Scifi

One More Time Around

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I advanced slowly into the lair, trying to stretch out my senses beyond their human, mortal limits.  Danger, the kind of danger that could instantly and permanently put my lights out, lurked around every corner.  I needed to trust my intuition.

Right now, my intuition was sending up all sorts of smoke signals and setting off all kinds of alarm bells about the corner ahead.  I didn’t see anything out of the ordinary, but I tightened my two-handed grip on the purloined pistol I’d taken from the entrance guard.

After all, with his head staved in, he didn’t need it any longer. Continue reading →

One Shot Kill

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*Author’s aside: Goddamn, that’s a cool picture.*

“Come on,” the man repeated implacably as he dragged me along. “We can’t stay here. It isn’t safe.”

I wanted to shout back at him, but focused instead on keeping my feet beneath me. I’d already stumbled and nearly fallen, and learned the hard way that my new captor didn’t slow down to let me recover. Continue reading →

Retirement, Part 4

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Continued from Part 3, here.

Garrick didn’t need anything, but of course, that didn’t stop him from finding some way for me to help him out.

I grunted as I bent down, struggling to keep my fingers under the heavy box without them getting crushed.  “And all of these need to be moved from the storage area out into the back of the kitchen?”

“That’s right,” he nodded, watching me through slitted lids as he picked at the dirt under his fingernails with a little shard of metal.  We weren’t supposed to have actual knives, of course, since the Company felt that this would pose an unnecessary danger to the inmates – er, workers – but that didn’t stop most folks who wanted a knife.  Most of them, like Garrick, found a bit of metal and used a grinder to sharpen down one side to hold an edge.

Bam, instant knife. Continue reading →

Retirement, Part 3

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Continued from Part 2, here.

The next morning, one thought stuck with me from my nightmares, the night before: Lyman hadn’t been the only one down there, ghostly, ghastly, grinning under the waves.  There’d been other faces, faces of other men I’d come to know during my contract here, men who finished before me and headed home to their families.

Had they all made it home safe?  Or were they in somebody’s stomach, just like most of poor Lyman?

I did my best to make my inquiries discreetly.  I knew who some of those former guys had been friends with, who they’d been most likely to contact after they got back home.  I dropped by those guys, reminisced about old times, tried to figure out if they’d heard anything from their buddies since their departures. Continue reading →

Retirement, Part 2

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Continued from Part 1, here.

I bided my time, sitting in the mess hall and watching the others eat.  I didn’t have much of an appetite, not when images of that severed hand, the flesh all full of water and flaking away, kept on popping into my head.  I managed to shoved in some of the slop, telling myself that I needed the calories, but a few bites was all that I could keep down.

I waited for a lull in the conversation.  It took a while, but I knew what I wanted to ask.

“Say, anyone heard from Lyman since he left?” I asked, once that opportunity finally arrived.

I tried my best to keep the question casual, but it still attracted a few curious glances.  “Lyman?  Mister Optimistic, off to marry his girl?” asked Gonzales, pulling back his teeth in that curious version of a smirk that he liked to flash around.  I guessed that he did so because it highlighted his gold tooth.  He claimed that he lost it in a gang tussle, but most of us suspected he was full of it.  “Why, you missing your bedroom partner?” Continue reading →

The Uplander Woman, Part 3

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For a few minutes, all my focus was on moving through the terrain as silently as possible.

That would be easier, a little part of my mind insisted on pointing out, if I could just leave Eliza behind.

The woman might have moved silently inside my house, but she had no sense of coordination for getting through the outdoors! She half-stumbled, half-trampled along like a boar in heat, crashing through dry twigs and leaving destruction in her wake. She had speed, at least, but that seemed to be the only point in her favor.

I very nearly left her behind. I wasn’t a part of her world, whatever she was caught up in, and I didn’t need to get dragged into her schemes. Let her be the one to face the Peacekeepers.

Face them, and the metal darts from those white weapons that they carried… Continue reading →

The Uplander Woman, Part 2

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Elisa didn’t stop, didn’t even pause in wolfing down the fish, until she’d consumed almost every morsel, picked the bones clean. She then sat back, her eyes briefly widening as a soft little belch slipped out from between her lips.

I laughed. Damn, but I couldn’t help it. It slipped out of me, just like the noise slipped out of her. I laughed, broadly and loudly, and she gave in after a second and laughed with me.

“Okay, Elisa,” I said, once I recovered. “Tell me who you are.”

She looked over at me, and started telling me titles. They meant nothing to me, nonsense. First Daughter of the High Patriarch of Spire Lindica, highborn of the Third Rank, other things that I didn’t even comprehend. It only took a few minutes before my head was spinning, and I had to hold up a hand to stop her.

“None of that means a lick of sense to me,” I groaned. “Look, why are you here?” Continue reading →

The Uplander Woman, Part 1

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All I saw of her at first were her eyes, gleaming out of the darkness at me. Brilliant blue, those eyes.

Looking back, they were my first sign that I was in over my head. More fool I, for not recognizing it at the time.

“Who are you?” The words slipped out of my mouth, even as a single glance at her revealed that she wasn’t anyone I knew. Not the kind of person I’d ever know, aside from a label, a single name that applied to all of her kind.

Uplander. Continue reading →

First Contact in Manhattan

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Staring up at the smooth, featureless, curved gray surface, I couldn’t help but marvel at the plasticity of the human race. Show us the greatest miracle to ever come to Earth, and we treated it as a sideshow attraction, grew bored of it in a week.

Actually, that would make a good opening line for my next article. I pulled out my iPhone, turned on the dictation app, recited these words carefully into its speaker.

Sentence recorded, I put my phone away with a sigh, looking back up at the huge object in front of me. Off to the left, a couple dozen feet away, two guys in plush, fluorescent green alien costumes were posing with the eager beaver little families from Iowa that still flocked here.

“Damn thing’s a tourist attraction, now,” I sighed, settling back on the bench that I’d claimed as my territory. “Hey, honey, let’s grab the kids for Easter break and fly them out to New York, see that big ol’ alien spaceship that landed there! Won’t that be a treat for them?” Continue reading →

Beyond Lonely

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Sometimes, at the heart of night while the rest of the world slumbered, Ada stepped out of her house to listen to the emptiness.

The adults thought that she didn’t notice, didn’t pay attention to their hushed talk when they met for coffee or wine. She’d play in the living room as they gathered around the kitchen table, using foreboding tones to make predictions about how the world would look if the exodus continued, whether they were making the right choice for raising their kid. And indeed, most of the time, Ada kept her eyes on her dolls, not looking up or paying much attention.

But children are sponges, and Ada absorbed, if not the exact words spoken by her parents and the other adults of the neighborhood, their general gist. She felt that vague sense of foreboding, settling in at the back of her mind and making itself at home.

And it was that sense of foreboding that drove her, some nights, to step out of the house and climb to the top of the hill in the middle of their street, up to stand in the center of the road and gaze out at the world beyond their neighborhood. Continue reading →