I thiiiink this one is gonna be long. Here’s part 1, feedback encouraged. (Parts will be shortish and episodic–I have about 10,000 words written but it’s pretty scattershot.)

“A DAY LATE AND A WORLD SHORT”

Back cover blurb

San Francisco’s not normally the sort of place you’d look to for the start of the apocalypse. But that’s exactly where it happens when Skip Mobley, purveyor of hot and cold beverages and amateur filmmaker, falls in with the wrong crowd of Norwegian gangsters, veterinarians, bartenders, and Norse deities. In a frantic journey spanning the globe from Colorado to Keflavík, Skip & co. fight against the clock to prevent, well, the end of the world.

PROLOGUE

The screen flickers between different kinds of static and eventually it finds a test pattern.  5 bip, 4 bip, 3 bip, bip, black.  The scene that follows is filmed in a concrete room with shelves of supplies, canned food, ammunition, it’s obviously some sort of shelter, and there’s a chair.  The camera shakes and a man with singed black hair and torn clothes sits on the chair, leans in, and adjusts something behind the lens.

He clears his throat.  “Hi,” he says.  The voice comes out hoarse and he coughs.  “Um, first off, if there are any film buffs watching, I’d like to apologize for the quality of most of the footage.  I shot it mostly with cameras between iPhone video and VHS quality… not my preferred tools, of course.  There’s a good Hemingway quote about, um–“

A voice yells from across the room, weary yet thunderous.  “We don’t have time for this.”

“Right,” Skip says.  “Sorry.  So anyway, if you’d like to see some of my other films, well, if you manage to find a copy of Sir Why Are You Leaving or Sometimes Not Rarely in what’s left of the Cal Berkeley library–“

“Get to the point, Skip, we’re running out of time.”

Skip coughs a few times and looks to his right.  “OK, OK, relax.”  He looks back at the camera.  “Anyway, sorry for the quality of the footage, I did what I could.”  He leans forward into the camera, a new urgency playing on his face.  “My name is Skip Mobley, and what you’re watching is a documentary film, my last one and as I have said by no means my masterpiece.  It’s about, um, the end of the world. Here we go.”