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When a catastrophic natural disaster looms on the near horizon, the government releases an airborne virus designed to make the human race tougher, better able to survive. It was developed for soldiers to make them better able to fight, go longer without food and water, and increase their strength.
In its virus host it bonds itself to our own cells and helps them to regenerate at an advanced rate, so that even if you die you can rise again. In non-combat field tests the soldiers become aware of this, they called the phenomenon Overclocking and looked at it in a positive light. How could you look negatively at being able to live forever? A quick shot of the antidote after the heart had begun to beat again and the virus seemed to slip into remission, leaving a healed body that would come out of the virus induced coma in a few days once again its own.
But the virus does something the governments didn’t consider, it never stops working, never truly becomes dormant. Even after the body has ceased any real life, the virus lives on, rebuilding it’s host in a new and potentially indestructible way. Days later, what was dead becomes alive once more.
In this book those closest to Project Bluechip begin to pick up the pieces of their world and get themselves to safety. They have heard rumors of a place in the South that might offer safety, but getting there may require a price that is far too high to pay…
EARTH’S
SURVIVORS AMERICA THE DEAD: BEGINS THE END
Earth’s Survivors
America the Dead: Begins the End is copyright © 2016 Dell Sweet. All
rights foreign and domestic reserved in their entirety.
Cover Art © Copyright
2020 Wendell Sweet
Some text copyright
2010, 2014, 2015 Wendell Sweet
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This is a work of
fiction. Any names, characters, places or incidents depicted are
products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual
living person’s places, situations or events is purely
coincidental.
This novel is Copyright
© 2016 Wendell Sweet and his assignees. Dell Sweet and Geo Dell are
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PROLOGUE
Route 81 rest-stop
Watertown New York
April 20th
1:00 am
A black truck pulled
into the rest stop and two men climbed out; walking toward the rest
rooms that sat in from the road. Concrete bunker looking buildings
that had been built back in the early seventies. They had been closed
for several years now. In fact the Open soon sign was bolted to the
front of the building; rust streaked the sign surface. It seemed like
some sort of joke to Mike Bliss who used the rest stop as a place to
do light duty drug deals. Nothing big, but still that depended on
your idea of big. Certainly nothing over a few thousand dollars. That
was his break off point. Any higher than that, he often joked, you
would have to talk to someone in Columbia… Or maybe Mexico, he told
himself now as he sat waiting in his Lexus, but it seemed that since
Rich Dean had got himself dead the deals just seemed to be getting
larger and larger. And who knew how much longer that might last. He
watched the two men make a bee line for the old rest rooms.
“Idiots,” he
muttered to himself. He pushed the button, waited for the window to
come down, leaned out the window and yelled. “What are you, stupid?
They’re closed.” He motioned with one hand. “You can’t read the
fuckin’ sign or what?”
Both men stopped and
looked from him to the sign.
“Yeah, closed. You
can read right? Closed. That’s what it says. Been closed for years.
Go on into Watertown; buy a fuckin’ burger or something. Only way
you’re getting a bathroom at this time of the morning.” He had
lowered his voice for the last as he pulled his head back into the
car, and turned the heater up a notch. The electric motor whined as
the window climbed in its track. He looked down at his wrist for the
time, 1:02 A.M., where the fuck was this dude. He was late, granted a
few minutes, but late was late.
A sharp rap on the
glass startled him. He had been about to dig out his own supply, a
little pick-me-up. He looked up to see the guys from the truck
standing outside his window. “Oh… Fucking lovely,” he muttered.
He pushed the button and the window lowered into the door, the motor
whining loudly, the cold air blew in.
“And what can I do
for you two gentlemen,” He asked in his best smart ass voice.
The one in back stepped
forward into the light. Military type, Mike told himself. Older,
maybe a noncom. A little gray at the edges of his buzz cut. With the
military base so close there were soldiers everywhere, after all
Watertown was a military town. It was why he was in the business he
was in. It was also why he succeeded at it.
“Did you call me
stupid,” The man asked in a polite tone.
“Who, me? No. I
didn’t call you stupid, I asked, what are you, stupid? Different
thing. The fuckin’ place is closed… Just doing my good deed for the
day… Helping you, really, so you don’t waste no time,” Mike told
him.
“Really?” The man
asked.
Mike chuckled. “Yeah
really, tough guy. Really. Now, I did my good deed, why don’t you get
the fuck out of here ’cause you wore out your welcome.” He opened
his coat slightly so they could see the chrome 9 mm that sat in its
holster.
“Really,” the first
guy repeated.
“Okay, who are you
guys, frick and frack? A couple of fucking wannabees? Well I am the
real deal, don’t make me stick this gun in your fuckin’ face,” Mike
told them. He didn’t like being a dick, but sometimes you had to be.
“You know what my
mother always said about guns?” The second guy asked.
“Well, since I don’t
know your mama it’s hard to say,” Mike told him. He didn’t like the
way these two were acting. They weren’t cops, he knew all the locals.
If it had been someone he had to worry about he would have handled
this completely differently. These guys were nobodies. At least
nobodies to him, and that made them nobodies to Watertown. If he had
to put a bullet in… His thoughts broke off abruptly as the barrel
of what looked like a .45 was jammed into his nose. It came from
nowhere. He sucked in a deep breath. He could taste blood in his
mouth where the gun had smashed his upper lip against his teeth.
“She said don’t
threaten to pull a gun, never. Just pull it.”
“Mama had a point,”
Mike allowed. His voice was nasally due to the gun that was jammed
hallway up to his brain. “Smart lady.”
“Very,” the man
allowed. “Kind of a hard ass to grow up with, but she taught me
well.” He looked down at Mike. “So listen, this is what we’re
gonna do. You’re gonna drive out of here right the fuck now. And
that’s going to stop me from pulling this trigger. Lucky day for you,
I think. Like getting a Get Out Of Jail Free card, right.”
“This is my business
spot… You don’t understand,” Mike told them. “I… I’m waiting
for someone.”
“Not tonight,
Michael.”
“Yeah, but you
don’t.” He stopped. “How do you know my name?” he asked. There
was more than a nasal quality to his voice, now there was real fear.
Maybe they were Feds. Maybe.
“Yeah, we know you.
And we know you use this spot as a place to do your business. And I’m
saying we couldn’t care less, but right now you gotta go, and I’m not
going to tell you the deal again. You can leave or stay, but you
ain’t gonna like staying,” The guy told him.
“Listen… This is my
town… If you guys are Feds you can’t do shit like this… This is
my town. You guys are just…”
The guy pulled the
trigger and Mike jumped. He fell to the right, across the front seat.
Both men stepped away from the car, eyes scanning the lonely rest
stop from end to end, but there was no one anywhere. The silence
returned with a ringing in their ears from the blast as it had echoed
back out of the closed car interior. The shooter worked his jaw for a
moment, swallowing until his ears popped. He lifted his wrist to his
mouth. “Guess you saw that,” he said quietly.
“Got a cleaner crew
on the way up. You’ll pass them in the elevators. The boss is waiting
on you guys.” The voice came through the implant in his inner ear.
No one heard what was said except him.
He nodded for the
cameras that were picking him up. “In case you didn’t hear it,
someone is supposed to meet him here so your cleaner crew could have
company.”
“Got that too…
We’ll handle it.” He nodded once more, and then walked off toward
the rest rooms as the other man followed.
Once in back of the
unit they used a key in the old rusted handset. It only looked old
and rusty, it was actually an interface for a state of the art
digital system that would read his body chemistry, heat, and more.
The key had dozens of micro pulse sensor implants that made sure the
user was human, transmitted heartbeat, body chemistry, it could even
tell male from female and match chemical profiles to known examples
in its database. Above and to the sides of them several scanners
mapped their bodies to those same known profiles. Bone composition,
old fractures, density and more. All unique in every man or women.
The shooter removed the key and slipped it into his pocket. A few
seconds later a deep whining of machinery reached their ears, the
door shuddered in its frame, and then slipped down into a pocket
below the doorway.
A second later they
stepped into the gutted restroom. Stainless steel doors took up most
of the room; the elevator to the base below. They waited for the
cleaner crew to come up, then took the elevator back down into the
depths.
The Bluechip facility
stretched for more than five miles underground. Most of that was not
finished space, most of that was connector tunnels, and storage space
bored from the rock. The facility itself was about three thousand
feet under the city of Watertown in a section of old caves that had
been enlarged, concrete lined and reinforced. The rest area was one
of several entrances that led into the complex. An old farm on the
other side of Watertown, an abandoned factory in the industrial park
west of the city and a few other places, including direct connections
from secure buildings on the nearby base.
John Pauls and Sammy
Black had Alpha clearance. Both were ex-military, but most likely
military clearance was no longer a real matter of concern this late
in the game, Sammy thought as they made their way down the wide
hallway. The word coming down from those in the know was that in the
next twenty-four hours the human race would come very close to
ceasing to exist at all. No confirmation from anyone official, but
regular programming was off air, the news stations were tracking a
meteor that may or may not hit the Earth. The best opinions said it
didn’t matter if it hit or not, it would be a close enough pass that
there would be massive damage. Maybe the human race would be facing
extinction. The government was strangely silent on the subject. And
that had made him worry even more. The pass was estimated to be right
over the tip of South America. So maybe formalities like Alpha
clearance weren’t all that important any longer. If only Mike Bliss
had given that some thought before he had pissed him off.
The halls were silent,
nearly empty. Gloss white panels eight feet high framed it. It had
always reminded Black of a maze with its twists and turns. Here and
there doors hung open. Empty now. Always closed any other time he had
been down here. So it had come this far too, Black thought. He
stopped at a door that looked like any other door and a split second
later the door rose into the ceiling and Major Weston waved them in.
Alice, he had never
learned her last name, sat at her desk, her eyes on them as they
walked past her. One hand rested on the butt of a matte black .45
caliber pistol in a webbed shoulder holster that was far from Army
issue, and Sammy had no doubt she would shoot them both before they
could even react. Alice was etched into one of those name pins that
the Army seemed to like so well, but oddly, just Alice, no last name,
rank or anything else. She wore no uniform, just a black coverall.
The kind with the elastic ankle and wrist cuffs. No insignia there
either. He had noticed that months before. Her eyes remained flat and
expressionless as they passed her desk.
“Alice,” Sammy said
politely. She said nothing at all, but she never did.
“Sit down, boys,”
Major Weston told them. He spoke around the cigar in his mouth: Dead,
but they always were, and there was never the smell of tobacco in the
office. They took the two chairs that fronted the desk.
The Major was looking
over a large monitor on the opposite wall that showed the north
American continent. This map showed small areas of red, including the
northern section where they were. The rest of the map was covered
with green. “Where we are, and where we need to be,“ he said as
he pushed a button on his desk. The monitor went blank. He turned to
face the two.
“So here is where we
are. You know, as does most of the world, that we are expecting a
near miss from DX2379R later on tonight.” He held their eyes.
John shrugged. “I’ve
been doing a little job, must have missed that. It’s not gonna take
us out is it?”
“Saw that on the news
a few days back. Guess we dodged a bad one,” Sammy said.
“Right… Right,”
Weston said quietly. “But that cover was nothing but bullshit.”
“It’s going to hit
us?” John asked.
“Maybe… The fact is
that we don’t know. One group says this, another group says that, but
it doesn’t matter because it will probably kill us off anyway. Direct
hit, near miss, it is going to tip over an already bad situation with
the Yellowstone Caldera.” He raised his eyes, “Familiar with
that?”
“Yellowstone Park?”
Sammy said.
John nodded in
agreement.
Weston laughed. “Put
simply, yes. Yellowstone has always been an anomaly to us. Back in
1930 the Army did an exploratory survey of that area. What we came up
with was that there was a section of the Rocky Mountains missing.
Looked at from the top of Mount Washburn it was easy for the team to
see that the largest crater of an extinct volcano known to exist lay
before them.”
“I guess that’s about
what I thought,” Sammy agreed.
“Yeah. We all think
that. Except it is not true at all because the Yellowstone caldera is
not extinct, it is active. Active and about to pop. There have been
several warnings, but we took the recording stations off line quite
some time ago, so there has been no mention of it in the news. Budget
cuts,” he shrugged. “So everyone is focused on this meteor that
may or may not hit us and instead this volcanic event is going to
blow up and when that happens the rest won’t matter at all.” He
clicked the button on his desk and the monitor came to life. “All
the red areas are spots where the surface pressure has increased.
There was, at one time, many active volcanoes on the north American
continent.” He clicked a button and the map changed to a view of
the European continent with many of the same red shaded areas.
“All over the
Earth… Higher pressures. Up until a few days ago the brainiacs were
still arguing over whether this could even happen.” He laughed. “It
is happening and they are arguing over whether it can happen. Well,
we had our little debates and then we realized that history shows
clearly that this has happened before. Several times. Call it the
Earth’s way of cleansing itself.”
“But it’s not an
absolute, right?”Sammy asked.
“Don’t start sounding
like the scientists.” He reached below his desk and came up with
six small silver cartridges. Each had a red button mounted on the top
with a protective cap over the button itself. He clicked a button on
his desk, and a picture of destruction appeared on the screens. It
was obviously an aerial shot, looking down at a chain of islands.
Smoke hung over the chain, reaching as high as the plane itself. As
the plane dropped lower, rivers of red appeared. “That picture is
an hour old. That is… Was, the Hawaiian chain.”
Sammy twisted further
to the side, staring at the monitor. “How can that be… I mean
everyone would know about it.” He turned back to Weston.
Weston nodded. “And
that would be true except the satellites are out because of the
asteroid. Shut down to avoid damage. That is the official word.” He
clicked the button on his desk and the monitor went dead once more.
“I started this out saying that none of it matters and that is
true. The Yellowstone caldera is going to erupt sometime in the next
few days. Not a maybe, not an educated guess: If the satellites were
up you would know that the park is closed. It has already started. We
have had a few small quakes, but the big stuff is on the way. He
rolled the cartridges across the desktop; Sammy and John caught them.
“Super volcanoes…
Earthquakes that modern civilization has never seen… The last super
eruption was responsible for killing off the human population some
seventy-four thousand years ago. Reduced it to a few thousand. And
that is not the biggest one we have evidence of.” He lifted his
palms and spread them open, sighing as he did. “So it is a double
whammy. If we survive the meteor the volcanoes get us, or the
earthquakes because of them, or we’ll die from injuries. And I think
those of us who die outright will be lucky. The rest of us will have
a hard time of it… Staying alive with nothing… We will probably
all starve to death.” He paused in the silence.
“Those cartridges are
a compound developed right here in this complex for the armed forces.
Project Super Soldier. SS for short. That kept people from looking
too deep, they assumed it was something to do with the Nazi youth
movement here and abroad. We let that misconception hold.” He
waited a second for his words to sink in. “SS is designed to
prolong life past the normal point of termination. It allows a
soldier to survive longer without food and more importantly without
water. Does something to the cells of the host, I don’t pretend to
know what. What I do know is that the people above me made the
decision to release this…” He picked up a mug of coffee from the
desk and sipped deeply. His eyes were red road maps, Sammy noticed
now. Like he hadn’t slept in a few days.
“So this is it for
us. I guess you realize that you probably won’t get paid for this. No
money is going to show up in your account. I will run it through
before I pull the plug, but I truly believe the machinery will be
dead by the time payday rolls around. So this is something I’m asking
you to do.” He pointed to the cartridges that both men were looking
over. Sammy held his as though it might bite him.
“Those babies are
really all we have to hope with. Most people will die outright. They
will never make it past the quakes, eruptions, and the resulting ash
clouds and gases. Up here we should be okay as far as gases go,
eruptions, but there are fault lines that crisscross this area. This
whole facility is bored from limestone caverns. Probably won’t make
it through the quakes, although it is a good eighty miles from the
closest line,” he shrugged. “Maybe, maybe not. My point is there
should be a good chance for survivors here.”
“So we do what with
these? Can they harm us?” John asked.
“Harm you, kill you?
No, but you will be infected the minute you push that button. It will
protect you the same as anyone else. There is enough in a single
cartridge to infect about five hundred million people,” Weston said
quietly.
“Whoa,” Sammy
whistled. “Why infect… Why not inoculate? And why six
cartridges… Three Billion people?”
“Minimum, three
billion. That is before those infected pass it along themselves:
After a while it won’t matter. As to the question of infected, this
is a designer virus. You catch it just like the flu. We infected
whole platoons by releasing it in the air over them. Eighty-Nine
point seven percent infection rate, but that doesn’t really matter
because it infects people close to you and those people will infect
you… Sneezing, waste, sex, water, food, it gets into and on
everything. And once it is in you, either orally or via bloodstream
you will be infected. The human body has nothing to fight it, no
reason to be alarmed or believe it’s anything more than a virus. And
that same response will help to carry it to every area of the body as
your own defenses manufacture white blood cells to fight it. So you
may as well say a one hundred percent infection rate.” He paused
and rubbed at his temples.
“Be glad they decided
on this. They have some others that will kill everybody in the world
in a matter of days.” Weston nodded at the raised eyebrows that
greeted his remarks. “I don’t doubt that the merits of which way to
go were hotly debated,” he finished gravely.
“The virus is
designed to live within the host, but it can live outside of the
host. It can stay alive in a dead body for days, even if the body is
frozen. In fact that just freezes the virus too, once the body is
thawed it will infect any living person that comes along. So those,”
he pointed to the silver cartridges, “are overkill. Same stuff is
being released across the globe. Great Briton… Germany…
Australia… West coast just a few hours ago. Manhattan has already
been done, all the East Coast in fact. I want the two of you to head
out from here. One vial here, then one of you head west, the other
south. Go for the bigger cities… Water supplies… Reservoirs…
Release it in the air or water, it doesn’t matter. There are men
heading out from the south, the west coast. The Air Force will be
dispersing the same stuff via cargo planes tomorrow or the next
day… As long as they can fly, if we can even make it that long, and
that isn’t looking really good right now…” He rose from the desk.
“I’ll see you out.” He turned to Alice. “Alice… Pack us up.”
Alice nodded as Sammy and John got to their feet, but her hand
remained on the butt of the pistol. Rubber grips, Sammy noticed as he
passed her.
“Alice,” he said.
“Um hmm,” Alice
murmured.
Sammy nearly stopped in
his tracks, but managed to hide his surprise as he passed by into the
hallway. The Major fished two sets of keys from his pocket. “Parked
in the back lot. A couple of plain Jane Dodge four-bys. Drive ’em
like you stole ’em. Leave ’em where you finish up. Hell, keep ’em if
you want ’em. Nobody is going to care.”
The three stood in the
hallway for a few seconds longer. Sammy’s eyes locked with the
Major’s own, and he nodded. The major walked back into his office,
and the door rose from its pocket behind him. Quiet, except the
slight buzzing from the fluorescent lights.
John shrugged as his
eyes met Sammy’s, waiting.
Sammy sighed. “You
heard the man… West or south?”
“Flip for it?” John
asked. His mouth seemed overly dry and he licked his lips nervously.
Sammy pulled a quarter
from his pocket and flipped it into the air. “Call it, Johnny.”
“Tails,” John said
just before the quarter hit the carpet.
Sammy bent forward.
“Tails it is. You got it, Johnny.”
John looked down at the
carpet. “West, I guess.” John said.
Sammy nodded, looked
down once more at the quarter and then both men turned and walked
away toward the elevator that would take them back to the surface.
Watertown Center New
York
Shop and Save
Convenience store:
Haley Mae
1:30 AM
“Last one,” Neil
said.
Neil was a detective
for the sheriffs’ department. It was closing in on 2:00 AM and he and
his partner Don had just come back from six hours of sleep to get a
jump on the day. Yesterday one of the checkout girls had disappeared
between the Shop and Save, a small mini mart on the western outskirts
of the city, and home. Earlier this morning she had turned up dead in
a ditch just a quarter mile from the front door. The techs were still
processing the scene, but it was looking personal. Stabbed to death,
multiple wounds, no defense wounds, at least none that he or Don had
been able to see, and fully clothed. Her purse had been found nearby,
wallet and cash inside. No ID, but her store ID had still been
clipped to her shirt. They would know more in a few days once the
coroner did her magic. It all pointed to someone she knew, and they
had no known boyfriend. The trailer park where she lived had turned
up nothing, they had questioned some people at the convenience store,
but some had been off shift, so here they were back at the store
questioning the other employees.
They had commandeered
the night manager’s office which was barely larger than a broom
closet, but at least it was a place to sit with enough space left
over to call in the workers and ask their questions. Free coffee via
the same night manager, who had still not gone home, was taking a
little of the six hours of sleep sting off, but to Neil free coffee
in a convenience store was like a whore offering a free shot of
penicillin to the first twenty five customers.
“Who’s next?” Don
asked.
The last half hour they
had been interviewing the people who worked the same shifts as Amber
Kneeland.
“Haley Mae,” Neil
said.
Don looked up and
stopped writing in his little notebook. “How do you,” spell her
name, he had meant to ask Neil, but she was right in front of him.
“EM. A. E,” she
said with a smile.
“Vietnamese?” Don
asked. She was obviously mixed race, African American and Asian, he
questioned himself.
“Japanese,” she
told him.
“Nice name,” Neil
said, “Haley.”
Beautiful girl, Don
thought. “Did you know Amber Kneeland? Sometimes works this
shift?” he asked.
“Not really,” she
answered. “I mean, I met her, but only in passing… I just started
here myself.”
She really is
beautiful, Don thought. “You wouldn’t know if she had a
boyfriend… Other friends?” he asked.
Haley shook her head.
“Sorry,” she said… “What has she done?”
“Nothing,” Neil
supplied.
“She went missing
last night,” Don said. “Turned up dead this morning.”
Haley shook her head.
“Oh my God. That’s horrible. She was such a nice girl… Quiet.”
Neil nodded his head.
“So maybe you did know her a little better than you thought?”
“I just started here
a few weeks back, and like I said, I don’t really know her… But it
might be a girlfriend not a boyfriend.”
Don looked at her. “You
wouldn’t know who?”
“No. It’s just a
rumor. Someone said it to me… I don’t even remember who… But I’ve
never seen her with a guy, and I have seen her with other girls…
Maybe also the way she looked at me a few times…”
“Go out with her?”
Don asked.
“No… Never… I…”
“Don’t swing that
way?” Don added.
Haley frowned slightly
before she answered. “I work. I don’t swing any way. But if I did
she wasn’t my type. She never asked me out, I never asked her out.”
“Didn’t mean to
offend you,” Don said. He shrugged. “She’s dead.”
“She would probably
do the same for you,” Neil said.
Haley nodded. “That
really is all I know. I hope you find who did it though. She seemed
like a nice girl,” Haley said.
“You don’t seem the
type for this… Bagging groceries at 2:00 am,” Don said, changing
the subject. “You aren’t local or I’d know you… This city really
is small despite the base.”
Haley smiled. “Came
here a year back with a boyfriend, Army. He left, forgot all about
me, I guess. I had this idea of modeling… Tough to get a foot in a
door though.”
“Wow, if he left you
behind he must be a fucking idiot… Any good?” Neil asked.
Haley laughed.
“Excuse mister smooth
there,” Don told her. Neil feigned a hurt look and Haley laughed
again. “He meant, have you done anything? I know somebody… Might
be interested.”
Haley arched her
eyebrows. “I can model. I did a You Jeans ad back in Georgia a few
years ago. I just need to prove it to the right person.”
“Escorting? Maybe
dancing. It’s strictly escorting or dancing, no funny stuff. Dance
clubs… Clothing modeling,” Neil said.
“Probably start out
escorting… Dance a little… Then if he likes you he’ll put you
into the modeling end of things. He owns a lot of shit… Several car
dealerships across the state… Some of the biggest dance clubs,
clothing outlets, those bargain places, but still, modeling is
modeling, right? Not the big name stuff, but it is a foot in the
door,” Don added.
“I can do that,”
she said slowly.
Neil passed her a white
business card with his own name scrawled across the back. “Tell him
I sent you… That’s my name on the back.”
“Jimmy Vincioni,”
Haley asked.
“Just V… Jimmy V,
good guy,” Neil said.
Haley nodded and tucked
the card into her front jean pocket. “I’ll call him… Thanks.
Look…” Her voice dropped to a near whisper. “I’m pretty sure
she had a girlfriend here… I just don’t know who,” Haley added
quietly.
Don finished writing in
his notebook, nodded once he met her eyes and then shook the hand she
offered. She walked away.
“Beautiful,” Neil
said.
“Absolutely,” Don
agreed. “You ain’t getting none of that though.”
“Yeah? But if Jimmy V
hires her? It’ll be the next best thing.”
Don shook his head, but
smiled. His eyes rose and watched as Haley walked away. “Guess I’ll
have to have a few drinks at the club if that happens.”
Neil chuckled low. “You
and me both,” he agreed.
Take a look at the series:
Earth’s Survivors: America the Dead | Barnes & Noble® (barnesandnoble.com)
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