Walked

Exodus Sequence #3

by Susannah J. Bell

Alternate cover edition for ASIN: B00CE976AC

A war veteran can’t remember how she was crippled.

Lt. Blossom Bartlett is recovering from mis-diagnosed PTSD and is unable to walk after a classified mission goes wrong during the war. Unable to recall the details of her accident, she is harassed by government officials who cut her medical funding and send her back home to a second-rate recovery unit. When she starts having bizarre flashes of savage violence, she doesn’t at first connect it to the lost memory – the day that changed the direction of the war.

Extract: I opened my eyes. The glass wall was the glass of my cockpit so that it was as if I was encapsulated in a blue bubble of sky. The desert sands rolled in waves beneath me. I was flying low. My engines were so quiet they registered only as a vibration in my bones, a rush of wind in the air if anyone observed me but there was little chance of being observed. There was no one on the ground. I could feel the package tick.

The Exodus Sequence: Each novelette in the Exodus Sequence is a standalone story. They don’t have to be read in order. They are not in any way connected like chapters in a book. They vary in style and character, time and place. However, the mystery unfolds as the sequence progresses, hence the numbering. To follow this unfolding, the sequence is best read in order.

A novelette is, by definition, longer than a short story but not as long as a novella.

30 pages, ebook

Published April 17, 2013

About the author

Susannah J. Bell is a writer of science fiction and other strange and surreal works. She was born in London but grew up in South Africa, escaping when she was twenty to be a writer. Not able to find much success in London, she dreamed of living in other parts of the world: the Scottish Highlands, New York, Mars, but never got much further than travel guides. Nowadays, she would like to live in a tower in a forest and dreams of travelling to the fantastical worlds of her imagination. Her writing has taken her from the familiar landscapes of Mars and Io and Titan, to worlds far beyond ours, even to the edge of the galaxy. She has explored other dimensions, realms, and space beyond. Within her writing, she explores different styles, voices and concepts, always returning to the theme that fascinates her the most: immortality. She has published several series such as The Fleet Quintet and The Exodus Sequence, and is working on a new series of novels, as well as a large literary work, more Exodus Sequence stories, and biographical short stories. She hopes one day to complete the fifth Fleet novel. She loves the sound of falling water, is passionate about trees, and is happiest when writing. She still lives in London.

Reviews

[Susannah Bell · Rating 4 out of 5]

This story didn’t begin life in the Exodus Sequence. It was influenced by a book I read as a child in which all the action could only be seen indirectly i.e. in the protagonist’s peripheral vision so that you could never be sure what was happening was actually real.
I wrote this story while working in a job I bitterly hated which explains the high level of violence. I could never get the ending right, though, and it wasn’t until the advent of The Exodus Sequence that the mystery of Bloss’s lost memory was resolved. The story had to wait over ten years to find out where it fit in the pantheon of my creations. Of all the Exodus stories, it’s the most accessible. It’s also the only story I’ve ever written that is set in Pretoria – recognisable by the jacarandas and the hadidas – and is set quite far in the future of the sequence as the moon has already been shattered into pieces.
I have only ever once had the type of migraine in which I saw a rainbow of colours, an aura, which I describe in WALKED in absolute detail. I had no idea what it was and thought there was something wrong with my eyes and kept blinking to make it go away. The irony was that the headache I had wasn’t even that bad (I get a lot of headaches.) Since then, I work very hard to relax, a state of mind which doesn’t come naturally to me. The incident occurred when a letter arrived from the DWP informing me viciously that I was about to lose my benefits and they couldn’t wait to see me starving to death in a gutter. Or words to that effect. And you wonder why I write stories in which I randomly kill people …

[Susannah Bell · Rating 4 out of 5]

This story didn’t begin life in the Exodus Sequence. It was influenced by a book I read as a child in which all the action could only be seen indirectly i.e. in the protagonist’s peripheral vision so that you could never be sure what was happening was actually real.
I wrote this story while working in a job I bitterly hated which explains the high level of violence. I could never get the ending right, though, and it wasn’t until the advent of The Exodus Sequence that the mystery of Bloss’s lost memory was resolved. The story had to wait over ten years to find out where it fit in the pantheon of my creations. Of all the Exodus stories, it’s the most accessible. It’s also the only story I’ve ever written that is set in Pretoria – recognisable by the jacarandas and the hadidas – and is set quite far in the future of the sequence as the moon has already been shattered into pieces.
I have only ever once had the type of migraine in which I saw a rainbow of colours, an aura, which I describe in WALKED in absolute detail. I had no idea what it was and thought there was something wrong with my eyes and kept blinking to make it go away. The irony was that the headache I had wasn’t even that bad (I get a lot of headaches.) Since then, I work very hard to relax, a state of mind which doesn’t come naturally to me. The incident occurred when a letter arrived from the DWP informing me viciously that I was about to lose my benefits and they couldn’t wait to see me starving to death in a gutter. Or words to that effect. And you wonder why I write stories in which I randomly kill people …