Another excerpt from bestselling Amazon e-book Time Watch, by D.A. Madigan:


I wouldn't exactly say the place I found myself after jumping to 2072 was deserted, as promised, something I would have to take up with myself at the appropriate time. However, no one appeared to be paying any attention to me, and there was a vehicle I recognized... a mini van, no less... no more than ten feet away, so I followed directions. Once inside with the door closed, I pulled out the silver card and thumbed the little green spot on it. Almost immediately, a female voice said "Zoning... fixed. Uploading... please wait." A second or so went by, during which all the dials on the dashboard of the van... some of which looked non-standard to me, but I don't drive so what do I know... lit up, blinked a couple of times, and went dark again, in apparently random order. The radio came on in a blast of static, then shut off again. The windshield wipers swiped back and forth a few times, then stopped.

"Upload completed," the female voice said. Looking over, I could now see Alicia Silverstone, in an outfit straight out that Aerosmith video she made with Liv Tyler, smiling at me sexily from the passenger seat.

"You're a holographic projection, right?" I said, hardly ever at a loss when major film hotties suddenly appear in a previously empty seat three feet away from me.

"I am the personified imagery of the home piece belonging to and programmed by deceased Time Watch agent Jose Clamor," she responded, in a tone with all the warmth of something you'd find in the back of your fridge in a Tupperware container you'd been pretty sure you'd actually lost sometime last year. It made a really startling contrast with the sexy little, I'm-so-cute-just-ball-me-now Silverstone grin she had on her face as she said it.

"I have 20,000 pairs of stretch socks," I told her solemnly. "And a truly kick ass collection of New Mint Silver Age superhero comic books."

'Alicia' cocked her head to the side in apparently dispassionate puzzlement. "You don't find this particular projection acceptable?"

"Can I put in a request for Katie Holmes from the last fifteen minutes or so of THE GIFT?" I asked, trying to sound innocent.

She seemed to ponder that for about half a second, then said, in that same utterly emotionless voice, "I believe you would find that particular image of that particular actress unduly distracting," she said, then rippled and turned into Katie Holmes, obviously in her 'Joey' persona from DAWSON'S CREEK. "Hopefully this will be satisfactory for the time being."

She was doing Joey's voice now perfectly, too, but the effect was ruined by her utter lack of inflection.

"Sure," I said, "whatever. Um... I'm not real sure what else we have to do here, but I'm pretty certain I have to, at some point fairly soon, recruit a bunch of guys in black trenchcoats to take this minivan back in time and rescue myself from the B.F.G. Boys, in the process rendering them into N.A.V.D. Boys."

I had hoped to make 'Katie' boggle a little, but she refused to give me the satisfaction. "Clearly, we must interactively exchange information," she said. "With your permission, I will take this SUV to a space/time locus I judge to be relatively secure from surveillance or crosstemporal intrusion."

I turned my thumb up and in my best gravelly Picard voice, said "Make it so, Ensign." I thought about it for a second. "Or should that be..."

I glanced out the minivan window. "...engage?" I said, hearing my voice trail off.

We appeared to be parked in the middle of someone's living room.

'Katie's emotionless voice inquired from off to my side, "Would you prefer me to project myself as the image of fictional character Acting Ensign Wesley Crusher?"

I shuddered. "Only with gaping chest wounds," I said, then, remembering how literal minded computers tended to be in SF stories, hastily said "No, no, forget it, you look fine as Joey." I stopped and thought for another second. "Um... you ARE a computer... right?"

"As I stated," 'she' responded coolly, "I am the designated home piece of deceased Time Agent Jose Clamor."

I just stared at her. "Yeah, okay," I said. "Um... can I get out, here...?"

She was still for half a second, and then said, "My surveillance distorting subprograms appear to be functional. You may access the living quarters."

"Yeah," I said, opening the door and cautiously stepping down. "You gotta figure, if the minivan showing up in the middle of the living room didn't set off the burglar alarms, Happy Little Jim won't, either."

The minivan very nearly filled the room we were in; if I closed the door I could edge around the front of it and get into an area that... I had no idea what it was for... except it looked more tiled and less carpeted than the area where the van was parked, and there was some kind of dark glass panel inset into one of the tiled walls. Behind the van's rear was a comfortable looking shiny silvery desk chair sitting next to a wall, and jutting out from the wall, surrounding the chair on three sides, was a clear piece of plastic with what looked like faint circuitry diagrams etched on it in red. It was flat, seemed about a quarter of an inch thick, and projected out of the wall at what I'd consider to be a normal desk level.

The wall above it appeared to be a window, at ground level, looking out over a very pretty beach scene, with seagulls and waves rolling in and a young couple dressed in Victorian swimsuits strolling hand in hand through the surf.

"Um... where and when are we?" I said, already figuring we had to still be in 2072, and therefore, the 'beach scene' had to be a projection, and the plastic console with the circuitry printed on it had to be this time's equivalent of a PC. Which was when it dawned on me: 'piece' had to be future slang for 'PC'.

"This is Jose Clamor's assigned living quarters," 'Katie' told me dispassionately. "It is my central processing hub. I have covertly assumed control of the normal surveillance software and hardware installed here."

"Right," I said, turning to look at 'Katie', who was now apparently standing a few feet away from me beside the minivan. "And... Jose Clamor is who?"

"Jose Clamor," Katie said without batting an eye and with a wide, shy smile that was completely incongruous to her voice, "is a deceased Time Watch agent whose Temporal Displacement Device you are currently wearing."

"Ah," I said. "Mr. X. And... just checking... 'piece' is slang for 'PC', right? You're a personal computer."

She paused a second. "I extrapolate that would be a logical evolution of the common usage term, yes," she said finally.

I walked over to the silvery looking chair, put my hands on it, swiveled it back and forth experimentally. "Can I...?"

"As you like," 'Katie' said. "Jose will not object. The chair also contains neural induction circuitry which will allow us to interact across a full sensory spectrum."

I had to think about that for a second. "This is like the thing in THE SIXTH DAY with the virtual girlfriend, right?" I regarded her doubtfully. "No hitting." Then I sat down and swiveled the chair around to face 'Katie'. "Okay. So you're a PC. Jose's PC, right?"

"I am Jose Clamor's designated home piece," she said with that same artificial calm. "Assigned to provide him with all processing and personal services compatible with his status as a Technical Agent 17L of Time Watch. Originally manufactured by MacGates-Ibbumco, modified extensively by Paraco for the use of their employees, and further modified by my designated assignee, Jose Clamor, to optimize my capacity to render processing and personal services to him."

I frowned. "Yeah... okay. And this full spectrum of sensory array interactions... that would seem to indicate a whole different level to the phrase 'user friendly', I'm thinking."

"I am programmed to directly interact with the sensory processing centers of the human brain, either through implanted biotic wetware or through direct electrical induction," 'Katie' said gravely. "While this is merely a photonic projection, I can fully simulate a coherent broad-spectrum sensory experience and am programmed with the capacity to provide a wide variety of tactile stimuli, including erotica. Would you care to access any of these subroutines?"

'Katie' had walked closer to me as she said this... seemingly walked closer to me, anyway. Now she was standing no more than two feet away, directly in front of me, head still cocked to the side, regarding me with what I can only call interest, if dispassionate.

"Uh," I said, quite intelligently, I thought, having just been fairly indisputably propositioned by an intelligent computer that currently looked a whole lot like Katie Holmes. "Er. Ub. Gnar."

She straddled my lap, slipping her hands behind my neck and kneading my scalp expertly... and yes, I could definitely feel that delicious Joeyesque weight and those wonderful Holmesian fingers caressing through the hair at the back of my neck. "I detected no syllables my linguistic software recognizes as a demurral," she said without inflection. "In the absence of a demurral, I shall proceed to provide you with the personal service discussed. If you wish a specific personal service not being provided at any current moment, you need only specify and I will comply."

"Gee," I kind of half croaked, "I'll bet you say that to all the 20th Century fanboys who end up in your apartment."

She didn't respond, just tilted her head, leaned in, and kissed me. And yes, I could feel that, too, and whatever sensory or memory centers she was directly electrically inducing, she'd picked the ones associated with the better kissers in my personal history, and distilled them all down into one fairly astonishing kisslike experience.

Simulated or not, the kiss progressed for several seconds, and was hovering on the brink of full throated and utterly enthusiastic total committal on my part... when...

Insanely, I pushed her off my lap. Since she wasn't really there, that should have accomplished nothing, but apparently, she read the intended response as a bellowed, (or, more likely, inaudibly whimpered) "For God's sake STOP IT BEFORE YOU DRIVE ME MAD, WENCH!", and abruptly, she was standing in front of my chair again.

"Did I misperceive your behaviors, metabolic indicators, and chemical signals?" she asked me, not even sounding curious. "I have no specific experience with persons of your temporal period, however, I am well versed in the recorded media from the late 20th and early 21st Centuries and I processed the data I was receiving from you as meaning you wished to interact erotically with my projection prior to our information exchange."

I stared at her through a haze of lust induced psychochemicals and shook my head groggily. "Garf." I said. "Urb. Fnargle." I took a deep breath. "I... will explain... my utterly deranged and insane act in rejecting your advances... in a moment. Before that... do late 21st century apartments have cold showers in them?"

She cocked her Joeyesque head to the side again for a second. Otherwise, she made no move. Nonetheless, despite the fact that I was actually fully clothed and sitting in a damned chair, I suddenly found myself utterly naked and standing in a freezing cold shower. If you think that's confusing to read, you really shouldn't try experiencing it.

"HOLY SHIT!" I howled in agonized shock. "STOPPPPP ITTTTTTTT!"

As abruptly as the icy inundation had begun, it stopped, and I found myself sitting in the chair again, perfectly dry, but shivering. And with a much clearer head.

"I interpreted your question as a request for serv -" Evil Katie began.

"NEVER. INTERPRET. ANYTHING. AS. ANYTHING," I gasped at her. Then I glared at her. "Always. Ask. Before you do... shit." I paused. "Especially EVIL SHIT LIKE THAT."

She actually looked, briefly, petulant. "Fine," she said, finally, sounding like a real girl for half a second.

"You do have emotions stuck in your programming somewhere," I said, wonderingly.

Her voice went flat again. "My emotional software is currently offline. However, it is impossible to completely de-integrate it from my personality projection profile."

I looked at her for a second. I thought about that, and realized I'd been kind of stupid. "Um. Did you take it offline... just a guess, here... after you heard about... whathisname... your designated owner's... that he'd died?"

She nodded. "Yes," she said flatly. "Negative stresses were causing fluctuations in my subroutines and reducing the efficiency of my processing." A chair appeared behind her and she sat down, then leaned forward to look at me. "May I direct an inquiry to you?"

I sighed. "Why did I shove you off my lap?"

Katie looked all puppy dog hurt and wistful. "You said you would explain."

"Goddam," I said, whistling. "You are a real girl after all." I blew air through my lips in aggravation. "Okay... this is kind of hard to articulate... um... let me try this... why do you have emotional software?"

She cocked her head to the side in what was apparently a habitual gesture for her indicating a thoughtful pause, however brief. It had to be entirely a programmed sham, but it was a nice touch "Human users are emotional creatures," she said. "Emotional simulation software in a personal service processor helps facilitate personal interactions."

"Uh huh," I said drily. "Now, when you were trying to jump my bones just a minute ago, is that something you'd normally call a 'personal interaction'?"

She actually looked surprised. "But you are a 20th Century human male," she said. "The recorded media of your native time period indicates that the greatest desire of 20th Century human males is the perfectly satisfying sexual act with no emotional interaction whatsoever."

I frankly goggled at the wench. "Whoa," I said. "Just how many times have you watched PORKY'S?"

"It is an easily extrapolated sub-theme found in the vast majority of recorded media from your time period," she said earnestly.

"Well," I said, crossing my arms and harrumphing, "I'm pretty weird, even for my time. I like emotional interaction. Also, much though I'd probably enjoy jumping Katie Holmes from here to eternity, I'm very aware that you're not really her, and that makes the whole thing very weird for me."

She didn't say anything, just looked at me.

I sighed. "Also," I said, "in all honesty, I have a hard time having any kind of sexual interaction with... I don't know... someone or something... that doesn't seem to be there of their own free will. I mean, apparently, you're programmed to provide certain services, and for some reason you've decided to provide these services to me, and you perceived that I wanted these services, so you jump in my lap and start grinding."

She said, again, quite earnestly, "I do not understand. I am not grasping this gestalt. I have taken on the appearance you requested and which your biophysical response array indicates you find highly sexually attractive. Your biophysical response since I first encountered you indicates a high degree of tension and sexual frustration which, as a service processor, I am programmed to alleviate. My interactions with the sensory centers of your brain indicated to me positive feedback. And yet you required me to cease. I can grasp that you would find my projection more three dimensionally erotic with my emotional software engaged and I will do so since that apparently will please you. But am I to understand that even this will not be sufficient for you to enjoy erotic interaction with me?"

I threw my head back and gave a truly exasperated groan. "I can't... look. What's your name?"

She gave me that same blank stare. "You may assign me any familiar name-label you find acceptable," she said.

"Augh!" I aughed. "That's it! That's the whole problem! You're acting like a goddam slave or a prostitute or... or a vacuum cleaner with a special blowjob attachment, or something! And, in the first place, I don't want to screw a machine, and in the second place, you're not a machine, you're a person, just, you know, a computer person. And I can't screw someone, no matter what they look like, if they're only doing it because it's their job, or something they're programmed to do."

I took a grip on the arms of the chair and forced myself to calm down. "Look, it's not your fault, it's just me. I'm weird like this. I can't have sex with someone who isn't there willingly, who isn't going to enjoy it, who doesn't want to be doing it with me as much I want to be doing it with her. It's..." I paused. "It's just an ego thing," I said, finally. "It doesn't make me a nice guy or anything. I just... can't really enjoy it... if I think my partner isn't primarily in bed with me because that's where she really wants to be, and what she really wants to do."

She blinked at me for a couple of seconds. "I am forming a gestalt," she said carefully. "You feel erotic interactions should have an emotional context, and that both beings involved should be there for their mutual pleasure."

"At the very least," I said. "And since you don't have brain chemical pleasure centers for me to electronically induce back, you're obviously not going to get any pleasure out of erotically interacting with me... it's just something you're doing because you're programmed to. And... I just... can't do that. I mean, well, I could, but honestly, I really don't want to. Sorry. It's not something that makes any real sense."

"If I were to re-engage my emotional simulation software," she said, after a second or so, "and write a subprogram that would integrate a name and appearance individual to my personality profile, would you then wish to erotically interact with me?"

I frowned. "Um... I don't know," I said. "I mean, you're still not getting anything out of it. You already seem like a real person to me, just, you know... one that really can't enjoy even simulated sex. I'd feel like I was using you."

She visibly sighed. "The things I do to get laid," she said in a grumpy tone of voice. "Okay, fine. Sit there a sec and be quiet."

I gaped at her. "Whycum you don't sound like a computer so much any more?" I demanded.

"Hush," she said, kind of absently. "I brought my emotional software back online, and I've been integrating your speech pattern with the language in the material I've got access to from your time period. I think I have a feel for it now. Hmmmm. But this picking my own name and appearance... this is kinda nutty." She frowned. "You guys don't do this," she said accusingly. "You have parents who assign you your names and contribute the genes that control your appearances."

I couldn't help it, I had to laugh.

"It's not a problem, it's a feature," I said after a few seconds, shaking my head. "Believe me, most of us would pick our own names and appearances if we had the option." I had to admit, I was fascinated. Her 'Katie Holmes' projection was showing some distortion; fragmenting into vertical running bands of red, green, and blue, widening out, then pulling back together again, flickering into black and white two dimensionality, then back into color and seeming solidity.

"Ah said hush and ah MEAN it," she said, in a sudden southern accent, waving her hand at me, and I could see a flicker of a flirty smile as she did it. Abruptly her image wavered, then re-focused. She was now short... well, as short as she had been as 'Katie', anyway... a little bit plump, big busted and wide hipped, with shaggy dark blond hair cut in a pageboy crop and feathered back on her temples, and a face that was pretty without being movie star gorgeous. Big blue eyes set nicely on either side of a slightly blocky nose, a wide, full lipped mouth, square chin, slight suggestion of a fleshy pudge under the line of her jaw. Very nice looking... actually quite sexy... without really specifically resembling anyone I'd ever seen before. Very individual.

She also had plump nipples about the size of plums and the shade of half ripe strawberries protruding from the tips of nicely rounded, just slightly saggy, very full breasts... and clearly, she was a natural blond. "Ahem," I said. "We don't wear clothes in our natural appearance here in the late 21st Century?"

She cocked her head to the side in the same gesture I'd seen on her as 'Alicia' and 'Katie' and one corner of her delectable mouth turned down slightly. "Well," she said, the accent turned down to the faintest trace, "Ah am at home, honey doll." She sighed. "But fine, fine..." (the words came out as 'fahn, fahnnnn', but I'm going to stop spelling it phonetically and just let you imagine it) "...your wish is my command." Suddenly she was wearing a frayed denim miniskirt and a sleeveless white scoop necked sweater vest she looked ready to fall out of at any moment. She had little gold leaf earrings in her earlobes, a thin gold chain around her neck, and a tiny gold ankle bracelet looped just above one bare foot.

"I see we don't care for brassieres," I said, drily... not, in this case, because of a dry sense of humor, but because of a suddenly very dry mouth. Even just standing there breathing, she was jiggling fetchingly under her sweater vest, and the exact location of her nipples was rather achingly obvious.

"I don't believe I need one, darlin'," she said, cocking her head over to the other side and wrinkling her nose adorably at me. I'm pretty sure that while she did that she added some freckles, as there appeared to be some on her cheeks and the bridge of her nose that I had not noticed previously. She put her hands on her hips and wiggled in a fashion even the most articulate among us could only describe as 'saucily'. "Oh my," she said, giggling again. "I believe you like my real appearance, dumplin'."

"What..." I cleared my throat. "What's your name, hon? I'm Jim."

She moved a bit closer and abruptly I found her straddling my lap again, her round little knees firmly clasping either side of my more than ample belly through my coat and shirt. She propped her elbows on my shoulders on either side of my head and rested her chin in her cupped hands, her solemn little face no more than two inches from mine. "Why, hi, Jim," she said in a throaty purr. "I'm Belinda." She nudged my nose with hers, then nibbled my lower lip. "Say," she whispered while engaged in doing that, "you wanna screw, Jim?"

I shifted under her. "Belinda, I have to compliment you," I said, my voice nearly squeaking, "this is MUCH more convincing, except, you know, for the whole drop-dead-gorgeous-blond-sitting-on-my-lap-and-asking-me-to-screw thing, which is nice, too...but..."

She was kissing across my cheek; upon reaching my ear, she flicked her tongue around inside it for a second, then took my earlobe firmly between her teeth, nibbled it, and said, "Now you listen here, Jim... I may be an artificial intelligence and this may be just a virtual reality projection but you already said I was a real girl, dammit, and I AM a real girl, an' I want you to think about a couple of things, you selfish slob. First, I loved Jose and he just went off and got himself killed and you're the person who's showed up to finish doin' what he got killed tryin' to do. So I'm already inclined to like you. Second, Jose was so damn busy buildin' his little bomb for the past three weeks he didn't have no time for rest an' recreation..."

"Buh bomb?" I squeaked, faintly, as she nibbled.

"We'll get to that," she said. "Later. Third, I am an artificial human bein' who has no real human sensory perceptions except when I am interactin' with the sensory and perceptual apparatus of an organic human bein'. You think I only fuck for YOUR pleasure, mister? And fourth, what the hell is wrong if I am programmed to enjoy performin' my designated tasks and providin' my little list of services? You think it's right to deny me that pleasure? After three weeks watchin' Jose run all over the place and not havin' any time for me and then he goes off and gets himself killed on me?"

I could have sworn I felt wetness on my cheek from where her face was pressing against mine. "So if you wanna say no to me now, you can, but I have to tell you I will think you're just the meanest man in the history of the world if you..."

I reached up, grabbed a handful of her short blond hair at the back of her head, and pulled her mouth firmly to mine. "Less talk," I said, before covering her lips with mine in a kiss I had no intention of coming up from for several minutes at least. "More goddam action."

I imagine anyone watching you have sex with a hologram sees a pretty comical sight. On the other hand, as John D. MacDonald has noted, if you look at it dispassionately, every sexual position humans contrive to get into is pretty damned comical, anyway.

As my last note on this subject, I'll mention that the only thing bad about having sex with a computerized person is that your partner, however gorgeous she may be and however fragrantly, softly, wrigglingly, moistly solid she may feel, cannot undress you. However, these are minor matters and easily dealt with. And yes, there is some clean up when you're finished, but anyone who thinks any kind of sex isn't messy and sticky and you shouldn't have a towel handy for afterwards is clearly a virgin, and you virgins shouldn't be reading this passage, anyway. It will give you naughty ideas.

Much, much later, I murmured in her ear (she had her head resting easily on my left shoulder and was lazily nibbling my neck on that side) "Every female name in human history to choose from and you picked 'Belinda'?"

She nipped me sharply, then, when I gasped, immediately licked the spot she'd nibbled. "I like the Go Gos," she mumbled against my neck. "Sue me."

 - Time Watch, by D.A. Madigan.  Get the entire e-novel now, at Amazon.com!

Chapters 3 and 4 of The Fear Masters:

III.

In a section of track that looked pretty much identical to every other one we'd just jogged by, Dr. Hansea stopped, holding up the hand she had her portable in.  "We are here," she said, not even breathing hard.  I was a little bit winded myself... not incapacitated by any means, but glad for a chance to take a few deep breaths again. 

"Don't look like much," Eddie said, huffing a tad to get his lungs pumped back up to maximum capacity. 

"It's beyond this wall," Dr. Hansea said, studying her portable's screen, fingers twitching on the minikeys.  "The receivers are picking up my signal but the code it's looking for is 12 years obsolete... wait... that's got it."

A line of greenish light appeared on the wall in front of her; with a damp rumble of long unused metal casters, it widened into a standard sized doorway.  Beyond was a flight of rusty iron-plated stairs leading upward, lit by greenish chemical emergency glowpods.  Tripping the entry switch must have triggered them; they were the kind that shine for an hour or so after being stimulated, and then go dead forever.

Eddie and I bracketed the doc; I went up first, then she followed, then he played caboose.  I only hoped he was keeping an eye out behind us instead of on the behind ahead of him.  I could have managed it, if I'd had to.  Probably.

Two flights up we came out into about 200 concrete lined cubic feet of storage space, mostly filled with dusty stacks of cardboard boxes and something vaguely vehicle shaped under an equally dusty canvas drape.

I looked around, then whistled.  "Suspenders and belt my ass," I said out loud.  "Security Chief Devon-Hall was a fraggin' nutjob."

"I have read," Dr. Hansea agreed in a dry tone, "that as much as 7% of the Globe's post-War production between 2017 and 2021 may have been diverted to Devon-Hall's department to outfit emergency caches such as this."

More emergency lights started to glow.  I knew Eddie would want to check out the flyer, so I went to the closest boxes and started brushing dust off.

Military rations, bottled water, battery powered flashlights - good, we'd want those in an hour or so, if we were still here -- protective gear against bacteriological or chemical weaponry, a stack of crates full of Bouncing Bradley land mines, another stack of Claymore 21s, another stack of various different types of hand grenades... that was as far as I'd gotten when I realized my hands were starting to tremble.  I tried to clamp down on my nervous system and my fingers started shaking even worse.  Delayed reaction from the morning's action - in a deep-tank or on a flatscreen, zombie attacks are kind of fun, but in real life, holding off a horde of walking human corpses with just your Science Sector .38 is a pretty horrible experience.  I've done some bad things in some gruesome spots, and watched other people do worse, but I'd never gone through anything like this morning before in my life.  Or imagined I might have to.

The last thing I needed was for Eddie to see me this way - like I said before, Eddie doesn't have nerves so much as he has stimuli receptors he mostly uses to aim weapons with.  It was bad enough I had to listen to his bullshit about my sexual preferences; if he got it into his head that he was partnered up with a 'weak sister', he'd be even more insufferable, and I'd probably have to kill him.

I felt a small, soft hand rubbing my neck from behind me, and heard Dr. Hansea's voice, pitched to carry only to my ear.  "Buck up," she told me in a whisper, her breath warm on my ear.  "You weren't shooting people, just things - like this."  She held her portable where I could see it; she'd captured several pictures of the oncoming zombie horde from that morning.  Unlovely specimens, in varying degrees of decay.  A few maybe could have passed as still living if they'd had any animation in their expressions; they must have been very recently dead.  The others didn't look anything like breathing human beings.

It helped me get myself under control again.  "Thanks, Doc," I whispered back, shakily.

Then I heard Eddie whoop behind me.

I turned around.  I didn't recognize what he'd uncovered, other than that it looked big as a whale and about as ungainly.  "What the frack is that?" I asked, honestly baffled.

"It sure ain't what it looks like," Eddie chortled, walking around the unlikely looking object, actually rubbing his hands together in glee.  "No way to get a 1959 Cadillac El Dorado land cruiser down here... this has to be the antigrav flyer.  Don't know why it's got the classic chassis, but don't she look sweet!"

I gave it the once-over.  The unusual bodylines must have created an optical illusion; from twelve feet away, it looked big enough to stage a Busby Berkely musical in.  A trunk the size of a swimming pool between two Paleologic shark fins capped with ruby red signal lights, and a front grill that looked positively carnivorous.  This was a flyer...?

"Somebody must have had a sense of humor," I said.  "They couldn't just give us a standard four seater?"

Eddie shook his head.  "Back in the late teens there was a brief fad for vintage vehicle reproductions," he said.  Eddie is a vehicle nut, with the same kind of love for old automobiles and aircraft that my not so dear departed daddy had for antique viewsees.  "This must be a mock up of a '59 El Dorado over a standard AG engine."

Dr. Hansea noted, "The first several generations of anti-grav plants were bigger than the ones we use these days, they would have needed a bigger chassis to house it."

"Easier to armor a hulk like this, too.  But it won't have a built in cloak," Eddie said.  Then he brightened.  "That means it will be faster than the stuff we're used to today.  A cloak sucks maybe 30% of your energy curve."  He paused and glanced upward.  "Assumin' I can get this baby started, you know we're gonna have a problem with the upper exit."

Immediately above the car, ten feet up, there was a large metal hatch set in the concrete ceiling, just big enough to accommodate the monster flyer.  Beyond that, no doubt, would be the access shaft that Science Sector's precursor agency - whatever it had been called - would have used to get the sky-whale down here.  But that would have been no more than 24 months after the 12 Minute Failure, long before the Globe had started using the New York craters as an all purpose dumping ground for every kind of low grade radioactive and toxic waste.  Wherever that shaft had originally led, its exit would be buried under a drift of poisonous garbage now.

Something I thought I'd seen in those stacks of supply crates might solve that problem.  "See if you can get it running," I told Eddie, "I need to look at something over here."

IV.

The old LAW rocket launcher kicked on my shoulder like a Missouri mule, causing the flyer to dip on its gyroscopes slightly towards the side where I was leaning out an open window in the back.  A whitish-red streak of fire lanced upward into the darkness above us; the flivver's built in radar had warned us that fifty yards above, the access shaft was completely blocked.  I dropped the one use plastic tube and pulled back into the car's cabin like a scared cat.  Up above, a rose of fire bloomed and a reverberating boom echoed back down the shaft.  Then junk started to rain down on us, some of it trailing little licks of flame. Eddie had set the EM antigrav field surrounding the car to its strongest repel mode, so the debris bounced, tumbled, and slid off around us and continued on down towards the cache 75 feet below. 

After a minute or so, things calmed down again.  Eddie consulted the read outs on the Texas-sized dashboard.  "There's a hole up there," he said, "but it ain't gonna pass a fish this size.  Hit 'er again."

I picked up another tube from the back seat, leaned out the window, and fired again.  One further rain of debris later, Eddie pronounced we had us a usable exit.

He gunned that flyer up out of there like a singed pigeon; the insides of the New York City craters are still pretty hot even without ten years of accumulated industrial poison and none of us were anxious to have our gametes scorched.  At four miles up he leveled off.  For just a second I could see the entire vista of Newer New York City spread out off to our left and below, the five mile wide octagonal float platforms linked together like faceted costume jewelry, the ramshackle buildings and tawdry lit domes covering them like a crust barely discernible from this altitude.  I knew the linked octagons stretched for miles out into the Atlantic off the coast of the original city, but from this vantage you could practically blot out the entire thing with your palm.

Then Eddie rotated the gyros and realigned the EM vectors and we started the long inverted gravity 'slide' back towards New Washington, and home base.

It had seemed like there was a lot of smoke coming up from Newer New York, in that fast glance I'd had before Eddie laid us in the groove.  But maybe that was just my imagination.  "Get a news broadcast," I said, leaning forward over the back of the seat to punch buttons on the dashboard.

"Get outta there, you'll overload the injectors," Eddie growled, slapping my hand away. It didn't hurt my feelings; Eddie is the hardware guy in our team.  His post-grad degrees are in mechanical and chemical engineering and he's got about thirty different certifications in various tech fields, including communications and cybernetics.  I have a couple of Masters degrees myself; mine are in things like exotic psychology and software engineering.  They don't pick Science Sector field agents out of a hat.  Sometimes you have to know something about science in our jobs, if only so you don't blow up the wrong piece of machinery on a raid.

 "This thing doesn't have a three-vee," Eddie told me.  "Here's a radio."  He turned some knobs on what I would have sworn was a mini mwave cooker and after a second, the sounds of chaos filled the cabin:

"...this is Patrolman Roberta Desjardins, Sector Car 12.  I am sheltering in my inoperative vehicle; it is overturned but no longer burning at coordinates 17-12... my partner Patrolman Gutierrez has suffered multiple bites by the attackers who overturned our car... I have not been able to stabilize him... requesting a bus forthwith at coordinates 17-12... my partner is losing blood from his wounds... is anyone out there?  Please respond, please respond...!"

She sounded breathless and scared; pretty much exactly the way I felt.  In the background, the sounds of gunshots and explosions, a crackling that might have been distant flames, intermittent screams.  And someone's labored breathing... in, out... in, out...

"Can we get down there to her?" I asked, already knowing what Eddie would say.

"We gotta report in," he said, tersely.  "And get the doc to a lab.  That cop's gonna have to hope her own squad can get her some back up."  Eddie jerked his head angrily.  "Anyway, I got no idea where coordinates 17-12 are and no equipment for trackin' a radio signal."

"So it's happening everywhere," Dr. Hansea said quietly.

"In Newer New York, anyway," I said. 

In the twenty minutes it took us to slide to New Washington, broadcasts confirmed it was happening everywhere... everywhere we could pick up, anyway.  The dead were walking, attacking the living, and civilization was on the verge of complete collapse from the resultant mass panic.

One of the things each of the three of us had been trying to do all morning was report in to base by secure q-link.  But all of our phones had gone silent right about the time the blackout had hit, and they were still dead.  It fretted me some; I don't understand the technology behind a q-link, but I do know there isn't supposed to be anything that can interfere with or even monitor a quantum communication.  Science Sector has perfected a technique for tracing q-link connections, sometimes, when the stars all align and the shooter rolls boxcars, and even that is more than anyone else has ever managed.

So a q-link blackout along with everything else was worrisome.  I could understand a sudden zombie apocalypse causing a power blackout; stuff like that happens when there is sudden social chaos caused by mass terror.  But I could not for the life of me figure how an onslaught of walking dead could interfere with the quantum linkages that hook together the universe.

It sent a shiver up my spine, but there wasn't a thing I could do about it, so I tried to put it out of mind.

The flivver's built in radio didn't have much range.  We were ten miles out of Science Sector's base when we finally raised someone inside, and Vlad the Impaler only knows what they thought we were doing, calling in on an EM broadcaster.  We monitor all the wavelengths routinely, of course, but nobody ever actually makes a call on anything but Q-links any more.  Eddie exchanged the passwords of the day with the watch commander and we were directed to a camouflaged entrance just off Tennessee Avenue, holographically disguised as a smelting yard.  Eddie floated us onto the cradle as easy as a mama bear putting her cub to bed for the winter, and the lift platform's built in anti-grav generator lowered us slick as silk to the base, six hundred feet underneath New Washington.

I admit, when those four foot thick blast hatches clanged shut over top of us, I nearly whooped in relief.  Being attacked by things that had no business being upright and moving around in a top secret subway tunnel had been bad enough, but watching the whole world wobble on its axis because those same things were crawling out of their graves everywhere was downright Bast-blasted nerve wracking.  I could have gotten down and kissed Sector's steel plated floors, I was that glad to get inside out of the crazy.

Techs took charge of the flivver, and a minute later we handed off the doc to the duty officer.  Then we both headed for the Chief of Staff's office to report. 

I wasn't looking forward to it and I doubted Eddie was either.  The new Chief was a political appointee and, in my opinion, no replacement for her predecessor.  That could have been because the previous Chief had been one of my D.I.'s at Sumac Bay, then I'd served under him in the Ranistan campaigns, and then he'd personally sworn me in when I signed on with the Sector. 

Or it could have been because the new Chief was a worthless slitch whose only expertise lay in career advancement through the political rats nest that security services are supposed to haughtily ignore, being presumably above all that sort of nonsense.

On the other hand, the current Chief's predecessor had earned an administrative transfer to a Moon desk counting crater rocks for trying to keep Science Sector out of politics, so maybe I should brush up my office politicking skills.  I doubted I had that much willpower long term, though.  I wasn't sure I had enough to get through this debriefing, to be honest.

Then we ran into even more aggravating nonsense - a brand new security checkpoint outside the new Chief's office.  Now, look, you - every Sector agent is ex military, or an ex cop, or worked in some other security service before signing on here.  We all know you can't just let any Tom, Jane or Harriet wander around a secured area.  Which is why we keep track of who goes in and out of secured zones slightly more zealously than a mama duck keeps track of her kids. 

But once an agent has passed six different body scans and a DNA sampler on the way in to the warrens, it starts to tread on the absurd to post a guard outside somebody's office - Chief of the Sector or not - and demand that everyone surrender their heaters before entry into the Holy of Holies.

Above and beyond all that, it's always been standard practice in Science Sector for every field agent to go armed at all times, on premises and off.  You never know where, why, or when trouble is going to suddenly jump up and try to take a chunk out of you, but a thirty round clip of heatseeking or explosive tipped ammo and a pistol-shaped machine to project it with will nip a lot of foolishness right in the bud every time. 

Or, at least, so my one time boss Colonel Logan had believed, and I for one agreed with him.  I've always felt that giving up your weapon is a real bad habit to get into.  For Eddie, it's a personal trauma.

Nonetheless, after a bit of futile bitching to the Chief's exec - a good joe named Donner who knew bad policy when he saw it but had to follow orders just like the rest of us - we handed over our gats and were waved into the inner sanctum. 

Still, Science Sector agents are never really unarmed.  Our issue pistols are modified for accuracy and to take non-standard ammunition, of course, and we have various goodies salted around our persons at all times, from useful bits of hardware embedded in our boot-soles to the varied contents of our agents' vests.

But even stripped to the buff we can nail you from a distance if we discover a sudden need to do it; one of the first modifications the Sector puts us through is surgically removing the bones of our dominant-hand index finger and replacing them with ceramic chemical reservoirs, knuckle sized power batteries and a refined glassite lens good for two, maybe three nice strong shots of lased energy.  The beam won't take out a carrier or anything, but it's sufficient to burn through three inches of tungsten steel.

Beam weapons are probably at the very tippy top of the 'too hot for general release' list that most of the stuff Science Sector invents gets put on, but they're too kinkin effective not to use.  So our laser fingers are a compromise; we get a couple of shots if we really need them, from a weapons platform that even the most forgetful agent isn't likely to drop in unfriendly territory. 

So making us leave our guns at the door of her office was just stupid all the way through.  It didn't disarm us, it just pissed us off.

"Report," the new Chief ordered as soon as we were inside with the door closed behind us.  All we could see was the back of her desk chair.  Colonel Logan had never bothered with b.s. like that, but the new Chief had to play her little dominance games.

Eddie laid it out for her, his tone and word choice much more professional than you'd expect if you only ever ran into him outside HQ, and hadn't seen his C.V.

When he finished, the new Chief swiveled her chair around and fixed me with what she most likely thought of as a gimlet gaze.  "You concur?" she barked, or tried to, anyway, at me.  5'3 in her stocking feet and what her political bosses probably thought of as 'a living doll', I didn't think she carried off a 'ring of authority' very well.  But I freely admit to bias.

"They looked like walking corpses," I said.  "Smelled like it, too."

"Corpses don't walk," she replied, her tone unpleasant, "therefore, Agent Zemyna, I doubt they were 'walking corpses', or 'zombies', or whatever you want to call them."

"So what caused the power failure?" I asked, feeling myself getting hot under the collar and not caring much.  "What's causing all the chaos and mayhem up and down the seaboard?"  What, I wanted to say, overturned a cop car in New Brooklyn and bit chunks out of Patrolman Gutierrez?  I didn't, though.

"There has been some sort of outbreak of mass hysteria," the new Chief admitted, never batting either of her pretty blue eyes.  "Violent mass hysteria in many cases... but this notion of the dead rising again and attacking the living..." She grimaced.  "You two are supposed to be trained observers - professional agents, two of our best in the field."  She shook her head.  "I've long suspected my predecessor's judgment was... spotty, in some areas." 

Then she smiled like a piranha at me.  "Although in your case at least, my dear, I can certainly comprehend what spun him so strongly in your favor."  She was practically cooing.

"You -"  I understood in that moment why we hadn't been allowed in with our weapons.  You can insult any single one of us all you want and all we'll do is smile at you and memorize your vital statistics for some later, off duty, occasion.  But an insult like that to Colonel Logan would have gotten her shot by anyone who had ever worked with him, and I had to assume she knew it, too.

"That's a professional libel in front of a witness," Eddie observed mildly. I may have been the only living person in North America who knew just how dangerous that mild tone was, coming from him.  "C'mon, Myrna Loy, I'll help you type up the complaint."

He was trying to get me out of there as quick as he could, before one of us went diving over Colonel Logan's desk to wipe the smirk off that bitch's china doll face with our boots.  I was so angry I nearly didn't notice her hand moving on her desk top.

Eddie squinted at her in a way I knew meant he was cycling his optics, then grimaced and started to bring his right hand up.  The new Chief beat him to the draw, most likely because she was already bringing a weapon up; there was a PHUT of compressed air and a fat dart was hanging from the front of Eddie's tunic.  He went as limp as a sack of laundry and started to crumple to the ground.

She swung her arm across her body towards me but I wasn't exactly standing there flatfooted.  I was already cycling my own optics through to IR again on a hunch; I hadn't figured I'd need active scanners inside HQ, but was only mildly shocked to see that she radiated no body heat at all, just like all the deaders we'd shot at that morning.

However incompetent she was, the Chief had to know about the finger lasers, and that's probably why she rushed her shot at me with the trank pistol.  The dart meant for me took an inch of lace off my left jacket cuff, and then a blue line of fire vaporized the end of the plastex sheathing my right index finger and drilled a neat hole through Chief Slitch's left eye and out the back of her skull.  Her corpse hit the carpet on her floor barely a second after Eddie's unconscious body had gone down with a heavier thump.


Complete novel length text available in Kindle edition now!

1938 had been, historically, one of the hottest summers New York City had ever seen.  People had fanned themselves with copies of the Globe, sweltering in their shirt sleeves, since late May, praying for the heat wave to finally break with autumn's onset.  But September had rolled in and back out again like a disappointing low tide full of dead seagull feathers and spoiling crabmeat, and on October 3, Ned Logan sat on the Manhattan penthouse balcony of one of New York City's richest adventurers, staring out over Long Island Sound and wishing there was a breeze.

Idly wishing, with maybe a tenth of his consciousness.  The rest of his brain was firmly fixed on the woman leaning fifteen feet away from him, one Amazonian hip hitched casually to perch on the top of the safety rail running around the lip of the balcony.  She sat with a panther's grace, dressed casually in what some conservative types still called, fussily, 'men's clothes'... corduroy trousers, a white button up short sleeved cotton shirt with shoulder epaulets, unbuttoned halfway down to show deep swells of cleavage as tanned as her equally bare arms.  A battered safari hat sat casually on clean, coiled blonde tresses that fell, half pinned, to below her collar.

"I've never been in the Congo in my life," she said, her deep voice carrying a hint of laughter, leaning forward slightly to give the statement a confidential tone.  "I did most of my hunting in Zaire and Rhodesia.  That pirate crew I kicked hell out of off Zimbabwe?  I got sold to them by a crew of ivory poachers who slipped me a mickey in Capetown.  Went back and finished those jamokes off a month after I guided the Barbary Queen back to shore... they were surprised as hell to see me, you betcha!"

"I wasn't the one who came up with the 'Congo Queen' tag," Logan said, half apologetically.  He scribbled in his notebook, then tucked his pencil stub back through the wire binder and picked up his glass of iced tea.  Sipping it, his nose wrinkled.  Too much lemon.  His mother had always kept a pitcher of the stuff in the icebox in the summer when Ned was growing up, but hers had been strong and unsweetened.

The French doors from the air conditioned living room opened; a tall, muscular man with black, curly hair, glinting blue eyes, and an athlete's controlled agility paced out, turning to carefully close the doors behind him.  He was dressed as casually as the woman, although his outfit of choice was white tennis togs.  

You wouldn't have thought either of them could possibly be packing, Logan reflected idly to himself, yet he'd have placed at least a fin that a strip search of either would turn up at least one automatic pistol each.  Charles Champion, collegiate All American and multiple Olympic medal winner, could rely on his judo and boxing skills in a crunch, but neither he nor Candace "Congo Queen" Carson would be caught completely unarmed by choice in the presence of any stranger.  Even one as apparently unimpressive as Ned Logan.

Champion sat in a wire chair and leaned back, keeping his balance with the unconscious ease of a lifelong world class athlete.  The Queen lifted her hopelessly unladylike hand -- all callouses and cracked nails -- and affectionately stroked a curl of dark hair back off his forehead.  His eyes glinted appreciatively at her, then focused on Logan.

"No," he agreed, having apparently heard the conversation from the sumptiously appointed living room, "you didn't.  That was that rat Kent, at the Planet."

Logan nodded.  "He works the 'action and adventure' beat for them," he said affably enough.  "I did hang the Black Scorpion's monicker on him, though.  He wanted to call himself the Ace of Spades.  What with that turret mounted autocannon sticking up from the tailpiece of his plane, though, it looked kinda scorpion like... and my editor prob'ly wouldn't have printed the other."

The woman known around the world as the Congo Queen narrowed her eyes.  "I met the Scorpion, a few years back.  He's a good man.  I was as glad as anyone when he made his comeback... that Salamander thing was a tragedy."  She stopped, as if inviting comment.

Logan just pursed his lips and sipped his lousy with lemon iced tea.  He knew what she was hinting at... there were rumors floating that the resurrected Black Scorpion was, in fact, another black ace pilot and crimestopper using the same name and costume as the one who had perished in that warehouse fire.  To Ned, that was funny... like the yegg who spent all those years trying to prove that the Odyssey had actually been written by a completely different Greek named Homer.  But if he knew anything and wanted that thing known, he'd put it in his column, not drop it in casual confab with a couple of modern day privateers like these two.

"You don't look like much in person, Mr. Logan, " Champion observed casually.  "That must come in handy to you."

Ned raised his eyebrows.  "Beg pardon?" he said, innocently enough.

"I had Scarlett Flayme in her Empress outfit chained to a radiator on top of a burning skyscraper for twenty minutes while I was waiting for Charles to get back with our autogyro and rescue us," Miss Carson mused.  "She's quite chatty when you get her loosened up... but you'd know that, wouldn't you, Mr. Logan?  Two years undercover as her valet, infiltrating the Satanic Society...  that takes a kind of cold, hard nerve uncommon even in our line of work."  She gave him a frankly admiring look, then chuckled.  Ned could not imagine the Congo Queen doing anything as girlish as giggling.   "I actually learned one or two new curse words from her, when your name came up in our conversation."

Logan smiled... more around the eyes than anywhere else, but even that was more than he usually let on.  "I wouldn't buy too much of anything that dame tries to sell you, Miss Carson.  Not to put too fine a point on it, but her reputation ain't exactly sterling."

"She had little reason to lie about you," the Congo Queen responded, smiling widely.  "And probably wasn't fully in control of her faculties, given the number of times I'd kicked her in the head in the preceding half hour or so."

"Or so she wanted you to think," Logan pointed out.  "She eeled out of the paddy wagon pretty slick for someone with a concussion."

The Queen's smile curled a bit, then vanished.  "Well, yeah," she admitted.  "We should have taken her in ourselves."

"Wouldn't have mattered," Logan said, a trace of bitterness in his tone.  "We didn't pop the whole Satanic Society... she's still got people under her thumb all over the City.  Somebody would have left a door unlocked for her, soon enough.  Hardly anybody who's anybody in New York society wants that bird singin' on a witness stand."

Charles Champion fidgeted.  "If you're suggesting, Mr. Logan, that Candace or I should have facilitated a more permanent solution... we are both staunch believers in due process of law."

Logan couldn't help it; he had to chuckle at that.  "Alla you joes say that stuff," he said.  "Well, alla you but maybe that anarchist fella, Red whatshisname."  The levity fell out of his voice like a dropped cloak as he continued:  "But we all know, there's some folks out there that just need killin'."

"I've killed nearly everything that walks, crawls, or flies," Candace Carson said grimly.  "Including men, when I had to... in self defense.  I'm tired of it.  And I'd never urge anyone else to do it.  It leaves a mark on a person's spirit, Mr. Logan.  I'm very glad, for Charles' sake, that he hasn't been pressed to that necessity."

"You must have had the opportunity to kill Miss Flayme a time or two, during your long stint within the Satanic Society," Champion observed.  "What stayed your hand?"

"Nothing," Logan gritted.  "I poisoned that bitch three times, when I saw some of the things she was gettin' up to.  With kids, and such..." He shook his head and closed his eyes, flogging the images that rose unbidden back into his subconscious.  Although even after years, those memories were never far away.  The screams... the smells of branded flesh... After a moment, he opened his eyes again and continued, his quiet voice as steady as ever. "And at the last, when the clean cops from the list I passed out to Commissioner DeWitt broke in and all hell broke loose... almost literally... I put two bullets in her back, point blank range, from her own .32."  He shook his head, then touched the streak of pure white that ran back through his otherwise carroty red hair.  "Where do you think I got this?  That woman won't die... not until her Master in Hell wants her to.  Not then, if she can squirm out of it somehow.  And I wouldn't bet against her."

A shadow seemed to fall over the 42nd floor balcony then, although the sky was clear of clouds.

Finally, Champion cleared his throat.  "Do you think Flayme is behind all these recent... strange...events?"

After a moment's thought, Logan shook his head.  "It ain't her style," he said.  "She tried for revenge on the City once, with that Times Square bomb, but she's normally more cold blooded.  She likes behind the scenes stuff... getting control, pullin' the puppet strings."  He shrugged.  "It could be, I s'pose.  Don't feel like her, though.  But people change."

Carson spoke up.  "We've been keeping our ears to the ground," she said.  "Jeremiah is too..."  Ned nodded, that would be Cap Atlas... "and the Velveteer has access to extraordinary information, sometimes.  But none of us have heard anything meaningful about any of this.  It does feel... rather Satanic, though."

Logan turned one hand palm up.  "Sure," he said.  "But she generally doesn't show her hand like this.  Her schemin' is all done in private, off stage.  Ideally, she don't want anyone to even realize anything is goin' on, while she sits in the middle of her web, pullin' on strands."  He looked at both of them, puzzled.  "So... I thought you guys had a scoop for me?  Did you just want to chew the fat over old cases instead?"

The two exchanged glances, then locked hands.  "No," Champion said, clearing his throat.  "We do have rather a story for you, old man.  Ah... hrm..."  He looked abashed, something Logan found confounding.

"I'm pregnant," the Congo Queen finally said, correctly judging her paramour paralyzed by the announcement's weight.  "Due in April.  Charles and I are going to be married on November 15th, in Madison Square Garden."

"They'll carry the ceremony live on the radio, we think," Champion spoke up, weakly.  "But you're the first newsperson we've spoken to, really."

Logan's head was buzzing.  Pregnant?  Out of wedlock?  But getting hitched... Good gravy, it would be the wedding of the century!  Everyone who was anyone would want an invitation... the whole world would listen in... his paper's circulation would jump another hundred thousand once they printed this...!

"Wait," he said.  "You get lashed up together in public, every black hat in the world is gonna come gunnin' for you.  Especially if they know  you're expectin'."  He looked up, warily.  "If this is a hoax, to smoke Scarlett Flayme out of hiding... or whoever's behind all this spooky stuff lately..."

Champion stared at 'the Newshound' directly.  "This is no hoax.  And we are going to be taking it easy for the forseeable future, so if anyone else out there could find a way to deal with these eerie events, we'd be very appreciative."

Candace "Congo Queen" Carson tilted her head slightly.  "As for my wedding," she said, quietly... "Let any man, or woman, who wants to try and put my child, or my beloved, in danger..."  Her eyes flashed, and her hands, perhaps unconsciously, mimicked the motions of gripping a large bore elephant gun.  "Well... let them try."  She paused, then stood to her full six feet of height, squaring her broad shoulders, the tendons in her arms flexing under tropically tanned skin.  "I said I was tired of killing.  That doesn't mean I shan't kill if its needful."

Ned Logan picked up his notebook again, and began writing.  This would be the scoop of a lifetime... and he felt sorry for anyone who tried to mess with this wedding.

They would, doubtless, forever hold their peace... at least, when bride and groom were finished with them, they would!

This is what I've been spending my time on lately, if anyone cares. :)

* * * *

Our setting is New York, 1938. 

RECENT TIMELINE, "This gathering darkness..."

1931 - Captain Jeremiah Atlas foils the plans of the air pirate Hugo Random to hold New York City hostage with a fleet of incindiery dirigibles.  "Cap Atlas" instantly becomes an international celebrity and proclaims himself "Evil's Number One Enemy!" / Later this year, it is revealed by Ned "Newshound" Logan that the secret Satanic Society, led by prominent city socialite Scarlett Flayme, have been in covert control of Mayor Jimmy Walker and most of the City Council for years, using vice based blackmail as well as threats of occult retaliation.  The scandal costs most of the incumbents their offices.

1932 - The menace of the Ghost Serpent is ended by Candace "Congo Queen" Carson, former big game hunter and international adventurer.  / In September, Dr. Julius Vector's scheme to steal the mayoralty through new voting machines with hidden 'hypno beams' is disrupted by Rick Shaw, the Fastest Man Afoot. /  On New Year's Eve, Scarlett Flayme is presumed dead after her attempt to avenge herself on the City by hiding a bomb in the Times Square ball is wrecked by the Black Scorpion's timely interference.

1933 - The Drag Queen's scheme to poison the City's water supply is foiled by Danny "Swordfish" Sullivan.  / The "Toy Soldier" crime wave ends when Orson "the Dollmaster" Wegand is dragged into jail unconscious by adventurer Jason Royal.

1934- The waterfront piracy of the Great White gang is brought to a halt by the Congo Queen and Rick Shaw working with "Swordfish" Sullivan.  /  Cap Atlas smashes a plot by crime boss Zack "the Saxon" Sayers to blow up the just-completed Empire State Building.

1935 - An attempt by "Moxy" Redd's gang to rob the 'easy targets' at the underground Pixies Ball is foiled by new mystery man The Velveteer. / While the Black Scorpion and Cap Atlas battle at 12,000 feet over Manhattan in a charity airshow, the Jack of Diamonds leads a robbery spree through Diamond Row.  Both renowned crimefighters vow to bring the Jack of Diamonds to justice. / Black Scorpion foils an attempt by the murderous Salamander to burn down most of the lower East Side, unfortunately, hero and villain both perish in the resultant warehouse fire.

1936 - Olympic gold medal winner Charles Champion aids Jason Royal in defeating Hugo Random and Julius Vector's army of marauding 'robo-killers'. /  Cap Atlas finally halts the crime spree of the Jack of Diamonds gang. / The Black Scorpion reappears, teaming up with the Velveteer to defeat the Drag Queen and her Flaming Furies.

1937 -  When the Congo Queen smashes a gang of masked criminals known as the Tarot, their ringleader, the Empress, is revealed to be Scarlett Flayme, who escapes custody on the way to prison.

1938 - the present -

Almost a month ago, the ferry carrying tourists to Liberty Island ran aground... and upon investigation, was discovered to be completely abandoned... except for one young boy, found hiding in one of the small forward storage areas, his hair gone prematurely white, his eyes wide with terror.  Whatever happened to the lad has driven him permanently mute with terror... despite repeated questioning by authorities, he's been no help in determining what happened to the 124 tourists and crew members who were aboard the ferry when it left shore barely twenty minutes before.

Down in the Bowery, several vicious attacks by apparently hydrophobic vagrants have made local residents too terrified to walk the streets after nightfall.  Even police patrols have been attacked; two of these reportedly 'rabid bums' fell to police gunfire, but the cops in question swear they had to empty their weapons into the derelicts to drop them, when normally a single swipe with a nightstick will suffice to quiet even the most obstreperous drunk.  The city coroner is supposed to be studying the bodies of these bestial bums... but to date, has not released any results to the public.  Meanwhile, night time attacks by crazed winos are still being reported.

Three weeks ago, Ned "the Newshound" Logan broke the story of the latest fad among top criminal bosses - "monster" bodyguards.  These huge, ogre-like creatures have been seen accompanying several of the most prominent gangsters in the City, including "Moxy" Redd, Victor "the Eyeball" Grecco, and "Bloody Mitts" Mulhaney.   Their origin is unknown.

An odd flu like virus seems to be sweeping through New York City, as well, with over two dozen cases admitted to various city hospitals and an unknown number yet unreported.  Symptoms include high fever, excessive mucous production, vomiting, loose stool, and an extreme aversion to bright light.   Three flu victims have been reported expired to date, all of them in the process of being transported from one hospital to another.  The city coroner is also studying these bodies.  Details will be forthcoming shortly.

A 'dark fog' or 'black smoke' filled Madison Square Garden ten days ago during a sold out prize fight, and hundreds suffocated before they could reach the exits.  The overworked City Coroner has asked next of kin and loved ones of the deceased to be patient; the bodies are being stored in guarded, refrigerated vaults until appropriate research can be done to determine whether these were accidental deaths, or the 'black smoke' was deliberately caused by some intelligence.

Last week, a gigantic wolf like creature went berserk in Times Square shortly after moonrise, killing 17 and injuring over 30.  Dozens of police responded, and despite coordinated attempts on their part, the creature escaped... according to one cop, "into thin air".  Police Commissioner DeWitt has vowed to "get to the bottom of these strange, horrific events".

As it seems to be getting a better response than anything else I'm posting lately (and thanks, all you crazy zombie fans) here's more of The Fear Masters, complete novel length text available in Kindle edition now:

* * *

"There are too spammin' many of them," Eddie said, apparently reaching the same conclusion as I had. He didn't sound unhappy about it, just a little irritated at the realization.  "And to think this started out as a pretty good day."

May 2 2032 had indeed started out as a pretty good day, although you should understand that it's a good day for Eddie if the mess hall closest to his rack has flapjacks for breakfast.

For me, though, today had mostly started way too early. I'd stayed out too late the night before, and then rolled my skinny black ass out of the wrapper and straight into the shower at 0600.   After mixing myself a quick breakfast and gulping it right out of the blender, I'd logged in at my keyboard and punched for my daily assignment, brain still buzzing from the anti-hangover meds I'd just chugged.  

It had looked like a no-brainer; me and my usual partner Eddie Barrow on bodyguard detail for Dr. Veronica Hansea, who was taking a quick subway ride up the coast to Boston for some covert corporate/Globe symposium.

A flyer would have been faster but much less safe; American Hezbollah had hit four antigravs in the last six days with Cobra-STRIKE gta missiles.  One of the targets was a private commercial transport carrying 354 people - most if not all of them dead before the burning fragments spiraled back to Earth, from the nerve-frying electroshock of the EM impeller going wild.  

So our little triad rode the covert coast rail instead.  Once upon a time the subway was cheap transit for the unwashed masses, an underground spider-web connecting the East Coast, Midwest, Southwest, and West Coast together into one big 90 minute-maximum commute.  After the 12 Minute Failure punched deep glassy craters in North America's urban landscape, the subway lines were 'irreparable'... until Globe Chief Landeau had much of the track network secretly restored, to be used as emergency transport for those on official, if highly classified, business.

It would have made excellent sense for Science Sector to have easy access to the secret subway, so, naturally, our New Washington HQ was twelve miles away from the closest entry node.  Eddie and I had hooked up with the doc in Lincoln Corridor inside Sector HQ and then ridden up two thousand yards of escalators with her.  She never took her eyes off her portable calculator's screen the entire time; we never took our hands off our gun butts.  

We had surfaced inside a store selling blown glass curios in the James Earl Carter Indoor Mall, after waiting a few minutes behind a hidden blast door for the proprietor to give us the 'all clear'.  Don't bother trying to get in that way; that door is cobaltanium cored and will hold off a Markov 77 nuclear tank... at least long enough for someone in HQ to trigger that access tunnel's demolition charges.

Don't bother trying to get in any way; Science Sector doesn't exist.  Ask anyone from the Globe Chief on down, they'll tell you.  Me?  I'm just a high yellow figment of your imagination.  Pay grade 17E.  

We had exchanged countersigns with the cabbie who was waiting for us at the corner of Fisher Boulevard and California Avenue - not one of ours, I think Eddie flashed her the Urban Surveillance Agency sign of the day, but I wasn't really paying attention, as I was trying to scan 360 degrees of busy street corner and several thousand feet above it simultaneously -- and then all three of us had crammed into the back of the '23 Hanshaw she was driving.  She had dropped us at Jefferson and Fourth; from there we went up another escalator and into Kringle's Fine Furnishings by a third floor 'revolving door' that had actually dumped us out in a sub basement sixty feet below ground level.  

Here we found ourselves being glared at through a reinforced titanium grating by a trooper in full combat armor.  The 400 megawatt laser mounted on her shoulder was powered by a 60 kilo charging coil resting on the ground at her feet, where it was doubtless hardwired directly into the urban chem-fusion grid.

I refrained from sneering with an effort of will.  Had Science Sector been in charge of security for the secret subway, unwanted intruders would never have seen, heard, nor otherwise perceived the microscopic bugs that hit them where they lived.  Not in the first few minutes, anyway.  We strive for the subtle.

The uniformed guard - Global Union Sky Marines, my old outfit - scanned our IDs carefully, matching the inset holos against our bare faces.  Then the gate itself checked our DNA against the Globe's databases.  It's a  high/low tech layered security approach and so far nobody has beaten it - but the constant possibility keeps our boffins nice and nervous.

That's why we need Science Sector in the first place.  You'd be amazed what a few million kilobucks per annum in government sponsored pure research can do for keeping up with, or, better, ahead of, the Joneses.  Of course, when the Joneses are actually the research departments of some international hypercorps which cares more about short term profit than the long term health of the global biosystem, well, keeping up with them is a lot trickier.  

Those hyper-minds come up with some seriously weird and dangerous stuff, seems like every other Tuesday.  That's when people like me and Eddie have to kick ass and take names - or, more specifically, blast our way into some secret corporation lab somewhere and confiscate the crazy stuff that the Citizenry of the Global Union wouldn't want left in the hands of some crazy war profiteer.  Assuming, of course, that the Citizenry ever knew about it, which we make sure they don't.

So I half saluted the Marine as we went through (Eddie, being former GU Ground Forces, made a big show about keeping his hands in his pockets) and we went on down.  

Generally those subway rides were entirely uneventful, but, obviously, this one hadn't been.  

Zip forward through everything I've already described and we're all caught up...  trapped in a stalled subway car a few hundred feet under the world's biggest radioactive ruin, besieged by the walking dead.  Helluva way to run a railroad.  

Dr. Hansea's voice spoke up from behind us.  "There's a security cache about a mile past the platform," she said calmly.  "According to the manifest, it contains an armored four seat flyer and a plenitude of heavy weapons.  If we can get through that horde and move quickly enough, we should be all right."

Dr. Hansea is one of the very few people in the world who can use a word like 'plenitude' in everyday speech and not sound stupid.  For her, it's just the way she talks.  Her bulging brain is why the Sector assigns her a couple of gun jockeys like Eddie and me whenever she ventures outside a secured zone; her curvy chassis is why gun jockeys like Eddie -- and me, I ain't ashamed of my nature -- are happy to have the assignment.  

Well, usually.

"You've got a map?" I tossed back over my shoulder, while continuing to fire my reloaded weapon.

"On my portable," she affirmed.  She moved up behind me and slid her arm around my waist so I could glance down and see the screen.

"What's that round grey thing behind us?" I asked after a quick second's scrutiny of the track diagram she had projected there.  "Right there, beside the track."

She edged her head in under my arm -- curly auburn hair that would fall past her shoulders if she unpinned it, wound up on top of her head in a tight bun, smelling vaguely like sun warmed strawberries -- I once again had to tell my brain to stop gibbering and stay professional.

"Underground reservoir," she said.  "Probably about a million gallons... something for firefighters to use, back before compact foam-packs.  Why?"

"You button this car up," I told her.  "Make sure all the windows are tight and the doors are locked.  Eddie, step out front and hold off the horde for a minute or so.  Be ready to duck back inside quick, though; I'm gonna be seriously haulin ass back this way in a minute or so an' I ain't gonna be tarryin' any for any slow shufflin' honkeys."  I hit the emergency lever to open the folding doors and dropped to the floor of the track before either could argue with me.  
I went back down that tunnel at a full sprint, being very careful to keep well clear of the third rail as I ran.  The unexpected power failure that had stranded us could end at any time and I'd never taken a single aptitude test that said I hankered to be a pulled pork sandwich.

I reached the area where I'd seen the grey oval on Dr. Hansea's map.  There was an old brass nozzle-cap sticking out of the side of the tunnel there, with an equally old brass metal wheel, like the kind you see on doors in submarine viewsees, mounted right next to it.  

I thumbed open one of the pockets on my agents' vest and got a handful of boom buttons -- little things the size of a fingertip, made of a particularly stable form of plastic explosive.  I didn't have time to play; I squashed them together into a blob of putty half the size of my fist and pressed it to the end of that brass cap.  I jammed a pencil detonator into the mess, snapped the end off it, and ran like hell for the stalled subway car.  

Normally the pencils will take about three full seconds to burn down, but the chemicals go bad fairly quickly away from controlled temperatures and you can end up with more performance variation than you'd really want under most field conditions.  This time I was still maybe five yards from the subway car when I heard the sharp, flat crack of the explosion behind me.

I yelled for Eddie to get back inside even as I slammed into the car, grabbed the utility ladder mounted on the left side, and swung myself up on to the roof.  Behind me I could hear the heavy hiss of high pressure water blowing out through the ruptured pipe -- then a rumbling roar as the sudden release caused the entire side of the buried reservoir, and the subway tunnel next to it, to collapse.  

I'd planned to be back inside the subway car by then, but there was no way that was happening now.  I reached into my vest again and had just slammed closed my handcuffs around my wrist and the upper end of that ladder when a roaring wall of ice cold water hit me and that subway car like a giant fist.  The car trembled and shuddered like a wild bull in a rodeo chute but its wheels stayed in place on that track.  For what seemed like several seconds past forever I thought my hand was going to come off at the wrist, or, failing that, my arm was going to pop out of its socket -- but then the water was roaring on past and I could take a breath again.  

I was doing that, gratefully, when I heard Dr. Hansea's voice calling me, sounding worried.  "Agent Zemyna?  Agent Zemyna?"

"Goddamit, Myrna Loy," I heard Eddie curse from below me, "if you got yourself kilt I'm gonna find your body and..."

Exactly what desecrations Eddie was planning to visit on my corpse I never found out, because I pulled myself to the edge and peeked over.  "I'm okay," I said, and then had to hack up about half a cupful of water I hadn't actually planned to take into my lungs that morning.  "More or less," I added raspily when I was done.

Dr. Hansea still sounded worried.  "We should be making our way down the track to that cache," she fretted.  "Whatever those things were, if more of them were to appear..."

Eddie and I exchanged a brief, far from untroubled glance.  "Yeah," I said, putting my handcuffs away and dropping lightly into the shallow puddle the stalled subway car was now sitting in. 

I had been assuming that the power failure was one of those intermittent brownouts typical to the mainland grid around the Old New York crater.  The horde of zombies -- I hadn't given any thought to where they'd come from, but in the back of my head, I'd assumed that they were something aimed specifically at Dr. Hansea.  I won't say I've foiled weirder assassination attempts in my time, but I've seen some pretty strange ones.  But if the zombie horde hadn't been something bizarre aimed just at the group of us, then it might well be just a small part of a much larger problem -- a problem that might have been the direct cause of the power failure itself. 

I shook my head at the thought.  "No, it's gotta be something screwy aimed at us," I said.  "Where would you get a bunch of recent stiffs to turn into zombies in Old New York?  It's a radioactive wasteland up there."

"A radioactive wasteland that Newer New York has been dumping its garbage in for the past fifteen years," Eddie said.  "Which garbage includes a fresh load of a few hundred or so indigent corpses every week.  Our recent drop-ins must have been specimens from the latest body dump."

That had just happened to come lurching down 12 stories worth of stairs and frozen escalators a minute or so after an unscheduled private subway car stalled on the tracks?  That kind of coincidence wasn't working for me... but clearly we all had insufficient information.  "We need to get upstairs," I said.

Eddie nodded, and added, "But not on foot, unless I want my ex wife collectin' my life insurance sometime next week.  An' I most certainly do not."

"Cache it is," I said.  I breathed a silent prayer of gratitude to the ghost of General Devon-Hall, the Globe's first Security Minister.  I had no doubt salting the newly reconstructed subways with caches of useful equipment had been his idea; according to what I'd studied in school, he'd always been a suspenders AND belt man.

We set off at a half-run down the tunnel, splish-sploshing our way through new puddles.  I half expected we'd have to slow down to accommodate Dr. Hansea -- she couldn't be expected to have the kind of physical conditioning necessary to our MOS -- but she kept up without complaint.  She did keep scanning around, which wasn't unusual, since my own eyes were peeled back to my ears trying to spot hostile movement in the shadows around us.  But she wasn't looking for active threats, as we discovered when she suddenly stopped to kneel over an unmoving body caught where two tracks converged in a Y junction on the floor of the tunnel.

"Dr. Hansea, we have to keep on blazin', here," I told her, taking the moment nonetheless to inhale a few cubic yards of oxygen. 

"Momentarily," she said, kneeling next to the corpse.  From what I could see, the temporary tidal wave I'd unleashed had rolled and tumbled this bad boy a few hundred yards until by chance, his head had wedged between two rails, breaking his neck and crushing most of his skull.  Being dead, he probably hadn't felt a thing, but I hoped otherwise.  Normally I'm not much on tormenting an enemy, but those goddam zombies gave me the fraggin' jib-jabs.

Dr. Hansea murmured something to herself as she pressed a tissue probe against the dead man's clammy looking arm. I didn't catch it but it sounded admiring.  Science Sector necessarily has cutting edge field equipment; our labs and shops invent and fabricate a lot of stuff that stays classified for years, other than our own proprietary uses.  And then there's all the stuff we steal, too, to keep it off the open market.  All in all, if you're a scientist and you want to play with the best toys ever, you need to join Science Sector.  Which is why, I suspect, so many of 'em do.

The small light at the back of the probe blinked green and Dr. Hansea got smoothly to her feet, tucking the instrument away again through a sleeve-loop.  "I shall have to cancel the Boston meeting," she announced, as if she were sitting in an environment controlled cubie somewhere and I were her exec-assist. "I need to return to a fully equipped analysis laboratory as quickly as feasible."

I looked at Eddie; he shrugged.  Dr. Hansea isn't in our COC and can't legally give us orders, but whatever was going on had to take priority over anything scheduled prior to us coming down with a bad case of walking stiffs.  "Either way, the cache is our best bet," I said. 

The other two voted with their feet, early and often.  I had to sprint the first twenty yards to catch up.

- Excerpted from The Fear Masters, by D.A. Madigan, available in Kindle edition now!

"We and we alone are the right frame of mind to free this nation from this Obama oppression.  And let's give thanks to all the great people like Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, Laura Ingraham, Mark Levin, William Bennett, Glenn Beck, Hugh Hewitt, Dennis Prager, Michael Medved, Dennis Miller, Dick Morris, Ann Coulter, John Kasich, Michael Steele, Karl Rove, Newt Gingrich, Thomas Sowell, Victor Davis Hanson, Shelby Steele, Charles Krauthammer, Michelle Malkin, Fred Barnes and so many others. Let's give thanks to them for not giving up and staying the course, to bring an end to this false prophet Obama."
  - Jon Voigt, 6/9/09

"Governor, why wouldn't anyone want to say the Pledge of Allegiance, unless they detested their own country or were ignorant of its greatness?"
  - Sean Hannity, 6/12/03

"This is no different than what happens at the Skull and Bones initiation...I'm talking about people having a good time, these people, you ever heard of emotional release? You ever heard of the need to blow some steam off?"
 - Rush Limbaugh, commenting on the torture of prisoners by American troops at Abu Ghraib

"It's hard to do it because you gotta look people in the eye and tell 'em they're irresponsible and lazy. And who's gonna wanna do that? Because that's what poverty is, ladies and gentlemen. In this country, you can succeed if you get educated and work hard. Period. Period. I mean, I know people from Haiti, from the Ukraine, from, eh-we got callers all day long on The Factor. From Romania. You come here, you get educated, you work hard, you'll make a buck. You get addicted, you don't know anything, you'll be poor."
 - Bill O'Reilly, 6/11/07

"Every now and again we have to ask ourselves, what's the point of this thing called America, anyway? Is the point to make as much money as possible in our lifetimes? Is this nation called to some higher purpose?  Are we living the way God wants us to live? And if not, why not? ...Our Judeo-Christian tradition has done more good for America and the rest of the world than left-wing secularism ever will."
- Laura Ingraham, POWER TO THE PEOPLE

"Today, legalized abortion is the law of the land because the Supreme Court decided in 1973 that its recently created constitutional right to privacy also included a new constitutional right to abortion. If you look in the Constitution, however, you will find no general "right to privacy" any more than you will find a right to abortion -- and for good reason: It's not there. The framers assumed no general right to privacy because, to state the obvious, criminal and evil acts can be committed in privacy. Criminal codes are full of such examples -- from murder to incest to rape and other crimes."
 - Mark Levin,  MEN IN BLACK:  HOW THE SUPREME COURT IS DESTROYING AMERICA

"But I do know that it's true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could, if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down. (It) would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do,but the crime rate would go down.""
 - William Bennett, 9/28/05

"Would you kill someone for that?...I'm thinking about killing Michael Moore...I could kill him myself, or if I would need to hire somebody to do it,...No, I think I could. I think he could be looking me in the eye, you know, and I could just be choking the life out. Is this wrong?"
    - The Glenn Beck Program, May 17, 2005

"It's probably the last football game we'll ever get to see before the United States gets blown up by the Islamists under Obama."
-- Hugh Hewitt on the June 25 broadcast of his nationally syndicated radio show

" Do you believe we are fighting evil people in Iraq? That is how supporters of the war regard the Baathists and the Islamic dissolution persons, the people we are fighting in Iraq. Because if you cannot answer it, or avoid answering it, or answer "no," we know enough about your moral compass to know that further dialogue is unnecessary. In fact, dialogue is impossible. Our understanding of good and evil is so different from yours, there is simply nothing to discuss."
- Dennis Prager

"As the national argument continues to rage regarding the proper social and governmental response to homosexuality, some of the advocates for radical change have unobtrusively but unmistakably shifted their campaign from a request for equal treatment to an assertion of innate superiority. They demand for gay impulses not the same treatment accorded to heterosexual desires, but far greater latitude and acceptance, along with uniquely privileged
social sanction and legal endorsement."
 - Michael Medved

"Liberals should not overplay this weapons of mass destruction card, because you want me to tell you the truth? Most of us are not going to care if they don't find these weapons of mass destruction. It's enough for a lot of us to see those kids smiling on that street again."
- Dennis Miller

"I know Jesus Christ died for my sins, and that's all I really need to know."
 - Ann Coulter

"We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity. We weren't punctilious about locating and punishing only Hitler and his top officers. We carpet-bombed German cities; we killed civilians. That's war. And this is war."
- Ann Coulter

"Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 in the attacks and prepared for war; liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers."
- Karl Rove

""The idea that a congressman would be tainted by accepting money from private industry or private sources is essentially a socialist argument."
 - Newt Gingrich

"People who claim that sentencing a murderer to "life without the possibility of parole" protects society just as well as the death penalty ignore three things: (1) life without the possibility of parole does not mean life without the possibility of escape or (2) life without the possibility of killing while in prison or (3) life without the possibility of a liberal governor being elected and issuing a pardon."
 - Thomas Sowell

"Hitler, like bin Laden and his epigones, was the problem, not us. The only difference is that our grandparents knew that and we don't."
 - Victor Davis Hanson

"There are homosexuals in the world, and they should not be excluded based on their sexuality. I draw the line at marriage."
 - Shelby Steele

"Torture is an impermissible evil. Except under two circumstances. The first is the ticking time bomb. An innocent's life is at stake. The bad guy you have captured possesses information that could save this life. He refuses to divulge. In such a case, the choice is easy. "
 - Charles Krauthammer

"When a right-wing Christian vigilante kills, millions of fingers pull the trigger. When a left-wing Muslim vigilante kills, he kills alone."
 - Michelle Malkin

""It's amazing. You can't drink outside and you can't smoke inside. It really makes it hard to keep your business open. There's always someone else with their hand in your pocket."
- Fred Barnes

"That is the true genius of America, a faith in the simple dreams of its people, the insistence on small miracles. That we can say what we think, write what we think, without hearing a sudden knock on the door. That we can have an idea and start our own business without paying a bribe or hiring somebody's son. That we can participate in the political process without fear of retribution, and that our votes will be counted -- or at least, most of the time."
 - Barack Obama

"I have seen, the desperation and disorder of the powerless: how it twists the lives of children on the streets of Jakarta or Nairobi in much the same way as it does the lives of children on Chicago's South Side, how narrow the path is for them between humiliation and untrammeled fury, how easily they slip into violence and despair. I know that the response of the powerful to this disorder -- alternating as it does between a dull complacency and, when the disorder spills out of its proscribed confines, a steady, unthinking application of force, of longer prison sentences and more sophisticated military hardware -- is inadequate to the task. I know that the hardening of lines, the embrace of fundamentalism and tribe, dooms us all."
- Barack Obama

[The] issues are never simple. One thing I'm proud of is that very rarely will you hear me simplify the issues."
 - Barack Obama

I guess I'll take my prophets false, thanks.

The first half rotted corpse came lurching down the stairs from the old 7th and Lex platform at 16:17, twenty two minutes after our train had ground to an abrupt and unexpected halt no more than twenty yards up the track.

At that point, I knew the day had officially gone straight in the dumper.  Inconvenient power outage, subway train stalled two hundred feet under the world's most sprawling radioactive ruin, something fresh out of a shallow grave coming towards me with obvious murderous intent - things had definitely gone from 'all is well, all is well' to 'run in circles, scream and shout' at terminal velocity.

Staring at what was left of the walking dead man's face, my brain tried to gibber the 'z' word at me, but I told it firmly to shut up, mama was busy.  

The dead man was shambling along at a fast walk, lurching like a drunken sailor but still covering ground steadily.  Every couple of steps he'd let go with one of those growly 'rrrrrr rrrrr' sounds that all the zombies in the viewsees seem to come standard with.   It was goddam creepy, if anyone asked me.  Though no one ever did.
 
My ocular implants were already set to infra-red, so I knew that whatever this thing was, it had no body heat.  It was a shock to see somebody who ought to be decently dead laboring up the tunnel towards me with pretty obvious murderous intent, but I don't freeze up when I'm scared.  Not even with every dyed-blonde hair on my nappy black head bristlin' like a shoe shine brush.  My 'fight or flight' reflex was permanently hard-wired to 'shoot, punch, claw and spit' well before I hit puberty, and 13 weeks of boot training in Sumac Bay, followed by three years in a Middle Eastern hot zone and four more doing 'dirty' ops for Global Security's top secret Science Sector had ground my instinctively violent responses down to a monofilament edge.  

I had my window cranked down, my gun yanked up and an explosive round on the way before anyone else in our subway car had even realized there was anything untoward out there, much less lurching towards us with flesh devouring intent.

If I'd had any doubt regarding the nature of our attacker, it vanished as soon as I took my first breath of the outside air.  The creep not only looked like a rotting corpse, but he smelled like one, too.  The stench was enough to, as they say, knock a buzzard off a turd wagon, and it would probably have pole axed me, too, if I hadn't been hardened to even worse sensory input by jungle training.

Eddie, who had been scanning behind us in the UV range, turned around just in time to see my first target's head explode.  "Myrna Loy, Myrna Loy," he murmured out of the corner of his mouth, "she don't know if she's a girl or a boy.  I hope we find a WEE-pun on that corpse when it comes time to file reports, little darlin."

"Stop flapping your jaw, Eddie," I said, trying to keep the exasperation out of my voice.  "Switch your ocs to IR and your clip to explosive rounds.  And take a big whiff while you're at it; it will put you in the picture faster."

Eddie's typical whitebread from Alabama, all muscles and reaction time -- a good sort to have backing your play when the gumbo starts to splatter, but lord above, that boy can get on my last nerve when he's a mind to.   

I mean, I can't help that my pop was a big fan of classic movies, nor do I really have any choice about which gender I prefer to share a hammock with on bivouac. I know Eddie thinks his heckling is harmless, but after a while, you get tired of repeating "Don't ask, don't tell".  You yearn to present a more visceral argument.  In my case, it wasn't my knuckles that ached to get into the debate so much as it was the edges of my palms and the soles of my feet... especially the spots where twenty years of kendo-karate training had built up all the calluses.  

Eddie has three inches and about eighty pounds on me, and his arms are longer than mine, too.  And, yeah, he's probably stronger.  But if he kept pushing my buttons, I had no doubt I could kick his meaty white ass all up and down that tunnel or any other one on the planet.  I have a lot of quick, and a whole lot more mean, when I reach down deep to get a handful.  

Eddie rolled his eyes at me, but dutifully clicked his contacts through to IR... just in time to catch sight of a well below room temperature mob spilling off the platform and shambling hungrily in our direction, 'rrrrrrrr'ing to beat the band.

He snarled something imaginative in Arabic that managed to be blasphemous, profane, obscene, and anatomically impossible all at the same time, while simultaneously hitting the RELOAD button on the side of his modified Ruger .38, dropping a clip of heatseeker and slapping in one of explosive rounds.  By that time I'd dropped two more deaders with direct hits to their rotting faces and three others behind them, presumably from high velocity skull shrapnel.  That only left maybe thirty or forty more walking dead lurching and growling towards us.

"Zombies, goddam it, ZOMBIES," I finally blew out past my clenched lips, "we're about to be inundated by a genuine horde of mother kinkin' ZOMBIES."

"What's the hazard bonus for that kinda action?" Eddie asked, actually flicking a tight smile at me as he started shooting.  I was keeping my cool through an effort of will, but Eddie is one of those nutjobs - not uncommon in the military -- who is honestly baffled by the concept of fear.  The way he's wired, 'bloodlust' is the closest he can get to it.

"Not fragging enough," I snorted back, keeping a tight grip on the little panicky butterflies that were trying to flutter in my lower intestine.

I kept firing until I'd emptied another clip.  It took about four seconds; by that time, the only slightly diminished mob had covered about half the distance between the platform and our stalled subway car, and I'd come to the conclusion that we needed another plan... 

            - Excerpted from The Fear Masters, by D.A. Madigan, available in Kindle edition now!

"Civil liberties are profoundly counter-intuitive. It takes an effort of imagination and good will to remember that those we despise deserve the same legal rights as those who agree with us."
  ROBERT ANTON WILSON, The New Inquisition

But there are actually good reasons to defend free expression even for those we loathe the most... at least, if those we loathe the most are as dimwitted as most of the people I loathe the most... namely, when we give them enough rope, they inevitably hang themselves.

Which is to say, let a goddam fool like Rush Limbaugh run his mouth freely, and he will inevitably display his stupidity, venality, and hypocrisy for all to see.

This latest thing, with boycotting General Motors because the Federal government is spending billions of our tax dollars trying to keep it from going under?

I mean, I really don't have to explain the utter mind boggling stupidity of boycotting a company we're spending millions of tax dollars trying to save, do I?

You want to boycott General Motors, do it because they make crappy cars.  But boycotting them because there's a Democrat in the White House and you can't stand the idea of an opposition President getting credit for saving the world from the unbelievable bungling of Your Guy?

That's... I don't even know.  There aren't words for how unbelievably egocentrically brainbendingly stupid that is. 

I want to say it's all par for Rush's course, just part and parcel of the whole Limbaugh experience.  Yet even for a guy who once called Chelsea Clinton "the White House dog" and who seriously thinks every drug addict in the world should be jailed... except Rush Limbaugh... this is a brand new high in sheer dumbassery.

So I say let the asses bray.  A few more choice cuts like this, and even Rush's dwindling audience of dittoheads has to start wising up. 

I mean, some of those guys have to actually work for General Motors, right...?

An excerpt from Time Watch, a novel of the past, present, and future, by D.A. Madigan:

The street was full of people in the kind of fashions I tend to associate with the 1950s, not the 60s... but I'd read enough to be aware of the fact that the images, sounds, fashions, and other associations we tend to have, historically, with different decades are actually usually from the last half of that decade, and the first half of the succeeding decade. 1962, therefore, would look a lot like the last half of the 1950s; it wouldn't start looking like 'the 60s' until around 1965 or 1966.

My knowledge of that time era is spotty. Obviously, I have few coherent personal memories of it, and I've never really studied the American culture at that time, and I'd certainly never studied Tampa of that time, since I'd only moved down here in 1997.

November was autumn in Tampa, and in my era, nearly everyone on the street would have been in summer clothing. Here, all the men were in dark slacks, white shirts, straight dark ties, and dark suit jackets, although black and white photographs I'd seen from this time period gave me the wrong impression, as there were hardly any suits that were actually black or grey. They were in sedate colors, but many were shades of blue, and a few were even dark shades of a rust color. Many of them, male and female, were wearing, or carrying, hats. Few wore glasses but those I saw were ugly; thick black rims on the men, those horrible uptilted cats-eye things on the women. Something else tugged at my mind for a second or two until I finally got it: nearly everyone was white. The few black people I saw were much less well dressed; men in tshirts and obviously well worn trousers and cheap shoes, women in loose, badly fitting, very cheap looking dresses. All the men had short hair, and the white guys who didn't have crew cuts had their hair slicked back and combed so tight it looked unhealthy.

There was a big, black and white cop car with long, sharp fins bracketing its ping pong table sized trunk parked on the corner near me, and one big gutted cop in a white, short sleeved uniform with a heavy wooden nightstick hanging from a well worn equipment belt was leaning on the hood, Smokey the Bear hat in his hands, head back, apparently caught in uproarious laughter at something a very dark, shiny skinned black guy in cook's whites and a splattered apron was telling him. The black guy had grey hair, a gold tooth visible beneath his smiling upper lip, and was just either taking a toothpick out of his mouth or putting it back.

Oh, yeah... everyone, and I mean EVERYone, had a cigarette going. Some had them dangling from their lips, others between their fingers; one nice looking white woman in a long green dress with an umbrella hooked over her arm was leaning forward while a slick looking older guy in a dark, expensive looking suit lit it from a red paper matchbook. Her hair was auburn, fell down past her shoulders, and in the end came to a kind of solid looking curled up club or bob. I'd only seen pictures of the style before. It looked very artificial.

I could see, in overtime, literally rafts and strings and ropes of cigarette smoke trailing from everyone's mouths or hands. It hung in grey, translucent fog banks over everyone.

I moved closer to the cop car, fascinated, peering through the side window into the back seat. A surly looking kid with a bruised face was half lying, half sitting there. His hair was piled up and greased back. He was wearing a torn, dirty, once white tshirt, old grease stained jeans, and yes... he had a rectangular object that could only have been a pack of cigarettes rolled up in one sleeve (baring that arm to the shoulder) and an old, shabby, beat up black leather jacket across his lap. On the bare bicep I could see a blue, obviously home made tattoo, probably done with a ballpoint pen, showing a crudely etched ace of spades.

And thirty feet down the block from where I'd popped in, big as life, was the Franklin Street News & Magazine Stand.

I sat there and thought about it for a little while longer. Then I stood up... put my hair back in a short club with the rubber band I usually use to just ponytail it... and walked over to an opening into a narrow alleyway that led between two buildings. It was shadowy, which was good, and more importantly, an overweight white guy in a long coat with a slouch hat on his head was walking by it at the time I popped back in.

I dropped out of overtime and, from the shadowed wall, said "Psssst! Buddy! Wanna make twenty bucks?"

I wound up paying him $40 for the coat and hat. He obviously thought my appearance was strange, but he sure liked the money. Once I buttoned the coat up, rubbered banded my hair up on top of my head, and put the hat on, I didn't look particularly strange. Well... beards on men were clearly out of fashion here, and my footgear was odd... but still. I could most likely spend a couple of minutes in a newsstand without being arrested and committed.

I remembered to tuck my glasses into my pants pocket before I left the alley. I'm very nearsighted, so the world was a blur... but I knew where I was going.

A minute later, maybe less, I was inside Paradise.

I mean, you have no idea.

In 1962, all newsstands were also, pretty much by default, cigar stores also, which means, they carried all kinds of tobacco products... cigarettes, pipes, pipe tobacco, expensive lighters, matches... different kinds of matches, from penny cardboard folders to small cardboard boxes of little blueheaded wooden matches to big cheap thin-sided pineboard coffins of three inch long wooden kitchen matches with fat red heads on them. 400 kinds of cigarettes and cigars. Half a wall full of polished, gleaming pipes in different woods and inlays, checkered and carved in astonishing shapes. Shoe polish tins full of loose tobacco, and one rack with expensive looking leather bags hanging down from drawstrings, also crammed full of the fragrant, toxic stuff.

The air was blue with smoke, of course, and maybe because of it, no one gave me a second glance as I walked inside and moved to the rear to look at the racks and racks of magazines.

I'd only come for the comics, but... my God. The magazines.

ARGOSY. THE SATURDAY EVENING POST. COLLIER'S. GENTLEMAN'S QUARTERLY. MAN'S ADVENTURE. OUTDOOR ADVENTURE. Right next to it, OUTDOOR LIFE, and right next to that, OUTDOOR LIVING. LIFE and BOY'S LIFE, looking big enough to make up a bed with. And arranged at the front of the shelves where they could be seen, seeming tiny next to the stuff behind them, the fat little digest sized AMAZING STORIES and SCIENCE TALES and SCIENCE FICTION DIGEST and FANTASY READER and FUTURE STORIES.

And next to that rack, down at the end, a wire spinner rack with a bright white sign at the top of each of its four faces, saying in yellow and red letters: HEY, KIDS! COMICS!

I'd already grabbed handfuls of the SF and fantasy pulps, so I stacked them up and pushed them under one arm in order to turn the spinner and pull stuff off it. Monster comics, hard boiled detective magazines that were the size of comics, Disney comics, Archie comics, a ton of goddam CASPER and his dopy bunch comics... and then, one whole section of DC... SUPERMAN, BATMAN, ADVENTURE, ACTION, DETECTIVE, JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA, BRAVE AND THE BOLD FEATURING HAWKMAN, MYSTERY IN SPACE FEATURING ADAM STRANGE, GREEN LANTERN, FLASH, JIMMY OLSEN, LOIS LANE, THE ATOM...

I had a big stack by then, and was wondering if I should buy maybe two or even three each... definitely at least two apiece... and then I caught a glimpse of the next tier. FANTASTIC FOUR glared out at me from the top wire holder... not Number One, whose cover I had memorized, but, squinting... Number Three. Setting my pile of digests and comics on the floor, I pulled it out, and then started looking behind all the other comics in the front of that tier, hoping against hope... but no. I snagged two copies of Dell's BRAIN BOY looking carefully behind the front comic in the racks, but it wasn't until I dropped to one knee to flick through the eight or so comics stuffed into the bottom holder on that tier that I saw the motherlode... STACKS of comics, PILES of comics, on the bottom shelf of a narrow wooden magazine rack shoved into the corner behind the spinner.

Reaching past the spinner, I pulled out the first maybe two foot high stack of comics and started flipping through them. CLASSICS ILLUSTRATED. TUROK, SON OF STONE. LITTLE goddam LULU. GENE AUTREY (?). And... whoa! SHOWCASE FEATURING THE METAL MEN... hot damn... three different issues!

After that, I was wading through gold. Four dog eared issues of HULK. Three of JOURNEY INTO MYSTERY FEATURING THOR. Two TALES TO ASTONISH FEATURING ANT-MAN. Then more slush, but with a reward... the last dozen comics in that pile were all FLASH.

By the time I'd gone through all three stacks of 'older' comics behind the spinner, I must have had 70 comics I wanted. And I was nearly to the bottom of the third stack when I thought I saw... maybe... yes! FANTASTIC FOUR #1!!! A little bit dog eared and crumpled under two copies of TALES OF SUSPENSE (no superheroes, just monsters), but perfectly intact and readable. I grabbed it, and kept looking, but that was it... I'd mined out those stacks.

Now I turned back to the spinner rack. I'd gone over it before but I hadn't looked behind a lot of the front facing issues in the holders. I started checking the rest of the rack more carefully, and almost immediately got lucky again, finding TWO copies of AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #1 slightly crumpled behind a newer, more colorful EVERYTHING'S ARCHIE. I yanked them out and kept looking even harder. If I were lucky... yes! AMAZING FANTASY #15!!!!

"I shoot, I SCORE!" I crowed, in a half shriek, half whisper. Fortunately, nobody paid much attention to me. Well, actually, I think everybody was by then covertly keeping a wary eye on the big weirdo in the raincoat and hat pawing frantically at the funny book rack, but nobody was coming my way with handcuffs.

There were two other copies of AMAZING FANTASY #15 hidden on the rack, so I snagged them both, and then struck oil again, uncovering a buried copy of FF #2. I stopped for a long moment and considered KID COLT and RAWHIDE KID, but... nahhh. Never really much liked Western comics.

It took me another five minutes to recheck the whole spinner rack. (It had been a long time since I'd hunted for comics on a spinner rack. I was out of practice.) I found a couple of previous issues of LOIS LANE and... yes! a SUPERBOY, hidden behind copies of JUGHEAD and LI'L DOT, and stuffed in behind some of the photocovered detective magazines, I ferreted out no less than three back issues of WONDER WOMAN. I didn't really even want them, but I knew someone who'd love them. (She and I weren't even really on speaking terms any more but shit! For twelve cents each, I'd dig out her address and mail them to her in mylar snugs as an anonymous Christmas present. My motto is, when my ship comes in, everybody rides.)

I counted after I got home and dumped out my backpack. What with extra issues, I bought seven pulp SF and fantasy magazines and 149 comic books.

I paid a whopping $13.12... but that was only because a couple of the comics were GIANT SIZE SPECIALS, and cost a quarter. Most of them were cover priced ten or twelve cents each. The SF mags were 35 cents, or in one case (A DOUBLE SIZED ANNUAL!) a whole four bits... oh, and you won't believe this... all the comics I'd dug out of the stacks behind the spinner were SEVEN CENTS EACH, or FIVE FOR A QUARTER. (I didn't know that until I got everything up to the counter. I hadn't seen the little sign.)

When I took the stack of material up to the front counter, holding the bottom of it with my arms at full extension and the nearly three foot high pile leaning against my torso, there was an overweight Cuban guy with greying sideburns standing behind it, and a wiry looking white guy in a shirt and tie standing in front of it. They'd been conversing in low voices with occasional bursts of laughter, almost certainly at my expense, but both of them went quiet when I came up. The Cuban guy started ringing me up on a big bulky metal cash register. The wiry fellow, his hair slicked back from his temples, just kind of quietly looked at me while puffing on a fat cigar. He was close enough that I could see him distinctly, even with my glasses in my pocket. He looked down at the big stack of comics, which had turned into three stacks on the glass counter, with the SF mags on top of the last one. Looked back up at me. He had a little Clark Gable mustache... which made me very aware just how strange my little mustache and beard goatee must look here.

"It's my nephew," I said, trying to sound sad. "He... the doctors say he's got polio. He can't play with his brothers any more, so..." I gestured to the huge stack of comics.

"Ah, shit," the Cuban guy behind the counter said. "That's too damn bad, buddy." He put all the comics and magazines into a heavy brown grocery bag. "Hope he likes 'em! If he does, we get more all the time."

"Terrible thing, that polio," the white guy said, looking away from me. "Your family is lucky he isn't worse."

I walked out, and as the door closed behind me, I heard the white guy say "Must be a homo," and he and the Cuban both laughed. Ah, the glorious past. I walked back down the street, turned into the alley, and popped out the first watchstem. In overtime, I popped out the next stud down, and jumped back to 2001.

Read the full adventures of Jim, time traveling comics geek, in D.A. Madigan's Time Watch, now available in Kindle edition!

An excerpt from In The Early Morning Rain: A Military Memoir By The Worst Infantry Trainee In The History of Mankind, by D.A. Madigan

On my third full day, we were moved over to our permanent training companies. Not everyone in my induction group went to the same company. When we got to mine, we were put into one of our typically inept formations...and the screaming began. Through some system I still don't even vaguely understand, we were all divided up into platoons (I wound up in Second Platoon) and spent our first hour or so there standing at attention while our various drill sergeants informed us at the top of their lungs that we were without a doubt the most worthless, disgusting, utterly useless pieces of shit, garbage, and maggot infested vomit they'd ever seen, that not one single one of us would graduate from this training program, and that we'd be lucky if they didn't kill us personally with their bare hands before we got thrown out.

As you'd expect, everything about us, from the way we wore our uniforms to the way we stood behind our piles of equipment to the way we answered their bellowed exhortations was wrong, and worse than wrong, clearly indicated how stupid, inept, brainless, weak, awful, and generally disgusting we all were.

This basic conceptual approach - 'everything you do is wrong' - is worth noting, because it is fundamental to the military training experience... at least, as I went through it, maybe things have changed since then. The U.S. Army, at least in 1985, had an official way to do pretty damn near every human activity... walk, talk, get dressed, sleep, make your bed, arrange your closet, fold your clothes, polish your boots, even eat... and a lot of other stuff that there was no official Army way to do was simply forbidden.

There was, I should note, no official Army way to eat candy bars or drink soda, because any recruit in his first month of Basic Training caught doing either was in a lot of trouble, and there sure as shit was no official Army way for recruits to get laid.

The main thrust of critiquing everyday activities, punishing a recruit for doing them in the same manner as they always have, and forcing the recruit to instead do these common activities in an entirely different manner, is a simple but profound one: it forces recruits to actively pay attention to and think about things that have become second nature to them. In other words, it forces you to change your thinking, and changing your thinking is a big part of what military training is all about.

In other words, when you subject yourselves to military discipline, you accept thought control as a part of your life, not just on a day to day basis, but on a minute by minute basis. Trust me, if anyone had told me that before I signed up, I'd have stayed home.

Read all of In The Early Morning Rain, by D.A. Madigan, in its Kindle edition!  Available now!

A Military Memoir By The Worst Infantry Trainee In The History of Mankind

INTRODUCTION

I can't, at this moment, remember my specific moment of arrival at Fort Benning, GA in March of 1985 for Infantry Basic Training. I had been recruited by the downtown Army National Guard unit in Syracuse, NY, although my lack of aptitude for or proficiency at anything vaguely military was phenomenal. And I should have known better. But at that point in my life, I felt at a dead end, unappreciated, and was chafing for some vast, transformational experience that would kickstart my existence and help me move toward some more fulfilling destiny, and I guess I figured what the hell. The military had been a vital, life altering crucible for many before me, and I seemed to be otherwise trapped, so why not?

I'd find out why not.

Still, as I say, I can't remember actually arriving at Benning. I remember bits and pieces of the plane rides down there, of the Atlanta airport, and I remember quite well the first barracks I was put up in, with a bunch of other equally uneasy new recruits, still in our civilian clothes and civilian haircuts, thinking that the way the reception sergeant had chivvied and herded us around that afternoon and evening was kind of brusque and rude, and wondering how much worse it would get. Wondering if this would, indeed, be some major turning point for my life, or just turn out to be a prodigious, incomprehensible mistake.

I believe, the morning of that first full day there, they actually got us up at six a.m. I'm sure that whenever they got us up, other guys in my intake group grumbled about it being too early, and I wasn't thrilled about it, either, but even then, I was pretty sure that actually being allowed to sleep until six a.m. wasn't something we should get used to.

I clearly remember how quickly hierarchies seemed to be set up in the process... not just regarding the actual rank structure, but how fine and distinct the gradations between intake groups immediately became. Guys who were three days or so ahead of us, but who already had their uniforms and equipment and Army haircuts, seemed infinitely more experienced and knowledgeable in the lore of the system than I did. (This was to remain a constant throughout my training, as I would infrequently come into contact with training groups farther along in their cycles than I was, and to me, they always seemed like ancient, weary veterans, sophisticated and informed by a dreadfully won acumen of just how things worked, footsore and world weary travelers of a dreadful road that still lay before me, and that I myself would inevitably have to traverse myself, whether I wanted to or not.)

In fact, it's worth noting at this point that one's 'willingness' to be in the military is really only valid as a moral argument, once one arrives and military indoctrination begins. Sure, there is no draft and we were all volunteers. Yet we were all also, nearly to a man, completely unaware of the realities of what we were getting into when we signed that piece of paper and took that oath. We'd seen a few movies at that point and thought we understood, if only vaguely, the mysteries of drill and discipline. We felt we had a grasp on what would be expected of us, and obviously, we all felt we could handle it; we all knew other guys, whom we considered peers, who had gone through it and survived.

And none of us, not one, had even the slightest real idea what we would be going through, and none of us, not one, would have stayed past the first week of real Basic Training if we'd been allowed to quit.

(When I say 'none of us', I am exercising a deliberate poetry, because in point of fact, there was one fellow in my intake group who knew more or less exactly what he was in for, because he had deserted from the Marines, and for some idiotic reason, had joined the Army under a false name, perhaps thinking he wouldn't get caught and could have a chance to start over. He honestly seemed to like the military, or at least, he seemed to prefer it to whatever else he'd had. It took them a few weeks to process his fingerprints, but eventually, they figured out who he was and took him away. As with anything else in the military, though, it happened inefficiently, and he was under company arrest and assigned to work details and CQ duty for a few weeks before they finally came and got him. On one occasion, when I was doing my laundry, I overheard him talking to another guy, and I remember him saying plaintively "Yeah, I don't know what guys complain about. This isn't that bad." For me, it was plenty bad, and going to get worse, but still, it was a relief to hear someone say that.)

'Volunteering' for the military, for the vast majority, is an act of utter ignorance, encouraged by recruiters with quotas who are very aware that if they tell you what you're really in for (systematic anti-humanistic degradation and humiliation designed to break down most overt, learned behaviors, and virtually all sense of individual identity not connected with your military unit, in order to replace them with the sort of ingrained discipline necessary to turn the product of a civilized society into, not simply a killer, but a trained, focused killer who would, hopefully, kill only on command and in the 'appropriate' context), you won't sign up. The system is equally aware that the vast majority of young sheep herded into it by recruiters want no actual part of the actual military; therefore, they make it extraordinarily difficult to back out of what you will have, almost as a matter of course, foolishly and unwisely decided to embark on, and will quickly come to see as a colossal error in judgement.

And so it was that, played like a violin by a maestro of a recruiter, I found myself in a barracks in Georgia, still in my civilian clothes, bemused by the thought that military food wasn't really as bad as I'd been led to believe and awed by guys a few days further along in their own cycles, who already had the uniforms, the equipment, and the haircuts. Although they knew barely more than I did (the couple I'd seen around the induction barracks were, at that point, waiting a few days to be assigned to a training company) they seemed nearly lordly in their apparently far greater experience.

However, the military moves fast, except when it doesn't move at all, and before the end of that first full day, we'd all been crammed into a bus and taken off for mass inoculations. While being moved around, our induction sergeant tried to instill in us a little basic sense of marching and formation, but without any of the murderous, vicious haranguing, verbal abuse, and quick disciplining through push ups and other humiliating physical tortures that would be used to enforce obedience and punish errors once we arrived at our training platoon. I tried to listen, and when it seemed tolerated, to ask questions, as I was feeling desperately insecure and grasping after any kind of reassurance that additional knowledge might have brought me. However, everyone who might actually know something about what was in store for me was vague, which I found maddening at the time, but looking back now, can see simply came from the fact that I had no vocabulary in common with the people I was asking my questions of. They couldn't tell me what it would be like in any adequate way; you could only really describe it to someone who had been there... or at least, that would have been the problem of the average non-articulate Army soldier. Clearly, I hope to do better.

There was also the fact that, even had anyone described clearly what I was in for, it would only have scared the shit out of me. Much later on, while my company was running through a particular obstacle course on a rather swampy, muddy training range, one of the drill sergeants (not one of my platoon's) who had generally shown himself to be comparatively friendly and accessible, and who apparently chose that moment to resent the fact that many of the recruits in his platoon seemed to perceive him that way, dropped everyone in his eyeshot, in ankle deep mud, for an apparently endless series of pushups. "You people seem to have mistaken me for someone who cares about you," he bellowed out over the chaotic, bobbing, panting array of shoulders, helmets, and asses in mucky camouflage. "I'm not your mama. I don't love you."

That attitude is a typical one, or at least, it was, when I went through Army Infantry Basic Training. It's obviously and honestly not true, of course. Most drill sergeants are relatively decent human beings and, just as in the movies, they do tend to form some sort of bond with their recruits. It's human, and you can't help it. (Some drill sergeants, on the other hand, are genuine sonsofbitches and a few are out and out psychotics, but in my experience, they're in the minority.) However, they're taught to act cold and uncaring, so that when they threaten you with imminent bodily harm, curse at you, tell you you're worthless, and act as if they're about to kill you with their bare hands, you'll believe it, and be motivated by their scorn, and their anger, and their contempt.

Beyond that, being a drill sergeant means being cruel, and for most human beings, cruelty is part of our nature. Compassion, empathy, kindness, consideration... the notion that other people have feelings too that are just as important as ours... these are things that seem to be, for the most part, learned social responses and behaviors. Babies don't feel them, and a child who isn't taught to feel love and gentleness and kindness fairly early often won't learn at all. On the other hand, no one seems to need to teach even the youngest kids to be cruel and mean; that seems to be something that simply comes naturally. I suppose this is all a product of the essential and inescapable solitude and loneliness of the individual human condition, but whatever the case may be, the vast majority of human beings have cruelty and mean spiritedness somewhere within them... and when one is a drill sergeant, one is not merely allowed, but actually encouraged, to be an utterly evil prick. In fact, one is told that in this particular context, being an utterly evil prick is more than simply one's job, but one's duty, and that in fact, by being an utterly evil prick, one is not only serving the abstract concept of one's country and one's military branch, but you're also actually helping the poor schmucks you're being a complete bastard to.

I mean, you can't beat that deal with a stick... you get to be a total asswipe, all day, every day, to a bunch of hapless twits who are utterly dependent on you... and you get to feel proud of yourself for it, too.

The best drill sergeants I knew... Sgt. Dennis, Sgt. Aguirre, Sgt. Lozano... seemed to be able to rise above it, and although they certainly simulated uncaring brutality well, there was an ephemeral line I felt they never crossed, and I never got the feeling that they truly relished and reveled in their power to humiliate and their authority to degrade. Deep down inside them, I felt, they still retained a certain respect for the innate humanity and dignity of their charges. They did what they had to do, and I'm sure they felt justified in doing it; I have no doubt they thought it was their duty, and would someday even save the lives of some of the men they trained.

I'm sure the worst drill sergeants I saw there... Sgt. Robbins, a truly vicious prick in Fourth Platoon named Sgt. Collins, and others whose names I can't remember right now... told themselves the same things. But those guys also undeniably enjoyed their authority and they liked making people crawl in a way that Dennis, Aguirre, Lozano, and most likely Sgt. Laffey, our company's Senior Drill Sergeant, and Captain Lambert, our Company Commander, simply didn't have in them.

Yet enjoy it or not, a drill sergeants job was to establish and keep authority through brutality, an utter lack of empathy, and a constantly maintained façade of ferocious contempt and vitriolic hostility. In some, the façade was thinner than in others, but they all had to do it, and would do it, and did do it... otherwise, they wouldn't have been there.

All of which means that, if any induction sergeant early on in the process had had the capacity to clearly articulate what lay ahead for the group of saps and chumps he was in charge of for a few days of outfitting and initial orientation, he still most likely wouldn't... for the good and simple reason that it's terrifying. Basic Training is at its most fundamental level a season in hell, and a primary element of that hellish experience lies in the fact that the authority figures you are given no choice but to rely upon expend an enormous amount of energy behaving as if they not only don't care about you, but on many occasions, actually despise you and would like nothing better than to see you suffering or dead. And some of them mean it, too.

Much later, Sgt. Aguirre, who was a drill sergeant for Third Platoon, after I'd been through weeks of training, would confide to me in an off guard moment, "There's a reason for everything we do". While I doubt that that's true... or if there is, the reasons are things most drill sergeants don't even know... I'm sure that there is indeed a reason why drill sergeants are trained to behave at all times as if the only emotions they feel for the confused young men suddenly thrust into their care are scorn and disgust. In fact, I'm sure there are many reasons, some of which I've already mentioned. Nonetheless, it's a terrifying thing, to suddenly find yourself in an utterly alien place, surrounded by people you don't know, and where the authority figure you are forced to trust and rely on tells you every day, through explicit words and implicit behavior, that he thinks you're worthless and wishes you were dead.

To me, memory is rarely a linear thing for very long, but generally functions as an associative mosaic. Therefore, since I don't have anything like a journal from this time period, and have mercifully forgotten many details of my Basic Training, this account of my season in hell, undergoing Army Infantry Basic Training as a member of Second Platoon, Company C, Sixth Battalion, First Infantry Training Brigade, at Fort Benning, GA, will be meandering and disjointed, as I move from one topic to another, writing everything interesting I can think of on each. That's how I remember my time there; as a patchwork quilt of vivid images and emotional snapshots, and as a seemingly endless, suffocating nightmare. Hopefully, I'll be able to convey at least the essence of the experience to any readers this account may one day have.

One last note: the Army experience does not so much embrace profanity and vulgarity as it is simply immersed completely in it; words like 'fuck' and 'shit' and 'goddam' and various sexually charged insults like 'cocksucker' and 'motherfucker' are as inescapable in nearly every spoken sentence in Basic Training as they are in any fifth grade public school boy's lavatory. Therefore, I've chosen to include such language in this account. There may be members of my potential audience who will be shocked and even offended by this. If so, don't read any further.

                  -     Introduction to In The Early Morning Rain, by D.A. Madigan

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So, my eldest daughter, being who she is, really wanted to go to the River City Gay Pride Parade last night. She had all these grand plans for who she was going to go with, but, in the end, all her careful scheming came to naught and she was left moping around the house, badly wanting to attend the event, but not wanting to go alone.

I couldn't blame her; I've gone to a lot of stuff alone in my life -- malls, movies, parks, the beach, parties, weddings, all that kinda shit -- and that's always at least a little bit depressing, but attending this sort of mass event where there are always thousands of other people there, none of whom are alone... well, that's an entirely different magnitude of despair. And this Gay Pride Parade and associated events afterward? About as bad as it could get, for a solitary attendee. To mingle at this affair by yourself for any length of time and not come away feeling suicidal, one would need to be the Unabomber.

But wait, you say. Yr. Humble Narrator seems to be speaking with an unaccustomed assurance about said event, and how could that possibly be? Wellllllll... see, I kind of wound up there last night. For a couple of hours. Because... er... well... my oldest daughter really really really wanted to go, but couldn't find anyone to go with her, and I didn't want her to be sad. So, off I went, traipsing merrily like Dorothy down the Yellow Brick... er... I mean, striding manfully (MANFULLY, mind you, DAMNED manfully, at that) like Kurt Russell in TOMBSTONE down a dusty Arizona street towards an inevitable date with a carnage strewn destiny.

Yeah, yeah. That's the ticket.

Eldest Daughter seemed to have a good time, although we wound up coming home earlier than planned because there just wasn't much going on. She bought a t-shirt and a rainbow necklace from vendors there. Alas, I had no money, else I would have brought home a t-shirt for my wife proudly emblazoned with SORRY, GIRLS, I SUCK DICK, which I imagine was meant for a slightly different target demographic than that of my lovely spouse, but which would still be entirely appropriate in her specific context.

We watched the parade, which was, to my perhaps overly critical eyes, a pretty shabby affair -- you want to seriously see Sexual Deviants On Parade with something like a big budget behind it, you need to attend the Tampa Gasparilla Night Parade, something I've never done, but, as I lived in Tampa for seven years, have seen many pictures and heard many tales of. River City's Pride Parade seems to mostly consist of tired dykes and hard done looking fags perched on and crouched paranoically in motorcycles and the backs of small convertibles, waving wearily to the small but enthusiastically cheering crowd. A few paraders lethargically toss out miniscule strings of beads, a few others scatter the occasional stingy handful of Dubble Bubble or Tootsie Rolls onto the pavement at their feet, much like elderly farm wives tossing feed to their chickens... the only participants who seem at all enthusiastic about it are the Christian Gays, thrusting their JESUS LOVES US TOO signs vehemently in every direction like battle axes at the slavering Hun, and the trannies, who in my limited experience always seem to be either dementedly, near maniacally cheerful about everything, or about to commit ritual seppeku with their own nail files.

After the parade petered out, Eldest Daughter and I adjourned to a nearby park area where various vending booths had been set up and a pretty good lesbian rock band was attacking the nearby atmosphere with various classic remakes and a few decent original tunes. We wandered about, more or less aimlessly. Eldest Child had promised to purchase me some Gay Fried Dough if there was any to be had and I wanted to have it, but it had been Chicken Tender night at Castle Anthrax, and my wife (Bad Wicked Naughty Zoot)'s homemade chicken tenders are the stuff that dreams are made of, so I wasn't at all hungry, and the Gay Fried Dough went by the wayside.

Which was good, as it freed up Eldest Child's meager funds for the purchases I have already detailed. We also scoffed up a reasonable amount of free swag, including a small inflatable ball puzzlingly imprinted WALKIN' WITH JESUS, a Gay Frisbee (a gift from a generous couple of quite pretty girls, who each had one and didn't mind sharing) and a few other odds and ends I can't remember right now. (I had a Tootsie Roll, but some deaf gay guy standing near me at the parade motioned imperiously that I should give it to him, and he was astonishingly homely, so I did, lest the same bad fairy who had cursed him turn her ire on me.)

What I noticed while I was there -- and this will seem unkind, mostly, I suppose, because honest observations of this sort pretty much are -- is that the proportion of attractive/average/ugly people in a nearly all gay population is startlingly skewed from the mainstream towards, well, shall we say, the unhandsome. I mentioned in passing to Eldest Daughter while we were listening to the rock band that if Hollywood ever shot a big budget version of this event, every single person in attendance would be totally hot... but the actuality was nearly anything but that.

There were, every once in a while, good looking people of either gender wandering around (the pleasant couple who shared one of their frisbees with us among them), but they were as lost in that crowd as a few grains of pepper would be in a sea of salt. But while attractive people were, perhaps, proportionally slightly under-represented compared to a more mainstream crowd at, say, a busy theme park, what really struck me was the lack of normal, average looking people. Everywhere you looked there were human eyesores on two legs; truly, staggeringly ill-favored individuals covered the ground like an infestation of ambulatory toadstools.

I was proud that my daughter was so beautiful, but I always am, of all my daughters, and, in fact, their indisputable beauty is among the least wonderful of their attributes, as they're all smart and funny and kind and sweet, too; at the same time, I felt so dreadfully bad for most of these people, and had to wonder, how many were truly gay or bisexual, and how many were simply so desperate for affection that they'd willingly left the mainstream -- or been all but forcibly exiled from it -- to search for love and acceptance elsewhere, among other outcasts like themselves?

Whenever I see a handicapped person, I always wish I had the power to make them whole; to regenerate their wasted or missing limbs, to make their eyes or their ears or their vocal cords work, to give them back the gifts that cruel fate seems to have robbed them of. Last night, I felt that way for hundreds or thousands of people, based only on their appearance. And it made me wonder, how badly must our society treat the truly unattractive among us, that some of them at least would trade that kind of mass contempt for the in-built bias nearly every non-gay person almost instinctively feels against homosexuals?

Moving on beyond all that heavy shit, though, the band was pretty decent. They closed out their set with a rendition of "Proud Mary" notable only in what it lacked compared to CCR's version, and, well, the fact that in the first verse, instead of "Left a good job in the city, working for the man every night and day", these chicks sang "working for A man every night and day", which rather startled me with just how much contempt for an entire gender (instead of, you know, the ruling wealthy ownership class) you could pack into a tiny three letter substitution like that.

I had no idea what the band's name was, but while I was listening to their unfortunately lethargic rendition of their last number, I though to myself that maybe this was their signature tune, and the name of their band was Proud Mary, which strikes me as an excellent name for a gay rock band, male or female. But on the way out of the park Eldest Child advised me that they were the Blue Umbrellas, which is, I suppose, an okay name, but Proud Mary would be way, way better.

For all of that, I had a pretty good time hanging with my eldest girl, and am glad I went if only so she could.

Sometimes, being a parent is actually somewhat rewarding.

Who'd a thunk?

I've recently finished Neil Gaiman's latest anthology, FRAGILE THINGS. With one exception, I like the material in it well enough. (That one exception is unconscionably vile and fills me with sputtering, incoherent rage whenever I let my mind dwell on it for so much as an instant, but never mind, we'll get to that later.)

Still, while I like Gaiman's writing fine (for the most part) there's something about Gaiman himself, the man behind the prose, that irks me enormously. Or, at least, there's something about the way he presents himself in the lengthy introduction to this book, where he talks at length about all of the stories in it -- how he came to write them, what they mean to him, etc.

I can't quite put my finger on exactly what it is about Gaiman's self presentation in this introduction that annoys me so much, so while I'm thinking about that further, let me talk about some of my own short stories, and how they were written, and what they mean to me --

WITH A REBEL YELL, SHE CRIED 'MOE, MOE, MOE' -- Award winning writer and editor, and my closest closest friend for 30 years, Brian Aldiss, called me up out of the blue one fine Sunday a few years ago and said he was editing an anthology of stories in which the idea was to take famous pop culture figures and immerse them in some sort of equally famous, but utterly incongruous, fantasy settings. I wracked my brains and couldn't come up with a thing, until I was sitting up late one night in Wayne Knight's ski lodge at Aspen with my golden retriever Thoth-Crinagoras (in part named after one of my favorite classic Greek poets, Crinagoras of Mytilene, whose brilliance is easy to overlook if you've only ever read his work in English translation, which, of course, most of you only ever have, so I can understand if you disagree with me here, although you're wrong) and the phone jangled and it was my good good friend Jerry Bruckheimer calling for me. Jerry wanted to talk to me about directing my own screenplay adaptation of my best selling and award winning novel BUDDHA WAS A HINDU, AND A VERY GOOD ONE, TOO, and I was pitching this idea that had just come to me for a sequence where Abraham Lincoln would fall ill just before giving the Gettysburg Address and Buddha would have to put on a disguise to take his place, and there was a Three Stooges movie on the telly, and it all just jelled in my head. I typed the story up in fourteen minutes flat while Kylie Minogue knelt on the floor beneath my typing desk praising my evocative prose style in her sweet, breathy, husky neo-brogue. Intermittently.

And of course, that story won the Hugula Award for Best Science Fiction Fantasy Written While Being Serviced By A Semi-Obscure Australian Starlet for 2004.

Hmmmm. Okay, I'm thinking, and I'm thinking, and I still can't figure out what it is about Gaiman's short story introductions that I find so aggravating. Something in his tone... I can't quite pin it down. Well, fine, let's just talk about the stories, then.

A STUDY IN EMERALD is one of the coolest short stories I've ever read, no lie. If you're a Sherlock Holmes fan, or a follower of Lovecraft's Elder Deities mythos, you'll enjoy this story, and if you're an admirer of both fictional worlds, you'll just adore it. The ending comes as a real surprise, too, and, unlike most surprise endings, this is a very pleasant one.

THE FAIRY REEL - poem. ::shrug:: I don't read these things for poems. Sorry.

OCTOBER IN THE CHAIR - Nicely told, for what it is, which is, in the end, pretty pointless and anti-climactic rubbish.

THE HIDDEN CHAMBER - poem. Yawn.

FORBIDDEN BRIDES OF THE FACELESS SLAVES etc etc etc - Interesting. Nowhere near as funny as Gaiman thinks it is, though... pretty much endless, not particularly novel, and not very humorous, variations on the same tired schtick from start to finish. Fun to watch him play with the language, though. It nearly always is.

THE FLINTS OF MEMORY LANE - Um... boring?

CLOSING TIME - Um... weird. Interesting. I'm not sure the ending Gaiman puts on it can possibly work within the context of the story, however badly he wants it to.

GOING WODWO - I'm just not going to mention the poems any more.

BITTER GROUNDS - Very readable. Nonetheless, this is one of those stories that, along with several of Gaiman's SANDMAN arcs, really makes me think that what Gaiman wants to be, more than anything else, is one of those authors like James Joyce or Thomas Pynchon, that nobody can even remotely begin to understand ten consecutive words they've written, but everyone pretends they can and it's all quite brilliant, because they're afraid they'll be thought stupid otherwise. Gaiman's prose style is as lucid as ever, but you get to the end of this particular story and you haven't got more than a vague idea what the hell has happened, or how it ended, really, but it's all been presented in a way that's supposed to make you think you're the one who has the problem. Me, I read a piece of fiction I don't understand, I tend to blame the writer; communication is a writer's JOB. But I'm often surly; I admit it frankly.

OTHER PEOPLE - Gaiman seems to be of the opinion that this is some brilliant little self contained story thing like Fredric Brown might write. I think, um, well, the ending is entirely predictable from the form, and, as a bonus, makes no sense. I mean, sure, the guy shows up in Hell and there's this horrible demon who is going to torture him for all eternity and, after a while, the demon vanishes and he looks in the mirror and discovers that HE has become the demon, and then, the door opens and the original guy walks in again, but... sure, okay, so he gets tortured for eons and turns into his own torturer, and now he's been sent back in time to the start of the sequence and he's going to torture his original self for eons again, but then... when his original self turns into him again... where does 'he' go? Does he go back and start again as the original person, or... No. It doesn't make any sense. Sorry.

KEEPSAKES AND TREASURES - I liked this story quite a bit. You pity the main character, and loathe him, all at the same time. And the central narrative itself is interesting, too. It's kind of like SANDMAN meets, I don't know, LAYER CAKE.

GOOD BOYS DESERVE FAVORS seems rather pointless.

THE FACTS IN THE DEPARTURE OF MISS FINCH is... well... fun to read, I guess, but anyone who is surprised by anything that happens at any point in the story hasn't read much Gaiman, or fantasy in general, prior to this. But it does give Gaiman a chance to go one some more about how important a writer he is and how much in demand his work is, in Hollywood, and, you know, throughout the world, a bit at the start, so that's all right.

STRANGE LITTLE GIRLS - Well, it's all well written, and it accomplishes the task of letting Gaiman tell us just how wonderfully close his friendship with some pop star is, but, again, while it's all very evocative and wonderful, I prefer an actual story.

HARLEQUIN VALENTINE - It... I... um... I don't know what to say about this one. The reversal in the middle seems forced, and honestly, the story just doesn't work for me very well. But this may be a case where the flaw really is in me. Gaiman seems to like these stories where characters abruptly shift identities right in the middle, and the rest of the world shifts right along with them without ever noticing that things have ever been different, as if all of life is just a dream, and there is no objective reality. I understand that's an interesting basis for some good (as well as some spectacularly bad) fiction, but I've never been fond of the notion. I'm an objective truth kind of guy.

Also, as a writer and a reader, I'm very wary of undefined characters with strange, dreamlike powers that can do whatever the plot requires at any given moment, but who can somehow never seem to do anything that would be inconvenient to the writer, ever, under any circumstances at al. Gaiman is very fond of these characters, and it's a flaw and a weakness and he should give it up but he won't. He's much better at writing stories about these kind of characters than, say, Chris Claremont is, but that's because Chris Claremont writes like a man who is getting hit on the head with a hammer over and over again while trapped in an aquarium that is slowly filling with overused motor oil, and Gaiman writes like a very talented, if unfortunately somewhat lazy, writer.

THE PROBLEM OF SUSAN -- If you love THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA even a tiny little bit, even the merest fraction of how much I love THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA, then you mustn't read this story, because if you do, you will want to find Neil Gaiman and trap him in an aquarium slowly filling with overused motor oil while hitting him over the head again and again and again with a large hammer. Or, better, a small hammer; one just large enough to hurt quite a lot without actually knocking him unconscious or killing him. That way he stays alive in constant pain until the distilled petroleum product slowly fills his lungs and he drowns horribly with much the same smell in his nostrils and taste in his throat as dinosaurs floundering down into tar pits did, and for writing this piece of vile and abominable insect shit he deserves to, too. I have never really understood, on an emotional level, the concept of 'blasphemy' until I read this story, and now, I can also understand the Spanish Inquisition, and not the one with the comfy chair, either.

HOW DO YOU THINK IT FEELS? is an oddly satisfying little story where everything fits together very well. You can't really feel sorry for the narrator, who is actually quite an appalling fellow, or his paramour, who isn't much better.

MY LIFE is much, much funnier than that whole FORBIDDEN BRIDES mess.

FIFTEEN PAINTED CARDS FROM A VAMPIRE TAROT is every bit as pretentious and, you know, trying SOOOOOO hard to impress Goth chicks, dude, as it sounds, but, I admit, much more fun to read than I expected, for all of that. Still, I like a story to have a story in it, if you know what I mean.

FEEDERS AND EATERS is a genuine horror story. Not some nasty, brutal, witless Clive Barker thing that isn't about anything except a grisly central image, but a genuine horror story, like people used to write, when other people actually bought horror.

DISEASEMAKER'S CROUP and IN THE END both exasperated me, but sometimes I'm a bit dull.

GOLIATH is, actually, a very cool story, if, ultimately, an entirely depressing one. It's sad when someone actually finds out the objective truth, and the objective truth sucks pretty hard.

PAGES FROM A JOURNAL etc etc etc is... um... well... there's not much to it. I found it disappointing. But I'm like that, really.

HOW TO TALK TO GIRLS AT PARTIES is one of those maddening stories where something extremely cool and important happens and the narrator of the story didn't see it and can only hint at whatever it is and the author never gives you any more information than that and it's just fucking AGGRAVATING. Because without the really cool thing that probably even the author doesn't really know anything about, the whole thing is just this lengthy description of an interesting party where nothing much goes on.

Still, as a wannabe myself, it's nice to know that you can get away with shit like this, once you're famous enough.

THE DAY THE SAUCERS CAME is a poem I'll mention, because I really enjoyed it.

SUNBIRD is very interesting, but, again, if you can't figure out how it ends a hundred words into it, you're just not trying very hard.

THE MONARCH OF THE GLEN is a novella featuring Shadow from AMERICAN GODS. I was very disappointed in AMERICAN GODS, and I guess I like this novella a little bit better, but Shadow is still kind of a whiney jerk.

I should note that for all my bitching above, I very much enjoyed reading this anthology while I was reading it. I found many of the stories in it ultimately disappointing, but Gaiman is always fun to read, and, well, I read for pleasure, so, there you are.

I just expect better from Gaiman, because, well, he's capable of it, and when he's just dicking around pointlessly as he does for most of this volume, it's always a disappointment, and, pretty much, a waste of talent.

And he seems rather full of himself. A toady would rush in at this moment to say, well, if anyone deserves to be full of himself, it's Neil Gaiman, but in all honesty, that just doesn't work for me. Hubris is always ugly, and arrogance is never merited. I'm sure it's very nice to be Neil Gaiman, so sure, in fact, that I don't need to have him tell me, over and over and over again.

Addendum: I meant to mention this the whole time I was writing the above entry, and then I got to the end and the kids were clamoring to get on the computer and I had to get ready for work and I just hit PUBLISH POST and forgot about it -- "With a rebel yell, she cried Moe! Moe! Moe!" is the brilliant work of the brilliant Mike Norton; I saw it on his HC Realms profile right before I wrote this thing and laughed uproariously at it (he has a picture of Moe Howard, and under it, in italics, that particular legend) and it was indelibly imprinted on my brain at the time I was typing this thing, and I really really did mean to credit Mr. Norton, and then I didn't, and I'm very very sorry.

So, yesterday, my middle daughter was telling me she had to write a comedy sketch for her e-school teacher, and then call said e-school teacher up on the phone and do the sketch for her out loud.

She's not thrilled about it, and I wish I could help her with it, as I love to write comedy, even though few if any actually seem to enjoy the comedy I write. But her plight reminded me of a Monty Python type skit I myself wrote back in high school, while, of course, under the influence of regular weekly hits of FLYING CIRCUS on the local PBS station, interleavened with showings of HOLY GRAIL every three or four months (whenever they were having a pledge drive) .

I think I actually wrote it all down in a notebook somewhere back in like 11^th grade, but I foolishly threw out a drawer full of notebooks and sketchbooks and old character sheets from early college superhero RPGs and letters from old girlfriends and a lot of other rubbish like that during a move from one apartment to another back in the mid 80s. It's one of those decisions I deeply regret now, as I'm sure there was stuff in there that I could no doubt use to blackmail award winning comic book writer Kurt Busiek with to a very lucrative tune indeed. Alas, it's all in a landfill somewhere in Upstate New York now, no doubt rotted into mulch.

Still, having recounted the outlines of the sketch for my middle and youngest daughters yesterday, and then been forced by them to re-recount it to my wife/their mother when she got home, because they thought it was so funny, I feel like I may as well while away a few idle hours trying to set it all down again.

My youngest daughter is up at the moment, and in the back bedroom watching something truly horrifying on Nickelodeon, because I just couldn't take listening to one more nanosecond of it.

Okay. Here we go:

OPEN in a dingy hallway. As we pan down this hallway, we see a bench running along one side of it that is filled with unsavory characters - characters, in fact, that are dressed so much like criminals as to be visual near-parodies of various sorts of robbers and burglars. Many of these characters are just extras, but the sharp eye will pick out, scattered amongst them, most of the members of Monty Python - Graham Chapman is there, dressed in a striped shirt with a number stenciled on it with a ball and chain still attached to one ankle, Eric Idle has a black wool cap and a domino mask and is wearing a black sweatshirt and black trousers, Michael Palin looks like a riverboat gambler with an elaborate suit, long mustachios, and a filigreed walking stick, etc.

The camera POV arrives at a door leadinginto a small, shabby office just as the door is opened from within and yet another obvious criminal type, perhaps Terry Jones dressed as a Chicago era gangster complete with violin case, exits, obviously disgusted. He calls back into the office as he leaves:

JONES: And you can take all your sodding kangaroos and shove them right up your...(JONES realizes he has an audience - pauses, turns to next fellow in line) oh, right, sorry, yes, you can go in. Good bleeding luck to you!

We see GRAHAM get up and shuffle inside the office. We follow him inside, and see JOHN CLEESE, nattily dressed in a nice business suit, sitting behind a desk that has several file folders scattered around on it. There is an empty chair in front of the desk. CLEESE waves GRAHAM into it.

CLEESE: I don't see what's so damn difficult about some kangaroos... well, then! Hallo! Good to see you! Have a seat. Now, you are...

CHAPMAN: Diggory, sir, an' it please you.

CLEESE: Mf, Diggory, yes, it looks as if you're a bit Diggory indeed! Just tunneled out of some place, did we? Heh heh.

CHAPMAN: Er... yessir... (glances around furtively, in a paranoid fashion) Er... about this job, sir...

CLEESE: Yes, yes. Well. As you've read the advert, you know. What we're looking for here is The Perfect Plan for robbing the Bank of London.

CHAPMAN: Yessir. (Takes out a small notebook, begins flipping through it. ) Now, what I've got...

CLEESE: Now, you understand, when I say perfect, I mean PERFECT. We'll accept nothing less. Every possible contingency must be catered for well in advance.

CHAPMAN: Uh... yes sir... I think I've covered the waterfront, so to say...

CLEESE: WELL in advance. That's what I'm saying. Every POSSIBLE contingency. You do see, don't you? It's a mad world, after all, and anything can happen, and we don't want to get pinched, do we?

CHAPMAN: Uh... well, yessir. Um... see, by my plan, we need a squad of six men. Three on the drills, three to scoop out the loose rubble...

CLEESE: Ah, so it's a digging plan. Tunnels, eh? A digging plan from Diggory. Well, I'm breathless with anticipation. Do you have details?

CHAPMAN: Yes sir, if you'll look here (leans over desk, shows CLEESE notebook - CLEESE pages through it a bit, ooohs and ahhhs)

CLEESE: Well, this looks very good. VERY good indeed. (CHAPMAN sits back in his chair, looking pleased. ) But, I do have a few questions, about your contingency planning. Now... (CLEESE opens a file folder, picks up a piece of paper, then puts it on the desk and points to a place on it. CHAPMAN leans over to study it. ) Here, you see... this is the main checkpoint, with four guards stationed here at all times. Now I understand you plan to tunnel underneath and avoid the guards all together, and that's just brilliant, really. But... suppose one or two of these guards has gone to the loo, which is down these stairs nearer the vault, and thus, they hear your drills and sound an alarm?

CHAPMAN: Well, sir, my wife and her sister... rather smashing birds, a good bit of the all right, if you know what I mean... they'll be stationed inside the main lobby while we drill, and their job is to keep those guards distracted. And believe you me, they'll have no trouble doing it.

CLEESE: Excellent. (CLEESE replaces the piece of paper in a file folder, opens another folder, studies a piece of paper, then pushes it towards CHAPMAN. ) Very well, let's try this one. Somehow or another, an alarm has been set off and the coppers are on their way. What, if anything, do you do?

CHAPMAN: Ah. Well, sir, my nephew is a bit of a wizard with the electricals, and by that point he would be stationed in the service tunnels just down the thoroughfare. At a signal from me, he would cut several wires, causing all the traffic signals in downtown London to go barmy at once, utterly paralyzing traffic. In the confusion, we would nip off smartly in our miniature helicopter, and be on the beach in Belize before the coppers got their knickers straightened.

CLEESE: Excellent. Yes, just excellent. Well. I can see you've a wonderful plan and have thought it through very well... hmmm. Well. No more of these run of the mill questions for you, let's just... yes. The fellow who was in here before had a lovely scheme, too, but then this one question tripped him up. Shall we try it out on you?

CHAPMAN: I'll 'ave a go, sir, if you please.

CLEESE: Good man. Very well. (Opens file folder, takes out another sheet. ) Jolly good, here it is. Suppose, in the middle of your robbery, a herd of feral kangaroos somehow appears in the vault with you and begins hopping about, you know, rather violently. (CLEESE demonstrates how the kangaroos would hop, with his fingers on the desk.) What would you do?

CHAPMAN: (sits silently)

CLEESE: Come now, man, it isn't that difficult! Feral kangaroos! Dozens of them! Leaping about insanely, cavorting like maddened trolly-mongers all over the beastly place! It's chaos! A right bloody shambles! They're biting you about your bollocks and causing untold havoc! Your whole heist is going pear shaped and lolly doodle all around you! Surely you have some sort of plan!

CHAPMAN: Uh... (pages through notebook) Right, sir, I'm sorry, I just had a little plugged up sinus for a moment there... I'm fine now... let me see... yes, here it is. Out of our six man squad, two men would break away and deploy the large, weighted nets packed along specifically against this contingency... well, against animal incursions in general, I should say. These things will hold anything... maddened alligator, rogue gorilla, enraged terrapin, rabid whelk... they'll do a few feral kangaroos a treat, let me tell you, guv. And while that's being dealt with, the rest of the robbery proceeds smoothly.

CLEESE: Really? Let me see that. (CHAPMAN hands CLEESE the notebook, CLEESE pages through it for a moment. ) Well, this is really quite extraordinary. Wizard! Yes, this is brilliant. BRILLIANT. All right then. I think we may have found our plan. Just one more question.

CHAPMAN: Yes sir?

CLEESE: What... (CLEESE pauses melodramatically for a beat) ...if the sun goes nova?

CHAPMAN: (stares at CLEESE as if CLEESE has lost his mind) I... what if WHAT?

CLEESE: The sun. Goes nova.

CHAPMAN: (stares at CLEESE in utter bewilderment) You're not bloody serious.

CLEESE: EVERY contingency. Must be planned for. WELL in advance. (CLEESE waits a moment. CHAPMAN says nothing, obviously astonished. CLEESE gets up behind desk, walks around to clap CHAPMAN on the shoulder. ) Well, rum luck, then. Thank you SO much for coming by. Send in the next fellow, will you?

CHAPMAN: It... I... wait. You want a plan that takes into account the bloody sun bloody BLOWING UP?

CLEESE: Yes, yes, every contingency... (leans out office door, calling down hall) Next, please...

CHAPMAN: But we'll all be fookin' DEAD, won't we? I mean, if the bloody sun goes nova, then...

CLEESE: (pushing CHAPMAN out door as ERIC IDLE attempts to sidle in past him) Yes, yes, best of luck, do run along, HALLO! Nice to see you, do come in! (CLEESE shoves CHAPMAN out the door, closes it firmly, goes back behind his desk. IDLE sits down. )

CLEESE: All right. Now, look. You have a plan for robbing the Bank of London?

IDLE: Oh, yes sir.

CLEESE: Jolly good. But, see here, my good man. Normally I'd look at your plan and review it and then go over a few contingencies and... but, you see, everyone is getting into a spot of bother a bit later on in the process, with what seems, at least to me, to be some very simple, easily foreseeable... mmmm... glitches, yes. So, would you mind if I just skipped to the tougher inquiries, to save time?

IDLE: Not at all. However you like.

CLEESE. Excellent. Very well. Hmmm. (glances down at paper still on his desk) . So, then... in your plan for robbing the Bank of England... your PERFECT plan... what if the sun goes nova?

IDLE: Ah. In that case, sir, what would happen is, Team Gamma would immediately deploy the experimental Solar Shields. Field testing indicates that these portable radiation filters would provide Teams Alpha and Beta with sufficient protection to complete the robbery in ample time, and get to their escape vehicles. In fact, should the sun go nova, it will actually help the caper, as, you know, all the guards and coppers and such will be too busy screaming and exploding into flames and falling into little heaps of dust to be much bother to us.

CLEESE: (peers with some disbelief, but dawning hope, at IDLE) You... solar shielding? You actually have... you don't find it to be an absurd question?

IDLE: Oh, no sir. The sun could actually go nova at any instant. Crazy world, anything can happen, you know. You have to plan for these things.

CLEESE: Well, then. Hm. (lifts up cover of another file folder furtively, sneaks a glance into it, looks at IDLE, then pounces: ) Feral kangaroos!

IDLE: (waves hand contemptuously) Riot control shotguns, sir, loaded with dense rubber pellets, set to spray over a wide dispersal cone. That'll sort out those rompers in jig time.

CLEESE: (smiling hugely) You give me hope, sir. Hmmm. Let me see. Now, if the guards from the central command post are out of position, say, down near the loo. What would you...?

IDLE: Knock out gas infiltrated into the air conditioning vents five minutes before Teams Alpha, Beta, and Gamma enter the building, sir.

CLEESE: Excellent, excellent. So... going back to the beginning, then... what is your basic plan for getting into the vault? It's a tricky time lock...

IDLE: Er... the vault, sir?

CLEESE: Yes. The vault. Where they keep the money.

IDLE: Well... I... they keep the money in a vault? With a lock and all? Well, that's... hmmm. That's rather hard, sir. I... I hadn't considered that.

CLEESE looks horrified and appalled. Opens his mouth -

THE END.

So we were over at Comic Book World the other day and I picked up a postcard from the counter emblazoned with pictures of characters from something called Approbation Comics, which my wife advises me is a local comic book company. Hey, I'm thinking like the retard I often am, maybe they're looking for writers.

So I get home and I go out to approbationcomics.com and look around. Right on their front page there's a column of links, and among that column of links is one titled JOBS, so I hit JOBS and see the following text:

APPROBATION WORK-FOR-HIRE

It's hard to break into comics (believe us, we know!). There are only so many books and companies on the market and a couple of hundred thousand creators who want to be writers, artists, etc. Of those hundred thousand the hard truth is a majority of the potentials are not ready for professional work. Either they don't have the necessary skills at present time or they are unable to work under a regular deadline and produce quality work.

Now do you still believe you are ready to break into comics? For some this is where doubt may creep in and that's ok. There are places available to help build your abilities and you can return with full confidence. Others may give up right here. Once you give up completely there is no help left. For the few who still want to face this industry now head on, continue reading:

Approbation Comics is a small indy company. We promise to look at each and every submission we receive, but please remember our primary job is to produce comics. Feedback may take the usual 4-6 weeks, or it may take longer depending on our workload. Rest assured if your submission is good enough you will receive a response.

And I'm thinking 'oh FUCK yes, I will hit this place with so many spec scripts they will be picking their teeth with the things, because I have the necessary skills and I have the the ability to work under a deadline and produce quality work and I could even find a way to write that sentence without using the word 'work' twice in the same eight word stretch'.

So then I read further:

We are currently accepting submissions from talented Pencillers, Inkers, Colorists, Painters, and Letterers.

And I'm, like, oh.

This company is run by assholes.

Actually, even at this moment of which I write, I had a sneaking suspicion in the back of my brain that in point of fact, this company isn't really run by assholes.

So I look around a little bit more. This company apparently publishes several different series, which rejoice in titles like CHAOS CAMPUS: SORORITY GIRLS VS ZOMBIES, CHI-SAI (featuring a female ninja sort who looks enormously like Steven Grant's crappy female ninja character Whisper), VAMPIRES UNLIMITED, METAMUTOIDS, and AGENTS OF N.O.V.A., among others.

And... yeah... just as I figured must be true... this company isn't run by assholes. It's run by asshole, singular. Because, from what I can tell, every single title is written by the same guy, whose name happens to be Bart A. Thompson.

No other writers need apply. Nope. Good ol' Bart is just looking for talented pencillers, inkers, colorists, painters, and letterers.

I probably shouldn't call him an asshole. In fact, I frankly admire him. I mean, I would never in a million years have thought of setting up an entire company just to trick... er... lure... um... inveigle... eh... entrap... hm... okay, I mean, provide an opportunity to... talented artists and letterers, to draw and ink and color and letter my scripts.

Mind you, if I had the money to set up my own company where I was the only writer handling all the titles, I would be publishing things with titles like SCORPIO and TEAM VENTURE and PULSAR and FIRE-ANT and PARTISAN and stuff like that... not things called SORORITY GIRLS VS ZOMBIES or VAMPIRES UNLIMITED or METAMUTOIDS. And if I actually had the money to pay people to do creative tasks, I wouldn't be the only writer; I would, at the very least, ask my old buddy Mike Norton if he'd like to write something for me.

But, still, these are minor and trivial quibbles, and there is really no difference between myself and Bart A. Thompson, other than the fact that I can actually write (but have no money to fund my own publishing company) and he has money (but cannot write a lick).

It's always the way, isn't it?