FRACTURED
COAST
Broken Tide Series
Book 2
By
Marcus Richardson
Mike Kraus
© 2020 Muonic Press Inc
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Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
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Special Thanks
Special thanks to my awesome beta team, without whom this book wouldn’t be nearly as great.
Thank you!
Broken Tide Book 3
Available Here
Chapter 1
State Route 17
Northwest of Charleston, South Carolina
Darien Flynt stumbled as he walked along the blazing hot road that ran northwest out of Charleston. He wiped the sweat from his brow and casually looked over his shoulder to see if any of his men had seen the misstep. His luck held—they were oblivious. They shuffled along with heads down, lanky hair wet with sweat, lulled by the heat and the constant buzz of insects.
The pair of new recruits still wore the orange jumpsuits given to them by the South Carolina Department of Corrections. The other three in his motley crew walked along Savannah Highway in silence. Each one looked ahead in a different direction. Darien frowned despite his good luck. If none of them watched him, it meant they weren’t paying attention to him, either. That was the kind of thing that might cause a change in leadership at some point.
He hunched his shoulders and continued walking forward. His feet slapped down one after the other in the mismatched work boots he'd liberated from a ransacked shop the previous day. He'd wanted to find himself some decent tennis shoes—something more comfortable to walk in—but then again, he hadn't planned on walking much before the tsunami. His first priority—as a car thief—had always been to find a car and steal it.
Darien sighed. His mood had grown more and more sour the longer he dwelled on his misfortune. He slapped the side of a cherry red Toyota 4 x 4 and continued to walk. Without a look, he knew the keys were still in the ignition. Most people had left their cars and ran when the second and third—and subsequent—waves had ravaged Charleston. Each wave pushed successively further inland, uprooted trees, washed away homes and businesses, tore apart families, and drowned everyone who stood in its path. It'd taken Darien almost three days to escape the wreckage of Charleston, just ahead of the incessant, remorseless seawater that lapped at his heels.
He swatted away a fly from his face. His escape from Charleston had been a near thing—he'd almost been swept away several times. Even worse, everywhere he looked, he found cars. Abandoned cars, wrecked cars, flooded cars. Cars tossed upside down and shoved through second-story windows, cars ripped in half, cars crumpled like accordions and stuffed inside the cabins of Mack trucks. Cars everywhere—the livelihood of his former criminal self—all ripe for the taking. Everything from jalopie's he wouldn't pay five bucks to rent, to a Rolls-Royce—a real Rolls—sat empty and ready for him to steal.
Only there was nowhere to take the cars he found. Gas wasn't even a problem—most of the cars he'd seen had at least a quarter tank or more. A few had to have been the property of survivalists, loaded down as they were with bags of groceries and boxes of canned goods. But all of them had been abandoned just the same.
And that meant every road as far as he could see, every side lane, every country dirt road—they were all clogged with abandoned cars. Closer to the coast, the roads had been choked with debris, fallen trees, and bits of houses or wreckage—he’d even seen a recliner in the middle of the road, as if someone had placed it there to watch the end of the world.
Jon Boy kicked a can of beans against the side of a Chrysler. The empty can hit with enough force to dent the finish on the driver’s door. "This sucks!" he growled, his voice an octave too high for the size of his body.
Here we go again. Darien sighed, stretched his shoulders, and stopped walking. “Jon Boy…language,” he warned. He arched his back and knuckled the tight muscles just above his waistband. "Let's take five, boys."
"About time—I need to find me some shade," said one of the convicts they picked up outside the Charleston wasteland. He hadn't yet figured out how the two idiots had managed to escape—he knew it wasn't because of their intelligence. Darien hadn’t had much time to puzzle out the convicts, though. They'd only been together as a group since that morning. The guys he escaped Charleston with had been in his crew for the past few years. But what they’d seen in the last three days…
Darien leaned against the hood of a sleek, low Porsche. He squinted up into the sky. Had it been three days? Or four? He looked down at the bare spot on his wrist, where the skin wasn't quite as dark as the rest of his arm.
