The Survivors: Book One by Angela White, Kim Fillmore, Lanae Morris

give.
    Kenny would have turned them away with icy looks and threats, but he was AWOL, and she couldn’t sit by and let people die without at least trying to prevent it. She would face him with the entire list of rules she had broken when he found her, or when she found him, but for now, she wasn’t done adding up crimes to be punished for. The two biggest transgressions, which he might kill her for, were still to come.
    The storm flew by quickly, the threat disappearing as quickly as it had come, and Angela eased the car up Queen City’s steep, narrow pavement, trying to avoid the big chunks of debris rolling through the ripples of muddy water. Cars and wrecks had been pulled to the side of this winding hill, looking like lined-up dominoes waiting to be pushed over.
    As with the rest of this broken city, she saw no signs of life, no one trying to continue like normal as she drove through her own neighborhood, but she could feel the eyes watching her from the barely cracked blinds. She was disappointed by it. She had hoped people would come together, but these survivors wanted nothing to do with her, only desired her to be gone, and she sped up, more than willing to comply. She understood how they felt. She, too, hated going out; hated leaving the small security of her den, but Warren had cleared this hill so she could make the trip rather than forcing her to live with them. Saying no after that was not an option.
    When they called for her on the CB, she always answered. Her Oath hadn’t vanished with the War, but she sighed in relief when her three-story, yellow brick building came into view. Leery eyes swept the nearly identical rows of red brick duplexes surrounding her, their matching mailboxes and light poles beaten up, dented from enduring man and nature’s fury. It all looked the same.
    Parking in the back lot, next to the small flower garden, her sad eyes sought out the tiny grave tucked amid rows of purple violets. Grief enveloped her.
    Her tiny, premature son had come in the dark, early morning hours after the War, his lungs not ready to work on their own. She had buried him just as an ugly dawn broke, had placed him in the wet ground herself, wrapped in the red, white, and blue quilt she had brought her first son home in. She had never felt more pain than when she began to cover him with the dirty, brown earth. Despite all her abilities, she couldn’t save her own child. Repairing existing damage was possible, but she couldn’t replace what hadn’t been given time to develop.
    Barely registering the harsh wind gusts, the woman forced herself to go to the grave, to mourn and keep feeling the awful pain so she could make peace with it. The blackness lurking in her mind wanted to block it out (and everything else), but she knew it would take over completely if she let it, and then she would never see her teenage son again. The darkness was too familiar, too comforting, and consuming. She had just spent a decade in its grip, as her life flew by, unable to change the mistake she had made by saying yes to Kenny.
    The wind swelled, but she paid no attention, broken fingernails digging into the pale, cold skin of her palms as she sank to her knees in front of the unmarked grave.
    “My baby," she whispered, tears spilling from dark lashes. Four weeks had gone by, but it still felt like yesterday. She had wanted him so much! His father hadn’t, but she had. Pain tearing through her battered heart, Angela let the darkness have its way for a while, her grief unbearable.
     
     
    2
    Bands of pain were clamping down on her stomach when she became aware of her surroundings again an she eased down the thickly-carpeted hallway stairs and unlocked the basement door. She slipped inside the pitch-blackness with a fearlessness that still surprised her. She’d been terrified of the dark as a young girl, but had spent so much time down here since the War that she didn’t even need the penlight anymore.
    Listening intently,