End of Days, The

This audiobook is narrated by a digital voice. The morning Kira Thorne watched civilization collapse, she was standing in line at a coffee shop, checking her phone like any other Tuesday. The barista was grinding beans with that familiar mechanical whir when every screen in the city went white. Not black—white. A searing, impossible brightness that seemed to emanate from within the glass itself. Then came the sound. It wasn't an explosion or a crash. It was silence. The kind of absolute quiet that follows lightning, stretched thin across minutes instead of seconds. Car engines died mid-idle. Air conditioning units wheezed to a stop. Even the barista's grinder fell silent, leaving only the whispered prayers of people who suddenly understood that everything they knew had just ended. Kira pressed her face to the window and watched the last plane she would ever see arc across the sky, its engines dark, falling like a wounded bird toward the distant mountains. The pilot was probably already dead—they all were, anyone who'd been flying when the pulse hit. EMP, someone behind her whispered. Electromagnetic pulse. Solar flare. Nuclear strike. The theories buzzed through the crowd like startled insects, but Kira knew it didn't matter what had caused it. What mattered was what came next. Her phone was dead weight in her hand. The cash register had gone dark. Outside, cars sat motionless in the street while their drivers climbed out to stare at engines that would never start again. A businessman in a wrinkled suit kept clicking his key fob at his Mercedes, as if willpower alone could resurrect the electronics that had governed his life just moments before. Kira had grown up on her grandfather's ranch in Montana, back when the old man still told stories about the Great Depression and keeping emergency supplies. She'd thought his paranoia was quaint then, all those shelves of canned goods and the well he'd insisted on maintaining even after rural water service reached their valley.