Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

Mike groaned at seeing the signs on every computer in the lab: IT UPDATES.

“Why are there always updates when I need to use the computers?”

Across the lab, It looked at him with three of its eyestalks. “So you don’t get a virus,” it gurgled through its tentacle-proboscis. “Be grateful.”

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“The problem for me was the necroplasts,” said the first judge, Cindy Wailing of the Ghouliard Culinary School. “There were just too many bitter souls of the damned, and it overwhelmed the rosemary and sage.”

“I disagree,” said the second judge, Eternos Slumbre of the Corporeal Spectre eatery on 5th and East. “I would have liked more necroplasts to help balance the sweet tartness of the chutney.

The third judge, Betty Wight, simply howled.

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“I don’t know,” I said quietly. “I think Pricklefist is a perfectly reasonable name for a pineapple.”

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PRAISE ALL BITMAPS!

Praise be unto the GIFs, the JPEGs, the TIFFs, the PNGs!

Praise be unto the rasters, the vectors.

Praise be unto the halftones, the dithers.

Praise be unto the black-and-white, the greyscale, the RGB, the CMYK.

For, without them, we are BLIND.

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Ostia is the perfect place to hide from somebody like me.

It’s abandoned, thanks to…well, you know. But not for so long that everything has been looted. If you know what to look for, there’s still food to be found that won’t give you a writhing death from botulism. Even batteries, if you’re lucky.

But that particular skeleton of a city is rapidly getting popular now that most people fancy that the danger is past. Oh, you’re still not allowed in, and the roadblocks will turn you back. USUN will shoot you on sight, though they don’t stray from the roads and certainly don’t get anywhere close to the outskirts.

So I wasn’t surprised to learn that my quarry had fled there. In fact, I relished it. With a typical bounty, the chase is half of the fun. In this case, with our history, it was more like the delightful final chapter to a long book, or the last moves in a long chess game. I intended to enjoy it to the full.

But only one of us was coming out of there alive.

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Hamid waved his receiver. “Signal coming in, boss. Satellite phone. Text only.”

“Don’t call me boss,” Ali said. “It’s demeaning. Call me Captain.”

“You’re the boss, boss,” said Hamid.

Ali snatched the handset and looked at it. “Foreigners sighted at following coordinates. Westerners. Lax security. Apparently excavating something.”

“Sounds like a good chance for us,” said Hamid. “Kill some interlopers, maybe take some hostages, get some artifacts for Khalid to move. They’re paying cash for hostages and artifacts in Raqqa.”

Ali nodded. He’d come out to the desert to do something with his life. He couldn’t be content running his father’s dry-cleaning business in Hatay. But in the eighteen months since he’d slipped south to join the Caliphate, there had been nothing but dusty patrols, slim rations, and a steady supply of contradictory orders from the higher-ups.

It was time to prove that he wasn’t a screw-up.

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