I don't know what this is

I needed some kind of backstory/prologue/opener thing for the NaNo story, working title The Mortal Coil. So I wrote one.

I shall post it. Because I don't post/share my work...ever, and if I ever hope to get published I need to get the hell over it.

So here 'tis. Vibeke is not at her finest - looking at it now I want to edit it to shreds - but it was the first thing I wrote in...quite a long time. Ugh, don't mind blogger wrecking my formatting.

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The unofficial story is that Charon ran out of room on his boat.
I’m serious. Apparently the line to cross Styx to the underworld was so long, Charon went “Hell with this shit” and took a vacation or something, or maybe he went to his overlord to find a bigger boat. I guess the Titanic wasn’t available.
That’s what people say, anyway. That’s the myth that has sprung up after two years.
The problem with Charon’s extended vacation isn’t just the undead that wander around the ruined cities and highways of America and presumably the world.
No, they’re okay. I mean, they’re a pain. They’re kind of like big, rotting cockroaches. But you can generally step on roaches without killing yourself.
The big problem nowadays is the ghost quotient.
Charon ran out of room. All those spirits of the recently departed had nowhere to go, be it heaven or hell or some place in between…so they decided to stick around here.
And get in my way.
Honestly, I’d rather deal with the undead than ghosts.
There, I said it.
The undead are easy. They’re usually slow. They’re vacant. All they really want to do is eat you so they can move on to eat your neighbor. They’re like really ravenous hicks without any sort of table manners.
Ghosts are tougher. They have feelings. They’re upset. They want to sit around and tell you about their lives and deaths and remember what it’s like to be human, or at least be walking around minus boiled skin or missing appendages or whatever it was that killed them. Sometimes they’re pretty damned gross.
The recently dead – the ones who died after the Cataclysm, which is probably what overloaded Charon’s ferry in the first place – are the worst. You see, they’re still solid. They can go through walls and float and even give you the chills, but they can also smack you around if they really want to.
They’re usually not much fun. And they don’t just drop like a good zombie when you shoot them in the head.
Welcome to Earth, 2014, and life after the end of the world.

(c) S. Baldwin