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Scourge Excerpt

From Ravaged Dawn Book 1

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A wall of hot air slammed into Jordyn with the force of a freight train and flung her head over heels across the parking lot. She landed on her side and rolled, desperate to protect her head in a shower of glass shrapnel. Searing heat baked her exposed skin. The air in her lungs whooshed out and pain exploded from her hands and knees as she scudded across the pavement.

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Temporarily blinded and unable to hear, Jordyn dropped to the ground and screamed in silence. She reached out, seeing mostly white, and with a shaky hand touched something—the side of a car. The metal felt hot. She jerked her hand away and crawled around the car. Gulping in the oven-hot air, she blinked through tears of pain. A sharp ringing built in her ears even as her vision gradually cleared. She stared down at the blistered skin of her arms and the tattered, charred clothing that hung from her body.

"What…?"

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She started when a chunk of smoking seat cushion landed not ten feet from her in a puff of embers. Jordyn looked up, shielding her eyes, as more debris fell from the sky, all trailing smoke. Burning paper and ash floated in the air. Pebbles and bits of roof tiles rained down around her, plinking off wrecked cars like hail. She flinched involuntarily as several pieces hit her head and shoulders.

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Jordyn looked around the parking lot and froze—Hanard’s building was…gone. Smoke and fire poured out of a massive hole in the ground, made blurry by shimmering, super-heated air. She turned and sagged against the car. The other buildings had lost all their windows and a few walls as well—glass covered the parking lot like a glittering sheet of ice. Chunks of brick walls, concrete blocks, pieces of metal and rebar, even office furniture—charred and smoking—littered the ground.

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Then she saw the bodies. The breath caught in her throat and her bleeding hand came to her mouth. Dozens upon dozens of people lay on the ground. A severed arm lay not far from her own ruined vehicle, covered by a light dusting of ash.

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The earth trembled again, and Jordyn looked around in a panic, expecting another explosion. Slowly, like a dying animal, a three-story building on the far side of the lot collapsed in on itself, floor by floor. A fresh cloud of gray-brown smoke billowed out toward her, and people ran for their lives, then vanished as it overtook them. 

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She pulled herself up against the side of the car and cried out in pain as the smoke rolled closer and began to dissipate. She caught her breath, and the world passed into shadow. An enormous column of smoke, boiling up into the sky where the Ag Sciences building used to be, blotted out the sun. Day turned into twilight under the volcano-like mushroom cloud, and cell phones and flashlights flickered to life across the parking lot like fireflies on a warm summer evening.

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Everything was gone. Hanard, the bacteriophage, the data, the research…it was all…gone. The lab and the building itself had been obliterated in the explosion. Their last best chance to end the blight had been vaporized, along with everything else. Only a crater remained, sporting a rim of twisted metal, sparking wires, and mounds of earth, asphalt, and rubble....