No Lights after Sundown

LOG LINE
After an EMP attack, four teens are captured by terrorists and learn of a seaborne biological attack to follow. Following a day of horror, they escape; with shades of Red Dawn and The African Queen they turn a family yacht into a torpedo and defy a gale to stop them.

SYNOPSIS
NO LIGHTS AFTER SUNDOWN
Written by Louis Stannard

Corey Case, farm teen and outdoorsman and his stuttering brainy friend, Marvin Clutch, are as different as eighteen-year-olds can be. With only days before college begins, they agree to one last fishing trip to the mountains. No sooner is the first fish in the pan at their campsite than a flash of light and a pulse of energy instantly brings America’s high-tech civilization to a halt as an EMP attack zaps every unshielded microchip in the country. Then, sundown.

Seeing only one fire further up the mountain, the boys decide to check it out before returning home. While hiking the short trail which normally opens to twinkling lights from the valley below, they cannot help but note “there are no lights after sundown.”

Approaching the campfire, they see a man on his knees with a knife to his throat. Shocked, they fall flat on the ground. Holding their breath, they watch Chechen émigrés Dimitri, Grigol and Vache murder their lawyer, Miller; he knows too much of their involvement in the EMP attack and a planned biological attack to follow.

Discovered, the boys flee setting traps to slow the terrorists’ pursuit. Taking a short cut, they rappel a sheer rock face and arrive at the national forest’s parking lot first. With the killers in close pursuit, they disable the Chechens’ hardened Hummer and flee in Corey’s old Jeep—an anachronism of pre-microchip America.

Leaving the mountains for the interstate, they thread through microchip dependent automobiles sitting dormant as far as the eye can see. Soon, they are stopped by predators who are fighting a retired motorhome couple protecting stranded teens Elizabeth Foster and Stella Mortimer from rape. The seniors prevail, but are killed themselves when Corey and Marvin offer the girls a ride home.

As the teens make their way through a night without lights, communications, water, food or gasoline, the remnants of civilization slip away as if never there. Worse, conflict builds between the four: The spoiled Elizabeth demands they drive her to “her sick Daddy,” as Marvin and the fatherless Stella bicker over solutions.

The terrorists are desperate to silence the boys. They kill everyone at an RV park just to steal a pre-chip truck and catch up with the teens at Corey’s family farm.

After a night of terror, intimidation and murder at Corey’s farm, the teens overcome personal demons and prevail. In a scene right out of the Great Escape, Marvin and Stella escape on an antique motorcycle while Corey and Elizabeth hide in a water tower and drown the pursuing Vache. Now outgunned, Dimitri and Grigol flee the farm for a rendezvous with a trawler at sea. They will use a developing Nor’easter to carry balloons laden with pestilence ashore for the coup de grace to a dying America.

Reminiscent of the African Queen, the four teens turn Elizabeth’s family yacht into a torpedo and launch into the storm. Defying the maelstrom and their sinking yacht, they attack the terrorist’s vessel.

Just feet from their objective, they are swamped by the storm and captured by the killers before their makeshift torpedoes explode. Forced to watch the attack on their homeland, the now stutter-free Marvin remotely detonates the torpedoes delivering a death blow to both vessels. Then, in a primal fight to the death, the now merciless teens kill all the terrorists as both vessels sink beneath the waves.

Rescued using hundred-year-old Morse from Marvin’s shielded radio, they return to the Case Farm where identical birthmarks reveal Marvin and Stella are brother and sister; all begin an agrarian lifestyle in what’s left of a civilization without technology.