jamieproctor.ca

Jonathan had many things.
A house.
A cat.
A pile of old and dangerously outdated magazines.
But most importantly, Jonathan had his smile, which was a particular sort of smile, a very specific kind of smile. A sunny sort of smile.
(Oh, and he liked the summer. In Jonathan’s opinion, July was at least three months too short.)
So when Jonathan woke up bright and early one day to see the shade already cooking off the morning pavement with the snap hiss and pop of frying dew, WELL
he was pretty pleased.
Him and his smile, his very sunny smile.
“A good day, to-day!” he told his cat brightly. It ignored him.
There was no time to waste, not on something like this. Jonathan had a quick breakfast of whistles and cereal and hurled himself out on the streets, every pore wide open and sucking in the furious sunshine.
“What a lovely morning!” he told a twitching songbird. It peeped at him and slowly slid backwards off its twig, dangling from its toes.

Downtown, that was the place to go. Jonathan would get a paper there, and some coffee.
So he walked, because the busses were held up by traffic which was held up by all the tires and asphalt melting together into a sort of petroleum omelet, hissing with tar and bile.
“A good day to walk, to-day!” Jonathan sang out at the honking, screaming masses. “A very good day indeed!”
He took the time as he walked to compose another little song, which he whistled freely to the world. Each note scraped and sparked against the air, like a flint and steel.
“A paper!” he said to the last newspaper stand in town.
“A drink!” he said to the fourth of the fourteen coffee shops he’d walked past.
The coffee had evaporated in its cup, leaving only a lukewarm residue of droplets. But the paper warmed his hands as he sipped it, cinders flaking from its edges.
“Heat wave?” Jonathan asked sardonically as it crumbled into ashes in his palms “Balderdash! Poppycock! Why, this is the nicest it’s been since ’08!”
He snorted – which blew away the smouldering remnants of sections A through W – dusted off his palms, and headed down to the park.

It was bright and early in the park. The lake shimmered and steamed, generating its own surly haze. The trees roiled spasmodically in the murky air; half-wilting, half-combusting.
“A lovely day for a dip,” said Jonathan. He took off his shirt and socks and hung them on a panting, immobilized seagull, then splashed in with a slosh and a cheer and a “brr! Lovely!” He swam out to the dock and back again three times – once on his front, once on his back, and once on his side – and then floated there blissfully, staring up at the dried, withering sun. It looked like an old cranberry.
“Wonderful!” said Jonathan.
The sun made a noise like ‘pbblt’ except smaller and exploded.
Jonathan frowned, decided that wasn’t important, and felt the back of his skull touch sediment. The lake had evaporated.
“I could use a nice sandwich,” he said to himself.
The café was closed. The fry truck was fried. And what had happened to the ice cream stand was simply unspeakable.
“Gosh, that’s awful,” spoke Jonathan, who didn’t let that sort of thing stop him. He wrung the sweat and evaporated fat out of his shirt and squinted through the burning plastic and chrome of the marina. “Aha!” he said. “The tuck shop!”
The tuck shop was also rubble, but through a minor miracle one of its fridges was only partially incinerated. Jonathan extracted a single unpunctured Freezie from it, and inhaled its sugary vapour through his nose.

Jonathan’s walk home was brisker than it had been that morning, despite the increased heat and the incineration of whole blocks. Where his path took him uphill he took off his shirt and used it as a sail to harness the searing winds generated by the firestorms; and the sidewalks were liquid and splashed under his feet, sliding him on his way.
As he stood at the door of his house once more, Jonathan stopped for a moment – at first to extract himself from the molten remnants of his sandles, but then to consider some deeper thought, something that cried out for expression.
He looked up at the sky, boiled cloudless and seared red.
He looked across the city, at the running, liquid glass and crackling wood.
He looked down at the ground, which was belching forth pockets of sulphurous gas.
He frowned, pursed his lips, shook his head, cleared his throat.
And he spoke.
“A bit hot out there, eh?” said Jonathan, as all around him passers-by burst into quiet and consuming flames. “Boy, it’s a real screecher.”
Then he went inside his house, which exploded.

His cat made it out just fine though.

Make way, make way!
Stand aside! Clear the path!
Make way for the most important, average, humble, righteous, special and relatable man to ever walk this earth!
Make way for John Q. Protagonist!

Step aside please – give us room to breathe, and breathe softer, lighter, less obstructively. We don’t want anyone to get in the way of the point of view. It’s a dot, not a line, and it sits in his pupil. Don’t clutter it, don’t insert yourself, step meekly and be judged as he sees, ‘cause he sees FIT and FINE.
You, you, you and YOU! You are antagonists now! You dislike him for petty reasons, prepare to be put in your place. You – yes you – behind the counter! You are infatuated with his everday charm, his exceptional attractiveness, and will flirt shamelessly on-shift! Not a love interest though, you can stop existing after this. And you…all the rest of whoever you are. You will be our canvas, our backdrop, our stage. Applaud, swoon, dance, sing, sing, sing! Let the world respond to the act that is the actions of he!

Make way for John Q. Protagonist! He’s a busy man, with so many people to be.
He’s everyone that matters, and he isn’t you but maybe he could be! Buy a lottery ticket to your closest theater, bookshop, or video game today! Step up, step up, no need to be shy – claim a few minutes in the sun as the most important man to ever walk, love, laugh, kill, and live.
(for the ladies, Jane Q. Protagonist will be appearing down the road Thursday night, because we care)
Put on the blank face and be amazed at how much it resembles your own from inside your head. Speak words and watch them matter; take action and watch it succeed; spend time and have it matter, oh sweet god matter, each hour filled with action, emotion, and precious sweet honey-suckled angel-kissed god-blessed meaning – and even metaphor.

Make way for John Q. Protagonist; there will never be another like him! There never was another before him; he’s as old as the first story, and always just in the prime of life. A perfect demographic flashpoint; he’s always the majority, but always goes his own way, fearlessly giving them what they desire! What a democratic maverick! A truly independent man of the people! He breaks all the right rules and makes all the right laws; he’s got his finger on the pulse of the universe and tells us its heartbeat with total confidence in that awkwardly charming way of his. What would we do without him?
Hah, as if we’d ever do anything without him.

Make way for John Q. Protagonist; he needs time and space to mend!
His heart’s been broken, his job’s been lost, his best friend shot him in an alley and left him for dead, his mentor disowned him and his dog died. He needs time and space to mourn, but in a way that makes him look good and leaves him emotionally sound yet wiser.
Pour him a drink, give him some advice, give him some space, pick a fight with him and let him get beaten up and tossed out in the alley like so much garbage to prove how much he cares (more than anyone else, nobody else cares). Soothe him, comfort him, tell him harsh truths; whatever it takes to get his mind moving again before the plot stagnates and we all give up.
Just don’t hog the screentime. Remember, this isn’t about you.

Make way for John Q. Protagonist right this second! Roll out the way under his feet and wrap it back up behind him as he goes, because you never had it to begin with. It’s his way or no way, you see – not that you see anything. You think you had a point of view? You think you had a soul? Get real, get lost, get off your high horse. If you were somebody, you’d be anybody, and you’d be John Q. Protagonist. You may challenge him, you may obstruct him, you may even kill him, but you can’t replace him. Without him, nothing matters, and you’re not even nothing.

Make way for John Q. Protagonist! He’s an ordinary guy just like you with a very special set of skills! He’s hopeless at something; maybe even something important. He’s okay at something; maybe even something stupid and useless. Bet you a dollar that both of those things create a satisfying narrative with some intriguing character development. Go on, BET you nameless troglodyte! Bet against the will of the universe – nay, the universe itself!
PIT YOUR WILL AGAINST A WALL AND LOSE.

Make way for John Q. Protagonist, and steel your empty souls, for their fulfillment is at hand. You oppose him in the most fundamental way: you are barriers between him and the conclusion of this story. Maybe you love him, maybe you hate him; maybe you help him up or shove him down, but you’re all there on the page, clotting it up, weighing down the wordcount, shoving your stubby generic bodies between him and that bold-font THE END.
You disgust us. You try our patience. You wear out your welcome. Get going and good riddance.

Make way for John Q. Protagonist – and hurry! He has no time for you, or you, or you, and you, and yours!
There are three sequels and a prequel due by tomorrow, poor bastard, so give him some space and get lost.

I see you like squirrels. Yeah, me too. Who doesn’t?
They don’t count.
Listen, I’ll tell you something good about squirrels. Something nobody else has ever told you.
I’ll tell you why squirrels have big poofy tails.
No, shut up, I don’t care what you’ve heard. Yeah, yeah, your mom’s an ecologist, but shut up and listen you little scumbucket.

***
So there’s a squirrel. Regular old squirrel, of moderate stature and years. She lived in a highly lovely tree, and one particularly nice spring morning she ran down its trunk and was surprised to see a human being there, leaning against it. It wasn’t at all the season for that sort of thing.
“Hello,” said the squirrel. “Who are you?”
The human being turned its head to look up at her and the squirrel was somewhat surprised to see that it was unmistakeable the great disciple, sage, seer, prophet, fortune-teller, well-wisher, and dogs-body, Kem.
“I’m being pursued,” said Kem, “and I can’t stop to chat.”
“How about a bite to eat?”
“Can’t stop for that either.”
“Jeez,” said the squirrel, “you must be HUNGRY.”
“Thirsty, too,” said Kem. “But you know what I really miss?”
The squirrel didn’t know and said as much.
“Sleeping,” said the disciple-sage. “I haven’t had a nap in a decade. You see, I am continuously and constantly chased by the three great demons of Ignorance, Despair and Cruelty, and if I halt for a moment I’ll be caught and mangled by them.”
“Well, why don’t you put your feet up here and have a little rest?” asked the squirrel. “Being chased when you’re half-asleep never helps – trust me, I’ve lost a few cousins that way. And this is a really shady and most refreshing tree to sleep under. Besides, I can keep watch. You’ll be fine.”
“They are extremely great demons,” said Kem.
“My teeth are very sharp and never stop growing,” said the squirrel.
“Fair enough,” said Kem. And without so much as a good-night or thank-you-very-much the disciple-sage rolled up in a small and extremely holy ball and began snoring.
The squirrel combed through the disciple-sage’s pockets for any stray nuts and found nothing, then immediately climbed up to the top of her tree and began the watch. She didn’t have to wait long. The ground was trembling, the leaves were shaking, and over the horizon came the great demon Ignorance. It was sixty miles tall and forty miles broad and it had to walk bent double and double again to prevent its head from being lost high above the clouds. In each of its huge warty hands it carried a brutally spiked war-club the size of a well-travelled highway; from each of its ears dangled incongruously small but splendid little earrings, decorated with emeralds a deeper green than oak-leaves.
The squirrel was very impressed by Ignorance’s appearance and wondered if there was any deeper symbolic meaning behind it. “I’m very impressed by your appearance,” she told Ignorance. “I wonder if there’s any deeper symbolic meaning behind it?”
“Dunno,” said Ignorance in its small, somewhat flat voice. “Hey, you seen the disciple-sage, Kem?”
“No,” said the squirrel. “Hey, is that her?”
“Where?”
“Just over your shoulder.”
“Where?” asked Ignorance, craning its neck about three times.
“Your left shoulder.”
“Which left?”
“Your left.”
“Huh?” said Ignorance, twisting its head back around the other way six times.
“Now she’s right behind you.”
“Huh?!”
“Right above you now!”
Ignorance spun its head around five times each way, reared straight up, bonked its head on the moon and toppled over into outer space, dead as a doornail.

The squirrel checked the horizon, ate some nuts, explored the inside of the great disciple and sage Kem’s hat, and generally made up things to take up time. At last she sat on a branch, utterly deprived of things to do.
“I’m done,” she said.
“Tell me about it,” whispered the great demon Despair into her ear.
The squirrel nearly leaped out of her fur. The great demon Despair was very quiet, so very quiet indeed that it had crept right up to her in her tree without so much as a hint of a warning. This was in spite of both the fact that it was the size of a mountain range and was being dragged on top of a jeweled palanquin by the innumerable labouring efforts of millions of tiny nagging doubts. In its right hand it held a jeweled flog; in its right hand a blacksmith’s-puzzle made of two perfectly-trapped circlets; in its other right hand it clutched a few stray nuggets of mucus, as it was currently knuckle-deep in its nose.
“Get your finger out of there when you’re talking to someone,” said the squirrel sternly.
“Sorry,” sighed Despair, brushing crumbs out of its palm and flicking them into the distance. “I’m hopeless, aren’t I? Well, I’ve screwed this up. Tell me, have you seen the great disciple-sage Kem?”
“Nowhere near here,” said the squirrel.
“Really?” asked Despair. “Not even under your tree, where I followed her tracks?”
“Nope,” said the squirrel.
“Not even huddled under that cloak and hat, which I have seen in the distance just ahead of me ten thousand times?”
“Not in a million years.”
Despair sighed again, a wind that dragged on forever. “Gosh, I’m just WORTHLESS,” it said wretchedly. “I can’t believe I’ve screwed up so badly. I can’t do anything right. I’m not a real person. I’m going to go home and never do anything again.”
And it did, towing its nagging doubts behind it like fishing-lines. The squirrel watched it leave, thoughtfully munching an acorn, then shrugged.

The great demon Cruelty was less subtle – and not merely because it was a vast and crawling thing with a thousand thousand arms and a million claws and sixteen hundred mouths with a billion very sharp teeth. It took an hour and a half to walk from the far horizon to the squirrel’s tree because it kept stopping to uproot and shred every blade of grass and crawling beetle it could see.
“HRRRNRNRNRNRNRNNRNRNRNGHGHGHGehehehehehehehhehehehehe,” it said to the squirrel.
“Hello,” said the squirrel.
“HRURURURURUURruururrrr,” said Cruelty, and it reached out with six of its arms.
“Are you looking for the great disciple-sage Kem?” asked the squirrel very quickly.
“HAHAHahahahayes indeed,” said Cruelty. It tore a few branches off the squirrel’s tree and began to strip the bark off them.
“Why?” asked the squirrel.
“I wish to commit unspeakable tortures upon her,” said Cruelty, idly scouring an ant colony with its heel. “I have plans.”
“Tell me,” said the squirrel.
“I just said they were unspeakable,” said Cruelty, and a wasp-whine of annoyance filled its sixteen hundred mouths. “There will be no words. Only flayings. And mutilatings. And wrenchings. And so on and so forth. There are a thousand complicated steps and seven thousand winding substeps and ten trillion individual components”
“Astounding,” said the squirrel. “How sure of them are you?”
Cruelty glared at the squirrel, eyelessly. “Very. My plans are astute and exact.”
“Well then luck is your ally! At the foot of this tree, vulnerable, blissful, and unaware, slumbers the great disciple and sage Kem!”
Cruelty clapped with glee and all its hands, knocking every bird in the sky senseless. “Hooray!” it said.
“Now go to work with your plan then,” said the squirrel. “Just don’t mess it up. Because you have only one chance and a thousand complicated steps and seven thousand winding substeps and ten trillion individual components.”
The great demon cruelty considered this. Then it considered the sky. Then it considered the squirrel. Then it considered the sky again.
Then it opened its mouth and said “well, I would begin at the forearm…”
“I don’t quite understand,” said the squirrel. “How do you mean?”
“Just here, at the nerve.”
“Where?”
“There are no words,” sighed Cruelty, and it held up its thousand thousandth favourite arm. “So. Starting from here…”

What was left of Cruelty in the end was just a few wayward atoms which quickly underwent isotopic decay and vanished just as Kem yawned and stretched herself upright.
“That,” she said, “is the best nap I’ve ever had. And also the only. Tell me, squirrel, did you find yourself troubled?”
“Somewhat,” admitted the squirrel. “But not to any great degree. Your demons are not very clever.”
“No,” agreed Kem. “But they are persistent, and I imagine they’ll be back someday. I think I owe you something all the same, mind. For the sake of a good nap on a kind spring morning.”
The great disciple and sage extended her hand and blew on her palm and then and there, nose to tail, the squirrel’s furry tail shifted and shook and shimmied until it had turned into a marvelous swirl of colour, every shade of the rainbow and more besides.
“Gosh, thanks,” said the squirrel.
“Don’t mention it,” said Kem. “Now shoo! I’ve got a load of ground to cover.”

***

Of course, next Wednesday the squirrel asked for her old tail back, since her marvelous rainbow-fur made her extremely visible to hawks, foxes, and cats. And thus it was that the squirrel acquired her tail, which was the same as her old tail. Sometimes life’s like that.

It was a waste of time, just a stupid waste of time – I said that from the outset. But we were into summer now, where time didn’t exist. Schedules had slipped apart; weekends blurred into Thursdays; nobody had anything to do but nothing.
So me and Sam and Dan went down to the old school, just to kill an evening, any evening, whatever day it was didn’t matter.

The fence was short and wire, didn’t even have barbs. Its mesh was too fat to keep out a rat, or even a raccoon; its frame was too feeble to stop a bear; a coyote or stray dog would dig under in a flash. It only existed to prove its point and hold up a sign.
TRESPASSING
PROHIBITED
UNSAFE
CLOSED
SOLD
LOT
and so on.
We climbed it like it wasn’t there, first Sam, then Dan, then me. Slow Jo. But it wasn’t my idea to come here – it wasn’t anyone’s, really – and I didn’t want to see this place again all that bad.
Neither did Dan. Sam didn’t either, but she’d said she did and so there wasn’t any way around it and here we all were with Sam’s crowbar and the little side door by the gym breaking apart. We probably could’ve pushed it over.
“Dark in here,” said Dan, because he was the one that said the things people had to say.
We pulled out flashlights, switched on apps, poked around until we found the door that still opened and walked into the gym, where the first zombies were.

They weren’t doing much. Standing. Groaning, but softly. Life doesn’t move too fast around here to start with, and once it stops it drops without rolling. Four of them, under a dirty old skylight like bigger versions of the strange moulds and mosses that were sprouting up from the tiles around them.
We took some pictures. Sam whacked one of them a few times with her crowbar, trying to get the head off, but she gave up as fast as could be excused. People are tougher than they look, and zombies are the people that wouldn’t fall apart properly to begin with.
Dan smoked in the gym, like he said he’d always sort of wanted to. Then we went into the halls and the classrooms and the bathrooms and up and down, looking for something and finding zombies, always more zombies. Here and there, still wearing t-shirts and dresses and suits. Sneakers mouldy. Eyes turned off and lungs pumping for nothing, staring up at the ceiling and the water damage coming in through the roof.
One of them did stop us on the second floor – my fault. I recognized one of their shirts and freaked out a little. I explained about middle school drama, Dan said ‘wow, that sucks’, and Sam pulled out the crowbar again.
It didn’t help anyone at all, really. Like getting revenge on a tree.

The teacher’s longue was empty. Just another room, once you ignored the fridge with the two overgrown tupperwares in it. Dan made us spend ages in there – kept insisting that Sykes kept a bottle hidden in a sewn pocket inside the couch, that he was always sloshed after lunch. Sam ended up jumping up and down on it to show him there was nothing there, then the whole thing collapsed into a big explosion of spores and dust. Gross.
“It’s your fault if we all get hantavirus,” I told her. She just laughed at me.
The principal’s office was even less exciting. They’d taken all the paperwork when they shut the place down, so we couldn’t even look up our files or anything.
“They’d just be boring anyways,” said Sam. “Hey, here’s Jo’s: ‘this girl exists. Went home sick twice. Freckles.”
“And yours would just be blank,” I told her. “Since you never came in.”
We busted it up anyways. We had to use the crowbar for something. We had to do something. The desk was just as tough as the zombies – dead, cheap wood that wouldn’t crumple properly. There were no electronics.

It was easy to get onto the roof. They’d taken the paperwork, they’d taken the keys, but they hadn’t done anything with any of the doors that was more complicated than some planks and a few screws.
The lawn looked nice from up there. They’d come by and tore it up real good about six months after the shutdown, but the grass had grown back and all the trees had gone wild and bushy, really real bush-y, not fluffy but like something from ‘the bush.’ They seemed to be eating up the lawn.
Dan had brought beers. Lite beers. We drank them because it was what we had, and we threw some rocks off the roof. Sam bugged me until I threw the zombie head she’d brought with us. “It’s therapy,” she said. “Therapeutic. Do it. C’mon. Just do it. Go for it. Do it. Now. C’mon. Do it.”
I did it. Still wouldn’t blink, but I guess it might’ve helped.

By then it was getting dark – too dark, where’s-my-hand-in-front-of-me dark – so we pulled our stuff together and headed back downstairs after we threw the bottles at the old basketball net. None of us made it. Sam hit on Dan after he missed his shot, but he didn’t notice and she got embarrassed and gave up real fast. Nothing new.
I’d expected the trip home to be bad, for something to go wrong, but really… It was dark down there, and the zombies wouldn’t stop sighing, but it was ALREADY dark down there, and we’d already heard them, and there was nothing new there, just green and crumbling dampness, and, well, nothing had changed.
We talked on the way back, casually, about very important things. Dan was going to ask around at the auto shops; Sam was heading to college.
For me, I looked at the blank, breathing faces around us, and I couldn’t think of much else. Not much else at all.

Apéritif: red Flamburr, aged in a forty-year furnace, curdled in the hate of myriad scorpions and chilled with glacier hearts.

Appetizer: ground-bone bread, newly formed from the freshest fruit of the Carrion-King’s gallows and married to a dark, troubled stormbran dough. Jams and mustards are provided from a wide variety of innards and traitors.

Soup: a rich Bnos-style cream, thickened with marrow from the gallows and lashed with a full brace of grave-onions.

Main Course: Every unfibrous muscle in a Manglefoot’s body, pulverized with tremendous force and braided into a sinewsage over forty feet in length along with the monster’s spinal cord and small intestines. Served rare.

Salad: clotted tumbleweed hearts from the ghostland of the east, where every inhabitant was buried alive, dressed with a thick pint of drakkblood, sweetened in the innarsyrups of gentle everbees.

Assassination: a tangy cyanide/cyanide-like capsule concealed inside one of the tumbleweed hearts by a furtive, cunning, yet fruitless hope. Clears the palate, provides a light buzz.

Cheese: Gorbeg’s own Griffon Green, aged in the Red Caves under the Blue Mountain in the Black Highlands of the Whitemarches. Includes the still-meandering beetles that are crucial to its fermentation. Served with a plate of ladyfingers, gentlefingers, and childfingers of all types.

Fallback Assassination: six inches of cold keenfolk-gleaned steel to the brisket, delivered two-handed by the waiter to the brisket.

Impromptu Snack: the crushed and mangled remains of the waiter, garnished with much chuckling and delight.

Dessert: desert sands from Tir; shaved ice from Altanorici; cold basalt from the flowfields of Burner’s Eye; all boiled to a scream and frozen into edible glass surrounding the chilled organs of an adorable yet delicious creature of unidentified species. Consumers may guess the dessert’s identity for a prize.

Digestif: Deep dark Glou, soused in its own luminescence and infused with hatred by a Longwhorl master-fumer. Topped with a single marbled-over Salaman’s Grape the size of a golf ball.

Unplanned After-Dinner Treat: the marbled-over Salaman’s Grape three more times (up and down and back again) accompanied with violent coughing, followed by six feet of the Carrion-King’s own esophagus, backwards. Garnished with fatal lack of oxygen to the brain.

On a day in the Terramac exactly like every other, something went very wrong and/or very right. It’s difficult to say which, how, or why – certainly the people of the Terramac would never answer. Their past, much like their future, is irrelevant. They will live with the consequences; everyone else, alas, must settle for dealing with them.
In this case it meant coping with an avalanche of molten mountain that scarred half the Baldy range from peak to peak, spattering across slopes and filling valleys with hot bubbles of squirming, coiling….substance. Not quite solid, close cousin to liquid, never a gas and plasma didn’t recognize it.
Still, it was quite something. And when it hardened, well. Things got weird.
Of course, there is never a lack of folk willing to pay for weird.

That was then. Now, riding into the present on Then’s back, four rucksacks stacked high and coiled about in heavy jackets, the admirable, the determined, the steadfast, the driven Ms. Jun Dolet.
She’d come to town. There wasn’t much other choice, up here in the Baldies. It was either stay in your cabin drinking, trapped by a blizzard; or go into town and get drunk, trapped by a blizzard. And Jun didn’t own a cabin. Jun didn’t own a single thing that wasn’t packed on Then or inside her own skull.
But Jun had a plan, which are a notoriously portable form of wealth. And it started there, in Pultro. A boiled town, that got by on milking the odd recluse or wealthy meditant who wanted to sit in its steam caverns for a few weeks imagining the meaning of life until they could taste it. That and the furs and feathers of small things too stupid to escape traps.
Jun walked into the bar and bought everyone a glass of something until they were all her best friends, which cost her a total of one old half-a-coin. It wasn’t very much, but then she only needed to buy two glasses.
The man in the corner told her she looked just like his little sister, then cried himself to sleep. The bartender was more awake, and less able to dodge eye contact or conversation.
“So, I hear this is a pretty famous place,” said Jun.
“What sonuvabitch told you that lie, I will fight him until he turns ugly,” said the bartender.
“Nobody I can remember. Some kind of scholar. But he said there’s one thing about the place that anyone should be curious about, and that’s figment stones. He showed me one.”
“Never heard of ‘em,” said the bartender.
“Here,” said Jun. And she pulled out a little pebble and rolled it in her palm. It was flat, but didn’t seem happy about it; as if all that it required to get itself up and moving again was a little shove.
“Never seen one before,” said the bartender. “Not around here.”
“He said there used to be a mine out here. That it used to be famous.”
“Never known that either,” said the bartender. “Try the Grey Loop, up by Thickethead. There’s nothing there at all.” Then she finished her drink and passed out, and Jun was forced to take her advice or leave it.

She took it. She took it right out of the bar and back to Then, who’d been patiently drinking from the town’s (under-heated, slightly-minerally, well-boiled) public well. She took it with her eighteen miles out of town, plus another quarter-mile vertical. She took it through a maze of boulders that wedger her fast until she had no choice but to drop two rucksacks, and an interesting encounter with something fast and feathered with too many teeth and not enough caution.
Then she took herself back to Pultro, along with Then, two rucksacks, and a pocketful of extremely sharp and pointy fangs, which bought her a few more supplies and a night somewhere dryish.
“Figment stones,” she asked the hosteler, who was frankly amazed that anyone wanted to stay in town, including himself. “Seen any?”
“Never heard of a thing like that thing,” he told her. “You sure you’re in the right place?”
“Absolutely,” she told him. “Folk pay a mint for these thing, rich idiots. You crush them and inhale them and you see, well, just about anything. Everything. All at once.”
The hosteler scratched his face, hitting his nose by random chance. “You could check the old Mork-Matten mine, down the trail and off the dead lumber track. You won’t find anything there though.”

So the determined, steadfast, and driven Ms. Jun Dolet (and Then) set out again, in the opposite direction. She went down the dead lumber track and found that it forked, and that those forks forked, and those forks also forked. Some of the forks were the same, and others just looked the same, and some of them looked like forks but were actually dead ends where the trees had run out, the rocks had grown too thick, or where a Slibbean Icemaw had set up its breeding den. The last one got Then, but in her haste to lose the beast in a thicket Jun had the good fortune to fall directly into one of the surface tunnels of the old Mork-Matten mine, directly onto the long-lost bones of old Malaster Mork, which still had Dep Matten’s pickaxe buried in its cervical vertebrae.
The pickaxe wasn’t worth much, but the story got her a free stay in the cabin of a twitchy trapper on the way back before she could finish freezing to death.
“Shouldn’t have gone out there,” the trapper told her, eyebrows bouncing like electrified caterpillars. She was six foot and more, but through careful cringing and constant furtiveness had attained a height of half her size. “Bad business out there. It’s too cold. Better stay in, where it’s safe. Safer. Safeish. Did you hear that? It was just the wind, but there’s stuff that sounds like it’s just the wind. Icemaws. You scared up one; it’ll be out there now, looking for food until it’s got it. Us, probably.”
“Figment stones,” said Jun. “Not one in the mine.”
“Well, yeah,” said the trapper. “It was an iron mine. You step on anything in there? Could get lockjaw. I almost got that last winter. Cut off my foot, that fixed it. Got a new one. Want to see it?”
“Sure,” said Jun. “But I need to know where to look for figment stones.”
“Not here,” said the trapper. “None around here I expect. Could look by the Manybends. It’s got lots of stones. Big stones, small stones, medium stones. Creeping stones. Those are stones that creep up on you, while you sleep. Sleep creeps. One of them almost got me five years ago, and I haven’t been back since. It’s how I got this scar.”
Jun looked at the scar and a lot of others and slept late, woke early, and set out for the Manybends river with half the trapper’ provisions, all of her liquor, and a murderous, many-headed hangover.
“Really, taking this stuff off her hands is doing her a favour,” she told herself.

The steadfast and driven Ms. Jun Dolet arrived at the Manybends and found that it exceeded her on all counts. It was faster, steadier, more driven, and considerably rougher and more anxious to get to know her than she was. By the evening of the third day she’d been in and out of it five times, of which only one had been intentional.
(The others, in order:
Bear.
Bear on the opposite bank.
Grand Murderfish – a real record-breaker; luckily it had only caught her coat with its teeth.
While drying herself off, a large stone had crept up on her and pushed her into the rapids)
Two of her toes were near-black, but sufficient whiskey and fire put paid to that and they reluctantly came alive again long enough for her to stumble into town and slouch down in the bar, trading a pack full of fool’s pyrite and a (slightly stabbed) Grand Murderfish eyeball for a lot of extremely bad liquor.
“Figment stones,” she told the bartender, and the bar. “Figment stones. They look like….stones. You seen any? Anywhere?”
“No,” said the bartender. “Go home.”
“Never heard of them,” said the bar. “Not once.”
“No such thing,” said the man in the corner.
“I’m going to piss,” said Jun.

And with much weaving and bobbing, the driven Ms. Jun Dolet harnessed just enough of her willpower to get herself to the outhouse before throwing up.
“Hllorpp,” she burped. No more rucksacks, no Then, one jacket, only the very last spec of determination, and her mouth tasted like pure pine sap – which might’ve been what the local booze was made from. It smelt even worse coming out than it did in; an overwhelming haze of stink was oozing up out of the pits of the privy, strong enough to tear your nose off and eat it.
Jun sniffled a little into her sleeve, which was square remulus purple strong major horse revved turn plonk doze bull chuff.
When she woke up a little, she was on her back with her head on dry pine needles, in cold air. Who knew if she’d have come back at all if she’d stayed in there, with the air so thick with…
Well then.

Jun Dolet dug a little next to the privy. Then next to the bar. Then in the middle of the town square. Then she paced around a little, clearing her head enough to make sure that she wasn’t crazy at the moment, and went back into the bar.
“Hey,” she said to the bartender. “What’s this?”
The bartender looked at the little stone in her palm. “Wood chips,” she hazarded.
“Pinecone,” guessed the bar.
“Scat,” said the man in the corner. “Icemaw, I reckon. Best run away.”
“It’s solid figment stone,” said Jun. “The whole town’s lousy with it. You’re drinking booze made from distilled sap from trees growing on top of it; you’re sleeping in dug-out cabins and shanties surrounded in it, the whole damned cauldron of boiled water this place sits above is pooling inside of it, and not a one of you has ever noticed?”
“Noticed what?” said the bartender.
“This. Figment stone.”
“I don’t see any. Do you see any?”
“What?” said the bar. “I can’t see anything. Ever.”
“You look just like my little sister,” said the man in the corner. Then he cried himself to sleep in two seconds.
“I think I see the problem,” said Jun.

She left town the next morning with four new packs: one filled with figment stone; one filled with provisions; one filled with a few samples of the local soil, water and booze; and one filled with the cashbox from the bar, which she’d persuaded the bartender didn’t exist.
One day, Jun vowed, she’d be back. Or rather, she’d pay someone else to come back for her. Figments were a decent enough indulgence, but the idea of spending that much time in them gave her the willies. You could wind up believing ANYTHING.
Thankfully, the world was full of people who’d pay good money for that.

“For Imaginariumia!” shouted Keith as he nobly clove a goblin in twain.
Eddie hated that. He hated that Keith had breath left in him to shout after that charge; he hated that Keith had dragged them into a wondrous land of magic and adventure where the sun always shone and then gotten them both dressed in chainmail and padded leather; but what he REALLY hated was that Keith was always cleaving goblins in twain, or smiting them, or striking them down. Eddie tried his best, but it always turned out like the goblin in front of him – his sword drove up through the goblin’s torso, shredding organs and spilling out viscera, then wedged hard into its ribcage and stuck fast. There Eddie was, in the middle of a battle for the lives of the Good People against the Evil Horrible Unpeople, noble deeds and heroic valour all around him, and his sword was jammed in gritty cartilage.
And the goblin wouldn’t stop whimpering. It was a nasal sound, probably not helped by the puncturing of one of its lungs by the cold-forged, elf-enchanted, dragonfire-hardened tip of Eddie’s blade, Swiffyfangg. Blood was frothing up its windpipe, and it sounded like wet hiccups.
The sword was still stuck. Eddie’s hands were slick with blood and worse – the goblin’s sphincters had relaxed. His mouth had clenched, gibbered, and clenched again; his teeth were grinding themselves down to meal. Finally, he licked his lips, opened wide, and let loose the foulest curse he knew.
“Let GO, darn you!”
At that moment a screaming goblin with an axe reached Eddie, Eddie’s neck, and his jugular, and he lost consciousness permanently.
*
There was a change in the rumble of the guns. Something undetectable, in a pitch that had noting to do with sound and everything to do with the human pulse.
It’s time, said Tom’s heartbeat.
“It’s time,” Peter whispered to him, crouched in the mud.
“It’s time,” said the nameless corporal.
“GO!” yelled the sergeant, and they were up and over the wire, running and screaming – inside, where it’s always louder – into the grey world with its grey sky and its shockingly dull blood pooling everywhere, arms pumping, packs wobbling, guns ready.
Tom couldn’t see the enemy. He wondered if that was a mistake. Tom couldn’t see the sun. He wondered if that was significant. Tom wondered something else, but just then he was interrupted by the accidental discharge of the rifle clutched in the hands of the nameless corporal, who’d stumbled in a hollow. It tore through Tom’s spinal column at the base of his neck and that was that.
*
A twig snapped.
Sarah froze as still as a statue, as still as an unworked stone, as still as the bedrock that insisted, continental drift or no, it hadn’t ever once moved an inch.
One foot hovered just above the dirt, muscles shrieking. She ignored them.
No more twigs, but the game was up. Something was there, something trying to be quiet in that way that mutes sound but raises hairs. On the other side of the copse, something was waiting with a bloody mouth and a deadened pulse.
Sarah checked the revolver – in the quiet way, with her brain alone.
Two shots fired. Four remained.
Breathe in. Breathe out. Ghostly.
Sarah took a step into the thicket into extremely thin and slightly foggy air, fell six feet down a gulley, and landed headfirst, snapping her neck.
*
Dusk parted in a flash of shadows and moulded muscles. Fred and Bert were snatched up as something drove their heads together with nauseating force, cracking skulls and driving soon-to-be-fatal blood clots into brains.
“Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhh!” enunciated Joe as the caped crimefighter whirled towards him. “It’s Capeman!” He fumbled at his gun with frozen fingers, but the shadowed finger was faster and sent a razor-sharp knife spiralling into his wrist with a contemptuous flick. Joe screamed and involuntarily squeezed the trigger, sending forty-eight bullets through the wall of the bank and out into the general public and three through the central mass of Capeman, where they shredded and pulped several vital organs.
*
Fred Steele crouched in his basement, a smouldering mound of pythons stacked like tyres, surmounted by a grey-eyed glare. In his beef-slab hands he held – with immeasurable care and finesse – the power of Azrael, the angel of death, incarnated as the components of a half-made pipe bomb. He sneezed and blew himself up.
*
Despite his best efforts, Colonel Wagner was eaten by the lion.

“Bergatroyd, m’boy, do you know what the easiest thing in the world is?”
“No, sir. I don’t know anything that you haven’t told me.”
Lloyd Robertson smiled the happy smile of someone explaining something that their conversation partner already knew. “Yes, right, that’s in your contract. Thank you for elucidating as such. It’s money. Money’s dead simple. Bergatroyd, I have one hundred zillion dollars, and if I wish it I could extend my hand and the world would hand me two hundred zillion more. It’s pretty much a snap.”
“Wow, sir.”
“Look, I’ll prove it. Come with me.”
So they walked out of the greenhouse, through the wine fountains, past the marble zoo, through the under-hanger, down the acceleration tubing, and out the front door into the shameful squalor of the world, where Lloyd had Bergatroyd procure a small child.
“Lemme go ya palooka,” said the small child.
“Shut up, small child, and let me do you a favour,” said Lloyd kindly. “I see you have a little piece of straw in your hand. Would you mind trading me that?”
“Sure,” said the child, eyes narrowed with the glint of someone who’d been burned before. “One hundred zillion biggos.”
“Fifty,” said Lloyd.
“One hundred zillion biggos and all your assets.”
“Deal!” said Lloyd, happily. He snatched up the straw quickly before his dupe could change her mind. “Now Bergatroyd, watch how I can make back my fortune with just this piece of – hey, where are you going?”
“He works for me now, Bubba,” sneered the small child. “Now get the hell off my property.”
Lloyd got the hell off her property. A lesser man would’ve been perturbed, but not he! He had a piece of straw, and he knew how to get what he wanted. All he had to do was start small and think forwards.
There, in the park, amongst the stray winter-hardened dog turds and salt-eroded grass. There. There! Opportunity was lurking.
“Hello friend!” said Lloyd to opportunity, grabbing her shoulder and giving it a good friendly shake. “How’s tricks? Say, would you like a one-in-a-lifetime opportunity to trade a piece of straw for that sandwich of yours?”
“Mmmfphlg,” said opportunity, through half her sandwich. “Mmmpplgh! Gllrf!”
“Ah, I see, I see. Good move! A wise investment. Here, if you’ll just take this I’ll get that out of your esophagus in a pinch, no worries.”
“HHHHRRRORK!”
“Hey, stop wriggling!”
“HRLP!”
Across the park, on a sunny bench, a policeman pricked up its ears. It stretched, yawned, turned around a few times, then lightly bounded to the pavement and casually strolled over to Lloyd, whereupon it separated him from opportunity by batting at his nose over and over.
“Now, what seems to be the problem here?” it purred, rolling over and over and showing its soft, furry tummy.
“A simple business transaction, we’re all friends here, no need to trouble yourself officer,” said Lloyd, tickling the policeman’s stomach.
The policeman grabbed Lloyd’s hand and rabbit-kicked his arm raw. “I wasn’t talking to you!” it hissed.
“He tried to take my sandwich and give me straw,” said opportunity. “I don’t like straw and the last quarter of my sandwich has his fat dirty fingerprints all over it.”
“I see!” said the policeman, rubbing its side against her leg. “Well, have no fear of that! We’re going to put this creep in the system.”
So the policeman created a criminal record for Lloyd and chased him out of the park with mock charges and a constant, terrifying moaning sound.
“Balls!” said Lloyd four blocks later, once he’d got his breath back. “I dropped my grass! It’s going to be a real pickle recouping my investment without it. I’d better harvest some recoupment stocks to refundate my assetitudinals. Well, that lawn looks good enough.”
It was very good enough. Lloyd decided it was so good enough that he could afford to be choosey, and had picked and discarded seven bushels (‘too short…too long…too coarse…too fine…too dry…too damp…too exuberant’) when the door opened and someone screamed at him for twenty minutes.
“Feel better?” asked Lloyd when they paused for breath.
“Yes,” said the homeowner. “Much. Geez. Thanks. I’ve been really stressed out lately. The mortgage, you know. Still, if you don’t buy now, you’ll be priced out. I’d have been a fool not to invest in a home.”
“Great!” said Lloyd. “I owned a house.”
“How’d that work for you?”
“I traded it to a small child as part of proving a point about how easy it is to make money with a single piece of straw,” said Lloyd. “Which is why I’m taking this straw from you, as soon as I find one I like.”
“How ‘bout that one?”
Lloyd looked. “It DOES look charming. Thank you.”
“Good luck too, seeing as it’s the last one on the lawn.”
“Yes, that was a little closer than I’d like.”
Sirens were roaring. A car pulled up next to the lawn and four or seven policemen fell out, lazily swatting at each other and never making contact.
“I called them before I came out,” said the homeowner. “Woopsy daisy.”
“No harm done,” said Lloyd, just as the policemen all grabbed a different part of his anatomy each and one of them broke his wrist.
“Stop resisting,” the policeman murmured softly into his ear as it put him in a sleeper hold with one arm and broke his wrist with the other.
“Ah!” said Lloyd. “My wrist broke!”
“Stop resisting,” said the policeman who had broken his wrist, who was still holding his broken wrist.
The policemen knocked Lloyd around until he got stuck under the back seat of the squad car. After a few moments spent trying to dig him out they seemed to lose interest and drove back to the station, where they sauntered in and ignored the commissioner making a big fuss over them.

Lloyd woke up the next morning to someone screaming at him again.
“H’lo?” he articulated.
“Oh, ICK, it’s still alive!” said the commissioner. “I can’t believe they left that in my shoe! Ugh. UGH UGH UGH UGH ugh.” He picked up Lloyd in a newspaper and threw him out of the station, back into the world.
“Am I being detained, or am I free to go?” asked Lloyd.
“Don’t come back!” shouted the commissioner, and slammed the door shut. The world was once against Lloyd’s oyster, and he was the sandy irritating grit in its guts.
But when Lloyd set foot on the street a free man once more, he was befuddled greatly. Every lawn was ablaze, the park was an inferno. Firemen were standing by with dry nozzles and empty hoses, expressions as flat and disinterested as Garfield strips.
“What’s going on?” he asked.
A firefighter turned to him. “New rules. No more straw within forty miles of city limits. It’s a very legitimate law that was purchased through legal means today, by a very rich small child who bought the entire city council a new pool.”

Lloyd never did find that straw he needed; Bergatroyd retired in three weeks; the small child nearly lost it all in the recession until they petitioned to receive more money from everyone else; the homeowner foreclosed; and the policemen lived happily until their kidneys failed due to poor diet, at which point the commissioner had them sent to a nice farm out in the country.

Blurt followed the trail.
It was heavy in the gut and wide in the leg; slung-backed and thick-limbed. It crushed through cinderblocks like cinders and waded through crunchy fields of broken wires and rust alike, and it ended up in a tangle of rubble at the bottom of a death-pit filled with broken bones and dead dust.
“Hey, sis” she called down into the tiny opening at the base. “What’s going on?”
“Reading,” came the voice. It was thick with phlegm and vexatation and a mouthful of razor-sharp teeth, and it was unmistakable in any way for anyone but Blurt’s sister, Clot. “Go away.”
Thus offered her invitation, Blurt nudged her way inside the gutted basement. There was very little light, but Heloderma spectacular – or the Greater Western Gila Monstrosity – was mostly nocturnal anyways and had pretty decent night vision.
Blurt’s told her that her sister was hunched over a big pile of dead plant matter, most of which had been thrashed into pulp then lightly singed and buried.
“Books?” she said. “You found books?!”
“Oh, a lot more than that,” said Clot. “I’ve found the answer.”
“The what?”
“The answer to all of it,” said Clot, and oh boy was that smugness in her voice thick now. “I know what happened to all of the people.”
“What, you mean uncle Blue and aunt Bop out west? I thought they got eaten by a buffalo.”
“Not US people, dumbass,” said Clot. “I mean the OLD people. HUMAN people.”
That set Blurt hissing for a moment. “Wow,” she said. “Really?”
“Really.”
“All of them?”
“Think so.”
“What d’you mean ‘think’?”
“Alright smartass, you think you know it better than me, you can look at it yourself. Take a peek.”
Blurt accepted a handful of tattered pages, squinted carefully, and began.

Craig Larggcoc sneered down at the undead filling the city through eyes of purestrain chipped blue granite. Greyed flesh, senseless moans, and the meandering will of the mob filled the streets. Not a single human life remained in the city – in basically all the world. In his incredibly accurate and flawless judgment, not much had changed.
The wind was rising; the storm was brewing; the window of opportunity was slowly sliding shut. Garth was whimpering again – his shrill, trembling voice nearly drowned out by the sonorous moans of the zombie hordes – something about going back to search ‘for others.’
“There are no others, Garth,” said Craig, coolly.
Garth stared at him with watery-eyed bewilderment. “What?” he said, vacantly.
“There are no other people,” said Craig, with a sigh. “Those are just cattle. Sheep. Wannabes. Real people? Those are scarce. The shambling mess out there weren’t real even before they started trying to eat us. They always wanted to do that, deep down. They’re just finally being honest about it.”
“But… but people’s lives matter,” whinged Garth, blubbering like the hideous little rat Craig had secretly always suspected him to be.
Something clicked inside his head like the trigger weight on a Messenschole No. 92 (one of the late run models).
“Garth,” said Craig, as rock-steady as the Rockies, “what’s the difference between a clip and a magazine?”
“What?” snivelled Garth.
“Garth, listen to me,” said Craig, voice still steely-calm. “For once in your noxious, wasteful, pointless little ‘life,’ say something useful: what is the difference between a clip and a magazine?”
Garth’s knees knocked together, tick-tock; a clock counting down to inevitability. “I…I…I…don’t knooowww,” he howled senselessly, like the maddened animal he was.
Craig pulled out his gun, which was both his best friend and his lover and he had named Stacy after that no-good bitch that had dumped him in high school for some scumsucking jock named Mel who was doubtlessly dead and drooling down there with the zombies that fucking prick. Stacy was a modified Glorfengummer ’07 with an elongated, silenced barrel and an underslung grenade launcher; a laser scope; camouflage patterning; tactical mesh webbing mesh webbing; an extended magazine; a tactical grip; and a self-lubing barrel for when he was lonely.
“Dumbass,” he sneered. Then he shot him a bunch.

“So… the guns killed people?” asked Blurt.
“No, no, no,” said Clot. “Zombies. See, right at the start – they killed people. All the people. Aren’t you jealous? Mom spent years wondering, and I’ve figured it out. The whole end of humans, all in one book.”
“I mean, sure,” said Blurt. “But you’re being sort of reductive, aren’t you? This is just one book. There must’ve been at least a hundred in here back in the day. Even if not ALL of them were about what killed people, there must’ve been more than just one. Can’t we cross-reference?”
Clot was annoyed. She’d dug through the ruins of half a city block, pulled out untold ancient treasures of what very well could’ve been human knowledge, and now her obnoxious sister was naysaying all her discoveries. “Knock yourself out,” she said.
“Thanks,” said Blurt, deliberately ignoring all context, and she settled down in front of another bookcase, which she immediately began excavating with her powerful forelimbs.
I hope it takes you a hundred years, thought Clot silently. I hope all you find are those little boxes of cereal that taste like Styrofoam gone bad. I hope that
“Found one!” said Blurt.
“Like fuck you did,” said Clot.
“Nope, seriously! Look! Look! It’s a bit slim, and half of it’s fallen out, but there’s a good chunk right here, that’s all about it. Here, read it yourself.”
Blurt picked up the new book with the slow care of a bomb disposal expert and began to read.

“The new fleet’s on schedule,” said Toby.
Peter examined the microscope and saw that it was so. The second-gen nanobots were seven times more powerful than the first batch. It was all down to a childishly straightforward application of Boolean Bayes-frames, immersed in a hyperquantum shell and exposed to nanorelative particles. This unstable mix of physics and chemistry was then probed relentless by Toby with great patience and tiny tools, smaller than an atom’s sneeze. The resulting nanobots were synched to each other’s will using a deceptively simple AI routine based on that of the common cold, which allowed them to piggyback on each other using whip physics like whip scorpions. The upshot of this entire paragraph was that Toby was very smart and that the nanobots would be able to tolerate surface temperatures of over seven trillion parsecs above Kelvin, transforming the hell-surface of New Earth into perfectly tranquil custom-landscapes, adjusted to their every whim and fleeting desire. At least, once they were released into the wild using the delivery system that Peter had developed from scratch. Injected deep into the magmatic chambers of neighboring volcanoes, the ash clouds that belched death into the skies of New Earth would instead sow sweet seeds of man’s genius and innovation.
This procedure was only possible due to the sensathump, a remarkable machine that could, by belching hypersonic signals, probe the interior of the planet much as a bat might an insect in mid-air. It was a very complicated and impressive idea and it was ideas like that which had put Peter in charge of the tiny survival colony of far-thinking people living in what had once been his prudently-constructed bunker before the exploding nebula had turned Earth into New Earth. Vision, that was what separated the real men from the simps and wastes of genetic material. That and a willingness to get your hands dirty. And speaking of which…
“You’ve done frapping good work,” Peter told Toby warmly, “you’re a real trebb, you know that? Hey, stick around for a minute. As you’re well aware, our survival will require a lot of eugenics described in intense yet matter-of-fact detail, and I can’t help but make you aware that your extremely nubile daughter is

“What’s a ‘nebula’?” asked Clot.
“A kind of thing in the sky,” said Blurt. “I think. Mom had a book with pictures once.”
Clot checked the book in her claws. It didn’t have pictures, although the cover had some human’s name on it in incredibly impressive font. “Huh. So… a nebula exploded and killed everyone. That doesn’t make much sense; where’d the zombies come from?”
“The nebula?”
“That’s stupid. Zombies are people, and people are too heavy to fly unless they’re birds. Humans aren’t birds. Probably.”
Blurb thought a little harder. “Maybe the nebula exploding killed a lot of people, and then turned most of the survivors into zombies. That’d make sense.”
“That’s too complicated,” said Clot.
“Real life is usually complicated. Like, remember when we used to think buffalo were good to eat? It seemed really simple for years and years and forever and ever, then the deadwinds changed and it turned out those were just larvae. Boy were we surprised.”
“There’s more-complicated-than-you-think,” said Clot, “and then there’s complicated-to-make—you-feel-clever. And this is that.”
“Which?”
Clot smacked her sister between the eyes and heaved her stunned body across the room. It took Blurt a few minutes to right herself, which Clot spent burrowing in the bookcase.
“Huh,” she said.
“Oh?” asked Blurt, somewhat upright and very breathless. “What is it?”
“Uh. Huh,” said Clot.
“Oh, one of THOSE. Well, am I right or are you?”
“Huh,” said Clot. And she handed Blurt the book.

“It was kind of you to meet with me on such short notice,” said ‘Old’ Nick, warmly. But the coldness in his eye belied the fire in his grin.
“Anything for the Supreme Ruler of the United Nations, Mr. nataS,” said Bradley.
“Ah! You pronounced my name correctly!” said Nick. “So many of you Americans cannot do that, you know. It’s very foreign.”
“I respect the names of all peoples, American or heathen, on God’s green earth,” said Bradley. He saw Nick flinch, and could not hide his own smile.
“Ah,” he hissed as with the forked tongue of the serpent (Genesis 3:15). “It seems the game is up, Pastor Blandford. Behold! I am the Antichrist, and as you are a man your will is now mine! Believe my lies about the dating of igneous rocks using isotopic decay!”
“No I won’t,” said Bradley, nobly. “I believe in my Father, who protects me from that sort of thing. Your cunning disguises avail thee not, tempter! I name thee – ‘Old’ Nicholas Infernus Lucifermaximus nataS – by thy title true: Satan!”
At this Nick nataS roared terribly and turned into a dragon with seventeen heads and each head was wearing a whore and each whore was wearing Babylon, and he vomited up such fire and fury that the whole earth was consumed and every man and woman and child died in that Armageddon.
But Bradley Blandford believed, and so he was okay.
“Take the wheel!” he yelled, and he slapped the Antichrist, and it was the backhand of Christ Slapping Through Him (Revelations 371:0.28). The great dragon yelped in unholy agony as if every Darwinist had screamed at once and

They sat there for a little while, unmoving.
“How’s THAT fit into your theory?” asked Clot.
Blurt tried to talk, realized her tongue was hanging out of her slackened mouth, and tried again.
“So…. It was the sky explosion, which was caused by the Antichrist…dragon…thing, which made zombies,” said Blurt. “The multicausal hypothesis, we can call it? Maybe. Possibly?” She shrank back from her sister’s expression. “Look, it’s a start.”
“I think it might’ve been people,” said Clot at last. “People did it to each other.”
“What? Why?”
“Because if I had to sit around all day looking at this crap, I’d kill someone too. Books are for nerds.  Come on, let’s get going. I stashed half a dead deer next to the river yesterday.”