Is this new novel worth continuing?
Aug. 25th, 2004 01:43 amBy
C. Wayne Owens
Jackson fought up to a standing position. There was blood everywhere, and he was sure that some of it was his, he just didn’t want to think about how much. He winced with pain.
At least two of his ribs were broken, he was sure of that.
He would have been hurt a lot more had he not be thrown into the ruins of a linen outlet. There was enough product left to cushion his fall some, though not enough.
His left arm tingled insistently. He had landed on that side, so maybe he was just feeling the nerves just coming back on line.
Or was that the heart attack thing?
Couldn’t think about that right now.
He was going to have to fight his way past the coat factory and the Children’s play area to get to the bank where he had left Molly and Shannon.
He wasn’t sure how long they’d be safe, even in the vault.
The current crop of monsters was bad enough, but within the next couple of hours the real rift in reality would split and every evil ever imagined would spill out of the hole in hell and be bottled up inside this monument to consumerism.
He picked up a steel bar that had once been part of a piece of art in the center of the common area. He used it to smash the head of the jabbering blue-grey baboon like thing screaming towards him.
As it hit the ground he steeled himself for what it would become.
It rose up as some sort of 12 foot tall rat-bat-spider like he had seen in “The Angry Red Planet” as a child. Luckily this was the fifth one of these he had faced and he knew what to do.
The bar broke the fore legs of the thing, and as it fell forward he bashed the little ratty brains out of its head.
It became a mist and wafted away.
“Thank God,” He thought, “Only have to kill that one once more.”
Then the horror began anew.
Somehow the speakers began playing that horrible mall music again. It sounded something like a big band Muzak version of “Inna Godda Da Vida” without the drum solo.
Horror comes in many forms.
Now, he was going to have to cross this Hellground and find his family.
He couldn’t believe that only 5 days ago the world had been normal.
(c) Copyright 2004 C. Wayne Owens