The Survivor Chronicles: Book 1, The Upheaval Read Online Free PDF Page B

really been a chain smoker. A heavy smoker, sure, but never a chain smoker. Now he lit one up right after the other, barely tasting them as he sucked them down with enough force to make his lungs ache.
     
    His heart was hammering, not so much from the effects of too much nicotine, but from the growing certainty that they might not survive whatever was going on around them. In all of his forty-one years he had never imagined he would see anything like this, let alone live through it.
     
    The scientists, news media, radicals, religious zealots, and every loony with a story to tell had prattled on and on about this stuff, this moment, right now. They urged people to recycle, preached about global warming, spouted about calendars, recited passages from The Bible, and talked about looming prophecies of doom. All of which Carl had never actually believed a whit. Not one iota.
     
    Oh, he’d kidded about it, joked about what he’d do if the prophecies and calendars ever came true, but as far as he was concerned it was never going to come. That day was for future generations to worry about, it wasn’t going to happen in his lifetime, he thought.
     
    Carl did his bit to help by returning bottles, but he did so mainly for the deposit, and he didn’t dump things into the water supply, at least not anymore. When he was younger no one cared about gas and oil and paint, or littering, and he’d left his fair share of pollution around. To be fair, though, he’d never really known what it could do back then. None of them did. Now he was more careful, but he still wasn’t a fanatical member of the pollution police.
     
    Yet he realized that what was occurring now didn’t have to be a result of global warming. It could be the calendar thing or some prophecy or Bible verse he didn’t know about.
     
    It could even be all of those things occurring at once, or it could simply be a single, isolated incident. He could be dead wrong about his unspoken, unshakable certainty that today actually was the end of the world as he knew it. Two hours from now he could find out that only the Cape had been affected by whatever was going on, that they were the only ones experiencing it, but he didn’t think so.
     
    The radio offered only static broken up by a strange whistling noise. At one point he’d thought he’d heard some kind of voices coming through too, but he wasn’t entirely sure they were there, or that they had even been human. Frankly, the noise had creeped him out. The hair on his neck had stood on end as the noise had hissed over the airwaves before returning it to the unnerving silence again. It was like eavesdropping on a CB conversation in another country, and not having a clue what the speakers were talking about. He’d turned the radio off with the silent vow not to turn it on again.
     
    His shaky hands lit another cigarette and tossed the spent one out the window. He’d crushed the filter in-between his clenched fingers. “Jesus,” John whispered in the driver seat next to him. “Jesus. What the hell?”
     
    The kid had been uttering the same sentences repeatedly for a few minutes now. It was beginning to grate on Carl’s nerves. But then again, the kid was right, this was a Jesus and What the Hell kind of situation they were in. Carl couldn’t take his eyes off the window as they drove sluggishly through the town. Some of the buildings had crumpled, literally just crumpled like dominoes one on top of the other.
     
    It was the heart of tourist season and Sandwich was a picturesque town. There were always tourists meandering the streets and checking out the shops that Carl himself had never once stepped foot in, even though he’d lived here for eight years now. It was still early, but there had still been plenty of people on the streets looking to beat the crowd of sightseers, antique hunters, and candy fanatics who would mob the streets later in the day.
     
    The ones that had escaped the crumbling buildings were