Tag: dystopian

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Character Interview with Maya Solomon

Interviewer: This month’s Palmetto High School’s student spotlight is on Maya
Solomon, 17, recent 1st place winner in the thousand meters sprint at the state
track finals. Here are your five questions.

Q1: What is one thing most people don’t know about you?

Maya: I have a twin brother named Mason. But nobody at Palmetto has ever met
him. He doesn’t live with us anymore.


Q2: Who is your favorite teacher?

Maya: Mr. Reynolds the music teacher. He taught me a lot about songwriting and
composing.


Q3: What is one thing you can’t live without?


Maya: My iPad. It has all my recordings on it, my favorite music, and pictures and
videos of my family. I would be really upset if I lost it.

Q4: Who is the one person you can’t live without?


Maya: My dad. He’s a single parent now. Without him, I’d be an orphan.

Q5: What are your plans for after high school?

Maya: I’m going to Meredith College where my mom used to teach (before she
passed away) to study music and creative writing.

Settings and inspiration for the Red Plague series.

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Remedy (Red Plague Series #4)

Written by Anna Abner

Copyright 2016 by Anna Abner

Enjoy this free peek into the Red Plague series!

Cover Blurb:

The red plague has devastated the human race, turning billions of people into zombies with red eyes and an insatiable hunger for human flesh.

Seventeen-year-old Callie Crawford is used to fighting. She was an all-star wrestler in high school, and since 212R destroyed her world, she hasn’t stopped fighting. When her high school boyfriend Levi caught the virus, Callie saved him by keeping him chained in a rural North Carolina barn, waiting for something to change.

Before 212R, Roman Duran was a computer nerd, but since the virus, he’s become a guard in the survivor enclave in Washington, DC. After volunteering for a rescue mission, Roman has been belittled, robbed, and left for dead. He hasn’t saved a single person.

Until he stumbles across Callie. Because she has a zombie on a short leash, and Roman is carrying a syringe full of zombie cure.

Callie and Roman will face soulless survivors and rabid zombies on their journey to save a single infected. Along the way, Callie will have to choose between her past and a whole new future.

Chapter 1

The sky was gray and hazy when Callie Crawford pushed her skiff into the cold Atlantic, the surf lapping quietly against the hull. She glanced up from her compass, not liking the look of the clouds on the horizon. A warm breeze thick with salt and moisture blew through her ponytail and teased her bare arms.

A storm was the last thing Callie needed. Dad had taught her a few things, but she was no sailor, and the strength of the tides and currents always took her by surprise.

As if things weren’t messed up enough by her oversleeping.

Today was Levi’s day. Every third day since the apocalypse was his, and she’d never missed a visit, never been tardy venturing onto the mainland where packs of slobbering, mindless people infected with the 212R virus ruled. Not once. But she’d overslept, and now she’d be late arriving. Worse, she’d be late returning to her newly acquired private island in North Carolina’s Outer Banks. She may be forced to sail home in the dark.

Water splashed the side of the skiff as she maneuvered it over a mile of ocean. She’d been making the same trip every three days for the past two months, and she still thought she was going to die every time she lost sight of land and nothing but azure water hemmed her in.

She sailed past one of the department of transportation’s huge white ferryboats, immune to the reminder of a lost world. People didn’t use ferries anymore, and it had been left to rot. The vessel had foundered some time ago with all its vehicles still aboard. It jutted half out of the water, quiet and still, its once bright colors slowly being eaten away by rust and barnacles.

She palmed her compass, adjusted the sail for speed, and headed west. By keeping the buoys in sight, she steered her skiff straight into the port at Morris Marina.

Callie secured the ship and then pulled a marble and her slingshot from a pocket, looking for signs of trouble. No birds chirping. No dogs barking at strangers. No squirrels climbing branches. Nothing. She could have been the last creature alive on the earth.

Watching and waiting, she catalogued her survival tactics. Attacked from the front? Side step with a kick to the knee. Let their momentum work in her favor. Attacked from the rear? Head butt to the nose. Swarmed by a pack? Do whatever it took to break free and climb, even if it was into the back of a truck or up a tree. She’d mastered chokes, arm bars, and more than one submission hold.

Humans infected with 212R were lethally fast. Speed and maneuverability were key in her personal survival strategy. And she must survive. Levi needed her.

Wary, Callie perched on the seat in her little boat and let loose a high, piercing whistle. No movement.

Her slingshot zipped securely in her pocket and a pack on her back, Callie ran. The port was clear, and she hurried past the ticket office, the souvenir shop, and a tiny cafe. Her liberated Range Rover sat with the keys in the glove box. It started right up, and Callie chose a CD from her growing collection of pilfered music. It felt like an Elvis Presley sort of day. She pushed in “Blue Suede Shoes” and drove fast down Temple Street.

#

Roman Duran jogged a step behind Jackson Schultz and saw the moment the other man faltered on his wounded leg, careening into a chain link fence. Without missing a step, Roman ducked under Jackson’s arm and forced him forward along the garbage-strewn sidewalk. The pack of infecteds was only two or, at the most, three blocks behind.

“Here,” Pollard Datsik, the third member of their trio, called. He slipped around a block wall and sprinted up a set of exterior stairs to an apartment above a liquor store. Roman dragged Jackson behind him.

While Roman helped Jackson to a sagging sofa, Pollard shut the door with a quiet click and peered through the window, his breath a puff in the silence.

“Are they following?” Roman whispered. “Are they swarming the stairs?”

Pollard stretched his neck to see further, and then soft-stepped to the next window and stared at the street below.

“I’m fine,” Jackson murmured unnecessarily. “I tripped. It won’t happen again.” He shoved Roman away. “I just need a couple minutes.”

Roman didn’t buy it. The injury in question was a jagged slash above Jackson’s knee he’d earned climbing a fence the night before. Though they’d stopped running long enough to wrap it, Jackson wasn’t as energetic as he’d been before the wound.

Separating from Jackson, Roman peered through a broken windowpane, blinking away the exhaustion that had dogged him for the past couple of days. Without enjoyment, he chewed one of their last handfuls of goldfish crackers, the food dry and pasty in his mouth. Water was about to become a serious issue.

“I’m so thirsty,” he complained in a whisper. “And dirty.” What he wouldn’t do for a clean, clear stream of fresh water.

Roman glanced at his companions, noting their equally stained and stinking uniforms. Maybe volunteering to leave Washington, DC had been a crappy decision all around. Maybe the veep should have sent older, more experienced survivors on her search and rescue mission. Maybe his eighteen years on the earth weren’t enough for this kind of assignment.

A pack of infecteds had caught their scent in Raleigh and hadn’t let go. Forty-eight hours without sleep or rest. Two days of running, of hiding, of trying to lose the predators. And now, they were out of food and water.

“What if we climb on the roof?” Roman whispered. “We could wait them out.”

Pollard seized the bag of crackers from him and crammed a handful into his mouth.

“We’re out of water,” Jackson reminded them. “What if they trap us for days? No.” He shook his head at the room’s closed door. “We could end up a lot worse than we are now. I say we keep running.”

“Forever?” Pollard scoffed. “There has to be a point where we say we can’t continue like this. A point where we circle around the pack and head home.”

Roman wouldn’t call Washington, DC home. But then he’d never called anywhere home. An orphan kicked into the system after his mother abandoned him, none of the dozen foster and group homes he’d lived in had ever been his home. And DC was no different. It was a way station to somewhere else, no matter whether he had an apartment or a job or a purpose. It still wasn’t home.

Roman had yet to find his real home.

Swallowing dry crackers, Roman double-checked the number of rounds for his M-16. When they’d left the safety of DC’s walls, they each carried forty rounds for their personal firearms. It had sounded like a lot at the time, but he was down to nineteen rounds. The other two men had less.

For an entire day, Jackson had fired warning shots at their pursuers—a mistake, Roman realized now—but the only result had been bringing even more infecteds into the pack, as nearby stragglers were attracted by the noise.

His ears perking up, Roman rushed to the far window and scanned for movement. Was he crazy, or did he hear a car engine?

Roman had left DC wanting to help people, both infecteds and survivors. After running into people, one worse than the last, his companions were nearly to the point of abandoning the mission. But Roman hadn’t given up. Even though they hadn’t helped a single person.

The sound of the Range Rover’s engine quieted as it drove out of sight.

“Let’s try the distraction method again,” Roman suggested. The last time they’d thrown empty cans near the zombies, they’d been curious enough for Roman and the other two men to escape. “It worked before.”

Their rescue mission to Myrtle Beach could still be salvaged once they shook this pack. Unhindered by the starving horde of infecteds, the three men could scavenge for food and water, sleep safely in shifts, and cover ground at an easy pace. This running for their lives, though, couldn’t go on forever. Without water and more substantial food than goldfish crackers, he wasn’t going to survive much longer.

“I’ll open fire,” Pollard said, as if Roman hadn’t spoken, “and you two run for the cell tower at the end of the street. I’ll meet you there.”

“Good plan,” Jackson said, “except you’re a horrible shot. I’ll do the shooting, thanks.” He stood, trying to hide a wince of pain but failing.

Pollard clenched his jaw at the insult. “Fine.” He grabbed Roman by the sleeve and dragged him toward the door.

“You sure about this?” Roman asked, still thinking his idea would work better than wasting more bullets and hoping to find each other under a tower.

“Just run fast,” Pollard said.

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Panacea (Red Plague #3) Chapter One

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Panacea (Red Plague #2)

Copyright 2014 by Anna Abner

Back Cover Blurb:

The red plague has devastated the human race, turning billions of people into zombies with red eyes and an insatiable hunger for human flesh.

No closer to extracting the cure from inside Ben Sawyer, Maya Solomon is ready to give up her quest to cure the zombie virus. But Pollard and Hunny have gone ahead to Washington, DC in search of other survivors. Alone and vulnerable, Maya and Ben begin a final and treacherous journey north in the hope that somehow the secrets locked inside Ben’s blood will finally free the world from the grip of the Red Plague.

Chapter One

I shoved open the door of our borrowed VW Bug and stumbled into several inches of gritty beach sand. Past a craggy dune, the Atlantic Ocean burst upon the shore. Over and over, undaunted. Behind me, Ben curled in the passenger’s seat, his long legs bunched to his chest to fit the cramped interior. He hadn’t woken when I drove hell-bent across fields and marshes to escape Camp Carson. He hadn’t woken when the car stuttered to a stop, empty of fuel, on the Virginia beach. And he didn’t wake as I stood over him, chewing at my bottom lip.

Smart had done more than lie about extracting my dad’s antiserum from Ben’s blood. He’d drugged him. Among other things. He might not wake up, not completely, until morning. Four hours or more.

He needed help, first aid, possibly a doctor, but all he had was me.

I searched up and down the beach. If a pack of quick-footed red zombies, sufferers of the 212R virus, found us, we had no protection except the car. So, not much protection at all.

“I’m going to search the trunk.” He didn’t answer, but talking to someone, anyone, made me feel better. “Okay, Ben?”

He flinched at the sound of my voice. The sedatives he’d been fed hadn’t worn off completely. I grabbed his hand so he’d know he wasn’t alone anymore. Reflexively, he squeezed back, his fingers twining with mine.

In the storage compartment I found a raincoat, but no emergency flares or forgotten bottles of sports drink. Certainly nothing useful. I tossed the coat into the back seat with my gear and then closed the trunk.

“Don’t worry,” I told Ben, “we’ll be fine.”

We probably weren’t going to be fine. Not alone and unprotected.

I turned toward the sound of the surf. “I just need a minute to make a plan.”

The whitecaps looked and sounded exactly the same as they always had. With all the chaos in the world and all the changes that had hammered down upon the human race, it didn’t seem right the ocean kept rolling across the earth, oblivious.

“I’m scared,” I signed at the horizon, my hands stuttering through the motions. Really, really scared.

But the surf kept washing upon the beach in a slow, quiet rhythm. Tempo adagio. Like a hymn. I hummed a counter-beat, and the sad melody I couldn’t shake returned.

Way down here … I disappear.

The water was black as tar with the occasional silver reflection of starlight from overhead. I tried to stay out of the surf, but it was tricky in the dark determining the tide’s reach, and cold salty water splashed over my sneakers.

“Aw, crap.” I didn’t have spare shoes, which only reminded me that my survival knowledge was nil. I knew how to run, hide, and disinfect. That was about it. Because I came from a family of technology loving city folks, not rugged survivalists. For the millionth time I wished my dad hadn’t left to finish his antiserum for 212R. He may not have been able to teach me about hunting or shelter building during the apocalypse, but at least I wouldn’t have spent so much time alone.

But if Dad hadn’t left, he wouldn’t have finished the elixir and Ben would still be a Red. My dad had wanted his work to mean something. To help people. And it had saved Ben.

So, it was worth it. I just wished I had both of them, Ben and Dad.

I glanced over my shoulder, but the compact car was a shadowy shape across the sand. More than anything, I felt alone. For the first time since the plague it wasn’t a pleasant sensation.

Night stretched and lengthened, seeming to last forever.

Where was Pollard?

I shouldn’t have pushed to separate our group. I should have fought to stay together, but I’d been so sure the four of us—Pollard, Juliet, Hunny, and I—would be too visible, too loud, too obvious, breaking into Ben’s locked room. I’d argued to be the only one to pull off the rescue mission.

Maybe it hadn’t been a good idea because everywhere I looked I saw only sand, water, and sky.

Pollard should’ve been on the beach.

But he wasn’t, and I had no way of contacting him. 212R had infected so many people, and so quickly, there was no one left to run water, trash, and electricity services. No GPS, no cell phones. Wherever he was, he was out of my reach.

I walked south, but didn’t catch sight of my friends. Or any human beings at all. Not even a single house or a forgotten beach umbrella. Pivoting, I marched north as far as I felt comfortable. Off in the distance I recognized roofs and a white fence. But that was it. No Pollard, no Hunny, no Juliet, and no sign they’d been anywhere near there.

Thirst drove me back to the car.

As for supplies, we were pathetically undergeared. In my backpack I carried my personal belongings, a canteen of water, some snacks, and a couple changes of clean clothes. An extra-long screwdriver. My short sword, a fully functional replica from the Lord of the Rings films that had been my dad’s before the red plague. And the golden-hued guitar Ben had given me.

Definitely not enough to build a secure shelter and hunker down for days.

Depending on the temperature, my water supply might only last twenty-four hours. The same for the snacks.

And with Ben not in his right mind, everything fell to me to do. Except I wasn’t any good at taking care of other people. I was okay at caring for myself, but awful at taking care of others.

I opened the driver’s side door and reached between the seats for my pack and the canteen inside it. Because of the tiny interior I was forced to get very, very close to Ben. I tried not to disturb him, but my ribs brushed his arm. He snapped awake, and I squeaked in surprise, banging my head on the roof of the car.

“Maya?” he exclaimed, and then he scampered out of the car on all fours into the soft sand.

“It’s me,” I confirmed, climbing out and massaging the top of my head.

“What happened?” He used the car to push himself upright.

“We escaped from Camp Carson,” I explained, glossing over the rough parts. Like the fire. The torture chamber. Unstrapping him from a gurney.

He turned in a circle, scanning the area, and then pinned his intense red eyes on me. “Are you okay?”

“I’ve been better.” Muscles and joints I didn’t even know I had ached. I stretched my arms over my head, and my spine crackled like pretzel rods. “How do you feel?”

He was standing and alert, and he had color back in his cheeks. All good signs.

“I’m okay. How far are we from the base?” He squinted down the beach.

“I drove about fifteen miles-an-hour for two hours.” Camp Carson was southwest of Richmond, but after traveling north and east I could no longer picture our location on a map. We definitely weren’t near any big cities. “The car’s out of gas. I haven’t seen or heard anyone.”

“Where’s Pollard? And Hunny?”

I kicked at a clump of grass. “They left a hole for us to go through. I stayed behind to get you. We said we’d go straight east and meet on the beach.”

“Did you go straight east?”

No. I had messed up. I should’ve forced Ben onto his feet and gotten us through the trees the night before, but I’d been so scared I’d wanted to get as far away from Smart as possible. He’d tortured Ben for days in his locked room, and I was scared he would follow us and recapture Ben.

And because of it, we may have lost Pollard and Hunny for good.

“There were woods to the east,” I said. “I drove north until I found beach access. I guess they went a different way.” Or, worse, went back to rescue us. If they had, they could be locked in Ben’s old prison.

“Was there a backup plan?” he asked.

“Meet at the Washington Monument. Pollard thinks there might be people there.”

Ben blew out a long breath. “Have you seen any sign of them at all?”

“I searched while you were sleeping. I walked up and down the beach but I didn’t see anything. Not even a piece of trash blowing in the wind. It’s too dark, but if I turn on a flashlight I might attract trouble.”

“I need some fresh air.”

I bit my tongue to keep from saying, “We’re already outside. How much fresher can the air get?”

But he was determined and wobbled across the sand to the edge of the water. Just as I had done, he inched too close and wet his boots. Except he didn’t jump back like I had. He stood in the surf and let it wash over his feet.

A memory of him strapped to a gurney in Smart’s barracks room flashed in my mind. What had they done to him?

After he’d injected my dad’s antiserum, I’d been so sure the right thing to do was get him to a doctor and pull the answer to reversing the red plague out of his blood. But Smart had lied to me. I’d thought Ben was being cared for by the residents of Camp Carson. But as soon as they’d closed the door on him, they’d started the horror show. They could’ve done anything to him in there. Surgery. Amputation. Complete exsanguination.

One thing they hadn’t done was extract the cure.

“Are you okay?” I asked hesitantly, afraid to spook him. I stepped closer, itching to feel his brow for fever, but I didn’t dare. Not with him so unsteady.

“Stay away from me,” he gasped. ”For God’s sake, Maya, just stay back.”

I moved away so quickly I nearly tripped and fell on my butt in the sand. But I steadied myself and then kept a healthy distance between us.

Ben’s expression was tense as he turned toward the churning surf. “I don’t like being tied up,” he growled. “They tied me up. Do you understand?” He sucked in a ragged breath. “It was like being in lockdown in Dogwood.”

The Dogwood Juvenile Detention Center in Raleigh, North Carolina. The one Ben had been sentenced to. The same one my twin brother had been inside when the red plague hit.

Mason had been incarcerated when he was fifteen and ordered to serve time until his eighteenth birthday. A milestone he probably would never make. We didn’t turn eighteen for three more months. If he hadn’t escaped before 212R spread, then he would have been trapped inside the jail when chaos erupted. Theoretically, he could still be inside.

I shivered. “Can you walk?” I asked. Silly question. Ben was in no condition to walk. He could barely stand. “Nix that. I’ll get you some water. You need to drink lots of fluids. Fruit would be nice.” I was babbling like an idiot. We didn’t have fruit. We were lucky to have clean, drinkable water.

“Here.” I tossed the canteen at his feet so he didn’t have to touch me. Or smell me. “Drink.”

Whatever progress he’d made in the last few days seemed lost. He was just as unstable as the first day after injecting the elixir.

“It’s not safe here.” He took a long swallow from my canteen, and then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. Carefully, he straightened his heavy boots, then the cuffs of his trousers, and then the sleeves of his black T-shirt. Finally, he rearranged his dark hair. “We have to keep moving.”

“No.” One thing was obvious. Some awful stuff had gone down in Smart’s so-called lab and Ben had regressed to near zombie status. “It’s two o’clock in the morning. We should stay here and sleep. At dawn, I’ll forage in the woods.” I glanced at the Atlantic Ocean rolling away from us. “Maybe I can even fish something.”

“You said Pollard is going to Washington, D.C.?” He frowned as if piecing a puzzle together. “Then we have to follow him.”

“What? No.” I advanced a step, and then reversed trajectory. “Sorry. I mean, you need to rest from,” I eyed him up and down, “whatever happened. We don’t have to rush into another trip.” Because I wasn’t even sure if Pollard was in D.C. Or okay. Or alive.

“You came back for me.” There was a growly resolve in his voice. “I will take you to your Pollard.”

“He’s not my anything,” I said quickly. “And you’re not ready to go on another road trip.”

“You should be part of a family, Maya, even if it’s not your own family.”

I huffed a laugh. Where had that come from? “I’m fine by myself,” I assured. “Besides, I had a family. They’re all dead.”

But Ben had stopped listening. “Is D.C. north of here?”

“It has to be.” There was no way I’d passed it during the night.

“Please pack our stuff. I just need another minute.” He plopped onto the sand again, pressing his palms against his eye sockets.

“Headache?” I guessed.

“Mmm.”

I left him in the sand to collect my backpack from the car, as well as my guitar and short sword. By the time I closed the Bug’s door, Ben was back on his feet.

“I’ll follow you.” His pace would be my pace, even if it meant slowing to a crawl.

Without saying a word, he lifted the backpack right off my shoulders and walked up the starlit beach, veering away from the water where the ground was firmer and easier to navigate. I jogged to catch up.

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Antidote (Red Plague #2) Chapter One

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Antidote (Red Plague #2)

Copyright 2014 by Anna Abner

Back Cover Blurb:

The red plague has devastated the human race, turning billions of people into zombies with red eyes and an insatiable hunger for human flesh.

The only known cure to the 212R virus is locked inside of Ben Sawyer. To get it out, seventeen-year-old Maya Solomon and a group of survivors will take him on a journey to what may be the last bastion of human civilization, Camp Carson, Virginia.

Chapter One

“Maya!” Pollard made a hard right, the RV bounced over a median, and I held Ben even tighter. “He’s a zombie. Back off.”

“He injected the cure,” I argued. “He’s not a zombie anymore.”

“You don’t know that!”

“He said my name,” I stated, still rocked by the memory of my name on his lips. I’d never heard a red-eyed infected person speak. No one had.

I felt the pulse at his throat and was rewarded with a strong thrumming against the pads of my fingers. Like plucking a bass guitar. His forehead, gritty beneath my palm, radiated heat. The fever had come on fast.

“Do we have Tylenol?” I called out. I didn’t even possess a proper first-aid kit. And there were so many other things that could go wrong.

“Not that I know of,” Pollard answered.

I wasn’t even sure if a fever was normal in a person infected with 212R, the zombie virus. Maybe he’d had one all along.

“I can do this.”

I had never done this. Over winter break I’d volunteered at St. Joseph’s Hospital to make my dad, the chemist with two medical degrees, happy. I had alternated between stocking supplies my manager re-organized after I went home—which was awful—and trailing actual nurses as they did their work—which was awesome. One LPN used to narrate every single thing she did, from inserting IVs to checking blood pressures.

But none of it had prepared me for this.

“Where are we going?” I asked. If we found a hospital or a clinic I might be able to scrounge medical supplies.

“Away from this nightmare,” Pollard said.

Away from the flaming remains of my dad’s CDC lab. Away from anything he’d made or left behind. All that was left of his work coursed through Ben’s veins and nowhere else.

As gently as possible, I unbuttoned the top two buttons on his shirt and peeled the dark navy fabric away from his skin to inspect the gunshot wound. A dime-sized hole, surrounded by angry swollen flesh, stared back at me.

I replaced his shirt and something like rough paper in his breast pocket, the one over his heart, stalled my fingers.

I pulled out a wallet-sized school photo and immediately dropped it.

“Crap.” Fumbling, I picked it up off the RV’s dirty linoleum floor and stared into my own face.

Mine.

To be certain, I flipped it over and my narrow, jagged signature adorned the back. Last Christmas I’d mailed the photo inside a care package to my brother Mason. It had been addressed to the Dogwood Juvenile Detention Center in Raleigh, North Carolina.

But if I’d mailed it to Mason, how had it ended up in Ben’s shirt?

“Hang on to something,” Pollard called.

I stuffed the pic into my pocket. If Pollard or Hunny asked questions about it, I had no answers, yet.

I tested Ben’s pulse again, this time the one at his wrist, just to be sure it still beat. But my touch jumpstarted a chain reaction. His fingers twitched, and then the tremors spread to his arms and legs.

“Oh, no,” I cried out. His legs spasmed and his head knocked against my belly and thighs. Hard. “Ben? Can you hear me?”

Fear twisted my insides into origami as I held him through full body convulsions. Finally, his muscles quieted. I checked and re-checked his pulse.

“What’s wrong?” Pollard shouted.

“The medicine made him sick.” Understatement. More likely, it had poisoned him and his internal organs were failing.

“You’re not going to die,” I whispered as his seizure faded to a few quivers in his hands. Not with my father’s only remaining elixir in his blood. “I’ll take care of you.” Whatever he needed. A bath. Decent clothes. Soft blankets and a pillow. How long had it been since he’d slept on a pillow? If he needed medicine, I’d find it.

I wanted to take care of him. Because with my father’s antiserum in his veins, he felt a whole lot like family.

And I didn’t have much family left. My gaze wandered across the interior of the RV from Hunny’s blonde ringlets to the back of Pollard’s head.

Pollard cursed loudly, clipping the rear end of a compact car and sending it spinning away. The RV swayed to the left and I knocked into the mini fridge.

“I noticed the neighborhoods are less crowded than the highways,” he said.

On our two-day trip into downtown Raleigh, we’d stuck to major thoroughfares and been slowed down at every turn. Nothing but streets bottlenecked with abandoned vehicles, packs of red zombies, and overzealous snipers. I glanced down at Ben’s dirty face. He’d be a major hindrance if we were forced to change vehicles, or worse, walk part of the way back to the truck stop.

“Get the map out,” Pollard said. “Please?”

He swerved around debris, and it felt like the RV went up on two wheels for a moment, sending my stomach into a tailspin.

“Hunny,” I called. “It’s in my backpack.” I was afraid to move. Afraid to jostle Ben, even a little bit, and maybe hurt him.

I shifted, positioning his head on my lap, and cupped the side of his face. To keep him still. To reassure myself he was still breathing.

The little girl, ringlets bouncing, leapt over the unconscious Red and rifled through my pack.

“Here,” she said, returning to the front of the RV and handing the paper to Pollard.

“Spread it out,” he said. “I’m not stopping this thing. Not for a single minute. It’s too crazy out there.” To prove his point, he waved at something on the other side of the extra-tall windshield. “You see that pack of zombies? Must be twenty-five of them.” As we passed the pack by bouncing onto the sidewalk, Pollard checked the side mirrors. “And now they’re running after us.” He caught my eye over his shoulder. “We’re gonna get out of here,” he said, his usually pretty blue eyes steely with resolve. “I promise you.”

With the map unfolded and laid out on the dash, he pointed at different sites. “We’re about here.” He glanced up and turned the wheel to avoid a decorative brick wall around someone’s front yard. “We’re going west through the suburbs,” he announced, nodding as if convincing himself as well as us. “Then we’ll turn south and come up on the truck stop from the back.”

“It took two days to get here the first time,” I reminded him.

“It’s not going to take that long.” He smiled reassuringly at me in the rearview mirror. “On a good day I can drive there in twenty minutes. So…”

But since 212R had ravaged the human race, changing over ninety-nine percent of us into flesh-eating monsters, time seemed to pass differently. What had once taken a few minutes now took hours when you factored in the loss of electricity and scavenging for gas and hiding from Reds.

“Just hurry,” I added unnecessarily. “We need a safe place to stop and regroup.” To process the sight of my dad’s empty and looted lab. Or the fire. Or Ben’s injecting what I hoped was the antiserum. Or his saying my name.

Pollard was right. As soon as he passed through the heart of the city, there were fewer parked vehicles, less random debris, fewer Reds. He rolled over streets, driveways, access lanes, and sometimes even sidewalks and front lawns to keep us moving in the right direction.

“Maya?” Hunny climbed out of the passenger seat and stepped tentatively down the narrow walkway between the gas range and the dining table. “I saw snacks in your pack. Can I have some?”

I couldn’t remember what was in there. “Of course.” Then I recalled another helpful item I’d collected along the way. “And grab the baby wipes, will you?”

But she crept as far as Ben’s boot and then hesitated. “What’s wrong with him?”

I wiggled a little, changing positions, but kept his head in my lap. He didn’t react, just continued sleeping against me. “He injected the antiserum to 212R.” At least I hoped it was the antiserum. If it wasn’t, he may have ruined everything by injecting himself with poison.

Hunny scrunched her nose. “What?”

“He took the cure,” I said. “But probably the wrong dose. It’s making him sick.”

Her green eyes traveled up his body from his dirt-caked black boots over his stained blue work clothes to his blood-splattered face. “Are you going to be a zombie now? Because you touched him?”

“No,” I said quickly. “If I haven’t been infected yet, I probably won’t be. Besides,” I added, nodding at the back of Pollard’s head, “he thinks we’re immune.”

“It’s just a theory,” he said, proving he was eavesdropping. “It doesn’t mean you should touch him, Maya.”

“I think it’s a good theory.” It made sense to me. No matter how catastrophic a virus was, there was always a fraction of the population naturally immune.

“What are you going to do with him?” Hunny asked. She nudged his boot with the toe of her tennis shoe and Ben’s leg wobbled, but he didn’t wake up.

“Easy,” I warned. He was a human being, not a toy. “I’m not going to do anything with him. He’ll wake up,” I hope, “and we’ll find out if the antiserum worked.”

She bobbed her head, but I sensed she had something else to say. Finally, she whispered low enough Pollard couldn’t hear, “Maya, I took something.”

My guts clenched. “What did you take?” And from where?

“I’m sorry,” she said in a rush. “I know you told me not to, but it was just sitting there, and it was so cute and little.”

“What did you take?” I pressed. We’d been in a lab where hazardous chemicals were stored. “It could be dangerous.”

“No, it’s not.” She pulled a silver rectangle from her pocket and offered it to me. “Here. Look. It was on your dad’s desk.”

The moment it landed in my palm I knew what it was. Immediately, like turning a faucet, I teared up.

“It’s me and my brother when we were little.”

I opened the small, hinged frame and stared at a pair of black and white portraits, cropped to show just the faces and nothing else. At two, when the pictures had been taken, we’d looked so similar. We both had wispy black hair. The same brown eyes. Only our smiles were different. Mine was smaller, more hesitant. Mason grinned whole-heartedly, showing off tiny baby teeth.

“This is me.” I touched the glass over my pale face, and then my twin brother’s. “This is Mason.”

So much had gone wrong since we’d taken the photos, but in the snapshots we were still young and sweet and the future seemed bright. Maybe that’s why Dad kept it on his desk, even after Mason was incarcerated. Maybe he’d liked to remember his kids before the darkness descended.

I thought of the picture tucked into my pocket. Is that why Ben liked it? Did my face somehow remind him of his life before the plague?

“I’m sorry,” Hunny said again.

I closed the frame and returned it to her. “It’s okay. I’m glad you took it.”

“You should have it.” She tried to give it back. “It’s yours.”

“No.” I shook my head. It hurt too much to look at. “Keep it. You can give it back to me later when you’re done with it.”

She wedged it into her pocket and unzipped my backpack. “Here.” She handed me the wipes and then returned to the passenger’s seat with a box of yogurt-covered raisins.

I scrubbed vigorously at my hands with a moist towelette, rubbing between my fingers and up both wrists. I repeated the process with a second cloth, removing layers of blood, dirt, and grime. No matter how hard I washed, though, I couldn’t remove every mark I’d gathered since the red plague exploded out of South America and then the world. Maybe I’d never be completely clean.

There was so much blood caked on Ben’s hands they looked black, but up his left arm was a fine misting of white paint. Evidence it had been him who’d written me a message on asphalt, and no one else. Proof he was different than most Reds. I reached to clean it off when the RV hit something so big I was weightless for an instant.

“Ladies?” Pollard announced, spinning the giant steering wheel. “We’re almost there.”

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My Review of Sundered by Shannon Mayer

My Review of Sundered by Shannon Mayer

Book Cover Blurb:

My name is Mara and I want desperately to become a mother. All of my dreams were dashed when the world was promised hope but instead became a place of danger, death . . . and monsters.

Living in a rural part of Canada, I thought life with my adoring husband was finally moving in the right direction. We had an idyllic home, friends, and plans for a future together.

The only thing missing, was the child we both so desperately wanted.

Hope came in the form of a single medical miracle. Yet the drug was not as it seemed and instead of healing, it beget a world of monsters.

Now we must find the will and strength to survive with only each other to hold onto.

But a deadly secret threatens our love and very survival …

My Review of Sundered:

I have to be honest, I downloaded this ebook because of the cover–the font, the title, the graphics. I didn’t know the author or what it was about, but was very interested. Judging a book. I know, I know. Luckily this little novella was worth the chance I gave it.

Though the premise takes a stretch of the imagination–a new miracle drug called Nevermore claims to cure everything from infertility to obesity and 90% of the population on earth lines up for the shot–it’s completely within the realm of believability, in my opinion, that a man-made drug could cause people to transform into zombie-like creatures. That’s exactly what happens in the story. So many people get the ‘miracle drug’ and so quickly, almost everyone on earth transforms into animalistic monsters before anyone realizes what’s happening.

Mara is a wife struggling with infertility and she nearly takes the Nevermore shot, but for a twist of fate. Through her eyes we witness the world around her crumble.

What I enjoyed about Sundered is that it’s a quick, fast-paced read about the apocalypse. There was no fluff, no slow pacing, no extraneous scenes. Everything I read raced toward the end. It was a fun, fluffy read in a genre I really enjoy. I’d recommend this novella to any fans of the genre.

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