Journey Into the Flame

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To the flame of truth within us all.

PROLOGUE

JULY 21, 2030

Every mile Camden Ford drove east from Oklahoma City along old Route 40 provided a fresh reminder of how little remained in the wake of the Great Disruption. The long drive home to what was left of Washington, D.C., gave him more than enough time to contemplate his mortality and the dangers he faced for the next thousand miles. He wished he could let his mind wander to football, kayaking, girls—all those things nineteen-year-old boys used to be able to enjoy. But he had to stay alert. You never knew what you might encounter on these near-deserted highways, and he had to make sure he arrived at the safe house in Clarksville before sundown.

He removed his cap and rustled his dark brown hair, allowing the wind blowing through the open window to provide a bit of cool relief on this hot July day. Weary from a long day of driving, he took off his sunglasses and surveyed the landscape around him. The world he’d grown up in was gone; the Great Disruption of 2027 had seen to that. Very little had changed since those catastrophic days three years ago.
Vehicles of all sorts lay abandoned along the road. Once-thriving farms were deserted, their fields untended. Roadside restaurants now served only dust to a stray passing wind. Camden slowed the car and grabbed his camera from the backseat, which was cluttered with survival gear: a cobbled-together water purifier, a gas mask, and a few vials of Androstenediol, an experimental anti-radiation medication. He took a few pictures of the abandoned farm and the forsaken town he was driving through. Pictures for posterity, he told himself. If there even would be a posterity. He sped back up as he glanced one last time at the town in his rearview mirror.

Camden had been sixteen when the Great Disruption occurred. He remembered that it had started with social and political unrest. Bombings were commonplace, as were assassinations of corporate and political leaders. The chaos escalated when an unexplained Carrington-class solar storm struck the earth, knocking satellites out of their orbits and taking down communications systems and electrical power grids. The world went dark.

Like other leaders in the U.S. government, Camden’s father, a high-level administrator and engineer in the Department of Energy, rounded up his family and fled the devastation and mayhem in the nation’s capital. They took refuge at their cabin in rural Virginia. Then, on December 21, 2027, also without explanation, an even more devastating natural disaster occurred: the earth began to shift four degrees south on its axis. Over the next three months, weather patterns changed, bringing rain to the deserts and drought to the rain forests. Earthquakes shook all seven continents as oceans unleashed tsunamis. In one short year, humanity returned to the Dark Ages.

Camden slowed again as he approached exit 1-85. He saw a man sitting beneath a road sign, his head leaning back against the signpost. The gun in the man’s right hand and the bloody wound in what was left of the right side of his head told Camden all he needed to know. Another suicide.

“People are just giving up,” his father had said a few months ago,
sounding sad and frustrated. “The conveniences of everyday life are gone. There’s no electricity, no gas for their cars or fuel for their heaters, no food to buy. Most people don’t know how to fend for themselves; they never needed to. And now there’s no real government to speak of that can help them. These people choose death over life because life is hard. But we cannot judge these people. Only God can judge them, son.”

God,
Camden wondered as he pressed on the accelerator and sped up once more.
Where is God in all this?

Camden’s family had returned to Washington in the spring of 2028. A small group of dedicated government officials, business leaders, and social activists had congregated there in a “peace zone” surrounded by barbed-wire fences, U.S. Army tanks, and other heavy weapons. They’d come in an effort to restore order and rebuild the country, which, according to estimates, had lost half of its population. Camden’s parents had helped to establish the World Federation of Reconstruction, and for the past two years, Camden had worked alongside them. Last year, having become trained in water purification, he’d started traveling to reconstruction zones all over the United States, assisting local leaders in restoring water systems. He had just completed a ten-week reconstruction assignment in the secured area of what had once been the city of Dallas, and he couldn’t wait to get home. He would spend at most a week with his parents, and then he’d go off to help with the reconstruction effort in another city. Although the WFR had accomplished a great deal in two years, focusing its efforts on the nation’s cities and metropolitan areas, wide swaths of small-town and rural America still lay in ruins, and the people who lived there believed the government had forgotten them.

As Camden passed a weathered road sign informing him that he was entering the state of Arkansas, he saw some activity in the distance. A crew of workers was at the side of the road near a WFR transport truck, while a white pickup was idling nearby. When Camden saw a wing and parts of a crashed airliner scattered in the field behind the workers, he realized a cleanup crew was collecting human remains.

The sudden series of solar storms that had hit the earth in 2027 had brought down more than seven thousand aircraft. Some of the planes had crashed into the seas and high mountains, never to be recovered, while others had plunged into populated areas, killing thousands of people. As Camden slowed down, he grabbed his camera and took a few pictures of the piles of bags at the roadside awaiting pickup. There was a part of Camden that was numb to these grim sights, but he was still glad he hadn’t been assigned to a cleanup crew.

A worker a good distance away from the rest of the crew waved at Camden before he placed a skull in a bag. As Camden waved back at the man, a loud shot rang out. Then another, and another. Camden saw the workers up ahead falling to the ground. More shots followed. The road crew was under attack, and he was driving right into it.

Four bearded men in ragged clothes were crouched behind the hood of the idling white pickup truck, firing rifles at the workers. Two federation security officers lay prone in the field, returning fire. But the crossfire was short-lived; the exposed security officers went down, spraying their last shots into the sky. The entire WFR crew was being slaughtered.

Camden slowed the car and reached for the gun he kept in his backpack. Suddenly, the car shook, and glass was shattering. A bullet had hit the edge of his windshield. Camden slammed down on the accelerator. The engine roared, and the car screeched forward, bearing down on the gunmen as two of them reloaded their rifles. He ducked right and then left, struggling to control the car as bullets shattered the back window and ripped into the side of the car.

This is it
, Camden thought, as he sped past the white pickup. His old car couldn’t outrun the truck. But just as he took in the deep breath he thought might be his last, the shooting stopped. In the rearview mirror, Camden saw the four gunmen pulling boxes out of the cleanup crew’s transport truck. Of course. They wanted the supplies more than they wanted him. Still, Camden kept his foot pressed hard on the accelerator for what seemed like a hundred miles.

I’m such a coward!
Camden pounded his fist on the steering wheel, wishing he could have helped the workers. But it had all happened so fast. He was no hero.

After about twenty minutes, Camden stopped shaking. He leaned back in his seat and eased up on the accelerator. The car slowed to a safer speed. Camden wiped away the tears that were running down his cheeks. “No more,” he said aloud. “No more. When I get home, I am done. My parents can do this without me. I’m finished.”

Two hours later, as the sun was setting, Camden pulled out his Federation map. He was relieved to see that he was just a few miles away from the safe house in Clarksville, near the Ozark National Forest. The Federation manual warned workers not to drive after dark. More Forgotten Ones, as they were called, would soon be scavenging the countryside for anything that would sustain them. Some believed they were remnants of the Crowd Twelve movement, which had instigated the boycotts and protests against rapacious multi-national corporations and financial institutions before the Great Disruption. Others believed they were survivors of the nation’s rural areas whose desperation had transformed them into cold-blooded killers. Whoever they were, the Federation manual was very clear: they were to be avoided. Camden laughed grimly to himself and thought,
If you can avoid them
 . . .

The Federation had built shelters around the country, safe houses for workers who traveled from one reconstruction site to another. In the distance, Camden saw the Federation flag flying on a tall pole, a welcome sight after his encounter with the Forgotten Ones. Camden pulled his car into a spot close to the entrance and grabbed his backpack as he stepped out. He ran his fingers over some of the bullet holes in the side of the car. There had to be more than twenty of them.

The shelter seemed a bit quiet. Camden could see lights on inside the building, but that was all. He wondered where the security was. The shelters always had a couple of guards on patrol.

Camden entered the safe house. “Hello,” he called. “I work for the
Federation. Is anyone here?” He rang the old-fashioned registration bell on the counter, but still no one appeared. “Hello?” he called again. He needed to gain access to the communications equipment to report the attack on the work crew.

He heard a sound from inside the small office behind the counter; he circled around and entered it. Camden gasped. The room had been ransacked. Tables and chairs were overturned, blood was everywhere, and the slaughtered bodies of four people and two uniformed guards lay in a pile in the corner.

Camden looked around the room. The radios must have been ripped out and stolen, because only frayed wires were still attached to the wall. Camden walked over to the broken supply cabinet and saw that almost all of the food and water rations had been plundered. Forgotten Ones again, he thought, as he rummaged through the remaining items, looking for anything that might be useful. Suddenly, Camden jerked back and almost fell over a chair; he’d felt something grab his right leg. Instinctively, he picked up the leg of the broken chair to defend himself. He spun around but saw no one, only the pile of bodies. Then he realized someone was moving underneath it.

Camden threw down the chair leg and his backpack and tried pulling the person from the pile. It was a young man not much older than he was. “What happened here?” Camden asked. “Who are you?”

The young man struggled for breath. “Robert,” was all he could say.

Camden took a small towel from his backpack and wiped some of the blood off Robert’s neck. Someone had stabbed him near the collarbone and left him for dead.

“Can you walk?” Camden asked, as he helped the young man to his feet. “We need to get out of here.” Just then, Camden heard a door slam and voices coming from the rear of the building. He knew they didn’t have much time. He grabbed his backpack and supported Robert as best he could as he hurried back to his car. He tossed some of his supplies into the passenger seat, laid Robert down in the back, and jumped behind the wheel. He left the parking lot so fast the car fishtailed, sending
up a spray of gravel. Shots rang out behind him, and once again, Camden was speeding down Route 40, racing for his life.

Camden looked in his rearview mirror and saw the silhouettes of a group of men holding rifles shrinking in the distance. His heart pounding, he struggled to keep one eye on the road and the other on the men in the mirror. A flare shot into the sky. His heart sank, and his hands started to shake. This was a trademark of the Forgotten Ones. They used flares to alert others in their clan that a target had been spotted. More flares rose into the twilight sky. Camden was being tracked.
What the hell do I do? Where is the next shelter? And what about this guy in the backseat?