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
WarningL Sexual content and language
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.
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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This looks really intriguing. Thanks for sharing and hosting this tour.
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