Geek Mafia: Mile Zero
By Rick Dakan
The classic Key West-style house just off Fleming looked much like the rest of the residences on the block – two-story wooden frame walls and peaked roofs with shallow porches nearly butting up against the sidewalk. Chloe’s rusting blue Vespa was tucked away beside the house, in the narrow space separating it from the neighbours. To anyone walking by outside, everything looked quiet and peaceful. Inside, Chloe was pissed.
Everything had been going great, and then those stupid fuckers had decided to show up a week early, forcing her to scramble to pack a week’s work into a single day. She wore a black bandana wrapped around her head, covering her buzz-cut pink hair. Numerous streaks of dirt on her cheeks and the tip of her nose testified to the heavy-duty cleaning she’d been doing for the past five hours. She wore loose-fitting shorts and a tight-fitting tank top that had once been white. She pushed a mop across the hardwood floors in her bare feet, grumbling to herself. She heard the door open and saw Paul standing in the doorway.
Even though it wasn’t his fault, she glared at him as he entered. As much as Chloe liked a clean house, she hated housework, and this wasn’t even her house. This space was sparsely decorated with just a few worn pieces of furniture and some bad condo art on the walls. After six months of being sealed up tight with the air conditioner off, it smelled of dust and mildew and needed a good airing out.
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Rick Dakan
Rick Dakan lives, writes, and plays in Sarasota, Florida, his home and native town.
Biography.
Born in 1972, he grew up in Florida before attending American University in Washington DC (where he earned a BA in History) and then Ohio State University (where he didn’t earn an MA in History). In those bleak, cold Ohio years of the mid-90s, he started writing for a living, and he hasn’t stopped since. Over the next few years, he scratched out a rewarding if poor living writing role-playing game books for numerous product lines, including Wraith: The Oblivion, Kult, Conspiracy X, Deadlands, Vampire: The Masquerade, and Dungeons & Dragons.
In 2000, he devised an idea for an online computer game, which eventually became the hit 2004 release City of Heroes. Teaming up with long-time friend Michael Lewis and a bevvy of talented folks, he moved out to San Jose, California, and helped found Cryptic Studios. Three years later, his partners fired him, but that didn’t stop him from continuing to work on the game and writing and publishing a twelve-issue comic book series based on the game. He wrote his first novel, Geek Mafia, in 2005.
Rick Dakan
