Tuesday, May 19, 2015

A NEW NORMAL

#‎TeaserTuesday‬ **Spoiler Alert**
Toxic, the final Raina Kirkland book, is guaranteed to surprise many loyal and first time readers. If you've read the 4th book, you know the world just isn't the same for Raina and everyone else in Washington State. Here's a taste of their new normal:
Toxic: Chapter 6
     I sighed. It was my turn to take off for the day. I was wearing the same sort of tight thin jacket, good for aerodynamics. I put on my hat to keep my face from getting wind burnt, and my goggles. I slid on gloves and made sure my shoes are on tight…I hated losing them in the air. Like with most powers, it begins with a thought. Think light, think up. I could feel a tingling in my body as my insides became weightless before the rest of me. Heartburn. Damn it, I drank too much coffee…again. It took me a moment to change my breathing and I struggled to ignore the feeling of nausea that was inevitable. As my arms moved up I could feel my feet leaving the ground and my first instinct was always to panic. No matter how many times I flew, I always felt the need to panic at first. I used to be deathly afraid of heights, to the point of debilitation. I told myself I was not afraid. That the fear was illogical, but I could feel my spine tingle with adrenaline as I rose above the ground, five feet, ten, twenty, thirty…
     “Come on,” I urged myself. I knew I’d feel better once I started moving forward. I always did.
     Once I reached the proper distance from the ground, I lunged forward to lay out flat and moved along. I'm no superman. There was no fist forward, fast flying with a brave smile on my face. No, my kind of flying was both hands clutching my stomach, periodically checking the GPS on my wrist to make sure I was still on course to Washington’s capital in Olympia.
     As much as I hated flying, I had to admit, the commute had the best view. An endless sea of trees, green lakes, farming fields lush with fruits and vegetables and sapphire snow peaked mountains on every horizon. The rain from last night left the air crisp and clean. I flew over Interstate Five. It was once Washington’s largest freeway, now it was just a crumbling mess of cement covered in green plants. Three years of no use and Mother Nature had all but erased Washington’s mighty roadways. The only roads that were maintained were those in the five major cities; Seattle, Tacoma, Spokane, Vancouver and Olympia. And only to a point, really. Not everyone lived in the wilderness like Alistair and I. Some still liked the hustle and bustle of city life, they liked to drive and bike and take public transportation, all electric and clean of course.
     I smiled as I came up on the capital of Washington. The grounds were fifty acres of pristine beauty, elegantly arranged flowers and shrubs and a massive variety of old growth conifers, mostly shaggy hemlocks. The men who originally designed the landscape were the very same who designed the look of Central Park in New York City. And as the hub of government and justice, the capital was bursting with people; administrators, civil engineers, mayors and more.
     Flying over, I could see each memorial created to honor great wars fought and lives lost. A bronze statue of an angel guiding a solder, a sailor, a marine and a nurse to victory was built in remembrance of those thousand or so citizens of Washington who never came home after WWI. A field of cast-bronze wheat and five large blades with six-thousand names honored those Washitonians who died in WWII. For those lost in the Vietnam War there was a curved wall on the grassy knoll with more than a thousand names carved into its glossy surface. And as for the forgotten war in Korea, a beautiful statue with five-hundred and twenty-eight names engraved… Each memorial tugged at my heart, but I couldn’t help but feel there was a monument missing from Washington’s capital. But what kind of statue would befit the loss of over three million lives?