Verwandte Artikel zu Sanctuary

Sanctuary - Hardcover

Cleary, James

 
9798217188918: Sanctuary
Hardcover
ISBN 13: 9798217188918
Verlag: Berkley Books, 2026

Inhaltsangabe

“The meek shall inherit the Earth, unless the rich get there first.” That’s the reality of the post-apocalyptic world in this electrifying debut thriller.

The near future…

Climate disasters have crippled the United States. With half the country under water and the other half a dust bowl, civil unrest would soon escalate into something darker, something unstoppable. Billionaire John Brandt anticipated this and channeled his money, power, and influence into being prepared for the great unraveling.

Now Brandt, his family, and his security team must retreat to Sanctuary, their underground bunker—a vast luxury mansion beneath the parched earth of the Nebraskan Great Plains. But they are not alone. Above ground a group of raiders are desperate to survive and will use any means possible to accomplish that goal. 

As tensions mount both inside and out, battle lines are drawn— between the haves and the have-nots, between decency and expediency, between life and death. In this game, everyone's a loser.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

James Cleary is a pseudonym for James DeVita. He is a native of Long Island, NY, and a recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship for Fiction. James is also a theater professional, and has worked extensively as an actor, director, and playwright.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Day 844

They're all gone. Jeremy's still breathing but he won't be much longer. I can see it in his eyes. It's the same look a lot of the others had before they died. It's hard to describe. If I had to, I'd probably say it's something like a look of quiet surprise. A sort of noiseless bewilderment, as if they're thinking, Okay, okay, this is really happening, this is it, this is my death, I should take notice, I should be present to this. And then, at some missed microsecond-because the actual moment can never be seen, no, not really, not ever-they just stop being. They're simply there, and then they're not. Like a sound you don't notice until it's gone. And then there is quiet.

Of course, the hours, days, or weeks leading up to that moment aren't very quiet. They're usually ugly and loud, or violent, or bloody, brutal, terrifying-but for the briefest of moments, just as they near the end of breath, after the grappling and the writhing and thrashing and denying, there seems to be, in their dimming eyes, beauty.

She unraveled the strip of torn shirt from her fingers, and the pen slipped from her hand. It rolled across the table and fell to the floor. She let it lie. She pried her fingers open as far as she could, trying to stretch them wide, but it was too painful. She let go and they crimped back into a twisted gnarl. The whole of the hand was discolored now, swollen past the point of function. She looked at it closely in the dusky half-light of the room. It seemed as if her hand belonged to another. And perhaps it did, for she barely recognized the woman she had become. The bandage on her palm was filthy, the blood already dried black. She lifted a corner of it and pulled. It stuck to her skin. She tugged at it, gently, then not gently, and worked loose the scab-encrusted cloth. Dust and blood had mingled, clotting up the edges of the wound.

A sound then, from the corner of the room, low-pitched and wet. She limped over to the boy and turned him onto his side, tilting his head down. Pink-tinged mucus drained from his mouth. "It's just me," she said, wiping clean his lips. He reached out, grabbing at the air. She let his small hand find hers, and she held it and it seemed to calm him. "Shh." His eyes were open, staring at something only he could see. She ran her broken fingers through his hair, his hair so light and fine, and long now. He'd said he was going to cut it when he turned ten.

She brushed back his bangs.

The boy quieted.

She made it back to the table and sat.

She picked up the pen and snugged it into the crook of her thumb and tied it in place again, pulling the knot tight with her teeth. She took up her journal and pressed flat another page, when a thin line of light fell across the table. She looked up. The sun was just beginning to swell the horizon. The sun that never changed. The sun that shone but never warmed. The sun chosen from a drop-down menu of a dozen other suns. The recorded sun that rose and set in an endless loop on the digital-screened "window" embedded high on the wall of the room.

False dawns.

Pretaped yesterdays made to look like todays.

2

Two years earlier. Ecuador.

Fifty kilometers south of Quito, before dawn.

summit trail on the eastern slope of Mount Cotopaxi.

¡Regresen! ¡Regresen!" the guide yelled, a violent crosswind nearly knocking him off the cliff edge.

He flattened himself against the rock face, waving Julia and Flynn back. "¡Regresen!" The wind had caught them unawares, squall-like, a sudden microburst rushing out of a still-dark sky. Flynn, trailing behind Julia, grabbed her jacket and traversed backward down the muddy slope, slick now with snowmelt and wet ash. Crouching low, he sidestepped into a shallow outcropping and pulled her in with him.

"Holy shit!" Julia yelled above the wind.

The guide stumbled in, crowding between them. "¡Ay mierda!" A crystally mist of rain glinted in the beams of his headlamp. "Los vientos, ¿eh? La montaña está muy inquieta hoy." He peered out, shaking his head and shouting above the wind. "¡Es muy peligroso!"

Julia, more thrilled than frightened, hoped they wouldn't turn back. Winds this dangerous usually didn't last long, and besides, she'd climbed in worse. "Escalemos más, ¿sí?" she asked, but before the guide could answer, Flynn stepped in.

"¡No! ¡No más!"

"Oh, come on! It's not that bad," Julia said, sure that Flynn didn't want to continue anyway. He never hid the fact that he didn't like hiking or climbing. "We can wait it out."

"I'm sorry, no."

Julia was fed up with being told what to do every step of the way, even from Flynn. Yes, he was new; yes, he was probably just trying to please her father; yes, she was too young to be traveling alone-whatever-it still pissed her off. Besides, she was better at mountaineering than Flynn and the guide put together. She'd been climbing since she was six and had been the fifth youngest person to scale Denali when she was fifteen. She'd chosen Flynn to chaperone because it was the only way her father would let her travel the world to climb. It didn't hurt, of course, that she found him ridiculously hot, but still, she didn't need to be treated like a child. She'd be getting five percent of her trust in a few months when she turned eighteen, and then she could do whatever the hell she wanted.

Julia peeked out of the outcropping. Dawn was barely breaking. Up the mountainside, a canopy of steel-colored clouds mingled so thickly with the volcano's ash plumes that neither was distinguishable from the other. A charcoal sky. She stepped farther out, squinting into the wind, and turned back to Flynn.

"Well, if we're not going up . . ." she said, and took off at a jog down the mountainside.

"Wait!" Flynn called after her. "Miss Brandt, don't-!"

"You want to go back, I'm going back!"

"Slow down!"

"Keep up!"

The slope steepened quickly as she descended and the trail turned icier, slush-coated, and mucky. She slowed her pace, still well ahead of Flynn, as an unseen sun began to gray the horizon before her. Twenty chilled minutes later she was at the base of the mountain, the ground there leveling off into a slate-gray expanse of pumice and ash, like the bleak terrain of another planet, all soot and cinders. There was a tiny café-thatched roof and stone-just off a gravel road where they'd parked that morning, and Julia was desperate for a cappuccino. She broke into a sprint, a rainy wind at her back pushing her along, and reached the café before Flynn. Struggling to open the door, she leaned back, yanked hard, and slipped in sideways just as an angry gust slammed it shut behind her.

The room hummed with windlessness.

It was warm and empty and still inside and smelled of woodsmoke.

Flynn blustered through the door a moment later, windblown and breathless; his fair skin, slightly freckled, flushed crimson. He dropped his gear and the backpacks and bent over, hands on hips, wheezing.

"You okay, old man?" He was only twenty-six but Julia liked teasing him.

Flynn looked up at her-not happy. "Please wait by the door."

"There's no one in here."

"Please wait by the door, Miss Brandt."

He stepped past Julia and checked the side windows. Looked behind a counter. Felt the stones above the fireplace. He approached a doorless back room with a curtain of jeweled beads dangling before it, one hand resting on the Glock 19 strapped to his thigh. "¿Hola?" he called out, and stepped through, the beaded strands tinkling as they parted. "Buenos días?"

Julia unzipped her climbing suit, a candy apple-red GORE-TEX onesie from Patagonia, and wondered when Flynn was going to kiss...

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Verlag
Berkley Books
Erscheinungsdatum
2026
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 13 
9798217188918
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
368
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Verantwortliche Person
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