by Schow, Ryan
If Maria realizes I’m here, if she sees me and remembers, he thought, she’ll save you the trouble and kill me herself.
She offered him a hand one more time. Having no choice but to take it, Carver grabbed it and with an unforeseen strength, this skinny little thing hauled him to his feet.
“There’s a house no one claimed. You can wash up, but then we’re meeting in the street in a little bit. I’ll let the guys know you’re friendly, for now.”
“I appreciate that,” he said, still unsure.
“Just be friendly, okay?”
“Okay,” he said.
He’d washed his hair, his underarms and his nether regions. When he was drying his head, Indigo appeared behind him. Carver didn’t startle because he felt the weariness setting in again and startling consumed too much energy. At least he was wearing pants. That he was wearing nothing else didn’t seem to faze the archer.
“What the hell happened to you?” she asked.
He looked down at his chest and hollow stomach, saw the bruising, the bug bites, all the bones in his ribcage.
“Been a tough road,” he said.
“Where are you from?”
Looking at his feet, there were blisters and cuts everywhere, the bones on the side of his big toe bruised. He saw her looking down at them, too.
“Clearly you’re not from here. We have some things for that next door. Band-Aid’s, some anti-bacterial ointment. We have food, too. It’s not gourmet.”
“I shouldn’t be here,” he said, thinking there’s no way he could show his face around there. If Maria was still with them, she would notice him, wouldn’t she?
He stood up, looked in the mirror at himself, saw barely any traces of his former self.
“Jesus in heaven,” he muttered, “I look like the shit end of a really long life.”
“I was thinking the same thing,” Indigo replied, handing him his old shirt. “So are you staying or what? Because the more you protest, the more you’re making me think you don’t appreciate my generosity.”
“It’s not like that,” he said, pulling the shirt over his head.
It stunk really bad.
“Come next door, if you meet everyone and they like you, then you can stay. If not, you can go. No one has a gun to your head, Carver.”
“What if I like everyone and I still want to go?”
“No one will stop you.”
He followed her next door, walked inside, tried to still his nerves and fix his hair. Indigo introduced him to a young blonde named Macy, then set him up with a can of mangos and some packaged soda crackers. Still dehydrated, he was about to ask for water when Indigo handed him an unopened bottle and said, “If anyone needs this, it’s you.”
He got the lid off and drank deeply, thinking nothing ever tasted so good in his life. “It’s not as delicious as the toilet water I’m used to,” he said, “but it’ll do for now.”
The young blonde girl next to Indigo laughed.
Macy.
That’s when he heard movement upstairs. A few minutes later there were footsteps on the stairs, the sounds of people coming down. He saw her legs first, then her knees, her waist and her face.
Maria.
His insides curled, a heavy, sick roiling starting low in his stomach. Can a person’s heart shake itself into cardiac arrest, he wondered. This was the moment he’d feared ever since he’d seen The Silver Queen, a.k.a. Maria, kill his friends. Now there he was, standing in the kitchen with her.
“Oh, Carver,” Indigo said, ripping him from his reverie, “this is Maria. She’s new to the group, too.”
He was a block of ice, frozen still, horrified.
The impossibly good looking woman extended a hand and said, “Pleased to meet you, Carver.”
“He’s trying us out,” Indigo told Maria. “Seeing if we’re a fit.”
“I like him,” Macy said.
“Me, too,” Maria replied, a sort of reptilian darkness in her gaze. That’s when she gave Carver the subtlest of winks, a gesture that chilled him to his very core.
When Indigo and Macy stepped away, Maria scooted up beside him, looked at him with those dark, penetrating eyes, eyes that knew everything, and said, “You didn’t think I knew about you, did you Mr. Gamble? Skulking along behind us like a rat all these weeks?”
As his world tunneled down into itself, he stood there, scared, terrified actually. He failed to make one single expression.
He couldn’t even swallow.
“Of course I knew,” she said, slipping her hand into his. Then, smiling genially, her eyes brightening, she said, “You’re so silly.”
END OF BOOK 3
The journey continues in The Age of Exodus…
Your Voice Matters…
IF YOU ENJOYED THE AGE OF REPRISAL, YOUR VOICE MATTERS.
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Afterword
Many of you reading The Age of Embers series did not come here through The Last War series. Although you don’t need to read The Last War series to enjoy this one, the merging of the two worlds has been half the fun of creating this ever expanding universe.
Many of the characters you see in this series, including Maria and her stolen child, the guards from Stanford, Jill, Marcus, Nick, Bailey and especially Indigo and Macy, are all part of The Last War series in one way or another.
There are some scenes in this series (The Age of Embers) that are merge points with the original series (The Last War) and provide context through seeing the scene from a different viewpoint. For example, the scene near the end of this book, where Marcus, Nick and Bailey first meet Maria (where the child is shot – super sad face) is a scene from The Terminal Run that is written in much greater detail from
Maria’s standpoint.
Although some of these scenes feel familiar to my Last War readers, these scenes are the same only in the dialogue. The dialogue is the connecting point and cannot change for obvious reasons. Everything else, however, is written fresh from Carver’s perspective. I saw this merging of timelines done for the first time in the movie, Back to the Future. The connecting scene between the original movie and Back to the Future II was the scene where Marty was playing “Johnny Be Good” on the electric guitar for the first time at the school dance. As a kid, watching that movie, seeing such an iconic scene revisited from a different perspective in the second movie was pretty dang cool.
Now you know…
For those of you who have not read The Last War series, it’s a seven book series that has earned some incredible praise, earning awards for anything from cover design to Top 100 most read book in Kindle Unlimited. With more than twenty million pages read and tens of thousands of book sales, The Last War series has become one of the more beloved series’ in post apocalyptic fiction, men’s and women’s adventure and young adult/dystopian fiction. You can read these books individually or at a discount with several different box set options. The entire series in all digital formats are also available in Kindle Unlimited, which means you can read them for FREE with your KU subscription. Simple click the link below for the way you’d like to start.
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Finally, I want to thank you for reading this series, for the awesome Amazon reviews for those of you who have left them, and for taking the time to immerse yourself in this fun, scary, (admittedly) violent new world. Next up is The Age of Exodus. This book will see a release date in early/mid July, 2019. However, if you are interested in reading it before it hits the shelves, simply join the Private Facebook Fan Group and when the time comes, I will announce the call for early readers. In the mean time, there are some very cool people in the group, and I’m there regularly and always interacting with newbies, fans and friends alike. Or you can just hangout for some other cool things, like sample chapters of upcoming books, info on past and future series, cover reveals and surveys that help shape the upcoming books. Simply follow the link below to be a part of this group.
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