This was the headline smeared across the front page of Nebraska’s largest newspaper, like a bold font slap in the mouth. Brannigan, Nebraska, which was hailed as being the home of the World’s Largest Jigsaw Puzzle on all of its billboards, was a small town without much money to its name, and its citizens were tired of being mocked for their incomplete roadside attraction. The desperate need for a new tourist trap had been growing since the Great Fire of ’66. Brannigan lost two attractions on that day, when the World’s Largest Match was burnt down by the newly completed World’s Largest Magnifying Glass. The oversized ocular assistant was taken down when it was deemed to be far too dangerous to Brannigan, and any oversized objects that might be constructed in the future. As time went by the town burrowed deeper and deeper into financial ruin. Brannigan’s citizens were looking for any excuse to stage a political coup and with the printing of this article they were certain they had found it. The small town’s mayor, Cal Janson, was certain the newspaper article would become his epitaph if he couldn’t assure the people at the town hall that the puzzle would be finished soon.

“Okay, if we could refrain from throwing anymore bottles or shoes, especially those of you wearing high heels, we can continue with the questions,” said Cal, nervously adjusting the tie that felt way too large around his straw-thin neck.

“We’re the laughing stock of the entire county Mr. Mayor!”

“I don’t think there was a question in there,” Cal said. He dabbed his handkerchief, which was now soaked with liquid fear, against his charcoal hair.

“My question is, why on Earth didn’t we make the world’s largest dictionary instead!?”

The crowd began to murmur in agreement.

“People, we are only forty pieces away from finishing the puzzle! Now it’s true, we still can’t tell what the image on the puzzle is, but I am certain once the last few pieces are put into place it will all make sense. And I hope all of you will be coming out for the big celebration tomorrow where we will be finishing the puzzle; won’t that be great?”

The crowd gave a tepid reaction, and then the mayor continued.

“Also, Mr. Cappello, they turned down your world’s largest dictionary idea nearly thirty years ago, you’ve really got to let it go.”

Cal began to survey the crowd for the next question when one of the townspeople exclaimed:

“He’s only saying that ‘cause he’s porkin’ the puzzle maker’s niece!”

Cal took a nervous glance at his wife, Carli; she had recently been kicked out of her second attempt at anger management and things were always a bit sticky those first few post-therapy days. This time she had been kicked out for proclaiming that “This shit is for pussies!” in the middle of a group therapy session.

Carli stood up from her seat, gently brushed off her purple dress, tucked her brown hair behind her ear and stepped up to the podium.

“Good people of Brannigan, to make the claim that attempting to finish the world’s largest puzzle is the result of nepotism because of my relationship with the puzzle’s creator is ludicrous. My ties to my Uncle Sebastian are strained at best, and as far as the newspaper article is concerned…”

Cal was amazed by his wife; she had always had a calm and levelheaded side that few people besides himself had the opportunity to see; he couldn’t believe this was actually his wife, reasoning and keeping the peace with the crowd. And then she said this:

“Honestly? Who reads the fucking newspaper anymore, for Christ’s sake?”

“This meeting is adjourned, thank you everyone,” said Cal, grabbing his wife and bolting off stage while the sound of boos, shattering glass, and shoes thumping against the wall accompanied their mad dash.



At the ceremony the following morning, Cal remained nervous. It looked as though the entire town had showed up at the grand unveiling. Many of them had stopped at Fiscal Frank’s Flea market before arriving, which was having a sale on angry mob supplies. They had all purchased bargain priced pitchforks, torches, or Molotov cocktails and each of them was prepared to handle their problems in the manner that their town was famous for: a good old fashioned mob scene.

Cal’s attentions were split between the volunteers putting the last few puzzle pieces into place and his watch, which was reminding him with each tick of the second hand that Carli was running late. He still could not determine what the image was that the tiny pieces were supposed to make once they had been put into their proper position. The rabid gerbils that currently inhabited his stomach calmed a bit when he saw his wife approaching the podium alongside her uncle.

Uncle Sebastian had always been considered a pariah in Brannigan and he wore this small-town judgment proudly like a crown.

“Screw ‘em,” he always said. “If I want to be like those cow-humpin’-corn-suckers I would burn all my books and plant my ass on a tractor.”

Sebastian was never one to keep his thoughts to himself, but in the past few years he had stopped speaking. It was as though his voice was a mom-and-pop store in a run-down neighborhood, boarding up its doors forever. All he did now was read book after book about space travel. The idea of flying through the cosmos had always fascinated him. Everyone in Carli’s family always assumed it was because of his disdain for Earth and everyone on it. He collected every newspaper article he could about America’s first moon landing and hung it on his office wall; in fact, it was on July 27th, 1969 one week after the moon landing, that he was commissioned by the town to build the world’s largest jigsaw puzzle. Sebastian was a master toy maker and specialized in puzzles; while the town desperately needed some kind of attraction to get tourists into Brannigan. It seemed like the perfect match. Five years later, Sebastian completed his magnum opus. A 1,000,000,001 piece puzzle that was exactly the length of the open land on the outskirts of the town; and now, nearly thirty years after its creation, it was complete.

“How’s he doing?” Cal whispered to his wife.

“I dunno, silent Sally still won’t say a damn thing,” she said. “I don’t understand, he was always flapping his gums when I was a kid. Ah, damn it! I’m sorry honey; I just can’t keep my cool.”

“It’s really alright, dear. Once today is over I think things will get a lot easier for us.”

Cal loved his wife; some would say in spite of her rage fueled outbursts, but it was rather because of them that he fell in love with her. The two of them were like the two halves of a black and white cookie; unimpressive separately, but once you put them together, they created something perfect.



In college, Carli was the president of the university’s Cause of the Week Club which protested on behalf of a different organization each week, regardless of whether or not this meant supporting conflicting ideologies. In the span of one month they protested on behalf of the Vegans of America Group, the Meat Packing Labor Union, Mothers Infuriated by Lazy Kids (or MILK), and Nobody Asked You Mom, Now Leave Me Alone So I Can Play My Video Games, I’ll Get A Job Tomorrow (or NAYMNLMASICPMVGIGAJT). The club gave Carli the perfect outlet for her pent-up rage. She could yell, threaten, burn effigies, and make signs that had both a social message, and some kind of pun.

Cal was the president of the Indifference Society. The majority of their meetings were spent discussing what they should do that week, but Cal always made sure that meeting time was always set aside for Carli, who came to their meetings in the hopes of recruiting more people for her next protest. Cal fell in love with the way her lips curled back when she snarled, and the way her small mole looked on her cheek when it reddened with fury. He went to all of her protests. It was on the day she punched out a cop to protect him while he was tied to a holly bush that he knew he was in love. Cal asked her to be his campaign manager for his bid at the class presidency, and thanks to her ingenious smear tactics he won by a landslide and finally gained the courage to ask her on a date. She said yes.



“I want to thank everyone for coming today,” Cal said into the microphone. “The last puzzle piece is being put into place now and then one of the brave pilots from Fort Ramrod will be flying over to tell us just what exactly is on the puzzle! Yeah!”

A few charitable claps were given to the mayor as the final piece was dropped into its destined position with a click.

“Oh my God,” Cal said, “oh my God, ohmyGodohmyGod.”

“Shut up, honey,” Carli said.

Cal spotted the jet plane a few short miles from the puzzle; he clapped his sweaty palms together in anticipation and turned on the walkie-talkie he had strapped to his belt.

“This is Mayor Cal Jansen,” he said as the black square croaked with feedback, “are you in position?”

“Roger that, Mr. Mayor, I am in position,” the pilot replied.

“So, what do you see?”

Cal proudly held the walkie-talkie up to the microphone so the rest of Brannigan could share in this moment.

“Well… uh… it looks to be… some kind of… some kind of phallus.”

Cal gripped the podium tightly; the rapid gerbils had taken hold of his stomach with ruthless aggression and were spreading to his entire body.

“It’s a what?”

“I’m pretty sure it’s a big penis, sir.”

Sebastian began to laugh hysterically like a man whose sanity was slowly slipping away. He made no attempt to hide his laughter at his nephew-in-law’s expense; his wrinkled hands clapped together as he watched the townspeople growing angrier and angrier. Cal threw the walkie-talkie onto the ground and looked the old man in his face, which was contorted from the swells of laughter that seemed unending.

“You spent taxpayer money to make a giant puzzle with the image of A PENIS?” Cal screamed.



The puzzle didn’t actually contain an image of a penis. The pilot, Jack Trubee, had been seeing penises everywhere lately. These phallic phantoms were the product of his repressed sexual desire for Ring Pops and his recent completion of a community college course on psychological literary analysis.



“How are you not more upset about this?” Cal asked his wife.

“I think it’s kinda funny,” she replied with a smirk.

The townspeople of Brannigan had had enough. With their weapons ready they rushed the puzzle in unison, all of their anger, frustration, and embarrassment being channeled into the burning light at the ends of their bargain priced torches. Sebastian’s laughter was silenced by the sight of swift revenge heading for his masterpiece. He bolted down the grandstand’s steps to throw himself in front of the wave of bodies that was about to come crashing down; if they were going to destroy his work, they would have to destroy him too. Sebastian thought about the exhausting evenings he spent working until the sun rose to cut each individual piece of the puzzle. There were beads of sweat dripping down his face as he stared into the angry eyes of Brannigan’s citizens; they did not understand his masterpiece, despite the fact that he hoped they would.

At that moment, a black limousine came barreling down the dirt road that ran parallel to the puzzle’s vertical edge. The limo, shining like spilled oil, stopped directly between Sebastian and the mob. Everything was still except for the miniature American flag attached to the car’s radio antennae, which was flapping violently in the mid-afternoon breeze. The flag’s presence seemed to suggest that the car ran purely on America’s can-do spirit. The silence was finally broken by the clicking of the limo’s back door opening. A large man in a blue military uniform stepped out and gave a mini salute to the tiny antennae flag. If his body type had to be compared to a polygon, it would be a square; two squares to be exact, one large one for the body and a tiny one sitting on top for the head.

“Hi there, folks, sorry to stop you in the middle of what appeared to be an ol’ fashioned mob scene. My name is Colonel G.T. Watts and I’m looking for a Mr. Sebastian.”

Sebastian slowly raised his hand and stepped forward.

“Sebastian, I’m Colonel Watts, damn good to meet you,” said the man, shaking Sebastian’s frail hand. “The NASA boys noticed your little project here on one of their satellites a few months back, but we wanted to wait until the grand unveiling before we came to see ya.”

Cal tried to intervene, still under the pretenses that he was standing beside a mural of a giant penis, in the hopes of saving his political career.

“Colonel Watts,” he said, “I am so sorry about all of this; we’ll have it taken apart immediately.”

“No harm done,” Colonel Watts said, with a hard smack to Cal’s shoulder, and returned to speaking to Sebastian. “As for you, sir, I want to tell you that I’ve worked with NASA for a few years now. I’ve circled this little blue ball of ours more times than I can count and I came here to tell you that you’re absolutely right.”

Colonel Watts pointed to the puzzle as he said this. Sebastian’s eyes filled with tears as he finally broke his years of silence.

“Thank you,” he said. “I knew, that if you just took a step back and looked at it… all the pieces would make something great.”

“I think the show is over, folks,” Colonel Watts shouted at the slowly calming mob. “If you gotta burn something down, try the motel I stayed at off the highway! They didn’t give me fresh towels this morning!”



After the crowd had gone their separate ways, Cal and Colonel Watts were left alone with the puzzle.

“It really is incredible, ain’t it?” the Colonel asked Cal.

“I suppose,” Cal said.

“I’ve seen and done a lot of things in my lifetime,” the Colonel said. “I’ve flown at the speed of sound, I’ve seen the Earth from the Heavens, I overthrew the kingdom of the Radioactive Moon Chimps… Whoops, I’m technically not supposed to talk about that last one.”

The Colonel chuckled to himself and went on.

“The point is, it’s this kind of thing that really stands above the rest. An example of the things a person can accomplish when he just puts his mind to it. It’s the only reason I’ve ever been able to fly anything, because someone simply thought humankind could do it.”

“So…” Cal said, “it’s not a penis?”

“No, no, no, it’s nothing like that.”

“So what is it?”

Colonel Watts looked at Sebastian.

“It’s a message,” Sebastian said.



A few weeks later, Sebastian passed away. He died peacefully and without pain, the doctors said. A short month after what became known as the Brannigan Puzzle Panic of 2010, Cal retired from the political game and opened up the Uncle Sebastian Memorial Gift Shop right next to Sebastian’s masterpiece.

Their most popular item is a miniature recreation of the world’s largest puzzle. Once it is completed, you can view the message that was originally intended only for the eyes of those who were miles above the Earth’s stratosphere.

It reads:

IT’S BEAUTIFUL FROM UP THERE, ISN’T IT?






BRIAN LONG runs the streets of New Jersey with a gang of literary street toughs known as The Broad Set: www.thebroadset.com.

Sterling was the leader — well, not really the “leader” — we were all anarchists in those days and we didn’t believe in leaders, authority, government, any of that shit. But Sterling was sixteen and he had a car, which meant he determined when and where we were going. To that extent, I guess you could call him a leader.

Victoria was too beautiful to be called Vicky or Vic or some other cutesy nickname. Just Victoria. We always joked with her that she should become the lead singer of a crust punk band and go by the stage name Victoria Victim. She didn’t like that idea. She said she was nobody’s victim.

Whitey was called Whitey because he was a Polish Jew and his parents came from Krakow or Warsaw, I don’t remember which. We thought it was ironic. His grandparents had been through the shit with the Nazis. He told me stories about them, stories so fucked up that when I heard them I just sat there like a deaf mute. After we killed the Nazi, Andrew told me he wished his grandfather was still alive so he could tell him about it. He said his grandfather would’ve been proud of him.

Then there was me.

We were The Musketeers, plus one, and we were ready for Friday night. We all met at Sterling ’s place and hopped into his rusty old Buick, Victoria in the front and me and Whitey in the back. My crew and I were headed out for a great show, The Abused, a thrash punk band from New York. We were gonna drink some beers, sing along with the punk anthems, jump around, pump our fists in the air, slap each other on the back, maybe meet up with some other punks, drink some more beers. We all knew it was gonna be one hell of a night. Anything could happen.

We rolled down all the windows and lit cigarettes, looking out the sweating pedestrians trudging along the sidewalks. Sterling was playing The Damned on The Brick’s CD player.

“Man, can’t we change this?” I asked. I wanted something harder, something I could stomp my shoes to, and The Damned strayed a bit too far into that whole wimpy British new wave kind of sound.

“It’s my car,” was his reply.

Victoria said she wanted to listen to something else, too. Whitey, who was slouched in the back seat with me, was staring out the window at the passing apartment buildings and bodegas. I hit him in the shoulder.

“Yeah,” he replied. “Something else.”

“That’s participatory democracy,” Victoria said. “Sorry.”

“This car isn’t a democracy,” Sterling replied.

Victoria scrunched up her brow.

“It’s not?” She crossed her arms in front of her chest. “Sterling , you’ve got to be the change you want see in…”

“Alright, alright!” Sterling huffed. “Spare me the political speech.”

He ejected the CD and Victoria slipped in The Exploited, which Whitey and I agreed was a better choice. The pounding music crackled from the speakers, muffled and scratchy from the countless hours of full-volume hardcore punk we submitted them to.

Sterling reached into a big brown paper bag shoved in between the two front seats. He threw a can back and I snagged it before it hit me in the face, a Pabst Blue Ribbon. We called it “Street Cred in a Can,” and we drank as much of it as our teenage bellies could handle, and then some. Sterling told us he got it from his older brother and we should drink up because we were getting close to the Fireside Bowl, a decrepit bowling alley turned infamous punk rock dive. Victoria chugged hers faster than me and then stuck her head into the back seat to rip a belch in my face. I finished my beer and burped in reply, although mine wasn’t nearly as loud. Whitey took a few sips of his beer and then threw it at a yellow Hummer parked on the side of the street. The can smacked the windshield and spewed frothy brew all over the car. I slapped him five.

Victoria scolded Whitey for littering.

“These are our streets,” she said. “Don’t shit where you eat.”

“It was a Hummer,” Whitey said in defense.

He had a point. After all, Hummers exemplified everything punks hated: materialism, upper class elitism, environmental degradation, macho douchebags, all that shit.

“Fine,” Whitey said. “The next time I see a Hummer, I’ll drink my beer and then piss on the car.”

“Atta boy!” Victoria said. “Fuck with The System, but watch out for Mother Earth in the process.”

Sterling slapped a curb with the front of the Brick as he pulled into a narrow parking spot. He threw the car into park and it groaned like the trip had worn it out. We got out and sat on the warmed hood. We all cracked open our second PBRs.

“To not shitting where you eat,” I said, raising my can in the air. The others said “Cheers” and we downed our beers quickly, hoping the alcohol would drain into our bloodstreams and cloud our minds a bit before the show. The Fireside Bowl was serious about not letting minors buy booze. Rules, regulations, identification cards — in a punk rock club? What a bunch of crap. We hated their rules, but it was the best club in town to see street punk shows.

Victoria collected the empties in a plastic bag and, after searching up and down the street for a recycling bin, she threw it in a nearby trashcan.

“Goddamn city doesn’t give a damn about the planet,” she muttered.

Victoria led the way down the block to the club. A couple of punk guys sitting on a curb checked her out, eyed her up and down, but they didn’t say anything to her. I walked up beside Victoria to make them think she was with me. With raised eyebrows, they looked up jealously, puffing away at their cigarettes. Punks are good at not trying to steal each other’s girls. Maybe it has something to do with their left-wing, self-induced guilt for being part of the male gender, the gender of The Oppressor, the gender of The System. In the punk scene, if a guy got laid, most of the time it was because the girl fucked him, not the other way around. At least that’s what I’d heard. I would be a virgin for a couple more weeks. It’s kind of funny: I was a killer before I was a lover.

As we approached the club we could hear one of the opening bands slashing away at their guitars. I felt the asphalt below me pulsing with raucous beats, as if the punk band’s riffs were pouring life into the crumbling streets. We paid our eight bucks a piece to a guy with a nose and lip ring and pushed our way into the hall.

The place was already packed. A hot, heavy fog of sweat and cigarette smoke hung in the stale air. It smelled like beer and piss — or maybe just cheap beer, which, after all, smells like piss. There were no fans or windows in the Fireside Bowl. Everything was pretty much black except for a small bar in the back by the bathrooms and the lights on the stage, which flickered on and off chaotically, without rhythm, like a deaf person was running the system.

Once inside, we huddled near the back, assessing the premises. The four of us began moving together to the music, slamming our boots and bobbing our heads. The first band played decent street punk, kind of like early Casualties stuff, but not quite as fast. We were all feeling the buzz and the music. We slammed our shoulders together and punched our fists in the air when the bass, guitar and drums would all stop at the same time. We stomped our boots on the floor together when the music ripped open again. We jumped around, up in the air, sideways, ricocheting off of bigger punks, back to the ground, up in the air again. I was surrounded by tons of people I didn’t know, thrashing around without a care, but I felt more like myself than ever. I was squished between punks on all sides, but I was unchained, free.

During the palm-muted intro to one of the opening band’s songs, Victoria slapped me on the arm and motioned me to come toward her. I danced close by her and as I stuck my head in her direction she kissed me on the cheek. At first I thought it was an accident, like she had bumped into me and her lips just happened to come together on my face. But I looked at her and she smiled. I put my ear to her mouth, offering her the chance to try to yell something to me.

“Let’s just do this forever.”

The drums and bass kicked in and I had to scream so she could hear me.

“Do what forever?”

“This!” She held her hands in front of her, opening her arms before the crowd.

One kid was helping another up off of the floor. A fat guy was letting a skinny kid use his shoulder as a crowd surfing launch pad. Faces, jackets, patches with safety pins, spiky hair and piercings all blurred together into one, a punk rock rainbow rising from the surging crowd. The vocalist was screaming about unity and, during the chorus, he let six or seven punk kids jump up onto the stage and sing the rest of the song.

“Okay!” I yelled in affirmation. “This is it, isn’t it?”

She nodded. The band’s song ended and the crowd breathed in at once, everyone stopped moshing and stuck their heads up to try to suck some fresh air. I was already sweaty and we had just gotten there.

I think I was a little drunk from those two beers. I couldn’t feel much. When you’re packed in that tightly, smashed between so many sweating, thrashing punks, it’s like you almost don’t feel a thing. Almost.

I sure felt it when I was slammed forward onto the floor. My face hit the ground and a bright flash shot across my field of vision. I tasted blood in my mouth and felt throbbing pain in my temples. The force that knocked me down was so intense that I knew it wasn’t just some kid pogo dancing around. This was intentional. I was on the floor because someone wanted me there.

I looked up, stunned, disoriented, at a towering pillar of a skinhead. My vision was blurry for a few seconds, but I quickly realized what I was dealing with. He was the whole package: shaved head, black leather jacket (even though it was one of the hottest nights of the summer), jeans tight around his bulging waist, iron cross on his belt buckle, combat boots like waffle irons. His shirt said something in Old English script. I never got to read the entire thing. I’m sure it was just some racist bullshit.

“Heil Hitler!” the skinhead shouted. All the kids I was surrounded by had scattered like roaches, leaving me sprawled out alone on the floor.

“What the fuck?” was all I could think to say. It seemed an appropriate response.

“Salute! Take pride in your pure blood, white brother!” the man said, his jowls flapping like a bulldog’s. His opened hand jutted out firmly in front of him. A black swastika was singed into the skin on his wrist.

I looked around to see Sterling backed against the wall behind the skinhead. Victoria had her hands over her mouth, her leftist sensibilities no doubt rattled by this six-foot-something mound of muscle, fat and hatred. I couldn’t see Whitey anywhere.

Everyone else stood back as far as they could get, fear burning in their eyes. There were dozens, maybe hundreds of them. There was only one Nazi. He stood alone, defiant, his huge, oppressive shape demanding all the attention. He and I were now the show, and all eyes were on us.

“Salute!” he commanded again. “Now!”

Standing to my feet, wobbling, I spat blood on the floor. I remember being worried that I had lost a tooth. I remember thinking that adult teeth don’t grow back. I pondered this fact like it was some spectacular mystery I had just now finally understood.

I told the Nazi that I wouldn’t salute him, that I wanted no part of his hateful system, that he should go fuck himself. I did all this by saying, simply, “No.”

He didn’t ask me again. Pounding the ground with his boots, he stamped toward me.

That’s when my mates jumped in. They threw off their self-preservation instincts and dove in to protect me. I didn’t even know most of these kids, but they knew I was in trouble, and punks protect their own. They leapt on the skinhead’s back like a pack of wolves working together to take down a bear. The Nazi threw one kid off with a snap of his thick right arm, sending him sliding across the floor into a wall of other punks. Two others clung to his jacket, but he shook them off by thrashing his limbs.

Right before he was about to reach me, his fists readied in front of him, Sterling jumped up and gripped his arms around the skinhead’s neck. The Nazi threw his arms back, trying desperately to pound Sterling hard enough to force him to loosen his grip. But Sterling was determined. Nothing could force him to let go. At that moment, two punks attacked the Nazi’s legs, ripping them out from under him. The giant fell flat on his ass with a resounding thud. Sterling still held his grasp, refusing to budge, trying to choke the massive fascist.

The Nazi was down. We’d done it. But we didn’t stop there. Hell no. The violence spread like poison through my veins, through all of us. We had tasted blood, and we wanted more.

I stomped on the downed skinhead’s chest as hard as I could. I was a skinny kid, so I couldn’t have done too much damage, but I kept kicking and kicking until my feet hurt. The Nazi kicked and punched in defense. His steel-toed boot slammed a kid in the face so hard I heard his nose break like splintered wood. The kid, blood streaming from his face, fell backward onto the floor screaming. His screams sounded oddly hilarious. While the Nazi’s punches and kicks were heavy and powerful, he was slow, and the punks moved fast, hitting him with dozens punches and kicks each second. The whole time he kept screaming, “Bring it on you traitors! You scum! You white niggers!”

Each time he yelled at us we hit him harder.

Whitey, out of nowhere, entered the fray. Down on his knees, he smashed his fists into the skinhead’s neck. Whitey slammed him in the temple, recoiled in pain, and screamed that he had broken his wrist. But wounds would have to be tended to later. The battle wasn’t over yet. We kicked the Nazi in the ribs, the face, the neck, the legs, for what must’ve been several minutes, although I’m not sure. Amidst the pounding of flesh on flesh, time seemed to stand still.

Through the chaos, someone screamed “Stop!”

Several punks jumped back like their mothers had caught them doing something they weren’t supposed to be doing. One by one, we stopped punching and kicking. The blood in our veins slowed. We all took breaths as the rage began to drain from us. It was Victoria who had screamed. She pushed herself between us and the Nazi, shoving and shooing kids off of his body.

When everyone backed off, I saw just how much blood was splattered on the floor. I looked at my shoes. The toes were smeared red. Nothing looked particularly special or pure about this blood. What the hell was the Nazi talking about? His blood was a dark, dirty red, just like the stuff that comes out of your nose if you pick it too hard.

Victoria pressed her fingers against the skinhead’s throat, kneeling.

“He’s dead,” she said.

I tried to swallow and almost choked. Now that the battle was over, I felt a thick, pulsing pain in my mouth. I ran my tongue across my gums. I had lost a tooth, one of the ones on the bottom. It was an adult tooth, I told myself, one of the ones that would never grow back. I cursed aloud and kicked the dead skinhead in the belly as hard as I could.

I got down on my hands and knees, searching around the club’s floor for my tooth. I don’t know why. It’s not like a dentist could’ve stuck it back in. It didn’t matter, though, because I couldn’t find it anywhere. There was just too much blood.






ISAAC JAMES BAKER was born in Belmar, New Jersey, in 1983. He grew up surfing and causing trouble on the Jersey Shore long before words like “Snookie” and “The Situation” further diminished the Shore’s already terrible reputation. He writes poetry, short stories and novels, and is working on his master’s degree in fiction writing from Johns Hopkins University. His novel, Broken Bones, the story of a young man’s struggle in a psychiatric ward for anorexics, is forthcoming from The Historical Pages Company. He lives in Washington, D.C.

The 2010
Jersey Devil Press
Anthology!

The 2010 Jersey Devil Press Anthology is now available, from our store, from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or from any other store of your choosing (ISBN 978-0-9846127-0-3). Also available in .epub, .pdf, and Kindle varieties.

Clocking in at nearly 200 pages, The 2010 Jersey Devil Press Anthology is the best of what we’ve published so far and then some. Twenty stories by twenty authors, all awesome. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll probably get hungry. And none of that is hyperbole.

This, however, is:

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What have we been so busy with? Why, the release of the 2010 Jersey Devil Press Anthology! And setting up the requisite launch picnic!

To celebrate the release of the 2010 JDP Anthology, we’ll be having a picnic in Brookdale Park in Bloomfield, NJ. You’re in charge of bringing your own snacks, but we’ll have plenty of copies of the anthology on hand. And probably a couple of snacks, too, despite ourselves. Date is Saturday, July 31st, from 1:00 p.m. until five or six or something. Consider it a chance to meet other authors and readers and get some much needed sun. And, let’s face it. You need some sun.

E-mail tickets@jerseydevilpress.com for more information on the exact location within the park. No, tickets are not actually required, but we don’t get to use that address nearly enough.

In the meantime, you’ve only got until July 27th to order the 2010 Anthology and any other JDP book for just $25! That includes Exponential Apocalypse, Perhaps., or another copy of the anthology. That’s right, two copies of the 2010 Jersey Devil Press Anthology for just $25! And all orders of $25 or more, of anything, will ship with a free set of magnets! Use them to stick stuff to metal!

Word Riot Press just released What’s Your Exit? A Literary Detour Through New Jersey, a collection of poems, stories, and essays by a number of New Jersey authors, as well as some people who just drove through it once or twice.

I haven’t actually finished it yet, but so far I’m digging it. There’s enough variety to suit whatever literary mood you might be in, and everything revolves around Jersey in one way or another, so that’s a plus. And where else are you gonna find (surprisingly resonant) poetry by Jason Biggs, the dude who fucked a baked good in American Pie? Hell, there are alternative tables of contents, sorted by Parkway and Turnpike exits. That alone should arrest your interest.

Figured a large enough number of our readers and writers have some sort of Jersey ties that I’d throw this out there. If nothing else, it’s a pretty solid defense against anyone who only knows New Jersey through The Sopranos or Jersey Shore.

You can order What’s Your Exit? from from Amazon or from Word Riot directly.

“There isn’t any milk!” the girl frantically replies.

“What do you mean there isn’t any milk?!” she yells back.

“I… I don’t know,” the girl stutters, “There isn’t any here. The shelves are empty!”

“Empty? EMPTY?!? What are we going to do?! How are we supposed to dig our way to the surface when the e-vac units arrive? Without milk to fortify our bones, surely we will succumb to the horrors of osteoporosis!”

“Plus, our cereal will be so dry!” the girl adds, wailing, “It will taste terrible!”

The futility of the situation descends upon them like the eye of a hurricane; an unsettling calm that allows them just a breath before destroying it again. It is one of those seconds that seem to last an eternity, caustic and silent, like a river of oil in a sea of vinegar.

“I guess this is it,” she says soberly, unzipping her fanny pack and pulling out a clear glass vial. She pops the lid and removes two capsules. “Here, take this pill,” she says, handing the girl a dose.

“What is it?” the girl asks.

“Cyanide,” she replies.

The girl looks at the small blue pill in her hand. It almost looks like candy. She closes her eyes and exhales dramatically. “I love you, mom,” she says.

“I love you too, honey,” the mother replies.

They take the pills and, moments later, drop dead in unison.



“What’s going on?” I ask O’Donnell, nodding towards the stack of bodies piling up in front of the dairy case. It is only my third day of work at the supermarket and I am not used to these kind of mass suicides yet.

“This isn’t typical,” O’Donnell says, “They usually just buy the milk and leave. Then again, we usually don’t run out of milk, so it’s hard to say.”

“What’s so special about today?” I go.

“Have you been living in a box, man? Take a look outside. It’s the Snowpocalypse. The End of the World,” his words are remorseful and teary. “If you need to hold me, it’s okay,” he goes.

“I’ll pass for now,” I say.

“Suit yourself,” O’Donnell shrugs. He curls up in a little ball in the corner and commences crapping himself.

Meanwhile, the store manager, Larry Levinworth, is directing the human traffic. He is standing on the conveyer belt of Register 5, holding a shotgun at his hip, looking very manly each time the front door opens and the wind rushes in, blowing his mane of chest hair in all directions. I am struck with the sudden urge to sculpt him out of Ore-Ida instant mashed potatoes, but I brush off the feeling as mild angina.

Shoppers clamour at his feet. Desperately they bleat out their brand-name provisions, hoping a gentle nod of Larry’s head could lend a compass to their hectic journey:

“Tropicana orange juice!”

“Quaker Oats oatmeal!”

“Chiquita bananas!”

- and -

“Mott’s applesauce. Mott’s applesauce! Goddamnit, which aisle is the Mott’s applesauce in?!? MOTHERFUCKER, I NEED MY MOTHERFUCKING MOTT’S APPLESAUCE!!! BLAUGHHAGDADFDADFJLADFAGIGIGADFIGNHCZ!!!!!!”

Larry puts the rabid patron down with a single shotgun blast to the skull.

At the base of Register 5 is Sandy, the most beautiful of all the checkout girls. Quickly, she scans items, her arms just a blur of color and white noise. Sweat cascades down her milquetoast brow. I could just imagine how good that sweat might taste. Like butterscotch. Or strawberry. Or perhaps shrimp scampi.

A sweet-looking elderly woman stands in front of her.

“Wait, I have a coupon,” the elderly woman croaks.

Sandy gives a glance to the amassing line whose vengeful, hate-filled stares prove to her that there is no God.

The old lady hands her the coupon.

“I’m sorry,” says Sandy, “But this item is already on sale.”

“What are you saying to me?” asks the old lady.

“I’m saying your coupon won’t work on this item,” Sandy nervously replies.

“Won’t… work…” the old lady starts hyperventilating.

“I’m sorry,” Sandy meekly says again.

But the old lady doesn’t hear her. The top of her skull fissures and splits and out of her wrinkled skin steps a winged beast. The beast screeches. Jars of Smucker’s jam and Vlasic pickles shatter, sending razor-sharp projectiles flying through the air. Sandy cowers. The monster opens its jaws and goes for her head. And just as the beast is about to clamp down, greeting Sandy’s fragile brain with that final, fatal crunch, an explosion – BOOM! – rings out across the sales floor.

Larry stands over her, grinning – the gun still smoking.

Fourteen more mother/daughter combinations have killed themselves in front of me. Outside, it continues to snow. I retreat to the stockroom to look for Wayne, the stock guy, who always has a flask of whiskey in his smock pocket.

I find Wayne, piss-drunk, doing donuts on the motorized hydraulic pallet jack. He giggles like a schoolgirl.

“Justin!” shouts Wayne, “You gotta try this!”

“No thanks,” I say.

He stops the jack. “What’s wrong with you, dude?” he says. “Did someone poop in your coffee this morning?”

“No, nobody pooped in my coffee this morning. I’m just a little worried because I just found out it’s the End of the World,” I admit.

“Pshaw,” Wayne waves me off insouciantly, “Let me tell you the secret to life. You can’t let the little things get you down. Every day is the End of the World. You just never noticed before.”

“I guess,” I say.

“Anyway,” Wayne says, “I know something that’s going to cheer you up.”

“Uh, okay,” I go, “But if you about to pull your weiner out again, I’m seriously going to hit you.”

Wayne puts his weiner away. He places his arm around my shoulder and whispers in my ear, “I know where to find some milk.”

I look at him in disbelief. “You lie!” I shout.

“Shhh!” he goes, “If Larry finds out I’ve been stashing it, there’s no doubt he’ll fire me… from a cannon! No joke. I’ve seen him do it.”

“Take me to it,” I tell Wayne.

He looks over his shoulder to make sure we’re not being followed/wire-tapped/infiltrated and motions for me to follow him.

Larry Levinworth has placed a leash around Sandy’s neck. She is in her bra and panties. Larry wears a Burger King paper crown and has declared himself the official King of the Universe. He confidently pulls Sandy around the supermarket. She follows obediently on her hands and knees, wrist-deep in the slush that coats the floor. A few customers have taken to worshipping Larry. They erect a shrine to him out of Bumblebee Tuna and Green Giant vegetable cans. They burn copies of Us Weekly at its base to appease their Lord. Larry nods with approval.

In the back, Wayne leads me to a mountain of Kraft Yellow American cheese, stacked up to the ceiling. He points to it. Apprehensively, I begin removing bricks until, at the mountain’s center, I unearth the much lauded Last Gallon of Milk.

The expiration date on it reads 1983 and it’s warm. Very warm. I hold the Milk in my hands like the last precious relic of some forgotten culture.

“How?” I ask in awe.

“I’ve been saving it for a rainy day,” he says, “Or, as the case may be, a snowy day.”

“We have to tell O’Donnell,” I tell him.

Wayne shakes his head in agreement.

We head back onto the sales floor. “O’Donnell,” I call out. My voice battles the patron’s screams and satellite muzak to be heard. O’Donnell looks up from his fetal position. I wave the Milk in my hand. His ruby-red face lights up as a devilish smile bisects his grapefruit – the fabled Milk of Ages; it’s here, and it’s real! We’ve all heard the stories, passed down from generation to generation – for it has been foretold, one day a Milk will come, unlike no others, it ushers with it the dawning of a New Era – and it is then, on that day of Final Judgement, the sinners and saints shall ascend to their thrones and each soul, large and small, shall know what it has done. We thought it the stuff of fairy tales, Sunday schools, and paranoid delusional internet chatrooms. But as sure as I hold this Milk here in my hand, every prophetic word of those childhood stories come flooding back to the banks of our collective memory:

I feel like Noah. And this Milk is my Ark.

O’Donnell stands up and starts running in our direction when suddenly a rogue cantaloupe rockets past us. It hits the wall next to O’Donnell and explodes. He is struck by the shrapnel.

“My eyes! My eyes!” O’Donnell screams, “There’s citric acid in them.” He collapses onto the floor.

“Don’t worry O’Donnell, I’ll save you!” I shout.

“Justin, don’t!” yells Wayne, but it’s too late. I grab a Boar’s Head Genoa hard salami from behind the deli counter and swashbuckle my way over to O’Donnell. He lays there paralyzed, bleeding, smelling like a fruit salad. He coughs.

“It hurts,” he strains, “Oh God, it hurts!” His voice weak and far away. “I don’t think I’m going to make it.”

“Don’t say that, O’Donnell,” I say, the tears welling up.

“I’m so cold,” he whispers.

“Well, we are in Frozen Foods,” I tell him.

“Just promise me one thing,” he goes.

“Anything,” I tell him.

“Just protect that Milk. No matter what, protect the Milk. I’d like to believe that somewhere – out there – there’s a place with no snow. I want you to take the Milk to that place, Justin. Promise me you’ll do that.”

“I promise,” I softly say, “I promise.”

His eyes go white. His muscles fall limp. One last bowel movement fills his khakis and he dies. I close my eyes and whisper a prayer. A few customers shove me out of the way and tear into his stomach, foraging through his intestines for what little crumbs of Planter’s peanuts they could find, undigested, inside.

Outside, snowflakes the size of footballs fall. They pile up quickly. At least four feet has fallen already and the dark, cloudy, billowing skies show no signs of respite. Eddie, the cart boy, tells us he spotted some polar bears in the parking lot. They were making love to SUVs. The radio reports that an emergency meeting of the House of Representatives to discuss possible evacuation procedures had quickly devolved into a massive orgy/battle royale. The vote is split evenly along party lines. There is no help coming.

We are on our own.

Larry is in his office, reviewing the security footage. Sandy does a sexy dance nearby. She dances and cries and her tears turn Larry on, but he is too enthralled by the images on-screen to pay any attention to her or her perfectly proportioned ass.

Larry sees me retreating from O’Donnell’s expired corpse. He sees the Milk in my hand. A sinister smirk crawls all over his lips. He grabs his shotgun, throws the leash on Sandy, and heads back to the sales floor.

Wayne and I reconvene in Aisle 5.

“What’s the plan, then?” I ask.

“Beats me,” Wayne concedes. He pulls out the flask and takes a sip.

The florescent lights overhead start to flicker. The muzak is interrupted by the foreboding wail of untuned violins. At the end of the aisle stands Larry, as tall and as granite as the blotted out sun. He is backlit by a red glow emanating from the register’s scanners. He shadow sprawls out across the floor, ending at our feet.

A legion of shoppers gather behind him. They are people from all walks of life – teachers, policemen, priests and doctors. Larry demonstrates their collective power by having them sing a few bars of The Oscar Meyer Weiner Song.

“What the fuck?” Wayne says to me, “What is happening to them?”

“I don’t know,” I reply.

“It’s like they’ve been brainwashed or something,” he says.

“Perhaps it’s all the years of subliminal messaging that the advertising industry has shoved down our throats,” I say, “All the commercial jingles and billboard salvation; all the pressure and speed of our capitalist culture – it’s like they’ve been turned into…”

“Zombies!” Wayne finishes my thought.

Larry points towards us. Without question, the zombies charge.

“Run!” shouts Wayne.

We run from the horde, throwing anything we could find behind us to impede their advance: Butterball turkeys, Charmin toilet paper, Crest toothpaste, Coca-Cola Classic. The products are consumed in their wake; their progress never slowing.

“What are we going to do?” huffs Wayne, his voice trembling with fear.

“Over here!” I point. We pull a sharp right and duck into the stockroom. Wayne continues running, but I stop.

“Come on!” he shouts, “They’re coming! They’re coming!”

“No,” I say defiantly.

“No?!” he gasps, “Are you mad?”

“Perhaps I am,” I go, “But I’m tired of it. I’m tired of running. It’s this place – it’s changed us. Just look at ‘em out there. We’ve been seduced by its convenience. We’ve let it subvert us, homogenize us, package us and resell us. But underneath its trusty, brand-name facade, it’s decaying, quickly, right in our hands. Well no more, I say! This is my food! And my store! And my Milk! And my life! And I say it’s time we fought back!”

A display for Chips Ahoy! has distracted the horde for the moment. The sale is too good to pass up. Ravenously, they tear at the packages of cookies. The violence of it is enough to damn any Keebler elf to an eternity of nightmares.

“This is our chance,” I whisper to Wayne, peering through the stockroom window, “Are you ready?”

“Ready,” says Wayne.

And I scream:

“CHARGE!”

We come roaring out to the stockroom on top of the motorized hydraulic pallet jack. Wayne pilots us straight into the mob. The Chips Ahoy! display tips over and flattens a few of them. The rest claw at us. One of them rips off my shoe. “Sweet, Nike’s!” the zombie says. Kicking free, I stand up on the jack and reach into the fanny pack around my waist. Grabbing a handful of coupons, I toss them into the air. Like ticker-tape the coupons rain down on the crowd and their attention quickly turns to the savings:

“That one’s mine! I had it in my hand!”

“No you didn’t.”

“Yes I did.”

“Fuck off, cocksucker!”

“You fuck off!”

“Give me my damn coupon!”

Their verbal blows quickly turn physical as the petty name-calling segues into fisticuffs. Wayne pulls the pallet jack through to the other side as the horde of zombies start mobilizing into several armies. Things soon escalate into a full-blown nuclear arms race. All factions of the crowd have their own atomic warheads:

“Give me my coupon!”

“Never surrender!”

“Veni vidi vici, asshat!”

“Ba-da-da-da-DA, I’m lovin’ it!”

The nukes are launched. They explode in a maelstrom of untold devastation, the likes of which Aisle 9 has never seen. Splattered guts drip from ceiling tiles and shelving units. Umberto, the janitor, comes out, puts a WET FLOOR sign down, and retreats back to his closet apartment.

Wayne and I watch from the end of the aisle.

“We did it!” says Wayne.

“Not quite yet,” I gravely reply.

We pull the pallet jack around to where Larry is standing. Wayne revs the engine. Larry lowers his head, curling his eyebrows into malevolent arches. His face looks like neo-gothic architecture; stone-cold bloodlust fuels his armada. Sandy can only watch, tea-saucer eyed, as Wayne hits the gas and we speed towards them.

Larry lifts the shotgun like it were a part of his own arm, so versed is he with his weapon that if he weren’t trying to kill me with it, I’d think it were poetry. Wayne squeezes the throttle until his fingernails crumble and

* BOOM! *

the shotgun sings as we slam into them. The pallet jack careens wildly out of control. We crash through the giant, plate-glass window at the front of the store and all four of us are tossed outside, into the Snowpocalypse.

It is minus 40 degrees outside. Sandy’s teeth chatter and her nipples go hard and I can’t help but look and become slightly aroused. Wayne has been thrown into a snow drift. He lays motionless. I stumble over to him. “Get up,” I say, kicking his leg. No response. “Wayne?” I kneel down and shake him harder. He rolls over and where his face used to be is a gaping, bloody hole. Wayne is dead. I want to cry but my tears turn to ice cubes before they can leave my eyes. I exhale a solemn breath. Gently, I pull the flask out of his smock pocket and pour a final sip down his shattered jaw. “Goodbye friend,” I say as the snow starts to bury him.

I am overcome with emotions; so fast they surge inside me I only have time to name them before they’re gone:

Anger.

Sorrow.

Hopelessness.

Desperation.

Larry is hurt, but he’s still breathing. I squint in his direction until one final emotion, the only emotion, solidifies in my soul:

Revenge.

He is on all fours. The blood leaking from his nose paints the ground beneath him psychedelic. “I admire your spunk,” Larry says, getting to his knees, “But I hope you realize, it’s all useless. You’re too late. One man can’t make a difference. It’s the End of the World. Nothing you’re going to do is going to change that.”

“That may be,” I say, “But you’re forgetting one very important thing…”

“Oh yeah? What’s that?” scoffs Larry.

“I’m drinking Milk,” I say, “And it does a body good.” I pop the lid of the warm, decades-expired Last Gallon of Milk, bring it to my lips and start chugging.

My entire body shakes. My stomach turns. I have a bout of diarrhea. And then I grow. My clothes tear off and fall to shreds as swollen, oily muscles canvas my torso. I gain height until I’m 10 feet, 20 feet, 30 feet tall! Larry is taken back a moment, but soon regains his composure and begins unloading round after round from his shotgun. The bullets have no effect on me. They just bounce off my rocky skin and disappear into the blizzard. A wave of terror washes over him. He feebly drops the gun and looks up at me, agape and helpless.

“One man might not make a difference,” I boom, my voice so loud and deep it causes avalanches to fall all around us, “But he can sure try, can’t he?”

And I step on him.

I pick up Sandy and place her on my shoulder. Larry is just a red stain on the pavement. The polar bears and SUVs pick at his remains. I smile triumphantly.

I begin walking. The snow continues to fall. Even at 30 feet tall, it is still up to my knees. Sandy clutches onto my back hair. The wind is unforgiving. Sandy scrambles up to my collar and clings onto my ear.

“Justin,” she says, her sweet voice desperate, small, and afraid, “Where are we going?”

I look out to the distance. Nothing but white in every direction. All is silent, cold, and lifeless.

“I don’t know,” I tell her.

And off we go.






DANGER_SLATER is highly-volatile and could explode at any moment! To be safe, don’t use your Danger_Slater around open flame. Don’t expose your Danger_Slater to direct sunlight. Do not look your Danger_Slater in the eye or you might turn to stone. Danger lives in New Jersey. The only devil he’s ever seen lives in his bathroom mirror. It needs to cut its hair.

The church sat astride Broad Street, the main avenue of that great cultural oasis of Central Jersey known as Red Bank. Dotted with bistros and boutiques – all favorites of the wealthy locals from Rumson and Fair Haven and the visiting weekenders from New York – Broad Street never failed to provide us with any shortage of appetizing choices for the evening.

Becca would stand at the tip of the steeple while I crouched next her, ready to pounce on whomever she instructed. I loved that moment before she gave the word: the light tapping of hearts beneath us, the crisp stillness of the night air, the rich leather scent of her Belstaff jacket, her hand on my shoulder.

Some nights I was her attack dog. Other nights, her wingman.

I miss her already.

I miss the sound of her biker boots clomping on the pavement beside me. I miss the way she used to wrap her arm around my neck and squeal after we’d killed together. Mostly I just miss talking to her.

Occasionally, we’d skip St. James and stroll down to Front Street to watch the Navesink roll by in the starlight. Becca liked watching the river even if she wouldn’t admit it. Sometimes she even let me hold her hand as we passed through the crowds, mentally marking kills for later.

In winter, there’d be time enough for us to browse at Jack’s Music Shoppe before it closed for the night. Jack’s was one of the last great independent record stores on the East Coast. They’d always open at midnight for a new Springsteen release and sometimes he’d stop by on his motorcycle to meet his fans and sign CDs.

Across the street from Jack’s is Kevin Smith’s comic book shop. We saw him one night, playing cards in the back with his friends.

It’s a whole lot of Jersey in one block.

Or at least it was before the sky fell.

The world ended on a Monday, but we didn’t see them till Tuesday.

We were back atop St. James, but instead of night it was ten o’clock in the morning. I was still too giddy from the thought of perpetual darkness to take the Newcomers seriously. They jerked and lumbered along, eating whatever had the misfortune to stumble into their path. I actually laughed at them. As always, Becca was thinking much further ahead.

“These things are going to taste like shit,” she said.

Five months later they ripped her to pieces in a shopping mall. Becca was smart and my best friend and a piece of ass to boot. She deserved a lot better than to be eviscerated in a burned out Anthropologie.

And in the end, she was only half right. The Newcomers didn’t just taste bad, they were bad – the human equivalent of spoiled milk. You could drain five of the things in one night and still be no closer to meeting your thirst.

It didn’t take long to realize that the Newcomers weren’t food; they were competition, a pestilence that consumed everything and anyone we could feed off.

We probably should have done something right away, while they were still in small packs.

Maybe if we had, things would be different now.

Maybe that emaciated beagle I ate earlier today wouldn’t have seemed as succulent and tasty as if I was biting into Eliza Dushku’s left butt cheek.

Maybe going three weeks without blood would’ve seemed like a bad dream, something you do on an insane bet, rather than the standard existence.

But blood drinkers aren’t generally known for their strategic planning – or their collective action.

Instead, we just went after the deer. Close to humans in weight, more readily available than one might think for a place like New Jersey, and not all that difficult to catch. And if you closed your eyes, they actually tasted just like people.

They didn’t last long though. No one will ever confuse a hungry population of blood drinkers with forest rangers when it comes to responsible culling practices. After about three months, it was no more Bambi.

Then it was whatever we could get our hands on. Wild Turkey. Opossum. Dogs. (Labs were surprisingly good.) It took us less than a month to run through them. And that was pretty much the end of regular food for us.

Eventually, the only thing that sustained me was the shared blood with Becca.

Before the sky fell, there was a place in Brooklyn called “Angel’s Sister.” It was run by this pair of blood drinkers who’d had a club going somewhere in New York since the late eighties. They named the first one, “Vlad’s Mom.” It was a play on “Dracula’s Daughter” from the Anne Rice books. The name was a send-up but the purpose was the same: a space for blood drinkers to gather peacefully with their own kind. It moved around the city every few years, changing names but keeping with the same in-joke. There was “Yorga’s Aunt” and “Lestat’s Niece” and my personal favorite, “Orloc’s Granny.”

By 2003, it was Angel’s Sister, and it was housed in an old diner in Wilmington. We met Nomar in the brick-lined back room. He claimed he was eighteen hundred and sixteen and had been the Emperor Nero’s personal secretary before being turned. I don’t think the math worked on that one, but I let it go. No one likes a smart ass. Besides, he was definitely older – and stronger – than me, so Becca and I sat and listened to him tell tales of the persecution that followed the great fire of 64 A.D.

“We went underground, to the catacombs,” he said, leaning in close to me and closer still to Becca.

“It was there the great nosferatu imperator Maximus Sanguineas showed us the blood circle.”

Yeah, “Maximus Sanguineas” set off my bullshit alarm too. But it was the way Nomar described the blood circle itself that made you believe in it, even if you didn’t buy the rest of his story.

In hushed, reverent tones, he described a cannibalistic feeding deep in the catacombs where blood drinkers would pair off with their most intimate comrade and one would drain the other within ounces of death. The point was to make half the coven strong enough to go out and find food which they would bring back to the others. Over time, the cycle would repeat, with the other partner taking his turn and becoming the hunter.

“You have to trust the fellow drinker, greatly, though,” he said and smiled at Becca.

“Trust,” he purred in his Eurotrash accent,“is what you need. Trust and knowing where to bite.”

He poked Becca gently in the thigh and every muscle in my body tensed.

He turned to me and smiled. “The neck, you see, is no good.”

Becca didn’t let me stay much beyond that.

She disappeared for a fortnight, twice as long as we’d ever been separated. When she showed up that night at Donovan’s, the first thing I noticed was that she was still wearing the same clothes. Becca stole from all the best boutiques and never wore the same outfit twice.

I knew she’d let him drink from her, had allowed herself to be kept by him. I wanted to hate her for it. But as she stumbled through the bar and grew close, rage was replaced by alarm. Her skin was ashen slate and her eyes were charcoal dots instead of their usual ice blue.

She didn’t say anything, maybe couldn’t. But I knew what she wanted. Within the hour we were both home, sipping on the sweet Goth girl from the end of the bar, the one who had insisted on ordering Pilsner Urquel while all her friends drank Coors Light’s. She was just Becca’s type.

When I rose the next night, the color had returned to Becca’s eyes and her skin was smooth ivory again. She sat primped and dressed for another evening out, a small smile playing on her lips as she watched me shake off the last of my sleep.

A dozen years as bloodmates and I’d never seen her naked. She always woke and dressed before me: a new expensive pair of jeans over the perfect curve of her hip, a just-in fashion top covering her small tomboy breasts.

She’d seen me constantly, of course, starting with the night she found me nude and feral down on Sandy Hook. She soothed me, took me in, fed me. Clothing me seemed to come last.

And each dusk she’d sit back and watch as I cleaned the dried blood off my chest and arms and dressed for the night. I don’t know what she got out of it. She just liked the power, I think, of her eyes on me. It served as further reminder to me that I was hers.

A few nights after she found me, I finally summoned the courage to ask her if I could still have sex, now that I was a blood drinker.

“Of course,” she said laughing.

“With you?” I added, almost without meaning to say the words out loud.

She went silent and looked at me for a long while. Then she took my arm in hers and said, “Let’s go out.”

That was the last we ever spoke of it.

It was before what would have been dawn if there still was a sunrise. We talked about nothing all night, maybe about how things were before the Newcomers. We spoke about that a lot towards the end.

After a while, Becca brought up the blood circle and that night at Angel’s Sister. There was no asking, just a decision for both of us, one she knew I’d agree to.

Calmly, precisely, she started telling me what to do. She lay back, wriggled out of her jeans, arched her back, and showed me where to bite. It was dark but her skin was nearly luminescent and my eyes lingered.

I moved my head forward and she grabbed a handful of my hair. Becca wasn’t angry, just firm.

“You’re just here to drink,” she said and let go of my head.

It was the best thing I ever tasted.

I said Becca was smart and I meant it. She knew others like us would start going after the humans’ stored blood supply. Riverview and Centra State would’ve been licked clean months ago, like most hospitals. But Becca had a gift for seeing the unobvious. New Jersey might be the Garden State but its most lucrative industry was pharmaceuticals. Drug testing and development meant the pharmaceutical companies needed their own large supplies of blood. Their labs usually had better back-ups and fail-safes for storage than the average hospital. Even five months after the end of civilization, their stocks might still be fresh and safe if we could just get to them.

The Johnson and Johnson facility by Rutgers was my first target.

I started out at the Home Depot on Route 9. We learned early that decapitation was the quickest, maybe only, way to put down the Newcomers. An axe and a small hatchet as back up and I was all set.

I headed north to New Brunswick.

New Jersey in the morning like a lunar landscape.

I think that was a Springsteen line.

What I saw as I hacked and sprinted along dead highways resembled less outer space and more mythology. Tartarus. Shoal. Hell. Everything seemed to burn. Dead trees lined the landscapes and empty cars – wrecked or just abandoned – jammed the thoroughfares like the getaway vehicles of a legion of ghosts.

The ground was a patchwork of blacks, grays, and browns, all of it dried and barren. The only things that moved other than me were the omnipresent, wandering, weaving bands of Newcomers.

I killed at least three dozen that first night. It was worth it for what I found in that one lab: forty-eight perfectly preserved whole units of O positive, over five people’s worth.

Becca hit a goldmine of AB negative during her first foray.

We knew eventually we’d exhaust the drug companies’ supplies too, but for a while things were better. We were drinking human blood again and I was closer to Becca than I ever could have hoped before the sky fell.

That was before either of us heard of Shotgun Annie or Eddie the Crazy Seven-Eleven Guy.

Humans always seemed like a spark in the dark to my kind. They didn’t know it, but people actually lit up our world. After a fashion, maybe the blood drinkers didn’t really know it either. With over six billion of them around, the sparks became ambient lighting, the preternatural equivalent of background noise.

At least that’s how it was before the sky fell. As the Newcomers consumed or converted what was left of humanity, the sparks returned. The last pockets of living people stood out like bonfires.

Shotgun Annie and Eddie the Crazy Seven-Eleven Guy.

They were the consistent sparks, the ones that were there each time we went out. Soon their names started floating to us on the wind. We never spoke them aloud, but we both knew who they were and, more importantly, that they were there – living, breathing people.

Annie was an assistant manager of a Gap at an open-air mall in Shrewsbury. She came home from work the day the sky fell to find that her seventy-year-old mother and two-year-old son were among the Newcomers’ first meals. And that was pretty much it for Annie’s sanity.

She looted a pair of shotguns from a local sporting goods store and duck-taped them together like the guy in that Phantasm movie. Then she filled her Kia with all the shotguns shells it and she could carry and went back to work. She opened the Gap like the world wasn’t dying and just waited. She even started a sale on outerwear.

While the big human safe havens were being sacked, Annie was stockpiling ammunition and gasoline and digging an escape tunnel. Occasionally, she took a break to try to sell reasonably priced denim goods to the survivors of the apocalypse. Since most humans who stumbled upon her store were seeking shelter not cargo jackets, Annie did what only seemed natural when they wouldn’t buy anything: she shot them and used them for food.

When the Newcomers finally came knocking, she was ready with barricades and long lines of sight set up over the mall’s wide-open parking lots. She shot as many as she could until the defenses were breached. Then she torched the Gap with the Newcomers inside before scurrying out her tunnel.

Afterwards she made herself manager of the Banana Republic a few doors down, started tunneling again, and waited for the next wave. By the time we picked up her scent, she was president and operating owner of an Anthropologie, having immolated over a hundred Newcomers in the Banana Republic, the Eddie Bauer, and the Brooks Brothers combined.

I still have no idea exactly what the fuck Anthropologie sold. The place was burned to a cinder when I went to recover Becca’s body.

As smart as Becca was, she could also be remarkably stupid – especially when there was something she wanted badly.

She didn’t tell me she was going for Annie, of course. But I could feel something wasn’t right as she drank from me. And she kissed me when she left. That in itself told me something was wrong.

About an hour later, I dimly saw her slip back into our lair, her arms cradling a scrawny and scared little thing. She set the skeletal beagle down beside me and left again. I knew she wasn’t coming back.

I wish I could say that I saw everything, that the blood circle put me there in her body, let me see through her eyes. But it doesn’t work that way. I just got flashes of feelings: exhilaration, disappointment, rage, and finally what I can only call surrender.

Annie didn’t make it out through her tunnel the last time the Newcomers came for her.

Becca must have known Annie was dead from a mile away, had to know the spark had been snuffed out, yet she went anyway. She didn’t run, didn’t come back to me. That’s what hurts most. Becca and the blood circle were all I needed, but it wasn’t the same for her.

But, then, it never was.

The blood from the beagle allowed me to walk, if barely. I stumbled out into the permanent night not really sure what I was doing. I couldn’t even carry my axe and just limped along with the small hatchet drooping from my hand.

It’s been a very bad year and I suppose I was entitled to a little luck.

It was black and lumpy and lying on the tattered asphalt.

A bear. A cub maybe? Not that big.

Winnie-the-fucking-Pooh.

I was on my knees drinking from him before I even knew what I was doing. Only after did I realize that he was wounded, near dead. There were Newcomer bite marks cratered across the thing’s stomach. There was a foul aftertaste in my throat. Another hour and his blood would be useless to me. He would’ve turned completely.

Into precisely what I didn’t want to think about.

Then I saw the cub’s mother.

Twisted and lumbering, she fell at me, crimson foam spewing from her snout.

I think she was still trying to figure out post-mortem movement. If the herky-jerky gait was awkward in a human, it was positively spasmodic in something that once was a bear. She couldn’t quite walk – on two legs or four – and so just bounded, picking herself up and falling in lunges at me. I dodged her three times and, on the fourth lunge, leapt onto the bear’s back and followed her to the ground. One hatchet cut into the head made sure she wouldn’t get up soon; two more cuts across the neck and she was down for good.

As I stood back, I saw her left paw reaching out in the direction of her cub. Or maybe that’s just how I imagined it. Something about it made me angry.

I didn’t know if the drained cub could still turn but I made sure he wouldn’t. That was the world I was in now: where you thanked someone for saving your existence by making sure to lop off their head.

I knew the strength from the cub would fade quickly. I only had so much time to get to Becca. I wanted to be with her at the end. But I needed something more. I had to make a stop.

In truth, Eddie the Crazy Seven-Eleven Guy was unfairly named. He was actually quite level-headed and positively stable compared to the likes of Shotgun Annie.

Eddie had been the proprietor of an Army-Navy surplus store he inherited from his father. But Eddie was a people person. His secret ambition was to own a convenience store, the type of place where he would make coffee every morning for his regulars and run two-for-one specials on chili cheese dogs for dinner. He’d become a fixture of the neighborhood, the place everyone stopped by on Sunday morning for donuts and a paper. It was a nice dream. So Eddie saved his pennies and was six months away from getting his own WaWa franchise when the sky fell.

That first day, Eddie took the things from his surplus store he though he would most need – a couple of generators, lanterns, sleeping bags, dry food-stuffs – and packed up his Blazer. He also took his dad’s Vietnam-era M-16, a good deal of homemade ammunition, and the 128 back issues of Hustler he’d collected since his seventeenth birthday.

Somehow he wound up in the abandoned Seven-Eleven on Maple Avenue. Like Annie, he opened the place for business. But whereas she was insanely cannibalistic, Eddie actually wanted to help. He was, remember, a people person. Had the first survivor he let in not turned into a biting, twitching fiend in front of the Big Gulps, he might not have grown so paranoid.

After he dispatched the thing with his father’s rifle, Eddie started parking cars. Dozens of them. He hotwired every car in immediate walking distance and began crashing them in concentric circles around his store. After two days he had three rings of crushed steel to barricade his own personal paradise, complete with a Blu-Ray DVD player, the entire contents of the local Border’s video, and what was likely the last operating Slurpee machine in the world. There was also, of course, his porn collection, which he finally had time to index properly.

The Newcomers would mass and threaten outside his barricades but ultimately lacked the mobility to scramble over three rows of busted-up automobiles, at least not before Eddie could get a head shot in. Like a suburban Robert Neville, Eddie manned his fortress, going out for provisions when the Newcomers drifted off to another target.

I actually expected to find him behind his check-out counter watching I am Legend that night. I was impressed to find that he had on Omega Man instead.

“They sure don’t make pictures like that anymore,” Charlton Heston was just saying as I rapped on the window from atop the pushed in hood of a Chevy Malibu.

I think Eddie knew there was something not quite right with me, even as he let me in, carefully undoing the locks on the glass door. He didn’t seem to mind too much though.

“Buy something,” he said.

“What?”

Eddie fingered the barrel of his M-16, resting near the cash register. But he didn’t pick up the gun. He positioned himself squarely behind the register. Behind him, Heston was screaming that there were no telephones ringing.

“Just buy something,” Eddie said. “Please. I never got to sell anything to anyone.”

I nodded and began walking up and down the short aisles as Eddie switched off the DVD.

I stopped at the small section of cleaning supplies and picked up a canister of Comet scouring powder. It seemed like the type of thing that would still be good months after the end of the world. I read the back of the can for a few seconds then nodded and moved on to the refrigerated drink locker. All the sodas were gone. There was just questionable looking juice and some green tea drinks. I took a bottle of the latter and walked up to the register.

“I don’t have any money,” I said.

“That’s okay,” Eddie answered. He pressed some buttons on the register and handed me a ten dollar bill.

I shoved it into the front pocket of my grimy, tattered jeans.

“Will there be anything else?” he asked.

I thought for a moment and tapped the glass counter above the scratch-off lottery cards.

“One of those,” I said, pointing to the one with penguins and polar bears on it. For some reason, I thought Eddie would like that.

Eddie’s hands shook as he ripped off the card and placed it next to the Comet and green tea. He waved his hands over all three items and muttered to himself, adding in his head.

“Seven-seventy-five,” he said.

“Pretty reasonable,” I lied and handed him back the ten dollar bill.

“Look like rain out there?” Eddie asked as he counted out my change.

“Don’t think so,” I said.

“Are you going to kill me or make me like you?” he asked.

“You don’t want to be like me,” I said.

I didn’t kill him there, of course. I only took a third of his blood. I needed him alive as bait.

Eddie stirs a little as he dozes on the counter of the gutted Starbuck’s I’m sitting in now. We’re a few doors down from the Anthropologie and I’ve lit some new fires to make sure they know we’re here. What’s left of Becca is sitting next to me. I’ve only kissed her twice. I know I shouldn’t do anymore.

I can hear the distant shuffle of dead legs and I start to catch their smell, fetid and pungent, even amidst the charred cloud of death that hangs over this place.

When they get close I’ll finish draining Eddie. I want all the strength I can muster. I want to kill as many of them as I can.

When it’s over, I wonder if Becca and I will be able to talk again.






MIKE SWEENEY lives in Central New Jersey where he writes constantly but never quite enough.

You can buy a paperback or a signed copy, or, if you’re more digitally inclined, or simply a tree-hugger, you can also get a copy for your Kindle or other e-reader.

If for some reason blindly buying a book solely on the word of the publisher isn’t your thing, you can go ahead and read two of the stories from the collection before you give us your hard-earned — or stolen or found or won, we’re not picky — money: “Jesus Was Broke” is here and “Decisions” can be found here.

Read them and love them. Then own them. Then read them again. Then tell other people to read them. The world will be a better place for it.

Case in point, this article from nj.com: Acrobatic thieves hit N.J. Best Buy.

The robbers pulled a Mission Impossible and went in from the ceiling, making off with twenty laptops.

While I — and JDP — certainly do not condone overly elaborate electronics heists, you’ve gotta admit that it’s kind of fucking awesome.

Perhaps., by Stephen Schwegler, is now available for pre-order.



Yes, you read that right, Perhaps. is now available for pre-order. In our store.
Perhaps. is due in all your usual retail establishments on March 15th, 2010, but we, being the wonderful people we are, have decided to open up pre-orders for it for the month of February.

You can order it as a classic paperback or in the extra fancy “author signed” edition. I can’t promise you that Steve’s handwriting will be legible, but I can promise that the ink will be free of blood. He was against that for some reason.

All pre-orders will be personally packaged with love and good intentions and will ship on March 15th.

You can find an excerpt from the collection, the short story “Jesus Was Broke,” here. Read it, love it, buy it. In whatever order you want.

And when you’re done, don’t forget to check out Issue Five! Free and online, just the way Mama used to make it.