I'm now over 50,000 words into the new novel. Here lies a snippet:
The next few pictures were distant and close-up shots of the
murder scene. It was a captured terror,
a collage of the impossible made possible. Hal winced as he clicked through each picture, the next seemingly more
gruesome than the last and festooned with enough violescent horror to deform
reason itself. He did not even know why
he was looking at the things. This
should have been Phil's job; he wanted them taken, and he should have been there
to choose which one was more newsworthy than the last. This was news, after all, an informative and
educating medium in which the world was introduced and reintroduced to the darkness
and mayhem of humanity on a daily basis.
What was only previously told in stories was now real and spattered
across papers and television screens for the world to see, for New Wood to see. Hal wanted to be a photographer plain and
simple. He wanted to freeze moments of
happiness and natural beauty rather than endorse moments of death and misdeed. How could this be deemed a career? He shook his head with disgust both for
himself and the means by which he now lived.
This was not how he had planned things.
He leaned into the
screen after clicking on the next picture of the man they had seen kneeling by
the car. He appeared normal enough; he
was still a bald man in his fifties and still wore spectacles. There was nothing terribly out of the
ordinary about him aside from the contraption he was clutching in his left
hand.
Hal double-clicked
and zoomed in: "Looks metallic," he whispered to himself as he
enlarged the picture a little more.
"That's blood," he added with surprise as he moved the pointer
over the man's hand.
At that
magnification the blood appeared as a crimson coverlet over his fingers and, as
for the device itself from which the blood seemed to emanate, it was shaped
like a starfish that hugged the hand and wrist with a mutated grip. Hal zoomed in further until the computer
pixels enlarged into unsightly blocks, but he was still able to discern the
shape of the thing. It appeared as a
glistening glove that seized its wearer with inbound claws to pinch and pierce
the skin. Hal could also now plainly see
a small but discernible antenna hanging from the base of the contraption, which
had burrowed beneath the flesh and infiltrated the vein.
"That can't
be," Hal said as his eyes moved from the antenna and back to the minute
pools of blood on the ground. He pursued
the trail of dark pixelated puddles at the man's feet, which led to the victim's
car door.
Hal's lips parted
involuntarily and invited a drifting draught into his mouth. Suddenly the residual taste of coffee on his
palate was erased and forgotten. He
swallowed cool dry air as his tongue kissed the roof of his mouth and remained
stuck there while he formed the only feasible and yet still unfeasible conclusion;
the man was injecting himself with the victim's blood...
