'Strange Tales from the End of the Millennium' - excerpts & ordering information

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"Strange Tales from the End
of the Millennium"

excerpts - much of this material is in the
process of being re-written from the 1st Draft

CONTENTS PAGE
"Strange Tales from the End of the Millennium, Vol. I";
R. W. Etheridge, II; 1999
Title Page
Author's Notes - i - iii
Contents Page - iv - v
PART I - TALL TALES & OLD POETRY
Character Sketches for "Dentalva's Plague" - 1-5
Chapter 1 - "Dentalva's Plague - Pt. 1 - Anarchy Erupts" -
          Pg.6
Chapter 2 - "Dentalva's Plague - Pt. 2 - Just Another
          Battle" - Pg. 39
Chapter 3 - "New Poetry & Journal Entries from the Second
          Half of 1998" - Pg. 74
Chapter 4 - "Death of a Goddess - 1977" - Pg. 106
Chapter 5 - "Old Poetry" - Pg. 123
Chapter 6 - "I Shot Dogs for Cocaine" - Pg. 158
Chapter 7 - "The Saga of the Mutant Swamp Peacock" -
          Pg. 162
Chapter 8 - "Brief Interlude - Grandmas" - Pg. 175
Chapter 9 - DELETED to make room for new material- Pg. 178
Chapter 10 - "Spring Break-- My Bus Trip Through Hell -
          1988" - Pg. 182 [AUTHOR'S NOTE-- for anyone that thought they might set me up
                                    for a marriage on the basis of this story, YOU WERE GROSSLY MISTAKEN.]

PART II - VAMPIRE WARS & OTHER STORIES
Chapter 11 - DELETEDto make room for new material
Chapter 12 - "Biker Bob Nearly Takes a Spill" - Pg. 197
Chapter 13 - "How I Killed Charley Manson & OJ" - Pg. 227
Chapter 14 - "My Grandfathers Return From Beyond the Grave
to Mete Out Some Justice" - Pg. 258
Chapter 15 - "Raising the Dead to Help The Sweeper" - Pg. 271
Chapter 16 - "Rebuilding Eden" - Pg. 296
Chapter 17 - "The Always Elusive Pink-gummed Swamp Ape
Strikes Again" - Pg. 297

All persons, events, and places are fictitious. Any resemblance to any persons, events, or situations are purely coincidental.

WARNING: ADULT LANGUAGE & SITUATIONS

Chapter One - “Dentalva’s Plague-- Anarchy Erupts”

Our first tale begins during the end of the Seventies, a trifle before a certain Republican president rode into Washington on his white stallion just like in his old movies...

PROLOGUE
Well, sir...
I can tell you this much...
It was a guaran-freaking-teed Strange Time...

You didn't know who was an agent of a foreign government, who was a wannabe gang banger with deep pockets and an expensive suit - hell, some of 'em were agents of our government - those guys didn't know much about manners when it came to business. Along back alleys in the poor sections of town, it was spoken in whispers that Manuel Noriega was keeping a stripper from the Glass Slipper in champagne and furs out on Ono Island, winning large sums of cash in card games from Jeb Bush while playing some perverted rules variation called "Panamanian Poker". We had all different kinds of aliens flooding in here, from Vietnamese shrimpers & Montagnards to Haitian VooDoo Princesses & Cuban defectors, Chinese streamer dancers & European trailer trash to Mexican maids & Guatemalan gardeners... UFOs were being spotted and photographed near the beach. There were all kinds of people dealing coke, and half of 'em turned out to be narcs, and a third or so of the rest were informants.
The old Miami joke about "can't tell the players without a program" got a lot of wringing out around here. I had a couple of drinking buddies I would occasionally bump into at an alternative music club about this time, and they swore their best "powder pushing flunky" was from the 2d quadrant of some Dannebian protectorate in the Crab Nebula, and got all of his “Earther” weapons from Oliver North -- !

Sometimes, you almost forgot who your friends were...

YEP, It was Weird, and that’s with a VERY capital "W"... but things are different now, again... things are always different around here, now & again...

A few years later, when the entropy was beginning to accelerate rapidly...
"Get me his head!!" Jessica was livid with rage, having lost a crucial court battle due to the fact that Raymond had gotten his hands on some particularly damaging files by luring a low-level computer security clerk into his bed, then pilfering her passcodes book.
Of course, he'd had to get into Louann's apartment to crack her wall safe, but that had been easy the second date, after she'd seen the accommodations at his place. Raymond never spent much time at his place, since he was almost always off on some kind of mission, scam, or quest for adventure.
He'd been driving to New Orleans when "Lulu" had called, and asked if he could come over and show her the other half of the sex yoga positions he knew. He took the nearest exit and reversed direction, calling his contact in ‘Nawlans’ to let them know that the job was off for him. He had bigger fish to fry. His associates were not happy, since without his presence, this particular job couldn’t take place.
Ray didn't tell me much else. Once he made it back to town, and got to Louann's apartment, it didn't take long for them to start to play. Ray later told me that he wore her out, leaving her deep asleep, and smiling, while he tickled the tumblers of her secret place. Although she'd know she'd been used when she awoke, Ray hoped she'd already read about the case, and realize that she had played a small, yet vital role in a larger plan. He wasn’t sure if it would do any good, but he left a red rose on the nightstand anyway.
He'd also arranged for Azzteroidz to open a numbered account in her name, funneling her legitimate pension funds, at a loan shark's interest rate, through a small brokerage firm which Jessica indirectly controlled. Azzteroidz had tacked on a little gimmick of his own, since once it was discovered, it'd be shut down -- the "clock" would speed up exponentially once the program was initiated. One of Lacey Spovik's "inside people" was able to set it up on the brokerage end, since she was already inside at this particular firm, as part of a larger plan to set up a "house of cards" situation throughout Jessica's empire.
Ray knew that if there were any way for Jessica to find out who let us into her system, she would, and that person would be a bright orange target for Ms. Dentalva's well-documented rage.
It had been easy for Azzteroidz to use the low-level entry to hack into the subsystems, then construct a path for the data to be microbursted to nearby parallel terminals.
Since the Internet was triplicated, and the Supreme Court had ruled that information obtained through the "free and open exchange of cyberspace knowledge" was admissible as evidence, provided the best public interest was being served (another "good faith" exception to what was left of the Constitution- one which went our way), it hadn't taken long for the files to be posted in so many places that the courts had to evaluate them.
Raymond, ham actor that he always wanted to be, tagged the files with his own cyberspace joke. He had a digital animated image of himself, dressed as a pirate, replete with parrot and eyepatch, saying, over and over again -- "Arrghh, me hardies, we're out to scuttle the butt of that sinister witch Dentalva!!" It was made even more comic by the fact that Ray had always borne more than a passing resemblance to Charles Bronson. Hell, when he was 13, he had a mustache, for crying out loud. That, and his wide, almost humorless face (until it lit up in a grin), would scare the piss out of most people just to look at him. He had been one of the first people that we really got wild with, years ago, and he still appreciated a finely-crafted joke.

Chapter Two - “Dentalva’s Plague-- Just Another Battle”

Midnight, or a little after, and Jessica was in the throes of a mood upswing, attributable to the news she had just received. Bwarantosabi should be touching down in Savannah any minute. Her private plane would then shuttle him to the friendly airstrip nearest his shack. The first canister of “Khryosilec” would be at the bio-lab within 4 hours, ready for loading into the delivery vehicles, after the old magus had-- what was the incomplete translation Shkwark had provided her? After he had "prepared the way..."
He was an odd one, the old witch doctor. She understood enough of the basic tenets of black magic, and some of the reality behind it, to know that this was a man of great power, and that he would only be loyal to her as long as it suited him. And she also knew that he was well-educated as a scientist, and an exceedingly nasty adversary across a negotiating table, to boot. She stifled a nervous chuckle at the thought of any lesser demon that had to go up against him.
But for some reason, at every great cusp of action for her plans, he would be there, and somehow always provide the critical link that allowed her plans to come to fruition. To say their very destinies were bound together would be superstitious, but then again...
Ensconced as she was, in her ivory tower, she was immune to the cries of despair wafting upward from those who believed they were doomed to a pitiful, wretched life on the street, unaware of the coming wave of contagion this sinister player was prepared to unleash.

"Randy, we just got word that Rudy was killed in the parking lot of the tavern. He was able to blast the radiator of the sedan they were driving before they got him, but-- they took his truck," Franklin was really pissed off now, this was personal. The bitch he was fit to pitch at Raymond was nothing, compared to this. Franklin had done a lot, if not most, of the custom work on Rudy's sled. And I don't use the 'sled' designation idly, since he would do the St. Nick thing, every Christmas, just for the children.
I spat and cursed, knowing that the truck was something Rudy would die for, but also knowing that it wasn't what they were after.
"Try to keep this under wraps. Lord knows, these folks have enough to deal with at the moment. Get the Dead One over there to take DNA samples from the car before it's impounded. Then have Azzteroidz do the quick-match, even if he has to have the hacker crew tap the National Crime Database. Hell, tell him to tap the NSA's system if he has to, falsify access codes to the contract operatives database, whatever. I want to know exactly who's responsible, not the trigger-man, necessarily, we'll deal with him shortly enough. I want to know which son-of-a-bitch gave the order," I said, as Leslie walked up, and curled her arm around my waist, kissing me deeply.
She had been coordinating the nursery detail, double-checking supplies and monitoring the progress of the evacuation.
Franklin nodded, and turned toward the hallway leading to the comm room.
Leslie looked into my face and asked, “ What order? Trigger-man? Oh, Randy, what the hell is it?”
“I’ll tell you in a little while– here comes Louann.” Louann nodded to Franklin as he passed, then looked at me and said, "I just want you to know that I appreciate the warnings, the money, and..."
Before she could finish, I stopped her and muttered,
"I'm just one person among many that had something to do with all this..."

Chapter Three - "New Poetry & Journal Entries from the Second Half of 1998"
This is a cycle of poetry and journal entries which indirectly tie in with the later Vampire War chapters.

Dark Lord - (1998)
You --
Who tear the soul from Paradise...
You --
Who subdivide the Mother...
You --
Who poison the waters...
You --
Who foul the sweet breath of the wind...
You --
Who build mountains of trash...
You --
Who drag the bays...
You --
Who litter our sacred places...
You --
Who foul the airwaves with the stench
of your lies & propaganda...
You --
Who would obscure truth...

All for profit,
All for instant gratification.

You --
Who would billboard the wilderness...
You --
Who know no love of land...
You --
Who see your soulless vapid reflection
in everything
You --
Lay to waste...
You --
Who would wash the world in your dreams
of lucre, lust and blood...
You --
Who would turn his children's children
over to the devourer of souls...
You --
Who would build sparkling cities
of falsity, concrete, chrome, & steel
over a beauty so great...
You --
Who would pave everything under...
You --
Are the terrible evil...
Yours is --
A horrible darkness.

A quote from Ambrose Bierce, "The Damned Thing"-- "There are sounds we cannot hear. At either end of the scale are notes that stir no chord of that imperfect instrument, the human ear. They are too high or too grave... I am not mad; there are colours that we cannot see."

Chapter Six - "I Shot Dogs for Cocaine"

We'd been eating calimari and jumbo shrimp, sautéed in a light bbq sauce, just sipping at our pale ales, and were about to order some Key Lime pie before getting down to the business of closing out the accounts from the month's charter fishing trips, when Jake's voice dipped into that low, eerie register he uses when he’s about to tell a good story.
"Did I ever tell you about the time I shot dogs for cocaine?"
"No, I guess you didn't," I replied, waving the waitress over with two more beers, eager to tear into the meat of a fine tale of definite weirdness.
"Well, it was during the coke glut of the mid-eighties, you know, Reagan's glory years...the time when the shadow government was trading guns for drugs for money for tyvek* for favors from the extremists in the Middle East, and cooking up the recipe for crack in their spare time, yada yada yada."
Our pie arrived, along with a small tangerine sorbet. Jake paused to cleanse his palate, then continued.
"I was living on the Emerald Coast of Florida, and had been gathering information and working the local subculture, trying to find out why it was so damned hard to find any decent weed -- for my own reasons, I never take investigative work for hire -- and in the course of my research, I ended up with a little coke habit of my own."
He took a couple of bites of pie, then washed the graham cracker crust down with a long draught of ale.
* - construction material- used here as code for C-4 plastic explosive

Chapter Twelve - "Strange News & Supernatural Overtones-- Biker Bob Nearly Takes a Spill & Later Gets His Head Lopped Off in a Post-Acid Dream Late One Night on the Highway; Breaking up Catfights for Fun & Profit; Death on the Highway to Hampton; A Truck In the Field, A Bullet with My Name, and Other Old News & Twisted Memories-- FLASHBACK-- Churchill & Duncan-- 1940; the Bobzilla Seance."

In the brain-crazed days of yesteryear, winging home on the shaft-driven 550 rice rocket after an all-night session of political discussion, musing about the possible weapons the boys at Eglin had been charged to develop, and generally just smoking and joking, trying to lighten the load, hoping to get to breakfast before sunup, drinking too much during my leisure time perhaps, but tonight-- revving up to the redline, pushing fifth gear up to about 90 mph to meet the light, getting squeezed between two U-Haul box trucks, one heading into the eastbound interstate onramp, the other forcing its way over the white line into my lane-- like he didn’t even see me... or didn’t care.
Hitting the roll-up curb of the concrete and grass separator island between the incoming lane of decelerating interstate traffic, the onramp, and my lane...a moment compressed in time-- I had fallen before, taken my lumps and scars at other times, other velocities, dumped other bikes more than my fair share of times, (inner demons trying to slay me, or did I always need to try the ‘edge of the envelope’, and sometimes fail?), and cracked the windshield of the fairing off when the rear wheel got stuck for an instant between the asphalt and an old railroad track on a windy, drizzly day on Main Street, pitching me onto the roadbed and thoroughly pissing me off. A Good Samaritan stopped to ask me if I was OK, as I pulled off my helmet, flinging it down in disgust, swearing to God...
Grinning widely at me, he says, "Yeah, I guess you are."

But, back to the moment...

Airborne for twenty?-- forty?-- feet, desperately pulling back on the handlebars before slamming down on the pavement, denting the gas tank with my right knee, front wheel wobbling horribly, laying into the accelerator hard to straighten it out, zinging past that worthless piece of shit bastard in the right-hand lane U-Haul, and on to breakfast... good thing for him, I was powerfully hungry, and unarmed. I could have performed my first citizen’s arrest.

Chapter Seventeen - "The Always Elusive Pink-Gummed Swamp Ape Strikes Again"

It was a slow evening on the river, and fellas was tellin’ tales about the different times and places they had encountered the always elusive pink-gummed swamp ape. The fire was large enough to keep the mosquitoes and deerflies at bay, while also serving the dual purposes of keeping the meat (which was hanging overhead) warm, and cooking potatoes in the looser, cooler coals at the outer edge of the fire ring.
Cicada and crickets were buzzing and whirring all along the water, and you could hear a bass or trout splashing back into the water after a jump, now and again. There was a half moon low above the horizon, and a few wisps of clouds obscured portions of the sky. The stars were bright in the regions that were clear, and a mild breeze stirred the pine boughs above their heads.

They found Jeremy already back at camp, nursing Old Hoer’s bottle of rye, brooding silently, and stoking the fire. Old Hoer didn’t say a word, just pulled a brand-new bottle from his knapsack and began hitting it a trifle heavy, even for him. Doc applied a heat pack to Jake’s hand, drawing the blood back into it before tissue damage could set in, and Franklin trudged back into camp with the tail section of the snake, saying, “Ya’ know, I could get five or six wallets, and a couple of hat bands out of this piece of skin alone! Hey Jake, you wanna get rid of this little memento of another near-death experience, and make some nice cash at the same time? I’ll do all the work, and split with ya’, 50/50.”
Jake didn’t have many words at the moment, muttering something about, “I’ll discuss it in the morning, if I find I don’t have any significant vascular damage,” and Franklin tossed the hunk of meat, having already stripped the skin off, into the largest of the unfilled coolers before settling down to sharing swigs off the remaining whiskey in Jeremy’s jug. Rollie and Randy continued their little squabble, but Rollie’s hearing was returning after an hour and a half, or so, and the camp settled down to a gentle hubbub.
Once Jake regained the use of his hand, and the initial shock and disbelief of all had given way to a sense of wonderment tinged with a wider understanding of things unknown, and those only guessed-at, an overpowering feeling of smallness strayed ever-closer to the tiny ring of light cast by the fire, and each man there knew even more fully the true nearness of his own mortality.
None of them was far from his weapon until long after sunup, a fresh breakfast, and hot coffee, had chased away the specters of the dark.

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