Outside Everbright

Best case scenario: youve got until age thirty-five. Then you justdry up. Literally. Forget leaving a beautiful corpse; you head into the crematorium looking like a human prune. You could be strong, clever, ruthless. You could be a norm or a mutant freak. You could be the only one left who knows how to keep the power on or extract a bullet. It doesnt matter. The husk takes everyone. But cheer up; its not all bad. Youth throws wild parties when it doesnt have to worry about Old Age. What fresh hell is this? Temper Eve plans to waste her twenties the way she wasted her teens: starting barroom brawls and stealing everything that isnt nailed down. Temper needs only two things in the world: action and anonymity. Her close ties with Everbrights criminal underworld supply plenty of both. All of that is destroyed by a stranger in a chance encounter. Now Temper is on the run, host to an alien presence called the queen, and targeted by everyone from local law enforcement, who want to use her as a weapon, to the medical laboratories, who want to use her to cure the husk. So much for anonymity. Temper has found a way to undo whats happened to her, to get rid of the queen and return to a safely inconspicuous life inside the gritty hell of Everbright haven. But it means leaving. And life on the outside is a death sentence even more certain than the husk. This aint your kid sisters apocalypse. Dont let the dystopian setting fool you. This is not a Young Adult novel. But if you're old enough to vote and you feel mentally equipped to handle the full range of swearing, nudity, sex, violence, nude violence, and drug use that a post-apocalyptic world has to offer, this is the book for you.