Read The Day After Never - Blood Honor (Post-Apocalyptic Dystopian Thriller) for Free Online

civilization was on the nanny state coming to the rescue.
    When it failed to do so, as it had for many weeks during prior regional natural disasters – like the hurricane that had wiped out New Orleans – the only surprise to Lucas had been the number of people caught completely off guard.
    Duke adjusted the lamp to shine on the woman and turned his attention to the wound. He studied the bandage and then called out to Aaron. “Bring the surgery kit. Alcohol. Gauze. Soldering iron.”
    “Be right back,” Aaron said, and went into one of the back rooms.
    “What’s her story?” Duke asked as they waited.
    Lucas shrugged. “Beats me. I found her in the desert, along with some dead friends.”
    “Kind of a looker, ain’t she?”
    Lucas grunted noncommittally. “Business been good?”
    “Can’t complain.”
    Duke had set up the trading post once the worst of the chaos had subsided, and it had thrived ever since. Duke’s terms were simple: he was relatively honest, and he didn’t ask or tell where items came from. His discretion was prized, although he reserved the right to refuse anything he didn’t want.
    A shortwave radio crackled softly in a corner and went silent. Lucas tilted his head toward it. “Anything new going on in the world?”
    Duke laughed, the sound a harsh bark. “Black helos. The Russians are coming. The grid will be back online any day. A nuke plant in California melted down and we’re all doomed. Take your pick.”
    “So same old.”
    “Yep.” Duke collected gossip like a fishwife and spent his off hours monitoring the airwaves, exchanging rumors with other survivors around the country. It was because of his hobby, in fact, that he’d been one of the first to recognize the true danger as the collapse had unfolded. The media had lied early and often, the Internet had been increasingly censored in the interests of national security, and straight answers had been few and far between. But Duke had collected reports from all over the nation from other like-minded, self-sufficient folks who’d seen disaster coming years in advance and taken appropriate steps to defend themselves.
    When the first casualties of the new super flu had begun appearing in Asia and the Middle East, he’d heard accounts from returning servicemen who were in his network, and the stories differed materially from those online or in the news. Unlike prior flu pandemics, this one had a longer infectious cycle with extremely mild, almost undetectable symptoms, enabling the virus to spread like wildfire before anyone realized the extent. By the time the domestic media and the CDC had been willing to admit that the case-fatality ratio of the airborne, highly infectious bug was approaching forty percent, the damage had been done: sixty percent of those infected ultimately survived, but even the survivors were bedridden for ten days to two weeks in the second stage of the disease, and transmission levels were near ninety-six percent, with only a fraction escaping unscathed due to natural immunity.
    Speculation had been rampant in the early days that the flu was a conspiracy, lab-generated, an attack on the U.S., part of a larger depopulation scheme, a takeover of the world by some shadowy group, while cooler heads had pointed out that every hundred years or so a bug came along and wiped out a significant portion of the population. The prior lethal pandemic had been the Spanish flu, which had effectively ended World War One, both sides being too sick to fight, and which, in a time before plane travel, had decimated the population with an estimated ten to twenty percent mortality rate.
    But as bad as the super flu had been, it was the collapse of the financial system and the breakdown of law all over the world that had tipped the scales. Unlike in 1918, the globe’s financial system was deeply intertwined due to the unregulated derivatives market, with mega-banks in the U.S. holding tens of trillions of paper from European and