Sky Fall (Book 3): Solar Storm Read online

  Solar Storm

  Logan Keys

  Solar Storm

  The Sky Fall Series Book Three

  Logan Keys

  © 2020 Le Chat Publishing.

  MY WEBSITE

  ***No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, without the permission in writing from the author.***

  Contents

  Prologue

  (recap)

  1. Near Baton Rouge, Louisiana

  2. Baton Rouge, Louisiana

  3. Two years earlier…

  4. The old orchards of Southern California

  5. North Texas near Dallas

  6. Outside Fort Benning, Georgia

  7. Outside Baton Rouge, Louisiana

  8. The old orchards of Southern California

  9. Baton Rouge, Louisiana

  10. Outside of Baton Rouge, Louisiana

  11. Two years earlier…

  12. Outside Fort Benning, Georgia

  13. Southern California

  Author’s Notes

  BLACK SUN WILL BE available soon!

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  Now Available: Sky Fall’s Book Four Black Sun is not yet available for preorder. Make sure to follow me on Amazon and join my mailer above, too, so you do not miss it!

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  Special shout out to all of my beta/arc readers and supporters. Thank you.

  Prologue

  Science fiction is not about science; it’s mostly about people, Clive thought, burning what must have been the thousandth book. He always watched the pages melt slowly into the flames as a sort of homage. Maybe it was a small gift to the author or to the book itself. He wasn't sure who it was for, but he did it religiously all the same. Disaster had given him two good things at least: Time to read, and time to think. The latter he avoided by doing the former. And then, once he was through with the story that sometimes took him to distant lands, other times to space among the stars, but often right back where he was in a post-apocalyptic tale that was eerily accurate to his own existence, he'd add it carefully to the pile, setting it in the stack before letting it burn with all of the rest. When night came, the books were a light to guide him and a warmth to fight the chill, one way or another.

  (recap)

  I know I’ve been slow at getting book three out so here is a recap of what’s been happening, so you don’t miss out!

  Kentucky found his way to the submarine that was moored just south of Baton Rouge in Louisiana. Separated from his group, he’d almost drowned in the swampy, cesspool water, but he’d managed to escape the gators only to be surrounded by nothing, marooned.

  Fifty plus people have arrived where Clive and Siri have been waiting for a miracle to get across the Colorado river and to his family. They’ve been hiding out in what used to be the orange groves of Redlands, California when from the hills they see stragglers coming to join them, begging for help. A cloud is arriving, a gaseous thing made to kill them all if they don’t act now. Everyone races for the bunker.

  Griggs slid that envelope across the table to the reporter two whole years ago. He did his job. So why on earth hadn’t anyone known about the government’s project Sol? When the flare struck, why hadn’t anyone known it was worse than they’d imagined?

  Kai has just rescued Sparky, aka Sierra, his sister, from a band of looters who roamed Baton Rouge.

  And Patty realizes that the man that knew her husband and was on assignment with him is now starting to remember what happened. But first, someone’s broken into her farmhouse and they’ve threatened to hurt Gina’s son, Samuel.

  1

  Near Baton Rouge, Louisiana

  Two black birds perched on the submarine, their eyes beady and too full of clarity to be real. Marooned, lost, and now perhaps dead—soon to be, if not already. Kentucky wondered if the dark wings flapping in his peripheral were from this world or the next.

  Is this how it happens? You simply slide from one room to another in your mind and then, Poof, you wake in a world almost like your own but worse or better depending on your deeds?

  “Today was a bad day,” he said through a throat that nearly refused to obey his lagging brain signal. His lips cracked painfully, and he knew that he was dehydrated even though he was inexplicably surrounded by water. Putrid and salty, he’d ingested enough to know. He’d swallowed enough to sicken. Unforgivably, his stomach kept trying every so often to rid him of the tiniest bit left.

  It was doing its job but killing him more quickly in the process, like a computer programmed with one murderous directive.

  Kentucky laughed, and the birds hopped farther away, eyeing him warily. “Isn’t that the way of it, though?” he said to them, and they cocked their heads in answer.

  When he slumped on his side, his head clunked the submarine’s metal and somewhere, deep inside, it clunked back. Tap, tap he went. And tap, tap it responded. “I’m really losing it, boys,” he told his two, little, dark friends.

  The sub was moored on parts of the city not so deep below, and the metal island didn’t really move towards any place, but the vertigo made it seem like he was lost in the grand sea and not in the middle of an overflowing swamplands.

  Kentucky’s darker thoughts swam around his lighter ones like sharks until he fainted at the end of one day and woke into a new one that held a haze across the land. Fog eddied into shapes, shades, and shadows, people walking on the water in a cool morning mist that was both terrifying and beautiful.

  The end of the world brought with it a strange hue of gray-tinted green.

  He moved an arm weakly through the fog. It swallowed his hand then lapped at him hungrily. The stuff of nightmares. “No wonder this is the land of voodoo,” he said, hiccupping because his innards were already trying to be outward once more.

  Then he sat up with a start, careful not to fall from his spot. Maybe he was dead. Maybe this was really the between, a place of ghosts. Other than the green, it was colorless. Other than the sun, it was…dead.

  Why he thought of the shopkeeper in the middle east then was no surprise. The man’s face, smiling with wrinkles, one tooth in front that used to be a flinty gold, and the black, bitter tea, all slammed back into his mind with ease.

  How did one make friends with people who only saw them as the bringers of war?

  But it had happened.

  Kentucky used to drink the tea out of a chipped cup as if it were fine china with a nod of thanks because the man hadn’t had two pennies to rub together, but he’d never failed to make the soldiers on patrol his most expensive brew when they passed by.

  Kentucky shrank away from the image, from the memory—from the potential judgement he’d face.

  And just like that, the man wasn’t smiling anymore. He didn’t have a face now, just a gaping hole where fog swirled inside the depths. A deep shudder ran through Kentucky’s body.

  His mother’s voice sprang up from the dead world like a torch of light. He latched onto that memory instead. “What do we do at the end of a bad day, Kentucky?” she asked, her accent as thick as her waist after gracing the south with seven children. Eight if you counted a miscarriage that came right before Kentucky’s birth.

  He sighed out the edge of madness and slumped back onto his side. “We count our blessings, Mama.” His voice cracked.

  He didn’t have anything to cry so his eyes burned without producing.

  Blessings…

  Kentucky closed his eyes and thought about his giant family gathered around a fat turkey, arguing over who would carve it. He thought about their shining faces all turning to him when he finally was man enough to hack to pieces all his moth
er’s hard work. But she’d endured it with a proud gaze. He then thought about their tense expressions, this time when he had to leave for war.

  Kentucky tapped the sub’s metal and it thudded deep below. “I’m thankful for this submarine,” he said with a laugh. “For the raft that got me here when everyone else probably…” He lifted his face when he felt a drop hit is nose. “I’m thankful for the people in the raft that tried to save me.”

  Another drop hit his hand which he cupped together with the other.

  Like magic, the sky opened.

  Kentucky sat straight, shouting for joy as his hands filled.

  Sucking the precious drops through cracked lips he murmured, “The rain. I’m thankful for the rain.”

  2

  Baton Rouge, Louisiana

  How many times had Kai saved her? It felt like a hundred, but it probably was only a few times since the end of the world and a few before it.

  “The swimming pool,” Sierra said, and her brother squinted at her then rolled his eyes. “I mean, you told me, ‘Don’t jump in on that side, it’s not that deep.’ I wasn’t paying attention. I hit my head, and…”

  “Sparky,” he warned, because she was being sappy. Very sappy.

  Torrential rain had forced them all to find shelter in the charred-out room of an old apartment building. Luckily, the bullet had gone through as a clean hole in Kai’s shoulder, so they’d re-wrapped it after sterilizing it with ease. Now, because of the pain, he’d taken pain meds along with a few swigs of some fine whiskey they’d found in the place where Sierra had been kidnapped. They’d grabbed a few things along with some canned food before moving to another building entirely to get away from the carnage in the wake of Kai’s blade.

  Of course, Sierra had snuck a cup of whiskey, herself.

  Well, everyone had. She wasn’t old enough to drink, but when had that stopped her before?

  “The food’s already all bad,” Quinn whined, checking the fridge, but Sierra was just happy to be alive. And her tummy was heated up by sloshing good stuff, so she could finally relax for the first time in what felt like forever.

  She could breathe.

  She was alive.

  Kai was alive!

  She leaned her head back with her eyes closed and counted her blessings.

  “What next?” Kai asked, but she shook her head.

  “We aren’t going to think about it until we’ve had R&R.”

  Mathew raised his cup. “Hear, hear.”

  Sierra sighed. “Anyway. The pool.”

  “No.” Kai’s eyes were daggers. “Stop it. Besides, you definitely kept that idiot from shooting me again. You saved my life, too, Sparky. No hero worship tonight. I’m not a hero, anyway.”

  Only she noticed the sadness that shot through his gaze before he hid it. If they were alone, she’d ask what was up. But they weren’t.

  Her adoration for her brother had no bounds, so what gave? He’d never balked at her praise this vehemently before, so something was going on, but there was no real time to talk about it. “The fan boat!” Mathew said, jumping into the game.

  “Yes,” Jen said. “Sierra totally saved us when she dove in and got the boat.”

  Kai grinned, the sadness abating as the tables had been turned. “And you threw me the rope. When it was flooding.”

  Sierra frowned. “Okay, fine. I get it now. Why it bugs you, I mean. No one knows how to say thank you for such a monumental thing.”

  “See!” Kai shouted. He stood, unsteadily, his lean extravagant. Sierra snorted.

  It was nice to see him let go a little. The world was ending; there was no stopping it. This moment of reprieve, this itty-bitty break, was nice.

  Kai put his arm around Sierra and chuckled as he gave her a gentle noogie on the top of her head. “I’ll be your sidekick anytime, Sparky.”

  “Very funny.”

  He frowned when he looked closely at her face. “Tired?”

  “Exhausted.” She wanted to stay awake, but she was fading fast. Now that the adrenaline was gone, she had nothing left. The whiskey had done its job and she was as loose as a noodle.

  “Eat some of the beans,” Mathew said before shoving a can into Sierra’s hand. “You’re tired, but this is important, too. We don’t know how hard it will be to find food after tonight.”

  Sierra hadn't thought about that. She should have. The fires. The flooding. Everything was destroyed.

  She sighed and ate the beans. It was freezing in the apartment without any heat, so they huddled together until, one by one, they fell asleep.

  Her dreams were warm.

  The room was warm.

  With them all in a huddle she was so hot she dreamed about being on the beach in Hawaii.

  Sierra woke stiff. She was dry-mouthed, cheek pillowed on Kai's shoulder, and he was softly snoring next to her.

  Mathew was the only one awake. He was staring at the window with a strange look on his face.

  She wasn't sure why, but her body knew before her mind did that something was wrong. “Kai,” she said through a dry throat. His arm was stuck to her side. It had bled a puddle overnight and he was pale, but that wasn't the problem—it was a problem, but not the problem.

  Still, Sierra’s brain was begging her for more rest.

  But the apartment was a hazy glow of orange.

  “What's wrong?” she asked Mathew, who was still staring at the window.

  He snapped out of it then glanced at her. Before he could speak, she smelled it.

  Fire.

  That’s why it was so warm!

  Sierra jumped to her feet, dumping Kai over. He scrambled upwards as well, while Mathew shook the girls awake. Sierra was already racing to the window.

  “Hot! Too hot!” she cried.

  While they’d slept the rain had stopped. The fires had grown.

  Smoke billowed underneath the door.

  Kai was nearest to it and he touched the knob and hissed as he withdrew his hand. “The hallway,” he said, and her stomach dropped.

  “How did we sleep through this?”

  “I was awake,” Mathew said. “I didn’t even smell it until right now.”

  Of course not. The place was stinking to high heaven as it was with rotting and burned bodies littering the area, and the rain had only made that worse. Sierra had found Lysol under the counter and sprayed everything to make the smell less. It didn't matter. In a world before now, they’d have heard an alarm. Nothing was working. No alarms were going to go off to warn them.

  The first fires that had blown through the charred building had finished off any backup energy it might have had. Everything within a mile radius was ash already, but they’d found a room in a place that still stood with only some smoke damage to the upper levels.

  “What are we going to do?” Jen demanded, as if any of them had a better clue than the rest.

  “Check the bedroom window. It’s on the south side.” Kai was the one already racing for the bedroom. “There’s no fire over here,” he shouted, but there wasn’t a landing or balcony for escape, either.

  “We’re three stories up,” Quinn said.

  Fire burst through the front door while Sierra searched the bedroom.

  This was her area of expertise. She liked being high up. Think, Sierra, she told herself.

  “Up,” she said. “We go up.”

  “Are you crazy?” Kai snapped back. Then Mathew said, “It’s the only way.”

  Sierra went first to see if it was possible. And it was, but only just barely.

  Ignoring Kai’s urgent calls, she quickly climbed out of the window.

  She was standing on a thin ledge above a death-defying drop, one small mistake away. The cheap, flimsy windowsill cut into her feet through her damp shoes. Her teeth chattered as the wind caught her hair and dress. “It’s really cold out here. Grab some jackets or we’ll be hoping we burn before we freeze.”

  Reaching upwards, she could just barely grab the edge of the roof a
nd scramble over.

  Once there, she turned around and called, “Come on!”

  Next was Jen, who surprised her by not freaking out once they stood together on the roof of a fiery building—an old roof that sunk slowly beneath their feet in warning. They could see the entire block from there, the wind threatening to rip them from their perch.

  Quinn was next but she stood on the ledge, clinging like a desperate cat to the wall. She reached out for Sierra’s hands but started to slip because she was too tense and no longer climbing.

  “Ah!” she screamed.

  Kai gripped her legs below, and Sierra held her hands as they teetered three stories up.

  “Guys!” Mathew cried.

  Beneath them, the room erupted in flames.

  There was no time for Quinn’s fear. There was no time for anything at all if Sierra wanted to make sure Kai escaped. “Let go!” she shouted to Kai who obeyed her, even as Quinn fell, but Sierra and Jen each had one of her hands.

  Quinn hung there, too stunned to scream. Her wide eyes met Sierra’s. “Please,” she begged. “Help me.”

  “Pull her up!”

  Jen and Sierra lifted Quinn, and she kicked her feet into the wall until she found the edge of the window, only this time, she desperately climbed to where the others were waiting.

  Mathew and Kai also climbed from the burning room, helping one another side-by-side.

  “No time for jackets,” Kai huffed, and they all moved upwards on the roof just before the edge collapsed in a spray of orange sparks.