♠ Out of hand ♠

He surprised himself by doing a brief dance step in the alley behind the neighbour’s house. Damn, it felt good to be out. Out of the house, out of cover. Out of his mind, probably, but that was nothing new. No more caution. No more holding back. He’d forgotten how much he missed it.

He wasn’t out of the woods yet. By the sound of things, every cop that ever there was, were gathered there together because –

Stop it. Get a grip.

He used to know people around the neighbourhood. There had been days, and nights – mostly nights – when he’d had to get out of the house, be somewhere else for a while. Before lockdown, when things were still normal.

Connor spat the taste of adrenaline onto a flattened cardboard box at the side of the alley. That had been his problem. He didn’t do normal.

But one of the neighbours… He trotted on tiptoes for a couple of steps, looking over the ramshackle wooden fence topped with rusted razor wire. Yip. That was the one.

He didn’t waste time climbing. With a kick and a shoulder, he was through the rotten planks and running towards the carport at the side of the house. There it was, exactly as he remembered it from last time he was there. An off-road scrambler, just waiting for him. He turned the key in the ignition and knew that someone up there was looking after him when the engine kicked into spluttering life.

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Read Big Day Out in weekly installments on FaceBook or WordPress. Receive notifications via Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr, GoodReads, or Amazon, where you’ll find the whole 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.

Download FREE sampler previews of all my books – and some complete short stories – from PCloud at www.bit.ly/FreeBurning. Or read them on Kindle Unlimited.

No charge. No obligation. No sign-in. Read for free. Share with your friends.

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For a different experience, listen to these weekly episodes as Spotify podcasts, Apple podcasts, or Google podcasts.

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Join me on Sunday the 5th, from 9am to 3pm, at BookDealers, 40 Wessel Road, Rivonia, for their last Book Fair of 2021. Come stock up on pressies for those long load-shed nights after Squirrel closes the bottle stores.

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If you have a book you’d like to publish, contact me to claim your 15 minutes of bestselling fame at No.1 on Amazon. Find all the above details and links at www.amazon.com/author/burning.

In case you missed the link while listening to the podcast, that’s www.amazon.com/author/burning.

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Cheers.