Back From The Dead: My Apocalypse Level-up System novel · Chapter 8 of 24

Chapter 8: Twenty Names

"What does it mean?" I asked.

The purple panel hung between us in the barn doorway.

Conroy looked at it for too long, and then he swept his hand through it, and the letters broke apart.

"It means two of us are close enough to see each other," he said. "That's all."

"That's not all."

"It's all I'm going to say tonight, Devon."

He walked out into the dark.

I let him go, because I had a list to finish and a town to talk into believing me.

I started with the diner on Route 9.

Every Thursday at noon the whole valley ate there: farmers, deputies, the school bus drivers, the woman who ran the feed co-op.

I sat down at the long counter with Hattie beside me and a notebook open on the formica.

"What's in it?" Hattie asked.

"Names."

I had written twenty.

Hattie's brother and his two kids were first.

The county nurse who ran the free clinic was third.

A farrier, a welder, a retired deputy, a woman who kept bees.

I had learned in the last life which people stayed human when it got bad.

I had learned it by watching who sat down on the road to hold a stranger's hand.

I stood on the rung of the counter stool so everyone could see me.

"Excuse me," I said.

The room got quiet when a girl climbs a stool.

"My name is Devon Pendelton. My father had the farm out on Route 9. I work at the vet clinic on Maple."

"We know who you are, hon," said the woman who ran the co-op.

"Good. I have to tell you something, and you're going to think I'm crazy."

"Try us," said the retired deputy.

"In about two and a half weeks a disease is going to hit Columbus that no hospital can stop. It spreads through bites and through breath. It kills slowly and then it doesn't."

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