Crump Cover Reveal

I've been working on a political satire piece based loosely on the short story "Six Minutes" and it's just about ready to publish (very possibly by Monday 8/14).

Here's a look at the cover, done by JW Schmidt, who also did the cover for "Shanghai Shuffle" (available for pre-order here).

I'm not going to put "Crump" up for pre-order, it's just going to get published straight away. I'll push out links to buy the book on Amazon through Twitter.  Stay tuned!

The Rapture

There's this mural of John Lennon's face that I see every morning. Below his face it says "Imagine", and it always leaves me wondering about that first line: "Imagine there's no heaven..." This week's SciFiSunday entry looks at one way to get to one of the most famous lyrics in music history.

I was sitting in the cool dark of my grandmother’s bedroom, kneeling by her bedside. She reached out to me, her pale white hand trembling visibly. “Robert…” she whispered, her voice like the rasp of a saw tipping through the wet stump of a dead tree. I leaned in toward her face, craning my neck so that I could press my ear against her weathered lips. 

“Yes, Grandma?” I asked hesitantly. 

“Robert,” she croaked, writhing as she spoke my name. She clutched at me with her bony, bloody hand, clawing at my neck and face. “Robert! Jesus is here… the Lord is with us, in this room…” 

“Yes, Grandma,” I sighed, untangling myself from her grip. 

“The Lord has come for me, Robert!” she continued, her black eyes sparkling like obsidian as they stared off into the distance, toward an all powerful savior that only she could see. 

My grandmother was in the final hours of being Raptured. I knew this because I had seen it happen to almost everyone else in my family, and billions of people around the world, over the last three months. The Rapture had started in December, around Christmas Day. I can still remember the news reports bubbling up through all the “best of” shows and New Year’s sales. It was easy to ignore for the first couple days. But then people around me started to die. 

My grandma’s eyes rolled around in her skull and then locked on me. “Robert!” she creaked, “Are you…” she licked her lips hesitantly, like she wasn’t sure she wanted to hear the answer the the question she was about to ask. 

“Yes, Grandma?” I prodded. I already knew what she was going to ask. She was going to ask the same question that every other person who had Raptured had asked me over the last few months. I’d talked to others that hadn’t been Raptured yet, and they had all experienced the same thing. When someone was near the end, right before they were about to be Raptured, the questioning would start. 

“Are you… going to be…” my grandmother faltered. At this point, I’m sure that she already knew the answer. The Rapture had been going since December. It was almost Good Friday. So far as I knew, my grandma was one of the last people in the world being Raptured. 

As January and February slowly ground down and everyone from my grandmother’s church group had already been Raptured, she began to fret. By the end of March, my grandmother was frantic. Why hadn’t she been Raptured? Had she done something to upset the Lord? Had she committed some unforgivable sin? Was her faith not strong enough. 

The news media hadn’t helped my grandma’s worrying. In the early days, there was widespread panic. A mystery disease that killed its victims in just three short days was engulfing the world. But then the statistics started to come out. When the Alt-right and the Christian-right first grabbed hold of what was happening, the panic quickly flipped and an hysteria swept over parts of the country: the End Times were coming.
I don’t remember who it was that first made the connection, but by mid-January, the symptoms had become widely known and data scientists had started to publish their findings. The three day disease seemed to be targeting people of faith. True believers all over the world were falling into a delirious fever, having religiously inspired hallucinations, and then dying peacefully in their sleep. Word on social media quickly spread: people weren’t dying of a disease, they were being Raptured. 

The nature of the symptoms helped reinforce the belief that this was a religious experience and not a disease, especially among Christians all over the world. From the onset of the first symptoms, it took three days for someone to die. The Christians imbued this number with special meaning. On the second day of the sickness, people developed sores on their palms and sometimes along their forehead. Christian leaders said these were sores were Christ-like stigmata that proved the faith of those being Raptured. And finally, there were the religious hallucinations that happened just before death. People were raving about seeing Jesus and the media ate it all up. 

Once people started to believe that they were being taken away to heaven, things started to fall apart. Mega churches held “Rapture parties” where the sick would kiss members of the congregation and smear blood across their mouths and eyes to help speed them on their way to being Raptured. In the places where religious violence had been raging for years, war ceased immediately as millions of people simply went home and died in their beds peacefully. People all over the world were dying, and they were excited to be doing it. In the US, the death infrastructure was completely overwhelmed. I’ve heard reports on the radio that there are dead bodies in homes all across the country. In big cities like New York and Los Angeles, the homeless populations just piled up in the streets. 

But by the end of March, the number of Raptures happening had dropped off to almost nothing. The official estimate put the global death toll at somewhere in the neighborhood of four billion people, though many officials are quick to point out that there’s really no way to be sure. It seemed that anyone who was going to be raptured had already been raptured. Almost everyone in the world with a strong religious conviction was dead.
Everyone except my grandma. Tears were welling in her eyes as her lips formed the words. “Are you going to be... Raptured?” she managed to ask at last. My grandmother had always considered herself a “good” Christian. She prayed for parking spaces at Walmart, and dismissed anything that didn’t fit with her world view as “the Devil’s doing”. So when everyone else in my grandmother’s Bible study group had died by the end of February, she started to get genuinely worried. 

“Yes,” I nodded, coughing meekly. “I started to show the signs just this morning,” I told her, the lie coming out more easily than I had anticipated. 

“Let me… let me see your hands,” she said, her large eyes darting around the room wildly. I hadn’t thought of this. 

“I only just started to Rapture,” I told her, looking away awkwardly. “I don’t have the stigmata, yet.” She sighed heavily, her body going still. It seemed like she was satisfied with my dodge. 

By the end of March, after innumerable millions of zealous believers had Raptured, the news coverage started to change dramatically. With the media and the government suddenly devoid of people who believed in ghosts, gods, and paradises filled with virgins and golden palaces, the notion that there was some divine rapture sending deserving souls to heaven was replaced with the more down to earth news that the world was being ravaged by a highly contagious, highly selective epidemic. 

My grandmother would sit in front of the television, damning the news anchor for the lies he was delivering. “It’s a Rapture!” she would cry hysterically. “You son of a bitch, you don’t know your ass from your elbow from a hole in the ground! This isn’t some disease! It’s the Lord taking His people back to His kingdom!” All of her favorite television personalities had either died weeks ago or gone into hiding to cover up the fact that they hadn’t been raptured yet. 

Three days ago, my grandma had burst into the living room, her body agile, her eyes bright. “I’m Rapturing!” she cried. Big fat tears started to run down her cheeks as she danced around like she was a little girl. I tried to smile, but I could feel the tears running down my cheeks too. My mom and dad had died in January, along with almost everyone else I knew. My grandma was one of the last people in my life. 

I’d never felt that religious fervor burning in my body, but I’d never had the balls the tell anyone. I wasn’t like my Uncle Frank, who had been banned from family events because of his open disdain for anything religious. I hadn’t heard from him since last summer. 

“Robert…” my grandma whispered, her lips barely parting. 

“Yeah?” I asked her. 

“I’m going with Jesus now,” she told me. 

I reached out and grabbed her hand, holding it tightly, as if I could keep her from going by holding on. She closed her eyes, and then let out her last breath. I put my head down on her chest and started to sob. Now I was alone. 

A dull thump-thump-thump echoed in my head like a heartbeat. “Grandma?” I said, sitting upright. I pushed my fingers up against her neck, but there was no pulse. I sat in silence for a moment, confused, then the thump-thump-thump came again. “Ah,” I sighed, realizing it was the door. I closed the door to my grandma’s room as I left, then went to answer the door. 

I recognized the huge, fat man standing on the doorstep the moment I opened the door. 

“Bobby,” he said, engulfing me in a sweaty bear-hug. 

“Hey, Uncle Frank,” I muttered. 

“How you doing?” he asked, pulling me outside into the bright afternoon sun. 

“I… uh… Grandma just died,” I said awkwardly. 

“I knew she would,” he said. “You and your Uncle Terry were the only ones I figured would survive this mess. Terry didn’t make it, though.” He paused for a moment, looking at me. “What’s wrong, Bobby?” 

“Well…” I wasn’t sure what to say. “Everyone’s dead.” 

“Yeah,” Uncle Frank laughed. “All those hypocrite assholes are dead. Have you been watching the news? There’s peace in the Middle East. There hasn’t been a single hate crime reported in the States in over a month.” 

“Yeah,” I shrugged. “But… I mean, I’ve heard all that on the news. But everyone is dead.” 

“They’re in Heaven,” he corrected me. “With Jesus.” 

“I guess you’re right. It’s what they wanted.” A sense of bitterness suddenly replaced the loneliness and sorrow I’d been feeling. “Yeah…” I said, screwing up my face. “They did want to die. They wanted to die and be with Jesus more than they wanted to be with me.” My mom, my dad, everyone; they’d all said the same stupid thing: “I’m doing with Jesus now.” 

“We’re better off, Bobby,” Uncle Frank said. “Anyway, let’s get the fuck out of here.”
“Where are we going?” I asked. 

“Anywhere you want,” he told me. “It’s Sunday. That means we can do anything we want.”

Six Minutes

Here's a short story based on an episode of Radio Lab that I listened to yesterday.

It was just after four in the morning. He hadn’t sleep last night. In fact, he hadn’t slept since Tuesday. But that didn’t matter much to him, he’d never put much stock in sleep. He often bragged about not needing to sleep. It was part of what set him apart from the rest of humanity. It was part of what made him so successful when others were struggling just to get by. Sleep might part of the rule book of being human, but he’d never been one to play by the rules. He chuckled lightly at the thought of that silly, impotent word. Rules, he mused. Rules didn’t apply to him.

It was just after four in the morning. The sun was still below the horizon. The air was cool and still. This was the time of the day that he most enjoyed. He reveled in being awake so early, while everyone else was unconscious and useless. It put him at an advantage. Life was a constant war, filled with countless battles. While his enemies were asleep, he was up and preparing a sneak attack. He would win the battle that was today. Winning was what he’d built his life around. Winning was what he did best.

Shifting in his silk robe, he thumbed through his phone, scrolling past the boring crap to find the juicy morsels. He jammed his other hand into a bucket of day-old KFC and pulled out a soggy drumstick to gnaw on while he read. When something good caught his eye, he immediately retweeted it without reading past the headline. The headline was the most important part. Nobody read the details. Details were for pinheads and pussies. Details were for little bitches that couldn’t make up their minds. Details were for losers. Headlines were for winners.

While he was tweeting, something on the news caught his ear. He liked to keep the news playing on the the television twenty-four hours a day. When he moved into this ugly little house, he had had a television installed in every room so that he would be able to stay connected to the world and what was going on at all times. Truth be told, he would have preferred to stay in his own place. But this house came with the job. And anyway, living here gave him a chance to get away from his nagging wife, who had decided to keep living in their old house. In his old house, he corrected himself. That house didn’t belong to her. Nothing belonged to her. Everything she had, she had because of him. Her fame, her jewelry, her house, her fake tits, her kid. Everything came from him. And if he felt so inclined, he could take it all back.

He fished around in the sheets for a minute until he found the television remote, and then cranked the volume up so that the sound filled the room. The girl on the news was a pretty blonde with plump red lips and striking blue eyes. “She could use some bigger tits,” he mumbled to himself as he shoved his hand under his bathrobe. He’d been pushing rope for years, but he still enjoyed fondling it while watching the news on Fox. He liked to imagine the blonde newsgirls on their knees, drooling all over him like dogs salivating on a prime cut of meat. He knew how they treated the girls over at Fox, and that made the fantasy all that much more real. These girls had gotten to where they were by being on their knees. They were well trained, and that was just how he liked his women to be.

While the newsgirl rattled off something about a conspiracy being perpetrated by the some liberal pansies, his stomach started to rumble uncomfortably. The rumbles started to build, moving from his belly down into his lower intestines. He pushed his cellphone into his robe pocket and then, with a sudden, agile burst of speed uncanny for a man of his obese girth and age, he leapt from the bed and sprinted across the room to the en suite. His ass made contact with the cool porcelain bowl just as he lost control of his sphincter, spraying the inside of the commode with a hot liquid stream of feces.

“Ahhhh,” he moaned in discomfort, “Jesus Christ.” He rocked forward, redistributing his weight over the toilet. “What the hell did I eat?” he asked the floor as the contents of his stomach emptied into the bowl. He’d been harboring suspicions since moving in that someone had been poisoning his water. Pursing his lips, he made a mental note to have someone look into the matter, but promptly forgot about the whole thing the moment his attention got sucked back to the news blaring from the two televisions in the bathroom.

“... and what do you think they’re saying?” a man on the television demanded. This guy was a recurrent guest on Fox and he always had something compelling to say. He looked at the man, suddenly under his spell.

“What did they say?” he mouthed the words like a silent prayer.

“They say,” the man bellowed, seemingly in response, “that the Russians, the North Koreans, the Iranians…” the man on the television paused for dramatic effect before suddenly exploding, “They’re all gonna nuke us! We can’t just sit by and let this happen! By God, we need to stand up. We’re a nation of Christians! Christian men and women, with Christian values, and Christian duties. We have to strike first. We can’t let them his us, we can’t let them get the upper hand! We have hit them before they hit us. Mark my words, these godless communists, these radical Islamic extremists, they’ll launch an attack on us by the end of this week. I can guarantee you this.”

From his throne, he stared at the television screen, transfixed. Today was Thursday. The end of the week was tomorrow. “Christ,” he mumbled to himself, “it’s a good thing I was watching the news. If I hadn’t seen this report, I wouldn’t have known this was going to happen.”

This was precisely the reason he kept Fox news running twenty-four hours a day on every television in the house. Fox was the only reliable source of information he had. And for a man in his position, he needed a trusted and true resource. His decisions were very important… no, they were the most important. And he was surrounded by disinformation and fake news! Everyone around him was constantly bombarding him with false reports and fake statistics. The lies were so thick in this city, it was almost enough to overcome even him. But fortunately for him, and fortunately for the world, he had good sources like Fox.

He grabbed at the phone hanging from the wall beside the bath towels and barked into the receiver: “Get me Peter.”

Seconds later, Peter came stepped into the bathroom. Peter was tall and thin, with a serious face floating above a tailored uniform that exacerbated the narrowness of his body.

“Mr. President,” Peter said solemnly as he entered the room.

“Give me the biscuit,” the President ordered.

Without hesitation, Peter reached into the case and handed the President a small plastic card with an authentication code printed on it.

“Get me the Joint Chiefs,” the President commanded into the phone he was still holding. There was a moment of static and then a weary voice on the other end answered.

“Mr. President,” the voice said.

“Yes. That’s me,” the President said. “I am the President. We need to launch an attack. A nuclear attack.”

There was a momentary pause at the other end of the line, as if the voice thought this might be a joke. “Yes, sir,” the voice said at last.

The President recited the code on the biscuit and then listed the targets. “Do North Korea first. Then do Iran. Do Russia last. Do you understand me?”

“Yes, sir,” the voice responded. “But we’ll need more specific targets.”

“I gave you specific targets,” the President whined. “North Korea, Iran, and Russia. All three of them.”

“Would you… be able to give us a city, at least, sir?” the voice asked carefully.

“The capital cities,” the President responded. “We need to do this now. Before they have a chance to nuke us first.” The President reviewed what he had heard on the news broadcast in his head. “It’s Thursday!” he blurted suddenly. The end of the week is Friday!”

“Yes, sir,” the voice said flatly.

“Mr. President!” another voice broke in abruptly over the phone. “This is the Secretary of Defense! I was just told that you’ve ordered a nuclear attack. Is this… wise, sir?”

“Mr. Secretary,” the President said, “I’m glad you’re on the line. Yes, this is wise. I have it on good authority, on the best authority, that North Korea, Iran, and Russia are planning to launch nuclear attacks on the US by the end of this week.”

“But Mr. President,” the Secretary said slowly, “North Korea doesn’t have the ability to strike the US. Their most successful missile tests barely make it into the Sea of Japan.” The Secretary paused for a moment to clear his throat. “And the Iranians,” he continued, “they don’t even possess a nuclear arsenal.”

“Don’t you feed me that fake news liberal pussy bullshit,” the President spat. “I have highly credible sources. I know things that you don’t know. I know a lot of things. I am the President. I’m ordering this attack.”

“Yes, sir,” the Secretary said after a long and awkward silence. “But sir, I want to be on record saying that I advise against this. The Russians will retaliate against us, likely within seconds of our launch. Their missiles will hit us and our missiles will hit them almost simultaneously. It will be a nuclear holocaust.”

“Not if we nuke them first,” the President said triumphantly. “Launch the nukes.”

“Yes, sir,” said the first voice. “The targets will be annihilated in six minutes.”

“Excellent,” the President said, slamming the phone back on the wall with a self-satisfied grunt. He sat on the toilet for a moment, basking in the glory of his latest military victory. The Liberal Media wasn’t going to fuck this one up for him. He’d just saved every man woman and child in the greatest country on Earth.

“You’ve done it again,” he said to himself. “You’re amazing.” The President suddenly noticed that Peter was still standing in the bathroom with him. “Get the hell out of here,” the President yelled. “Can’t a man wipe his ass in private?”

Once Peter was gone, the President pulled his phone from his robe pocket and tweeted “Just nuked North Korea, Iran, Russia. #MAGA”.

He put his phone back in his robe and then took his time cleaning up. He washed his face and brushed his teeth. He cut his fingernails and vainly attempted to straighten out his unruly hair. Then, pulling his bathrobe tight around his body, he strutted back into his bedroom. Today was one for the history books, that was sure. He looked over his shoulder at the television, checking the time. It had been about six minutes since he gave his order. By now, those bastards would be dead. He walked over to his bedroom window and pulled back the curtains. As he did so, there was a brilliant white flash that filled the room with a blinding light.