WE ARE THRILLED TO INTRODUCE TODAY'S GUEST AUTHOR, ALIANNE DONNELLY, WHO IS SHARING AN EXCERPT FROM HER NOVEL, 'WOLFEN' #RWRTeamBlog #ReadWriteRepeat

AN EXCERPT FROM 'WOLFEN'

“What happened to you after Gerry died?”

Sinna almost choked on a bite of squirrel. She coughed, and took a sip of pine tea to clear her airways. “Where did that come from?”

He shrugged, set a finished arrow aside, and took up another raw stick. “You’re so good at coaxing others to talk, you never say much yourself.”

“There’s not much to say, really,” she hedged.

“Event A: Your caretaker and the only person you’ve ever known and lived with since Chernobyl, dies. Event B: Aiden and I find you shot and bleeding to death in the company of several other people. Discuss.”

When she didn’t answer right away, Bryce set down his tools and braced his elbows on his knees, giving her his full attention, which made it even more difficult to unravel her tongue.

Sinna didn’t know where to start. She opened her mouth a couple of times, but couldn’t find the right words to explain.

“Take your time,” Bryce said gently, almost as if she were a wild animal he didn’t want to spook.

Sinna poked at the biggest burning log to break it apart. When it kicked up a shower of sparks, they brought back a memory. “Gerry used to save her notes on an old voice recorder. It ran on batteries, and for a long time we had plenty of them. She didn’t tell me when she put the last ones in.” God, this was harder than she thought.

“She died on my birthday,” Sinna said. “We were going to have a huge meal, and she had this bracelet all wrapped up in a fancy box and Christmas ribbons. And then I had to go and leave her. Afterwards I… I sat there for hours, just playing back her voice. I listened to her talk about the Grays, and me—things she never told me directly. She worried about how safe our house was, and where there was still food to be found, and how she wished the world could be better for me. I can recite those recordings by heart now, but I couldn’t tell you what her voice sounded like. All I remember is her screams.”

Sinna shook her head. If only it was that easy to forget; just shake it off like a dog shook off bothersome fleas. But those fleas kept coming back, just like her memories. “Anyway, that recorder and the bracelet was all I took with me, besides food. The batteries had died, but I figured as long as the chip was okay, I could maybe find more and get it working again. Stupid, I know. I should have taken something worth trading. I didn’t think of that.

“I found a group of stragglers in an abandoned church. Twenty-six of them at the time, all crammed into this underground rectory. They didn’t have much, but they had enough to get by, and they knew where the pickings were still decent, so we managed. I traded five cans of tuna for a pair of batteries. Then I changed them out and discovered the memory had gotten wiped somehow. I cried so hard that day. It was like I’d lost her all over again, you know?”

“There were only six of you when we found you.”

“Yeah, well. Shit happened. People left, hoping to find some promised land out east. Others just disappeared, and the rest died off. One by one. After half of them were gone, we didn’t bother mourning anymore. Fewer people meant fewer mouths to feed. Easier to sleep without all the noise, and our meals were a little bigger; turns out there’s more power in smaller numbers.

“There was this one girl, eighteen-year-old smartmouth, who liked to huff paint thinner. She spent most of her time in a daze, watching us and smirking every so often, like she was thinking ‘I wonder which one of you will be next.’ She used to try to make us take bets on whether or not the gatherers would come back from their trips. I hated her so much. Then, one day, she just got up and walked out, like she was done with it all.

“And then there were ten. Harli went first. She was out on a gathering trip and fell ten stories out of a broken window. At least that’s how Connor told it. But since he’s the one who tried to kill me, I find myself questioning everything he’d ever said and done.”

“That’s right, Connor was the blademan.”

“Yeah. He used to be a butcher. Real handy with a knife. Like when he stuck it into James’ heart. But that was a mercy. Jimmy had a bad infection that had gotten him more than halfway to the grave. Connor just nudged him over the threshold.”

“And the rest?”

Sinna bit down on her lip. “Nate killed Tam.” She had to force the words out. “Jimmy was the love of her life, and when he died, he took her soul with him.” The rest came out in a rush. “We ran out of food, we decided it was time to bug out, but Nate didn’t want to drag her along. So he killed her while the rest of us were sleeping.

“Isaac died in the chase with Grays. We got separated. The rest of them hid in an elevator shaft but I couldn’t… I… It just reminded me too much of Chernobyl. I ran a different way. When I found them later, they told me Isaac’s heart had given out. And then Connor shot me, and I woke up in a cute little house with two new Wolfen friends. The End.”

Sinna expected Bryce to ask more questions. She almost wished he would; give her an excuse to snap at him, take some of this anger out on someone. All of those people dead and gone, and she’d just stood by and let it happen. Oh, sure, she’d talked a big game with Nate over Tam, but he’d gotten the last laugh anyway. Sure, she’d helped Isaac get out of harm’s way, but he’d died there all on his own. Even when she helped, she didn’t help.

She owed them her life; because of them, she was sitting here now, alive and well. It pissed her off, even more so because she had no one to blame but herself. So yeah, a verbal spat would be nice about now, just to get it out of her system.

But Bryce said nothing, just looked at her, and when she didn’t go on, he nodded and went back to whittling those damned arrows, leaving Sinna to self-destruct in the silence.

Rather than sit there and do nothing—the surest way to drive her bonkers—Sinna retrieved an arrow from yesterday’s bunch and studied the fletching. It looked simple enough, just a bit of duct tape cut into triangles and curved to steady the arrow’s trajectory. She took the bit of remaining tape, claimed one of the smaller, very sharp knives from Bryce’s collection, and sat on the other side of his arrow stack to fletch her useless little heart out.

After that, she practiced archery. She had the mechanics down now, so Bryce didn’t need to instruct her. He just pointed out the target, and let her have at it, and for a while, it was relatively easy going. The old ache of strain eased, and Sinna was able to shoot like a pro before a new ache set in. The final score: Sinna seventy, woodland targets three. And the best part was no arrows were lost during the honing of her skills.

“Can you teach me to hunt?” she asked, gathering all of her arrows back up.

“Not today.”

“Are you sure? I’m a pretty quick study.” Her small victory over static targets had made her giddy. She hopped from foot to foot, bow in hand, arrow nocked. “Please?”

Bryce glared.

“Just throw something! I want to see if I can hit it.”

He sighed, picked up a pine cone, and hurled it into the sky. It disappeared before she’d even had a chance to sight it down.

“I wasn’t ready that time.”

“Then that’s your first lesson in hunting. You want to eat? Be ready. Always.” He took her bow and stashed it on the mule’s back bench. “Get in. We’ve got ground to cover.”

“Be ready. Meh, meh, meh,” she mimicked, climbing back into her seat.

The mule had taken a serious beating. Even after as good a scrubbing as they could manage, it looked like crap. Somehow, though, it still worked, and after an hour of trekking through the woods at a crawl, they found a semi-decent road again and turned south.

It was a quiet drive, which bothered Sinna for a while, but then they were out in the open and she settled in to watch the scenery pass by. She imagined what the people in the Gilroy colony would be like. Despite Bryce’s fears, Sinna believed there had to be some good left in people.

Maybe they’d already made that serum thing, and Sinna and Bryce wouldn’t have to take the girl, just the chemical solution. Maybe they weren’t like Klaus at all.

And maybe we’ll wake up tomorrow and the sky will rain down chocolate chip cookies.

Sinna frowned at the horizon. “Hey, Bryce, do you see what I see?”

“Yeah,” he said shortly.

Dark, ominous storm clouds were gathering a few miles off, and the mule was heading right for them.

“What do we do?”

Even as she asked it, the sun dimmed, taking its battery-recharging power with it. This was coming together faster than Sinna liked, and there was no shelter nearby that she could see.

“We keep going as long as we can,” Bryce said, knuckles white on the steering wheel. He was gradually speeding up, as if they had a snowball’s chance in hell of outrunning it.

“What happens when we can’t go anymore?” Rain and wind were minor inconveniences; she could handle that, no problem. A little water, possibly hypothermia? They just had to wait out the cold and they’d be fine. The rumble of thunder worried her more. Lightning liked fast-moving metal objects.

Bryce didn’t answer. “Keep an eye out for caves, buildings, fallen trees; anything we can hide under.”

“Right.” She could do that.

The first blast of chilled air sent a shiver of unease down her spine, and the first drops of rain almost sent her into a panic. Then it started pouring so hard she couldn’t see anything at all through the deluge. Without windshield wipers, Bryce was driving blind.

But he never slowed.

Which was why he hit the lone figure in the road, head-on.

**********

Books2Read (all available universal links for ebook and print edition): https://books2read.com/wolfen/

Amazon (universal): https://books2read.com/u/b5ODg1?store=amazon&format=EBOOK

Amazon (US direct): https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00QBATCLQ

WOLFEN book blurb:

Man’s quest for genetic perfection has led to the creation of new subspecies. Wolfen were the pinnacle of scientific achievement, redefining the limits of what it means to be human. Their counterparts, in turn, grew into the ultimate predators. Incapable of higher thought, converts were unstoppable in their need to breed and devour, and when they escaped, they brought the world to its knees.

Almost two decades later, humanity is on the brink of extinction and only the heartless survive. Rescued by two Wolfen brothers, Sinna must now brave the treacherous wastelands of North America in order to reach safety and the promise of a better life. But when an unexpected gambit forces them to separate, a genetic advantage becomes a liability, and the worst monsters turn out to be the ones who don’t have claws.

In the game of survival, Wolfen were created to be champions. No longer. The enemy keeps evolving, rendering old tactics ineffective, and the only rule left is to endure at any cost.

**********

Author Alianne Donnelly

Author Bio:

Alianne Donnelly is an avid lover of stories of all kinds. Raised on a healthy diet of fairy tales in a place where they almost seemed real, she grew into a writer who seeks magic in the modern age and enjoys sharing a little bit of it with the world through every story she writes. Her books span the spectrum from fantasy to science fiction with varying degrees of romance sprinkled throughout. Alianne now lives in California, where she spends her free time reading, writing, and daydreaming. Read more at aliannedonnelly.com 

**********

COMING SOON: On Sunday 15th March, we are delighted to welcome back our guest author, Kathleen Swann, who is sharing the historical biography story of her mother and grandmother, 'Phyll to Her Friends'.