Sevener

By Thea Hayworth

Post-Civil War and post-zombie apocalypse, a Kansas rancher is approached by an unusual drifter.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Thea Hayworth
• Release date: May 12, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301509270

Thea Hayworth

Thea Hayworth lives surrounded by snakes, gadgetry and reference materials. She is also incurably addicted to pen names.

Book preview

SEVENER

by

Thea Hayworth

*****

Copyright 2013 by Thea Hayworth

Smashwords Edition

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License Notes

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I’d first noticed the birds mobbing over the ridge a few days ago, a great, wheeling cloud that filled the sky like a cracked-open hornet’s nest. Up close, a mob even half that size sounded like Gabriel’s trumpet ringing out over Babel: eagles and crows, songbirds and sparrow hawks, all shrieking and screaming and piping together while anything on the ground ran as far and as fast as it could. At least I’d seen this one coming; slow as it was moving, I’d gotten the cattle put up in the big barn yesterday evening, doors bolted and every crack and cranny in the walls plugged up tight. I might still lose a few head to panic if that unholy racket drifted our way, but that was a risk a rancher took. Better than losing the whole herd to the sickness.

Work didn’t stop just because there was a mob in the air, and having cattle in the barn didn’t mean they didn’t need to be fed. I had hay drying in the field that needed turning, a henhouse to inspect and maybe a few chickens to kill if any of that mob to the west had fluttered this way in the night. For whatever reason, the birds always did get the worst of it, and it wasn’t just God keeping an eye out for falling sparrows anymore. By the time those things dropped, they were pure poison, and it was the Lord’s own mercy that they usually didn’t get back up again. They were just about the only things that didn’t.

I was no gunslinger, but I had a Colt I liked to take with me on my rounds, and I strapped that on and fetched my hat before I unbarred the door. It was still early enough that I didn’t feel too bad about the hours wasted, but the sun was high enough that I could see trouble coming by the time I stepped off the porch.

Five years ago I’d have woke with the dawn if the ranch hands and the cook didn’t wake me first, but it was just me now. For all that I’m told I clean up well, I’m not such looker that a woman would move all the way out here to get a better view, not when she could find the same model in town: skin baked to clay and hair bleached to straw, still the early side of thirty but prospects dwindling. I didn’t mind the quiet so much, or else I’d just gotten used to it. We’d lost a few men early on, and the rest had run back to the cities, like that was any safer. Out here, if the sickness took a fella, it might not get much chance to spread. In the cities with everybody rubbing elbows, a body might not even know he’d been touched until he woke up with a fever no amount of snake oil could cure.

With the cows out of harm’s way and the horses snug in their stable, there wasn’t much moving on the ground. I was a good ten miles from my closest neighbor and could have stood to be another hundred; the Bancrofts never had been much more than a pack of rustlers

Reviews for Sevener

[Ariam · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Well, the book was amazing. The plot was very complex for that short a book, the worldbuilding was insane aaaaaaaaaand she goes and leaves it at the 'final battle' kinda. It left me bereft, seriously. And it doesn't seem like the kind of book to get a sequel, so I guess we'll have to be happy with what we got ?

[Jen DuBay · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Fan ducking tastic world building, writing, characters. Everything was superb... but I *hate* it when books end on a cliffhanger that never gets answered.