Read an excerpt of Aurora, from Spider-Man and Kimi screenwriter David Koepp

David Koepp is high on the list of “writers whose work you definitely know, even if you don’t remember their names.” Koepp’s name is all over modern blockbuster cinema: He wrote 2002’s Spider-Man, the first of Sam Raimi’s trilogy about the wall-crawling superhero, and adapted Michael Crichton’s novel Jurassic Park He was the director of the original film in the continuing dinosaur series. He co-wrote the first of Tom Cruise’s Mission: Impossible movies, and the first (and last) of the stillborn Dark Universe movies, The MummyCruise stars as well. The 1993 classic of cult-crime was his creation. Carlito’s WayAl Pacino and Sean Penn star in the movie. KimiWe currently have a contender in the top 2022 movies.

Koepp also wrote or co-wrote David Fincher’s Panic Room, Ron Howard’s The Paper, Robert Zemeckis’ dark comedic fantasy The Death is Her, and Steven Spielberg’s Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Whether you love or hate any of those movies, you’ve almost certainly seen his work on screen.

Koepp is also a director — his films include the creepy Kevin Bacon ghost story The Stir of Echoes The action film starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt as the opulent Joseph Gordon-Levitt Premium RushThe deeply bizarre Johnny Depp film Mortdecai. In 2019, he was a novelist and wrote the bioterrorism thriller Cold Storage. His latest book, AuroraHarperCollins has announced that a Netflix version of the film adaptation has been offered to. The Hurt Locker, Zero Dark ThirtyAnd Strange Days director Kathryn Bigelow.

Aurora is a Crichton-like “scientific thriller” based on real-world predictions about the possible outcomes of a large-scale geomagnetic storm on modern society. The novel centers around two locales: In Aurora, Illinois, a woman named Aubrey is looking after the 15-year-old son of her predatory ex-husband Rusty, who’s currently in the process of divorcing his latest wife. Aubrey must prepare for the worst and survive the downpour in power lines as the national grid is predicted to collapse.

Thom, her distant, extremely rich Silicon Valley CEO brother, keeps a $30 million emergency kit in case of an unplanned event. But he is facing completely new problems when the lights go off. Here’s a sample from Aurora which will be available in shops on June 7.

HarperCollins Publishers

What was suddenly clear to Aubrey was that she’d learned exactly nothing from COVID. Well, that wasn’t entirely true. She had learned once again that wildly unexpected events do happen in life and that they can last way longer than you’d ever imagine, with much more far-reaching consequences. Therefore, it’s only basic common sense to stock up on supplies and hope the dreadful day never comes. She’d become mindful of the fact that she was no longer a solitary person in this world but, rather, the sole caregiver for a moody teenage shithead, and that she had a moral obligation to be prepared to provide for them both. Sometimes things happen. Always be prepared.

18 months ago her first move was to research what the average person needs in an emergency. She’d googled “basic home disaster kit” and found hundreds of hits to choose from. The first few were sponsored, overpriced duffel bags jammed with too much of the wrong stuff, but a few links down she found an article with a dot-gov suffix, so she’d clicked on that. This handy checklist covered everything. Not just another deadly virus, but also for fires and power outages. Dutifully, she’d printed it out and taped it to the rust-proof black steel storage rack she’d bought on Amazon for $200 and put together one rainy Saturday, just around the corner from the basement stairs.

Aubrey stood in front of the rack now, staring at the two-page disaster checklist, which she’d even laminated before taping it to the support on the right side. She’d gotten off to a great start. Her feeling was that lamination was particularly helpful. The first item on the checklist had been marked off. Download the Recommended Supplies List. There was a neat black line drawn through it, a line so straight and true that it fairly shone with confidence and pride in one’s farsightedness. Yes, she’d done that.

However, the rest of this list was unmarked and clean. The rack contained one or more items, depending on your counting method. It was a cardboard bag that once housed twelve Goya Black Beans. One of the cans was missing, and she remembered clearly the day she’d made them as a side dish and discovered that both she and Scott despised Goya Black Beans. She’d only bought them because she’d read they could be stored for long periods of time, but, damn, you could hang on to those eleven cans of beans for a decade and still not eat them.

Rest of the rack could be used for storage, but was not occupied by any survival equipment. No stored water, hand-crank or battery-powered radios or NOAA Weather Radios with tone alert were found. You didn’t find anything on the other side of this list.

Aubrey looked at the empty shelf in despair. “That’s pathetic.”

She heard a voice behind her. Scott was at the bottom of the steps when she turned around. He was not in a mood to harass her. She turned and returned. “I’m aware of that.”

“You didn’t stock up on anything?” “No. Did you?”

“I’m fifteen. It’s not my job.” She didn’t answer. Scott sensed something was amiss and continued pressing on. “Did you really need to come down here and look at the rack in order to figure out there was nothing on it?”

“No, Scott, I was well aware there’s nothing on the rack. I came down to get this.” She tore the laminated list off the upright and headed for the stairs, brushing past him. He stared at empty shelves and remained where he was.

“I hate those fucking beans.” “So do I. Are you coming?” “Where?”

“To the store.”

He turned to look at her. Now, she was at top of the steps and he was at bottom. He frowned. “The thing hits in, what, four hours or something? Is it possible to estimate the amount of customers who will visit the shop? Do you honestly think there will even be anything left at the store?”

The anger rising within her was overwhelming, so she took a deep breath to calm it. Panic is her predominant emotion. “It’s not going to get any better if we wait. Meet me at the car.”

She went upstairs and got her purse. She was happy to have at least 100 and 11 dollars. They’d stop at the bank on the way, take the daily limit off her debit card, and put everything they could get at the Piggly Wiggly on her Visa while the machines were still working. Even if they bought every single thing on the list, in double quantities, it wouldn’t last them more than a couple weeks, but there was no point thinking that far ahead.

After grabbing her keys, she walked towards the front door and pulled her bag across her shoulders. Scott emerged from the basement, strode toward the TV and began to scroll towards it. The channel was showing increasingly hectic cable news. Scott’s eyes were big, his spiking anxiety belying the adolescent cool he was attempting to project.

Aubrey turned back, picked up the remote, and shut the TV off in the middle of the anchor’s breathless speculation about the duration of the impending worldwide power outage. Scott turned against her. “You don’t think we need to know that stuff?”

She took one step forward, and looked up at him. He’d passed her in height about a year ago and she wasn’t used to it yet. She was happy with her posture. She stood, ramrod straight, and looked into his icy blue eyes, the same color as his father’s.

“No. We don’t. What we need is to get to the store, now.”

His cheek was tingling as he looked at her. He was either mad or afraid, and he literally bit his cheeks. It was probably both.

Aubrey softened Aubrey’s tone. “You know, I read once that if you’re sad, you’re living in the past. If you’re anxious, you’re living in the future. But if you’re at peace, you’re living in the present.”

“And if you’re completely fucked, you’re living with Aubrey.”

It was impossible not to want to give him a slap. It was so intense that she imagined doing it herself, feeling the adrenaline rush through her body. As her arm began to swell, she saw her right hand slip back under her left biceps and her forearm arcing in an arc. Her backhand caught him on the right side. He jerked his head to one side, and a red spot appeared on his cheek. She saw him turn back to her, shock in his eyes, his fingertips going to his inflamed skin, and she saw the expression on his face that said, “Wow, I have completely misjudged this lady and I better pull my shit together right this fucking second.” Somehow, seeing that scene play out in her mind was enough, and she didn’t need to live it.

She spoke instead in a calm voice. “I’m sorry your parents dumped you, Scott. I’m what you’ve got. Get in the car.”

She turned to go.

She got into the car and closed the doors. She’d made a strong, unkind play for control and now just had to hope she’d commanded enough of his respect to get through the next few hours. The rearview mirror caught her attention and she turned to look up. They weren’t the only ones in the neighborhood who’d heard the news, and everybody was headed somewhere, doing what needed to be done while it was still possible to do anything at all.

—

Norman Levy, the eighty-eight-year-old former college professor who lived at the near end of the block, was standing in his front yard, holding a boxlike contraption in front of his eyes and staring directly into the late-afternoon sun. Aubrey smiled half-smile for the first day. Norman, of course, was well-informed and curious. He never was anything other than that.

Turning around, she looked at her home. Insatiable, she placed the flat end of her hand onto the centre of the wheel, and let out an impatient horn blast. Scott emerged a few minutes later with the screen door closing behind him and something thick in his pocket. The front door was left open half the time. Jesus Christ! This is the worst sidekick that I have ever had.

Scott got into the car and shut the door. He stared straight ahead. Aubrey reversed the car and pulled the front out faster than she expected.

—

After the bank closed one hour earlier, the queue for the ATM cubicle stretched out to the curb and half a block down. Scott and Aubrey just sat for a while in the car, staring at it.

“That line’s at least a half-hour,” Aubrey said. “Puts us behind at the supermarket. Do it or not?”

Scott was on the phone and tapping away. She grinned. “Can whoever you’re texting please wait until we—”

She was reading on the phone when he cut off her. “It says the average ATM can hold as much as two hundred thousand dollars, but almost none of them do. In off-hours, it’s more like ten thousand.”

Aubrey’s eyes skimmed the line in front of the bank, counting fast. “That’s gotta be thirty people. Closer to forty.”

“What’s the most you can take out at once?” he asked. “Six hundred dollars.”

He stood up and shook his head. “Even if we waited, that thing’s gonna be empty by the time we get there.”

“I have a hundred and twelve dollars on me,” she said. “That’s it.”

Aurora

These prices were correct at the time of publication.

Coming soon: A major motion picture by Netflix, and Academy Award-winning director Kathryn Bigelow.

The author Cold Storage comes a riveting, eerily plausible thriller, told with the menace and flair of Unter dem Dome or Mary Project Hail MaryA Midwestern family is affected by a cataclysm that affects the world.