Flash Virus: Episode One

S
TEVE
V
ERNON
 

FLASH
 

VIRUS
 

EPISODE ONE
 

OF
 

A YOUNG ADULT SERIAL
 

STARK RAVEN PRESS
 

FLASH VIRUS – EPISODE ONE
 

By Steve Vernon
 

Cover Art: Keith Draws
 

ISBN-13: 978-0-9880972-2-3
 

First Printing – October 26, 2012
 

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
 

 The publisher and author does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-person web sites or their content.
 

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DEDICATION
 

To My Wife Belinda – From whom I caught love like a cool disease.
 

Who remembers those three magic words – to be continued?

I first read them in a Marvel comic book. As I recollect, The Hulk was just about to put his fist directly through the head of Thor, God of Thunder.

Now, that didn’t bother me that much. I always was more of a Hulk-rooter than a Thor fan. What can I tell you? The dude with a hammer – how sissified was that?

But I still remember the feeling of reading those three magic words.

To be continued.

Words like that caught you by the throat and dangled you over a pit full of man-eating crocodiles – with a school full of pet piranha.

Words like that made you gasp and want you to hold your breath.

Sometimes you read them at the end of a comic book and you knew that you would have to hold your breath for an entire mouth. Other times you read them at the end of part one of a two-part television episode. Steve Austin was just about to be dismantled by Bigfoot – who was really Jean Ferre, no matter how many times they called him Andre The Giant.

Words like that were a little frustrating, sure, but the cool thing was that words like held an innate promise of splendor to come. You just knew that you would have to derail your entire train of personal existence until you caught that next episode and found out whether or not Steve Austin was going to be sent to the Six Million Dollar Junk Heap in the sky.

Authors like me use those three words to a limited degree at the end of every sentence, chapter, and paragraph we write. Their always has to be that little nugget of suspense that encourages the reader to keep on reading.

“I’ve just got to find out what happens next.”

So – without any further hoopdoodlery or fol-de-rol – (two great words that I heartily encourage you to use just as often as you can) – allow me to introduce my very first – and hopefully not my very last – fiction serial.

Every two weeks I will unleash another episode in the continuing adventures of Briar Gamble as he goes toe-to-toe with Captain Albino’s forces of evil.

So as near as I could tell the end of the world began roughly about the time that Billy Carver’s butt rang - about halfway through the War of 1812.
 

All right – so his butt didn’t really ring – but the brand new cell phone that he was carrying in his butt pocket went off awfully sudden and unexpected.
 

It was absolutely the weirdest ring tone that I had ever heard – kind of like a crossbred mix tape of rap-music-gargling and stained-church-glass-yodeling but I recognized the tune right off.
 

There wasn’t a kid on the planet who didn’t know that tune.
 

The tune was Santa Claus Is Coming To Town.
 

You know – better not pout and checking his list twice, watching when we’re sleeping – which is really kind of creepy when you stop and think about some fat old bearded man peeping at kids in their Sponge Bob Square Pants pajamas – not to mention that whole bit about rooty-toot-toot and rummy-tum-tum.
 

Whatever the heck that meant.
 

In any case, that was the tune that Billy Carver’s butt was playing - which – when you think about it is a pretty weird tune to hear playing in the middle of the month of May – even if it was coming from a free butt-covered cell phone – which each of us had been given by a guy in a pair of fish bowl sunglasses.
 

Which I’ll tell you about in just a little bit.
 

Right now we are talking about Billy Carver’s butt.
 

Mind you – I was not looking at Billy Carver’s butt when his cell phone rang.
 

That’d be just weird.
 

Maybe not as weird as Santa Claus peeping – but weird just the same.
 

What I was actually looking at – the same way as I had looked at it for five days a week and nine months of the year for the last entire decade - was the classroom wall clock.
 

In fact, as far as I can calculate I have been sitting here for about a hundred years or so – give or take a glacial millennium - just waiting for that lunch bell to ring – even though I knew that we had thirty-two minutes and twenty-one and a half seconds before the lunch bell was actually supposed to ring.
 

It turns out that lunch bell wasn’t ever going to ring.
 

Not in the way that I expected it to.
 

Not unless you count the way that it rang when it hit the floor later that morning after being shot from off of the gymnasium wall by one of Captain Albino’s headphone-wearing stormtroopers.
 

But I’ll tell you about that a little bit later on too.
 

You don’t want to rush into the end of the world.
 

You want to take your time.
 

But first - I really ought to introduce myself before we get much further into this story.
 

My name is Briar Gamble – and if you want to know the complete honest truth – I have been waiting for a bell of some sort to go off for the last ten years or so – ever since that first horrible day when Dad had looked up from his Pac Man coffee mug in the middle of a Bugs Bunny cartoon that I had seen at least fifteen times before and had said those thirteen terrible words to me – “Well Briar, I guess you are old enough to go to school now.”
 

That was way back in grade primary – but even then I knew that there were about thirty million other places in the known and unknown galaxy that I would rather be living in than sitting here in some funky old classroom listening to one teacher or another spouting off about algebra, grammar and the War of 1812.
 

I just didn’t belong here.
 

I knew that – even back in grade primary.
 

I knew that before the first homework assignment got handed out – and forgotten.
 

I knew that before the first bully had ever wedgied my underwear up about three degrees beyond the pooping zone.
 

I knew that like I knew my very own name.
 

Which was Briar Gamble – in case you weren’t reading too closely, seven paragraphs back. My Dad said that he and Mom had named me after a weed – on account of the way I had sprouted up where I wasn’t supposed to be – whatever that was supposed to mean.
 

That guy sitting across from me? That little fellow, with his hair poked up like a hay stack that can’t spell “comb” if his life depended on it and that freckly bent up nose, slightly running? That’s my buddy Jemmy Daniels. His real name is Jeremiah but we all call him Jemmy on account of Jeremiah has about three too many syllables. Jemmy is my best friend – which is another way of saying that his head had been swirly-dunked nearly as often in the boy’s room toilet bowl as I had been – by Billy Carver and his so-called friends.
 

Jemmy had one short-coming.
 

Jemmy actually liked going to school.
 

Which was weird.
 

I don’t really know why I hated going to school so very much. I always have. It was like I was born hating it.
 

Nearly everyone else in the school seemed to be getting along all right – or else maybe they just took a while to catch on to the fact that school just plain sucked – but I knew that school sucked and high school sucked even worse than that.
 

I knew it just as soon as somebody first tried to teach me poetry.
 

Which was way worse than the War of 1812.
 

I mean – what is poetry? You say a bunch of words together, try and rhyme them, throw in the occasional thee and thou and you don’t really have to make sense if you don’t want to. You just say something like – “That bird flutter-pating upon yonder branch, don’t it make thou heart flutter too?”
 

I mean what is that supposed to mean?
 

Do you want to hear me read you some poetry?
 

Here goes.
 

How much does high school suck – let me count the ways.
 

Infinity one.
 

High school long-weekend-homework sucked.
 

Infinity two.
 

High school pop-math-quiz sucked.
 

Infinity squared – thee, thou and thine – divine apple rind.
 

Do you really need me to go on?
 

The truth to tell – going to high school sucked about as hard as all of the vacuum cleaners in the whole wide world being simultaneously flushed down a billion backed-up toilet bowls into the hugest black hole in the known entire universe.
 

Amen.
 

So when that brand new free cell phone in Billy Carver’s back butt pocket went off in class like it was an alarm clock attached to some incredibly dangerous and life-threatening nuclear time bomb – halfway through Old Man Jenkins boring-as-peed-on-pencil-shavings lecture on the War of 1812 – I was absolutely ready for it.
 

I whole-heartedly welcomed the strange Christmas-sounding ring tone as a brief but happy diversion from the wall full of absolute and undeniable suckitude that I had been driving headlong at for the last ten years.
 

Namely, school.
 

“Well are you going to answer that?” Old Man Jenkins asked Billy Carver. “It might be awfully important – like maybe the President of the United States of America calling you up to ask you what time it is.”
 

Billy Carver smiled at Old Man Jenkins – like he didn’t even realize that Jenkins was just being sarcastic. I don’t know why teachers always think that they have got to talk to us kids that way – like we were too dumb and stupid to get their jokes – but they’ve been talking to us that way ever since cavemen first figured out how to fart.
 

And all we could do was sit there and grin.
 

Billy Carver was awfully good at grinning. He had that sort of a way of grinning a half-crooked sharp little sneer like he knew that he was going to be the first one of us boys to lose his virginity and most likely with the prettiest girl in school – rather than the blind, deaf and chronically stupid and most-likely figment-of-imaginary girl who might possibly get close enough for me to even think about grinning at.
 

Face facts.
 

Unless I was maybe the last boy in the universe and happened to be sitting beside the last girl in the universe and she was so completely bored out of her mind that she couldn’t think of anything better to do than to let me have my way with her – I figured I was doomed to a state of perpetual virginity until somebody shot me with a bullet of you-poor-dumb-numb-nut.