"The Age of Ausra I: The War of the Mayors" eBook (EPUB & PDF formats)

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Excerpt

Episode One: “The War of the Mayors”

It felt more like a day in mid-August than a day in early June. The heat waves gyrated and pulsated against the asphalt in an almost obscene manner, and the scene from a short distance away was as if Lake Chatuge had overflowed its banks to inundate the black asphalt of former US Highway 76. Of course, it hadn’t rained for weeks. Welcome to summer in the South.

Caleb had witnessed a lot of suffering and horrible things in the final months of his childhood life in Marietta, Georgia but the carnage in the denser urban neighborhoods of downtown Atlanta was far greater. Yet as the pandemic worsened and the supply chain faltered, food and basic supplies became scarcer, which put society in competition with itself. The results were devastating and quickly spread into the suburbs of every major city in America and beyond. Marietta was just the next place in the crosshairs.

Now 17 years old, on this day that distant chapter of Caleb’s life was not dominating his thoughts. Filling the empty orange, five-gallon Home Depot bucket with blackberries was…

Having not been bush hogged for several years, what was once the right of way along the old highway now provided the perfect sunny environment for an intense thicket of thorny blackberry groves more easily accessible via the adjoining asphalt roadbed. And the arrival of June has always ushered in the peak of blackberry picking season in the Deep South. At least there were a few things that the pandemic and unrest that followed couldn’t change.

It happened in an incredibly short amount of time. In just a few weeks after the identification of the deadly viral strain, the mortality rate soared to 50% for those unfortunate enough to get infected in the first, most potent and contagious wave. And that was in America.

The death rate worldwide was even worse. The terror wrought by the sudden onslaught of death and grief caused everyone to simply hunker down at home… and that included those serving in the medical community, law enforcement, the manufacturing industry, agricultural sector and even the military. So, it wasn’t a World War 3 scenario, nuclear holocaust or civil war that led to the fall of America and every other civilized nation on the planet. Everyone either died or just stayed home.

At first, he wasn’t sure what he was seeing because the shimmering heat waves made it difficult to discern real objects in the distance from a mirage. But as soon as Caleb realized it was a vehicle traveling toward him, he quickly crouched behind the blackberry grove to hide. And though the truck passed without noticing Caleb, he knew they’d return because the Hiawassee River Bridge was out just a couple miles further up in the direction the truck was heading. So as soon as the truck was out of sight, Caleb beat a trail back to the village to tell the others. The blackberries would have to wait.

Marietta was a fine community in its day. Cobb County boasted one of the highest per capita household incomes in America and very few homes in Caleb’s neighborhood could be purchased for less than a seven-figure sum. But soon after the collapse, famine and desperation pushed people out of urban Atlanta and the wave of civil disobedience spread as quickly as the virus did. And it was just as lethal. Eventually, some semblance of order was restored but only by opportunistic strongmen who managed to outthink or out muscle (or simply outlive) their rivals to essentially become a dictator of a city state. This saga was unfolding everywhere.

Caleb’s parents and kid sister Lea survived the pandemic, though all four family members were infected over the first year and a half, with Lea experiencing the most severe case. Caleb wouldn’t have admitted it back then, but he loved Lea more than anything on the planet and was so concerned about her illness that he never left her side while she was ailing and tended to her every need. However, he still referred to her as “The Brat”, and no matter her age at any point in their future lives, Lea would always be two years Caleb’s junior.

…