by Zack Archer
Fiasco Heights 1 & 2
The Complete Saga
Zack Archer
Contents
I. Fiasco Heights Book 1
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
The End Of Book 1
Author Notes
II. Fiasco Heights Book 2
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
The End
Author’s Notes
Summary
Defeat supervillains, develop a harem, and save the universe.
It’s all in a day’s work for Quincy Fletcher, a down-on-his luck security guard whose life is turned upside down after he accidentally kills one of the galaxy’s worst bad guys.
Confronted by a mysterious woman named Aurora, Quincy learns that he’s now a marked man. Going on the run to escape the associates of the villain he killed, he accompanies Aurora to Fiasco Heights, a sexy-dangerous city on a parallel world dominated by the good, the bad, and the pleasure-seeking.
Once there, Quincy’s recruited into an underground team called “The Shadow Catchers,” a group of superheroes who’ve dedicated their lives to saving the city. Quincy soon discovers that he possesses superhuman abilities which he’ll need as he battles supervillains, dragons, synthetic warriors, and the Harbinger, Fiasco Height’s most dangerous bad guy, who’s hellbent on destroying the universe.
Warning: This is a cinematic harem book that shares much in common with a comic book or graphic novel. Do not buy this book if the idea of reading a thrilling story bulging with frenetic high-action, heroes, villains, boobs, explosions, and a harem of lovely ladies turns you off. For everyone else—yes this means you—what are you waiting for? Buy the book and enjoy!
OTHER HAREM BOOKS BY ZACK ARCHER:
THE SWORDSMAN – BOOK 1
THE SWORDSMAN – BOOK 2
POX AMERICANA – BOOK 1
LIMINAL – BOOK 1
Copyright © 2019 by Zack Archer
All rights reserved.
This is a work of fiction (shame on you if you didn’t already know that) and all rights are reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the copyright owner, Quincy Xavier Fletcher, and/or the Shadow Catchers.
Copyright 2019 by the House of Archer
Created with Vellum
Thanks to all the indie authors who’ve blazed a trail for the rest of us, particularly when it comes to harem books. Folks like Michael-Scott Earle, J.A. Cipriano, William D. Arand, Jamie Hawke, Harmon Cooper, and all the other great authors out there, not to mention film-makers like the late, great Andy Sidaris, who basically invented a subset of harem-like movies back in the day – many thanks! And a shout-out to all the amazing fans who enjoy reading adrenaline-fueled stories of guys and gals thrust into impossible situations, who somehow find a way to cultivate a harem, discover their inner powers, and save the universe. This book is for all of you. Hope you enjoy it!
Editor
The great team at Ascension E&P.
Archer’s Army/Beta Readers/Wannabe Editors
“Big” Jim Bridges
Maria Sexton
David Denison
“The Mighty” Leo Roars
Irwin M. Fletcher
Part I
Fiasco Heights Book 1
By Zack Archer
1
The sky over Fiasco Heights was streaked with psychedelic colors the afternoon that I killed my third supervillain.
I was strapped in the passenger seat of an acoustic transport machine, a “wave sled,” cruising a hundred miles an hour over a strip of bitumen that bisected a plain of pumice dotted with rocky outcroppings.
My eyes were everywhere, scanning left and right, peering forward and back, searching for the man who was hunting us, a thick-necked brute nicknamed the Barrister, who wielded a powerful, oversized gavel made from a mysterious, intergalactic alloy.
“Do you see him?” a female voice asked.
I turned to my left and swapped looks with the woman piloting the sled, an achingly beautiful shit-kicker in a skintight singlet who called herself Aurora. I shook my head and smiled, watching Aurora’s ample breasts strain against the black-green nanomesh garb, her long, coffee-colored hair whipping in the wind. “I think we’re in the clear,” I said.
“What makes you think that?” she replied.
“I’ve got a sixth sense about these things,” I answered, tapping a finger to my head. “We are gonna be platinum.”
BOOM!
A rocky outcropping, down and to our right, vanished in a blast that fragmented the rock, sending shards of it in every direction.
Turning, I watched the gavel snap back into the mallet-sized hand of the Barrister, who was running across the ash faster than a cheetah. He was clad in a silver singlet that was partially hidden under a short, oil duster that came down to his waist and featured a full shoulder cape and brass buttons that glimmered in the half-light. His long, blond hair was bound behind his head, and the sharp angles of his face were screwed up in a look of agony or ecstasy (I couldn’t tell which).
The Barrister waved his gavel at our sled, and we vroomed forward. If you’ve ever seen the old movie “Star Wars” you probably remember what an X-34 Landspeeder looks like. Our sled resembled Skywalker’s ride, although it was thinner, more compact, and instead of the air-cooled thrust turbines that powered the Landspeeder, our machine was juiced by twelve tiny machines that produced the acoustic vortices that propelled us eight feet off the ground.
>
The big villain mounted another hillock of gravel and grabbed his sex while making an obscene gesture at us.
“Did he just do what I think he did?” I asked.
Aurora didn’t answer, she was too busy firing up the wave sled, throttling the accelerator, increasing the intensity of the ultrasonic waves that rocketed us forward. My head snapped back as Aurora deftly maneuvered the sled up and over the outcroppings and a monstrous knot of bleached bones.
BOOM! BOOM!
The stone formations all around us vanished in percussive blasts, obliterated by the Barrister’s gavel. Looking over the rear seat, I saw the bastard ducking under a stone arch then hurdling a ribbon of boulders, arms and legs chopping the air.
“That sonofabitch is incredibly persistent!” I shouted. “And he’s got serious anger issues!”
“Do your thing!” Aurora screamed back.
“You want me to bust some moves?!”
She smiled as if she didn’t have a care in the world. “No, Quincy, I want you to use your powers to defeat him!”
I sucked in a breath and heaved myself up at the same moment that the Barrister flung his gavel directly at us.
The gavel spun forward as time and sound seemed to slow.
This happened all the time when I was “summoning” by the way, when I was reaching way down deep inside myself to call upon whatever strange and powerful forces I’d been blessed with (or cursed with, depending on your POV).
Sounds muted, but the colors all around me suddenly became brighter. The air shimmered with iridescent color and then assumed a glassy, almost liquid-like quality. My line of sight was fringed with chromatic aberrations, and then I held up my arms as the air caught fire and—
Wait!
Hold on a second.
At this point, you likely have a shitload of questions, starting with who I am,
how did I come to find myself next to a smoking-hot chick like Aurora, and did I just set the friggin’ air on fire? I mean … seriously?
In the interest of clarity, it’s probably best if I take a step back and explain how it all started. I realize almost all of what I’m going to tell you is hard to believe, but if I were you, I’d follow along anyway.
For starters, it’s a pretty righteous story, but more importantly, as crazy as it sounds, your life might depend on it.
Life is a helluva lot easier to live when your eyes are closed. Okay, I’m paraphrasing a line from the old classic rock song “Strawberry Fields,” but that doesn’t make it any less true. In my experience, the vast majority of people stumble around, consumed with their crappy everyday lives, never realizing that most of the world is beyond their perception.
What I mean is, there’s a whole other world of sights and sounds and smells that most living things, particularly humans, simply can’t sense. For instance, animals can see ultraviolet light that people can’t, plants and insects can smell complex odors that they use to communicate, and powerful electromagnetic fields exist that only a handful of creatures know about and use for energy and guidance. The inability to perceive the wonders of the real world means most of us are figuratively deaf and blind, feeling an occasional rumble or a gust of wind and that’s about it.
I say ‘most’ because there are certain people who are aware of these unseen things.
Some of these people are good.
Some of them are very bad.
I should know because I’m one of them.
One of the good ones that is.
Now is probably the right time to introduce myself. My name is Quincy Xavier Fletcher and until three days ago, I was a few years shy of my twenty-sixth birthday, a mild, unassuming security guard—which I know is a little disconcerting, because it sounds like the thing you hear after they catch a serial killer and they interview the killer’s neighbor on the news (“he was such a mild, unassuming young man!”)
I might occasionally be a little off, but I’m totally not a serial killer, and I used to be mild and unassuming (I swear!) until the day Aurora showed up.
It’s a cliché, but the day she entered my life had started off like any other…
2
I woke a little after two in the afternoon, roused by the sounds of my two roommates, Harker and Renfro, hooting and hollering as they prepared to throw their usual mid-day bash in the crappy little den of inequity we called home.
I rolled off the cot in my room and stared at my four metal walls. I suppose you could’ve called the place an “apartment,” but that would be seriously misleading, because the four-room flophouse we shared was actually two metal boxes grafted together, a pair of cargo containers plopped down between hundreds of others in the middle of a new kind of urban housing development called a “CHU Farm.”
A CHU Farm is a cluster of climate-controlled containerized housing units, hundreds, sometimes thousands of them yoked together horizontally and vertically, that became popular ten years back, around the late 2030s, when an urban housing shortage coincided with the introduction of the UBI, universal basic income.
The quick and dirty on UBI is that the rise in automation (machines, artificial intelligence, etc.) meant that shitloads of workers, blue-collar, white-collar, upturned collar, whatever fucking collar you had, were out on their asses. We’re talking upwards of ninety-percent of the working-age population was without work. When faced with this crisis, what did the government do? Did it roll up its ginormous sleeves and try and discover new sources of employment?
Hells no.
Not even close.
It simply conjured up a new way to pay people off.
A monthly payment (“net-value stipend” was the preferred euphemism), that ranged between $1300 and $2089, depending on a number of factors.
Here’s the kicker though.
You were still required to submit responses to a government employment test. If you scored high enough, you had a shot at securing a plum job stacking boxes at an Amazon fulfillment center or greasing down the friggin’ ‘bots that took all the jobs in the first place.
My roomies, Harker and Renfro, intentionally flunked the test because they, like most folks, preferred UBI over real work.
Wouldn’t you know that my dumb ass took the test after sniffing some glue and shotgunning several beers. I ended up getting such a high score (no pun intended) that I was given a job on the early night shift at a tech company called Pythia.
Guess what my pay was?
About five hundred bucks a month less than what Harker and Renfro were getting for sitting on their asses.
A fist pounded on my bedroom door. “You still alive in there, Quincy?” Harker shouted.
“I’m up,” I yelled back.
“Good,” Harker replied. “Cause the ladies want you to do your thang.”
I groaned and grabbed my Pythia security guard uniform off a nearby chair, blue slacks and a blue, short-sleeved shirt with a nameplate (which read “Quincy X. Fletch”) pinned to the front, along with my security card, and a pair of earbuds.
My reflection greeted me from a mirror pinned to the back of the door. Yawning, I ran a hand through my dark, unruly locks, and massaged a face that hadn’t had a good shave in several days. I did a “most muscular” pose which only served to accentuate how perfectly ordinary I was. Sighing, I eased my five-foot ten-inch, hundred and eighty-pound body into the slacks and shirt, and exited the room.
Harker and Renfro were waiting for me in what passed for our living room. A TV was on in the background showing a live-feed from a top-rated reality show called “Snuffed,” a program that involved people hunting other people in real time.
The guys were seated on the floor in front of a glass table, their girlfriends Jen and Molly flanking them. There were four shots of booze lined up on the table, along with a huge battery that was connected to the wall by a long, white cord.
Jen, the long-limbed, prettier of the two ladies, clapped her hands as I strode forward. “It’s the energizer!” she shouted.
>
“Battery Man!” Harker bellowed, pumping a fist. “Battery Man is in the house!”
Renfro grinned hugely and flipped a switch on the battery.
A red light flashed green and the battery hummed.
My gaze hopped from the battery to Renfro. “Seriously?”
“C’mon, Quincy. One quickie. The girls dig it and besides, this is what you do,” he said.
I shook my head. “There is no way in hell I’m doing this.”
“Pretty please, Q-man,” Jen said, leaning up so that I could snatch a peek at her beautifully augmented breasts which were visible inside her tight, low-necked shirt.
I peered into Jen’s unnervingly blue eyes and studied her bright, passionate mouth. Her eyelids batted like the wings on a moth, and for a moment, at least in my mind’s eye, we were whisked away from the shitty little cargo container.
