Dirk lowered himself onto a cheap plastic chair. His eyes wouldn’t meet Noddy’s, drifting instead over the Johannesburg skyline. It was a more impressive view at night, when the neon madness of the city that never sleeps became stars reflected in a pool of infinite darkness. Some stars burned steady, constant. Come up here any evening, to this block of flats on top of Nugget Hill, and you’d see the street lights running along the main highways and boulevards, mapping out the playground of the rich and the poor and everyone in between. Hubs of incandescence scattered from Melville through the CBD to Yeoville and Hillbrow itself. The warming glow of Ponte City rising fifty-four floors above those streets of gold. And moving between the hubs, scattered along the highways, were brothers and sisters, friends and lovers, sons, daughters, mothers and fathers, all part of one living breathing soul. The multitude of faces, voices, colours, bodies, laughing, crying, smiling, dreaming. Some familiar, some forgotten, some never to be seen again.
“It’s not that, china. Mick gets out in a couple of days.”
“So he’s out of the coma? Still as mad as ever?”
Dirk nodded slowly. “Worse, I think. I went to see him this morning. The funny part? His teeth have turned black from the nerve damage. Should have been wearing a helmet.”
“That is funny. So he’s even uglier than before?”
Dirk nodded even more slowly. “Ja, boet. Uglier and meaner. But you know the bit that’s not so funny? He doesn’t remember.”
“What? Falling off your bike?”
“No. Well, no, he doesn’t remember that, either. But it’s other things… He’s lost bits and pieces, here and there. Seems to be a random thing, you make out?”
“No. I don’t. What are you trying to say, Dirk?”
Both beer bottles were tilted before the response came. “Man, he doesn’t remember breaking up with Janine.”
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What happens when reality TV ventures out into space and awakens ancient gods who would really rather be left alone?
Watch the human race tear itself apart in the face of cosmic forces unleashed after millennia.
Let Sleeping Gods Lie – my new science-fiction horror novelette – is available on Amazon and various other online retailers. I have some paperback copies if anybody wants one, or you can find them at Curiosity, in the Railways Cafe.
Finally, catch Big Day Out, a mad mercenary romp through the dystopian nightmare that Covid-19 might have become. Might still become, if we don’t keep our self-appointed leaders on a very short leash.
Available on Amazon or from Book Circle Capital.
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