The Wake Up Call
Introduction to Chapter 1.23
Don't worry if you haven't read The Wake-Up Call story from the beginning. The complete story (once finished) will be re-released in a single .PDF document together with some images.
The 'short' (cough, cough) story I started way, way back in Hugi 16 is surprisingly still going. At the last count the text is close to 600Kb made up of 31 chapters and has over 77000 words. In this issue of Hugi there are more than the normal number of new chapters for all those Hetch fans out there. The story itself is coming very close to it's end, so please enjoy these next few chapters because the ones, which will hopefully appear, in Hugi 27 will be the final ones!
A quick recap of the story so far
Hetch, the main character, is a newbie courier sent on a job to delivery a mystery metal case by his sleazy boss Mewco. After waking up on a long haul shuttle Hetch's case and his artificial arm disappeared. To add to his bad luck the shuttle stop where he should have got off, Rhyson, was devastated by a bomb explosion. He met a kind stewardess who offered to show him to the lost property department. Inside the room he recovered his case and arm and escaped through some ventilation tunnels and into the women's changing rooms where he broke into the lock owned by the stewardess. He viewed some vid-recordings before being taken to the Eldora Tower and being beaten up, relieved of his case by two large thugs and locked in the room with the body of his dead boss Mewco.
He put on the disguise of Mewco (his clothes and face mask) escapes a fire and climbed up the outside of the building and was helped by a cloned individual called 'Seven'. Below the Eldora Tower was a gang of identical copies of Seven holding the stewardess and the two thugs hostage. Hetch releases her, takes the case and escapes through the sewer system. Outside in an alley he is ambushed by a gang and shoots some of them dead while one manages to run away. The stewardess attempts to shoot but is stopped by a rookie cop who Hetch knocks out. They hide and manage to find a taxi-pod that runs into a local city riot. Hetch is shot climbing out of the taxi-pod roof by a skinhead.
The stewardess takes the case and accepts a ride with some troops. The troop carrier is overpowered by a longhaired technician called 'Splice' and his partner in crime 'Trimble' (the skin head). Hetch's body is taken to the Aurora Complex (a huge building owned by the McKaffs, 3 gangsters called Keel, Dakk and Wheeze). He is revived by a cleaner who experiments with medical equipment in his spare time. Hetch makes his way up to meet the McKaffs who have the stewardess, Trimble and Splice in the boardroom. Trimble is shot dead by Dakk then the stewardess and Hetch are forced to wear timed explosive armbands and ordered to bring back the case to the McKaffs.
They stumble into a dirty cafe and run into trouble in the form of a biker gang who attack them both. The chef is killed by one of the bikers. Outside rioting and troops overrun the streets. They escape through the ceiling ventilation tunnels and into a hidden workshop where terrible things happened. They steal one of the 'scoot-jockey' gang's huge motorbikes before being stopped by a roadblock. A taxi-pod driver drags the stewardess into his cab before they overpower him and fly the taxi-pod through the city. They hit a sign and crash land on a rooftop in a bad neighbourhood. The timer on the stewardess' explosive armband is about to reach zero.
I hope you enjoy the story...