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From the Chronicles of Post-Millennium Earth:

Know oh reader that between the years when the twentieth century faded and the rule of the deadites prevailed, there was an age undreamed of, when the world was littered with piles of junk that had once been valuable, when no country survived as it had.

Hither came Ash, the American. Student, part time worker, buffoon who troubles followed like crows a battle. A killer of deadites, a man of strange sense of humor and unending anger, to tread the ruined soil of the earth under his booted feet.

Chapter 1 - In the Future

My name’s Ash. That’s it, just Ash. No first name, no last name. I may have had a first name, but it was so seldom used, I’ve forgotten it myself. It’s who I am. Once I was a college student, had a girlfriend named Linda, a job at SaveMart. Yeah, life was fine.

Then I made a mistake. Actually several mistakes but the first one led me down the path to where I am now. In the future. See, one weekend, Linda and I went to this cabin. Once there we found this tape recorder and an ancient book. Foolishly, we played the tape which was a spell, a chant, whatever, from a book, the Necronomicon. A book of ideas that were pure evil. This book awakened ancient Sumerian maybe Babylonian, whatever, demons messed me up (I’m short a hand) and took Linda to . . . where? Hell? Jersey? A Political convention? I don’t know. What I do know is that I’m in the future and things are totally fucked. The world looks like a giant junkyard. No Captain Kirk and the Enterprise here, brother. Just piles of junk where there used to be cities.

I crawled out of the cave I’d spent the past few centuries in suspended animation in and, after freaking out for a while, decided to see what was up with my new home. Perhaps I could find a time machine or a burger or something.

Oddly enough, there were forests around and I heard animal life. I only took a few things from my sleeping place, my shotgun (109.99$ at SaveMart) and my chainsaw. I’d converted it to run on alcohol, so it would serve me, but I was down to my last twenty shells for the shotgun.

I kept to the outskirts of the junk pile that used to be London (I’d been in America when this started, but the demons from that freaking book have an odd sense of humor) when I saw a sign I’d never thought to see again: SaveMart. Well they hadn’t been in Europe when I worked for them, but they were now. Excited I scrambled over a junked car with some skeletons in it and entered the store. A hole in the roof gave me plenty of illumination. I decided to head for housewares, my old home away from home,

The store looked like any SaveMart, wide aisles and plenty of stuff for the consumers. A display stopped me short. Acme Prosthetics? Picking up a flyer, I read about do it your-self prosthetics, no need to see a doctor. Ha, I thought. I had them beat for a while. Like seven centuries!

Looking around I found a box that supposedly held a right hand. Picking it up I read about the hand. It was made by Swiss Army and had several attachments built in. Nuclear powered with a cell the size of a grain of rice; it would organically bond to its user. Grinning I opened the box and dumped out the contents. There was a tube of organic cement, kind of like a flesh based super glue and the hand. It was clean (something I wasn’t, having been in a cave for seven centuries!) and felt soft, like a real hand. What did I have to lose? I loosened the straps on my medieval hand made hand and put it aside. Picking up the instructions, I read that the stump had to be clean. Ah shit. Turning I headed over to the pharmacy department for some alcohol. Taking a few bottles, I went back to housewares. Why artificial limbs and there were many different kinds of them, were in house wares I didn’t care about.

I cleaned my stump and picked up the instructions. I decided to put on a generous amount of adhesive. Opening the tube I squeezed out a horrid looking red glob, kind of like the blob from that old movie. Spreading it around with a plastic stick so thoughtfully supplied, I lifted the hand and, aiming it carefully, pressed it against the stump.

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