Living in Flames – sneak preview of first chapter of this sci-fi & dark fantasy novel set in Bristol UK.
This novel isn’t due to be published until next year but I thought I’d give you a taste of what’s coming.
David J Rodger
Bristol, UK, the near future, the lives of three people collide in a gruesome twist of the hand of fate. A former marine turned to crime, and two enigmatic figures who are concealing their true identities whilst skimming the city’s underworld of drug-cartels and shadowy tendrils of old merchant families.
A carved African idol is discovered clutched in the hands of a dead man who is barely human. Greed unlocks centuries-tarnished mystery about the origins of the idol and brings back to Bristol a banished bloodline hell-bent on vengeance and diabolical glory.
A carrion God lying dormant for three hundred years risks being returned to the world of Man.
David J Rodger’s trademark unforgiving rendering of harsh reality, and relentless narrative pace, are here in palm-sweating abundance, delivered in a novel that drags open a shocking legacy of one wealthy family’s trade in slaves, and reveals the consequences on those who dabble with unnameable cosmic horrors.
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OPENING:
Four of the figures were reposed further back from the edge of the roof, silhouetted by the alabaster light of a half-moon; they surveyed the city of Bristol in contemplative silence. The fifth figure, their leader, was leant forward with both arms locked straight supporting himself against the stone balustrade as he scoured the tangle of small lanes below him with an intense gaze.
The fifth figure uttered a solemn statement with a slow, brassy voice, consonants cracking like bones in the lazy swirl of his vowels.
“This is where it all began.”
- From the private journal of Cray: my flesh, my blood, my faith, my disease
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1.
Dex Rašković knew the city; he knew the quiet places where most people didn’t walk after dark. Hopefully the drones wouldn’t be programmed to come looking down here either.
He strode through the back streets as fast as he could without looking like he had something to hide; head bowed against the persistent rain, with the hood of the hydrogel poncho pulled up.
Something big and bad was going down; police were everywhere, creating snap cordons and road blocks on all the main routes; the shitty little drones swarming through the pedestrian areas, scanning. It was the scans he was worried about.
With a handgun tucked into his pouch and three kilos of unlicensed gene-twister strapped around his waist, getting stopped would not be good.
Dex was still assuming all the police activity had nothing to do with him; just a case of being in the right place at the wrong time. There had been gunfire and lot of it down by the harbour.
The sounds had brought back uncomfortable memories of fighting skirmishes in the Gulf. Operation Metal Hammer. He’d done the whole slog out there: went in when the war started and came out when it ended, if you could call it an ending.
Maybe Bristol was being hit by terrorists – yet more repercussions from the war? Maybe it was a cop sting gone bad? Or some of the demonstrators camped out by the Carthew Tower deciding to up the ante with a few automatic weapons; not likely, in his view, but crazier things had happened.
He crossed a busy main without looking; all the traffic at a standstill, headlights glittering in the rain. Brisk pace, he entered another deserted lane; things seemed to be getting calmer the further he walked, moving away from the danger zone.
His planned destination was the Strontium. A nightclub situated in the heart of a shabby part of the city known as St Nicholas Market. It was the place he’d been calling home for the past three months, ever since he’d bailed out of Switzerland fed up with low wage private security work and bored of a country where people got angry if you had a shower after nine P.M.
The club and the drugs around his waist were part of his retirement plans.
Bristol was just a big turf war between the Manchester, Cardiff and London syndicates.
The club belonged to Jerry White, Manchester’s longstanding crime guru. Dex thought ‘guru’ was a lame word for a man like Jerry White. Psychotic bulldog with a hard-on for maiming people was more appropriate but he guessed ‘guru’ had eloquence and helped Jerry cross the boundary when selling crime to ‘good’ people.
His departure from Switzerland had followed the relocation of his good pal Duke, to the Tonga Islands, who had left to run security for the royal family out there. Duke was a lucky bastard but he’d arranged the introduction to Jerry White and the rest was history.
The club gave Dex presence, access to a lot of people and a grubby income. The gig came complete with a bunch of White’s dealers who were there to shift the pentathene IV coming out of Jerry White’s labs. It should have been a lucrative cash builder but the dealers were a stable of lame horses and White refused to let Dex recruit his own talent.
It meant the income was nowhere near what Dex had planned on and now exposed him to a risk of defaulting on the drugs-for-cash advance White had started him with. Defaulting on Jerry White would be an invitation for getting his face re-arranged with a sledgehammer.
He had a few grand tucked away in an investment portfolio but again, nothing close to an amount that would let him press eject on England and go live The Life somewhere.
Besides, he didn’t want to go on the run. The Strontium might not have been his business, but it was his to manage and that gave him a sense of belonging, of ownership, of sanctuary, that he’d never had before. Not even when in the Forces: always on the move, never more than a month in one place; everything temporary; everything disposable, broken, barely working or dead. That all ended in the Gulf with a dishonourable discharge and the blood of a Norwegian reporter on his hands. Could have been worse; his CO could have managed to prove he’d pulled the trigger and he’d have been serving twenty for murder.
So being the kind of man he was, quick to identify opportunities outside the box, Dex had grabbed the chance to make a lot of cash in one strike
The three-kilos of gene-twister strapped around his gut had come from Jerry White’s gland-farm up North. Sixty grand’s worth. It had been smuggled out by somebody in White’s organisation; somebody willing to get butchered for a chunk of easy money. Dex had bought it tonight, down by the harbour just before all the guns started going off. If Jerry White ever found out what Dex had done…
It wasn’t a scenario he chose to consider.
The whole deal had been set up by Henry McVee. Dex didn’t know McVee and was a long way from trusting him, but so far the operation had played out the way the skinny kid had said it would. McVee seemed to have a needle into White’s organisation; knew the people, knew the operation. Dex didn’t know how and knew better than to ask questions. The next stage of the plan was to hand the three-kilos over to McVee who had a buyer lined up in Glasgow.
And there was the rub. Dex didn’t trust McVee but he had to rely on him for the final bag.
Dex stepped out of the lane through a metal archway into St Nicholas Market. The market was a decrepit, historical structure of old stone; its open-plan interior converted into a labyrinth of small carbo-plastic stalls selling everything from tarot cards and incense to specialist software services, eclectic paper-format magazines, and the myriad sub-strata of dance music. This time of night everything was closed and the market was deserted; but it made a convenient short-cut to the club. The police and their drones didn’t seem to have pushed their snouts this far.
He had only met McVee once, about three weeks ago. Short ginger hair, a weird goatee beard bleached blonde, and as skinny as a rifle barrel; but Dex had sensed a bristling aggression that told him McVee wasn’t a stranger to violence. McVee was probably a couple years younger than him; Dex had him pegged as around twenty-five. Man wore shades like he thought he was a rock star.
If the Glasgow deal turned true then Dex was in line to pocket one-hundred and eighty grand. Not a bad return on the sixty he’d just spent.
That’s if the ginger twiglet can shift it.
One hundred and eighty grand bought a lot of opportunities. Opportunities Dex knew he’d be able to convert into bigger cash returns. His ticket out of here; but perhaps more importantly, with this pride intact.
He heard the muffled thumping of the club’s sound system seeping above ground through ventilation ducts.
It gave him a flutter of euphoria. He was almost home.
The euphoria vaporised when his eyes caught sight of the body on the ground.
Dex stopped and ripped back the hydrogel hood from his head; glancing around quickly he checked there was no-one observing. He stepped a bit closer; the hairs on the back of his neck prickling up.
The body was lying where it had fallen between a row of empty packing crates against one wall. A sticky rivulet of blood was pooling beside an outstretched hand.
Fuck.
He had seen plenty of corpses in the Gulf, he had almost gotten blasé about it back then, but this was the middle of the city and it was close to the Strontium. Too close to ignore. The police would come asking questions.
Another glance around him: the bleak empty passageways of the market stretched off in three directions. No sign of any onlookers.
This was his find.
The rain was hammering down on the corrugated plastic roofing three-stories overhead.
He reached up to the DVFrames he wore on his face and pressed a small stud on the upper edge of the right lens. He’d configured the button to launch a ‘sweep’ application installed on his PA device, tucked away in the pocket of his cotton cargo pants. The Personal Assistant polled the immediate area for visible broadcast tags. Most people broadcast something, even just a nickname or a “Who Am I” tag.
The DVFrames presented the results as digital overlay superimposed within his field-of-vision. A cluster of red dots about twenty metres to his right described the people waiting to get into the Strontium. But there was nothing broadcasting nearer than that, and the body wasn’t broadcasting anything. No PA, stolen, or simply not activated.
Time to find out.
Dex squatted down so he could take a closer look.
The hand was striking: the fingers thick and muscular, covered in calluses; the nails cracked and caked with ingrained dirt. The blood was dark red, almost purple in the poor overhead lighting. Dex moved closer, his heart beating a little faster. The drumming of the rain on the corrugated plastic seemed to grow more intense as if providing a soundtrack to the moment.
The smell of the body hit him then, and Dex had to angle his head away and suck in a breath. Sweat and urine and something else that was indescribable yet offensive to his nose. The man was wrapped up in a dirt stained raincoat; his legs were twisted beneath him, wearing jeans that were wet with water and maybe blood, and a pair of filthy worker boots. A homeless person, he suspected. A wide brimmed hat hid his face. Dex frowned, staring at the visible flesh of the man’s jaw and neck. It looked wrong somehow. Easing forward he went to reach out, lift the hat and take a closer look but paused as he noticed an object clutched in the man’s other hand. Hard to see clearly in the poor light the object looked like a wooden statue, like one of those African tribal knick-knacks you could buy anywhere.
An empty bottle was kicked nearby, the sound of it skittering and clinking against stone echoed around the deserted passages.
Shit!
Dex stood upright and stepped back from the body. He glanced up and down the passage but saw nothing. His attention went back to the long shape clutched by the dead man against his chest. Dex stepped forward, leant over and grabbed it from the dead man’s grip.
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