A Thief in the Night

by Dennis Michael Whelan

Overview

In Australia, an elderly couple with an interest in astronomy spots an unexpected comet, soon dubbed Henwood 1. Theres a bit of panic but not much as the comet is expected to miss Earth. Instead, it smashes into the moon and vaporizes. But when it dissolves, it emits a pathogen that travels to Earth and infects the population.

Den is a Viet Nam veteran, changed by what he saw as a sniper and helicopter pilot in the war. As people begin to die around him, he struggles to surviveat any cost. The Australian Parliamentary tries to ensure that a democratic system endures as a Justice Enforcement group secures all available weapons, but theirs is a losing battle as humanity dissolves.

Following the death of his wife, Den searches for his son and remaining family amidst the chaos. Hes an old dog, but he does learn new tricks and, unfortunately, remembers how to kill. Soon, a fanatical vicar steps forward and encourages murder among his acolytes. Who will survive this new world order, or is the Earth and all its inhabitants doomed to extinction?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781504302586
Publisher:	Balboa Press AU
Publication date:	06/07/2016
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	498
File size:	587 KB

About the Author

Dennis Michael Whelan is a former member of the Royal Air Force and a private pilot. In his writing, he combines his love of flying with his interest in astronomy and all things military. He utilizes his imagination to create realistic action stories and depict humanity’s response to disaster

Read an Excerpt

A Thief in the Night

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By Dennis Michael Whelan

Balboa Press

Copyright © 2016 Dennis Michael Whelan
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5043-0257-9

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CHAPTER 1

I'm writing this book as my account of the happenings of the past several years events as I suspect not many are thinking about the long term future, or even if there will really be a future, or if the illness will return and finish the human chapter on Earth once and for all.

So for the generations to come, this then is an account by a survivor.

"The end of world's civilisations and peoples came as, Peter would have it, "As a thief in the night" and it was sudden and quick and had nothing at all to do with mankind. Or perhaps, using the careful gender description we would have used such a short time ago, people kind.

But that is long past and those of us who survive think now only of the present day.

I guess it was only a coincidence that the Rev Warlington included the reference to Peter 3,9-10 in his sermon that Good Friday before the world changed so drastically; and I wonder now looking back whether he had some mystical insight.

I'm not a regular church goer but I do have some sort of feeling, but hardly a conviction, just a sort of deep down hope in an afterlife and a world or time when we see the face of our creator and are welcomed into a world of complete understanding and love.

As a Catholic, how funny to say that as I'm no more a Catholic than my dogs if keeping the believes and saying the prayers are concerned because I do none of that, I'm more a pagan in reality So I wonder if it's more to do with the training or indoctrination we received as young people, but I'll probably return to that from time to time as this is also something of a mini account of my life before the world changed as much an account of the last years.

Maureen, my wife, is, rather was, a Protestant, but again her faith was nominal as she could as well be a Catholic or follower of Judaism or Islam as the names meant little to her as her belief in a God of love and compassion was very real. Whether such an entity exists is neither here or there to her now that she no longer lives, but I hope there is a someone or something looking after her now as she was a fine and beautiful person and I miss her every day. Strange how she was such a regular church but had so little believe in a power beyond this world we inhabit, yet me such a laisse faire Christian has a conviction of an eternity filled with something of which I have no knowledge at all.

So because I cared little about where we went to church I tagged along with her and had our son brought up in her faith, but he was so unlike me that he had even less time for it than I and no sense of a Creator.

Maureen said "That was one hell of sermon. You don't expect something like that at a time of a feast day celebrating the Resurrection and a new beginning for all who believe."

We were standing outside our church, aptly named, I now think, "Holy Trinity" as most of those who once lived are now, hopefully, part of it. The church was built in the 1950's and a pretty imposing place with its tall angular red brick exterior and never fully completed interior. Built at the end of the church building era and constantly in debt or just breaking even and populated, in the main, by the elderly. The various vicars coming and going with the stays getting shorter and shorter as divorce, death and the constant sniping and back biting of the mainly female congregation drove the vicars away. Only really coming alive at the main Christian feast days such as Christmas and Easter and New Year.

Strangely the old and young survivors still celebrate Christmas, but the rest of it has long gone.

We were greeting the various parishioners, all known by Maureen and she unfailing kind and generous chatting away, and me bored shitless putting on a good pleasant face and desperately trying to remember the names. They all seemed to know mine, I hardly able to put a name to the many familiar faces.

I answered as we got in to the car, "He's a strange person to be a priest", being Catholic I could never get the hang of vicar, "so austere and removed from the world of his bloody church. Why in God's name", I was after all the son of an Irish man and had all his sayings burnt into my being, "is he so aloof and unconnected with his parish?"

I started the car and we drove home and had some hot cross buns and later in the afternoon put on the video of Jesus Christ Super Star and watched it for the umpteenth time as we had done for so many Easter times. The music and the story always strangely moving.

Now looking back I think about that sermon as perhaps he knew something that even he, the sometime prophet, did not know at that time. Perhaps the Creator had given him a message or had a special purpose for him as he and his wife became survivors.

But even then our destinies were joined.

CHAPTER 2

I now know the comet, that was called prosaically enough Henwood 1, was not very large as comets go, in fact a bit of a tiddler really and had never been seen before, at least in the short time we on Earth had been aware of comets and their orbits.

There were a lot of reports in the media about a possible impact with the Earth but some quick calculations by NASA and the US military soon concluded that its orbit would miss the Earth by about 400,000 kilometres, or in the old system about 250,000 miles. So apart from a general interest story rating about a ten line entry in the newspapers, that was about it. One paper ran an article about comets and a thumbnail sketch of the women who had discovered this one.

Because I knew bugger all, or very little, about comets until the actual event I'll come back to the subject of comets shortly.

Jessie King lived at Gaffney's Creek about 100 k's from Melbourne and in a lovely wooded part of Victoria, close to the Eildon Dam. This very old gold mining town had a romantic history, or it was looking back at it, but I bet bloody difficult for those who made the original history. The old original A1 gold mine had been brought back to life and revamped in the modern era about twenty years previously and was still producing gold.

Jessie's family connection was strong in the area as grandfather and grandmother had been pioneer gold miners. Jessie recounted the story in the newspaper of her mother, as a little girl, coming over the Black Spur hills, close to Healesville in a coach and four at the end of the 19th Century. She married a Henwood in the mid 1920's.

They had originally had a silver mine lease out at Ravenswood about 40 k's from Townsville in Queensland but when the silver petered out they had come down for the gold mining in Victoria and originally settled there as the Ballarat gold fields had finished long before. They had always been from mining stock with ancestors from the Cornish tin mines in England. In time she would have two daughters to her husband Frederick Henwood, and in one of those strange turns of fate her daughter's name, would become part of the history of the world, should the peoples of the world flourish and grow. But time alone would tell.

My wife Maureen had a connection to the family through the King side of the family so the Henwood story was deeply embedded within her and to an extent, as her husband, me. So it was not strange that on a holiday to northern Queensland Maureen felt a desire to explore the now long abandoned old mine and settlement which was now a much diminished small township, but alive with its history.

It was one of those cloudless and blue Queensland days. Just an odd little cloud and no wind and a dry deep centred heat and we had had our lunch in a two story hotel that had seen the best days of Ravenswood, sitting on the veranda and, chatting to other Aussies also having lunch and from a bus tour for senior citizens, I wonder what became of them? We wandered up to the little Museum and the volunteer curator was helpful in looking up documents, so we found the details of the Kings and eventually found the fenced off hole in the ground with old rusting machinery and a sign saying Kings Mine.

Standing in the cemetery, we were always drawn to old cemetery's, looking at the old memorials we both had a sense of peace and love, the old glass covered white plaster flowers, all colour long drained from them after 130 years of Queensland heat and the memorials which spoke of love and loss, young and old. The Muslim grave of a long dead Afghan camel driver or miner, no name just the strange bare and unremarkable grave; what had brought him to this distant place and what was his story, his aspirations.

Why now I wondered, when we once had so much dealing with and respect of and for Afghan's and their part in opening up our country, were they so reviled in the press of our times.

So Maureen and I stood hand in hand in the absolute quiet and stillness on the hill looking down at the town and the old houses and machinery in the warmth and the light, surrounded by the spirits of all those buried there who bore us only love and peace, and we were at peace and in love too with those long dead people and each other.

Margaret Jessie Henwood, Jessie's daughter had through winning a number of scholarships entered university in the days when it was a male dominated scene and became a science teacher in one of Melbourne's prestigious private girls school, where the yearly fees would feed several thousand Afghans, and taught maths and science. She had never married but I sensed when we first met and even now looking at her picture on the wall, and the conversations we had, it was not that she was never asked but more she wanted to be her own person, do her own thing and pursue her own career which involved science and all things celestial. A very attractive person and probably in her mid-50's she had taken an early retirement, collected an equally interested and bearded and well-heeled male widower called Gordon, purchased a small property at Gaffney's Creek where they had built a state of the art laboratory complete with astrodome and two large telescopes with electric motors and such, and surrounded by, dogs, cats, sheep and many other animals entered into a very rewarding form of retirement. They felt no need to marry at that late stage in their lives.

Jessie had found one comet but it was very small and unremarkable and as there was some controversy over who had actually seen it first, and as it had a taken her a week to report it, someone else had claimed naming rights and she didn't pursue it. Just went out most nights for a few hours and checked the digital camera exposure plates, did some star gazing and such and wrote up her notes. It was a comfortable spot air conditioned and well appointed with the two telescopes electric drives keeping them on the designated point and compensating for the earth's rotation, the sprung hydraulic mounts keeping it completely without bounce. The observatory had cost well over the price for a decent suburban home and worked very well. Gordon had paid for it as a form of very expensive wedding gift, except neither wanted to marry, and by now had a shared interest in all things celestial.

The comet when she first saw it was something out of left field and as she had learnt her lesson from the first one, had reported it after double checking, within a couple of hours. It gave her more pleasure than she had imagined it would have to have Gordon say, "Let's call it Henwood 1", and she in turn promised Gordon the next one and if there were a next one call it Gordon 1.

Comets are, perhaps I should say were, discovered routinely and were named after the person making the discovery and after all the checking has been done to verify it was indeed a comet or asteroid it took the name of the finder. Probably the most famous in recent times being the Shoemaker –Levy 9 comet which had eventually impacted Jupiter in July 1994, the first time an object had been detected by an amateur astronomer that had actually impacted a planet.

Initially the only people interested in the Henwood 1 comet were astronomers being as that comet was quite insignificant and small and not a bit like the regular big ones such as Halley's comet which come round predictably every 76 years. But about 6 weeks after the discovery the press and media got very interested and involved when NASA accurately predicted Henwood 1's course and calculated its impact point, then the world got interested big time.

Gordon was in the nicely appointed kitchen making one of his impressive dinner dishes, Gordon did all the cooking, said "It was a creative thing to do" and he did it very well indeed.

Gordon's wife had died of a fast moving cancer four years before and whilst it had not been the happiest of marriages it had certainly not been the worst and he had found the depths of his loss more than he could have ever imagined. He immersed himself in his academic world which centred around Australian literature and early aboriginal art and Jessie had come in contact with him during a time when he was giving a lecture on art at her school.

They gravitated together, a bit like the comets I guess gravitate toward the Sun and it had moved on from there. Initially a sharing of common interests and mutual need for companionship had developed into warmth and affection and the decision to live together, take early retirement, travel and then the move to the bush. Well hardly the bush close as it was to the Gaffney Creek township with connected water and power, but a nice place to live and far enough from Melbourne to avoid the urban sprawl but close enough to get to the city in a couple of hours. Being situated in a hollow they had no problems with any of even Gaffney Creeks modest street light glare when carrying out their shared interest in astronomy.

Jessie had picked up the direct telephone line that connected the observatory with the house and dialled. Gordon saw the red light flash and the phone rang. "Gordon come on down I think I've found something." He picked up on the suppressed excitement, "Be right with you". Switching on the big heavy duty flash light with the red lens cover hoping his night vision would be improving by the time he'd covered the 250 metres and walked swiftly along the path with its white edging, everything calculated to make it easier to travel with little light.

Jessie had attached the camera and recorder unit to the telescope and had started recording, the computer generating time and date information direct to the CD unit.

"Come and have a look, check the computer screen first, you can have a look through the telescope when you see what you're looking for". They went to the computer bay carefully screened to ensure the light didn't upset the night vision and put on the red lensed goggles. They looked at the first screen which was showing the real time heavily magnified image and she moved the cursor arrow to a star. "Now just look to the left of the star", and he saw that the star was two stars in reality but the main one appearing to have a slight bulge of light to one side, just a touch, and as stars go a pretty insignificant one, but the magnified image was quite clear.

There were two stars close together. Gordon knew that with the untold billions of stars in the universe some were inevitably going to appear close together but they could be separated by hundreds if not thousands of light years, the magnitude and size of the stars skewing the observation to make it appear they were as one. He knew Jessie knew something he didn't so he held his tongue; he could tell she was just about ready to burst with excitement. "Now come to the time lapse computer screen". She typed in the coordinates then ran it back a couple of days and the hit Fast Forward Run, and there it was a small half circle of light that appeared from behind the right of the star and gradually merged then appeared as a bulge of light on the left.

He looked at her, her eyes reflecting the light, put his arms round her and gently kissed her. "Congratulations Jessie, you've found your comet". There could be no doubt about it, the small moving light against the fixed star was moving through space. He knew she would have already checked all the known comets and asteroid orbits so this was her very own Henwood 1 comet. The size, speed and orbit were beyond their ability to calculate at that time, but NASA and all the main stream observatory's around the world would include it in the list of new and old known objects that continually move around our universe. Whilst it was significant to Jessie and Gordon, to the rest of the world it was no big deal, in time they would get around to checking its orbit and try to ascertain its size but it would have to wait until someone had the time to carry out the calculations.

Of course when they did eventually get around to it, it was a very big deal in deed.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from A Thief in the Night by Dennis Michael Whelan. Copyright © 2016 Dennis Michael Whelan. Excerpted by permission of Balboa Press.
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