Free Radioactive and The Decay Dystopian Super Boxset- A Dirty Bomb and Nuclear Blast Prepper Tale of Survival by Roger Hayden, James Hunt

your fucking cat in here and kill them in front of you. Now tell me who you’re working for!” Garrett shouted.
     
    Matt felt weak. He was beaten. He was bloody. His family was in trouble, but something wasn’t right about what Garrett had threatened him with. He tried to pull together the pieces of the thought slowly forming in his mind. Something was there that didn’t make sense.
     
    Then it hit him. His body started shaking again, but not from pain or fear or cold. He felt the corners of his mouth tilting upwards into a smile. Small gasps of air left him, passing for laughs. They started soft but grew louder. Matt wheezed and winced in pain each time the sounds left him.
     
    “What the fuck is so funny?” Garrett asked.
     
    “That’s not my cat,” Matt said.
     

Chapter 2
     
    Samantha sat on her cot staring at her daughter, Annie, curled up next to her brother Jim’s cat, Tigs. She watched her little chest slowly rise and fall. The inside of the tent was grey with light as the sun outside struggled to break through the dawn. She rubbed her eyes with her palms, trying to remove the lost hours of sleep. Two weeks. It’d been two weeks since they arrived at the refugee camp. They had been plucked from their home in Phoenix and sent here. She had no idea where her husband Matt was and no idea when she would ever see him again.
     
    Jim Farr poked his head through the tent door silently. “Hey.”
     
    Samantha whipped her head around and threw her hand over her mouth, letting out a gasp. “Jesus, Jim.”
     
    “Sorry.” Jim stepped inside and Tigs rushed over to him. He reached down, scooped her up, and scratched behind her ears. It was one of Tigs’s favorite spots. Jim placed her back down and glanced over to his sister, who was still watching Annie.
     
    “We’ll find him, Sammy. Once the military gets their communications back up, they’ll be able to give us some more information,” Jim said.
     
    “Yeah, because they were so willing to share things before everything went to shit,” she said.
     
    “I thought we weren’t supposed to say that word,” Annie said. Her eyes opened slowly. She blinked away the sleep and stretched across the cot.
     
    “You told Uncle Coyle he couldn’t say it,” Annie said.
     
    “That’s because Uncle Coyle’s met his life quota for bad words. Your mom hasn’t,” Jim said.
     
    “Have I met my quota?” Annie asked.
     
    Samantha scooped Annie up from the cot.
     
    “No, but that’s because you haven’t been given a quota yet,” Samantha replied.
     
    Annie looked up at her mother and grinned, exposing her missing front tooth.
     
    “When do I get mine?” Annie asked.
     
    “When you’re thirty, and that’s also when you’re allowed to get married,” Jim said.
     
    “Uncle Jim’s kidding. It’ll be when you’re forty,” Samantha said.
     
    Coyle tore open the tent flaps and poked his head inside. His eyebrows were raised and his wild hair stood out in all directions. He looked like a mad scientist. “Breakfast line’s getting long,” he said. “I don’t want to have to wait thirty minutes like we did yesterday because somebody couldn’t get out of bed.” He looked accusingly at Annie, who giggled.
     
    “What’s on the menu today?” Jim asked.
     
    “Well, Monday was grey mush. Tuesday was white mush.” He rubbed his chin and then looked at Jim with over-exaggerated excitement on his face. “You think we’ll get the charcoal mush today?”
     
    Jim led the group over to the breakfast line. They passed other families, loners, and soldiers crawling out of their army-issued relief tents and stretching their bodies in the morning sun.
     
    Jim had seen more people arriving every day. They came from Los Angeles, San Diego, Phoenix, and Las Vegas; there wasn’t a major city in the southwest United States, or the entire country for that matter, that didn’t get hit by some sort of attack. He heard rumors of camps similar to their