Frigging Edward Scissorhands shit right here.”

  Jack looked around at Bill. Saw him panting, struggling to make his way up this hill. He half-smiled, just a little. As much as he found Bill hard work, he had to admit he kind of enjoyed his company.

  And he knew Bill kind of needed his company, too. Not just from a survival perspective. But from an emotional one, too.

  He’d just lost his mum and killed a man all within the space of one crazy day.

  That was a hell of a lot of dark shit to deal with.

  “Well,” Jack said, barely breaking a sweat as he climbed up the long dirt track towards his house in the middle of the woods. The road grew wilder, less maintained. The trees grew thicker, and the sound of the birds louder. “I didn’t exactly choose a house with the Bills of this world in mind.”

  “‘The Bills of this world’? What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Well,” Jack said, not wanting to offend Bill but at the same time not really wanting to hold back, either. “You’re hardly fit and healthy.”

  Bill frowned. He looked genuinely insulted. “Not fit and healthy? And how the bloody hell do you know that?”

  Jack scanned him, head to toe. Saw his bulging belly. The beads of sweat dripping from his face. The way he was panting more than Villain, Jack’s trusty Rottweiler, who was running up ahead. “Well. I guess I’m wrong to make an assumption. But I can only go off what I’m seeing. What’s right in front of me.”

  Bill rolled his eyes, shook his head. “Whatever. Can we just focus on getting to your place? Less talking, more walking, all that?”

  Jack walked on. “I’ll remind you again. First, the only reason you’re following me at all is because you’re lucky enough to have me invite you along. And second, you’re staying in the shed.”

  Bill sighed. “As long as it’s got a bed and some comic books I can lose myself in, I’m good.”

  Jack raised his eyebrows and didn’t say anything. Just enough to instil a little fear into Bill.

  They walked further up the dirt road leading to Jack’s house. This walk brought all the memories back of the first time he’d ever come here. After his daughter India’s death and Hazel’s affair, his life had fallen off the rails. He’d lost all desire to bond with people, to connect with people. He’d even walked away from his own son, Wayne. A sin that he should never be forgiven for. Something he would never allow himself to forget.

  But he’d done it because he didn’t want to lose him.

  It was twisted, but it was the only way of avoiding any pain that might follow.

  He wasn’t thinking straight at the time. And that loss, that pain, it still hurt him today.

  He thought about Hazel, about Wayne, about where they were out there.

  And a part of him wanted to go back to Preston. To search for them. To find them.

  But he knew he was chasing a fantasy.

  He knew there was nothing back there for him.

  There was no point chasing the past. This was his life now.

  “So what happens when we get there?” Bill asked.

  Jack turned, somewhat grateful for the distraction. “What happens when?”

  “When we get to your place. What’s… what comes after?”

  Jack felt uneasy. He knew what was coming. The unknown. Uncertainty itself.

  But an answer like that wasn’t going to be an easy pill to swallow for someone ordinary. Someone driven by goals. Someone who believed in the storylines and narratives of the world around them.

  But the sooner Bill got used to it, the better.

  “What’s next is we do whatever we can to survive. We hunt. We gather. We defend. I… We use whatever we can to get through this. As long as it lasts.”

  Bill stared at Jack for a few seconds, totally silent.

  Then he puffed his lips out, shook his head. “You really believe that, don’t you?”

  Jack frowned. “Believe what?”

  “That this might be… well, a long-term problem.”

  Jack lifted his hands. “Look around you, Bill. It might only have been a day. But you’ve seen what has happened already. You’ve seen what even you’ve done, and what you’ve lost. You’ve seen how easy it is for everything to collapse. But think about the wider world, too. The second that power went out, the economy collapsed in an instant. Money became meaningless. Bartering and trade of valuable items, that’s the new currency. After that? Homelessness. Looting. Starvation. Dehydration. Civil unrest. Disease. And it doesn’t take long for that to happen. Because remember, the army, the po
lice, they’re people, just like you and I. They’ve got families to look out for. Mouths to feed. They’re not going to serve these failing ideologies when they see everything decaying around them. Not forever.”

  Bill didn’t respond. He was just speechless, as they kept on walking.

  Eventually, a few minutes later, he finally broke the silence.

  “I hope you’re wrong, Jack.”

  Jack stopped. Smiled. A weight lifted from his shoulders.

  Right up ahead, he saw it.

  The dark wood.

  The steel roof.

  The place he’d built by hand.

  The place he called home.

  “Home sweet home,” Jack said.

  Chapter Three

  Wayne wasn’t sure how long he’d been walking, only that it was almost dark, and he was still nowhere near Candice’s home city of Glasgow.

  It felt like he’d been walking forever. The spring sun had been intense right through the day, and Wayne’s forehead was stinging with sunburn. In the old days—well, the days before today—he might’ve cursed himself for not wearing an SPF moisturiser, because he always looked flushed whenever he burned.

  But he didn’t care about that anymore. All his obsession with his appearance and his looks and making sure he looked his best at all times was gone.