The Daily Novel

THIRTY-ONE
The world had become a living nightmare. Lawlessness ran amok. Beautiful buildings were vandalized; houses and dwellings were burned or filled with nasty squatters. My own apartment building lay in charred ruins and my possessions destroyed. I had lost friends and coworkers to bullets, disease, suicide, and mishap. Teenage daughters of good people were raped [...]

THIRTY
I drew a peculiar assignment one day in late August.
We had to go secure several broken windows at the armory downtown—the very armory that was in service as a body identification and disposal station. This was where they brought bodies when people called in on the Dead Body Hotline. We had a crew of only [...]

TWENTY-NINE
Scheerer came up and joined me the next day as I sat on a pile of lumber after a day’s work. He was usually busy doing something—prioritizing work orders, figuring out crew assignments, bugging the shop guys to get this vehicle or that vehicle up and running. It was a little strange for him to [...]

TWENTY-EIGHT
Good news was hard to come by, but it was easy to hear of the bad everyday. It seemed as if the entire world had turned into a cauldron of misery. The world economy had all but collapsed, and natural disasters reared their spiteful heads as allies of the terrorists, ensuring that life was difficult [...]

TWENTY-SIX
Though they happened any day of the week, Sunday had become the traditional day of suicide among the more organized of the remaining population. I guess people felt a little closer to God if they took their own lives on a Sunday morning. Jumpers included the sick, the lonely, the heartbroken, and the depressed. The [...]

TWENTY-FIVE
I was sitting in the Kaiserhof. My crew leader had cut us loose around 3:30 due to the heat. As if life wasn’t unbearable enough, that August was sweltering. Temperatures were in the upper nineties, and the humidity was tropical. The bar’s central air conditioning system had permanently failed in early July, but the joint [...]

TWENTY-FOUR
Hitting Atlanta was a brilliant stroke by al Qaeda; those guys were not stupid. Not only was it home to CNN, one of the most-watched news channels around the world—ergo, information dispersal venue—but it was also home to the CDC, the United States Centers for Disease Control. In fact, Ground Zero for the Atlanta nuke [...]

TWENTY-THREE
The Kaiserhof remained the place where I could relax and lose myself in my thoughts. Having gone virtually unscathed during the riots, it maintained its allure as a safe haven. The place never seemed to run out of beer or edibles. I don’t know how they did it, but it was a mystery I was [...]

TWENTY-TWO
I was downhearted most of the time. I still had heard no word from Sarah. Certainly by now she could have emailed and told me where she was, where she had fled to. I could tell her that she could come back if only she would reach out and contact me. I even summoned the [...]

TWENTY-ONE
After the fourth of July, police and military interventions became more and more sporadic as their members fled, were killed, or in some isolated cases, joined or started their own survival groups. Gangs started to run more and more rampant and there was a fundamental moral breakdown in society. Rape, robbery, and murder continued their [...]