THE RISING - PROLOGUE

THREE WEEKS BEFORE THE OUTBREAK

His name was Adrian West, and he was going to save the world.

Adrian had laid all the evidence on the large table before him. It was everything he needed to take down Miles Chadwick and his insane band of doomsday lunatics, all the evidence he had carefully curated over the last two months. Documents, secret recordings, photographs, flash drives. Everything. Eight weeks of work to ensure that he’d be taken seriously. Eight weeks of holding his breath, looking over his shoulder, wondering if he’d been made.

They would not hesitate to kill him—of this, he had no doubt.

There were three of them working together to bring it all down. It was risky. As the saying went, three people could keep a secret, if two of them were dead.

But they had been clever. Careful. They had taken no one else into their confidence. Everything was done in person: no emails, no text messages, no phone calls. They met weekly to discuss their progress.

But time was running short.

He did not know where or when the attack would take place, as that information had been kept secret at the highest levels of Penumbra. But it would be soon. Activity had accelerated, and pieces were being moved into place. The operatives were scheduled to arrive at the Citadel the following day. There, each would collect a designated canister and fan out to the attack sites.

Absently, he brushed his hand against his shoulder, the site of the PB-815 vaccine injection he’d received after signing onto the project. If everything went according to plan, he would never need its protection. The vaccine’s nanoparticles would circulate through his veins for time eternal, looking for an invader that would never come.

He carefully placed each item of evidence into his briefcase, closing and locking it when he was done. He spun the dial of the briefcase’s combination lock to three random digits and set it on the ground. A quick check of his watch. It was just past two-thirty in the afternoon. His meeting with Special Agent Dan Hughes was less than an hour from now, at a diner in Omaha, roughly twenty minutes away.

He had to ensure that Chadwick never deployed the canisters. If Chadwick got the first hint that he’d been made, he’d release the virus early. That was the demented beauty of his plan. Once the virus was ready, that was it. All they had to do was open one at an interstate rest stop. That would probably be sufficient. The world sat precariously on a knife’s edge, and it had no idea. Humanity’s only hope was that Chadwick would adhere to the carefully orchestrated schedule he’d constructed years earlier. That was why Adrian had been so careful, so meticulous, in building his case. He would get one chance. Civilization would get one chance.

Adrian stood up and stretched, the ligaments and muscles in his back popping deliciously. He was a tall man, pushing forty, and his life was dedicated to his work. The ravages of age were rearing their ugly heads: a trick knee that was sore more days than not and a hip that screamed if he sat at his desk too long. He had never married, had kids, or had a proper relationship. His destiny had lain on a different path, bringing him here.

He wandered over to the window, looking east toward downtown Omaha. The other buildings in the office park glinted in the hot July sunshine. He had rented this tiny office space for his work, paying in cash for three months. It was an irregular arrangement, but occupancy in the park had been well below expectations, so the property manager had agreed to Adrian’s unusual proposal. The office was sparsely furnished — a high-speed copier, a desktop computer, a landline phone, and a file cabinet. These few items had been his trusted allies in his secret war against Miles Chadwick.

The day Chadwick told him played on a constant loop in his head. He was an epidemiologist with Penumbra, hired to analyze genomic data, conduct modeling, and analyze machine learning data to help the team monitor interactions between host and pathogen. He had left a successful career with another pharmaceutical company, drawn in by the prospect of cutting-edge work. The selection process had been rigorous: physical examinations, psychological evaluations, and a series of inoculations.

And the first few weeks had been cutting edge, out in the wilds of Nebraska. The facilities were top-notch, and the team was stocked with the most brilliant minds he had ever encountered. Then, one Friday afternoon, he was summoned to a meeting. Miles Chadwick was waiting for him.

It was a meeting unlike any other he had ever attended.

“Do you know why you’re here, Dr. West?”

That was the first question Miles Chadwick had asked him.

When Adrian did not answer, Miles continued nonplussed, as though it had been a rhetorical question.

“It’s because we are on the brink of a paradigm shift. And we need people of your considerable talents.”

This was an innocuous comment, one he expected. Every lab believed it was on the brink of a paradigm shift. It revealed nothing about the nightmarish few minutes that would follow. When Chadwick had finished laying out his dark, twisted vision, Adrian could barely breathe. But he kept up appearances because he suspected very strongly that failing to do so would be like signing his death warrant.

It was time to go. Adrian gathered his briefcase and small suitcase and rolled out to the parking lot. It was hot, the sun beating down on the asphalt, cooking the weeds that somehow found purchase in even the tiniest crack in the pavement. A quick scan of his surroundings. Nothing out of the ordinary.

He guided the car out of the lot and onto Route 73, heading north toward Omaha. The traffic was thick, but he kept a wary eye on his mirrors for any potential trail. At Route 221, he turned east onto a lonely two-lane highway that would feed into the western Omaha suburbs. The land was flat, and the road cut through the plains like a bullet.

Ten minutes from Omaha, he noticed the large black SUV in his rearview mirror, closing in fast. His heart leaped into his throat while he simultaneously dismissed his concern as his paranoia worked overtime. His hands grew damp on the steering wheel as the truck grew more prominent in the mirror. They had entered a heavily foliaged section of the highway. The trees were heavy with the summer leaves, their branches reaching across the road to form an arboreal tunnel.

“Go around, go around,” he whispered.

He eased off the accelerator, hoping to encourage the driver to go around him. The westbound lane was empty as far as the eye could see; it would be a simple pass if the driver’s motivations were not malicious. As he slowed, he heard the truck’s big V8 engine roar in the summer stillness. A second later, the vehicle was on top of him. A man leaned out from the passenger-side window, bearing an automatic weapon. But he did not fire. The truck slammed into his rear bumper, causing Adrian’s sedan to shimmy badly. He whined in fear as he mashed the gas pedal to the floor. But it was useless; the bigger, faster truck stayed on his tail. It backed off momentarily and came in hard at Adrian’s left rear bumper, forcing him off the road and onto the shoulder.

The car screamed over the side of the road, sending Adrian’s heart into his throat. It had happened so suddenly that he hadn’t had time to be afraid. The car bottomed out on the shallow embankment as he struggled to regain control. But abject terror quickly flooded through him as the car went airborne, giving him a clear view of the large tree blocking his car’s flight path.

The car’s right front panel struck the tree’s trunk and spun wildly before crashing hard to the ground and rolling over onto its roof. Adrian, who had blacked out from the impact, slowly came to, hanging upside down, still restrained by the seatbelt. The airbag had deployed and was pushing against his face.

Alive!

He was still alive. Every single muscle and bone hurt and maybe there were internal injuries, but he was still in the game for now. He released the seatbelt and dropped to the ground. The duffle bag had wedged into the passenger-side footwell. As he reached for it, his lungs and chest burned with pain. But he had to get to it. As his fingers wrapped around the bag’s strap, he heard movement outside the car. He saw a pair of boots loping casually toward the vehicle.

“Can you please call 911?” he called out weakly.

There was no reply as the boots stopped outside the crumpled window frame. Perhaps the good Samaritan had not heard him. He started to call out a second time when the person dropped to their knees and peered in through the window frame. He was a big fellow, his face hard and jawline sharp. His black hair was slicked back. Most alarmingly, a gun the size of a cannon was pointed at Adrian.

“Wait,” Adrian said meekly.

They always said that at the end, your life would flash before your eyes, but it wasn’t like that for Adrian West. As the woods echoed with the report of the large-caliber round, a single, solitary thought flashed through his mind before everything went dark.

He would have a lot of company soon.

* * *

GOOD AS GONE - Chapter 1

PROLOGUE

May 1973

Five of them entered the bank that morning, but they moved with the efficiency and precision of one. The pirate went in first, firing a single shot into the air but not saying a word. The shotgun blast showered the lobby with dust, plaster, and asbestos fibers. At first, some of the customers thought a car had backfired, but the bank employees recognized the sound for what it was. Glances were exchanged, and lips tightened with fear.

With a simple wave of the shotgun’s barrel, the pirate shepherded the customers and tellers to the ground. They were compliant enough, lining up on the ground like freshly caught fish, their fingers laced around the backs of their heads.

The witch was the second one inside, a few seconds behind the pirate, and she made a beeline for Stephen Jewel, the young man who had recently ascended to the enviable post of bank manager. Jewel was thirty-five but looked seventeen and had to shave only twice a week. He had a pretty wife named Larissa and a new baby on the way, and he was very conscious of the fact that he had wet himself upon hearing the report of the pirate’s shotgun. Now this lunatic wearing the green mask was headed right for him. Stephen would later tell police that the witch was a woman, but that he wasn’t entirely certain. After changing his pants, of course.

The witch handed him a note. Scrawled on it were the words, we want it all. He handed it back, knowing full well what the robbers wanted.

“All what?” he asked with a quiver in his voice.

The witch pulled out a pistol and fired a shot at his feet, showering the cuffs of his wide-bottomed trousers with the dust of exploding marble.

“OK, OK,” he said weakly, holding up his hands in surrender. “Follow me.”

He glanced around the bank lobby, which resembled a still photograph. Nothing moved. The pirate had his gun trained on the hostages. A grizzly bear, a werewolf, and a vampire, who’d come in behind the witch, stood guard at the front door. The sixth robber was in the car, parked along the curb in the beaten-up sedan, waiting to whisk the sextet to a better place, a better life.

The witch followed Jewel around the velvet ropes to the corner of the bank, where the vault stood open, its armored door now as useful as an umbrella in a hurricane. A phone on a nearby desk began ringing, startling everyone. It jangled half a dozen times before the caller gave up. His hands shaking, Jewel used his key to open a second door inside the vault, leading to a smaller room and the robbers’ ultimate target. The witch licked her lips when she saw the stacks of cash, delivered not twenty minutes ago via an armored car from the Federal Reserve down on Eighth Street. Two million dollars in neat ten-thousand-dollar bundles.

The witch reached inside her robes, whipped out four large burlap sacks, and handed them to Jewel. She tapped her watch with the muzzle of her pistol then retrained the gun on Jewel. He got the message and started filling a bag with the bricks of cash. When he finished with the first, the witch tied it off with a rubber band and slid it back out into the main vault. Jewel repeated the process with the next three bags until all the bundles were bagged up like groceries. She followed him out of the vault, and he took his place on the floor with the others. The pirate and the werewolf made their way toward the bags, and that was when everything went straight to hell.

A customer named Eleanor Hatfield began shrieking. She was a large woman with makeup that looked like it had been baked on, and she was terrified. Eleanor pushed herself to her feet and began running blindly, her arms covering her head. The desperate voices of the other hostages pleaded with her to lie back down, to take her place on the floor. It was too late.

The witch took one step forward and shot Eleanor in the neck. She tumbled to the floor in a heap, smearing blood across the fresh marble floor. The remaining hostages howled in terror, and another one, this one an off-duty police officer, saw the resulting chaos as his chance. In one graceful and life-ending move, he swept to his feet and drew a small pistol from the holster around his lower calf. He got off a single shot at the witch, but he missed badly. His bullet struck the vault door and ricocheted into a wooden desk, lodging itself into the lumber. The pirate returned fire, catching the officer full in the chest with a twin-barreled blast. The force of the impact blew the officer to the ground like a typhoon, and he lay perfectly still.

This time, the hostages didn’t make a sound, rats that have learned not to pluck the cheese from an electrified platform. The pirate stepped over the body of the officer, silent and bleeding, and yanked one of the hostages to her feet. Her name was Denise Vaughan, and she was one of the bank tellers. The others were afraid to look, secretly thankful that they had not been selected.

With Vaughan in tow, the robbers each grabbed a sack and exited the bank less than ninety seconds after first entering and shattering the morning calm. Outside, they were greeted by a glorious morning, warm and fragrant, with that first hint of summer. The sky was a brilliant blue canopy over the clear air, the kind of day that just begged for a cooler of beer, some beach chairs, and a trip to the seashore.

The Olds was idling at the curb, its driver casually smoking a cigarette, as if he’d just dropped someone off to make a quick deposit. The group poured into the car, and the driver eased into traffic, heading east on Broad. They were nearly two blocks away before they heard the first sirens responding to the bank job. A block later, the car pulled into the parking lot of a no-tell motel, and the werewolf got out. The car sped away.

The robbers never said a word.

Chapter 1 of SHADOWS

CHAPTER ONE

More than anything, Lucy Goodwin wanted to get home.

They had been on the train for four hours already, today’s journey from Philadelphia to Washington, D.C. aboard the crowded southbound Acela taking more than twice as long as it should have. The train had been scheduled to leave three minutes past seven, but it was closer to eight before they got underway, and Lucy was already two terrible cups of coffee into this terrible day. And once underway, they could never get up to a good cruising speed. Somewhere in northern Maryland, the conductor had fired up the intercom to inform them that a pickup truck had broken down on the tracks and that cost them another forty minutes.

Ordinarily, Lucy loved traveling by train, the methodical clackety-clack of the train cars rolling along the steel tracks a welcome salve to the stress of her life. It was soothing, much more so than air travel. For medium-range travel, you couldn’t beat the train. But it had been a long three days at the annual nursing conference in Philadelphia; she had been out of sorts from the moment she set foot in the convention hall, waiting in line for her name badge and her bag of useless swag. What a waste those bags were. Coupons and magazines and stress balls and drink koozies and all manner of junk that more often than not ended up in a landfill. As if the planet didn’t have enough junk to deal with.

The National Nursing Council’s annual conference was typically one of the high points of Lucy’s year. Although she loved being a nurse, it was nice to get a break from the rigor of her twelve-hour shifts, and the continuing education seminars were always instructive. Plus, she got to catch up with nursing school friends who’d scattered across the country over the years. But by the middle of the first day, she was done with it. She began counting down the days, then the hours, and then the minutes until it was over.

Instead of dining with her fellow nurses, she took her meals alone, not in the mood to spend a week with five hundred other nurses, drinking, gossiping, complaining. During the sessions, she sat in the back row, doodling in the small notebook that had been inside her tote bag. She missed her patients, she missed the E.R., she missed her dog. She even missed Jack, her pain-in-the-ass brother.

But it was over.

She sighed.

It was finally over.

It was Friday, and they would be home by dinnertime. Soon, she would be on her couch in her pajama pants and sweatshirt, eating General Tso’s chicken from Peking and binge-watching something mind-blowingly idiotic. Maybe a good reality show about housewives with too much money and not enough sense. She would sleep in, as she wasn’t due back at the hospital for her next shift until Sunday morning.

Next to her sat Manuel Diaz, her fellow E.R. nurse at the Henrico Doctors’ Hospital, a suburban hospital just west of Richmond, Virginia. He was a nice enough fellow who’d come to nursing later in life. He was a decent nurse but a bit chauvinistic. Rarely showed deference to more experienced female nurses, seemed to think he knew better than them. Patients loved him though, which made him a formidable coworker.

He’d been asleep since they pulled out of the 30th Street Station in Philly. She’d gone to bed early the night before, but he’d stayed up partying with a contingent of nurses from Tampa. When they’d met at the continental breakfast at five-thirty that morning, he had still reeked of cheap liquor and cigarette smoke. He obviously hadn’t slept. Whatever. As long as he didn’t puke on her.

The train was moving along at a good clip, finally, after an eternity at a snail’s pace. Outside, the landscape flew by in a flash. They were south of Baltimore now, hopefully no less than thirty minutes from Union Station. There, they would switch engines for the last two hours to Richmond, where Lucy had lived for the last fifteen years.

She turned her attention back to the e-book reader on her lap; her book club was reading a novel about a teenage boy who loses his mother in a terrorist bombing of a museum and the priceless piece of art that he steals in the ensuing chaos. It was beautifully written, but the story just had not held Lucy’s interest. She flipped through a couple more pages before her attention waned once more. She checked her reading progress. Thirty-four percent into the eight-hundred-page novel. The book club was scheduled to meet the following night. Yeah, well, she didn’t think the other women in the club would read it either. And if they did, she could certainly fake her way through it. Besides, a healthy chunk of any good book club involved drinking wine and gossiping about the women who hadn’t shown up that night.

“Where are we?” Manny asked, startling her.

The big man stretched and let out a long breath.

Yup, still whiskey-tinged, thought Lucy.

“Just south of Baltimore,” Lucy said.

“Cool,” he said.

Cool. Everything was cool to Manny. Giving report on a shift change, cool. Headed out for a smoke break, cool. Asteroid headed toward earth, cool.

“That was a good conference,” he said.

“I guess.”

“You didn’t enjoy it?”

“It was fine,” she said, anxious to shut off this line of conversation. She closed her eyes and pictured herself on the couch with her carton of Chinese food.

“You should have come out with us,” he said, yawning.

“I was tired,” she said.

He waved a dismissive hand at her.

“You always say that,” Manny said. “You hardly ever go out with us. You’re such a homebody.”

This was true. If she wasn’t at work, she preferred to be at home. Out in the country with her dog and the animals and the farm and the trees. In her downtime, she liked to read and drink tea like an old lady. Sometimes, she felt like an old woman. She’d certainly suffered enough for one lifetime. She hoped that she wouldn’t have to endure any more heartache.

Either way, Lucy’s partying days were long behind her. She was thirty-nine years old and she didn’t bounce back from a twelve-hour shift like she used to. She envied the exuberance of her younger coworkers, many of whom she had by a decade or more. But that was how it went. You had your time in the sun, and then you moved out of its glare. Or more accurately, you were pushed out of its glare.

“I’m old and tired.”

A dismissive wave.

“I’m older than you!” he replied. “Seriously, Luce, it’s no good for you to just shut yourself off like that all the time. Anyway. We missed you. Had the best cheesesteak at four this morning!”

And that was Manny. Guy was even older than Lucy was. But he’d only been a nurse for three years, having spent years working as a paralegal for a real estate firm. Then he decided that nursing was his true calling and went through the bachelor’s degree program that the hospital offered. He was relatively new to the profession, but time did not care. Nursing was a tough job in your twenties, and he hadn’t gotten his license until he was almost forty. His downfall was coming sooner than he expected. Especially if he was up eating cheesesteaks at four in the morning.

“’Best cheesesteak in Philly’, they said.”

“I’m sure they all say that.”

“Man, it was good.”

“I’m sure your body will appreciate that,” she replied.

“My body is a temple,” he said. Then he leaned back and closed his eyes again.

She shook her head. Nurses and doctors were notoriously bad at taking care of themselves. She didn’t know if it was a middle finger to Death, the battle those in her profession were constantly fighting and losing, or the stress of the job itself, dealing with people who did not follow their advice or who ended up in her emergency room for the dumbest, most preventable reasons possible. Kids overdosing on prescription medication they had found in their parents’ closets. Young adults who hadn’t buckled their seatbelts rocketing through windshields. Gunshot victims were the hardest, especially the young victims. Toddlers who’d found the semi-automatic pistol their careless fathers almost certainly would have never used in self-defense and blown their faces off. She hated guns; she wasn’t sure if that it was despite the fact that she’d spent four years in the Army as a medic or because of it.

Stop, she thought.

You did what you could. You fixed the ones you could fix and you sent them on their way. And maybe they would learn their lesson and see that they’d gotten lucky this time, and change their ways and live a bit more carefully or get into rehab or always wear their seatbelt or pay a bit more attention to their kids and a bit less attention to their smartphones.

She set her attention back on her book, but once again, her focus faded after just a few sentences. Maybe it was the delivery system. Maybe she just wasn’t one for e-books, no matter how close they came to duplicating actual print with their electronic ink. Maybe if she had a print version of the novel, she would be farther along. Maybe she would even be enjoying it. She loved books; her house was swamped with them. She filled her bookcases as fast as her brother could build them for her.

She turned her gaze back out the window; the landscape rushing by took on a distinctly metropolitan feel as they drew closer to Washington. They were crossing the Anacostia River; Route 50 ran alongside the river, thick with lunch hour traffic. Waves of heat shimmered in the distance. It was another hellaciously hot day.

            One more chapter.

            She would finish one more chapter before they got to the station. Perhaps she’d bang out another chapter or two at home tonight, getting her closer to the end of a book that wasn’t just a book but award-winning literature.

            She glanced back down at the e-reader; the screen was blank. She hadn’t remembered turning it off, but the thing glitched from time to time. Another benefit of print books. You cracked one of those open and the words would be there every time. No battery to worry about. So she often forgot to charge up her electronic reader. To be fair, the device did have a long battery life, and so it was easy to forget that it did, in fact, have a battery. She slid the device back into her backpack. The author’s scintillating prose would just have to wait.

            Next to her, Manny snored.  

Boredom rippled through her. They were in that phase of the trip where you were almost there, so close, but not quite, which made that last bit stretch on interminably. Like that old math trick–if you kept halving the distance you had left to go, you would never get home. Around her, the other passengers appeared to become restless as well. Muted whispers became loud whispers. In fact, she had to admit, they really weren’t whispers at all.

The first hint of trouble was the uniformed train attendant virtually sprinting down the aisle toward the locomotive, which was six or seven cars ahead of theirs. He was a tall, thin man; he’d been quite jovial that morning, telling jokes, laughing as he’d scanned the passengers’ tickets.

He didn’t look jovial anymore.

As he bolted down the aisle, he did not make eye contact with anyone, his gaze focused on the pass-through to the next train car. Something about the look on his face had unnerved Lucy, sending a chill rippling through her. She wondered if a passenger was having a medical emergency. She rose out of her seat and looked around the train car. A number of animated discussions were underway.

In the row in front of Manny, catty corner from Lucy, was a young girl, maybe twelve years old, her nose in a book. A print book! Ha! A kid with more sense than Lucy. Next to her was an elderly black woman. They had boarded the train together; perhaps she was the girl’s grandmother.  

“Excuse me,” a voice said, startling Lucy from her daydreaming surveillance of her train car. A man’s face appeared above the seatback in front of her. He was handsome in a traditional sort of way. He wore a suit and had nice hair. A pair of black eyeglasses framed his face just so.

“Sorry to bother you,” he said, holding up his phone. “My phone just died, and my charger doesn’t seem to be working. Do you have one I can borrow?”

“Uh, yeah, let me see,” replied Lucy, digging into her bag. Her charger was connected to her phone; she detached it and handed it to the man.

“Thanks,” he said. “Just need to get enough juice to call my wife.”

Her gut twisted at that. Not because she had her eye on this man; it was more his life that she was eyeing. And not his actual life. The perfect version of his life—the one that he and his wife posted on social media. Maybe a life that she had dreamed up of whole cloth. The one that filtered out the tedium and boredom of everyday life. For all she knew, this man and his wife detested each other. But it was a life she had been deprived. It was a life she would never have. It was a life permanently scarred with tragedy, a gouge across her soul that would never heal.

He disappeared back into his seat. She lifted her phone to check her messages, which, to her surprise, was dark itself. Now that was weird. It was fully charged when she left the hotel this morning, and she had used it sparingly since boarding the train. She definitely had not turned it off.

Before she had time to process this newest development, a commotion at the front of the train car caught her attention. Another conductor, this one a petite Asian woman, had come into her train car, her arms extended, patting at the air with her hands, as if to tell everyone to quiet down.

“Heads down!” she screeched. “Heads down!”

A bolt of terror rocketed through Lucy as the train car erupted into panic.

As the woman passed her row, Lucy reached out and grabbed her by the arm.

“What’s happening?” Lucy asked.

The conductor reared back, trying to break free of the grip, but Lucy would not let go. She was at least eight inches taller than the conductor and outweighed her by fifty pounds.

“Let me go!”

“Just tell me what’s happening!” she barked.

The woman relaxed her gyrations and looked Lucy dead in the eye. Beside her, Manuel stirred awake, his eyes wide with confusion.

“The engineer can’t stop the train,” she said grimly. “Nothing’s working. We’re going to crash.”

Lucy let go of the woman as her words sank in. She disappeared into the next car, shouting her morbid warning.

“The hell did she just say?” Manuel said.

Lucy glanced out the window as the city rushed by in a flash. They were going at least seventy miles per hour.

“My God,” she whispered.

Chapter 1 of THE NOTHING MEN

CHAPTER ONE

They began calling numbers at an ungodly hour, in that sliver of night just before dawn when nothing good happened but bad things often did, not because they had to, but because they could.

Ben Sullivan had been dozing since midnight; the fatigue had finally closed in around him like a noose and left him hovering in that thin space between sleep and wakefulness. His body buzzed upon the call of each number, and when he finally heard his own, a loud, drawling NUMBER FOUR, laced with a Southern twang like good barbecue soaked in pepper vinegar, his eyes shot open and his heart began pounding like a coke-fueled hummingbird’s. He gently rubbed his eyes, ran his hands across his face, trying to massage some life back into his skin. The fear and stress had carved inside him deep canyons of exhaustion that would soon need to be filled with real sleep, but he didn’t have time for that now. He would sleep later.

“Here,” Ben called out as he staggered to his feet.

He pulled on the straps of his permanent companion, a haggard-looking blue backpack he’d carried during law school, now dirty, paper-thin, having lived up to its promised warranty and then some, in situations probably not envisioned by the good people at L.L. Bean. It held a pocketknife, two cans of ravioli, a canteen of water, some toiletries, a thin blanket, and his papers. Its straps had frayed, the zipper barely functioning. In other words, it was just hanging on. Like everything and everyone else.

They were in the parking lot of an abandoned shopping center in Short Pump, an unincorporated suburban community in Henrico County, just west of the city of Richmond, Virginia, camped out in a federal staging area known as the Cage. Years ago, the strip mall had been quilted together from a menu of suburban prerequisites, a mishmash of stand-alone fast-food joints, nail salons, and wireless phone stores. A huge Walmart at the southeastern tip had anchored the development in headier times. Now the one-acre parking lot served as a clearinghouse for government-sponsored job lotteries, swap meets, day-laborer pickups, and all manner of illicit commerce.

The U.S. Department of Reconstruction & Recovery had set up a cattle call in the southwest corner of the sprawling shopping center just outside an old Taco Bell restaurant. About three hundred people were packed into the Cage like hogs and not smelling much better. Portable spotlights ringed the perimeter, blasting the Cage with harsh sodium light from which there was no escape.

Despite the early hour, the air was swollen with humidity; it had been drizzling off and on all night. It was the sort of rain that seemed ready to burst, like an overripe piece of fruit, and wash away the stickiness. It never did, leaving you wanting, the itch unscratched, the sneeze un-sneezed. The sky simply perspired, the intermittent drip-drip-drip of the rain against the asphalt nothing short of maddening.

Ben had been in the Cage for sixteen hours now. It had been his luckiest break yet, finding out about the job fair before word of it had been announced on Freedom One. He’d been one of the first on site, scoring a very low lottery number, which meant that he’d be one of the first considered. The Department made its hires on the spot, and when all the slots were filled, that was that.

Thanks for playing, but you can return to your regularly scheduled programming of starving to death with your families.

The job lotteries, which started at four in the morning, were as organized as anything else these days, which was, to say, not very. They were first announced via Freedom One, the government-controlled communications network and then just as quickly by mouth. Hundreds of people lined up for each lottery, often for just a handful of job openings. Some days there were a dozen jobs; every now and again, you’d stumble across a job fair with thirty. The typical gig involved manual labor – debris cleanup, construction, body removal, the dirty work required after the closest thing the world had seen to total apocalypse since the asteroid had wiped out the dinosaurs.

Security was loosely maintained by a small platoon of Volunteers, the new federal security force that had been commissioned after the Panic ended. The lightly trained soldiers kept a disinterested eye on the corral; they usually didn’t get involved unless absolutely necessary, and the definition of “absolutely necessary” fluctuated from day to day, from platoon to platoon. The soldiers handed out lottery slips in a first-come, first-serve fashion starting twelve hours before the interviews began. When they ran out of slips, they locked the gates.

A pair of portable chemical toilets constituted the beginning and the end of the government-sponsored amenities, and those were normally rendered unusable within the first hour. Anyone was free to leave the pen, but if you left, you didn’t get back in. Abandoned spots fell to those on a waiting list, those ringing the pen like vultures.

As Ben wove through the waiting throngs of nameless, faceless strangers who just wanted to work again, he felt scores of eyes on him, the burning envy, the anguish, the hate of those holding higher lottery numbers, most of whom would leave today with nothing. He didn’t begrudge them these feelings because he’d felt them as well, but he wasn’t experiencing any survivor’s guilt either. You didn’t make it far these days by feeling sorry for other people.

The foreman nodded imperceptibly toward Ben before turning and making his way toward the small corrugated trailer at the north end of the cage. Ben hurried to catch up, falling in step behind the man. The foreman was a big fellow with an easy way about him, confident in his place in this new world.

“Your number?” he asked.

Ben handed him the slip of paper, stamped with the numeral 4, which had been issued to him upon his arrival at the camp. The man scanned it with a handheld electronic wand, and the machine emitted a satisfying beep upon confirming that Ben’s ticket was genuine.

“You got your papers, right?”

“Yes, right here,” he said, unzipping his backpack and removing the folder. He offered his papers toward the man, who simply waved them off.

“Wait until you’re inside.”

Ben closed the backpack, and they walked in silence as they covered the distance to the doublewide trailer. The aluminum siding glinted under the glare of the floodlights, the familiar U.S. Department of Reconstruction & Recovery logo emblazoned on the side. The ubiquitous seal, which had made its debut a few months after the Panic, consisted of a magnificent bald eagle in the foreground with a bright orange sun peeking out just behind its head. Ben had once wondered how they’d managed to come up with a logo so quickly, and he decided that maybe they’d had one all along, part of a contingency plan that had been drawn up, considered, revised, approved and then stuck in a drawer somewhere.

That is, at least, until they’d been faced with the question of What the hell do we do now?

Well, for starters, we’ve got this kick-ass logo we can use!

To his left stood the ruined shell of the Walmart, the store’s marquee still identifiable despite missing both letter A’s. A fire had consumed the building at some point, the edges of the doorways blackened with soot, as if smudged by the hands of a child giant. The burned-out chassis of an Army vehicle remained lodged in the front entrance. Its tires were gone, as was the canvas top. The devastation never got easier to look at, stark reminders of those terrible months three years ago when all seemed lost.

The foreman checked his watch as they reached the trailer. The place was quiet but for the rattle of an air-conditioner unit protruding from a side window like a cancerous growth. On the far side of the trailer, two yellow school buses bearing the words U.S. Department of Reconstruction & Recovery idled in the old drive-thru lane. A pair of soldiers walked the perimeter of the trailer, their rifles gripped tightly in their hands.

“You’ve got another five minutes or so,” he said. He lit a cigarette.

Ben pressed down each of his thumbnails firmly, a nervous tic of his. He took a deep breath and let it out slowly.

“Nervous?” the foreman asked, blowing smoke out through his nostrils. 

“Yeah,” Ben said. “First time I’ve made it inside.” 

“Just try and relax,” he said. “They’re looking for healthy, stable people for these jobs. There’s two dozen openings today. As long as you don’t piss yourself in there, you should be fine.”

Ben nodded.

“What’d you do before?” the man asked. 

“Nothing,” he said. “I haven’t worked in a while.”

“I mean before before,” the foreman said. “Before the Panic.”

Ben tensed. 

“Oh, before before,” he said. “Right.”

Before before, Ben thought. When America had spent its days watching YouTube videos and going to farmers’ markets and arguing about climate change.

Before.

“Lawyer,” Ben said, hoping the guy would drop this line of discussion. He didn’t want to talk about the Before Before or the Time Before That either. He spent enough time thinking about it. Most days it was all he thought about.

The foreman seemed to find this amusing and began cackling with delight, a big explosive thing that burst out of him, as if Ben had stepped on a laugh mine. He dropped his cigarette to the ground and crushed it with his boot.

“Damn lawyers,” he said, a sudden edge to his voice. “Bet you’re not used to this kind of cattle call. Golf and cocktail parties and strippers for you lawyer types.”

“No, sir,” Ben said, his heart clapping against his ribs like a frightened puppy trapped in a cage. He was terrified that he was blowing his chance. “I just want to work.”

Just then, the door to the trailer burst open, and a soldier emerged, dragging a thin man behind him. The man’s name was Milton; he’d gotten to the site a few moments before Ben and had drawn Ticket No. 3. He was a nervous fellow, twitchy, talking nonstop until the interviews had begun. The soldier, the name Kendrick stitched to his fatigues, had Milton by the lapels of his dirty work shirt. With his M4 rifle slung over his shoulder, Kendrick dragged Milton, who had let his legs go limp and seemed hell-bent on making his eviction from the trailer as complicated as possible, down the steps.

“Hey, fuck you!” Milton was barking, twisting and turning like a child refusing his medicine. “A monkey can do this job! I just want to work! Look at me!”

“No Reds,” Kendrick said. “You know the rules.”

The soldiers outside rushed over to help their comrade, but before they could get there, Milton cleared his throat and fired a loogie directly into the soldier’s face. That was that. With fresh spittle on his face, rife with only-God-knew-what pathogens, Kendrick unslung his rifle and drove the butt of the rifle directly into Milton’s stomach, doubling the man over. As Milton struggled back to his feet, moaning, Kendrick rotated the rifle and aimed it directly at him.

“Take this asshole into custody,” Kendrick barked. He turned his attention back to Milton. “Get your hands up.”

“You ruptured my spleen!”

The foreman took Ben by the arm and the two of them eased away from the scene. Not breathing, not making a sound, Ben stared at the barrel of Kendrick’s weapon, a steel snake hovering in the air. They were no more than ten feet away from Milton, just a few steps behind the soldier.

Milton remained rooted to his spot, not giving an inch. He looked each of the three soldiers in the face, and then he swung his gaze over toward Ben. Their eyes locked, and in Milton’s, Ben saw nothing. Just a total absence of light and hope and anything that once might have been good and pure in his life. Ben blinked and looked away, focusing his gaze on one of the school buses. This wasn’t his problem.

But from the corner of his eye, he saw Milton’s shoulders sag, about as perfect a case study in body language as there ever was, a man who’d just watched his very last straw flutter away, a child’s helium balloon caught on a thermal and disappearing from sight.

Milton’s body tensed, leaning forward ever so slightly, and then he bull-rushed the soldier, a manic howl erupting from the depths. Kendrick squeezed off a short burst from his rifle directly into Milton’s chest. It was a little thing, but a terrible thing all the same. A dark stain bloomed on Milton’s shirt like a dark flower portending an ominous future. He crashed to the ground in a heap, and he died there in the parking lot of a Taco Bell. Behind him, the crowd buzzed loudly, but they remained docile, conscious of the heavy guns that would be loosed upon them at the slightest provocation.

“Clean this piece of shit up,” Kendrick said to his comrades. Then he looked over at Ben and said: “You. Let’s go.”

Ben could barely move, his eyes locked on Milton’s body. He willed himself to take a step forward, and Kendrick searched him, pawing through his bag, confiscating his knife.

“Well, counselor,” the foreman said, his voice devoid of emotion, as though he watched soldiers kill unarmed civilians every day. Hey, perhaps he did. He clapped Ben on the shoulder. “You’re up.”

Ben’s knees nearly buckled with fear as he climbed the three steps to the screen door, Kendrick trailing close behind. He took a deep breath and briefly considered hauling ass out of there, but he couldn’t. He’d come too far. He’d invested too much. And certainly, he was better prepared than Milton had been.

It was time to push his chips to the center of the table.

Chapter 1 of ANOMALY

CHAPTER 1

Claire Hamilton stared at the time on her phone, wondering how only four minutes had elapsed since her twins’ soccer game had kicked off. She had held off checking the clock for as long as she could, certain that she could make it, if not all the way to halftime, then pretty close to it before checking. And when she had finally looked, when it felt like hours had gone by, that the referee would be reaching for her whistle at any moment, Claire’s stomach flipped. Nope. Four minutes, each second elongated by the stiff wind and cold drizzle pelting down on her and the other parents jamming the sideline of Field No. 9 at the Seattle Strikers soccer facility.

The clock stared back at her unflinchingly, not caring at all. 

Time did not lie.

A mere four minutes had passed.

She did the math in her head. Eight minutes left in the first half, plus the full twelve of the second, plus that wind coming in hard off the Elliott Bay that had her teeth chattering. She was glad she’d worn so many layers; she’d been burned too many times on that score. Today she wore flannel long johns underneath her jeans, two long-sleeve shirts, a sweatshirt, and a heavy coat. A wool University of Washington cap kept her head warm. This wasn’t her first rodeo. 

It wasn’t that she didn’t enjoy watching her six-year-olds, Hugo and Miranda, play soccer. She did, really and truly. She loved how they looked in their little black shorts and turquoise jerseys and tiny little shin guards and how they tried so hard, well, Miranda a little harder than Hugo. And typically, she wouldn’t have it any other way. There would always be time to sip coffee and read the paper. Watching her kids just be kids filled her with a kind of joy she once believed would not be possible for her. But watching a bunch of first graders clump around a ball like malignant cells on a raw Saturday morning in October was not as appealing as, say, lying in bed with those kids and reading the Seattle Post-Intelligencer as the rain pattered against their roof and windows.

And when she’d called the weather hotline that morning, hopeful that the game would be canceled, her heart sank a little as the recorded voice had pleasantly informed her that all fields were open. Even the kids had been disappointed when she told them to hurry up, they needed to go. Time waited for no man or child. Their team, the Hurricanes, would be taking on the Tornadoes precisely at eight, rain or no rain.

Her phone buzzed in her hand. A text from her husband Jack. Like many of the other parents, she kept one eye on the field and the other on her screen.

How’s the game?

She typed a reply.

Cold.

What’s the score?

No clue LOL

She glanced up at the sideline, where her daughter was getting ready to throw the ball in. It never stopped being adorable, her tiny Miranda holding that ball over her head as she scanned the field while fielding suggestions from her coach and about twenty well-meaning but misguided parents. The tip of Miranda’s tongue protruded from her mouth just so, as it often did when she was deep in concentration. With all her might, she flung the ball into play; it traveled about four feet and landed right at the shoe of an opposing player, who proceeded to kick it right back out of bounds. Circle of life.

Claire’s phone buzzed again.

This coffee is good.

Her eyes narrowed. She had forgotten her travel mug on the counter in their rush out the door.

You better save me some.

She received the winking-eye emoji in return.

He would save her some, no doubt about that. Jack, a headmaster at an all-boys’ private school just outside Seattle, was the husband who got up and made the coffee, brought it to her in bed every morning because she was not a morning person and the aroma of the fancy shit he brewed was enough to get her stirring. He brewed it, dressed it up just the way she liked, two sugars and a splash of creamer, brought it to their bedroom. How lovely it would be to sit up in bed and lazily enjoy her coffee, but he drove a hard bargain. The deal was that she couldn’t have a sip until both her feet were on the floor. It wasn’t a bad deal.

It was, in fact, an excellent deal she had ended up with, and so it always flummoxed her to become hyper-aware of the locket hanging from her neck at the very moment she counted her blessings and good fortune. Even now, her hand had drifted to the hollow of her throat, tracing the outline of the necklace held snugly in place by her sweatshirt. The locket had a funny way of doing that. She could take it off and close that door forever, but that didn’t seem right.

“Big game tonight,” she heard someone say.

She glanced to her right; another parent - maybe Clementine’s father? She could never keep all the names straight - was pointing at the cap on her head. They were already six weeks into the season, but she had barely gotten to know any of the other parents. They seemed nice enough. But there was just never enough time to establish a real connection with these people, so why bother. It was a little depressing, to be honest, to know you were at that stage of life where you didn’t want to meet anyone new. There just wasn’t enough time.

“Oh, right, the game,” Claire said.

The University of Washington was playing host to its rival, the Oregon Ducks, that night under the lights. Claire didn’t care for football, but Jack was a die-hard Ducks fan, having earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees there.

“If we can win this one, we’re in the driver’s seat for the Pac-12 title,” said the man. 

“I’m sorry, what was your name again?” Claire said.

“Jason,” he said. “I’m Clementine’s dad.” 

“Claire,” she replied. “The twins.”

“Nice to meet you. Miranda is quite the spitfire.”

“Thank you,” Claire said.

“So what year did you graduate?”

“Actually, I’m a professor there,” Claire said.

“Oh. What do you teach?”

“Astrobiology,” she said.

“What’s that?”

“It’s the study of the origin and evolution of life, both here on Earth and elsewhere,” she said, awaiting the inevitable reaction to her canned response. People meant well when they learned what her field of study was, and there really was intellectual curiosity percolating. All good things. But it always came back to the same thing.

“You mean like aliens?”

She smiled.

“Haven’t found any yet.”

“You think there are?”

“I do,” she said, and she meant it. “The universe is simply too big for us to be the only life form. We’ve just started to scratch the surface of what there is to know.”

“Wow,” came the reply.

“That being said, I think there’s a good chance we never find it.”

“Why?”

“Same reason. Because the universe is so big.”

“Then why study it?”

“Someone needs to set the table,” she said. “Future scientists will make breakthroughs, but they need something to build on.”

“Be pretty cool if we did,” he said.

“Yeah,” Claire said, with an eye toward agreeability. She still wasn’t sure she ever wanted to make contact. She didn’t know if the Jasons of the world could handle it because she wasn’t even sure that the Claires of the world could handle it.

“Well, good luck,” Jason said, as though she had signed up to run a half-marathon rather than devote her life to perhaps the most important scientific work in human history.

“Thanks,” she said, and the conversation fizzled out.

A ripple of depression. Interest in her work, in the sciences generally, in what made it all go was often shallow, unless, of course, the alien thing came up. She did believe there was life out there, somewhere, because it simply did not make sense otherwise. The firm belief always amused her, this faith she had, a woman of science and logic and reason. Claire had left the church long ago and struggled when talk turned to God and blessings and prayers and all of it. She could not, for the life of her, understand how people took on faith alone the existence of an all-powerful, all-knowing deity; yet, she believed just as heartily in the existence of life beyond her home planet.

On the plus side, this little conversation had eaten up a good bit of time. Just as her fingers had stiffened into frozen rictus and her cheeks burned with wind, the referee blew her whistle to signal the end of the game. While another mom handed out snacks, Claire began packing away her chair, noticing that it was probably time to replace it. The mesh had torn and the metal rods were orange with rust. It seemed like they had just bought these chairs, but that’s the way time worked. Everything in her life always seemed like it had just happened. Momentous and mundane, events raced into the past while the memory of them burned brightly in your mind. Time was the enemy of all things.

It was a bit of a struggle to feed the folded-up chair into the fraying bag, leaving her to wonder why they didn’t make the opening for the bag just a few inches bigger in diameter. The cinch rope always got hung up on a chair leg and it took forever to get it just right. As she slung the chair bag over her shoulder, her twins, Miranda and Hugo, came bounding toward her, their sweet faces warm and pink in the cold. Steam curled off their sweaty heads.

“Mommy, did you see me?” each of them said, almost simultaneously.

“I did, guys, you were both so awesome.”

“Did we win?” Miranda asked. “I bet we won.”

“You played like a team,” replied Claire, not having the first damn clue who won the game. They didn’t even keep score at this age. Well, not officially at least. There was one dad who kept score religiously and yelled at his son after each game. As the old saying went, if you don’t know who the asshole is, it’s you. Always getting on his kid about his positioning, about his hustle, and the kid would stand there, his face holding together like porcelain that may or may not shatter. More often than not, it held. She didn’t know where the kid found the fortitude not to break down crying, but he did. He would either become a billionaire or a serial killer. Only time would tell.

“You always say that,” Miranda cut in. “Can we have our snack now?”

“No,” Claire said. She never understood the purpose of post-game snacks. Burn two hundred calories during the game and then inhale four hundred calories worth of fruit gummies. “You guys ate before we left.”

“Aww,” whined Hugo.

“Let’s go, guys.”

They fell in line behind her as they made their way to the car. It was Saturday, and they had nothing else scheduled for the day, which was both a curse and a blessing. At six, the twins were right at that age where they could entertain themselves for a bit, but just for a bit. They got along well enough, but rarely a day went by without some pitched battle being waged between them.

It had started drizzling, and rain was forecast through tonight, which meant that it would be an indoor type day. They could bundle up, drink hot chocolate, do that hygge thing they did in Norway. Curl up with blankets and books and movies. Feed them chicken nuggets and then order Chinese for her and Jack while they watched the game. Hugo loved watching football with his daddy.

“Everyone strapped in?” she asked after she had loaded the chair in the back of the Toyota Highlander.

“Yes, Mommy,” they replied, again almost in unison.

Both were able to buckle themselves into their car seats, which turned out to be a more significant milestone than she had ever imagined. When they were small, it had taken a good ten minutes to get them strapped in; it had been one of those things that ate up far more time than you realized, little temporal vampires. That’s what they didn’t tell you about parenting, how long even the littlest things took. Oh, your kid is dressed? Bravo. How about another ten minutes fighting about shoes and then another twenty when your son decides to change his shirt for the third time?

Every drive with the twins was different; sometimes they bickered, and sometimes they got along. Hugo was the cut-up of the pair and every once in a while he would have his sister laughing so hard she was crying. Claire stole a peek in the rearview mirror and saw Hugo making weird scrunched-up faces at Miranda, who was trying very hard to ignore him.

About halfway home, her phone rang.

“It’s Daddy!” cried out Hugo, leaning forward to catch a glimpse at the Caller ID on the vehicle’s information screen.

She clicked open the line using the button on the steering wheel.

“You save some of that coffee for me?” she asked.

“Where are you?” he asked, ignoring her question.

The tone of his voice chilled her more than the blustery conditions at the field had. If she hadn’t had the kids in the car with her, she would’ve thought he was calling to tell her something had happened to one of them, that Hugo had vanished from the park, that Miranda had choked on a piece of hot dog and she’d better get to the hospital as soon as she could. It was the worst thing about being a parent, the constant worry that gnawed at you like the ocean eating away at the beach. Anytime the phone rang and she wasn’t with them, her heart froze, her mind racing to the worst-case scenario. It felt like she was falling, her stomach pushed up against her rib cage until she confirmed otherwise.

“What’s wrong?”

“When will you be home?”

“Ten minutes,” she said, noticing a slight tremor in her voice. “What happened?”

“You’ve got visitors.”

Her heart fluttered.

“Who?”

“NASA.”

Claire struggled to keep her focus on the road. It had been a long time since she’d spoken to anyone from NASA. More than a decade.

“What do they want?” she asked.

“They said it’s about Peter.”

Peter.

Welcome!

Howdy! Welcome to my new website and the first post here. 

I'll try to update on a somewhat regular basis. 

Let's see.. 

Currently reading SICK IN THE HEAD by Judd Apatow. 

Have some fiction to get to soon. 

Also working on revisions for my new book, but it's not going very smoothly right now. More on that later.