Excerpt: Shifter

When the first meteor hit, it killed all the dinosaurs. When the second meteor hit billions of years later, it killed all the technology. Mountains broke. Land shifted apart and sunk into the ocean. Skyscrapers crumpled. People died.

Cockroaches remained , but so did a few scattered people who bounded together into tribes and tried to put the world back to the way it was amidst the chaos. Unfortunately, a lot of knowledge died as well. And because of it daily life no longer revolved around driving to work, chatting on the blackberry, putting in an 8 hour day, twittering, checking e-mail and facebook, going to the gym, listening to the ipod, grabbing a fast food dinner and then plunking in front of the computer for a game of World of Warcraft or TV with Gossip Girl for the night. In fact, daily life now made Little House on the Prairie look like Meet the Kardashians.

The dinosaurs had become extinct. The humans, however, evolved. Although, some say they de-evolved. On the one hand, there were the artisans, medics and hunters, who weren’t much different from what they were pre-meteor. Only now their services were in more demand. Gatherers or looters, were equally accepted for whatever goods they could scavenge or sell for profit. Yet on the other hand, there were the techs – who could make the electronic still work. Only they charged the machines with their bodies and minds. These rare individuals were hotly contested and each tribe needed at least one tech or found themselves in a severe disadvantage during trading season. And even rarer were the shifters. Shifters could change into any animal form they wished, only the price seemed to be their humanity. Feral shifters were like the werewolves of horror stories and were hunted down like creatures of the night. Sane shifters usually hid what they were until they found a tribe to accept them.

But the humans weren’t the only survivors of the meteor. Some dark fairy tale creatures who had cowered from the great technology, know where free to roam the countryside for tribute or terror. It was these bogeymen hindered the tribes from rebuilding their civilization. But not all creatures of evil were from legends, there were some humans who made even the darkest villain look askance. There were some humans who didn’t want to go back to being a corporate drone or a retail worker. They liked their new status in their tribe. It was these humans, the assassins who decided to eliminate the techs. No more techs would mean they would be safe to be the big fish in their little pond.