Internet’s wide, wonderful weirdo rainbow. Deep inside, you might be an angel, an elf, a big sexy ostrich, a wizard, an anime character, a cannibal, a holocaust denier, or a Ron Paul supporter; whatever your wacky bent, there’s a dozen communities out there where you can insulate yourself among like-minded freaks until you’re convinced that you’re normal and everyone else is just unfairly persecuting you, denying your God-given right to identify as an anime Nazi dragon.
The Greatest Generation knows that the Internet isn’t just perverse and obscene: it’s actively creating crazy people. Isn’t it great? It is like Caligula’s brain swimming around in a fish tank. We don’t want to jump in, but holy shit, we sure do love to tap on the glass.
PROLOGUE
The Reluctant Anti-Hero
The finger bones of my right hand exploded like Chinese fun poppers stuffed into sausages. My experiment was a resounding success. I had proven that a car door can completely shut with a juicy human hand wedged between the frame and the door.
I heard the horrible crunch of the door closing an instant before I felt the pain. Then I screamed and bit down into the glazed doughnut I was carrying in my mouth. I exhaled a curse into the fried dough so terrible I have subsequently scrubbed it from my memory.
When I stub my toe I shout the f-word. I can only imagine the sort of twisted, high-yield, weapons-grade version of “fuck” that emerged from my mouth at that moment.
Things did not improve in the immediate aftermath of slamming my (motherfucking) hand in the car door. It was unfortunate, but my brain, the human brain, never evolved the ability to cope with that situation. My instinct when confronted with the explosive pain in my hand was to yank that hand in the opposite direction.
It’s understandable. That instinct has served the hands of fifty generations of my forebears well, protecting their fragile digits from fire, explosions, rolling boulders, giant tusked tigers, and dinosaurs. I’m sure that instinct will work just as well to protect my great-great-great-grandchildren’s hands from vengeful robots and laser dinosaurs.
At that particular moment, with my hand shut into the door of my car, with a spit-covered doughnut tumbling in slow motion from my wailing mouth, I yanked my hand away. I yowled and I yanked my wounded hand from the door with all of my might.
That was my brain’s rough draft at least.
The reality was a door that had somehow latched shut, securing my crushed hand in a vise. When I yanked with all my might my hand caught for a moment and then, with a unique ripping sound I will never forget, I freed my hand.
Or at least the inside part of it.
I looked at the bloody mass of my fingers, twisted and crimped and dripping blood, and I very nearly passed out. What I left behind between the door and the frame was a bloody glove bearing the fingerprints of four fingers and part of a thumb.
My doctors would later refer to this as a “degloving” or a “40 percent avulsion.”
“You should have open door first, Dumb-Dumb,” Dr. Lian, my Chinese doctor, would scold me in the coming days and weeks.
But that’s jumping ahead. That’s skipping the moment of horror as I realized I had just compounded a terrible injury.
I staggered back, my eyes flicking from the exposed pink and red insides of my right hand to the tattered cuff of bloodied skin dangling from the rim of my car door. I could barely even move my gory fingers, owing mostly to the severe fractures but also at least in part to the amount of pain I was experiencing.
Those people who tell you getting shot or breaking a leg barely hurts? Lying jerks. They’re just saving the surprise for you.
Gentle reader, you probably bought this book, which means I owe you. I don’t know you, but I like you. You have sound judgment. I sincerely hope a straight-shooter such as yourself never has your hand crushed and degloved. But, if such an accident befalls you, I feel you should be fully informed as to the degree of pain you might be expected to experience.
Allow me to go ahead and clear up any misconceptions on that subject.
It will hurt. A lot. How badly it hurts is difficult to say, but it will be measured in profane increments like “fuck loads” and “shit tons.”
You may scream a great deal as a result of this pain. You might even urinate in your pants. Really. You don’t think about that sort of thing, but when you experience a lot of pain, sometimes you lose control over other body functions. This may extend to defecating in your pants as well, although I was spared that level of indignity.
Don’t worry about peeing. You won’t even notice, what with the pain and most of the blood falling out of your body through the exposed meat of your hand. I didn’t notice as I began to empty my bladder. I was yelling incoherently and rolling around in a puddle of blood and doing a good job of smashing my doughnut.
Taking the groceries home was right out. Forget it. That frozen food could go ahead and thaw itself out in the trunk. Those Klondike bars could go ahead and melt. I had some serious yelling and peeing and bleeding to do.
My cell phone began to ring.
“Say, baby, put down that pipe and get my pipe up,” said Bill O’Reilly as his Robo the pimp character.
I was unable to stop yelling and bleeding, but I was able to reduce my crazed thrashing just enough to dig into the pocket of my blood-soaked jeans and grab my phone.
“Say, baby, put down that pipe and get my pipe up,” Bill O’Reilly repeated.
I managed to flip the phone open with my left hand and hold it up to my ear. It was covered in blood and smelled like pee.
“Aaaaahhh!” I screamed into the receiver.
“Whoa, baby, turn down the volume,” exclaimed the voice on the other end.
It took a moment through the brain-curdling pain, but I recognized the voice. It was Lonnie Saunders, my editor from Kensington Publishing.
“Ahhhhhhaaaaaaaaa!” I replied.
“Zack, baby, what’s with the screaming?” Lonnie sounded like he was chewing gum.
The best I could manage to reduce the screaming was holding the phone away from my head. People in the grocery store’s parking lot were beginning to gather around me. It seemed like they wanted to help, but they were afraid to touch me.
I can sympathize.
“We looked over your book proposals, baby,” Lonnie explained. “It’s all good stuff, really amazing stuff.”
I had just enough sense in my brain to doubt Lonnie’s sincerity. When Kensington requested a list of potential book concepts, I had given them two real choices larded with a bunch of ridiculous wizard-themed proposals.
There was no way Lonnie thought the wizard books were “good stuff.”
“Wizard erotica. I love it. Potion recipes? Great. You really know your wizards. I love the mercenary wizards book, too, but I think you need to flesh it out a little more. Now this other idea, this darkly
