Welcome to the Revolution : The Sons of Thunder: Unrated Director's Cut (City Knights) Dystopian Cyberpunk Science Fiction by Chris Miller Book Tour with Giveaway
Welcome to the Revolution
The Sons of Thunder
Unrated Directors Cut
City Knights Book 1
by Chris Miller
Genre: Dystopian SciFi Cyberpunk Action Splatterpunk Adventure
When Sawyer "Deck" Declan,
more machine than man, is offered an opportunity to go after the
terrorist who took his former life away, he heads into the wastelands
surrounding the domed city of Nuevo Buenos Aires, hunting a sadistic
army of cultists bent on equality or death, all under the direction
of their mysterious Messiah and Declan's nemesis, Carlo Varga. A
showdown for the ages is in store for The Sons of Thunder, because
Declan is bringing hell to their doorstep.
The Revolution
Starts Now.
"Fantastic! A high-octane, uber-violent blend of cyberpunk and splatterpunk...Blade Runner meets Road Warrior." - Mike Duke, author of the AMALGAM series.
Nuevo Buenos Aires
Network News at 9:00:
“NBAN News has yet to confirm that the
vigilante known only as The Cyber Angel has struck again, but it is believed
they are responsible for the latest murder in the Mob Massacre. This time, the
victim is Diamante lieutenant Lucio Villalobos. Villalobos was found in the
barrio district this morning, the apparent victim of the cloaked figure who has
been haunting our streets for years now. Known for crushing the faces of their
victims, The Cyber Angel is thought to be a person with cybernetic enhancements—a
cyborg, or ‘borg—as evidenced by the brutal nature of their killings. Faces are
crushed to pulp, bones shattered to powder, and that is often after the removal
of fingers, sometimes arms, and, once, even a leg. The Cyber Angel’s targets
thus far have all been gangsters or members of former mob groups, such as
Diamante, but also still operating elements like Rising Sun, who trade and deal
in illegal tech, the Con-Feds, who briefly tried to establish themselves in
Nuevo Buenos Aires before their leaders were all killed and hung from light
poles in the Southern District and the rest headed for friendlier areas in the
North American domes. Even the once-feared Sinister Samurai Six—an all-female group
of thieves—have been crushed from our locality in recent years.
“These reports continue as police extend
their years-long search for the vigilante, though no evidence has ever been
connected to a single individual for any of the crimes. While many in The City
consider The Cyber Angel to be a local hero, authorities say they are a
dangerous menace, and anyone with any information on the identity of The Cyber
Angel should come forward immediately before there is more bloodshed in our
streets.
“Hero or villain, The Cyber Angel has left
our City’s streets coated in blood since first surfacing. Hailed by many as a
savior, critics have begun to question why this cloaked individual has yet to
set their sights on The Sons of Thunder, the terrorist group taking credit for
a series of recent attacks that have rocked The City and shattered uncountable
lives with their brutality. These attacks strike at the heart of our City, and
even against our children. All citizens are urged to be vigilant and to report
any suspicious person or persons to the closest automated officer, or contact
your nearest precinct and speak with detectives. This goes both for The Cyber
Angel and members of the terrorist organization known as The Sons of
Thunder...”
Excerpt Two
Death is something
a man earns.
Sawyer
Declan had more than earned his, though it had been denied him in the end. He
supposed most would be thankful for the opportunity, to be wrenched from the
abyss and dragged back into the light, just to be alive. But Declan’s life had
ended fifteen years ago, blown apart into so many pieces that reconstruction
and augmentation were out of the question. There still needed to be brain
activity for it to work. He’d been blown apart too—at the same time his life
was ending—but he’d been the lucky one, at least if you’d asked anyone besides
Declan, that was. Even though he’d lost an entire arm and leg, the lower half
of the other leg, an eye, and his organs had been mostly shredded, there had
still been brain activity, and the self-described benevolent entity that owned
The City and everything and everyone in it had swooped in and saved his body,
even though his life was gone.
Fucking
monsters.
A woman
on one of the stages was humping a chrome pole with her naked crotch and
whipping her breasts for a collage of men and women gathered around, most
holding cred sticks in the air. She blew a kiss to one of them, and they swiped
their stick over the scanner for tips. Another woman was in a suspended,
transparent cylinder, pressing a pair of gargantuan breasts against the glass,
smooshing them into something that resembled fried eggs from a chicken the size
of a bus. The rest of her was big, too, but she had no fewer congregants than
the thin woman at the pole, cred sticks out. Even the guy at the back who
stroked a phallus that had to be cybernetic to be so large—and to remain
engorged for so long—was raking it in with an idiot grin on his face as eager
men and women hooted and awed at his massive man-rocket.
Declan
looked back to his drink, uninterested in the show, and lifted the glass to his
mouth, the scent of scotch stinging his nostrils. He took a sip. His cybernetic
left arm made no audible whirs of servos and moved smoothly as it manipulated
the tumbler. He sat it back on the bar with a thunk and Declan pinched
the bridge of his nose with his real hand, trying to push the memories away.
Push the happiness of them away. The brief joy they brought was always followed
by the crushing pain of loss and the desperate desire to finally acquire what
he had more than earned in service of Mothercorp. He’d tried a dozen times
putting a pistol in his mouth, resting the barrel on his tongue, tasting its
cold metallic tang. But he didn’t have the balls. This, too, shamed him and was
thus why he spent most nights here at this out-of-the-way dive in the red-light
district after a hunt. After he left another scumbag with a crushed face dead
and bleeding into the sewers to be reclaimed into what the people of The City
would drink in the form of water in a few days.
He
ignored the prostitutes promising to make his night one to remember. He didn’t
want to remember. He wanted to drink. Thankfully, even though his liver,
kidneys, lungs, heart, and most of his stomach and gastrointestinal tract were
artificial, he could control the speed with which his liver processed alcohol.
At least he could still get drunk, even if liquor and tobacco were incapable of
killing him now. One more reason to drink.
Declan
tapped ash from the end of his cigar into a plastisteel tray on the bar and
drew a long puff. Before the smoke was even gone, he downed the rest of his
scotch, seeing the girl on the pole through the bottom of the tumbler. Now she
was upside down, holding herself in place with taut legs and her sex seemed to
be sucked to the chrome rod. More cred sticks swiped. More tips. More
disinterest from Declan.
He
turned to the holocast over the bar, which showed the front of Airescorp with
the ruined steps. The bodies had been cleared and they were reporting on the
attack by The Sons of Thunder. The fifth such attack in the last month, and
they seemed to be increasing in frequency. Aside from a brief statement, they
weren’t bothering to report much on the latest victim of who NBAN News had
branded as ‘The Cyber Angel,’ a title Declan always frowned at the mention of.
It wouldn’t have been the name he’d have chosen for himself. He wasn’t some
hero. He was just taking out The City’s trash, unlike the corporate police,
unlike anyone else. It was all he had now.
All
those newscasts did was bring up memories and feelings best left forgotten or
at least blurred in a bath of alcohol.
“Can you
change this, Brown?” Declan asked the bartender.
The bar
bot turned to him, its brown—almost rusty if you asked Declan—steel body
whirring loudly with servo motors and gears, its blue LED eyes blinking off and
on once.
“I am
sorry, Deck,” it began with a digitized voice that nonetheless sounded
apologetic, “but the proprietor of this establishment has given me orders to
show our patrons the state of The City at all times and—”
Declan
waved him off.
“Okay,
okay. Just top me off,” he grumbled. Then, under his breath, he added, “Like anyone
in here is paying attention to the state of The City.”
Brown’s
waist tilted several degrees in a sort of bow, the eyes blinked out and back
on, and it rose.
“Coming
right up, Deck.”
Brown
made his way to the back bar as Declan let his eyes lift back to the holocast.
It had been a horrific attack. Nicolai Bulgakov had been surgically augmented
with a bomb inside his torso, but that wasn’t all. Two-and-a-half-centimeter
ball bearings—solid steel spheres—had been implanted along with the bomb, and
it had been these that had caused most of the casualties. The drone footage of
Bulgakov coming apart in half a dozen directions, a beam of blue-white fire
erupting from him, people’s bodies being rent and torn apart in explosions of
flesh and gore, had been too much for Declan to watch, too close to the last
thing he had seen as his life had been snuffed out fifteen years before.
When he
had been denied the death he had so honestly earned.
Cora had
been beautiful. Long, dark hair—almost black—with hazel eyes he’d once thought
he would forever be lost within. She hadn’t been especially tall, but she was
slender and fit, with an intoxicating smile and an utter refusal to take any
shit whatsoever, which lent itself well to her not only being accepted into the
Corporate Security Force Academy, but also in climbing the ranks quickly after
graduation.
Declan
took his tumbler in hand after Brown had refilled him and spun it lazily on its
base with his cybernetic hand. The neural sensors controlling the kilos of
pressure his fingers exerted were now so tuned he hardly had to consider them
anymore. The more he stared at his robot arm, the more bitter he became. The
more he drank, the more bitter he became. The more he went out in the dead of
night, hunting the elusive man who had ended his life only to settle on cheap
substitutes to put down when he couldn’t find him, well...
It all
reminded him of Cora. All of it. Every time he looked in the mirror and saw the
chrome eye staring back at him from his scarred left socket—the scar extended
over his cheekbone and terminated above the corner of his mouth—he was sent
back to that moment, that sweet, carefree moment in bed, seconds before Carlo
Varga had kicked in their door and Declan’s waking hell had effectively begun.
“Fucking
monsters,” he muttered with a slur under his breath before throwing back the
whole scotch in one go. He swiped his cred stick over the bar’s scanner and
stood to leave, his legs uneven for a moment. His left eye twitched, his liver
began processing the alcohol faster, and within a few seconds, he felt better.
But this feeling was short-lived.
“Sawyer
Declan,” a woman’s voice came to his ears—a familiar voice, one he had not
heard in many years—and the blood chilled in his veins. “You’re a hard man to
find.”
He
turned slowly, the hairs on his neck curling out, erect and tingling, his
breaths barely moving any air into his artificial lungs. His pulse accelerated
as she came into view, and he grabbed the edge of the bar as he blinked, not
believing what his eyes were telling him.
It was
like staring at a ghost.
Chris Miller is a native Texan and award - winning author of more than fifteen books in horror, suspense, crime, sci - fi, and more, including the Amazon - bestselling Splatter Western, Dust, which was nominated for a Splatterpunk Award, Shattered Skies, also nominated for the Splatterpunk Award, one - third of the collection Cerberus Rising, nominated for two Splatterpunk Awards, and many more. His novel The Damned Ones was winner of the Home Grown Horror Award in 2021.
Chris is also featured in dozens of anthologies. Father to three beautiful children, he lives in Winnsboro, Texas.
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I liked the excerpt.
ReplyDeleteGreat cover art. Looks amazing. Sounds like an interesting story.
ReplyDelete