Clearance Sale

By Richard Quarry

When Alice alerts Bill to news flashes showing cities crumbling as metal melts away, he huffs, "Photoshopped."

 

Seconds later their apartment starts to fall away beneath them.

 

Bill and Alice scramble, slide, and bounce out, escaping with nothing but their lives and a gray plaster coating of gypsum dust cemented by bursting water pipes. They join the pitifully meager exodus of survivors struggling from the ruins. On the outskirts of town they trudge down streets lined with cars and trucks reduced to giant roller skates. The inhabitants gulp down the last of the hash and beanie-weenie before cans and can openers pass on to glory. Starved city-dwellers wave credit cards at natives who wave half-melted and distinctly un-phallic guns back. It's the thought that counts.

 

Oh yeah, and then there's the … werewolf? Hard to be sure. Whatever, it's got Alice moaning, "Why can't we have a plain old zombie apocalypse, like normal people?"

 

You should be so lucky.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Richard Quarry
• Release date: Apr 11, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215669334

Book preview

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Clearance Sale

Richard Quarry

Copyright © 2023 by Richard Quarry

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

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Contents

Clearance Sale

About the Author

Absent From Felicity

Clearance Sale

Bill Carburry, normally a reserved and civil man, loosed a heart-felt string of curses as the slicing blow he’d aimed at the tip of the stick sliced the skin off his left forefinger instead.

Bill, please, groaned Alice Doral, leaning against a tree trunk opposite. She held her arms wrapped tightly about herself, and rocked back and forth as she spoke. A coat of gray dust covered her. No more drama. No more noise. I can’t take it.

Bill looked with sinking heart upon the blood seeping from his finger. He couldn’t take any more either, yet it kept on coming. The end of the world as we knew it. The end of the world as anyone but a cockroach could know it. Terror and exhaustion orders of magnitude beyond anything his previously well-ordered life could have readied him for. Hunger, cold, uncertainty — check, check, check. And now this. Well, he didn’t think it was funny.

I know, Alice. He tossed the four-foot piece of branch away in disgust. Dumb idea anyway. Shit, I’m an IT professional. Trying to sharpen a stick with a piece of rock like a goddamn caveman, that’s just … demeaning. Apart from stupid. Damn, and I finally paid off my student debt last year, too. All for—

His lips clamped down. It wasn’t fair. Wasn’t right, not at all. When he thought of how much time, money, and general self-denial he’d put into mastering what the whole world regarded as the gold-plated ticket to a prosperous and secure future….

Well, it just wasn’t right.

Alice came shuffling across the twigs and fallen leaves. Fervently they held each other, seeking life, seeking warmth.

Ouch! said Bill, involuntarily.

Oh Bill, I’m sorry! she cried, staring dismayed at the claws that had replaced the fingers of her left hand. I forgot.

There’d been hardly any warning. And what they got, they didn’t believe.

It’s some kind of Orson Welles thing, Bill had insisted. "You know, that War of the Worlds radio broadcast telling everyone the Martians had landed? Created mass panic. People kept calling the police to report they’d actually seen the Martians. And that was