Matt Wallace is going on an internet promotional rampage. It’s quite frightening because he is quite frightening.

Fortunately, his current rampage causes no harm and is rather cool.

Wallace has been promoting the Kindle version of The Next Fix and has a series of famous people lined up to “vlurb” for him. “Vlurb” is the hot new thing in the book world right now. Essentially, you get famous people to video record themselves pontifying the greatness of your book.

Like how J.C. Hutchins does here for The Next Fix:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ktaHBHQwHKw

Don’t skip the Hutchins video. It’s rather funny.

Here is Wallace’s plan, straight from the scary man’s mouth:

“To make sure everyone who has dropped the coin on a Kindle/iPhone/iPod knows they can now carry their next fix WHEREVER they go, myself and the good folks at Hurdy Gur, Inc. are producing a series of video promos featuring some of the most talented and trustworthy names in fiction, media, and general geekism.”

Future names include Scott Sigler and Mur Lafferty, two of the coolest people in the biz.

Being his publisher and all, I heartily recommend you grab a copy of The Next Fix for the Kindle/iPhone/iTouch/iPod and support this promotional rampage.

The past two weeks have focused on some of the bigger names in SF/horror podcasting. Now that you’re familiar with podcasts and the kind of quality content that’s available, I’m going to give you a run-down of some of the lesser-known (but still high quality) podcast novels that are out there.

This week, we’ll focus on some of the science fiction titles. You may also want to check out those titles which have won the Parsec Award, an award given for the best audio fiction in a range of different categories from short form to long form, from audio dramas to podcasts of magazines and anthologies. You can find the full lists of winners and nominees on the site.

• The Failed Cities Monologues by Matt Wallace (Apex author and 2007 Parsec Award Nominee) – A dystopian future tale of two cities: one, a technological marvel and the other, a wasteland.
• Singularity by Bill DeSmedt (2007 Parsec Award Nominee) – What if a microscopic black hole is at the center of the Earth, consuming the planet from within?
• Crescent by Phil Rossi – There are places much darker than space…one of them is Crescent Station.
• Quarter Share by Nathan Lowell – A galaxy-spanning search for profitable trade aboard the Solar Clipper Lois McKendrick. (This audiobook is followed up by Half Share, Full Share (a 2008 Parsec Award Nominee), and Double Share.)
• Beautiful Red by Darusha Wehm (2008 Parsec Award Nominee) – The dull life of a cubicle worker is interrupted when she discovers her employer’s computer system has been broken into, an invasion that may have been the work of a shadowy group called the Red.
• The Arwen by Timothy Callahan (2007 Parsec Award Winner) – When a comet threatens to destroy the remote world of Regal, the Earth Alliance assigns The Arwen and her crew to destroy it. But things are not what they seem… (Season 2, Season 3)

There are also classic tales of science fiction, read by others:

• Badge of Infamy by Lester del Rey (2007 Parsec Award Nominee) (Read by Steven Wilson)
• Black Star Passes by John W. Campbell (Read by Scott D. Farquhar)
• Star Surgeon by Alan E. Nourse (Read by Scott D. Farquhar)

Next week, horror-related audio books that’ll run a shiver up your spine!

Sunday, January 11
Apex Digest issue 1 sold out – The first issue of Apex Digest, Spring 2005, is now sold out. At least there are none left in our stock. We suggest checking out popular online retailers such as Horror-Mall.com to grab the last of these.

Tuesday, January 13
Apex Magazine Welcomes Guest Editor Michael A. Burstein – Apex Magazine is delighted to announce that the April issue will be a special one devoted to the concept of how the future will remember the past, and edited by award-winning writer and Apex author Michael A. Burstein.

Michael will be looking for dark science fiction stories devoted to the concept of memory, including the slipperiness of history and the dangers of forgetting the past. Stories for the special issue should be submitted as per the guidelines given on our submission page.

The Apex Publications ‘Apex Web Team’ – Jason is assembling a “web team” of Apex fans that will canvass their corners of the Internet with Apex widgets. In return, they’ll be listed as a member of the “Apex Web Team” and will receive a discount on any and all orders they place through the Apex store. See the link above for the widgets and more information.

Wednesday, January 14
The Fix has posted its review of Apex Magazine - July 2008 –
Z. S. Adani over at The Fix has posted a review of Apex Magazine’s July 2008 issue! Read the whole review here!

Thursday, January 15
First Look: Harlan County Horrors edited by Mari Adkins – Harlan County Horrors is a regional based horror anthology by Apex Magazine submissions editor Mari Adkins. The striking cover art is by Billy Tackett, a favorite of Apex fans. Harlan County Horrors is scheduled for publication in October, 2009. Follow the link above for a partial list of authors contributing stories, as well as a first look at the cover art.

Friday, January 16
The Fix Reviews Matt Wallace’s THE NEXT FIX – Ziv Wities over at The Fix has posted a stroke-by-stroke review of Matt Wallace’s dark science fiction collection THE NEXT FIX. Read the review here! And make sure to check out the free fiction sample of “A Place of Snow Angels” from THE NEXT FIX!

Apex Editor and Author News

Alethea Kontis has published her poem “Rabbit in the Moon” at Everyday Weirdness.

Jason Sizemore has had his story “The Dead and Metty Crawford” reprinted at NVF Online.

Link Salad
The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror will not be continuing in its current incarnation.

An awesome picture of the Martian sunset via Astronomy Picture of the Day.

Buy a Hugo Award Nomination for $850. Win for $8,800. Via SCI FI Wire–theoretically.

Save the Short Story – A Web site dedicated to preserving the much-maligned and much-neglected art form known as the short story. Visit the site to learn what you can do to save the short story.

AUTHOR’S NOTE
I was originally going to call this one “All the White Horses” because the inspiration for the story came from the song “Winter” by Tori Amos. Anne Stringer suggested the title I ended up using. It was better than mine, but don’t tell her I said so.

Being a SoCal native, I started picturing Death Valley perpetually covered in snow and staring out at a piece of the Pacific slated with ice. That appealed to me. I also liked the idea of telling an epic post-apocalyptic story in a very small, single camera set-up kind of way and exploding that old hat
notion of the literary sci-fi/fantasy messiah. Fuck that noise, man. I’d rather go snowboarding than save the world any day of the week.

It’s worth noting that “A Place of Snow Angels” was originally published in Apex Science Fiction and Horror Digest and was my first story in print. The same folks have now released my first short story collection. Now that’s symmetry worthy of prophecy, right there.

Joshua was seven when he saw the white city. It was his first deep trek across the Mojave tundra with Dedimus, hours spent listening to the snowreaver’s jets pulverize powder and ice, and somewhere under that Dedimus preaching, always preaching, about Joshua’s bond to the ever-growing winter, his
future, his responsibility. By the time they reached the Santa Monica coastline, Joshua’s ears were ringing and he was hungry, and despite the arctic chill he found he was sweating.

They stood on the shore and looked west. At first there was just the ocean, slow moving and rough-hewn gray, like unfinished sheets of steel. The frost shifted in heavy curtains above
them. Then morning broke and the tide changed. Twenty miles off the coast, the white city blazed as pure and broad as the horizon itself. There were walls, parapets, and spires that stabbed the frosty fog billows.

“Who lives there?” he’d asked Dedimus.

“No one,” the old man told Joshua. “That is the fata morgana, an illusion created by the cold. Like any worthy opponent, winter tricks your eyes, draws you into falsehoods.”

Joshua didn’t believe that, not then and not now. It must be a place of snow angels, he thought, real ones. If they lived anywhere it would be in that city, behind those white fire walls.

All his short life he’d been waiting for something, his insides told him. Dedimus said it was just his body preparing for ecoimmersion. But sometimes at night, in his dreams, Joshua saw himself astride a white horse, riding through the streets of the white city.

The winter is eternal there, and in the cold he thrives.

Joshua doesn’t mind the winters getting longer, and he wishes they’d stop asking him to save the world.

It’s Dedimus, always telling him that soon the whole of Earth’s soil will be just as frozen as California’s, telling him that he, Joshua, will grow up to save them all from it. Because of the prophecy, the one made in a laboratory at UH Manoa after the temperature inversion choked half the population of
Los Angeles to death. A child born to the New Earth, to the ice planet it was becoming. A child born in symbiosis with the new environment, manipulated through science to control it.

Dedimus is his teacher, mentor, and doctor. He’s been an old man all Joshua’s life, and he often wonders if there was ever any color in the man’s white beard. It’s just them and
Mida, his caretaker, and Hieronymus, the ashen wolfhound twice Joshua’s size. They live on an old farm buried under one of the vast Death Valley snowdrifts. Dedimus says it’s better if
he doesn’t know exactly which one, or exactly where it is. Dedimus says they have enemies, men who want to hurt Joshua. There’s a boy halfway around the world who claims to be the reincarnation of Buddha, or at least his handlers claim he is. They have their own notions about saving the world.
They’ve gathered many followers. They consider Joshua a threat.

Mida takes care of him and always has, for as long as Joshua can remember. She cooks their meals and runs his baths. There’s an ancient smokehouse set apart from the main property with a door inside of it. The door isn’t old, it’s brand new, titanium, and it leads down into a bunker laboratory. It’s
off limits unless Mida takes him there so Dedimus can perform his tests, hooking Joshua’s brain and body to the mini-biospheres, snow storms in a bottle and nuclear winter terrariums.

Sometimes Dedimus visits his room late at night. It was scary the first time, but the old man just stood there, staring at Joshua in the dark. Finally, he said, “One day you’ll walk in the sun, Joshua. You’ll watch the ice melt at your feet and the gray skies roll back forever. You’ll lead us into the light.” Then he left.

It’s the same every time. Only the words change. Dedimus stands in the doorway, a dark shape in front of soft lamp light from the hall, and stares at Joshua in his bed. He stares for a long time. Then he says, “You’ll will the weather into submission. Do you understand how strong your will is, Joshua? Can you yet?” Or, “Imagine, Josh. Imagine commanding the waters and the skies of this Earth as easily as you command Hieronymus. You’ll be our savior.”

Mida reads to Joshua a lot. From what he’s gathered, being a savior never works out well. Not ever.

This morning they came for him, the men Dedimus always warned Joshua about. Three of them, draped from head to toe in snow camouflage, invisible as they approached the farmhouse.

But not to Hieronymus.

Joshua saw the wolfhound fall on the first. They hadn’t broken cover yet, and to the boy it appeared as though Hieronymus was attacking the naked drift itself. Then white turned to red, and he heard a man’s scream. Two black rebreathing masks beneath white hoods appeared. One of them slashed at
Hieronymus with a knife, but it didn’t stop the wolfhound from going for his throat and pulling him down to the snow.

Joshua, watching through the ghost face of his bedroom’s frosted windowpane, thought for sure the third one would finish Hieronymus. Then Dedimus appeared on their old broken porch, a long black rifle with a skeletal butt like a jigsaw puzzle missing pieces slung tight against his body. One eye watched
the sighting screen affixed to the weapon’s barrel track its target. He fired a single shot. It wasn’t loud, just a pop and a crackling echo.

When he was little, Joshua held a ripe tomato in his hand and, for no other reason than it felt so soft and yielding, squeezed it as hard as he could. It was like that, what happened to the third man’s covered head.

Now, laid out in the snow, perfect white clothes turned to bloody rags, their masks are gone. The faces, spice-colored with wide, dead, almond eyes, are Asian; Chinese, Dedimus says as
he searches their ghillie suits. Each one has a crimson stick with an electrified tip. They’re also carrying digital recording equipment.

“These men were planning to torture you,” Dedimus tells Joshua. He holds up one of the candy-red cattle prods. “They would’ve used these things to burn your insides with electricity until the pain broke your will, then turned their cameras on and commanded you to renounce your title as savior. All this after they killed me, Mida, and Hieronymus, of course.”

“Dedimus, don’t tell him things like that,” Mida pleads.

“He needs to hear it!” Dedimus screams, and his eyes are as wide as those of the corpses stiffening in the snow at his feet. All the blue seems to have gone from them, leaving only angry black cauldrons. There’s spittle in his Santa Claus beard. To Joshua he looks like someone else, someone Joshua has never met before.

Mida’s crying now. “He’s just a boy.”

The next morning, the blood from Hieronymus’ wounds has formed several tiny creatures frozen solid in the snow. They’re red and raw and unrecognizable; Mida calls them fetuses. To Joshua they look like the shrimp she uses to make gumbo, before she puts them in the boiling pot. When he asks Dedimus
about them, he says that Hieronymus is a very special dog, one of the last wolfhounds, a protector. The Hydra Strain he’s been injected with ensures that if he’s killed there will be new wolfhounds
to take his place, born from his blood.

For the first time, Joshua wonders about all the things they’ve injected him with since he was a baby. For the first time, the first time ever, he’s afraid.

This morning he woke up and Mida was gone. Joshua knew it as soon as he opened his eyes, knew it by the absence of the cinnamon and searing flesh breakfast smells that seduced him into waking so many mornings.

“She lost her faith,” is all Dedimus will tell him, no matter how many times he asks, how hot his tantrums run. “She lost her faith.” That, and, “You have to pack your things now, Joshua. We’re leaving. I’m taking you someplace new. Someplace safe.”

“Where?”

“A place that’s still warm. One of the last places.”

“I wanna ride my board. One more time. Before we go.”

And he knows Dedimus would say no if it weren’t for Mida, for what he’s done to her, whatever that may be.

“One hour,” Dedimus says. “Hieronymus will go with you. Don’t make me come looking.”

Joshua nods. Dedimus won’t need to look for him.

He sits on a ridge overlooking the farm, Hieronymus resting on his haunches at the boy’s side.

All the times Dedimus talked about will, Joshua never told him he already knew how strong his was. It didn’t matter. He had the farm, and Mida, and his snowboard. He didn’t care about the rest. Now Mida’s gone, and the farm isn’t his home anymore.

Dedimus always said when the time came to will the winds, he’d feel everything. He’d feel himself spreading to the four corners of the Earth. He’d feel himself in every crystal of precipitation,
in every tidal wave, in every atmospheric swell. It would be complete symbiosis with the ecosystem.

It’s not like that at all. It’s like something Joshua holds in his hand. It seems absurd that this should be something he wields like a toy, but that’s exactly what it’s like.

The storm comes on quickly, turning the sky above the drift into a gray and black maelstrom that swirls and constricts and focuses. It becomes the great finger of Boreas descending to rub out the split-wood farmhouse. Within seconds the snowfall buries every door and window. The walls creak and quake like a dry husk ready to burst. Then the thrashing air currents begin to crystallize. Ice dive-bombs the side boards, stripping whatever’s left of their virgin coat. Instead of rebounding to
Earth, each bullet-hard bit is sucked into the eye of the storm, a swarm of frozen fairies flocking to form a glacial hammer that’s now poised above the dark slates of his home.

Through the white pestilence, Joshua thinks he sees Dedimus at the porthole that looks out from the rafters of the farmhouse. There’s a dark hole in the middle of his beard. It’s his mouth. It’s a scream trapped with him, entombed all around him. The old man punches through the glass, punches
with his bare knuckles and wriggles his arm free to the elbow, candy-striped with blood and sugarcoated with bits of broken glass. Then the roof belches its collapse like an angry drunk,
and the walls come tumbling down right after it.

Joshua knows Dedimus is gone because the storm dissipates. The sky’s fury is just a vague memory of still, gray clouds. And, for just a moment, an ultraviolet blade cuts through them to fall on the remains of the farmhouse.

Hieronymus is strong enough to pull the sled by himself. Joshua doesn’t need a whip to drive him or reins to steer him. The wolfhound will never tire, never succumb to the cold. Dedimus made sure of that. He’ll draw Joshua across the tundra to the edge of the western winter lands, and when they
reach it, there’ll be an ice floe to carry him across the dreary waters to the white city under the frost, to the place of snow angels. Dedimus would chastise him. His faith was just science spoken in an ecclesiastic tongue. But Joshua’s proven he knows more than Dedimus did.

Besides, he thinks, if it’s not real, if the white city really is just a fata morgana, then he’ll make it real.

Order The Next Fix from Apex Publications.

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

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.