by submission | Sep 25, 2011 | Story |
Author : Donovan Pruitt
So much blood. My blood.
The wind shouted for just a moment, throwing sand over the stone and down my back. My hat tumbled off lazily, dancing in the dirt, taunting me out of arms reach. I wouldn’t move for it. Move and I’m dead.
My duster stank of whiskey, the scorched edges giving it a nose of salted caramel. God, I wish I had a drink. Just one sip. Even Martian grain would taste like an angel’s lips.
Energy blasts chipped at the stone behind me, eroding my cover, shaping my tombstone. I flipped my revolver down, opening the chamber. Six holes, five were smoking, empty craters. One cartridge left: the Firebolt. It only sounds impressive.
“Draw, pig!” he shouted, not even halfway down the street, now. Bryonis Clayton, wanted for robbery and murder. Lots of murders. About to be one more.
Sheriff was his last, about ten minutes ago. He pushed his wet, red star into my hand, told me he smelled lilacs, and then choked on his own blood behind the bar while broken bottles of whiskey rained all over us. I took his gun, took his honor, and ran after Clayton.
“Is my bullet feeling good in you, boy?” he taunted me, shoving more cartridges in his gun. He had plenty. I had two: mine, and the one inside me. The second one wasn’t helping.
There was a deafening roar as a transport ship sped off overhead as fast as it could, carrying hundreds of souls to the heavens. Guess they left without me. That’s okay, though; I’ll find my own chariot and ride it around Clayton’s house in hell, shouting his name into forever like a damn gnat he can’t get rid of. That’ll show him.
I snapped the revolver back, drew the hammer with a strain until it clicked. Everything hurt. My eyes blurred, but I stood up, partially hunched over with a death grip on my gun. I stared at Clayton, gritting my teeth. He displayed his with a smile. He gave me an elaborate gesture, a mockery of aristocratic practices intending to show me he’d honor the showdown. He knew I was dead. He believed he already won. He was right.
“Tell the devil I’m fucking coming!” I spit at him, jerking my wrist up. I couldn’t even raise my arm or level my shot, but I fired anyway. Then I closed my eyes, accepting it for what it was.
Luck.
The Firebolt hit him in his shooting arm, blowing it back to its drawing position with a lick of flame in the air no more brilliant than a firework. He screamed, but instinct had already overwhelmed his muscle memory, and the vision of fire blooming in the air must have made him think I shot a Dragon’s Breath judging by the fearful look in his widening eyes. He fired a round into the dirt without even feeling it. It was a Boomer. It went boom, then it tore him in half.
Gravity won me over. I smacked into the dirt, lips embracing my resting place. The bare, dusty feet of a barmaid ran toward me, kicking up a trail. She knelt down and squeezed a bladder into my mouth. Martian grain, piss of the red planet. It tasted like an angel’s lips.
Forcing my pale mouth into a toothy grin, my fingers twitched with the Sheriff’s star toward her. A crowd looked on, rubberneckers of three murders.
“Tell them…I smell steak,” I puffed out with my last breath. It sounded better than lilacs.
by submission | Sep 24, 2011 | Story |
Author : David Shute
They’ve had me running assassination jobs for awhile now. Terrorists, political loose ends, and the occasional despot in between bigger jobs.
It kicked off with Nan Kang-Dae, a North Korean defector picked up by the Chinese authorities. His government had managed to turn him into a firestarter, a pyrokinetic. Unaware of this the Chinese sent him back. Some time after the mental safeguards were put in and before brainwashing he managed an assisted escape and fled his homeland.
Had he been left alone the safeguards would have prevented him from ever accessing his abilities. He’d have been free and harmless. Instead the Chinese sent him back and the North Korean brain butchers finished the job.
We’d been on the cusp of this for awhile; the arms race merging with the human race. They put me together piecemeal with implants, injections, and a swarm of nanobots.
I lost my fatigue response and the physical need for sleep went with it. This allowed a constant stream of extended training and conditioning sessions. I can run pretty fast and I have pretty impressive strength, but my real selling feature is extreme resilience. We’re talking dropped from a plane over North Korea without a parachute resilience. That’s how they sent me in for Kang-Dae.
The poor bastard’s eyes looked empty, like he hadn’t slept a moment in his entire life. His fire took most of my clothes and all of my hair trying to stop me. It hurt like hell but verified I was fireproof. I also learned that I could tear a man’s arms off if properly motivated.
Getting out of the country was the hard part. Still, you can cover a lot of ground when you don’t get tired, don’t have to stop to sleep. Some of the jobs have relied on that particular side effect of my modifications.
I’ve tried sleeping. I can feel it gnawing away in there, at the edges. I need to shut down but my eyes won’t stay closed. If I relax for too long my muscles twitch, urging my body to move. I keep trying.
I’ve completed all the training they can throw at me. For the most part I’m left alone; alternating between bloody field work and laying in a darkened room telling myself that this time I’ll sleep.
They’ve tried replicating my results. It hasn’t taken. They must have missed documenting some variable the first time around. More’s the pity. The formula they hit on seems pretty good on the surface. None of my targets have measured up yet at least.
The last job was an internal problem. Their inability to recreate their successes with me has done little to hamper their other programs. This was their first successful test, relatively speaking, with super speed. He flipped a switch. They’re not sure why but something broke and they sent me in.
I gave him a free shot. In the time it took me to react he got in about forty. He threw me around pretty good but that was the extent of it. I let him go at me for a couple minutes with a vain hope of perhaps.
I think he mistook my apathy for confusion or fear. He got too close and I grabbed him by the throat. I found myself looking into another pair of tired eyes and snapped his neck. Another job well done. Another disappointment.
Maybe the next one.
by submission | Sep 23, 2011 | Story |
Author : Dan Simon
He didn’t remember signing the death waiver. He didn’t remember enrolling in University at all. But he was at University, so he must have signed a death waiver at some point. He was beginning to crack under the pressure. That was all.
He had gotten an A- on his last several physiology exams. Much too close. He needed to focus on his school work. Trying to find a way out of University wasn’t a productive area of thinking. He didn’t know why he wasted his time.
He couldn’t particularly complain much. He was a sharp guy. He was also destitute. And there is only one way for a guy like himself to get a higher education. University was free as long as he made the grades. But if he didn’t…
He checked to make sure he was wearing his RF ID. It was like a student ID at some of the other colleges he had heard about. But it wasn’t just for using the computer lab, or getting meals. His RF was his proof that he had the clearance to be at University. Not that people just wandered in. The machine gun towers at all entrances were a bit disconcerting at first. They tended to keep away the average hoodlum. But the nests were a threat that one soon learned to live with. They were staffed by guys who had families to feed. For many it was a second or third job. There was no danger. Just power.
No. The real reason he always made certain that his RF was on him was the sniper teams. They were much worse than the nests. One always knew when he was near a nest. But with a sniper team… He had heard that there were only three or four teams on all of campus. But you never knew when you would see a window that, normally closed, had been opened outward and draped with cloth. Or worse, when you wouldn’t see any sign of them at all.
He had heard of other schools that gave warnings the first time grades fell below satisfactory level. The primary difference being that at those schools a D was unsatisfactory. They say only the smartest survive University. Your first warning that your grades had fallen below an A was… well there was no warning. The snipers didn’t use subsonic rounds.
He’d had to name the Cadaver in his anatomy class. He didn’t need to use any imagination. He would have recognized his old roommate Brandon anywhere. Even with a concavity for a face.
All he had to do was focus. If he studied hard, and kept his grades up, eventually he would be a doctor. And not just any doctor. An MD from University was accepted globally. He could work anywhere he liked, and be guaranteed a starting salary 40% higher than doctors from any other school. Because he knew how to handle pressure. Because he had survived.
If he could just keep his grades up.
by submission | Sep 18, 2011 | Story |
Author : Andrew Bale
I should have just slept with her, in retrospect. She had been attractive and suggestive, but there had been something about her that smelled like trouble, and sure enough, she had come back to the hotel bar with her arm wrapped around six feet of good old-fashioned trouble. Maybe I was supposed to be revenge on him for something he had done, but now she was going to use him to punish my rejection.
She pointed me out to him and he started striding towards me with blood in his eye. I stood up and stepped away from the bar. I should have just left, but I was at that stage of drunk where I wasn’t thinking straight but thought that I was. Besides, I was a little pissed at myself for turning down an easy score and at her for her betrayal.
As Trouble got near, the world started to slow down. The implant sensed my fight-or-flight response and responded by pumping me full of chemicals that made adrenaline feel like roofies. The artificial nerves switched from the setting that let me talk to people to the setting that let me count the beats of a hummingbird’s wing. No normal man could possibly defeat me.
Unfortunately, Trouble had that look too. Rather than rushing in like the angry fool he had seemed, he had slowed his approach and come into a fighting stance. He was an augment like me. Damn.
Science had not yet found a reliable way to replace muscles or change the speed with which they contracted, and that made a fight between augments a curious thing to watch. Fast thoughts, slow muscles. Make a wrong move and your opponent will see it, find the right counter, and launch his own attack, all faster than Bruce Lee at his finest.
I saw Trouble tense for a left jab, so I started to bring my arms up for a parry and cross. His left relaxed and his right dropped for a body blow, I began to bring my parrying hand up for a strike at his face, forcing him to pull ever so slightly back. Two attacks, two responses, and to those watching we might as well have been statues.
It went on like that for what seemed like hours, punches, kicks, shoves, slaps, all scarcely started before they were abandoned as futile. In the minutes we actually fought neither of us made a move more dramatic than a step, more obviously aggressive than a shrug.
Thankfully, I don’t stay in fancy hotels where the bars have nice clean floors, and the eternity it would have taken for him to look where he was stepping would have given me ample time to drop him. He didn’t see the wet spot until he started to slip, and an instant later the fight was effectively over. My left hand started to reach out, to help push him down while my right hand cocked slightly for a knockout punch on the floor. He had no way to counter, and it showed in his eyes. Along with a reflection of her face.
Bitch hit me with a barstool.
Despite our modifications, he couldn’t watch the floor and I couldn’t watch my back. They got in a few good kicks, then ran for it. I woke up a few minutes later, bruised but okay, and waited for the police. No one saw anything, not even the bartender, and the cameras were out so nothing came of it. I guess it helps to be a local. Fucking Pittsburgh.
by submission | Sep 17, 2011 | Story |
Author : Phillip Riviezzo
Mother warns me not to go too high, to stay safe and not ascend too many decks. It’s where the Things Above live, and they are dangerous. They hate us and want us all dead – thankfully, they’re too soft and weak to come down to our homes. Not that Mother need worry, since climbing too high hurts. I went up twenty decks once, the furthest I’d ever been, and I think I almost died. The gravity was so strong there, I could barely move, and I could feel my heart stressing to keep blood pumping. Supposedly, there are fifty decks, and past the fiftieth deck, the world ends. So we live down here, and They live up there.
According to the storytellers, passing down ancient songs and tales, it was different once. We didn’t always live here, in the belly of our Ark, kept warm by the glow of Mother Core and lulled to sleep by the rumbling of Father Drive. Once, the storytellers claim, we lived on an Ark that was round like a ball, not long and cylindrical. On the ball-Ark, everyone lived on the top decks, and there was no difference between the Things Above and us. But that Ark broke, the stories say, and we left. The people of the round-Ark moved to our Ark, and we flew away. They say this was a hundred grandfathers past, so no one knows what is truth. What happened next, though, is more interesting.
In most stories, everyone lived close to Mother Core and Father Drive at first, and were all happy. But some people were weak, or lazy, or stupid – they had no skills or knowledge that was useful to all people, and they refused Mother Core and Father Drive the reverence and worship they deserved. So they were cast out, banished to the far upper decks to live their lives and the lives of their children exposed to the darkness of the nothing. As they left, Mother Core cursed them, froze their bodies so that they and all who came after them would remain in the shapes they were. They would receive none of Mother Core’s gifts, gifts she bestowed upon those who remained loyal and useful, to make us better at what made us special first.
There are other stories, though. They are less popular, and people do not tell them when the Coremen are around, since it makes they yell about heresy and hit people with their clubs and claws. The other stories start like the first ones do, with all the people leaving the round-Ark in our cylinder-Ark, but they are the opposite of the first stories. In the other stories, all people started high, at the top decks. But there was not enough room for everyone, so some people went down. It was decided, the stories say, by the size of one’s pockets – people with bigger pockets stayed high, while those without were forced down, closer to Mother Core and Father Drive where the ‘shielding’ was weak.
Sometimes, I understand why the Coremen dislike these stories, because they make no sense. Wouldn’t people with big pockets be better to carry tools, and so live closer to where tools are needed? Why wouldn’t people wish to be close to Mother and Father? They care for us, and in turn we care for them. It is us who heal Mother Core when she is sick, and soothe Father Drive when he tires. Can the Things Above claim to be healers for their dark gods? I don’t know, or care – I like it down here.
