Chapter One

The first chapter of my scifi novel in progress...

Chapter One

 

 

 

Danny had lived in the Dreads his whole life. He’d grown accustomed to the dirty, rain-soaked alleys and the crumbling buildings of brick and ash. Alleys that were filled trash, rotten scraps, dirty broken needles, and the huddled forms of those that were less fortunate than him. At seventeen, he’d long ago learned how to keep out of sight and how to move without being heard.

    He was both short and thin for his age, and had learned that the best way to survive in a city that wanted nothing more than your bones and your soul, was to keep out of the way. To walk where no one noticed you. To love the shadows as your best friend and the silence as your mother. It was better than his real mom, at least. Sometimes he wished she would be silent. Constantly screaming at him, shouting that he was just a piece of trash that brought her nothing but trouble…That was when she was sober enough to crawl out of bed and realize he’d somehow managed to stay alive (no thanks to her).

    Tonight was one of those nights. He could still hear her throwing things around in the kitchen as he slipped out through his bedroom window and onto the fire escape. She’d eventually leave the house and show back up sometime tomorrow night, too high to even care about yelling at him. Too high on the souls of those less fortunate…

    Danny ran up the fire escape, yanking the straps of his backpack tight across his chest. He brought his hood up as he reached the top of the roof, the moon highlighting the buildings around him with a ghostly glow, the light clinging to the edges of the crumbling homes like pale flesh on brittle bones. Solomon City…a graveyard masquerading as a city. A city masquerading as Olympus, he thought with a slight smile, enjoying the slight poetic nature of his own words.

    Then, he set off across the rooftops at a full run. He’d never been very strong, but he was happy with his ability to outrun most people he knew. He’d been saved more than once by his long stride and his knowledge of the city rooftops. He’d discovered, at a very young age, that the rooftops were the safest place for someone like him. On the roofs, you could stay out of the way of all the gangs, junkies, and, worst of all, cops that liked to take a s**t on anyone they could find.

    He’d taken this path for most of his life and knew all the shortcuts and ways across. The roofs that were too far to jump had long ago been bridged with wooden planks or long beams. Danny ran across these as if they were hardly there, never looking down at the blood-filled alleys beneath him. He was an eagle, a shadow, a fleeting, unstoppable--

    CRASH!

    Danny hit the ground hard, wincing as he tripped over a cardboard box. He closed his eyes, trying to regain his bearings. What the hell--, he thought, turning onto his back and shaking his head. He glanced over as someone moved beneath the cardboard box he’d just tripped over. Slowly, a man crawled out, scrambling to his feet. Danny stood up, brushing off his pants as the bum let out a deep burp.

    “What the hell, man? Isn’t there somewhere else you could sleep?” Danny said, shaking his head and opening up his backpack to check on the things inside. He pulled out a cheap, clunky piece of plastic with some old headphones wrapped around them. It was one of those old CD players. Vintage, the man who had given it to him had called it. Tracking down CD’s for the thing was near impossible in an era where most people just downloaded their music straight onto commlinks or in-ear syncports. And now, to top it all off, the thing was cracked right down the middle. “Damn, man, you broke it.”

    “There wassunobody up here…,” the man grumbled, in a confused manner. Probably wondering how it was that he’d found an empty rooftop to sleep on and yet had just been run over by a kid. What kind of kid runs on rooftops? Well, Danny does. And this just happened to be one of his rooftops.

    “Look, you’re gonna have to find somewhere else to hole up, man. This is my roof and I don’t need to be trippin’ over old men on my roof. Go. Go on. Get outta here!” Danny said, waving the man off. The old man grumbled something incomprehensible, before picking up his cardboard box and shambling away to the fire escape. Danny shook his head, looking down at his broken CD player. Great. Just f*****g great.

    He looked around him, spotting a few neon lights glowing in the window of a building a few blocks down. One of the signs read Gavin’s Antiques, in bright neon blue. Danny smiled. Good, maybe he could see if the old man had another CD player laying around the place. Or a few spare parts that Danny could use to fix his. Settled on bothering the old man for a bit, Danny shoved the broken music player back into his bag and made his way across the rooftops to Gavin’s “Junk Shop”.

    He didn’t use the front door, but rather climbed down into the back alley behind the shop and knocked on the door there. Danny stood there, glancing up and down the alley, before finally hearing movement on the other side. There was the sound of a few bolts being slid back, then the door swung open to reveal a thickly muscled, grizzled man in his fifties. He was dressed in a plain white t-shirt and a pair of jeans, a dirty rag tucked into his belt, grease on his fingers.

    “Damn kid, we have a front door,” Gavin said, shaking his head before turning and walking into the store. Danny followed him inside, shutting the door behind him and sliding the locks back into place. When he turned around it was to see Gavin placing a large handgun on a nearby counter. Danny glanced around the back room of the old shop, taking in the familiar surroundings. Over the last year, Gavin’s Junk Shop had become a second home to him. The old man had caught him digging circuit boards out of his trash and brought him inside to show him the real stuff. That was the night he’d given Danny the CD player that was now cracked and broken in his backpack.

    “Front doors are for losers,” Danny replied simply, taking off his backpack. He unzipped it and pulled out the cracked, broken body of the CD player.

    “What the hell did you do to that thing? Take a sledgehammer to it?” Gavin asked, raising a single grey eyebrow. He picked up a small motor from the table top and began unscrewing one of the pieces.

    “Don’t ask. Do you have another one? I can pay for it this time…,” Danny said, setting the music player on the table next to the man. Gavin picked it up and popped off the back. There was a crack through one of the tiny little plastic cogs that helped turn the discs that you put inside of them for music.

    “I might have something you could use to fix it. Wait here…,” he said, walking out of the room and to the front. Danny waited until he was out of sight, before picking up the gun he’d left laying on the table. He felt his breath catch in his chest. The thing was heavier than it looked. He peeked around the corner to see if the old man was within earshot, before pointing the gun at the calendar on the wall, displaying a picture of some ASF spaceship.

    “Bang,” he said, smirking. Then he sat the gun back down and walked over to one of the walls. It had a few pictures hanging up in old fashioned glass frames. The ones that held paper copies of pictures, rather than digital ones, and could only display a single picture per frame. Everything in this place made you feel like you were in the storeroom of some old museum. Old computers with components that were so large they actually had to be fit into big plastic boxes. Vacuum cleaners that needed to be pushed. Radios with antennas. The only sign that you were even in the 22nd Century came from the pictures on the wall. Danny stared at one of a younger Gavin in a military uniform, standing in front of a glass window, behind which could be seen dozens of ASF spaceships.

    Right next to it was a picture of Gavin the way he could be seen now. Grey hair combed back, grizzly beard, in a tank top and black pants tucked into combat boots. He stood in front of a group of at least twenty people, all of them with smiles on their faces. Danny had seen this picture before. He’d bothered the old man for answers about who the people were on a daily basis until he got an answer. When he found out that Gavin used to be part of the mercenary crew Paladin, it was almost impossible to believe. Since then, he’d spent nearly every night here, just listening to the old man tell him stories about all their missions, and about the people who used to work for him. How a man who was practically part of legend came to own a s****y junk shop in the Dreads of Solomon City was beyond Danny…

    “We’re closed, come back tomorrow…,” Gavin’s voice brought Danny back to reality. He turned his head, straining his ears to hear what was being said in the other room. “I said we’re…”

    CRASH!

    Danny felt his heart jump as he heard a loud shout from the front room. He looked at the back door, with its locks still slid tight. Then right at the gun laying on the table. Without a thought he picked it up and crept over to the doorway, peering around the corner. His eyes widened as he saw Gavin being lifted to his feet by a man the size of a small bear. Gavin didn’t just stand there however, he sent an elbow right to the man’s nose. But the bear-man didn’t let go. He didn’t even seem to flinch.

    Frozen in place, Danny watched as the man sent a backhand across Gavin’s face before tossing him against one of the walls. Danny held the gun in his hand, watching as Gavin picked himself up from the ground.

    “Who are you?” he asked, spitting onto the ground. He looked right past the man, meeting Danny’s eyes. He didn’t say anything. But there was a look in his eyes. A look that said: run. Danny stood there, frozen in place, gun in his hand. The bear-man didn’t say a word, simply picking Gavin back up and slamming him against the wall. The man’s back was to Danny still and he wondered if it was possible for him to get a shot. He’d never used a gun before. What if he missed? What if he hit Gavin? What if…

    CRASH!

    Gavin was slammed against the wall once more. This time, he reacted. He sent a foot to the large man’s knee and the man buckled. Then the old war-vet picked a nearby vase and smashed it against the man’s head.

    “Yes!” Danny yelled in excitement. Gavin glanced over at him for the briefest of seconds. That’s all it took. The bear-man had risen to his feet and took Gavin by the side of his head with both hands, squeezing hard and lifting him right off the ground. Then he let out a horrible scream. A battlecry that would make any wild beast cower and run. It was a blood cry and the man went into a frenzy to match it. He slammed Gavin through a glass cabinet, smashing his head against the wooden panel behind it. Then he slammed again, and again, and again. When he finally let go, Gavin fell to the floor like a sack of potatoes.

    Danny stood frozen in terror.

    Then the man turned to look at him. Danny dropped the gun and ran. He flew to the backdoor, heart pounding in his chest. He slid the bolts away and rushed into the alley. He ran until he was no longer on the streets, but back on the roofs. He ran past the bum who had decided to come back to the roof while Danny was gone. He ran all the way home, climbed in through his window, rushed into the barren kitchen, grabbed a dirty knife from the sink, then locked himself back in the room and sat on the floor gripping the knife and staring at the window. No one came through it. Not that night. Not the next morning, when he was still sitting up with the knife in his hand.

    When his mother finally came home, he nearly jumped out his window. She was halfway through screaming at him before he pulled her into a deep hug. She didn’t say anything. She didn’t fight back. But he didn’t tell her what was going on, either. Gavin was dead. Gavin was dead and Danny had seen it happen. Nothing she could say would ever make that image go away…

Author's Note

Thorough reviews welcome...

Reviews

[strangebrain]

Excellent! I really love the atmosphere.

[Hester Vane]

Its easy for me to say don't be harsh on yourself because I'm my own worst critique! But don't be, this is a great first chapter! It feels gritty and fresh, i really like Danny as a protagonist! Your dialogue is great, really solid! If this was the first draft, i would love to see the second! Great great job! I really want to keep reading!

[MachinaWriter]

Thank you so much ^^ That really means alot. I just posted the second chapter, where I introduce one of the other main characters, a cocky and arrogant mercenary named Adam. Trust me when I say there's more than meets the eye when you first see this new character. Be sure to give a thorough review. ^^

[MachinaWriter]

Ugh...I hate this version of the first chapter. Why did I upload it? lol I've edited and rewritten most of this whole thing. It's still the same sequence of events, but the writing is better in the new version. I've eliminated the passive voice that is prevalant in this and changed a few details about the murder and the dialogue, but you can still get the gist of the story from this version.