the end of Everything (New Adult Erotic Romance)

by

Katie Ayres

Copyright 2014 Katie Ayres

All rights reserved.

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Disclaimer

This book is a work of fiction. Names,
characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s
imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual
events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

Blurb
: WHEN EVERYTHING ENDS, ONLY LOVE
REMAINS.

This is a new adult erotic romance
series and contains graphic sexual scenes and explicit violence.
Not suitable for under 18s.

The dead are not staying dead.
They’re rising and attacking the living. Eighteen year-old Faith
loses her parents and almost loses her life but Gideon saves her.
Can they make a new life for themselves in a changed and violent
world? Or, will the End Times rip them apart?

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I stood on the front step of my parents’
farmhouse, my heart in my mouth as I watched the road for my
brother’s red pick-up truck. It was after five in the evening and
the air had already turned cool. My mother’s azaleas were in bloom
and a few bees flew from flower to flower gathering nectar. In the
field that ran along the road to the house, Sergeant and Brownie,
our two horses, grazed contentedly. The Holsteins were grazing or
nodding off behind the barn. Everything was quiet, peaceful, but
the calm in our little corner of Tennessee was deceptive. A few
days ago, the world went mad and now chaos reigned in the cities.
Nashville and Memphis had been closed off and the National Guard
had been called out but the trouble hadn’t reached our area. I
still didn’t really understand what was going on. Ma and Pa were
Born Again Christians and didn’t hold with too many new-fangled
things so we didn’t have the Internet and we didn’t watch
television or listen to the radio either. Satan’s Box, Pa called
it.

The first inkling something was wrong came
when Pa went into Acadia, the nearest town to where we lived, last
Friday. When he came back, he and Ma had held a whispered
conversation before they turned to me and Gideon with such serious
expressions on their faces I’d thought they’d somehow known what
had happened in the barn between us. Gideon had kissed me. We’d
kissed! I felt the heat enter my cheeks and I was like about to
faint. I couldn’t even look at Gideon. Pa would kill us. I knew he
would. The blood roared in my ears and I waited for lightning to
strike. When nothing happened, I realized everyone was looking at
me funny.

“Are you alright, Faith?”

“Yes, Pa,” I whispered. “I’m sorry.”

“You look sick. I hope you ain’t coming down
with that sickness I’m talking about…though how you could have
gotten it…” His voice trailed off as he peered at me.

“What sickness, Pa?”

He sighed. “That’s what I’ve been talking
about the last couple minutes. You haven’t heard a word I’ve said,
have you?”

I apologized again and he explained about the
sickness that had broken out, not just in Tennessee, it was
everywhere. He didn’t know where it had started, maybe New York
City or Los Angeles, the modern world’s versions of Sodom and
Gomorrah as he’d said a hundred times before. Thousands of people,
maybe millions, were infected. People, ordinary people, were
sickening, dying, and then rising again to attack and consume the
flesh of the living. He called them the risen dead.

My eyes widened when I heard that and an icy
fear gripped my heart. “Are these the End Times then, Pa?” I’d
asked.

“I fear so, my child,” Pa had answered, a
strange note of sadness and gleeful triumph in his voice. “God is
cleansing the wickedness of the world.”

“Is there no cure?” Gideon asked in his deep
voice.

“How can there be a cure for God’s
punishment?” Pa had snapped.

That Friday and Saturday our family prayer
meeting lasted twice as long as Pa led us in fervent and lengthy
prayers for our deliverance and salvation.

I wasn’t surprised when, on Sunday, we found
our small Pentecostal church full to overflowing, some people
couldn’t even find seats and had to stand. The extra high
attendance caused Pa to snort in derision. “Their sins are catching
up to them and now they turn to the Lord but the Lord will not hear
them,” he’d whispered fiercely to us. I’d quaked and wondered if
that applied to me, too.

Pastor Joseph apparently agreed with Pa
because his sermon had been full of fire and brimstone as he’d
ranted about the sins of the world. Pastor Joseph said it wasn’t a
sickness that was afflicting people, it was the will of God. The
End Times were upon us, he shouted. The world was ending and soon
we’d see the Horsemen of the Apocalypse riding through the air,
raining death and destruction upon the godless. The dead who were
rising again hadn’t become infected by some virus, he’d yelled at
us as we’d listened, riveted, to him. No, the risen dead were God’s
instruments of destruction, earth angels armed not with a flaming
sword, but with a hunger for sinful human flesh. I’d not yet seen
any of the risen dead and I don’t think anybody in our area had
either but, after that sermon, I imagined them as tall,
mud-colored, wingless versions of their former selves.

Pastor Joseph advised us to pray forgiveness
for our sins, to pray without ceasing. The truly saved would rise
to heaven in the coming Rapture before the earth angels could
attack them. They would not be harmed. By the blissful
self-satisfied look on his face, I could tell he expected Jesus,
himself, to summon him heavenward at any minute.

Ma and Pa sat between Gideon and me so I
couldn’t see his expression. Was he as worried as I was about what
we’d done? Was that why he’d practically stopped talking to me? But
it was just a kiss. Nothing more. Lot’s daughters had done worse
with their father but I knew that was no excuse. Gideon might not
be my brother by blood but we’d been brought up together and had
called each other ‘brother’ and ‘sister’ from the time I knew
myself.

Pa and Ma adopted Gideon from an orphanage in
Nashville twenty-one years ago when he was just a little baby. Her
doctor had told Ma she wouldn’t be able to have children so they
made up their minds to take in somebody else’s child and give it a
good Christian home. But, then, a year later Ma got pregnant with
me which is why she sometimes called me her Miracle Baby. Gideon
doesn’t look like us at all. We’re big-boned and blond and I’ve got
Pa’s green eyes but Gideon was dark-haired and dark-eyed, his
angular face, fine-boned.

As I’d grown older, my feelings for Gideon
had changed, deepened, but I’d known they were sinful and wrong and
had kept them under tight wrap. How could I ever have explained to
him how the sight of his shirtless chest made my heart slush around
in my chest? Or, how I felt like melting when he sent me one of his
slow, lopsided smiles? Gideon was beautiful. He looked like how I
imagined movie stars looked but, since we weren’t allowed to watch
movies, I couldn’t say which one. I was sure any Hollywood person
who saw him would have loved to put my brother up on the screen.
With his open good looks, sparkling honey-brown eyes, and kissable
lips Gideon would draw women in droves to whatever movie he
appeared in. These were sinful, lustful thoughts. They were not the
kind of thoughts a girl should be having about a young man, least
of all one brought up as her brother. Pastor Joseph’s sermon about
the wages of sin and the arrival of the End Times was like it was
meant especially for me.

After church, Pa and Ma spent a long time
talking with their friends. Usually, people hurried home so they
could prepare lunch and then relax for the rest of the day but,
that Sunday, everyone wanted to talk about the End Times and about
the plague of the undead God had sent among us. The president had
called it a sickness, some kind of virus. He’d said his government
was doing its best to maintain order and control and keep the
sickness from spreading. He’d promised it would be over soon but he
was in D.C. and nobody trusted him, anyway, because it was like he
didn’t read his Bible and understand about the End Times.

It made me anxious seeing how tense and
worried people looked. I was eighteen, officially an adult, but I
felt as frightened as a child who’d been told the bogeyman was on
his way. Pastor Joseph seemed very sure of his own salvation but I
didn’t think all his church members shared his confidence. I, for
one, didn’t, and Gideon’s expression told me he didn’t either. I
guess that’s why he stepped up his efforts to avoid me after
Sunday. If I entered a room he was in, he’d leave. If I asked him a
question, he either ignored me or, if Ma and Pa were around, he’d
answer in a monosyllable without looking at me. I know Ma and Pa
noticed but they hadn’t said anything, hoping we’d work things out
without them having to get involved. The kiss we’d shared had made
me hope there could really be something between us but his
standoffishness afterward made me realize I was hoping in vain for
a love that could never be.

And now, here we were. It was Friday again
and Pa and Ma had gone into town to pick up supplies and collect
their mail. They’d left shortly after seven in the morning as they
usually did and should have been back around lunchtime. Gideon had
kept himself busy all day after we’d finished milking the cows,
checking and repairing the fence that ran around our property. When
he’d stated his intention that morning at breakfast I’d asked him
why he was bothering? If these were the End Times, what did a
broken-down fence matter, but Pa had said that was exactly the
wrong attitude. God did not mean for us to simply give up and wait
for his Angels to collect us. No, He wanted to know that we had
enough faith to continue our daily lives just as if the end of the
world was not upon us for His Chosen would know that their
salvation rested with Him and that He would not forsake the
righteous. I hadn’t been convinced but I didn’t argue. I figured
Gideon just wanted to do something that would keep him away from
the house and away from me during Ma and Pa’s absence.

I sighed. Thinking about a future for myself
and Gideon, together, had been silly even before the End Times.
Now, as I waited for him to return from Acadia with our parents, I
understood that I’d been just plain ridiculous. Gideon had shown me
quite plainly that he didn’t want that kind of relationship with
me.

I grimaced and forced my thoughts away from
the sad turn they’d taken. It was rapidly turning dark but I didn’t
see any lights approaching on the road that led to our house. Where
were they? Gideon knew how worried I’d been about Ma and Pa before
he left to go look for them. Why hadn’t he called to let me know
they were okay and to set my mind at ease? What was keeping
everybody? I debated whether I should walk out on the road to meet
them. I’d never liked being on my own and, now, the house had a
yawning sort of emptiness that made it suddenly feel kinda creepy.
I went inside and turned on all the lights on the bottom floor.
Father didn’t like us to, as he put it, waste electricity, but it
made me feel a little better seeing the rooms all lit up.

I returned to the porch. The road remained
dark. Could they have been in some kind of accident? But, if so,
somebody would have called to tell me about it. Gideon or one of
the townsfolk. Somebody. I wrung my hands, growing increasingly
worried the darker it got outside. Could one of the Risen Dead have
showed up in Acadia? But, even so, Pa and Ma should have been
alright because Pa always carried both a revolver and a rifle in
the pick-up even when he went to church. Then I remembered what
Pastor Joseph had said about how the Earth Angels couldn’t be
stopped by bullets. Goosebumps rose on my arms. I rubbed them
quickly away but the sense of dread remained. Maybe Ma and Pa and
Gideon, too, had been caught in the Rapture. The idea of this
brought tears to my eyes because it meant I’d been left behind. A
bout of self-pity overtook me and I started crying. I couldn’t
believe I’d never see my family again. I should have been happy
they’d gone up to heaven to be with God but I wished I’d either
gone with them or that they’d stayed.