Repossession (The Keepers Trilogy)

REPOSSESSION

THE KEEPERS TRILOGY

BOOK I

BY RACHAEL WADE

ALSO BY RACHAEL WADE

Love and Relativity

The Preservation Series :

Preservation, Book One

Reservation, Book Two

Declaration, Book Three

The Resistance Trilogy:

Amaranth, Book One

The Gates, Book Two

The Tragedy of Knowledge, Book Three

© Rachael Wade 2013

Rabbit Hole Press Orlando, FL

www.RachaelWade.com

Editor: Arlene Robinson

Cover Design: Robin Ludwig Design

ISBN: 978-0-9896304-2-9 (Paperback)

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

DEDICATION

To my readers. Your support is such a gift to me. Thank you for everything.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Writing the acknowledgment section gets harder and harder with each book because it’s impossible to give everyone I want to acknowledge a proper shout out. I simply can’t express my appreciation enough to every blogger, author, and reader friend I’ve made since I began my writing career. All I can say is that you know who you are, and you know that I love you and am grateful for your amazing support over the past few years. Thank you, as always, to my greatest muses, Patricia and Dave, and to Tessa and Cathy for reading the early drafts and giving me great feedback. Also, thanks to God for the gift of storytelling, and the blessing that allows me to do what I love for a living. Much love, everyone. xo

AUTHOR’S NOTE

A Glossary of Terms for reference can be found at the end of the book.

INVASION

15:00

All the flowers are gone.
I stared at the demolished flowerbed, the gun dangling from my lifeless fingers. My mama’s favorite garden destroyed.

I loved that damn garden.

It was the only sanctuary I had, giving me a cozy spot to bask in peace and quiet while I looked out over the yard. I could watch Cooper and Riley play, could toss them a Frisbee and laugh while they chased the neighborhood cat. Our black and yellow lab retrievers were inseparable. Mama always said they went together like cookies and cream. When the Invaders first touched down, they disappeared, just like every other animal in the neighborhood, retreating into the nearby woods like they’d gone into hiding or something. There was no more barking, no sign of them since.

I used to just sit and watch them in that garden, waiting for the moments to pass, wondering when life would evolve, when I’d see progress. Sometimes things were so damn boring and uninspired in our little town. Mama told me to never allow restlessness to become a burden, because before I knew it, the tide would turn and a new season would be upon me. Sometimes, though, I couldn’t help feeling antsy.

Morton, Alabama wasn’t known for much except a surplus of Baptist churches and Wednesday-night bingo matches after Bible study. The town and the people were sweet, all right, and I was damn lucky to live in a place where people knew your name. They had big hearts. Good people, they were. Hell, I grew up in one of those churches, and they did right by me, always teaching me about grace and whatnot. I like to think I have all they taught me about God figured out now, but the truth is, I’m not sure if I ever will. Did that make me less Christian than them? Was I one of the heathen they preached about on Sunday mornings? Because I didn’t interpret the Good Book the way they all seemed to?

Hell if I knew.

Daddy taught me to do the best I could to understand the gospel, to listen to my conscience and all that, and then leave the rest to God. Said it wasn’t for me to understand. Not all of it, anyway. He’d go on and on about how I needed to just accept that I’d never find all the answers I was looking for. Said if I ever did, he reckoned I wouldn’t like what I’d find, and no matter what answers I’d stumble across, they’d never be enough to satisfy my curiosity anyway.

“Human,” he’d say. “That’s what you are darlin’, just human. God don’t expect you to have His all-knowing superpowers. Jus’ you let it be, now.”

But for a girl like me with big dreams and bigger questions, Morton, Alabama was suffocating. I hated bingo, I figured looking for answers was better than not looking for them at all, and I was far from content just sittin’ on my behind waiting for something interesting to come along and get me outta this town.

They always say if you stop looking for something, that’s usually when you find what you’re looking for. So it shouldn’t have come as a surprise to me when the Invaders finally made their way to our tiny town, arriving on a warm spring afternoon. They’d first sent our nation into mass hysteria, stationing themselves along the coasts and in harbor towns. That’s when Cooper, Riley, and other neighborhood pets started disappearing.

Not long after, the sightings began around Morton, and that’s when we knew things were changing.

We were an inland town, far from the Gulf or any ocean, and the Invaders seemed to like water. So they were starting to spread out, exploring even the most rural, isolated areas. We thought we’d lucked out at first, thinking they weren’t interested in coming to our neck of the woods.

We were wrong.

Optimism wasn’t in my favor when it came to a future in Morton. I remembered I’d just given up any hope of leaving this place. Dylan dumped me, I failed my first college exam—a true testament to my lack of interest—and I lost the last ten bucks in my bank account to an overdraft fee. Working at the town pet store wasn’t exactly ideal for raking in the cash. Every dollar meant something to me, and damn it, that ten-buck loss was a bitterness I’d taste for at least another month. I wanted to go to college to better my future, I did, but none of my classes seemed to hold my attention.

When my parents’ screams rang from inside the house that balmy, sunny afternoon, I saw the first one, right there by the backyard shed, trampling through Mama’s garden. Tall, pale white, and decrepit, drippin’ with some kinda clear ooze, like it had been going for a swim in a pool of diluted Vaseline or somethin’. It stood on two feet, hunched over, with sunken-in eyelids, its eyes dark, glowing, gaping holes staring back at me. Extending its long, frail arm, it released a wheezing sound, and a small cloud of white emanated from its ghoulish mouth as if it was breathing cold air.

The next thing I knew, its bizarrely graceful fingers splayed wide in the air, and a round, aqua-toned metal container shot forth, aimed directly at me. I stumbled backward over the garden bench, dodging it, and smashed into the back door. That metal container lodged tight to the left of my head, smack into the wall next to me. The creature released another one of those low wheezing sounds, and turned to reach for the latch on the shed. When it entered the shed, the back of its head was to me.

My eyes darted to the left, burning holes into the piece of metal just inches from my ear, wondering what that thing would do. Explode maybe? Release some kind of toxic gas? I sure as hell didn’t want to find out. With one more quick look at the foreign intruder, I realized it was more interested in our shed than finishing whatever the metal device had failed to do. I slipped in through the back door.

Tiptoeing into the hall, I ignored the terrifying fact that my parents’ screams had halted and reached up to the top cabinet on our cherry-brown china hutch, pulling out one of our Glocks. My fingers trembled as I checked the ammo and cocked the weapon. My shaky hands found the screen door latch and I stepped back outside, hoping the thing was still in the shed.

Thank God, the back of its head was still facing me while it rummaged through our stuff. The shade from the shed surrounded the white skeleton-like form, leaving me mesmerized for a moment at the sight of its elegant, phantasmal shape. As quick as I observed this, its head snapped around to me and its wheezing sound morphed into a high-pitched screech. Its hand extended again, probably to launch another one of those metal cylinders at me.

My reflex was lightning.

Forcing my hand steady, I raised the gun, released a deep breath, and aimed and pulled the trigger, unloading a round into the creature’s head. The casings burned my knuckles; the pops deafened me. While I watched the intruder jerk and drop to the ground, a wave of thoughts swamped me.

I did not have all the answers. I did not know if I’d deserved God’s grace or wrath, or what would become of me if I ever fled this town.

But I did know how to shoot a gun.

ONE

Darkness surrounded me, the smell of rust and metal burning my nose. A battery-powered lantern was propped on the table in the corner, illuminating the darkness with a weak, dim flicker; the ceiling above me pounded violently as mechanical, uniform stomps penetrated the earth above, making the hole in the ground where I was now, bound and gagged, a haunting and eerie grave-like cell. I imagined this was what it felt like to be buried alive.

My breathing accelerated, my nostrils flaring while I struggled against the tape over my lips to scream. Something sliced into my wrists. Peering up through my bangs, I could make out the faint silhouette of my arms, shackled by chains above my head. I couldn’t be here. Couldn’t be on their territory, under their confinement. No.

But from the looks and feel of it, I was.

The Invaders had taken over most of the United States territory, and from what we could tell, moved in to claim our planet’s water source, which was already severely threatened. They’d lined up all along our coastal perimeters, creating barrier stations to mark and control their turf. Some said they came from the water, whatever that meant.

We hadn’t figured out, or no one was willing to admit they knew about the Invaders’ weapons or what made them so superior to ours. They weren’t nuclear. People weren’t dying from radiation sickness. No, their weapons wielded power and technology that our military couldn’t even begin to understand, let alone conquer. Since the Invaders’ arrival, many humans had starved or died from dehydration and random violence, the lack of medical care and supplies, and pure desperation. Between looting, hoarding, and panic-driven consumption, we’d been our own worst enemies since they’d come to our planet. They didn’t have to exterminate us. We were taking care of that all on our own.

And here I was, on enemy territory, taken prisoner. As if the restraints weren’t enough to tell me I was on their stomping grounds, the aroma of rotten oceanic residue confirmed my worst fears. It was a putrid, salty marine smell, one that sank into the marrow of my bones, prompting my gag reflex. Wherever the hell these creatures were from, they made decaying fish and muddy swamp water smell like petunias.

But it wasn’t the Invaders who were holding so many humans prisoner. Not personally, anyway. To our horror, it turned out to be our fellow humans—traitors of the worst kind—who’d been the ones to kidnap and hold us prisoner. Apparently, according to various rumors, these traitors were serving the Invaders, and had been in charge of setting up and managing thousands of prison camps all over the country, maybe all over the world. News about countries other than our own was limited since our military and technology had been brought down. Apparently, some human prisoners were destroyed upon arrival at these camps, and some were forced into labor units, while others were shipped off in aquamarine, cocoon-like Capsules to God knows where. The Invaders were virtually invisible and unreachable within these prison camps, only lurking there in the shadows to oversee and direct operations while the human traitors did all their dirty work, managing and disposing of their prisoners. Their main ships settled near the water, around their operating stations, while others were deployed to the prison camps and to the streets for patrol.