The Grone Protocol: Armageddon's Deneumont, Chapter 004

Like most of you, I am a popular writer of highbrow thrillers and suspense novels in my spare time. For your literary enrichment, I will be serializing my latest work, THE GRONE PROTOCOL, here in my “blog” (short for “web blog”) every weekend (unless I forget or don’t feel like it or die something). Here’s the fourth chapter, which should fill your daily quota of gripping intrigue. If not, mosey on down to your local Book Hut; I hear Stephen King shit out four or five new books this week.

004

Barry Peterson walked through the lobby like he was holding a pickle between his buttcheeks that he would have to eat if it fell on the floor. He was wearing a shirt, pants, and shoes, just like his favorite actor Ray Romano, who often wore shirt, pants, and shoes on his television program. Standing just over six feet tall with blue eyes, wavy blonde hair, and one of those chins that looks like a butt, he was a very handsome specimen of a man. According to a lot of ladies and stuff, I mean... I don't really, y'know, notice stuff like that about dudes. Anyway, chicks seem to dig him.

Barry fingered the manila envelope he was carrying. Inside was but a single piece of paper, emblazoned at the top with the Grone Corporation's logo, an egg with human features eating an ice cream cone and riding a wooly mammoth. It was an extremely important piece of paper, one that Barry knew he could not let fall into the wrong hands. It wasn't so much the piece of paper that was important, but what was printed on it. Sometimes Barry wished he could just throw the paper away, but he knew better than to waste such a valuable commodity, no matter how potentially dangerous it might be.

Little did Barry know that at that very moment, on the other side of the Atlantic, a little man in a flower costume was building a dinosaur out of paperclips.

Barry walked up to the elevator and pressed the little triangle that means "up." As he waited for the metal doors to part, he had the sense that someone was watching him. He kept looking at the elevator, pretending nothing was amiss, but the feeling that he was being stared at persisted. "Be cool, man," he thought to himself. "Nobody here suspects a thing. There's nothing to worry about."

Little did he know how wrong he was. There was plenty to worry about. Tons of stuff. So much stuff that if you were given a list of the things there were to worry about, you wouldn't know what to worry about first, so you'd just start worrying about different things at random.

As hard as Barry was trying not to worry, he found himself worrying anyway, worrying away like a worry bee. Still, no matter how bee-like his worrying was, it wouldn't do a damn thing to stop what was about to happen.