New Story: Baby Eater
It's been a while since I've posted anything here. That's because I've been busy over the last year writing a whole frekkin' book.
Baby Eater is a wild post-apocalyptic story that begins in the year 2222. We’ve got everything: cyperpunk, superheroes, cat girls, a portal to Hell.
This one comes with a warning for intense violence.
Without further ado, here’s chapter 1.
1: The Magic Scroll
Present Day: Present Time
“I’m going to summon Lucifer,” Dolores said as she looked out at the crimson sky from “her" concrete "balcony." She wore a ripped-sleeve shirt and had a round scar on her left cheek. She scraped her fingernails against the railing, over and over.
“My Mom says summoning isn’t real.” Juan, the neighbor boy, responded. He came up to Dolores’s knee and wore a Carcinade Man T-shirt.
“Yeah, well your Mommy don’t know shit, Kid,” Dolores said. She was standing outside the door of her apartment.
Like all the doors in these apartments, it was also a screen. It currently displayed an ad for an energy drink called “Carcinade.” A man in tights with oversized sunglasses was chugging the glowing green liquid. Whenever anyone looked at the screen, he gave them a thumbs up and the words “Carcinade makes me Super!” popped up over him. Then he would fire lasers out of the screen, powerful enough to damage any unlucky viewer’s eyesight if it hit just right.
Below, rusty vehicles zoomed over streets plastered with advertisements. More and more of the trucks around here were coffin-shaped these days. Dolores watched one stop. The coffin doors lifted to both sides, revealing the mass of corpses within. The truck’s mechanical claw grabbed a fresh one off the sidewalk and tossed it in.
Of course, Dolores could barely see the streets because there were so many big-ass billboards stretched across the sky below. Most of them were advertising shit that only rich bastards could afford. Like, a toaster? Who the hell used anything besides a microwave to cook?
One nearer to Dolores showed a man chained to a wall. He was missing a couple of fingers. Another man with a tie stood next to him, holding a pair of snippers. There was no sound in these, but dialogue was captioned at the bottom of the screen. “Remember, for every minute that goes by that no one buys our new hubris flavored Mountain Don’t, l will cut one off a finger. Once he’s out of fingers, I’ll slit his throat.”
The prisoner pleaded, “Please, for the love of God, buy the fucking drink!”
“Act now, or his blood will be on your hands (Mountain Don’t is not responsible for any injuries or deaths incurred during our promotions).”
Large smokestacks rose from the city here and there, releasing the noxious red fog up into the sky where it formed a blanket that blocked out the Sun, the final solution to global warming.
In the distance was a large glass dome. This was the pristine inner city that only their overlords had the “right” to access.
Dolores ignored whatever complaints Juan was raising now and walked off towards the elevator. Apartments here were crammed as tightly as possible. Some of the doors she passed were less than a foot wide and one of them was on the ceiling.
When she stepped inside, the other residents of Sunshine Forest Apartments gave the tall woman with the single ripped sleeve and side-shave a wide berth, all of them except for the man in the red hoodie.
She made her way down the street, passing several shops. One was an illegal drug store. Well, it was legal to produce, sell, and buy them, but not to own or consume the drugs they sold. The shop window was a transparent holo-monitor which displayed a girl eating a spiky pill with the words “Leave reality behind! Try some Ad-Vantage. Once you start, you’ll never want to stop!” “Ad-Vantage” was a name so stupid and shallow, only a marketing team could have thought it up. It was a hallucinogenic nano-drug that caused the user to hallucinate advertisements. Ads were everywhere in this city, absolutely everywhere.
Dolores turned into a back alley and approached the door. Above it, in neon lights, were the words “Betty’s Rare Junk.” Dolores pressed the doorbell.
A slot opened in the wall and a robird, a mechanical parrot, popped out. “BRRRROCK! What’s the password?”
“Let me the fuck in or I’ll be eating scrambled circuit bird tonight.”
The robird’s eyes flashed between blue and green, ending on green. It said, in a robotic voice this time, “Password accepted,” and the outer door opened.
Dolores stepped into the entrance chamber and the door slammed shut behind her. She listened to the whir of the air filtration system which seemed to match the pattern of overhead light that went dark every few seconds.
The inner airlock door slid open with a hiss.
The shop was full of boxes of strange objects, stacked on top of one another: There was everything from skulls with elongated inhuman shapes to chips probably containing some unique virus. Despite the name of the shop, there were more common things for sale here as well. There were bags of bronze and steel dust. The steel dust looked a lot like Ad-Vantage, but based on the labels, these were actually cosmetic nanomachines used to coat your hair in a thin layer of metal. There were prosthetic arms and eyes on one table next to a gun, too large for any human to use, the kind that were mounted on sentinel drones. She didn’t know how Betty had managed to get her hands on that. Well, she had a pretty good idea.
Dolores walked over to the counter.
A sturdy-looking woman with a telescopic bionic eye leaned over the counter. Beatrice Burmin, called Betty, was the owner of this fine establishment.
“Do you have it?” Dolores asked.
Betty looked up at Dolores, who was a full three heads taller than her. Her scowl deepened and her eye telescoped out towards Dolores’s face. “Yeah. I’ve got it.” She dug under the counter and pulled out a small wooden box.
“So, is there some kind of spell scroll inside? How does this work?” Dolores asked.
“A spell scroll?” Betty chuckled. “I guess you could call it that, sure.” She opened the box to reveal what appeared to be a machine rolled joint. “You really wanna buy this ‘magic scroll’?”
“I’ve got nothing to lose anymore.”
Betty scrunched her eyes. “Alright then. Are you paying in Thoughtcoin, or are you going to give me platinum teeth again?”
Dolores said “Don’t get the wrong idea. It's not like I do that every day. Those bastards had it coming though.”
“Oh, really? Tell me. How do you normally make money again?”
“Doesn’t fucking matter. I’m me, not my job. Let’s just do this.”
Betty shrugged. She held out her hand. Her carpals glowed green from the implants. Dolores took her hand, causing her own carpals to glow red as the Thoughtcoin was transferred from her account.
The streets were crowded, but the walk home was easy enough. Or should have been.
Two men looking to be in their early twenties approached her, blocking the sidewalk. “Hey, you look like my type, hot stuff. Come gimme a kiss.” The dumbass with the XXX Technology Logo tattooed across his face said. His grin was replaced by a cringe of pain as Dolores kicked him in the balls with her steel toed boots.
Once home from Betty's, she took a seat in the one chair in her studio apartment. Her mother’s ashes were in a porcelain Mountain Don’t vase on the shelf above Dolores’s holotube. A couple of clown dolls were to one side of them and a photograph was on the other.
“Sorry Mom. I’m not going to do what you did. I’m not going to end up dying heroically. If you were alive, I know you’d be more than disappointed by the things I’m about to do. But you aren’t alive. You weren’t there when I needed you. And so now it's come to this.”
She pulled out the joint and gave it a sniff. It had a chemical smell, not one she recognized.
She lit it up and gave it a huff. The smoke burned a little in her throat. When she blew a smoke ring is when shit got weird. A fiery portal opened in the center of the smoke ring with the scream of a thousand children being forced to eat their nutrisynths. Dolores could make out the silhouette of a horned figure with a tail that ended in a spade.
At least they seemed like horns, until the figure stepped out. The Devil took the form of a pink-haired girl with cat ears. She wore a cute gothic lolita dress. She at least had a spade shape at the end of her fuzzy tail. Or was it more of a heart?
If you’re interested in reading more, the entire book is on Amazon here.
Both digital and physical versions are available.