The Last Adults — Part I
Chapters 1–13
Download Part I (PDFs)
Chapters 1–3 (PDF) Chapters 4–5 (PDF) Chapters 6–8 (PDF) Chapters 9–10 (PDF) Chapters 11–13 (PDF)Table of Contents
Chapter 1: The One-Hour Life (Revised)
The airlock hissed its countdown, a mechanical serpent coiling around Jim Keening’s lungs.
45:00.
Jim pressed his gloved hands against the cold inner door, feeling the faint vibrations of the decontamination jets finishing their cycle. The solvent smell seeped through the suit’s filters as a ghost-memory more than a scent. It was the only thing that still felt normal.
Everything else—the dead comms, the empty labs, the dozen former colleagues now toddling and staring into corners—belonged to a world that had slid off its rails and kept falling.
Six weeks.
Six weeks since the world went silent.
Six weeks since the Nursery Flu had torn through the planet at the speed of breath.
When the first cases appeared, they’d thought respiratory failure. Of course they had. New flu, frantic headlines, ventilator shortages—all the old grooves from pandemics past. The CDC lab in Atlanta had sealed its BSL-4 unit like it had for Ebola, Nipah, Marburg. The protocols had been written for things that killed your lungs, not your mind.
The protocols had been wrong.
Alistair proved that.
Chapter 2
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Chapter 3
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Chapter 4
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Chapter 5
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Chapter 6
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Chapter 7
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Chapter 8
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Chapter 9
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Chapter 10
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Chapter 11
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Chapter 12
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Chapter 13 — End of Part I
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