The steam carriage halted in a muddy rut, clacking and chuffing. He eased himself down, precariously balanced upon the stones so as not to dirty his shoes and turned to his driver, who seemed nonplussed to come to such a place. “Keep the boiler hot, my man, I shan’t be long.”
The driver nodded beneath his oilskin and hauled back on the brake, holding the carriage in place while Jaggers attended to his business.
Jaggers tugged his hat down to shield his face from the fine, misty rain and pushed his way distastefully through the rusting gates. His feet crunched the patchy gravel as he picked his way fastidiously up to the paint-peeling doors of the once great house. It was pointless pulling the chain, so he prodded open the rotting wood of the door with one gloved finger and stepped, damply, inside.
It was dingy and reeked of mould, the floor was littered with scraps of paper and the ‘leavings’ of many cats. Covering his face with his handkerchief, he headed inward, towards the lamplight glow.
There she was, squatting on the floor in bloomers and bodice like he didn’t know what. He turned his head away, as common decency demanded. “For God’s sake, Aurelia, it’s worse than last time!”
“Jaggers. Do you have it?” She said, turning towards him and peering through her goggles. She was pale as a dove these days, hadn’t seen the sun in years. Her figure had become lean and tight, and he was uncomfortably aware of that right now. Her hair was stringy and wild, and, disgustingly, she was always dirty with oil and soot.
“You were ruined, before this madness, Aurelia. I beg you, stop.” He held out the package despite himself, and she clawed it eagerly from his hands.
“That’s quite enough, Jaggers. You may show yourself out.” She might look like the gutter trash of the East End, but her clipped and perfect tones still showed her to be a lady.
Nose wrinkled, wiping his fingers with another ‘kerchief he did as he was told.
Aurelia barely noticed him leave; her attention was upon the package. She lifted it to her face, her pale and dirtied lips pressing to the brown paper as she inhaled. A hint of spice, the tang of hot metal, a hint of a lady’s perfume. With trembling hands, she untied the string and opened it.
Within was a box, and a note. ‘May this give you what you need, love, L.A.B.’ The note barely warranted a glance. The box’s hinges creaked slightly as she opened it and gazed within.
Simply finding someone to cast such an improper image had been an adventure. She had been forced to correspond with disreputable men until she found what she needed. There, cast in brass and wrapped in oilcloth, was the fruit of her labours. A priapic ‘lingham’, made in distant Hindoostan where the stifling clutch of Christian morality had not yet reached.
She could not ship it directly to herself; people had learned of her obsessions. So it came via Lady B, and from her also came the other half of the box. A sleek case, full of hole-punched cards.
She tucked the case under her arm and reverently lifted the golden phallus from its case. Smooth, shining, discoloured in an instant by the heat and the oil of her fingertips. She didn’t mind. She held it close, watching it gleam in the warm light, the breath from her budded mouth misting its perfect surface.
She carried both down into her workshop. There, amongst the detritus of years of experimentation, was her masterpiece, complete save for the things she now held in her hands. Her Adonis of brass and iron. A man of fire, wrought from science, who would endure. A man who could not help but love her and would never leave.
She set the last piece before him and languorously arched her arms back to unlace her bodice. It fell from her light-starved flesh. Dainty breasts, tipped the palest coral pink, lean legs ending at the tufted shadow of her belly and the rounded curve of her muscular rump. She pushed her goggles up and stepped to the god she had made, bending to her work, completing him with a kiss that left the print of her lips upon his unflagging length.
She climbed him, pressing her body against the cool metal of his form and slotted the case into his back. Her hips rocked against the sculpted shape of him, leaving the imprint of her body stained against his polished surface. Her arms came around him as she found and turned the valve that would stir him to life. “Awaken my Compuson.” She murmured as he began to tremble.
The brass Adonis shuddered and hissed, golden skin warming, a dull glow appearing in his eyes. The hiss was a sound of passion. She felt his heat against her and kissed his mask. His hands clutched her, grasped her, pulled her to him, and she gasped as their bodies met with a watchmaker’s precision and the heat of a forge.
He was cool within her, atop her, but she was aflame. She writhed beneath her self-made man with the eagerness that only years of desire and imagination could bring about. She oiled him with the slickness of her need; she moved with him like fine engineering. The fire within his boiler paled into insignificance next to the fire in her belly.
They were made for each other.
Her nails clutched and broke against his metal skin, her legs wrapped about his waist and crushed to his unyielding form as he pistoned and she arched, a reciprocating engine of lust. He never tired, never flagged, never paused. She screamed and shuddered in unalloyed joy, hysterical paroxysms of bliss rendering her senseless.
Faster and deeper he moved in his rolling, liquid gait. Papers, gears, tools, all of it fell to the floor. His body moved so eagerly, with such passionate force that a coal, glowing hot, fell from his boiler, scorching Aurelia’s leg before it tumbled to the ground. She cared not; he was all she’d hoped for, tears streaked the soot upon her cheeks, and she didn’t see the papers begin to burn.
Another of my Pulp Nova stories, at least an early draft of the first part. You can buy these neo-pulp stories in a single book at Lulu.
Deep in the devilishly decadent district of Soho, above the luminous light of the lanes and the inebriated intonations of the imaginative industry that calls it home, lies the flat of that most flirtatious and fiery fighters for freedom, Madu Bandara, also known as Mimsy Burogrove, perhaps the world’s only psychedelic detective. See her now, safely sat upon silks and satins, silently supposing and mute as she meditates upon the mysteries of the mind and this mortal coil.
Mimsy is a small woman, perfect and petite, charming and comely in her coffee-coloured cut-off kaftan that blends with her caramel skin until it looks like all is one. Lying upon the cushion in a lotus, her limbs aligned languidly, the lissome lady of love and learning, sable shorn, has no reason to suspect the scandalous scoundrels that slip and slide through the shadows toward her sanctuary.
The Hashishin are heralds of the hate that her hirsute rival, The Guru, now feels for our famed feminine figure. Silently, they shimmy open a shutter and slip within, sharp shivs held in sure hands, eyes shining as they slide towards her. Their steps may be virtually soundless, but she is aware of them and, as they approach her, intent on assisting her into the afterlife, her eyes open, and the bindi that she bears upon her brow begins to burn with a brilliance that blinds and baffles the brutes who have come to bleed her.
She floats, she sees, through their minds as though she were rooting through their pockets. She sees the hatred that they have for her, instilled in them by their mentor. She sees the promises that they have been made, the heaven that they have been promised. As they hesitate, she strips out of her body and steps naked into their minds.
Wadi was a pleasant little boy, until his father shut him in the hut with the spiders. All night long, he could not sleep, feeling the webs brushing his face, hearing their skittering legs – imagined or not – feeling them dance across his skin. He is grown now, a man, a thug, a killer, brave in the face of almost any danger but…
Wadi’s mouth opens wide in a wail. Under his skin swarm a slew of spiders, and he screams as he slaps and stabs at them, sprawling backwards through the sash and down to the street below with a sickening splash so high is our siren’s shelter. Her impossible iris turns its ire upon the other interloper and infiltrates his intelligence.
Haider, on the other hand… Haider just wants to be loved. In the secret gardens of The Guru, he has met the dusky maidens who serve in the afterlife. He wants to carry out his missions so that he can be returned to their embrace. He doesn’t know that this heaven is a fake; he doesn’t understand that no right-thinking deity would ever accept a murderer, however much they thought they were doing the right thing. Mimsy takes pity on him. She breaks apart like a kaleidoscope of curves and lips, of soft eyes and warm kisses, and she enfolds him within her, she tells him she loves him, and her one becomes many, surrounding and stroking, murmuring sweet words in his gullible ears.
Haider slides to the floor with a subtle and serene smile and sighs as he stares into the stars only he can see. These two thugs are not the only transgressors, though. Their task was to trouble her, to throw her off, to tempt and taunt and turn away. At her door, the deadliest of the dangerously deranged dealers of death delays, determined and – he thinks – destined to kill her. Luck is with our lady, at least as he leans in, a latecomer looms large over the lowlife.
Detective Inspector St. John is an imposing individual, intent upon ingress when he identifies the ingrate intent upon inflicting iniquity upon our illustrious ingénue. Maddened at the malice of this malcontent, the man makes his move, laying his mitts upon the miscreant and mashing him against the marmalade-coloured mass of the door until his mandible is mincemeat and his muzzle is mushroomed across his mug. With that accomplished, the agent of the law seeks access and admits himself to the scene of anarchy and amour that has become of her accommodation.
“Mimsy;” St. John nods, wiping his hands, leaving the unconscious body of the Hashishin assassin behind him. “Trouble?”
She uncoils from her crouch over the barely-conscious cur and crosses the carpet to give him a kiss upon his cheek. “Nothing that I couldn’t take care of, Christian, but thank you for your help.” She smells like jasmine and jam, honey and hashish; she’s warm and wonderful, but he’s here for work, not women.
“Well, we do have trouble, down at the station. A murder that seems like your sort of thing.” He screws a cigarette into his kisser and sighs as he sparks it, taking a deep and soothing suck upon the slender cylinder. “Gruesome business, but strange. If you’re finished playing with religious fanatics and cults, we’d like you to take a look at it. For payment of course.”
The psychedelic princess pouts prettily. “It’s always business these days, Christian, never anything fun. If I am going to help you with this, you have to agree to let your hair down.” She fondles his follicles, and he must confess that his fine features have been flattened by the cutting of his flowing locks, but he falls in with her feeling.
“Agreed.” It was no hardship to hang around the happening with this hepcat; she was honest and happy and had to be humoured, at least here and now.
“Did you see the victim? Investigate the murder yourself?” Her hand hesitates over his, and her eyes turn heavenward as he hesitates.
“Yes, I did.”
“Then we don’t need to go anywhere.” A touch and her ten digits tingle at his temples.
She slips into Christian’s mind; they know each other, they’ve been lovers. It’s like sliding into a warm bed next to someone you care about. For a moment, he’s alarmed, but she’s done this before, and he tries to relax. She walks through his structured and ordered mind, bare feet slapping against the hard surfaces of laws and duties, of honour and decency, leaving little footprints of chaos in her wake.
She stops, a moment, a glittering barrier around his thoughts, cutting her off from his memories, his fantasies, though through the shield she can make out the shape of herself and hear the words they once shared. He’s so nervous, she finds it sweet and skips on, giggling, deeper into his mind.
A giggle is not appropriate here, not in this dark corner where he buttons down the bad things that he’s seen, the bad things that he’s done. Here, the horrors and the guilt wait behind walls far stronger than those used to keep her out, but these are to keep these memories in, suppressed, hidden.
Mimsy closes her eyes and steps through, and what she sees she can scarcely believe.
A man stands naked in a room as the ghost of her astral body watches. A screwdriver in his hand, the body of another man before him, dead and bleeding, his skull stabbed through and leaking, right above and between his eyes, deep into his ajna chakra, into the pineal gland, the gate to the higher planes and the imagination.
She dissolves into a cloud of butterflies and returns to her body, opening her eyes to her friend, the Inspector.
A moue of disgust mars her marvellous mask as, in a moment, she opens her mouth and mumbles. “A horrible murder, but you know who did it. Why do you need me?”
He shrugs his shoulders and, with a shudder, speaks what has been unspoken. “The man we caught claims not to remember anything. The man he killed is his friend, his business partner. They have no reason to kill each other. It’s motiveless, and if it wasn’t for the fact that it happened, we would never have thought it would. We need you to look inside him and to tell us if he is telling the truth.”
She taps a fingertip, marking time against her top lip and as time passes, she takes in a terrible something in the man’s eye. In his eye, as though perched in an aerie, is an eerie entity. A yellow man yells at her, a man she has a yen to understand. Determined, she decides to dive once more into his dreams, this derangement indicative of something deeper than the dead man at work, but the little man is gone.
She realises then that St. John’s radio is unwrapped and he is ranting. The radio is rushed away again, rapidly, and he reaches for her hand. “We really do need you.”
“Oh?”
“There’s been another murder, the same method, a different man, a different victim.”
This is an early first draft of the first part of this story, you can find it and the rest of my neo-pulp stories in the collection Pulp Nova, available at Lulu.
Tessa groaned and wound the sheets around her head, hoping the noise would go away, but it wouldn’t, the clamorous ring of her TeleBand just keep going and going, the greenish light of its screen flashing as it strove to get her attention. She fumbled her arm out of the mummified cocoon of her sheets and groped for her glasses on the bedside fresher, fumbling them onto her face and falling with a thump onto the floor as she writhed like some bizarre linen caterpillar across the floor to the Teleband.
Cold metal and worn leather were felt against her fingertips and she sat up, the sheet falling around her slender, shirt-covered body as she hit the answer button and squinted through the thumbprint on her glasses at the tri-d, metal face that appeared, hovering, over her wristband.
“Maam.”
It was Robur, her partner, a 41st interation 124C model Metalman, not very lifelike, but an effective partner and a good ‘man’ to have on your side in a fight.
“Robur… you do understand that humans have to sleep right? I have to get eight hours natural a week rather than hypersleep or I’m no good to anyone.” Tessa pulled up the hem of her nightshirt and wiped the lens of her glasses so she could see more clearly. He was just a Metalman, he wouldn’t care about a little flashed skin.
“I am sorry maam but Captain Newton was most insistant that I contact you. We have a Code Prometheus incident at the BioVat facility on the corner of Gernsback and Capek. The proctors are containing it at the moment but they want Science Police on site as soon as possible.”
Robur’s voice became more and more annoying the longer he spoke for, that grating buzz of an artificial voicebox was especially irritating before coffee and breakfast.
“I’ll be there as soon as I can Robur. Have the proctors set up a perimeter one block around BioVat and deploy Mag Screens for containment. I’m on my way.”
Tessa slapped the TeleBand and cut him off, stepping up out of the cocoon of sheets and peeling off her nightshirt.
“Lights!”
The daybulbs glowed dimly and slowly built up to full brightness as she crossed the room to get her uniform. She paused a moment and wrinkled her nose at the sight of herself in the mirror. Short curly hair, Buddy-Holly glasses, a figure so slim and boyish that if it wasn’t for the way her hips moved everyone would think she was a man. She was strong though, despite being slight, flexible and fast and – most importantly – brilliant. They’d wanted her to go into research, her parents, but the Science Police was where it was at, safeguarding the advances of others and protecting the city from the terrors that lay beyond the dome.
Tessa pulled on her foil cap and stepped into the ion shower. There was a hum and a tingle as the electric stream and a gust of air blew away the top layer of dead skin cells and she hopped back out, pulling on her uniform. Royal blue trousers a size too big for her, a black blouse and white tie, her gunbelt with its ionic pistol and her long white lab coat. Lastly she strapped her Science Police band to her other wrist and checked herself in the mirror. It would do.
Tessa threw open the window and stepped out onto the balcony, pressing the button on her TeleBand to summon a police disk. Below her the whole of Science City Zero was laid out, a glittering panorama of lights and sounds, the shining beacons of cars, planes, disks and balloons. The spires of the banded towers, the web of their skywalks and transit tubes. Above it all the great arch of the dome, the night sky barely seen beyond it, only The Moon bright enough to compete with the scintillating, kaleidoscopic glow of the city.
The disk arrived, swooping up to her balcony on dim pencil beams of force. Tessa leapt aboard and swept down over the city, heading as fast as she dared towards the incident.
***
Tessa swept down out of the sky and jumped from the disk, leaving it to flit its way to another appointment with a sudden surge in velocity. Fishing in her pockets she popped a caffeine and a breakfast pill from her dispenser and strode purposefully up to the line of proctors, waving to Robur as she did so.
“Ah, greetings Maam.” The Metalman waved to her, his chassis gleaming beneath the daybulb streetlights, all burnished blue-steel and armoured rivets. He was surrounded by proctors in their heavy armour, lightning guns in their hands as the finished establishing their perimeter.
“Report?”
“The cordon has been thrown around as you requested, the incident appears to be contained but there is ongoing violence within the BioVat building. Spy-Ray examination reveals several unidentified hominid-like forms and several scientists inside, perhaps hostages. There’s interference from the fires and electrical shorts, so that information is only seventy-percent accurate, for which I apologise.”
Tessa turned to the proctor captain, looking up, her neck aching as she looked into his faceless helmet.
“We’ve surrounded the building with ten megawatt energy screens and have deployed three units in a cordon around the building, there to back you up should things go pear-shaped maam. Captain Newton has ordered us to cooperate fully, but we’re only to enter at your behest.”
Tessa popped another caffeine pill, she had a feeling she’d need it. As she swallowed she unbuckled her holster and hoisted out her ionic pistol, checking the charge and the settings, nodding to Robur to do the same.
“What do we know about BioVat Robur?”
“Independent biological research and development company maam. They research into synthetic life but their bread and butter is creating synth-men for biological experimentation.”
“Brainless clones for medical research… who’d attack a medical facility?” Tessa scowled and marched up to the line, gesturing the proctor on duty to take this screen down when they went through. Robur pulled his own pistol and stood beside her.
“Three, two, one…”
The crackling screen faded out with a low buzz and the two ran forward, the light slap of her All-Stars contrasting with the heavy clank-clank of Robur’s feet. He wasn’t exactly stealthy. The screen came back up behind them, sealing the area behind an impenetrable screen of force and they slammed up against the wall, either side of the door.
“Ready?”
Robur’s steely head nodded, once, the glow behind his eyes intensifying and then he stepped around, kicking the revolving door out of its housing and sending it sliding violently across the foyer to smash the reception desk to smithereens.
Inside it was chaos, full of smoke, fires burning here and there, showers of sparks as cabling burned and shorted. The ground was slippery with a pinkish goo and the cause was readily apparent. Deformed, cancerous, muscles ballooned to ridiculous proportions, the synth-men had broken free of their containers. Twisted, like hairless gorillas, veins pulsing, rage in their eyes, the handful in the entrance turned their incoherent anger on the interlopers and leapt to the attack.
“Does not compute!” Robur cried with what sounded like genuine anguish. “Synth-men have no brains… no conciousness!”
“Worry about that later!” Tessa darted inside, sliding on a slick of the pinkish goo and ducking under the tree-trunk arm of one of the synth-men. Her ionic pistol hummed in her hand as she twisted, sliding on her bottom across the chequered floor and firing, a blue beam of coherent electricity striking the synth-man and hurling him to the far wall with the stink of ozone and bacon.
The remaining synth-men bounded and leapt, roaring like jungle apes as they moved. Tessa scrambled out of the way as one landed on the spot where she had just been. Thanking blind chance that she was as small and slight as she was. Where it landed the floor cratered, muscle so dense it must have weighed twice as much as it should and been in unspeakable agony, crushed by its own muscles. Robur shot the other out of the air deftly with his pistol, playing his beam across the creature’s chest until he was sure it was still.
By then the third had gotten its meaty paw upon Tessa and had her by the ankle, hauling her upside down before it’s face, ape-like fangs bared as it roared, spattering her glasses with spittle. There was a crash nearby as Robur slammed into the remaining synth-man before he could recover, bearing him down to the ground and pounding his neanderthal brow with fists like hammers while Tessa twisted and struggled.
Blinded by the spit she felt its other hand grasp her around her head, the span of its fingers sufficient to pluck her cranium from her spine as though it were plucking a grape. She tried to calm herself, to remember her scientific boxing lessons and then she lashed out with all the strength she could muster, slamming two of her knuckles one side of the synth-man’s head and the butt of her pistol the other, just between the ear and the jaw.
The creature roared and dropped her, she landed awkwardly on her shoulders and back, upside down, lifting the ionic pistol and blindly firing between the creature’s legs. The roar became a howl, high pitched almost beyond hearing and this time the ozone stink was mixed with burning hair as the thing dropped like a felled tree.
The bone-crunching noises of Robur’s fight also came to a halt and he strode over to help her up.
“Are you alright maam?”
“No thanks to you. Why didn’t you attack the one that had me?”
“I knew you could handle it maam, within a ninety-three percent probability anyway. Taking the remaining problem out of the equation seemed the best course of action.”
“There’ll be others, we need to get to the lab where the spy-ray saw the scientists.”
They nodded to each other and ascended the stairs two and three at a time, heading back through the offices, blasting left and right as more of the synth-men emerged from the side rooms, blinded by pain and rage there was nothing they could do but put them down.
“This is monstrous, whoever did this is a sociopath.” Tessa growled as they stood back to back, blasting away at the tide of muscle that dogged their every step, climbing over the bodies of dead office workers and the remnants of destroyed desks as they finally got back to the factory doors.
They burst through and slammed the metal doors shut behind them, standing on the gantry that lead to the control chamber, beneath them a sea of tubes, many of them broken, filled with the pink plasm that supported the synth-men growth, but there was only one inside. A brute bigger than any other they had seen, towering over the cowering scientists in the control room.
“Hold the fort Robur, I’m going to get the scientists.”
The Metalman nodded and slid his arms through the handles, bracing back against the door as it rang like a bell, massive fists hammering from the other side, roars and snarls of frustrated as the iron and steel of robot and door refused to give, though it began to dent.
The hulking synth-man turned, one eye massive and yellow, larger than the other, one whole side of its body larger than the other. Clumsily it turned and loped towards her as she marched towards it, ionic pistol raised.
“Science Police, surrender to impartial justice!” She gave the warning, even though she knew it couldn’t understand. The body of a monster and the mind of a newborn.
Predictably, it ignored her and began to run, a lopsided lope towards her.
Behind her Robur channelled his own power into his chassis, electrifying himself and the door, shocking the synth-men hammering on the other side to death, his whole body arched and glowing, heating up from the power coursing through him.
For her part Tessa kept marching on the giant synth-man, depressing the firing stud on her pistol, the blue coruscating light struck the creature full in the chest, burning its flesh, charring its skin, but still it kept on coming, teeth bared, marching into the ravening beam as though walking into the wind.
Tessa stared, disbelieving as the massive creature came closer, closer, closer and reached into the beam, burning off one of its own fingers to snatch the pistol from her hand. It grinned in triumph as it crushing it like a drinks can in its maimed fist but Tessa didn’t miss a beat, swinging her leg back, then forward and planting the very toe of her boot into the mass of dangling flesh between the things legs. It grunted and she grasped, and pivoted, using its own off-centre weight to hurl it from the gantry to plummet to its broken-necked doom amongst the shattered tubes below.
The fight was over, the scientists in shock and useless as witnesses. They called in the proctors to guide them out and put out the fires, that left them free to look over the control room without interference. It was a wreck, a mess, evidence was hard to come by in such a disruption of blood and wreckage, but they divided it up into sections and went through it methodically, despite Tessa’s aches and pains. This was where a Metalman came into his own, they couldn’t experience boredom and his mechanical precision was an inspiration.
It was Tessa that found it though, breaking open the feeder mechanism to the MONOVAC she ran her fingers down the mass of punch-cards and felt the hard edges of newer cards inserted into the sequence.
“What do you make of these Robur?” She plucked the newer cards out of the feeder, tucking torn pieces from her notebook into the gaps to mark the spaces.
The Metalman took the cards and fed them into his universal slot, shuffling them like a stage magician as they flew into his slot and his tubes and switches cogitated with a noisy flickering, digesting the information.
“They’re plasm codes maam. I am no expert but according to my interior library these sequences relate to muscle, bone and nerve tissue growth, including brain tissue. I conjecture that…”
“…someone introduced a little Mr Hyde into our mindless Doctor Jeckylls.”
“Indeed maam.”
“So then, there’s no question.”
“None at all maam.”
Tessa tossed the remaining punch cards angrily onto the floor, spilling them everywhere, kicking the pile so it fell between the slats in the gantry and turning back to Robur, stabbig her finger into his impassive face.
This is an early draft of the first part. You can find all my neo-pulp stories collected in Pulp Nova via Lulu.
Heat haze shimmered over the salt flats, making the surface look like water. Doctor Green took a swig from her bottle of water, grimacing at the tepid warmth of it, and she’d only been out of the car for a short while. You could see for miles on a good day, but today the view was obscured by smoke. Wreckage lay over some distance, wheels and foil-thin aluminium and titanium. The kind of thing yokels might mistake for a UFO crash. She sighed and flipped open her notepad, rechecking her notes while the medical team zipped up the body bag and the police hovered around her.
“Can you tell us anything yet?”
The depressingly and ostentatiously Mormon sheriff had been a pain in her backside since she’d arrived, standing over her shoulder while she examined the body and the wreckage of the Swift IV, the latest foolhardy attempt at a land speed record with a rocket-powered cigar tube on wheels.
“Anything I tell you is only going to be preliminary.” She sighed, pushing her hair back from her face, the sweat slicking it out of her eyes. “I think it’s safe to say he died almost instantly when the steering column pierced him, speared his heart and broke his spine in two places. That seems the most likely cause of death. As to the vehicle’s cause of failure, you’re better off asking the mechanics.”
“How fascinating.” This new interruption was a deep, basso rumble of a voice that almost made her jump out of her shoes. It seemed to come out of nowhere, and she and Sheriff Bralan turned as one to look at the source.
He was a towering man, unbelievably not sweating in the noon sun as it glared off the flat. He wore a thin white shirt and tan-coloured trousers, heavy walking boots, his only concession to the sun a pair of classic, black, Ray-Ban sunglasses and a white cloth tied as a bandanna around his neck. Inexplicably, he wore heavy gloves over his hands, one of them holding a slung pack over his shoulder. There wasn’t an ounce of spare fat on him. He didn’t look like a gross, overblown caricature, not a body builder, more like an anatomical diagram or a classical Greek statue, though the look was marred by the strange tattoos that covered his cheek, jaw and neck, vanishing down beneath the shirt.
“He with you?” The sheriff drawled, hand going down to his gunbelt, a move that the giant reacted to with only the barest flicker of a smile.
“No.” She said. “I’d remember him. He’s not part of the car crew either.”
The sheriff drew his revolver and levelled it at the big man. “We’ve got to account for everyone here, mister…”
“Doctor.” The big man interrupted.
“…and this might well be sabotage. So you’re going to have to come with me.” The sheriff finished, undaunted.
“A crashed supercar, a dead driver – judging from the bag – the police are suspicious and what I take to be a scientist or doctor already on the scene, and you want me to waste my time coming with you to answer tedious questions?” The big man stared at the sheriff as though he were something one might find upon overturning a rotting log. “I am Doctor Oswald Stone, and I was out walking. If I am to get to the bottom of this intriguing mystery, I cannot afford to waste time with you.”
She went to open her mouth and interject, but his authority questioned, the sheriff was in no mood to play nice. He cocked back the hammer on his revolver as his deputy crab-scuttled behind the giant man, hand to his own gunbelt.
The big man gave her an apologetic look, and then there was an abrupt blur of motion. One muscular leg snapped back as straight as a laser beam and hit the deputy just beneath his ribs. There was a brief, loud, woof of expelled air as he flew back several metres and slid to a halt, slumped over himself, desperately trying to breathe.
The sheriff did no better. The big man’s gloved hand grasped his pistol with impossible strength and tore it from his hand in the same motion as he kicked the deputy, flicking the gun away with a casual gesture that sent it flying out across the flats, vanishing into the heat haze.
“If you can find your gun, you’re welcome to try and take me in for questioning.” The big man said, returning to his casual, relaxed stance and turning to her.
“If you’re a doctor as well, this could get terribly confusing. Call me Doc or Osmium, and you are?”
Her heart pounding in her chest with fear, she swallowed it back and answered him. “Doctor Susan Green, pathology mostly, but I dabble and do medical support for things like this. What are you a doctor of?” She felt like an idiot saying that, given what just happened, but banal pleasantries were better than being kicked.
“Oh, life, the cosmos, everything and anything interesting. I’ll call you, Susan, then, if you don’t mind.” Doc shifted his pack back into place on his shoulder and began pacing over towards the wreckage. With the sheriff swearing a blue streak and chasing after his gun and the deputy trying to work up enough breath to vomit, she followed hurriedly in Doc’s trail like the tail of a comet, finding herself babbling about the accident.
Eli Grange had been the best driver, on paper, with three previous record attempts, jet fighter experience, and inhumanly good reflexes. The car had been checked over a dozen times. The safety harness and other life-preserving equipment were all in good order. Everything had some form of redundancy and safety, and yet… something had gone wrong. On the first proper run, the rear end had drifted, and the car had tumbled end over end, side over side, until it was completely wrecked.
The Doc crouched amongst the main body of the debris, listening, asking questions, technical questions about the wheels, about the chassis, about the engine. Intelligent, seeking questions that she couldn’t always answer, but he seemed to be finding his way. She glanced about her in a panic and saw the rest of the pit crew heading over, angry, curious, wondering who the hell this man was, perhaps, just as she was.
“Who the hell is this guy?” Mick, the chief engineer on the project, lumbered up, a big guy but heavy with it, unlike this ‘Doc’ person.
“Doc Osmium,” Susan answered, without a trace of humour, still unsettled from the brief fight. “He’s dangerous.”
“AHA!” The Doc shouted, emerging from the debris holding a tiny piece of metal, startling them both as more of the engineering crew arrived.
“You can’t go messing with that! We need to work out what caused the accident.” Mick thundered, stamping towards the Doc with a look of murderous intent. The Doc thrust the tiny piece of metal beneath his nose, bringing him to a halt.
“The lox regulator valve. There’s a tiny grain of sand between the washer and the nut, keeping it fractionally open. I surmise that this caused a tiny fluctuation in the fuel feed to the car’s rocket, which was enough – at full acceleration – to throw the tail off, leading to the crash. As to the rest, the abruptness of the crash and the fact that it was side on seems to have tumbled the car in such a way that your safety precautions were only minimally effective. An enormous string of bad luck…”
Mick stared at the washer as the others arrived. “Bad luck?”
Before the question could be pursued any further, the Doc abruptly froze, slowly raising his hands from his sides. Susan’s head jolted around, expecting to see the sheriff threatening the big man again, but it wasn’t; it was Jose from the pit crew, an ugly slab of an automatic pistol in his hand, levelled at the Doc.
“Couldn’t just let me get away, could you, Osmium?” Jose’s voice was different, hard-edged; he meant to use the gun, she could tell. “Had to follow me, all the way out here, track me down and put me away. Madre de Dios man, they were only samples.”
The Doc’s face twisted into a feral snarl. “Irreplaceable samples collected by Charles Darwin himself, priceless. Would you believe me if I told you that I wasn’t actually here for you? This is the most terrible coincidence.”
Jose shook his head and laughed. “That smooth tongue might be a hit with the ladies, Osmium, but it’s not going to get you out of this.”
Susan saw his knuckles tighten around the trigger, and she acted. Her boot caught Jose – if that was his name – in the back of the knee and sent him down to the ground. The pistol barked, the bullet going wide, sparks flying as it ricocheted off the car’s wreckage. With Jose down, the Doc moved with that unnatural precision and speed again, grabbing a blackened piece of metal and hurling it like a discus. The heavy sheet slammed into Jose’s throat with a sickening ‘Chud!’ and he fell back, stone dead to the flat ground, the metal embedded halfway through his neck.
Susan stared wide-eyed at the Doc as he picked his way out of the debris, the rest of the crew keeping well back from him now as he crouched over Jose’s body.
“Carlos Ortega, a thief and a murderer, wanted by Interpol for theft to order. The funny thing is that I wasn’t here looking for him at all. I really was just walking.” The big man looked up at Susan and frowned, his face creasing, the tattoos on his cheek twitching as his jaw muscles worked.
“I happen to be walking here, he happens to be here, there’s an accident that is wildly unlikely stemming from a tiny flaw in an otherwise perfect machine… and you’re here.” His steely eyes settled on Susan.
“So? It’s just blind chance, isn’t it? Things like this do happen… synchronicity they call it don’t they?”
The Doc stood up again. “Synchronicity is what we call it when causally unrelated events occur that seem to hold meaning beyond coincidence. In a truly random universe, we might brush it off, but I’m afraid I’m still a bit of a stuffy old Newtonian, clockwork universe fan. I’m a big supporter of cause and effect, even in quantum physics, and this seems to stretch the odds a little too far for me. Something more is going on.”
He stepped forward, those Olympian features twisting into a wry and enticing grin as he offered her his massive, gloved hand.
This was an early draft of the first part of the story. You can buy all my neo-pulp stories collected in Pulp Nova from Lulu.
Ace slumped over the chipped formica of the counter and gripped another full glass of scotch in his scarred and meaty fist. He was a great bull of a man, swaying slightly in his drunken haze and running his hand through the thick beard and tangled locks of a man who’d spent a long time in space. His battered flight jacket bore a faded RAF roundel on the back, and his denim was worn thin from frequent use and stained with oil. Low on his hip hung an Eliminator pistol in a worn-smooth holster, but nobody in The Proxima Bar seemed to pay it any heed.
A gloved hand smacked down on Ace’s shoulder, startling him, making him spill a little of his scotch over the filthy bar.
“Mein Herr, you are Englisher, yes? I recognise zer badge on your jacket. Royal Marines, ya?”
Ace grunted and started licking the spilt whisky from his fingertips, giving the German a sidelong glance. The German and his two friends behind him, grinning and muttering to each other. That was all the response he gave them, not a single word otherwise.
“Kriegsmarine.” The German said, pointing to himself and his friends. “Picked up your mess on Gelida, ja? When you broke and ran?”
Ace tossed back the scotch and spun the squeaking stool around, setting his jaw, grinding his teeth until his jaw muscles bunched, staring deep into the German’s eyes with an unwavering stare. The big blonde man wilted slightly under Ace’s drunken glare, but couldn’t back down in front of his friends.
“Run and hide. Like little girls. While we fight and die, like men.”
Ace sized him up, ignoring his words and his fruity accent as the German regained some of his courage, puffing out his chest like a strutting cockatoo. Huffing and puffing as his friends laughed behind him, her jabbered away like it meant anything. Ace ground his teeth harder, and then with the power and speed of a tiger, he pounced, lashing out with the glass in his hand and ramming the base of it into the German’s big mouth.
Teeth crunched, glass shattered. The barman studiously ignored it all, turning away and intently polishing his glass. The man choked on blood and shards and fell back, clutching his ruined mouth with both of his hands. His friends were stunned, standing there with their mouths open as the stream of invective had cut off in an instant.
Ace wasn’t above kicking a man while he was down and slipping from the stool, reared back his steel-toed boot and drove it with uncaring force deep into the bleeding man’s crotch. His eyes bulged near out of their sockets – at least he was distracted from the ruin of his mouth. He toppled with glacial slowness, sideways onto the ground as Ace jabbed a finger at the other two Kriegsmarine.
“Want some, you crumbs?” Ace finally spoke, his voice like someone gargling gravel.
One of the Germans turned and ran, his tail between his legs; the other one grabbed a bottle and smashed it against the side of the table. Ace sighed and clenched his fist, but before the two could join battle, a burly, blond-haired man smashed a stool over the top of the German’s head, and he went down like a puppet with its strings cut.
“Could have handled him.” Muttered Ace, turning back to his drink.
The blond muscled up to Ace and offered his hand. “Damn, Mister, but you can fight. Put ‘er there. I’m Bang Donnybrook. These are my friends, Gail and Professor Quartus.”
Ace didn’t take his hand, but he turned his head and gave all three of them the once-over with his steely eyes.
The blond was a big, broad man, but too clean-shaven and picture-perfect to be a veteran, though he had a couple of scars here and there and clearly thought of himself as a capable man. He was grinning with his perfect white teeth, hand still thrust out, trying not to look insulted that Ace hadn’t shaken it, but he was.
The Professor was a mischievous imp of a man with strong Semitic features and a wicked, mirthful intelligence behind his eyes. A slide rule was tucked into the pocket of his patch-elbowed jacket, and he managed to exude, all at once, the confident intellect of a genius and the louche arrogance of a hop-head. “Given your skills…” He said, smiling at Ace’s snubbing of his blond friend, “…we have a proposition for you. If you might be interested.”
Ace considered, licking the taste of the scotch from his teeth as he turned his eyes on the last member of the trio. She was a raven-haired beauty with a great rack, hidden away though it was in a severe professional woman’s dress. Maybe a reporter or something? Nice gams too, skirt hugging them like a glove. She shifted a little uncomfortably under his eyes, and it was clear by the wrinkle of her nose that his ragged looks and brutal nature disgusted her.
“Say your piece.” Ace rumbled, setting his haunches back on the worn barstool and signalling the barkeep for another glass.
“We’ll need you sober.” The woman, Gail, sniffed, tugging her purse tighter to her body.
“If he says yes.” The professor remarked with a snort of laughter.
“Let’s hear it. Once I say yes, I’ll be sober on your time.” Ace grabbed the glass and held it, waiting to hear what they had to say.
“We need a pilot.” Said Bang, the blond giant.
“So hop a passenger ship. You don’t need me.”
“We’re going to Dyzan.” The professor said, leaning forward in an arch, in a conspiratorial whisper.
“In the post-war chaos and with the civil war going on there?” Ace stared at the trio like they were retarded. “Why the hell would you want to go there?”
“That’s our business.” Said Bang, trying to reassert his leadership and dominance over the Professor, who was clearly his intellectual superior. “We’ll pay you well.”
Gail opened her purse and stepped forward, showing its contents to Ace. Gold glittered inside, and more, the unmistakable lustre of Gelidan sapphires and the golden gleam of a Dyzan slave harness. Perhaps not a King’s ransom, but at least a Prince’s ransom, more than enough to risk the war-torn planet Dyzan, Earth’s hidden twin behind the sun, the exotic and deadly world that had invaded the Earth and brought an end to the war, until they were overthrown. The last thing Ace wanted to do was go back there; he’d killed enough of the Dyzanian people to last him a lifetime. Then again… money and even though Bang and Gail wore matching rings, she wouldn’t be the first married woman he’d seduced away from her husband – if he managed it.
Ace stroked his stubbled chin and downed his glass. “I’ll do it. My ship’s in the dock. We can leave whenever you want.”
They were in a hurry and grabbed their bags, all but hustling Ace out of the bar and then letting him take the lead, barrelling down the crowded street in a drunken swagger and shoving people out of his way, swearing like a sailor as a jetpack swooshed a little too close overhead.
Even drunk Ace could tell they were on edge, and that put him on edge. He could tell they were being followed as they made their way to the offshore private spaceport. It was a rusting hole, but Ace couldn’t land at Manhattan Spaceport any more, not after that ‘incident’ with the customs patrol.
Paranoid as years of war and betrayal had made him, it didn’t take Ace long to spot the men who were following them. Trenchcoats and hats, they couldn’t look any more suspicious if they were trying to. Ace took a roundabout route and, turning a corner, wheeled around. “Hide.” He grunted to the trio and turned back, peering his head around the corner.
The three men were walking abreast with grim intent. Ace wasn’t the type to take any chances and drew his eliminator, thumbing the safety. The sleek and deadly blaster hummed in his hand, and he stepped out into the alley, levelling it at the man in the centre.
There was a whip-crack of annihilated air particles as he depressed the firing stud. The ravening beam lanced out and struck the man full in the chest, burning a glowing hole the size of a football through his chest and melting the bricks behind him.
To their credit, the others didn’t scream, didn’t run; they drew their own weapons and sprang to the sides of the alley, their hats falling from their heads, revealing the polished domes and horseshoe moustaches typical of imperial warriors from Dyzan, some remnant of the Emperor’s guard intent on revenge, perhaps. Their golden fist-guns cracked and sparked, invisible bolts of energy striking the wall behind Ace and exploding the brickwork into red-glowing fragments.
Ace calmly stood as the bolts struck around him, dialling the Eliminator’s emitter to maximum aperture and levelling it down the alleyway, thumbing the firing stud for a second time. There was no snap-crack this time; the dispersed energy was nowhere near as powerful. He kept the stud down as the air shimmered beneath the beam’s power. Scraps of paper burst into flame, paint peeled. The men from Dyzan screamed as their clothing smouldered and caught, lighting them up as human torches. Ace calmly paced towards them, narrowing the aperture as they screamed and rolled on the ground, playing it over them like a hose until they melted like candles thrust into a hearth. Finally, the last, bubbling scream came to a halt, and he took his finger off the stud.
Almost immediately, he sprang to a ready stance again, a whirl of black robes ducking back around the corner out of sight, an enemy he had missed. A skilful one. All the more reason to get away and all too good an indicator that there was much more to this than the trio had told him. Wasn’t that just his luck?
When I heard her scream, I knew my secret was out. With a roll of my eyes to the heavens, I pulled myself out of my seat and down the hall to where she stood. She shivered and clutched her coat as though it were the only thing she could rely on in the universe.
She turned to me, wide-eyed and shaking and spoke, her voice quavering. “There… there’s a monkey in your cupboard.”
I peered around the door into the cupboard under the stairs. Bobo looked up from his laptop and gave me a thumbs-up. I turned back to Emily, my agent, and spread my hands, trying to be placatory, and I began to explain. “Well… he’s more of an infinite number of monkey…”
“Like the Shakespeare thing?” She at least had some control of her wits. I was glad. I closed the cupboard door gently, and I led her away to the living room. I sat her down on the sofa and went into the kitchen to make her a cup of tea.
“Sort of, you know the principle, right?” I called back over my shoulder.
Still clutching her coat, she sat, pulling at the fabric nervously, trying to remember how it went. “Isn’t it that, if you had an infinite number of monkeys, typing away on keyboards, eventually by pure chance they’d come up with the complete works of Shakespeare?”
“In essence, yes,” I called to her.
“But… there’s only one monkey.”
I poured hot water over the teabag and squished it gently with the spoon, bringing it out with me and sitting down next to her again. “That’s why I said an infinite number of monkey. And well, technically, he’s a chimp, so an ape, not a monkey. Monkeys don’t have enough brain mass for it to work.”
“I don’t understand.” She said, letting go of the coat and gratefully clutching the tea.
“It’s really quite simple,” I explained. “he is just one chimp out of an infinite number of potential chimps from subtly different universes that stretch in all lines of potentiality in all directions. So, while he is one chimp, he is also, in effect, every possible chimp, in all possible universes and times, at one and the same time.”
“But,” she trailed off, clutching the mug though the hot water must have been hurting by now. “What is he doing in your cupboard?”
“You’re always asking me where I get my ideas. I don’t. I have the chimps come up with them for me, and then I curate and polish them.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“You’d believe me if I told you an infinite number of quantum chimps was the source of my stories rather than deep thought, consideration, influences and yadda-yadda-yadda? I don’t think so.”
Later, Bobo presented me with a brilliant paper on the best ways to get rid of a body.
The plan was to just move out of cover and slot him, shoot him in the back of the head just as the unspeakable cunt deserved, but then things got complicated, just as they always do.
He knew I was there.
He poured himself a drink from the cabinet, whiskey over ice. If I didn’t already hate him, that would have tipped me over the edge, but compared to everything else, adulterating good drink didn’t seem significant somehow. As though he didn’t have a care in the world, he turned to the shadowed corner in which I was hiding and spoke, right to me.
“I suppose you’re here to kill me?”
There was no point hiding any longer, I raised the pistol and stepped out of the shadows, keeping it centred on his chest. The gun was suddenly feeling heavy. This was supposed to be an execution, not a conversation. I swallowed and tried to keep the rising nervousness down. I was supposed to be a fucking professional.
“You know who I am, I suppose, and that doesn’t intimidate or worry you,” he went on. He wasn’t even scared; the ice barely rattled in the tumbler as he drank – unless the drinking was the sign. This was too much like a movie. Generally, you aim a gun at someone, and they piss themselves and do whatever the fuck you want, not this cunt. He was made of sterner stuff, but then, I already knew that.
“I know who you are.” I replied. Swallowing again, to my own ears, my voice sounded weak.
“British? I was expecting some crazed internet lunatic from San Francisco, not this. Hardly seems fair. You know everything about me, and I’m facing a man dressed like it’s London 1980 all over again.”
I growled, and my grip tightened again on the pistol, knuckles white under black gloves.
“Seemed appropriate for killing a terrorist.”
That seemed to surprise him. Finally, his eyes widened, and he stared at me incredulously. “What? You mean you found me… with the intent of killing me, but you still think I… you still think we…?”
Infuriatingly, he began to laugh, and that was more than I could stand. I stepped forward and I slammed him across the temple with the gun, skin split, blood ran, and he fell to his knees, spilling his drink. Copper over whiskey. I slammed the pistol barrel against the side of his head again, but something stopped me from taking that last step; he was making me doubt. I couldn’t afford to doubt.
He was still laughing.
“What’s so fucking funny? Three thousand casualties and fuck knows how many killed in an unjustified war, and you can sit here and laugh?” I pressed the gun harder against his head, blood was pouring down now, matting his hair, staining his cheek, but he was still laughing.
“You got all the way to me… but you still think we did it.”
I ground the gun against his temple, breathing hard now, furious, angry, teary-eyed, trying to focus.
“We know you did it, you’re connected to each scene, you confiscated the evidence, you masterminded the whole thing, the whole cover-up, all of it. We’ve got the evidence, we’ve got the pictures and the documents to prove it, and we’re going to get to all of you. Justice will be done.” That was better, a little self-righteousness, and I was back on track. The man was scum; he deserved to die. I was ready.
“Don’t you want to know what really happened and why? I’ve no reason to lie now, you’re going to kill me,” he looked up, he wasn’t laughing, but he was still smiling. He was mad, that was it, insane, you’d have to be to do what he did. I didn’t shoot, yet, he went on. “Yes, we covered it up, yes, we hid evidence, yes, we put out false reports and doctored things to look suspicious, but no, we didn’t do it. It was just a group of religious zealots, and frankly, we’ve had it coming for almost a century.”
“If you didn’t do it, why cover it up?” I was weakening again, my resolve seeping away once more as he spoke, the gun wavering. Maybe he was right, maybe he was just pleading for his life.
“Governments are transitory, short-term things,” he explained. “All they care about is the next election, that’s what; five years at most? They can’t think long term; they’re incapable of it. That’s why China is going to outstrip us. Democracy doesn’t hinder them. But there’s us. Government bureaucracy doesn’t change, we stay the same, us and business, and we can think long term.”
“So it was bureaucrats and business, that still doesn’t excuse you.” If he was pleading for his life he wasn’t doing a very good job.
“No, you don’t understand. We didn’t do anything this time, but one day we might have to. We have to be prepared for contingencies, don’t you see? One day, we might have to kill our own to justify a war, or we might have to fake some atrocity or cover up an experiment gone wrong. We haven’t yet, but one day, we might. It’s all about contingency. Create baseless stories of conspiracy now and in the future, when we are covering something up, the people crying about it will be dismissed as lunatics, just as they are being now.”
I stared down at him. That was insane, all that trouble, all that pain, all that extra grief, just to pave the way for some unformed future conspiracy to get away with things? That was almost worse than masterminding it themselves.
“Why not just tell the truth? Why not just be open? What about the businesses making money off of all this? What about the new crusade?”
“Opportunists.” He answered. “Vultures, nothing more. As to telling the truth? We tried that with Project Bluebook, and the crazies are still having a field day with that.” He sighed and looked up at me, right into my eyes. “Look, we didn’t do anything, we just made it appear – to certain people – that we did, just in case. You kill me, and you don’t avenge anyone, you don’t set anything to rights. You just add another number to the body count.”
So that was his plea.
“Alright, alright. You didn’t do it,” he smiled, but it was premature. “You’re willing to in the future.”
The frame descended from its cradle and set down upon the ground in an easy, loose-limbed stance.
Unnaturally still, it was a foreboding presence, even without a controller. Sleek and deadly, its blank eyes stared out into space, and its matte surface seemed to blur its edges into the shade of the dimly lit room.
“This,” said the Tech-Sergeant“, is a model M-33 teletrooper. State-of-the-art Marine issue with sealed armour and amphibious capability. The chassis will withstand sustained assault rifle fire and can deflect a .50 calibre shell. It has a responsive neural-network interface that allows it to learn how you operate, and vice versa. The camera array has a threat recognition and alert system with a 360-degree field of vision, thermography, low-light and penetrating radar overlays. It’s about as strong as three men, and the on-board fuel cells can keep it operating in the field for twenty-four hours without resupply. With a backpack fuel pod or standby mode, this activity profile can be considerably elevated. Each unit is armed with built-in bladed weapons and an arm-mounted sidearm fed from a hopper containing a hundred rounds of nine-millimetre shells. It can be armed with a variety of weapons, but the standard issue is the MR-2 modular assault system. One of these babies sets back the Alliance military fund around fifty million ameros. Any questions?”
The slouching wiseacre at the back of the pack stood up straight and raised his hand. “If these things are so fucking badass, why aren’t we winning, Sarge?”
There were gasps from the other inductees, but to their surprise, the tech-sergeant didn’t bawl the guy out; he just reached across himself and idly itched at the stump of his left arm with his fingers and then fixed the mouth with a thousand-yard stare.
“Because, son, raising a kid to fighting age and handing them a century-old AK-47 only costs about a thousand.”
John was startled awake by the sound of screaming. His eyes jumped open, and for a momen,t he was blinded by the light. Then things began to swim into view. A hospital room, no surprise there, a smell of blood and antiseptic in his nostrils and then he realised it was him who was screaming.
It sounded wrong.
This was not his aged, croaking, earthy voice; it sounded like a cat or a girl. He wasn’t screaming though; he was startled, upset, but he was not making his mouth open or his lungs empty in that shrieking cacophony. He tried to lift his arms to stifle his mouth, and they would not obey him; nothing would.
He felt himself lifted, as though he weighed nothing. The nurse seemed like a giantess, cartoonishly enormous, but even his eyes wouldn’t obey him as the world span and twisted about him. All was confusion, fear, and vertigo as he tried to fathom what had happened to him. Had he become paralysed? Was he hallucinating? Were these the tortures of some hell that he had never believed in? The visions of a dying man.
The room span and twisted again, and the vision changed. A young woman, holding him in her arms, but who was she? It took him a moment, a long moment, racking his memory until he recognised his mother. Not as the old woman, light as a bird in his arms as she gave her final breath, not as the fierce matron who had raised him after his father died, no. This was his mother as he’d never seen her, young, pretty, red-faced and sweaty, eyes out of focus from pain and drugs, cradling his tiny body against her bosom.
He was an infant again.
Or was he?
He couldn’t speak, he couldn’t move. All he could do was watch mutely from behind his own eyes through the cringing embarrassment of sucking his own mother’s teat, of shitting and pissing himself helplessly. He was trapped, imprisoned in his own body, and he went mad.
He screamed against the walls of his consciousness, metaphorically tearing with his nails at the fleshy coffin in which he found himself, looking for a word, a twitch, anything that showed he was having any impact at all upon this body, this new and old life.
When the madness passed, he tried to think. Was this a reincarnation? Then why was he himself again? He’d been an artist, not a scientist, not a priest, not a philosopher. He’d heard people talk about space curving back in upon itself and space and time being one. Was that what had happened? Had time curved back upon itself as well? Was he some ghost of his former life playing back over itself again, an echo? There was nobody he could ask; he couldn’t speak. All he could do was stare out through his own eyes and listen through his own ears when something was seen or said that had some bearing on his situation, though that was still limited to the things known in his lifetime.
There were no answers to be had.
A black depression descended as his life unfolded before him. Every mistake, every glory coming into being with relentless predictability. Every mistake he’d ever regretted, every triumph he’d ever had. The missteps anticipated and dreaded, the wonders dulled by repetition.
He felt the tarmac under his knees as, broken-hearted, he cried in the street.
He cursed himself as a clumsy fool as his fumbling teenage self haltingly tried to make love.
He scowled from behind his own face at the mawkish grins and self-congratulation at the birth of his son, who would later hate him.
He shook his head in resignation as he saw his marriage collapse through his own, ill-considered affairs, dulled by drink and mediocrity as he sought sensation and freedom.
Then the worst came. He felt his body grow feeble, ill, old. He felt the tremors come, the cough and the blood. His eighty years had come and gone for the second time while he watched it fly past, a mute and imprisoned spectator. Now he could barely see, barely hear; his prison was beginning to crumble around him as the sound of the softly beeping machines and the flicker of the fluorescent lights faded out.
Perhaps now, perhaps this time, he’d finally be free.
Intestines steamed like fat sausages on a griddle as the cold rain hit them in big, spattering drops like marbles. The rain diluted the blood, shit and bile into a bilious cocktail. It washed into the gutters, clogging them with severed fingers and offal that floated like macabre little boats of organ meat, bobbing merrily in the sanguine rivulet. A jumble sale of limbs, bone and muscle was tangled in a disorganised heap in the street, stray dogs already fighting over the ‘bargains’ amongst the dross.
“So…” Said Jartan, flicking blood and viscera from his blade. “What the hell kind of sword is that anyway?” He’d never seen its like, half again as long as a power claymore, double-bladed and apparently with no connection between the haft and the blades themselves. It looked… wrong.
T’nk looked down at him disapprovingly, shaking out her fleshy dreadlocks and showing her sharp teeth in a display of dominance. “A trophy, taken from a worthy foe on a faraway world. I call it the M’nth K’Knn, ‘Far Soul’ in Killan.”
Jartan looked down at his own sword, feeling a little inadequate somehow, even though he’d done his own fair share of the killing. “A trophy? So it’s not SLA technology then? I’m surprised they let you keep it.”
T’nk grunted again, nudging half a body into the gutter with the toe of her boot. “The killing is done. Why do you want to talk?”
Jartan tried to look nonchalant as the rain beat a boss-nova rhythm against his helmet. “Just making conversation… new to the team, you know. It’s not every day you get caught in a DarkNight ambush with your squad leader.”
T’nk rolled her eyes. Perhaps if the humans lacked vowels, they wouldn’t be so keen on filling the air with mindless chatter either. “The duel I fought was caught on camera. The blade is associated with my brand and marks a defeated enemy. So… my sponsors insisted, and Head Office acceded. To them, it means money; to me, honour. Since you ask… what of your blade, it looks non-standard to me.”
“This?” Jartan raised his own sword once more and tried to make it sound as good as possible. “This is a custom Dynamic Precision Blades vibrosabre from Mother’s Milk Studio. Offworld ceramic, custom inlay, shock battery, twice the vibe of your standard model with a sword-breaker back edge and a lifetime guarantee on the cutting edge. Cost me a pretty penny and seems to have paid off.” He tried a smile on her and began to pick his way across the strewn body parts, almost slipping on the fleshy slurry that the rain was only beginning to clean away.
“Nice.” T’nk offered, which was as close as she ever seemed to get to a positive word. “Though small.”
They sheathed their blades and stepped out from between the buildings, and the rain came down harder, washing them clean.
“Should we…” Jartan hooked his thumb back towards the alley and the tangle of growling dogs.
“Leave it for the Shivers.” She said and started down the street. “It’s what they’re for.”
Postmortem Studios 
