by Angel Lawson
He’s giving him the choice. And I watch the tic in Cole’s jaw as he runs the plays through his head. Kill him. Hurt him. Maim him. Finally he says, “You spoke of my life before—how it was filled with hope and possibility—how I threw it away.”
Hamilton’s down on his knees now, eyes pleading.
“There’s only one thing I lost in all of this that I regret. Everything else was worth it. The decisions I made were for the better of this country—for the people. How dare you question my loyalty.” He glances over and I feel the pain in his words. “To anyone.”
“I was wrong. I didn’t understand,” Hamilton says, but his arrogance betrays his hatred. Once again the crowd roars. I look up and see a man emerge from the center tunnel leading the Mutts and Bama Brigade inside. A wide, real—not painted—smile on his face.
Reality bears down on Hamilton and Walker. Cole resumes his condemnation. “No. You didn’t understand. You have no idea what the real world is like out there. You don’t know what it’s like to be hunted and to hunt. We didn’t have walls protecting us and even when we did we had to make decisions based on survival.”
Cole’s voice is calm. Eerily so, and he bends closer to Hamilton and points a gun at Zoe, who is frozen to her spot on the stage.
“Would you kill her for the future? Would you sacrifice family?”
Hamilton looks at his daughter—weak and pathetic. He takes a deep breath. “Yes. I would.”
Cole’s back straightens. “That’s the difference between us. Because I couldn’t. Alex couldn’t.” His hand tightens around his throat and says, “You’re the real monster.”
The snap is quick, brutal, the light of Hamilton’s eyes extinguishing in an instant. Zoe gasps and I run across the stage to her. She falls in my arms, sobbing, and I watch Cole as he stands. Walker falls to her knees, tossing her weapon at Wyatt. Davis ties her hands in binds, while Jude does the same to Jackson.
Wyatt takes little time reaching me and pulling me off the ground. His hug is crushing and his words sweet and powerful in my ear. I feel the change in this moment—the actual hope that was missing in all our other fights. The good guys didn’t swoop in to win this one. It was only us. The dirty and conflicted. The morally questionable.
I look over Wyatt’s shoulder, searching for Cole, but he’s no longer on the stage.
“Where did he go?” I ask Wyatt.
“We’ll find him.” He looks past me and I see that Zoe is on the ground next to her father’s body. I take her hand and pull her away, back toward the way we came in.
Halfway across the platform, Parker and Mary Ellen appear from their hiding spot. Jude hobbles over, bloody from his fight with Jackson, and helps Parker back on the stage. They fall into a tight, heartbreaking hug and my eyes lock with Wyatt’s.
“Mary Ellen may need a little help,” I suggest. He raises an eyebrow but Zoe is the one that moves to help her. Once she’s on the platform, I can’t help but stare at the girl’s belly. Wyatt gives me a questioning look.
“She’s pregnant.” We watch Mary Ellen ghost her hand over the small bump protectively. “Finn’s, obviously.”
“Pregnant?”
I laugh at his confusion and it feels good. So good for something to break the fear and sorrow. “That still happens, even in the apocalypse.”
“I know that. I mean…” And for the few times since I’ve known and loved Wyatt Faraday, he looks afraid.
I pull him close, wrapping my arms around him. Death surrounds us. Hamilton is dead. Chloe gone. The Mutts are safe, for now, at least. Around Wyatt’s back I see my sister and father emerge from the rear of the stadium with Perez and her council. The Bama Brigade and Mutts are calm and organizing the crowds. Despite the sticky blood under my feet and the fact half our allies turned traitor, we’re stronger than ever.
“Tell me about that place again,” I say, keeping my eyes on my sister and father. I don’t want to let them out of my sight. “The one at the beach.”
His chin rests on my head and his arms squeeze me tight and Wyatt, whispering in my ear, reminds me of the little slice of heaven he claims waits for us further south. The place we can go to be together. Where we can exist in peace, away from the carnage and fighting.
Because after today, after the gunfire and blood, the girl who nearly lost it all in order to save those most important to her, plans one last thing.
To live for the future.
Epilogue
The air tastes salty, and when I step off the boardwalk my toes sink into the soft, gray sand. I can’t help but look down and marvel at the moment.
I’m barefoot.
Which is exactly how you get killed in the apocalypse.
There’s something else—at first it was jarring. The waves beat the sand unrelentingly, day and night. The sound settled in my ears, replacing the silence that has followed us for years, through the farmland and forests. Over mountains and in the dark of night. On our tiny island, silence doesn’t exist. The ocean is alive with the waves and wind. Wyatt was right. It’s perfection.
At first, I’m sure that we’ll all die. Me and Wyatt. Mary Ellen and the baby. I doubt Zoe will even make it on the trip. I’m convinced that now that we’re here, now that we’ve found the kids and the Armstrong family, I’ll bring danger with us. But Dorothy and her husband Matt are strong. Her daughters, their husbands and kids are even stronger. So we don’t. We don’t die out here on this island. Instead we survive. We live. And ultimately, although it’s in a different way, we thrive.
I sit on the bottom step of the boardwalk that leads up to the small beach house and think about how I got to this place. Before Chloe took over PharmaCorp, before I escaped north with my sister, I found three children in an abandoned, burned-out section of Augusta, Georgia. I found these three children, Devin, Kori, and Garrett, who needed a home. I couldn’t provide one at the time but Wyatt did. He went even further by giving them a family. A housewife and farmer he’d met and rescued from the Hybrid Army. He gave them a house, a beach, really, an entire island, isolated from the danger and infection of the world.
The kids race down by the water’s edge. Mr. Armstrong watches from the lifeguard chair dragged from some other part of the beach. Zoe, out for a walk with Mary Ellen and her baby, stroll near the dilapidated pier. M.E. named the baby, a girl, Finley, and she has her father’s eyes.
The sun beams overhead and the sky is clear and blue. We’ve made it to another summer.
Vibrations on the boardwalk alert me to someone coming, and although my hands ghost over the place my hatchet should be, I don’t panic when it’s missing. It’s taken months to fight the reflex. Wyatt says we shouldn’t lose it completely. That, realistically, we should find a place in the middle.
He thinks we should try to be happy.
His feet appear on the step, then down on the sand next to my own. I find them fascinating. They’re brown and tan and until we arrived on the island I’m not sure I ever saw them. But now they’re exposed all the time. On the beach. Through the house. In our bed. He rests his hand on my lap and I thread my fingers through his. He has a silver band that matches the one on my left hand.
“How was patrol?” I ask. He’d been gone since the day before with two of the other men.
“Good. Randy bagged a deer.”
“Really?” We don’t keep much meat. So something fresh is always a treat. “I’ll go up soon to help.”
He nods. His chin is smooth—he shaved before he came down, knowing I like it best. “It was pretty quiet though. We did run into a few scouts from Birmingham. They’re helping Augusta get up on their feet.”
After the battle in Winston-Salem, agreements were made between the cities of Birmingham, Winston-Salem, and New Hope. A three-part council was created and it was agreed that the Mutts were not a threat. In fact, all parties agreed the Hybrids are an on-going issue, but the Mutts, if willing, seemed to be the answer.
Paul agreed to command these soldiers—
or rather, bounty hunters. Hamilton wasn’t mistaken about the threat of the Hybrids—his ideology was wrong. The Hybrids and Eaters are still a problem, but as a society we have to accept the changes. And the Mutts are part of us now.
Jane and my father are back in Augusta, reclaiming the old PharmaCorp building as a new Safe City. Parker and Jude went with them. Much of the work had been done by Jane before Chloe’s coup and although it hasn’t been easy, it sounds like, from the news we occasionally get, things are moving forward.
“Any word about Jane or Dad?”
“Just that they’re making vaccines again.”
Worry tugs at my chest. “Nothing new I hope?”
“I don’t think so.” There are fine lines by his eyes. We both know anything is possible with my sister. “The guy I talked to said they were sending teams out soon—out West to look for more viable cities.”
“Any word on Cole?”
He shakes his head. “I asked, but no. He’s a ghost.”
Cole disappeared after the battle. Walked off the stage and none of us saw him again. Not Paul or the other Mutts. None of the soldiers that edge our island on their patrols. Cole simply vanished.
Wyatt squeezes my hand. “He went through a lot—probably more than the rest of us. He may just need time. It’s what I had to do after Liberia. Sometimes the only way to rest your brain is to get away from everything and everyone.”
I bite my bottom lip. The guilt and pain I feel for Cole is ever-present. Most of us made it out in one piece—at least physically. Cole is broken and I’m terrified he’ll never find his way back.
“Wyatt! Wyatt!” Kori calls, racing from the shoreline. She holds a green plastic bucket over her head and water drips down her skinny arms.
“What’ve you got?” he asks when she makes it over. Most of the water is gone but down in the bottom is a small crab. It holds its pinchers up menacingly. “That thing looks pretty scary.”
She shakes her head. “I’m not afraid.”
Kori doesn’t remember much about life before the island. Neither does Garrett. We’ve made an effort to keep the real monsters out of their lives. Devin is almost fifteen and Wyatt has taken him and Zoe under his wing for training.
She runs off, kicking sand, and I lean into Wyatt’s side.
“It’s weird, isn’t it,” he says, eyes scanning the horizon. “The normalcy of it all.”
“Definitely.”
“Do you think we can stay here?” he asks. It’s not the first time. Sometimes I’m the one that asks the question with no answer.
“As long as we can.”
“Do you think it’s wrong we left it all behind?”
I shake my head. The wind whips through my hair and I push it behind my ears. “We did what we could. We fought our battles. We killed and watched people we loved die. The future relies on many people, Wyatt Faraday, not just us.”
He squeezes my hand and hops up. “Come on.”
I raise my eyebrow. The water’s not really my thing. The Atlantic is too dark and filled with predators I can’t see. Wyatt knows this and he yanks me from my seat and flips my legs into his arms.
“You’re pretty demanding, did you know that?” I ask.
“Someone taught me not to run away or give up.”
He carries me down to the water, wincing when the cold water hits his feet. The children shout and surround us, pulling at me to let go and swim. Even when we’re waist deep I keep my fingers linked to Wyatt’s. We learned one thing in all of this: We need one another to survive this broken-down, dangerous world. That even though people can be as terrifying as the monsters, we don’t have to succumb to the darkness.
~The End~
*skip the author note if you don’t want to hear my blahblah but do want to hear an announcement about future books.
Author Note
Readers! First let me apologize for the lateness of book 6 of The Girl Who series. I wanted it out three weeks ago. That just didn’t happen. This whole spring was a little insane. In my personal life we had a major death in the family, had to clean a (VERY FULL) house, have an estate sale, deal with estate *things* and then ultimately make the decision to move houses. That final part is still in process. That doesn’t include kids, school, work and all the other obligations of life. That being said, I haven’t been so involved and immersed in one of my own stories in a long time. Alexandra had a story to be told and I’m grateful the muse spoke to me.
I need to thank everyone that helped me keep on track. April and Laura for their beta-wisdom. Logan Keys for her marketing input. Author Rachel McClellan who taught me how to make Facebook Ads, which got my OTHER books to sell which gave me more time to focus on this series. Author Chris Fox whose interviews and books taught me how to relaunch a series I didn’t do right the first time. Obviously I thank AngstyG for the A-Mazing covers. She’s the Gayle to My Oprah or the Oprah to my Gayle. I never know who’s who. Probably depends on the topic. And of course thank you to the awesome readers who encouraged me to get this sucker finished in record time. I hope it met your expectations. I tried.
Don’t forget to follow me on the social medias. I’ve got more up my sleeve! See you soon!
Angel
Announcements!
First, my goal all along was to spin this off into a larger series. I knew exactly where I wanted it to end about midway through book 4, which is pretty impressive for a pantster. I knew Alexandra and Wyatt could have their own happily-ever after-ish (It’s the apocalypse people, there’s no rainbows around here but there is such thing as good night’s sleep and sleeping with your boots off.)
My current plan is to write a follow up series with Cole as the central character. I can’t give away too many details but I’m excited to share his journey will you all. I’ve got to get through the summer of 2017 before I can commit to a release date but fingers crossed for late fall/early winter. I also need a chance for Alexandra to stop bossing me around and for Cole to find his voice. If you want more information about this series and release dates make sure you subscribe to my mailing list! I’ll post updates when I can and ARC opportunities!
Please keep up with me via my mailing list—one specifically designed for dystopian and post-apocalyptic novels. You’ll be the first to receive information about the next books in the Death Fields series as well as sales and other goodies.
Also, you can find me on twitter @theangellawson or on Facebook at Angel Lawson or Angel Lawson Author. Come say hi. I do have cookies but they’re gluten free.
(PS: Don’t get mad if I publish some other books. I haven’t bailed. I just have crazy artist brain!)
Angel Lawson Books
The Death Fields:
The Girl Who Shot First
The Girl Who Punched Back
The Girl Who Kicked Ass
The Girl Who Kissed the Sun
The Girl Who Broke Free
The Girl Who Saved the World
Creature of Habit Series:
Creature of Habit (Book 1)
Creature of Habit (Book2)
Creature of Habit (Book 3)
A Vampire’s Seduction (Ryan’s Story Book 4)
A Vampire’s Fate (Sebastian’s Story Book 5)
The Wraith Series:
Wraith
Shadow Bound
Grave Possession
Urban Fantasy
The Lost Queen
Vigilant
Contemporary Romance:
FanGirl-A Girl Who Shot First Companion Novel
For the Win
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