FINAL WARNING — THE EXCERPT
Final Warning: Return of the Neanderthals
These are the opening pages of my science fiction fantasy novel, Final Warning: Return of the Neanderthals, an outrageously surprising eco-thriller with a strong environmental message. The quirky plot swirls around Neanderthals, corporate crime, paranormal love, magic ants, a Victoria’s Secret model, a secret experiment going awry and more.
FINAL WARNING — THE EXCERPT
The captain sits down behind the wheel, takes off his plumed helmet, and grimaces out into the endless darkness of space.
“We’ve got to move faster, Neanne,” he says, glancing back over his shoulder. “There’s trouble ahead. I can feel it in my bones.”
The short, red-headed little female watches the captain’s black-gloved hand masterfully nudge the tiller of the ship forward. The needle of the ship’s speed-registering device undulates all the way to the right side of the dial: its coal-black tip turns bright red and begins frantically pixelating. The female’s green eyes widen as the spaceship begins a slow, laborious spin.
“Captain,” the little female says, clutching his shoulder. “We are approaching the Red Zone. I fear you may endanger the ship.”
“I’ve got to take this old bucket through a warp in space, Neanne,” says the captain, with a benign smile. “We’re on a rescue mission, and we’ve got ten thousand light years to go.”
***
Many miles away, an alarm buzzes in the product testing lab. Dr. Patricia “Trish” Maypole the corporate research scientist awakes with a start. She sees the red light flashing across the room. She slips into her sensible shoes and hurries forward, blinking and straightening her neatly-pressed white lab coat. A former high school athlete, Trish is a well-built, conscientious Kansas woman whose platinum blonde hair is pulled back into a high, long ponytail that almost reaches all the way down to her waist.
Trish stops at the testing chamber, a stainless-steel contraption that looks like a cross between a microwave oven and a side-loading washing machine. She pushes a button. The red light continues flashing but the buzzing stops.
Very carefully, Trish pulls on a pair of purple gloves and extracts a transparent box. She sets down the box and slowly and fastidiously removes its top. Twelve grasshoppers have just completed their first exposure to the signal at full power but at first glance, the results don’t look good.
Soon, two bright green grasshoppers spring out of the box. They hop onto the work-bench, one after the other. The two insects cock their heads and stare up at Trish as if they can’t quite believe her. For a moment, Trish has an eerie feeling that both grasshoppers have gotten smarter. The pair of them hops up and down before her, one after the other, as if trying to tell her something using a mysterious body language she can’t understand.
When Trish tries to scoop them up, the grasshoppers leap from her hands and begin flying around the lab. They spiral up toward the ceiling together and hurl themselves against the bright white light over the testing apparatus like two crazy kamikaze pilots, one after the other. As if trying to escape into the light, the insects smack against the fixture again and again.
“Stop that! Get down here!” Trish says, talking to her insects like disobedient children. But the grasshoppers don’t obey.
Trish hurries to the stockroom. She pulls out a tall ladder and a butterfly net, but before she can get the ladder opened and positioned correctly one of the grasshoppers falls to the floor, its brains apparently fried to a crisp by the searing light.
Trish bends down and picks it up by a hind leg. It’s one of the males. Over Trish’s head, the other grasshopper is still locked in a crazy death spiral around the light, like a winged planet spinning around the sun.
Her other grasshoppers are not moving. Trish senses something going terribly wrong. Deep in her abdomen she feels an eerie flutter, like a small frightened bird desperately beating its wings inside her, trying to break out. Her stomach sinks. She doesn’t believe her testing equipment needs to be calibrated again. But conscientious Trish Maypole the scientist pulls out her phone and calls in the techs.
***
As the reporter dreams past the graveyard, an airplane bellies down toward the Detroit Airport. He hurries into an ominous corporate ballroom. The reporter realizes he’s on the biggest story of his life. He nervously strides past hundreds of well-dressed white businessmen seated at tables, and sits down before a catered dinner. Looking from side to side, the reporter self-consciously adjusts his red tie, his adrenaline pumping like crazy.
Ballroom lights dim. Waiters in white uniforms stream through the ballroom in the dim light, carrying dessert trays heaped with plates of bright red cherry pie. On the far wall, a giant video screen fills with an image of a big man’s craggy face and silver hair.
“We will create the future, and I’m here to tell you the future is now,” comes a disembodied voice.
Hedge fund managers and bankers politely applaud. In the dim light, the reporter notices a few surreptitiously placing buy orders on their phones.
The reporter hears his cue. He adjusts his red tie and leaps to his feet
“Where did he come from?” someone whispers.
The reporter snatches a microphone. He stands tall in the spotlight, breathing quickly, and rather theatrically lifts one fist over his head.
“Question!” he blurts.
The reporter flinches at the sound of a CANNON.
***
Percival “Piggy” McGuffin, president and CEO of the Universal Cellular Corporation, is nestled in his darkened penthouse office at corporate headquarters. McGuffin swipes through picture after picture on his phone, breathing heavily. An immaculately-groomed American Springer Spaniel dozes on a plaid dog bed near a cabinet not far from his desk. Suddenly, the corporate titan’s intercom buzzes like an angry bee.
“Mr. Tippsy is here to see you, Piggy,” comes the voice of his secretary, Angelique.
“Have him wait five minutes, then bring him in,” McGuffin snorts, slapping off the intercom and reluctantly turning on his office lights.
President McGuffin acquired his unusual nickname “Piggy” the year he won his fraternity’s end of the year cherry pie-eating contest. In the final minutes of the competition, as his fraternity brothers moaned and rolled across the back lawn of the frat house, barfing up cherries, Percival McGuffin looked up from his plate and realized he was the last man still eating. Sauntering amongst his fallen brothers, he playfully kicked their stomachs, called them a bunch of losers, and for good measure bent over and showed the sickest among them how to stuff down one last sloppy red dripping fistful of cherry pie. Without wiping his mouth, he lumbered toward the judge’s table, swept up all three trophies, and smirked at the astonished judges. Hugging the trophies tightly against his chest, McGuffin turned to address the small crowd. He threw back his head and cried, “I’m the winner! The only winner!”
“Piggy, piggy,” came a female voice, followed by laughter.
The stout young business major with the legendary appetite soon embraced his new nickname, Piggy, which gave him even more notoriety at the frat house. Piggy sprang from a long line of ruthless, obsessively-competitive men.
Later, as he began aggressively slashing and burning his way up through the executive ranks at Universal Cellular, McGuffin insisted his underlings address him as Piggy, because he believed his nickname intimidated less aggressive colleagues.
At this moment, President McGuffin is at the top of his game. He’s been Universal Cellular’s president and CEO for five years. He’s offshored the last of his company’s factories. He has begun aggressively negotiating a new contract for himself, he’s healthy as a horse, and he’s grabbed a wife he knows any man in America would die for. When Piggy’s office door opens, the sharp-eyed, silver-haired executive glances up from his phone.
Chief Operations Officer Theodore “Ted” Tippsy follows Angelique into the office, his thick black eyebrows moving up and down to the noticeable rhythm of her trim behind. Tippsy is a short, partially bald, seemingly carefree man who is more or less Piggy’s best friend.
“Bing bang,” Tippsy says, slapping his hands together. He and Piggy go all the way back to Wharton. They were both offered positions at Universal and they made a pact to work their way up the org chart together. Glad-handing and back-stabbing their more principled colleagues with breathtaking ruthlessness, they rapidly ascended to the top.
Tippsy sits down and makes himself at home. He notices a sleeping dog on a plaid dog bed next to Piggy’s big trophy case. “What’s this, Pig? You got a dog?”
Piggy’s little spaniel wakes up, blinking. The animal lifts its head, accepts a pat on the head, gratefully shows its teeth, then sighs and reclines again.
“Wife thought I needed a friend,” Piggy says. “Named him Dominator. Mutt cost me ten grand,” Piggy says.
“Nice,” Tippsy says.
“Here’s something nicer. Our engineers just figured out how increase the power of our signal, by a factor of ten.”
“A factor of ten? You’re kidding! There’s never been a signal that powerful before.”
“You won’t believe what we can do with it. I’ve got to roll it out right away. Marketing thinks we’ll triple our revenues the first year.”
Tippsy whistles and shakes his head. “That’s going to rearrange the furniture around here,” he says.
“Our partners in China are putting up a thousand satellites a week, and they’ve found a company to manufacture the new phones. As of today, you’re in charge of the buildout of the towers. We finalized the prototype, but we’ll need base stations all over the country. I’ll have engineering get you the details. As soon as I roll this out, I expect at least three of our competitors to bankrupt, and I’ll be right there to gobble up their bones.”
Piggy flashes a wicked, pie-eating grin.
“Piggy, you’re a genius. I fucking love it,” Tippsy says, rubbing his palms together. “Hey! I’ll order up some champagne.”
“No booze, Ted. For now, this stays quiet, understand? But hey, let me show you something that’s even nicer than that — ”
With a conspiratorial smirk, Piggy proudly hands Tippsy his phone. Tippsy’s eyes widen as he swipes through the pictures of a voluptuous brown-skinned woman with long black hair and a cruel red mouth, dressed only in revealingly-cut scarlet and black underwear.
“Whoa! She can fill a brassiere. And my God, those legs!” Tippsy gasps, swiping through image after image of the same come-hither brunette in revealing lingerie. “A knockout! Pig! Who is she?”
“Victoria’s Secret model, name of Tormenta Storm. Wife number six. She’s all mine, Ted,” Piggy says, taking back his phone with a sly, pie-eating grin. “Spotted her on the cover of one of Cheryl’s catalogs a couple of months ago. Got her number. Sent Angelique to Tiffany’s to purchase some diamonds, then messengered her the diamond earrings with my personal compliments. Invited her to dinner at the most expensive restaurant in town, flew her off to St-Tropez for the weekend, gave her the matching diamond necklace. She agreed to marry me on the spot. Soon as my lawyer got rid of Cheryl, we tied the knot.”
“Piggy! Stop! You’re a cad!”
“Tormenta’s to die for in the sack, Ted,” Piggy says. “Just last Monday, I closed Escrow on the big lakefront chalet that she liked. I’m dying to spend more time with her and dammit, I will, soon as we get this damned rollout out of the way….”
When Piggy begins swiping through pictures on his phone, Tippsy takes the cue and stands up.
“Bing bang,” Tippsy says, slapping his hands together. “I’ll get to work.”
***
The little female spins around on wobbly legs, seeing red. She holds her head as tightly as she can but she can’t stop the snap, crackle, and pop humming through her brain. She feels herself weave in the dusty air like a young woman possessed by hostile spirits. She falls to her knees. Pains blast through her cranium like thunderclaps, one after the other. She can almost feel them rearranging the wiring in her small, delicate brain.
After what seems like an eternity, the painful shocks subside.
The little female opens her eyes. She takes a deep breath. She rises to her feet. She feels stronger. She notices her skin has become softer and more pliant. She feels positively radiant, even glowing. She not only knows she’s become more beautiful; she is now possessed by a new, practically regal dignity. Somehow, she thinks, whoever or whatever she was before has been transformed into something royal. In fact, she thinks she’s suddenly become a Princess.
The Princess experiences a frightening new self-confidence. She knows she has become several orders of magnitude more intelligent. She can’t yet process all the changes, but the Princess knows she can figure out a million things she couldn’t even hope to understand before.
Although her surroundings do not look at all familiar, the Princess is thinking like crazy. But she can’t remember anything. All her memories are gone.
In the strangely haunting twilight, the Princess squints and looks around the dark, cavernous room. She realizes she has no idea of where in the heck she is.
END OF EXCERPT
David Drum is a Los Angeles-based writer and the author of several books.