Bouncer Post #31

Title: KILLING KESSLER

Genre: YA sci fi

Word Count: 60,000 words

Query:

Sixteen-year-old Tabby Weber doesn’t want to murder anyone, but in Griffin Kessler’s case she’s willing to make an exception.

In the year 2018, nineteen-year-old science prodigy Griffin Kessler created a virus that nearly wiped out the human race. A decade later, survivors are imprisoned in concentration camps while brutal gangs roam the deserted cities. Tabby, her siblings, and her best friend, Murphy, live in hiding while they complete her father’s time machine. Their goal is simple: travel back in time and kill Kessler before he can finish his virus.

When Tabby and Murphy return to 2018, Tabby meets Kessler, who isn’t the monster she imagined at all. She soon finds he’s smart, sexy, and as desperate to protect the virus as she is. As Tabby falls for Kessler, Murphy confesses his own feelings for her. But Tabby’s love life is the least of her worries. With Murphy still determined to kill Kessler, she doesn’t know how to stop him, or if she even should.

  

First 250:

Our hiding spot is less than ten feet from the boy. An overhead floodlight blazes against the predawn sky, so bright I see the sweat falling from his wavy black hair and the clumps of dirt on his shovel. He has stubble on his jaw and a muscular chest and arms, but he looks young, maybe sixteen like me.

I glance at Leila. My sister’s lips are stretched into a wide smile. I reach out to her with my mind. Forget it, Leila, I think. He’s locked in the Village.

We’re watching him through the witch hazel bushes outside the Village fence. The electric fence, twenty feet of razor wire crowned with another five feet of spiked coils, surrounds Pitman Air Force Base. The base was once the heart of Wexler Falls, until Alexander Zika’s henchmen transformed it into the concentration camp we know as the Village.

Leila’s expression doesn’t change, but I know she heard me. We can shut off our thoughts as easily as closing our eyes, but if she were blocking me out, I would feel it.

Seriously, it’s not like he’s going to break out of there and take you on a date, I add. Leila knows this, of course, but that won’t stop her from doing something stupid. She turned fourteen last month, and all she thinks about is boys.