Book of the Lost: AAV-07d25-11: (A reverse harem, post-pandemic, slow-burn romance) (The JAK2 Cycle, Book 3)
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Book of the Lost (AAV-07d25-11)
The JAK2 Cycle, Book 3
VES Pullen
Contents
Prologue
I. The Bunker
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
II. Beyond the Walls
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
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Playlist for Book of the Lost
About the Author
Copyright © 2020 VES Pullen
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without written permission from the author, by any electronic or mechanical means including but not limited to: exporting to file, photocopying, recording, information storage and retrieval systems, or other means known now or hereafter invented. Exclusions: brief excerpts or quotations for use in reviews or tattoos (pix or it didn’t happen).
This is a work of fiction. While references might be made to actual historical events or existing locations, the names, characters, places, and incidents are products the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons — living or dead — businesses, or locations is purely coincidental. Really. That bar is by no means a block and a half from my house.
Written with Scrivener
Created with Vellum
Dedication
This is dedicated to Roxie.
You were born several years later, and several hundred miles away, and although we look nothing alike, you are my twin sister. Whatever, “science,” we know the truth.
If I leave all for thee, wilt thou exchange
And be all to me? Shall I never miss
Home-talk and blessing and the common kiss
That comes to each in turn, nor count it strange,
When I look up, to drop on a new range
Of walls and floors ... another home than this?
Nay, wilt thou fill that place by me which is
Filled by dead eyes too tender to know change?
That's hardest. If to conquer love, has tried,
To conquer grief, tries more ... as all things prove;
For grief indeed is love and grief beside.
Alas, I have grieved so I am hard to love.
Yet love me—wilt thou? Open thine heart wide,
And fold within, the wet wings of thy dove.
— Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Prologue
Mouse, About Four Years Ago
“I want to die,” the little girl whispered, her voice broken from vomiting from the pain. “Why can’t I die?”
“Because you’re special.” I ran my gloved hand over her damp forehead, smoothing the hair away. “Because you deserve to live.”
“I’m not, I’m not special— and I don’t deserve it more than anyone else. And— and—” she hiccuped a few times, and I winced at how painful it sounded, “and you said all of them are dead. Why? Why is everyone else dead—?”
“Shh.” I held up the cup of water and moved the straw between her lips, forcing her to sip from it. She’d been getting whinier every day, and I love her, but Jesus… “No more talking until you drink more, your throat is all fucked up.”
I only felt a little bad about using her drink to shut her up until she grimaced, and I realized the water was too cold. As soothing as it probably was to her inflamed throat, she was already developing anxieties about cold foods, and I felt slightly mean.
But still didn’t stop.
“I don’t know what to tell you, Aesli, I don’t know anything. I don’t know why you have this horrible disease either, but I do know that PV is why you lived. That virus is no match for your fucked-up blood. How’s that for irony? The thing that makes you so miserable is exactly why you survived.”
“I wish I was contagious then, I’d infect everyone,” she grumped, shifting uncomfortably. Tears carved raw paths down her smooth cheeks, the salinity itchy on her delicate skin. I ran a damp washcloth over her face, gently, wiping away the burn and wishing things were different.
I wished for so many things to be different, but what I wanted more than anything was to live. I didn’t want to be one more person that she lost. I didn’t want to be the one to leave her all alone.
It was just a matter of time though, before the virus found me too. When that happened, Aesli would be on her own in a ghost town of bloated corpses and decay. People had died so fast — faster than anyone could keep up with — and when the authorities arrived, they took one look and threw up a wall around the town, rather than try to help.
I could only hope that when I failed my last death saving throw, she’d be strong enough by then to make it to the quarantine barrier on her own.
Scratch that, I also hoped they didn’t shoot her on sight when she got there.
This girl… this beautiful, brave little girl deserved to live. She deserved a full and happy life after being ravaged by a disease that, by rights, shouldn’t have hit her until she was old and gray. She hadn’t even had her first period yet — a super late bloomer these days, my abnormal little freak — and frankly, with the way that girl gushed blood from a fucking paper cut, I’d hoped I wasn’t anywhere nearby when that started. It’d be like that scene in The Shining when the elevator doors open.
She hates when I call her my little freak. Or she claims to, I know she secretly loves it — any attention is good attention! Okay, not really.
I met Aesli at the medical center the day she got her diagnosis. She’d had test after test, for weeks, because they wouldn’t believe what the results were telling them. Her vision hadn’t come back yet but she was seeing gradations of light, and she was incredibly frail; she hadn’t been eating much since her disease manifested, and she was just this gangly, skinny little girl with the most beautiful dark red hair that I wanted to shave off and glue to my own head.
Since she would be coming in for daily blood draws until her red blood cell count dropped to normal levels, the powers-that-be wanted her to have some consistency, and decided that I would be a good person to work with her. I’m still not sure why, I wasn’t exactly known for being good with kids or anything — in fact, I’m pretty sure it was entirely based on me being female and shorter than her, like I wouldn’t loom over her too much or something. Or maybe because I was about forty years younger than all my co-workers. Regardless, we didn’t get many customers that returned daily, so assigning me as her only phlebotomist was a surprisingly thoughtful and compassionate gesture. And I hoped I could somehow make it all less scary for her.
It wasn’t scary at all, not for Aesli.
Her parents were a different story, but Aesli? From the first day, she sat down in my chair and stuck her arm out for the needle, and asked me what my favorite band was because hers wasn’t a band, she loved Billie Eilish and Hals
ey best. She was talking so fast and so confidently, it was hard to believe that little body was holding in such a huge personality.
After a ten minute lecture on the singers/songwriters/“freaking geniuses! Sorry, Mom…,” while I did her blood draw and then hooked up the bag of fluids, I finally got a chance to talk. I told her I was going through a Die Antwoord phase, and then I had to find them for her on her Spotify account on her phone and heart my favorite songs so she could listen to them. I gave her mom a look, but she just laughed and told me they didn’t censor what she listened to as long as it was over her headphones and wasn’t a boy band.
I know she regretted that call, because when they came in the next day, Aesli informed me she sang her father “the Daddy song” — not one I’d favorited for her — but he still wouldn’t get her a puppy. And how she kinda wanted a penis but only if it could have wings. And also now she was a huge fan of Die Antwoord and would I make her a playlist?
That was my Aesli.
Since then, and for the past however many months, I saw her five days a week and it was the brightest part of my day. She was unrelentingly cheerful and enthusiastic about everything, despite all the tests and treatments and physical pain. Despite the bone marrow biopsy and the operation to create her fistula. Despite the insurance company refusing to authorize the gene mutation analysis, or the nutritionist, or the “off label” gene therapy treatment that would keep her off the meds that could make her infertile. Despite all the struggles and the miserable reality of her disease, she was optimistic and compassionate, always trying to make it easier on everyone else.
She found or made up reasons to celebrate every day: She got her eyesight back! I dyed my hair! She dyed her hair — well, only a streak but it matched mine! Halsey dropped a new album! Her blood count was down below 60%! Her nails all broke off but that’s okay, she didn’t like them long anyway! I found my own good moods persisting long after she’d leave, until they lasted the whole fucking day.
She was the goddamn bright spot for the entire lab, every person started smiling when her mom helped her through that door every morning.
This clusterfuck of an epidemic? Her losing every goddamn person she loved?
It. Wasn’t. Fucking. Fair.
The washcloth dropped from nerveless fingers as what she said finally penetrated the fog of exhaustion and grief eating me alive.
“Aesli, I think you might have just saved the world,” I whispered, staring at her with my mouth gaping open behind my surgical mask. “Starting with me.”
A week later, I’d gotten past the extremely mild fever I’d “suffered” as my immune system responded to the injection of Aesli’s magical blood and her surplus of white blood cells and antibodies. My professional phagocytes identified the foreign invaders, bound to them, devoured them whole, then displayed the ingested material to other white blood cells as part of antigen presentation. They used my lymphatic system as a goddamn transit system to share their little medicine show all over my body, instructing my immune system on what to look for and how to destroy it.
While we were both recovering — me significantly faster than her — I took time to experiment with her blood, working off of every piece of literature and journal article I could find in the whole damn place about how to create a vaccine, scouring the internet for instructions and ingredients.
What shouldn’t work, did.
And I know it did, because I had plenty of samples of infected blood to test against.
Aesli had also recovered completely, regaining her strength after seeming to skip the secondary infection phase — her immune system was never compromised so her body was never vulnerable.
During that time, we’d been living off of pudding cups and the contents of the various vending machines since I didn’t trust any of the other food in the hospital. If it wasn’t in the second year of its four year shelf-life, and had been sealed within the temperature controlled vend-o-rama since prior to the outbreak, I wasn’t going to ingest it or let Aesli eat it. Her “clean room” in the ICU wasn’t quite as clean anymore, but it had the pumped-up, closed-loop ventilation system that protected us from the decomp smell for the most part.
When she was awake, we passed the time talking, reading to each other, and trading off as the Dungeon Master: I taught her how to play Dungeons & Dragons without rulebooks, character sheets, and only a few six-sided dice I found in an old board game in the kid’s ward. It wasn’t easy, but she learned the basics enough to even DM for me.
Sitting together in her room, she spent days planning her “campaign” while I read medical books and worked on the vaccine, and her excitement, her fucking imagination, was a thing of beauty. Surrounded by all this horror, grieving for her family, she found so much comfort in the same game that got me through my own childhood, and it almost brought a tear to my desiccated peepers and warmth to my stony, deadened heart.
But once we both felt capable of making it to the barrier, it was time to go.
We walked from the medical center to the edge of the quarantine zone — just a few miles but it took several hours at our pace, with frequent rests. At first, we stayed way back because the guards went into a panic, positive no one was left alive in Salem, but I finally got them to listen, and one of them immediately ran off to find the CDC investigator in charge at my request.
I guess I sounded like I knew what I was talking about, that or shouting “We have a vaccine! I can prove it works!” was enough to get their attention.
And the rest, as they say, is history.
I
The Bunker
Chapter One
Luka
I started out in the morning at a fully stocked grocery store with my brother, buying flowers and chocolate for Azzie as part of her plan to rescue us from the bad guys — a plan years in the making that somehow just worked. No one turned on us, even though plenty of people could’ve. No one involved fucked up and gave anything away.
Everything. Just. Worked.
My brother was even safe, waiting at the cabin with the worst people in the world — the Slopes and the Callises — and although he seemed a bit on edge and primed for violence, he was (physically) unscathed.
I’d call it a miracle, but I thought it was just a really fucking good plan. They didn’t take anything for granted, and although it depended on a certain amount of trust in people, the people they chose to trust came through.
And I knew this Mouse person was involved in formulating and exhaustively refining the plan, but I’d never met Mouse, so as far as I was concerned, it was all Azzie. My girl was a fucking genius.
Yeah, that’s right: my girl.
My beautiful, smart, sassy girl.
I didn’t even give any fucks that I was sharing her with four other dudes, because those dudes were my brothers, even the two that weren’t related by blood.
After rescuing Sasha from the garbage people, as Azzie liked to say, we walked for a good twenty minutes through the woods, then piled up outside this perfectly normal looking cave. I’d stayed towards the middle of the group, hovering near Azzie’s foster family.
Didn’t know why, just a hunch.
There was something going on. Call it “twinplet sense,” call it male intuition — or maybe it was just the look on Azzie’s face when she left that cabin, and how my brother was giving these fucks a death glare — but my Spidey sense was tingling. That’s different from “Spider sense” which is just Spider being all mysterious and enigmatic like he do.
Anyway, I wanted to hit something. Like, really badly.
Unfortunately that fuck Ryan Callis was about fifteen feet in front of me during the walk. And also Azzie would’ve killed me if I started something with him and we left obvious signs of a scuffle, like tearing up the ground or splattering blood around.
I mean, technically I could’ve knocked him out with one punch — that’s kinda my thing — but then we’d have to figure out how to carry all his shit plus carry him, so th
at was out. But contemplating all of it helped distract me for a little while.
“Everybody grab a seat,” Azzie said, sounding off. Maybe she was just tired — it had been a long, stressful day plus the last, oh, four years leading up to this — or maybe it was because she and Spider were covered in dirt, pine needles, and bits and pieces of plants from covering our path. Or maybe it had something to do with Greg and Rachel, who kept a pretty consistent distance away from both her and Sev. Yeah, I was thinking that’s the issue. “We have to be inside before dark, but we can take a few minutes to rest out here before we go in.”
“Are we going to be living in a cave?!” The little boy was so excited and I was like Same, kid.
Living in a cave sounded awesome, and I was kinda jealous of them because now I was picturing us going all hunter-gatherer, clubbing bears and shit to bring home to Azzie, then sleeping all curled up with her in a big pile of animal pelts in front of an open fire every night. We’d go feral, grow our hair long and cultivate some massive beards — can Spider and Tai even grow beards? — bathing with Azzie in nearby streams or hot springs—
“No, that’s just how the entrance is disguised,” Azzie explained, interrupting my fantasy just as I was getting her all stripped down and wet in my brain movie. Filed that one away for later. “There’s a bunker here, underground. It’s one of those things that everyone in Salem knew about, but after the pandemic started, only Mouse and I remembered this place existed. When plans got solidified to move back to the town, they asked Mouse what she wanted to do or where she wanted to go, because she’s a hero, you know? They told her she could have anything she wanted. They were grateful back then.”