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The Final Book in the “Martyr’s Fire” Series!
The finale is finally here!
You can order the finale to the Martyr’s Fire series in paperback or for Kindle! And be sure and go back and read the other books in the Martyr’s Fire series: Noiné’s Child, Noiné’s Prayer and Noiné’s Eyes! See the whole series here! Order many copies for yourself and give the extras to your friends!
Description:
6471 A.D.
They said they would never forget. A millennia ago, mankind set aside all boundaries of religion, geography and tribal allegiances to fight the greatest battle in the history of the world.
That battle is now the stuff of legend. People rarely talk about it anymore, and those few who do doubt that it really happened. The old walls are back up, and the old animosities.
In the mountains, Adam Forest is growing to manhood while dreaming of only one thing: flight.
On the plains, Noen is growing up with dreams of a world outside her little community, where the old legends still hold sway and people can believe in the ancient God without fear.
But between the plains and the mountains an ancient evil has been revived. Even if it can be beaten back, is it too late, for the cultures on the mountains and the plains are collapsing. Is there any hope left?
Who knows? Who still remembers?
The Dumbest Planet in the Universe
A world without sin or strife or pain.
Scott Passer III, “Trey” to his friends and family, went in for a routine heart ablation. He woke up in a spaceship little bigger than a coffin and going … where?
He finally crashes on an idyllic planet many galaxies away the locals call Oolod. They put him back together and begin to show him a world where no one even knows the meaning of lie.
And hovering over all is a mysterious figure Trey can’t see. He can’t even hear the being’s name when others speak it. Who is this strange being, and was it him that brought Trey across the universe?
And why?
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And why?
Sample Chapter
I went into the hospital for just a routine ablation. I mean, as routine as those things can be. They are attempting to get an out-of-whack heart back in whack by searing it and causing scar tissue in just the right spot. Yeah, it’s as crazy as it sounds, but it works.
And since you’re looking up what it is on line anyway, I’m not going to knock myself out explaining it to you.
As far as heart surgeries go, it has a history of success. A lot of people are back at work within weeks, sometimes days. For some people it takes a little longer, but not usually too long. Not like a lot of the other heart surgeries.
And I had had it done before. A couple years before I had had it done at a hospital in Oak City. The thing was, though, they could only do so much of it at one time, so they did (according to them) about ninety percent and then the plan was to get the remaining ten percent “in a couple years” after I was completely healed. (Yeah, I know I said that they said that most people recover quickly, and on the first round I had. I had gone back to my job as an accountant after a couple weeks—part time—and then full time by a month later. Not like I was playing pro sports or prone to ridiculous amounts of jogging, so I didn’t have a problem.)
I just had to get the job finished. Afterward, they told me, I would be back up to full strength in no time. All the old fatigue gone, better sleep at nights, a new man—if you didn’t count that I was rapidly leaving fifty in the rearview and hadn’t been a stud on any field or court since, well, ever. In Little League I was the kid you stuck in right field, in adult softball I was the man you put at second base or catcher—the two places least likely to harm the team in a no-slide league.
So maybe, with that final ten percent taken care of, I would at least be able to go on a long, brisk, walk without feeling light-headed or nauseous.
When I had it done before, I went through all the pre-test junk we’ve come to expect, filled out a ream or two of papers, then showed up at the hospital on the day in question. I was well-rested because my insurance had even sprung for a decent hotel room near the hospital for the night before and after the surgery. I hadn’t eaten or drunk anything in twelve hours when I walked through those hospital doors and, pretty soon, I was laying in a hospital gown on a hospital bed, thinking hospital thoughts.
They had wheeled me into the operating room and then this nice lady had told me she was going to put some stuff into my IV which would make me go to sleep. I started counting backward from a hundred, got to about ninety-seven … before waking up in recovery and being kind of sore and tired. It turned out, they had stopped short because the anesthesia had been wearing off and they couldn’t have continued without putting me in serious pain, the kind of pain that would have complicated my recovery.
That’s what I was expecting, then, for round two: count to three, wake up in another part of the hospital, everything hunky-dory.
Anytime you go under, though, there’s always a slight chance you won’t come back up. Or that you might have a wild dream while under the influence. The kind of dream that seems so real you will never be convinced by anyone that it was not.
The Journey
I’ve always been a man who followed his instincts. When I woke up, then, and my first instinct was to scream, that’s what I did. Instincts two through six were remarkably similar, so I followed them as well. Instinct seven was to call ineffectually for help, so I did that, followed by more screaming.
You see, I had expected to awaken to the visage of the anesthesiologist who had put me to sleep—or one as like that one as to be no matter—and then get the usual questions like “How are we feeling?” and “Would you like something to drink?” When I didn’t wake up to that, I think my responses were quite called for.
At first, I thought I was still asleep, for it was all darkness about me. But then I realized my eyes were open for I was seeing a little. Dim shapes and faint lights were all about me. Hence the screaming, though, for I appeared to be in a box. My first thought was: coffin. “I died on the table and now my heart has re-started on my own but they’ve already chucked me in a box for shipping back to … where would they ship me?”
I was born in Flomot, Texas—wait, that’s not right. I was born in Lubbock, TX, but that was because there was no hospital in Flomot. One of my first sensations upon awakening from the anesthesia was of movement, which is what helped lead me to the conclusion that I was in a coffin and someone was taking me back to Flomot for burial. I didn’t have any special affinity for Flomot, but I guess I never had made any “final wishes” known, so it made sense to bury me near my mother’s plot. They could have buried me near my father, but he was a veteran and accorded such honors, so I would only have been in the same pasture, not right next to him.
Once past most of the screaming, it came to me that if I were in a coffin, there wouldn’t be any lights. I had seen coffins advertised that were insulated so you could buy them before you needed them and use them as coolers at parties before you checked out, but I had never known of one that came with lights. And these lights didn’t seem close enough to be inside the coffin with me. Where were they coming from?
Trying to calm down and think about the problem, I hit on the idea that maybe I was inside an iron lung. I had never heard of winding up in one being one of the possibilities following ablation, but then I also had no idea what an iron lung looked like from the inside or out and, thus, the theory was no better or worse than any others I might have come to.
I tried to move my arms and legs, but while I could move them a little, I was clearly packed into some sort of … something? Box? Coffin? Shipping crate? I think my mind liked the iron lung idea because it at least connotated medical care whereas all the other options led one to think of abandonment.
Maybe it was some sort of hyperbaric chamber, I suddenly thought. I had heard the term and, while I didn’t know any more about what one looked like than I knew about iron lungs, the idea seemed more reasonable. Didn’t they use them to immerse someone in a very sterile, pure environment? Maybe, I reasoned with my still-panicky self, there had been some hint of infection and they needed me in a completely clean environment as I recovered.
With that thought in mind—and realizing it could still apply to what little I knew of an iron lung—I decided that maybe I was looking through a glass window at a darkened room in the hospital. Not one hundred percent dark, but just mostly darkened. Why would it be so? I asked. Perhaps it was late at night. Or maybe it was just part of providing a calm world for the patient to wake up in. Bright, garish, hospital lights can be rather unsettling, I knew, when one first woke up.
But then, I realized the lights were moving. And that there were a lot more of them than I had at first thought.
Stars!
I was looking through a window at stars!
And either they or I were traveling very fast.
I actually calmed down then, for it became instantly clear to me that I was having a dream. It didn’t feel like a dream, but I just guessed that to be because of the drugs. As I noticed the stars (or me) moving faster, I laughed to myself that the anesthesia should have included some Dramamine.
I also got the sense that I was accelerating away from Earth—flat on my back and feet first. I couldn’t turn around and look, of course, but that was just the idea that came to my mind. I looked for Saturn, but was already outside the solar system and moving away quickly—or so I calculated (with no available facts).
Noiné’s Eyes – Martyr’s Fire – Book 3 available now!
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AD 5252 and all of the western world is at war.
Led by King Vykyant, a coalition of more than a dozen nations has come together to fight an evil on a far-off continent. “We will fight it there to protect our families here.”
But the families at home are not free of danger, for the fight is being waged there, too.
Thousands of soldiers marching, fighting and dying in a foreign land. People at home getting spotty information at best.
A world at war, as told through the eyes of the people on every front line.
Now available for Kindle & paperback. (Due to the length of this novel, it will not be available in hardback.)
Sample Reading
Three thousand years before, the continent had been a land with everything: verdant forests, wide rivers, harsh deserts. There had been cities and towns and beaches and places where men and women went for leisure and many places where they worked. It had been a land of mystery, and legends, and ghosts.
There had been people of education and what was called sophistication, often living just feet from those who didn’t receive those accolades. There had been people in the finest clothes, often living not so far away from people who had the barest rags, then a little further away were people who didn’t know what clothes were for and—had they known—couldn’t have imagined wearing them. Technology had existed side-by-side with stone tools.
When the first of great wars had come, the majority of the continent had remained relatively unscathed. Relative being a relative term, for there had been fights and squabbles, but almost none of the large-scale harm that had affected every other continent on the planet. Some of the survivors from other continents moved to that continent thinking it would always be that way.
When the wars returned—though in the myopic view of the future’s rear view, all the wars were one—the continent was mostly spared, though circumstances made it isolated.
The continent was still rich in many ways, but especially in tyrants and graft. Its resources were plundered and sold, leaving the majority of its population in even more poverty and want than they had been before—and they had been among the planet’s poorest back then. Its great forests were plundered not just for the wood, but for the precious metals that lay beneath, a process that had begun before the wars, then accelerated after even though the booty was just being sold to fellow residents of the continent.
But then came more wars that finally poisoned the rest of the planet. That southern continent was more protected than all the others, or so it seemed at first. Very few military strikes landed there. It was not attacked with the poisons that were levied against practically everywhere else and atmospheric conditions swirled them away. The last of the people who could escape from the other continents came to the southern continent.
They brought their wealth with them—some of which had come originally from that continent, ironically. The richest brought their own security forces with them, setting up little fiefdoms, assuming that to do so was their right even as they ran those who had been on the land for time out of mind off of it. Those so displaced headed to the already crowded cities, making life even harder—or deeper into the jungle.
And then the winds shifted. Not the political winds, but the actual winds, and the poisons everyone thought they had escaped came to the southern continent.
Millions were wiped out in just months’ time.
As in the rest of the world, those who survived, survived in pockets. Perhaps more people survived on the southern continent than on others. Some estimated that while elsewhere in the world ninety percent of the population was wiped out by the wars and their poisons, on the southern continent it was “only” eighty percent. Those who survived quickly stopped burying their dead and just threw them into the rivers or natural ravines. This exacerbated the poison, and the stench.
Technology was lost.
Commerce between the pockets was impossible.
Mankind was reduced to its most primitive state as every waking hour was spent scrabbling for food and shelter. And on that continent, in its pockets, there were more people fighting for the few resources the poisons hadn’t killed. The men and women of those lands became more vicious than in the rest of the world because they had to if they wanted to survive.
A millennium later, as the poisons dissipated and people all over the world began to venture bravely beyond the piece of ground they had known for a thousand years, there was some conflict of course, as is the nature of man. In some places there was cooperation, though, as the people met others who had goods or services they didn’t have themselves. In some cases across the globe rival pockets still spoke a semblance of the same language, but in some they were so divided they couldn’t even sign to one another. There was fighting at times, too.
The southern continent knew nothing of cooperation. For a thousand years and more, all anyone had known was a mad struggle for life amidst death and when they encountered someone they didn’t know, the first thought on every mind was challenge, and murder. Pockets of stronger people conquered pockets of weaker people, though there were no pockets of weak people. The strongest took over, killing or enslaving the weaker until only the very strongest ruled. Tin-pot dictators were overrun by tyrants, and tyrants were squashed by despots. When finally a potentate arose for a time who was over the whole continent, it was with an army of people who were only biologically men, for in reality they were animals.
Like with animals, as the leader began to show weakness, he was slaughtered by a younger, stronger, lieutenant who would then rule until the same fate befell him. And so it went. For two thousand years the plants grew back, deformed and twisted from the lingering effects of the wars, but not so deformed and twisted as the men and women who occupied the lands.
Their languages were guttural and rarely written down. Their thoughts were of conquest and survival and not worth being written. Every thought was toward evil and their own advancement.
It was only natural that the puppet who was the latest to rise to “command” of the whole continent could be easily persuaded to look beyond the continent, to the lands to the north, where it was said there were good lands and weak people who would fall easily before his blade.
Ashes to Ashes – The Last Valley – Book 1
Ash.
Siblings Josh and Claire were out with a detail of locals trying to replant the Selkirk area following the previous summer’s fire when the ash hit. They had seen a lot of ash, but not like this. This was a wall two miles high that swept through and buried everything. Everything.
Some said it had to be the result of a volcanic eruption. As far as anyone can tell, the two-score people who have made their way to the valley are the last people left alive in the world. Everyone is trying to survive, but Josh is determined to thrive.
With Claire by his side, he begins to rally the people to not just claim a life in the ash, but to build a new community. With death all around them, and continuing to come their way, Josh begins to wonder if he can keep everyone going long enough to build something new. Even if he can keep their hopes up, how long can they push back against the ash?
From the ash arises a new town, a new way of life, and hope.
Be sure to read the rest of the story in “Crazy on the Mountain” and “Book of Tales“!
Available now for Kindle and paperback.
…
Sample passage
You can only live in panic so long. Eventually, you have a nervous breakdown or you wear out. Claire and I just wore out. It had been about six o’clock in the evening when the wall of ash descended on us and minute after minute, then hour after hour, of sitting in a darkened pick-up truck, clinging to your sibling for dear life, while outside the wind moans and nothing is visible takes its toll. Throw in that we were already tired from an afternoon of work and, somewhere in there, we fell asleep. Or my brain shut off, which was a lot like sleep.
I remember having the momentary thought that I probably wouldn’t wake up. I pictured the ash covering the truck until every crack was full and the air was used up. I fell asleep picturing our parents crying one day as they got word from the Forestry Service or someone like that, saying that a pick-up with the remains of their two youngest was found buried under a mountain of ash. I look back now and am a little surprised that I fell asleep under those conditions, but at the time there just wasn’t anything else to do.
“Josh,” a voice whispered in my ear. I hoped it was my mother, waking me up in my own bed, the events of the day before just a dream.
“Josh,” repeated Claire, a little more loudly. “I can see.”
“Hmm?” I asked, trying to wake up and realizing just how uncomfortable sleeping upright in a pick-up truck can be. I finally got my eyes to open and realized Claire was right: we could see, if dimly.
The wind was still blowing a hefty breeze, but the cloud of ash had dispersed enough that we could actually see a little of what was outside. It was a weird light, though, and it took me a few more moments before I realized that what I could see was because the moon had broken through a gap in the clouds—whether clouds of water vapor or of ash I couldn’t tell at that moment in time.
As my brain came into focus with my eyes, I realized that part of why we could see—even by the light of a not-full moon—was because the moonlight was reflecting off the light-gray coat of ash that covered everything. It wasn’t quite like moonlight on snow, but it was a little brighter than if it had just been shining on the dirt. “Wonder what time it is?” I mumbled.
“Middle of the night, looks like,” Claire responded. “We must have slept several hours.”
“I’m just glad to wake up,” I told her. She cast me a strange look, but didn’t ask me to explain.
“Think we can drive home now?”
“Maybe. I can see the road, anyway. Wonder if we ought to check and see if everyone made it to safety, though?”
Claire looked like she was about to say something in response to that, then pursed her lips and nodded, saying, “You’re right.” She pulled a flashlight out of the glove box and checked to make sure it worked. She started to reach for the door, then gave me an ironic smile as she gestured with the flashlight, “Why didn’t we remember this earlier?”
“Just geniuses, I guess,” I replied with a shrug.
The wind was blowing, yet not really high like it had been when I had gone after the bottled water. Still, as soon as we were outside and next to each other, Claire took my hand as she swept the area with the flashlight in her other hand. If memory served, the last time she had held my hand for anything other than a family prayer was when we were both pre-school age and Mom had made us hold hands while we crossed the street. It was a strange sensation and not particularly comforting to me, but maybe it was to her. Just as I thought that, she gave my hand a reassuring squeeze, then let go.
The ash beneath our feet stirred up with each step, making us cough even though the makeshift bandanas were still in place, and then making us go slower so as not to stir so much up. It wasn’t deep—perhaps no more than a half-inch to an inch in most places—but it was pervasive. The wind kept ash in the air, but another glance up at the moon showed me that we were in a sort of trough where “new ash” (like new snow) didn’t seem to be falling. The ash in the air seemed to have just been stirred up from the ground or been blown off the ridge that hung above us to the west. To the north and south, on either side of the gash in the sky, it looked like the ash still roiled.
We walked nervously over to where the flashlight showed us a lump under the ash. Claire held back a step but curiosity forced me to close the distance and kneel down, even though the shape beneath the ash was pretty clear. I reached out gingerly and brushed the ash away, hoping I would startle whoever it was awake.
The body was cold beneath the ash.
“Can you tell who it is?” Claire asked, coming a half-step closer.
“Annie Meyers,” I replied, then wishing I had a way to cover her face back up with a blanket, or the ash. A muffled sob escaped Claire’s lips.
“If we had … “ Claire mumbled.
“Yeah. If we had known, and if we could have found her, and if we could have brought her into the truck—“
“You don’t care that she’s—she’s dead?”
“Of course I care. And I will spend the rest of my life telling myself I should have seen her and picked her up but I’ll also spend my life knowing there’s nothing I can do to change the past.”
“Why are you so cold?”
I stood up and responded angrily, “Cold? Claire, look around you. There are at least three other lumps in the ash about the same size as this one was. I’m not cold, I’m … I’m scared to death!” I was a little surprised at my ability to say it out loud, but once having said it, I knew it was true.
She came over and, putting an arm around me, offered, “Maybe someone else made it to a vehicle.” I nodded and we began to gently step towards the nearest vehicle, an old van owned by Mister Glass.
I pounded on the side of the van and was both startled and relieved to hear a response. The side door of the van slid open and Mister Glass stuck his ash-covered and bespectacled face out into the wind. “Josh? And Claire. How have you survived this long?”
“We were in our truck,” I replied. Claire shined the light into van as I asked, “Did anyone else make it through with you?”
“There are five of us,” Mister Glass replied, stepping outside and looking up in apparent surprise at the moon. “I think the others are asleep, but I haven’t slept a wink. Anyone else make it?”
“We don’t know, yet. We know that, um, Mrs. Meyers didn’t.”
Mister Glass swore lowly, then said, “I got a couple lights. Let’s see if we can find anyone else.”
Howard Glass was a semi-retired electrician from Kansas who had come to the mountains with his wife a decade before. She had died of cancer a couple years after they arrived. He always talked about going back to Kansas, but he also talked about how much he loved the mountains. When he lost his house to one of the fires, we all figured that would be his signal to head back to the flatlands. Instead, he had lived in a trailer while rebuilding and spent many weekends helping with one of the valley’s replanting projects. He still spoke fondly of Kansas, but never mentioned going back there anymore.
Mister Glass picked up one flashlight from the floor of the van, gave his other to Aunt Jenny, and then we began to walk to the other vehicles that had been parked along the road. We spread out a little, but stayed within sight of each other’s lights. Personally, I kept a hand on Claire’s shoulder, telling myself it was for her comfort and safety but knowing it was mostly for my own peace of mind.
The other lumps were just that: lumps, which was an extreme relief. It seemed that everyone from our work party except Annie Meyers had made it into a vehicle. While some people were still having trouble breathing, they were all still alive. As word went around, people began to point fingers in regards to Annie Meyers. Why hadn’t anyone helped her to a car? Why hadn’t anyone looked for her?
“Wait,” Claire interrupted. “How did Annie get here?” Several people grumbled in reply, but Claire stood firm and asked, “All of the rest of us scrambled for the vehicle we came in, right? Who did Annie ride with to get here?”
At varying speeds, we all came to the idea that Claire’s question was a good one. We didn’t immediately have an answer until someone declared, “The Roxons!” As several people, me included, said something interrogative as to what the speaker meant, he (Freddy Wilson) said, “The Roxons were working with us earlier today. Were they still here when the storm hit or had they already left?”
Everyone spoke but no one could remember when the Roxon brothers left, whether Annie might have come with them, or whether she was friendly enough to have ridden with them in the first place. A couple people said they thought they had heard a car moving along the dirt road in the early moments of the storm, but they weren’t for certain and other people were sure they hadn’t heard a vehicle. Someone said, loudly, that it would be just like the Roxon brothers to run off and leave poor Annie to die as they took care of their own skin. Others argued that the Roxons wouldn’t have done that. I stayed silent, remembering how my own moment of selfish panic had only been thwarted by the happy accident of my sister beating me to the truck. I said a prayer of thanks in my mind that I had found her, for if I hadn’t, she might have suffered Annie Meyers’ fate.
Someone said something about how it must be one whale of a forest fire, to be interrupted by Danica Frowley, who said in a tone that brooked no argument, “This is volcanic” as she rubbed (apparently) ash between her fingers.
Someone objected, “We don’t have volcanoes around here!”
Danica happened to be looking at me as she said, “I didn’t say it was around here. It could have come from a hundred miles away, or a thousand. But no forest fire is going to produce this amount of ash—look at the places we’ve been working these last couple years. Somewhere, maybe Capulin down in New Mexico or Krakatoa in Hawaii or one of the Alaskan volcanoes or—somewhere, a volcano blew.”
“This came from the west,” Mister Glass pointed out. “Does that mean it was Alaska?”
“There are volcanoes all along the Pacific rim,” Danica told him. Danica Frowley was a banker from nearby Fairplay who loved to hike in the woods. In her mid-thirties and fairly attractive with her flawless dark skin and lithe frame, I had heard more than one person wonder why she had never married. I had gotten to know her a little on these weekend work parties, but not well enough to have any sort of answer for that question. I had a guess that she was married to her work, but that might have just been nothing more than a guess. “And just because we saw the ash coming from the west doesn’t mean the volcano is in that direction. Did you see how high that wall of ash was? I think it came from the west, too, but at that altitude, the winds can blow differently than—“ She shook her head and said, “That’s neither here nor there. I can’t tell you where the volcano is, but I can tell you this much ash has to be volcanic.”
Since she seemed to know what she was talking about, and as none of us had any better ideas (and agreed with her assessment that this level of ash was beyond any of the fires we had seen in past years), we all turned to her as our authority. “How bad?” Claire asked, receiving nods of agreement from many of us.
Danica thought a moment, then replied, “Depends on where this happened. If we’re right and this came from the west—probably from the Pacific Rim—if it can blow up there and hit us with ash here … then I would think we’ve got to be talking a death toll in the millions.” As we all mouthed the words—twenty-plus of us standing around her—Danica continued, “Seattle, San Francisco, if they were closer to the blast they might be leveled now. And if this set off the San Andreas … “
Aunt Jenny looked at her watch and said, “We felt that first quake at about five-fifty, our time. It was probably, what? Better part of an hour before the wall of ash hit. Then, it was almost five hours before the ash let up enough for us to get out of the vehicles. Does that tell us anything?”
Danica answered, “I have a cousin who’s a geologist. It might mean something to him. I have no idea how far or fast a wall of ash like that could travel. And if there’s a weak spot in the earth’s crust, that might not be the only volcano—others could open up or it might just be the one. Either way, I don’t think this is a good thing.”
“Well,” I said, speaking for the first time in a while and finding the nerve to do so I knew not where, “It seems to me that the thing for us to do now is try to get back to town or to our homes. See if there’s power there and if anyone’s hurt.”
Several people agreed, but someone asked, “What about Annie? Do we just leave her here?”
“Somebody help me get her into the back of my truck. I can take her at least as far as Como.”
“And then what?” Claire objected. “Put her in the barn until someone claims her?”
“It’s either that or leave her out here,” I replied. Did I mention that, as brother and sister, we were often very skilled at pushing each other’s buttons? In the past, we had just been better at keeping it off public display. Of course, we had never had one of these discussions over a dead body before, either.
Claire, in an overly-logical voice I had come to hate over the years, said, “We can either take her into town and bury her or fire up the front end loader over there and bury her now. Either way, the salient point is that she’s dead.” That last word was said with pointed irony that deserves its own special typeface.
“We’ll take her in the truck,” I pronounced somewhat imperiously. “She was Catholic. We can take her to the Catholic Church in Como. Probably people gathering there right now, trying to figure out what to do next.”
Claire clearly wanted to object, but she didn’t interfere when a couple ladies wrapped Annie Meyers in an old blanket and then myself and Freddy loaded her into the back of the pick-up truck. It suddenly registered on me that I was going to be driving around with a dead body in the back of the truck and I wasn’t crazy about the idea but I wasn’t going to tell my sister that. What I said to her was, “Come on. Sooner we can get to the church, the sooner we can get her out of the truck.”
Claire said nothing in response, but got into the cab and slammed the door.
I was relieved when the engine fired up, though I had no reason to think it wouldn’t. I turned on the headlights, but that actually reduced the visibility due to the ash still in the air. I turned off the headlights and switched on the fog lamps and that helped some. I looked in my rearview and saw several other vehicles turning on their lights. I was glad I had parked with the truck pointing down canyon as I watched people behind me do three point turns on the narrow dirt road.
“Why aren’t we moving?” Claire asked, none too happily.
“Just making sure everyone can get their wheels going,” I replied as I slipped our truck into drive.
As we moved out slowly, Claire surprised me by saying, “I’m sorry I argued back there, Josh. I just—I just—I don’t know. I just get a feeling way down in my stomach that Annie’s not the only one who died here this evening and, well, maybe if I can deny she did, maybe no one else did, either.”
“Yeah. I understand.” I looked over at my sister in the glow of the dash-lights before us and headlights behind us and asked, “You think Miss Frowley’s right? Millions dead?”
“Dear God, I hope not,” my sister replied quietly.
At the mouth of the valley, where it opened out onto the larger South Park Valley near the site of what had been the town of Peabody back in the gold rush days, there was less ash. As if the valley we had been in were a large pipe that had blown the ash away from its entrance. But then, as we passed onto the grounds where once had stood the other mining town of Hamilton, the ash started getting thicker. By the edge of Como—itself once a prominent mining town but by this time a burg with an official population of less than fifty people—the ash was six inches deep and, like snow, drifted higher in some places. I was only going about five miles an hour—at the beginning due to visibility but then because the traction was so miserable. I had driven that old truck in snow storms and on ice, but driving on that ash was the least in control I had ever felt in a vehicle. Only a mile down the road and I could already feel the ache in my shoulders from the tense way in which I gripped the wheel.
And then someone started honking their horn and flashing their lights behind us. I came to a stop, panicking for a moment as it seemed like we were just going to keep sliding indefinitely, and then got out. Mister Glass had been right behind me in that old conversion van of his and he was getting out as well. We had started out from the Selkirk with six vehicles in our caravan and now there were only five. “What happened to Miss Frowley and her bunch?” I asked, as if Mister Glass could somehow know more than I did under the circumstance. Rather than snap back pithily, he just shrugged and we started working our way down the line.
At the last car, driven by Freddy, we were told, “I just looked up and Miss Frowley wasn’t behind me. I didn’t see her go off the side or anything.” Freddy was getting out of the car as he said this and began walking back down along the road.
Mister Glass had had the presence of mind to grab one of his flashlights and began to sweep the road and the ditches to either side. We had only gone a couple hundred yards when we found Miss Frowley and the three people with her gathered around her car, the hood up. As we came up closer she said, “I tried honking, but I wasn’t sure if anyone had heard me.”
“What happened?” Freddy asked her.
“Just died on me. I can’t get it started back up.”
Freddy motioned for her to get into the car, then said, “Try again.”
The car made a chugging noise, but wouldn’t engage. Freddy opened up the air intake, took out the filter, and looked at it in the light of Glass’s flashlight. “Full of ash,” Freddy commented, banging the filter against the engine block. Putting it back in place, he motioned for Danica to start the car again. She did, and it came on, but still sounded sluggish.
“This is going to be a problem,” Freddy commented sardonically, to be punctuated by the sound of one of the cars ahead of us honking wildly. As we three set out at a run, Miss Frowley’s passengers jumped in her car and followed us.
The third car in the caravan had been driven by Wlllard Guthrie, who was now standing beside his car and peering under the hood. “Just died. Acts like it’s not getting gas.”
“It’s not getting air,” Freddy told him, and us. “And who knows? The gas line may be clogging up, too.” He looked around and said, “There’s a good chance none of us are going to make it very far this night.”
“Well, let’s go while we can,” Mister Glass said, then we could hear his van dying from where we were. At that moment, Danica pulled up even with the convoy only to have her car die again.
Noiné’s Child – Martyr’s Fire – Book One
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(Published Aug 13, 2022)
5225 A.D.
…
It has been three millennia since the last of the great wars.
Two thousand years since mankind emerged from the little pockets they had fled to, trying to avoid the poisons.
Ancient tribes, politics and allegiances are all forgotten. Science? Religion? Philosophy? Engineering? Gone. Forgotten. Without a trace.
…
In the aftermath of the murder of her family, Noiné emerges from the ashes of her home, clinging to an ancient and mostly-forgotten faith and determined to make things better for herself, the child she hopes to have, and the sister who may yet live.
Sample Reading
Noiné was seventeen when the raiders came.
She had been out in the fields, in a little depression that made her invisible from the house. On such days it was hot—not just warm, but hot—yet she still liked to go there when her chores were done for it was the closest thing to solitude she could find in her life. No parents or grandparents and, especially, no siblings. Just far enough away that she could barely hear the normal goings-on of the farm, but close enough that she could hear should someone call out.
She liked a little time alone now and then. She wasn’t quite so enamored of solitude as her nearest sister, but she did like to take a few moments now and then to just revel in silence. A person from the city might have said she lived always in silence, but Noiné didn’t think so. There were always the noises of a farm: the clink of metal, the stomp of hooved feet, the turning of the windmill. Add in the noises of her youngest siblings, who never stopped talking! and it became overwhelming at times. She would move off to where she could hear if called, but have a little peace. Sometimes she prayed, sometimes she sang little ditties and hymns to herself, and sometimes she just sat and barely thought about anything.
Therefore she heard the scream.
Noiné popped her head up cautiously, thinking her mother had perhaps seen a mountain lion and not wanting to draw attention to herself from the cat as she was so exposed. What Noiné saw was a handful of men on horseback, attacking the farm. One of them was riding away with Noiné’s mother across the saddlebow in front of him. She thought she saw her father—or maybe her father’s father—lying facedown in the yard. She saw her grandfather—her mother’s father—try to charge the raider carrying off her mother and receive the lead from some sort of percussion weapon full in the chest for his troubles. He slumped to the ground and moved no more as Noiné watched.
Noiné was too scared to make a sound. She lay facedown on the prairie grass, feeling its warmth against her skin, and wept as silently as she could. When she could get her hearing back, she lay still, listening for sounds from the farm. There were still hoofbeats and footfalls, though no more screams. And then she heard the crackle of flames and each pop was like seeing her grandfather shot again. Her heart heaved in her chest and she was afraid she would make a sound that might be heard. It seemed to her as if her heartbeats could be heard!
Would that be so bad? she asked herself. Wouldn’t I rather die with my family than survive alone? A voice inside her head told her she was a young woman, thought pretty by some, and the men who would carry off her mother would do the same to her and worse. She clutched at handfuls of the prairie grass as she thought of her mother. She prayed her mother could escape.
Or die quickly.
Her wits returned in conjunction with the setting of the sun. She left her little depression and made her way to a nearby draw, hunched down and, hopefully, unseen. Once in the draw, she made her way towards town. It was all of six miles and likely seven, but she was sure she could make it—even if it turned dark before she could get there.
The dress she wore was a light brown, simple thing, which would help her blend in with the surroundings as the sun sat. Her long brown hair she had twisted into a single braid down the center of her back, as was the custom for a woman of her age among her people. She fingered it lightly as she set out, the feel bringing her both comfort and sadness for her mother had braided it for her. For the last time? she wondered.
She had only gone a few steps when she turned back. She crept back to where she had been hiding and peeked over the roll in the fields. There was no movement around her house, and her house itself was just a smoldering ruin. In the fading light she could see the lump in the dirt where her grandfather had fallen. She saw another, similar lump near the ruins of the barn and had to cover her mouth to keep herself from making an anguished sound aloud. She felt the sound in her throat and chest, though.
Noiné topped the small roll and made her way to the remains of the house. When she was close, she whispered the names of her siblings but heard nothing in response. Where were they? In the house? Had they been taken by the bandits to be sold as slaves or something even worse? She stepped over toward the barn and saw that the lump was her grandmother, and near the barn her other grandfather. She wanted to fall down into the dirt and lay there with them until she died, but her legs continued to walk as if by their own volition.
She found no sign of her father. She guessed him to be wherever the children were, for he would have protected them to his last breath. How would he have done so? He was not a fighting man. Strong, resolute, and a harder worker than any two other men, he would have fought back with his hands if he could. He might have retreated to the corn crib, which was close to the house but had solidly built walls. She had a vision of him trapped in the house with the little ones and suddenly it became clear: if that were how he died, while the house burned and crashed around him, he would have been holding her siblings close and saying prayers over them and telling them the stories of their family’s faith that he knew so well.
She made herself stop and say one of the prayers he had taught her and her siblings. It gave her a little strength, and then she began to walk. Five miles to town? she asked herself. More like seven, she thought. And she had never made the journey in the dark—she had made it rarely enough in the light. But she was convinced she could find the town. Would she find help? Her family had never been shunned in town, but neither had they been regulars, coming in only twice a year: once to buy seed and once to bring in the harvest. Even doctoring, they did themselves.
They were not without friends, though. There was the family named Trook to the east, but that was in the wrong direction. And what if the raiders had hit them, too, for the one who rode off with Noiné’s mother was heading that direction.
There were other farming families they were either friendly or acquainted with, but were mostly in the wrong direction as well. The ones that weren’t, were off the path if she were to make straight for town. Oh well, she thought, maybe I’ll at least see one of them if I somehow get off the track.
An hour later, she was sure she was still on the right track but was wishing she had brought some water. She thought she recognized some of the landmarks even in the wan light of a fading moon, and thought old lady Deen’s farm might be nearby—and she had a good well, one of the best around—but Noiné was afraid that if she got off the track she might not find it again. And she had seen no lights on the horizon to indicate a campfire or even a lantern, so the path seemed her best bet.
She had cried much that first hour, but then it slowly faded and she just became an automaton, putting one foot in front of the other, thinking of nothing except staying on the path—which she imagined looked rather silvery in the moonlight. At least, she prayed what she was seeing was the path. She wasn’t sure what anyone she came to could do, but she just kept telling herself she had to make it. When her mind began to get numb with the exhaustion and darkness, she kept herself alert by reciting the prayers her parents had taught her. She even smiled as she realized that she was subconsciously saying the prayers to the cadence of her footsteps and, if she wanted to increase or decrease the speed of one she had but to increase or decrease the speed of the other.
She did. Her shoes—which hadn’t been much to start with—were torn and her feet were bleeding when she finally came to the outskirts of the little village the locals called Forest (though the forest it was named after was little more than a few old, gnarled, wind-blasted stumps anymore). She had fallen once—she wasn’t sure why—making her clothes dirty and the palms of her hands wet with blood and sweat. She had a tear near the knee of her skirt from the fall but she told herself to be thankful for that because it let a little cool air in on what was a surprisingly warm night.
She had run almost mindlessly at first, then settled to a walk when her lungs and side commanded her to, not knowing what sort of help she might find in town for her family only had the minimum amount of contact with the people there. Noiné knew why that was, but also knew to not talk about it, even within her family. Still, she hoped there would be someone there who would be willing to help, for weren’t the raiders a problem to all?
As she approached the town, she wasn’t sure where to go, but then she saw a slew of horses tied up before one building and decided with what was left of her mind to go there. Some men were standing around on the porch before the building—which she thought might be a public house of some sort—and one of them made a half-hearted effort to stop her as she burst through the crowd and into the building.
Inside, before her eyes even adjusted, she called out, “I need help! The raiders have attacked my family.”
Someone nearby put a hand on her arm and said something like, “You need to get out—”
But then a voice spoke from the middle of the room and all other sound disappeared. “What is the problem, young lady?” a voice of command asked. She looked and as her eyes adjusted to the dim light and the dark paneling inside, she saw a tall man standing up and coming toward her. As he stepped into the light she saw that he was a man of regal bearing, taller than most and with a strong face. He reached out to her with large hands, which she took nervously and found them calloused.
She said, the words flowing quickly, “I live just northeast of town, about seven miles. Raiders attacked our farm. I saw one of them carrying off my mother. I saw my grandfathers laying on the ground, dead. I—I ran.”
The man came closer, then commanded someone to his left, “Get this young woman a drink, and food if she can take it.” He helped her to a chair and asked her in kind tones, “Now tell me exactly what you saw and how we may get to your place.”
Noiné took a sip of the proffered drink, then related all she had seen—little as it was—and directions on how to get to her family’s farm. The man listened intently, then turned to another man who stood nearby, a man with the darkest skin Noiné had ever seen, and said, “Yarfan, I want the men mounted up and ready to ride now.”
“Understood, my lord,” Yarfan, the dark and very thin man who nevertheless looked to be made of long muscles, said. He turned smartly on his heels and followed his men, who were already heading outside.
The man who was clearly the leader took one of Noiné’s hands in his own and said, “Rest assured: we will find who did this.”
“May I—may I ask who you are?” she managed to reply in timid voice.
He smiled, a very nice and warm smile, and told her, “I’m the king” with a good-natured chuckle. Then, standing to his full height, he turned to a stout woman nearby who was apparently the keeper of the inn and said, “Take good care of this young lady. Provide for her needs. I will be back and will settle up for her expenses as well as our own.”
“Yes, my lord,” the innkeeper said, nodding obsequiously.
Noah
What if an inventor, say an Edison or a Leonardo—instead of sixty—had eight hundred years to invent? What if the antediluvian world were not made up of hunter-gatherers and the beginnings of an agrarian society, but of spacefarers and scientists?
And what if it were into a world like that that God spoke to tell one of the preeminent scientists of the day to build an ark of wood?
An imaginative take on what Noah’s life might have been like before God called him to build the ark. A fictional work by Samuel Ben White.
Available in Kindle and in paperback.
“As it was in the days of Noah … ”
The world has become a dark, sinful place. The crops are dying. The morning dews that used to water everything are drying up. There is nowhere safe, nowhere secure, and no one wants to listen to the one man who tries to tell them that it doesn’t have to be this way.
At five hundred years old, Noah is told by God to build an ark, to save of the human race.
Noah, who has always been rather afraid of boats, is now building a huge vessel a hundred miles from the coast. How did he get here? Why did God choose him, out of all the people alive, on the planet and off?
As he builds the ark, Noah looks back on the five centuries he has lived—on the places he has been, the women he has loved, and the God he has served. With a wife beside him and three growing sons, he is building a boat more than four hundred feet long in anticipation of a flood in a land that has never known rain.
Interstellar travel, giant beasts of the earth … this is not the story of Noah you have ever heard, or even imagined!
A Thousand Miles Away
Edward Garrett finds himself washed up on the shore of a foreign land, shipwrecked! As he tries to find his way home, he becomes involved with The People, a friendly—but reserved—people who live along the coast and are being harassed by brigands from the mountains known as the Brazee.
Thinking that Marcus has brought him here for just this reason, Edward agrees to lead a posse into the mountains to try and retrieve four teenage girls who were captured by the Brazee. Edward’s greatest desire is to leave, to go find his beloved Marianne and let her know he didn’t die in the great battle by the river. In the process of freeing the girls, however, he is shot and lands in a Brazee prison. There, he is forced into gladiatorial games where the only way to freedom … is death. A futuristic fantasy in the tradition of Louis L’Amour.
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And don’t forget the two prequels to this novel: “All the Time in Our World” and “Some of the Time“!
Reading Sample
Running up the stairs of the tallest parapet of the grotesque castle that overlooked the river we in my day called the Mississippi, I was bleeding from a few minor cuts and my skin was bruised in many places, but I had never felt more alive. Nor had I felt more joyful.
Ahead of me ran Marcus, carrying his sword and with a light step as one who is running for pleasurable exercise. One might even say he carried the sword casually, though Marcus did nothing casually. All he did was carefully planned and meticulously executed. If Marcus had stopped to admire the sunset, anyone watching would have just assumed that was what he had always intended to do at that moment, for those who knew him knew that none of his steps, moves or halts were in waste.
Holding my own sword in my right hand, it’s blade still flecked with black blood for I had had no opportunity to clean it, my mind went back briefly to how we had come to be there. I say briefly for it was just a matter of steps, but the mind works in overdrive when in battle and a million thoughts may rush through a mind in their completeness in less time than it has taken me now to write this sentence.
We had crossed the great plains that I had once known as the land of Oklahoma with relative ease, though it hadn’t seemed so at the time. The logistics of moving such a great force of such disparate abilities and technologies had been one of the problems. The skirmishes we had fought against advance scouts of the Enemy had been another difficulty, though as we looked back later those battles had been like swatting mosquitoes.
As we had crossed into what had been known in my time as Arkansas and Missouri it seemed as if every valley and each forest held a new host of enemies lying in wait to ambush us. We had excellent scouts of our own, but it soon became obvious that it was not a position that promised a long lifespan. Though, as we went further, experience taught our scouts much and those who made it to the river with us were woodsmen indeed.
We came to the river fully six months after setting out on this excursion. We had been joined by additional members of the Gund Nation, as well as more Overstreets (who proved to be the best scouts for they could move through the forest more quietly than the wind itself) and even a large contingent of warriors from a people known as the T’rah’mra, who lived far to the southwest of Green River, along the sea coast. Somehow Marcus had gotten word to them and though they had set out before us it was some time before they could catch up to us. They were a people who were mighty in the skills of boat building and their service when we got to the river was immeasurable.
Still six days from the river, we had been met by a most surprising delegation. Eight men and five women—all taller than my six foot and appearing to me made of whipcord and muscle dressed in clothing that looked like something the Polynesians of my day might have enjoyed—arrived at our camp, also saying they had been summoned by Marcus. How they had received said summons none were ever clear, but Marcus greeted them warmly and assured us he had called for them. They were a people who called themselves a name which meant “Land of Wet Ground” but they were known in rumor and legend to the Gund as the Treemors.
They were somewhat darker of skin than I, but not so dark as the Cherokee or the T’rah’mra and, as I say, they were all tall. Some of them approached seven foot, though most were around six and a half. I was to find out later that they came from the deep woods that I once knew as Georgia and Northern Florida. Even with their bright clothing, they could disappear into a forest almost as well and quickly as an Overstreet.
The delegation of thirteen—a number of some significance in their reckoning—brought us the welcome news that they had a force of some hundred thousands amassed on the far side of the river, not twenty miles from the Enemy’s castle. They were the most advanced of the surface-dwelling people and maintained a primitive radio communication among their people. It was subject to disruption and had a limited range, but they assured me that they could and would work in concert with us when the time came to attack.
That time was soon. We knew the Enemy was aware of our presence and we were also certain he knew why we were coming, for he was not a being who welcomed casual visitors. While we hoped that we could maintain some element of surprise as to the “how-to’s” and “where-fore’s” of our attack, we knew that our only real hope lie in the justness of our cause. More than that, of course, was that Marcus was on our side and he had never been defeated—nor would he ever be we were sure.
I split our forces into three main divisions, though two of the divisions were—numerically—vastly superior. The smaller division—which was itself bifurcated—was our demolitions team. Half of them were to work their way to the western shore of the river and, on signal, begin to bombard the city with bombs my good friend Lomar would have relished to handle. The other half, meanwhile, had taken themselves up river approximately two hundred miles, to an ancient dam on the river that created what Marcus said was the largest inland, manmade, lake in the history of the world, larger even than the Lochs he, Marianne, Daniel and I had marveled at many years ago on our first journey. Upon reaching the dam, they would set charges and—from a safe distance—blow them and release the water of the lake.
Book of Tales – The Last Valley – Book 3
Jerry was just a college kid trying to catch one more weekend of fun before senior year when the ash hit. His college, his home town, his family—all wiped out in the blink of an eye. With the nation teetering on the edge of ruin, he joins the military to help with the search and rescue but finds that the powers that be want to use this natural disaster as cover for an unnatural war. The last war. Winner take all that’s left.
In the satellite photos, though, he sees evidence that the lands where he grew up might still have some green grass. With no idea whether anyone still lives there, Jerry dreams of someday returning to those pastures, even if it means living there all alone.
Meanwhile, Josh, Adaline, Claire and the rest of the denizens of the last valley have built a thriving community—and even have contact with another community across the mountains. But a disease is sweeping through Overstreet, one that could wipe them all out. Twenty years before, the cure would have been easy to affect, but now, their isolation may be their doom.
They can only pray for a miracle.
Make you read how this all started in “Ashes to Ashes” and “Crazy on the Mountain“!
Order today for Kindle or paperback!
…
Sample reading
The man on the other side of Jerry from Darren—a stout, middle-aged man in a white plantation hat, shorts too short for his build and a Hawaiian shirt unbuttoned so as to display his hairy chest and ample gut—suddenly said, “Bartender. That TV got any sound?”
The bartender looked like he was about to say something negative or sarcastic in reply, but his attention went to the TV, and then he was grabbing for the remote and fumbling with it as if it were hot before he got control of it. As he turned up the sound, everyone sitting at the bar turned their attention to see—not the usual sports anchors but one of the nightly anchors from the parent network that owned the sports channel. He was dressed in a suit and tie, but he looked uncomfortable and his skin tone was different (owing to not having the time to be made up) as he said, “To repeat, we have reports from people in Wyoming and Idaho that an enormous plume of ash and smoke has been seen spewing from the ground in Yellowstone National Park. According to these reports, the cloud was spotted by people more than a hundred miles outside the park and is estimated to be rising to a height of—“ He touched his ear in that way anchors do when getting important updates, then swallowed hard as he looked off-camera and asked, “How reliable is—“
The TV went to that picture channels use when having technical difficulties, then suddenly there appeared a harried-looking woman, standing at the podium of the White House. She took a deep breath, then said, “We apologize for breaking in on your expected programming, but we must insist that everyone in the western United States get inside the nearest building. Shut the doors and windows and, if you have breathing masks, please apply them.”
As the TV began to play a loop of what the woman had just said, several people were saying things like, “It’s even saying that on my phone!”
“And my watch!”
“It’s all that’s on the radio.”
Several swear words were heard as people began to ask questions.
“What happened?”
“A nuke?”
“That first guy mentioned Wyoming. Haven’t they always said there was a giant volcano under Yellowstone?”
“They’ve been saying that for two hundred years,” someone argued in response to that last question.
Suddenly, the alarms were sounding, telling everyone to get off the beach. Lifeguards were using bullhorns to tell specific people to get out of the water, and shore patrol boats were appearing as if out of nowhere and making sure everyone could make it to the sand safely. The warning sirens of the town of Galveston could be heard in the distance.
Darren wasn’t too steady (or cognizant of the danger), so Jerry helped him get to their motel, a ratty little place near the beach which suddenly looked better than it had all week as the traffic jam of people exiting in cars began to pile up. Ineffectual honking was added to the general din of the warning sirens—now aided by police and fire sirens. People could be heard shouting, and screaming, as they tried to obey the order to get off the beach. Voices shouted at the car in front of them, as if the person driving that car were just sitting still to be obstinate and not backed up behind a row of stopped cars, all waiting for a break in the traffic. The repeated warning from the White House could be heard coming from a thousand phones and car radios.
In the motel room, Jerry turned on the TV, to see the same warning being repeated on every channel. He stumbled across one network on which a person at a news desk was saying, “We have an unconfirmed report that the famed Yellowstone volcano has erupt—“ before the feed went down, to be replaced by the government loop. Darren’s brain had almost caught up to the moment, then, and he asked Jerry, “What’s goin’ on, bro?”
It momentarily crossed Jerry’s mind to make some comment about the stupidity of Darren’s recent attempts to talk like a surfer—or like he imagined surfers talked, for none of the actual ones did—but he replied, “Not sure. Sounds like a volcano, though.”
“In Houston?” Darren asked, squinting at the TV as if doing so would improve his perception.
“In Yellowstone,” Jerry replied shortly, staring at the TV himself, trying to will it to give more details.
Darren was about to make an attempt at humor along the lines of hoping Yogi Bear was OK, when the President of the United States appeared, standing at the podium that the spokeswoman had been standing at for the looped message. He had that calm, measured look he always carried, but Jerry noticed he appeared to be just a little short of breath. Like he had hastily dressed and run to this room from another part of the White House. He eschewed his famous winning smile to look reserved, paternal and constipated as he said, “My fellow Americans. Exactly seventy-eight minutes ago, there was an eruption of gas and ash from what we have known for years as the Yellowstone Dome. Eighteen minutes after that,” he paused and looked down, appearing to his constituency as a man who was grasping for his sanity in the face of bad news. After a moment, he looked back at the camera and said, “Eighteen minutes after that, the largest eruption in the recorded history of mankind began. Many of you have felt the tremors and even those of us who didn’t will, the experts tell me, soon be seeing a cloud of ash and dust from the arctic circle to the Yucatan peninsula and, perhaps, beyond. I must ask you to stay off all land-lines and hold all other forms of communication to a minimum as we dedicate all the resources of this great nation to our first responders. Stay off the roads and highways. Listen to your local authorities.”
He took another deep breath, stared downward at the podium for a moment that seemed excruciatingly long but was probably only a couple seconds, then looked back up at the camera and said, “’Choose this day whom you will serve. As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.’ If you are a praying person, or even if you have never prayed in your life, Marion and I ask you to join us in supplication before the God of the Universe.”
And then most of the stations went blank and the few that remained on the air began to loop the president’s announcement. Jerry was sitting there numbly as Darren commented, “Think we can get back to college before classes start?”
“What?” Jerry had an idea that any reply was going to be wasted, but he told Darren, “I think college is over, Darren. I think everything may be over.”
“No kidding? You mean we, like, graduated?”
Jerry thought of several sarcastic replies, but finally just said, “Yeah. Just like that.”
Darren swore, but it wasn’t clear what at or to what purpose. It might have even been a word of triumph, based on the look on his face.
Jerry tried to call his parents, but no lines were available even though his phone said he was getting plenty of signal. He tried and tried again, with no success. Even tried going outside, as if that might help.
What he saw outside was the continued chaos of people trying to leave the beach, of cars jammed to a halt on the roadways, and many people just standing and watching in numb fear as an ash cloud miles high came near. It was visible first as a dark line on the horizon, but after the President’s announcement, several people had been watching for it and more than one voice had called out, “There it is!”
Then, word had spread through the crowd and even those in cars—who had so recently been honking or shouting—got out and stood, looking to the northwest as the dark line grew closer and closer. At first, it just looked like a rapidly approaching storm, but then it became clear that it was darker than most storms, and far taller, reaching hundreds or even thousands of feet into the air as it approach like a wall. Swear words were heard, as well as prayers. Some people fell on their faces, crying out prayers of repentance while others screamed or just stood numbly. Jerry even saw one woman walk to the beach, taking off her clothes as she went, and then walk calmly into the water until it was over her head. He ran close to try and find her—even enlisted a lifeguard who was still nearby and had seen the woman as well—but they never found any sign of her.
Email the author (garisonfitch@gmail.com) to find out about purchasing an autographed copy or getting the trilogy in paperback at a discount.
Be sure and read how this story started in “Ashes to Ashes” and concludes in “Book of Tales“!
Sample passage
I happened to ask, “Deanna, how long have you lived in Vail?”
“What? Oh, you might say I’ve lived there all my life.” Adaline and I looked at each other in surprise, for this was not said with the hick voice Deanna had mostly been using of late. It also made us wonder about our earlier thought that she was from Denver. She continued, in a somewhat conspiratorial tone, “My great-grandfather was the first of the family to come to Vail. The story that he told his family was that he had been a banker in Birmingham, Alabama,” the names of the city and state were said with a deep, southern accent. “But the bank had gone bust—through no fault of his own, of course, so he had headed west to seek his fortune. He said he worked several jobs in towns both big and small before landing in Vail, broke and starving, worried about his wife and kids back home for it had been some time since he had been able to send them money.
“But it was ski season and he took a job in a kitchen at one of the hotels. He worked hard and sent money back to his family and, by the end of the ski season, had worked his way up to waiter. Over the summer months, he proved himself invaluable and was made assistant manager of the restaurant, and then manager. At that point, he sent for his wife and kids and was ever so happy to see them. He got his kids—who were teenagers by then—jobs in Vail and they saved their money and, would you believe it, one day they bought the restaurant! Using all of his banking and monetary skills, he was eventually able to buy the building the restaurant was in, and his ‘empire’ was begun!”
Deanna chuckled, then said, still in the refined voice of someone who had grown up on the tonier side of life, “And thus began the Coventry empire of Vail. Pembleton is my married name, of course. I grew up attending the best schools, a member of all Vail’s best clubs, and groomed for a career in hoteliery. Yes, I know that’s not really a word, but my father always said it should be. But, I went off to college and fell in love and got married and, well, the last thing I wanted to do was to come back to Vail for anything other than a visit. Best laid plans of mice and men, right? My father had a stroke when I was just about to turn thirty, so my husband and I came back to watch over the business while he recovered. What was supposed to just be a few weeks in Vail became years, with my own children going to those same schools I did, joining the same clubs, being the same spoiled, rich brat I was. Oh how I wish we had never left Denver. My husband, Paul Pembleton, he rose to great heights in Vail, sat on all the important boards and had chairmanships in all the clubs, but I think he always resented the thought that he had only gotten there because of my family connections. It wasn’t true, of course, but it’s how men think sometimes. You know, I think he actually appreciated the ash cloud, for it allowed us all to go back to square one, with no one being anything more or less than what they could contribute.”
In a sly voice, she continued, “But speaking of square one. When my own grandmother was nearing the end of her life, I went and sat with her for many an hour, listening to her stories of growing up in Alabama, of earlier days in Vail than I had ever known. And one night, when she was strangely lucid,” a phrase that got both mine and Adaline’s attention, for we had both been thinking it in relation to Deanna, “She told me a story. According to her, my great-grandfather hadn’t been an innocent bystander in the failure of that bank, but the main instigator. His father was the actual president of the bank, you see, and my great-grandfather had been manipulating loans in some way that allowed him to pocket a sizable sum on the side. Undeclared, you might say.
“Then, one day, maybe he thought his father was about to get on to him, he withdrew an enormous sum of cash from his personal account, walked out of the bank, and no one knew where he went. Didn’t go home or anything. When my great-grandmother called her father-in-law that evening, he said they should call the police, thinking something nefarious had happened to the up-and-coming young banker. Perhaps a ransom call would come in any moment. It was then, so the story goes, that the bank president first realized what his son had been doing. He called his daughter-in-law and convinced her not to file a missing person’s report, for fear of what the publicity would do to the bank. He did agree, however, to engage the services of a private detective.”
Deanna was still speaking in a normal voice, though it became a little dreamy as she said, “I wondered if it were a private eye like in the movies: snap-brim hat, long trench coat, steel-jawed chin. Anyway, the private eye had little trouble following my great-grandfather—though ‘great’ is probably the wrong word for him,” she said with an ironic chortle. “It seems my progenitor had left a bread-crumb trail of prostitutes visited and affairs started that led all the way to Vail, where he was working as a lift attendant at the ski area while, um, serving a rich lady at night while her husband attended to his … let’s say: board functions.
“When the bank president learned of this, he brought his daughter-in-law and the kids out to Vail for a ski trip, hoping to engender one of those movie moments where the miscreant is surprised by his one true love and repents of his wicked ways. According to my grandmother, it was almost like that. Her father was happy to see his children, but not so happy to see his wife. Still, he stopped the fooling around, for a while, and took his family in. His father got him a respectable job as the manager of one of the local restaurants and my great-grandfather gave all appearances of becoming a respectable citizen again. What he was actually doing, though, was continuing his association with the rich lady. He got money out of her somehow and bought the restaurant. Set his wife up as the general manager, dumped the rich lady for a younger mistress, and made his children managers of other properties he had acquired. By the time I came along, great-grandfather was dead and his true story had been buried longer than he had.” She laughed heartily before adding, “There’s even a picture of him in the museum, all dressed up and looking distinguished, with a little plaque about how he was one of Vail’s leading citizens and top philanthropists. He even gave enough money to one of the local churches that they named the recreation building after him. Can’t you just see some youth minister telling the kids who came out to play volleyball, ‘And this building was named after a notorious sinner, who would have slept with any of your mothers who let him, in Jesus’ name, Amen!’” She cackled with laughter and then slipped back into one of her songs. Adaline and I looked at each other strangely, but continued on without a word. We did discuss later how much of the story we thought was true, but had no way to come to a conclusion. And we still thought Deanna was unhinged at best.
We made it to Vail in less than a week, which really encouraged me—and made Adaline wonder why I had thought it would take three weeks. The thing was, I hadn’t been counting on the Interstate being in such good shape, which it was. There were only a couple places where the ash had slid across it, and neither of them deep. And while Black Gore Creek ran strong in some places, it didn’t cross the highway at any point. As we pulled up in sight of Vail, I was smiling and telling Adaline how surprised everyone would be if we pulled back into town before they even came to look for our signal.
“Where are your people?” I asked Deanna, once we had her attention for she had been in the middle of a rousing rendition of either “Amazing Grace” or “I Fought the Law” (it was hard to tell).
She crawled up to crouch behind the front seat and, pointing, said, “Up yonder. You cain’t see it from here, but it’s the other side of that big white building by the ski slopes. I heared you talking about how the wind blew that gash in the ash—gash in the ash,” she repeated with a laugh, “And we had something just like that. People to the left and right was all dead, but our little gash was just fine. All things considered, I mean.”
“Think we can make it before nightfall,” I asked, for we were still a good five miles out, “Or should we make camp and get there in the morning?”
She looked up at the bright spot of the sun that almost shown through the ash and said, “Let’s see if we can push through. If we can’t, at least we can stay in one of the buildings on the edge of town. We might make’er this evenin’, though. Them’s good horses you got there.” This was a surprising statement, for she had frequently complained when we stopped to water the horses or, worse, gave them a lengthy breather and roll when we came upon that rare meadow of thick grass—or any grass. I couldn’t blame her for being anxious to get to her people, but I did get tired of her complaining—especially as we had been making such good time.
As we pulled closer to the town of Vail, some thunderheads started building to the west. “I hate to say it, Deanna, but we may need to pull up and find shelter.”
I had expected an objection, but she looked at the sky and said, “Them’s buildin’ up to be gully-washers, all right.” She pointed off to the right and said, “They’s an old mechanic’s shop up yonder. You’d be able to pull the horses into the dry.”
With impeccable timing we got the old garage doors open and the horses inside the bay just before a wall of summer rain came through. I enjoyed seeing it, though, for it made me think of the rains we used to have when I was growing up. They would come up on us all of a sudden, pelt you with raindrops the size of golf balls, then pass through as quickly as they had arrived. I could see some sunlight to the west, creating a golden line on the mountains in that direction, which made me think this would be one of those storms. It was, but by the time it had passed through it was too late to go anywhere so we set up camp in the old automotive shop. I was afraid Deanna would be upset by us stopping that close to her goal, but she just curled up on a couch in the manager’s office and went to sleep.
Crazy on the Mountain – The Last Valley – Book 2
Josh Overstreet and his sister Claire have been carving a life out of the ash for more than half a decade, unsure whether anyone yet lives outside the small valley where they have established their town of Overstreet with two dozen others.
Then Deanna Pembleton stumbles into the valley, asking for help for herself and her friends. Claiming they have eked out a life much like that of the people of Overstreet, she begs assistance, which Josh is willing to give. She is, however, clearly unhinged on some level. Could the people she is claiming to want to help just be figments of her imagination?
Against the advice of almost everyone in Overstreet, Josh and Adaline set out to try and take food to Deanna’s people, hoping that people still exist outside “the last valley”.
They never dreamed their valley might not be there for them when they get back.
Be sure and read how this story started in “Ashes to Ashes” and concludes in “Book of Tales“!
Available now on Kindle and paperback.
…
Sample passage
I happened to ask, “Deanna, how long have you lived in Vail?”
“What? Oh, you might say I’ve lived there all my life.” Adaline and I looked at each other in surprise, for this was not said with the hick voice Deanna had mostly been using of late. It also made us wonder about our earlier thought that she was from Denver. She continued, in a somewhat conspiratorial tone, “My great-grandfather was the first of the family to come to Vail. The story that he told his family was that he had been a banker in Birmingham, Alabama,” the names of the city and state were said with a deep, southern accent. “But the bank had gone bust—through no fault of his own, of course, so he had headed west to seek his fortune. He said he worked several jobs in towns both big and small before landing in Vail, broke and starving, worried about his wife and kids back home for it had been some time since he had been able to send them money.
“But it was ski season and he took a job in a kitchen at one of the hotels. He worked hard and sent money back to his family and, by the end of the ski season, had worked his way up to waiter. Over the summer months, he proved himself invaluable and was made assistant manager of the restaurant, and then manager. At that point, he sent for his wife and kids and was ever so happy to see them. He got his kids—who were teenagers by then—jobs in Vail and they saved their money and, would you believe it, one day they bought the restaurant! Using all of his banking and monetary skills, he was eventually able to buy the building the restaurant was in, and his ‘empire’ was begun!”
Deanna chuckled, then said, still in the refined voice of someone who had grown up on the tonier side of life, “And thus began the Coventry empire of Vail. Pembleton is my married name, of course. I grew up attending the best schools, a member of all Vail’s best clubs, and groomed for a career in hoteliery. Yes, I know that’s not really a word, but my father always said it should be. But, I went off to college and fell in love and got married and, well, the last thing I wanted to do was to come back to Vail for anything other than a visit. Best laid plans of mice and men, right? My father had a stroke when I was just about to turn thirty, so my husband and I came back to watch over the business while he recovered. What was supposed to just be a few weeks in Vail became years, with my own children going to those same schools I did, joining the same clubs, being the same spoiled, rich brat I was. Oh how I wish we had never left Denver. My husband, Paul Pembleton, he rose to great heights in Vail, sat on all the important boards and had chairmanships in all the clubs, but I think he always resented the thought that he had only gotten there because of my family connections. It wasn’t true, of course, but it’s how men think sometimes. You know, I think he actually appreciated the ash cloud, for it allowed us all to go back to square one, with no one being anything more or less than what they could contribute.”
In a sly voice, she continued, “But speaking of square one. When my own grandmother was nearing the end of her life, I went and sat with her for many an hour, listening to her stories of growing up in Alabama, of earlier days in Vail than I had ever known. And one night, when she was strangely lucid,” a phrase that got both mine and Adaline’s attention, for we had both been thinking it in relation to Deanna, “She told me a story. According to her, my great-grandfather hadn’t been an innocent bystander in the failure of that bank, but the main instigator. His father was the actual president of the bank, you see, and my great-grandfather had been manipulating loans in some way that allowed him to pocket a sizable sum on the side. Undeclared, you might say.
“Then, one day, maybe he thought his father was about to get on to him, he withdrew an enormous sum of cash from his personal account, walked out of the bank, and no one knew where he went. Didn’t go home or anything. When my great-grandmother called her father-in-law that evening, he said they should call the police, thinking something nefarious had happened to the up-and-coming young banker. Perhaps a ransom call would come in any moment. It was then, so the story goes, that the bank president first realized what his son had been doing. He called his daughter-in-law and convinced her not to file a missing person’s report, for fear of what the publicity would do to the bank. He did agree, however, to engage the services of a private detective.”
Deanna was still speaking in a normal voice, though it became a little dreamy as she said, “I wondered if it were a private eye like in the movies: snap-brim hat, long trench coat, steel-jawed chin. Anyway, the private eye had little trouble following my great-grandfather—though ‘great’ is probably the wrong word for him,” she said with an ironic chortle. “It seems my progenitor had left a bread-crumb trail of prostitutes visited and affairs started that led all the way to Vail, where he was working as a lift attendant at the ski area while, um, serving a rich lady at night while her husband attended to his … let’s say: board functions.
“When the bank president learned of this, he brought his daughter-in-law and the kids out to Vail for a ski trip, hoping to engender one of those movie moments where the miscreant is surprised by his one true love and repents of his wicked ways. According to my grandmother, it was almost like that. Her father was happy to see his children, but not so happy to see his wife. Still, he stopped the fooling around, for a while, and took his family in. His father got him a respectable job as the manager of one of the local restaurants and my great-grandfather gave all appearances of becoming a respectable citizen again. What he was actually doing, though, was continuing his association with the rich lady. He got money out of her somehow and bought the restaurant. Set his wife up as the general manager, dumped the rich lady for a younger mistress, and made his children managers of other properties he had acquired. By the time I came along, great-grandfather was dead and his true story had been buried longer than he had.” She laughed heartily before adding, “There’s even a picture of him in the museum, all dressed up and looking distinguished, with a little plaque about how he was one of Vail’s leading citizens and top philanthropists. He even gave enough money to one of the local churches that they named the recreation building after him. Can’t you just see some youth minister telling the kids who came out to play volleyball, ‘And this building was named after a notorious sinner, who would have slept with any of your mothers who let him, in Jesus’ name, Amen!’” She cackled with laughter and then slipped back into one of her songs. Adaline and I looked at each other strangely, but continued on without a word. We did discuss later how much of the story we thought was true, but had no way to come to a conclusion. And we still thought Deanna was unhinged at best.
We made it to Vail in less than a week, which really encouraged me—and made Adaline wonder why I had thought it would take three weeks. The thing was, I hadn’t been counting on the Interstate being in such good shape, which it was. There were only a couple places where the ash had slid across it, and neither of them deep. And while Black Gore Creek ran strong in some places, it didn’t cross the highway at any point. As we pulled up in sight of Vail, I was smiling and telling Adaline how surprised everyone would be if we pulled back into town before they even came to look for our signal.
“Where are your people?” I asked Deanna, once we had her attention for she had been in the middle of a rousing rendition of either “Amazing Grace” or “I Fought the Law” (it was hard to tell).
She crawled up to crouch behind the front seat and, pointing, said, “Up yonder. You cain’t see it from here, but it’s the other side of that big white building by the ski slopes. I heared you talking about how the wind blew that gash in the ash—gash in the ash,” she repeated with a laugh, “And we had something just like that. People to the left and right was all dead, but our little gash was just fine. All things considered, I mean.”
“Think we can make it before nightfall,” I asked, for we were still a good five miles out, “Or should we make camp and get there in the morning?”
She looked up at the bright spot of the sun that almost shown through the ash and said, “Let’s see if we can push through. If we can’t, at least we can stay in one of the buildings on the edge of town. We might make’er this evenin’, though. Them’s good horses you got there.” This was a surprising statement, for she had frequently complained when we stopped to water the horses or, worse, gave them a lengthy breather and roll when we came upon that rare meadow of thick grass—or any grass. I couldn’t blame her for being anxious to get to her people, but I did get tired of her complaining—especially as we had been making such good time.
As we pulled closer to the town of Vail, some thunderheads started building to the west. “I hate to say it, Deanna, but we may need to pull up and find shelter.”
I had expected an objection, but she looked at the sky and said, “Them’s buildin’ up to be gully-washers, all right.” She pointed off to the right and said, “They’s an old mechanic’s shop up yonder. You’d be able to pull the horses into the dry.”
With impeccable timing we got the old garage doors open and the horses inside the bay just before a wall of summer rain came through. I enjoyed seeing it, though, for it made me think of the rains we used to have when I was growing up. They would come up on us all of a sudden, pelt you with raindrops the size of golf balls, then pass through as quickly as they had arrived. I could see some sunlight to the west, creating a golden line on the mountains in that direction, which made me think this would be one of those storms. It was, but by the time it had passed through it was too late to go anywhere so we set up camp in the old automotive shop. I was afraid Deanna would be upset by us stopping that close to her goal, but she just curled up on a couch in the manager’s office and went to sleep.