Bits & Pieces (Benny Imura 5)

They said amen.

Outside the wind howled and the snow fell. Outside there were moans on the wind.

Inside it was warm.

Inside it was Christmas.

Dan stuck the tines of the fork in to steady the turkey and to steady his own trembling hands. Then he began carving.

FROM NIX’S JOURNAL

ON SURVIVING

(BEFORE ROT & RUIN)

Everyone always talks a lot about survival.

I’m not sure I understand what that means, though.

We survived First Night. When the plague started and the dead began attacking the living, some people survived. Thirty thousand people, as far as we know. Tom thinks there’s probably more, though. Other towns like Mountainside, Haven, and the other seven. Maybe too far away for us to have heard anything about them. Maybe in other countries. As Mom always says, “It’s a big world.”

She’s right. It’s really big.

There used to be seven billion people on Earth. Could all of them have really died?

Chong and I talk about this a lot. He’s like me—he doesn’t believe that we’re the only ones left. He says it’s “statistically improbable.” He says that natural barriers like rivers, canyons, deserts, mountains, and stuff would have given people a chance to escape or defend themselves. I think so too. But I also think that there are places that were built to be defended. Castles, military bases, underground bunkers, high-security places. Mr. Lafferty at the store says that there are hundreds of secret installations, and thousands of bases around the world. He thinks that maybe there are millions of people still alive.

But everyone’s cut off.

How will we ever find them?

How will they ever find us?

PART TWO

THE DYING YEARS

The Light That Never Goes Out.

First Night Memories

1

Pastor Kellogg

(On First Night, fourteen years before Rot & Ruin)

It rained the night the world ended.

A hard, bitter, soaking rain, as if God and all his angels were weeping. Fanciful, sure, but to John Kellogg, pastor of the Pittsburgh Three Rivers Church, it seemed likely that heaven should mourn the end of all those years of living, of building, of crafting laws and striving to refine the humanity of the race. The whole process, from dropping out of the trees to the mapping of the human genome, should have amounted to something more substantial, something not so easily smashed flat and brushed away.

But it didn’t, and the steady rain felt like tears to him. God’s tears.

It was a strangely religious moment for a man who had been gradually losing his faith, year after grinding year. Caring for the homeless. Running shelters for abused women and runaways. Watching people drop out, one by one, from the twelve-step meetings held in the church basement. Trying to comfort mothers of sons killed in deserts half a world away for reasons even the politicians couldn’t quite agree on.

That morning John Kellogg had argued with his wife about it. He told her that he just couldn’t do it anymore, that whatever spiritual reservoir he’d once possessed was now used up. Molly had a simpler faith, one whose unshakable nature Kellogg had always envied.

“Give it another year,” she said. “Go talk to the bishop. Get some help before you throw