by submission | Jun 20, 2020 | Story |
Author: Cara Yablonski
The delivery was late. For the first time ever.
Every season, the Towne received a shipment full of supplies. Necessities of life. A crate: the size of a modest house and filled to the metal-clad brim with sustenance. One that you could always count on it to arrive because it was all you had and everything you needed.
Until yesterday.
The missing delivery had set the community into panic. People gathered to murmur and buzz. “Where could it be?” they asked in hushed tones, “It must be arriving soon. A delay, or perhaps bad weather!” Many nodded in agreement, for it was better to cling to false confidence than to challenge it.
“That’s it for us. We’re doomed!” stated one man, who wore his spectacles far down on his nose, close to the tip. He paced the Towne square with his gaze focused hawk-like on the sky above. Fear filled the community and threatened to overflow. The thick, manufactured air turned hot and stale.
But there were contingencies in place for such an occurrence. Contingencies that were better left in the untouched, dust-laden charters. Forgotten, until now.
A deep alarm sounded, reverberating across the community, and filling every small corner.
The contingency asked for all to defy their most basic instincts. The townspeople were to bring their supplies to the community center. All food, water, and toiletries – no exception – to be managed and rationed.
The people gathered at the community center. Bumping elbows and shoulders as they cleaved to their goods. Faces marked by a furrowed brow and tight-lipped mouth. Sneakers squeaked against the epoxied resin floors.
The chatter amplified until a dark-haired woman arrived. She grasped at the podium’s ledge and tapped a finger against the microphone. A hush fell like a thick blanket draping over the room.
“Thank you for coming here today. For bringing your balance of supplies and trusting in our contingency plan. As you all know, The Delivery is delayed. This contingency will see us through until…” she coughed, a dry tickle in the back of her throat, “…until the delivery arrives.” Looking across the room at her people she felt a heavy pit in her stomach. She watched as they clung to each other. Hugging tightly to their children and holding the hands of their neighbors. “The delivery is on its way. We should all rest assured that we are being looked after.”
She departed from the podium and exited the building. The sky was beginning to darken, and the woman looked upwards, demanding an explanation. Prayers unanswered, she kicked at the rust-colored dirt beneath her. If only it could provide the sustenance they needed.
A deep chatter resumed as the residents exited the center, congratulating each other on their assured survival. Clapped their hands on each others’ backs and hugging, relief filled smiles adorning their faces.
It was a close call, but all would be fine.
An office building sat empty. Papers scattered about, collecting dust. Half-eaten lunches lay abandoned on office desks, their owners nowhere to be seen. Such time had passed that the contents had spoiled and soured. The only sounds that remained in this world belonged to the failing electronics that had survived and outlasted all life.
In a warehouse nearby sat a large crate, the size of a modest house. Full to its metal-clad brim with supplies. Gallons of water rested in plastic drums. Food lay untouched, rotting in its temperature-controlled packages. The rest of it dried and stale. All of it late for delivery.
by submission | Jun 19, 2020 | Story |
Author: Gabrielle Elaine Thurman
James sneezed, the corn maze’s pollinic miasma tickling his allergies. Shaking fingers pulled a tissue from his pocket. He dabbed his watery eyes, which searched the crowd at the labyrinth’s entrance for anyone matching the app’s description of his soulmate.
When he’d signed up to be one of the company’s newest software testers, he hadn’t realized how much it was going to affect his love life. Every few weeks, the app sent him on a new blind date, and every few weeks, James bid the woman goodnight, dialed the developers, and stuttered out the disappointing news: He had not found his true love.
“Excuse me.”
He turned, meeting the eyes of a tall brunette. His stomach sank. A neon alien tat sat right in the middle of her cleavage, and similarly themed doodle tattoos squiggled across her collarbones and down both arms. There were piercings in her nose, lips, eyebrows, all the way up both ears and, from the looks of her black tank top, her nipples as well.
“Orion?” he guessed. He awkwardly tucked his used tissue away. I’ve got to at least try with this one, he thought.
He stuck out one sweaty, nervous hand.
She looked at it in disgust. He snatched it back, shifting from one foot to another.
“It seems we’re looking for the same person,” she said. She pressed the cyber-chip embedded in the center of her wrist, and a hologram appeared of a WANTED poster.
ORION BUCCHERI: NON-BINARY HOMOSAPIEN of EARTH MINOR.
SPACESHIP THEFT: 150,000 UNIT REWARD UPON CAPTURE.
The hologram grinned, and the air left James’ lungs. Tasseled dirty blonde hair shaded the criminal’s dark blue eyes, and hir full lips smirked even in a mug shot. Ze had oil-stained fingertips, and the shirt’s sleeves strained to contain hir corded muscles.
The app had finally gotten it right.
“Have you seen this person?” The woman asked.
“No, I—” The app beeped. Orion was near. James tucked his chipped wrist behind his back. “No clue. Can’t help you. Sorry.”
“Well, keep an eye out,” she said.
“Will do,” he said, smiling placatingly. The woman narrowed her eyes.
“Leave bounty hunting to the professionals,” she warned. James nodded, gesturing to his dusty button-up and slacks.
“You’ll find no competition from me,” he assured her. He laughed nervously, and after a moment, she nodded. He took one step back, then another. As the bounty hunter began showing the hologram to the group entering the corn maze, he ran for the barn, the beeping from his wrist growing louder with each step.
Sure enough, a spaceship hid behind the red front doors.
“Orion!” he called.
Immediately, metal pressed against his neck. Pre-recorded cheers came from the direction of his wrist.
“Who are you?” Orion hissed. “How did you find me?”
“My name is James,” he said. “You have to hurry. There’s a–there’s a—”
He sneezed.
Orion yelped and immediately tased him. James’ teeth chattered as electricity rolled through his body, eyes rolling back in his head.
He collapsed to the straw-covered ground, muscles seizing.
Orion cursed and grabbed him by the ankle, dragging him to the spaceship.
“We’ve gotta get outta here,” ze said. Ze sighed. “I guess you’re just gonna have to come with me.”
He moaned. Wait until the developers hear about this, he thought. Orion slammed the spaceship hatch, and the cabin pressurized.
The thrum of the spaceship’s warp core drive rattled his teeth. James dropped his head back against the floor and shut his eyes.
“Guess I’m not going in to work tomorrow.”
by submission | Jun 18, 2020 | Story |
Author: Beverly V Head
Sandrine was up early to begin work. She had put all the ingredients out the night before so that she could get started as soon as she got up. She had a long day ahead of her with teaching, errands after classes, and a late movie with her girlfriends.
She took her time reading the directions. She read them three times to be sure that she had each ingredient and the correct order for mixing them. Fortunately, she had read the directions the night before and discovered that she did not have the red pepper, a key ingredient. A quick trick to Piggly Wiggly had solved that problem.
After Sandrine had finished mixing the ingredients, she went out into the back yard. She walked down to the stream at the back of the yard. She stood on the wooden bridge that she and Reynolds had built together the previous summer. It was pleasant standing there with her face tilted up to the sun. A breeze ruffled her hair. She could have stood there for hours, but she needed to clean the kitchen.
She had just finished sweeping the kitchen floor when she heard the front door open and then footsteps up to the second floor and then footsteps back down the stairs.
She was sitting at the table in the breakfast room when he ran into the kitchen.
“Sandrine! Help me!”
Reynolds still had on the clothes that he had worn the previous day. Even in wrinkled clothes, he looked good. But he also looked scared. His eyes were bright and shiny, like he was about to cry.
“Sandrine! Please! Something is wrong!”
Sandrine looked at him as he ran from the kitchen into the breakfast room. His feet were bare. He must not have had time to put on his shoes when he had left that woman’s house.
When she did not say anything, Reynolds started to cry.
“What have you done to me? Sandrine, I told you that I didn’t cheat on you. That woman that called you was lying. I don’t know her like that. I just know her from work. Please, Sandrine! Help me!”
Sandrine watched Reynolds run back into the kitchen. She heard the back door open. From the bay window in the breakfast room, she could see him running across the gravel path and then down the driveway. His feet were bleeding.
He looked from left to right as he ran around the cul de sac. He was crying and screaming. After four or five times around he began running out of the subdivision into the woods behind the tennis courts. She sat until she could not hear his screams. She wondered briefly if any of the neighbors had called the police to report someone running and screaming.
Sandrine looked at the clock. It was time to go to her first class. Before leaving the kitchen she picked up the bottle with the red pepper mixed with the sand out of one of Reynolds’s tracks from the sand she had poured in the path to his tool shed. There was not much left since she had thrown most of it into the running stream in the back yard. She had followed exactly Miss Zora’s directions for giving Reynolds “running feet.” Now he was running from place to place, unable to stop.
She wondered how long it would take Reynolds to run himself to death.
by submission | Jun 17, 2020 | Story |
Author: Katlina Sommerberg
The grey tabby crouched low to the earth, her belly collecting dust. Duchess’s eyes tracked an iridescent gleam zipping across the sky. She wiggled in place: a final preparation before takeoff.
***
Her human had adopted her from a shelter, scooping her up in arms reeking of iodine. His home, a tiny house stinking of iodine and filled with jars of mosquitos, became her castle. His warm laptop, covered in coding puns and academia stickers, was her favorite bed.
He always made time to entertain her. As they played, he muttered about his Ph.D. thesis and deadlines. She barely listened to his rants about the ethical concerns or his advisor suggesting new genes to target. Occasionally, they had visitors – humans fiddling with his equipment and observing his trapped mosquitos.
Eventually, the captive mosquitoes reached a population where their buzz became an intolerable roar. Their habitats cluttered the floor. Duchess hated them and spent more time outside; her human didn’t notice. She watched him slave over mosquitos through the windows, until winter came around.
Then he yowled, danced, and rushed outside to scoop her up in his arms – interrupting her mid-stalk. He rocked her side to side as she squirmed, eyeing the fleeing mouse, but he kissed her belly anyway.
She scratched just above his blue eyes. He dropped her. She ran out to the forest and didn’t come home until he was asleep.
When she returned, the house was silent. All the glass habitats were empty. Duchess ate stale sashimi off the table, next to a printout of his thesis, covered in red ink.
His abstract declared the modified mosquitoes, once released into the wild, would reduce local populations to 10% of their current numbers in three years. He drew on previous work analyzing the failed endeavors to cull malaria-carriers from the mosquito population and speculated mosquitos would be extinct at the decade’s end.
Over the next few months, she rarely saw him. One of his friends came over every day to wait on her, and Duchess appreciated this new caretaker. But she missed her human. She scattered his awards in hidden nooks. The temporary caretaker cleaned them out of her hiding places once a week.
This stopped the night her human came home. He crashed in front of the television, where a reporter explained diagrams with exponential decay rates for a multitude of species populations.
“Spiders and dragonflies are hit the hardest, after the abrupt decline of the mosquitoes. Many reached critically endangered conservation status this morning,” the reporter said.
Her human threw a beer bottle at the screen. It exploded against the wall and drenched him in glass.
The next day, journalists lined up outside their house, screaming questions. He stayed inside, only appearing to retrieve delivered groceries or boxes. When he gave her dried food, Duchess screamed for three days. But he refused to brave the crowds to retrieve fresh fish from the market.
She snuck out a half-open window. Grasshoppers and crickets blared in her sensitive ears, but she mercifully heard none of the mosquito’s evil whine.
***
A human’s arms circled her body. Duchess yowled her protest. The human stank of coconut oil, and Duchess craned her neck away from the clammy skin.
“Kitty, you can’t kill a dragonfly –” she said, her lecture broken by one swipe.
Duchess landed and shot off to a bush. Wide-eyed, she watched the woman nurse her bleeding arms. But after a few minutes, the woman picked up her cardboard sign and re-joined the crowd in front of the house.
Duchess slunk off to find more iridescent flashes.
by submission | Jun 16, 2020 | Story |
Author: Morrow Brady
Stavros mooned the earth like the asshole he was. Jacob, the calm, perfunctory overseer AI, had never seen such a thing in its operational life but understood that showing one’s personal point of evacuation to a whole planet, meant something emotional had happened and that it might be mildly amusing to keep an eye on things.
Pulling up his lower torso, Stavros secured the seal to the rest of his spacesuit and climbed across the remains of the lab for the airlock. He ignored all requests from Earth Command and commenced the long walk.
“I’ll let him know myself” and “Bastard!”, the latter repeated thirty-nine times, was the only thing Jacob heard from the helmet mic as it followed the feeds.
After 8 hours, with oxygen tanks nearly depleted, he arrived 30 kilometres away at Peary Crater mine. He removed his suit and stood momentarily naked in the recently re-oxygenated annexe, steam issuing from his bruised body. Grabbing a handful of energy bars, Stavros ripped one open to gnaw vigorously at its chewy strip.
The synthetic underwear and subsurface crib suit pried from the battered old storage unit were one size too small. But beggars can’t be choosers when you’re the dumb Lunartic whose hand had been forced to do the dirty work. He entered the dome’s lift core and activated mine environments. Sensors detected a minor leak at level 959, but nothing of great concern, so he cracked the lid, hooked up the descent harness and fell 9 kilometres underground. The controlled fall, lit by a red LED strip-light that descended into hell was hypnotic. His bitter rage pulsed inside.
Stavros, being one crazy son-of-a-bitch, had arrived with time to spare. Four minutes in fact. And being down here, completely clear of that asshole by-the-book AI, he could do what needed to be done and get his ass off this goddamn rock. The pod ejector assembly, stretched in both directions down the laser cut mine tunnel, for as far as he could see. He knew the schematics off-by-heart but knew mining crew gamma left it fully operational before they abruptly departed in the only remaining rocket 10 hours earlier. All he needed was to load an empty class 1 pod with enough oxygen for the three-day journey back to earth.
“I’ll bust his jaw. The bastard” Stavros spat, gulping water from a dirty rehydrator.
With the ejector charge at capacity and the pod locked and loaded, he set the auto-launch countdown and climbed in. Haunched down in the base of the pod, he held the oxygen cylinders in place and braced. He didn’t brace enough. No-one with any sense could have. The acceleration needed to launch a pod fully laden with moon ore was far beyond human tolerances. The instant surge in momentum had him out cold before it had reached a quarter of the way out of the launch tube. Not that it would make a difference, he was after all inside a windowless capsule, flying through a darkened tube, about to be launched through space at a dust mote sized target located in South America – aptly titled the Podcatcher.
At the moon surface, the shaft lid automatically slid back and the pod flew through a plume of gas into space at great speed directly toward earth.
Jacob, barely saw the pod pass by the sensors but the scanner told it pretty quickly what just happened. Stavros had launched and was heading home. The psycho did it and there was nothing anyone could do about it.
