20 Years Later

20 YEARSLATER

E.J. NEWMAN

E.J. Newman was born in a tiny coastal village in Cornwall,
south west England, during one of the hottest summers on
record. Four years later she started to write stories and
never stopped until she penned a short story that secured her
a place at Oxford University to read Experimental Psychology.
She now lives in Somerset with her husband, her son, and her
books, where all are loved dearly. She runs her own
copywriting business and a free short story club at her blog
Post-Apocalyptic Publishing at
www.enewman.co.uk
.

        “
For my grandparents, both here
and on the other side,
       but especially for my Nana,
who always believed in me.”

E.J. NEWMAN

©2011 Emma Newman

ISBN 978-0-9844981-2-3 (hardback)
ISBN 978-0-9844981-1-6 (ebook)

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or any portion thereof in any form. Request for such permission should be addressed to:

Dystopia Press
3615 Franklin Ave., No. 237
Waco, Texas 76710

www.dystopiapress.com
[email protected]

Publisher: Mark Roy Long
Editor: Kayla Allen ([email protected])
Cover design: SoroDesign (http://sorodesign.com/)
Interior design: Stacie Buterbaugh ([email protected]) Author photo: Harry Duns (
www.harryduns.com
)

Special thanks: Scout Flowers, Annabeth Parrish, Joy Cozby, and Steve Tiano

First edition

Publisher's Cataloging-in-Publication
(
Provided by Quality Books, Inc
.)

Newman, Emma, 1976-

20 years later / Emma Newman. -- 1st ed.
  p. cm.
  SUMMARY: Twenty years after a plague has wiped out
most of humanity, four friends in London seek to
discover the secret behind this catastrophe.

Audience: Ages 12-18.
ISBN-13: 978-0-9844981-2-3 (hardback)
ISBN-10: 0-9844981-2-5 (hardback)
ISBN-13: 978-0-9844981-1-6 (ebook)
ISBN-10: 0-9844981-1-7 (ebook)

1. Teenagers--England--London--Juvenile fiction.
2. Plague--Juvenile fiction. 3. London (England)--Juvenile
fiction. [1. Teenagers--Fiction. 2. Plague--Fiction.
3. London (England)--Fiction.] I. Title. II. Title:
Twenty years later.

PZ7.N47976Twe 2011 [Fic]
QBI10-600137

London wasn't always a dusty, ghost-filled monument to the dead. It was once an intense city with toxic air and the constant din of millions of people talking, consuming, shoving past each other. Perhaps it's impossible for you to imagine so many people alive in this place but, I assure you, it's true. After all, where do you think all the bones littering the streets came from? Each one of the skulls you step over every day was once a person, alive as you are now, and that skull was filled with dreams and fears just like yours. Terror was probably the last thing all those poor souls felt. God knows it was for me.

I can only guess that you're in London, unless this book has had its own adventure too. For a moment more, indulge me, I like to try to imagine who you are. Of course, I can only make some educated guesses. It's likely that you're older rather than younger, as so few children read now. But perhaps you are young, and if so, you must have one of the survivors caring for you, someone kind enough to teach you how to read now that there are no schools. I hope so, it makes you one to treasure.

Perhaps you're trying to decide whether to burn this book now or read it first. Are you weighing up which is more important to you: a few more minutes of heat or the hours of another person's voice reaching up to you from these pages?

Wait! Let me speak to you, let me tell you this tale! Don't you want to know about the Red Lady's rise to power, or perhaps how she fell? Have you heard the name “Joshua” whispered in dark places and wondered what exactly he did? Or is it David the King who fascinates you? No, what am I thinking? It must be the Four you want to know about, the four who changed the world. Well, I was there, watching as it all happened, so if you
burn this now, you'll never know.

I shall start after It happened, some twenty years later, when London was divided between the gangs: the Gardners, the Bloomsbury Boys, the Red Lady's Hunters, to name but a few. Yes, I shall start in the place where it all began: Miri's garden.

You may not have heard of her, but one of the most important people you need to know about is Miri. In the year I begin this account, she was in her forties. I'd like you to try to picture her, hair long and dark with some silvered strands. Some of the lines around the edges of her large brown eyes were no doubt left by the horrors she experienced when It happened, but most of them were carved by smiles.

Miri's garden, at the centre of Queen Square, Blooms-bury, was one of the most beautiful places in London. Not dangerous and wild like the big public parks with their beasts and thorns, and not overgrown like the small house gardens are now. Well kept and orderly, Miri's garden kept her and many others alive.

Her home was part of an old school with arched windows where the housemaster once resided. The other choices were old offices (too impersonal) or one of the hospitals that surrounded the square, but nothing on this earth would make Miri step into a hospital for a second time since It happened, let alone live in one.

The old schoolmaster's house was where her son, Zane, was born and raised. Ah! I can imagine your eyes widen and hear you say: “Yes, I've heard of him!” Well, yes, of course, everyone alive has but, at this point, very few knew of Zane. He learnt about the healing arts at her side, which is why I start with her. Without Miri, there would have been no Zane as you know of him.

Zane was always a sensitive child, with his mother's dark, soulful eyes and the thick brown hair of her youth, uncut since
the day he was born. At the time I have in mind, he was almost fifteen and his hair reached his lower back. He was becoming a handsome young man, so yes, everything you might have heard about him in that regard is certainly true.

At that age he knew very little of life outside the garden, but despite everything his mother did to protect Zane, his innocence was still taken from him. Not by one dramatic event, but gently, like each day steals one's youth. The first little piece was stolen the night the Giant came.

On the night Zane first saw the giant, the summer moon was almost full. A figure approached Miri's house slowly and fearfully, keeping well within the shadows and ducking behind anything nearby whenever the clouds parted. The visitor crept up to the house and paused, looking carefully at both ground floor windows several times before finally making a choice. Standing on tiptoe, he cast one more fearful look around the shadowed square before tapping insistently on the glass.

After a few moments, Zane opened the window as quietly as he could, held up a lit candle and peered down with sleepy eyes.

The trespasser bounced on his tiptoes. “Hullo!” he whispered.

Zane smiled at the Bloomsbury Boy standing in front of him. “Hi Dev, what's wrong? It must be the middle of the night.” The candlelight shone off Dev's teeth revealing the large gap between the front two. Even though it was only illuminated by one candle, Dev's shock of unruly hair was clearly bright ginger.

“Come with me,” he whispered. Dev was shaking, as if scared as well as excited. The Bloomsbury Boys' territory was only five minutes to the west from Miri's garden, in Russell Square, but Dev rarely came over at night.

“But it's dark!” Zane said, looking past Dev. The garden in the square, so familiar in the daylight, looked forbidding. His mother never let him go out alone once the sun had set, and that had never bothered him at all. The routine was always the same; packing up tools half an hour before sunset, then filling three buckets of water from the pump in the garden.
Once everything was safely inside, she had taught Zane to go to every door and window in the house, locking and checking each one, before lighting candles in the kitchen and living room. It was then Zane's responsibility to ensure that all of the curtains were closed perfectly, lest the candlelight shone out of a gap into the darkness. He had never asked why, it was just the way things were. Unlocking the window to talk to Dev had been bad enough, the thought of climbing out and into the moonlit garden was just … absurd.

“But you got to come with me! I seen sommat … sommat weird …”

Dev's apparent agitation stopped Zane from sending him away. “What do you mean by ‘weird'?”

“A light … in one of the windows, high up. I saw it. Was like it was movin' too.”

Zane was fully awake in an instant. “A fire!”

“No, not fire. I know what that looks like, an' it weren't that. It weren't like nothin' I ever seen before. Weird light … we got to check it out, might be sommat important, we got to keep you and Miri safe. An' I don't wanna wake Jay up, in case it's sommat … stupid.” Dev hung his head, recalling the last time that had happened. “You're clever. I thought you should come look-see too. Jay'd be dead chuffed if you did.”

Zane considered this carefully. Within the Bloomsbury Boys, a strict hierarchy was in place. Jay, at the top, was the biggest, the one who had lived the longest and the one who had survived most fights with the Gardners. He could also be charming when he needed to be. Miri had once said he had Irish blood in him but Zane looked carefully the next time Jay was cut and his blood looked just like everyone else's.

The only ways that a boy could impress Jay were to either fight a Gardner up close and win, or get a Token, a physical trophy to prove a Boy's ability to steal from the enemy in their own territory and get away afterwards. Tokens earned
a Boy status within the gang: the more Tokens, the more respect and the better claim to food, the ultimate Token being the black tie of a dead Gardner.

Dev, approaching fourteen (a guess, as none of the Boys knew when they were born and didn't mark birthdays), didn't have the dexterity or coordination to survive close combat with a Gardner and mercifully knew that fact. Unfortunately, he also didn't have the luck or the wits to be able to obtain any other Token, and every day had to watch Boys much younger and smaller rise higher in Jay's estimations. Jay was the axis upon which Dev's world turned and Miri had patched Dev up several times after varied attempts to win his favour.

Zane frowned. “If there is something weird there, it might be dangerous.” He took a deep breath. “I suppose it's up to us to make sure this isn't a threat, right?”

Dev beamed at him. “Too right!”

Zane and Dev stood outside of the hospital at the far corner of the square. His house couldn't be seen from here, the line of sight intersected by the dark garden.

Zane shook his head. “I'm not going in there.”

Dev, a good six inches shorter, looked up at him with large hazel eyes. “Go on, honest-like it'll be worth it, you ain't seen nothin' like what I saw, you wanna see it too. Your Mum won't know; she's asleep.”