Rumored to Exist, by Jon Konrath
Rumored to Exist, by Jon Konrath
Available at:
Amazon, Smashwords
Visit the “Rumored to Exist” website
33% off coupon on Smashwords (Reg. $2.99, now $2.00) - coupon code ZP73X.
Description: A combination of pop-fiction references, heavy metal speed, and hilarious parody mix the half-dozen different stories together into a nightmarish tale of post-apocalyptic America.
Meet John Conner: UFO enthusiast, militant screenwriter, explosives expert, and extreme sports enthusiast. He works for an insane scientist who collects human corpses and made millions on an impossible-to-solve childrens puzzle that shoots poisonous spikes when it isnt completed. On his days off, Conner steals genetic material for blackmail purposes with his Columbian bodyguard Tito, and hangs out with his Lego-obsessed friend Nick. His Texan lawyer, preoccupied with his own earwax, has vanished to Vietnam; a guy named Ivan has started selling sheep for sexual purposes; a famous filmmaker is working on a cinematic trilogy based on vomit. Plus he and Nick found a way to talk to the dead via a librarys electronic card catalog terminal. But even in this strange world, the meaning of life eludes him, and he needs to know the answers, or at least find a way to pay his six-digit phone bill.The nonlinear, experimental fiction of Rumored to Exist blasts through a hyperdimensional landscape of the near-future, mutated fact, and impossible science. A combination of pop-fiction references, heavy metal speed, and hilarious parody mix the half-dozen different stories together into a nightmarish tale of post-apocalyptic America.
Excerpt
10
It’s one of those days where you want to lock yourself in your office, snort dry erase markers, break out that pint of Johnnie Walker Red you hid in your desk, and listen to the Doors song “The End” over and over in your CD player, screaming out the words in a drunken stupor while writhing on the floor, in toxic shock and hallucinating from the markers — “hello father / yes son / I want to kill you” and then your boss walks in to ask you about a project and you’re half-naked, sweating profusely, Post-it notes and crud stuck to your skin, and The Doors are playing out of the s**tty speakers on your PC so loud that you can’t even hear the words anymore. And when I feel like this before lunch, I know something bad’s going to happen.
I’ve long ago given up on understanding my role in the workplace. When I was a child, I dreamed about doing something important, designing specific prosthetic arms for amputee world-class chess players. With my Legos and the pieces of various consumer electronics I managed to pry apart—calculators, smoke detectors, a garbage disposal—I designed the prototypes for a series of fine-action arms usable with any regulation chess set; in fact, several limbs were designed for specific purposes. I spent months refining the fingers of a Radio Shack robotic hand to specifically work with the space constraints of an isolated d-pawn. But the gas crunch of ‘74 put a stop to the use of my father’s TIG-welding equipment (he left his job as an assembly foreman on the Skylab project to pursue a flailing career as a research intern on the ill-fated Godzilla animated cartoon series), along with my debilitating pre-school obsession with Marie Osmond and the Watergate hearings. Before I could blink, I was buying a set of third-rate SAT scores to cover my lackluster performance at the Lyapunov Academy (incidentally, half of my graduating class shot themselves, in honor of the school’s namesake Russian mathematician) and pursuing a PhD in diesel mechanics. I’ve come to love the tolerance of a high-compression engine, the whir of a finely tuned diesel injection pump, the taste of kerosene. I even cranked out a better than average dissertation on Fourier Transformation conversion on Korteweg-de Vries equations to predict cold-starting behavior on the ‘77–‘84 VW Rabbit Diesel. Since grad school, I’ve pushed papers, flipped burgers, balanced books, and done about every other menial scrap of work I could find to turn a quick buck. Through it all, I still dream about working in a more noble profession, maybe something involving nuclear weapons, the shaving of pubic hair, or possibly booking guests for the Conan O’Brien Show.
Incidentally, you can’t get high by inhaling dry erase markers. You probably knew this if you took chemistry classes, like I didn’t. You can also probably explain the chemical reaction, but I could write a thesis on inhalants and 17th century literature. Spenser was really into rush; Chaucer preferred plumbing cement in the bottom of a plastic bag. Shakespeare was strictly a paint thinner and acetone kind of guy. If you read The Merchant of Venice after taking 15 hits of veterinarian-grade Demerol like I did, you’d know what I was talking about.
47
It rained N-alkyl dimethyl benzyl ammonium chlorides so hard, it cleaned the rooftops and sidewalks of soap scum and hard water stains within five minutes. The townsmen scraped the mold from cheese, fruit, and 40-day-old microwave spaghetti, and tried to determine its hallucinogenic properties in a giant ergot clusterf**k of death. It became an annual festival, The Growing of the Fungus. It caused addled town-planners to create new streets careening at psychedelic angles, with weird and sometimes identical names on street signs in often-unreadable deviant languages. Also, infant mutations rose to a phenomenal high: missing or extra limbs, Siamese twins, open chest cavities, and disproportionate body sizes. Nobody knew about it, because the town used 640-volt power mains and an obscure Russian TV format, causing confusion in all external media.
I heard about the story from this city planner I met on an R. Buckminster Fuller mailing list I joined when I got obsessed with that geodesic dome on the cover of the first Suicidal Tendencies album. On our first date, I brought her to an illegal rodeo where they used large dogs as bulls, and then afterward we went to a Super K-Mart to buy some groceries and cook soft tacos with Spam and pineapple chunks, and we saw Axl Rose shopping for food with Chiang Ch’ing, former wife of Mao Tse-Tung. The four of us went to the Big K Cafe for several rounds of Icees, where we discussed the upcoming Guns ‘N Roses album, Chinese slave labor camps, and how f**ked up the new K-Marts looked. Later, we went to a Starbucks next door and pistol-whipped the counter help to get some free coffee and scones.
After a few mediocre dates, she landed a new job in Kitchener, Ontario, where she planned to learn French and design multilingual death chamber equipment for NATO war crimes tribunals. I thought about following her up there, but I couldn’t score enough points on the immigration entrance exam without learning how to skate. I wrote off the entire relationship, bought a cache of wooden-cased Apple I computers (the largest private collection outside of Silicon Valley), and went to work on a cubist-based mutilation death-squad militia based in Hell, Michigan. It made me forget, somewhat.
63
“What the hell were you doing out in the desert for three days?” the doctor asked. He methodically tapped my back with his fingers as I lay on the paper-covered table in the small examination room. (At least his rolls of sterile butcher paper had Far Side cartoons printed on them, so I had something to do besides steal half his s**t while I waited an hour and twenty minutes after my appointment time for him to show up.) “And why did you tell the nurse you had nephroblastoma? Wilms’ tumor is only found in kids younger than eight with cancer, not in 28-year-old men who spent a week looking for UFOs.”
“It wasn’t UFOs. I was trying to find evidence of a hybrid man-alien skull that’s allegedly lost in Mexico. I have GPS coordinates and everything.”
Doctor Van Nostrund wasn’t your standard family doctor, even if he did have a practice in one of those strip-mall medical clinics usually crawling with poxed and contagious preschoolers. He made his millions by designing a special bong that mixed krypton-81m in the chamber with the dope smoke. When the radioactive gas passes through the lungs with a bong hit, a gamma camera is used to shoot the weird, swirling patterns through the respiratory system and the whole thing is mixed in post with some other f**ked up special effects. It’s in that one Korn video, if you don’t know what I’m talking about.
“Wonderful. I hate to say it, but I think your pain is just from sleeping in the back of a rental car for the last three weeks. I’d give you some painkillers, but I’ve seen your website.”
“So I should keep loading up on Tylenol and Wild Turkey?”
“Try buying a Kraftmatic bed, and taking up a more domesticated hobby, like nuclear weapons repair. You could also look into a chiropractor that isn’t just an Asian chick that gives you a handjob at the end of her ‘massage.’ And before you ask, I don’t know anything at all about hybrid skulls, Carbon-14 testing, or DNA matching. There’s a podiatrist next door that might be able to help you if you find any alien feet, though.”
F**k him. I got dressed, went to my car, and checked the haul in my gym bag: 14 prescription pads, 2000 tongue depressors, a carton of Zoloft sampler packs, half a box of latex gloves, and a 16 ounce tube of K-Y jelly. Not bad, for a $20 copay.
73
“Hey man, you want to play Nintendo?” I woke and looked around the hospital room, if you want to call it that. It looked like a Satanic leper colony in bad need of a paint job. The day nurse was taking a bong hit, a broken game console in his lap. I had a rhyming dictionary in my hands, with IV tubes the size of kitchen plumbing in both arms, my inner thigh, and my ankle.
“What the fu…” I tried to sit up, and my weakened body told me I hadn’t moved in a long time. It felt like I jogged three miles after a severe heart attack. Every muscle was atrophied, and I must have lost 80 pounds from dehydration alone. I tried to remember what happened to me, but my swiss cheese mind only gave me brief flashes: someone handing me a gun, firemen in silver suits, Vietnamese money being thrust in my face as a wager, newspaper headlines about Superman getting busted for beating up two New York Giants players in a Long Island bar, putting one bullet in the chamber of the pistol, spinning it before holding it to my head, a mob crowd of peasants screaming in an unknown Asian language, script revisions for a Chris Rock prime-time vehicle about a wacky criminal in his thirties who tries to go straight by forging his way back into high school. None of it made any sense.
“You want some Tang, man? Lemme find the recipe.” The male nurse, who looked like Glenn Danzig minus the decades of intense weight training, put down the bong and Nintendo controller, and ran out of the room. What ever happened to the days of hotter than hell female nurses, straight out of female-only colleges and ready to sponge-bathe anything you shoved in their face? F**king managed care health plans.
My skin, a cross between Bea Arthur and G.G. Allin, had a pale lutefish tone, with needle marks, scars, patches of shaved hair, and a tattoo of directions to Alyssa Milano’s house. I tried not to move, thinking any conservation of energy would get me back on the streets as fast as possible. With only the rhyming dictionary and a copy of the June 9-15, 1974 TV guide, the wait would seem like forever.
Persian, version, inversion, submersion, recursion. Recursion! This was all a math test. When I took Calculus 1 (the second or third time), I found recursion listed twice in the index. On page 509, see page 521. On page 521, see page 509. It was the two men’s faces becoming a picture of a vase for my entire Calculus experience. I got a C-. I never went to Calc 2, got an F.
It all reminded me of when I was four and in the hospital for the first time for grinding up a Weebles figurine with a Makita power tool and inhaling the dust. I roomed with an Amish kid who lost an arm by falling off a tractor. Never having seen any Amish people before, I thought the black-and-white dressed people were reject extras from the TV show Kung Fu, or maybe some distant relative of the Stormtroopers who didn’t wear armor because they were wimps. 15 years later, I wondered if the boy would ever learn to masturbate properly with only one hand.
“Hey man, here’s your juice.” Stoner bud produced a peanut butter jar of lukewarm tap water and various chunks of orange dust swirling like an Oklahoma twister. “It’s got some echinacea and goat testes powder—it’ll help you heal faster.” I didn’t care; I drank the whole thing in one giant gulp. Dismay. Monet. Morey. Ben Gay. Chevrolet.
143
The NYPD had the building surrounded. SWAT team troopers with full body armor, black urban camouflage suits (A/X Armani Exchange, $1350), automatic weapons, teargas, and infrared binoculars hid behind squad cars parked like bunkers in the street. Snipers sat at every rooftop with high-power rifles, wearing black nylon and Gore-Tex suits with three-quarter hoods (Gucci, $725; available at select Saks Fifth Avenue and Gucci stores) and matching pants, (John Bartlett, $335.) Marine AH-1W Whiskey Cobra helicopters flew between the Manhattan buildings, blasting Mariah Carey’s first album, both as a psych-warfare tactic and to detonate any stray anti-personnel mines with the high-register vocals.
The police chief, wearing a polyester-rayon suit (Guess Collection, $450) with a viscose-cotton shirt (Paul Smith, $290) slammed down the phone in the makeshift command center across the street from the bank. “F**k! He won’t budge unless we bring in Martin Scorsese as a hostage negotiator. Do you think he’s going to show up, strap on a Kevlar vest, go in without a weapon, and talk to this f**k? What the hell was his name again?”
“David Holzman,” said the cop-who-doesn’t-play-by-the-rules action hero dressed like a surfer (cotton board shorts by Stussy, $44; cotton shirt by Diesel, $79; Sunglasses from Ray-Ban by Bausch & Lomb.) “He’s an NYU film school dropout who just got snubbed on a grade for a film called Enema Bondage of the 14th Dimension—it’s a parody of the ephemeral educational films of the ‘50s, How to Make Friends, How to Use Brylcream, How to Build a Bomb Shelter and Rat Out Your Neighbors as Communists, whatever, but his film’s got this weird plot involving Klaus Barbie, latex paint, and time travel…”
“Is this his first offense?”
“No, he made a 68 minute silent film with a camera in a refrigerator.”
“No you f**k, I mean criminal offense!”
“Other than a dozen film permit violations, not really.”
“We’re not getting Scorsese in here. We can’t afford director’s guild day wages just to save 17 hostages. Once he shows up, he’ll demand a catering truck, and then we have to feed the whole SWAT team whatever he eats. F**k it, just nuke the place. They’ve got insurance.”
The AH-1’s loaded Wagner in their CD players (California Audio Labs DX-2, $650) and swept the building, dumping 16-round bursts through the front of the bank with their 20mm M197 cannon (contact your General Electric sales representative for information on retrofitting of the M197 to your AH-1G or newer Cobra.) The depleted uranium shells shattered the office building, killing everyone inside, and raining glass in a one-block radius. The crowd on the street cheered, and the police chief optioned the rights to Jerry Bruckheimer the next day. John Voight would play the chief, and utter the “I’m too old for this s**t” line.
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Rumored to Exist, by Jon Konrath
33% off coupon on Smashwords (Reg. $2.99, now $2.00) - coupon code ZP73X.
Available at:
Amazon, Smashwords
Visit the “Rumored to Exist” website
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