by Logan Keys
WORLD
APART
The Long Fall Series
Book 6
By
Logan Keys & Mike Kraus
© 2018 Muonic Press, Inc.
www.muonic.com
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www.logansfiction.com
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No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Table of Contents
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Authors’ Notes July 7, 2018
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The Long Fall Book 7:
Final Refuge
Special Thanks
Many thanks to the awesome beta reading team, including Claudia, Glenda, James, Jonathan, Karen, Lynnette, Marlys, Robin, Sarah, Scarlett & Shari. You all rock. :)
Prologue
After the Fall
Is this the end of the world or was that before? How about now? What about ten seconds ago? Brittany mused on these things. When was the exact time of death, and how had she missed it? Perhaps it all would never truly end but instead become something new. She grimaced at such a quaint and perfect silver lining to the bloody clouds that hung above the new endangered species: Homo sapiens.
The two new people were a nice distraction, so Brittany found herself near them whenever she could manage. With the cold, it behooved everyone to sit nearly on top of one another anyway. The one woman who’d come with the older man, Michelle, she was pretty. Not classically pretty. Brittany was probably closer to what people had seen in magazines before the fall than Michelle was. Not that Brittany looked at all like a model. Especially now. But she was a bit more…commercial, though average looking on a good day. Still, Michelle drew the eye with her confidence and good posture. She faced the world with squared shoulders, and Brittany noticed people noticing.
Michelle leaned over and asked Brittany, “What is all that about?” She pointed at a small cluster of their group gathered around one member.
Michelle was such a seemingly clever person that Brittany was not at all surprised that she’d asked about George. And also, she wasn’t surprised that Michelle had pegged one of the only problem-people right off the bat, same as Brittany had. He was showing off tonight with the new people in earshot, and he raised his voice to an unusually high volume to be heard better.
George called out to all who would listen, “There was a problem and the government stepped in to resolve it all, didn’t they? And that lead to what? This! The entire destruction of our Earth and for what reasons?” George rubbed his fingers together, “Money, people. All of it is for money. And it’s our job to never ever let this happen again. We don’t give them authority again. This is a new earth…and it’s ours.”
“Oh,” Brittany said quietly. “That’s just our local conspiracy theorist. He has a rabid cult following now.” The man with Michelle, Bob, leaned in to hear her as Brittany filled them in. “He always felt that the shields started the fall of….what? What is it? Was it something I said?” Brittany lifted a hand in George’s direction. “He’s just crazy. Don’t let it bother you.”
Michelle nodded slowly but then murmured so quietly that Brittany wondered if she’d heard her correction. “He’s not wrong, though.”
Brittany noticed they’d given her strange looks when she said George’s theory, but let that sleeping dog lie and she went back to her musing about the end of the world. She listened to George rant until she was able to tune him out and move alone to her space next to the wall where she usually traced invisible pictures until she fell asleep.
With her face to the wall, she thought up soothing music she could no longer play, and then filtered through the images of the T.V. shows she’d watched more than once. All of that wound her down until she was sleepy and it helped her finally figure out that the end--- it’s not such a tangible thing to have a birth date. Or a date of death. The end of the world was inside of her. It was in the things lost, and things found out about yourself that you never knew. It wasn’t something to view anymore but a growth…a tumor. And it was eating its way to her heart and no one was going to stop it.
Chapter One
Mexico
Luckman was looking at the snow covering the sand and thinking how strange it was. He was focusing on the otherworldly feel of a frozen desert, the white that hid the ground, and the icicles that hung from the spikes on cacti---he was focused anywhere else but the drops of blood that German was leaving with every step he took. But still, Luckman couldn’t avoid the overwhelming anxiety as each labored breath puffed from his friend’s lips into visible tendrils of fog. As they slowed even further when they should have been going as quickly as possible. As they trudged onward despite how cold it was. Luckman tried not to think too hard. To predict a bleaker future than the one he was living in, because he’d already seen how things could change in a second. How they could roll backwards and everything you thought before could be flipped with the tilting landscape.
Their lives, German’s and his, seemed to be on a strange seesaw. One going up. The other going down. At one point, he knew, someone was bound to stop going up again.
Holtz turned and opened the map, pausing, and letting his pack drop to the ground.
Luckman glared at Holtz, daring the other scientist to say one word about German slowing them down. One flipping word. It was all he needed to unleash impotent rage he’d felt at the unfairness of it all. It was pent up there and beating against an invisible barrier inside of his head. Instead, Holtz seemed like he was trying to be as helpful as possible, like he knew better than to press Luckman in this dire moment. “I figure we’re about an hour away from Nogales,” Holtz offered.
“Good,” Terry said until Holtz added, “By car.”
Luckman did the math in his head.
“Two days,” German said, interrupting his foggy calculations. “On foot. In this.”
This was increasing snow that fell gently in such a way as to make a person think about the calm before the storm. Outside of the weather problem was the terrain. Cacti and boulders, cliffs and canyons, basically any desert obstacle imaginable. Not to mention the cracks in the earth making the way a strange weave left to right, sometimes doubling back and wasting effort.
“Three days,” Luckman said, knowing that was best scenario at this point. He frowned at German’s blood-soaked side. Since he’d last looked, the jacket had a spot double the size of dark wetness. They’d had to patch it a few times, but it was worse no matter what they did. Turns out, the one sister whose name Luckman had not remembered became the trooper since the plane crash. The petite Jean had stepped up to the plate to help with German’s injury. As luck would have it, she’d taken some cour
ses for a short period, she’d said, as an EMT. Her knowledge was best used in an emergency. She dealt with German’s side while Luckman was helpless to know what to do. Occasionally, but gently, Jean forced German to sit while she looked him over with what seemed like a practiced eye.
They had been unable to find anything to stitch the wound with even if she knew how, which she said she didn’t, not something this deep. And, as she’d also noted several times with a stern expression on a rather pretty face that Luckman now noticed, the big guy needed stiches asap…or else.
However, when the world ends, there was no more “ASAP” for medical emergencies. No more “ASAP” for doctor visits or ER trips. There would be no calling an ambulance with a mad dash to the hospital full with supplies and the end game being emergency surgery. And with each passing hour, German looked more wan and his steps grew more sluggish. The desert had already taken as much blood as they’d managed to keep inside of the Russian.
Luckman watched German sway on his feet until he collapsed down onto the desert ground with a sigh.
“So, three days,” Terry said as she pulled her hair back underneath her cap. She, like all of them, was loaded down with supplies they’d scavenged from the wreckage. So far, they wouldn’t starve. Water wasn’t dangerously low…yet. And they could maybe melt snow if they had to, but eating it was out of the question because of body temperatures already being an issue in a freeze. The desert was the desert, but what people didn’t understand about it was that when temperatures dropped, it was as deadly as any icy mountaintop. Exposure there, especially at night, was as much a worry as it had been in the Antarctic. It was colder in Sonora (where they thought they might be) than it was where they’d been in New Zealand.
Luckman swallowed at the thought of the last place he’d been. Possibly the entire island had been wiped out by that wave. He hoped not but…he hoped a lot of things. One of which was that they weren’t going to trek to the border to find the US a desolate graveyard. With the rate of the killing cold, it could happen.
German sat quietly, waiting for them to decide. Never a good sign that he wasn’t arguing or dictating or making crude jokes. And the light was fading. German gazed at the setting, distant sun with unfathomable thoughts on his broad face. Night. It was approaching. And he looked as though he’d resigned to a fate of fading along with the day.
Luckman knew what he was thinking.
They shared a glance and Luckman’s stomach dropped. He surely had not seen defeat there in German’s gaze, had he? Luckman fought the urge to shake his friend. To knock some courage back into him. His back teeth ground together from fear.
“Good idea,” Jean said, dropping her pack. “Why don’t we rest a moment? Then find a canyon for tonight. There should be some caves nearby in these rocks.”
She gave Luckman a pointed look, and he gave her one back. When did “Miss Quiet Sister” become the voice of reason in the group? When all of the men had gone silent, Luckman realized. That’s when.
When her brother had died, and she and the rest realized they were next. That’s when. People changed in crisis. It was human nature to have that dividing line between life and death demand something from you. Some stood the test. Others folded. Jean stood.
Terry had gotten quieter. Danielle was in a state of shock, her arm still painful, most likely broken, and her face was pale even though she’d taken something for it already. Even Holtz had been somber and sweet. Luckman himself had been so focused on German he truly hadn’t cared about much else, and German…well German was barely holding, wasn’t he? Silently accepting his fate. Trying not to be a burden.
That’s when Jean had been forced to take the reins as if they all needed to take turns to survive. She was small… but mighty. Luckman realized that he liked her. It was that fast. An instant attraction to someone who made themselves useful. It was an instinct almost to be pairing up with someone who could handle this hell. Since the plane went down, Danielle had stopped touching him, flirting with him, even looking or talking to him. But other soft hazel eyes had been tracking him since they’d left the wreckage, and they’d been Jean’s.
What a freakish thing to occur in this mess. What a terrible irony. Every moment he felt more drawn to the woman, and like everything else during the apocalypse, it was poor timing and was never going to be given a chance or a future.
Jean glanced away as if she understood the circumstances clearly too. All things considered…and she was already pulling German’s jacket open without a word. She didn’t ask the big Russian’s permission, she simply started working. A strange thought came to Luckman that Jean was like a nurse in the terminal ward where all the patients had accepted their fate, and so she, the only one left to run things, was doing just that.
“Drink this,” Jean finally said, breaking the silence that had Luckman’s mind drifting in all directions. He started to realize Jean wasn’t speaking to German, but rather to him. That she had moved to stand before his place, and her lips moved again, “Drink it. You look terrible, Lucky.”
Her voice moved past the panic that clouded his brain. It moved past all the hopelessness and coaxed something out of Luckman he didn’t know he had left. He nodded and accepted the bottle from her and took a sip. She locked eyes with him, one side of her mouth lifting into a smile that straightened too fast to be caught in the trap of his gaze.
Then she was gone from his vision and the sun was there again, where he’d been staring, thinking, musing disastrous things like how someone would find the lot of them somewhere in the canyons, dead and gone, nothing but bones, if humanity even survived….
Luckman took another drink and wiped his mouth. He glanced over at German expecting the man to give him a quirked brow. Tease him over flirting with the woman, but instead, Luckman found German gazing into the sunset with what was probably a similar expression to his own. Neither of them had expected to make it this far, he supposed. German probably felt it was time to give up, like how Luckman had in the water when the ferry had sunk before.
But he wouldn’t let German do that.
He’d push him into a fight.
He’d make sure the Russian went down swinging, if it was the last thing he made sure of.
Holtz was still going over the map, and Luckman thought about how he might ask him questions. Or take a look for himself. Instead, he sat down right where he was and breathed. He just breathed for a moment. Because how long would the peace last?
**
They had made it to a cave just in time. The storm grew intense and everyone collapsed inside the moment their feet touched the dry floor, uncareful of whether the animal who’d previously lived there was still in residence or not. The snow stopped and now there was blowing rain. Like a monsoon…in winter.
The wind howled outside of the cave in a blustering rage. Luckman slid down against the wall to think, to rest. If he could get some shut-eye for a few, he’d feel better, maybe. German was pale and quiet, and the pale part didn’t scare Luckman half as much as the quiet part. Luckman closed his eyes to shut out the visual. Though his eyes were shut, Luckman’s mind raced. They had barely traveled half a day of what German and Terry had surmised would be three, and yet they were all already exhausted.
Outside, the wind seemed to redouble in answer to his worries. They were too tired to start a fire, though they needed it. “Here,” a gentle voice said, and Luckman’s eyes snapped open.
Luckman found Jean there before him again. She had a book of matches in her hands. “I don’t have anything to burn, do you?” When he shook his head, she pursed her lips to the side instead of straight on, and it was the cutest thing he’d seen in what felt like forever. Luckman wiped his face and the thoughts away. “Maybe if we look for some dry brush,” she offered, and he made to rise, but she gave him the matches and stayed him with a hand. “I’ll get it.”
Luckman would have argued with her…a day ago. Maybe three. Back when he’d had some sort of chivalry left. But si
nce the mechanics of a civilized society had fled… When was the exact moment? He couldn’t remember. But fled they had. And now, he watched Jean check on everyone who was too tired to even talk and gather firewood. She was the caveman in this cave, he thought with a silent laugh. And he wasn’t even embarrassed by that fact.
German, no doubt, would have given his last bit of blood to object, but the big Russian was already snoring, his soggy side a constant reminder that he was still losing it. That he was running out of time.
Luckman frowned as Jean started a small fire between them all and the light caught the red shine of German’s midsection. He stared at it and stared hard, feeling rage wake him up better than a cup of coffee. He then glared over at Holtz who he found, with surprise, was watching him, too. Holtz glanced around and then opened his mouth, but Luckman put a finger to his lips and motioned for them to go outside.
He knew this was coming and wanted to have it out where no one could hear.
Holtz nodded, although the scientist shot Luckman a strange expression when Luckman got to his feet and stepped right out into the pounding rain. Once they were unable to be overheard, Holtz did what Luckman knew he might and what he’d counted on.
“The big guy’s not going to make it,” Holtz shouted over the noise. “You know it. He knows it. Everyone does.”
Luckman watched Holtz quietly until he continued.
“We should---”
Luckman wasn’t even aware that he’d moved. He had no recollection of stepping across the space between them. Nor did he remember thinking about grabbing each side of the other scientist’s jacket and shaking him like a rag doll, effectively cutting him off. “We should what? Huh?” He backed Holtz up against the outer wall of the cave, and harshly thrust him against the rock. “Leave him here? Would that suit you? For the animals to eat!” Luckman roared. “How about if he was drowning? Would you steal his life vest, too!”
