Bumping Back at things in the Night... Autumn 2014
Urban Romance Science Fiction FREE Short story
Fantasy World Building News
alternate realities
YA
work in progress
Tales from a splintered mind
Meet 2 Authors with 1 Aim
A New Look to YOUNG BLOOD What’s Black, White & Red All Over?
Being story samples and the
Love & Monsters, Amerikan Dreams, Amerikan Nightmares, Black, White & Red All Over, The Ladies’ Paranormal & Adventure Club, Kippers for Tea and all characters contained within them © Rob Sharp 2014. These stories are works of fiction. The names, characters, places and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, business establishments, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved. This is a free magazine and may be downloaded and copied. The right for Robert Sharp to be
identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Further information can be obtained by contacting: robsharpavalon@googlemail.com
A “Boy reading comic” Production
I
n his new age of Self Publishing, there are now so many ways to get your stuff out there, but it’s catching an audience that’s the trick. Over the last few years I’ve been lucky enough to meet a few good publishers that like my work, but I finally feel the time is right to
general ramblings of an author with a split personality
combine everything I’ve been working on. Because that is the secret. Whether I’m writing Science Fiction, Young Adult or Crime as Rob, or steamy Romance and Supernatural stuff as Rikki, it’s all within the same shared universe. Characters and locations move between stories.
Where the joins occur, I’ll leave it to you readers to find. I’ve just got to find time to write it all. Love & Monsters combines numerous ISSUU ideas in one semi-regular magazine. When more short stories, novellas and novels are created, I’ll produce an issue 3, and so on.
Hopefully, if you like what you see and read you’ll track down my books and give them a try. After that, if you like the books, you’ll help spread the word. Because, there is a plan... Cover Pic: noor13yoon
avalon2020
The elfin
The mage
The vampyre The Shapeshifter
The earth-angel
NEW RELEASE!
Vampyre Kisses sampler
Will the Girls protect their own, even if Silver is guilty of murder?
I
PROLOGUE
t wasn’t so much the thick black blood pooling at the victim’s head that frightened the wits out of the young couple who discovered the body, or the expression of bland surprise on the pale, dead Vampyre’s face. Rather it was the fact that Arno Zyman, owner of a little coffee shop off Elizabeta Square, had been embedded into the stone wall, upside-down. Literally pressed into the side of the Ambrosia Emporium building where it lurched sharply at an acute angle to be flanked by Merovingian Alley. As the Emporium was next door to Little Transylvania’s one solitary Underground Station, the night’s revellers returning to the foggy Seven Streets had rapidly built up a sizable crowd, to gawk and be horrified at the same time, until the NYDP finally turned up. Riding a pair of chestnut mares from the precinct’s stables, Officers Stokes and Ra pushed the nosy civilians back from the crime scene, using their skittish mounts as living barriers, until the meat wagon arrived pulled by four black yearlings, and the Supernatural CIS unloaded themselves wearily from the carriage, little black
bags in hand. “Could be worse,” Emilio, the acting coroner of the unit, said with a stifled yawn. “If this were outside the Principality, all these ghouls would be flashing away with their mobile phones!” Officer Stokes, having unbuckled his riding helmet to reveal a mop of ginger hair, looked back at the mixture of Night People. “It still happens, but in a local way. I caught one enterprising Troll making a detailed sketch of the body! As near as we get to new technology, I guess.” “I hope you confiscated it from him. It would save us from doing the job,” replied the coroner with his usual deadpan delivery. Together they both scrutinised the body from close-up. Emilio Bakkara thumbed on a small dictaphone of indeterminable age, now powered by a tiny, sparking Firestone crystal instead of four Triple-A batteries. “Victim is a male, by his pale skin, a Vampire, American born with approximately ninety per cent of his bones and internal organs crushed by some tremendous exhibition of strength.” He paused the machine and pushed the victim’s dark blue lips back, revealing even more black blood. “Ah, that’s not good,” muttered the experienced crime officer. “What’s not good?” Stokes queried. “Some sick bastard has pulled both pairs of primary fangs out of his mouth, probably with a pair of pliers!” It was only then that the policeman noticed the eyeteeth missing from the Vampyre’s artificially whitened smile. “Looks like we’ve got a Vampyre Killer loose in the streets of Little Transylvania,” Stokes said bitterly. Times like this he struggled serving at Precinct 13. Hate-crimes always turned his stomach and ended up in a messy blood bath. “Azul save us all.” The CIS coroner crossed himself diagonally.
Although, another life ago before the Seven Streets had claimed him, Jimmy Stokes had been raised a good Catholic boy, he could only agree, mimicking the Dryad’s pagan actions. Time to break out the garlic oil and sharpen the wooden stakes. The last tooth collector they had caught for seventeen murders of the Undead had been a Vampyre himself, back in ’94. “Just this once, I would kill to give out a simple parking ticket!” Then, as the horse-drawn traffic moved around the gathering crowd and his Egyptian soul-eating partner struggled to hold them back, he knew that wasn’t going to happen any time soon . . . not in Little Transylvania, nestled like a cancer inside the sprawling cadaver that was New York City. Whether it was benign or deadly still remained to be seen.
I
Chapter One
t was raining fit to flush out the dead when the three shrouded figures staggered down the slick cobbled streets, stumbling and cursing, whilst they tried to support a fourth person between them. Considering the late hour and the fact that all the many bars and clubs nestled within Little Transylvania had long since shut, it was a little late for drunks. Which left the other alternative. The ladies were in some sort of distress. The four-story frontage of the Bavarian-style restaurant was closed to the vile elements, wooden shutters battened down and the door firmly bolted, as the group stumbled under its door arch, protecting them from the worse of the storm. The tallest girl with her long blond hair slicked to her face and body, hammered on the door fit to break it down. Eventually, flickering candlelight appeared at a few of the top crooked windows punched into the steeply pitched tiled roof. Finally a rotund figure carrying a lamp could be seen through the small windowpanes set in the door, which made the hand-blown squares of glass give off an odd blue tinge.
“Who ist there on this devil of a night?” shouted a heavily accented voice. “Lady Cleopatra Defoe . . . I have your daughter with me and she is sorely wounded!” Locks clacked and turned and great bolts were drawn back, without hesitation, but as the doors were flung open wide, Ygor Karnstein, in his oldfashioned striped nightshirt was holding not only a flickering oil lamp, but a double-barrelled blunderbuss too. “It ist actually you, after all these yearz . . .?” gasped the small, fat gentleman, his oiled hair scraped back in the best Bella Lugosi fashion, that nose a little pointed and those teeth beneath the dark red lips very, very sharp. “How you have ze audacity to come to my door?” Then his eyes fell on the group’s patient. Her face paler than death, her dark, raven-hair stuck to her face, her eyes closed and her breathing almost nonexistent. “Silver . . . my lost jewel! Quick, bring her in out of ze rain. Vounded, you say? Vhat dangerz have you dragged her into, cursed Earth-Angel?” He beckoned to them all with his gun. But then as they all stumbled into the porch, nearly squashing the old Vampyre against the restaurant’s inner door, he had a sudden change of heart. “Old Godz curse uz! Iz that an Elfin there with her pointed earz?” The blonde nodded, wiping the rain from her face with the back of her hand. “I am Anya—” “I haff no interest who you are, young lady! My daughter ist brought her by a cursed Earth-Angel and an Elfin! Even I did not believe she would zink that low! And who iz thiz one with the Nubian skin . . . a Daemon perhapz?” He pointed his gun at the black girl with the drenched dreadlocks. The fact that she was restrained in ancient cold iron manacles didn’t seem to faze him. He was still in shock at Cleopatra daring to show her face in the Principality after all these years.
“She’s human,” Cleopatra said, very nervous at the way the old Vampyre was waving that antique weapon about. Blunderbusses had a habit of going off by themselves and those trumpet-shaped barrels could contain anything from lead shot to silver nails. “Her name’s Artemis Brown and she is a known thief and pimp and is in our custody, connected with a rather complicated crime!” Ygor grunted. “She can come in. Pimpz and thievez I can cope with. High Elfin and Earth-Angelz should be all in the ground feeding the wormz!” “Don’t I get a say in anything anymore?” bitched Artemis, putting on an attitude. “No!” snapped the old Vampyre, poking her in the ribs with his gun. “I shall keep this one in chainz for security. Come back in a few dayz and we shall see if home-healing haz saved my Silver!” With that, he pushed Anya and Cleopatra back out into the terrible storm and slammed the doors in their faces. As the light grew dim through the windows, no amount of banging could get the Little Transylvanian restaurateur to open up again. “Ungrateful, saw-toothed bastard!” Anya growled. “At least we got her home. Raven’s place is only a few blocks away through one of the south gates . . . let’s move before we drown!” As they tried to pull their drenched coats closer to them, Cleopatra looked up at the distant lights of New York’s skyscrapers looming over the surrounding medieval streets. “Welcome back indeed,” she said to herself, hoping the other half of their party was having a better time at Raven LeCroix’s apartment, down in Greenwich Village. *** “Stand still or I’ll bash your brains out!” shouted the skinny teenager, waving a baseball bat around in the air like a mad thing.
With one huge catcher’s mitt of a hand, the bearded hunk of a man with his Stetson dripping rain everywhere, simply reached out and disarmed the young girl. “We used a key, doofus!” Jake Rivers said, herding the rest of his party inside the extensive apartment, still half-decorated due its owner’s fading interest in that domestic task. “Didn’t Raven text you that we were coming or something?” Mitch Vinny cowered back as the massive man, built like a WWE wrestler crossed with a Rottweiler, was followed by a young teen about her age, also in a Stetson, and an older girl in a really weird bright green coat and slouch hat. This third figure, like a refugee from a Cosplay convention, was hanging on to the back of Jake’s battered old leather jacket for grim death. She looked as if she was either on some illegal substance, or if not, she needed to be. “Raven texted?” muttered the frightened girl as they dripped all over her. “I’ve no credit on my phone. Where is she?” “Halfway up the Himalayas when we last talked to her, driving a classic Rolls-Royce, lucky stiff,” said the teen in the cowboy hat, shaking herself like a dog. As she removed said Stetson, a shock of green and blue hair tied in bunches exploded into the room. “Saaay,” gasped Raven’s slightly slow apprentice. “Are you Misty Rain? As in, ‘Dead girls don’t cry’ and ‘Bring your sword to the wedding?’” The cocky young superstar grinned crookedly. “So you like the classics, eh? What did you think of my second album?” “It stunk, dude!” “I thought so, too. Album three’s going back to my twisted roots. Should have never listened to those frigging studio execs! What does an over-the-hill thirty-year-old know about Progressive Cthulu Rock anyhow?”
As the two teenagers exchanged teen-speak interspersed with giggles, Jake tried to steer the girl in the green coat to the great semicircular coach. “Is he really dead?” Quick whispered, eyes like saucers, brain away in another room. “Is the Boogieman dead?” “Whoa!” Mitch exclaimed. “Is she out of it, or what?” “Away with the Daemons, I’m afraid,” Misty explained. “Bad gig at the Walpurgis Festival near Venice. Death and destruction and everything you’d rather not imagine. We found her on a chain being used and abused by some—” “Misty. Shut your mouth for two seconds. Crap keeps coming out of it!” Jake snapped. He nodded to the girl in the green coat, Jodie May Quick, who had just started to curl up in the foetal position. “You’re just making the Greencoat here worse!” The Rock Star looked mortified. “I didn’t mean anything by it, mate! I was just telling the apprentice here what happened.” “I know,” Jake grunted, realising he’d gone in a little too hard yet again. He missed his business partner, Jayne. She always had a softer touch with the brat. “Hey, it’s Mitch, isn’t it?” he tried to smile, addressing the still confused apprentice. “Raven said it would be okay if we crashed here for a few days . . . or a week. We’ve just bailed from a slightly stolen Zeppelin, er, forget about that last bit. See if you can rustle us up something to eat, there’s a good kid!” “Is he always this patronising?” Mitch asked her new best friend. “Oh, yes!” Misty Rain replied, with feeling. “We’ve beers in the cooler and there’s most of a pizza in the fridge and last night’s Chinese, I’ll nuke them in the microwave if that will do you?” “Like a dream, young lady! What’s the rest of you having?”
Ignoring the bodyguard’s bad sense of humour, the two teens left him trying to coax the Greencoat out of her near-catatonic state. Just as the food was ready, Cleopatra and Anya showed up like two more drowned rats, much to Jake’s disappointment. It meant even less food for him. But Cleopatra said she wasn’t hungry, which quickly cheered Jake up again. Despite the storm, still looking immaculate with her bobbed rich-red hair, dressed in a deep blue brocade edged dress, showing off her fine handtooled knee-length pirate boots, she sat on the couch next to Quick and tried to coax the girl back to reality. Walpurgis Night had been bad. She’d faced worse during her two centuries of reincarnation, but suddenly she had dragged all these new friends into danger. They had survived, but only just, no thanks to her other soul-self, the Angel who she kept locked deep inside her. But worse still, they were now all on the run from the Arcane Law. Somehow they’d crossed the Atlantic unchallenged in the police Zeppelin she had stolen, disembarking at Manhatten-4, one of the lesser known dirigible mooring masts in New York City. Then she’d turned the airship back around on automatic pilot, to head out to sea and confuse their pursuers. She’d like to believe she’d eluded the all-seeing eyes of the DMZ, that secretive bunch of bastards that passed for the law amongst all Supernatural folk, but they were just too damn good these days. Far too many of her old friends and acquaintances had decided it was easier to work for the DMZ than have them snapping at their heels. Ex-villains always made the best secret cops. She wondered vaguely which of her past acquaintances they’d put on her case and how far the DMZ was willing to go to bring her in. On both accounts, had her clairvoyant powers been working right, she would have been surprised. *** Outside in the rain, numerous men in black SWAT uniforms were already moving into a holding position around the building that contained Raven’s
apartment. Black vans were trying to look inconspicuous down adjoining alleyways. Of course, the human officers were under the illusion that they were working for some obscure black ops group from the CIA. Only their handler knew the truth of it, and his handler, safe on the other end of a comlink. “Negative-man to Control . . . all suspects have now landed. The Earth-Angel seems to be in her Beta form at the moment, but you know how quickly that can change!” The DMZ agent with the odd codename of ‘Negative-man’ was one of your usual raincoat brigade. With his collar turned up to meet his porkpie hat, if it hadn’t have been raining he would have looked at least thirty years out of date. At the moment, he just looked sensible, as the storm appeared ready to rumble on through the rest of the night and into the following day. But it was his face that attracted unwanted stares. You couldn’t see it for the bandages. “Affirmative, Negative-man. Keep all human conscripts alert and on their toes. We are filing for ‘Detain and Liquidate’ warrants—for the Earth-Angel, the High Elfin and the Werewolf—as we speak. Misty Rain has been declared off-limits, even though she has now been identified as an immortal goddess. Better not take out one of America’s best-loved teen Rock-Stars. That would never do!” Brilliant, thought Mr Stuart grimly, some desk-jockey with a sick sense of humour. But the warrants worried him. DMZ was through playing hardball with Cleopatra and her merry crew. It would be interesting to see how the Earth-Angel wiggled her way out of this one. Or should that adjective have been, ‘flapped’? ***
The full book can be downloaded from:
soulmatepublishing.com
or from Amazon, or Barnes & Nobel
Update on the Ladies’ Paranormal & Adventure Club Changes for the Girls’ Club.
Just as Book 3 ‘Vampyre Kisses’ emerges from the darkness, the lovely ladies at Soul Mate Publishing have decided to give the series a boost by releasing a new cover for Book 1 ‘Young Blood’, which pulls the whole series into line.
If you like the feisty characters featured in this series, there are still a couple of short stories available for FREE, via special ISSUU connections.
Jesse Arkwright and the Spider Temple
(Featuring the legendary adventurer, Jesse Arkwright, from Vampyre Kisses) tells of one of her earlier escapades back in 1934. Lost in the Amazon jungle, having been rescued by a passing boat, what really happened to Jesse in her missing week? As she relates her strange tale to her rescuers, it all began with a fellow explorer named, Johnny Sorrow. The trouble is Sorrow has been missing presumed dead for several years! http://issuu.com/avalon2020/docs/jesse_ arkwright__short_story_
Kiss-Chase
(Featuring werepanther Jayne Constantine and her werewolf business partner, Jake Rivers) is a tall tale from Jayne’s military days, when she was a member of an odd mix-match of Supernaturals known as, Finnegan’s Irregulars. Stranded and alone in a Fictional Forest after the enemy attacks, how did Jayne survive 24 hours where everything that moves was trying to eat her… well, nearly everything!
http://issuu.com/avalon2020/docs/kiss_ chase_short_story
in progress...
Book #4 The Ladies’ Paranormal and Adventurer Club: GHOST LOVERS
Little Transylvania, nestling in the heart of New York, had always been a weird place, even before people and daemons began to vanish from its streets. But the Girls’ Club has problems of its own, as with two friends missing, they decide to move into the Zodiac Building, a sorcerer’s Keep with strange and spooky legends. Even on their first day under its 13-sided roof, their new home begins to show its dark side, as it is an anchor to a phantasmagorical Bridge that leads from here… to there, and takes people on a one-way journey. With Raven missing her workaholic boyfriend and trying to become their new leader, Silver struggling with her own relationship and kleptomania, and Jayne with newborn daughter Kitten splitting from her lover (who just happens to be a god), they are not prepared for Samantha Katz, the girl without a heart. Nor Kitten’s new nanny… an ex-daemonic warrior incarcerated in the body of a Victoria’s Secret model, called Honey. New girls, new perils, new lovers. Situation far from normal!
glory keller ran away three years ago... when she came back, worlds had changed
Amerikan Nightmares #2
ROB SHARP
Things I’m writing at the moment
Book #4 of The Ladies’ Paranormal & Adventure Club
Meet Samantha Katz, the Girl with no Heart... and her Fey friend!
Rikki Sharp
Amerikan Nighmares Book 2: BROKEN GLASS
When teenage runaway Glory Keller returned home after four years missing, to say she had totally changed was an understatement. The tattoos and the sword came as a bit of a shock to her mother. Her father was more concerned when Glory’s horse began to eat his prize roses. But it was what she whispered in her younger brother’s ear that should have concerned them. “You’re Next...” On the other side of the Glass, through unseen tunnels, moving doors and mystic portals, exist other worlds. Dark worlds, alien worlds, worlds if not run by the Guilds, then heavily influenced by them. There crooked slavers, fallen angels and daemonic businessmen have a market for young runaways, such as Glory Keller and her slightly insane BFF, January. Then there was the hunting beasts to run from. The carnivores. And darkest of them all was the man without a face who had marked Glory as his own… Zeitgeist.
OUT NOW!
BW&RAO sampler
Five corporate legbrakers walked into a Curio shop in Greenwich Village and died - violently. Three years later, they came back to life again.
Epitaph November 18th 2012 The Tourists liked London. As with most of the major cities scattered around the Looking-Glass Earth, it had its fair share of secret streets, impossible rooms linked to other realities via wormholes, and moving buildings with a spiteful will of their own. Such an invisible spider’s web of fickle things allowed the orange-suited timetravellers to set up their power bases freely and without prejudice. Saint Alice in the Fields, a perfect example of a square-towered Norman church. caught between busy modern streets and blighted by air pollution, loomed over the far end of that most secretive of places, Methuselah Square. It was Summer Breeze’s first mission into the past and she was understandably rather nervous.
Crouching down, Polaris re-buttoned the nine year old’s coat correctly, checked she’d got a bottle of drinking water with her and some candy in case her blood sugar dropped. “Now, you are sure you’re alright with this?” said the stunning young goddess kindly. “It needs to be done,” chirped the girl with white-blonde hair. “John Savage has got himself lost inside the Ouroboros. Someone has to jaunt inside the belly of the beast and lead him back out.” “It should be me…” began Polaris. Almost maternally, Summer Breeze placed one hand on her friend’s shoulder. “We don’t know how Ouroboros would react to you doing your thing inside of it. That’s why I’m going. I’m smaller… I’ll create less fictional backwash.” “Heather could go, or Zen, if we can sober him up for long enough.” “There are only five of us in the Looking-Glass Earth who can naturally travel through Time at the moment, who understand what the Void is saying and who can answer back. But mum says the Enemy has been doing this for 200 years and is trying to erase her rivals. I’m too small to register in her black mirror thingies!” “When did you grow up and get so clever?” asked Polaris with a smile. As the two conversed, literally within their own spatial-bubble, the world moved around them as if they weren’t there, while Polaris tightened the straps on Summer Breeze’s backpack. “I’ll be fine,” the girl repeated. “Besides, you’ve forgotten, I’ve got a special friend.” Slipping off her pack, Summer unzipped it and delved inside. With a flourish, she pulled a raggedy blue object, which promptly let out a violent sneeze. It looked like a well-loved toy rabbit, until it objected rudely to being hidden in
the backpack. “You try being folded in freaking half!” complained Mr Snuggles, Summer Breeze’s constant companion since being small. “It smells of freaking cheese and old peoples’ socks… and I can’t stand cheese!” “This is why I hid you, Snuggles,” said Polaris. “That mouth of yours! We’re still not sure where you came from, but in this Reality and the ones surrounding it, toys can’t move and talk!” “That’s your loss, sister,” grumped the bunny, staring far too long at Polaris’ fabulous cleavage. “Anyhoo, what the kid says goes for me. We’re a team. When the chips are down, I can deal the rough stuff, sweet-cheeks.” “Being a pervert doesn’t make me warm to you one iota.” “Well you shouldn’t be built like a Victoria’s Secret model of steroids! I yam what I yam, to quote a famous sailor – end of story.” “This isn’t helping John Savage one little bit!” shouted Summer Breeze. Polaris closed her eyes and counted to 10. Never work with children and animals – even toy stuffed ones. She summoned up Power 3 from her arsenal of 99 super-human abilities, total global wisdom, then she opened her eyes again. “Go. Get gone, now, before I change my mind. If your mother trusts you to do this, who am I to doubt you?” Cuddling Mr Snuggles close, Summer Breeze waved a cheery bye-bye, and with hardly a sound, vanished. Polaris stood up, praying to all the gods that she’d done the right thing. This was a Game of two halves, with two star players. John Savage, aka The Sentinel, re-tooled for the 21st Century as a feisty fighting-machine only to be gunned down before his time. Then after three years in a morgue draw, along with four team-mates, he’d come back from the dead.
Now E=mc2 had hired a paranormal detective to track Savage down. Anthony Leibowitz, known to the precious few as, Leibowitz the Younger (on account of his dad did this gig before him – long before him), was an obsessive collector of the strange. Aged about 128, and he kept exotic wildlife in his pockets. Especially very smart mice. In the Grand Scheme of Things, both men were as important as each other. Both had individual paths to blaze from the moment Savage smashed his way out of that morgue draw. Right from this precise second, as Polaris stood alone in Methuselah Square, through to the Time Wars of 2022 and into the blind-beyond. People like her and the mysterious Tourists, those orange-suited Chrononauts that were beginning to make a nuisance of themselves, were stood behind these two players, cheering them on. But the moment was rapidly approaching when Polaris no longer needed to hide and could be her true self. Hell, she was the woman of the stars after all. The girl with 99 powers, and counting. Standing tall, the secret heroine shot up into the sky at Mach 1, breaking the sound barrier as she reached escape velocity. Then she took a left turn and jaunted back to the year 2003, when all the fun had begun. <Look out, Black Isis…> she ‘pathed into the void. <I’m coming for you!>
Chapter 1 - White Light September 3rd 2003 The President visiting Dallas was turning into a whole PR nightmare. These were the boom times in the United States of Amerika, no matter which way you spelled it, but as the mid-terms were coming around and
Arnie had his eye on a third stint in the Whitehouse, it had been decided to make a grand show of things to erase bad memories from the past. Losing one good President to the gun in Dealey Plaza had left a scar across the heart of the nation. It was time to erase that mark. Litta Graff had been assigned to the on-air team at CBS, as a program researcher. She was to be based in a downtown office in contact with the live crew, to feed them facts and figures about the Kennedy’s and every minutia that happened on November the 22nd 1963, as and when gaps appeared in the live broadcast. “Christ, the eyes and ears of the world are on this thing today and I’m shuffling papers in the research team like a fucking intern!” she groused to her co-worker, Arlene as they logged in to their individual work stations. “Watch your mouth, Litta,” hissed Arlene, a thirty-something bottle-blonde who was looking forward to becoming a Cougar in the very near future, what with all these young stud executives filling up the company. “You nearly got the axe over that crap with Senator Greystoke. Think yourself lucky you’ve still got a job!” Litta bit her bottom lip and nodded. She’d gone up against the might of international corporation, E=mc2 on the trail of corruption, and lost, big time. On reduced pay and her career in tatters, she still sensed Greystoke’s eyes on her, all of the time. Those odd clicks on her home phone when she picked it up and a series of dark cars sitting outside her apartment were beginning to freak her out. “I just wish we were out in the open, where we could see the cavalcade live, rather than stuck in this pokey office, that’s all,” she said bitterly. Arlene squeezed her arm. “Never mind, honey. You’ll catch yerself a real cute guy someday soon with a fat pay check, and then you can kiss this crappy job goodbye. With those sassy Chinese eyes and your tanned complexion, you tick all the right boxes!” Litta nodded, tying to ignore the slightly racist comment. I don’t want to give
up the job… I want my old life back, she thought bitterly, logging on through the infranet to the live crew. The hour of the parade grew nearer. President Schwarzenegger’s Show-biz chums had done him proud as dozens of interviews were being held in the strobes of the paparazzo’s cameras. The latest estimate said there were 317 individual camera crews from TV companies all around the world. It was the largest live televised event of the decade. Just the time and place to make a statement. Since her obsession with bringing Senator John Clayton Greystoke to some sort of justice had only been aborted by her fall from grace, Litta had not slowed down in her quest for knowledge one jot. In fact she had blown a large part of her personal savings on various bits of hi-tech kit. The irony of it being, most of it was from the One Stop Science Shop, E=mc2, of which the Senator was CEO. In the bag between her feet as she tapped away at her keyboard, trying not to lose the will to live, was an Ultrawave Tracer. She had paid a fortune for the illegal parts of this device and was still struggling with the science behind it. Not working on any normal satellite phone network, this seemed to be a private wavelength of communication for various secret law enforcement agencies and VIPs such as Greystoke. She had first seen the CEO use one of these whilst spying on him the previous summer. It was normally a TV phone as small as a wristwatch, but Litta’s contraband unit was a hand-held set as big as a games console. She had it scanning the strange airwaves permanently on days like this, trying desperately to hack into something important. The device picked that day to suddenly burst into life. “Samaritan 5, this is 17. We have the green light for the Terminator. He’s on the move…” crackled a clear voice suddenly from under the table. “What the hell…?” Litta’s friend gasped, as the diminutive reporter grabbed for her bag and stumbled to her feet. “Cover for me, Arlene. Something I’ve
got to do!” Then she was away through the fire door and heading up towards the roof via the stairs. “Honey, you’ll lose your job!” the blonde shouted after her, but it was too late, Litta Graff was already becoming part of history. The sun up on the roof of the office block was blisteringly hot as she burst out of the fire escape door, her custom-made machine in hand. By the sound of things, she had picked up a waveband being used by the President’s secret service, although she’d never heard of Samaritan agents before. Leaning over the parapet, Litta had a perfect view down onto the route for the cavalcade. Crowds already lined both sides of the road, waving their stars and stripes and blowing plastic horns like it was a public holiday. She grinned at her illegal device, as coded messages moved backwards and forwards. “You beauty!” she laughed. But boy was it hot up there. She shielded her eyes from the sun and blinked up into the clear sky through her dark fringe. Was it her imagination, but was there a dark spot hiding in that solar disk? Eyes streaming, she had to look away, as the convoy of cars had begun to ease its way down Dealey Plaza. Switching the camera on her device to magnify, she zoomed in on that familiar craggy face, as Arnie sat in the back of an open topped limo, performing to the crowd. The first gunshots came from a building directly opposite from where Litta was watching. She actually saw the flash before she heard the sounds. Three swift shots in close succession. The bodyguards instinctively hauled the President down to safety, as his driver slumped forward over the steering wheel. Then the armoured fold-back roof began to rapidly close over the president’s car. The Police escort moved in, but even as they did so, a second maniac appeared out of the crowd with an automatic machinegun opening fire on the line of VIPs. He was joined by a third, then a fourth from further behind the convoy, catching the Police out, at least one officer going down and not moving.
Then more terrorists opened up from shop-front positions, because that was what this was; a terrorist attack and it was turning into a bloodbath. Breathless with shock, Litta Graff had already hit ‘record’ on her device. All she could do was watch with the detached eagle-eye of a reporter. Then he came out of the sun, gliding on the rays of light. A man standing in the air as if it was a natural thing to do, clothed all in white with an impossibly long, folded metallic cloak slung over the right shoulder and a massive solar ray shield holding it in place, glinting like the sun herself. Swinging down over the city, the man-with-a-purpose passed right by where Litta Graff was hiding. She looked into the face of one of the secret world’s most powerful posthumans. His black muscular face, head totally shaven, was ringed with a golden mirror visor. The way he looked down over the thousands of faces lining the roads below him, was unfathomable. As if they were just ants beneath him, was what flashed through Litta’s mind. Standing on light, he soaked it all in, picking up wavelengths the reporter couldn’t even imagine. Then, in a flurry of movement, adjusting the golden visor, he began to fire tight laser beams into the crowd, cauterising the gunmen like the cancers they were. Touching down right next to the President’s car, he bent over a wounded policeman as another hail of bullets rattled off the roadway. Several must have hit him as he protected the man, but they seemed to make no impression on the stranger. It was only now he was in scale with the rest of the world that everyone could see how tall he was – well over six foot eight, probably heading towards seven foot when he stood tall and proud. There was a flash of light from one open hand and a ball of fire rolled across the road and engulfed that particular gunman. Then he went in search of the rest of the group; 13 terrorists in all, taking them out one by one. Job done, caught by the world’s cameras, he rose majestically back into the air, flicking that insane cape behind him. As he retraced his steps and flew right over Litta, she suddenly found the courage to cry out to this man in white.
“Hey! Big guy! What’s your name?” He looked down at her as he drifted by. It was as if he could see right through her flesh and bones and into her very soul. “You can call me, Corona. Or maybe, the Solarnaut is better… How’s that sound, Ms Graff?” Then he was away back into the blinding sun, already a living legend. With a trembling finger she clicked an open channel on her homemade device. “This is Litta Graff reporting for… well, just reporting. If you can hear this, if anyone can hear this, the mystery-man in white’s name is, the Solarnaut, and he just saved the President’s life, right here in Dallas, Texas. We’ve waited a long time for a hero like him, and as an Amerikan citizen of mixed race, I am proud to tell the world… the Solarnaut is black!” She joined in the cheering and the waving from the insane crowds below as her hero vanished back into the solar glare. Then the Ultrawave crackled in her hand and sprang into life again. “Miss Graff? Well done, Miss Graff… We got your report, short and sweet though it was, loud and clear. My name is Aaron Baxter… I own a little outfit named, Global News. Do you fancy a new job?” And the Looking-Glass Earth would never be the same again. ***
The full book can be downloaded NOW from:
fiction4all.com (From September 1st 2014, also from Amazon or Barnes & Nobel)
Kippers for Tea short story
There comes a time in every father’s life where he has to have that ‘special conversation’ with his son. You go clammy with the anticipation of it. The hairs on the back of your neck bristle in electric excitement. But that day, that warm Friday in May, as my turn came to take Peter through his right of passage, I could only think back to when my dad told me the secret of the Bay. The day my life turned around and I was given those first hints of what responsibilities were about to be heaped upon my skinny shoulders. Where my story and Peter’s became one with this unique, magical place. *** Saint George’s Bay had sat on the west coast of Yorkshire for... well, as long as Britain had been an island, I suppose. A collection of stone built cottages and terraced houses, thrown like some giant’s dice down the rugged, heather covered hillside, to meet the grey mud flats and the cold Irish Sea. Farmers had used the land around the horseshoe shaped cove for arable and live stock for generations without number. But it was chiefly a fishing village, with the five or so boats spending half their lives sitting on the hardened mud, anchored at a jaunty angle, waiting for the tide to come back in.
As a nipper, I felt the sea was part of the land breathing. Those bubbling breakers chasing each other further and further up the flats in soft sighs, smoothing out the worm casts that had been magically created since the last tide went out. Tickling round your toes like liquid laughter, ice cold and sharp. Making the lads whoop and do a silly dance to get out of the way of the next wave and bringing out shrill screams from the lasses. Why did God make young lasses squeal so? It really used to get on my wires when I was nine. Just the age of my Peter, on that special Friday. Way back then, me and my best mate, Ivan Shufflebottom used to chase the Casey sisters down through the twisted back streets of the village, running from curved cobbles on to flat Yorkshire slate, ducking under full washing lines and banging against blossoming hanging baskets. Through muddy puddles by the pealing back yard gates, sending cats and dogs running for their lives. We were the knights of the Bay, and no evil could harm us. The constant downward spiral of the streets ment once you had begun that epic run, there was no stopping you, until you staggered, corked-legged onto the concrete quay-side, breathless and laughing. And all the way down, the sisters would scream. What a bloody racket! Whilst, outside the Bubble, as my dad had called the fold in reality, the world passed us quietly by. To all intents and purposes, life in Saint George’s Bay was stuck in the groove of 1938. And there wasn’t a soul who lived inside the Bubble that cared. It had been Grandpa Hardcastle that had first drawn up the plans for the life buoys. Clever sod was Grandpa – the only member of the family to leave the Bay and go to Manchester University. In 1921, for a northern farmer’s lad, that was some going. The buoys were odd, ugly spheres of metal, rivetted shut to make them water tight and painted red; like little old fat faced men. The Generals, Grandma Hardcastle had called them, when Grandpa first showed the assembled village what they could do. The name kind of stuck. He had placed four of them out on the mud flats, around Simon Barclay’s oldest fishing boat. With yards of electricity cables stretching up the sands,
as the tide had begun its endless race inland, he had pulled one of those ruddy great switches in his garden shed... and the boat had vanished. “It’s a pinch in the structure of reality,” Grandpa had tried to tell me, years later, when I was seven. “Things get bent around it, like light and the curvature of space. Inside the Bubble, everything outside appears frozen from the moment the Generals are turned on!” “So the rest of the world has moved on to the 1980’s... and they have no idea that we are here?” I asked, still not really getting to grips with this thing. “None what so ever...” Grandpa nodded gently, chewing on the stem of his old pipe, a satisfied smile on his face. *** It had been a unanimous decision to seal the Bay off from the rest of Great Britain. 1938 saw Nazi Germany feeling his oats. Moving out to reclaim old territories and in a bloody mind for empire-building. At that time, Grandpa Hardcastle had been working for the army and for Whitehall. It was an open secret that the country was were preparing for war, but certain factions of the government wanted a back-up plan. Several back-up plans in fact. The idea that little pockets of England could be sealed away, where the army could regroup and plan a resistance movement in the event of a full-blown German invasion, appealed to our warlords’ devious minds. As Grandpa had invented the means to achieve that, Saint George’s Bay was put forward as the ‘test hamlet’ to disappear. This was all co-ordinated through the SIS and a little known branch calling itself, Department 5. So little known that after the war was over, Department 5 vanished without a trace too, taking all its crazy ideas and fanciful missions with it. According to military historians, it never existed – so neither did we. After 1946, the Bay and everyone in it became truly invisible. Of course, we only found out about this later... much later. But I’m getting stuff out of order. Back to Grandpa’s amazing life buoys.
With everything being hush-hush in those twelve months before the war, the Bay was perhaps the only village to be finally surrounded with a ring of eighty two red buoys – some even anchored out to sea, to give us a sizable area in which to fish. For, cut off from the rest of the world, we would have to support our selves in every way until the ‘all clear’ came through. But it never did. So on December 4th, 1938, Father Cummings, the village priest, pulled the series of switches that split us apart from the rest of the world. It was that simple. Of course, the story went that the invasion of England was already under way. When anyone inside the Bubble looked out, it was as if the world were a picture, still and quiet. The weather, the seasons and the cycle of day and night still affected us, even though the outside appeared frozen in time. Plus, the tide went in and out, which was a bloody good job seeing we were a fishing community. Just don’t ask me to explain the math. I’ve looked over Grandpa’s original figures which I’d rescued from dad’s bonfire until my eyes ached, numerous times, and they still make no sense. He was a blooming genius, make no mistake. But the villagers had been told that if the buoys were ever turned off, for any reason, that was it. We would be dropped back into normal space to be at the mercy of whatever lay out there. The Generals would burn out once the power failed and could never be turned back on again. That was the reason we had out own steam driven power station on Warburton’s farm, a set of undersea turbines out near the mouth of the horseshoe bay and the line of windmills up on the cliffs behind the scattered houses. Belts, buttons and braces, my dad called them. Three independent power supplies to ensure the Generals never died. That was Grandpa again. As I said, he was the clever bugger in the family. Give my dad his due, in the 70 years we’ve hidden away, two buoys have had
to be replaced whilst the whole system was live. Turning the new General on, then turning the old, failing one off. My dad changed both of them. There’s another one, number 77, beginning to flutter up on the moor. Hope I’ve got the same steady hand as my dad when the time comes to change that bugger. Anyway – for three months before Father Cummings pulled that switch, the army had helped construct a series of underground petrol tanks for the village’s domestic needs. But only Doctor Black’s car and the volunteer fire brigade’s van were ment to use it. The rest was eked out to power our original electrical turbine station, before Grandpa converted it to steam. The army also insured the two underground streams were pure and filtered, our precious supply of fresh water, other than the rain barrels everyone fitted to their houses. Medicines were stockpiled, food stuffs like sugar and tea brought in by the truck load. But they ran out eventually, which was where my family were forced to step in. The years drifted by inside our little balloon. Sometimes people talked about what might be happening outside. Had Germany really won the war? Was the country a barren battlefield or still a green and pleasant land? But mostly, they just thanked my family for being safe in their invisible habitat and to hell with the rest of the world. I only just remember Grandpa these days, which is sad. We used to sit up on the cliff tops, with the windmills whirring musically behind us and the heather rolling like a sea of purple in the stiff sea breeze. He’d tell me all sorts of things that he still wanted to do. Stuff about rockets shooting passed the moon and flying in machines without wings. To a wide-eyed seven year old, it was just the stuff of fairy-tales. But when he died in his sleep at the ripe old age of eighty four, without all those wonderful ambitions done, dad and me cleared out the sheds which he had built behind our family house as his laboratories. The things we found in there. The drawings of cities under the sea and buildings in the clouds. Dad burned most of them that very afternoon in a big fire on the field, except what I squirrelled away. I never did understand why. I think he was
frightened by the products of his father’s amazing mind. But I digress. The coming of my Peter’s special day was making me think of times past. As I looked out from Grandpa’s workshop, typing with two fingers on my new iMac, updating the family diary, I could just see the rusting hulk of the Potemkin, lying on its side out in the bay. It always amused me that the one set of visitors that Saint George’s Bay should get were not the Nazis, nor the Americans, but a lost Russian submarine. In Outside Time, the year was 1974. For us inside the Bubble, we still basked in the endless year of 1938. It rather put the wind up our parents to discover the Bubble wasn’t a bubble after all, but a dome. In a particularly nasty winter sea, the disabled nuclear submarine had been washed under the weakest point of our protective distortion field and then beached, up on the mud flats. Funny thing was, when the Russian crew found out where they were and what our village was, they didn’t want to leave. To escape from the constant threat of the Cold War was a blessed relief. It was through them that the village as a whole finally discovered that Germany had lost the war. But the political unrest between all these megalomaniacs with their nuclear missiles just the press of a button away, made the community all the more determined that the village should remain hidden. That was why my best mate’s name is, Ivan. And his son, Gregore, is Peter’s pal. The sailors, of both sexes, soon settled to the village way of life. There was a knock on the lab door and Peter finally wandered in. Covering the white, gleaming computer up that really shouldn’t have been there with an old towel, I smiled at his uncertainty. It echoed my own nervousness on the day my dad let me know the Big Secret. “You ready?” I asked him, ruffling his sun-bleached hair. “Guess so...” he replied. Obviously he’d rather be out in the fields with his mates, or squelching down on the mud flats, digging up lugworms for bait.
“C’mon, trouble!” I tried to make light of the thing. But even now after all these years, my heart was in my mouth. We walked down the back stairs that had been carved and cemented into the cliff face over three hundred years before, towards Ruggle’s Cave. Peter was silent, whilst I prattled on with a nine year old’s nerves about the weather and the day’s catch. The cave was cold and dark, as usual. Once a winter store for fishing tackle, it had been out of bounds to all but my family since Father Cummings pulled the switches back in ‘38. Old crates and the remains of the army supplies which Grandpa and his brothers had built every one of the Generals with, were still strewn around the dry cave floor. I unlocked the wire mesh cage at the back of the cave marked, ‘Dangerous! Poison!’ with the old iron key dad had passed on to me the night he died of Influenza in 1993. I could sense Peter shaking in his wellington boots next to me. “It’s ok son. It’s just your time...” I tried to reassure him. “Time for what, dad?” he winged. “Wait and see,” was all I could come up with. Lighting an oil lamp with Grandpa’s old petrol lighter, I held it high to show a winding flight of worn steps. Steps that went back up again, through the rear of the cave. Up and up, under the ring of the Generals’ influence and our protective bubble. We were taking a father and son trip to Outside Time. The breeze was just as stiff beyond the bubble as it had be inside, when we eventually came up between two great boulders, near the abandoned Grange Barn. Peter didn’t seem to realise that we were now no longer inside the Generals’ distortion field, until I physically turned him around. “Christ, dad! Where’s the village gone? Where’s the Bay? Where’s the Russki sub?”
“Language, son,” I gently chastised him, gently. “That is what the outside world sees of us, Peter. Bugger all. Now I want you to see what the outside world has become whilst we’ve lead our sleepy little lives in the safely of Saint George’s Bay.” I unlocked the padlock on the old barn door and pulled the tarpaulin off my bike. It was a gleaming four wheeled beast which I’d purchased through the usual disguise, barely eighteen months ago. I have to admit, I loved that machine. “Cor, dad! She’s a beauty!” Peter stroked the gleaming red metal surface, eyes as bright as penny marbles, as we clambered aboard the custom made double seat. “It’s called a quadbike, son. Certain things have moved on a bit since your Great Grandpa Joshua’s day.” It was those ‘certain things’ that I’d come to show him. It was time for my son to see what had become of the outside world. We cut across the moor where the old road used to be, before the army covered it over and took down all the signs, as they had left us that final time three weeks before the Bay vanished. Before Saint George’s Bay was edited from all the Ordinance Survey maps. Soon the modern motorway lay ahead of us like a long, grey snake, cutting its way through the countryside. The sound of an endless parade of futuristic cars reached us even on the moor tops, as the new houses and their streets and their sounds inched ever closer to the Bay that wasn’t there, year on year. I told him briefly about the great advances in computer technology, which seemed to push people further into themselves rather than create a more sociable world. I told him of the millions and millions of people that now inhabited this land and about the pollution and the rising crime rate and the wars they still caused – always the wars. And most confusingly for him, I had to explain the value of money. But above all, I had to get across the general inhumanity of man to man. The things the outsiders had gained and the things they had lost.
“Our family has been in charge of this secret since 1938, Peter. Sometimes, the odd person in the village feels he just has to leave our tiny, stable, quiet community – for whatever reason. This is where Great Grandma Hardcastle’s legacy kicks in...” Then I told him about his clever Great Grandma Betty. How, even though Great Grandpa Joshua was a genius in many fields of science, he wore odd socks every day of his life and couldn’t cook a simple meal even if he was starving hungry. Betty was the brains behind the brains. She had invested every penny that was owned by the whole village just before her husband made the Saint George’s Bay vanish from reality. Because we wouldn’t need money in our bubble community. She’d gathered it all in and invested in a vast array of stocks and shares – most of them with American companies. Grandma had gambled that if the Nazis did invaded Great Britain, our old pounds, shillings and pence would be declared worthless. That was why she had converted most of the village’s cash into American dollars. If they didn’t invade and the war dragged on, the country would have become bankrupt. So the USA idea still held sound. With that growing nest-egg, as the whole world’s currency market changed, year upon year, it gave us a fallback plan. Grandma realised even with the stores of food and petrol, if this quiet little life of ours was to have any longevity, we would eventually have to interact in a secret way with the rest of the world – whoever owned it. Which is what we Hardcastles did. That was our sacred trust. With Grandma’s legacy, we secretly bought more medicines and certain food stuffs using one of half a dozen fake companies. Plus the odd luxury or two, like the laptop hidden in the shed back home. Peter was going to be amazed by the internet. First my father, then myself had brought fresh supplies over the moors in the pitch black, using our new diesel tractor, which was also hidden in the barn.
Now that was a ride and a half, I can tell you. The ‘back door’ had be left open on purpose for such forays into the outside world. Grandma had persuaded her genius husband to do this one small thing on her advice. It had also been left incase anyone wanted to leave the closed community. Of the seven people who left Saint George’s Bay, swearing on the bible and their family’s lives that they would never reveal our existence to a soul, five returned within the year of their departure. One died in a car crash in Germany of all places and the final man, as far as we know, is still living a happy life out amongst the modern world. These are some of the things that I told my son, Peter, as we stood there through that long afternoon hidden on the edge of the moor, as the evening rush hour on the motorway began to build up. I tried to be honest with him, emphasising the things he would have to leave behind if he decided to explore this new and exciting world. That you would live in a house, on a street, in a suburb, within a city, where you would be lucky if you knew your next-door neighbour’s name, let alone the two hundred and seventy three villagers that were gathered around you like an extended family. Sometimes they were a little too familiar, but that was the way we liked it. Living eternally in 1938. In a place where anyone helped bring in the catch at the end of the day, if they were free from their own chores. Where the whole village helped the Johnson family harvest the crops with their two steam-driven tractors, and we all enjoyed the harvest festival afterwards, set up on the old quay. Where you never needed to lock your house door. Where the last police officer we had needed retired in 1951. Where you were safe with the people who loved you... Peter listened, as much as a nine year old could, as he watched the procession of bright, shiny cars move past and the day’s light began to fade. “So.” I asked him, with my heart firmly in my mouth. “What do you think of
this outside world?” He thought for a moment or two, I’ll give him that. Then he turned in the twilight and grinned at me. “Is mum doing kippers for tea?” Peter finally came out with. “ Guess so... It’s Friday after all, isn’t it? “Good. I’m hungry. Can we go back now, dad? All those people down there are giving me a headache.” And I couldn’t help but agree with him. Mounting the quadbike a second time, we turned our back on the modern world and began the journey back to 1938. “But can I ride this bike when I’m a bit older, can I, dad?” I sighed, thankfully. That was more like it, Peter, my son. “Maybe...” I gave the dad’s answer. “Just on the moor top...” he continued his pestering, which was his current job as a nine year old. Just as I had with my father, when I first saw the petrol driven tractor he drove to show me the rest of the world. But this time, tea called us both home. Back inside the Bubble, as it would for many years to come, God willing. Kippers for tea then maybe a game of draughts and then to bed. There would be fishing nets to be mended early in the morning. END
out there...
Books knocking on Publisher’s doors at the moment.
A TOUCH OF MIDNIGHT (YA)
After the Red Storm traps Sarah Starling with her brother and sister in their crumbling London home, they emerge to find Wild Magik has replaced Science. From hidden worlds, the faerie Sidhe have migrated to our reality and now own the Earth. Two years later 17-year-old Sarah Whispers is the wife of a shady Sprite, Jack-of-Nightingales. Her siblings have been spirited away, yet there are other teenagers living free up on Zenith Heights. The talk is of revolution but Sarah faces her biggest challenge yet… death. Hidden between Life and Death she meets the ephemera. As their latest recruit, her new name is Sarah Midnight. Everyone talks of pushing the Fey back into the sea, but all Sarah wants to do with her new powers, is find her brother and sister. At the moment, with GWL Publishing.
DARK
STAR HEROES Book 1 The Art of War
DARK STAR HEROES (YA)
The year is 4879. The artificial intelligence known as Ten, are trying to put genetically modified humanity back together again to explore the other half of the galaxy, by enrolling Earth’s scattered children into the Saratoga Program. Caruso Ives from the asteroid belts lives in his antigravity chair. He wants to explore the Dark Stars, as does rich-girl Desiree Day, neo-fascist Hauser Siegfried and tech-head Imra Singh. There are others heroes of course, hiding in plain sight. The most controversial being Chevaux Noir, the 4 Horsemen, who everyone used to think were characters from fiction. Amongst all the book learning, the teen-crushes and the space wars, it’s sometimes difficult to tell who are heroes and who are villains. Currently with Tor Books.
THE RED KISS
Someone is spreading the truth in a society founded on lies. Someone has worked out how the system works, leaving their little mark everywhere. X marks the spot. It could be you. It could be me. Because someone in the East End of a very strange London is bringing the whole bitter fabric crashing down… Sealed with a Red Kiss.
Albert Einstein Ate my Baby! (Short Story)
It’s 1960’s America, where in the world of Supermarket Tabloids, the more outrageous a story the better. But when editor Pat Wolowsky stares at the latest headline of his own rag, The Village Investigator, and wonders who the hell wrote that piece garbage, he realises it’s time to investigate his own story. Enter a world where Gonzo Science is making a mockery of Reality, and Fact is being rudely usurped by Fiction! Accepted by BTS EMAG
A Political thriller (or maybe just a love story), set in a world not that different from our own, when a Street Angel named Ruby rescues failed businessman, Terry Mage from the particularly deadly Organised Crime. Whilst the poor get poorer and the corrupt Police State just looks on, who is X, the one person fighting for what is right... or maybe its just for what scarps are left? At the moment, with December House Publishing.
Tiers of Heaven (Novella)
Lost in an impossible Future, where most of the Past has been forgotten, someone has created the World of Tiers and sparcely populated it with Mankind’s successors. Erasmus Crow and his unhygienic assistant, Emily girl, are the crater-city’s equivalent of detectives. On being given a mystery to solve, Crow falls in love with a picture of a girl who never existed... then meets her ancestor and falls for her too. Romance, intrigue and killer robots in an empty world! With Pulse Romance
EXTRA!
Just out as a FREE ISSUU download, the Prequel to the Black, White & Red All Over Trilogy! http://issuu.com/avalon2020/docs/ wonderful_life_issuu
Thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s it for now!
avalon2020