Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

The thing grinned, showing teeth rend with decay and slobbering diseased luminescence about the forest floor. Everything that its foul fluids touched began to brown and curl in on itself. Its hundred of bloodshot eyes leered about the thing’s vaguely lupine carapace.

“I am the poisoned one, child, and it is my lot to end that which is living.” Its voice was thick with noisome phlegm but with a vaguely refined edge, as if it had learned to speak by observing a nobleman. “You would do well to step back lest you too are ended.”

“I am flattered that you care for my safety so, O poisoned one,” said Maria. She curtsied with an imaginary skirt.

A laugh like a death rattle in an envenomed throat. “Child, I care nothing for you or your safety.”

“And yet you warned me so kindly against approaching,” said Maria. “If I had stumbled across you unawares, I would surely have perished.”

“My poisons are indiscriminate, child.”

“Yes, but perhaps you are not.”

This seemed to give the beast a moment’s pause.

“You have warned others, have you not?” said Maria, taking a gamble. “Those who would listen, anyhow?”

“Indeed,” was the sad, phlegmatic reply. “But so few do.”

“I am listening, now,” Maria said, trying to hide the triumph in her voice even as her hand tightened around the blade behind her back. “Tell me of your pain.”

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“I scavenged the arms from other suits of TI-42 battle armor,” said Kial. The six arms whirled around her as she spoke, making it impossible to tell which were her true arms and which were empty armor shells. “There were plenty on the battlefield after the annihilation.”

“And then you were able to get the neural connections to work even without limbs in them?” said Amar. “Impressive. Which are your real arms?”

“They are all my real arms,” Kial snapped. “I only take off the suit for maintenance.”

“What about maintenance? What about fuel?” Amal pressed. “Even with a battlefield to scavenge, powered armor is resource-hungry, yours probably even moreso.

“I take what I can find. And I take what I can’t,” said Kial airily. “Now, if you leave me with everything I demand, you may go in peace.”

“And if not?”

In a flash, each of Kial’s six arms was armed, brandishing the collapsible MP-696 machine pistols that every TI-42 operator had carried for emergencies.

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Inevitably, on each new world, I look up at the stars overhead, spinning through the cosmos. I see the galaxy in whose arm I rest, and I am ever struck by its beauty.

And, just as inevitably, its emptiness.

For this is my personal galaxy, mine to do with as I see fit. Forever mine, but also forever empty.

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And people say we’re not fun anymore!

Let me tell you, though: remember those days everyone’s always on about, the halcyon time when carnivals and circuses and funhouses were clean and innocent and honest? It was never that way. That’s the rose-colored glasses talking.

And, while I’m at it, I should add that the twisted and screamy dark nightmare carnivals, circuses, and funhouses are exactly the opposite. Looking back–or is it forward?–with nightshade-colored glasses, seeing horror everywhere. It was never like that either, movies aside.

It was always both.

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The Kru spread out, whispering softly to each other in tongues that sounded gutteral to outsiders. Each left their assault rifle slung, brandishing instead what Sli had assumed to be walking sticks.

“Muskets,” Sli said. “Those are muskets!”

“Bullets are hard to find,” said the lead Kru, Nils. “Expensive. Hard to make. Musket balls, black powder…those are easy. So we use them first.”

“You’re not making me very confident,” said Sli. “Single-shot ramrod-pushers?”

“For most things, it is enough,” grunted Kru.

“Not for this!”

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“I never was good at carvin’ nothin’ but flowers. So that’s what I carve, and if any man says I ain’t fit to do it, well, I’ll carve him too.”

That’s what “Flower” Johnson used to say. A notorious knife fighter, he made ends meet with odd jobs on ranches or posses, but in his ideal moments he was known to carve beautifully detailed blossoms.

Some of them went as gifts to ladies he fancied, or as payment in lieu of cash–if Flower Johnson handed you a walnut rose and said you were paid, you were paid. A few even found their way into the hands of local children, with the rumor being that Johnson had a secret soft spot for them.

But the finest flower he ever carved was on the handle of his trusty Bowie knife, which he called Rose. Each time he got a little better at whittling, he had changed out the handle for one with a better rose, and by the time of his death Rose was a sight to behold.

In the end, though, it was Rose that killed Flower Johnson. At least in a manner of speaking.

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“Stay back!” said Chris, brandishing a gilded copy of Strunk & White. “Begone, grammarpire!”

“Bah,” said the creature, brushing the book aside. “I’m not a grammarpire, ya idjit. I’m a grampire, and I’m here to suck your grandmother’s elderly blood.’

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Kevsera would often return to the park and linger for a while amid the shadows of late afternoon leaves. She hadn’t been there as a child, but it reminded her of the idyllic green space a few blocks from her parents’ house. All her many hours running around when people were less concerned about that sort of thing came flooding back as she sat with one arm over the back of the rough wood, slouched deeply but not nonchalantly.

It certainly helped that the anonymous city park, not important enough even for its own name, was the last place on earth where Kevsera could visit.

When she had chosen to leave, there was a clear warning, a clear delineation: it was an opportunity to see places and things and times her dead-end life never could have revealed, but there was no going back. Crossing over the threshold was to leave the past, and the world that contained it, behind. The park was the only loophole, and Kevsera wasn’t even sure how it was possible.

Nevertheless, she returned often, typically not even bothering to change what she had been wearing…elsewhere. Few people came by, after all, and those that did tended to be cyclists who kept their heads down. Certainly not observant enough to notice a woman with an odd affect and on clothes slouched over a splintery bench.

Dog walkers were her favorite, rare as they were, because they were almost always willing to spare a few moments of conversation and to suffer their animals to be pet. Talking to another human, possibly the first human she’d seen in months from her perspective, and running her hands through the thick fur of a friendly animal… It was a remarkable bit of nostalgia, of normalcy, in a life that had become dominated by the fantastic.

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The bus took us through the worst of the unrest, rocking with the impact of stones and bullets, with the heavy armored sides and thick multiplex keeping the missiles at bay. An older car, ablaze, slid by as people emerged from the thick smoke wearing bandanas to press their assault.

“Do they know?” whispered one of my fellow passengers.

“How can they not?” I said. “Even if they can’t admit it to themselves.”

The port was heavily defended, but even then I could see that the lines were breaking. Tracers arced out from hastily erected fortifications, but I saw just as many soldiers desperately charging in the same direction we were, some peeling off their uniforms as the they away their weapons.

An explosion rocked the bus, knocking it back on two wheels. The driver, whose pay was a spot for him and his wife, heeled it back over like a veteran. But I could see a line of bruise and blood across his forehead where the impact had cracked his head against something or other. Our armed escort, sitting up front–and similarly paid with a berth–clutched her rifle like a life preserver, knuckles monochrome.

I caught a glimpse of the bay as we rattled toward it. The ships were already pulling out, everything that could be commandeered or put into service. They were beset by smaller launches on every side, either people desperate to board or people desperate to destroy. A bright crimson flower blossomed against the hull of one of them–an old cruise ship–and it heeled over.

“Suicide,” I said. “I’m not sure I blame them.”

A few moments more, cutting through the throngs of people who were able to make it through the armed cordon, we arrived at our dock, another old cruise ship pressed into service.

“Thank goodness,” said my chatty fellow passenger. “We made it. We’re safe.”

“Safe?” I said. “Far from it. We’re just buying ourselves the right to die last.”

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