“I wish we could have had a picture of him.”
“I will never forget what he looked like.” Ren adjusted the blanket over the baby’s legs. “He looked like you.”
I stood over the little bassinet next to our bed and drank in every detail of my daughter. Every little crease in her peaceful face, every curve in her arms and legs, the little chin that echoed her mother’s chin, and the stubby little nose that looked far too much like my father’s nose. The baby sighed in her sleep. Her little arms, wavered for a second, reaching out in front of her. I reached down and touched the little fingers, covered by a thin piece of fabric built into the little infant pajamas. “Daddy is here.”
From the bed, propped up on pillow, Ren said, “We can’t call her the baby forever. She will eventually need a name.”
“I guess I was sold on having a son,” I said.
“You do. You will always have a son, even if he can’t be with us.”
“I know. I guess I just never even bothered to consider a different name, let alone a girl’s name.”
“We’re going to have to come up with one. We could name her after your mother, or my mother, or my sister?”
I shrugged. “Maybe.”
“Do you have a better suggestion? I never thought about it, either.”
I rest my hand lightly over the baby’s chest and stomach. I felt the barely-noticeable rise-and-fall of her breathing. She was strong. Healthy. It made me feel better about the future. I looked at Ren, who had never been more beautiful than she was at that very moment. “We could name her after the one thing we will always have.”
“What’s that?”
“Hope.”
It’s Thursday, I think. Honestly, it doesn’t matter.
The days themselves are unimportant. I count time by the growth of a little girl now. She’s forty-eight days old as I write this, strong, healthy, and growing like a weed. I have been making check marks to count the days in my journals. I want to remember her birthday. I want to remember everything about her.
Little Hope is everything I wanted her to be, and then some. The more she grows, the more excited I am to see what the next day will bring. Granted, she is not much right now outside of being a sleeping, eating, and pooping machine, but I am embracing that fully, enjoying her for what she is and gratefully anticipating what she will become.
Ren and I struggle some days, but the joy that Hope has brought into our lives helps. We cannot change what we cannot change. That has become our motto. Someday, if I ever make a placard for this farm, that will be the motto on a ribbon below the coat of arms.
I think of the little boy at the bottom of the hill often, and I hope that he is with my parents, and with Ren’s parents, and I hope he is happy there. Perhaps someday I will get to meet him again. Maybe I won’t.
In the meantime, I survive. So does Ren. So does Hope. We have a farm to run. We have food to grow, water to purify, and solar panels to assemble, erect, and wire so that our house can have electricity again. There are a million things that I need to do, and we have a future to build.
This is the continued journal of my life.
My name is Twist. I’m twenty. I’m a husband, a father, and farmer. I have a beautiful wife, Renata, and our daughter, Hope.
And we are still alive.
Acknowledgements
Thank you for reading this. If you’ve made it this far, I will have to assume that you’ve dauntlessly waded through 500-plus pages of prose, following the journey of Twist in the vast emptiness of a post-apocalypse America. I cannot tell you how grateful I am that you chose to take that journey.
This book represents the culmination of more than three years of my life. While I worked a full-time job, managed being the parent of a tween-turning-teen, managed an almost twenty-year marriage, walked my dog, repaired stuff around the house, and struggled with the daily slings and arrows of life, I managed to write three novels. It was never easy, but writing isn’t something I do for fun. It’s not a hobby. It’s a compulsion.
The hardest part about writing independent books like mine are wondering if anyone is actually reading these words, these stories. Over the years, a fair number of people have reached out and let me know that they not only read them, but enjoyed them. A few let me know that they think my books were stupid, but that’s just part of the game. I’ve always said that there is no greater critic of a writer than the writer himself. I’ve never needed help in noticing or elaborating on my shortcomings. It only makes those of you who cared enough to send kind words or who badgered me for a sequel that much more appreciated.
For everyone who read these, liked them, and helped me along my journey—this omnibus is for you. From the bottom of my heart: Thank you.
About the Author
Sean Patrick Little lives in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin. He writes a lot. He watches too much TV. He plays guitar and bass badly. He has two cats that annoy him a lot. He has a dog, a walleyed, big-eared Heeler/Corgi mix, who demands constant belly rubs. He has a wife and a child.
That child is now a teenager.
Please send help.
You can follow Sean on Goodreads, Twitter, Tumblr, and Facebook if you are interested in keeping up with his upcoming projects. He is not hard to find.
He’s not terribly exciting, but he enjoys the attention all the same.
Facebook: facebook.com/seanpatricklittlewriter
Twitter: @WiscoWriterGuy
Other Books by Sean Patrick Little
The Centurion: The Balance of the Soul War*
The Seven*
Longrider: Away From Home*
Longrider: To the North*
The Bride Price*
Without Reason*
Family Ghosts: A Collection of Stories of the Supernatural and Unexplained*
The Survivor Journals
After Everyone Died
Long Empty Roads
All We Have
The TeslaCon Novels
Lord Bobbins and the Romanian Ruckus
Lord Bobbins and the Dome of Light
Lord Bobbins and the Clockwork Girl (2020)
The Abe & Duff Mysteries
The Single Twin (TBA)
All books are available as eBooks on your favorite online retailers. Hard copies can be ordered online or, preferably, through your favorite independent bookstore. Remember: local stores need your support more than major online retailers do.
*E-book only
Publisher’s Note
The world of publishing grows more and more competitive every year. It is harder and harder for small press and independent books to compete in a crowded marketplace. There is a mountain of books published annually and only so many readers and so many hours in a day—not to mention the almost insurmountable competition from all the various electronic screens that beg for attention.
If you enjoyed this book, please help spread the word about it. Tell all your friends. If they buy copies and like it, ask them to tell their friends, and their friends’ friends, and so on. Word of mouth is always the best sales tool.
If you are a creative type, doing things like posting fan art on social media, participating in message boards and plugging the book, doing cosplay and posting photos, or making models of things in the book is greatly appreciated. Use hashtags to make sure people know where the inspiration for the image originated and to what it relates. Anything that extends the reach and audience of the book is always a positive and always appreciated. Support the things you enjoy.
To further aid the cause, you can politely ask your local library to purchase a copy and ask your local bookstores to carry it, as well. Every little bit helps.
If you enjoyed this book, please leave a kind review on major websites like Amazon or Goodreads, or any of your other favorite book retailers. Link to the book on your Facebook pages or Twitter accounts. Good, honest reviews help more than you know, and we truly appreciate every review. The more positive reviews the book gets, the farth
er the reach of the book spreads.
If you have a bookstore or work in a library and want one of our authors to speak, or you would like to host a signing, please let us know. If we can make it happen, we will.
And if you really enjoyed this book, please let the author know. A kind word is sometimes the jolt a writer needs to keep working. That goes for any book you’ve enjoyed, ever. Most writers are on Twitter nowadays. Or they have email addresses or some other way to contact them. If you send them a message, they will see it. They might not reply, but they will be grateful.
You should probably also do the same things for anyone important in your life in general: your grandmother or grandfather, your parents, a favorite teacher, a friend that has been there for you—it really doesn’t matter: If someone has done something that you have appreciated, please let them know.
Spread some positivity in this world. It will do you, and others, more good than you might know.
With sincere gratitude,
Spilled Inc. Press
Appendix
As I was compiling this three-novel set, a friend asked me why there weren’t any bonus features in it. I figured she was probably right, so I set about trying to annotate the novels in some way to deliver some sort of something extra for readers who already read the books.
Here is the repository of those annotations, which are hyperlinked in the text.
The annotations are designated by a simple breakdown:
-The first Roman numeral designates the book (I for After Everyone Died, II for Long Empty Roads, and III for All We Have).
-The second, standard number designates the chapter within that book.
-And then the letters designate the order in which the annotations are listed within that chapter.
-At the end of each annotation, the word BACK will return you to the section you just left.
I hope someone will find this information interesting and entertaining. If not—well, I tried.
--Thanks for reading.
Sean
I.1.a: This is how this series started, with that one line. It came out of nowhere one day while I was at work. I wrote it down to try to figure out what to do with it, and then nothing happened for a couple of months. I had a Google Docs document in my cloud drive with this one sentence. It wasn’t until a few months later, two other things happened, and the combination of those three things led me to write a post-apocalypse novel.
The first of those things was that I got caught in a bottleneck of traffic on the highway one night. I’d had a bad day at work, and the last thing I wanted to do was be doing 20 mph on a four-lane highway. I remember wishing that there was no one around so I could just put the pedal down. That led me to dream about long, empty expanses of highway. I wanted to be the only person driving on those roads.
The second thing was that Cabela’s was building a new store in Sun Prairie, where I lived. I remember driving past that Cabela’s and wanted to just go in and look around without a crowd of people. These books basically came out of my desire to not have to deal with crowds.
BACK
I.1.b: Figuring out what to call the main character took longer than I’d like to remember. I wanted the name to have meaning, but I also did not want it to be a standard name. I wanted the name to be like something someone in a Mad Max-like post-apocalypse scenario would be called. I also knew that I was writing a sedate, slow-paced, realistic novel about life after a viral apocalypse, and I did not want any sort of crazy endings or unforeseen happenings. I didn’t want there to be any twists, so to speak. So, the name sort of just happened.
BACK
I.1.c: I toyed with the notion of giving a very specific cause for the Flu, but think it’s better if we don’t know much about why. The important thing isn’t the why. It’s the what do we do now? I think in a realistic scenario, should something like this ever really happen, we’d never know its cause. It would probably cause more panic and terror if the government came out and said something like We accidentally released a virus! They would most likely keep that information on lockdown and wait until the dust settled.
BACK
I.1.d: This comes from a personal bias, I think. I never like it when the weather doesn’t match my mood, especially when it comes to tragedies. Shakespeare was always good about having weather match the tone of a scene. That’s sort of how I feel things should be. If there’s tragedy, give me the long, steady onslaught of rain.
BACK
I.2.a: At book signings and things, I’ve talked about this moment. I think it’s because if this sort of event really came to pass, I don’t think I would want to survive. I’ve always said that if it came to nuclear war, I would want to catch the first missile with my face. I would not want to be one of the survivors. I think that holds a very limited appeal to me. If I wake up one day and can’t watch reruns of Parks and Recreation on Netflix, I’m out.
BACK
I.2.b: This is one of the things I’d go back and change if I did this book over again. It’s not in Rowdy’s character to eat a corpse. He would have laid down next to his beloved family and starved to death. I think, initially, I wanted this to be a statement about Rowdy’s will to survive, but looking back—it was wrong. This sentence was a mistake.
BACK
I.2.c: This is actually based on a true family story. I grew up on a small farm outside of Mount Horeb, Wisconsin. My dad rarely traveled because there were animals to care for and chores to do, so it was not uncommon for my mother to drag us places leaving Dad alone on the farm for a weekend or so.
One year, near Easter, my mother, my sister, and I drove up to Lakeville, Minn. to visit my grandmother for the holiday. We left Wednesday afternoon (school was closed Thursday and Friday), and we were supposed to return on Sunday. Well, April being April, and Minnesota being Minnesota, there was a massive snowstorm that Sunday that stuck us at Grandma’s for a couple extra days.
My dad, stuck at home with all the supplies for an Easter Sunday dinner and no one to share it with, went ahead and fixed a full plate for Fred, our Labrador Retriever (and one of the inspirations for Rowdy). He put Fred into one of the kitchen chairs and he ate a nice meal with the dog.
If my mother knew what plate the dog had eaten from, she would have thrown it out. Classic Dad.
BACK
I.2.d: Bob Lindmeier is a real guy, and he’s really a meteorologist on WKOW, the ABC affiliate in Madison. He’s been there for more than a quarter-century. When I think of weathermen in Madison, his name is the first one that jumps into my mind. The second one would be Elmer Childress, who was on the NBC affiliate when I was a kid. Later in the series, I mention Charlie Shortino, too. Another real guy.
BACK
I.2.e: I shamelessly stole this scene from Pixar’s Up. I love when Doug the dog is still on the old man’s porch. Doug is probably the best fictional dog since Buck from The Call of the Wild.
BACK
I.3.a: The library is a real place. Check it out online. It looks like a cool old one-story castle. It’s a gorgeous building. The first time I saw it when I first moved to Sun Prairie in 2008, I thought, Man, I’d like to live in that building. I guess, in a way, I made that thought a reality in this book. I tried to keep the physical landmarks around Wisconsin as accurate as possible, but sometimes you have to made adjustments to fit the story.
Also, if I was to survive an apocalypse, the first place I’d go would be to a library or a book store. I basically see myself as Burgess Meredith in that one episode of The Twilight Zone where the guy finally has time to read all the books, but he breaks his glasses.
…only, I don’t wear glasses…
…yet.
BACK
I.3.b: Growing up in the sticks as I did, this was an issue once or twice—a deer died somewhere near enough to the house that I could catch the stench of rot on the wind. It’s not something that you forget. When I was trying to envision a whole town, a whole state of rotting bodies, I almost gagged on the sme
ll in my head. It would be horrible.
BACK
I.3.c: This is a big fear I’d have during an apocalypse. Tooth pain or any sort of gum/tooth injury would be awful. Think about how even minor mouth injuries affect you. A world without dentists is no world for me.
BACK
I.3.d: The amount of mail and messages I’ve gotten about this section is second only to the amount of mail and messages I’ve gotten about Rowdy and Fester. People really seem to understand the importance of socks. This is a good thing. If you’ve never had really good socks, treat yourself to a pair. You may never go back to cheap ones. Same thing with quality underwear, too. Anything lies that close to your skin in your most sensitive areas is not a place to cheap out on. Same thing with bed sheets: buy quality stuff. Get the high thread counts. It makes a huge difference in your daily life.
BACK
I.3.e: My parents were both military officers. My father was a Marine Corps infantry officer. We had guns in the house growing up. I’m not anti-gun, but I’m not pro-gun, either. I appreciate guns, but I don’t like them. I think that has to do less about politics, and more about the fact that I’m such a huge fantasy novel nerd that I just like swords more.
BACK
I.4.a: This is one of those things I had to research. I discovered that if we had an apocalypse, the in-ground gas stores would eventually evaporate to a point where they would be unusable in standard internal combustion engines. I’m not certain how long it would take, exactly. I saw time limits that ranged anywhere from eighteen months to three years.
The Survivor Journals Omnibus Page 62