Short Stories by AP

The Edge of the Earth

Wed, 21 Sep 2011 14:59:39 -0400

My house resides at the edge of the Earth. At the corner of ruin and strife. At the intersection of alone and scared.

The world ended two years ago. A massive viral contagion culled ninety-five percent of our population. For those fortunate souls, death was swift. Those who survived because of a mysterious immunity were destined to a far worse fate. We fell to anarchy first, famine next, and disease last.

582 days after the first infection, I found myself the only known survivor on a planet that once housed nine billion. War and pestilence had had their way. I was numb to the acrid stench of death that once haunted me like an insufferable itch. I no longer feared finding rot beneath every shelf I turned over. To me, vile sights had become the norm.

Fate chose me at random to be immune. Fate may have given my body a strong constitution. But fate didn’t choose me to be a survivor. In my neighborhood, I had been “that guy.” The one with the $75,000 underground shelter stocked with medicine and non-perishables, enough to nourish and care for me, my wife, and my four kids for a full year. Call me a conspiracy theorist, fine, but I was prepared.

I wasn’t prepared to bury my family. I was a broken man when my shovel met the earth. When I lay down the last flower, I lay myself down hoping to die. But I didn’t. I decided I needed something to live for. I would find five survivors to take in, maybe offer them a chance they wouldn’t have had.

For months, I had searched to wit’s end. Most I found were sick. The rest were more trouble than worth. I finally managed to find five. Two tried to steal, and I kicked them out. One left in the middle of the night without giving a reason. The last two eventually succumbed to illness.

I stopped searching. I became a solitary island of humanity foundering in a decaying sea. Hope was gone, relegated to nothing more than a dictionary word. During the outbreak, New Earth promised to send transport vessels for the survivors. I never believed it. Was I a carrier of the mysterious disease? If I had that question, New Earth scientists did as well.

No, there would be no rescue. I was at the edge of the Earth. Alone.

(opening sentence borrowed from Ami Mckay’s The Birth House)

250 Words of Sci Fi

Fri, 16 Sep 2011 16:40:00 -0400

The stasis bullet hummed by me in a flash of blinding blue.

“You’ve lost, Cromwell! We’re all dead in minutes, and New Washington is coming with us!” my foe shouted. Another shot ricocheted inches from my shoulder.

I had the right specifications to get past the security doors of the huge industrial warehouse. I’d made it through the gibberish of code, then cut down countless guns-for-hire to get to the central room that housed the massive rift bomb. I knew how to disable the detonation system. But I lacked the key. Sermon, chief anarchist of the Destabilization Matrix, had it. And he wasn’t going down easy.

Two minutes. Three rounds. One flashbang. As Sermon’s charged bullets crackled past me, I scoured for an answer. One of the warehouse crates I used for cover had been ripped open by Sermon’s wild shooting. Reflective sheet metal. There I found my answer.

“Not today, Sermon,” I fired back.

I heaved four metal sheets towards my enemy. They slid across the concrete floor like skates on ice and came to a rest in a pattern around Sermon. I engaged my flashbang and launched it. The metal plates amplified the blinding light and sonic reverberation, and Sermon stumbled into the clear. I dropped him into a heap with a single shot.

I hurried to my defeated adversary. He shuffled helplessly away, the key hanging at his side. I snatched it, and leveled my government issue handgun at Sermon’s forehead.

“Destablize this.”

Sci Fi #1

Thu, 01 Sep 2011 09:40:00 -0400

“Space is a big place.” Shawn had heard that damn cliché ad nauseum. He’d heard it a thousand times during Flight School. A thousand more times when he joined the military, and a thousand times again when they promoted him to Special Ops. When he was dishonorably discharged for taking money under the table in exchange for cargo protection, guess what, he heard it again. And again when he used his shady underworld contacts to make a living in a piracy outfit.

The last time Shawn heard it? Two hours ago. Fed up with his ship’s profit-hoarding captain, Shawn had organized a mutiny. Or so he thought. He had overestimated two things: the value of his special ops training, and the loyalty of his “friends.” They turned on him. Shawn’s punishment was banishment on an uninhabited planet. The environment was Earth-like but harsh, and he was given only two days’ worth of sustenance.

“Space is a big place, you know,” the captain said, laughing as he boarded his landing shuttle to return to the cruiser.

Shawn stood in an alien desert. The burning sun filtered through dust and sand stirred up by the shuttle’s departure. To all sides lay hundreds of miles of ambiguous, reddish-yellow nothing, broken only by a shimmering sun mirage. Above, the sky emptied into an amorphous purplish blue, a window into the endless void that separated Shawn from his home.

Space was a big place. And Shawn knew that now.

An Unwelcome Suitor

Thu, 01 Sep 2011 09:26:00 -0400

Thomas heard familiar sobbing followed by a whiff of air, footsteps on the staircase, and the crash of door against frame.

“Danni, what’s this all about?” He strained to listen, but heard only the sounds of the night. Thomas flicked his blindman’s cane and shuffled towards the front door. “Did you leave the door open?”

He halted and screwed his lips into a frown. “Is there someone out there? Don’t try to fool me. I may be blind but I’m afraid of no man.”

“I’m here for your daughter,” came the booming reply.

“You made her cry and you expect me to give her up for a date?”

“I don’t think you understand—”

“Oh I understand. Your night is done here. Go.”

“Not without your daughter.”

Thomas laughed. “I like persistence in a man. Let me ask you a few questions then.”

“Well—”

“Do you drink wine?”

“What? Er, no. I don’t care for the taste.”

“How would you know the taste if you don’t drink it?”

“Uh, I—”

“Do you plan to have sexual relations with my daughter?”

A pause. “Sir, you should know that—”

“Yes or no.”

“No!”

“How about a job?”

Another pause. “You could call me independently wealthy.”

“Well what in bloody hell does that mean, son?”

“I have a hoard of treasure. Gold, jewelry, trinkets, gems—”

“Don’t try to impress me, boy. I’m likely to say no. How about a home?”

“Atop a mountain.”

“Atop a…my daughter is seventeen years old. Treasure and mountain abodes make you sound like a man. Just how old are you?”

“Nine hundred and twenty years old.”

Thomas furrowed his brow until it touched the bridge of his nose. “You’re a dragon,” he muttered.

“Aye.”

“Here to take my daughter because she’s beautiful, and you wish to gaze upon her as she lives luxuriously amidst your treasures.”

“Aye.”

“Young knights and the like will come looking for her, you know.”

“They will. But no man will touch her until I release her on her twenty-fifth birthday.”

Silence.

“Right. She’s yours, then.”

Sci Fi #2

Thu, 01 Sep 2011 09:25:00 -0400

“No one could figure out how you’d managed to disappear without a trace. Please stay strong. We will do what we can to set you free. Love, Ben and Miranda.”

As if I needed the reminder. Disgusted, I crumpled the letter and hurled it into the corner of my prison cell.

I’d been locked away in Folsom for a good month. In that time, I’d made two friends: a lumpy bed and a streak-stained toilet. They were the only things keeping me company in solitary. My only decorations, cold stone and rusted iron. The food sucked. I’d already lost at least ten pounds. I smelled like something between a wet dog and a fresh cow pie. I looked like an anorexic sasquatch. But, it was my own stupid fault that I was here.

If only I hadn’t been so damn naïve!

I grew up outside Reno, raised by Ben and Miranda — my neighbors. My dad never his left work. My mom never left her drug-induced stupor. I couldn’t go live with extended family: both of my parents’ families had disowned them. I guess they had that in common.

At the end of high school, I was voted “Most Likely to Go to Jail.” The reason wasn’t my neglected upbringing, or my penchant for, ah, innocent misbehavior. Rather, my family’s casino business had a notorious reputation for…how does one put this lightly…heavy-handed negotiating tactics with two of its primary constituents: borrowers and prostitutes. I suppose my classmates figured I’d fall into the family trade.

Well. I’d made good on that yearbook prediction. But, it wasn’t for any of the usual reasons. My neighbors were my family, you see, and they taught me the importance of being hospitable, understanding, and most of all, forgiving. Those were valuable lessons that led my life in a vastly different direction from my biological parents. Those traits are the reason why I became a sympathizer for the remaining E.T.s. And they’re why the Western States Army arrested me.

It had been eleven years, nine months, and ten days since the E.T.s first came. Like every human, I remember the date: September 27, 2011. How could I forget? In the span of five days, the US population dropped from a third of a billion to an estimated fifty million. Major population centers, all flattened. The other fifty million, mostly thrown into human prisoner camps and forced into labor.

Everyone talks about the resilience of mankind. I guess it’s true. We bounced back.

[more available upon request]

Mortality

Thu, 01 Sep 2011 09:22:00 -0400

The worst smell in the world is the puff of smoke from the bullet that takes your life.

It must be true. I’ve killed a hundred men at point blank range. The ones that don’t die as soon as ballistic breaks bone tend to wear the same mix of shock and abstract wonder before the life leaves their eyes. The other feature they share: a crinkling beside the nasal bone, telling me that they recognize the scent of the gunpowder responsible for their deaths. And I wager that’s the odor no man wants to whiff.

A lot of things smell worse than gunsmoke. Sure, it gives you an acrid bite in the back of your nostrils. The sulfur is pungent enough to turn your bile. The charcoal can sting your eyes. But powder aroma is nothing compared to decay, rot, barns, turpentine, poor hygiene, cabbage, low tide, opium dens…the list goes on. I tell you what, though. I’d rather smell those things seven days a week than catch a hint of the billowing reek that snuffs me.

I’ll be honest: I’m bound to puff on that fog when the Reaper calls my name. One day I’ll draw steel on my mark, but he’ll be faster. Maybe he’ll have a spring gun up his sleeve, or a buckshooter under the table. Or maybe I’ll be a day older and a hair slower on the trigger. If that bullet doesn’t kill me on impact, I’ll get a face full of the yellowing smoke. And I’ll probably look off in the distance as my body starts to fail me, and screw up my nose like a rat sniffing a corpse.

I wonder if I’ll have time to think about that smell before the lights go out. Probably not.

Her Last Deception

Thu, 01 Sep 2011 09:20:00 -0400

Raun stood stark still, back flat against the cold stone wall. His pitch-black tunic was damp with sweat, magnifying the chill against his skin. He held his short-sword in Thieves’ Pose, hilt gripped loose, blade pointing downward, parallel and flush against his forearm. Taking a deep breath, he scanned his surroundings. He had managed to conceal himself in a small, out-of-the-way storage closet. Smoked meats, dried goods, herbs and bottles of liquid lined the shelves.

Clangs exploded from the grand bell tower — two short, three long, two short for “Intruder in the Keep.” Leather-clad feet shuffled in the hallway outside the pantry. The Royal Guard were frantically searching the castle, trying to uncover the thief who had stolen a prized possession from the young Baroness herself. Raun could not hide in this hole forever.

He cursed his foolish arrogance. With his free hand, he pounded his frustration against his thigh. The woman he had loved, who he thought had loved him back, had turned his world on its ear.

A hundred times throughout their romance, Raun had wondered why royal blood would love a simple thief. Now he knew that their pairing was a ruse. Attracted by his honed thief’s skill, the Baroness had played his emotions and used him to steal a powerful artifact from her rival. Days after Raun had returned with the relic, the Baroness had exposed him as the thief in order to deflect the rival’s blame. ‘Plausible deniability,’ the politicians called it. She labeled Raun a traitor, and marked him as an outlaw to be killed on sight.

The affair was over. The simplest of Raun’s roiling emotions was anger. And it was the strongest. As a cocky young male, he did the first thing that came to his vengeful mind: he stole back the sacred relic from the Baroness. Now, hiding in a cold, dark pantry, Raun faced the consequences of his arrogance.

Sneaking away through the shadows was no longer an option. Attempting to fight his way out of the doors of the Keep meant almost certain death. Raun was skilled with a bow, but less so with a sword, and he was facing a score of the most professional and best trained warriors in all of Isindria. Plus, the Baroness’ men were authorized to kill on sight. Isindria’s arcane laws at their worst.

He rapped his head against the hard stone. His colleagues in the Isindrian underworld often boasted about laughing in the face of death, declaring their bravery in the name of the prize. As a confident youth, Raun had done the same. But now, as deadly guardsmen searched the keep with one thing in mind, he felt something new and real: fear. The bundle at his side hung like a bag of weighing stones. He was alone and outmatched. He was cold, and not just from the damp tunic. The thought of death chilled him to the core, and left him contemplating his other option: surrender. Surrendering to the Guard meant living to see another day, even if it was in the Keep’s subterranean dungeons. But the punishment for thieves was also death, and he dared not rely on the compassion of the Baroness to spare his life. She had already shown Raun her true colors. Could he escape from prison before the fall of the executioner’s axe?

Death by fighting and honor, on one hand. Death by executioner on the other. Raun cursed himself again and ran his hand across the back of his neck.

His hand came across a piece of fabric. He paused in mid thought, fondling the black silk that hung from his skullcap. Meant to conceal his face, it had been a gift from the Baroness when she had first tasked him with stealing the relic. His thoughts returned to the treachery of the woman he thought he loved. He had lived his life to earn the honor that would allow a common thief to exit the shadows and be with royal blood. Now, she had crushed his hopes and left him for dead.

The vitriol burned Raun’s blood, and he remembered the wrath that had brought him back to the Keep in the first place. A ruined relationship. Outlaw status, which would forever make Raun an enemy of every Isindrian, even the underworlders. A shattered pride. He would rather die fighting than let the Baroness have the satisfaction of a public execution. And he would die to see her face when he had his revenge.

With a deep breath and clenched teeth, Raun stepped into the hallway.