Okay, here’s the preview of the first two chapters of my upcoming post-apocalyptic survival novel A Warm Place!
If you are a 1$/month (or above) Patron over on my Patreon, you can also read the next chapter right here!
A Warm Place will be out January 1st, 2021! Possibly even December 31st, depending on how fast Amazon gets it up.
ZERO
I can no longer remember the exact day that the snowfall began.
I know it was in June, two years ago now.
Some days I’m convinced that it was the fifteenth of the month, but other days I seem certain, absolutely certain, that it was twenty first. And then other days, I just don’t know. I guess it doesn’t really matter anymore. A lot of people argue and debate over when the end of the world began, I suppose that’s why I still fixate on it from time to time.
There are those who say it began in this decade or that decade of the previous century. Some even say it began during the Industrial Revolution. They all probably have a good point. It wasn’t any one thing that led us here. It was a lot of little things, a few big things, and mainly just people, rich people, who either didn’t care or actively fought against saving the world.
I mean, I think. I could be wrong.
Shit, it could be aliens for all I know.
But for me the end of the world began when snow fell in June.
I was in Florida when it happened. That was where I had lived my entire life.
There were warning signs. You kept hearing about freakier and freakier weather all up through the 2030s. For me it was ‘out of season’ hurricanes, or ‘unusually strong’ hurricanes that just kept coming. Eventually they wiped Miami completely off the map. And then the news started talking one day about how California was burning again, only this time it didn’t stop.
I remember seeing the Hollywood sign consumed in flames.
I think that’s what finally made it real for a lot people.
Or maybe it was the tornadoes ripping through the Midwest, leveling whole cities.
Or maybe it was the rain. Before the snow, we had rain, and I remember coastal cities just being totally flooded.
They had to evacuate New York City. As far as I know, no one ever went back.
I swear to God, it was like a goddamn disaster movie. Only it didn’t stop.
It just got worse.
Even with all that, I still got floored when it started getting cold, as in cold cold, in the middle of June. I went outside one morning and saw my breath on the air. It felt like stepping into a parallel universe. A few days later, a blizzard hit my town. I think that was when it really clicked home for me that this wasn’t going to just go away. I don’t know why that was the straw the broke the camel’s back for me, but it was.
I still wonder how long the politicians knew. Obviously the scientists knew, but I do wonder how many of them kept silent...or were silenced.
That’s still a really clear memory for me, though.
Stepping out of my apartment building and just stopping as the cold hit me like a hammer. It had been seventy five degrees the day before.
My breath on the air.
My lungs burning in the cold.
Miserably gray clouds overhead.
That was when I knew, somewhere deep, that this was it.
This was the beginning of the end.
ONE
I opened my eyes and was met with confusion and pain.
For several seconds, I had no idea what was happening, what hadhappened, or even where I was. I tried to move. My body was well on its way to numb, my muscles sluggish and unresponsive. I groaned and shifted again.
I was constrained by something, it was across my chest.
I blinked a few times, looked around, shivering, and finally my brain clicked back on at least part of the way. I was inside my damned car. But something was wrong, deeply, frighteningly wrong. I groaned as a wave of pain rolled through my body. My seatbelt was what was holding me in place. I reached down and fumbled with it, trying desperately to figure out what in the fuck had happened. Because obviously something had happened.
That my jeep, I realized all at once, was tilting slightly to the right. And there was a crack through the windshield, a big one. I hit the release and pulled the seatbelt up. My thoughts came slowly, like they had to crawl to get to where they were going. I knew I had to do something. I just wasn’t sure what the fuck it was.
Jesus, how hard had I hit my head?
Judging by the headache that was being kept at bay by the cold, probably pretty hard.
The cold. That was it. The cold. I had to get out of the cold.
“Come on!” I snapped, and jerked my whole body. A bolt of pain seared through me and I felt several different parts of my body cry out in pain. It hurt like fuck, even through the numbing cold, but it served its purpose.
I was more awake and aware.
Okay, I’d been in a crash. I’d been driving along a highway perched up on a steep incline and...I must’ve gone down over the incline. Why? I was pretty careful with my driving. Especially given how fucking foggy it had been.
Then I remembered.
Someone had appeared out of the fog. I’d been going a little faster than I should have. I’d swerved, gone right through the guard rail and down the incline. Shit. After all I’d gone through to get this damned car, the luck of finding it, and I’d only managed to hold onto it for a freaking month and a week!
I looked around, shivering worse now.
Maybe it wasn’t a total loss. But that could wait. The driver’s side window was broken out, as was the back windshield. I could hear the wind shrieking and knew that meant a storm was on the way. As I looked back out through the cracked windshield, I saw from the big fat snowflakes that were tumbling down from the iron gray skies overhead it was already here. Fuck. If I didn’t find somewhere secure in a hurry I could freeze to death.
I tried the door. It wouldn’t open. Feeling a bit of panic, I shoved against it. It should open if it hadn’t been too damaged in the crash, given that my side was the one that was angled slightly up in the tilted car. I began shoving harder, leaning into it and pushing against whatever I could. The door groaned and suddenly popped open.
I fell out into a drift of snow.
“Fucking-fuck!” I snapped, anger and pain briefly overwhelming me as my whole body cried out in anguish. I struggled back to my feet and automatically reached back into the car, towards the passenger’s seat, where my backpack full of all my most crucial shit was. My heart skipped a beat as I failed to find it. I crawled back into the vehicle, pain momentarily forgotten as fear started to overwhelm me.
No, it had to have just fallen down in the-
I looked on the floor, below the glove compartment, which itself hung open.
It was empty.
“Oh fuck me,” I whispered.
Someone had robbed me. I looked in the back fruitlessly. They had even taken the fucking mattress I’d had back there!
There was nothing left.
I stepped out of the car, my head suddenly clearing, my panic suddenly zeroing out.
In the ensuing months of the apocalypse, I had learned that I was oddly suited for surviving in it. Perhaps even thriving in it. One of the reasons, and this was one I had nurtured once I had recognized it for what it was, was that when the shit went down and fight-or-flight instincts kicked in, it was almost like a circuit breaker was flipped in my head. My panic, my anger, my fear, after a certain threshold they just drained away in a hurry.
Leaving my head clear to act.
I stepped up on the seat I had just been sitting in, getting my head above the car and taking a look around the area. Behind me was the incline I’d crashed down and the highway above. Well, I called it a highway, really it was more of a route through desolate nowhere, not one of those big four-lane jobs everyone thought of when you said highway. Nothing back there for me. There wasn’t much to see to my left because the land rose a good six or seven feet. To the right was a relatively flat stretch of land and I could see some trees scattered about.
Dead ahead, though…
The visibility was shit and getting shittier. But through the blowing snow I saw it: a building. It was small, almost certainly a cabin of some kind, but it was, ideally, four walls and a roof. Even that could mean the difference between life and death. Hopping back down, I immediately set out. Marching around the front of my vehicle, I headed off, kicking my way through the snow, careful as I could be to keep from falling in any holes in the ground. That had happened way too often for my liking since this whole thing had begun.
I paused only once, glancing back at my jeep. It was a lonely sight, and a sad one. I’d found that thing six weeks ago and worked hard to fix it. And now it was probably fucked. Well, that was the way of the world now.
Or I guess it always had been, it was just more obvious now.
Telling myself to get over it, that whining about it, even inside my own head, wouldn’t change shit, I marched on.
The cabin grew closer as the winds picked up. Yes, definitely a blizzard. I fucking hated blizzards. Well, I guess that wasn’t entirely true. Some of the most sex-fueled nights I’d had were during bad blizzards.
I tried to think as I marched across the open space towards the cabin, but it was too hard to think. My head was hurting and that, combined with how fucking cold and in pain I was in other places, andthe damned blizzard, made it too hard to think about the before or the after. I guess all I should worry about was the right now.
There wouldn’t be an after if I didn’t get my ass in gear and stay alive.
As I got closer to the cabin, it became obvious that the front door was open. Great. That could mean nothing, and I didn’t notice smoke coming out of the chimney. But someone could’ve just gotten there ahead of me, seen me coming, or maybe heard my crash, (how long had I been out?), and was now laying in wait for me. Fuck, and I didn’t have any weapons on me, either. Or did I? I began checking my pockets patting them down. No, the holster on my hip wasn’t just empty, it was gone. Knife was gone, too.
And my-
A wash of fear broke through my stoic dam as something occurred to me and I reached into my inner pocket.
“No,” I muttered as I began digging deeper into the pocket, even as I knew it was empty. “No, no, no!” I snapped.
My journal!
My fucking journal!
For a moment I was almost overwhelmed by anger, pure, white-hot anger that I hadn’t felt in a very, very long time.
I was fucking livid.
But a particularly strong gust of wind almost knocked me over and a throb of pain cut through my body and it was like a dash of cold water across me. I could be angry later. Someone had stolen my journal, but I would deal with that later.
Of all the fucking things that could-
“No,” I muttered as I tromped on towards the cabin. “Fix it later.”
As I approached the open front door, cutting down to maybe twenty feet of space, I realized there was someone inside. They were laying on the floor, apparently passed out. I got a little closer and shifted, trying to get a read on what I was seeing. A woman. An attractive woman. Fuck. I looked around immediately.
This screamed trap.
But I didn’t see or really sense anyone out there. Didn’t mean no one was out there, but normally my instincts were good. Of course, I’d just been in a car wreck, a bad one that I was lucky to walk away from, and in a worsening storm.
And I was unarmed.
Not quite defenseless, but definitely unarmed. I moved forward until I hit the front wall of the cabin and peered cautiously inside. I saw some things: a bed, a kitchen area, a fireplace, but no people other than the unconscious woman. Time to do a perimeter check, see if someone was hiding out back or something.
I considered the possibilities as I walked around, scoping the situation out.
This seemed like a trap because I knew a lot of guys, not everyguy, but too many who were out and about nowadays, would find an unconscious woman and do exactly what you think they would do. I wouldn’t, because amazingly, there was more standing between me and doing unforgivable evil than ‘I’ll get away with it’.
The apocalypse didn’t wipe out everyone’s moral compass, in fact, I’d seen some genuinely self-sacrificing, heroic people since the snow started to fall.
But I think most people don’t realize that a shocking number of us don’t really have a moral compass, or maybe even just a shitty one.
And all these cliché tropes about civilization being the only thing keeping us from turning into barbaric savages was way more true than we’d like to admit.
In a way, it was true for me.
Before, I never would have killed someone.
Now? I had killed people. Not many, and I avoided it if at all possible, but sometimes it literally was you or them.
And it wasn’t going to be me.
I moved around the side, tried to peer in one window, but a curtain was pulled over it. So far, no sign of anyone. I kept going.
It was also possible that the woman had been running from someone, and that someone might still be around, looking for her. All the more reason to get inside and get secure. I came around back. Still no one. Just a thick forest about twenty feet away, barely visible now. Hustling along, I quickly completed my circuit and became about as certain as I could, given the circumstances, that I was alone save for the woman.
I carefully moved inside, ready to fight for my life if I had to, making damn sure to check either side of the open door before I got in.
No one was pressed up against the wall with a gun or a knife or something else to smash me in the head with.
Once inside, I closed the door and the howling of the winds quickly became blessedly muted. Working as fast as I could, I checked the building out. It was small, the kind of place people rented out, usually one, maybe a couple, to get away from everyone and everything for a weekend. So the kitchen, living room, bedroom, all one room. There were only two other doors. One led to a narrow closet that was basically empty with no place to hide, the other led to a bathroom with a shower stall that was going to be useless.
I checked the shower, I checked under the sink and under the bed, I checked everywhere a person could conceivably hide.
Finally, satisfied that I wasn’t going to get jumped, I moved over to the woman.
Crouching, I began to assess her.
She was still alive, that much was obvious, and I couldn’t see any blood or wounds. She wasn’t quite dressed for cold weather, wearing just some jeans, hiking boots, and a thin jacket over a shirt. She was very cold to the touch. Chances were, she passed out from exhaustion and being cold. Something I felt close to doing.
But I couldn’t, not yet.
Carefully, I picked her up and crossed the room. I got her situated on the only bed, a double-wide that was just big enough to hold two people. I got her under a blanket, made sure her head was comfortably on the pillow, then went back to the closet and pulled another blanket I’d seen in it down. Throwing it over her, I moved over to the fireplace.
For a moment, I was stymied. Normally I’d have supplies to start a fire, but I’d been motherfucking robbed and…
There. Relief flooded me as I saw a pack of matches peeking out from underneath a nearby footrest. I retrieved them, opened them up. Only six left, but hey, it worked. I pocketed them and then checked around the fireplace for stuff to burn. There was nothing left in the fireplace itself, and there were just a handful of twigs and a single, somewhat more substantial log left in an area that was clearly designated for fuel.
I threw it all in and then hunted around for a bit longer. There was a desk in the corner to the right of fireplace, beneath a window next to the front door. The top was bare, but as I rifled through the drawers, I found some papers. Good tinder. I set some in after ripping them up a bit and adjusted the fuel as best I could.
I’d need more, I didn’t think I was going anywhere for the rest of the day, but this would do for now. Working carefully and diligently, I got to work.
Firs things first: I checked that the chimney was clear. It was.
God fucking forbid I die of carbon monoxide inhalation after all the shit I’d survived.
It took a few minutes and two of the damned matches, but I got a fire going. It was small but growing. I crouched there, tending to it, making little adjustments and just relishing the warmth. Well, sort of.
Warmth meant my body was going to lose the numbness that was acting close enough to a painkiller. All that pain I was in was going to hit me full force. Making myself leave the primal comfort of the fire, I moved back over to the woman and checked on her. She was breathing less shallowly now and her color was coming back.
I wondered who she was. She looked young, maybe late teens or early twenties. Not too much younger than I was, even if I no longer felt twenty five.
I didn’t know what age I felt, other than old, most days.
She was obviously attractive, a redhead who would have easily been a cam model or vlogger or whatever a few years ago, with a lot of subscribers desperate for her attention. Even bedraggled and half-dead her beauty was obvious. I left her in the bed and walked back over to the door. Might as well scavenge for wood while the storm had yet to go into full swing. I opened the door, glanced back one more time at the mystery woman, then I left.
Back into the hungering cold.