Unless specifically referred to, all of the characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination and are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people, places or events are entirely coincidental, unless a specific person, place or incident is referred to in the text of this publication.

This publication is for educational and entertainment purposes only. The statements expressed herein are the opinions of the author alone and should not be construed as or taken to be legal, medical, or professional advice of any kind. The reader is responsible for his or her own actions.

The views expressed in this publication are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher or any of the contributors who worked on this publication.

Unless otherwise noted, all Scripture quotations are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, by Biblica, Inc
TM
. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com.

At times this book will quote Scripture from other Bible translations that do not have copyright restrictions.

Neither the author nor the publisher assume any responsibility or liability whatsoever on behalf of the purchaser or reader of this publication.

ISBN-10: 1511442182

ISBN-13: 978-1511442183

Dedicated to the One who is the way, the truth and the life

Jesus answered: “Watch out that no one deceives you … when you see standing in the holy place ‘the abomination that causes desolation,’ spoken of through the prophet Daniel—let the reader understand— then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains. Let no one on the housetop go down to take anything out of the house. Let no one in the field go back to get their cloak. How dreadful it will be in those days for pregnant women and nursing mothers! Pray that your flight will not take place in winter or on the Sabbath. For then there will be great distress, unequaled from the beginning of the world until now—and never to be equaled again… If those days had not been cut short, no one would survive, but for the sake of the elect those days will be shortened.”

--Matthew‬ 24‬:4, 15-22‬ (NIV)
‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬

Somewhere In The Continental United States

In The Near Future

CHAPTER 1

“So Mr. Wells, do you know what I really miss about, you know, the time before all this started happening?”

“Sean, you can call me David, unless your parents insist that you call me Mr. Wells. And you know we aren’t supposed to talk about what things we miss about the past. Jesse specifically asked us not to. We are supposed to look towards the future, not talk about what we miss about the past. I think you were at the meeting when that subject came up.”

David and Sean were serving their turn at the advance look-out post of a Christian prepper group, totaling 40 people, who had only recently retreated into the hills outside their town. A smaller, Mormon group had a retreat nearby, up a common road.

The country had recently gone through a series of calamities, some with religious significance and some without, which ended most of the rule of law from the federal and state governments in the United States.

The American president, who had been widely distrusted by the Christian community, was attending a conference in Jerusalem, to celebrate the mid-point of his much-heralded seven-year, universal peace treaty. Most other world leaders also attended. This treaty had succeeded in keeping world peace as never before. Even skeptics had been impressed with the peace kept by this treaty, engineered by the American president.

The location of this conference, believed to be the location of Solomon’s Temple from biblical times, was chosen to emphasize the historical significance of the occasion.

However, during the conference, nuclear bombs concealed inside shipping containers exploded simultaneously at several American east-coast port cities. For those who survived the nuclear bombs, full-scale rioting ensued, making the cities involved a vast wasteland of death and destruction. Fearing the same attacks, other port cities that had not been attacked halted all shipping operations, resulting in shortages of essential supplies and food. People in those cities also rioted.

All the rioters in American port cities not only demanded a resumption of the shipments of food, but they also resented the fact that any semblance of privacy they had had was gone, ostensibly in order to protect against terrorist attacks like what just happened. Rational observers of the situation agreed that this was one of the few times when the frustrations of rioters, if not the actions, actually made sense. Government snooping of phone calls, e-mails, texts, computer hard-drives, credit card and online purchases, and all other aspects of life in America had produced no noticeable increase in security, as had been promised. Facial recognition cameras had even been set up in city centers, recording the identities and travelling of drivers and pedestrians through the cities. Yet, this end of privacy had still not halted the attacks.

Soon after the nuclear explosions in the American port cities, terrorist sleeper cells inside the United States began operations in which they attacked electrical substations – those unprotected junctions of electrical power lines where the voltage in the lines is regulated for further movement into a nearby city – with machine guns in an attempt to cut off the power grid and all communications. At first, the nationwide coordinated attacks on power substations, dubbed “Metcalfing” after the location of the 2013 dry run, had scattered success. Nevertheless, several major American cities still had power. A few nights later, after further attacks on substations, those cities too were in the dark.

The lack of power and communications freed up the terrorists inside the country to attack in other ways, like poisoning city reservoirs, bombing refineries, crop-dusting downtown areas with anthrax and blood from Ebola victims, and sabotaging train tracks to cause derailments. Stinger missiles, which had been smuggled across the country’s wide-open southern border, were used to shoot down passenger planes. These attacks resulted in the deaths of millions of people, who kept drinking the tap water, taking trains, flying planes and attending work, in the vain hope that normalcy would soon return.

Meanwhile, the American president, still at the Jerusalem conference, noticeably hesitated when asked by a reporter if he considered surrendering to the terrorists. The lack of seriousness of his answer to this question startled many, as it revealed the fact that somewhere in the highest offices of the country a surrender was even contemplated. Nevertheless, for a few days this open consideration of surrender seemed to work, as the terrorist attacks from within the country paused, and Americans looked forward to a return of peace and security.

But it was not to be. Once news of possible surrender fully reached the citizenry, several states that had always opposed the president and his policies, and even some counties within states that had supported the president, rejected any talk of surrender, and announced that they would not abide by any decisions reached with the perpetrators of the terrorist attacks. The American military was dispatched to quell the “disloyal” jurisdictions. It was another American civil war, except this time there were many fronts.

As with all wars, the United States government had to immediately spend much more money than it had, forcing it to go into even more deficit-spending than it had already been. In the most responsible of times, this would have led to inflation, as so many more dollars were chasing a limited amount of goods and services. But in this situation, the government had for years already been pointlessly overspending to provide government benefits to the citizenry. The result was inflation rates that fluctuated at 30% on up, depending on the week and month.

The people soon realized that their dollars and government benefit checks were almost worthless. Consumer spending for non-food items came to a stand-still, resulting in mass lay-offs. The official unemployment rate topped 35%, while the unofficial rate was much higher. The American economy plunged into a slow-down that was even worse than the Great Depression of the 1930’s.

By then, established Christian churches were long gone, either made to preach only from abridged Bibles, approved by the federal government, or shut down as purveyors of “hate speech.” The land and buildings of the churches that were shut down were confiscated and sold at government auctions. Many other religious groups, most of them Muslim, bought church properties at very low prices, and these groups began to establish and grow their congregations.

The shutting down of fundamentalist Christian churches as disseminators of “hate” ended any political influence the churches and their followers had, and this in turn enabled some state and local governments to restrict heterosexual weddings, so that such weddings may occur only after the couples trying to marry pay a high fee and take a course on “inclusiveness and tolerance.” Muslim weddings were exempted from these new rules.

Throughout the country, small pockets of Christians stayed together and worshipped in their homes. The “Bible study groups” from the Christian churches of old became the new Christian churches, except much smaller and underground. With these new churches, secrecy was second in importance only to the unabridged Bible that they studied.

These Christians, having read the many predictions in the Bible, realized that the End Times were here. Those who had prepared, like the group David and Sean belonged to, left their homes and jobs and met at agreed-upon retreat locations, where they hoped to survive the coming apocalypse. The coming days, weeks, months and years would see whether these families would survive as they had prepared.

One of the first observations made by the leaders of this group were that the people who came to the retreat were shocked and in many cases seriously depressed. After several weeks a policy was promoted at the periodic meetings the group had that they were to encourage humor whenever possible, and to minimize the talk of the “way things used to be.” Despite the obvious challenges, the leaders of this group began to highly prize a positive mental attitude among its members.

*****

“Oh come on,” Sean said. He paused. Both looked outside their hillside bunker, onto the empty dirt road below, without saying anything. A dark smoke cloud could be seen in the distance to the east.

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