Ezekiel Boone - Ezekiel Boone - [Hatching 03] - Zero Day

Thank you for downloading this Simon & Schuster ebook.

Get a FREE ebook when you join our mailing list. Plus, get updates on new releases, deals, recommended reads, and more from Simon & Schuster. Click below to sign up and see terms and conditions.

CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP

Already a subscriber? Provide your email again so we can register this ebook and send you more of what you like to read. You will continue to receive exclusive offers in your inbox.

We hope you enjoyed reading this Simon & Schuster ebook.

Get a FREE ebook when you join our mailing list. Plus, get updates on new releases, deals, recommended reads, and more from Simon & Schuster. Click below to sign up and see terms and conditions.

CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP

Already a subscriber? Provide your email again so we can register this ebook and send you more of what you like to read. You will continue to receive exclusive offers in your inbox.

Praise for The Hatching Series

Guaranteed to do what Jaws did to millions of people.

Suspense Magazine

You know those people who claim spiders are more afraid of us than we are of them? When it comes to The Hatching , they lied. Great gory funand creepy, in every sense of the word.

John Connolly, #1 internationally bestselling author of A Time of Torment

The Hatching takes an impressively terrible doomsday scenario and adds spiders, making it one of the creepiest books of all time.

Tor.com

Its an original plot, with a horrifying premise guaranteed to entertain and shock the reader... The Hatching is a page-turner.

New York Journal of Books

The Hatching is a hair-raising thriller that reads like the love child of Independence Day and World War Z , but is creepier than both.

The Real Book Spy

Its been too long since someone reminded us that spiders are not just to be feared, but also may well spell doom for mankind. Fortunately, Ezekiel Boone has upped the ante on arachnophobia. This is a fresh take on classic horror, thoroughly enjoyable and guaranteed to leave your skin crawling.

Michael Koryta, New York Times bestselling author of Those Who Wish Me Dead

Prepare to be terrified... Hair-raising.

Parade

Peter Benchley (with an assist from Spielberg) scared everyone out of the water with Jaws . Hitchcock showed us how terrifying birds can be. Michael Crichtons Congo went overboard on gorillas.... Add Boone to the list. He has given everyone more reason to fear spiders.

Men Reading Books

Globe-hopping, seriously creepy read.

Publishers Weekly

Building on the success of The Hatching , Ezekiel Boones Skitter is scary-good fun that sets the stage for at least one more epic showdown between mankind and the terrifying eight-legged beasts hell-bent on destroying them. If youre not already reading this series, its time to start!

The Real Book Spy

The mark of a good series for me is that Im ready for the next book as soon as I finish the current one, and sometimes even before Im finished. As soon as I finished the last page of Skitter , I hopped on Goodreads to see if book three had been listed yet.

Michael Patrick Hicks Reviews

ALSO BY EZEKIEL BOONE

The Hatching

Skitter

An Imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10020

www.SimonandSchuster.com

This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the authors imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright 2018 by Ezekiel Boone, Inc.

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information, address Atria Books Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

First Emily Bestler Books/Atria Books hardcover edition February 2018

and colophon are trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

For information about special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact Simon & Schuster Special Sales at 1-866-506-1949 or .

The Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau can bring authors to your live event. For more information or to book an event, contact the Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau at 1-866-248-3049 or visit our website at www.simonspeakers.com.

Jacket art by David Wu

Author photograph by Laurie Willick

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN 978-1-5011-2510-2

ISBN 978-1-5011-2513-3 (ebook)

For Zoey.

Ill try to write faster.

Mars Conquest Shuttle, Low Earth Orbit

C ommander Reynard never used foul language, so pardon him, but this was some grade-A bullpoop. Where the heck was his parade?

Reynard was a born-and-bred Saskatchewan wheat farmer. Canola and lentils and peas, too, but durum wheat most of all. His mom had managed the farm with an iron fist. She was quick with a kiss or a kind word, but she could squeeze a nickel hard enough to make it weep two quarters. Reynards dad was in charge of the actual physical work of farmingsowing and reaping, disking fields and tasking the hired help, soil testing and fertilizingbut it was his mom who ran the show. And one of the things shed always told Reynard and his sister was that complaining about the weather neither makes it rain nor shine. If you cant change it, dont complain; and if you can change it, change it. And you still dont complain. For his entire childhood, hed been taught that the worst accusation that could be leveled against another person was that they were a complainer. A dog barking at the wind, his mother said. And if it held true when he was just a boy on a farm, his mother told him, it held doubly true now that he was an astronaut.

But still.

Bullpoop.

Hed left the farm for university at seventeen, and although hed gone back for vacations and holidays, hed never really looked back. Yes, in some ways he knew that the open skies of Saskatchewan and the red dirt roads of his childhood would always define him, but hed spent his entire adult life working to trade that childhood in for the endless skies of space and the red dirt of an entire planet.

Commander Brian Reynard. The first man to set foot on Mars.

And this was what he was coming back to?

Forget the hours hed spent studyingan engineering and biochemistry double major as an undergrador in flight simulators as part of the Royal Canadian Air Force. Forget the time hed spent at Edwards Air Force Base during a joint program that allowed him to attend the US Air Force Test Pilot School, or the time hed spent getting his masters in aeronautics. Forget the chunks of his life that were eaten by the basement offices at NASA and the meeting rooms of the Canadian Space Agency. Forget the time hed spent running and working out at the gym, making sure he was in better shape than the younger and more polished astronauts who were trying to bump him out of the spot hed earned. Forget, even, all the years hed spent preparing specifically for this one single mission.

Just look at the mission itself: eight and a half months flying the Mars Conquest shuttle using a fuel-efficient but relatively slow Hohmann Transfer Orbit to Mars; one and a half years establishing the first research station on Mars itself and waiting for the window to align for the trip back; another eight and a half months flying the return. How about that? Almost three years of his life. Sure, humanity had reached the point where simply going to space was no longer enough to make you famousthe Wikipedia list of people whove been in space was absurdly longand even walking on the moon was a crowded field. But to be the first person on Mars? The first man to set foot on the Red Planet? The first human to stride upon a giant, cold, dusty sphere floating among the stars? That had to count for something, didnt it?