The Pirates of the Apocalypse Read online

  The Pirates of the Apocalypse

  Book 2 of the Rock Harbor Series

  By J. B. Craig

  Edited by Eva “Kricket” Callinan

  Cover Art & Illustrations by Miranda Li

  Copyright May 2018, Case #: 1-6605316171

  Foreword

  The first book was dedicated to my wife, and she still has my back. I love you so much. This one is for my kid, the fierce beast who is always the most grown-up in the room. Her aura may have made its way into some of these stories, and despite that, she still loves me. She is one of the many folks who helped me (hopefully) make the second book better.

  Thanks to Miranda Li for the map and the cover art. We sat in Rock Harbor about a year ago brainstorming what it should look like. Avery, my amazing editor, really raised the quality of much more than just my SPAG (Spelling, Punctuation and Grammar errors). Unfortunately, I write like I tell stories in sign language (that’s an inside joke for CODA’s). Any faults in the story are all mine, because I’m sure I rejected more than one good suggestion. Team Ohana, you rock! I look forward to working with you for many years. To all in the extended family who gave me feedback, ideas, stories, and other input, Mahalo. Much love to all of you who rode this rollercoaster with me. What a hoot!

  To those downloading this early, please continue to leave honest reviews, especially if I got something wrong. I can fix mistakes in e-books easily.

  The Legal Stuff –

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and events are used fictionally. Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, places or actual events, is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the author, except that brief sections may be quoted or copied for non-profit use without permission, given that full credit is given.

  Table of Contents

  Pirates of the Apocalypse (Daddy’s Home): Book 2 of the Rock Harbor Series

  Foreword, Table of Contents, and Map2-5

  1. April at UPenn

  2. Getting To Know Pete

  3. Strangers-in-Arms

  4. Road Trip

  5. The Bare Bones Motel

  6. Chef’s Surprise

  7. The Susquehanna Military

  8. Late-Night Visitors

  9. Sailing Lessons

  10. Pirates of the Chesapeake

  11. On the Lady Maria

  12. Family Reunion

  13. Pete Meets the Dragons

  14. A Present from Bannon

  15. First Shift

  16. Decisive Action

  17. America’s Navy

  18. The New Normal

  19. Dragons Under Fire

  20. Recovery

  21. Tough Goodbyes

  22. Sailing Down the Bay

  23. Summer Storms

  24. Stella and the Stellas

  25. On the Road Again

  26. Saint Mary’s College

  27. The Locust Swarm

  28. Healing

  29. Status Report

  30. Pete’s Heaven

  31. The Next Wave

  32. Field-Expedient

  33. A Campus in Crisis

  34. Resting, Repairing, and Recovering

  35. Happy Arrivals

  36. Part 2 – Maria’s Homecoming

  37. Catching Up

  38. Breakfast with the Community

  39. Pete – First Night Shift

  40. Angel’s Surgery

  41. Pete’s Reward

  42. Shift Change Briefing

  43. A Worried Dad

  44. Bannon’s Night

  45. Watching the Ghost

  46. Nellie the Barn Owl

  47. Reunion

  Author’s Note

  By Miranda Li

  1. April at UPenn

  “One more month,” Maria muttered, finishing her second coffee of the morning. “Then I’m done with these asshats.”

  Early April meant finals season, and Maria had been assigned a particularly trying group project. She hated these things with a burning passion, since one way or another she was the kind of student who ended up getting stuck with the lamest group members and doing most of it herself. Unfortunately, her path to her business degree - and thus her financial freedom and personal independence - was stuck behind a seemingly endless stream of them.

  Her professors all emphasized teamwork under difficult circumstances and tight deadlines, and building a professional camaraderie with your fellow students as real-life issues that she would face out in the business world. That was the kind of advice that worked in theory. When you got four team members who all had compatible schedules, goals, and about the same level of work ethic, it was theoretically possible for things to run smoothly. It hadn’t happened once to Maria in her entire scholastic career, and she wasn’t going to hold her breath in this instance. Her Bachelor’s was just a month away.

  Her dad would say that a truly good leader focused on people’s strengths instead of their weaknesses. He would sometimes put on his ‘leadership face’ for her and her twin brother Jared. Jared would roll his eyes before tuning it out and going back to his e-books. He wasn’t into the ‘fluffy’ leadership stuff that their dad spouted. They’d both heard it a thousand times before, but Maria had to admit that her father did occasionally have good nuggets of wisdom. She wasn’t quite as jaded as her twin, and they often disagreed philosophically. Despite that, they were as tight as most twins - maybe even because of their differences.

  While there were no champions on it, there were strengths in her team. After all, everyone here got in, and most would graduate with a good education from an Ivy League school. That said, most of them were smart, sheltered rich kids who didn’t need to work to afford their tuition and could drink, smoke weed, and bang their way through college instead. Maria had to get her schoolwork done around her work schedule. Taking on some of the financial load was the deal when her parents agreed to let her go outside of Georgia. Jared was attending Georgia Tech in downtown Atlanta - he liked their engineering program, and was just as happy to only have to worry about in-state tuition.

  Sighing, Maria decided she was being too uncharitable towards her group. Each of them had things they could do better than she could. She’d just have to take the brunt of the organizational work and give them exactly what they could handle. She remembered Jenna having very neat formatting on what was otherwise an atrociously-researched report, so she’d have her do the Works Cited page, footnotes, and final check of the formatting. Evan was shamelessly lazy, but also fairly outgoing, so he could probably skim her notes well enough to do a decent job at presenting. Erika was a fine arts major and made no bones about the fact that this was a survey class for her, so Maria put her on graphics and art for the final PowerPoint. After assigning everyone by their text message group, Maria sighed. If she could pull this off, she would have well-earned an ‘A’.

  In the middle of composing her instructions via text, Maria’s phone went black. A few seconds later, she heard deep booms from the street outside and her apartment lights went out. Of course - because the only thing worse than pushing a terrible group through a long assignment was a power outage and a dead phone to make coordination even more difficult.

  Fortunately, Maria had a rechargeable plug-in flashlight that was there for times when her dark basement apartment lost power. After flicking it off and on a few times, she confirmed that it was dead too. Great. She’d have to charge her phone off her laptop and call the maintenance office again. It wouldn’t be
her first call to them - she wasn’t handy, and while she didn’t have high expectations for the kind of shoebox she could live alone in, power was one of those necessities that simply needed to work. Though her apartment was kind of shitty, she did love it for what it was - freedom. Having a true space of her own to recharge in was worth the pains that came with renting, including a mediocre-at-best maintenance department.

  Luckily, it was mid-morning, so she opened up her ground-level curtains and got enough light to get around her place. With the apartment lit up enough to stumble around in, Maria took a moment to reconsider. Not only were her phone and flashlight suddenly dead, but she could hear no sound at all through her paper-thin apartment walls - no alarm clocks for late classes, no shower radios, no nothing. Even her normally bustling street was quiet - there was none of the campus noise she was accustomed to of humming car engines or blaring pop music out windows.

  Maria’s dad was a ‘prepper,’ who frequently came up with doomsday scenarios and was determined to impart lessons he’d learned from his Army days to prepare the family for even the impossible. One thing he’d taught her was that, in the event of a real power grid emergency, her electric key fob for her car wouldn’t work. While no one in their family besides her dad Greg put much stock in his scenarios, accepting his lessons had been the only thing that made him feel safe enough to be able to agree to her renting her own apartment at school. “Power out, phone dead, no flashlight…” Maria murmured to herself. There was no way. She’d walk outside, she’d get in her car, and she’d spend a good chunk of time she would never get back arguing with maintenance and doing her schoolwork at the local coffee shop.

  Maria walked outside to her SUV and clicked the key fob. Nothing happened. Taking a deep breath, she used the key to open the door and tried to start her car. It was only five years old and running with no sign of any problems after her last class. Panic started to slowly sink in as she looked across the street - Maria’s apartment complex was directly across from their local fire station, and she could see several confused firefighters trying to crank or push open the power doors. One of them noticed her watching and waved at her. Maria waved back at him with an easy grin she didn’t feel and then went back into her apartment.

  “Of all the things Dad had to be right about,” Maria muttered. She tried to think what he would tell her to do in this situation. It was obviously something connected to the power - and worse than a simple large power outage, since battery-powered devices wouldn’t be affected by that. ‘Water is life,’ she remembered, one of her dad’s favorite prepper mantras, and ran around her apartment to turn on all of the faucets, filling her kitchen sink, her bathroom sink, and her bathtub.

  When her dad had last come out to see her, he’d done some maintenance on her hot water heater. At the time, Maria had been mad at him for several minutes for potentially violating her rental agreement, but he’d showed her where the drain was, and got it fixed quicker than waiting for maintenance. At a rough guess, Maria figured she had about one hundred gallons of water between her sink basins and hot water heater. Since her sink was filling up, she went into her recycling bin and pulled out all of the containers she could see - glass, water bottles, anything that would hold water - and dipped them into the sink to top them off. If it turned out she’d completely overreacted, that was fine by her - she’d just pull her drains and re-recycle the properly-rinsed bottles.

  Like most college students, Maria had very little food on hand. She had most of a 24-pack of ramen and a bag of oranges from her grandmother, who had sent them to her during a recent trip to Florida. She also had assorted condiments and frozen meals, plus whatever was in that backpack her dad put in her closet after her first Christmas in the apartment. Every time her parents came up from Atlanta to visit her, Maria spent most of the time Christmas shopping with Mom, while Dad worked on maintenance issues that her landlord was never going to fix. All three of them knew that Maria would appreciate his help with those things more than his attempt at shopping, and he was happy to provide the wallet in exchange for getting it done. Her dad’s only real time spent shopping was the ‘prepper stuff’ he bought online. Maria and Leigh had both rolled their eyes at his craziness many times. Jared paid more attention in that arena. He went so far as to bolt a gun safe to his Jeep’s Chassis, even though he wasn’t old enough for a carry permit in Georgia.

  “Dad will never let me live this down,” Maria grumbled. She dug past her laundry to grab the emergency backpack he’d made for her - which she’d grudgingly accepted and promptly shoved in the back of her closet as soon as he left. “He’s going to be dancing around with his ‘I told you so’ dance.”

  Her prepper backpack was camouflage, and had a .22 rifle strapped to the side with some Velcro. Maria had fired the rifle a few times under her Dad’s guidance at his favorite gun club in Georgia. Three magazines (“Stop calling them clips!” her dad would insist) each had ten rounds in them, with two inset into the stock of the rifle, and the third loaded. He’d also left a longer curved thirty-round clip sticking out of a pocket of the backpack. Greg had told her to never have a round in the chamber until she was ready to shoot something. He had lots of stories about people accidentally shooting themselves or others because they’d forgotten that they hadn’t cleared the weapon.

  Maria set the rifle aside and opened the main compartment of the pack. She had a black canteen sitting in a steel cup. Shaking and opening it, Maria found that it was already filled with water - no doubt more of her dad’s handiwork. Continuing her inventory, she also found a camouflage poncho, a nylon quilted poncho liner, a pair of brand-new hiking boots, a camo hoodie, a pair of pistols in holsters, and a few extra boxes of fifty-count ammo.

  Still no food, but Maria smiled fondly when she spotted the pistols. Her dad was pretty protective of her, and teaching her to shoot safely was his main course of the self-defense class he created for her and Jared. The first was a cowboy style Ruger Blackhawk “single-six” revolver with two interchangeable cylinders, one in .22 magnum and one in .22 long rifle. It had always been her favorite - it was simple and reliable, and while it took a little bit of time to reload, the light recoil made it easy to shoot accurately. It was loaded with the .22 magnum cylinder full of hollow-point ammunition, with the hammer was on an empty cylinder to avoid accidental discharge. After a second of internal debate - was a pistol really necessary? - Maria strapped the leather holster on. If her dad had been right about any of his ‘dark times ahead’ scenarios, she knew he’d be right about the need to keep herself safe.

  The second pistol was a Ruger Mark IV with three ten-round mags. It was also a .22 LR, and a Christmas gift from her dad. She’d thanked him politely, but said if she was going to shoot a .22 then the Blackhawk was her gun. She rolled her eyes - it seemed that her genetic stubbornness had struck once again and her dad had packed it for her anyway.

  Finally, Maria hit paydirt - at the very bottom of the main compartment of the backpack were several bags of “just add water” freeze-dried food, in a variety of flavors. Beef stroganoff and macaroni out of a packet weren’t her idea of gourmet, but she knew that it would be more than other students would have prepared and would hold her over in a true emergency.

  She packed everything back up neatly and opened the front pocket, wondering what else he’d thought might come in handy. It was mostly small items, with a compass, a bright orange whistle, and a flashlight wrapped in several alternating layers of aluminum foil and plastic wrap. When Maria finally unwrapped it, she was pleased to find that not only did it actually work, but it also had a strong beam with several brightness and ‘SOS’ flasher settings. It looked like he’d also included a spare battery for it wrapped in the same foil and plastic layers - maybe that had saved it from whatever happened to the rest of the power.

  Everything else he’d stuck in the pack looked strange, and she wasn’t sure what any of them would be used for. Dad’s ‘toys,’ as her mom called them. Dad couldn’t hav
e his baby not be ready to ‘bug out,’ as he and his prepper buddies called it, at a moment’s notice. If he had his way, she’d figure out what they did eventually.

  The last time he’d lectured her and Jared about their emergency action plans, he’d talked about what could go wrong in a wide-scale power failure. The two of them had a shared mutually doubtful glance when he’d pulled up a map of all of the nuclear power plants near UPenn. “Maria,” Greg had said, “If the shit hits the fan, you have to get out quick. No one will publish anything about what happens if the lights go out because of an EMP. They’ll say that there are generators and shut-down procedures, but if an EMP fries the backup generator, these things could melt down, and you do not want to be anywhere close. So grab your bag, get on your bike, and get going South to Rock Harbor – quickly, okay?”

  The extreme possibility of losing both power and backup generators had seemed such a remote possibility that Maria had quickly given her stock “Yes, Dad, move south quickly.” She’d tuned him out afterwards, occasionally nodding and smiling while throwing ‘please save us,’ glances at her mom - who gave her the customary ‘what are you going to do, he’s your father’ smile back and kept on knitting.

  2. Getting To Know Pete

  After finishing his tea, Pete sat out front, enjoying the chilly but clear April morning at the fire station. It could’ve been just a normal day if it weren’t for the mechanics trying to figure out what was wrong with their fleet of trucks. The guys were yelling at each other about whose turn it had been to do the routine checks. Pete looked over to the neighboring apartment complex, wondering if anyone else was having power trouble.