Until the End of the World (Book 2): And After Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title

  License

  Dedication

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38

  CHAPTER 39

  CHAPTER 40

  CHAPTER 41

  CHAPTER 42

  CHAPTER 43

  CHAPTER 44

  CHAPTER 45

  CHAPTER 46

  CHAPTER 47

  CHAPTER 48

  CHAPTER 49

  CHAPTER 50

  CHAPTER 51

  CHAPTER 52

  CHAPTER 53

  CHAPTER 54

  CHAPTER 55

  CHAPTER 56

  CHAPTER 57

  CHAPTER 58

  CHAPTER 59

  CHAPTER 60

  CHAPTER 61

  CHAPTER 62

  CHAPTER 63

  CHAPTER 64

  CHAPTER 65

  CHAPTER 66

  CHAPTER 67

  CHAPTER 68

  CHAPTER 69

  CHAPTER 70

  CHAPTER 71

  CHAPTER 72

  CHAPTER 73

  CHAPTER 74

  CHAPTER 75

  CHAPTER 76

  CHAPTER 77

  CHAPTER 78

  CHAPTER 79

  CHAPTER 80

  CHAPTER 81

  About the Author

  Acknowledgements

  And After

  Until the End of the World

  Book Two

  by Sarah Lyons Fleming

  Copyright © 2014 Sarah Lyons Fleming

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the author, except as used in a book review. Please contact the author at [email protected].

  Cover photo © Cruskoko Dreamstime.com

  Lumos font © CarpeSaponem, Sarah McFalls

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  For Will, who knows that the way to my heart is through water filters and crossbows.

  And who loves me in spite of (or maybe because of) it.

  CHAPTER 1

  It’s still dark when I wake for my breakfast shift at the restaurant—that’s what we call the dining area here at the farm. Most people dread breakfast, but I like it. This past year has brought me a new appreciation of the dawn. I like the way it rubs off on me, the way it makes me feel quiet and peaceful.

  What I don’t like, however, is the cold, and it’s plenty cold in here. I push down the blankets and shiver when the air hits my skin. The farmhouse is always freezing by morning, no matter how much wood they load into the furnace. I drape a scarf over the light when I get back from the bathroom, so as not to wake Adrian, and inspect myself in the mirror. My hair is its usual puffy morning mess. I smooth it down and wind it into two buns. I might not have to keep it out of reach of zombies here at Kingdom Come, but I’m pretty sure no one wants a strand of long, brown hair in their oatmeal.

  I walk to Adrian’s nightstand to retrieve my hat. I don’t kiss him goodbye; Adrian is not a morning person, despite his many tranquil qualities. He’s sleeping bare-chested, with the blankets at his waist. I don’t know how he can stand it. We wage a silent, half-asleep battle every night in which he kicks the blankets off and I pile them back on.

  Adrian’s fingers wrap around my wrist. I drop my hat and quash my scream. “Holy crap! You scared me.”

  “Sorry,” he says, his voice sleepy. “How do you get prettier every day? What’s your secret?”

  I return his smile and ignore his question. “You’re a cheery fellow this morning.”

  “Because I got to see you. You didn’t answer my question.”

  Adrian’s hair is rumpled and he has pillow creases on his cheek, but with his green eyes, olive skin and strong features, I think he’s the one who’s beautiful.

  “Well,” I say, “you’ll be thirty soon, and your eyesight fails just a tiny bit more every day. It’s an illusion.”

  He lets go of a dramatic sigh, the one he throws around when I won’t act serious. “Can’t you just take a compliment?” I pull away, but he tightens his hold. “Take the compliment.”

  “Thanks,” I mutter.

  His dimple is at maximum depth now, although his calloused fingers haven’t loosened a bit. “And now answer the question.”

  “Don’t push your luck.”

  He releases me with a chuckle. “That wasn’t so hard, was it?”

  “It was horrible.” I brush back his dark hair and kiss his forehead. “I can’t believe you made me do that. See you at breakfast?”

  “Two eggs, over easy,” he orders. “Bacon, toast and hash browns.”

  “You wish,” I say with a laugh. We’re low on eggs at this point in the winter; most of the eggs are in the incubators, making new chickens. “Oatmeal. Buckets of oatmeal. I’ll make it just for you.”

  I tiptoe down the creaky stairs and into the night. My boots crunch on the leftover snow, of which we had a record amount this past winter. Not that anyone keeps records anymore. A lot has melted, but the enormous piles that have been shoveled to the side all winter might need a week or more.

  The restaurant is off to the right—a barn-like building whose windows glow with the warmth of electric light. We have real bulbs in the farmhouse too, while people in the cabins and tents have to make do with oil lamps, candles or battery-powered lights. I pull off my boots once I’m through the back door and wave to Mikayla, who’s started the fires in the wood cookstoves.

  She sets a giant bag of oats on the floor and smiles. “Morning, Cassie.”

  “Morning.”

  The kitchen is a huge room with a pantry, three wood cookstoves and a long counter in the middle for food prep. I hold my hands over one of the stoves and soak in the warmth. Mikayla’s ringlets have already escaped the confines of her ponytail and stick to her temples. Her skin has a golden glow and her cheeks are flushed from the heat. That’s another reason I love breakfast shift—by the end of it we’re in tank tops and bare feet like it’s summer.

  “Want to start the oatmeal?” she asks.

  “Sure.” I retrieve a giant pot and grab the milk out of one of the freezers that are modified to run as refrigerators on the solar.

  “We’ve got a bunch of eggs,” Mikayla says. “Enough to make frittatas. I’m so excited!”

  She bounces around, collecting ingredients. Only Mikayla could be this excited about eggs. She was on the farm before Bornavirus destroyed the world; she’d plan
ned to start her own farm one day.

  “Where’s Ben?” I ask.

  Ben and Adrian were partners in what was a sustainable farm called Kingdom Come Farm. It’s now Kingdom Come Safe Zone, although we’re still a farm. You have to be a farm these days, if you want to eat. Fully-stocked grocery stores are a thing of the past. Mikayla and Ben began dating in the fall, and now they’re inseparable.

  “Guard duty. He’ll swing by after. He made me promise I’d hide some frittata for him. Hey, are you going on the final run? They found a group of Lexers over to the west.”

  “Yeah, I think we’re leaving after breakfast.”

  We’ve spent the winter killing all the infected we could locate. We’d waited, fingers crossed, until winter came, hoping the infected would freeze. And when they did, we made it our mission to seek them out and finish them off. We’d also hoped that the cold would destroy them once and for all, but it turns out there’s a fifty-percent survival rate when thawed, based on our own experiments and reports from a few other Safe Zones. It’s better than nothing.

  I put on water to boil, set home-canned fruit on the serving tables in the dining area and then start on today’s bread. I love making bread, although making it in such large quantities is more work than pleasure. We have it down to a science: it’s measured, kneaded and tucked by the heat to rise by the time Toby and Jeff fall through the door. Jeff has a crooked ponytail and bags under his eyes, and Toby’s blond dreadlocks are rattier than usual.

  “Rough night?” I ask.

  “I’m too old to be sleeping in that tent,” Jeff says. He turns to Toby. “Unlike you, I am no longer twenty-six. You young whippersnappers may be able to stay up all night, but we old folks need sleep.”

  He’s only in his forties, but I know what he means. The guys in that tent are all lovely human beings, but they’re loud. “I don’t blame you,” I say. “I wouldn’t want to be in there.”

  “There’s an empty bed in the old timers’ tent,” Jeff says. “I’m switching today.”

  Toby points a finger. “You thought you could hang, old man, but you were mistaken.”

  Toby was an employee on the farm before Bornavirus. He’s so laid-back he can appear lazy, but he knows the farm and all its animal and vegetable residents intimately, including the once-illegal herbs he grows just outside the fence. He might prefer hanging out to work, but he does more than his fair share, and he’s good on patrol. Jeff mutters something and pushes Toby into the dining room to set up tables and chairs.

  A moment later, Penny rushes in and hangs her coat on a hook. Her dark hair is in a haphazard bun, and her eyes are puffy with sleep. “Sorry I’m a little late. James practically had to push me out of bed.”

  Penny walks to where I’m stirring oatmeal and wipes her fogged-up glasses on her shirt. “I’m late,” she says with a frown.

  “Geez, Pen, you’re allowed to be late once in your life.”

  She pushes the antique glasses up her nose and whispers, “No, I’m late.”

  “Shit.” I drop the spoon into the pot. The oatmeal sucks it down like quicksand. I try to fish it out without taking my eyes off Penny. “Crap.”

  She nods at my eloquence and takes a deep breath. Her normally light brown skin is almost as pale as mine. I inspect her for any other signs of pregnancy, but her soft curves haven’t changed in any significant way.

  “How late? How do you feel? Are you freaking out?”

  Penny points at where I’m slopping oatmeal all over and runs a shaky hand along her glasses’ earpiece. “I’m over a week late. I’m tired and, like, not quite right. And of course I’m freaking out!”

  “So how can we find out? Didn’t they used to inject rabbits with urine? We can’t do that. There are rabbits here, bu—”

  “Well, we could murder a rabbit,” she says with a look that tells me I’m insane, “or I could go to the infirmary and get one of the tests. James and I are going to get one after breakfast. Maureen’s filling in for me at school.”

  “That probably makes more sense.” I laugh and squeeze her arm. “I’m excited. Can I be excited?”

  Penny’s brown eyes shine. “Yeah. I’m kind of excited.”

  Sometimes I think about a sweet, tiny baby that Adrian and I have made. But then I think about how I would have to protect it. How I would have yet another person to worry about. How babies cry and make noise and you can’t tell them to keep quiet. And then I stop thinking about babies. Besides, I’ve got Bits.

  This is the next best thing, though, so I focus on the positive: A tiny Penny-and-James baby. Quite possibly the smartest baby ever. I whisper this to Penny when she passes on her way to the pantry, which gets me an eye roll and a giggle.

  By the time Ben and Dan arrive, the dining area is filled with people eating oatmeal and day-old toast. Only the early birds and those in the know got frittata this morning. And me—I think I ate four eggs’ worth. Barnaby, a dog with some Golden Retriever but no brains to speak of, follows them in. He sniffs my leg, tail wagging madly, and then plops his butt on my foot where I wash dishes at the trough sink. There aren’t many dogs around, since Lexers eat animals. Maybe a lot of dogs were eaten by their owners before they figured out they should have run.

  “I heard I could score some real eggs,” Dan says.

  Mikayla bustles over to where she hid the last of the frittata. “You heard right.”

  “I tried to lose him, but he followed me like a lost puppy once he heard,” Ben says. He takes off his winter hat to reveal a curly mop of brown hair. Mikayla tousles it and gives him a kiss.

  Dan puckers his lips at Mikayla. She grins, hands him a plate and says, “Not gonna happen.”

  “Worth a shot,” he says to Ben, who doesn’t look all that amused. Ben’s a very nice person, but he’s unbelievably serious.

  Dan inhales his frittata by the sink while Barnaby pants beneath his plate with hungry eyes. Dan’s a carpenter and good-looking in a scruffy, dirty-blond, young-weathered-thirty-something kind of way. He’s never hurting for company, and he’s an incorrigible flirt; he puts Ana to shame.

  “Here you go,” he says to Barnaby and drops a bite of frittata on the wood floor. Barnaby scrambles to his feet and wolfs it down.

  “Don’t let Mikayla see you do that with real eggs,” I say. “She’ll kill you.”

  “I couldn’t resist. Look at that face.”

  Barnaby’s tongue lolls out of the side of his mouth while he shifts his gaze between me and Dan. This dog eats anything, barks at everything and manages to get himself filthier than I thought possible. He doesn’t know a single trick.

  “That is the dumbest dog ever,” I say, and give him a scratch. I love Barn, but it’s true. “It’s a good thing he’s cute.”

  “Well, he’s not fixed. So, if we find a girl who’s not, maybe we’ll get puppies.”

  Barnaby horks up something he’s scavenged, and what looks like crumpled paper hits the floor in a pool of dog drool and frittata. I look at Dan. “That’s the future of domesticated dogs? We should just cut our losses and move on.”

  Dan laughs and wipes it up with his cloth napkin, which he then throws into the laundry bin. “You’re going on the run with us later, right?”

  “Yeah. You’re going? You just got off guard. Don’t you need any sleep?”

  He drops his plate in the sink and pats his stomach. “I’m going to get a couple hours right now. I’ll be good to go.”

  “Well, that’s dedication.” I’m decent at killing zombies, and one of the few who are willing to do it, but I don’t like it.

  He winks. “Nah, I heard you were going and didn’t want to miss out.”

  “Must you bother me?” I ask. “Aren’t there tons of other girls you could flirt with on this fine morning?”

  “Yes,” he says, “but they don’t blush like you do. I can’t help myself.”

  I threaten to squirt him with the water nozzle and say, “Go to sleep, you. I’ve got people to feed witho
ut you bugging me all morning.”

  He salutes me and marches out the door. I leave to retrieve the next round of never-ending dishes. These people can eat.

  CHAPTER 2

  There are clothes under my clothes, but it’s still freezing on the back of the snowmobile. I grip Adrian’s waist and bury my face in his back to keep out of the wind. We come to a stop fifteen miles from the farm, where a group of Lexers was spotted on one of Dwayne’s flights in the plane.

  Dan checks his map and points into the trees. “Right down there.”

  Ana shakes out her short, chestnut hair before pulling her cleaver off her shoulder. The cleaver-shaped blade on one end of the shaft is perfect for decapitation, and the dull spike on the other end slides into an eye socket or the soft spot right below the skull. It’s still our favorite weapon, although my Ka-Bar knife is a close second. And my revolver. I love my Smith and Wesson.

  “C’mon!” Ana says, bouncing on the balls of her feet.

  She heads down the incline without waiting for a reply. Dan races her down the snow-covered slope with his snowmobile partner, Toby, following behind. I take off my mittens and pull on the leather elbow-length gloves that I use to deal with Lexers.

  “Go ahead,” I say to Adrian. “I have to get out the rubber gloves and stuff.” He nods and joins the others.

  “Why are we here again?” Peter asks from behind me.

  He leans against his snowmobile, eyes as dark as his black hat. I finish pulling latex gloves over my leather ones and grab my cleaver.

  “To preserve the human race,” I say, only half joking.

  “No, I meant we as in you and me. We hate this.” He blows into his hands before pulling on his own gloves.

  “Well, I certainly don’t love it.” I point to Ana. “Not like your other half. But I think she does it solely for the outfit.”

  Peter sniffs in amusement. Ana wears black leather gloves and a black leather jacket. They match the black leather pants she’s tucked into tall, fur-lined boots. She’s not tall, but she’s strong and gorgeous with her small features and dark eyes. We watch as she brings her cleaver forward in a swift, effortless and deadly motion.

  “We do it because it needs to be done,” I continue. “I’m not going to sit at the farm, worrying about whether or not people come back, are you?”