A few years ago, I had an idea for a story and started writing it but my eyesight has gone bad and I can't finish it. The premise is a huge solar flare that irradiates and destroys huge swaths of the earth and leaves equally large areas untouched. I call it Zebra. I got the idea from the AT&T logo with the ball representing earth and the blue and white horizontal stripes.
This is what I had already written:
ZEBRA
First, let's get one thing straight. I'm not a nice person. I'm a convict for a reason. Well, I guess that would be ex-convict now. The zebra pretty much changed all those previously important titles and descriptions.
I'm not going to bother claiming to be innocent. Those days of claiming to be innocent are long past. It's been two years now since zebra changed everything. I was an accountant for a large company and got caught with my electronic fingers in the till. Guilty. I syphonned off several hundred thousand before they caught me. Useless now but at least I'm still alive.
I suspect your wondering about the zebra? About two or so years ago the sun fired off tons of solar flares. When they streaked across Earth, they burned whatever was in their path. Radiation, mostly. Large long stripes of desolation beside large long stripes of normal. The planet looked like zebra stripes when it was over. Stripes fifty and sixty miles wide and running for hundreds of miles long in some cases, west to east. Or is that east to west? I don't know and I guess it really doesn't matter any more. I'm not a scientist and we cons were all locked up during the storm. What I'm passing on is just what we've managed to glean from Ham radios and sporadic television broadcasts from undamaged stripes, like our own. Basically, if you were caught in one of the flare stripes, you died. If not, you lived. Simple as that.
The prison I was incarcerated in was located in a green belt stripe. Obviously, or I wouldn't be telling you this tale. It was one of those commercial prisons, contracted by the State of California to keep us cons locked up until our sentences were completed. Once we became aware of what happened, it didn't take long for the inmates to overpower the few remaining guards. Most of them just took a runner right after zebra hit. One con took over control. He was ex-military. Some kind of officer. We called him The Colonel. He was in for murder and was bad-ass enough that no one messed with him. Not the guards. Not the warden. Not the other cons.
He was a natural leader and he got us organized quickly enough. I had a position on the Council because of my background. I was promoted to Chief Quartermaster. I had the keys to all our supplies. Good job to have in the post-zebra world, right?
We – convicts remember? – quickly scoured and took control of our entire stripe. At the widest spot it was fifty miles wide and our little bit of heaven was about a hundred and fifty miles long. Mostly hilly land in Cali on the Nevada border. Up near Lake Tahoe and Reno. Good thing we had some altitude. The ocean swelled with the melting polar caps. Yeah they got zapped too. On top of that, a lot of ocean water ended up in the atmosphere and it was cloudy and raining for a solid year. Lots of tsunamis too. For those uneducated types, that's tidal waves. The whole ecosystem and weather patterns got turned upside down.
So, bottom line, the coastline of most of the world was eventually under water. On the west coast, that meant from Anchorage, Alaska in the north to San Diego in the south. I don't know about Mexico. Or South America for that matter. I heard you could buy beach front property in San Antonio, Tx now.
I'm guessing by now you probably want a blow-by-blow rundown of just what the hell happened. I would never lie to you. I'm a con, right? We never lie. Well except for the fucking pedophiles. You know? Kiddie fuckers. Can't trust any of them. If you can even find one still alive. But, I digress.
The zebra hit our little portion of the world during the night. Now, I have a small window up high in my cell/room. It's one foot tall and 2 feet wide. The window, not the room. My cell faces the north side of the prison and we are just ten miles away from our northern zebra line. I remember seeing some bright flashes that night, but didn't really hear anything. It did get a lot warmer than normal, however. In the morning, things were different.
Most of the guards and staff either fled, or didn't bother to show up for work the next day. Someone stuck around long enough to open up the cell doors before fleeing. Yeah, we had electricity. Turns out some rich guy established a huge wind turbine business in the valleys leading up to the Nevada border. He was selling electricity into the grid, until he died and we became the grid.
So there we sat. Some guys split. Some worked out year old 'problems' with other inmates. Then the Colonel took over. He rounded us up in the cafeteria and got everyone seated and semi-quiet. He had armed those of us he sort of trusted. I was one of the guys holding a former guards shotgun. It's really amazing just how quiet men get when someone has a shotgun pointed in their general direction.
A local television station had been broadcasting news – some of it true and a lot of it false conjecture – about what had happened to the world. The Colonel realized the strategic situation immediately. He dispatched about half our men to take over the nearby National Guard Armory. Using the supplies and equipment from the Armory, it was just a quick matter of time before we owned our little slice of paradise.
We sent out roving teams to round up the population. Anyone contesting our control, was shot and killed. Women and children were separated from the men. The men would become our labor force while the women would become, well, we are cons, right? You know damn well what the women would become. The kids we kept. They would grow up to be the future, right? They were also a good way to keep the bitches under control. Besides that, we weren't hurting much for food. Lots of farms with livestock in the area. Grocery stores were stocked full and the electricity was keeping things cold. The prison even had a huge green house farm where we had spent most of our rehab time tending the growing vegetables. We usually got three crops a year out of our twenty acre enterprise.
Hang on. One of my bitches just showed up with a problem. I got to take a break and fix her pussy. It needs a probing. Should take me, oh, twenty minutes or so. I'll be back shortly.
Okay now, where was I? Right, the aftermath. Now I've heard it both ways and I'm still not sure which is true. Some claim it was actual fire that rained down from the sky and burned everything. Some claim it was radiation and the fire was just natural stuff burning on the ground. Some blamed God. You know, the whole end of the world thing. Rapture or whatever. We did hear on the news for several days prior about massive solar flares and crap. No one pays attention to that kind of scientific hoopla though. One news type scientist guy was talking about the sun 'shedding' fire into the solar system. I think he made up the word shedding just because it was a good allegory for those of us who couldn't understand whatever technical term should have been used. Regardless, the shedding sun shredded Earth. The hot stripes were hot. Hot as hell. Concrete and steel buildings were burned down into slag in minutes. We could feel the heat inside our safe zone. At night, the sky north and farther south of us, glowed in the dark. We would have been worried about forest fires, but everything burned so fast the fires never really got going.
Within a couple days, the rains came. Torrential at first. I mean, it was wet everywhere. A lot of the ocean had burned off into the atmosphere and it took about a year for it all to come back down. Like I mentioned before, the polar ice caps got hit hard, too. When all was done, the sea level had climbed a good distance. No, we didn't have any way to measure the change, but the sea level was about seventy miles farther inland from where it used to be. At least in our area it was.
One of the first things the Colonel did was to call in all the really psycho guys into the former warden's office for a meeting. There were eight of them. Real mean, nasty mothers. So. We killed them. All eight. We all knew they could never be trusted. Kudos to the Colonel for having the balls to take care of that potential problem right away. I know this because I was there. Me and my twelve-gauge. I'm not a nice guy, remember?
So this was the story I was working on till my eyesight gave up on me. It's pretty bad. The eyes not the story. The way I was planning to continue with this was to have the MC get fed up with how bad the cons were running things and treating people. Outside of being a white collar greedy type criminal he really wasn't a bad sort.. Just don't tell anyone. That would ruin his reputation. He decides to take off and cross the countryside. He has access to all the supplies after all. The radiation levels have mostly died down but there are mutations out there in the wild. His women (Several. I hadn't decided on how many. I was thinking somewhere between 3 and 5) figured out his plans and demanded to come along. He had always treated them decent and they did NOT want to be thrown back into the pool of available women. So the story becomes the adventure of visiting other surviving strips of land.. Each of them different in their own way. Some good and some bad. Had to use horses. The gasoline only lasts for so long. Horses and mules and/or a wagon.
I can't finish this. If you happen to know of a successful, talented author, male or female who might be interested, feel free to pass it on. I think the story has enormous potential as a post-apocalypse banger. Let me know what you think please.
Thornfoote