Get Katja

“What is impressive about Logan is his distinctive milieu, his command of tone and atmosphere and his deftly sketched selection of characters. Logan wants, and probably deserves, his own genre. . . .”

—Martin Lewis, SFSite.com

“Though the story is compelling enough to make you want to keep reading, Logan’s storytelling decisions here are what really elevates the whole experience. There are times where—despite the grit and the tawdry surroundings—Logan comes very close to creating something like art.
Katja From the Punk Band
is so good its almost scary.”

—Lincoln Cho,
January Magazine

“Readers who can tolerate the deliberately unpleasant action will appreciate the skill with which it’s presented. . . .”

—Publishers Weekly

“Excellent prose and pacing make
Katja From The Punk Band
one of those books you’ll endlessly recommend. . . .”

—Luca Veste, author of
Dead Gone

“Annoying, annoying, annoying. Really, I’m appalled. This man stole perhaps eight hours from me and I want them back. . . .”

—Cormac O’Siochain,
The Crime Of It All

“A visionary in the genre’s midst. . . .”

—Asimov’s

“Like a combination of David Bunch and J. G. Ballard, Logan tells tales of a wounded humanity that has lived so long with its mechanical adjuncts that ‘nature’ is a meaningless term. . . .”

—Paul Di Filippo, author of
The Steampunk Trilogy

“Logan is a stylish transgressor for the next evolutionary moment. He reminds me of Harlan Ellison at his most daring and dangerous raw, fearless, unpredictable, disturbing, and much needed. . . .”

—Jack O’ Connell, author of
Word Made Flesh
and
The Resurrectionist

“Logan proves to be a powerful stylist with a distinct vision. . . .”

—Jeffrey Thomas, author of
Punktown

“Logan wields a fuck of a lot of power with only a few words. . . .”

—Dan Schaffer, creator of
Dogwitch

ChiZine Publications

Waking up to find herself strapped to a gurney, the wall beside her stickered with x-rays and the lurid blueprints of the bizarre surgery she is about to be subjected to, Katja decides that things can’t get any more fucked up. Of course, she’d had the same thought not that long ago—before the mad surgeon, the sweaty cop and the gang of hoodlum transvestites—so what did she know?

And so before the gurney, before anything else, there was the sound check. . . .

With the final chord still ringing, she presses the guitar up against the amp, squeezing out every last drop of feedback as sweat slides down her face and arms. She turns back to the crowd, probably around a dozen or so people, if that, letting the sound cycle and decay, her breathing only now returning to something akin to normal.

There’s a guy in a leather jacket and bright white trainers with their tongues protruding, his arm around a drug-skinny girl with more piercings than teeth; an immense biker with a walrus moustache and scabbed knuckles; a fat guy in a raincoat; a teenage runaway still nursing the same beer he’d bought when the sound checks had begun, delaying his return to the streets.

And then there’s the transvestites—four in total. Their indifference to the music is as forced as their positioning amidst the meagre crowd.

Katja leans into the mike. “Yeah, fuck you too,” she says, then whips the cable from her guitar and stalks off.

Her bandmates linger momentarily before following her cue, jumping from the rear of the stage into the short corridor leading out the back of the building.

“Hey, wait up,” Joey says, his drumsticks still clasped in one hand. “You want to go get a drink or something?”

“Did you see them?”

“See who?” Joey asks. Max shows up behind him, his bass guitar slung over his shoulder.

“The trannies.”

“The what now?”

“Never mind,” she says. She snatches her hoody from a hook and pulls it on.

“It wasn’t exactly packed out there,” Max says.

“What did you expect? It was just a sound check.”

“But it was still on the posters. Is that the sort of crowd we’re going to get tonight?”

“I’ve had worse,” she tells them. “What were the pair of you expecting, a ten-thousand-seater arena? It is what it is. You want to play or what?”

“I’m just saying is all, “ Max mumbles.

“If you’re here for the groupies or the money then I suggest you figure out a plan B.”

“Yeah, c’mon Max,” Joey says, “it is what it is. And, hey, at least tonight we get paid, right?”

“Hopefully,” Katja says, looking up the corridor to Dimebag Dexter, the bar’s owner, already hustling on the next act.

“So you coming or what, Kat?”

She bristles at the contraction of her name but doesn’t say anything. Shakes her head.

“Some other time,” she says, turning and walking away. “See you all tonight.”

She strides past a bouncer who makes a show of removing the ear plugs he has been wearing and dropping them to the ground like spent bullets. Katja pushes the rear fire door open and as it swings away from her there’s the now-familiar moment of panic, of expecting someone to be waiting for her there.

But it’s only the grainy darkness which fills the alley beyond, tinted red by the neon exit sign above the door. The chilly air immediately cools the sweat on her skin. She lights a cigarette and a smile blossoms on her face, sparked by the buzz of finally playing a show again—and almost immediately the creeping sensation of being watched returns to her, a constant companion ever since having escaped to the mainland.

She blows smoke into the air, runs a hand across her freshly shaven scalp, then traces a finger across her neck tattoo, the skin there still slightly flaky from the recent inking. She takes another drag on the cigarette, adjusts her grip on the guitar, then walks up the alley which leads away from the Wheatsheaf.

Stops dead when four figures appear before her then spread out to block her in. They wear figure-hugging dresses and vicious heels, bright red lipstick and glittery, gaudy jewellery.

“Finished already?” one of them says in a deep, gravelly voice. She steps forward. Her hair is piled into a dogwitch-black beehive which defies gravity. “No encore?”

Katja shrugs, subtly checking for available escape routes but not finding any. “Leave them wanting more.”

“A girl after my own heart.” She snatches the cigarette from Katja’s lips with two manicured fingers, takes a deep enough drag to burn it down to the tip, then discards it. “I’m Lady Delicious. And I’m here to collect, honey.”

“I don’t have any honey.”

A flicker of a smile skips between the transvestites as if it were a joint being passed around.

“Lady D has been looking for you,” one of the others says. This one is shorter than Lady Delicious, stockier too, her efforts ruined by the five o’clock shadow darkening her jawline. “Lucky I spotted this.”

She holds up a poster advertising the gig, torn from a wall.
The Broken
is emblazoned across the top in chunky black lettering alongside a grainy picture of Katja sporting her shaven head and neck tattoo. Beneath that, the times and location of the open sound check and the gig which would follow later that night.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. You must have mistaken me for someone else.”

Lady D takes the poster and holds it up to the illumination coming from a nearby street light. “I don’t think so, it’s here in black and white. Or are you going to pretend like you don’t know anything about the money?”

“I don’t know anything about the money.”

“Nikolai knows about it though, doesn’t he?” She looks to her Tgirls who nod in confirmation.

“Nikolai’s gone,” Katja tells them, stiffening at the mention of the man’s name. “He was kicked out of the band and I don’t know, or care, where he is.”

She tries to push past them but they close in and block her route.

“Unfortunately that’s inconsequential. The money was taken out in the band’s name—therefore we intend to collect from the band, regardless of who is or isn’t in it.”

Katja bites down on her anger at Nikolai fucking her over once again.

“The Stumps are dead. I don’t know what that junkie fuckwit was playing at but it’s nothing to do with me.”

“I don’t care what you’re calling yourselves, the debt is the debt.”

“Yeah well you’re straight outta luck, we don’t have any money.”

“What about your gig fee?” Lady D asks, nodding at the instrument slung across Katja’s shoulder.

“There isn’t one. Not yet. You think that cheap bastard in there would give us our fee in advance?”

“So you
are
getting a fee.”

“Only after we’ve played tonight.”

“You sure about that?”

“Look, I’ve already told you—”

“Answer the fucking question,
honey
,” one of the other Tgirls interjects. This one is slender but with a pot-belly which stretches the glittery fabric of her dress to the point where it becomes slightly translucent.

“Yes,” Katja says. “Tonight.”

“Then we’ll come back tonight to collect,” Lady D replies. “In the meantime I’ll take that if you don’t mind.”

She points to the guitar.

“But I need it for the gig.”

“Don’t worry, I’ll give it back. It’s just a little insurance on my part. Give.”

She says it in the same measured, soft tone she has used all along but there is more menace in her eyes now.

Katja knows she has no choice and takes it off, hands it to the pot-bellied one.

“Now if you’ll excuse us, we have other business to attend to. We’ll see you later tonight,” Lady D says.

An instruction, not a question.

The four disappear around the corner, and then a few moments later an engine revs and tires squeal. When Katja exits the alley there is no sign of them.

She pulls her hood up, her paranoia about coming out of hiding well-founded after all, even if not for the reasons she initially had.

With nothing else to do she walks in the direction of the squat. She takes the usual unnecessarily circuitous route there, a habit she developed after escaping from the island, weaving through the strip clubs and drug bars. She passes the tattoo parlour where she recently had her neck and chest tattoo inked—a multi-coloured cacophony of shapes which are either flames or angel wings, or perhaps both, circling around the words
When You Hit Me, Hit Me Hard
in an elaborate script. The design, in the end, hadn’t been as important as whether it did a good job masking what was left of the trach tube she had cut away.

She ignores the patter of porno theatre salesmen and the muttered remarks of hookers before emerging into a quieter district of old houses, most of which have all of their windows boarded up or smashed in. The squat is the fourth one along and she slows her pace as she approaches it.

There was no point in trying to get in, of course, they’d kicked her out several weeks ago. The journey to it is merely a reflex, a memory, something she feels compelled to do before finding a doorway or abandoned garage to hole up in for the night.

Just as she turns to cross the street, tires screech and a set of headlights flash across her. She runs purely on instinct, not even bothering to see who it is or whether they are coming for her, but she only makes it as far as the unkempt lawn of the next building before being jumped upon.

She crashes to the ground and feels the weight of someone pushing down on her. Something soft is pressed to her face, a rag or cloth, and then the smell hits her. Chemical-rich and heady, her vision instantly begins to sparkle. She struggles but already her limbs are disobeying her. Everything is slowing down.

She manages to turn onto her back, her assailant a vast shadow haloed by the streetlights behind them.

His face only becomes clear when he leans in close enough for her to smell the tequila on his breath—fat, a handlebar moustache and bulging eyes.

“Stop fucking
fighting
, you little tramp,” he sneers at her in an accent she can’t quite place.

Darkness gathers at the edge of Katja’s vision, then closes in around her. She feels herself starting to drift, focuses on the streetlight to maintain her consciousness.

“I know who you are, Katja,” the man says, grinning madly. “And I think we both know there are certain people who would just love to get their hands on you.”