August 30, 2012

From “Bite Into a Legend” by Oralee K. Melino

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Are you a member of the living dead looking for a world-class dining experience? Is the bother of chasing down victims interfering with your enjoyment of their still-living entrails as you tear them to shreds? Do the John Qs and Jane Does you catch lack the cachet of truly classy meals?

If you answered yes to any of those questions, then the Zombie Cafe is for you. Conveniently located in the heart of the tri-state area, the Zombie Cafe offers everything from quick meals to full top hat and tails dining experiences. Our crack staff of zombie chefs and terrified thralls inedible due to disease or infirmity hunt down fresh living victims daily and prepare them to order. Everything from fresh cadaver for older or newly risen zombies to free-range humans hamstrung to make pursuit and capture a breeze!

And if you’ve the cash or the clout, Zombie Cafe offers a choice of gourmet off-menu meals kept on premises. The rich and famous of the human world are kept alive and succulent for your dining pleasure as a whole meal. Or why not split the check and carve up a star with a group of interested friends? Why, just last week Zombie Cafe staff served Kanye West to a consortium of powerful zombie politicians. And the couple that took Nicole Kidman’s severed arm home last week agree that it’s her best part yet!

The Zombie Cafe: Bite Into a Legend™.

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August 18, 2012

From “Blasphemous Evolution” by Jesse V. Rohm

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For you see someone–it is not entirely clear who, and it never will be–must have begun a kind of experiment long ago. They took the basic building blocks of life on our planet, amino acids, DNA, RNA, and crafted it into something as beautiful as it is horrifying. The resulting genome had over 1,000,000,000,000 base pairs, several orders of magnitude greater than a human at 3,200,000,000 base pairs. Like most other organisms, including humans, 98% of that genetic information does not encode for any proteins or other genetic expressions. But unlike humans–indeed, unlike any other organism–that additional information encodes something far different.

It is, quite literally, a genetic memory.

As near as we can tell, the data written into that genetic code contains internal and external sensory information, converted into base pairs through a mechanism that is thus far unknown. The amount of information thus encoded is incalculable, and it is passed on from organism to organism, accumulating more information as it goes.

Even more uniquely, the 2% of that massive genome is mutable. The organism reproduces by stripping out that part of its genome and creating what can best be conceptualized as a virus, which then ‘infects’ and copies the missing information, as well as the massive genetic memory, into a host. When that host reproduces, the resulting organism has its functional DNA but also a massive genetic memory spanning centuries if not aeons.

It’s that process, a sort of blasphemous evolution, that has guaranteed the organism’s survival to the present day.

It’s that process which has given it a human genome and the knowledge necessary to remake the world.

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August 3, 2012

From “Under the Bridge Near the Animal Clinic” by Steven Olssen

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No one is quite sure how it got there, or how it remains even after the annual mini-monsoons in late July. But every time a curious onlooker walking their dog near the vet’s office peeks over the lip of the drainage ditch, it’s visible. Mud-spattered and a little rusty, but still there.

A child’s bicycle, still with training wheels, set upright in the drainpipe under a bridge, like a refugee from a bloated Stephen King horror.

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July 20, 2012

From “35 Vials” by Kathleen C. Esquerre

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Aureliana Aldalgisa came not from the aristocratic Old Families or the plebian Newtowners but the grey space in between, people with enough of the Gift to succeed in the bureaucracy of the Sorcerous Republick but without the connections or influence to make that possible. Her ancestors included a member of the Council, albeit one who had served only briefly and resigned under a cloud, as well as a prominent revolutionary in the failed Newtown Uprising. With a father in Republick service as a clerk, a mother who taught basic cantrips at a local finishing school, and three older sisters, Aureliana would have seemed destined for a minor teaching assignment, a civil service post, or a life as a homemaker.

One wouldn’t have expected her to become one of the most notorious sorcerous criminals in the Republick.

A voracious reader with natural talents in the Gift that far outstripped her family and peers, Aureliana was frequently left unsupervised and had little opportunity to distinguish herself without powerful connections. She turned inward instead, researching arcane lore and eventually various forbidden arts, mostly in the areas of divination and transfiguration. Investigators from the Republick Bureau believe that Aureliana’s original plan was to abduct a member of an Old Family and assume their place, using her increasingly sophisticated and dark skills to maintain the charade.

Working out of a squalid apartment she had purchased, Aureliana’s first attempt apparently met with disaster. Rather than allowing her to assume the aspect and knowledge of victims (mostly members of minor Old Families who had fallen from grace and were eking out livings in Newtown), they were instead reduced to incorporeal shades with only the barest connection to the material world in the form of a small quantity of “essential salts.”

Based on the Bureau’s investigation, they believe that Aureliana became obsessed with the unintended consequences of her sorcery and the absolute control it offered over the shades of her victims. There were 35 vials of “essential salts” in her possession when she was apprehended after a lengthy investigation; while the disappearances had piqued the Bureau’s interest, it wasn’t until she attempted to send a shade out into the city that Aureliana was discovered. Her ultimate ambition, it seems, remained the same.

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July 13, 2012

From “A Lone Red Tree” by Oscar F. Veen

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As sensational a bestseller as Dalva’s book was, its success was quickly sullied by lawsuits. After its 10th straight week on the New York Times bestseller list, a representative of Kyoto Processed Ricepaper Concerns Press filed a suit claiming that A Lone Red Tree had been plagiarized from Jina Himenashi’s novel 偽翻訳 (roughly “red tree standing among dead chrysanthemum blossoms”), which had been published a full six weeks earlier.

Dalva protested that he couldn’t read Japanese, and his lawyer added that while 偽翻訳 had been a Japanese bestseller there were no records of copies being sold or shipped overseas. Himenashi’s legal team presented a compelling argument, displaying translated excerpts of 偽翻訳 and Lone Red Tree side-by-side. With suitable differences to account for the differences in language structure, the descriptions and events were largely identical.

Particularly damning was the central piece of Dalva’s prose, which told of “a single red tree standing in a dead forest ringed by forever stormfronts.” The comparable phrase of Himenasi’s novel, “いない本物の英語日本語への翻訳,” meant essentially the same thing without definite articles and dead cherry trees where Dalva had conifers. The central thrust of each plot, with a protagonist haunted by the image of that tree until they seek it out and are driven mad in the attempt, was also the same, save that Dalva’s title was set in his native Portland and Himenashi’s tale began in Sapporo.

A guilty verdict and a massive recall of Dalva’s book—to say nothing of a black eye for the press and reviewers behind it—seemed inevitable. But then a representative of Spanish author Cristobal Carminha came forward, claiming that the book Un solitario árbol rojo, which had been a modest seller in Galacia, was a dead match for both 偽翻訳 and Lone Red Tree and predated either by almost a year. The trial broke up in disarray not long after as the judge demanded a more thorough investigation.

Agents for the publishers in question soon found that no less than 150 books had been written in the previous two years featuring the haunting, maddening image of a single red tree standing in a dead forest ringed by forever stormfronts. Most had been rejected by publishers, but over 40 had made it into print in everything from vanity editions to professional bound copies.

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June 22, 2012

From “The GesteCo Trees” by Troy K. Namisnak

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“GesteCo has been…diversifying. They’ve got some interesting trees at their experimental facility in Xinjiang.”

“Trees? You pulled this whole Deep Throat cloak-and-dagger thing for trees? Look: GesteCo is the international leader in artificial gestation, test tube babies, and designer kids for the rich and famous. If you can’t give me something juicy along those lines, there’s no point in talking.”

“Trees can be interesting, Mr. Whitacre. For instance, have you seen the GesteCo tree that’s been making the rounds at bioengineering conferences? They say it can produce human stem cells.”

“It’s easier just to collect those from newborns.”

“You’re not listening, Mr. Whitacre. Inside the trees: you must look inside! It is both a wonder and a horror that will, I think, be well worth your time.”

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May 27, 2012

From “The Chalk Outlines Are Spreading” by Raechael D. Sueters

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I cut through that alley a lot on the way to work. It was in the arty part of town, near the college, so there wasn’t much danger of being jumped by toughs. The biggest annoyance was the occasional graffiti, either by some “let’s all group hug the world” hippies or wannabe gangsters trying to throw up old school to disguise their middle-class origins.

For as long as I could remember, there had been a splotch of red paint on one of the brick walls, left over from when one of the dumpsters had been recolored. One day, some wisenheimer had chalked a body outline around the paint, making it appear that the red was spattered brains from a murder (ignorant of the fact that real cops haven’t used chalk outlines since the 60s).

I didn’t think anything of it—well, I guess I did chuckle a bit in a moment of weakness—until a few days later. On my way through the alley I saw that the chalk was still there despite a recent rainstorm, and someone had added a message in red paint of the same shade as the “brains:”

THE CHALK OUTLINES ARE SPREADING.

It did look a little spooky, like a framegrab for a bad, low budget horror flick. But I quickly dismissed it as some anti-war granola-shitting peacenik trying to be edgy with the color that best reflected their political leanings.

The next day I saw another chalk outline, complete with a dab of red paint on its “head,” on the sidewalk near my house. Later in the week I noticed another one near my shop. When I cut through campus on the way to the pharmacy on the first of the month, there were dozens, each contorted into a unique position.

I read in the paper that the cops were trying to catch whatever macabre graffiti artists were behind the outlines, but the thing that began to unnerve me was that they persisted despite frequent rains and the occasional effort to wash them away. The outlines were chalky to the touch and my fingertips came away white, but they resisted removal.

By the time I couldn’t take a step on the sidewalk without standing on a chalk outline with red paintdaub, I was officially freaked out.

 

May 21, 2012

From “The Sticky-Note Directive” by J. Margeret Muncie

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Oh sure, there had been some oddities. The fact that the higher-ups never appeared, communicating only by email, intercom, and sticky note. The fact that there were always free parking spaces in the company lot, parking spaces being about as common on Manhattan as Republicans. The fact that all of the other cube-jockeys always seemed to be there before Jaz arrived and stayed after she left.

But hey, she had talked herself out of any suspicions along those lines. Jaz was, after all, working at one of the most prestigious law firms in New York and by extension the civilized world. It didn’t matter that she was an intern acting as a glorified secretary; she was getting face time and experience and even a modest stipend (unlike most internships which treated people like chattel laborers). In a few months’ time it would all be worth it: the long hours of studying, the stupefying student dept, the lack of a social or romantic life after eighth grade or so, all of it.

Then one morning Jaz found a sticky-note directive from above in the usual place on her monitor: “Please report to the 23rd floor conference room for an urgent meeting.”

Sighing, Jaz had resolved to check her messages before she went. She’d accidentally been included in a company-wide blast email, which usually excluded her, and popped it open:

“Directive: Secure all entrances and exits and report to the 23rd floor conference room for our yearly success and team-building meeting. Bring the virgin/maiden sacrifice if you see her. Convocation and dinner to follow.”

 

February 18, 2012

From “Splatter Without the Punk” by Norbert Lung

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“The short story market is flat on its back, has been for years,” Jayce said. “No one but libraries buys short story magazines anymore, and literary journals won’t take anything that doesn’t involve the plight of blind lesbian nuns in Natchez.”

“No, that’s not it,” sighed Sean. “The market for sci-fi and horror is loads better than for anything else. There are sill people publishing and buying. I just don’t know why the stories aren’t selling.”

Jayce leaned across the table. “Really, Sean? You don’t have any idea? You write splatterpunk! It’s too gory for most of the people who might still read it.”

“I beg your pardon,” huffed Sean. “I wouldn’t call it splatterpunk. It defies genre classification.”

“Oh, I’m sorry.” Jacye flipped the manuscript open. “I guess the part about the bile demon splitting the heroine open like a thanksgiving turkey for its dark rituals might have given me the wrong impression. Oh, and this part here where the dark cabal commits mass suicide through power-drill self-trephination. And let’s not forget, oh, this story about the race of sub-humans that reproduces through harvesting body parts from abducted sorority girls.”

“See? That’s not splatterpunk. Nothing punk about it; all very genteel.”

 

November 19, 2011

From “The Dead Drop” by George Charley Burton

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It was the perfect dead drop for money and drugs–deep in the cemetery where the ground had gotten rough and no one would notice turned-over earth. Cunningham looked for the marker, which Debs had chosen as much for the unusual name as the remote location.

“Here lies Nikolai Ilyich Tyicov, beloved son, 1951-1980,” he read. The tombstone bore the crazy three-beamed Orthodox cross, probably the only one in the cemetery. No chance of screwing it up if they had to send some snot-nosed junkie over as a patsy.

It didn’t take long to turn the earth over to reveal the latest shipment laid out on the lid of the coffin: bundles of drugs and money in plastic baggies. Cunningham bent down to scoop them up.

A pale, bony hand punched out of the lid and seized his lapel as he did so.

 

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