The International Writers Magazine: Novel Extract

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ANOTHER PLACE TO DIE by Sam North An brief extract from the thriller about the next great flu pandemic Lulu Press: ISBN-10: 1847538991 ISBN: 978-1-84753-899-4 Extract: Another Place to Die - Week One Deka the cabbie is waiting for his next fare in downtown Vancouver. ‘They closed the airport,’ Reece told him over the radio. ‘I just got the last passenger. Port and Train stations closed too. I heard they are closing the roads into BC as well. All of them. No one out, no one in. Schools next. UBC talking of suspending this whole semester but the students are already here. They’re going to go crazy.’ Deka muttered something. He had known this was coming. Everyone was scared.

Reece was still talking. ‘Had a guy in my cab from the hospital. They admitted 1200 today. 1200, Deka. It was only about a hundred a day last week. He says they’ve opened a mass burial pit right by Deer Lake and another near Port Moody.’

Deka hadn’t heard that one. ‘I had a Doctor in the back who says they don’t burn the bodies. Got no time, just dump them in a pit add some chemicals and go back for more. She was heading up to Quesnel. Says the virus hasn’t reached there yet.’

Reece snorted on the radio. ‘If it ain’t there now, a Doctor’s going to take it there. Start with the chicken soup Deka, really. I mean it.’

Reece signed off and Deka was sat in his cab waiting for the next customer. Chicken soup. He was tired of telling people he was a veggie and besides chicken soup was the last thing anyone needed. Wasn’t it chickens where all this had gotten started? Fucking Bird Flu. How many times did they say it wasn’t going to spread to humans? Only just about everytime some kid died from it. Then something knocked it off the news and people forgot all about it.
He was bored. Been on duty since 5 am. He liked to quit around seven. Only did the nights on weekends. No fares for an hour now and he’d read the paper, digested all the bad news he could manage, done the crossword. He was about to quit when he saw a guy running. The man looked a little bit crazy, even if he was wearing a suit. There were some people chasing him. Deka locked his doors. He didn’t like the look of this situation. The man wasn’t wearing a mask, the men chasing him were. They looked like security guards.

The man reached his cab. Tried the door and when it wouldn’t open banged on the window shouting for him to open up. One look and Deka could tell the man was sick. Anyone could see that. He was sweating and his eyes looked hollowed out. He held up a hundred dollar bill, screaming now for Deka to get him out of there. But Deka shook his head. The security guards were joined by a Doctor and a male nurse in HAZMAT space suits. They had the man surrounded, guns levelled at him.

The man turned again to Deka and held up several notes. ‘A thousand. Take me to the airport.’
Deka looked past him to the Doctor who was preparing a syringe. ‘Airport’s closed.’ He told the man. ‘No one can leave now.’

The man’s face fell. He knew it was over. He tensed as the needle went in, right through his suit and everything. The guy in the space suit grabbed him, turned him around, and cuffed him. The shouting had stopped and they began to lead him away. The Doctor gave Deka a thumbs up, a thanks for co-operating he guessed. But Deka felt dirty somehow. Instinctively you wanted to help people, but not with this thing. Even the money was contaminated. A thousand bucks. That man must have been really desperate. Deka didn’t want to think about it.

He unlocked, got out of the cab, grabbed the disinfectant and went around to the other side of the vehicle and began to clean every spot the man might have touched. Sprayed the window where he breathed on it and in particular the door handles. That’s when he saw the notes. Ten of them, lying in the gutter. A thousand bucks.

He frowned. A thousand bucks off his payments would come in handy. He looked around. No one was looking. He sprayed them where they were and withdrew some tweezers from his pocket. He took them around to his side, placed the notes in a plastic bag; careful not to breathe the whole time he was exposed to them. He felt sorry for the guy; but then again, in twenty-four hours he’d never need money again.

He drove to the bank. The tellers all wore masks and gloves now. The notes, like the coins all had to go into a microwave to get zapped before they’d even look at them. Even then they picked them up with tongs and put them into a counting machine.

He’d put all the day’s takings in with it. Almost $1,800 with the guy’s notes. He left himself two hundred to live on. He put it in against his loan and felt a momentary lightening of the pressure. It still left five grand owing on the cab, but the bank would be happy for a while. He knew they were calling in loans all over the place, it was killing business as they instigated repossessions all over the city. Stupid. They should be lending more as business dropped. By the end of this plague the banks would end up owning everything and everyone would be beggars on the streets outside.
‘Thank you Mr Deka. You stay well now.’
From the corner of Deka’s eye he saw a bank employee sneeze and several of the girls behind the counter wince behind their masks. They all looked trapped and scared.
‘You too.’ Deka countered and quickly left. He hated being out in public now. It was too dangerous. Time to go home.

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Another Place to Die - The Next Great Flu Pandemic is coming. Are you prepared?
Reviews:
'It will keep readers in suspense, laced with gritty-gallows humor'
Charlie Dickinson
'Beautiful, plausible, and sickeningly addictive, Another Place to Die will terrify you, thrill you, and make you petrified of anyone who comes near you...'.
Roxy Williams - Amazon.co.uk
Fascinating, frightening and compelling, Another Place to Die is the ultimate page-turner which I guarantee will result in many late nights under the bedside light with you uttering, ‘just one more chapter!!’ Ian Middleton

Read the first Chapter for free - Order Now direct from Publisher : Another Place To Die
or from Amazon UK or Amazon.Com

Are you worried about your health this winter? Read my book '‘Another Place to Die'' . If you have the slightest worry about how to survive the coming flu pandemic, you need this book and all the proceeds go to keep Hackwriters going. In the UK newspapers 31.08.07 they were quoting a Home Office paper called: Planning for a possible Influenza Edpidemic and predicting 650,000 'extra' deaths this winter in the UK if it breaks out. There will also be a shortage of coffins, not that you need them in a mass grave. It's all in my book, you don't need this report. Another Place to Die is a guide on how to survive the pandemic. So order now for your autumn reading. (Maybe Amazon will do you a deal on a coffin too!) You will not be disappointed.
See the review from Ian Middleton.

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