by Stephen R. Smith | Apr 17, 2009 | Story
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
Caroline walked the long way down from the bluffs, down the winding dirt road and out into the farm fields. To her right the abandoned silo – silent silhouette against the moonlit sky. Impotent concrete rocket reaching skyward, never to fly.
Derek was a jerk. He had driven her up there, her and the friends they shared. She just assumed.
Never assume.
Once Donna arrived it was pretty clear his attention was elsewhere.
“Don’t go!” He’d called out, but she left anyways. He didn’t follow.
Jerk.
In the distance a dog barked at her intrusion, but the sound didn’t grow closer, and the farm house was too far from the road for her to worry. She watched, looking for lights in the windows, for some sign she wasn’t alone. So distracted, she didn’t notice the odd streak of light hanging in the middle of the road ahead of her until she’d almost stepped into it.
Static crackle caused her to snap her head around to find a sliver of bright white light suspended in the air, almost as tall as her.
Unconsciously, she took a step back, and the band of light seemed to do the same, segmenting into two vertical halves, one moving back first, followed by the other.
Caroline fumbled in her pocket for her phone, and holding it in front of her thumbed the tiny camera to life. The device chimed three times, and then clicked, flashing the screen in a futile attempt at lighting the scene. She frowned at the phone, the image a complete white out.
Spreading itself into a virtual wall of light almost the full width of the road, the anomaly pulsed dimly three times, then flashed bright as daylight. She stood blinking, then dropped her phone and gaped at the image of herself captured on the shimmering fabric of translucence. Her likeness flickered, suspended, looking altogether as surprised as she felt.
From the ground, her phone began to vibrate, the 1812 Overture rising in volume from its tiny speaker. Still fixated on her captured image, she picked up the phone. Derek. A flood of emotion caught up with her. Jealousy, hope and for the first time fear of this strange phenomenon she was experiencing alone on this road.
The light shimmered and changed, her likeness distorting and shredding as the smooth fabric of brightness fragmented into a multitude of ribbons. It began to vibrate in time with her phone, and from seemingly everywhere at once, the 1812 Overture shook the ground beneath her feet.
The phone hit the ground again, this time only seconds before Caroline. She clasped her hands over ringing ears as the thin pillars of light began dancing around her, some searing white, some deep blue, some variegating through all colours of the spectrum. She curled up fetal on the ground as they closed in, surrounding her, cutting off any possible retreat to the farm house.
“Get away from me,” she screamed, clamping her hands down tightly over her ears, but unable to look away. “Leave me alone, get away, leave me alone!”
For a moment, the light faltered, pulling away and dimming in its intensity. Unsure.
“Please, leave me alone,” she sobbed.
The hanging strands of light slipped into each other, merging as they touched, until there was but one dim stripe of light hanging over the roadway. It hovered for just a moment, and then zipped from the dirt, to the silo on the horizon and then straight up into the night sky.
Caroline watched, tears streaming down her face as she called out. “Wait, don’t go.”
by Stephen R. Smith | Apr 8, 2009 | Story
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
“Mama?” A tiny voice slipped quietly through the room. Between her and the woman in the bed an impenetrable forest of metal stands, tubes and blinking machinery stood guard.
“Come in sweetheart, it’s alright.” Her mother’s voice warmed the space, shushing the noisy equipment. “Mama’s alright baby, come see me.”
Clad in a pink dress and knee socks, the girl of no more than five years bravely stepped away from the safety of the door frame. Big blue eyes focused and fixed on her mother lying in the hospital bed, and her legs carried her along that line of focus until she could reach out and touch her hand.
“There, there, Mama’s all better now.” She held her daughter’s hand gently, but firmly. “The doctors made me all better. Come. Climb up here and cuddle with me.” She tried her best not to wince, shuffling a little to one side to make room. She held her one arm away so her daughter wouldn’t become tangled in the web of cords snaking away from her body.
The girl climbed cautiously up the side of the bed, nearer the foot so as to avoid the side rail, and then crawled up beside her mother and lay her head gingerly on her chest.
“Did they really take out your broken heart Mama?” She barely breathed the words.
“Yes dear, they really did.”
The girl put her ear tentatively to her mother’s chest, listening for the familiar thrub thrubbing, but there was no such noise.
“Mama?” She started and stopped.
“Yes dear?”
“Mama, can you still love me now that they took your heart away?” The words were brave, but her voice quivered.
Her mother wrapped her arms around her baby girl. “Of course I still love you. My love for you isn’t caught up in some broken old heart, it comes from everywhere.” She suppressed a gasp as the little girl squeezed her back tightly.
The girl contented herself snuggling quietly a time.
“Mama,” she said finally, “your love doesn’t rumble like thunder like it used to.” She pressed one ear again to her mothers breast, covering the other ear with a free hand. The sound rising up wasn’t the familiar steady beating she had grown with, but rather a different sound that ebbed and flowed. She squeezed her eyes shut and listened to breath being drawn in, and pushed out, and to the rhythmic rushing that kept time.
“Mama, your love whooshes like the ocean. Like the great big wide ocean.” She lay there, eyes closed and smiling, liking very much the new sounds her mother made.
Her mother lay still too, her tears also like the ocean, but adding no sound of their own.
by Stephen R. Smith | Mar 10, 2009 | Story
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
Kruger had given up wiping the dust off his goggles, relying instead on the shadow cast by the ridge line for direction, a shadow that was shrinking. They’d have to find a pass to the other side before the sun swung overhead, or risk boiling in their watersuits.
A gap in the rock opened up, and turning into it, Kruger saw in his periphery what looked like a large rock retreat into the shadows. He stopped, and Packard stepped into him hard from behind, almost knocking him down.
“Warn me before you do that.” Packard’s was too tired for his voice to convey annoyance.
Kruger pawed away the dust on his goggles, staring into the darkness. Had he hallucinated that?
“I think that rock’s alive,” he pointed one gloved finger, raising his arm only from the elbow, “the locals eat some kind of shell meat from out here, that might be food.”
His copilot moved closer, wiping at the red film that obscured his vision, skepticism hidden beneath his sealed headpiece.
“I wish I’d thought to grab the rock hunting gear before we bailed.” Kruger noted his companion wasn’t too tired for sarcasm.
Kruger kicked loose a chunk of stone and tossed it into the darkness, flinching despite himself as a flat expanse of what appeared to be rock dislodged itself and lumbered along on four angular legs in the shadows before hunkering down and becoming still again.
“I think we’d best leave that alone Kruge, I doubt we could beat that craggy bastard to death on a good day.”
Kruger felt a bead of sweat form on his nose before his recycler snatched it up, and he realized the sun had moved overhead, the temperature inside his suit rising.
“We’ll get ahead of it, chase it out into the open.” Kruger moved slowly, careful to step back inside the decaying shadow.
“Ahead of it?”, Packard’s voice taking on an incredulous tone, “Chase the damned thing? We’ve been walking for four bloody days, I’m not in any shape to catch anything, and if we did, how do you propose we kill it?”
“We sweat to stay cool, and we’ve got suits to conserve moisture. That thing’s hiding in the shadows and trying hard not to move. If we make it run in the open desert, I doubt it will last five minutes.”
“I doubt if I’ll last five minutes.”
“Pack, it could be days before we get back, we need food. We just run it until it drops, and it’ll bake in the sun all afternoon. We wait in the shade until dark, then we eat.” Kruger had a plan. Kruger always had a plan.
Packard shook his head, but followed the pilot’s lead, moving carefully past the creature while collecting fist sized chunks of rock.
When they were safely on the shadowed side of the ridge, they began mercilessly pelting the animal with thrown stone, forcing it first to retreat to the edge of the outcropping, and then reluctantly to break cover and lumber off into the blinding afternoon sun. They chased it as far as they could, before returning to the safety of the overhang, watching it stagger and falter on the open ground, unable to find refuge from the heat.
Kruger sat carefully, leaning back against the rock. “Now we wait.”
Packard pictured the hard shelled creature, likely drifting over with sand while they sat there.
“I only wish I’d thought to grab a can opener when I was bailing out.”
Packard again; always with the sarcasm.
by Stephen R. Smith | Feb 21, 2009 | Story
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
Detective Staind waited in the darkness of an empty doorway. He watched as the man, head down, hands stuffed deep in his pockets, crossed the street fifty meters away. Waiting until the man turned down an alley, he unholstered his weapon and followed. It was much easier finding someone when you knew exactly where they were going to be.
The man threaded his way through the refuse and rubble that littered the alleyway. It had been years since anyone cared for these buildings, only the crazy and homeless took refuge here now.
At the mid point between the two larger streets, the alley narrowed to just a shoulder’s width, and at this point the figure stopped, puzzled, his progress blocked by steel drums piled with broken stone. Something was wrong.
“William,” Staind yelled down the alley, causing the man to turn, startled. “William Heath. You’re a difficult man to find.”
The figure stepped back from the opening and cast furtive glances, looking for an alternate exit.
“That’s the only way through William. Unless you can get past me,” he motioned with his pistol over his shoulder, “but I don’t like your odds.”
William moved slowly towards the detective, hands still in pockets, but head up, alert. “Who are you? What do you want?”
Staind leveled his weapon at him, halting his approach.
“You’ve upset a lot of people William, you’ve killed a lot of women. You didn’t think that could go on forever, did you?”
William’s hands were at his sides now, fists clenching and unclenching, eyes locked on the barrel of the gun.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Yes you do William, yes you bloody well do. You’ve strangled thirty two woman in the last five years. Thirty two, you prick. You’re very careful, I’ll give you that, you’ve left almost no evidence behind at all. Not a trace of you anywhere, no bank accounts, no public records. You’ve done a very thorough job of not being anywhere we could look.”
“You’ve got nothing then, have you?” he smirked.
“Well William, I said you left almost no evidence. You did make one mistake, people like you always do. Yours was not making sure Mary Truman was really dead before you stuck your tongue in her mouth. She’s a diver William, big lungs, you should have kept the pressure on a little longer. That piece of your tongue she bit off, she was choking on it while you incinerated her face. We found that piece of you stuck in her throat.”
“There’s no way flesh you found in some dead whore could have led you to me. That’s impossible.” William shifted his weight from foot to foot, eyes still fixed on the raised handgun.
“Normally no, as you’re not in the system. Lucky for us though, one of the fathers you left grieving owns a company that clones feed animals. He grew two good copies of you. One he kept for himself, for what I don’t want to imagine, but the other offered us a face to show, gave us fingerprints to trace. It gave us a trail, and that trail led me ultimately,” he paused, “to you.”
“Officers are crating and cataloguing your squat as we speak. We have quite the case and I expect William Heath will fry quite nicely when all is said and done.
William smiled, extending his hands as he resumed his approach. “I suppose this is where you take me into custody.”
“Perhaps you didn’t hear me.” Staind spat noisily, then squeezed off a round into William’s forehead, dropping him like a rock. “We’ve already got you in custody.”
by Stephen R. Smith | Jan 31, 2009 | Story
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
Revy leaned heavy against the bathroom sink, his reflection in the streaked mirror staring back battered and bruised. Stitches poked through pink flesh behind his jaw and beneath his hairline, bloodshot eyes sunken and dark. How long since he’d slept? He couldn’t remember.
In the corner of his vision lurked the promise of ability. He focused, and a window zoomed into focus. “Status: Online, Idle…” He wished he knew how to make it do something. He winced through the pounding in his head, swinging open the vanity mirror to expose bottles of pills. Mixing a fistful of pain meds and anti-biotics, he dry swallowed them, feeling the fizz as they partially dissolved in his mouth.
Cho said the pain would go away in a few weeks.
Cho. He remembered Cho. He’d bought illegal bio-tech from him a few times, but this was different. “Real serious shit,” Cho had said, “top secret shit. You pay big cash money.”
Revy’s head ached as memories forced themselves to the surface. The money he’d stolen, from whom he couldn’t recall. The operating theatre, Cho gowned and chatty, the nurse counting backwards with him from one hundred. He remembered a recovery room, the feel of his battered face through bandages.
Revy closed the cabinet door and studied himself in the mirror again. The stitches were dry, maybe a week old. They should come out soon.
Cho was dead.
Those memories clawed at the fog inside his head. Cho talking about training, promising to teach him to use his implant. He remembered the silent thunder of booted feet, men shouting. Cho screaming outside his room, words he could hear but not fully comprehend.
He remembered gunfire.
It had been days since he’d found himself curled up on the fire escape of his apartment building outside his kitchen window, bare feet screaming from the cold steel and the snow.
“Status: Online, Scanning…”
Sound overwhelmed him as he stumbled out of the bathroom; the fan in the kitchen, a music player from the floor below, the old recluse coughing from his apartment near the elevator. The noises were amped up, wrapped in soft static. He leaned his head against the thickly papered wall, watching his front door through the haze of his living room as it shimmered in and out of focus. He heard the elevator door open, and the door to the stairwell. He could hear boots, men. Revy closed his eyes, listening as they made their weapons ready while closing the distance to his door, to him. The pounding of his heart increased in frequency. Adrenaline flooded his system, clearing the fog and easing for the moment the throbbing in his head. Revy retreated into the bathroom; the window wasn’t too far from the fire escape, maybe he could jump.
He could hear them with high fidelity now, right outside the door. White light and pain shot through his head and he clutched at his ears in a vain attempt to block out the sensation. Had he been flash banged? Had he waited too long? His eyes squeezed shut, he waited for the heavy hands, for barked orders that didn’t come. Revy opened his eyes tentatively to find himself outside in the hallway, door pushed open to the stairwell, listening. The old man by the elevator was coughing into his phone, wheezing about gunfire and screaming. There was no screaming now. Revy found his hands comfortable on a large assault weapon. Scattered around his apartment doorway Revy counted eight bodies amidst spattered and pooling blood.
“Status: Disengaged, Idle…”
The only thing he knew now for sure was that he couldn’t stay.
