Published by Hobb’s End Books, a division of ACME Sprockets & Visions. All works herein Copyright © 2020 by their respective authors. Cover design Copyright © 2020 Wayne Kyle Spitzer. Please direct all inquiries to: HobbsEndBooks@yahoo.com

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SINGULARITY FOR HIRE

by James C. Glass

Academic life for Melvin Funovits had abruptly disintegrated into brainless routine with the arrival of Dean Harrison Ludlow, a former History professor who knew little, if anything, about physics. Ludlow had declared research to be a useless activity at a small, private and expensive university, and everyone’s teaching load had gone up by fifty percent overnight. The major in physics had been dropped, the faculty decreased to two people to provide service courses for rich engineering students whose fathers had lucrative jobs waiting for them. They were expected to graduate, and learning standards were tailored for that goal. Problems were solved in class for later regurgitation on generously graded exams, without any knowledge depth in the subject matter.

Melvin wanted desperately to leave, but could not. He’d only published one paper since his thesis, and had miraculously received tenure for it. He was not a good teacher, was known for putting students to sleep in class. His sanity was maintained by his research project hidden in one corner of the department shop used for construction and repair of equipment for student laboratories and demonstrations, and he worked there evenings and weekends.

And it was there, one evening, when he first produced the worm-hole.

It was certainly some kind of singularity. He had first observed the thing while working with plasma confinement. A tube was filled with hot plasma confined by strong, twisting magnetic fields perturbed strongly by an electromagnetic wave from a directional antenna a meter outside the tube. There was a popping sound, and suddenly the tube was empty and a big ball of plasma was hovering in the air next to the antenna and Melvin Funovits was stumbling over a chair to get away from it. The plasma ball rose and exploded against the ceiling with a loud whoosh, and when he recovered from the shock Melvin found the gas cylinders feeding the plasma tube sucked dry. Somehow, everything in the tube had been transferred directly to a point near the directional antenna.

He tried it again, and the phenomena was repeatable, the glow inside the tube disappearing as a plasma ball crackled into existence near the antenna.

Direct transport of matter was teleportation, a dream out of science fiction. He could have fame, wealth and world travel. He could form his own company and staff it with dedicated scientists, find a good research director and spend a lot of time living and traveling in Europe. Switzerland was nice. But when he thought for a moment, he knew that in the industrial world there wouldn’t be much call for the teleportation of hot plasmas. He would have to do it with solids.

Melvin Funovits rebuilt his machine. The plasma tube was now gone. In its place was a shallow rectangular box open at the top and made out of iron. An identical box was fixed just below the directional antenna. He picked up a twisted blob of colorful glass and looked at it closely after his first experiment the previous evening. He had successfully transported it, sort of. It had been a child’s marble.

It wasn’t a marble anymore, and Switzerland seemed far away.

He would proceed by trial and error. The field configuration was complex, and he wasn’t equipped to map it accurately. There should be size and even shape effects, and the size of the singularity was an unknown. He worked the rest of late afternoon and far into the evenings with a series of objects: a child’s wooden block, lead bricks of various sizes, and a tiny ball bearing. All were transported, and all were horribly distorted by the process. The distortion was least for the ball bearing, so the entrance to the worm-hole, or whatever it was, seemed to be quite small, but not microscopic. Any large object sucked into it was spewed out as a mangled blob at the other end. His dreams of fame and fortune were fading. Feeling frustrated, yet curious, he tossed a wilted flower into the box and turned on full power to the antenna. A putrid stench suddenly filled the room, and the slimy mess he saw in the box by the antenna disgusted him. He turned the machine off, then walked in light fog back to his apartment in darkness, feeling quite depressed.

Melvin was comforted by his dreams. He dreamed of a mountain chalet in Switzerland. His chalet was perched on a hillside overlooking a small village of houses with orange roofs, surrounded by jagged snow topped mountains reaching up to a clean, blue sky free of smoke and exhaust fumes.

In the evenings he would entertain lady-friends in his little home; perhaps he would choose one for his wife. Now that he was wealthy, a woman might overlook his physical appearance and personality in favor of a comfortable material life. He was a quiet, gentle sort of man, basically a good person, and he deserved a life of more than frustration and loneliness, a life full of stimulus and creativity.

In his dream, Melvin realized he was angry, and now willing to go to any lengths to get what he wanted. His hope rested on one positive aspect of his personality.

He was a very persistent person.

The experiments continued during evenings, weekends, even short breaks between a myriad of classes filled with robotic students writing down problem solutions and memorizing them. Melvin didn’t care anymore. He gave them what they wanted, what they needed. He would never again derive an equation for them.

At first the size of the singularity seemed to be the only problem. A single piece of buckshot two millimeters in diameter transported without change in size or shape, but even two pieces together ended up an irregular blob of lead at the receiving end of the machine. The singularity size was something just over two millimeters, hardly a practical size. Perhaps he could increase it by using move power and a larger antenna. But the power supply was inadequate and he would have to build a new one.

Transport was only one way towards the antenna, and on a Saturday night Melvin’s hopes for a better life rose again, briefly. An object placed at the receiving end was fused with the transmitted object, without change in shape or size. Only the density changed. A small, wooden block became a small lead block containing twisted pieces of wood when a similar-sized lead block was transmitted.  He tried it with identical lead blocks, and the normal density of lead was doubled. The crystal structure couldn’t be the same, he thought. Transported atoms were probably packed interstitially at the receiving end, and the result was a material that would defy all metallurgical processes.

So what good was super-dense lead if you couldn’t fabricate anything with it? Shielding? He doubted that. Shielding was straight forward enough with normal lead. Radioactive waste disposal? Maybe, but there were easier ways to do that. The results were the same with copper and steel. Industry wanted lighter, stronger, more easily worked metals, definitely not the kinds of things he was producing.

Over a weekend, and well into a Monday of classes, he tried to make alloys, transmitting one metal into another. The task consumed him totally. In his obsession, time meant nothing, and he was freed from class preparations, lectures, grading, and the mindless questions he had answered a thousand times.

He failed again. The metals would not mix together in a uniform way. He cut open sample after sample to find globs and veins of one metal in the other. Certainly not an alloy. He tried another pair of metals, oblivious of the classes he was missing, not seeing the classrooms filled with waiting students, and Dean Harrison Ludlow prowling the falls furiously in search of a professor who had missed three classes that morning.

Melvin cut open the little block of steel, saw the veins of tungsten in it and felt tears welling up in his eyes. It was no use. The machine had no practical applications and he was stuck fast in his mindless environment forever. A tiny part of him retained hope; he searched the room for something else to try in the machine. Through a mist of tears he saw two blocks of marble holding up a row of books on a shelf. Amorphous material. Perhaps that would give him something. He put one block in the receiving box, and was positioning the other at the transmitting end of the machine when his laboratory door suddenly flew open and Dean Harrison Ludlow was screaming at him.

“Funovits, this is the end! What the hell are you doing down here? There are a hundred students upstairs right now, milling around in a classroom, waiting for one of your brilliant lectures and you’re down here tinkering!”

Melvin jumped away from the machine, frightened. “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize that—“

“—You don’t realize anything! Your only reason for existence here is teaching; you’re not even supposed to be doing research!” Dean Ludlow, red-faced, waved an arm around the room and shouted, “Where did you get all this stuff? Steal it?”

Melvin pressed his lips tightly together, fear changing rapidly into something else. He backed up against the power supply of the machine.

“Of course you won’t answer,” thundered the Dean. “This is all stolen equipment here, equipment to be used only for teaching.” He stalked over to the machine, slapped one hand on it, smiling as Melvin glared back at him.

“No matter,” said Ludlow, still smiling. “I don’t even need theft charges; missing your classes is quite enough for dismissal. I will be very glad to get rid of you, Funovits, you and your terrible teaching. The students will probably thank me.” He grabbed one edge of the box at the machine’s transmitting end, pulled at it and leaned over to look in it when Melvin Funovits spoke very softly to him.

“Don’t touch anything,” said Melvin. Behind his back, he felt the hum of the power supply. It was on standby, set for full power.

“Oh really,” said the Dean, and he reached with one hand towards the block of marble in the box. “I’ll do more than touch, Funovits. I’m going to take this apparatus apart, and you’ll help me do it, and then you’re going to get out of here, and out of my life.” His hand grasped the marble.

Melvin Funovits threw the power switch. “I don’t think so,” he said.

“Oh,” said Dean Ludlow.

There was a crackling sound and a blast of heat; the image of Dean Harrison Ludlow was frozen in space and time, shimmering and then fading to nothingness. A putrid stench filled the room and Melvin remembered the flower. He turned away, swallowing hard to suppress an urge to retch, and then the terrible odor was gone with the heat and the room was suddenly cool. When he turned off the power supply, silence swallowed him and he stood for a long while, listening to the pounding of his heart and wondering about what he had done. Where the Dean had stood was nothing. He hesitated, then walked over to the receiving box of the machine and looked inside it, wincing at what he saw.

The block of marble was still there, same size, same shape, only the color had changed. It glistened black and purple, with streaks of yellow, green and red. Lots of red. When Melvin leaned close he breathed in a bad odor again, and his stomach moved with revulsion. He put on a pair of disposable plastic gloves and touched the block, feeling the hardness of it, pushing on it. The block was heavy. How much had the Dean weighed? A hundred and eighty? Maybe more. All of it was there, in a block of marble. The enormity of his deed suddenly struck him.

He had murdered Dean Harrison Ludlow in cold blood. Or had it been an accident? Ludlow had been fooling with the machine and it had suddenly started up, and the man was gone. It was a most unfortunate accident. Still, who would believe him? Doctor, please tell the court about this block. Certainly, your honor. The block has type O blood, same type as that of the missing person. Otherwise, all I can say is it is a dense mixture of smelly organic matter and marble with some spectacular colors, and it would make an interesting bookend if it weren’t so heavy. The weight is really most unusual.

He would have to dispose of the block. He could push hard enough to tilt it up on one edge. The hydraulic lift in the laboratory did the rest. He lowered the block towards the floor, placed it on a hand truck and moved the block around the room. He locked the door, turned out the lights and sat in darkness, thinking. His story was clear. He had been ill that day, had called the Dean at his home that morning to tell him he wouldn’t be able to meet his classes, and hadn’t seen the man since. No, the man hadn’t sounded depressed or unusual in any way.

A new thought popped into his mind about the use of the machine. It surprised him with its practicality. And for a while he sat in darkness, developing a new idea and waiting for night to fall.

The main steam pipe was in place and workmen had begun that day to refill the small chasm that ran through the center of campus. Shortly after the sun had set, and just before students had finished their evening meal, Professor Melvin Funovits pushed a creaking hand truck out of the physics building and over to a point of the excavation where filling operations had ceased for the day. He tipped the truck forward. A heavy load dropped into the pit and buried itself deeply in the soft, new earth below. He pushed the hand truck back to the physics building with ease, striding along briskly. In the quiet of his laboratory, his new idea had developed quickly, and he had found a way out. He would sell his invention to a particular business group, but making contact with that group was going to be complex and perhaps dangerous to accomplish.

––––––––

THE DAY WAS BRIGHT and clear; Marvin breathed in the crisp air of late May, sipped his tea and watched a party of climbers ascending an ice wall across the valley below his Swiss chalet. Two checks had arrived that day: a quarterly interest payment from the Zurich account, and a royalty check forwarded to him by his bank in Geneva. The machine had been used again, when and how he didn’t know or care about. The organization never told him about how it was used. He had certainly given them enough ideas on that subject when he sold the machine, and new ideas kept coming to him all the time, along with solutions to the various technical problems they assigned to him. He was now a consultant who made only occasional trips to Chicago, New York, Rome and Moscow when necessary.

The work kept his mind active and allowed him to mostly work at home, near Monica. He had finally discussed marriage with her the week before and she had smiled sweetly, a good sign. He knew what her answer would be, after a proper waiting period. They would be married in the elegant little church at the edge of the village overlooked by his chalet. There would be music from the seventeenth century organ he had donated to the church. He looked forward to their life together.

It was a good life, he thought. The bad times were rapidly fading memories, and he owed it all to his employers. It was not surprising that he was irritated by the occasional slanderous newspaper stories about them. Nothing could ever be proven, of course, because of all the missing bodies. People simply disappeared.

It was a fine organization to work for. All the families involved had been most generous in supporting his work, and treated him with respect.

And Melvin Funovits had become a very loyal employee.

A SURVIVOR’S GUIDE TO THE DINOSAUR APOCALYPSE

A tale from the Flashback/Dinosaur Apocalypse Cycle. First there was the Time-storm, which erased half the population. Then came the dinosaurs ...

by Wayne Kyle Spitzer

Each of us, I think, had to understand it on our own terms, the totality of the desolation, the speed at which the old world had fallen away. Each of us, I think, had something of an epiphany looking down at it.

For me, it was seeing the helicopter’s shadow slink wraith-like over the hulk-jammed freeways and overgrown downtown intersections, realizing that shadow was the only thing—the only human thing—moving in any direction. For Sam it may have been the aircraft carrier—the USS Nimitz, Roman had said—run aground between Pike Street Market and the big Ferris wheel (and presumably straight into the State Route 99 tunnel). Leastwise that’s what she was looking at as she gasped audibly and the helicopter swung north by north-east, over what would have been Belltown, toward the Space Needle.

“You gotta see this,” said Roman, his voice sounding generic, condensed, tinny over the headsets. “Anyone here ever seen an eagle’s nest? In the wild, I mean?”

Lazaro hmphed. “I’ve scaled a 200-foot Douglas fir and touched one. Does that count?”

Nigel sneered—you could actually hear it, even from the front. “Ya, mon. But only in your dreams.”

Roman nodded at Lazaro. “Yeah? Was it big?” He sounded jocular, condescending. “How big was it, you think?”

“I don’t know. About four feet,” said Lazaro. He seemed annoyed—even hurt. “What’s it matter?”

“I was just wondering how it compared to, say, that, at five o’clock.”

We all saw it at once as the helicopter leaned and I was pressed against Sam: a nest the size of one of those above-ground pools—the kind someone like Lazaro might have had before the Flashback—built up around the Needle’s radio tower and comprised of what appeared to be mud and fallen timber.

“Jesus, it’s everywhere,” whispered Sam, her face and chesnut-brown hair—which smelled of honeysuckle and gunpowder—reflected in the glass. “They—they’re blue, teal. Like robins’ eggs.” She shook her head pensively, meditatively. “I wouldn’t have thought that.”

“Where’s momma bird?” said Lazaro.

“That’s a good question,” muttered Roman. He made a complete circuit of the Needle before leaving its orbit completely and heading back in the direction we’d come. “Nor are we sticking around to find out.” He voice became suddenly focused. “Okay. I’m going to fly low between the buildings—because you can bet we’re being watched. So, don’t freak out. The idea is to shield our location from prying eyes for as long as possible—or at least until the chopper’s up and everyone is clear. Got it?”

Check. Downtown Seattle was not a safe place, especially in the business district, and not just because there were pterodactyls roosting in the skyscrapers. For one, it bordered on territory controlled by the Skidders, a ruthless gang which operated out of Doc Maynard’s Public House and Underground Tour in Pioneer Square. It also shared a border with New Beijing and a group called the Gang of Four. Neither, Roman had assured us, were to be trifled with, and both were known to make frequent excursions into the no-man’s land of the business district. Throw in roving packs of velociraptors, which were also territorial, or the occasional tyrannosaurid, or even an herbivore with the Flashback in its eyes, and you had a situation which needed to be gotten into and gotten out of quickly.

And quietly.

“Just stay in range,” I said, checking the switch of my walkie-talkie, making certain it was on. “Or it’ll be a shitshow all over again.”

It was a cheap remark—no one had been closer to Chives than Roman—and one I regretted immediately. “No,” he said, and crossed himself. “It won’t. Trust me. Anything bigger than an alley cat—you’re going to know it. We’ll get you inside, I promise.”

“It’s not getting inside I’m worried about. It’s getting out with what we came for.”

He looked at me with those damned earnest eyes—something I would have preferred he didn’t do, especially while thundering between skyscrapers—and smiled. “We’ll do that, too. Now lock and load, Jamie. All of you. We’re almost there.”

––––––––

“SEE THAT COURTYARD just east of the library? That’s our landing zone,” said Roman, slowing us to a near hover, beginning to lower altitude.

I watched as the helicopter’s shadow grew on the wild, waving grass.

“Again: when you hit dirt I want you to go immediately to the street—5^th Avenue, right there, and follow it south-west. Stay close to the buildings, they’ll give you some cover. Get ready.”

“From predators?” asked Joan, our mechanic, her voice full of doubt. It was her first time out of the compound with us.

“From people,” said Roman. “They’ve been known to snipe from the towers.” We touched down with a slight bounce—tall grass lashing at the windows. “Remember, right on Marion ... then all the way to 1^st—to the Exchange Building. You can’t miss it: there’s a Starbucks across the street with a—”

Joan balked. “There must be a hundred—”

“... with a gutted triceratops in its window.” He looked at her over his shoulder, then at each of us individually. “It’s—it’s probably been picked clean by now.” He swallowed as though he’d said too much, then straightened suddenly and nodded once. “Everyone just—stay sharp, okay? Good luck.”

And then we were moving, piling out of the hatch and into the prop-wash, scrambling for the street, as the Bell 206 climbed—the sound of its rotors thundering, reverberating off the buildings, the grass dancing.

“Other side of the intersection, that condo,” I said, “let’s go.”

We double-timed across the pavement—or what was left of it—to where a concrete overhang offered some measure of cover.

“Hold up,” said Nigel. He dropped to his knees and began assembling his weapon—a commercial weed trimmer outfitted with a 10” saw blade—as Lazaro hovered above him.

“Yeah, hold up. Nigel saw some grass he wants to trim,” said Lazaro.

Nigel primed the trimmer but didn’t start it. “I didn’t hear you complain when this opened the belly of that Barney—you know the one that had you pinned? Or did you forget about that?”

“And covered me with its guts,” said Lazaro. He pumped his shotgun briskly. “You were too close. Charlene would have taken you both.”

“That so, mon? Like it took Chives?”

I glanced at Lazaro and saw him bunching a fist. “Stand down, Lazaro ... I said stand down! Now!” I looked at the others quickly, hoping to quell any unrest. “We all know precisely what happened to Chives ... and there ain’t nothing—I mean nothing—that is going to change that. Ever.” I made eye contact with Nigel as he stood. “He couldn’t be left that way. Period. Now let’s move—Lazaro, take point. Nigel, bring up the rear. Let’s go.”

And we went, hustling down 5^th Avenue even as the sky grumbled and it began to spit rain—all the way to Marion Street, at which we turned right ... and were promptly greeted by a hail of gunfire.

––––––––

AT FIRST IT HAD SEEMED like a miracle, the fact that there was an underground garage opening right there and that we’d all managed to get into it before anybody was hit—at least until the metal gate came rattling down and we realized our attackers hadn’t so much targeted us as herded us directly into a trap.

“Drop ‘em, now!” came a voice, even as we spun in its direction and raised our weapons—and quickly realized there was nothing to shoot at. Nothing visible, at any rate. What there was, however, were tiny red dots—on our foreheads, over our hearts.

“You see them. Good,” said the voice, just as cool as iced tea—the perfect accompaniment to the clatter of shifting firearms. “And now you’re going to bend down ... slowly ... and lay all your weapons at your feet. All right? Nooo one has to get hurt. Just do as I say ... and then we can have a nice conversation. About who you are, for example. And where you’re from. And what you’re doing being dropped off by a helicopter in the middle of disputed territory. Our territory. Okay?”

“Okay,” I said, and nodded at the others—and at Lazaro twice; we’d been in this situation before and he always wanted to play chicken.

Slowly everyone did it—the red dots never wavering, the rain starting to rattle against the gate.

“Is that a weed wacker?” said the voice, and was followed by laughter. “Damn.”

I heard the tapping of what turned out to be an axe head against concrete before I realized he’d stepped into a shaft of gray light. “Don’t let their laughter get to you—people used to laugh at us too.”

We watched, paralyzed, as the bearded silhouette seemed to yawn and stretch. “What can I say? All this rain—it makes me sleepy. I’ll tell you, I could really go for a Flat White about now. Two ristretto espresso shots, some whole milk steamed to perfection, a little ephemeral latte art right in the center. Sounds good, doesn’t it?” He cocked his head in the near perfect silence. “No? What you want then, a bronson? At this hour? A good, earthy black IPA, perhaps? I could go for that. Something with a nice malty backbone—good for the old ticker.” He laughed, seeming to think about it. “I know. Too conventional, right?” He shook his head. “Momma always said: she said, ‘Atticus, all your taste is in your mouth.’”

There was a thin chuckle and a few clanks of the axe. “Kind of mean, don’t you think? Anyway. That’s what she said.”

He began walking toward us—slowly, deliberately—dragging the handle, dragging its blade along the pavement.

“Look,” I said. “We didn’t come here looking for any ...”

“Any what?” He stopped about four feet in front of me, close enough at last for us to have a good look at him, and what we saw seemed utterly incongruous with what Roman had told us—except, of course, for the multitude of tattoos (mostly triangles), and even more so the washboarded scar, which ran from somewhere on his scalp and through an eye (over which one lens of his dark, plastic-framed glasses had been painted black) clear to his left shoulder. That much, at least, fit. What didn’t fit was the slicked-back pompadour and long, full, meticulously-trimmed beard—Jesus, there was even product in it—nor, for that matter, the flannel lumberjack shirt and skinny jeans, not to mention the Converse sneakers. What didn’t fit, as the similarly attired men holding laser-guided rifles emerged from behind overgrown automobiles and support columns, was that the feared and formidable Skidders were, when exposed to the light of day (and not to put too fine a point on it), hipsters.

“Well doesn’t this just take the cake,” said Lazaro, and spit.

“I take it we aren’t what you expected,” said Atticus. He leaned on the axe as though it were a cane. “I must say, neither are you.” His good eye, which was a pale, piercing blue, dropped to our weapons. “You came well-armed. What are those—M4s? Not exactly an easy thing to come by—since Big Green fled the scene.” He raised his chin and cocked his head, studying us. “And that helicopter. I mean, damn. What did you do? Raid a small airport? Got a pilot, even.”

He began pacing, slowly, methodically. “That’s better than a doctor. So, to summarize: You got a helicopter. You got military-issue rifles. You got, well, plumbing—I mean, you’re clean, all of you. You even got ...” He stopped dead in his tracks, dead in front of Sam. “You even got—a girl!” He screwed up his face suddenly and leaned back, staring at Joan, who glowered at him. “Make that plural. Sorry. It’s just that ...” He looked Sam up and down. “It isn’t always this easy to tell—”

“Look, what do you want?” I snapped.

Atticus reared his head back as though he’d been wounded. “Jesus! Tone. I was just going to say how important it is for the fairer sex to be represented in any post-apocalyptic scenario. You know, women.” He leaned close to me, I have no idea why. “My boys call them tassels—fuck if I know. Something out of Williamsburg, I suppose. Like putting crayons in your beard, or whatever.” He stepped back to address us all. “All of which is just my way of saying—you have a home. A base. A place to hang your hat. And because of that, I’ve only got two questions.” He hefted the axe suddenly and decisively—before switching it to his other hand and touching it to the ground. “Where? And why, since you have your own turf, would you come prancing onto ours—a crime punishable by death? I mean, just, holy bugfuck. It had to be for something good, right?”

“What’s it matter if you’re just going to kill us anyway?” protested Lazaro. “You said it yourself: ‘a crime punishable by death.’ So why should we tell you anything?”

“Because information is currency,” said Atticus flatly. He added quickly: “One I might just accept in exchange for your lives. Along with your guns, of course. And maybe the girl. It really all depends on the quality of your—”

But I’d stopped listening: focusing instead on the darkness behind him, behind his men. Because something had moved there. Something amongst the cars.

Several somethings.

“The pharmacy,” I interrupted quickly, almost breathlessly, “the one on Madison Street. B-Bartell Drugs. That’s—that’s where we were going.” I looked sidelong at Sam as sweat beaded along my brow. “We were going to Bartell Drugs—for prenatal vitamins. I’m sorry, Sam.”

“That’s very interesting,” said Atticus, matter-of-factly. “But considering we’re on Marion I’d say you overshot the mark.”

I stared at Sam intensely, trying to communicate in secret, trying to communicate with my eyes alone. “We—couldn’t get to it from there. There were raptors between us and it; at least, that’s what I think they were. They—they were in some kind of utility tunnel, which was dark. I’m the only one who saw them. The others—they, they had to take my word. We we’re looping around the building to bypass the tunnel when you opened fire.” Sam faced forward again and squinted, her expression a mask, her composure unwavering. That’s when I knew she knew.

“As for the guns—take them,” I said, trying not to look into the dark. “Just let us get the supplements. Please.”

I looked to find Atticus staring at me, his head at an angle, his mouth hanging open. Then he guffawed—once, twice—and paced away, raising the axe head as he did so, slapping the flat of its blade against his palm. “Man. You are one noble fuck. All of you. And here I thought you were just a bunch of hardened, cutthroat survivors—come to take a slice of our purloined pie, no doubt.” He stopped suddenly and turned around. “You, with the wire-frame glasses. Raptor-spotter. What’s your name, son?”

I glanced at Sam on one side and Nigel on the other.

“Jamie,” I said, and looked at my shoes. “Jamie Klein.”

“Jamie,” he repeated, and approached to within a few feet. “Jamie Klein.” He pinched the axe between his knees as he began to swing and stretch his arms. “Damn. That suits you, you know? I mean, you seem like a nice guy. A real mensch. Are you Jewish?”

I shook my head.

“No. Well, it’s not important. What is important is that we establish a baseline. Something that, well, will get me the truth—when I ask a simple, goddamn question. So I’m going to ask you one more time, before I give the word. Where is your base-camp? And why—you need to think about this, you might even say your life depends on it—have you come to Pioneer Square?”

“I told you,” I said. “We needed medicine and supplements for—”

“The girl,” he said, and took a step back—even as two of his men (who weren’t training rifles) grabbed Sam by the upper arms and forced her to the pavement.

“Sorry about this, troops—I really am. But I did say it: You needed to think about this one. Carefully.” He took up the axe and tapped its head on the pavement. “I mean, you don’t get to be the Big Dog without keeping your word, right?” He raised the hatchet slowly, confidently, the leather of his half gloves crinkling. “And believe me when I say: When it comes to south Seattle, we are the Big Dog ...”

That’s when something leapt up in the darkness and my eyes darted to the blur—in time to see a blue and red velociraptor pounce the farthest Skidder back: its sickle-foot claws latching firmly into his abdomen, its fore-talons gripping his broad, flannelled shoulders, its jaws closing about his head. And then all was screaming and gunfire—which lit up the garage like the fourth of July and thundered, cracking, off its walls—as I piledrived Atticus and wrested the axe from him; as everyone scrambled for their weapons and the raptors pounced upon more Skidders.

“Lazaro!” I remember yelling—knowing his shotgun could blow the gate, knowing he’d opened locked doors with it before—before a man screamed nearby and I looked: and saw his attacker biting off the top of his head—just opening it like a watermelon, taking everything but his long, full beard.

And then there was a shotgun blast and we were falling back, still firing at the velociraptors, still firing into Atticus’ men—lighting up everything and everyone as we ducked beneath the gate and burst into the rain. As we hustled down Marion Street with Roman thundering above us and the screams of the Skidders still echoing in our heads.

Toward the Exchange Building and a gutted triceratops in the window of a Starbucks. Toward the research and development lab of Roman’s former employer ... and something we knew only as Gargantua.

––––––––

SOMEONE NEEDED TO SAY something, anything. The danger in silence was that, post-Flashback, one inevitably heard the emptiness, the melancholy: the sound of the world just breathing in and out, dreaming. So I said: “For her, the Flashback is over”—hoping it would break the spell of her liquefied eyes and deeply sunken sockets, the pale, wispy hair, the fuzzy white fungus in her nostrils and mouth. Hoping, I suppose, that it would drown out the Nothing—if only for a moment.

“No more power lunches for this babysan,” said Lazaro, and spat. He kicked the spilt attaché case at the base of the cycad, where her feet should have been, and paper and cash swirled. “Here one minute—melded with a tree the next. Shit sucks.”

Sam stepped closer, examining where the woman’s face merged with the tree. “Initial Flashback, you think? Or an aftershock?”

I watched the rain—which had lessened to a drizzle— dribble down the corpse’s face and neck. “I don’t know, she seems pretty well preserved. Could have been an aftershock.”

“Probably suffocated,” said Nigel. “Tree manifested and her lungs couldn’t expand. Jesus. What a horrible way to go.”

I looked at Joan who was white as a ghost. “You all right?”

“Yeah. It’s just that ...” She shook her head. “It’s nothing.”

She jumped as our walkie-talkies squawked; it sure looked like something to me. “Go ahead, Sea One,” I said. “What’s your twenty?”

I looked to see the Bell 206 arching over Elliott Bay.

“Just west of you—monitoring pack movements near the Colman ferry terminal. Carnotauruses, by the looks of it. I take it you’re at the Exchange?”

“Affirmative—and awaiting instructions.”

“Through the double doors, left at the first hall, all the way to the end. Austin Dynamics and Land Systems. They’ll be a secure door—you’ll have to blow it. And hurry, because there are predators of the human variety on the move in Pioneer Square.”

I peered at the sky, at what Roman called the Mesozoic Borealis, watching the colors bleed in and out of each other, watching them shift and change shape. “Yeah, ah, about that. Requesting alternative escape route—Over. We have had contact with Skidders. I repeat, we have had contact with them. We—they’re all dead. Over.”

But there was nothing, just the sound of the helicopter.

At last Roman said, “That’s unfortunate. But it doesn’t change a thing. Escape route is still 1^st Avenue through Pioneer Square to Edgar Martinez Drive—then I-90 to Issaquah. Do you copy?”

That’s when I saw it: him, the kid, dirty-faced and wild-eyed, his hair like an unkempt mane, listening to us from the nearby stairwell—like the feral boy in The Road Warrior, I swear.

“Hey!” I shouted, drawing the attention of the others, “Hey, kid! Hold up!”

But he was already gone—climbing from the well at its opposite end, bolting up the shattered sidewalk like a gazelle. Weaving right at 2^nd Avenue—where he vanished into the primordial mist.

––––––––

“JESUS,” SAID LAZARO, before the overheads had even finished flickering on. “I mean ... Who was this thing even built for, Godzilla?”

I stared at the vehicle, which was the length of a small yacht, say, 50 feet. “Well, not to put too fine a point on it, it was built for us. Or whoever survived whatever apocalypse Dannon had dreamed up.”

I approached the rover and slid my hand up one of the tires—which was taller than I was, by about a foot. “Welcome to the world of big tech billionaires and their passion projects.” The rubber felt stiff, unyielding, like polished wood. “His was to build a fully self-contained armored expedition vehicle—a kind of mini-Noah’s Ark—something that could not only sustain life but go about exploring what was left of the world—if and when the shit ever hit the fan.”

I circled the big rig while gazing up at its slanted cab and wide, black grill, its array of lights, its giant push and roll bars. The thing was like a van-version of the Cybertruck but on fucking steroids. “Reckon he was like Mr. Musk—in need of a challenge, but also a moral imperative to justify it. For him that was this apocalypse he saw coming.” I paused to examine the roof turret and what appeared to be a .50-caliber machine gun. “A virus, maybe. Or a war. Dinosaurs probably weren’t in his game plan.”

“Looks they were getting ready to test it,” said Sam. “Look.”

I looked to where a massive steel ramp (we’d descended stairs to get to the production floor) ended at an equally massive door. “Good. Looks like this might be easier than we—”

There was a rattle of weapons followed by Lazaro shouting, “Stop! Get on the ground!” —and I hurried to see what the commotion was; at which instant I saw a man in a blue shop-coat standing by a huge sphere and holding what looked like a small, olive-colored ball over his head—a ball with a ring attached, through which he’d looped a trembling finger.

“He’s got a bomb!” I shouted—but resisted raising my rifle. “Everyone just chill! Okay?”

No one did—chill, that is—but no one fired either, and a moment or two passed in silence.

At last the man said, “See this big tank here, this round monstrosity?” He indicated the white metal container next to him, which was taller even than he was. “That would be propylene gas—enough to level this entire floor, maybe the building itself. See this?” He nodded at the olive-colored ball. “That’s your standard military-issue hand grenade, courtesy of the kids who were stationed here before they and the city fell. See those?” He nodded at some handles and hoses near the floor. “Those are the valves I loosened as you were making your way here. If you don’t smell it yet, you will. It’s strong. Now. Any questions?”

“Only one,” I said, and pushed up my glasses. “What do you want?”

He shifted his footing as though preparing for a long standoff. “I want you to lower your weapons,” he said, and wiggled his fingers near the pin—keeping himself on his toes. “Lower them and kick them toward me, all of you. Then we’ll talk.”

Nobody said anything.

At last I set down my rifle and motioned for the others to do the same. “Do it,” I said, and slowly raised my arms. “You too, Lazaro. Let’s go.”

The weapons clattered as they were placed on the floor and punted toward him.

He lowered his arms cautiously. “There, see? We’re still capable of it—rational thought. It hasn’t gone the way of the dinosaur.” He laughed at that, but kept the grenade close to his chest. “Yet.”

He looked at our weapons as though running calculations through his head. “There’s Neanderthals roaming the streets, did you know that? Real ones—not supporters of President Tucker.” He paused, seeming to size us all up. “Remember them? With their little red hats and faces all puffed in rage?” He chuckled. “Fell off the flat earth, I guess. No, these are genuine Homo sapiens neanderthalensis—right beside modern man and triceratops; right beside honkers from the Jurassic and Cretaceous and Triassic. Just sort of one big medley—like Time itself was put in a blender, or a concrete mixer, or a cream separator, and churned.”

He seemed to relax a little and even lowered the grenade.

“I’m Ewan, by the way. Ewan Homes. I—I was Gargantua’s chief engineer. Before life put us all in the blender.”

“Jamie,” I said. “Jamie Klein. This is Sam.” I indicated the others. “That’s Lazaro, Nigel, and Joan. We—we’re from Issa—”

“Jamie, don’t,” interrupted Sam.

“It’s all right,” I said—and meant it. I trusted him; I don’t know why. “We’re from Issaquah. Got a camp there in what used to be a drive-in theater; it’s got walls, vegetable gardens, some chickens and goats—there’s even some generators, if you want to watch a movie. The thing is—Ewan—it’s not overcrowded. And what I’m going to suggest just now is that—"

“Nothing leaves this facility,” he snapped—simply, with finality. “That includes me.” He raised the grenade tentatively and reached for the pin—then hesitated, his eyes searching mine, or seeming to. “No ... no, I don’t hear it. It’s not there.” He lowered the olive-colored explosive slowly, tentatively. “The guile of the predator, the cunning of the fox. It’s not there. You speak ... earnestly.”

I let down my arms carefully, incrementally, maintaining eye contact. “I speak as someone who has sought Gargantua while not knowing it had a guardian, a sentinel, which is yourself, or at least how you see yourself. I speak as someone who has faced the Big Empty alone just as you have—and knows it is not for lack of bread that a man dies, but lack of purpose, and that you have found yours in the guarding of this machine, this vehicle—a vehicle that, for whatever reason, you cannot even drive yourself, or you would have done so already. And I’ll offer you another way—Ewan, chief engineer at Austin Dynamics and Land Systems, whose budget was 8.5 million per fiscal year and who’s assistant was named Roman Daystrom, your best friend—if you’ll just turn off that fucking gas.”

––––––––

BY THE TIME I’D REINTRODUCED Roman and Ewan via radio, and the former had convinced the latter to not only come with us but to let someone other than himself drive Gargantua (Ewan, we were told, was blind as a bat), and Nigel had escorted the engineer to his quarters so he could retrieve some of his effects, the clock on the wall of the shop read half past one—more than enough time for the Skidders to have organized some type of counter-strike; a fact that weighed heavily on my mind as the women and I began gathering up specs and schematics and Lazaro paced the room impatiently. 

“What the hell’s taking them so long? You heard Roman—carnotauruses, heading this way. Oh, I forgot. Nigel’s on Jamaican Time.”

“They have been gone awhile,” said Sam. “Maybe we should—”

“It’s no good splitting us up,” I said. “There’s no telling how quickly we might have to leave. Nigel’s got it—everyone just chill.” I looked at Lazaro. “Can you give us a hand with these? They’re going to be heavy.”

“Why the hell are we carting them along, then?” He snatched up one of the boxes with a huff and headed for Gargantua. “Or him, for that matter? Dude is definitely a few sandwiches short of a picnic.”

“You going to fix this thing when it—” began Joan, but Lazaro was already up the ramp.

We continued working in silence.

At length Sam said, “Who was he, you think? That kid?”

I shrugged my shoulders. “Just a kid. Probably been on his own since the Flashback, who knows?” I heaped some manuals into a box—which created a cloud of dust. “He gave me a start, that’s for sure. I didn’t really get a good look at him.”

“I did ...” She paused as though visualizing him. “He had bones around his neck, did you know that? Or teeth—like, really big ones. He’d strung them together as a sort of necklace. Isn’t that odd, you think?”

Our faces were close as I stopped to reflect. “I don’t know. Is it? Maybe he’s extracting them from dead Barneys, like trophies. I confess, my first thought was that he’d gone feral. And yet ... He was wearing contemporary clothes, I remember that. Puffy coat, jeans, tennis shoes. I mean, he wasn’t like Mowgli or anything.”

She looked at me and started to grin. “I didn’t think he was like Mowgli ...”

“All right! Drop your cocks and grab your socks,” belted Lazaro—from the top of the ramp. “They’re back.”

I looked to see Nigel and Ewan entering the shop from the left, the latter seeming like an utterly new man—his hair no longer mussed; his clothes no longer a catastrophic mess.

“Apologies, apologies, a thousand apologies,” he said, before pausing to admire Gargantua. “But a maiden voyage such as this requires a fresh change of clothes.” He looked on a moment longer and then dropped to one knee—began ruffling through his overpacked bags. “Ah, yes, here it is. It’s—I opened it with Nigel.” He withdrew a corked bottle—which glinted darkly in the light from a high window. “Voila! One of eight bottles of Dom Perignon Rose champagne, Vintage 1959, served in Persepolis in 1971 by the then-Shaw of Iran.”

He looked at us with a face flushed with excitement, and we looked back.

“To—to celebrate the 2500^th anniversary of the founding of the Persian Empire ... by Cyrus the Great.” Disappointment stole over his face like a shadow. “It’s—it’s to break over the bow, as it were. To christen Gargantua.” Nobody said anything. “Yeah—well. Waste of liquor, anyway. Especially when I’ve got so much celebrating to do. I’ll, ah—I’ll just get the door. Over there.”

He moved up the ramp toward the garage door.

That’s when I thought of Lazaro’s admonition, I don’t know why: You heard Roman—carnotauruses, heading this way.

“Wait, Ewan,” I said.

But he was already there, triggering the great door with his fist, turning to look at us as it rattled upward, pulling the cork from the champagne. “Life is for the living,” he said, and toasted us with the bottle. “And this stuff ...” He poured champagne into his mouth and down the sides, soaking his clean, white shirt, splattering the floor with foam. “This is for howl—”

But then the door was open and they were there, the carnotauruses, and one closed its jaws about his scalp while another laid wide his abdomen (and another took up his legs) so that, howling, he was opened like a pizza being groped by eager hands. And then they themselves howled and piled over his body, and all we could do was to run—everyone save Nigel, who had his trimmer, which he started with a sputter—because our weapons were already in the rover.

––––––––

WOULD WE HAVE MADE it to the truck if Nigel hadn’t done what he did? I don’t know—maybe. But I doubt it. The fact is these carnotauruses were moving—faster than I’d ever seen them move before—and had cut the distance between us in half before I heard the revving of Nigel’s trimmer and saw him sweeping it across a dinosaur’s belly, opening it like a can of spaghetti.

“Someone start the truck!” he shouted, his voice raw, animalistic, “I’ll hold them off as long as I can!”

I scrambled up the stairs after Sam and Joan but before Lazaro. “Joan, this is your gig,” I said, before essentially falling through a portal into the cockpit. “Get us out of here.”

But she just stood there, looking around the deck and the crush of dials and switches; looking as if the vehicle itself might swallow her at any moment. “No ... No, I’m sorry. But I can’t ... I just ...”

I indicated the co-pilot’s seat. “Sam.”

She buckled into her harness as I took the driver’s seat and did the same, hoping that what Roman had told me was true—that Gargantua could pilot herself—and hoping, too, that I could remember the test protocol he’d so wisely insisted I study.

“Gargantua, this is Jamie—and I’m going to be your test driver today.” I looked out the massive, slanted windshield to where Nigel had thrust his trimmer’s saw-head into the mouth of a carnotaurus, only horizontally, after which he leveraged the shaft brutally—and popped off the top of the thing’s head. “We are go for power on. I repeat: We are go for power on. Initiate protocol.”

I watched as blood geysered from the beast’s lower mandible—even as nothing seemed to happen with the vehicle.

“Gargantua. Initiate protocol.”

“I got a bad feeling about this,” said Sam, even as the creatures closed in around Nigel, and Lazaro opened fire from the ramp. “I mean, if you could just bounce in here and say ‘go’ then it obviously—”

“Clearance is Delta-Delta—Dawn,” I said rapidly, recalling the code words Roman had insisted I memorize, recalling how well he’d prepared me should something happen to Joan, as the consoles lit up like Christmas trees and the screens flickered to blue life; as the rover’s hybrid engines hummed and whirred and pulsed, powerfully. “Issaquah via I-90, go!”

And then we were moving, smoothly, robustly (after an initial lurch), as one of the screens showed the stairs beginning to retract and Nigel rushed onto them—where he was assisted by Lazaro—as we clanked onto the ramp and powered up its traction-metal and finally burst onto the street.

“Sea One, this is Away Team Alpha, we are on our way!”

I looked up through the cockpit’s huge windshield in time to see the Bell 206 thundering overhead—zooming toward Pioneer Square and the headquarters of the Skidders; zooming toward Edgar Martinez Drive and I-90 and home. “Do you copy?”

“Copy you loud and clear, Away Team Alpha,” said Roman at last, euphorically, and laughed. “Congratulations.”

I looked over my shoulder as Nigel and Lazaro joined us on the bridge, then forward again through the tinted windshield—where the streetlights were passing dangerously close to the roof. “Everybody hang on, we could run out of clearance fast.”

There was a frap-frap-frap as the twigs of trees started colliding with us. That’s when I first noticed it: him, her—a lone figure—walking out into the middle of the road, stopping between us and Pioneer Square. Turning to face us as I instinctively hit the brakes.

“Auto-pilot disengaged,” said a voice—Majel Barrett’s from Star Trek, I swear; some geek’s idea of a joke.

“Is that who I think—” Sam started to say but then trailed off.

I peered through the angled glass, which was bullet-proof, I presumed, I mean it was thick, as the truck ground to a stop and the figure came into focus—beard, flannel, and all.

It was Atticus.

“Well, well,” said Lazaro, sardonically. “Slippery motherfucker, isn’t he?” He added: “What’s that?”

I looked to where another figure had entered the street to join him, a smaller figure, wearing a puffy black coat and blue jeans, whose hair was wild and unkempt. A figure who wore a necklace of large teeth around his neck—T. rex teeth, by the looks of it—and smiled gap-toothed as Atticus ruffled his hair.

The kid. The feral boy. Mowgli, whatever.

But that wasn’t all, for there were others now too—not Skidders, there were no beards or flannel or Converse shoes—just people: men, women and children, most of them disheveled, who walked out single-file and formed a living fence across the road— even as another group (visible on one of the monitors) did the same behind us. And it was at precisely that instant that I glimpsed the first of the red dots—which were fleeting, erratic, sometimes holding on a person’s head, sometimes roaming—and realized just how much trouble we were in. How trapped we’d become.

––––––––

TIME HAD STOPPED—not because of any Flashback or roiling time-storm or strange, vague lights in the sky, or because fully three quarters of the human population had vanished without a trace (and been replaced with prehistoric flora and fauna), but because we’d been outsmarted, pure and simple. And now all we could do was watch, as the rows of people in front of us and behind began to lay themselves on the ground and another brought Atticus a megaphone—which he lifted to his mouth while steadying himself with his ax and directed at the rover’s cab.

“Well, just check ... this ... out! Damn!” He acted as though he might slap his knees. “‘Gargantua One.’ What do you know? I mean, what will they think of next?”

The feral kid appeared to laugh as the wind gusted suddenly and the branches of the trees swayed.

“Those are some prenatal vitamins, I must say. I can see now why you thought this was important enough to risk your lives. Not to mention kill or allowed to be killed some of my best men.”

My mind raced. Time. We needed time. I searched the banks of switches and readouts for a means of communication and found a toggle marked ‘loudspeaker,’ which I flipped.

“I seem to recall you were about to chop off Sam’s head,” I said, hoping it would keep him jabbering for at least a minute.

“And snip such a fine tassel?” He laughed. “Not on this watch, Midtown. You need to learn to recognize bullshit when you see it—”

I switched off the loudspeaker. “We need ideas—fast.”

“For what?” said Nigel. “You can see all the red dots. He’s got us in a hopeless situation, tactically.”

“That’s bullshit, man,” snapped Lazaro. “There’s a machine gun on top of this thing.”

“And what are you going to shoot at? The air? They’re hidden in the buildings all around. You’ll be lucky to get in a burst before—”

“He’s right,” I said. “It’s no good. Those people aren’t just human barriers—they’re hostages. We start fooling around with that gun ... and they’re toast.” I keyed the mic of my radio. “Sea One, this is Away Team Alpha. Come back.”

Atticus continued: “... gangland theatrics. How else was I going to get you to talk? I knew you were after some kind of kale ...”

Our radios squawked. “Go ahead.”

“Listen, Roman, quickly: We are surrounded by Skidders and need technical data regarding Gargantua— defense mechanisms, weapons systems, whatever you got. And we need it fast.”

He responded almost instantly. “Where is Ewan, asleep?”

I started to speak but hesitated, wondering if I should tell him now or later; if I should disrupt his focus. “He ... he’s passed out in the back. He was ... he was pretty drunk.”

But there was no response and we listened to Atticus as we waited; luckily for us, the motherfucker liked to talk.

“... and consider yourselves lucky you didn’t run into, say, Antifa. Don’t laugh—those little fuckers are hard. Like a bunch of Viet Cong running around in black pajamas. Saw them go up against a militia once—might have been White Out, I’m not sure ...”

“Okay, listen up,” came Roman at last, his voice full of urgency. “The gun up top can be operated from inside as well as out, you just have to use the joystick, which is on the right side of the driver’s seat. There should be a pair of sighting goggles also, hanging above, which are slaved to the .50-cal—you’ll use these to acquire targets. Just hit ‘auto’ on the joystick and you’ll be golden. There’s also smoke dispensers mounted on both sides of the vehicle, the switch is right above you, but I don’t advise using them—they’re too effective and you’ll be blinded for several minutes. At least. Other than that the vehicle was designed primarily for exploration, so I don’t know what—can I provide any sort of air cover? Prop-wash, for example?”

“Negative, I repeat, negative. It’s too tight in here. Just stand by.”

Atticus, meanwhile, was still going on: “... ever seen a pack of allosaurs take down a diplodocus? That’s what this was like. Just hit and run, hit and run, until the big dumb bastards collapsed from their own weight. Now they’re dead—and a bunch of skinny anarchists have AR-15s ...”

I peered at the old buildings through the trees and at the darkened windows, many of them without glass. If it had been even slightly foggy or misty—as it had been earlier—we might have traced the beams right back—

My heart must have skipped a beat, I’m sure of it. Jesus, I thought. Could it be that simple?

“What is it?” asked Sam, sounding concerned.

I reached for the goggles and slowly slid them on, then gripped the joystick cautiously. “See that switch right there? The illuminated blue one?” She nodded warily, her face pale. “That’s the smoke dispensers. When I give the word I want you to flip it, okay? Don’t be scared.”

“What are you doing?” snapped Lazaro, with a clear edge to his voice. “Sandahl, what is he doing?”

“I’m getting ready to target those snipers,” I said, and pressed the ‘auto’ switch, making sure to keep my head perfectly still lest the machine gun swivel and alert Atticus. “Nigel, get ready on the loudspeaker. On my word only I want you to order those people to get up and get clear. Make sure they understand—we are coming through. There can be no confusion. Lazaro, I want you to open the side door—but do not lower the ramp—and take a position; at my word you’ll use my M4 to clear targets on the right side of the truck only, understand? I’ll take care of the left and then swing around to help you.”

I waited for him to acknowledge and when he didn’t I snapped, “Do you understand? We don’t have time for this.”

“Yes, I understand!”

“Good. Now—Joan. Where are you, girl?”

She stirred in the seat behind me. “I’m—I’m sorry, Jaime. I’m so sorry. But I—”

“You don’t have to be,” I said. “I know it’s cramped in here. And I’m sorry I didn’t listen to you when you tried to tell me about ... your condition. But you’re going to make it, all right? We all are. Just buckle up and hold tight, and try to focus on what’s outside. Just like you did in the helicopter— okay? You got this.”

“I got this,” she repeated, and exhaled sharply.

Atticus, meanwhile, had been counting down. “Three ... two ... one.” He sighed and lowered the megaphone—then lifted it to his mouth again. “The problem with you, Jaime, is that you just—don’t—listen. Now I just explained to you what was going to happen if I reached ‘one’ and you hadn’t come out, and goddamned if you didn’t come out. So. What’s going to happen now is that we’re going to kill one of these people for every 30 seconds you remain inside the vehicle—starting immediately.” He directed the bullhorn at the upper floors of one of the buildings. “Hershel? You awake up there?”

“Get ready,” I said.

“I’m awake,” came a voice, though it was impossible to tell exactly where from.

“Fine,” said Atticus. “Hershel, in 30 seconds, I want you to place your site on the head of ... that little girl, right there.” He gestured at a storefront on our right side—Simply Seattle. “Green coat, last one on the end, right next to the display window. Copy that there, Chief?”

The man didn’t hesitate. “Twenty-nine! 28! 27 ...”

I toggled the loudspeaker myself. “We’re coming out,” I said, suddenly, and glanced at Sam. “We’re trying to figure out how.”

There was a silence as Atticus seemed to think about this.

At last he said, “Well, how complicated could it be? Just open the door. Hershel, keep counting ...”

“Twenty-three, 22, 21 ...”

“It’s not that simple,” I hurried to say, “It’s, like, pressurized or something.” To the others I said, “On my mark, okay? Get ready.”

“We’re at 18 seconds and counting, James,” said Atticus. “Best clean your glasses and get with it.”

“Seventeen, 16, 15 ...”

“Okay! Okay. We’re depressurizing. Right ... now.”

And then Sam was toggling the smoke as I gripped the joystick tightly and Nigel took over the loudspeaker and Lazaro opened the side door, after which we cursed loudly and bent to our tasks, and, together, threw wide the gates of Hell.

––––––––

IT STARTED, INNOCUOUSLY enough, with the thump, thump, thump of the smoke grenades, which launched at an angle from both sides of the cab and bounced off the overhanging tree branches—as well as breaking at least one nearby window—before falling to the pavement and bursting into clouds of gray smoke. Nor did anything happen immediately—almost as if everyone outside were in a state of shock. But then the smoke began to rise, obscuring everything, and illuminating too the beams of the lasers—which lengthened as I tracked them and led straight to the top floors of Doc Maynard’s Public House—at which I depressed the ‘fire’ button and lit them up; even as Lazaro opened fire on the other side and feedback whined from the loudspeakers.

“Move—if you would live,” shouted Nigel. “Get up and run, all of you! We’re advancing.”

But we’d spent our surprise and what Skidders remained in the windows rallied, opening fire indiscriminately, shooting blindly into the smoke, as their muzzles flashed like Xs and we continued to cut them down; as Nigel repeated his directive and my foot hovered over the gas. “Are they clear yet, Sam? Are they out of the way?”

I continued to fire even as bullets impacted against the windshield and side window, cracking them in rings, leaving huge craters.

“I don’t know, I think so,” she said. “They’re scrambling, I saw that much.”

“Then we’re going,” I said. “Nigel, give them a final warning.”

“But how can you drive with the windows smashed?” protested Sam—even as more rounds impacted the glass. “How can—”

“Engage the auto-pilot!” I shouted, aiming at what appeared to be the last holdout, holding down the ‘fire’ button, feeling the cab vibrate and shake.

“But I don’t know—”

“Got it,” blurted Joan—having rallied herself, or so it seemed.

And then the engines were humming, pulsing—winding up like great turbines, moving us forward into the mists.

“We’re all clear!” shouted Lazaro. “It’s Issaquah or bust!”

And with that we emerged from the clouds; to see what could only be Atticus himself running down 1^st Avenue, his unbuttoned flannel shirt flying out behind him, his Converse sneakers pounding the pavement. The feral kid, meanwhile, was nowhere to be seen.

“Jesus, does he even know we’re coming?” asked Sam.

“No,” I said, squinting between the cracks. “We’re on electric.”

“Good,” said Lazaro. “Run the fucker over.”

I tapped the gas pedal, to take it out of auto-pilot, having found a spot through which I could see clearly. “I’m reverting to manual,” I said, having no intention of running him down like a dog.

But nothing seemed to happen; we just continued moving forward—picking up speed—until trees were blowing past on one side and buildings were blurring past on the other.

“It’ll go around,” said Joan. “The sensors haven’t picked him up yet, that’s all.”

But I wasn’t so sure as the gap between us closed rapidly—so rapidly I could see his buttocks pumping beneath the skinny jeans and his keys dancing wildly at his hip. And then he disappeared beneath the rig with a pronounced thump and the cab jolted, bouncing once, and I glanced at the rear-view monitor in time to see a skid of dark blood and bone and guts extending out behind us almost indefinitely.

“Okay ... so I thought I was better,” said Joan, still staring at the screen—her face green as a ghost. “But I’m not.” Her cheeks puffed suddenly as though she might vomit. “We need to pull over, I think. Like, now.”

“Okay. I’ll try,” I said, and tapped the gas pedal.

But this time, control reverted back to me—as it was supposed to do—and as we passed Jackson Street I began looking for a place to pull over, because it was finished, I knew. We were safe.

We’d survived the Dinosaur Apocalypse. Again.

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BY THE TIME WE DID pull over—or rather, ground to a halt in the middle of the street—rain was starting to speckle the windshield (or what was left of it) and the sky had darkened, none of which prevented Joan from leaping onto her seat the moment we stopped and grabbing the handle of one of the ceiling hatches.

“Is that a good idea?” I asked, as she turned the handle and pushed the hatch open. “We haven’t even had a look around yet—”

But she had already burst through the opening and was gasping for air, sucking it into her lungs in great, shuddering gulps, exhaling as though she’d been holding her breath for a lifetime. “I—I don’t care,” she rasped, as though she were collapsing from exhaustion. “Couldn’t ... couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t—do it a second longer.”

“What’s wrong with her?” asked Lazaro.

“She’s fine,” I said, breathing in the fresh air myself, feeling relieved, almost euphoric. “Little bit of claustrophobia, that’s all. Take all the time you need, Joan. We’re done with this now. We’re all done.”

Everybody seemed to relax in their seats, exhaling, stretching their muscles. It was the first real rest we’d had since leaving the drive-in that morning.

“Well, would you look at that,” said Lazaro at last, peering out his window, and laughed.

I followed his gaze to where a black awning with white letters read COWGIRLS INC – AMERICAN SALOON.

“Never heard of it,” I said, and winked at Sam.

“I could go for a drink or five about now,” said Joan, and laid her head on her arms.

“I could go for one of those waitresses dancing on the bar and shaking her ass in my face,” said Lazaro.

“Ewan had the right idea,” sighed Joan, and shifted her weight. “With that bottle of champagne, I mean.” She fell silent for a moment as though remembering. “What was he saying when ... when ...”

I thought back on it, on that awful moment when the carnotauruses had torn him limb from limb. “He was in the middle of saying ‘howl,’ I think,” I said, and slumped against my window. “That the champagne was for howling, not busting over Gargantua, to christen it. I think he’d been alone so long that he’d died a little, or even a lot. We’d given him hope. A reason to howl at the moon, or something.”

Nobody said anything as the clouds rumbled overhead and the rain grew heavier, drizzling around the ringed cracks in the windshield, trickling down Joan’s coveralls.

“I want to dance in the rain,” said Sam, softly.

“We want you to too,” said Lazaro.

“Aaoooh!” crooned Joan, and when I looked she’d stood straight again and spread her arms at the sky.

“Aaoooh!” responded Lazaro, almost as though he were drunk.

And then Nigel joined in, followed by Sam, and finally myself, and there we all were, howling at the sky like a bunch of damn lunatics, beating our chests for having survived another day—spreading our fiery, Phoenix wings in defiance of what we’d done and still had to do and what had become of the world.

And it was on the tip of my tongue to suggest we actually go in and have a drink—or five—when Joan’s body seized up like a vice and her voice became muffled, at which I squinted through Lazaro’s window and saw the lower body of the tyrannosaur (or whatever it was), and realized its head would have been exactly where she was—and that the new sound I was hearing, which was a garbled sound, an obscene sound, was that of Joan screaming; whimpering; suffocating no doubt in the monstrous animal’s palette, before it jerked its head and she was yanked clean from the hatch. Before the great and terrible animal stepped back and began shaking her like a ragdoll, even though she was surely dead already, hurling her against the pavement with a sickening smack, pinning her there with its tri-clawed foot; which is when I stepped on the gas—but not before seeing her come apart like mozzarella—and drove away as fast as I could.

After which we drove the rest of the way home in silence and tried not to think of all the blood splattered around the hatch and pooled like thick, dark wine in her seat. After which we kept our heads down and our eyes alert, all the way to Issaquah and the drive-in we called home. All the way until we greeted Roman at the heli-pad with open arms and walked together, through the cool shadows of the carports, to our respective campers and trailers and RVs.

DR. JEKYLL IN LOVE

by Ron Ford

To the casual observer, Dr. Henry Jekyll was the very picture of the Victorian gentleman. He paid his taxes and bowed to his queen. His collar was stiff, as was the upper lip of his public face. He ran a respectable surgery in a respectable London neighborhood, and his beard was always respectably clipped. He kept respectable hours and attended meetings of respectable organizations. He was respectably married to a good woman from a  respectable family. But beneath the social veneer, Jekyll, like all men, was driven by passions that had little to do with the demands of the current mores. These vary among men, but Jekyll’s main passions were the curiosity for knowledge withheld from men, the secret questioning of powers, both political and theological, and, of course, the lures of the flesh. In this last passion, he was perhaps not so different from his fellow Victorian Londoners after all.

The passion of science had once ruled his life. He leaned on it to help quench his thirst for arcane knowledge. In the years following University, and prior to marriage, he had built his thriving practice; but his heart and mind were always in his private laboratory in the ante-building at the back of his home. In that place he would toil into the night with his pet theory, trying to isolate the virtuous man from his baser self through the means of chemistry. However, with marriage and maturity, and that passion had gradually dwindled, to be replaced by the greater need for amenities – the comforts of a stuffed armchair, a full glass, and an ample larder. And, of course, still, the pleasures of the flesh.

It had been some time since Jekyll had finished with his experimentations. In the end, it was concluded that humans require both halves of their nature to function effectively in a contemporary world, and so, separating them made little sense. Contrary to what you may have read (the author, Mr. Stevenson, veered from the facts of the strange case, and killed off the good doctor to make an ending with a clear moral lesson, as was demanded by his Victorian public), he had stopped using his drug habitually, and allowed his alter ego, Edward Hyde, to come out only for occasional recreational purposes, and in those rare instances when Hyde’s bluntness could handle a situation better than could his own civility. Yes, he had sown his wild oats and settled down. Now instead of  Hyde’s nocturnal carousing, he looked forward to Thursday evenings, which he and Mrs. Jekyll both kept clear in their appointment calendars. Thursday night, you see, was what they, among themselves, referred gigglingly to as their “liaison night.”

While the name for this type of arrangement, and the night of the week on which it falls, varies from couple to couple, the ordered Victorian society in which the Jekylls lived would only allow man and wife to spend some time sharing, as it were, the marital bed - relatively guilt free – if it was part of a carefully-considered, and well-scheduled itinerary. 

On this particular Thursday afternoon, Jekyll, as he always did, closed up his surgery and headed home with a hop in his step. Although it had been an unusually trying workday, he was smiling in the cab all the way home. This gave Curtis, the driver, a secret smile, for the good doctor had once confided in him over a bowl of Christmas punch the exact meaning that Thursday evenings held in his busy week.

Upon reaching home, Jekyll paid Curtis, leaped from the cab, and bounded through the door. In the foyer, he tossed his cloak, hat and stick to Poole, the butler, as he shot up the stairs. Poole, knowing full well the drill, made no utterance to impede his master’s progress. Tingling with excitement Jekyll traversed the upstairs hallway, and finally stood facing the door to the boudoir of Beatrice Jekyll, the parting wake to his schooner, the nectar to his honeybee, the rose to his thorn. He took in a deep breath, and let it out. At last!

He rapped upon his lady-love’s door, as he did once a week.

“Who is it please?” Mrs. Jekyll queried from behind the heavy door, Her voice was the honeyed purr of a hummingbird’s wings. 

“Why, darling, it’s me,” he answered. “Your husband. Henry Jekyll.”

There was a slight pause. “Just a moment,” she answered.

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MRS. JEKYLL SAT ON the day bed in her boudoir, arranging the folds of her skirt to the most aesthetically pleasing configuration before allowing herself to be seen. Something devilish whispered in her ear, and she considered raising it a bit to show a glimpse of ankle.

“Good heavens, you wicked thing,” she scolded herself. “That will be quite enough of that.”

She lowered her hem to the floor and looked up. She was ready.

“You may enter,” she called out.

The door opened and Henry entered, only a tad sheepishly. “My darling! How beautiful you look,” he told her from the doorway.

Mrs. Jekyll raised one beckoning arm toward him and allowed him a welcoming smile. Jekyll sighed with relief and crossed to her. He took the proffered hand and kissed it gingerly between the third and fourth knuckle. She glanced at the empty place beside her on the day bed, then quickly back up at him. Not needing to be told twice, he eagerly sat beside her, and proceeded to kiss her hand repeatedly as he moved up the arm, leaning into it as he went.

“My darling. Your beauty drives me mad,” he said between kisses. But even as the words left his mouth, he knew that he had said too much.

“Darling. Please,” Mrs. Jekyll said with some distaste, retrieving her arm out from under him.   Jekyll fell to the carpet at her feet.

“Right, right, my dearest one,” Jekyll conceded, picking himself up and re-seating himself. “I was more animal than man. Can you ever find it in yourself to forgive me?”

“Of course I forgive you. You may hold my hand.” She again offered him the offended appendage.

“Your hand,” Jekyll said, taking it, “is a thing of precious beauty. God out-did himself on this, His masterpiece.”

“Oh, darling, you do go on.”

“How a wretch like me ever won your favor, I will never comprehend,” Jekyll lied.

“You are in a solid profession and from a good family,” Mrs. Jekyll responded. “I am very satisfied with our union.”

“Satisfaction is all I seek, my darling,” Jekyll said, moving his face up until their noses all but touched. “Your satisfaction, and yes, my own,” he suggested.

“Oh,” Mrs. Jekyll said with comprehension. “I suppose you’ll want to kiss me now, and me I’ve just applied my lip rouge.”

Jekyll was taken aback a mite. “Well, darling, it is Thursday night, after all.”

“Yes, yes, I know, and I know you do look forward to it so,” she said, sympathetically.

“I do, Truly, I do,” Jekyll confirmed. “Well, we are married after all.”

“In the eyes of God, yes, of course we are,” she said. “But love, I simply can’t go through with all that this evening.”

“But... Thursday.”

“I said I know, darling, don’t be pedantic. It’s my woman’s time. You’re a doctor. You understand these things.”

Unfortunately, as a doctor, he did. As a husband he was having a harder time reconciling it.

“Now see here, darling,” he began, “that is a trifle unsporting, don’t you think?”

“Unsporting?” she asked, seemingly oblivious to the connection. “In what way?”

“Well, in every way, really,” Jekyll said. “In the ‘let no man put asunder, love, honor and obey’ way.”

“Don’t be coarse. We are civilized subjects of Queen Victoria, after all,” she reminded him.

“Indeed,” Jekyll agreed, in the most irreverent way. “God bless Queen Victoria.”

Then, there came a rapping at the door.

“Who is it?” Mrs. Jekyll called out.

The door opened slightly and Poole stuck his face in. “I beg your pardon, madame, but this card was delivered for Dr. Jekyll.”

Jekyll rose and smoothed the wrinkles in his jacket. “Thank you, Poole.” He took the card from a silver tray held out by the butler, who nodded and retreated, closing the door behind himself.

“Who is it, darling?” Mrs. Jekyll inquired.

Dr. Jekyll read the note to himself then looked up at the missus. “A medical emergency, I’m afraid, dear,” Jekyll lied, as he crumpled the note and buried it in his side pocket. “I could be gone for hours. Please don’t wait up.”

“Oh, that is a pity,” she sympathized. “But perhaps it’s for the best. I’ll be staying in this evening, my dearest love,” she lied to him. “Because of my woman’s time.”

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JEKYLL, IN EVENING wear, turned the key in the lock, which was now seldom used, allowing himself into the laboratory. He lighted an oil lamp on the work bench, took out the crumpled calling card, and opened it up for another look.

“Eddie – I’ll be at the Cock and Fig. Room 23. Bring your big walking stick. The fancy one - Sybil.”

Sybil Vane was a “friend” of Hyde’s. the ugliest girl in the chorus line at the Chez Follies. Her teeth were crooked, she had one bloodshot eye that always leaked, her nose was a brioche made of pocked flesh, and her hair, like straw, jutted sharply and haphazardly in all directions. Still, for all she lacked in beauty, she had a way about her that drove men mad. An attitude, a style, and an ample bosom only came part way to explaining her allure. She was up for anything, but she was no push-over. She was, in fact, the only woman he’d met so far – Hyde, that is – who seemed able to keep up with the hedonistic, nocturnal sinner, and come away calling it a good time.

With Miss Vane, Jekyll surmised, he could satisfy his uncivilized lust in the guise of Hyde, and yet remain faithful to his divinely-ordained legal union with Mrs. Jekyll. The thought of it made him laugh, but only a tad maniacally. 

He began to mix the familiar chemicals in a precise manner. His excitement rose as he saw the expected chemical reactions. The fluid changed from clear to blue, then to red. The mixture bubbled without the aid of heat, and a pinkish froth rose and spilled out over the rim of the glass. When the fizzing had subsided, he pulled a metal flask from a drawer and filled it with the chemical via a tiny silver funnel. He put the flask in his breast pocket. He would sip on the mixture as he walked to the inn, he told himself. Then, by the time he arrived, he surmised, it wouldn’t be him arriving at all.

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EDWARD HYDE ARRIVED at The Cock and Fig a few minutes later. He grinned with anticipation as he flung open the door and stepped inside. The desk clerk, a certain Wendell Beauchamp, recognized the husky, diminutive form of Jekyll’s alter-ego, with his stubbly mutton chops, blood-shot cruel eyes, and protruding, crooked lower lip. Hyde caught a glimpse of Beauchamp ducking behind the desk as he landed in the foyer.

“And a dandy how-de-do to yourself, Beauchamp,” Hyde chuckled, remembering their first run in, which cost the desk clerk the use of his sight for a few hours. “I’ll just see myself up, shall I?”

Hyde bounded up the stairs. Upon reaching the second floor landing, he paused a bit, trying to determine which direction he should turn down the corridor. At that moment, he heard a man clearing his throat behind him. 

Clearing his throat.

“Well, have you had a good look? It’s not changing, you know,” it spoke. Hyde turned to see a  gentleman – A Mr. Kensington Thistleberry - who, as chance would have it, was climbing the stairs  behind the hedonist. The gentleman was also on his way to a tryst with his paramour. Thistleberry naturally felt that a man of his station ought not have to wait for or walk around one from a lower station. “I think you can quite move along now,” he concluded.

“Oh, I does beg yer pardon, guv’nor,” Hyde said, with infinites sarcasm, as he bowed deeply to his social superior and stepped to one side.

“I should think so,” Thistleberry sniffed, breezing past Hyde. But only a step or two, as Hyde’s stick, thrust in front of his ankles, sent him sprawling to the dusty carpet. Before the gentleman could react, the large silver head of the cane was lowered to the back of his head.

“One good tap, that’s all she’d take,” Hyde said. “Funny the fragile-ness of a bloke.”

Thistleberry shivered and offered no response.

“Lucky day for such a fine gentleman as yourself. Cheerio and whatnot.” Hyde tipped his hat and continued on his way, chuckling lowly.

When his shivers had subsided, Thistleberry picked himself up and bolted from the establishment, standing up his lover, never to return.

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HYDE ARRIVED OUTSIDE room 23 with a smile on his crooked lips and a raging pressure in his trousers. He raised a heavy paw to knock, then hesitated. No, he thought. I’ll surprise the trollop. He grabbed the cheap brass doorknob, twisted, and burst into the room.

“Ah-ha, slut!” Hyde said. “Looky who’s here?”

His announcement was met with a loud, wet snore. There she was, slumped over in the armchair, out cold, drool glistening on her acne-pocked chin. There was a gin bottle on the floor.

“Drunk again, ya gutter-smellin’ tart,” Hyde sneered as he removed his hat and pushed it down over her head. Half of her face was swallowed inside the chapeau.

Sybil sprang to her feet in a defensive stance. “What in the name of Hades?” She pulled a dagger from her garter and slashed out blindly. Hyde easily jumped back from the blade.

“You’re robbing the wrong twitch, bucko!” she said defiantly.

They circled one another a few times, her blindly moving counter to the sound of his footsteps.

“I’ll cut ya! I’ll cut ya!”

“You dare pull a knife on me?” 

She made a lunge at the sound of Hyde’s voice, with the battle yell: “I dare!”

Hyde side-stepped her, and chuckled. “Give it up. Yer outmatched, ya cow.”

“Not while I got my knife, Sonny Jim,” Sybil said, and made another lunge at the sound of his voice. This time Hyde was less prepared, and the blade made a slit across his hip pocket, spilling coins nosily out onto the floor.

“Jackpot!” Sybil howled gleefully.

Hyde had had enough at this point. This was costing him money. He snatched the hat back from Sybil’s head. “It’s me, ya gutter-smellin’ tart!”

Upon seeing him, the misshapen chorus girl’s face lit up as best it could. “Eddie!” she yelled. She leaped into Hyde’s arms. She wrapped her hairy legs around his waist, and he grabbed her under her oddly-shaped buttocks. Their lips met, and their tongues entangled, like copulating snakes. Drool gushed out from their oral cavities, mixing and dribbling down their chins.

This went on for far too many minutes. Then, they pulled apart and looked at one another. Hyde grinned with lust. Sybil’s eyes narrowed mischievously.

“Masher!” she said, drew back her left, and backhanded Hyde across the jaw. He dropped her in surprise, and, cat that she was, she landed on her feet, poised for more.

Hyde was red with rage. “Harlot!” he barked, and gave her the back of his left mitt. She bent with the impact, and came up smiling.

“Pig!” She gave him the right paw this time.

Hyde’s face stung on both cheeks now. So he gave her another one as well. “Bitch!”

Her head snapped back and then came forward again, hungry. They locked eyes and the passion raged again. They ran at one another and collided with such force that Sybil was flung across the room, onto the bed. Hyde ripped off his clothes as he stepped closer and closer to her, leaving a trail of garments on the carpet.

At the bedside, he saw her lop-sided, inverted-nippled breasts and lost control. He leaped onto the bed, straddling her as he came down. The bed gave out, and the mattress crashed to the floor. They laid there, groping one another, their lacing tongues again insatiably coital serpents.

They rolled as one and were encased in the bed sheet like  jalapeños in a burrito. To the outside observer, it would have seemed as though a giant worm of malevolent intend was writing about where the bed once stood, seeking nourishment, perhaps.

Then, suddenly, the worm ceased to writhe.

One end of the coital tube opened, and Mrs. Jekyll’s head poked out.

“Perdition!” she said. “Just when it was getting good.”

Hyde’s head emerged from the opposite end of the linen-skinned night-crawler. “What now?” he grumbled.

“Well, look at me,” she returned. “I told you, you didn’t leave me enough. Not for the whole night.”

Hyde muttered under his breath and got up. Mrs. Jekyll enjoyed watching him bend over as he went through his jacket on the floor, displaying, from a seldom-seen angle, the one asset of Hyde’s that Jekyll envied.

Hyde found what he sought and returned to the coital caterpillar. He got back in, and handed the flask to Mrs. Jekyll. She drank the remaining potion to the last drop. There was a moment of anticipation, then her flesh began to quiver, and her head rolled with a familiar intoxication. She gagged once or twice, grabbed her throat, and thrashed wildly.

When the requisite gesticulations had subsided, it was no longer Mrs. Jekyll protruding from the sheet-tube. Indeed, it was, again, Sybil Vane.

“Is that all you got, Eddie?” she scoffed.

Hyde laughed throatily. “‘Od’s bodkin, but I do love liaison night,” he offered to the universe, then dove back into the sheet. Sybil, grinning her crooked yellow smile, wriggled into the other end.

The linen worm of lust again began to churn, writhe, and roll about the room. It continued to do so long into the night.

WORLDS APART: A FATHER’S LEGACY

by M. Kari Barr

Prologue

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HE WAS A TINKERER REALLY. He knew some called him a nerd, but he felt he did not really belong in that category either. He was good looking he knew; with his broad shoulders and shiny smooth brown hair, he was too lazy to go in each month for a trim so it was always falling into his eyes. The thing of it was though, the thing of it was . . . was that he was far too shy. He lived alone in the large home his parents’ had left to him. He did not know for certain that they were dead, but the fact that they were gone was just the same. They had taken most of their vast wealth, and had bought their way onto the exploratory deep space vessel, Maritania-11, which was headed for sector 549. Contact ended the previous year after they had been gone for five years.

“I don’t suppose it helps to dwell on it,” Edwin said to his housekeeper.

She turned her smooth face and gentle gaze towards him.  “I believe you said that last week.” She busied herself with the kitchen counters. Meticulously, like clockwork, she scoured every inch and crevice of the kitchen on Mondays. She had a schedule and kept to it.

Edwin ate in the kitchen, since the dining room felt far too vast for his solitary person,

True, he had a butler to keep him company; indeed they spent hours tinkering on machines together. They were great friends even if Al was a few years older. At twenty-five, Edwin felt it was time for him to get a life. His mother was always nagging him about dating. It seemed to be all she mentioned during his last year of high school and his first years of college. She had been home then. Even from space her conference calls were about his social life. Father agreed, but also said Mother should give it up.

So Edwin admired the maid’s form as she worked. She didn’t seem to mind, he had been doing it the last few years—trailing her about as she cleaned.

She smiled at him now, her perfect green eyes catching the light overhead. “You seem to have nothing to do today. Do you have any special requests?’

Edwin grinned back, his technique was improving, “Not really. Don’t you get tired of the same routine day in and day out?”

Her kitchen work was done and so she placed the cleaning clothes in the hamper just off the kitchen. Edwin admired the way her hips swayed. She wore Capri’s and a cropped top. Still, it was crisp white and black, like a uniform, just more attractive. The outfit was at Edwin’s request; he never did like the black dress and white apron Mother had always insisted on.

Returning, she replied, “Really, Edwin your questions are making less sense. This is my job and I enjoy it.”

“Is that so? Wouldn’t you like to just . . . I don’t know, be spontaneous? Go for a walk in the park? Go shopping, anything not on your schedule?”

Edwin had stood up, his emotional outburst having gotten the better of him. Helena looked up at him her eyes wide. She looked him up and down and then replied, “As a matter of fact, I do feel an urge to do some shopping, though that is usually done on Tuesdays.”

Edwin smiled and offered to drive. “I gave Al the day off,” he presented as an explanation.

Edwin could not keep the smile off of his face. This was the first time a female, who was not related to him, had ever been in the car with him. Really it was pitiful, but he chose not to think on the pathetic lateness, nor the fact that she was the maid. He simply enjoyed the here and now.

They really were not in need of much, since most items were delivered. He ate the same foods weekly so the same items were sent by special delivery. He felt his chest swell as he saw the appreciative glances sent their way. Helena really was one of a kind. Her strawberry hair cascaded like a fountain from the high ponytail she wore it in. Her grace was remarkable, just watching the way she picked an item off the shelf was breathtaking. At least Edwin felt his breath catch. As if she heard, she glanced at him and smirked.

Once home, and feeling reckless and bold, Edwin asked Helena out to dinner. He stood holding his breath as she demurred.

“I am your servant, as you well know.”

“You can keep your job. I would be devastated were you to leave! I just thought it would be nice; I have not been out to dinner since my parents left.” That was not entirely true, he had been to a pizza place a few times with Al, but he felt no need to clarify.

She ran her hands down her clothes drawing his eyes to her shape. “I do not have anything to wear and I have to be home by midnight. Unless . . . ”

Edwin interrupted, “Come with me.” He took her delicate hand and nearly ran to his mother’s large walk in closet. She had left countless gowns, some she had never even worn. Helena simply stood looking at them.

“Well pick one,” Edwin urged.

She looked about her, scanning in her systematic way. Once she had made a complete circuit she selected the pale green dancing dress. It had a skirt that flared out ever so slightly. Edwin approved, it was actually a dress Mother had bought for her final night on earth. But at the last minute she had not worn it, because Father had chosen to wear grey and she wanted to wear purple to match better.

Yet, Mother had worn several dresses in that same style when teaching Edwin to dance. Beginning at the age of twelve she had begun teaching him the social graces and inviting people over for dinner. He danced well, but never managed the small talk required to keep the interest of the girls.

Edwin brushed those thoughts aside. Helena seemed to really care about him, and she did not mind that he followed her about the house as she cleaned. They talked comfortably, but long silences were easy as well.

Edwin chose a fine black suit with a pale green shirt and slim black tie. Helena was needed for tying the tie since Al normally did that for him. Her gentle hands efficiently knotted the tie and softly brushed against his neck before she smoothed his shirt and jacket all while looking into his eyes.

He so wanted to kiss her right then, but he felt constrained to postpone the pleasure he was sure would be his.

So instead he thanked her and soon helped her into his sports car. Dinner was superb, they each had chicken scampi. Edwin delighted in her delight, it was her first time tasting such fare.

An old school mate happened by as they were finishing dessert. “Hey, Edwin, how ya doin’ mate?” He surveyed Helena a moment while Edwin responded. Then he added, “I almost didn’t recognize her, Georgia right? She’s got the eyes.”

Edwin grinned, “No sorry, mate, this is Helena. Helena this is Charles Dupree, we went to school together.”

She stood and greeted Charles warmly. Edwin was filled with pride as Charles nodded appreciatively.

“Nice. Nice to meet you, Helena. This is Janine.” Janine was lovely, but slightly unsteady.

Charles appeared to be trying to keep her upright.

Edward smiled broadly at Janine and then Charles. “Janine, indeed. Well good luck, buddy. I hope to be seeing you next month at the exposition. You are attending, right?”

Charles looked abashed, but then smiled crookedly, “Yes I’ll be there. I may have to do a few upgrades, but I’ll give you a run for your money.”

Edwin was stoked; he could hardly keep the grin off his face as they drove back to his place.

Helena asked, “Why so jovial?”

Laughing, Edwin replied, “That Charles was always so cocksure that he was better than me. Did you see Janine? Hah, you are above and beyond her caliber! Ah, sorry that is no way to be speaking to you. Helena, forgive me.”

She placed her hand on his and replied, “There is nothing to forgive.”

Bursting with joy he escorted her in. She readied his bed, folding down the covers, fluffing the pillows, getting fresh water for his nightstand. All while he changed into his pajamas.

His desires were conflicted. He knew not what he wanted. Taking her hand he led her to his laboratory. She had been there daily and went to her closet. He watched as she entered and shut down her program. His hand wavered over the two prepared microchips. He wandered down the wall going to the very first; Anna was inside, he opened it and there she stood—his first automaton. Her eyes were missing as he had loved how perfect they were. Helena wore them now as had each of the rest before her B-G. Some closets he skipped over completely, knowing that the remains had been cannibalized for the following models. He looked in on Georgia her eyes also missing. She had been great, he mused.

She was actually much like Janine, since she stumbled a bit. She cleaned house well, but could not go shopping on her own. Yes, Helena was perfect. But he was not ready yet. Pulling the eyes from Helena, he placed them into Georgia and inserted her microchip.

Her animation was slow, but within a minute she was stepping out and asking Edwin if he had brushed his teeth.

“Yes, Mummy,” he replied as she took his hand and guided him to bed.

Once tucked in, she snuggled to his side and sang him a lullaby while he played with her silky hair, his thumb in his mouth. Gently she lulled him to sleep where dreams of greatness at the expo greeted him.

Part One

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GENERALLY, I LIKE TO think I’m your happy-go-lucky kind of guy. Then again, I revel in being the strong silent type. Right now I am confused. Currently I am aboard the Maritania-15 headed to my ancestral home— Earth.

Coming out of stasis should be gentle and pleasant, hah! Not for me. For me it is like being lost in a fog while being chased by Gorlodians, without access to my lungs. In other words, it is like having no ability to breathe as large eight-armed hairy beasts of the Jungles of Handai hellishly slaver for my flesh.

In reality, the eight restraints are life supports pumping drugs and such through the system. I would forgo stasis all together except for the fact that take off is ten times worse. Through trial and error I have learned that two weeks in stasis is my limit . . . so here I am, in recovery awaiting my cup of sodeepop. And no, it tastes nothing like cola.

It’s nasty, but cures the shakes and aftereffects of the procedure.

An attendant, dressed in blue, hands me the sparkling cure. “Drink up, mate!”

Her cheer was sheer mockery, so I glowered at her as I took a swig. The overly sweet and potent drink was supposed to be orange flavored, but was so bitter one wonders why they even bother trying to disguise it as soda.

Downing the last of it, I exclaimed loudly, “Gah! That is some nasty stuff!”

“Nice to see you responding so well,” she smiled teasingly. Her long dress swooshed when she walked and her tight bustier accentuated her curvy figure.

With my broad shoulders and light brown hair and eyes, I was used to such attention and equally used to squelching it. I was taken.

That is until two weeks ago.

Seeing my attention wander, the nurse briskly informed me I was free to go to the gym and then I could check into my room. I complied, completing the requisite circuit training before lazily strolling to my assigned room.

Feeling refreshed, and yet needing to relax, I lay down on my almost soft and comfy bed. My mind reviewed the purpose for this trip.

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IT WAS SECOND-DAY, I had just returned to work after a harsh weekend of coping with my breakup—alone. Jaritzia had simply said, “I am no longer interested in us.” That’s it, when asked for details she just walked away. Hung up when I called, and refused digi-coms.

So I was sitting at my desk reviewing a case I could do in my sleep. When she walked in. No, not petite and dark Jaritzia. This woman was perfection personified. Her grace was almost too perfect.

Her smile was seemingly genuine as she entered and asked, “Is this the office for Detective Alistair Guthwolf?”

I wanted to be sarcastic, as my name was printed in large iridescent lettering on the door she had just entered, but her innocence and wide-eyed look caused my mouth to remain fixed as I stood, answering with a nod.

Extending my hand I replied, “Yes, this is the correct office. I am Detective Guthwolf.”

Her smile lit up her face which had not really seemed to look worried, but now that she was smiling, I could not help but think that she had. Been worried that is.

I showed her to a seat, taking in the clothing, which was very retro, even Old World. Her pants were skintight; I think they called them leggings. The leg coverings were matte black. And very shapely legs they were. Her blouse was crisp white with lace detailing. As a P.I. I pride myself in taking note of the details.

Returning to my seat, I looked into her perfect green eyes and asked, “So—How can I help you, Miss  . . .”

Her hair was pulled back in a neat ponytail, yet her elegant hand went up to ensure each pale auburn tress was in place. “My name is Helena . . .”

A brisk knock and in walked a vision I never thought to behold, suddenly I was confused and yet enlightened all at once.

“Al?” I questioned. My heart began to pound as if I were meeting a long lost relative.

He was nearly as graceful as Helena, he looked down his proud, aquiline nose at the young woman and then replied, “Indeed. What has she told you?”

I wanted to hug him, yet I was unsure about his response, so I merely shook his hand—repeatedly. My namesake: Al.

“What?” I recalled he had asked a question. “Oh, all I got was her name, Helena.” I returned to my side of the desk. “I guess you have no last name either,” I deduced.

Again, that heart-fluttering smile.

She deferred to Al. So I retuned my gaze to him. My father’s most cherished creation— Al had been crafted by my father, a brilliant roboticist, some forty years earlier. Al had remained on Earth to watch over my older brother whom I never met. Edwin had been an adult when my parents left on the Maritania-11. He declined their invitation to pay for his passage into unchartered space.

But my father had several holo-displays of himself and Al working in his lab, or playing a game of pool. My father made sure I knew that I had been named after Al, even though Al had never really been named Alistair. It’s not that I never saw other robots, my father continued his art. He worked with a limited production . . . making two a year, but he made sure they were perfect.

For as old as he was, Al was a marvel, well let’s not leave out Helena. Helena was pure perfection as stated before. Not even father had crafted such beauty, grace, and innocence. How does one make a robot appear innocent?

Helena was the work of my brother, Edwin, along with advice from Al. The reason I marveled at their un-aged state was due to the fact that a time warp causes items shipped to age twenty years, even though the flight here only takes a month. Not that the material robots are made from deteriorates very fast. What with renewing skin cells and all.

Of course, back when my parents left their home planet, technology levels were only what they had gleaned on Earth and from the few neighboring galaxies who deigned to share their knowledge. In that earlier ship, my parents had taken ten years of real time to get to my home planet. Not all of it was affected by the time shift. Still they aged thirty years, having rejected going into stasis. They wanted to enjoy space travel for heaven’s sake! And still they were willing to have me at the ripe ages of 73 and 79. They raised me until my twentieth year and then like they had done to my brother, they took off in a ship—this time a newfangled stasis memorial which is programmed to orbit the moon for one hundred years. Were I of a mind, I could go and awaken them to ask a question or share good news like weddings or children. I haven’t had anything to share yet . . . especially since being walked out on.

I mention this to let you know how dear this meeting was to me. Al may as well have been my uncle, because of the stories my father told and the love I could feel as he spoke of him.

Helena was “family” as well, I suppose. I did not know at the time what she meant to Edwin.

“So tell me what brings you across the great expanse?” I asked.

Al pulled up a second chair, took a look at Helena and then replied, “Edwin died and left his possessions to his only kin.”

I looked at them in stunned silence a moment and then replied, “He seemed to be a fine man. I only began communicating with him two years ago; in fact the way time works he should still be alive. Would you like to speak to him?” I reached towards my keyboard.

Helena looked interested but forlornly shook her head. Al replied, “Perhaps after we tell you our plight.”

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FROM WHERE I LAY ON my bed, I could see the storage compartments where servitors-robots-companions were stored for take-off. The small windows allowed the face of each to be viewed. Now lifeless, I could stare at them more closely. My father was genius! Truly such skill would be worth killing for . . . killing for. Yes, that is a thought.

In fact, it may be the very reason Father left Earth at all. Al told me how Edwin had won scientific expositions year after year. His robotic theories were sought after, yet he kept them close. He did finally open a full scale production, yet like Father, he held back that which he sold to the public.

Standing, I went to my own automaton, the one father left for me. Bertram had been a fixture in the house all of my life. I inserted his microchip and undid the restraints. Bertram had brown hair much like my father’s—he actually looked a lot like Edwin, my brother. Slim, graceful and with a pointed chin that dimpled when he smiled.

He winked at me in greeting and stepped out of the seeming closet.

“So what is on your mind today, sir?” Bertram asked.

I gave him a sideways glance and replied, “The same thing as before we boarded this contraption, Bertie! An investigation into my brother’s death is a bit awkward. I have never even been to Earth, and now I am beginning to think that Father was aware of the threat all along.”

I paused to stare down my servant. It was hardly a fair match as he willfully prevented any blinking whatsoever. With a loud sigh I threw myself back on the bed, and continued my questioning.

“I know you cannot lie. Bertram, tell me: Did Father know that unscrupulous entities were seeking his research data files?”

“Yes.”

I wanted to scream why didn’t you tell me? But I knew it was futile. He could not volunteer information; it was part of his unique programming.

With enough key questions, I pieced together the situation . . . to a point.

And I didn’t like it. I was in danger now as well. Father evidently felt it wise not to tell me. That part I do not get. What did Edwin know?

After having spoken to Al I did contact Edwin and he did not wish to say much for fear of spies. He implied that he was aware of his death before having sent Al and Helena my way, in other words he was not dead when they left. They had left that part out of their narrative. Edwin had hired a lawyer to bring them to me. Obviously, as automatons cannot book flights as independents . . . robots have no rights since they are simply machines.

I shook my head, as obviously those making laws had never met Father’s creations . . . or had they?

“Bertram? Did Father work for any government agencies?”

Bertram smiled as though encouraging this line of thinking, “Define government.”

“Gah! I take that as a no. So Father worked for a subversive group seeking to infiltrate the ruling body?”

“Yes.”

“Did he make more than two automatons with your abilities,” I held up my hand to forestall his answer, “and are they still functioning?”

“Very good, yes, they are.”

It was a good thing I had two weeks before my flight was to arrive because it took the entire two weeks to guess all the right questions to ask.

Turns out Father had made ten fully functional and self-motivating servants like Al and Bertram. Except their assignments were not to protect family, instead they were to act as spies, having been sold to high ranking officials in various governing bodies throughout earth. Two had been discovered and immobilized. But the other six were still relaying information back to Al who then sends the information to a supercomputer kept in a secret location unknown to any of the robotic spies.

So to be clear—Dad’s bots can communicate silently through the airwaves. Great! I can see why humans would not want such creatures to exist. Conversely, I can see how the military would lust after such technology. Man! I have no idea what I am supposed to do with this information.

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Part Two

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A LAWYER GREETED ME at the gates. “Hello, Detective Guthwolf? Alistair Guthwolf?”

He was a short stout little guy, with a stern demeanor. Thin blond hair and pink scalp gleamed in the yellow light of Earth. I have been to several planets in my line of work and they are all very similar . . . but the light of each is always startling at first. Earth at noonday was no less startling than Siendra or Pallantine. The air was clear and crisp with a cool refreshing breeze. It was spring; a wonderful time to visit any planet as far as I am concerned. Jaritzia and I had always planned our vacations based on spring . . . ah, why must her memory creep up on me like this?

I replied, “Yes, that’s me. You must represent Edwin, my brother?”

“Yes, yes, quite right my good man. Please, I have arranged a second car to collect your items. If you would come with me?”

He motioned towards two sleek navy blue hover-cars with tinted windows. It felt unwise, yet I could see no reason to remain the half hour it would take for my items to be brought forth. So I went.

We were taken to Edwin’s home, not to an office as I had supposed. Bertram was allowed to accompany me.

The house was crafted in the style of ancient England’s manor homes, from centuries past. But I knew that it was not that old, as father had built it after his own designs. He has holos of that as well. I only watched them once, as a boy when I chanced upon Father reviewing them himself one evening. My brother was only two years old at the time. It is odd growing up with a mere idea of a brother, one you never expect to know or have any great concern for. When the plans for the new com-link was announced it gave me a thrill for a moment to think I might get to speak to him, yet I had no faith in science. That is why it was so surprising that the same year my parents departed also happened to be the same year the com portal finally opened. I was not left a lone man without family!

Edwin, of course, never even knew of my existence. The first ship to return to Earth was the same ship which opened the com portal. So I was twenty-one and Edwin was fifty— again that time warp did a number on things. It is hard to conceive, but essentially those we communicate with through the portal are nearly the actual age they would be in real time were we on the same planet together. But in reality they are twenty years older . . . meaning people who want to know about their future can make a com call to a distant planet and ask for a readout of their lives. Some even have it in their wills that all their info is to be sent to such and such planet. It appears Edwin had a morbid fascination with his life and time of death and had done that very thing, indeed the last time I spoke to him before boarding the ship, was with the understanding by each of us that it would be our last communication. Of course, it's not exact . . . time has a way of twisting, bending and shifting.

I do wish he would have told me precisely what it was he wanted me to do once I got here.

The lawyer, whose name was Maxim Snerdly, had opened the home. I was expecting it to be moldy and dusty and all those things one thinks of when seeing an old stone manor which has been shut up for years. Yet, I was greeted by another of Edwin’s automatons. One dressed much like Helena, she wore a slim black skirt, which came to her knees and a very similar white blouse. Her hair was silver and her eyes were grey. She reminded me of Mother so much that tears sprang to my eyes.

She seemed to read my mood and hugged me warmly. “You must be our dear Alistair. How I have longed to meet you!”

I choked on the lump in my throat and merely nodded. How would it be to have the skill to craft your own mother? Your own friends?

The home was meticulously cared for, as clean as my home ever was, having been cared for by Bertram, and the nonhuman autobot Father had designed to perform menial labor.

Before I could ask, Mr. Snerdly introduced the housekeeper as Georgia.

“Georgia B,” she corrected with a downward glance at her shoes.

It is understood by those who know anything about concept creations such as cars or robots that each model gets its own name, generally beginning with the letter A. Meaning, Georgia was Edwin’s seventh creation, and then he had created Helena, pure perfection if ever I had seen it. The B meant he had gone back and reworked Georgia. I could see no flaws. Obviously, having worked the kinks out with Helena he could have gone back and redone each of his earlier versions had he a mind to. But this was not the puzzle I was sent for to solve.

Turning to Mr. Snerdly I demanded, “Alright, I‘m all ears. Tell me what ya got.”

He sighed and nodded before responding, “Very well, first I am required to read the will.”

It was long and technical, but essentially as Al said everything was left to me. The surprise was how much there was and its value. Edwin had not only begun production of automatons, but had three fully operational plants creating service bots for a variety of purposes. The estimated value was one billion credits! A number so staggering I could not even begin to take it in. Yes, Father had left me sufficiently wealthy, my work was hardly needed. But now . . . now my work was merely a hobby, it would seem.

Having voiced my opinion, Mr. Snerdly shook his head vigorously, “Not so. Your deductive reasoning is very much needed.”

He reminded me of the purpose for my visit. How could it have slipped my mind so quickly? Money. Money and power does that, makes a guy forget the things he values.

“So tell me the circumstances of Edwin’s death. I assume it has been investigated already?”

“No, sir it has yet to be reported.”

“What! When did he die?” I shouted.

“Two hours ago. His body will be found by yourself as you are guided to greet him, by his maid Georgia. You will inspect the scene first, obviously, and then will make the call to the authorities yourself.”

My stomach made a curious drop as I tried to comprehend how my brother had orchestrated his death and my part in solving it.

“Fine,” I replied with false bravado, “But tell me first; what part have you played in setting this up?”

“Me? I have merely insured that all was in legal working order—the transfer of power has been seamless, or will be.”

His words were odd, but I let them slide. “Anything else?”

“Only that he wants you to view his holo records in their entirety before making your final pronouncement. It will be told to authorities that you were called in by Edwin to investigate his murder. For that is what it is. In other words you are to tell the authorities the truth as you have experienced it, except for the fact that I was here. We will have a public reading of the will next week.”

With that, Maxim Snerdly left, just as Al and Helena arrived with my baggage.

I looked at Bertram in surprise and then said to Georgia, “Well, show me to my brother.”

Her gaze went to Helena, briefly, reflecting sorrow. I could almost swear I saw a tear glistening in Helena’s perfectly clear green eyes. We went up, the four robots and I.

He was old, but looked so peaceful. Helena looked for but a moment and left. Georgia glanced at Al and went after her. Al stood by the door with Bertram as though to record my actions—of course, to record my actions! No doubt the police would want proof that it was not I who had killed my billionaire brother.

I scanned the room, but saw nothing out of place. Though if something was missing I would never know it. I sat in the chair beside the bed and wept. I never had my brother truly in my life and somehow the lack struck me with a force I never imagined. Spent, I picked up the phone and called the police.

As I waited for their arrival, I questioned Al about Edwin’s activities before Al had left the planet.

Nothing out of the ordinary was learned. Edwin was a hermit all of his life; not completely, of course, he reveled in competing in the annual Science of Robotics Convention. That and going out on the town with Helena. Her grace on the dance floor had become legendary—indeed two photos on the wall showed Edwin and Helena in a loving embrace, her dress captured mid-swirl. One pic seemingly screamed they were lovers, the look in their eyes was so tender.

Looking at Edwin, I could see no cause of death. To a casual observer it appeared he had died in his sleep. The detective who arrived was of the same opinion.

He had greeted me briskly at the front door, “Detective Swanson. Where is he?”

I lead him back up. He looked about as equally clueless as I and then allowed the coroner to remove the body. Once that was done he turned to me. “Very well, what’s your story?”

I recounted it as I have to you, without the side details about scent and memories. I guess you could call it the dry version. We proceeded to explore the rest of the house together. The lab was of particular interest. Yet, no clues stood out.

He had an assistant view the distant obituary reports on neighboring planets, but they each varied enormously as to conclusions.

“How is that possible?” Detective Swanson shouted.

Seeing the lost look and fear in his assistant’s eyes I explained, “Until we make a conclusive determination the reports will be all over the place, this looking to the future is not precise. Based on our actions the reports can change. Even my brother Edwin did not know. The only thing he knew was that he had died too soon. He had not gotten the real reason either. If that ability existed then what would we need detectives for at all?”

They each nodded with relief on their faces, albeit for differing reasons. The holo’s from Georgia and each of the other robots were viewed.

I was taken off of the suspect list, but two visitors seen from Georgia's recorded memory bank caused me undue heartache.

Georgia had answered the door two weeks earlier and there, standing in that lovely yellow sunlight stood my Jaritzia! My exclamation turned into a coughing fit as I tried to hide my recognition. Should I tell? I was not yet sure. Surely they would learn she came from my own planet; Cobrium.

She came in and told Edwin that she needed him to view a holo. Acting as though they knew each other! Indeed no introductions were made at all. Was I being framed after all?

I chose to maintain my silence for the time being. The detective and his men left.

Al suggested, and Bertram concurred, that now would be the best time to view the holograms. The library was extensive and it appeared to be a daunting task, but having begun at volume one I was drawn in and lost track of time.

My brother was young, my parents were in many of the holo’s. Al was ever solicitous—attending to my father’s needs and then Edwin’s. I learned of a secret lab hidden beneath the house, my startled look was met by a ghostly smile from Al. Obviously, better answers would be found there.

I watched as Edwin painstakingly went through the steps to reproduce the same excellence which Father had achieved. Why had Father not simply shown Edwin how to craft his masterpieces? Then again, there is value in discovery and it did seem that Edwin had improved the craft by the time he created Helena—perhaps Father did know what he was doing.

Again Jaritzia was seen at two separate conventions; the second time speaking coyly with Edwin. The conversation was not captured and he rebuffed her advances. My blood was boiling. She had not fallen for me out as she had claimed. My pride had not seen past her praise for detective prowess. Indeed I had only been written up once in the Galactic Gazette—ah I see it now, my name was mentioned as being the son of pioneering roboticist, Winston Guthwolf.

I had allowed her in my home, un-supervised. Bertram had not notified me of anything suspicious.

“Bertram, did Jaritzia snoop about through Father’s things?”

“Yes.”

“Ah!” I screamed out of frustration. I knew it was not Bertram’s fault, Father had programmed him to be discrete. Too discrete. Was he not supposed to be protecting me? What about my emotions? I was still heartsick. I had thought she would be the one. The One.

“Show me,” I commanded tired of playing the guessing game.

Bertram removed a thin rectangular chip, which recorded holo’s of everything he viewed.

The device sits at the base of his skull the living flesh recedes and the chip slides out like a ticket one gets at a parking garage. Once removed the skin closes back over the opening knitting together seamlessly.

Jaritzia was overheard speaking to her superiors, as well as having found nothing of worth among my father’s journals and holo’s. Finally a lead! Her superior was Major Hanrahan of the Federated Army; known to be actively seeking an overthrow of the current ruling party: The United Collective.

I am in deep. Who was my Father? I asked the question again addressing Al.

“Your father was the man who sired you. He was a member of the Robotic Alliance Guild. He was . . .”

“Got it,” I interrupted, “So this Guild, how much power do they wield and where do their sympathies lie?”

Al glanced at Bertram, received an eye twitch and then replied, “We wield immense power and our sympathies rest with neither group. We wish to present a third cause.”

“No,” I groaned, I did not like politics, I DO NOT like politics.

“So how is any of this helping me to solve Edwin’s case? I think I need to have the autopsy report. Though I still suspect Jaritzia. Very well, let me see this secondary lab.”

Georgia announced dinner. Indeed my stomach growled as the door opened and the scent of chicken and herbs wafted into the room. I had been at it all day.

Helena joined me for dinner, Al served and Bertram stood at the door as always. Bertram did not eat, he preferred to receive nutrient IV injections nightly instead. I learned Al had initially been so wired, but Father had altered him right before he left. Al went out to dinner often with Edwin in his younger days, before Helena.

Helena inspired longing. Her eyes were so wide and green, so open and honest. She seemed to peer into my soul.

“Pardon my staring,” I said catching myself, once again, while we ate our raspberry sorbet.

She smiled sweetly. “Not a problem, Edwin was much the same. I rather enjoy the attention.”

She seemed to sigh.

"Tell me about him."

She smiled again and began from her earliest memories. I was done with my dessert and continued to listen with rapt attention. They were in love! Truly in love. Who would have thought one could design one’s own sweetheart?

Eventually she acknowledged we were done and guided me towards the sliding door which lead to the elevator down to the lab. A lab not noted in the designs of the home.

I learned that Father had indeed built the home without the lab and added it in later using robotic diggers to clear out the soil, rock and debris. Again robotics installed the cement base and walls.

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IT WAS THERE THAT YOU greeted me. In your home away from home as it were. A seeming mere boy of twelve. Helena, your mother apparently, introduced you as her son. Do you recall?

“Alistair, this is Ivan Guthwolf—my son.” Helena lovingly hugged you once.

I could imagine she had missed you, having been away for two months. Well a human mother would, and she seemed to have such emotions. You in turn smiled happily and returned her embrace.

Seeing my puzzlement, Helena took me to the closets containing each model of your existence. Edwin had crafted a baby which could grow two inches, in preparation he had crafted a new model. He had three more units already made in preparation for your maturing to adulthood. It was mind blowing; I was stunned.

“What is this?” I finally asked.

“This is where the future lies. This is your past. This is that which our enemies seek and which must never be revealed,” Al replied.

Bertram nodded in support of the statement.

A terrible thought began to percolate, unimaginable and yet it began to make sense. Now fear warred with wonder.

“My home, who is watching over it? What if . . .”

Bertram placed a comforting arm around me. “Sir, it is alright. We have ensured that all is secure. Never would we have left the home abandoned. And your assumptions are correct, a similar lab sits beneath your home in Cobrium.”

I felt myself freeze. Bertram opened a hole in my chest, no sensations could be felt, but I was aware of his movements. He inserted a wafer thin chip into a slot. Suddenly knowledge and awareness of a vast network opened up! Communication was instantaneous. I was one with—my family. Such an odd word.

Peace settled over my soul. Yes, I am a robot and I have a soul. Father has created over ten thousand creations, one thousand of whom have the ability to in turn create more. Both Al and Bertram being chief among them. Edwin had been meant to replace Father, but he had a glitch. And, well—Father could not deactivate him. Edwin was his son—like me.

As for solving Edwin’s demise . . . that was a ruse. The mystery was truly to get me to seek the truth about my own heritage. Edwin had deactivated himself, unable to cope with his lack of humanity. He, like me, had truly believed he was human and the knowledge was too much for him to bear. Still his concern for you, Ivan, caused him to send for me.

And that is my conclusion, case closed.

BROTHER BOB

by Kevin M. Penelerick

The plane ride lasted close to six hours. The battery on my phone gave out halfway through as I’d spent most of the flight binging ‘House of Cards’. The cord in my car was frayed to the point where you had to hold it just right to get it to charge. I figured I’d plug it in when I got home, which is why I didn’t get my wife’s messages until it was too late. Though I don’t think it would’ve helped had I received them any sooner.

As I approached my neighborhood, I could see the sirens from two blocks away. The streets were blocked by fire engines and at least a dozen cop cars. The street, Independence Dr., was my street. I turned the radio on and flipped over to the local news as I approached, picking up what I assumed was a report on what was going on.

“...did not return fire. The woman had been shouting out the window just moments before she appeared with the gun. No one appears to have been injured.”

I drove past three news trucks and glanced between them, trying to get a glimpse down the street. It wouldn’t be the first time there had been an incident on Independence Dr. We had two senators and a Supreme Court Justice living in our neighborhood. Senator Rococo from New Jersey had a sex scandal every other month, which usually meant media trucks camped out for a week or more at a time. My guess was his wife had finally had it and decided to take his mistress hostage.

When I last spoke to my wife, Ilene, before catching my plane in Los Angeles, she’d been getting the kids ready to go to the zoo. I hope she’d made it home before the latest round of madness, Tommy Jr. needed his naps on time, or it wasn’t pleasant.

I rounded the media trucks and saw a group of neighbors standing on the corner. Housewives and their kids mostly, I didn’t see my own amongst them, but they’d know what was going on, they always did.

A reporter was interviewing one of them. On my radio, the newscast continued.

“Police have no idea what drove the suburban housewife to take such drastic actions. She has refused to communicate with a negotiator and opened fire when a deputy approached her yard. At present, the police are not returning fire for fear of killing the abducted animal or one of the women’s two children. For viewers watching on their TV’s or online, we’re about to show the dramatic footage taken earlier today as the woman made her getaway, backing up traffic for miles as she drove down I-66, with over a dozen police cruisers in pursuit. The animal had its head sticking out her open moon roof, eye’s closed, just like a dog out for a drive. The stolen animal, Robert the Giraffe, has been at the National Zoo since 2013. A gift from the federal government, rumored to have been rescued from war torn Rukrazistan, during the humanitarian crisis of 2012.”

I clicked off my radio as I pulled to a stop at the curb and opened my door. The woman being interviewed, Mrs. Crenshaw from three doors down, turned and pointed in my direction, her eyes going wide. Shouts of “There he is!” rang out and I suddenly wished I had stayed in my car. Before I knew it, men with cameras ran at me from all directions, followed closely by sharply dressed reporters.

“Mr. Watson!” the reporters shouted as they drew nearer.

I glanced around. People everywhere were looking at me including a group of six or seven cops.

What the hell is going on?

The reporters surrounded me, shouting questions in a thunderous cacophony.

“Why’d she do it?”

“Is she unstable?”

“Is she going to kill the giraffe?”

“Is your family part of a terrorist sleeper cell?”

“What will you do once she’s in prison?”

I pushed back with my hands. What the hell was going on here?

“Leave me alone,” I shouted. “I’m just trying to get home.”

Bright lights from the cameras flashed, causing me to blink and look like a drunken frat boy at 2am. I turned away, trying to get back to my car but found my way blocked by the crowd of reporters. Someone grabbed my arm as the barrage of questions continued.

“Is this the first time she’s taken an animal captive?”

“Your neighbors say pets have been going missing in the neighborhood for weeks!”

What?

My head spun as my arm was jerked and I found myself hurried away from the ravenous pack of reporters. I looked at who was pulling me along by my arm and discovered it was a large black man in the blues of the Arlington County Police Department.

A shout from the crowd caused a new eruption of noise as people pointed away to the east. I looked where they were pointing to see a stream of military Jeeps and black Escalades rolling down the street toward us.

“C’mon,” the cop barked, tugging harder and moving me to the somewhat open space behind the police barricade where three more officers stood, guns drawn. They were pointing them at the ground, but their eyes indicated they were ready to point them at me should I make any sudden moves.

Officer Lincoln as I would come to know him in the coming minutes brought me to a stop and shouted at me. “Are you Thomas Watson?”

“Y-yes,” I stammered.

“Is your wife Ilene Watson?”

“Yes. What’s—”

“Come with me. The chief has some questions for you.”

He again yanked me by the arm, the three officers with their guns out followed closely behind. I found myself ushered into a command tent where more officers stared at the screen of a tablet, watching drone footage of... wait, that was my house! I could see my yard, my wife’s Suburban, the moon roof open and there behind them, the large tall windows that encased the A-frame entry of our open ceilinged living room and standing right in the middle was a giraffe. Robert I’m guessing.

“What the hell,” I muttered.

“Sir,” Officer Lincoln spoke to the man with the chief’s hat. “This is the woman’s husband.”

The chief’s eyes glared up from the screen to look at me. He studied my face a moment, his brows scrunching together.

“What is your wife up to? Are you involved?”

Outside, the screech of multiple vehicles coming to a halt sounded, followed by shouts and commands.

The chief looked toward the flap. “What the hell’s going on out there?”

“The feds, Sir,” Officer Lincoln answered.

“The feds? Shit. Looks like we’re about to be relieved of duty.” The chief bit his lip. “See what you can find out from the husband. I’ll see if I can stall them long enough for us to get something we can use.” He stormed from the tent, barking orders at his officers.

I turned to Officer Lincoln. “What’s going on here?”

He tilted his head and took a breath. “You don’t know? Where have you been?”

“30,000 feet. I just got back from the west coast. My phone died on the plane and my charger’s broken.” I glanced down at the tablet screen. “Why is there a giraffe in my house?”

“Your wife stole it.”

My mouth fell open. “Huh?”

I shook my head. “She stole a giraffe? From where...” I shook my head again and spoke out loud, more to myself than to anyone else in the room. “She was taking the kids to the zoo!”

“That’s correct, Sir. She stole it from the National Zoo in Woodley Park.”

“What? How? Why?”

Officer Lincoln picked up another tablet from the makeshift command table. “Those are the questions we are trying to answer as well. Well, we know how, we just don’t know why or what she’s planning.”

He pulled up a video and hit play. It was security footage from the zoo. There was my wife, Tommy Jr. And our newest addition, little Abigail in her baby buggy, strolling through the zoo. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary. They walked passed a sign that said Giraffe’s with an arrow. The footage stopped there for a moment.

“The cameras in the giraffe area we’re down, something had chewed through the wires,” Officer Lincoln said.

The next clip started from the same angle. The time stamp showing it was twenty-two minutes later. My wife ran by, pushing the baby and tugging Tommy along behind her in a hurry. Various cameras followed them as they made their way from the zoo. They disappeared into the parking lot.

Another video started. This time showing her pulling the Suburban into the back parking lot, driving over the curb and onto the lawn.

My eyes widened.

She parked, got out, shouted something to Tommy and ran off toward the zoo.

I was dumbfounded. She just left our kids in the car. All by themselves. And the car was still running.

Tommy crawled out of the back seat, reached up and pushed a button which opened the large moon roof, followed a moment later by the one that opened the rear hatch.

The clip ended and a new one started. This time, showing my wife running through the zoo in a different part than before.

“The camera’s about to cut out again.”

Officer Lincoln was correct. One moment my wife ran down the path to the right, the video flashed and went dark. When the next clip started, it was from a different angle and showed that two minutes had passed. All I saw for a moment were people diving out of the way, then I saw the body of the giraffe its long legs galloping by, but no sign of Ilene.

The camera switched to a higher viewpoint near the rear entrance. I could make out our Suburban in the distance and there came the giraffe and what was that? On its back, long black hair bouncing?

“Ilene?” 

I watched as her and the giraffe stormed passed startled onlookers to the Suburban. When they got there, she slid off its back and it... it bent down, climbed in and stuck its head out the open moon roof. My wife closed the back, got in and tore out of the parking lot.

It dawned on me that she had made our son an accomplice to giraffe napping or whatever kind of crime they were going to call this.

The next clip to start playing was news footage showing my wife, kids and evidently Robert the Giraffe driving down I-66. A line of police vehicles in pursuit. I’d see on the news later, my wife leaning out the front window with my AR-15, shouting and shooting warning shots at an approaching police officer.

The tent flap flew open behind us. A man in camo, with Colonel stripes stepped in, followed by men in suits and dark mirrored glasses. The man barked orders and the men in suits escorted the other police officers out of the tent until it was just myself and Officer Lincoln remaining.

––––––––

“MY NAME IS COLONEL Rodale. Mr. Watson, you need to tell us everything you know about your wife’s plans. What’s she up to?” The colonel’s mustache twitched as he waited.

I stared at him wide-eyed.

“Are you involved in this?” He bent over the small table and glared at me.

“What? No, sir,” I blubbered. “I just returned home from Los Angeles. The last time I spoke to my wife was this morning.”

“And did she tell you about her plans to abduct the giraffe?”

“No, she was just taking the kids to the zoo. My wife would never...” I glanced down at the tablet which showed that clearly my wife had and shut up.

“You know I will listen to every phone call you’ve ever made for the last ten years, right? Read every text message?” He raised an eyebrow at me. “Lying to me won’t work. In fact, teams have already started.”

Oh, god. That was going to be embarrassing.

“The last time I spoke to her was this morning. She was taking the kids to the zoo. That’s all I know. I can’t explain all—” I waved my hand into the air as I attempted to illustrate the point.

“Col. Rodale, Sir.” A beefy blonde man held up the tablet with the drone footage of my living room. “She appears to be doing something.”

“What?”

“She’s talking to the giraffe.”

“Let me see that!” He didn’t wait for the man to hand it to him, just reached over and grabbed the tablet.

We all were able to see the screen. The giraffe’s long neck was bent down, my wife’s hands cupped around the side of its face. Her lips moved. We couldn’t hear what she said, but I recognized the movement her lips made as she finished speaking. “I love you.”

My eyes jumped to the colonel’s face to see if he or anyone else had caught it. Sooner or later some linguist reviewing  the footage would see it.

“She just told the giraffe she loved it,” I told them. My stomach churning.

The colonel glanced up, the right side of his mustache trembling, eye’s narrowing. He looked back down and tilted the screen away, but before he did, I swear I saw the giraffe’s lips moving.

“Get them out of here,” the colonel barked to the men in the suits.

“Wait,” I cried. “She’s my wife. Please. I want to know what’s going on just as much as you do.”

“You don’t have the proper clearance to know.”

“Please, sir?”

He continued staring at the screen, holding a finger up to hush me, but telling the men who rushed to remove me to wait just a moment.

“Can you read your wife’s lips?”

“Yeah, sometimes.” That was mostly a lie, but I’d say anything to be able to stay there and find out what was going on. “She has a beautiful smile, so when I’m with her, I watch for it. I watch her mouth move.”

He glared then turned the screen back so I could see it. “What’s she saying now?”

I watched as she resumed speaking to the giraffe.

“Um, let’s see.” I studied her lips. Oh, Ilene, what have you gotten us into!

“Something about a part. Now the giraffe’s talking again.” The reality of that statement sunk in as I waited to see my wife’s lips move some more. While I could kinda make out what she was saying, I had no idea what the giraffe might be telling her.

“She’s nodding.” Everyone was watching that I realized and my cheeks reddened. “It’ll be ready soon.”

She ran from the front living room. In the background I saw little Abigail bundled up in her car seat, sitting on the couch and... I swallowed a lump, there was Tommy Jr. approaching the giraffe.

Colonel Rodale spoke to his men. “We’re going to need to move fast. Prepare the team. She’s getting ready to move.”

His words slowly sank in as I watched my son stand before the giraffe, holding his hand up in a waving gesture. The giraffe bent and licked my son’s forehead. Tommy laughed and spun around. The giraffe raised it’s head and looked out the window, staring directly at the drone.

A radio on the colonel’s belt squawked. “Number Sixteen reporting Sir, I’ve got him in my sites. Should I take the shot?”

The colonel turned to one of his men. “Shut down the media.”

The man bolted from the room.

“Negative,” the colonel said into his radio. “We’ve got enemy eyes on the prize. We need to shut them down before we shut him down. Keep him targeted, but wait for further orders.”

The colonel obviously knew more than I did about what was going on here.

“Col. Rodale,” I spoke, “Is my wife in danger? What’s up with that giraffe, is it really speaking to my wife?”

The occasional twitching of his mustache was all I got in response.

I asked again. “Is my wife in danger?”

His radio squawked. “Number Twenty-Two reporting Sir, the Watson woman is in the backyard. She appears to be video chatting with someone and opening the side of their hot tub.”

The colonel swiped on the screen selected a button marked twenty-two and the screen changed. A smaller image appeared. My wife knelt beside our hot tub, removing the side panel with one hand and holding her phone in the other. She got the panel off, then looked directly at the phone as she spoke. I saw her lips again say, ‘I love you’ then she hung up the phone and stuck it in her pocket.

My mind reeled. Why was my wife telling people that weren’t me, including a giraffe she stole, I love you.

We watched the screen as she reached into the guts of the hot tub I’d just bought last fall and yanked something free. She pulled out what looked like a circuit board or some such, torn wires and all. The camera swayed and a red dot appeared on the back of her head.

The colonel’s radio crackled.

“This is twenty-two. Should I take the shot?”

“What?” I cried.

The colonel ignored me and spoke to one of his men in the tent while holding the radio to his mouth, ready to respond. “Are there any enemy eyes on the backyard?”

The man shook his head, grabbed his radio and started rattling off commands.

“You can’t shoot my wife!”

The colonel shot me a don’t tell me what I can’t do look, betrayed by his twitching mustache, which now included most of his cheek as well, the whole thing bobbing back and forth involuntarily. He clenched his teeth, trying to keep it all from moving.

“Your wife has stolen government property,” the colonel stated.

“When did that become a capital offense?” I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

“When—” he looked at me, about to say something, then stopped himself.

On the screen, my wife ran back into the house. The red dot trailing after her.

“Twenty-Two standing down. Target is out of sight.”

A moment later the colonel’s radio squawked again. “This is One sir, she’s back in the living room.”

The colonel swiped up and the drone footage reappeared, showing my wife rushing back into the living room, some piece of our hot tub in her hand.

It was then I noticed the dishwasher. It was in the living room behind the giraffe. Our microwave sat atop it and there were wires running everywhere.

We watched in silence as she connected wires from the hot tub circuit board to the dishwasher wires. The giraffe bent down next to her, watching, it’s lips moving.

The colonel shouted. “Has the media been shut down?” 

Tall, blonde and obedient spoke into his radio.

We all watched and waited. I saw my wife push power on the microwave and it turned on, the light illuminating the cooking chamber. It was empty. She pulled her cell phone out of her pocket and started speaking into it again.

The image on the tablet flashed once turning everything white, like a giant camera going off. It was like my house, kids, wife and the giraffe included had disappeared for a moment.

My wife picked up Abigail from the couch, walked over to stand next to the giraffe with little Tommy Jr., then squatted down, still talking into her phone.

The image on the screen flashed twice.

She had Tommy squeezed in close and spoke to the giraffe. “Get down here.” Her lips said.

The giraffe lowered its head.

“Media is down,” The colonel’s radio blasted.

The colonel depressed the talk button.

“We love you,” I saw my wife’s mouth move. Was she talking to me? I suddenly wished I had my cell phone, though with a dead battery it wasn’t going to do me much good.

“Kill that bastard!”

The screen flashed three times. A red dot appeared on the giraffe’s forehead right before the third one. After the final flash we all had to blink to get our eye’s to adjust. On the screen, my house was gone. There was a big hole in the ground, brown dirt, surrounded by the green grass of my manicured lawn and part of my white planked fence.

They were gone.

“What just happened?” I spun to face the colonel. “Where is my wife? What did you do?” I stepped toward him.

His radio was alive with chatter as soldiers reported in. ‘Sixteen. Target is gone.’ ‘Fourteen. What just happened?’ ‘Twelve. Um, Sir?”

Colonel Rodale ignored my question and spoke into his radio. “Did you take the shot sixteen?”

“Sixteen. Negative, Sir. The flashes blinded my scope and the target disappeared before I could get a clear shot.”

“Dammit!” The colonel spat, the twitching from his mustache stopped as rage boiled over. He spoke to one of his men. “That damn giraffe had been paying attention while it lived in the lab. Somehow it knew how to build the experimental Nexus Device. They’re gone. Let’s wrap this up.”

The men in suits issued commands into their radio and left the tent. A moment later it was just Colonel Rodale, Officer Lincoln and myself.

“Where is my wife?”

Colonel Rodale spun in my direction, seeming to remember I was there. “Gone!” he barked. “Along with a top secret government asset.”

“A what? He was a giraffe at the national zoo!”

The colonel scowled at me. His mustache twitching again.

A vehicle screeched to a stop outside the tent, one of the dark-suited men stepped in and nodded at the colonel. He turned to us and spoke.

“This never happened.”

He turned and left the tent.

My jaw hung open.

We heard the vehicle pull away and I turned to Officer Lincoln to find his face mostly the same as mine, dumbstruck.

A few long heartbeats later, the chief re-entered the tent. From outside, other officers began removing the canvas from the tent and breaking down the poles.

“Officer Lincoln, assist your fellow officers with cordoning the area around the sink hole.”

Officer Lincoln stared at his boss with a furrowed brow. “The sink hole sir?”

“Yes. The sink hole.” He pointed at the tablet where the drone was now circling the large hole where my house used to be.

“But...”

“Now. Officer Lincoln.”

The large black man glanced at me and shook his head, then left.

The tent and poles were completely torn down from around us. Officers were now picking up the tablets and flipping the table over, folding its legs.

“Mr. Watson,” the chief turned to me. “In light of your tragic loss, no charges will be filed against you.”

“Ch-charges?” I stumbled over the words as my brain tried to follow what he was saying.

“A police report will be available in a couple of days.” He handed me a card for their Incident Follow-up Team. “You’ll need it for your insurance company.”

My head spun. The whole world seemed to be spinning. All around me officers and firemen were in motion. Moving barricades directly around the hole that was my home. Ushering people away, telling them to return to their homes. The black Escalades and military vehicles were all gone.

The police chief turned and walked away. The fire trucks pulled out. The crowds, even the media, almost everyone seemed to disappear just about as quickly as I’d seen my house, my kids and my wife do.

I found myself standing in the middle of the street, staring down Independence Drive to the cordoned off hole a half block away that used to be my home. I closed my eyes picturing what my house used to look like on the tablet screen right before it vanished. I remembered the flashing lights, my wife’s face, her saying, ‘I love you’ to her phone.

My eye’s shot open! My phone!

I ran to my car, jumped in and started it. I grabbed the frayed white cable, damn generic piece of crap, and plugged it into my phone.

As usual, I had to wiggle it, which caused my phone to turn on, but then a moment later it died all over again. I pushed the little clip in, lifted it ever so slightly with my pointer finger and took in slow deep breaths.

My phone powered up. I watched and waited as it searched for a signal, found it and began the little spinning wheel at the top which meant it was downloading data.

My mind raced, my stomach churned and my heart ached until finally the ding of messages began to flow in.

9:47 am I hope you have a safe flight honey! I’ve got Abby and Tommy Jr. Loaded up. We’re off to a day at the zoo! Can’t wait for you to get home! I miss you! Xoxo.

10:32 a.m. A picture of my wife and kids taking a group selfie at the entrance of the national zoo.

10:55 a.m. Tommy loved watching the Pandas eating sugar cane. He said it reminded him of the way you eat beef jerky. So cute!

11:20 a.m. Tommy’s starving. Taking them to the Rainforest Cafe for lunch. That reminds me, I’m making a pot roast when I get home this afternoon. I’m sure you’ll be starving when you get back. Xo

11:42 a.m. A picture of my daughter’s cheeks covered in the red of pasta sauce, grinning from ear to ear. I smiled a moment before the pain of loss hit and I started to sob.

12:05 p.m. All cleaned up and heading off to see the monkeys with your monkeys!

1:04 p.m. OMG!

1:07 p.m. I don’t even know how to explain what just happened. I found Bobby!!

––––––––

MY MIND REELED. BOBBY was her older brother. He’d gone away to college when Ilene was just starting middle school. He’d gone missing during his freshmen year. No witnesses, no trace. It was an unsolved cold case and had left a deep hole in her families lives. This thought made me glance down the street at the deep hole in my own life.

Ding! More messages came through on my phone.

––––––––

12:36 P.M. OUT OF ORDER, another picture came through. This time of little Tommy with wide eye’s looking at a huge spider in a glass case.

––––––––

1:12 P.M. HE’S BEING held against his will, has been all along!

––––––––

MY MOUTH FELL OPEN as I stared at my phone waiting for more messages to come through. For a moment nothing happened as the little wheel spun. Then a video icon popped up. I hit the play triangle and waited.

––––––––

1:16 P.M. MY WIFE’S face appeared, the camera bouncing all around. She rushed through the zoo, pushing the babies stroller and yelling at Tommy Jr. To keep up. “Honey, this is incredible! I found him! I found my brother!” She turned a corner, dodging around a group of people and then continued. “He signed up for some sort of clinical trial to make money while we was away at college. On of those things where they hook you up to a machine or something and you tell them how it makes you feel, except this one was a government experiment.”

She glanced away. “C’mon Tommy. We’ve got to hurry.”

“But,” the small voice of his son called from off camera.

The view swung around and I could see my young son, his cheeks were flushed, obviously upset. “You said we could go see the Elly-Fants!”

Ilene bent down and held out her hand to our son. “Yes, I did honey. And I promise to bring you back someday and show them to you, but right now we’ve gotta go get the car so we can bring your uncle Bobby home.”

Tommy sniffled. “The talking giraffe?”

“That’s right honey. We don’t have a lot time. We have to get the car and get him right now.”

Tommy sniffed again, then said, “Ok.”

“Now smile and say bye to daddy!” She wiggled the phone.

Tommy stared right at it with the overly big smile of a child trying to do what he was told and said, “Bye, daddy!”

––––––––

1:34 P.M. THE NEXT message to come in made my stomach sink. They were driving down the road. Ilene held her phone in one hand and drove with the other, her window was down, hair flapping in the breeze. Directly behind her, the large body of the giraffe, with its heads out the moon roof was clearly visible, my children squished in their seats to either side of it.

“Sorry honey,” she said to me. “It’s been a crazy afternoon. We’re on our way home now. I’m trying to keep you updated on what’s been going on so it’s not a complete shock when you get home. They’ve been keeping Bobby captive all these years. He signed up for some sort of experiment they were running to connect the minds of humans with different animals to see if we could communicate, but something went wrong. It transferred their brains and they couldn’t figure out how to reverse it. Crazy, huh?”

She looked to her side mirror a moment, biting her lip. She brushed her dark hair from her eyes and when she looked back at the camera her face was trembling.

“They didn’t know what to do with him. They put his human body in an induced coma to try and keep it from hurting itself, but it ended up dying. They experimented on him for a while and then just left him locked up in the lab when they realized they couldn’t reverse it. They were doing all sorts of crazy experiments there.”

Her eyes darted away again. “Honey, I know you’ll be tired when you get off your flight, but would you mind stopping by the hardware store and seeing if they have any Acacia trees? I don’t know if we’ll have anything for Bobby to eat since we’ve never gotten around to putting in the landscaping we’ve been talking about.”

Car horns were now honking all around her as she merged with traffic.

“Anyway,” her eyes constantly darted from the phone to her mirror. “One day this colonel came into the lab and offered Bobby a chance to get out. They wanted him to be a spy. Evidently, a Russian Dignitary really liked giraffes and a couple of times a week he’d go hang out at the zoo and watch them. Others, known Russian operatives, would join him and the government really wanted to know what they were saying. They taught him Russian and—

ROOOO! ROOO! A siren blasted in the background.

Ilene’s face went white. All of a sudden, in her window, the face of the giraffe appeared, its long neck stretching.

“We’ve got trouble,” the giraffe said.

My mouth fell open. The giraffe really talked! More sirens joined in and the video ended abruptly. My heart thundered in my chest.

––––––––

2:22 P.M. A NEW VIDEO showed the inside of my living room. The giraffe standing there just as I had seen him in the drone footage. My wife’s face appeared.

“Hi, honey. You’ll be landing soon and hopefully getting these messages. There’s no need to stop and get Bobby food at the store. He says there’ll be plenty to eat when we get where we’re going, but please hurry. I’ve got to get some things together for Bobby, but while I’m doing that, he’s gonna fill you in. I love you!”

I watched her lips say those words and then she darted away. All I could see was the bulk of the giraffe’s body until Bobby’s head drifted down into view.

“Um, hello,” he said, his lips flopping around something like a horses and then he turned so that one eye could see the camera. “I’m not really sure how these things work, but uh, hopefully you can hear me. Okay, so I’m your brother-in-law, Bobby, but I guess you know that. It’s nice to meet you. Ilene told me all about you on the drive here from the zoo. You sound like a good husband. I’m sorry if I’ve kinda turned things upside down. When I saw Ilene walk by my cage at the zoo I was just as surprised as she was about to be. I’d been there about three years and never seen anyone I’d recognized and even if I had, they told me if I ever talked to anyone they’d kill me. But when I saw her, I knew I’d found my one and only chance.”

To the side of the screen I saw Ilene pulling our dishwasher from the kitchen into the living room. She’d yanked it right out from under the counter. I wanted to stop and ask them what she was doing, knowing it was both impossible and also already kinda knowing what she was doing based on how things ended.

Bobby continued. “When her and the kids came walking by, my heart started pounding. Luckily no one else was about, so I just blurted out her name. She stopped and looked around, I waited a moment and said it again.”

Ilene, who was in the background yanking wires out of an alarm clock, stopped and turned to look at Bobby and the camera. “It scared the beejeesus out of me!”

The giraffe made some sort of huffing sound. Was that laughter?

“Yeah, she nearly jumped out of her skin when I said, ‘It’s me Bobby.’.”

I caught sight of Ilene as she stopped what she was doing and glanced out the front window, her expression one of alarm. She disappeared a moment, then came back holding my AR-15.

“The cops are coming,” she shouted at Bobby. He rose up and turned away to look out the window. Ilene rushed over to the phone, staring away, but talking to me. “I’m sorry honey, things may get out of hand. I didn’t want this to happen, but after what they did to my Bobby, I can’t just sit by and let them take him again.”

In the quiet of my car, power cord held just right, I cried out, “No!” as she hefted the rifle and reached up hitting the stop button on her phone. The video ended and tears streamed down my face.

My wife had just opened fire on the police.

A moment later a text popped up on the screen.

2:47 p.m. “I’ll send more soon. Tommy wants to say goodbye.”

“Goodbye?” My heart rose up in my throat with great heaving sobs just as another short video came through. This one of our son, Tommy Jr. He didn’t know many words. His face was all smiles.

“Hi Daddy-Boo!” That’s what he called me whenever we video messaged because I liked to disappear off camera and then pop back up peek-a-boo style. “Momma says were going to have to go bye-bye now with Uncle Bobby. He’s a grraff! I lobe you!” He ducked off camera and came back up giggling. Despite the tears and heartache, I laughed. I’d watch this video a hundred times before the government somehow triggered my phone to reset itself erasing everything.

The video ended there and for a few minutes, nothing more. Then, the face of the giraffe appeared on the preview icon of a new and long video. I hit play.

3:02 p.m. “I’m really sorry about all this Mr. Watson. I thought we’d be able to get away from the zoo without being noticed. I’d chewed through the security camera wires in my unit and stolen a set of keys ages ago, just in case an opportunity presented itself.”

My wife appeared next to him, holding up something that looked like a circuit board. “Is this what we need?”

Bobby shook his head. “No. We need one with three transistors.”

“Ok, I’ll keep looking.” She glanced at the camera, “Hi, honey!” then darted off.

“You’re probably wondering what’s going on,” Bobby said, looking directly at the camera. “I can only imagine how all this has sounded so far, but, it’s about to get stranger. After the experiment that transferred my mind inside this body, they kept me locked up in a lab where they were doing all these other experiments. I’d planned to go to school for physics, so I found it all very interesting. I watched. I listened and even though this brain is tiny, I remembered.”

If I weren’t listening to a giraffe talking, I’d never have believed anything he said. What came next was exactly as he had said it would be, even stranger.

“They were working on all sorts of projects. Interstellar transportation, matter transference, cross-breeding of species, they even tried to get me involved in that one, but that’s a story for another time.” He made that huffing sound again. “Anyway, they were also working on one for trans-dimensional travel. It turns out to be quite a bit simpler than anyone could imagine, but because of that, the scientists decided to keep it a secret. If everyone knew how easy it was, the world would fall into chaos.”

Ilene appeared in the background, hefting the microwave and setting it atop the dishwasher. She had the back panel off and held a wire in her hand.

“Was it the green wire or the black wire?” She called out to Bobby.

He glanced away. “Green to black, then black to green.”

Ilene stared into the electronics a moment then called back. “Ok, got it.”

Bobby returned, but before he could continue, Tommy Jr. Cried out.

“Momma. Army trucks!”

I saw her rush over to the window and stare out with wide eyes. She came over and stood in front of Bobby. I couldn’t see what they were doing as she stood facing him, blocking the camera but I could hear her and knew that at that very moment, I’d been standing in the tent with Officer Lincoln and Col. Rodale.”

“We’re going to get you to safety,” she said, followed by, “I love you.”

She reached behind her, grabbed the phone and the video ended. Thankfully, another video had already loaded, showing a shaky close-up of my wife’s face. I hit play.

3:14 p.m. She was walking out the glass sliders at the back of the house, onto our porch.

“Hi, honey. I know this is all really crazy. You’ve probably landed by now and hopefully been getting my messages. I tried calling, but it went straight to voicemail. Did you forget to charge your phone again? If there’s any way you can get to us, we’re gonna be leaving soon.” She knelt down and pulled a screwdriver from her pocket and removed the panel from the side of the hot tub and began fishing around.

I knew at that moment a sniper had his sights trained on my wife.

“I’ve just gotta get one more part and then this thing Bobby’s been telling me how to make will transport us to somewhere safe.”

She yanked something free and looked directly at the camera. “I’m sorry, honey. I hope you can understand. It’s my brother, Bobby.”

The final message she had been sending before they disappeared never came through.

SEEDS OF THE DEAD

An Excerpt from the Novel

by Andy Kumpon

A dusty plot of land in the middle of nowhere—a depressing sight to behold as one could appreciate that its wasted potential for beauty—ravaged by poverty and drought—had long lead to this destruction of the American Dream. Rows of withered corn stalks laid broken and dying on the cracked soil all-thirsting for a smattering of rain. A lone farmer muttered obscenities as he nailed a foreclosure sign on his dilapidated gate. Hard lines on his otherwise youthful face bespoke a life of stress and worry. Near-featherless chickens, malnourished with neglect, pecked at the barren ground near his feet. Behind him in the distance sat the skeletal structure of an ancestral farmhouse like a ghost in ruins.

A low rumbling sound distracted the farmer—he glanced up toward the road just as his lead hammer missed the mark and smashed the tip of his thumb to a bloody pulp. “Ahhhh—shit!” He grunted as the heavy hammer fell to the ground and struck the tip of his tattered boot, crushing his big toe within. He hopped on one foot in anguish as the chickens scattered under his feet while flapping their naked wings.

The distant rumbling soon became a convoy of ominous black semi-trucks. One by one, they rolled past the farmer as his eyes gleamed with hatred. The cabs and trailers adorned no markings or logos and reflected only a clean, black metallic shine. “You bastards put me out of house and home, but I’ll be back, I promise you that, I’ll be back!” the farmer shouted, waving an angry fist with his uninjured hand.

As the last of the fleet passed him by from the opposite direction, another vehicle approached. The farmer squinted, unable to discern more than a shiny, glistening grill in the diffuse sunlight. After a minute, a black Escalade glided abreast of the farmer. He could not make out anything in the tinted windows except his ragged reflection. Seconds passed before he summoned his courage and retrieved the lead hammer at his feet, raising it defiantly.

“Well, show yourselves, God-Damn cowards!”

The passenger window powered down, and the blood drained from the farmer’s face. “Oh, I didn’t mean anything,” he sputtered, dropping the hammer, raising his hands in supplication. “I’ll leave! I will! And I’ll give you no hassle whatsoever,” he vowed, stumbling backward. “Oh God, man!” he pleaded. “You can’t possibly want to shoot me over this!”

A gun barrel recoiled twice in the open window, its report muffled by a silencer. The farmer clutched his belly as two distinct holes in his undershirt stained the cotton fabric red. He dropped to his knees and slammed hard on his back, gasping to retrieve the air hissing from his lungs. The dying man heard the Escalade’s door opening, followed by the click-clacking of heeltaps on the pavement. A pair of oxford dress shoes leisurely approached his fading eyesight.

“Your chickens will dine well tonight,” said the voice above the oxfords.

Finally, in graying vision, the farmer saw his starving chickens gathered about his face. They pecked at the moist orifices, as they would peck maggots off any rotting carcass.

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MOONSTAR LABORATORIES was a sight to behold. Dominating a sprawling industrial park in the suburbs outside a major metropolis, its eclectic layout comprised dozens of pyramidal structures of laminated glass and carbon steel, resembling space-age, industrial greenhouses. Most of them were joined to sterile white buildings in the bland, architectural design of any office complex defining corporate America. The landscaping was immaculate, featuring perfectly trimmed hedges and grass so green it might be mistaken for artificial turf.

The interiors were even more elaborate—laboratories filled with the best cutting—edge equipment money can buy. Wall to wall stainless steel tables and countertops lined the laboratories. The smell of astringent and bleach wafted through the air.

Peter Malik held a black and white lab rat in his steady hand as he studied it closely. Its tail was curled gently around his wrist as he focused his hazel eyes on the passive rodent’s admirable girth. Peter’s white lab coat was pristine with a black letter M embroidered over the left breast pocket. Everything about Peter was pressed and clean—he took pride in his appearance—befitting a profession held in high esteem. On his left wrist was displayed the latest fruits of his labor, a brand new Suunto Core watch. It caught the attention of the rodent, who nosed the glittering metal, sniffing it with curiosity.

Another man stood close by his side. Rory, Peter’s lab assistant, exuded a cool demeanor, enhanced by hip, multi-colored glasses. His trendy button-down shirt was partially concealed under a well-worn lab coat. “Gets his own cage, like rat royalty,” remarked Rory with an indulgent smile.

“No harm will ever befall Lil’ Pete,” responded Peter, fondly stroking the spoiled lab animal. He opened the barred door to a private cage and gently placed Lil’ Pete inside. The rat scurried over the cedar shavings and onto an exercise wheel, accelerating like a racehorse down the stretch.

Rory held up a pair of small glass vials filled with corn seeds to the light. He looked them up and down intently, the yellow color of the corn bringing out hints of green in Rory’s otherwise dark brown eyes. “They said these prototypes need some additional modification. Basically, the timing is a little off on their termination dates,” explained Rory as Peter took one of the vials in his hand and examined the contents.

“You know Rory, I’ve been here ten years. And I’ve never seen anything stir more controversy than these terminator seeds. People hate them.”

“People hate everything we do. If we cured cancer tomorrow they would hate us for that too,” said Rory as Peter held the seeds up to the fluorescent lights overhead and eyed them acutely.

“They just need to get over their hysteria. We’re not the enemy,” said Peter, matter-of-factly. He glanced up at the security camera perched on a wall-mount in the corner of the lab. Its dark cover showed the men’s reflection like a black mirror—the all-seeing electronic eye—always watching, recording every movement. Peter placed the vial in his lab coat pocket and pulled out a Swiss army knife.

He held up a genetically modified potato and sliced a piece into a bite-sized chunk. “The food we’ve been creating can change the world for the better,” he said as he offered a slice to Rory.

Rory gulped, as he took the starchy tuber between his fingers and slowly raised it to his quivering lips. He suddenly paused and placed his other hand over his stomach. “I just ate lunch. I’m stuffed.”

“Rory, you had a garden salad,” protested Peter.

“Yeah, like two servings,” said Rory with a slight air of drama.

“And crackers!” Peter took the genetically modified slice from Rory, popped it in his mouth, chewed and swallowed. Rory shuddered.

Peter pulled the vial of seeds back out of his pocket and looked at Lil’ Pete. “Snack time!” He poured out a handful and handed the rest to Rory, who approached a second cage full of even hungrier scurrying rodents.

The rats, knowing it was feeding time, stood on their hind legs, squealing with delight. They then rushed forward, crowding the cage door to be first in line for their daily allotment.

Lil’ Pete munched on his corn seeds—uncontested—as his little rat nose wiggled with every bite. “It’s okay little buddy. I trust whoever made these,” said Peter as he stroked the head of his furry friend.

The hours flew by and as night fell, Peter and Rory wrapped up their experiments. Before Peter departed, he made one last check on Lil’ Pete. He was sound asleep, randomly twitching to some happy vision in rat dreamland. The bruxing of his incisors almost reminded Peter of a gentle purr. Yeah, life is good for them all, he thought as he covered Lil’ Pete’s cage with a blanket.

Peter exited the back door into the parking lot with his satchel bag over his shoulder. He tossed it into the trunk of his late-model BMW and slammed it shut. Just overhead hung an immense lit-up sign with blazing letters: Moonstar Foods Inc. The sign glared so brightly that even on this cloudless night it outshone the light of the moon high above. He looked up at the words and logo—he felt so noble and distinguished—and for a moment it beamed beneficently down on him, making him feel like a rock star.

As Peter opened the driver-side door, his peripheral vision glimpsed two suspicious figures lurking at the edge of the lighted lot. Teenagers, he thought to himself with annoyance. Both wore dark hoodies to conceal themselves in the black of night. They moved silently into the shadows. They carried cans of spray paint and crouched low, thinking they were undetected. Peter took out his cell phone and dialed security. He whispered into the receiver, “Hey, you guys may want to come out and see this—just outside the parking lot near the rear exit.”

He looked on as one of the figures quickly sprayed the word MONSTER INC in bright red paint on the side of the building. The letters ran like thickened blood down the side of the building’s white and clean facade. The other figure sketched a crude rendition of a monster—a ghoulish fiend— with massive jowls and clawed appendages. Overhead lights suddenly flooded the area as the two vandals were caught on security cameras.

Shouts and profanity echoed from the darkness, followed by a trio of armed security guards in dark uniforms. They chased after the unruly teens as they scurried off in an attempt to avoid capture. As the mischief-makers ran toward the hole in the fence they had schlepped through on their arrival, a mobile guard on a security cart cut them off. The miscreants were quickly corralled by the other guards on foot, apprehended and escorted back to the building. One angrily shouted, “GMO is the food of the dead!”

Peter shook his head. To each their own, he mused as he drove away in the moonlight.

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THE MORNING LIGHT CREPT through Peter’s window like golden threads. A sliver of radiance sliced through the blackout curtains and landed on his face like a mini spotlight. He stirred and opened his eyes, just seconds before his alarm clock sounded. He sat up in his bed, stretched his arms wide, and indulged in a loud yawn.

A family portrait, propped up on his nightstand, stood watch over him. He fondly regarded the visages of his parents, both smiling brightly at the camera. Between them sat a much younger Peter, posing proudly in graduation garb. Although he had aged a bit since then, he hadn’t really changed very much.

Peter slipped out of his bedclothes and jumped into the shower. Not one to tarry before breakfast, he emerged soon after and picked out fresh clothes for another day in the lab. Steaming java awaited him in his state-of-the-art coffee maker as he breezed into the kitchen.

Peter’s morning routine rarely strayed from the usual. Actually, most of his daily routines rarely strayed from the usual—a fine arrangement that fed a certain smugness which would irritate his colleagues. He cherished his quiet, organized lifestyle, a lifestyle that allowed him to focus almost entirely on his work, and to nurse his desire for worldly success and professional recognition.

Peter pulled out his laptop and set it on the breakfast table. The memory of the prior night’s vandalism flashed in his mind. What drives people to hold Moonstar in such contempt? He typed the words, MOONSTAR LABORATORIES into the YouTube search bar, and instantly a swarm of results flooded the screen. In page after page, videos vilifying Moonstar scrolled up. Most of them made outrageous, unfounded claims against his employer, in Peter’s bemused opinion. Other highlighted videos were GMO protest marches from every corner of the globe. He clicked on a random link; it showed throngs of protesters marching in solidarity, waving signs and chanting slogans deriding the company, his company. The blood, sweat, and the tears, or the endless hours of trial and error combined with the personal sacrifices he had endured for all of humankind endlessly maligned to no-end. Peter muttered to himself, “Get a life people ...get a life,” He then slammed the lid of his laptop shut, glanced at his wristwatch and realized it was time to go.

His daily commute to the laboratory was postcard perfect as he pulled up to the automatic gate and security booth.

“Morning, Mister Malik,” said the guard.

“Morning, Gus. So, did your guys take care of those vandals last night?”

“Oh, yes sir we did. You won’t be seeing them again anytime soon,” The guard grinned ear to ear as the gate lifted for Peter.

As he parked his vehicle, a paint crew had already assembled to remove evidence of the prior night’s destructive and unsightly tagging. He could only smile to and think himself, nothing to see here.

As Peter entered the lab he was assailed by a pungent stench that could only be that of rotting flesh. “What the hell is that smell? Did the sewer back up or something?”

“I wish it were that simple,” replied Rory, hovering over the cage that held the bulk of the lab rats. He covered his nose and gagged from the foul odor permeating the lab. “This shit’s ugly,” he warned, as Peter stepped up beside him. Rory pulled back the cover and Peter peered through the tiny cage bars.

“What the hell happened?” gasped Peter through gritted teeth. Every rat was dead—wet and slimy—and each corpse seemed to have suffered the same hideous mutation. The rat’s jaws and teeth appeared to have tripled in size. Just as shocking, all of their orifices oozed globs of pus and yellowish green fluid. An epic mess caused by some malignant virus—or was it something even worse?

Peter turned towards Lil’ Pete’s cage with a look of dread. Had he, too, fallen victim to the same ailment? He slowly walked over, swallowed the lump in his throat, and pulled the blanket back, only to reveal that indeed his furry friend also had become a horrific, mushy lump of mutated rat-flesh. “Oh, Lil’ Pete. It got you too,” Peter grew silent, steepled his hands, and buried his head in thought. What the hell could have caused this freakish lab-rat apocalypse?

Removing a sample corpse, Peter and Rory laid it belly up on one of the stainless steel tables. An adjustable work lamp beamed a bright light on their subject. As the men prepared to perform an autopsy, they silently regarded the deteriorating animal whose features were so monstrously transmuted.

Peter held a scalpel and probe as Rory prepared to jot notes on his clipboard. First, Peter examined the jaw line, propping open the mouth by pressing down on its gnarled, elongated incisors. “It’s mouth has somehow gotten ... bigger,” said Peter in disbelief.

“Well, it’s not like he’s going to be eating anytime soon,” replied Rory with a nervous chuckle.

“Let’s look at those internal organs,” said Peter as he cut into the rat’s gooey flesh—the juices flowed from the incision as he nudged and prodded the stringy guts and intestines. The rat’s inner digestive tract overwhelmed their noses with its horrendous stink.

“Oh man! And I thought they smelled bad on the outside,” choked Rory. They pulled back from the carcass and composed themselves before digging in further.

“Its stomach is—expanding,” noted Peter.

“Expanding? With what?” asked Rory as he peered over his Peter’s shoulder as he lightly poked the exposed stomach with the tip of the scalpel blade.

“Well, let’s find out, shall we?” Peter speared the vein-covered, fleshy sac with a sharp thrust. Shockingly, the dead rat emitted a horrendous shriek. Both men jumped back from the table in abject horror.

Suddenly, the splayed-open rat reared up on its haunches and leapt at them. The men stumbled back— incredulous at the impossible reanimation. The odious beast snapped its enlarged jaws. Instinctively, Rory swatted it down with his clipboard. “Oh shit!” he screamed.

Within seconds the men heard more blood curdling shrieking from behind. They turned to see the other rats rising up, one by one, reanimated, back from the dead. Wet and slimy, they converged on the bars of the cage with the gleaming eyes of predatory little monsters. They hissed, and their ravening, enlarged jaws gaped open, their twisted yellow fangs seeking warm, living flesh.

The red emergency light flickered overhead. Quickly, Rory moved towards the door and pressed down on the handle. It clicked loudly, auto-locked from the outside. They were trapped. “They locked us in!” shouted Rory.

Peter glared up at the black eye of the security camera as the horde of mutant vermin savagely ripped the bars of their cage apart.

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FAR FROM THE LABORATORY commotion, in a lavish office suite high in the same building, an exotic-looking woman sat behind an executive desk. Model perfect, dark brown hair pulled into a neat French twist, lips colored a signature Prada crimson, eyes opaque and cold under thinly arched brows, she projected a condescending gaze at nothing in particular.

At a matching desk across the office sat a man of similar demeanor. He ran a hand through his sandy brown hair, grazing a slightly receding hairline. His brow shaded glittering, hunter-green eyes. He was unnaturally thin— certain of his employees had labeled him as "a snake in a suit." He and the woman sat with their backs turned to the office door.

Furnishings and décor were split down the middle; between them, the two shared only a large antique Persian carpet, a rare nineteenth century Hiraz, hand knotted by palace artisans of another age. The woman’s side of the office bespoke a fondness for high-end accessories with a showy, yet artistic flair. His side was post-modern, nearly colorless, minimalist and spare, suggesting his fealty to the bottom-line.

Their attention was fixed on a bank of monitoring systems mounted on the back wall, a row of high-tech digital screens constantly monitoring mission-critical labs in the complex. Incongruously, a Chopin etude played in the background as the two sat watching Peter and Rory desperately battling the monster rats in Lab 1A.

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“RORY!” PETER POINTED to some half-filled beakers on a shelf labeled ACID in dark bold lettering. Rory stared down at the splayed-open rat, now crouching and ready for another attack. It suddenly leapt at his face. Rory ducked, and the rat hit the wall hard behind him with a squishing thud, leaving a splattered, rat-sized stain. Rory rushed over and seized one of the beakers. He hurled it at the cage as the other rats were squeezing through the twisted bars to get at the men. The glass exploded on impact. One rat escaped; the others were not so lucky. The rats squealed in agony, dissolving on contact with the acid.

“Peter!” Rory tossed him a second sealed tube labeled: “Hydrochloric Acid.”

Peter juggled the tube as the lone escaped rat bounded after him, snapping at his ankles. As Peter back-stepped away from the rat, he tripped over his own feet and landed hard on his back, knocking the air from his lungs. The container flew from his hand and shattered on the floor. Shards of glass sprayed over the sealed concrete as the acidic liquid spilled out between him and the zombie rat now lunging for his throat. As the rat splashed through the acid, the flesh of its feet sizzled and dissolved. Legless, the rat squirmed and slithered like a snake towards Peter’s jugular.

Then, from above, Rory slammed a canister of liquid nitrogen down on the thrashing monstrosity, squashing it like a cockroach. Rory and Peter feverishly glanced around the room. The worst was over.

The red alarm light suddenly switched off and the doors to the laboratory unlocked with a loud click. Rory glared up at the security camera. “Well thanks a lot! Does this mean we get a raise? Extra benefits? How about some insider trading in company stock?”

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PETER STOOD BEFORE the two massive mahogany desks. Two expressionless security guards stood behind him. A gold-plated dish filled with caviar sat prominently on one desk, and a half-eaten Styrofoam box of Chinese carryout rested on the other. A pin-drop would be heard in the silence if one dared to test it. Peter finally spoke. “Pardon me for asking, but what the hell just happened?”

Simultaneously, the two leather chairs swiveled around, revealing Sofia and Richard Beaudette, the same two people who, moments earlier, had watched the vicious rat attack. The two were siblings and heirs to the Moonstar Empire. Although they were biological twins, they looked hardly anything alike.

Sofia was strikingly beautiful as aforementioned. The rest of her attire revealed a low-cut, exquisite blouse fitted on her perfectly shaped form that suggested sexual intensity and domineering authority. “Moonstar is moving in a new direction, Peter,” she laconically responded.

Richard was dressed in a tailored suit, as immaculate as his sister, but plainer, conservative. He was all business, pleasure admitted only after hours, through the side door. For the most part, business was his pleasure. “My sister is correct,” Richard said, quite as coldly as his sister. He swirled a pair of chopsticks in the chicken chow Mein box and wolfed down the contents.

“And what direction is that?” Peter asked.

Sofia smiled seductively at Peter as she took a pinch of caviar in her fingertips. “One that would benefit our shareholders and investors, especially those with a keen interest in Moonstar’s future growth and profitability,” said Sofia as she placed the delicacy on her tongue and closed her lips.

Richard cut in, “You are well aware of our corporation’s dubious past: From chemical weapons development, to pesticides. Agent Orange to DDT. Right?”

Peter swallowed the lump in his throat. “The rats ate those seeds—died—and ... then ... reanimated,” Peter struggled with his words, still shaken by his terrifying ordeal.

“You had to see with your own eyes,” said Sofia.

“We could have been killed!” Peter shuddered, involuntarily.

“Peter—dear, sweet Peter,” Sofia cooed. “We wouldn’t have let that happen. You’re much too sweet, not to mention, valuable to us.”

Peter raised a suspicious eyebrow as he surveyed the many portraits lining the walls. Generations of men and women gazed back blankly, all of them former founders and CEO’s of the Moonstar corporate hegemony.

Richard folded his hands across his chest and leaned forward. “Moonstar has been in our family since the turn of the last century. Feeding the world was never our main objective.”

Peter looked at them, wondering if they were completely mad, or just exhibiting calculated insanity. Richard continued, “You are one of our most brilliant scientists. We need you to refine what others have already created. And we’ll pay you handsomely.”

Sofia produced a manila envelope from her desk drawer and gently stroked its edge. “Our offer to you to stay with us,” she said as she extended the envelope to Peter. “We believe you have what it takes to join our leadership team.” Peter’s fingers felt heavy as he hesitantly reached for the envelope. Sofia looked him up and down intently, smiling enticingly.

“We’ve been contracted by an outside agency,” explained Richard. “Can’t really tell you anything beyond that, at least not now.”

“It’s only business, Peter. We’re not doing anything diabolical here,” Sofia said archly.

Peter slowly looked up at the main monitor. On it, he saw Rory cleaning the lab. A sudden movement directly behind Rory caught Peter’s eye. The security camera lens zoomed in, revealing that the movement emanated from none other than Lil’ Pete.

“Oh my God....” Peter trailed off as he watched the reanimated zombie rat creeping up behind an oblivious Rory.

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RORY, DROWNING HIS concerns with music from his iPod touch, was completely unaware of the danger. Sporting a pair of oversized latex rubber gloves, he scraped up the remains of the ghoulish rodent he had smashed with the canister minutes earlier. U2 blasted a classic hit through his ear buds, but it couldn’t cover up the unavoidable stink of putrid, rotting flesh in the lab.

Rory knelt to retrieve the gob of twisted slime by its tail. “Oh, no! Don’t you lose it!” he said to himself as he dry heaved and gagged. “Man up! Man up!” Rory tried not to breathe through his nose—blocking his nostrils from tasting the stench in the air. Undetected, and stalking Rory like a lion versus a gazelle, Lil’ Pete inched closer to his prey.

“It’s a beautiful day—Don’t let it—slip—away!” Rory dropped the formless carcass into a garbage bag unaware that death was only a few feet away....

TORCHLIGHT PARADE

by Bill Link

One

He was dreaming, again; the same dream as before, and before that, and before that... The dream was the oldest thing he could remember from his early childhood, when he must have been three or four years old, following him his whole life into his adulthood.

Row after row of marchers, illuminated in the fiery glow of their hand held torches, tramped in a procession that trailed behind seemingly for miles and miles through the blackness. The march went on and on for hours... days... forever. A loud, metallic CLANG, CLANG, CLANG was the only sound filling the air from somewhere, which he eventually came to recognize as a sort of steady, rhythmic beat that was almost some kind of incomprehensible music.

Sometimes, his sleeping self would be walking single mindedly, somewhere amid the countless other marchers, torch in hand, when he would glance past the others in his row in one direction then the other, to peer into the surrounding darkness. Always aware there was someone else watching, unseen from beyond, he’d catch brief glimpses of faces in the flickering light. Faces covered with scales, with fur, or full of tentacles, de-fleshed skull faces, or malformed parodies of faces, till he forced his dream self to look away with growing fright. Wake up, he tried telling his dream self with growing desperation, please, just wake up!

Other times he was watching the march from the darkness with those non-human onlookers, seeing the torch bearing participants dressed in everyday clothes; jeans, tee shirts, skirts, dresses, shorts, business suits and every other kind of clothing he’d see every day. But it was the faces beneath those torches that had always chilled his sleeping self to the bone. Rubber masks, all of ordinary people; men and women, young and old, of every race and skin color, but all looking like grotesquely inhuman Halloween masks. And then he saw it. The sandy haired marcher who turned his head to peer at him through eye holes set in a rubber face that was meant to be his own.

And this time, there was the face of a middle aged woman with dark curls rushing toward him – or he was rushing at her – her fists up against her mouth and her eyes filled with terror when she screamed.

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LOUIS JOLTED AWAKE with a scream. His heart pounding in his chest, he recognized the darkened interior of the car and the steering wheel in front of him, realizing he had fallen asleep in the front drivers side, again. The headlights shined in the roadside, and the evergreen boughs beyond, where he had apparently pulled off of during this last spell of narcolepsy. Outside the car windows, late night traffic sped past him beneath the freeway streetlamps. So much for this latest prescription that was supposed to keep this from happening, again, realizing he had been sleep driving, again. And sleep nightmaring. But it wasn’t just the nightmares that accompanied the fits of sleep, and the sleep walking and sleep driving, was it?

“Thanks a lot for fucking up my life, Uncle Jim,” he muttered with choked bitterness to the man who had been dead for twenty eight years, now. “Thanks for skinning my back and putting out your cigarette butts out on the raw muscle, you chain smoking psycho... then letting me live.”

He could imagine his Uncles toothy, sadistic grin – the only thing he could still remember about the man after all this time – behind the flames guttering out from somewhere in Hell.

Looking at the digital clock glowing in the darkened interior, he saw it was almost three in the morning. Just how long had he been asleep? God damn it, he thought angrily, he was going to be late getting back to Spokane... again. Starting up his car, Louis glanced out into the freeway before pulling out into the empty freeway, realizing he’d be driving from western Oregon till dawn before he reached eastern Washington. That was alright, he had already decided. The last thing he wanted was to slip back to sleep into that nightmare parade again that his uncle had made a forever place of terror for him.

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Two

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“MICHAEL IS IN A SHITTY mood,” Erika said, looking up from the keyboard behind the receptionist desk with a sympathetic grimace the moment Louis hurried into the office doorway, carrying an armful of rolled up advertisement specs. “He was expecting you two hours ago, but I covered for you and told him you had car trouble, after I got your call on voicemail this morning.”

“I appreciate that.” Breathing a reluctant sigh, he said, “I guess it’s time to face the music.”

“Lou, listen,” Erika said in a lowered voice as she leaned over the desk, “just tell Mike about this sleep disorder of yours. Otherwise he’s liable to fire you.”

The young, mixed race woman, Erika Johnson, who had moved up from Sacramento three years ago to work for the company’s front office, was one of the few people Louis had let in on his atypical form of narcolepsy after the first time they had gone to bed together. He had come to respect her intelligence and good nature after he learned she was much more than a pretty face and a pair of long legs, good only for answering the phone and setting up appointments.

Smiling sadly, Louis said, “And as soon as Michael learns his sales rep who is a narcoleptic, I don’t see much in my future conducting business on the road for him.”

“But you don’t know that.”

“Until my doctor prescribes the right meds that’ll keep me from falling asleep at the damnedest times and places,” Louis said with a sad smile as he passed by the receptionist desk for his boss’ office, “I’d say it’s a certainty.” Knocking timidly, he opened the door bearing the name, Michael Gimlin, printed on the frosted glass.

“You’re late, again, Naulin,” the small, balding man man sitting behind the desk said gruffly to Louis. He kicked back in his chair with a sour expression as he pushed his wire rimmed glasses up his long, narrow nose, with no concern about berating an employee within earshot of the rest of the office. Louis shut the door quickly.

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A HALF HOUR PASSED before the door to Michael’s office opened, again. Erika turned in her chair and held her breath with uncertainty, till she saw how Louis raised his eyebrows with a look of relief as he shut the door behind him. Walking quickly to the receptionist desk, he told her in a subdued tone, “God, I am such a bullshit artist,” grinning as he pulled on his collar with a single finger with a display of comic exaggeration.

“Thank Christ,” she breathed. “So, just what did you tell... Say, aren’t those the clothes you wore when you left for Portland a couple days ago?”

Louis cast a glance down at the jeans, tee shirt, and unbuttoned dress jacket he had put on in Erika’s apartment the morning he left Spokane a couple days before. “Yeah... it’s not what I was wearing when I was driving home last night.” He shook his head, perplexed.

Erika giggled. “Changing your clothes in your sleep, now?”

“I might have,” Louis said with a shrug, and a chuckle that sounded hollow as he wondered why he suddenly felt so unnerved.

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Three

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MOMENTS AFTER LOUIS rang the bell, the door opened to the tall, bespectacled man dressed in a bathrobe. “Come in, come in,” Erika’s roommate said chipperly, standing aside so Louis could walk past. “Like some coffee?” He sipped from his own steaming cup. The smell of toast, and fried bacon and eggs filled the air inside.

“I’m good,” Louis said, waving him off as he headed over to Erika who was seated at her laptop set atop the desk on the living room side of the buddy bar that separated the room from the kitchen, “but thanks, Philip.” Erika looked up from the computer screen as he leaned down to kiss her. “Good morning.” Her dirty breakfast plate laid forgotten on the desk with silverware laid haphazardly on its face, next to a half filled coffee cup.

“Good morning,” she echoed him with a smile. “Hey, before we go to work, did you see Yahoo News this morning?”

“No, I haven’t,” he said, shaking his head. Pushing back the chair, she stood up and stepped aside for him to sit down. On the screen was an article entitled, Missing Woman Found Near Washington, Oregon Highway: Declared A Homicide. Perusing the text about a bludgeoning death with a blunt object, his eyes dropped down to the photo of a woman with a head of dark curls in her fifties, her chubby face lit in a smile from happier days. The name, Judith Campbell, appeared to him in the text. His mouth fell open as he recognized that face from his last narcoleptic event.

I had to have seen her picture before, he told himself, feeling that sense of unnerved dread stirring up from somewhere deep inside. Did I ever really see her? Or was he just assigning a face to a dream image that...

He realized Philip was talking to him.

“I’m sorry, what?” He shook his head as if cobwebs filled his skull.

“Erika told me that lady was found nearby where you said you... uh, fell asleep,” he said delicately. “In fact, about the same time, maybe.” Taking another drink of coffee, he said, “You just might have lucked out having whoever that psycho was miss you, dude.”

“Well, I’ll see you tonight,” Louis heard Erika tell her roommate as he stared at the photo that was so much like the face left over in his conscious thoughts from his dreams over a week ago. “Is Adam staying over with you, tonight?”

“You know it! I kinda think he’s going to pop the question, soon.”

“Well, if he does, early congrats! We should take Phil and his fella out for dinner,” Erika said, which seemed to barely register with Louis. Jostling his shoulder, she said, “Honey... did you hear me?”

“Yeah, yeah,” he said, feigning a laugh as he quickly stood up from the laptop. “Great idea.” He realized his heart was pounding in his chest.

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Four

FOR THE REST OF THE workday in the small, downtown office, Louis found himself distracted, often staring out into space. When coworkers speaking to him during business meetings had to repeat themselves as Erika and Phillip had that morning, he apologized again and again, muttering about lack of sleep. The truth was, he felt wide awake. Rather, it was the unbidden images and thoughts that filled his mind – of the murdered woman’s horror filled face as she screamed, but even more, the marcher in the torchlight parade wearing the rubber mask that was a parody of his own face – that filled him with a growing anxiety till he wanted to crawl up the walls to escape the ghosts in his own head.

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“ARE YOU OKAY, LOU?” Erika turned in the passenger seat to face him with a look of concern. Another driver who had attempted to merge into their lane of traffic slammed on the brakes at the last moment, avoiding a crash, tires squealing on the pavement, followed by a prolonged, angry honk of a horn. “You’ve been acting like a sleepwalker all day.” Outside the car, rush hour traffic crawled along the street lanes. Horns beeped in the distance. Louis came to a stop when the traffic light ahead turned red. She had been talking nonstop about Phillip and Adam tying the knot since getting the call from her roommate just after three that afternoon, and asking Louis which restaurant they should take the couple to celebrate, when she realized on the drive home that hardly anything she said seemed to be registering with

him.

He breathed a sigh before answering. “That article you showed me this morning spooked me, I guess.” Staring out the windshield at the long line of cars ahead, he said in tonelessly,

“Having... that... happen on the same stretch of highway where I had an episode hit a little too close to home for me.” At least he was able to tell her half the truth.

“Oh, honey, I’m so sorry. I didn’t even think how scary that might be for you!”

“It’s okay,” he said softly, reaching over to squeeze her hand. She squeezed back.

“You up to taking Phil and Adam out to celebrate, tonight?”

“Of course I am.” He flashed her a smile, despite his feelings of uneasiness that lingered. Soon, the light turned green, and they were driving down the road again.

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“WELL, NOT TO GET INTO any gory descriptions while we’re eating,” Adam said as he chewed a forkful of linguine he had just put in his mouth, “but the department’s been making inquiries about the woman found in western Oregon, near the Columbia. Just too similar to the cases we’ve been working around the Spokane and north Idaho area.”

“Yeah, I was just reading about that this morning,” Erika said, between bites of the pizza she shared with Louis.

Seated next to Philip across the table from Louis and Erika, Adam King looked every bit the part of a cop, with his stubbly shaved head, and his muscular, ramrod physique. Like his fiancé, he dressed semi casual in his button up, long sleeved shirt, and dress pants. Louis felt under dressed in a tee shirt and jeans. The moment he had met Adam for the first time months ago, the police detective exuded a confidence and an authority that he found uncomfortably intimidating; a feeling which he had never gotten past.

The Spaghetti Street restaurant was alive with diners seated around the four that evening, chattering over Americanized Italian food. Cars sped past the windows on the thoroughfare outside as the sky darkened.

Taking a drink of his beer to wash down his last mouthful of spaghetti, Philip said, “You know, Lou here was nearby the scene of that murder,” gesturing to the other side of the table to Louis. “Erika and I thought it might have even been around the time it happened.”

Louis remained silent and stone faced, with downcast eyes on his half eaten slice of pizza set on the plate before him, having lost his appetite that very moment. Erika squeezed his knee comfortingly beneath the table, and gave him a quick, apologetic smile.

“Really?” Adam raised his eyebrows in surprise. “Just driving through?”

“Uh, no,” Louis said in a low but steady voice, wiping his mouth with his napkin before he continued. “I had pulled over on the side of the road to get some shut eye, after a hard day dealing with a client.” He patted Erika’s thigh left bare by her dress that had ridden up when she took a seat, as to convey to her all was well, even if it felt like it wasn’t.

“Well, you should consider yourself lucky, despite your carelessness,” Adam said as if scolding a teenager caught drinking, and speared another forkful of pasta. “Taking a snooze

on the roadside at night is never a good idea, especially with this particular perp who doesn’t seem particularly choosy about his victims.”

“I suffer from a type of narcolepsy. Apparently some part of my subconscious drives to someplace safe when I blank out.”

Adam chewed then washed down his food before answering. “Sorry, I didn’t know that,” he apologized. “But just the same, the person who murdered the Oregon woman is believed to be the same who picked up a male hitchhiker in Idaho, who he killed near Airway Heights at the end of February a couple years ago.”

Erika’s eyes widened. “When exactly in February was that?”

“February... twenty eighth,” the detective said after shutting his eyes and wrinkling his brow in thought.

“Jeez, you’re batting two for zero, honey,” she exclaimed, turning in her chair to face Louis.

“Huh?” He shook his head, confused.

“I remember you telling me how you woke up in Airway Heights around that time, after attending a meeting for Michael... in Idaho.” Erika fell silent; the expression on her face was of one who knew she had said too much.

His jaw having fallen open, Philip wordlessly glanced about the table, from Erika to Louis, whose expression was of dawning bewilderment and fright, and then to his fiancé. “That’s really some coincidence,” he made himself laugh, though his smile faltered.

“Hmm,” was all Adam grunted, his face set in stone, going back to eating his dinner.

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“I’M SO SORRY, HONEY,” Erika said, apologizing again, shaking her head with a troubled expression on the drive back to Louis’ studio apartment in the Valley. She had promised Philip she’d leave the apartment to him and Adam to continue on their celebrations in privacy. “I don’t know why I had to shoot my mouth off like I did in front of Adam.”

“Why do you think you shouldn’t have mentioned what happened to me at Airway Heights?” He kept his eyes straight ahead out the windshield on the road. Suburban homes passed by the windows. “You don’t think I did anything, do you?”

“No! No, of course not,” she exclaimed, turning to face him with a look of dismay. “I just thought Adam... would misconstrue what I said.”

They drove the rest of the way back in silence.

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THAT NIGHT UNDER THE covers, he heard Erika whisper hotly in the darkness, “I really am sorry. Let me make it up to you.” He felt her hand sliding into his boxers.

“I need to get some sleep,” he muttered, brushing away her hand. “Sorry.”

She rolled over with her back to him with a low sob. He knew he should be apologizing to her, but the disturbing sense of bafflement he had been living with since coming home from Oregon had been occupying his thoughts since that morning. I’ll tell her I’m sorry in the morning, he told himself.

But now it was more than just that, wasn’t it? He had virtually forgotten how he had had another narcoleptic episode two years before while driving home from north Idaho, only to awaken outside the little community west of Spokane. He only now recalled how he had laughed with embarrassment when, looking down at his bare chest and arms, he saw he had sometime or other that night, for some unimaginable reason, gotten rid of his shirt and suit jacket. Just another inexplicable occurrence of his crazy affliction, he had chalked it up to as he had driven home.

But with those recollection came memories of the bad dreams he had had prior to finding himself in Airway Heights after midnight.

He thought it had been whoever it was who wore the rubber mask of his face in the torchlight parade who had slowed to pull over to the side of the road when he spotted the man with his thumb out as he walked along the highway. Climbing into the passenger side, the man with a goatee and wearing a brown leather jacket looked to be in his late twenties. “Thanks for the ride man; it’s getting pretty dark,” the hitchhiker had said, introducing himself with a wide smile as Charlie Metzger. He had jabbered on and on about hitching for rides as he traveled west from Wyoming, hoping to make it to Seattle, while the driver wearing the Louis Naulin mask remained silent as he drove, before things went black momentarily, like a television or movie scene finishing up.

“Dude, you could just leave me off in downtown Spokane,” Charlie had laughed nervously, as the city now fell behind them. “I mean, you don’t have to take me all the way to Seattle!” Again, the interspersed blackness fell on the dreamscape.

“No... please...,” Charlie now begged, his hands covering his blood streaked face from the ground overgrown with sagebrush and dried grass among the spotty snow where he had been sprawled out in. The driver wearing the Louis mask had raised the hammer and swung it down again and again, feeling Charlie’s facial bones crack through the hammer’s handle until eventually caving in, blood and chunks of bone splattering the clothing Louis wore.

Thankfully, blackness had swallowed the faceless corpse up, followed soon by wakefulness, sparing Louis any further horror.

Staring wide eyed into the darkness shrouding his bedroom, seeing the shapes of his TV set atop his nightstand and his dresser in the dimness as Erika snored softly next to him, Louis shuddered in fright.

––––––––

Five

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LOUIS WAS SURPRISED to see Adam and another cop, a heavy set older man also in plain clothes, come into the office a few days later. The three other employees went about their business at their desks, ignoring the two. Pressing the button to the printer to copy some new specs, Louis waved. Adam waved back with a smile before stepping into Michael’s office with his partner.

Strolling over to Erika’s desk, he waited till she was done on the phone before saying, “I just saw Adam and who I presume was another cop walk into Michael’s office.” He looked at the closed door, furrowing his brow, before saying, “I wonder if Mike’s in hot water over something.”

“I wouldn’t know,” she said tonelessly, punching up another number. She kept her eyes down, away from him.

Heaving a sigh, he walked away, his face set in a sad grimace. He had apologized and apologized to her for being an asshole to her since that night they had taken Adam and Philip out to dinner, and everything seemed to be all right at first. But since, she had been distant to him, as she came up with one excuse after another that kept him sleeping alone.

He knew she was slipping away from him, but over a spat like this? None of it made sense. Unless she suspected he had done something terrible, just as he thought he might have.

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STEAM FILLED THE BATHROOM when Louis stepped out of the shower stall after turning off the water. Toweling himself off, he was about to step toward the door when he stopped and turned to the mirror which was fogged up. Wiping the glass clean, he turned and looked over his shoulder at the scar tissue that was his back. After all the painful corrective operations he had endured in his childhood, and his attempts to just be a regular kid all throughout school, he had never really gotten past what his uncle had done to him, despite how the scars had faded over the years. No, it was the scars his uncle had left in his head that remained with him into his adulthood.

Was it possible, he wondered as he dressed in the bedroom, that he had done something terrible during those narcoleptic blackouts? Was that why Erika was shying away from him in the past days, after suspecting such a thing? The truth was it wasn’t just the strange coincidences of waking up in the wrong place at the wrong time or the vivid nightmares that haunted him. It was his lifelong fear that his uncle had passed his madness and sadism on to him with what his uncle had done, as he plopped down on the side of the bed which creaked under his weight. And that realization was what kept him in a constant state of fright, he knew as he dropped his face into his hands.

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A FEW MORNINGS LATER when Louis walked into the office, he found Adam and the big bellied older detective waiting for him in the lobby. Behind the receptionist desk, Erika closed her eyes with a look of shame, and turned her chair away from him.

“Louis Naulin,” Adam said, drawing a pair of handcuffs from his belt under his dress jacket as he stepped forward toward him, “you’re under arrest for eight counts of murder. You have the right to remain silent.”

“What? Wait, there’s some sort of mistake!”

Adam grabbed him by the arm when he found himself spun around with his hands behind him. Handcuffs, cold and uncomfortably tight, clicked on his wrists behind his back. “You

have the right to an attorney. If unable to afford an attorney, one will be provided for you.”

“Erika,” he croaked as he was pushed from behind out the door held open by the fat cop.

“Everything you say can be used as evidence against you.”

Desperately, he twisted his neck and waist around to see how the woman he had fallen in

love with kept her face turned away from him, before she disappeared behind the closing office door. She knew this was going to happen, knew the police were coming for me, realization screamed in his mind as her coldness toward him finally made sense. SHE KNEW!

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“PLEASE STATE YOUR NAME,” Adam asked stoically. He sat across the table from Louis in the interrogation room with a manila folder laid out in front of him. The older detective, who had introduced himself to him as Lt. Shostrom, leaned cross armed by the two way mirror, with the sole of one shoe propped up against the wall. He had asked Louis if he wanted an attorney present, to which he told the cop no, the irrational thought that only guilty people needed lawyers having popped nonsensically into his swirling head.

“Adam, you know me,” he cried out, pleadingly. “Your fiancé knows me! I haven’t murdered anyone!” He heard the hysteria in his own rising voice.

“Settle down and state your name, please.”

“Louis Jacob Naulin.” He slumped into the wooden chair dejectedly, though the anxiety he had felt since his arrest remained. From there, Adam asked him his birth date, his occupation, and his address, and every other relevant piece of information in the same chilly voice. At one point, he interrupted Adam to ask: “How much was Erika in on this?” The hurt of betrayal trembled in his voice as he imagined Adam sending Philip as a go-between with Erika to poison her mind against him. The detective ignored him and continued asking questions to verify his identity.

“Now that we have that out of the way, maybe you can start with who you really are.”

“Excuse me?” He stared at the stone faced detective with a look of bewilderment.

“Your birthplace you claim as Lombard, Illinois, your parents Andrew and Judy Naulin, even your psycho uncle who you say kidnapped and tortured you as a kid, none of that checks out. None of them ever existed.”

“What?” Louis shook his head in confusion. “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,” he couldn’t help but laugh anxiously. “Of course everything about my personal history is true.”

“In fact, there’s no evidence of a Louis Jacob Naulin existing at all till five years ago. About the time the first of the eight murders you’ve been accused of was committed.”

“That... just doesn’t make sense...,” he whispered as he dropped his head in confusion, when he suddenly looked up, his eyes wide with dawning realization. “Maybe my parents changed their last name after the police shot my uncle and rescued me! It would have been all over the news, and they wouldn’t have had any privacy.”

“You know that particular scenario isn’t something I even considered,” Adam said with a rare smile, propping his elbows on the tabletop and resting his chin momentarily on his folded hands, before his face became unreadable again. “Regardless, we know none of that happened, as I had Illinois law enforcement search their state records, after which they reported back to us how no such incident ever occurred. I even requested hospital reports from all over the state, and all inquiries came up empty. Same with the news outlets. So, you have another explanation?”

“Then there’s the matter of your nonexistent birth certificate and social security number,” Shostrom spoke up in a gravelly voice from behind his partner, unfolding his big arms.

“That... can’t be,” Louis said in a lilting voice, shaking his head at the craziness of it all. “The inside of that workshop where he did those things to me is imprinted on my brain... even after all these years.” His mind was turning into a blank with growing desperation. Of course he was Louis Naulin. Of course he wasn’t a murderer, despite doubting his own sanity earlier. He just needed time to think and figure this all out. He could never forget memories of those human limbs filling up a bin, or the pile of heads, or the torsos in that out-of-the-way shop hidden away in the partially shut down industrial park. He knew all of those nightmare recollections were real, and that made him real.

“Let’s forget the matter of your identity for the time being,” Adam said, opening the envelope and taking out crime scene photos which he spread out in front of Louis. “We found out from your boss your whereabouts the other day when each of these happened. It turns out you were on the road and near each incident at the right time.”

“I didn’t do this,” he said, his voice trembled as he beheld the photographs in front of him depicting corpses with their faces erased into bloody pulp in varying states of freshness and decay. Men, women, even a couple teen girls and an African American boy who couldn’t have been older than ten.

“That black kid you’re looking at,” Shostrom said, pointing to the picture as he strolled over to the table. “He was with his parents on a family trip when he vanished from a rest area outside Spokane. When we found his body, and his mother knew there was no more hope of Jamal coming home, she attempted suicide. I just wanted to let you know that.”

“NO! NO! NO!” Louis sprang from his chair behind the table, sobbing uncontrollably. “I didn’t do this! I didn’t!”

“Mommy, please, help me mommy!” The boy’s face was a mask of tears and mucus, and sheer terror as the hammer slammed into his face, sending him spinning to the rocky ground beneath the scrub pines.

“No... It can’t be...” Louis grasped his head as he sank down to the floor, his shoulders heaving as he wept. He remembered the man wearing the rubber mask of his face snatching the kid from outside the restrooms where his parents made a pit stop after drinking too much Pepsi in the car. The man in the Louis mask had driven miles away with the boy to turn his face to mush.

“And that other one... Well, you know about all of them better than either of us do,” Shostrom said, straightening Louis’ chair. “You wanna sit back down, now?” He offered a hand to Louis who had curled up on the linoleum floor. He allowed the big cop to pull him to his feet, and sat back down, trembling as tears streamed down his face.

“Just to let you know, we have the murder weapon,” Adam said. “A search of your car turned up a sledgehammer light enough to use single handed beneath your front seat. Clothing with bloodstains has been recovered near Airway Heights and in northwest Oregon we think we can connect to you.” Leaning forward over the table, he asked, “So, are you ready to talk yet?”

“I have blackouts. I’m narcoleptic,” Louis sniffled as he wiped his eyes and cleared his throat to try regaining his composure. “I have the medicine to prove it.”

“Yes,” Adam said with a nod, “that much we were able to confirm.”

When I black out... I dream about this parade marching in the dark. The marchers and the crowd along the sidelines ... they aren’t human, but the marchers wear human masks. One of them even wears my face. He’s the one I’ve seen kill those people in my dreams.” Eyes wide like saucers, it was the first time he had ever divulged his nightmares to anyone, and speaking about it now in a high, whispery voice, he felt his anxiety begin to skyrocket with the thought these two men would either call him a liar, or insane. “But not just during my episodes. I’ve been dreaming about it since I was little. Since my Uncle Jim did those things to me.” He hugged himself as he trembled.

His head lowered, Adam smiled as he listened. “Sighing, he said, “If you want to go for an insanity defense, be my guest; I can’t tell you how to plead. Personally, I’ve never put much stock into that multiple personality shit, but...”

“I never said I was crazy,” Louis bristled, feeling sudden anger growing inside. “I never said I have multiple personalities!” But he had to wonder, was that true at all? He himself had already doubted his sanity.

“Alright, you’re not crazy,” Adam raised a calming hand, keeping his voice calm. “I was just about to ask if you could tell us about each of these dreams that occurred on occasion of the murders in question.”

Nodding his head and pursing his lips in a grimace, his whole body began shaking when darkness suddenly fell over him.

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LOUIS AWOKE TO THE sounds of angry fists pounding against the interrogation room door, along with equally angry voices telling him: “You in there, open the fucking door! Don’t hurt those men anymore!” There was a chair propped up under the doorknob. His eyes searching about, he realized he was standing in the middle of the room. He found Adam cringing in the far corner, his nose bloodied and smashed against his face that was twisted in agony, as he grasped his mangled and swelling hand. Was his shoulder holster empty? That was when Louis realized he was holding a revolver in his hand.

“Just... just let them in,” Adam wheezed nasally in pain. “Promise... be al.. alright.”

Louis turned around slowly to find the two way mirror cracked in a spiderweb pattern and splattered with blood, only to look down at himself to see how his clothes were bloody. Below the mirror, Shostrom laid on the floor motionless, the side of his face obliterated in red ruin. Shards of mirror glass lay scattered about him.

“What happened here?” Shaking his head slowly, Louis stared at his reflection, which was rendered into a stain glass window image in the shattered mirror, when he remembered what had happened in bits and pieces. Of rising from the table, grabbing Adam by the head, and slamming his face into the tabletop. Of flying at the heavy set cop in a tackle before he could clear the gun from his holster, and to slam his head into the mirror as blood splattered everywhere. Of whirling about in a crouch to see Adam stagger to his feet and pull his gun, when he was suddenly on top of the detective, fighting on the floor for the revolver, when he felt every bone in Adam’s hand in his own break as he squeezed and twisted, till the gun fell with a clatter.

“Please... for Erika,” Adam managed to sob, “let me go.” The police outside the door continued shouting threats.

Ignoring them all as he felt shock coming on, Louis told himself, “This isn’t me... I can’t have done this,” when another memory took shape.

Louis’ reflection had stared back at him amid the broken glass and blood, and broke into a grin. Taking a handful of his sandy hair, his reflection had pulled up, sliding his face off. The huge, round, yellow eyes that looked back at him had been set in a face covered in scales. That hideously reptilian face split into the toothy grin that had always haunted him since his childhood: his Uncle Jim’s grin. “Remember,” the thing that wore his face as a mask had hissed.

The memories that flooded back were of that workshop where the thing with Uncle Jim’s smile had been hovering over him as a toddler as he laid stomach down on a worktable. No... no... he hadn’t been a toddler, just smaller, because he had no arms and legs yet. He had squirmed about, crying out in agony as the thing used some sort of gun like, mechanized tool that was part drill, part welder on his back.

There had been others like him there as well, in various stages of completion who screamed and cried on the surrounding tables, being assembled with alien and unearthly tools by monsters with faces of scales, or writhing tentacles, or furry snouts, and every other kind of nightmarish horror. Taking arms or legs out of nearby bins, or soft tissue and viscera hanging from racks, or picking disembodied head that moaned and cried silently from shelves along the wall, the monsters attached them to flayed open, writhing torsos with raw muscle and spread apart rib cages that would soon be sealed with scar tissue. Putting together people who had never been born, and with heads filled with memories of pasts that had never been.

“All I am is a mask,” Louis said, his voice cracked with devastating realization. “I’m just something that thing wore when it crossed over to here from... Hell?”

Everything he recalled from his past – his parents, growing up with his friends, his first time he had sex – none of it ever happened. The only thing real was Uncle Jim, who was more a spawn of the pit than he could have ever believed. Walking closer to the mirror slowly, he had to wonder how many others were manufactured people that monsters hid inside. It wasn’t ever him who had done those unspeakable things, he told himself, but it was he who would pay the penalty for them the monster inside him had committed. And then what? That thing

would go back to the darkness to construct a new human being to hide behind?

Bending down, Louis picked up a shard of glass. The chair bracing the doorknob shook as someone kicked at the door from the other side. He paid no attention to it as he straightened. Putting the broken piece of mirror against his temple, he said, “Let’s see who’s under here,” to his reflection, before the sharp edge cut into his skin from which blood streamed down his face. Then he sliced downward.

SCYTHE

by Erik Schubach

One |Demon

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I STUMBLED IN MY LOW heels a little when the pain struck.  “Damn it, not now!” I hissed under my breath as I winced in agony when my shoulder started to smoke slightly.  I could smell the flesh burning as my mark of binding rearranged itself to allow the soul fire to start pouring through my body.  My vision sharpened as my eyes began to burn.  I stifled a scream of pain as my eyes reconfigured to allow The Sight.  I knew they were a brilliant metallic gold now, burning with the soul fire of my kind.

“Come on Lisc, pull it together,” I whispered to myself.

I glanced down at my shoulder and pulled up my short sleeve slightly to determine the threat level.  The brand of the curled up, sleeping demon was now standing fully erect with its wings spread, claws at the ready, and I felt the almost overwhelming compulsion to go on the hunt.  I muttered, “Damn it damn it damn it.” I pulled my mirrored sunglasses down over my eyes, I shrugged my light jacket on to hide the now glowing tattoo on my arm which smelled slightly of sulfur.  My hands shaking the whole time as I resisted the urge to let it take me, to let it change me.

I continued on with the rest of the interns on the tour of the museum and did my best to ignore the siren's call of the hunt.  I couldn't let it take me now.  I couldn't blow this great opportunity to have a regular job and a more normal life.  I had just finally settled down from my random wanderings from city to city.  But I felt my jaw rearranging as fangs started growing and pain flooded my being as punishment for not following the call, for not doing its bidding.

My jawbone cracked and crinkled, causing one of the men in our group to look over at me, and I looked down and away before he could see my jaw distending.

I felt the horns start to tear through my skin at the apex of my skull.  I sighed, I was just deluding myself.  I should have known I could never have a normal life.  I've tried so very hard, but my family's God damned curse; and I mean that literally, we were damned by God; makes sure of that.

It had been months since the last calling.  I thought that maybe my nightmare was over, and the curse had run its course, since I know next to nothing about it.  So with this new lease on life, I believed that I had, I was able to go through training and finish my schooling.  I was on the verge of getting a normal job and living a normal life after this internship.

All that I have worked for would be all blown to hell if I left just then.  All because of something I had no part in, something some ancient ancestor had done, now our entire bloodline will forever be Scythes.  Fallen demons who are trying to win their way back into heaven.

I grunted in pain when my tailbone started burning as my hips cracked and my tail started growing, slithering down my pant leg.  Kimoura Kaga, the anthropologist research assistant who was leading the tour, and my immediate supervisor, stopped her orientation speech and looked over at me.  Her eyes homed in on me with laser-like focus.  Had she heard my bones cracking?

I hesitated before looking away from her, damn she was gorgeous.  I've always loved the looks of Japanese American women.  They had something that just really got my motor running.  Too bad I'm so socially inept.  When Kimoura introduced herself this morning to each of us individually in her back office, I got all tongue tied and couldn't get rid of my blush.  She must have thought that I was slow or something.  Hell, when she asked my name I said,  “Ummm.”

She had grinned and tilted her head cutely and looked at her clipboard to examine it, then looked back at me with a wry grin, saying, “I don't have an Ummm, on the list.”  Her grin turned into a reassuring smile, and she said, “Just relax, take a breath.”

I looked up at her and had to look away, here huge expressive eyes were so dark they looked almost black.  My pulse was pounding, and I was getting a little lightheaded.  Yup, that's me, so smooth with the girls.  I swallowed then blurted out, “Lischca Umm Fonteneau?”

She shot me a playful wink and a toothy smile as she asked, “There, that wasn't so bad, now was it?”  She laid a hand on top of mine then yanked it back quickly and looked at her hand in shock for some reason.  Then the shocked look faded off her face, and her enticing smile returned.  I looked at my hands, sweaty and clammy, no wonder she pulled back.  Smooth Lisc, really smooth.

I finally pushed my shy attraction to the side and smiled back and said,  “Sorry.  Just nervous.”

She tilted her head again, and her eyes seemed to be studying me more thoroughly this time.  I felt like she was taking everything in.  When her eyes stopped on my shoulder and narrowed like she was trying to see something better, I had absently lifted a hand to cover the bottom of the sleeping demon brand.

She seemed to make a decision with a slight nod of her head, and she inclined her head to me and stated, “Don't apologize Lischca, I can call you Lischca, can't I?”

I blushed again and nodded, just great, I had a crush on the woman.  I hated when people called me by my full name, I preferred Lisc, but she could call me anything she wanted to.

She finished with, “I think you'll fit in just fine here.”  She stood, indicating the meet and greet was over.  I stood and scurried out of the office with the grin I tried to hide behind my hand, concentrating on placing one foot in front of the other.  Just what I needed to do was to trip over myself as I retreated.

Now here, just an hour later, I was going to disappoint her, and myself, as I lose the internship I had fought so hard to get.  I didn't even make it through orientation.  At that moment, I hated my curse more than I ever had.

As she looked at me from the front of the group, I shot her an apologetic look.  My skin was starting to burn all over, indicating I had lost the battle to hold the change at bay, it was going to happen whether I allowed it to or not, it must be a strong calling this time, to force the change upon me like this.

I slid away into the shadows and started running down the back corridors of the museum.  Following the call, I was drawn toward like a moth to a flame.  The overwhelming burning sensation from inside me started dissipating now that I was doing as I was supposed to.  Being a good little slave to the calling.  Paying penance for the sins of my family's past.  Sins I did not commit, and sins I had nothing to do with.  I hated my ancestors so much for making me into this... beast.  And that I had to atone for their sins and indiscretions.

I turned down a hall and was drawn to a door with a red sign which read, “Employees Only.”  I buzzed myself through the door by scanning my intern badge, which was hanging on the lanyard around my neck, over the lock.  I dashed down the stairs before the door had even finished closing.  My mouth was salivating, and I licked my long fangs with my now forked tongue, then it snicked out to sample the air.

I could taste my quarry now, and smell it, the viscous black blood coursing through its veins, and the sour sulfurous odor of its breath.  A Velscore Demon?  Shit, what was something that nasty doing here at the museum, and during the day even?  It must be hunting for someone in particular, tasked a specific target.  That's all those things did, with a single-minded purpose, hunt their prey to the ground.  They were incredibly efficient at it and were tougher than most other demons.

The only plus was that they were possessed of no innate magics of their own, they were just beasts who lived for the hunt, and for instilling as much terror into their victims as they could before the kill.

I was so far out of my league here.

At that thought, a tear rolled down my cheek, since I knew what was coming next, something I had no control over.  The curse, which was placed on my family so long ago, when my ancestors foolishly communed with demons for power back before Christ, causes us to be compelled to battle all evil.

If we ignore that calling, as punishment, we are slowly changed into the form of the very demons which my family had dealings with.  It is agonizing, and it slowly drives us out of our minds as we feel what the demons would feel.  I didn't like the things I felt and thought when I tried to ignore the call.

As recompense, if we did follow the calling, we were granted the boon of soul fire to help us defeat evil, to soothe the pain and mental anguish thrust upon us by our demon form.  From what I gathered from the sparse information my father had shared about the curse before his death, we can win our souls back if we do as we are compelled to do.  That keeps me pushing forward, knowing that one day... I may be free.

Just as I braced myself, my body exploded into a pain and torment which I cannot describe adequately, as my full demon form burst forth, shredding my clothing as my wings tore from my flesh at my back.  The curse always made sure I was able to handle a threat by changing me, stripping my humanity away to a point which I could complete my hunt.  Like a good slave.

Sometimes it was a partial change, almost unnoticeable except in my mind, where my thoughts were tainted but still mostly human.  My speed and strength are slightly augmented.  But sometimes, when the threat was most dire then it would be a more drastic, complete transformation like now.

Even tempered by the soul fire, I felt like every cell in my body was on fire.  I could smell and taste the monster which I had become both in body and in mind, and I hated myself.  I hated everything.  I was torn between the urge to tear apart everyone and anything just to make the pain go away, or to follow the calling.  It took all of my will and concentration to do the later.

My head snapped to the side, swiveling unnaturally.  The brimstone under my skin smoking and burning every nerve.  I licked my lips, feeling my fangs as I listened to the whispers in my head.  Yes, the hunt.  I could kill.  The thought thrilled me in ways I am ashamed of.

I inhaled deeply, pulling air through my enlarged nostrils and over my forked tongue.  I clenched my claws into fists, feeling the power coursing through me.  Yes, I could kill the Velscore like this, eat its flesh.  My mouth turned up into a toothy smile, baring my two-inch fangs to the world.  I ran my clawed hands over my breasts and down my sides.  Yes, the hunt was so seductive and thrilling in an almost sexual way.

Part of me, so small and human, in the back of my brain, shuddered in disgust.  Knowing that my demon was aroused at the thought of killing.  I could see the chains in here, inside my head as I watched through the eyes of the creature I had become.  See the soul fire binding my demon to do its bidding.  Binding... me, to do its bidding.  I was the demon and it me, I hated myself for that.

I ran down the hall, following the stench of the Velscore, it was on the move, it had smelled me.  Good!  I loved prey which ran.  I screamed a challenge that sounded of something from lowest pits of hell, and grappled the wall with my leathery wingtips to help increase my speed as I clawed at the floor to gain traction.

I burst into a large room filled with antiquities which were being arranged in an exhibit that would probably be brought up to the main level soon.  I sneered and swept a wing, which was crackling and snapping with fire, across the exhibit, smashing it to bits.  My inhuman laugh at causing just that small amount of chaos made me curl up in shame into a corner of my mind.

Movement in my peripheral vision caught my attention.  I was immediately diving at the Velscore on instinct as it made for the door.  I slammed a claw down at its muscular back, my talons sinking in.  I raked at him, pulling putrid flesh from it in chunks.  I was distracted by the smell of blood and raw flesh and paused to eat a claw full of the rotting flesh of my enemy and lick the delicious hot blood from my fingers.  I shuddered in my hiding place, trying to become smaller, to not see and feel the thrill my demon felt.

In my distraction a heavily muscled arm of my enemy struck at me, the curved claw at the end of it sinking into my side, the pincer at the end of his claw tearing at me.  I stumbled back out of its reach.  Damn it, I needed to focus, not let my demon do the thinking.  I reasserted myself, I hated the feel of my demon body, it felt so wrong and so right all in the same instant.

I was outclassed here, that's why the curse had transformed me fully.  Even so, my demon could not hope to defeat this Velscore.  This may well give me the peace have desired for so long, maybe in death, I could finally slip the chains of the curse.  But my demon would not let me escape it that easily, it loved the violence and mayhem and would fight every inch of the way to survive.

My opponent was single-minded.  It was on the hunt for something or someone and would do anything to get to its target.  I was in its way.  It was going to go through me to get at the poor soul it had been sent after.

My kind... the cursed, the Scythes of God, had something a normal demon did not have.  A human mind and a chained soul.  We had free choice to a certain extent.  As long as we did our duty like a good dog, we were free thinking.  And though I was outclassed physically, there was still a chance that I could out-think the Velscore.  I would have shed a tear if I could have, over the fact that sometimes, we humans can be even more brutal than demons.  It was shameful but true.

I sneered as I looked around while I backed into the space to give myself more room to act.  I took in everything around me, cataloging, categorizing, formulating a plan.  I looked down to my injured side.  Black blood was pouring out, bubbling, burning, and sizzling on the concrete beneath my feet.  I licked my lips at the sight of the blood.  I had been so hungry for so long.

I fought the demon inside me down again.  I raised a claw and allowed the soul fire to burn through it, heating my blackened skin.  It was painful, but I had felt worse.  I then grabbed my side with the hand now burning white hot with soul fire and screamed an inhuman screech as I cauterized the wound.

I panted and my demon wanted to dive on the approaching Velscore, to punish it for the pain I caused us by stopping our blood loss.  I hissed as I looked at the chains on the hoist above us and said, “No, wait.”  My demon roared at me, I roared at me.  We roared at us.  I was the demon, and I wanted to remind myself of it, warning myself not to think of me as two separate beings.  I wanted to punish myself.  I looked at the chains again, and I understood my human half as I growled back at myself, “Lischca is smart.  But I will eat his heart after.”

I shuddered at the thought, and even more at the fact that it just sounded right to me.  I was losing myself into my demon.

I backed away slowly, luring the Velscore to the point I wanted it, as he stalked around while as I kept myself between it and the door.  Then just as he crouched to attack, there was a blur in my vision, I flinched at the pure bluish white light that gave the cruel promise of hope.  It shown off a sweeping blade which sliced through the air in a graceful arc.

It clanged against the hard shell of the beast's pincer, chipping a small piece off of the monster's carapace.  I blinked at the impossibility of it, no mortal weapon could harm a demon.

My eyes were mesmerized by the light of the blade.  It promised that impossible hope... and peace.  I blinked and forced my eyes up to see...  Kimoura?

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Two |Battle

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SHE DANCED AND PARRIED and stayed between me and the other demon as it pressed its attack.  That beautiful blade slicing through the air in those graceful arcs.  Chipping carapace off the claws of the beast and actually drawing its blood.  Leaving sizzling trails of scarred flesh in its wake.

She was moving faster than any human should be able to.  I was mesmerized.  I used The Sight and caught fluttering glimpses of wings of pure soul fire slashing through the air behind her as she spun and danced around the demon.

She turned to look at me.  That same soul fire burning in her eyes, it hurt, it burned my entire being, and I felt shame for what I was, while I wanted nothing more than to bask in it.

She said with concern coloring her voice as she fought, barely paying attention to the creature, “You're injured.”

I hissed at her, tasting the air with my tongue.  I, we, growled out, “I am fine.  I had a plan, but you interfered.  I will eat his heart!”

She smiled and said softly, “No you won't, Lischca.”

My mind almost shut down with the overwhelming wave of shame that flowed through my entire being when she said my name.  She knew who I was... what I was.  I wanted to die.  Maybe that blade of hers, which shone with hope.  Maybe the hope it offered was an end to my miserable existence once and for all.  An end to the pain.

She spun her sword in the air in a complex pattern, ending with the motion of sheathing it.  Yet there was no sheath, and now apparently no blade either.  It had simply vanished, that wonderful and terrible light extinguishing.

She stepped back away from the beast and myself and smiled in actual mirth as said in a sing-song tone, “Then by all means, show me this grand plan of yours.”

My demon wanted to take her, sexually, on the floor then tear her apart after the fact for being so smug.  I was just staring in shock at her smile.  Was she... having fun?  I'd show her.  I didn't need her help, I'd be done with this demon then I'd eat both of their hearts.  I reprimanded myself, “No, you won't.”

I screeched out a challenge that could only have come from a hell-spawned beast as it curdled my own blood.  The Velscore turned from her to me and answered my challenge with one that would have stripped away the very humanity of whoever it was aimed at.  I smiled, as I was not human just then.  I was demon.  I would bathe in its blood.

We charged at each other.  At the moment of impact, I spread my leathery wings wide and with the smell of rot, flame, and brimstone, gave them a mighty flap.  I thrust up above the demon, my rear claws sinking deep into its shoulders, my barbed tail wrapping tightly around its neck as I flapped again and grabbed the chains as I came even with the hoist.  I grappled the overhead beam with one front claw and grabbed the chain with another.

I slammed the hook at the end of the chain into the demon's flesh and pushed all of my soul fire into my fist.  It burned through his chest.  The soul fire flared like a purifying flame, burning the demon flesh that touched it, changing its nature to that of true flesh.  I licked my lips.  True flesh that would taste so sweet.  I hooked the chain to another as my fist came out his back then I started to drop back to the floor.

He snapped at my tail as I uncoiled it and I screeched in pain and anger as his fangs bit into the flesh of it.  I dangled upside down.  My arms inches above the floor, being held by my tail in the jaws of the chained Velscore, who was thrashing its body and head, trying to sever my tail.

I was about to twist upward to slash at the beast to get free when I heard a sweet chuckle behind me.  “Great plan.”

I hissed as I looked back at Kimoura who was just sort of sauntering up to us demons as we hung from the hoist above.  By all that was holy, she was beautiful.  I would ravage her in bed, make her scream my name knowing only I could show her such ecstasy, then I would bathe in her blood.  “No!”  I shouted to my demon nature in my head.  “You will not touch her!”

She reached to her side and drew out that sword from nowhere.  The light was so pure.  It shamed me for my tainted thoughts.  I wanted to beg for forgiveness.  I wanted to bow before that light, grovel and surrender my soul to it and to her.

With a single thrust, her blade pierced the tough hide of the demon, directly through its heart.  My eyes went wide as it started to crumble into putrid dust.  No I'll...  I fell flat on my face.

She chuckled and reached out to help me up as she sheathed that wondrous sword.  I skittered back along the floor in shame, pressing my back against the wall, my wings pressed flat.  She didn't need to see me like this.  She smiled so fondly, so compassionately as she kept approaching with her hand held out.  Offering it to me.

I shrieked out in pain and anger and... fear, and was instantly up and crossed to her with a claw around her throat.  I screamed out in a shrieking wail, “I will eat your heart!”

She smiled and just reached out with her hand and gently caressed my cheek.  There was no fear in her eyes, only amazement and... happiness?  Her delicate, warm fingers tracing the cracks in my hide.  The red burning of hellfire which was mottled with the yellow and white sulfur veins running across my skin.  She whispered, “No, you won't.”

My entire soul shifted in its chains.  Leaning in, yearning for her touch.  Straining hard against the chains that bound it and me.  It was the touch of innocence.  I felt a tear fall down my cheek, stinking of brimstone, sizzling as it fell to the concrete.  She smiled again and said in awe, “So beautiful.  I had no idea.”

I started crying and slid to the ground.  I didn't know why I was crying.  My demon was recoiling into my hiding place forcing me out to deal with something it couldn't comprehend, something it couldn't understand.  Something that was not hate and violence.  I realized what I looked like, a naked female demon and I dropped my hand from her throat and covered my modesty with a wing as I shrank away from her and curled up into a ball in the corner of the room.

She followed, not allowing me to retreat.  She reached out again and ran her hand along my horns.  Then the leading edges of my wings.  She scrunched down to meet my eyes.  Her voice seemed to hum inside my very being as she smiled and said, “It is ok Lischca, you don't need to hide from me.  I'm so happy I finally found you after all these years.”

I just stared at her, my body craving her touches as tears continued to flow.  I felt the burning agony of my demon form slowly subsiding, melting back into the dark recesses of my being as my skin started taking on a pinkish hue.  Oh God no.  Please, Lord, don't embarrass me any further.  How low can I sink now?  I felt my demon aspect retreat from my mind and then the shame and repulsion for the way I had been thinking when it was in control hit me, and I turned my head and puked.

I spit out the chunks of demon flesh that she... that I, had eaten, and I sobbed while this woman, whom I had just met, simply held me and shushed me and rocked me.  Comforting me.

Finally, I looked up into her eyes as her own soul fire flickered out, and those beautiful dark eyes smiled at me.  I bit my tongue hard as the demon brand on my shoulder reconfigured, curling up and pulling a wing across its face as it went back to sleep.  I whispered, “Who... what are you?”  I couldn't get enough of her.  I felt as if I should know who she was.  I felt like we had known each other my entire life.

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Three |Key

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SHE TILTED HER HEAD in confusion then her eyes lit up in shock and she stuttered out,  “You... you really don't know?”

I shook my head.  She smiled and stroked my cheek, I leaned into the warmth and closed my eyes.

She said as if it were the most obvious thing in the world, “I am your Key.”

I opened my eyes and shrugged in confusion.  She blinked in genuine surprise and confusion and asked, “Didn't your parents tell you?”

I shook my head and admitted in a small voice, “I don't know much about the curse.  I got my first Calling the day I turned eighteen.  My father told me a little about our curse, our sin, as I changed.  We both went on the hunt that night, but only I returned.”

She placed both hands on my cheeks and lifted my head so our eyes could meet again.  How was it possible that she seemed even more beautiful each time I looked upon her?  It made no sense.  I have never felt attraction so strongly for someone before.  I just wanted to please this woman, but I felt ashamed that I didn't know what she wanted me to know.

She read this in my eyes and comforted me again, then looked at the ceiling like she could see through the entire building to the blue skies above.  She spoke like she was teaching an ancient history class, “Every Scythe has the chance for redemption, to be released from the punishment which all of their bloodline must suffer for siding with the disciples of Satan.”

My heart skipped a beat at that.  Redemption.  I truly could get free of my demon?  Father said that much, but not how.

He was going to tell me all after our first hunt, but they were waiting for us.  The demons.  They thought to take out a young Scythe, but my father's demon proved to be too much for their ambush, he died protecting me, before my demon could break free from the chains I had restrained it with to finish off the last of them.

She spoke like her thoughts were miles away, and she was grasping at them like they were an elusive mist trying to slip between her fingers, “When a Scythe is on the fringe of redemption, when the good they have done, dispatching evil from this realm, balances the debt of their tainted soul.  Their Key will finally be allowed to find them.  On the day your debt is paid, your Key can then unlock the shackles on your soul, break the chains that bind and set you free.”

Now my heart was threatening to beat right out of my chest.  I blinked tears out of my eyes and looked at this wondrous woman.  Trying to comprehend what she was saying.  She released one of my cheeks, and I missed the contact almost immediately.  She pulled up her shirt sleeve and there, burned into her skin, flaring with her bluish white soul fire was the number ninety-nine.

She smiled and explained, “When your chain of sin is reduced below one hundred links, your Key will finally complete their lifelong search for you.  We witness and chronicle your last battles with other demons as you banish them back to the underworld.”

Then her face dropped, painted with profound sadness, and I wanted to do something, anything, to see that smile again.  She said in a haunted tone,  “It usually takes a lifetime to erase the debt, and most of your line die long before it can happen.  Before redemption.  The very few that have accomplished it near the ends of their lives, were finally able to live the last days of those lives in peace.  Hand in hand with their Key.”

Then her face transformed, as that sadness was replaced by a fierce pride.  “However, my Scythe has battled almost every day for years, following the Calling, no matter how faint. Diminishing her debt faster than any Fonteneau in recorded history.  I searched for you endlessly as my brand counted down, but the curse would not allow me to find you until the proper time.  I have dreamed of you all my life.  Watched you from afar in the waning moments between sleep and waking.”

I blinked.  That was it.  Why it seemed like I have known her my entire life.  Why I had such an attraction to Japanese American women.  I have dreamed of Kimoura my entire life as well, but the dreams were fleeting.  I could never hold onto them for more than a few seconds after waking.  Now I saw them all clear as day.  It had always been her, burning in the glory of her soul fire, her wings fluttering behind her like an avenging angel ready to take me home.

She closed her eyes and whispered, “I was so frightened when the number stopped counting down on my brand.  For months there was nothing, and I had feared the worst.  I thought my beautiful Scythe had been lost in battle and lost to me forever.”

She opened her eyes, and a happy tear flowed down her cheek as she shared, “Then a goddess walked into my office this morning.  I couldn't believe my eyes, it had to be you.  Then I saw the brand on your arm and just knew it.  You were even more beautiful than in my dreams.”

She chuckled. “I didn't understand how I had found you when my brand was still at one hundred.  But the moment you ran from the group, I felt the tingle on my shoulder, and the number changed before my very eyes, and I was suddenly... aware of you, and where you were.  I felt the dark place in which you hid in your mind, as you did what was required of you in your other beautiful form.”

Then she grinned and said with that touch of mirth in her voice, “I had to come to you to watch you do battle.  Terrible plan by the way.”

I couldn't stop a surprised giggle at that.  That just put a huge smile on her gorgeous face, her dark eyes sparkling.  I finally spoke, trying to come to terms with what I thought she was saying to me, “You... you're my... Key?  I can finally be rid of this God forsaken curse one day.”

She nodded, tears welling in her eyes.  She said hopefully, “If you will have me.”

I blinked, and she shook her head in exasperation and almost growled, “You are way too shy.  I'll have to break you of that.  But now, I'd really like to do what I have longed to for my entire life as I have searched endlessly.”

She stroked my black, sweaty, matted, and human hair back and looked at me like nobody had ever looked at me before.  Like there was nobody else in the world but the two of us.  I knew she was seeing my soul, and she leaned down, and I instinctively leaned up.  Our lips met in the gentlest whispering kiss, which felt like a promise to me.  I swear my soul was crying as we pulled apart slightly.

Then she winked at me with a flush face, her eyes sparkling with playfulness and mischief as she said through a cute crooked smile while she ran her fingers through my hair,  “So, ummm... what say you about finding some clothes?  You're kind of naked here and it is reeeeealy distracting me.  In a good way of course, but still distracting.”

I chuckled and nodded, my eyes wide in adoration of her.  Just ninety-nine more times.  Less than a hundred times, becoming that evil to fight evil.  If she was my prize.  I could do that.  If she would have me.  My heart beat strongly, I had loved this woman in my dreams my whole life and not even known it.  And now, I would love her with whatever time I had left in this world.

Then I blinked myself out of my thoughts and blushed.  But first, I need clothes.

THAT THING WE KILLED

by Enyaw Reztips

I still don't know what it was, that thing we killed. I've seen things like it, in movies and on TV. But those things were made up, or based on the bones of extinct animals. Like monsters. This wasn't like that. This was just an animal, though not one that any of us had ever seen. Not in Halcomb County, that's for sure.

It hadn't threatened us, as far as I can remember. It turned on us, hissing kind of, a limp trout falling from its mouth, because we had startled it. I sure remember that mouth, opened like a wet, black rosebud, showing spiny teeth, a white palate. Maybe it had lunged toward us. Maybe it deserved what it got. I don't even remember who fired first or why. It was a long time ago and everyone involved is dead, except me.

We'd gone out that day to get a trophy for my thirteenth birthday, even though it wasn't hunting season. We made an odd sort of family back then: Uncle Horseshoe (because of his mustache), Hank, and Frank Garstole, who lived in a cabin next door. Uncle Horseshoe owned every kind of gun imaginable, from Scout rifles to muskets, and the walls of his house were covered with every kind of trophy, the great prize being a seven-tine rack of moose over the fireplace, which he said he'd killed alone in the Blue Mountains in December of '62, but which Frank said he stole from a woodpile in Alaska.

Frank laughed at the thought of us going out. "Horseshoe," he said, "Now what do you think a game warden's gonna say when he sees you outfitted like brigands?"

I remember Horseshoe just staring at him—he was huge on staring. "Don't worry about it, Frank," he said.

Frank said to me after they'd gone out, "They're scarin' up their own trouble, boy. Let 'em go."

But I ran after them.

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WE STARTLED IT, AS I've said.

We were rounding a deadfall, bitching about how it had been a wasted day, when we saw it. I saw it complete for only an instant; it looked like a snake—not a Rattler or a Moccasin, more like a Python, or one of those Boas you sometimes see in National Geographic, with its giant body held up by an entire hunting party—a snake threaded through a turtle. But then it fled, hissing kind of, slinking back into the water and paddling away, toward the center of the lake.

I wasn't frightened by it. It didn't look or act like The Giant Behemoth, or Reptilicus, or anything else you might see at a matinee or in comic books. It was just an animal, though not one any of us had ever seen. But then bullets went punching through its blubber. Then the thing's blood went spraying in all directions.

There was a rickety dock nearby, which we used to get closer. I remember the spent shells dropping and plinking off its boards. The thing turned on us; I suppose it had to. It tried to hiss but managed only a choked gargle. Blood bubbled from its throat and spilled from its mouth.

"Take the fatal shot," said Horseshoe. He must have laid down his rifle because I remember him helping to steady my own. "Easy now, you'll own this forever—" I stared the thing in the eye and squeezed the trigger.

It threw back its head, rising up. It gasped for breath, spitting more blood. It barked at the sky. Then it fell, head thumping against the deck. Its serpentine neck slumped. The rest of its blood spread over the boards and rolled around our boots and flowed between the planks.

I was the first to step forward, looking down at the thing through drifting smoke.

Its remaining eye seemed to look right back. I got down on my knees to look closer. The thing exhaled, causing the breathing holes at the top of its head, behind its eyes, to bubble. I waited for it to inhale, staring into its eye—I could see myself there as well as the others, could see the sky and the scattered clouds. The whole world seemed contained in that moist little ball. Then the eye rolled around white—it shrunk, drying, and the thing's neck constricted. And it died.

Horseshoe slapped my back, massaged my neck. "How's it feel, little buddy?"

But I didn't know what I felt. I could only stare at the eye, now empty.

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WE WENT BACK THE NEXT day with Frank Garstole and a bunch of others with the intent of hoisting it out of the lake, but there had been a thunderstorm and whatever it was we had killed was gone, slipped back into the water, I suppose. Old Frank sure had a laugh about that, chiding Horseshoe, "Well, the bigger they are, the more apt they are to vanish without a trace."

Horseshoe just stared, like he might kill him right there on the spot. It was the same look he gave me when, visiting years later, I joked about that rack of moose he'd found in Alaska. We'd been sitting on his back porch, which was falling to ruin just like his body, having beers, and—well, it was a look that said it was time to go. I went and never saw him again.

I still think about that thing we killed, from time to time. Sometimes I dream about it. Sometimes in the dreams I am in the water with the thing, where it kills me rather than me killing it. Sometimes, as I sink, I see it hovering high above. I see it through a cloud of blood and a ceiling of water, rimmed in solar fire, beautiful. Other times I am the thing, and I rise, spitting blood, barking at the sky.

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The End

About the Authors

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JAMES C. GLASS read and wrote science fiction as a kid and published a fanzine while in high school, but then came college, a degree in physics and starting a family while working on ion and arc-jet engines at Rocketdyne.

​

Graduate school followed, and a thirty five year career as a professor of physics, department head and dean at North Dakota State University and Eastern Washington University. The writing during this time was seventy five technical papers on his research in molecular biophysics and superconductivity. But the fiction writing bug bit hard again when Jim was well into his forties.

His first published story was in Aboriginal S.F. and soon after he won the 1990 grand prize in the Writers of the Future Contest. He retired from his academic job in 1999 and now writes full time.

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WAYNE KYLE SPITZER is an American writer, illustrator, and filmmaker. He is the author of countless books, stories and other works, including a film (Shadows in the Garden), a screenplay (Algernon Blackwood’s The Willows), and a memoir (X-Ray Rider). His non-fiction writing has appeared in subTerrain Magazine: Strong Words for a Polite Nation and Columbia: The Magazine of Northwest History. He holds a Master of Fine Arts degree from Eastern Washington University, a B.A. from Gonzaga University, and an A.A.S. from Spokane Falls Community College. His recent fiction includes The Man/Woman War cycle of stories as well as the Dinosaur Apocalypse Saga. He lives with his sweetheart Ngoc Trinh Ho in the Spokane Valley.

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RON Ford is an actor, writer and filmmaker, active in the Spokane theater scene. In 1994, after moving to LA, he sold his first screenplay which became the horror hit, The Fear. He became a filmmaker in 1997 with his directorial debut, Alien Force, starring Burt Ward of Batman fame.

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M. KARI BARR writes what she wants. Mainly that would be fantasy. She enjoys writing poetry, children’s stories, and general fantasy to be enjoyed by readers 14 and up. The prologue included with the story of Gulthwolf was one of Kari’s very first published short stories, having been entitled The Eyes Have It. It had been picked up by an odd, macabre magazine that no longer puts out material. The author also self-published an eBooks version which is still out there, but is in need of editing. Kari is the author of the Tales of Destiny series. Readers can expect Book 3 to be published by 2021. To contact her visit intangience.net

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KEVIN PENELERICK is a 44 year old author and creator living in Northern Idaho. He believes there are many great stories left untold and many great mysteries unsolved. He is currently at work writing these tales and will share them once the pen stops moving and he knows they are complete.

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ANDY KUMPON is an award winning writer and filmmaker from Washington State. Andy has always been interested in sci-fi/horror/fantasy. He is a big fan of the old Godzilla movies, creature feature and, of course, Star Wars. Andy is the main writer and author for “Seeds of the Dead”.

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BILL LINK, born William Daniel Link, was born in 1966, and has been a lifelong resident of the Spokane/Spokane Valley area of Washington state, where most of his fiction takes place. While having graduated from Eastern Washington University with a B.A. in History, it was his lifelong love of horror and weird fiction that determined what he'd do with the rest of his life. He has published an anthology of short horror fiction called Creeping Shadows, a horror novella entitled Skin Like Tanned Leather, and has contributed to the anthology series, A Roll Of The Dice, volumes I, II, and III. He hopes to be publishing a new novella accompanied with short stories in the near future. He resides with his wife, their daughter, and their cat, Lovecraft.

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ERIK SCHUBACH has always been drawn to strong female characters in books, like Honor Harrington. He also believes that there is a significant lack of LGBT characters in fiction and other media.

Each of his books features strong, likeable female characters that are flawed. As he puts it, “I think that flaws and emotional or physical scars make us more human and give us greater character than simply conforming to some pre-established ‘social norm.’”

He has also originated various sci-fi, paranormal, fantasy, post- apocalyptic, urban fantasy, and horror series. Examples would be The Valkyrie Chronicles, the Fracture series, The Bridge series, and the Urban Fairytales series. His most ambitious undertaking yet has been the Techromancy Scrolls series, an epic adventure set in a world three-thousand years beyond a mass extinction event—a world where magic and technology collide.

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ENYAW K. REZTIPS is a writer of super-short horror stories whose specialty is substituting for writers who have, for one reason or another, not made it into a given anthology. Mercurial and enigmatic by nature, he would prefer we say as little about him as possible at this particular time.