Chapter 6 is up, free like all the others till July 27. I freely admit that titling a chapter in which bazillions of jellyfish wash up on the beach "A large group of professionals" makes me happy.
At long last, the Gipper rises!
In this chapter, Joe finds out just how bad it really is; it's a good thing Aura's on the job, and that she has what you might call the Ultimate Backup in an Appropriate Pickup.
Since line clips from the chapter, both here and in Twitter, proved popular yesterday (and a couple of you nice people dropped me notes to tell me they were exciting, and even suggested one or two more you thought I should have used) .... here's some more line clips. Imagine this as the movie trailer with quick cuts between them:
Schar’hukk C’desto’dha was concerned and attentive, not afraid or confused; he was a professional.
The next innocent-seeming monkey, an apocalypse-obsessed closet-case Lutheran pastor from Aisselle de Dieu, Wisconsin, had the requisite innocence, but it was the kind of innocence associated with a holy fool, making up in fool anything it lacked in holy ....
Joe is attacked not just by monstrous alien evil, but also by a thesaurus: Joe had been thinking, This is so weird, this is so awful, since the weird pep-rally-cum-Satanic-rite began, but when Bayle Brazenydol froze in mid-sentence, the top of his head flipped back at the eyebrows, and something like a skinned bat—no, more like a turtle pried out of its shell—then again, like a nude possum with an umbrella sewn under its skin and its face taken off with a sander—whatever it was, it made his immortal soul recoil, his mortal stomach heave, and his writer’s mind reach for words like squamous, oleaginous, grimy, and slither.
“They dare to use the Elder Tongue here,” Hayes said. “It is worse than I thought. Move away from me. I am glad I knew you.”
He was not looking his best. The flesh had shrunk, the wax fills no longer fit, the eyes had fallen in and flaps of the suit that had been lightly basted together up the back hung loose behind him—but there was no question that this was the Gipper himself, Ronald Reagan, back again. “Well,” he said, “Here I am.”
And looking down at the way the suit hung empty on his desiccated flesh, and then holding up hands to show that his right hand, and some of his fingers on his left, had dropped away, he cocked his head in the trademark grin, and said, “Where’s the rest of me?”
No cop ever really likes conventions: "Weirdest thing, we get this convention, and jellyfish are piling out of the sea, beaching themselves all along the shore. It shouldn’t be a problem for traffic but people react real weird when they’re confronted by all those living slimebags."
No cop ever really likes conventions: "Weirdest thing, we get this convention, and jellyfish are piling out of the sea, beaching themselves all along the shore. It shouldn’t be a problem for traffic but people react real weird when they’re confronted by all those living slimebags."
