

### Plasma Frequency Magazine

### Issue 1: August/September 2012

Cover Art by Tais Teng inspired by "Frequencies"

Electronic Edition

Editor-in-Chief, Richard Flores IV

Assistant Editor, Amy Flores

Assistant Editor, Lara G. Carroll

Art Editor, Vacant

Marketing and Advertising, Vacant

Plasma Frequency ISSN 2168-1309 (Print) and ISSN 2168-1317 (Electronic), Issue 1 August/September 2012. Published bimonthly by Plasma Spyglass Press, Vacaville, California

Annual subscription available at www.plasmafrequencymagazine.com. Print edition $56 for US residents for one year. Electronic edition available free.

Published by Plasma Frequency at Smashwords

Copyright © 2012 by Plasma Spyglass Press. All Rights Reserved.

www.plasmafrequencymagazine.com

www.plasmaspyglass.com

In This Issue

Cover Art by Tais Teng

From the Editor

Fallout 1979

Michael Andre-Driussi

My Bonnie Lies Under the Ocean

John H. Dromey

Art by Richard H. Fay

Aslahkar

Nyki Blatchley

An Extreme Quantum Event

Greg Leunig

Book Review

To Die a Stranger

Frequencies

Michael Hodges

Art by Laura Givens

The Demon's Grimoire

Gary Cuba

Cold Powers

Spencer Koelle

The Drone Controller

James Valvis

The Jabbertown Mystery; or,

The Breathtaking Brunette and the Deadly Catch-Claw

O'Neil De Noux

From the Editor

For about a year and half now I've dreamed of publishing my own magazine of science fiction and fantasy. As I submitted my own writings to various publications, I realized there was no shortage of markets out there. I wondered if a magazine, such as the one I thought of, could ever get started with so many others around. Nevertheless, I continued to research this idea. Soon I learned there is also no shortage of talent to fill those markets.

So I started putting together this magazine. I thought about what I enjoy as a reader, and what I wish for as a writer. I built my magazine around those principles.

I wanted to provide the reader with much more than simply words. I wanted to showcase art, stories, humor, and highlight talented authors. I wanted my readers to know of novels that were being published every day by authors whose talent might otherwise slip by the wayside.

The result of my dream lies before you in this first issue of Plasma Frequency. It has been a long road, with a lot of hard work and dedication. It feels good to set in motion something I've dreamt about for so long.

There are many people to thank for this. My family has been very supportive of my many literary aspirations. My wife has accepted the countless hours I have spent putting life into this. And my three boys, who constantly come in to my office to "help" me; without them I might forget the simple things that make life enjoyable.

Of course I have to thank the writers. Without writers, there could be no magazine. I never expected the quantity and quality of submissions we continue to get. They prove there is still so much talent in the world.

Last but not least are all of you, the readers. Your readership is what drives the whole thing. Writers write to be read and artists draw to be seen. I put this magazine together for you more so than myself.

So without further ramblings from me, I will step back and let the true talents showcase themselves. On behalf of all of us at Plasma Frequency, we hope you enjoy our magazine today and for many years to come.

Richard Flores IV

Editor-in-Chief

Fallout 1979

By Michael Andre-Driussi

Nelly stood facing an empty parking lot, a homemade radiation meter in her hand.

"Call it out," said Dick behind her. He sat behind the wheel of the idling station wagon, a '72 Oldsmobile Vista Cruiser.

It was Day 14, two weeks since President Carter told the nation to shelter in place. By the cloudy morning light Nelly read the foil leaves hanging inside the soup can.

"Minus seven and four," she said, her voice muffled by the bandana. She looked up, pushed her glasses into position, and gazed toward the glass and brick front of the Fareway supermarket so many meters away. "We should park closer—like, right at the door."

"Nope," said Dick.

"Why not?" she asked, looking at him. A big reddish-blond jock, he was 29, six years older than Nelly, and married with kids.

"Security reasons," he said, and Wayne beside him nodded. Lorraine in the back seat, the youngest at 21, rolled her eyes.

"So instead we take more radiation, walking across half the parking lot." She stretched her shoulders, constrained by a borrowed trenchcoat that was too small.

"Yep," he said, just like a gym teacher talking to a balky kid.

"That's—"

"Time," said Wayne, as he scratched at his long dark sideburn.

"Minus eight and five," said Nelly.

Wayne looked at the chart and said, "One point six per hour."

"You're kidding," said Dick, as Wayne wrote it down in the notebook beneath the other figures. "Well, damn, we got a local hot spot. We'll give it three more minutes."

Nelly looked around, this being her first visit to Fort Dodge, Iowa. Even though it was now located inside the fallout plume stretching from South Dakota across northern Iowa, the place didn't look all that different from Ogden, a small town 80 kilometers away to the south. In both places the sky was cloudy, and the temperature felt more like fall even though it was summer.

The difference was the total lack of people, the eerie silence of an empty city. On the pavement she saw many little clumps that were dead birds.

"Time."

"Minus eight and six."

"Yeah, not so hot, like point six," said Dick. "So it's probably point six, or average the two readings for one rad."

"Better safe than sorry," said Nelly.

"Okay, so call it 'one.' We're cleared for six hours of work here, minus the driving time, but I doubt we'll be here an hour."

Dick turned off the engine. Nelly put the meter in the back seat as the others got out and stretched.

"That's five times what it was at the spot checks," said Nelly.

"We'll find out later, when more numbers come in," said Wayne.

Dick took up the rifle, put on his John Deere cap, and sat on the hood.

"Hey, bring me some Little Debbies on the first trip out, okay?"

"Sure."

The three scavengers started across the parking lot. Now Nelly saw the dead birds as being subtle signals that this was an area with a lethal cumulative dose in two weeks. Such a dose was more than enough to kill a person, but staying in a house would cut that dose in half. Nelly tried to recall the tables she had studied. Grudgingly she admitted to herself that Dick was right to be security conscious—there could be stranded survivors who would take the car to escape.

"Remember," she said, "powdered milk for the kids. And Tang, we all need the Vitamin C."

"Space Food Sticks," said Lorraine. Her hair was like a shaggy white poodle, a perm growing out. She adjusted her bandana and laughed, saying, "God, we look like bank robbers."

"Get your carts from inside," said Wayne. "They won't be contaminated."

The interior of the supermarket was dark, and Nelly coughed at the heavy odor of rotting fruit and vegetables. They switched on their flashlights.

"First up is a trip to the powder room," said Lorraine.

"Me, too," said Nelly, breathing through her mouth. "For 'security reasons.'"

"Women," muttered Wayne, getting a shopping cart.

"Go ahead and start without us," said Nelly. "Pick up three nine-kilo bags of rice, and some Little Debs."

"Yeah, well, check the phone. It would be good if we could call in from here."

As the women moved toward the back of the store they came across evidence of minor looting.

"Whoever did it must've headed to Wisconsin," said Nelly. Her stomach growled as she caught the smoky scent of fire-roasted meat.

"Yeah," said Lorraine. "I can't imagine stopping at the market, myself, can you? Once I left the house, I'd just drive straight out."

"Hello?" came an old man's voice from the darkness ahead.

The women froze. Nelly found the revolver in her hand but didn't remember drawing it.

"Hello!" she said. "Who's there?"

"It's Howard," said the voice, beyond the open doorway to the backroom. "I'm Howard. Who are you?"

"I'm Nelly, and this is Lorraine, and here comes Wayne. We're from Ogden, down by Boone. Are you alone?"

"Well, just me and Dave, but he's dead. The radiation got him."

"How long you been here, Howard? This is Wayne."

"Pleased to meet you. Uh, what day is it?"

"It's Day Fourteen," said Nelly, "August twenty-fourth."

"Oh, then I've been here close on two weeks. Listen, if I help you load up your car, can you take me with you? I mean, you're here to loot the place, right?"

"We're not looters," said Wayne. "We're from Boone County, and Fareway's headquarters is in Boone."

"Oh, I see, I see. So I've been guarding it for you, even though it looks like I've been squatting. Anyway, if I help, can you give me a lift?"

"Yeah, we can," said Wayne. "But that'll be a hundred kilos of food we can't take 'cause of you."

"I'll make it worth your while."

"Of course we'll take you," said Nelly. "Do you have experience in medicine, or police work?"

"Nope. I'm a retired accountant."

"Were you ever in the military?"

"No, I'm four F with flat feet."

"Do you have any family in Boone?" asked Lorraine.

"Nope."

"Any family at all?"

"Just my wife, but she died some years back."

Wayne shook his head and whispered, "It's coming out of your share."

"It's all right," said Nelly to the hidden Howard, "I'll sponsor you, personally."

~

Nelly pushed her loaded cart out the door and shouted, "Hey, we found a survivor!"

"You're kidding!"

Howard came out, pushing a cart, and said, "Hello, I'm Howard."

"Wow," said Dick. "Wow! How're you doing, Howard?"

"Not too bad. Things are looking up."

"You got any high value skills?"

"No," said Wayne, next in line. "Just another loser like us."

Once they reached the station wagon, Howard said, "As a matter of fact, I've got some information that you might want."

"Yeah?"

"Yes. How much weight can this car carry?"

"With four passengers, around 400 kilos," said Dick. "With five people, I dunno . . . how much do you weigh?"

"So each trip you take around 400 kilos? Which is what, 800 pounds?"

"Almost 900."

"There's a dead truck driver back in there, name of Dave," said Howard. "He was alive when I got here, but he had radiation sickness and died after a week.

"Anyway, he was driving on Interstate 24 when he saw the mushroom cloud at Des Moines. In the confusion he drove his truck into a ditch, where he passed out or something, maybe a concussion. When he woke up, the truck wouldn't start, so he got out and walked to the next stop on his list. He ended up here."

"So what?" said Wayne.

"So there's a truckload of food on Interstate 24, west of here, right?" said Nelly. "Maybe the truck can run, too."

Howard nodded. "Dave kept saying it was the battery. Now, with your car here, we could go get a fresh new truck battery at Montgomery Wards just a couple miles up the street."

"I say we do it," said Nelly.

"Well, who's gonna drive it?" said Dick. "You?"

"Damn straight."

"I don't like it," said Wayne. "We've got a guaranteed thing right here, a whole bunch of car-loads. Once we get back to Ogden, the next team takes the car, and we're done for a couple days. Why should we go off on a wild goose chase?"

"How much do you think a twenty-six foot box truck can haul?" asked Howard.

"You tell me," said Wayne.

"Somewhere around three thousand kilos, I'm guessing. Which means that in one trip today you can deliver many times what you could haul in this one car. But think about it—this truck got its cargo from some sort of food distribution center, right? You find that place later in the week, and then the box truck will really come in handy."

"My God," said Nelly, her mouth watering. "We have to go for it. I say we get the battery and drive along Interstate 24 for an hour or two, using up our exposure time, and if we can't find the truck, we head home with what we got here."

There was a pause.

"Yeah, all right," said Dick. "But we've got mileage limits on one tank of gas, so forty kilometers west, that's it."

"Great," said Nelly, flashing a smile.

~

The trip to Montgomery Wards was quick and easy with Howard giving directions. They picked up two truck batteries of differing sizes, just to make sure.

They found the box truck 32 kilometers away, in a shallow depression between the highway and a cornfield. The bad news was that the area had collected so much rain runoff that the truck sat in the middle of a small pond.

Nelly stood with her borrowed rain boots in the water, stunned at how rapidly the foil leaves flexed inside the can. Her mind racing, she called out numbers that made it clear that the water surrounding the truck was another localized hot spot, much more radioactive than the first one.

"We could draw straws," said Dick.

"Absolutely not," said Nelly. "This is my deal. Pace off five meters from the edge, and stay behind that line. Behind the car. That'll cut your exposure in half."

As they moved to comply, she shoved the soup can into her coat pocket and walked further into the water.

"Whoa, wait a minute!" said Lorraine.

"First thing is to see if there's anything inside!" Nelly called over her shoulder, heading to the back of the truck. When she lifted up the door she gave a whoop of joy that was echoed by the others.

"Now check for the keys!" cried Howard.

Nelly hurried around the corner. She stumbled, making everyone gasp, but she recovered without falling into the radioactive soup.

"That's two minutes," said Dick as she reached the door.

Nelly climbed up and felt a trickle of sweat skate down her side. She cried out in triumph at finding the keys in the ignition. She turned the key, but nothing happened. The knob for the headlights was pulled, so she pushed it in. She turned the radio knob until it clicked off.

She tried to keep calm and focused on each task ahead, but every simple thing became more complicated. In growing irritation she searched for the way to open the hood—having succeeded at that, she was propping it up when Wayne called out "Five minutes."

That was too short for what she had gone through, but it was also distressingly long to be exposed to radiation. Her heart raced and she felt a rush of sweat. She looked over to the team to complain but shouted instead at the sight of smoke rising from a farmhouse off to the northwest.

Nelly ran out of the puddle as Dick climbed onto the roof of the station wagon for a better view. The smoke had already grown to a greasy yellow mass, the sign of a house fire.

"Wish we had some binoculars," he said.

"Shouldn't we go help them?" asked Lorraine.

"Hell no," said Wayne.

"I just hope they don't come this way," said Dick. "We've got to hurry."

"Yeah," said Nelly, "so give me the wrench, or whatever."

All they had was a pair of pliers.

Nelly said, "Dick, you keep a watch on that fire, okay?"

"Yeah."

"And Wayne, keep calling my time."

"Sure."

Nelly went back out to the truck and wrestled with the nuts at the battery's post clamps, then fought against the securing bolts. Once it was free, she eagerly started to lift the battery and was surprised at how heavy it was. As she staggered with it across the puddle, Wayne called out "Ten minutes."

Back at the car, Nelly set the dead battery down and reached for the fresh one, but Howard put his hands on it. "Let me help you. I can carry it over."

"No," she said. "You've had more radiation than any of us. You'll get sick if you get much more."

A number of gunshots rang out from the burning farmhouse. Nelly heaved up the fresh battery and waddled back to the truck. She dropped it into the rack, tightened the tie down finger tight, and started working on attaching the clamps to the posts. Sweat dripped into her eyes, and she couldn't wipe them because her glasses were in the way. The glasses were fogging up and she felt like crying because she was running out of time.

There was a bang and a flash and her arm hurt like hell. She thought she had been shot. The pliers rattled through the engine compartment to splash into the soup.

"You okay?" shouted Lorraine.

"Yeah," said Nelly, figuring it out. "I just touched the pliers to metal and it sparked."

There was no time. She slipped a small plastic bag over her hand and fished the pliers out of the water. Her arm trembled, but she made herself continue the job.

She slammed the hood and climbed into the cab. Wayne called out, "Twenty minutes!"

Nelly flashed them a crossed fingers from the driver's seat.

She turned the key. The engine turned over but it wouldn't start.

"Come on, damn it!" she cried, trying again.

She tried a third time, then pounded on the steering wheel in frustration.

"Hey, can you smell gas?" called Wayne.

Nelly sniffed and, finding the aroma of gasoline, said, "Yeah?"

"Then it's flooded," said Wayne.

"Come on back here," said Howard. "You've got to give it time to dry out."

She went over to the car. Lorraine handed her rags and she wiped off her boots. She sat on the hood, rocking with impatience. They heard motors starting up over at the farm, and to Nelly that sound seemed to mock her efforts.

"How far away is that house?" she asked.

"I don't know," said Dick, "a kilometer?"

Nelly felt sick.

Time dragged on. Finally Dick said, "Okay, Nelly, give it another try."

She walked over, climbed into the cab, and sat there for a moment.

She turned the key. The engine turned over but didn't start.

"Please . . . please," she murmured, her voice cracking.

She tried again. The engine sputtered to life.

Nelly drove the truck out of the puddle, then stopped it and let it idle as she hurried back to the car for decontamination rags.

"All right!" said Dick. "Now let's get the hell out of here!"

"Ten-four good buddy," she said. "Lead the way. Come on, Howard, you're riding with me."

Once they were inside the truck, Nelly said, "Far out! We did it! Now we can talk turkey."

"You don't trust the others?"

"I do," she said, watching the car pull ahead of them, "but I've got to fill you in, and it's easier in private." Nelly had a time grinding the gears, and then they set off with a lurch.

"Sure, I understand that. So are you from Missouri? I noticed the car's license plate."

"That's not my car," she told him. "I'm from Arizona, originally. Went to college in Illinois, wound up in Des Moines. The car belongs to Jane. On Day 4 she piled the kids into the car and took off north, drove out of that plume. Now she's part of our shelter group in Ogden, and she let us use her wagon for the job in exchange for a cut.

"I was delivering legal papers when the missiles came on Day Zero. I had a job with this law firm, and even though delivering papers wasn't in my job description, they said I'd be back in Des Moines in time for lunch.

"And Dick! He was coming back from camping with his little family. Saw the mushroom cloud at Sioux City in his rearview mirror—came that close to being in the middle of it.

"But here I am, running like a motor mouth," said Nelly. "Tell me about yourself. Why'd you go to the market?"

"'Cause I ran out of food."

"Makes sense. Did you ever get sick? You know..."

"Yeah, I know," said Howard. "I saw it all with Dave. Believe me, I know. The answer is no, I didn't get sick."

"Huh. So, like, you decontaminated, and all that?"

"Sure. I wore trash bags over my shoes, and fixed another one like a poncho."

"How did you know to do that?"

"Just civil defense stuff from the '50s."

"Huh," said Nelly.

"But I've never seen anything like your meter. Can I look at it?"

"Yeah, sure. Here."

It was a soup can with a clear plastic cover that had a number line with zero in the center. Inside, two threads in parallel crossed the middle of the can, each supporting a separate leaf of bent foil. After looking it over, he asked, "What's that in the bottom?"

"Bits of drywall."

"How does it work?"

"I don't know, it just does," said Nelly. "After you set it up, you read the leaves. See the foil hanging from the threads? See the number line? That's in millimeters. So you read off the position of the leaves at the start, you know, to the left and the right of the center, and you time it for a while, then you read the positions again. If there's radiation, it will make the foil leaves open up."

"The leaves look all opened up now," said Howard. "Bigger than the number line."

"Well sure," said Nelly. "It keeps reading the whole time. The point is what the reading was during the measuring time. We'll have to reset that one."

Howard studied it another moment, then set it down between them.

Trying to sound nonchalant, Nelly said, "So, what was it like with Dave?"

"Well, he had been sick before I got there, but he thought he was better. You know, weak, but better. Then, it must've been a week later, he got it again. Puking, the runs, and the rest."

"Must've been scary."

"I gotta admit, I thought it meant that the store was radioactive." He looked out the window at the poisoned cornfields rolling by. "That I would be next."

"And now we know—he walked all those kilometers, and the first fallout landed straight on him. Poor guy."

"His wife and kids were at Des Moines."

"Ugh," said Nelly. "He'd seen the worst. But with his help, we're still alive."

"We should give him a proper burial."

"You're right, a hero's burial in Ogden. And you, another hero, you're in our shelter group now."

"I'm glad to be there. Or 'here.'"

"It's called 'Griswold's hundred,' because everyone's been put into groups of a hundred, with forty locals and sixty 'visitors.' Our group's in twelve houses at the 700 block of West Cherry. Mr. Griswold's our boss, and Boone is our county seat, thirteen kilometers away."

"Wow, sounds very organized," said Howard.

"Yeah, it's been a rough couple of weeks. The town's population doubled with all the refugees, and then we had to turn the new ones away. That's why Wayne was being that way about taking you in."

"Huh. Okay." Howard absently picked up a small book from the dashboard.

"So you've got to make yourself useful, all right? This truckload and the food distribution place is a great start, but you can't just rest on that."

"Hey," said Howard. "This is his log book—here are the addresses!"

"You keep it. That's all you've got to bargain with."

"Thanks, Nelly."

"I want to get that food, too. I mean, here we are, 'visitors,' busting our butts out in the plume to prove ourselves, our worth, I guess. Well, that's one reason—Lorraine's with us because she likes Wayne. We're getting hazard pay, but money's kind of abstract these days, and we all know that food is worth more than gold right now."

"So what's your reason?"

"Okay—well . . . look," said Nelly. "Each shelter group has a mix of dependents and providers. So, like, we've got Jane and other mothers, and their kids—they're dependents. Plenty of locals are dependents. So there's that fact.

"Now, Lorraine wouldn't mind being a dependent, but I couldn't stand it. I don't want to help out with the kids while 'the men' go out and bring home the bacon. I don't like kids and I certainly don't want to have any—I'm a firm believer in the E.R.A., and I don't like the sort of 'caveman' mentality that's been growing stronger since the nukes."

"And now you're bringing home the big bacon," he said.

"Got that right! 'We got a great big convoy, ain't she a beautiful sight.'"

The irradiated landscape looked brighter to her then, lit by rays of optimism. She had ventured into the dead wasteland and won a treasure.

She turned to him and said, "When we get to Pilot Mound we'll be out of the plume."

Some time later they heard Wayne on the CB radio calling the Pilot Mound check point. After a few calls, the checkpoint responded, and then Wayne explained they were bringing in a new truck and a survivor.

It was around eleven o'clock when they arrived at their shelter group. They went through decontamination by showering and putting on fresh clothing, then they drove their cargo downtown to Clark's Food Mart on West Walnut. It was during the unloading that Nelly vomited.

Dick hurried her over to the fire department, two blocks away. Once a paramedic was assigned to her, Nelly told Dick to go back and make sure they were not being cheated at Clark's.

"It's probably just the flu," said Nelly to the paramedic. "Or maybe nerves."

"Maybe," he said, readying a pen and clipboard.

He asked her questions about her trip. It was all routine until he asked her for the reading on the puddle and she said, "Six."

He raised his eyebrows. "Did you drive into South Dakota?"

"No, of course not."

"Because that's what they say is the average around the craters."

"I know."

He looked back to his clipboard and asked, "How long did you stay?"

"Half hour."

"Then you drove back?"

"Yes."

"Another hour."

"No, more like two."

"Okay," he said, writing a bit. "Well, it looks like you had about four rads. Shouldn't be a problem—"

"Like I said."

"Maybe it is just a bug or nerves. But it is suspicious that you threw up three hours after that last hot spot. That sounds like radiation sickness."

"How hard is that 'six rads per day' rule, anyway?"

"I don't really know," he said. "But if you were a refugee from Missouri, based on your symptoms I'd guess you had absorbed one hundred or two hundred rads during your drive over. But that's not possible, right?"

"Right," said Nelly, licking her dry lips. "Listen, there was another guy at the store. Howard was with him when he got the second part of radiation sickness, about a week ago. Anyway, my question is, how many rads did he have?"

"Hard to say. He was sick, then better, then sick again, and he died?"

"Yeah, like that."

"Sounds like it was probably more than a thousand," said the paramedic. "But it might have been as low as two-fifty."

Nelly went back to Clark's Food Mart. Since the station wagon had been unloaded, Dick offered her a ride to the shelter group.

"You okay?" he asked, as they started out.

"The medic agrees it's probably just nerves," she said, rolling down the window. "It's been a big day."

"Sure has, but now the team's spooked."

"Don't worry. Send the car out with the next team."

"I think we should wait until the truck is empty, then send it back with a full team in a small car. Or maybe two—"

Suddenly Nelly leaned over and vomited out the window.

"Sorry about that," she said, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand.

"It must've been the puddle," he said, pounding the rim of the steering wheel.

"Maybe. Listen, I don't want to go to the fallout ward, all right? I want to heal up at the shelter group. I can have a little quarantine room, or something, okay?"

"Well, I don't know..."

"Promise me."

"All right."

~

The moment Dick left her in her new sickroom, Nelly's arm began to tremble and her stomach knotted up. Fearing another episode, she opened one of the covered buckets and knelt over it, panting and sweating. Nothing came up. She groaned, thinking of the choice she had made which could not be changed, but then she broke into a cold sweat at the new choice before her.

On shaky legs she stood and began pacing. She lost all track of time, so when a gentle knock came at the door she stopped as though she had walked into a wall.

"Nelly?" asked Dick through the door. "Can you handle visitors now?"

"Yes," she said. "Yes, please come in." The door opened and she saw the other three behind Dick. "All of you. Has the second team come back yet?"

"They just left."

"Like we said, the truck and a worker car?"

"Yeah, like that."

"Great." She moved around them and closed the door. "I—Howard, you gotta help me out here. You've got experience, and I—I've got radiation sickness."

"It could be the flu—"

"No," she said. "It's radiation. I just don't understand how I can be sick."

"It was that puddle, wasn't it. I should've gone in there—I'm older, it doesn't matter for me."

"No, it was my deal. I made the choice, but I can't figure out how this happened." She caught herself wringing her hands and stopped. "I mean, well, I got something like two hundred rads today."

"Two _hundred_?" said Howard. "How's that possible, when you were talking about ones and sixes? You said the puddle was a twelve."

"I lied."

"God damn it!" said Wayne.

"What?" said Howard. "Then what was it, really?"

"It must've been four hundred. I just can't figure how."

"But what did the meter say?" asked Howard.

Dick said, "It only goes up to forty, anyway."

"Oh God."

"I figured if it was fifty or eighty," said Nelly, "I'd limit myself to a half hour and get only half as much. More than six, but less than a hundred."

"And we were standing next to that," said Wayne, "so we took a lot, too."

"Yes," said Nelly. She took a shuddering breath. "I had you pace it off, remember? And I told you to keep on the other side of the car. That was about five meters, far enough that you got only half of what I got."

"So wait, I got a hundred?" cried Lorraine.

"Maybe," said Nelly, nodding with sadness.

"This is bullshit," said Wayne. "We need to know the real number."

"Yeah, that's right," said Dick. "We've got to borrow a Geiger counter from Boone, go back and check it out. Then we'll know for ourselves, and for Nelly, too."

"Let's go," said Wayne, and they left.

"I can't believe this," said Lorraine. "I know _you_ don't want to have kids, but I'd like to keep my options open."

"I'm sorry," said Nelly. "I'm really, really sorry. I wasn't thinking right. I was only thinking about the risk to me. We said before—when we saw Carter on TV, and we knew we were on our own, we all said that it was death by starvation in weeks or death by cancer in years."

"Yeah, well, there's another one in-between, which is called 'genetic damage.' So you can fry your eggs all you want, but when you fry _my_ eggs, without even asking me, that makes me mad!"

Lorraine stormed out, leaving only Howard and Nelly.

"How could a puddle be four hundred _per hour_?" she asked.

"It's just like the parking lot," he said. "In the car the guys were saying how the rain probably washed the fallout off the roof and dumped it all onto the lot. It became concentrated. Except instead of being one supermarket roof, it's that whole cornfield, or many fields, feeding into that one puddle."

"But it's more than fifty times the average at Ground Zero, and I don't think we were standing in a crater!" She shook her head suddenly as a new thought occurred, then, looking at Howard with deep concern, she said, "You took one hundred today, too—how do you feel?"

"I'm okay."

"Oh God, Howard, I'm so sorry."

Howard sighed. "Maybe it is just the flu."

After Howard left, Nelly threw herself down onto the cot and cried herself to sleep like a little girl.

~

As Nelly suffered through her illness the next day, Dick and Wayne took a technician to the puddle and returned with a solid number—the spot emitted two hundred and twelve rads per hour, meaning Nelly had received around one hundred and the rest of the team had gotten about fifty. Nelly was not in danger of the more advanced sickness that had killed the trucker Dave, but her convalescent period was still set for two weeks.

Nelly kept up on the salvage operations and sent out a pair of motorcycle scouts to investigate the food distribution center that trucker Dave had come from. They returned with news that the place had burned down to the ground, a big disappointment to Nelly.

On the fourth day she felt recovered from her sickness, and the town gave her a victory parade. Mr. Griswold drove the truck and Nelly sat beside him, waving to the thousands of people who lined the streets. Leading the way was Jane's station wagon with the rest of the team, Lorraine and Howard throwing candy to the children.

"Isn't this a bit much?" Nelly asked Mr. Griswold.

"Nonsense," he said. "You're a hero, their first hero. They're afraid you might die, their first martyr. You aren't going to do that, are you?"

"I—I hope not."

"Then we should celebrate! We all need something to celebrate."

Nelly felt uneasy at the accolades that seemed to whitewash the terrible mistakes she had made, but after a few more blocks she realized that she was a symbol to them, a symbol of courage and hope. It wasn't _her_ , it was what she represented. This made her feel a little better, but it was seeing Lorraine laugh as she leaned out the window that really gave her relief, and the parade became a wonderful thing.

Then it was back to work.

As the days rolled by, she sent teams to Fareway supermarkets in the plume, first to Webster City, near Fort Dodge, and then further afield. The Fareways at Forest City and Clear Lake, at the northern edge of the plume, were already nearly emptied by scavengers from Worth/Mitchell and Floyd. On the other hand, Algona's Fareway in the center of the plume was a rich haul, so big that Nelly invited another shelter group in on it.

On the morning of Day 28 she approached Dick and said, "My recovery time is over—I want to get back out there."

"No," said Dick. "You're not going into the plume."

"What do you mean?" she asked, bewildered.

"You've been sidelined by injury. You've hit your limit."

She looked into his face, hoping he was joking, and said, "But—"

"You see that, right?" asked Dick. "You can't get sick like that again."

"But—but what will I do?"

"What you're doing now."

"This is it?"

"Yeah," he said with a chuckle. "But it seems to get bigger every day. Like this job today you're so eager to ride with."

"I worked hard to set it up, and I don't want any screw-ups at Emmetsburg."

"You're going to have to trust us, and the teams from the other shelter groups."

She felt her face get hot with anger. It was all slipping away from her—despite her dedicated efforts, even despite how she had risked her life at the puddle. She said, "I didn't picture myself like this. It feels like a prison."

"We've all had to make adjustments since Day Zero."

Somewhat chastened, she said, "Sure, but this is like being a..." She thought 'housewife,' but instead she said, "An office worker, and I wanted to be out there, doing."

Suddenly it hit her—the office workers she had left behind, the ones she was going to have lunch with later that day, until the mushroom cloud came. She felt guilty and sick, that she had grudgingly taken a chore to deliver papers but had survived when she should have died at the office with the rest.

And now she kept trying to run from her new home, as if they might nuke Ogden at any minute.

"Hey, you okay?" asked Dick.

"Yeah," she said weakly. "Just...Day Zero."

"I don't know," said Dick, changing the subject. "It seems to me like you've been promoted. I mean, you've taken over our salvage operations, and now you're even controlling the operations with other groups as well."

"I guess you're right," admitted Nelly. "I hadn't thought of it like that, I just wanted to go out again." She thought of the parade, and how the people thought she had taken those risks for them, not for her own ego. She sighed and said, "Yeah, all right."

"Take it like a man, Nelly. Take it like a man."

She punched him in the arm, which made her feel better.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Michael Andre-Driussi has had stories published in such places as _Interzone_ , _ParaSpheres_ , and _M-Brane SF_ , but he is best known for his Gene Wolfe reference book Lexicon Urthus, for which he was a World Fantasy Award finalist. His latest Wolfe reference book, _Gate of Horn, Book of Silk,_ will be published in 2012.

My Bonnie Lies Under the Ocean

By John H. Dromey

"Thanks for meeting me at my home," the man said. "Discretion is important to me."

He was obviously nervous.

His visitor was calm.

"No problem," she said. "How did you learn about my services?"

"I found your business card in my... in a female acquaintance's effects and I was curious about your relationship. What exactly does a _necromancer_ do?"

"I'm sometimes able to reanimate the recently departed. What happened to your lady friend?"

"She took a midnight plunge from the top deck of a cruise ship. Her death was ruled an accidental drowning. The case is closed."

"I may have read something about her untimely passing in the newspaper. I tend to take a professional interest in that sort of thing. Was her name Bonnie?"

"Yes."

"And you'd like for me to revive her?"

"No! _Don't_ bring her back! I'll pay you. Just take the money and forget you ever met her."

The man held out a bulging manila envelope.

The woman declined to accept it.

"Sorry to disappoint you, sir, but you're a tad late in making that request. I've already been well-compensated in this case. Bonnie paid me in advance. Apparently, her suspicions about your murderous intentions were well-founded. I really should be on my way now. My work is done. Successfully, I might add, because—unless I'm badly mistaken—I can hear soggy footsteps approaching. You probably have a lot of unresolved issues to deal with, so I'll leave you two alone."

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

John H. Dromey was born in northeast Missouri. He's had a byline (for brief, humorous items) in over one-hundred different newspapers and magazines. In addition to a mini-mystery published in _Woman's World_ , his fiction has appeared online at _Liquid Imagination_ , _The Fast-Forward Festival_ , _Sorcerous Signals_ , and elsewhere, as well as in a number of print anthologies.

Aslahkar

By Nyki Blatchley

Art By: Richard H. Fay

The howl of hunting wolves sent Keiruh scurrying for cover among the ruins. He'd barely escaped them in the hills, and he prayed to the goddess that they wouldn't follow him into the city.

The city. These ruins weren't what he'd expected from the legendary city of Aslahkar, and he wouldn't have made the long journey if he'd known how it would end. The tales spoke with wonder of the great city in the far north, and he could see why, even in its death. The biggest city in his homeland, huddled around the king's castle, took a full twenty minutes to walk across side to side. Keiruh visited often with his father on business, and the first time had got lost in its twisting streets and alleys; but he'd been crossing the ruins of Aslahkar for hours, and there was no end in sight.

What could have happened? He'd soaked in the legends of Aslahkar since childhood, until he couldn't endure not seeing it with his own eyes. Where was the thriving, bustling city, bursting with life and colour and wonderful scents? Where were the people who came here from all over the world to trade in the city's hundred and one markets? Where were the beautiful city-folk, and the music and poetry that floated through garlanded streets all day and night?

Keiruh's doubts had grown as he went further on his journey. He met no-one – indeed, there wasn't even a paved road, and his passage through the snow-treacherous mountains had been difficult and hazardous.

The baying of the wolves sounded again from further away, and Keiruh resumed his trek along a broad street, its paving choked with grass and weeds, flanked by high walls that broke off two or three storeys above his head. They were built with blocks of dressed stone taller than he was, and he couldn't imagine how it had been possible to lift them into place.

Elsewhere, he'd crossed wide plazas and explored interiors that were surely palaces or temples, one or two themselves the size of a great city. Some fragments of upper floors survived, but Keiruh didn't trust his weight on them. He found nothing inside: neither human remains nor relics of occupation. For all he could see, Aslahkar might never have been populated at all.

A slight sound behind him brought Keiruh around, hand grasping for his sword. A fox had stopped in mid-stride as it crossed the road. It examined him for a while, wary and curious. Keiruh made no move against it, and the fox licked its lips, a shadow of amusement flickering on its face, before it resumed its journey, vanishing into a gap between two buildings.

Keiruh sat on a rough stone that protruded from one of the walls and wondered what in the goddess's name he was going to do. His pack was depressingly light, since he'd expected to buy food in the city. He had a good supply of gold and silver, but that was of less use than the stone he sat on.

The wind cut him with its cold edge and wailed among the ruined buildings. Keiruh drew his fur-lined cloak more tightly around him, wondering where he could find shelter. The pale, shrouded sun hung low in the sky, but it would sink no further – for many days now, as he'd travelled northward, the sun hadn't set. He guessed that, in any other land, this would be near midnight, and he was weary to the bone, both in body and in spirit, but another howl from the wolf-pack reminded him that he dared not sleep in such an exposed place.

Nevertheless, cold and exhaustion overcame him. A gulf of sleep claimed him for a time that was both infinite and infinitesimal.

~

A shout woke him to blazing light amid darkness. Rows of lamps illuminated the elegant, dressed stone of buildings that soared far above him, and revellers thronged the well-paved streets. As far as Keiruh could see in the lamplit night, they wore bright clothes and elaborate masks, and most were drinking from large jugs.

"Are you all right?" asked a clear female voice.

He looked round. A girl stood over him, young and svelte, draped in a red dress that covered little and long, tawny hair that covered more. The mask covering most of her face gave her the aspect of a fox, and amused green eyes gleamed in the lamplight.

"Are you ill?" she asked, crouching beside him.

"Where am I?" he asked. "I was in the ruins of Aslahkar. It was endless day there."

The polished mask didn't change, but the girl's eyes seemed puzzled. "This is Aslahkar," she said, "but there are no ruins here. And what's day?"

Keiruh tried to explain, but she interrupted with a high laugh like the playing of fountains. "That's silly. Light comes from lanterns, not from the sky. I'm Olash. Who are you?"

He told her his name and country, and she nodded, though he felt she was humouring him. He didn't mind, especially when she stroked his face with a small, delicate hand.

"Why are you dressed like that?" she asked, letting her hand trail down the fur lining of his cloak.

"Against the cold," he explained, but didn't need her evident surprise to see the absurdity of the statement. A balmy breeze played on his face, more in keeping with Olash's clothes than his.

"Come and join the party," she suggested, leaning to give Keiruh a light kiss on the lips. The mouth that escaped through the hole in her mask was red and soft.

"What's it for?" he asked. He didn't greatly care, if it was a party he could share with Olash – now he was no longer cold, he could appreciate the pointed breasts and rounded buttocks that half showed through the thin fabric of her dress – but hoped he wouldn't be unwelcome.

She gave her exquisite laugh again. "It isn't for anything. It's a party. Isn't that enough?"

That seemed fair enough to Keiruh, especially when Olash drew him up and wrapped him in an embrace that pressed her enticing body against his. He shrugged the cloak off, but still wished he wore fewer clothes, the better to feel her.

Olash led him to a group of revellers who welcomed them both gladly, sharing their drinks with Keiruh. The wine was unlike any he'd ever tasted: light and sweet, with nothing cloying about it, it propelled him to excitement and joy without dulling his wits. He drank freely and ate the sweetmeats he was offered from time to time, though he was never sure who offered them.

The party extended throughout the streets of this whole living Aslahkar, with no centre and no rules. Olash stayed beside him, but they moved from group to group, and no-one questioned his presence.

At some point – it was even harder to keep track of time in this starless, moonless night than it had in the endless day of the ruins – Olash drew him away and into an unlit building. Inside, she pulled his clothes off, tossing them into darkness, before shedding everything but the fox-mask and leading him to a soft, broad bed. She gave herself to him fiercely, snarling and clawing at his flesh, but Keiruh didn't care about scratches or bites in his ecstasy.

~

Nothing happened in the dark city except the party; at least, Keiruh never encountered anything else. Not that he cared, as long as Olash was with him to enjoy the endless night's celebrations.

When he woke that first time in her arms, she gave him clothes like those the revellers wore. There was a mask, too, which she said suited him, although he forgot to ask what it showed. From time to time, it occurred to him that he could take it off and look, but something always distracted him. After a while, he forgot about wondering.

The city was elegant in the lamplight, the flames lending a red-gold glow to the stone and setting shadows of buttresses and seductive statues to playful flickering. His favourite statue – unless there were several of the same kind – showed a naked youth and girl wrapped exuberantly around each other, the ecstasy of love animating their beautiful faces. On one occasion when they drank and sang beneath it, one of their companions – a petite, blonde girl with a pretty cat mask – told him, "They're like you."

"What do you mean?" he asked, pleasantly confused.

"The statues," said the girl. "They're like you and Olash."

Keiruh examined them. What was she talking about? It was difficult to remember what he looked like, though it was certainly flattering to be likened to the gorgeous young man, but he could see little of Olash in the stone girl.

"But..." he protested.

"Don't worry about it." The girl giggled and planted a light, sweet kiss on his lips. Keiruh glanced to see whether Olash was annoyed, but her eyes were amused. For a while, the three of them cuddled and kissed together, but the blonde girl wandered off after a while with another group of revellers that came past. Keiruh didn't mind – he had Olash.

There was an endless supply of food and wine for them to enjoy. Keiruh asked Olash once where it came from, and she just stared at him. "It doesn't come from anywhere," she said. "It's just there."

"But someone must produce it." His merchant background protested at the incongruity. "Are there slaves, or something?"

Was that it? Was there a horde of slaves working to service a privileged group who did nothing? For an instant, the revels lost their lustre.

Olash laughed loudly and long. "You do say the most ridiculous things, Keiruh. You must come from a very strange country, if that's what you think."

Questions lost themselves at last in Olash's wild lovemaking. From time to time, she'd take him into a house, and they'd tussle and roll and scratch together in the darkness, before collapsing into peace and oblivion.

Keiruh was never sure whether it was always the same house. Each time it was entirely unlit, and he never entirely remembered the streets they danced and sang through, with whichever group they were with, when they weren't making love. The door was always close by whenever their kissing and caressing fired the urgent need, so maybe Olash used any house she chose.

There came a time at last when Keiruh and Olash were among a group of half a dozen, sitting against a wall and singing the most beautiful song he'd ever known. A couple of wine-jugs passed among them, and Olash kissed him between drinks and verses. Her glittering eyes were vivid green in the lamplight, and her lips glistened with desire.

"You look so beautiful," she murmured.

"What do I look like?" Keiruh asked, without much thought. "I've never seen my mask."

"You don't need to," Olash told him, and they kissed again, long and sweet-tasting, before joining in the next verse of the song.

Halfway through, Keiruh recalled the thoughts he'd had early in his stay, that there was a very easy way to see his face. Slipping his mask off, he held it up before him. It was polished and left holes for eyes and mouth, but otherwise the mask showed his own face.

Olash screamed. Keiruh turned to see her on her feet, staring at his face with horror in her eyes. The song had stopped, and their companions' expressions mirrored hers.

"He's got no face," someone said.

"What... what do you mean?" he demanded, though his head spun.

"There was nothing under your mask." Olash's voice was barely more than a whisper. "I thought..."

Turning, she fled into the darkness, and the other revellers stampeded after her.

Keiruh was slower to rise, and his legs wobbled, unsteady and collapsing. He fell a long distance into dark that was nothing like night-time.

~

The cold woke Keiruh, piercing through the layers of clothes and the fur-lined cloak wrapped around him. He lay on frozen ground next to the stone block he'd fallen off, beneath a pale, freezing sky in which the low sun shone a dim yellow.

Hauling himself painfully back to sit on the stone, against the demands of his stiff limbs, Keiruh gazed around endless, weed-grown ruins. A fox stopped its saunter down the road to look back at him, before scuttling off into the cover of buildings.

Keiruh began to cry.

At last, his belly told him to stop feeling sorry for himself, and he investigated the pack that still lay beside him. It bulged, where he was sure its canvas had hung slack before. Sure enough, it was stuffed full of food, along with a couple of sealed wine-jugs.

Keiruh tried to make sense of what had happened as he absently ate a little. The food was light and sweet as any he'd eaten during the night revels and, as he examined the ruins of Aslahkar, he recognised the layout of streets he'd walked and danced through with companions whose names he'd never known. Except for one.

He examined the pack thoughtfully. It was difficult to judge, but he suspected there was enough food to see him home safely, or at least to lands where his gold and silver were worth something.

But did he want to go? If he fell asleep under this endless, frozen day, would he find the night-city of Aslahkar again? Would he find Olash, and be able to put the mask back on?

The whisk of a red tail showed between buildings. Shouldering the pack, Keiruh decided to follow the fox for a while through the streets of Aslahkar and see where it led him.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Nyki Blatchley is a British author and poet who graduated from Keele University in English and Greek and now lives just outside London. He has published about three dozen stories, mostly fantasy or horror, in publications such as Penumbra, Aoife's Kiss and Icarus. His novel At An Uncertain Hour was published by StoneGarden.net in April 2009, and he's had several novellas published. He's currently working on a fantasy trilogy called The Winter Legend.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Richard H. Fay currently resides in upstate New York with his wife, daughter, and two cats. Formerly a laboratory technician-turned-home educator, Richard now spends his days juggling various art and writing projects. History, myth, legend, folklore, all serve as inspiration for his creative endeavors. Many of the fruits of his labour have appeared in a number of e-zines, print magazines, and anthologies.

An Extreme Quantum Event

By Greg Leunig

When Jeremy eats the second to last cookie, it is as though Susan is sitting beside him in the low gravity hab module. As though she is next to him on the compressed foam of his bed, in the eight foot by eight foot living space, within the gently rotating living section of the Mars Space Station. He pretends she's there as the semi-sweet chocolate chips slowly liquefy between his tongue and the roof of his mouth, and whispers to her how there are four other hab modules rotating like wheel spokes around the living section, and how only two of them are occupied right now. One by an asshole physicist named Benjamin, and one by a geologist named Lena, who he imaginarily tells Susan that she would like. Because she's very nice. When he tells Susan how nice Lena is, he thinks involuntarily of Lena's thin waist, the curves of her hips, her Greek skin naked as she floats in zero-gravity.

He does not tell even imaginary Susan about this mental betrayal, making a point to visualize imaginary Susan's ring finger, the ring he placed there three years ago. He holds the last bite of cookie between his thumb and index finger, waiting for a moment. When the real Lena pokes her head into his room, the first thing she does is look at the cookie, and roll her eyes. He pops the last bite into his mouth and smiles at Lena.

"You know," Lena says. "Two years with no sex is a long time."

"Lena," Jeremy starts, but she cuts him off.

"Maybe you can do it. And maybe you can force me to do it. But down on Earth, with four billion other men, you really think your wife can do it?"

She waits just long enough for him to think about this, to fume, to start to formulate an answer.

"She's fucking the pool boy right now, Jeremy."

His mouth, which had been open, snaps shut and he looks at her, letting his fears sink beneath his exasperation. Lena has been walking around in her underwear while off duty for the last two months. To remind him, she says, of the fact that they are alone up there, orbiting another world. Just the two of them, existing alone. When he reminds her that Benjamin makes three, she usually rolls her eyes and walks off. She seems to be rolling her eyes a lot lately.

"Did you want something?" he asks, resisting the impulse to rise to her bait. To point out that Susan and he do not even have a pool, much less a pool boy. "Or are you just here to make me forget this." He points at his wedding ring on "this," as much to remind himself as her.

"Yes. The computer network is glitched. I need you to fix it."

"I'm a mechanical engineer, not a computer engineer."

"Well," she says. "You're an engineer at least. And it's your job to make sure the Mars Station stays functional. So do your job, and fix it."

Before he can reply she turns and leaves. He tries to resist watching her turn. He tries to call to mind Susan in her underwear, smiling up at him from their bed in their home in Baltimore, but it has been so long, and all he has is the picture in his locker, a portrait of her smiling. He feels guilt, but still he gives up on visualizing Susan, and simply watches Lena, almost naked, vanish from his doorway. If she wants him to look, he reasons, there's nothing innately wrong with doing so.

When she is gone, he rises and heads for the computer room. Outside of the slowly rotating residential section, he floats in zero gravity, a feeling that he still relishes after a year and seven months on the station. It may be the enemy of his skeletal structure and he may need months of therapy upon returning to Earth, but knowing this does nothing to diminish the sheer joy of weightlessness.

In the computer room he spends twenty minutes figuring out that "glitched" means the computer isn't loading the software meant for sending and receiving personal messages. Then, he spends two hours reading the manual, and another two hours discovering that the software is infected by a computer virus. He corresponds with Houston, a frustrating process, as every tight-beam electron broadcast takes five minutes to reach the Earth, and each response takes five minutes more to return to the station. He spends a good portion of this time assuring freaked out analysts that the personal message software is the only one corrupted by this particular virus. All essential functions are intact. Everyone wonders how it could possibly have reached the Mars Station computer system, and the tech experts at home promise to get back to him when they figure it out. Until then, no personal messages for any of them.

It is not until he puts the computer manual away that Jeremy thinks about the repercussions to him. He will not be able to complete the monthly ritual, to compose his post-cookie-eating message to Susan. Nor can he check to see if he's received his monthly message from Susan. Perhaps she was so busy with the pool boy that she forgot to send it, he thinks, and even as he thinks it, he knows that this is exactly what Lena wants, to get in his head.

Just thinking of Lena again, spurs a little pang of lust, and he shoves it roughly into a hidden corner of his mind. Two years is a long time to go without sex. Jeremy has never gone that long since the first time he had sex, her a high school sophomore when he was a freshman. He forgets her name, but still remembers the feel of her skin. He tries to remember Susan's skin, but all he can remember is the texture of the photograph in his locker. Now, suddenly, he is compelled to hold that photograph.

He returns to his room via the kitchen, another eight by eight room that, perhaps because of a social quality of eating food, or maybe simply by coincidence, is also the gathering place for the three residents of the Mars Station, even when they are not eating. Now, Lena and Benjamin are both sitting at the small table in the center of the room talking in low voices. They stop when he enters, and he ignores them to pass through and continue toward his room, toward his locker.

Just outside of his room, he makes the transition from zero to low gravity, sliding into the rotating "hallway" to which each of their rooms is connected. He is sick of this hallway. They are required to log an hour of walking or jogging every day, to stave off muscle degeneration. Lena says it's like having their own personal track. He thinks it feels more like a big hamster wheel.

When he gets to his room, he taps his password into the electronic display on his locker – S-U-S-A-N – and when the latch releases, opens it. His eyes are immediately drawn to Susan. She is fair skinned, brunette in a way that is almost blonde. That smile is the thing he misses more than he could possibly miss sex. He touches the photograph, which gives him a little charge, and as he does, notices that the cookie Tupperware that was once filled with Susan's cookies is now empty. His first thought is that he miscalculated, accidentally ate the last cookie a month early. The plan was to be eating the last cookie next month, and looking at Earth while she looked at Mars, which would be the closest the two planets had been to each other since he left two years before. The closest he would be to Susan since leaving her. Now he would be scraping crumbs and apologizing to Susan – that is, if the personal communications software were up and running by then, if Susan hadn't found someone else, hadn't moved on to –

This feeling, that he has somehow ruined his marriage to Susan simply by improperly rationing his cookies, is quite suddenly replaced by a very specific memory of running his finger along the ridges of the last cookie earlier today, as he closed the top on the Tupperware and put it back in his locker.

So.

A minute later he is shouting at Benjamin and Lena in the kitchen. How that cookie had extremely intimate meaning for him and his wife. How he's appalled that one of them would break into his room while he was fixing their computers, and steal from him. He goes on and on, losing himself in the tirade, until the momentum of his anger fades, and he finds himself simply standing there. Lena looks genuinely hurt, and Benjamin bored.

Benjamin speaks first. "So your thinking is that a physicist or a geologist snuck into your room and somehow cracked the code to your locker, risking a felony arrest upon returning to Earth for tampering with federal equipment in a non-Earth planetary orbit, because we were hungry for chocolate chips?"

Jeremy is quiet. Thinks again about the possibility that he simply miscalculated, ate the last cookie by mistake. But his memory is very clear on leaving it intact.

"What's your alternate theory of how a cookie would vanish from a locker?" Jeremy asks.

"Extreme quantum event," he says without pause. Jeremy almost laughs out loud, but Benjamin's face is very serious. He is in lecture mode, something Jeremy has seen before, many times.

"As you no doubt realize, matter is composed of atoms. Which are composed of electrons and protons and neutrons. What you may not realize, depending on your background in quantum mechanics, is that these atoms are held in place at the nano level by nothing more than sheer probability. Electrons disappear and reappear in orbit around their nuclei in a pattern that is governed only by the fact that it is the most probable place for them to reappear. It's technically possible, though highly improbable, for an individual atom to disappear and reappear somewhere else entirely. It's theoretically possible for an entire small object to disappear and reappear somewhere else. In this case, a cookie disappears and reappears in space outside the station. Or maybe within the metallic fabric of the outer walls themselves."

"Wait," Jeremy says. "Are you implying that my cookie simply disappeared into space on account of some wildly improbable, theoretic quantum event?"

Benjamin nods.

"And that this is more likely than the fact that one of you would risk a felony conviction for a cookie after two years of shitty synthetic protein meals?"

"Well," Benjamin says, "normally I wouldn't say yes, but yes. And here's why. We've been, these last couple years, anywhere from 80 to 300 million kilometers from Earth. And space isn't uniform. There are theories floating around that try to explain this, but I'm starting to think that this might be because the laws of quantum mechanics vary in different parts of space. Probabilities change, the further out you get. This far out, the probability of such an extreme quantum event might be higher."

"How high?" Jeremy says, with a sigh.

Benjamin grins, and shrugs. "No point in having this conversation if you think I'm lying to cover up a cookie theft." Yet Benjamin can't resist answering a question, Jeremy can see it on his face.

"But, to answer your question anyway, high enough for a small object to vanish maybe once in two years. I don't really know. Can't really know for sure."

"Jeremy," Lena says. "This sounds crazy to me, too. But we both knew how much that cookie meant to you. Do you really think we'd take it just because we had a sugar craving?"

Jeremy doesn't believe her, not exactly, not entirely, but her expression seems genuine and it is hard to believe she is lying, as hurt as she looks. Defeated, he accuses them both of being full of shit and turns to go back to his room, to rehearse what he will say to Susan to explain why he did not send his monthly response, and why their last-month-on-the-station ritual will no longer be happening.

"Jeremy," Benjamin says before he can leave.

"Yeah?"

"Think for a second. You've been feeling strange lately. It's been building slowly the whole time we've been out here. Like something isn't right in your stomach. The psychologists will tell you it's because of the gravity, or from being far away from Earth, but you know they're full of shit. You know it has to be something else."

Jeremy shakes his head, leaves for his quarters.

~

Every twelve hours it is Jeremy's job to run a systems check from the operations room of the Mars Space Station. It is a task that takes about an hour, and requires roughly zero percent of his attention. He flips switches, and looks at green lights. Theoretically, there could be a red light, in which case he would have to fix something. So far, there have been no red lights. This is a very well put together station, not to mention brand new. In five years, perhaps, a different engineer will have red lights to deal with. But for Jeremy, the job involves looking at green lights and being bored.

Oxygen re-circulators, he thinks to himself. He imagines it in his best professional astronaut voice, and imagines other astronauts confirming. He thinks about how this is nothing like a movie, how it is just him quietly flipping switches and trying not to think about Susan and the pool boy. Damn. The more he tries not to think about it, the more he sees her sitting by the neighborhood pool. Maybe the boy is a lifeguard. 18 and fresh out of high school and eager to learn, Susan bored and tired of waiting for Jeremy and angry that he left her alone on Earth for so long. Maybe she has already confessed about her transgressions with the pool boy or already told him the marriage is over, and the message is waiting for Jeremy, for the IT guys back on Earth to figure out how to fix the personal message software.

Green light on the oxygen re-circulators. He flips another switch. Oxygen fire safety system, primary, he thinks.

The mystery of the cookie seems like something far in the past, even though he has spent two hours reading up on quantum physics. On how what Benjamin said about it being theoretically possible for atoms to move spontaneously is true, as near as he can tell. It's all very confusing.

What's closer than thoughts of the cookie is how weird he feels inside. Just like Benjamin said. As though his organs are trying to separate from each other, or are free falling out of him. He wants to write this off to zero gravity, but he has felt it in the gravity of his hab module too. He has been taking some generic stomach medicine for the past couple of months, but it doesn't seem to be helping. The problem seems to be bigger than his stomach.

Green light on the primary oxygen fire safety system. He flips a switch, thinks to himself in his astronaut voice, first redundant oxygen fire safety system.

When Lena slips in just as he is finishing his systems check, she sheds her top and pants immediately. The door slides shut behind her and she types in the code for a manual lock, so that Benjamin is locked out of the operations room.

Naked, he thinks, she is at least three times as beautiful as he has imagined her. There are little imperfections that he never included in his fantasies: a small mole near her left nipple and a small scar that disrupts the growth of her hair between her legs. These imperfections make real everything he has imagined about her, and he can barely stand it. In his head he hears what she has said about the things they could do, having sex in zero gravity, and he realizes how badly he will miss this weightlessness back on Earth, how badly he wants to experience something as tremendous as zero gravity sex. Lena says nothing now as she floats towards him, but the sweet heaviness of her voice is in him nonetheless. She seems almost to hover, not hurrying, letting a little bit of momentum carry her towards him. When he tries to think of Susan, she's wet with chlorine, riding the kid from the pool in the bedroom of their house. Before he can recover from this Lena is on him, kissing him. Unbuckles him from his seat, and he floats towards her. Like it is only gravity between them, pulling them together. She is warm and when he is naked and he clings to her, they rotate slowly. The whole time that they are entwined, a part of him in the back corner of his mind, the only part that is still considering the future, is thinking about how this is the culmination of two years of isolation and primal instinct. And also how maybe someone can get married once, but get it wrong, and then find their soul mate much later. And isn't it wrong to hold your own mistakes against your soul mate?

When it is over, and he can only float, he watches her push off one of the consoles towards her pants, from which she withdraws a small hand-vacuum. She bounces around the room, and he stares. When he realizes that she is sucking up the organic remnants of what they have just done, the gravity of this reaches him. Pulls him back into the real world. He's cheated, for the first time in his life, on Susan, the girl of his dreams. Two year of fidelity thrown out in the blink of an eye. And as much as he tries to hate himself for thinking it, his primary concern is that he doesn't have much time left on the station with Lena. That he should have done this a year ago.

"Can we do this again?" he asks, fully aware of how that question has made him feel on the occasions that sexual partners have asked it of him after one night. But still, he has to know that this was not a one time thing. That it was something more than an instance of lust that destroyed a happy marriage.

She smiles at him, blows him a kiss, and puts her pants on. "That was really good," she says.

When he gets up the nerve to ask her if that's a yes or a no, she has already unlocked the door and is floating away. He asks the question of her back, and she never turns around or stops to answer. Just laughs, that sweet heaviness echoing in the small confines of the operations room.

~

It does happen again. In fact, for the next two weeks, he and Lena have sex several times a day. He is not sure if it's love or zero gravity, but it is euphoric every time. The one time they try it in her quarters, in low gravity, it is lackluster. It makes him feel like he is going to be sick, and he can't get Susan out of his head. So they stick to the zero G sections of the station. They get better at it, figuring out new tricks each time – new things that they never would have dreamed of in the gravity of Earth. Benjamin walks in on them a few times, rolls his eyes, and leaves each time. "See?" she says each time. "Like it's just you and me up here."

"You were right," Jeremy says each time, nodding.

When he is not with Lena, he is thinking about how to tell his parents that he's divorcing Susan to be with Lena when he gets back. Or he is thinking of scenarios in which Susan finds out, trying to think of ways to prevent these scenarios. Or he's feeling that feeling in his organs, like they are coming apart. It gets worse daily now, and he reads more and more on quantum physics. There is nothing about quantum probabilities changing at a distance from Earth, but if he is being honest with himself, Jeremy understands almost none of what he reads. And Benjamin is right about something. What is happening to Jeremy is very physical. Something is not right with him.

When Benjamin floats into the operations room during a systems check, Jeremy pauses and looks at him. "Twelve days to go," Benjamin says idly, pushing off the floor and allowing his body to come to rest on the ceiling.

"Yeah," Jeremy says.

"This always makes me feel like a vampire," Benjamin says, clinging to the ceiling.

"Hey, so what you said about the quantum physics stuff affecting me inside. Were you just fucking with me?"

"I don't know. Do you feel it inside you?"

Jeremy nods.

"Well then," Benjamin says, obviously irritated at being questioned.

"What's happening to me, exactly?"

"Well, your organs are composed of billions of atoms with billions of electrons. Probably, some of your electrons are jumping into space because of small scale extreme quantum events."

"Why am I just noticing now? We're the closest to Earth we've ever been in this station." Jeremy has lost track of his systems check and will have to start over. But he does not care, because he just wants his stomach to be right.

"Well, individual electrons have probably been jumping since we crossed over into this quantum zone. You're just noticing it now because enough have jumped for it to start making a difference to your body chemistry."

"Are you having the same problem?" Jeremy asks.

"Of course. None of us is immune to quantum physics."

At this point, Jeremy is so clouded with thoughts of Lena, guilt for Susan, and papers on the quantum level of physics – not to mention the feeling of isolation from being away from Earth for two years – that he does not notice the glint in Benjamin's eye when Benjamin rubs his stomach to emphasize the fact that he is having the same problem.

"So why don't we tell Houston?" Jeremy asks. "We should let them know. This is going to be a big problem. What if the station is coming apart?"

Benjamin shakes his head. "It'll still be too slow of a process for it to effect the station, though it will probably mean parts have to be replaced sooner than anticipated. The real danger is if a larger scale extreme quantum event happens, like when your cookie disappeared. Imagine if that was one of the oxygen filters."

But Benjamin has lost Jeremy's attention at "cookie." Jeremy's eyes glaze over, and he is flooded with memories of Susan.

When he met her at his brother's college graduation, her working for the catering company. He found a clumsy excuse to touch her hair – he forgets what it was now – and she smiled and looked down at her feet. It was incredibly soft, her hair.

When she graduated from the culinary academy, and they, together now for a long time and drunk at her favorite pub, snuck outside to make out – as if they were teenagers instead of 23 and 24 years old. And he proposed to her spontaneously, used his pen to draw a black line around her ring finger when she accepted with a happy gasp. Promised to buy a ring the next day, hung over.

When he bought the ring the next day, still hung over, and had to throw up in the jewelry store's bathroom, and the sales woman thought he was nervous, but he just laughed and said no, he was only hung over, and he could never be nervous about the idea of spending the rest of his life with Susan.

Benjamin slips out, leaving Jeremy lost in the pull of his past. Jeremy idly checks the personal message software, but it is still corrupted.

When, later, Lena floats into the operations room, Jeremy simply shakes his head and waves her away.

~

The last time Jeremy has sex with Lena, it is, like the first, in the operations room. It's the day before the second crew arrives at the Mars station, before Jeremy and Lena and Benjamin begin the 124 day trip back to Earth. After, he asks her if she loves him while she is using the hand-vacuum to clean up little floating gobs of semen. Not for the first time, he wonders how nobody thought to bring condoms up to the station. He supposes NASA just preferred to imagine that its astronauts don't need sex.

"Look," Lena says. "I don't think we should do this anymore."

He says nothing, just watches the curvature of her back as she floats from gob to gob.

She finishes, puts the hand-vacuum away. "Okay?" she finally looks at him when she says this word.

"So that's it? You just wanted to have sex with me in zero-G, and now you've had your fill?"

She shrugs.

"I'm floating here with what is pretty definitely going to be a shattered marriage, in love with you, not to mention my organs are coming apart at the atomic level, and all you can do is shrug?"

"Jesus, Jeremy. I can't believe you fell for Benjamin's bullshit that hard. Seriously? You really think your organs are coming apart?"

"What do you mean?" he says.

"I mean, he made that shit up. I bribed him to make it up."

"What?" Jeremy feels lost, as though he is falling into some infinite cavern, where there is no light.

"You wouldn't stop moping about Susan. So I ate your fucking cookie, and convinced him to give you an excuse for believing it wasn't me. I also had him put the virus in the personal message computer. I did all of this so you would stop clinging to what was going to be a doomed marriage anyway, and just do what we've both wanted to do from Day One."

He stutters, unsure what question to ask first. His head is so cloudy, and his stomach is still coming apart. He works through the questions in his head first. Figures that the stuff with his organs is a side effect of being in space for so long. Of isolation and low or zero gravity. Just like the trainers back on Earth said would happen. He'd been deceived – let himself be deceived, maybe. To get what he wanted. He wants to throw up, and let Lena clean that with the vacuum too.

"How'd you get into my locker?" he asks her, instead. Trying to keep his voice level.

"Really? The way you stared into space when you'd eat those cookies, or talked about her on the flight over here from Earth? It took me three tries to guess that your password was her name."

He nods. "How'd you bribe Benjamin?"

She laughs. "Sex, of course. The first day we got to the station, he and I had sex. But it was terrible. Still, he had a good time. So I bribed him with more sex. He's not such a bad guy, you know."

He nods again, angry with himself at how upsetting this news is, at the fact that even now he is jealous that Lena slept with Benjamin, even on top of everything else.

"Don't you want to know why your marriage was doomed from the get-go?"

He shakes his head, unable to focus his eyes on anything.

She shrugs again, and turns to leave.

He hates himself even before he asks the last question. He feels it building up, like a parasite inside of him. And he tries not to ask it, but when she is on the threshold of the operations room, he does.

"What about the ride home? We at least have those last 124 days at least, before you abandon me." He doesn't mean for it to come out sounding so pathetic, but it does. It seems more and more that he is not in control of himself.

She does not turn around. "No, Jeremy. This was it. I can't stand how you've become about Susan. I'm going to sit in the ship, read, write some papers on the possibilities for terraforming Mars. Then I'm going to get back to Earth, get through the gravity-readjustment as fast as possible, and spend a month on a tropical beach. Alone. If I'd known how badly this would affect you, well..." she shakes her head.

He wants to ask her how she could do this to him, but he can already hear her answering in his head. Telling him that he's an adult, she didn't do anything to him – he did this to himself.

When she leaves, he feels all the potential warmth and joy of what his reunion could have been with Susan. After almost three years apart, nights together on the beach or in the mountains, under the stars, talking about what he'd seen in space, what she'd done on Earth. Her hair soft under his hand. All of this warmth slips out of cracks in him and pools on the floor, before leaking out invisible holes in the station, into space, where it is crystallized by the freezing temperatures of the void, shattered. All of his potential happiness disperses into an infinite void of cold stars, so vast that it makes him feel like a displaced electron, lost in the wrong part of the universe. He thinks about the depth of joy he has lost in space, how pale the ecstasy of zero-G sex now seems in comparison, less than ten minutes after it has passed. He tries to comprehend the magnitude of what he has done, or why.

The philosophizing fades rapidly, until his mind is consumed entirely in a mad struggle to reach into space and reclaim some of the warmth of the feeling of reunion with Susan. It scrabbles frantically through the holes in the station, reaches out into the emptiness of space for the crystalline shards of happiness, but they have already been incinerated in distant stars, sucked into black holes.

When a voice crackles into the room over the radio, the first radio communication that Jeremy has heard in two years, he barely hears it. "Hey there Mars station, this is Hermes Three, just entering radio broadcast range. We'll be along to relieve you tomorrow. How's everybody doing in there?"

He wants to laugh at the question. At the world "relieve." But all he can do is sit, completely still, all of the most important parts of him drifting out into the surrounding abyss.

### ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Greg Leunig has an MFA in fiction from Eastern Washington University. You can find some of his work at _Strange Horizons_ , _The Washington Pastime_ , and _The Colored Lens_. He very occasionally blogs at: http://thebarking.com/. Follow him @GregIsDangerous on Twitter to learn about his dental hygiene, etc.

Book Review

To Die A Stranger

From the Amazon.com Book Description:

"Anna-Marie has it all - a pretty face and a life of leisure backed by the wealth and status of the family business, the Delany Computer Corporation. It's not enough. Anna's bored, so she dabbles in showbiz as the holo-actress Amaranth Dusk. She gains some success, then loses it all in an aircar accident that almost claims her life. Scarred and severely injured, Anna struggles back to health. As her memory clears, she realises that the accident was a deliberate attack and tries to discover who wanted her dead. Her investigations take her to Delany Corp, which has a secret at its core, a hidden conspiracy of government-funded technology and espionage. Anna unwittingly stumbles into a top secret project that takes ordinary humans and pairs them with computers to create spies who can read minds and walk through walls. These agent-pairs are used by Earth Intelligence, Mother Terra's primary security force, as powerful weapons to keep her empire of colony worlds under control. Zenith-alpha 4013 is part of the project, a flawed computer who has failed to find a partner. It chooses Anna, and together they must outwit all of Earth Intelligence to escape and survive."

I had known little of Jilly Paddock. A friend of mine urged me to purchase a novella of hers, and when there was a deal on The Dragon, Fly and Other Flights of Fancy I purchased that instead. But I hadn't actually read it yet. So when Jilly's partner, Dave Brzeski, emailed me asking if we'd review To Die a Stranger, I really didn't know what to expect.

I came across her blog (www.tabbycat.wordpress.com) and found she took a break from the craft after selling two stories in the 1990's. She has only just returned to writing within the last year or so.

And boy has she returned with a vengeance. She had four titles released on Amazon in the first quarter of 2012. Jilly self publishes her books, and she is the classic example of extraordinary talent choosing not to waste her time and skill on waiting for a big time publisher to recognize it.

To Die a Stanger opens up with a beautiful passage that ends with:

"Her true name is Anna-Marie Delany and this is the story of her death."

And with that line, I was hooked.

We follow Anna, living the actress persona of Amaranth Dusk, at a Hollywood style party. She hides behind this persona to protect the image of her father's business. Anna is a snot-nosed, spoiled little actress. Or, at least she plays the part well.

A nasty aircar accident, that by all accounts should have killed her, shatters Anna's life along with her body. When she starts to recover, she can't help but wonder if it really was an accident. While trying to settle into her new life, one without acting, she begins to seek out answers about the crash. Only answers seem to be unavailable.

But when Anna stumbles into a secret government program, she discovers that her new life is really just beginning.

Jilly is a wordsmith the like of many of the literary greats. Jilly's talent with words ranks her among the likes of Bradbury, Card, and Heinlein. Her imagery is so well created that you are easily swallowed into the world of Anna Delany. The quality of work here is a true mastery of the craft.

The characters are vast and varying in nature, adding to the believability of the story. I had trouble with Anna's actress persona, but it is shed so early on that I quickly found myself relating to her. I loved her and wanted nothing more than to see her succeed. Even the antagonists that Anna faces are relatable as people. And who couldn't love Zenni, the computer that helps Anna. I often found myself forgetting this character was not a person at all.

Of course, there is much more to a good book than just prose and characters. You can't describe a great scene with good characters and have them do nothing. You need an engaging plot. The story here was very strong. I didn't once find myself aware of the fact that I was reading. The plot pulls you in. By Chapter 6, the novel is one I couldn't stop reading. I found myself up at all hours needing to finish the story.

As Anna developed her special abilities, with the help of Zenni, I began to wonder what was the real cost of using these powers. Anna did become weak, but as time passed it seemed that the weakness became almost nonexistent. I wondered sometimes why she didn't simply use her powers to get out of certain situations. Even still, none of this distracted from the story.

There are several tests I use to tell me if a story is good. First, do I find myself losing track of time when I am reading it? Check. Second, do I find myself thinking and wondering about the story when I am forced to stop reading? Check. Third, do I make it a priority to get back to the story as soon as I can? Check.

Finally, and the strongest of tests for me, am I sad when it is over? I was. I find myself already missing Anna and Zenni. By the end of the story the plot threads are tied up nicely, but Jilly teases at the possibility of a sequel by leaving just enough open. I can only hope there is a sequel in the works; I'd like to visit with Anna and Zenni again soon.

The book is available on Amazon.com in Kindle only. As a fan of paper books I was disappointed to hear this. It is available free for Amazon Prime customers in the Kindle Owner's Lending Library, or you can buy it for $4.99 (£3.23 in the UK). I'd suggest you buy it because this is one you will want to read again and again. I struggle with eBook prices, but $4.99 is a good value considering the story. I'd certainly pay more for a physical book.

The summary:

To Die a Stranger

By Jilly Paddock

Published April 7, 2012

Self Published under Cathaven Press

ASIN B007SESVHU

Available at: Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk

US:  https://www.amazon.com/dp/B007SESVHU

UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B007SESVHU

My ratings:

Prose: Excellent

Characters: Excellent

Story: Excellent

Value: Good

Overall: Excellent

This is a must buy for any science fiction fan. Jilly Paddock is a literary master that tells a fabulous story. A link to purchase this book is available on our website's Issues section.

Frequencies

By Michael Hodges

Cover Art By: Tais Teng

An overgrown gull flew across the sky, letting out a series of piercing cries. A peculiar shadow trailed the evading gull, fluctuating in size, as if a child trapped inside a black pillow sack.

"Get inside," Genua whispered. She took her brother by the hand and ushered him into their log cabin. Chunks of dirt crumbled down the outside wall as the flimsy door shut. The whites of their eyes shone through the filmy window pane.

"What is it?" Gep asked.

Genua did not answer.

"Come on, sister. I'm not so young anymore."

"No you are not," she said, gazing out the window on her tip toes. She looked at her brother, with his blonde tousled hair and eager eyes and put a hand on his shoulder. "It's gone," she said.

"What's gone?" Gep said.

"The bird—"

"I saw the giant gull, Genua. I'm not asking about that. What was the thing behind it?"

Genua turned and went to the back of the cabin, busying herself with a few of the dishes and the lukewarm water in the plastic basin. She whistled a song her mother had sung to her many years ago, and thought she remembered a phrase—maybe something about a dear prudence. She could feel her younger brother's eyes burrowing into her backside. He had the energy of a hungry seal. And true, he wasn't so young anymore. He was eighteen now, but she still treated him as her baby brother.

"Fine," she said. "I don't know what it is. All I know is what I was told by Johnathan."  
Genua turned to face her brother, the dull coastal light half-illuminating the cabin.

"You noticed the size of the gull?" she asked.

"Yes. Biggest I've ever seen. But I was distracted by—"

"—the shadow."

"Yes."

"The gull is not from this ocean," she said. "At least that is what Johnathan told me."

"How could that be?"

"Are you going to listen or ask questions?"

Gep blinked.

"It is possible. Johnathan told me it was from an island in the Atlantic Ocean, thousands of miles from here."

"How does Johnathan know this?" he asked.  
"He knew many things. You know this."  
The dim light faded, bathing the cabin in an uncomfortable darkness. Genua grasped a thick candle from a rickety shelf and struck a match. The smell of sulfur filled the room, and the hiss of flame merged with the melodic, whispering ocean.

"You've seen that gull before," Genua said.

"No I haven't."

Genua smiled in a way that those in their twenties do, beaming confidence.  
"Oh, you have," she said. "You saw that gull fly over during our walks on the beach, when you were much younger. Of course, the gull was smaller then. I distracted you so you would not see the shadow."

"How can you recognize it? I mean, I would have noticed."

"There is a mark on its breast, silver in color and shaped like an arrowhead."  
Gep frowned, his forehead becoming hot and sweaty. Genua's confidence disappeared.

"It's coming back, isn't it?"

"Yes," he said, grimacing.

"Lie down."

He did.

She reached under the wooden bunk bed and pulled out a large coil wrapped in electrical tape. A woven section of wires emitted from the coil, flowing to a metal box riddled with switches and two gauges with clear plastic coverings. She checked one of the gauges and it indicated they had twenty minutes of power. All he needed was five minutes. Genua flipped the switch marked 8uf, and a ringing frequency emitted from the coil. She held it in her hands and placed it on Gep's chest, waiting twenty seconds, and then moving the coil to his forehead, along his spine, to his feet, and upon his buttocks. For the last twenty seconds she placed the coil over his heart.  
Gep sighed as the frequency cleared the pain.

"Better?" she asked, knowing she didn't have to.  
"Yes, yes."

"You won't need that for awhile," she said.

The battery gauge indicated fifteen minutes remained. She slid the frequency machine back under the bed and opened the door, checking for the gull and shadow. They were gone.  
Genua glanced behind their hand-hewn cabin at the small, wooden windmill, the blades not moving at all. She didn't like it when those blades were still. It meant no power, and no power meant a return of the morphing bacteria which infected them. The bug could evade anything except for the frequencies, but those could not kill it, only do enough damage to make it hide for a week.  
"Cursed winds," she said.  
"They will come," Gep said. "You have to be patient."

"You always did have that over me, didn't you?"

Gep nodded.  
Genua met his eyes with hers.

"How the gull got so big, no one knows, not even Johnathan," she said. "The shadow behind it? That's supposed to be Antholzat, brother."

"What?"

"You know, evil, madness, insanity. Like the bacteria. Johnathan said the gull keeps Antholzat occupied now. When men did those things at the Island to the swine and monkeys, Antholzat saw an opportunity, ravaging the experiment stations and setting loose the bug. Some say the gull was part of the experiments there, and it can never die. Johnathan said Antholzat only works when it gets a helping hand and it had many helping hands on that Island. Think of it like you and I working the tide pools for razor clams. I hold the bucket, and you pluck them from the ocean floor. Well, Antholzat can't do both of those things—it needs someone to hold the bucket. Johnathan said the gull will stop flying and let Antholzat finally catch it when the gull deems man is no longer in league with it."

"Antholzat killed off mankind?" he asked.

"That is half-correct," she said. "It was man and Antholzat in partnership."

She gazed out the filmy window and a thick breath of humidity and salt filled her lungs.

"I want to kill Antholzat," Gep said, his eyes wild.  
"Antholzat cannot be killed. You must know this."

"I'm going to try anyway."

"You can't."

Gep turned away and punched the door with his hand, causing it to rattle on its weak latches. He flung the door open and ran onto the beach, sand kicking up behind his stained moccasins. He saddled a dune, heading towards the tree line. There, an ancient redwood forest towered over the beach. One tree stood above the rest, and above the world. Gep touched the enormous twisting bark as energy from the behemoth coursed through his veins. A rusty plaque was nailed to the ocean-facing side of the trunk, revealing the tree's name as Hyperion, tallest in the world, and one of the oldest living things known to mankind at 2,000 years. Hyperion stood sentinel over their log cabin. Marbled murrelets nested in the top branches, where they chittered about with their fat bellies and spastic ruffling. At night they made darting trips to the ocean, sometimes waking them with their whirring.

"I'm going to kill Antholzat," he told the tree.

Gep walked into the forest on a worn path amongst enormous ferns. He veered off-trail into them, and they brushed like giant fans at his frock. The soothing trickle of a creek filled his ears and he swung east. Something splashed in the creek. Gep paid it no mind, instead reaching for a young redwood which had a worn line wrapped around it. He loosened the line and walked into the creek with it, past the splashing creatures. As he reached the opposite bank, the fish balled into a net and he dragged it onto shore. Four bright, silvery salmon flopped on the moss. Gep took a smooth stone, bonking each one on the head. Roe oozed from one salmon. This grotesque display always sickened him even though his fishing was as routine as washing the dishes.

After cleaning his catch, he walked past mighty Hyperion, back towards the cabin. Smoke wafted from the aluminum chimney shaft. Genua had started the stove.

Something on the beach caught Gep's eye and he dropped the pungent, fern-bundled fish onto the sand. He stared, not sure what he was seeing, then realized it was the massive gull, looming where sand met water, approaching from the south. The gull let loose deep throated cries as it scanned the beach. Gep sprinted towards the ocean, snatching a four foot spear from the side of the cabin. The gull passed over him, the silver arrow mark gleaming in the dull light. Goosebumps streaked across his forearms and he felt a great sense of hope. The hope diminished when he noticed the shadow coming, perhaps two hundred yards behind the gull. He crouched behind a clump of tall grass, spear in hand. Gep peered between the saw-edged grass as Antholzat approached, its form constantly shifting. His lymph nodes swelled and his throat tightened. Antholzat was making him sick.

Twenty yards.  
Blackness leached into his nerves.

Ten yards.

Gep leapt into the air, releasing the spear with fury, the weapon cutting through the thick sea air towards the warbling shadow. The spear met its mark, but rather than sinking into the prey, it bounced off as if hitting a boulder. A spark shone between blade and shadow, and his spear was sent to the beach where it daggered into the soft sand.

The pulsating shadow hovered above Gep. A foreign cadence filled his ears and his lymph nodes swelled, making his shirt collar tight. Gep gazed into the thing, noticing that the constant shifting appeared to be human limbs pushing at the fibrous, black tissue. There were no eyes or mouth.

The cadence filled Gep's mind along with images of deep space, of rocks drifting in the void, of certain sections of stars blocked by things which absorbed light. His face moistened with sweat and his eyelids would not close as he trembled. In his mind appeared a white planet of volcanic dust. Uncountable, black shadows swarmed its surface in unison, then flew into a hole in the terrain the size of earth's moon. He shielded his eyes and turned away. Antholzat resumed chasing the gull, leaving him shuddering on the beach.

When the trembling subsided, Gep stood, collected his spear, and ran to the cabin. Genua had to know. When he opened the door, he found her lying on the floor, groaning.

"Hold on, Genua!" he shouted, reaching for the frequency machine under the bunk bed.  
"Save it for yourself," she groaned. "Only fifteen minutes left." She covered her face with both hands as her legs spasmed.

"I don't think so," Gep said. He placed the humming coil over various parts of her body, and Genua no longer convulsed. He helped her up and she hugged him.

"Thank God you came back," she said, weeping.

"It's okay, big sis."

"Ten minutes left, Gep. God damned wind!"

"I'm not sure God has anything to do with it," he said.

~

Gep awoke, screaming. He had dreamt of the shadows on the ash planet and how they streamed into the bleak hole.

It was not yet sunrise. The waves slurred and hushed. He went outside and looked upon the windmill. It didn't budge.

Ten minutes, he thought.

~

Genua woke early to see Gep sharpening a spear with his buck knife. As he carved, Genua realized her baby brother had become a man. And not only a man, but an alpha. She watched him walk to the ocean, probably after the numerous surf perch.  
She hoped there would be wind today, but the stillness in the air was an ominous sign. This was the worst dry spell they'd seen, and she wondered if it had anything to do with the return of the gull and shadow. Miles away, lightning scorched the sea, and the usual wind which accompanied this action did not materialize.

Breakfast consisted of salmon garnished with redwood seeds. They had taken to planting them as instructed by Johnathon, but there were so many of them it was acceptable to feast.

Movement appeared in the corner of her eye and she turned. For a moment Genua thought she saw her dead mother and father. This vision haunted her often on the lonely beach. She missed them so. The bacteria reduced life expectancy by twenty years, and mother and father were on the edge. They had gone, just like most people.

The move to Beach of Redwood was essential. The verdant woods provided a never-ending supply of berries, mushrooms, and seeds, while the ocean provided all the meat they would ever need. It was a bountiful place, and their only competition was the over-fed animals that gorged on the berries and the gulls who stole their fish. The weather was also ideal, hovering between forty and sixty degrees Fahrenheit all year. There was no need to worry about freezing or getting too warm. She learned from Johnathan that survivors lived in places like New York, and that extreme weather beat them down and reduced their vitality even more. She thought of the terrible island Johnathan had mentioned and pictured it as a nightmarish realm, with mold growing in the tile cracks and long abandoned animal stalls where the experiments took place. In her mind, she could see filthy plastic cages and chewed wire pens. What had they done?

~

The day was half-lit, the sun failing to penetrate the thick coastal clouds.

There were chores to do. Not as many as those survivors hanging on in harsh climates had to do, but chores nonetheless. Genua reached under the bed and checked the power gage.

Oxygen expunged from her lungs and she gasped.

Gep had failed to turn off the power switch. The meter indicated there was no power.

"Gep!" she screamed, running onto the beach.

Gep was perched like a heron in a shallow pool, his pants rolled to his knees.  
"Are you okay?" he shouted.

"Gep, you forgot to turn off the switch. How could you?"

"What...no, no Genua. I would not do that...."

"You did!" she said, pushing at him and splashing the sea along her frock.

Gep ran to the cabin as Genua sat in the cold sea, holding her head and crying. Her frock soaked along with her hair. Sand coated her elbows and bare feet and was washed away by the abrasive water. She couldn't believe it. How could he be so stupid? He was clumsy sometimes, but never stupid.

Lightning flashed where sea met sky. The storm brought no wind.

Gep sulked from the cabin to the sea, and Genua could see tears in his eyes. He never cried. She stood, kicking water as she walked to him, her arms out. Gep did the same. They hugged at water's edge as the froth licked their feet.  
"I'm so sorry," he said.

"It's okay, Gep. It's okay."

"The wind will come," he said. "There's a storm out there."

"Forget it for now, brother," she said.

A marbled murrelet darted above them, making its way back to Hyperion.

~

They ate salmon at the perimeter of the fire pit east of the cabin, sitting in green and blue lawn chairs they'd taken from a defunct sporting goods store a long time ago. The clouds refused the sun passage. Genua and Gep glanced at the windmill between bites of their meal.  
"Why did Johnathan leave?" Gep asked.  
"He wouldn't tell me," she said.  
"Where do you think he went?"

"Who knows?"

"Do you think he'll be back?"

"No. He was sick. You know this."

A normal gull cried from the sea, joining the crackling of logs. A moment later an osprey flew over, a surf perch impaled on its talons.  
Genua noticed Gep was sweating. It was too cool for that.

"Are you warm?" she asked.  
"Yes."

"From the fire?"

"No."

"Oh no," she said. "It's too early for that."

"I wish it was."

Genua glared at the ocean.

"Come on wind, come on!"

Gep tried to fake it, but the infection was too much, and he turned pale, his shoulders slumping.

"Hang in Gep. Hang in, do you hear me?"

Genua scrambled to him, putting a hand on his cheek and an arm around his head in a high hug.

"I hate this," he said. "Why can't the machine kill it all?"

"I don't know."

"Why so early?" he asked.

"The full moon," she said. "It draws the bacteria out."

Gep groaned and writhed.

As Genua cradled him, she noticed a twitch of her left eyelid and a flushing weakness across her limbs.

No, she thought. God damn it, no. She looked to the motionless windmill and bit her lip.

"Wh-what's wrong?" he asked.

"Nothing," she said.

Gep began to convulse, his teeth chattering.

"Y-yur...abad...l-liar," he chattered.

"Shhh, keep quiet. Save your energy."

"Is it... f-finally g-going to win?" he asked.

"No. Don't say such things."

"Are w-we... g-going to d...die here, t-today?"

Genua lost her hold on Gep and collapsed to the sand. The infection was always worse for those who were older.

"No!" Gep shouted. He slumped out of his chair and crawled on the ground next to her, putting a shaking arm around her back to keep her warm.  
"Don't," she said. "K-keep y...your...own...w-warmth."

They tried to inch closer to the fire.  
"I d...don't w-wanna d...die yet," Gep said.

Genua gathered enough strength to place her hand in his. As she did, a large shape approached from the north, its wings as long as a man, its head tilting and searching, its beak opening and closing.

"G-Genua, the gull," Gep said.

Genua warmed at the sight. The last time I'll see it, she thought, drifting away.

Gep slapped her in the face. The pressure jolted her awake.

"D...don't you...g-go," he muttered. "I...I love you, G-Genua."

"I love...y-you...too, Gep."

He squeezed her hand.

A rush of air buffeted Gep and he looked up. The giant gull was above him, its wings beating with tremendous force, fanning the flames and shooting sparks into the air. The eyes of the hovering gull stared north, towards a curious, bulging shape which drew closer.

"Dear...G-God," Gep muttered.  
Antholzat was bigger. Much bigger. Somehow it had grown to the size of an open parachute. The shifting characteristic remained, and the trapped limbs seemed even more bulbous and grotesque—beyond human proportions.

Antholzat closed in.

"Go!" Gep cried. "Fly away."

The gull remained over them, hovering.

Twenty yards.

The gull shrieked.

Ten yards.

Gep's mind filled with the ash planet and the swarming shadows. His lymph nodes swelled and his mouth dried.

Antholzat expanded, and the billowing blackness swallowed the great bird. The gull let loose a muffled cry from within, but it was too late. The gull was sealed in the blackness, its huge beak trying to jab out.

Gep babbled and stuttered. Antholzat hovered above him, now even bigger, and Gep thought he saw the last few beats of wing from the stoic gull. Antholzat veered towards the sea, skimming over the surface and disappearing where water met sky.

Lightning flashed on the horizon, and sea salt blew into Gep's face.

The wind.

It came cool and hard, tousling his hair and turning the creaky, wooden windmill. It rattled the feeble cabin door.

His limbs were stiff, but he was young. The cabin lay only fifteen yards away. He could do it.

Gep crawled in front of his sister and grabbed both her wrists. He sat and used his legs to push off the sand; each push causing tremendous weakness. He could do it. He was Gep, a good hunter, an even better fishermen and an expert explorer of Beach of Redwood. Sand coated his frock and windblown particles entered his mouth. His face dripped sweat. Gep reached the door and managed to drag Genua along the floor, gasping as he did. He began to feel faint, each movement of his head making it worse. He took the heavy coil in his hand as skittering sand pelted the cabin walls. The windmill roared. Wind screamed through unpatched gaps in the logs. Gep flipped the switch and thought of Johnathan. How he wished his friend was still around.  
The coil hummed, and Gep lay on his side, placing the coil on his chest. He moved to his sister and hugged her tight enough so that the coil treated both of them, its frequency driving away the bacteria from their hearts.

~

How long he'd been out for, he had no idea. The storm had broken the clouds and the sun shone into the cabin. Gep turned Genua over and felt her pulse. She was alive. He shook her gently.

"Gep?" she asked.

"It's me. Are you okay?"

Genua sat up, holding her head.

"Just a nasty headache," she said, gathering her bearings." What happened to the gull?"

Gep looked to the floor.

"Antholzat took him."

"What?" Genua's eyes grew moist, and she turned away.

"We got a storm too," he said. "Enough to power the machine. We almost didn't make it this time."

"Thank you," Genua said.

Gep examined the feeble door. Its hinges were still attached.

"I'm going to gather the food we left before the bears do," he said.

The storm had adjusted some of the dunes, but the sun's rays blazed, and he relished the warmth on his face.

Frenetic rustling came from Hyperion and a flock of marbled murrelets shot into the sky.

He picked through the sand-covered eating utensils and scraps of food. The fire had been blown across the beach, and some of the smoking logs poked out of the dunes here and there. As he kicked sand over one of the smoldering hunks of wood, a cloud covered the sun.

Damn it, he thought.

A gust of wind blew his hair.

That was no cloud.

The beating of giant wings.

The gull soared above him, tilting its head, always searching. It was now the size of a school bus, its silver mark glimmering in the good light. Goosebumps erupted down Gep's arms, and his spine tingled.

"Genua!" he shouted. "Genua!"

Genua hobbled from the cabin. Her eyes widened, and she pointed to the sky, laughing and smiling.

The great gull circled above them, tipping to one side like an airliner, climbing to four hundred feet. As it climbed, it veered towards the redwoods, and one tree in particular.

The gull beat its monolithic wings and prepared to land on top of Hyperion. The ancient, gnarled branches held the gull's weight, and it poked its beak into a knothole. It tilted its head back, let out a mournful cry, and regurgitated a messy black substance into the hole. A group of marbled murrelets swarmed onto the tree, placing sticks, twigs, moss, and other forest litter into the hole.

The gull observed the murrelets with its enormous, yellow eyes and pushed off Hyperion; the massive tree swaying and dropping particles as the bird flew once again.

Genua and Gep watched it soar over the trees and beach, then the Pacific. It faded where sky met sea, as most things do.

### ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Michael Hodges resides in Chicagoland, but often dreams of the Northern Rockies. His nature-themed stories have appeared in numerous publications, from the _Dead Bait 2_ _Anthology_ with Ramsey Campbell to _Something Wicked Magazine_. He's currently hard at work editing two novels.

### ABOUT THE ARTIST

Tais Teng is a pseudonym for a Dutch fantasy and science fiction writer, illustrator and sculptor. His real name is Thijs van Ebbenhorst Tengbergen and he was born in 1952 in The Hague.

As an illustrator he made several hundred covers and interior illustrations for science fiction, fantasy and horror novels and magazines. He has sold covers and illustrations to _Daily Science Fiction_ , the _Nightland site_ and now _Plasma Frequency_. He works both in color and Black& White. You can see his work at:

http://taisteng.deviantart.com/gallery/ .  
Tais Teng has also written more than a hundred novels and his books have been translated in German, Finnish, French and English. _The Emerald Boy_ has been published in the USA. He recently sold the story "Embrace the Night" to the _Night Land site_.

You can download his recent short story collection (108.000 words) _LOVECRAFT, MY LOVE_ at https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/171375

The Demon's Grimoire

By Gary Cuba

Art By: Laura Givens

Yes, it was true that Sylvia Feldstein's singular purpose that night was to get fully and irrevocably snockered, after having been stood up on her blind date with that accountant fellow--the one her roommate Kate's boyfriend knew, who'd said was a really nice guy and primo material for a single professional gal like her.

The son of a bitch had begged off at the last minute, leaving her to spend another Saturday night alone and morose in her New York City flat. And on top of that, she knew that later on she'd likely be forced to listen to the squeak of Kate's bedsprings in the adjacent bedroom, accompanied by her roomie's equally squeaky squeaks of ecstasy.

Just not fair, any way you looked at it.

Thinking about it more, Sylvia forewent the inherent difficulties of pouring and steering her wine glass to her lips, and started swigging directly out of the bottle.

But no, she hadn't gotten totally drunk yet. Not quite yet, not quite enough. Even so, when she heard the thunderous boom rattle all the articles inside the apartment, she dropped the half-empty bottle onto the shag-carpeted floor, where its contents merged with the myriad spill-stains left behind by who knows how many prior occupants of the apartment.

The sound was supercalifragilistically loud. She shrieked in terror.

When she finally reclaimed her wits, she witnessed some sort of apparition congealing at the far end of the living room. The thing was masked by a cloud of dense smoke, which smelled of shit and sulfur--not so different from the way their bathroom smelled after Kate's boyfriend used it, she thought. From out of the haze she heard a deep, hoarse, demonic voice intone: "I compel and conjure you, Sylvia of Feldstein, to appear at once to me, and be ye not wrathful, for I hold the Words of Power over thee . . ."

What the fuck? Sylvia watched as the smoke dissipated, revealing a small impish form, mostly green, scaly, with long ears and gnarly feet. And extending from them, long, dark toenails that just wouldn't quit. About three feet tall, at most. The dude might have passed for Yoda's uglier step-brother. He held an oversized, leather-bound book in his hands, and stood within a circle that seemed to be burnt into the carpet.

"Stop right there, mister," she said. "I'm calling the cops." She fished in her pockets for her cell phone, then realized it was sitting on the kitchen counter, blocked by the intruder. "Okay, scratch that. I'm going to scream loudly now, and that will bring all the neighbors."

Of course, she knew that no sensible New York City resident would ever respond to such screams--but she hoped the demon wouldn't realize that.

The little imp looked up from his tome at her. "You're not supposed to do that. I've conjured you up and you're supposed to be . . . docile and subservient. It says so right here!" He stabbed a claw onto the page of the open book.

Sylvia approached the circle warily. "Docile. Subservient. This has got to be my worst nightmare." She looked back at the empty cartons of takeout Chinese food she'd eaten earlier, which littered the cocktail table. "Let me guess: This is all about a tainted batch of Moo Shu pork, isn't it? Or an overdose of monosodium glutamate?"

The demon shrugged his shoulders. "I'm only going by what I read."

"Wait a freaking minute," she said. "If you conjured me, what am I still doing here in my apartment? Why haven't I been transported to your . . . to your own lair?"

"It wouldn't work," he said. "You'd surely succumb to the sulfurous atmosphere there. So I made some adjustments, went the extra mile, so to speak. Look, Missy, I'm doing my best to accommodate your needs, here!"

"Thanks for that, Lizardhead. Like you could ever know them. What the H do you want with me, anyway?"

The little green imp dropped his head and shuffled his feet. "I'll be honest with you. The fact is, I'm dying. No more will I walk the beautifully barren wastelands of Hades, nor hear the luxurious lament of doomed souls crying out in their agony. I am soon to be a goner."

"But I thought demons were immortal. Not that I know all that much about that hokey-pokey stuff, mind . . ."

The demon sighed. "I shared Adam's birth date. I played shuffleboard with Noah on the deck of his great ark for forty days and forty nights. I watched expectantly from behind a rock as Abraham held a quivering dagger over his young son's beating breast. Yet I too must perish. There is only one imperative that we all must obey, human and demon both. And that is to pass along our seed to future generations. That is why I conjured you, Sylvia. To pass along my seed."

With that, he grunted and produced a brown, hairy nodule from a fold in his skin, about the size of a walnut, placed it on the floor in front of him, and gave it a push to roll it outside of his protective circle in Sylvia's direction.

She stared down at the nut. "So . . . what am I supposed to do with that ugly, gross thing?"

The demon smiled up at her. "Put it where the sun doesn't shine. You should know what I mean, being a fecund, nurturing female of your species. Insert it into the most appropriate receptacle for growing my seed to fruition."

Sylvia picked the nut up and threw it back at him with as much force as she could muster. "Prevert! Like hell I will!" It missed the imp, ricocheted off the far wall and bounced back, ending up at her feet again.

"Lady, please. Simply put it in a pot of topsoil and water it occasionally. No need to get so bent out of shape about it. Jeepers, that's my progeny you're tossing around so recklessly there. Have a care!"

Sylvia picked the nodule up gently. "Sorry, I got the wrong impression. I thought--"

"I know what you thought," the demon said. "I was just having you on. You certainly wouldn't begrudge an old dying codger a last moment of fun, would you? It's almost as good as sex!"

She nodded knowingly. It was, in fact, akin to the story of her life, continually having to make do with substitutes for good sex. "All right, all right. I'll take care of your damned seed, not to worry. But I don't even know your name. Which seems awkward, considering that you're the father of our . . . baby." She hefted the nut in her hand and gave him a smirk.

"Oh, my true name is unpronounceable by any human. But you may call me 'Gimlet' for short."

Sylvia pointed to Gimlet's book. "I take it that's a grimoire--or a demonic version of one."

The imp blinked at her. "You have your grimoires, we have ours. You summon demons, we summon humans."

"You know, my roommate is an assistant editor for a major publisher. That book might interest them, if first print rights were to be available--on this plane of existence, that is. Not that the money involved would mean anything to you. But the enduring legacy of having your byline in print might appeal."

The demon's beady eyes lit up with green fire. "You think?"

"I definitely think," she said.

"Deal! I have no more need of it." He extended the book beyond the circle and Sylvia took it. His warty lips extended into a huge smile, and he began to fade away inside another cloud of foul-smelling smoke.

Sylvia heard Gimlet's raspy voice issue a final farewell from within the cloying miasma: "Thanks for everything, little mother."

Sylvia, holding the book and the seed to her chest, replied, "And to you too, little father."

When Gimlet was gone, she pitched his seed into the garbage can in the kitchen. But she kept the book, and began thinking of the perfect man she would conjure up with it. Maybe Ted, that major hunk over in Marketing & Sales, the one with great teeth, who always smelled nice. She was sure she could figure out how to make that "docile and subservient" part work right.

Sylvia settled down on her sofa, cracked open the book and got right on it.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Gary Cuba's quirky fiction has appeared in more than forty magazines and anthologies, including _Jim Baen's Universe_ , _Flash Fiction Online_ , _Universe Annex_ ( _Grantville Gazette_ ), _Abyss & Apex_ and _Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine_. He lives with his wife in South Carolina. Links to some of his other published fiction may be found at http://www.thefoggiestnotion.com.

### ABOUT THE ARTIST

Laura Givens is a Denver Based artist and author. Her art has graced the covers of numerous publishers' books and magazines. She has provided story illustrations for _Orson_ _Scott Card's Intergalactic Medicine Show, Jim Baen's Universe, Talebones, Science Fiction Trails and Tales of the Talisman,_ among others. Her work may be viewed at www.lauragivens-artist.com . In 2010 she naively decided she could probably write stories as good as many she had illustrated. She has sold tales ranging from zombie stories to space operas. She was co-editor and contributor to _Six-Guns Straight From Hell_ , a weird western anthology, and is art director for _Tales of the Talisman_ magazine.

Cold Powers

By Spencer Koelle

It began with a speck in the distance. Nothing distinguished this speck from kelp, a seabird, or driftwood, except that it was not any of these familiar things.

Carol Shelley set down the cold fish and her flint knife. She stepped outside the lighthouse keeper's cottage. Ever-present wind and drizzle caressed the island. Thin mist rose off the sea.

The speck looked bigger.

Carol couldn't feel the chill. She returned to the cottage and locked the door for no clear reason.

After breakfast, Carol checked the window. The speck had grown close enough to look wrong. It moved through the water, fast, but left no wake.

She retreated to her workshop, where the statuettes waited. Her hands trembled too much to carve the deep navel of the goddess Debranua, so she polished the three-sided pyramid of blue quartz. Once it shone perfect and smooth, Carol stepped outside again.

The breeze tasted sour. The speck had become a bulge in the ocean, like water rushing over a hidden rock, or a wave that didn't break. The sea should be choppy today. Around the bump, it lay still.

Carol ran inside and searched the shelves for a book of Inuit Legends.

She'd visited the mainland two moons ago, to trade for teabags and flare pistols. She'd felt unwell, and one angry old man glared at her when she sneezed. Later, the radio had mentioned a virus devastating seaside villages.

The book said some shamans could create a tupilak from dead parts and magic, driven by the sole purpose of pursuing the shaman's enemy. A wand of spruce could stop it, the call of a crane could banish it, and a stronger mystic could force the tupilak to turn on its maker.

Once assembled, the shaman must animate the entity by immersing it in the sea.

Carol needed to jump in her boat and sail away. That would mean entering the water. What if the impossible bump circled around her, or hid deeper, and came up straight underneath?

She looked outside. The bump in the water was gone.

~

Carol held still. If she ran, she might run straight towards it. She spun around. Sea spray rose against looming rocks. Dense pine crowded around her, but no spruce grew on the island. Something sharper than rotting fish tainted the still air.

Carol moved toward the dock. The waves and wind died. The drizzle ceased. She must reach the boat. This spit of rock provided nowhere to run. Mist bloomed.

Pebbles crunched under her feet, but all the slow drips and bird cries stopped. The reek of ammonia rose.

Carol almost missed the dock in the heavy fog. Darkness, shorter than trees and taller than the stones, waited on the planks. She fled for the house, and felt it follow.

Carol slammed and bolted the door. She retreated to her workshop and locked both doors in there. Maybe it needed permission to enter, like a vampire.

Something wet slapped against the far wall. Then she smelled ammonia, saw fog curl under the door, and heard the outer wall crumble behind it. She grabbed her pyramid, flare gun, and coat as she kicked open the door.

She tried to double back. At every turn, she caught the dark formlessness in the corner of her eye. It hunted her to the beach. The fog parted.

~

Carol gagged on the chemical reek. Her body cramped. She couldn't shut her eyes.

The tupilak had no color, not even black or grey, just shades. It was amorphous vastness. The thing reached for her, blind and striving.

She fired a flare into the center of the darkness. Something pale appeared, but the tupilak never slowed. There was nowhere to run or hide.

Carol held her crystal masterpiece before her eyes and drew a noxious breath. She stared down the unchanged nightmare, through the prism, and chanted with all her might. It drew closer. She poured everything into a song without words. The shaman pushed back. The impassive tupilak almost touched her. She howled into the air.

"Return!"

The other will broke. The tupilak curled its shapeless bulk, impassive. It bled into the sea. She shivered, too weak to retch or weep. The darkness sank into a bulge. The bulge faded to a speck. The speck faded out of sight, onto the mainland. Miles away, she heard the shaman scream.

### ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Spencer Koelle is a crotchety fantasy author trapped in a young assistant philanthropic consultant's body. He has written two novels and is working on a third, none of them published (yet). He holds Garth Nix in the highest esteem and enjoys referring to himself in the third person. For more of Spencer's work, visit www.spencerkoelle.com

The Drone Controller

By James Valvis

His job was simple. Find the bad guy and take him out.

Or at least it had been until this new, spineless government came along. Suddenly there was a lot of talk about the basic rights of people, that they were entitled to a jury trial, that the government shouldn't eliminate its own citizens for disagreeing or even waging asymmetric war, and blah, blah, blah.

He didn't normally pay attention to politics. He just worried these pansies presently in charge would cost him his job. Because he treasured his job. What was not to love? It was like a video game. Hell, it was a video game. He sat in his one bedroom, government-paid home, pulled out the joystick, positioned the drone, and took out the scum who needed taking out. All that was missing was a score at the top of the screen.

No, he even got that. It came in the form of a direct deposit to his account for every successful kill.

Best of all, even on busy days, he was done no later than noon and had the rest of the day to surf the net.

In the heyday of the Drone of Terror, as they'd been calling it lately on the news, he was one of a hundred Drone Controllers popping off three or four precision rockets a day. Since this new regime took over, however, he was down to one a week on average.

Sometimes he too wondered about the morality of it. Maybe killing shouldn't be so easy, so secondhand. What about collateral damage and harm done to infrastructure? Didn't some cities look like war zones now? Things like that. But he shrugged it off. That kind of nonsense was for the religious and the poets. It wasn't his fault that some people had fallen out of favor with the Leadership. He was just the executioner. Someone else was judge and jury. He didn't even know his targets. And he didn't want to know.

When he woke up that Thursday morning seven weeks after the latest election, his nerves were already teetering. He had received no new targets for twelve and a half days. That was the longest draught yet, and a sign that the new regime, its cabinet now fully in place, intended to keep its word and phase out the Drone Controller Program. Or at least slow it down. Drone Controllers like himself might soon be working the dirt mines on Mars.

It was with some trepidation that he sat down to check for work. He was so relieved to see a new target on the screen, its coordinates already punched in at HQ, that he didn't even bother making himself coffee. He cracked his knuckles at the machine and went straight to work. He grabbed the joystick, noted the calm weather around the coordinates, checked his satellites, and positioned the drone. That would take some time. The drone had to come in high and stealthily across several states or the antiaircraft that anarchists sometimes sent up might get lucky and knock it out of the sky.

He had time for that coffee after all. While he made it, he hummed to himself. It always happened this way. The party out of power complained about the abuses of the party in power—until the people put them in charge. Then, once in charge, they wanted to keep and consolidate their power, not to mention get a measure of revenge, and so the drone attacks started again. Plus there was always the usual problems of crime and terrorism. Order was always the first priority for those in power. Nobody kept hold of their positions long without maintaining it.

People said this new party was going to be different. They said they would dismantle the whole thing. But they had been wrong. The people were always wrong, rushing after every savior with a promise. This morning's new target was proof. He'd been a Drone Controller for almost twenty years and expected to keep at it another forty. It was good, rewarding, and patriotic work.

With the coffee done, he carried his cup back to the terminal. He was humming again, happy. And yet—something was bothering him. Something was just a little off. Not much, just a flickering pixel at the edges of his mind. Maybe it was the coffee. With the drone attacks down and his savings taking a hit, he'd had to switch to Canadian coffee. And Canadian coffee was terrible. It was almost as bad as the orange juice that came out of Iowa.

No big deal. The drone was now in position. Its altitude kept it a safe distance from any possible antiaircraft. This was a necessary precaution. Missiles were cheap, but drones were not, and he didn't intend to lose a drone on his only assignment thus far this month. It would mean the missile would take some time between shooting it off and hitting the target. That hardly mattered. In the half-minute flight from ignition to objective, the person meant for elimination would never see it coming.

He sipped his coffee. Ah, coffee. His brain seemed to need it, even this bitter sludge. He could hardly think without it.

The target, a mere vector on the screen, was now in view. With the joystick, he positioned the drone perfectly and, smiling, hit the fire button. On the screen the missile began its descent.

He set the joystick down. Yes, the good times had returned. Didn't they always?

Now that he had a moment and some caffeine in his system, he thought some more about what had been bothering him earlier. It wasn't the coffee. No. It was something else. A trifle, surely. And yet he could not stop himself from worrying about it. Maybe... maybe had something to do with the coordinates. Yes, that was it. He had seen them before. He knew them. He leaned back in his seat, sipped at his coffee. Then he sat straight up.

Yes, he knew those coordinates.

And this time he also knew the target.

### ABOUT THE AUTHOR

James Valvis is the author of _HOW TO SAY GOODBYE_ (Aortic Books, 2011). He is widely published in places like _Daily Science Fiction_ , _Los Angeles Review_ , _Pedestal Magazine_ , _Potomac Review_ , _storySouth_ , and _Strange Horizons_. He lives near Seattle with his wife, daughter, and toy robots.

The Jabbertown Mystery; or,

The Breathtaking Brunette and the Deadly Catch-Claw

By O'Neil De Noux

A True Account of Adventurer Vincent Daniel's Unraveling the Nonsensical Mystery at Jabbertown and the Breathtaking Brunette's Encounter with the Deadly Catch-claw

The squeak of the saloon's swinging doors turns me around as a slender woman steps in, looks around a moment and moves gingerly to the bar to climb on the stool next to me. I try not to stare. She's very pretty but awfully disheveled, scarlet lipstick smeared, face smudged with dirt, blue eyes raccooned with splotched eye-liner. There's a tumbleweed look to her dark brown hair, a look unintended, I'm sure. Her blouse, once yellow, is filthy with green, brown and black swatches, as are her snug, denim pants. Both blouse and pants are torn in places. She's young, twenty, twenty-two.

"Twas brillig," the counterman tells her as he arrives with a tall glass of ice water.

"Twas brillig," she replies and gulps the water down.

"Slithy toves?" the counterman asks.

"No." She extends the glass for a refill.

"Jubjub?"

"No." She drinks the refill slower.

"Bandersnatch?"

She shakes her head, puts the glass down on the bar and says, "Catch-claw."

The counterman recoils as if she slapped him, turns to us with a fairly-convincing look of terror in his eyes. "Gyre and gimble in the wabe."

I glance at my friend, the great adventurer Vincent Daniel, who narrows his left eye and says, "What the hell language is that?"

As I'm about to say I haven't a clue, it hits me. "It's from a nonsense poem. Nineteenth Century Earth." I should have picked up on the town's name and the street outside, Jabber Walk.

The counterman, a lean man with white hair and a leathery face crevassed from years under the strong Octavion sun, wipes his hands on his apron, asks if we are ready for re-fills.

"Sure." I go back to my MiniMac. I'm writing my friend Vincent's latest adventure: _Deadly Dive at Ichthyosaur Isthmus; or, The Willowy Blond's Brush with Death._

Our cappuccinos come quickly. Vincent adds one sugar cube. I drop in two. The woman orders a triple espresso, climbs off the stool next to me, limps around to sit on the stool on the other side of Vincent. I've seen this often. Tall-dark-and-handsome has a magnetic effect on the opposite sex. One lovely red-headed waif actually faked fainting in front of Vincent's horse to get his attention. She ended up getting plenty attention. But that's another story _. Author's Note: See Flight from a Ferocious Fukuiraptor; or, the Freckle Faced Red-head's Fancy._

"You look familiar." The brunette looks closely at Vincent as she rubs the back of her neck.

Vincent turns to me and I whisper to my MiniMac, " _Stampede of the Stegosaurs; or, Close Call for the Vivacious Vixen._ " The cover pops on the screen and Vincent passes it to the disheveled woman. My best art adorns that particular cover, Vincent yanking Vivien Vernacular from an onrushing herd of rampaging stegosaurs.

The brunette says, "I remember one about a tyrannosaur."

I lean around Vincent, tell the MiniMac to bring up _Attack of the Allosaur; or, The Sizzling Red-Head Uncertainty_. She nods at the art.

"I don't know anyone who's survived an encounter with a tyrannosaur," I add.

"Who are you?" She passes my computer back to Vincent who gives it to me without looking over his shoulder

I tell her, "Jake Dickens. Author and illustrator of the Vincent Daniel adventures."

She tries to run her fingers through her hair, pulls out a twig, two leaves, tells Vincent, "I am indeed fortunate to have found you, Mr. Daniel. We sorely need your help here in Jabbertown."

"We're just passing through." Vincent leaves it to me to explain, which is part of my job.

"We're on our way to Russetville. A scientist thinks he's discovered pre-humans living in the Coral Mountains. From the descriptions, he might be correct."

"More likely they're muggle-heads from Westwego." Vincent is doubtful.

The woman extends her hand for Vincent to shake, which he does.

"Carole Dodge," she says. "I changed it."

"Really?"

"It was Carole Doddgunnardson."

"As in Dr. Horatio Doddgunnardson?"

"You've heard of my father?"

Oh, no.

"Author of the Indigenous Species Act? Who hasn't heard of the meddlesome bas – " Vincent stops himself, picks up his cappuccino and takes a hit, leaving me to elaborate.

"We spent two years working our way across the Milky Way, landing on Octavion to discover some fool passed a law that we could not hunt dinosaurs."

Her triple espresso arrives and she dumps four sugars in it, takes a sip. "You should be thankful. Otherwise you would just be hunters instead of great adventurers."

Author's Note: The Indigenous Species Act, Federal Revised Statute 1117-1950, outlaws hunting or killing indigenous creatures on Planet Octavion except in self-defense. When the first settlers discovered dinosaur-like animals, like tyrannosaurs, on this wild planet, they organized hunting parties. That didn't last long. Scientists, led by Dr. Horatio Doddgunnardson, won that the argument, but we settlers won the big one, the Right of Habitation Act, Federal Revised Statute 1129-1958, which guarantees humans the right to colonize any inhabitable planet, even out here along the backwash of the Milky Way. We must spread our species.

A hideous screech rattles the ancient chandelier and bounces Vincent and me on our stools. Carole and the counterman nod at each other.

"What the hell?" asks Vincent.

"Catch-claw," Carole says, lifting her glass and finishing off the refill.

"Getting close," adds the counterman.

"I was crossing the Borogove when it almost got me." Carole checks her elbow and I see a bruise there. "Chased me all the way to Mimsy Lane."

A louder screech reverberates through the saloon.

"Gonna pass right outside," says the counterman.

"Heading back to the caves."

The counterman shakes his head. "Manxome bastard."

They both look at the saloon doors, which turns our attention that way. The next screech is more of a roar and getting nearer. Vincent eases off his stool and draws both revolvers. I follow him with my semi-automatic in hand now.

_Author's Note: As laser rifles and particle fragmentation guns are illegal on Octavion, the only weapons allowed are pre-21_ st _century Earth weapons, which actually gives us settlers a lot to choose from. At first, only the military and police had weapons but the reach of the old second amendment is vast and every citizen has the right to keep and bear arms, so firearms came to Octavion._

Vincent Daniel stands above me at six-two, with his bronzed complexion, lean physique, deep set, dark brown eyes and that devilish smile. He and I are both twenty-two. As usual, he wears a plaid shirt, this one green and gray, along with faded denims covered in tan chaps, tan cowboy boots and sand-colored Stetson, a blue bandanna around his neck.

Vincent cocks the hammers of his twin Colt .45 pistols with their ivory grips. I grip my nine-millimeter Glock 26, a compact 'baby' Glock, a little over six inches long and carrying twelve bullets. We ease over to the saloon doors and peek out.

The beast growls, deeper and closer, coming from our left. Vincent cracks open the swinging doors and I move around to see. The dusty street is empty except for a full-grown Baryonyx sniffing as it lumbers slowly our way. This particular variation is orange with green horizontal stripes running from its long neck to its longer tail. Its crocodilian snout, lined with rows of sharp teeth, is flat and wide with a sloping forehead. A student of dinosauria, since these creatures are remarkably like the dinosaurs of Earth, I know a Baryonyx is a spinosaurid from the early Cretaceous Period, which came earlier than the tyrannosaurs of the late Cretaceous. Here on Octavion these monsters exist simultaneously. Scientists are baffled. No surprise there. Like T-rex, Baryonyx are biped with rear legs as thick as an oak tree.

Vincent eases the doors shut and peers out the top, while I look from below as the Baryonyx takes exception to a land cruiser parked across the street and swats it with a claw, sending it four feet into the air. Unlike tyrannosaurs, these spinosaurids have hefty arms, muscular, with long talons on their claws.

"Catch-claw," Carole whispers behind us. I catch a whiff of light perfume now as she leans in. "It lumbers through town just after dawn and in late afternoon. Thank goodness it isn't fast, like raptors."

The land cruiser is left upside down, two of its tires bitten off. The baryonyx does not look our way as it continues down the street, kicking up dust, tail swishing behind it.

"We've only lost one settler to the Catch-claw," Carole adds. "Old Callooh Callay. Homeless fellow. Couldn't move quickly enough. Got snatched near the giant Tumtum tree at the far end of town. The Catch-claw is slow but old Callooh was into his liquor and stumbled a lot."

We ease out on the raised wooden sidewalk and watch the Baryonyx leave the small town to go out on the Khaki Plain toward the nearby Ecru Hills.

"It nests in the hills. Big caves there," Carole explains.

We re-holster our weapons and Carole tells us pistols wouldn't be much good against a Catch-claw.

"We have rifles," Vincent says.

"You need a vorpal spear."

It takes me another few seconds to remember. "Shouldn't that be a vorpal sword?"

"No, spear."

"A blade," I counter. "You know. From the poem."

"What poem?" Her blue eyes open wider. Lose the dirt and I'm sure there's a real beauty there.

"The nonsense poem. _Jabberwocky_."

Carole shrugs, touches Vincent's arm. "The only way you can snicker-snack a Catch-claw is with a fire-hardened spear dipped in molten vorpal. We'll need crystalline vorpal. I have a kiln at my studio."

That's enough for me. I go back to my MiniMac and pull up the poem and it's all there, beginning with, "Twas brillig." There's _jubjub, slithy toves_ and _bandersnatch_. Hell, there's even a _mimsy_ , some _borogoves_ and _Callooh Callay_. And I'm right. It's a _vorpal sword_. I wait for Vincent and Carole to step back in but only my friend re-enters.

"Where is she?"

"At her studio. Right down the street. She says to give her time for a quick shower. I offered to assist but she's at the shy stage at the moment."

We return to our cappuccinos.

I state the obvious. "We're not heading to Russetville anytime soon, are we?"

"When I rid the town of the Catch-claw." There's a gleam in Vincent's eyes. "You'll get to draw another picture, write another tale."

"She a paying client? And I mean money."

"She's actually the town's mayor and they have a generous budget."

"And lovely blue eyes."

"There's a body beneath that clothing as well."

We get multiple views of Carole Dodge's naked body as we step into her art studio later. Paintings on two walls, one of her backside as she peers over her shoulder, one reclining on her side, face lit by bright light, her eyes closed. There a nice shot of some full frontal nudity in two photographs on another wall. She's top-heavier than she appeared in the saloon. There's also a life size brass sculpture of naked Carole, arms raised, breasts lifted.

"Did you say 'shy' earlier?"

Carole steps into her studio with a brush in hand. Her hair is wet and she runs the brush through it. She's applied crimson lipstick to her full lips and whatever she put around her eyes make the blue orbs stand out. She's in a short, dark blue, strapless sundress and matching high heels. She smiles.

"My self-portraits out sell the landscapes I paint – five to one."

I look around and there are landscape paintings of the desert, a blue mountain, most likely Mount Azure, the Sienna plain, a river. No need to point out the obvious. Naked Carole trumps a desert scene.

Carole breezes over to Vincent, goes up on her toes and brushes her lips against his.

"The lipstick won't smudge," she says, parting her lips to give Vincent a real kiss. Carole eventually disengages herself from Vincent and comes straight to me, brushes my lips and then French kisses me right there.

"You're kinda cute," she tells me as she pulls away, running the brush through her hair again. "We double up on jobs around here. The counterman at the saloon is chief of the fire brigade Our librarian runs the massage parlor. I'm mayor and town whore."

Did she just say _whore_? Vincent and I exchange a 'did I just hear that' look.

"It's how I got elected."

I'm at a lost for words.

Vincent is not. "So where exactly do we find crystalline vorpal to melt down? It's rare, isn't it?"

"Good news and bad news. The only known deposit in this hemisphere is three miles from where we stand, out on the Khaki Plain. Its where the Maya Blue River narrows before merging with the Persian Blue River. You had to cross one to get here. There are huge boulders, vorpal boulders there for the picking.

"The bad news. They lay in Tulgey Woods where a colony of jubjub birds nest."

"What exactly is a jubjub bird?"

Carole goes to the far wall, reaches for a portfolio on the shelf and takes it to a drawing table. A moment later we're looking at a rather good pen-and-ink depiction of a pterodactyl.

"There are at least a hundred roosting in Tulgey Woods. You haven't enough bullets."

I see a sly look in Vincent's eyes as he grins. "Pterodactyl aren't nocturnal."

"Neither are we. Have you seen a Bandersnatch up close? They _are_ nocturnal."

"Bandersnatch?"

She flips through her portfolio to show us an excellent rendition of a velociraptor.

"Damn," I say.

Vincent stretches, still grinning. "We'll go a few hours before dawn. The raptors will have fed by then and the pteros will be snoozing." He puts a hand on Carole's shoulders. "You see, we have night vision goggles."

"Aren't they illegal?"

"So are sonar bouncers." He adds. "Where is there a decent place to eat around here? We've some hours to kill."

Carole leads us up the block. People mill about, a few examining the unfortunate land cruiser. It isn't much of a restaurant but the food smells wonderful and my first bite of steak is too good for me to ask what kind of meat I'm eating. On Octavion, one never knows. As Vincent so aptly puts it, "It's all in the seasoning."

I flip open my MiniMac and show Carole _Jabberwocky_ by Lewis Carroll. She reads it slowly, her lips moving as she reads.

"Quite clever, Mr. Lewis. When did you find time to write this? When I was showering?"

"Dickens. My name is Jake Dickens." I point to the screen. " _Jabberwocky_ was written in 1872. That's old Earth time."

Carole passes the MiniMac back and picks up her cherry phosphate, takes a sip and says, "Don't be silly."

"Bandersnatch? Tumtum tree? Vorpal sword? Jabber Walk? Who named everything around here, anyway?"

Carole takes a bite of her vegetable wrap, smiles again. "The great namer of names. He left a text in the library at Scarlet City. Everything in Jabbertown came from the ancient legend."

Vincent is content to let me do the talking as he watches this beauty – and Carole Dodge is a beauty all cleaned up and obviously available with her second profession in mind.

"You're talking about John Joseph André?" I ask.

"Oh, yes. He discovered the union of the two rivers here and the fact Jabbertown rests at the center of the continent along Octavion's equator, equidistant from both pole. He also found the vorpal and the fields of aqua clover, the fastest growing plant on Octavion." She holds up her wrap to show a blue-green leaf. "More vitamins than spinach, more protein than soy. You saw the farms on your way in, didn't you?"

Author's Note: The famous explorer John Joseph André became infatuated with the colors on Octavion, which are, frankly, brighter, more vivid than on Earth. He called himself the namer of names as he discovered mountain ranges, rivers, plains and seas all over Octavion and named each, such as the Cinnamon Hills, Cobalt Sea, Cerulean Sea, Magenta and Indigo Forests, Mount Azure, Viridian Sea. He also named much of the flora. And apparently, Jabbertown.

Which is why we have a Khaki Plain, a Maya Blue River and Persian Blue River.

"You mentioned a legend."

"The ancient legend."

"From where?"

"Here." Carole talks patiently to me as if she's explaining it to a child.

"How can a legend be ancient here? Jabbertown was built, how many years ago?"

"Four."

I'm getting nowhere.

"I have you know I have a history degree from Scarlet University."

Vincent clears his throat and says, "Did you sleep with your professors?"

"Just the male ones." There is no guile in Carole's voice. She smiles warmly and I think I may be falling in love with her. I can see Vincent's fallen in lust with her. She's his kind of woman, one dedicated to giving and receiving pleasure from many rather than to someone boring, like a husband.

~

Neither Vincent's palomino Hank nor my ovaro Oliver spook easily and we ride them out of town at three a.m. _Author's Note: Roughly the same size as Earth, Octavion days are slightly longer._

At seventeen hands tall, Hank is a handsome stallion with a golden hide, blond mane and long tail. Oliver's pinto spots are black, brown and tan on his white coat. He's a good fourteen hands and a feisty stallion. The horses do not get along.

Jabbertown is twelve blocks long and ten blocks wide, not including the wharves along the river. The solar powered streetlights grow dim behind us as we move on to the Khaki Plain. As darkness envelops us, we don our night vision goggles, power them up and everything grows bright around us.

We're heavily armed, each with twelve-gauge shotguns loaded with buckshot, as well as Winchester .30-.30 rifles, our handguns, flash grenades, smoke grenades and the most effective weapon against raptors – sonar bouncers whose high-pitched wail will repulse the most ravenous velociraptor. Humans cannot hear it, neither can horses. It causes excruciating pain in a raptor. We ride in silence, looking and watching as we approach Tulgey Woods.

Before leaving town, we'd negotiated a generous fee from Mayor Dodge, who was all business. Later, as we mounted out steeds, Vincent casually asked me, "Do you know how much vorpal is worth?"

I haven't a clue.

He'd looked it up on my MiniMac while I was napping. It is the rarest, most valuable mineral on Octavion. Its uses are many, as vorpal is common on near-Earth planets, but not out here along the Milky Way's backwash. Apparently, once smelted with sulfur and white phosphorus it hardened into a dense mass. In its pure form, crystalline vorpal is the finest conductor of electricity in the known universe. When I read terms like 'known universe' I cannot help wondering what goes on in the 'unknown universe'. Must be fascinating. I wonder if gravity ever fails there.

Tulgey Woods is not dense. Its wide-spaced tumtum trees give the pterodactyls plenty wing-room to swoop. Thankfully, they are asleep, hanging upside down from the branches like twenty pound carnivorous bats.

Vincent waves to me, points at the ground and dismounts. Crystalline vorpal lies in chunks around us, some as big as a man, several much larger, many much smaller. We pick up the ones we can handle and stuff them into the large saddle bags on our mounts. Oliver is skittish and I see a pterodactyl spread its wings, flap once, then fold its wings to resettle.

As we slip away from Tulgey Woods, Vincent eases closer and says, "Did you see the huge boulders?"

"Yes."

"We need earth grabbers, land rovers."

What appears to be a huge boulder crosses in front of us and we both have to rein our steeds as a full grown nodosaur hurries by, baying at us. We pull back to avoid the swinging club at the end of the tail of this turtle-like creature.

"So that's what we saw back there," Vincent says.

"What?"

"Didn't you see a couple empty shells back there? Something's eating nodosaurs and it isn't raptors. They're too small."

I spot the dim lights of Jabbertown as we lope back across the Khaki Plain. Hank bolts and Vincent hangs on. Oliver won't be left behind and we gallop for the town. I look around and sure enough, three streaking shadows on our right are closing fast. Four more approach from the left, cutting us off. They are so swift, we barely have time to pull out the sonar bouncers and point them at the raptors. Vincent focuses on the ones on the left, I focus on the others and press the 'on' button. Two seconds later, I wonder if they are broken. Another second shows me they aren't as the raptors twist away, heads jerking as they screech so loudly I have to hold on tightly as Oliver outraces Hank to Jabbertown.

We arrive in time to spot the Catch-claw waltz down main street, right past us as it head in the direction we came.

~

Carole is in the workshop behind her studio and has the kiln fired up and six long spears already sharpened to wicked points. The counterman from the saloon dons a heavy canvass body suit with a welder's helmet. Apparently he is also the town welder-smelter. His name turns out to be, not too surprisingly – Snark. From another nonsense poem by, you guessed it, Lewis Carroll. We stay across the room as Snark smelts the vorpal, mixing it with liquid sulfur. He pours the concoction into a cauldron with liquid white phosphorous and we have to go outside to allow the fumes to evaporate.

I'm thinking Carole has a date later as she's in a fitted red dress, short enough to show most of her shapely thighs and all of her slim calves. It's low cut as well and from the impressions through the cloth, she's wearing nothing beneath the dress. She's also in high heels and Vincent is trying not to stare. I stare.

Snark goes back into the workshop while we go into the saloon for some cool iced coffee. Caffeine – we need to keep our wits about if we're going after a Baryonyx with a damn spear. Carole joins us.

"What we need is a fifty caliber machine gun," I say as we sip whipped cappuccinos.

The scarlet lipstick on Carole's lips glisten even under florescent light. "Snicker-snack. Vorpal will slice right through to the Catch-claw's heart."

"Just how many are there?"

"Just the one."

"All we're bound to do is get it angry," I say.

Carole just smiles. "My father's law doesn't even apply here. This is self-defense. We tried setting up feeding stations outside town, but the ugly brute just wanders through to Tulgey Woods."

Snark comes out later and announces the spears should be ready for the Catch-claw's late afternoon jaunt through Jabbertown. I can't help peeking as Carole climbs off the stool and I'm right. No underwear. She tells us she'll see us later. Has business to attend. Right.

We go to our room. I take a nap while Vincent turns on my MiniMac. Just as I'm dozing, flashes of Baryonyx, swooping pterodactyls and rumbling nodosaurs ranging though my mind, he says, "I've found four markets for vorpal. I tell you, there's a fortune out there for the picking."

"Nodosaurs," I tell him. "The Baryonyx feeds on them. Its food source is in Tulgey Woods. They built Jabbertown on its food trail."

I manage to get a few hours sleep.

Outside Carole's studio, we find her in an extra-short, fly-away blue skirt matching her eye color and a white blouse. The skirt is gauzy and as I said, fly-away, as the gentle breeze floating down the street raises the it. She wears white panties and even in this century, the sight of a pretty woman's panties has an electric effect on men, me especially. I almost walk into a street pole and Vincent's no better, tripping over a root in the dusty road.

Carole giggles as Snark comes out of her workshop with two long spears. He passes one to each of us and goes back for the others.

"What, we just stand here and toss these at the Baryonyx as it passes."

"No. You toss it at the Catch-claw," Carole answers. "We've no spears to waste on practice."

And get ready to run.

"Are you able to run in those high heels?" I ask Carole.

"I dance in these. I can outrun a Catch-claw."

"You almost didn't yesterday."

"I got caught up in a garden of outgrabe bushes. Could not see over them. Apparently the Catch-claw could see me or smell my perfume. He almost got me twice, before I slipped away."

We wait on the wooden sidewalk of the dirt lane. Snark has the spears propped against a nearby wall. Vincent's packing his revolvers and I had my semi-auto in its holster. I stand holding both our lever-action Winchesters, each with twenty .30-.30 hollow point rounds.

The Baryonyx is on time, lumbering up the street, tail swishing, head moving back forth. I hope it had a nice meal, a belly full of nodosaur. It does not seem to notice us until Vincent Daniel, the great adventurer, strolls into the street in its path. Vincent lifts the vorpal spear and takes two steps forward and chunks it. The vorpal tip strikes the beat on the forehead and bounces off.

"The head too hard!" Carole calls out as I run to hand Vincent a second spear, then rush back to Snark to get another. Vincent sends the second spear lower and it strikes the beast's mouth and bounces off. I hand him a third and run back to the wooden sidewalk. Vincent moves closer to us and throws again. The spear strikes the Baryonyx square in the chest. It hangs there a moment before the beast swats it away and growls at us, its beady eyes focusing our way.

The next spear clips the right side of its jaw. The creature raises its head to howl in anger and Vincent rushes forward, using the momentum to hurl the fifth spear into the Baryonyx's belly. It sticks but only for a moment as the beast screeches and swipes the spear away.

Vincent comes back for the final spear, which Carole holds out for him. He reaches for a rifle and Carole grabs it.

"No. It has to be a vorpal blade!"

Great. I put my rifle down, keep Vincent's and wait for the damn thing to come for us. Hell if I'm going to stand here with a working rifle and let a Baryonyx get too close.

Vincent moves in front of the beast and backs up, getting a good bead on it. The Baryonyx raises its head and roars, then coughs and wavers. It takes another step, stops and looks around. The huge creature slowly pirouettes – that what it looks like to me – and collapses. It's not breathing right and the damn thing's eyes are closed.

I move into the street and Vincent joins me as me approach the Baryonyx. Its labored breathing slows and it stops moving. My friend leaps up on the beast, stands on its chest and raises the last spear with two hands and plunges it into the massive chest.

I climb up and it appears the Baryonyx is _dead_.

"How far did your spear go in?"

"Couple inches," Vincent whispers. He doesn't let go of the spear as it will just fall away.

"What killed it?"

"I think it had a heart attack. Maybe it's real old."

"How can you tell?"

"It moved slow, didn't it?"

"Well, if it gets up, we'll have to use the guns, I suppose."

Standing on the Baryonyx of Jabbertown, I have an epiphany watching the poor thing. All it did was cut through town on its way to feed. My epiphany, something I've been wrestling with for a long time. Dr. Horatio Doddgunnardson was right about killing these beasts.

No doubt I have my latest cover, as I can envision my illustration of Vincent Daniel standing atop the beast with spear raised. We climb down and Carole rushes over.

"Oh, my beamish boy!" Carole leaps at Vincent, grabbing his neck, wrapping her legs around his waist. She kisses his cheeks, then his mouth and it appears they are going to do it right there, but they manage to stop themselves as people – I hadn't realized there were that many people in Jabbertown – come out to see the dead Catch-claw.

~

The great adventurer Vincent Daniel sits perched on a stool sipping a triple espresso as I read "Jabberwocky" by Lewis Carroll aloud. We're the only customers in the place. Snark isn't listening.

"Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;

All mimsy were the borogoves,

And the mome raths outgrabe.

'Beware the Jabberwock, my son!

The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!

Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun

The frumious Bandersnatch!'

He took his vorpal sword in hand..."

"See, I told you it was a _sword._ "

Vincent grins at me and says, "Mayor Dodge has given up her second job to a willowy blond, whose also the town's nurse. You saw her yesterday out on the street. Hard to miss the lovely with long yellow-blond hair and eyes brighter blue than Carole's. I saw her. She wore a white dress, looked nurse-like and I wonder if she can pull off the second job.

"So Carole's down to one job."

"No, two. She and I and you are equal partners in our new venture, Three-D Vorpal Exports.

"Three-D?"

"Daniel, Dodge and Dickens."

Carole steps in with the willowy blond. Both wear snug-fitting denim pants and black, see-through tops. Carole wears a white lacy bra beneath her. Miss Blond wears nothing beneath hers and her breasts look positively luscious.

"Twas brillig," Carole says as she kisses Vincent's lips.

Miss Blond breezes over to me, extends a hand. "Twas brillig."

"And the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe."

She's confused. "We haven't been introduced. I'm..."

"Don't tell me. Alice, right?"

"Yes."

Carole sits next to Vincent and Alice comes around to sit by me. If I'm not her first customer, I'm about to be her latest. Snark brings fresh cappuccinos for everyone.

"What I cannot figure," I tell them. "Is how Lewis Carroll knew about vorpal blades."

"What do you mean?" asks Carole.

"Who's Lewis Carroll?" asks Alice and I like her more by the minute.

"There's no vorpal on Earth," I explain. "How did a Nineteenth Century British writer know about it?"

Vincent's brow furrows. Carole shrugs. Alice winks at me.

I love it when no one knows when I'm joking.

### ABOUT THE AUTHOR

O'Neil De Noux has published ten novels, eight short story collections and has over 300 short story sales. He writes in multiple genres: crime fiction, science fiction, fantasy, horror, western, literary, children's fiction, mainstream, humor, religious, romance and erotica. His short fiction has won the SHAMUS and DERRINGER Awards. His novel, _JOHN RAVEN BEAU_ is the 2011 Police Book of the Year (Police-Writers.com). He is also the author of the historical epic _BATTLE KISS_.

