The Last War

Book 1: The Last War Series

by Ryan Schow

Genres: Post-Apocalyptic Fantasy; YA Action & Adventure; YA Science Fiction; Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure

Synopsis

In the middle of an ordinary San Francisco day, an unrelenting attack brings the famed city crashing down upon her citizens. With her family scattered about the city, Cincinnati McNamara will fight for a daughter who may already be dead, a husband with a death wish and a brother who’s fresh out of the military and shaped by a war he just left behind. Caught in the killing fields and forced to run, this remarkable family will attempt the impossible: they’ll try to escape a world now backsliding into a nightmarish landscape more reminiscent of the stone ages than the once famed city by the bay.

The Last War is a clean, lightning-fast thriller about an ordinary family struggling to escape San Francisco in the face of insurmountable odds, an abysmal loss of life and the dawn of a new, post-apocalyptic dark age. Prepare yourself for a ride like no other. Are you ready?

READING ORDER OF THE COMPLETE LAST WAR SERIES:

• The Last War
• The Zero Hour
• The Ophidian Horde
• The Infernal Regions
• The Killing Fields
• The Barbarous Road
• The Terminal Run

Release date: December 13, 2017

Publisher: River City Publishing

Print pages: 214

Sample

Chapter 1

 

CINCINATTI

 

 

Forget who you were. What you did for a living. That fancy title on your business cards. Forget your paycheck, your overpriced car, the upscale neighborhood you lived in because there’s no such thing as upscale anymore. Or society. Or even civility for that matter.

 

Oh, and if you’re looking for a sense of community? Honestly, don’t hold your breath. Welcome to San Francisco. Welcome to hell.

 

To survive in this post-apocalyptic cesspool, you have to un-know yourself. You have to strip away that which makes you human: your empathy, your enormous heart, all the ways you used to be and feel so special. How things are now—the big cities being stamped into ruin, relentless bombing runs, the onset of hunger and the spike in crime—you need to understand your life in this city is a death sentence.

 

The circumstances being what they are, doing unforgivable things, unspeakable things, is the norm. It’s what you do to stay breathing. Not to belabor the point, but if you don’t subscribe to the philosophy that if you’re weak, you’re a corpse, then honest to God, the window between right now and your demise is probably already closed, you just don’t know it yet.

 

My husband, Stanton, recently told our fifteen year old daughter, Macy, “If someone’s in your face and you don’t feel right about them, if something feels off, just shoot them. Don’t even think about it. Just do it.”

 

Two weeks ago this would have been the most irrational statement in the world, but the way Stanton says it, you can almost believe that he believes he sounds completely rational. To think he was once the voice of reason in our little family of three...

 

Oh and me? I’m an ER nurse. Well I was, past tense. My name is Cincinnati McNamara and I spent my career at Saint Francis Memorial Hospital. I used to save lives, not take them, so hearing my husband so brazenly speak of murder is a pretty big pill for me to swallow.

 

We’ve killed though. We didn’t mean to and we certainly didn’t want to, but if we weren’t wanting or trying to kill people and we did so anyway, what does that say about the times?

 

It says plenty.

 

Speaking of matters of life and death, before the collapse, every life had value. Even the junkies, the criminals and the homeless. Now the only lives with any value are mine, Stanton’s, my daughter Macy’s and my younger brother Rex’s. I don’t like thinking like this, but we really are in a survival-of-the-fittest type of world here.

 

I suppose we could lament our situation, this sour turn of events, but we try not to. We can’t afford the mental breakdown. Even though it’s coming. We tell ourselves we’re not those kinds of people, the kind who just lay down and die when things get tough. We tell ourselves we’re survivors, fighters.

 

Perhaps this is true. It could be a lie.

 

Either way, we are our own cheerleaders, our own slave drivers, as we slog through what will surely become some urban wasteland if someone doesn’t stop the brutal war being waged on mankind. Can it even be stopped? Are we the ones to do it?

 

Probably not.

 

So we navigate the streets of San Francisco, squatting where we can, eating what’s available, and we try not to comprehend this city’s monumental fall from grace. Instead, we dig our heels in as we grapple the impossible odds and grind against the gears of our sometimes frail and overworked minds. We do this while hiding from enemies who have taken to the streets and who kill from the air, and we do our best to ignore the voices in our heads telling us to go ahead and give up, just quit, end it once and for all and just eat that bullet.

 

You may be wondering, why press on when things seem so dismal? I’ve asked myself that same question a hundred times. Maybe more.  I have an answer, but it’s flimsy, propped up on faith and desperation. We’re praying that when the smoke clears and all the bodies have been stacked and properly burned, there will be something left to hang on to, some semblance of hope for a new life, a new future, a brand new world.

 

If you could see what I see, how this city turned upside down in a single afternoon, how devastation has spread to every corner before me, perhaps you’d understand these things I’m telling you. Perhaps you’d know what I mean when I say faith and desperation.

 

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Putting the cart before the horse if you will.

 

Let me start at the beginning…