THE GRINDING
Tuesday, August 17, 2010
[With apologies to Misters Cronin, King & McCammon. They all seemed to have so much fun writing the same book, so I thought I'd have a shot at it too.]
The brilliant scientist had just made his breakthrough in the field of Apocalyptic Metanarrative, when his wife died of freezerburn - an inevitable consequence of being trapped in the fridge for so long. When the sinister government Agent came to take his work away for evil, the scientist, crippled by grief, had no objection to make.
As a madcap scheme with no foreseeable value, the government naturally backed the Agent's work to the hilt. They even furnished him with an enormous, deathtrap-rigged mountain laboratory. Since all projections showed that the project would invariably go wrong, the lab was strategically placed in the center of the country and equipped with a nuclear self-destruct.
Security was tight, but it wasn't long before Sugar, the trained chimp who had complete run of the building after dark, got drunk on bootleg rum and released the virus across America. The self-destruct didn't go off, but it would remain primed and ready for at least six hundred more pages.
The first to die from the virus was the Agent himself. His brain was graphically sucked from his head in d4 rounds...
By the next chapter, the virus had spread to the archetypal small town at the foot of the mountain. As these were the first truly innocent victims, their deaths were especially tragic and overwritten, ensuring that the horror of the situation would become patently obvious.
Sally, from the hardware store, dissolved into ooze and then ate her children. Old Harry, the town drunk, gave mummy rot to his barstool companion, Chipper McGee. Perhaps worst of all, Miss Donalds, the grammar school teacher and eccentric spinster, wiped out the entire second grade with her electrical breath weapon.
As it spread, the world-building necessitated that the virus take wilder and more destructive forms. A Purple Worm crushed Chicago. Dinosaurs roamed the Texas plains, toppling over rigs and crushing oil workers underfoot. An Ear Seeker (formerly the Secretary of Defense) killed the President, but too late to stop the nuclear rain that wiped out most of the West Coast. Dragonnes patrolled the coast, freely noshing on NATO relief vessels.
By that time, the presses had ceased running, but everyone knew the horror that had befallen them. Some called it a plague of demons (Types I through VI), but others knew... the virus had unleashed first edition AD&D monsters.
(Now, a chapter of documentary evidence, written in italics, so you know to take it really seriously.)
[Found the locker of little Timmy, Age 6]
Dear diary,
Theres no reel story hear but miss jonson says i should record what we r doing because the reeder may need some exposition. As ther is no character bilding in this book i shuld rite reel funny so peple reely care about me and understan the tragady of my fate. i hope i am not et by a gelatinus koob but oh god hear it comes now... argh i die.
[End of documentary evidence.]
Meanwhile, a turn of the page later, a small settlement had built up in the ruins of civilization. Guided by a wise old gender-ambiguous figure (one previously considered insane, but now revealed as completely infallible), these desperate pioneers had driven off a pack of Ropers and built themselves someplace safe to life.
Many chapters were spent in this settlement, known as THE LAST HAVEN OF SANCTUARY, most describing the way that the people eked out their meager existence. Life was rough in THE LAST HAVEN OF SANCTUARY, but the people hunted, herded & planted their crops in very great detail, and, so, time went on.
It all changed when the little white girl showed up. Improbably, she had survived from the very beginning of the book, when she was first alluded to in the preface. Her brilliant whiteness had gone unmarred by the dirtiness of the world around her. All who gazed upon her were blinded by the dazzling, pearly iridescence of her pale skin. Those that wrapped their eyes in several layers of thin gauze were able to see deeper - to realize that, despite her youth, she was possessed by the wisdom of the ages. Forsooth, often she would open her white, white mouth and, from between her dazzling teeth, she would utter sage advice. Things like "you'll need cold iron to hit that Jackwere" and "if you stop shitting in the kitchen, you'd have less cholera".
The little white girl had been chosen, she explained, reflexively, to bring about a great cleansing. For if someone could just go to Middle America, climb the mountain and set off the conveniently-untriggered nuclear device that were left behind, everything would be "O.K." All the monsters in the world - even the psionic ones that nobody really understood - would simply go away. For the evil in the world was all linked together by invisible lines of plottery, invisible lines that would render them all inert by the end of the book.
Well, this kind of announcement wasn't easy to swallow, even if it did come from a little white girl (and she had been right about that Jackelwere). Also, because this was a book with delusions of literaryness, there was a lot of conflict within THE LAST HAVEN OF SANCTUARY. See, some folks had grown to like the post apocalyptic lifestyle. Greedy Mister Gustafferson, with his cellar full of pornography and tinned beef, well, he was doing alright. And everyone knew that Jimmy Grimston was laying pipe with the Lamia that nested by the power station. Don't forget that there was also love triangle that needed to be resolved with some of the protagonists (inevitably with the self-sacrifice of the extraneous male). And, naturally, it was reaping season - and after 150-odd pages of agricultural detail, damned if anyone is going to leave the wheat in the field.
Still, shit needed to get done. The cannibal Hobgoblins upstream provided one incentive, and the ever-dwindling supply of water/fuel/medicine/oxygen was another. Rumor had it, some Xill and an Iron Cobra had been spotted a few miles away - if the Fiend Folio critters were starting to turn up, events were fast spiraling out of control.
Maybe the little white girl was going to get her way after all...