The Post-Humans (Book 1): The League Read Online Free

table, but it had come with the rental house, and the boys all used it to fix their hair.
    Athan looked like he was going to a funeral, or a wedding, maybe a job interview. His short brown hair was a mess, so he slicked it back with his fingers to get it to look at least a little presentable. He’d have to clean his clothes later.
    He had to see if he could manage this with clothes on.
    He was nervous, but it felt right.
    He remembered standing on that beer soaked carpet at The Link with everyone screaming and recoiling from him. The look in his friend’s eyes. The fear.
    How would he face them again?
    He was responsible for throwing the club into turmoil and frightening everyone, including himself.
    He pitied the man in the mirror. Things couldn’t be normal for him again if this was real.
     
    Athan Harper fixed his tie and turned to his sleeping friend Lockie.
    “Good bye cruel world,” he whispered.
    He stepped into Lockie for the last time.
    He found himself standing fully clothed next to the scaffold of flesh. Around him a white glow had begun to bring a cold light to the new and strange world that was shrouded in a soft mist. Everywhere, Athan began to see the shapes of the strange landscape become more visible, and he could see that the land went on and on, maybe forever.
    “Where am I?” Athan whispered as he placed a hand on the warm leathery skin of the skeletal tree-like thing beside him.
    Am I inside a new world? Is this in my mind? And why had he been drawing these extraordinary shapes all his young life?
    He wondered if it were some kind of premonition that he had been able to channel the shapes of this world through his hand.
    What would happen to all his things and the drawings that lay all over his room next to Lockie’s.
    The drawings all over the walls?
    There would be questions that he had no answers for.
    He couldn’t go back there.
    He knew he had to see his family, maybe for the last time.
    He couldn’t be just Athan Harper now, he needed to learn more about this place and himself.
    This was the beginning of his self imposed exile.
     
    Athan set off across a wide expanse of shifting dunes of skin. It heaved a little like it was breathing. It was comforting and warm and felt like home for some reason. Like he had been there before.
    His Mum’s house was where he needed to go, to say good byes and wash his clothes maybe. He could smell the way, or feel it. He couldn’t decide what the sensation was, but he knew he was going in the right direction.

Chapter 1
    THE WIND HOWLED.
    The freezing cold rock felt comforting to the small boy who hid there. It protected him from the wind and the constantly falling snow. Andy had no idea how he had become lost out in the storm. He wasn’t even dressed to go outside in that kind of weather.
    Andy looked down at his cold left hand, and wondered why he couldn’t feel his fingertips.
    He had so many questions.
    Had he run away from home again? Was Dad angry with him? Dad was often angry with him; the things he did, the choices he made.
    A sound broke his thoughts.
    Had his father come to find him? Or was there something else out there in the storm?
    Something coming for him?
    Andy squinted into the blurring storm, peering as hard as he could with his stinging eyes. He couldn’t make anything out in the swirling grey darkness. He had to squeeze his eyes shut afterward to relieve the sting of the icy wind.
    Again a sound, out in the dark.
    He squinted harder.
    Then Andy put a picture to the sound. It was a clanging or twanging, and only one thing could possibly make that broken music. A guitar, a broken guitar.
    He looked around the side of the rock, in search of somewhere else he could hide, or somewhere to run to.
    His father had found the broken guitar. His broken guitar. The one Andy had broken.
     
    Andy had found it in his Dad’s study and wanted to impress him by playing a song his Dad would recognize. Like one of those cool Black Sabbath songs or