Free The Sky Grew Dark (The End of the Golden Age) by E.L. Montclair

 
     
     
     
     
     
     
    We worked as quietly as we could in the darkness. Sweat was running down my back on this cold night, the moon’s bright rays giving plenty of light for the task. Adrenaline coursing through our veins, we worked quickly, hoping we wouldn’t be seen.
    I barely had time to feel remorse, knowing the time would come for that soon enough. When the hole was deep enough we hid the shovels and went for the body we had hidden nearby in some underbrush. We pulled it out; clothed with only a pair of underwear, we lowered him into the ditch.
    We had only a moment. I looked across the darkness, searching my mom’s face. I had never seen her this thin or haggard in my life. She looked at me, tears making white trails down her dirty cheeks. She loved him as well as her own son. 
    I wanted to say something, to somehow honor this man we both loved, but I knew we shouldn’t risk it. Tears blurred my vision as I silently retrieved my shovel. As quickly and quietly as I could I began burying my husband.
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    CHAPTER ONE
     
     
    5 months earlier
    I hurried to the car with my groceries in tow, feeling pretty good now that the morning sickness had passed. The sky was cloudy and grey on this humid September day in Southern California. I anxiously looked around, hoping I had time to finish my errands before another storm hit.
    I loaded up the car, quickly checking my cellphone to see if I had any texts or missed calls. I noticed something strange. My reception flashed from full bars to a circle with a slash, over and over again. I turned on the car, and began pulling out of the parking lot. I slowed to take in what I saw. A man staring at his phone. I glanced around. Everybody I could see was stopped in their tracks, looking at their phones with concern.
    I started trembling uncontrollably. It was happening. I took a deep breath and tried to focus. I drove as quickly as I could to the house and tried to round everybody up. We all knew what the plan was. Anybody that couldn’t be tracked down within thirty minutes was left behind. They could try to meet up with us later but we needed to get to the shelter as soon as possible.
    We grabbed the kit we had packed, a few necessities, and piled into the two cars. The cloud cover broke minutes after we got into the car, rain soaking the ground in seconds.
    Hitting the freeway as fast as we could, we wound up the coast for about two and a half hours to the spot we had found. We unloaded our supplies and made our way down the steep side of the cliff to the large cave, hidden completely out of sight from an aerial view by trees and bushes. According to our plan the guys hid the two cars, one twenty miles away, and the other two miles, both driven off the road and covered with branches and leaves. We didn’t know how long it would be before we used them again.
    We assembled in the cave and went over the plan.
    The group consisted of; me, my husband Ian, our two sons; Seamus and Gaiden, with another on the way, my mom Sherry, my step dad Frank, my sister Lisa, my brother Joey, and my grandpa Emil.
    We were part of an organization that was preparing for an attack. We weren’t preparing for Armageddon, we were preparing for an eminent attack. A friend in international communications had come to find out that a secret alliance had been made between Iran and North Korea.
    We had tried to warn others, but many either chose to disbelieve or didn’t put feet to their fears. With all the ‘doomsday’ preppers around it was hard to talk to people about something like this seriously.
    Based on the intelligence collected, aerial attacks were what we had planned for. We had only visited this cave once, not wanting to draw any attention to it, and we had prepped it as much as we could on that single visit.
    The expected form of attack was biological warfare. Knowing this, we would have to be contained for three to six months, depending on