Pretty Little Things To Fill Up The Void - Chapter 1

Fade in across the dark and rippling bay and past the sprawling behemoths of the old oil rigs that rise out of the water like great rusted sentinels.

Pass over the loading bays where the workers move amongst the great machinery and the crates piled high around them, then over the bare concrete plains that lead up to the skyscrapers and the squat brick-shaped buildings that dominate the city.

Cut to a group of teenagers walking along the sole remaining wall of a shattered storage warehouse, balanced precariously on the crumbling edifice as they make their way single-file along it. There is a twenty foot drop on one side, piles of jagged rubble filled with glinting shapes like the teeth of a wild cat waiting for its prey to fall from a tree on the other.

Cut to one of the many arcades that scatter the streets of this place, pan inside to the dazzling concoction of flashing lights and garish illuminated imagery. The joystick junkies, the pros, are consumed by crowds of onlookers as they battle with the games cabinets, cheered and booed in equal proportion. Pan across to the back of the place where people lay sprawled out in the booths, bathed in the electron glow, tripping on chemical cocktails or just blasted by the atmosphere. Their sweat beads on their skin and it is multi-coloured.

Cut.

To a trailer park far away from the insane lightshow of the games arcade, cooled by the glow of the moon, warmed by the fire that some children have lit. They alternate between heating themselves by it and throwing whatever junk they have managed to gather into it, cheering as it burns. Pan across them to the woman walking by herself through the scrubland that surrounds this mock-refugee camp, her arms wrapped around herself. She looks up and something glitters in her face – a lip ring, curled around dark purple lips. She enters one of the trailers and collapses to the floor. She hugs herself into a ball and begins to rock.

Cut to three people, dumping the rucksacks they carry onto the concrete beside them. Pull back to take in more of the building they stand before, a recently-renovated office space of some kind. The new metal glints and the dark glass is fine and pure. The three pull cans from their respective bags, shake them up and begin to work. They each stick to their own area, deftly decorating the surfaces with their spraypaint, with their identities. They will each write their own names in undulating, expressive twists and turns but the message will be the same – this is ours, it will say.

Cut to a dusty workshop and a woman whose face is hidden behind the screen of a welding mask. Sparks fly over her shoulders, fizzing to nothing on the dark hooded top that she wears. She moves the pieces of metal laid out before her around, checking their arrangement before melting them into one another.

Cut.

To a workshop of a different kind, this one brighter and more open. Chunks of plaster and plastic sheets litter the floor and a woman, small and with a taut, fibrous musculature hammers away at one of the dirty white obelisks with a chisel and hammer. Pan around her to the man that approaches carefully from behind, his large hands outstretched. He grabs her suddenly and she jumps at his touch. She swivels in his grasp and reveals to us the strange device that runs down her back. Her spine has been augmented by a jagged mechanism that brings to mind a spider clutching its prey, draining her of essential fluids. The man kisses her neck and whispers to her and the woman’s demeanour changes. Her feet are bare. She squeezes her tools and she watches him leave.

Cut.

 

 


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thumb_katjaKatja From The Punk Band
Jackie Brown meets the Sex Pistols in a fast-paced industrial crime-thriller that weaves multiple storylines and timeframes.


Pretty Little Things To Fill Up The Void
Set in a city of chemical warehouses and nihilistic video game junkies, five lives intertwine in explosive circumstances ...


thumb-nii.jpgNothing Is Inflammable
My second collection of industrial fiction, filled with stories of poisonous love and machine paranoia ...


thumb-rb.gifRohypnol Brides
My first collection of fetishcore fiction, headed up by the novella SWATFetish.


thumb-io.gifI-O
The one that started it all!  A slim collection of eight short stories, this is where my industrial fiction began ...

PLTTFUTV Chapter 1 - INFO

Added on: 4th August 2008

Status: Published

Information:
This is the first chapter from my debut n*vel Pretty Little Things To Fill Up The Void, published by Prime Books in 2007. You can find out more about it here.

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