She paused, her gaze sweeping over the battered faces of her surviving crew. They were few, broken, and weary, but they were alive. And as long as they were alive, there was a flicker of hope. A fragile, almost imperceptible ember, but hope nonetheless."We survived the descent," Jameson continued, her voice firming with resolve. "That’s more than many could have managed. The Odyssey may be broken, but we are not. We will assess, we will adapt, and we will survive. This is ...

The camp was a makeshift place off an old logging trail. It was dry under the pines where they had set up camp, but the logging road had flooded over, the water had receded, and now the road was a quagmire of mud steaming in the early morning sun.They had encountered no major obstacles on the way in. Joel knew the way. The road was cracked in a few places, flooded in a few others, but only a few inches of water. The major stuff had held off until they had arrived and settled in.

This is a bonus book. It covers the history of some of the characters before the plagues were released. It tells you the how and why of it. I hope you enjoy it, Dell.Jefferson Prescott stood quietly and sipped at his coffee. The house in Esmeraldas was his private escape. He could sit and watch the ocean, or travel into the mountains in just a few hours time, and Ecuador was such an easy country to live in: The people so happy with so little.Tommy Murphy stood at the rail a...

Billy was up on the roof. Beth, Jamie, Winston and Scotty were standing at the edge of the building as he was, looking out over the city. Things were crazy, and they seemed to be getting worse as the days rolled by.The police precinct was still burning. It had started sometime during the night two days before, and since there was no one to put the fire out, it had been raging for hours now. A few minutes ago, the roof of the building next door to the precinct burst into flames. May...

The doorman, an elderly white haired man, had been dead, lying in the doorway preventing the door from closing and locking. The dead had killed him but not turned him. Or at least he had not turned yet. What a lot you learn in three days, she told herself now, as she remembered. They had dug in, shifted him outside the door. Bear had dragged him to the gutter as she had held the door. They had no sooner let the door close than he had sat up in the gutter of the street."Bear! He's o...

The survivors are coming together in small groups after the meteor near miss that caused the Earth's Plates to shift and caused one of the biggest extinction events in Earth's history. This is not a random event. If the meteors close pass hadn't caused it something else would have caused it. Extinction events occur at a background rate of about 0.1 to 1 species per 10,000 species every 100 years, with mass extinction events happening much less frequently, approximately every 50 to 100 mill...

Candace slipped between two abandoned trucks and made her way around to the back of the main building of the truck stop. The building cast long shadows among the scattered wood pallets, junked trucks and oil barrels. A long wooden fence ran around most of it, blocking the view from the highway. She hurried over next to the wrecked front end of a big tractor cab and squatted down close to the ground, balancing against one of the tractor's tires with one hand. She finished and had just stood...

Ethan, his face etched with the weariness of a thousand sleepless nights, hauled a dented bucket overflowing with salvaged canned goods. Each can, a tiny victory snatched from the jaws of starvation, represented another day survived in this ravaged world. He grunted with effort, his muscles protesting under the strain. The weight wasn't just physical; it was the weight of their existence, a constant, oppressive burden. He was a steelworker once, his hands forged to shape metal into somethi...

The Story of Bear.Bear is the man who made his way out of New York amidst the death and destruction of the apocalypse and fought his way across the country, finally ending up a member of the Nation, and the Leader of the first OutRunner team. This book follows Bear from Manhattan to the Nation as he makes his way across the country and meets the people who will become members of the OutRunners, lifelong friends and the woman who will become the love of his life.Bear will beco...

The air hung heavy with the scent of pine and decay, a discordant symphony that mirrored the Crew's fragile hope. Days of relentless travel had etched exhaustion onto their faces, their movements sluggish, their steps heavy with the weight of their past and the uncertainty of their future. Havenwood State Park, with its towering redwoods and seemingly undisturbed tranquility, had promised respite, a sanctuary from the relentless horrors that stalked their world. The illusion shattered with...

Zombie fiction: The Nation comes together person by person to fight the dead and survive the Zombie Apocalypse...He was up the ladder faster than he would have thought possible. Billy, Mac and Dell were up next, but the firing was over. It had not come from Beth, except at the very end. There were half dozen dead laying in the roadway a hundred yards from the bus. Directly below, as Bear walked to the edge and looked down, two frightened young kids stared up at him. Teens, maybe, h...

Slowly, deliberately, he pushed himself up, his limbs protesting with every movement. The cheap linoleum floor was cool beneath his bare feet, a small mercy in the sweltering heat. He moved through the sparse landscape of his current existence, his eyes taking in the chipped paint peeling like sunburnt skin from the walls, the single, bare bulb hanging precariously from a fraying wire, the sparse collection of possessions that spoke volumes about his fall from grace. A chipped ceramic mug,...