This is our future.

Though their bodies were naked, their minds empty, the fearful, half-mad faces that followed Marie from behind the bars were humanity’s hope.

Marie hurried her step. Despite almost twenty years on the project, the depraved gazes never ceased to bother her.

A familiar voice entered her head, unbidden. It will be over soon, Marie.

Marie shuddered, her eyes drawn to the blue-eyed experiment in the corner cell. His drip bag had run out again and he was awake. Fear clotted her blood as she watched him. She knew, more than anyone, that Twelve-A could kill them all, should it ever cross his mind.

The experiment said nothing more, merely watched her.

Marie hurried through the heavy doors and entered the lab. “Twelve-A needs another dose. He’s awake again.” Marie hoped her fear didn’t show.

“Colonel Codgson wants him awake,” the tech, a young blonde Army lieutenant, said. The woman gave the holding area a nervous glance. “Codgson’s got techs monitoring him, making sure his patterns stay level–he’s scheduled another demonstration for this afternoon.”

Despite herself, Marie cursed. Codgson was a fool. Ever since he had discovered their prodigy’s unique talents, Codgson had made every attempt to show him off to the board. Twelve-A had been pitted against everything the other labs could throw at him–and had lived.

“Do you think Twelve-A will survive this one?” Lieutenant Carter asked, peering at the experiment through a camera installed in his cell, face etched with worry.

Marie knew the lieutenant was partial to the handsome, blue-eyed young man in the last cage on the right. She didn’t think of him as a killer.

“He’s survived all the others.” Still, Marie felt dread creeping into her soul. Twelve-A hated the Dark Room. What if this time, he decided not to cooperate? Just the tiniest slip by the technicians monitoring him and he could wreak destruction on the whole lab. It wasn’t worth the risk.

“I know,” Lieutenant Carter said, eyes fixed on the glass windows of the experiment wing. “That’s what bothers me. He doesn’t like it… it hurts him. What if he doesn’t–”

A male voice behind her interrupted them. “We have his DNA. We can always make another, if he fails to cooperate.”

Marie stiffened and turned. The Colonel stood in the hall, his perfectly crisp blue uniform accenting a bored demeanor, as if they were talking about cloning rats.

You don’t have a clue, you stupid fool, Marie thought, watching him.

The Colonel caught her gaze and smiled, a wormlike twisting that chilled her core. “The first rule of this project is not to become attached to the subjects, Doctor.”

Marie’s anger spiked, as it always did around the Colonel. “You shouldn’t leave him awake and unguarded like that. Twelve-A could kill us all right now if he wanted to. He could empty our minds, make us all stop breathing just like he does in your Dark Room.”

The Colonel snorted. “I doubt that. My techs–”

“–would die too,” Marie interrupted coldly. “You’re playing with fire, Colonel.”

The Colonel laughed and rapped sharply on the thick metal door leading to the containment area. The sound diffused with the sheer density of the metal. The Colonel gave her a smug look. “He doesn’t even know we’re here.”

Marie glared, but said nothing.

“If he did,” the Colonel said. “He would have killed us a long time ago.”

“You don’t know that,” Marie said. “Maybe he doesn’t like to kill.”

The Colonel’s gaze sharpened, as if he was a hound breeder and she had suggested his dogs didn’t like to hunt. He turned to Lieutenant Carter abruptly. “Collect the experiment and take him to the Dark Room. Our visitors are waiting in the observation booth.”

As the tech went to get the necessary equipment, Marie asked, “What’s he going to fight this time?”

“An experiment from another lab.”

Marie’s lips tightened. “Twelve-A represents thirty-five years of work. If you want a friendly competition for the generals’ viewing pleasure, go get one of the Eleven-series to be your gladiator. He shouldn’t be risked.”

The Colonel gave her a humorless smile. “There is nothing friendly about it. The lab that fails today loses its funding. If we lose our funding, every experiment will be killed and our data destroyed. We need to win. That’s why I chose him.”

Marie watched him and saw the sincerity there. Softly, she whispered, “They would kill them all?”

The Colonel inclined his head. “Now you see why it must be Twelve-A.”

“Why?” she whispered.

The Colonel gave her a long look before he said, “Congress discovered our intent. The board hopes we can stall them for a few years, and the fewer active labs we have, the better our chances will be.”

“Can’t we combine the labs? Throw them all into one building?”

The Colonel shook his head. “The genetic lines wouldn’t fight each other if they were kept in the same building.”

Still hopeful, Marie charged ahead. “Then maybe we could use some other means to determine the success of the experiments. Something that does not endanger their lives. There is evidence that latent brain activity is a clear indicator of–”

“We’re constructing a war,” the Colonel interrupted. “The alien Congress will bathe in its own blood before it realizes it can no longer hold us. Twelve-A and his kind represent Earth’s hope for independence, and it will take many of their deaths to see it happen.”

Doggedly, Marie said, “You’ve used Twelve-A three times in the last month. Why not Ten-F?”

“You want to place all of their lives on her?”

Marie licked her lips. Ten-F, though potent, was insane. She had fingernail scars down her face from where she’d tried to take out her own eyes after her final visit to the Dark Room.

“Colonel, you don’t see them after their experiences in the Dark Room. It’s obviously very traumatic for the mentals, and you’ve already used Twelve-A many more times than regulations allow. I want you to retire him. He’s too valuable to the project for any more games.”

The Colonel’s eyes narrowed. “This is not a game.” Marie started to retort, but he cut her off. “Go find out what’s taking Lieutenant Carter so long. I told them noon sharp.” The Colonel’s mouth twisted in irritation when he glanced at his big wristwatch. “We’re two minutes behind already.” He strode off in the direction of the Dark Room, hard black heels reverberating on the white tile as he departed.

Marie went looking for Carter.

Ten minutes later, she found the lieutenant slumped on the floor of the containment corridor outside Twelve-A’s cage, the behavioral adaptor still clasped in her hand.

“You killed her?!” Marie cried, jogging up to kneel beside her.

Dr. Carter had a pulse. Relieved, Marie turned on the experiment.

Cold blue eyes met her stare, unwavering. Twelve-A was only two feet away, squatting naked in front of the bars, watching her. He was angry.
M
I’m not fighting.

Marie stumbled away from him. She began to reach for the behavioral adaptor, and then froze when she saw him following her motions with his eyes. Twelve-A knew what she was thinking. He’d never let her use it.

Tentatively, Marie retracted her hand. “You need to fight. If our lab fails this match, they’ll all die.” Eyes still fixed on him she motioned to the other experiments.

Twelve-A’s eyes flickered toward the others, and then back at her. They’re miserable. You treat them like animals. They’re better off dead.

In that moment, she realized that Twelve-A could not only kill Marie and her comrades, but he could also kill his own kind.

“No!” After twenty years of living her work, the experiments were Marie’s children. At the thought of losing them, she almost forgot the history of the man in front of her. She reached through the bars to touch his knee. “Things will get better, Twelve-A.”

He recoiled, drawing deeper into his cell before she could reach him. You can’t lie to me.

“I’m not.” Marie held his eyes. “Just once more. I’ll make sure you won’t have to do it again.”

Twelve-A glanced to the side, away from her, pain etched in his young face. For long moments, he said nothing. Then, ,i>Take me to the Dark Room.

Marie glanced down at the unconscious lieutenant, then at the experiment. She left the behavioral adapter on the floor.

#

“Watch closely,” Colonel Codgson said, addressing the visitors. “See how he paces? Our experiments show an innate aggression… a drive to fight. He’s anticipating the kill.”

Marie watched with her back to the Colonel, recognizing Twelve-A’s pacing for what it was–anger.

“Is the experiment contained?” one of the visitors demanded. A nasal, gray-haired woman pointed at the large behavioral modifier in the corner, indicating the two technicians monitoring it. “Are they all that stand between us and that monster?”

In the Dark Room, Twelve-A stopped and gave the observation booth a small frown before continuing to pace. The others did not notice, but Marie’s heart clenched.

He knows we’re here, she thought, horrified. And he’s listening.

“We’re in no danger,” Colonel Codgson replied. “The walls are a foot and a half of lead-ceramic composite. Even the windows are leaded. His abilities cannot penetrate.”

“Has this been proven?”

“Beyond a doubt,” Colonel Codgson replied.

On the other side of the glass, the Dark Room doors opened and a second experiment, a naked redheaded woman, was thrust inside.

The fight ended as swiftly and without drama as they always did with Twelve-A. He simply walked up to the other experiment, gently took her chin into his hands, nodded, and his opponent collapsed.

“Amazing,” the nasal woman said, though she did not sound very amazed. “That’s it? Why didn’t they fight?”

“No one can fight Twelve-A,” Colonel Codgson said, pride seeping through his voice. “He is our finest creation.”

Again, Marie thought she saw Twelve-A glance in their direction, but an embarrassed-looking Lieutenant Carter was already leading the experiment from the room, her fist wrapped tightly around her portable behavioral adaptor. The moment Twelve-A looked at her she twisted the dial and made him scream.

As Marie watched the other technicians rush in to help Carter carry the experiment from the room, she felt indefinable sadness. The Lieutenant’s good will had officially ended.

She and I were his only two friends in this place.

Afterwards, Colonel Codgson hosted a celebration to commemorate their continued research, but Marie could not stay. She left the restaurant and drove back to the lab, thinking about the look of anguish she’d seen on Twelve-A’s face as Carter and the others had prodded him back to his cell and re-attached the driplines.

Even though she got chills thinking of it, Marie wanted to see him. Console him.

When she got there, the lab was cold and dark. Marie flicked on the lights and moved to the holding area, swiping her card and pushed one of the thick leaden doors open. Inside, a sixth of the lights remained permanently on, more for the technicians’ comfort than the experiments’–no one wanted to be alone in the dark with the monsters they had created.

Somewhere, near the back of the room, Marie heard crying.

Though she carried no restraining devices, had followed none of the pre-entry monitoring protocol, Marie stepped inside the corridor.

“Hello?” she whispered.

Though she knew her words had not been loud enough to carry beyond her own ears, the sobbing cut off instantly.

Cold prickles crawled across Marie’s arms and back. It was Twelve-A. He hadn’t been drugged. She had seen him get drugged.

Had Lieutenant Carter forgotten to refill the bag? Or had Twelve-A made her forget?

The idea was terrifying. Marie knew right then she should scurry back behind the protective leaden walls and wait for assistance.

And yet, she found herself rooted to the place, unable to leave. Guilt welled in her gut like a moldy sack, weighing on her soul.

They don’t deserve this, she thought, eying the other experiments in their beds. All slept, either naturally or by drugs, splayed out in naked disregard like animals.

The crying had not begun again, and Marie got the eerie impression that Twelve-A waited for her in the darkness. Realizing how blithely she’d stepped into his trap, Marie’s pulse began to race. Fear paralyzed her. Like a farmer standing feet from a tiger hidden in the undergrowth, she had entered his realm, and her continued existence was solely his decision. Running was no longer an option, as much as her panicked thoughts screamed at her to do so.

She made herself move deeper into the corridor of cages.

Twelve-A was tucked into a fetal position on his bed, knees to his chest, back against the corner where two walls joined. As soon as he saw her, he stopped rocking.

I know their fear before I kill them.

Self-loathing emanated off of Twelve-A in a thick mental wave that made her stumble against his cell. Panting, Marie struggled to keep from bursting into tears at the emotional barrage. Knowing that this was how he felt, that this was him, Marie had to act. Before she could talk herself out of it, she opened the gate to his cell and went to sit down on the thin mattress beside him.

“It’s okay,” she said, touching his knee. “You’ll never have to do that again.”

The touch made Twelve-A jerk, and for the first time, she realized that he had never been allowed to touch another human being before, other than those he meant to kill. Before Marie could correct her mistake, he unfolded and threw himself into her arms like a frightened child.

There, the lab’s most dangerous creation cried into her shoulder.

Marie froze, terrified of his presence, terrified of what she’d done. She felt Twelve-A’s body tremble against her, wracked by an emotional torment whose very residues still left her weak and nauseous. Despite her fears, she felt tears coming to her own eyes and softly began stroking Twelve-A’s shaven head.

“It’s okay,” she whispered.

He shook his head against her chest and sobbed. Pent-up breaths exploded from him in tortured spasms. His grip on her back began to hurt. Marie said nothing more and wrapped her arms around him.

Biologically, Twelve-A was a healthy eighteen-year-old boy. Mentally, however, he was as vulnerable as a small child. They had kept outside stimulation to the barest necessary for survival, sedating him with drugs for most of his life, never speaking within hearing range, never giving him a chance to think.

The reason was simple; undrugged and unhindered–like he was now–he could execute his keepers with a thought. Unrestrained, his cell open, he could cast Marie aside and simply leave the lab. He could walk through the open containment area doors, all the way to the reception area, where it would be a small thing to get past the guard and escape, never to be seen again. Like with Carter and the drip-bag, he could probably even make them all forget he had even existed.

Marie considered all these things as she sat there, holding him, but found she did not care. He needed her, and that was all that mattered.

Thank you, came his mental whisper in her mind. Twelve-A’s body had calmed somewhat, leaving only an underlying shuddering, like someone who’d spent too much time in the cold.

“I’m going to help you,” Marie said, before she realized it was true. “I’m going to help you escape this place.”

Twelve-A looked her in the eyes and said, I could escape any time I want.

“Then why don’t you?” Marie whispered back.

The others, he replied. If I took them with me, they’d all be caught and brought back here.

She watched him closely. “But you wouldn’t.”

He shook his head once, and it gave Marie chills. She wondered just how powerful their experiment was, just how much he’d been hiding from them.

Tentatively, she said, “You know what’s outside the complex, don’t you? Can you actually feel beyond the walls?”

Twelve-A looked away. His silence was answer enough. All of their precautions, all of their procedures, all their efforts to keep him ignorant of his humanity… all had been for naught. Twelve-A had been in contact with the real world since the moment he’d been born.

“I’ll get you out of here,” Marie said. “I promise.”

#

That night, she drafted an anonymous letter to the funding committee, to three separate civil rights groups, to eight government officials, to six leading scientists, and to three different news agencies. She knew it would end her career. She knew she and her colleagues would spend the rest of their lives in prison. But, after everything she’d done, it seemed a fitting demise.

To Marie’s surprise, her letter was not published the next day. Nor the next. Not even a whisper of it came in the weeks that followed. Her only indication that something had happened was the Colonel’s increasingly terse attitude, his shortening temper.

“Get Twelve-A,” he snapped upon entering on the final morning. “He has another demonstration to make.”

“No!” Marie cried, stepping between the iron-faced Lieutenant Carter and the holding area. “You promised, Colonel.”

Codgson’s eyes were chipped obsidian as he said, “Someone betrayed us to Congress. Confirmed their suspicions. Their ships are coming. The committee is here to decide which specimens to use in the fight against the Dhasha commander. They want to see Twelve-A in the Dark Room, to see just how much they can do with him.”

“Let me do it,” Marie said, desperate, now. “Let me retrieve him.”

The Colonel glanced back to frown at her. “Why?”

“He is like a son to me.”

“He is an animal, Doctor.”

It took all of Marie’s willpower to say, “It’s not a crime to be fond of one’s dog, Colonel.”

He gave a bitter laugh. “Make sure he’s in the Dark Room in six minutes.”

Marie was shaking as she walked down the corridor. Congress was coming, and Earth would feel its wrath for ages to come. She, and every other scientist who worked on the experiments would be killed. The experiments themselves would be murdered, the labs destroyed. Their only hope of avoiding the coming apocalypse was if the experiments could do what they were created to do.

Defend them.

Marie felt helpless as she approached Twelve-A’s cell. She’d tried to help, but she’d brought the aliens to their doorstep, instead.

It wasn’t you, Twelve-A told her. I never let you send that letter.

Marie clearly remembered sending it. She remembered checking twice, just to make sure.

Then Marie gasped at what he was trying to tell her. She had been in her own home, twenty miles from the lab. His influence couldn’t possibly reach that far. But if it had… Fearful, she began backing away. Twelve-A watched her through the bars.

He was huddled in one corner, his lanky knees tucked under his chin. Once more, she felt like she was caught in the tiger’s stare, but this time the tiger was debating.

After a moment, Twelve-A looked away.

Marie sank down to her knees in front of him, relief washing over her. Softly, she said, “I can help you get out of here. I can help you start new lives on the surface.”

Twelve-A’s blue eyes flickered toward her. We can’t go now. The aliens will kill us.

Marie felt like she’d been struck. “You know about the aliens?”

They’re destroying the other labs. This is the only one they haven’t found.

Marie blinked at him, once again shocked by how much he had managed to hide from them.

“We need you to fight,” she whispered. “We need you to stop the-”

I’m not killing the aliens.

“But you’ve got to help us defend the-”

No, Twelve-A thought. I don’t.

Coldness settled in the pit of Marie’s stomach. “You’re going to kill us, aren’t you?”

I’m killing everyone who knows about this place. It’s the only way the People are going to survive.

Marie met the deep blue of his gaze and sweat slid like ice down her back as she began to bargain for her life. “Once we’re dead, then what? Where will you go? What will you do? I can help you create new lives for yourselves. I can help you adapt.”

He didn’t answer her. Looking drained, he got to his feet. Come with me to the Dark Room. I want you to watch something.

Reluctantly, Marie did. Once they stood outside the small green door, Twelve-A gave her a gentle nudge down the hall, toward the observation booth. Confused, she went.

Inside, the occupants were milling in obvious agitation. Every face she had ever seen inside the lab was there, checking their watches, grimacing at the blond experiment pacing in the Dark Room. As more staff filtered into the observation booth, Marie anxiously glanced from Twelve-A to the group of observers and back, wondering what he planned for them. Her entire body trembled with fear and adrenaline. She’d heard the mental’s death was painless, like falling asleep. She was terrified she was about to find out.

“So what are we waiting for, Colonel?” one of the generals finally demanded. The group had become more and more aggravated as nothing happened in the room before them.

“We’re waiting for your test subjects,” the colonel replied briskly.

The general’s face went slack. “What test subjects? We’re here because you told us your famous Twelve-A could do something that would save millions of lives.”

At the Colonel’s frown, a man in a black suit bitterly snapped, “Do not tell us you brought us all together to waste our time, Colonel.”

The Colonel stared back at them in complete confusion. “I never sent for you.”

A thin woman with short-cropped brown hair snorted. “Then who did?”

In the center of the Dark Room, Twelve-A stopped pacing. He turned, his ice-blue eyes cold beyond the leaded glass.

Me.
It was like a mental thunderclap. Several members of the committee screamed and staggered toward the door. Only Colonel Codgson remained where he stood, staring at Twelve-A through the glass with a queer little smile.

Twelve-A nodded at them.

As one, the two dozen uniformed men and women occupying the room collapsed in a falling wave of flesh.

Except for Marie. She kept breathing, waiting for it to happen, but it never did. Minutes after her companions’ wide eyes began to glaze, she was stunned to find herself still standing amidst the corpses. Alive.

She looked at Twelve-A. Beyond the glass in the center of the Dark Room, his body had slumped to the floor with his victims. Heart thundering, Marie went to see if he lived.

Put me back in my cell, Twelve-A told her, when she entered the room and knelt beside him.

Marie recoiled. “Your cell? Why?”

I want to die.

“No!”

Do it.

It allowed no argument. In a daze, Marie drew him to his feet and helped him back into the containment area. As she settled him onto his bed, Twelve-A said, Please kill me.

The mental whimper was infused with so much emotional agony that it left Marie’s chest afire. Still, her eyes flickered toward the IV rack they used to keep the experiments sedate. “I’ll go get the drugs. They’ll make you feel better.”

Twelve-A caught her hand as she turned to go, his blue gaze intense. You should kill me, Marie.

“No,” she said, finding strength in the words, “I shouldn’t. I should get you and all your friends out of here.” She patted his hand and he released his hold. She went to the labs, got the drugs, and hooked them to the rack. As she was connecting his IV line to the bag, however, he stopped her. His cerulean eyes were angry.

If you’re not going to kill me, leave.

She winced at the force of his thought. “What about your friends?”

Don’t worry about us. Leave. Lock the doors and never come back.

Marie met his deep blue stare, saw the danger there, then hurried from his cell. She heard the gate to Twelve-A’s cage slam behind her as she went to the containment doors and wrenched them shut. She used her card to lock them, then rushed through the facility, gaining speed as she realized she was the only one left alive. The only one who knew about the experiments. The only one who could help them create new lives on the surface.

The only one who could keep them alive.

She could rehabilitate them. Find them jobs. Find them friends.

The guard was not at his booth. Buoyed by her new mission, Marie hurried past, pushed through the bullet-proof glass doors, and locked them behind her with another swipe of her card. She followed the corridor, climbed the stairs, and exited through the single door at the top. Facing it, the entrance looked like the door to a decrepit coffee shop, with the Coffee House Express sign hanging askew and the paint peeling.

Under the façade, however, the door was tank-proof, the walls behind it bomb-proof. It would take nukes to get inside.

Marie locked the entrance with her card, sliding it through an inconspicuous crack in the wooden trim.

Thank you, Twelve-A told her. That should keep them out.

“Yes,” Marie said, hurrying toward her car. “But don’t worry–you won’t be in there long. I’ll find somewhere to keep you. The war will make it harder, but once I’ve got living quarters and food, I’ll come back for you.”

You don’t understand, Marie.

She stuck her key into her Ford. “Don’t understand what?”

Once it’s safe, we’re going to get ourselves out.

“But I can-” Terror infused Marie’s soul as she realized why Twelve-A had left her alive. Babbling, Marie said, “Please, Twelve-A. I can help you. I won’t tell anyone. Please-you don’t need to kill me.”

Twelve-A gave a mental shudder, buoyed on a wave of self-loathing. It’s always so hard.

Even as she opened her mouth to scream, a wave of calmness overpowered her. Her eyes drifted shut and she slid to the concrete beside her car, the keys tumbling from her hands to clatter on the cement. Trapped in the darkness of her own body, Marie felt her heart stop.

Somewhere, deep underground, Twelve-A replaced the IV line and closed his eyes. His shoulders began to shake as he waited for oblivion to take him.

END

---

More of Sara King’s work can be found in Apex Science Fiction and Horror Digest issue 11.

Sara King is a 24-year-old Alaskan sci-fi writer who wrote her first full-length novel at the age of 12. She’s written 10 novels and 26 short stories since, and her story “The Moldy Dead” appeared in issue 11 of Apex Digest (her first sale!). It takes place in the same world as the sci-fi series Donald Maass is representing for her in NY. Sara King has sold stories to Cemetery Dance, Blood, Blade, and Thruster Magazine and Aberrant Dreams. Check out her website at www.kingfiction.com.

Daddy was home.

Screaming away and pounding on his desk, he could be heard across the little two bedroom ranch home. Two children, one six, the other eight, pushed the remnants of their Thanksgiving dinners around their plates, flinching at every noise. They were nervous, they new Daddy would be into eat soon.

It could be said that Daddy–Gerald Malcolm Linden-gave them plenty to be nervous about. Gerald had been drafted in the year 2046, the third year of the American-Asian war, at the height of the Pacific conflict. His first assignment was a cozy spot as a logistics officer, hidden safely behind the lines and helping the real men, the generals, map out important battles. The job treated him well, that is, until he messed up. Four thousand marines dead in six hours, recognized as the worst slaughter of American lives in the history of the country. The generals thought him a spy, tortured him for information. When none was forthcoming, they placed him in the frontlines of the battlefields, in the jungles of Vietnam, fighting a resilient enemy the Americans had lost to seventy-years before. Let the Vietnamese get rid of a problem they didn’t want to deal with.

The youngest child, tiny Michelle Renee, balanced a shriveled pea on her thumb and sent it flying across the table with her index finger. Michelle was proud of her pea sharp-shooting skills, and her talent didn’t let her down this time. The pea found its target, plinking harmlessly, but effectively, against her brother’s forehead.

“Ouch!” shrieked Mark, as he laughed, scooping up a portion of mashed potatoes with his hand, readying a counter-attack. Mark felt it was time for a full-fledged food fight, especially before Daddy came to the table.

“Don’t you dare, Mark Gerald Linden!”

Mark wanted to argue, but one look into his mother’s authoritative cloudy blue eyes emptied his mouth of rebellion. In the background, Mark heard his father screaming at the video-phone in his office. The screaming was punctuated by the sound of crashing furniture and plenty of swearing.

Another pea bounced off Mark’s forehead.

“Hey!” he said to Michelle. “I’ll get you for that.” Mark jumped from his chair. He made monster noises as he rounded the table and grabbed his sister in a bear hug, tickling her. Michelle squealed with laughter. The pair wrestled, giggling and wrestling, prompting their mother to join in the fun.

The office door opened, and Daddy sulked into the dining room.

“Goddamn it!”

A man in his forties, crew cut, sharp blue eyes, that wore a patented military man bulldog sneer stormed into the dining room. Mark narrowly avoided running into his father, as he scampered for his place at the table. Nobody dared say a word. They knew Daddy was angry.

“What’s wrong, Gerald?”

“We’re fucked, that’s what’s wrong.”

“Gerald, the kids…”

“It doesn’t fucking matter. They should hear this.”

“Hear what?” asked Lydia.

Michelle began to wail, as she often did when Daddy was mad.

“The psychologist refuses to sign off on my papers. Says I have to find real work, not draw a pension. Six goddamn years in the jungle and not one fucking penny.” Gerald pounded the table with his fist. One eye tended to drift during his mad spells. Right now it stared at Mark while the other looked to the ceiling in exasperation.

Mark cleared his throat. “Daddy?” The eye glared at him, broadcasting a threat of physical violence for his insolence that interrupted his father’s thoughts.

In a flash, Gerald swept his arm across the dining table, sending bowls, plates, and glasses smashing against the dining room wall behind Mark. Mark ducked the shards of shattering glass and crockery. He didn’t know what to think. He’d only seen his dad three times in the past few months. Daddy stayed at the bars till late at night, and often went to the doctors during the day. This man was not Daddy, but a scary stranger.

“There’s only one thing left to do.”

“Gerald, you’re scaring the kids and you’re scaring me,” Lydia said. She reached her hand out to Gerald’s now bleeding wrist, using her most consoling voice.

“They always think they’ve got me,” Gerald mumbled, this time smacking the tabletop with his open right palm. “But they’re wrong. So very wrong.”

“Gerald?”

Outside, a freak November thunderstorm brewed over the marine base. Mark could hear the wind picking up, pelting their house with sand and grit.

Gerald hunched over the table and placed his head in his hands. Mark knew Daddy had a temper, but this was different. An ill-defined danger surrounded his father.

“Who are you, little girl?” Gerald asked.

“Mommy?” Michelle asked. “What’s wrong with Daddy?”

The family sat quietly around the dinner table.

“Mommy?”

“Nothing Michelle. Daddy’s just tired, that’s all.”

Gerald smiled at his daughter. He stood up and hugged her tightly where she sat.

“You know Daddy loves you, right?”

“Yes. I love you, Daddy.”

Gerald walked over to Mark, who leaned away from the man, Daddy, suspicious.

“Mark, you know your daddy would always do what’s best for you?”

Mark peered over to his mother. She nodded “Yes”.

“Yes, sir.”

“Good.”

Outside, a brilliant flash of lightning crackled nearby. For a brief moment, the power flickered off. Without anyone at the table noticing, Gerald had disappeared.

Lydia jumped to her feet and gathered her children in her arms. She pushed them in the direction of their bedroom. “Go on, get in your room. Mommy needs to find out what’s wrong with Daddy.”

“Mommy,” cried Michelle. “I’m scared.”

“It’s ok, sweetie. Daddy is a little upset and Mommy is going to find out what is wrong. And besides, Mark will protect you, right Mark?”

Although on the verge of tears, Mark nodded silently and put his arm around his little sister.

Mark recognized the sound of his father’s shotgun being loaded with shells from within the office. Quickly, he herded Michelle into their bedroom and locked the door. They huddled together in the corner next to a giant plush Winnie-the-Pooh that had been an early Christmas present from their aunt and uncle in Orlando.

“Mark, what’s going on?” Michelle asked. Her tears rolled down her face onto Mark’s arm. They tickled as they made their way to his fingertips.

“Daddy has a bad headache, okay? The army doctors told Mommy it’s because he’s been away from his family for so long.” He felt Michelle nod in his arms. “Mommy wants us to play ‘hide and go seek’ until he’s not mad anymore.”

Through the thin plaster walls of the house, Mark heard an argument raging over the sounds of the building storm.

“They think they got me, but they don’t; the sons of bitches.”

“Gerald, put that away.”

“Don’t tell me what to do. I’m a goddamn corporal.”

“Put the gun away, Gerald. Let me call Dr. Fiesler.”

“Dr. Fiesler? He told me all the sick shit I’ve done; it’s in my head. In my head, Lydia.”

“I don’t think Dr. Fiesler understands,” Lydia said, her voice calm and modulated.

“I think you’re trying to confuse me.”

Silence ensued, followed by some muffled pleas.

“On your knees.”

“No.”

“Don’t make me shoot you in the face.”

“Gerald, no! The kids.”

“On your goddamn knees!”

“Fuck you.”

A second later, a gunshot blast rocked the house. Then another. Then nothing, absolutely nothin. The only sound Mark could hear was the pattering of rain on the rooftop. Michelle sobbed silently in his embrace.

Footsteps.

Mark’s eyes narrowed. They were attentive to every movement inside the bedroom and around the doorframe. Quietly, he placed his hand around Michelle’s mouth and placed a finger to his lips, indicating for her to remain quiet. Then he walked her over to the closet, slid the door open and shoved her gently inside. Once again, he motioned ‘quiet’ and shut the closet door.

Outside the room, in the hallway, he heard the shotgun reload.

Mark slid underneath Michelle’s bed, one of the two twin sized beds the siblings shared. Kissing his face was Michelle’s favorite baby doll. It stared at him an inch away with those faraway, empty black eyes.

The doorknob rattled.

“Open this door, Mark.”

Silence.

“Your father orders you to open this door.”

A few seconds passed, then a shot rang out. The middle of the door and part of the frame disintegrated.

“I promise not to hurt you.”

Horrorstricken, Mark watched his father’s boots stomp through the door. Gerald knocked the debris aside and entered the room.

“Your mother is hurt, real bad,” Gerald said. “She needs you to help her.”

Mark eyed the closet, praying that Michelle wouldn’t fall for this obvious bit of trickery. Enraged, his father upended the mattress and frame of Mark’s bed. Bedding and pillows fell all about the room. The boots moved into the bathroom and yanked the shower curtain off the rod. Cursing, Gerald ripped the linen door off its hinges.

“She’s bleeding from her eyes,” Gerald yelled. “Like those goddamn Viet-Cong when I tortured them. Their eyes bled, too.

The boots marched to the bed that hid Mark. They paused. The barrel of the family’s Winchester made black smudges against the white carpet floor. Mark could smell the fresh cordite. The doll’s plastic face became warm and alive, transforming to the face of his mother. “I love you,” it whispered, before exploding in a spray of blood and brains. Mark stifled a cry, blinking away the tears and the horrible image. When he looked again, the doll’s head was normal, with the black eyes and plastic body.

Without warning, the boots rushed toward the closet. Acting on instinct, Mark sprang out from under the bed and threw his body into the back of his father’s knees, sending him tumbling to the floor. For now, the closet door remained closed.

“Son of a bitch!”

Gerald grabbed Mark by the ankle and tried to pull him closer. With his other hand, the man reached for the shotgun. Mark twisted onto his back and sent the ball of his right foot into his father’s shin. Gerald howled in pain, grasping for his left leg, allowing Mark the split second he needed to slip free. He jumped up and found himself in the hallway.

His father grabbed the shotgun and stood. Behind his dad, he saw Michelle peek out of the closet. Her sad, round eyes were filled with tears. Mark’s only thought was to get his father out of the room before he found Michelle and killed her, too. Picking up a vase from the hallway end-table, he threw it, and it shattered across his father’s ducking broad shoulders.

“You stupid motherfucker,” Mark said. The swear words felt funny coming out of his mouth. Had Mark ever swore before? And even now, he felt a ridiculous instinct to respect his father, this crazy man he called ‘Daddy.’

“What did you say to me, boy?”

“Fuck you. You ain’t killing me, you crazy fuck-tard.”

Gerald rushed the doorway and Mark darted left, toward the living room. He sprinted to the foyer and rushed out the front door.

Lightning crashed, momentarily highlighting the ancient oak in the front yard. Mark splashed through the slippery desert mud and took cover behind the tree. The rain blew in from all directions, as the storm grew angrier and louder.

Gerald followed, splashing loudly through the puddles of rain that now flooded the grassless front yard. The halogen flood lamp at the end of their driveway flashed on.

“Run all you like, but I’m not going to let you live. Not a single one of you mother fuckers ever got away from me? They thought they had me, but I was on to their ass.”

Gerald stalked across the yard holding the shotgun ready in front of him.

“Bet you ain’t ever been shot, have you son? The pain, oh Christ, it will make you puke your guts out.”

A moment of nothing but the rain falling.

“I’ll shoot you in the head, you’ll never feel the pain, I promise.”

A whistling sound passed overhead, above the clouds. For nearly a minute, the father and son listened. Mark knew the sound to be a military jet making a landing at the base airfield a mile away.

“You hear that, boy? That’s the first of the bombs. That’s the Asian Alliance. I told the generals they were coming. We’re all fucked.”

Mark strained to listen through the rain, the jet landing, his father’s ranting, trying to ascertain from which side of the tree Dad approached. He crouched and placed both feet against an exposed portion of tree root for better footing.

“Come on. Hiding behind a tree? You want to hide, your ass had better be dug down into the mud, under the water. You can do better than that.”

When the nose of the shotgun appeared, Mark grabbed it with both hands and pulled backwards as hard as he could. He made sure to keep the barrel pointed away from his body. Knowing he wouldn’t have the strength to pull the gun from his father’s military-trained and well-muscled body, he only tried to create enough leverage to cause Gerald to topple face-first in the slick mud.

Gerald did topple. Mark managed to escape by leaping over Gerald’s flailing arms. Miraculously, his feet ran true through mud, so he made a dash for the back of the house. He crashed through the back door, and ran straight to the bedroom closet where he had left Michelle.

“Where’s Dad…”

Mark put his hand over her mouth and once again made the motion for silence.

He pulled her out of hiding and tugged off his muddy wet shoes and socks and stashed them in the closet. Grabbing her hand, he crept to his father’s office. The place was in a shambles. The desks were flipped on their sides. Office supplies and computer equipment littered the floor. Everything had been torn off the wall in Gerald’s last fit of rage. Everything except for a trophy 9-iron his father had won years ago at a Camp Pendleton Base golf tournament.

Mark heard his father kick the front door open. The man walked straight into the children’s bedroom, following the wet, muddy tracks Mark had left behind. Gerald slid open the closet door only to find a pair of wet tennis shoes and socks.

“Son of a bitch,” Gerald said.

Mark raised the club overhead and brought it down with all his might, connecting squarely with the back of his father’s head. Gerald grunted and stumbled against the wall. Again, Mark swung the 9-iron. This time, Gerald slumped to his knees. He dropped the shotgun across his lap and rubbed a spot on the back of his head. He brought his hand back to his face, the hand covered in blood. Rage emanated from the soldier.

A whistling sound, like the first one, but much louder and closer, shrilled overhead. Lighting erupted. A few seconds later, the thunder shook hard enough to rattle the house.

Mark grabbed the shotgun.

“No…” Gerald gasped. “The bombing has started.”

For a moment, he lifted it and thought about pulling the trigger, wanting to pull the trigger. But he walked away. Back into the office. Mark kneeled before his little sister and took her in his arms.

“It’s ok, Michelle.”

Mark propped the shotgun on the edge of the desk, aiming it at the doorway. He put two of his small fingers lightly around the trigger.

And together they waited for Daddy to enter the room.

END

Jason Sizemore is the managing editor of Apex Publications. His short fiction has appeared in a variety of magazines and anthologies including Surreal Magazine, Aberrant Dreams, and Murky Depths. He lives in Lexington, KY.

Interview with Jeremy C. Shipp
interviewed by Jodi Lee

Author Jeremy C. Shipp has been published in ChiZine, The Harrow, Flesh and Blood, and many other publications. While preparing for the forthcoming collapse of civilization, he enjoys living in a moderately haunted Victorian farmhouse in Southern California. His first novel, Vacation, was recently added to the Stoker Preliminary Nomination list and was ranked third before voting closed in the Preditors & Editors Reader’s Choice Poll. Results for both awards are forthcoming.

I recently had the opportunity to ask Jeremy some questions. I’m quite sure it was Jeremy, and not the gnome, who answered. He is definitely one of the funniest new writers I’ve had the pleasure to speak with.

Jodi Lee: For a first published novel, how has the success of Vacation affected your views of the publishing world?

Jeremy C. Shipp: Back when I was a schoolboy-wearing sailor suits and eating giant lollipops-I thought the publishing world was a magical place, where writers, readers, publishers, editors, and all the rest danced together in the Mystical Forest of Literary Ecstasy. Eventually, this romanticized ideal shattered, as romanticized ideals tend to do.

So before my novel was published, I feared that there wasn’t room for a book like mine in the world. I wasn’t sure it would ever get published. And if it was, I wasn’t sure if anyone would connect with it.

Thankfully, that fear-based reality wasn’t the one that engulfed me. Instead, I learned about the Bizarro literary movement. And I’ve received much support and feedback from readers, reviewers, writers who I’ve respected for years, and many other slinkster cool folks. What this all boils down to, I suppose, is that I discovered it’s OK to be myself after all. Sorry if that’s too after school specialesque…

JL: In 9 years of speaking with authors, interviewing authors and reading promotional materials, I have to say you are one of the most approachable – if not *the* most approachable I’ve spoken to. How do you think this has helped with Vacation? Has it hindered the success at all – i.e.: has anyone given you grief over promotional tactics?

JCS: Before my book was published, I dreaded the idea of promoting my work. Then I realized I could have fun with it. So I spend a few hours every day having (usually strange) conversations with people, coming up with silly contests, writing weird interviews with insane grocery bags, etc.

And most people seem to really enjoy the weirdness and the fun. The only problem I’ve had is that some people just don’t get my brand of strangeness. But I’m OK with that.

JL: I enjoyed Vacation immensely, although I was warned it was sometimes a bit hard to follow. I was one of ‘those’ teenagers though, so the acid flashback-weirdness was relatively easy to navigate; what influenced you to write such a bizarre, yet oddly believable novel?

JCS: You know, it’s interesting how some read the book and say, “This isn’t so weird that I didn’t understand it,” and others says, “Whaaaa?”

This book spawned from a passionate place inside me; my love for life; my disgust toward various social systems. My goal with this novel was to maintain certain boundaries-like psychological and emotional feasibility. At the same time, in regard to other aspects of the book, I gave my imagination as much freedom as possible.

JL: How much research went into the novel?

JCS: Lots. I researched more for Vacation than any other book I’ve ever written. And I was surprised at how much I enjoyed the researching. I recently graduated from college when I started Vacation, so “research” was still a slightly traumatic word. I’d never researched for myself before. So it was a nice change. I definitely started learning a lot more after I finished school than when I was in the system.

JL: Tell me your reactions to all the fantastic blurbing Vacation has received – have you secretly been bribing anyone? Have any of your literary heroes come out to give nod to Vacation?

JCS: No bribing-although I did wish on a few shooting stars (which may have been planes…I wasn’t wearing my glasses). I’m extremely honored by the blurbage that my novel has been blessed with. Piers Anthony, Jack Ketchum, and many others. I never thought they’d read my novel, let alone like it. I’m as giddy as a schoolboy. I even put on the sailor suit every once in a while, for old times’ sake.

JL: You’re not just a novel author, you have several shorts out in the world as well. After a fairly lengthy search in our submissions area, I could only find one submission (which you had to pull due to acceptance elsewhere) for our wonderful magazine. Can we expect anything from you, soon?

JCS: Definitely, yes. I love Apex. I’ve been focusing on my new novel “Cursed” for a while, but I’ll write some more shorts soon, and Apex will be the next publication I submit to.

JL: Any way all this success is going to go to your head?

JCS: I had a layer of parsnip implanted in my head to protect me from that. Parsnips, of course, repel ego (and also powdered tang, for some reason).

JL: Any whispers or nudges in the direction of a film based on Vacation? I mean, that would be the absolute in bizarreality. Can we hope?

JCS: The only whispers I’ve heard lately are from the yard gnome who lives under my bed. He likes to freak me out when I’m trying to fall asleep. But if Vacation were made into a film someday, that’d be awesome. I do have a short film I wrote in production right now, called EGG. And I have a few other screenplays in the works. Maybe one day, there’ll be a movie called Vacation. Well…besides the one that already exists…

JL: And of course, I must ask – after the year you’ve had with Vacation, do you have any in-depth advice for those of us still waiting in the wings?

JCS: Oh no, I feel my After School Special-ness acting up again. This probably isn’t very in depth, but I think it’s important to have as much fun as possible, whatever you’re doing.

JL: For my last question, I have to ask the question that’s been on my mind for months – when does Jeremy C. Shipp get to take a vacation? I swear it seems like you’ve been promoting in one form or another since early last year. Are you tired of it all yet?

JCS: Maybe I will take a vacation one of these days, but for now, I’m having a blast. This promotion stuff is really just another excuse for me to be silly. Now I gotta go feed the gnome under my bed some powdered tang. I can’t really drink it anymore.

Featured Interview with Sara King
interviewed by Jodi Lee

Sara King was born in Fairbanks, Alaska, in 1982, when the temperature was 40 degrees below zero. Since then, living with the snow, hail, freezing rain, fog, floods, black ice, and Chinooks her home state hasn’t seemed too bad. Sara was four when she discovered writing for the first time. Since then, her world’s never been the same.

While clapping my hands in glee – no, really – after hearing Sara would be the featured writer for February, I immediately began formulating questions that I thought would best suit this truly forthright personality. I can’t be more pleased with the responses… Ms. King is definitely an asset to our Global Domination plans.

Jodi Lee: First off, I want to thank you for “The Moldy Dead” (Apex Digest issue 11). It was an absolute pleasure to read with just the right mixture of aliens and horror…particularly at the end. What was your inspiration for the story?

Sara King: A badass antagonist from my 4-book After Earth sci-fi series. I have this Geuji mastermind, Forgotten, take the stage in Books 2 and 4 to slap the other aliens around. At that point in the timeline, Forgotten is the only Geuji not imprisoned on bullshit charges-charges levied because the other aliens were afraid that if a Geuji got free, it would slap them all around. I usually do my world building backwards, so once I had the fact that he was a sentient mold with a real grudge against the rest of the world, I decided to go deeper. “The Moldy Dead” was a story about how his people have been screwed over by Congress since very first contact, when they deliberately almost annihilated the Geuji’s entire race. As I learned from Donald Maass’s Writing the Breakout Novel Intensive Workshop, you’ve gotta make every character sympathetic…even the bad guys.

JL: I know this is probably a redundant question by now, however – what did you think of the cover of issue #11, being representative of your story?

SK: It’s perfect. However a reader pictures a character in their head, that’s exactly how I want it. On that same vein, I don’t give a damn how a reader pronounces Geuji, Ooreiki, Huouyt, Jahul, or any of the other alien terms in any of my works. People think I care, but I don’t. However they pronounce it is the way it was meant to be, because reading is an individual experience and doesn’t need to be uniform or even similar.

JL: I for one was floored when Jason informed us it was your first sale. Things seem to have moved pretty fast for you in the last year or so – how excited are you?

SK: I’m actually impatient. Things aren’t going as fast as I’d like. I mean, I’m 25. A third of my life might be gone already. It’d be nice if we could speed things up, people. (Claps hands.) But really, I’ve got to say I’m thrilled that my cover-letter went from “Hi, I’m a new writer…” to “Hey, you may remember me from such publications as…” I’m also tickled about the editorship with Aberrant Dreams. Who woulda thought that lil’ ole me, with no copyediting experience and only a high cchool diploma under her belt, could beat out 50 other authors in an editing test? Oh, and yeah. There’s that agent thing. That got my little heart pounding. I think they probably heard the squeal in space.

JL: For those that haven’t read your work outside of “The Moldy Dead”, you have a story in the last issue of Blood, Blade and Thruster (alongside our own Jason Sizemore), titled “Fairy.” Is this story set in the same universe as gave birth to the Ooreiki, Jahul and Huouyt?

SK: Absolutely not. “Fairy” is a Millennium Potion short story, along with “Parasite”, which won Honorable Mention in the Writers of the Future Contest and is available on my website (www.kingfiction.com). The two universes are vastly different, with Millennium Potion having only two alien species, both nearly extinct due to human encroachment, and the After Earth series having, literally, thousands. (Though, thank God, I’ve only had to detail a dozen or so over the course of four books…)

JL: Your Apex Online story “Twelve-A” is rather heavy, emotionally; on one hand, Marie fears for her life, but on the other, she seems to have maternal feelings for the one that could kill her. How hard is it for you to work the emotions through the stories to wrench the hearts of the readers?

SK: I’ve been chewing my cud on this one for three hours and I still don’t have a good answer, so instead of continuing to give my computer a bovine stare, I’ll just do my best. I’m a little bass-ackwards in my writing methods. For me, emotion’s always the easiest part. It’s the first thing I try to define in a story. Once I have the overriding emotion, I can get a feel for the characters. Once I have the characters, I work on their wants and desires. World building always comes last, and Twelve-A is another example of world building backwards, using the characters and their actions in the novel to determine their histories in the short stories. Tension-which is mostly emotion anyway-is pretty easy for me in general. World building-the setting, the history, the details-is my biggest struggle as an author. If you noticed in “Twelve-A” (I’m gonna poke holes in my own story now), the lab was barely described, the corridors and rooms vaguely labeled, the characters little more than their actions. I find this, not emotion, the most difficult part of writing, and it’s incredibly hard for me to work those kinds of details into a story without leaving it clunky. I truly admire writers who can, and I’ve asked several of them how they do it, and they always give me a look like I’m some sort of poor, crippled lizard-for them, scene comes before emotion, which gets worked in later. I can’t picture myself ever writing that way, so that’s the biggest thing I hope to overcome with six weeks at Clarion. That, and my Cheetos addiction.

JL: Your bio says you’ve written 11 novels, and are now working on the 12th. Are they in a series, and if so, can you tell us a bit about them?

SK: Heh, I’ve got a very dark and scary closet where I keep about five of those, a couple of which I wrote before starting high school. Still, I count them because damn it, I did write them, and damn it, even though they sucked, they had a beginning, middle, and an end, and they were over 120k words. Of the six that remain, the ones I believe are publishable are the four After Earth novels (which spawned “Moldy Dead”) where aliens discover Earth and forcibly induct it into a universal Congress, Millennium Potion (“Fairy”) where space pirates seek out the cure for immortality, and Gamers, where activists fight a gaming company’s stranglehold on society and end up fighting addictions of their own. My current project, a fantasy called The Rockfarmer’s War, is my first attempt at making a true multi-POV storyline that (big surprise here) details a society devolving into war, a la George R.R. Martin. It’s been a real breeze…now I’ve just gotta find a way to reign in my 6 POV characters, keep the conflict between the 11 different factions from spiraling out of control, and at the same time pull an ending out of my ass that won’t leave my readers wanting to kill me in my sleep.

JL: Congratulations on securing representation with the Donald Maass Agency. What will you be tempting readers with until we get our hands on your novels?

SK: Actually, you can get your hands on one of my novels right now. Millennium Potion has been put on the back-burner while I work on my fantasy and I’ve been sending the current draft out to anyone who asks to read it. Just email me at thundress@hotmail.com. It serves a dual purpose: I get some great feedback for the next draft, and readers get a fun romp through space. Other than that, I’m still cranking out short stories, one of which will soon appear in Cemetery Dance Magazine, and another that will be in Aberrant Dreams. And, for those of you who are really daring, I’ll be launching a free program in February where I’ll be writing a new sci-fi adventure novel exclusively for readers on my mailing list. If you’re interested, the sign-up email is kingnovel@gmail.com.

JL: Sara, as I recall, you’re working towards acceptance to the Clarion Writing Workshop. How has that been going, and what would it be like for you to attend the next session?

SK: Omanomanoman. It would be fantastic. Then I could actually go up to the program administrator and ask (I actually plan on doing this) what he/she was thinking when they passed me over last year. I mean, (scoff), can’t they recognize true genius when it bites them in the ass? It would be the Great Alaskan Nose-Thumbing, and it would take place sometime near the end of the workshop, after I’ve fantastically wowed them all with my fabulous works and there’s very little chance of being kicked out.

JL: Imagine you’ve just made your first big sale to a well known and well respected publishing house. How would you celebrate, given your location?

SK: Ummm. There’s not much to do in Alaska in the winter except drink and fu– Whoops. Umm… Yeah. I’d snowshoe around the house, indulge in a few snowball fights, go sledding in the snow, make snow angels, watch the Northern Lights reflect off the snow, and check the weather to see if it forecasts more snow. Then I’d probably go absolutely mad with joy and call everyone I know and babble about how they’re gonna tromp through the snow to their cars right now and go buy their copies, and no, I don’t care that it’s snowing.

JL: In my poking around while prepping for the interview, I came across… your blog! Hehehe. Do you find yourself (really, truly, seriously) worrying if other editors or writers stumble across it? For what it’s worth, I had a good chuckle.

SK: No, I don’t care what they think. If people can’t take a joke, they have self-esteem issues and I laugh in their general direction.

JL: As a writing editor, do you find yourself sympathizing with the writers of rejected stories more often than not? With the editors?

SK: Aw, man, you had to bring that up. Being an editor is horrible in two ways. First, I hate rejecting people. Second, I hate reading bad stories. I’m the tear-it-in-half-and-throw-it-in-the-fire-if-the-ending-doesn’t-please-me type of person. Unfortunately, that doesn’t work too well with a computer. But it’s got its good moments, too. I actually like going through the slush, in a crazy sort of way. I read each story all the way through (gasp!) and every once in awhile I find a real honest-to-goodness gem. Further, I learned how important it is to make a story just as good as it can be before you submit. I found there’s lots of stories out there that are really close, right on the cusp, but it seems like when you ask for a rewrite, they have no clue what you’re talking about. So, with reluctance, I stopped asking for rewrites. I’m sure a lot of other editors have had that same experience.

JL: At the end now – can we hope to see more from you between the covers of Apex Digest?

SK: Depends on whether or not you recognize genius when it bites you on the ass.

---

Read Sara’s work in Apex Science Fiction and Horror Digest issue 11.

Sara King is a 24-year-old Alaskan sci-fi writer who wrote her first full-length novel at the age of 12. She’s written 10 novels and 26 short stories since, and her story “The Moldy Dead” appeared in issue 11 of Apex Digest (her first sale!). It takes place in the same world as the sci-fi series Donald Maass is representing for her in NY. Sara King has sold stories to Cemetery Dance, Blood, Blade, and Thruster Magazine and Aberrant Dreams. Check out her website at www.kingfiction.com.

Read Twelve-A by Sara King

Interview with David Wong
interviewed by Jodi Lee

When Jason asked me if I wanted to review John Dies at the End, by David Wong, I took it. It sounded interesting and when I looked it up, the cover was intriguing. Permuted sent the book out, I dived in. Half-way through the first reading, I emailed Jason to see what he thought of an interview possibility. At the end of the first reading, and part way into the second, I emailed David (also really a Jason… the Jasons are taking over, I think) and asked if he’d be interested.

Here it is, with me three-quarters of the way into my third reading of the book. I swear I find new bits each time. When I grow up, I want to go help John and David fight inter-dimensional evil.

Jodi Lee: John Dies at the End is a complete mind-twist from start to finish, and it all starts with a meat monster. Was it an attack of the munchies, or just another shot at a dick joke that created the walking bologna?

David Wong: Do you remember that scene in Terminator where Arnold Schwarzenegger emerges nude from the time portal, and he encounters that biker? And that biker looks down at Arnold’s dong and cracks some dismissive joke? JDatE is hopefully like that. It’s easy to just look at it and see nothing but penis, penis, penis.

But, just as there’s like 40 gigs of RAM in that Terminator penis, hopefully there’s an actual theme running through the silliness of JDatE. Though I guess when we see the terminator’s metal endoskeleton later there’s no dong there, so maybe the dong part on Arnold was just dong through and through. So maybe that’s a bad example.

What were we talking about? Oh, right, the monster made of meat. In our culture almost everybody believes in the soul, but most will still roll their eyes behind your back if you claim to have seen a ghost. But if they’re right about the soul, then we’ve all seen ghosts. We see them every day, only they have meat wrapped around them and we call them “people.” When they say the eyes are the window to the soul, they’re really saying the eyes are two twitching orbs a ghost uses to peer into the physical world from within the wet, warm machine it drives around.

So the idea was that, in confronting an entity made of pre-wrapped meat products, David first began to grasp the nature of the human soul, realizing through that ridiculous scenario that he, and us, live in a world of possessed meat.

And that ultimately is what the book is about, from the riddle on the first page, to the meat monster, to the bizarre fate that befalls David at the end. It’s all about exploring what a terrifyingly weird-ass idea dualism is.

JL: Since we’re on the inspiration topic, whatever gave you the idea for “Soy Sauce”, and why name it “Soy Sauce”?

DW: We have this habit of giving bland, ordinary nicknames to unimaginable things (for instance, you’ll hear at-risk people referring to AIDS as “the bug”) so when people came across this black drug that would basically let you slip into other dimensions, it seemed right that somebody would give it an innocuous name like Soy Sauce.

Also, it looks like soy sauce in the syringe so there’s that.

JL: I’ve read Douglas Adams is an inspiration in your work. Is this why JDatE is a dimensional journey for David and John, similar to that of the space travel adventure of Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect?

DW: Exactly, particularly in the sense that they get to step into these new worlds where everything is ridiculous from A to Z. It really is a blank check for insanity.

Also, in David you see a lot of Arthur Dent’s reluctance. While monstrocities are pouring into the night, David would really prefer to go back home and watch Ultimate Fighting.

JL: Who came first: David Wong, writer’s pseudonym, or David Wong, intrepid battler of evil?

DW: I started writing as David Wong when I created my first website (pointlesswasteoftime.com) back in 1999. It’s just part of internet culture that you don’t write as yourself. My friend Mack Leighty would write under the username John Cheese. Both of us would write in the first person, but always as these fictional people, so we wound up creating these characters on the fly. Two years later when I started JDatE (for that website is where it first appeared), it made sense for it to star David and John because that’s who the fans knew.

JL: What is up with Molly the dog? I have my theories… why is she so intelligent, and how does she come back?

DW: Molly’s exact origins is one of the mysteries of the book and it’s one that David, as the narrator, doesn’t happen to have the answer to. But the reader should be able to put it together. When reading JDatE it’s important to note that you are probably smarter than David, and that just because David hasn’t figured something out, doesn’t mean the answer isn’t there.

As for Molly, I’ll bring up two of my favorite fan theories, without saying which one is closest to being true:

1. Molly is actually the hero of the story. She, in her own dogly way, is carrying on her own struggle against these mindless dark beings and John and Dave mostly just get in her way. Thus, if the boys had just stayed home, Molly would have taken care of the whole thing on her own and everything would have turned out fine.

2. Molly doesn’t exist in the actual JDatE universe, but David simply adds her when putting the story to paper, to explain things he otherwise didn’t want to explain. We find out elsewhere that David isn’t the most reliable narrator, so perhaps when he hits a part of the tale that, for his own reasons, he doesn’t want the reader to know about, he essentially just says, “the dog did it.”

JL: By now, most people know that JDatE was a serial novel posted online via a blog. Given your success at marketing and selling a previously free piece of work, do you suggest this as a stepping stone for other writers?

DW: YES, if you’re a new writer. A thousand times yes. But not for the reasons you may think.

JDatE was my first novel. The reason the vast majority of first novels wind up unfinished in a drawer somewhere is because people can’t sustain three years of tedious writing with no reward, and they don’t have anyone looking over their shoulder pushing them to finish. So, it fizzles out.

Publishing online, in serial form, protected me from that. I got instant fan feedback via email and our message board each time I posted. I got immediate compliments and gratification, and had constant nagging from people demanding to know what happened next and complaining loudly when the next chapter was uploaded late. The readers themselves were there to re-light the fuse every time it sputtered.

Also, that feedback served as a sort of on-the-job-training. I could see within hours of publication which parts people liked, or didn’t understand, or were bored by (for my server stats told me exactly on what page the readers were quitting on). Readers gleefully pointed out plot holes and continuity errors, told me which scenes they loved and which they hated. All of this shaped the story as time went on.

Now, don’t get the impression that I was writing it according to popular opinion, like letting them vote on what character died next or anything like that. I wasn’t. A story could not be written that way. But there are all of these non-obvious things in the technique and the language that I would never have learned if not for that instant reader feedback. It basically served as my novel writing school.

But is this the best way to get started as a novelist? I don’t know. Understand that I didn’t put the book online for free as part of a grand marketing scheme. I put it online for free because most of my fans are poor and I knew they would never read it otherwise.

JL: Are you hoping to market the sequel in a similar manner, since the story is ongoing, online? By the way, I’ve read about half of the posted material, and it’s just as mind-boggling as JDatE. I do hope to see it in hardcopy someday.

DW: Sure, right now the first half of the sequel is online, for free as before. I’ll write the rest of it some day–and put it online–as soon as I can clear the other writing projects off my desk. They’re starting to pile up.

JL: What does David Wong (or should I call you Jason, Mr. Pargin, Supreme Ruler or Sir?) do when he’s not writing some truly messed up adventures?

DW: I work as the Assistant Editor for the humor site Cracked.com. I was hired last fall, and it was the first full-time writing job I’ve ever had. Before that I worked at an insurance office 40 hours a week and spent another 30 hours writing and editing pointlesswasteoftime.com and did other miscellaneous writing jobs for pay where I could squeeze them in. I didn’t sleep a whole lot.

JL:How far are you going to take the boys… is the current project the last one, or do you have a tiny tube of the Sauce in your sleeve?

DW: I would love to keep writing the stories, as long as I have ideas. What I don’t want is a situation where it turns into a series, like where I contractually have to write one every year whether I want to or not. That would quickly turn into a bland assembly line of episodes where I just keep inventing monsters for them to fight, stretching it out like the last seasons of the X-Files. I don’t want it to get like that, where there are more episodes purely because more are required. I only want to come back to it as long as I actually have something to different to say each time. Life’s too short.

JL: I heard a rumor… ok, not a rumor, but I’m gonna ask: is print the end for JDatE, or will there be… more?

DW: The ink is barely dry on the contract, but… I have in fact just sold the film rights to JDatE, to Don Coscarelli (Bubba Ho-Tep, the Phantasm series). He contacted me late last year after he got hold of a copy of the paperback. And I think anybody who’s seen Bubba Ho-Tep can tell you JDatE is in good hands.

The club is called Bazard and the old brick building doesn’t want it. This is meant to be a temple of industry, a factory that once produced nice respectable toxic products. Now it’s used to manufacture midnight pleasuremongers from daytime wage slaves and bored school kids. It is an abomination. The walls cry tears of dust and mold while the load bearings creak hollow spook house protests that aren’t even blips beneath the crushing sonic weight of the music.

It’s a Saturday night soaked in sweat and spilt alcohol, and five hundred of them undulate together on the dance floor; leather children, necrophages, next-gen cybergoths filtering the world through their designer spectrographic goggles. On the main stage, a band with the Babel-text moniker “griMM/griN” is in the middle of a shriekgasming second set. Their frontflesh, a milky waif two generations too late for heroin chic, has a vocal splitter that allows her to scream the death metal refrain and sing Lovecraftian lyrics in a soft siren falsetto at the same time. The women sway and the men thrash, vice versa in some cases, under an aurora borealis cascade. The light field, magnesium flare-magenta and acid mist-green, is generated as one solid slate. It materializes in the rafters then blinks down toward the floor in scanning waves. As it descends over the crowd, tossing heads break through the field like drowning victims struggling for their last gasps.

Two men hit Bazard after 1:00 a.m. that the mood and the music don’t touch. They’re not here for either. They are stoics in a cult of hedonists, still buoys in an angry sea.

The first one, renamed upon being reanimated, is called Gideon. The Company prefers to command their Dead Men in this war. He’s otherwise unremarkable. Unremarkable height, unremarkable build. But his skin is as hard and dark as Venusian rock, skull clean-shaven except for long curving sideburns and a meticulously kept Van Dyke; a look that was in vogue ten years ago. The ceramic mail shirt and black slicker he wears, with its fiberglass suspension rings down the spine, are more contemporary.

The one behind him, the big man, 6’5” and wide through the shoulders, as white as Gideon is black, follows his lead. Darrick’s threads aren’t as shiny as Gideon’s, dusty black jeans and dustier boots, an old charcoal shirt with the sleeves rolled up to the elbows. He’s new to Gideon’s world. His eyes wander more, his mind questions more. He is new, but not inexperienced, not unsure. Those eyes that wander are not wide eyes, they’re slit and sharp and broadcasting on all-bands a warning wherever they search. And the titanium collar around his neck looks like it’s there for a reason.

“Who’re we looking for?” Darrick asks, the faces all blurring into one frenzied mosaic.

“We’ll know soon,” Gideon says.

In the thick of it Darrick pauses, eyes to the stage, pupils dilating as they refocus.

“What is it?” Gideon asks.

“The chick. The lead singer. She’s sending out double-coded sound waves. I can see them.”

“I know.”

“Can anyone else?”

“No.”

“What’re they for?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Gideon says. “It’s not why we’re here. Focus.”

“That is weird, man. They’re like fireflies going into everybody’s ears. Except for ours. Is that the implants?”

“Focus!”

“All right. But it’s weird.”

Gideon slips a hand inside one the pockets on his slicker, as casual as a man waiting for a bus. He calibrates the device tucked down there by touch, reading the buttons like Braille. It remodulates the aurora cascade above their heads; now the light carries a saturating signal, electromagnetic particles that penetrate the pores, designed not to disrupt everyday cybernetics. The particles are encoded for a single purpose, a specific power supply. When the scanning field descends for the two hundredth time of the night no one notices any difference, and at first glance the crowd seems unaffected; and at second glance…at third glance. Then Gideon spots him, a man who was just another too-spiff club nanite in his surface-of-Mars print jacket a moment ago, before his body was inundated with EM particles.

At first it looks like an absent seizure, then a full blown seizure, and by the time anyone realizes it’s not a seizure at all, the man’s spine bursts through his back like an angry invertebrate. The circle of bodies that’s formed around him watch as he’s de-boned by the hand of the gods, holding their drinks in front of them like protective talismans. The reproTon has already grown into the man’s skull and seized his ocular cavities; his eyeballs suddenly disappear. Tears rip through each cheek and his mandible snaps off, hanging down his chest like a broken trap door, an escape hatch being employed by the thing wriggling free through his cracked hard palate. The man’s neck balloons as the reproTon pulls its chassis up his throat, the part that released his spinal cord, poisoned by the EM particles in the man’s blood, forced to excise itself from his body.

The reproTon hits the dance floor a second before the pile of wasted flesh it has discarded like an infected limb. Its head is no bigger than a doll’s and decorated with bits of the man’s frontal lobe. His eyes dangle from interface cables connected to it. The reproTon’s body is just a small mass of claws and gears overgrowing a cylindrical frame; it’s impossible to distinguish the blood from the oil it fabricates to lube its moving parts. The metallic mushroom thing writhes weakly, like a newborn, slowly righting itself.

Meanwhile the men who’ve beaten it from the bio brush are trying to circumvent Chaos’ children, the rest of the rollers and ravers and clubbers who think all is right in their supersonic, chemically-synthesized world. Darrick shoves them aside and the crowd lets him because they think he’s a bouncer; later they’ll tell the Uni cops he looked so much like one.

Gideon has almost reached it when the reproTon starts hopping across the club floor, head bobbing and gears springing like some grotesque tinker toy. This toy, however, is self-generating. Blue tendrils of electricity fire from its metallic skullcap, wafting and careening like luminous sea algae under oceanic currents. They create a magnetic vortex, calling every ounce of metal in a twenty yard radius: furniture, piercings, jewelry, watch parts, PDAs, cell phones. It cannibalizes every useable bit of hardware, reshaping metal with centrifugal force and melding the new pieces into a crude bipedal form, building itself a body from the ground up, literally, and doing it on the run. The pogo stick inertia moving it forward becomes the hobbling gait of two prosthetic legs.

Gideon and Darrick try to intercept, to close the gap between themselves and reproTon. But the crowd is too thick and oblivious, the club too big. The pair is caught in an undertow of bodies recoiling from the industrial monstrosity clawing its way off the dance floor with hands made of forks and drink stirrers. Even Darrick’s arms, the only two things that never fail him, seem useless to stem the tide.

“We’re losing it!” Gideon yells. “We can’t let it get out the door!”

“Need a diesel with a cowcatcher to mow these fuckers down, man.”

“Darrick! Berserk!”

“I can’t. I’m not pissed off.”

“It’s getting away!”

“This is a rave, not a battlefield.”

“Berserk! Now!”

“I can’t!”

Gideon doesn’t have time to argue the point any further. The knife is in his hand as if it’s always been there. He picks the fleshiest part of Darrick’s thigh and sinks the blade, all four inches. Gideon twists the knife’s mother-of-pearl grips until its polycrystalline edge scrapes bone.

The pain is God; vengeful, all-powerful. Opposing it is surprise and confusion and anger. Darrick’s agonized curses turn into animal growls that sound like the death throes of some heavy machine. The on-set of convulsions is quick, and the convulsions are inhuman in their violence; it should be physically impossible for muscles to contract that fast. He starts to change. His veins and the seams of his clothes seem to burst at the same time. The titanium collar around his neck stretches into two dozen individual platelets on a band of silicon elastic. Roars shake the heat-woven air, shattering the reverb of the music, and the bear goes crashing through the crowd, brushing bodies aside like tall blades of grass. Its claws never taste flesh, but the blood of a dozen broken noses stains its dull amber coat. More than a few bodies fall under the stampede. More than a few rib cages are crushed by it.

The bear, not a grizzly, not anything that’s tromped the open terra for two thousand years, catches the reproTon at the top of the staircase leading to the main doors. The limbs it’s formed from steel bar stool legs and rolled up serving trays fold in the bear’s angry maw. The personal defense systems of reproTons are as varied as a person’s response to attack. This one runs 50,000 volts through the bear’s body. It only singes fur and enrages an already raging berserk. The bear crushes the reproTon to the grated flooring of the staircase, mashing its cobbled guts under a shaggy paw. The human eyes attached to its robotic head have already glazed over, but now what was operating them dies as well.

A berserk’s bloodlust is not sated by lubricant, and so it will turn on the crowd, drawn to their heat, to the thunder of their hearts and in their veins.

Gideon’s traded in his knife for a thumbnail remote controller. It only has one button, and when he presses it, the titanium platelet against the back of the bear’s neck emits a steady stream of alpha waves, sent through the cervical spinal cord to the inferior end of the medulla oblongata. The bombardment retards the brain chemistry of the berserk, triggering a recall before rave flesh is put on tonight’s menu.

The berserk comes on fast and violent. The trip back is slow torture. First shedding fur, then skin cells, bones moving and cracking and breaking down under a thick hide that’s slowly becoming thin skin. Bald paws split and become webbed fingers and webbed toes that have yet to remember how to evolve. The maw is hardest to watch. Its teeth break. It regurgitates blood in buckets. Its wet black snout shrivels and falls off. Then the whole thing shrinks, withering, vaguely phallic and disturbing. But the eyes never change, just their inflection. The humanity returns. The rage, like crimson rings around each iris, has receded.

Five minutes later, five minutes that are forever for the beholders and longer for Darrick, who’s curled up on the floor, naked, hairless, toothless, and bleeding. The bristles of the bear’s coat surround his fetal shivering like threshed wheat.

He’s forgotten all about the knife wound.

Darrick’s first words aren’t really words. They sound like hard wind in a cave. His breath is so ragged, his voice so deep.

“God it hurts…it hurts…”

“I know,” Gideon says, kneeling beside him.

“Help me…oh fuck…help…”

“I can’t.”

Instincts say touch him, hold him for support; physical, emotional. His hand hovers. The air moves an inch between Gideon’s fingers and Darrick’s shoulder. Anywhere he places them will bring agony, at least right now. Gideon can hear Darrick’s epidermis solidifying. It sounds like wood swelling and splitting in a heavy rain.

The band has stopped playing. The bouncers, called out in force, idle in their leather muscle vests. They want none of this. There are so many sets of unblinking eyes straining to process the horror, so many minds, so much sense memory searching for some point of reference that will put this situation into a context they can accept.

Gideon watches the remains of the reproTon. They need to be contained. It can convert the radiation from the several hundred electrical appliances in the vicinity. It can regenerate. The containment team is waiting outside with their lead-lined anti-deuterium storage equipment.

This one wasn’t parasitic. It was symbiotic. For all they know the pile of meat ventilating on the dance floor was born conjoined with the reproTon. Gideon sees it more and more now. He’s seen baby birds hatch with fiberglass eyes. He’s seen flora blossom with nanotech pollen. He’s seen The Integration, the inevitable process of mankind merging with its own rampant technology, that the transhumanist movements prophesized and The Company refuses to accept. The Company, who dispatches teams of reanimated soldiers like Gideon and sapienmorphs like Darrick to combat reproTons as if they’re a disease that can be contained. And though Gideon wasn’t reprogrammed to think outside mission parameters, he knows that soon their efforts won’t matter anymore. The difference between a plague and evolution is only what’s left. Soon there’ll be no more Sneetches without stars, and Gideon and his berserk partner will just be outmoded hardware.

Darrick has stopped moaning, and even though every muscle, every joint, every splinter of bone screams, even though it feels like he’s only a day born and trying to stand on his own, he does it. He stands, aching and unashamed, swallowing the blood from his gums because using the muscles involved in spitting it out would hurt far more.

“I’m cold,” Darrick says.

Gideon nods. “I know what that’s like.”

“What’re they all staring at?”

“A Dead Man and a berserk,” Gideon says, and green-lights the containment team.

END

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Matt has short fiction in Apex Science Fiction and Horror Digest issue 8. In April, 2008 we released his first collection of stories titled The Next Fix.

Matt Wallace is currently poised to take the Australian film industry by storm. He is a trained catch wrestler, a Michelin chef, a skilled swordsman, an accredited demonologist, and a master of Filipino knife-fighting. He also writes the occasional fallacy.

An award-winning author and screenwriter, Matt has spent the last few years making his name and his bones in the medium of podcasting. Upwards of 10,000 listeners now download his stories released through the monthly Variant Frequencies podcast, and he has twice been honored with the Parsec Award for short fiction. His first novel-length release, the deeply prosaic, ultra violent, highly experimental The Failed Cities Monologues, garnered a small battalion of fans who have become fond of stalking Matt at conventions in full character costume. It is currently available from Podiobooks.com.

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Buy Matt Wallace’s collection of dark SF titled The Next Fix from Apex Publications.

The letter came on Tuesday marked “Post Apocalypse.”

It smelled like Aspen cologne and there was a smudge of barbeque sauce on one corner.

Sarah ripped it up and threw it in the trash.

The next one came on Friday, also “Post Apocalypse”, no barbeque sauce. But this one had an ornate gold seal on the flap that said, “Today is the last day of the rest of your life.”

Cheery.

Sarah ran it through the shredder there by her desk along with the letter that said she might have already won twelve million dollars.

When Monday’s letter came Sarah just sighed and tore off the end of the envelope.

There was nothing inside.

“Ha ha. Very funny.”

Down the street, she heard the tinkling music of the ice cream truck. She stepped out onto the porch, and the mushroom cloud was on the horizon.

A sepia colored overlay, a movie played on a life size screen, the soundtrack coming through the fillings in her teeth. All around her people were running and screaming. There was the sound of gunfire in the distance. Her neighbors’ house was burning and the ash that covered the lawn was thick enough for angels.

Huh. Well.

In her pocket the phone was ringing. She answered it with, “Nice touch.”

“Like it?” Ian said. “I saw it and thought of you.”

“It doesn’t match my outfit.”

“Sure it does. You’re wearing the red dress I bought you. Nothing says nuclear sunset like Dolce & Gabbanna.”

She was wearing ripped jeans and a Grateful Dead t-shirt.

“When is this? I thought I had another week.”

She pulled the R-13 form from her back pocket. Purple, the standard color for willful self-destruction. It was smudged, but she was pretty sure it wasn’t today’s date.

“You do. I just thought you’d enjoy a little preview. Of course if this is too much for you, you could always come home.”

“No, Ian. I couldn’t.”

She closed the phone and headed inside to pack for her next assignment. When she looked back over her shoulder, the ice cream van idled at the corner, children in an orderly row waited for orange push-ups and popsicles.

It looked like it might rain later.

###

They’d met at a hurricane party in the French Quarter just after the turn of the 21st century. Sarah was a graduate student collecting data on pre – versus post – disaster societies. Ian was shirtless, pouring mojitos too heavy on the mint.

The music was too loud. Guitars with strings made of razor wire, drums with an irregular rhythm, and a blue-black woman chanting low, in a language Sarah couldn’t quite decipher. She understood the hunger though. The wanting and the need. She could taste it like the sugar and salt and lime on her own skin.

The August heat was heavy and damp. Sarah could feel the lightning inside.

She liked his slow drawl and his quick smile, his soft grey eyes and the way his callused hands made that whispering sound across her sweat-slick skin.

“You know,” she said, slivers of ice clinking against the side of her drinking jar, a sprig of mint pressed to her lips. “I really shouldn’t be telling you this, but that levee isn’t going to hold.”

“What? You mean the storm? Honey, a little bit of rain ain’t going to hurt nothing.”

Sarah ran the damp mint down the hollow of her throat, and Ian’s eyes followed it.

“I’m not talking about just a little bit of rain.”

He swallowed thickly and shook his head as if he was already underwater.

“You can’t listen to a thing those old weathermen say. Fools wouldn’t know a rain cloud from a strong fart.”

She took a step closer to him. They were almost touching now, their bodies swaying slightly in time with the band.

“This time, they’re right.”

“That bad, you think?”

“Honey, I know it.”

The muscles of his chest sang to her stroking fingertips.

Drowning would be such a waste.

“I can show you.”

She breathed warm rum across his neck when she whispered in his ear. If he’d struck a match, they’d have both gone up in flames.

###

The next day Sarah woke up back in her own bed with a brand new rose tattoo on her ass and an unauthorized, undocumented time traveler tangled in her sheets.

Over breakfast she’d tried to explain and somehow Ian just…got it.

He nodded his head as he shoveled in his eggs. He asked questions, all of them thoughtful and intelligent. He wasn’t freaked out.

That should have been her first clue.

“I want to go back,” he said when she finished.

So once they’d filled out the paperwork (there was a mountain of it), they’d booked a trip for the days following the storm.

They’d stood together on a bridge overlooking his hometown, sleeping restless beneath the green water. Trees, cars, and the bloated corpses of dogs floated by when Ian first asked her the question, “If they’d known for sure that this would happen, you suppose they could have done something different?”

That initial question was like a stone dropped into a pond. Bigger questions, theories, disasters, rippled all around them, and it seemed like only Sarah could see the ugly, hulking shapes of things swimming just below the surface.

###

Ian had asked for and received a grant from the University. He was convinced that if he could foresee the end of the world he could forestall it.

Sarah thought he was a genius. All her life, time travel had been used for nothing but recreation or dry academic research. Together they set up the Apocalypse program intending to make a difference.

But then they didn’t.

Month after month, year after year, time after time, the world just kept on ending. And they watched.

And watched.

And watched.

Sarah tried to calculate how many millions of people she’d seen die. She could barely make it to the john before she threw up.

Still they had no idea how their own timeline would end.

She’d tried to talk to Ian about her doubts and they’d had a fight that ended with a black eye for her, and him spitting a tooth out in his hand.

Sarah had taken the next ticket to the end of the world. She hadn’t seen Ian since.

###

The shift change seemed rougher than usual.

Sarah was sitting at the breakfast table drinking a cup of coffee when the vortex opened practically at her feet without so much as a courtesy call. If her bag hadn’t been there beside her, she’d have been forced to go on without it – all of her research with its carefully drawn charts and painstaking notes would have been lost.

The invisible walls of the time shift sealed tight around her, shrinking her skin and squeezing the air from her lungs. Her bones creaked with the pressure and the copper taste of blood and bile slicked her throat.

Sarah couldn’t help feeling Ian had booked it that way on purpose to punish her.

When the vortex opened up again and Sarah was spit out, she could tell it wasn’t the faded and lumpy linoleum of the observation post kitchen underneath her bruised ass.

She opened her eyes.

She was lying on the beach who knew how many miles from the house. It shouldn’t have even been possible, but there it was.

The water was a cool murky green. Low waves barely ruffled the surface but they still managed to pull at her left shoe. Her bag was already bobbing a few feet out.

“Goddamn it.”

The sky was the same odd green as the water, dotted with ugly, yellowish clouds and, once again, it seemed to be on fire.

The letter was already there beside her on the sand, the envelope red as a wound, URGENT stamped infection black.

“Lovely.”

Inside was the R-13 form. Powder blue indicating a Celestial Event.

What is the nature of The Event?

Blanks for the date, time and weather conditions.

Please state, in your own words, what you observed leading up to The Event.

Be SPECIFIC.

Remember details MATTER!!!

Behind the form was a small white card. In Ian’s handwriting were the words, “Real time.”

God, he could be such a dick.

The comet, or asteroid or whatever it was, streaked through the sky apparently aiming for a point somewhere between her eyes. The wind screamed in her ears. Her teeth vibrated in their sockets and her bones felt ready to shatter. It started to break apart and chunks of fiery rock rained down around her. She could smell her hair burning and see blisters rising on her hands.

The ocean was beginning to boil, and foul-smelling steam, like rancid fish, rose up around her. Sweat stung her eyes.

“Shit.”

The vortex was closed.

She looked down at the envelope.

Post Apocalypse. That joke just keeps getting funnier every time you tell it.

Asshole.

Sarah thought that if she had a pen she might just start filling out the form for the hell of it.

She would write, “huge motherfucking rock” in the space next to Nature of The Event.

August 29, 2113.

She looked down at her watch.

3:27 p.m.

Weather conditions?

Who gives a fuck?

In her own words she would write, “THIS SUCKS!”

Is that specific enough?

The vortex opened beside her and Sarah stepped through.

The observation posts they used were more or less the same in each dimension. Sometimes the color of the walls or the stains on the shabby carpet varied, but not by much.

The house Sarah’s vortex opened onto was positively opulent.

She tumbled into an overstuffed Italian leather sofa, creamy and soft as meringue. The floors were marble tiles laid in a beautiful, intricate pattern. Thick, chocolate-colored, velvet drapes covered a window the length of one whole wall.

The phone was ringing.

“Fuck you very much, Ian,” she answered cheerily. “Nice fucking weather we’re having, don’t you think?”

“Sarah, honey, is something wrong?”

“I am tired of your little game, Ian.”

She was grinding her teeth together so hard she could taste enamel dust on her tongue. Mixed with the bile in her throat, it made her feel lightheaded and a little buzzed.

“You’re pathetic, shuffling through dimensions all these years and you’ve learned nothing except that eventually the earth always ends one way or another, and there’s nothing you or anyone else can do about it.”

“Are you finished?”

“Not even close. That was it. My last Armageddon. I’m coming back, and I’m reporting you and your useless research to the University. You’re finished. How’s that for an apocalypse, you sorry piece of shit?”

“I was calling to apologize. My timing on the last shift change was a bit off. I didn’t mean to cut it so close, but I won’t say I’m not glad for the opportunity for such a close observance.”

The last sentence was so oily she could almost hear it squeak. The lying bastard, he was enjoying every minute of her discomfort, savoring her rage and humiliation like a warm bath.

“We’re so close honey. I swear to you. We get just a little bit closer and then you’re gonna see it for yourself. I promise you, baby. It’s gonna be wild.”

“I meant it, Ian. I’m going to the University.”

“You do whatever you feel you have to. Our work doesn’t need defending.”

He tossed that “our” out as casually as a blow dart, and she felt it prick her skin, draw a drop of blood.

“Just tell me when the event is scheduled to occur here and when you’ll have my ticket out.”

“Don’t worry about that, Sarah. You’ve got plenty of time. I arranged a sort of vacation for you. You’ve been a lot of help to me. I’ve treated you poorly, and I’m sorry.”

“Whatever. Let me know when you’re ready.”

She closed the phone before he could speak again. Who knows? Some time or other they might have actually been in love.

Out of habit she turned on the TV and switched it to a news station. She couldn’t remember how long it had been since she’d seen nothing but rapes and murders and robberies. No prophets, no alien overlords, no countdowns to doomsday. Here was a place where they really believed things would just go on forever. Sarah could get used to that.

She made a sandwich and poured herself a glass of wine. She was half dozing when the doorbell rang.

Crawling across the porch was a man in a blue uniform and a jaunty hat. His neck was swollen and his face had turned the shiny blue black color of an overripe plum. Greenish pus oozed from his sores and his eyes were filled with blood. The man was choking, his mouth opening and closing trying to speak. Spit flecked his lips and misted up into Sarah’s face. She touched the dampness with the tips of her fingers. Fever heat rolled off him like evil thoughts.

In his outstretched hand was a smooth cream colored envelope.

Post Apocalypse

She tore the end off the envelope and the yellow sheet fell on the ground at her feet.

The color of plague.

Oh no, Ian, you dirty son of a bitch. How could you?

The mailman pitched forward across the welcome mat, sputtered and died.

A breeze caught the paper, and it tumbled end over end down the walk into the street and out of sight.

END

James Walton Langolf is a full time mother and part time college student from Mesa, Arizona. She believes that crazy from the heat is a valid defense for just about anything.

Previously published in Surreal Magazine and the erotic anthology Love at First Sting, her literary influences include Tom Piccirilli, Joe Lansdale, Ken Bruen and many, many more.

I tried to warn them, but the humans wouldn’t listen and the cats just taunted me.

The faint paw prints in the dust were the first sign. I started sniffing out the cause and became alarmed at my findings. The great mastiff, Old Sam, my sire’s brother, warned me about such things, but I never thought I would see them for myself. I stayed with Sam’s family whenever my humans went away, and at night in the dark when the masters were asleep, he would whisper the old secrets.

“Nowadays it’s just considered Dog Lore, boy,” he would say in his deep growly voice. “But believe you me, these things can still happen. And it’s the forgettin’ that gives ‘em power. Promise me, boy, no matter what they tell ya’, you remember the truth. It’s your sacred duty.”

I promised him, of course. And later I tried to tell my friends at the park about my talks with Old Sam. They laughed at me and told me he was an old dog, and those were just stupid stories. The Doberman twins teased me about it so much one day that I lost my temper. One of them ended up at the vet – served him right. I got banned from the park.

But I never forgot Old Sam’s stories, and as the danger to my masters grew, I kept my word. He was long gone when the trouble started, but I knew I couldn’t let him down – it was my duty.

At first the furry Long Ears were confined to the space beneath the bed in Ashley’s room – no chance of discovery by the humans amidst the teenager’s detritus. I paced outside her door, but the silly girl wouldn’t let me in.

“Get away from my door, you stupid dog,” she said, followed by her favorite whine. “Mom! Goliath’s going to mess up my room.” As if I could make it any worse.

One of the cats arrived and curled around the Ashley’s ankles. She sneered at me as she picked it up for a cuddle. The cat grinned its smug grin as the girl carried her off into the room, slamming the door in my face. The cat would live to regret her preferred status.

#

The unseen fiends seemed emboldened by my banishment, and their infestation spread down the hall. Their numbers were multiplying, as their kind was destined to do.

As my concern escalated, my mistress caught me digging and scratching under the boy’s bed – apparently I damaged the finish on the hardwood floor. She gave me a stern warning and sent me to the laundry room for punishment. It was there I discovered the nest – it was under the dryer. I heard their dusty voices and the sounds of hopping before they detected my presence. At that moment, I decided, if need be I would stand guard there for the rest of my days. I would not allow the evil to spread and harm my family. I had to stop Dust Bunnies.

Day after day and night after night, I held vigil in the laundry room. On one the cats stopped by, as usual to mock my efforts.

“You lummox,” she said as she passed by the door with her fluffy groomed tail held high.

She circled back and lingered, rubbing against the doorjamb.

“Goliath’s the big hero – guarding the dirty underwear. Oh, I do feel ever so much safer now.” She walked away with a dismissive glance over her shoulder.

“Loser!”

Eventually the furry devils beneath the dryer became restless – I was thwarting their plans. If I nodded off for even a moment, they darted out to pluck my whiskers or poke me with sharp objects. I thought if I could only hold out long enough, perhaps they would tire of waiting and leave through the dryer vent, then my humans would be safe. But my masters worried that I wasn’t eating so they brought dishes of kibble and water to my stronghold. I tried to resist but eventually they coaxed me from the laundry room to relieve myself, and the determined little beasts started to plan their operations around my forced relief schedule. They ducked out while I was gone to spill my water dish and prove to me they were on the move and winning the war.

Finally, I refused to leave my fortress. I had to protect my family. They didn’t understand the danger they were facing. Unable to hold my bladder any longer, I soiled the floor. My master’s patience was already growing thin with my laundry room vigil, but the soiling completely destroyed my credibility.

My master hurled threats of the pound, as he dragged me from the laundry room. I strained and pulled at my collar as he tore me away from the only safety I could ensure the family. I whimpered as the voices giggled and chittered and chided me from under the dryer. My master forced me to the front door and threw me outside into the yard.

“Maybe a night alone in the cold will sort you out, Goliath.”

I was frantic. I barked and clawed at the door. As the lights went out for the night, I howled in wretched fear for my family. If only I could make them listen, get them to let me back inside the house.

But no one came to the door, instead they shouted from the upstairs window.

“You’re going to the pound tomorrow! That’s it! Now, SHUT UP!”

I lowered my head, and dropped my ears. I silenced my sorrowful howls. Wandering around to the deck at the back of the house, I peered through the sliding glass doors, hoping I could at least keep watch from there.

For hours nothing happened. A tentative relief came over me. Perhaps all the threats from the dusty nest were hollow. Maybe my family was safe after all. The moon washed over me in the chilly night. I was weary, and I stretched out on my stomach and rested my muzzle on my paws so I could keep watch through the big glass doors. Soon all the stress and burden of the last few weeks came over me. My eyelids felt like stones, and finally I fell into a deep sleep.

As I slept, I dreamed good dog dreams of running with the boy in the green grass of the yard and fetching my yellow tennis ball. My master looked on with pride, and scratched behind my ears when I came to show him my ball.

“Good boy, Goliath. You are the best dog a family could ever have.”

My heart soared with joy and love for my humans. I would give my life for them.

Tap, Tap, Tap. The sound roused me from my dream, and I felt the cold night air in my bones and the frosted dew on my nose. Tap, Tap, Tap. I opened my eyes to the sight of hundreds of the dusty little long-eared fiends on the other side of the glass doors. They were each holding a weapon; the one tapping on the glass was grinning a long-toothed grin and wielding a meat clever from the kitchen above his scraggly cockeyed ears. Several of the others waved their paws at me, bouncing up and down on their mutant bunny hind feet. A procession passed in front of the door, at least twenty of the dirty beasts danced by, carrying a half-bald cat, legs tied to a broomstick like a pig ready for the spit. The cat’s once pink tongue lolled bloody from her mouth. As they paraded by, whiskers twitching, I could hear their wicked laughter through the door.

I leapt to my feet and barked with all my might, and something hit the glass with a splatter. It stuck to the window in a red sticky mass. As it began its smeary slide down the glass, I could see it was a human ear. I was too late.

In a panic, I barked and pounded my heavy paws against the glass door, but the little beasts turned their backs and shook their dusty cotton tails at me. Through the doorway across the room, I could see hundreds of them dragging a body down the stairs, like grimy-furred Lilliputians. I pounced at the doors, throwing the entire weight of my Mastiff body at the glass – the frame cracked and splintered. I barked and howled and continued to hurl myself against the glass until the wood around the door finally gave way. The doors caved in and the glass shattered on the hardwood floor, destroying the little fiends that hadn’t managed to scatter.

Oblivious to my bloodied paws, I raced across the broken glass and into the living room, heading straight for the stairs and the dusty rodents that were still dragging my unconscious master. They turned and attacked, hacking at my paws with knives and scissors, jumping on my back and stabbing me with ice picks and steak knives, but I bit and I ripped and tore at them until their tiny bodies were strewn like rag dolls motionless around the room. Badly bleeding, I padded quickly to my Master’s side in hopes he was still alive. The gaping hole in the side of his head where his ear had been, oozed with thick dark blood. I drew my tongue gently across his cheek. I could feel his warmth – he was still alive. I licked him again, and his eyes fluttered open.

With relief he looked into my face and whispered, “Goliath.” Then his eyes widened and shone with terror. “Upstairs, boy. Get them!” he rasped.

I bounded up the steps to save the others. The master’s bedroom looked like a massacre –my mistress’s body hung limp over the side of the bed, bloodied and shredded. I ran ahead to my boy’s closed door, relieved when all there seemed quiet. Suddenly, shrieks sounded from the teenager’s room. A wet trail of red paw prints led to her open door. As I burst into the room, I saw hundreds of the beasts swarming over the floor and around a fluffy feline mass at the foot of the bed. Some of the fiends had broken away from the pack and were beginning their climb up the bedspread. The terrified girl was huddled against the headboard, hugging her knees to her chest.

“Goliath, they’re eating the cat! “Help me!” she whimpered through snot and tears. Please….”

I leapt into action mauling and trampling the Long Tooths, but there were so many of them. They swarmed over my body, ripping and tearing at my ears, slicing into my flesh with their house hold weapons and their razor-claws.

As I felt my strength ebbing with the loss of blood, to my horror, I noticed little Teddy standing wide-eyed and frozen in the doorway. I barked a warning and lumbered behind the bed, trying to distract the Long Tooths from the boy. Flailing my head around, I flung the beasts into the air, and as I drew the mass of fiends away from the door, Ashley made a run for it, grabbing Teddy by the hand. For just a moment she glanced back at me, her face streaked with tears; then the two of them disappeared, leaving me alone with the horde. With great relief, I heard the children running down the stairs.

I struggled to survive, but the fiends kept coming. The blood loss and the pain of my torn flesh was draining me of strength, but I knew the longer I distracted the dark rodents, the more hopeful I was that my family would escape with their lives.

Howling my final battle cry, as my ancestors would have done, I reared up on my hind legs, and tossed the beasts from my back. Coming down hard, I hammered them with my paws again and again, trampling their wicked bodies. I gnashed with my still powerful jaws – the taste of their bodies sickening, their black blood spilling from my muzzle as I continued my assault.

Long painful moments passed during the battle, how many I’m not sure, but I sensed the house was finally vacant of my humans. Bone weary and staggering with dizziness, I stumbled with the weight of the next wave of the Long Tooths’ attack. Taking advantage of my weakness, the rabid beasts dragged me to the floor. Snarling and drooling they blinded me with their claws. As if from far away, I heard unfamiliar voices, shouts, the popping of gunfire.

My body failed me, and I could no longer struggle. As my pain passed away from my awareness, my thoughts wandered to the ancient Mastiff Lore and Old Sam; I knew he would be proud. Entrusted with the sacred duty, I had saved my family from the old evil – from the Long Tooths.

END

Fran Friel is a full-time writer and part-time slave to a band of domestic animal masters. She spends quality time with her husband pretending they live in Maui. Living in Connecticut, this pretending requires a vivid imagination, which brings us back to the writing.

Fran’s writing has won competitions at The Horror Library and Lamoille Lamentations, and has appeared in print and online at The Horror Library, Insidious Reflections, Wicked Karnival, The Lightning Journal and Dark Recesses Press.

Fran’s novella, Mama’s Boy, released by Insidious Publications in 2006, was nominated for a Bram Stoker Award in Long Fiction. A collection of her short stories, including Mama’s Boy will be published in Spring 2008 by Apex Book Company.

You can visit Fran at www.FranFriel.com.

Order Fran Friel’s collection Mama’s Boy and Other Dark Tales from Apex Publications.

The Tennessee River has swollen again, and nothing stops it. Not the locks or the dams. Not the TVA. I know that it was different once—that Chattanooga was a crossroads, alive and healthy; a place of promise and opportunity. But like all things left wet for too long, it warps. It rots. And now it would drown us all to keep us.

The great gorge fills, and the city sinks behind me.

In 1973 when the river last rose like this, my aunt Louise was fourteen years old and my mother Leslie was eleven. They lived on the north shore of the city, but this was back before the neighborhoods were renovated into quirky suburbia. There was no sprawling green park or blue-topped carousel with vintage-look horses.

On the very spot where the lion fountains spit water streams in the summer, there once was a closed-up armory. Like all things utilitarian and military, it was gray and smooth with no hint of ornamentation. It was a work building—a barn for the army’s cast-off supplies, surrounded by a chain-link fence.

Lu said she never saw anyone come in or out of the place, and so far as the neighborhood kids knew, it was deserted—and therefore a target. This is a story I had to drag out of her throat, word by word.

She’s never liked to talk about my mother.

By the time the girls reached the armory, it had stopped raining and the river lapped up against the rocky bank at the bottom of the short hill. The chain-link fence was twisted open in more than one place, and any of those holes was big enough to fit a teenaged girl through.

It was a neighborhood game: who could get inside fastest, who could find the coolest souvenir. Who could stay inside the longest without getting scared.

“It’s empty,” Lu assured her little sister. “There’s nothing in there but a bunch of old equipment, and most of it’s covered up. I don’t know why you’re so keen to get inside.”

“Because you and Shelly went without me last week.” Leslie sulked, peeling the fence back and holding it tight. “That’s why.”

Lu ducked underneath and took Leslie’s hand to bring her through the hole. “If I’d known you’d make such a stink about it, I’d’ve brought you sooner. Now’s not a good time. It could start raining again any minute, and things are flooding up.”

“It’s got to be now, while Momma’s asleep. You were the dummy who got caught. If you hadn’t got caught, we could go on Sunday.”

“We could still go on Sunday if you really want.”

Leslie sniffed. “Can not. You’re grounded.”

“Only so long as she knows where I’m at.” Lu pointed up at a broken window. “That’s the best way in. There’s—” She cut herself off. A fat raindrop splashed down onto her cheek. “Jeez. Hurry up. It’s starting again.”

Though the girls looked much alike, Lu was the older, taller, and stronger of the pair. Her hair was knotted into black braids and her jeans were ratty around the knees, showing brown skin and scabs where she’d fallen one time too many. She put her shoulder against a sopping wet crate and shoved it hard. It inched its way to a spot beneath the window. “Hang on, it’s high. I’ll get another one so you can step up.”

“No, I got it.” Leslie hoisted herself onto the crate and poked at the broken bits of glass. She glanced down at her cut-off shorts and wished they reached farther down her legs.

“Don’t touch those. Look. Someone reached inside and unlocked it.” Lu pushed the frame and it scraped against the sill. “Hurry up and get inside. Aw, shit.”

“That’s a quarter for the swears jar.”

“Not unless Momma hears me, it’s not. Get in, and get your look around. We’ve got to be fast.”

“Why?”

“Look at the river.”

Leslie glanced over her shoulder, out to the south and to the bridges. “Wow. I’ve never seen it like that before. It’s right at the edge of the building. Usually it stays down by the rocks.”

“Yeah, it does. This is way too high, and I think it’s getting higher. Look at that boat over there. It used to be tied down at the dock. Look where it is now.”

“Whoa.”

Lu shoved at her sister’s bottom. “Go on. For real.”

“I’m going. What are you, scared?”

“Not of anything inside, no. But I don’t like the look of that water. It shouldn’t be so high.” Even as she spoke, gray waves knocked themselves against the south end of the old armory. They beat a slapdash time there, creeping up along the cinderblock walls.

Leslie’s legs popped over the windowsill and she dropped herself down onto something below. “What’s this?” Her voice echoed loud against the high, corrugated metal ceiling.

“I don’t know. Something to step on. Climb on down, if you’re going to. It’s raining again out here, and I’m getting soaked. And the river . . . I don’t like the look of it. It’s too full. And . . .”

“And what?”

Lu murmured the rest. “And I don’t think it’s supposed to be that color.”

“What?”

“It’s always sort of gray and blue. Maybe it’s just the clouds or something.” Lu slung her leg past the broken glass and climbed inside to stand beside Leslie. Together they were perched atop another set of boxes, or possibly a large piece of machinery—it was something covered with a khaki-colored canvas that was thick like a tent.

Leslie stamped her feet. “It feels solid.”

“It is solid. Look at all the footprints on this thing. We do this all the time. Come on down then, if you’re coming. Let’s get this over with. The river’s rising, and Momma won’t sleep forever.”

“Shelly will cover for us.”

“She’ll try.” Lu hopped down to the cement floor and brushed her hands off on her jeans. “But there’s no telling if it’ll work or not. I’m grounded, remember?”

“Forever and a day. Do you think she meant it?” Leslie stepped down beside her, and copied Lu’s hand-wiping gesture.

Lu shrugged. “Probably. But that don’t mean she can make it stick. Well, this is it. You happy now?”

“Yeah,” she breathed. “I guess. It’s dark in here. Did you bring a light?”

“No. It’s still daytime. We don’t need a light. Your eyes’ll get used to it. Come on. I’ll walk you through and then we’ll leave and you won’t make a big stink about it anymore. Deal?”

“The whole thing. I want to see everything you got to see with Shelly.”

“Fine, yeah. The whole thing. But we’re going to do it fast.”

By then the rain was not so much falling as plummeting. Louder and louder it came down, and Leslie was right—it was dark inside, despite the afternoon hour. Within the disused armory, all the space was filled with veiled gear and shrouded military tackle. From floor to ceiling the ghostly monsters stood still and silent, lumpy and lame.

“What’s underneath the sheets?” Leslie wanted to know, but Lu didn’t know and nobody else did either.

“Stuff. Army stuff. Big machines and trucks. Boxes of junk. Most of those sheets are tied down, and it’s too hard to pull them up.”

“What? I can’t hear you.”

The rain was too much, the echo was too hearty. Water poured onto the old metal roof as if the river had overturned to empty itself. It drove so steady that the sound fuzzed out to a harsh white noise.

“Hurry up,” Lu said, ignoring Leslie’s request to repeat herself.

“We’re going to have to ride our bikes home in this, aren’t we?”

“It’s only getting worse. This is stupid. Les, this is stupid.”

“Not getting scared, are you?”

Lu looked back up at the window, and down at the floor. “Les, the water’s coming in. We’ve got to go.”

“Shit,” the younger girl whistled, lifting her sneaker up and splashing it back down.

“Quarter for the swears jar.”

“Not if Momma doesn’t hear it, right?”

They stared back and forth at each other, and held their breath while the sky dropped down outside. “Les. Let’s go. It’s not letting up. It’s just getting worse.”

“Can’t get much worse.”

Lu took Leslie’s wrist and tugged her back towards the window. Leslie’s token resistance was feeble. “We can’t ride in this weather. Maybe if we wait it’ll let up,” she protested, but the water was climbing up her ankles, and the fight was leaving her.

The older girl reached the makeshift exit first and scaled the now-soaked tarp with a couple of well-placed footholds. She used her arm to shield her eyes from the blowing rain that gushed through the broken window.

Leslie prattled on below. “We’re going to have to run for it. We’ll have to walk the bikes and we’re going to get wet in the rain.”

“Jesus, Les,” Lu said. “We’re going to have to swim for it.”

“What? Don’t say that. It’s just rain.”

“No, it’s not just rain.”

“It is rain—I’m standing in it right now!”

“No, Les. It’s the river.”

More water squeezed through the cracks beneath the doors, and the tide crawled up past nervous ankles, past the hems of jeans, up along skinny shins. “Lu? Lu, I don’t like this. Lu?”

“I don’t like it either. Get out of that water. Get up here, now. Come on. You’ll catch cold.” She sent down one hand and Leslie grabbed it, pulling herself up.

“Let me see out the window.”

“No. It’s just water, but it’s coming up fast and I bet we don’t have bikes anymore anyway. They probably washed away by now.”

“You’re just trying to scare me,” Leslie accused, but she didn’t push past Lu to look outside. She reached down to her feet and squished her shoes to let out some of the water. She twisted the bottom of her jeans and wrung out more. “It’s getting cold in here. And the water—where’s it all coming from, Lu?”

“What? Be quiet, I’m trying to think.”

“Lu, look at the floor. Lu, look at the floor.”

“I’m looking! I see it, okay? I see how the water’s coming up.”

A loud creak popped through the hideous white noise of the hammering rain.

Leslie jumped and scrambled higher, to stand just below her sister. “What was that?”

“How should I know? Stop it, you’re panicking. Don’t panic. It’s just water. It’s just water.”

“It’s a lot of water.”

“But we’re on top of all this stuff. We’re real high up. It won’t reach us. When it stops raining, it’ll all run back down to the river, that’s what it’ll do. It can’t rain forever. Maybe we’ll even find our bikes. Maybe Momma won’t kill us.”

“You’re going to be grounded until you’re dead.”

“Get on up here.”

Leslie squeaked with alarm, and pointed back at the ground. “It’s still getting higher!”

“Well it’s not going to get as high as the roof or anything. There’s—there’s an attic, Shelly said. She went up there with a boy once, but don’t tell her I told you about it.”

“Which boy?”

“I don’t know. One of ’em. Just, come on. We can climb across these, over to the other side—I think that’s it, that’s the attic door in the ceiling, see it?” They were both getting drenched, standing beside the open window. Lu took Leslie’s face in her hand and directed it to a handle above them, across the armory space.

“I see it. Yeah. We can make that, can’t we?”

“We can make it.” But the water was rising still, filling up the spaces between the cloaked machines. A foot at a time it crawled the walls, so fast that if Lu picked a spot on the wall to stare at, she could count to ten and watch it disappear. At the window the rain was finding easy entry, and the river was waiting its turn.

“This is bad, isn’t it?” Leslie fretted. She stood close to her sister and shivered.

“It’s not that bad. Here. Stretch your legs, you can make that next stack—see? Just crawl and be careful. You won’t fall. You go first. I’ll help you.”

“You go first.”

“All right. We’ll do it that way, then.” Lu reached out one long arm and snagged the tightly-fitted tarp on the next pile of junk over. By shifting her weight she closed the distance and grabbed a handful of canvas, using it to haul herself over. She extended her hand back to Leslie. “Here—come on. I’ll pull you.”

Leslie nodded and held out her hand. She let her sister heave her across, and when she arrived on the new spot, she clung to the heap and dug her fingers into its bulk. “Only one more, right?”

“Just one more. Then we’ll be right under the attic, and I’ll pull the door down so we can go up inside. It’ll be drier there. We’ll be safe for a long time. Long enough for the rain to stop and the water to go down, anyhow.”

“Okay. Okay. Don’t let go of my hand.”

“I’ve got to for a second. The next one’s closer, see?” Lu only leaned to reach the second stack of covered military detritus. She could span the gap between them if she stretched her legs apart, so she made herself a bridge and let the smaller girl scramble across her body. “Now give me your hand again.”

She didn’t need to ask twice. Leslie thrust her fingers into Lu’s. “I’m getting scared.”

“That’s okay. This is kind of scary. But don’t freak out on me. Freaking out only makes it worse.” Lu reached for the metal latch above her head and gave it a good yank. The ceiling held, and groaned.

“You’ll have to—Les, put your arms around my waist. Pick your feet up, yeah. Like that. I’m not heavy enough. Pick up your feet. There, that’s it.” Combined, their weight pulled against the springs and coils above, and the hatch reluctantly slumped down with a jerky flop. A ladder on a set of rollers followed it. Lu grabbed the bottom rung and pulled.

“It’s dirty up there.”

“It’s dirty and wet down here. Go on. I’ll hold the door down, you go up the steps.”

“You go first.”

“I can’t. You’re not heavy enough to hold the door down. Just go. I’m right behind you.”

“You better not be fooling me.”

“I’m not fooling you.” Lu’s arms shook as she held the door low enough for Leslie to scale. Beneath them, the water soaked its way up the veiled machines, rising foot by frightening foot. By Lu’s estimation, if they’d stayed on the floor it would have been up to her little sister’s waist; but she also knew that on the other side of the window, more water waited. The whole river was knocking, asking to come inside—and it had shown up quick on the doorstep. She’d sworn the flood wouldn’t make it to the armory’s old roof, but she wasn’t as sure as she pretended.

Later she would learn that a dam somewhere up river had failed, and that’s why the water had come so high, so fast. And later, it was easy to say that if she’d only known, she never would have brought her sister out to explore.

But back then, as the afternoon grew late and the sky went dark and the Tennessee River oozed up out of its bed, Lu could only work with the decisions she’d already made. She pushed at Leslie’s feet, then scurried up after her.

With the weight of the girls removed, the door clapped itself shut into the floor behind them.

“It’s dark up here,” Leslie whispered, because big, dark places made her think of church.

“You said it was dark down there.”

“Well, it’s even darker up here.”

“You’ll get used to it.”

The attic was as dirty as Leslie had declared, and darker than Lu was willing to admit. Rain noise was louder there too, since nothing but the thin metal roof separated the girls from the sky.

Lu peeled off her sweater and wrapped it around Leslie, who was wetter and colder, or so it seemed. “Don’t touch the pink stuff in the floor,” she said, pointing to the half-finished floors. “It’ll make you itch, or that’s what Shelly said. It’s insulation. Walk on the boards in between them, if you can.”

“Okay.” On shaky legs Leslie did as she was told, struggling to stand astride the beams that would hold her. “This sucks. We can balance up here above the itchy pink stuff, or balance down there above the water.”

Lu lifted her voice to be heard above the battering rain. “The pink stuff is warm, at least, and it won’t drown you if you sit in it too long. So I’ll take the pink stuff, if it’s all the same to you. Let’s go back there—the floor’s more covered. Less pink stuff to worry about.”

Together they tiptoed across the wood planks and dodged curtains of cobwebs, Leslie going first with Lu’s hands on her shoulders. If either of them had been any taller, they would’ve had to crouch. But as it was, both of them could lift their hands and brace themselves on the underside of the roof.

Leslie coughed and wiped at her face. “It smells gross up here.”

Down by one of Lu’s feet, curled in a pink, fluffy bed, the remains of a rat lay decomposing. “It’s just . . . old stuff. Old places. They smell like this, after a while. Don’t worry about it. Keep going.”

When they reached the back corner they sat down, curling their arms and legs until they folded around themselves, and around each other. “I’m cold,” Leslie complained, but Lu knew she was mostly just afraid and didn’t want to say so.

“Yeah, it’s chilly in here. But you’ll warm up as you dry off.”

Down came the rain and washed out all the other sounds except for the occasional cracking, creaking complaint of the old armory. But the armory was built to last. It would not fall, it would only fill.

Night settled in early because of the weather, and the rain kept coming.

Antsy and damp, the girls huddled close without speaking much. Once it was dark there was no sense in speaking. There was no reason to talk about heading home; the only real question was when to start shouting for help. The time hadn’t come quite yet—there was a balance that must be tipped. Their fear of their mother had to be outweighed by their fear of being trapped, and for a long time the fear of their mother won out.

Lu also thought that if they stayed missing long enough, there might be a chance that parental relief would be great enough to overrule parental retribution. Her hopes weren’t high, but she was running low on hope as the night dragged on, so she clung to what she could get.

Lulled by the violent downpour and its insistent beat on the metal roof, eventually the sisters dozed.

But they awoke with a jolt and grasped at each other’s arms.

“What was that noise?” Leslie demanded, though she knew her sister didn’t know any better than she did.

The noise sounded again and they were both awake enough to hear it clearly. It was something hard and knocking. Something dense and thick, with deliberate intent.

“Somebody’s there?” Lu guessed. “I don’t know. It sounds like . . .” She hesitated, listening hard.

There, again. Another blow. This one made their bottoms jump.

Leslie breathed faster. “Somebody’s right underneath us. I think.”

“Not somebody? Maybe something floating.” Lu knew as soon as she said it that she shouldn’t have.

“What? You think the water’s got that high?” There was the panic again. “Floating up so high that it hits against the ceiling underneath us? You don’t really think—”

Lu thought of the river outside the window, and how it boiled at the walls of the armory. She believed yes, that the water could get that high; and she figured that yes, something must be floating up to the ceiling in the hollow space below. But to say so meant that her sister must know it too; and though she was not such a nervous little sister as little sisters went, ten or twelve feet of water underfoot might be enough to send anybody into a fit.

But there wasn’t much point in denying it. The banging continued faster, or maybe only in more places. Maybe it came from more than one—crate? machine? At least that’s what it sounded like to the girls, who crushed their bodies against each other, trying to be small, and trying to be blind.

Lu said she didn’t really want to know. Leslie didn’t either, and that was why she let Lu cover her eyes with a sleeve, even though there wasn’t anything to see.

There was plenty to hear, from every direction all at once.

“What is that?” Leslie groaned again, her head buried in the crook of her sister’s neck. It did not occur to either of them to call out for help. Whatever was bungling and bumping its way along the ceiling was not friendly, and it was not helpful.

“Shhh—” Lu told her, and she rocked her back and forth.

Pound, pound, pound went the noise until it was louder than the rain had ever gotten, though less rhythmic.

“Oh shit, Lu. You know what they are.”

“Be quiet.”

“They’re hands, aren’t they? Listen, do you hear them? Listen, Lu. They’re hands. But they ain’t alive anymore.”

“Shush up. Stop talking.”

Leslie lifted her head and narrowed her eyes. “I can hear them. Can’t you? Don’t you hear what they’re trying to say?”

“No, and you can’t either. Hush it, would you?” Lu tried to force her sister’s head back down but Leslie wouldn’t let it go.

“But that door is really heavy, ain’t it? They won’t be able to pull it down, I don’t think. Not unless the water gets higher, and, listen, it’s stopped raining.”

She was right. The sudden quiet threw into sharp relief the dull staccato beneath the floor where they sat.

“Be quiet, Les. For Jesus’ sake, shut up. You want them to hear you?”

“Who cares?” she said, and the eerie, knowing glare she gave to Lu made her stomach knot and sink. “Can’t you tell? They already know we’re here.”

But the door was heavy, and it held. And by the time the first hint of dawn came creeping down the Tennessee River gorge, the water was retreating its way back to the river’s bed. Though they wouldn’t open the attic door, the girls shouted out to police when they heard the sirens, and when the man with a megaphone called to them from a small, flat boat.

They were home by breakfast, but all of their mother’s worry didn’t keep the pair of them from being grounded indefinitely.

And late at night, while her little sister slept, Lu listened for the hammering of the searching hands. She never heard it again, but Leslie dreamed of it for weeks—whispering frantic prayers into her pillow between twilight and dawn.

Tell the burned-up man it was all a mistake. Tell him it was all a mistake.

---

Copyright © 2007 by Cherie Priest. All rights reserved
Apex thanks Cherie Priest and Liz Gorinsky for the permission to reprint this chapter. We encourage you to purchase Not Flesh Nor Feathers from your favorite bookstore.

Cherie Priest was born in Tampa, Florida, down the street from the stadium in 1975. In 2001 she graduated from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga with an M.A. in Rhetoric/Professional writing, and she also has a B.A. from Southern Adventist University in Collegedale, TN. She uses her college diploma as a mouse pad.

In October of 2005 her first novel, Four and Twenty Blackbirds, was released by Tor; and the sequel Wings to the Kingdom arrived in October of 2006. Not Flesh Nor Feathers completed the trilogy in October of ‘07 — and that one’s got exploding zombies in it, for which you can thank Cherie’s husband.

And in other news, there’s also a noir/Victoriana/werewolf/disaster mosaic novel — Dreadful Skin — available now from Subterranean Press, and a hillbilly feud/cave monster/ghost novella called Those Who Went Remain There Still coming from that same fine company in 2008. But for the most part, Tor has its delightful hooks in her for the next couple of years — since they’ve purchased two more novels (unrelated to Eden and her friends): a gothic fantasy called Fathom and a trashy vampire novel, Awake Into Darkness.

Jersey was an arrow in flight given legs. She ran, neck lowered, tail a rigid beam behind her, the twin sickle-shaped talons on each foot raised to keep the orange sand away. She reached the top of the small bluff and turned to face Shelly, who stood down at the base of the hill.

“Alright, Jersey!” Shelly yelled, her blonde hair lit up like gold in the sun. “Back down!” She punctuated this with a whistle that urged the troodon onward.

Like a red bullet, the small dinosaur blasted back down the hill, throwing up billows of orange sand in her wake. Shelly called with different whistles, testing her. Jersey jerked left, then right, always in time, always with precision. The training had paid off.

She charged up another hill, reaching a rise and a sudden drop of about fifteen feet. Shelly had seen it too late and called frantically, trying to get her to stop, but Jersey didn’t hear it in time. Rather than stop, she did what millions of years of selection had ingrained into her instinct.

She leapt.

For a moment, Jersey was thirty-feet high, a soaring bird in the low Alettian gravity, looking as at home in the air as her descendants did. But it was inevitable–down she came, legs bent at the knee and to her sides, reflexively trying to spread the impact that was surely coming.

Jersey struck the sand, hobbled forward on one foot, then fell over. She began making her strange cry of pain, like a combination of hyena cackle and dolphin squeal, and didn’t stop even when Shelly ran over to examine her foot.

Shelly cradled the dinosaur’s chin, and Jersey buried her head into her sweater, still yelping. “It’ll be okay, Jersey, It’ll be okay,” she said, repeating it as assurance not just for the dinosaur, but for herself.

The howl brought attention quick. Dakota, their largest troodon, almost as tall as a person, rushed over the horizon and into the valley. Shelly was glad to see the alpha male; his presence would reassure Jersey. What she wasn’t so wild about was the dust-covered, twenty-foot land walker that trudged along on the trail of the dinosaur. She could see her husband’s face through the canopy.

There were warmer expressions on gargoyles.

#

Alettia is a dusty, orange, barren world situated in a close orbit around a star forming the center of a planetary system in the western arm of the galaxy. The location is not remote, per se; it’s just that the system itself is nothing more than an insignificant point among the galactic charts. It’s the kind of planet where even free land doesn’t attract interest. In the stellar sea, it is a tiny island lacking distinction among merchants, and value for tourism. There is no human settlement–officially.

Alettia simply missed its chance. Had it been discovered some time ago, even as early as two hundred years back, surveyors might have considered themselves fortunate, as it is a planet that congealed from particularly iron-rich lava. With the advent of silinum ship materials, however, the orange-colored surface is nothing more than a reminder of uselessness; a dusty accumulation on an antique that will never be brushed clean by interested hands.

#

For a while, Shelly didn’t say anything. She sat in the second row, directly behind Jake, cradling Jersey’s head in her hands. Jersey whined softly as Shelly scratched her scaled head. The walker’s cabin shook slightly with the vehicle’s forward movement. At one point it had been the top of the line, with a stride like an athlete, perfectly poised. Now it was just a shambling, degrading drunkard that slowly ferried them around with each crude, jaw-rattling step.

“That was really stupid,” Jake said. His green-tinted, polarized goggles hid his eyes as he glanced back at her through the rear-view camera.

“Can’t you at least try tact every now and then?” she hissed.

“I’m out of tact. Plenty of sunburn left, though. What happened back there?”

“I was working on Jersey’s evasions. I think she got excited and didn’t notice the rise.”

“It’s not that she got excited, it’s that she trusted you too much. You know how troodons are…very loyal. Good little lapdogs.”

“Don’t be an ass, Jake.”

“It just surprises me, Shelly. Dakota and I have worked out here for two years, and he’s fine. You see how he’s down there ahead of us? He’s watching for the same kind of thing Jersey just sprained her ankle on.”

She glanced down through the transparent belly window, and saw Dakota trotting ahead: A red point that zipped back and forth, checking their path.

“I taught him that,” said Jake. “Maybe you should have taught Jersey the same thing before you had her tear ass all over the sand.”

“What do you think I was doing out there, sunbathing?” She raised her hands, which brought immediate complaints from Jersey. She lowered her hands and resumed scratching, and the noise stopped.

“A little spoiled, isn’t she?”

Shelly reached down and pulled up the lever on the right side of the pilot seat. The walker jerked to a halt, settling on its articulated hips.

“Damn it, Shelly!”

Below, Dakota stepped to the side to avoid the cloud of dust kicked in his direction.

“Will you stop it?” she asked.

“It just seems like you’re sloppy.”

She folded her arms and waited.

He unbuckled the straps, pulled his goggles up and twisted in his chair to face her. His furrowed brow seemed to stamp on his eyes.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m trying to be level-headed about this, but we’ve got maybe a week, and then we’re out of water, sweetheart.”

“I know that, Jake. Shit–you think that hasn’t been on my mind? I knew I screwed up the moment she came down from the jump.” Her eyes were pools of water that threatened to overflow.

Jake reached a hand over the seat, ignoring the nudges Jersey gave it. He stroked Shelly’s cheek. His hands had been soft three years ago. Now the palms felt like knots of rope.

“We’ll make it,” he said.

She stroked his hand with her fingers. “Let’s get some food.”

#

A little over a century ago, Zidane Corporation, a minor biological concern, attempted to establish an ecosystem of sorts on the rocky, barely tolerable Alettian landscape. They needed a stabile natural environment for various special projects. From their massive ships they seeded bacteria, molds and lichens, insects, and then finally plants. Fifty years later, they came back for the second stage of their plan and discovered major problems, finding the world only marginally suitable for further use. Few of the plants had proven successful, and most of the insect species had died out. There was only a small chance of success. Too far invested to halt their plans, they released their cargo onto the sands of Alettia.

It must have been a magnificent spectacle in the beginning: hundreds of species, perfectly represented with exactly calculated population ratios, had been disgorged from the cartel’s massive superfreighters with timed precision. The largest herds of herbivores went first. These were the socially-inclined smaller bipeds, the lumbering long-necked sauropod titans, and the armored quadrupeds formed up into formidable scaled phalanxes. At their feet sped smaller species: insect eaters, egg stealers, and packs of omnivorous runners. Hours later, the large predators were unleashed. This scattered the remaining herbivores, some of which had lingered near the transports, suffering a kind of habitat shock after being released from their pens.

This release of life, it was desperately hoped, would provide the end pieces necessary to establish a full ecosystem on Alettia. But there simply wasn’t enough plant life. Within two decades, the herbivores had eaten every leafy plant that had been hardy enough to survive Alettia’s harsh conditions. When the plants themselves were gone, they grew desperate, feral, turning to the bark and even digging up the roots as they struggled to fill their burning stomachs. The scattered patches of established forest were stripped bare; ecological bastions sacked by the assault of too heavy a dependant population.

After the herbivores began dropping in desiccated, bony piles to the orange sands, the large carnivores soon followed. It was tragic, like a living reenactment of the extinction millions of years prior. And no one had been present to relocate the animals. Zidane, bankrupt and neglectful, had been fighting legal battles back on Earth for years.

Alettia, it seemed, had fallen victim to the only attempt to make it significant. The next human visitors would arrive, appropriately enough, as a result of similar neglect, their damaged ship barely getting them to the surface before its drives went offline.

#

The freighter Wyvern was essentially a scrap heap, and Jake knew it was his fault. It was all his fault. Every time he looked out over the scrubland, or into the sky with its oppressive sun, his anger came back. It was a self-loathing born of isolation and plenty of time to focus on his guilt.

Once a day, at night or morning, Jake went out and brushed the dust off the bridge’s canopy, just in case someone would pass overhead in orbit. It was the only part of the ship still reflective after two years of sandstorms.

He climbed up on the canopy, brushing the dust away. He never seemed to truly get rid of it. Tiny pebbles rolled along the glass; persistent flecks. They reminded him of the meteorite–the one he hadn’t seen the day of their accident. He’d skipped minor maintenance on the sensors before leaving port and had bought Shelly some plates she wanted instead.

By now, they should have been at Lemdia for two years, running their own business. He thought of the green fields and clean oceans of that world, and his heart ached.

Jake stepped down, and then under the tarp, which flapped in the steady headwind that came off the scrubland at night. He reached between two rows of tenacious vegetables, dug into the soil, and withdrew the night’s meal: potatoes and carrots, boiled in water distilled from their own urine.

His favorite. He balled up his fist and struck a nearby wall.

“Jake? You okay?” Shelly called from inside, her voice muffled.

“I’m fine. I’ll be inside in a second,” he said. He walked back towards the hatchway, grumbling as he went. Overhead, the twin moons of Alettia cast their baleful glow along the horizon. The sky was a field of diamonds strewn over a silky ribbon: the arm of the Milky Way. It might have been beautiful, provided it hadn’t been the same thing he’d seen every night for two years.

He opened the hatch and stepped inside, tearing off his boots. He tossed them into the gloom of the next compartment, where they thudded and boomed as they tumbled to a stop.

The main cargo hold, past the airlock, was now their living quarters. It was a chamber sixty feet long and twenty feet tall. From the ceiling hung lines with clothes and other garments draped over them. Three drums crouched at the rear of the room; from these a host of makeshift tubes ran up to the utility wiring, out a small, coin-sized opening in the hull, then into the garden.

At the rear of the chamber was the engine bay, now mostly sand-filled, but its fusion core put out just enough power to run Jake’s makeshift water system. Directly forward of their living space was what had once been the bridge, with its pot marked canopy and tattered seats. The main problem was the shape the bridge was in. The most important equipment–in particular, the subspace transmitter–had been damaged beyond repair in the crash.

“Out shining the windows again?” Shelly asked. He handed her the vegetables, and she began cleaning them.

“Yeah.” He sat down on an old titanium storage crate.

“What are we going to do?” she asked, dropping the peeled potatoes and carrots into the boiling water. Her face was lit by the glow of the cooking fire. “We’ll never get into that transport with Jersey in the shape she’s in.”

“We’ll send Dakota.”

“He’ll never make it, and you know it. He’s all muscle. If this was a pulling contest the big guy could do it, but not when speed counts.”

“Think Jersey’s ankle can heal in a week?” asked Jake.

She shook her head. “Of course not; that’s not who I’m talking about.”

Jake had lifted a cup of water, but he sat it back down and brushed a hand through his sun-bleached hair.

“No,” he said, pushing his hands down as if he’d flatten the idea with his words.

“You know he’s our only chance,” said Shelly.

“He’s a bad-tempered, vicious little shithead. Forget it.”

Shelly sighed. She took the pot off the fire and put it on a nearby floor. She stood, brushed some sand off her pants, and then walked to a shelf near the bridge hatchway. She opened a small box, and from these she took two gleaming China plates–they’d been valuable back when money mattered–from the shelves and walked over to the pot, where she crouched down and served his food onto one of them.

“Your clean plates?” he asked. “Thought we were saving those for the night we recovered the transmitter core.”

She handed him his plate, then took hers and shattered it against the floor. The fragments of porcelain clattered and rang against the metal as they fell.

He stood up so fast his potatoes rolled off his plate.

“What the hell was that for?” he demanded.

“There’s no point, Jake! We’re not going to make it off this damn planet. You and I are going to be bones out here; just another heap among the others. You understand?”

She turned away and folded her arms, silent for a moment, fuming, and then she turned back. “It hasn’t rained in three fucking months. I’m going to at least try, whether you like it or not.”

He sighed. “You’re my wife, sweetheart, but…”

“Then don’t make me your widow,” she snapped.

She sat down, folded her face into her hands, and sobbed. After a while, he stood up and walked over, crouched, and wrapped his arms around her.

The scrubland was silent that night, empty except for the howling of wind.

#

Nature has a habit of exploiting a niche. When an empty keyhole is presented, the first species to match the combination, to unlock the door of adaptation and travel beyond, is almost always rewarded. It was thus on Alettia that the same phenomenon occurred: of all the species seeded by the cartel, only one proved stubborn and tenacious enough to survive. It had passed through the doorway of disaster and into the realm of survival on the other side.

It was not the strongest, or the boldest animal. But it was clever–clever enough to move towards the poles, where the subtropical weather meant more water, more plants, and with it more creatures for it to feed on.

And it was fast–fast enough so that when none of the lumbering herbivores were left, it was able to outrun its starving, larger kin, often to return days later and feed on the remains of its assailants.

It was troodon–just smaller than a human, social, wary and with an unmatched ability to learn and adapt to its surroundings. It was the only large animal still left in any real number on the planet.

It was this species that Jake and Shelly had discovered near their crash site, close to the southern pole. After examining their situation, they slowly earned the trust of a small family group of them: two males and two females. One of the adults, Virginia, fell victim to a tragedy soon after. This left Jersey, the alpha female, and Dakota, the alpha male.

And, of course, Tex.

#

Shelly walked out past the nose of the freighter, then on beyond a cluster of tangled metal that had once been the left wing. She hugged a silver reflector dish to her hip. An oily, thick protein-based slurry sloshed around in the dish. It was alien food; part of their shipment cut short, and it never went bad, they’d been told.

Jersey and Dakota sat in the shadows of an overhanging fragment of the wing, and watched her with slowly turning heads as she walked by. Jersey’s ankle was wrapped tightly in bandages, but the troodons were not restrained in any way. The two of them usually hung around the freighter, occasionally disappearing into the scrubland for hours at a time to find rats and other small vermin to eat.

Tex, however, was seldom seen near the freighter. He tended to stick two or three hundred feet out, usually tucked in the shadow of a large bush, or standing atop one of the surrounding dunes. He was a loner. But there was one thing that always got his attention.

Shelly placed the dish on the orange ground and rattled it around several times, so the sound echoed into the surrounding air.

A head popped up behind one of the dunes. “Food, Tex!” Shelly yelled. The animal began to run towards the camp.

Dakota and Jersey rose and walked over to the dish. The larger male waited patiently while Jersey lowered her head and began to eat.

She was shoved out of the way by another mouth plowing into the dish so hard some of the slurry spilled out and into the sand, congealing into dark beads.

He’d made it from a hundred feet away in seconds.

Tex was a deep, forest green, with black dappling down his back. He was smaller than the crimson hulk Dakota, only four and a half feet tall or so, but immeasurably meaner, and faster–maybe even faster than Jersey. He grumbled as Jersey tried to lower her head again.

Dakota growled back, but Tex ignored him. Jersey and Dakota glanced at Shelly. “Can you believe this?” they seemed to ask in their plaintive expressions.

“Don’t worry,” said Shelly. “I’ll bring more out soon.”
Shelly sighed, shaking her head as she watched Tex gorge himself noisily. Nasty, belligerent Tex.

Their only chance.

#

Alettia had been the Zidane company’s last chance, as the firm had significant financial problems before ever conceiving the scheme. When the Alettian project failed, the company was reduced to bankruptcy, and their assets were broken up and sold by angry investors. Thirty years before Jake and Shelly would arrive, the company had one last mistake to make.

In the struggle to hide a semi-illegal project, Zidane sent one last ship, a small transport, back to the planet. The ship, crewed by a single green pilot, carried a failed genetics experiment in its hold. The pilot was given instructions to release the thing within the hold onto the sands of Alettia. Shortly after his arrival all contact was lost, and the ruined company never investigated the incident further.

#

Tex had been quick to pick up the basics–follow the commands and food would be given. Shelly knew he understood the whistles–he’d seen Dakota and Jersey obey them dozens of times. Keeping him motivated was the problem. Tex would only follow an order if it was on his terms.

In this case, the moment Shelly had stopped giving him bits of protein pieces he had stopped obeying. He stood several feet away, head down, scratching the back of his neck with one claw.

She whistled three times in a row, louder each time, her face turning red with frustration, but Tex just looked at her impassively.

Shelly balled up a fist and gritted her teeth, furious at him. He responded with a low growl. Furious, she threw the tray of protein bits on the ground. He was instantly at her feet, snatching each piece up and gobbling them in turn.

She shook her head. This was going to take a while.

#

The solution to Tex’s obstinacy was discovered, accidentally, three days later.

Shelly had gone out before the heat of the day, just after the four hours of darkness comprising the short summer nights on the south poles. She’d run through several whistled exercises with Dakota, because it was good to keep him occupied. Once again, he demonstrated his loyalty and trust. Half the time she did these sessions, she didn’t even need to bring any food along. It was like Dakota was bright enough to realize the necessity of the activity.

Part of the way through their routine, with the sun climbing into the five AM position, she spotted a familiar shape on the rim of the crater that comprised the valley.

It was Tex.

At first he just watched, but after a while he trotted down a short distance into the valley and began following the same commands Dakota was issued. Dakota would charge off, and, as if he had a mirror image, Tex would do the same. When Dakota weaved or leapt, Tex would follow suit. He executed every command with perfect accuracy, but with a grace and fluidity that astounded Shelly. And, he was unbelievably fast.

Testing her theory regarding sudden change in his behavior, Shelly called Dakota over. He was gentle around her, even though he was nearly as tall as she was, and much heavier. She scratched his chin, heaping on verbal praise the entire time.

Tex stood twenty feet away, raising and lowering his head, grumbling softly. She deliberately ignored him. After a while, he barked out in regular, shrill yelps.

So that was the secret–jealousy. Big bad Tex had grown used to attention and wasn’t about to lose it. Shelly grinned. She’d found the way to get him cooperating.

Now, all they had to do was get him to the lake.

#

For nearly two years the couple had been able to eke out an existence on the poles. Over several months, Jake had tried to fix the transmitter, but to no avail. They weren’t going to be calling for rescue considering what the Wyvern had on board.

Even worse, Shelly was right. The rains had stopped, and might never fall again. The poles were experiencing an unprecedented period of drought. Their stored water wouldn’t last. That meant it was time to get off the planet, or they’d die. The trained troodons would be needed for their true purpose.

Jake had seen the old Zidane transport once before. It sat at the edge of what had once been a large polar lake about sixteen kilometers to the east. The craft was in the vicinity of the only remaining water they knew of. He’d long been interested in securing some of the water and seeing what he could scavenge off the hulk. He was confident that he could get a working transmitter from the wreck. But something kept him from going after the prize.

That something was an animal, and no ordinary beast. He’d seen the creature a year ago, from the canopy of the walker. It had scared the shit out of him.

Jake didn’t know anything about genetic engineering, but he’d known instantly that the beast wasn’t a product of natural evolution. The creature looked like an oversized, reptilian ape, standing ten feet at the shoulders. It had a short, wide head, with curved, tusk-like teeth that sprouted from its jaw like swords on display in an armory. Its large eyes were unblinking pools of ebony. It moved with an uncanny ease on two massive, powerful legs. On each front forelimb were four serrated claws. It was as if someone had given the contents of a nightmare life.

The most terrifying aspect of the creature had been its total lack of aggression. It hadn’t charged Jake when it had seen his walker, and one of the troodons, Virginia, a hundred feet away. It had just stood at the edge of the water, staring at him. It had a good thing going, and it knew it. All around the creature’s lake were piles of bones; remains of whatever had come there to drink.

Bold, headstrong Virginia had done the worst thing possible: she’d charged. Before Jake had realized it she had rushed around the side of the walker and through the underbrush, then on to the edge of the lake. Jake had called her and whistled after her, but she ignored him–something she never did. Perhaps she was obeying some predatory instinct to size-up the competition for territory. Or maybe Virginia had just been curious, and too confident in her own speed. She reached the lake and stood on one side, and the beast issued a hideous roar from the other.

The creature bounded towards her, unnaturally fast; an aberration of momentum given its size. She turned and bolted away, but she wasn’t fast enough. It caught her and ripped her to shreds. Then it had turned, face bloody with viscera, to face Jake. Jake quickly hurried his walker back across the scrubland, full speed the entire way, aware that if the creature decided to change its mind and give chase, he’d be dead.

#

Jake and Shelly sat in the confines of the Wyvern‘s cargo hold, savoring a rarity: green peppers. The peppers needed a little more water than the other three vegetables they’d grown, and their seeds were also few in number compared to the other varieties in the single crate of gene-enhanced seeds that had been part of their original shipment. Over time, the peppers became a special treat; something they jokingly called “tropical ice-cream.”

There was no joking tonight. Jake sat close to Shelly, his arm around her, as they munched on slices of pepper. She sat with her knees folded up to her chest, and both of them stared into the fire.

“You think he’s ready?” he asked.

“I think he’ll do fine. He’s a green blur, Jake. You should have seen him today. When he really wants to take off, he flies.”

“But will he tomorrow?”

“I think he can.”

“Because you know…this pack might be the only ones left. If he gets hurt…”

“Jake, he’ll do his part. You should try trusting him.” She glanced at him, then back to the fire.

He sighed. “You used to hear the insects after dark, you know? Now it’s just silent out there, like a winter’s night on Europa.”

“It’s an aborted world,” she replied.

“Well, we’re leaving it soon. Look, tomorrow…I want you to stay in the walker and give your commands over the speakers.” He rubbed the back of her hand with his fingers.

Her features softened. “Tex needs me on the ground. Dakota’s the only one that’s ever been reliable through the speakers. You know that…”

“Yeah, but I was hoping you’d forget about it for a little while.” He grinned, but it was a grin stretched thin over a frown, as if pulled up by invisible fingers at the edges of his lips.

“It’ll be fine. Tex will end up running that son of a bitch on a wild chase. By the time that freak is panting, you and Tex are back to me and we’re taking the radio to the Wyvern.”

She made it sound so easy, but her self-convinced confidence was one step from delusion. He nodded anyway, because he wanted desperately to take her word for it.

She tucked her head into his chest. “We have a hell of a day ahead of us tomorrow.”

#

The sun broke over a horizon the color of blood pouring from a wound.

“So much dust in the air today,” said Jake, standing near the walker. “Remember when that color meant rain was on the way?”

“Maybe we’ll get surprised,” said Shelly, over near the wing, feeding the pack. “Maybe God will give us some water today.”

“If by ‘giving water’ you mean pissing on us, it wouldn’t surprise me. Are they ready?”

“Yeah,” she said. Three heads were buried in the bowl of slurry. Two packets of the stuff were left in the cargo hold, then they’d be out. Another reason for urgency.

She’d often wondered, if things got truly terrible, where the loyalty would end, and where the predatory instinct would begin. Ravaged by hunger, maybe the troodons would turn on her and Jake…

“Shelly, you with me?” Jake asked. “I said, is Tex done?”

She watched him lap up the last of the slurry. “I hope so…his food is gone now.”

Dakota paced back and forth nearby, anxious, unusually active for this time of the early morning. It was like he knew.

#

By the time they reached the lake, it was the heat of the day, two in the afternoon, and the sun had climbed high overhead.

The lake was very nearly dry. Only a small, dark expanse of mud sat where there had once been the deepest portion of the lake. Sitting on the far bank, on what was now sun-baked sand topped with a few tufts of dead vegetation, was the Zidane transport. Its once-silver sides were tarnished over to brown; sand-blasted by the elements. But it was intact, and its hold’s exterior hatch was closed.

A streak of faded, barely-discernable red ran from the hatch door down the side of the ship to the ground.

Jake set the walker to idle and its engine whined down. Shelly leaned forward.

“Instruments pick up anything?” she asked.

“Not a damn thing.” A burst of hope. “Maybe it died. I’ll set us down.”

The walker lowered, and Jake hit the rear door locks. The doors hissed up; as wings they rose. Dakota and Tex leapt from the rear cabin. Jersey sat up inside, whining.

“You’re staying here, sweetie,” said Shelly. She reached back to touch Jersey’s head, but the troodon lowered it to the seats. Something was bothering her.

Shelly and Jake stepped from the cabin. Dakota and Tex stood side by side a few feet away, looking in the direction of the lake. They were rigid and alert.

“All right,” said Jake. “I brought the micro welder in case the hatch is stuck. You ready?”

“Yes. Jake…please be careful.”

He nodded, then turned and walked toward the lake. The wind was picking up, blowing dust with it, lashing him in the face. He pulled his goggles down over his eyes, and crouched near some desiccated shrubs along what had once been the shoreline. The transport was only twenty feet away, agonizingly close.

Shelly whistled. Tex trotted forward, entering Jake’s field of vision from the left. Then, abruptly, he turned and ran back a few feet.

The response was a louder whistle from Shelley. Tex turned and hesitantly went back where he’d been directed too. This wasn’t Tex’s attitude–Jake could see he was nervous.

But nothing happened. Shelly called out a few more whistles, and the dinosaur trotted around the edge of the lake bed, inscribing a slow turn that took him to the far side.

Then she gave another command, and he stopped, waiting.

Jake glanced back at her. Her response was a shrug. Things were looking up. The tragic irony hit him: they might have prepared for a danger that didn’t exist anymore. An extra year on this rock, for nothing…

He rose from behind the bushes and walked toward the transport. He reached the hatch, silent, and placed his hand on its alloy skin. It wasn’t bolted shut. He shoved, and the hatch didn’t just swing open–it fell over, clanging on the metal of the interior floor with a sound that echoed around him.

He looked back at Shelly, raising a thumb. But her smile faded, and she screamed. He turned fast–

The blow struck him in the back. He flew several feet through the air, then tumbled into the sand, coughing as it went up his nose and mouth. His side was wracked with pain. No organs, he hoped, but his ribs had taken a nasty hit.

He rolled over onto his back and scrambled backwards.

It was the beast. It towered over him, a dark, menacing figure covered in sticky mud from the nearly-dry lake bed. Its black eyes blinked twice, bringing up white lids to cleanse the mud away. It opened its mouth, exposing three sets of gnarled tusks, and roared at him. The smell of decayed flesh assaulted Jake’s nostrils.

The creature howled and turned away from him. Blood dripped from its left leg onto the sand. It turned to face its assailant–Tex. The courageous animal growled; his sickle-claws on his feet covered with blood.

Tex turned and ran across the sand. Mad with fury, the beast charged after it, dropping to all fours and bounding forward on its knuckles, its front hands curled up like a primate’s.

Juke numbly realized Shelly was screaming, begging him to run, for God’s sake, run. He stood, and did run, but into the transport. They’d be dead anyway if he didn’t get what they came for.

His eyes slowly adjusted to the dimly-lit cabin. Remarkably, the emergency lights were still powered, bathing the interior in red light. His hopes spiked. The transport was in amazing condition for an old hulk. He hurried forward through the cramped ship, kicking away empty boxes of emergency rations and bone-dry bottles that had once held water, and then found the door to the cockpit.

It was lying in the floor, ripped away at the mounts. Claw marks were visible on its surface. Jake stepped over it and walked into the cramped cockpit, lowering his head to keep from cracking it against the holo-panels that arched down low over the shredded crew seats. Just below the dangling electrodes of the pilot’s neural interface was what he came for: the subspace transmitter core, covered with dust but intact. He pulled the micro-welder from his pocket.

#

Shelly called frantically to Tex. He bolted left, then right, and each time he turned, a clawed hand cut through the space where he’d just been. She called out with an arching whippoorwill whistle. This meant a sharp left turn, but Tex either misinterpreted her command in his panic, or decided to do things his way once again. He turned and ran back beneath the creature’s legs!

She gritted her teeth, sure this would cost Tex his life. The beast roared and swung its claws at its feet, but missed the dinosaur, instead throwing sand into its own face. Tex emerged unscathed from the crook between the beast’s legs and tail, running towards her. He was tiring, losing speed. Then she heard a shout.

Jake burst from the door of the transport. He clutched a bundle of electronics with one hand and held his left side with the other.

The beast howled in fury and bolted towards him. Desperate to help, Shelly glanced left.

But Dakota wasn’t there.

Jake ran as fast as he could, gritting his teeth against the pain. It felt like his side was covered in hot coals. He ran around a line of small, dried-up trees. The beast charged through them, splintering them away.

It was almost on him. He decided he’d throw the transmitter to Shelly. She’d learned a lot from him about the ship–she could fix it. She would make it. That’s what mattered.

But the beast wasn’t after him anymore. He glanced back and saw the unthinkable.

Dakota clung to the creature’s shoulders, slashing at its skin with his talons. He leapt from the beast and hit the sand running.

The beast turned to give chase to Dakota, but Tex quickly crossed his path again, throwing it off. Confused, the creature roared and charged after Tex again.

Shelly whistled as hard as she could; so hard it sounded like her vocal cords were giving out, but neither dinosaur was listening to her. They zipped back and forth, crossed paths, cut in and around the beast, making it lunge at nothing in frustration.

Finally it kept after Dakota. Tex broke away and vanished into the cloud of dust that had been thrown up around the lake by the chase.

Dakota ran away from the lake, toward the transport, but not fast enough. The beast was going to catch him. Dakota leapt over the same jagged stumps that had been trees a moment ago, then turned, ready to go down fighting.

The beast raised both arms back, claws spread, prepared to lunge–and Tex was suddenly on its back, attacking furiously. Caught mid-lunge, the beast lost its balance and fell, hard, onto one of the shattered stumps. It impaled the beast straight through its chest and out its spine. Blood and bile oozed from the animal’s back, irrigating the orange sand with a river of red.

The horrible thing was still wailing in mortal agony when they fled with their prize. Shelly drove while Jake sat on the back seat, their three friends at his side, out of breath, wounded but alive.

#

They’d contacted Daegan Base, a trading substation, but it would take another day or two before help arrived. Daegan’s staff had initially found Jake’s story hard to believe. No one, after all, ever went to the Alettia system.

Jake sat down to their last meal on the planet that had been their home for three years. He tried to focus on their pending rescue and not the fact that he had nearly been killed. Judging by the steady pain in his side, he’d come very close.

Shelly eased down next to him, and brushed the hair out of her face. She did something she hadn’t in over a year–she leaned over and kissed him.

“I fixed something up for tonight,” she said. He chuckled when he saw it: a previously-broken china plate, patched up with bonding tape.

Good as new, as far as he was concerned.

Jonathan Gillespie lives in Atlanta with his wife, Michelle, a manx cat and a bearded dragon. His day job is in systems administration. In his early twenties he decided to write casually, just to see if he had a knack for it. Before he knew it, he’d churned out two novel manuscripts exceeding one hundred-thousand words, and several short stories.

Having realized he enjoyed this craft to the point of obsession, he began submitting to magazines in hopes that one day his fiction would be surrounded by a glossy cover, sitting on shelves at major bookstores.

Visit Jonathan Gillespie’s website at http://jonathancg.net.