October 19, 3:15 p.m. Year of the Curtain+5
San Diego, California
Adam Solomon put down the newspaper, frustrated with the dearth of options in the want ads. Try as he might, he just couldn’t find any job openings for somebody who had half a course of college-level art classes but decided to leave school in search of more “real world” experience. What he hadn’t realized at the time was that if you didn’t already have that “real world” experience, nobody was going to be interested in hiring you for a job that would help you obtain it. It was a nasty little Catch-22, and as he flipped to the front page of the paper, he wondered how many other people he’d known during his brief tenure in art school had fallen – or would fall – for the same trap. At this point, really, his only hope was to find something to pay the bills before he had to tell his father he’d been right all along.
“Any luck?” Perry asked, refilling Adam’s coffee cup without being asked. The one bright spot in Adam’s life was the fact that his spindly, bespectacled older brother owned the MochaBean Café, so hey, free coffee. There had been days in the last few weeks, in fact, where he hadn’t lived on anything else.
“Not a damn thing,” Adam said. “Nobody’s hiring in general these days, and they’re especially not hiring cartoonists. I’ve gotten so desperate that once or twice I’ve even thought about going back to school.”
“For what?”
“To finish my art degree. You think I’d ever be qualified to do anything else?”
“So let’s say you go back to school. What will you get out of it?”
“A deferment on my student loan payments.”
“Okay, yes, but is that really going to help you out?”
“You’re talking long-term here, right?”
“Bingo.”
Adam let out a depressed sigh. “I guess not. I’m just looking for a way to put off the inevitable, I suppose.”
The barista heard this and grinned, tossing her thick brown hair back and allowing one heavy lock to fall over her devilish eye. “Finally applying for that greeter job at Wal-Mart? Are you sure you’re qualified?”
Adam shook his head and looked at Perry. “Why, exactly, do you still let Amber work here?”
“To reasons. First, when you two started dating I told you in advance that I wasn’t going to fire her if you ever broke up, which itself was inevitable. Second, because I’m not always here and it’s nice to have someone around to bust your chops.”
“I hate you both.”
“Win-win!” Amber chimed. “So where have you been looking?”
“A few publishing houses. A fruit packing company. Any place with a graphic design department, really, but I’m not certified on any of their software. I know their software, I know the hell out of it, but they all want their piece of paper.”
“Then take some courses and get certified.”
“I can’t afford any right now. I need the job to get the class, I need the class to get the certificate, I need the certificate to get the job.”
“Wal-Mart it is, then.”
Adam did his best to ignore her. “I also tried putting together a few cartoon packages to try to sell to the syndicates, but that’s been a bust too.”
“You mean a comic strip? Geez, Adam, nobody is selling comic strips to newspapers anymore. They’re dying out, even I know that.” She reached into her apron and withdrew a slim leather case, which she opened to reveal an iPad. A few taps on the screen, and she presented it to Adam. It was a comic strip with a kid and a talking duck, very much like the ones you could see in any major newspaper, but with one exception Adam could see immediately.”
“This is funny,” he said.
“It’s a one-man operation. The guy writes the strip, draws it, puts it on his website for free. Makes his money selling ads on the site and selling books, t-shirts and other crap with the duck’s picture on it.”
“Yeah, but this is one guy. For every cartoonist who’s making money on the internet, how many are working a full-time job and struggling to get anyone to read their strips?”
“Oh, thousands,” she said. “The trick is, you’ve got to come up with something nobody else is doing.”
“Like what?”
“Hell, Adam, if I knew that I’d do it myself! You’re supposed to be the creative one! Think a little bit, stop singing the same mopey-ass song you always do and create something.”
She wandered off to take an order, leaving Adam with her iPad and some food for thought. This, he remembered, was the reason they broke up. Sometimes you needed someone willing to give you a swift kick in the ass. The thing was, if the person doing the kicking was too good at it, she wasn’t the person you wanted to come home to at the end of the day.
Still… something nobody else was doing… what could that be? He looked at the iPad and the newspaper next to it, pondering the effect one was having on the other. Newspapers were dying because of the internet, but what was the murder weapon? Speed? Haste? That was part of it, but there was more. The internet was inherently more…
…reactive.
He looked at the newspaper headline, something about that lunatic in New York, Congresswoman Rooker, who kept speaking out against Curtain believers. Underneath that was a piece about the alleged “Hunter Academy” in the Pacific. An ex-student was claiming the Academy was stocking zombies for training purposes. An absurd notion – Adam himself was a Curtain Agnostic at best – but still, the two stories made him think.
He put aside the paper and took out his sketchbook, which he always brought into the shop with him. In an hour, he doodled his cartoon. The congresswoman – he’d used the iPad to look up her picture for reference – was giving a press conference again denying any Curtain stories. “And I tell you again, friends, there is no Curtain! There are no creatures waiting to come out and consume our flesh! There are no–”
As she ranted, a zombie roamed onto the stage, moaning that old horror movie cliché: “Brains… Braaaaaaaaains…” As he shambled onto the dais, he looked at Rooker, then down at the reporters, then back at her. Then he continued his slow march and cry of “Braaaaaaaains…” right past them without taking a nibble.
It was an obvious joke, Adam knew, but he kind of liked the way he drew it. There was something in the execution that appealed to him. Maybe he was on to something here.
