The World After (Book 3) Read online

  THE WORLD AFTER

  Book Three

  RYAN CASEY

  Higher Bank Books

  CONTENTS

  Bonus Content

  The World After

  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

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  THE WORLD AFTER

  Book Three

  CHAPTER ONE

  Bill Bates wasn’t sure how many more steps he could take before he collapsed and gave up completely.

  It was late in the afternoon and the air was biting cold. It had been that way for a long time now. The blackout must’ve occurred… what, six months ago? Or was it seven, now?

  It didn’t really matter, in truth.

  What mattered was that it was winter, and it was cold, and that Bill and his family needed to find some kind of shelter soon or they wouldn’t be able to push on much further.

  He looked at the barren fields either side of him. The grass was covered with a frost that, once it’d fallen, just didn’t seem to be lifting. The trees were bare. There was no life, not at all. Everywhere just seemed empty. Dead.

  Bill had never been a fan of winter. It’d always been his least favourite season. The dark mornings, the dark nights. That claustrophobic feeling that accompanied it. It was always up to Rebecca to restore his winter cheer.

  But looking back at Rebecca, just a few paces behind, she hardly looked like she was enjoying winter anymore. Not now it had been forced upon her, and there was nowhere warm to go and hide.

  Bill slowed down. His feet were sore and blistered. His lips and nostrils were dry from all the cold air. He was wrapped up in a thick North Face parka he’d taken from a body a month or so back. The smell of the dead man still clung to it, reminding him of what he’d done. But he couldn’t let that knowledge get to him too much. He just had to keep a stiff upper lip and accept that what he’d done, he’d done in the name of safety and self-preservation.

  “You okay, Rebecca?”

  Rebecca looked up at Bill with defeat on her face. She was always such a beautiful woman, with long dark hair and perfectly smooth skin. But this world had taken it out of her. Narrow cheekbones. Patches of hair missing. And her teeth… her teeth were decaying rapidly.

  But everyone was the same. Nobody was thriving in this world. The time for thriving was long gone.

  Rebecca didn’t say a word back to Bill. She didn’t have to. He knew already that she was at the end of her tether.

  And then there was little George beside her.

  Bill’s heart skipped a beat when he looked at his son. He was only fourteen years of age, but he was such a fighter. He’d been rather plump when the blackout came. He’d been sat on his Xbox, in fact, a morning ritual that always preceded school. When it happened, George’s biggest concern had been that his Xbox had broken. There was no regard for the rest of the power. There was no acceptance that everything might have gone down, because nobody really thought a thing like that was possible.

  But it was. They’d seen it now. Everyone had seen it now.

  They were living in the world that followed.

  George wasn’t a plump boy anymore.

  His clothes hung off his bony frame. His face was narrow and pale, ghostlike. His eyes were the worst, though. They looked vacant. Like there’d once been someone behind them, but that someone was gone now.

  It devastated Bill to see his son like this. He was supposed to be enjoying his teenage years, chasing girls and going on adventures with friends. He was supposed to have his whole life ahead of him—college, university, a first job, a girlfriend, a house, then a wife and a kid. Because when people used to tell Bill that the good years were the childhood ones, he didn’t believe it. Growing up was the best damned journey of all, in spite of all its challenges.

  But George wasn’t going to go to college. George wasn’t going to get that first job, meet the love of his life, then spend the rest of his life with her.

  George was going to grow up in a world where he had to hunt to survive. Where he had to build fires, and where he had to spend days without basic privileges such as water and food.

  And that was if George made it.

  That was if any of them made it.

  George stumbled towards Bill, Rebecca by his side. All of them stood there for a moment, just totally still as the bitterly cold breeze blasted them once again.

  It was Rebecca who broke the silence. “You don’t have anything? Anything at all?”

  Bill looked down into his rucksack. His stomach sank, even though he knew what the state of the rucksack was already. There was a bottle of water with hardly anything left in it. There was a first aid kit, which wasn’t much-damned use when there was nothing to heal. Other than that, there were a couple of pen knives, some spare underwear and clothes… and that was it.

  The last of their supplies. The last things they owned.

  Every last bit of it.

  Bill looked back up at Rebecca. He knew she could read the defeated expression on his face like a book. George just glared on with those glassy, distant eyes. It was almost as if this poor fourteen-year-old boy was just begging to be put out of his misery.

  Maybe that’s what it had to come to.

  Maybe that’s what had to happen. Their only remaining choice…

  No. He couldn’t think like that. He couldn’t give up.

  He put the rucksack back over his shoulder and rested a hand on Rebecca and George’s backs. He leaned in towards them. “We’re in a difficult position. I’m not going to pretend otherwise.”

  “A difficult position?” Rebecca said, her breath clouding in front of her. “We’re on death’s door.”

  “Don’t speak like that in front of—”

  “No. No, we have to start being honest with each other,” Rebecca said. “Because the more we kid ourselves, the more trouble we’re going to end up dragging ourselves into.”

  Bill looked into George’s eyes, trying to get a read on where he was at, mentally.

  George just stared back blankly at him, his son still inside, deep down, some
where.

  “We’re not going to find shelter,” Rebecca said, her voice shaky and pained. “We… we’re not going to find anywhere. So the best thing we can do is just…”

  She didn’t finish what she was saying. She just fell into Bill’s arms. Bill felt her warmth as she held onto him. He knew what this was. This wasn’t the pair of them giving up. Because they didn’t have anything to give up, not anymore.

  This was them being defeated.

  Bill closed his eyes as he tightened his grip around his wife’s body. He imagined he was holding her for the first time all over again. Like they were on the promenade at Lytham, both of them united and closer to each other than they ever had been to anyone else.

  “What’s… what’s that?”

  When Bill heard George’s voice, he didn’t really register. Not at first. He’d already accepted defeat. He’d already faced up to his inevitable fate.

  But it was when he saw George’s eyes that he knew something was different.

  There was a light to George’s eyes.

  There was life in George.

  He held his breath and turned around to what George was looking at, slowly.

  When he saw it, he didn’t understand it. Not at first.

  But slowly, the realisation built up inside.

  It filled his body.

  It brought tears to his eyes, and made his knees buckle with weakness.

  “We—we’ve made it,” Bill said, as he fell to the ground beneath him, the hard earth grating his knees. “We’ve made it.”

  Bill looked ahead at the thing in front of him, listened to its beautiful sound, his family by his side.

  He knew everything was about to change.

  Forever.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The moment I opened my eyes, I knew something was wrong.

  It was light. The sun couldn’t have risen long ago. I could see it peeking through the cracks in the cabin that Holly, Lionel and I had been staying in. The cabin was damp and it was freezing—completely freezing. But it was something. It was shelter. That was the important thing. A roof over the head was better than no roof over the head.

  But there was a problem.

  Lionel was by my side, but Holly was gone.

  I looked around the inside of the cabin first, scrambling to my feet. The walls were covered in mould. I could see my breath even though we were inside. The tips of my fingers were permanently numb and my hands a blue-ish shade.

  But you got used to that, when you lived in the world we lived in. It was winter now. December. Three months since Holly, Lionel and I had started travelling together on our own. Six months since the beginning of this whole sorry mess.

  To be honest, the life before just seemed like a dream. It didn’t feel like we’d ever really lived in that old world, even though we’d spent the bulk of our lives there. Our eyes had been closed. We hadn’t opened them up to appreciate the sounds of wind on a summer’s day, the birdsong, but above anything, the beauty of electricity itself.

  Car horns honking.

  Heating.

  Showers.

  All of those things taken for granted, total luxuries in a world where silence, thick coats and boiled water-washes had replaced them.

  “Where’d she go, Lionel?” I asked. Because speaking to my dog was normal now. Lionel was a good dog. We’d had a good bond, ever since he’d ended up with us after his owner, Derek, was killed. Before the end times, I’d never really been a big dog person. The end of the world was doing its best job of changing that.

  Lionel didn’t seem to know what I was talking about, though. He looked around the cabin, as did I, but it seemed like he was searching for food or something to enjoy rather than Holly.

  My heart pounded, my lips dry and chapped as I licked them with my similarly dry tongue. Head thumping, I moved over to the window—or rather, where the window once was and had now been boarded up. I looked outside through the cracks in the wood, tried to see if I could see Holly.

  There was nothing but frozen ground.

  Specks of snow falling from above.

  No footprints.

  “Come on,” I said, grabbing my machete with one hand and lugging my bow and arrow over my shoulder. It was one I’d made myself. I was getting better at the whole wilderness survival thing. I suppose I had to, if I wanted to survive this world. “Let’s go find her.”

  I ran down the steps of the cabin and through the area that we used as a lounge/kitchen.

  “Holly?” I called, as I scanned the room—the empty shelves, the dusty walls, the old dying cobwebs in the corner.

  But my voice just bounced back off the walls.

  Holly wasn’t here.

  “Shit,” I said.

  I opened the cabin door, holding my breath. I raised my machete. I didn’t want to draw too much attention to myself. Because drawing attention to myself meant alerting other people to my presence, which meant running into other people, which meant…

  Yeah. I didn’t even want to think about what running into other people meant. Only that it always brought chaos with it, and the last thing I wanted or needed right now when Holly was missing was chaos.

  I ran across the frozen ground outside of the cabin. The cabin was located right at the edge of a woodland area, just outside a caravan site. The site had been all but abandoned. I knew that wasn’t the case with all caravan sites. I’d seen a few months ago that Mike and Phillip’s respective groups had found solace in sites of their own. Well, Mike and his people had moved on, but Phillip just transferred from one site to another.

  I wondered where they were, Mike’s group and Phillip’s group. I’d killed Phillip, after all. I wondered how they were getting on. Whether they’d changed their ways. Or whether they’d collapsed without a leadership figure in their company.

  I didn’t care. I didn’t care if every single one of them was dead.

  All I cared about now was Holly and Lionel.

  And Holly was nowhere to be seen.

  I ran a little further outside the woods, down the hill, when I saw somebody.

  I stopped, completely still. I held up a hand, urging Lionel to be still, too. He had taken some time to train with commands of my own, but he was learning. He was adapting, just as we all were.

  I saw three people passing by. They were three men, all holding walking sticks, all walking upright. They looked… withered. But they were alive, so that was something.

  But the voice in my head made me crouch down, slowly, and tighten my grip around the machete.

  Holly had gone missing.

  And now there were three people right by us.

  I pictured them settling in the caravan site just outside the woods and I knew I couldn’t be comfortable with them there.

  They had three bags. Supply bags. Things that could come in handy.

  I knew what I had to do.

  I knew how I had to act.

  I lowered my machete.

  Then I lifted my bow and arrow, and aimed the arrow right at the back of the neck of the man furthest to the left.

  I swallowed a lump in my throat and went to fire.

  Then I felt a hand on my shoulder.

  I almost fell down the slope I was on as I spun around, dropping my bow and arrow instinctively and lunging for my machete.

  But it only took a moment for me to realise I wouldn’t need my machete for this person at all.

  “Holly,” I said.

  She was short, barely breaking five foot. She was dressed in a thick goose feather coat that was way too big for her, and she had a little red nose.

  She had a squirrel over her shoulder.

  She looked at me and then she looked at the people walking out of the woods.

  “I have to—”

  “No,” she said. “You don’t.”

  I tensed my jaw and looked back at those people. They were going to be our neighbours. They were going to cause problems. They were going to be a threat.

&nbs
p; “You don’t have to, Scott.”

  I watched the people pass by and I wanted to pick up that bow and arrow and finish their lives before they could become a problem.

  But in the end, I stayed crouched there and I watched them walk off into the caravan site, into a world of their own.

  “Now come on,” Holly said, as Lionel bounced excitedly around her now the people had gone. “I’ve got us breakfast.”

  I listened to the faint laughter of the three men who’d walked through the woods.

  And as I walked away with Holly and Lionel, I wished I’d dealt with that trio while I’d had the chance…

  CHAPTER THREE

  That night, we sat around the campfire with the remainder of the squirrel Holly had caught, and I resisted the urge to tell her off for her disappearing act earlier that day.

  It was dark. It got dark really early these days, of course. And it was bone-chillingly cold. We were around a fire, which I’d taught Holly how to start properly without matches. One method in particular that I found interesting was making a fire from ice, something that was in abundance this winter. You get a bowl of water, freeze it until it’s a couple of inches thick. Then you use your knife to carve the ice into a lens. Once you’ve done that, you polish it down, angle the ice towards a bed of tinder and voila.

  Of course, it was unnecessary as hell. Glass was in abundance, in abandoned car windows and the like. But still. It was a skill worth knowing, just in case. But it was dependent on the sun, which of course, in Britain, was something never to depend on. Ever.

  For other times, it was better to either use the traditional hand drill method, or to spark a fire from flint and a pocket knife.

  All of these methods considered, Holly was learning fast. Which was a good thing. She had to be a fast learner in a world like this.

  But no amount of fire would warm the pair of us—or Lionel—up. I wasn’t honestly sure I’d even warm up again, even if by some miracle I did find myself in a working sauna. I’d constantly have that chill under my skin. A reminder of the world I’d lived in; of the man who I’d had to become in order to survive in it.

  I stared at the flames coming from the fire and listened to the crackling of the wood. Every now and then, I heard noises from the trees, which snapped me out of the present and refocused my attention. It could be the men we’d seen walking through the woods towards the caravan site. Or it could be worse. Someone else. A group like Mike’s, who were no doubt still on the road.