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  Praise for LIVE, FROM THE END OF THE WORLD

  With [Live, From The End Of The World], there is a bold new voice howling in the post-apocalyptic wasteland. William Vitka brings serious game to the genre in a way that revitalizes while it terrifies.

  —Jonathan Maberry, New York Times best-selling author of ASSASSIN’S CODE and DUST & DECAY

  [Live, From The End Of The World] is charmingly perverse, vivid and thrilling. It feels like Philip K. Dick’s delicious hate letter to J.J. Abrams.

  —Cherie Priest, award-winning author of BONESHAKER and GANYMEDE

  Greatness manifests itself upon you immediately. It’s there in the song’s first stanza. The film’s first few frames. In the case of William Vitka, greatness grabs you by the face, not letting go until it has told you what he wants you to know. Sometimes dark. Sometimes funny. Sometimes scary. Always true.

  —Bernard Schaffer, author of GUNS OF SENECA 6

  Live, From The End Of The World

  By William Vitka

  A PERMUTED PRESS BOOK

  ISBN (eBook): 978-1-61868-582-7

  LIVE, FROM THE END OF THE WORLD

  The Hroza Connection Book 3

  © 2015 by William Vitka

  All Rights Reserved

  Cover art by Sean Vitka

  This book is a work of fiction. People, places, events, and situations are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or historical events, is purely coincidental.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author and publisher.

  Permuted Press

  109 International Drive, Suite 300

  Franklin, TN 37067

  http://permutedpress.com

  Contents

  Chapter 1: TechnoPulp; Pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo

  Chapter 2: It’s Okay, Ma’am. I’m a Scientist

  Chapter 3: No Vacancies at the Roach Motel

  Chapter 4: Wherever You Go, There You Are

  Chapter 5: They’ll Last Longer than We Will

  Chapter 6: Paging Dr. Romero

  Chapter 7: omgwtfbbq

  Chapter 8: There Will Be Blood

  Chapter 9: Five Nails Through the Neck

  Chapter 10: QED, You’re Fucked

  Chapter 11: Eat the Press

  Chapter 12: Misery Index

  Chapter 13: Corpus Malus

  Chapter 14: The Extinction Event Horizon

  Chapter 15: In the Mouth Of Madness

  Chapter 16: Movement from Discord

  Chapter 17: Sterilization

  Chapter 18: Joke’s Over

  Chapter 19: Despair

  Chapter 20: A Dead Man’s Tracks in the Dust

  About the Author

  Chapter 1:

  TechnoPulp; Pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo

  He had skullfucked a whore to death.

  Brooklyn Councilman Jonathon Schneer had at some point between one and one-thirty a.m., NYC-time, decided that sleep was for jerks and that ramming his wingding through the eyehole of a hooker in some kind of Catallus-styled insanity would be an excellent use of his time.

  There’s a flurry of activity in the newsroom. Our police scanner picks up the robotic radio chatter of political perversion from NYPD rapid response drones at the scene.

  This is a five-alarm fire. Almost as good as the mayor getting shot. Or maybe Pope Americus losing a testicle.

  We gotta scramble. Get the fighters on deck.

  We need a witness. A source. Something. Anything. One of the reporters tracks down Schneer’s driver. Some guy named Whitlock.

  Mr. Whitlock, we’d like to ask you a few questions.

  The editor on duty gets one of the kids in the newsroom to cold-call the driver’s house. Meaning: We’ve got a name and contact information, but whoever’s gonna answer won’t be expecting the call or the questions.

  We get a lotta static when we do this. Folks who tell us to fuck ourselves in various ways. So, it ain’t much of a shock that the driver’s wife is pissed at us. But she’s more pissed at her husband for “runnin round” the city at the beck and call of a “honky politician.”

  She gives us Whitlock’s mobile number.

  The driver’s full name is Albert J. Whitlock. From file photos of Schneer’s cadre and a cursory glance at the city database, we see he’s a stocky five-foot-eight black man. He’s been at the pedals for seventeen years. Largely as a wheelman for local pols. He’s been Schneer’s driver for six years.

  This is all good to fluff the story. Good bullshit details and tidbits that give the piece weight or “background,” as idiots say.

  But we’re goddamn journalists. Not a bunch of stupid “journalism” students who don’t have enough sense or balls to get on the street and be motherfucking journalists.

  We need meat. We are... Well, we’re tabloid reporters, if you gotta know.

  You snob.

  Whitlock answers his cell with a grunt. He says he just finished giving his statement to police. And he’s tired. Shaken.

  And while he shouldn’t tell me anything at all (he says, off the record, that he loves our front page headlines, and “never much cared for” Schneer), here’s what I jot down on my Asimov datapad:

  No drugs are involved.

  Schneer is a devout Catholic. At least, he goes through the motions.

  Schneer is “totally dedicated” to his family—but!

  Schneer’s got two brands of sexual deviance: A pleasure droid and a hooker. Some chick named Jocelyn Mathers, alias Jackie Em.

  Ah. There’s that meat.

  Why would Schneer kill a prostitute he enjoys regularly? Did she give him a disease? Is he a good Catholic boy driven mad by politics? A psycho in disguise? A lunatic making the laws?

  There are a lot of angles to consider for a journalist-cum-tabloid hack such as myself.

  When Whitlock checked on him, he claims, Schneer was talking to another entity. Maybe babbling at the hooker. But that couldn’t have been it—for reasons that should be clear.

  Schneer then allegedly started screaming at the sky about monsters. Some “corruption.” How he really wasn’t “a bad person.”

  The guy saying all this while blood and brains and cum splosh off his hard-as-a-handle dick.

  NYPD drones contradict the driver’s story.

  They report no such dialog, no such raving. The NYPD says—and this could be creepier depending on your disposition—that Schneer did nothing more than moan, groan and apologize.

  Doesn’t matter.

  You think I have the time to care about what’s true anymore?

  Unreliable witnesses are a true bastard to deal with, but that’s all right. I can use all of it. Schneer’s supposed demonic dialog and the NYPD’s claim that he was just shy of catatonic.

  All I need to do is attribute certain claims to certain witnesses.

  My company doesn’t have to take responsibility for what they saw.

  Or rather, what they say they saw.

  Exaggerations and the hyperbolic are our bread and butter.

  But I still need a goddamn headline.

  Our archaic print edition will hit stands in the morning.

  The Internet will not wait.

  For the past whoknowshowmanyyears, physical newspapers haven’t earned media outlets a dime. The few stalwarts that do still print a “real” paper do so mo
stly out of stubbornness. All focus is put on digital editions.

  Get us online! Gets us on your phone! Gets us on your datapad! Even our holograms are cute (“r u single lol click here for tight wet holes in ur area”—Kill me now).

  Hey, you can finger fuck em if you want to. Just wave that digit around right, and make sure you subscribe, cuz I need to pay the rent.

  We’re the frontlines. We move fast. We break stories. And thanks to the ever-steamrolling cultural zeitgeist, we can get away with a hell of a lot. Every media outlet is a tabloid now. Every media outlet is in a race to last place.

  Take your morality, your beliefs, and chuck em right the fuck out the window. Sentimentality doesn’t interest me. It never really interested anyone else, either.

  You’re the ones buying this. I just supply it.

  People want sex and violence. Weirdness and perversity. I deliver.

  If it bleeds, it leads.

  This story has all the craziness a reporter could ask for, but it needs a headline. Something snappy. Something that’ll stick in people’s heads. A five or six word “sell” of sex, prostitution, politics, violence, and bloodshed.

  Schneer’s supposed beliefs give me the freedom to make religious connections. As an addendum to that, he always runs as an Independent, but his voting leans toward Neo-conservatism. I don’t even know if I’m gonna be writing the story or just the headline—breaking news is a chaotic event—but background does help the thinking process.

  I want a full, blown-out page. A big spread. Or whatever fits within the computer/datapad screen’s frame. I pull a picture of the street from our NYPD livefeed—provided to us by a doofy kid in the police department for a couple grand. Adjust the levels to increase the contrast between light and dark.

  There’s some red near the mouth of the alley. Drippy splatters where the blood and brains and goo slipped from the head of Schneer’s penetrating prick.

  I’ll increase the hues. Bring out the red end of the spectrum.

  But it’s gotta stay dark. I need to make it look like a hellish gullet. Not just a throat. People need to think of Tartarean jaws when they see it—a malicious monstrous maw.

  Headline. Headline. Headline.

  I grab the NYPD feed and flick my finger up to turn on my Asimov’s hologram interface. I watch the scene live as drones film it. I wait for inspiration to strike.

  COPS CUFF CRANIUM CRUSHING COUNCILMAN

  Yes.

  I’m a fuckin genius.

  * * *

  I walk out the elevator bank in my building and pass through the security doors. They’re big. Made from a Plexiglas composite of dubious reliability. They slide sideways from the center and look like they might’ve come from the set of Star Trek.

  The night lights in the lobby play over my face like static on a dead screen.

  I scowl. My datapad pumps an old “Best Of” Death Metal mix I made up through my headphones and into my grey matter.

  I hate this place. I hate me. I hate what I do.

  I hate what we’ve become.

  Where are my flying cars? Why don’t we have teleporters? Why is it so hard for the world to find drinking water? Why were we all so quiet while stem cell research was murdered by religion? Why can’t we afford anything? Why haven’t we cured X, Y, Z?

  Oh ho, good sir! There’s no money in cures. There’s only money in treatment.

  Remember elephants? I don’t either.

  Brooklyn and lower Manhattan? Probably only around cuz of the giant fuckoff sea walls around the islands of NYCZ. It’s worth mentioning that NYCZ is still a primary source of income for the United States of Christ.

  Tourism. All that.

  Fuck.

  We have nothing of the shining future that fantasists masturbate to. What we have are a few of the nightmares from Philip K. Dick’s pink-light paranoid brain. We don’t have matter transporters or benevolent pastel societies. We have mountains of garbage and digital diseases cuz people can’t resist having sex with new and interesting things—which includes the first line of consumer androids.

  NYCZ broke ground when it came to robosex scandals.

  To the shock of absofuckinlutely nobody, it involved a politician.

  The datapad in my jacket plays the next audio track. Vader’s “The Book.” Good shit.

  I wave goodnight to the security guard. His face is bathed in electric blue. He stares into the screen of his gadget and pays me no mind. I watch his hands move. He flicks a finger along his pad’s screen. Left. Right. Then he flicks upward and his machine’s hologram system displays the media he selected. A replay of two manga girls making out. Disgusting waste of tech, truth told.

  Anime... Why anime?

  Outside, it’s another chilly December night. Building-sized neon and multi-story screens hawk wares from our glorious business overlords. Shit, they’ll even buy your DNA. For top dollar.

  Maybe you can buy your privacy back for some genetic code...

  Sorry, bad joke. Privacy went away a long time ago. It ain’t coming back.

  The wind picks up. Smells like a superstorm is brewing—something that’ll shit a dozen inches of polluted grey snow onto the streets.

  I can’t remember the last time I saw white snow. Real, pure snow. Hell, the Earth hasn’t seen a natural environmental cycle in a couple decades. Half a foot of snow will fall in a night. The next day will bring black carbon-heavy rain. Thick fog will follow. The temperature will do whatever it feels like doing from moment to moment. Things will melt. Things will freeze.

  Civilization tosses and turns in the bed it’s made.

  The future sucks.

  I wanna to teleport to a bar. I want whiskey and I want to forget. I wanna think clearly, but I can’t stop wondering what new headline will come with tomorrow’s craziness. I wanna relax, but my conscience will not let me be.

  And my conscience is in conflict with my landlord.

  An advertising drone buzzes me. The metal merchant swoops down. Its disc-shaped fuselage contorts. Little platinum arms pop out holding a two-foot wide screen. Its boosters swivel for balance. Tiny impulse magnetoplasma rockets fire. Expensive, impressive technology for a pissbot like this.

  NASA sold away that same magnetoplasma tech about twenty years ago when it was desperate for funding. The agency went bankrupt anyway. Sold theoretical blueprints at a consumer-industry auction. Our best and brightest have gone to shit cuz knowledge is no longer viable.

  We got plasma-powered sales bots, yep, but no flying cars to escape from em with.

  The drone steadies. Flashes. Takes a bioreading to ascertain my age and health. Totally shitty. Totally legal.

  Targeted advertising at its finest.

  The thing squawks. “Hey dude, you look tired. Need a jump?”

  All ad drones have AI. Some are smarter than others. This thing might as well be called A Scanner Dumbly.

  I flick my Zippo. Light an American Spirit cigarette. “I don’t need any of your consumer-grade garbage, pusher droid.” The irony is not lost on me.

  “Man, you don’t even need a prescription for this!”

  I notice a Wal-Mart logo on its side. Its screen flashes and some fuckball electronica from speakers I can’t see. A pill slowly takes shape on the screen. There’s a happy face on it.

  Ecstasy?

  Not so lucky.

  The word REVITALOXIN fades up.

  I put my cigarette out on its very expensive screen. The stogie leaves a melty, dark ring.

  “Damage!” the machine squeals. “I Detect damage. This advertising drone is property of Walmart Stores, Inc, stock symbol WMT. Any intentional harm caused to this mechanical device will be considered in violation of—”

  I head to the bar. Leave the flying toaster to sputter and spark at someone else.

  Cha
pter 2:

  It’s Okay, Ma’am. I’m a Scientist

  “You’re a fuckin moron, I hate you, and I’m gonna see to it that you are sodomized with your mother’s rotting bones, you troglodytic misanthrope.”

  This is how I talk to my friends.

  Wait. “Friends” isn’t the right phrase. “People capable of tolerating my incessant assholishness,” is much, much closer.

  Fellow journalist Fred Okafor cocks an eyebrow. “What... What does that have to do with my belief in God?”

  Fred works for The New York Times as part of their online team. I hate The Times cuz it’s considered respectable. Also their headlines suck and ain’t funny at all.

  Still, here we are. Enjoying another Tuesday night at The Thing—a dive bar of the best caliber. The kind of place schmucks like me adore for having “character.” A place that’s the opposite of a friendly environment. A place where the only time someone’s gonna bother you is if you’re bothering them.

  I’m wearing a short-sleeved shirt with a cartoon of the prophet Muhammad. He’s got a bomb on his head. The caption underneath reads: Mullah-fucka!

  I find it clever in an intensely stupid way.

  Nobody tries to behead me.

  Our bartender, a gorgeous post-op transgender woman, (her real name is Janice, I think, but I always end up calling her Jaundice by accident. She changed her name to Absinthe or some other Goth shit so it doesn’t really matter what I call her) has horns and a subcutaneous screen in her sternum that displays various forms of piercing fetish porn. The little monitor is bright enough that her skin doesn’t get in the way of me seeing what’s being done to someone else’s skin.

  Nobody tries to behead her, either. But they should. Just so I can watch what happens. She’s nuts. Gloriously so. I saw her kill four iridescent, mutated rats in here last week with a nail gun. Squeaky things that looked like a mix between a guinea pig and a spider. She threw the little glowing bodies at tourists from the mainland United States of Christ afterward. It was beautiful.