Freezing Point (After the Shift Book 1)

  Freezing Point

  After The Shift Book One

  Grace Hamilton

  After The Shift

  Freezing Point

  Killing Frost

  Black Ice

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales, is entirely coincidental.

  RELAY PUBLISHING EDITION, SEPTEMBER 2018

  Copyright © 2018 Relay Publishing Ltd.

  All rights reserved. Published in the United Kingdom by Relay Publishing. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  www.relaypub.com

  Blurb

  In the dawn of a new Ice Age, families everywhere are taking to the road to escape the frigid landscape—but you can’t outrun the cold.

  No one could have predicted the terrifying impact of human interference in the Arctic. Shifts in the Earth's crust have led to catastrophe and now the North Pole is located in the mid-Atlantic, making much of the eastern United States an unlivable polar hellscape.

  Nathan Tolley is a talented mechanic who has watched his business dry up due to gas shortages following the drastic tectonic shifts. His wife Cyndi has diligently prepped food and supplies, but it’s not enough to get them through a never-ending winter. With an asthmatic young son and a new baby on the way, they’ll have to find a safe place they can call home or risk freezing to death in this harsh new world.

  When an old friend of Nathan’s tells him that Detroit has become a paradise, with greenhouses full of food and plenty of solar energy for everyone, it sounds like the perfect place to escape. But with dangerous conditions and roving gangs, getting there seems like an impossible dream. It also seems like their only choice.

  Thank You

  Thank you for purchasing ‘Freezing Point’

  (After The Shift Book One)

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  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  End of Freezing Point

  About Grace Hamilton

  Sneak Peek Killing Frost

  Also By Grace Hamilton

  1

  “What’s that?” Freeson asked, pointing beyond the wrecker’s windshield.

  Nathan squinted through the swirling snowflakes peppering the glass, but the wipers were struggling to give meaningful vision beyond the red expanse of his Dodge’s hood. He thought they were on the spruce-lined Ridge Road running between Lake George and Glens Falls but he couldn’t be sure. The cone of light thrown out by its headlights only illuminated the blizzard itself, making it look like a messed up TV channel.

  Without any real visibility, the 1981 Dodge Power Wagon W300 4x4—with driver’s cab, a four-person custom-sized crew cab behind that, a wrecker boom, and a spectacle lift—grumbled deep in its engine as Nathan slowed the truck. To stop the tires fully, Nathan had to go down through the gears rather than by the application of the discs. There was a slight lateral slide before the tires bit into the fresh snow. The ice beneath was treacherous enough already without the added application of fresh flakes.

  Who knows how thick the ice is over the blacktop, Nathan thought.

  With the truck stopped, he tried to follow Freeson’s finger out into the whirlpooling night.

  For a few seconds, all he could see was the blizzard, the air filled with fat white flakes, which danced across his vision like God’s dandruff. Nathan was about to ask Freeson what the hell he was playing at when he caught it. He saw taillights flicker on and the shadow of a figure move towards the truck’s headlights.

  Sundown for late April in Glens Falls, New York State, should have been around 7:50 p.m. The Dodge’s dashboard clock said the time was 5:30 p.m. and it was already full dark out on Algonquin Ridge.

  The world had changed so much in the last eight years since the stars had changed position in the sky and the North Atlantic had started to freeze over. The pole star was no longer the pole star. It was thirty degrees out of whack. Couple that with the earthquakes, volcanoes, and tsunamis wrecking countries around the Pacific Rim, and the world had certainly been transformed from the one Nathan had been born into twenty-eight years before. And this year, spring hadn’t come at all. Winter had spread her white skirts out in early December and had left them there. It was nearly May now, and there was still no sign of her fixing to pick them up again.

  A face loomed up in the headlights, red with the cold, hair salted with snow, the flakes building up on the shoulders of the figure’s parka. It was Art Simmons.

  Nathan zipped his own puffy North Face Nuptse winter jacket up to his chin, opened his door, and jumped down into the powder. The snow came up to his knees and he could feel the hard ice below the chunky soles of his black Columbia Bugaboots.

  Even through the thermal vest, t-shirt, and two layers of New York Jets sweatshirts, the cold bit hard into Nathan. Without the meager, volcanic-ash-diluted sun in the sky, the early evening was already steel-cold and the blizzard wind made it near murderous. He rolled his hips and galumphed through the snow towards Art.

  “Nathan! Is that you?”

  Art had, until recently, been a Glens Falls sheriff. He’d been a warm-hearted gregarious man whose company Nathan enjoyed a lot. But since being laid off when the local police department had shut down, he’d become sullen and distant. Seeing Art so animated now offered the most emotion Nathan had seen coming from the chubby ex-cop since before Christmas.

  “What’s the trouble, Art?”

  Art’s words tumbled in a breathless rush. Sharp and short, it was clear that the cutting air had begun constricting his throat. “Skidded. Run off the road. I couldn’t even see the road… I’m in the ditch… Been here an hour...”

  “Run off the road?”

  Art nodded. “Glens Falls has been overrun, Nate. Scavengers tracked me. If I wasn’t trying so hard to outrun ’em, I wouldn’t be here now. Hadn’t driven so fast, when I lost them through Selling’s Bridge…”

  Nathan had heard the rumors of small packs of raiders using snowmobiles to hold up residents in their cars, stealing supplies and invading homes. But he hadn’t seen evidence of them himself. He’d only been told by neighbors and friends they were operating in other parts of New York State, fifty miles further south than Albany, but not until now had he gotten any notion they might be as far up in the state as Glens Falls. But now that they were here, the lack of an operational police department in town might just make them bolder and more likely to try their luck with what they could get away with.

  “Where did they go?” he asked.

  Art shook his head. “Guess they lost me in the blizzard when I came off the road. Maybe gone off to
track some other poor bastard. They won’t be far.”

  Freeson joined them in front of the truck, banging his arms around his own parka to put feeling into his fingers. His limp didn’t help him wade through the snow and his grizzled face was grim, but Nathan knew the determination in Freeson’s bones wouldn’t allow his physical deficiencies to stop him doing the job Nathan paid him for. The cold might freeze and ache him, but the fire in Freeson’s belly would counter the subzero conditions for sure.

  Freeson hadn’t been right since the accident, maybe. Quiet at times, and quick to anger at others, but he was always one hundred percent reliable.

  Together, they walked the ten yards down through the snow to the roadside ditch beneath the snow-heavy trees.

  An hour in the blizzard had made Art’s truck almost impossible to recognize. Nathan only knew it was a white 2005 Silverado 1500 because he’d worked on it a dozen times in the past ten years. The last time had been to replace a failed water pump that had fritzed the cooling system. Nathan smiled wryly. No one needed their cooling system fixed now—not since the Earth’s poles had shifted. Since that unexplained catastrophe, the Big Winter’s new Arctic Circle had been smothering Florida and the eastern seaboard, all the way up to Pennsylvania and beyond. It had frozen the Atlantic clear from the U.S. to North Africa.

  Art told them he’d been turning the taillights on and off every ten minutes to signal to anyone who might be passing, trying to preserve battery life at the same time. He said Nathan’s wrecker had been the first vehicle to show up since his slow-motion slide into the ditch.

  Nathan scratched his head through his hood and looked up the incline of Algonquin Ridge. The Silverado was trapped between two spruces on the edge of the ditch. The tail had kicked up as the front end had dropped, leaving the back wheels floating in space—or, would have done that if the snow hadn’t already drifted beneath them and begun to pack in.

  There was no leeway in the tree growth to get the wrecker onto the downslope of the road, either, though the easiest way out of this would have been to pull the Silverado down the thirty-degree incline. Instead, they were going to have to pull Art’s truck up the slope and fight gravity all the way.

  Nathan opened his mouth to tell Freeson to get back in the wrecker and start her up, but Art placed a hand on his shoulder and pointed into the trees. “Look.”

  Through the forest, three sets of Ski-Doo headlights were moving along two hundred yards up beyond the treeline. The blatter of two-stroke engines was dampened by the snow, but still unmistakable. This part of the ridge was well out of town and had once been a popular tourist trail. There were wide avenues between the spruce where summer people rode chunky-tired trail bikes, and winter people, Ski-Doos. They had room to maneuver.

  “They’re back,” said Art.

  Better get this show on the road.

  In theory, it should have been a simple operation. Nate turned the wrecker around and reversed it towards the ditch while Freeson and Art cleared as much snow as they could. As they worked, Freeson bitched about the way the town was dying and how you couldn’t get much of anything from the last store in town, and that the hospital was going to be shutting down and you couldn’t get fuel oil, and… and… and…

  Nathan knew Freeson was just working his jaw to keep his mind off the cold, but the litany of unhappy changes on his lips, when run together like that, did nothing to spread warmth through the three men. In the past, Freeson would have been telling a stream of off-color jokes that would make Nathan groan at best and look for a stone to render his employee unconscious at worst. But since the Arctic Circle had shifted, leaving a trail of dying towns and cities in its wake, the resulting changes had been the only topic of Freeson’s conversation. That was when he wasn’t weeping because of the loss of his wife.

  Nathan and Freeson latched the boom hook from the wrecker to the rear of the Silverado with a tow strap while Art got into his cab and started the engine. The blizzard maintained a steady build-up of snow on anyone who stood still for more than ten seconds, wind whipping at their faces like slaps from an angry girlfriend.

  Through the trees, the scavengers’ Ski-Doos circled like sharks. Not getting any nearer as yet, perhaps waiting for the right time to take advantage. They could have just dived down on the trio and trapped the truck where it was, but Nathan figured they were trying to raise the tension and get them more scared—scared enough to abandon the trucks without a fight, maybe.

  At first the Silverado’s wheels just spun fore and aft, throwing up a spray of snow and slush. Nathan stood on the back of the Dodge, operating the boom winch, and Freeson sat up in the cab, keeping the engine running steady in neutral with the brakes on.

  It all looked like it was going to work fine—the stricken Silverado, wedged between spruce and the slimy mud bank, should have been popping out, cork-like, from the bottle of the ditch. However, as the Dodge took the strain, its winch whining and wheels spinning, their luck run out.

  The Dodge hadn’t been bedded in tight enough in the snow covering the icy road. With one sickening lurch, the Dodge slipped, failed to bite, yawed on the ice, and pitched Nathan six feet down into a snowdrift as it slid into the ditch next to the Silverado.

  “Dammit!” Nathan cursed, picking himself up out of the snow. Freeson was already jumping out of the Dodge to see the damage.

  “Don’t get out!” Nathan shouted at Freeson, more frustrated at himself for not predicting this than at his employee for coming to check on him. “I’m fine! Start her back up!”

  Meanwhile, Art had been distracted by the Ski-Doo lights, which were definitely getting nearer. The riders were still teasing. Still trying to instill fear in their prey, apparently.

  It was working.

  Nathan jumped as Art thumped the side of his truck, his breath steaming around him. “The shotgun’s at Dot’s place.”

  Dot Henderson—Dorothy in her professional capacity—was a forty-year-old librarian who had been Art’s significant other for eight years, although they didn’t live together for reasons that Nathan couldn’t fathom. She was a woman of strong features and even stronger heart, and had been the rock Art needed when the police department had closed down. It was no surprise that Art had been going over there tonight with supplies. It made sense for them to pool their resources as this Big Winter rolled on.

  Art stared at him. “You got your gun, Nate? I reckon their spines have caught up with their balls. Foreplay’s gonna be over soon and they’re gettin’ ready for some action.”

  Nate shook his head. He only had the guns at his house for hunting; they didn’t come with him to work. Glens Falls wasn’t that kind of town.

  Well, it hadn’t been.

  Art and Nathan set about unhooking the Silverado from the boom while Freeson tried to drag the Dodge out of the ditch under its own steam. But the wheels weren’t in the mood to cooperate. Sixty seconds of spinning came and went, and it was clear the Dodge was going nowhere.

  Art was getting antsy, and with good reason. The buzzing of the Ski-Doos was getting ever nearer. Nathan got the sense they were being emboldened by the three men’s vulnerability, and it wouldn’t be long before they forced the situation.

  “We should get out of here. On foot. It’s a mile to the Andersons’ ranch. We can come back at first light.”

  Nathan knew Art was a man who felt naked without a gun, as fifteen years as a cop would do that to a fella, but it didn’t matter. “No way am I leaving my livelihood to those assholes,” Nathan said with a slow shake of his head.

  They needed to get the Dodge out of the ditch, and they needed to get it out now.

  The back tires had plowed away all the snow beneath and now rested on the slimy wet mud of the bank. Each turn of the wheels would only dig them in deeper. Although the blizzard was still silting up everything with snow, the fact that the Dodge was touching earth gave Nathan an idea.

  “Free, unhook the towing strap.”

  As Freeson did a
s he was told, Nathan reached into the tool crate nestled behind the crew cab of the Dodge. Among the tools Nathan might need to help recover and make running repairs on any vehicles he might be called to, here was just what he needed. A sturdy fire ax.

  He threw his knife to Freeson. “Cut the strap into four pieces.”

  Freeson looked at Nathan as if he were mad.

  “We’ve got a spare back at the shop. Do it.”

  Nathan, one eye on the ever nearer Ski-Doos, went into the trees, picked a young spruce of just over fifteen feet with a trunk the circumference of his forearm, and felled it with four hard blows.

  “What are you doing?” Art yelled. “Building a fire so you can toast some marshmallows?”

  Nathan just glared at Art, breathing heavy, the cold ripping into his lungs and snowflakes stinging his eyes. Without a word, he chopped four, three-foot lengths of trunk and carried them to the Dodge.

  Within two minutes, each section of spruce was strapped fast to a tire on the wrecker via the lengths of towing strap Freeson had cut for Nathan. The trunk sections stuck out horizontally from the bodywork, but were shallow enough to turn with the wheels without getting snagged on the wheel arches.

  Freeson got the idea, but Art was angry. “We could have been halfway to the Andersons by now!”