I'm in the Big Apple. They call it the Big Rotten Core now. As I walk down Broadway, I'm struck by its similarity to the post-apocalyptic movies I over-consumed as a teenager. The emptiness of the streets, very I Am Legend. The newspaper tumbling through the intersection, unchecked like a tumbleweed through a western town, very The Road. The sad motherfucker leaning up against the wall, smoking a cigarette, and staring at the cracked and crumbling concrete, very Book of Eli.
The street ends at Times Square, once a mega-hub of awesomeness where cowboys played guitar in their underwear and an unceasing cavalcade of electric, sex-themed ads assaulted wayward tourists. It was now just a scene from The Postman. There weren't enough people to provide upkeep for the cities. Those that stayed did so because they had become ghosts themselves, haunted by the losses of The Drop. They stuck around, though no more food was coming, except for that which they grew themselves. Though the children didn't play hopscotch on the streets and the stoplights had been turned off, the ghosts remained, remembering the glory of New York and its eight-and-a-half-million residents.
Glass crunches under my boots as I turn and look inside the Disney Store... all those toys just sitting there, no one left to play with them. I step inside. The cash register was busted open a long time ago, but the toys sit waiting. And I can't help but wonder who will actually benefit from the story that I am going to tell.
The next generation, I suppose, the ones that will grow up without music. The ones that will grow up without the internet, they'll want these dolls. They'll want something to play with.
I exit the Disney Store, sick of looking at clownish, Dory plush dolls. I am in time for the show. The man at the end of the street puts a gun in his mouth and pulls the trigger. Blood sprays the wall behind him. I scream like a maniac, but somehow, no one in Times Square hears me... because I'm the only person left alive in a place that was once called "The Crossroads of the World." And I wonder, was that man just waiting for someone to stumble along? Was he waiting for an audience before he killed himself? Or were his sixty days up?
I shudder and call the police. "Hello?... Yeah, there's been a suicide in Times Square... What do you mean three hours?"
I hang up. I go back inside the Disney store, and I grab myself a Dory plushy, and I hold onto it for dear life as the man's blood and brains run down the wall. This was probably the worst vacation idea I had ever had.
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The Abbey
By Jacy Morris
Here is a sneak preview:
THE ABBEY
PROLOGUE
He would make him scream. So far they had all screamed, their unused voices quaking and cracking with pain that was made even worse by the fact that they were breaking their vows to their Lord, their sole reason for existence. Shattering their vows was their last act on earth, and then they were gone. Now there was only one left. A lone monk had taken flight into the abbey's lower regions, a labyrinthine winding of corridors and catacombs lined with the boxed up remains of the dead and their trinkets.
Brenley Denman's boots clanked off of the rough-hewn, blue stone as he trounced through the abbey's crypts, following the whiff of smoke from the monk's torch and the echo of his harried footsteps. His men were spread out through the underworks, funneling the monk ahead of them, driving him the way hounds drove a fox. The monk would lead them to his den, and then the prize would be theirs. And then the world.
He held his torch up high, watching the flames glimmer off of golden urns and silver swords, ancient relics of a nobility that had long since gone extinct, their glory only known by faded etchings in marble sarcophagi, the remaining glint of their once-prized possessions, and the spiders who built their webs in the darkness. Once they were done with the monk, they would take anything that glittered, but first they needed the talisman, the fabled bauble that resided at the bottom of the mountain the abbey was built on.
Throughout the land, legends of the talisman had been told for decades around hearthfires and inns throughout the isles. Then the tellers had begun to vanish, until the talisman of Inchorgrath and its stories had all but been forgotten. But Denman knew. He remembered the stories his father had told him while they sat around the fire of their stone house, built less than ten yards from the cemetery. His father's knuckles were cracked and dried from hours in the elements digging graves and rifling pockets when no one was looking. He knew secrets when he saw them. His father had first heard the story from the old Celts, the remains of
