Recognition
Page 4
bright, I gotta wear shades - ironic use of a line from a song by 1980's group Timbuk 3.
Real horror-show, like - A line from "A Clockwork Orange" by Anthony Burgess.
locked and loaded - weapon ready to fire.
one up the spout - weapon preloaded, ready to fire.
lesson learned - information taken and used to improve future procedures.
slotting, slotted, to slot - to shoot and kill.
FIBUA - Fighting In Built Up Areas.
stoppage - any incident where a loaded weapon fails to fire.
space cadets - Air Cadets, normally used as an insult or slur.
shout - call to an important task, a rapid response is normally expected.
Authors Notes:-
I almost abandoned this a couple of times during the course of writing. The horror aspect was easy enough, I haven't covered vampires or vampiric type creatures before but they were close enough to zombies to be fairly easy to write.
It's not that difficult to imagine the Armed Forces desperate enough to recall everyone able to still shoot for a crisis like this. All the dates the hero gives are right from my own RAF career, ditto the glaucoma stuff, that's all my personal experience.
The cross dressing stuff took quite a bit of reading to research, hopefully it sounds fairly convincing? It made quite a funny counterpoint to the horror aspects in my head, my various re-reads seem to indicate it does work okay.
Killing my protagonist at the end is nothing new for me, I've been doing it in stories since I was 9. I'm still stunned they never bundled me off to a shrink to be honest. They certainly would in todays world.
Clearly the 1970's was a more innocent time where imagination wasn't punished.