The Survivors (Book 2): Autumn
By V. L Dreyer
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Credits:
Story by V. L. Dreyer
Edit
ed by Holly Simmons
Cover Art by Alais Legrand
Graphic Design by Alyssa Talboys
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All material contained herein is Copyright © V. L. Dreyer 2014. All rights reserved.
The following is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental, or used in the form of parody.
ISBN 978-0-473-27437-5
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For more works by this author, please visit:
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The Survivors
series is set in New Zealand. In order to preserve the authenticity of the setting and the heroine's voice, this novel has been written in New Zealand English.
New Zealand English (NZE) is an off-shoot of British English, but the geographical isolation of the country has given rise to a quirky sub-dialect that is neither entirely British, nor Australian.
I have attempted to make this novel as easily accessible as possible for readers around the world by providing contextual explanations for most words. However, as the language variations are subtle and frequent, it is not always possible to do this.
A more in-depth article on the language used in this book is available on my website, where you also have the facility to ask me questions.
I still haven't quite wrapped my head around how my life managed to change so much in such a short period of time. Ten years ago, I lost my family and all of my friends to the devastating plague that came to be known as Ebola X. I've spent the last decade running for my life, always alone, constantly afraid, with nobody that I could trust.
This summer, everything changed. I met a group of good people. For the first time in my adult life, I've started to feel like I belong again. Like I'm worth something. I've found my long-lost sister, alive and well after all this time. I've found friendship, with Ryan Knowles, Doctor Cross, and even little Madeline. I've even found love, with a man named Michael, who makes me feel like there could be so much more to life than just surviving day to day.
Everything was going so beautifully, until disease caught up with us again. Except this time, it's not Ebola X. This time, it's listeria poisoning. The victims it wants to take? My sister, and her unborn child…
I had been through a lot of bad days in my twenty-eight years of life
. Terrible, painful days. The kind of days that no human being should ever have to go through. But today felt like the worst.
Even the sky wept as we lay her in her grave
. Despite the rain, the ground had been baked hard by the long, hot summer. It was like digging through rock. It was a struggle to dig her grave deep enough to protect her body from the elements, and from pests. We had no choice, though. We couldn’t just leave her to rot in the sun and be eaten by rats. She was family.
When we finally deemed the grave deep enough, the sweating men climbed out of the hole
. All except one: Ryan Knowles. Our friend. He was only twenty-two, but he had been so ready to be a father. Now, it was like someone had stripped the life right out of him. His face was expressionless as he reached up for the tiny body. The light was gone from his eyes.
Skylar looked reluctant to surrender her baby’s body to the earth
. She was even younger than Ryan was, just eighteen years old and barely more than a child herself – but like her fiancé, she had been so ready for that baby. She had so much love to give. Now, she wouldn’t have the chance. She could still have another baby in the future, but I understood the look in her eyes on some instinctive level, both as a woman and as her sister. No other child could ever replace her firstborn, lost to a miscarriage.
She held the tiny body for a moment longer, then leaned down to place her daughter in Ryan’s outstretched arms.
He took the child and looked at her stiff little face, his jaw clenched in silent tension. He didn’t say anything, but my imagination filled in the blanks about what he was probably thinking. That face should have smiled and cried, laughed and loved along with the rest of us, but now she would never have that chance. In a heartbeat, her innocent life had been snatched away from us. We’d been excited to welcome her into our little family; now, all our hopes for her had been dashed. Her life had been taken from us before she had a chance to learn how much we loved her.
Ryan leaned down and kissed the baby’s forehead, then he placed her in the little box we’d found for her
. We had buried other members of our family before, but it felt wrong to just put her into the dirt. She was so tiny, helpless and fragile that even in death, we wanted to protect her.
I knelt beside my sister on the edge of the grave and put my arm around her for support
. She’d cried so much over the last few days that her tears had run dry; now she just stared into the hole in the ground, looking wrung-out and heartbroken.
Her baby
. Her firstborn child. Gone, just like that.
Skylar trembled beneath my touch, but she didn’t seem to have the strength to cry anymore
. A part of her was in that hole, her flesh and blood. A piece of her had died along with her baby. We’d already lost so much; losing one more piece was devastating to us all.
All we had was each other, just the six of us against the world
. There used to be more people in the group, but they’d lost little Sophie just before I arrived, and Dog not long after. We should have been nine by now, but we were only six. Six people living in the ruins of a civilization that had collapsed a decade ago beneath the weight of a deadly plague. Six people in a country that used to house more than five million, before Ebola X had decimated the entire human race.
Humankind was on the verge of extinction
. It wasn’t just one tiny baby that we were burying, but a part of the future. Now that there were so few of us, every life was integral to the survival of our entire species. Forget the whales and the tigers; now homo sapiens were on the critically endangered list.
It seemed to take forever for that hole to fill
. The rain fell steadily and plastered our hair to our heads, like a constant reminder from Mother Nature about the burden of grief that lay upon us. Even those of us who didn’t share a blood relationship with the baby felt a bond with her. They suffered just as much as we did.
I looked at Michael, the man who had once been a police officer and was now my lover and my friend, and I found his face solemn and stern
. I knew him well enough to understand that he blamed himself for the baby’s death, even though there was nothing that he could have done to predict Skylar’s fever. Beside him, Stewart Cross, our doctor, looked just as grim – I suspected that he felt the same way.
I didn’t blame either of them
. No one had suspected that Skylar’s headache had been the symptom of an infection that would have the strength to take her baby’s life, and almost take hers as well. There was no way we could have known. Surviving after the fall of mankind meant that we only had access to rudimentary medical supplies, so we didn’t have the means to test for listeria poisoning. The doctor had figured it out just in time to save Skylar, but by then it had been too late for the baby.
The poor baby
. She should have had her whole life ahead of her. She didn’t deserve such an undignified end.
Grief surged within me, and I closed my eyes to try and fight it off
. Like my sister, I’d already cried so much that I wasn’t sure I could cry any more. Beside me, Skye clung to a tiny pink teddy bear that I’d scavenged for her as a gift. My intention had been to cheer her up when she wasn’t feeling well, but now it could only serve to comfort her in her time of mourning.
We watched as the last of the soil went back onto the grave, and the men gently smoothed it and patted it down
. It was a mud pie. We’d buried my only niece in a mud pie. A tangled web of emotions surged within me. I wanted to laugh and cry and scream at the top of my lungs until my throat was raw. I’d barely had enough time to accept that I was going to be someone’s auntie, and now she was gone.
Michael held his hand out for the wooden grave marker I was holding, his face set in an expression that looked just as wrung-out and exhausted as I felt
. I handed it to him without a word; he took it and drove it as deep into the dirt as he could, to make sure that the wind wouldn’t knock it askew.
Kylie Knowles-McDermott
We loved you before we knew you.
I read the marker again even though I’d read it a dozen times before, struggling to fight back the surge of emotion that threatened to overwhelm me
. It was true, so true. The loss of that baby made me feel like someone had ripped a hole in my heart.
Michael came and sat beside me once his work was done, while the doctor stood with his head bowed beside the tiny grave
. None of us could bring ourselves to say anything, so we stood and sat silently, each of us wrapped up in our own grieving process.
We were so focused on ourselves that none of us noticed when Ryan left, and no one saw where he went.
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The storm turned violent, forcing us to leave the graveside and seek shelter
. We were wet and bedraggled by the time we filtered back into the old motel we’d refurbished and converted into our home, but we were all too wrung out to complain. Skylar disentangled her hand from mine and headed off towards her room. The doctor took his little granddaughter, Madeline, off towards theirs.
Michael stayed with me, though he was silent and solemn
. We stood hand-in-hand on the upper walkway that overlooked our garden, and watched the sky roiling overhead. A cold wind blew past us; I snuggled against his side, comforted by his warmth and stalwart strength.
Lightning split the heavens
. We smelt the tingle of static discharge in the air. The thunder came a few seconds later, a deafening rumble that seemed to reverberate around and around until it shook us to our very cores.
Michael nuzzled his face against the curve of my neck, seeking some way to comfort me
. I knew without words that it upset him to see me in pain. Although we had only known each other for a short time, I’d come to depend on him so much. I touched his cheek, and he kissed mine in return, while the cold wind swirled around us.
“I feel so helpless,” I admitted softly, not sure what else to say
. There was nothing I could do, for my sister or her child.
“Let’s go inside.”
He hugged me gently, his deep voice barely audible over the storm. “A hot drink will make us feel better.”
It wouldn’t, but I gave him credit for trying
. I nodded and let him lead me down the stairs to the ground floor. We went through the lobby and back out into the cold, passing by the garden that we had planted together. I glanced at it, wondering if our precious little plants would survive the weather.
And what about Skylar?
Would she be strong enough to weather the emotional storm she was going through? I worried about her constantly, but no matter how hard I tried I was helpless to protect her. She was my only sister, the one person I had left from the days before the disease came. Our mother and father had died years ago, and we had been separated then. Now, a decade later, a miraculous freak of fate had brought us back together. The thought of losing her again was more than I could bear.
Michael and I retreated into our communal kitchen, and there we found Skylar sitting at the table as though reading my thoughts
. There was a note in her hands: a scrap of damp paper that looked like it came from a notebook. I stared at it. What was she doing with a scrap of paper?
She looked up at us as we entered, her expression haunted.
“I found this on my bed,” she said, her voice barely more than a whisper, then she looked at me with huge eyes and held the note out towards me. Although her rudimentary reading level was more than enough to handle a simple note, now was not the time for me to push her to read it herself. I took the note from her and sat down opposite her, while Michael went off to make our drinks. I had to read the note three times before it made sense to me.
I looked up and stared at my poor sister, with dread twisting in my stomach
. The last thing I wanted to do was break her heart again, but I had no choice. I read the note out loud to her, fighting my own raging emotions to try and keep my voice steady for her sake.
Dear Skylar,
I can’t stay here right now
. I don’t know where I’ll go but it can’t be here. I don’t know if I’ll come back. Maybe one day.
I’m sorry.
Ryan.
When I finished reading, my eyes shot up to my baby sister. Her expression would have been unreadable to the uninitiated, but I could see the emotional collapse that took place behind her eyes. Although her face stayed neutral, I saw her falling apart like a house of cards on the inside. Ryan had been the one constant in her life for ten years. He had been her companion, her lover, and her pillar of light and support for more than half of her life. Just like that, her baby was dead, and her fiancé had left her as well.
“It’s my fault.”
Her voice was shockingly harsh in the silence. “I did it. I killed my baby, just like you said I would. I didn’t mean to. I don’t know what I did, but it’s my fault.”
“No!” I exclaimed
. “You heard what the doctor said: it was food poisoning. It’s no one’s fault, least of all yours.”
I tried to grab her hand, but she pulled away from me
. She wouldn’t make eye contact, and she wouldn’t answer. Trepidation washed over me like a rising tide when she rose and left the room, but Michael held me back when I tried to follow her.
“Leave her, Sandy,” he whispered
. “She needs time.”
I turned on him, tears blurring my vision
. “But– what if–”
“Hush.”
He swept me in close against his broad chest, and drew me back into the security and warmth of his arms. “When she needs us, she’ll let us know. This is your sister we’re talking about, remember?”
I didn’t have an answer to that
. He was right. My little sister was stronger than all of us put together. I just had to hope that it would be enough to get her through.
So, we left her alone, and sat together drinking tea and listening to the storm raging outside while I struggled to cope with the internal storm that raged within me
. Ryan’s departure had brought us down to five: two experienced fighters, an elderly man, a child, and Skye. His departure not only cost Skylar her mate, but it cost the entire group one of its few able-bodied defenders. I wasn’t sure how we were going to survive.
