Excerpt from PRODIGAL, Maelstrom Chronicles #3

 

Recently I released TRAITOR, Maelstrom Chronicles #2, with Entangled Publishing. I'm chugging away at #3 and I wanted to share the first page or two with the readers at Here Be Magic! We don't have a release date for it yet, but it does contain some spoilers if you haven't read the previous books (ANGELI, TRAITOR). It's a post-apocalyptic alien invasion Earth-based SFR.

Our heroine Claire appears in both ANGELI and TRAITOR, and she's pretty grumpy about getting her own book. But she's always grumpy.

And yes...I'm putting a cat in this book :)

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Chapter One

 

Claire flipped the visor of the Humvee down when the late afternoon sun nearly blinded her, reflecting off the white of the latest snowfall. She and two other loads of able bodies out of Camp Chanute were returning from a foraging mission to the mostly deserted city of Bloomington, Illinois. The long, straight roads in this area, free of debris and stalled cars, didn’t lend themselves to ambushes. Detritus littered the highways to the north, thicker as the roads approached Chicago.

She didn’t make foraging trips to Chicago if it could be helped.

But the visor didn’t cancel out the glare. She blinked and squinted. Her eyesight had been enhanced by her Shipborn associates, but not so much that her DNA had been tainted by the tech. Still, it was enough to ascertain the flash of light wasn’t reflecting off the snow, but off some kind of metallic object in the middle of a field.

An object that hadn’t been there when they’d driven this road this morning. She knew this highway well, and that huge field had the remnants of corn stalks in it. Nothing else.

“Slow down,” she told the Humvee driver. “You see that?”

Will shook his head. “I just see snow. Snow and old dead corn. Maybe it’s a child of the corn.”

“Shut up.” Not visible to the human eye, then. Claire flicked on the radio to the supply truck. Dixie had the best binoculars and was enhanced like Claire to boot. “Dix, what do you make on the right side of the road? Far mid field.”

A little static crackled through the speaker before Dixie’s response. “I don’t see any...wait. Huh. There’s a big silver thingamabob, but sugar, I don’t know what it is. Fighter jet or something? Could be Shipborn.”

“That doesn’t make sense. Gimme our eyes.” She reached across the back seat to Eduardo Martinez, another of her officers. He complied, and she lifted the heavy black binoculars to her face. Twisting the focus, she spotted the unidentified object.

Sleek and silver, possibly some kind of vessel. No landing marks around it, but no snow built up on it. Didn’t look like Ship 1001 or its shuttles. More like a giant pill, so brightly silver it was almost white. Hard to see against the patchy snow. Was that a window? A door?

The sun emerged from behind a cloud and sparkled on the metal again, obscuring details.

“I’m going to check it out. Hold position,” she advised Dixie before directing Will off road.

The Humvee thumped through the corn stubble that rose above the snow, some of the rows lumpy enough that she pressed a hand against the ceiling to keep from bouncing into it. A gentle rise ahead took them out of sight of the object temporarily.

“Be careful,” Dixie chided. “Last time you went to check something out, that group from up Chicago way ambushed you.”

(c) 2015 Jody Wallace　

Jody Wallace

Smart. Snarky. Seductive. And that's just the books.

http://www.jodywallace.com * http://www.meankitty.com