Thunder and Acid: A Post-Apocalyptic Survival Thriller Read online

  THUNDER AND ACID

  A POST-APOCALYPTIC SURVIVAL THRILLER

  HARLEY TATE

  Copyright © 2022 by Harley Tate. Cover and internal design © by Harley Tate. Cover image copyright © Deposit Photos 2022.

  All rights reserved.

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

  The use of stock photo images in this e-book in no way imply that the models depicted personally endorse, condone, or engage in the fictional conduct depicted herein, expressly or by implication. The person(s) depicted are models and are used for illustrative purposes only.

  CONTENTS

  Thunder and Acid

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Epilogue

  Also by Harley Tate

  Acknowledgments

  About Harley Tate

  THUNDER AND ACID

  FALLING SKIES BOOK TWO

  Falling temperatures and acid rain. A sanctuary that’s not all it seems. A family caught in the middle.

  Welcome to Falling Skies. Do you have what it takes to survive?

  After an asteroid crashes into the Atlantic Ocean, Caleb Machert risks everything to transport his family to safety. But two weeks later, he’s having doubts. Are the soldiers he’s working alongside rebuilding the United States, or tearing it apart?

  Elizabeth spends her days prepping food, cleaning toilets, and failing to make friends. While hauling recycling, she overhears a soldier blaming her husband for a failed mission. If the general believes it, then Caleb’s in grave danger.

  Reeling from an unexpected loss, Lana is determined to never let anyone down again. She’s intent on becoming not just a soldier, but a fighting machine. When faced with a do or die situation, her training is put to the test. This time, she might pay the ultimate price.

  It’s a race against the clock for the Macherts before freezing temperatures and acid rain are the least of their problems.

  Thunder and Acid is book two in Falling Skies, a post-apocalyptic thriller series following ordinary people struggling to survive when a meteor strike plunges the United States into chaos.

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  PROLOGUE

  Cheyenne Mountain Complex

  Colorado Springs, CO

  Monday, June 14th 10:05 am MST

  Thomas Daniels ran his campaign for President of the United States as a man of God. Raised Methodist, he attended church regularly for most of his life. But if he was honest with himself, he’d only ever been marginally religious. It was family tradition, that was all.

  He believed in the distant sort of way that plenty of people did, but wouldn’t have called himself devout. Not the way his constituents were led to believe.

  There were times on the campaign trail when he had misgivings about his proclamations of faith, crafted by some speech writer with polling data in mind. Would God bring him low for his exaggerations? Would he be outed as a fraud? But it never happened, he was elected, and was a good president.

  According to the polls, anyway.

  Daniels stared into the middle distance, somewhere between the end of the desk and the concrete wall of his presidential office in Cheyenne Mountain. Maybe Hell wasn’t a metaphor. Maybe all those speeches where he proclaimed his belief in an active God weren’t exaggerations at all. Maybe God really did take a personal hand in mortal affairs and humanity had been found wanting in His judgment.

  Hell, a pastor explained to him once, was not an eternal existence of pain and agony, not a lake of fire, or a pit of endless torture. Instead, it was simply the absence of God. A place where God’s light couldn’t reach. A place of unending hopelessness.

  “…nearly fifteen degrees in the last two weeks, and temperatures are still falling nationwide.” The voice of President Daniels’s chief of staff filtered into his consciousness. “Mister President?”

  Daniels blinked away his distraction and turned to the younger man. “I’m listening, Pete.”

  Pete Camby closed the folder in his hands and laid it on the desk between them. Daniels reached across the plain aluminum. With no more gravitas than a child’s desk in an elementary classroom, his current desk was a poor substitute for the desk in the Oval Office.

  Made from oak timbers of the British ship H.M.S. Resolute as a gift to President Hayes from Queen Victoria in 1880, the Resolute Desk as it came to be known, held a special place in Daniels’s heart. He used to run his hands over the carved wood and imagine countless past presidents doing the same. It gave him strength. Grounding. Gravitas.

  He palmed the cold metal and shrank inside.

  “Would you like me to have some coffee brought, sir? If you’ll forgive me, you seem…”

  Weak? He exhaled when Pete didn’t continue. “Coffee would be fine, thank you.”

  Pete muttered the order into his radio before leveling a long, concerned look on him.

  Daniels leaned back in his chair. “Say what’s on your mind. I need your candidness.”

  Pete hesitated a moment, but Daniels picked him as campaign manager for the same reasons he made an excellent chief of staff. He considered his words before he spoke, and what he said was always worth hearing.

  “One of the most important jobs you have at the moment, sir,” Pete explained carefully, “is to not get mired in despair. There’s not a whole lot keeping our people together right now—the people here, in this facility, I mean—except their faith in your leadership.”

  “Oh, is that my most important job?” Daniels rubbed the bridge of his nose where the longest headache of his life had taken up permanent residence. “Here I thought it was to carve out policy for a new kind of world none of us ever expected to live in. Silly me.”

  Pete’s jaw flexed, but he recognized his friend’s dry humor even if it was darker than usual. “One of,” he repeated. “I’m only mentioning it because people are beginning to notice.”

  Daniels turned away from his old friend. Of course, they were noticing. How could they not? Every day was a new report, worse than the last. The only bit of good news had been when the ash stopped falling and rain cleared the air enough that Americans could finally take a full breath outside without suffocating.

  But the rain kept falling. And the sky began to shake with thunderous fury. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration projected storms on the horizon unlike anything seen in human history: lightning storms lasting days, windstorms scraping entire towns off the map, off-the-chart tornados. Already, hurricanes relentlessly pummeled the east coast with no sign of slowing.

  And the cold… the cold was coming.

  “Then my anger shall be kindled a
gainst them in that day,” Daniels began, his voice soft and strained, “and I will forsake them, and I will hide my face from them, and they shall be devoured, and many evils and troubles shall befall them; so that they will say in that day, Are not these evils come upon us, because our God is not among us?”

  The lines around Pete’s mouth deepened as his brow furrowed. “Psalms?”

  “Deuteronomy.” He shook his head, mystified at his ability to recall the verse after all this time. “Funny what sticks in your head when you’re not paying attention. I think I first heard that when I was sixteen.”

  “With all due respect,” Pete offered as he raised his eyes again, “God didn’t do this. It was just a random act of nature. One that’s happened before, several times, and one that will almost certainly happen again. This isn’t some kind of punishment. It’s a disaster, and one that we’ll get through. One that we must get through. But it will be a lot harder if you lose hope.”

  “I haven’t lost hope.” Daniels meant every word. “I’m just a little maudlin, Pete. You’ve got to indulge me that. At least in private.”

  “Yes, sir,” Pete agreed, as the door to the office opened, and Lieutenant Marcus Yaeger entered with a mug. Pete waved him over. “Come on in, Lieutenant.”

  For the few seconds that it took to deliver the drink, Daniels ensured that he didn’t look hopeless or tired. He squared his shoulders, straightened his back, and plastered the calm, competent expression he’d mastered way back on the debate stage in college all over his face.

  He accepted the mug from the young Lieutenant with a grateful nod. “I do appreciate it, Marcus.” The part of his mind that had spent thirty years playing politics shuffled automatically through a mental dossier on the man and plucked out the necessary information. “How’s Rosalind doing lately? I don’t think I’ve asked in a few days. She was having some respiratory problems before, was she not?”

  Lieutenant Yaeger’s eyes lit up somewhat, and he smiled slightly at the mention of his wife. “She’s doing better, sir. It was just a cold, the doc said. Nothing serious.”

  “You let her know I’m glad to hear that.” Daniels sipped the coffee before he nodded approval and smiled up at the Lieutenant. “This is just perfect. Exactly what I needed.”

  Pete dismissed the man and turned to Daniels with a half-smile as he retrieved the folder from the desk and opened it again.

  “What’s that grin for?”

  “I’m just reminded why I agreed to manage your campaign for congress all those years ago. And why I’m glad to serve with you now, Tom.” After a moment, his smile fell, and his eyes grew serious.

  Back to business. Daniels waved him on. “Go ahead.”

  Instead of reading from the folder, Pete lowered his voice slightly, and glanced at the closed door to the office. “The people who have noticed your… maudlin mood, are the same ones saying that you’re too nervous to act decisively. They want more action from you. A show of strength. Madame Speaker has been particularly insistent.”

  “They want me to declare martial law,” the president clarified. Two weeks before, the mere thought boiled his blood. Now it just made him tired.

  Pete glanced down at the folder, flipped the page, and licked his lips. “We’ve lost contact with a number of rescue operations, communications outposts, and checkpoints. Most of them are in the Appalachian Mountain region, right around where North Carolina, Virginia, and Tennessee meet.”

  “Weather related? It’s one of the hardest hit areas due to the impact. Weren’t there wildfires at the beginning?”

  Pete nodded. “Yes, and there are still some fires as far as our latest intelligence shows. But we were in contact with several a few days ago, using the radio-satellite relay system we patched together. To our knowledge, that system is still functioning.”

  “Who do we still have contact with out there?”

  “I can find out from General Ainsworth.”

  “Do that,” Daniels agreed. “And see who he can send out to investigate. Intelligence gathering only. Make that clear; I just want to know what’s going on out there.”

  Pete scribbled a note. “He’s going to ask about authorization of force. In the event of… trouble.”

  He’d been going to say in the event of insurgents, Daniels knew. That word had been gaining traction over the past couple of weeks. All around the country, amid the deepening cold, and the storms, and the fires, a dozen little fiefdoms had tried to take root.

  A portion of Chicago, St. Louis, even one in Colorado were all attempting to create order out of chaos. At this point, even President Daniels had to admit that the people leading these various communities sounded more and more like would-be warlords.

  Martial law would only make it worse. He understood the impulse, the need to clamp down and force order to happen. It was the same impulse a parent had when confronted with an unruly child. But that kind of paternalism did more harm than good. He believed that. He’d seen it happen before in other nations and knew of dozens of other times it had failed throughout history.

  Daniels leaned forward and curled a fist above the cold metal desktop. “Make it clear to the general that no force is authorized until we have a better understanding of what is happening. Even if it’s another militia—observe and report only. Give Ainsworth an inch and he’ll take ten miles but only admit to three of them. I’m not about to let him off the leash.”

  Pete’s lips thinned, and he made another note before turning the page. “Speaking of militias, we’ve made inroads with the group outside Jackson, Wyoming. They’re asking for…”

  Daniels listened patiently to the rest of the report, managing to keep his attention focused for the most part.

  But the more he heard, the more a weight settled on his shoulders, heavier, somehow, than when he was sworn into office. And he couldn’t help himself from thinking of another verse. One that came unbidden to his thoughts. Part of a Psalm that his grandmother from the Pentecostal side of the family had taught him.

  Answer me quickly, O Lord, my spirit fails, do not hide Your face from me, or I will become like those who go down to the pit.

  He only hoped they weren’t there yet, and there was still time to return to grace.

  CHAPTER ONE

  LERLAINE

  Piney Creek Road, Lansing, NC

  Monday, June 14th 3:57pm EST

  The last can of baked beans weighed heavy in Lerlaine Cobb’s hands. Tears skidded down her dry cheeks as she stared at the empty cabinets. Her shoulders shook. Pain spread across her chest as she muffled her sobs, hiding from her two boys in the kitchen.

  Maddox wailed from the living room, globs of snot bubbling across his upper lip before dribbling down his chin. At three years old, he was too young to understand the ache deep in his belly. Hunger pains. At the first high-pitched wail, she’d retreated into the kitchen—run from him, if she was being honest—because there was precious little holding her together these days. He didn’t need to see her falling apart.

  Lerlaine stole a glance at the bouncy seat resting on the floor. Hunter wasn’t crying, and in a way, that was worse. Ten months old were supposed to cry when they were hungry. But after her milk dried up and the store ran out of formula…

  He was weak and getting weaker.

  One can of beans. Half a canister of dry formula. The water ran for a while, pumped from the shared well out back. But then the ground shook in a quake strong enough to collapse the whole dang house and the tap hadn’t run after that. She eyed the half a jug of water on the counter through her tears.

  Enough of that. Get it together.

  She wiped her eyes and ran a tongue across her dry lips as she snatched the can opener off the counter. Her hands moved automatically, almost numb, and the sound of shearing metal hurt her ears. Everything was painful now.

  When the sky lit with streaks of fire, then the ash rained down, and the wind picked up and flattened half the town, she’d thought God favored her little
family somehow. That the blood of Jesus Christ had washed over them in their sleep and spared them. It seemed like a miracle.

  Almost nothing in Lansing survived, but there she was—her windows boarded up and her roof patched with some old plywood from the shed, but otherwise intact. She’d made it. Her children had made it.

  Hurricanes pummeled the coast her entire life. They’d be on the news a few times a year—this or that city flooded, houses destroyed, whole towns sometimes. Inland towns full of displaced people, strangers whose whole lives were destroyed in an instant; in one terrible, hellish moment, everything was gone.

  But then someone showed up. FEMA, the Red Cross, the national guard. Neighbors and volunteers. People flooded in as the flood water receded, cleared the wreckage, and made way for rebuilding to begin. For weeks and weeks, sometimes months, it was all that was on the news—Small-town America, still a mess, but getting better. Story at ten.

  After the miracle, after the rocks and the fire and the wind and the awful ash that had covered everything and choked the air… After the electricity failed, and the water stopped flowing, she’d told herself that if she just waited, they would come.

  All those helpers and heroes always on the news—they would come, and she would be saved. Someone would help her rebuild. She would help others rebuild. They would tell their story on the nightly news of survival and optimism. Of hope against all odds. Of salvation.