Winter Burn

Jacqueline Druga

On a frigid winter day, the sun hurls a massive solar ejection at the western hemisphere, creating an extinction-level crisis like the world has never known.

In typical fashion, sixteen-year-old Allie isn’t crazy about her life, and with good reason. Over the course of a year, her life has become unrecognizable. Not only have her parents lost their jobs, and the family lost their house, she now relies on stolen Wi-Fi. But worst of all, her seventeen-year-old brother is dying of brain cancer.

To her, nothing can be worse. On the morning of the event, Allie and her mother are forty miles from home getting medication her brother desperately needs.

The solar event turns everything upside down and cascades Allie and her mother into a nightmare journey.

Allie is determined. The new burning landscape is not the end of the world; to her the end of the world would be not making it home before her brother dies.