Deadly Fishconomist Assassins

by submission | Oct 9, 2008 | Story

Author : Andy Bolt

Carlton Marx felt only mildly guilty for opening up slice portals in peoples’ thoracic cavities. He was doing it in the hopes of developing a method of deployment for his growing army of genetically engineered combat fishconomists – economist/sea creature hybrids pumped full of high test adrenaline and testosterone boosters.

When Piranha Maynard Keynes burst out of Queen of England’s chest on live neuro-vision, it took a squad of amphibious battle yetis to catch and subdue him. Back in his lair, deep beneath an Albuquerque bagel shop, Carlton pondered his actions.

“I feel bad about my deadly aquatic assassin eating the Queen,” he said to no one in particular. “But people must learn about the heterodox theories regarding variable interest rates in a capital gains economy. And I can’t think of a better teacher than a psychotic half-man, half-fish, all financial wizard. Also, I need a bagel.”

Carlton pressed another button.

When Milton “Electric Eel” Friedman came crashing through the sternum of DJ Hemoglobin in Hoboken’s techno-vampire disco, most of the patrons thought it was part of the show. A sparking Friedman played along, doing a set of “The Electric Slide,” “Electric Boogaloo,” and “Oh, Dear God, It’s a Shocking Fish Monster! (Summertime Love mix).” Then he inadvertently electrocuted all the pseudo-vampires with a combination of The Running Man and an excited pop-and-lock maneuver.

“This string of semi-accidental deaths is greatly perturbing me,” Carlton mused, licking strawberry cream cheese off his lips. “Perhaps I’d feel better if I knew that people understood how the Walrasian model presents the possibility of perfect competition leading to Pareto efficiency. Wait, did I say Walrasian? I meant Walrusian!” Carlton cackled with self-satisfied glee. “Bagels sure are delicious,” he added, tapping another button.

Marie-Esprit-Léon Walrus exploded into Independence Hall through the torso of a tour guide dressed like Thomas Jefferson.

“Vour score and zeven years ago,” he began, gasping through his tusks with a French accent. Several people looked confused as he flopped heavily onto his flippers, emerging from the trunk of the dead guide.

“I thought Lincoln gave the Gettysburg Address,” said a puzzled little boy with braces.

“Walruses are very bad at history,” said Carlton sorrowfully, munching with grief on his ninth jalapeño and blueberry bagel.

“Perhaps that is the greatest tragedy of all.”

Resistance

by Duncan Shields | Oct 8, 2008 | Story

Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer

It’s light outside which means that if we leave our hiding place, we will be seen and killed.

Not too long ago, human history was exposed and swept clear. Everything we sent at them just bounced off. It’s six months later and I have no idea how many of us are left. They seem to have stopped actively hunting us which is good. We’re more like vermin now. They lay traps and go about their business. It’s still very unsafe to travel in the daylight.

They have dry, deep-blue skin the same texture as cork. Bullets go about an inch in and stop. It’s like they’re made of rock with a light coating of clay. They’re huge. Two massive elephant-foot legs. Two arm-tentacles that split into a mess of smaller tentacles at the end. Those tentacles are very efficient and ridiculously strong. Watching them operate the complex mining machinery they brought with them is almost thrilling.

Watching those tentacles go into a loved one’s head orifices and squeeze is another matter entirely.

They wear what look like black rubber overalls with giant galoshes. About the only weak point we can find is that they need to wear filter masks poking out of their mouths to breathe this atmosphere.

If you shoot them in the filter and none of their friends are around to give them a replacement, it takes them about half an hour to die. It’s a rather gruesome thing to watch. It’s like their insides are made of slugs and someone is pouring salt down their throats. It looks agonizing. We’d rather give them a quick death like they gave so many of us but beggars can’t be choosers.

I laughed once when Teddy referred to us as ‘the resistance’. As far as I could see, we scavenge for food and try to avoid the new owners of this planet. We fight when cornered and almost always lose. Resistance indeed. Pah.

Gwendolyn’s pregnant now. She’s the only woman with our little group who is of child bearing age. None of the three men in our group is admitting to being the father but she’s not pointing fingers. Anyway, it could be one of the other six of us that have been killed over the last three months. It’s maddening not knowing if we’re the last ones in Britain. We met one other person in the last four months but she couldn’t talk. She died not too long after we met her.

We lost.

Healer

by submission | Oct 7, 2008 | Story

Author : Glenn Blakeslee

He led me past a tractor rusting in the rain, pushed aside chickens with his foot and opened the door to his little house. Inside, bleak light fell through dirty windows.

“How much you gonna charge?” he asked.

The house was cluttered with dirty cooking tools and heaps of unwashed laundry. A new chaotic rice-cooker and a clunky media player sat on a wood countertop. He wore a blue phototropic shirt. Typical burgeoning bourgeois.

“How much you gonna charge?” he repeated.

“Where is she?” I asked.

He led me into a back room. His wife lay on a simple bed. She smiled wanly, her eyes only for her husband. “Zensheu,” she said.

Zensheu nodded toward his wife. “You need to fix her,” he said. “She needs to make sons and clean.”

I pulled a chair to her bedside, set down my bag. Zensheu stood watching. His wife had dark circles under her eyes, but her pale skin was unblemished. She was lovely. “I’m Wenwen,” she said.

“I’m here to heal you,” I said, and she smiled a brilliant smile through sad eyes. “I need you to take off your blouse.” Zensheu didn’t move so I helped Wenwen sit up. She slowly removed her blouse.

“I’m paying someone to feel my wife’s titties?” Zensheu asked, his arms folded across his chest. Wenwen’s right breast was swollen along the radial midline. The skin there was dark. “May I?” I asked her, and when she nodded I used my fingertips to probe along the distention. I could feel a mass.

“You one of those livelong guys?” Zensheu asked. “You gonna live forever on my money?” I raised Wenwen’s arm and felt along her chest, up to her armpit. The lymph nodes were swollen.

“You fucking corporados,” Zensheu said. “You squeeze poor farmers, you fix our breaks and bruises and live forever.” I pulled the assay unit from my bag and ran it along the distention. Wenwen winced as the probe extended and snapped back. I set it aside.

“That’s it?” Zensheu said. “I owe a bag of gold?”

Nothing he said was true. I learned my craft online, bought my gear second-hand in Beijing. I saved for months for my first kilo of nano, and rode my bike through the district. I made just enough to support my wife and I.

The livelong nano was for the rich, and would never, ever, be mine.

I poured ten grams from the nanosite canister onto the palette. I turned on the transceiver and plugged it into the assay unit. While the unit turned diagnostic data into machine code and passed it to the transceiver, I pushed aside a small portion of nano, shielded it with my knife, and then passed the transceiver over the rest.

This nano would eat Wenwen’s tumor, and follow the metastasized cells along the highway of her lymph system.

I punched a different code into the assay unit, fed it to the transceiver, and passed it over the portion I had shielded. That nano would live in her womb forever, killing male zygotes.

I pushed the nano together into a single pile, scraped it up with a wooden spoon, and fed it to Wenwen. She grimaced at the taste of carbon, and swallowed.

Outside, the rain still fell. Zensheu approached from the side of the house, and held out a chicken. The chicken was scrawny, its legs deformed. “Here’s your pay,” he said.

I took the chicken from him, and slammed its head into the side of the tractor. I threw it in the mud and walked off, into the rain.

Sickness

by Sam Clough | Oct 6, 2008 | Story

Author : Sam Clough, Staff Writer

Sacha slumped down in a doorway, gathering her heavy clothes tighter around her. As a prophylactic measure, the cloth and leather were almost useless: it was less about protection, more about appearances. The door behind her was like every other in this street. Rough, wooden, and with a ‘X’ splashed across it in red paint.

She stared at the bodies that littered the street. Tens of them on this street alone, thousands across the district, and hierarchy-knew how many uninfected were starving to death in their homes, afraid to unseal the windows. Some of the infected were dangerous, violent, but those in the later stages of infection just curled up and died where they fell.

Sacha was trapped, doubly so. By the quarantine around the town, and by the blockade of the ‘red’ districts. She was not infected. Unlike the citizens of the town, Sacha had an immune system she could talk to.

However resistant she was to the pathogens in the air, she was not resistant to the flamethrowers of the local army. In the style of armed forces everywhere, they had donned their rudimentary hazardous materials suits and were methodically putting the town to flame.

Someone walked past the door by which Sacha was slumped. He was wearing a neat, well-fitted uniform – that of an officer in the local army. He continued past her, down the street, then Sacha heard him stop and backtrack. He stared at her for a long moment, then spoke.

“Emdal-Abek Sacha Sousver. Medical technician, on assignment from Cluster.”

“And you are?” Mildly surprised at the use of her full name and the unimpressive description of her assignment, Sacha got to her feet and eyed the officer more closely.

“Ash-Abek Peter Carnelian. Disruptor.”

“Sent to rescue me?”

“No. Cluster is worried that this crisis will lead eventually to a military coup. I’m here to guide them down a different track.”

“Let me guess. Kill the High Command.”

“In one. Are you sure you’re medical?”

“Positive. Do you think you could get me out of here? I’m becoming immunocomprimised. I’ve done all I can to help, but I need to get into a medical lab.”

“I think I’ll be able to explain it away.”

Peter placed a hand on her shoulder, and they headed for the nearest checkpoint. A line of soldiers were carefully creating a dead zone on the infected side, setting fire to everything within ten metres of the perimeter. A milling crowd of the infected were shouting, screaming and begging just outside the reach of the flamethowers.

“Sod,” Peter murmured, “we’re going to have to get through them.”

One of the crowd spotted Peter’s uniform.

“Djah!” The cry of ‘officer’ went up, and as one mass, the infected turned and ran towards what they saw as their salvation.

“Run.” Peter hissed, and Sacha fled back the way they’d come. He drew a sidearm, and levelled it at the crowd. “Uhd. Tuz lidla. Lidla!” Some of the more risk-averse slowed, but most continued to run. He fired three times into the crowd, and ran after Sacha.

Panicking, Sacha ran headlong into a dead end. Peter was hot on her heels, having discarded his now-empty sidearm. There was a knife in his hand, and bloodstains covered his once-immaculate uniform. He threw something at her. Instinctively, she caught it: small, ovoid and metallic. A capsule key.

A rush of air almost knocked her off her feet and a door hissed open in the air beside: Peter had called his one-man capsule. He wanted her to leave.