Axiom's End by HotDog Girl
Chapter 11: E.T. The Extra Extra Terrestrial
DHI Book Club Discussion by pibbs
protected by Fair Use, bitch
First sentence and I'm already laughing at her buffoonish writing.
She’d catapulted herself against another parked car...
LOL Catapulted? Lindsay, I'm going to need you to calm the fuck down.
Anyway ET looks lifeless, as Cora gets herself under control after some mindless screaming, and gets a closer look.
The color of its skin seemed even more a thing not found in nature, at least not on Earth, but now she could really get a look at its texture. More than anything, it reminded her of canvas or perhaps some kind of polymer. From what she could tell, this was not a being of flesh and blood but something else, perhaps some kind of machine.
She can't tell the difference between canvas and polymers? One is a cloth, the other is plastic, you ignorant fool. Is all that booze killing your brain cells?
Then another dumb sentence.
...the calculating part of her brain started to kick into motion. What to do with an unconscious, and possibly dead, alien?
If only Lindsay had used some part of her brain to write this.
More ET anatomy.
Like the skin, there was something manufactured about the structure of its feet, like an engineer had reinterpreted something nature had done wrong the first time. If there were an Earth comparison to its feet, it would probably be eagle talons, but the talons had been reimagined by Steve Jobs and filed to sleek, willowy nubs.
Willowy nubs?
Definitions:
willowy- tall, slim, and lithe
nub- a small lump or protuberance
Gentlemen, I'm only on the second page.
So, she gets in the van. Keep in mind an EMP event of some sort has knocked out all traffic, and even in this chapter it's mentioned again. So...
But the engine turned on the first try.
Of course it does.
She heads east, with a stupid plan.
She had a good friend from the internet who lived in Salt Lake City.
If I ever find myself with Spoony's corpse in the back of a stolen van, I'm coming to one of your fucker's house!
five dollars on a cheeseburger and milkshake from an In-N-Out
Bullshit! Well... I don't have an In-N-Out here. Is food really that cheap there? I guess I shouldn't doubt someone like Lindsay when it comes to food.
Now a couple of pages of this kind of shit.
There was the possibility she could use the alien corpse as blackmail to force whoever had taken her family to release them from whatever form of indefinite detention they were in, but somehow, she felt that was more likely to backfire. It wasn’t exactly leverage—what would stop the feds from just taking the corpse and locking her away forever?
Scenery descriptions, gas mileage worries, camping with family memories, thinking of totally
not daddy issues daddy issues ETC. All the while she keeps eyeballing the thing wondering if its really dead, or only mostly dead.
She turns off at “Donner Lake” to dump the body that she finally decided was a liability, while pondering the origin of “Donner.” Lindsay keeps describing how the ET keeps shifting during the trip. Gee? Is that important? Way to telegraph what's already an obvious trope.
Someone already pointed this out, but here is another wonderful Lindsian descriptive.
“You must be dead,” she muttered, kneeling next to the creature. She sat down, shaking her head. “What do I do now, buddy? You were the one who got me into this.”
The corpse stayed corpselike.
picardfaceplam.jpg
.
She reached out for the side of its neck, a rough approximation of where one would check for a pulse in a human. Before she could touch it, the waxy gray seal over the eyes tore open. She jerked her hand away as the creature bleated something, some screeching, clicking alien language like dozens of forks scraping and stabbing old frying pans.
But you know, in a corpselike way. Don't forget, this thing has no mouth, so it could just be farting.
So our brave hero, once again tears out of the van, and goes screaming off into the night. She screams her way right into two state troopers.
“Evening,” brayed one of them, the older of the two. He was a mustachioed, walrusine guy in his forties with a tag that read “Tallman.”
Why didn't Lindsay just make this a straight up parody? It almost already is through her incompetence. Maybe that's why the editor left all this dumb writing in, because she thought it was supposed to be comedy. Lindsay has written the novel equivalent of “The Room”.
In case you were wondering, the other trooper is disappointingly not called Shorty but Sandoval.
Then Lindsay finally writes about something she knows well, being arrested.
Tallman took her by the arm and guided her toward the blinding lights of his state trooper SUV. His radio scratched static as he called for backup.
“No,” said Cora, coming to her senses.
Tallman rounded on her, and she heard a clinking sound and felt a metal bracelet close around one wrist behind her, then the other. “You have the right to remain silent—”
“No!”
So Not Shorty Trooper peeks in the van, and ET stuff happens.
For an instant, the two police officers were frozen, then they were spasmodic, like thousands of volts of electricity were coursing through their bodies, and their guns flew into the darkness of the woods as though to escape the scene. The creature stepped out of the back of the van, steadied itself, and turned its attention on the state troopers.
The ET injects the troopers with something. It releases the handcuffs, and orders her to get in the van and drive. They drive past Reno.
End of Chapter.