Krisis (After the Cure Book 3) by Deirdre Gould Page A

empty lots occasionally. The flooded subways made it worse, steam curling up from the stairwells, still carrying a foul human odor even after almost a decade. Swarms of mosquitoes hovered around the openings, breeding in the still water. Ruth wondered what they ate. Dogs maybe. There were still lots of them. Or maybe they fed on infected people who still managed to cling to life by attacking rats or pigeons or the occasional person that still wandered the street. She wondered if it was the lack of people or luck that had prevented a malaria outbreak. There were so many things to worry about now.
    She’d thought it would stop after losing Charlie and Bill, that she wouldn’t care any more. And a part of her didn’t. But Ruth didn’t like the idea of suffering. Especially alone. At first, she’d just been trying to avoid the most brutal methods of dying. There were so many now. The sick people had roamed the streets for the first few years, attacking and killing anything they found. But winter, starvation, battles with others and secondary diseases had killed off a good portion of them.
    Just after Bill had killed himself, bands of scavenging survivors had swept through most of the city, the last wave of people fleeing. They had taken what they wanted, when they wanted it. There were too many weapons just lying around. Everyone was armed. Ruth had hidden until the city was silent again. But the loneliness was deadly. A bad fall while scavenging, allowing a door to close and lock behind her, even letting a fire go out in the winter, death waited in the simplest things now. And that wasn’t even counting the microbial threats. Ruth knew too much about those. Most diseases simply didn’t have a method of transmission now that everyone was gone, even the corpses. But even a rusty nail could be the start of a terrible, unstoppable infection now.
    The fear of a painful death had made her seek out the stragglers, the people that stayed. There were hundreds, maybe even a few thousand. But they were scattered all over the large metropolis. Ruth only knew a handful. But many, many of them knew who she was.
    She’d come to Emma’s address. Just another row house in the middle of a long string of others. Nothing special. Just like the day. Just like Emma, Ruth told herself. But it was a lie. They were all special, all different. She’d done this dozens of times, kept expecting them to blur, meld, become one nameless face in her memory. But they remained stubbornly unique.
    She stood on the top cement step and leaned in toward the front window. The summer sun was too bright and bounced off the glass. Ruth pulled her gun from its holster. She expected that Nick would have told her if Emma was loose, but she had been surprised before. The knob rattled loosely as she opened the door. Emma heard it and began banging somewhere overhead. Ruth put away the gun, satisfied that the girl was restrained. As she closed the door, the growling from Emma’s room bubbled over into a shriek of rage. It was like raw, searing pain spilling into the air. Ruth couldn’t stand that shriek, not since Charlie. She pulled a pair of headphones from her pocket and shoved one into each ear. A second later, Dvorak washed away the screams. But it couldn’t mask the world around her.
    The living room was barren, except for a few long clotheslines strung across it. Strips of torn cloth hung from them, the sepia ghost of old, washed blood staining them. Ruth touched one, realizing it was a homemade bandage. There had still been real ones for Charlie. She had thought their lives were so difficult that first year. But they had medicine and gas and food then. It had been almost six years since she’d seen a sterile gauze pad. Ruth ducked beneath the streamers of cloth. The back of the room was also bare, except for a pile of broken furniture and an axe sitting in front of a large old fireplace. It was nothing unfamiliar. They all did it.
    Ruth and Bill had raided