Book Release: The Hemingway Bible
Question everything you believe.
Author Shawn Casselberry has released a new Sci-fi novel called The Hemingway Bible (Story Sanctum, 2024).
Scientist and atheist Dr. Lydia Cheyenne Wagner thinks she's the only survivor of an asteroid strike she predicted until she discovers Father Jules, a devout priest who has "miraculously" survived.
Their beliefs and personalities clash as they try to find a way to peacefully coexist in a post-apocalyptic world.
Everything changes when they encounter a fanatical teenage cult that has made a Hemingway novel their Bible.
The erratic cult leader, known as the Captain, wages war against any unbelievers, causing Dr. Lydia and Father Jules to choose sides in a life and death battle over what is faith, what is fact, and what is fiction.
The Hemingway Bible is a provocative, engaging post-apocalyptic story about the dangers of religious extremism and the urgent need to come together across the ideologies that divide us.
Available now on Amazon and other online retailers.
Read an excerpt from the opening two chapters:
“One generation passeth away, and another generation
cometh: but the earth abideth forever." Ecclesiastes 11:4
BOOK ONE
The Scientist
CHAPTER I
[These are the original writings of Dr. Lydia Cheyenne
Wagner detailing the events following the annihilation.]
The Beginning
This is the beginning of something new, I repeat like a
mantra, even though it feels like the end.
Gripping the steel latch of the pressure sealed door, I
pause, not sure I’m ready to see the devastation on the other
side. The geiger counter registers safe levels of ionized
radiation, but I wear a constrictive, silver hazmat suit as an
extra precaution.
Here goes... everything.
I whip the door open, and push back the decomposed
remains of two bodies in a final lover’s embrace.
Death is everywhere. The old growth forest
overhead is stripped bare, orange dust covers the ground
like century-old rust. The sun is brighter than I remember,
shining above like an ambivalent god, unphased by all the
trauma and tragedy our planet has endured. There are no
sounds of birds in the air or movement of any kind, animal
or human. There is nothing but soul-crushing silence.
I’m the only survivor.
I let the heaviness of that sink in. I don’t have time
to entertain hopes. I’m a scientist, trained to think rationally.
I don’t take leaps of faith unless I am damn sure there is a
safety net below.
That’s why I had built a fully functional underground
station and took shelter for over a year. It’s why I warned the
world the asteroid was coming, despite the government’s
denials and lies. I tried to save them, I tried to save them all.
Why didn’t they listen? Why didn’t anyone listen?
Normally I’m calculated, controlled. Seeing the
devastation untethers me. I fall to my knees on the forest
floor, despair rising from my chest and tightening like a
vice grip around my throat. I rip off the face guard of my
suit to let in some fresh air, feeling like a baby gasping for
their first breath. I throw up my breakfast, then pound my
fists into the forest floor next to the corpses.
For a moment, I envy the dead. I envy all humanity
for being spared from this hell on earth: the end of all life.
Then I see something move in my peripheral vision.
A lone cockroach crawls out from underneath a rotted log.
By fate, luck, and natural selection, we have both survived.
I smile weakly, pick myself up, and return to the bunker
with renewed purpose. This isn’t the end.
This is the beginning of something new.
CHAPTER II
My SHTF plan
There are no other signs of human life anywhere. I’ve gone
from Tacoma to the coast of Oregon, nothing but charred
bodies. Schools, hospitals, synagogues, and churches, all
reduced to rubble. Even Costco is flattened like a football
field.
All telecommunication systems are nonfunctional.
All computer servers are down permanently. Everything
saved in the cloud is lost forever, as is the cloud itself. The
AI revolution everyone feared is now a footnote in history,
as is every major corporation, including Amazon, Meta,
and Starbucks. Everything that we thought we couldn’t live
without... gone.
My only means of transportation is a solar powered
UTV 4-wheeler that allows me to navigate this new post-
annihilation world. The car manufacturers had refused to
make solar vehicles, preferring electric cars that were as
dependent on fossil fuels as the cars before them were
dependent on gas. So I did it myself.
But I don’t have time to gloat, and no one’s around to
hear me say, “I told you so!” My deepest fears are realized.
I am completely and utterly alone. I know it’s unlikely there
are any other survivors. What the asteroid and subsequent
nuclear fallout didn’t destroy, the contaminated waterways
and decimated food supply chain would have. Within
months, radiation and starvation would have wiped out any
other humans who may have happened to survive the initial
collision.
Things could have been different, if they only would
have believed me. By they I mean everybody. The president
convinced the government, the media, and average citizens,
including my own family and friends, there was no threat.
Even the religious fanatics didn’t heed my warning. I mean,
I thought end of the world prophecies were their sweet spot.
But what can I say? If the roles were reversed, would I have
listened to them? Not unless the science checked out. As
my math teachers were so fond of saying, “You have to
show your work.”
And I did. I presented it in every conceivable format.
I wrote articles, I did interviews, I spoke at conferences.
I even did a podcast, for Christ’s sake. I guess that’s one
benefit of the end of the world. No more podcasts.
I would have been another casualty had it not been
for my scientific foresight and a state of the art underground
station I had built to my unique specifications to get me
to the other side of the Paw (Post-apocalyptic world).
My preparations led me deep into the world of preppers,
survivalists, and end times believers, but our reasons
couldn’t have been more different. I wasn’t trying to get off
the grid to avoid the government, and I sure as hell wasn’t
bracing myself for a biblical armageddon. I was doing what
I was trained to do: follow the science. Who knew that
doing that would lead me down a rabbit hole of nuclear
fallout bunkers and disaster preppers.
I had come a long way since my first encounter,
before I figured out whether I was a survivalist or a prepper.
I didn’t know there was a difference until a guy named
Lenford asked me which one I was. Lenford ran a small
doomsday supply shop out of his house in Oregon called
“Boom!” When he mentioned Nikita Khrushchev within
the first five minutes, I knew he’d be a good source of
information (I would later learn that Khrushchev was a
household name among preppers due to his involvement in
the nuclear standoff between the United States and Russia
in the 1950s which spurred the nuclear bunker movement).
On the wall behind Lenford were signs that read, “Shoot
first, ask questions later,” and “Beware: I shoot bears,
Communists, and Communist bears.”
“See, survivalists live off the land, they don’t carry
much on ‘em, and they’re usually not armed,” he instructed
as he cleaned out an assault rifle. “Preppers, we live in
shelters with the comforts of home, living off our supplies...
and we’re heavily armed.” He looked down at the rifle in
case I didn’t believe him.
“I see,” I said, even though I wasn’t sure I did.
“The real question is,” Lenford asked me. “What’s
your SHTF plan?” He cocked the rifle and looked through
the scope at an invisible enemy behind me. Once I confirmed
that a real life bear or communist hadn’t snuck up behind
me, I asked, “My what plan?”
He lowered the rifle onto the counter, satisfied with
his work. “Your SHTF plan?”
When I didn’t answer, he spelled it out impatiently:
“What’s your plan when shit hits the fan?”
“Oh, right. I’m not sure. I’m looking into an
underground bunker.”
He gave an approving smile. “You’re a prepper
then.”
“Yeah, I guess. But I wouldn’t mind learning to live
off the land, too.”
His smile disappeared.
“But yeah, mainly a prepper.”
I would interview thirty or forty more guys like
Lenford, and a few women too, just for good measure. I
learned that even among preppers there were big differences.
Most of them had specific emergencies they were concerned
about. For some it was a nuclear attack, for others it was
epidemics, economic downturns, or EMP blasts. One guy
just said, “China,” when I asked why he built his bomb
shelter. It was like rush week in college—everyone had
their favorite doomsday scenario, and the disaster they
feared most determined the kind of preparations they made.
That’s why I spent most of my time with the
Khrushchev types. They had their eyes on the prize, the
nuclear radioactivity prize. I picked their brains and took
their advice for the most part. I even bought a pistol just in
case I needed to defend myself from a lawless mob, which
was Lenford’s suggestion based on his post-apocalyptic
fears of another civil war. Technically, Lenford suggested
an assault rifle like the one he was cleaning, but I settled for
the pistol. He seemed disappointed in me for that, too.
From someone named Beverly Devoe, I learned
everything I needed to know about food supplies. I spent
over four grand on freeze dried food, MREs (meals ready to
eat), and a year’s supply of canned goods from a Mormon
Food Canning Center. Beverly, who was a member of the
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, informed me
that all the families in their church were encouraged to
have a year’s supply of food just in case of emergency. I
learned a lot from folks like Lenford and Beverly, mostly
how preparation was half the battle.
But I also knew things they didn’t know from my
research of closed systems and nuclear, biological, and
chemical filtration units. Like the lessons of the Arizona
State University Biosphere 2 project, the most ambitious
experiment in communal isolation ever conducted. Back
in the 1990s, a crew of four men and four women locked
themselves inside a three-acre glass complex to see if they
could survive in a closed system for two years. It didn’t end
well. Not because they lacked technology or education, but
due to infighting among the scientists and malnutrition. I’m
alone here so I don’t have to worry about infighting, and
I’m carefully monitoring my nutrition. Check. Check.
Additionally, the average Joe who builds a fallout
shelter in their backyard typically doesn’t account for the
little things like bug infiltrations or rain damage. I learned
it takes real money to build the kind of shelter you need to
avoid a global disaster like the one we were facing. And
banks don’t give out mortgages for doomsteads. You have
to pay cash.
Mine cost a little over $2.3 million—my entire
retirement savings—which sounds like a lot, but once you
factor in a thousand pound blast door that can be locked
down at a moment’s notice and the filtration system with
three military-grade filters each providing 2,000-cubic feet
per minute of filtration at $30,000 a pop, it adds up quickly.
Then there was the drilling of four deep subterranean
geothermal wells for the water filtration system that uses
UV sterilization and carbon paper filters. The system can
filter 2,000 gallons of water a day into three electronically-
monitored 10,000 gallon tanks which was more than
enough to sustain me until the radiation cleared and it was
safe again to go out. Power to the station was supplied by
four different redundant generators so if one went out, I
would still have three backups. This wasn’t something to
pinch pennies on because if there was no power, then I’d be
as dead as the bodies outside the station.
Thanks to the miracle of science and the art of
prepping, I’m still here. I know I really should be grateful
just to be alive, to have been spared from this nuclear
holocaust, but seeing the aftermath feels like a trauma from
which I’ll never recover.
Available now on Amazon and other online retailers.
