WHAT READERS ARE SAYING

“The Road meets (a way better) Hunger Games.”

“Gritty, grim, violent.”

“Finally, a dytopian fiction book that ISN’T for young adults!”

BEFORE

He could smell them burning. It wasn’t a familiar smell but it didn’t have to be. Deep down, some part of him just knew what it was. It embraced him as he snapped awake, buried under the mingled scents of torched wood and heavy smoke. Around him, the house was ablaze. He screamed.

Dry and ragged, his prepubescent cry was more cough than shout. He hacked into the air, his young lungs pining for whatever last gasps of oxygen could be found. Hungry orange flames consumed the timber walls of the cabin in a gluttonous frenzy. The room was more smoke than not, the child’s saving grace the simple fact that he had fallen asleep on the floor. He blinked back the ashy haze, his vision dappled and fluttered as he crawled toward the kitchen. The flames hadn’t reached there yet, shades of glowing blackness tucked away from the growing fire. He made it a dozen feet before stopping.

Where is everyone? Where is Rachel?

Then he remembered the smell. It was meat. It was people.

“Rach!?” he shrieked. “Rachel!?”

His juvenile shouts were hoarse and muffled, the inferno claiming the noise for its own. He dragged himself back into the den, the silky soot smudging against his hands and wrists as he crawled. He followed the light upwards as the fire cracked and huffed, caressing the ceiling with its thin tendrils of concentrated heat. The Boy, hardly past his eleventh birthday, whimpered as he pushed deeper into the scalding smoke, every inch an expedition. Finally, he saw her leg sticking out from under the table. The wood was scorched and freshly aflame.

“Rachel!”

The worn soles of her boots glimmered in the vagueness. Scrambling toward her, he pulled his shirt over his face, desperate for unspoiled air. He tucked his chin as he shimmied over the floorboards. They were warm to the touch and dark. Delicate black-grey flakes trickled down like hot rain, painting the wood as it reflected the light. He reached out to grab his sister’s leg, slapping at the flames, pulling her toward him. But her leg wasn’t there. It was just charred bone and a fragile shell of nothingness. His hand pressed straight through.

He grasped at her torso, pulling her towards him. She was hot and empty, her melted flesh sticking to him as desperately as he flailed for it. He felt its gelatinous grip boring into his hands and arms as it in turn melted his skin. The last bits of her ruined body sizzled against his forearm. She was on fire, what was left of her. The Boy was too. But he didn’t want to let go. He couldn’t. So he held her ashes as they burned together and let the darkness take them.