Bill Congreve’s awesome short story collection, Souls Along The Meridian, is now available as an ebook. You can get the Kindle edition here and a variety of ebook formats from Smashwords here.

All the details and other purchase options for the book can be found here.

Please share this news, tell your friends and family and let’s get Bill’s fantastic work noticed by a wider audience.

.

Categories: Anthology, Bill Congreve, Ebook, New Releases, News
No Comments »

Blade Red Press is very proud of its first single author collection, Souls Along The Meridian, by the great Bill Congreve. This book contains thirteen dark stories and was described by Australia’s Godfather of Horror, Robert Hood, as “Brutally satirical, humanely sorrowful or replete with blood, gristle and darkness, Bill Congreve’s tales explore the depths of the human and inhuman soul and linger in the heart and mind long after reading them.”

Below, as a little taster, you’ll find the opening section of the first story in the collection. Get it today – you will not be disappointed.

The Desertion of Corporal Perkins
by Bill Congreve

ONE

Up close and personal, the artillery barrage was an act of violence that made Corporal Perkins scrabble at the dirt as though he could crawl into it. Then it stopped. The echoes rolled into the hills — where they remained, crackling and rumbling like thunder as the artillery fired on other units.

The war between the Vikings and the Panzers, the Bureau of Entertainment’s first experimental night war, had begun.

Private Novice Farouk raised his head and looked at his watch. “Only twenty seconds,” he whispered.

Perkins was more pragmatic. “Too expensive for them to keep that up for long.” He wiped dirt from his mouth.

“Report!” The order was whispered out of the dark.

Every warrior in the section responded, the novices sounding surprised as name after name called off. The section was still ten strong – six men, four women.

“Most times it’s just a light show. Then the next shell will wipe out a whole section,” said Perkins.

Farouk nodded wisely.

The scout moved out. The section formed at three-metre intervals in an arrowhead formation across and along the ridgeline. Their mission was to cut off the rear of an enemy outpost that was to be attacked by the remainder of their company. But the enemy quite obviously knew where they were. An ambush would happen soon.

The vegetation was sparse, long dry grass dotted with gum trees and outcrops of rock. The half moon above the western horizon gave enough light for each man to stay in visual contact. When the moon set they would draw closer together, perhaps hole up somewhere and wait out the night, and damn to their orders. Perkins was tail-end Charlie. Farouk was in front of him, behind their sergeant. Perkins grunted. There was a jauntiness to Farouk’s step as if, after surviving one artillery barrage, he had a prerogative never to die.
Barely visible in the darkness, the scout rapped sharply on her rifle butt and dropped to one knee. A flare burst overhead and illuminated the section like frozen statues on snow. She ran for cover.

“Contact!” shouted the sergeant.

The scout was bowled off her feet within a second. The body didn’t come to ground for two metres.

They’ve got us cold, thought Perkins. What happened to her … dumdums! They’re using dumdums. No warrior does that! And Farouk’s just standing there, enjoying the show.

Perkins block-tackled Farouk. The bullet aimed for Farouk’s heart only grazed his shoulder.

“Do you want to die?”

#

Perkins peered into the darkness up the slope. Nothing but flickers of light as the enemy fired. He aimed at where one had been, more in hope than expectation.

The light machinegun carrier pulled a squat, ugly pistol from a holster on her ammunition carrier’s corpse. Sheltered by the body, she aimed the pistol into the air. A couple of seconds later a flare burst over the enemy position and the gunner began firing short bursts at darting targets. Then she stopped.

Perkins aimed again, paused, and swore.

The enemy wore no uniforms.

“They’re spectators! We’ve been ambushed by filthy fucking specs!” The sergeant shouted and lifted his head. A bullet from a sporting rifle exploded through his helmet and his skull and splashed Perkins with fresh blood.

“Where’s the controllers! Where’s the controllers!” Farouk shouted in outrage.

Shapes darted back and forth without discipline on the ridge above them, shouting, some wearing military dress, others in jeans and flannelette shirts. The shapes carried a variety of weapons: laser rifles, flechette guns, hunting rifles. Perkins even saw a hunting bow.

“Cameras? Any cameras?” Perkins shouted.

The machinegunner obviously didn’t care about being caught. She began firing again; the toll of spectators mounted. Perhaps she had decided more quickly that they had no choice.

Perkins took a deep breath and put aside his discipline. He used his FN automatic rifle — of obsolete design but recent BuEnt manufacture — on the civilians. Boot-camp basic training took charge. Aim. This is not a human being. This darting shape on the hill will kill me if it can. Breathe out gently and let the sights settle on the target. Squeeze the trigger.

If the army controllers came now, or if BuEnt’s cameras were watching, they had no excuse. They would all be executed.

Perkins smacked Farouk’s boot with the butt of his rifle. “What are you waiting for? If we don’t get out of this, we’re dead anyway!”

#

One by one the section died.

Perkins lined up another careless shape and shot it. A body twitched and fell across rocks. “Look at the jerks. They haven’t got the faintest idea!”

“But there’s too many!” Farouk fired past Perkins at a rapidly moving silhouette.

Perkins couldn’t see when the shape went down whether Farouk had hit it or if it had dived for cover.

“Shit!” said Farouk.

“There’s always too many. Specs breed like fucking rabbits! If they didn’t have us pinned down we would’ve carved them to pieces by now.”

Then Perkins and Farouk were the only two left alive, and they looked at each other and ran.

Bullets kicked dust. A laser brought smouldering branches down. Fire and smoke obscured their path. They jumped rocks and crashed off the ridgeline, tumbling through dust and scrub.

Silence.

They crept around a ledge of rock aiming to get uphill behind the spectators. Here, they were outnumbered. Up there, they might have options.

“Okay?” whispered Perkins.

Farouk nodded, and poured water from his canteen over a flashburn from a reflected laser blast. Drips splashed on the dry earth.

Voices sounded close by. They froze.

“Did you see that scout? Man, did I bag her!”

“Back off, Fred! I got her first!”

“Yeah? Just like you did those deserters in Perth last year, I suppose?” The first voice sneered.

“I want the head.”

“Jesus! Don’t get caught.”

Farouk stood, fired twice, and then screamed.

“Feel better?” Perkins asked.

They ran again, along the side of the slope, hidden in the thicker vegetation but making noise, and reached a saddle between two massive outcrops of volcanic rock that sat like mediaeval fortresses on the ridge. Cliffs reflected a ghostly radiance. Perkins and Farouk climbed into the saddle until the cliff above occluded the stars. Beyond the saddle, the ground sloped steeply into a black valley deserted by the setting moon. Then came the lights of a small coastal resort and behind that a glimpse of a flat black horizon that was the ocean.

Perkins jumped a fallen tree and dived behind a boulder. Farouk went to ground behind the log and looked out from under it. They had a view over a sloping rock platform dotted with boulders, stunted acacia and tea-tree scrub before the ground sloped into darkness fifty metres away.

“They’ve got too much cover,” said Farouk.

“It’s the best we’ll get. And they’ve gotta come this way. See anything?” Perkins whispered.

“Not yet.”

Perkins turned and looked towards the coast. Somewhere down there a regular army battalion would be patrolling the reservation boundary, containing the war and arresting and shooting deserting warriors.
Shadows danced among the rocks, too quickly to be fired at. A flechette gun burped, and shredded bark exploded off a tree a few metres away.

“Where did the spectators get that thing from? And the laser?” Farouk asked.

“They must know where the cameras are. Otherwise they couldn’t be here, doing this,” said Perkins.

“That means they have no choice. They must kill us. Are they off-duty army, or something?”

“Army’s better than this. These guys are amateur. Maybe they are the media, or BuEnt bureaucrats.” Perkins aimed down the slope, waited, and fired twice. A scream began, and didn’t stop.

“What did you do, Farouk. Why’re you here?”

“Immigration sentenced me. I came off a boat.”

“You think you’ll survive your year? Become a civilian like these aresholes?”

“No. You?”

“I got life,” Perkins grunted. He looked behind him into the dark valley, towards the reservation boundary.
“Fuck this. No judge told me I could be shot at by civilians.”

“I can’t come with you.” Farouk’s gestured back along the their path. “I’ve already run once, it didn’t work.”

“What we just did isn’t running.”

“Not that. Before I came here.”

Perkins didn’t try to change his friend’s mind. “Cover me?”

“Give me a chance to get up in those rocks.”

There could be nothing more to say. They clasped hands. Perkins opened fire at the darting shadows. Farouk climbed into the rocks.

When he heard Farouk start shooting, Perkins rolled backwards off the rock shelf and ran into the valley.

#

The torn and burning wrecks of hovertrucks and laser tanks, their camouflage paint blackened and invisible in the dark, showed where the army had recently maintained a well-armed and disciplined presence. Concrete bunkers were blasted apart; the electrified, razor-wire fence was shredded and torn.

The corpses littering the ground didn’t bother Perkins so much as the meaning behind the desolation. And that bothered him even more than Farouk’s decision to stay on the mountain.

Acrid smoke stung Perkins’s throat and made his eyes water. He dodged past the wrecks, keeping to the darkness, expecting the crackle of a laser at any second. But the winking lasers atop their semi-intelligent concrete fenceposts had also been taken out. He held his breath for twenty metres until the sea breeze blew the smoke away.

Pieces fell together in his mind: random words overheard in a bar, a secret stockpiling of ammunition, a concentration of elite army units caused by media concern over the night war, a battle between the two largest and best trained gladiator armies whose leaders were brothers. The government due for an election —and attention drawn away from politics at the right moment.

A suspicion formed in his mind.

He cursed as he tripped on something soft and slippery. A burst of automatic fire disturbed the dust behind him. One bullet grazed his calf muscle, and he felt blood trickle into his boot. A bullet? That meant another gladiator. Or a spectator. Or … God knew what.

He abandoned caution and ran.

The road wound out of sight through thick forest. Ahead of him lay the resort village of Bendemeer. He had always wondered what it would be like to visit a place like that, reserved for government cronies. Tonight he would find out. He would sneak in during the early hours of the morning and hide in some bureaucrat’s garage.

The night became still. The war on the reservation still thundered, but that was becoming amorphous, spread out, the sounds seeming to come from all directions. Perkins wondered which other boundaries had been over-run, and by whom. He slowed his headlong rush and walked silently, struggling to control his breathing. He listened.

Night sounds: animals, the whispered pounding of distant surf, tree branches creaking in the breeze.
A surreal sense of peace permeated the bushland. It could not have existed for long: a military unit of some kind, army, gladiator army, organized spectators, some-Goddamned-body, had come this way ahead of him.
Neither could the sense of peace continue.

An owl hooted. He froze in his tracks and heard distant screaming down the road ahead of him.

#

Want to read more? Read the rest of this story and many others in Bill Congreve’s awesome collection, Souls Along The Meridian. All the details here.

.

Categories: Bill Congreve, New Releases
No Comments »

Here’s the fourth in our series of previews from the Dark Pages anthology.

Dust
by Naomi Bell

They came from the dust, the man and the horse. From the west, where the wind screamed across the prairie, lifted the good earth to hack at the air in a host of swords. The wind that pounded the walls of the house, clattered at the windows, stole black fingers along the sill.

*

So simple a thing, so easily done. A clench of my hand and the old blade will part the skin into a black-red sea. There, at the hollow ‘twixt collar and throat, there will I find the path to deliverance.
The man sits on the bench, his face in his hands. Dust stains him in the colors of earth. Even here, it slithers under the door to lie at his feet.

I sit beside him, my hands on his flesh. He looks to Matthew while I cut away the rust-red cloth. The scissors slide flat against his skin, tug at the torn strips of shirt he has used to bind the wound. As I peel back the bandage, blood rises.

He shudders. I still my hands, the point of the scissors against the soft paleness of his body. He looks at me now with forgiveness.

—I can bear it.

Dust layers his skin, blackens the wound. Blood and dust, staining my fingers.

*

We’d been inside, in our silence. Matthew paced from room to room, the pages of the Bible in his hand rustling as autumn leaves. I set to my chores, head down to my well-trodden path. Vegetables in the pot. Plates on the table. Two plates now, not three.

I saw Jamie in the turn of my head, heard him in the slammed door, the scrape on the verandah that might be a footstep. The vegetables tumbled from my fingers.

Outside, the wind railed, pelted dust to shroud the sun in daytime darkness. Grit clawed through the chinks between the boards, pinpricked my every breath.

We heard, then, a thud on thud, wood on wood. Matthew cursed, glad of it, and looked to the window. There, in the black-gray churning, we saw the paddock gate banging loose. Matthew swore, said he’d shut the gate, but my eye led me further, to the barn and beside it a horse and a man. The horse stood head low, its rump to the wind, its nose at the barn door.

We didn’t speak, didn’t decide. Wrapped our faces in cloths, pushed open the door. We crept across the yard, holding onto each other, bent half-over. The dust launched at us, drove us sideways ‘til we nearly missed the gate, had to feel along the fence to find it.

The man half-lay along the horse’s neck, the reins trailing to the ground. Matthew caught the horse by the bridle, raised its head. When the man lifted his face, his eyes gleamed as pearls in a crusted black mask.

—For pity’s sake, help.

I did not know, not then. I unlatched the barn door, strained to drag it open against the pummeling air. Matthew clicked his tongue and led the horse inside. In the sudden hush, the man slid down the horse’s shoulder to the dirt floor.

—Thieves. On the road.

The dust had coated man and horse, skin and hide as ash. Loose, the horse stepped away, plodded into the empty stall. It stood shaking its head, blowing out its nostrils.

Matthew found a pail, carried water to the horse. He hauled off the saddle, threw it over a rail. The saddle left a square patch on the horse’s coat, deep copper streaked dark with sweat. On its withers was a penny-sized patch of white hair, where an ill-fitting saddle had once rubbed. When it had drunk and lifted its head, its gray face ended in a chestnut muzzle with a wide white splash.

The horse turned its head to Matthew and nickered.

A chestnut horse with a white blaze. Jamie’s horse.

*

Matthew had wanted his son to go to school. Wanted him to turn aside from our life of drought and blizzard. I told him, then, that the money should go to the bank, but he shook his head, said that I couldn’t understand. He took Jamie and together they walked the road off our farm, dogged by a plume of dust that reached to the knee. I watched them from the kitchen window, marked the spot where they shifted into the distance.

I turned to the farm, the labor to wring the day’s food from the land. Under the high clear sky I fed the livestock, worked the vegetable garden, hauled water bucket by bucket from the well. In the surrounding fields, the crop grew, rolling seams of gold, a promise spread across the land.

As the sun slid low, Matthew returned, leading Jamie on a horse. The dust danced about their feet. At the paddock gate, Matthew lifted Jamie down, tousled his hair, both of them grinning. Jamie threw his arms around the horse’s neck. He led the horse into a stall, loosening the saddle-cinch while Matthew gave instructions.

The horse looked like a hide stretched over a fence rail. Hollow flanks, sharp hipbones, dull red coat. Jamie took feed meant for the milk-cow and gave it to the horse.

Matthew explained that he’d taken money that we’d scratched from the earth, money that could buy a doctor or a winter meal, and offered it to the horse-dealer. And the horse-dealer shook his head. But in a corner pen, Jaime spotted a worn-out cowpony, bound for slaughter. The horse dealer smiled and clinked the coins in his pocket.

Proud of his haggling, Matthew said that the horse would teach Jamie, would keep him safe. And Jamie loved that horse. Somewhere in this cracked-dry land he found pasture for it, and when he thought I wasn’t looking he stole corn from my garden. With a harshness that shames me now, I told him that come the long cold of February he might wish that corn in his own belly, but he ran to Matthew instead. I’d hear them, sometimes, from the barn, their voices light in the dusk air. Matthew, with his fool’s tales. I’d sit on the stoop, husking corn, and listen.

Every day across the hard-baked earth, that horse bore my son the seven miles to the school. That school, those books, they poured stories into Jamie’s head, washing out the simple ways of the land.

Matthew was proud of his son. On Sundays after the service he would gather with the other men, brag of his son’s learning. As the farmers talked of the milk drying up in the cows, of the wheat shoots turning brown under the sun, Matthew would rest his hands on Jaime’s shoulders.

—My son will be more than a farmer.

Would that I could take back his pride, humble ourselves and be forgiven.

Two weeks ago, the surveyors came, with their books and strange machines to map a route for the great railroad that will connect us to the East. Every day on his ride home, Jamie would stop awhile at the surveyor’s camp, share their food, listen to their talk. He’d ride home in the slanting sun, babbling their gibberish about devices that could measure the angle of the land as if slicing it into pieces.

I wish I’d forbade such talk. Told him our ways were dug from the earth, our lives rubbed dark with dust. But my words clattered like the blades of the windmill.

Two days ago, men came. Hungry men, empty men from the sun-scorched plain, slashing at the surveyors with knives of broken glass. They wanted the food and they took it. They tried to take the surveyor’s horse, but it kicked and tore free. So one of the men seized Jamie’s horse.

Afterward they said that the surveyors had tried to stop Jamie. But Jamie loved that horse. He grabbed the man’s arm—he was just a boy, not yet ten—he grabbed the man’s arm and the man, oh God, the man killed my son for his horse.

*

Read the rest of this fantastic story and thirteen other superb dark speculative yarns in the Dark Pages anthology. Print and ebook available now. Get your copy here!

.

Categories: Anthology
No Comments »