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Category:
Science Fiction
ISBN-10: 1619506173
ISBN-13: 9781619506176
Frank Clayton’s life has fallen apart in the wake of his son’s death. His wife has left him, he has been blacklisted from employment and his citizen-consumer status had been taken away, leaving him no choice but to enlist in a murderous reality show. When an opportunity comes up to escape his predicament, he finds out that he still has something to live for: revenge.
Frank Clayton’s life has fallen apart in the wake of his son’s death. His wife has left him, he has been blacklisted from employment and his citizen-consumer status had been taken away, leaving him no choice but to enlist in a murderous reality show. When an opportunity comes up to escape his predicament, he finds out that he still has something to live for: revenge.
Excerpt
They left the trenches right after the sirens and made their way through
collapsed houses and wreckage. Progress was slow; the men cursed and
groaned as they clambered over broken beams and piles of junked machinery.
Dawn was just breaking, a thin white line on the edge of the flat,
featureless horizon. Watery light trickled through the smoke and dust, across the bombed-out buildings and courtyards, but the rutted streets under the shattered skyline were still awash in shadows. Already the air was heating up, promising another blistering day.
Clayton hung at the rear of the infantry column, keeping his eyes on the back of the man in front of him, placing each foot as carefully as he could, feeling grit and ash crunch under the soles of his boots in the dark. He supposed he had been lucky so far. In the first episode of the show, his assault company had alighted on the killing beach long after the worst of the massacre was over, encountering only sporadic enemy fire. Days later, as they hunkered down in the remains of a razed village during the push inland, a soldier from another unit had told them that thousands had died during the landing, many of them never making it off the barges. The body count exceeded all network estimates and the advertising revenue was nearly double. Ninety-two percent up
from last quarter, the man had shouted over the dull thump of explosions, like he was reading a corporate propaganda piece. The feverish shine in his eyes, the pride in a job well done, had made Clayton sick to his stomach.
Death was everywhere. Death in the lenses of hidden cameras, playing on
high-definition screens, over and over, to the cheers of a faraway crowd. Sooner or later it would be his turn.
But he was still breathing, still walking. He wasn’t a corpse.
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