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.
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Categories: Bill Congreve, New Releases
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