FrankenFred (title/story pending)
an excerpt

“Fuck, man . . .” Garth looked down at the cigarette on the ground, the tiny trickle of smoke wafting out from its charred end. He had barely lit it before some sort of quake had dislodged it from his lips and sent it plummeting to the dirt and grime at his feet. If it had landed anywhere else on the ground, he would have just picked it up, dusted it off, and gone right back to smoking it. This time, however, the cigarette had fallen in such a way that the nice bright yellow end that you're supposed to put in your mouth had landed in a freshly planted dog shit.
“That was my last fag . . .” he sighed, thinking about how painful those next few minutes without some sort of toxin in his lungs were going to be. It was only five minutes to the nearest corner store, but it was going to be the five minutes from hell.
He stood up from his position leaning on the wall of some random building in the old industrial area that no one went to anymore, save for the homeless and a few gang members who needed a place to lay low. He dusted off his jacket, an old leather jacket he had “borrowed” from his dad's closet way back when he left his family behind for good. His dad wasn't going to miss it anyway, since he'd already left that house years before. He turned to his right, towards the big chain link fence off in the distance that separated the old metal buildings from the new streets and the rebuilt city, with a step-touch-step-turn-pose. Tough guys weren't supposed to be dancing-types, but that didn't mean he couldn't make it look tough. He was about to walk out of that old collection of lost jobs and greenhouse gases, but something caught his eye. Something was running out of a nearby building. It was human, he could tell, but there was something different about it. It almost looked like it was a quilt of different people, all stitched together like an old movie monster. It darted through the buildings, and out through a hole in the chain link fence.
“Well, now . . .” Garth grinned, “this could get interesting.”
Then he remembered that he had stashed a few spares in one of his jacket pockets, just in case. He pulled out a bent, old, dirty cigarette, lit it, and took up the chase.