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Category:
Science Fiction
Publisher: Nuncici Press
Type: Fiction
Copyright: 2017
Price: $4.99 (eBook)
The story of a young girl trapped between two Americas of the future.
Listen to the audiobook at http://www.acole.net/visit_other_worlds/motherless_child/
Seventeen years in the making, Motherless Child reflects the vision that Adam Cole felt compelled to share about the world we are becoming. This radically different take on the future shows an America completely irrevocably split into two countries. In the Unincorporated States countless tiny communities full of disenfranchised “whites” have forgotten even their own history, while in the cities, the vast Corporation of the United States of America asks anyone not contributing to the bottom line to politely do themselves in.
With wry humor and bitter irony, Cole takes readers by the hand and leads through an intimate look at the landscape of the new world. Fleeing a CUSA purge, Rosa and her parents are separated from one another while making their way across the Unincorporated States. Stranded in the small town of Ascension where she is first shunned, and then embraced as the only child resident, all Rosa wants is to get back to her family. But when she attracts the attention of the vicious town boss Elder Oughta, she discovers her loyalty is more divided than she thought.
Book One in the CUSA Series
Listen to the audiobook at http://www.acole.net/visit_other_worlds/motherless_child/
Motherless Child is available at Amazon and anywhere else books are sold! If you want to know more about Adam Cole, watch a video, or read some of his other books for free, visit www.acole.net now!
Excerpt
Chassis turned back to all of them and spoke out. “Folks, this isn’t good, but it’s still not the end. Everyone needs to keep quiet and let me handle it.”
While Chassis was talking they heard heavy footsteps on the stairs, and Porter came up with his big shotgun in his arms. But there was no old lady behind him this time. Just a bony white man with a lot of scraggly beard and a long, sharp nose.
Chassis had her gun pointed at Porter’s head, right at the temple. He looked surprised, but he didn’t back down or put up his hands. “You better not,” he said. “You can’t get back on the road without us.”
“What have you done to my bus?” she asked him.
Porter grinned. His mouth was a big black hole. The man behind him said “I guess we didn’t put those front tires on quite right. Your axle came right off. We can fix it back up if you want.”
“Then do it,” Chassis said, each word crisp like the scrape of a knife against a whetting stone.
Porter still didn’t seem to care about the gun at his head. “I want something,” he said to her.
“You got everything you wanted in your agreement,” Chassis told him.
His cheeks puffed out. “My Mamma got everything!” he yelled at her, pouting like a child. “I didn’t get nothing that I wanted!”
Chassis didn’t react to Porter’s tantrum. “You can’t have anything else,” she said, not backing off.
“You better put that gun down,” said the man behind Porter. “Phil is standing just outside with a rifle pointed at your head.”
Chassis’ shoulders tensed, and then sagged, and she sat down. “You know,” she said to Porter, “that the people where I come from can hear what you’re saying on the radio. If you do anything—”
“I ain’t gonna harm you,” Porter said. “I just want what I said I want. I want the China girl for the night.”
“You can’t have her,” Chassis said. “She’s not part—”
“I want her!” Porter interrupted, spit spraying from his mouth. He moved his big belly towards Chassis. “I want her, or you ain’t going anywhere! You give me that China girl…” Then he paused, and his eyes found Rosa again.
Rosa tried to shrink away, but she was afraid to move. “Or I’ll take that pretty little spic there.” He gestured at her and took two steps down the aisle in her direction. Even though her Mamma was all the way at the back of the bus, Rosa knew she had stopped breathing.
Instantly, all the fear she had forgotten to feel before came into her now. A sickening sense of falling with no clue as to where the bottom was. “Daddy?” she cried, uncertain, unable to grasp for him, hoping that he was behind her.
But in that moment of connection between them, Porter’s eyes went sad. He made a sound like someone was sucking the air out of his lungs, and he fell on his knees. There was a huge thump when he came down on the tilted bus floor. He was squirming, trying to get to the hole in his back where the Chinese girl’s father had stuck him with a little knife, but his arms were too big and he couldn’t even touch the handle. The girl’s father was looking down at Porter where he had dropped, and when Porter wriggled all the way to the floor, Chassis and the man on the steps could finally see what he had done. Chassis’ face got all scrunched up. “Do you know what—“ she started to say as the bony-nose man practically fell down the bus stairs in his hurry to get off.
Rosa knew what was about to happen next because she was watching the Kwangs. When they got down, she got down. Then everything in the world shattered in the space of a few seconds.
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