Nathan Jones - First Winter

The people of Newtown fleeing south have received news of another Gold Bloc invasion force coming north from Mexico. Stuck between two fronts they had no choice but to split up into smaller groups and try to hide from blockhead patrols until they could find a safe place to go. In spite of Deb’s best efforts her group, exhausted and harried, are captured. This concludes the events of Reclamation.

Determinationbegins with Lewis leading a night raid on his own shelter, which the blockheads have occupied as a patrol post. He manages to kill dozens of them and steal several trucks full of supplies, which he brings back to the temporary camp the Aspen Hill residents have set up in the mountains. He brings some of those supplies down to the volunteers along Highway 31.

Matt has been assigned to guard a hillside south of 31, as well as do what hunting he can to feed his people and the main camp. He ambushes a squad of blockhead scouts and takes several prisoners. In the process he has a minor confrontation with his friend Pete Childress, who shoots a few of the enemy who are fleeing and surrendering. The young man is reassigned to camp, and eventually deserts and disappears.

Trev and his squad start out training recruits to get them ready to fight, but they’re soon reassigned to patrol north of the highway, near where Vernon and his men are guarding the same canyon where Trev first ambushed them. The two groups have minor clashes, which come to a head when Trev leads a failed ambush against a blockhead patrol and loses several people, and Vernon refuses to come to his aid.

Meanwhile Lewis has been leading several attacks against the blockheads occupying Aspen Hill, and has fended off a few attacks as well. Disaster strikes when the enemy feints an attack up Aspen Hill Canyon. When Lewis takes a team in a truck to hold them back they’re ambushed by a small group of elite enemy soldiers who target the truck with a rocket-propelled grenade. Lewis manages to avoid the strike by veering the truck off the road, but in the crash Mayor Tillman’s son-in-law is killed and Lucas suffers a broken leg. In the aftermath the Mayor calls Matt back home to assist her running the town, while Lewis blows up the road leading up the canyon and takes reinforcement volunteers south to help Trev and the others along Highway 31.

After a brief period of fighting the blockheads capture Corporal Williams and two of his men and stake them up within view of Davis’s people to die slowly. Lewis had been planning a raid on the nearby blockhead camp to destroy their armory, and at this provocation decides to go that night. He and a small team including Trev manage to sneak in, but Trev is separated from them and forced to flee to a structure in the middle of the camp.

There he discovers hundreds of blockhead prisoners, captured US citizens who were being used as slave labor and brutally mistreated. Among them is Deb, barely recognizable after her ordeal. Against Lewis’s objections Trev resolves to help the prisoners escape if possible. With the help of Davis and others in the military providing distractions they manage to get the prisoners to safety, although many are killed in the escape. Vernon comes to their aid, prompting a reluctant reconciliation between the two groups.

The fighting intensifies over the next couple weeks, and news reaches them that Canada is resisting Gold Bloc occupation, largely motivated by the enemy’s mistreatment of prisoners. With their supply line disrupted the blockheads become even more desperate, and there’s some hope that if the US forces can hold out a bit longer the enemy will leave. Many of the freed prisoners volunteer to join the fighting, including Deb, who joins Trev’s squad.

In one final attack the Gold Bloc forces hit the US forces in the mountains from all sides. The fighting is brutal, but Aspen Hill’s volunteers south of Highway 31 manage to eliminate hundreds of enemy soldiers by using Lewis’s plan to lure them into a landslide that engulfs the entire hillside. After that the enemy doesn’t send much more their way. Following a brutal day of fighting the blockheads are finally turned back on all fronts, and they pull out of the area and retreat back to their territory with the US military in close pursuit.

Trev, Lewis, and their volunteers return home with Deb, Trent Lincoln, and a few other volunteers who were part of their squads and have nowhere else to go. The town has relocated to a valley farther west in the mountains and are digging in to prepare for the nuclear winter that will soon be upon them. A wounded Pete Childress is found by a military convoy heading east to continue the fight against the blockheads, and is invited to enlist. This concludes the events of Determinationand the Best Laid Plans series. First Winterbegins soon after and continues the story.

Dramatis Personae: Since there’s a large and well established body of characters from the Best Laid Plans series, for those who’d like a reference on the ones who’ll be prominent in the Nuclear Winter series a Dramatis Personae has been included at the back of the book.

The hideout had been ransacked.

Trev supposed he shouldn’t be surprised. Sure, it was fairly well hidden from anyone on Highway 31 or any of the dirt logging roads that crisscrossed the mountainside, and they’d determined for themselves last fall that anyone on the opposite mountainside would have a tough time picking it out, even with binoculars. You’d have to blaze an uncomfortable trail off the beaten path to get to where you could see it clearly.

At the same time, the small structure was only a few hundred yards upslope of the highway, and there had been a lot of people passing by down there recently. You had to cross Huntington Creek to get up that slope, sure, but that wasn’t the most insurmountable barrier. Especially where refugees and possibly even soldiers might break away from the crowd to hunt and forage, or even fish the creek.

He looked around the tiny room where he’d spent the last winter with his cousin Lewis. It was completely bare, aside from a few stray bits of rubbish not even desperate scavengers had deemed worth taking. There weren’t too many signs of vandalism, at least, aside from where the hasp on the door’s padlock had been torn free of the frame. Whoever had come through here had obviously either had enough respect for the space to leave it alone, even if they were stealing from it, or they’d been in too much of a hurry for wanton destruction.

But the biggest relief was that the small wood burning stove was still there, although slightly moved from its usual place. As if the looters had tested its weight before deciding it was too much to bring with them.

Actually, if the looters had to leave one thing behind out of everything they’d taken, the stove was what Trev had desperately hoped would still be here. It was a miracle that it was.

One of the main reasons he’d come up to the hideout with Lewis and Jane, aside from to check on its condition and do some hunting and fishing, was to make sure that small but heavy hunk of cast iron hadn’t been stolen. With nuclear winter approaching it was practically worth its weight in gold.

Especially since Lewis was making this trip largely as a favor to Trev. Specifically for Trev and his mom Clair, dad George, and siblings Linda and Jim. The Halsson cabin where Lewis and Jane, their sister Mary, and their mom and dad Lucas and Eva lived already had the larger, nicer stove Lewis had brought from the shelter, so this one would be going into the Smith family’s cabin.

That was a huge deal. Thanks largely to Lewis’s preparations both cabins already had carpet, windows, decent furnishings, and even efficient lighting from strings of LED Christmas lights, and limited power to recharge small devices and even watch the occasional movie on a projector. Those were all luxuries in new Aspen Hill, which was building itself from the ground up as people forced to flee their homes struggled simply to put roofs over their heads and scrabble for the bare necessities.