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 featured writer | Sep 22, 2011 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Featured Writer
That was what they looked like. Tongues. In every possible colour you could conceive that a tongue could turn. They came to earth as refugees from a conflict of such horror that only the vaguest rumours and hints escaped, the details of which were kept to an elite circle of politicians and their chosen.
“Mum, there’s a libbomoff in the back garden.”
“That’s Libidromorph, Ellen. It’s come for Tammy. Don’t look; you know its bad luck.”
That’s how we explained it to the children. Libidromorphs were scavengers. They could eat anything organic, providing it was dead. Watching one of the alien tongue things root out the corpse of a family pet and wrap it gently before crushing and digesting it was something you just did not want your kids to see. Then again, the world was a far cleaner place these days. The tongues smelt nice, a kind of cinnamon and patchouli musk.
“Mum, what happens when they have eaten all the dead things?”
She had a point. Several sensationalist shows had caused some public uneasiness over this. Then the shocking incident in the Valley of the Kings had emphasised the fact that the tongues would eat dead organic matter no matter how old. Archaeologists had been in an uproar for months. But the diplomats had explained to the tongues that certain corpses were not for consumption. You could buy ‘reverence flags’ now that you wrapped your deceased loved one’s body in and the tongues would leave it alone.
“Daddy!”
Ellen hurtled out of the kitchen and down the hall into her father’s arms. He was home early, looking pale and dishevelled. She went to find out what worried him and caught the end of him telling Ellen to go upstairs and pack because they were going on a very special holiday, right now. She raised an eyebrow at him as Ellen rushed upstairs in a joyful, excited rush. He took her in his arms and hugged her close. As he did, she felt him shaking as he whispered in her ear;
“We were at the nearest landing site, monitoring those growths on the sides of the valley. They’re not some sort of hive, they’re towers of chrysalides. One hatched two hours ago. It ate the observers and every living thing in the valley after that. Damn thing was like some giant flying woodlouse with armoured carapace and pincers. Bulletproof and fireproof too. I took a Hummer and got the hell out when more of them hatched.”
I leaned back and looked at him. Andy always had the answer. I had never met a more capable man than him. He looked awful.
“We have to go. They’re going to nuke the valleys before more of them get loose. We have to do it now or they’ll spread like some biblical plague.”
I asked why we had to leave. He stared at me, horror in his eyes.
“The blasts have to be big enough to go down into their burrows. Which means this city and several others are in the blast radii. God help us, we’re going to kill millions. The predictions are that bad. But if we can destroy the towers, we can mop up the remaining pupae. If we don’t get the towers, we’re dead.”
I looked at the phone. Andy turned my head back.
“No time. You, me and Ellen. We can make the bunker at the base if we leave in three minutes and the roads are clear. Now go.”
I ran upstairs as the sound of huge wings became audible.
by Duncan Shields | Sep 21, 2011 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
Shifters, they called them. People not in line with our own universe but only barely out of sync. It could happen to anyone. A person wouldn’t even know if it was happening to them. One of the more extreme giveaways was if someone was speaking to a person that wasn’t there. Chatting away to dead space.
Sure, to them, they were talking to an old friend. A friend that had always existed but had never been born in this universe.
No one knew what was causing these shifters to take over existing members of society, only that the numbers were on the rise. We had tools to measure the impostor’s molecular quantum makeup but those tools were the size of hospital MRIs. Not portable. We didn’t have anything we could carry around and scan citizens with.
If they were being replaced, where were the originals going? Was it a chain reaction down the line of every multiple universe in existence or was it just our universe that was eroding on a quantum level and letting strangers in? Were we soon to cease existing entirely?
So far, the shifters themselves were only from universes slightly different from our own. We didn’t have any shifters from universes where Hitler lost the war, for instance, or worlds where the Romans successfully conquered Europe. So far, they’d only been people who still knew what year it was and the prime minister’s name but thought, for instance, that we had no space program or didn’t know what an eggplant was.
That made them very hard to spot. The difference between universes could be anything. You couldn’t question one of these things about every single aspect of their lives. We were terrified.
Until we noticed the thing about the weather.
It turns out the weather is different in every single universe. No two are alike. Universes mere vibrations of existence apart can have thunderstorms while we have sunlight. Chaos theory or something.
So we keep an eye out for people wearing scarfs on sunny days, people wearing shorts in the rain, people squinting or wearing sunglasses when it’s cloudy out. Then we catch them. Then we interrogate them.
And every time we start questioning a suspect, we start with a conversation about the weather.
