Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

Nuñez never met a wild conspiracy theory he didn’t like, but unlike most of the paranoid wackos he networked with in the musty corners of the internet, he didn’t take the whole thing too seriously. It was as much a joke as a way of life, kind of like devout Catholics with a store of priest/minister/rabbi jokes.

“I don’t buy it,” I said. “Sure, the surveyors among our founding fathers were as human as the next guys, but they were not sex perverts that redrew the map of our country to suit their own twisted mores.”

“Sure they weren’t,” Nuñez responded. “Ever look at a map? Really look at a map? The states look like things!”

“Only a few look like things. Most of them just look like blobs or squares.”

“But the ones that do look like something…think about them!” he cried. “Michigan, Florida, Louisiana…tell me that’s not intentional and perverted!”

“It’s not.”

“Oh, right,” Nuñez said, his voice dripping with what may or may not have been sarcasm. “Three states look like a hand, a dick, and a sock, and you’re saying there wasn’t a pervert behind it all. Now who’s being naive?”

Bernard’s infection was getting worse, and had become a gangrenous abscess. “I thought I’d gotten off lucky,” he kept saying; almost his entire battalion had been annihilated when the Vietminh took redoubt Eliane 2, and he had escaped to join Dubois in redoubt Isabelle with only a deep scratch from barbed wire.

“We all got off lucky,” was Dubois’ constant response. After watching the Vietminh overrun the last French positions around the Dien Pien Phu airstrip through their field glasses, the nearly 2,000 troops at redoubt Isabelle had attempted to break out to the west. The Viets had blocked the route east to Hanoi, and the river route from Vientiene in Laos was the only other safe haven for a thousand kilometers. The 2,000 men, their ranks swelled by stragglers from the overwhelmed redoubts to the north, were chewed to pieces as they left their fortifications.

By DuBois’ estimate, less than a hundred had made it through the enemy lines, a number whittled down over the intervening week by desertion or disease. And now, with roving patrols of Viets still hunting for them, the survivors had come to a place even stranger than the one they had fled: a vast plain strewn with enormous, empty jars.

Whitacre had read the file on Dr. Sekou Ankrah, prepared for him by the State Department with an unusual level of candor. It seemed that Dr. Ankrah was Western-educated, with medical degrees from Columbia University and King’s College. Not unusual; many young Africans of his generation had gone to school abroad.

More unusual was the route Ankrah had taken: he had walked nearly 500 miles from his home village to a seaport, and worked as first a stevedore and then a machinist’s mate on a tramp steamer. He’d only managed admission and tuition at King’s thanks to a patron acquired (if the dossier were to be believed) at a shoeshine station.

In fact, it seemed to Whitacre that Ankrah would have been happier practicing medicine rather than ruling a country. His New York practice had been thriving up until the point he returned to his native Azania to assume a position in the pro-independence lobby that eventually led to his installment as Prime Minister and then Minister for Life.

The suddenness of the move might have had something to do with Ankrah’s son–a topic that the file made very clear never to broach. Apparently a liaison with a nurse, and daughter of a major benefactor, was as much a scandal in 1938 as 2011.

Quite a journey from that Azanian village to dictatorial power, and thence to a second-rate nursing home in South Africa.

Through the blackness, nothing was visible save the lights of Lanth’s dreadnought and the pinpoint of piercing white in the distance. The dreadnought’s crew hadn’t seen the pursuing glow of the Kite, but it was only a matter of time until their lookouts took note.

On the Kite‘s bridge, Othe stood with his hands on the wheel, surrounded by what was left of his crew: twelve men, five women, and two that could only be called children. Barely enough to steer and man the guns on one side.

Yet they were all that stood between Lanth and the nascant universe waiting to be born ahead.

“You want to say anything, skipper?” asked Visani, the navigator.

Othe looked at his assembled rabble, short so many of the faces that should have been among them. “We only get one chance at this,” he said. “This might be the last story anyone can ever tell. Let’s make sure it’s a good one.”

“And back here’s where you’ll be working.” Max’s smoldering cigar swapped hands as he opened a beat-up door, revealing a small closet. A burner was set up on a crate, boiling a single egg in a metal cup.

“What am I supposed to do?” Jimmy said. “Teach my grandma how to suck that?”

Max cuffed Jimmy on the back of his head. “Watch your tongue, punk. And watch the egg. You gotta swap it out every few hours with a fresh one from the fridge. If Pat or somebody else needs you to help out with something, you do that too, but don’t forget the egg. When you got nothing else, I want you back here keeping an eye on it. You can eat the old one when you swap ’em.”

“Why?” cried Jimmy. “This is a bar. People don’t come here for eggs!”

Another cuff. “City rules say any joint serves liquor also serves food. City inspector walks in, we can give him a boiled egg. Other places bribe ’em, but this is cheaper.”

“You gotta be kidding me,” Jimmy sighed.

“No, and if you think you’re too good for an egg-watcher, you can just march right out that door,” said Max. “Peyton, the bartender, worked his way up from egg-boiler. So can you. But if you can’t even watch a boiling egg, you’re not worth anything to me.”

The fires on the south side had been burning for years. That’s where the City had stored its fuel reserves, even after it had switched over to other power sources. The rigs offshore were still burning too, and daylight had taken on a dusky hue as a result. The occasional ray of sunshine would lance down between the dark, rolling clouds above the ruins, but ten years of twilight had convinced the scattered survivors in the Park District that they’d seen the last of a blue sky in their lifetime.

Things had been much worse when the City had been in its death throes, with widespread looting blurring into the block-by-block fight for the city center. By the end, no one had really know which side they were on; everyone had simply tried to take what they could and flee. Now that everything that could be easily stolen had been carted away, the gleaners were able to eke a living from the ground, digging up the remains of supplies that the Citizens had lain away for lean times.

By the time the odd drifter arrived, there were even some small children in the group, who would always know the City as a warren of ruins endless in all directions. The only electricity they’d ever experience would be the dim sparks that the survivors were able to coax from the shattered power grid. Still, they endured, even though the healthiest of them was lean with hunger.

One day, one of the oldest Park District survivors (they often called themselves Parkers now) struck out into the Financial District in search of more canned food. Kevin Vanderkum had been a mechanic before the collapse, which meant that the poorly-tooled rifle which had been shoved into his hands as a conscript in the last days of the battle still worked. When Kevin saw a shape bumbling through the rubble ahead of him, he leveled the weapon and called out a sharp warning.

The figure lifted his arms and came into view. An ordinary-looking man, middle-aged, but it was his clothing that struck Kevin as odd–the man was wearing a business suit that, aside from a few scuff m arks, looked brand-new. All the readily available clothing had been seized by looters or rounded up by the Parkers and other survivors; Kevin himself wore a motley assortment of rags with a necktie as a scarf.

“Who are you?” Kevin said.

“She isn’t here,” was the reply.

“Edenstein’s finished.” Crowley said.

Behind him in the corridor, Franke jostled for a better view, blocked as the doorframe was by his partner’s bulk. “What makes you say that?”

Crowley stepped aside, and Franke tumbled into the study. Edenstein was face-down on his desk, blood spilled like ink over his papers, with a small neat hole in the glass behind him.

“Do you think I’m wrong?” said Crowley. “Shall we take him to a hospital?”

Franke glared, then approached the desk. Removing a fountain pen from a tweed pocket, he poked at the man’s body. It was stiff. “Three to twelve hours since death,” he muttered. “Locked up, alone, unarmed, no pistol, and yet, if we believe the exit wound, self-inflicted.”

“How’s that?”

“The gun had to have been inside his mouth,” said Franke.

Even if there’s someone I have a lot in common with, nervousness usually leads me to flub it badly. I make wooden conversation, suddenly unable to seem interested or interesting, before desperately falling back on bad jokes and verbal fireworks to desperately impress how fun and smart I am.

It never works.

Doesn’t help that some of my material is a bit cerebral.

When talking about a mutual acquaintance who was known for being petty and superficial, I once quipped “If Stacie was any shallower, she’d be a hill.” I thought it was a graceful and hilarious metaphor.

I was wrong. “…what?” the girl said.

“You know, we say someone is shallow…like they’re a pool of water,” I said desperately as every last bit of humor drained out of the room. “If a pond gets to zero…shallowability…it’s a field. If it gets negative…shallowability…then it’s a hill…!”

“I don’t get it.”

Slim C. McWhit certainly earned his name. His momma had passed him off to an aunt and headed west as soon as she could travel, leaving him only with a daguerreotype and a given name. But if nothing else the woman was prescient, as people had often said–safely out of earshot–when observing Slim’s lanky frame and uncanny skill with the knife.

He made his living as a trapper, hunter, and occasional gambler, as did many of the old cowhands rattling around Prosperity Falls. Ever since the Ide raids had caused the settlement there to splinter–and drop its time-honored rules against gambling and making a dime off Ma Nature–there had been opportunity for folks like Slim.

A fellow Texan had arrived with Slim, one Coulton Baines. Colt Baines was cut from the same cloth and shared a similar story of growing into his name, even though he preferred Remingtons and Schofields for his trick shooting. Though they’d come as friends, the two soon parted as enemies over a woman, and not an establishment in Prosperity Falls saw one coming without a shade of fear over what’d happen if the other happened upon them.

“I just don’t see how a harmless little game of ‘Hunters vs Infected’ is such a big deal,” Mikey whined. “It’s bandannas and nerf darts. Nobody’s dying.”

“You’d do well to remember two situations, Mikey,” Dr. Jonsen said. “Osborn College and Southern Michigan University.”

“Is that supposed to mean something to me?” said Mikey.

Jonsen sighed. “About eight years ago, a game of ‘Hunters vs. Infected’ went on at Osborn. Things got out of hand thanks to a big reward for the winner offered by the fraternity council. By the end, the survivors holed themselves up in an abandoned dormitory with canned food and snipers on the roof.”

Mikey laughed. “That’s what they get for having a reward. Our only prize is bragging rights.”

“Then you might pay more attention to what happened at SMU. Their game of ‘Hunters vs. Infected’ coincided with an outbreak of cordyceps meningoencephalitis. Ninety people died and the rest were sick for months.”

“Are you…are you saying that a real zombie outbreak happened during the game?” Mikey said, eyes wide as saucers.

“Perhaps,” Jonsen said. “The official report was rather vague.”

“You’re going to have to tell me more about that.”