A Violent Anthology

Our way of life didn’t end with a bang. There was no pandemic, no foreign invasion, no EMP, and no natural disaster. Our way of life was rotting away in front of our eyes for decades before the violent collapse, but it was an inconvenient truth that no one wanted to address and only a few dared to speak of in private with close friends. It wasn’t discussed in the news, nor was it debated in the capital. It was ignored for as long as it could be until it couldn’t be ignored anymore.

The Parkers were a normal family, well, normal for the 1940’s and 1950’s living in the 2020’s. Sam traveled a lot for work as a risk management consultant and Andi decided to put her career on hold to raise their two girls and homeschool them. They lived on a small homestead in central Missouri and tried to preserve some of the good that came from the nuclear family example all those years ago. They raised their own food as much as they could, preserved what they could, and tried to pass some of this forgotten knowledge on to their girls for future generations. They did this because they felt it was the right path and because they saw the writing on the wall. The nation and society were circling the drain. Society was one spark away from igniting the powder keg to send it over the edge into a free fall.

They thought they were prepared as well as they could be for just about anything. Pandemics, financial collapse, and even the fabled EMP. What they weren’t prepared for was for Sam to be at the epicenter of the event that lit the fuse, while he was half a country away in Colorado. He had to get home. That was his promise to his girls, Daddy would always come home, no matter how long it took or what he had to do. But they’ve got their own fight at home, too. How far would you go to get home? How hard would you fight to make the 800-mile journey home? For Sam, he had to go pretty far to make it. But getting home is when the real trouble begins.