Richard Shury
Into a world of slumbering dust and anarchy, a young woman is thrown. How Janice came to this new city, and more importantly why, are mysteries. Someone or something has caused her to arrive; someone or something seems to be following her. The world she encounters is dark, and grey, and the people she meets there seem tired and battered down by the effort of living in their all-but-dead city. There are strange energies around, and one of the group, Darian, has been strangely affected by one of them. Still, they have hope, and they have what they think is a way out. Janice joins them on their journey, but she soon finds what looked like escape may in fact be something else altogether.
The party’s journey will not be easy, and things aren’t helped by the Darian’s increasingly erratic behaviour and the eerie visions he experiences. Janice tries to cope with the situation into which she’s been thrust, and the small group try to hold themselves and each other together long enough to reach some sort of help or safe haven, but in a sense they are driving blind, and none of them know what might happen next.
As energies converge and dangers increase, the people try to make sense of what is happening. Janice longs for home even as the others search for a new home, and things turn violent and desperate. The events that unfold seem both familiar and yet strange. Eventually, one truth is realised by them all: their lives and their beliefs will never be the same again.
Richard Shury was born in Wellington, New Zealand, and that was where he stayed for most of his life, until completing an English degree at Otago University, Dunedin. Sensing opportunity and craving travel, he moved to the UK in 2005. He currently lives in West London with an assortment of Kiwis, Aussies, and one South African, and enjoys the usual passtimes associated with that lifestyle, as well as sampling the eclectic London culture. In his spare time he writes, paints, and reads books about poets and atheism.
Panting, breathing, stumbling, running on and on, through the dust-ridden city; tripping over the endless screeds of rubbish which seemed to multiply daily, clogging the already-clogged veins of the city, and spilling out into the minds of anyone who lived there. Finnegan Lockhart was incessantly moving, always scrambling to hide from the city’s gangs and what ever else lived there. They would pursue anyone who looked like they had anything of even remote value, and sometimes they hunted people just for fun, for the sheer thrill of it. When he was a boy, he had seen them shoot a man in cold blood, and it had been just a matter of fun to them. He had watched, terrified, hiding in a large waste bin he had been playing in, as they’d hunted the man, who ran until he was exhausted. They had toyed with him before coolly shooting the man in the face and riding off on their old motorbikes, hysterical. He now realised that they were probably on some kind of drug, whatever they could find or make, what else was there to do in this city? This had been in the early days, before people had become afraid even to walk the streets, when the city was really just groups of drifters who got tired of drifting and settled there, like the dust. The two images Finnegan knew he would never forget were his parents and that poor man without a face.
Now it is my turn, he thought. No! I can’t go like this; I don’t want it to end! Becoming panicked he took a foolish turn and ended up in a dead end alleyway - no way out. Why did I do that? he wondered. I know this place better than that. I must be panicking. And he was. He heard the laughter of the gangsters, their unpredictability increased by the radiation they’d probably exposed themselves to. It was the latest craze. You get an old MT pulse generator (they’d been used to clean warships), and put your head in its emissions outlet for as long as you can without your brains frying. Usually about twenty seconds, but it didn’t matter - most would fry their brains anyway, eventually.
Finnegan stumbled over some dead bit of the city and fell headlong into the hard, dust-laden concrete. He looked up as the motors roared themselves around the corner. He looked around frantically for a hiding place - any place to run to. But there were none. Well, goodbye, Fin, you had a decent run of it anyway. Well, not really, but if you’re gonna damn well die you might as well go out moderately content. His only regret was the thought of his lady, waiting at home, who would never know what had happened, who would just go on waiting for him to come back until she could not come back either. Or perhaps so he feared. He did not want to leave her alone in this place. ‘I’m sorry darling,’ he whispered to the warm, heedless air. At least I’ll go with dignity, he resolved, no begging or cowering. The bastards will not get that from me.
‘Hello friend,’ one of them drawled, his face contorted into an ugly mask of too much gin, and bad radiation sores, ‘do you have anything interesting for us today?’
‘Yeah, we’ll trade it for not killing you,’ another interjected, his tone mocking but somehow jubilant. At this there was a round of low, grumbling laughter among some of the men.
‘No, we won’t,’ returned the first. He seemed to Finnegan to be the leader: he had the biggest bike, the biggest voice, and the biggest gun. ‘We’re going to kill ya, so you may as well get it over with quickly: you give me what you’ve got now, and I might just make it painless for ya.’
Finnegan looked up defiantly, his will determined to hold. He stared into the gangsters leaden eyes and saw pure malevolence, a human driven by selfishness and hedonism to the exclusion of care for anything, or anyone, else.
‘Go to
