I found myself a friend, but he's crooked as a stick in water So now I'm writing fairy tales To catch the spirit of revenge... Won't you share a common disaster? -- the Cowboy Junkies, "A Common Disaster" And now the wheels of Heaven stop you feel the Devil's riding crop get ready for the future-- it is murder. -- Leonard Cohen, "The Future" ======== Disaster struck the city of New Haven on the night of September 29th, 2001. ======== The men aboard the garbage scow weren't being very careful. If they'd known they were carrying several dozen barrels of hazardous, radioactive waste, they might've calmed down a little. If they'd had any idea they were *also* carrying a sixty-pound plastic drum, full of waste chemicals generated by the scientists at the Rascombe Building over on Old Apple Street, they probably wouldn't've been drinking. But they didn't, so they were, and they crashed the scow. Usually, the garbage scow carried... well, garbage. Scow detail was notoriously easy to come by and notoriously hard to lose, because not just anyone would voluntarily get aboard a reeking pile of garbage and stay there for as long as two hours. The scow averaged three spills a week, under optimal conditions, and usually, that was just fine with the garbage company. All that usually came of that were a few dead seagulls and fish, which was sad on some insignificant level but was also not the garbage company's problem. However, both the Rascombe Building's crop of scientists and the biohazard cleanup teams at the Summer Valley nuclear power plant had had the same bright idea at the same time. They thought, in so many words, that they could save a lot of money if they just threw their trash where everyone else threw their trash, as long as they kept it a secret. So they sealed up their waste inside steel barrels and a plastic drum, and they snuck the waste products onto the garbage scow. If the group from Rascombe had been five minutes slower, they might've actually run into the group from Summer Valley. Later that same night, when the scow crashed against a fishing boat and nearly capsized, it lost a good half of its cargo. Among that half were the waste barrels and the plastic drum, naturally, both of which knocked against each other hard enough to start leaking. The waste chemicals and the radioactive waste blended together as they sank, and as they blended together, a school of unsuspecting fish swam straight through the resulting yellow-green cloud. Five minutes later, as they struggled to right their scow, the men from the garbage company were *quite* surprised when it rose into the air by itself and flew like a rocket straight back into New Haven proper. It cleared the harbor by a good twenty blocks and wound up sticking out of the side of the KKVX building like Oddjob's hat. It clung there tenuously for a good minute before the fishing boat followed it up there and knocked it down. The fish walked onshore a few minutes later, flexing their new clawed hands and still growing at a rate of three feet a minute. They had some issues to discuss. ======== Then, amused and quite pleased with itself, Disaster struck again. ======== "Guys, you are not going to *believe* what I just saw!" Danny Phelps said, running into the main laboratory. "Not now, Danny," Deke Voight said. "How's our power supply, Jenny?" "Thirty-five percent and rising. No signs of irregularity." "Good. Andy, what's our status?" Andy Stark cleared his throat and pushed his glasses up. "We're about a minute from the full materialization of the dimensional matrix. All components read normal, all variables taken into account... we're looking good." "...guuuuuys," Danny whined, "this is *really cool*!" "We're trying to breach the very fabric of our plane of existence, Danny," Deke said, only faintly annoyed. "We don't have time to watch alley cats fight." "This isn't alley cats--" "--and I don't care if you found another potato chip shaped like Nixon's head, either." "No, it's not--hey!" "Um... problem," Jenny Spica said from her console. "Big problem or small problem, Jenny?" Deke asked. "Small, really." Jenny tapped her console's readouts with a pen. "There's an unforeseen glitch in the phase array. The matrix is going to be unstable while it's open, so we need to be *very careful.* One good sharp shock, and it might open permanently." "Andy," Deke said, "any idea where we're opening a gate *to*?" "None whatsoever. I'm excited." "Okay," Deke said, rubbing his eyes, "no sharp shocks to the dimensional gate. Good. Important safety tip. Are we willing to proceed?" "Roger that, boss," Andy said. "...yeah," Jenny said, with a sidelong look at Andy. "Let's go." "Guys," Danny said, "maybe you should come look at this *before* you throw the--" Deke threw a switch in the center of the room. The block that the Rascombe Building stood in the center of browned out, as the custom-built machinery siphoned off most of the power to feed the new device. Slowly, the sharply cut quartz crystals lit up with internal light, focusing the generated power at the appropriate frequency and resonating it up into a higher plane. The wire loop that held the crystals in place shuddered slightly, but held. Then they were looking somewhere else. That somewhere was a constant rolling plane of dust, as far as they could tell. A sun shone violet over a landscape of barren surreality, like an uninspired Dali. Creatures paused in their unknowable affairs to look at the sudden bright circle that had materialized, and the creatures bared mouthfuls of carnivore teeth when they saw what was looking back. "Uh-oh," Jenny said. "...okay," Deke said, the first to regain the power of speech, "we've broken the veil between the worlds and looked upon the face of the unknowable. Good job, everybody. Now *close it*!" "Roger that!" Andy said, and ran for the power switch. Outside, one of the fish picked up and tossed a city bus. The bus clipped the edge of the State of Connecticut building and went into a lazy corkscrew, flipping around and end over end like a thrown ruler. The fish nodded its approval as the bus finally wound up slamming, back end first, straight into the side of the Rascombe Building. This, among other things, cut the power to the building. Andy Stark was thrown headlong into the power switch, which flipped off and tore free of its housing at the same time. The whole room shook. Jenny Spica's console flipped over onto her. Sparks flew as wires broke. The wire circle that formed the dimensional gate tipped forward, leaving the gate itself behind it as it fell. Delicate electronic components shattered into sand. The creatures from the other dimension stood up, slowly, and licked their lips. There were many of them, and they took their time getting to the open gate. "If you say 'I told you so," Danny," Deke said from the floor, "I will kill you before they can." ======== Disaster, never one for subtlety, decided to go for broke. ======== In the suburbs, peacefully ignorant of the giant fish monsters running amok in the city, rotted hands pushed their way to the surface through six feet of cold earth. A graveyard inverted, disgorging its contents into the night air. A boy, listening to death metal, holding a book he shouldn't've had, and wearing only a thin sheen of someone else's blood, finished reciting ancient words as the earth erupted. Flushed with trumph, he issued his first command. He was quite surprised when the marching hordes of ravenous undead, instead of peacefully acquiescing to his desires, stomped him into the grave-dirt and kept going. Hi-ho. At the Grand Street Metro, a subway train pulled up to the station ahead of schedule, which was odd in itself, as ever since the digging had begun on a new, subterranean level of subway tunnels, very few of the trains had been running at all. This new train was made not of aluminum and graffiti, but of brimstone and obsidian. This new train, the New Haven-Dis Transplutonian, had been en route for a very long time, and the commuters aboard it had come a very long way. They had not traveled here for the sale at Macy's. An elderly couple, both well into their golden years, enjoyed each other's company as they strolled peacefully through Coltrane Park. Neither the man nor the woman possessed the eyesight they once had, although, to be fair, the enormous spiderweb they both walked straight into was very hard to see up close. A five-and-a-half-foot tall spider began walking down the web to investigate, leading the elderly couple to scream in panic and thrash wildly in hopes of escaping. This accomplished nothing but tangling them up further, although it did wake up the rest of the park's colony. In a warehouse near the docks, one that had somehow managed to have been spared by the fish creatures, a large crate covered in kanji and hiragana shook. Then it shattered, sending shards of wood and eggshell ricocheting across the warehouse. A birth cry spawned flame that shot up into the night, straight through the warehouse roof. The newborn creature, blinking and yawning, shambled out the nearest door, looking for its mother. Meanwhile, the burning warehouse served as a makeshift incubator for the other dozen or so similarly labeled crates, with similar results. The next day, the Monster Island Farmers' Company, headquartered in New Haven (their motto: "Isn't it about time you had a *real* omelet?"), would go quietly bankrupt. That was just the start of it. Disaster chuckled to itself and went off to take a nap. ===================================== New Haven ------------------------------------- because you know what's funny? the apocalypse! Scene 1-1: Eschaton Boulevard by Thomas Wilde and James Howard ===================================== "Look, I'm sorry," Charlie Hopewell said in resignation as he turned the wheel, taking his blue Chrysler Neon around a corner. "I know I promised that this would be a night for just us." His girlfriend, Alicia Carmine, gave a small "Hmph!" of frustration and, her arms folded, continued to glare out her window at nothing in particular. "I really didn't expect the Chief to call tonight," Charlie continued. "I really thought I could have a night off." "And the second he *does* call, you scamper obediently over," Alicia muttered bitterly. She blew air upwards, fanning some hairs that had escaped her ponytail. "Look, c'mon," Charlie said, "you know how much defending the city means to me. I love my city and I love my job." He paused briefly. "And you." Alicia sighed, shaking her head. "I had to fall for a cop," she said. It wasn't a unusual statement. "Besides, with all those explosions, I'll bet something important is going on." Charlie continued to drive, idly noting that it was a bit foggier outside than it had been a second ago. ======== The fog in question spewed forth from the wreckage of a shop, further up Donnelly Avenue. Kramer's Antiques was, seemingly, just like any other thrift shop in New Haven. It catered to old ladies looking for old furniture, or younger women looking for retro kitsch. Its main room was a paean to past decades' consumer goods. The shop had another side to it, as do most things, if you think about it. Those who knew Roderick Kramer, the owner of the shop, were allowed to see the shop's back room. There, Kramer kept his real stock-in-trade: the occult, strange, macabre, and unique. Kramer's Antiques' back room was a precarious maze of mirrors, potions, chests, keys, bottles, toys, weapons, masks, books, scrolls, jewelry, and other assorted _objets d'art_, brought to Kramer from across the world. From Los Angeles to Cape Town, the people who sought out Earth's secrets knew Kramer's name, and brought him what they found in the hidden corners of the world. Kramer's newest acquisition was a small item known as the Watchmaker's Gear. It had been brought to him by Daniel and Elizabeth Stowe, the American descendants of the infamous Stowe family of adventurers, who had found it in the lair of the Krakow-based Servants of the Light Everlasting. To the casual observer, the Gear was a small golden ball, always warm to the touch, which would hang in mid-air if released. The trained observer, however, would recollect mention of such an item in the journals of the infamous John Parsons, the only practicing black magician to have a lunar crater named after him, who had named the Gears in a sort of rough homage to the writings of St. Augustine. According to Parsons' research, the Gears were fragments of space-time, somehow solidified and brought into three-dimensional space by an unknown agency, for unknown reasons. "They're harmless," Kramer had told Daniel Stowe earlier that night, holding the Gear up to the light. "The only danger to be found in one of these little beauties is if someone were to, for whatever reason, break them. If that happened... well, I'm not sure what would transpire, but I assure you, it would *not* be pleasant!" He laughed, Daniel laughed, and they left the store to get a drink. Kramer was, naturally, wrong. As no living human knew, the Gears were not merely inert fragments of time. They were eggs. Left alone, surrounded by strange magics, this Gear quietly hatched. Its golden shell broke, and grey mist seeped out into the store, first shyly, and then with greater force. ======== "I couldn't fall for someone with *free time*," Alicia continued. "Like a journalist, or a hobo. No, *I* had to fall for a *cop*." "Okay, yes, you've made your point," Charlie said. "Hmm. It got foggy all of a sudden." "Even *teachers* get a couple months off every year," Alicia said. "And what's more, when *other* people are offered free time *they* actually *use* it, *Charlie*." "There isn't usually fog in downtown New Haven this time of year, is there?" Charlie asked. "No, Charlie," Alicia said, "there isn't." She rolled her eyes and let the topic drop. "I mean, *look* at this," Charlie said, parking across the street from the front doors of the New Haven Police Force's main branch. "Wow. Anyway, here we are. You wanna come in with me?" "I'm hardly dressed for a police station," Alicia said, indicating the slinky red dress she had on. "I'm in *my* nicest clothes," said Charlie, who was wearing a black dress shirt with black slacks and black shoes. He felt it emphasized his short blonde hair; that, and he didn't own many civilian clothes that weren't black. "True enough," Alicia said with resignation, getting out of the car. "And anyway," Charlie said as they crossed the street, "sometimes late at night they bring women in and they're wearing dresses like the one you'r--" "Charlie, be quiet," Alicia said. "Okay," Charlie said obligingly. ======== "So this is the Alicia we've been hearing about," New Haven Chief of Police Arthur Renoir said conversationally. "Yes, hi," Alicia said in a less-than-congenial fashion. She glared at anything that happened to be in the corner of the room to her right. She had known she wouldn't feel like talking to the New Haven Chief of Police from the second she had entered his office. There was a poster tacked up behind his chair, depicting a kitten holding onto a tree branch. "Hang in there!" was written in yellow on the bottom. She *hated* posters like that. "So what's up, Chief?" Charlie asked, leaning forward in his chair. He was the one who had bought the Chief the kitten poster as a birthday gift, thinking that it would be a nicer gesture than just giving him one of the two Charlie already owned. "Why'd you call me in here?" "We were on a date," Alicia said. "Yes, I'd imagine the formalwear gave it away," Chief Renoir said without a hint of sarcasm. He adjusted his large glasses. Alicia rolled her eyes. "Anyway, Charlie, I'm going to be honest with you," Chief Renoir said, steepling his fingers. "You've been called in here as the result of several different outbreaks of trouble around the city. Did you happen to see anything unusual on the way here?" "No sir, Chief," Charlie said. "Really?" Chief Renoir asked. "What route did you take to get here?" "We were heading for Fitzgerald's, an Italian restaurant on Basie Avenue about twenty minutes west of here, but when your call came in, we turned, and I drove along Armstrong the whole way to get here." "And you didn't see anything odd? Anything at all?" "Not a thing." "Good to hear," Renoir said before calling to his secretary. "CARLA! ARMSTRONG STREET'S CLEAR! GET THE CAR!" Alicia turned to see Renoir's secretary nod. She quickly started walking for an exit. "What was that about?" Alicia asked Renoir. "I'm getting to that. See, Charlie, we've been getting calls in by the truckload since about seven-thirty. It started with this one call from a frantic woman saying there were six-feet-tall fish people coming from the docks and rampaging through town." "I see," Charlie said, nodding. "*What*?" Alicia blurted out. "We thought it was a prank call, or perhaps a narcotics-induced hallucination, but sure enough we began getting more calls about six-feet-tall fish monsters. Then those became calls about eight-foot-tall fish monsters. We got confirmation of this when an off-duty officer called to report it, and we were discussing what our plan of action would be when we got a call about zombies in the suburbs off of Davis Street." "Oh, now *come on*," Alicia said. "Zombies?" Charlie asked. "And then a call about giant spiders in Coltrane Park," Renoir continued. "Following that we got calls of giant fiery birds in the sky near the harbor, destructive fiery armies of monsters rampaging downtown, and apparently just east of the blazing monster armies is an infestation of--we don't know what the hell they *are*, exactly, other than they've been tearing apart people using very sharp teeth." "Jesus," Alicia said. "It was when we took the calls about Central Hospital being overrun by vampires that we all finally decided on our course of action. Charlie," Renoir asked, "how important is this job to you?" "How important?" Charlie said. "Chief, this job is everything to me. I'd give my life for this city, and this job is my life." "Yes, it is." Alicia sighed. "I see," Renoir said. "Why, Chief? What's the plan?" Charlie asked. Chief Renoir pushed his glasses up and his chair back, rising from behind his desk. "I don't know about you, then, Charlie," he said, "but we decided that we're quitting." "What?" Charlie said, dumbstruck, as he rose to his feet. "Who's quitting?" "*Everybody*, Charlie," Renoir said. "Every last one of us. We're getting out of this town as fast as we possibly can, and I hope you'll do the same. So you're *sure* you didn't see anything on Armstrong Stree--" "*Everybody*?" a dumbfounded Charlie asked. "I'm the last to go," Renoir answered. "I was wondering why it was so empty," Alicia said. "But what about the people in this city?" Charlie blurted. "They need us!" "Charlie," Renoir said, "what they *need* is a miracle at this point. And guns." "Big guns," Carla interjected. "Big goddamn guns." "But--" "Good luck!" Renoir called, walking away from his office. "Christ," Alicia said aloud as they watched Renoir look at a ringing phone and stop to pick it up. "Charlie, he's right. We need to get out of the city." Charlie stood in shock, staring at the door. "But..." "Charlie..." Alicia said after a pause, "uh... doesn't your *sister* live on Davis?" "Yeah," a still-dazed Charlie said. "It's only a few blocks from here. Why?" Then he did a doubletake. "Oh," he said, following quickly with a tripletake. "*Oh*! Oh, no! We need to hurry! Come on, let's go!" Alicia jumped out of her seat and the two of them went through the door of the office, striding briskly through the police station. They reached Renoir just as he put the phone down, and he turned to them. "Charlie!" he called. "Yeah, Chief?" Charlie said, stopping. "You can pretty much call me 'Arthur' now, you know," Renoir said. "Anyway, did you say it was Fitzgerald's you two had been heading for?" "Yes," Alicia answered. "It's a good thing I called you in, then," Renoir said. "It just got demolished by undead chickens." Charlie and Alicia both blinked. "So... 'bye," Renoir said, hurrying out an exit. "I'm amazed," Alicia said. "Come on!" Charlie said. "We're parked out front!" ======== "We, uh, weren't parked out front, were we?" Charlie asked as he and Alicia surveyed the area from the front steps of the Police Station. "I think we were," Alicia said with a look of complete awe on her face. "But where's my car?" Charlie asked. "Charlie," Alicia asked, "*where's the street*?" ======== Three blocks away, a dog was barking incessantly. In her bathroom, Karen Hopewell opened one eye and sighed. She was soaking in a nice hot bath, to which she'd added Epsom salts, Calgon, Mr. Bubble, bath beads, perfume, three Alka-Seltzer (just for the hell of it), and her old rubber duck from when she was five. It hadn't been a good week. Like her brother Charlie, and like Hopewells before her for the last hundred and eighty years (this dated back to Proinsias Hopewell, who had gotten off of a boat from Dublin in 1821, put down his bag, popped his neck, and arrested a guy), Karen was a cop. Unlike her brother Charlie, she hadn't made it to plainclothes yet. This week, she'd had to help deal with three millennialist prophets, a cult that claimed they were sent from the fifth dimension to "save" as many people as they could from the impending collapse of our plane of reality (the rite that "saved" said people involved the leader of the cult, three sheep, a bottle of baby oil, a feather duster, one of those five-foot-long red licorice whips that taste sorta like rubber cement, and the absence of clothing), an apocalyptic preacher with a Bible who was stopping traffic, an old woman swathed in hemp and crystals with hardbound copies of Cayce and Nostradamus' works who was doing the same thing, a five-hundred-pound man who was *also* doing the same thing but only because he'd fallen out of the back of a pickup truck during rush hour, and a hysterical mother whose newborn son had the face of an adult. Upon sober reflection, Karen would have rather been a rock star. Casey, who wasn't even her dog, kept barking. He was a good dog, but then again, he was also Charlie's dog. Everything Charlie touched seemed to turn to virtue, like some kind of really nauseating version of Moses. Casey was perfectly housebroken, good around children, liked strangers, almost never barked in the middle of the night, could let himself out, and could fetch the newspaper. At various times, he'd also fetched slippers, a pipe, a can of beer that hadn't been in Karen's fridge, the newspaper, the paperboy (who never put the Sunday paper through Karen's rosebush again), a pack of cigarettes, and Karen's revolver. Casey liked to use his own initiative. It was a minor quirk in an otherwise impressive dog. Karen was about to call out for Casey, but then she heard the knock on her front door. That explained it. With a groan, she got out of the tub, shrugged on her bathrobe, and, just in case it was a really brave door-to-door salesman, she picked up her nightstick from where she'd left it that morning. Shooing Casey away from the front door, Karen unlocked it. As she pulled the door open, she heard running, shouting, and the occasional scream from outside, but there were a lot of kids in her neighborhood, so she didn't think anything of it. The man standing at her front door was only wearing the front half of a suit. He turned to look at her, through eyes that had been sewn shut, and said something through sealed lips that sounded like a scream. Grave-dirt and the occasional worm fell from his body whenever he moved; his skin was mottled white and bleeding formaldehyde; he wasn't alone. "Oh, *great*," Karen said, and slammed the door as hard as she could. ======== "Hello?" Charlie said into his cell 'phone. "Is anyone there?" "No. No one is there. Hence the problem," Alicia said, waving her arms around in the fog. "I think your sister's place is this way, Charlie. It's only three blocks..." "The 'phone's making this strange sounds, though," Charlie said. "I think there may be interference." His 'phone, as though to underscore his point, made a loud hissing, ringing sound. "Hello?" "Interference from what? The fog?" "Stranger things have happened, 'Licia," Charlie said. "Like those." In the fog, visible only as silhouettes, giant figures shambled past Charlie and Alicia. Their footsteps shook the ground. They were roughly bipedal, walking upright as though unwillingly, and both Charlie and Alicia could see the rough bone spurs that jutted from them at every angle. One of them stopped, and turned in what Alicia was sure was their direction. "I think we should run now," Charlie said, and did so. Alicia kicked off her heels, and ran after him. ======== The bone shamblers barely noticed the small, fast things as they ran away. They were too small for food and too soft to be a threat; they were beneath the bone shamblers' notice. They had been brought here, they felt, for a reason. The shamblers were creatures of Limbo, the swirling mists beyond time and space, and thus they knew what might translate to patience. They would find out why they had been called, in the fullness of this new thing called "time." The shamblers walked off, through Kramer's Antiques, to await their destiny. Underneath their feet, the assembled relics of a lifetime's work lay crushed and destroyed, trampled underfoot as the shamblers came through the portal created by the hatching Gear. In so doing, the shamblers inadvertently freed three jinn; two lesser demons; five imps; a very surprised salamander; a group of five undines, who immediately dove into the plumbing and disappeared; and Ambrose Bierce, who, once upon a time, had stared for too long into the wrong mirror. And so it goes. ======== "Karen!" Charlie yelled, pounding on his sister's back door. "Karen, are you--" The door opened just enough for Karen to stick her service revolver out. Casey barked happily from inside. "Could you please let us in?" Alicia asked. "Downtown's sort of foggy." "Fog," Karen said flatly. "You're scared of fog." "It's more what's *in* the fog, Karen," Charlie said. "May we...?" "Yeah," Karen said. "Sure." She released the door's murder chain, let Charlie and Alicia in, and closed the door again as fast as she could. "What the hell's going on? My police scanner is just picking up white noise, the only radio station still on the air is NPR, and every TV channel is showing 'Benny Hill.'" A sudden moaning made Charlie and Alicia jump. "Oh, yeah, that." Karen's casual demeanor abruptly vanished. "*And* there are *zombies* on my *front porch*! *Zombies*!" "The Chief said that, yes," Charlie said, "so we rushed right over. He quit just as we got there." "He *quit*?" "The whole force decided to run away, Karen," Charlie said. "It's just you and me and maybe the Chief, if he hasn't gotten out of town by now." ======== Chief Renoir was halfway down Armstrong Street when the road exploded in front of him. A giant alligator jumped up from the sewers and ate his car whole. Hi-ho. ======== "So if they left town, maybe we should too?" Karen asked. "I mean," and she pointed towards the front of the house, "zombies! We leave!" "Not just zombies," Charlie said. "Vampires, giant fog monsters, huge fish creatures, and I think the Chief said something about undead chickens." "*What*?" "Giant spiders, too." "Charlie, you are not helping." "Karen," Alicia said, as much to head off Charlie as anything else, "could I borrow something to wear? And some shoes?" "Sure. You know where the bedroom is." Karen turned to Charlie. "Look, I don't know what the hell is going on, but we've got to get out of town and why are you being very calm and shaking your head?" "It's very simple, Karen," Charlie said, with the iron resolve of a man to whom *everything* is very simple. "The city is under attack, and it's my job to protect it. I'm a police officer, and I swore a solemn oath to defend this city against all who would seek to do it harm." He looked off into the distance, which, in this case, meant he was looking into the corner of Karen's dining room. "I intend to see that through to the bitter end." "That was very stirring, Charlie," Karen said. "I may throw up. Look, I know you love being a cop and all, but--" "Charlie? Karen?" Alicia said from the bedroom. "Could you come here?" Karen and Charlie exchanged a look. Karen pulled the hammer back on her revolver, while Charlie picked up her nightstick. Quickly, they ran into the bedroom. Alicia, dressed in a pair of jeans and a sports bra, with a shirt in her hands, wordlessly pointed out the bedroom window. The zombies surrounding Karen's house were under attack. All Charlie and Karen could see, initially, was a blur of motion, moaning, and blood. Then a feather floated by the window, and Charlie realized just what the small, fast creatures were. Outside, something let out a loud cluck of bloody victory. "Undead chickens, hm?" Karen said. "Charlie, dear," Alicia said, "that was a nice speech and all, but..." "...okay," Charlie said. "Let's get out of here. I don't know *how* we'll get out of here... but we will. I promise you that." Alicia smiled at him, and put the shirt on. It was a bowling jersey, which read NHPD on the left breast, and had NEW HAVEN P.D. screenprinted across the back. "...honey, choose another shirt." ======== TEASER: What could possibly be causing this destruction? Will Charlie, Karen, and Alicia make it out of town? Will more disasters befall the city of New Haven? Could the city, perhaps, conceivably, be saved? ...that's kinda up to the next author. Ask him. Or her. Whichever. ======== Authors' Notes: So I sez, 'n' I sez, "MMK," and this is during "The Last Escape," this online game I used to run, and I'm /msging the hell out of MMK while I really *should* have been doin' somethin' else, and I'm tellin' him that Russet Corners, Illinois, is this fictional city of mine that I blow the hell out of all the time. I mean, I've had it taken over by demon mages, eaten by monsters from outside time, invaded by demons, and, in LE, it's been infested with zombies. I mean, this has been *nailed*. And he sez, he sez, "It'd be funny if you did all of that to the city at the same time." I went, "Hey, yeah," and started thinking about it, and I wrote something. He wrote something. I wrote something. Meanwhile, the universe drifted onwards towards its inevitable slow heat death. Eventually, we got this, and we want you to write the next chapter. Do it. Now. For the record, I did not realize until I'd already started writing this that there actually *is* a New Haven. This is a different one, set somewhere in the coastal United States. Thomas Wilde Maryville, Missouri 1/31/02 Of course, if he had had his way at the time this story would be called "End Times City," so I think all things considered the real New Haven will cut us some slack. HELLO, NEW HAY-VEN! WE LOVE YOUUUUU! Anyway, as he stated, this story is completely open to the interpretation of whoever wants to write for it next. And if you think that should be you, by all means sign up! Go right ahead! We encourage that sort of thing. Very often. And with delightful zest. ...undead chickens. Heh heh heh. James Howard Winnipeg, Manitoba 2/07/02 (d'oh!)