Until the End of the World (Book 3): All the Stars in the Sky

  Table of Contents

  Title

  License

  Dedication

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38

  CHAPTER 39

  CHAPTER 40

  CHAPTER 41

  CHAPTER 42

  CHAPTER 43

  CHAPTER 44

  CHAPTER 45

  CHAPTER 46

  CHAPTER 47

  CHAPTER 48

  CHAPTER 49

  CHAPTER 50

  CHAPTER 51

  CHAPTER 52

  CHAPTER 53

  CHAPTER 54

  CHAPTER 55

  CHAPTER 56

  CHAPTER 57

  CHAPTER 58

  CHAPTER 59

  CHAPTER 60

  CHAPTER 61

  CHAPTER 62

  CHAPTER 63

  CHAPTER 64

  CHAPTER 65

  CHAPTER 66

  CHAPTER 67

  CHAPTER 68

  EPILOGUE

  About the Author

  Acknowledgements

  All the Stars in the Sky

  Until the End of the World, Book 3

  Sarah Lyons Fleming

  Copyright © 2015 Sarah Lyons Fleming

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the author, except as used in a book review. Please contact the author at [email protected].

  Cover photo © Cruskoko Dreamstime.com

  Lumos font © CarpeSaponem, Sarah McFalls

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  For Jamie, my first and most favorite fangirl. And my own personal juker.

  And for my parents (again). Because y’all deserve more than a novella.

  CHAPTER 1

  It isn’t easy to be optimistic when you have thousands of unknown miles ahead of you and an army of zombies at your heels. Especially when the road you’ve been traveling for hours is barren of all life—except the undead, of course. If I hadn’t promised to believe everything will be all right, I might consider jerking the steering wheel out of Peter’s hands and sending us all into a tree. It may be unlikely we’ll get to Alaska, but I won’t be the one to say it.

  “Want me to drive?” I ask.

  Peter takes his puffy eyes off the road. I’ve begged him to sleep, but he refuses. I couldn’t sleep after Adrian died. “Maybe in a little while.”

  Peter’s the main reason for my optimism. He says we’ll make it, and I think that belief is what’s holding him together. That and Bits, who sits in the back with Hank, both staring out the window as we follow the RV and pickup through Quebec. Or maybe we’re in Ontario now.

  I unscrew the cap of my water bottle and offer it to Peter. His dark hair is limp, hanging to his cheekbones, and he pushes it back with a sigh. I want to say something, but there’s not much to say to someone when they’ve just watched the person they love become a zombie. I know this from experience.

  The sun bleaches the brown grass to beige and flickers through the trees like a strobe light. I’m too tired to find my sunglasses, so I close my eyes to escape its brightness. A moment later I start awake, heart racing and damp with sweat. I saw Ana, face slack and neck bloody, right before I sent a bullet into her brain. John under a pile of Lexers. Henry’s struggle before he fell into the bus. Dan watching us leave from the ambulance’s roof.

  Dan’s dead by now. If he lost the nerve to do it himself, even bolstered by the flask he always carried, enough time has passed that he’s one of them. Dead, even if he’s walking. I know he didn’t lose his nerve, though. I may not have known him as well as I could have, but he wasn’t the kind of guy who’d sit around and wait to become a zombie.

  I haven’t slept in over a day, but I won’t sleep until Peter does. He needs the company and, truthfully, so do I. I’m afraid to go to sleep. To dream. Because no matter how optimistic you are when awake, sleep gives your brain free rein to fuck with you. My eyelids threaten to lower and I sit up straight, legs crossed under me. Criss-cross applesauce, Bits calls it.

  “Lie down,” Peter says.

  “I’m fine.”

  “Cassandra, please.”

  “You need to rest, too,” I say. “I’ll keep you company until then.”

  He doesn’t argue, even though I know he wants to by the way he grips the steering wheel. Penny sticks her head between us from the back. “Let me and James take over for a while.”

  Penny doesn’t look much better than Peter, but she uses her teacher voice that leaves no room for argument. She hasn’t asked me for more specifics about how I killed her sister. That’s a conversation I hope never to have. Peter pulls to the side of the road. The other vehicles stop and Nelly leans out of the pickup’s window. When he sees we’re switching, he sits with the engine idling until we resume driving. Our last pit stop wasn’t too long ago.

  There isn’t much room for passengers when the VW’s bed is open, but Bits and Hank are small kids and they fit on the two seats that are left. I smile at them and even Hank, who lost his dad yesterday, smiles back.

  “You guys tired?” I ask. They both shake their heads. “Hungry?” Two more shakes.

  I finish working off my boots and dig my fingers into my heel. It may be smarter to sleep with my boots on, but my feet need out. Peter kicks off his boots, places his holster by his side and flops back with an arm over his eyes.

  “Are you okay if I sleep?” I ask the kids. “Do you need anything?”

  Hank fingers Adrian’s knife on his belt, which I officially gave to him last night. I had my Ka-Bar in my bag, and Adrian would have liked for Hank to have it.

  “We’ve got it,” he says.

  It would almost be funny because he’s a skinny ten year-old with big glasses and burgeoning dreadlocks that look more like a clear-cut forest than hair, but his dad is evident in Hank’s serious expression. I hope there is such a thing as Heaven, and that Henry’s with Corrine and Dottie now. I hope everyone we’ve lost is up there, having a kick-ass dinner or something. John believed they would be, and if it’s true, he’s up there.

  I kiss the kids’ foreheads, then lie down and steel myself for more images: The splatter that flew out the back of Ana’s head, hitting the Lexers behind her. The way her hands twitched on the dirt road before going still. But when I close my eyes, it’s only blackness. Even my brain is too tired for games right now.

  CHAPTER 2


  I wake in the late afternoon when Peter kicks me in his sleep. His eyes open. I can see he’s remembering Ana by the way he swallows and stares into space. That first wakeup is the worst. They all suck, but the first one—the one where you remember someone is dead—takes the cake. Every once in a while, even months later, you get one that’s almost as bad, but you’re somewhat used to the letdown by then. You’ve grown a thicker skin, even if it only feels like a millionth of a millimeter.

  “Did I kick you?” he asks. “Sorry.”

  I rest my cheek on the mattress. “Just don’t steal my blankets unless you want to be kicked back.”

  He tries to smile, and I touch his shoulder before I sit up. Bits and Hank are still in their spots, Sparky the cat perched between them. James is behind the wheel and Penny is asleep in the passenger’s seat, hands resting on her round stomach. Penny’s always hated naps, but at six months pregnant she craves them. She’s not missing anything exciting. The road had been open fields, then an endless wall of trees on either side, and now we’re at flat with small groups of trees.

  “Well,” I say, “Ontario’s shaping up to be just as exciting as Quebec.”

  “Seriously,” James agrees. “We’re coming up on a town where we’re going to look for fuel.”

  We’re sticking to gas stations instead of siphoning or draining fuel from the tanks of abandoned cars. Most have already been emptied, or the gas has oxidized into an engine-destroying muck that even our fuel stabilizer can’t save. Add in the time it took to check each car, giving Lexers time to converge on us, and it quickly proved to be an exercise in futility when an hour’s work produced four gallons of usable gas.

  The pickup has a hundred gallon tank in the bed, but with three vehicles, one an RV, we’re blowing through gas like it’s water. Which, incidentally, we’ve also seen plenty of—there’s a lake or pond or marsh every time you blink. It’s great for drinking and washing up, something I’d really like to do, but water isn’t going to get us another 3,600 miles.

  We discussed ditching the gas-guzzling RV last night, but we need a vehicle that holds a lot of passengers in case something happens to the pickup or VW. I hope we don’t have to ditch Miss Vera the VW. She’s not as shiny as she was a day ago, covered as she is in dead bugs and dust, but her wood interior still gleams. The general consensus was that there’s no correct answer, so we left it as it is for now.

  We cross a small bridge onto a street of plain houses painted various shades of brown. They’re unfenced, with only the eternal flatness of this part of Canada as their backyards. We’re hoping to make it through the thousands of miles of prairie to the mountains before the Lexers do. Considering that we have no idea where the Lexers are or in what direction they’re heading, it may be a stupid and insane plan. But it’s all we’ve got.

  The houses are replaced by cheap motels and a few boxy buildings that housed businesses, followed by a stretch of stores with boarded windows and peeling signs. The bodies, garbage and abandoned cars make it clear this place was part of the apocalypse, but it looks as though the apocalypse began long before zombies.

  Bits’s and Hank’s lips are still chocolaty from the MRE dessert they ate while I slept. I reach into one of the bags crammed by the wall. If we get separated we don’t want to be without ammo, clothing and food.

  “Now eat your carrot,” I say, and hand them each one from the gardens we plundered at the Quebec Safe Zone. Their eating junk food is the least of my worries, but I figure I should say something mother-like. I pull on my boots while they crunch their carrots and then grab myself one. We don’t have much food spread between twenty people; these and the dessert were rationed for lunch.

  “So, what happened while I was asleep?” I ask.

  “Trees,” Hank says.

  “And lakes,” Bits adds.

  “Not surprising,” Peter says, and sits up next to me. I hand him a carrot and he chews slowly. “Any grass? I was hoping for grass.”

  I smile sideways at Peter when they giggle. He looks better than he did a few hours ago and certainly better than a few minutes ago.

  “How’re you feeling?” Peter asks me.

  I should be the one asking that of him, except I hated when people asked me how I was after Adrian. “I’m fine.”

  I’m not fine. I just have other things to worry about. Like Hank and Peter and Penny and Maureen, who’ve all lost someone they loved. I did too, but I don’t have time to mourn. I don’t want time to mourn. I’ve woven it into the grief I already carried instead of letting it knock me down the way it could have. Staying optimistic may be difficult, but after yesterday I’m pretty sure I can endure anything this world throws at me.

  “Are you okay?” I ask.

  He keeps his face to the window. “Yeah.”

  It could be he’s holding it together because he doesn’t have any other choice. Focusing on patrol or guard helped me to get through this summer, and now we’re on the longest patrol ever. I spent two weeks living in a tent and crying after I lost Adrian. I guess that was what can be considered a luxury these days, which is a truly depressing thought.

  I eat the last of my carrot and reach for Hank’s hand. “How are you, sweetie?”

  Hank, the least snuggly ten year-old I’ve ever met, climbs into my lap like a puppy. Bits knows now that we’d never leave her, and I hope it’s only a matter of time before he knows it, too. I’m stuck with these kids, which is both a wonderful and terrifying responsibility. “I’m so glad you’re with us,” I say. “Don’t worry, we’ll be there soon.”

  Hank wipes his nose on his sleeve and nods. He’s smart enough to know that it might not happen, but I want him to believe—maybe it’ll make the difference between death and survival.

  “Gas station,” James calls.

  The gas pumps sit in a large concrete lot with a convenience store set far behind. We ignore the pumps, pull to the underground tanks and turn off our engines to wait for any unwanted visitors. After a full minute, there’s still nothing but empty street on one side and open field and train tracks on the other.

  Zeke’s head emerges from the RV. “All right. Take your spots.”

  Penny moves into the driver’s seat and waits with the kids. She’s there to rescue us or take off with Bits and Hank if she can’t. She hates this part but does it with a grim determination I’d only seen on her sister prior to now.

  Nelly jumps from the pickup and saunters over, blond hair sticking out at crazy angles and blue eyes sparkling. “You’re both looking less shitty. Did you sleep?”

  “Is there an ounce of tact in there, Nel?” Adam, his boyfriend, shakes his head.

  “You know there isn’t,” I say. “It’s a lost cause. Give up before you go crazy.”

  “Too late for that,” Adam says.

  Zeke, Kyle and Shawn work on opening the ground tanks and readying the pump, which resembles a tiny red generator with a gas nozzle on one end and a collection hose on the other, while the rest of us fan out in a circle to keep watch. Once the pump’s going you can’t hear a thing. I wish we had the small tanker truck from Whitefield that held enough fuel to deposit us in Alaska with barely any stops.

  The roar of the pump commences and continues on. That means there’s fuel in the tanks and it looks fresh enough to use, although they’ll add fuel stabilizer to be sure. If there’s enough to fill the tank in the pickup’s bed, the vehicle gas tanks and the fuel cans, it’ll get us another 800 miles. I grip the axe, a tactical tomahawk, that I found among our spare weapons, and wish for my cleaver. It’s gone forever, seeing as I dropped it on the road outside Kingdom Come. I loved that weapon for its versatility, but mainly I loved it because it was handmade by John. I’d gladly give up every weapon I have and a whole lot more to get him back. That he’s gone leaves me feeling rudderless, as though we’re not traveling to a destination but lost at sea. I’m trying my best to believe Peter when he says we’ll make it, but John would’ve been able to convince me. I tell
myself to stop wishing for things that can’t be. If there were no zombies, we wouldn’t be in this mess in the first place. How’s that for a wish?

  I grind my teeth. When we get to Alaska I’ll allow myself a huge, sobbing, ugly cry. Until then, I’m focusing on the people I do have instead of the people I don’t. By the time seven Lexers stumble out from between the businesses across the road, I’ve managed to swallow back my tears. Those of us on the street side move forward to meet them at the sidewalk.

  Five against seven is a fair fight when it comes to people and zombies: We have speed and brains and they have the ability to go forever. I swing my axe. The handle grip sits firmly in my glove and the head is nicely weighted for impact, with one side a hatchet and the other an evil-looking spike.

  Peter ventures into the street after one that’s strayed from the pack. He finishes it off and then slides his blade through the back of another’s head. The metal blade glints in the Lexer’s open mouth before he yanks it out. He’s taking more chances than he should, and I resolve to keep an eye on him to be sure he doesn’t do anything stupid like I did this summer.

  The remaining five close in, resembling extras in a horror movie with their open sores and gray skin and tattered clothes. I’m glad the pump masks the noises that must be coming out of their gaping mouths because, along with the smell, those hissing moans can drive you batty. I’ve held on to the hatred for these things that want to eat us, but they don’t scare me as much as they used to. I still get tense and sweaty, but I’d be a fool not to when death is only feet away.

  I’m taller than the woman who comes for me, so I swing the spike downward through the top of her head. It’s not the optimal spot—you can get a good knife or machete through skull, especially the softer skulls of older zombies, but it’s more work for the same payoff and you’re better off going for an eye, nose or mouth. I’m pleasantly surprised when the axe’s spike punctures with no jarring impact the way a knife would.

  Jamie whoops and skewers a tall, skinny Lexer with her spike. The curly ends of her black hair poke out from the knot atop her head and her rosebud lips are curled. Jamie’s fairly crazy, even measured against everyone else who’s survived thus far, and we’re all crazy to some extent.