Fossils in the Asphalt - Vol. 2: Fossils in the Asphalt, #2

By JD McDonnell

Ten Strange Tales of the Terror, Suspense and the Supernatural. All written during the 2000's....
The Angel Underwater. A gangster from beyond the grave goes seeking revenge in 1920's New Orleans, and he's got a brand new pair of shoes.
Sweet Bliss. The most perfect pop song ever written was not crafted by humans, but its got some vicious grooves and a killer beat.
Candee. Setting back the clocks one hour does not mean a whole lot in the broad scheme of things, until it chooses to mess with the spirit of Halloween.
Van Homeschooled. What's in a name? That depends. Is your neighborhood infested with teenage vampires? Is your last name Van Helsing?
Tuesday's Child. In Nazi Germany, a girl known as the Cookie Cutter has the ability to walk through any wall, but only on a Tuesday.
The Last Amendment. The President, Vice President and Joint Chiefs of Staff sit down for a meal that looks like it may last forever.
The Polkageist. A man is haunted by a very noisy ghost in a house that is less than a year old.
Saturn & Sphinx. There is a hex shaped hole in the north pole of Saturn. A research team investigating it discovers that curiousity and cats have a very long history together.
Pinball Wizard. Robots from four millenia into our future unearth an absolutely terrifying artifact: a pink Fischer-Price record player.
Strip Poker. A man with an uncanny ability to win at poker discovers that the house always wins in the end.

• Language: English
• Publisher: JD McDonnell
• Release date: Sep 3, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393369516

JD McDonnell

I write books and other things.

Book preview

PG-13

If this book were a movie it would be rated PG-13 for violence, tense situations, rampant titillation, an ocean of salty talk. It is not recommended for minors.

Copyright © 2020 JD McDonnell,

All Rights Reserved.

Please do not copy or reproduce without permission. All characters in this book are either fictional or meant to be portrayed in a fictional manner. For more great, fun stuff come visit the website at:

www.jdmcdonnell.com

At sometime in the early 2000’s I made a New Year’s Resolution and somehow managed to keep it.

Big Mistake.

From the bargain book table of a Barnes & Noble I picked up a very fat instruction manual on how to program with PHP and MySQL. I had been building websites since the late 90’s but up until this point they had always been simple affairs, basically billboards on the side of the information super-highway. Earlier I had been visiting some friends in Boston and while taking the subway around the city we talked about a problem I had with the matter of reading fiction on a computer monitor. We were all using bulky eye-biting CRT monitors at the time. There was nothing that could be done about that, but I had been noticing something else, a problem with the matter of scrolling while reading.

Think about it.

When you read on a monitor you read a paragraph or two, stop, use the scroll wheel (or at this time scroll bars, oh the agony!) to move a few more paragraphs into view, go back up the page, find where you last left off and recommence reading. With a book you read to the bottom of the page, turn the page and your eyes automatically know where to go to continue reading. Yes there were Page Up / Page Down buttons but they were a herky jerky affair that still left your eyes searching for where you last left off. What the world needed was a better way to break up a scroll of text into actual pages on screen. That was a revolutionary idea at the time.

For my New Years Resolution, I resolved to learn PHP in hopes that its advanced programming power would help me figure out how to perform this little trick. Which also shows you just how little I knew about the internet at the time. Javascript would eventually help me pull off this trick. PHP would do something else. It showed me how to store information on the server in an easily accessed data table. It gave me what I needed to create a website where anyone could sign in as a member and post their work for all the world to see and comment on it and promote it. I didn’t realize it at the time but I was on my way towards creating something which did not even have a name yet, something that would soon become almost analogous with the internet itself: a social media site.

After a few months of after-hours work DigitalPulp.org was born. It was quite a hit on first release and an entirely uphill battle afterward. The idea was too ahead of its time. It had no editor because everyone was sick and tired of having to go through editors. Myself included. We wanted to upload our work, push a button and blammo it goes out live!

Unfortunately, having no editor also meant that amateur writers began to flood the place with some seriously amateur writing. Because of this the professional writers I invited to join the site wanted nothing to do with it. I suspect many expected it to be a scam of some sort, and for that reason I was hesitant to charge anyone to use the site. After all, this was the age of Information Wants To Be Free! which is a socially acceptable way of saying No One Wants to Pay For Anything on the Internet! People were already paying Comcast $70 a month to access the internet. Shouldn’t that be enough to cover the cost of everything on it?

Ugh. That’s not how it works….

DigitalPulp was a fiction orientated site but that didn’t stop droves of people from posting poetry on it. This got so bad that around 2005 I created a spin-off sister site called DigitalVerse.org which was geared towards poetry. DigitalVerse was a hit that soon left DigitalPulp in the dust. During that time I used to travel around, hanging signs in any coffee shop or library that would let me. I emailed pdfs of the sign to friends in different cities and had them doing the same. We put forth a very strong grassroots effort to get these sites noticed. Unfortunately, neither site had any revenue stream to speak of aside from some Google Ads for which I once received a $100 check. Yes, for eight years of programming and promoting and dealing with trolls and spats and flame wars and forgotten passwords I received the grand total of $100. This is what is meant by a Death March.

It was an exciting time but also a tumultuous, arduous, and ultimately doomed experience. Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites were rising up around us, stealing away members. The financial crisis of 2008 hit and with all the sites (there were more than two) bleeding red I called it quits. By 2008 everyone had found their five goto sites and that did not include us. My web sites were basically dead husks floating in a sea of code. I deleted their files and they were gone in an instant. Vanished into thin air. That pretty much describes the core of my thirties — vanished as if they had never been — thank you internet, thank you for that.

During this time, I did manage to write a lot of short fiction and not just for DigitalPulp. I often sent pieces off to traditional outlets, hoping to make it into something like Asimovs or F&SF and praying they would include in my byline a link to my digitalpulp profile that would send droves of people to the site. No such luck. In fact, that little added detail may have deep-sixed most of the work I sent out. The world of traditional publishing was scared of us, afraid that we were conspiring to pull the rug out from under them with our ebooks and self-publishing and social media sites. In truth, I think we were doing more to reinvigorate the literary world than anyone had done back during the latter half of the 20th century. The trickle of people interested in becoming writers was manifesting itself online as a torrential downpour. I often found myself wondering if the entire book market wasn’t being propped up by people who were only buying books because they wanted to write them someday.

Competition was fierce. In the 1980’s you were almost guaranteed a hand-written rejection slip. In the 1990’s you would get a printed rejection slip. By the 2000’s you would be lucky to get your manuscript returned to you. I did get a few publications, mostly to small fly-by-night websites. For one of them (I cannot remember which) an editor offered to send a check for $5. I told them to save the stamp and have a drink on me.

By around 2006 I began to realize that the future was not in short fiction. It was time to start writing longer works. After a few failed attempts at writing a novel I hit on an idea that stuck, The Celtic Shelf, a prehistoric fantasy about the dawn of civilization set the year 10,000 BC. I finished writing the 600+ page megalith in 2008, just a few weeks shy of Roland Emmerich’s megaflop 10,000 BC entering the theaters. A bigger and more devastating lightning strike of synchronicity there has yet to be. I was querying literary agents by the dozen and not hearing back from anyone. I cannot say why they did not reply. It could have been because this was 2008 and throngs of newly unemployed people were digging out old attempts at novels and desperately trying to see if they could get them published somewhere, or it could be because I was a first time novelist trying to push a story that sounded suspiciously like something that had just crashed and burned in the cinema. When Stephen Colbert does a bit picking on your film in particular. That is a bad sign.

I did hear back from one agent, a guy who said he would look at my manuscript if I promised to never contact him again. Even though I had only contacted him once. That guy is lucky I didn’t submit to him a pipe bomb.

For all the hope and enthusiasm and bright ambition that the decade started out with, the 2000’s ended in a very ugly way. The Celtic Shelf would not get picked up by anyone. Eventually I would self-publish the thing in 2010 and sell about 27 copies. At around the same time, because I didn’t want to be seen as a one book author, I quickly pulled together a small collection of short stories called Fossils in the Asphalt Vol 2. Not a single copy sold.

Now it is the summer of 2020 and I am re-editing all three volumes of Fossils in the Asphalt for release as ebooks. Will they do better this time around?

By God, let’s hope so.

He looked at the photo one last time. It would be the nineth or tenth one last time today. The photo was of a man who once took peculiar delight in stepping on other people only to eventually be stepped on himself. Normally this was nothing out of the ordinary, but what struck Times-Picayune reporter Samuel James Ponticliff as strange was the way in which he had been stepped on, which was to say that the man had literally been stepped on in a very big way.

The man in the photo was Jefferson James Lalleman, aka the Lullaby man, a gangster who took his fashion sense from the silver screen and left everything else behind. No celluloid heart of gold beat beneath his fine silk vests. The man was cold to the soul. At one time it seemed as if every other corpse pulled out of the river bore his signet ring stamped on its forehead. Nothing could be done about it because New Orlean’s finest were firmly in the pocket of the Lullaby man’s Ringtooth gang. Of course, this was 1928 and the police were more likely to be found in a man’s pocket than a set of keys, yet paying off the police proved to be no guarantee of protection.

The grainy black and white photo showed the Lullaby man on his back with arms and legs stilted upwards like the broked limbs of a smacked roach. Then, right up his middle, stopping just short of his neck, something heavy had reduced Jefferson Lalleman to a pin-striped pancake. His head was cocked forward, chin to neck, dead eyes bulging as they saw it coming, whatever in the hell that was. The Lullaby man’s mouth was locked open in a never ending scream of blood and vomit. Broken ribs cut through the sides of his jacket like a set of knives. He died with a .38 revolver in one hand and a hogleg in the other, both empty. Apparently, Jefferson had come to the warehouse looking for a gunfight only to find the heavy end of a small steamroller. Samuel bit his lip as he hissed a breath in thought. It was harsh. It was chilling. Not cool enough to break the prickly hedgehog of mid-summer heat, yet icy all the same. Sam, pinned the photo to his wall of suspicious leads and walked out onto the balcony for some fresh air to think in.

The story had a world of problems. For one thing there were no steamrollers on this side of town. Road work in the French Quarter meant waiting until the street had become a muddy rut and then hiring some poor bastards to pepper it with cobblestones. New Orleans was still a horse driven town. The rich loved their carriages and the shippers loved cheap bray horses they could whip to death on the trudge between the docks and the rail yards. It got so hot in August, that the asphault of a proper yankee road would come up on people’s shoes like chewing gum, and no one would stand for that. Was there even a steamroller in all of New Orleans? What had levelled the Lullaby man? What had happened to any of them?

People turned up dead all the time in this city, but rarely did they ever simply disappear and never in numbers like this. Vincent Magill, vicious leader of the Front Street Devils, disappeared on June 15th. The rest of the Front Street Devils, disappeared June 17th – 19th. Vaugn & Roxy De Jean, an extorionist and his gun moll disappeared June 21st. Maud Corduroy, who ran sweatshops on the north-side with all the tenderness of an old world plantation vanished June 23rd. Phillipe Byrd, the Ice Baron, who controlled every ice factory in Louisiana and had lynched more than a few union leaders to keep it that way was reported missing on June 25th. Benji Smallwood, loan shark - poof - June 26th. Boss James Dixon Carlyle, stodgy confederate veteran and local grand wizard of the KKK was