I was hoping you would post this!
(If you didn’t I was going to.)
I read it yesterday and enjoyed it—BUT it was not enough! I want to know what happens to your antagonist after he leaves the ruined radio tower!
BTW, where is everyone—or should I say ANYone? Seems like he should encounter some people/community somewhere. Even and maybe especially in the mountains; where, as they say, a country boy can survive.
Finally, I’d be amiss not to notice the excellent title you gave the book.
It’s not “part one” of something serial, sorry about that. It’s a short story, and really just a reason to write the last third in a form people would read. If I wrote a nonfiction essay concerning the “why” in the last third, nobody would read it. The entire plot is a matter of creating a plausible backstory to the last third. My intention was to drag the reader up into the tower and make him look out at the landscape. That’s why he has no name, just the history teacher and by the end the hunter.
If I had to write the next few chapters, I would have to resolve a ton of open questions that nobody, today, can really answer. Would it be as bad as I describe? Cannibalism? History teaches yes, but who knows? Would the nuke plants still be running, providing regional juice? Maybe. Nobody knows. I don’t want to answer all of those open questions; it wasn’t my goal with the story.
My goal was to write the why, and what the signs are leading up to it. That’s all. If others would like to write similar episodes, from other POVs or opinions, I’d read them. I’d like to know what engineers, computer network guys etc think might happen. This narrator is just a high school history teacher who was in a lucky spot when it happened.