by Duncan Shields | Mar 8, 2010 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
I woke up with pain in my head and a shrieking in my ears. All I could hear was this horrible sound ringing around in my head. It was like car tires and screeching baboons and fire alarms all mixed together. A migraine pounded through my skull.
I stood up and I nearly passed out. The pain eased when I took a step south. I kept walking in that direction. When I got to the wall of my apartment, I screamed because I knew that meant I had to double back to go to the front door and make it outside. With a deep breath, I cried and walked backwards, grasping behind me for the doorknob while I sobbed and whimpered.
I found the doorknob. I yanked it open and dove outside. I ran in the direction that eased the pain, my pajamas flapping in the early-morning August. The direction took me away from the city. Luckily I lived on the outskirts of town and there weren’t many cars on the roads at this time of day. The pain was too great to have me worry about traffic lights or looking both ways. There was no way I could have driven a car. It was all I do to put one foot in front of the other.
All that mattered was stopping the sound and the pain.
I walked and ran for eight days. I didn’t stop to go to the bathroom. I didn’t stop to eat. I tipped my head back when it rained to drink.
Luckily, I haven’t been arrested. Luckily, I haven’t been beaten up. Luckily, I haven’t been hit by a car or bitten by a snake.
I have been walking a straight line.
I first saw the first person like me two days ago. Just a dot on the horizon of the desert I was walking through when I crossed into Arizona. I have seen twenty-seven others since. I can see them off to my right and left, getting slowly larger, one step at a time. We are all converging on the same point.
This is good news. I can feel the pain in my head being slowly replaced with pleasure.
We are being called. I don’t know how many of us have been killed or hurt during our blind migration towards the end of the pain. I can’t even imagine what it would be like for someone who got the call in a prison or a hospital. The pain would have driven me insane if I’d been constrained.
I can see the other walkers more clearly now. They are all stained, stinking, shambling messes with smiles on their faces, smiling wider as they get closer to the place of no pain and no shrieking sound in their ears.
There are helicopters over the horizon, over the patch of earth where all of the walkers’ paths meet.
There is something underneath the helicopters. A bright blue flying saucer. A floating, glowing alien ship that has no place in the middle of the desert. It’s hard to see details because the sun is setting near it. There is a hole in the clouds above it.
We walkers are all stumbling towards it, powerless to stop ourselves and not knowing what we’re walking towards or why we’ve been chosen.
I’m scared of the helicopters. I don’t know if they are there to monitor us or kill us. They look out of place.
I keep walking towards the blue ship with the other walkers into the dying sunset with a smile on my face.
by Duncan Shields | Feb 25, 2010 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
We put Jesus24K99 into his cage for our own protection. The anti-coagulants weren’t holding. He was destabilizing. He’d bleed out soon.
The hole in our research was the stigmata. The actual crucifix had been uncovered in a basement vault of the Vatican. The nails from the cross had been scraped for flakes. The DNA, when used to make clones, had created short, dark babies.
Obviously not Jesus.
We tinkered with the DNA, adding a lot more milk to the coffee, if you will, to make the clone more acceptable to Middle America. We needed an Aryan beauty the likes of which would make women swoon and men envy. We needed today’s Jesus, not the old one.
Blond, emaciated babies were being created in our lab. They refused to eat. They cried a lot. Vials of their tears had cured cancer in my wife and two of the assistants. Even Jeffrey’s back was normal again.
Plans were afoot to release the cure for a price that was low enough to afford but would still make our company billions under masked creation papers. Lies, basically. The cure for cancer. Probably the cure for AIDS. Who knows? Maybe the cure for everything. If nothing else, at least these crying babies could make the people of earth healthy again.
Unfortunately, it made me picture rows and rows of eyeless Jesus Baby Clones crying into suction tubes in cages like chickens in KFC farms. I got back to work.
Most of them had turned out hemophiliac. We had no idea what to do when the holes in their hands and sides appeared. This baby Jesus was moving sluggishly.
It was like some unseen force was killing these babies, like what we were doing was not for the greater good and we were being sabotaged.
Jesus24K99 rolled onto his back and stopped moving. The pool of blood spread out beneath him, eventually slowing to a stop as his heart stopped pumping. The tattoo on his arm was scanned. The lights in his cage went out.
The compactor took over. He was added to the basement remains.
We hadn’t even figured out how to accelerate his aging when we made a stable copy. There was talk of hiring an actor as Plan B and cutting our losses by sticking with the whole ‘cure for cancer’ thing.
I’d be out of job if they did that but I was starting to think that maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad idea.
by Duncan Shields | Feb 16, 2010 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
It’s a reasoning process. There are seconds left. The cold leather of the chair is warming up beneath my manacled wrists. The restraints are tight on my arms. I’m wide awake and dreaming.
I can’t decide if it’s a syringe or a snake that they’re drawing back out of my arm. I can feel the pitter patter of little feet running through my veins, getting progressively softer as they hit the smaller tributaries. My body is a giant vibrating footstep tied to a chair.
Laboratory nine. People don’t come back from this lab. I have opinions. This is where they put people with opinions. You should hear the way the sergeants pronounce that word. It’s right up there with communism, hippie, and free will. Venom drips from their lips.
It’s dark in the tiled room except for the light over my chair. My muscles vibrate faster and faster until they hit a state of constant striation. Being cognizant, I realize that this must be what a seizure is. I’ve never had one before but I saw a friend have an epileptic fit when I was a child.
We were playing in a field. It was a hot day. This was before the occupation, of course, before the clicking mandibles hissing out a whisper that was the closest they could come to English. The messages from the sky. The examples. Prague, Toronto and for some reason Adelaide made into legend as a warning shot. I remember the hissing language from aliens. They looked like a cross between spiders and crucifixes.
I remember they lit up the atmosphere of the Earth to prove their power, to scare the primitives. The ozone layer had flashed like a dance club.
Me and my friend David in that summer field had looked up. The strobe light of the entire sky had set my friend to moaning. His joints froze and he fell back like a broken toy. An animal keening had squeezed out of him. It sounded like a kettle reaching a boil.
It wasn’t a good sound. I can hear it echoing around me now in the laboratory and I realize that it’s coming from me.
Soon, I know that if I don’t give in to the suggestions that are coursing through my veins, I’ll die. No one has come back from this room. No one has given in.
It’s almost comforting to know that there are still humans who will fight to the death on these tables, resisting the attempt to shape their allegiance until they’re switched off permanently. I feel honoured to join them.
I can feel the lights within my mind turning out one by one as the chemicals give up coercion and switch to destruction.
I am candles on a birthday cake being blown out.
by Duncan Shields | Feb 5, 2010 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
I got pretty good at morse code after a while.
My co-pilot had a beak. The only way we could figure out how to communicate was if he clicked his beak at me in morse code. He was a pretty impatient dude so he did it really fast. He was wired to the eyeballs with Hexamex for the course changes that might be needed. Being that sped up and prepared for a possibility that might not happen isn’t any kind of fun. Makes a person a little high strung.
The only time he was verbose was when he was making up curses. He didn’t get the abstract notions of my human swear words but he understood actions and verbs so it was fun to hear him be creative when he was telling me off.
One memorable time he told me that my mother enjoyed having sex with hyenas because at least when they laughed at her, she didn’t have to take it as an insult. He also insinuated that my hyena father was where I got my annoying laugh, my short legs, and my hunger for dead animal meat. His race was herbivorous.
He was an Aereacoltra, a flying bird man. He would still be a flying bird man except for the fact that his wings were torn off as part of a prison sentence. He lost an eye in that prison as well during a scuffle over living quarters. Now he’s just a dude with a beak and an eyepatch.
He told me that an antigravity harness is nothing compared to banking and wheeling in a silent sky on a huge pair of wings. That’s the longest thing he told me other than the cursing.
His name was a series of chirps and whistles but I ended up just calling him Stan. Sometimes he hummed to himself as he scanned the instruments for possible pursuit. He sounded like he was gargling marbles but it was oddly musical and whispery.
The irony of the fact that he was a pilot who used to be able to fly wasn’t lost on him. In fact, he took off one of my fingers with that beak of his when I pointed it out.
What’s freaking me out now is that he’s locked himself in his quarters and he hasn’t come out for six days. There’s only so much I can do by myself at the controls before I need some down time. The autopilot’s an emergency measure and we really can’t take the risk of having no one at the wheel, not in this asteroid-laden sector.
“Stan! Get out here! Now!” I pounded and yelled at his door.
Softly, I could hear scrabbling behind the door and then the clicking of the lock. The door swooshed open and there was Stan. He looked exhausted.
“What the hell, Stan? What’s going on! It’s been six days!” I screamed at him.
Stan stepped to the side. Behind him were four eggs. Stan looked at me apologetically.
‘Quadruplets’, he clicked at me with his beak. ‘I guess the condom must have broke at that last space port’
Open-mouthed, I looked from Stan to the eggs and back to Stan again. We weren’t due to dock for another eight months. Stan looked ashamed.
“So should I start calling you Stella instead of Stan?” I asked.
It’s hard to tell when someone with a beak is smiling.
by Duncan Shields | Jan 25, 2010 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields , Staff Writer
Mapping the human genome made it easier to map the genomes of the rest of the world’s animals. Myself, I have a bit of wolf in my nose and some alligator in my spine. Nothing that stands out, mind you. The business world is still conservative and I want to maintain a low profile in my business.
I’m in a whorehouse called The Zoo and I’m having dinner with my favorite escort. I make enough to afford the best and these splices are what I always want. I look across at her.
She’s all leg. It’s pretty sweet. The pattern on her long neck entices me. Her giant brown eyes are looking at me with unmistakable desire. Her stiff hair stands straight up in a broom-brush mohawk all the way down her spine, bracketed by her backless purple evening dress.
She’s a half-jaffe. Her fingernails are a dark brown and her skin is a luxurious orange-yellow. Her hexagonal skinspots remind me of hot days on the Serengeti planes. And even hotter nights. The wine is getting to her. It’s an act but it’s a good one.
She shakes her head to clear it and I see taut muscles hugging four feet of slender giraffe neck do their work. I’m entranced by her beauty. The bangles in her ears jingle and it’s music to me.
The two little balls that protrude from the top of her head peek out coquettishly from her coiffure. She’s dyed her bangs red.
Her long nose ends in wide nostrils. Her generous mouth twists at the edges in a wry smile. She knows how I want this dinner to end.
She’s wearing six necklaces in a ladder from her strong jaw down to the base of her neck. The last necklace dips towards her spotted cleavage.
Around the restaurant, there are men having dinner with sissy-bears, wylfen, whore-boars, even some nudie-birds. They make me sick. Give me a half-jaffe anyday. They’re tall and worth the climb.
I can hear her tail start to swish behind her. She shoots me a look that says I should ask the waiter for the bill so we can go up to her room. Blushing and shaking, I reach for my wallet.
