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the end of Everything (The Risen) (Erotic New
Adult Romance)
     
    I stood on the front step of my parents’
farmhouse, my heart in my mouth as I watched the road for my
brother’s red pick-up truck. It was after five in the evening and
the air had already turned cool. My mother’s azaleas were in bloom
and a few bees flew from flower to flower gathering nectar. In the
field that ran along the road to the house, Sergeant and Brownie,
our two horses, grazed contentedly. The Holsteins were grazing or
nodding off behind the barn. Everything was quiet, peaceful, but
the calm in our little corner of Tennessee was deceptive. A few
days ago, the world went mad and now chaos reigned in the cities.
Nashville and Memphis had been closed off and the National Guard
had been called out but the trouble hadn’t reached our area. I
still didn’t really understand what was going on. Ma and Pa were
Born Again Christians and didn’t hold with too many new-fangled
things so we didn’t have the Internet and we didn’t watch
television or listen to the radio either. Satan’s Box, Pa called
it.
    The first inkling something was wrong came
when Pa went into Acadia, the nearest town to where we lived, last
Friday. When he came back, he and Ma had held a whispered
conversation before they turned to me and Gideon with such serious
expressions on their faces I’d thought they’d somehow known what
had happened in the barn between us. Gideon had kissed me. We’d
kissed! I felt the heat enter my cheeks and I was like about to
faint. I couldn’t even look at Gideon. Pa would kill us. I knew he
would. The blood roared in my ears and I waited for lightning to
strike. When nothing happened, I realized everyone was looking at
me funny.
    “Are you alright, Faith?”
    “Yes, Pa,” I whispered. “I’m sorry.”
    “You look sick. I hope you ain’t coming down
with that sickness I’m talking about…though how you could have
gotten it…” His voice trailed off as he peered at me.
    “What sickness, Pa?”
    He sighed. “That’s what I’ve been talking
about the last couple minutes. You haven’t heard a word I’ve said,
have you?”
    I apologized again and he explained about the
sickness that had broken out, not just in Tennessee, it was
everywhere. He didn’t know where it had started, maybe New York
City or Los Angeles, the modern world’s versions of Sodom and
Gomorrah as he’d said a hundred times before. Thousands of people,
maybe millions, were infected. People, ordinary people, were
sickening, dying, and then rising again to attack and consume the
flesh of the living. He called them the risen dead.
    My eyes widened when I heard that and an icy
fear gripped my heart. “Are these the End Times then, Pa?” I’d
asked.
    “I fear so, my child,” Pa had answered, a
strange note of sadness and gleeful triumph in his voice. “God is
cleansing the wickedness of the world.”
    “Is there no cure?” Gideon asked in his deep
voice.
    “How can there be a cure for God’s
punishment?” Pa had snapped.
    That Friday and Saturday our family prayer
meeting lasted twice as long as Pa led us in fervent and lengthy
prayers for our deliverance and salvation.
    I wasn’t surprised when, on Sunday, we found
our small Pentecostal church full to overflowing, some people
couldn’t even find seats and had to stand. The extra high
attendance caused Pa to snort in derision. “Their sins are catching
up to them and now they turn to the Lord but the Lord will not hear
them,” he’d whispered fiercely to us. I’d quaked and wondered if
that applied to me, too.
    Pastor Joseph apparently agreed with Pa
because his sermon had been full of fire and brimstone as he’d
ranted about the sins of the world. Pastor Joseph said it wasn’t a
sickness that was afflicting people, it was the will of God. The
End Times were upon us, he shouted. The world was ending and soon
we’d see the Horsemen of the Apocalypse riding through the air,
raining death and