A long overdue excerpt...

It's been a long time since I posted an excerpt from my work. Last week I talked about a novel I wrote when I was a teenager. It got me thinking. I couldn't really remember much about it other than that I was highly inexperienced when I wrote it. Some parts of it were drafted when I was fifteen. It was finished, roughly, when I was seventeen, just before I graduated. When I graduated I re-read it. I remember how rough I thought it was. I put it down with plans to revisit it in a couple of months, maybe a year or two- tops. 

I was really naive back then. Real life happened, and I never returned to it, so it sat there. Recently I have been thinking more and more about it. After my last post, I decided to fish it out of the literary locker where it has been chained in the dark. Maybe I've aged, or maybe I am as ugly as it is, but for some reason, I saw some beauty there, so I decided to post an excerpt here and see what happens. 

I hope you all enjoy it; I decided not to leave any context because the full manuscript is over seven hundred pages. I think the bit I have chosen represents the whole thing well. So here it is in it's rough and unpolished rawness.

            "He remembered one day the “Sky-people” came. He was fourteen. They forced his parents to give a sample of their blood. Some of the soldiers held them down while other soldiers put the sample in a machine. Mother and father had screamed and shouted at them. The machine blinked red, and the soldiers looked at each other. The soldiers looked at his parents and told them they had faulty DNA. They were sentenced to be sent away. They fought and tried to run with him.

There had been a struggle, and his father had escaped from the soldiers. He had grabbed his mother and him, and they fled into the woods. Monty kept up as the soldiers regained control and started to follow them.

They didn’t get far enough fast enough. One of the sharp-shoots had gotten his long gun and sited the three in. Those two shots had echoed through his mind since that day. He suddenly found himself running through the woods alone. When he realized they were there, he turned and ran back to them. They were lying thing the grass a couple feet from each other. Monty knelt to see if they were alright even though he knew better.

At first, he cried and felt nothing. He didn’t care that the soldiers were making their way through the forest. There was just loneliness and sadness, but then as the soldiers lifted him to his feet, he became angry. He seized a nearby stick and hit one of the men in the face, and then ran back to his dying mother.

They caught him and pulled him off her. He felt the cold metal of cuffs slide over his wrists. It chilled the skin as they slid shut. The soldiers lifted him and marched him to a vehicle parked in a clearing next to the cabin Monty and his parents had lived in.

They threw him in the vehicle, in the back in a large cage with other people. All of them were scared, and some were crying. There were women and children in the cage but very few men. The transport lifted off and flew into the sky, into the clouds. It went north for a couple of hours, then he could remember feeling the craft drop rapidly.

When it had set down, the door to the cage opened and the ramp in the back of the vehicle slid to the ground.  Guards came in from the front and started pushing the prisoners to the back and out of the cage.

When it was done, the small group was standing in the wreckage of the city with nothing. No warnings, advice, or provisions were given to him or the group. For a while, they stuck together. There were about twenty, and they were scabs. They wandered, lost, alone, and hungry. That first night was the worst night of his life.

Just before the sun went down, someone had suggested they cross the bridge and find safety in a building on the north side of the Lawrence. 

It was not until they were halfway across the bridge that they realized things were living on it. They dropped from above, from the perches; some crawled up over the railing, and some came from the abandoned cars. They were a swarm as they funneled out of their hiding places. They came as shadows in the dusk, black figures with bird masks. They cast pointed silhouettes on the broken bridge. Monty could never forget the noise they made as they chased the scabs from the bridge. They cawed like crows. It was their ravenous feeding call. It could be heard echoing into the chasm where the Lawrence once flowed. 

 The group ran as fast as they could, but the Droogs were faster. They did not stop to cook the fallen; they tore into them while they were still alive. Groups of Droog came and took the fallen the group from the pavement and tore them apart in frenzy.

The rest ran and ran while they were chased. They went as fast as they could, but little more than half made it to the other side. They did not stop at the end of the bridge but continued to run into the stacks and the piles. There they hoped there would be safety, not knowing that the things that lived in the stacks were almost as bad.

The small group of twelve, including Monty, found shelter in one of the collapsed buildings. They were destitute and confused. Some of them had heard of New Quebec, but only rumors.

That night as the sun disappeared, someone found some wood and lit a fire, an inherently terrible idea. They huddled in the cold around the orange fire light, trying to stay warm. The creatures from the stacks saw the fire as a signal. They didn’t come in mass. They ate and stole members of the group one at a time.

When morning came, there were six people left. As scabs did, they looked for a place to hide. In the process, the Hatters took the rest to the dead tanks. Monty hid went it happened.

He kept quiet and buried himself in the dirt and garbage while the last of the group was marched off the churn the methane and ethanol in the tanks.

Many nights were spent in the dark amongst the wreckage alone. Monty had been driven mad with hunger and one day as he crept through the stacks, he came across a man with food. The man called himself Gunner. He took Monty in and fed him, and explained the prison. The rest was forgotten history." 

Cheers!