"02 - They Came and Ate Us - Armageddon II- The B-Movie 1.1" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rankin Robert)

They Came and Ate Us
Armageddon 2: The B-Movie
Robert Rankin

THE END OF PART ONE

If you ain't where you is, you 're no place, God

In the year 2050 planet Earth finally got the chance to enjoy Armageddon. It had originally been scheduled to occur in 999 and after that fell through, in 1999. However, due to certain legal loopholes in the original contracts and God moving in the mysterious way he is known and loved for, the thing didn't actually get under way until 2050.

But when it did it was a real showstopper. Cracking special effects, flaming chariots, angelic hosts, fire and brimstone, the whole kith and caboodle and the kitchen sink. All in glorious Buddhacolour and broadcast live as it happened.

The major pay-off came with the playing of the now legendary UNIVERSAL NOTE, which magically transformed Earth from an irradiated plague-pit into a pretty reasonable facsimile of the original Garden of Eden. An event of no small fabness by any reckoning.

The Big Figure then put his only daughter Christeen (twin sister of Jesus Christ, but unfairly edited out of the New Testament) in charge of the show and left her to get on with it.

The run-up to all this involved numerous comings and goings. These included spacemen, time travelling, sex, violence, TV gameshows, the Antichrist and a sprout called Barry. But all that is far too complicated to go into here. One point which might just be worth mentioning is that an independent survey carried out on the planet

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Phnaargos in 2050 did manage to pinpoint the single root cause for the disastrous course of human history taken during the latter part of the twentieth century, a course leading inevitably to the Grand Nuclear Holocaust Event of 1999, which laid waste to two-thirds of the known world. The survey proved beyond all doubt that all the fuss and bother was the fault of one single man. That it could, in fact, be parcelled up and laid fairly and squarely upon the guitar-shaped doormat of one Elvis Aron Presley.

Yes, that very one!

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PART ONE

I was not born to live a man's life but to be the stuff of future

memory. King Arthur

I knew Hyde Park when it was a flowerpot! Hugo Rune

At two thirty in the afternoon of 16 August 1977 the telephones on the desk of police chief Sam J. Maggott of Memphis PD rose against him. Spitting Big Mac, Sam snatched up the noisiest protester and shouted' Yo' into it, the way one does. The not-too-distant voice of a junior officer poured a stream of incoherent gibberish into Sam's ear. This concluded with the words 'you'd better get over here quick, chief.

'You wanna run that by me again, boy?' Sam swept the other jangling phones into an open desk drawer and slammed it shut. 'You are telling me what?'

'He's dead, chief. Elvis. And there's some deep shit going down here.'

'Goddamn!' Sam Maggott held the handset at arm's length and regarded it as he would a negro come to propose marriage to his teenage daughter. 'You pulling my pecker, boy?'

'I swear to God, chief.'

'Someone shoot the son-of-a-bitch?' The phone was back at Sam's ear.

'Seems like he had a heart attack or something. He's lying in his bathroom. His security are all over the place