Dawn of Deception Series Boxset: A Post-Apocalyptic Survival Thriller Series Books 1-3 Read online

  Dawn of Deception Series Boxset

  A Post-Apocalyptic Survival Thriller Series, Books 1-3

  A. R. Shaw

  Copyright © 2019 by A. R. Shaw

  Apocalyptic Ventures LLC

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  For the survivors among us.

  Contents

  Foreword

  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

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Introduction

  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

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Introduction

  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

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Chapter 80

  Chapter 81

  Chapter 82

  Chapter 83

  Chapter 84

  Chapter 85

  Afterword

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by A. R. Shaw

  Foreword

  Unbound, Book 1

  In a post-apocalyptic world, Sloane Delaney struggles to keep her daughters safe. With all her neighbors gone and her abusive second husband dead, Sloane and her daughters, Mae and Wren, maintain a dangerous charade to keep looters at bay from their neighborhood. When young Nicole shows up on their doorstep, nearly dead from dehydration and starvation as a result of her father’s growing paranoia, she joins the determined group as they adjust to life without most of the luxuries they had previously taken for granted. Aided by a pack of abandoned dogs, the women are able to project an image of an occupied and active neighborhood until corrupt FEMA agents arrive on the scene, threatening their hard-won sense of security. Fleeing their now-unsafe home, Sloane and her girls head for the woods and an abandoned old house Sloane is sure will be a safe haven for at least a few days. She doesn’t count on the handsome and helpful Dr. Kent having also taken refuge there. With her girls’ lives on the line, can Sloane learn to trust again in this dangerous new world?

  If you’re going through hell, keep going.

  Winston Churchill

  1

  Night before Dawn

  Sloane Delaney and her daughters abandoned the first floor of their two-story home along Horseshoe Lane altogether. A tsunami wave—caused by a massive earthquake along the Pacific Rim—hit after some phenomena no one could yet explain, sending floodwaters that overtook their neighborhood situated in the once-picturesque setting of Cannon Beach, Oregon.

  The displaced seawater had receded from the first floor, leaving an indelible layer of thick, brown, chocolate pudding-like sludge along the painted sandstone walls and Italian tiled flooring. The wayward sea currently hid at a lazy standstill below in the basement like a freeloading relative, getting stinkier by the day. It wasn’t done with them yet. The basem
ent was full of it, only having ebbed an inch since the day before.

  And yet, on the queen-sized bed she used to share with Brady, Sloane slept in peace for the first night since the fateful day that she’d married him a few unpleasant years before. She wasn’t worried about marauders storming the neighborhood or anyone breaking into her food stores like she should be. She hadn’t even boarded up her blown-out sliding glass door yet. Any opportunistic person—or hungry animal, for that matter—could waltz into her disaster of a house and take everything left of value. Those worries could wait. Sloane wanted to enjoy the one solitary, peaceful night given to her because of what had happened to her husband earlier in the evening. Across the street, in the sodden backyard of Larry Baker’s house, Brady lay dead—murdered, in fact, by a single gunshot wound to the head.

  She wasn’t the murderer, and she didn’t plan it, yet she had hoped that it would happen. Brady had sent her, unwillingly, directly across the street to gather information on Trent Carson’s plans to leave town, with several other neighbors, to a hideout he knew of.

  Trent was guarded with his information. They’d been friends once, but that was before her marriage to Brady. None of her friends and neighbors liked Brady much, especially not Trent, and a short time after the marriage, she didn’t like him either.

  Then Sloane informed Trent of her own fake plans of heading to Hillsboro. She had hoped Trent would catch on to her hint when he advised her to be careful on Route 23. She told him she’d planned to take Route 30 instead. She and Trent both knew Route 30 didn’t go anywhere near Hillsboro. Her act of going along with his advice was cunning desperation; she knew Brady was listening to her every word. Unfortunately, Trent didn’t realize the ploy and ended up thinking she was in on Brady’s mad plan to steal one of the few running vehicles from Larry Baker, Trent’s next-door neighbor. Trent ended up shooting Brady in Larry’s backyard that night when he’d refused to drop the shotgun he carried.

  Immediately after taking Brady out, Trent hurried across the street to Sloane’s driveway, warned her to stand down, and drop the concealed weapon he knew she carried onto the ground. “Is he dead?” she’d asked. That was really all she wanted to know.

  “Yes,” Trent said with what she’d call a little trepidation in his voice.

  “Good,” Sloane said and didn’t care what Trent did to her for her part in Brady’s scheme to rob her neighbors of their only working vehicle. Her only thought was that Brady being dead ensured her daughters’ safety now. She no longer had to endure his mistreatment of her and the girls.

  The verbal abuse started shortly after they were married. The threats and physical abuse escalated over the past year to include Sloane’s sixteen-year-old daughter, Wren, and her thirteen-year-old daughter, Mae. She’d never forgive herself for not saving them sooner. They were already scarred from losing their father to a pandemic flu four years prior.

  She was hospitalized in the ICU for weeks with the virus without knowing where her daughters were. When she finally escaped the hospital three weeks later as one of the lucky few to recover from the pandemic flu, she found her twelve-year-old and nine-year-old living alone in their house. Those were vulnerable years in a young girl’s life in normal times, marred with insecurities and night frights. The Carsons and Bakers had done their best, under the circumstances, to keep track of them and bring them food. Unaccompanied and not knowing that their father had died or that their mother was desperately trying to get home to them, the girls were scared to death.

  She was broken after Finn, her first husband, died. She felt utterly lost when she discovered that even her distant, extended family in Hillsboro had perished from the flu as well. So when Brady came along and offered stability as a family again, she did it for the girls’ sake, thinking it was the right decision. She wanted to replace the things they’d lost. She wanted to fix them. Ultimately, her decision couldn’t have been more wrong.

  After Trent left her alone in the neighborhood the night before, she retrieved her Glock off the ground, returned to her home, and locked the main door. The girls had waited inside, so Sloane ushered them up the stairs and into her own room. She locked the door and looked into their frightened eyes, which beckoned her for answers. “He’s not coming back,” she said. “He’s gone for good.”

  All three of them cried tears of relief as they cuddled on the big bed, and Sloane held them until they fell soundly, and safely, asleep. Afterward, she remembered what Trent said to her before he left. “Help yourself to anything you can salvage.”

  She had responded with a thank you and said that, in return, she’d keep an eye on their houses. She knew what tomorrow and every other morning would bring to them, so she pushed herself into a peaceful slumber. There would be days of dreadful labor and danger ahead of her and the girls. If they were to survive this—and they would—she’d meet it willingly, and never again would she succumb to a weakness of mind or an empty soul to fill the void Finn’s death left in her heart.

  2

  Daybreak

  “Mmmooommm!” Mae whispered in a tone far too loud to be a whisper at all that ended up sounding ghostly. Sloane heard the plea from a deep and drowsy state, but what woke her was the moist breath sliding down like a hand over her nose and mouth. She sat up with a start, vaguely remembering the events of the previous night and how they might relate to the morning’s dawn.

  “What?” she said, confused, her heart pounding out of her chest. Her hand had already clasped around her daughter’s forearm, and her brown eyes searched the room for her older daughter Wren. Once she saw her sitting nearby, Sloane’s eyes flew to the door. Was the bedroom door still locked? It was closed, and the six white panels faced her, still as intact as the night before.

  “Are you okay?” Sloane asked.

  “Yeah,” Mae said, startled that she’d scared her mother so badly.

  “We were wondering when you’d get up,” said Wren.

  Sloane looked into Mae’s sea-blue eyes, so much like her father’s. “What time is it?”

  “I don’t know. There’s no power, remember?” Mae reminded her.

  She looked to Wren. “You haven’t left the room, right?”

  “No, Mom. We haven’t left. We were waiting for you to wake up. It’s really quiet out there,” Wren said, reflecting Sloane’s own brown eyes back to her.

  She released Mae’s arm with an apologetic look and a smile. “That’s a sound I want you to both remember,” she said, holding up a finger. “Listen to it. Remember that silence.”

  She held their gaze a moment. She’d been a high school French teacher before it all started, and teaching habits die hard. “Silence. That’s what we need. Any sound we hear from now on is potential danger. Remember that,” she said as she slipped her boots on over the cuffs of her jeans and slung a button-up chambray shirt over her white tank top. “Let’s tidy up and have a bite to eat. We have a lot of work to do today…well, every day from now on.”

  She opened the nightstand drawer and pulled out her black Velcro thigh holster as her daughters readied themselves for the day. She slid the black waistband strap on her hips and looped the leg strap around the outside of her thigh. After placing the Glock from her nightstand into the harness, she checked the position for an easy reach.

  This was one of the many lessons Trent and his wife Harper taught her after things calmed down from the pandemic, and they’d finally established a semblance of normal life—until now, of course. She’d been to the range once or twice a month and found that the Glock easily fit into her hands. She even enjoyed shooting, once she got past the phase of closing her eyes right before firing.