This sampler book © 2012 by Quirk Productions, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher. ISBN: 978-1-59474-633-8 (e-book) Bedbugs copyright © 2011 by Ben H. Winters Pride and Prejudice and Zombies copyright © 2009 by Quirk Productions, Inc. Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children copyright © 2011 by Ransom Riggs Night of the Living Trekkies copyright © 2010 by Kevin David Anderson Taft 2012 copyright © 2012 by Jason Heller The Last Policeman copyright © 2012 by Ben H. Winters Quirk Books 215 Church St. Philadelphia, PA 19106 CONTENTS Introduction ................................. 4 Bedbugs..................................... 5 Pride and Prejudice and Zombies ................. 43 Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children ........ 106 Night of the Living Trekkies ..................... 186 Taft 2012 ................................... 259 The Last Policeman............................ 327 Thank you for downloading Quirk Books Summer Reads, curated by Planet Quirk! Planet Quirk is a world of 99.4% pure imagination (and 0.6% evil genius). It’s a community where you can get your inner geek on. We offer advice on pairing the perfect beer with your favorite comic books. We compose poetry about Harry Potter. We share our favorite Etsy geek crafts. We give away cool stuff and much, much more. Here we’ve rounded up some of the best fiction that Quirk Books has to offer. So if you like to geek out over any kind of sci-horror- fantasy-book-game-film-comics fandom, just pull up a captain’s chair, crack open this sampler, and stay as long as you like. (It’s cool—we know this guy with a machine that can get you back home before you left in the first place...) And if you want more original entertainment, join Planet Quirk online. Resistance is futile. planetquirk.com twitter.com/planetquirk facebook.com/planetquirk bedbugs_cover2:Layout 1 6/8/11 4:09 PM Page 1 FOR RENT: Top two floors of beautifully WINTERS renovated brownstone, 1300 sq. ft., 2BR 2BA, eat- in kitchen, one block to parks and playgrounds. No broker’s fee. Susan and Alex Wendt have found their dream apartment. Sure, the landlady is a little eccentric. And the elderly handyman drops some cryptic remarks about the basement. But the rent is so low, it’s too good to pass up. Big mistake. Susan soon discovers that her new home is crawling with bedbugs . or is it? She awakens every morning BEDBUGS with fresh bites, but neither Alex nor their daughter Emma has a single welt. An exterminator searches the property and turns up nothing. The landlady insists her building is clean. Susan fears she’s going mad—until a more sinister explanation presents itself: she may literally be confronting the bedbug problem from Hell. BEN H. WINTERS was nominated for an Edgar Award for his novel The Secret Life of Ms. Finkleman. He is also the author of the New York Times best seller Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters. He lives with his wife and children in Boston. quirkbooks.com bedbugs_interior2:Layout 1 6/23/11 3:57 PM Page 8 bedbugs_interior2:Layout 1 6/23/11 3:57 PM Page 1 BEDBUGS bedbugs_interior2:Layout 1 6/23/11 3:57 PM Page 2 bedbugs_interior2:Layout 1 6/23/11 3:57 PM Page 3 BEDBUGS Ben H. Winters bedbugs_interior2:Layout 1 6/23/11 3:57 PM Page 4 Copyright © 2011 by Ben H. Winters All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Number: 2011922691 ISBN: 978-1-59474-523-2 Printed in Canada Typeset in Bembo Designed by Doogie Horner Cover photo by Jonathan Pushnik Production management by John J. McGurk Quirk Books 215 Church Street Philadelphia, PA 19106 quirkbooks.com 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 bedbugs_interior2:Layout 1 6/23/11 3:57 PM Page 5 FOR DI bedbugs_interior2:Layout 1 6/23/11 3:57 PM Page 6 bedbugs_interior2:Layout 1 6/23/11 3:57 PM Page 7 BOOK I bedbugs_interior2:Layout 1 6/23/11 3:57 PM Page 8 bedbugs_interior2:Layout 1 6/23/11 3:57 PM Page 9 1. “Hey, Al. Come look at this one.” Susan Wendt studied the screen of her MacBook while her hus- band, Alex, paused the DVR and walked over to the kitchen table. He read the Craigslist ad over her shoulder and delivered a quick verdict: “Bull crap.” He cracked his knuckles and scootched behind her to get to the fridge. “It’s total bull crap, baby.” “Hmm. Maybe.” “Gotta be. You want?” He held up a Brooklyn Lager by the neck and waggled it back and forth. Susan shook her head, scanning the Craigslist ad with a slight frown. Alex opened the beer and went to crouch beside her. “It’s one of those where the broker lures you in and then goes, ‘Oh that place? That place got taken yesterday! How about this one? Rent is joost a leeeee- dle beeeet more expensive. ’” He slipped into a goofy gloss on the thick Brazilian accent of the most recent broker to take them on a wild-goose chase through half of south Brooklyn. Susan laughed. “But wait,” she said, pointing at the screen again. “It’s not a bro- ker. See? ‘For rent by owner.’” Alex raised his eyebrows skeptically, took a swallow of the beer, and wandered back to the TV. Their apartment search, now two and a half months old, had been bedbugs_interior2:Layout 1 6/23/11 3:57 PM Page 10 10 BEDBUGS her thing more than his all along. He felt that their current place, a one- bedroom-plus-office-nook off Union Square, was perfect. Or, if not perfect, then at least perfectly fine. And the idea of moving, the logistics and the packing and the various expenditures—it all made him want to tear his own head off. Or so he rather vividly expressed it. “Plus,” Alex had argued, “I’m not sure this is the time to jack up our rent.” Susan had been calm but insistent: it was time. It was time for Emma to have a proper bedroom, one that wasn’t a converted office nook; time for Susan to have a place to set up her easel and paints; time for Alex to have a real kitchen to cook his elaborate meals. “And rents are a heck of a lot lower than they used to be, especially in Brooklyn. Besides, Alex,” she had concluded, making a blatant appeal to his vanity, “you’re doing really well right now. Come on. We can just look, right?” Alex had relented, and “just looking” rapidly escalated into a full- on search. Every evening that summer, after Emma had her bath and went to bed, while Alex settled in for his nightly dose of god-awful reality television, Susan trolled Craigslist and Rentals.com and the Times real estate section, entering rents and square footage and bro- ker’s phone numbers on a master spreadsheet dotted with hyperlinks. On the weekends the family tromped from open house to open house, from Fort Greene to Boerum Hill, clutching cups of deli cof- fee and informational folders from Corcoran, pushing Emma in her bright-pink Maclaren stroller. They’d found places they loved for way too much, places in their price range that they hated, and, for occasional variety, places they couldn’t afford and hated anyway. Last weekend they’d schlepped all the way to Red Hook, riding the F train to Smith and Ninth and bedbugs_interior2:Layout 1 6/23/11 3:57 PM Page 11 BEDBUGS 11 then the B61 the rest of the way. The apartment they’d seen there, a converted artists’ loft on Van Brunt Street, was Susan’s favorite so far. It was footsteps from Fairway, cater-corner from a hipster bakery fa- mous for its salted-caramel tarts, and featured a master bedroom with a thin slice of East River view. But the apartment was forty-five minutes from the city, and with no utilities included it was just north of their budget. “We really can’t push it on price,” Alex said, shaking his head. “Especially with you not working right now.” Susan had smiled tightly, hiding her deep disappointment at his veto. She’d been increasingly and painfully aware, as the apartment search continued, that she had little leverage on the question of cost. It was true—she wasn’t working just then, a state of affairs Alex had totally supported, but it didn’t give her a lot of leeway on rent. She carefully transcribed the details of the “for rent by owner” Craigslist ad into the spreadsheet on her MacBook. They hadn’t even looked in Brooklyn Heights, because—well, what the hell for? No one was renting two-bedrooms in the Heights for under four thousand dol- lars a month, recession or not. No one except (Susan copied the name carefully from the ad) Andrea Scharfstein, who was offering the top two floors of her Cranberry Street brownstone: “1300 sq. ft., 2BR 2B, d/w, ample closets.” All for a startling $3,550. “Thirty-five-fifty?” Alex snorted, fast-forwarding through a com- mercial break. “Bull crap, baby. Guaranteed.” * When Alex, Susan, and Emma arrived on Cranberry Street a little before their scheduled appointment at 10:30 the next morning, bedbugs_interior2:Layout 1 6/23/11 3:57 PM Page 12 12 BEDBUGS Andrea Scharfstein was waiting for them on the top step of her front stoop, reading the Sunday New York Times and sipping tea from a big yellow mug with the WNYC logo blazoned on the side.