After Days (The After Days Trilogy) Read Online Free PDF

fight with every last ounce of my being to stay alive, but I sincerely hope that when the time comes and I must face death, that I can do so with as much courage as those reporters did during Hell Week.
    Alan died around midnight.
     
    Eleanor lay down with him on the bed, her head on his shoulder while she cried. I stood and watched for a few minutes, then went to my room and sat on the bed, arms wrapped around my knees while I listened to her sobbing through the walls. It was happening again. I had finally started to feel like I belonged and now my new family was being torn away from me just as surely as my real family had been. If anything this was more painful because it was happening slowly…I knew what was going on but I was powerless to stop it. Eleanor was sick too, she was trying to hide it from me, and doing a pretty good job of it, but I had noticed. Within a day, two at most, I was going to be alone again.
    An hour and a half later the sobbing stopped. At first I thought that she’d fallen asleep. But then I heard her in the closet. The closet of their bedroom backed onto the wall of my room, so I could hear her quite clearly as she rummaged around. It sounded like she was tearing the closet apart and I wondered what she was hunting for. Several minutes later the sounds stopped. A period of quiet followed, and then BOOM! I jumped and then wrapped my arms tighter around my legs.
    The house fell into a deep silence as I sat on my bed with tears running down my face until the morning light was shining through my window. I wanted to go and check on Eleanor but knew what I would find, with the same certainty that I had known about the fire trucks almost two years earlier. I finally got up the courage to go into their bedroom. I found her slumped across Alan’s body. There was a red mist like spray on the walls and headboard of the bed where they lay, and Eleanor’s arm hung off the bed, limp and lifeless. Near her open hand, on the floor, there was a short barreled revolver.
    I knew what she had done, but my mind refused to accept it. “Eleanor?” I asked, stepping forward into the room. “Eleanor… Mom?” There was no movement. Moving closer I could see the small perfectly round hole in her temple. A small amount of blood had leaked out of it and down the side of her neck, matting her shoulder length hair in a dark clump. I wanted to turn back, to run away, but I found myself stumbling forward instead, moving around to see Eleanor’s face. Her eyes were open and glazed.
     
    I tried calling 911 of course, but there was no chance of getting through. I also tried calling John and Amy several times each, but only got busy signals. I went next door to the Moorcock house, they had always seemed like nice neighbors, but nobody answered the door. Finally, I decided I would just have to close up Alan and Eleanor in their bedroom for the time being and deal with them later. There were enough leftovers from Christmas dinner and canned food in the pantry to last me a solid two weeks. Although I hoped that it would not come to that.
    The TV channels started disappearing that day, with most of them being completely off the air by New Year’s Eve. There were no fireworks. No big ball dropped in New York City. No one celebrated the turning of an era. America had fallen. It was on January first when the last news channel still on air reported that Chinese soldiers had begun landing on American soil.
    The Chinese government had issued a statement welcoming the children of America as citizens of New China, and promising re-education and adoption into the new world order. But Tom Dallard, the last news anchor I ever saw doing a live broadcast, told stories of Chinese soldiers rounding up the children of New York and Atlantic City and forming them into work gangs to clear bodies. It was apparent that we were to be nothing but slaves to these new overlords.
    Dallard was one of those few non-Chinese people that seemed immune to