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    Violent Delights (The Others, Book 1)
    Violent Delights (The Others, Book 1)
    Violent Delights (The Others, Book 1)
    Ebook89 pages1 hour

    Violent Delights (The Others, Book 1)

    By Lauren David

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    About this ebook

    This is the way the world ends.
    Fire falling from the sky. Deaths running in to the millions. The unimaginable horrors of a new world. And the survivors, separated in to distant factions, have been forced to start anew, scraping out a desperate survival in the leftovers of a dead world.
    This is but one of their stories.

    **

    Seventeen-year-old Julia craves more than her world has to offer. And when she meets Robert, she suddenly realizes how much more is possible—including true love.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherLauren David
    Release dateDec 29, 2012
    ISBN9781301900879
    Violent Delights (The Others, Book 1)

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      Book preview

      Violent Delights (The Others, Book 1) - Lauren David

      CHAPTER ONE

      BEFORE

      It began with an accident. Or maybe it wasn’t an accident at all, but something that had been carefully planned and then executed with deadly precision. In the days after it happened, there were many theories going around about those two planes, and much speculation about what had happened on them. Most people agreed that it was likely a terrorist attack, not unlike the one on the Towers, but no one would ever know for sure.

      The old woman had actually seen the crash with her own eyes, when she was just a young lady. A girl, really, waiting at a stoplight in her idling car, on her way to the grocery store to pick up pork chops and fresh corn. There was a song playing on the radio, something fast-paced and light and popular, and she still remembers the rhythm of it, even sixty years later. The song sometimes comes back to her from nowhere, and everywhere, as if the wind has been carrying the melody for all these years, and occasionally swings by to refresh her memory.

      Look at her dancing,

      Just take it off

      Let’s paint the town,

      We’ll shut it down

      My mother was waiting for me at home, the old woman says. She keeps her voice low, so no one but the girl sitting at her knee can hear her voice. The others don’t like to hear this story. They would rather she kept the past dead and buried. I was singing along with the radio and I was happy. So happy.

      The old woman doesn’t have the words to describe those last moments, when there was nothing more to life than the summer wind blowing through her open window and the sound of her off-key singing. It’s the freeness she remembers best, the happiness that was in her heart then. These feelings are clearer in her memory than the sight of the two airplanes streaking across the crisp blue sky, leaving frothy white smoke in their wakes, like deep scratches left on a pane of glass. She watched the planes through her windshield as she sang, not expecting that they would collide, although that is exactly what happened. There was an explosion, and fire rippled through the air, melting some of the skin on the left side of her face like candle wax. But she was lucky. There were others, standing outside, without the protection of a car. Those people were burned to crisps, their bodies turned to nothing but unrecognizable hunks of smoldering ash.

      And then what happened? the girl asks. She’s heard the story many times before, but the old woman always gives it a different ending. She once told the girl that a box full of silver coins had fallen from the planes, and she’d found it, becoming as rich as a queen. Another time, she said it was baskets of food and beautiful clothing that had rained down on their heads, like something out of a fairy tale.

      But this time, the old woman decides to tell the truth. Maybe it is because of the light in the girl’s eyes, or maybe it is the way she holds her grandmother’s hand. Or maybe it is nothing at all. Maybe the old woman has finally decided that it is time for the girl to know the truth.

      It was the Sickness that fell from those planes, the old woman says, leaning closer to the girl. It rained down on our heads, invisible, but deadly. And it was passed from person to person, until there wasn’t anyone left who hadn’t been touched by it. And people were dying, dropping like flies in the winter. There was no medicine to cure it. I watched my own mother die in her bed. By the end, she didn’t even know who I was.

      The old woman doesn’t tell the girl about the other things that fell from the sky that day—the wreckage and bits of paper and shards of broken glass that cut her face. And the broken limbs of those who were on the planes, wrenched from the rest of their bodies. And the blood. She also doesn’t tell the girl how her mother died, choking on her own breath, her neck swollen up like a black inner tube. There are some things not meant to be shared, especially with a girl so young.

      But you lived, the girl says slowly. She’s not frightened. But this girl has always been different from the other children. She is not weak, like so many of the others.

      Yes. I lived. But most died. The old woman turns her head toward the fire, which throws a glow over her wrinkled face. But she can barely feel the warmth in her old bones, which have suffered so much over her long life. And for the survivors, everything changed. We left the cities behind us—that was where things were the worst, where sickness and death lived. We turned our backs on everything we had known, and we never went back. We have fallen in to a dark age.

      The girl turns away from her grandmother, to look around the room. They are surrounded by stamping boots and swirling skirts, glittering jewels and high-pitched laughter. This doesn’t seem like a dark age, she thinks.

      But the old woman remembers. In the days after the accident, the survivors chose to turn away from the future, which seemed to hold only bleakness and death for them. Instead, they looked to the past, where things seemed safe and familiar, like the verses of a well-known and much beloved lullaby. Those were less complicated times, they told themselves. There was no need for electricity or cell phones or computers and refrigerators—besides, who could make those things work anymore? So they built a new village, far from the places they’d

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