The creases around Dan’s eyes deepened when he grinned. “Sure, they got here maybe a month ago. With Bits and the others. You know them?”
Bits was here. Peter felt so light he could’ve sworn his boots had left the ground. Everything grew blurry, but this time he didn’t bite his cheek to stop the tears. Bits was here. He didn’t ask who the others were, just in case Dan left someone out by accident. He was afraid to ask about Ana. If it was bad, he wanted Cassie to be the one to tell him.
“Yeah,” Peter said. He wiped his eyes. Dan looked so pleased for him that it was impossible not to smile back. Reunions were rare these days. “I know them.”
“Call Cass on the radio,” Dan said to the guy at the table. Then he put a hand on Peter’s shoulder and motioned up the road.
Dan said something. Peter nodded along, but he wasn’t listening. He was watching the gold and red leaves float to the dirt road and praying they were all there. Then he heard something besides Dan’s friendly voice—the sound of bare feet slapping the ground. He only knew one person who ran around barefoot as much as she could.
Peter looked up as Cassie rounded the bend. She stopped—mouth open, eyes wide—almost like she hadn’t been sure it was him she was going to find.
“Peter!” she called, and ran toward him.
Her laugh was so carefree and her smile so wide that he was almost positive they’d all made it. But, no matter what, he still had a daughter and a best friend. He still had a family. He was home.
THE END
Turn the page to continue Cassie’s story in
And After.
And After
Until the End of the World, Book Two
For Will, who knows that the way to my heart is through water filters and crossbows.
And who loves me in spite (or maybe because) of it.
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 planned 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.”
&n
bsp; 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 without 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.
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 c
ertainly 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?”
There may be nothing worse than not knowing what’s happened to someone you love. This new world is full of stories, of lives, with no ending. People have survived, died, turned—there’s no way to know. My brother, Eric, was supposed to meet us at my parents’ house last summer. He never showed. Everyone has a story like that these days, and I couldn’t bear to have another.
“I know,” Peter says. He frowns in Ana’s direction. “They’re going to thaw soon. You know she’s going to want to be out here all the time.”
Ana is brave to the point of stupidity. Last fall she took on six Lexers by herself. She’s used herself as bait. And, in true Ana fashion, she always escapes unscathed, so she doesn’t see what the problem is.
“We’ll be there, too,” I say. “I’ll keep her under control.”
“You may be the only person who can.”
Ana and I make a good team because we can usually anticipate what the other’s planning. Not only do we keep each other safe, but I can usually deter her from doing asinine things like fighting six Lexers who could be ignored. Unlike her, I don’t have a death wish. She listens to me. Occasionally.
“I’ll do my best. Now, come on, or we’ll be accused of shirking our duties.”
Peter drapes his arm across my shoulders while we walk. It’s not awkward, even with our past. In the past year he’s become one of my closest friends. I can tell him anything, the way I can with Penny and Nelly. Sometimes I tell him more; the Peter who never discussed anything profound is practically a philosopher now.
Until the End of the World Box Set Page 46
