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The Dead Are Coming: Death Hits The City, Part 2

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PART ONE HERE Part 2 The boys, these jokers, looked back bemused. Or was it baffled? With hindsight, that look grabbed Daniel by the throat. It was terror. The crowd, already at capacity swelled towards the back, trying to evade whatever was eating away at its front ranks. As the crush briefly receded like the tide; ebb and flow, he could see there was nowhere to go. The danger upfront, thrashing it's way into the crowd, high concrete walls on two sides, and outward opening doors on the school side meant the weight of the rush just crushed into cold, unsympathetic inanimate brickwork and concrete. The back was last to be hit. Bodies under bodies. Grabbing Alan and Matthew, and screaming something he'd never repeat correctly again, they rushed just ahead of the back of the panic. People began falling and pushing, the fight had become larger it seemed, a squall of fists and anger. A sea of blue became a melee, as the three boys pushed their way towards what Danie...

The Dead Are Coming: Death Hits The City

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All in blue blazers, the class were subdued. Hunched over desks, dulled as beings now, no light fell on the poor souls in this hardest of winters. A sea of disinterest. Skies outside were grey, but the radiators were blazing, fighting the oppressive cold; unusually accurate timing by the school. This peculiar warmth was making the boys sleepy. Sleepier. This class were less interested than normal. Not only was the country gripped in fear of African Flu, but they were stuck in history class, which was far worse. Through the window a few trees moved, slowly, and a lot of concrete didn't move at all; as Daniel remembered. A disinterested sky. The heavens don't care, whatever they told you at school. Particularly this school. Daniel could see down the hill, he thought, over the school buildings which stuck together like concrete cancer. A sterile landscape, robbed of personality. Maybe a man staggered by, maybe he didn't. It was hard to be sure now, his view hadn...

The Dead Are Coming: John and Stephen

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The Dead Are Coming John and Stephen Prologue / Simone (parts one) Two men stalked the side of the semi detached house, like burglars on the prowl. Fat, wrapped against the cold, unlikely burglars. It is daylight in the city, hardly burglary hour. Their method is similar to that of a thief, stay quiet and do not get caught. Although they are looking to take, it is not from the living. Quite what “living” is, these days, is open to debate. Depending on your disposition. The only conventional living people they have met are boarded up and shoo them off hurriedly; they’ve been meeting less of these people of late. The other “alive” housing occupants wander their halls, decaying and trying to get out, bouncing angrily off their old life. Life. These houses should be treated with caution. Empty houses are better. Or houses with corpses which aren’t animate. There are dead outside the houses, too, walking. This is why they work at day. Danger from an animate assailant is anoth...

Las Vegas: The Good, The Bad, The Weird

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Exam Question 1.1. LAS VEGAS IS A HELL OF A  PLACE [OF HELL]: DISCUSS Las Vegas: Part 1 , Part 2 , Part 3 , Part 4 Las Vegas: The Good, The Bad and The Weird The Good

Las Vegas: Can A Chad Swing My Vote?

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Las Vegas Part 1 , Part 2 , Part 3 I’m back to swears. Forewarned is forearmed. Boxing has been my staple while staying in Las Vegas. It has sustained me, given me meaning and distracted me from what Vegas appears to be. Despite all the fun I've had with the boys and things I've experienced which I wouldn't in the UK, as you've probably guessed, Las Vegas ain't somewhere I was built for. Except the weather. Man I love that heat. The guys (Josh and Asinia) had been getting up super early to do some training which sounded super good for them, but super boring for me. Despite being a boxing nut I have disabilities, and one of those is not giving a flying fuck if no punches or egg shaped balls are involved*. As well as not liking 5am.

Las Vegas: Boxing Baby!

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Just for Nicky, this one has no swears in! Las Vegas: First Impressions Las Vegas: Jet Lag and Downtown After what was honestly something of a disappointment that Vegas is not really for me, I felt had to move on. I'm here for two weeks. I’m aware I may have put the disappointment in slightly stronger terms in previous posts. I’d thought I might really like it, if I don’t know me by now, I never will. Which is a whole other problem I’ll deal with shortly after my last breath. So it was on, on, on to the next one. The next one happened to be boxing, fortunately. The sole reason I’d come here, which was a consolation to me. I do not box, but then neither does Conor McGregor and that’s not stopping him coming to Las Vegas on a high. I also have a scheduled spar with Hollywood Josh. Which will be fun. Hellraiser, through Mickey’s connections, are encamped at Floyd Mayweather’s gym, which is pretty obviously a centre for excellence. Sam Fleetwood had a youngster called Ty...

Las Vegas: Jet Lag and Downtown

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I am now unbound by writing for work. So expect more expletives, and honesty. All my own opinion, with added grumpiness. Our long walk on the day of arrival around the epicentre of the madness that is Las Vegas taught me that while the Strip is a marvel, it is not marvellous. I don’t like clubbing or shopping and it is essentially one huge hybrid of those things. However, there’s plenty more to Las Vegas than the strip. I hoped. I had to hope. I was raised Catholic, it’s all we had, and it has stuck. Before I could explore beyond gaudy ground zero, though, I had to contend with a sore throat and a general overwhelming feeling of lethargy. I've never travelled 8 hours (and arguably 40 years) into the past before. We went to the gym we’d wandered into on the Thursday evening on Friday, and beforehand got some breakfast at a diner/ burger type place. I had already worked out that eating was going to be a problem for two reasons. Firstly, I have lost a stone and a half ...

Las Vegas: First Impressions

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This was initially written for work, but for reasons which will become obvious, is now going out on my blog instead. I’ve been to America before, twice. Once was a 6000 mile road trip round the south eastern states; it was amazing for many reasons. That I don’t drive was just one of them. New York in my early teens was fun, but New York is a lot like London, where I grew up. It was safe to say I had never been somewhere in America I have despised. Las Vegas is totally new to me though and the Hellraiser annual Las Vegas “sparring party” has been going out with Mickey Helliet since 2010. Mickey has been going since long before then, and has attended big fights out here. Sadly that’s not an option this time, but it offers a unique opportunity to both the boxers who benefit from sparring at Floyd Mayweather’s gym, and me, as a writer and boxing fan. I was extremely excited to be coming out here.

The Space Between Trees

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When my son went missing, I was horrified. How do people get lost in this day and age? He’d never been a tough kid, he played sports, sure. But he wasn’t a leader or a game winner. I wasn’t ashamed of this part of him, I should say. I wasn’t ashamed of that, because that part was what he got from me. He had his day, few tries here and there, occasional game where the other players, children really, would pat him on the back. That was pride, for us both. I suppose. Not without his difficulty is kind. Is it kind? He has a bad mood. That’s not the right words. He has an inability to have consistent mood. In that sense he wasn’t normal. Isn't normal. I don’t think. He was like a ship in a storm, always struggling to rectify the ballast, to equalise. Always rocking, overcompensating. It was horrible to watch, hard to be around. It was awful to be around. He’d puff his chest out and go about his day but I could always see he wasn’t ok. What could I do though? He said he was fine...

Simone Part 5: The Dead Are Coming

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Rancid, swollen, images of the dead she’d seen flashed at Simone through unconsciousness. Worse was those eyes. Piercing her every blink. Eyes suggesting life but full of death. Broadcasting the afterlife. The desperate, pleading eyes of her son. Asking her not to kill him. If there was a choice she wouldn’t have done. Simone cried herself awake. Linus was making food. It was dizzying bouncing from extreme to extreme. Although this routine she could get used to. How was it that this weird little man seemed so at home in the apocalypse. It’s so hard to look to the future when the past is ripping your heart out. This man had a plan. She didn’t have time to answer her own thought before he spoke. “Hi. Did you sleep well?” She half lied out of politeness, in the way English people do. “Yes thank you. I needed that.”

The Dead Are Coming: Simone, Part 4

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Simone Parts 1 & 2 & 3   found on the numbers! The two settled down in the main room. Linus prepared a simple meal for them of rice with mushrooms and herbs from the wood, salt and pepper. It was by far the best food Simone had eaten in days. Chocolate bars and crisps may last but they’ll only keep you going so long. Though he had those in abundance, too. He’d an air rifle which he hunted with, he said, so occasionally he’d eat rabbit or pigeon, maybe squirrel. Although he wasn’t too fond of squirrel, and he refused to shoot the red ones on an ethical basis which seemed out of place to Simone in the new world. The air gun was quiet, he explained, and the leftovers and innards the dogs would eat. Food was an issue for him, he had been hiding for a month or so, which was almost as long as the world had been in this shit. Another safety precaution. Simone wanted to know what drove him to such extreme safety. “Oh come on. We all knew.”

The Dead Are Coming: The Large Man

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(The Dead Are Coming: Simone, will be back soon, as the story needs more work done in the next section. Believe it or not I have some standards. My Top Ten Horror Films will also be within the next week). The Large Man is a short story from The Dead Are Coming , a sprawling novel (in Utero) about the living and the dead. Over the radio, two male voices competed at being annoying. “Yes, yes! And we’re back! That was the latest from Jizzy Jeff, big tune!” “Love it bruv! Love it! My man and I are spinning until the sun comes up. Don’t go nowhere.” “We ain’t going nowhere and I am GLUED I mean GLUED to this mic all night. We’ve plenty more coming, too. Hold tight.” Music with a limited target audience continued to blare from the radio signal unendingly. If only. Everything ends. Static. Mostly static. Dead air. Hoarse and whispering. “Please help us. We have a child. We know this is going out. Please, please help us.” “It’s too late. It’s too late. They’r...