An Unexpected Sanctuary

By Cassie Decker

An aggressive super-flu pandemic wipes out a majority of the population over the course of one Christmas holiday—and brings Tobin and Kyle together. For almost a year, they’ve been trekking across the country from Colorado toward a sanctuary in upstate New York. Kyle’s survival skills have kept them alive, and Tobin wants to repay the man he loves with a very special gift of his own making. He sneaks off in search of the last few pieces… only to get himself and Kyle kidnapped by a desperate stranger. With their journey to New York on hold—possibly indefinitely—they’ll need to accept that home isn’t always defined by a place as much as the person you’re with.

A story from the Dreamspinner Press 2017 Advent Calendar "Stocking Stuffers."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dreamspinner Press
• Release date: Dec 1, 2017
• ISBN: 9781640803015

Cassie Decker

Cassie Decker started writing love stories once she read her first romance novel in high school and instantly fell in love with falling in love. She believes everyone deserves a happily ever after, whether the men in her stories rope cattle in the rodeo, live in a tropical paradise, or are just trying to survive in a postapocalyptic world.  When she’s not writing romance, she’s reading it. And if there’s time between that, you can find Cassie getting her geek on with cosplay costumes, comic-cons, and video game binges. Besides being a total nerd, she likes to knit naughty rainbow keychain charms for her friends, home brew her own beer, and practice her ukulele. Cassie also loves playing in the Colorado wilderness with her husband and her corgi pup, Murphy, when she’s not busy obsessing over the fictional men plotting their steamy love stories in her head, that is. Email: [e-mail] Facebook: www.facebook.com/cassie.decker.9 Twitter: @cabooseomalley Blog: www.lopsided-whiskey-grin.tumblr.com

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By Cassie Decker

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An Unexpected Sanctuary

By Cassie Decker

An aggressive super-flu pandemic wipes out a majority of the population over the course of one Christmas holiday—and brings Tobin and Kyle together. For almost a year, they’ve been trekking across the country from Colorado toward a sanctuary in upstate New York. Kyle’s survival skills have kept them alive, and Tobin wants to repay the man he loves with a very special gift of his own making. He sneaks off in search of the last few pieces… only to get himself and Kyle kidnapped by a desperate stranger. With their journey to New York on hold—possibly indefinitely—they’ll need to accept that home isn’t always defined by a place as much as the person you’re with.

To Jep, for always supporting my dreams, and to Jamie, for giving me the encouragement I needed to act on them.

MY NAME is Tobin Abernathy, and it has been one year since the K3X8 flu pandemic brought the world grinding to a halt. I was in my junior year of college in Fort Collins, Colorado, and just a few days from finals week and the Christmas holiday when news started coming in of the global virus. It was fast moving, aggressive, and unstoppable. It started with a fever and a cough, then moved to a total system shutdown, and after that, you were just done. Average amount of time from the first symptoms to the last? Less than forty-eight hours. The incubation period was so long, though, many people didn’t realize they had been passing it along until it was much too late.

Mass hysteria doesn’t come close to describing the events that happened following the initial news of the outbreak. Panic set in like a raging wildfire, fueling the madness. Grocery stores ran out of food, airplane travel ceased, freeways clogged with people trying to flee densely populated areas, and quarantine zones were put up in all major cities in a futile attempt to contain it. But that was before it all went dark. No more TV or radio or internet to tell us what was going on in the rest of the world or even the next city over, no more cell phone towers sending signals, no more power grids running electricity to homes or businesses or hospitals. This was all within the first month.

We all found pretty quickly, though, as soon as the sickness hit, it petered out. There wasn’t really anyone left after the end who could do scientific research to explain where the virus came from or even how those of us who survived escaped without experiencing any symptoms at all. Some said those with stronger immune systems were able to fight it off more successfully, while others said strictly isolating yourself from everyone until it had passed was the key. But at that point, even with the threat of the disease ultimately gone, the damage to our modern way of living was already done. Society tried holding on to some semblance of itself, but we had lost too many too fast for it to go back to normal.

Those of us lucky enough to have survived the onset of the virus had to learn how to cope with life after the end. People were fighting for limited resources and searching desperately for places to shelter from the elements of that first brutal winter. Record-breaking amounts of snowfall did little to stem the hysteria. Violence became so commonplace it was almost expected. Roving gangs formed quickly and took what they wanted whether you tried to put up a fight or not. Our already-dwindling population was reduced further in ways that didn’t have anything to do with the K3X8, or KEX, as