Feast (29 page)

“See you soon, Ricochet,” Boone replied, using Peter’s old callsign, which he had learned from Jakob, while regaling the boy with the story of how he and his father had faced off against the ExoGator.

Back at the truck, everyone was inside and waiting. Ella sat in front. Lyn sat in the back seat, between the kids, both of whom looked to be dealing with their own personal miseries. Alia was nowhere to be seen. Peter climbed into the truck, slid behind the wheel and let out a sigh.

“You okay?” Ella asked.

“Will be, when this is over.”

She gave his arm a rub and said, “We should go.”

It was just seven in the morning, but they wanted to reach their first destination long before the sun set, giving them time to search for the kinds of weapons that would allow them to stand up to an Apache attack helicopter, not to mention the ever-evolving ExoGenetic creatures between Hellhole and Boston.

“We’re waiting on one more,” Peter said, and when the back of the truck sank down a bit, he knew she had arrived.

“Am here, family,” Feesa said through the open back window.

Stunned eyes looked from the Chunta warrior to Peter.

“She insisted,” Peter said.

“Protect family,” Feesa said. “Kill Eddie.”

“Good enough for me,” Ella said.

“Her breath smells like a Woolie fart,” Anne said, which got a hoot of laughter from their Rider compatriot and kept the girl from joking again.

“Family,” Jakob said, and he held his fist out to Feesa. She pushed her larger fist against it, gave an approving nod. Then she leaned back out of the window, sitting in the truck bed, arm up on the side as though ready for a nice drive in the sun, which was probably as far from the truth as you could get.

Peter started the engine, shifted into drive and left the safety and comfort of hell behind. “Next stop, Fort Bragg.”

Epilogue

Anne leaned her head against the window, watching the endless streaks of crops pass by. Bored by the monotony, she started naming the vegetation, whispering to herself. “Asparagus. Beets. Corn. Peas.”

And then at some point during the brain game, she didn’t know when, she switched to the crops’ formal identifications. “Chenopodium quinoa. Spinacia oleracea. Lycopersicon esculentum. Triticum aestivum.”

The words were an audiobook narrator’s worst nightmare come true, but she could rattle them off as quickly as the crops shifted from one to the next. She’d become fluent in her mother’s botanical geek speak. She’d also decided to keep her growing knowledge, and the memories that came with it, from her family.

Because as the amount of information stored on the USB drive leached into her head increased, so did more recent memories. And with every new memory came the growing fear that she couldn’t fully trust the woman who had grown her, dragged her across the country and introduced her to her biological father.

Ella, she was beginning to realize, was a first class manipulator. Anne knew it was a useful skill to have in the current state of the world. Anything to stay alive. But she didn’t think that applied to her father. Sure, she’d only met him just over a month ago. And yeah, he hadn’t willingly donated his DNA. But they
were
family. By blood, and now more.

Anne knew her feelings for Peter and Jakob were genuine. But her mother’s feelings? She wasn’t sure.

Memories peppered her like nearly forgotten dreams.

She remembered them the way that steam wisped above a boiling pot, clear for a moment and then dispersed into the air. She could feel its lingering humidity, but could no longer see it or experience it directly.

And one of those memories left her worried.

She couldn’t recall the events around it.

Couldn’t tell you where she—where Ella—was, or what she was wearing, or what the room smelled like. But she could remember the emotion, raw and angry, close to how she imagined an ExoGen felt every time it saw another living thing.

But it wasn’t hunger Ella felt, it was
hate
.

For Peter.

She looked away from the blur of crops and watched her parents. Peter was behind the wheel, keeping them at a steady forty miles per hour, eyes on the highway headed north. Ella sat beside him, scanning back and forth, always vigilant despite the relative quiet they’d experienced since leaving the swamps of South Carolina behind. Their shaved heads, now covered in a thin layer of scent-concealing dirt, matched. As far as the post-apocalypse went, they looked like a couple. More than Jakob and Alia ever had.

And they acted... Well, they acted married. Happy in an intense way. Trustworthy. A team. Everything she wanted them to be. But those were the best deceptions. The ones that were too good to be true. Eddie learned that the hard way.

Would Peter?

The question conflicted Anne, because as much as she loved Peter and Jakob, she felt the same for her mother. But on top of that love was the unshakable belief that her mother’s every action since leaving ExoGen was solely for Anne’s benefit. And ultimately the world’s. So she still trusted her mother.

For now.

Maybe Ella really did hate Peter. Maybe he wasn’t even Anne’s biological father. Maybe she had no father at all, and no brother. The questions put a deep ache in her chest and nearly brought tears to her eyes.

Grow up,
she told herself.
Life is about surviving. There’s no place in the world for tears.

Ella had spoken those words to her a week after they first fled into the wild. They had resonated and become part of Anne’s core belief system.

But no matter how hard she tried to ignore the questions, and the emotions they unraveled, she couldn’t help but wonder about it all. If she was going to help save humanity, she wanted to know that it was worth saving. That they were on the right side. And that her mother wasn’t also lying to her.

So Anne rested her head against the window glass and tried to remember more.

Tried to remember everything.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jeremiah Knight is the secret (not really) identity for an international bestselling author of more than fifty horror, thriller and sci-fi novels, and comic books.
Hunger
, the #1 post-apocalyptic bestseller, was the first novel under the Knight name, which Suspense Magazine called, “A riveting post-apocalyptic epic of man's rush to save the world and the harsh consequences that follow.”

For more on Knight and his alter-egos, visit
bewareofmonsters.com
.

COMING SOON

UNITY

By Jeremy Robinson

Euphemia Williams, known to her few friends as Effie, and everyone else as Eff-Bomb, will punch you for looking at her funny, for using her full name or for noticing that she’s a genius. But when an elite global entity known as Unity takes note of her intelligence and offers her a chance to escape the hum-drum life of a foster-child, she signs up. At best, she expects her time abroad to be a vacation. At worst, an actual challenge. But what she finds, upon being swept up in a futuristic transport, is far, far worse.

En route to a secret location in the Pacific, a meteor punches through the atmosphere triggering an electromagnetic pulse that sends the transport plummeting to the ocean. While fighting to escape the crash and climb onto an island beach, the meteor slams into the sea. A tsunami races across the island, pursuing Effie and her fellow survivors deeper into the volcanic island’s lush jungle.

Beaten, terrified and abandoned, the small group discovers that they are not alone on the island. The locals are ruthless and well-trained. With the survivors looking to her for leadership, Effie struggles—and fails—to keep everyone alive as they fight for survival.

Along the way, Effie uncovers the island’s secrets. The parents she never knew were entangled with the island’s strange history. The island is home to far more than human survivors. And the meteor that sent them careening into the ocean, wasn’t a meteor at all. There are more—and one of them is headed their way.

Jeremy Robinson, creator of the ‘Kaiju Thriller’ genre, and international bestselling author of the
Project Nemesis
novel and comic book series, launches this new series combining the behind-enemy-lines themes of
Red Dawn
with the high-tech monster-fighting robots of
Robotech
, infusing it with his frenetic pacing and character driven plots.

AVAILABLE NOW

APOCALYPSE MACHINE

By Jeremy Robinson

THE HUMAN RACE STARTED THE SIXTH MASS EXTINCTION ON EARTH.

A chain of subglacial volcanoes erupt in Iceland. The melting ice floods the countryside. Poisonous gas descends on Scotland. A tsunami devastates the Norwegian coastline. An ash cloud rises into the atmosphere, blotting out the sun across Europe, ushering in a new Ice Age. Dozens of nuclear power plants, flooded by ocean water, experience meltdowns. Millions perish. Many more are displaced. All on the first day.

On the second day, a series of earthquakes moving in a straight line, reveal the presence of something massive, walking across the landscape. Concealed by a thick, radioactive ash cloud, the ‘aberration’ heads west, toward Russia.

Abraham Wright, a science writer for
Modern Scientist
, who wants nothing more than to be reunited with his family, finds himself at the center of the United States’ response to the crisis. Under his new title as Assistant Science Advisor to the President, Wright is sent to Europe with a team of Army Rangers, where he uncovers the truth about the ancient behemoth laying waste to the world: there have been five mass extinctions on planet Earth, and the aberration has been present at each.

On the third day, the world fights back.

And loses.

Separated from his family by continents and oceans ravaged by countless disasters and populated by strange new life, Wright struggles to survive in an evolving world. Hoping to uncover the key to mankind’s redemption, he fights for answers, and to reach his loved ones—before the human race’s extinction.

THE APOCALYPSE MACHINE WILL FINISH IT.

Jeremy Robinson returns to the Kaiju Thriller genre he popularized with the largest Kaiju to ever appear in fiction: the Apocalypse Machine. Bursting with all the epic action, desperate struggle and complex characters that readers have come to expect, Robinson takes the world to the brink once more, pitting humanity against the greatest threat he has yet to conjure, and asking the question: Does humanity deserve to inherit the Earth, or is our time up?