The Night the Moon Died: A Short Story in The Becoming Universe: The Becoming, #5.5

By Jessica Meigs

Dez Ikeda had never met Emma Hadley before he stumbled across her on the side of a Georgia highway. Despite the fact they were strangers, he and Emma decide to team up on their mutual journey to Alabama.

It's a good thing, too. Because in the course of their journey, they discover something life-altering, something that holds alarming consequences for not just them but the rest of the world.

"The Night the Moon Died" is a short story in The Becoming Universe. It is approximately 7,000 words long and takes place after Redemption, the fifth book in The Becoming Series.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jessica Meigs
• Release date: Nov 5, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201976798

Book preview

The Night the Moon Died

The Night the Moon Died

A Short Story in The Becoming Universe

Jessica Meigs

THE NIGHT THE MOON DIED. Copyright © 2021 by Jessica Meigs.

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

Excerpt from BLOODLINES © 2021 by Jessica Meigs. All rights reserved.

No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of the author.

To all my readers, past and present.

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Thank you for sticking in there for all these years!

Contents

Emma

Dez

Emma

Dez

Emma

An Excerpt from Bloodlines

About the Author

Also by Jessica Meigs

Emma

The stiff breeze, tinged with a hint of oncoming snow, snuck up the back of Emma Hadley’s worn denim jacket, wracking her thin, half-starved frame with involuntary shivers. She shifted her backpack of meager supplies against her back, hoping the pack would help block the wind from going up her back, then tightened her jacket around herself.

She was not adequately dressed for roaming around in the great outdoors during winter in an apocalyptic Georgia. But it wasn’t like she’d had much of a choice. Not after the zombies had run her off.

She’d been holed up in a little duplex in a town with the deceptively lovely name of Willow Creek. Willow Creek had been far from lovely after the zombies had come through, though. But that was something like two years ago—she wasn’t exactly sure of the timeline anymore; she’d lost track of what day it even was and had only the haziest notion that it was sometime in the month of December—and all that was left were scattered supplies, broken windows, crushed glass in the streets, and the occasional zombies. Well, at least until the last batch had come through.

She didn’t even know the names of the four people she’d been hiding with. She’d only met them a day before they’d died. They hadn’t had any food to spare, save for a couple of granola bars they’d begrudgingly given her. Which, speaking of, she was hungry and really wanted to dig one of the bars out to eat, but it was too damn cold to even think about taking off her backpack to get at them or removing her hands from her armpits where she’d stuffed them and where they were just starting to warm back up a bit.

She really, really needed to find something resembling shelter already. She’d been walking on the side of a deserted highway for about six hours now, not entirely sure where she was, no clear destination in mind, just putting one foot in front of the other on the crunchy, frostbitten grass. All she knew was she was headed west, anywhere away from the East Coast, as far from the insanity of Atlanta as she could get.

Truth be told, it was a sheer miracle she was even still alive.

As memories of the hellhole that Emory University had become pretty much immediately with the outbreak of the Michaluk Virus tickled at her brain, she shook her head, hard, abruptly, like she could just rattle the nightmares loose if she jostled her brain enough. Her focus needed to be on her surroundings, on the wrecked and abandoned cars around her, not on her past traumas, no matter how relevant to the current circumstances said traumas were.

Emma heard a