Okay.  Time for my nightly tally of all that I own.  Let’s see how today fared.

Four shirts, two pairs of pants, my coat, my shoes, my hat, and my gloves.  One of my shoes is starting to develop a hole.  That’s going to be tough, because it’s difficult to find my size.  Next time I’m at Goodwill, maybe I’ll get lucky.

I sprinted down the darkened street.  Fortunately, the previous barrage had knocked out the power to the street lamps, cloaking my mad dash in darkness.  I could hear the blades of the helo above me as its searchlight panned across the ground.  They were still looking off to the left, where they had seen my previous muzzle flashes.

Up ahead, I could see the outline of the safe house.  They must not have decoded its location from the missives, or it would have already been razed to the ground.  Ducking to keep a low profile, I quickly keyed in the combination to the front door’s electric lock.  The bolt snicked open and I ducked inside.

I wasted no time making my way to the concealed weapons cache behind the hallway wall panel.  Most of the items within were nothing more than I expected; I hastily reloaded my handguns with fresh clips, slipping reloads into the pockets of my coat.  A larger, bulky case behind the assault rifles caught my attention.  I heaved the case out of the compartment with a grunt and laid it upon the floor.  I flipped the latches open and lifted the lid.  Despite my anxiety, a smile grew across my face.

I stepped out onto the front porch of the house.  Frustrated with my disappearance, the helo had resorted to a grid pattern, and was even now slowly panning down the street.  I lined up the tube on my shoulder, squinting through the laser sights, and pulled the trigger.

Boom.  The chopper erupted into a fireball, a momentary artificial sun hanging blazing in the sky before crashing to the earth.  The flash of red lit up the light.  Unfortunately, it revealed another danger.

I cursed as I ducked below the railing and slotted another charge into the rocket launcher.  The death of the helicopter had revealed a line of tanks rolling down the street.  It would be easy for them to trace the path of the rocket, and even as I reloaded, the second floor bedroom of the safe house gained a new window.  I shielded my eyes as chunks of debris rained down.

I didn’t stand a chance in a face to face confrontation with a half dozen Abrams.  Vaulting the railing, launcher still in hand, I unloaded over my shoulder as I sprinted across the street towards the commercial buildings on the other side.  The lead tank made a grunting noise as the rocket round blew it apart, but its fellows were already leveling their main guns.  I dropped the empty weapon.

The tanks couldn’t catch me as I wove between buildings, but I could now hear the thwomp of another incoming helo.  My eyes strained as I looked towards the sky.  I caught the flash of a neon sign off the blades as the chopper swung down towards me.  The spotlight clicked on, sweeping towards me, and I knew that I’d soon hear the rolling thunder of its autocannon.

I dove unceremoniously into a bush as the helo swept past.  As soon as it had passed over my hiding spot, I rolled out, drawing my 1911 with one hand and grabbing for an alternate clip with the other.  I chambered the alternate clip and slammed it into the gun with a practiced, smooth motion.  The incendiary rounds tore through the fuel tank of the chopper.  “That makes two,” I thought to myself as it burned a hole into the ground.

I switched back to normal rounds for the 1911 as I ducked my way through the darkness.  I still had to make it to the extraction point, but I had given my opponents something to consider.  I was not going to go down easily.

“Look, I’m just saying that it’s really hard to get published. Have you ever tried to enter a writing contest?  Million entries. We’ve got no chance.”

“Yeah, everyone wants to be a writer. That’s why I don’t want to be one.”

“What?  Why not?”

“It’s like you said. Everyone is trying to be one, right?  Submitting manuscripts and stuff?”

“Well, yeah…”

“But no matter how many are submitted, only a few are accepted. It’s an inverse. The more people want to enter, the lower their chances. So when everyone’s entered, your odds are pretty much zero.”

“Yeah, I got that. So I really might as well not bother entering then.”

“But everyone’s gonna think that. And all of a sudden the editors are all starved for material and start publishing left and right.”

“So I should submit my writing.”

“But everyone’s doing the same thing. You’ve got no chance again.”

“Lemme see if I’ve got this… There’s plenty of demand for my writing, but only at the wrong times?”

“Exactly. The time to submit is when you’re not submitting.”

“I don’t get it. Do I just keep resubmitting constantly, then, in hopes of hitting that right time?”

“Ah, but that’s what they’re all doing.”

“I can’t win at all, can I? Man, I give up. I’m out.”

“And now my own chances have gone up, since you’ve dropped out!  That’s why I’m telling this to everyone.”

“I get it!  The more hopelessness we cause, the more hope there is for us. It seems kind of sick and twisted though.”

“Oh, it definitely is. Haven’t you ever wondered why all the most successful writers are so insane?”

“So I can’t make it as a writer because…”

“…because you’re not enough of a sociopath.”

“I don’t think I want to read anymore. I’m going to be wondering about the writer’s intentions. Maybe I’ll just watch some TV instead.”

“TV?  Do you have any idea how competitive screenwriting is?”

Foreword: I thought of this story late at night, and was immediately repulsed by it.  If you’re squeamish or don’t like to think of things in your ears, you might wanna skip it.

Buzz.  Buzz.  I can’t get it out of my head.

Heh heh.  Literally.  God, I can feel it moving.

It all began in the bathroom the other day.  I was cleaning my hands but one of those tiny flies was buzzing around.  It was one of those really small ones, the type that are impossible to see or catch, but sound like a helicopter is coming in for a landing whenever they get near my ears.  The thing kept on swooping in front of my eyes and diving around my head, oblivious to my ineffectual swatting.

The damn thing finally landed in my ear!  Seizing the opportunity, I grabbed for a cotton swab while keeping my head still.  As soon as the swab was in my head, I vigorously ground it into my ear.

I had thought that the fly was just sitting on the surface of my ear.  Unfortunately, the thing had been perched right at the entrance to my ear canal, and my vicious swabbing forced it deep inside the ear.

The fly went berserk!  The buzzing of its wings sounded like jet engine attempting to take off inside my head. I could feel the sensation inside my ear, something painfully thumping against the walls of my inner ear.  I screamed, now clawing at the ear with the swab in hopes of dislodging the insect, or at least killing the horrible thing.

My attempts were futile.  Instead of dislodging the bug, it crawled even deeper into my ear.  I was on the floor, twitching, trying to find something to do.  Finally, after an agonizing eternity, I remembered that water or oil was supposed to wash foreign objects out of ears, lifting them up as the ear filled.

I grabbed for a cup sitting next to the sink and, panting as I struggled to control my movements and not flail wildly from the pain and disturbing sensation, I poured a cup of water into my ear.  At first, it did nothing, but then I felt that unmistakable sensation of water entering my inner ear.

Nothing was happening.  Nothing was happening!  I screamed again, from equal parts helplessness, pain, and rage.  But then, the buzzing ceased!  I felt a final brief scrabbling of horrible hairy lags inside my ear, and then the insect stopped its movements!  I threw my head to one side, and as the water flowed out of my head, I saw the hated fly emerge, trapped in the liquid.  I crushed it into oblivion with my thumb.

That was almost a week ago now.  The next morning, when I woke up, I could hear it.  A very faint buzzing noise that always seemed to be coming from my right, no matter which way I turned my head.  It’s been there for the last two days.  Water won’t flush anything out.  I have a doctor’s appointment tomorrow.

I think it laid eggs.

Interesting fact: experts estimate that 1-2% of the population are psychopaths.  That means that when you’re walking around the grocery store, one or two of those other people browsing the produce or eyeing the ice cream are most likely willing to kill you without a second thought if they think they can get away with it.

Most of the time, this presence of amoral individuals in our society doesn’t end up having too big of an impact.  Of course, when a thousand people are given time machines and set loose on the past, those effects tend to be amplified a bit.

Even I don’t remember the specifics of it all.  You see, it’s easy to mess with the past – it turns out that there really isn’t any conservation of time streams, and when a change is made in the past, the future shifts.  The old future isn’t destroyed, but you can’t get back to it any more.  Think of it like adding a new stick onto a fractal tree: all of the old branches are still there, but once you go back below the new branch, you can’t get to them any more.  And with a thousand people hopping around history, the timelines don’t stick around for too long.

Anyway, here’s what I remember.  I know there were originally about a thousand of us.  Maybe less, maybe more.  They ported us all to different times; I know this because I woke up in Victorian England, and another traveler I talked to said he first came to in the Cretaceous, being eyed by a raptor.

The controls are hard-wired into us.  Literally.  See the screen on my arm?  A few of the travelers are convinced that it’s nanobots, working inside our brains and bloodstreams.  One guy insisted that we were “touched by angels”, but he was pretty off his rocker.

When I first figured out that I wasn’t insane quite yet, I spent a few years tooling around with the cavemen.  Pretty relaxing when food and shelter are my only worries.  Of course, we couldn’t bring anything with us when we jumped, so I had to bring down deer and such in old-fashioned ways.  And after a while, I just wanted a woman without more body hair than me.

On that first trip into the future . . . man, I wish I could somehow get back to that future.  It was a utopia; we had moved beyond war, beyond petty little struggles, and damn near close to beyond money.  Everyone was healthy, everyone was educated, and the world was beautiful.

Of course, nothing like that lasts.  In my case, it lasted all the way until I took a quick hop in the past, to go meet Caesar in the flesh.  While I was back, someone went and popped Hitler, and *poof*, there goes that future.  When I tried to get back, I found a radioactive wasteland.  Needless to say I didn’t stick around long.

After that, I just went on a binge, hopping around and doing what I wanted.  Every now and then I would see how the future had shifted, but there was no way to know if it was my doing.  I met a few nice girls, settled down for a few years, and then one morning I’d wake up, take a hop back in time, and they would be gone.  It’s tough to care about anything when everything is transient.

And that brings me around to now.  I’m leaving these writings on some heavy-duty plastic, which the store clerk in the future assured me would last for at least a few million years before becoming illegible.  I’ve figured out which areas are going to rise up into mountains, so I figure these writings should be safe from being swallowed in magma.  As long as no one comes back here to remove them, or tampers too badly with life 300 million years ago, they should be around.

Don’t invent time travel.  Maybe if this works, I’ll cease to exist.

The music was a wall of noise.  Not only were the flashing laser beams blinding my vision, but the sound deafened me, pushing me back against the entrance.

The disorientation only lasted a moment before the cacophony began to conform to order.  The roar slipped into a bass beat, rhythmically vibrating my bones.  A synthesizer screeched in the upper registers, using autotune to fling itself from end to end of the scale.  The gyrating lasers revealed a flux of bodies, moving against each other in the constant, ever-changing hormonal grind of loneliness.

Blinking my eyes to see through the rainbow-pierced darkness, I moved through the crowd towards the bar. My voice was useless here; I waved at a bartender until he saw me, and then pointed to one of the empty beer bottles.  He nodded in mute understanding, holding up four fingers.  I paid without argument.

I turned and leaned against the cool wood of the bar as I surveyed the room.  The deejay in the middle of the club waved one arm wildly above his head, conducting the loudest orchestra in existence.

Fortunately, the edges of the room were not as congested with humanity as the center, and I was able to weave my way around the fringes without too much trouble.  Several girls briefly caught my eye, but they were lost in the sound and darkness before I could do anything more than register their existence.  I waited for the hours to pass, for the crowd to start to thin.

An hour later, the music was still just as deafening, but my ears had learned to block it out, treat it as nothing more than mere background.  My gaze had settled on a pretty young thing catching her breath a few feet from me at the bar.  Downing my beer and upping my courage, I started to move towards her.  As I skirted a kissing couple, a blinking light on the wall caught my attention.  It seemed different from the rest of the club lights.

The blinking light was coming from a red box on the wall.  I squinted at it.  Was that the fire alarm?  My stomach flipped from the realization.  Searching for the exit, I realized that no one else was moving!

“Fire!” I shouted, at the top of my lungs.  No one noticed.  The kissing couple broke apart momentarily to glance in my direction, and then resumed their semi-private session.

The bartender, a muscular youth with a shock of blonde hair, had come to offer a refill.  I grabbed his arm and pointed at the flashing alarm.  After a moment, his uncomprehending look shifted to horror.  He dropped the rag he had been holding and sprinted for the back door behind the bar.

Well, that wasn’t much help, I thought sourly.  I was sure the alarm was blaring, but no one could hear it over the music.  I began pushing in towards the center of the room towards the deejay and his platform.  My shoulder was quickly bruised from forcing my way through narrow gaps between bodies, and I left a trail of angry glances in my wake.  The crowd swallowed me up; my only guide was the sight of the two massive speakers looming behind the deejay’s station.

After an eternity of faces, I reached his workstation.  He turned to face me as I hauled myself up, but his expression was unreadable behind oversized sunglasses.  I didn’t waste time trying to talk – I could barely hear my own thoughts.  I knocked him aside and yanked the cords from his computer.

With an electronic screech, the music cut out abruptly.  The silence lasted but an instant before it was filled with the blaring of the fire alarm.  The lasers, keyed to react to sound, began pulsing in the alarm’s rhythm, adding to the emphasis of the metallic beeps.  Every head had turned towards me as I had removed the cords, and each flash revealed a sea of upturned faces.

I didn’t speak a word.  I pointed towards the exit, and they calmly and quietly filed out.

Preword: This is my entry written for the Lascaux Flash short story contest for September – I’m entry #99!  If you want to check out the contest and the other entries, visit http://www.lascauxflash.com/.

Ducking out from its shelter, the cockroach crawled up the pile of rubble.  Occasionally, a loose stone gave way beneath one of its six feet, but it never slipped or lost its balance.  The higher oxygen content of the air gave the roach more energy, but it picked its path carefully, staying out of the radiation-dense sunlight.

This was one of the luckier roaches.  The radiation exposure hadn’t left much of a change; most of the genetic damage was confined to junk sequences in its genome, and it hadn’t sprouted extra legs or vestigial gills like some of its fellows.  It had excellent genetic potential, and had already mated twice in its lifetime.

The roach continued to scramble up the pile of pulverized concrete, its feelers twitching as it scoured the air for signs of food.  It had spent the last week feasting on a carcass buried beneath the rubble, preserving it from the drying sun and the radiation-filled air.  Little but bones remained, however, and the roach had correctly decided to move on.

Cockroaches are not complex creatures.  Most of their behaviors are based off of a very simple set of instructions, relying on limited environmental cues.  Roaches can’t recognize unexploded nuclear warheads, much less comprehend their destructive power.  The casing on this warhead, beneath the rubble, hadn’t cracked, and presented no radiation danger to the roach.  But there was no food, and the roach moved on.

Taking flight, the roach buzzed across the sea of concrete towards the bay.  Nothing green grew here any more; what hadn’t been atomized in the initial blast had withered and died from the toxic fallout.  But the sea  was deep, and life still persevered beneath the agitated waves.  Life still persisted everywhere.  The roach was a testament to that.

The roach alighted upon a rotting fish and began to feast.  An occasional wave reached the carcass and rocked it in its sandy grave, but the roach paid no mind to the gentle movements.  It had become the apex predator in this brave new world.  It continued to consume its meal, enjoying the shadow.  The shadow was cast by the green metal hand rising from where it lay half-buried in the sand, still clutching the weathered shape of a burning torch.