Sunset in La La Land
A short story first published on Wattpad in 2018
The end came like a thief in the night—a bumbling, inexperienced thief more in it for the thrills than any material gain. For what does it profit a man to lose the world and with it his own soul? Only a madman would want to end the world. But madmen are never in short supply.
Looky Tangler was a struggling street magician, frequent pickpocket, and occasional thief-in-the-night cat burglar. He’d taken the name “Looky” to facilitate what he’d expected to be a breakout catchphrase: “Looky here, folks!” It didn’t play as well as he’d hoped. His surname, though improbable, was real.
For Looky, life was an endless hustle, a losing game missing half the pieces. But things didn’t really get bad until his dog started talking to him. He’d been excited at first, naively in retrospect.
With his usual crowd in the park one day, Looky shared not illusions but truth, as it had been revealed to him: “The establishment runs on adrenochrome! CERN is the serpent of Revelation! The cult of Apollo has sold our flesh to subterranean locust kings!” And so on.
The crowd was not happy. They jeered and cursed and found small, inexpensive items to throw. In the resulting confusion, a high-school football hero was jostled into the street and hit by a city bus. Public opinion placed the blame squarely on Looky Tangler, the mad magician. He wound up awaiting trial in a hospital on a slow drip of antipsychotic meds.
Many months passed. Justice was not swift in the time before the war.
When the locusts eventually broke free and disaster sirens wailed their agonized warnings, Looky made good his escape. All along the Sunset Strip, horrified heathens fell prey to chitinous insectoid monsters. The final war had begun. It was not going to end well.