Richard Cox - House of the Rising Sun

It was a manual typewriter. A black Underwood typewriter that weighed a ton and might have been a century old.

A little more searching revealed half a ream of blank white paper, and when he loaded a sheet, and typed his own name, he discovered an ink strip in working order.

You could never know if what you believed to be real actually was. What mattered was what you did with the reality you had been granted.

Thomas rolled the paper to the middle of the page, centered the text, and lay his fingers on the keys.

Even if there would be no more films for a while, that didn’t mean he couldn’t write. Stories had been told on stage centuries before the camera was invented. This made Thomas remember a novel he read once, where a troupe of actors, twenty years after a global flu pandemic, traveled from town to town, performing, hoping to keep art alive. Hoping to inject a little humanity into a world that had lost so much of it.

He typed HOUSE OF THE RISING SUN.

He typed SETTING - AIRPORT, MORNING

He wrote until candlelight was overcome by pink sunshine streaming through the windows.

He wrote until the sun had risen high into the sky, until he could feel its heat beating on the roof.

When he was done, when he was staring at a short stack of typed pages, Thomas knew there was something he could offer the town of Kiowa Village after all.

He put on shoes and grabbed his gun and hid his stores of rice and canned goods in the spot where the floorboards were loose (so his supplies wouldn’t walk away a second time). He tucked the script under his arm and headed for the door.

That’s when he heard footfalls on the porch. Someone was outside.

Thomas watched and waited. He imagined he could hear seconds ticking by, each one like the sound of a typebar striking a sheet of paper.

And then he heard it, finally, a sound so friendly and out of place that Thomas could hardly believe it had happened: Someone had knocked on the door.

He approached slowly, his hand on the butt of his gun. He turned the knob and stood behind the door as it opened.

“Where are you going?” asked Skylar, who was wearing a blue shirt Thomas had never seen, and who was visibly pregnant.

“To see you,” he said.

“I’m glad to hear that. Because I’ve been waiting.”

“You have?”

She nodded. She was trying to hold back tears and failing miserably.

“I choose life,” Skylar said, and stepped into his waiting arms.

Nearby supernovae are extraordinarily rare, and the electromagnetic effects one might have on the Earth are far from certain. But the danger of losing electrical power and devices is real. An EMP attack or coronal mass ejection (CME) from the sun could disable large swaths of the electrical grid, and many electronic devices would likely be damaged or destroyed. Earth narrowly avoided a direct hit by a CME in July 2012, and some scientists estimate a twelve percent chance of it happening for real in the next ten years.

In House of the Rising Sun, I leaned on dramatic license to upend the lives of my characters. An actual event might be less severe. And certainly the aftermath of an EMP would unfold more gradually than in this novel. I intentionally compressed the timeline to maintain narrative momentum.

Still, you don’t have to be a hardcore prepper to give yourself a chance to survive. A little planning can go a long way, even if you don’t want to buy a bunch of name-brand gear.

Some housekeeping notes: The Food Pyramid at 81st and Yale no longer exists, at least not in this timeline. There is no Walmart DC in the location described, but the layout of my fictional one is based on real facilities and mostly accurate. I don’t know what’s on the 53rd floor of the Empire State Building, where Skylar’s dad works, and Google was not very helpful there. Lakewood Village was selected as a setting for its location and is not the enclave of nouveau riche mansions it seems to be in the novel. Cinnamon, where Keri works, is completely invented. Most other geographical errors you may find are intentional or immaterial to the story.

Blaise, who directs Thomas and his group to the Walmart DC, was inspired by the second track on Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s EP Slow Riot for New Zero Kanada. This song is built around the audio interview of a real man in Providence, Rhode Island who called himself Blaise Bailey Finnegan III, an apparent alias inspired by Blaze Bayley, former singer for the band Iron Maiden. The quote at the beginning of this novel is part of a long interview (basically a rant) about a looming apocalypse not unlike the one that occurs in the pages of this book. A few lines of dialogue on pages 294-295 resemble bits of this rant as well.

Finally, if this is the sort of thing that interests you: I conceived this story in 2010 as a way to write a post-apocalyptic novel that didn’t feature zombies or viruses (imagine that!) or an imminent asteroid impact. It became House of the Rising Sun when I realized a supernova could become my story’s inciting incident. But the manuscript did not become a novel until 2016, in the months leading up to U.S. Presidential election. Though I expected one candidate to win, I built the world of this novel with the other outcome in mind, and I’d love to know how you feel about it. Please visit www.richardcox.net/HOTRSto share your thoughts.

Richard Coxis the author of five novels. He lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma with his wife and two daughters. In his spare time he likes to hit bombs.

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The Boys of Summer

Copyright © 2020 by Richard Cox

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

ISBN: 978-1-949102-43-7

Cover design by Claudia Noble

Printed in the United States of America