The End of All Things told the story of Carly Daniels and Justin Thatcher's travels across a shattered nation in search of a safe place to settle, after the pandemic. But it was also a journey into love, and an affirmation of hope. Carly finds strength in her faith that things can be even better than they were before, that compassion and charity are not luxuries; they are what make us human. Life endures, and so does love. The End of All Things is only a beginning.
Two of them introduce us to new characters you will meet in the upcoming sequel to The End of All Things, and the other two are a visit with old friends.
The Horsemen
L.A.'s mayor has declared quarantine to try to halt the spread of the Infection. Pearl sets off across the city to buy supplies, but already the world is changing. Something strange is in the air. The Horsemen are coming ...
Veronica
When Veronica's mother doesn't come home from work and no one answers the phone when she calls for help, a nine-year-old girl is thrown into the chaos of a world coming to an end. Veronica decides it's up to her to find her family. "Veronica" is the story of a little girl's courage in the face of the end of all things.
"I Wandered Lonely As A Cloud"
They called her Shadowfax-- the mare Carly and Justin found on their travels. But before she was found by Carly, the retired dressage horse was known as Cloud. An unusual tale of the end, told through the eyes of a confused and lonely horse, left in her pasture.
Birthday
A previously-published bonus story. Carly knows Justin has never celebrated his birthday, and after society crumbled, no one knows what date it is, anyway. But she wants to do something special for him. Celebrating the little things helps them keep hope alive, and as a blizzard rages outside, a small gesture of love warms their home.
Tales of courage, tales of survival... Tales from the End.
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Excerpt:
Pearl scooped her purse off the passenger
seat and hurried into the store. There were no carts in the parking lot and
none in the vestibule. When she got inside, she saw why. Lines stretched to the
back of the store and doubled back to curve along the walls. People held
groceries in their arms, for lack of other options. Pearl opened her bag and
withdrew the thin, nylon shopping totes she kept in one of the side pockets.
The shelves were almost bare, something
that struck Pearl as being almost as fundamentally wrong as 911 being out of
service. She’d grown up in the land of plenty, where stores could not only be
counted on to have an abundance of food but multiple brands and varieties of
it.
Pearl hurried through the aisles and
squeezed between other shoppers to grab cans and boxes off the shelves. Her jaw
dropped when a woman snatched a can right out of Pearl’s hand then scurried
down the aisle before she could react.
It seemed the whole world had gone mad.
Pearl filled her bags, took her place at
the end of the line, and shuffled forward inches at a time with the rest of the
shoppers. She took out her phone and read some of the novel she’d started last
week, but eventually had to give it up because her arms ached so fiercely from
holding up the bags. She couldn’t set them down. She’d seen what happened when
someone did that. After a woman put her bag down to answer her phone, a man
snatched it off the ground. He’d blended back into the crowd before she even
noticed and shouted at him to stop. No one paid this small drama any heed, and
the woman had left the line, weeping, to scour the quickly-emptying shelves,
her hours of progress lost in a moment.
Pearl wondered if she could let the woman
ahead of her in line, but that was one crime the shoppers seemed united in
punishing. Line jumpers were forcibly shoved to the back of the crowd.
An hour later, Pearl rounded the end of an
aisle and saw the manager heading toward the front of the store with a sheet of
paperboard he taped over the door. NO FOOD, SOLD OUT it read. He locked the
door and stood by to let out the customers who were leaving. A couple came to
the entrance and pounded on the door, despite the manager shouting and pointing
to the sign. They rattled the handle, as though the door could be persuaded by
persistence. The manager finally turned away to ignore them.
“I’ll give you five hundred dollars for
one of your bags.”
Pearl turned and saw a thin, blond man
standing to her left, but he wasn’t in line. He had a wad of cash in his hand,
and he held it up. “What do you say?”
Pearl wondered if he thought she looked
like she needed money. If that was why he’d approached her first instead of the
others. “No, sorry.”
The guy didn’t react. He simply turned
away and walked over to a Hispanic man a few paces away. Pearl gritted her
teeth.
A loud crash made people jump and scream.
She spun around. At the front of the store, the people banging on the front
door had taken a propane gas cylinder from the cage outside and thrown it
through the plate glass window. As the manager shouted, a man gripped the woman
by the waist and boosted her over the sill.
“Are you crazy?” the manager yelled. “There’s no food left here! I’m calling
the cops! You can’t—”
The man hit him with a roundhouse punch
that sent the manager sprawling onto the glass-strewn floor. As if that had
flipped a switch in the waiting customers’ minds, some of them began to drift
toward the front of the store. As more became emboldened, they followed. The
cashier shouted at them to stop, but they paid her no heed as they swarmed
through the broken window and into the parking lot. It was interesting, if
appalling, to watch the progression. Eventually, the line looked like what
might be seen on a normal afternoon.
One of the cashiers closed her register
and ran up to tend the manager who still hadn’t moved from his place on the
floor. She managed to help him to his feet. He put an arm around her shoulders,
and she helped him through the store. His nose gushed blood that created a
garish red bib on the front of his shirt.
Within a few minutes, Pearl had reached
the register. The cashier was crying even as she smiled automatically and
recited a mechanical Hello, how are you?
Pearl said she was fine. It was an
automatic response on her part, too.
“Thank you for staying.” The cashier
scrubbed a hand over her cheeks to wipe off the tears.
“Just the right thing to do,” Pearl
replied as she repacked her groceries into the totes after the girl scanned
them.
“That seems to be in short supply these
days.” The cashier announced Pearl’s total. “What’s happening? Why are people acting like this?”
“The Horsemen have been loosed.”
A chill swept over Pearl and she turned
around to stare at the tiny, old lady behind her, who’d spoken in a
surprisingly strong voice for her apparent age and fragility.
“Horsemen?” the cashier repeated.
“War, Death, Famine, and Pestilence,” the
woman said. “It was foretold in the Bible—”
The cashier rolled her eyes. “Whatever,
lady.” She handed Pearl’s change back to her with a word of thanks, and Pearl
heard the old woman trying to explain again, but the cashier wasn’t interested.
She stepped carefully through the broken
window on her way out and looked around with caution, because it occurred to
her that the breakdown of law and order meant she had no choice but to defend
herself and the two precious bags of food. Pearl didn’t see anyone lingering
nearby, so she walked swiftly through the parking lot, her bags clenched
tightly in her arms.
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