Butterfly Winter

A Bomber crew crash lands in a remote area of China after dropping their bombs on Chinese cities in a terrible future war. The survivors are embraced by a hamlet filled with children, only to learn that doom might have come to claim them all. Excerpt: Pearson stared down at his hands as they shook above the small keyboard. This was his moment. He had a choice. He had the power to make a difference. A statistic flashed through his mind: Shanghai has 861 regular secondary schools with 795,400 students and 76,600 teaching staff. Shanghai has 1,021 primary schools with 788,600 students and a teaching staff of 61,300. The attendance rate of school-age children is 99.99%. What got him every time was the attendance rate. 99.99 percent. Every time he remembered this fact he couldn't help but imagine that the one tenth of one percent who didn't go to school must surely have felt left out. And in the Xu Hui district, in the southern part of Shanghai west of the Huangpu River, primary target of the Morning Star and sister city to Irvine, California, 451,000 students were just waking for school. About the Author: Weston Ochse (pronounced 'Oaks) (1965 - Present) lives in Southern Arizona with his wife, and fellow author, Yvonne Navarro, and Great Danes, Pester Ghost Palm Eater, Mad Dog Ghoulie Sonar Brain and Goblin Monster Dog. For entertainment he races tarantula wasps, wrestles rattlesnakes, and bakes in the noonday sun. His work has won the Bram Stoker Award for First Novel and been nominated for a Pushcart Prize for short fiction. His work has also appeared in anthologies, magazines and professional writing guides. He thinks it's damn cool that he's had stories in comic books. Weston holds Bachelor's Degrees in American Literature and Chinese Studies from Excelsior College. He holds a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from National University. Weston is a retired U.S. Army intelligence officer and current intelligence officer for the Defense Intelligence Agency. He has been to more than fifty countries and speaks Chinese with questionable authority. Weston is a black belt in Tae Kwon Do, a purple belt in Ryu Kempo Jujitsu and a green belt in the Hawaiian martial art of Kuai Lua.