Final Dawn: Season 1 (The Thrilling Post-Apocalyptic Series) (2 page)

6:13 PM, March 26, 2038

Rachel Walsh

A shout drifted through an open window in the suburbs of Atlanta as Rachel Walsh once again tried to get her daughter, Julie, to obey her instead of ignoring her instructions.

"For the last time, Julie, get down there and change the laundry out! You're fifteen and more than old enough to be a fully participating member of the family!"

Julie dutifully ignored her mother, again. Defiant to the last, she turned up the volume on her headphones and slouched lower on the couch behind a magazine, doing her best to stay wrapped up in her world of grunge music and the never ending fashion cycle.

Rachel stomped over to Julie, ripped off her headphones and threw them to the floor. As they cracked against the wall, Julie screamed at her mother, signaling the start of another night of mother-daughter fighting.

"Why do you hate me so much!"

"Get off your lazy butt and start helping out around here!"

"Leave me alone!"

As the shouts grew in pitch and volume, Rachel's husband, Jeremy, stepped in with a slow, deep voice that cut through the shrillness of the two women.

"Hold on just a minute, there. Rach, I'll handle this."

Jeremy spoke with the thick drawl of a true southerner, born and raised. Rachel passed her husband a look of thanks, then stomped down to the basement. As she descended the concrete steps, she listened to Jeremy's voice grow harsher as he laid into their daughter, trying once again to shape the girl's attitude into one of kindness instead of blatant disrespect. Rachel sighed, thinking about her job, her relationship with her daughter and how she wished she could just get away from it all for a day, or even an hour.

Damned stairs. Why did we have to build such a deep basement, anyway? This was all Jeremy's idea,
she thought to herself. Her thoughts wandered from the basement and the laundry back to her daughter.
What else am I supposed to do? We've tried grounding her, taking away all of her stuff, pushing more work on her, but nothing is working. I need a break.

Maybe I'll take up drinking.
Though Rachel wasn’t the type to drink, she had to admit that the thought was beginning to sound appealing.
Home for just two weeks and I’m already cracking? Get ahold of yourself!

Reaching the bottom of the stairs, Rachel was started from her musings by the lights coming on automatically, triggered by motion sensors that picked up on her movement. She opened the second door at the bottom of the staircase and slid a nearby brick in front of it with her foot. Jeremy hated when she did that, but she wasn't about to deal with yet another annoyance while carrying a full load of laundry up the narrow staircase.

The house had originally been built without a basement, but Jeremy had insisted that they put one in as soon as they bought the place. The only trouble was that Jeremy had a streak of paranoia in him, so he had the basement built like a fortress, with six-foot thick walls and buried an extra ten feet underground. He had a dumbwaiter installed to make it easier to move things like the laundry between the ground floor and the basement, but the cable snapped last week. Jeremy kept saying that he would fix it, but he was so busy at the office these days that the replacement cable still sat coiled in the corner waiting to be installed.

Rachel sighed again as she opened the dryer.
Damned elevator, breaking like that, just when —

A deep rumble caught Rachel's attention, and she stood up from the dryer, clothes in hand, head cocked to one side, listening. Another deep rumble passed through the house, shaking the appliances and causing the wall of canned food behind her to rattle ominously.

What the…

Another rumble, louder, more forceful. Then another, and another. Before Rachel could so much as turn around to head back up the stairs, the room shook violently and the upper door slammed shut. Rachel heard a muffled scream from behind the door and started to run up the stairway. At the fifth step, another tremor hit, causing her to lose her footing and fall backwards, slamming onto the floor and skidding up against the washing machine. Just before Rachel blacked out, she saw the effects of one last tremor as it shook the brick loose from in front of the bottom door to the staircase. The door slowly swung shut just as a bright light began to emanate around the edges of the door at the top of the stairs. Rachel could swear that she heard echoes of the screams of her husband and daughter as the darkness enveloped her.

5:45 PM, March 28, 2038

Nancy Sims

Clearly it had all been a dream, Nancy thought as she walked back to her new office in Miami. The taste of fresh seafood was still dancing on her tongue as she returned from lunch, and she felt the warmth of the sun beating through the windows on her back as she sat down and turned toward her computer. The dream had been so real, yet here she was, at her new job, settling in and enjoying her new life in Miami.

What an odd dream, though,
she thought. Nancy frowned as she typed in the password for her computer.
Wait, why is the keyboard so warm?

"Mark!" she half-shouted down the hall. "Is the A/C turned on? It's really warm in here!"

Receiving no answer, Nancy’s frown deepened. She got up from her desk and walked into the hall. She gasped as the normally bustling office was suddenly devoid of the people and cubicles that had filled it just moments ago, now replaced by rows of drooping corn and a blazing summer sun.

"No, no, no. This isn't happening. This isn't real!" she shouted, as the rest of the office disappeared around her. Nancy's vision blurred heavily and she fell backwards towards her office door. Seconds later, she opened her eyes and saw the harsh reality surrounding her.

As Nancy woke up, she realized that the office had been a dream, and this, instead, was reality.
At least I’m alive… I think,
she mused, fighting against a splitting headache that was forming behind her eyes. Nancy looked around at what was left of the interior of her vehicle, noticing that every window had broken and the airbags had all deployed. The SUV was filled with empty white sacks that hung from the front and sides of the interior. A thin layer of dust caked everything, including herself. The roof was heavily dented from multiple rolls, but thankfully she had left the sunroof cover closed, though it had been ripped off in the last roll before the vehicle came to a rest.

A dull pain radiated from her chest where the seatbelt was strapped. Nancy tugged at her shirt, gasping at the extensive bruising that appeared along her chest. As she wiggled her extremities and touched each of the hundreds of scratches and scrapes on her body, she slowly realized that she was relatively unharmed, even if she looked like she had been through a warzone.

Coughing, Nancy tugged at her seatbelt and then reached down to unfasten it. Just as the button clicked, she realized that the car was upside down. Six inches wasn't far enough of a fall to do serious damage, but it was enough to make her immediately regret it. She kicked a few remnants of glass out of what was left of the passenger window, pulled herself out and struggled to her feet. Leaning against the car and shielding her eyes from the midday sun, she took in the surroundings. Ahead of her, towards Kansas City, a thick black cloud of smoke hung on the horizon and the faint smell of ash and fire reached her even though she was still many miles outside the city. Turning around, she looked back and saw more black smoke drifting along the horizon from the Denver area, dissipating as it spread across the plains. The memory of the bright flashes came flooding back, and she put a hand to her temple as if to will the headache away along with the memories.

11:21 PM, March 26, 2038

Leonard McComb

Distant booms thundered far overhead as Leonard regained consciousness. He blinked several times, trying to clear away the darkness that enveloped his vision when he realized that it wasn't his eyes that were the problem. The entire light system in the tunnels was out. While not a completely unusual event, it did mean that there was a major break in a line somewhere.

"Must have been caused by that damned earthquake," he muttered. Leonard reached up to his head and then cursed as he realized his hardhat and headlamp had fallen off. He groped around, feeling at the edges of the collapsed pipe until he felt the firm cold touch of the plastic hardhat. He could tell just by the feel of it that it had been cracked in several places, but there was no discernible damage to his head beyond a throbbing headache.
Thank heavens for small favors,
he thought. Feeling around on the helmet, Leonard found the headlamp on the front and flicked it on. The bright beam cut through the dark pipe he was in, illuminating the collapse at the closest end. As Leonard panned the light around, he saw that the pipe was broken and chipped in several places, but the end he had entered through looked intact.

Leonard turned himself around and started crawling out of the pipe, holding the headlamp and hardhat in one hand as he crawled. Distant booms still thundered, and Leonard paused for a moment to listen to them. While they weren't as strong as the original rumbling that had sent him diving for cover in the first place, they were definitely coming from the surface, which meant that they had to be incredibly powerful to penetrate through this many layers of dirt, rock and concrete.
Could be pipelines rupturing in the tunnels, or aftershocks. What do I know, though? I'm an engineer, not a geologist.

Reaching the end of the pipe, Leonard stood up, placing the hardhat back on his head and panning the headlamp around the room. Most of the damage seemed to have been caused by parts of the ceiling caving in, with man-sized chunks of concrete scattered around the room at odd angles. The aftershocks (or whatever they were) were coming less frequently now, but with each one, a cloud of dust was exhaled into the air, and small chunks of the ceiling rained down around him. Leonard glanced around, searching, and then spied what he was after. With a grunt, he pulled a piece of concrete off of his shoulder bag, hoisted the bag over his shoulder and checked the contents. Aside from a healthy deposit of concrete inside, it was intact, including his lunch pail and spare hardhat that he carried with him. He pulled out a sample-sized bottle of whisky from the bottom of the pail, drained it with a gulp, then pulled out the intact hardhat and put it on his head. He attached his headlamp to it and set aside the spare in the bag.

"Priorities first," he muttered, as his tongue and throat grew warm from the whisky.

11:47 PM, March 28, 2038

Marcus Warden

Breathing heavily, Marcus stopped running and leaned against a nearby tree, bracing himself as he fought to catch his breath. He had spent the last three hours jogging through the forest, heading back towards his car parked on the outskirts of the national park. Once he had woken up and the shock had worn off, Marcus realized that all of his electronics had failed. His cellphone, satellite phone, emergency radio and flashlights had all stopped working right around the same time that the first flashes brightened the night sky. Fortunately, the moon was nearly full and had provided plenty of illumination to his hasty gathering of his camping gear. As he took a sip of water from his canteen, Marcus looked up at the sky and noticed that the moon seemed somewhat dimmer, as though a layer of tinting had been spread over its surface. In fact, the entire sky had that look, with the stars and the moon both not providing the same amount of illumination they had just a few hours ago. "Shit," he said, looking at his watch, "Ten till midnight. It'll be mid-afternoon before I get out of here." While the valley he was in had provided relief from civilization (and protection from the apparent cataclysm unfolding in the outside world), climbing uphill meant that he had to double his speed and triple his effort to get out of the valley and back to his car in any reasonable amount of time.

Marcus pressed on, a thousand thoughts filling his head as he jogged around trees, scrambled up over rocks and traveled a winding path up and out of the valley. Was this just some type of test? There were no reports of tests, and surely no agency would be testing a bomb this close to a national park. What if it was war? Tensions with the Middle East had been higher than ever, but surely not this high.
What about the office? The business, the contracts... mom and dad.
His throat seized up as this thought passed through his mind.

Marcus didn't have a wife, and his girlfriend was more of a casual acquaintance than an actual relationship. Marcus never had time for other people, being as busy as he was with his work, but he always had a special place in his heart for his parents. Now in their sixties, Marcus had set them up in a small house in Richmond once his company passed the ten million dollar mark. They had refused at first, but Marcus was determined to convince them to move back to Virginia and settle down. Slowly but surely, with the help of weekend visits and extended vacations, he gradually wore them down and managed to convince them to move into a townhouse purchased by his company. They had insisted on paying rent, which he dutifully accepted and then secretly slipped into a private fund that funneled back into their checking account. Marcus suspected that they knew what he was doing, but he also knew that they were too proud to bring it up, so the charade continued, helping to fuel a closer relationship that all three of them cherished.

Marcus was starting to regret the decision now, though. If this wasn't just some hoax or test and those really were bombs exploding, then he didn't think someone would be targeting any random place on the East Coast. If there were bombs this close to DC, there would have to be some in DC, and if there were some in DC, there could have been one in Richmond, too. Marcus shook his head, forcing the thoughts out of his mind, willing himself to move faster. He had to get to his car, get to civilization and find out what was going on.