White Horse Read online

  THE WORLD HAS ENDED, BUT HER JOURNEY HAS JUST BEGUN.

  Thirty-year-old Zoe leads an ordinary life until the end of the world arrives. She is cleaning cages and floors at Pope Pharmaceuticals when the president of the United States announces that human beings are no longer a viable species. When Zoe realizes that everyone she loves is disappearing, she starts running. Scared and alone in a shockingly changed world, she embarks on a remarkable journey of survival and redemption. Along the way, Zoe comes to see that humans are defined not by their genetic code, but rather by their actions and choices. White Horse offers hope for a broken world, where love can lead to the most unexpected places.

  ALEX ADAMS was born in Auckland, New Zealand. She lived in Greece and Australia before settling in Portland, Oregon, with her family. White Horse is the first novel in a debut trilogy.

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  JACKET DESIGN BY LAYWAN KWAN

  JACKET PHOTOGRAPH BY OCEAN/CORBIS

  COPYRIGHT © 2012 SIMON & SCHUSTER

  “WHEN I WAKE, THE WORLD IS STILL GONE. ONLY FRAGMENTS REMAIN.”

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  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2012 by Alex Adams

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information, address Atria Books Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

  First Emily Bestler Books/Atria hardcover edition April 2012

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  Designed by Jacquelynne Hudson

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

  ISBN 978-1-4516-4299-5

  ISBN 978-1-4516-4301-5 (eBook)

  I wrote this for you, Bill.

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Part Two

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Part Three

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thank you seems too small a thing for the following people:

  My amazing, dynamic agent, Alexandra Machinist, who I’m secretly convinced is a superhero. Thank you for loving my work, believing it could go great places, and making sure it got there.

  My wonderful, insightful editor, Emily Bestler, who makes editing fun (and often funny). The next manuscript has less spitting and vomiting, I promise.

  Constantly upbeat editorial assistant extraordinaire Caroline Porter. Thank you for answering all of my weird questions and being the most helpful person I know.

  To the entire Emily Bestler Books/Atria team; I don’t know you all by name yet, but that in no way diminishes my gratitude for the hard work you do. Book people are the best people.

  Special thanks to Linda Chester for her kindness and wisdom.

  To my parents, who didn’t think I was crazy for wanting to write. Or if they did, they had enough compassion not to say it to my face. I love you both.

  There is a best sister in the universe and her name is Daisy. I’m sorry this book doesn’t have vampires, shopping, or lots of the color orange. One day.

  A huge thank-you to my dear friend Stacey McCarter. You’ve read everything I’ve ever written, even when it was awful, and still you speak to me. If you ever need to bury a body, call me; I’ll bring the backhoe.

  Speaking of buried bodies, the brilliantly clever Kim McCullough and I have not buried any—yet. That might change if I keep giving her my uncorrected work to read.

  A world of thanks to two talented writers and good friends, Jamie Mason and Lori Witt. You both get it. You really get it.

  MacAllister Stone and the Absolute Write community: you gave me my training wheels and for that I will be eternally grateful.

  White Horse never would have been written if it wasn’t for William Tancredi, my alpha reader, alpha male, sweetheart, and favorite person. You inspire me to be a better writer and a better woman. Also, you make me laugh until I cry. I love you, you know.

  And to you, Dear Reader. I write to entertain you. Hopefully I’ve succeeded. Let’s do this again sometime.

  W H I T E

  H O R S E

  PROLOGUE

  DATE: THEN

  Look at me: I don’t want my therapist to think I’m crazy. That the lie rolls off my tongue without tripping over my teeth is a miracle.

  “I dreamed of the jar last night.”

  “Again?” he asks.

  The leather squeaks beneath my head when I nod.

  “The exact same jar?”

  “Always the same.”

  There’s a scratching as he pushes his pen across the paper.

  “Describe it for me, Zoe.”

  We’ve done this a half dozen times, Dr. Nick Rose and I. My answer never changes, and yet I indulge him when he asks. Or maybe he indulges me. Me because I’m haunted by the jar, him because he has a boat to buy.

  The couch cushions crease under me as I lean back and drink him in the way one drinks that first cup of coffee in the mornings. Small, savoring sips. He fills the comfortably worn leather chair. His body has buffed it to a gentle gleam that is soothing to the eye. His large hands are worn from work that doesn’t take place in this office. The too-short hair, easy to maintain. His eyes are dark like mine. His hair, too. There’s a scar on his scalp his gaze can’t possibly reach in the mirror, and I wonder if his fingers dance over it when he’s alone or if he’s even aware of its presence. His skin is tan; indoors is not his default. But where to put him? Maybe not a boat. Maybe a motorcycle. The idea of him straddling a motorcycle makes me smile on the inside. I keep it hidden there. If I let it creep to my lips, he’ll ask about that. And while I tell him all my thoughts, I don’t always share my secrets.

  “Scorched cream. If it were a paint color, that’s what they’d call it. It’s like … it was made for me. When I reach out in the dream, there’s a perfectness to the angle of my arms as I t
ry to grasp the handles. Did you ever have the one kid in school whose ears stuck out like this?” I sit straight, tuck my hair behind my ears, shove them forward at painful right angles.

  His mouth twitches. He wants to smile. I can see the debate: Is it professional to laugh? Will she read it as sexual harassment? Laugh, I want to tell him. Please.

  “I was that kid.”

  “Really?”

  “No.” His smile breaks free, and for a moment I forget the jar. It’s neither huge nor perfect, but he made it for me. I find myself filled with a million questions, each designed to probe him the way he searches me.

  “Do you have a recurring dream?” I ask.

  The smile melts away. “I don’t remember them. But we’re talking about you.”

  Right. Don’t throw me a bone. “The jar, the jar. What else to tell you about the jar?”

  “Are there any markings?”

  I don’t need to stop and think; I know. “No. It’s pristine.” My shoulders ache with tension. “That’s all.”

  “How does it make you feel?”

  “Terrified.” I lean forward, elbows pressing a dent into my knees. “And curious.”

  PART

  ONE

  ONE

  DATE: NOW

  When I wake, the world is still gone. Only fragments remain. Pieces of places and people who were once whole. On the other side of the window, the landscape is a violent green, the kind you used to see on a flat-screen television in a watering hole disguised as a restaurant. Too green. Dense gray clouds banished the sun weeks ago, forcing her to watch us die through a warped, wet lens.

  There are stories told among pockets of survivors that rains have come to the Sahara, that green now sprinkles the endless brown, that the British Isles are drowning. Nature is rebuilding with her own set of plans. Man has no say.

  It’s a month until my thirty-first birthday. I am eighteen months older than I was when the disease struck. Twelve months older than when war first pummeled the globe. Somewhere in between then and now, geology went crazy and drove the weather to schizophrenia. No surprise when you look at why we were fighting. Nineteen months have passed since I first saw the jar.

  I’m in a farmhouse on what used to be a farm somewhere in what used to be Italy. This is not the country where gleeful tourists toss coins into the Trevi Fountain, nor do people flock to the Holy See anymore. Oh, at first they rushed in like sickle cells forced through a vein, thick, clotted masses aboard trains and planes, toting their life savings, willing to give it all to the church for a shot at salvation. Now their corpses litter the streets of Vatican City and spill into Rome. They no longer ease their hands into La Bocca della Verità and hold their breath while they whisper a pretty lie they’ve convinced themselves is real: that a cure-all is coming any day now; that a band of scientists hidden away in some mountaintop have a vaccine that can rebuild us; that God is moments away from sending in His troops on some holy lifesaving mission; that we will be saved.

  Raised voices trickle through the walls, reminding me that while I’m alone in the world, I’m not alone here.

  “It’s the salt.”

  “It’s not the fucking salt.”

  There’s the dull thud of a fist striking wood.

  “I’m telling you, it’s the salt.”

  I do a mental tally of my belongings as the voices battle: backpack, boots, waterproof coat, a toy monkey, and inside a plastic sleeve: a useless passport and a letter I’m too chicken to read. This is all I have here in this ramshackle room. Its squalor is from before the end, I’ve decided. Poor housekeeping; not enough money for maintenance.

  “If it’s not the salt, what is it?”

  “High-fructose corn syrup,” the other voice says, with the superior tone of one convinced he’s right. Maybe he is. Who knows anymore?

  “Ha. That doesn’t explain Africa. They don’t eat sweets in Timbuktu. That’s why they’re all potbelly skinny.”

  “Salt, corn syrup, what does it matter?” I ask the walls, but they’re short on answers.

  There’s movement behind me. I turn to see Lisa No-last-name filling the doorway, although there is less of her to fill it than there was a week ago when I arrived. She’s younger than me by ten years. English, from one of those towns that ends in -shire. The daughter of one of the men in the next room, the niece of the other.

  “It doesn’t matter what caused the disease. Not now.” She looks at me through feverish eyes; it’s a trick: Lisa has been blind since birth. “Does it?”

  My time is running out; I have a ferry to catch if I’m to make it to Greece.

  I crouch, hoist my backpack onto my shoulders. They’re thinner now, too. In the dusty mirror on the wall, the bones slice through my thin T-shirt.

  “Not really,” I tell her. When the first tear rolls down her cheek, I give her what I have left, which amounts to a hug and a gentle stroke of her brittle hair.

  I never knew my steel bones until the jar.

  The godforsaken jar.

  DATE: THEN

  My apartment is a modern-day fortress. Locks, chains, and inside a code I have three chances to get right, otherwise the cavalry charges in, demanding to know if I am who I say I am. All of this is set into a flimsy wooden frame.

  Eleven hours cleaning floors and toilets and emptying trash in hermetic space. Eleven hours exchanging one-sided small talk with mice. Now my eyes burn from the day, and I long to pluck them from their sockets and rinse them clean.

  When the door swings open, I know. At first I think it’s the red answering machine light winking at me from the kitchen. But no, it’s more. The air is alien like something wandered freely in this space during my absence, touching what’s mine without leaving a mark.

  Golden light floods the living room almost as soon as my fingers touch the switch. My eyes blink until they summon ample lubricative tears to provide a buffer. My pupils contract just like they’re supposed to, and finally I can walk into the light without tripping.

  They say it’s not paranoia if someone is really out to get you. There is no prickle on the back of my neck telling me to watch out behind me, but I’m right about the air: it has been parted in my absence and something placed inside.

  A jar.

  Not the kind that holds sour dill pickles that crunch between your teeth and fill your head with echoes. This looks like a museum piece, pottery, older than this city—so says the grime ground into its pores. And that ancient thing fills my apartment with the feel of things long buried.

  I could examine the jar, lift it from the floor and move it away from here. But some things, once touched, can never be untouched. I am a product of every B movie I’ve ever seen, every superstition I’ve ever heard, every tale old wives have told.

  I should examine the jar, but my fingers refuse to move, protecting me from the what-if. They reach for the phone instead.

  The super picks up on the eighth ring. When I ask if he let someone into my place, his mind goes on walkabout. An eternity passes. During that time I imagine him clawing at his balls, out of habit more than anything else, while he performs a mental tally of the beer still left in the fridge.

  “No,” he says, eventually. “Something get stolen?”

  “No.”

  “What’s the problem, then?”

  I hang up. Count to ten. When I turn the jar is still there, centered perfectly in my living room between the couch and television.

  The security company is next on my list. No, they tell me. We’ve got no record of anyone entering apartment thirteen-oh-four.

  “What about five minutes ago?”

  Silence. Then: “We’ve got that. Do you need us to send someone out?”

  The police give me more of the same. Nobody breaks in and leaves things. It must be a gift from a secret admirer. Or maybe I’m crazy; they’re not above suggesting that, but they use polite, hollow words designed to make me feel okay about hanging up the phone.

  Then I remember the
answering machine’s blinking light. When I press Playback, my mother’s voice booms from the speaker.

  “Zoe? Zoe? Are you there?” There’s a pause; then: “No, honey, it’s the machine.” Another pause. “What—I am leaving a message. What do you mean, ‘Talk louder’?” There’s playful slapping in the background as she shoos my father away. “Your sister called. She said there’s someone she wants you to meet.” Her voice drops to a whisper that’s anything but discreet. “I think it’s a man. Anyway, I just thought you could call her. Come over for dinner Saturday and you can tell me all about him. Just us girls.” Another pause. “Oh, and you of course. You’re almost a girl,” she tells Dad. I can picture him laughing good-naturedly in the background. “Sweetie, call me. I’d try your cell phone, but you know me: ever hopeful that you’re on a date.”

  Normally, I feel a small flash of anger in my chest when she calls to match make. But today …

  I wish my mom were here. Because that jar isn’t mine.

  Someone has been in my space.

  DATE: NOW

  The human body is a wondrous thing. It’s an acid manufacturing plant capable of transforming simple food into a hot burning mess.

  I vomit a lot now. I’m great at it. I can lean forward just right and miss my boots completely. If the world wasn’t gone, I could go to the Olympics.

  As soon as breakfast comes up, I poke down an apple. It takes.

  “Do you have to go?” Lisa asks. She’s chewing her bottom lip, working the delicate skin into a pulpy mass.

  “I have to get to Brindisi.”

  We’re standing in the farmhouse’s yard, encapsulated in a constant damp mist. Plush moss springs from pale stones that make up the house’s exterior walls. My bicycle is leaning against a long-abandoned water pump. Somewhere along the way, the owners had resources enough to reroute the plumbing and enter the twentieth century, but they left the pump for charm or lack of caring. The bicycle is blue and not originally mine. No money changed hands. It was purchased for the paltry sum of a kiss outside Aeroporto Leonardo da Vinci di Fiumicino. No tongue. Just the surprising taste of tenderness from a Norwegian man who didn’t want to die without one last embrace.