Crazy Busy

By Julian Boote

"The Apocalypse has begun... and there’s no clocking off."

Jim’s holiday has ended oddly. People are acting weird, and his girlfriend, Ruthie, has made the strange decision she prefers a weekend working in her office over his company. But if that’s odd, Jim’s first day back at his job reveals just how weird the world has become in his absence. All his colleagues are fixated on getting their work done... and pronto. Jim is also pressed to use a new computer app.; Benny The Bee – the latest in neuro-linguistic programming, guaranteed to boost anyone’s productivity.

But Benny is addictive – dangerously so. Once stung, you can’t stop working. You don’t want to stop. Ever. And Jim realises that Ruthie has been stung.

The word “deadline” quickly takes on a new and frightening meaning as those exposed to the app. become increasingly unhinged and violent. Can Jim avoid being stung by Benny The Bee? Can he figure out a way to rescue Ruthie from Benny’s addictive influence? And will Jim’s colleagues even let him out the office alive?

It look’s like Jim’s first day back at work is going to be his last.

Crazy Busy is a disturbing urban nightmare (9,000 words) about the modern work ethic which asks, “Just what might happen if work really ruled all our lives?”

• Language: English
• Publisher: Julian Boote
• Release date: Apr 9, 2012
• ISBN: 9781476231754

Julian Boote

Julian Boote is an actor, author, screenwriter and filmmaker with a BA Honours in Film & Art from Reading University in the UK, with four feature film credits to his name in the roles of producer, co-screenwriter, and second unit director. Julian has recently returned to his first love; acting, and is thriving, working now in front of the camera. Creating stories has been a pleasure for him since childhood, and he hasn’t stopped, his current project being a novelisation of one of his feature scripts. He also writes short stories in his (copious) free time, including tales for children.

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Crazy Busy

by

Julian Boote

Copyright © Julian Boote 2008

All rights reserved

The right of Julian Boote to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Cover design by Peter Bradbury

Smashwords Edition 2012

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The first inkling I had something was going seriously wrong with the world was when a driving instructor stole my car.

I was on my way to pick Ruthie up from work, and I’d stopped at the junction on the corner of her offices at Total Life Assurance in Potters Bar. The lights had turned green, I’d put the car into first and was easing right when the driving school vehicle abruptly charged through a red from my left, cutting across my path, its engine snarling. Following the way it went, muttering a casual, ‘Arsehole,’ I expected only to see its tail lights ducking under the horizon down the hill. Instead I was greeted by the sight of it reversing in a drunken diagonal across the road, at a much-reduced – what you might call chastened – speed. An ugly white gash had been scooped out of the tree on the pavement from which it had just rebounded (the trunk still shuddering, its branches shedding leafy autumnal tears from the impact), while the entire front left quadrant of the vehicle was crushed, its windscreen now nothing more than a zany filigree of safety glass.

Even as I stopped to help, the totalled car’s doors opened. From the front passenger side jumped the instructor; a man in his late forties, bearing a gut from years of sedentary directing of his students’ role in traffic, as well as a fresh scar on his forehead, weeping gouts of blood. Oblivious to the wound now adding a scarlet patina to his already clashing silk tie and shirt combo, he testily ordered the twentysomething woman and the teenage boy, emerging from the back, to follow him. They approached my car, and, without a word