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    2036: The Final Resistance
    2036: The Final Resistance
    2036: The Final Resistance
    Ebook143 pages2 hours

    2036: The Final Resistance

    By Leah McClellan

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    About this ebook

    After fifteen years of global isolationism, widespread bombings, and the leadership of a fanatical dictator, life has changed. Protests are memories, lies are truth, the free press is gone, and tolerance is exchanged for torture. A silent desperation falls over Washington, DC and the entire United States.

    Kathryn Foster had marched the marches and waved the signs, and she’d once fantasized about using her Power to stop the seeds of fascism before they took root. But she's horrified with her violent thoughts and hopes for the best instead. When she’s assaulted a few years later, her Power fails. Pregnant, her options are illegal and risky, and with her Iranian-American friend Maheen’s help, she fights her revulsion and lovingly raises her daughter, Regina.

    As conditions worsen, her buried rage emerges as she longs to do something, anything to stop the destruction. And twelve years later, the Resistance reorganizes into an army of Power. Kathryn’s Power. Regina’s Power. Maheen’s Power. But she can barely look at the leader. It’s America’s last chance for freedom, and it’s kill or be killed. Can she trust him?

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherLeah McClellan
    Release dateFeb 21, 2017
    ISBN9781370047918
    2036: The Final Resistance
    Author

    Leah McClellan

    Leah McClellan champions strong female characters, those who are finding their strength, and men who aren’t afraid to live outside traditional gender roles. Originally from the snowy hinterlands west of Philadelphia, she enjoys travel, reading, and long bike rides on sunny Florida trails.Follow her on Twitter @LeahMcClellan

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      Book preview

      2036 - Leah McClellan

      2036

      THE FINAL

      RESISTANCE

      LEAH MCCLELLAN

      This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is either fictitious or entirely coincidental.

      Copyright © 2017 Leah McClellan

      All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the author and publisher.

      ISBN-13: 978-1544222288

      ISBN-10: 1544222289

      Second edition June 2017

      10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3

      For more information: LeahMcClellan.com

      For resisters everywhere.

      Turning and turning in the widening gyre

      The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

      Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

      Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

      The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

      The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

      The best lack all conviction, while the worst

      Are full of passionate intensity.

      Surely some revelation is at hand;

      Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

      The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

      When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

      Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert

      A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

      A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

      Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

      Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

      The darkness drops again; but now I know

      That twenty centuries of stony sleep

      Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

      And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

      Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

      —William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming

      Yes, I'm angry. Yes, I am outraged. Yes, I have thought an awful lot about blowing up the White House. But I know that this won't change anything. We cannot fall into despair. As the poet W.H. Auden once wrote on the eve of World War II, we must love one another or die. I choose love.

      —Madonna, January 21, 2017

      Table Of Contents

      Preface

      Prologue

      Part One

      Chapter One

      Chapter Two

      Chapter Three

      Part Two

      Chapter Four

      Chapter Five

      Chapter Six

      Chapter Seven

      Chapter Eight

      Chapter Nine

      Chapter Ten

      Chapter Eleven

      Chapter Twelve

      About the Author

      Other Books by Leah McClellan

      Preface

      Even when we prefer compassion over hatred, peace over war, and hope instead of fear, violent thoughts sometimes creep in. When someone says Oh, just shoot me in response to some small misdemeanor or I’ll kill him for that! they very rarely mean it. The words are perhaps better left unsaid, but they merely represent strong emotion without wish or intention attached. They are metaphor. Analogy. Similitude. And they can be dark. Dark, indeed.

      Prologue

      The street sign, though twisted and bent, was a familiar site in a chaotic landscape. It nodded a weary welcome like a starving dog greets a long-absent master: a bit of hope, a flicker of recognition, but no strength left to stand.

      This street was not my own, not this. I glanced at the sign again, and after slipping through the flimsy barricade, I stepped carefully over concrete chunks that seemed to have fallen from the sky. I picked my way over shards of glass and detoured around broken snatches of life: a faded T-shirt, a plaid blanket stiff with rain and cement dust, a gutted briefcase. A few buildings appeared untouched, and families gathered outside, sitting or shifting about as if they couldn’t bear to remain indoors. A little girl, tattered shorts around her ankles, squatted in a corner between the steps and the building.

      After describing my mother and giving written details and contact information to anyone who would accept a piece of paper, I moved on to the next block and the next under a clear blue sky. I sealed my nose from the inside, pinched it from the outside, and breathed as little as possible as I tried to make sense of the concrete: A wall? A sidewalk? Part of a foundation blown apart by the blasts? Orange and red bits were tiles from old roofs and bricks, of course. Black was street paving. Burned car parts were burned car parts. Window sills and frames were easily recognizable as were doors or railings or the occasional shoe.

      Each item, alone, had a name, meaning, and purpose. It was the whole that I couldn’t process. Like the flurry of black birds that flew up and away as I approached; that was ordinary. Their caw-caw calls, their stony eyes, and their thick, sharp beaks were familiar. The muffled rush of wings was also an everyday sound. What I could not understand was the why, the reason for their gathering in a street that should be clean and smooth with shiny cars and people crossing, not dust and rocks and rubble and birds pecking.

      I waved my arms and watched the last bird, a bird larger than the others, rip and claw something as one defiant eye kept watch and dared me to come closer. I shook my arms and hands again, and it finally flapped its wings as its red beak, red claws, and something dangling like a snake lifted into the air. I looked down. Jeans. A baseball cap. Skin. Bones. A pool of blood.

      I ran.

      Nothing existed in my young mind as a reference, not even a movie or TV documentary. This was not some far away land where women wore long dresses and didn’t dare show an inch of skin, not a place where children begged for food as bombs destroyed their homes. This was not some almost-fictional place where armies marched with strange, stiff legs and tall boots. This was not a city where terrorists had struck with bombs and shrapnel, their own bodies blown to bits for someone else to clean up while the world, except for those whose lives they had touched, forgets until next time.

      No. This was Washington. This was America. And where was my mother?

      PART ONE

      WINTER – LATE SUMMER 2024

      CHAPTER ONE

      When they raped me, I was strung tight between two choices. One was stay alive. The other was escape. Any attempt to escape would have cancelled out stay alive, but every cell in my body screamed fight, run. And I wanted to live.

      After they surrounded me in the back of the restaurant, I swung wildly and threw well-aimed kicks before they grabbed my arms. Someone punched me, and they dragged me over gravel and cement to a car. They shoved me in the back. They slapped me when I screamed. I floated in and out of consciousness, and by the time they pulled me out of the car and kicked me again, I just wanted it over. I’d fought, but there was no point. No Power. I could only let them have their way. If I wanted to live.

      I floated in my mind and detached from my body. Tried not to feel the tear of a thigh muscle or the pummeling between my legs, to not hear the groans of a man twice my size, to not feel the rigid, snake-like tongue in my mouth or smell the hot breath of the man who had long since bathed. To not hear them moan oh nice and you so tight nor the words of the man who whispered in my ear.

      I’m so sorry.

      He, too, mounted me like the others, though he was gentle. His closed mouth barely pressed against mine, against my breasts, and he didn’t hit me. He whispered apologies and pulled me toward him, his arms wrapped around my back. He was awkward and unsure, but when his loins began to tremble he groaned, and his pounding thrusts seemed endless. I opened my eyes and searched the dim room over his shoulders.

      A silhouette filled the doorway. I stiffened, and with a mad howl the man rose up, his back arched. His position accentuated the pain as he held me tight and collapsed in jerky spasms, his wet face pressed against mine.

      But this was the last one, as far as I knew. Six in all. The urge to run nearly overpowered me once again, but I waited. This man would surely let me go. I stared at the ceiling and the red haze that clouded it.

      The man finally rose and looked down at me, his face illuminated by a bit of light from a window. I stared back. He wiped the side of his hand over his eyes and turned away, groping for his pants. His hair was wavy and dark blond, his eyes bright blue, his teeth straight and white. He was slender and not much more than a boy, perhaps twenty-two. My age, though the other men were grizzled, old, thick.

      Can I take a shower? My voice was hoarse, and I coughed. I’d seen a bathroom when they pulled me, stumbling, down the hall of the two-room apartment and threw me on a bed. He reached for my hand and led me there but gave me nothing to wash or dry with. It didn’t matter. I only wanted water. Water to cover me. Water to hide me. Water to take this away. I watched the stream of red swirl in the drain.

      The hall and bedroom were empty when I emerged. I found my clothes and dressed quickly while the men joked and laughed. I hobbled about on one shoe and found a rat nibbling the other in a corner; I waved my arms and swung my foot in the air, but it didn’t let go until I kicked it. I grabbed my coat, and the men cheered as I stared straight ahead and walked past them, willing myself to the door. My wet hair streamed down my back.

      I burned to attack, to destroy. I wanted to run, but I didn’t dare. I stopped when my eyes were pulled away from the coveted exit. The men

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