Smart Bitches, Trashy Books

A Modest Proposal…

by Candy | August 09, 2005 | Tuesday at 11:39 pm | 29 Comments

...only this one doesn’t have to do with eating Irish babies, I swear.

(Besides, everyone knows Cambodian babies are the tastiest.)

I came up with a story idea last night. Part of it’s based on a dream I had—I have crazy, adventuresome dreams all the time, like the one in which I was Conan the Barbarian hunting down an Alien through the Kuala Lumpur Hilton—and part of it’s inspired by Serious Sam, a video game. While waiting for my rice to finish cooking last night, I banged out part of Chapter 1, and realized, wheee, this is really fun. And I came up with this idea:

I’m going to try and start a serial story here on Smart Bitches, sort of like what some of those pulp magazines featured in Days of Yore. The story is going to be over-the-top, and the action is going to be improbable, gory and fun. I’m not going to do any research—or at least, nothing that can’t be looked up in two seconds on Wikipedia or Google. Anything I can’t figure out for myself, I’m going to bullshit my way through, and any nitpicks about how I got this detail wrong or how the setting for THIS region is so TOTALLY NOT REALISTIC will be laughed at and disregarded. I’m aiming for gloriously silly mind candy, and I want to bestow said mind candy upon you teeming masses.

I’m thinking I can bang out a chapter once a week, once every couple of weeks. Every chapter will be plotted as it’s written; I have a pretty good idea of where I want the story to go, but I have no idea what the ending is going to be. I’ll find out where the story is going at about the same time you will.

So what do you guys think? This regular feature will spare me from thinking up scintillating issues to discuss every day, and hopefully it’ll bring some much-needed discipline to my writing habits, not to mention it’s a chance for me to exercise my flabby (er, non-existent) fiction writing skillz. Before you weigh in, though, down below is the part of Chapter 1 that I’ve written so far. Once you’re done reading it, let me know if you’re interested in seeing this story being continued for the next few months. Be honest. No hurt feelings if you think this is quite possibly the most retarded partial chapter you have ever read.

Chapter 1

Egypt.

If there was one thing Jennifer hated, it was fucking Egypt. Especially Cairo.

The crowds. The noise. The stench. The thieves. The beggars, who were more often than not thieves in disguise. The food—really, was a piece of roast mutton or beef that didn’t still have hanks of skin and fur still sticking to it too much to ask for? It was enough to turn Jennifer into a Vegan.

And the camels. Oh Lord, the camels. The gas crisis of ‘79 had hit Egypt particularly hard, and much of the populace had decided to go back to using the filthy beasts for their transportation needs. As far as Jennifer was concerned, though, the only good camel was a camel roasting on a spit. They smelled evil, they were surly, they took up way too much room, they spit, and worst of all, some of them seemed to have developed a regular fetish for rubber, which they liked to bite without warning.

Not convenient for an agent who always kept a pair of rubber gloves or two in her back pocket.

Most of all, Jennifer hated the heat.

God. The heat.

The heat in Egypt had a personality all of its own. It was a pushy lover—no, a strident, nagging mother. It insisted you sit up and pay attention to it now. It enveloped you, smothered you, swallowed you whole and then spit you back out, covered in a slime of sweat. And you had to brace yourself for more of the same the next day, and the day after that, and the day after that.

Jennifer was decidedly in Egypt, and not only that, she had lost Karkossian’s trail yet again. Consequently, she was feeling out of charity with the world, and Ramzi the Flea just happened to be handy. Literally. In the tiny, crowded back office of his shop, lit only by the few rays that managed to filter through the small, dirt-encrusted windows, she had him against the wall and dangling a foot off the ground. Her .44 Toshiba Motivatrix—God bless the Japanese, it came with a built-in electronic silencer and it took decent digital pictures—was jammed under his chin. Ramzi looked just about as unhappy as Jennifer felt.

Good.

“OK, darlin’” she said, her Texas drawl more pronounced than usual, the way it always was when she was pissed off, “Would you care to repeat that again? I think the heat must’ve affected my hearing, ‘cause I’m pretty sure I didn’t hear you right.”

“Madame, I assure I don’t know any—glurk!” Jennifer hitched him even higher against the wall and pressed the gun lovingly against his Adam’s apple. Ramzi the Flea had come by his nickname honestly: tiny and wizened, he couldn’t have stood higher than 4’10,” a whole twelve inches shorter than she was, and that was without the three-inch heels she was currently sporting. His face was starting to turn purple; the resemblance to a prune was uncanny. She smiled.

“Ramzi, hon, why you gotta piss me off? You know how much I fucking hate this place. You know how much I fucking hate the heat, especially when there’s no air conditioning anywhere. And you know—you gotta know—how much I hate coming into the Prostitutes’ Quarter to look up your shriveled little ass for some information that I know damn well you have. Now, maybe the heat has affected your hearing too, so I’m going to ask again, real nice: Where is the Book of Angels, and what does Karkossian want with it?”

Ramzi’s mouth open and closed, but only a faint whistling sound came out. His thin hands flapped in the air and plucked ineffectively at her. Jennifer eased up the pressure on the gun. He took an unsteady breath. “Madame. The book.” He paused and panted.

“Yes? The book…” she said encouragingly.

“It is.” Another pause, another panting breath.

“Baby, I don’t have all day,” she said and started pressing the gun against his throat again.

Something about the look in her eyes must’ve twigged him on to the fact that at this point, she would’ve happily blown his head off and looked for another informant, one who wasn’t as recalcitrant. “The book!” he squeaked. “The book, it is a very bad book Madame and it does not like women so please Madame if you forgive a worm like me to say this, if you even touch that book bad things will happen, very very very bad things, Madame, and I do not know why Karkossian wants it but he is a very very very very very”—another big, shuddering breath—“very very very bad man.”

“Excellent, darlin’. This is a start. But come on, now. ‘A very bad book?’ What kind of bad? Mein Kampf bad? Or Bulwer-Lytton bad? And it doesn’t like women? What the hell does that even mean?”

Ramzi looked up at her, large brown eyes swimming with misery. Jennifer almost felt sorry for him. Almost, if she hadn’t known what a ruthless, evil, conniving old bastard he was.

She did spend the first eight years of her life with him, after all.

“Madame,” he choked out, “The book. It is… It has the power to—to summon things. And it does not like women. Every woman who has touched it, Madame, has died horribly and in great pain. The last woman who was foolish enough to do so, they could not find enough pieces of her to find out who she was.”

“You’re shittin’ me. Come on, now, for real.” She tightened her hold on him and hitched him a bit higher.

“No, no, I do not lie, Madame,” he croaked, hands going to the back of his neck in a vain attempt to loosen her grip. “Karkossian has the book, and it can only mean he wants to summon the Elder Gods, the Sleeping Ones. No other reason to seek the Book of Angels. He took it to the ruins of Karnak, and that is very very very very very…”

“Bad,” she finished for him. “Right. I get the picture.” She sighed, stepped back and opened her hand. Gravity did the rest. Ramzi landed in an ungainly heap on the floor, leaving an impact crater in the thick dust and knocking over a stack of boxes stamped “Made in Taiwan” and “Fragile.” The topmost box split open, and dozens of massive pink dildos spilled out. Jennifer’s eyes flickered to the spill of sparkly ersatz phalluses on the filthy floor. Her mouth quirked up, then flattened again as she pressed her gun against the side of Ramzi’s head. Caught in mid-scramble, he froze and looked up at her with a wounded expression.

She lifted him to his feet with a none-too-gentle yank, gun trained on him the whole time. “OK, Ramzi,” she said, shoving him back against the wall. “I’ll bite. Tell me about this woman-hating book and the Gods it can supposedly summon.”