Reaper: Book One of the Reaper Saga

By Eli Kwake

I am trapped. I know there's only one way out of here. I'm not sure I'm brave enough to take it. How did it come to this?

I grew up on my Da's farm. I went to school. I had a best friend. I was a normal kid. Well, if you ignore my flying an

• Language: English
• Publisher: Eli Kwake
• Release date: Apr 10, 2020
• ISBN: 9781955587044

Book preview

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Reaper

Book One of the Reaper Saga

by Eli Kwake

Copyright © 2019 Eli Kwake

All rights reserved. This book or parts thereof may not be reproduced in any form, stored in any retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise—without prior written permission of the publisher, except as provided by United States of America copyright law.

EPUB ISBN: 978-1-955587-04-4

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020900246

Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places and events are products of the author's imagination, and any resemblances to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

First Printing 2020

www.elikwake.com

For Kathaleen Kwake, who encouraged my writing.

You are missed.

Acknowledgments

In no particular order:

Thank you to Dreamie Walker-Wood for the amazing art you have done for this book. I am always in awe of your talent.

Thank you to the janitor at Raymond Cree between the years 1999-2001. You told me I could write when I definitely could not. Without you, this book would not exist. Thank you.

Thank you to my mother, Deborah Romig, who taught me to love reading, and who told me truthfully that writing was a lot of work.

Thank you to my beta readers. There are too many of you to name here, but you were all wonderful, helpful, and patient.

Thank you to Chris Baty for inventing NaNoWriMo, during which this novel was written. While I'm at it, thank you to Tiffany Carpenter for telling me about NaNoWriMo in 2004.

Thank you to Ruth Kwake, my wonderful mother-in-law, for helping me edit, reading multiple drafts, and continually telling me its worth the effort.

Thank you, forever and always, to Alex Kwake. My wonderful husband, thank you for putting up with me. I love you even when I am snarling at you.

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Prologue

I lay for a moment, my face wet with tears. Now is not the time to be crying. I force myself to take deep, steadying breaths. Slowly I stop shaking and my cheeks dry.

I lift my head and look over at the tiny boy who shares my cell. We are both chained to the wall. My left wrist, his right. The chain keeps us on the cold, metal tables we are on.

Unlike me, he has never known the world beyond these walls. It isn’t fair. He doesn’t know what’s out there. If I don’t do something drastic, he never will.

I’m not smart. I’ve never been good at plans. But there is only one way out of this place. I’m not sure I’m brave enough to take it. But I have to be, somehow. I have to be, for his sake. I lick my lips, already dry, cracking, and hesitate.

Not yet. I have to give him something. Something to hang onto after I leave this place. Some glimmer of hope in all this darkness. Do I have time? Maybe.

Would you like me to tell you a story? I ask. He nods. I’m not like Da. I don’t know all the stories. But I know this one because this one is mine.

I pause for a moment, thinking. I guess it all starts with him. It all comes back to him. To the first time I saw him. To the first time I used my Power.

I swallow hard past the lump in my throat before I begin.

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Chapter 1

I was two years old the first time I saw him. I was out for a walk — a toddle, really, at my age — with Da. We were walking from the farmhouse to the road, and I saw something I wanted. I don’t remember what it was anymore… a rabbit maybe. We always did have a problem with rabbits on the farm. I took off running faster than Da could keep up with me.

I stepped out into the road, and he was suddenly there in front of me.

He was tall. Everyone is tall when you’re only two years old, but he seemed like a giant to me. He was dressed, covered head to foot, really, in black, ragged robes with a deep hood. Over his face he wore the skull of some animal — a dog’s maybe. Or that was what I thought when I was a bit older. There was something about him, and it wasn’t just that he was a stranger and had appeared out of nowhere, that scared me. He reached out a hand towards me.

I shrieked and flew back to Da.

I do mean that literally. I flew. I didn’t run quickly. I flew straight up to wrap my arms around his neck, screaming and sobbing. He had the presence of mind — or the instincts, more probably — to catch me before my suddenly manifested Power could fail. He held me, trying to soothe me. Poor Da must have been bewildered, between the sudden stop, the scream, and the fact that I could suddenly fly.

I don’t remember anything after that. Da told me when I was older that he hadn’t seen anything, certainly not a man in black ragged robes. What he had seen was a truck roaring towards me, and me stopping and flying back to him before the truck could hit. I hadn’t even noticed. I had been too focused on the man in the black ragged robes who had appeared before me.

Da took me back to the house. I don't remember it anymore, but the way Da told it Ma had been watching from the window. She was absolutely furious when we got back inside. She was furious with Da, for letting me get so close to the road, but she was even more furious with me. She had seen me fly, and it had shattered her perception that I was a perfectly normal little girl. Instead, to her, I was some kind of flying freak. She couldn't take it.

Da had all kinds of stories about the next few weeks. I guess they weren't very fun for him, and they weren't for me or Ma either. I had manifested the Power to fly, and I wanted to fly all the time. Ma was trying everything to keep me out of the air. It must have seemed to her like once I started flying, there was no getting me to stop.

She tried everything. She tried bribing me to stay on the ground. That would work until the bribe was gone, and then I would be flying again. She tried yelling at me. That only made me cry and fly to wherever Da was. She even tried tying me to heavy furniture. That was when we found out that I could fly with anything I could touch. It was also when we lost the antique settee that Da's Great-Gran had left to our family.

Finally, Ma gave up. She gave up on me. She gave up on our family. Da never said, but I guess they must have been fighting a lot those last weeks. She packed her bags three months after I first flew, and just walked out on us. I don't know where she went then.

After Ma left, Da raised me on his own. He had a hard time of it at first. I still wanted to fly instead of walk. He managed to keep me on the ground, more or less, until I was four years old. At that point, he was able to explain that he needed me not to fly all the time. That sometimes I had to walk. I didn't understand, not really, but I listened better when he told me to stop flying.

I stopped trying to fly outside unless Da told me I could fly. We had a grove of tall, old apple trees, and my favorite time of the year got to be fall when the trees were filled with ripe apples. I would fly up into the trees with a basket and pluck ripe apple after ripe apple for hours. Da liked it too because he got to bring more apples to the market without having to risk anyone up on a ladder.

In the house, it was harder to keep me out of the air. I just wanted to be flying, all of the time. I would hover above puzzles, play with dolls in midair… Poor Da had to install a lock on the cupboard, to keep me out of the honey in the pantry. The only time I would hold still was when Da was holding me. My favorite time to be held, of course, was when I was being told a story.

He told me all the kid's stories when I was little. Beauty and the Beast, Jack and the Bean Stalk… everything he could read out of a storybook. When he got tired of reading me the same stories over and over he started to read me old detective novels. I loved being read to. By the time I was four years old I was able to start reading, just a little, on my own.

He didn’t just read fiction to me. He had a set of old history books too, some of which had been handed down by his Great-Gran. I learned all about the world before the world ended.

It was strange to me to think of all the people that used to be alive back then. There are only a few cities left on this continent, and the closest to us was Sky City. Da had gone there when he was younger, and that was where he met Ma.

When I was seven years old, I crawled into bed with Da one night still shaking from a screaming nightmare. He lay there groggily for a little while. I lay next to him, shaking and sniffling until Da patted me lightly on the head.

Did you want me to tell you a story? he asked, his voice still raspy from sleep.

I nodded, sniffling.

He patted my head again. This is a story told to me by my gran, your great-gran. There aren’t any books about this story. When it was happening everyone was too afraid to talk or write about it. And after… Well, after they were too busy trying to survive and rebuild to write anything down. There might be journals, but my gran didn’t keep one.

Then how did you find out about it? I asked curiously, starting to calm down. I was still quaking and shivering, but the shivers were starting to slow.

I was very curious when I was your age, and I used to pester my gran for stories. Finally, she told me what happened. To shut me up. It’s not a happy story. It’s not a complete story. But it’s a true story. Do you want to hear it?

I nodded. Yes, Da.

When my gran was a little girl, something strange began to happen. People began to disappear all over the world. At first, people thought it was just the way things were. People used to disappear all the time back then.

Why? I asked.

He yawned. Hmm. No real reason, sometimes people just would. They would get tired of living with the people they lived with, and wander off never to be seen by their loved ones again. Sometimes people would be killed, and never found. But something about the scale of it… something wasn’t right. Soon everyone knew of someone who had disappeared.

I was alive with curiosity, and my shivers calmed completely. What happened to them?

That’s another story, for when you’re older, he said gently, before continuing the story. There didn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to which people would disappear, but later, the people who asked the most questions started to disappear. So, people stopped talking about what was happening. It went overnight from something people talked about to something people didn’t dare mention.

I would have said something, I said boldly.

Would you? Da asked. Knowing it might result in your death or disappearance?

I said nothing, suddenly doubting. Would I have?

People stopped mourning when their loved ones disappeared. People stopped doing anything. Fear covered the entire world, and there seemed to be no end to it.

But there was an end, wasn’t there Da?

Of sorts. He thought for a moment. Before that though, the… I think my gran called them states? The section of the country just south of us, called California, pulled away from the rest of the world and said ‘No more’. It broke away from the great country Cascade used to be part of, and people stopped disappearing there.

How did they stop it, Da?

I don’t know, he admitted. But they did. People realized they would be safe there. Many people fled to the new country, the Republic of California. More than the cities could hold. For six months there was peace in that place.

Did something bad happen? I asked in a small voice.

Yes, he said. Then he sighed heavily. My gran said there were these things, called nuclear bombs, that would destroy everything for miles. Countries everywhere, the entire world over, launched these bombs at the Republic of California, and everything and everyone was destroyed. That’s why we don’t ever go south of here.

Because there’s nothing? I asked.

He nodded in the dark. Because there is nothing but ruins, and the air and the ground there are deadly. It would hurt us to live any closer than this.

I was quiet for a moment, digesting this. What happened, Da? You said there was an end to people disappearing.

There was an end. For a while after, things went back to how they had been. No one spoke of the people disappearing again. But eventually everything, the world that had been, it just collapsed. There weren’t enough people to keep everything going. Entire towns had been swallowed up by this nameless fear.

And then it stopped?

Yes. For no reason, it just stopped. When my gran was around twenty-three years old, when your gran was four, the whole world ground to a halt, and everything stopped. The disappearances stopped.

But why? I asked. Why did they stop? Why did they happen at all?

He laughed, sounding a little bitter. That’s a story for when you’re older, I think. Do you think you can sleep now, my little raven?

I think so, Da, I said, yawning. I rolled over and went to sleep, wondering why Da wouldn’t answer all of my questions.

There were a lot of questions I had that he could never answer. Why did Ma leave? Would I ever see her again? Where did Ma go? Why did I have to go to school in town? Why couldn’t Da teach me everything on the farm? Why wasn’t I allowed to fly outside unless Da said? Why wasn’t I allowed to fly around anyone but Da?

I was, just like Da, an inquisitive child. Many of my questions went unanswered, but I continued to ask them.

The few questions I never asked Da were about the man in the black ragged robes. I would see him, sometimes, all through my childhood. He scared me. I crawled into bed with Da often after nightmares about him.

He was a silently lurking figure, a near-constant presence. Da called him my imaginary friend, but I knew there was nothing imaginary about him. And he certainly wasn’t my friend. I just wanted him to go away and leave me alone.

There were times he was there. Just… there, for no reason. I would wake up with him at the foot of my bed in the middle of the night. I would be sitting in my room, and he would be there. I would be eating lunch with Da, and he would be there. He was there every time I dared disobey Da about flying outside. The minute he appeared, I was back on the ground and racing for wherever Da was.

He was also there whenever I was even slightly in danger. He was there whenever I decided to go for a swim without having Da around. He was there when I decided to try and explore a cave I found in the woods. He was there every time I did something — anything — that I now know is dangerous for a child to do. He was there, stopping me with his presence.

I never knew for certain why he was there when he appeared. I just wanted him to go away. I wanted him to stop appearing out of nowhere. I wanted him to leave me alone.

Da still couldn’t see him, and seemed baffled about what to do about him. After all, how do you get rid of an invisible friend? Even if the invisible friend is more of an invisible nightmare...

Da did his best. He loved me. He took care of me. He made sure I was as happy as I could be with only one parent to love me. He did a really good job. I loved Da enough that I didn’t care, not for very long anyway, that Ma was gone. Ma had decided to leave us. That was all that mattered about her. I wondered where she had gone, but it didn’t really matter.

I had Da.

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Chapter 2

Not long after Da told me the story about the world ending, I started going to school. Da sat me down several times, before school started in the spring, to tell me not to ever fly while I was in town. He said that my flying had to be a secret, just between us.

He kept telling me this with a worried look on his face. The look on his face, more than anything he said to me about it, made me listen to him. Da didn’t tell me why it was so important I didn’t fly — I think he didn’t want to scare me — but it didn’t matter.

It was ten miles from the farm to the schoolhouse in the middle of town, so Da took me in the old, beat-up truck that had been passed down from my Great-Gran. We were lucky enough to live on the main road between Dansville and the next town. Da dropped me off every morning and picked me