Free Final Dawn: Season 1 (The Thrilling Post-Apocalyptic Series) by Mike Kraus Page B

was still wary of the thing he saw that morning and he opted to skip a fire for the night, choosing instead to open a can of peaches and another pack of beef jerky. As the shadows grew long, he turned on a small flashlight to its lowest setting, pointing it at the ground to keep it relatively hidden while still enabling him to eat his meal.
     
    As he ate, he grew more relaxed, growing tired as the sounds of the night forest grew around him. Crickets chirped loudly and bats dove overhead, their faint squeaking echoing as they dined on moths and other insects. Off in the distance, high in the mountains somewhere, he heard the howl of a coyote, then the answer of another as it called back to the first.
     
    Marcus finished his dinner and tucked the waste into a side pouch on his backpack. He pulled out a machete he kept looped to the back of the backpack and set it down beside him. Spreading a sleeping roll on the ground, he laid down on it, using the backpack as a makeshift pillow and tucking the machete under his right leg to keep it close within reach. After Marcus shut off his flashlight, he remained awake for a while, watching the stars grow bright in the sky and listening to the sounds of the wildlife around him.

10:39 AM, March 27, 2038
    Leonard McComb
     
    If the devil himself had brought hell up and overlaid it on top of the earth, it still wouldn’t have been as gruesome and terrible to witness as the devastation that now stretched across the landscape. Roiling clouds drifted through the skies, covering the ground in a murky shadow in one moment and letting rays of sunlight through in the next. Acrid smoke and hot fires smoldered in every street and corner of the city, feeding off of gutted buildings, overturned cars and the bodies of countless victims whose remains lay scattered in the streets.
     
    After Leonard’s mind began to process the shocking visuals that surrounded him, he gagged, nearly vomiting as the scent of the city overwhelmed him. The smell of the smoke and fire was strongest, followed closely by the unmistakable smell of death and burning flesh. While much of the city had been flash-burned and vaporized in an instant, there were more than enough fuel sources left for the fires to consume.
     
    Most of the skyscrapers on the island had been completely destroyed, wiped away in the first few seconds after the blast. Those that still stood were only ten or twenty stories high at most, and even still, a steel shell was all that was left of them. Many of the shorter, squatter buildings still stood, like the corner markets, port warehouses and townhouses that were far enough out to withstand the pressure wave.
     
    Leonard stood not quite in the center of it all, but close enough to feel like he just stepped out of paradise and into oblivion. The exit to the processing station that he had finally escaped through was on the south side of Manhattan Island, close to the World Trade Center memorial and just a short distance from a large marina. As he looked around at the devastation both on and off the island, his eyes filled up with tears, though he dared not think about it for fear of feeling like a lesser man. Leonard didn’t like to cry, though this was one of the few times in his life when he felt that he couldn’t stop the emotions.
     
    He began to walk, slowly, through the rubble of the streets, making his way to a small Sanitation Department check-in point near the marina, or what was left of it. He wasn’t prepared for this level of destruction on the surface. He had been expecting the damage underground to be caused by an earthquake, but this was something entirely different. Earthquakes would shake buildings and bring them down, but this was on a scale more massive than anything he had seen or read about in his lifetime.
     
    Anything but one thing, that is. As Leonard climbed up a mountain of rubble and half walked, half slid down the other side, the pattern of destruction began to feel