Read Online Krisis (After the Cure Book 3) by Deirdre Gould - Free Book Online Page A

agonizing seconds between breaths and then the relief of his rising chest and she’d blow out her own breath and realize she’d been holding it. But now his belly was still. She knelt down beside them, touched Charlie’s cheek, hoping to feel warm skin. But his face was cold and stiff like canvas. She looked up at Bill. His eyes were closed and his arms were around their son. She had imagined they would look peaceful or eased afterward, but Bill just looked blank. Like a mannequin, expressionless, almost unrecognizable. She didn’t have to check his pulse to know he was gone. She sat back on her haunches.
    “But I had good news,” she said, “why couldn’t you wait? What was one more night? I could have saved us.” She curled up next to them, the cold from their skin radiating into hers. She wanted to cry. She needed to cry. But she couldn’t. A dull ache spread from her chest to the rest of her body. Shock, and pain and exhaustion overtook her.
    Juliana found her asleep next to the corpses of her son and husband the next morning.

Chapter 5
     
    Seven Years Later
     
    It had seemed like such an obvious place to look. People had always gravitated toward water, why was it any different now? But she and Frank had covered hundreds of miles of coastline looking for survivors, new little towns springing up or just small bands of wandering scavengers. Almost a decade after the December Plague hit, Nella had expected hundreds, thousands of people even, to be clustered near the ocean, building new lives. The ocean was full of food; the fish population had thrived, and it was a quick escape if a village were threatened. It’s why her home city sat where it did. But after the first few days, as they reached the edge of their existing trade network, they’d seen almost no one.
    Once, they’d seen a few small boats on the horizon that Nella hoped were fishermen. And they’d found a lighthouse keeper who had been alone since the Plague hit, who kept the lamp lit anyway. Its beacon had saved their small sailboat, but Nella had the eerie feeling that he’d kept it going for someone else, for hundreds of ghost ships that would never arrive.
    Then she and Frank had wasted almost a week scrambling through the burnt rubble of the capitol city. It was the first place they had planned to go, it had made sense. They had both given up on any kind of government rescue years before, on any kind of government existing, save their own military governor. But others wouldn’t have given up. They would have flocked to the capitol looking for aid, to rebuild, to find other survivors. They had even avoided the port, hiding the boat miles away in case the people didn’t turn out to be friendly.
    They should have known almost immediately, though, that the capitol had been abandoned. It hadn’t struck Nella as odd that nobody met them on the little back roads, that was why they had chosen the little hotel dock on the edge of farmland. A few days later, they reached a four-lane highway, and still met no one.
    The highway was breaking up, saplings shooting up through the edges of the tar, charred rings dotted the roadway where refugees had lit campfires along the way. Stray cars had been moved into the median, sprouting grass in the cracks of the hoods and trunks, puffing angry balls of mosquitos from the wells of the flat tires. All the signs of people were there, but nobody moved along the road. There were no new signs or markets along the way, something common on the roads leading to Frank and Nella’s city. Frank was just ahead of her, his body a cool blade of shadow against the hazy setting sun. He whistled as he crested a slight hill and turned back toward her.
    “You’ve got to see this, it’s incredible.”
    She hurried up the hill and looked down into a low plain. It was obviously marsh most of the year, the thick odor of decaying leaves still strong in the dry heat of the early summer. A herd of deer jostled and crowded each other,