"The Age of Ausra II: Migration of the Remnant" eBook (EPUB & PDF formats)

The EPUB book format (.epub) provides the smoothest and most comfortable reading experience, and it is compatible with most commercial readers such as Amazon Kindle, Apple Books, and Google Play Books. There are also a number of free e-reader apps that work very well, FBReader for iOS and Android being our free reader of choice.

The PDF format (.pdf) is the most ubiquitous reading experience, and all it requires is the free Adobe Acrobat Reader (which you probably already have). Like an EPUB file, it can also be imported into most commercial readers such as Amazon Kindle, Apple Books, and Google Play Books. Major drawbacks in reading PDF files in Acrobat or other e-readers are the inability to adjust font type, size, line-height, etc., and an overall "clunky" user experience.

Identical EPUB and PDF versions of your book will be included in your zipped download, just unzip the folder to a known location on your device. A quick online search should provide the info you need to import our EPUB products into your reader of choice, and we include instructions with every download.

Excerpt

Episode One: “The Big Apple Core”

Before the Pandemic, the population of Manhattan Island was approaching two million living and breathing souls; however, there were now less than a dozen hapless survivors sheltering somewhere in the urban ruins located within the confines of the island’s 23 square miles. All but two, an older but robust couple fortunate enough to still have one another, believed they were the last person alive on earth. Before this crisp and bright fall morning would succumb to the infinite blackness of a city without electricity, that belief would change.

For well over a century, Manhattan had consisted of dozens of distinctly different and unique neighborhoods and districts that, collectively, can probably best be described as a dense ball of multicolor yarn. However, even though there are over fifty individually designated neighborhood districts in Manhattan, outsiders often define it as consisting of three primary parts: Midtown, Uptown and Downtown.

Before the Europeans “discovered” the Americas, inhabitants of the island were a blend of various indigenous Indian tribes. The Dutch preceded the English, largely through the notorious Dutch West India Company which, with its sibling company the Dutch East India Company, diversified their primary business of silk and spice trading to become one of history’s most infamous slave trading conglomerates. The Dutch quickly determined the island could become a strategic port for the delivery of slaves captured on the African continent to the New World.

Always in competition and conflict with the Spaniards, Portuguese, French and English, through the Dutch West India Company, the Dutch moved to legitimize their claim to the island by purchasing it from the Lenope Indians, who signed it away via a document they neither understood nor could read. Still, the assurances by the cordial and ever-smiling Europeans convinced the tribe that whatever was being offered must be a really good deal so, without negotiating, they unwittingly sold the island to the Dutch company for food and a few personal items worth the equivalent of $1,842.16 in today’s dollars. Before the collapse, the value of the island’s underlying land (with nothing attributed to its buildings and infrastructure) was just under $2 trillion, underscoring that the transaction truly was in fact, a good deal, at least for somebody.

The Tower Building was the island’s first skyscraper, a steel framed 11 story masonry-clad building completed in 1889. When it was demolished along with most of its contemporaries, the 22 story Flat Iron Building, located downtown and on the southern end of the island, became the oldest still standing skyscraper in Manhattan. Its sole occupants were now Sarah and Abbott Smith. Abbott, or “Ace” as he had been known since his college days, was an elite corporate attorney before the collapse, and Sarah was a rising star on Wall Street with a higher earning potential than her husband. She was Harvard educated with an MBA from The University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business, while he got his law degree from Duke University. They had met accidentally twenty-five years earlier at a Dave Matthews concert in Charlottesville, Virginia when they crashed into one another trying to merge into traffic leaving John Paul Jones Arena. The exchanging of information for insurance purposes (the accident was Abbott’s fault) led to a spontaneous wedding culminating from a rock-climbing adventure in Colorado seven months later.

Ace got his nickname in undergraduate school at Vanderbilt University from fraternity brothers who were amazed at his uncanny ability to heartily party the night before a big exam and still “ace” the test while barely cracking a book or breaking a sweat. He was two years older than Sarah, who was still a fitness addict, and who at 55 (other than her gray hair) looked like she was still in her twenties. They both played hard and worked harder and didn’t consider having children until it was too late.

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