Hunting for the Lamb of God

Jamey O'Donnell

Description

A super electromagnetic pulse wipes out the electrical infrastructure of America, eliminating all means of transportation, communications, along with food and water supplies. Two families navigate their survival through this dystopian nightmare that no one was prepared for.
If food became unavailable due to a natural disaster and your only food source was human beings, would you eat someone? Would you go a step further and kill someone to eat them? These are decisions that would have to be made by normal, everyday people if faced with this type of situation. Hunting for the Lamb of God traces the footsteps of two families living across the street from each other in a suburb south of Denver, Colorado. The families join forces to navigate through a dystopian nightmare after America is hit with a super EMP (electromagnetic pulse), where food and water supplies run dry, and neighbors turn against neighbors, hunting each other for food to survive.

Sujets

• Thrillers
• Suspense
• Fiction

Informations

• Publié par: AuthorHouse
• Date de parution: 26 juillet 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781665533034
• Langue: English

Extrait

HUNTING for the    LAMB of    GOD

JAMEY O’DONNELL


AuthorHouse™
1663 Liberty Drive
Bloomington, IN 47403
www.authorhouse.com
Phone: [phone]
 
 
 
 
 
 
© 2021 Jamey O’donnell. All rights reserved.
 
No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.
 
Published by AuthorHouse 05/08/2023
 
ISBN: 978-1-6655-3304-1 (sc)
ISBN: 978-1-6655-3303-4 (e)
 
 
 
 
 
Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.
Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.
 
 
 
Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.
 
Scripture quotations marked NKJV are taken from the New King James Version. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
CONTENTS
Foreword by Jack Cashill
1 The Bright Light and the Big Swoosh
2 Prayers for the Dead
3 D.C. and N.Y.C.
4 Little Plastic Jesus on the Rear-View Mirror
5 “This Wasn’t Supposed to Happen”
6 Week Two
7 Fourth of July
8 Darkness on the Edge of Town
9 The Underground Rail System
10 Permission Granted
11 By the Grace of God
12 Lamb of God
13 DIA/Base 12
14 The Gauntlet/Homecoming
15 Change of Plans
16 Stick to the Plan
17 Much to be Thankful For
18 Welcome to New Hope
19 A New Day’s Dawn
20 Old Chevy’s Never Die

EDITED BY
KATHLEEN KLINE
DRAGONFLY PUBLISHING AND EDITING
 

DEDICATED TO MY SON
RORY JAMES O’DONNELL
Foreword by Jack Cashill
I had not read too deeply into Jamey O’Donnell’s Hunting for the Lamb of God when a novel thought crossed my mind. As a fan of the post-apocalyptic genre in both print and film, I knew enough to be concerned about supplies of food and water and batteries and gasoline and guns and ammo, but O’Donnell made me think about something more basic: is my bicycle in working order? Following an EMP attack, a bike is about the only thing on wheels that will be working. A shopping cart would help too! It is this kind of attention to everyday detail that separates Hunting from so many other works in this genre.
But a bicycle and a shopping cart are not the only things I would need to have at the ready. A good paper copy of the Bible would be even more helpful. My e-Bible would be as useless as my subscription to Netflix. If the bicycle provides mobility, the Bible provides hope. It is their hope and faith that distinguishes our protagonists, basically a two-family cluster, from America’s dwindling number of survivors. It is hopefulness, too, that makes any post-apocalyptic novel readable. By contrast, after slugging through a book like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, the reader looks for the nearest cliff to jump off.
Of my sixteen published books, two have been novels, and these were the hardest to write. The first, published in the year 2000 and called 2006: The Chautauqua Rising , imagined a functional but dystopian America in the very near future. The second book, The Hunt published in 2019, featured a Christian father and his two sons ensnared in an unexpected battle against a terrorist cell in the wilds of Colorado. Both books had positive endings. Both were well received.
While writing The Hunt with my co-author Mike McMullen, a skilled outdoorsman, I came to understand the essentials of successful male-oriented fiction. Those essentials start with likable, relatable protagonists. O’Donnell scores high on this one. In fact, he scores high on all the essentials: a credible plot, believable dialogue, flawless technical details, logical behavior, abundant suspense, and, finally, yes, a touch of romance. It never hurts. Not to turn Jamey’s head, but I would argue he does a more credible job imagining a post-apocalyptic future than Stephen King does in the morally inconsistent novel, The Stand .
As a fan of TV’s The Walking Dead , I watched in dismay as the writers forgot the essentials after the first few seasons. What had started out as a highly credible examination of how people behave when all social order breaks down, became increasingly ungrounded and even woke. Without a logical thread and a moral code, the genre quickly degenerates. O’Donnell honors the essentials in Hunting as he will, I am sure, in the planned sequel.
The reader of any novel has to want the characters to succeed, and he wants them to succeed without betraying the principles they have absorbed as Christians and Americans. In fact, as the reader will come to understand, the characters in Hunting will survive only if they stick to those principles.
Jack Cashill

“There are those who rebel against the light;
They do not know its ways, nor abide in its paths.
The murderer rises with the light;
He kills the poor and needy and in the night he is like a thief.
The eye of the adulterer waits for the twilight, saying
        “No eye will see me”, and he disguises his face.
In the dark they break into houses
        which they marked for themselves in the daytime.
They do not know the light, for the morning
        is the same to them as the shadow of death;
If someone recognizes them, they are in
        the terrors of the shadows of death.”
 
Job 24: 13-17 NKJV
ONE
The Bright Light and the Big Swoosh

B rian had just blasted through the gauntlet of soldiers on his way to the church tower and was now positioned to take out the sniper at the top where the church bell hung above him. Rocky was playing alongside Brian and was making his move to flank the sniper in hopes of distracting him, giving Brian enough time to load his RPG to take the sniper out.
Two rounds pinging off the church bell was all it took to draw fire from the sniper, and according to plan, the sniper fired back, enabling Brian to fire the RPG.
BOOM! Direct hit!
It was no sooner than the tower and its inhabitant exploded into pieces when the bunker shook violently for a split second, and everything, including the Call of Duty game they were playing on the Xbox, went dark.
“Aw man...what the heck” muttered Brian.
The lights, monitor, Xbox, fan...everything had suddenly lost power and the two boys, along with Brian’s older brother Mark, were sitting in complete pitch-black darkness in the doomsday bunker their dad had built in the backyard five years ago.

It was approximately 1:16 p.m. EST on May 24, 2022, when the lower forty eight of the United States, most of Northern Mexico, the southern half of Canada, along with Cuba, Belize, and the Caribbean Islands saw the big bright light.
There were technically three bright lights that spanned from the East to West coasts, with the east light appearing first, followed by the west light, then lastly the center light between the two.
It was at that moment that the world took a quantum leap backward and nothing would ever be the same. Three nuclear warheads had just exploded 200 miles in space into the thermosphere over the United States within minutes of each other.
The first thing people saw was the blinding light that overtook the sun and everything else in view. A loud swooshing sound followed, accompanied by a massive shock wave-powerful enough to knock people to the ground that were outside.
These effects were the result of three nuclear explosions strategically positioned over the United States, designed to create a super electromagnetic pulse (EMP) and cripple the U.S.
Cars on the roads and highways immediately stopped dead in their tracks, all things that ran on electricity came to a screeching halt, computer screens went black, phone conversations ended, television and radio broadcasts stopped, and 3200 jet airliners began to fall from the sky over America, Canada, and Mexico.
Over 2000 satellites were immediately disabled, and because the International Space Station was orbiting within only 227 miles of the Earth, it also lost power.
In the blink of an eye, the Northwestern Hemisphere of Earth had been thrown back into the Stone Age, all at the hands of Iran, being directed by North Korea.
These two countries had been secretly working together for years to implement this exact plan at this exact moment in time. Leading right up to the minute and hour of this day.
It went off seamlessly without a hitch.
North Korea constructed the warheads and Taepodong-2 ballistic missiles, whereas Iran made the rocket launchers. Two were designed to be launched from shipping containers loaded onto freighters, moored off the east and west coasts of America.
The third missile and launcher were to be assembled and launched from inside Mexico after being smuggled in. This had needed to be the first pivotal warhead put into position, placed a full year before launch day.
All the construction for the container launchers had been completed by the end of 2020 and was ready to go. The constructed warheads/missiles were smuggled into Iran by submarine from North Korea, then moved to Tarragona, a small burg outside of Barcelona, Spain. This is where the containers were modified for the mission, to be loaded onto two separate freighters, along with six soldiers of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard ...one inside the container with the missile and launcher, the other five as passengers. One soldier would be needed to unlock the doors of the co