Screaming. A man ran out of the building beneath her, on fire, and rolled in the snow. Another ran out, his gun pointed in the direction of Giovanni. Jess swung her rifle around and fired, this time aiming mid-torso. Blood spattered and he dropped. Jess glanced to her right. The boy-scavenger held his leg, hopping back toward the wall. More screaming. An engine roared, and a second later a vehicle came skidding out of the garage entrance.
Jess had to blink twice, trying to understand what she was looking at. It had the body of a Volkswagen Beetle, but with the wheel wells ripped out. Large circular rollers with jagged spikes were welded onto the back axle, replacing the tires, with rudimentary skis welded onto the axles on the front. Skidding to a stop, the boy-scavenger hopped into the open door, while two more of the scavenger-men sat in the front-boot, firing randomly in Giovanni’s direction. Jess lifted her rifle, pulled a round into the chamber, aimed and fired. Her bullet dented the roof. The two men ducked as the driver accelerated, kicking up a spray of dirty snow. It accelerated up the street, disappearing into the gloom.
Just scavengers. Easily scared. She looked down. The man she shot lay motionless, a pool of black spreading around him in the light of the Humvee headlamps.
“Help.”
Was it that the man in the snow? Jess held her breath.
“Help me,” came the voice again.
Was Giovanni hurt? In a hushed silence, Jess strained to hear.
“Please, help me.”
No. It was coming from inside the building, and the voice wasn’t Italian; it was distinctly American-sounding.
Giovanni and Raffa and Lucca appeared from the shadows on the other side of the street. They looked up at Jess and she nodded. Yes. She heard it too. Stepping through the foot of snow and ash covering the roof, Jess found the stairway down. It was locked, so she chambered a round and fired into the lock. The door swung open. Clicking on her headlamp, Jess made her way down to the first landing slowly. It could still be a trap.
“Please, help me,” came the muffled call for help again.
Jess cleared the next floor, her stomach tight, constantly looking behind and up. Something about this was weird. It didn’t make sense. Even scavengers would have been more prepared, put up more of a fight. Clearing the last set of stairs, she entered the lobby and opened the door to the garage. In the light of their headlamps, Giovanni and Raffa and Lucca stood encircling three people, all of them tied up, hands and feet, to a radiator with bags over their heads.
“Please, whoever it is, please let me go,” said one of the tied-up people, a man.
That voice. Jess strode to the side of the room, toward the pleading man. Giovanni shrugged. “Go ahead,” he muttered, but she could see he already knew.
Jess pulled the bag off the man’s head and stared in open-mouthed disbelief. “Roger?”
Hope you enjoyed the first chapter of Sanctuary, book two of the Nomad trilogy, now available for advance purchase on Amazon, just click here or search for “Mather Sanctuary” on Amazon.
In the next section I discuss the science and research work behind Nomad, and recent findings of other star systems that have crossed into our solar system. In the final section are instructions for watching the video of me running the 3D simulation of the Nomad encounter, with instructions on how you can even do it yourself.
FROM THE AUTHOR…
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Discussion of Real-World Nomad-like Events
From the Author
Matthew Mather
First off, thanks for reading Nomad! I hope you enjoyed it—and weren’t too frightened by the possibilities. Feel free to email me if you want to chat about it, my email is at the end of this section, and also on my website.
I’ve always been fascinated by black holes. I think it began when I was ten years old and watched the eponymous Disney film The Black Hole. The movie fueled my curiosity, and as a teenager I tore through black hole-related science fiction, from The Forever War by Joe Haldeman, to Hyperion by Dan Simmons, to Earth by David Brin.
The topic was as fascinating to me as it was to many others, spurring an abundance of books and short stories. Surprise, surprise, then, when I did some research and discovered that not a single book or film had ever covered the topic of the Earth encountering a medium-sized black hole. So, I decided to write Nomad, to fill that gap, but with a determined focus on making it scientifically accurate.