Why You Were Taken: A Cyberpunk Conspiracy Thriller (When Tomorrow Calls Book 1) Read online

  Why You Were Taken

  When Tomorrow Calls - Book One

  JT Lawrence

  Contents

  Praise For JT Lawrence’s

  What Amazon Readers

  Also by JT Lawrence

  Grab ‘The Stepford Florist’ for FREE

  Why You Were Taken

  1. Bride in the Bath

  2. Rainbow Vom

  3. They Must be Playing with the Weather Again

  Journal Entry

  4. A Big Red Bloom Over His Heart

  Journal Entry

  5. Tommyknockers

  Journal Entry

  6. Mad Furniture Whisperer

  7. Organic Arse Carrots

  Journal Entry

  8. Mary Contrary

  Journal Entry

  9. Shining & Slippery with Sweat

  Journal Entry

  10. A Swarm, A Smack

  Journal Entry

  11. Corpse Fingers Stroke Her Neck

  Journal Entry

  12. A Good View, Too

  Journal Entry

  13. Messiah Magic

  Journal Entry

  14. Teambuilding

  15. Every Perfect Bone

  Journal Entry

  16. Hello, Pretties

  17. Sub Rosa

  Journal Entry

  18. Borrowed Scrubs

  19. Piranhas

  20. Toy Chase

  21. Red Fingerprints

  Journal Entry

  22. Tsotsi

  23. Her Abductor’s Handwriting

  Journal Entry

  24. A Little Less Conversation

  25. The Seven That Were Taken

  26. Non-Lizards

  27. Cracked Cobalt

  28. Little Lagos

  29. Yip, Yip, Yip.

  30. Capital Fucking F

  31. The Unholy Trinity

  32. Cheerios

  33. Baby Starter Kit

  34. Unlucky Firefighter

  35. The Ultimate Bloodless Revolution

  36. Next Stop: Cyborgs

  37. That’s What Frankenstein Said

  38. White Hole

  Journal entry

  Epilogue: Six Months Later

  What’s Next?

  Grab ‘The Stepford Florist’ for FREE

  Also by JT Lawrence

  About the Author

  Stay In Touch

  Acknowledgments

  Praise For JT Lawrence’s

  Why You Were Taken

  “A tightly wound and imaginative thriller.”

  - PAIGE NICK

  “Why You Were Taken is a far out, near future, Afro-punk, Gibsonesque, instant classic sci-fi thriller. JT Lawrence has painted a sexy, smart, surprising and ultra cool vision of South Africa in the year 2021. I loved the textures and the tech and, most of all, the characters, who stayed with me long after I’d burned through the book. Highly recommended. Can't wait for the movie.”

  - TIAN VAN DER HEEVER

  “In this fast-paced thriller, the lives of a synaesthete and a creative bioengineering designer are intertwined in a world where technology is at a newfound high, water is scarce, and a fertility crisis exists. Vivid writing, well-developed characters and the author's special brand of dark humour make this a must-read!”

  - MICHELLE WALLACE

  “'Why You Were Taken' is a triumph! A futuristic thriller set in Johannesburg in 2021, it tackles so many of the issues that speak to this zeitgeist. Janita's linguistic imagination creates a dark and menacing atmosphere, which resonate long after one has put it down. Intriguing, witty, gripping and pacey, this thriller is unputdownable.”

  - BRIDGET BIRD

  “A little dark, a little thrilling and, as the novel that came before, a little amusing with with her sharp as tack sense of humour.”

  - TRACEY MICHELLE

  What Amazon Readers

  are saying about WYWT

  ★★★★★

  “Richly imagined speculative fiction.”

  “The twists and turns were addictive.”

  “The last time I was this captivated (obsessed) with a book is when I was eight … I am devastated that it is over. A very smart and captivating read. I am envious of everyone else who is yet to read it!”

  Also by JT Lawrence

  FICTION

  WHEN TOMORROW CALLS

  • SERIES •

  1. Why You Were Taken (2015)

  2. How We Found You (May 2017)

  3. What Have We Done (October 2017)

  The Stepford Widow: A Short Story (Oct 2017)

  The Memory of Water (2011)

  Sticky Fingers (2016)

  Grey Magic (2016)

  NON-FICTION

  The Underachieving Ovary (2016)

  Dedication

  Every word of this novel is dedicated to my late writing mentor & very dear friend, Laurence Cramer, who taught me to never walk slowly.

  Mister L, you packed more sap and spirit into your short time on earth than most people do in a lifetime. I’ll never forget feeling my baby boy kicking inside me at your funeral; asserting the cycle of life. Easing my devastation. How I ached to see your sons struck fatherless. How it burned to see how much you were loved by so many.

  A lifetime lesson in your passing, too: ‘Grab Life by the Balls,’ I can hear you say, late at night when the darkness pulls at my sleeves. I see your light, Mister L. Thank you for the writing. To me, you’ll live forever.

  Grab ‘The Stepford Florist’ for FREE

  Jasmine is arrested for performing a bootleg vampire facelift in her modded-out steampunk caravan.

  She’s thrilled, because it worked out exactly as she planned.

  Grab this short story set in the futuristic

  When Tomorrow Calls world now.

  Why You Were Taken

  Chapter 1

  Bride in the Bath

  Johannesburg, 2021

  A well-built man in grimy blue overalls waits outside the front door of a Mr Edward Blanco, number 28, Rosebank Heights. He’s on a short stepladder, and is pretending to fix the corridor ceiling light, the bulb of which he unscrewed the day before, causing the old lady at the end of the passage to call general maintenance, the number which he has temporarily diverted to himself.

  He would smirk, but he takes himself too seriously. People in his occupation are often thought of having little brain-to-brawn ratio, but in his case it isn’t true. You have to be clever to survive in this game, to stay out of the Crim Colonies.

  Clever, and vigilant, he thinks, as he hears someone climbing the stairs behind him and holds an impotent screwdriver up to an already tightened screw. The unseen person doesn’t stop at his landing but keeps ascending.

  The man in overalls lowers his screwdriver and listens. He’s waiting for Mr Blanco to run his evening bath. If he doesn’t start it during the next few minutes he’ll have to leave and find another reason to visit the building; he has already been here for twenty minutes, and even the pocket granny would know that you don’t need more than half an hour to fix a broken light.

  At five minutes left, he checks the lightbulb again and fastens the fitting around it, dusts it with an exhalation, folds up his ladder. As he closes his dinged metal toolbox, he hears the movement of water flowing through the pipes in the ceiling. He uses a wireless device in his pocket to momentarily scramble the access card entrance mechanism on the door. It’s as simple as the red light changing to green, a muted click, and he silently opens the door at 28, enters, and
closes it behind him. In the entrance hall of Blanco’s flat he eases off his workman boots, strips off his overalls to reveal his sleeker outfit of a tight black shirt and belted black pants.

  The burn scar on his right arm is now visible. The skin is mottled, shiny. He no longer notices it; it’s as much part of him as his eyes, or his nose. Perhaps subconsciously it is his constant reminder as to why his does what he does. Perhaps not.

  He stands in his black stockinged feet, biding his time until he hears the taps being turned off. Mr Blanco is half whistling, half humming. A small man; effeminate.

  What is that song? So familiar. Something from the 1990s? No, a bit later than that. Melancholy. A perfect choice, really, for how his evening will turn out.

  He hears the not-quite-splashing of the man lowering himself into the bath. Tentative. Is the water too hot or too cold? Or perhaps it’s the colour of the water putting him off. Recycled water has a murkiness to it, a suspiciousness. Who knows where that water has been, what it has seen? The public service announcements, now planted everywhere, urge you to shower instead of bath, to save water. It does seem like the cleaner option. If you do insist on bathing, they preach, you don’t need more than five fingers. And then, only every second day. His nose wrinkles slightly at that. He takes his cleanliness very seriously.

  Mr Blanco settles in and starts humming again. The man with the burnt arm glides over the parquet flooring and enters the bathroom. Even though his eyes are shut, the man in the bath senses his presence and starts, his face stamped with confusion. The scarred man sweeps Blanco up by his ankles in a graceful one-armed movement, causing water to rush up his nose and into his mouth. As he chokes and writhes upside-down, the man gently holds his head under the water with his free hand.

  It’s a technique he learnt from watching a rerun on the crime channel. In the early 1900s a grey-eyed George Joseph Smith, dressed in colourful bow ties and hands flashing with gold rings, married and killed at least three women for their life insurance. He would prowl promenades in the evenings looking for lonely spinsters and pounce at any sign of vulnerability. His charisma, likened to a magnetic field, ensured the women would do as he told them, one of his wives even buying the bath in which she was to be murdered. His technique in killing them was cold-blooded, clean: he’d grip their ankles to pull their bodies under—submerge them so swiftly that they would lose consciousness immediately—and they would never show a bruise. But where such care had been taken in the actual murders, Smith was careless with originality, and was caught and hanged before he could kill another bride in the bath.

  A moment is all it takes, and soon Mr Blanco is reclining in the bath again, slack-jawed, and just a little paler than before. The man in black turns on the taps and fills the tub. Turns out five fingers is enough in which to drown, but it would be better if it looks like an accident, or suicide.

  Mr Blanco’s face is a porcelain mask, an ivory island in the milky grey water. Perhaps the person who finds him will think he fell asleep in the bath. Which he has, in a way. He washes his hands in the basin, wipes down the room. He throws on the white-collared shirt he brought with him and within five minutes he is out of the building and walking to the bus station, dumping the dummy toolbox and overalls on the way. He manages to hop on a bus just as it’s pulling out onto the road. He’s in a good mood, but he doesn’t show it. This was one of his easier jobs. He wonders if the other six names on the list will be as effortless.

  He slides his hand into his pocket and pulls out the curiosity he lifted from Blanco’s mantelpiece: a worn piece of ivory—a finger-polished piano key. Engraved on the underside: ‘Love you always, my Plinky Plonky.’ It’s smooth in his palm and retains the warmth of his skin. A melody enters his head. Coldplay: that’s what Blanco was humming. The man finds this very satisfying.

  Chapter 2

  Rainbow Vom

  Johannesburg, 2021

  Kirsten, late for the appointment she’s been dreading for weeks, taps her sneakers on the scuffed concrete of the communal taxi stop on Oxford Road. The taxis are supposed to collect passengers every fifteen minutes but the drivers don’t pay much attention to the official timetable. Most of them are passive aggressive which, Kirsten thinks, is better than just plain aggressive, which they were in the old days. Taxi bosses, South Africa’s own mafia, used to gun down their rivals—blood in the streets—as if our history doesn’t have enough of that already.

  They stay with her, the pictures. She doesn’t know if it’s part of her synaesthesia or if she just has a more visual memory than most. It comes in handy with her job as a photographer.

  The exception, of course, is her early childhood, of which she can remember very little. It was before you could download and back up your memories. Her parents used to tell her what she was like when she was a child, describe her first word, her first steps, the outings they had been on, but Kirsten’s early memory remains an odourless, flavourless blank.

  One year, for their anniversary, Marmalade James gave her the first book she had ever read cover to cover. A hardbound, beautifully illustrated, vintage edition of a Grimms’ fairy tale: ‘Hansel and Gretel’. The pages are foxed, the cover bumped. When she holds it she can feel that the book contains more than one story. She was so touched by the gesture: as if he’s trying to give her a small part of those early years back. She treasures the book. Reads it carefully, is appalled by it, falls in love with it, can’t bear to read it again. Still dreams of toaster waffle tiles.

  Kirsten’s watch beeps with a reminder just as a minibus rolls up. She’s supposed to be at the clinic already. She double-clicks the message and it dials through to the reception machine, letting them know she’s running late. People are more flexible now that personal cars are practically extinct and almost everyone relies on public transport. At least that’s what Kirsten hopes, seeing as she’s terminally late. The irony of her period being precisely on time every month is never lost on her.

  She lets a few passengers push in front of her in the queue so that she’s last to board and gets a seat in the front row. She hates sitting at the back. All the smells: the perfume and aftershave and shampoo and worn pleather shoes and smudge and atchar and chewing gum. All the sounds: the tinny kwaito, jazz and retro-marabi on the radio; the different languages and dialects; the shades of skin; the mad hooting.

  The close fabric of different textures and colours makes her giddy, sometimes ill. Overwhelming: like having to see, smell, touch and taste all the colours of the rainbow, in 3D, at the same time. At its worst, it mixes together to become a thick, soupy, smelly, bubbling, multi-coloured mess.

  Normally she closes her eyes, pictures herself in a clean white room, and tries to cut herself off from her senses, but fellow passengers never like that. They either take offence or move a little away from her, afraid, perhaps rightly so, that she will hurl on them. Rainbow Vom, she thinks, and smiles, although the idea doesn’t make the trip any easier.

  With her LocketCam she takes a quick snap of the miniature disco-ball hanging off the taxi’s rear-view mirror, which swings as they stop to pick up passengers. The driver makes a dangerous stop at a dogleg to offer a woman a ride. Probably because she’s pretty, Kirsten thinks, till the door opens and she sees the woman’s bulging stomach.

  Christ. As if this morning isn’t difficult enough.

  The other passengers all snap to and make the appropriate noises. Not gasps, not quite, but something similar. They shift up in their seats, making space for her, dusting invisible crumbs off the cheap cracked upholstery seat.

  The pregnant woman smiles shyly, thanks them in vernacular. The people on either side of her beam as she sits, and steal shy glances at her bump. The woman smiles, puts her hand on her belly. A special kind of smug, the way only pregnant women can be. Kirsten stares out of the hair oil smeared window.

  The Infertility Crisis has hit the lower socio-economic groups the hardest, with nine out of ten couples battling to conceive. As the sa
laries climb, though, the infertility—bizarrely—decreases, with top earners having the reversed fortune.