The Will to Survive

  The Will to Survive

  An Anthology of the Apocalypse

  A PERSHING PRESS book

  The Will to Survive, copyright © 2018

  All Rights Reserved.

  Edited by Felicia A. Sullivan

  Cover art by Hristo Kovatliev

  This book is a work of fiction. People, places, events, and situations are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or historical events, should be considered fictional.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author and publisher.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  A Note from the Editor, Felicia Sullivan

  All the Optimism of Hamlet by M.L. Katz

  Code EMP by M.P. McDonald

  The Shimmers by Kelly Hudson

  The Worst Case Scenario by C.A. Rudolph

  PHASE 6 by A.J. Norris

  Double or Nothing by Clabe R. Polk

  Wooly by Shane Gregory

  Brothers by Dust by Timothy Johnson

  The Collective by Patrick D’Orazio

  The Last Charter by Steven Bird

  The Spread by Shaun Schubert

  Fractured Hope by Chris Pike

  Rusty’s Run by Nick DeWolf

  Into the Valley of the Shadow by Sean T. Smith

  Above the Line by Josh Hilden

  Make My Day by Mike Sheridan

  Replica by Stephen North

  Showdown at Rig City by Jamie Mason

  These Things the Kitten Said by D.J. Goodman

  A Single Stone by Joshua Guess

  The Angel of Lafayette by Jonathan Yanez

  Last Bus Out by Brad Munson

  A Note from the Editor

  It’s been a rough year. 2017 has been a brutal beast for many people, on many fronts. Sitting in the comfort and safety of my home, where I live and work, watching news broadcasts of devastating wildfires, hurricanes, floods, storms…it’s hard. Seeing my fellow humans suffer devastating, life-altering events is difficult, and I know there isn’t much I can do. Sure, I can donate money to various causes and charities. Sure, I can offer thoughts and prayers, encouragement, and empathy. But there’s only so much that will accomplish.

  As I’m sure you have, I’ve made donations in various places for victims of Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria. Our money certainly helps, but the need is so great I wanted to do more. With a strong desire to help, but limited resources to do so, after conversations with a few editing clients and one very special publisher friend, I decided to go forward with this project.

  The Will to Survive, this anthology, was born from that urge.

  One hundred percent of proceeds are being donated, split equally, to two different charities on behalf of Hurricane Heroes, the name I have given to the authors, donors to the Go Fund Me fundraising campaign, the formatter, proofreader, and cover artist who generously agreed to participate in this project. All proceeds from book sales will be donated to help the charities provide money to assist people who need food, water, shelter, and basic supplies for their everyday lives.

  The two charities I have selected to receive donations are:

  One America Appeal (Puerto Rico and Virgin Islands); and

  Global Giving Hurricane Harvey Relief Fund (Texas/Florida)

  If you donated to the Go Fund Me, thank you. If you purchased a copy of this book, thank you. If you shared mine or the authors’ links about the project, thank you. Thank you all for supporting this project, reading this book, and helping your fellow citizens.

  Onward and upward, peace and blessings.

  Felicia A. Sullivan

  Acknowledgements

  An incredible amount of effort and behind the scenes work went into creating this anthology. There are a number of people to thank, without whom this book would not have been possible.

  First and foremost, I have to thank Sheila Miller for her diligent work, reading a vast number of the submissions. Without her informed, detailed reports on each story she read, I would have had to slog through every single one in addition to keeping up with my own packed editing schedule. Sheila, this anthology would not have been possible without you. THANK YOU!

  Jacob Kier, for his encouragement, sage advice, and invaluable friendship.

  All the authors who submitted a story for this anthology, THANK YOU for supporting this project. I could not accept every story, but I appreciate every single one of you for contributing.

  Hristo Kovatliev, cover artist king, who created the stunning cover for this book. You are a wonderful human being.

  Author R.E. McDermott for his last-minute push/support for getting us over the hump with donations to the fundraising campaign for this project.

  Steve Konkoly and Tom Abrahams, for your wholehearted support, even though you had your own charity project to manage at the same time.

  A special and heartfelt thanks to author C.A. Rudolph, who jumped right in to help with publishing issues. It’s not what he signed up for, but his unflagging energy, efficiency, and all around great ideas helped launch this book, and it wouldn’t have been possible without him.

  My husband Victor, for his unflagging support, encouragement, and for not grumbling (too much) when I sometimes work twenty hours a day.

  A number of the authors and others who contributed to this project donated their work, and I both thank them and applaud their care and concern for their fellow humans.

  All the Optimism of Hamlet

  by M.L. Katz

  The world is a stage, but the play is badly cast. ~ Oscar Wilde

  I sat on my roof in the drizzling rain the day after Hurricane Gertie contemplating with some combination of horror and fascination the way the murky water lapped against the rain gutters. As the constant drizzle turned to steamy vapor in the heat, the debris-clogged water looked both repugnant and inviting. Slipping down the slick shingles for a soak seemed like the most natural and awful thing in the world.

  If I couldn’t return to my home, at least I could have a swim.

  Besides the visible garbage, tree branches, and an occasional small mammal’s corpse, I knew snakes and other nasty things lurked below the opaque, greenish surface. I also knew that taking that quick slide down to the water would be the last thing I would ever do. Still, I thought about it just the same.

  I heard a distant bang that might have been a gunshot and barely cared. Any looters within several miles would need scuba gear. If some lonesome soul on a rooftop decided that a gun would offer an easier solution than drowning, I had missed the chance to argue about it. Even if I hadn’t, I’m not sure what I would have even said.

  Beyond a few slim rivulets in the streets that swiftly ran into the large drains, my neighborhood had never flooded before. Ha! Aren’t those what my grandma would have called famous last words? My neighborhood had never flooded before.

  That thought led me to thinking about last words in general. Maybe I needed some. Even if I fell victim to one of the many hazards around me, my daughter may venture here to view her ruined inheritance at some point.

  I grabbed the black Sharpie from my bugout bag and scrawled: ‘Tis an unweeded garden, indeed!

  I wrote the words in big square letters on the wet shingles beside me. The words blurred a little. I thought they stayed legible enough. Who could expect perfect penmanship from a middle-aged woman on a roof with a Sharpie?

  My daughter loved literature and had recently forced me to take her to some seedy playhouse two hours away to see Hamlet. If we never spoke again, I hoped she would find the message and smile. At least she’d know that I thought about her in my last hours and could take comfo
rt in that.

  Thankfully, the wind had calmed since last night. The last time I had dared to check the internet from my cell phone, the weather service reported a maximum of two-hundred-mile-an-hour winds as the beast they called Gertie plowed right up the interstate from Galveston to Houston. The officials also helpfully informed us that Hurricane Gertie beat Hurricane Wilma’s 185 MPH blast from 2005 but did not top Hurricane Patricia’s 215 MPH gale from 2015.

  I have always liked facts and figures. On another day, I would have found statistics like that interesting.

  By the time the dirty side of Gertie pounded my neighborhood, she had slowed to 192 MPH. That was fast enough and compounded by the fact that we had suffered a tropical storm the week before. The ground had already been soaked for days, and the many creeks, bayous, and drains in Bayou City had reached their capacity. We were screwed with no way to evacuate a population as large as most states through the pinholes of our interstates.

  At least by the time the water in the attic covered my shoes the wind had calmed. Perhaps I felt somewhat ungrateful to complain about how the persistent drizzle soaked right through the light windbreaker I had packed in my bugout bag. I don’t know why I kept the jacket on when all it did was make me perspire more; I just know I did. I suppose I did it out of habit. Some echoes of my own mother’s voice told me that I should wear a raincoat.

  I did not need a weather service to tell me the damage in and around Houston exceeded the Tax Day flood, Hurricane Harvey, and probably every major storm all bundled up together. I used the Sharpie to scrawl $40 million dollars beside the Hamlet paraphrase. I had read an article that said it would take $40 million to help reduce the risk of future flooding after Hurricane Harvey had flooded the city a few years before. Of course, the city and state both pled a lack of funds to fix the drains but not to pave the city in impermeable concrete. Compared to Gertie, Harvey had been a late-summer shower.

  Anyway, I had to leave the bulk of my hurricane supplies in my kitchen pantry. I had carried some water and a few dry goods up to the attic, but they might as well have been on the moon. I was not inclined to try to climb back down and then up again. What middle-aged woman can haul cans of beans, extra batteries, and cases of clean water to the roof when they needed to scramble out through the hole in the roof that a fallen pine had conveniently opened?

  All I had was my bugout bag, a half-charged cell phone, the axe I had not needed to break out of the attic, and a bad attitude. Oh, and of course, I had Oaf, the fluffy little mongrel my daughter had picked out at the shelter to keep me company before she left for college. Naturally, my daughter had named the nervous and dramatic pup Ophelia, a name that seemed too prophetic to contemplate. I just called her Oaf. She never seemed to know either of these names, and if she responded to something else, she kept it to herself.

  Terrified by the rain and occasional distant thunder, Oaf buried her bearded face under my jacket and dug her back claws into the denim of my jeans. She shivered more than I had previously thought possible. For such a small creature, she sure managed to emanate a lot of that wet-dog smell too. The little orphaned doggie annoyed me beyond reason as I sat and watched the floodwaters lap against my house. I pitied her too. I pitied the poor soul that I imagined had shot himself. That made me pity myself even more.

  I wished I could just speak with my daughter one more time, but the red line on my phone made me dismiss the attempt as folly. Cell phone towers had fallen all over the city. Besides, I just could not stand the thought of that final connection going black.

  Only one week before, I had fretted over my noisy garage door, a note from the HOA to pull weeds from between the cracks in my driveway, and the clunking sound my washer made during the spin cycle. As I braced my feet against the slick shingles of my roof, concerns over home maintenance and that thirty pounds I really needed to lose to please my doctor faded against the only thought that ran through my head.

  I could die today.

  I screamed when the eighty-foot pine tree that had leaned at an impossible angle most of the night fell into the water with a mighty splash. My windbreaker did nothing to keep me clean and dry against the spray of debris and water. A six-foot branch missed Oaf and me by inches and stuck itself into the roof like a bolt dropped by the gods. With Oaf under my windbreaker, my feet slipped.

  I slid down the roof on my rear end until my feet hung just over the gutters and the flood beyond them. Oaf whined as I fought to use my feet to slide both of us upwards toward the spot I had left my bugout bag. I slapped my hands against the rough shingles to help steady myself and cut my finger on the head of a shingle nail. Instinctively, I put that finger in my mouth and tasted blood.

  “Oh, for crying out loud!” I shouted at the gray heavens. “If you’re going to kill me, can’t you do it faster?”

  I must have thought I was alone in the world. It had certainly seemed that way. That was the first time I heard Felicia’s voice.

  She called from the rooftop to the right of me. “I told you that you needed to have those tall trees cut down before the next storm!” she shouted.

  My head snapped to the side. “Seriously?” I yelled back. “We’re probably going to drown today, and that’s all you have to say?” I blinked away tears. If I didn’t fall off the roof, the next branch might not miss me. I could get zapped by lightning. A vicious cottonmouth snake might slither out of the water to bite me.

  “We’re not going to drown,” she replied firmly. Her pleasant features looked grim, but she persisted. “The rain has slowed down a lot. A little water won’t kill you, Marilyn.”

  “Oh, really?” I asked in a tone that was as venomous as I imagined all the snakes in the water to be. In fact, I was glad to see her, but it wasn’t purely because I felt neighborly. Maybe I just wanted to have a human companion before I died. I also had a darker reason.

  See, Felicia was a big prepper. Over the past few years, she had transformed her entire backyard into a magnificent garden. She spent her days canning, preserving, and organizing for her survival. She had a big compost pile by the fence, so she never needed to buy fertilizer. Her rain barrel provided water during the driest months of summer. Her husband had installed a set of solar panels to provide power in case of an emergency. Of course, about ten feet of water buried all of that prepping just as well as it buried my untended mess of a yard.

  I don’t know why I had to say it. “Ha,” I told her, “it looks like all of your crap is as deep under this water as all my crap.”

  “Oh, that was just mean, Marilyn,” Felicia replied. “Seriously, there is something wrong with you.”

  After she said that, I felt sort of bad. I forced myself to look at her across the expanse of greenish water that had transformed our rooftops into islands.

  “Look,” I said, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry about your stuff. I’m sorry about my stuff. I’m sorry for myself, and I’m just a sorry sack, all right?” The broken end of the pine tree floated toward my house, took out several feet of useless gutter, and lodged itself under the narrow eaves. The other end of the tree extended past where my fence would be and broke the attic window of the house behind me.

  Oaf whimpered against my belly. Felicia’s dog, a big gray Pit Bull, looked proud and defiant as he stood guard beside her. The cheerful brute’s tale whipped back and forth like he had been born to protect his mistress from disaster. Even Felicia’s dog was better than mine. I could at least admit I was happy she had saved Sluggo. He was a clever and loving dog.

  “You know, Marilyn,” she said, “we need a way to float out of here. Nobody’s going to come and save us for a long time. We’re two people out of millions. I understand the situation as well as you do. We’ve got to get out of here to someplace clearer and dryer. Other trees could fall. Our roofs could cave in under us. This is not a sustainable situation.”

  “Oh?” I remarked with my remaining reserves of spite. “I’m surprised you don’t have a boat packed away in your supplies.
I figured you’d have an inflatable yacht or something.”

  I shook my head. I looked at my axe then shifted my eyes toward the eighty-foot pine. Even if I had been a wizard who could chop up a tree to make some sort of craft, there was no way I could handle that heavy tree from the top of a slippery roof. I had known for hours that long-term residence on this slippery and damaged roof offered too many hazards and too little sustenance.

  An eight-foot wide section of fence floated past. The hours I spent researching arcane topics on the internet had not totally been useless.

  “I’ve got an idea,” I called out. I reached into my windbreaker to pat Oaf’s fluffy head in some vain attempt to calm her down. Still sitting, I used the pine branch that had almost killed me a few minutes before to fish for the fence section and lodge it under the eaves to keep it there.

  “What are you doing, Marilyn?” Felicia asked.

  “I’ve got five, five-gallon jugs with water right below me,” I said. “Actually, I’ve got six in a case. I think we should save one because I’ve only got part of a quart of water left up here.”

  “How is water going to help us?” Felicia asked. She spread her arm to point out that water was one resource we did not lack.

  “I don’t mean to use the water. I’ll use the jugs. If I empty them, that will displace two-hundred pounds, plus the fence section is already somewhat buoyant on its own. I’ve got long zip ties to attach the bottles to the ends of this fence section. That’s plenty to hold me, my little dog, and my bugout bag. It’s not enough to also hold you, your dog, and supplies you want to take. It’s a start though. If you can contribute something for a bit more buoyancy, we can make ourselves a crappy raft.”

  “You really want to build a raft with me?” Felicia asked. “How did you get an idea like this?”