All We Have (The Survivor Journals Book 3)

by Sean Little

  “I wish we could have had a picture of him.”

  “I will never forget what he looked like.” Ren adjusted the blanket over the baby’s legs. “He looked like you.”

  I stood over the little bassinet next to our bed and drank in every detail of my daughter. Every little crease in her peaceful face, every curve in her arms and legs, the little chin that echoed her mother’s chin, and the stubby little nose that looked far too much like my father’s nose. The baby sighed in her sleep. Her little arms, wavered for a second, reaching out in front of her. I reached down and touched the little fingers, covered by a thin piece of fabric built into the little infant pajamas. “Daddy is here.”

  From the bed, propped up on pillow, Ren said, “We can’t call her ‘the baby’ forever. She will eventually need a name.”

  “I guess I was sold on having a son,” I said.

  “You do. You will always have a son, even if he can’t be with us.”

  “I know. I guess I just never even bothered to consider a different name, let alone a girl’s name.”

  “We’re going to have to come up with one. We could name her after your mother, or my mother, or my sister?”

  I shrugged. “Maybe.”

  “Do you have a better suggestion? I never thought about it, either.”

  I rest my hand lightly over the baby’s chest and stomach. I felt the barely-noticeable rise-and-fall of her breathing. She was strong. Healthy. It made me feel better about the future. I looked at Ren, who had never been more beautiful than she was at that very moment. “We could name her after the one thing we will always have.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Hope.”

  It’s Thursday, I think. Honestly, it doesn’t matter.

  The days themselves are unimportant. I count time by the growth of a little girl now. She’s forty-eight days old as I write this, strong, healthy, and growing like a weed. I have been making check marks to count the days in my journals. I want to remember her birthday. I want to remember everything about her.

  Little Hope is everything I wanted her to be, and then some. The more she grows, the more excited I am to see what the next day will bring. Granted, she is not much right now outside of being a sleeping, eating, and pooping machine, but I am embracing that fully, enjoying her for what she is and gratefully anticipating what she will become.

  Ren and I struggle some days, but the joy that Hope has brought into our lives helps. We cannot change what we cannot change. That has become our motto. Someday, if I ever make a placard for this farm, that will be the motto on a ribbon below the coat of arms.

  I think of the little boy at the bottom of the hill often, and I hope that he is with my parents, and with Ren’s parents, and I hope he is happy there. Perhaps someday I will get to meet him again. Maybe I won’t.

  In the meantime, I survive. So does Ren. So does Hope. We have a farm to run. We have food to grow, water to purify, and solar panels to assemble, erect, and wire so that our house can have electricity again. There are a million things that I need to do, and we have a future to build.

  This is the continued journal of my life.

  My name is Twist. I’m twenty. I’m a husband, a father, and farmer. I have a beautiful wife, Renata, and our daughter, Hope.

  And we are still alive.

  Acknowledgements

  Three books. Great job, everyone. Take five. You made it.

  We made it.

  This book goes out to everyone who liked the first two. Without your support, I never would have made it this far. Thank you to those of you who read the first two in this series, thanks to those of you who bought copies or came to signings, and thanks to those of you who liked the first two enough to ask for a third. This is truly your book. Please, tell friends, write reviews, and tell your libraries to get copies. It helps more than you know.

  I’d like to take a second to thank the people who have helped me, who have said nice things about my work, and the people who have believed.

  Paige Krogwold did the cover for this book, just as she did the other two in this series, and it was fantastic, as usual.

  Ann Hayes, Veronika Linins, Maddy Hunter, and Jack Quincey were my beta-readers. Their feedback was invaluable.

  Thanks to everyone at Mystery to Me. Their support has meant a lot to me. I always enjoy stopping in there. That store makes me wish I lived closer to downtown so I could stop in more often.

  Thanks to my sister, Erin, and my buddies, Dusty and Ryan. We played a lot of Call of Duty at night, and that’s why it took me longer to write this book. I greatly appreciated the distraction, and look forward to more distraction.

  Thanks to my wife, Kaija, for her support and friendship, and to daughter, Annika, for my giving me the impetus to write about birth. (Now, stop watching unboxing videos on YouTube and go read a book, please.)

  Thanks to my parents. They don’t always understand my sense of humor, but they are to blame for my love of reading and writing. My mom bought me the “Dragonlance Chronicles” for Christmas when I was six. Those three books pretty much doomed me to a life of nerdly pursuits and writing.

  I guess I could thank Margaret Weis for writing the “Dragonlance” books, too.

  And finally, a shout-out and double-stacked load of gratitude with cheese to Duane Sprecher and the fine people at the wonderful Culver’s restaurant in Sun Prairie, where 100 percent of this book was written and about 90 percent of it was edited. Stop in, and tell them I sent you. You won’t get a discount or anything. They might even look at you strangely, as if perhaps you need therapy. Nonetheless, go buy a burger from them and tell them thanks. If enough people do this, maybe we can get Culver’s to sponsor the next book.

  --Hey, a dude can dream.

  Sun Prairie, Wis.

  June 2018

  About the Author

  Sean Patrick Little lives in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin. He writes a lot. He watches too much TV. He plays guitar and bass badly. He has two cats that annoy him a lot. He has a dog, a walleyed, big-eared Heeler/Corgi mix, who demands constant belly rubs. He has a wife and a child.

  That child is now a teenager.

  Please send help.

  You can follow Sean on Goodreads, Twitter, Tumblr, and Facebook if you are interested in keeping up with his upcoming projects. He is not hard to find.

  He’s not terribly exciting, but he enjoys the attention all the same.

  Facebook: facebook.com/seanpatricklittlewriter

  Twitter: @WiscoWriterGuy

  Other Books by Sean Patrick Little

  The Centurion: The Balance of the Soul War

  The Seven

  Longrider: Away From Home*

  Longrider: To the North*

  The Bride Price*

  Without Reason*

  The Survivor Journals

  After Everyone Died

  Long Empty Roads

  All We Have

  --The Survivor Journals Omnibus*

  The TeslaCon Novels

  Lord Bobbins and the Romanian Ruckus

  Lord Bobbins and the Dome of Light (coming 2018)

  Lord Bobbins and the Clockwork Girl (coming 2019)

  All books are available as eBooks on your favorite online retailers. Hard copies can be ordered online or, preferably, through your favorite independent bookstore. Remember: local stores need your support more than major online retailers do.

  *E-book only

  Publisher’s Note

  The world of publishing grows more and more competitive every year. It is harder and harder for small press and independent books to compete in a crowded marketplace. There is a mountain of books published annually and only so many readers and so many hours in a day for people to read—not to mention the almost insurmountable competition from all the various electronic screens that beg people’s interest and attention.

  If you enjoyed this book, please help us spread the word about it. Tell all your friends. If they buy copies and like it, ask them
to tell their friends, and their friends’ friends, and so on. Word of mouth is always the best sales tool.

  If you are a creative type, doing things like posting fan art on social media, participating in message boards and plugging the book, doing cosplay and posting photos, or making models of things in the book is greatly appreciated. Use hashtags to make sure people know where the inspiration for the image originated and to what it relates. Anything that extends the reach and audience of the book is always a positive and always appreciated. Support the things you enjoy.

  To further aid the cause, you can politely ask your local library to purchase a copy and ask your local bookstores to carry it, as well. Every little bit helps.

  If you enjoyed this book, please leave a kind review on major websites like Amazon or Goodreads, or any of your other favorite book retailers. Link to the book on your Facebook pages or Twitter accounts. Good, honest reviews help more than you know, and we truly appreciate every review. The more positive reviews the book gets, the farther the reach of the book spreads.

  If you have a bookstore or work in a library and want one of our authors to speak, or you would like to host a signing, please let us know. If we can make it happen, we will.

  And if you really enjoyed this book, please let the author know. A kind word is sometimes the jolt a writer needs to keep working. That goes for any book you’ve enjoyed, ever. Most writers are on Twitter nowadays. Or they have email addresses or some other way to contact them. If you send them a message, they will see it. They might not reply, but they will be grateful.

  You should probably also do the same things for anyone important in your life in general: your grandmother or grandfather, your parents, a favorite teacher, a friend that has been there for you—it really doesn’t matter: If someone has done something that you have appreciated, please let them know.

  Spread some positivity in this world. It will do you, and others, more good than you might know.

  With sincere gratitude,

  Spilled Inc. Press