The apocalypse will be unexpectedly boring?

Taken from “Crunch Time”, which you can buy for only .99, alongside 200 more pages of reading (including an extended preview of the upcoming science fiction novel BLUE HIGHWAY). Get it right here.

“I pointed out the window, even though the parking lot was largely empty now, but for some scattered trash and newspapers. No eaters or fraternity pranksters or cops or anyone. Newspapers. Who the hell reads newspapers anymore? They looked as if they’d been put there by the set dresser for THE OMEGA MAN and it he thought it was still 1973.

At least we weren’t in Los Angeles. You couldn’t have paid me to be there today. The riots, at least they said they were riots, were going full bore.

Full bore as in boring. We’d been hearing that the world had been coming to an end for how many years now? Acid rain, peak oil, infertility crisis, overpopulation, global warming then global dimming. LA had been in slow-motion apocalypse since we decided that we all couldn’t get along. Just that now the rioters were occasionally eating some unlucky clod who couldn’t get out of the way, that reports told of them being shot point blank and getting back up and someone had used the word ‘zombie,’ proving that they could be ignored. Zombies were so last year.”

Granted, zombies were last year when I wrote this in 2011.

So .99 gets you “Crunch Time”, “Blink” (a horror story about a thing from another place that can’t decide to be when its dragged here by mistake), previews of “A Mere Death” (fantasy from the volume DUSTBEARER), six chapters of RAGNAROK SUMMER (fantasy novel which follows the Norse gods 100 years after their victory at Ragnarok), a selection of essay from my nonfiction books, and finally a long preview of BLUE HIGHWAY, featuring a United States torn apart by several wars for secession, The Great Big Zero and muscle cars running on hydrogen instead of high-octane.

Give it a try, won’t you?