The World Never Ended novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Poison
Cora swallows the poison she hid, and her parents and husband walk in alive; the apocalypse was a set, and she is locked in the cellar, where she chooses to make herself throw it up.
At four in the afternoon I swallowed the poison I had hidden in my mattress for seven months.
The nurse had given it to me the winter before, in a brown vial, with a whisper.
"For when you're ready," she said. "It's quick."
I was ready now.
They had taken my third baby twenty minutes ago.
I never got to hold her.
The sheet under me was wet and the room smelled of antiseptic.
I lay down and waited for it to work.
Five years ago the world ended, and I was lucky to be alive.
That is what I was told.
A plague tore through the country and the cities shut. My parents and I got into a survival compound run by a private group.
Then I got sick, and Mom and Dad gave me their last food.
They died two days later.
My husband Dean went out the gate to find medicine.
He never came back.
The compound said he was killed at the quarantine line.
I had no one, no money, and no ground to bury them in.
So when the compound offered me a deal, I signed it.
I would carry children for the future, and they would feed me and let me set a memorial stone for each of my dead.
Three babies, three stones.
Mom, Dad, Dean.
My debt was paid today, and I could finally stop.
The door opened.
Someone laughed.
"Okay," a woman said. "You can stop now."
I opened my eyes.
She wore jeans, white leather boots and a cream cashmere coat.
My mother had been dead for five years.
"Mom?"
She smiled at me.
My father came in behind her, healthy and rested, and then my husband walked in carrying a bundle.
"Cora," Dean said, and his voice cracked on my name.
It was the voice I had played in my head every night.
He was holding my baby.
"You died," I said.
He frowned.
"No, I didn't."
"It's over, sweetheart," Mom said. "The whole thing is over."
My father checked his watch and nodded.
"You're square with us now," he said.
"What debt?"
Dean's face went flat.
"Audra," he said.
Five years ago my adopted sister fell down our staircase while she was pregnant, and said I pushed her.
I didn't.
Nobody believed me.
"You almost killed my child," Dean said, shifting the baby on his arm.
"I never touched her."
"Still?" His jaw tightened. "She lost the baby. The doctors said she could never carry another. She nearly didn't survive it."
I could not get air.
"We knew you'd never give Audra children willingly," Mom said.
"So Dean found another way," Dad said.
I looked at the baby.
"These three are mine," Dean said. "And yours."
"The program," I whispered.
"Wasn't real."
"The plague?"
"Staged."
"My parents dying?"
Mom looked at the floor.
"We had to make you believe it."
I slid off the bed, and pain tore through me.
Blood ran down my legs and none of them looked.
I went to the open door and held the frame.
Outside, the end of the world was being packed up.
A man in a hazmat suit pulled off his mask and lit a cigarette.
Two workers rolled away a quarantine barrier on wheels.
Cameras hung on metal rigs and a line of people stood at a trailer, collecting envelopes.
I knew those faces.
They were the guards who had counted my rations.
Past the gate there was a highway with cars on it and a billboard, and glass towers in the sun.
The world had never ended.
Only mine had.
"Five years?" I said.
"We planned to bring you back after the first baby," Dean said, annoyed. "But Audra was afraid."
"She wanted a son and a daughter, and she needed to feel safe. So we waited."
The poison burned lower in my stomach.
He looked at my face and then looked away.
"It was a punishment, Cora. You were supposed to learn from it."
"You paid for what you did," Mom said. "Just stop fighting Audra."
Dad held a car door open.
"Get in," he said. "We're still your family."
I tasted blood.
The drive to our house took less than an hour.
It stood where I had left it, with the same pale stone steps.
Audra ran out before the car stopped, and saw me, and went white.
"No," she said. "No, no."
Dean got out and stepped past her, and looked up at the small black camera over the staircase in the front hall.
Then he looked at Audra.
"Keep her away from me!" Audra screamed. "She's going to push me again!"
Her hands were steady on his arm.
Dean handed the baby to my mother, took my wrist and pulled me through the house.
"Dean, please."
He opened the cellar door.
It was dark down there.
"Audra can't look at you today," he said, and shoved me in.
The bolt slid shut.
I sat on the bottom step and heard them above me.
"Leave her down there till Friday," Audra said, her voice small and calm. "The party is Friday. I can't have her in the house."
A party, for my baby.
I looked at my shaking hands.
If I stayed here, the poison would finish me before Friday, and they would bury me under a fourth stone.
So I got on my knees and put two fingers down my throat.
I did it again, and again, until there was nothing left in me.
Above, a chair scraped.
Mom's boots came across the floor to the cellar door.
"Cora, honey," she said, in the warm voice I used to love. "Just drink the water we left. It's all over now."
There was no water on the step.
I looked up at her shadow under the door, and realized she had not asked if I was alive.
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