Read The Harvest (Book 1) for Free Online Page B

the cold, but his mind was numb from the past hours events and didn’t register or react to the drop in temperature. He pulled out his cell phone, dialed nine-one-one. No answer. He called the police direct, again no answer. Endless rings, endless snow, endless wind. Luke hung his head to cry, but no tears came.
    A hair splitting scream from the neighbor’s house curdled his blood, and shocked him into action. He jumped the fence between the yards and ran to the back door. “Mrs. Bowers.” He pounded on the sliding glass doors. “Mrs. Bowers, are you ok?” He peered inside her house. She didn’t answer or come to the door. Through the doorway to her dining room he could see what appeared to be a hand lying on the floor. Luke tried the handle. Locked.  Using a flower pot from the porch Luke smashed the glass.
    Inside, the house was in perfect order, as anyone who knew Mrs. Bowers would expect. She ran a tight ship; everything had its place. There was no overturned table, no pool of blood, no head snapped off at the neck, but there was a hand. Luke’s gaze came to rest on that hand. He shoved his own hands deep into his pockets. The air inside the house was suffocating his entire body. The sight of that hand choked the breath from his lungs.
    Just two months shy of twenty, Luke’s only exposure to death was when he buried Tiger, a yellow lab he had for twelve years. Sometimes the image of Tiger lying in his grave haunted Luke’s dreams. Now, here in a span of eighty minutes, he’d managed to add the image of his father’s mutilated body and was on the verge, he assumed, of adding a gruesome picture of Mrs. Bowers to his mind’s album of unforgettable sights. The thought of leaving tempted him. He didn’t have to look, he reasoned with himself. He didn’t have to know if she died in the same way as Luke senior. He didn’t have to, but he did.
    “Mrs. Bowers?” He almost whispered her name, taking a step closer. The hand didn’t move. He grabbed the edge of the wall, pressed his face against the sheetrock. For several seconds he remained glued to the wall, before he took a deep breath and rolled his head around to the other side. “Oh man.” He leaned up against the wall. The hand was attached to an arm and that was all. There was no body to associate with the limb. Luke relaxed against the wall. He wasn’t sure if feeling relieved was respectful, but that’s what he felt.
    Back in Mrs. Bowers’ living room, Luke perched on the edge of her couch. Never having been so completely on his own before, he had no idea what his next move should be or where he should go. Luke Senior made all his decisions for him. He was the one that decided Luke would play football, that he would be a quarterback, and not just any quarterback, but the quarterback for the Louisiana State University. The all time winningest college football team in the history of college football. Go Tigers. And when Luke senior was not around, Coach Cale stepped in to run his life for him.
    Luke went along with his father, because that’s what he was supposed to do. Honor his father and mother, but especially his father. Disobey him? Never. Even to think it would have been considered blasphemy. Luke, who tended to gravitate towards peaceful solutions in most situations, avoided confrontation as much as possible. To have an original thought or idea was asking for conflict and conflict was avoided by doing as he was told.
    His aversion to conflict and anything of a violent nature was a flagrant contradiction to the physical game of football, but was the very thing that made him the top ranked quarterback in the nation. At six two and a solid two hundred ten on the scales, he could take a hit. He’d rather not, but he could take one. The thing he couldn’t do very well at all was hit back. He didn’t possess the same aggressive nature he had witnessed in every other player on the field, including the kicker. It was this weakness that drove him to