1 a Winded Note: This Book Is a Labor of Love. I'm

A winded note: This book is a labor of love. I’m printing a few copies for friends and family. If you happen to enjoy the book and want to share it with another reader, please direct them to my website where they can download the book for free. I ask that you do not email the PDF of my book to other readers. www.modschow.com Dark Out Book I is essentially a prologue to the full story. I had too much background to give in just a few pages. Book II (will be mailed in July 2021) gets into the characters a bit heavier and the plot line becomes more intense. Yes, there is a book III. As you all know, I am not a writer by trade, or at all. It is a hobby I’ve picked up and enjoy, and that I am hoping to improve upon. As they say (no idea who said it) Rome wasn’t built on a day, so I’ll gladly take the bruises of your reviews and use them to build up my writing skills. Dark Out is Copyright protected. #1-9320286201.Dtd., 9/22/2020. Dark Out may not be reproduced or distributed in any medium without the express written consent of the author, Marisol Schowengerdt. I hope that you enjoy this book. That you find it prescient to our times. And, that it makes you think. Sincerely, thank you 1 all for reading this book, I know you’d rather be watching Netflix. One April 2028. As he drove past another abandoned farm, Gary’s mind began to wander. He saw a parallel between the fallen sun-scorched trees and the swaths of rigor mortis-stiffened bodies scattered in homes. Countless lifeless bodies, some well into decomposition, have been discovered over the last several months as requests for wellness checks have skyrocketed. Soon, the numbers will reach into the millions. Pulling the sweaty T-shirt away from his skin, his eyes darted to the truck’s dashboard — 5:10 a.m., then to the temperature gauge, 115° Fahrenheit. It’s going to be another ugly one. Reflexively, he rolled up the window and flipped on the air conditioner. As soon as the cool air left the vent and touched his skin, he felt his body relax. It was no wonder the trees were dead. Over the past two years, the greedy sun has hoarded the sky and kept the rain away, leeching the moisture from every living thing. The sun’s searing touch had become lethal, so much so that only deserts and the creatures that live in them could survive in such a pernicious environment. Fruit trees lay where they fell, as desiccant winds licked the last drops of moisture from their fibers. Gary thought it looked like a graveyard. 2 The sound of fine sand clawing at his truck made him look out his driver’s side window. No! Dark, ominous clouds were gathering and charging towards him like a herd of wildebeests charging across the Serengeti plains. Although he knew he’d find none, he looked around for cover. The results quickly met with his expectations; the narrow, two-lane road flanked by dead orchards would have to do. The storm muscled its way in and intensified surprisingly fast. Within minutes, blasting sand turned into a scouring pad. The wind blew hard, rushing the dark clouds across the sky and giving flight to every sand granule and pebble in its wake. The last sand storm he got caught up in had removed his truck’s paint and left his tires buried beneath a mound of dirt. As loath as he was to have to dig out again, he preferred it to being carried off by the tempest winds that were already trying to run him off the road. With no cover to duck under, Gary pulled to the side of the road and braced himself. Thud! Gary jerked his head and turned towards his driver side window. Hard, large balls of hail began bludgeoning his truck, striking so hard that they bounced a good foot into the air after impact. Before long, piles of hail had grown around his truck; they wouldn’t last long. The angry sun would soon return and dissipate them. But would he still be there to see it? Watching and wincing every time a particularly strong gust of wind grabbed onto his truck, he prayed not to be scooped up and tossed into the dark sky. The raging wind shook, rattled, and shoved at the truck until it had fully turned the truck 180 degrees. After a few intense minutes of white knuckling the steering wheel—each minute felt like its own lifetime—the storm passed, leaving new divots on the hood of his truck. The extent of the damage wreaked on his 3 truck’s body wouldn’t be known until he went about the business of inspecting it. At least they were both still there. As quickly as the storm came, the sky cleared and the sunrays resumed their merciless, microwaving caress. The worst was when the rays touched bare skin. It felt, at least to Gary, as if his skin were being singed. The government recently declared a national emergency, warning people against exposing any skin to the sun. He thought the declaration a waste of time—one need only stand in direct sunlight to know that the sun’s rays were cooking the skin. It was no surprise that aggressive skin cancers were spiking all around the world, the condition spreading quickly like a global plague. Dead trees, parched cracked soil, shuttered windows and empty streets, all prescient visual cues. Humanity’s future will be a harsh, unforgiving one. If there even is a future for humanity. Tired of his mind masticating the same tough, sinewed meat that is humanities future, Gary turned on the radio and listened as a female news anchor explained that the bodies of those not claimed would be given burial in one of several mass graves. The mass graves were on everyone’s lips. People weren’t coming forward to claim the dead found in homes, tens of thousands of them across the region, millions throughout the nation. People couldn’t afford the burial costs. One more tragic component of poverty—no dignified burial. The memory of the mass graves filled near to capacity, with bodies being bulldozed in, was disturbing even for an ex-FBI field agent. Every day, there were more bodies to bury. Every day, California and the nation waded deeper into insolvency. Every day, Gary grew more grateful that he had the means and the wherewithal to listen to Entelo, his dear Argentine friend. 4 In the space of his thoughts, the mass grave and the dead trees became one and the same. The long, endlessly intertwined and gnarled tree branches transformed into human limbs. Twigs morphed into knotted fingers. Branches became ungodly bent and twisted limbs, with a split here and a snap there. And the landscape, which was once so rich in minerals that it fed America, metamorphosed into the grotesque canvas of death and despair that painted the smiting of humankind. “Moving on to other news….” Gary’s thought drifted back to the news anchor’s melancholic delivery as she relayed the details of the most recent tragedy. “A bus full of senior citizens travelling from Los Angeles to Sacramento became overheated and broke down along Highway 99 yesterday, during high noon… all passengers succumbed to the extreme heat before help could arrive.” Gary shook his head, reached forward, and shut off the radio. He didn’t need to listen to the news to know how disjointed daily life had become. It’s a new world, he thought to himself. Saddened. A sad world. The need to avoid the sun during its strongest hours had Gary out of bed and in his truck at four in the morning, on his way to the butcher to do his shopping. He had to get it done and be back home before the sun’s full force came out and cooked him alive, like it had those old people in the bus. A terrible and sad world. His left front tire skidded out of the sand dune the storm had built around it, then plunged in and out of a pothole on the asphalt road. The sudden jolt momentarily jarred him. Reflexively, his eyes went to the rearview mirror, but there were too many chunks of missing pavement to identify the culprit pothole that had temporarily swallowed his right front tire. 5 Downtown Reedley opened up before him. Doldrums of architecturally deprived iterations of the same house design began to replace the tree-graveyards once called farms. Shoulder to shoulder, the homes seemed to hustle into view on their teeny-tiny lots, showing off their spotty construction and lack of curb appeal—the toll of the storms hadn’t done them any favors, either. The potholes in town were just as bad and plentiful as they were in the countryside. Jutting, plunging and jumping, the truck travelled over the road like a small boat plunges and rolls through rough waters. Slow and steady ensured less damage to his precious truck’s suspension. The town’s homes, many abandoned and forgotten, stood in a lonely silence. Not a wisp of life could be seen moving on a porch or through a window. Most mornings, a face or movement would be visible. Today, all he saw were shutters and curtains, kept drawn against the rising sun.

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