Katie And The Reaper (A Post-Apocalyptic Romance)

Prologue - Katie age 14

Love this story? Want to help a soppy writer out? I am going to be posting the adventures of young Katie to the new kindle vella platform for pay, but I need a couple readers to help me clean up all my mistakes before I post. If you want to keep reading - and want access to the new stuff, message me to be a part of the team so you can keep reading about Katie for free. Bring me your eyes and grammar skills! 

NOTE: to avoid triggering some of the Zon's content rules I will not be posting much smexy there, I will be writing about Katie's life before she actually gets together with the Reaper.  He will be hovering in the background, and you will get a taste of their "connection," however. 

April 19th 2021

Katie is hard to write. I don't know why.  She has been literally stuck in my head for years. If you have read my stuff you know that I have mommy issues.  They end up dead; they are abusive; they are flighty or selfish.  Shhhh.  Don't tell my mom.  Or the stepmom.  The first one or the second one.  My teen years were hard and Katie carries some of that angst.  Her mate is a monster that eats monsters and he won't settle for a simple story.  Neither, it turns out, will Katie. She has a hero complex that won't quit.  

This book is still in the back of my head. Waiting for the muse to say when it's time to come back to it.  So- if you don't like an unfinished story haunting you...walk away now.  

Katie

The hunger was bad today, but the thirst was even worse.  Day two, no water but drips.  Tomorrow, no water and they die.  Katie blocked out the myriad of other complaints that made walking forward difficult.  She'd just keep moving and obsessing over water.  Seemed like a plan.  Maybe she'd gain an extra sense about it and be able to find some. She was so thirsty she didn't even sweat anymore. 

Katie pushed ahead, knowing Mom would follow.  Marie bent under her load of supplies, a backpack containing everything ( but food and water,) weighing more than she did.  Katie couldn't even pick it up.  If she hadn't kept moving forward, Katie knew without a doubt that Marie would have sat down and never stood up again.  Her mother was three days past talking, lots of days past thinking and only following her fourteen-year-old daughter out of sheer stubborn instinct.  At first, hopelessness had poured off the woman in waves, threatening to drown Katie.  Marie was sure that they were too far from help, too far from resources and was determined to hide the fact that a slow death (tomorrow) was imminent. 

The distance was impossible for Katie to judge.  In the last year, survival had sharpened a lot of her born talents, but a sense of direction wasn't one of them.  She could hear help somewhere ahead.  Feel a gathering of people like a person could hear the waves of the ocean.  They were a blip on her internal radar.  But she hadn't expected the deep valley, cut through with a big dry riverbed that they had to climb in and out of, to be between them and help.  She'd no internal terrain map to warn her about the rocky mini-mountain after the riverbed.

They were there.  People.  Humans.  Not human.  She knew it sure as sunshine.  But they had to get to them.

She heard the stumble -trip of her mother falling forward behind her.  When she looked back Mom was on her knees.  That backpack was friggin' impossible and slowing them down.  On shaky legs herself, Katie turned to catch the older woman from a face pant, snatching at the roll of blankets near her mother's head.  "You got to take this off and leave it, Mom.  Just bring the rifle." 

Katie had asked her to leave it behind yesterday and that night her mom had given her the, "Aren't you glad I'm your mother look," when they laid down on the blankets to sleep and used flashlights to see by.