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  Sky Fall

  The Sky Fall Series, Book 1

  Logan Keys

  SKY FALL

  The Sky Fall Series book one

  Logan Keys

  © 2019 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

  Untitled

  1. Just outside of Los Angeles California

  2. New Orleans, Louisiana

  3. Just outside of Fort Benning, Georgia

  4. Two years earlier

  5. New Orleans, Louisiana

  6. Los Angeles, California

  7. New Orleans, Louisiana

  8. Two Years Earlier

  9. Just outside of Fort Benning, Georgia

  10. New Orleans, Louisiana

  11. Los Angeles, California

  12. New Orleans, Louisiana

  13. Two years Earlier

  14. Just outside Fort Benning, Georgia

  15. Just outside of Los Angeles, California

  Author’s Notes

  Please sign up for my post-apocalyptic list HERE

  Now Available: Sky Fall’s Book Two WHITE FLARE is Now Available

  CLICK HERE

  Special thanks to Pauline Creeden, my editor, along with the awesome Laine Lambright, and fabulous Ryan Schow. To all of my beta and arc readers and readers and supporters thank you.

  1

  Just outside of Los Angeles California

  Though Clive found little traffic during the drive through the suburbs surrounding Los Angeles, inside the city, it was gridlocked. A lot of people stood outside watching the sky. He turned up the radio.

  The power will be out for at least four hours, in some areas, overnight.

  Keep refrigerator doors shut. Stay cool or warm, depending on where you are in the country. Plan for a total blackout, followed by spotty service for a week from various providers.

  Clive’s phone notified him of a new voice mail. He pushed the button to listen.

  “It’s the apocalypse!” Clive’s brother, Darryl, shouted. “Do you hear me? This is it! The big one!”

  “I’m not kiddin’…”

  Static.

  “You should see the---”

  Beep.

  “….party is just start…”

  Static.

  And then the phone cut out. Clive debated on leaving it before pressing the call button on his dash.

  It went right to voice mail. “You’ve reached Darryl. Believe it and receive it, man…or woman…haha…at the beep!”

  That heavy silence hung there as it always had when it came to his younger brother. Where to begin? Clive couldn’t quite stop being the parent since their actual parents died. It was freaking exhausting, and he pressed end without saying anything.

  With a sigh, Clive parked on the street, got out, and kept his head down as he made his way toward the office. The block was full of pedestrians meandering around in casual wear. Some even looked dressed for a party, instead of the suited-up men and women who usually were in the business district.

  “What the---” Clive’s coffee cup was crushed against his chest as what looked like a rainbow slammed into him.

  Hot liquid exploded onto his dress shirt, soaking his skin.

  “Sorry, man!” A girl, maybe sixteen, backed away from him with her hands up in lame apology, but she was laughing, too, like it was the most hilarious thing she’d seen all day.

  Clive just stared at her. Her curly hair bounced in a mixture of yellows, greens, purples, and blues, and her sunglasses were hot pink, made overlarge for her face. “Fine. All right. Whatever, guy,” she said like he wasn’t accepting her apology, and he wasn’t sure that he was.

  She lifted her sunglasses to wink, grinning before spinning around and running off.

  Clive grumbled and tried to pat at his shirt with a napkin, uselessly. She’d been looking up at the sky and not watching where she was going. He shook his head and brushed past a few others who were also shading their eyes. Like zombies, they stood in the middle of the street, motionless.

  Mid-crosswalk, a man gazed upward, stopping right in front of Clive and forcing him to pass on the side.

  When Clive crossed, the little green walk symbol had already turned to a red palm, and he noticed the man still hadn’t moved.

  “Hey!” Clive called, alarmed. “Look out!” A car went through the crosswalk smashing into the frozen figure, throwing him into the air before he landed with a thud, rolling across the pavement with a wet sound.

  The car screeched to a stop, and a lady climbed out, crying that she hadn’t seen him.

  People ran to the man’s side, including Clive.

  “Someone call nine-one-one!”

  Clive pulled out his phone and dialed. “I’m at the intersection of Seventh and Broadway. There’s been an accident.”

  The voice was distant and full of static. “Hello?”

  Clive checked the bars on his phone. He’d always had excellent service before in the city, but he had only half a bar now. “Hello?”

  He redialed.

  “Let me through!” a woman said. “I’m a nurse!”

  Clive watched helplessly as she tried CPR, but it was clear that the man’s neck was broken. It sat at a strange angle, and he wasn’t breathing.

  Clive tried the emergency number three more times. “My phone won’t go through. Anyone else’s working?”

  Someone finally flagged down a police officer who radioed for an ambulance.

  Soon after, they carted the body away, and Clive realized there was nothing else that he could do.

  In a sort of shock over the events, and having seen his first dead body ever, Clive checked his watch and walked towards his building. His shirt was dry now, stiff with a brown stain across it.

  He pulled out his phone and texted Sara, his wife. It’s getting crazy here. Stay safe. If something goes wrong, please don’t wait for me, just go to your parents.

  He decided not to tell her about the man until he got home so she wouldn’t worry.

  Inside his building, the power was on, but hushed voices and worried glances told him he wasn’t the only one who thought that outages might be worse than predicted.

  “The boss is out,” Len said motioning to the office where their manager usually sat. “Coffee?” he asked, glancing at Clive’s shirt.

  Clive took a cup and thanked him before he made his way to the back office. Seventeen stories up, it was usually his favorite view, but today he shut the blinds. The sky was a no-go zone. It creeped him out. And the fact that people treated this as normal creeped him out further.

  The neighboring office had the news loudly playing on their computer. Sheila was a conspiracy theorist who said the government was causing the solar flares they’d been experiencing, for a tax hike.

  The largest aurora borealis ever seen is now floating above Texas. We have reports that other areas are seeing them too.

  Sheila was on her phone. “Hi, Channel Nine? This is Sheila Stone and I wanted to say that Los Angeles has the lights as well. Yes, I’m looking outside. It’s um…it’s started here. You know the government has been controlling the weather for a long…hello? Hello?”

  “Phones are dead!” she called, and Clive tapped his foot, fidgeting with paper work that he was too unfocused to read.

  When the minutes passed, and Sheila was ultra-quiet, Clive decided to check on her.

  He knocked on her door. “Hey,” he said entering. He put his back to her windows after catching a glimpse of the clouds that were a strange hue of green. “How you holdin’ up?”

  “Good. Yeah.” But she was staring at the win
dow and not paying attention to him.

  “All right. Well, let me know if you need anything.”

  He turned to leave, and she said, “A gun.”

  Clive paused at the doorway. “What?”

  “Jeffrey. They fired him yesterday, and I packed his things. They asked me to, you know? But inside his top right drawer he had a gun. Did you know that, Clive? I left it because I didn’t know what to do with it.”

  Her computer was still playing the news.

  The countdown begins. As the CME (Coronal Mass Ejection) hits earth there will be some electrical disturbances, but scientists have confirmed this is not as big as the Carrington event in eighteen fifty-nine. About half as strong. We’re going to be seeing the power surges starting in ten minutes as the …

  “You think he was FBI?” Sheila asked, turning up the sound. “Jeffrey, I mean. A mole?”

  “Uh. Hmm. Not sure.”

  Clive left her office and went straight to what used to be Jeffrey’s. He closed the door then locked it. They’d had a string of carjackings near the building, maybe Jeffrey felt like he’d needed to protect himself. He stayed late sometimes.

  Clive didn’t like to imagine a more nefarious reason for the weapon in the office.

  The desk was cleared off and empty and the office’s blinds were open. It was overcast outside, and as Clive moved to shut them his gaze caught the strange swirling colors in the sky.

  His stomach dipped. The aurora borealis was so foreign and in the middle of the day, the phenomenon simply hung there, dancing.

  Clive closed the blinds.

  The desk drawers were empty, too, except for the top right one, which did indeed have a gun inside. Clive stared at the thirty-eight snub-nosed revolver. He hadn’t held a gun since he’d been on his father’s farm as a kid. His mother had moved him and Darryl to California when they were teens, and they had never looked back.

  He had grown up thinking small town life was the worst, but now he’d give anything for a little patch of land. Funny how life does that to a person.

  Clive picked up the weapon, finding with surprise that it was loaded. He dropped the bullets out of the revolver into his palm and pocketed them both.

  The power cut out.

  Even though they had been warned and everyone should have been ready, he heard someone scream. It wasn’t just in LA or even in California. It was half of the planet. The dark side of earth would only be affected later should the power outages continue.

  He returned to his office, and someone knocked on the door. Because of the silence, what without the hum of the familiar things that ran on electricity, it startled Clive, sounding overloud. “Come in,” he said.

  Sheila poked her head inside. “Hey, boss man.”

  He smiled tightly. “Don’t call me that.”

  “Well, for today you are.” Sheila was excited. “What’s the plan?”

  People fell into two types. Excited. Nervous. Or a little of both. She was the last one.

  At the three-hour mark, the power turned back on, and the office applauded.

  Sheila turned on the news again.

  Welcome back folks. Our atmosphere has already mitigated most of the ejection. Flights will resume immediately though; some ongoing rolling blackouts are predicted in the largest cities…

  Sheila seemed disappointed, but that tightness in Clive’s chest eased. “All right everyone,” he said, feeling better than he had all day. “Back to work.”

  After some time, he checked his watch and realized it was almost time to leave. His phone buzzed, and he lifted it to his ear. “Hey, hun,” Sara said. “See. Nothing to worry about.”

  “Yeah, you were right. See you when I get home. Kiss the monkeys for me.”

  “Done and done,” she said with lips smacking as she planted a kiss on each of their children for him. Greggy, two, squealed in delight, while Caroline, eight going on teenaged, groaned.

  When Clive put his phone back, he realized he still had the gun in his pocket. He couldn’t exactly leave it in the office, so he’d have to take it home and ask Fred tomorrow…

  “Oh my god!” Sheila yelled.

  He ran to her office. “What is it?”

  “Look!”

  She was pointing at the window. The sun was dim, like a hanging black ball in the sky. Clive gaped at it. Something was wrong. His brain couldn’t absorb the irregularity of a dark sun.

  “What’s happening?” Sheila cried.

  The sun flashed bright and the side of it erupted, creating a light that nearly blinded Clive.

  He clenched his eyes shut.

  Len ran into the office and he was already turning up the volume of Sheila’s computer. “Listen,” he said, his eyes wide with fear.

  We’ve just been told that a second CME has erupted from the sun and is headed for earth at an alarming rate. What usually takes days is…

  But Clive couldn’t understand half of what the newscaster was saying because others had noticed the sun and the office was loud with people shouting and talking at once. Several crowded into Sheila’s office to hear the newsman.

  “It can’t be true,” someone shouted. “They said that it was done!”

  Len hushed them.

  Space weather reports indicate that there will be a geomagnetic storm created by the solar flare twice as large as the Carrington Event…

  Clive felt as if he were falling from the seventeen stories up, but he wasn’t sure yet why he felt that way. “When is it supposed to hit?”

  Len gazed at Clive with blurry eyes. “They made a mistake. It has to be a mistake.”

  There is no way to predict the outcome of such a catastrophic…

  “What should we do?” Sheila asked and Clive stared at her numbly before shaking his head.

  There’s no time to prepare. The result of the impact will be… This can’t be right?

  The newscaster was choking on his words.

  Devastating. Ladies and gentlemen, scientists expect impact in eight minutes. We will try to countdown with you here for as long as we have power…may God be with you all.

  The lights flickered, and Sheila’s computer shut off, but the lights came back on. Mentally, Clive was still falling from a cliff. He was rushing towards the cement of disbelief.

  Clive didn’t waste another second, he was already running out of the office, blindly, partially pushing through anyone in his way. Most had not heard, so he shouted, “Everyone out, get out of…the city!”

  Maintenance man Keith was putting an out of order sign on the elevator, but Clive thrust him out of the way knowing he could spend all of his eight minutes trying to run down the stairs. “You have to get out of the building!” Clive wasn’t sure why he thought the skyscrapers would be more dangerous, but he did.

  Keith stood frozen in surprise.

  “Get out of my way!” Clive roared, pressing the button.

  The doors opened, and feet were pounding close behind him. People crammed inside, pressing the ground floor button and the doors began to close.

  Others were running towards the closing doors, shoving each other, knocking people down. Sheila reached for them just as the doors inched shut. “Clive!” she cried but it was too late.

  Inside of the elevator, some were weeping, others were trying to use their phones. Clive was frozen, his mind racing.

  The lights flickered again, and they all cried out as the elevator shook when the power surged. Why had he taken the elevator? Was he out of his mind? What if they were trapped when it struck?

  Beneath them, the floor of the elevator dipped, and Clive gripped the railing. It hit the bottom with a loud sound, but the doors opened, and they rushed out towards the exit, happy to be free.

  Clive burst through the glass doors, and more of his coworkers spilled out behind him. A panicked crowd was already running down the street. To where? He had no idea.

  He ran down the sidewalk toward his car, knowing it was too late to do anything, but still, he w
as frantic to get home. He grabbed his phone and dialed Sara, but he already knew from the others in the elevator that the lines were tied.

  More people scattered, and a little girl got knocked down, her body skidding on the pavement. Clive stopped and helped her up. She looked just like Caroline and his heart squeezed tight. The mother grabbed the girl’s hand, and they disappeared into the crowd.

  His car was usually in the parking garage but today he’d parked a block away to get coffee, paying the meter instead. His long legs ate up the distance, his mind was thinking a million thoughts per second. How long had it been? Did Sara know? Would she try to get the kids away from the city? Would cars still work after it hit?

  How long was eight minutes when you were counting every second as your possible last?

  Not long enough.

  His Honda sat a dozen feet away when the sky darkened.

  Clive froze and looked up to see he was shaded by a seven forty-seven that had dipped low, too low.

  He watched in horror as the wings sheared off on the buildings to either side. One of the buildings was his office and a chunk of it flew into the street, crushing cars and people.

  Like a crescendo, the screams that had been apparent before, rose in unison, until that was all he could hear. The echoes of terrified humans all shouting their fear at once.

  There was a second of stillness before a skyscraper bent in half, toppling into another building near it, before collapsing in on itself in a deluge of powdery disintegration.

  In what felt like slow motion, the plane passed his position without wings, taking out street lights and wires before finally bottoming out on the street, crashing, exploding on impact, throwing Clive off his feet like a rag doll.