Slow Apocalypse by John Varley Read Free Book Online Page B

neighborhood of
Lost
?”
    “Stranger than that,” Dave said.
    Bob promised he’d do his best to get everyone together, Dave’s place, seven o’clock until whenever. Dave hung up and pulled to the curb outside Valley Scooters, which he’d found after a brief Internet search.
    He walked down a line of scooters parked on the sidewalk. They were bright and shiny as new pennies, and as colorful as a basket of Easter eggs. A salesman approached him.
    “Get ’em while you can,” he said. He was a young, thin guy with tattoos around his neck and a ring in his left eyebrow.
    “Selling a lot of these things?”
    “I wish I could get two or three hundred more of them every month. But the factories can’t turn them out fast enough. You checked the prices at the pump these days?”
    Dave admitted that he had.
    “Up another five cents for premium this morning. This one gets eighty miles to the gallon.”
    Dave knew he shouldn’t look like he was too eager to buy, but the fact was he’d already decided he was going home with one. Possibly two.
    “I live on a hill. Would that be a problem?”
    “I wouldn’t recommend this one for climbing hills. Motor’s too small. I’d recommend you move a step or two up in horsepower.” He patted the black vinyl seat of a machine that looked a little heftier. “You don’t take these things on the freeway. Fifty is about right for a top speed, cruising around the city. Take a look at this one over here.”
    He took a ride on a white 150cc Vespa LXV 150, and he liked it. He put it on his credit card and then stowed the scooter in the back of the Escalade, where it fit easily.
    He went home and did a search on Craigslist, and got lucky. He found another Vespa, this one 90cc, with an asking price of $1,900, just down the hill in West Hollywood. The man he talked to on the phone said it belonged to his partner, who had a new job that was too far away to commute by scooter. Dave told him he’d be there in an hour, stopped by the bank and took a large cash advance on another credit card, pulled into the driveway of a nice little bungalow on Laurel Avenue and quickly concluded the deal. The scooter was a bright pink, and the seller tossed in two deep purple helmets.

CHAPTER FOUR

    The posse gathered in the office for poker that evening. As they got started, most of the chatter was about the sad state of the industry. He knew they all needed work except Bob, and felt a bit guilty knowing that they expected that he would be outlining a new writing project.
    They didn’t play for pennies, but it was not a high-stakes game. It cost five dollars to get in, then raises were limited to ten dollars. They had never had a single pot over three hundred dollars. Dave was down about thirty dollars and Bob was the big winner when somebody called for a break.
    “You know, Fearless Leader, the poker is fun and all, but we all know you brought us here to talk about a new show. So how about it?”
    That was Jenna Donovan, five foot two, flaming red hair she could never keep under control, about a billion freckles. She was the youngest of them, twentysomething moving in on thirty, and she had the most twisted sense of humor of any of them.
    “Not a series idea,” he said.
    Dennis Rossi frowned at him. “Bob said that’s what was happening.”
    “I said I thought so,” Bob said. “Dave didn’t actually say that.” He was the gray eminence, hair gone completely white, a face carved out of reddish granite, chewing on his empty pipe. Dennis was curly-haired and hyperactive. He often went for broke in the poker games, and usually proved just what that expression meant.
    Dave decided to treat it like a pitch meeting. They all had plenty of experience with those, trying to sell an idea to executives at a studio. It would start them off on familiar ground, then maybe he could ease them into the notion that it was much more than a story idea.
    “It’s not a comedy,” he said.
    “Not a problem with