June 27, 2011

From “Queenie’s Secrets” by Shelley “Neva” McKenzie

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“The secret to looking young is quite simple, really,” Queenie said. “You must first be a pimply and pale teenager. I guarantee you that those finely tanned and toned cheerleaders of yesteryear are like old leather suitcases by now.”

“That…doesn’t make any sense.”

“Think about it, dear!” Queenie cried. “What’s in that goo you so desperately smear? Moisturizers and oils to replace that which your skin no longer produces. The sun dries you out like wash on the line and leeches those precious oils and moisture away, leaving you to sag like a post-Viagra codpiece. By being pale and burning easily, you have no incentive to sun-worship, which leads those teen idols to burn off their beauty and youth so early. Pimples are an expression of excess skin oils and moisture; with a deeper reservoir from which to draw, what losses there are aren’t crippling. You pay for it in high school, dear, but in twenty years’ time you’ll have youth aplenty while those you once envied are crocodile suitcases. It worked for me.”

 

June 26, 2011

From “Z.E.T.A.” by Maxine P. Lang

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“Is it true that there are actual voodoo zombies that are living but nevertheless enslaved?”

The late Mr. Crenshaw adjusted his tie and his lolling jaw. “That’s a reckless exaggeration. The so-called voodoo zombies are simply a combination of cultural belief, hypnosis, and narcotics. We true zombies argue that attaching the term to anyone still living is ignorant and divisive. I can take another question.”

“I’m still not clear on the whole ‘flesh of the living’ thing. Can you clarify?”

A noise that might have been a sigh escaped Crenshaw’s bloated lips and he rolled his bleary eyes. “For the last time: like any other creature, zombies require sustenance. Just like the living, we must eat that which was once alive to survive.”

“But does it stop being alive when you hunt it down and kill it, and is it people?”

“I thought we’d been over this. Look, most anything will satiate our hunger for flesh. There’s no danger if you’re smart about things, and there’s no need to fly off the hook. Come up here and I’ll show you.”

The persistent questioner, after a moment’s hesitation, climbed up onto the dais and approached Crenshaw. He held out a discolored hand for her to shake. She took it, and squealed in terror as Crenshaw’s iron grip brought her into his waiting jaws. A few people in the front rows were splattered with what could only be termed leftovers.

“In sum, there’s no danger if you’re smart about things,” Crenshaw continued between bites of coed. “I think we have time for one more from the audience.”

 

June 25, 2011

From “Tchotchkes in Tacoma” by Rowena A. McFadden

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The elementary school teachers passed the booth by the hundreds, gleefully filling tote bags and backpacks they’d brought for the occasion to brimming with free books and tchotchkes. Sometimes they’d even pretend to listen to Henrietta’s sales pitch, only to slip away with a souvenir or two as soon as the opportunity presented itself.

One of the few sane design decisions in the Van Haagen Press pavilion was that, among the styrofoam buttresses and backless chairs, there was a small room isolated from the sales floor and accessible only to the sales team. It was intended to store stuff that the  conference attendees weren’t supposed to see, but Max had run all that stuff back to the hotel already to save himself a trip later, and it wound up being used as an ersatz breakroom.

“Look at them out there,” Henrietta sighed. “Filling up their bags in jeans and t-shirts while I lose half-an-inch of cartilage in these heels for eight hours. They don’t seem to realize I’m paid on a commission basis.”

“And they’re salaried at a level that a Van Haagen bigwig wouldn’t pay an illegal maid,” retorted Max. “They might not get fired for wearing comfortable clothes to work, but they also don’t get paid three months out of the year.”

“You saying we should join them?”

“I’m saying it doesn’t matter. They don’t have any money, we’re throwing it away on baubles. I just hope I can find another job before someone with letters after their name at Van Haagen realizes that.”

 

June 24, 2011

From “Jasper’s Hope” by Carla Y. Eleuard

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“There are dangers out there. Mutants. Barbarians. Savages. Some men speak of the Legion, say that it’s waiting out there to put things right, hidden by the men of old until it was needed. But we didn’t need to go chasing dreams or shadows; we needed real answers. That’s what Jasper Coop brought us.”

“You mean…the guns?”

“The guns are only a part of it, son. A very small part. Jasper helped us make them, helped Cooperston defend itself and trade, but there’s more to it than that. He showed us that there was value in hanging together, in building something that lasts.”

“But he’s gone now.”

“Jasper saw that he had done all he could do, and he went off to seek the Legion and to meditate on the cause of the world’s fall. But we have others who share his vision. Trixie. Kayla. Donald.”

 

June 23, 2011

From “Lebedev’s Specter” by Altos Wexan

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“He said he saw something, in the heart of the reactor, just before the meltdown,” Valerian said. His eyes seemed to grow cloudy with the weight of remembrance.

It was painful to even hear those words, after what had happened in the Ukraine. “What did he see?” Vasily asked, trying not to let his voice crack.

“Captain Lebedev…he’d gone aboard to try and stop Berenty, to try and leave the rest of us a way off of this rock. We were in radio contact the entire time. There was so much static…so much gunfire…it was hard to understand, hard to make out.”

“Uncle Valerian…what did the captain say he saw?” Vasily pressed.

“I thought I heard Petr Ulyanovich say that he could see into the pod the Elbrus IV had constructed, into the heart of its design. Something even that snake Berenty couldn’t conceive.”

“Uncle…”

“The captain said he saw a young girl. Not unlike his wife when she had been a young woman. It was the last thing he ever spoke of.”

 

June 22, 2011

From “Descent into Contagion” by Tamera M. Juarez

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Those who had survived the contagion described its throes as a descent into a personal hell: a sensation of fatigue and detachment eventually growing into complete dissociation from reality. They’d hear a roaring in their ears, like a distant waterfall, and then the colors of the world around them would change. Bright became dark and dark became bright; noise was amplified a thousand times, as was movement.

The worst thing, though, was the change sufferers perceived in human expression. The ordinary actions, words, and even facial expressions were suddenly suffused with menace, demanding violent–even lethal–retaliation. Sufferers would see themselves as beset on all sides by threats, and a sort of terrible paranoia borne of fever was the result. Curiously, this didn’t seem to extend to other sufferers, who seemed to see one another as erstwhile allies. At the very least sufferers would ignore each other while they turned tooth and nail, knife and gun, on their other fellows.

The contagion seemed to run its course in a few weeks, with something like twenty to thirty percent surviving if they hadn’t been killed in their violent frenzy. Those fortunates would gradually return to normal, though they were often emaciated and starving by that point and easy pretty for those that remained violent. The remaining seventy to eighty percent would eventually reach such an imbalance of activity versus caloric intake that they would simply shut down. Occasionally, heavy sedation had been shown to allow even the most violent afflicted to endure the course of their infectious madness, but the intense supervision it required–to say nothing of the medications and expertise involved–made it out of reach for all but a lucky few.

 

June 21, 2011

From “The Naming of the Sparrows” by Sandra Cooke Jameson

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There was a time long ago when sparrows had no personal names. They all addressed one another as “Sparrow,” which caused no end of confusion; in fact, legend held that sparrows did not flock in those days but were strictly solitary, never associating with one another save to bear young. The elders spoke of these as dark days, when four-leg and two-leg predators had their way and no sparrow stood a chance once it had attracted their baleful gaze.

Then the hero known as Ellw discovered the secret to personal names, to telling one sparrow from another, and flocking together for protection in numbers from the four-legs and the two-legs. The tales disagreed as to how Ellw came upon these secrets, and the storytellers were usually at pains to share the different interpretations–the debate it provoked served to draw their listeners in further. Some said that Ellw had discovered these things through natural genius. Others claimed that he had learnt to speak with another creature, such as the cooing bob-heads or the shrieking whitings, who had revealed the secrets. There were even those who claimed Ellw learned to listen to the two-leg striders–to base predators, llew–in a corner of a far-off island, stealing their names for righteous use.

Regardless of which version of the tale was offered, the end was the same: Ellw’s teaching spread far and wide in the World Beneath, and today he was regarded as the father of all sparrows in spirit if not in fact.  Some rejected Ellw’s ways, others sought to improve or modify them, but rare indeed were few isolated sparrows who had not heard them.

 

June 20, 2011

From “The Obsidian Talisman” by Jan C. Wisniewski

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After the great victory before the city gates during  the Second Siege of Vienna, King John III Sobieski of Poland, whose hussars had helped to carry the day, captured the Ottoman baggage train. He wrote effusive letters home about wagons heaped high with the wealth of the Orient that had attended Kara Mustafa Pasha and his troops.

One of his letters never made it to the Polish court at Warsaw; its courier was waylaid and robbed, either by Ottoman stragglers or the troops of Imre Thököly of Hungary, who had tried to profit while Poland was virtually bereft of troops. The letter made its way to Budapest, where it was lost in the former royal archives until a researcher uncovered it in 1916.

The king’s letter described the contents of Kara Mustafa Pasha’s personal saddlebag, with particular attention paid to a small object described as a “spiral of black obsidian or other polished black mineral.” None of the prisoners could identify the bauble or recalled seeing it before, but its place so near the Pasha, intermingled with mementos of home and family and precious jewels, intrigued the king. He declared his intention to take it with him to Warsaw.

That same researcher, granted access to the Polish archives after the fall of Warsaw the previous year, was able to trace the obsidian talisman’s path. It had followed Stanislaw II August into Russian captivity, been held at the Tsar’s court, and then captured by a German unit.

The object, whatever it was, seemed to presage the decline and eventual doom of whichever realm held it.

 

June 19, 2011

From “Battery Buckshot” by Leonor Ilene Hopkins

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Of course, Sebastian wasn’t going to let a little thing like the apocalypse get him down. Far from it: he saw it as an opportunity to play with a vastly increased store of components which he was free to scavenge. His slight frame and sixth sense for things that were large and angry–honed by many years on the playground–served him well in picking through the debris of a collapsed society. Things he never could have afforded for his experiments and gadgets were suddenly free for the taking.

Even with his avoidance skills, the question of what to do when confronted with another angry scavenger–or, worse, Slow Walkers or Fast Walkers–did occupy a fair bit of Sebastian’s time. Many of the other survivors relied on guns, but Sebastian saw a plethora of weaknesses inherent in firearms, not the least of which was that most gun stores had been thoroughly looted and ammunition was scarce. One thing there were plenty of, though, were batteries–every size from AAA to D, and kept in every corner grocery. For a long-ago merit badge, Sebastian has experimented with getting a battery to release its entire charge as a directed zap of energy. It was a simple matter to expand the concept and combine the necessary parts with a few springs, coils, and triggers from real guns.

The first scavenger had laughed when he saw Sebastian loading what looked like a shotgun with D cells instead of shells. He was still laughing when the expended charge stopped his heart and Sebastian ejected the smoking and spent batteries onto the cracked pavement.

 

June 18, 2011

From “Everything is Strange” by Michael K. Pendleton II

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“You do understand that my German is rusty, right?” Benoir said.

“At least you have German at all. I studied Spanish in college.”

Pages ruffled in the log book. “25 November 1917. Still no visual contact with L.59, and no further signals from base or Tanganyika. Position is unknown due to heavy cloud cover both above and below.”

“Sounds like they were having some trouble,” said Benoir.

“26 November 1917. The order to abort was given at 8.23 this morning, but we cannot be sure that the airship is moving in the correct direction. Everything is strange.”

 

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