When humanity ends a pos.., p.1
When Humanity Ends: A Post Apocalypse EMP Thriller, page 1
WHEN HUMANITY ENDS
AFTER IT TURNS DARK BOOK TWO
JACK HUNT
DIRECT RESPONSE PUBLISHING
Copyright © 2022 by Jack Hunt
All rights reserved.
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WHEN HUMANITY ENDS: AFTER IT TURNS DARK Book Two is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
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After it Turns Dark series
When the World Turns Dark
When Humanity Ends
Book 3 Coming March 2022
The Great Dying series
Extinct
Primal
Species
A Powerless World series
Escape the Breakdown
Survive the Lawless
Defend the Homestead
Outlive the Darkness
Evade the Ruthless
Outlaws of the Midwest series
Chaos Erupts
Panic Ensues
Havoc Endures
The Cyber Apocalypse series
As Our World Ends
As Our World Falls
As Our World Burns
The Agora Virus series
Phobia
Anxiety
Strain
The War Buds series
War Buds 1
War Buds 2
War Buds 3
Camp Zero series
State of Panic
State of Shock
State of Decay
Renegades series
The Renegades
The Renegades Book 2: Aftermath
The Renegades Book 3: Fortress
The Renegades Book 4: Colony
The Renegades Book 5: United
The Wild Ones Duology
The Wild Ones Book 1
The Wild Ones Book 2
The EMP Survival series
Days of Panic
Days of Chaos
Days of Danger
Days of Terror
Against All Odds Duology
As We Fall
As We Break
The Amygdala Syndrome Duology
Unstable
Unhinged
Survival Rules series
Rules of Survival
Rules of Conflict
Rules of Darkness
Rules of Engagement
Lone Survivor series
All That Remains
All That Survives
All That Escapes
All That Rises
Single Novels
Blackout
Defiant
Darkest Hour
Final Impact
The Year Without Summer
The Last Storm
The Last Magician
The Lookout
Class of 1989
Out of the Wild
The Aging
Mavericks: Hunters Moon
Killing Time
CONTENTS
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
A Plea
VIP Readers Team
About the Author
1
Chattanooga, Tennessee
Gambling was his drug of choice, and it had damn well nearly killed him.
Admittedly it was his downfall, but now it would save him, and for once in his pitiful life, there was no way he could lose. Unlike watching a white ball ping between red and black on a roulette wheel with no idea of where it would land, Tommy Sheridan could see the outcome.
He held the winning number.
And this time, he would swoop in and clean up before anyone else would.
In a way, his life could be measured before and after prison. He liked to think that his brain worked differently from the average joe’s. Most weighed gambling by loss and gain, but to him, it was all numbers. A loss here, a gain there, one up, two down. For every loss he encountered, he always knew the odds would eventually swing in his favor. After embarking on a crazy losing streak that landed him in jail for three years, he figured that it was only a matter of time before the pendulum swung the other way.
It had, in the form of a minimum wage job he hated and an event that had seen multiple storms and an EMP take down the power grid. Word soon spread — through the grapevine — that no country had been spared. Who was behind it? It was hard to know. Solving that mystery required answering another question.
Who had the most to gain?
For him, he didn’t give a crap who started it, countries had been picking fights with one another since the history of mankind — like children in a sandbox, kicking sand in each other’s face, each one as childish as the next, each one justifying their reasons so they could sleep better at night.
None of it mattered in the grand scheme of things, especially when all humanity cared about now was figuring out where their next meal would come from.
And he held the answer, at least for a select few.
Yep, he was ahead of the curve.
The light-bulb moment had struck Tommy while standing in the storage area of Food City. It was the only job he was able to get fresh out of the can. And what a gig it was. It was humiliating at the age of forty-two to take orders from some wet-behind-the-ears kid, especially when before going inside, he’d been sitting on a pile of money.
After prison he had nothing.
Not only that, he owed big-time. Protection on the inside wasn’t cheap.
Eighty thousand dollars.
It was money he didn’t have but Vladimir didn’t care. If he didn’t receive it by the end of the day, his life would be over. Could he have run? Sure, but Vladimir would find him. Hide? He could do that but Vladimir’s street dogs would eventually sniff him out. No, there was only one way out of debt and that was to pay.
And pay he would at the cost of others.
It was by far the biggest gamble he’d ever taken.
In the light of day, Tommy eyed the countless brown boxes inside the 10 x 15 storage unit like they were gold. Right then, they were. If caught, he knew his actions would buy him a one-way ticket to prison with no chance of getting out, but with the grid down, no transportation, and stores being looted, his theft in the late hours of the evening went unnoticed.
As an employee of Food City, he’d taken it upon himself to lighten their load with one single purpose in mind — exploiting those in need to get out from underneath the debt. He’d managed to dodge Vladimir’s goons for the past few days but he knew they’d eventually catch up to him. That’s why he’d been spending his time moving all of this.
The logic was simple.
The average American family had less than ten days’ worth of food on hand. As such, household supplies would be hard to come by. He’d seen it. With the grid down, ATMs and banks were no longer accessible. Within days, people swooped in and cleared the shelves, paying with whatever loose cash they had on hand. Those were the lucky few. The proactive. They pillaged stores like Vikings, taking whatever they could find before stores posted signs to limit how many items could be in one order. The next group of people, well, they took to looting or stealing what others had outside the store. And the rest, well they were just naïve to think that the government would save them.
For most it was a nightmare; for him, survival was regular life.
He’d been on his own since the age of eighteen when he’d moved out of the Black Hills of South Dakota. He wanted to pave his way, prove himself, and show that he wasn’t a giant screw-up. The next twenty years, he’d failed to deliver on that promise going so far as to take his sister Laura and his parents for a ride to the combined bill of fifty grand. That had pained him more than any debt he’d owed in the past.
But now he had a chance to make it right.
But first, he needed to be free from Vladimir and that’s what this storage unit was all about. After learning about an older truck working in his city, he’d broken in, hot-wired it, and brought it around the back of Food City. He loaded up as much as he could and took it to a storage unit.
Of course, he couldn’t have done it alone. No, he’d managed to sucker in his only friend, fellow employee, Marcus Callaway.
Marcus was a blond hippie whose only aspiration before the grid went down was to earn enough money to buy a PS5 and an overpriced gamer’s chair while living in his mom’s basement.
The two of them stood in the 10 x 15 unit, gawking at boxes of ramen noodles, rice, pasta, and cans upon cans of food.
“Are you sure this is going to work?” Marcus asked.
“Sure. Have a little faith.”
Of course, he had no idea whether people would fork over the kind of money he would ask for — triple the normal price — but it was worth a shot.
“I don’t know about this, Tommy. I mean, what value is money going to have if the grid is down?”
“Two days ago, you thought the government would have the power back on. Society is conditioned to believe that help is coming, that the lights will magically turn on even if they won’t. That’s why no one is going to just toss away their money or think less of what they have. But food? Food is primal. It’s a life-or-death commodity right now. That’s all people are thinking about. You saw it yourself. The looting, the fights, people clearing out the shelves. What I’ve done is essentially create our own shop that no one knows about except you and me. That, my friend, is gold. Pure gold! What we are about to embark on is science.”
Marcus didn’t look convinced. He scratched his blond hair. “It’s not that. Without the power grid, no ATMs are working. So how is anyone going to pay for this? The average person might be carrying fifty bucks on them and no doubt by now they’ve already spent that. I mean, it makes more sense for us to keep this food, split it and use it to survive on until the power comes back on.”
“Marcus, Marcus, my dear friend, you are looking at this all wrong. Have you ever heard of the old saying, give a man a fish, feed him for a day, teach a man to fish, feed him for a lifetime?”
“Sure.”
“I’m teaching you how to fish here.”
Okay, he was going out on a limb to convince him to help to pay off a debt, but Marcus didn’t understand the gravity of the situation. More specifically his situation. Tommy had left out the part about using the money to pay off Vladimir and possibly win his way back into the good books of Laura and his father — which ultimately was his end goal. He figured what a person didn’t know wouldn’t hurt. Besides, he couldn’t pull this off alone. It was too much work.
Marcus grimaced.
Tommy continued, “We’re not going to target the poor here. Sure, the average joe might only have fifty bucks on them, if that, but the rich, the wealthy of this society, those morons will have some serious bank at home. We’re talking about thousands stashed away in a safe or under a mattress or in some secret pot.” Tommy smoothed out Marcus’ store shirt like a parent. “Think of yourself as a door-to-door salesman. A new form of grocery employee. We bring the goods to them. We can even say we are working for the grocery store. We’ll canvass the neighborhoods and get the orders, then deliver the food. Boom. Seventy-two hours from now we will be rolling in the green.”
“Then what?” Marcus asked.
“What do you mean, then what?”
“Well, okay, let’s say it all goes to plan. What do we do with all that cash? I mean, it’s not like it’s going to be much use to us.”
“We split it. You can do whatever you want. Sit on it. Burn it for all I care.”
He cared very much. He cared enough to keep him out of the loop on how much he would be getting. It wasn’t like it was the first time he’d had to sell someone on an idea and get them to invest. And the one thing about every 21-year-old whose only experience of life was working at a grocery store and gaming was they didn’t have a clue. “All right, listen,” Tommy said, placing a hand on him and getting ready to deliver his most convincing argument, even more convincing than the one he gave to Vladimir’s goons who had every intention of gutting him like a pig in the showers until he agreed to their outrageous protection fee. “The power grid is out. ATMs are down. Most shelves are cleared. But the one thing that hasn’t changed is people’s view of money. That doesn’t change overnight. Hell, that doesn’t change in a month. Now if the grid stays down for six months or a year, sure, the perception will change, but right now, in week one, it’s still the same. Green is green and there are more things that have value besides food. My life for instance.” The words left his mouth and he quickly backtracked. “I mean, staying alive…” he trailed off. “Anyway, you’ve got no access to your bank account, and even if you did, how far would three hundred and sixty dollars stretch? That’s right, not far. But I’m talking about big money. Thousands We’ll charge twenty, thirty dollars a can of food and that’s just the low-end products.”
“They’ll pay that?”
“Shit, Marcus, they already were with the amount of inflation. All right, it wasn’t twenty or thirty dollars exactly but it was damn near close. The bastards who own grocery stores are criminals. Price gouging has gone through the roof. So, this isn’t new to them and in light of the situation, I think… no… scratch that, I know that people will hand it over without hesitation, especially when they’ve got young mouths to feed. Marcus, the world is our oyster. Let’s go take those pearls and for once be the ones on top. Now are you with me?”
Marcus let out a lungful of air and cast a glance back at the food and chewed down on the side of his lip. “I don’t know.”
“Then why the hell did you help me take this?”
“You told me we were going to split it.”
“Yes. And we are. The money, I meant.”
“Yeah, well you left out that part.”
Tommy could feel this slipping away from him. He had a good mind to close the locker on the unit and tell him to take a hike. He’d handle this himself, but no, a quick glance at the analog watch on his wrist made it clear he didn’t have time for theatrics.
“Fine. Go on. Take your half. But don’t come running back to me a few months from now when you’ve eaten your way through it and you have no money to trade. Me, I’m going to take what I have and turn it into a gold mine.”
If they hadn’t been four days into the disaster, he might not have been able to convince him, but as it stood, Marcus was as dumb as 90 percent of society. Food was essential but a person could go weeks without buying it, they could hunt if need be. Money, on the other hand, well, that would still be of value for at least a couple of months until the penny dropped that society wasn’t going to return to normal.
“Go on. Take it.”
Marcus dropped his chin and ran a hand over it. “All right. I’m in.”
Tommy slapped him on the arm, grinning. “Good man. You won’t regret this.”
Of course, he would, but by that time, Tommy would be long gone.
2
Fort Myers, Florida
Laura considered herself fortunate to have survived until the earth moved.
Four days after Hurricane Fiona swept across Florida like a giant crushing everything in its path, Laura was preparing to be discharged from the hospital.
The doctor informed her that she was lucky that the bullet hadn’t hit an artery or bone. While the length of time to heal varied widely based on the wound, how old a person was, how fit they were, or if any complication like infection arose, most patients were discharged as soon as possible to focus on healing at home.
In her case, the bullet had torn through muscle, causing a considerable amount of blood loss but nothing that the doctor at Lee Memorial Hospital couldn’t treat.
