The headlights of Jimmy’s car cut through the rain and splashed up onto the abandoned house. He knew the details of the house well – he used to stare at it from the hill opposite, hoping that his friends didn’t dare him to set foot on its lawn, to get up close to it, to touch its peeling paint and, the most verboten of all, to peek into a cracked window.

Of course, they inevitably did, and they called him a chicken when he came running back with panic snapping at his heels.

And he’d been right alongside his tormentors to berate another coward on another day.

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“I have found the mummy’s tomb!” announced Professor Simpson to his colleagues Mister Junkers and Miss Twillby.

“You sure have,” said the mummy, who leapt up from his sarcophagus, shook off the gold ornaments plating his wrappings, and slammed the stone door shut. Darkness filled the burial chamber.

Snick, fwoosh, crackle. The match, and then the candle, lit the wide, concerned eyes of Miss Twillby.

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A line of robots marched. A bird overhead, if there had been any birds left, would have seen a line of chrome and wire stretching from horizon to horizon. Their legs lifted their feet and placed them down again in perfect synchronization, all dictated by a cesium clock buried deep within the robots’ citadel.

Now the line of robots marched towards the final human outpost, a ratty town made primarily of ragged tents and more ragged humans.

The robots at the back rolled off of the production line and began marching toward the human colony.

The robots at the front laid down rubber panels so that the metal feet of their comrades would have traction.

Each robot that wasn’t building other robots or laying rubber had its arms replaced with oversize pneumatic shears extended, ready for pruning humans.

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Inspector Bic paced up and down the train car, surrounded by the confused faces of the passengers. Each stood in their pajamas, robes or mostly-transparent slips over mostly-transparent negligees. The conductor kept his eyes straight upon Inspector Bic and his twitching mustache.

“So you see, Conductor Bearnois, that because of the time of death, the murderer must be someone on this train!”

“Impossible, Inspector Bic.”

“No, not impossible! Improbable, maybe, but the facts may laugh at us from behind the safety of the hedges of disbelief!”

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“Come on out,” the vampire said. He sat on the steps of the church and picked his teeth.

“No,” the priest said. He sat on a lawn chair on the other side of the door made of wood from a tree chopped down by a lumberjack from ages past.

“You’re going to run out of food,” the vampire said. “And I think it’s starting to rain.”

“So will you,” the priest replied.

“But I’ll keep living.” The vampire popped open an umbrella.

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Yaroslav waited in a parked car across from the Whig Club.

John Hanks would be arriving any moment. Even though he was under federal protective custody and the typical high-profile witness would never be allowed out on the town, nobody told John Hanks where to be, when to be there, or how to behave when he arrived.

And every Thursday night, he and the other members of the Whig Club swigged scotch out of crystal and gobbled down plate-sized slabs of beef, while they sat in a parlor with their own portraits hanging above them.

“Typical,” Yaroslav muttered to himself.

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