Remaining, The: Faith

Book 0: The Remaining

by D.J. Molles

Genres: Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Post-Apocalyptic sci-fi; Military Sci-Fi

Synopsis

Dan Molles' stunning Remaining saga continues in the second novella in the series set in a world ravaged by a bacterium that has turned 90% of the population into ravenous animals.

The world is slipping into chaos. A mysterious plague has come stateside, and Clyde Bealey suddenly finds himself with nothing but a suitcase full of worthless things and a desperate sense that he must prove himself to his pregnant wife. As he tries to lead his family to safety through a world filled with madmen, he will learn that the cost of his pride might be more than he can bear.

Book 1: The Remaining

Book 2: The Remaining: Aftermath

Book 3: The Remaining: Refugees

Book 4: The Remaining: Fractured

Novella 1: The Remaining: Trust

Novella 2: The Remaining: Faith

Release date: May 27, 2014

Publisher: Orbit

Print pages: 50

Sample

ONE

The soldier behind the megaphone blinked away sweat and took a loud, amplified breath. When he spoke, it was deliberate and slow, the sound of his voice taking on the muffled, squawky quality of any loudspeaker announcement.

“Folks, we cannot fit everyone on the bus with everything they’re carrying.” A very thin layer of patience was still intact. “We only have room for you to take one bag. That’s one bag per person. If you can’t fit it into that one bag, you have to leave it behind. Also, there’re no firearms on the bus. If you have any firearms with you, please hand them over to the soldiers standing next to the big green boxes and we’ll try to make sure everything is returned to you at a later date.”


Clyde Bealey stood on hot, cracked concrete, crammed in with everyone else. Hundreds of scared, sweating people. Above them, the sky was bright and cloudless. The sun merciless. All the tiny muscles in his face ached from squinting so long against it. Under its broil, the blacktop shimmered and heated the soles of his dock shoes to the point of discomfort. Wearing them without socks seemed like a bad idea now. His cotton polo shirt hung damp on his shoulders. One stubborn strand of his longish blond hair kept meandering over to the center of his forehead, routing drops of sweat right onto the bridge of his nose, where they caused his thick glasses to slide out of place.

He felt sick to his stomach.

It never happens on a cloudy day, he thought. Bad things always happen on sunny days.


He had watched the news. He knew what was out there. As did everyone else standing in that crowded parking lot. They knew it academically, on a small, muted scale. They’d watched the madness in other, poorer countries, and they’d seen it spread. And the whole time they had the attitude of, That’s so tragic for those people over there.


But then it was stateside. And then it was a few cities away. And now they were standing here, scared to death, thinking of all the videos they had watched on their televisions and laptops, and wondering how the great and mighty United States government could let this happen to them.

The soldier pushed on. “If you need to rearrange your belongings, please step to the side and make room for others to pass by. You don’t have to worry about losing your place. We’ve got enough buses for everyone. You won’t be left behind. Just keep making your way forward in an orderly fashion and comply with the soldiers as they search you and your bags.”

The soldier with the megaphone stood in the bed of a Humvee, painted tan to mismatch every other piece of military equipment around that was painted green. They were gathered in the middle of a high school parking lot. Everything around them had the usual sandy-looking dilapidation that went hand-in-hand with towns along the coast. The wide-open expanse of cement was fissured and potholed. Water stood in large puddles from last night’s rain.

There were perhaps three hundred people in the parking lot, and still more were coming in. As the crowd grew, so did the sense that panic was resting just underneath the surface of everyone’s minds. When the crowd had been small, there had been the sense that they were only the silly “paranoid ones.” The sense that everyone else was more levelheaded and didn’t believe it was necessary to evacuate to FEMA camps.

Now, as the crowd began to press in, the mood changed. It was clear that they were not the paranoid ones. It was clear that everyone was sharing the same fears. And a shared fear is made real, and can no longer be rationalized away.

The cars that everyone had driven were clustered up around the high school parking lot and completely jammed the surrounding roads. The only path that remained open was one marked by caution tape and guarded zealously by soldiers. It led the buses through the packed-in vehicles and out to the only lane of Highway 55 that remained open. There, they would step on the gas, the engines roaring like they were airliners heading down the tarmac, and they would haul ass to the FEMA camp at New Bern.

Still, people were trickling in, having parked blocks away from the school and hiked in, lugging all their precious things that the sweat-soaked soldiers would soon tell them they couldn’t have. There were small hills of personal effects that had been left behind. Soldiers walked among the piles, dressed in their gray and tan digital camouflage, wet rings around their collars and armpits.

Clyde watched them and realized that none of them wore helmets or body armor. Most of them had rifles strapped to their shoulders. But Clyde didn’t think they were loaded. He didn’t know much about guns, but he thought these ones should have had big clips sticking out of them. And he couldn’t see a single rifle that had one. Some of the soldiers who stood at the big green crates full of confiscated weaponry had pistols strapped to them that looked like they were loaded, but that was it.

Strangely, it gave Clyde comfort.

After all, if the US Army didn’t think it was serious enough to give their soldiers ammunition, then surely it wasn’t that dangerous, right?

A hand gripped Clyde’s arm. The heat and sweatiness of it annoyed him briefly. He looked down and found Haley looking up at him, brown hair frizzed on top, matted underneath. Her cheeks flushed with heat. Eyes sharp and clear blue.

The two of them were polar opposites. The kind of relationship that he knew his friends talked about behind his back, secretly betting against them. Clyde and Haley were like people from different countries. He was upper-class Richmond, Virginia. She was lower-class Farmville, North Carolina—she disliked even saying the name of her hometown around Clyde’s friends because she knew the name alone made them laugh inwardly. As though only rubes could be produced by a place with such a name.

Clyde’s friends were not the only doubters. His family bordered on hostility. His sister had essentially avoided Haley from day one. And when he had announced to them that he was going to propose to Haley, his father had just quirked a single eyebrow, and his mother had cried bitter tears of disappointment.

But his was not the only family that disliked the marriage. Haley’s fa. . .