CATACLYSMOS Book 1 Part 1: This is the Way the World Ends: A Post-Apocolyptic Serial Thriller Read online

  praise for michael lister

  The Florida Book Review says that "Vintage Michael Lister is poetic prose, exquisitely set scenes, characters who are damaged and faulty" and Michael Koryta says, “If you like crime writing with depth, suspense, and sterling prose, you should be reading Michael Lister," while Publisher's Weekly adds, “Lister’s hard-edged prose ranks with the best of contemporary noir fiction.”

  “Like a two-hundred page poem, with words that skip on the waters of the imagination like well-polished stones, DOUBLE EXPOSURE is absolutely riveting! Elegiac prose, insightful characterization and a wonderfully ingenious plot.” Michael Connelly

  "Eerie and cinematic, classic whodunits with thoroughly modern sensibilities. John Jordan manages to be deeply flawed yet utterly appealing. Lister, with his gift for exploring the nuances of human relationships, creates a vivid and multi-faceted supporting cast, each character finely-wrought, each portrayal unflinching. Suspenseful, complex and original, page-turners with a soul." Lisa Unger

  “Michael Lister has the world of Florida Panhandle noir all to himself. Tough, violent, and hard-boiled, This novel of obsession and suspense will remind you of Raymond Chandler, Graham Greene, and why you started reading crime novels in the first place.” John Dufresne

  “Tight, taut, terrific PI noir with a classic and fully-realized 1940s setting. Michael Lister is one of those rare, gifted writers who can immerse you with his first sentence. The “Soldier” series is a treasure—don’t miss it!” Kelli Stanley

  “Lister’s hard-edged prose ranks with the best of contemporary noir fiction.” Publisher’s Weekly Starred Review of The Big Goodbye.

  “Michael Lister successfully brings back the hard-boiled 1940′s P.I. with his Jimmy ‘Soldier’ Riley series. Soldier has heart, the dialogue is relentlessly hard-boiled, and the local is steamy and original. Lister knows how to mix it all together with the steady hand of a solid pro.” Robert Randisi

  “Michael Lister delivers the goods like Tyson in his prime, hard, fast and beautiful kind of brutal.” Gary Phillips

  about cataclysmos

  Thank you for giving the post-apocalyptic world that is Cataclysmos a try. I really appreciate you taking this journey with me. Cataclysmos is a serial thriller with new parts being published on a regular basis.

  For more information about Cataclysmos and for notifications of new installment releases, sign up for the Cataclysmos Communiqué by clicking here.

  Don’t miss a single thrilling episode of Cataclysmos!

  Click here to sign up today!

  FOR A LIMITED TIME GET PART 2: NIGHT FIRES OF THE NEW WORLD FOR ONLY .99 CENTS. CLICK HERE.

  Post a review and join the Cataclysmos Communiqué and I'll send you the next installment of CATACLYSMOS FOR FREE! Click here.

  The end.

  This is the way the world ends!

  When the end comes it comes with astonishing speed.

  It has been a slow build to the brink, but once the point of no return has been breached, night falls fast.

  Disasters, avoidable and not, and the inhuman responses to humanity’s existential crises, every tipping point tipping us over the ragged rim, into a black abyss from which there is no return.

  One man walks alone on a lonely road in search of his loved ones in a wasteland that used to be the world.

  Though danger lurks around every bend of the desolate landscape he is undaunted and will be undeterred. His mission is simple if nearly impossible – find his family and friends who are still alive.

  Encountering survivors who range from colorful characters to deadly adversaries, his journey is as much inward as it is outward, revealing as much about himself and the other survivors as the bleak new world they now inhabit.

  Warned to stay away from the coast, he heads directly into danger, choosing death over a world without his remaining loved ones in it.

  But is he too late? And if he’s not, is he up to the task of saving them?

  books by michael lister

  (Cataclysmos)

  Cataclysmos Book 1 Part 1: This is the Way the World Ends

  Cataclysmos Book 1 Part 2: Night Fires of the New World

  Cataclysmos Book 1 Part 3: The Deacon

  Cataclysmos Book 1 Part 4: Perish Twice

  Cataclysmos Book 1 Part 5: The Long Dark Night

  Cataclysmos Collection Book 1 Parts 1-3

  Cataclysmos Book 1 Complete in 5 Parts

  (John Jordan Novels)

  Power in the Blood

  Blood of the Lamb

  Flesh and Blood

  (Special Introduction by Margaret Coel)

  The Body and the Blood

  Blood Sacrifice

  Rivers to Blood

  Innocent Blood

  (Special Introduction by Michael Connelly)

  Blood Money

  Blood Moon

  Blood Cries

  Blood Oath

  (Jimmy “Soldier” Riley Novels)

  The Big Goodbye

  The Big Beyond

  The Big Hello

  The Big Bout

  In a Spider’s Web (short story)

  The Big Book of Noir

  (Merrick McKnight / Reggie Summers Novels)

  Thunder Beach

  A Certain Retribution

  (Remington James Novels)

  Double Exposure

  (includes intro by Michael Connelly)

  Separation Anxiety

  (Sam Michaels / Daniel Davis Novels)

  Burnt Offerings

  Separation Anxiety

  (Love Stories)

  Carrie’s Gift

  (Short Story Collections)

  North Florida Noir

  Florida Heat Wave

  Delta Blues

  Another Quiet Night in Desparation

  (The Meaning Series)

  The Meaning of Jesus

  Meaning Every Moment

  The Meaning of Life in Movies

  Sign up for Michael’s newsletter by clicking here or go to www.MichaelLister.com and receive a free book.

  about cataclysmos

  Thank you for giving the post-apocalyptic world that is Cataclysmos a try. I really appreciate you taking this journey with me. Cataclysmos is a serial thriller with new parts being published on a regular basis.

  For more information about Cataclysmos and for notifications of new installment releases, sign up for the Cataclysmos Communiqué by clicking here.

  Don’t miss a single thrilling episode of Cataclysmos!

  Click here to sign up today!

  FOR A LIMITED TIME GET PART 2: NIGHT FIRES OF THE NEW WORLD FOR ONLY .99 CENTS. CLICK HERE.

  Post a review and join the Cataclysmos Communiqué and I'll send you the next installment of CATACLYSMOS FOR FREE! Click here.

  The end.

  This is the way the world ends!

  When the end comes it comes with astonishing speed.

  It has been a slow build to the brink, but once the point of no return has been breached, night falls fast.

  Disasters, avoidable and not, and the inhuman responses to humanity’s existential crises, every tipping point tipping us over the ragged rim, into a black abyss from which there is no return.

  One man walks alone on a lonely road in search of his loved ones in a wasteland that used to be the world.

  Though danger lurks around every bend of the desolate landscape he is undaunted and will be undeterred. His mission is simple if nearly impossible – find his
family and friends who are still alive.

  Encountering survivors who range from colorful characters to deadly adversaries, his journey is as much inward as it is outward, revealing as much about himself and the other survivors as the bleak new world they now inhabit.

  Warned to stay away from the coast, he heads directly into danger, choosing death over a world without his remaining loved ones in it.

  But is he too late? And if he’s not, is he up to the task of saving them?

  books by michael lister

  (Cataclysmos)

  Cataclysmos Book 1 Part 1: This is the Way the World Ends

  Cataclysmos Book 1 Part 2: Night Fires of the New World

  Cataclysmos Book 1 Part 3: The Deacon

  Cataclysmos Book 1 Part 4: Perish Twice

  Cataclysmos Book 1 Part 5: The Long Dark Night

  Cataclysmos Collection Book 1 Parts 1-3

  Cataclysmos Book 1 Complete in 5 Parts

  (John Jordan Novels)

  Power in the Blood

  Blood of the Lamb

  Flesh and Blood

  (Special Introduction by Margaret Coel)

  The Body and the Blood

  Blood Sacrifice

  Rivers to Blood

  Innocent Blood

  (Special Introduction by Michael Connelly)

  Blood Money

  Blood Moon

  Blood Cries

  Blood Oath

  (Jimmy “Soldier” Riley Novels)

  The Big Goodbye

  The Big Beyond

  The Big Hello

  The Big Bout

  In a Spider’s Web (short story)

  The Big Book of Noir

  (Merrick McKnight / Reggie Summers Novels)

  Thunder Beach

  A Certain Retribution

  (Remington James Novels)

  Double Exposure

  (includes intro by Michael Connelly)

  Separation Anxiety

  (Sam Michaels / Daniel Davis Novels)

  Burnt Offerings

  Separation Anxiety

  (Love Stories)

  Carrie’s Gift

  (Short Story Collections)

  North Florida Noir

  Florida Heat Wave

  Delta Blues

  Another Quiet Night in Desparation

  (The Meaning Series)

  The Meaning of Jesus

  Meaning Every Moment

  The Meaning of Life in Movies

  Sign up for Michael’s newsletter by clicking here or go to www.MichaelLister.com and receive a free book.

  a post-apocalyptic serial thriller

  cataclysmos

  this is the way the world ends

  book 1 / part 1

  by

  michael lister

  table of contents

  1

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  3

  4

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  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  1

  The end.

  This is the way the world ends

  This is the way the world ends

  This is the way the world ends

  Not with a bang but a whimper.

  T.S. Eliot had been wrong.

  When the inevitable end finally arrives, it comes with neither a single bang nor whimper, but a series of sighs and death rattles, concussive bangs and barely audible whimpers, fires and floods, complete collapses of both the billion-years-work of the natural world and the thousand-years-work of civilization.

  When the end comes it comes with astonishing speed.

  It has been a slow build to the brink, but once the point of no return has been breached, night falls fast.

  Bangs and whimpers. Different disasters, avoidable and not, and the inhuman responses to humanity’s existential crises, every tipping point tipping us over the ragged rim, into a black abyss from which there is no return.

  No one knows much. There is only conjecture, speculation, deduction. Most survivors only know the particular devastation they have been spared from. He has yet to hear a unifying theory for the underlying cause. And no one he has yet encountered knew any more than he did about anything but their own particular end of the world.

  It makes a certain sense to him.

  The birth of the universe had always been shrouded in a singular impenetrable mystery. Why shouldn’t its death be?

  Of course, it’s nothing nearly as grand as all that. It’s not the end of the universe, just of earth—and maybe not even that. More likely it’s just the end of mankind—at least in any kind of meaningful way.

  The end.

  Of course, the end isn’t only an end, but a beginning, a bleak, brutal beginning.

  Dawn of a darkness devoid of grace and beauty.

  Birth of a stillborn world.

  2

  Barren wastelands border entire towns submerged beneath black bodies of water. Empty cities, the dead their only inhabitants, surrounded by sections of scorched earth where fires still burn, embers still smolder, and ash still falls like smoky snow from a charcoal sky.

  Gray days.

  Every element a pale, muted pewter.

  Slate sky above. Ashen earth below.

  Weak currents of wind carrying ashes like bits of dried snowflakes across the lifeless landscape.

  3

  Twilight.

  State Road 73.

  Two-lane rural route connecting US 231 and Highway 90 in North Florida near Marianna.

  Figures in the dim distance.

  Walking this way.

  Gray shadows stretched across a gray landscape.

  One tall and hunched, stiff and awkward, slower. The other shorter, darker, nimble, walking warily.

  He steps deeper into the woods, into the pines and live oaks, the resurrection fern and wild columbine lining the rural highway, and watches.

  It’s his custom not to walk on but beside roads. From a few feet within whatever foliage lines the particular thoroughfare he’s following, he can keep an eye on the street without being detected himself. It makes for far more difficult terrain to travel, but what it costs in pace and pain it pays in safety and security.

  He’s in a hurry to get where he’s going, but is convinced the slower, more arduous route is the faster route, the only route that gives him any chance at all.

  Stepping a few steps deeper into the forest, the dry, brown resurrection fern crackling beneath his feet, he waits and watches.

  He scratches at the too thick beard beneath his bandana and attempts to roll the tightness and tension out of his neck and shoulders.

  The rural road is empty save the two figures, random debris, and the occasional abandoned vehicle. Grass and weeds have already begun to stretch through its cracks and crevices. Soon it will be completely overgrown, buried beneath an angry natural world attempting to blot out all signs of the civilization that tried to destroy it.

  As they grow closer, he can see that it’s an old white man and a young black guy. They appear unarmed, innocuous, but he’s thought that about other survivors before. Wrongly. And it cost him.

  Can’t be too careful.

  He crouches and watches, letting them pass.

  The old man is tall and thin and wears an old once white now charcoal cowboy hat.

  The old man looks harmless enough, but there is menace in the young man, and unlike so many of those who remain, including himself, he is not only not emaciated, he has retained much of his muscle tone.

  How empty the earth is now, he has no way of knowing, but he encounters fewer and fewer living souls as he continues his journey south toward those he will forever feel responsible for.

  Everyone he encounters—or avoids encountering by careful concealment in kudzu and the understory growth of pine tree forests and hardwood hammocks and ash piles and even among the dead—is heading in the opposite direction from
him.

  Rumors and reports all say the same thing. It’s worse along the coasts. Of the myriad massive existential events that have befallen the earth, at least one billowed in from beyond the wall of blackness out in the raging seas. The Gulf of Mexico is no exception. In a great ironic reversal, people en masse are evacuating instead of exodusing into his home state of Florida.

  When the two men have gone, he continues.

  Up ahead, some fifty feet in front of him and down in the road, an overturned FedEx truck partially blocks one lane of the highway.

  He wonders if it’s worth a look, a quick search of the back to scavenge the packages for supplies.

  He assumes it has been done a hundred times already, but the doors of the vehicle are shut tight, like eyelids against seeing the way the world is now.

  He has only taken a few steps when . . .

  —Hey neighbor, the old man says behind him, his voice friendly, alarmingly disarming.

  He turns, his hand on the weapon in one of the duffel bags swinging from the straps across his shoulders.

  Had they seen him? Smelled him? Heard him? Had he been careless? How?

  —Yes, you in the woods. Hey there.

  The two are standing in the empty road looking in his direction. No visible weapons. No obvious threat but the young man himself.

  He slowly pulls down the damp bandana covering his nose and mouth.

  The bandana is white with a black paisley pattern, which matches his urban camo pants and head wrap, black t-shirt and boots. They were the only things left in the Army Navy and Outdoor stores he had looted, but were in a way perfect for the burned-out and ashen world he was presently making his way through.

  —Hey, he says, his voice not unfriendly exactly, but guarded.

  —You’re headed the wrong way, brother, the old man says.