Read the first chapter of B of the Bang
B of the Bang is available to buy as an ebook, paperback or hardback from 1/11/24 (11/1/24) - Amazon link. This is the first chapter. If you enjoy it please do consider sharing this post on social media as that makes a huge difference to how many people get to read it. Thank you.
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PROLOGUE – NOW THAT’S WHAT I CALL TRICKLE DOWN ECONOMICS!
Angelina Bird was fucked if she was going to let Etienne Lemoine fuck her like this. Some botoxed Frog who couldn’t even finish half his shoe of absinthe at Davos? She was supposed to let that plastic-grinned croissant explode a dirty bomb in her fucking London? Her family was London. Her Dad. Her Nan. They owned the jewellery shops. The office buildings. The flimsy little flats. The Birds had been at it for centuries; they were more than…the thought exploded unfinished in a froth of rage.
What did he think this would do to rents? Who wanted to live in Chernobyl-by-Thames?
She had to take a second to let the fury pass through her.
She breathed deeply in the drizzly air of the grey, moist London morning. It all felt very Monday. The damp spattered against her face as she bent over and the water coalesced on the tip of her nose. She blew the droplets away with purpose and clamped the leg brace around her right thigh and clicked the buckle into place. This was going to mash these tights right up, but that was just more motivation for kicking Lemoine in his head until her Gucci was ankle-deep in the pulp. But she had to escape first. She clamped the left leg brace on, straightened up, and toggled the engine’s jets. She felt the thrust immediately as a band of vibration across her back and down her arms. Woah, Daddy!
“Madam! Please! There’s no access to the roof up here, you need to come down!”
Bird was vaguely aware of a security guard walking towards her, past the pipes and vents that punctuated the roof of the building.
“Piss off,” she replied, while checking the monitors on her wrist display. Fuel wasn’t optimal, but it would be enough to get her to the outskirts of London in the little time she had been given, and that was really all that mattered. She should have let her Nan know, but there wasn’t really time. Lots of things wouldn’t matter after today.
“Madam, now we don’t want there to be any trouble here, do we?”
Bird remembered the guard and finally looked at the man, who was now five metres away. White polyester shirt. Black polyester trousers. Shiny patent leather shoes. Give him a run up and the right carpet and he could power the building single-handedly. There were weird epaulettes on his shoulder with two thin stripes of gold braid, like he’d been promoted. From what to what? A turd with one gold stripe to a turd with two gold stripes? Had his family gone out to dinner when he’d got the second gold braid? Bird recoiled; the man’s teeth could have had their own documentary series. Non-playing characters like this infested her flats.
Lots of things wouldn’t matter after today.
She raised one of her arms towards the man, who stopped approaching and took a moment to take in the weird exoskeleton that the woman was encased in. It looked like something out of Transformers. As he gawped, Bird levelled both her arms at the guard and briefly cycled the engine, causing the air at the end of her arms to shimmer. A concussive blast of power struck the security guard and shoved him back against the safety rail. He struggled to right himself, but the jets were relentless. He felt himself scrambling for purchase on the wet roof; his shiny shoes failed to get any traction against the blast. He felt the railing fall away. Then all he could see was a constantly revolving view of the top of the building and, increasingly, the ground. A bus. A tree. A surprised dog. He thought about the sausage bap cooling on his desk. Then there was just the ground.
“Blame Lemoine,” Bird said over the railing.
She picked up the flight helmet at her feet and strapped it tight under her chin. She slung the hardshell briefcase across her front and felt a shiver of excitement about the value of what she was holding. Not just the Willy Wonka Golden Ticket that the case represented, but all of the diamonds nestled in the foam. Her Nan had always insisted that they had a stash of wealth “just in case” and everyone had nodded and gone along with it, but she’d been proven right. Bird couldn’t imagine what the world would be like after the fallout settled, but she knew that five billion in diamonds would still be a good start. Maybe she would hire a hitman to bring her Lemoine’s toes.
The head-up display on the helmet’s visor relayed the power and fuel levels of the engines and gave her an overlay of her GPS position. There was a warning symbol flashing at the bottom, cautioning her that she was in a built-up urban area and that all jetpack flights had to be approved with the relevant authorities. Bird looked at the London that prostrated itself at the feet of the building. She felt confident that the ‘relevant authorities’ would have more pressing concerns than someone using a jetpack. She looked at London again. What had possessed Lemoine? It would mean war. None of it made sense.
Bird crouched slightly, braced her core and thighs as she angled the engines towards the roof and gradually let the power from the jets build. Her feet rose onto tiptoes and then with more power squeezed from the triggers in her hands, just the toenails of her tiptoes were touching the building. Then she took to the sky - one metre, ten metres, one hundred metres. She rose beyond the communication aerials and cooling vents. She felt her body being buffeted by the gusts of cold, misty wind. She blinked repeatedly behind the visor and shook the droplets of water that gathered on her chin.
She’d flown across London in a helicopter countless times, but to fly under her own power was a novel experience. Even the section of the Thames that she could see through the low clouds looked less caustic from up here. As she glanced down, she could practically hear the Eastenders theme tune as the city itself dissolved and the satellite view of the capital took its place. She picked out the various districts and zones of London. She saw the tourist spots, the dangerous places, the centres of power, the places she owned.
It wasn’t beautiful exactly, but it was hers.
Yet somewhere down there, right now, radioactive material was billowing through the streets. She wondered where the bomb had gone off – she could see a few columns of smoke rising across the city and if she squinted, she thought she could see flashing lights, but that could be for anything. Bird tensed her core, repositioned the jets and watched the display showing her point towards the South, towards the promise of deliverance. As she spun through 180 degrees, she had a fraction of a second to see the giant black circle that burst through the cover of the clouds.
Her brain was just beginning to trace that the black circle was connected to a wing, and the wing to a fuselage, but by then she was at least two metres inside the engine, and in a flash her brain and body were ejected from the rear of the engine as a red, aerosolised mist. Angelina Bird was now only detectable as a faint metallic taste on the wind. Her hardshell case ricocheted around the blades of the engine, smashing it to pieces. The case’s contents were spun around and blasted out, following her remnants into the sky. There was a slamming noise and long streaks of fire and a guff of dark black smoke emerged from the jet. It briefly let out another mechanical shriek, and then the only noise was a descending whine.
Enjoy that? Go buy the book and find out what happens next!Thanks for reading Andrew Shanahan! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
