A Perilous Journey Read online

  A

  PERILOUS

  JOURNEY

  RISE OF THE EMPATHS: Book One

  A. S. HAMES

  RISE OF THE EMPATHS

  A Dystopian Fiction Series

  Upper Young Adult / New Adult Crossover

  Five hundred years after an apocalypse wiped out most of the world’s population.

  A controlled society where speaking out means death.

  A sixteen-year-old girl who is different.

  After centuries without technology, something has happened to the human race.

  Empaths have emerged.

  But it’s not safe to be an empath. People call them evil mind-readers.

  Mind-readers get burned alive. Or worse.

  Thrown together by a war against their society, empath Jay and ordinary seventeen-year-old Ben must fight to stay alive. But even if they survive, can there be any kind of future for them?

  Book One: A Perilous Journey

  A terrifying childhood incident means Jay has suppressed developing her empath ability. But now, as she approaches her seventeenth birthday, she is drafted into the army as a wolf-handler.

  Here she meets Ben, an ordinary boy from the valleys. But Ben’s family has suffered because of an empath and he feels only hate for the evil-doers.

  Of course, danger has a way of forcing people together – and so, unaware of Jay’s gift, Ben grows close to her as they fight to stay alive.

  RISE OF THE EMPATHS

  A Dystopian Fiction Series

  Upper Young Adult / New Adult Crossover

  A Perilous Journey (Book 1)

  Land of the Dead (Book 2)

  Ice in the Soul (Book 3: available March 2018)

  All The Crashing Waves (Book 4: coming soon)

  The City of Towers (Book 5: coming soon)

  This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, locations, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination, or have been used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, locales, or events is entirely coincidental. No part of this e-book may be reproduced or shared by any electronic or mechanical means, including, but not limited to printing, file sharing, and email, without prior written permission from the author.

  This e-book is licensed for personal enjoyment only. This e-book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author’s work.

  © 2018 A. S. Hames & Mark Daydy

  Contents

  Prologue

  1. Volunteers

  2. Farewell

  3. Trust and Truth

  4. Aboard

  5. Run!

  6. Families

  7. The Enemy in Me

  8. The 117-309 Group

  9. Escape Attempt

  10. How To Survive in Battle

  11. Close To The Front

  12. Is This a Suicide Mission?

  13. The Strangest Things

  14. Assault on Endeavor

  15. The Spy in Me

  16. The Fake War

  17. New Rules

  18. Last Train

  19. Death in the White Tip Mountains

  20. Bodyguards

  21. Rebels

  22. Southbound

  23. Renner’s Town and Beyond

  24. Ambush

  Prologue

  JAY

  This is so funny. Three women from the next farm are talking with Ma on the porch and none of them is watching Pa while he fixes our handcart. But one of them, Rae, a fierce-looking lady with lots to say about stewed fruit recipes… well… in her head… Pa is kissing her on the lips. I’m so bursting to tell everyone.

  “Rae wants to kiss Pa!”

  Ma snaps at me. “Don’t make things up, Jay.”

  I quieten. “Well, that’s what’s inside her head…” I should know. I’m nearly seven years old, not a baby.

  Suddenly, everyone starts talking at the same time and I’m sent away. I don’t understand so I go round the back to play with my brother. He’s made a tent using sticks and an old bedsheet, so I sit inside and draw pictures of flowers on scraps of paper. Then we go up to the river and make twig and leaf boats.

  When we come back, there are people coming up to the house. They see me and yell “empath!”

  My brother runs inside to get Ma and Pa, but the people grab me. I scream because I don’t want them to take me away.

  “Ma! Pa!”

  “Put her down!” Pa yells at them.

  “Stay out of this,” the woman grabbing my hair says. “She read Rae’s thoughts.”

  “You leave her be, Jo,” Ma says – and she’s pointing a bread knife. “No-one read Rae’s thoughts. It’s not possible.”

  “I was there and Rae’s been struck silent by it. Your daughter’s an empath.”

  “We have to destroy them,” a man says, “or they’ll take control.”

  “She’s no empath,” Pa says.

  “We can’t have them gaining power over everyone,” a woman says.

  “She’s just a child,” Ma says. “Put her down!”

  She and Pa try to reach me, but there are too many people.

  “Burn the empath,” someone says.

  “Burn her alive,” another says.

  “I know what organs to remove first,” a woman says.

  Some of them start tearing off my clothes and I’m too scared to scream anymore. It’s like I’m frozen.

  “Leave her be!” Ma yells.

  Someone is holding a long rusty knife and starts marking my skin with a stick of charcoal.

  “Listen to me,” Pa yells. “I’ve known all along Rae had designs on me. I told my wife about it and my daughter overheard. That’s all there is to it.”

  “It’s the truth,” Ma says. “She’s just an innocent child.”

  The crowd goes a little quiet and I try to make sense of it. It didn’t happen how Ma and Pa said, but I’m not telling anyone. I’m just waiting for something to happen.

  “Is it true, Rae?” someone asks. “Did you make it so obvious?”

  Now I can see Rae, farther back in the crowd. She starts to cry. “I… I don’t know…”

  I’m let go.

  I don’t know what happens next because I’m rushed inside and put to bed.

  I lay still, hardly daring to breathe.

  I don’t want to be an empath.

  I don’t want to have organs removed.

  I don’t want to be burned.

  I have a way to see what people are thinking and feeling. I thought everyone did. I’m seeing now it’s a bad thing. A very bad thing. I won’t do it again.

  Not ever.

  1. Volunteers

  TEN YEARS LATER

  JAY

  I’m six feet from a killer wolf. He’s on the back of a truck that’s just pulled up alongside me in the town square. With piercing golden eyes, flesh-ripping teeth, a face as white as a blizzard, and a coat the shade of a storm cloud, he looks more than a match for a girl who’s a month off seventeen.

  “Hello,” I say.

  He stares right at me and I make an involuntary move for the rifle slung over my shoulder. Not that I’m allowed to shoot, even if he attacks me. This is Von, Hero of the Nation, and you can’t go shooting heroes, which is just as well because my weapon is damaged and might explode if I pull the trigger.

  The truck driver gets out and comes over.

  “What’s your name?” he asks. He’s wearing a moss green military tunic like my own. Except mine is embarrassingly
new, while his is crumpled and grubby with mid-July sweat and dust. A true mossback.

  “Jay-Ruth Two-Five,” I tell him. “My friends call me Jay.” I instantly regret saying such a stupid, childish thing. We are not friends, we are soldiers.

  He unties Von, orders him down off the back, and hands me the thin rope leash.

  “Is he tame?” I ask, trying not to panic at the fact that I’m in charge of a wolf.

  “Just treat him well,” the driver says.

  What a strange thing to say. The wolf features prominently on the Leader of the Nation’s personal crest and on the badge we soldiers pin to our tunics. How else would I treat him?

  Ignoring me, the driver goes off to see Colonel Five-Five with some paperwork.

  “Stay, boy,” I tell Von – pointlessly it would seem, as he doesn’t look like he wants to go anywhere. Even so, I remind myself that the Leader is due in an hour for his first-ever visit to the town and I want to be in full control.

  “Stay,” I tell him again. “Stay and do not move.”

  Von yawns and lies down beside me, and I attempt to feel his emotional state. Not that I’m any good at it. I’ve long resisted developing my empath skills, mainly because of my experience as a young girl. My only concern over the years has been cloaking any hint of it in me.

  “Exciting day,” says a man carrying a couple of big paint pots and a short, rickety-looking ladder.

  “Yes,” I agree. “Very exciting.”

  “You’ve missed a bit, you idiot,” he yells at an elderly man who’s been painting the front of the town hall for the past half hour.

  He’s not the only one under pressure. There are people hurrying to complete all kinds of jobs: topping up the oil in the street lamps even though it’s daytime, sweeping dust off the concrete road leading up to the execution site in the main square, tying flowers to any available vantage point… There’s even a group of musicians practicing furiously with copper whistles, four-stringers, and pan drums. Having received just three hours’ notice of the Leader’s visit, I reckon most of us are feeling the kind of excitement you could easily mistake for fear.

  “Two-Five?” It’s the truck driver calling me. The colonel must have given him his instructions. “From today, Von will be attached to the 4th Forbearance Volunteers during your training period.”

  I already know that. I’m to be one of three handlers, possibly because I’m Head Girl at Forbearance School. Had Pa survived the flu outbreak of three years back, he would have been proud of me landing such an important job.

  “If he craps in camp, clean it up fast,” the driver says as he retrieves a bag of Von’s things from the back of the truck. “If you’re smart, you’ll take him for early morning walks and save yourself the trouble.”

  “You like walks?” I say to Von.

  “Here,” the driver says, shoving the bag at me.

  “What happened to his previous handlers?” I ask. “The ones he was with when he became a Hero of the Nation?”

  Sergeant Seven-Nine comes over and prods me with his baton. It’s only a short jab, but it’s under my ribs and it takes my breath away, although I try not to show it.

  “No questions,” he says. “Just practice with it and try to avoid looking like an idiot with a wolf.”

  I’m embarrassed but the sergeant turns away as if I no longer exist. I don’t think he likes new soldiers.

  As I lead Von away to get him some water, Trooper Essie-Jon Three-Zero is crying. This doesn’t surprise me. As the youngest, it’s snotty little Essie’s job to shoot a man for Crimes against the Nation – but he looks a million miles out of place among army cars, troop trucks, regular soldiers, and twenty-nine fellow volunteers. I suppose it’s because he’s only twelve that he’s viewing the target sideways, even though this is only a practice with another new trooper playing the role of the prisoner.

  “You won’t hit the target if you don’t look at it,” the sergeant says.

  You don’t need to be an empath to get a sense of Essie’s emotional state. I hope I don’t turn out to be scared like him. As Head Girl at school, and not far off finishing so I can become a trainee teacher, I have to set an example. It would be a betrayal of the school for me to openly display such fear. Until the war is over, I have to be a good soldier – just like Ax, my brother.

  I think of him often.

  The war has been going on for two years now, and Ax has been missing for eleven months. It’s no secret I plan to find out what happened to him. Like me, he’s an empath. So are Ma and Pa, for that matter. It’s just that we’ve never interacted. Their understanding of my trauma meant a respect for my decision to turn away. Being halfway between empath and normal can be lonely though, and I sometimes wonder if my decision as a young girl has been hurting me for too long.

  “Death to the Leader!” hollers the fifteen-year-old boy volunteer playing the role of the prisoner. “Death!”

  There is a stunned silence. My pulse quickens. The sergeant is immediately in the volunteer’s face.

  “Why are you repeating the crime?”

  The volunteer is terrified. “I was trying to get Essie angry.”

  The sergeant takes a step back, raises his baton, and swipes the offending boy across the side of the knee. The volunteer squeals but does his best to suppress an obvious need to hop and howl.

  The sergeant snarls at him. “If we were executing a baby-killer, do you think we’d get a baby and let you kill it?”

  The sergeant doesn’t wait for a reply. His eyes are already on Essie.

  “Now shoot him!”

  I tug gently on Von’s leash and we continue toward the rear of the town hall where there’s a water butt with a tap.

  Krak!

  A gunshot. Essie has fired his weapon. They’re only blanks I remind myself. Only when the Leader of the Nation arrives for his first-ever visit will the town of Forbearance witness death. I’ve never seen a public execution before – I’ve always found an excuse to avoid them. It’s a grim prospect, but I’ll find the strength to watch. You can’t make a fuss in front of the Leader.

  At the tap, I fill Von’s steel bowl.

  “Drink, boy.”

  He cocks his leg against the town’s radio mast then comes to slurp his water.

  “Remind me,” an approaching voice says, “which of you two is the vicious killer?”

  It’s my fellow newly-appointed wolf handler, rough, brawny Dub-Gray Six-Seven, known to all as Dub. I have no idea why he was chosen, although I’d guess it’s because he’s completely fearless.

  “Where were you?” I ask. “We were supposed to meet Von at the truck.”

  He drinks some water from the tap and spits the last of it on the ground. Some of it goes over my boot.

  “About your stupid poem.” He’s referring to the verse I’ll be reading aloud at the ceremony.

  “What about it?”

  “Speaking as a friend, keep it short. It’ll save the Leader and me falling asleep.”

  We’re not friends. He calls me mud-splat because of my freckles, dung head because of my brown hair, and pencil legs because compared to his tree trunks, mine are skinny. God knows what he’d call me if he found out I’m an empath. I think he’d volunteer to build the bonfire.

  The fact is Dub’s a workhand on various farms, including ours. Being a year younger than me, he resents my seniority. He also reckons the ten percent of kids who attend school are as soft as slugs and aren’t chosen for our brainpower, but our gullibility. It’s no wonder schoolkids and working kids hardly ever get along. Not that Dub’s a kid. Two months back, I saw him with a willing farm girl – another occasion where you didn’t need to be an empath to work out how they were both feeling about that particular situation.

  Krak!

  Another gunshot.

  “Hey Wolfie,” Dub says. “How many people you killed?”

  I don’t like the way he says it. It’s disrespectful to the only animal to have earned the title H
ero of the Nation.

  “Why don’t you take charge of him,” I say, handing Dub the leash. I’m hoping he’ll have Von during lunch because I don’t want to fight with a killer wolf over who gets my first-ever army ration, especially as I’ve heard we’ll be having meat in our fried potato pats. I haven’t had meat in ages months – or fish, for that matter – mainly because they doubled the cost of hunting and fishing licenses. Not that there’s much to hunt or fish.

  “What do you eat, Wolfie?” Dub says. “What’s that, boy? You like peanuts and chocolate? Me too.” Dub grins at me. “I heard it’s our duty to see he gets what he likes.”

  While Dub no doubt tastes imaginary treats, the sun reflects off a silver badge on his army cap.

  “Your senior scout’s badge,” I say.

  He takes the cap off to examine it. Now the sun is shining off his straw blonde hair forcing me to squint.

  “I’m entitled,” he says, brushing a speck off the cap’s stiff peak.

  “So am I, Dub. I didn’t know it was allowed.”

  “If you go home for it, you’ll miss lunch,” he says, accurately guessing my thoughts. “But it’s okay – I’ll let you know if your meaty pat was as tasty as mine.”

  It’s easy to dislike Dub.

  Hurrying off along the side of the town hall and across the square, I catch a glimpse of the young would-be executioner.

  “Stop blubbing and try again,” the sergeant barks at him.

  I’m soon racing past the mostly empty stores on Main Street trying to avoid people’s eyes. There isn’t much to buy because of the shortages, but people still come to gossip. Seriously, you can’t go near a store without having someone try to find out all your business.

  I nod to a woman whose son went with the 3rd Forbearance Volunteers back in April. They were eighty strong, mainly older teenagers who didn’t go with the two hundred 2nd Forbearance Volunteers last November, or the five hundred original Forbearance Volunteers of last June, who joined the war on its first anniversary and are still out there, refusing to rest until the job is done. My older brother Ax – Leading Trooper Ax-Kane Two-Five – is with the originals.