It is so fantastic to see editors Neil Williamson and Andrew J. Wilson reunite for another anthology of speculative fiction from Scotland – and what a collection of authors they’ve brought to the collection. With established names and up-and-coming authors and every kind of speculative genre, you’re going to find a story to delight you. Here we have an extract from Jane McKie’s story ‘Night Snow’.

Nova Scotia Vol. 2: New Speculative Fiction from Scotland
Edited by Neil Williamson and Andrew J. Wilson
Published by Luna Press Publishing

Extract from ‘Night Snow’ by Jane McKie

Your breath in the snow is a bird on the wing. 

You long to snake arms around the waist of snow. To hug a body that dissolves if you touch it. You want to lie on the bonnet of a stranded car as if it’s a gurney. You give it a go. Nothing moves in the pre-dawn cosy post-apocalypse of snow, but snow. 

* 

Being here, in the snow at night, reminds you of wearing your favourite headphones: white Sennheisers. This is what snow feels like, but instead of music, your own breath, your heartbeat. Reassuring. Cosy even. 

* 

It’s as if the world wants to clear its throat. Some kind of blockage, something there, just beyond description. In this hush, this non-noise, there is sweetness to being out on the street alone, in a world of unnatural light. The tenements wear white mantles; it must have been snowing for ages. They look both familiar and strange. Almost every shape is a lie: contour lost to the slow accretion of flakes that you wish would fall on you, yet, somehow, don’t. Every snowflake misses you even though you invite flurries. 

* 

Now someone is drilling just around the corner. You try to move towards the sound, but find that snow, which fell on everything but you before now, is compacted around your boots, sticking to your clothes, and movement is impossible. The drilling intensifies, the drill bit penetrating your skull, skewering the grey-beige sludge of your brain until you scream and wake up screaming. 

* 

‘Where am I?’ you ask the figures at your side. They say nothing. ‘Where am I?’  you scratch out again, throat on fire. 

No one answers. They look down at you, four of them, their expressions inscrutable, and you wonder why they don’t reply. 

You’re on your back, head slightly raised, aching all over, disorientated. And then, slowly, you remember. Remember signing the form with Amy, remember the weeks of talk before you did. 

She was all for it, wanting to make sure the best bits of your mind, your personality, weren’t lost in the march of the disease that had already begun to wreak its havoc. You were less convinced – after all, this was the choice of megalomaniacs and nutjobs. But she was the scientist, the one who could marshal arguments; and she had the patience for a fight. 

‘Mum, it makes sense. I know you think it won’t work. But what have we got to lose?’ 

And you wanted to say, perhaps as much as six months. Wanted to say, I’m scared; scared to go now, so quickly. Just a tiny bit early. But then, she’d wipe her eyes and say, ‘Mum, please.’ 

Cryonics when you were 50 was cryonics in its infancy. Sure, you had the money – money for Dignitas, money for the procedure – but a big part of you thought there would be a million better uses for it. That ‘please’ sat with you for days that stretched into weeks. You knew the thing Amy was best at was hope, and you had to give her that. She’d been a naive wee girl, too, but so sharp you could cut yourself on her, as your mum used to say. 

* 

You’re in a room so white it reminds you where you have come from. The walls are glowing. The people around you look very much like they did before you went under, and you wonder how much time has passed. They don’t talk even though you ask question after question. Sometimes there are as many as five of them, sometimes only one or two. But you are never alone. 

You watch them – the nurses – as they move around the room purposefully, and you realise it’s choreographed somehow: a silent dance. They seem to know what to do, who’ll reach over and adjust whatever is clamped to your head, who’ll bring liquid and take liquid away. 

* 

A couple of weeks have gone by, maybe more, and you haven’t moved from the semi-upright position they have you in. You’re angry now. Not one bloody word! No view save the exceedingly boring room you’re in, and the figures who move around you, whom you have come to think of as evil. Well, okay, maybe not evil, but you have no way of telling and you’re so pissed off, you’re like a pot left on the stove. You think of that cliche of alien abduction, and transpose your nurses into the role of alien experimenters even though they’re clearly human. They look, walk and smell human. Not aliens or androids, you’ve decided. 

You talk at them all the time. Shout a lot. Sing sometimes. 

You wish she was here. Amy. That she’ d been the one to revive you. But she probably died a long time ago, you realise, unless she, too, froze her body for posterity. 

Nova Scotia Vol. 2: New Speculative Fiction from Scotland edited by Neil Williamson and Andrew J. Wilson is published by Luna Press Publishing, priced £16.99.