Into the Ashes

This audiobook is narrated by a digital voice. The morning sky burned orange over what had once been Denver, though Marcus Chen could no longer tell if the color came from sunrise or the perpetual fires that had consumed the world three months ago. He adjusted the makeshift filter over his mouth and nose, squinting through the haze that had become as constant as breathing. The silence was what unsettled him most—not the absence of sound, but the wrongness of it. No birds sang. No traffic hummed. Even the wind seemed muffled, as if the very air had grown thick with grief. From his perch on the twentieth floor of what had been the Meridian Tower, Marcus surveyed the wasteland that stretched beyond the city's skeletal remains. The glass and steel monuments to human achievement now stood like broken teeth against the horizon, their surfaces blackened and their foundations cracked. Between them, the streets lay buried under layers of ash so deep that abandoned cars appeared as small hills in a gray desert. Marcus had been a meteorologist before the collapse, spending his days predicting weather patterns and tracking storms. Now he tracked something far more dangerous—the movement of other survivors. In the early days after the event, when the electromagnetic pulse had knocked out all electronics and the subsequent firestorms had consumed everything flammable, people had banded together out of necessity. But as resources dwindled and desperation grew, humanity had begun to fracture along lines that Marcus had never imagined possible. He pulled out his journal, one of the few paper notebooks he'd managed to salvage from his old office, and recorded the day's observations. The ritual had become his anchor to sanity, a daily reminder that somewhere beneath the ash and chaos, the world still operated according to natural laws.