Deadly Awakening (The Ashdale Reaper Series Book 1) Read online

  Deadly Awakening

  The Ashdale Reaper Series Book 1

  G. K. Lund

  Copyright © 2018 by G.K. Lund. All rights reserved.

  This book is a work of fiction. Similarities to actual events, places, persons or other entities are purely coincidental.

  Published by Northern Quill Press.

  ISBN: 978-82-93663-12-6

  www.northernquillpress.com

  www.gklundwrites.com

  Cover design by Damonza.

  (Add. Image by Zairon - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0)

  Edited by Helen Baggott and N. Hall.

  Deadly Awakening /G.K. Lund, 1st. ed.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Epilogue

  Enjoyed the book?

  Author’s note

  More books by G.K. Lund

  About the Author

  Chapter 1

  I am always in the back of your mind.

  Do not ever doubt that I exist. You know you exist, and considering the inevitable outcome of it all – so do I. It is the natural way of things. Yes… not what most people want to hear, I know, but there we are. I have always been. I do not know how long, but rest assured I am old. So very old. Older than any of you can fathom. I think that’s the reason for all this. That’s why it happened. Because I do exist. No one can dispute that. My consciousness, however, is disputable. Not to me of course. I am acutely aware of myself. Just like you are aware of yourselves. And then again, why should I not be conscious of everything around me? Of course, everything around me is… well… everything. For I am everywhere. Always. If I were not, there would be chaos. So many see me as evil. Something that must be fought and defeated. Perhaps that is true in some cases. I don’t know anymore. But I do know without a doubt that I am a necessity. Like it or not. Deny it if you will, but that is how it is.

  So why did I take such a drastic step? As I said, I am conscious of what is. Most of the time I am everywhere, aware of it all, sometimes I am focused on something or someone. Sometimes I am nowhere. Like you I grow tired from time to time. So very tired. In these periods I go nowhere, remember nothing. My whole being and purpose is always there though. Do not think otherwise. I simply am. And I am focused on, and of importance to, everything.

  Yet… it was one of you who made me stop in my figurative tracks. It was on a bridge. I was there, and so was he. A young fair-haired man. Such a tight-set jaw, yet there was a completely blank face. Nothing could be read there. Not even by me. You see, I don’t do the deed. I am the inevitable outcome of certain factors. In this case, jumping off a bridge. I was not there to push him off or make him do it. By no means. I come when the deed is done. But this man made me stop and wake up a little. Suddenly I was conscious of nothing else. All of me was there. I have from time to time thought you all relatively interesting. And I was wondering, as I have sometimes, why this one wanted me. What did he expect me to do to make it better? And what could possibly be so bad as to make him wish for me? I don’t know if there is something after me. I am just the transition. And I myself will not know that for a long, long time yet.

  So, I watched. Saw him climb on to the railing. Young. Clad in good clothing. To my understanding, he looked normal. Like he had what he needed. He closed his eyes for a moment. The wind played with his hair and clothes, but it was not strong enough to shake his balance. I noticed some cars had stopped. People were shouting. Pleading with him. He didn’t listen. His mind was set. He wanted me. There was no way out of that. I was after all there. I do not pop up for scares and close calls. When I come, it is final.

  He jumped.

  Just let himself fall forward. There was no sound from him. Only empty space where he had been a moment ago. Then came the screams from the onlookers. I, of course, saw him as he fell. It was a long way down. There was fear chiseled into the elegant features of his face now, but no sound came.

  I, like you, also become curious about things. I can’t deny that. I do on the other hand have an indefinite amount of time to study what interests me. Sometimes I have even taken form and shown myself. Of course, it has merely been a shadow of a humanoid shape in this particular place. As the man was falling to be greeted by me, a new curiosity fell over me. I could not understand his action. I truly could not, and in a blink of a second, before he hit the water, I made my decision.

  I took over.

  Chapter 2

  The eyes opened. Air was drawn into the lungs. It burned. Not as much as everything else though. I could feel every neuron connecting with me. Every nerve reacting to me. Adjusting. The blood soaring through the veins as that meaty muscle in the chest started pumping again. All the cracked and broken bones reattached and healed. I felt trapped. The meat was attaching itself to me. And it hurt. Pain coming at me from everywhere. Panic and fear were new to me, and now it threatened to strangle me.

  “What the fuck?” said a voice next to me. “Oh my God.”

  I tried to focus on the speaker. Tried to sit up, but was pushed back down again.

  “I need some help here,” the voice shouted. Harsh, confused, worried. It sounded like the owner of the voice wasn’t used to shouting. It was a woman. I tried focusing on her and found that the eyes worked. It was daylight. That was odd, I thought. Surely it had been night? I was wet too. That was no surprise though. The shivering cold, on the other hand, was. I saw several figures coming toward me. The woman next to me had a look on her face I could not read, and to my defense, I was rather new in the game at this point in the story. The woman was dressed in jeans, a simple gray shirt, and a leather jacket. My guess was that she was a couple of years older than the man who jumped off the bridge. Me that was… sort of. Dark long hair, bronzed skin and large amber eyes which were focused on me. As the other people reached us, I realized that she was suspicious.

  “Oh my God,” shouted someone else. “Oh my God, oh my G… He was dead. Olivia, he was dead. I swear. I checked.”

  “I know, Tyler,” said the woman who had been there since I woke up.

  A dark-haired man entered my field of vision and started touching me. Neck, arms, chest. Holding up the eyelids, staring into the eyes.

  “Sir? Sir, can you hear me?”

  I tried answering but had no voice. I don’t think that was actually the case. I was probably in shock. Yes… me. But I had fused, to call it that, with the body, and with that comes natural reactions. As I came to understand later, maybe it was for the best in this case. The dark-haired woman continued glaring at me. I looked around as the man kept checking up on me. There were a couple of uniformed men beh
ind the woman and the man next to me. Cars parked further up. I realized quite quickly that I was lying on stone. I could also hear lapping water and turned the head left. The river was there. The bridge was not. I tried stretching the neck, but could not see it. What I saw on the other side of the river were rows of buildings and high-rising church spires behind them.

  “We need to get him to a hospital,” the man said, reaching for something in his pocket.

  “Yeah,” the woman agreed. “Clearly he hasn’t been murdered.”

  Chapter 3

  At some point between my first awakening and the hospital, I must have passed out again. That made me understand for the first time how fragile I was. Falling off a bridge and being shattered against the surface of a cold river, does apparently take its toll on a body even though it has healed.

  This time I woke up to find a woman, dressed in pink and comfortable clothes, crying at my bedside. I had no idea who she was, obviously, but found the gesture oddly comforting. As for myself I was now dressed in something white and put in a bed. There was no pain caused by injuries. Only the numbness I felt from interlocking with the body. It was truly a shock. I didn’t realize this at the time, but as I had never been corporeal before, it was inevitable.

  The woman looked at me with such relief when she realized I had woken up.

  “Ben? Oh Ben,” she said taking the left hand, holding it with a light grip as if afraid to hurt me. “I could hardly believe it when they brought you in. How do you feel?”

  At this point, I realized I actually had to say something. It was clear this woman knew this person.

  “Confused,” I said with an unused and hoarse voice, strained from not speaking for a while, which was apparently mine. “What happened?” I added. They did, of course, not know the truth, but I wanted to know why I was brought there.

  “You were found in the river. Not far from Central Bridge,” the woman answered choking back tears. “Why? What did you do? What happened?”

  In all honesty, I had no idea. I had not jumped off any bridge, and anyway, that was what had intrigued me in the first place. The woman by my bedside though didn’t seem intrigued as such… more angry and frightened. Odd, I thought – being angry at someone you apparently care about.

  “Ben?” she pressed when I didn’t answer.

  I had no idea what to say to her. I merely looked at her. She was partly Asian, that much I could tell. Black short hair, a heart shaped beautiful face with light brown eyes which were now red and puffy from crying.

  “Who are you?” I asked for lack of something better to say. Not a good idea, I know, but to my defense I was lying there completely bewildered, the flesh caging me in like a prison cell. Oh yes. I could think of nothing more than shedding this new form, but I couldn’t. Not in front of this woman.

  “Who am I?” she answered and rose. She stood staring at me, all tears gone now as she wiped them off. She looked… well, I would say insulted.

  “You give us a scare like this and you have the nerve to ask who I am as if I have no right to ask you questions. I’m your fucking friend that’s who.”

  “Yes…” I said thinking this through as fast as I could, and in all honesty, you lot really think slowly inside this meat. No wonder I couldn’t come up with anything that would help myself. “But who are you?” I repeated.

  The woman was about to say something more, but she suddenly stopped, looking at me all wide-eyed now. “You mean you don’t know?” she whispered.

  “Yes,” I confirmed, hoping this would get her to leave me alone so I, in turn, could leave.

  “Oh my God, Ben. You don’t remember, do you?” she said and sank back down on the chair.

  So yes. The biggest cliché of them all. The soap-opera amnesia. Or retrograde amnesia. Call it what you like. I had not planned it. How could I have? I hadn’t thought any of this through. I had simply asked who she was, and she had drawn conclusions and a good thing too. As soon as she ran for the doctor, I tried leaving. I closed the eyes, drew a deep breath, and focused on leaving the body. Focused on severing every neuron, on releasing myself from the interlocking mind of this slow-thinking creature.

  No such luck.

  I tried again. It didn’t work. What was going on? A powerful being like me, and I was trapped? I could feel the body starting to sweat. To shiver. The breath came heavier, the heart thumping like a hammer in the chest. What was going on? Why didn’t I have any control? The hands flailed at anything around me, the body twisting in the bed. Voices became louder. Hands grabbing hold of me. The voices telling me to calm down. That everything was going to be okay.

  But how could it be? I was trapped. Trapped in this weak, slow, fleshly, and clumsy prison of a body, which now no longer contained the one who was born in it. I sank back in bed as the realization hit. The woman had called me Ben, and Ben was no more. He would not come back. It was me now, and I had to deal with the situation. Unfortunately, the situation at hand was a needle in the arm which made everything go blurry. I tried telling them that there was no need for such measures. I was, after all, a more evolved being than them. The words never came out as I slipped into unconsciousness. Perhaps that was for the best as well.

  Chapter 4

  Rose.

  Rose was the name of the woman dressed in pink who gave me a way to live as Ben without knowing anything about him. She was a nurse at the hospital, the only reason anyone there knew who I was. She had seen me by chance when I was brought in. Apparently, she had nothing more to do at work that day though, because she didn’t leave the room. At all. I am quite familiar with hospitals in truth and my impression is that there is always something to do for the people working there. But not for Nurse Rose, oh no. She would not leave and so I was stuck with her. At my bedside. I didn’t know what to say. I did not know the woman and clearly, that was the problem. She had stopped crying, but seemed on the verge of tears all the time, fighting to keep them back. I closed the eyes and tried to leave again. Focusing completely. Slowing the breath, and letting go of the fragile shell around me. But it was no use. I had the feeling of a veil covering the body, hindering me with an amazing weight that was keeping me inside.

  I sighed and opened the eyes.

  That seemed to worry her as well. She sat up a little, but relaxed when she realized that I hadn’t actually… what was it she thought? I looked closer at her but became none the wiser. Her eyes were red from crying, her lips pressed tight. She kept her eyes either on me or on the bed right in front of her. She seemed to be thinking hard, but of what I couldn’t say. I did not get to ask either since a different nurse came into the room. She had the same type of clothes on, only they were blue pants and a flower-patterned top. She exchanged some words with Rose, but it was the tray she was carrying that interested me. There was a smell coming from it and it was… appealing to the nose. The nurse pulled a small table that was attached to the bed in front of me and put the tray down on top of it. She then lifted the lid off and I became so entranced by the contents that I never heard her leave.

  It was food. Warm food.

  Now, it’s not like I didn’t know what the stuff was. I know so many things, far beyond what any of you will ever know (not to be offensive), but I had never, ever, tasted food. I had never needed sustenance. But now I did. I could feel it in the stomach. A gnawing feeling. Hollowness that made the body feel weak. And there was liquid in the mouth. It was clear that the sight and smell of the food was the reason for this, because I had not thought much about it up to that point. What I had before me was a plate of spaghetti bolognese, a juice box and a cup containing different small pieces of fruit. As I said. I knew exactly what it was. I’ve been around, to put it in easy terms. Still, I couldn’t stop staring at the wonder in front of me.

  “You really should eat, Ben,” Rose said.

  I looked up at her. I had forgotten she was there. “Yes,” I said and looked at the food again. I had never eaten anything before. “Could I have a gl
ass of water?” I asked.

  “Sure,” she said and got up. She found a plastic cup and filled it in a sink next to the door. She smiled when she handed it to me, but it was a weak smile. I took the cup expectantly. I have seen so many men in need of water. Crying for it like a long-lost friend. I have seen them perish without it, others cry in relief when they finally got it. I had always wondered at the taste of it. Maybe it was fitting that I try it first. So, I did. I raised the cup and let the clear liquid in. Tasted it. Mild is all I can say. But it was good. Cool and mild. Then I swallowed it. Well… the body did. It seemed to know what to do. That was a relief. I drank the rest in one go and felt better afterward. Apparently, I had been thirsty too. I put the cup down and gave the food my attention again. The body knew how to swallow so I went at it with a new-found eagerness. I picked up the fork, but that felt funny. I looked at it completely bewildered for a moment. Of course, cutlery is not the same around the world, some places they just use their hands. I contemplated that, but then took the fork in the other hand. That felt better. Seemed I was right-handed. And slow minded, I reflected with resentment. But the food was good. Once I got the hang of twirling the spaghetti onto the fork, the food went down with speed. It was tasty, salty, and easy to chew. I ate every bit of it. Then I concentrated on the fruit. These juicy, sweet, and sour little bits of nutrition.