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    Clearance Sale
    Clearance Sale
    Clearance Sale
    Ebook50 pages42 minutes

    Clearance Sale

    By Richard Quarry

    ()

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    About this ebook

    When Alice alerts Bill to news flashes showing cities crumbling as metal melts away, he huffs, "Photoshopped."

     

    Seconds later their apartment starts to fall away beneath them.

     

    Bill and Alice scramble, slide, and bounce out, escaping with nothing but their lives and a gray plaster coating of gypsum dust cemented by bursting water pipes. They join the pitifully meager exodus of survivors struggling from the ruins. On the outskirts of town they trudge down streets lined with cars and trucks reduced to giant roller skates. The inhabitants gulp down the last of the hash and beanie-weenie before cans and can openers pass on to glory. Starved city-dwellers wave credit cards at natives who wave half-melted and distinctly un-phallic guns back. It's the thought that counts.

     

    Oh yeah, and then there's the … werewolf? Hard to be sure. Whatever, it's got Alice moaning, "Why can't we have a plain old zombie apocalypse, like normal people?"

     

    You should be so lucky.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRichard Quarry
    Release dateApr 11, 2023
    ISBN9798215669334
    Clearance Sale

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      Book preview

      Clearance Sale - Richard Quarry

      Also by Richard Quarry

      a Nat Frayne mystery

      The Dread Men and Other Cases of Nat Frayne

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      And Make Not Dreams Your Master

      Lord Under London And Otther Cases of Nat Frayne

      Lord Under London

      The Case of Dancing Kali

      The French Medium

      Perfidious Albion

      Further Adventures of Odysseus

      Odysseus and the Eye of Odin

      Man Of Many Turnings

      The Evolved

      The Big Empty

      Point Of No Return

      The Outcasts

      Holobrain

      Grinder

      The God Machine

      The Evolved

      The Valrayne Saga

      Dance of Sword and Heron

      Dance of Deer and Shadow

      Dance of Cat and Amber`

      Standalone

      Beer Run

      All You Ever Have To Do

      Midnight Choir

      Geneslide

      Blue Dread

      The Horns Of Hathor

      Flameout

      What Rough Beast

      Absent From Felicity

      The Homecoming of Lucian Wren

      Mary's Hell

      The Sound of Snowfall

      The Fires of Beltane

      Devolution Day

      Beer Garden

      The French Fries of Freedom

      Soldier of Discontent

      Clearance Sale

      The Treasure of the Endless Scrub

      Star Mole

      Questing Song

      Board Games

      Miss Kittenses

      String Theory

      Tea Party

      No Boobs, No Kardashians

      The Blue Ibis

      Soldier of Discontent and Other Stories

      Clearance Sale

      Richard Quarry

      Copyright © 2023 by Richard Quarry

      All rights reserved.

      No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

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      Contents

      Clearance Sale

      About the Author

      Absent From Felicity

      Clearance Sale

      Bill Carburry, normally a reserved and civil man, loosed a heart-felt string of curses as the slicing blow he’d aimed at the tip of the stick sliced the skin off his left forefinger instead.

      Bill, please, groaned Alice Doral, leaning against a tree trunk opposite. She held her arms wrapped tightly about herself, and rocked back and forth as she spoke. A coat of gray dust covered her. No more drama. No more noise. I can’t take it.

      Bill looked with sinking heart upon the blood seeping from his finger. He couldn’t take any more either, yet it kept on coming. The end of the world as we knew it. The end of the world as anyone but a cockroach could know it. Terror and exhaustion orders of magnitude beyond anything his previously well-ordered life could have readied him for. Hunger, cold, uncertainty — check, check, check. And now this. Well, he didn’t think it was funny.

      I know, Alice. He tossed the four-foot piece of branch away in disgust. Dumb idea anyway. Shit, I’m an IT professional. Trying to sharpen a stick with a piece of rock like a goddamn caveman, that’s just … demeaning. Apart from stupid. Damn, and I finally paid off my student debt last year, too. All for—

      His lips clamped down. It wasn’t fair. Wasn’t right, not at all. When he thought of how much time, money, and general self-denial he’d put into mastering what the whole world regarded as the gold-plated ticket to a prosperous and secure future….

      Well, it just wasn’t right.

      Alice came shuffling across the twigs and fallen leaves. Fervently they held each other, seeking life, seeking warmth.

      Ouch! said Bill, involuntarily.

      Oh Bill, I’m sorry! she cried, staring dismayed at the claws that had replaced the fingers of her left hand. I forgot.

      There’d been hardly any warning. And what they got, they didn’t believe.

      It’s some kind of Orson Welles thing, Bill had insisted. "You know, that War of the Worlds radio broadcast telling everyone the Martians had landed? Created

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