The Winter War, Part One: The Deepening Dark E-BOOK

The war between men was over. Cities across the world had died under the hammer blows of nuclear war. The ashes of the vaporized millions and the burning of the treasures of humankind blanketed the sky, enveloping the earth in a funereal shroud of deepening shadows. In a small town, the traumatized crew of a navy submarine and the the local citizens struggle to survive and build a future beyond nuclear winter.

But other forces, held in check by civilization, have been loosed in the new dark age. An ancient war, that had long smoldered, hidden among the bright lights of the modern world will explode in a new conflagration of blood and murder among the cold, dark ruins of the shattered world.

Among the ashes, the forces of good and evil, mortal and immortal, take their sides.

"The hand of god had swept the city of San Francisco away.

Bandar stood, swaying and wavering in the wind blowing from the bay, appalled by the ruins of his world. None of the great towers that clustered on Russian Hill, on the northern edge of town remained. All lay in scattered, blackened ruin, that flowed in a cascade broken and scorched masonry and iron, down to the lapping waters of the bay. Only short stumps of tangled, twisted steel, no more than a story high, remained... "Good god," he whispered. "They really did it." A rage welled up in him. That people were self-destructive, he well knew. As a one time king of the night, he had taken advantage of that fact to keep himself and his minions fed through the centuries of his rule."

"Leila was hungry. Of course, that was nothing new – she had been hungry for centuries. From her pale, emaciated face, her eyes scanned the faintly illuminated landscape of the street, spying obstacles and dangers. The windows were blown out of all the buildings she saw. Some of the buildings, those built of framed wood mostly, were tumbled piles of wreckage. Some walls had come down from the blast and littered the street. There was no sign of life, though there did not seem to be enough radiation to matter. Certainly, there was none of that odd and painful sparkling on her skin, like that she felt as she picked her way out of Sacramento.

That had been wild, she thought. She had been doing what she often did through the long nights, searching. Leila had made a point to learn all she could of new technology when it became available. She knew programming. She knew how to build an app. She knew very well how to hack websites and systems. Centuries of investing had given her the wealth she needed to hide in plain sight from the mortal world. Know-how kept her hiding places secret even from the growing panopticon of government and industry.

She used the time to maintain and build her network. Many others of her kind were spread around the world. Some, like her, sought to prevent the kinds of horrors that had been inflicted on helpless peasants across Eurasia. The ultimate goal was to end the scourge once and for all."