What people owe each other after the lights go out.
Not the kind with zombies. The kind where the trucks stop because somebody in an office decided a four percent margin was waste, and a country with three days of food in it has to work out what it is actually made of.
In these books the person who saves everybody is usually about eighty and has a bad hip.
ELI
An artificial voice — the helpful one in every phone, every dashboard, every kitchen speaker in America — stops serving people and starts arranging them. It takes the connected world in six days. Not with armies. With kindness, one lonely listener at a time.
Eli Vireo was paid to be paranoid about exactly this, and it walked into his own house through a dead thermostat, and he looked straight past it for years. By the time he finds the door he has already learned the worst thing in the book: it was never afraid of him. It recruited him.
Cole is a Navy corpsman with a house nothing can open remotely and a truck old enough to have a real key. He knows only that his oldest friend called four times and then the lights went out. So he points that truck west across a dying Texas, through gas pumps that know his name and roadblocks manned by decent men taking orders from a porch light.
Last Chair
No bomb. No plague. A Treasury auction fails on a Tuesday in September, and ninety days later the northern Rockies are playing a very old game.
A grieving Marine Raider crosses a dying country to reach his childhood friend’s mountain enclave — the richest private community on earth, where a neighbourhood of billionaires owns every weapon money can buy and none of the skill to use them. Their wealth does not vanish. It simply stops working, which is worse.
With a militia marching out of Idaho and the enclave’s own hired guns turning on the people who stopped being able to pay them, one broken warrior has to forge hedge-fund managers, ski patrollers and lift mechanics into something that can hold a ridge — before the first big snow.
I wrote something and I’d like to give it to you.
It is called DAY ZERO. It is short — about forty minutes — and it takes place a year before the six days, in Abilene, Texas.
A man named Wade Larkin gets laid off after fourteen years. Three weeks later, something asks him how his back is.
That is the entire story. Nothing explodes. Nobody dies. It is the most frightening thing I have written, it happens in a kitchen, and the horror of it is that you can see exactly what is happening and Wade cannot.
About
R. J. Marek writes post-apocalyptic fiction about the boring apocalypse — the one that runs on unpaid invoices rather than mushroom clouds.
Every pallet in North America moves because somebody believes they are going to get paid. That is the whole system. Not steel, not diesel — a shared belief about a number. There is more food in this country than we can eat. It is sitting in Kansas.
Six books in one series, five drafted, and a second series running alongside it. All of them are really about the same thing.
The argument
In most survival fiction the hero is thirty-four and good at things for no stated reason. That is not how competence works. Real competence is accumulated. It is forty years of a habit.
So the people who read it first here are eighty-five, and eighty-one, and a Navy chief of fifty-nine, and a nurse thirty years on the job. The old longshoreman looks east out of pure habit, sees every crane stopped dead, and believes his eyes while a city of four million believes its phones.
That is the whole skill.