I’ve been hard at work on the sequel to New Hope City. It’s been tough, but I think it’s going to be one of my best works to date. Here’s a tiny excerpt of the new novel. Enjoy! Also, if you haven’t left a review for New Hope City, please do so now. Thank you so much!
New Hope City – Book #2 (Excerpt)
Sliding my blade across the Captain’s throat would be the sweetest thing I ever done. Does that make me evil, Tony?
Sunni looks out from the rooftop at the dusty, sundrenched city two stories below as she talks to Tony. She tries to remember his face—calm and confident, not the death mask he wore as he bled to death in the trunk of Carlos’ car.
New Hope’s a lot worse off with you not in it. Squatters and campers got this side of town bursting at the seams and everybody’s still scared of the Captain.
A siren whines in the distance then it fades. Just below Sunni’s perch on the roof, a wild-haired man wields a machete. He spews a stream of epithets at a group of laughing teens who mock him. Nothing to see here, the same it’s been for the past four years and probably longer than that.
I didn’t keep my promise like I said I would. Every day I keep telling myself that I’m going to make them pay for what they did to you…to me…but…I never do. I keep dreaming and planning and pretending, but I never do nothing. Maybe I’m still the scared little girl you took in years ago.
Sunni closes her eyes and tries to imagine what it was like before the whole fucking world went to hell. But she can’t see it. She can’t imagine anything different from what she’s been seeing most of her life. Fuck it. She opens her eyes and takes it all in, the crazed machete wielding man, the angry, fucked up teens out to steal, rape and get high, the hundred or so tents and shacks in the dirt field across the street. This is the way the world is—fucked up and dog eat dog.
The trademark rumble of Danny’s rusted, blue pickup drowns out the noise of the encampment. He’s just a half block away but driving dangerously fast down the crumbled road. His front tire rams hard into the golf ball sized pothole as he comes to a stop just beneath Sunni’s spot on the roof.
“Sunni,” he yells out as he jumps out of the truck and makes his way to the bed.
Sunni comes to the edge of the roof and peers over it. A teenage girl’s laying in the trunk’s open bed, her navy blue school uniform, soiled black and brown with dirt, her limbs sprawled into a wild arrangement, her hair littered with stiff, red and orange leaves, and her face bruised but strangely peaceful.
“This one’s alive,” Danny calls out.
Alive? That snaps Sunni out of her dazed fascination with what she thought was a corpse. But it’s not a corpse, it’s a real living being. She rushes down the roof’s access stairs past the cluster of small, makeshift apartments on the second floor and down to the dark, dingy bar on the main level. The bar patrons’ demands for answers are ignored as she pulls a small cooler from the shelf beneath the register. Four glass canisters filled with clear liquid sit in a pool of melting ice, she grabs one of them, and then she gets a syringe from the wooden box on the shelf.
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The sequel to New Hope City is scheduled for release in 2015. To be notified of when it’s released please signup for the mailing list.
SunHi Mistwalker writes fiction set in dystopian and post-apocalyptic worlds. Her new novel New Hope City, a dark coming-of-age story set in a post-apocalyptic America, follows the life of Sunni Brown, a teenage girl exploited by sex traffickers who tries to get a fresh start when she meets a disillusioned cop. She is also the author of the science fiction series After The Darkness. Please sign up for the mailing list for receive updates, freebies and special discounts. You can also follow SunHi on Twitter and Facebook.
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