FINAL HOUR or A Hard Rain Is Falling: A Dystopian Tragedy and Post Apocalyptic Survival Thriller

By G.H. Holmes

FINAL HOUR or A Hard Rain Is Falling
A Dystopian Tragedy and Post Apocalyptic Survival Thriller

"What's my name? Don't ask me. I'd have to trust you to tell you, and why should I do that?"

The apocalypse begins while she is driving home. A cosmic disruption shreds her life. Flaming hailstones mixed with blood fall from the sky and devastate the world. The fires that follow pin her down. Yet, she cannot stay here.
She musters her courage and begins to walk across the ravaged land to the house of her parents far away, not knowing what awaits her there.
She is alone and without means. She has no survival skills and hunger is a mean beast following at her heels—when a mysterious stranger steps into her life and adds to her confusion.
Signs of roving gangs and murderous blood cults appear along the way. But the danger of the road is nothing. The closer she gets to her destination, the further she descends into a nightmare, until she faces a showdown with true evil.

FINAL HOUR is the moving story of a young woman's voyage through a future in which lawlessness abounds and trust is a luxury. What keeps people alive in the face of universal enmity and destruction? Who will mete out just recompense when the institutions of civilization are defunct? This is a bold meditation on good and evil, on true justice and moral quandaries.

Dystopian and post apocalyptic fiction in the vein of Cormac McCarthy's The Road. A harrowing tale. A thriller. Full of suspense, even without graphic sex and gore.

About the author:
G.H.W. Holmes loves deep forests, which he frequently visits with a rucksack and a rifle.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sharaya Lee
• Release date: Apr 25, 2019
• ISBN: 9780463533093

Book preview

G.H.W. Holmes

Final Hour

or

A Hard Rain is Falling

A

Dystopian and Post-Apocalyptic

Novel

Copyright 2019 by G.H.W. Holmes

All rights reserved!

No part of this book may be used, reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law, or in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This is a work of fiction.

Any resemblance to places, incidents or actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

*

It's spring.

Bright green leaves whisper in the southerly wind. On bare feet she stands in a lush glade wet with the cool dew of the morning. The air is electric blue and the sun caresses her face, which she holds up to the star, eyes closed. Birds jubilate. A nearby brook babbles softly in a language that is older than man. The water, so clean, sparkles ever so gently.

Water…

She starts to cough. Her throat is so dry. A coughing spell seizes her. She shakes and digs her fingers like claws into the upholstery. The spring landscape vanishes and gives way to darkness.

A sweat-stained darkness far from spring.

She's in town now. The sky is sulfurous and silent. Nothing moves. It's the moment before the storm. She dreads what is to come, because she already knows it. Nothing but a replay for her anguished soul. They announce their coming with a soft-swelling hiss: a drizzle of red rain. Flaming hailstones as big as the heads of children fill the air. They have to be meteorites. Not of this world. Some explode on impact. Some retain their form on the ground. Fiery pebbles rain down on her vehicle. Fat drops burst on the windshield. The viscous liquid stains the glass and paints it red. This is the end.

She is still coughing. The spell racks her frame. With eyes closed she waits for it to subside. Finally she inhales laboriously and sits up.

She is awake in the back seat of her car, a dreadful place she doesn't want to be.

Once again the new reality of the world with its desolation pressed down on her like a stone mountain until she could barely breathe. The air in the cabin was no help. It smelled of wood smoke and sometimes of molten tires and tar and other things from the fires raging outside. Even the inside of the car was a haze. A hothouse haze. And there was no fresh air to be had in the land.

What is happening to the world? she thought. What is happening to me? And why?

Why?

With unfocussed eyes she looked up at the car's canopy and waited for an answer, but there was none.

By rote she fingered her telephone. Its touchscreen stayed black, just like in the last six days. Cold and hard and black. Her window to the world was closed.

She put her smartphone down and climbed from the back into the driver's seat. Hoping against hope her trembling hand reached for the car key in the ignition and she turned it.

Nothing.

Her reflection in the mirror showed a steep furrow in her forehead. That was new. She looked away.

Why am I still alive…?

She sighed.

Everybody else seemed to have left the planet.

Inked with many symbols and lines, the man's face was a veritable roadmap to perdition. The tattoos spread over his bald head and broad neck and came down on his bare chest and disappeared in his underwear that showed in his baggy pants.

He'd lost his gang in the night. He'd answered a call of nature in one of the hail-slain houses up the street and when he came back, they were gone. Perhaps this unbearable smog or the heat had chased them away. He'd looked for them and called for them, but they were rovers and never stayed long in one place anyway and he had no idea where they were now.

Alone, but unperturbed, he'd slept a wink. He still had his machete, after all, and he knew how to work it. He knew it well. In a way he was already adjusted to the apocalypse before it ever began. The giant hailstones and the blood rain were new and he'd rubbed the brass talisman around his neck to stay the evil spirits. But the aftermath of that mess didn't really feel foreign to him.

Now he was walking along the street in the orange twilight of the morning—when a sudden movement in one of the cars on the vast lot to his right caught his eye. Most cars were dead. Burned-out husks. But some still looked like an auto. And now he'd seen a glimpse of long yellow hair in one of them. He stopped in his tracks.

He liked yellow hair.

None of the women in his native country had yellow hair. They were beautiful, all right, and he had sampled many of them. Not that they had all agreed to his activities. Only a few had done that. But he didn't care. He didn't have to ask permission. At home he was one of the lords of the land. He was a nobody here, but that was okay, too. Here they had women with yellow hair.

He left the street and sat down in the shadow of a torched pickup and drank a swig from his bottle and took his machete out of its sheath and laid it on the ground before him. From his backpack he took a length of blue rope and put it by the machete. He was going to study the situation before he pounced. Perhaps the woman was not alone. Perhaps she had a gun. He'd find out. He was a patient man. His gaze never left the girl's face beyond the window of the grime-smeared car.

Her eyes stung. They were too dry for crying. She glanced out through the car windows, which had gotten more opaque during the night. They looked like the surface of a turbid pond. A sickly red, they seemed covered with bull's blood that had dried and cracked like parchment and the chips had flown away. She sat in a hollow red planet and looked out at a yellow atmosphere. She lay in a coffin with dirty windows and a steering wheel.

Once again she questioned her sanity.

What made this happen?

There was nobody to answer her. She was alone. With a groan she bent down and fished for the two liter bottle of water in the footwell. The thin plastic crackled in her hand. She unscrewed the lid and drained the bottle of its last tepid dregs. With a grimace she dropped the plastic bulb and its lid back into the footwell and wiped her mouth. The young woman rubbed her eyes and tried to concentrate. She had a hard time of it, because two liters of water in six days just wasn't enough, even for somebody with a lithe little frame like hers.

She'd have to get out of the car today.

For a longer period of time.

She dreaded the world outside, now that the end had come over mankind. Blood and dust and ashes. She rolled her eyes. The ideas colliding in her head sounded so pathetic. But if this wasn't the end, then it was a convincing prelude. Despite the heat she still had goosebumps, had them since it all began. Her stomach hurt. But she'd have to get out. There was no way around it. Shriveling up and dying of dehydration was not an option. Not after six days of holding on. This car was not going to be her coffin after all.

She dreaded opening the door. The sights that her eyes would have to cope with, the smells that were going to assault her nose, the seeking and searching of foreign terrain that she'd have to do… She wasn't made for any of this, wasn't an outdoor survivalist. Nuts on cable TV that she scoffed at. She desperately wanted to leave this place. She craved peace and quiet, yearned for an evening with a good book in front of the fireplace. A glass of bubbly that looked like the real thing and a good romance novel. She caught her nodding head.

What did her place look like?

Did she even have a fireplace?

With a frown she realized that she had forgotten where she lived. Momentarily even her name eluded her.

Who was she?

Who cared? Her mind returned to the matter at hand. She was dying of thirst. She was hungry, too, but desiccation was the more pressing problem. Now that she fully appreciated that fact, her headache became unbearable. A surefire sign. She'd have to find water. For that she'd have to leave her precious grime-smeared car that was her safe space. The castle in which nothing could touch her, in which she was held harmless of dragons.

Ludicrous.

She knew, half mad and forgetful though she might be, that she was thinking nonsense. But rapine and death at the hands of the desperate were not ludicrous and magical thinking eased some of the fear.

Think clearly, she said to herself. There is nobody out there. If anybody were out there, they'd have paid you a visit by now. Somebody would have come and jerked the door open and grabbed you by the hair. They'd have dragged you out and would have pounded you into submission. And then they would have…

…you heard screams the first three nights. But nobody found you. Nobody has come by in six days. So move your fat butt and get out and go find water.

She closed her eyes, put the palms of her hands together and touched her nose. Her stomach churned. But she'd eaten little even before the apocalypse and was used a churning stomach.

The lever was sticky in her hand when she finally pulled it. With a thud the door opened. Immediately the smell of smoke intensified. The air sucked in scratched her throat. Overwhelmed, she pulled the door shut. She wasn't going to walk out into that inferno. She'd suffocate out there. Her lungs might collapse. The smog was just too much.

What are you talking about? she chided herself. It's not as bad as it was in the first few days. You can even see buildings today. If you dare to look at them.

Get.

Out.

Now.

The wind was a blast from a furnace, but she didn't feel it on her puckered skin. The yellow air was full of low-flying cinders and soot and prickled her eyes. The fires were more distant now, but they still spoke with the guttural threatening voice of a bully, and when a chance breeze whipped them, they roared.

With wide eyes she stood by the car and took in what she saw. The vast parking lot had truly turned into the surface of Mars. The red grime had dried on the hot macadam, which in turn had grown soft and had hardened again and was now uneven. Broken like the sun-scorched earth during a drought. The cracks had filled with silky ash that the draft kept moving on. This was a stricken world, smitten of God and afflicted.

The rocks that littered the lot were black and white and red and yellow. Mostly fist-sized, none was bigger than a human head. They were spread around unevenly. Some lay smashed like pumpkins and she wondered what material they were made of. On the far end they had shattered the cars parked there, which in turn had caught fire and now were only charred wrecks. The fiery stones coming down on her own car had been much smaller and had done no outsized damage. In fact, her own car seemed to be the only one still intact on the entire lot. But it ran no more. Even if it had run, she couldn't have left this lot with it. Mars wasn't made for cars.

The tall buildings in the distant smog were black and stood out of true. Giants with weak knees. On the wind she heard the inanimate screams of metal giving way, but couldn't see the screaming building fall. The ground shook anyway.

She glanced up at a sudden light in the sulfur-colored clouds and something hit her in the forehead and stars exploded. Stunned, she found herself on her behind, the car looming beside her. Her nervous eyes cast about, but she couldn't make out what hit her. Whatever it was, it hadn't hurt her. On the contrary: she found her headache halfway gone.

She got up on her hands and knees and breathed. The debris underneath cut into her skin.

Water, she thought. I've come here for water.

With great effort she picked herself up, wiped her hands on her leggings and stood and looked at the supermarket two hundred yards away. There were other buildings, but they didn't interest her. The steel-frame edifice was still smoldering. And what the fire hadn't destroyed was probably trash by now. Especially in the freezer section. The whiff of decay was on the breeze and she was about to get sick. But today she couldn't afford that. Today she needed to go there to find water. If bottled water was to be found anywhere, then it was there.

What came out of the taps by now probably rotted your gut. It tasted like sulfur even on a good day. Maybe the pipes didn't even carry water anymore. She hadn't turned a tap in six days. Not that she was opposed to it. A bathroom sounded like a good idea. But what she wanted was bottled water.

Losers can't be choosers.

We'll take that fork when we get to it.

First she'd be looking for plastic bottles and if there weren't any, she was going to try out the tap. In the customers' bathroom, if it still existed. With wobbly knees she set out for the building.

What was that, she wondered and rubbed her forehead.

Constantly checking in every direction, she stalked across the vast broken parking lot on unwilling legs. She felt naked, oh so naked.

I'm a fish, she thought, the only fish. In a fishbowl. I'm presenting myself on a platter like a piece of meat. Like a burlesque dancer splashing around in a giant glass of champagne. Look at me, everybody. Fully clothed, she had never felt more undressed. She was sure, a thousand eyes were following her. If she could have, she would have sunk into one of the cracks underneath her feet, where ashes drifted along.

Ashes.

Of what?

Of wood and grass and buildings. And other things. If she'd be lying in those cracks, somebody else might now walk