• Complain

Kent Kelly - And the Ashes

Here you can read online Kent Kelly - And the Ashes full text of the book (entire story) in english for free. Download pdf and epub, get meaning, cover and reviews about this ebook. year: 2013, publisher: Wonderland Imprints, genre: Science fiction. Description of the work, (preface) as well as reviews are available. Best literature library LitArk.com created for fans of good reading and offers a wide selection of genres:

Romance novel Science fiction Adventure Detective Science History Home and family Prose Art Politics Computer Non-fiction Religion Business Children Humor

Choose a favorite category and find really read worthwhile books. Enjoy immersion in the world of imagination, feel the emotions of the characters or learn something new for yourself, make an fascinating discovery.

Kent Kelly And the Ashes
  • Book:
    And the Ashes
  • Author:
  • Publisher:
    Wonderland Imprints
  • Genre:
  • Year:
    2013
  • Rating:
    5 / 5
  • Favourites:
    Add to favourites
  • Your mark:
    • 100
    • 1
    • 2
    • 3
    • 4
    • 5

And the Ashes: summary, description and annotation

We offer to read an annotation, description, summary or preface (depends on what the author of the book "And the Ashes" wrote himself). If you haven't found the necessary information about the book — write in the comments, we will try to find it.

On April 4 , 2014, 6 billion and 783 million people died in the blinding white fireballs of the Pan-Global Nuclear Holocaust. Sophie Saint-Germain, wife and scientist and mother of one, was not among them. She lived for a time, and so her words endure. The reclamation of her terrifying story is a miracle in itself. Uncovered during the Shoshone Geyser Basin archaeological excavations of 2316, Sophies unearthed diary reveals the most secret confessions of the only known long-term female survivor of the Holocaust in central Colorado. Her diary reveals the truths behind our legends of the High Shelter, the White Fire, the Great Dying, the Coming of the One, and the Gray Rain Exodus, her horrifying journey into the wasteland made with the sole conviction that her daughter, Lacie, was still alive. For these are the first of words, chosen by the Woman of the Black Hawk: From the Plague Land, from the Fire. This is the book of the woman who was, this is the codex of our ancestors revelation. An episodic narrative, FROM THE FIRE, EPISODE VI: AND THE ASHES is the sixth and final installment of a serialized novel by Kent David Kelly. It is preceded by END OF DAYS (I), THE CAGE (II), THE HOLLOW MEN (III), ARCHANGEL (IV) and GRAY RAIN EXODUS (V). This unforgettable novella comprises 24,000 words, 100 printed pages. From Wonderland Imprints, . FROM THE FIRE GIVE ME SHELTER THAT I MIGHT ENDURE THE STORM, GIVE ME THE STRENGTH TO PRAY MY DAUGHTER WILL PREVAIL. ~

Kent Kelly: author's other books


Who wrote And the Ashes? Find out the surname, the name of the author of the book and a list of all author's works by series.

And the Ashes — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work

Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "And the Ashes" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.

Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make

FROM THE FIRE

AN EPISODIC NOVEL OF THE NUCLEAR HOLOCAUST

EPISODE VI: AND THE ASHES

by

Kent David Kelly

VI-1

The Judgment of the Fates

Splinters of umber and scarlet evening sky flickered in and out of focus over the highway, coruscating haze and glimmers of crystal-clear horror dead and twisted bodies, garbage, spinning wheels and bloodstained metal panels. The black wind gusted clumps of ashes off the road and into the air, breaking the remnants of lost souls into powder and withering them all away. East, forever east they flowed afar, to where their endless graves would lie for centuries.

The gusts tore and pulled down fragments of greater light, one last flare of radiance before the ultimate darkness. She could see the obsidian wasteland of highway wreckage, silhouettes of overpasses and fallen columns. She smeared the girls blood out of her eyelashes and re-gripped the wheel with radiation-burned and poisoned hands, the woman pursued and haunted, Sophia Ingrid St.-Germain.

* * *

Under the glare of the racing H4s three un-shattered high beams, the blurring car and pickup wrecks seemed to animate in garish frames of flickering light, a lurid spectacle of melted engines with people fused inside of them. The debris seemed endless puddles of glass, rubble piles, trash heaps, crumbled barricades, the silhouettes of half-crushed bodies dangling from splinter-frame door and windshield.

Forty miles an hour, forty-five. The H4s damaged engine growled, fuel blurted out of the still-open gas valve. The wind swirled up more gouts of powdered glass, and in the tiny whirlwinds garbage bags and scoured trash rebounded and billowed up to either side.

The black rain was falling thickly, a sap-like mess of dusty water, flesh motes and foamy ash. Greasy smears whorled back and forth over the cracked and bullet-holed windshield as the wipers juddered beneath their sodden burden.

Sophie yanked the wheel and rounded her way around the wreck of a side-tumbled, articulated Caterpillar truck. She heard the squeal of brakes perhaps fifty yards behind her as the lead pickup truck in pursuit was forced to slow, with the H4s muddy dust plume wrapping around its shattered windshield. More vehicles farther on behind the pickup slammed on their brakes, each forced to navigate their way through the narrow gap in a single constricted line. But the motorcycles raced on ahead.

The men of Pearsons Corner had lost much in underestimating their prey. At least a dozen were dead, their already-imprisoned women had staged a revolt, and there could be no doubt that one side was massacring the other even as Sophie and Silas raced away. Sophie had counted at least two of the pickup trucks, several cars and a dozen motorcycles as she bolted her way down the on-ramp and back onto I-25. As she shot another glance back and hit the accelerator, the rains thickened in her mirror and smeared all the pursuing vehicles silhouettes and headlights away. The trucks and buses and RVs, however few of them might still be running, were far too slow to give chase. Many of the men had already abandoned the pursuit, likely ordered back to deal with the insurrection. But as Sophie was forced to slow and circle her way around another smashup in the breakdown lane, she caught a glimpse of the lead pickup there behind her once again, and the glowing Cyclopean eyes of six of the motorcycles as well.

Relentless.

Not only was her stash of medicine and food and machinery a treasure trove, but she had bested Zachary and the others, had stolen fuel, killed and gotten away. Worst of all, she had left one priceless gift behind for the imprisoned girls and women, the many fighting victims she could not save: Hope.

She would pray for the prisoners victory if she could. This night, if I survive, she promised. There was no time. She stole one glance back into the interior via the rearview mirror, looking for Silas face, before she was forced to look away. More wreckage spun by. She gunned the Hummer down the clearway, racing beyond another steely hillock made of fused-together wrecks. But she had only seen Silas unmoving and shadowed hand, the fingers spread as if longing to touch in death upon something beyond the H4s ceiling.

Faster again, fifty. The rains were clearing the dust down from the air, the high beams could pick out the silhouettes of still more wrecks some sixty yards out. She was traveling about seventy-five feet a second, and the H4 was threatening to hydroplane with every rapid correction as she wove around ever thicker piles of debris. If she went any faster, she would never have enough time to react to one of the big wrecks, or a crater, and then it would all be over.

She nudged the HK submachine gun, still stuck down in her torn hazmat suit, with the tensing plane of her muscled thigh. She wondered if she would still be able to draw it out if she suddenly found herself reeling from the force of a head-on collision. And deeper, a more reptilian part of her mind mused about what it would feel like when Zachary walked around to her window and raised the double-barreled shotgun at her face and

No.

Faster, fifty-five. Practically suicide. The lead pickup truck with the overburdened window wipers was losing ground, she could hear its engine fading. But at least six of the motorcycles were fast approaching.

Something sharp and tumbling, maybe a piece of heavy garbage, winged by and knocked the Hummers side mirror askew. Sophie could barely see as the rains went angling there in the wild wind, pelting across her windshield. And now Im almost blind. She strained to listen to the motorcycles engines over the H4s own, trying to discern which side the cycle gunmen were going to mount their assault from. The rearview due to all of the remaining piled supplies could only show her Silas hand, garbage and ammo boxes, the swirl of blood-speckled candy wrappers. The most crucial of the side mirrors had been scraped off long ago, and the drivers mirror was now tilted and filthy with syrupy globs of rain.

Cant see anything! She bit the inside of her mouth, heard a strange keening in the back of her throat. A guttural sound, a trapped and hunted animal coming to terms with an inevitable death. What? she thought. What more can I do?

In gauging the chase, Sophie was forced to listen more intently to the echoing engines, to decode the beams of headlights bouncing off the wrecks and signs around her, to estimate the distance of the riders and gunmen by their hooting catcalls and shouted orders.

A shot cracked out and Silas gasped, torn for a moment from the riptide depths of his own oblivion.

Hes still alive!

Sophie lifted one of her blood-spattered hands up off the wheel for just a moment, hoping to adjust her mirror to see either Silas or the cycles, but there were two puddle-filled craters up ahead she needed to deal with in two seconds time. She spat a curse as she forced the H4 in a sagging course around them.

No, too hard. Too far!

There was a delirious, panic-slickened moment of swirling weightlessness as the Hummer lurched and then slid at an angle across the lanes, hydroplaning. An eerie fluid whirr and the squealing of disrupted water sheets sang out as the vehicles tires completely lost contact with the surface of the road. She clenched the wheel with both fists once again, practically yanking the leather wheel-cover off in her white-knuckled grip. With slow and deliberate movements, she forced herself to turn the wheel gently not against but rather along with the vehicles angling momentum. Every instinct screamed at her to overreact, to yank the wheel in the other direction to immediately stop the slide.

And if you do, she knew,

Next page
Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make

Similar books «And the Ashes»

Look at similar books to And the Ashes. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.


Reviews about «And the Ashes»

Discussion, reviews of the book And the Ashes and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.