by Hari Navarro | Mar 8, 2022 | Story |
Author: Hari Navarro, Staff Writer
Space.
I creep up vast multitudes of inky hills though they are not hills but rather mountains of soot and slowly I sink ever down into their glue.
My face is a hollow thing that has two windows and out of them I can see wells with stars that shine in the pit of their pits.
I have been on this vessel for so very long.
My name is a thing that I pluck and twist upon the sweetly embroidered rectangle of my uniform breast and yet it has long since failed to fill my ear.
But I know who I am.
But am I who I know?
She and she is me.
Me and she is she.
She is a thing that whispers into my fingers as they caress the data and adjust trajectory to the ebb and tidal pull of this fathomless cosmic nothing.
She is the dead girl I found with her fingers curled against the glass of her cannister.
She is my future daughter sitting on a rain-flecked curb carving my neglect into her arm in beautiful cursive font with a needle she found in the gutter.
She is the seed that died in the soil, its reach curdling just below of the surface.
She is this ship.
I want to know her more than I do. I want to wow her with my looks. I want her to find solace in scanning every inch of my body as I undress and step into the shower flute. And as I then lay alone upon my empty crib, still swaddled in towels and beading from the heat of the jets — I want her to watch.
My ship is folding in space and the space in my head is folding ever so neatly into that space.
Such obnoxious and vile calm perverted perfection.
Most days I run my long since chewed away nails across the screen. I drag shards of my protruding dried flesh and follow our projected path back to Earth and I think of the beach at the end of the cliff-top road.
Kaupokonui.
I remember how long ago a girl laid me down upon the concrete roof of the war-time bunker. A relic all but completely suckled into the roaming sand. She with eyes as grey as the grains — she who took me whole.
I want to be taken again.
I want to be taken whole.
I want to be taken home.
Endless.
by Julian Miles | Mar 7, 2022 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
Colin claws his way through a ruined doorway, his sight near-obscured by the blood smeared across his face. Slumping to the floor, he wipes his vision clear with his sleeve, then surveys his surroundings.
An ancient stone vault, lit by an ultra-modern lamp. The soft light highlights the exquisite etchings on a steel coffin, and is reflected in the smoky chrome of the blaster clutched in a taloned hand.
A calm voice emanates from the shadows above the gun.
“Good evening, Mister Dawson. A stimulating journey, I trust?”
“Bastard.”
The reply tails off into a wrenching sob.
“I take it your little army came to a sticky end?”
He gathers himself. There’s still a chance.
“They did.”
“Well, here we are, exhausted hunter and indifferent prey. What next?”
“Smug bastard!”
“Defiance. How sweet.”
“We’ll get you. Not me. Not my team, God rest ‘em. But someone will find the data caches.”
Hopefully enough impetuous fools will have vanished by then to make the rest wary. Make them investigate this evil thoroughly, using all the technology available, and then not make stupid assumptions based on centuries-old cinema.
“You left them with Susan?”
“Not just her.”
“Then other people might see them.”
The choice of words catches his attention.
“But not if we’d only left them with her? What have you done?”
“Nothing new. Now, enough byplay. Time waits for no-one, not even me.”
“So?”
“Choices. You may join us, or you and your family will simply disappear.”
“Us?”
“You didn’t think I was a singular aberration, did you? That was a rash. Our attrition rate is vanishingly small amongst those who fully adapt.”
“So I work for you, or you eat my family?”
“In short: yes. Technology still trips us up occasionally. Having someone who can intervene is essential. Since you discovered and then killed Tez Wallace, you will take his place. It can be quite lucrative, and the health benefits are excellent.”
Colin nods. A sop to his selfishness to make servitude bearable: old techniques, but effective. The data is his only hope. All he has to do is buy time.
“I’ve no choice. I’ll obey our bloodsucking overlords.”
“The term is ‘nightwalkers’, and I am not one of the voivodes. We should both pray to whatever gods we have left that we never attract the attentions of such. They are busy trying to save my kind from the ravaged planet your kind have created. Petty distractions receive short thrift.”
“You’re trying to sneak onto the colony ships!”
Fangs flash in the darkness.
“Very good. A few self-contained feudal domains are the ultimate goal, I believe.”
Marty’s crazy idea had been correct. He’d been right to insist it be included in the cached data.
Colin smiles. Good on you, Marty. When Susan gets the truth to the media, you’ll be famous.
There’s a chuckle from the shadows.
“You still haven’t realised, have you?”
He looks up.
“What?”
The sound of skirts rustling makes his eyes go wide. A raven-haired figure in a pale ballgown steps into view.
“Did you really think you had any sort of advantage? Susan has belonged to my voivode for years. Our monitor within the hunter collectives. Bringing about your downfall was her final task before being embraced.”
She smiles, revealing long, delicate fangs instead of canine teeth. Green eyes show no hint of regret.
Colin feels hot tears start down his face.
“We of the dusk are eternal. Will you serve us?”
He nods, still crying. This surrender is only to save his family. It will never be more than skin deep.
by submission | Mar 6, 2022 | Story |
Author: William Kee
Captain J. P. Koontz was locked in the munitions bay. It was freezing. Thank God, I brought the suit. Soon he would need to put the helmet on. The crew was outside banging on the door.
“Give it up, Cap. We’ve turned off all life support except the oxygen. You’re going to freeze to death in there.”
Koontz shouted back, “I told you, you’re not taking this ship from me. She’s mine!”
“You know you didn’t give us a choice. Come on out now,” Carter’s voice held the anger and resentment it had since they left Earth. They won’t wait out there for long.
“If I come out, it’ll be with a phaser in each hand.” Koontz moved as he talked. They had taken control of the bridge, but he’d been able to do a complete lockout of the munitions bay and opened the weapons cases before his clearance was revoked. This room was his. If they want it, they’ll have to come in and take it. Koontz removed a single block of plastic explosives from the lockbox. It was soft in his hand and easy to mold and press into the seams of the exterior wall. He shouted over his shoulder, “Hey, Carter, how many of you are out there?”
“All of us. So you come out with however many phasers you want. It won’t make a difference. You can’t win.”
“I think you and I have different definitions of winning.” The sound of Carter typing into the keypad on the outside of the door was audible through the cold metal. They’ll be through soon. Koontz connected the wire between each packet of plastic explosives. He put his helmet on and turned it to lock it in place. Then, holding the detonator in his hand, he crouched down behind one of the large boxes of munitions secured to the floor of the hold and waited.
The door chimed and then hissed as it opened. The crew stood there in the doorway trying to get a look into the room. Captain Koontz made eye contact with Carter through the suit helmet. Carter’s eyes grew wide in fear and Koontz said, “I tried to tell you,” and activated the detonator. The sound disappeared along with the crew into the vacuum of space. Koontz was sucked back against the secured box for half a second before all the air was gone from the room. He floated through the door of the compartment and sealed it behind him, doing the same through each door as he made his way to the bridge. When he sat down in his chair the computer announced that the remainder of the ship had been pressurized. Koontz took off his helmet and said, “Computer, confirm I am alone aboard this ship.”
“Confirmed.”
Captain Koontz shook his head and said to the empty bridge, “Looks like I won. I tried to tell them.”
by submission | Mar 5, 2022 | Story |
Author: Kaci Curtis
You said that everything was going to change. I remember where we were sitting, sand clumped between our toes. I remember being afraid. Not of you; never of you. But of the picture of inevitability that you painted upon a rough and murky canvas.
“Everything will be different,” you warned.
And it was. The world took a turn that was so sudden, so irrevocable, we may as well have jumped off a cliff and tried to fly. Well, some of us tried to fly. The rest just fell, screaming all the way down.
You said that it would get better soon. We sat in the shadow of a crumbling bridge. A stringy bird charred over our fire. The darkness was full of enemies.
I remember scoffing when you said it. For the first time, I didn’t believe you. Nothing was going to get better. And you, once a mountain of a man, became a liar in my eyes. Because you couldn’t trust me with the bitter, relentless truth.
Fathers and daughters were supposed to trust each other. You feared that I would break; run screaming into the night and become of a victim of those who wanted what little I carried in my pockets. So you lied to me.
And in the same breath, you lost the parts of me that cared.
You said that I needed to be more careful. We soaked in a stream, scrubbing the blood from our clothes. I was humming a song from back before it all went silent. Your warning went unheeded; it was useless to me. I’d been careful for too long.
I wanted to be careless, to run shouting through the trees and draw them all to me, for miles and miles. I wanted to find the edge of the world and sail right off of it. To put an end to this monotony.
You could see my restless spirit, like prey trembling on exhausted legs just beneath my skin, jumping at the smallest noise.
“Be careful,” you cautioned.
As if I had a choice. As if my cavernous soul and rotting mind was something small to be swept away by the current; cleansed and forgotten.
But I was too often hunted, too often hungry, and far too gone.
You said that you were sorry. I was lying in a casket of mud when you finally found me. Someone had taken my knife and bundle of snare wire. They’d left me with a deep gash across my stomach.
You said that you should have been there to protect me. That had never changed, even when everything else spiraled into something savage and unrecognizable. There was still a father and a daughter, and a desire to live.
Except that I lost mine, didn’t I? I think so. I think it fell off that cliff I was seeking and didn’t have anything to grab on the way down.
What else was there to do, when the world as we knew it ended and everyone lived off what they could steal from others? When food became as scarce as good water and there was nowhere safe to sleep? When the electronics that we’d let devour us went dark and half of us didn’t know how to start a fire? What else was there to do but to falter, crash, and break apart?
You said that you were sorry, and clutched my hand. And I would have told you that I was sorry, too. That I had fought to stay with you.
But I’d already gone.
by Hari Navarro | Mar 4, 2022 | Story |
Author: Hari Navarro, Staff Writer
There is a house that grows like a jar of cancer-rimmed razors from the very top of my head. I wear it like a hat and when it rains its central courtyard fills with water and makes my skull feel soggy with its burden and my neck hurts and cracks when it twists.
This house is where I was born and into it trickled the very first of my memories or at least those that I have been groomed not to forget.
Pretty things like the man with the buckle-head snake whose tail bound at his knuckles and swung and pirouetted at his thigh. It was vicious and it bit but I used it. I did and it distracted from the stains that bloomed and dripped from the cotton.
I have just boarded and been seated upon the transport and already feel the vibration between my legs as its mighty engines thrum and clamber in anticipation of lift-off.
It has been a long time coming but it will be this craft that finally pulls me away from my home and the creeping wet mould it has sown in the grooves of my mind.
I rest my forehead against my portholes cooling compress and my eyes dart to the side and for an instant in the cursive colours I can see the twin iron doors that lead to the boilers.
I can see the hideous verdant paint that he slashed upon them although he knew there was not enough to finish.
No care. No attention to the little things that matter. Every inch of that house splattered with spittle-lipped hate.
The constantly tinkering craftsman.
I remember the tools he used to hammer and bend and smash and… crack. Such skill as he left just enough of a gap so that the light got in and then froze and split me in two and three.
He pulverized my youth so effortlessly as he tapped his foot in time and ground me away between my tiny thumb and the swollen gorge of his forefinger grasp.
I wish I could forget that tune. Three chords are all you’ll ever need, he said. “Daddy’s lil’ girl ain’t a girl no more…”
I can feel the pincers of that house at One Zero Nine arch and dig into my sides as we power up and away and I finally am to be rid of this filthy mesa of such hopeless hope.
Its time to do the dishes.
The woman in the green knitted top that I think I remember from a pornographic clip about a polo-necked secretary who is surprised by a UPS delivery man screams at my feet.
I am a wet used sack of flesh on the floor and my peeled carcass slumps to the side and the exposed meat of my forehead feels again the cool calm compress on the portal glass and I wonder if I’ll be having the chicken or perhaps maybe the pork.
by submission | Mar 3, 2022 | Story |
Author: J.D. Rice
The end, it seems, is nigh.
I stare at the billboard strapped over the old man’s chest, telling me to repent of my sins before the apocalypse comes. Crudely written scripture verses surround big, bold letters saying “REPENT!”
I haven’t been to church since I was seven. I couldn’t tell you what any of the verses were in reference to, nor could I say with certainty that any of the books listed are even in the Bible. Mostly I’m just shocked that anyone actually has access to one of these signs in this day and age, and that anyone would take the time to patrol the streets the day before the asteroid hits.
“Repent!” he says. As if humanity has anything to repent for.
We’ve come so far in the last 100 years. Poverty is gone. Hunger, war, and disease have all been eradicated. People still die of chronic conditions, genetic defects, even some rare outbreaks of personal violence. But plague? Crime? These are things of the past.
Technology has progressed in leaps and bounds. Philosophy and experience has taught us how to use this technology for the good of all. The Earth is unified in a way that our ancestors never would have thought possible. Borders are a formality, and racism is confined to only the darkest corners of the world. After tens of thousands of years of struggle and hardship, mankind has finally come into its own. United and strong.
Now one rogue asteroid, set on its course for earth thousands of years ago, is going to end it all. And all this man can think to say is, “Repent!”
I glance down at the bag in my hand, filled with food my wife is going to use to prepare a last meal for our family. My son and daughter don’t fully understand what is happening. We haven’t had the heart to explain it to them. Better for them to die in a flash than sit quietly pondering their own mortality. We’re going to give them one last night of joy, tuck them in for the night, and then pray that death finds us before they wake up the next morning.
Now, instead of walking the rest of the way home, I stare at the man across the street, my blood boiling. How dare he stand in judgment? What moral superiority could he possibly have to justify his actions? What sins does he suppose we committed to deserve this?
He’s just a blind, stupid fool unable to cope with the inevitable.
I step up to him, wanting to tell him off, wanting to yell and scream and tell him that his God never did anything for the world but plunge it deeper into the darkness.
But then – quite of their own accord – my lips starts forming words that lack any of the venom and vitriol my id so desperately wants to unleash.
“I know you are scared,” I say, looking into the man’s eyes, which I see – now that I am up close – are on the brink of tears. “I don’t know why you are out here. Maybe your religion is all you had growing up. Maybe you’re clinging desperately to anything that might give you a glimmer of hope. Or maybe you’re just lonely.”
The man lets out a deep exhale, the tears welling up in his eyes.
“You aren’t alone,” I say. “You have me.”
My bag of groceries falls to the ground as the man unexpectedly hugs me, the flimsy billboard bending between our bodies. We hold the hug for some moments, unspoken emotions washing between us, before finally breaking.
In the end, he joins my family for dinner and sleeps peacefully on our couch as my wife and I wait for the end. We face the catastrophe in the same way mankind has learned to face all its challenges.
Together.
