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Cryptic Crits Tree Bucket, "Star Flame Grave Wing" Good enough of an opening, although I could do without the excess capitalization. Interesting detail. Why is this captain so unfamiliar with their own ship's capabilities? Some interesting ideas in there. And the ending is cute. But it barely connects with the rest of it. Middleish Brotherly, What Was Needed A solid opening. I'm told real young people don't use periods in non-angry texts, although the age of the narrator and his social media coterie aren't clearly established. But overall, this is quite good. Solid dialog and character work. The ending is a bit weak in terms of plotting (the prose at the end is quite good, though) but otherwise probably in the top portion. Nae, The Prisoners of Bodwin Moor Another from the cryptid's point of view, but a fairly harmless beast. Speaking of point of view, yours shouldn't work; either you're in the beast's head or you can give the English dialog. But it almost still works. Middle. Yoruichi, The River Slow but interesting opening. Overall an interesting piece. I can't for a second buy the abysmal security practices for a working hydroelectric dam, or for any working dam to ever be empty of personel at any time. Middle Maugrim, You Otter See My Animal Enamels So this feels a lot like a complicated joke with no punchline. The bits are okay, but they just don't come together at all, from the lack of any context that could make the opening pun work at all to the sudden animal hell to the Wikipedia exposition, the sudden shift from flirtation to hostility. Low group. QuoProQuid, St. Liz and the Dragon Slow establishing opening. Needs Corgis. It sorts of lives and dies on mounting absurdity, and the "moo" earns a laugh, but not really enough to justify the premise, and the ending is just there. Middle/middle low. siotle, Hunting (for the Way out of this Place) Opening is a bit generic, establishing a classic snipe hunt. And in the middle we have a sighting of the beast that does nothing in particular to influence the arc of the story. This one is just there, really. Low. Antivehicular, A Cubicle, A Coracle, A Storm Strong, evocative opening. Very much my jam. I don't know if the second person narration is a great choice here, don't know if it does anything that first doesn't other than letting you finesse a probable narrator death ending. Could have used more breathing room in a few places, but you were at the word limit. High, top pick.
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Dec 2, 2020 00:03
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Timeout Prompt:Strange Eyes 809 words It was never going to work. Darius was an outtimer, a shard of another reality working itself loose. He was lonely as I was. His eyes, well, one was the ocean and the other was copper flame. I drowned and burned in them, was lost and blinded. And then he was gone. And then... He seemed normal, at first. Foreign, of course. The future is another country. But relatable. He had a thousand stories about the second culture. He was infinitely joyful in this era's art. I went in thinking it was just a bit of fun. I don't know what he was after. You hear stories, of course. Predestination paradoxes. Someone changes enough things in their past and suddenly their grandparents never meet. But nature abhors a paradox, so the easiest way the timestream can correct is to make them wind up their own ancestor. A simple failure of birth control is more likely than every bit of DNA of a person lining up just right. Darius laughed at that one. "First gen outtimers, that might have happened once or twice. Then we started donating. You know, sperm. Or eggs, as the case may be. Give time an easier path." Darius started out weird. Funny weird. Good weird. He knew things. He could cook, and each meal was an adventure. A good enough lover. A listener, too. But he got weirder. That's what happens, outtime. A hundred little changes here in present, parts of their mission or incidental brushes against a butterfly's wings. Each one makes a change in the future, a change in their history. And before you know it they aren't the person they were when you met. He was never cruel. Never violent, even when the second culture shifted into a hyper-patriarchal duels-and-gladiators dystopia. (Sometimes outtimers came to fix their past, sometimes to undo ill-thought out changes from the last group, sometimes to learn, sometimes just to escape. The only constant was that they came at all.) No, he never raised hand or even voice to me. He just got different. Colder. Stranger. I left him, told him it was over. He just nodded and packed his things. Then, at the door, he turned to me. "Are you sure?" he said, and stared at me with those eyes, one a phosphor dot, the other a supergiant star. I blinked until I felt tears and watched him go. I saw him again just the other day. This would be three years on, one relationship with a nice, normal intime man in between. George was nice. Normal. Reliable. By the end of it I hated him like he'd strangled my cat. Which he never would have done, even if I had one. But I did, and I did unforgivable things, and when he did forgive me I hated him more. So I ran into Darius. There are a lot more outtimers now. The second culture's dying and they're showing up half-starved, lean and dangerous. The ones who've been here for a while aren't any better, but they get treated better. Not exactly fair, but that's the way it goes here in the late first culture, here in the second roaring twenties. So Darius was in the same bar as me and neither of us were that interested in getting drunk. He was hustling darts and I was sharing stories with one of the bartenders and I fell in those damned eyes, the approaching light of the big bang, the fadeout of the last ember of heat death. We sang karaoke until we got booed off the stage, then got wrecked at trivia because outtimers are always trash at trivia and I'm not that great either. We went home together. He was like a stranger, like a different person in bed. You get more than one first time, sort of, with an outtimer. But they don't remember it the same way. He was manic, driven. He had a mission now, grand and dramatic and secret. He wouldn't even hint at what he planned to do to save the future. There's this way of looking at the future, when you've gotten back together with an ex, when you know it's going to end badly but maybe if you don't think about it ever it might come out different. I think that must be what it's like, coming from outtime. We met at a concert, at the first one after the pandemic in this town. I bought the tickets on a lark, thought I'd have someone to go with but ended up selling the second one online. He came in after the opening act, two songs into the main event. He sat his backpack on the seat and pulled out a water bottle, and I glanced into his eyes, one sapphire and the other mermaid-scale. "Hi," I said. "I'm Astrid."
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Dec 7, 2020 07:19
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Week 234-Binging on Bad Words
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Dec 8, 2020 10:03
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Week 234 The Wheel 4600 words 1. When his horse hesitated and reared back, Arkham shouldered his rifle. Jacob had the same trouble with his mount. He shouted "Who's there?" and Arkham silently cursed him for giving away their position. He scanned the thin woods, checking each tree for a hand or knuckle grasping the edge from behind, looking for any over-thick shadows. It was close to noon and freezing, too dry for snow or even much frost. There, a tall pine with one branch of clean green needles, not dusted and ashed like the rest. Arkham aimed at the space left of the tree, then jerked his head to the side. Jacob caught the signal. He had his pepperbox at hand. He fired without aiming, a bullet flying deeper into the woods. "Don't shoot, don't shoot!" A man in rebel grey stepped out from behind the tree, right into Arkham's sights. "You going to come quietly?" asked Jacob. "You don't want to take me prisoner," said the reb, hands raised. He had a clean shave and a singed left sleeve. "In fact, you're going to let me go back to my unit." "Fat chance Johnny," said Jacob. He dismounted and reached down and took the man's sidearm from his belt. "It's Zeke," he said. "You're all Johnny to me." "Look," said Zeke. "Check my pocket. Left pants." "Are you trying to pull something funny?" "Humor him," said Arkham. Jacob reached in and pulled out a heavy yellow disk, like a coin but blank on both sides. "It's gold," said Zeke. "And there's a lot more where that came from." "What do you mean?" said Jacob. "I'm with the payroll. A wagon full of gold headed for Charleston." "You weren't just wandering around here," said Arkham. "You were looking for us." Zeke nodded. "If I found a full unit I would have traded what I know for freedom and a ticket to Brazil I guess. But this way is better. You can find a few people you can trust and we can all be rich. There's more than enough to go 'round." Arkham listened to the details, the number of men and weapons, a few ambush positions on the route, some signals while Jacob emptied the bullets from Zeke's revolver. Then they watched Zeke walk away. "Who are you thinking? We'll need Michaels," said Jacob. Arkham nodded. Without the supply chief there would be no chance to keep that kind of weight hidden until the end of the war. "I'd want six more riflemen. Maybe eight." "Six," said Arkham. "I can think of a few names." "I bet you can," said Jacob. Michaels was easy to convince. He was already crooked as they came, started working angles to squeeze profit out of whatever steel had to come off the wagons to make weight immediately. Most of the men Arkham wanted were in right away. Ezra took a bit of convincing. "Look," Jacob said, "We're already going to put the Confederates in a deep well of pigshit-" "Don't be profane," said Ezra, sniffing as if he could smell the words themselves. "A deep well of porcine excrement just by making sure they can't use it to pay their men. It isn't like we'll be hurting our side. We'll be winning the da- sorry, the blasted war. And think what good could be done with that money after." Ezra's eyes moved left, then right, as if he were comparing two visions etched in the air. "I'm in," he said. "I may come to regret it, but I'm in." Ezra was Arkham's least favorite person in the entire Union army apart from General McClellan, but the man was an amazing shot. He had two revolvers, one taken off a rebel officer at the battle of Marion, and was better with his left hand than most soldiers were with their right. At the signal, while most of the men were taking shots with their rifles he was in front popping shot after shot, each one a clean kill. It was a perfect ambush, a massacre, half their number dead in the initial volley. “Yield!,” shouted a rebel, the ranking surviving officer from the look of his uniform. “We yield, you bastards!” Ezra hesitated. Arkham set down his rifle and put hand to sidearm, as did most of the others. The surviving rebels slowly raised their hands. “Like hell you do!” said Zeke. He raised his pistol to the officer’s head and fired. Arkham resumed shooting, and the rest followed in a chaotic fight. Only one of the rebels had weapon ready enough to do anything but shoot wildly. He charged right at Zeke. Zeke turned and shot, just missing behind the man. His bayonet sunk deep into Zeke’s guts minutes before Ezra shot the man. His corpse fell across Zeke, wrenching the rifle and bayonet several degrees, deepening the cut. “Damned fool,” Jacob said as he walked by Zeke’s body. “Don’t blaspheme,” said Ezra. “You want to bury the dead?” asked Jacob. “We’re heading east tomorrow,” said Arkham. “No more patrols this way. Leave them for their own, or for the buzzards.” The horses in the camp were spooked and useless. Arkham cut their tethers and let them run, each flying off a different direction. He checked the main wagon and found the trunks. They each had padlocks, large iron ones that weren’t too strong to be pried off. It was there, gold, enough to make them all rich, if they were careful enough. He organized the men in front and behind the wagon, pushing and pulling together. Half doing the labor, half on lookout, switching off around midway back, they reached the edge of their encampment. Jacob went in and came back with Michaels. Moving each of the two trunks was a four-man job. Would have been better with six for the load, but they weren’t long like a coffin, so it had to be four. They carried each trunk to the supply tent and set them down where Michaels directed. He had new locks ready. “Remember,” said Arkham, “We know where you sleep.” “I’d never-” said Michaels. “Course not. Still.” “Temptation is a mocker,” said Ezra. :And you’ll have charge of this for quite some time. Just remember that we all know what the count was. Anything that comes missing when we make the split comes out of your share.” 2. “Jacob’s not coming,” said the woman. She wore black and white and a small red hat. Dark hair and a face just starting to show signs of age but still striking. “That makes three less shares, then,” said Arkham. Two of the men had fallen on the battlefield during the last year of the war. “Like hell it does,” she said. “I’m his wife and what’s his is mine by rights.” Arkham was getting a little worried. He didn’t know how much this woman knew, didn’t know how far she would be likely to go. She was an unknown, an element of chaos, and Arkham didn’t like that even a little. “Is he dead?” he said. “No,” she said. “I mean, I don’t think so. He was fine-” “He isn’t here,” said Arkham. “Don’t know what would take priority over this.” “Family. We got a telegram from Chicago, from his mother. She was having trouble and Jacob shot right out there. He was supposed to be back by now, but-” “How did you find me?” "You're a pretty distinctive looking person," she said. She wasn't wrong. Arkham stood a head higher than near anyone, lean and lanky, and had a scar on his head and right ear that was hard to miss, a parting gift from the war. "Jacob told me where the meet was and my eyes did the rest." Arkham didn't trust her, couldn't even be sure she was who she said she was. But he couldn't just kill her for a half dozen reasons, not least being she might be telling nothing but the truth. And he couldn't have her bouncing around the outside of the job either. So. "Mrs. Breakridge," he said. "Molly," she said. Arkham nodded. "Molly, then. We're meeting up tomorrow afternoon in the backroom at the Star. I'll make sure you don't have any trouble getting in." That gave another half-day for others to arrive, but as the hours passed and they didn't Arkham liked it less and less. When the meeting started it was just him, Molly, Ezra, and Vince Darling. "Michaels was a, was a blessed idiot and a piece of work," said Vince. He was the one who had been out here, out in northern California keeping eyes on Michaels since the war. "Paranoid. Didn't white around or gamble or have any other expensive habits. Didn't trust the banks. When he died the banks and town taxmen went round to settle his estate, and nobody reported nothing about a huge pile of gold in there." "Could be one of them went freelance, took it himself," said Arkham. "They work in teams. Pairs. Too many eyes to be that dishonest," said Vince. "And not enough to shift it besides," said Ezra. "Cashing out that much gold leaves records. That's why we wanted the mine." Ezra had bought the rights to a tapped-out mine down in the valley for a hundred or so. They were all going to buy in and claim the gold as from a newly-found vein. There were even smelting works and ingot molds on site, in need of a scrub to shed the rust but good enough. "So we have to assume it's at the house, hidden," said Arkham. "Let's hope it's not buried unmarked in the yard." "Can we get in?" asked Ezra. "Not much to stop us," said Vince. "No posted guards, and the neighbors aren't close enough to be an issue. Foot patrol walks by at ten." "Then we'll arrive at eleven," said Arkham. "Not together, and not from the same direction. Ezra and Vince from up Sherman Street, Molly and I down Ashford Lane." The road was dark, unlit save for the lantern Molly carried. "How did Michaels die?" she asked. "Some kind of fit, the doctor said. Apoplexy, swallowed his own tongue." Arkham didn't turn his head to speak, just kept scanning the darkness beside them. "What a horrible way to die," she said. "I've seen worse," said Arkham. "Well, of course," she said. "What with the war. Jacob never speaks of such things, but sometimes, in the dead of night..." "Some people have that trouble," he said. "Can't leave what's meant to stay on the battlefield alone." "But not you, mister- is Arkham your family or Christian name?" "We're here," said Arkham. Vince and Ezra were just ahead of them, inspecting the front door. There was a hefty lock and a notice from the town glued over the keyhole. Ezra dropped his sack of tools and pulled out a long iron prybar and started trying to work it into the space between door and frame. "Give me that, you pure fool," said Molly. "Don't-" said Ezra as she snatched it out of his hand. She walked around to the side window and wedged it in the crack in the old paint at the bottom. The window lifted after a shove and she shimmied inside. Arkham passed her lantern to her through the window and she navigated to the front door, which opened up to let them all in. The house had clearly been searched, but not as thoroughly as they were going to search it. Drawers emptied, some furniture moved about. Not much more than that. They set to work, putting holes in the walls, ripping open mattresses, prying up any floorboards that sounded different when tapped. They found nothing after searching for hours. "There's another building out back," said Vince as the others were resting and trying to think. "Some kind of larder." They all went to the back yard. The larder had a heavy lock attached, and nobody objected to Ezra using the pry bar this time. The huge door swung open. "Well," said Vince. "The man sure did love his cheese." The larder was full of cheese, hard and soft and between. The smell of it was strong but not unpleasant. There were stacks of tiny cheeses, bigger ones set on tables, and at the back of the room, leaned up against the wall, was a giant wheel of Sacramento white cheddar, near as tall and wide as a man. Arkham walked towards it, and pulled out a long Bowie-style knife. He sunk it to the hilt in the side of the cheese. He pulled it out and tried again, a few inches to the right. Clink. The knife was less than halfway in. He hacked a bit, then pulled out a disk, a blank golden coin just like the rest. They set to clearing out the room and rotating the cheese wheel. "Good news is, it rolls," said Vince. "Looks about the right width for the old mine track, too," said Arkham. The plan had been to rent or buy a cart and move it down to Ezra's mine that way, down a few miles of track that nobody used any more. There was a thump from outside, and most of them reached for a weapon. Then a cat let out a yowl of displeasure and they relaxed a little. Ezra and Vince checked out the area and reported nothing unusual. They rolled the cheese out the door, then across the yard and through the gate. "Careful," said Molly. "If it falls we'll have a devil of a time getting it upright again. The street was empty in that predawn hour, too early even for the delivery boys. There were a few bumps that required work to push it. They got lucky getting it on to the track, with a road crossing, where the track tops were flush with the road. They just had to turn it the right way, a maneuver they had gotten practiced at, and roll it into the track proper. From there they could move smoothly and swiftly, having to push only rarely where the grade was briefly uphill. Just as the sun was starting to rise, while they were moving at a brisk pace, suddenly there was a loud sound, *crack* *crack* *crack* as three railroad ties snapped under the weight of the wheel. It stopped, then wobbled, but didn't tip over. Then Arkham noticed Vince on the ground, bleeding from the head. Perhaps only two railroad ties. Another loud crack. Ezra fell, shot in the left knee. He scuttled painfully over to the wheel, trying to use it as a shield. Arkham and Molly were already ducked behind it. "Now why don't you come on out and die proper," someone was shouting. "I can promise you I'll finish you proper, and not leave you out waiting on the buzzards." Arkham finally recognized the voice. It was Zeke. 3. Ezekiel "Zeke" Carter was never one for giving up. Lying under a dead man with a wide and bleeding gut wound was no excuse, no place to start. Zeke was in the war before there even was a war. He rode with Bill Quantril at Lawrenceville and helped burn that nest of Yankees and abolitionists to the ground. When he signed up he figured that experience should have gotten him into the cavalry, but the recruiters laughed at him and put him with the rest of the cannon fodder in the infantry. He wished he could remember their names and faces. That was before he started making a list. Lieutenant Jefferson (no relation) made his list, maybe right at the top. Jefferson had a mad-on for Zeke from day one, and the feeling was mutual. Singled him out for punishment even when everyone else was doing the same thing. Zeke figured Jefferson knew he was twice the soldier, twice the man, and couldn't help but try to push him down. Not so smart now, with his brain splattered all over the dirt. But one name goes off- two, really, but Galen didn't go long enough before gut-stabbing Zeke to being sent to hell himself to really make the list. As soon as he was out from under the man's meat and bones he'd forget Galen's ugly mug. Not so for the others, for the right men who paid him back for making rich by leaving him for dead. He'd remember each of those faces long as he lived. Which he didn't know how long would be. As long as he lived and as long as he burned in hell too. Zeke was never a quitter. He couldn't just wait for the end. His arms were working. He shoved, and the dead man rolled off him to join another Virginia soldier. He tore the shirt off the nearest corpse and tied it right around his chest. It soaked through right away, but he figured it would at least keep the dirt out. He began to crawl. Light kept fading from his eyes. He thought he heard music, heard the bluebirds whistling 'Dixie'. Then a moment of blackness, then motion: he was on his back, looking upward at a blonde angel eclipsing the sun. Then the darkness came back, and it stayed for a long time. "Don't get up." The voice was strangely familiar even though he knew he'd never heard it before in his life. His body throbbed inside with fire and pain and he could barely lift an eyelid, let along a leg. "Wasn't," he said, barely a rattle. "Gonna try." "Let me help," she said. She poured from a pitcher to a glass, then lifted his head and tilted some in. "It's tea," she said. "Though more lemon and sugar than tea the way I make it. You need the water and the sugar, and the rest won't do you harm." "Who are you?" he asked between difficult swallows. "To you I'm Mrs, no, Miss Janey Hawcroft." Zeke coughed, nearly letting tea down the wrong pipe. "A widow, then?" "If by that you mean did the damned Yankees murder my husband and burn down my family home, then yes, the answer is yes." Zeke smiled, waving off more tea. "Want," he said "revenge?" Each day the pain was a little less, the range of his mobility a little more. And each day Zeke told Janey a bit more. The day he told the whole story, told what he'd done was a bad day. The pain, lessened as it was, felt like a constant burden he could not bear. He half hoped she would set a pillow on his face and take seat on it, press until he suffocated for his treasons. But she did no such thing. She looked him squarely in the eye and said "How much gold, exactly?" As he gained strength they started planning, mixing violent fantasies with actionable plans. "I get what's mine, get all of what's mine, and then we go down to Brazil. There's places there where you don't even need to speak Spanish or nothing. English all day and live like a king. Last place left in the world where you can be a proper rich man." And one day the news came to their corner of the world, the news that that old ham John Wilkes Booth shot the vile Republican Abraham Lincoln, then got run down like a rabid dog himself. "Well l, that's one name off the list," he said. That night, during his daily bath she took intimate liberties without a word or look between them. "Shall I thank you, Miss Janey?" he said. "Thank me by making it real. All of it." Once he was mobile the war was long done. The newspapers in Yankeeland were helpful, publishing lists of heroes and their deeds. He found Dirk Randall, decommissioned home in West Virginia, and made a trip. "Here," said Janey. "For expenses." It was the two gold coins he had seen into his uniform the first time he had access to the chest. He took three, that day. One to use to prove his story, the others for a rainy day. Of course she'd found them. He came back three days later, with one less name on his list and Jacob's last name and town of residence. Breakridge, and Steerpike, Kansas. Janey wanted every gory detail. Her face lit up as he told it. "Next time, I come with you," she said. "Hm," said Zeke. "Could be useful. He'd know my face on sight." "So, to Steerpike?" "No. He's a local hero there. We can draw him away." In Chicago, after they watched him go to the hotel, she said, "Zeke, would you be cross if I were to seduce this Yank?" Zeke guffawed. "You think you could?" "I know it. I know the type, ugly guys who managed to somehow marry a bit out of their league. They don't ever think about getting propositioned, and so don't have the slightest defences." "Go for it," Zeke said. Zeke was impressed by her brutality, and, grudgingly, with Jacob's courage. He took a lot of pure pain without giving a word, and for a while it looked like he was ready to die without naming a name or a place. Then she reminded him why he came to Chicago in the first place. "You want we should go round your address, bring your Ma in for some of the same as what you're getting? Or that little nephew of yours. We know where they live. We know where they sleep. She extracted every bit of information to be had from Jacob and left his shell for the hotel staff to find. So from there they went to California. Perhaps, Zeke thought, she may have been a bit too enthusiastic. When they cornered Michaels, she showed him her needles and knives and how they glowed bright red when you put them on a stove for a few minutes the man pitched back and started shaking like a snake-handler in the chair, fell on the floor and plum dropped dead on the spot before he could give up a thing. "No matter," Zeke said. They'll come right to us. And they did, and from their hiding spot just behind the fence they heard it all. Zeke pulled her arm and they ran back to their horses, a bit too quickly, a bit too noisy. Zeke spotted an alleycat and kicked at it as they went to give them something to blame for the sound. He missed but the cat still took offense and yowled nicely. They went halfway down the track before finding a good ambush point. The old railway ties were in bad enough shape already, a few hacks and prys with a shovel and they were ready to crumble. He dug out enough dirt beneath them to make a dip deep enough to stop it, as far as he could reckon. Then they waited. Zeke wasn't ever a crack shot, and Janey had barely ever shot at anything her whole life. Zeke managed to get a hit on one of them, while Janey's bullets missed wide. The devils ran for cover behind that great wheel of cheese. "Now why don't you come on out and die proper," Zeke yelled. "I can promise you I'll finish you proper, and not leave you out waiting on the buzzards." 4. Arkham shot from behind the cheese, careful shots at the source of the voice. He heard bullets impacting rock. Dawn sunlight flowed through new holes in the cheese, illuminating rays in the dust. A clink, as another bullet struck one of the coins buried inside. Ezra laid down a few shots of covering fire and Arkham popped his head around the wheel, scanned, and shot. He heard a cry, a woman. "Zeke? Zeke! Come back here you cowardly little-" He looked again. Zeke was on his horse, fleeing down the track. Arkham and Molly carefully walked up to where the woman was lying, bleeding from her thigh, her gun just out of reach. Arkham kicked it away. "You," she said, looking at Molly. "You're Jacob's woman, ain't you? He had a lot to say about you when I took him to bed, for sure. Then he had even more once I had my knife on him. He was a beggin' for mercy like you wouldn't believe." "Your turn," she said. "But don't bother." She had a gun, a little .22 Arkham hadn't known she was carrying, and she put bullets in each of Janey's eyes without blinking. "He's going to try again," said Ezra. "How are you," said Arkham. "I'll live, Lord willing the rot doesn't set in. Can't put weight on that leg though." "No turning back now," said Arkham. "No," said Ezra. Molly whistled, trying a few different calls. Ezra looked at her strangely, and Arkham put his hand on the wounded man's shoulder. A brown horse carefully approached. "Figured there'd be two. Two of them. And with the one not tied and close at hand the other would be too. You can ride?" "That I can," said Ezra. They pushed the wheel down the tracks for a while, finally reaching a slight upward grade, creating a blind spot in a lightly wooded part of the countryside. "Here," said Arkham, softly. "You sure?" asked Ezra. "Where I'd do it." Ezra nodded. "Wait for my signal." Arkham readied his rifle and walked, to the left of the tracks some distance, then crouched as he reached that blind incline. Lots of trees. He looked for the fatter shadow and thought he saw something, something moving slightly out of rhythm from the wind. He aimed to the right of the tree and gave the signal, a bird call. Ezra shot, wildly. Zeke broke cover and ran. Zeke ran left. Arkham missed. He dropped the rifle and drew his revolver, shooting from the hip. Two wild shots. A hit, low. Then his gun jammed. Zeke was down, leg wounded, lying on top of the tracks. He saw Arkham slapping at his gun and laughed. He drew his pistol and took careful aim. Then the wheel of cheese, heavy to begin with and laden with heavier gold, rolled down from the top of the blind and crushed Zeke's legs and lower torso without so much as slowing down Arkham walked around and slit Zeke's throat with his knife. He prided himself in not making the same mistake twice. 5. "You ever thought about what you're going to do with your share?" asked Ezra. "Anyone else, that would be a stupid question," said Arkham. "But not you," said Ezra. "I know you. You've been all about the getting and I bet you barely thought about after." "Wouldn't have done so much good. Turns out three times what I would have thought at the start." "With that much, three times doesn't mean as much." "Could be." "The widow. Molly. She's going to have all kinds of men coming after her." "She can handle herself, looks like." "Sure, right until she can't." "Are you trying to suggest something? Matchmaking part of your ministry now?" "I'm no preacher," said Ezra. "But I do see something there. Stick around for a while. Maybe she'll find some broke European nobleman who makes her happy to slowly fritter that fortune down. Or maybe not. None of us knows the Lord's plans." "Maybe I will," said Arkham. "Not like I've much better to do."
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Dec 14, 2020 04:31
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Conflict of Interests 857 words Winter opened the door. His clothes from head to foot were white, impossibly clean for the weather outside, just like his hair: white, pure white without a hint of shine or reflection. He walked to the empty chair and sat down. "It's about time, isn't it?" said Ruby. "No need to rush," said the man in brown tinted glasses. I didn't have a name for him yet, not even one as transparently false as the others. I was in another room, in another building, three blocks away, watching the video feed from a camera inside the light fixtures and listening to audio pieced together from five listening devices buried in the building's concrete, watching and listening to the people who thought they ran the world. I took my notes by hand. Hard won lessons from my predecessor, Mr. Desmond. The Interests have power over their own images. Recordings don't last long enough to cross the whole city. I'd rather be a lot further away. Getting hazard pay, but it's never worth it. Time and a half didn't help Mr. Desmond, not really "Things have gotten out of hand," said Winter. "I'm sure we can all agree-" "I don't," said the man in the brown-tinted glasses. "Agree. Not a bit. Far as I think, we're just getting started." Hand-written notes. Not typed. Uses ribbons reveal secrets. Could burn them, but that's just asking for someone to intercept them between hand and flame. So handwriting, pen and ink on paper, each single page resting on hard steel, Ieaving no impressions. There was a fourth person in the room. Golden-hair over dark skin, younger than the rest. Ms Wilder. She spoke up. "What did you have in mind?" Winter snorted. "More of the same, no doubt." "Doing next to nothing hasn't worked," said Ms Wilder. " I say let chaos reign a while longer." There are four armed guards at my location. One here with me. One outside the door. Two more outside the building. I'm sure each of them has specific instructions as to under what circumstances they should shoot me. Observing the Interests is dangerous, top priority business. "You've been quiet," said the anonymous man. "Ruby, where do you stand?" "Winter and I crossed over for a reason, you know," she said. The camera captured her eyes, bright red pupils dancing like flame. "And what reason was that?" he drawled. "You wouldn't understand, Gambler," she said. Finally, a name for that Interest. "The stakes got too high." "I've agreed all along," said the Gambler. "Nuclear exchanges are still as far off the table as we can manage." "And that gets less each time you turn up the heat." She drummed the table with her nails. We had hints, of course. Before he went, Mr. Desmond had managed to learn bits of their plan. But there wasn't much we could do about it without working for one of them. Get an advantage over our enemies? Ruby would own us. Turn a profit? The Gambler would collect his due. Ms Wilder's domain, at least, was alien and repellant to our organization. We did not rebel in chaos. And Winter, well, we all do Winter's work eventually. "Well," said Winter. "We appear to be deadlocked." "There should be five of us," said Ms Wilder. "Indeed," said Ruby. "Then on that we are agreed," said the Gambler. He stood up, then climbed on his chair, then onto the table. He walked straight to the camera and smiled, staring right at me. Then he reached through the screen and pulled me through faster than my guard could draw his weapon. The experience of being squeezed into an electron stream crossing a kilometer of copper wiring and then extruded through a microengineered lens is even more unpleasant than it sounds. "Do you understand what you've observed?" asked Ruby once I stopped hyperventilating. "What our goal is?" "Chaos," I said. "That's the hammer," said Ms Wilder. "What's the nail?" "The end," I said. "Of the world." "Go on," said Winter. "What more is there?" I said. "We're not for it," said the Gambler. "Quite the opposite. We've got a good dozen nightmares coming down the line." "We need a fifth," said Ruby. "To break ties, sure. But also your aspect. Information. Secrets and lies." I thought quickly. Was this what happened to Mr. Desmond? What would happen to me if I said no? Or if said yes? I would, in a sense, own my agency, and the others. Become a proxy for them at least, with incredible independence. If I was tempted, the next man would likely fall. There wasn't in inexhaustible supply of Mr. Desmonds. "I'm in," I said. "What should we call you?" asked Ms Wilder. "Alex doesn't quite fit." "Call me Rumor," I said, and assumed my aspect. Knowledge flooded to me, flooded through me, and I processed it, knew the state of the world better than anyone, better even than the other Interests. "And I vote with the old riders, with Winter and Ruby, for a time of respite." "Are you sure?" asked the Gambler. "Never," I said. "But my vote stands."
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Dec 21, 2020 08:33
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Dec 23, 2020 23:57
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Advent 1248 words 1. In the morning Della discovered little Benjamin's third eye, which had opened overnight in the middle of his forehead. She called Jasper and they both called the doctor, and after a short video consultation the doctor told them not to come into the hospital and to just monitor his temperature over the next few days. "It's nothing that needs an in-person visit," said Dr. Akara. "Times being as they are." 2. Dr. Akara reviewed the literature between patients. It was quite scant. 3. Bey took more than six hundred dollars off the Rotten Robbie cashier. The gun wasn't even loaded. They both knew the chain's policies. He could have brought a Nerf gun, a water pistol, a pointed hand inside a jacket pocket and gotten the money. 4. Every television and radio set in town stopped their regular programming in favor of signals broadcast twenty years ago. Bey, scanning police channels for signs of a warrant or BOLO, recognized the events playing out with dread. 5. Jasper found Benjamin outside of his crib, trying without success to climb into the living room sofa. He decided to get a camera, to capture his method of escape next time. 6. In the late afternoon it began to snow, vigorously, despite the high forties temperature. Three inches accumulated during the night and stubbornly refused to melt. 7. Snow angels appeared on the ground spontaneously, unwitnessed in the cold morning. 8. Jasper tried to review the tape of Benjamin's latest escape but instead found himself watching Della and Bey, in their teens, arguing with their father. The sound quality was too poor to make out words. When he showed it to Della she insisted on erasing the tape and removing the camera from Benjamin's room. 9. Jasper replaced the camera, now hidden in a stuffed octopus. 10. Bey paced across the kitchen, turning the police scanner off, on, then off again on each approach. 11. Dr. Akara was abed and awake, sweating with fever and memories of college-age assignations. The combination was neither pleasant nor unpleasant. His case was mild; the fever would break by morning. 12. Payments began going out at noon. It was a large account, old and disused, bloated with interest, and suddenly disbursing to pay fines and bail for hundreds of people throughout town. Naturally the activity was flagged as suspicious and the transfers put on hold within minutes. 13. Harold Porter's attorneys and executor stood outside the bank, knee deep in the strange warm snow, demanding to be let in along the first clerks to arrive for work. His scattered relatives' lawyers arrived later and unprepared. They might still have stopped it, had the old man died, but he was live and lucid with medical affidavits to testify. 14. "They'll be taken care of," he told his executor. "I didn't touch the house, or the bonds." "They're already working the media," said Johnson. "Highlighting the least worthy." Harold sighed. "They'll never understand. Johnson, do you understand?" "I believe so," said Harold. "I'll be dead before Christmas," he said. He passed just before midnight. 15. Jasper watched the tape on the basement TV. The sound was clearer. Twenty years ago. Shouting between Della and her father, an argument over perfume. He raised his fist and lunged. Bey stepped between them, took the blow in his midsection. He got up, spat, said "Try that again." Their father obliged, another hard body-blow. Bey swung back, hard, with the instincts of a street fighting kid. He connected, hard, dislodging a tooth. The older man lost all control. Jasper couldn't finish watching. 16. Bey couldn't sleep, not for days. He couldn't turn off the scanner either. He knew the date well, December 16th. After a night and day in the basement without food or water, the police had come. Bey listened to the lies over the scanner, heard himself screaming in the background as the officers congratulated each other, as they drove him to St. John's. Bey lived his life without fear of prison or hell, for he had already been through his term at St. John's and neither had any terror left to offer. 17. Della and Jasper were walking to Benjamin's room, to pick him up and bring him to dinner. They saw his head emerge from the center of the closed door, third eye open wide, others closed, and saw the rest of him pass through the door as if it was a hologram. Jasper gave it a firm knock, it was solid wood still. Della picked him up, half expecting her arms to pass right through him. They did not. Benjamin was hungry, and ate his strained peas without complaint. 18. The pilgrims emerged from their quarantine hotels and began to explore the town, having had their fill of displaced radio and, for those who had thought to bring tuners, television. It was cold now, enough that the snow on the ground was not miraculous itself, but as they walked across it, masked and distanced, they saw snowmen roll into being, ramparts form and piles of snowballs assemble and fling themselves across empty yards. They witnessed, and recorded on phones uploaded to the cloud, where skeptics immediately tried to prove them deep fakes. But they would always know better. 19. Jasper confessed. He slept on the couch that night. 20. The pilgrims fell into disputes among themselves, speculating over causes. Ideas involving religions old and new, of aliens, faeries and cthonic intelligences, of paranatural phenomena and quantum effects of information saturation. The discussions were serious and spirited, but never cruel. The occasional passing snowball made it difficult to stay too serious. 21. On the night of the equinox a group of pilgrims attempted a ritual few of them understood, tried to draw down the moon. And, for a few seconds, they seemed to succeed: two moons were visible in the sky. Nobody got a clear picture, though. 22. Jasper and Della had a long talk. Jasper mostly listened, and held on tightly. "The urn on the mantle?" Della said. "That's just ash, from the fireplace. I flushed him down with the sewage the day after the funeral." 23. Bey checked his mail late in the evening, an almost weekly ritual, and found the notice: all his fines paid anonymously, his driver's license unsuspended. A game-changing gift, and he thought he knew who to thank. 24. "It wasn't me," said Della, framed by the front door. "Bull," said Bey, backed six feet on the front porch. "Nobody else has any reason to care about me at all. Nobody with money anyhow." "It wasn't. I wouldn't-" "Wouldn't throw good money after bad again?" said Bey. "That's what you said before. I thought maybe you'd changed." "Wait," said Della. "Maybe you're right. Maybe I should have-" Bey turned to walk back to his car. "I, I mean, I owe-" "Nevermind," said Bey. "Not like you can even invite me in anyway." "We can pack you up a dinner at least," said Della. "And you haven't seen Benjamin since he was born. Jasper, bring him out here." Jasper to the room and returned with the eighteen-month-old child. "You know that kid has an extra eye, right?" 25. Benjamin's third eye closed and receded into his forehead at noon on Christmas day. Dr. Akara told them that was to be expected and to continue watching his temperature. Normal radio programming resumed later that evening as the snow melted into the dry ground.
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Dec 28, 2020 08:09
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| # ¿ Apr 19, 2024 11:41 |
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In, flash me.
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Dec 31, 2020 03:50
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