Agnes at the End of the World Read online

  Copyright

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

  Copyright © 2020 by Kelly McWilliams

  Map illustration © 2020 by Tristan Elwell.

  Cover art copyright © 2020 by Tom Bagshaw.

  Cover design by Marcie Lawrence and Jenny Kimura.

  Cover copyright © 2020 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  Hachette Book Group supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

  Little, Brown and Company

  Hachette Book Group

  1290 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10104

  Visit us at LBYR.com

  First Edition: June 2020

  Little, Brown and Company is a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc. The Little, Brown name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: McWilliams, Kelly, author.

  Title: Agnes at the end of the world / by Kelly McWilliams.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Little, Brown and Company, 2020. | Audience: Ages 12+. | Summary: “Sixteen-year-old Agnes must escape a cult and a Prophet as she attempts to save the world from a pandemic”—Provided by publisher.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019031178 | ISBN 9780316487337 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780316487306 (ebook) | ISBN 9780316487856

  Subjects: CYAC: Cults—Fiction. | Brothers and sisters—Fiction. | Epidemics—Fiction. | Religion and science—Fiction. | Love—Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.M47885 Agn 2020 | DDC [Fic]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019031178

  ISBNs: 978-0-316-48733-7 (hardcover), 978-0-316-48730-6 (ebook)

  E3-20200505-JV-NF-ORI

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Map

  Part One

  Prologue

  1 Agnes

  2 Agnes

  3 Agnes

  4 Beth

  5 Beth

  6 Agnes

  7 Beth

  8 Agnes

  9 Agnes

  10 Beth

  11 Agnes

  12 Agnes

  13 Agnes

  14 Beth

  15 Agnes

  16 Agnes

  17 Agnes

  18 Agnes

  19 Agnes

  20 Beth

  21 Agnes

  22 Agnes

  23 Agnes

  Part Two

  24 Agnes

  25 Beth

  26 Agnes

  27 Beth

  28 Agnes

  29 Beth

  30 Agnes

  31 Agnes

  32 Beth

  33 Agnes

  34 Agnes

  35 Agnes

  36 Beth

  37 Agnes

  38 Agnes

  39 Agnes

  40 Beth

  41 Agnes

  Part Three

  42 Beth

  43 Agnes

  44 Agnes

  45 Agnes

  46 Beth

  47 Agnes

  48 Beth

  49 Agnes

  50 Beth

  51 Agnes

  52 Beth

  53 Agnes

  54 Beth

  55 Agnes

  Part Four

  56 Agnes

  57 Agnes

  58 Beth

  59 Agnes

  60 Agnes

  61 Beth

  62 Beth

  63 Agnes

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  Discover More

  For Clara Bailey Mullen

  Explore book giveaways, sneak peeks, deals, and more.

  Tap here to learn more.

  PART ONE

  PROLOGUE

  Once, a girl lived in a double-wide trailer on ranchland, beneath a wide white sky tumbled with clouds. The Prophet, a scowling crow of a man, presided over everyone and everything. When the girl wasn’t praying or busy with chores, she’d spin in meadows dancing with bees and dandelions, until Father called her name from the porch: “Agnes, back in the house!”

  Run.

  In Agnes’s world, secular music was forbidden, as was television, radio, and all technologies of sin. She wore homemade dresses that draped every inch of skin, though they were far too hot. At twelve, boys and girls were forbidden to play together, and the Prophet called the children little sinners with a sneer.

  Nevertheless, Agnes loved her world. Loved the meadow and the rocky canyon and the hawks that screeched overhead, winging impossibly high.

  One day, the meadow spoke. She was dancing when the hum rose up through the bottoms of her feet and into her small, little-girl bones.

  It was like a song. An old song. She pressed her ear to the ground and listened. Rocks pulsed, stones echoed, and clouds, trees, leaves rustled with melody. The girl smiled, her heart full, because God had opened her ears. He’d scratched the earth with His fingernail and revealed a hidden world.

  The girl was too young to see the danger in being singled out in a land where the Prophet expected his faithful to march like paper dolls, arm in arm, and all the same.

  Perfect obedience produces perfect faith.

  In Sunday school, Mrs. King asked the children if they remembered to pray.

  “I don’t need to pray,” said Agnes. “Because God is singing, everywhere, all the time.”

  Children snickered. Their teacher swiftly crossed the room. She grabbed Agnes’s arm, her face purple with anger, and stretched it across the desk. Then she slammed a Bible’s spine across the girl’s knuckles, over and over, until the middle knuckle of her right hand cracked like a nut.

  Pain exploded up her arm. She knew better than to scream.

  The woman bent and poured poison into her ear. “Insolent child. Only the Prophet hears the voice of God. Lie again and I’ll show you real pain.”

  That night, hand throbbing and swollen, the girl told herself she didn’t hear the sky singing or the earth humming. That she’d never heard such lovely, evil things.

  Never. Never.

  Perfect obedience produces perfect faith.

  Agnes pretended so hard not to hear that one day, she didn’t. The world went silent, all song snuffed out like a candle flame.

  When she returned, hesitant and barefoot, to the bee-spun meadow, she heard nothing.

  Nothing at all.

  1

  AGNES

  Sickness is punishment for your rebellion. It must be corrected by prayer alone.

  —PROPHET JACOB ROLLINS

  Agnes, are you in rebellion?”

  The question startled her like a rifle’s crack in the dark. Agnes froze with her hand on the trailer’s doorknob, her backpack slung over her shoulder. It was a quarter to midnight, and her fifteen-year-old sister was sitting bolt upright in bed, staring hungrily at her.

  Agnes’s pulse throbbed in the hollow of her throat, beating a single word: Caught.r />
  She’d been sneaking out the last Saturday of every month for two years, and she’d never been seen before.

  Such an obedient daughter, the matrons always said.

  No one would ever suspect that such a sweet, hardworking girl regularly broke one of Red Creek’s strictest Laws—no contact with Outsiders.

  It was an act for which she could be banished, and she never would’ve risked it if her brother’s life weren’t at stake. Luckily, her family were deep sleepers. But some sound—or dark intuition—had woken her sister tonight.

  Are you in rebellion?

  Agnes shut her eyes, dreading the truth.

  She’d always wanted, more than anything, to be good. Would God understand she’d never wanted to break His Laws?

  Would the Prophet, if he ever found out?

  “You can tell me,” her sister coaxed. “I won’t condemn you. I’m the only one who wouldn’t.”

  “Please, Beth,” she pleaded. “Go back to sleep.”

  Beth was already standing, shivering barefoot in her white nightgown. Her eyes shone lambent in the dark, and Agnes felt a cold wash of fear. She was well acquainted with her sister’s stubbornness.

  Oh, why couldn’t she have slept on, like all the times before?

  “Wherever you’re going, take me with you.”

  “It’s too dangerous.”

  Beth’s eyes flicked over the living room. “I don’t care. I’m bored to death here. Please.”

  The twins rolled over in their cot. Agnes held her breath, but the younger girls didn’t wake. In the far corner, a crucifix night-light illuminated Ezekiel’s sleeping face.

  For as long as Agnes could remember, she and Beth had shared everything—a bed, a hairbrush, their dreams.

  Everything, except this. Agnes’s only secret, too dangerous to share.

  Beth’s eyes lit up. “Is it a boy? Is that it?”

  Agnes pinched the bridge of her nose. She loved her sister dearly, but people whispered she was trouble waiting to happen. They whispered that she was impulsive, spoiled, vain, and exactly the sort of girl to lead an innocent boy into the shadow of the valley of death.

  But Agnes loved her too much to believe it.

  “No,” she said miserably. “I’m not meeting a boy. Why would you even ask me that?”

  Beth cocked her head, calculating. “If not a boy, then what on earth—?”

  Agnes’s cheeks burned. She hated living this shadowy double life—the lies breeding ever more lies, the constant shame like a ball of fire in her chest.

  She met Beth’s too-pretty eyes, green as lake shallows, and nearly confessed.

  I have no choice, she wanted to say. I sold my soul two years ago. If I hadn’t, we’d have buried Ezekiel in the meadow.

  Yet to save his life was a grave-deep sin, and so it must be her cross to bear—hers, alone. As much as she loved her sister, she knew Beth wasn’t strong enough to carry that burden for long.

  To save her brother’s life, Agnes bit her tongue.

  “If you are in rebellion, I understand,” Beth insisted. “Don’t you know I have doubts, too? Lately, I think Red Creek is—”

  “Stop,” Agnes whispered fiercely. She’d had enough of her willful younger sister for one night. “It’s none of your business where I go!”

  Beth rocked back like she’d been slapped. Then a chill settled over her fine features, an icy mask of rage, and Agnes trembled despite herself.

  “Everyone always says you’re so faithful,” Beth bit out. “But it’s all lies, isn’t it?”

  “Beth.” She willed her to understand. “I’m trying my best.”

  And not everything is about you.

  Agnes glanced at Ezekiel clutching his stuffed toy Sheep, then quickly looked away.

  “You think I’m a child.” Beth’s voice smarted with hurt. “But you can’t keep me in the dark forever.”

  “Don’t tell,” she said urgently. “Hate me if you want, but don’t tell.”

  “Fine.” Beth turned her back, digging under the mattress for her diary. “But I’ll never forgive you for this. Never.”

  She scribbled furiously in her book, sheltering in her own little world.

  Beth, I love you, Agnes wanted to say, but didn’t. Beth, I’m sorry.

  She glanced at the clock, and her heart contracted. It was nearly midnight. She didn’t have much time.

  Quietly, Agnes pushed open the trailer door and slipped into the evening air.

  The night smelled of lavender, dust, and danger.

  Agnes always met the Outsider in the King family cemetery, at the bottom of the hilly meadow that sprawled like a green carpet from their porch, unrolling all the way to the forest’s edge. The graveyard marked the boundary she absolutely couldn’t cross. The end of her world, before the wild Outside took over.

  Holding a flashlight and blue picnic cooler, she hurried towards the small collection of headstones that rose from the ground like rotten teeth. The grass was velvet, the moon a white slice.

  The Outsider wasn’t there.

  Stomach knotting, Agnes sank among the graves to wait.

  The King family had lost five children. The stones read: JEREMIAH, STILLBORN. ANNABELLE, STILLBORN. NOAH, STILLBORN. And JONAH. And RUTH.

  Ruth had been a beautiful baby, and Agnes would never forget her funeral. The little wooden casket and how the baby’s tiny fingers curled inwards like petals in a bud. The Prophet said God’s will had been done when the fever took the child, and Agnes believed him. But she ached for the baby and for her mother, whom all of Red Creek blamed. It was a sign the woman had earned God’s wrath that so many children had died, and a judgment she had no choice but to accept.

  In the graveyard, an electric certainty struck Agnes like lightning. Keeping Ezekiel alive—administering his shots, checking his blood, praying he wouldn’t collapse when she wasn’t there to revive him—her head swam with the mountainous, unholy difficulty of caring for a child so ill, all on her own.

  She should walk away. Go home, confess, and beg God’s forgiveness. If Ezekiel fell sick—died, even—well, it wasn’t her place to interfere.

  But she was glued to the earth. She loved her baby brother with her whole soul, and she’d rather lose her chance at heaven than see him so sick again.

  “Agnes?”

  She spun around and saw the Outsider coming towards her. A middle-aged woman dressed in her cotton nurse’s outfit. Her hair frizzed a halo around her head, and her lips were richly painted. Her skin was darker than any she’d ever seen before—an umber nearly black. The Prophet would call her a child of Cain, a member of a race damned long ago. But Agnes struggled to see her that way, carrying as she was a cooler full of lifesaving medicine in a hand spangled with rings.

  Her name was Matilda, and two years ago, she’d saved Ezekiel’s life.

  And thrust Agnes into this endless, living nightmare.

  “Sorry I’m late.” Matilda paused, catching her breath. “It’s chaos at the hospital. Have you had much trouble here?”

  “No trouble, ma’am.”

  She blinked. “No sickness? Nothing strange?”

  Agnes didn’t know what she was talking about and didn’t care. She wished Matilda would just get on with it, so she could get back to her world and forget all about this.

  Or try.

  “Oh, sweetheart, you’re pale.” Matilda touched her shoulder. “Everything okay at home? You can tell me, you know.”

  Agnes looked away, blinking back tears. It would be so much easier if she could hate the Outsider. But Matilda was gentle, motherly, and Agnes had yearned for a mother ever since her own had taken to her bed. Maybe Matilda knew that. Maybe she was only playing a role. Didn’t the Prophet say Outsiders would try to trick you? That they’d hide their wickedness until it was too late?

  “Do you ever wish you could leave this place? Go to school?”

  Agnes bristled. “I do go to school. On Sundays.”

  Matilda
frowned. “I mean a real school, with other kids. A public education.”

  “I’d hate that more than anything.” Agnes caught herself, lowered her voice. “Outsider teachings are against our faith.”

  Matilda smiled sadly. “You’re a good girl, trying to keep faith and care for your brother, too. But Agnes, obedience and faith aren’t the same thing.”

  “You don’t like us.” Agnes felt increasingly defensive. “But we’re following God’s word.”

  The nurse shook her head. “Just think about it, okay?”

  Outsiders are devious, the Prophet always said. Trust them at your peril.

  Agnes glanced back at her trailer, small on the hilltop. Every minute she spent in the cemetery she risked everything. If someone caught her, she might never see her siblings again, and the kids were all she’d ever had.

  When daylight came and her brother had his medicine, Agnes swore she’d think of the Outsider as little as humanly possible.

  “Insulin for thirty days.” Matilda’s tone turned businesslike. She handed Agnes a blue picnic cooler.

  It felt heavy in her hand—sinful. In exchange, Agnes passed her the empty one. Also, the piece of folded notebook paper she kept in her breast pocket: Ezekiel’s diabetes log.

  In it, she tracked his blood sugar, carbs, and activity. Her chest tightened while Matilda read it over. Agnes was supposed to keep Ezekiel’s blood glucose between 80 and 130, and she tried her best. But despite constant vigilance, his log showed peaks and valleys as mountainous as Red Creek itself.

  Matilda’s eyes softened. “Fluctuation is normal. You’re doing a fine job. Let me guess. You’re probably dreaming in numbers now, right?”

  Agnes managed a wan smile, thinking of the carb-counter book Matilda had given her two years ago. She’d practically memorized it.

  Matilda held her eyes. “Agnes. If he lived in the world, your brother could have all the power of technology keeping him alive.”

  Yes, she thought sadly. But what of his soul?

  Matilda sighed, resigned. “Where do you keep his insulin, anyway?”

  Agnes chewed her lip, knowing how bizarre it would sound. “I bury it in my garden. Deep, where the earth is cool.”

  Matilda looked shocked. “Well. I guess you can’t keep it in the fridge. You’re right that I don’t like what I’ve heard about this place. But I do like you.”