No Shelter (#1) A Post-Apocalyptic Love Story

By T.S. Welti

When the environment is ravaged by rising sea levels and monstrous storms, America is divided and survival becomes more precious than love.

When seventeen-year-old Nada and Isaac stumble upon a handsome stranger in the woods, their cozy alliance and romance begin to unravel. This stranger promises Nada the impossible in exchange for helping him rescue his sister from a prison in the last corner of civilization in the western United States. But this rescue operation is wrought with complications, including the fact that the girl they are supposed to save is the ex-President's daughter. This mission puts everyone's life at risk, especially Isaac--the one person who has always been there for Nada. Now Nada and her small tribe must choose between a somewhat comfortable existence in the mountains and the chance at a life free of fear and starvation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: T.S. Welti
• Release date: Apr 9, 2012
• ISBN: 9781476009230

T.S. Welti

I was born and raised in Southern California and have lived in three countries, three states, and a gazillion different cities. I write mostly sci-fi, fantasy, and romance for readers ages sixteen and up. When I'm not scribbling, I love traveling; misquoting movies and TV shows; and pretending to be a celebrity chef.I began telling stories when I was five and began writing them down when I was six. I was painfully shy as a child. Writing and reading provided an escape from the scary world. In fact, I was so introverted, I once wrote a story about a girl who got rejected by her imaginary friend and the story was based on true events. Thankfully, as I got older I grew out of the shyness, for the most part, but I never let go of my books or my pencil.If you dig my books (or me), sign up for my new release mailing list. bitly.com/tsweltiNRYou can find out more about me and my books at tswelti.com.

Book preview

NO SHELTER

Book One of the No Shelter Trilogy

by T.S. Welti

http://tswelti.com

Copyright © 2012 by T.S. Welti

Smashwords Edition

Published by T.S. Welti at Smashwords

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each reader. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

ISBN-13: 9781476009230

For Ronnie,

who encouraged this lunacy

and will never know how much that meant to me.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. ALLIANCES

2. ABANDONED

3. STRANGER DANGER

4. SALTON SEA

5. KANE AND ELYSIA

6. NO SHELTER

7. MT. VESUVIUS

8. TREMBLE

9. SCAVENGERS

10. DISPOSABLE

11. FUNNY

12. PIECES OF YOU

13. BURN IT UP

14. HOLDING

15. FRIENDS

PREVIEW OF LEFT BEHIND

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

COPYRIGHT

"The end of the world will come with a violent choking breath, and the final gasp will be that of a child."

- Dr. Bradford Pike, December 21, 2042

CHAPTER 1

I didn’t know how sharp my blade was until Isaac used it to stab me in the back.

I met Isaac Faulk during the Whitmore High School riot two years ago. Isaac, with his towering build and eyes the color of smoldering ash, immediately caught my eye as a potential ally. After the ice melt and the flooding, my mother and I knew we wouldn’t survive in this environment without a man around. Isaac fit the description, but he was intimidating.

He didn’t look totally scary; at least not at first glance. The scariness came from the darkness that dwelled in his eyes and the hard shadows and lines of his young face. He was hungry in every way.

He arrived at Whitmore High School alone, but he made friends immediately. My mother and I, mostly I, studied him from a distance.

Nada, you shouldn't stare. It makes people uneasy, my mother said, as she cleaned the festering wound on her thigh. 

During the flood, a broken tree branch gored my mother in the thigh. The wound had begun to heal nicely after a few weeks at Whitmore, but an infestation of bedbugs had re-infected the wound. She had been nursing it for more than six weeks now and growing weaker by the day.

I’m not staring, I insisted, as I took the aloe from her hand and closed the jar. This stuff’s not working, Mom. You need antibiotics.

They’d sooner give us a knife in the gut, my mother muttered as she leaned against the wall of the cafeteria and closed her eyes as she fiddled with the ruby pendant on her necklace. The last remnant of her life with my father.

They’d sooner give us a knife in the gut.

My mother was referring to the twenty or so hulking young men who lurked in the corner of the cafeteria all day. They called themselves the Guardians. They claimed to guard the Whitmore High School community from those who wished to take an extra scoop of beans in the lunch line or outsiders who tried to raid the auditorium, which doubled as a storage room for all the food and supplies. But Mother and I knew better.

The Guardians wanted to gather enough men in their gang to take over Whitmore and keep all the food and supplies to themselves. Hallie Glover had whispered this information to me in the lunch line two days ago. I hadn’t seen Hallie since.

The Guardians probably dropped her over the cliffs into the rising waters over what used to be Los Angeles. L.A. and everything I loved and hated about the city was under a hundred feet of ocean. The Hollywood sign made it out almost completely unscathed by what is now referred to as The Event.

Of course, that wasn’t the official name of the storm that Dr. Bradford Pike predicted twelve years earlier. With everything either frozen, under water, burned to dust, or deserted, nothing was official anymore.

As the atmosphere grew more toxic and the polar ice melted into the oceans, the water levels rose gradually for about forty years. It wasn’t a huge concern until Dr. Pike discovered a way to measure tectonic plate pressure. His discovery led to more and more research and evidence that predicted rapidly cooling oceans could increase the stress on tectonic plates and set off an unstoppable chain of biblical flooding, earthquakes, super volcanoes, and monstrous blackout storms caused by volcanic ash. His research was criticized as sensationalism and buried by the very government agencies that were supposed to promote environmental protection.

The wealthy abandoned America in the years before the storm. The media left, the politicians left… We were the ones left behind. The lost souls wandering a broken environment and scrapping for food, clean water, and shelter.

If you were lucky enough to find all three of those at the same time, you’d better keep it to yourself.

Despite my mom’s advice, I couldn’t take my eyes off him. In the light of the trash can fires and candles Isaac appeared broken. Whatever happened to him to make him seek refuge at Whitmore, it must have stripped him bare. He was exactly the kind of person I wanted with us when the Guardians took over—someone with nothing to lose.

The next morning, I approached Isaac. That’s when the fragile community at Whitmore High School shattered into a million pieces. 

I grabbed a green plastic plate from the rack and walked quickly to catch up with Isaac in the lunch line, passing up the breadbasket—the only decent food in the cafeteria.

Hey, I said.

Isaac turned around and examined me from beneath the curtain of brown hair covering his eyes. Hey.

I… I need to talk to you.

He didn’t respond or look at me as he grabbed a plastic fork as if he knew what I was going to ask and he didn’t want to encourage my insanity. I had to make my plea quickly.

I can hunt and I’m good at hiding, I whispered, as if I was on a survivalist job interview.

That’s not worth much around here. They’ve got enough food to last a year.

It won’t last a year and you know it.

He avoided my gaze as he grabbed a thimble-sized cup of pudding from a tray. Next to the hundred or so thimbles of pudding were trays of finger-sized peanut butter sandwiches and tiny cups of reconstituted mashed potatoes.

I don’t know what you’re talking about, Isaac replied.

Though I could already taste the chocolaty pudding on my tongue, I passed up the pudding, as usual, and took a peanut butter sandwich and