Free Necropolis Rising by Dave Jeffery

question some of his father’s vitriol. It started at 10 years of age when Arthur Everett, the last bastion of bigotry began to talk bout “niggers” and “rag heads” and Thom told him that his teacher said that such words were racist and the product of an ignorant mind.
    Arthur Everett’s big face turned bright red, his big, beer-fuelled belly baulked with outrage from beneath his Rule Britannia tee-shirt. And he knocked 10 year old Thom off his feet with a massive blow to his head, the stars he saw staying with him for a good half hour afterwards.
    After this Arthur Everett declared open season on his son. The physical abuse came thick and fast, disinherited but contrived, always open handed, never fists, and, other than the original assault, to the body, where it could not be readily seen.
    Joy Everett always tended to her son afterwards, an ambiguous affair beginning with words of comfort and ending with hints that Thom was perhaps antagonizing matters. He hated her for this, it was the reason why he never visited her now; even though Arthur racist, bigot, dip-shit Everett was now maggot fodder in Rowley Regis Cemetery, a coronary saving the world from one less moron
    So at eighteen, Thom left his mum to it, and moved into Clydesdale Tower; his own place - his own space, and as time ticked on, his world became smaller; helped by the odd mugging or two, once in the elevator, another time in the stairwell. A mobile phone and a wallet later, Thom was looking elsewhere for new premises. And he was still looking when he found Dr. Richard Whittington.
    He was in a bar, bombed on Polish lager when Whittington said that he had a “proposition” for him.
    “ I bet you have,” Thom said through a fog of booze. “Move on, guy. I’m not that kind of fella.”
    “ Nor am I, my good man,” Whittington had said, his small eyes intense behind his even smaller spectacles. “This is a business deal. Nothing sordid, but it has to be between us.”
    “ What do I get out of it?” Thom had asked.
    “ Can I buy you a drink and explain the details?”
    “ Sure, you can,” Thom replied. “Make mine a double.”
    Their discussion lasted one hour and twenty minutes, and in this time Thom agreed to “assist” in Dr Whittington’s “ground-breaking research” in return for indefinite, rent free accommodation in Hilton Towers and a cool, mouth dribbling one hundred thousand pounds .
    “ For that kind of money I’d go through hell,” Thom said downing his last drink of the discussion.
    The first ten days of Dr. Whittington’s experiments weren’t quite hell; but they were close enough.
    He couldn’t remember much of it, just sketchy images and occasional flashbacks. Whittington had given him something, a concoction that had tasted like vomit. Then the world winked out for a while. Three days, in fact, Whittington had informed him later.
    Some of the memories had to have been nightmares, part of the dreamscape he’d sunken into whilst under Whittington’s mind-bending cocktail. Some images were of blood and madness and thoughts of irrepressible hunger.
    Then all was well. An apartment to enjoy and more money than Thom could spend. Oh, and the girls. Whittington knew some great girls, everything catered for; all part of the deal. All part of what Whittington consistently referred to as “The Initiative” . Now it was only a blood sample every three days. A small price to pay to reap such lofty rewards.
    A sharp pulse of pain brought Thom’s mind back into focus. He scanned his apartment. Before he blacked out it was decorated with the spoils of opulence. Large leather sofas, a huge TV; built in stereo that had been pumping out AC/DC while his head had been full of Wei Lin, naked and beautiful and wanting.
    Now the room about him was jaundiced by the emergency lighting. In this half-light Thom could see the devastation about him: chairs over turned, the Italian leather suite exposed to the rain blown in through the