Ilya Thaxton

Work on the old novel is coming along slowly but surely. I'm up to around 17,000 words now and I've been spending time out in the English countryside and studying pictures to try and come up with some nice imagery for the following peice of writing I've been doing.

I'm not going to go into detail about Ilya Thaxton and who he is too much in my blog because you some of that in my latest bit of writing. I've got to go back to my really early stuff and edit/rewrite sections of it as it feels too much like bareboned plot and not enough fleshing out of the details or imagery.

Anyway, he's my latest bit of writing:

The fact the grim faced guard was wearing nothing more than a tight fitting pair of briefs and carrying sandwiches and fruit loose in his hands might have been quite an amusing sight if it wasn't for the fact he had endured many months of incarceration at the hands of the Red Star. The guards had even stopped bringing his food on plates after the last escape attempt a few weeks ago and now all they did was open the door, step in, put the food down and walk out. Ilya had even tired of willing the guards undergarments away while he was in the cell to makes things just a little extra uncomfortable for his captors. After several weeks of not even bothering to use his powers to escape, the guards were beginning to get a little braver and would step several feet into the room and lay the food down on the hard, metal floor before slowly edging back out of the box cell. Although, with his leg still in a cast, it mean he had to clamber to his feet and hop over to the food to eat it.

He'd been sitting alone in this steel cube for what must have been months. He wasn't sure. The passage of time was kept from him and there wasn't anything he could write on the steel walls with to take a tally of how long he'd been here. It was a bit cliché anyway scribing on the walls how many days he'd been in the cold, unforgiving box and he hated being cliché. His mission hadn't gone so well. He'd often thought about the intensely difficult times he spent in the A.L.B.F. base intimately learning the working of the trident warhead as well as the variety of pistols, rifles and blades that were made available to him. He couldn't recall them any more, someone had messed up the room, when he closed his eyes and pictured the small canvas bed and the two rows of tables set out with weapons and the nuke they didn't come to him.

The time before being Awoken by the mysterious invisible agent in the Birmingham Ghetto is even more of a blur. Vague memories of going to work some dead end job each day of his life, watching the same TVs shows over and over again and just existing without any real purpose or point. Knowing what he knew now, he was a little surprised he didn't have stronger memories of the day that he'd relived hundreds of times in his life. He couldn't recall anything from his house either. He'd memorised the locations of all sorts of useful household implements before he'd been liberated from his slumber. None of them came to him now.

He'd spent many hours with Jackson's scientists. Muslims. Sons of Islam some of them. They'd spoken about it as it if were some great achievement but Ilya had little understanding at what these dark skinned men had witnessed or from where they had come. He'd realised a while ago that this was probably Jackson's design. A way of de-cluttering his mind so he could focus on the mission of martyrdom he had been recruited to perform. He'd spent months taking apart and reconstructing complicated laser weaponry, Red Star weaponry like AK-47s and the stolen nuke. It had been very difficult for him to grasp many of the internal working of the complicated bomb but it was essential that he learnt. For his gift would only work at very long ranges on items with he knew intimately.

The SCAR-L. He'd fallen in love with this weapon. Oddly, he found that he was a natural with fire arms and quickly appreciated the pros and cons of each he used. He'd spent many hours using the weapon out in the British countryside shooting deer or wild boar as part of his training. He'd even slept with it by his side. He longed for it now, picturing the weapon in his mind. The stumpy stock, the slight curve of the magazine, the short barrel and hand grip that he'd become so used to holding, until it had become an extension of himself. He'd wasted away hours trying to recall like a sickened lover dwelling on their lost delights of the flesh it but to no avail. He was utterly alone.

With the months of training behind him, he was turned loose on his mission. The Scottish highlands were remote and cold but nestled within the mountains and lochs was a Red Star military base. It was the nerve centre for all Red Star forces across the former United Kingdom and a prime target. The Awoken didn't have the man power for a direct assault and using agents to sneak the nuke inside the base would have been impossible due to the size of the weapon. Even something that's invisible can be discovered if it's big enough for someone to walk right into it.

So, with his SCAR-L, survival equipment, holosuit and a map he began to work his way north passing the Liverpool and Manchester Ghettos on the way up to deserted Scotland. There were no ghettos in Scotland. The former cities of Glasgow and Edinburgh had been laid waste to during the wars and hadn't been reconstructed by the Red Star for some unknown reason. Perhaps it was too far north, perhaps they just didn't like the Scottish or perhaps they didn't want people too close to their installations.

The cultured lands of England had changed from how Ilya remembered it looked on the TV. The once chaotic mosaic of fields that coated rolling countryside had grown wild and unkempt. Vast swathes of rape had blossomed widely while humming honey bees danced in their thousands around the bright yellow sloshes of paint that had been tossed on the hills. The golden and green fields of corn had receded under this assault and divides of organised hedgerow had become rife with thorny bramble and elderberry. Ilya found passing through some sections of the countryside almost impossible and had stuck to the relative ease of travelling along crumbling roads which were still marked with rusted, ancient sign posts, giving distances to named nothingness.

Occasionally, he would have passed close to a small town or village and stop and marvel at the destruction nature can cause over time. Rows of red bricked houses had crumbled under the elements and snaking fingers of ivy, sweet honeysuckle and Bryony covered every inch creating strange monoliths of vegetation. A bitter sweet reminder of the beauty of nature versus the forces of man. The Pennines loomed on the horizon and he began to climb steep hills while pushing north. To the west he could see the sprawling ghettos of Liverpool and Manchester with all the signs of the twenty first century. In the evening Ilya had watched the sun set over the sea and awed as midnight hit and the Red Star's Reset Crews went to work under the eerie green lights that kept the prisoners asleep whilst houses were tidied, fridges refilled and even the same newspaper was posted through the door.

When he was tired, he slept and when he was hungry he'd hunt. It was a very simple existence and far removed from what he'd left behind. He'd often shoot ducks or rabbits and eat them and on one occasion he found a deer that had become ensnared in rusted, barbed wire that had mingled with brambles after the fence posts that held it had rotted away. The countryside was full of reminders that man once ruled the countryside. Ancient dry stone walls still criss-crossed the land in an impressive testament of the skill that went into creating these well weathering walls.

While many of the towns, villages and hamlets that Ilya passed had been reduced to weed ridden rubble, huge metal structure still stood strongly against time and the elements and occasionally the complexion of the beautifully wild landscape would have a metallic blue blotch of human legacy. Warehouses, quarries, distribution centres and factories that were clustered into industrial estates were like old western ghost towns, occupied only by birds and squabbling feral cats.

Some places hadn't been so lucky. Several times Ilya had crossed great gullies of destruction had been carved out of the landscape as reservoirs of water had exerted their destructive pressures onto the dams which held them in place for hundreds of years until they could hold the water back no longer and had split wide open. The great torrent of water and concrete had drowned or crushed everything its path, washing away trees, houses and roads without preference. All that remained now of a great cataclysm that had been repeated across the globe was the innocent river that way in the deepest centre of the gully.

Days more hard travel over the mountainous region where tinted yellow meadows contrasted deeply green, tree covered peaks that plunged into shadowy lakes against the high azure mist to low cerulean gradient skies that put the greatest of painters and digital artists to shame. Buds of cotton hug high above while giant waves of dry ice mist rolled down the ridges and faded away.

I'm overall quite chuffed with this and I've done a bit of research into what exactly the world be like without mankind to try and give the peice a real sence of realism. It was interesting to learn that rats and cockroaches wouldn't thrive without man because they need our waste and our warm buildings to breed in.

I'm also really not happy with the name of the Russian aggressors in this novel and need to seriously rethink the name "Red Star". It kinda sucks.