by Julian Miles | Jun 22, 2016 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
The office is derelict, with many more overturned chairs than collapsed desks. Filing cabinets stand crooked and burst, the once-precious burdens they held now repurposed as nesting materials or fodder.
A few plasticised pieces of paper flick or wave in the desultory breeze, which enters through the hole where the wall collapsed into the alley – the piles of masonry broken by the protruding bones of some unfortunate caught in the fall.
Tonight the scavengers of this dank corridor, where the river Thames is slowly winning a guerrilla war against the low-end, are moving cautiously around the derelict office. In the only sturdy corner, one of the desks has been righted, and a chair placed behind it. In that chair a shadowed figure sits, the glowlight on the desk angled away, making the shadows of the alley seem more menacing.
In the alley, the new patches of inky dark cede before a black figure, who waits by the edge of the hole, invisible to the one who waits within.
“You know they’re going to blame you for this, don’t you?” The voice from behind the desk is conversational and cultured.
“I’m not responsible.” The reply from the shadows of the alley is guttural to the point of incomprehensibility.
“I did not say you were at fault. I said you were going to be blamed. It is a subtle difference; only for those directly affected.”
“What my sib did is not on me. Whyfor you blame me? Seek the one who held my sib in thrall.”
“Your sib, and you, are an urban legend, living testament to the errors of the early animorph projects. With your body in the light, the sensation will cause the spotlight to fall elsewhere. A monster is better for headlines than some convoluted plot about a chip and its maker.”
“My sibs are not for your diversions, Mister Manter. You should have looked elsewhere for them.”
The figure behind the desk quietly presses the button on a small, secure transmitter. The winds picks up, and the dark beyond the fading illumination of the glowlight seems to deepen. The figure behind the desk quirks his head, as if an expected event has not occurred.
A clawed hand extends into view. The pallid scales are almost obscured by dried blood. In that massive grip, a receiver flashes silently.
“We are not man-made mutants, Mister Manter. My father watched the sons of the Third Reich rain bombs upon this city, and his father swam through the bodies drifting away from the Great Fire. I venture that I will live to see all the outcomes of tonight’s endeavours. You, however…”
The voice growled into silence, and Mister Manter launched himself from behind the desk, his Sireo chargegun punching fist-sized holes through the outer wall.
“Damn you, Sharktor! You’ll not take me!”
The thrum of a compressor-pulse shotgun was nearly lost in the Sireo’s howl, but the impact wasn’t. It caught Manter in the kidneys and threw him through the hole in the wall.
As he ricocheted off the opposite alley wall, a gigantic hand swatted him down. Manter’s remaining breath left him in a rush as he slammed into the ground
“My name is Chak’tur, and I have no intention of taking you, Mister Manter. Here is as good a place as any for you to die.”
Manter gritted his teeth and turned his head – in time to see the monstrous, clawed foot descending.
A sudden scream rolls through the darkness, then cuts off, leaving only echoes to fade.
by submission | Jun 21, 2016 | Story |
Author : Harris Tobias
The night Janet saw the UFO was the night she threw Frank out of her life. She had just finished dumping all his stuff—clothes, records, comic book collection—into several black plastic garbage bags and placed them on the lawn in a neat row. Let him come home to that, the miserable excuse for a man. She’d had a hell of a day— a visit to Planned Parenthood with her mom. Frank was too busy to or too squeamish to be present, the hypocrite. His idea of fatherhood didn’t extend any further than the end of his penis, the prick.
The plastic bags looked like aliens lined up on the lawn in front of the trailer. Their shiny black skins reflecting the moonlight. Just four bags. That was all it took to get him out of her life. Four bags and four plastic tubs of comic books. Franks precious comic book collection. The only thing he really cared about.
How could she have ever expected anything more from a big baby like Frank? Already the trailer seemed more open, more room to breathe, more space both physically and emotionally. Goodbye and good riddance, Janet breathed the first breaths of un-oppressed air in two years and she liked the way it felt.
Comic books. What a metaphor for her life. Her life read like a tawdry magazine filled with every cliche in the book. Frank cared more for his comics than anything else. He’d spend hours with them. “They’re going to take care of us in our old age,” he would say as though that justified the time he spent. How could someone be so anal about one thing and a complete slob about another? He’d leave the rooms a filthy mess but his precious collection was the example of organization, every book lovingly covered in plastic, labeled, cataloged and filed away for posterity. And where was the prick now? At some stupid comic convention.
He lived in a fantasy world, a comic book world of super heroes and impossible villains. Impossible things, that’s what Frank believed in. That’s why they could never get along because, deep down, she was a practical girl who liked practical things, real things, like a regular paycheck and regular meals. Silly, regular stuff like that. That’s why she was the one with the stupid job while Frank read the want ads and comic books.
When every last bit of Frank’s stuff was outside, it began to rain. Janet went in and fixed herself a seven and seven and sat down at the tiny table in the tiny kitchen. She looked out of the window. She could see Frank’s stuff outside in the moonlight lined up like an invading army of dumpy alien ninjas and laughed to herself. Frank would appreciate that image.
She was having her second drink when she saw it. At first she thought it was the moon, it was so bright and round and other worldly, but the shape was wrong and it was moving horizontally across the sky very slowly, behaving in a most un-moonlike way. The object hovered over the trailer park for a while then darted away as if spooked by something. A UFO, Janet thought to herself almost giddy with the novelty of it. Frank would be jealous that he wasn’t here to see it. I saw a UFO she thought just before the tears came.
by submission | Jun 20, 2016 | Story |
Author : Rosalie Kempthorne
“Are you quite sure you want to do this?” He was asked that question again.
And once again he answered “Yes.”
“This is a one-way trip.”
“Yes, I understand.” I know what I’m signing up for.
But not without signing yet again. Another form, crawling with fine-type, a cramped little box at the bottom for him to try to fit his signature. Rogan signed. There was no need to think about it, he’d already signed these documents five – no, six – times since he’d first been approved for the expedition. He’d had all the time he needed to reconsider his choice. Why would I? What the hell do I have keeping me here?
Somebody must have been satisfied, because the doors slid open and a hallway lit up – glowing green footprints on the floor showed him where to go.
When he reached the completion chamber, he saw that about half the pods were already occupied, the other half open, inviting their next guest inside. To the right of him a woman had just completed her cycle. Rogan didn’t mean to be rude, didn’t mean to stare so openly, but this was the first time he’d seen the process in real life.
She was wet with translucent gel, and still groggy, her hair knotted and plastered against the sides of her newly sculpted head. Her skin had turned golden, not really skin now but very fine scales. Gills stood out clearly against her neck. Third and fourth eyes were only just beginning to open. Heavy shoulders, stretched limbs – they’d be weird getting used to. But necessary. This form was ideally suited for survival on the planet’s surface – cheaper and less restrictive than a life spent in environmental suits.
The whole process took only a couple of hours.
It made sense.
It was all just so… permanent.
A company technician in a green, knee-length coat was waiting beside the pod, holding out another form for Rogan to sign.
“Are you sure you want to go ahead with completion?”
“Yes, I’m still sure.” He wondered if he’d grow to find them attractive: transformed women like the one he’d just seen. How long before the face he’d see in the mirror would start to seem like his own again? How long would it seem like an intruder in his life?
I’m sure, he thought to himself, I’m sure.
“This is a one-way trip,” the technician reminded him.
“Yes. Yes.” He scrawled a signature over the screen and waited for the pod to open. Two glowing footprints showed him where to stand; the green, fetal image of a human figure showed him where to lie, how to curl into the bright, fiber-glass womb. Well, this time, he thought, I’ll remember being born.
He resisted the instinct to close his eyes as a thick gel seeped into the chamber. It was warm and fizzing against his skin, then cool, as his skin adjusted. Once submerged, there was only brightness, over-white lights shining and refracting through gel, pinpoints of light impersonating stars, a sense of void, just outside the reach of his vision. As wires came out and found their target in the last few minutes of entirely human flesh, as a cool silence oozed down around him, Rogan felt perfectly calm at last. Whatever came from this he would be new, rewritten, repaired – in a genuine sense, reborn. He’d open four eyes and he’d see another universe.
by submission | Jun 19, 2016 | Story |
Author : Beck Dacus
“We noticed from orbit,” said the commander of the fleet form Quijote III, “that you have quite the renovation project going on here, and we have to commend you. Taking on a project of that scale is very admirable. And the foresight that involves! I think we could learn a thing or two from you.”
Earth’s emissary simply stared, slightly frightened at his own confusion. “I… well, I just… what?”
The alien commander stared back. “You know. The warming project. I think it’s very innovative.”
The chattering in the crowd behind them had stopped, the camera flashes becoming more infrequent. “I’m afraid I still don’t know what you’re talking about,” the representative said.
The commander gave what sounded like a series of low belches, the equivalent of a Quijotese chuckle. “Surely you’re aware of the carbon dioxide you’re emitting into the atmosphere, warming the climate and warding off the approaching Ice Age? You see, we don’t have the climate cycles allowing for such a catastrophic event on Quijote III, but I hope we would have come up with the same solution you did. Really remarkable move. You do know, don’t you?”
“Uh, yeah,” the now extremely nervous delegate said to the esteemed alien visitor. “I know.” He raised his communicator to his mouth, and asked his supervising officer, watching in the crowd somewhere, “What should I tell him?”
“Play along,” the officer said from the back of the crowd, sweating abundantly and tapping his foot in an anxious twitch. “Let him think we’re doing it on purpose. We can deal with the media later.”
After the emissary chuckled and subtly bragged about humanity’s little “engineering project,” the crowd roared angrily at the lie, shouting about the treachery of Earth’s government. The confused Quijotese official was led back to his space-to-surface shuttle and ushered back to his starship, sent away before it got too violent… and before he figured out what was going on.
by submission | Jun 18, 2016 | Story |
Author : Kristin Kirby
I caught him in my arms as the others ran for safety in the shelters. The fires began to die around us. I sat on the ground and held him while the sliver rays took their inevitable toll. An agonizing way to go, the rays. They moved fast and deadly through your insides–too fast and too many to remove or repair.
“Did it…work?” He could barely rasp out the words.
“Yes, you did it.” I swiped tears from my eyes so he wouldn’t see them. “Everyone made it.”
He nodded, relieved. The snow fell in light, cold whispers that melted to nothing. It made promises we all needed to believe: more seasons, more time.
“Remember…” he started, and then he was racked with coughing.
I grasped his hand. Mine shook badly. “Yes?”
“Remember our drive…in the mountains?”
I nodded. It had been last fall, a warm day with only the hint of chill. We’d met the month before, new recruits unsure of how bad the invasion would become.
On a day leave, our last, we’d changed into civilian clothes, run through the rain to his solar truck, then driven east toward the snowcapped mountains. Only an hour from the city, the highway had risen higher, the towns had become smaller, and the rain had stopped.
We’d seen a bald eagle high in a fir tree, and when we’d driven past, it had flown up, great, dark wings arching and white head dipping as it glided over the nearby river.
“Wouldn’t it be great to move up here,” he’d said. “See, this is something real, something you can touch. There’s an eagle. There’s the river. There are mountains. Concrete things, beautiful things. Not like death. That’s a concept. You can’t see it or touch it. It only becomes real in the absence of something.”
He hadn’t talked about it before–the impending war and what it might cost us. Driving on, he’d looked steadily at the road and become silent. I’d taken his hand and he’d squeezed mine back, and we’d found a motel, and when we had undressed and come together, his body had been warm and relaxed and strong.
“This is real,” he’d said, our eyes locked, his hand on my face.
By that evening when we’d returned to the barracks, our orders were waiting for us.
“I remember,” I said softly. I smiled and put my forehead against his cheek. So many things to say, and now they’d be lost. “I remember.”
I felt his face contract. A smile of love, I hoped, and not a grimace of pain from the sliver rays. I pulled away to look. It was neither–a twist of his mouth. Regret. Sorrow.
“Sorry for…being stupid,” he said.
“No, don’t. You saved–”
“We should’ve had a…lifetime.”
He coughed again, hard, blood at his lips. It would happen now. I would lose him.
I held his face and willed my hands to be steady. In the moment my eyes met his, we lived a thousand years. Ten thousand. Still not enough, but they would have to do.
“I’m here,” I said. “I won’t let go.”
I felt his warm skin. The rough sleeve of his uniform. The ground beneath us, safe for now. These were real, concrete things. You could touch them. Goodbye was a concept. It only became real in the absence of something. Of someone.
He closed his eyes. I sat with him. Bombs went off in the distance, but I heard only the whispers of the falling snow.
