Publisher : John Joseph Adams/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (May 25, 2021)
Publication date : May 25, 2021
Language : English
File size : 6971 KB
“Doucette’s ’seven’ aren’t just 'magnificent'—they're also entertaining as hell.” —Scott Sigler, New York Times bestselling author of the Infected Trilogy
"The adventure I've been looking for! Never once did I know what to expect, and I loved being proved wrong at every turn. Far more mind-bending than a book this fun has any right to be." —Zack Jordan, author of The Last Human
“[A] riveting postapocalyptic outing… Doucette’s vibrant prose and unique premise make for an enticing adventure.” —Publishers Weekly
This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang, but a whatever.
The whateverpocalypse. That’s what TourΓ©, a twenty-something Cambridge coder, calls it after waking up one morning to find himself seemingly the only person left in the city. Once he finds Robbie and Carol, two equally disoriented Harvard freshmen, he realizes he isn’t alone, but the name sticks: Whateverpocalypse. But it doesn’t explain where everyone went. It doesn’t explain how the city became overgrown with vegetation in the space of a night. Or how wild animals with no fear of humans came to roam the streets.
Add freakish weather to the mix, swings of temperature that spawn tornadoes one minute and snowstorms the next, and it seems things can’t get much weirder. Yet even as a handful of new survivors appear—Paul, a preacher as quick with a gun as a Bible verse; Win, a young professional with a horse; Bethany, a thirteen-year-old juvenile delinquent; and Ananda, an MIT astrophysics adjunct—life in Cambridge, Massachusetts gets stranger and stranger.
The self-styled Apocalypse Seven are tired of questions with no answers. Tired of being hunted by things seen and unseen. Now, armed with curiosity, desperation, a shotgun, and a bow, they become the hunters. And that’s when things truly get weird.
O N E
Robbie
1
Robbie wasn’t sure how he ended up back in his own bed.
Not that this was an unwelcome discovery. He’d gone to his first bona fide collegiate keg party the night before — a staggeringly bad idea given it fell just before his first full day of classes— and drank . . . well, a lot. He wasn’t sure how much; potentially enough to warrant measurements in gallons, but not enough to convince him he likedbeer.
The party was in an off-campus apartment roughly six blocks from the dorm, so his being able to drunkenly stagger back to the room and then pass out on his own bed made plenty of sense. He just didn’t remember doing it.
He rolled onto his back and noted that he was stillfully clothed.
His shoes were still on. He still had his wallet.All good things.
Then he took a look at the alarm clock. It had nodisplay.
“Hey, what time is it?” he said— to nobody, apparently, as he was alone in the dorm room.
He had two roommates. He barely knew them,because everyone was a freshman, and it had only been four days since they had come together fororientation.
There was Nguyen, about whom Robbie knewonly two facts: He was Vietnamese, and he groomed his own eyebrows with tweezers every morning, for no good reason. The other roommate was Taylor, who folded his underwear.
That was the extent of what he knew about them,up until he discovered there’d been some kind of power failure during the night. Now he could add “won’t wake up their roommate even though hehas an early class the next day” to the list.
He dug his cell phone out. Itwas dead.
“Aw, come on.”
He got out of bed, ignored the rush of blood that made him a little dizzy, and pulled open the dormroom door.
The hallway had no lights. It was daytime, clearly, but the only windows in the hall were at the ends, which didn’t do much to help illuminatethe middle.
“Hey, does anyone know what time it is?” he shouted. No answer. He stepped backinto the room.
“Well, this is crazy,” he said.
It was a weird moral quandary. The sun was up, so it was evidently morning. Probably early morning, but maybe not. Could be, he’d missed hisfirst Intro to Macroeconomics class already andwas now well on his way to missing Freshman English. He should be grabbing his bookbag — which he’d packed the night before, aftermemorizing the locations and optimal paths for allhis classes and running out.
Excerpted from The Apocalypse Seven by Gene Doucette. Copyright © 2021 by Gene Doucette. Published and reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. All rights reserved.
