The Commissioned Conscript

By Chris Knight

Jeff Tozier was your everyday working man, caught up in your everyday, largely uneventful life. Little did he know that one night, a phonecall from his boss was going to change his life forever...A day worker moved to the night shift. This simple transition would introduce him to a whole new world, the world of after dark.Taking him to people and places, he never expected to go to...including the world beyond the grave. Journey with him if you dare....

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Dec 8, 2010
• ISBN: 9781467892124

Chris Knight

Chris Knight is a research fellow at UCL and author of Decoding Chomsky: Science and Revolutionary Politics.

Book preview

© 2010 Chris Knight. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

First published by AuthorHouse 11/22/2010

ISBN: 978-1-4520-7748-2 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4678-9212-4 (ebook)

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

About the Author

Chapter 1 

Jeff worked at the garage. It earned him a living. He hated it, up early, and serving customers, day in and day out.

Still, he was alive, the greatest asset in the world, or so one of his Australian friends had told him of late, giving them both a sense of mutual revelation and momentary enlightenment. He supposed it was true.

Jeff Tozier stood at his bathroom mirror looking into a face that somehow didn’t seem his own. Yet it was, it was him in the flesh, he was born with that face, and he would certainly die with it.

His parents or God’s gift to him, he wasn’t sure which. Not especially handsome, just your average man in the street in a clean shaven kind of way. Though in his dreams, it was Robert Redford, Mel Gibson and Tom Cruise all rolled into one, depending on which angle you were looking from.

He smirked at himself, his teeth were yellowing, not from not brushing but just too much caffeine, he supposed.

He had once read that Hitler had yellow teeth, through vast amounts of sugar consumption, not necessarily from lack of brushing either.

He ran his left hand over his newly shaved face, he loved to shave. As a boy he couldn’t wait to grow a beard. At 13, he had once borrowed his mum’s eyeliner and tried to touch up the whispings of a faint moustache to impress an older woman he was in love with.

He had succeeded only in enhancing his self consciousness and possibly embarrassing himself in her presence, for she had noticed the eyeliner but not let on.

She merely sniggered that she had a young admirer and her ego was flattered.

She dined out on the story with her woman friends, they had slapped the back of her hand and her forearm, in their dainty feminine way, and said he’s only a kid, no big deal.

He stood still, almost in a trance, his eyes still fixed on the stranger in the mirror, his eyes surveyed himself carefully, as though he was seeing himself for the first time ever.

He splashed some water on his face and patted his short brown, greying at the temples hair into a modest part.

43 years old, he didn’t look it, but then again that was a matter of opinion. He had honestly been taken for younger and older and quite truthfully, he didn’t care.

He noticed the wrinkles on his eyes, the cat’s claws, or birds feet depending on what culture you hailed from. They certainly were the rings on his tree trunk. Unstoppable, and then like so many things in life, simply not worth worrying about.

He glanced quickly at his watch, 7:30 am, he had to motor. No time for dawdling. He had to be at the garage by 8. A 15 minute drive through the N.Z. town, providing no traffic jams.

He paused to take one long last look at himself, strangely as though he expected never to see himself again. He shrugged his shoulders wondering where that thought came from.

It momentarily frightened him. He felt his waist, 85 kilograms and it looked as though he had a pillow stuffed under his black long sleeve shirt. What a gut he thought, patting it firmly with both hands, as though it was some kind of achievement being over weight. He felt the midriff, my paunch eh? He said to himself, he had no intention of losing it.

It was his baby and he had carried it proudly for far more than 9 months. A short guy, he stood at 1.70 tall so the gut was difficult to miss, even to the untrained eye. He had been skinny in his 20’s, not only physically, but emotionally too. Mentally, just not quite heavy enough, in every sense of the word. Never really sure of himself. He lived in a facade. He had gone from 20 to 30 in the blink of an eye, an awful collection of memories, of not knowing who he was or where he was going. An underweight, a flyweight, never really comfortable in himself, and always trying to pretend he knew who he was.

He kept in the background, preferring to let others steal the foreground, while he stood in their shadows, perfectly eclipsed and hidden. Just where he wanted to be, to endure that turbulent decade.

With some skilful acting, he could pass for a modest middleweight or at least so he told himself. He had watched his classmates grow up, get married, one or two had died off prematurely. Others had moved away or gotten jobs in larger cities. Some had moved overseas

He always seemed to be watching someone else’s life, never his own. He heard from his parents about his childhood acquaintances successes from time to time. Wayne had bought a benz, one girl had won the lotto, and gone from rags to riches. Another lass had married a Japanese and had relocated to Tokyo. And so the list went on…

Jeff had managed to keep himself alive, and gain 30 kilo’s. Good on him! He sniggered to himself, as he slammed the front door.

Chapter 2 

He got into his 1978 Volkswagen beetle. The Christchurch rain was pelting down, trickling down the windscreen and dampening everything. Damp, damp, damp! he felt so dampened from mild annoyance to anguished irritability. It always rained on Saturday, so to speak. He started the car and the engine kicked into life on the third turn of the key.

He roared off down the street into the wet. He drove at speed, cutting corners, and riding the accelerator like a 17 year old who had just got his license. The traffic was steady, not as bad as he had figured. He glanced periodically in the rear vision mirror and wondered if he could arrive by 8 am.

He hated to be late, a punctual person by nature, it upset him to be a minute over. Kind of played on his