Redemption (Book 4, The Redemption Series) (24 page)

A Note From the Author

Thank you all for reading The Redemption Series!

The next series I will be working on is
The Dominion Series
, which is the second series featuring Anna and Malcolm. The first book is titled
Awakening
.

You can keep track of my progress on
Awakening
at my Facebook page or my website every Sunday with the
Awakening
meter.

I have attached a sample of the first book in my
Harvester of Light Trilogy
. I hope you enjoy it!

Thanks for reading!

Sincerely,

S.J. West

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www.sjwest.com

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[email protected]

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Harvester

Book One

∞

Harvester of Light Trilogy

What price would you pay to live forever?
In a time when technology gives you the choice of trading in your humanity for immortality, war has broken out between those who have chosen eternal life, known as Harvesters, and the last bastion of humans who view death as a small price to pay to retain their immortal souls.
As one of the few remaining survivors of the war, Skye and her best friend Ash struggle to live in what’s left of a post-nuclear United States. They elude capture by the Harvesters and simply try to stay alive in a world gone mad. After years on the run together, Skye's feelings for Ash develop into a love that is never openly reciprocated. Ash stoutly maintains his role as Skye's guardian, never allowing his emotions to get in the way of keeping her protected.
Finding themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time, Skye and Ash become embroiled in a struggle against two Harvesters who are torturing a young man named Jace. During the altercation to save themselves and Jace, Ash is mortally wounded. Skye begins to lose hope that she can save her friend until a mysterious woman appears out of nowhere. The woman instructs Skye to journey to the Southern Kingdom, a haven built by the surviving members of humanity, if she ever wants to be with Ash again.
“Our fates are in your hands. Don’t fail us,” the woman warns Skye before literally vanishing into thin air, taking Ash with her.
Desperate to be reunited with Ash, Skye and Jace begin their long trek towards the Southern Kingdom. Along the way, Skye unlocks a dark secret about her past, and discovers why Jace is so adamant that he knows her even though he has no memories about his own past. During the trials they face together along the way, Skye attempts to cope with her developing feelings for Jace. Feelings she never thought she would have for anyone but Ash.

CHAPTER ONE

“Skye, wake up.”

Ash’s worried voice threaded its way into my nightmare, saving me from the familiar torture of reliving the last moments I’d spent with my parents.

I opened my eyes and found Blue, my Weimaraner, lying beside me with his head held stiffly out in front of him on alert. The scar over where his left eye used to be glistened dully against his silver-gray fur.

I rolled over on my thin pallet made of old magazines and found Ash knelt beside me. He held a small flashlight loosely in one hand with the light shining down between his legs, illuminating the dusty, cracked tile floor of the library we had spent the night in. As usual, he was wearing the green army jacket, which once belonged to his father. The knit green cap on his head covered most of his blond hair, but a few wispy curls peeked out at the base of his neck. He hadn’t shaven in a couple of days, and the short stubble accentuated the sharp upward angle of his cheekbones, slim nose, and full lips. His clear blue eyes held a worried look I had seen one too many times over the years.

“What’s wrong?” I asked, sitting up quickly.

“We gotta leave.”

“Why?”

“Something strange is going on outside. I don’t think it’s safe for us to stay here anymore.”

Ash stood and offered me a hand up. I grabbed it, hurriedly getting to my feet.

“Do you think Harvesters are nearby?” I asked, not wanting to leave the old abandoned library before having a chance to further explore the scattering of books which remained. They were my only teachers in a world where such a luxury didn’t exist anymore.

Ash turned his back to me and crouched down to the floor again, shoving the canned and packaged food we had scavenged from an old grocery store the day before into his oversized backpack.

“There’s a guy walking out in the street. If Harvesters aren’t following him, they soon will be.”

I stood behind Ash trapped in my silence, not sure if I should voice my request. Questioning a decision Ash made wasn’t something I normally did, but the thought of leaving the library so soon prompted me to find a way to stay a little longer.

“I want to see him,” I finally said.

“We don’t have time for that,” Ash replied dismissively. “We need to move.”

“I don’t want to leave yet, Ash. Maybe you’re just overreacting,” I said, hoping that was the case. “At least let me see what’s going on for myself.”

Ash looked over his shoulder at me.

“It’s my
overreacting
that’s kept us alive all these years.” He continued his packing with a little more force than before.

“I’m not a child. I’m eighteen now. I think I deserve a say in whether or not we need to leave.”

Ash grew still and sat quietly, presumably thinking over my request. Finally, he rose and begrudgingly said, “Come on.”

Blue hopped up from his spot on the floor and padded along at my side as we made our way through the shattered remains of a place once visited by those seeking culture and knowledge.

When we first reached the library the day before, in what was left of the small town we were in, I had actually giggled with joy, a rarity. Ash had responded with a grin of pride spread from ear to ear, since he was the one who had found the library. It was one of our rare happy moments together since escaping the Harvester breeding camp and losing our parents five years ago.

Ash led me up what was once a grand staircase made of steel and cement to the library’s second floor. Once there, Blue took up guard at the head of the steps, watching for any sign of danger at our backs. Ash knelt down beside a shattered window and motioned for me to sit next to him.

Out of the corner of my eye, I caught a brief glimpse of my reflection in a cracked mirror hanging on the far wall. I noticed a few strands of my long brown hair had escaped from beneath my dark green pageboy knit cap. The matching coat I wore was a size too large for my slim frame, but beggars couldn’t be choosy in the post-apocalyptic age we lived in. I didn’t like looking at my reflection. It seemed like no matter how much sleep I got the dark circles, which seemed to match the brown of my eyes, never went away, making my face appear hollow and sunken in.

Ash handed me the binoculars as I sat down beside him. He jerked his head toward a fist-sized hole in the window.

“Take a look for yourself,” he told me.

I put the binoculars up to my eyes and peered out the hole to the outside world.

Daylight was struggling to make its way to Earth, filtered through a haze of never ending gray clouds. A few hundred feet away, I could faintly make out the silhouette of a person walking. I focused the binoculars on the stranger and felt my cheeks instantly begin to burn from embarrassment.

It was a young man who looked to be only a few years older than me, possibly Ash’s age. He was completely naked except for the sheen of splattered blood against his tanned skin. His body looked conspicuously healthy, like he had spent a great deal of time in a breeding camp. His well-toned muscles rippled as he lurched down the street like a drunkard, constantly wiping at a stream of blood pouring from a gash over his right eye. He kept glancing behind him with frightened eyes but continued to pull himself forward with grim determination.

I began to scan the road behind the man to search for anything else out of the ordinary.

My breath caught in my throat, strangled shut by fear.

“Harvesters,” I whispered.

Ash snatched the binoculars from my numb hands and looked back out the window. I knew what he was seeing. Two Harvesters, a man and a woman, dressed in their signature black uniforms, slowly following the stranger as if they were on a leisurely stroll instead of a hunt.

“Damn it,” Ash said. “We’ve gotta get out of here before they find us.”

Ash stood hastily and made it all the way to the head of the stairs before he noticed I wasn’t beside him. He turned back to me.

“Come on, Skye. We’ve gotta go,” he whispered urgently.

I sat on the dust-covered floor fighting between my primitive human instinct to run and survive and my conscience. My conscience won out.

“We can’t leave him to be butchered by those animals,” I told Ash. “You know what they’ll do to him.”

“Yeah, the same thing they’ll do to me and you if they find us. We can’t fight two Harvesters, Skye. I need to get you out of here.”

Ash had been my guardian since I was thirteen and given the responsibility to keep me alive by my father. I knew he wasn’t a coward. He would fight to the death to protect me.

He had done it before.

It was as if protecting me was all he ever thought about, making him blind to the needs of others.

I looked up from the floor and found Blue standing next to Ash, both of them waiting for me to move.

“We’ve seen so much death. Can’t we at least try to find a way to save him?”

“I’m only interested in saving you,” Ash said desperately, taking a step toward me with his hand held out. “Please, Skye. I’m begging you.”

I instantly felt ashamed. I was making Ash beg, me of all people. After everything he had done for us, for me, why was I trying to make him do something which would most likely lead to our deaths or worse, capture?

Ash was right. I didn’t owe a stranger a futile attempt to save his life. I owed Ash so much more.

I rose to my feet and made my way to the head of the stairs, grabbing Ash’s hand.

We didn’t even bother to pack the rest of our meager belongings. We always traveled light in case we needed to make a speedy getaway. Ash carried the majority of the few possessions we had, saying it was his responsibility as the man. When we were younger, I used to tease him about that statement. After all, he was only three years older than me. But now, it was true. He was a man. He had been my protector through the darkest of days. My strength when I had none left.

I tried not to think about what was happening out in the street. Ash was right. There was nothing we could do to help the stranger. He was as good as dead with two Harvesters on his trail.

Harvesters were soulless creatures made from their own selfish desire to stay alive forever, no matter what the cost. They harvested healthy organs from the last remaining humans who chose to reject the “miracle” of immortality. My father always said the Harvesters traded in their souls in a bad deal with the devil since they weren’t actually granted true immortality. They could be killed. It just took a lot to kill them.

I saw Ash stuff the semi-automatic pistol he kept loaded into his coat pocket in case he needed to access it quickly. We both knew if the Harvesters found us, the gun would be practically useless, but it gave us both a false sense of security.

We had just put our backpacks over our shoulders when we heard the distinct click of well-soled shoes against the cement sidewalk outside the library. Blue immediately dashed up the stairs, but Ash and I didn’t have time to follow him.

Ash grabbed me by the arm and ran behind a couple of old wooden bookshelves lying face down on the floor, one atop the other. He encircled my waist from the back and pulled me down on top of him. We stared up at the cracked ceiling trying to slow our breathing, praying by some miracle the Harvesters wouldn’t sense us.

“Drag him in here.” We heard the female Harvester order.

I could hear the metallic scream of hinges as the front door to the library was kicked in, slamming against the tiled floor in a plume of dust. There was a second set of footsteps accompanied by the sound of dead weight being drug across the floor. I heard a soft thump and a quiet groan of pain.

“What should we do with him?” the male Harvester asked in disgust.

“Hell if I know,” the woman answered, apparently just as exasperated with the situation. “The Queen said to get the information she wants out of him, but I’m not sure what else we can do to make him talk without just flat out killing the poor son of a bitch.”

“What if we can’t get the information she needs?” The dread in the man’s voice was clear.

“Then we’re dead,” the woman answered in no uncertain terms.

The Harvesters were silent for a moment as if they were contemplating what their next step should be.

“Do you hear that?” the woman asked.

I imagined her head cocked to the side, listening to something only she could hear.

“Hear what?” The man replied in agitation, clearly wanting to get the task at hand over with as soon as possible.

“I hear…heartbeats, three of them.” I heard the woman sniff the air. “Two humans…and a dog.”

I stopped breathing.

“Yeah,” the man answered, finally becoming aware of our presence. “They’re close too.”

I heard the light tread of the female walk over to the bookshelves Ash and I were hiding behind.

“There’s no use in trying to hide from us,” the woman said in a soothing voice meant to deceive the gullible. “We won’t harm you. You’re far more valuable to us alive.”

I felt Ash pull the gun out of his coat pocket. If we were lucky, he could disable one of the Harvesters before they knew what happened. But we both knew it would take a miracle to incapacitate two Harvesters simultaneously.

“Mmmm,” the woman crooned, “you smell so young and fresh.”

Ash’s body tensed under me as he brought the hand he held the gun in up against my side, the tip of the barrel pointing up.

The wooden shelves we hid behind creaked from added weight. Before we knew it, the female Harvester’s head appeared above us, causing me to gasp involuntarily.

The corners of her eyes were slightly slanted on a perfectly oval face. She had pale white skin with long black hair parted in the middle, hanging on either side of her face like silk curtains. She smiled at us, showing perfect white teeth.

“There you are,” she said in a voice which might have been disarming if her eyes didn’t look like she wanted to eat us alive.

From the balcony above us, I heard a low growl and saw Blue jump from the second floor landing onto the woman’s back. The woman reached an arm behind her and flung Blue off as if he was no more than a pesky fly. Blue fell to the floor beside the bookshelves, unmoving, not even a whimper.

Blue’s distraction was just what Ash needed. Just as the Harvester started to look back down at us, Ash shoved the end of the gun’s barrel underneath her chin and pulled the trigger.

Her head jerked back as the bullet entered her soft flesh, piercing tissue and bone. She fell forward with her head hanging limply over us. Ash and I sprang to our feet, hoping to catch the other Harvester off guard, but we were already too late.

The male Harvester was standing on top of the fallen bookshelves, even before our shoes hit the tiled floor. He grabbed Ash by the throat and hurled him at least two hundred feet, only the far wall of the library stopping his flight. I heard Ash’s head crack against the exposed concrete and watched helplessly as his limp body crumpled to the ground like a rag doll.

It felt like time suddenly slowed down as I looked back at the male Harvester. Before I could even collect my thoughts to formulate a reaction, he grabbed me by the front of my coat, pinning me against the wall at my back.