Surrender the Sun: A Post Apocalyptic Dystopian Thriller by A R Shaw Read Free Book Online

poured warmed maple syrup over his pancakes. He eagerly dug in.
    Maeve also ate a pancake, and they each had two slices of bacon. After breakfast, she packed up the leftover pancakes and saved them in the fridge along with the extra bacon. She usually threw out the bacon grease, but this time she kept every bit of it in a bowl. She wasn’t sure why. Her grandmother used to save bacon grease, but Maeve had never used it for anything before. She figured if her grandmother kept it she probably used it to cook with, and since Maeve had few supplies, she was saving everything possible.
    After breakfast was put away and the dishes were done, Maeve scoured the house for candles, matches, flashlights, and anything else she could find or thought she might need if the power went out. In all, she had three decorative pillar candles and few books of matches from various hotels from years past as well as a butane torch lighter she used for the fireplace that was nearly empty. She also found a flashlight under the kitchen sink and another one in the garage. She wasn’t sure how old the batteries were—that was something Roger always took care of. She hadn’t gotten around to being the man of the house yet. Every time Maeve went into the garage, Roger’s scent that permeated everything within would send her into a three-day grieving spell. As a result, she avoided the garage as much as possible.
    While Ben made car noises with his handheld game, she stood back and tried to assess how many hours of candlelight they had. “Probably a couple of days if we only use them at night,” she said to herself.
    “What, Mom?” Ben asked.
    “The candles. We have enough for probably a few days, and we have about three or four days of food hopefully…” she trailed off.
    “Do you think that’s enough till the storm passes and we can go to the grocery store?”
    “Sure,” she said, being optimistic for his sake.
    “First, we have to wait for someone to come and fix our battery, and then we will go to the grocery store.”
    That’s when the next gust of wind rattled the house. So strong was the force, that like a child playing with a toy town, it also took down several trees and power lines and, along with them, the joyful tune coming from Ben’s racing game.

Chapter 6
     
    Deep in the Kootenai National Forest, a few residents lived isolated lives among the tall cypresses, winding streams, and wildlife that roamed among them. They were part of their surroundings, unlike those men who lived on paved streets. They knew of one another and also knew where each of their neighbors resided, tucked away in hidden coves among large boulders the glaciers abandoned years past or near veiled alcoves. There were at least five hundred acres between each of them. A few of them visited one another when the need arose, to either trade something or when they had a task for more than one man, but mostly they remained alone, and those that required the isolation were left alone out of respect.
    Mark Bishop was one of those men. He’d never imagined his life taking this turn. He’d started out in a pretty standard household: one mom, one dad, and a sister, growing up in a little town named Post Falls, Idaho, not far away from his current residence.
    After graduating high school in 2014, Bishop headed to the University of Washington and spent four years in the rain and muck of Seattle. Then he graduated in 2018 with a shiny new bachelor’s degree in atmospheric sciences and promptly fled the wet area before the ever-present mold could form on his certificate.
    He’d applied for jobs a few months before graduation and instead landed a great internship with the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in Maryland for a congressional communications position. The position entailed studying oceanic and atmospheric research and giving reports to Congress. But that’s as far as he got into a routine life Prewar. Things were changing.
    In the spring of