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So what do you say we get some good ol' fashionned honest to god collaborative fiction going on?
Vague guidelines to aid general goodness:
1.To avoid being blatantly silly and injokey and avoid being deadly serious - try for a happy medium?
2.At least slightly understandable narrative stuff please - Byronic purple prose, freaky shamanic drug psychosis and far out stream of consciousness experiments are probably best dealt with elsewhere..
3.NO STUPID POST-MODERN ENDING SHIT! None of that waking up from the dream/putting down the book/taking off the VR helmet nonsense.
It's rubbish.
(God, I feel like some kind of Outer Church commandant after that)
So, er, aside from the above, do what you please..
I'll set the scene:
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Johnny Coca-Cola awoke, and memories of the night before flooded back immediately. New Years Eve. He always went crazy on New Years Eve. He remembered the drugs – far too many of them. He remembered playing the big show – he remembered it being brilliant, which probably meant it was shit. He remembered Eddie pulling him off the stage just before he started on about the eighth encore – he could hardly stand up. He remembered .. surely not .. racing through the streets of the city in his shiny new car. The streets of the city which were supposed to be closed off for the street party. Oh please say that didn’t happen.
He hoped to god that the memory he had of the fat woman bouncing off the bonnet and cracking the windscreen wasn’t real. Or driving through the parade float. Or side-swiping the ambulance. That kind of thing would be hilarious if you saw it on TV. But not quite so amusing if you actually did it in a drug fuelled frenzy.
He’d been determined to get to Westminster for some reason. He had no recollection of why. He just had a mad idea that something was going on there. He remembered that Eddie and Mia were in the car with him. He remembered he’d locked the doors. He actually remembered being sick on the steering wheel, which was pretty horrible.
The last moments he remembered clearly. The bright red light shining directly onto his face like one of those things doctors use to look into your eyes. The weird little man standing in front of them, getting closer every second. The thing he was carrying, Scarcely being able to believe it was a .. The impact. The big bang.
Shit.
Nothing could describe the headache he felt, but there was also something uncomfortable cutting into the back of his neck. A gentle breeze was blowing across his face. His hands were cold. He decided it was time to open his eyes, and then maybe think about moving.
The first thing he saw was the pigeons, circling overhead in a manner traditionally reserved for vultures, and then the sunshine. Looking around in his near horizontal position, he realised where he was. Trafalgar Square. Lying awkwardly on the steps. He’d obviously failed to get anywhere near Westminster. Near him was the burnt out wreck that used to be his car. Not burned out in any minor way either – it was completely torn apart, in pieces, the ground was blackened six feet around it in every direction.. Johnny didn’t even want to think about how he’d survived, or about what had happened to the others in the car.
Recovering his balance – his back and his legs ached as badly as his head – he began to take a hesitant stroll around the square. Looking at his watch he saw that, assuming it was correct, the time was 2:37 pm and the date was January the 3rd. He’d been unconscious for three days? In the middle of Trafalgar Square?
That was another thing – the square was completely deserted. Not a living soul in site. In fact, the city was in silence. Early afternoon in central London and the noisiest thing was the pigeons.
Something was clearly up.
The pavement was buried under a scattering of seemingly identical leaflets.
Johnny picked some of them up, half expecting to see government directives about bomb shelters and radiation sickness. Either that or ‘SURRENDER ENGLISHERS, RESISTANCE IS FUTILE!’
Instead, they seemed to be part of some activist stunt or situationist prank. Of the half dozen he’d picked up, three of them were the same, reading ‘ALL THE MONEY’S GONE. NOW WHAT?’. The other three featured meaningless joke slogans – ‘Benjamin Disreali says: There is so much sand in the world, why don’t we utilise it?’, ‘Stalin’s paranoia was a self fulfilling prophesy. So was Bucky Fuller’s optimism’ (he was sure he’d seen that one somewhere before), ‘If you don’t know what a funnel is, get mummy to show you one’. Nonsense, basically.
On a whim, he checked his pockets. His wallet was still there, but all his paper money had indeed gone. Hardly that surprising seeing as how he’d been unconscious for three days.
It was only then that Johnny saw something that made his blood run cold… |
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