The Smoke That Never Stops: A Post-Apocalyptic EMP Survival Thriller
The fires were three miles apart.
That's how Chloe Summers knew. Standing on a Des Moines balcony forty one days after the lights died, watching five separate blazes ignite along the western horizon at the same hour, evenly spaced, with the wind at eighteen miles an hour blowing them straight into the city.
Nobody starts a line of fires by accident.
Somebody looked at a map. Somebody checked a forecast. Somebody picked a day.
Chloe runs with a pack and a dog and forty one pencil marks on a cabinet door. Behind her, half a million people are walking east into open country because the fire gave them nowhere else to go. That was the point. Ahead of her, in a state where nothing runs anymore, headlights are moving on the gravel roads at night.
They call themselves the Firemen. They burned the city to empty it, and they have been feeding that fire every single week since, because a sky nobody can see through is a sky where they are the only ones with a flashlight.
Chloe finds a farm. A windmill still turning, a garden laid out in string, a young widower and his seven year old daughter and the smell of meat over a fire for the first time in six weeks. She means to stay two days.
Then a man walks up that lane with his hands out from his sides. He is polite. He is honest about exactly what he is. He offers terms twice.
And he is right about just enough of it to make him the most dangerous thing left alive in Iowa.
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