Read The Rot (Post Apocalyptic Thriller) Online
Authors: Paul Kane
Tags: #British, #Science Fiction, #horror, #scifi, #Post-Apocalyptic
The Rot (Post Apocalyptic Thriller)
Table of Contents
ALSO FROM HORRIFIC TALES PUBLISHING
The Rot by Paul Kane
First published in 2016 by
Horrific Tales Publishing
http://www.horrifictales.co.uk
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Copyright © 2016 Paul Kane
The moral right of Paul Kane to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organisations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
INTRODUCTION
BY
TIM LEBBON
There is a fine tradition amongst writers for destroying the world. You can’t blame us. It’s a fun thing to do, and sometimes the world feels like it needs destroying. Just to see what comes next. Just to see how those few who manage to survive move on into whatever brave new world might evolve out of humanity’s decline and eventual extinction.
And to see how little effect our passing will really have on Planet Earth.
I’ve always been fascinated with the End of All Things. I’ve destroyed the world a lot of times in my fiction – too many to bother counting – and I’ve killed literally billions of people, often in pretty horrible ways. I’ve nuked them, poisoned them, had them eaten by nasty beasties, served them up as a zombie feast, frozen them to death, drowned them, burned them, and melted them down into a haze of nano-techy things. I’m often asked why I write so much apocalyptic fiction (to be fair, probably only 5% of what I’ve written has been apocalyptic, if that…but people tend to remember the world being destroyed). I always take a stab at answering, but in truth it never feels quite right. I don’t know for sure what the fascination is…but I suspect it’s to do with the final death.
Lots of horror fiction is about death – confronting it, experiencing it, dealing with it, or not. Apocalyptic fiction is about the death of Us, not just the death of One. One day Humanity will go, whether it’s in a brief blaze of cosmic fire, or a whimper of burned or diseased bodies. Writing about that is a way of exploring not only what it is to be human, but what it is to be humanity. We’re barely a flicker in universal memory. Cold, dark infinity doesn’t care about us. As Richard Dawkins said, “Nature is neither kind nor cruel, but pitilessly indifferent.” It doesn’t matter
at all
to the universe whether we as a species live or die.
Which leaves it up to us to make the choice.
Apocalyptic fiction is about our struggle for survival against universal indifference. Whether it’s individual survival or survival as a species, we’re fighting against that cold dark infinity as it tries to swallow us up.
What would you do to survive? What
wouldn’t
you do? How far would you go?
I can’t remember the first apocalyptic novel I read. I suspect it was
The Day of the Triffids
(Wyndham’s novels are still among the best). It quickly led on to many more, and sometime in my mid-teens I read the novel which remains one of my favourites to this day.
The Stand
by Stephen King is a mighty work (both in scope and physical heft!), and it set the benchmark for the many apocalyptic novels to follow. Other favourites of mine include
The Death of Grass
by John Christopher,
World War Z
by Max Brooks,
Swan Song
by Robert McCammon,
The Purple Cloud
by M. P. Shiel,
War of the Worlds
by H. G. Wells, and many, many more.
In
The Rot
, Paul Kane takes the apocalypse and makes it all his own, adding to the roster of splendid horrors we all love to fear. This novella really is a grim slice of horror. I guess you could call it science fiction, but really it’s so bloody, gritty, and
meaty,
that edging it towards the SF realm would probably be misleading. There are a couple of original sciency ideas that are interesting, but make no mistake – this is a horror story.
It’s difficult writing an introduction to a work like this without giving away some of what makes it such a compelling read. But one of the aspects I liked so much – and which I think is an idea that could easily be visited again by Paul – was the SKIN. The concept of this futuristic creation is both neat and simple. The SKIN is a high-tech body covering that helps protect and maintain the wearer for an indefinite amount of time. It’ll recycle body waste, from the obvious examples, to shed hair and skin, blood, and all the other nasties you can imagine. It’ll filter out any dangers from outside, such as viruses and bacteria. It will even seal and treat minor wounds suffered by the wearer.
In effect, the SKIN is a barrier between the protagonist and the rest of the world, both physical and, more importantly, psychological. He’s one step removed from the world around him – cut off, effectively, from everything he has always known – even though he still exists within it. This is the idea I found most interesting. He wanders through the slowly degenerating world like a ghost, interacting yet still protected (to some extent) from the decline that has settled into the world he knows and loves. He’s suffered loss, and is destined to suffer more, but as the novella progresses he tries to shake the idea that he’s simply an observer, and become part of the world once again.
The story is told in a very conversational style. It’s informal and comfortable, and even quite light-hearted during the opening paragraphs, and that’s misleading, because
The Rot
is far from that. It’s like listening to someone chatting over a pint about cutting off your head and gouging out your heart. That’s intentional, because the whole story is written as the protagonist’s recorded version of events. I’ll be honest, it took a few pages for me to get used to this style. But once it hit home what it meant – a first-person, last person’s testimony – I think it worked extremely well. I like first person narratives anyway (as a writer as much as a reader) because it often makes a story more immediate, and more satisfying when you’re trying to get inside a character’s head. It works exceptionally well here, and as a reader you start to feel just as trapped as the protagonist, in his head, in his SKIN.
Then there’s the idea itself. I don’t want to say too much about it, because it grows and expands in clever and shocking ways throughout the novella (although the title will give you a pretty good idea of what you’re letting yourself in for). But it’s a good one, and I don’t remember reading a concept exactly like this before in horror fiction. There’s a hopelessness to the protagonist’s plight, a grimness hanging over his every word all the way through the story. Sometimes such grimness can be overly cloying, but that’s not the case here. His striving to move on, to discover more, to find a way back, is even more traumatic in the face of what he’s facing.
Besides, I like grim stories. They can get down to the deep, dark depths of a character’s soul, and strip them bare. In
The Rot
, confusion leads to stunned understanding, hope is presented and then ripped away again, and grim inevitability sings through behind the protagonist’s conversational tone. I loved it from beginning to end.
Tim Lebbon
Goytre, South Wales
August 2016.
THE ROT
Paul Kane
For Jon, David and all at Abaddon/Rebellion – feeding my post-apocalyptic writing habit for almost a decade.
‘Change and decay in all around I see.’
Abide with Me.
CHAPTER ONE
Record:
Testing, testing, 1, 2, 3. Mary had a little… Okay, enough of that shit.
Pause. Playback.
Resume recording:
Right, seems to be working. Captain’s Log, Stardate… No, not even funny. Not now we won’t even get to it, won’t see that future since the world’s gone to… Have to stay positive, there’s always hope; that’s what Mum always used to say, before… Might be a way to reverse all this, I just have to find it. Getting off topic, need to start from the beginning. In the beginning, there was the word – and that word was
fucked
. Again, not funny. Need to set all this down for someone – even if it’s just me. Can’t use paper and pen, can’t use computers – this is the only way. To be honest, I’d totally forgotten the SKIN had this facility. Yeah, I mean, I read the handbook, sort of, listened to the lectures – though a lot of it went over my head, I’ll admit. But given more time, I’d have got a handle on it. I did remember eventually, so that’s got to count for something, right? It’s not like I haven’t been busy, but I prefer to be active, y’know? Always have. Act, then look back on things later – so I guess it’s pretty apt that I haven’t started to use this until a couple of months after everything…
