THE END IS NIGH! The wolf doth lie with the lamb, the dog doth play footsie with the cat and I have put in a serious 8 hours work without resorting to Twitter, Facebook or TV for distraction. Surely we stand on the brink of the end times? But when something ends something else must begin, even if that something is nothing. And in this case it’s anything but. Crashed America will be out on the 1st of May and, as a harbinger of doom, here’s a sample chapter to arouse your lustful urges.
You can also rush over to Smashwords where there’s a page setup for you to bookmark so at midnight on the 1st you can put your order in. Everyone else will after all and if you don’t then you’ll just be left out, shunned by society and chased out of town like the tasteless heathen you are.
Earl paused for a second to think. Jimmy paused to observe.
“Where’re we goin’?”
Earl ignored the question, partly because he wasn’t quite sure any more but largely because he rarely felt obliged to reply to his diminutive associate. Like the Oriental Masters of old he preferred to teach by demonstration, so he indifferently swung a flattened palm at his brother, catching him with a blow to the back of the head. Jimmy, after an initial moment of drunken swaying immediately forgot all about it, which an optimist would say was the entire point of the lesson.
The bigger man wasn’t lost, he couldn’t get lost, not around this neck of the literal woods. Born and raised here, he very definitely possessed the ‘Knowledge’ of the area but his goal was not a feature on the mental map he unwittingly followed; giant fire balls and the causes thereof were not phenomena which could be located by useful landmarks. To him, reasoning with that understanding was easy: the Weird Shit was lost, he wasn’t. He smiled at this.
Like Holmes at his most incisive he’d moved one step closer to the greater truth of the case; not only did this Weird Shit explode unexpectedly but now it was refusing to be found,. This made it even Weirder Shit. And once things passed a certain level of unusualness by his general standards Earl could be certain that the liquor elixir of Enlightenment was really kicking in and his day was bound to provide some revelation, much like that time he’d found the pick-up truck surrounded by dead people and full of cocaine, unusual and moonshine always offered a reward. Now the only task was to follow the signs which were bound to appear, like staggering half-dead Colombians, or weeping, bloodied men crawling through the swamp with leeches attached to them and a look of absolute confusion on their faces.
“Hello there,” said Earl.
“Wha’?” said Jimmy.
“Urghgh,” sobbed Joe, as he looked blearily upwards at his new acquaintances. Still lost in the midst of some world altering badness his higher brain was in no fit state to step into society. A barely audible voice did manage to mumble ‘Help!’ in a hopeful sort of tone but was soon silenced by the leading player in the saga of Joe, which felt that swearing, crying and feeling really shit were of far more practical concern than the arrival of external bodies on the scene. Especially when they were external bodies which would probably die before long, this being the apparent trend for all things in the world. It could be said that this was neither a particularly useful nor reasonable balance of power but as Earl would have attested, reality was not a reasonable thing, unless you possessed a very, very slanted view of it.
Angst and unhappiness established, Joe’s eyes returned to the bleary, teary squinting which had preceeded the new arrivals. He ceased crawling but the two standing men were moving closer. This was noticed on the peripheral of Joe’s consciousness but still failed to stir up any kind of real interest in the world beyond his own sense of feeling really shit. A kick to the face had some impact though; such things usually dragging a mind back to the more physical realms even if Joe’s lost soul had neither thought about nor sought such a thing, which made its arrival all that much more useful, in a strange kind of way. Given the blood loss, the life of idleness and the never having been hit by anything more offensive than a stray tennis ball to the shin at the age of seven Joe took a steel capped boot to the face in much the way you’d expect. He passed out, with neither a whimper nor a bang but with a slight splash.