After
Life Lessons
Book
Two
Laila
Blake and L.C. Spoering
Genre: post
apocalyptic
Publisher: Lilt
Literary
Date of
Publication: April 28, 2015
Number of pages:
350
Word Count:
95.000
Cover Artist:
Laila Blake
Book
Description:
Years after the
end of the world, the scattered survivors have begun to reconcile with their
fate and are starting to build communities from the rubble. Life has been kind
to Aaron and Emily, and maybe it is that infusion of hope that leads them on a
winter trip to search for Aaron’s family. But the world outside their little
haven has grown harsher, the conditions rough and dangerous.
Not everybody
they meet on their journey allowed the grim realities to harden their hearts,
however. Malachi and Kenzie - an easy-going drifter with a bum leg and amnesia,
and a teenage girl who has lost everyone and everything - are on an
ill-conceived mission to Mexico, while Iago and his band of nomads work to
forge trading connections between the small settlements of the south.
All of them will
discover new nightmares on the road, far surpassing the threat of the last
rotting zombies still roaming the countryside. And now they must come together
to fight for peace and justice in the world they trying to rebuild.
Warning:
This novel contains language some might find offensive, some gore and
situations of a sexual nature. Reader's discretion is advised.
Buy Links:
Excerpt
Emily & Aaron
Emily & Aaron
It was in the symmetry,
of course. In the fifteen shocks of hair that fluttered in the breeze, as it
swept a few leaves across the square. In the thirty pairs of shoes, all
pointing up at the grey sky.
Emily took another step
closer. She could hear her blood sloshing in her head, like she was underwater
and she moved back again, turned away to watch Song. Sparrow started to fuss:
even she could tell something was wrong. Very, very wrong. For once, Emily had
no interest to investigate, no need to see what they could scavenge. She just
wanted to pack up her children and run.
“Aaron,” she hissed. He
was walking down the line of corpses, his shoulders stiff with anger, or grief,
or maybe shattered faith. “Aaron!”
For the first time since
their first days together, Aaron was a wall. He didn’t turn back to her, not
until she was almost stomping her feet and biting her lip to keep from
screaming. His gaze was blank when he did.
“They were executed.” His
voice sounded like it was coming from the bottom of a well.
A shiver ran down her
spine, and she found herself reaching for him. Her hand stilled in mid-air as
though she’d only just noticed that he was much too far away. The breeze
stirred the hairs on her arm and she let it sink, cradled her hand around
Sparrow’s tiny head in a vestigial instinct to shield her.
“How… how do you know?”
she asked, voice hardly loud enough to travel across the square.
He breathed in so deep,
she found herself worrying about his ribs, imagined them crackling under the
strain. He shook his head, nodded towards the ground.
“Hands are bound with zip
ties,” he said eventually. “Looks like they were beaten before…”
“Come back here,” Emily
said again, more urgently this time. “Please, baby.”
She could have been
watching a movie, or one of those terrible war reports she remembered on the
news from Before, the ones she would switch off before Song had time to
understand what they were about. It occurred to her, then, that Aaron could
have been one of those soldiers in the reports she was lucky enough to switch
away from, replace his face with Big Bird, with John Cleese.
“There’s more behind the
house,” he said in a monotone. She didn’t follow his gaze. “Must have been the
entire neighborhood.”
“But… why?” Emily shook
her head at herself almost immediately. Annika had been right: she had gotten
cocky. She had forgotten all the things she’d seen after the end, before Aaron
had made her forget that humans could be a disease upon the world, far more
dangerous than the dead.
She sent one long last
glance at Song, then she stepped out of his line of sight, hurried to Aaron’s
side as quietly, as quickly as she could. She reached for his hand, squeezed it
tight.
Her eyes were drawn
downward almost against her will. They hadn’t wasted bullets. She stared at a
line of fifteen gaping slits in fifteen throats, like fifteen twisted smiles.
“They haven’t been dead for long, have they?”
He tipped his head back
and seemed to peer directly into the bare late autumn sun before he looked back
at the blood at their feet. “A week maybe,” he said. “Probably less. Hardly
decomposed at all.”
She tightened her hold on
his hand, tugged once.
“We can’t stay here.” She
enunciated every word, slowly, quietly, trying to get through to him. They had
slept peacefully, less than half an hour away from this spot. They’d had no
idea. “Aaron. We can’t stay here.”
He didn’t respond right
away, and it made her heart pound harder in her chest. There had been a night,
years before, when he’d told her he’d never really talked about his time in the
desert, that he’d never seen the point, and though she’d disagreed, they’d
never spoken of it again. She wanted to kick herself now.
“Aaron,” she said, voice
terse. “Song and Sparrow.” He finally stirred with those words.
“Get ‘em back in the
trailer,” he instructed.
About
the Authors
Laila Blake is an author, linguist and translator. She writes character-driven love stories and blogs about writing, feminism and society. Her work has been featured in numerous anthologies. Keeping a balance between her different interests, Laila Blake’s body of work encompasses literary erotica, romance, and various fields in speculative fiction (dystopian/post-apocalypse, fantasy, paranormal romance and urban fantasy) and she adores finding ways to mix and match.
Laila Blake is an author, linguist and translator. She writes character-driven love stories and blogs about writing, feminism and society. Her work has been featured in numerous anthologies. Keeping a balance between her different interests, Laila Blake’s body of work encompasses literary erotica, romance, and various fields in speculative fiction (dystopian/post-apocalypse, fantasy, paranormal romance and urban fantasy) and she adores finding ways to mix and match.
A
self-proclaimed nerd, she lives in Cologne/Germany with her cat Liene, harbors
a deep fondness for obscure folk singers and plays the guitar badly. She loves
photography, science documentaries and classic literature as well as a number
of popular TV-Shows.
Author Links:
L.C.
Spoering
has a degree in English writing from University of Colorado, and a lesser
degree in sarcasm earned from the days of yore on AOL. A storyteller since she
started talking, she now spends her days writing, reading and contemplating the
universe through various pop culture lenses.
Author Links:
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