#SaturdayShortStories

August, 2010

With stories from

Michael Kirkland

Constella Espj

Mama Dragon (aka Juliet Devitt)

Sebastian Agrippa

Jonathan Martin

Les Mackenzie

Emily Bryan-Reeder

Illundiel

Sidney Stephens

Anne Trotter

Edited by Michael Kirkland

Cover art by David Y.

You Wouldn't Download A Car

Michael Kirkland

I was thirteen when my family got our first bioplastic 3D printer. I was the first in my class to have one at home, so I enjoyed a brief surge of popularity as I invited my classmates over to print little tchotchkes. At first we had trouble printing our WoW characters, but someone on the internet figured out how to break the models out of Activision's Digital Restriction Management. Someone always did.

At first our parents were thrilled at no longer being begged for $25 action figures from the latest games and web series, but once enough people had bought printers, Synthetic Genomics upped the price on the cartridges and integrated DRM into the printers so that we couldn't refill them ourselves. After that we were only allowed to print for school assignments, so soon enough the printer was relegated to my Dad's boring office, to gather dust beside the old-school paper printer.

Manny was the only one who kept coming to hang out after that. For a while we'd scheme and plot about getting around the DRM, but eventually I got bored, and my dad wouldn't let us mess with the printer. Manny resented it more than most, because his disciplinarian father was a Mafiaa lawyer. He wasn't the romantic kind from late night movies that defended rakish mobsters from authoritarian prosecutors - quite the opposite. Mafiaa was an old epithet mangled from the names of the industry groups that first bullied their customers when it started getting easy to copy data: Music And Film Industry Associations of America.

Two years later, Manny blew all his savings on the newest model printer, an SG Conductive 101w. He had to beg his bewildered parents to drive him into the city, where he searched dozens of tiny shops for a rev 1.1 model. The 1.0 was buggy and would break after six months, he explained, and the 1.2 had fixed a crucial firmware bug that he actually wanted. I didn't understand at first, but Manny was good with these things. I'd made sure my parents bought me the specific model notepad Manny had told me to, and he'd done something to it that let me download all the games and porn that Apple and the school didn't want me to have. It even lied to the school network and said I wasn't running my IM client during class.

I'd only agreed to help him unpack it because I knew it would probably have some of those jumbo packing bubbles that were so fun to pop. It was huge - the size of a small refrigerator - and it almost looked like one, complete with black coils winding up the back. He didn't want his Dad to help, because he said he was going to crack the firmware like he did on my notepad. His Dad would give him such a beating if he ever figured out what Manny was doing.

I didn't really understand why he was so excited about a boring old homework printer. You didn't even get bonus marks for making dioramas with them anymore, because our teachers had figured out by that point that it didn't take all that much effort. Manny was really excited though, and I guess I was sort of curious why.

I sat and popped the bubble wrap while Manny pried the cover off and soldered the end of an old USB cable on to the mainboard. He told me to sit with my back against the door, so he'd have some warning if his dad decided to peak in. I happily obliged him, pop pop popping the wrap contentedly as he pecked away at his notepad, doing whatever indignities to the printer's internal computer.

After a while, he pulled the cable from his notepad and carefully resealed the cover, so his father wouldn't notice if he looked. He had an impish grin as he finished, and pulled a tube of what looked sort of like printer feedstock from his bag, and topped up the "starter" cartridge in the printer.

"Don't ever tell my dad I'm doing this." he told me, suddenly very serious. "I'll have to buy an official cartridge every now and then so he doesn't get suspicious, but for most stuff I can get away with this. And we can make it for nothing."

His grin crept back, dimpling his cheeks.

"Or rather, you can. I'll build you a bioreactor, and you can throw your kitchen compost, garden clippings or whatever into it, and out comes printer goop. You can even use your sister's cat, if you want."

I had to smile at the idea of mulching my sisters mean Siamese into homework, but I still didn't really see the point.

"OK, Manny, it's cheap to print again, but why bother? My parents let me print all the homework I want anyway."

Manny pulled up the ladder page for my level 750 half orc paladin, and pressed print. My brow furrowed. I hadn't granted him permission to access the model files, but the green skin and Alliance heraldry of my toon were slowly being extruded by the print head.

"Well, that's cool. But other than my character, I can't really see myself wanting action figures anymore. We're a little old for that."

Manny just smiled. The figure finished, and he tossed it to me. "This was just a test, to make sure the new firmware is working."

I nearly dropped it when the half orc's arms sprang up, and I heard a tinny, quiet version of the half-orc "Rarw!" battle cry. You couldn't print these even if you did buy the rights from Activision. You had to order them, for hundreds of dollars.

"The Conductive can do exactly what its name suggests. It can print chips. It's only supposed to print simple chips, like those, but there's no physical reason for that. It's just more Mafiaa bullshit. Watch this."

Next out of the printer was a notepad. It looked exactly like mine, even down to the hundreds of scratches I'd carelessly gouged into the plastic backing. But it was faster. A lot faster.

Manny was literally rubbing his hands. I almost expected him to cackle. "Now what, exactly, do you think a printer is save some chips and a lot of plastic? Nothing."

A section of black tubing was being extruded.

It took us almost a month to print out all the parts for a second printer, smuggle them past Manny's father and into my basement. By then I had litres of feedstock grown and ready. It took us another month of pouring through online HOWTOs and some rather messy and sometimes literal bug hunting to get it working. But we did it. What had cost Manny $2,000 (or nearly a year's income), we'd replicated in a month. With what we'd learnt, and without having to worry about his dad catching us, we could do it again in a week.

But summer vacation was over, and we had to go back to school. I got 15 minutes of popularity when I let anyone print whatever clothes they wanted to surreptitiously scan at the mall. We offered to help build our classmates their own printers, but they thought it was too geeky. By October I was out of the feedstock I'd grown from grass clippings over the summer, and there was only so much kitchen scrap available to throw into the bioreactor.

The mainstream world started to take notice of the hacker underground building and sharing pirate printers and feedstock. SG hired several Mafiaa firms to sue and bully, including Manny's father's. Hundreds of Americans were arrested, and thousands more had their life savings extorted from them.

Manny and I did our social studies team project on the issue. We explained to our class how, as Canadians we were safe so long as no money changed hands. Our seminar covered the compromise bill C-31 passed by Prime Minister Charlie Angus (Canada's first Liberal Democrat PM) banned DRM circumvention and all unauthorized copying unless it was for strictly noncommercial purposes. We used a play on Angus' famous quote ("The state has no place in the bookshelves of the nation") as our subtitle, and I think that snagged us our 'A'.

Our teacher had been an old copyfighter, apparently. She and my father had even campaigned together for Angus in the election of '14. She called him up to reminisce and praise our paper. I don't think the old hippie had ever been prouder of me. I didn't get many 'A's.

Manny didn't come to school the next day, or the one after that. I eventually heard that his father had sent him to an American military school, and that throwing his son under the bus was good for his career - he was promoted and his family moved to the city.

In the spring I took three blocks of shop class. I had to register for something, but Manny had helped me get all the credits I needed for both junior and senior years in the first term. He said he had plans and wanted us to have as much free time as possible when we could get plentiful feedstock. I'd have had trouble even passing the core classes on my own, so I gladly played along.

I enjoyed the shop classes. They weren't too hard, and really only amounted to playing with toys all day. I printed a suborbital balloon and digital camera, and released it to take pictures of our town from the edge of space. I took apart and rebuilt a biodiesel lawnmower engine.

In the evenings I made a little money cutting grass, which let me build up lots of feedstock. I wasn't really using much of it, but I felt like I owed it to Manny somehow.

Summer rolled around, and I was bored out of my mind. I didn't really have any friends other than Manny, and there was absolutely nothing to do in the faceless patch of suburbia I lived in. Like most 16 year old boys, I wanted a car but had little money. I looked for a beater I could buy with the few hundred dollars I'd have above the cost of insurance, but I'd barely be able to buy an engine with that. I'd done well in shop, though. The lawnmower couldn't be that much less complicated than a car, could it? Nearly everything else in a modern car was plastic, and I could get more than enough goop to just print it. I had three months with nothing else to do, so I thought I might as well try.

I dug around the forums we'd used when we assembled my printer, asking around for help printing a car frame. I figured I'd be laughed off, but it turned out lots of people were printing not only frames, but whole engines! Someone inside SG had posted the genome for a microbe that could build super strong, heat tolerant plastics to The Pirate Bay, and people were openly using it everywhere but America.

A Swedish grandmother walked me through printing the sequencer I'd need to kick-start the new bioreactor, and a college student from Kansas taught me how to upgrade my printer to use the new feedstock. I'd never been more terrified than when I started disassembling my printer. I wasn't even sure I'd be able to rebuild it without Manny, but I did OK.

By the end of June I was ready to start, but I took a week to print an air conditioner first. It was hot, especially when I ran the printer, and it placated my parents. It took me the rest of the summer to finish my car - a copy of a Tata design I found online.

My parents were bemused. My shop teacher was ecstatic. He called the local blog, and they cajoled me into walking them through how I'd built it. I tried to explain that I'd just followed instructions I found online, but they didn't really get it. I was front page news.

Then the Mafiaa noticed.

A private security firm broke down our front door at 3 AM the next morning. They pulled my family and I from our beds and held us kneeling in the living room with our hands bound behind our backs with thick plastic straps. My sister was crying quietly - they'd killed her cat in front of her just because they could, and my father was crumpled on the floor with my mother trying to wake him. I later found out they'd broken his arm and concussed him with the butt of a rifle.

They kept us there until the real police arrived to arrest us. I watched them carelessly load my printer, bioreactor and all of our notepads into a black van, and then all of us into separate paddywagons.

At the station they left me in a grey, windowless room for what seemed like hours. Every time I moved to sit on the floor, an officer burst into the room and pulled me to my feet, and once, when I almost dozed off standing, a shrill buzzer rattled my skull. Eventually a dour policeman escorted a morbidly obese bald man into the room, set up a table and one chair. Mr. Goldstone - Manny's father - sat in it and stared at me with naked malice.

"Boy, you're in real trouble. Praise the Lord I got my Manny away from you when I did. He's shaping up nicely, 'case you're wonderin'."

"I've done nothing wrong, you bastard."

Mr. Goldstein flashed his teeth in a predatory smile. "No? The way I see it, you took money to take away what you used to fill that stolen printer of yours. Which you stole from me and mine, by the way. That makes it a commercial act, and illegal even under Canadian law. My employers are mighty tired of people flouting American law just 'cause they live elsewhere. They've been looking for someone to make an example of. Someone like you."

"Try it. This is a free country. You can't pull that crap here."

"You think, do you? Maybe we wouldn't win out, in the long run. Maybe, maybe not. But justice ain't free, boy. We're gonna sue you, your sister, and both your parents separately, and we can have you all held under ACTA charges. Maybe even extradited to the US where you'll face real charges. Can your family pay lawyers while locked up? It should only take, oh five or ten years."

I grit my teeth and seethed.

"But it doesn't have to come to that, boy. I can be moved to let your family go, if you agree to a settlement. You agree to a $500,000 fine, and we'll call it done. We won't even make your parents pay it, so long as you agree to drop out of school and work it off in one of our call centres."

They'd been pulling this crap in the US for decades, but it had never happened in Canada. I wouldn't stand for it.

"I want to talk to a lawyer."

"You do that, boy. But the offer won't be on the table long."

The next day, they let my family meet with a lawyer my mother found in the jail directory. He told us bluntly that we were clearly on the right side of the law, but that we wouldn't have the funds to fight it. My mother was holding back tears and insisting we fight, but I stood up and said "No."

"I'll take their settlement offer."

I saw how this had played out in the US in previous decades. The people who fought eventually settled for even worse terms when they ran out of money to pay their lawyers, and they always did. The Mafiaa never ran out of lawyers.

I turned and walked out the room before anyone could object.

I worked in the Mafiaa call centre for two years. Nominally I was paying off my settlement to SG and Tata (or rather, their Mafiaa lawyers), but the amount owed never went down. They located the call centre somewhere in the middle of Flyoveria, United States, where they were the only ones offering housing and any other necessities. They only had to pay us minimum wage, and they priced our rent and the company store so that we always owed a little bit more at the end of the month. The US government didn't care that they were sharecropping - the Mafiaa always made generous "campaign contributions" to both parties.

Technically we could quit any time we wanted, but then our settlements would be struck. We were in America, and so we'd face American Criminal Interference With a Business Model charges, and our families would be pulled in under ACTA back home. We could be fired if we were less than enthusiastic, too.

We sold settlement insurance to hapless Americans. The idea was that you could never be entirely certain someone in your household hadn't started using BitTorrent, or that a neighbour hadn't cracked your wireless connection. For only $79.99 a month, you could have that liability covered.

Occasionally we had to call people the Mafiaa had targeted for a lawsuit. I never got used to that.

We were openly encouraged to tell our stories to the people we called. There was no need to lie or exaggerate like any other salesperson. Pay up or suffer our fate. It was a strong and painfully personal argument.

I was lucky in that my parents were trying to raise the money needed to buy out my settlement. In ten, maybe fifteen years I could be free. Less if my parents managed to get a second mortgage, but that was pretty hard with potential charges looming over them. Most of my colleagues had few illusions of ever being released. Suicide rates were pretty high - that was not technically a settlement violation.

So when my outgoing calls were hacked that morning I was bitter and angry. It wasn't all that unusual. A lot of people thought we should fight the Mafiaa regardless of the cost to our families. Some probably just didn't care who got caught in the crossfire. I was surprised when my earpiece rang after just a few moments. It usually took them hours to reset the autodiallers.

"Hello, George"

"Hello Sir, I'm calling to offer you a limited time opportunity to purchase comprehensive intellectual property..."

The sales script had left well worn tracks in my mind. I could probably recite it in my sleep, so it took me a beat to realize the customer had called me by name.

"Who is this?"

"You don't recognize my voice? You wound me. It's your old friend Manny. Sorry I left you hanging there buddy, but I was kinda stuck myself. It's all good now, though, you're talking to the valedictorian of Wedgewood Military Academy."

"That's great for you. I can't tell you how happy I am to hear that. Now piss off before you get me fired."

"Whoa, hold on a sec. First, don't worry. I've disabled the supervisor interface for your line and replaced it with recordings from yesterday. They won't know we've talked. Still, best not leak any more intelligence than needs be. Just know that I'm getting you out of there buddy, clean and safe. Be ready. You'll know when."

He hung up, and the autodialler kicked back in. I tried to forget about Manny and all the trouble he'd caused me. A month later I'd almost I almost had. I'd just gotten off my regular 16 hour shift, and all I wanted was to sleep.

There was a corpse hanging from a noose over my bed.

My corpse.

"Come on then." Manny's voice came from a printed phone on my desk. "You'll be worse than fired if they find you with a body, so you might as well take a runner. It looks just like you - it'll even pass a DNA test - so you're free and clear. The dead own no debts."

"What? How..."

"Time and place Georgie boy, and it's time you were anyplace else. There's a geocache a few clicks north of your compound marked on the phone. Be there in an hour."

I nearly threw the phone at the wall. Manny had backed me into a corner the same way his father had. I could do what he said, or my family and I would be crushed underfoot.

I'd go north. What else could I do?

I waited half an hour in my room before leaving the residence building. Half an hour in that tiny room with my own corpse hanging lifelessly beside me. I had to; my coworkers were still moving through the halls of the building to their own tiny rooms, and I couldn't let them see me leaving.

I made my way out of the building quickly, and headed north. Once away from the compound the night closed in on me, overcast and moonless, but the ground was clear and level. I made my way by the cold glow of the phone's LED flash and followed the GPS beacon. I didn't see Manny's humvee until he rolled down the window, spilling out a glow from LCD panels inside.

"Get in buddy, I don't like being so close to that compound of yours."

As I walked around to the passenger door, I ran my hand over the surface of the humvee. It was cool, but not cold to the touch and matte black across it's entire surface. It had no mirrors, and what I thought were tinted windows were just panels of the same material that made the rest of the frame.

I got in and sank into a warm, soft leather bucket seat. Manny handed me a steaming cup of coffee. Real coffee! I wrapped my hands around the mug and just held it under my nose, taking in the smell. We couldn't get real coffee at the company store. They'd only sell us caffeinated chicory root powder. It tasted almost, but not quite, entirely unlike coffee.

I closed my eyes and took my first sip just holding it against my palate, letting those wonderfully complex oils infuse my senses. I swallowed and exhaled slowly, disturbing the surface patina like a gulf coast tide pool.

Manny handed me a lid. "It might get a bit bumpy. There are no roads where we're headed."

I looked around the interior of the vehicle. I could see the countryside tinged green in all directions. I touched the panel and it rippled a tiny rainbow away from my fingertip - the entire upper surface of the interior was a seamless LCD panel.

"Manny... who paid for this?" I asked nervously. "What have you gotten me into now?"

Manny just laughed.

"No one paid for it. It's printed, just like that Tata you put together, and just like the body hanging in your room. It took some doing to get the bone, muscle and gristle all in the right spots, but it's just meat. No significant difference from the soggy pork I'm sure they fed you back there."

"You can print people!?"

"Well, not singing, dancing, breathing people. At least not other than the slow, old fashioned way. But they've been growing hearts and kidneys for the insured for over a decade now. It's pretty well worn tech. Putting the whole thing together wasn't easy. I'd have sprung you a year ago if it were, and that body wouldn't pass even a cursory autopsy, but how many people killed themselves in even just your compound last year? They don't care enough to look closely. Maybe once enough people start doing it they'll notice, but cremation is cheap, so yours will be ashes by then."

"But this isn't a flimsy Tata like I printed, and I still had to buy some materials for even that."

"You didn't have to, you just didn't know how to get them otherwise. Fine, you can't get a lithium battery from switchgrass no matter how clever the bugs in your bioreactor are, but throw a long dead iPod in there and you can. If we were on the coast we could even use seawater if we wanted, but the iPod is easier. Never underestimate the contents of a municipal dump. Really, it comes down to this: rare stuff is rare, if it's hard to get we don't need much of it. Material cost is effectively zero now, at least for the simple stuff. You don't need to pay for atoms."

"So money doesn't matter anymore?"

"Of course it does. Money is just a stand in for whatever does matter. No one will ever be able to print you a parking spot in downtown New York or a home cooked meal, but what is that, really? Soylent Green is people. The home cooked meal is valuable because a person took the time to make it, and the spot in New York is different from the spot we just drove over because it's close to those 30 million people."

"Money is slavery, then." I said bitterly.

Manny laughed.

"It can be. I'm sure it's looked that way to you the last few years, but there's nothing inherent to capitalism that makes it so. I didn't break you out to fight a revolution, if that's what you're thinking. I paid attention at that military school; the most victorious general is the one who never fires a shot, and I play to win.

Look, this vehicle took us 500 person hours to build. Tesla would do something similar in maybe 20. It makes more sense for us to let Tesla build our cars, do something else ourselves, and split the difference. If we're both saintly altruistic angels, I give Tesla something worth 240 hours and they give me wheels. We both walk away 240 hours richer. But neither of us are, so they'll try to get all 480 hours from me, and I'll do the same. All else being equal, if Tesla asks too much more than 20 hours someone else will come along and offer cars for a little less than they do.

But that's not what's happening. If I tried to trade with Tesla, or any other car company for something like this, they'd ask for the equivalent of about 4000 hours of your average person's time. Eight times what capitalism would set as the upper bound. They can escape the rules only by sending soldiers and lawyers at anyone, like you, who tries to do better than them."

"It doesn't sound to me like you're winning."

"Change isn't something you can accomplish with guns. No one marched into Moscow and forced Gorbachev to implement glasnost, but Iraq reverted to an Islamic Republic shortly after the occupation ended. Local revolution doesn't work any better; Iran and the USA are both nominally democracies, but you can only run for office if an Ayatollah or National Committee gives you their blessing.

Change happens slowly, a new system whittling away at the old until, one day, it just isn't there anymore. Be a patient mammal, let the dinosaurs die on their own."

Over the next three months Manny helped me build my own humvee. He had dozens of bioreactors and printers hidden in the area of countryside we could cross in a night. We only visited them to drop off biomass or collect feedstock, and we had lots of hidden cameras on every approach, just in case they were being watched. They never were, we camouflaged them well.

We didn't eat luxuriously, but I gained weight and shed the flab that had accrued over my years sitting in a cubical. Manny grew us slabs of protein rich culture that tasted sort of like spicy chicken, and some sort of dense, sour tasting bread. I wasn't supposed to, but I snuck off and ate wild berries when Manny was busy with one of his projects. There was no real coffee. That had been a dirty lie, but what we had was at least better than the chicory root.

When we'd finished the second vehicle we started taking turns delivering unrestricted printers around the country. We'd never meet the people they were going to. Someone would post a request online, and we'd hide it somewhere near them and send a GPS location a day or two later. All we asked in return was that they do the same for at least two other people. Most people did far more.

It was dangerous for us to actually, physically, cross borders, so we didn't. There were thousands of nomads like us around the world. People who were just better off without a fixed address to storm or bank account to seize. So long as there was even one of us on the right side of a border, there was no need to cross. We were citizens of the internets. That's where all important work had gotten done for decades, anyway.

Within a few years, anyone who wanted a printer had one. Most people kept going to their jobs, mowing their lawns and participating in the dinosaur economy where they could be seen, but behind closed doors they cheated on it. Corn, soy, and wheat farmers were the first casualty, as people began to print their staples. Foods with complex flavours or structures were harder to print. After a few years you could print something more or less like hamburger, but no matter how attentively you grilled a printed steak, it wasn't quite right. Quite nice beer could be brewed with printed hops pellets - but you had to put in all the same effort you would into any other craft brewery.

Commodity futures sagged. No one noticed at the time, but crafty, conservative Canadian banks started to shift their investments into hard to produce luxury products. They bought up thousands of tiny craft breweries, artisan wineries, and British Columbian hydroponic marijuana farms.

Governments started requiring proof of material purchase for building permits, which just caused people to stop applying for them. The unforeseen secondary effect was the near collapse in the market for professional construction contractors - since their permits could be more closely monitored - and a renaissance of do-it-yourselfism.

It took a while for the vehicles we nomads drove to penetrate the mainstream. They didn't look anything the cars sold for road travel, and took some doing to assemble. We designed them to cross open country, and to hide. We never took them into cities and avoided even small towns. Still, bit by bit hobbyists adapted our designs. They made them look more like brand name cars, and got better at faking registration and transfer documents. While someone who got caught with a pirate car when they were one in a thousand would blame a phantom used car dealer and go out and buy a legitimate one, once every tenth car was a knock off they'd just shrug and print another. Then everyone did.

In the space of about six months, the auto industry just... popped. The Mafiaa lashed out viciously, but those it targeted just drove out to the abandoned corn fields and joined the nomads. We had plenty of experience by then, and could equip them quickly, and put them to work doing the same.

Tesla, Ford, and Tata screamed for federal enforcement of their copyrights. Ford and Tata demanded a bailout from both major North American governments. They strained under the debt load required to keep the agricorps running amid the collapse of the commodities market, but a few billion dollars were found to placate them and the voters attached to the auto worker unions. Six months later both Ford and Tata filed for bankruptcy.

Tesla reorganized, jettisoning their budget and biodiesel models to concentrate on their luxury electric and hybrid lines. They shrunk to a fraction of their previous size, and their original shareholders lost most of their value, but they survived.

Martial law was declared in countries around the world, and troops were sent into the shantytowns of newly converted nomads to confiscate illegal printers. About half the time the soldiers threw down their weapons and joined us, when it happened west of the rust belt.

Even when printers were captured, we quickly replaced them. After the first few raids, people started launching spy balloons to warn of approaching soldiers, letting the shantytowns scatter ahead of them.

The balloons were simple things meant to stay up a few days and then be replaced. They had no means to be recalled, and many people started making them radar transparent. That made it harder for the shantytowns to be seen, but they became a hazard to navigation. An American Airlines 797 crashed over Idaho, and that pushed them into bankruptcy. The rest were grounded, and most quietly folded.

It didn't much matter to us. The FCC wouldn't have let us fly even if we did print airplanes.

In an act of desperation, the US government shut down ICANN and severed most internet backbones within their borders. We recovered quickly, installing wireless transceivers on our balloons and creating a giant meshnet in the sky. It was quirky, slow and unstable, but whenever it got bad enough to bother someone sufficiently, they fixed it themselves. Ironically, the shutdown was really only effective against commercial interests.

Denmark took the first step away from the brink. In Copenhagen, instead of fleeing out of the city they went inward, to the hippie commune of Christiania before spilling back and occupying the rest of the city. The Danish parliament capitulated, and withdrew from ACTA. Sweden, Norway and Finland followed.

In North America, we were divided regionally but transnationally. The east was furious as manufacturing industries crumbled, and banking followed it. The prairies were unsympathetic - they felt nothing had been done for them when people stopped buying food. The west was blamed for instigating the crisis, and really, they had. We're not entirely sure, but it had always seemed that at least half the nomad population was Californian.

British Columbia and Washington jointly seceded and began talks to form a Cascadian Union. Oregon followed a week later. The US military retreated east of the Rockies to hold the rest of the Union together. Prime Minister Benedict Mulroney called for calm, then shot himself in the face that very night.

Today Cascadia and the Norden Union are the world's only islands of stability. Africa and the Middle East are in open, but thankfully small scale war, outside of the radioactive remains of Israel. The rest of the west is in chaos. The Chinese aren't talking and there have been no sustained communication links with the rest of Asia. Ships sent to Australia do not return or make radio contact.

California is still debating joining Cascadia, and it seems likely at least everything from San Francisco north will.

As for me, I've picked a nice quiet spot on the beach on a tiny island in Haida Gwaii, an archipelago in northern Cascadia. My years as a nomad have made me skittish around people, so I hope you'll understand if I don't say which one. My sister is thinking of joining me. My dad had a heart attack shortly after I "died", and my mom was killed by an Albertan peacekeeper during The Troubles.

Manny is running for a seat in the first Cascadian parliament, and he's got a fair chance of being elected Prime Minister, depending on how the seat allocation falls. I'd appreciate it if you voted for him. He's on the Liberal Democrat ticket.

Dodge West

Michael Kirkland

I wanted to spend the day after Benedict Mulroney died at the Arboretum. It was a beautiful early August day, the sun was shining and there was a cool breeze. I got up early and popped over to the LLC to wake up a grumpy stoner to sell me a bag of good, imported British Columbia Bud. It wasn't cheap, but today wasn't a day for the crappy Phillip Morris "marijuana cigarettes" authorized for sale at 7-11. It was a good day, and I was going to enjoy it.

If I hung around the apartment all I'd hear about was how Deputy PM Rachel Harper was no better, and hooting about how Benedict Mulroney was Canada's worst Prime Minister since his father. I didn't want to argue about it, I just wanted to enjoy the day; there would be time enough for that later. The thing of it was, as much as Mulroney's father was Canada's favourite boogeyman - he died in prison serving a sentence for treason after everything came out about his deals with that German businessman to subvert the Canadian military - he wasn't that bad. He was at least effective, when he wasn't selling us out, while his son presided over the dissolution of the nation.

I sat down and loaded my little pink pipe, plucking apart one of the deep green, white speckled buds. This was going to get much harder to buy with BC in a different country now, and I was going to enjoy it all to myself. Well, myself and the trees. I'd share with them. I lit the pipe with my Hello Cthulhu Zippo ("Works even in the depth's of R'lyeh!") and inhaled a deep toke of silky white smoke. I didn't smoke often, so I quickly sank down, feeling the rough bark against my back, and running my fingers through the soft grass.

"Remember the rules, Missy. They're no different just because that's not tobacco: you stay six metres away from any building or pedestrian right of way." A campus rent-a-cop nagged at me. Damnit, I thought I'd wandered far enough into the foliage.

"Yezzir!" I chirped. I wasn't going to let him spoil my day. I flipped him off to his back when he walked off to bother someone else.

"Sarah! There you are!"

Urgh. My hiding spot failed me. I waved noncommittally at Alan, my roommate, and he wandered over to join me and the trees. He sat cross-legged in the grass, smoothing the pleats on his green tartan parochial school jumper. I handed him my pipe and lighter.

"No politics! None!"

"OK! OK! Truce! I come bearing gifts." He dropped a large paper bag on the ground in front of me. "I haz algae chips!"

Well, I was kind of hungry.

Alan and I were biological engineering students. We weren't supposed to grow anything without a long, stodgy review process and a "socially, legally, and bio-ethically sound justification." That did not include "because it's nummy". In theory we could only bootstrap a new organism with the department gene synthesizer, but most of us had our own illegal versions now. The department synth was faster, but ours could use the community developed OpenWetWare BioBricks, even the ones the Bio-Ethics committee wouldn't approve. It could also ignore the licensing and mix Monsanto and Synthetic Genomics patented genes.

Like most students, we used it to make free junk food.

I took a chip from the bag and looked it. It was dark green, and slightly iridescent, like most things we made from algae. I popped it in my mouth and chewed experimentally.

"Mmmm, spicy!"

"Do you like it? I spliced a capsaicin producing BioBlock into a nutritious OpenWetWare algae strain. I'm gonna call it piri piri algea, or palgea for short. It's 40% carbs, 35% protein, 25% fat and 100% yummy."

"Om nom nom nom, wut?"

"Eats it Ms. I-can-haz-cheezeburgr. It's good for you."

Alan poked me affectionately in my freshman 15 belly.

"Rawr, @feministhulk smash your puny body normative ideals!"

I raised both fists and mock Captain-Kirk punched him into submission.

"Noooo.... I surrenders! I likes you when you're green!"

We collapsed into the grass giggling. We spend the rest of the day smoking and spouting pop culture nonsense to the Arboretum trees. Alan kept his promise and didn't mention politics once. It was a good day.

I stewed over a lumpy mass of bioplastic in our apartment lab (which our muggle friends would insist on calling a "kitchen"). If I'd grown this on an OpenWetWare platform, it would be an ultralight, supertensile and nigh bulletproof sheet. I was trying to grow it in the Monsanto approved cell that I'd be legally allowed to submit to the school, but it just wasn't working.

Alan came into the lab clutching his Android tablet and gave me one of his I-know-you-don't-want-to-talk-politics-but looks. I sighed. I wasn't getting anywhere today, so I'd indulge him. "OK, Alan. Let's hear it." I led him out to our living room and sat us down on our ratty couch. "Are the Americans plotting to steal our toe bones? Are the Westboro Baptists planning to protest kittens?" He wasn't biting.

"No." he said in a small, defeated voice. He looked down at his skirt, fidgeting with the pleats. I scooted closer to him and took his hand. "What is it?" This wasn't like Alan. He'd rail on about any social issue you'd let him, injustices real and imaginary, but always with a smile, and always with an idea to make it all better.

"There's a draft." he said quietly. "and I think there's going to be a war."

The Americans had been rattling their sabres at Washington and Oregon for weeks. There would have to be a draft if they were going to do anything about the succession - nearly half their soldiers just walked away when ordered into a "police action" against other Americans. Even I had heard that there was a draft bill being rushed through Congress, but we were safe north of the border. I squeezed Alan's hand. We both had a lot of friends who wouldn't be.

"It'll be OK, Alan. The Americans haven't had a real draft for nearly a century, and even then, at the height of their empire, it nearly destroyed them. There will be a lot of fun protests and political bickering, but it'll all blow over. If they actually start shooting it'll turn California and probably Texas against the East. If you'll cheer up I promise I'll even go to a protest with you, so long as you promise not to get us arrested." It wasn't working. Alan looked up at me with wide, teary eyes.

"No." he squeaked. "Here."

He pushed the tablet into my hands, showing me his feedreader open to his Canadian politics trawlers. I skimmed the headlines.

CBC | Bill S-52: The Canadian draft The Globe, Mail & Star | Is S-52 constitutional? Unfortunately yes. The Tyee | Human Resources Canada suspends student loan program: grist for S-52? Torontoist | Will S-52 pass? Maybe

My eyes bulged and my lips fumbled out a bewildered "What?"

"They want to make everyone between the ages of 18 and 25 who's not enrolled in classes march around the country smashing printers, and they're pulling our student loans to make sure we that aren't."

I squeezed the tablet hard. Its piezoplastic screen nearly cracked.

I took a breath.

"Pack up the lab. How much palgea do we have?"

Alan looked sheepish. "Um, a lot. It doesn't spoil once you press the moisture out, so I just let it keep growing. There's maybe 50 kilos in the closet."

I smiled and put the tablet down. "Alan, that'd feed us for months. Pack it all up, and whatever stuff you need. One bag of clothes, and make sure some of it is cold weather gear. We're getting the hell out of here before that bill passes."

We packed up all our lab gear, food and some clothes into my imitation Tata Voyageur SUV. I'd made the chassis to look exactly like the official version that rolled out of the plant in Windsor, but everything else was my own custom work based on open nomad designs. It had an SVO (Straight Vegetable Oil) engine, so it could run on unmodified algal oil that I grew alongside Alan's palgea on the roof. All I had to do was drain off the water and squeeze the oil out of an algae mass, and I'd designed a presser into the SUV that let me dump it in straight from a bioreactor.

I thought I'd have to argue with Alan about my one bag of clothes rule. He had an order of magnitude over his body weight in clothes, even though everything we wore was grown from a biomesh that could never stain and didn't need to be washed. He was good, though. Mostly. I checked his bag, and it had almost all of the essentials; a heavy coat, several cashmere-like sweaters, and of course, a half dozen printed skirts, tank tops, jumpers and several pairs of sandals. There was a little room left in the trunk, so I let him have another bag. I had to make sure he packed some boots, socks, and thermals.

"Are you sure about this?" Alan asked, looking back at our cheap apartment building. "Maybe it'll all blow over. No one's even sure the bill can pass."

"Maybe it won't. Maybe a month from now you'll be teasing your silly, panicky roommate. I can deal with that. I'm not ok getting shanghaied into fighting on the wrong side of a civil war. Are you?"

"Well, no..."

"Look, if we drive all out in shifts, we can be in Vancouver in three days. If it all blows over, we can drive back again in time for class. If it doesn't... we'll be out of reach."

I closed the trunk and got in the car. I pulled up our route on the dashboard Android - skirt east around Toronto on the 401, then north on the 400 until it became the Trans Canada Highway, and west all the way to Vancouver. It would be a little faster to drive through the States, but more dangerous. Things were more volatile south of the border, and it was probably best not to let Canada Border Services know where we were headed.

It was an uneventful trip, with endless searing blacktop bisecting tall green fields of switchgrass through late summer Manitoba, and then Saskatchewan. We ate palgea and bothered fast food franchises for their waste frying oil, which we filtered on the roadside to supplement my declining stockpile of algal oil.

We were just outside Calgary when Radio 2 interrupted the end of a Rachmaninoff piece. The aged, warbling voice of Tom Allen cam on and told us "Well folks, I'm being told S-52 passed in the House. Everyone between the ages of 18 and 25 will be expected to register for the Canadian Selective Service System within the next 30 days. Tune into Radio One for more, or stick with us for Beethoven's number 7."

I had to pull over. I hadn't really believed it would pass. I thought we'd all be laughing about my quirky run for the hills of British Columbia in a month. Alan was looking out the window and bunching his fists around his printed Starfleet-issue gold accented skant.

"We'd better get across the border quickly. Do you want me to drive?"

"Yeah." I pulled my blanched knuckles away from the plastic steering wheel, and got out of the car. I looked west into the foothills of the Rockies as the sun sank below their peeks, saturating the deep green of the conifers growing up their slopes. "Let's go." I said, turning my back on the flatlands of the east.

Self-Portrait

Constella Espj

Nathan remembered that he had to get up now. The sun was shining through the crosshatched wires in his window, making shadowy X’s all over everything, him, his bed, the walls. He stared at them for a moment, pondering what might be inside the dark intersections, but quickly brushing the thoughts from his head. He had things to do today. He rolled out of bed, rubbing his eyes and stretching with a loud groan. He sat for a moment, poised on the edge of his mattress, not really wanting to feel the cold floor on his feet. Of course, the floor was really only cold on that side of the bed, where the sun didn’t reach, where everything was dark, and the X’s were smothered under a blanket of obscurity.

Tentatively, he placed one foot on the floor, wincing at the shock of the cold. He considered, briefly, curling up again in his warm bed, enjoying the sunlight, resting for a little longer. The thought of his head lying on the sun-warmed pillow stretched interminably in his mind. But, there were things to be done today. He placed his other foot on the floor, allowing it to acclimate itself to the temperature. He wished he had put them both on the floor at once. The left one was already used to the floor now, while the right was adjusting itself to the seemingly burning cold tile. Finally, he pushed himself off the bed and started the walk to the bathroom.

It was painful, each step. Not physically, not really, but the journey always hurt. He knew what he was going to see. Himself, in the mirror, again. The pain of this realization was what hurt. It pulled down the middle of his stomach, like a cramp, and held it taut. Halfway there, he became nauseated. It happened every day. He stopped for a moment, trying to control his stomach. He imagined it would get easier someday. The arduous journey resumed, each step onto the cold, hard floor jolting him awake. He got inside and turned on the light. The rubber band in his stomach let fly suddenly, and he almost retched. The floor dropped from under his feet and he gulped back bile, bitter and angry-tasting. The mirror always left him shaken. He knew what he was. He was a monster. He was a creature from the depths of hell. He shied away from human contact and tried to keep to himself as much as possible. It didn’t always work. He hated to see himself every day, because it reminded him of what he was. But, he had to get showered, brush his teeth, dress. Breakfast would be soon. He sighed, and trudged on.

Nathan came down for breakfast as usual. He ordered the same thing: 3 eggs, scrambled hard, 2 sausage patties, and 2 english muffins, dry. He drank only water, from the tap. No ice. The staff was used to his simple demands by now. They didn’t complain because at least he wasn’t like Mrs. Jones, who liked poached eggs in hollandaise. She was sure funny about the texture of her eggs. If they were the least bit too hard, or too runny, or the yolks weren’t shaped just-so, she would sniff and declare them “unfit for human consumption” and then complain that they were taking so long to perfect her breakfast that by the time she reached the sunroom the sun would be down. She was a piece of work, that woman.

Nathan, though, was quiet and unassuming, an all-around nice guy. Well, except that he wore a hat with a veil. Most thought he was strange: the veil wasn’t mesh, or lacy, or net, like a woman’s veil. No, it was akin to something worn by women in strict Middle Eastern countries. It covered his face and neck, with two holes for eyes. His eyes, they saw every day, were dark eyes, somber and dismal. The merest hint of skin showed around them. As the staff knew, Nathan was well over forty, but through the eye holes his skin showed not a crease or a laugh line.

He always wore long sleeves. He was certainly well dressed enough, with nice blue jeans and lots of flannel shirts. The employees at the cafeteria sometimes wondered if he got hot in all those clothes. He never so much as lifted that veil or rolled back his sleeves. Mrs. Jones was always mumbling about “the boy” being “odd” and “touched.” As the staff cooked her eggs for the third time that morning, they were undoubtedly thinking she was the odd one. As usual, Nathan sat in the corner, alone at a small table, facing the wall. He leaned far over his food so that he would not have to do much maneuvering to get the food under the veil. The cooks wondered how he managed not to get food all over that veil. Nobody had figured it out yet.

Finally, he finished his breakfast and cleaned the table off. He threw away his napkin and utensils, the styrofoam plate, and the paper cup from which he drank his water. The tray, he placed on top of the other trays. Today, his was orange, and he stacked it on a brown tray. Mrs. Jones, observing this, wondered aloud why they had to have such “dreadful colors” in this place. Nathan walked out, slowly, every move seemingly choreographed to broadcast the semblance of real life to whatever audience he had. But everyone had already turned away from him, his performance was for naught. The cooks were busy breathing a sigh of relief because finally, Mrs. Jones had her eggs cooked to perfection.

The studio was so quiet with the lights off. Nathan almost hated to turn them on, their harsh fluorescence bathing every color with unnatural hues. But he had to. He couldn’t work in the dark. His sculptures were coming along very nicely. Instead of mangled blobs of clay they were now beautiful figures, dancing in long dresses and elegant suits. He imagined that at night, when all the lights were out and everyone was gone, they danced in the cabinets where he stored them when he finished making them. The thought made him feel good. Well, close as he could get, anyway. He held up today’s project. It was going to be his finest work yet. He was going to try to capture himself in this one. When he first came here, he couldn’t sculpt so much as a stick figure. Over time, his talents, apparently latent and unexplored, showed themselves to such a high degree that people began to beg him to sell his pieces. For a long time, he resisted, because the sculptures were of his father and mother, and they were very personal. After a lot of persuasion, however, Nathan had amassed quite a bit of money. He imagined it would be useful if he ever went anywhere.

He looked down again at his clay. This was going to be difficult. He hated to look at himself, but this work must be done, he thought. He was going to work on the eyes today, those smooth eyes; somehow he couldn’t capture the spark that others saw in them. He did, however, get the cast- the despairing look, the sad gaze- eyes can tell so much, he mused. With his thumb, he smoothed the clay down around the eyes, at times resisting the urge to dig his thumbnail right into the middle of an eyeball. His breathing sometimes grew intense and harsh, but at these moments, he out down the clay and tried to think on other things. Sometimes it worked. After several hours of working on the sculpture, he put it into a cabinet and locked it up. He couldn’t risk anyone seeing it before completion. He washed his hands and looked down at his sleeves, at the cuffs which had hardened bits of clay on them. For a moment, he simply stared, as if unsure what to do about these little pieces of clay. Then, he turned out the light and shut the door. It was time for supper.

Later that night, in his room, he took off the veiled hat. He removed his flannel shirt. He took off his pants and let the cool air assail his body. He looked down at his flesh, now goosepimpled and covered in a light sheen. He saw the claws and spikes that covered his body. The dense fur on his legs. He closed his eyes, willing away the sight. The floor was again cold. He could not wait to get into bed. He quickly pulled on his nightclothes and climbed into bed. He turned off the light and briefly, for good measure, checked to make sure the bathroom door was shut. He fell asleep quickly, the rhythm of his breathing, even and deep, filling the room, as moonlight and X’s fell upon his bed. He shifted a bit, and then the X’s began to shift. They didn’t shift because of his movements, rather, independent of them. The lines in the X’s began to pull closer together, gathering in a puddle of shadows at the side of his bedspread until they slid onto the floor. They heaved and writhed down there, coming together in a number if indescribable ways, their oily, liquid joinings and partings the stuff of nightmares. They finally settled on a shape, and began to rise from the floor, the head taking form first, and the body following behind, until the creature stood. It was as tall as Nathan. It was shaped like Nathan. It leaned over its sleeping doppelganger and shook the bed. Nathan awoke with a start.

“What are you doing? Sleeping when there’s work to do? Get out of bed!” Nathan was stricken with fear. “I said get UP! You worthless little piece of trash!” A belt, made of the same shadowy stuff, materialized in the creature’s hand. Seeing this, Nathan suddenly forgot where he was. All of a sudden, he was a child again, and his father was on another drunken tirade. He got out of bed. The shadow-dad wielded the belt menacingly. “Well, come on now! Get busy!” Nathan knew what he had to do. He headed toward the bathroom, dreading opening the closed door, dreaded turning on the unforgiving light and seeing himself in the mirror. It was hell, and he was trapped in it. He stumbled in the direction of the door. He pushed it open and turned on the light. The shadow-dad made him turn around. “Now do it! Do as you were told!” He knew he didn’t want his dad to have to repeat the instructions spoken to him the first time. After he had heard them, he never forgot what they were. On into the night, Nathan did as the shadow-dad bade him. Just as the almost-black night sky saw plumes of pink clouds, he was able to go back to bed. He climbed into the bed, his throat aching from tears deferred, and fell asleep.

Nathan slept like the dead, awakening much later in the day than yesterday. He knew that now he could only have lunch. Resignedly, he got out of bed to face the day again. As he left his room that day, the staff members noticed he was carrying a plastic grocery bag, tied at the top. The residents sometimes had accidents. He was probably just tossing away embarrassing evidence. Nobody really paid attention.

Several months passed without incident. Nothing very exciting happened anyway, but not a thing out of the ordinary happened. Mrs. Jones didn’t even relax her stringent rules for her poached eggs and hollandaise. Nathan went to the studio each day to work on his sculpture. It was coming along nicely, except that it pained him to look at it. His talent was apparent in this, because it really turned out looking like him. He spent countless hours smoothing the skin around the eyes. This seemed the most important to him, because it was the most human thing about him, in his opinion. The rest was coming along nicely too, well, nice as far as progress. The sculpture itself was still hideous. The beauty of it was that he managed to capture every nuance- each matted patch of fur, every deformity on his body, each horn that was covered by his jeans and flannel shirts, was exposed here, in clay, made by his own hands. At times, he shuddered, wished he could throw the damned thing against a wall, smash it, never have to see himself, but he knew that would not do. This was to be his piece de resistance, his magnum opus. This would be his greatest, and maybe last, work. After this, he would lay down his tools, and release the past, and live out his last days in a state of rest. At last, the work he started as a child would be done. He paused briefly, almost smiling, but feeling unable. He sighed instead, and carried his creation to the cabinet where it was kept.

This time, the shadow-dad was not so nice. He practically dragged the stonefaced Nathan to the bathroom and forced him to do the work which his real father had prescribed for him so long ago. Nathan did as he was told. The next day, it was cold, the X’s on the bed were a little dimmer. Winter was coming. It would be very cold now, Nathan hated the cold. The very thought of foggy breath, and looking out to see snow, made him cringe. He looked down at the radiator underneath the window. It would be time to turn it on soon. He shifted to get up, and made an involuntary cry of pain. Nathan hurt. No doubt, it was from last night’s frenetic activities. And idea began to take shape in his mind. He thought about the sculpture, the midnight visits from the shadow-dad. He wasn’t at all sure he could take much more of those. As he sat up agonizingly, he looked down at his body. The sight filled him with both terror and a strange satisfaction. There were far fewer patches of hair, horns and extrusions. Somehow, working on this sculpture, he mused, was making him human again.

He rose and journeyed to the bathroom, feet aching on the cold floor. Today the rubber band in his stomach had more slack, he felt much better. Perhaps the shadow-dad wasn’t so bad at all. His mind, for some reason, revolted at the very thought of the shadow-dad. It recoiled and he felt as if he had swallowed something noxious. He brushed his teeth extra hard that morning, rubbing the toothbrush along his tongue until he gagged, both on the toothbrush, which he plunged ever farther, and on the blood and saliva which began to run from the front to the back of his tongue from the rigorous friction. He would have to eat breakfast slowly today.

The sculpture was almost done. Nathan had to add a few details, and it would be finished. He’d had to request a few more tools, and the staff wondered why, but since he was doing so well with his sculpting, nobody really though to question him. He smoothed the skin around the eyes again, wanting that, at least, to be flawless. A few more days and he would be finished. The shadow-dad had visited him more often lately, and each time it did, he was given more ability to sculpt, more talent to make that sculpture look like him. Each time he worked it, the more he made it look like the monster he saw himself as, the more human he became. He could almost feel exhilarated, almost laugh. Perhaps a little more work yet, and he could. He put the sculpture away and put the new sculpting tools away too. He surveyed the studio, then flipped the lights out and went to his room. It was a while yet before dinner, and he had some cleaning to do. Last night’s work had left a mess. Reluctantly, and with no small amount of discomfort, he began to scrub the bathroom.

Tonight, the shadow dad was lenient, almost merciful. Nathan knew that it was because his work was almost done. He did not mind so much going into the bathroom, and walking on the cold tile floor tonight. He could almost look into the mirror without cringing. He was almost human. He was nearly elated. As he awoke the next day, he decided to stay in bed. He huddled under the covers, his eyes tightly shut, dreaming of short-sleeved shirts and going without a veil. It was incredible. When he finally did slip out of bed around lunchtime, he got dressed in his usual clothing, and headed straight for the studio. He was ready to complete his sculpture. Last night, the shadow-dad had told him that he was almost good enough. He had only to finish the sculpture.

Endlessly he toiled that day, feeling a sense of urgency he had never before experienced. At times, his fingers slipped onto the tools, leaving bloody streaks in the clay. Nathan didn’t care anymore. It was like a dream come true, and he was going to do it today. His usual slow, methodical plodding was gone, he worked feverishly, the veil drawing close to his lips with each intake of breath. His thumbs soon were ridged with deep gashes, the cuts bleeding, blending with the clay he pressed and trimmed. It got late, almost time for dinner, but Nathan did not move, he was engrossed, a man possessed. He was going to finish tonight.

The next day Nathan woke up. The X’s on his bed were so pale he could hardly see them. It wasn’t morning anymore because he’d been up all night. His sculpture was finally finished. He’d brought it to his bedroom and put it atop his chest of drawers. He didn’t look at it though, because it was hideous. Nathan wanted to eat but it hurt to move. His arms and fingers ached, his head hurt, and his tongue was swollen. He heard a knock at the door and some voices outside. He didn’t want to be seen like this, in his nightclothes, teeth unbrushed and face bare.

Laboriously he pulled the covers from himself, wincing. He tried to hurry so they wouldn’t be waiting too long, but he wasn’t fast enough and in moments he heard the sound of keys. A grunt pushed itself around his fat tongue when he attempted to sit up and reach for the nightstand drawer where he kept his veil. Before he could even get his fingers past the edge of the mattress the door burst open and one of the white-clad men who looked after the residents stepped in, then paused and gasped. Nathan stared at the man and the man stared back at him, then out of the corner of his eye he saw the sculpture on the chest of drawers. His eyes and mouth opened wide and he stepped backward, bumping into another man in white.

Nathan could only watch, croaking out tiny, weak sounds as the first man fled, calling for medical help. It seemed the other people stepping into the room were getting paler too, like the X’s. One man slipped on something and another one said “Jesus” and Nathan thought he was praying. It was too late to cover up now so he lay back down and watched everything grow faint against the sudden brightness of the room. He looked at the sculpture again and was happy it was finished. The eyes were perfectly like his own, and before he stopped seeing anything at all he curved his lips in imitation of the monster’s smile.

Quill

Constella Espj

Before Paolo had found himself sequestered from the world in this quaint little cottage he was renting on the grounds of the estate of Lord So-and-so, he’d been an inveterate party animal and wholly unashamed womanizer. The collection of suits and hats that were probably being eaten to Swiss cheese by moths now had been his uniform for impressing the ladies. With bespectacled dark eyes, swarthy complexion, and long hair he looked the part of a writer, and he used that to his advantage. There was nothing like the look on a woman’s face when he nimbly rolled a smoke and licked the paper, then flicked his eyes up to hers and said in his accent of his “I’m a writer.” It was a one-way ticket to Fucksville and he’d been there so many times it was reflected in his writing. Perhaps proving that sometimes you can judge a book by its cover, he wrote sex-filled mystery novels and women ate them up. His favorite artistic endeavor, however, was signing his autograph on a woman’s body with his tongue- the autograph wasn’t permanent but the memories sure were.

After one conquest, he’d awakened in the night, sweating and gasping. He’d been dreaming of falling.

The nameless partner to his left sat up with him and sleepily asked if he was alright, rubbing her eyes with one hand. She placed the other hand on his back and he started, shaking it off. The sensation was too intense, some sort of prickling feeling that seemed to be inside or underneath his skin. The girl on his right just groaned and turned over. Suddenly acutely aware of the feeling of the silk sheets he climbed out of bed over the body of sleeping girl and the protests of the other and sat in his leather chair, naked, to commence writing. The next day everything was fine, but some weeks later it happened again, and then again. He sought to mask the feeling with increasing amounts of hard liquor, but it worked only for so long. Those girls had it easy. The stronger the sensation’s presence became, the weaker his control over himself became and eventually he had hurt someone.

Della…that was her name. She’d given Paolo her body after he’d told her he would model his bombshell jewel thief in “Heart of the Night” after her. She was perfect: long blonde hair, deep blue eyes, and the most shapely red lips he had ever seen, with a shapely body to match. Della was a stunner and he’d immortalized her in name and in form in his half-finished work. Barry didn’t know this- hell, nobody did- but the last night they’d been together he was in a frenzy of agitation. He bit her too hard, pulled her hair, rutted her like a beast, ignoring her pained cries. Oh she’d fought him: clawed his back, slapped him called him a bastard, but the pain was what kept him going. He felt himself ascending, the prickling inside him growing, and he exorcised it on her until she was bruised and battered and sobbing. When he was finished he collapsed, panting, suddenly contrite and mumbling humiliated apologies while she hobbled painfully around the room, gathering her belongings to leave. Many hundreds of thousands of dollars later he had bought her silence and hidden his shame but that was the last time he touched a woman. Whatever was wrong with him wasn’t getting any better and now he was practically a rapist as well as an alcoholic.

Barry had noticed a difference in him as well, and had called to ask him about it sometime last year.

“So…are you changing genres on me?”

“What?”

“You’re asking me why your manuscripts keep getting rejected. Paolo, you write detective stories. What’s with all this freedom stuff?”

“I don’t know, I just- I don’t know.” He didn’t know. The half-completed noir novel was languishing on his laptop and he wasn’t able to finish it. He was writing a new story, again and again, and it had nothing to do with jewels or detectives or girls whose namesakes he had alienated.

“Look, man. We’ve been friends a long time and worked together even longer. Are you having some kind of problem that I am unaware of? You’re not like yourself at all, man. What is this new stuff, stream-of-consciousness? Bird men, freedom, ancient vistas, this is weird shit, Paolo. I don’t wanna sound harsh but keep it up and you’re gonna have to find a new agent ok? The market’s tough as it is right now and I don’t do fantasy. Better take a breather or something, pal. Go see a psych, get some pills, take a sabbatical.”

The pills didn’t help; that uncomfortable, agitating prickling showed up even under the meds. The psych blamed it on the alcohol. Faced with the decision between drinking and medicine, he got rid of the prescriptions and went abroad. He couldn’t relax any more than he could at home, but he found solace in the cottage and could suffer, curse, and cry alone. Eventually the prickling had cost him his laptop when he found that in his frenzy to rid himself of the feeling he was smashing the keys down and bruised the hell out of his fingertips. One day he found himself considering gluing thumbtacks or bits of broken glass to the keys to provide the painful relief he so desired. The realization that his body and mentality had been so perverted sent him into a fit of rage and he picked the laptop up and threw it onto the floor, destroying it. He bought an old manual typewriter that made his hands ache with its stiff keys and expended his frustrations on it. He could bang with impunity on it and it kept on working.

The birds were loud. The cicadas were loud. The colors in the garden were loud and the smell of the flowers was loud and the sun was too damn bright. Paolo took a drag off his cigarette, squinting his eyes against the smoke rising from its tip as he pinched it between his teeth so he could pull his hair into a ponytail. His head ached and his mouth tasted sour from too much vodka and vomit and the taste of tobacco was not helping at all. Another day with another hangover after another night of shitty sleep. It felt like his skin had wool underneath it and his muscles were tensed with energy he couldn’t expel. All that agitation made him antsy, irritated, and sore. He shook his head, plucking the cigarette from his mouth and pressing his lips together in annoyance. This was bunk.

He would have asked himself how he was supposed to get anything done in this state but he was, in fact, more productive than he’d ever been. Consumed with restlessness he’d tried running, swimming, even aerobics. Yoga was too calm and while boxing was cathartic he was afraid he would hurt someone or beg them to hurt him. While he was busy concentrating on the enormous headache he was trying to get rid of and contemplating going back to bed he became aware of the sensation: his bones were singing and his muscles were tensing. His back hurt from all this tensing. He was never the type to be stressed out before, but all this stress was definitely stressing him out now. Clenching his jaw so tightly he thought he could hear a tooth crack, he crushed the cigarette out and rose to go to his desk, clenching and flexing his hands the whole way.

Sitting in his straight-backed wooden chair before the enormous, old typewriter Paolo exhaled sharply and licked his lips. Briefly he touched his forehead and winced at the sting of his fingers against the raw gouges he’d created the night before. The vodka didn’t really help with his problems but it had become a familiar habit and a sort of safety net. Before he could claw his eyes out or his skin off, or any number of other things he could guzzle it down and pass out. This was no kind of life for a writer. He started typing.

Hours into the late afternoon the pile of paper next to the typewriter was ridiculously large. Why hadn’t he ever been so prolific before? Maybe fantasy was his thing now, because detective stories weren’t getting any traction at all. Snatching the page from the machine and dropping it atop the others he glanced at the vodka bottle and realized it was too early to start drinking it. Well, maybe just a nip. After draining the flask he tossed it aside and grabbed the manuscript to stack it, slamming it hard against the scarred wooden desk. He felt the slices of papercuts opening and he slammed harder, craving the pain. Anything to distract him. By the time he stopped the bottom edge of the manuscript was beaten up and he started to read. It was the same story he’d been writing for a year now: flying men and women, leaping from cliffs and soaring over forests and mountains and fields. Reading it filled him with delirious envy. Paolo wanted that delicious feeling and every day when he woke up he lamented being earthbound. He hadn’t been falling in that first dream- he’d been flying.

With aching muscles and shaking fingers he rolled a cigarette, spilling tobacco everywhere. Oh what happened to these magic fingers? The ladies would not be impressed. He laughed joylessly and sucked in smoke until it burned his lungs.

Later in the mirror Paolo examined his body. He’d been in good shape before but now he was so thin, birdlike. His cheeks were hollowed and the shadows under his eyes rendered him gaunt and made him look older than his twenty-seven years. Wiping steam from the mirror he studied his collarbone, ran his fingertips over its bony prominence. It didn’t seem this noticeable before, maybe because he used to eat regularly. The cold drip of water from his hair felt strange on his skin but he didn’t feel prickly yet. The burning hot shower did the trick for a while, at least. It was unpleasant at first but over the months he’d grown used to it and would curse in frustration at a shower that wasn’t hot enough to scald him. His eyes wandered to his shaving kit and he rubbed a palm against his stubble-studded cheek. He hated electric shavers but he’d had to resort to them because the thought of using his straight razor always spawned other, more gruesome thoughts. He wasn’t ready for that yet, but he was close.

He threw the manuscript in the trash. Barry was right about one thing- it wasn’t even a story. After venturing out to get more vodka and tobacco papers Paolo returned to the cottage and sat down to write the same story again.

Sitting before the keyboard again he started to type. The man, maybe himself, standing atop a cliff, surveying the world below. The prickling rose in his back and he typed harder as he described the feeling of wings extending, arms stretching out, leaning forward and pushing away from the solid ground. The man in his story fell into the currents and was lifted, feeling the wind slide over and under his wings ruffling the feathers. Paolo started to cry, pressing so hard on the keys that he thought he might break his fingers. Hell, he hoped he would. He typed harder. The agitation only grew and in a few minutes he abandoned typing altogether and instead pushed his fingers through his hair, dug his nails into his scalp and wailed, slamming his elbows against the table and the corners of the typewriter and everything else. The pain wasn’t enough. He stood, kicked the chair, kicked the leg of the desk, kicked the footboard of the bed, jumped up and down as hard as he could. Nothing worked. Finally he lay on the floor in a heap, dragging his nails against his scalp and face, sobbing as hard as Della had when he’d violated her. Nothing made it better.

That night Paolo decided to go for a long drive. The beat-up little car he’d bought to use was noisy and the suspension was shot but he didn’t mind- the bumps and vibration kept his mind off the persistent feeling of being wound too tightly with energy he could not expel. He didn’t notice the scenery and barely avoided hitting pedestrians. He had no idea where he was going but it didn’t matter because there were lights in his mirror and now he was being pulled over for erratic driving. It didn’t help at all that he was unable to sit still, fidgeting in the seat and gritting his teeth and breathing hard from exhaustion and rage. He slept poorly that night in gaol, unable to achieve the peace he could only get from doing the complete opposite of drying out. The next morning he was released and told to go straight back to the cottage. Instead he continued the way he’d been going the night before, ignoring architecture and other drivers and making his way to lush, green country.

He left the car unlocked. Standing on the cliff, he saw the sea, smelled its saline tang. It was nothing like the pristine world of his dreams but it was as close as he’d ever get. The sensation became a noise in his head and he turned around for a moment, looked beyond the car to see where he’d come from, the place he could go back to. The noise grew louder and his vision receded. That place wasn’t where he’d come from at all, and it was no refuge for him now. Facing forward he closed his eyes. He could feel all the tingling of the past year concentrated between his shoulder blades, shaping itself and changing him. He felt wings extending and now the prickling became power. Arms outstretched and with a ragged, triumphant shout Paolo leaned forward and his feet left the ground.

Transmission

Constella Espj

The cherry glowed brightly again. Kellen knew it was a joint, and she envied the smoker. Random testing had convinced her that her degree and its delivery of a decently-moneyed job were more important than the occasional pot party. Dismayed, she wondered where all of her gleeful rebellion had gone, and sighed. Some days she’d just love to relax in a roomful of haze. Framed in a bay window, she watched the distant ember. Those days were gone. “Up past my bedtime” she murmured to herself.

While Kellen was hunched over saliva samples the next day at work, the unknown smoker, Jeremy Bendis was checking his bathroom mirror repeatedly. He looked, rubbed his eyes, looked again, and kept it up for most of the morning. There were spots on his irises. Around the fifth time he checked he noticed that each spot had a counterpart on the other eye. Thinking he was imagining that they hadn’t been there all along, he left for class.

“Jer! Wait up!” Missy didn’t need him to wait. She walked fast. Catching up to him and hardly out of breath she related to him the events of the party after he left early. “Soooo, Danny and I are kind of like an item now…” her eyes slid over to him, searching for signs of disapproval. Jeremy was the kind of friend who could be counted on to disapprove of a bad partner and while Missy liked Danny- a lot- she would consider whatever Jeremy had to say. When he didn’t say anything Missy felt a little nervous.

“Jeremy? You think I’m wrong on this?” Missy elbowed him in the arm.

“Uh, yes. Yes I mean I approve. Danny’s a really nice guy and I’m glad you hooked up.” He was instantly sincere. Missy relaxed.

“Distracted much?”

“Sorry, musta smoked too much last night. I think I’m still high.” Palm smoothed hair.

“Lunkhead. You need to stop that, it’s a bad habit. You better not flunk out on me. I’ll see you later.” His eyes followed her for a few moments as she stepped into the building where her classes were and disappeared down the hall. Shaking his head, Jeremy departed in the direction of his own class. He could be paranoid some other time.

After class, in the local coffee shop Jeremy asked Missy to check his eyes.

“I mean, does it look like it’s new?”

“Jer, I’m pretty sure you’ve always had those. Maybe you never noticed.” He relaxed. Missy would notice. She’d known him long enough. Mind at ease, Jeremy sipped his latte.

Not very far away, in her cubicle Kellen ate a tuna salad sandwich and drank a soda. She wasn’t so diet-conscious that she couldn’t enjoy some gratuitous sugar now and then. It was about the only thing she enjoyed unless her relentless pursuit of work and her studies could be called enjoyment. She liked her vocation, but she needed a vacation. She made a note to look around some travel sites.

“Ma! Mom! Come look at this!” The spots had fine arcs between them. Two days later and Missy had been wrong. Those things hadn’t always been there. Marla stepped into the bathroom door, sensing a note of panic in her son’s voice.

“What’s wrong?”

“Mom- look.” He advanced on his mother, holding an eye open with his fingers. “Something’s wrong with my eyes.” She searched the whites for redness and then zeroed in on the hazel irises. Something was there. She leaned closer and squinted, knitted her brows.

“What is that?” A tiny worry niggled at her, one that probably didn’t mean anything. She’d ask the other mothers later.

“I don’t know. It started the other day. I thought maybe the spots had already been there but then this happened.” He carefully left out the detail about the weed that he thought might be the cause of this. What the hell kind of stuff was that anyway? Maybe Missy was right.

After Jeremy had gone to bed, Marla logged into the Mothers site. It was very private, members-only, to discourage curiosity seekers from dropping in. It had been a while and though Marla didn’t care for the crazy rantings of some of the mothers there were some friends she’d felt guilty about not speaking to in a while. It would be nice to catch up. At the same time she hit up a search engine searching for eye spots. Around the same time she was loading the Mothers chat applet she was discovering a lot of pictures of insects with what looked like eyes on their wings. She turned her attention to the chat.

<Chocolateer> Wow look who it is! Long time no see Marla.

<w@bigail> I AM SERIOUS U GUYS ALL KNOW ITS TIME

<Mars> Hey hey everyone. Pleasantries all around.

<w@bigail> MARS IS UR SON JERMY SICK?

<w@bigail> IF NOT HE WILL BE SOON

<Mars> What’s w@b going on about now?

<Chocolateer> Enough with the caps already.

<Chocolateer> Probably about how she wants a big fat /ignore LOL.

<Chocolateer> How are you Mars? It’s been a while.

<w@bigail> mars u can’t say i didn’t warn u

***w@bigail has QUIT***

In a while it was almost like old times. Lurkers joined in the conversation and everyone got caught up on what was new. It was nice, but Marla had things on her mind. The comments Abby had made in the chat piqued her curiosity. Was something wrong with Nina?

<Mars> Is Nina alright? What set w@b off like that?

<pandoras_socks> nobody really knows. she just started going off about it being time the other day. since then she’s only gotten worse. i don’t know what’s wrong with nina if anything really is. you know how w@b gets when she thinks about things too much.

<Chocolateer> Supposedly something “unearthly” is wrong with Nina’s eyes.

A chill came over her belly so suddenly that she almost gagged.

<Mars> Did she say what was wrong with them?

<Chocolateer> Get this. “Spots.” She fusses over that girl so much she probably knows the second a split end forms.

<Mazy> Yeah “Nina we have to get you to the salon right away!” hahaha

<Chocolateer> LOL I told her to go to the eye doctor. I should have said the head doctor. She doesn’t want to get on with her life even after all these years.

<Mazy> You were being too nice to her Choc. She does need to get over it.

The room felt like it was tilted. Too hot. It was spinning slowly around Marla. Now she felt unsure whether she was thinking clearly. Had those spots been there all along? Maybe the color was simply defined more? She was sure they were new, of course she was, she’d just looked at them. But if only Abby…Crazy Abby was thinking about this maybe she was just panicking over nothing. The other mothers didn’t mention anything.

<Chocolateer> Mars? Don’t worry about w@b. She just wants attention. She hasn’t changed since you left.

<Mars> Choc, pm?

In the private message window Marla told Chocolateer about Jeremy’s eyes.

<Chocolateer> Oh dear. You’re sure these are new?

<Mars> Yes. I’m not crazy, and maybe w@b isn’t either at least about this.

<Chocolateer> For now let’s keep this between ourselves. It could be anything. Have you taken Jeremy to the eye doctor? Let’s not get all worked up over nothing. We all agreed that “end of the world” stuff is nonsense. Let’s not have everyone worrying about their kids.

<Mars> We’re going in the morning before he has class. I’m not just being paranoid here. And I’m not thinking about the end of the world. Just, what if it’s some “trait” that some or all of the kids will develop? I mean it’s not like we can pretend our kids are just like everyone else’s.

<Chocolateer> The kids ARE just like everyone else’s. You were there. You got tested, Jeremy got tested. The kids are fine. They’re not magically just going to get something wrong with them. Look, go to the eye doctor. Take a break from work, send Jeremy away for a week, and relax. Get back in the studio.

<Mars> I’m not. I’m just a little freaked out. You’re not thinking I’ve lost it are you? I’m calming down, I promise.

<Chocolateer> Nobody thinks you’re turning into w@b. Let me know what you find out, OK? It’s probably nothing.

<Mars> sighs

<Mars> You’re probably right. Thanks Kate.

Mars left the chat room and Marla went to bed.

At the eye doctor Jeremy reluctantly confessed his smoking habit to his mother and the doctor, genuinely concerned. He was relieved and chagrined to know “marijuana can’t do this to your eyes.” Marla wished desperately that it had been the pot, because the doctor also said he didn’t know what could do that to your eyes.

“Aside from patterned contact lenses, which you obviously aren’t using, I don’t really know. Keep an eye on it and I’ll do some research. I’ll call you if I find something out, and you call me if it changes, okay?” In the car on the way to lunch Marla told Jeremy that when they got home he was turning over his stash. Maybe she’d keep it for her week off.

Kellen wasn’t going to have a vacation any time soon. She was too busy processing bloodwork. The fabled “ring-eyed kids” were being tested for something or other. She wasn’t sure what, because as far as she had heard there wasn’t anything wrong with them except now they had eye tattoos or something. Kids would do anything to be different, she concluded as she inserted vials into the centrifuge. Maybe they were all in a secret club together, kids who thought their mothers were, well, Mothers. That whole thing was weird and she was really too young to have remembered much about it at the time. That’s what the internet is for. When she got home she would check it out.

<Chocolateer> Benji’s got them, Mars. We went to lunch and he was wearing sunglasses. I had to make him take them off. He was hiding them.

<Mars> sighs

<Chocolateer> What do you think could be happening?

<Mars> I don’t know but it’s scary.

Stretched out on her bed, Kellen opened her laptop and searched “Mother Incident”. She ran across the name of a band, a few songs with the same moniker, and some very kooky pages dealing with UFO’s and supernatural phenomena. She fell back on the most and least reliable source, a wiki.

This particular page was full of information. Within two minutes she had the general information down. Twenty years ago women around the world all got pregnant at once. The cases were all startlingly similar. Each woman had been an artist of some sort and had been commissioned by a man of indeterminate nationality to “chronicle her time.” Of the women who had accepted this commission, a number had become sexually involved with their patrons and became pregnant within a month of one another. Each woman had been told near the end of her pregnancy that she was “giving birth to the end of the world” and the men had taken their chronicles and left. One woman committed suicide, saying she wasn’t going to be responsible for destroying the world.

In the pre-internet days, most of these women were unable to connect with each other but over time a “Mother” movement had grown, though it seemed mostly underground and/or suspect. How could anyone be sure someone else was a Mother? Apparently the kids all turned out to be perfectly normal so in the end it looked like a weird case of mass hysteria, online-style. Still, it was interesting that each of the Mothers was an artist or documenter of some sort. “Hm,” Kellen mumbled around a mouthful of candy.

Bloodwork was getting exciting. This is what she signed up for. The kids were sick. Flulike symptoms and general malaise. When she’d had time to, she’d caught the latest news from her rss feeds, carefully ignoring the huge pileup of old alerts. The ring-eyed kids were having their 15 minutes and the Mother Incident was news again. Blogs, video sites, and general connectedness had afforded Kellen a fresh look at the old stories. It wasn’t any kind of tattoo or contact lens. All the ring-eyed patients were confirmed to be children of the Mothers. Fuzzy webcam images and spuriously-lit clips of young adults flooded the web, eventually capturing the attention of mainstream media outlets which provided better quality images and properly-lit video clips. By then, though, Kellen was too busy to pay much attention.

“Mutants? Aliens? Who ARE the ring-eyed children?” Walter had snuck up on her, intoning the latest scandal-rag headline. Walter’s khakis were, as always, strangely unrumpled and simultaneously uncreased. She wondered how he did it.

“What’s the latest in Scandaland Walt?” Pausing her paperwork.

“Seems the Mothers have a lot of explaining to do. Most of the kids had no idea it was their mothers.” He shook his head. “I guess they didn’t want to seem crazy.”

“So these kids all have moms that did this chronicle thing? And now they’re sick. Maybe all the vanishing dads had a bad gene.” What had happened to all the dads anyway? Kellen didn’t want to ask that one out loud.

“The weird thing is all of them were the same. Guys of indeterminate age and indeterminate accent, indeterminate ethnicity and apparently now indeterminate species.” The last bit was said with a bit of a snort. “I think a lot of ladies got down with some crazy drugs and this is what happened to their kids. There’s probably a lesson in this somewhere.”

“Yeah, use a condom.” Kellen half-smiled as Walter sauntered off chuckling.

The eye doctor couldn’t find anything after weeks of research and polling colleagues. He learned he wasn’t the only one with such patients and that Jeremy Bendis wasn’t his only such patient. Unable to find any answer, doctors and patients had been hammering search engines for information which was regrettably in short supply. He added the information he had to several sites both for doctors and for patients. No, they definitely were not contact lenses. No, it also was not any sort of eyeball tattoo. Heaven knows something like that would hurt and get infected and whatever else and that would be a mess. After he’d finished posting he browsed for images. The photos could not do justice to the real thing. It was spectacular, and it invited the viewer to stare and stare. He’d gotten lost in them, watching the patterns develop and then even after they stopped. He looked at all the photos he could. It seemed he couldn’t help himself.

Walter wasn’t gone for long. Within a half hour he’d come back with disturbing news. “Thirteen nurses have reported developing flecks of dark color in their eyes.”

“Nurses? You mean like they caught this from the kids? That’s kind of weird don’t you think? Are they sick?”

“They’re fine. But supposedly so were the kids when they were getting these spots.”

Marla paced her bedroom. A swath of tamped-down carpet was visible around her bed, to the window, to the bathroom door. She pushed back her bangs and looked again. She did have them.

<Mars> Guys, I’m getting the spots. Today I noticed they are a little more defined.

<Chocolateer> My grandchildren are getting them. Maybe it’s just us. Maybe they’re coming from us and we’re passing it down. The twins are so much like Benji, maybe that gene came from him too.

<pandoras_socks> lacey has the flu. her eyes haven’t changed any more though. I think they’re done. how’s Jeremy?

<Mars> He’s got the flu too.

<Dobby> Marcy is sick too. As a dog. You think it’s connected?

<w@bigail> ITS ALL CONNECTED AND NO1 BELIEVED ME

<Chocolateer> Please, with the caps.

<Mars> Does anyone else have them?

<w@bigail> i do. almost a whole ring now. u will all have them 2 and then we will get sick.

<Chocolateer> I can’t believe I’m asking this but, w@bs, what do you think is going to happen next?

<Dobby> Oh Choc don’t encourage her!

<w@bigail> u kno. end of the world.

<pandoras_socks> you had to ask.

The kids were entering hospitals at an alarming rate. Kellen spent nights sitting up analyzing blood samples while Marla sat up nights watching her son grow pale and weak. Her eyes nearly mirrored the intricate rings in his own, and even as she looked at him now she found herself caught up in the way her gaze naturally followed the twisting, looping works of the rings. As a cosmetic device it certainly worked. When she’d first seen the fully developed patterns in her son’s eyes she’d felt something. A fleeting but very strong sense of familiarity. Surely it was nothing but at the same time she couldn’t help looking every chance she got, trying to figure out why she felt it meant something to her.

The eye doctor felt the same thing. Surveying the umpteenth patient of the day with a beautiful and frightening ocular adornment he couldn’t help notice that even through their minor variations, all of these rings seemed like he knew them. Some of the eyes were red and bleary, some poorly disguised with contact lenses. Most of his patients were college students who felt invincible and their increasingly worried parents. He couldn’t shake the feeling and, on his break, checked his own rings and wondered if his patients simply reminded him of himself.

Kellen hadn’t been home in days. She had no idea what was growing in her refrigerator but she did know that no single microbe was making these people ill. After countless tests of every bodily fluid and excretion they could think of, the only thing Kellen’s superiors knew was that a virus appeared inside the body literally from nowhere. No agent of transmission could be identified or isolated. The rings were an early symptom of infection, if it could be called that. The kids were all critically ill and increasingly so were their families and friends. Doctors and nurses were calling in to work with head and body aches, enervation and nausea. Walter had gone out to help at a hospital, dressed in the finest biohazard gear that could be purchased. With so many people sick and the vector still unknown, money was not an object. Nonessential personnel had been sent home weeks ago and would be recalled to work when necessary and/or possible. Support staff was bare-bones. Even the cafeteria staff were mostly absent.

The phone. “This is Kellen.”

“It’s Walt. I can’t come back in. I’ve got them. The spots.” Oh God.

“Walt, no. You can’t. You’ve been suited up tight haven’t you?” She felt desperate and for the first time really scared. Walter could be abrasive and sometimes preachy but he was a nice guy and he lived to mentor promising researchers.

“Sorry Kel, I won’t be back in. You’re going to be cut off soon.”

“What do you mean cut off? The line?” Annoyance seemed like a good way to replace her worry.

“From everyone. I know you’re drowning in blood there but everyone’s sick and we can’t risk the last well people getting sick. Has anything popped up yet?”

“Nothing. Same as before. Similar viruses but different in each person. It’s like the body manufactures them itself. I heard that some people aren’t getting them.”

“Some people who?”

“One of the blogs I read is written by a girl whose sister is blind. The sister isn’t sick at all. Wish we had her blood here to see if there is some reason why.”

“The blind? That’s odd. Maybe they don’t get out much. Bump into things, you know.” Typical Walter, all heart.

“Maybe someone should check into it? I know I’m just a lab rat but-“

“Not just a lab rat, but we’re looking at everything. You’ll get to make theories one of these days. Keep looking at the blood. Try to find something. I’m counting on you. When this is all over I’m going to write you a glowing performance review.” Well, that soothed the sting a little, but the slight was unmistakable.

Marla’s phone rang.

“Hello?” Her voice was uncharacteristically soft, scratchy. She had Jeremy’s flu. She looked at the clock, hoping she could feel better in enough time to go see her boy.

“Mars. It’s Kate.” She sounded, if possible, worse than Marla did.

It was foolish at this point to ask how she was doing. Marla waited, listening to the breath hitching wheezily on the other end of the call.

“Benji…the twins. My babies are gone, Marla. All my babies are gone. Nina’s dead, Abby…nobody can find her.”

“What about Dora?” She asked even though she didn’t want to.

“She was admitted to the hospital yesterday. It doesn’t look good for her.”

Marla sighed. “Abby was right. How could this be anything but the end of the world?”

Nobody else was using the couch in the lab’s break room, so it and the immediate area surrounding it became Kellen’s home away from home. She spent most of her time wearing scrubs and booties, sending test results out on the same carousel the samples came into. The samples didn’t come so much these days though and sometimes the results sat for a while. The tv in the break room was old and didn’t get cable, so she didn’t know whether regular shows were still going on but it seemed on the channels she had, the news was on all the time. The news anchors were ashen, though, and weren’t looking so well. The woman could barely sit up straight and the delivery of both was nearly a monotone. All the news, all the time, was about the ring flu. The kids were dead. Their parents were dead. Doctors and nurses were dead and dying and the hospitals were like the morgue waiting list by now.

She couldn’t stay here much longer either. She was going stir crazy from being isolated and the cafeteria had stopped making and bringing food. She was surviving on whatever hadn’t gone bad in the vending machines. Her badge had magically gotten unlimited credits and there was an entire wall of mostly unhealthy food in varying states of preservation. Even though she was used to spending most of her time alone, Kellen had become abominably lonely. Walter was the closest thing she had to a best friend lately and he was sick. She crossed over to a window and stood on a chair to see outside through the small aperture. Couldn’t even open it to get fresh air. Nothing was outside. Just the mostly empty expanse of parking lot and the distant road visible between breaks in the trees. She hadn’t seen any cars on it in a while. There wasn’t any bloodwork coming in now. The few people still in the building sent instant messages to one another about where food and beverage caches could be found, how to operate the laundry, and where the key was to the janitorial supply closet so more toilet paper could be gotten.

Kellen left the window and paced the floor, eyed the machines. She was tired of cheese puffs. Her stomach was in knots. She wanted a steak sandwich. Where in the world would she ever get a steak sandwich? The realization finally hit her. In the quiet break room with its staticky tv Kellen broke down and cried. She would never probably have a steak sandwich again. Or get a glowing review from Walter. Or get another job or smoke another joint or any number of things. The world was dying and she felt in some way responsible because she had run out of tests to do just like every person at every other lab in the world and there was no answer. For a while she sat on the couch with her knees drawn up and close to her chest, arms wrapped around, and her head down. Not like someone was going to show up and see her, and so what if they did? She’d literally spent more than six weeks holed up in a small section of a building, increasingly and finally absolutely alone. Eventually she cried herself to sleep.

Marla lay in her bed, beautiful eyes fixed on the ceiling. Nobody had been able to come see about her and she’d expired alone. Her boy had died weeks before and she hadn’t been able to ease his suffering nor had anyone been able to ease hers. It was over now, as was the suffering of all the Mothers’ children and most of the Mothers themselves.

“Kellen” She jolted awake, surprised at hearing a human voice in her space. It was Walter.

“Walt! Oh man shouldn’t you be in the hospital or something?” He looked ashen and very ill. He had sunglasses on. “Sit down, Walt. Come on. Where’s your suit?”

“Kellen I think we figured out the vector. It’s not a germ.” He paused to catch his breath, his now-bony frame plopping into a chair. Absurdly he was wearing a lab jacket which seemed several sizes too large and khakis but this time they were rumpled and stained. “It’s eye contact, Kel.”

“It’s…what?” She glanced at the dark glasses. “Eye contact? How can that spread a disease?”

“The ring is an instruction. You can’t help but study it and you, you feel like you know it. It tells your body to make you sick.”

“I don’t understand. I saw pictures and-“

“Not very good ones, I assume. Inside of us all there are the remains of diseases that have become part of our genetic makeup. This instruction wakes them up. Or makes up a new one. It’s like a recipe, Kel.” A recipe for what, she wondered in the face of the clear answer.

“So everyone’s-“

“Dead. Yes. You were right about the blind. They don’t have it. Neither do tiny pockets of remote or secluded people. Everyone else is fading fast. Humanity is fading fast. Oh Kellen, who would think it would end like this?” Tears were trickling down from under the glasses. Walter turned his head to wipe them so he didn’t expose her. It seemed important to try to save at least one person in the face of the failure to save anyone else. He rose unsteadily.

“Walt, what are we going to do? We need a plan.” Kellen shook her head as if she were refusing the enormity of it all. What were they going to do? What did you do when the end of your species was near? She felt weak, her knees wanted to buckle but she was already sitting. She kicked her feet as if backpedaling through time.

“I came here with a plan.” His hands had been in his pockets and when he withdrew them Kellen thought how absurd it was that he’d carried around tiny waterguns with him. Just as she was about to ask him what he was going to do with them he sprayed her in the eyes. 

Special Delivery

Sebastian Agrippa

Massive hoofs, the size of watermelons, crushed the rocks underneath as every muscle in his horse quivered as though animated by some internal current of electricity. The enormous steeds were bred for this kind of work. Their riders, however, were not. In fact, and it was indeed a fact, to go where they were about to go you pretty much had to be dead. With all the great machines and wondrous inventions; flying machines and such, this was the one task that still required primitive beasts of burdens, and it was madness. The whole thing made no sense; there were easier ways to travel, damned easier. Bloody tradition my bloody arse, Quail thought to himself and not for the first time. This damn tradition must have been thought up by some ancestral demented alcoholic frat boy whose arse Quail was determined to shove his boot up when they meet in the afterlife. Oh and look here, we’re about to ride freakishly large over-glorified donkeys into the land of the dead, maybe we’ll meet him. I have a bone to pick with him. No doubt he is all bone by now. This shit is madness. Quail was sulking on the inside, unaware of his grim visage on the outside, but then again, better anger than the slowly worming knot of fear.

Dalai hoped she was doing a good job of hiding her fear. She knew logically that they all felt the same way, but there was a sense of competition here, and she wouldn’t be the one to pee in her pants. Now if only she could get her bladder on her side. They all chased adrenaline, perhaps more religiously than they should, but it doesn’t take much creativity to notice the similarities between a rush and fear. Besides, even their usual risk taking had controls, this was uncontrollable, they may all die. Come to think of it, she wondered, what happens if you die in the land of the dead? Just stay there, I suppose? Or are you immortal? Curiosity aside, she wasn’t about to find out. It was almost time to go and everyone was beginning their pre launch rituals. Most people thought of her ritual as the most pessimistic, but anyone who knew her knew it was actually more of arrogance than anything else. Her ritual consisted of watching her comrades, memorizing every detail about them and their gear in case they all died. This of course rested on the basic belief, or perhaps conceit, that only she would survive if all hell broke loose. Oh my life is just full of puns isn’t it? They were five this time. The four closest friends she had ever had. To her left sat Golan, a massive brute of a man, on his horse, Menes.

Golan stood at seven feet and four inches, and was as thick as a tree. His father, also a large bear of a man, would often joke that Golan’s mother had cuckolded him with a tree, or mountain, or beached whale. As a child he had accidentally strangled the full grown mastiff that they purchased for him as a pet. Its throat was crushed beyond any hope of repair even had they gotten there in time. He was always quiet and watchful, reserved without being withdrawn, and always polite, even when he lost his temper. The horse he rode, Menes, though the same breed as all the others, seemed amusingly small beneath his massive frame. A difficult feat since this breed, Brechen, were easily twice the size and with far greater strength and stamina than a regular horse. All their horses descended from the same stock and were very similar but could easily be told apart by their personalities. Menes was sturdy, thoughtful, and singularly intelligent. He would probably be the last to die of all their horses.

To her right was Belen. Belen was a pretty boy, the perennial ladies man, obnoxious and narcissistic, but quite possible the most graceful fighter she had ever known. While the rest of them were taught the more brutish fighting forms preferred by the military, he was learning to do things that would make an enemy swoon while he killed said enemy. While she and others were at the academy, he was mostly home schooled because he was apparently a genius. Dalai had yet to see any evidence of that, and he was her brother, she would know. Uppity jerk face! She loved him though, and would continue to love him, even when she could finally catch him unawares and drown him, or smother him with a pillow, or push him off a cliff, or… He was looking at her now, so she put on her most convincing smile hoping she didn’t look maniacal. Maddeningly, and as usual, he didn’t seem to notice or care. His horse, Palace, was just like Belen. Palace wouldn’t eat, drink, or sleep with the other horses. He would not allow himself to be touched or ridden by anyone but Belen, and occasionally Dalai. The horse was by no means a frolic, he was the strongest and most hale of all their steeds. The rider of Palace could guarantee that he would get from point A to point B; his only job was to hold on.

Ahead was the fearless leader of this particular exercise in insanity. His name was Chiron, riding Mange. Mange was the oldest steed, and in fact the oldest thing in this adventure. He was older than all the riders. Not that anyone without a trained eye could tell by looking. He was as healthy as or healthier than the others and had been on this kind of trip a number of times before. Chiron was not really the strongest or the smartest of the group. But he was the oldest, and cared about the entire squad like family. An orphan since he was nine, he molded a new family out of this unit and the rest of the squad. Like Mange, he had taken this trip a number of times and had the scars to prove it, including one deep scar just beneath the left side of his lip that made any smile he gave, few as they were, seem crooked and endearing. His right eye was slightly opaque due to the damage he sustained on one of his first trips and so it was mostly blind, but it was rumored that he gained a special kind of vision from it on the other side of the gate. He was the navigator, we go where he goes, and his job is to get us out alive, or at least not dead if there was a difference.

Behind her was Quail and Donkey. Who the bloody hell names their horse Donkey anyway? Quail was…

She flung a flask at him and in his shock it nearly hit his face.

“Damn it Quail, you have that creepy caca-face smile of yours. It’s creeping me out!”

Quail was not in the mood for this. He stooped to pick up the flask caught in his open utility bag and flung it back at her harder than he should have. But she caught it anyway.

“Quail! Wipe that damn grin off your face! You need to stop being a doody-head and plotting on how you’re going to rape me!”

Belen spit out a laugh that scratched his throat and burned his nostrils before swallowing any further outbursts under her stare. He decided at that moment that he was very interested in a rock on the floor. Quail was still looking incredulous, trying to find the right words to say,

“uh, huh, what? I’m not trying to rape you, stop being crazy.”

“You are planning to rape me. You’re waiting for me to fall asleep and then you’ll take advantage of my womanly ways, because you love me. And you keep staring at my chest!”

She seemed to scream, whine and sing it at the same time. Quail, poor thing, looked like a trapped mouse surrounded by cats.

“I’m not staring at your chest… I’m staring at your neck, and wondering where that hideous grotesque wart that’s where your face should be came from.”

Dalai stuck out her tongue at him. “You wish you could bury my face in kisses. You were going to rape me in my sleep.”

“I was not going to rape you in your sleep,” Quail barked, “definitely not!”

Dalai’s face lit up with triumph, “Aha! So you admit you were going to rape me, just definitely not while I was sleeping.” Quail just looked away, he wasn’t in the mood, and he knew she was just trying to cheer him up. No one knew his moods like she did. Suddenly the image of drenching her face in kisses popped in his head and he blushed. And as he tried to pretend he couldn’t see her smile he thought to himself he would never go on a mission in the same unit as his girlfriend again, he always thought that, and he knew it was a lie.

Chiron suddenly turned around in his saddle. “Okay children, form up! Wedge formation, the gateway will be opening in a moment. Stay close, watch each other’s backs. Follow me wherever I go. If I fall, do not stop under any circumstances, follow Mange, he will lead you to the next point and a gateway is set to open automatically if I’m not there to open it. If Mange falls, keep riding straight and switch to emergency procedures. You know what to do. Trust in your training and don’t pick up hitchhikers hoorah!” They all threw the salute back. “Hoorah!”

In formation, everyone began methodically checking their gear, strapping their bags, and strapping themselves into the steed-harnesses. The harnesses were awkward straps like suspenders keeping the riders secure from flying off their horses. This, however, meant that occasionally, if struck with enough force, they could take their steeds down with them. With their gear strapped they checked each other before moving on to their weapons. For tasks like this, they were each granted standard military machetes: large blades modified with a slight curve at the end, a few daggers, and a mini tactical axe. Projectile weapons of a large enough calibers would be unwieldy so they were limited to hack and slash, besides, blades don’t run out of ammunition. With all pre launch checks complete, the unit fell silent waiting for the moment.

Nerves were tight, each face severe and grim, muscles tense and jaws clenched. Each said a silent prayer in their own way because where they were going, God would be deaf to their cries and it would be too late for absolution. They had trained for this. Endless drills to make their movements instinctive. But nothing could prepare them for the real thing quite like the real thing. The only thing they were prepared for was the feeling of passing through the gates; everything else would be different every time. They just had to remember their training and follow the leader.

Quail felt grimmer by the minute. He had heard the stories about jumps like this. The thrills were amazing but it was the horrors of those who didn’t make it that troubled him. He recalled an older cadet with a number of these particular jumps on his belt telling him the story of a cadet improperly strapped in who was lost on the other side. On another jump they saw him torn near to pieces, screaming in agony begging to be saved and cursing them for riding past. They talked about the horrors and monstrosities all looking to get out with you and their descent into rage and mad attempts to keep you there when they realize you would leave them. Too many service men came back scarred and unable to continue in service. They would return addle –brained, mumbling to themselves and drooling everywhere, unable to sleep because of the night terrors haunting them. Some returned seemingly just fine until later, sometimes days or weeks, sometimes months or years later, they would snap and go on a killing spree or fall into a catatonic state or just lie down and die. It was because of these that they limited the number of this particular jump for special occasions, and tried to use the same teams as often as possible. After a jump, all personnel were required to go into counseling and would be segregated from the general population for up to a month. Even the Wraiths, the elite military scouts, and assassins one and all, true killers, were only required to be separated for seven days. These were men and women trained to kill instantly and efficiently under the slightest amount of stress. Quail had to admit, he wouldn’t want to meet any of those fuckers in a city central market during the summer.

This was the worst part, the waiting. Any amount of courage or comfort was allowed to dissipate during these long silent waits. Instructors said the fear was better anyway, it kept you sharp. But Quail knew, if he had to wait any longer he would pop a vain, it was maddening.

The horses sensed it first. A slight change in the atmosphere, the smell of ozone in the air like the smell left behind after a lightening strike. The horses, though trained for this, were skittish. Who could blame them? For all their bred intelligence, they could never hope to understand the madness of where they were going, the realm of the dead. The hairs on their arms and the back of their necks began rising as the opening gate charged the air. It began as a rumbling that seemed to start from every direction, but then concentrate behind them. It was a rumble like a massive rockslide, slowly beating steadier till it sounded like a stampede. Quail couldn’t shake the image of a thousand gigantic wolves thundering toward him. The sound soon turned into something more terrifying. It began to sound like a rushing tidal wave with violent winds heading straight for them. He had been trained well enough not to look behind him, he would see nothing there. The real action was in front. Tiny sparks starting at a central location and steadily spreading out further, in wider arcs and longer radius, until it exploded in a massive crack. It was like the sound of some malformed projectile ripping unevenly through the sound barrier rather than piercing it. Suddenly there was a dark gaping maw ahead, sucking in all the air around them, winds whipping past them like they were caught in a storm, and frighteningly, over the sound of the wind raging past their ears, the bellows and screams of that realm’s inhabitants. God! How many of them are there?

It felt like they had been riding for an eternity but it may have just been a few minutes. The steeds refused to be detained by any obstacles. Their massive hoofs finding purchase crunching the bodies beneath them. There was no road, no trail, just bodies everywhere. Quail tried to focus on his unit but he couldn’t help but look up. The vastness of the realm was staggering; there was no horizon, just bodies stretching into infinity. There were so many of them, all of them moaning and screaming. They were piled on each other, crawling, walking or staggering, but all going in one direction… opposite to theirs. For the second time, Donkey stumbled as a hoof thrust clear through the chest cavity of a cadaver. There seemed to be no fires anywhere, but the whole place smelled of ash and sulfur. All the bodies existed in different stages of decay but they all seemed to still suffer physical sensations. They all seemed to be in some sort of pain. Periodically, through the screams, they heard the howling of some beast. None of them could imagine the creature, large enough to send a bellow piercing through that noise. And with each howl, the dead would drive themselves into frenzy, redoubling their wails. The most dangerous ones were the ones close enough to notice them. Each face decayed and rotting off showing fair amounts of bone beneath, if that hadn’t begun rotting too. You could see the anguish give way to determination and then rage as they fought their way over their cadaverous comrades to reach the steeds and hitch a ride out or steal the horses to make their escapes.

What made them more frightening was the desperate and guileless way they fought for purchase, reaching up to the reins and jerking on them with preternatural strength, gnashing their teeth and letting slip inhuman war cries. Ahead of Quail in the wedge formation was Belen. On the side harness of his horse Palace, was a severed arm. To his chagrin, Donkey seemed to have slowed down a fraction. Looking behind, Quail could see a headless cadaver clinging to Donkey’s tail and being dragged along over the other corpses. He looked down and noticed that Donkey had a new horseshoe on his left flank, a skull, no doubt belonging to the hitch hiker. Following Chiron’s lead, they all pulled out their machetes to hack of the limbs of the thickening crowds. They had been noticed and excitement, rage, anguish; all these things rippled and blossomed through the ranks of the dead till it seemed they would be slowed to a stop just from the thickening knot of bodies reaching out to them. In the distance behind and to their left, Quail noticed something moving toward them with immense speed catching up to them. The ‘thing’ was grey as ash. It seemed to be just a torso with a ghastly head, razor sharp teeth, and massive spindly arms that rotated like windmills propelling it toward them. The distances played with scale and as it got closer, it became obvious it was the size of Golan, perhaps taller. With Golan and Menes seeming the most burdened, the creature leapt at them from behind, wrapping its arms around the horse’s neck and biting into the back of Golan’s neck. The creature began to shake and sway side to side, violently trying to roll man and horse over. But Golan, despite jaws sunk into the back of his neck continued to keep up, letting out a massive raw before driving his fist backward between the beast’s eyes. It crumpled immediately but wasn’t dead. It had just been blinded.

Behind in the distance, more of those creatures emerged, thousands, all seemed to just materialize from the legions of dead, as though they were made of the ash in the air, if it could be called air. Just as Quail turned to face forward again a small form, couldn’t have been more than three years old when it died, leapt up, head butting his chest and knocking the wind out of him. He fought the urge to black out and only his training kept him in control as the steed, now struggling more to run against the tide of the dead, seemed to slow some more. As if taking a queue or coordinating their attack, more started doing the same from the side, hitting his horse in the chest, while he slashed as best he could. To his left, in front of Golan, a corpse managed to gain a hold of Dalai’s horse and climb on behind her. Quail wasn’t sure if it was grinning out of joy or if its face had just decayed to a point where it showed permanent teeth. But it began grabbing at her breast, trying to tear her armor off. This one seemed less concerned with escaping and more interested in mounting her. It squeezed violently and eagerly on her breasts, and looked like it was licking the back of her neck, periodically screaming some shrill war cry. She fought him while trying to control her horse, wildly throwing her elbows behind to no avail. Quail threw a dagger at the back of its skull. It stuck but did not stop it. It didn’t even seem to notice. Golan closed the distance and wrapped one massive hand around its neck squeezing and yanking backward. Sometimes, Golan’s strength was frightening. He nearly decapitated it. The only ones who seemed relatively untouched were Belen and Chiron. Belen was calmly swinging his machete in wide arcs, back straight and unperturbed. Looking at him, you would think he was harvesting wheat in some pretty meadow. Damn he was graceful. Chiron’s movements were harsher, more rigid, and more powerful. He moved like someone born on a battlefield keeping his eyes forward. The whole unit, even Belen, was drenched in gore and rotting or rotten flesh but he and Mange seemed untouched. He was death within death. Any dead body launching itself against Chiron would be cut to pieces before it even got close enough for its falling pieces to touch him.

Something emerged from the tide. Like nothing Quail had ever seen. It was the size of a wild boar but looked like a cross between a frog and a pit bull. It launched itself at Chiron with surprising speed and he only managed a moment of surprise before it slammed into his chest and began clawing and gnawing at him. It clawed his chest and arms, forcing him to drop his machete but he managed to hold on to the reins with his left hand. His harness came loose, as the creature continued to slash, shredded in the onslaught. Chiron wrestled with it until a powerful swipe to his head knocked him backward off his horse. The whole unit gasped at this but miraculously he held on to the reins with his left hand and he was dragged, over the dead by Mange. Most of his face was torn off and part of his scalp was hanging loose. If he survived this, he wouldn’t be pretty ever again, not that he ever was. It wouldn’t matter anyway if they didn’t make an exit point soon.

Up ahead they saw it, a fresh opening, and the finish line. It was small so that nothing could get out but it would expand as soon as they crossed before closing quickly. Quail looked back and noticed the headless body still holding on and those strange legless creatures gaining on them. He set to work cutting Donkey’s tail hair, stranding the dead, and hoped they would make it in time. As they got closer to the gate, Quail could hear those creatures behind, almost close enough to leap. In their thousands, they sounded like a swarm of locusts almost drowning out the wailing of the dead. He had always wondered what his final words and thoughts would be when he died. He had imagined something heroic and memorable, but then again, he had also imagined an epic battlefield or a plush death bed, not some hellish nightmare from, well, hell. All he could think was, “shit shit shit shit shit shit shit!” With one final push their horses leapt toward the gate and somewhere behind the raw panic Quail hoped Chiron was still holding on and Donkey hadn’t stomped on him.

They all stood around panting, their horses sticky with sweat but otherwise curiously unperturbed. Belen, for all his grace fell to his knees puking repeatedly, and it was almost obvious from the smell that he had made a mess of his trousers. Dalai was doubled over, her eyes so wide open it appeared they would pop out. She was panting and he could hear her heart racing from where he stood, or was that his heart? As Quail tried to speak, nothing came out; his voice was raspy and weak. In the back of his mind he realized that he had been screaming the whole time during the trip. Screaming till each gasping breath hurt his lungs. Golan was quiet and thoughtful despite the bleeding on the back of his neck. Medics would take care of it and give him something for an infection. Though how one inoculated oneself from dead infections was beyond Quail at the moment. It was all he could do to keep his hysteria at bay. He could see they were all fighting in their own way to keep insanity away. Quail knew for certain that he was never going to sleep again.

They all looked up suddenly as Belen gasped. Chiron was getting up. He was a mess, his left cheek bone had caved in, the scalp on that side was hanging loose and most of the skin on that side of his face had been scraped off. Making him more ghastly was the missing flesh on the left where his lips should have been making it appear as though he were permanently grinning at some joke a demon just told. As he spoke, it was a little hard to follow. He was drooling on the left side and his words were garbled. “Eurry time. Eurry fvucking time.”

“Um what happens every time Chiron?” Quail asked, but wasn’t sure he wanted the answer.

“Euyry fvucking time, that fvucking demon dog comes for me. Every scar I have. I thought it vas just that type of creecha, but I’m convinced it vas the exact same creecha eurry time.”

Quail wasn’t sure if Chiron was smiling or it was his new face, but he could have sworn he detected some amusement. Did Chiron enjoy it?

“Next trip, I’ll pack a special weapon fvor him. I’yl chop him into little peaces; Bad doggy, play dead. Ahaha.”

Chiron had obviously gone off the deep end. He was planning to go back. He was actually looking forward to it. Chiron glanced at Quail, holding his gaze for a few moments, and then as if he had read Quail’s thoughts he nodded. Shaken, Quail went to attend Dalai, she didn’t seem damaged but she looked like she was trying the hardest to keep the panic at bay. He could almost see the adrenaline coursing through her veins. If only he could have seen himself. He was pale, his eyes were bulging and he hadn’t blinked in a few minutes. He hadn’t noticed how hard he was breathing or how his whole body was trembling. He seemed completely oblivious to the fact that his knees were about to buckle. He didn’t notice any of this, all he saw was Dalai, bent over, staring at a rock and Belen rubbing her back probably more for his own comfort than hers. Belen was pale and seemed old. They all seemed old, as if the realm of death had drained vast stores of their life force. Suddenly Dalai broke into laughter. It was a hacking, crow-like cackle that made the hairs on his body stand on end, mainly because of the raw madness that seemed to be behind it. Where are those bloody medics? There should be a team here already; we need our post-gate debriefing and we have a message to deliver damn it!

She looked up at him and her eyes seemed to glow slightly from within. It was a gaze that froze him, with his breath trapped in his lungs, and left him with a certainty of creeping madness if she didn’t get counseling soon. If he could see himself, he would have seen the same thing in his own eyes, but caring for others was part of his way of healing. Still laughing and staring at him he approached her.

“Babe… Are you okay?”

“Hoorah!” She responded and then returned to her cackling. That was good enough for him. He reminded himself that he would never go on a mission like that again. But he knew it was a lie, they were all lying to themselves. As the adrenaline finally wore off it was replaced by something calm and pleasant. They all knew, on the inside, that like Chiron, they were addicted. That was one hell of a rush. Hoorah indeed.

Dusk of Dreams

Sebastian Agrippa

They’d been standing there for what seemed like an eternity. Corny as it seemed, time seemed to have slowed to a crawl. Nothing was happening at a quick enough pace for Matt. Nothing! He was getting tired again, he couldn’t keep this going much longer, but he couldn’t go back there. Not there. What’s the hold up? His guide looked just as restless as he did, but Matt suspected it was for a different reason.

His guide was a fast talking diminutive little man. He barely rose to Matt’s chin, and Matt could hardly be considered tall with his six foot frame. No one really knew his name, all the old ones down in Chinatown called him Guy, but Matt suspected it was more in the “that guy” sense of the word. Guy was pale with a shock of curly red hair poking out of his bowler hat, who wears bowler hats anymore?, and he had a slight twitch, the barely noticeable kick of his left leg as though suffering from a barely contained bout of Parkinson’s. It made him look nervous and restless, and his fast talking created the illusion of boundless energy.

“I thought we were going to see some wizard? Why are we at a club in the middle of the city? I don’t really have time for this.”

Guy glanced sideways at him, opened his mouth, and then paused as though trying to decide the words to use. This was the first time Matt and seen him at a loss for words, he seemed genuinely perturbed; as though it were imperative he used the right words. It was… eerie. It was quickly replaced by his familiar smile. You couldn’t help but feel you were staring at Dennis the menace after a prank gone wrong. It both managed to disarm you and force you to brace for a lie. This man was trouble… fun, fun trouble.

“Yes we are going to see the Wizard.” He finally said, amusement tingeing his voice. “What do you think wizards do on their off time? They all need hobbies, pastimes, jobs. The bad ones game the system, but most of them make a place for themselves and earn a living.”

Matt’s head jerked at the answer. “You mean he works here? The wizard works at this club? If you tell me he’s the bartender I’ll have my money back, thank you, and be on my bloody way.”

Guy just continued to smile for a moment. The door finally opened into darkness and Guy casually walked in. “Oh you’ll see.” He said behind him. Matt paused for a beat, looked over his shoulder at passing cabs, then walked in after him.

The two of them stood in front of set of massive double metal doors, easily ten feet in height. At the center, where the two doors met was a circular symbol, a crescent moon with strings or tendrils radiating out from its center. Guy answered the question before Matt could ask it.

“That’s his mark. Chances are, if you’ve ever had a dream in this city, you’ve seen it at least once.”

“I’m not sure I understand.”

“You will. We just have to wait for the next round for these doors to open.”

Great, more waiting, it was getting harder to stay awake, what had it been, 36 hours? 48? Guy seemed to notice the growing unease, and for a moment sympathy covered the smile.

“Okay look, there’s no need to worry. This thing has you spooked doesn’t it?” Matt tried his best to compose himself before responding, but his answer was shrill and almost too loud.

“Of course I’m spooked! Every night, every nap, every time I close my eyes; you don’t know what I’ve seen, you have no idea how much it hurts…”

The door started opening. A slow swing that betrayed the heaviness of the doors, but there seemed to be no one in sight controlling them. Guy grabbed his arm, almost stopping the blood flow. His knuckles were white from the strain and his eyes had widened with the creeping hint of madness. He started whispering urgently.

“Listen carefully, the wizard is here tonight. He’s the DJ. They call him DJ Oz, but I wouldn’t refer to him as the Wizard of Oz if you value your life… or sanity.” Guy glanced back toward the doors, almost fully open now, and exposing pitch blackness beyond. He turned back to Matt and continued, unbelievably he sped up.

“Pay attention. The wizard is a dream weaver. Every night he broadcasts over his pirate radio station, Morpheus fm. As almost eight million people sleep, he controls their dreams; he is the lowest common denominator between good and evil.” By now, Guy was practically hissing and looking desperate to finish. “He has the power to control the dreams of eight million people, he can make it real, and he can stop you from waking up or plague you with nightmares. Anything that happens in Dreamtime was either caused by him or he knows about it. It’s his world. But even he isn’t powerful enough to force a waking dream unless he is in contact with you.”

It suddenly dawned on Matt. That’s why they were there. The wizard could explore his dreams without him having to fall asleep. But Matt was shocked out of the revelation by a slap across his face from Guy, now barely looking human, foaming at mouth.

“I said focus! Everyone in there is in Dreamtime, the lines have been blurred, you have to relax and let him control it. Otherwise, amplified by his power, there’s no telling what you might unleash in there. Once we step into that room, we step into a new world that is both beautiful and savage. Remember to let go. Walk through that thick wall of darkness and try not to be afraid. Let go…”

Matt was trying, but the panic crept in from all sides, threatening his mask of serenity. The door had opened to a maw of darkness so thick it looked like a wall. It looked like the universe had just stopped at that spot. Guy had walked in, practically dived in and Matt could hear no sound emanating from it. It dawned on him, Guy wasn’t panicked, he was excited. What had seemed like fear was actually the pain of an addict struggling to hold back long enough to instruct a newbie. Still, the panic crept in, and fearing his knees would buckle before he had a chance, Matt leapt in…

It looked like a regular dance floor. Matt felt like he’d been to it or any one of a thousand raves just like it. The place where the door had been was replaced by a mass of dancing bodies. He seemed to be the only one not dancing. He was standing in the middle of the dance floor, alone, with all the revelers giving him a wide berth though none of them seemed to know he was there. Guy was nowhere to be seen. The revelers were gyrating mindlessly, throwing themselves around, twisting provocatively. The building hadn’t seemed large enough to hold more than a hundred and fifty people from the outside, but there must have been a thousand people there, “he controls the dreams of millions,” Guy had said. A thousand was probably a cake walk.

Then Matt noticed him, the DJ, on a raised Dais scratching away at the turntables, one headphone to his ear like some yuppie, and wearing dark sun glasses despite the darkness of the club. He was massive, an image out of Norse myth, with a massive mane of hair and an impressive beard, but the effect was somewhat spoiled by his choice of clothing. He wore a red tracksuit, strait out of the 80’s rap seen, or an episode of Sopranos. His fingers were dotted with glowing jewelry and what looked like runic symbols. Matt was beginning to notice the symbols all over the wizard. The runes ran down the visible parts of his neck, hands and any other exposed piece of flesh; all of them glowing as though lit from within. He was imposing; powerful, impressive… he was magnificent.

For the first time Matt heard the music, he hadn’t noticed the silence that had preceded it. It started as a distant pulse, a steady beat that barely registered in his ears but tickled the back of his skull. It seemed to be coming closer and as it did he could hear the melodies beneath it. It was the most intricate and complex sound he had ever heard. It didn’t feel like it was being played but like it was being weaved. Matt couldn’t help himself, his body took a life of its own and began to gyrate and twist to the sound. The air around him thickened, almost fluidic and his body strained at the effort to maintain the rhythm despite the increased resistance.

He was suddenly elsewhere. He looked around and sensed he was in a garden but could not objectively make out his surroundings or register the items around him. The only thing in focus was the ursine man that was the wizard glaring at him.

Matt’s body continued its maddening gyration in the club, his movements becoming jerkier almost violent.

Matt was in the garden staring back at the wizard and trying to speak, but he seemed to have lost control of his mouth and his tongue seemed dead. The wizard just continued to glare, anger growing in his expression, eyes starting to glow as though lit from behind and his runic tattoos seemed to come alive.

Matt’s body continued to gyrate wildly, now he was leaping across the room, ramming into other revelers laughing and screaming loudly, frothing at the mouth.

The garden started to come into focus, Matt was regaining his ability to move, he felt the familiar weight of his tongue and opened his mouth to speak. Before a word came out he caught the distant flicker of orange in the corner of his eye and noticed for the first time that the wizard had been looking past him. Something behind him infuriated the wizard and he couldn’t shake the growing sensation of heat. With sudden realization Matt turned around to see an entire world in flames, buildings burning down, thousands of voices crying out amidst the scent of burnt flesh. In his immediate vicinity thousands of desiccated corpses with the tell-tale scars of a pox, seemingly dead from some pestilence each splayed out in various poses, fleeing or pleading. And through it all, from somewhere deep in the distance, a sickly cackle pierced through to them, raising the hairs on the back of his neck. It echoed for a moment and then cut off into a hacking cough.

Matt turned around to see the wizard furiously staring at him.

“WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?!?”

Matt stepped back, frightened, the words stammering from him. “I don’t know I didn’t do anything, I keep having these horrible nightmares; I came here for you to help me.”

The wizard took a step forward, his runes now glowing with urgency and fury, his eyes almost engulfed in flame. “YOU HAVE DOOMED US ALL, YOU HAVE RELEASED HIM!”

Matt was on his knees now, “I don’t know what you mean, who have I released, please don’t kill me.”

“FOOL! I DON’T HAVE TO KILL YOU, HE WILL, HE WILL KILL US ALL, YOU HAVE RELEASED MY FATHER…”

With that the wizard struck at Matt and he awakened in the club. As he looked around he thought he was alone, the club was empty, but the lights suddenly came on. The wizard was standing by the switch looking haggard. All around them were the bodies of the revelers, all taken by some sort of pox and a few with the unmistakable signs of scorch marks. The smell was awful, Matt gasped and coughed with every breath and he and wizard staggered to the exit. As they left Matt called out, “Guy! You still alive?” The wizard turned to Matt with a wry smile. “That’s more sympathy than my brother deserves. He fled once he sensed what was coming.” Matt started at that. There had been no resemblance, no hint.

“I hope he’s alright, wherever he is, he really hooked me up.” Matt was startled by the laugh he received from the wizard and couldn’t understand the bitterness coming from it.

“You still don’t understand my little hapless killer. My brother has the same abilities I do, just not as focused. He is a troublemaker and a trickster. If he were a god he would be Loki. He’s a dream shifter, tangling people in Dreamtime and taking whatever shape he wants in order to have fun. He has no heart, and I suspect you were one small part of an elaborate plan.”

They had made it outside and everything looked normal, no hint of the horrors within the building, and it seemed there would be none, because he turned around to see the building vanished. Matt had seen enough not to be shocked and was too shaken to think about the fate of the poor victims within. “No way, no way he is that sick. Everyone loves him; he’s charming and fun, and a really nice guy to everyone.”

The wizard laughed again. “If you were the devil, how would you hide? By being some evil dictator, or some charming aid worker? Whatever my little brother is playing at involves my father, which means it involves the end of all things. It would be just like Cotillion to think the end of the world was a fun practical joke.”

Matt still wasn’t buying it and the wizard could tell. He paused for a moment then continued talking about his brother, Guy, Cotillion. “A long time ago, out of boredom he walked into a town and infected all their dreams. He drove an entire town of a little over two hundred people insane with visions. Men jumped out of windows thinking they could fly. One man smashed his head against a wall for almost twenty-four hours. He’d been brain damaged within the first thirty minutes but it took him that long to die. By the end of the week all but three of them were dead.” Matt was trying to hide the growing horror on his face, Guy was a monster, and that story sounded like many that had been told throughout history, how many of them had been his handiwork.

The wizard continued. “It was after that incident that I put limits on his powers. The closer he was to me, the less power he had. He couldn’t affect dreams easily in my territory, and when others sleep he feels a compulsion to sleep where I have the advantage. In all honesty, I wondered why he didn’t just go as far from me as possible. I knew he was obsessed with this city, but had no idea why, so I set up shop here, He’s probably been biding his time this hundred years.”

Matt was caught off guard again. “Wait, how old are you anyway, and what’s your name?” The wizard looked at him for a moment, and then answered. “I am over a thousand years old probably as much as five thousand, you really stop counting after a few centuries and I’m a few minutes older than my little brother. My name is the wizard. At least that’s what it is now. I don’t remember my original name anymore.” The wizard suddenly stopped and looked up at the clouds, glanced over at Matt, then turned and started walking off hurriedly, calling over his back, “Follow me, we have to get to my sanctum now!”

Guy, Cotillion, stumbled past the rocks in his path toward a spot in the dark that he could sense more than see. He could barely hide the joy on his face. This was going to be so fun. A scale bigger than anything he had ever tried and he had tricked his brother into inadvertently helping. This was going to be better than what father did in Sodom and Gomorrah…

Guy called out into the dark. “Father! Father!” Through the dark a voice, like the scraping of dead trees responded.

“Yes my son.”

“Are you free father?”

”No my son.”

”But I hear your voice father, I swear it, I hear your voice.”

“That is because, my son, I live again… and soon as I am free, I shall punish your brother for imprisoning me, and then… all that you know shall come to an end.”

A dry cackling laughter emanated from the dark, sickly and diseased, broken by bouts of hacking coughs, but filled with menacing pleasure. Guy smiled, eyes lit from within, runes glowing beneath his shirt, and in the preternatural glow of his power an old and hideous face could be seen in a massive tree with all the plants and insects around it dead.

“Soon my son, everything shall be at an end…”

Tattoo

Mama Dragon (aka Juliet Devitt)

Mattie heard the door alarm and put down her book. She listened as three people came into the shop and heard the heavy door slam shut. Well, give them a few minutes to see what kind of people they sounded like and if they were going to stick around. No use getting the old bones up for no reason.

“Shit. Look at the place. A dump, man. Let’s go.”

Nasty sort, that one, Mattie thought. Heard it before; guys who think they’re big and bad and treat people like crap. Any luck, they’ll turn around and leave, just like he wants.

“Hey, wait a minute, Bull” Another young male voice, but a completely different tone to it. “You’ve been saying for months you want a special tattoo for your twenty-first birthday and you’ve looked all over and haven’t found something you like. So at least look, ok?”

“You’re dumb. Eggshell. Just ‘cause someplace looks like a dive, you think it’s going to be all cool and mysterious, like it’s hiding something special. Shit, look at the dumb stuff on the walls. Cartoons from the ‘50s for crisake. Besides, how come nobody else knows about this place? Not in the phone book, either. You just happen to see it riding by on the bus.”

“But there is some pretty stuff. . .” Hmm. Teenage girl with fake ID.

“Fuck. I’m not after pretty. You’re as dumb as he is, Tushy Trishy.”

“I know that, and don’t call me that.”

“Something wrong with liking your ass?”

Mattie heard the them shuffling through the design binders on the counter as the rude one, the one they called Bull, accompanied their perusal with an almost continuous stream of derogatory remarks and snorts. After a few minutes of this she heard a binder slammed down.

“This is shit. I’m out of here.”

“Hold on Bull.” It was the other boy. “My dad told me that when he was a kid people had to ask to see the good stuff because tattoo artists kept their special stuff in back. I mean, you never know.”

“Well where the fuck is someone? Can’t someone hear us out here?”

“Um there’s a bell on the counter,” the girl ventured.

“So ring it.”

Mattie began uncurling herself from her chair before the bell actually rang. Once the damn bell rang you knew they were sticking around. If it had just been the girl and the one boy, she would have already been out front to help them. But that other one? Oh well, work’s work. The bell rang again.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” The beaded curtain across the door to the front area of the store clacked loudly as she came through and stood behind the counter. Not much to the front area – the counter with design books jutted out from one wall and barred easy access to the back room. A handful of plastic chairs with their backs to store windows flanked the front door. The three young people stood in the narrow space between the counter and the chairs. It wasn’t hard to figure out which one was her potential customer – he had the look about him that said he’d get a kick out of tying a cat to the back of a car and driving down the freeway.

“So you think my shop is funny, hunh?”

“You’re shittin’ me, right old lady? You run this place? This stuff is crap.” His laugh was hard as he gestured to the walls and books.

“Um, he really wants something weird, something maybe no one else has,” the other boy said apologetically. “He wants it for his birthday. See, he’ll be twenty-one and he figures . . .um, well.”

“Oh, come on, Eggshell, don’t crack on him now. I mean, after all, you found this place for him so don’t get all wimpy about it.” The girl’s voice had an edge on that Mattie suspected was for Nasty (no way was she going to dignify his pitiful existence by thinking of him otherwise).

Mattie looked at the girl. “Sounds like your friend isn’t impressed with my shop.” Her glance shifted to Nasty. “You rang the bell. Must mean you want something. Otherwise why are you still here?”

He answered her question with one of his own. “How come nobody knows about this place? Maybe you aren’t legal or something?”

“People find it when they really need it.”

“Yeah? What’s that supposed to mean?”

Mattie shrugged. “Whatever you want it to mean. So do you want a tattoo or are you leaving? I’m in the middle of a good book.”

“So go back to you book. We’re leaving.”

“Wait,” the other boy sad, grabbing Nasty’s jacket. He turned to Mattie. “He can be a real dick, but maybe you’ve got some other stuff? My dad told me the old tattoo parlors kept their good stuff under the counter or in back. You know, so people had to ask. . .like, people who knew to ask.”

Nice kid, this one, thought Mattie. Nasty and Nice. One of those kids who ends up running around with a jerk because they’ve known each other since first grade. Her voice gentled. “Your dad knew his way around, hunh? Smart guy. And you’re smart for paying attention.”

There was grit in her voice when she turned back to Nasty. “You ought to learn some things from your friend. And he’s right – I do have other designs in back. Not any of that new tribal stuff and I don’t do crude symbols or sayings so don’t expect anything like that. But I can’t think of anyone who looked that didn’t find what they wanted.”

“Yeah, well I don’t want anything everyone else has. I want something different. I want something so weird that people will just flip.”

“By the way,” Mattie said, “are you going to be able to pay? And it’s got to be cash. I don’t have a machine for plastic and wouldn’t trust one anyway. If you have to run to the bank before we start, that’s ok by me.”

“Shit. Now that makes me think you don’t trust me. I got cash all right and more than enough.”

Mattie shrugged, then turned and held the beads to the side, gesturing him to follow. “You can come too,” she said as she noticed the girl and Nice hesitate. The room behind the curtain was large. A single bright reading lamp beside one of the chairs was the only light. One side looked hospital sterile with a steel counter and cabinets running the length of the wall. Two sinks interrupted the counter at strategic points and an autoclave sat at one end. Two chairs and a masseuse’s table, all upholstered in dark leather with white paper draped over them were set far enough apart to allow ample work space around them. Pale linoleum stretched from the cabinets almost to the middle of the room.

Where the linoleum ended, the room abruptly changed its mind. Nondescript carpeting laid the groundwork for two clusters of furniture, each including a couch, mismatched armchairs and strategically placed coffee and end tables. Separating the two seating areas was a waist-high double-sided book shelf, its top providing a counter for all sizes of binders stacked on top of each other.

Mattie headed to the pile, flicking on a couple of floor lamps as she passed. “So where do you want this tattoo? I gather someplace people will notice?”

“I want it on my right arm and big enough so even if a person just gets a quick look they’ll know I’ve got the baddest tat they’ve ever seen. If you even have something that bad,” Nasty snorted derisively.

Mattie slid binders around, creating newly ordered stacks. Finally she slid a dark red, medium sized binder out from under a shortened stack and walked over to one of the couches. “Here. Sit down and find what you want,” she said, putting the book down and walking away.

She turned a radio on to a classic rock station and flipped on bright lights around one of the chairs. She glanced back to see the three sitting on the couch, their heads together over the book. She turned back and began readying her work space, rifling through cupboards and drawers for what she needed. Behind her, she heard pages being flipped and a mumbled conversation between the boys, pierced occasionally by a squeal from the girl.

Finally there was a moment of silence, almost as if they had stopped breathing. Then Nasty exploded, “What the fuck?”

“You find something?” Mattie asked, disinterest oozing alongside the words.

“This shit is fucking crazy.”

“Isn’t that what you wanted?”

“Yeah. Sure. But what the fuck is it?”

Mattie crossed the room and took the book. “Oh, that one. I call it ‘Deranged Mitosis’.”

“Hunh?”

Nice looked at Nasty. “Mitosis. That’s when cells divide to make new ones. I think it means crazy cell division.”

“That’s just plain dumb to name a tat design.”

”Don’t get it, Bull,” the girl pleaded. “It’s worse than gross – it’s ugly and scary. . .it’s wrong. I won’t touch you if you get it.”

“Oh yeah you will,” he sneered, “because you’re mine and you wouldn’t know what to do if you didn’t have me. My body, I do what I want and you’ll take it.”

“She’s right,” Nice interrupted. “There’s something wrong with that picture. Ok, so it sounds dumb but there’s something bad, something really sick about it.”

“Yeah. And that’s why I’m going to get it. How much is it?” he asked, getting up.

“Humph.” Mattie let the air hang for a moment. Two fifty. Paid up front”

Nasty pulled out a wad of crumpled, dirty bills and counted them into her hand.

“Have a seat” Mattie stepped over and got out the ink she would be need.

Mattie turned to the two on the couch. “You guys want to look at more pictures? Or I’ve got stuff to read over on those end tables.” She motioned to some stacks of magazines.

“Thanks, but I’ve got a book,” the boy said pulling a paperback from his jacket pocket.

Mattie looked at the girl. “You?” she asked gently.

“Do you have something. . .not like that stuff. . .maybe pretty stuff?”

Mattie walked over to the bookshelf and rifled through the piles again, returning with two very large green binders and a petit pink one. “You’ll like these,” she said handing them to the girl.

* * * * * * *

Nasty preened in front of the mirrors, turning to see his new tattoo from as many angles as possible. “Come over and look at this. People are going to absolutely freak out.”

Nice shut his book. “We’ve already seen it in the book and we’ll have to look at it forever from now on. Why don’t you got out and show it to everyone who passes by.”

“I’m going to do just that while you two pussies get your act together.” He bashed through the beaded curtain and then the front door opened and shut, the alarm taking swift notice.

Mattie watched the other two drag themselves off the couch. The boy looked sad and apologetic. “Hey,” she told him, “you’re not him. And I don’t know where that asinine nickname of yours came from but I came up with another one for you. So you take care of yourself, Nice.”

She watched his face go from momentary confusion to a smile. “Thanks. Wow. Thank you.” As he ducked through the strands of beads he called back, “Don’t take forever, Trish.”

It did look like the girl would take forever. With obvious reluctance she put the binds back on top of the bookshelf.

“Aren’t you going with them?” Mattie asked.

The girl scrutinized the floor. “Yeah. . .but. . .I don’t know. . .don’t know why I stay with him.” She looked up at Mattie. “You have a lot of beautiful stuff in your books. How come you don’t put them out front so people can see them when they come in?”

Mattie put her hand lightly on the girl’s back and guided her toward the doorway. “Your friend. . .the one you call Eggshell?”

“I’m not going to call him that anymore. I don’t care what other people think, I’m going to call him Nice.”

“Ok, well Nice knows why these books aren’t up front.”

“So people have to ask for the good stuff?”

“Yeah. When you’re ready, honey, you come back and ask. And bring that Nice boy with you. I’ll still be here.”

Mattie watched her join the boys out on the sidewalk, then turned and walked back through the beads. She stood for a moment listening to the music before turning the radio off. She went back to the chair, her chair – nobody else ever sat in it. Sitting down, she reached over and opened the cupboard in the bottom of the coffee table near her seat. She pulled out an overstuffed scrapbook, the corners of its fabric cover long frayed to dust, and set it on her lap. A cat slithered out from under a nearby chair, jumped up, and hunkered down on the broad padded arm of Mattie’s chair.

“Hey Chocolate.” Mattie whispered. “You going to keep me company?”

Mattie let the album fall open. She never argued with it, never tried to force her will on it. She looked at the photographs and news clippings in front of her now and thought, Of course. On the left page was a picture of a smiling couple. The man cuddled a new born baby in the crook of his left arm while they held their right forearms up to display tattoos. Taped under the photo was a small note card. Mattie smiled, remembering their choices and remembering how wonderful it was to receive the photo and note telling her how their lives had blossomed.

But it was a newspaper clipping on the right hand page that was pertinent to today. The article was headlined “Slumlord won’t stand trial for multiple rape charges – Doctors say mysterious, aggressive cancer will kill him before courts can take action.” The photograph accompanying the article was a profile mugshot of the man, Deranged Mitosis clearly visible on his upper arm. 

Hollow World

Jonathan Martin

Chapter 1

It had been three days since the world had ended, for all intents and purposes at least. The three longest days of his life Peter thought to himself. He thought it had begun with a number of explosions, he now knew they were gas tankers, and even the underground tanks at gas stations. Those had been the worst, he had walked by, no, near a Seven Eleven, now reduced to a crater that was still smoldering, earlier. He had been there just five days ago, buying a six pack of Corona for him and his girlfriend to split. He hadn’t heard from Beth since the explosions.

She had called him to ask if he knew what was going on and to tell him that she was going to come home. The last sound he had heard on the other end of the phone, right after he heard her start the car, was another explosion. His ear had rung for a good hour after that, but no, he had to move on, he couldn’t think of that.

He passed hollow bits and pieces of metal as he walked down the road, that piece might have been a fender, that one a side panel on an SUV. Some of the parking lots he passed still had cars that were whole in them, but no one dared to turn them on, no dared to get close to them. A sound of metal scraping against metal made everyone jump, hands moving to the weapons they carried by their sides. A woman, maybe twenty-five, appeared off to the side of the road, pushing between pieces of two hulks, one of which might have been an F150, definitely the King Cab edition. She was crying, the tears smearing the dirt the caked her face. She approached cautiously, her hands clutched to her chest.

“Please,” she said between sobs. “P-please.”

“Hold on lady,” Sam said, a knife in his hand. Looking around, other people had their weapons in their hands as well.

“You hold on,” Peter countered. “Ma’am, if you will just stop there, I’m sure we can talk, and no one will get hurt.” This did not help the woman, whose dirty hair might have been blonde, but for now was matted with what looked like blood and soot. Her crying began to get heavier, her sobs louder. But she did stop. “What’s your name, miss,” he asked her.

“S-S-Sarah, with an H,” she stammered out, trying to control her sobbing.

“Well Sarah,” Sam began…

“With an H,” she added, clinging to something of her own.

“Yes, with an H,” Sam continued, “do you have any weapons with you?”

This was the fourth survivor that Peter, Sam, and the rest of the group had encountered, and after the first one had seen them and opened fire without asking questions, it sounded like a smart plan. The group, for indeed that was what it had become, consisted of himself, Sam, Julie and her young son, Kyle, Zachariah, and Amy.

“No, no I don’t.” She said, and the dress she wore did not offer many, none in fact, places to hide anything.

“Well Sarah, with an H, where are you coming from, and are you alone?” Sam asked.

“Yes I’m alone, and I was at TWU when,” she started crying again. Peter approached her, causing the rest of his group to tense.

“It’s ok, can you tell us what you saw?” Peter’s voice was low and soothing, or at least he hoped it was. He figured that her story was going to be the same as Sam’s, same as Amy’s, but he, no, they, they needed to be certain.

“Wednesday afternoon, about two, stuff started blowing up, gas stations, cars on the road. My Ethics class, we all went to see what was going on, and after everyone saw the smoke, they all ran to the parking lot.” She had been fine for the few seconds this had taken, but as she recalled the next bit, her sobs started again.

“It’s ok,” It was Amy. Those were the only two words he had heard her say.

“Well, my car was in the shop, so I had walked to class, so as I was walking back, I heard more explosions, coming from the parking lots, and as I got there, I saw Emily get into her car, and it went up in smoke and flames.” She forced the last bit out, but Peter could tell it was cathartic, her breathing became easier, her crying lessening. “One of the cars must have blown up a power line or something because I watched the school building go dark, for about a minute, and then the backup generator kicked in, and the next thing I knew, the school was raining down on me.”

Sam looked at Peter and nodded. “Gas generator.”

“Well, you come with us Sarah with an H, I’m Zachariah.” He held out his hand, an innocent gesture, which she shrank from.

“It’s ok, we haven’t shot you yet, we’re not going to.” Peter said. He saw the look of relief wash over her face.

“They did, they shot at me.” She was looking over her shoulder. “Yesterday, they shot at me.”

Chapter 2

A week had passed since they had met Sarah, with an H. Peter could not help but think about the things people held on to when they were pushed to their limits. The day after they had met Sarah, they came across a sixteen year old boy named Brian in the frozen food section of a Walmart, a spoon in one hand, a gallon of rocky road ice cream in his lap, and a Winnie the Pooh blanket draped over his shoulder. When they finally managed to get the spoon out of his hand and for him to come with them, he clutched the blanket so tightly his knuckles turned white. Two days after that, they had met Chris.

Their first impression of Chris was of a 90’s grunge rocker, right down to the faded red and black flannel shirt he wore over his Misfits t-shirt and stringy bleached blond hair. He had an acoustic guitar slung over his left shoulder and over his right was a bag full of beef jerky and peanuts. That first night, while they camped inside a vacant house a little ways off the interstate, he offered to play them a song. After everyone decided that would be nice, Chris pulled the guitar off of his back and set down on a green chaise lounge while the rest of the group, now numbering ten people total, sat down, mostly on the floor to listen.

Chris began to play, and after a few moments, Peter looked around. He knew the tune, but could not place it, and by the looks on everyone else’s face, that seemed to be the consensus. It was not until about a minute in, when Chris began to sing, and he only sang the one line, that the song dawned on the group. “And I feel fine…”

“Chris, do you know the rest of the song?” Peter asked.

Chris nodded, and continued to play, not missing a beat, and once the chorus kicked in, once again, “And I feel fine,” this time though, he sounded guilty.

“Chris, that’s ‘It’s the end of the world as we know it’ isn’t it?” Amy asked. “Do you really think that’s appropriate?”

“And I feel fine.” As he finished the line one last time, tears streaming down his face, he flung the guitar against the wall. With a resounding thud, the guitar bounced off the wall and landed on an unoccupied sofa, the same ugly green as the chaise he was sitting on.

Amy stood up and went over to where Chris was, and, sitting down beside him, put her arm around his shoulders and just sat there while he cried. “I get it, Chris, I get it.”

Zachariah, his bald pate reflecting the candlelight, stood up as well, “I’m going to take the flashlight and look through the rest of the houses on this street. The power is out so food is going to start spoiling soon, and we need to start stockpiling canned goods and the like if we are going to make, plus I may find more weapons or candles and batteries. I’m going to take the wheelbarrow that is in the garage. Wish me luck.” With that, he got up and left the house through the garage. A few seconds later they heard the garage door open, and then close.

Zachariah went to the last house on the same side of the street, figuring he would start there and work his way back to the house they were currently residing in. After no one answered his knock, they were still civilized people after all, he tried the front door and found it locked. Zachariah had been a locksmith before that day, and his particular skill set served him well now as he pulled a pick out of his jeans pocket and proceeded to force the tumblers open. Fortunately for him, most house locks were well below his expertise and he had the door open in no time.

Leaving the wheelbarrow on the front porch and walking into the foyer of the two story house he had just broken into, Zachariah swung the flashlight’s beam back and forth, highlighting a picture of a forest road, an old tube television, in addition to a staircase, and a hallway that presumably led to the kitchen. He decided to check upstairs first, and bounded up the steps, two at a time, and after rifling through all the closets and drawers he found, came up with a box of AA batteries, some matches, and a few candles. There was a can of butane too, but he did not want to risk having it blow up on someone, they still didn’t know what had caused the explosions. After climbing down the staircase, walking this time, he set his treasures in a pile at the door and went to look for the kitchen to see what goodies it would hold.

A door at the end of the hallway led Zachariah into the kitchen where the first thing he noticed was the smell of urine and feces, very strongly. He sung the flashlight around the room and had the light not caught the glow of it’s tags, he would have missed it. A small Doberman mix was laying in a corner looking emaciated, but managed to thump it’s tail a few times upon seeing another living thing. Zachariah moved cautiously into the kitchen, the dog’s eyes followed him, but it made no move to stop him. He approached a doorway that he thought might be the pantry and opened it. Indeed it was, and sitting there in the middle of the floor was an almost full bag of dog food, with an empty bowl sitting next to it.

Well, first things first thought Zachariah, as he filled the bowl with the dog’s food and slid, rather than walked, towards the dog. It lifted its head, and wagged its tail again, but that is all it had the energy for. He set the bowl down about a foot from the dog, because that is as close as he dared get, and the dog whined, but did not get up. “Come on guy, you need to eat.” Again the tail wagged, but the dog did not move. Going back into the pantry, Zachariah found what he was looking for and came out with a broom in hand, which he used to push the bowl right up to the dogs nose. This time, the dog lifted it’s head and dropped it into the bowl, managing to eat a few bites before needing to rest again. While the it was occupied, Zachariah continued his search, pausing when he found bowls and a jug of water to give the dog it’s own water dish, which it lapped at greedily. In addition to the mutt, Zachariah found a case of green beans, some HoHo’s, a box of crackers, and some packs of Ramen noodles, all of which he added to his pile at the door.

The dog still showed no interesting in moving, so Zachariah topped off the water bowl, and the food bowl, of which it had finished about half. He set another bowl full of water on the floor, a couple of feet from the first and told himself he would come back in the morning to check on the dog, before he left, and after carrying the two armfuls of acquisitions to the wheelbarrow, proceeded to the next house, one stop closer to being back with his companions.

He approached the front door, this one painted red to match the shutters his flashlight had shone on. Setting the wheelbarrow at the foot of the porch steps, Zachariah planted his feet and knocked on the door. The first bullet grazed his check, but the second shot caught him in his right bicep, with enough force to knock him off the porch, and into the wheelbarrow, tipping it over and scattering it’s contents. Dazed, it took Zachariah a second to come to his senses, and once this was done, he stood up and took off running to the voices of his companions, who had come outside to see what the gunfire was about.

He ran towards them, about four houses down from where he was, and stumbled as he tripped over the gnarled root of a large tree that was growing in one of the lawns he was cutting across. As he lay there, unable to use his arm to raise himself, and nauseous from the pain, circle of light shown on him, and he heard someone, he thought it was Amy, say, “There he is.”

Hands were on him, picking him up, and he lifted his head to see Peter on one side of him, and Chris on the other dragging him bodily back towards the house they had moments before been in.

“He’s been shot!” It was Amy, and she didn’t sound sickened, just shocked. “Lets’ see what we have for painkillers inside, and I will walk into town and get some tools in the morning to take the bullet out.”

“What do you know…” Peter started.

“I used to be a surgeon.”

And that was when Peter and Zachariah both realized how little they knew about the people they had thrown their lots in with.

Chapter 3

A loud explosion shook the house around them early the next morning. Zachariah was sitting on the ugly green chaise with a bowl of Cheerios, Kyle sitting next to him, picking at his own bowl of the same. Amy had just finished cleaning Zachariah’s arm, and was making a list of items she would need to extract the bullet. Peter and the rest were still sleeping.

As Amy, Zachariah, and Kyle all crowded around the front door, to see if it was safe to open, Peter came bounding down the stairwell, still pulling his shirt on. “What the hell was that?”

“I don’t know, but it was close.” Replied Amy, "we were just wondering who should go check it out."

“I will,” both Peter and Zachariah said at the same time

“You’re not going anywhere, Zach,” Amy said, in a motherly tone.

Peter opened the front door, and stepping off the porch, looking around. The house whose occupants had shot at Zachariah was smoking, and from this angle, it looked like the back half of it was completely missing. He turned towards the door, where Amy, Kyle, and Zachariah were all crowded around, and said, “I think they tried to start the car. It’s the house those bastards that were shooting at Zach were in.”

“It’s Zachariah. If you pull the bullet out of my arm, you can call me anything you want.”

“I’m gonna go investigate.”

Amy replied, “Ok, be careful.”

“Wait,” Kyle said, pushing his way past Amy and Zachariah, before returning carrying a Colt 45. “Take this.” He held the pistol out by its barrel, presenting the handle for Peter to grab. His posture said he had done this hundreds of times before, but the quiver of his lip said otherwise.

“Thanks Kyle, that is a great idea.” Peter walked up, took the gun from him, and tousled the boy’s head.

Peter started off on the walk, and the first thing he noticed was the fire that was in the process of engulfing the house. The second was the wheelbarrow, still with what looked to be canned goods in it, sitting at the foot of the steps leading to its porch. Deciding not to brave the fire, Peter grabbed the wheelbarrow and noticed that while the fire did not appear to be moving toward their house, the house on its other side looked like it might go up any minute.

As he thought this, the chimney of the burning house collapsed, and carrying burning lumber, across the side yard and hit the last house on the road. Peter turned back towards there temporary home, pushing the wheelbarrow, and saw Zachariah standing there shouting at him. Over the crackling and popping of the fire, he could not tell what he was saying, but he looked panicked.

Before Peter could take another step, Zachariah was running toward him, his right arm hanging uselessly at his side, making his lope seem unbalanced.

“Got to get the dog,” was all Peter heard as Zachariah ran by, almost bowling him over.

Pushing the door open, Zach plowed down the hallway, which had already filled up with smoke. He could feel the heat coming from the right side of the house, where the fire had already taken over the living room and dining room. Bursting into the kitchen, he found that the dog was cowering in a different corner, opposite the side of the house that was lit up. At least he had moved Zachariah thought.

Zach grabbed the dog’s food and water dishes, and said “Come on,” leaning against the kitchen door so it would stay open. The mutt did not need to be told twice and ran as fast as it could through the kitchen door and out the front door, which Zachariah had left standing wide open. As Zachariah ran through it behind the dog, he noticed a leash hanging on a coat hook by the door and grabbed that too with his right hand, the bullet wound screaming in pain. He registered that he was bleeding again as the fresh air struck him full in the face, and as he reached the bottom of the porch steps, he collapsed, exhausted, and was greeted by a rough tongue, licking the side of his face.

“Shoo! Get!” Peter barked as he approached.

“No Peter, it’s okay.”

“You sure? Is he what you went in for? You crazy sonofabitch.” He strung the words together, but he was smiling as he said it.

“Come on, help me get him back to the house, and we should try and soak our roof and at least the house next to us to keep that fire as far away as possible, otherwise we may all be looking for a new place.”

Peter took the leash from Zachariah’s hand and caught the dog. Clasping the leash to the dogs collar, he read the tag. “His name is Rocky, Zack…ariah,” he caught himself.

“You know, as long as you don’t call me dead or bait, Zach is fine, come on.” With that he stood up and started his off balance shuffle back towards Amy, and the rest of the group, all of which who now stood on the lawn.

“You idiot,” Amy said, looking at the blood that was trickling down his arm. Rocky walked up to her and nudged her hand with the top of his head. Absently she scratched it. “I need to go get some supplies. Sarah, come with me, I am going to need an extra set of hands”

“With an H,” was Sarah’s reply, but she was nodding. “Maybe we can find some bikes or something!”

“Take this,” Peter handed the Colt to Amy, he was still not sure of Sarah’s state of mind, and she made no move towards the gun, but she also did not shy away from it.

“There used to be a drugstore about two miles from here if I remember correctly, let us try there,” Amy said, pulling the list she had made from her pocket. “Does anyone need anything else, razors or anything?”

“Yeah, bring me a razor and a some shaving cream, grab any food you have room for, and maybe some extra medical supplies, gauze, band-aids. You’re the expert here.”

Sarah and Amy took off down the street, away from the smoldering remains of the house that had blown up, and the fiery remains of the one Zach had rescued Rocky from.

Jahannum

Les Mackenzie

And when he had opened the third seal, I heard the third beast say, Come and see. And I beheld, and lo a black horse; and he that sat on him had a pair of balances in his hand.

Zero

The creature wandered the open cracked concrete field staring up at the sun, a grey halo in the autumn afternoon sky. The buildings in the distance burned spires of thick black smoke reaching like thick clawed hands to grasp the empty sky. He remembered very little before the burning, both of the city in the distance and within his own body. His stomach churned like flaming oil but the wind chilled him. His body felt eternally cold.

Was there a place he needed to be? If so he had long forgotten it. His mind was a blurry collection of images that no matter how hard he concentrated would not be forced into cohesion. The sun, so beautiful, he thought blankly as he lurched toward the distant, smoking spires. His thoughts were overcome with emotion, where all rational thought was as alien. He appeared to be in the empty concrete field strewn with burning wreckage and charred corpses but he didn’t care to know why.

He just wandered through the purgatory.

One

Tariq bin Khalid bin Al-Salam glanced down at his watch again. It was the third time in the last two minutes noting the time as 0849. He stood silently amongst the throngs of men and women silently hurrying to their places of business. Cars honked and streetcars thundered by spilling more people onto the street whom mostly, like Tariq, said nothing while they monitored watches and cell phones, scurrying to their destinations.

He wore the business suit of an affluent businessman and carried a nondescript brief case. The only real difference between Tariq and the hundreds of other citizens ignoring one another while hurrying to their places of employment, school and business was he wasn’t in a hurry. In fact, he was counting the seconds until the black limo was scheduled to pull up and deliver him to Pearson International where he would launch the most devastating biological attack in recorded history. So deadly that the toxin was to spill over the border into America and hopefully other Western countries crippling the heathen world and plunging it into chaos.

The evil colonial imperialists needed to be eradicated. His life mattered little compared to holy jihad and his mission would see victory no matter what the cost.

Tariq was member of a ‘sleeper cell’ which operated in the busy Kensington Market area of downtown Toronto. Among the fish markets and restaurants he and his brothers had posed as infidels. Taking jobs as computer programmers, commodity brokers, parking attendants and one was even a local elementary school teacher. They turned their backs on Islam in public as they privately plotted to strike the final blow in century’s old war.

Tariq watched the people, so foolish in their many self centered beliefs, filter off the street and into the surrounding buildings oblivious to what was about to befall them. The deadline to start their daily toil would mean nothing after today. It meant nothing even before today. He suppressed an urge to burst into laughter as he watched the people with disgust, with utter contempt. Asian, Caucasian, Arabic, Infidels all. They would be purged.

“Hey man,” Came a gravelly voice from a nearby nook, “Got some change?”

The black limo pulled up as Tariq quickly glanced over his shoulder at the homeless man, knotted hair and dirty beard hidden under a sundered woolen hat that had seen better days. Its greedy eyes looked shallow and empty as they tried to garner pity from one that pitied them all.

Tariq ignored the man and ducked into the back of his black chariot.

Two

Tariq handed his brief case to the group of passengers as he quickly took his seat. The fellowship remained silent as the limo glided forward down the busy and unkempt city street. Nothing needed to be said. The plan had unfolded flawlessly for the past 10 years. Like a well oiled machine some people would say. 3 years ago the group had hit their only snag but that was quickly taken care of. A member of their group had taken a liking to a local woman and both had been quickly disposed of. Failure was not an option for the faithful. The remaining four knew as much.

All of the members had given up much in the name of their true God and fought their temptation like lions. Even when they had amassed so much they were willing to give it away in the name of Allah. The rewards of this life would be pale in comparison to those in heaven.

Two of the other three passengers wore matching business suits and dark glasses. Closely cropped hair and clean shaven faces. Ambiguity was always good when blending in with the infidels.

Tariq absently looked down at his watch as they continued to drive.

“What is it, Tariq,” asked Mehboob? A short thick limbed Arabic man dressed much like his counterparts save his shaved head and golden teeth. He was known around the market as Switch, a local thug for hire and the group’s primary contact to the local underworld. Bloods, Angels and every other faction used Switch when they needed certain things taken care of. Mehboob was so good at playing the part of criminal Tariq often wondered how he walked the line they all had to navigate where they played a part in public but remained faithful at their core.

“Nothing Mehboob,” Tariq snapped folding his hands into his lap, “nothing at all.” He softened his tone closing his eyes and bowing his head.

Nothing at all, he thought imagining the news this evening if there were enough people alive to report it.

Three

The plan was simple. Each cell member, now four strong, had the ‘death plague’ implanted into their mouths, more specifically their teeth. They would easily pass through customs and security with ‘legitimate’ documents as regular citizens. Each one would travel to a predetermined destination. Once at their destination they would release the potent toxin into the air by biting down hard on the fragile toxic tooth. The attack would infect everyone within hundreds of meters with the retrovirus, quickly spread through physical and airborne contact.

The people that had developed the virus warned that its infection rate was insidious. Everyone that came into contact with the infected would themselves become infected. The virus, labeled XT-04 sleeper, would cause the infected to display flu like symptoms as their immune system was compromised. This state often was accompanied with dementia and hallucinations according to the “salesman”. The virus then entered second stage incubation where the victim would begin vomiting uncontrollably and their body temperature would elevate causing their skin to flake and burn in places. In the most severe cases the thermodynamic effect would cause hemorrhaging and surface lesions. In the third and final stage the patient often died. Tariq had wondered what that meant.

Tariq would wish for death before the second stage and when he released the virus he would never reach stage two. He had already planned his suicide well in advance.

The limo reached the terminal and the door swung open to reveal the futuristic building and throngs of departing families, globe trotters and business people. The cool autumn air howled through the nearby parking garage kicking up small eddies filled with discarded trash and errant leaves. The sky was overcast, the sun itself a white halo in the haze.

The last view of the sun that Tariq would perhaps enjoy, he mused, as he hustled into the terminal briefcase at his side. He didn’t look back as the limo drove unceremoniously away, leaving him to his mission and his thoughts.

Four

The terminal was like a temple in size and scope reminding him of many of the old Mosques he’d visited as a boy, a different time, before the public knew him not as Victor Ali but his true name. He tore his gaze away from the soaring artificial beauty of the cathedral ceilings and approached the ticket counter. The transaction was brief as he offered a friendly smile to the attendant. A young Caucasian woman with wavy auburn hair tied into a pony tail, displaying her face and neck like a common whore. Like all the other brazen whores.

He chose a window seat so that he could see the sun from the air, before he had to do his holy duty. He walked away from the counter allowing his mind to wander a little as he breathed these last breaths of pungent, perfumed air. The struggle would soon be over and he would strike the final blow against the unholy. He, Tariq, son of Khalid would be remembered by the devout for annihilating many infidels within their own castle, along with the brave few.

He moved deeper into the terminal past the ignorant masses trying hard to suppress a victorious smile. These sheep would be some of the first to die and be a boon of souls cast into Jahannam. There they would eat the Ad-Dhari for all eternity as it churned in their bellies like fiery oil. A fate most of these pigs deserved. The plan had finally come to pass. The end was near. No longer did he have to pretend to be a faithless heathen. He was almost home.

“Sir,” a voice stirred him from his reverie. He spun on his heel to find two security guards looking him in the eye carefully, almost cautiously.

“Yes?” He responded politely in a perfect Canadian accent. The plan had gone without a problem and this was obviously just a misunderstanding. These ignorant fools were no doubt looking for directions or inquiring as to how they could help him better enjoy his stay or some other pleasantry.

“Can you step this way, sir.” The second asked motioning toward the ticket counter and the door beyond.

“How can I help you officer,” Tariq inquired a small degree of distress creeping into his voice, quickly squashed, “Is there a problem with my seat assignment?”

The first officer offered him a patronizing smile as the second officer’s hand fell to his firearm. And that’s when Tariq smiled slowly placing his brief case down and deliberately fanning his hands outward from his body. The best laid plans had begun to fall down. He knew it as the first officer snatched the prop briefcase and two more security appeared from the door weapons drawn.

The second officer grabbed Tariq’s arm with rattlesnake quickness clasping a handcuff over his wrist and swinging the other arm into the adjoining restraint. He fought the urge to bite down on his weapon as he heard his name, his true name.

“Tariq Al-Salam,” One of the new officers asked. This one a whore wearing a non-descript brown trench coat. She carried a firearm in a shoulder holster beside two prominently displayed breasts. She wore makeup and stank of perfume.

It didn’t matter now. He would not lie to these whore pigs.

“Yes,” He replied.

She made a swift and concise motion with her hand and Tariq felt a sharp crack at the base of his skull and then the darkness came.

Five

Tariq awoke in a small, well lit room colored a vomit green with a small table and two stools bolted to the tile floor. The opposite wall had what he could only have imagined being a one way mirror with the room beyond filled with at least six men in suits thinking they had beat him.

He found his hands were fastened behind his back, to the stool on which he sat. His movement was severely impaired but it didn’t really matter too much at this point unless… His tongue quickly probed around the back of his mouth finding the toxic tooth still securely in place.

The door to the room slowly creaked open and in walked the same whore police officer he had seen on the concourse. She no longer wore the trench coat. She wore a tight red blouse that accentuated her ample breasts. She carried a thick file folder no doubt filled with intelligence. Information these fools had waited too long to use at any rate.

She sat and looked at him for a time. No doubt part of an oft used interrogation technique.

“Can I help you with something,” Tariq grinned ignoring the intimidation tactic?

The officer frowned opening the sizable file folder.

“Does the name Aahil Al-Salam mean anything to you Mr. Al-Salam?” She asked her question like a hot spear through Tariq’s heart.

The grin left Tariq’s face. He opened his mouth to speak and found it took a moment for the words to come, “That name means nothing to me. That person is dead to me.”

The detective nodded, “I see.” She replied leafing through the folder and producing several photographs of what appeared to be a brutal crime scene containing the bodies of two young people, a man and a woman. The woman was Asian, her hands bound and tied to the headboard of a bed. The man was Arabic his unseeing eyes staring blankly into the camera from a bodiless head.

“These are the crime scene photos taken three years ago in an apartment on Danforth Avenue. The victims were a young couple who were subject to one of the most brutal and sadistic home invasions in my history with the police services. According to autopsy Miss Xu-“The detective motioned to the picture of the young woman whom Tariq clearly recognized-“was tortured, raped and sodomized. We can only surmise that Mr. Al-Salam was awake for the encounter based on the toxicology reports that show a heightened level of adrenaline in his body.”

But Tariq had stopped listening to the whore, lost in the shadow of his past.

Six

This is what happens to the pigs you lay with Aahil! Tariq heard himself screaming as he remembered Switch running the flat of the long knife along Lisa Xu’s inner thigh. Her muffled, tired screams as she continued to struggle against the bindings.

Aahil growled fiercely from behind his gag as his eyes bore into his brothers like hot knives. Tariq did not look away. He met his brother’s gaze as he motioned for Switch to continue his grizzly work. For the past 14 hours the four had sat in this filthy, stinking apartment that reeked of incense and fruit, mingled with the coppery tang of fresh blood.

Switch had raped Lisa Xu repeatedly with large, cold objects as well as with his own object. He had made her scream and cry as Aahil pleaded from behind a gagged mask of tears to his brother, his blood, to make her torment end. Switch whispered horrible things into her ears as he rammed horrible things into her body and after fourteen hours of torment Lisa Xu was a shell, reacting on instinct and fear alone.

Her torment finally at an end, she watched the knife slide into her vagina. The blade punctured her uterus as Switch grinned wickedly, sadistically twisting the hilt. She felt the baby she was carrying touch her soul briefly. There was no scream, only darkness and her beloved’s anguished moans carrying her to the next world.

The room was silent as Lisa Xu’s body hemorrhaged bright red life over the off white sheets. Her dead eyes turned upward, a whore’s smile on her face.

“She is gone now Aahil,” Tariq spoke in a monotone matter of fact way removing the gag on his brother, “We’ve had our fun with the whore. Now we must do the work of Allah, most holy.”

Aahil spat in his brothers face roaring like an animal, “I’LL KILL YOU! I’LL KILL YOU!” He repeated over and over again as Tariq unsheathed his father’s sword. He had hoped that the murder of the woman would change his brother’s mind, bring out the younger siblings steel. It did not.

He brought the blade upward and in a clean, downward slice cleaved his brother’s head off, a silent prayer on his lips. He then picked up the disembodied cranium and kissed it gently on the forehead.

“May Allah, most honored, show you the way my brother,” He whispered discarding the head on the bed next to the pig infidel who screamed like a whore every second Switch ravaged her.

“May you find your way.”

Seven

“You would not believe how hard it was to track down Mr. Al-Salam’s real name.” He heard the detective say as she produced more photos. None of them shocked him. He had lived through the event and the photos were nothing but grim reminders, “Emigrated from Syria in 1997 under a student visa with a false name taught English as a second language under yet another alias. He had no criminal record to speak of. Very tough piecing that one together…

“I thought it was just some dumb shit immigrant that tried scoring with the wrong oriental girl. But when I started digging I found all sorts of interesting little tangents that Mr. Al-Salam aka Mr. Ali failed to fill out in his refugee claimant form. I had a friend in CSIS help me do some digging and you know what we found?”

Tariq let a smile cross his lips. They were fishing, they knew nothing.

“They found that you and Mr. Ali were on the same flight to Canada using similar forged visas and similar refugee claims once you landed. They also found a connection between some of your movements for instance a trip to Cuba together in early 2005 just before Mr. Ali’s death. Two Mr. Ali’s on the same flight to Cuba staying in the same hotel. The same two Mr. Ali’s that were total strangers on a plane in 1997 flying to this country for the purpose of what?”

“Does it really matter?” Tariq grinned.

“You’re GOD DAMNED RIGHT IT MATTERS!” the detective roared throwing the file folder across the room and scattering it into a million fluttering pieces. “You’re Tariq Al-Salam. You’ve been on the every terrorist watch list since 9/11 and here you are sitting in my interrogation room. So you may as well spill what you had planned because you’re going back to Syria if you don’t. If you deal with us we may get you a nice cell in Maplehurst where the only torture you endure is the endless hours of Much Music, bagged apple juice and fake Jamaican accents.”

Tariq nodded, “Let me out of these restraints and I will tell you everything you want to know.”

The detective smiled the same patronizing grin as the other officers. The grin that guaranteed she thought she had the upper hand. After a long pause she motioned to the mirror and two more officers entered the room. They stank of CIA; coffee, gun powder and mint chewing gum. The same smell of agents that secretly took his father away all those years ago.

They both drew their guns, stiff arms zeroing in on Tariq’s face. The female detective stood and moved toward Tariq retrieving the shackle key from her belt. She knelt behind the terrorist, “This is your only chance at a deal,” She warned placing the key in the shackle lock and twisting.

“Fuck with us and we’ll just get what we need from the others,” She cautioned again as Tariq slowly placed his hands on the table, rubbing his wrists.

“Others,” He asked?

“Oh, didn’t we mention it? Mehboob ‘Switch’ Mohammad came forward two weeks ago and told us everything.”

Tariq snarled probing the tooth in his mouth absently with his dry tongue, “But… Why?”

“I suppose he felt he had more to live for than die for.” One of the CIA agents offered with a sneer.

Tariq looked at the light, vomit colored walls of the 10’x10’ room the two way mirror and the Spartan furniture. For the first time in along time he despaired, inwardly, not allowing these infidels to see his tears of hate and rage. If only he could see the sun one last time. But it was too late now.

The man looked up at the female detective flanked by the two armed agents.

“You were right,” He laughed maniacally, victoriously. The agents cocked their weapons as they backed up seeing the mania in the man’s dark eyes, “One chance!” He roared leaping from the table and biting down on the fake tooth, hard.

Green fumes spewing from his mouth like dragons breath. He spun grabbing the woman detective and biting down hard on her shoulder as the FBI agents opened fire. Tariq felt the bullets bite into his back, shoulder, leg as he held tight to the woman detective. She cried out, punching him in the kidney and then gouging him in the eyes. He laughed as he felt the blood spill from his body. He was already dead.

He finally let go of his target falling to his knees. A beep echoed in the distance as he fell to his face watching the agents tend their counterpart. She was bleeding too. He had at least killed the whore with his bare hands, he thought bitterly as the door to the room slammed shut and locked leaving the agents, the detective and Tariq alone in panicked fellowship.

A voice echoed over the room’s antiquated PA system, “Biological agent detected. Quarantine procedures now in effect for cell nineteen. Hazardous material experts have been alerted please standby.”

Tariq laughed, which sounded more like a drowning gurgle as his lungs filled up with bodily fluids. One of the agents trained a gun on him as the rooms sprinklers engaged. The other agent knelt over the police officer cupping her head in his hands. She was unconscious, her chest barely moving with the ebb and flow of natural breathing.

The bullets burned his flesh and the fluid filled his lungs. He felt nauseous as he laid there. Why wasn’t he dead? He had been shot repeatedly. He should have been dead. He felt the urge to vomit as he watched the agents drop and join him. Bile spewed from the rooms occupants in unending supply as they all fell down. The beep in the distance continued as the FBI men grew ashen and continued to vomit and convulse.

Tariq Al-Salam continued to vomit and laugh as he thought his victory. He laid there a crazy smile on his face as he closed his eyes and welcomed death and victory for Allah most beloved.

Eight

Michelle Paquette was a University of Toronto graduate specializing in chemical engineering and computer science. He was recruited into CSIS in the early days of the organizations birth and had excelled through the ranks and consulted on many terrorist attacks making him the resident expert on Middle Eastern terrorism, he supposed. From 9/11 to Air India he had been there but when they shut down the Pearson International holding facility 15 hours ago he didn’t know what to expect when he arrived.

He had been picked up at Trudeau International and ferried directly to the holding facility. On the chopper he was briefed with what little information CSIS had on the attack and the suspects involved. Surveillance showed that everyone in the facility had been killed by a toxin that was purposely released despite rigid security and search procedures. A few people deep within Cell Nineteen showed signs of cognition their moans still heard over the monitors but everyone else was dead. 118 people trapped in lockdown. But compared to the alternative 118 people was a small price to pay. It was cold comfort but cold was the only comfort he knew lately.

He touched down outside the facility located away from the main three terminals and stepped from the chopper surveying the hazmat team’s progress. Men and woman in specially designed, form fitting hazard suits busily shouted orders as other workers set up airlocks and scrubbing areas. The CSIS liaison met him as the chopper lifted off. She was young but he had dealt with a dozen times in the past half decade at various meetings and functions within the bureau. Her name escaped him at the moment, “What do you ‘ave to report,” Michelle asked skipping the formalities, his French Canadian accent mangling the English exchange.

Dana Melrose nodded motioning to the nearby staging area, “We have all of the necessary equipment onsite. We’ll be ready to enter the facility within the hour. We’re just triple checking quarantine procedures and air samples.”

“Good,” Michelle responded absently walking briskly toward the staging area, Melrose in tow, “Do you ‘ave anything to add to da initial brief?”

“No sir.” She replied hesitantly.

“Are you sure?” Paquette probed seeing the moment of indecision in his younger counterpart’s eyes.

“Actually sir, it may be an error on the technician’s part but all the air samples retrieved from the scene are clean,” She offered trying not to look incompetent in front of a senior official.

“Alright, I want to be inside dis facility witin the hour,” Michelle responded, ignoring the omission and surveying the suit area for the proper gear. Not one to mince words he needed to get inside the Holding Facility before he could get any concrete answers. And with so many questions he needed at least one answer at this point.

Nine

The original brief had contained the schematics for the facility and the subsequent 9/11 retrofit that had no doubt saved the thousands of lives in the nearby terminal 1. After the 9/11 attacks, when rooms full of intelligent people theorized what would come next, many believed a biological attack the most logical. The government had decided to create modular environmental systems within key facilities across the country. It was a stoic approach at cutting any potential loss of life that had paid off sixteen hours ago. It was a simple and cost effective procedure that allowed the bureaucrats to sleep better in their beds.

The airlock unit had been placed directly over an environmental access hatch located 10 meters from the facility since the lockdown had magnetically sealed every other door. The mobile unit had been hermetically sealed over the small hatch. Attached to it was a mobile scrubbing unit to screen and cleanse anyone leaving the facility of potential contaminants. Paquette, Melrose and two other technicians had entered the airlock twenty minutes earlier to test containment and extract several dozen environmental samples. These samples had been tested at the mobile lab unit that was nothing more than a multi-million dollar coach bus dubbed Alpha Control.

Surprisingly the samples were clean not twenty-four hours after the initial outbreak. The same result as the first three trials. Melrose hadn’t fucked up; it would appear the area was clean. But that didn’t fill Mr. Paquette with an iota of ease given the current body count.

The quartet moved into the scrubbing station and retrieved their helmets and securely fastened them. They all double checked seals and containment procedures because Melrose had warned her team Paquette was a ghoul when it came to procedure.

“Radio’s on,” Paquette ordered as he switched on the bio-suits short range radio, “Alpha Control, dis is Paquette, do you copy?”

“Alpha Control here Dr. Paquette,” A crystal clear voice responded from the base station coach, “We read, over.”

Paquette nodded as he turned to his team now trapped behind insect like masks as they shuffled into the airlock. Once inside, Melrose hit the containment control and the airlock hissed shut. The two technicians moved to the sealed hatch and removed the seals.

“Down we go,” Paquette smiled as he moved toward the hatch and began to climb down the service ladder into the unyielding darkness.

Once inside the sealed pipe chase the team arrived in one of the service closets deep within the facility. The door opened into the detention wing of the facility near the initial outbreak. Cell Nineteen according to the data pulled from the environmental systems computer before lockdown was initiated fully.

Paquette opened the door to the hallway and stepped through casually. The corridor was basked in the red glow of emergency lights. Near the end the bodies of several officers sat propped against the walls covered in what could only be bile and blood. The emergencies beep still echoing throughout what was now essentially a tomb. Paquette had seen worse but he was still taken aback by the sight. One of the officers had apparently committed suicide his spent revolver still in hand, his brains oozing dry on the wall behind him.

“Melrose,” Paquette began ignoring the spectacular violence of it all, “Take Cleary and ‘ead up to da control room. Get da lights back on and stop dat beeping. Patel you are wit’ me.”

Melrose and Cleary obediently moved to up the hallway as Paquette and Patel made their way toward cell nineteen, where everything was now eerily silent save the alarm klaxon.

Ten

Melrose and Cleary silently made their way up to the control hub of the detention center shoulder lights lancing through the dim red glow as they climbed the access stairwell. They passed over several bodies huddled in the fetal position, agony etched into their hardened faces.

“Have you ever seen anything like this Melrose,” Cleary whispered into his mono-directional mic. He knelt over one of the bodies that looked as if she had torn her own eyes out, here hands petrified into emaciated claws.

“No,” Melrose replied curtly, “Can the chatter.”

Cleary nodded taking rear again and watching his commanding officer go. Melrose, Cleary and Patel had all served together in Kabul Afghanistan with Joint Task Force 2. They had been assigned to the National Defense Initiatives as a promotion, or so they were told, cushy desk jobs where they had to deal with internal threats that all but didn’t exist. Well, until now.

Melrose moved to the door, that according to her blackberry sensor was the control hub. There was a biometric scanner and a good old fashioned key pad. Melrose moved to the keypad and entered the override code 5195-7906-53 and the magnetic lock disengaged with a satisfying snap. Cleary pushed the door open gently at first then gave it a brisk show with his shoulder as he realized a corpse had been lodged up against the portal.

The two quickly entered the room pulling the body out of the way. Melrose moved to a bank of workstations and servers that controlled the internal environmental systems. For security purposes the facility, when in lockdown, disengaged all hard line communication with the outside world including internet and virtual networks. If that hadn’t been the case she could have turned the alarms off from outside the station.

Cleary noted the three corpses lying in pools of bile and feces and thanked God that his environmental suit filtered air quality. Two of the corpses appeared to have died fighting one another, strange. The assailant was violently latched on to the victim’s neck.

“Melrose,” Cleary knelt near the two still forms prodding them with his gun, “Take a look at this.”

He swiveled to get his commanding officers attention. Melrose moved to the corner and looked down at the two combatants. The apparent aggressor’s eyes snapped open as it let out a gurgling cry and lurched away from its initial victim.

“Holy shit,” Cleary cried falling onto his ass and drawing his sidearm, “She’s still alive!”

Melrose drew her side arm as well quickly stalking toward the injured woman who appeared more dead than alive, eye dangling precariously from its socket. Her skin was ashen under the flashlight glow and her skin was marked with countless scratches and tears. “What the fu-“

“Melrose! Behind you,” Cleary roared as the corpse they had just moved was standing behind his commanding officer claw like hands seizing her arm and ripping it backward. The creature tore greedily into Melrose’s bicep as she pulled the trigger impotently. Cleary was on his feet in seconds his gun firing hot bolts of lead through the things skull. He spun as the second creature lunged at him firing his last three rounds into the things chest.

It came on relentlessly clawed hands seizing his helmet and pulling him close. It’s savage, bloody maw slamming uselessly against the environmental helmets hard casing.

“Alpha Control,” Melrose cried into her microphone as she picked up her gun with her opposite hand and unloaded it into Cleary’s target all five shots sending the screeching monstrosity back to the floor it’s skull in a myriad of grey matter, “We’ve encountered… hostiles. Please advise.”

“Hostiles,” Alpha Control responded, “say again?”

“Hostiles,” Cleary added as he inspected his suit for tears, “as in not fucking friendly, copy?”

Melrose looked blankly at her arm now that the rush of adrenaline had left her. She quickly fell to her knees her head swam from loss of blood no doubt. The thing had bit her. Blood squirting from what could only be her brachial artery, she noted lazily as a severe nausea gripped her.

“Hold position Cleary,” Alpha Control responded, “We’re sending in an extraction team.”

“Why didn’t I think of that,” Cleary moaned moving to Melrose who appeared to be struggling with her stomach as well as her wound, “Boss, you okay?”

It was a name that pissed Melrose off, even now.

“Fuck you Cleary,” She coughed clutching her arm, “What the hell happened to those people?”

Cleary shook his head, “I have no idea. But I’m not waiting around to find out.”

He reached out to the now decapitated corpse and tore a strip of clothing from its emaciated arm. He quickly tied Melrose’s wound off and pulled her to her feet. As an after thought he checked his side arm and his spare before hauling Melrose to the door.

“Alpha said hold position soldier,” Melrose spat, coughing violently.

“Alpha didn’t just watch two corpses stand up and make you their buffet Boss,” Cleary smiled wryly trying to add some levity to his insubordination. It didn’t work.

“Those weren’t corpses Lieutenant,” Melrose corrected, “they were unidentified hostiles.”

Cleary looked at Melrose like a fresh nipple had sprung from her forehead, “You’re joking right Dana? Two corpses just stood up and tried to take a chunk out of both me and you. Or did you just miss that?”

Melrose grunted as she kicked the door shut and slumped back against it, “Alpha said hold and we hold.” Her tone that of finality. “Alpha Control can rot in hell. But I’ll defer to your infinite wisdom Boss.”

Cleary moved to the last corpse in the room and drew his weapon. The shots rang out BLAM BLAM as he placed two bullets in the things head for good measure. And then they waited.

Eleven

Dr. Paquette and Lieutenant Patel moved confidently through the lower cell block toward cell nineteen ignoring the half dozen corpses littering the hallway, faces mostly upward, contorted in masks of agony and mania. Paquette had never, in his thirty years investigating terrorist operations, seen bodies this horribly disfigured. Most biological agents, as a rule, caused internal or external damage. It would seem whatever was used in this facility did both on masse.

They came to the door of Cell Nineteen and Patel keyed in the override code watching the door quickly unlock with the expected magnetic click. Paquette pushed the door open easily entering the scene as it had played out. The prisoner’s name was Tariq Al-Salam and he was apparently an integral part in launching a biological attack that was foiled here. Well, at least stopped from reaching the general public.

He had succeeded to some small degree killing 118 people in this very facility. Again that feeling of cold comfort crept in as Patel moved to inspect the bodies of the victims, Ambrose, was the detectives name, according to the file. She had what appeared to be a bite wound on her upper torso above the left breast. It was a violent and savage wound but it did look to be made by a human mouth. No doubt Tariq’s handiwork, before the FBI agents shot him dead, by a cursory examination of the ballistics.

Dr. Paquette knelt over the terrorist’s body placing a gloved hand on jaw and moving his head back and forth like a child would a doll. No rigarmortis was present, which was strange in a body this old. And even through his environmental suit Tariq seemed to be warm to the touch, hot even? Suddenly the sound of gunfire echoed down the hallway and Patel lunged for the door pane listening intently. Someone was shooting up above.

“Doctor,” He began casually glancing back at the kneeling doctor, the first to see Tariq move, “Doctor!”

Paquette screamed in agony as Tariq Al-Salam tore hungrily into his hand removing his thumb and forefinger in one savage bite. The doctor fell backward, eyes wide with terror and disbelief as Tariq rose like a vengeful wraith from the pools of blood and bile. Patel raised his sidearm and unloaded his clip into the creature that had been Tariq bin Khalid bin Al-Salam as Dr. Paquette screamed into his communication receiver, “dey’re still alive! DEY’RE STILL ALIVE!”

The taste of flesh fresh on his pallet the creature lunged forward grabbing the annoying toy that burnt holes in his chest and stomach. It tossed Patel’s sidearm away carelessly as it plunged its mouth toward the soldier’s fleshy shoulder. Patel screamed trying to push the creature away with all his strength but it was too much. The thing was strong and driven by sinister purpose.

Dr. Paquette scrambled into the corner screaming like a man possessed. He clutched his bloodied hand as he cried for salvation in both French and English. Tariq ignored him as he tore Patel’s suit and flesh away from bone in meaty chunks. Not to be denied the feast, the detective, Ambrose was her name wasn’t it, kindled her eyes opening and her gaze falling on the good Doctor.

“No,” He cried as the woman fell upon him moaning with ecstasy of the feast to come. “NO!”

“Dr. Paquette, we are sending in an extraction team hold your position,” the order from Alpha Control buzzed across the wireless, but the room had grown silent save the slurping and crunching of those ghouls who sundered flesh from bone.

The Other Woman: A fairy tale

Emily Bryan-Reeder

She came when I had just turned 15.  The streamers that my friends had put up where still hanging in the living room.  They were sagging and limp, but they still clung to the walls supported by the steady hand of masking tape.  She arrived on our doorstep with no purse or bags.  Just standing there on our doorstep, like it was hers.  I’d like to tell you that it was raining, or that there was a storm brewing when she came, but that just wouldn’t be true. And I like to tell the truth. 

My little brother was the one who answered the door.  I didn’t hear the knock because I was laying on my bed with headphones stuck in my ears.  Mother and father were next to greet her, this Other Woman.  They shook her hand and welcomed her in like any other honored house guest.  I still didn’t know that she was here, in my house, talking with my parents, like she belonged.  I lay blissfully unaware on my bed lost in the nothingness teenagers call “being bored.”

I was disturbed from my repose by my father who, with no respect to privacy, opened my door and shouted to be heard above my music. 

“Geupancomtotketchen” 

I sat up and removed the headphones, “what?”

“Kitchen, now.  You’re going to ruin your hearing with those things you know.”

He walked away and left me alone with my decision, do as I’m told or ignore and do as I wish.  Not in the mood for a fight I went with do as I’m told. 

That’s when I saw her, standing in our kitchen, leaning against the counter, her hands clasped in front of her.  A gesture reeking of faux supplication if I ever saw one.  She had long blonde hair that was ratty at the ends.  She was trying so hard to beautiful that she just made herself uglier.  Her pink lipstick clashed with her orangy skin.  She smiled at me, but nothing in her face moved. It looked like she her face was frozen in a mask made of skin. There was something wrong with her eyes too.  I couldn’t tell what color they were. Whenever I looked into them I felt myself compelled to look away. It happened several times before I gave up and stared at her strangely narrow nose. 

“This is your aunt,” said my mother. “She will be staying with you while we go on vacation.”

“You need to be a good girl and take care of your brother.” My father smiled at me and turned to pick up the suitcases.

I couldn’t find my voice properly and when I did it was dry and forced, “when did you tell me that you were going away?  I don’t even know her!” 

My father frowned at me like he was both disappointed and a little confused. “You’ve known for weeks pumpkin, and of course you’ve met your aunt before you just don’t remember.”

“Be good,” my mother said with an absentminded look as she turned and walked out the door.

“How long will you be gone? When did I meet her? She doesn’t even look like either of you!” I shouted but they didn’t appear to hear me.  I turned and looked at the Other Woman, my aunt. She smiled at me her mouth stretching across her face showing all of her teeth.  She had more than what seemed human. 

“Well, girl, it’s just us.  Time to get to work.  I’ll watch your brother and you get dinner made.” 

She picked up my brother and carried him to his room. I watched her walk away and I was left alone in the kitchen, as the shock wore off I started making the only dinner I knew how to cook, spaghetti with sauce from the jar. When it was made I went to find her and my brother.  They were sitting in his bedroom playing.  Or at least my brother was playing, my aunt was simply watching him from the bed.  I told them that dinner was ready and went back to the kitchen to finish setting the table.  She glided in, her heels were high but seemed to make no sound.  My little brother jumped into his seat and dug into his spaghetti with gusto, but my aunt just sat and stared at her food. 

“This is terrible,” she said, “you will try harder tomorrow for breakfast wont you?  I think you ought to make poached eggs.”  I opened my mouth to protest, but she just smiled and got up, took my brother by his hand and went left the dining room.  There was nothing to do but to clean up and research how to cook eggs.

Day after day it went on like that.  I cooked, cleaned and she sat and watched my brother play in his bedroom.  She never talked to me unless it was to give me instructions or tell me that my food wasn’t good.  Every night at dinner she would tell me what I was to make the next day, and somehow we always had the ingredients for it, but I never saw her leave the house.  

I spent my free time reading cookbooks and trying to find out where my parents went.  I searched the computer, looked through their things and called every travel agent in town, but no luck.  Days blurred together, my cooking improved but it was never good enough for my aunt.  She turned her nose up at everything I made, from grilled cheese to fillet mignon. Nothing was good enough for her.  I dripped sweat from every pore making bread from scratch and cooking over a hot stove for hours.  I became determined to cook the best meals for her.  I created the most delicate of sauces, souffles that would make a French Chef weep, and perfectly cooked cuts of every type of meat imaginable.  I didn’t know how my brother wasn’t getting fat from my cooking, I wasn’t gaining weight because I was spending almost all of my time slaving, all for her.  But it wasn’t to last much longer. 

Everything changed when I caught her in my brother’s bedroom.  I wanted to catch her doing something in there since all I ever saw her do was sit and watch him.  Her wrong eyes staring at him so intensely I thought that she might burn a hole right through him. I crept down the hall, quiet as I could, for fear of her hearing me.  I crawled the last couple of feet to the door frame and peeked around the edge.  That’s when I saw her.  She had changed.  The skin on her face was pulled back, exposing all of her teeth, and her eyes were huge and mostly white, her perfectly blonde hair fell over her as she bent over my brother’s stomach, drawing in deep breaths.  I watched in horror as she sucked the yellow light of his life into her own mouth.  I jammed my fist in my mouth as to not make a sound and got up and ran. 

I knew that I had to be rid of her and quickly formulated a plan.  I took the soup I’d been simmering and threw it out.  In it’s place I took garbage and threw it in the pot. All the nasty bits from dinners past, pieces of plastic and junk mail. I went out to the backyard and took handfuls of dirt and threw those in the pot.  Finally, I grabbed the largest knife and cut straight across my palm.  Blood streamed into the pot.  It turned on the stove and let it simmer while I carefully bandaged my palm and waited. 

I didn’t even have to call her for dinner.  For the first time she came nearly running into the dining room when as soon as I put the bowls of soup out.  My brother followed her silently and sat and stared at his food and then looked at me, eyes wide.  I gave him a silent shake of my head. The Other Woman on the other hand gobbled up her soup as quick as she could. Food stuck to the her face all around her too big mouth.  

“Is there more?” she looked at me pleadingly. I gave her my brother’s bowl and mine as well. She licked those bowls clean.  I could see her shirt start to tighten, the buttons straining.  “More?” she asked.  I brought out the pot from the kitchen and set it in front of her.  She stuck her whole head in the pot and I knew that my moment had come.  I picked up the butcher knife and held it up above my head.  I brought it was down quickly, her head dropped into the pot with a plop and her body slumped down in the chair.  I quickly picked up my brother and took him to his bedroom and set about cleaning up the mess.

My parents were home the next morning with pictures of their trip to the Caribbean and seashells for the both of us. 

“Did your aunt leave already?” asked my mother as she kicked off her shoes

“She had to leave last night, she had a killer headache.” My dad smiled and hugged my little brother and sat down for the breakfast I had made.

“This French toast is excellent” my father said.

My mother nodded in agreement. “And the house is spotless! I’m so proud of you, you’re really growing up.” 

I just smiled.  “Don’t get used to it.” 

Prologue

Illundiel

This was never what Sam wanted. Isolated, alone, and waiting Sam knew what had to be done. Everyone waits for the future to arrive, but when it does it’s never enough and there’s always more to be desired. People dream about days with hover cars, world peace, and no poverty. Stuff like that doesn’t magically happen, not overnight at least. Improved farming techniques and future technologies make resources infinite while famine, hunger, and money become things of the past. A country was always defined by its quality of life and the size of its army, but now that’s meaningless. In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king and, in a world with everything, man wants for nothing.

Outside of the apartment, it’s quiet. The streets are empty. The world doesn’t exist anymore. Established Institutions? Religion? Religion is the cause and the solution. Evolution has proven that religion is pointless. Man has achieved all that is to be desired, so what more can be promised to man? God? Men are gods. The future? The future is eternal.

Sam knew what had to be done, but that meant nothing. Knowing and believing, knowing and doing, knowing and not doing are all the same. Not that it really matters, had anyone known then we still would have been powerless to stop it. Armageddon. Perhaps the worst part is that what happened, happened slowly. Slowly and inevitably, the world changed. Slowly and inevitably, people gave in. And all it took was 9 months.

Samantha Salvator grew up like any child of the 1980s. Her days filled with cartoons and toys, Big Wheels and Little People, great music, and futuristic movies. Her father, an insurance adjustor, was obsessed with anything new. Gadgets, laser discs, compact discs, camcorders, computers, and the Internet were all shiny new toys to play with. These play toys that would usher in a new era for mankind surrounded Samantha like a fort. Samantha’s mother was a homemaker; she had no ambition, no goals love was her only value. Some might have said that she was the perfect woman. Growing up in a suburban area was easy, filled with play dates and baseball games. Forced interactions through social gatherings that reinforced the social contract that Locke and Rousseau had so carefully laid out.

Man is inherently good, hardly. Man is inherently evil and only does good because society dictates it. Well…What if Society didn’t dictate it? What if there was no Society, only survivors? What if man were to release his inner beast? Ragnarok had finally come and no one had thought to stop it; in fact, most people welcomed the technological revolution with open arms, rejoicing in their loss of self and acceptance of sloth. Man would be judged and found wanting.

This was never what Sam wanted. As she sat there looking out the window, it was raining. She looked into each raindrop, reflecting the light from the neon signs. The advertisements were everywhere but they meant nothing now; the lights are always on in a city that never sleeps. Rain used to be refreshing¾cleansing, if only another flood had come, but it had to be fire this time. The streets are empty. As Sam motionlessly stares out the window she recalls it all horrifically. The day she had meet Peter and how on that day the only thing she could think about was how perfect her life was going to be. Peter was beautiful and made her feel complete; young and in love was all that the two of them could ask for. What a dream come true it was for two people traveling to the big city for the first time, meeting, and falling in love. But everything feels like a dream until it becomes a nightmare.

Peter was 20, Sam was 18, and they were happy. Their parents said they were too young and that they would just be another divorce statistic but they were married nonetheless. Their love had already given them so much and was going to give them all that they would ever need. Pregnancy seemed futile as if by Divine Mandate. Remembering back to that day, sitting in the doctor’s office on that cold table her feet having just come out of the stirrups, Sam was more nervous then she had ever been in her entire life. This was academic more then anything else because Peter had already gone to see his urologist. His sperm count was near perfect, but they had no motility, so at least if she was fine then they could still try artificial insemination, in vitro…something. Watching the clock hands move didn’t help at all what were really minutes felt like days to her. The anticipation was antagonizing and then all of a sudden she had her answer. No, no she would never be able to have children. She not only had a T-shaped uterus but her eggs were useless. In an instant, what once was an endless love became pure hatred.

And then she was pregnant, she had everything she ever wanted, and all it took was a word. Neither of them was scientifically able to have children; now it seemed inevitable and that’s why Peter left. No one except for Sam knew the truth. No one except for Sam had made the bargain. No one except for Sam would be left after all was said and done. All would be made to pay. Samantha Salvator was the one woman who could have stopped it. Technology, detachment, it all helped…it wasn’t like the old days where they performed Exorcisms and people actually believed in voodoo and hocus-pocus. Some would say that Gods are vain and need man to worship them, that the source of their power is their vanity. If that had been the case, then everything would have been fine, only the problem is that if no one believes in something it doesn’t make it not false…it just makes it more dangerous. This was never what Samantha had wanted, but the pact she made had been honored.

Maybe if Sam was stronger this could have been avoided. If man were more resolved this could have been prevented. If God’s Grace was infinite it wouldn’t have mattered. But Samantha had chosen this for man and all it took was one “Yes.” 

Hitting The Gas

Sidney Stephens

He tipped the bottle to his lips, and the taste, barely anything on his tongue but flavorless gasoline, filled him. Made him whole. He felt his throat warm, felt his stomach burn. It was the first steps towards dumping death in his veins and he savored the idea. The only bittersweet peace he'd ever find tonight.

He took a few more downs of it and wiped his mouth, then carried the bottle to the motel room window. 

Leaning against the windowframe with one arm, he watched the street with hard, bitter eyes, watched the cars hiss by in the rain. He looked behind and saw Tisandra quietly sleeping on the bed, Zuzu passed out next to her, her mouth wide open, drool pooling on the pillow. He fucking hated Tisandra. Hated her royal airs, her smug condescension, how even the way she breathed spoke of entitlement, of privilege. And his hand seemed to tighten and inflame as in reply. But most of all, he hated that she was the reason he and Zuzu were so far away from home. He hated her so intently for that.

Home.

The thought of it twisted on his chest and he pulled another swig from the bottle, wincing as the burn went down. Five years. Five years of his life, gone right down the shitter. No input. No protest. No choice. No way of getting them back. Just last week he knew where he was, where he was going. Some vague idea of it anyway.

And now?

Now he was here, five years past his old life, sulking in a cheap motel, nursing a whiskey bottle and watching royalty sleep in the same bed with his little sister. And on the run. Always on the run.

Fuck her, he thought to himself, and took another stiff swallow from the bottle. He ought to just grab Zuzu and leave her majesty here in the morning. Let the bastards chasing them contend with her. Let them have her. He could be away before she woke up and never have to deal with her petty Disneyland problems.

Something he knew Zuzu would never agree to.

He watched the cars for almost an hour, letting his thoughts ride themselves out, letting his mind rage and rant, letting the sound of the cars balm him. Like ocean waves right outside his door. Until finally he grew tired of himself and, closing his eyes, wished it all away.

It was enough that nothing had changed when he opened them up again.

He made his way back to the bathroom, flipped on the glaring white light and capped the whiskey bottle. He needed a shave. He hadn’t showered in days. Dark rings marked his eyes. And the booze was catching up with him. He looked into the mirror, into his haggard face and decided to lay himself down now, while he could still keep track of his horizon. He grabbed the blanket Zuzu had left him and set himself down onto the floor next to them.

Fuck this running away shit, he thought, nestling into the pillow, wrapping himself in warmth. Fuck her majesty. Fuck that old bastard's curse. Fuck the whole damn world. Fuck it all. Let it all burn down around him for all he cared.

And softly, as cars outside his window whispered through the drizzled streets, he let out a thick sigh into the thin darkness of the room, found sanctuary in the closing of his eyes. And slid into a whiskey-tinged dream.

Six hours later, he heard Tisandra turn the shower off and hum loudly to herself. Like a drill beating into his skull.

It wasn't that he was hung over. But the noise of it, the cold-blooded perkiness of her voice at.....he rolled over to look up at the clock on the nightstand.....at seven o' clock in the goddamn morning was just too much. He saw that Zuzu was still asleep, on her side, her knees practically under her chin. He rolled back over again and cursed under his breath.

"Are you awake?" she asked, emerging from the fog of the bathroom and smiling, a towel wrapped around her head and around her torso.

"No" he murmured and threw the blanket over his face. She sat down at one of the chairs and picked up one her fashion magazines and began idly flipping through pages. Noisily flipping through pages. Then the flipping stopped and she sat there in the quiet of the room.

"Shouldn't you be getting up?" she asked, cutting through him.

"No. I shouldn't. Leave me alone" he said through the pillow.

"You don't think we should have left by now?" she asked.

"No" he told her, the pillow castrating his anger. She stood up and loudly plopped the magazine down on a table near the window. Under his breath, he cursed and realized he had no choice. Angrily, he threw the blanket off himself and sat upright, his face scowled. Out of the corner of his eye, he could tell she was grinning. He sighed, rubbed his eyes and stood up on his feet. And managed to flip her off without even looking at her.

Shuffling his feet and wincing at the daylight that broke through the thin curtains, he trudged into the shower and saw the whiskey bottle perched on the sink.

"Hello, old friend" he mumbled to himself, and spun the cap off for a swallow. A shitty breakfast at best but for now it’d have to do.

"If you're going to hassle me about waking up” he told Tisandra, “you might as well wake up Zuzu too. The sooner we roll out of here, the sooner she and I can get something to eat." Tisandra nodded in agreement and the bathroom door closed after him, water soon roaring into the tub.

By the time he emerged from the bathroom in his boxers, his hair wet and slick on his head, he felt iron-pressed and ready.

"Feel better?" Zuzu asked him. She and Tisandra were laying stomach-down on the bed, both of them peering through the magazine, Tisandra eating the leftover rose petals.

"Much" he said. "It's your turn, squirt. Make sure you hurry too. We need to get a move-on as soon as we can." Zuzu nodded, bounced off the bed and dug through her bags for a clean change of clothes. "Out in a jiff" she squealed with a grin, slipped past him and closed the bathroom door. He grabbed a white t-shirt from the duffel bag and put on the same pair of jeans he'd worn for days. Grabbed his smokes and rolled them in his sleeves. Put his shoes on. Checked the pistols and slid one of them into the waistband of his pants, the other into the duffel bag and threw on his Wanderer jacket. The sound of running water fired up behind him and then Zuzu's radio came after, playing the Chordettes.

"You take longer than I do to get ready, Mr. Huxley" Tisandra said. Her crimson hair had lightened just a bit, in the drying of it, and cascaded down in front of her face a little. She had put on one of her silken dresses and her upended bare feet and calves peeked out from the bottom.

"Har har" he said and moved to the door. “I’ll be back in a minute” he told her, “Just checking the engine before we go”. He turned the knob, quickly put on his sunglasses to ignore the sun and looked to the outside.

He never made it completely through the door. 

Floating in front of the hotel office, bigger than a house, was the galleon that had been chasing them going on four nights straight. It hovered a good thirty feet off the ground, its shadow draped over a few parked cars like a dark curtain. Pitch black sails hung flacidly from the masts and rope ladders dangled down its blood red and ebony sides. All around it were scrambling, shrieking goblins and one corpulent one in an eyepatch barking orders to all the others from the deck.

A squad of about ten or twelve goblins swarmed around the motel office, some chattering like angry insects, some snarling and laughing. Through the office windows Bobby saw three goblins argue with the hotel manager's wife and then jump on top of her, their clawed hands swinging cutlasses, blood splattering the glass.

"What's wrong?" Tisandra asked and Bobby re-entered the room, quickly and quietly closing the door.

"They're here" he said.

"Who's here?"

"Who do you think?" he asked with a smirk. “Certain friends of yours who have a habit of scooping out people's brains and making fog lights out of people’s heads."

"I knew you should've gotten up earlier! I told you!" she said and hopped to her feet. "Still, what are the odds they know we’re here?”

"You're kidding right?" he asked and smirked at her. “They know, for chrissakes. Why else would they be here?” From the bathroom he could hear Zuzu singing "Lollipop lollipop, oh lolli lolli, lolli, Lollipop…..POP! Bah doom doom doom". She was banging the shampoo bottles against the shower wall like drumsticks on 'bah doom doom doom'.

Bobby rubbed his face with his hands and groaned through his fingers to help him find his focus. He moved to the side of the window and pushed the curtain aside just a bit, asking for a tiny view. The goblins with the cutlasses were moving from room to room, kicking down doors and wasting no time with the people in them. He could hear the fighting, the screams, from halfway across the complex.

"Shit" he whispered to himself and slid away from the curtains before he could be spotted. "Okay look," he told her. "We go out the back way, out the bathroom window and try to sneak our way to the Beast."

"But if the Beast is out in front then..."

"We'll worry about that after we get the fuck out of here" he said, nervously checking the pistol's clip again to make sure it was full.

He knocked on the bathroom door. "Zuzu?" She was too busy singing to hear him. He turned the knob. Locked. He rapped on the door a little harder. "Zuzu!" and then heard the shower curtain scraped back.

"Yeah?" Zuzu said back, her head peeking out of the water, her hair soaped and spiked like a porcupine's. The Chordettes were just finishing up on the radio.

"We need you out of the shower. We've got company outside in the parking lot."

"Whaaaat?!" he heard her yell over the water. Tisandra, despite her fear, smiled a little.

"I need you out of the shower, Zu" he said a little louder. "We've got none-too-friendly company. Outside. In. The Par. King. Lot"

"Shit. Okay" she said and seconds later the rumble of the water was choked off to just a gurgle. He turned and saw Tisandra gathering up ALL of her luggage. Her garment bags. Her four suitcases. And her hat carrier. It nearly made him laugh watching her try to drag all six pieces of luggage into the bathroom on her own. He looked at her and started shaking his head. They'd die before they even made it to the bathroom.

"Take only what you can carry, Tisandra."

"I am" she replied, making a juggling act of each one as she tried to trudge them into the bathroom.

"I mean take only one or two of those suitcases. We can't make it out of here carrying half of your shit."

"You don’t understand. I need--"

"Will you stop fucking arguing with me and just GO!" He yelled, pointing the gun towards the bathroom.

"Stop yelling at me!!" she yelled back.

"You don't seem to get it, princess. We do not have fucking time to discuss this over tea. Those guys outside?" he asked. "They are here to kill Zuzu & me and to take you back home. And in about ten seconds, they will be kicking down that door and no amount of luggage is going to do us a fuck of a lot of good, you got me? Now if you want, you can stay here with your umpteen suitcases and your magazine." he said, picking it up and shaking it in front of her. "But me? I'm taking Zuzu and we're going out that bathroom window right the fuck now! If you're coming with us, then take two goddamn suitcases or wait here for them. Those are your options. Personally, I don't give a fuck what you do."

There was a long, disturbing pause. The bathroom door unlocked with a pop and Zuzu emerged in her hastily pulled on clothes.

"Geez, do you two ever stop fighting? You both sound like you're married." Zuzu said with a grin, buttoning up her shirt. She was soaked to the bone, her hair dripping. "What's the plan, Stan?"

Bobby, his face tense with anger, just pointed to the bathroom. "O-kay" Zuzu said. "We’ll just stare at each other, all pissed off. Wonderful plan." Bobby and Tisandra just ignored her.

"Well I'm taking these two then" Tisandra said, abandoning her garment bag and hat carrier and two of her other suitcases and angrily toting her two favorites into the bathroom.

Screams from neighboring tenants broke his thoughts. He pulled the pistol out of his waistband and peeked through the curtains again. He couldn't see the goblins standing guard outside any rooms. The sounds though, about two or three rooms down, wasn't a good sign.

"They're close" Bobby told Zuzu and she nodded, biting her nails. He grabbed his duffel bag, slung it over his shoulder, made sure he had the keys to the Beast in his pocket and very quickly followed Tisandra into the bathroom. She was struggling to open the window.

"Here, for chrissakes. Let me see that" he said and slid the gun behind his shirt. It was a simple turn-lock, nothing fancy but the window still refused to budge. Caught between making too much noise or doing what he had to do to bust them out, Bobby opted for busting.

He took off his jacket, wrapped it around his elbow and jabbed at the window's edge. In a pop it broke loose and swung out on its hinges. He unwound his jacket from his arm, reaching down to grab her suitcase and pitched it angrily through the window. The look on her face made him feel a little better.

So he pitched her other suitcase the same way.

He clasped his fingers together and gave Tisandra a boost out, then Zuzu’s bag went, then Zuzu after. Soon enough, he was clambering out the window behind them. 

His duffel bag slung over his shoulder, he crept alongside the alley wall, praying not to have attention drawn to them. Over the slight click-clack of Tisandra's sandals against the concrete as she lugged her suitcases in each hand (she was doing a pretty good job carrying both of them, he noticed), he could hear the goblins breaking their room door down and shrieking to each other. Taking the lead, he snuck past bathroom window after bathroom window, dodging trashcans and scattered broken beer bottles, Zuzu and Tisandra only steps behind.

When he got to the end of the alley, he could see part of the bow of the Hemlock poking out past the corner several meters away. He knew The Beast was waiting on the other side. Getting to it was going to be a problem. The ship was a fair enough distance away. But the goblins, or at least a good handful of them, were outside, keeping watch. Those were the ones he knew would charge him the minute they saw him move from around the corner and make for the Beast.

He switched his duffel bag strap from his shoulder to across his chest and swung the bag to his back. Then dug into his pockets, clutched the keys and took two deep breathes. The pistol was firmly gripped in his other hand, his trigger finger nervous. "I'm going to see what's going on" he said to them and peered around the corner without giving himself away.

He saw at least eight of them. Four were standing outside the door, jabbering at each other, their cutlasses loosely gripped in their thin-skinned hands, and another four were standing on the deck of the ship. Given the shrieks and shrill sounds from the inside of their room, he guessed there were at least three or four more. He quickly slid back behind the corner and tried to do the math fast. He had seven shots. God, this was going to be close. He turned to Tisandra.

"I’m going to make a run for the Beast. I want you two to stay here. When you hear the engine start up, don’t haul ass until you see me. Got it?" They both nodded and Zuzu offered help with Tisandra's suitcase. "Wish me luck" he told them and slinked around the corner to the parking lot.

"Good luck" Zuzu whispered once he was out of earshot. Tisandra didn't say a word.

His heart was pounding when he made it around the corner. Two of them spotted him immediately and it rippled for just a second to two others. He couldn't waste any time. He fired two shots, both of them breaking through the air like sharp thunder, and nailed two goblins in the head, each with a sound of cantaloupes splitting apart.

The other two remaining realized they didn't have the swords for what he had, so they scurried into the hotel room, shrieking and chattering to their comrades. Bobby, gun poised, quickly made his way to the Beast and unlocked it, never losing his bead on the goblins nearest to him. In their faces and snarling jaws he could tell they were indecisive on whether to rush him and tear apart the car or get their heads blown off. He untangled himself from his duffel bag and held it loosely on his arm as he opened up the driver door. Just barely out of range, he could hear Slaughtermouth bellowing from the deck of the Hemlock.

"Turn this goddamn ship about!!"

Bobby didn't dare even look to see it. He slung the duffel bag and the pistol into the seat, slid behind the wheel of the Beast and turned the ignition. Immediately it woke to life with a deafening roar, flames blasting out of the tailpipes. He revved the engine once, then slammed her into reverse, whipped his head around and threw her backwards.

He could see out of the corner of his eye that the Hemlock was scrambling with goblins at the cannons. He kicked the clutch pedal, jammed her into first and gunned the gas pedal. The Beast took off with a metallic rage, just as a cannonball volley blasted out of the Hemlock's side and ripped through the hotel room they had stayed in. The boom was thunderous, goblins and fire spraying everywhere. Bobby slammed the brakes just past the last hotel room and Tisandra and Zuzu darted out from behind the corner, ducking from the flying debris, bags in their hands.

Bobby leaned over and unlocked the door, flinging it open for them. "Hurry!" he yelled and half-stumbling, half-jumping into the backseat, Zuzu got in first. Bobby threw the seat backwards and Tisandra fell into the car after her, nearly sitting on the pistol, her suitcase almost taking up most of the room. The remaining goblins, those that that hadn't been blown to bits by the Hemlock's shot, raced after the car, cutlasses swinging, snarls pouring. Now all of a sudden they'd found their courage.

Bobby punched the gas and the Beast took off, the tires screeching as they burned against concrete. The Hemlock took chance of the pause and blasted another cannonball from its side. The whistle ripped through the air and barely missed the hotrod, exploding instead against a parked pick-up truck on the curb, steel and fire scattering everywhere.

"Jesus!" Zuzu screamed as a few of the truck parts pinged against the Beast. "It's like dodge ball! Except with fire!" The fire blazed right past them as they hit the main road and flew towards 66.

"Keep your heads down!" Bobby yelled as he tried to maneuver through the slower traffic. Tisandra ducked as best she could with her suitcase on her lap. Zuzu practically disappeared into the backseat.

"Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!" Slaughtermouth screamed as a small legion of goblins clambered back on board from the hotel parking lot. "Don't just stand there gawking!” he bellowed, “Move!” The three prisoners chained to the main deck were flogged and tortured anew, their wails pouring out of them and into the sails. The helmsman turned the wheel and the Hemlock spun to her right, slowly taking off in pursuit of the Beast.

"So help me god, I will decorate the stern with your useless fucking skulls!" Slaughtermouth rumbled.

"This one's dead, sir" one of the goblins reported, his cat-o-nine tails clumped with blood. Below him lay the open-mouthed corpse that had finally given up its last wind.

The Hemlock began to drag as if in answer. The Beast was a 3/4 of a mile down Route 66 when the Hemlock caught sight of it. "Bos'n!" Slaughtermouth barked. "Do whatever it takes for us to overtake them."

"Yes, Captain" the boatswain acknowledged. "Four more prisoners to the sails!” he commanded and several of the Lanterns proceeded to go below deck to drag up their cargo. Hammer, spikes, tawses and surgical tools were rolled out. Two goblins fastened grappling irons to several loose chains, and then the chains were anchored to the ship's deck, at the ready. Another pair manned the harpoon guns at the stern.

Slaughtermouth reached for his pipe, clenched it in his teeth, and ignited it with a flash of match that lit up his face. "Yes fucking sir, we will snare this little trout yet" he toned.

The Lanterns began hauling out gaunt and chained victims to the deck of the Hemlock, forcing them to their backs and then splaying them in a spread-eagle fashion with ropes. Then, with twisted drive, the goblins began hammering spikes into each victim's palms and ankles, securing them to the deck of the ship, each pound of the mallet emitting a new howl of agony. Then the lashings and tearings would begin, the tortured screams gusting the ship's canvas with vigor. Just the fears of those who had yet to be staked were enough to fuel the Hemlock's pace. Wind whipped across the ship with added fury as it picked up speed, the sails snapping and full.

"That's it, lads" Slaughtermouth praised, his smile wide and leering. "Every little drop you can!!" he ordered.

Bobby could see the ship in his rear view mirror, now only a half mile behind them. He checked the speedometer. At 90 miles an hour, they should be lost in our dust, he thought. But the Hemlock was closing the distance with every second, like a cat slowly slinking toward the mouse. Zuzu looked behind them and saw the ship barreling close.

"Can't we go any faster?" She asked.

"I've got it floored" Bobby said, looking at the rear view mirror. "I don't understand. They weren't this fast the last time" He caught a glance of Tisandra looking at him. Her eyes, while still angry about the argument, had cooled to abject fear. He couldn't blame her. He had no interest in seeing them all eviscerated by the Lanterns. He swerved violently again to get past the slower cars, the whole while watching the Hemlock grow larger and larger behind them.

"They’re right on top of us" Tisandra said nervously.

"Gimme a second to figure something out" he said.

Slaughtermouth bellowed with a sneering smile. "Hooks on my order!" Three more Dread Lanterns had joined up on the forward deck, grappling hooks in hand, chains clinking like chimes behind them. The lashings reached a fever pitch and the prisoners' howls filled the ship with the noise of their cries. The Hemlock gained four car lengths away from the Beast. Then three. Then two. Then....

Bobby saw the goblins, standing ready with hooks just above them. "Like hell you are!" he said and he eyed the special switch Dvalin had warned him about. Only in emergencies, he’d been told. No arguing about it. This definitely qualified. "Put on your seatbelts" Bobby said and immediately the girls scrambled to put them on. "And for fuck's sake, hold on to something" he told them, flicking the switch with squinted eyes and a small click from the dash.

Suddenly, like a hurricane of power, the car burst out and away and took off with a rocket's blinding speed. Bobby barely had time to react. All he could feel was the overwhelming weight that slammed them into the back of their seats and the flashing blur that became the landscape. The engine roared as if it was about to explode, the supercharger thundering power through the engine at breakneck force. And the speedometer, matching fury, climbed and climbed and climbed to a feverishly shrill pitch. It was like hell itself was driving the engine now.

100 mph. 110 mph. 120. 130. The needle broke its limit at 140 and continued accelerating. "Jeeeesus Christ" Bobby muttered, barely able to keep a grip on the steering wheel, his foot still flat on the gas.

The Hemlock practically disappeared into a dot behind them. 

Gabrielle, The Hero and the Thief

Anne Trotter

Sometimes she pretends they’re married, when he comes home to the secret base tired and beaten, bleeding but undefeated, and she makes him soup and sends him to shower and stitches his injuries. It’s a harmless little fantasy, one she fills out with holograms of flowers and domestic chores. She cuts his black hair, darns his ripped grey uniforms, always has a hot supper waiting in the oven, even when he’s late and she’s long since gone to sleep. He likes roast beef and hates brussels sprouts. So she cooks until the smell of a home-made meal overwhelms the smell of gunpowder from the range and machine oil from the workshop, and pretends.

It’s a long way from how they met, from his iron fingers biting into her arm as he dragged her into the base and set the barrier codes to lock her in forever. She’s come to understand that this is necessary. She killed a lot of people that day. He could have killed her; her childish temper tantrums about being locked in stopped years ago. Now she sits and eats popcorn and watches cable instead of prowling the halls looking for a way out. Besides, she’s had years. First thing she ever  learned here were the lockout codes and circuit diagrams. But she never left. Not even when she hated him; because she knew even then that she hated herself more.

Even at the worst of it, when she dreamt of cutting his throat with an ion dagger, he wasn’t so bad. He was kind, in his way, as much as he could be. When she complained about being bored he gave her a credit card, and now she’s got a library of books built up in her room. Wuthering Heights sucked ass the first time she read it, until she understood it was a monster story; A Separate Peace bored her to death, but she read it anyways. She likes Watership Downs and Hellboy better. But she’s read them all; all the books you’re supposed to read, and all the cheap thrills you’re not. Despite her dutiful self-education, the stories without many people and the stories about animals remain easier for her. It’s too hard to imagine a lot of people these days. She’s out of practice.

She does more than read, of course. When she first arrived she had majors in teenaged angst and bitchiness, with minors in skipping school and drinking. She’s learned a lot since then. Besides the cooking there’s her small web design and online security consulting business, a couple games, and a forum she moderates. In the real world of the tower, she’s learning how to maintain night vision and laser power supplies, to make herself more useful and take that load off him.

That last one, that was a tough decision. He’s the only person she sees. If she fixes his things, does that mean he won’t be here as often? Will she be shooting herself in the foot by helping reduce his workload? She asked online in her own forum, disguising her question as that of a girl in tech support. Amid the encouragement to be selfish was an answer that both depressed and heartened her: she already knew the answer or she wouldn’t have to ask, it said. It was true. So she picked up the tech manuals and started pestering him for lessons.

Every time he leaves her heart twists. Every time he comes back she has to stop herself from throwing her arms

around him in gratitude and relief. She isn’t sure how much of it is simply that he’s the only real person in her world. She tried to think about it, but it’s so hard. He’s a hero. So many women love him without knowing him; she knows him, inside and out, and there is so much more to love than they can realize. How then to decide what’s Stockholm Syndrome and what’s real? She hated him once. Surely that means something.

Even if it’s all situational, it doesn’t matter; her situation, their situation, will never change. Might as well make the best of it. She long ago realized that as surely as she is forever doomed to be his prisoner, he is forever doomed to guard her. She used to think, when it got black, that he should have just killed her. She doesn’t bother with that sort of stuff anymore; it’s not worth her time. Too much to do.

She’ll never let him know how she feels. It would make things awkward; he’d reject her, of course, and then things would be strange, and he might avoid her. Not let her help. And that’s her whole world now: helping him. That’s her only purpose.

She’s fixing a new tab onto a broken buckle on his glove with a torsion wrench and a bandsaw when the barriers go down. She nearly looses a finger in shock; indestructium is tough stuff, and you have to be damn careful working with it. She feels the barriers go, a hum in her bones gone silent, a pressure that has kept her contained for – how long? A decade? More? She’s forgotten, lost track. He would never do this. An accident?

What’s happened?

She has to fix it, right away. Already she can feel herself stretching out into the world, inch by inch. This is bad. She pushes the goggles up on her forehead, snatches off the leather gloves and tucks them into her workshop apron as she runs down the hall. Hurry, get to the power supply, what the hell is that *smell*?

It smells like – flowers and spices and explosive residue, like baking and woods and ripped metal. She stumbles around a corner and there it is: a hole in her world. Outside, the sun is shining, and there are sunflowers nodding away against a blue, blue sky.

She didn’t know they were in a field. How could she not realize? Granted, there weren’t any windows, but he would have told her if she’d asked. Why had she never bothered to ask where the hell she’d lived all this time?

Better question – why the hell was there a hole in her wall? Then there’s a shadow, a man’s shadow in the hole blocking the too-bright sunlight and the sunflowers and the shadow Is Not Him.

This is a shock of epic proportions, one that renders her mute and stupid for the time it takes the shadow to move into the tower and stride over to her. She’s gaping up at him in awe, and he’s barely glancing at her. He grabs her arm – so familiar. Hard fingers biting into her muscles, just the same way her love had done oh so many years ago, a come-along grip that drags her after this new man’s brisk steps. Another man grabbing her, and for a moment she’s nostalgic, then she’s offended, then she’s terrified he’ll let go and she won’t feel another human touch for the rest of her life.

What if he’s dead? Her him, not this new him. Shadow-him who isn’t a shadow as the hall lights pick out his golden hair and proud nose. Roman features, beautiful mouth – cruel, but still something she wants to draw. But what if her own hero, her guard, is dead? How could someone find this place if he were alive? How could someone hope to break in with the alarms silently blaring, calling him home to save her, to lock her back up again?

Her shadow-man is glancing down at a little readout, following an arrow on a map. It looks fairly accurate. She can’t stand the curiosity anymore, and opens her mouth.

“Is that an e-webmaster 2000? I’ve seen them on TV, but I don’t have anyone to call, so I never bothered to order one. Can you really use it to do sonic materials testing and signals calibration? I almost got one for those reasons, but – I’ve already got really good equipment. Nothing as portable, but why get new stuff when what you’ve got already works? Can I see it? Did you write that app? Is that the tower?”

He yanks her to a halt, whipping his gaze around to glare at her in disbelief. She studies every line of his face eagerly, drinking it in, terrified at his presence, equally terrified he might leave her. Her first visitor. A thief, breaking in. An uninvited guest… dammit! A guest. Where were her manners? “Um. I’m so sorry. My name’s Gabrielle. Um, what’s yours?” He scowls and turns away. “Would you like something to drink? We have water, and an espresso machine, and I can make tea. I’ve got Earl Grey, Russian Caravan, Chai, Jasmine Green – ” he stops and turns his head slowly, with menace. She watches, breathless. He’s glorious. She sighs, dreamily.

He quirks an eyebrow at her, and she blushes but can’t look away. Not now, not when this unfamiliar face is so close to her. She wants to touch him, to see if that silvery-blond stubble on his jutting chin is prickly. She wants to know what it feels like.

He’s asking her something. His voice is a wondrous rumble, completely new in her tiny world. She misses half of what he says. “…are you, exactly?”

Context being everything, she guesses at his question and answers. “I told you; Gabrielle. I live here, sort of.” She forces a smile. Honesty is the best policy. “I’m sort of a prisoner, actually. The barrier keeps me in. But that’s gone now… oh, crap. I have to fix the barrier.” Cold washes over her, and she tugs hard against his grip, suddenly terrified.  ”I have to fix it now, before he gets home, or – let go, I have to!” He’s dragging her along again and now that she’s remembered, she can feel the sunflowers outside, feel herself questing out, feel how she’s hovering over this man like a hungry ghost. He can’t even tell.

She’s going to kill him and she doesn’t even know his name.

“Be silent,” he says, without looking at her, and though she opens her mouth nothing comes out. She screams, but no air moves from her lungs. She finds herself tiptoeing along at his side, trying to ensure her footsteps make no noise.

Wonder fills her mind. He can control her! He could tell her, don’t hurt anyone, and she wouldn’t be able to! He could set her free. He could – he’s going to die, and all her hopes are going to die with him. She yanks hard, twisting her arm, and slips free. She’s gone like a flash, down the hall, fingers in her ears so she can’t hear what he says; she’s pretty sure he yelled “stop” but nanananana she can’t hear him.

Down, two turns, into a room, heart pounding. Stand silent by the door, feeling him. He comes after her a little, then pauses; moves away, following his little map on his little toy phone. She needs to talk to him.

She brings up the central computer, triggers text to speech, starts typing. Stops. She must be silent. This is not silent. She can’t do it; can’t even make the computer talk for her. Can’t warn him over the intercom.

She grabs her hair, feels him stride down a dead-end corridor that leads to nothing but a bathroom and some janitor’s closets, is relieved. She has some time. She types, prints, grabs the paper from the printer, runs. There, there, there. He’s a hot spot in her mind, so close. She’s too excited. The sunflowers are sweet outside, there are bees and butterflies and mosquitoes and worms and she can feel moles and rabbits dammit dammit please -

There he is, glaring at a door open onto a broom. She skids to a stop; he whips around; hand on the laser cutter at his belt, but she’s only holding a piece of paper, waving it frantically. He strides towards her, snatches it away, reads it quickly. Looks at her, one eyebrow up.

“Order you not to hurt anyone?” he says, and his voice is a sarcastic, amused rumble. “You?” She nods violently, desperately. “What if I simply order you not to hurt *me*?” His voice goes a little dreamy. “I could order you to kill… him. Order you to never hurt anyone but him, but that one exception needs to be made. He’s your jailer, as you said. Would you like that? I think that’s best. I’ll take what I need, leave you here waiting with orders to kill him, then you can be free. Walk out over his corpse. Everyone wins.” He’s smirking at her and she feels it, such great sorrow.

She was never going to do this again. Her dead are all there, swimming before her eyes. The school, the students, the dead faces blank and surprised, the dead teachers slumped on the ground in front of their desks with their dry-erase markers rolling on the floor, the dead hampsters in their cages and the dead birds outside the window and the dead trees still green but falling to pieces when the wind blew. And his order is there too, all the freedom she’s ever wanted glittering before her, like a christmas tree ornament on an 80′s TV show: soft and sparkling, her entire future in a cage gone with a word, with a moment of silence. She could go outside. She could walk next to people, have coffee surrounded by people, go hiking and fishing and shopping for shoes that would fit because she could try them on in a store.

He opens his mouth. It’s an order that’s coming, and she knows it. An order that could set her free. All she has to do is nothing. All she has to do is this one thing, and she can go out into the sunflowers that are withering and the bees that are dropping from the air and the moles underground that won’t rot because she’s already eaten the bacteria, already killed everything within ten feet of the tower except this man, this man, this first man. She leans up and kisses him, tears falling down her cheeks, presses her lips to his and tastes the salt and his words. He smells like cinnamon and concrete, and his lips are firm under hers.

She’s welding a sheet of indestructium into place over the hole in the wall when he comes home. He lands in a shower of soil, ignoring the plasma cutting torch in her hands to grab her arms with his iron fingers, his eyes sweeping over her to be sure she’s ok before he shakes her once and hugs her hard. He looks like hell. There are bags under his eyes, one eyebrow is half-singed off, and there are fresh bloody circles around his wrists; someone locked him up again. She doesn’t care. The welding mask hides the tears that are pouring down her face.

He steps back, inhales, pulls himself together. Silently, without a word, he picks up the next sheet of metal and holds it in place for her to attach with a few sunbursts of light and heat. Her hands shake for a moment, but she manages, and slowly the hole in her world vanishes. She works until she’s ready to fall over. He’s long since gone past the point of exhaustion, and she knows it, but for once she can’t stop for him. She can’t stop until it’s all gone; until not even a gnat can slip into her tower.

They walk back down to the workshop; he drags the fuel canisters for the cutting torch, she dangles the welding mask from her fingers. He doesn’t comment on the clean streaks the tears have washed free of her cheeks. She doesn’t comment on the hug he gave her. They move around each other warily, with practice, slowly putting their world back together.

Six weeks later, she walks into the top floor control room and finds a skylight; every month after that, a new window appears somewhere in the tower. A small stone patio grows around the base at ground level; not a weed or bug crawls on it, because the barriers have been extended – just a little – just enough to cover a couple of lawn chairs, facing west across an autumn field of sunflowers. 

Windows: Or, End of Tour does not mean End of Service

Anne Trotter

The sorts of issues which drive a man to build a near-impenetrable fortress in the middle of the family sunflower farm are not easily overcome. Adding windows to his tower was a difficult step for Saul. Not physically, of course, but the first rent he cut in the ceiling for the skylight felt like cutting open his own skin. The first cut left him sick to his stomach. Putting your faith in objects was a weakness – but he knew why he’d done it. He only  wondered why it was so much worse to cut it himself than it had been to see the gaping wound made by the Controller.

There really wasn’t any logical, security-buffered excuse not to – materials advances meant that with just a little extra thickness, the clearsteel was as tough as the indestructium he’d been using. It took him a couple months to get the stuff together. He wanted to procrastinate, even then, even knowing it hadn’t been fair to Gabrielle that he’d left it closed up for so long. Saul had been telling himself it was temporary. After all, this was his home, and she was just here until they could figure something out.

He’d been trying to “figure something out” for almost ten years now. Ten years was too long for a man to deceive himself that way. Too long to leave a woman cooped up in a single building without a bit of sunlight or fresh air. She wasn’t the same lethal girl she’d been; hadn’t been that girl for a long while now. Still lethal, of course, as the endless sweeping out of dead ants and dead wasps and dead mice attested. Still self-evidently of the feminine persuasion; but not by any stretch still a girl. And though she seemed content, when it came down to it, he knew she couldn’t go on this way. It had been coming for a while – since he would not go to change, change had come to him.

From his earliest memories he’d known two tings: he wasn’t alone in his abilities, and he had to hide them. His parents were smart. His mother had been born to the farm, his father born Amish; they had met in college, then returned to his mother’s farm. He sometimes wondered if it was because of his abilities that they did so; because a farm was a safe place to raise a boy who needed to be tethered to his bed at night and who, when he slipped his leash as a toddler, might end up a hundred feet in the air. He hadn’t thought about it until after they were dead, but after – after he added the question of what dreams they’d given up to raise him to his weight of guilt.

They ingrained habits into him from a young age. Brush your teeth, make your bed, watch out for your brother, don’t let anyone see you fly, don’t spit on the sidewalk, don’t swear. Even when they died he didn’t break that rule. He ran, he knelt, he cried; but he didn’t fly. Before the military he fantasized that if he’d flown, he might have been in time to save them. While he was serving over in the war he started to understand nothing could have saved them, and instead fantasized about getting there in time to say goodbye. Later he let it go, and knew that there had never been any possibility of contact. No matter how fast he got there, no matter how strong he was, he wasn’t faster than a bomb. He could only have died with them. Or ended up like Jimmy.

Jimmy never blamed him, even without his legs, even without his balls, and that was the worst thing that Saul could imagine. So he ran away and went to war and left Jimmy on the farm with Consuela. She stood there solidly fat in her black polyester pants and white shirt and cussed at him in her beautiful voice, the day he left, called him a coward for ditching. But it was in Spanish, so Saul could pretend he didn’t understand. And he wasn’t a coward. In the war everyone got blown up once or twice. Some part of Saul wanted to end up as a cripple. He pictured the worst, over and over. To his nineteen year old mind that wasn’t cowardice; just a chance for the scales to equalize. But those imagined worsts never happened. His biggest injuries were never physical.

He’d hoped for some sort of punishment, but it seemed that justice was napping for nine years. In the meantime, Saul learned how to be afraid, and how to spot a bomb in a pile of junk, and how to call for fire support and patch up a friend when he got shot and fix night vision and improvise adapt overcome ounces are pounds pounds are pain drink nap scrub dishes burn both literal and figurative shit cry when nobody’s looking because you’re a soldier kiddo, and if they catch you crying then they’ll think you’re broken. And after a while there really wasn’t anything left to learn, and he really didn’t care if they thought he was broken, and one day he couldn’t stop the tears making tracks down his face while he walked his patrol. So they sent him back to the land of fast food and plentiful beer, and stuck him in the hospital for a while.

Eventually he stopped crying and they let him out to go home.

The silo project started after Saul came back. He’d had an obsession with safety for a little while. Too many loud noises and he needed someplace quiet; too many flashing lights and he needed someplace dark. It all stayed with him, it was inside his skin. Even in the sunflower fields he could see the sand, and even when he knew in his heart that if he’d stayed he’d have been worn down to nothing – even then he felt guilty for leaving. He saw his boys walking patrol in his sleep. Sometimes he flew over them in his dreams, scouted for them, sniped from the sky for them. Sometimes he was shot down. Those were the good dreams.

When he woke up his rational mind knew that he’d stayed in as long as he could. You don’t leave your friends in the shit, not if there’s any choice; but they kept coming and going, and eventually no-one was left from when he’d started. Just a bunch of kids who looked like they were getting younger and younger every day. He trained them and pushed them and worried when they snuck beer, and then they died or left and he did it again and again. Like running in place; pointless, after a while. So instead he ran back to the things he’d run from the first time around. In the end it didn’t make any difference, what his rational mind knew. His emotions said he’d left them. But he’d left Jimmy first. He was good at leaving.

It was weird at first, of course. He’d changed but nothing else had. The farm still kept on going; sunflower oil was still useful stuff. Jimmy was still a cripple and a eunuch, confined to his wheelchair. Consuela was still refusing to speak English, changing Jimmy’s underwear with a constant stream of sweetly spoken Spanish profanity. Their parents and sister still slept in their graves on the hillside, under the century-old willow trees. Running away to war changed nothing; so he turned inwards, built a fortress out of an old silo, moated by sunflowers, protected by a stolen military grade barrier projector. He never questioned why an empty silo in the middle of a field needed so much protection. It wasn’t difficult to understand that it wasn’t the physical structure which needed this excessive safety, after all.

It wasn’t easy work, by any stretch. He’d begun by reinforcing the old silo exterior from the inside, then attaching indestructium plating stolen at night from the metalworks plant up the road. Plasma-welding it in place with his dad’s old kit. He didn’t feel bad about stealing the plating – he shorted them one sheet a night for a year. They had plenty left over. Sweating and struggling, flying low and slow carrying the heavy plates of metal, he exhausted himself quickly at first; he was out of practice with the flying. Gradually learning he could lift more and more, go longer and longer without sleep. Armoring up the old, unused silo like an inverted armadillo, a metal turtle dressed in a poorly-painted wooden shell.

Telling no-one, telling himself it was no big deal, not really a secret even if he worked at night and avoided the cameras and refused to answer Consuela when she asked where he went.Easy stuff to hide when the owner is in a wheelchair and hires out all the fieldwork to immigrants who don’t speak English, and they want their jobs so they don’t ask questions. Even easier when you hook up the stolen military barrier generator and post caution signs about the structural integrity of the building. Consuela nagged for an answer but never came out to see, and Jimmy never asked where his brother got off to at night. Jimmy just watched and waited.

When the armor was done it was still an empty tower, tall and hollow with a single entrance at the top. You had to fly to get in. He stood inside and looked around, and thought: still not safe. Still not done. So he started digging. It took two years to get it right, even using granitic diggers borrowed at night from the factory construction site two counties over. It was the flying with it that was the problem; he was fast, but it was a heavy piece of gear and he had to return it every morning. He worked at night, every night, installing wiring, pipes, and concreting the tunnels so they wouldn’t rain dirt down on his head.

Sometimes he stayed up during the day to talk to Jimmy. Jimmy was immobilized in the one room, moving eternally from the massive bathtub to the massive bed. Saul didn’t come by every day though. When Jimmy fell out of the bed and lay on the floor for half the day, they revamped the old barn into a livable apartment. Consuela moved in full-time to save her the drive from the city. Six months later her daughter Palomita moved into Consuela’s spare bedroom to help manage the farm. Palomita didn’t like going out to the fields; she’d been part of the farm life for twenty five years, had whacked the heads off enough sunflowers in her life to learn to hate them. Still, she managed the paperwork and permits and purchases better than Saul or Jimmy ever had. She didn’t bug him about his nights either; she just called him loco and told him to stay out of her way. She was going to double their profits, and they’d better not argue.

So Saul was left alone, and that was good. And the labyrinth he built was done, and that was good. And then one day he came into the farmhouse after a week of putting finishing touches on the electrical system, and Consuela was red-eyed and shaking as she tried to cook, and Jimmy was grey and looked sicker than ever, and he learned that Palomita had gone into town two days ago and never come back.

Two days… had he been gone that long, or just not noticed when he came home? He couldn’t remember, and that scared him. Palomita being gone scared him too. He’d been home three years and hadn’t felt fear in all that time, not from anything outside himself. It felt like an electric shock. Jimmy was a shock too. His little brother lay there in the bed, nearly buried under his own flesh, but his eyes were still there. Still Jimmy’s eyes. And he didn’t say anything, just looked at his big brother. Who silently left that night and put on the thermals hunting goggles, grabbed a GPS and a warm jacket, tucked a laser cutter in his belt, and went flying.

He’d had a long time to perfect the idea of a flight search, even if he’d never actually practiced one. He knew the local area so well that he barely needed the GPS, but he took it anyways, to make sure there wasn’t anyplace he’d missed. Palomita had only been gone two days; there was still a chance. Through the thermal goggles the world was strange and clean. He spotted herds of deer, looking oblong from the sky; rabbits and sheep and a couple herds of dairy cows; people asleep in their beds. He searched until daylight was coming and he was too visible, and then he came home, gobbled down the sandwiches Consuela had made him, and slept without dreams for the first time in two years.

That night Saul went back up and searched again, and four hours into the night he found the truck they used for deliveries. It wasn’t on a main road and it was nearly the same temperature as the surrounding patch of forest, but when he landed there was no mistaking it. So he went back up, low, weaving in and out of the trees the way he’d done when he was a kid, sliding past the soft pine tops that brushed against his jacket while he scanned the ground and found the little wooden building almost under the trees and the still cold sedan parked by the side of the cabin and the still cold body in the trunk and the hot sleeping figure in the bedroom. He walked towards the house and stumbled on the uneven ground. The soft dip of graves underfoot did not show up on thermal imagery; soil was soil, to the eyes of the camera. It was a lesson in things that could not be seen from the sky.

That was the first time, the first rescue mission. A failure as rescues go. When he was done with the hot man in the house he left him there to slowly cool, and carried Palomita’s cold little body home to Consuela. She wailed and wept, her rotund body bent double, her plump face seared by deep crevasses. Then she kissed her little girl and cleaned her young cold body with warm soapy water, dressed her in her favorite clothes. Saul put a coffin together out of spare lumber, Consuela lined it with the house’s best sheets, and the three of them buried the little girl in the graveyard next to their dead sister and dead parents and grandparents and Consuela’s dead husband and all the other members of the family who had lived their lives on the farm. Jimmy was there, propped onto a pallet lift and hauled outside through the upstairs window. Consuela was there looking old and grey, and for the first time seeing her in the light Saul noticed how her hair was more white than black.

Something inside him had woken up on that hunt. He’d wanted to find Palomita alive. He felt like there were bitterly sharp edges inside him grating together, like the novocaine had worn off but the drill was still going. He felt like there was blood inside him for the first time in years. It hurt so much. He tried to stay out in the silo for a while, to get numb again, but he didn’t have any food out there and Consuela kept coming out to knock on the wood facade and ask if he wanted sandwiches or soup or cornbread and chili or fresh tortillas with beans and cheese. So he set up a phone line, and got into the habit of stopping by the kitchen – it kept her from bugging him later. And Jimmy called him and they talked at night, from across the field. Seemed like Jimmy stayed awake late into the night too. And sometimes when he was talking to Jimmy, it wasn’t so bad. His little brother was a smart, funny guy.

The second time he went out to fly a search pattern, it was because he’d come in and found Consuela sitting at the kitchen table with a sobbing field worker’s wife. It was a relief to find the man stuck in a ravine where he’d fallen trying to snare rabbits, and the rescue team put the anonymous call down to someone else trying to stay out of trouble. Could easily have been much worse, Jimmy said, looking at Saul with wise eyes in a massive body. Much worse, if he hadn’t flown out.

And that was the start of it, and when the violence in the city spilled out he was there, and he got noticed so he wore a jacket and visor, and the local police didn’t try too hard to find him and the military tried really hard but failed because he’d been them, he knew how they worked. There were occasional meetings with others like him – some hiding, some helping, some in the police and some letting their rage out on the world like a cancer. He had a couple lucky misses, a couple close calls. And then one day the high school died and the emergency response personnel started dying and they had to pull out, and it was in the middle of the city and spreading, and he knew enough by then to get in, tranq the girl, grab her by the arms and haul her ass out of there. It was a risk, but the alternative was worse. Until the moment he grabbed her, he wasn’t certain she couldn’t kill him too.

He could have turned her over to the military. He asked her, once, if she wanted to go; and under her blue hair and her black mascara, her ripped jeans and too-many-times-pierced ears, even under that he saw her shake her head, quick and silent, because they both knew what the military would do. It was why he hadn’t let them know how he could fly, not even his best friends, not even his sergeant, not even when everyone around him was dying. So he wouldn’t turn this little girl over, even if she was the most dangerous thing in the world, even if it would have meant advances in medicine that would save his brother Jimmy. Some things just weren’t worth it.

And now he had windows, and she wasn’t a girl anymore.  For a while she’d had a different hair color every month; then no hair; then some self-piercings, which he’d had to disinfect and issue antibiotics for. She’d painted the walls black, played music that wailed with violins, seemed nothing but a bundle of self-pity. He left her a bunch of catalogs and a TV, brought boxes and food in for her, but tried to avoid her as much as possible. She seemed to want to fight, to want argue, and he couldn’t do it. Couldn’t’ handle the yelling. So he left. And while he was out avoiding her, she changed, and his tower changed.

For a while it was painted black; then it was painted with dragons; then it was painted with green fields and mountains and undersea life; then plain white. It seemed like every time he came back it had a new color scheme. He installed a better ventilation motor to handle the paint fumes. She took up welding as a hobby, and strange metal furniture populated every room he didn’t lock down. She bought a violin, then a saxophone, then a guitar, then drums; he soundproofed his level of the tower. She learned to cook.

He started finding notes – try the cookies. I made a pie. There’s chicken in the fridge, I made too much, if you want some have some. He didn’t see her, but it was hard to resist when he was hungry and there wasn’t anything else in the fridge and it smelled good. He wondered sometimes if she were planning to poison him, but he lived through meatloaf and peach cobbler and stuffed peppers, and it really was good food. Much, much better than the microwave stuff he’d been surviving on all this time. So when he bumped into her in the kitchen, he didn’t immediately run away; and slowly, they started relaxing around each other. Something eased, and while they never really had conversations, sometimes he’d sit and eat with her. He could always leave later.

And now he had windows, and he thought they might never have a conversation, but when she was sitting looking out over the sunflower fields at the forest and the mountains and the other silos, he thought – maybe it’s ok not to talk. There were a lot of maybes. Tech had come a long way in ten years. Maybe he should start doing some more research. There might be smaller barrier generators; he could talk to some friends in the military, see what they were using. If it could be mounted on a car, he could take her for a drive. They could go to the beach. Maybe she could meet Jimmy. Maybe she would leave, if he gave her that freedom.

Jimmy wold like her, Saul thought, as they sat and watched the sun rise over the sunflower field from the little patio he’d paved with local slate. But maybe she wouldn’t like Jimmy. It was a risk. But the tower was the safest place he knew, and that wasn’t safe anymore either. So maybe he was an idiot, and maybe all this time he should have been checking more frequently to see if he could find a way to fix something for her. He couldn’t fix the past, and he couldn’t see any way to set her free right now. But at least he was looking int he right direction now.

He looked over at her in the morning light, and she was beautiful. She glanced over and smiled at him, and he blinked.

Exactly when the hell had she become beautiful?

He turned back to looking at the sun. She contemplated him a moment; her heart gave a little jump. He’d noticed her. That was good.  Terrifying, but good. She picked up her coffee cup and settled back to watch the sunflowers lift their heads. A mosquito wandered past the barrier field and drifted dead to the ground; a weed seed between the slate cracks sifted itself to dust before it ever sprouted. She knew and didn’t care – the sunflowers were beautiful and safe, the clouds were pink and the sky was gold, and it was going to be a beautiful day. 

Zombies and Dolls

Anne Trotter

They made me real stupid in the lab where I was born, but it’s ok, because brains are only good for people who need to take care of themselves. I don’t ever have to take care of myself so brains would just be extra baggage. That’s what the psychologist said when they was explaining about how we were born. I remember everything. They made us stupid, but we have perfect memory, because sometimes we have to remember lots of stuff all in a row.

I know numbers because I need to be able to count things, like dancing steps and how many minutes I swim to keep in shape. They said we swim because it doesn’t hurt our boobs as much; we have big boobs because it makes us sexy. We all like being sexy. I don’t know why they bothered telling us why we swim though; we don’t need whys. We just like it when they tell us to do stuff.

Like today. Doctor Jerome came in today, and he looked nervous, so I asked him if I could help and he said yes. So he said I had to remember some numbers and walk across town and tell them to a woman named Mirabelle exactly right, and I said sure, and he said go now, so I did; and it made him really happy.

It’s my first time out all alone, and it’s lots of fun. Everything here is green and pretty. The walk paths are nice, and everyone smells at me and looks at me, which I really like. I found the building Doctor Jerome said to find by asking a nice boy who thought my boobs were excellent; I said thank you. He followed me a little to make sure I found it ok, and asked if he could buy me coffee; I said yes, but after I did my chore. He went away very happy. I like making people happy like that.

I found Mirabelle by asking the secretary at the desk in the front of the building. She frowned at me until I smiled really big at her; when I smile really big, people just can’t help but smile back. Smiles are contagious, the psychologist says. Mirabelle looked very surprised to see me, and when I told her the numbers she grabbed my arm and brought me into her office, which was full of books. I can’t read because I don’t need to, but Mirabelle must be very smart and very useful because she reads a lot. I think that must be nice, but not as nice as making people happy by having big breasts and smiling a lot and giving the best blowjobs in the world.

I told Mirabelle the numbers, and she wrote them down exactly right, and then she looked relieved but still worried so I asked if she wanted a blowjob. She was surprised then, but she smiled very nicely at me and almost cried because I made her happy, and told me that was ok, I should go straight home now. I told her there was a boy who wanted to have coffee with me and she said no, that would be bad.

I didn’t understand but I don’t really need to, so when she said no, go home, I did. But I wished I could have had coffee. I’ve never had coffee before. We’re not allowed to have it at work, but if the boy said it was ok it would have been ok. We can only have things other people give us. It’s good we’re so pretty and people like to give us things.

I got home, but home was all upset, and Doctor Jerome was nowhere around so I couldn’t tell him that I did what he said and got it right. I felt bad then, so I went down to the guards and gave them blowjobs, and that made them happy so I felt better. They always like blowjobs but we don’t always have time, because the politicians get priority and then we have to exercise and eat and sleep and look pretty at parties.

While I was there they were talking about a traitor. I’d never heard that word before, and I remember every word I’ve ever heard, so I asked what it meant. They looked at me very nicely and said it meant a bad man who hurt people. This made me really upset. I almost cried, and that’s bad because your nose tuns and you’re not as pretty, but I’d never heard of anything so horrible! How can there be people like that who like to hurt other people?

They looked worried when I got sad, and tried to make me happy, so I was happy because I didn’t want them to worry, and it made me really happy to see them all relieved. Then they sent me away to go exercise, even though it wasn’t time yet, but really there’s no such thing as too much exercise.

I was doing yoga to stay flexible when the alarm went off. Nobody else was in the gym because it wasn’t exercise time, and I’d never heard this alarm before. I didn’t know what to do. There was no-one to tell me what to do. Alarms mean you should do something. Finally I decided to get dressed and try and find someone to tell me what I should do.

I went back to our sleeping room. On the way I saw people down one hall all moving very fast, but even though I called out they didn’t notice me. Whatever they were doing must have been very important, because they were in a very big hurry. When I got back to our room where we all sleep in beds along the wall, there was no-one there. So I sat and waited.

Eventually I got sleepy, so I counted the hours, and it was past my sleep time. There was no-one in the sleep room and we all sleep together, at the same time, so where was everyone? I had a horrible feeling being alone. I’m never supposed to be alone. Where was everyone? I tried to lay down but I couldn’t sleep, it was too quiet; there was supposed to be everyone’s breathing and dreaming all around me, but there wasn’t anyone there.

Then I heard a noise down the corridor, so I got up to go see what it was. It must be someone there, I thought, that’s good, they can tell me what I need to do and where I can go to be with everyone else and the person walking down the hallway was Doctor Jerome.

He didn’t look so good. He looked sick, all grey and sad and his eyes were very strange. I smiled my biggest smile and said Doctor Jerome, Oh good, could you please help me? I don’t know where everyone is. And he sort of mumbled something and started walking towards me, and then I saw he was hurt, and I thought, I should get him help, that’s blood. But he looked lost and scared so I didn’t want to leave him. So I walked over and took his hand and it was cold, and he held my hand too tight, and I pulled him over to where there was a phone and thought, why didn’t I call anyone sooner?

So I picked up the phone and I dialed the number for help, and a machine answered saying emergency get out of the building so I pulled Doctor Jerome along behind me towards the stairs.

It was really difficult getting him down the stairs. He kept wanting to smell my hair, which was nice, because I like my hair to smell nice and I like it when people want to be near me and smell me, but first we had to get outside because the phone said emergency. Then he leaned over and nibbled on my shoulder and that was nice too, but I kept pulling him along until we got to the door and got out of the building, but there wasn’t anyone  outside either and that made me sad.

I had to stop and look around then, because I’d never been outside while it was dark before. I’d been awake when it was dark, but always inside, and always with a lot of other people, and now it was just me and Doctor Jerome and he bit me on the shoulder. Not hard, but enough to hurt, so I giggled and said ouch and then he really bit me hard and I bled and I said ouch Doctor Jerome that hurts and then he bit my arm and I screamed and ran away.

I should not have screamed and run away. I cried after. What Doctor Jerome must think! I’ve made him sad. HE moans and wanders around and I can hear him and see him but I stay in the shadows and I’m so angry at myself for not going to help him, but my arm hurts. I want someone to come make it better. I want someone to come help me. I cry and cry but nobody helps me, and then I feel hot and tired.

I fall asleep, outside, at night, all alone.

I wake up all alone. I don’t like being all alone. I go looking for someone. I’m clumsy. I should be graceful but I can’t be, I try but I stumble and sway. I don’t see anyone.

I walk. I walk and walk and walk all over.

I see Cynthia, standing on a corner, looking all alone. I walk over to her, She cries when she sees me and tries to run towards me but she falls and skins her knee. I help her up. She smells good. I smell her. Her skin smells good. She’s talking but I’m hungry and I lick her shoulder, then I bite it hard and she yelps but I can taste it and she wants to make me happy but it hurts her like it hurt me and I can’t stop I’m hurting her why am I hurting her this is wrong but she’s delicious and then she runs away and I cry, but I don’t think my eyes are working anymore.

I see Doctor Jerome. Maybe he can fix me. My arm doesn’t hurt anymore. I go over to him where he’s standing swaying under a streetlight watching a moth. I say Doctor but it comes out mmmmaaaarrrrr and he looks at me, but he doesn’t smell good like Cynthia did, so I just stand near him and cry without any tears, and it sounds like huh-huh-huh-huh.

When the sun comes up it’s hot so we go into a building and lay down where it’s cool and stare at the ceiling. When it gets dark we get up and go outside and walk around. We see Cynthia standing with Lenore. Cynthia doesn’t smell good anymore. She smells like me. I smell like Doctor Jerome. Lenore smells like Cynthia. We walk around until we find a boy hiding, and then we eat him and feel better so we sleep.

I think we are bad people now. I dream of giving blowjobs and smiling guards and swimming, and when I wake up I find some gasoline and some matches and pour it all over us. The others just look at me because I keep dropping the gas can but I took yoga so even though everything is stiff and achey and hurts to bend I pick it back up and get us all. Lenore wants to walk off but I pull her back and then I set us on fire.

It doesn’t hurt. We burn like candles. I feel better, knowing we won’t make anyone else unhappy, every again. 

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"Original Author" means, in the case of a literary or artistic work, the individual, individuals, entity or entities who created the Work or if no individual or entity can be identified, the publisher; and in addition (i) in the case of a performance the actors, singers, musicians, dancers, and other persons who act, sing, deliver, declaim, play in, interpret or otherwise perform literary or artistic works or expressions of folklore; (ii) in the case of a phonogram the producer being the person or legal entity who first fixes the sounds of a performance or other sounds; and, (iii) in the case of broadcasts, the organization that transmits the broadcast.

"Work" means the literary and/or artistic work offered under the terms of this License including without limitation any production in the literary, scientific and artistic domain, whatever may be the mode or form of its expression including digital form, such as a book, pamphlet and other writing; a lecture, address, sermon or other work of the same nature; a dramatic or dramatico-musical work; a choreographic work or entertainment in dumb show; a musical composition with or without words; a cinematographic work to which are assimilated works expressed by a process analogous to cinematography; a work of drawing, painting, architecture, sculpture, engraving or lithography; a photographic work to which are assimilated works expressed by a process analogous to photography; a work of applied art; an illustration, map, plan, sketch or three-dimensional work relative to geography, topography, architecture or science; a performance; a broadcast; a phonogram; a compilation of data to the extent it is protected as a copyrightable work; or a work performed by a variety or circus performer to the extent it is not otherwise considered a literary or artistic work.

"You" means an individual or entity exercising rights under this License who has not previously violated the terms of this License with respect to the Work, or who has received express permission from the Licensor to exercise rights under this License despite a previous violation.

"Publicly Perform" means to perform public recitations of the Work and to communicate to the public those public recitations, by any means or process, including by wire or wireless means or public digital performances; to make available to the public Works in such a way that members of the public may access these Works from a place and at a place individually chosen by them; to perform the Work to the public by any means or process and the communication to the public of the performances of the Work, including by public digital performance; to broadcast and rebroadcast the Work by any means including signs, sounds or images.

"Reproduce" means to make copies of the Work by any means including without limitation by sound or visual recordings and the right of fixation and reproducing fixations of the Work, including storage of a protected performance or phonogram in digital form or other electronic medium.

2. Fair Dealing Rights. Nothing in this License is intended to reduce, limit, or restrict any uses free from copyright or rights arising from limitations or exceptions that are provided for in connection with the copyright protection under copyright law or other applicable laws.

3. License Grant. Subject to the terms and conditions of this License, Licensor hereby grants You a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive, perpetual (for the duration of the applicable copyright) license to exercise the rights in the Work as stated below:

to Reproduce the Work, to incorporate the Work into one or more Collections, and to Reproduce the Work as incorporated in the Collections;

to create and Reproduce Adaptations provided that any such Adaptation, including any translation in any medium, takes reasonable steps to clearly label, demarcate or otherwise identify that changes were made to the original Work. For example, a translation could be marked "The original work was translated from English to Spanish," or a modification could indicate "The original work has been modified.";

to Distribute and Publicly Perform the Work including as incorporated in Collections; and,

to Distribute and Publicly Perform Adaptations.

The above rights may be exercised in all media and formats whether now known or hereafter devised. The above rights include the right to make such modifications as are technically necessary to exercise the rights in other media and formats. Subject to Section 8(f), all rights not expressly granted by Licensor are hereby reserved, including but not limited to the rights described in Section 4(e).

4. Restrictions. The license granted in Section 3 above is expressly made subject to and limited by the following restrictions:

You may Distribute or Publicly Perform the Work only under the terms of this License. You must include a copy of, or the Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) for, this License with every copy of the Work You Distribute or Publicly Perform. You may not offer or impose any terms on the Work that restrict the terms of this License or the ability of the recipient of the Work to exercise the rights granted to that recipient under the terms of the License. You may not sublicense the Work. You must keep intact all notices that refer to this License and to the disclaimer of warranties with every copy of the Work You Distribute or Publicly Perform. When You Distribute or Publicly Perform the Work, You may not impose any effective technological measures on the Work that restrict the ability of a recipient of the Work from You to exercise the rights granted to that recipient under the terms of the License. This Section 4(a) applies to the Work as incorporated in a Collection, but this does not require the Collection apart from the Work itself to be made subject to the terms of this License. If You create a Collection, upon notice from any Licensor You must, to the extent practicable, remove from the Collection any credit as required by Section 4(d), as requested. If You create an Adaptation, upon notice from any Licensor You must, to the extent practicable, remove from the Adaptation any credit as required by Section 4(d), as requested.

You may Distribute or Publicly Perform an Adaptation only under: (i) the terms of this License; (ii) a later version of this License with the same License Elements as this License; (iii) a Creative Commons jurisdiction license (either this or a later license version) that contains the same License Elements as this License (e.g., Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 US) ("Applicable License"). You must include a copy of, or the URI, for Applicable License with every copy of each Adaptation You Distribute or Publicly Perform. You may not offer or impose any terms on the Adaptation that restrict the terms of the Applicable License or the ability of the recipient of the Adaptation to exercise the rights granted to that recipient under the terms of the Applicable License. You must keep intact all notices that refer to the Applicable License and to the disclaimer of warranties with every copy of the Work as included in the Adaptation You Distribute or Publicly Perform. When You Distribute or Publicly Perform the Adaptation, You may not impose any effective technological measures on the Adaptation that restrict the ability of a recipient of the Adaptation from You to exercise the rights granted to that recipient under the terms of the Applicable License. This Section 4(b) applies to the Adaptation as incorporated in a Collection, but this does not require the Collection apart from the Adaptation itself to be made subject to the terms of the Applicable License.

You may not exercise any of the rights granted to You in Section 3 above in any manner that is primarily intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or private monetary compensation. The exchange of the Work for other copyrighted works by means of digital file-sharing or otherwise shall not be considered to be intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or private monetary compensation, provided there is no payment of any monetary compensation in con-nection with the exchange of copyrighted works.

If You Distribute, or Publicly Perform the Work or any Adaptations or Collections, You must, unless a request has been made pursuant to Section 4(a), keep intact all copyright notices for the Work and provide, reasonable to the medium or means You are utilizing: (i) the name of the Original Author (or pseudonym, if applicable) if supplied, and/or if the Original Author and/or Licensor designate another party or parties (e.g., a sponsor institute, publishing entity, journal) for attribution ("Attribution Parties") in Licensor's copyright notice, terms of service or by other reasonable means, the name of such party or parties; (ii) the title of the Work if supplied; (iii) to the extent reasonably practicable, the URI, if any, that Licensor specifies to be associated with the Work, unless such URI does not refer to the copyright notice or licensing information for the Work; and, (iv) consistent with Section 3(b), in the case of an Adaptation, a credit identifying the use of the Work in the Adaptation (e.g., "French translation of the Work by Original Author," or "Screenplay based on original Work by Original Author"). The credit required by this Section 4(d) may be implemented in any reasonable manner; provided, however, that in the case of a Adaptation or Collection, at a minimum such credit will appear, if a credit for all contributing authors of the Adaptation or Collection appears, then as part of these credits and in a manner at least as prominent as the credits for the other contributing authors. For the avoidance of doubt, You may only use the credit required by this Section for the purpose of attribution in the manner set out above and, by exercising Your rights under this License, You may not implicitly or explicitly assert or imply any connection with, sponsorship or endorsement by the Original Author, Licensor and/or Attribution Parties, as appropriate, of You or Your use of the Work, without the separate, express prior written permission of the Original Author, Licensor and/or Attribution Parties.

For the avoidance of doubt:

Non-waivable Compulsory License Schemes. In those jurisdictions in which the right to collect royalties through any statutory or compulsory licensing scheme cannot be waived, the Licensor reserves the exclusive right to collect such royalties for any exercise by You of the rights granted under this License;

Waivable Compulsory License Schemes. In those jurisdictions in which the right to collect royalties through any statutory or compulsory licensing scheme can be waived, the Licensor reserves the exclusive right to collect such royalties for any exercise by You of the rights granted under this License if Your exercise of such rights is for a purpose or use which is otherwise than noncommercial as permitted under Section 4(c) and otherwise waives the right to collect royalties through any statutory or compulsory licensing scheme; and,

Voluntary License Schemes. The Licensor reserves the right to collect royalties, whether individually or, in the event that the Licensor is a member of a collecting society that administers voluntary licensing schemes, via that society, from any exercise by You of the rights granted under this License that is for a purpose or use which is otherwise than noncommercial as permitted under Section 4(c).

Except as otherwise agreed in writing by the Licensor or as may be otherwise permitted by applicable law, if You Reproduce, Distribute or Publicly Perform the Work either by itself or as part of any Adaptations or Collections, You must not distort, mutilate, modify or take other derogatory action in relation to the Work which would be prejudicial to the Original Author's honor or reputation. Licensor agrees that in those jurisdictions (e.g. Japan), in which any exercise of the right granted in Section 3(b) of this License (the right to make Adaptations) would be deemed to be a distortion, mutilation, modification or other derogatory action prejudicial to the Original Author's honor and reputation, the Licensor will waive or not assert, as appropriate, this Section, to the fullest extent permitted by the applicable national law, to enable You to reasonably exercise Your right under Section 3(b) of this License (right to make Adaptations) but not otherwise.

5. Representations, Warranties and Disclaimer

UNLESS OTHERWISE MUTUALLY AGREED TO BY THE PARTIES IN WRITING AND TO THE FULLEST EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW, LICENSOR OFFERS THE WORK AS-IS AND MAKES NO REPRESENTATIONS OR WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND CONCERNING THE WORK, EXPRESS, IMPLIED, STATUTORY OR OTHERWISE, INCLUDING, WITHOUT LIMITATION, WARRANTIES OF TITLE, MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, NONINFRINGEMENT, OR THE ABSENCE OF LATENT OR OTHER DEFECTS, ACCURACY, OR THE PRESENCE OF ABSENCE OF ERRORS, WHETHER OR NOT DISCOVERABLE. SOME JURISDICTIONS DO NOT ALLOW THE EXCLUSION OF IMPLIED WARRANTIES, SO THIS EXCLUSION MAY NOT APPLY TO YOU.

6. Limitation on Liability. EXCEPT TO THE EXTENT REQUIRED BY APPLICABLE LAW, IN NO EVENT WILL LICENSOR BE LIABLE TO YOU ON ANY LEGAL THEORY FOR ANY SPECIAL, INCIDENTAL, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR EXEMPLARY DAMAGES ARISING OUT OF THIS LICENSE OR THE USE OF THE WORK, EVEN IF LICENSOR HAS BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.

7. Termination

This License and the rights granted hereunder will terminate automatically upon any breach by You of the terms of this License. Individuals or entities who have received Adaptations or Collections from You under this License, however, will not have their licenses terminated provided such individuals or entities remain in full compliance with those licenses. Sections 1, 2, 5, 6, 7, and 8 will survive any termination of this License.

Subject to the above terms and conditions, the license granted here is perpetual (for the duration of the applicable copyright in the Work). Notwithstanding the above, Licensor reserves the right to release the Work under different license terms or to stop distributing the Work at any time; provided, however that any such election will not serve to withdraw this License (or any other license that has been, or is required to be, granted under the terms of this License), and this License will continue in full force and effect unless terminated as stated above.

8. Miscellaneous

Each time You Distribute or Publicly Perform the Work or a Collection, the Licensor offers to the recipient a license to the Work on the same terms and conditions as the license granted to You under this License.

Each time You Distribute or Publicly Perform an Adaptation, Licensor offers to the recipient a license to the original Work on the same terms and conditions as the license granted to You under this License.

If any provision of this License is invalid or unenforceable under applicable law, it shall not affect the validity or enforceability of the remainder of the terms of this License, and without further action by the parties to this agreement, such provision shall be reformed to the minimum extent necessary to make such provision valid and enforceable.

No term or provision of this License shall be deemed waived and no breach consented to unless such waiver or consent shall be in writing and signed by the party to be charged with such waiver or consent.

This License constitutes the entire agreement between the parties with respect to the Work licensed here. There are no understandings, agreements or representations with respect to the Work not specified here. Licensor shall not be bound by any additional provisions that may appear in any communication from You. This License may not be modified without the mutual written agreement of the Licensor and You.

The rights granted under, and the subject matter referenced, in this License were drafted utilizing the terminology of the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works (as amended on September 28, 1979), the Rome Convention of 1961, the WIPO Copyright Treaty of 1996, the WIPO Performances and Phonograms Treaty of 1996 and the Universal Copyright Convention (as revised on July 24, 1971). These rights and subject matter take effect in the relevant jurisdiction in which the License terms are sought to be enforced according to the corresponding provisions of the implementation of those treaty provisions in the applicable national law. If the standard suite of rights granted under applicable copyright law includes additional rights not granted under this License, such additional rights are deemed to be included in the License; this License is not intended to restrict the license of any rights under applicable law.