World After
Chapters (81)
Title Page
Copyright Page
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Text copyright © 2013 by Feral Dream LLC
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Skyscape, New York.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available upon request.
ISBN-13: 9781477817285
ISBN-10: 147781728X
Text design by Patrice Sheridan and Susan Gerber
First edition
Dedication Page
Dedicated to the early readers of Angelfall. Thanks for falling first.
CONTENTS
CONTENTS
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
1
EVERYONE THINKS I’m dead.
I lie with my head on my mother’s lap in the open bed of a large truck. The dawn light etches the grief lines on my mom’s face while the rumble of the engines vibrates through my limp body. We’re part of the Resistance caravan. Half a dozen military trucks, vans, and SUVs weave through dead cars away from San Francisco. On the horizon behind us, the angels’ aerie still smolders in flames after the Resistance strike.
Newspapers cover shop windows along the road, making a corridor of reminders of the Great Attack. I don’t need to read the papers to know what they say. Everyone was plastered to the news during the early days when reporters were still reporting.
PARIS IN FLAMES, NEW YORK FLOODED, MOSCOW DESTROYED
WHO SHOT GABRIEL, THE MESSENGER OF GOD?
ANGELS TOO AGILE FOR MISSILES
NATIONAL LEADERS SCATTERED AND LOST
THE END OF DAYS
We drive by three bald people wrapped in gray sheets. They’re taping up the stained and crumpled fliers of one of the apocalypse cults. Between the street gangs, the cults, and the Resistance, I wonder how long it will be before everyone is part of one group or another. Even the end of the world can’t keep us from wanting to belong, I guess.
The cult members pause on the sidewalk to watch us pass in our crowded truck.
As a family, we must look tiny—just a scared mom, a dark-haired teenager, and a seven-year-old girl sitting in a truck bed full of armed men. At any other time, we would have been sheep in the company of wolves. But now, we have what people might call “presence.”
Some of the men in our caravan wear camouflage and hold rifles. Some man machine guns still aimed at the sky. Some are fresh off the streets with homemade gang tattoos made of self-inflicted burns that mark their kills.
Yet these men huddle away from us to keep a safe distance.