Book picks similar to
When the Ashes Fall by Jacqueline Druga
post-apocalyptic
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Plague Year
Jeff Carlson - 2007
Instead, it evolved into the Machine Plague, killing nearly five billion people and changing life on Earth forever.The nanotech has one weakness: it self-destructs at altitudes above ten thousand feet. Those few who've managed to escape the plague struggle to stay alive on the highest mountains, but time is running out—there is famine and war, and the environment is crashing worldwide. Humanity's last hope lies with a top nanotech researcher aboard the International Space Station—and with a small group of survivors in California who risk a daring journey below the death line...
The Flight of the Silvers
Daniel Price - 2014
The sky looms frigid white. The electricity falters. Airplanes everywhere crash to the ground. But the Givens are saved by mysterious strangers, three fearsome and beautiful beings who force a plain silver bracelet onto each sister’s wrist. Within moments, the sky comes down in a crushing sheet of light and everything around them is gone.Shielded from the devastation by their silver adornments, the Givens suddenly find themselves elsewhere, a strange new Earth where restaurants move through the air like flying saucers and the fabric of time is manipulated by common household appliances.Soon Hannah and Amanda are joined by four other survivors from their world—a mordant cartoonist, a shy teenage girl, a brilliant young Australian, and a troubled ex-prodigy. Hunted by enemies they never knew they had and afflicted with temporal abilities they never wanted, the sisters and their companions begin a cross-country journey to find the one man who can save them—before time runs out.
Zombie Fallout
Mark Tufo - 2010
With fears of contracting the H1N1 virus running rampant throughout the country, people lined up in droves to try an attain one of the coveted vaccines. What was not known, was the effect this largely untested, rushed to market, inoculation was to have on the unsuspecting throngs. Within days, feverish folk throughout the country, convulsed, collapsed and died, only to be re-born. With a taste for brains, blood and bodies, these modern day zombies scoured the lands for their next meal. Overnight the country became a killing ground for the hordes of zombies that ravaged the land.This is the story of Michael Talbot, his family and his friends. This is their story a band of ordinary people just trying to get by in these extra-ordinary times. When disaster strikes, Mike a self-proclaimed survivalist, does his best to ensure the safety and security of those he cares for.Book 1 of the Zombie Fall-Out Trilogy follows our lead character in his self-deprecating, sarcastic best. What he encounters along the way leads him down a long dark road always skirting on the edge of insanity. Can he keep his family safe? Can he discover the secret behind Tommy's powers? Can he save anyone from the zombie Queen - a zombie that seems by all accounts to have some sort of hold over the zombies and Mike himself? Encircled in a seemingly safe haven called Little Turtle, Mike and his family together with the remnants of a tattered community while not fighting each other, fight against a relentless, ruthless, unstoppable force. This last bastion of civilization has made its final stand. God help them all.
The Bear
Andrew Krivak - 2020
They own a few remnants of civilization: some books, a pane of glass, a set of flint and steel, a comb. The father teaches his daughter how to fish and hunt and the secrets of the seasons and the stars. He is preparing her for an adulthood in harmony with nature, for they are the last of humankind. But when the girl finds herself alone in an unknown landscape, it is a bear that will lead her back home through a vast wilderness that offers the greatest lessons of all, if she can learn to listen. A cautionary tale of human fragility, of love and loss, The Bear is a stunning tribute to the beauty of nature’s dominion.
Warday
Whitley Strieber - 1984
But Warday destroyed much of civilization.Whitley Strieber and James Kunetka, old friends and writers, take a dangerous odyssey across the former United States, sometimes hopeful that a new, peaceful world can be built over the old, sometimes despairing over the immense losses and embittered people they meet.In an eerie blend of fact and imagination, Strieber (author of "The Wolfen" and "The Hunger") and Kunetka (author of "City of Fire: Los Alamos and The Atomic Age", "1943-1945" and "Oppenheimer: The Years of Risk") cut through the doublespeak of military bureaucracy and the rhetoric of the 1980's peace movement to portray America after Warday.
Thicker Than Blood
Madeline Sheehan - 2015
Leisel and Evelyn lost everything. Husbands. Families. Friends. Lives that made sense. All they had left was each other, and a friendship that could withstand anything…Even an apocalypse.Until one fateful night, the marginal safety they’d come to rely on comes to a vicious and brutal end. With the help of Alex & Jami, both unlikely allies, Leisel and Evelyn are able to escape their shattered sanctuary only to find themselves face-to-face with a much altered, much crueler life where they have to find the way—and the will—to stay alive in a world they no longer recognize.Traveling across a broken and infection-ridden country; the road-weary group are pitted against endless violence, improbable circumstances, and the ultimate loss.Everything comes at a price—especially safety, the cost of which could very well strip them of the one thing they’ve tried so hard to cling to: their humanity.Yet along with all the trials they’re forced to endure, there’s also hope in the form of love. Having loved Leisel from afar, Alex attempts to put the pieces of her fractured heart back together.But in such a savage world, is there room for love?In a place of nightmares-made-reality, where the living should be feared far more than the dead, an unbreakable friendship and a love amongst all odds can mean the difference between life and death.There are friends…And then there are Leisel and Evelyn.
Bishop's Honor
A.R. Shaw - 2016
In the year 2030 the Maunder Minimum, a period of solar inactivity, will cause a mini-ice age like it did between the years 1645 and 1710. When it does, Bishop will have to save her not only from the effects of severe weather but also from man himself. Maeve Tilton and her son Ben live alone in the rural town of Coeur d'Alene, Idaho. Since her husband died in the war, she's barely kept her head above water, and when the first freeze strikes in the fall, she's completely unprepared for what lies ahead. Only a war-torn man, one who prefers the solitude of the Kootenai National Forest, can rescue her and her son.
Joshua
John S. Wilson - 2012
He had to get away, from the rioting, the lawlessness, the killing. Away from the brutal gangs that ruled the highways. Then there was the boy that he found along the way, an orphan with no place to go. He couldn’t leave the child behind; that would be murder. Together they had to make their way across the razed landscape of post collapse America, west to where there was safety, a chance to begin again. If only they survived the journey.
Without Warning
John Birmingham - 2009
In Paris, a covert agent, a woman who inhabits a twilight of lies and death, is close to cracking a terrorist cell. And just north of the equator, a forty-foot wood-hulled sailboat, manned by a drug runner, a pirate, and two gun-slinging beauties, is witness to the unspeakable. In one instant, all around the world, for politicians and peasants, from Gaza to Geneva, things will never be the same. A wave of inexplicable energy has slammed into the continental United States.
America, as we know it, is gone. . . .
WITHOUT WARNING
Now U.S. soldiers are fighting a war without command or control. A correspondent records horrors for no one. Washington is gone and the line of succession is in tatters; the functioning remnants of government are in Pearl Harbor, Guantánamo Bay, and one desperate, isolated corner of the Northwest. For the jihadists, it’s Allah’s miracle. For Saddam, it’s a chance to attack. Iran declares war on an America that doesn’t exist–except in the hearts and souls of the men and women who want it to.In this astounding work of alternate fiction, John Birmingham hurtles us into a scenario that is unimaginable but shatteringly real: a world of financial ruin where a cloud of noxious waste–from America’s burning cities–darkens Europe, while men and women in offices around the globe struggle to make decisions that cannot hold and opportunists unleash their secret demons.From a slick Texas lawyer who happens to be in the right place at the right time to a hard-working city engineer in Seattle who becomes his terrified city’s only hope, from the cancer-stricken secret agent to a drug runner off the Mexican coast and a U.S. general in Cuba, Without Warning tells a fast, furious story of survival, violence, and a new, soul-shattering reality.
The Feed
Nick Clark Windo - 2018
It destroys us.The Feed is everywhere. It can be accessed by anyone, at any time. Every interaction, every emotion, every image can be shared through it.Tom and Kate use The Feed, but they have resisted addiction to it. And this will serve them well when The Feed collapses.Until their six-year-old daughter, Bea, goes missing.Because how do you find someone in a world devoid of technology? And what happens when you can no longer trust that your loved ones are really who they claim to be?
The Dead Lands
Benjamin Percy - 2015
A few humans carry on, living in outposts such as the Sanctuary-the remains of St. Louis-a shielded community that owes its survival to its militant defense and fear-mongering leaders. Then a rider comes from the wasteland beyond its walls. She reports on the outside world: west of the Cascades, rain falls, crops grow, civilization thrives. But there is danger too: the rising power of an army that pillages and enslaves every community they happen upon. Against the wishes of the Sanctuary, a small group sets out in secrecy. Led by Lewis Meriwether and Mina Clark, they hope to expand their infant nation, and to reunite the States. But the Sanctuary will not allow them to escape without a fight.
Apocalypse Law
John Grit - 2011
In the bedlam of lawlessness and starvation, hungry, desperate men arrive from the nearest town to take their meager supplies. A benevolent stranger keeps coming in the night to steal food. Sensing the stranger means no harm, Nate leaves food out as charity. But the stranger ignores offers to join them, then comes to their aid when a gang of prison escapees, led by an old nemesis of Nate's, raids their home. In the end, it is the kindness of a father desperate to save his son that may give two families and the stranger an opportunity to build a new life in a post-apocalypse world.
Primal Shift - Season 1
Griffin Hayes - 2013
But a thousand motorists suddenly abandon their cars on the Golden Gate Bridge and leap to their deaths in a roiling bay. Jets packed with families rain down from the skies above Salt Lake City International Airport, dotting the landscape with orange fireballs. Worse yet, New York City police launch a murderous rampage against those they swore to protect and serve. Law and order across the globe collapses in less than five minutes, plunging humanity into chaos.Something is affecting our minds, our sanity. Could it be a terrorist attack? The ultimate virus? Or an experiment gone horribly wrong?A handful of survivors claws its way out of the ashes of the old world, strangely unaffected by The Shift. Among them, a frantic mother desperate to find her son. A sailor hunting a soulless killer. A former CEO willing to kill for power over this new, feral wasteland.Together, they'll battle both the hordes of bloodthirsty cannibals who used to be their own families and neighbors, and a dark figure who commands these legions with his every twisted whim.Someone somewhere must know what happened, where to find safety. And whether those eerie lights shimmering in the skies overhead are an omen of something far worse than even this bleak living hell.
The Darkness After
Scott B. Williams - 2013
The modern world that sixteen-year-old Mitch Henley has always known comes crashing down. Anarchy, looting and chaos explode all around him. Stranded in New Orleans, Mitch escapes into the Mississippi backwoods he knows so well, hoping to stay alive using the survival and hunting skills he learned from his game-warden father. Alone and on foot, Mitch sets out to make his way back to the family farm and his younger sister. Not knowing if his parents are dead or alive, nothing else matters . . . until he meets April Gibbs along the way. Smart, beautiful, lethal and alone, she is also making a treacherous trek to find her lost family. They decide to travel together for safety, but neither can begin to imagine the danger that awaits them in the woods. Set in the same anarchy-and-desperation-reigned world of the author’s dystopian thriller: The Pulse, The Darkness After a frightening look at how fragile our technologically dependent lifestyle really is.
Collapse
Richard Stephenson - 2012
With the American people deep in The Second Great Depression and two of the most powerful hurricanes on record to contend with, the United States is in no condition to deal with hidden terrorists on its soil, maniacal politicians, and the most formidable military threat the world has seen since the Third Reich. This is the story of three men from three very different walks of life: Howard Beck, the world's richest man, also diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome; Richard Dupree, ex-Navy SEAL turned escaped convict; and Maxwell Harris, a crippled, burned-out chief of police of a small Texas town. At first, they must overcome their own struggles and fight for their survival against impossible odds. In the end, the unlikely trio must band together to save their beloved country from COLLAPSE. Empires topple. Nations crumble. Civilization is fragile. In 2027, America will fall.