Author Description

In 2072 a pandemic caused by a bacterial infection that does not respond to antibiotics kills the vast majority of humanity. Too few people survive to maintain civilization. Governments collapse. The few stunned survivors struggle on in an empty, unsympathetic world which many come to call the Afterworld. Thirteen years pass. John Moore and the sisters Alicia and Jaclyn Coleridge are among the generation born too late to remember the civilized times. They come from disparate backgrounds. He is an orphan and member of a scrounger gang that roams the vacant, sometimes brutal, lands. The gang contends with others in scavenging usable goods to sell and confront the dangers of dead, collapsing cities. The sisters are daughters of a powerful mayor who rules the settlement of Coleridge Gardens as autocratically as a feudal lord.The scrounger gang's routine is much the same every year. They spend summers collecting pre-pandemic goods to sell at the Coleridge Gardens harvest market. They stay at the town's only hotel, Haas House, during the market, then go to the larger town of Nellie's Fair, situated on an island in a lake near the ruins of St. Louis, Missouri. They deposit their earnings from the market in its bank and enjoy its pleasures for a few weeks, then spend the rest of the winter at Haas House where John works as the hotel's brewer.As he reaches manhood John wearies of gang life, settles in Coleridge Gardens and works at the hotel as a full time brewer. He readily adapts to the settled life and finds love with Alicia Coleridge. The town, however, is not without tension. Its fiery young fundamentalist preacher, Paul Gephardt, keeps his congregation, which includes most of the townspeople, terrified of the End Times. The pandemic, he claims, was its first stage. Suddenly Gephardt disappears; at the same time Alicia is missing. Jaclyn tells John they left together but, given Alicia's dislike of the preacher, John knows she would not have gone willingly with him. Beli