I’m on the blog tour for The Prole Soldier today and am excited to share an exclusive extract with you! Thank you to the lovely Caroline form Bits About Books for inviting me onto the blog tour and for providing this extract for me to share.
The Prole soldier is available to buy in ebook now and at £1.99 is an absolute bargain. You can buy it here.
Before i share the extract with you, here is a little bit about the book.
Book Description:
The Prole Soldier is set in a dystopian near future
Theo lives and works in the Blue Zone of Rainbow City.
He is almost sixteen at which age he will begin four years conscription – military or mines. He wants neither. He hates his life and despises the cruelty, injustice and inequality that prevails.
When the opportunity arises for Theo to be involved in the fight for change he grabs it, knowing that failure will cost him everything.
Exclusive 1st Chapter Extract:
Part 1 – The Blue Zone
Theo ran. Down a narrow moonlit alley. The snow deadened his footfalls. He was leaving a trail, but it couldn’t be avoided. If he kept close to the walls in the darkness his footprints wouldn’t easily be seen. He skidded on ice and collided with a metal drum. He grappled with it. Stopped it falling over, making noise and alerting others to his presence. If he were caught in the Yellow Zone they might not even question him. Scan him, Chip him, leave him for the rats.
He thought he’d heard the whirring of a drone’s motor on the still night air. They weren’t impossible to shake. It would depend on who was operating the remote control – how skilful, experienced and intuitive they were. How knowledgeable they were of the borough. Drones had the ability to deal with a trespasser if they had a clear line of sight and could get close enough. In that respect the maze of streets and blind alleys that characterised the Yellow Zone of Rainbow City worked for Theo as well as against him. Drones, too, didn’t always ask questions.
With the threat of a drone in the area the only thing to do was to hide and wait it out. Depending on whether it had been a drone and it had been on to him, a foot patrol could be along soon, if there was one around. It was not worth gambling otherwise. Theo believed such caution was one of the reasons he was still exploring the Yellow Zone when others who once had were no longer around.
He slipped into an open doorway. A wall of inky blackness confronted him. Flicking on his head torch, he made his way through the pools of standing water and around the scattered debris and piles of rubble that littered the floor, having rained down from the roof of the bombarded structure a long time ago. The crunching of broken masonry under his feet bounced back at him off the walls.
Theo wondered about the building’s original purpose. He was in a large open area. A tall sculpture of a barely clothed woman holding what looked like a bucket above her head provided a focal point. Theo stopped and stared at it for several seconds. The sculpture appeared undamaged but aged. It stood in a tiled recess in the floor. He believed that at one time water would have cascaded down it. Now it was streaked with green slime, grime and bird shit.
He hurried deeper into the darkness of the derelict building. His breath plumed white in the light of his head torch. With his breathing under control, his panic subsided and his composure returned. He found a place to hide and turned off his torch. He waited and listened.
Theo was in the YZ because the business of living, for a prole in Rainbow City, was beyond hard and with no realistic hope of anything better. The potential rewards of scavenging in the Forbidden Zones were not a match for the inherent risks – termination chief among them – but the activity brought intrinsic rewards in the form of thrills and excitement to an otherwise dull, deprived and predictable existence. As well as an abstract feeling of aliveness, there were real things to be found out here. Things to be traded. Things that could make life a little more bearable, a little more comfortable. Opportunities. And maybe one day…
Foot patrols in the YZ were not frequent but the threat of the surveillance drones more than made up for the lack of a physical human presence. It was the drones that concerned Theo the
most. They were difficult to hear and almost impossible to detect at night in the darkness until they were upon you. Technological harbingers of doom.
Satisfied he was alone, he turned his head torch back on and allowed his curiosity to encourage him further into the building. He came to a stairwell. After a moment’s consideration of the possible dangers still lurking outside the building, he descended into the pitch black. He had time.
The air was bitterly cold. Theo shivered as he perspired. The concrete walls and metal treads ran with the water of the thaw. He stopped and listened. Hearing nothing he didn’t expect to, he continued his descent and added the ringing of his heavy boots on the rusting ironwork to the noise of the dripping water and his breathing.
This was not a building Theo had been in before because this was not a borough of the YZ he was familiar with. He leaned over the railings and peered into the depths of abyss-like blackness. For a breath-stilling moment he had the strangest sensation something was down there, staring back at him. His scalp prickled. He shuddered and brushed aside that unhelpful foolishness.
The head torch beam was not strong enough to penetrate the dark at the bottom of the shaft. But there must have been something down there once, he reasoned, or why have a stairwell? More intrigued for what lay ahead and below than concerned for what might be above and behind him, he continued on down in the growing hope of rich pickings.
Theo counted ten full flights of stairs before he reached the bottom. There had been no doorways off the stairwell. The frozen air hurt his lungs. There was at least a foot of trapped water.
The torch beam picked out the rusting closed doors of a freight elevator. Looking around he saw a door in the opposite wall. He stepped into the water and splashed across to it.
Above the door was a faded sign: ErgoCryo. It meant nothing to Theo. He tried the door. It was locked. He took the stubby iron bar from his pack and prised it open. The old rotting wood of the frame splintered easily. Theo pulled on the door against the resistance of the water and submerged rubble.
He waited while the water from the bottom of the stairwell washed into the room. There was a familiar noise coming from inside, barely audible. It reminded him of the humming of electrical circuits in the factory where he worked. He had to be mistaken. There couldn’t be anything still receiving electrical power in the YZ. It was probably just a draft moaning through an air vent, he thought.
He stepped inside. The air in the room felt warmer than outside. To test his theory about a power supply he flicked the light switch on the wall just inside the door. The sound of long dormant circuitry and old light bulbs waking up widened Theo’s eyes. The lighting stuttered and then slowly, one by one, the long tubes overhead noisily flickered into life and into the distance. He shut the door behind him to seal in the light.
A huge cavernous space stretched out before him. A subterranean vastness. It was not empty. In neat rows as far as Theo could see was a forest of upright tubes. Each tube was about three metres tall and a metre in diameter. Electrical cables stuck out from the tops. The cables ran into channelling in the roof space above. There were small panels with little lights glowing on most of the tubes. He flicked the overhead lights off. The lights on the panels remained on. Theo believed that explained the humming he’d heard. He turned the lights back on. He guessed there must be dozens of the cylinders. He went to the nearest one.
Cut into the tube at head height was a small transparent rectangle. Theo put his face to it. He instantly recoiled, calling out in fright. Backing away his heel caught on something. He stumbled and fell to the wet floor horrified and gasping for air.
Ooh sounds so good doesn’t it? I can’t wait to read the rest of this book and hope you enjoyed it too!
About The Author:
Crime writing author Oliver Tidy has had a life-long love affair with books. He dreams of one day writing something that he could find in a beautifully-jacketed hard-cover or paperback copy on a shelf in a book shop.
He found the time and opportunity to finally indulge his writing ambition after moving abroad to teach English as a foreign language to young learners eight years ago.
Impatient for success and an income that would enable him to stay at home all day in his pyjamas he discovered self-publishing. He gave it go. By and large readers have been kind to him. Kind enough that now, after moving back to the UK to his beloved Romney Marsh, Oliver is a full-time writer. Mostly in his pyjamas.
Oliver Tidy has fourteen books in three series, a couple of stand-alone novels and a couple of short story collections. Among his books are The Romney and Marsh Files (British police procedurals set in Dover) and the Booker & Cash novels, a series of private detective tales set in the south of England and published by Bloodhound Books.
For more on Oliver Tidy and his books, check out his website: https://olivertidy.com/
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