Famine, With Fries

By Jefferson Smith

When Congress outlaws drive-thru dining across the US, a small Canadian border town is caught like a deer in the headlights of the slavering hordes who are coming north, all looking for a burger and fries, to go.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jeff Smith
• Release date: Nov 20, 2014
• ISBN: 9781502217745

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Famine, With Fries

Copyright © Jefferson Smith 2014

Written by Jefferson Smith

Edited by Fleur Macqueen

Published by Creativity Hacker Press (creativityhacker.ca)

All rights reserved. Neither this book nor any portion thereof may be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in book reviews and commentary.

Originally published in Theme-Thology: Invasion, by HDWPbooks, September 25, 2013.

This edition published: October 1, 2014

To anyone currently in line at a drive-thru…

I’m with you in spirit.

The apocalypse is a young man’s game. Least, that’s how Hollywood likes to tell it. But the truth is, if things are so bad you’ve gotta send Balls O’Manly Steel in to save the day… Well, you’re probably already nipples up. Or you soon will be.

Nah, in the real world, it’s us older folks who’re gonna save your bacon. Not by lifting a car off your damsel in bikini distress, you understand, but by making sure she don’t wind up under that car in the first place.

See, that’s what an old crust like me’s got that your twenty-something chisel-chin doesn’t—a bit of common fucking sense. Averting your average armageddon isn’t about testosterone. It’s about subtlety. And I oughta know.

Because I averted one.

〰〰〰

It was one of them first warm days of early spring and the sun was finally starting to get some bite to it. Me and Four-Bit was pulled over to the shoulder out front of the little school, waiting for the tykes to clear on back inside so I could finish sweeping the streets. Didn’t want to have to keep watching nine ways from Sunday for some tiny pair of shoes to come skittering up out of Four-Bit’s big front broom, so I figured it was as good a time as any for lunch.

There was a time, on a day like this, I’d have been out on the tiller, breaking up clots and getting ready to seed. Knowing me, I’d have been frantic about getting it done before the rain blew in, too. Or maybe still flinching with worry about a late frost. Turns out, farming had been a more fearful life than I’d ever accounted, but testosterone-me had been a real stubborn prick. Took a heart attack, a foreclosure, a divorce, and twenty-five years of bellyaching before I’d finally admitted the simple fact I should’ve faced up to in my twenties.

I hated farming.

Four-Bit rumbled a grumpy fart and I cocked an ear to listen. She sounded a hair lean. Wasn’t my job