by submission | Oct 27, 2016 | Story |
Author : Anthony Tedeschi
“Okay, so look – I don’t do nitrous anymore.” Sirius Dunbar whispered through a weaseled grin. He sat on the splintered wooden floor within the cabin of the flying fortress. Around the crooked table, littered with disheveled playing cards and open bottles of whiskey, sat the other three participants of the gambling.
The propellers spun on the wings of the mammoth zeppelin as it caught a bout of wind and ascended abruptly. The SS Marmaduke was out in front – leading a caravan of wing-ships through the Kalahari Desert. Her mission: see to it that the cargo (84,000 quarter-kegs of nitrous) makes it to the Pittsburgh metropolis unscathed. 38 zeppelins followed directly behind the Marmaduke.
Captain Mathias Chelmsford sat across from Sirius Dunbar, drinking from an aged bottle of red wine. “Like bloody Hell you don’t do nitrous you senseless wit! Do you not remember your last hand? Going 64 on a pair of lows! Don’t try to fool me; I know your pockets are drying up! Drier than the air outside.” The Captain rambled through his rich gray beard between swigs of the tart nectar. Sirius Dunbar stopped talking then. Chelmsford looked around the table to the other two gamblers – on the left was his first mate, Hille Fitzroy. Fitzroy had spent many years in the dregs of New England, which had become a ravaged battlefield once the Industrial Expanse began. On the right of Chelmsford was a new conscript of the Marmaduke, a world-weathered man by the name of Eli Grave. The crew knew little about him besides the fact that he knew his way around a 308 Zep-Engine. The lantern in the middle of the table lit the room dimly as wax dripped from the wick.
Chelmsford furrowed his brow and addressed Fitzroy: “Mister Hille, I believe it’s your turn.” The Marmaduke convulsed then; oil and grease spewed out from the copper exhaust pipes just beneath the cabin.
Fitzroy reached into his pocket, searching for a wager as Dunbar opened in a snide grin once more: “There have been whispers aboard the Tulkinghorn of a Dead-Ringer on board. No one’s seen his face, but they say he moves like an apparition, disappea-…”
Chelmsford roared: “I won’t submit to such preposterous rumors, Dunbar, I just won’t have it! Dead-Ringers are myth, legend.” Fitzroy pulled from his jacket a hand-carved, snub-nosed blunderbuss and placed it on the table.
Dunbar began again: “That’s a rather hefty sentimental sum, Fitzroy! How much trust you have in them cards?” Hille Fitzroy sneered towards the dimwitted cannon-jockey. “Some of the crew aboard the Tulkinghorn says he is moving freely from ship to ship.”
Captain Chelmsford caved: “And what animal adorns his watch? He then turned to the new conscript: Mister Grave, I believe it’s your turn to wager.”
Eli Grave reached into his pocket, breathing deeply. Dunbar whispered through a furrowing moustache: A Serpent….
Just then, Mister Grave produced an emerald pocket watch – engraved on the surface with a hissing rattlesnake. He placed it on the table, and promptly disappeared.
by submission | Oct 26, 2016 | Story |
Author : Alicia Cerra Waters
We were lost in the desert on Omega, sitting under one of those skeleton trees, slowly drying out like everything else around us. They call Omega the first and the last; the first planet from its galaxy’s sun, and the last planet anyone would ever want to live on. The alpha and the omega. I heard that’s supposed to be a reference to some ancient culture’s religion.
We were dehydrating, my baby and I, and I was thinking about the only blue sea I’d ever seen. When I heard a man’s sigh, I wasn’t sure if I was imagining things or not. Then I saw the shape of him, thin and bedraggled, hunched over a weary horse. I began unwrapping my hair, the only part of me that was still beautiful. As he approached, I noticed a water skin bobbing at his side.
I leaned against the skeleton tree as he approached. “You look like a tall, cool drink,” I said.
He was wearing a dazed and beaten expression. “Cover your head, lady. You’ll get skin cancer.”
I spent what little energy I had to lift the baby, leave the shade of the tree, and walk at his side. “Nice of you to worry about me. Any chance you’d share some water?”
The man shook his head. “Can’t. I need it to get to the nearest ranch, and there’s no water between us and that ranch. Guaranteed.”
“I can offer you something better than water,” I said.
The man scoffed. “Out here there’s no such thing.”
“Please,” I said, peering up at him, batting my eyelashes. Anything was worth a try.
He shook his head. “My horse can’t carry us both. My water won’t stretch to me, you, the horse, and the baby.”
“Fine,” I said, “Then take my baby with you.”
“Oh hell.”
“If you don’t, we’ll both die out here.” I held up my child. He was small and dull-eyed as he squirmed in the rags I had swaddled him in.
The man turned his head. “Ma’am, I’ve got to think about this.”
“Please.”
The man sighed. “I knew it was a mistake to take the main road.”
“Is that a yes?”
He pulled the reigns on his horse and the creature came to a halt, grateful as the man tied its reins to the base of the skeleton tree. He detached the water skin from his pack and said, “I’ll give the child some water.”
I reached for the water skin, my eyes stinging with an effort to produce tears, as I let the water drip into my baby’s mouth.
The man sat down underneath the tree and leaned against the trunk, watching me with bloodshot eyes in layers of cracking, leathery skin. I sat down next to the man and put the baby in my lap. I held my son’s little hand as he licked water droplets from his pink lips.
“I’m sorry a nice lady like you is all alone out here,” he said, laying a fatherly hand on my shoulder. He was being sincere. That made it harder.
“I’m sorry too,” I said. In a quick movement, I withdrew a dagger from the folds of my blouse and plunged it into his throat. The shock of pain filled his eyes as he collapsed like a fallen tree, his blood flowing into the sand like the only river in the desert. I stayed with him until he was empty, then I took a drink from his water skin and climbed onto his horse, bound for the nearest ranch.
by submission | Oct 23, 2016 | Story |
Author : David Burkhart
Only Anderson and Miller reached the concrete bunker door. The rest of the squad had fallen in a heroic attempt to reach and secure the bunker. With bullets whizzing around them, Anderson keyed in the code to open the bunker door while Miller returned covering fire. In the quiet of the bunker, they could barely hear the bullets outside bouncing off the bunker door. Anderson turned on the console and started entering information as Miller sat down on the floor with her back against the console and her rifle pointed at the door.
As the video screen came on, Anderson glanced down at Miller slouched on the floor beside him and noticed for the first time the blood coming from the corner of her mouth. Her blouse was soaked with blood. She tried to smile as they listened to the hammering on the bunker door getting louder. In a few more minutes, the bunker would be breached.
Anderson stared at the iris scanner as his eyes were examined. Passing the test, he successfully entered his thumbprint and then his whole hand-print before returning to the iris scanner. A hacked-off thumb or hand could pass the tests, but only a living eye would naturally change slightly between iris scans. The fail-safe cover retracted exposing the red firing switch.
The video screen was a jumble of static and chaos but Anderson could somewhat make out a group of men seemingly trying to talk to him but only static came out over the speakers. He spread his arms out to his side with his palms up to signal he couldn’t understand them and asking for orders. Suddenly a person he recognized as The President stood up with a sign that said, “DO IT”.
Several dozen nuclear warheads were stored in the vaults beneath the bunker. It was unthinkable to have the warheads fall into the hands of the terrorists who would soon storm the bunker. Anderson firmly pressed the red firing switch until the activated light came on and then sat down beside Miller. She had died. He put his arm around her, pulled her close and laid her head on his chest and they waited. In case the terrorists breached the bunker, Anderson pulled the pin on a grenade and held the grenade against his chest with his free hand. A few seconds later, a slight tremor in the floor was felt just before Anderson and Miller were instantly disintegrated and the particles that had made up their bodies were sucked miles up into the sky into a huge mushroom cloud.
by submission | Oct 21, 2016 | Story |
Author : Thomas Desrochers
“You have to understand that, at the time, people still believed in a better future. There were people who could see the writing on the wall, of course, but nobody was willing to listen to them, much less able. When the barges stopped it was quite the shock. The state had maybe half a million left at that point, but it could only feed fifty thousand, and that was assuming the machinery could be kept fueled and maintained.”
Outside the wind howled, out of tempo with the sputtering of the wood stove. The cabin itself was only ten feet by ten feet and sparsely populated: a cot, a chair, the stove, a wall of firewood, a cast iron pan hanging from the ceiling, and a rifle in the corner. No windows, only the light from the stove to cast dim dancing shadows over the room and across Adams’ weathered, bearded face and sunken eyes.
Adams shrugged. “We got by for a while. We farmed, we hunted, but we couldn’t fight the fires in the summer, we couldn’t keep our equipment going forever. Anybody who got out alive… well, nobody came out whole. Hardly anybody came out at all.”
His audience sat on the cot opposite him, two foreigners seeking passage north: both were women, one covered head to toe in brown robes that obscured every aspect of her, the other wearing an ankle length skirt and a heavy wool sweater. Her skin was as deep and smooth as polished onyx, her eyes bright and curious.
“But you did make it out,” the curious one said.
“I did,” Adams replied.
“Then you can guide us back?”
Adams sighed and sank into his chair. “I didn’t leave alone. I took what was left of my family, a second cousin only twelve years old.” Adams fell silent, looking somewhere half a lifetime removed.
When he started up again his voice was hollow. “We weren’t the first ones to try and get back to the states – the wolves had already figured their strategy out by the time we hit them. We never found bodies, only thousands of bones scattered across what was left of the ALCAN. We had to stop early to start a fire if we couldn’t find a vehicle to sleep in, and we’d take shifts through the night.
“We were doing alright until the 30th day. We sat down to take a break and eat a little, and a fog rolled in with no warning. We were high up so the trees were small – too small to climb.
“It was over in an instant. Four dead wolves and Max trapped under one of them, bleeding out. He still had his dog-eared copy of Asimov’s ‘Robot Dreams’ in his hand. There were tears rolling down his face, mixing with the blood and dirt. I told him, ‘Don’t cry, Max, don’t cry. It’ll be over soon. You’ll get to see your parents and your brothers real soon.’ He just shook his head, and he said to me, ‘It’s just not fair. It’s just not fair. We were promised a future with robots and spaceships. A future where we were great! Instead we got this. Why should we dream when we’re back to hiding from wolves around a fire?’
“What’s there to say to that? What can you say? The fog didn’t burn up. He didn’t die quickly.”
Adams wrestled his gaze back to the present, looking the young woman in the eyes. “You’ll only find graves if you go back there. Whatever you’re hoping to find is dead with the rest of it.”
by submission | Oct 20, 2016 | Story |
Author : Rick Tobin
Ventilation fan rumblings echoed over huddled mourners chilled in multi-colored, insulated, puffy arctic suits. Their drifting breath mists bellowed over a gaunt figure, attired in a jumpsuit dyed red on the left—solid white on the right, draping over a black, plastic coffin revealing embalmed features of Jonathon Rigby, renowned author and humanitarian patron aboard space station Lin Toller 10.
“Dear soul of Jonathon Rigby, I give easement and rest to you, dear passenger. Drift not down shipboard hallways, lost and searching. Be at peace, one with this ship, now and forever, in accordance with your wishes. For everlasting serenity, I pawn my soul for your clearing. Amen.” With that, the sin-eater collapsed on the aft cargo bay’s cold steel, groaning and frothing in pantomimes of sexual paroxysms.
Gathered parishioners turned away while covering their noses from aromatic surrounding cargoes of odd spices, along with spew and spoor of countless caged species. Still prone, he spoke slowly to Rigby’s relatives. “This man shall not be ejected, but shall be resurrected and recycled as part of his once spinning home, pure and clean of all indiscretions.”
Attendees drifted to comforts of cleaner air on heated decks, leaving the sin-eater horizontal and shivering. A robust sky marine remained, in full uniform, without assisting the practitioner up to face him: Rigby’s brother.
“Jonathon was damn near a saint, without discretions or sin. If I could prove you were defrauding my family I would hunt you down.” Controlled rage rippled on his face.
The sin-eater gently stroked his assailant’s right cheek. “Sergeant, my calling assists all souls to absolution, even those, like your brother, living clean, glorious existences. Sin is not evil. It means missing the target…falling short from choices. Everyone makes such choices. Everyone.”
Rigby slapped the hand away. “My great-great-grandfather wrote about you squibs in his journals. They used to call you Sky Pilots, full of hidden agendas. Well out here, padre, heaven is freezing vacuum above hell’s heat of reentry. No sin here…only survival…the guy with the meanest weapon and greatest hunger wins. There is no soul.”
The thin, aged face of the sin-eater grew taut. “You can’t deny your soul. No atheists in a foxhole, remember?”
“If the Corps wanted me to have a soul, they would have issued one. Strange how people outside foxholes think they know. I served at Xanthia. That’s where I learned there is no God, no hope…no soul. Flying spiders ate my buddies. People like you sent us onto that forsaken rock where even dirt ate marines. Then, when we’d lost thousands, deal makers blew it up. You’ll choke cleaning those bastards. I wonder what my family idiots paid you for this charade.”
“I take no funds. They donated a year’s supply of food credits”
“You bastard! That’s a small fortune out here.” Rigby moved forward, fists clenched.
“I sense you don’t fear death, but the not knowing. The soul exists outside our time-space continuum. Everything for the departed is unity. That’s what the Majorana fermion particle discovery was about: eternal existence.” He backed away from the Marine’s reach.
“Who cares? I need to get out of here before I wipe this deck with your skin.”
“I prefer anodyne language, Sergeant…not this personality assassination during anguish. Everyone grieves uniquely. If yours is aggression, I’ll disengage. We will part now, Sergeant, as I await your return. Eventually, I will purge your darkness before the long journey. I’ve met your kind a hundred times. We will conjoin. Until our final meeting, I’ll simply remain, drifting in the stars, with hope and hunger.”
