A debilitating virus emerges in India and quickly burns its way through the densely populated areas of Asia. The victims suffer for days even weeks on end until finally succumbing. Streets are empty and major cities are mere graveyards Because of the slow killing nature of the virus, attempts to contain it to one continent seemingly work at first, but human smuggling into infection-free areas cause the virus to break borders globally. Darren Reynolds is a foot doctor and survival enthusiast. For years he has made it a hobby to collect all things survival, knowledge and goods. Despite the fact that the United States is fortress America, he knows the virus won’t stay out forever. When news breaks that the virus is on American soil, he is ready to hunker down. He will do anything to protect his family from what threatens to wipe out mankind. But Darren soon learns, things aren’t what they seem. The threat of man’s extinction will not come from the virus. It will come from what rises in the aftermath.

    The cities go black. Most cars don't run. Nowhere seems safe. In the freezing Northeast, the temperatures are just as much of a threat as the chaotic, violent population.After years away, Meg is back for a freezing Western Massachusetts winter. She's home to take care of her ailing father. They're on the way to one his dialysis appointments when the power cuts out. Her father understands what's in store for them, and he urges Meg to join him and head to the more rural areas, where their chances of survival are greater. But without dialysis, Meg's dad is as good as dead. What will Meg do? Wil lshe have to chose between saving her father or herself?James is a native Floridian up in Massachusetts here on a fully scholarship. Culturally, he's a fish out of water. Things are different here than in Florida, and the Northerners dont' seem to like him. When the EMP hits, James is one of the few people on campus to understand the severity of the situation. It seems like the best thing to do is to drive back to Florida. After all, his old, unfashionable truck still runs fine. But James doesn't even make it to the highway when things start to go south for him.

    This is Georgie Fitz’s reality when an EMP bomb goes off over her home in Denver, Colorado. As one of the few who knows how to survive the start of an apocalypse, she sets out with her boyfriend to escape the city. After all, the darkness of the Rockies is safer than the violence in the streets.

    Reed Clayton Sanders left home the minute he had his high school diploma in hand. He waited that long only because the Army wouldn't accept him without one. Now, ten years later, he's home. Home with no warning, no advance notice, no anything after being gone ten years with almost no contact with his family. Home carrying a secret that is burning him up from the inside. A secret that has pushed him to the brink, forcing him to become a criminal in order to be where his family needs him to be, even though they don't realize it yet. Because Clayton knows something they don't. Something that hasn't happened, but will. Something that will burn everything it touches. And change the face of the world forever. PROLOGUE They didn't have real names.Well, they had them of course. They just didn't use them. Not here. They were known by names their comrades had chosen. Names that suited their personalities. Names that only mattered to them. The men of CTG 31 were the kind of men that didn't exist in the modern, civilized world. There was no place for them in an enlightened society. Except when that society needed them. They were the kind of men who visited dark places in the middle of the night, doing violence to those who preyed on the weak and the helpless. Rough men, yes, but honorable. They had a code of their own, these men, and they lived by it as if it were a writ from a Higher Authority. No one broke that code, that set of unwritten rules that kept them from sliding over the edge. Kept them from becoming like those they hunted. Like those they were pursuing right now. “We're about twenty, maybe twenty-five minutes behind, Boss-man” The man known as Boss-man stopped, hand raised in a fist. Those following halted and spread out without being told. “Status?” Boss-man asked tersely. He was angry. They were all angry. Something they had to guard against in their business. Keeping things strict and orderly helped. “Still on the trail for now,” the scout replied. “Continue,” Boss-man ordered and waved his hand forward. The squad of men behind him began moving again. They were in a hurry today. Before dawn a group of terrorists had attacked a small village that the squad had befriended. Or that had befriended them. The men of CTG 31 weren't sure which was the case. They did know that the people of the small village known as Home had become their friends. The village had become a place where they could relax, even if only slightly, and be people for just a few hours at a time. A place of sanity in a world that had lost it's own. And that place had been violated. People they knew had been killed. Children they had grown to care for taken, herded toward a fate that no one in their group wanted to consider. Someone had to pay for that. Someone would pay for that. Dearly. They had been in pursuit for hours, running the entire way. Hard men who pushed themselves to be harder still, banking that toughness against a day like today. A day of reckoning. Had the attackers known the kind of men they were offending, it's entirely possible they would not have committed the atrocity. They were not brave men, these thugs known as terrorists. By nature terrorists were cowards, using fear and intimidation to force their will upon those too weak to resist them. But they hadn't known, and so they had attacked a place that was sacred to this squad of hard, violent men. And in so doing had assured that they, themselves, would not see another day on this mortal plane. Time meant nothing as they ran. There was only the objective and nothing else. A dozen pairs of eyes roamed the country around them, missing nothing as they moved.

    He had worked the same job his entire adult life, he had never married and he had no children. He was used to doing things on his own. His comfortable life was shaken to the core the day he learned of his fathers death. It set in motion life altering events and the allure of a new life that was too great to walk away from. When an Electromagnetic Pulse brings the modern world to its knees, Jason's choice proves to be the right one. EXCERPT “You should see yourselves,” the rough male voice said. There was something eerily familiar about it. He chuckled a little. “You see, I told you girls, didn’t I? The looks on their faces would be purely magical, priceless even!” the man said. The two women stepped farther into the light. They were identical twins. I knew one as Kari, Braden knew the other as Isabella. When the man stepped into the light. My heart stopped. “OH….” Jill said quietly. “MY….” I whispered. “GOD….” Braden finished. “Is that any way to greet your father and your sisters?” Jack Sterling asked as the trio closed to a few feet from us. I felt my knees go weak; my head was spinning. I wasn’t even sure if I was still breathing. The fine line that separates reality from imagination was suddenly gone. What had only a few minutes before been a straight, defined path, had become shrouded in a mist of skepticism and fear. Just before I’d lost sight of that path, I could swear I’d seen a “Dangerous Curves” road sign. I also knew things were travelling far too fast to even attempt negotiating those twists and turns. There are times when reacting too slowly can save your life. For instance; you have a blowout on your car at 70 MPH on the freeway. Reacting slowly can keep you from doing the opposite and rolling your car. This wasn’t one of those times. This wreck was going to happen. Just like the blowout, I was experiencing the sudden onslaught of emotions. Panic.... Surprise.... Anger.... Most of all was fear. Pure, unadulterated fear. You know, the kind of fear that leaves you unable to speak or scream. The fear that leaves you unable to move, let alone run for your life. The fear that can cause time to stop along with your heart. A slight breeze picked up in the late summer night and it felt like a blast straight out of the arctic, in the dead of winter. I could feel the goosebumps on my arms and neck. Even though I was sweating profusely, my entire body was frozen. All I could do was stand there, mouth open, thoughts racing. My mind was beginning to explode with questions for the man before me, my father, Jack Sterling. Every thought stopped just short of exiting my mouth. The words prob-ably couldn’t get past the fact that my heart was jammed firmly in my throat. That’s probably the same reason I hadn’t taken a breath either. Was I dead? Was this the spirit of my father coming to take me into the light? That thought left as quickly as it had come only to be replaced by anoth-er, darker notion. Maybe he had come to take me to Hell.... I stood, unmoving, as he began to cover the last few steps between us. This was it. This is how it all ended. He stopped less than an arm’s length away. I could smell him now. The slightest hint of body odor with just a hint of diesel fuel. The only scent of him that I could remember was his cologne. He’d always been clean shaven, wearing a pressed blue or black suit and that damned cologne. He reached for me, and as much as I wanted to, I was unable to pull away. I wanted to run away screaming like a small child. I could feel my muscles tremble as his hand came ever closer.

    With no one to rely on but herself, she has to find a way off the bloody streets before it's too late. But with a six-month-old baby and a hysterical toddler in tow, escape seems unlikely. Battered and abused, Maria looks back upon her life with husband Rolf with loathing. Caught in a prison from which she cannot escape, she's powerless to change her destiny and forever bound to a man she hates. Until the virus grants her an unexpected chance at revenge.All it takes is one mistake...As the sun sets against the backdrop of the African veldt and living nightmares walk the streets in the shape of their loved one's bodies, humanity's last hope rests in the hands of ordinary men and women called to do extraordinary things.

    Jim Farr, a former Naval Intelligence Officer, owns a maritime mechanics company and works as a contractor for the San Diego Naval Base. It’s a normal day on the job until explosions go off. With the Naval Base destroyed, and word of attacks happening around the country, Jim has to get to his sister in Phoenix… But that’s just the beginning. Follow Jim along in this three-part action packed series and find out just what happens when the bombs go off.The Decay-A nearby nuclear attack rocks a small town in Pennsylvania, sending one man, Paul, and his step-daughter, Julie, on a perilous journey of survival. What started out as a normal Friday afternoon soon shatters into a race for survival against the odds upon the loss of communications—cell phones, Internet and electricity—as a result of the nation’s downed power grids. Paul attempts to get in contact with his wife, Samantha, who is away on business in Colorado, but soon discovers that his only option is to travel cross country amidst the chaos of strategically timed nuclear attacks along the East Coast.

     Ellie Feldman is on the way home from a business trip, looking forward to seeing her kids, when her plane is grounded on the tarmac in Hawaii. No one wants to tell her what's going on, until finally she learns of the virulent disease spreading over the globe. Now she has to find a way to get home to her family. Back at home her ex-husband, Nick Statton, thinks his problems revolve around financial hardships and helping their children as they continue to adjust to the recent divorce and going from parent to parent with shared custody. Then he discovers there's something far worse to worry about. As the nation descends into chaos around them, she must face the challenges of being out in a society falling apart, while he and their children face those of being shut in.

    The shot heard 'round the world at Lexington and Concord in 1775 birthed a nation. Less than a century later, cannons firing on Fort Sumter, South Carolina thrust that same nation into a civil war. The assassination of an obscure archduke sparked a chain of events leading to World War I. The dastardly bombing of Pearl Harbor led America into the Second World War.Akart's new novel, Nuclear Winter First Strike, depicts a world on the edge of nuclear Armageddon. Will history repeat itself as warring nations take their battles to the highest level of destruction? Can America avoid being drawn into these conflicts beyond her borders?Nuclear Armageddon hangs over us like a mighty sword and ordinary Americans will be caught in the crosshairs.This is more than the story of nuclear conflict. It's about the devastating effects wrought by Nuclear Winter. Our possible future is seen through the eyes of the Albright family whose roots stretch back to the early settlement of the Florida Keys.Hank Albright, a widower and proprietor of the Driftwood Key Inn, is the epitome of the laid-back islander inhabiting the Keys. His brother, Mike, is a homicide detective for the Monroe County Sheriff's department. Along with his wife Jessica, a paramedic and member of the Sheriff's department water emergency team, they become involved in the investigation of a sadistic serial killer.Hank's son, Peter Albright, is a Washington, DC reporter covering the State Department. He's unknowingly thrust into the middle of the conflict in the Middle East. Upon his return home, he begins to unravel a conspiracy leading to an unexpected dynamic between the President, the Secretary of State, and North Korea.As the drumbeats of war beat louder, Hank's oldest child, Lacey McDowell, begins to sense the warning signs. Along with her husband, Owen, and teenage son, Tucker, she begins to prepare for a hasty exit from their San Francisco Bay Area home.Will America become embroiled in the nuclear conflict? Will the President cross the Rubicon, that point of no return after which lives and cities may be destroyed? For the Albrights, like their fellow Americans, their lives are about to change forever.It was not our fight, but it became our problem.

    The economy barely survived the lockdowns, but it staggered along until civil unrest shattered people’s hope of better times to come. With it being an election year, more and more Americans were waking up to the idea that they truly were behind the curve. The hope was; if they did not get sick, run out of money, or they could avoid violent mobs, they would be fine. The collapse happened so gradually; nobody saw it coming but the very few.Life-long friendsThree doctors, a realtor, a contractor, and a pro shooter/model, make up the couples who had been lifelong friends and pooled their money to prepare for hard times. They soon find out money cannot buy you everything, even safety and security.A jealous rancher wants to buy their land and does not want to take “no” for an answer. More than once, Lyle and his family are found on the wrong side of the fence. With human remains found on the new property, the mystery deepens, as the world around them slowly descends into chaos.