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Delirium
Debt
Collector 1
Susan
Kaye Quinn
Genre: Urban Fantasy with a
Cyberpunk Twist
Date of Publication: Mar 2013
ASIN: B00BW7KXXY
Number of pages: 48
Word Count: 12,000 words
Cover Artist: Steven Novak
Book Description:
What's your life worth on the
open market?
In this gritty urban fantasy,
debt collectors take your life energy and give it to someone more
"worthy"... all while paying the price with black marks on their
souls.
Lirium plays the part of the grim
reaper well, with his dark trenchcoat, jackboots, and the black marks on his
soul that every debt collector carries. He's just in it for his cut, the ten
percent of the life energy he collects before he transfers it on to the high
potentials, the people who will make the world a better place with their
brains, their work, and their lives.
That hit of life energy, a bottle
of vodka, and a visit from one of Madam Anastazja's sex workers keep him alive,
stable, and mostly sane... until he collects again. But when his recovery
ritual is disrupted by a sex worker who isn't what she seems, he has to choose
between doing an illegal hit for a girl whose story has more holes than his
soul or facing the bottle alone--a dark pit he's not sure he'll be able to
climb out of again.
***first
episode of the nine-part serial***
"Absolutely
riveting!"
"Quinn
has a way of writing heart-breaking characters."
"You'll
be holding your breath, looking over your shoulder, and begging for more."
Contains
mature content and themes.
Book Trailer: http://youtu.be/0-ngIMiEF1M
Available at Amazon
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OPTIONED FOR VIRTUAL REALITY BY IMMERSIVE ENTERTAINMENT
2014 Semi-Finalist in Science
Fiction in the Kindle Book Awards
It is recommended that you start
with the first season, but each season is a complete story for that debt
collector and can serve as an entry point to the series. There are five planned
seasons in the Debt Collector series, the first four each from the perspective
of a different debt collector with the fifth season bringing all four together.
READING
ORDER
Season One - Lirium – COMPLETE
Episodes 1-9: Delirium, Agony,
Ecstasy, Broken, Driven, Fallen, Promise, Ruthless, Passion
Season Two - Wraith **available
for pre-order** releases 12.15.14
Episodes 10-18: Wraith, Specter,
Menace, Temptation, Shattered, Penance, Judgment, Corruption, Atonement
Excerpt:
My jackboots are
new, the latest ultra-light material out of Hong Kong’s synthetics district,
and they make a strange squeaking sound against the hospital floor. It’s the
kind of sound that might gather snickers or a raised eyebrow, but no one looks
at me, at least not on purpose. I stroll past the ICU desk, taking my time,
breathing in the antiseptic smell that masks the odor of death held back by
machines and drugs and round-the-clock care. The nurses duck their heads and
study their charts, ignoring me. As if catching my eye might mean I’m coming to
collect their debt, rather than Mr. Henry’s in Room 301.
The floor is so
highly polished that I see the reflection of my trenchcoat running ahead of me,
black as a midnight grave, a spook that lives on the surface of the
oft-scrubbed tiles. It reaches the door to 301 before me and disappears in the
dim, flickering light coming from the room. The spook has gone back where he
belongs, into the dark recesses of my soul, assuming I still have one. If I was
a betting man, I would say the odds of having a soul keep getting longer with
every transfer I do. The older debt collectors, the ones who are still alive,
don’t have anything shining out of their dull-glass eyes, even when they’re
hyped up on a transfer. There’s no telling what my eyes look like.
I stopped
looking in the mirror a long time ago.
Mr. Henry’s hooked
up in all the usual places—tubes in his arms and monitor patches hovering over
his temples and the blue-veined skin of his chest. His knobbed knees and
shriveled legs stick out the end of the blanket. I don’t know if he’s tossed
the blanket aside or the nurses just forgot to cover him up again after his
sponge bath or whatever they do to prepare patients for a debt transfer.
Goosebumps raise the hair on what’s left of his legs into a small forest of
gray fur. I tug the thin, white-weave blanket over his exposed legs, and Mr.
Henry opens his eyes.
They’re pale
green and watery—washed out and used up like the rest of him.
“You’ve come for
me,” he says.
I pick up one of
the hard-backed, plastic hospital chairs, the kind that makes you uncomfortable
sticking around the ICU, just in case all the death-waiting-to-happen doesn’t
do the trick. I carefully set it down, backward facing at the head of Mr.
Henry’s bed, and settle in. I don’t answer him, just study him for a moment
over my laced fingers.
“What’s your
name, son?” he asks, which makes me lean back and mentally check over his file
again. No, he’s not an Alzheimer’s patient. He shouldn’t think I’m his son. And
I’m only twenty, but no one’s mistaken me for a boy in a while, not since I
started collecting.
“Lirium,” I say.
It’s just my collector name, short for Delirium. Some punk collector thought it
was funny when we went through training and it stuck. I don’t use my real name
anymore, so it’s as good as any. Most people don’t ask.
“Is it going to hurt, Lirium?” His hand
wanders out from the blanket, shaking a little and fluttering around his chest,
like it’s searching for something. Then it lands on the rail of his bed and
grips it.
“No, sir.”
Relief gushes through me like water from a busted hose. When patients have been
properly prepared, that’s the question they ask. It means they’re ready. I
should thank the nurses on the way out, if I can get one of them to look at me.
“It won’t hurt at all, Mr. Henry. In fact, it will be a relief.”
This isn’t really
true, but I imagine it will be better than what he’s feeling now, all the aches
and pains of the cancer slowly eating him from the inside out. This is where I
usually tell them that transferring out is a good thing and how paying their
debt will make the world a better place. I tell them it’s better for
everyone—they get relief from having to live the last painful stages of their
disease, they’re no longer a drain on the resources of the world, and someone
else, someone in the height of their productivity, whose contributions to the
world will be long lasting, will receive their debt and do even more with it
than they can imagine. And I get my cut. Everyone wins!
I usually leave
out that last part.
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About
the Author:
Susan Kaye Quinn is the author of
the bestselling Mindjack Trilogy and the Debt Collector serial, as well as
other speculative fiction novels and short stories. Her work has appeared in
the Synchronic anthology and has been optioned for Virtual Reality by Immersive
Entertainment. Her business card says "Author and Rocket Scientist"
but she mostly sits around in her PJs in awe that she gets to write full time.
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