TRUE BELIEVERS: Chapter 24 — Accidents Will Happen

True Believers is a full-length novel by Thom Dunn, based on his play of the same name. It’s a satirical tale of star-crossed lovers, aspiring comic book creators, crazed fanboys, cybernetically enhanced humans, women in refrigerators, real-life superheroes, and girls who dress like Slave Leia as their lives intertwine over a whirlwind weekend at a comic book convention in the early 2010s.

The book will be serialized on Medium throughout the month of April 2020. Here is the first chapter. Check back every day for more chapters!

The way that Calvin had originally explained, every round of Drink & Draw is meant to last for fifteen minutes. But Billy swears that each one is getting progressively longer and drawn out and oh my New Gods of Jack Kirby this night is tedious and boring and utterly endless and pretty much exactly why Billy doesn’t like humans and wishes he could just be alone somewhere with his other cyborg brethren. Maybe Calvin could join him every now and then.

But certainly not this Calvin, this cocky, arrogant, pod-person facsimile of his once-best friend.

“I need another Red Bull,” he says. “All this human interaction is fucking exhausting.” He slides out of his hightop chair, pivots on his right foot, and walks with rage and purpose toward the bar.