Go-Go Girls of the Apocalypse

Go-Go Girls of the Apocalypse

Victor Gischler

Mortimer Tate was a recently divorced insurance salesman when he holed up in a cave on top of a mountain in Tennessee and rode out the end of the world. Go-Go Girls of the Apocalypse begins nine years later, when he emerges into a bizarre landscape filled with hollow reminders of an America that no longer exists. The highways are lined with abandoned automobiles; electricity is generated by indentured servants pedaling stationary bicycles. What little civilization remains revolves around Joey Armageddon's Sassy A-Go-Go strip clubs, where the beer is cold, the lap dancers are hot, and the bouncers are armed with M16s.

Accompanied by his cowboy sidekick Buffalo Bill, the gorgeous stripper Sheila, and the mountain man Ted, Mortimer journeys to the lost city of Atlanta – and a showdown that might determine the fate of humanity.

Victor Gischler

  Go-Go Girls of the Apocalypse

For Anthony Neil Smith and Sean Doolittle, who both

assured me I had a good book on my hands even before I

believed it myself

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I need to add some names to the list of usual suspects. David Hale Smith has been one hell of an agent… Thanks for catching everything I’ve thrown at you. Thanks to Zach Schisgal, Shawna Lietzke and the team at Touchstone/Fireside for keeping me on track. And extra thanks to my wife, Jackie, and son, Emery, for putting up with me. Last but not least, many thanks to all those readers who keep coming back.

When the people saw that Moses was so long in coming down from the mountain, they gathered around Aaron and said, “Come, make us gods who will go before us. As for this fellow Moses who brought us up out of Egypt, we don’t know what has happened to him.” - EXODUS 32:1

I

This is how Mortimer Tate ended up killing the first three human beings he’d laid eyes on in nearly a decade:

A wreath of cloud lay smooth and still about the top of the mountain like bacon grease gone cold and white in a deep, black frying pan. The top halves of evergreens poked through the cloud, frosted from last night’s snow. The final days of winter, not too cold-Mortimer Tate estimated maybe thirty degrees. The thermometer had burst in the third year, that most bitter winter when it had gotten to twenty below or more. The thermometer had been made in America by a small company in Ohio.

Nothing was made to last anymore, Mortimer’s dad had been fond of saying.

Mortimer sat at the window of the cabin, which had been built directly in front of the cave. The cave stretched back deep into the mountain. Mortimer sipped tea brewed from ginseng and tree bark he collected and dried himself. The coffee had run out the first year. So many things had run out that first year.

Mortimer watched the men come up the mountain, had seen them rise up through the mist and had blinked at them, thinking he’d cracked up at last. But they were real, rifles in front of them, not trying too carefully for stealth,