Seeking a Fairy Goddoctor

My second Petroleum Sunset “episode” is now available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Smashwords, and will be popping up at places like Diesel Ebooks and the iBookstore over the next week. As you can see to the right, it is called “Seeking a Fairy Goddoctor” and hopefully it will make you smile.

It comes a few months after “Once Upon a Gas Tank” ends, and continues Ty and Joel’s adventures in a post-petroleum world. Ty and Joel are rummaging for plastic at the dump when Joel jabs his arm with a rusty piece of metal. So Ty must take Joel to the big city hospital for a tetanus shot.

Here’s an excerpt:

~*~

“Go get me some food, Ty.” Joel had taken to orderin’ me around. He had already had me fetch half a dozen magazines and turn the channel on the teevee a dozen times.

I bit back my smart-alek reply. Ma was countin’ on me. “What do you want?”

“Junk food. I ain’t had junk food in about a century.”

“That’s right—you liked double cheeseburgers, didn’t you?”

Joel shot me a look of pure gratitude. “That would be awful good.”

I stood. “I’ll get you two of ‘em. You gonna be alright?”

“Hah. What’s gonna happen to me here?”

He was right, so I left. I walked over to a row of fast food places, picked one that I remembered, and got six double cheeseburgers, two extra-large fries and a couple a huge cups of soda–with ice. We ain’t had ice in an age. I hauled it all back over to the hospital, and I couldn’t find Joel.

I looked all over the waitin’ room, but he wasn’t there. I went to the front desk and butted in ahead of some fat guy.

“Hey.” I said to the counter girl. “You call Joel up yet?”

She looked at me and I realized she wasn’t the same girl I’d spoken to before. “We have not called anyone up named Joel, sir.”

“Well, where is he?”

“Hey—” the fat guy said, “Wait your turn.”

“I already done waited for two hours,” I told him. He shrank back as if I scared him.

“Wait a minute.” The girl said. “This Joel—was he a little younger than you?”

“Yeah, he’s ‘bout fifteen.”

“He went outside with a man.” She pointed the way I’d just come.

I frowned. “Why would he do that?”

“I don’t know, sir. Now if you’ll excuse me, this gentleman has been waiting patiently.” And she turned back to Fatso.

I didn’t see nothing else for it. I went outside and looked around.

“Are you Ty?”

I spun. There was a man—a doctor by the white coat—who’d come up from a walkway off to the side. “Yeah?”

“Your brother’s at my clinic.”

“Your clinic?”

“Yes, I have a sort of traveling clinic. If you’ll come this way?”

I followed him. I wondered if he was one of them black market doctors. We went out to an empty back parking lot a pretty long way away from the emergency clinic, to a large white pickup truck with a camper shell on it. He opened the door to the camper, and I stepped in … to a clinic, by the looks of it. There was lights and cabinets and a little sink and medical stuff and Joel, lying on a cot. There was a new bandage on his arm.

“Hi, Ty! This is Doctor Jones. I got my tenaitus shot. We can go home now.”

~*~

Naturally, things aren’t as rosy as they seem … Here’s the blurb:

When Joel jabs his arm with a rusty piece of metal while prospecting for plastic at the town dump, their Ma is countin’ on Ty to find Joel some decent medicine. They head to the city, where Ty must contend with overloaded medical bureaucracies, rapscallion fraudulent doctors, blood-stealing bouncers, and a shadowy medical underground in order to find Joel the object of his quest:

A tetanus shot.

Boy, does he ever need a fairy goddoctor.

Amazon – Barnes & Noble – Smashwords