Good News For Dead People

By Jamie Waters

The Second Civil War has come to America, and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are riding.

 

Good News for Dead People is a dystopian short story collection about what happens in the time between twilight and pure darkness. Runaway climate change, war, and scarcity lurk around every corner while anarchy reigns supreme.

Follow a psychopath fresh out of prison, a thyroid patient searching for pills, and a Senator's shroom-obsessed son, among others, as they navigate the dangers of a bizarre world that is hostile to life itself. See war and collapse from perspectives never explored, from genesis to the bitter end.

AI free writing. Plotted, written, and edited by a human, from start to finish.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jamie Waters
• Release date: Dec 31, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223492498

Book preview

Good News for Dead People

Jamie Waters

Copyright © 2022 Jamie Waters

All rights reserved

The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Bowl of Fire

Good Luck, Nicole

The Blue Lady

Good News for Dead People

Mechadon vs. Metatron

A Demon is Here

Trouble at Blueberry Farm

The Canaries

To You, My Song

Acknowledgement

About The Author

for whoever needs it

Let this life of worry

Pass by in silence, as

Silent as Time itself.

Live unknown, and so die.

Palladas

Bowl of Fire

Eric smelled the fire before he ever saw it. To him, it smelled like a barbecue cookout — the stink was faint on the air, but every day it grew a little stronger, a little more insistent. It wasn't his first wildfire by a long shot, but he had a certainty it would be his last. The energy around him felt different than it ever had before. It was heavy with destiny, and Erik had no plans of moving from where he was.

It could have been nuclear, or otherwise man-made — a flicked cigarette, maybe, or a grill from one of the RV camps. But it wasn’t. Erik knew that much. He didn’t know how he knew, but he knew, the same way he knew the sky was blue or that he'd be dead soon.

The fire had come from the sky, and it needed no help from man. It had started as a high pressure system caught between two jet streams, steamed right up from the dead blue waters of the Pacific. From there, it flowered into a black line of clouds and cut through Oregon like a hot knife. It didn’t take a genius to figure that out. It happened like clockwork every year.

The storm raged and thundered with an intensity not seen since prehistory, turning and falling over itself, pulsing with alien-red lightning. It conjured winds that pulled up the very earth. There was hardly any rain, of course. There never was, and there never would be again — at least, not for ten thousand years, and probably longer than that.

When Erik closed his eyes he could see it plain as day. He saw the towering black columns rolling and thrashing, killing and tearing and eating like a wild animal, before they broke apart against the Rockies. But that wasn't enough, or even half of it. The ghost of the storm lived on in the fires that lit up behind it, as always.

∆∆∆

Erik lived in his parent’s house, though it was less of a house and more of a statement.

There was the main building — built like a Roman villa, with 30 bedrooms, 30 bathrooms, 3 kitchens, foyers, dens, and a movie theater — and flanking either side there were guest houses, as well as a greenhouse, an arboretum, and a tennis court.

It was all too much for Erik to handle — but his father was busy in DC, and his mother was in London for a conference. A month had gone by, and neither of them had returned. It wasn’t long after they left that the chef, the maids, and the groundskeepers vanished as well.

Erik had sent a thousand texts to his father. When that failed, he’d swallowed his pride and texted his mother, but he got no response from her either. No signs of life. His mother didn’t nag him, his father didn’t ask  how things were going, or what games he was playing. When all of Erik's measures failed, he spent several days working up the nerve to make a phone call, but by the time he did, he got nothing except a dead tone. He’d tried emailing his parents, too — and their assistants — but he got silence and dead noise every which way he turned.

With all the luxury and space of the modern world, Erik spent the vast majority of his time in the study. It was his father’s study — the same one that he wasn't allowed in for most of his life — but it was his now, he guessed, as was the house and the land, along with everything in it. And, like every other part of the house, Erik left his mother’s decor intact and only added his things over it. Most of the rooms were mature beige cells accented with tasteful peacock statuettes, track lighting, and abstract art pieces. But feathered out among all that were Erik’s additions: action figurines, band posters, and psychedelic tapestries with laughing mushrooms and red-eyed dragons. The study was the epicenter of his grand merging, and so it was the weirdest scene in a moving picture of weird scenes.

There were bookshelves lining the walls with good leather bound annals jostled and turned, forever doomed to collect skin cells and field spider colonies, and those piles were mixed in with cheap paperbacks of candy-colored fantasies, murder mysteries, and space odysseys — all of which had been in and out of the bathroom for the better part of twenty-six years.

The grand oak desk served as the eye of the storm. Besides a bust of Plato which Erik had drawn a twirled mustache on, the desk also served as a home for a giant gaming computer that glowed and winked like a UFO. Behind it, a mounted elk’s head looked on, replete with a horned viking helmet (despite Erik knowing that vikings never had horns on their helmets, he spent half a day putting it up).

The leather couches, which used to house dignitaries and experts and doctors of philosophy, now played host to stuffed cartoon characters and long pillows with anime girlfriends on them. And, flanking that, there was a giant globe that once housed a wet bar. The liquors were long gone — Erik stowed them away in cabinets, bitterly remembering the slurring arguments his parents engaged in, the petty months long wars they fought amongst themselves, and replaced the whole thing with a bevy of supplements, tinctures, salves, and other remedies that he deemed necessary. Things like horny goat weed and crystals that vibrated with the universe.

Despite having his run of the place and slowly making it his own, there were some problems Erik had with being the last man standing. Severe ones that he didn’t know how to get out of. The food situation was dwindling by the day, and the solar generators barely made enough power to run his computer and a few lights, and that was under the best circumstances. The internet, the TV, the radio — none of them worked, and the mail had long since stopped running. As for driving into the nearby town, Erik couldn’t work up the courage, but from the distant cracks of gunfire he occasionally heard, he gathered things weren’t going well.

But Erik's crowning problem was the bathroom situation; the generators couldn’t run the pump houses, even at full power, and so the plumbing had shut down entirely. Erik took baths in the indoor pool and drank sodas when he was thirsty, or wine if he was desperate, and when he had to go, he went. He’d filled up half of the bathrooms that way, until the situation in one became untenable, at which point he’d lock it and move on to the next bathroom, like a hermit crab changing its shell

∆∆∆

That was how Erik’s days went; a kind of dreadful winding down, slowly running out of food and bathrooms, waiting for text messages, for signs, for anything — until he smelled the fire.

He thought about running, about getting in any of the cars and making a break for it. His father loved all sorts of cars. Erik could have charged up one of the electrics and gone five hundred miles on that alone. He knew he should do just that — load it up with guns, with money, with his quickly vanishing pantries, and get out of Dodge. But no matter how long he rolled the idea around in his head, it just felt wrong.

He decided to do a fire themed video game marathon instead, and cater it with the last of his indica stash, a plastic barrel of cheese balls, and a bottle of fake orange sugar water.

He started with an old city building game and turned the ‘disaster’ setting to maximum. He spent a whole day trying to build up his metropolis against hurricanes, volcanoes, earthquakes, and heat waves. Every time he tried, he ended up with a bankrupt heap of rubble. When he was a kid, the game had frustrated Erik to no end; but with the charcoal stink seeping through the house, he found it a strange comfort. It made him think of his father, off trying to do the same thing but for real, and he hoped that it was going better for him.

On the second day Erik played a game called Demon, as a knights templar entering the very bowels of Hell to battle the devil.

But it was on the third day, while playing a survival game with a fully destructible world — a world he was hard at work burning down with a pixelated lighter —that he heard a hard, fast knock at the door.

Erik took off his headphones. At first, he thought the sound had come from the game. Then he convinced himself that he’d imagined it, or that he was having shroom flashbacks.

But the knocking came again, louder and more insistent. Erik’s heart jumped into his throat at the sound of it, and he instinctively ducked to the floor. After another string of shaking knocks, he crawled to the large study window and peered down through the bamboo blinds.

Outside, under the large carport, there was a shabby, ash-streaked van loaded down with trunks and backpacks, and a single pink flamingo ornament.

Erik heard a voice shout below, just as he turned and crawled to his father’s desk drawer. He opened the bottom shelf, which he’d left undisturbed, and started pulling out handfuls of dusty old speeches, along with old weather reports and proposals and black binders full of draft laws. All the way in the back, there was a chipped oak box with a silver derringer with a few loose bullets.

By the time Erik got it loaded and started for the door, there was another string of knocks, along with more shouting. But as he passed down the marble hallway, the voice became clearer. It was a female voice, and it was screaming, Erik!

His first thought was that his mother had made it home. But that didn’t really hold up on a smell test. He doubted that if she made it out of London, and all the way back to the states, and through the battles and stalemates and sieges, and through the refugee waves, that she’d drive towards the fires. And he doubly doubted that she’d come back for him...

But if it wasn't her, that only left...

Emily? Jonathan?

Before Erik stood his friends — or what was left of them. They were both gaunt and filthy and wearing sweat-soaked clothing. For a long while, they stood looking at each other.

Well, well, well, Erik finally said, his heart still pounding. He turned to his side and gestured into the house with his derringer. Get in here.

∆∆∆

The old trio sat at the long oak table in the dining room; the stained cathedral windows, taken from some medieval church in Europe, cast the entire room in rippling rainbow-colored light. Erik got three bottles of water, a box of breakfast biscuits, and some cans of deviled ham from the pantries. He couldn't really afford to give them, but he didn't mind skipping meals. Jonathan and Emily were hard at work on all of it when Erik steered the conversation.

I thought you two were in Portland.

We were, Jonathan said through a mouthful of biscuit. But... it didn’t work out.

That killed the conversation dead for a good long while, and Erik didn’t want to press them; the very mention of Portland seemed to make them both wince. But, finally, Jonathan continued. It was dying even before the storm, from the bombings. It was really fucking dead after the storm, though. People are trying to get out. Half of it is on fire. The interstate is a madhouse.

I think I got a can of gas squirreled away, out in the toolshed, Erik said. That should get you out of the county, at least. You can just take the electric car, too. But once it dies, I don’t think you’ll have any way to charge it.

Thanks, Jonathan said, wiping his mouth with the back of his wrist. But we didn’t come here for gas. We came to get you.

To that, Erik said nothing. He just sighed, amused, and gave a half smile – as if he didn’t believe them. Emily looked down at the table as the awkward silence took over. Erik had always had a talent for making things uncomfortable; once upon a time, he would have given everything he had to break free from that habit, but he’d come to terms with it.

Look, I... Jonathan said. I know that things between us have been rocky in the past. But I’m here. And I love you. We love you. We came for you.

Again, Erik said nothing for a good long while. Do you know anything about DC? Or London, maybe?

Jonathan looked down at the table, then looked at Emily.

Erik, I... Emily was looking at Erik, but he quickly averted his eyes. Even there, at the end of the world, with the best friends he'd ever known, he couldn’t make eye contact for more than a few seconds. DC, last we heard, was a bloodbath. I don’t know anything about London. They’re still fighting out east, I think. That was a while ago.

And my father?

Emily shrugged and shook her head.

Erik thought for a moment about his father. Part of him wanted to imagine he was in a bunker somewhere, or leading a valiant charge against a besieged city; he saw him wearing golden armor, caught in a sunbeam, like the paladins in his game Templar. But another part of him knew that probably wasn’t true. I guess we’ll never know.

Come with us, Jonathan said. The fire is a few days behind us. There’s still time. We can go find out together.

Erik thought about it — he really did. He’d been thinking about it every day. Even when he was gaming, or high, leaving was in the back of his mind. He had the wherewithal to get them away from the fire and to set up an existence. There were camping supplies somewhere in the garage, along with a first aid kit, liquor, jewelry, and guns. He could have made an honest try, especially now that his friends were in the picture. But that wasn’t the first time he’d chewed over the thought, and he always came to the same inevitable conclusion: he simply didn’t feel like it. He didn’t want to live out of a tent, or butt heads with would-be warlords, or get pressed into a militia, or see the battlefields or go hungry or bathe in a creek or eat canned beans. He didn’t want to do any of it.

The dining room was silent as a tomb, and Erik realized he’d been thinking himself through yet another awkward silence. Can you stay for the night?

Yea... Jonathan said. Yea. We were hoping to, actually. Like I said, the fire is a ways out. But then again... they move faster than you would think.

After dinner, Erik led his friends to the pool; the waters were still and turning green, and there was a ring of soap scum forming on the edges, but it was clean enough. He brought Emily a change of clothes from his mother’s closet; it was full of glittering evening gowns and designer pant suits, but he settled on jeans and a good, thick t-shirt he was pretty sure his mother had never worn. For Jonathan, he brought a pair of his own jeans and an old t-shirt that said, Live Long and Prosper. He liked the irony of it, but he also thought it might bring good luck, if such a thing existed. To that pile of spoils, he dug out one of the ‘overnight visitor’ packs the staff kept for distinguished