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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.
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Clearance Sale - Richard Quarry
Also by Richard Quarry
a Nat Frayne mystery
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The Dread Men
And Make Not Dreams Your Master
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Lord Under London
The Case of Dancing Kali
The French Medium
Perfidious Albion
Further Adventures of Odysseus
Odysseus and the Eye of Odin
Man Of Many Turnings
The Evolved
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Point Of No Return
The Outcasts
The Evolved
Holobrain
Grinder
The God Machine
Standalone
Beer Run
Trade All My Tomorrows
Midnight Choir
Geneslide
Blue Dread
The Horns Of Hathor
Flameout
What Rough Beast
Absent From Felicity
The Homecoming of Lucian Wren
Mary's Hell
The Sound of Snowfall
The Fires of Beltane
Devolution Day
Beer Garden
The French Fries of Freedom
Soldier of Discontent
Clearance Sale
The Treasure of the Endless Scrub
Star Mole
Questing Song
Board Games
Miss Kittenses
String Theory
Tea Party
No Boobs, No Kardashians
The Blue Ibis
Soldier of Discontent and Other Stories
Devolution Day and Other F&SF Stories
Angry Angel
J'Hai Does Windsor
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
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