Dragon Rising Excerpt 1 - 3

Excerpt 1

In the Beginning

May 28, 2033

I woke to screams. Again. This time it was a whole f***ing gang. Twenty+ men. Three women…girls, really.

I didn't do a thing but empty my stomach.

There was a creak and Asher straightened, clicking off the keychain, the sickly blue LED glow vanishing. He waited in the darkness, his back pressed to the wall of the supply closet. His free hand tightened around the hilt of his sword.

The seconds ticked by punctuated only by the sound of his breath, each moment of silence more reassuring. He exhaled, and flicked the keychain back to life. It would help if he could find a flashlight, but it was getting harder and harder to move around the city now that the gangs had taken over. When he’d found the rack of garish, “I heart the Yankees” baseballs at Duane Reed, he’d swept them all into his pack, buoyed for just a second by the promise of light in a City gone dark.



Excerpt 2:


He barely used (the LED keychains), reserving them for the nighttime hours spent hunting for precious food. Since what he’d dubbed “Foodmageddon” had begun, the landscape of New York City had changed irrevocably. Not the physical landscape of course, though several serious fires, the flooding of lower subway levels, and some unexplained explosions at the south end of the City might beg to differ. But he barely left the five block radius around his school….because the human landscape had changed the most.

Since everyone fled fearing nukes, the City was largely abandoned, the towers and subways now skeletons and blood vessels in a dead body, a corpse left to rot in the summer sun. At times he imagined walking out to the center of one of the Avenues and standing there alone, certain that he was the last man on Earth.



Excerpt 3


(The abandoned state of New York City) deepened the ache for his parents. What if he was one of the last men of Earth? Not “were,” not the subjunctive…the subjective. What if he WAS one of the last men on Earth? The thought rattled around his brain like a psychotic marble.

He shifted, his toes prickling, the protest of a crouch held too long, of pinched blood thrumming at its bounds. The pain sharpened his thoughts, reminding him of the realities. Being morose would get him nowhere. The truth was that most times, if you did hear the sound of another human being…you’d be sorry.

His eyes fell to his journal and for a moment his mind seized, the writer’s block springing not from blankness, but from the jam of emotions clogging his throat. What could he add to his confession? Who was left to judge? His tears welled in acid pools, the sting of dehydration serving as both reminder and betrayal. His mind settled and his fingers found life again.

I keep thinking about my roommate Jeff, wondering where he is…if he made it. Probably snuggled into some post-apocalyptic kibbutz in Jersey by now and the joke’s on me. That was that kid’s kind of luck.