Free Alone: Book 1: Facing Armageddon by Darrell Maloney

into homes under cover of darkness.
         He also assumed that since the looters didn’t know which homeowners were armed, they sometimes got surprised by homeowners wanting to protect their property.
         He hoped the homeowners won such battles. And he hoped that they showed the looters no mercy.
         He walked to the back door and out onto the deck. It was still too early to fire up the camping stove to make coffee. It was nothing more than a small burner that perched atop a disposable bottle of propane. But it still put out a small circle of blue flame that had enough light to be seen some distance away. No sense sending out a beacon to others who might be anxious to get such a fuel source.
         It was much smart er to wait an hour and brew his coffee in the daylight.
         Dave sat on a folding chair on the deck and contemplated his future. It was becoming easier now to consider the possibility that his wife and daughters may have died. If their plane was still in the air when the blackout hit, it would have lost all power and would have dropped like a rock.
         He hated to think about it, but he had no choice. It was a real possibility. At least if they died that way, it would have been over rather quickly. They’d have screamed together and hugged each other and prayed. But then after the crash, they’d be at peace. They wouldn’t have to worry about dying of thirst, or starving to death, or being murdered by bands of marauders taking what they wanted at gunpoint.
         Then he began to wonder.
         He was assuming that the airplanes would fall from the sky after the EMP. But what if that wasn’t the case?
         He’d been in airplanes flying through thunderstorms. He’d even looked out a window and seen a bolt of lightning hit one of the wings once.
         And nothing happened.
         And that made him think.
         The airplane he was on didn’t blow up or crash because it wasn’t grounded. It was in essence a flying Faraday cage. The lightning bolt hit the plane, and the electricity encircled the outer skin and then dissipated, without harming the people inside.
         He wondered… wouldn’t the airplane react the same way when the EMP hit it?
         Perhaps the safest place in the world to be when the EMP hit was aboard an airplane.
         But then what? Even if the airplane survived, how could it land without its glide slope beacon telling it when and where to approach the airfield? How could it find its way when air traffic controllers couldn’t communicate with it, and give the pilots landing instructions?
         How would the pilots know whether or not it was safe to land on a particular runway, even if they could find the airport? Without the tower giving them clearance to land, they’d have no idea who or what might be sitting on the runway, or the taxiways, and in their way.
         But somewhere in the recesses of his memory, Dave found a straw to grasp at. It seemed that months before, he’d watched a program on the Discovery Channel about emergency landings. And they’d talked about training for such instances. They’d talked about the FAA requiring pilots to train for landings when they lost contact with air traffic control.
         They even showed commercial airline pilots, in a flight simulator, approaching a blacked out airport. And it showed as they overflew the airport, to make sure the runway was clear. Then it showed them as they circled back around, and without the aid of a glide slope beacon landed the plane the old fashioned way. By watching their instruments and looking out the windows.
         On the program, the pilots were able to land safely in the simulator.
         It gave Dave renewed hope that Sarah, Lindsey and Beth may have survived even if they were still in the air when the EMP hit.
         By the time the sun finally rose that morning, Dave had pretty much convinced himself that his family