The Black Ditch
LAURIE STERNE feels like he’s been cut adrift in space. His father has been shot dead, caught in the crossfire of a gangland war that has also claimed his boss’s life. Laurie is a refugee who lost his adoptive mum years before and doesn’t know where he was born, let alone who his birth parents were. But he’s not alone in the world: someone is trying to kill him.
This is London, 2050, a dumping ground for climate refugees and dissidents. Gangs rule, murder goes unpunished and the police make sure you can’t escape.
In his struggle to stay alive, he finds an ally: his former boss’s secret daughter.
But with the killer predicting his every move, is the man without a past being betrayed by the woman who seems to offer him a future?
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US – https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07V1HHTJK/
Extract
IT is 2050 and Laurie Sterne lives in the prison city of London, confined there for life as a climate refugee. He is used to most things being rubbish, most of the time. But Monday, February 14, raises the bar on terrible.
His adoptive father, the last, surviving link to his childhood, is shot dead. Not only that, he witnesses the assassination of his boss and is nearly killed himself. All on Valentine’s Day; London specialises in that kind of cruel irony.
Later he is picked up by police, chemically interrogated and dumped in jail. His world is in tatters.
Then something quite unexpected happens…
Tuesday 15th February
HE woke and wished he hadn’t. He lay on a stinking mattress facing a damp concrete wall. He looked at its chipped, black paint through half-open eyes.
He shut them again – he had a pounding headache. It was more than a headache; it was a devil inside his skull punching his brain.
The air stank. His green trousers were filthy, bloodstained and still damp from the rain. He was incredibly thirsty.
He heard someone move near him. He started to curl into a ball and brace himself for blows.
The someone sat on the mattress and pressed a bottle to his mouth. He turned on his back and parted his lips. The bottle tipped. Water flowed, mostly into his mouth but some onto his face. He drank for a couple of seconds. The bottle withdrew and he let the ice-cold liquid go down. He breathed in. The stink of desperation and failure had been replaced by a woman’s perfume. He remembered the scent. Couldn’t buy it in the Garden of Eden, he’d tried.
He opened his eyes.
Marina Haas.
She caressed him with her gaze. Her skin was brown, her hair long, wavy and black, her eyes green. She touched his left cheek.
‘Bad?’ she whispered.
She was nowhere on Laurie’s list of expectations. All he could do was stare.
‘Can you sit up?’
He put the flats of his hands on the grey plastic mattress and shifted until his back was upright and supported by the wall behind him.
She put the bottle to his lips again and he took in more water.
Marina was a united nations of beauty. Her delicately-boned face and petite nose hinted of South-East Asia, her skin was North African, her tall, slender body was Scandinavian and the ebony hair that spilled over her shoulders was South American. The eyes, though – they were other-worldly.
‘I have disinfectant, needle and thread, plasters, penicillin, morphine…’
‘Water. Just water.’
‘I didn’t know if you’d be dead, half dead or a little bit dead so I brought them all.’
He reached for the bottle. It was cold. He pressed it to his forehead and then drank from it again. He picked through the road crash in his head for coherent thoughts.
The simple things: this had to be a police cell, Marina was with him and he’d never felt so alone.
‘I have a banana. All the way from the tantalizing tropics, just for you.’
She conjured the fruit from somewhere below his sight line.
‘Sugar, carbohydrate, protein and a pharmacy of vitamins in one attractive, easy-to-access package.’
He shook his head.
‘The correct answer is in the affirmative. You look starved, you must eat.’
She peeled the banana and offered it to him. He bit into it. He wasn’t hungry; it was a small bite.
Marina was overdressed for jail. She wore a tight-fitting brown wool jacket, a silk fawn blouse to complement her eyes, a long, flared fawn skirt to match the blouse and brown, knee-length, lace-up boots.
By the foot of the bunk on which he lay was a large physician’s bag in matching leather.
She reached into the bag and brought out a black cylindrical tin with a white band round the top.
‘Darling, this is amazing, I’ve never seen one before. It’s coffee. Fresh-brewed coffee in a tin. You just twist the base and there’s a little Merlin inside who conjures up the sweetest cup in the blink of an eye. Pff! Just like that!’
He shook his head.
Marina looked at the physician’s bag, slightly disappointed. ‘Not even one per cent dead?’
His reply was lopped off by a spike of the pain in his head.
‘Not a drop of morphine, just for fun?’
He took the banana from her, ate some more and washed it down with water. He breathed out slowly and looked at her emerald eyes.
‘No.’
‘Well in that case, let us arise from this dungeon and bathe our faces in the sun. I have a stupid, horse-like appetite that must be addressed.’
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Author Bio – Simon J Lancaster is the author of The Black Ditch, the first in the Laurie Sterne trilogy of dystopian future thrillers. Prior to writing novels he was a national newspaper journalist in London, as well as a music critic and private pilot. He has written short stories and plays and, after reading extensively about climate change, concluded that the fantasy gun-play of contemporary-set action novels would be the lived experience of our coming world.
Social Media Links – Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/simon.lancaster.75457
Everything Is Better With Dragons 