Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

“Ma’am, is there a thrift store up here? The sign says so.”

“Jeffery, come on up!” The woman cried down the stairs, more or less ignoring my question. “Now! We can’t get your room ready without you in it!”

“Ma’am?” I said again, more insistently.

“Why are you wearing just a t-shirt in February?” the woman asked, acknowledging me at last. “And where are your shoes?”

“It’s a long story,” I sighed, shivering. “Suffice it to say that I didn’t get anywhere near enough sleep last night. But is there a thrift store up here?”

“Oh, no,” she said, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. “They went out of business months ago and I bought their space to turn into an apartment.”

Dammit! I started back down the lobby stairs, holding the door open for the woman’s son, struggling inside with a box of toys.

“But there is a Salvation Army across the street,” the lady added. “Behind the McDonalds. It’s hard to see from the road.”

I barely touched the snow and slush as I dashed across the road–good thing, as I was in my socks. There were still a few hours until my date at 9pm. I could make it.

The Salvation Army was small, only a single room, but it had rack upon rack of wonderful clothes. I bought a warm sweater and a pair of pinchy but semi-formal shoes and socks. It devoured most of the $20 I had in my pocket, but there was enough left for a drink or two at the date, and I’d figure everything else out afterwards.

I decided to hang around to kill some time, and settled into a high-backed armchair. I flipped through a book and examined an old Professor X vinyl figure on the shelf, one that would have been worth a hundred bucks in good condition but barely ten now. Might be a good subject for a blog post, I mused.

Then suddenly the lights went off. I looked up; the store was dark and the doors shuttered. Apparently they were on a timer, and the clerk had closed up shop for the night when I was preoccupied–and invisible.

I was about to get up and look for a way out when I noticed a subtle red glow emanating from a socket on the wall. The store had a laser burglar alarm that was now live, and all the sweaters and shoes in the world wouldn’t mean anything if I tripped it.

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“Well kids, here’s your new tutor!”

“It’s an octopus!”

“I think it’s dead!”

“Nobody’s perfect.”

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“It’s sad, isn’t it?” said Lloyd, looking out over the city of Arcadia from the portico of his hotel on the Citrine Hill. “Arcadia used to be the shining light of the continent, and war has all but snuffed it out.”

Sure enough, the wide boulevards were all but empty and lit only by moonlight thanks to blackout restrictions. The grand art noveau statuary and buildings that the government had erected during the last decades’ prosperity were braced with sandbags and wood against artillery strikes and bombs. The official position of Lloyd’s employer, the city of Naraka and its associated state, was that Arcadia was rotting from the inside out through decadence and immorality.

From Lloyd’s point of view, it had already happened.

Turning back to his informant, Lloyd placed a sack of Arcadian gold coins on the table. “What have you brought me?”

Callaghan, the informant, gestured at the paper. “A complete map of the city’s defenses as prepared for the Arcadian General Staff. As you can see, it consists of three concentric trench lines about five kilometers apart with fortresses located at strong points in each line.”

Lloyd looked it over. “How many troops?”

“About 100,000, including artillery, transport, and noncombatants.”

“Materiel?”

Callaghan laid down another sheet of paper. “That is their greatest advantage. There aren’t enough defenders to fully man the lines, but they are well-supplied. Each battalion has one heavy and two light machine gun companies, and there are thousands of light mortars, submachine guns, and the like being given to anyone who can bear arms. They have enough gas masks that gas shells will be used by artillery and by their landships. This line here might mean that the Arcadian Air Corps is preparing to use gas bombs as well, but I can’t be sure.”

Lloyd nodded. “Any idea how many landships, how many biplanes?”

“Most of them were lost with the collapse of the Heimstadt front. No more than a handful of each, mostly older types. The plan is to use the landships as mobile fortresses and the planes as interceptors and bombers–they are too old and slow for anything else.”

“You’ll be well-rewarded even beyond this when the time comes,” said Lloyd, spilling the coins onto the table. He cast his gaze back to the moonlit streets of Arcadia, soon to be re-lit with the explosions from artillery and bombs. “It’ll all be for the best, you’ll see. A stronger Arcadia will emerge from the fires like a phoenix.”

“If you say so.”

“It has to,” Lloyd murmured, nervously stroking his beard. “It has to.”

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Dario Azzara, sotto capo to Don Luca Baldi, sat in a darkened room with a bottle of aged scotch at his elbow.

“I heard crying upstairs.” Don Baldi said, quietly entering the room. “Has something happened?”

“I was about to wake you up, to tell you,” said Azzara. His face was drawn, and he mumbled into his glass.

“But you needed to fortify yourself with some liquor first,” said on Baldi quietly.

“Yeah.”

“Well, how that your drink is finished, why don’t you tell me the news? I seem to be the last one to know.”

Azzara choked a little, thinking back to the massacre he had witnessed.

“It’s all right,” said Baldi. “We’ve known a day like this would come. It’s the life we have chosen.”

“Angelina D’Antonio has been eliminated from American Idol,” Azzara choked. “The vote wasn’t even close.”

Don Baldi fell to his knees with an anguished sob that echoed throughout the manor.

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