The Day the Grid Went Down

A Post-Apocalyptic EMP Survival Thriller

By: Tim Kimball

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

They were already gone before the world ended.

Spencer, Nathaniel, and Jasper (three boys from three broken homes and carrying three backpacks) had been living in the Wyoming backcountry for six weeks when the sky lit up to the south and every electronic device within a thousand miles died in the same instant.

No phones. No cars. No grid. No way back to the world they'd run from.

Not that they wanted to go back.

What follows is not a story about boys becoming survivors. They already were survivors of things worse than any wilderness and of houses that taught them early that the most dangerous predators walk on two legs. What follows is a story about three young men who discover, in the wreckage of civilization, that everything they suffered to escape had been preparing them for exactly this moment.

Spencer carries a secret in the hip pocket of his pack, a Ruger .22 pistol that he took from his stepfather's bedside table the night he ran. He tells himself it was for protection. He knows it was for more than that.

Nathaniel speaks in single sentences and tracks game the way other people read maps, by something deeper than skill. He has a photograph in his pack he never opens. He has a grandmother in Lander he thinks about every morning on the observation post.

Jasper is fourteen years old and the most dangerous person in any room he enters, not because of what he carries but because of what he knows, and what Jasper knows, from the moment the pulse hits, is exactly how bad this is going to get.

From the smoking ruins of a National Guard installation to a cattle drive across frozen Wyoming terrain. From a firefight in a vehicle bay at two in the morning to a longhouse on the Wind River Reservation where icons of the ancient faith watch over a Sunday service held by a sergeant who carried a prayer book in her field kit. From the discovery of Orthodox Christianity in the most unlikely of circumstances to the night sixty-five men come over the ridge.

This is a story about what three boys built when the world that failed them finally, completely, fell apart. About the soldiers and ranchers and doctors and tribal elders and one small black cat named Phoebe who joined them in the building. About a colonel who opened a gate when he didn't have to. About a preacher in Riverton who decided a church was the most useful building in a crisis. About what it costs to survive and what it costs even more to stay human while you do it.

It is a story about faith found in the dark. About forgiveness asked for and given. About a boy who dies with the name of God on his lips and two friends who bury him in the aspens and then go back to work because that is what he would have wanted and because the work does not stop and was never supposed to stop.

The Day the Grid Went Down is a post-apocalyptic thriller with the bones of a coming-of-age story and the soul of something older than either.

It's a story about three broken boys who found each other in the Wyoming wilderness and built, from nothing, something worth fighting for.

The fight isn't over.

It was never going to be over.

But they are still standing.

And they are not finished.