I recently had loads of fun at Warfighters and decided to write my experiences there into the novel I've been working on for a while now.
There was a thread on BXB with some snippets of my story and I'll be posting a few more on here in the future. Feel free to tell me what you think. This peice is set to be the prologue. I was originally going to do a prologue based at the same time as the rest of my story but I really wanted to write something set now and was torn between something set in Russia or something in England. My experiences in the APC at Warfighters made up my mind. England it was.
It's funny but while being driven around in that APC I was sitting there thinking about writing this peice. I was trying to take a mental note of everything I saw and felt during the experience so I could write convincingly about it. I also wanted to get some spercific detail in about the way England defended itself from the Red Star and how the end came about.
I also tried out having James Talbot's thoughts in italics while the main narration would stay as normal font to try and separate the two. One being a sort of all knowing, all seeing narrator and the other being a personal narrator who is just really quite pissed off at where he is. I'm only posting a small section as I don't want to spoil the big reveal.
_________________________________________________
Prologue
The AR-18 was heavy on his lap. Driving offenses, what a joke, six months in prision for driving offences and it happens now. The judge had told him he'd been lenient by giving the chance to think about what he'd done in a cell with a bunch of other minor criminals. So what? I was driving without insurance, an MOT and breaking the speed limit. Those aren't jail able offences. They had become in recent months. The war in Europe wasn't going well and you didn't need an imbedded journalist to tell you that. Reserves and the TA were called up first, in a matter of hours after the first assaults across the borders of Poland and then volunteers were called for and the emergency services were raped of all but the non essential personnel.
When Germany capitulated and the Americas pulled out of air bases across mainland Europe and the UK, volunteers were called for. With a poor response, compulsory conscription kicked off and suddenly those small blue, red and white national insurance cards which seemed to be so innocent and useless to most people became a ticket to death.
France was next to fall. They actually put up a strong resistance and managed to hold out for a good few days against the approaching enemy forces before they were swept away under the wave of metal death. The army, air force and navy were already engaging the Russian forces across the coastal areas of France when James Talbot landed himself in court.
An overly officious and self-loving former Community Support Officer has actually bothered to stop and arrest him in spite of all the civil unrest, looting and down right violence that was engulfing the country as civilisation began to fall down around their heads. Wanker. Only a few hours later he was in front of one of those new judges who'd been given powers to do exactly as he pleased with criminals by the Government.
Bang. Talbot was slammed into a cold, concrete room with a metal door and food slot for six months for a series of minor traffic offences. A few days later, the Government agreed to pardon every single criminal currently incarcerated in return for their services in the war. Fucking typical. Opposing political parties screamed headlines on the front pages of The Sun about the Government deliberately locking up anyone breaking the most minor laws just to swell military ranks but even the PC, liberal lovies shut up when they saw hell unleashed on the south coast.
He remember watching live video feeds from the BBC as they filmed an unreal army of robots emerging from the English Channel. Talbot had sat in his make-shift barracks near High Wycombe unable to comprehend what he was seeing. It was like someone had crossed the wires somewhere and when you selected BBC News 24 you got the Sci-Fi channel. As conscripts and the remaining British army fought back against the metal wave crashing onto the beaches the news feeds were cut with ominous sounds of death and destruction. He threw up a lot that day.
The APC was like a coffin on tracks for the twelve men around him, each fresh out of prison and non of them committing a crime more serious than shop lifting yet they had donned camouflage, as if would be any help, and been handed old weapon that he was told was a reliable weapon. He knew full well that these were all that were left in the British armoury. He was pushed and pulled into the other men in the cramped, dark and confusing vehicle. There were no windows and the only light came in through the unrefined crack around the drivers entrance hatch above him to his right. It was probably a good thing he couldn't see, southern England wasn't very fair and green anymore. It had been bombed to ash by both sides. First by the Russians as they began their advance and then again by what British forces remained on the small island about to witness the last stand of Nato and Europe. Dover, Folkstone, Hastings, Brighton were all smoking remains of their former selves and the war had reached as far north as Guildford, Gatwick and even Croyden as the Russian forces made a strong push for London. It had all happened in less than 24 hours.
Kent, East and West Sussex were flooded with the endless marching robots of the Red Star. Devon and Cornwall had been cut off from communication as Red Star forces marched straight through Dorset and Somerset wantonly killing and destroying what ever they felt like. The last thing he'd heard on the grand scale of things before being thrown into a one day shooting lesson was that the South of Wales had been invaded through the Severn and that a desperate last stand by the British army was being made just south of London. Right where he was going. A fucking last stand. A fucking driving offence.
The stink of piss reached his nostrils and his thoughts were derailed. He realised why someone in the APC had pissed themselves as the sound of distant rumbling, thunder was the first thing to cross his mind but then a suddenly not so paranoid feeling crept into him as he realised it was the roar of battle. More rumbling and then some strange crashes and howls of like the kind he'd never heard before. They were only just audible over the encroaching roar of the APCs engine as the driving gunned the squealing machine up a steep incline before it crashed back down the other side at twice the speed it went up and his stomach pulled a similar manoeuvre before he began to wretch and gag, trying to regurgitate the contents of an empty stomach.
After what had seemed like an eternity in the oppressive, piss stained, puke ridden interior of the APC, it came to a halt and the rear door was pulled open by a bloodied man, his fatigues were torn and covered in a mix of mud, sweat and blood. An unlit cigarette chose that moment to suicidally leap from his grinning mouth and the man cursed his bad luck. "Get the fuck out." James had expected to see day light, but it seemed to be dusk outside, he checked his watch as he couldn't believe he'd been in the back of the APC for as long as that suggested but the cracked digital display showed that it was one thirty in the afternoon.
He half crawled, half walked his way to the door and awkwardly dropped onto the mud, he peered first up into the sky and saw thousands of columns of smoke rising up from all directions and blotting out the midday sun. Rather dramatically he mumbled: 'It's the fucking apocalypse' to himself to which the bloodied man added: 'You've not been in a fight yet'.
_________________________________________________
Anyway, I had a real brain storm on the loo at work the other day and rushed into the canteen to write an cool idea for a twist in the main story but I'm having a few issues with actually making it fit into what I've written so far so I might have to go back and re-write a couple of sections.
I've also had a little feedback and while most of it has just been 'you spelt science wrong' or the equally unhelpful 'it's great'. I've been adviced to make the Dan Bukk introduction more 'pervy' so I'm intending to do that as well.
With BXB being so busy at the minute and my time at work getting tougher, I'm finding less and less time to write and I only really squeezed some in tonight because I'd exhausted all other forms of entertainment. Not the best reason to write but a reason nontheless!
