The Survivors: Book One Read Online Free Page A

truck’s engine had died too, Kenn mashed the pedal and ducked, as the chopper spun past. He met the eyes of the horrified pilot for a brief second, before it hit the main dorm, exploded through it.
    Orange flames and thick black smoke billowed upward, and Kenn’s heart froze as the cheers and screams of those outside the fences grew louder, hungrier. If the boy had been in there, he was dead now. No one could have survived that.
     
    Falling apart at the seams
     
    8
    By midnight, communication lines were down across the country. No internet, no phones, no cable - and unchecked rioting across the nation. With their lives suddenly blown away, the stunned survivors had no idea what to do. Few thought to help each other.
    Split between broken states that had only small areas capable of sustaining life, most people began trying to get out of the cities. Searching for safety, and unaware that it no longer existed, millions more were lost in the aftermath. At dawn, the American people were confident, arrogant about their future. By dusk, the dream was crushed, faith not only shaken, but mortally wounded.
    Less than a week after the War, the death toll stood at 250 million in the United States alone. Twenty million of those who survived were seriously injured or blinded and another seven million had the radiation sickness. Most of those didn’t live to see the new year.
    The numbers were staggering, inconceivable, and yet, real. The world’s worst fears had been proven true. The horribly high cost of freedom was settled in the blood of the innocent, as debts like these, in the end, always are. The people should have been prepared, ready, and instead, the governments expected to protect, hurt their citizens as much as the actual bombs. The Draft took tens of thousands of desperately needed doctors, scientists, nurses and engineers, and they stripped farms and factories alike of their crops and livestock, leaving their owners bodies rotting where they fell. They took it all.
    Some people fled before the President’s broadcast began airing, tipped off by determined sources as the governments began locking it down. A few of those quick-thinking souls survived, but flight was not an option for most. There were loved ones and supplies to be gathered first, and by then, the roads crammed with traffic and accidents were impassable, forcing people to either wait in their cars for the convoys of draft trucks, or set out on foot to find somewhere to hide.
    Those were the ones who fled too late, and were caught out in the open with all those who had already been on the road for the holiday. The rest hunkered down where they were and hoped their town wasn't a direct target, or close to one.
    Only two of every nine Americans survived the end of the world. This is our story…

 
    Chapter Two

 
    January 1 st , 2013
    Outside Bonneville, Wyoming
     
    1
    “There’s a storm coming.” Samantha’s tone was low. She hadn’t forgotten who she was talking to.
    Her captor’s hard voice lashed out in the cold, Wyoming wind. “Tell us something we don’t know. It’s rained every day since you geniuses blew us up!”
    Flinching, Samantha ducked her head, dirty blonde curls hiding a pale, bruised face full of loathing. Instead of arguing, she poked at their reluctant fire with her once expensive shoe, watching the creepy darkness of the highway overpass around them. The clinking echo of the heavy chain around her ankle made her quit before Melvin could tell her to. Now was a bad time to draw attention.
    Samantha had never hated anyone as much as she did the two drunken men sprawled carelessly in lawn chairs just behind her. Warm in their paint-stained overalls and long johns, she shivered miserably in the same torn, reeking office clothes she’d been taken in. She wanted to be alone inside their rusty van, out of the icy wind, and searching for something she could use as a weapon, but the two males liked to wait until she was nearing frostbite