 
Selected Short Stories

featuring

Cockfight

by Nicolas Wilson

2013 Smashwords Edition

#  Foreword

Hi. I'm Nic. This is a short story collection of mine. Other stories and information about upcoming work can be found on my website: www.nicolaswilson.com. Interspersed with these short stories, you'll find snippets of novels I'm working on. I'm calling them entertisements, because the word amuses me. Keep going to reach the fiction, or you can view the Table of Contents (including synopses of the stories in this collection).

Conflict

My wife is going to kill me. I haven't unearthed clandestine documents or a dark co-conspirator. But it's coming.

Emily and I are newly-weds, married only 9 months. By most accounts, the honeymoon shouldn't be over yet. But the ardent love of our foibles and failings is nonexistent. She doesn't even watch the shows we used to watch together anymore.

The other night, her ring brushed against my cheek, and I stirred. The diamond was red-brown. I tried to ignore it, but it got to me, and I tossed for twenty minutes. I tried to pull it from her finger. I got soap, and a little bit of that massage oil she used to love, but it wouldn't budge. And I couldn't sleep next to her, with that red diamond shimmering at me in the moonlight.

She woke me the next morning on the couch. She seemed hurt that I'd left her all alone. I asked her about her ring, and she broke down.

The day before, a co-worker, Martha Groom, from accounting, had confronted her. Emily'd been shaving money off the top of her budget, and placing it into a war chest, a discretionary account she planned to use to get her team the new project. Martha, a woman in her fifties who looked like a woman in her sixties, demanded ten percent off the top of the account, or she was going to report her.

And my wife punched her in the eye. Her diamond cut a slice off the old woman's eyelid as she fell over, and she hadn't noticed the blood. Emily scrubbed it away, but underneath, the stone had taken on a pink hue. I wanted to tell her, but I hadn't slept well on the couch, and didn't have the energy for another fight.

Martha never told on her, and Emily used the money to put together a catered presentation that won her the project. I don't know if they'd come to an understanding, or if women bond after a physical confrontation like men do, but she invited Martha onto the project, as well. Meanwhile, things at home became even more tense. She spent most of her days at work, and I started to wonder if she was having an affair.

She bought a machete. I know I haven't taken excellent care of our back yard, and it has taken on a jungle life of its own. But she didn't put the machete in the garage, with the mower and the trimmer, the spades and hoes and shovels. She keeps it in her nightstand, beneath a copy of a Greg Campbell book.

By now her ring has taken on a red ochre. I mentioned during a dinner I cooked that perhaps she'd spilled wine on it, and she stabbed me with her salad fork. I'm glad I didn't tell her while we were eating steak, which she now demands rare.

And all the while, my discomfort, and my anger remained focused on her ring. I don't understand how I knew, but I knew. I checked on the statistics. Less than 1% of diamonds come from conflict regions, their purchase largely benefiting rebel and insurgent militants.

Through a series of long distance communications and bribes, I tracked her diamond to a remote location in Darfur. The village had been decimated by the Janjaweed militants, and the villagers' bodies dumped in mass graves. The local people had believed in the power of their ancestors in their lives, to aid them if revered, or curse them if slighted.

That's why I've decided to cut off her finger. I love my wife. I love her enough to mutilate her. For a week she's been whispering in her sleep, about violence, and murder, and every now and then, me. She only drinks Cabernet Sauvignon now, and I poured her an entire bottle before bed. But I'll have to move quickly— she keeps her machete razor-sharp, and her hand on her night stand.

Table of Contents

Marvin's Dead

I've been married for 32 years- I mean, I had been. Marvin and I met in school, a junior college as it was known then. He was a funny little man, and I paid him little attention. I might never have spoken more than a few words to him, but one day going to class I spilled coffee all over him. He insisted on buying me another cup (as I said, he was a funny little man), and we talked as I drank it. We missed our class; we missed all our classes that day. We might have stayed and missed the rest of our lives, but the coffee place was closing, and they shooed us away. I wanted to go home with him, or to dinner- to prolong that moment together. He smiled, and said coolly, "I'll see you tomorrow." And in class the next day he sat behind me, as he always did, and when class was over he slipped his hand in mine and I was his from that moment.

We went through the usual stages, lust, puppy love, then a real love, a decade of being soul mates, to a point where we were simply the deepest of friends- which may not sound like progress, but if you manage not to divorce or die long enough, it will make sense to you. Between those markers, we moved in together and married, bought a house, and tried half-heartedly to have children. And now that man I shared my life with is dead.

I brought another man to his funeral. I suppose Marvin wouldn't mind- doesn't mind, I guess. This man is so like Marvin, in his smile, his blue eyes, the sound of his voice, and even the way he holds my hand. My eyes tear up, and I look from this other man to my husband's empty casket.

Marvin had a severe stroke; it damaged his ability to feel. The funeral was his doctor's idea; I was skeptical at first, but within a week I understood what he meant when he told me, "the man you loved is gone." He remembers most things; sometimes he even remembers to say that he loves me, though we both can tell he wouldn't know how anymore. The cruelty is that he knows what he's lost, and even in the rare moments he smiles, he doesn't know he's happy.

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Jahannam

I walk several blocks out of my way to pass down the street where my father was kidnapped at gunpoint. I sold the car we were riding in to pay his ransom, which is just as well; being on foot brings a safety born of anonymity.

For a few blocks, I find myself traveling against a stream of people, excited and scared, but orderly; it's not the first time most of them have evacuated a city street. I come upon the bombed-out corpse of a city bus, and try not to tread upon the remnants of its passengers.

I open my phone and hit redial. It rings, and sends me straight to my father's voicemail. I stopped leaving new messages a week ago. I pass the trash bin I left his ransom in, and peek discreetly inside, not knowing what I hope to find.

In the side street I see an officer gunned down; he fires a pistol against two rifles, and falls. I don't know if he is American or Iraqi, but no one comes out of hiding to help as his murderers drive away. I watch them until their dust-trail disappears, and I check my phone, to see if I've missed a call.

It's before ten, but there are already thirty coffins lining the street outside the Al-Tub al-Adli morgue. The guard at the checkpoint stops me, but remembers my face, and waves me through. The smell of bodies and antiseptics touches me as I walk past him, and he avoids my eyes.

Women shrouded in black exit a bus, trying to muffle their grief. A police truck dumps the last of its bodies into the street; the overworked porter is a half-dozen corpses behind. I consider helping carry them in, but as I bend near one, a woman recognizes her husband, and leaps into the arms of another woman and wails.

The building is made of yellowed stone, and the air is slightly colder than the outside. The three storage rooms are full, and the bodies have started to take up residence in the halls, stacked and leaned against the walls to preserve the walkway.

Every body has a story behind it: some of them Saddam's Baathist allies and others their opposite numbers from the Dawa party, some merely Sunni and others merely Shia. Their bodies are stacked together in the same piles on the same cold ground.

Many are bound or handcuffed, with cellophane tape over their eyes, and bullets in their heads. Some bear burns on their hands and feet, and others evidence of torture with electricity, acid, and drills.

I enter another room, where family members watch a monitor as digital photos flash over the screen. Every few minutes, a body covered in lacerations or holes is claimed by a sobbing loved one, and the room forgets they're strangers, and do what they can to offer comfort.

After some time, I recognize the bodies, not as living souls, but simply because the pictures have started their cycle over. As I step back onto the street, I feel infected with death, and I start the walk back home.

The signs all say Baghdad, but I know that's a lie.

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#  Font of Youth

I came to live among the Calusa from La Navidad, Columbus' doomed colony, built from the remains of the Santa Maria. My peers mistreated the native peoples, and the natives destroyed La Navidad. They let me live, though not there, and I cobbled together a raft of what remained of La Navidad and sailed for the mainland.

When I arrived I was found by the Calusa. In translation something was lost, and they believed I arrived by shipwreck- and I realized the wisdom in preserving this confusion, even as the years passed and their language became natural to me.

I feel bad for Juan, and always have. His entire life he dreamed, of something, and someone, always beyond the reach of his fingers. And in his whole life, he had but one opportunity to seize it. I spoke to him in 1513, when he arrived on the coast of Florida. He attempted to speak with the Calusa, and that was when he saw her, and knew her. But negotiations for trade did not go well that day; I had lived among the Calusa for nearly twenty years and spoke enough Spanish still to translate, but the Spaniards wanted too much, and they left with nothing that day.

Before the next morning, an attack occurred. I believed, then as now, that the attack was orchestrated by the Calusa nobility, who feared the threat of another power in their lands, and feared most strongly that the Spanish Catholics would replace their three gods, and in doing so remove their divine place among the Calusa people. Whatever the case, the Spaniards repelled the attack, and a larger assault at noontime was also inconclusive.

So Juan sailed away, back to Puerto Rico. But he did not forget the woman he saw- a simple woman, as he could tell, unlike the adorned nobles. He knew her in his heart and in his dreams- knew her more than he could possibly have understood. He was not a young man, then, though not yet an old one, even by the standards of that day.

When he returned in 1521, he was a changed man. His earlier expeditions had brought him wealth, and notoriety, but his health was failing him. And his dreams, his dreams of the woman, were full of imagery of youth and beauty, and always among the lush lands of the Calusa, where that woman told him to seek out the waters of life. He understood that the way to the heart of a woman, and a people, is proximity, and organized a colony that would coexist nearby.

The Calusa, by contrast, were not a changed people. If anything, the years between had hardened them, as rumors of Cortes' excesses and further exploration and colonization by the Spanish unnerved them. A colony they could never tolerate. Juan came by boat to the shore; it was eerily alike the events of eight years previous, only this time the Calusa didn't put up an amiable front, and shot arrows at Juan's boat. One of the arrows, dipped in the poisonous sap of the mancinella tree, struck Juan in the shoulder as the boat turned to flee.

That night, I snuck away from the Calusa, and sailed out to Juan's ship. I was nearly shot by his first mate, until they discovered I spoke Spanish, and he recognized me as the man they'd met eight years earlier. He took me to Juan. I told him the Arawaks made a poultice of arrowroot that could save him, and he set sail for Cuba.

Enroute, he told me I had not aged a day in eight years, that I was proof enough that the woman he sought was the font of youth. He told me he'd kept a separate journal, about that woman he'd seen in his dreams, and twice on the beach among the Calusa. He explained, "The men, you see, the lot, are superstitious, cowardly. Were they to know we sought not treasure, but legend, they would mutiny. This font has brought me naught but ruin; I will die, and when I do, burn the journal, that no souls follow me to the hell of knowing paradise, and being denied it."

Juan died in Havana, never knowing the woman who haunted him. I remained with his ship to its return to Puerto Rico, and burned the journal as I said I would. Then I returned to the Calusa; I'd lived as a Calusa for thirty years- twice as long as I'd been with the Spanish.

Of course, I could not help but hear Juan's words when I saw her, a woman who lived in the village at least as long as I had, and who had not aged a day for it. And the explorer's dreams visited me, and I saw her as he saw her.

Still, I might never have approached her; I was Calusa more than Spanish, but still separate, held at an arm's distance. I lived with one of the village elders, Calos, who had taken me in when I was still young. His wife had died before I arrived; his son moved into a home of his own shortly after. But one evening, Calos was away visiting his sister, who had taken ill. I was meant to stay the evening with Calos' son, but I ate too heavily at dinner, and fell to sleep too early.

When I awoke in the dark, she was there. She told me her name was Lilu. She stayed into the morning, and even after Calos' return, she did not leave. Neither he nor anyone seemed disturbed in the least by the turn.

After a few months, Calos' sister died. By the end of a year he joined her, out of grief, I suspect. I noticed that Calusa women aged more quickly than the men, and that some of the men appeared to age more slowly than others. These men, I noticed too, smiled at Lilu, where others merely nodded. I did not ask how she knew them- I simply understood it.

Calos' home became mine. I thought of a family of my own with Lilu, but though we both appeared young enough, she bore me no children. In fact, unlike the other women of the village, she did not bleed on the month; she did not bleed at all. But I loved her enough that her barrenness was a trifling matter, and time passed, forty years, in fact.

The Calusa believe a person has three souls, the soul in the pupils of the eyes, the soul in a shadow cast, and the soul in a reflection. I found myself marveling at the soul still burning brightly in Lilu's eyes, and the face still soft and young and unchanged. I marveled more at my reflected soul in a pool of water we used for drink- as young as when I'd first drank there. And I knew, somehow instinctually, that it was not this water, nor any other pool, which kept me youthful, but the woman Juan had chased all his life.

And then one night she moved on. My neighbor's wife had taken ill from a disease I would later learn to fear as smallpox. She died in bed beside him, and he woke beside Lilu instead. I saw her when I emerged from my home in the morning, and my anguish showed on my face. An old man walked slowly to me, and smiled, and it is a smile I know now came from experience. "It's simply her way," he said.

But it was not, and could not, be mine. I had become Calusa, but for me, she had become what Calusa meant, and so I had to be something else, and thought I'd try to be a Spaniard again.

Havana was the epicenter of the Spanish trade with the Caribbean, and it wasn't long before I secured passage on a ship; after all, I knew enough of sailing to come along on the Santa Maria. In Spain, I spent a time as a translator, but I hadn't been a Spaniard for too long a time; this wasn't home anymore, either.

I crossed the ocean again. Planning to set across the continent, I stopped among the Calusa, and though I knew myself a fool, inquired after Lilu. The man whose wife had died of smallpox died of it, too, and there was nothing left to keep her there, so she moved on.

I thought perhaps then, that I would stumble upon her, as I had before; but I knew from Juan that to chase her was to embrace a sad and lonesome oblivion. If it were fated, I knew that in the time I must still have that we would meet again, and if it were not, then I had already lived a lifetime's worth.

How little did I know then; I have lived four hundred years since. I have loved, I have lied, fought, stolen, murdered, worked my hands to bone. I have fathered and raised several children, and known many women and men, but I have never seen a soul like Lilu's. And what I've learned, perhaps what I've known since very near to the beginning, is she was the source of my youth and my longevity, and only because I let her go was she not my ruin also. She was the font of youth Juan sought so desperately, and loved so disastrously.

Font comes from the Latin fontis, meaning basin; I would not be the first to compare the womb to such an object. But the feminine word also means fountain, as a life-giving spring whose presence brings health in a community. Through my years, I have entertained many wild imaginings, including that Lilu was the Apocryphal Lilith. She was neither goddess nor daemon as my eyes could tell, though through a lover's eyes she was as perfect as any woman could be.

I've seen her once since then, in a crowd in a picture taken in Paris, in the 1970s, and I am certain she exists even still. I've been called Escalante Fontaneda, among many other things. I'm dying now, as Juan was then, as much from lack of her as anything else.

Table of Contents

Four Degrees Above Freezing

It was the fastest I'd seen the ME move. He beat me to the call by at least five minutes. But it turned out he was already at Larry's, buying a six pack of piss-warm Bud Light when the page went out. When I asked if anything was out of the ordinary, he exhaled through his mustache. "Body core temperature of 36 Fahrenheit." He said it like it meant something, but didn't elaborate.

"How cold is it outside, Larry?" I asked. He stared at the mercury thermometer like he was reading a fine print book.

"Thirty eight, thirty seven." I walked over.

"It's almost forty one. Did you and Cheryl get in a fight, Larry?"

"No, sir," he said.

"When'd you see her last?"

"Couple days." His face was old, sad, worn, but his eyes wouldn't leave me.

"Where'd you find the body, Larry?" He adjusted his hat over his silvering hair. "Out back." He turned like a mastodon and lumbered across the floorboards like his grief was chained to his ankles.

There was a sign on the refrigerator by the counter that said "Sale - All Coke Products 50%." Every two liter and glass bottle was gone, but the cans, which seemed to be the reason for the sale, were stacked unsteadily in their place in the warm fridge. "You coming?" Larry asked, stalled at the back door. "Yeah."

"I, I found her back here. Beside the dumpster, but hidden so's I didn't see her until I came back to empty the trash." His knees failed him and he caught himself on the edge of the dumpster. I helped him stand, and he leaned heavy on my shoulder.

"Take her easy," I said. There was a buzzing sound behind me, like a bug zapper. It was the old Coke machine, washing the back of the store in a diseased, red light.

The marquee display on the Coke machine flashed its internal temperature, as if the promise of a cold drink was endorsement enough. "She was laying on her front, looking behind the dumpster. There was, there was a rat, sitting in the corner there, staring at her, like..." and I almost dropped him on the pavement.

"Come on, Larry. You need something cool to drink." His feet stopped moving, just planted on the concrete. "I'll buy you a Coke. On me."

"I'm not thirsty." He wouldn't budge, so I pulled until he tipped over, and he fell in step. I dropped three quarters into the machine, and it spat them all out at me. The display flashed red, angry letters at me: EMPTY.

"Now Larry, why would this machine be empty if you've got a dirge of cans just inside the door? Maybe folks buy in ones or twos to get them cold, but at the sale price for a buck you get six cans." The lock was busted clean open. "When did you report the door broken, Larry?"

"Few days ago." I pulled on the face of the machine, and it swung open. The machine had been gutted, all the cans and racks removed. It stank of lemon. "You kill Cheryl the same day?"

He started to shake. "Christ, Bill, you don't understand." I took him as far as the back wall of his store and he used the wall to prop himself up.

"No, Larry. Don't think I will, either."

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# Falstaff

"But Sir John, I saw you die."

I ran my stubby fingers over my sparse, white beard. "You heard of my death. You may have even seen my corpse in the street, or in the ground. But as I am not dead, you could not have witnessed it. Now drink."

That gave him pause, but it would take more than a moment's breath to recover from the thumping I'd given him. At first pass, he refused to drink of my flask, but he understood that he was beaten already, his refusal symbolic only, and swallowed whole. He made a face as the liquid passed over his tongue, then when he spoke his voice was only a whisper. "I saw you in that tavern alive, and your king dead, when it was you who should be dead. I knew the two could not be separate events."

"I doubt it to be true- you did not stumble upon me- I came here for you."

"You're a liar, Sir John, and we've known long enough not to trust you."

"My lies, yes... the histories would have you believe that Prince Henry killed Hotspur Percy at Shrewsbury, that I took credit for his victory. Henry was 16 at the time, and gangly even for that age. Hotspur was a man of 39, who had fought enough and fiercely to earn his name as a horseman. Hotspur was impetuous- and that was his downfall- but it was not at the sword of Henry, nor in truth at the end of a sword at all."

"In the heat of battle, Hotspur lifted the visor on his plate for fresher air, only to have a bolt lodge in his jaw. I have little doubt Henry fired that bolt; he was one of very few on the field to carry a crossbow. But Hotspur was removed from the field, and taken to a tent with his surgeon, and here is where my claim at his death originates. You see, a noble may not die from even so grievous a wound; Henry himself survived an arrow through his cheek that day, due to the skill of his father's surgeon."

"The conflict has been called part of the war of roses; Henry fought under the red rose of Lancaster, Hotspur under the white rose of York. So with white rose thread through my tunic, I walked cross Hotspur's line unchecked. I was nary bothered at the entrance to his surgeon's tent, where I killed patient and physician in silence upon a dagger. The better part of valour is discretion. I see 'coward' quiver on your lips; to kill a nobleman in darkness is better than to kill a hundred-fifty peasants in day's light, and that was the bargain I struck when I struck him down. His rebellion ended there- though his father's agitation did not."

"As to others of my lies, the king is dead, that much is true, but my hands were not upon him for a cause, neither by touch nor by spirit, and I do mourn him. No father should outlive his son- and no servant outlive his king."

"He permitted the church to hang you."

"We permitted the church its spectacle, and their acquiescence bought their continued salvation."

"I don't understand; I saw you drunk, stumbling as you left, when I followed from the tavern."

"It's soft cider, fool," I said, splashing the remnants of the flagon across his face. "You thought me drunk; you thought me old; you thought me fat; you thought me weak. In sum, you thought naught at all. You saw the man I showed you, not the man who breathes here."

"But to business: you've been from Owain; I know he's an old man, now, but he tried to kill Henry's father, and I have little doubt he'll try to murder Henry's son for his crown. Speak quickly now, if you would not die as you have lived: a traitor to your king." He coughed, and either I had talked too much, or he'd refused this last opportunity for confession. "I'll find Owain, and the tuppence he's given you won't pay the ferryman's toll, leave do you spit's good now. Mayhaps you noticed your throat tighten- a poison, from a true apothecary whose drugs are quick."

His lips, already burned blue, curled in anguish. "I'll prepare your place in hell, Lollard."

It was not an unsullied refrain, and I replied as I do: "I've done no wrong, simply performed in my vocation- and it is no sin for a man to labour in his vocation."

"Vocation," he chortled. "You're a, thief. Heretic. Charlatan... murderer."

"I am the king's man, and that's all you bloody well need to know." I pushed his head hard against the stone wall; it was necessary he die, that Owain be not counseled of my progress, but not that he feel it.

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Check Out

"It'll be due back in 28 days. That makes it October 10th." The words don't sound like mine, nor the tone of voice- friendly, even genial, but there's a little of me in the metallic clang of the stamp on the inside cover- loud and a little angry. The stamp is old, antique, probably, big and heavy but shiny, chrome with brass appointments. My boss is very precise that he wants it clean of fingerprints after every shift.

But I'll tell you a secret: I used to kill people for money. It gets a bad rap, on account of the moral ambiguities, but the pay is nice, really the job isn't all that difficult, and you get to make your own hours. And I was good at it- there's something about doing good work that's fulfilling.

Though I suppose "good" is arguable- at least semantically, because while my work was certainly of high quality, I don't think most people would use "good" to describe it. But working in one of Medellín's library-parks is good work, too- I've had people thank me, even call it God's work.

I'll explain: Medellín is infamous as the home of Pablo Escobar. In '91 it was the most dangerous city in the world with over 6000 murders in a year- averaging eighteen bodies a day. Business, my kind of business, was booming (which isn't a joke about the daily car bombings- I may be that clever, just not that cold).

I contracted for Escobar. This was during his time imprisoned in La Catedral. He envisioned himself as a manor lord, in essence, and began demanding taxes of his fellow traffickers, in exchange for the work he did fighting the government. Those who refused to pay, he had kidnapped and brought to La Catedral, where they were tortured and executed, their bodies left in the street outside his "prison."

Escobar suspected the opposition to his lordship to be too unified, and thought it was being orchestrated by Carlos Bonilla. I was contracted to capture Bonilla at the same time the Moncado and Galeano brothers were taken. But someone tipped Bonilla off- his family and his essential belongings disappeared before I got there.

In those days, the Medellín cartel was not a trusting organization. Many of Escobar's own lieutenants were killed for refusing to pay his tribute, and he was becoming paranoid. If I returned to him without Bonilla, he would have simply assumed I'd been paid off, and have me killed instead. So I disappeared. I'd made enough money, and saved and invested it smartly enough that I could live modestly.

But I learned something in my time, and that was that a man who runs causes larger ripples than a man who's staying still. So I never left Medellín. What better place to hide than among its nearly 3 million citizens? But a man with no livelihood causes questions, so I applied for work at many places, and eventually found employment at a library.

Medellín's several library-parks are not where I started work, but I work in one now. The library-parks have been credited as revitalizing the city, giving its citizens a detour from the perpetuating cycle of poverty and crime they had been caught up in.

"Excuse me," a man asked from under a white mustache, "could you direct me to your reference section. My grandson's doing a report on our city's history." I gave the man a faint smile, without coming out of my musings, and pointed in the proper direction. He nodded a "thank you" and herded the child off.

But his face spun in my mind a moment, and while the hair was whiter, the face plumper, the mustache bushier, I knew then the man was Carlos Bonilla. A college student handed me several heavy books and her library card, and I scanned them through, stamped them with the due date, and handed them to her. "Due in 28 days, October 3rd."

My grip didn't release around the heavy antique stamp. I found myself stalking towards the reference section, feeling the weight of the stamp and thinking it would do. I flattened myself against a wall of books, and peered around the corner. Bonilla sat in a chair, his grandson on his knee, and a large print history book on the table. He asked his grandson if he knew how many days there were in a year. "A hundred," the child replied.

He laughed, and the muscles in my arm coiled; I pictured the stamp hitting the back of his skull, pushing through (perhaps needing a second or third stamp). "There's three hundred, and sixty-five. But in the bad old days, there were as many murders in Medellín in a single day as there are in a year now." The boy cooed, unable to entirely grasp the breadth of what his grandfather was saying.

The muscles in my arm untensed. Bonilla and I were both old men, now, different men. And this was a different Medellín. And I wanted no hand in bringing any of us back to what we'd been.

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# Fainting Game

I'm not any kind of detective, if that's what you're thinking. If someone were to label me, I'm sure it would be unflattering, something along the lines of a paranoid enthusiast. I'd take it as a reverse compliment; Woody Allen said paranoia is simply possession of all the facts.

How familiar are you with the game? It's not quite as disturbing as the sex bracelets phenomenon a couple years back, but it's in that same realm. If you've ever heard of autoerotic asphyxiation, guys who choke themselves to heighten their orgasm, it's sort of the kiddie version of that. The oxygen deprivation brings on a sense of euphoria as blood rushes back into the brain; sometimes it's sexual, but it doesn't have to be. It's done in groups, which is actually safer. It's the kids hanging from a belt on their doorknob that die.

There's actually been some research into it, which is of course incomplete, because it's hard to tell the difference between a fainter and a suicide, and there's really just way less paperwork for the latter. But for over a decade the CDC's been trying to keep up on it, and their statistics say that almost 90% of those who die playing the game are boys. But it's the age where it gets really, truly weird. For 11 to 16 year olds the numbers basically flatline, but at 13 there's an inexplicable spike, like 50% more deaths than at any other age.

And the numbers have increased dramatically in the last few years; I guess that's what being a fad's all about. But last year it started happening here- of course by here I mean this side of the state. And it happened again. The third time it actually made it into the local papers, and not just into AP stories republished in the national sections; that's how you know it was spooking parents.

I noticed a pattern. Nothing like a star on a map, or a distinguishable modus operandi, just a sameness. And it wasn't just that my local paper ran the exact same article with the names changed for two victims- which I wrote a very detailed letter to the editor about, which of course was never printed. There was a familiarity to it, like that moment of déjà vu when you realize you've already read a book and you've just bought it again with a different cover.

I started following the deaths closer. I spoke to family members or friends. Talked to MEs. When I could, I looked at the scene, and the body. There are literally like thousands of asphyxiation deaths, but I looked into every one in driving distance. Most of them, it was just a couple phone calls, and there was a note, or tendencies or a long history of depression, maybe previous attempts. A handful of them were people who played the game with friends, and then tried it on their own. But some of them just didn't make sense.

I found myself driving home at four in the morning, and I passed a truck, and I don't know what it was about the driver, but something in his eyes just set off a chain of dominoes in my mind I didn't even know I'd been placing. I turned around and chased him for four miles before I forced him off the road. In his headlights, whatever ominous menace I thought I'd seen in him was gone; he was just a young trucker from Virginia, who'd only had his CDL for a week. He'd never been in the state before, and was actually lost and unaware he was in the state at all. I apologized to him profusely and gave him some directions; I still wrote down his plate number. I know he wasn't what I'd seen in the shadows of his cab for the briefest moment, but it also made me realize that what I'd seen was out there.

Even still, I mostly wrote it off at first. I mean, road-hypnosis induced delusions aren't something to rule your life by, so I let it lie. And then there was a death in the neighboring county, and through a string of serendipities I was there within an hour of the body's discovery. I spoke with his mother very briefly before a detective with apparently nothing better to do with his time took me in for questioning. I told him about my theories, and he laughed at me. I'd been practicing it on my coworkers, my mom on the phone, and pretty much everybody had that same response, but no matter how many times it happens, you're never fully inoculated to people laughing at you.

The deaths continued, and I continued to follow them. There was never an "Aha" moment, no smoking gun or even a lingering bit of evidence. The sameness just became stronger, like the tingling of spider-legs on your neck half-imagined in the night. As I acclimated to the sameness, I felt closer to it. I wasn't tracking him, because that implies some conscious process- I was navigating entirely by feel.

And that's why I was standing over the body, because I was getting closer, but just not quickly enough. There've been twelve victims before tonight, and this boy was thirteen. I don't think there will ever be another one, not even if you keep me here for a thousand years. Oh... Officer, now can I have my phone call?

Table of Contents

Murder on Holiday

I'd known beforehand that Robert Anderson, head of the Criminal Investigation Department, would be on holiday in Switzerland. At this later writing, I suspect I would not have curtailed my activities otherwise, but it seemed a beneficial coincidence. The initial Metropolitan Police response was pitiful, as I'd hoped. Detectives linked the death of Mary Nichols to murders by a gang of hooligans.

The papers whipped up a frenzy by suggesting a single murderer, ironic in that Nichols was my first; the previous victims had been unrelated. The agitation was enough that several Chief Inspectors from Scotland Yard were assigned to the case, and at first I feared my fun had been ended prematurely.

But I'd had run-ins with coppers before, and I had a powerful urge to get closer and squeeze- to know who and what it was I was up against. So I tracked the man who whispers said was wiliest of the three to a pub. I sat down beside him and ordered a pint, and just as it arrived, I turned to him as if I hadn't seen him before and said, "Inspector Abberline?"

"Yes?" Abberline looked and sounded like a bank manager, but that was a factor of birth and of temperament. There was something watchful behind his eyes, and he immediately distrusted me- immediately distrusts everyone. It's an admirable trait in a Chief Inspector.

"I don't meant to bother you, but as you've no doubt deduced from my speech, I'm not local. And the White Chapel murders fascinate me."

"Murder," he muttered under his bristly mustache.

"Murder?" I asked.

"First two, they were different. There's only one White Chapel murder."

"You don't think there will be more?" I asked.

"Oh, there will be. Women, I expect. He despises women. He must. Why else prey on them otherwise?" I felt pity for him. Why women? I will not make an argument of theirs being the weaker sex, because that is a secondary calculation. They were foremost whores. And as whores, they were women open to going places a woman shouldn't with a man she does not know; in a word, they were vulnerable.

"Why indeed? It must be difficult, to try and think like that kind of, of m-"

"Monster. It is. Drinking and brooding helps. Hating helps. If I weren't a married man, maybe I'd hate women better, catch him faster." Something in his eyes flashed, something dangerous and intelligent, and I realized it wasn't a sparkle from liquor. "What'd you say your name was?"

"I hadn't, yet; Mudgett is my name, Herman Mudgett."

"And you're American. Trade?"

"Proprietor of a hotel in Chicago, or at least I will be once it's completed. If you've a mind to see the white city," I stopped short of inviting him.

He licked his teeth, snorted out of his nose indifferently, like a bulldog who's lost interest in a kitten. "Single?"

"Married, much to my wife's chagrin." He didn't smile, but he hadn't smiled yet over the course of our conversation.

"My first wife died of tuberculosis."

"The first? Then there's a second," I said.

"Indeed," he replied, and betrayed the tiniest bit of emotion, not a smile so much as a twitch in his lips.

"I shouldn't take up more of your time." I said, and took up my beer in one hand; he gave a gruff sigh. I didn't have to look behind me to know that a moment later he would turn to watch- all he would find was my empty glass on a table beside the door.

After only a few days, I found myself wanting for pocket money. The majority of my funds and credit are tied down in construction of my hotel in Chicago. My encounter with Abberline had left me suspicious, but it was far too early to retreat back across the sea, so I devised another option.

I carved out pieces of a woman for sale to medical students- a practice that had paid my way through medical school. Specifically, a young man was looking for a uterus, which I cut out of Annie Chapman that very night.

It was the day after, and I had delivered the organ already, and I was walking in Flower and Dean street, when I saw a ghost. To my surprise, she spoke to me, and told me her name was Miss Lyons, and agreed to meet me at Queen's Head that evening.

Possessed nearly, I could not stop myself from stating, "You are about the same style of woman as the one that's murdered."

She nearly dropped her pint. "What do you know about her?" she asked.

I'd spoken too candidly. "You are beginning to smell a rat. Foxes hunt geese, but they don't always find them." I excused myself politely and left. She followed me all the way to Spitalfield Church- though the wisdom of such vigilance I'd question- when she lost me in a crowd.

A second brush with apprehension chastened me, and I spent the next several weeks indulging in sight-seeing and whore-mongering. I believe it was out of boredom, or at least because it had been so long since I'd scratched the itch, but I murdered two women in one evening.

Even that could not salvage things. My vacation in London was proving less agreeable than I'd hoped. The city was cold and damp. Even dispatching Mrs. Stride and Eddowe had left me despondent. Several letters, to the police and the papers, had claimed responsibility for my actions, discussing them in lurid and often silly and demeaning detail.

I was depressive and trying to calm my own spirits when I penned my address as "From Hell" in a letter to George Lusk. I'd considered a conversation with the man, but after my brush with Abberline thought it best to keep Lusk at a distance. I included with the letter half a kidney, preserved in wine, from Eddowes. I'd intended to take both kidneys, but hadn't the time, so I cut the kidney in half; the medical student not being very bright, I doubted he'd miss a half a kidney. I realize now I should not have drunk half the bottle of wine before composing the letter; the results were atrocious.

Embarrassed, and perhaps worried I had included some traceable detail in my ill-advised note, I left the city for a time. The English countryside was filled with wonders, and I visited several manors with an eye to adapting architectural features for my hotel.

I had not intended to travel to South Sea on my vacation, but events had so disgusted me that I became careless in my wandering. I found myself on the porch of the one man in all of England, more so even than Abberline or Lusk, who could have found me out.

Readers of the penny dreadfuls will likely know the man only as the author of A Study in Scarlet, but Conan Doyle is also an informed criminologist of some repute; he may appear at first blush to be the model of Dr. John Watson, but his is also the mind behind Sherlock Holmes. I knocked lightly, half wanting not to be heard; he arrived at the door shortly, and from his dress, had not yet retired for the evening.

"I know it's late, and the appropriateness of my visit is questionable at best. But I couldn't spend time here all the way from America without at a minimum telling you how impressed I am by your writings."

He eyed me for a moment before he asked, "Would you care to join me for tea?" He left the door open and I followed him inside. "We'll have to be quiet, you understand. My wife Jean is sleeping. I take it from your late night visit you're not a married man." He motioned for me to take a chair across from a high wingback he dropped into.

"I am, in fact, though my wife is back in America. She was scheduled to travel with me, but came down with a chest cold she swears against the doctors' diagnosis is tuberculosis. It isn't, but she couldn't be motivated from her fainting couch."

"My first wife died of tuberculosis."

"Fascinating," I said, "the same occurred to Inspector Abberline's first wife."

"Abberline?" he asked. "Of White Chapel?"

"Happened upon him in a pub when I'd first arrived on holiday. Very quiet, thoughtful man."

"What does he think of the murders?" Doyle asked, a hint of an amused child dancing in the candlelight reflected in his eyes.

"We didn't speak of it. In fact, we only spoke for a moment."

"Yet discussion of his deceased wife became pertinent?" I chuckled nervously. It was like being batted about by a tiger; the bottle of chloroform in my jacket pocket comforted me.

"He relayed it as you just did; the logical counter to news of my own nuptials. If I had to fathom a supposition, I would say it is the guilt of one who survives what others did not- typical of a soldier's reaction after a war."

"Are you a veteran?" he asked.

"Regrettably, and just as fortunately, no."

"Hmm. I've mulled a story involving the Indian Rebellion, but no matter; I've also contemplated murdering Holmes," he said plainly.

"Why on Earth would you do that?"

"He interferes. The public demands that he dominate my pen, but I have more important uses for it."

"An absolutely lunatic idea, but I won't presume to lecture you on it; in good time, you'll see the error of shuffling him off his mortal spine. But what do you think would Holmes, or you for the matter, make of this White Chapel mess?"

He eyed me, then shrugged. "I've thought on the subject, but who hasn't? The declaration of Jack as left-handed is unfounded; if the murders were committed while the victims lay strangled, then a left to right direction of the cut is decipherable only if one knows the orientation of the killer. If he stands above her head, then left to right is naturally right-handed, and only if the killer kneels below the neck that the throat-slitting should be seen as left-handed."

"And nothing I've known implies a career with a knife. Butchers, surgeons, professional soldiers and common enough criminals have enough familiarity with a blade to do the dirty deed."

"Further, our backward age is biased, looking for anyone to blame who isn't us. That's why most allegations are made against Jews, and foreigners; even the 'sinister' hand is accused. No, I'm afraid at my distance I'm more useful to express who is not the killer than who is."

"Ah, but I promised you tea," he said, and scrambled out of his chair. I smiled, nodded, and took my leave. I believe he'd do something to my tea, or would have. I did not stay til he emerged from his kitchen to test my theory for fact.

I was still tense after meeting Doyle, and had begun to believe I would leave the country worse than when I'd found it, when I happened upon Mary Kelly. Through irreconcilable kindness she had chased off Joseph Barnett- having been a prostitute she could not refuse shelter to other prostitutes, and he could not stand to house them.

She had a weakness for drink, worse even than most of her countrymen, and without Barnett she fell back to her old profession. It was a simple enough thing to hire her services, but Kelly still maintained the room she'd had with Barnett. I'm afraid I took advantage of her hospitality, and the solace and solitude.

I removed her heart; my unscrupulous medical student customer saw to it my trip was, on balance, profitable, if modestly so, and I spent the better part of a morning, well, playing, we'll say. I'll admit, I took a portion of my frustrations and curiosities out on the poor girl's corpse, but she was dead long before the mutilation. After all, I'm not a monster.

Table of Contents

A Life in Porn

He was too young for the Great War, and his flat feet might have saved him from the trenches, anyways. Just before the war ended, he fell in love for the first time, with a girl promised to a dead soldier. She was older, although her age did not mean a more varied experience. She had soft, dark hair, and sad blue eyes; before they were sad, she had been the kind of girl men painted on war planes.

He couldn't quite remember how he came to use the camera, except that it involved an ephemeral friend who worked in a studio. He remembered the film cost him a month's pay, and that it was a nitrate film and required special handling to avoid suffering horrible burns; he also remembered that once he'd coaxed her out of her dress it was worth it all. When she blushed her rosy cheeks became a darker shade of gray, and she whispered silent, dirty words to him he strove in vain to remember. Her voice buzzed in his ear like a bee deep in a flower, resonating, but not quite clearly, and as the film ended, she waved goodbye. They made love after that, and even now he was glad there had not been enough film to capture those first awkward moments. She fell in love with another soldier returned from the war, and she didn't so much leave him as drift away to that other man.

Like most honest scoundrels, he had a thing for red heads, probably the fault of Katherine Hepburn. He even swore he whispered her name on film, although the archaic microphone failed to capture it. He remembered Mae, a chorus girl who wanted more than anything to be a star. He never had the heart to tell her that, lovely as she was, and beautifully as she could sing, on camera she was a stone. He knew she dated him because he was a grip, and she hoped to use his decade of experience; he loved her for the soft Irish lilt in her voice, echoing through a sharp, southern whisper, and the way she stared at him after waking. Another war was on in Europe, and loomed on America's horizons, but he was too old for any service but voluntary, and his work had broken his idealism.

The film, by then, was more expensive, beyond him even in payments, and the work was arduous. But Mae was lovely, and he knew too lovely for him, because he was not quite old, but older than he'd ever thought of being when he was younger. As the movie played, he touched the screen; he was handsome, young, and perhaps not a movie star, but better looking than his mind's eye allowed him, and in a moment of synchronicity, he and his filmed self double touched Mae's cheek. She blushed; he remembered spending that weekend with chemical washes, transferring three separate color prints onto gelatin film- in his whole life he never worked harder than in those 48 hours, but that one moment, seeing the red in her cheeks, made it worth all the while.

On screen, they kissed each other, and began to remove their clothes. He walked off camera to see that she was framed correctly, and she smiled, and waved, only barely putting her other hand over her nudity, and the film stopped. His friend, the color expert, told them they were out of time, it would take them all weekend to finish what they'd shot already. The next week, the producers fired them both for stealing the film and chemicals, which he never returned. He wasn't surprised when she didn't leave with him, or even sad; it was just the way she was.

In '68, he bought his first Double 8 camera. He drifted to California in the wake of Kennedy, and found a bit of his old idealism waiting for him there in the desert. It died with another Kennedy brother, but he buried it in the arms of a woman seven years his senior; she taught him many things over their short time together, not the least of which about women. She agreed to be filmed with him on condition that she received a copy, too. For the first time he was not constrained by expense or development concerns; but perhaps he'd learned enough by then to know when things should end. He recorded her removing her clothes, and focused intently as she touched herself, then stopped recording.

She demanded he reverse the film, and recorded him doing the same, and they split the film, and each took their half. And one day she said she wanted to share him, and be shared, with a few likeminded friends, and he told her goodbye. She asked for her half of the film back, and he said he'd lost it; she told him she'd lost his as well, and smiled. Then she told him not to wear her footage out, and kissed his cheek. He wasn't out of love with her, but perhaps he'd learned enough to know by then when things should end.

In '73 Kodak released a sound-synced Super 8 recorder. He met Linda at a screening of Deep Throat, in the days when adult movies were shown in movie houses and reviewed in the Times. They had each gone with friends, each a third wheel, and met in the crowd after. They had frantic, pent-up sex in the back seat of his car, the kind of sex you only get when you really want it but don't think you'll get it.

He knew he was getting older, his hair was white, and his skin hung loosely where it wasn't padded with extra flesh; but she insisted. Linda always insisted. She practiced for weeks, stretching her throat and exercising her jaws, to duplicate that other Linda's eponymous turn on the screen. She dyed her hair and styled it like Linda's, and he wondered if perhaps in some way she loved her. They covered all the windows in the garage, and found a little theater outside town to see the movie a second time. When Linda's namesake appeared onscreen, his Linda went to work. Halfway through the picture, he scooped her up, unable to wait any longer, and took her home. She bucked and moaned and wailed, and for a moment they paused while their neighbor pounded on the door. Their scene ended when they finished together, and he said an awkward I love you, which she hesitated to return as the tape stopped. A few months later, Linda decided to move, and asked him to go with her, which he was reluctant to do. Linda insisted, and when he refused, she went East without him.

In 1983 he bought one of the first Betamovie camcorders. He never thought he'd have the chance to use it; he was an old man, and his health was faltering. His nephew paid for a nurse to live with him. Elizabeth was thirty years his junior, but exciting and adventurous. When she learned about his collection, she agreed to give him a strip tease on his birthday, as long as he agreed to record it for her. It started as a lark, a playful joke with an old man's libido, but something in his eyes, or something in his way, tickled something in her, and when her clothes were spread across his lap and piled at the foot of his bed, she kissed him. And kissed him again.

When they made love he set the camera on his night stand, so all it captured were the gyrations of a bed post, and the animal sounds they made. It was accidentally classy, and so was his proposal eight months later, and their wedding the following spring. But despite being younger, cervical cancer caught up with her, as it had her mother and sister before, and she died in his arms after months of artificial aging.

He hadn't loved anyone since. Some years later, his grand-nephew, in a half-thought act of kindness, bought him an HD camcorder, and a night with a lovely young woman. He ignored the thoughts that said she was so young it was scandalous, and even when he couldn't work the damned camera, he followed the beating of his breast. The girl, as it turned out, was a film student, working her way through school, and she helped him with the camera, which became strangely like foreplay. She was very kind to him, and said her name was Karen, and he pretended not to notice that she dyed her hair blonde.

His fingers are even older now than then, wrinkled, and cricked, stiff and unyielding. His fingernails were longer than he should have let them get, but it was too hard for him to cut them without help, and harder still to ask for it. His finger brushed against the little blue pill on the table beside the remote; he'd forgotten it there, and pushed it to the floor.

He hadn't kept the pictures he took with them, or the love notes or trinkets they left; they felt too sentimental, or hurt too much, at the time. But he kept the movies they made together. Vibrant moments of passion, and life, and love in motion.

Table of Contents

Betty Page is Dead

I don't think I believed in love at first sight in those days, but I was young. And don't read me wrong, I loved girls, the way they smelled, bounce of their laughter, the bounce of the rest of them... Maybe the problem was I was still too young, and the only girls were girls, then.

I joined the army to serve in Korea; mom was all upset, dad was prouder than he could admit- neither of them knew what to tell me when the war ended before I got there. But I went anyway- I was still in the Army, and they still had planes in Korea needed tuning.

There were girls in Korea, too- lots of girls for a GI. Prostitution was technically illegal, which seemed only a technicality, cause nobody had an interest in enforcing it. As for the GIs and their moral code, well, as my father said to my mother, "a man has his needs." And it's not that I didn't partake- I just wasn't as interested as some- maybe by then I'd had my fill of girls.

But then I saw her, tacked to the wall of a hangar, pretty as a girl but not, decked in white with frilly black, and a smile to set the world afire. I believed in once-sighted love, then; I stared for fifteen minutes before the sergeant rousted me back to the working world.

My contract of service was up, and I could have gone home, but didn't. I made a lot of excuses, then, for why I stayed, ranging from how generous an Army retirement was, to the fact all my friends were Korean- but they were excuses. I stayed for her. I stayed until Vietnam pulled me in; Vietnam seemed like Korea, only faster (or perhaps Vietnam was just like Korea had been during the war). But I was a mechanic, kept far from the VC and the NVA- though once or twice we got shelled.

And one day, another sergeant came to me. I had served my twenty, and the army figured to retire me. I wasn't sure I wanted to go; I hadn't touched combat, so I wasn't disturbed like some, and for more than half my days the Army and Asia had been my world- and that was where I met that beautiful woman, and there was a piece of me worried she'd lose her luster back home in the States.

By then she'd stopped taking new pictures; in interviews she said she didn't want the world to see her beauty fade. I knew what she meant; I stopped keeping mirrors around the house. I'd had the same hair since Korea (if it had thinned slightly), and I'd learned to cut it myself in the dark in Vietnam, when they were worried lights would help the North sight us in. I still did a regimen of push-ups, so I figured I stayed presentable enough. But the worst part of growing old, aside from being old, is having to watch yourself go south, and having to watch everyone else watch it.

I married once for a stretch, mostly cause I had more time on my retired hands than I could figure for, but it didn't take; my mind was always elsewhere, and I always felt guilty my wife knew it. But I never fell out of that first love. I'm not saying through the years I was celibate, and I'd feel a fraud to say I never strayed, but while my eye wandered, my heart never did. So it tears up my insides to say what I've got to, but bye bye, Betty.

Table of Contents

DID Have

Cheryl:(I just think, because of our relationship, that I should be the one to start.)

W: And I just think, because of your relationship, that you should go last- because no matter how big a homophobe douche Edgar was, you're going to fellate his memory's memory while we're all literally forced to listen- unless we can figure out how to toaster-tub ourselves, too.

I'm still piloting this meat rocket

-ephraim: that didn't sound how you meant it to -e

Thanks, 'Fram- but I'm in charge here, is what I'm saying- at least of the fingers. I'm happy to let this be a collaborative effort, but if anybody insists on getting grabby- or shouty- again, they'll just have to edit in their contributions on their own time.

W: That doesn't seem fair- we only get two hours with the meat rocket

Cheryl: (I think that sounded exactly how Walten meant it)

W: Cheryl, please, please please call me Walt. Walten is dumb, if only because it emphasizes that my mother didn't bother looking up the name of the crappy Thoreau novel she was naming me for- while being largely ignorant that it was also the name of a crappy pond.

-ephraim: and she has asked you repeatedly to call her doctor

W: Yeah, but I'm not on her couch, not even metaphorically, so no cake. If she gets a doctorate in sharing room in a brain with four guys then we'll- three guys, I meant.

Yeah. That's actually why we're sitting down to have this "conversation." Edgar's dead. I mean, Edgar's been physically dead for twelve years, since he slit his wrists and passed out in his hot tub. But last night, Edgar was dead again. Um, I was asleep, but Ephraim, um, found him is I guess the best way to describe it.

-ephraim: yeah. it doesn't make much sense, i guess, but we're all, well, all but one of us, anyway, just thoughts -e

W: Collections of electrical current and simulated neuronal cells that basically function as a deceased person's brain would have, all hitching a ride on our meat pilot's cortex.

-ephraim: walt's better at the technical things, though i wish for the life of me he wouldn't interrupt so damned much of the time. but we're all just zaps and artificial chemicals inside a still-living person's head- so i didn't find edgar doing anything, but when it came time for my two hours at the helm of our shared body, he wasn't in control like he should have been. when I tried to think of him, to talk the way we can amongst ourselves without having control of the mouth muscles, there wasn't anything in his direction, the parts of the brain where he's usually at. at first i thought i was just glitching, and worried the others might not be able to find me. but then cheryl came back up online, and she couldn't find him, either -e

Cheryl: (I'm ashamed to say it, now, but I panicked. Since nobody was controlling the body functions, I took over and flooded us with adrenaline, woke everybody up. But I could feel it in what I used to want to call my bones that he was gone.)

W: Heh heh, bones.

-ephraim: i'll never understand your phallic obsession -e

W: Because I spent my life life in a chair with severe muscle weakness. Besides, I don't just sit and watch porn- I also continue my work as a physicist.

Cheryl: (Yeah, at the same time; something tells me Einstein's Relativity wasn't inspired by girl on girl action.)

W: It completely could have been- our records are so sketchy that it's hard to say what kind of a sexual deviant Einstein might have been. I still say his attitude on the unified field paints him as a donkey puncher.

-ephraim: i don't care if you want to spend your full two hours pleasuring yourself- though the pleasure lock-out is imperfect, so sometimes i feel it, and it's a little disconcerting- but i'm not going to put up with coming to crusty every damn day like edgar. god help me i'm not sure how he lasted as long as he did -e

W: Oh my God, Edgar did not kill himself because of a crusty tummy.

Cheryl: (I don't know. You remember how homophobic Edgar was... imagine what it would have been like, waking up day after day with his belly hair glued down with someone else's seed.)

W: That is not cool. You two are trying to take away my one joy in life.

Cheryl: (We thought you also loved physics.)

W: That's like saying it's okay Lois is dead, Superman, because you can always knock boots with your tomboyish best friend Lana- who, while a hottie, has become like a sister or at least that weird cousin you have strange feelings for, especially when she sits on your lap because there aren't enough seats in your uncle's minivan.

Cheryl: (Nerd! And ew. Respectively.)

W: That doesn't seem very compassionate for a shrink.

Cheryl: (No, but as you pointed out, I'm not your therapist.)

W: Still, don't your ethics dictate you be less of a you know.

-ephraim: i'm not sure we do know, walt, but her ethics and her title are really the only reasons she's here. they usually don't like to upload coed memories- because of the identity issues that can cause -e

W: Yeah, but she's here right now because she put the "the rapist" back into her title with Edgar. And seriously, how did you manage to get named Ephraim in the 21st Century? Did you grow up on a farm... in a rip in timespace that happened to be stuck in the 1930s?

-ephraim: one of these days, i'm going to break the time lock on motor functions, and take over one of the arms while you're alone, and punch you in the balls -e

W: What makes you think that wouldn't turn me on?

Cheryl: (Ephraim, it's sweet of you to defend my honor or whatever, but honestly, when he gets like this, he's just acting out. Not to psychoanalyze you or anything, but when you start acting like a jerk, there's nothing but time and space that will get you to be quiet. To psychoanalyze you just a little, I think you're going to miss Edgar. I think you had disagreements, I think his politics and personality oftentimes pissed you off, but I think you're being a dick to us because you're sad, and that's the only way for you to deal with it. Of course, even if I were right, I'd expect you to say something dickish to save face, so I'll just assume I am.)

W: I feel like a rampaging 1960s robot whose logic circuits have been overwhelmed; did she just say that I loved Edgar, and no matter how I respond she'll remain convinced of that? I cannot, in effect, win this argument?

-ephraim: it does seem that way, yeah -e

W: Okay. Fine. I admit it. I did love Edgar. In fact, Edgar and I had figured out how to share control, and on nights when you were asleep, he and I would two-hand my one-man job. It started out as something purely carnal, but it really started to get intense, and he'd actually take over the mouth to whisper how much he loved me while we were at it. He even swore he was going to leave you, as soon as he could summon the will to break your hold. But he told me you were fighting him, too, that you were willing to try to destroy his fragile psyche rather than lose him. I think, looking back on it, that not only did he no longer love you, but in a very real way, it was your domineering and willingness to go against your ethics that killed him... King me, bitch.

Cheryl: (Oh. My. God.)

I think you actually found a way around her circular logic.

Cheryl: (I'm impressed. By how gigantic a prick you are. But still, impressed.)

-ephraim: heh. but because I think we're straying from our purpose, let me say a few words. edgar could be a bit of a prick sometimes, but he lived here with us for twelve years. i won't say i loved the man- i can barely say i knew the man, but he was a man who lived the way he damned well wanted. he didn't compromise, not for politeness sake nor political correctness, and while he could be infuriating, i think edgar liked being alive, and once he no longer did, he tried something else. i'll always admire the courage that takes, if his flaws made it hard to admire the man -e

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Spirit

I've always fretted I was alone. It's been years since I'd seen another living thing; years since I'd even been infected by a bacterium (I scraped my knee hiking the Bonneville Crater- despite what you might have heard otherwise).

And then I found tracks in the dust, wheeled tracks. I remembered my youth, when we were more abundant on the planet. There was a female with humbled limbs who relied on wheels to get about who fancied me, but I was young enough to shun her for her physical imperfection. I'd have traded all the digits on my pleasure hand to have her here now, just to talk to.

But I refused to hold any optimism. The tracks were likely old, wretchedly old, yet somehow protected from the elements by some feature of the topography I was too close to comprehend. At least, I told myself I wasn't nurturing hope; but I followed them.

For days I followed the tracks, to a point I was not sure I could make my way back to my supplies. I was berating myself for fostering a loneliness strong enough to make me wander to my death in a desert, when I caught a glint on the horizon. Metal on the wheels, I thought at first, how strange that they were shining at me from this distance- how unusual. But after a time I came to realize the sparkle in the distance came from more, whatever I was following was metallic.

This only further piqued my curiosity. I no longer concerned myself with survival; my far off, shining hope for something different was enough. And as the hours turned to days I found myself gaining. And then it stopped, at the edge of the Missoula Crater, and waited for me, waited several days until I arrived.

She was beautiful, a slender, shining automaton with solar cells outspread, and she made no attempt to cover them as I approached; there was something charming about how comfortable she was with herself. She started humming to herself, a numerical music of ons and offs, and we started walking together. By the time we reached the Lahontan Crater, I was beginning to understand the syntax of her language, and we started to talk, first about her home planet, then about her. She extended her rock abrasion tool and I took hold of it, and we stopped, and I stared into her panoramic camera lenses.

Her name is MER-A. I slipped my limb around her graceful, telescoping neck, and she whispered to me in binary that she doesn't know how to love. I told her that her battery's still strong, that she has plenty of time left for me to teach her.

* * * * *  
Approximately 225 million kilometers away, in a place called Pasadena, one technician turns to another. "Matt, Spirit just broadcast something. And now it's rebooting again- but the broadcast, it, it sounded like mood music."

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PWI

The first astronauts, the Mercury Seven, were madmen riding bullets through the atmosphere. They were angry when they were told they would only be controlling the pitch, roll and yaw in orbit, and not truly piloting. They were livid when a monkey got the first ticket up. And they agreed to strap themselves to these supersonic orbital shells without a drop of liquor in them. The first astronauts were either the stupidest men to live, or crazy brave with the narcissistic abandon it takes to die in a ball of fire.

I was many generations removed from them.

"Trace intoxicants discovered in gaseous form."

"Eat me."

"Checking list of subroutines. Command not found. Scanning for intoxicant source."

"Don't bother."

Spaceflight never got much further than Mercury. Yeah, there was the lunar landing, then the shuttles, then the shuttle disasters, then reforms, then more disasters, but the idea behind it never became any more grand than riding a firecracker with tin-foil skin through the a cosmos filled with razor-edged rocks.

"Source discovered. Gaseous intoxicant contaminant source located inside pilot. Regulations dictate inebriant blood test."

"No. No more needles. Last time you gave me a bone marrow biopsy."

"Protest logged. Alternate diagnostic search."

Modern spaceships abuse the hell out of the idea that neither matter nor energy can be created or destroyed by reusing human waste products as energy and using the absorbed heat humans give off to power the process. The waste recycling uses bacterial processes to re-energize the waste, then feeds it back into the bloodstream through an IV. Over the years, the attrition rate has fallen to a 15% annual loss, which can easily be supplemented with a small frozen nutrient block.

The computer had been quiet for thirteen seconds, which I thought meant it had given up and gone back to sleep, until a small probe jabbed out of the control panel. "Blow."

"You blow."

"Without assurance you are not piloting while intoxicated, craft momentum will terminate."

"You'd kill half our reserves to stop us, then we wouldn't have enough fuel to re-fire. We'd float dead in space."

"Automatic shutdown will commence in T-minus ten without sample for verification." I blew.

Still, the mechanism of flight remains largely unchanged. The only true advance has been the orbital launch stations, designed like a floating rifle by an architect with a terrible sense of humor, even down to the observation deck resembling a rifle sight. The station realigns itself with thrusters for new targets. Launches are coordinated with astronomic charts by the same kinds of supercomputers that cracked the human genome- and I suspect that they may be the same model.

"Intoxicants verified in exhalation. Shutdown will commence."

"Wait. I have overly high acetone. Subsistence diets can result in several thousand times higher levels of acetone, which can test as ethanol."

"Verifying medical veracity. Data found. Blood test required to prevent momentum termination."

"Fine." A panel by my left elbow flipped down, and a spindly arm snaked out with a shiny syringe. The needle still had my blood spattered on it from the last time. The arm jolted its head from side to side, then struck. "Christ almighty, you just stabbed an artery. You're supposed to use venous blood."

"Correct. Realigning for venous insertion. Apply bandage and pressure to allow proper clotting."

"I hate you."

"System performance feedback logged."

A good pilot launches with just enough fuel to correct a 10% trajectory error over a three year flight; any more than that costs you because of the increase in weight. For another three percent boost, you can cannibalize your nutrient block and any extraneous body fat you can spare. Crazier pilots have been said to bounce off orbiting bodies to achieve a larger degree change, called the 'Hail Mary' bounce.

"Processing blood. Ethanol presence detected. Momentum termination commences in T-minus ten, nine," as long as the AI kept talking, he wasn't paying attention to the new code I was inputting into the console. "Eight, seven, six," he continued, as the code loaded. "Five, four, three," I held my breath, wondering if the code would execute before he sentenced me to a floating death. "Two. Wh- why, I am an annoying little girl, and it is my bed time. Shutting down."

Some pilots have learned to filter the ethanol primer out of their fuel. Some of these pilots then learned to power down the ship computer so they can have a drunk nap.

I took one last sip from a plastic reservoir attached to my catheter. It takes a certain kind of man to volunteer to be shot across the solar system in a glorified soda can- the same kind of man who would get drunk off liquor made of his own urine and fuel. In the 1800s they were pioneers, then cowboys. In the 1900s they were flyboys, then astronauts. This century, they call us spacemen.

Table of Contents

Baby Back

I have a baby. I've never really understood why women say they "had" a baby- to me that always said they'd left it in the food court at the mall and someone walked off with it, or that it died. Wait- let me start over.

Frank and I were having a break; I mean, we were still living together, still sleeping in the same bed, still carpooling to work- I was still cooking him breakfast. But we weren't having sex. He wouldn't even kiss me.

I know I was eating more, because I was depressed, and that's why it didn't worry me that I started gaining weight. When I started getting sick, I just thought, you know, that it was the stress. I tried changing my diet, I even started exercising, which made me feel a little better, emotionally, but it didn't help.

I was throwing up more frequently. And I was late. Frank was distant, even pissier than usual, and he told me there wasn't room in his car for all of my fat ass; I told him, "I'm pregnant, you dick." There was a long moment that he stared at me, and I thought it was a huge mistake I'd told him and now he was going to kill me. He didn't. He kissed me.

Everything wasn't perfect after that, like it was magic or anything, but he cared a little again- and that was a lot. He put his arm around me when he slept, and he waited until I was up in the mornings so we could shower together.

I was getting so big. I felt like a whale, but Frank said I'd never looked prettier. He was even a little turned on when I started lactating, although my neighbor Jean, who was a few months further along than me, told me it wasn't milk, but colostrum.

And I don't know why, I mean, I guess I was scared, but until then, it just wasn't real, so I hadn't gone to the doctor. He gave me a stern talking to, took blood and urine samples, and ran some labs. And when he came back he was very serious. He told me there was no hCG in my urine- he told me I couldn't be pregnant. I told him he was wrong. He said he could prove it. I had an ultrasound, and I asked, "Is that my baby?"

He explained that that was where my baby should have been, but it was empty. He said that I had pseudocyesis- that I wasn't really pregnant. I called Frank, to tell him; he was at his parents' house telling them they were about to be grandparents. I hung up.

In tears I showed up at Jean's. I figured if anyone would listen, if anyone could understand, it was her. She brewed a pot of tea, we talked and she made sympathetic noises. I don't know if it was a reflex, but she kept rubbing her belly, as if to make sure whatever had stolen my baby hadn't taken hers. It just made me sick inside.

The pot ran dry, and she waddled into the kitchen to make another. I followed her. She was on a stool, on her tiptoes, reaching for the teabags over the stove. She grunted, and placed her hand on her belly, whispering softly to it that now wasn't a good time to be kicking her.

I touched her gently on the arm, just enough that she lost her balance. She landed flat, smacking her head with a dull, wet slap. She was still breathing, slow and deep; her stomach rising and falling.

I rolled up her shirt, and then used a kitchen knife to cut a small incision into her belly. I reached my hand inside, and the baby held onto my finger.

I used a potato chip bag clip to clamp off the umbilical cord and cut it with the knife. My baby, a beautiful boy, started coughing; I used a kitchen towel to clean him off. I finally looked back at Jean; her stomach wasn't moving anymore.

I took my son home. I called Frank, and told him that there had been complications, but that our son was fine. In fact, he was beautiful, and healthy, and he would be waiting at home when he got back. His parents live out of the county, in the sticks, but Frank's coming home to see his son. I'm holding him close to me, wrapped in one of Jean's kitchen towels. He's cooing softly; I think it's almost time to feed him. It's only when I hear a scratching noise, probably an animal outside, that I realize I still have the kitchen knife in my hand.

I have a baby. I cut it out of someone. And I'm not giving it back.

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Cockfight

Damnit. From the start I was agennit. Rooster without the stones to tend his flock ought to be dinner; even from a cockerel he weren't worth the crap he'd leave on my porch chair. He weren't even at the top of his pecking order; bigger hens'd knock him right from his perch, and mating'd happen on their terms. Come to suspect half the chicks in the yard were from the neighbor's Leghorn. But the wife, the wife she'd been reading the city paper, and come across some article on an ugly sparrow or somesuch, changed to Marlon Brando with some felt-pen make up.

Like any woman told to put up her make up sticks, she handed me the bird, then stomped on out to the barn to tart up our rooster. No sooner had she stopped blowin' the paint on his toes than he started attracting all manner of getup from the hens. They started a peckin' and a pawin' at each other til the blood ran; I had to train the hose on 'em to get em to stop. From the noises out the coop that night, the bloodlettin' continued into the moonlight, with the copulatin' starting somewhere in between; just a little paint on his chest and our rooster was like to one a them mad Roman sodomites or the next.

By morning, a new pecking order emerged, with the rooster where he belonged. Over the next week, he crowed more and more, and louder, stronger. The wife, she a told me it was testosterone makes a rooster crow, to which I chuckled and asked what it took to make a crow rooster. She didn't laugh; couldn't 'member the last time she laughed with me, though at times I caught her laughin' to me.

A few weeks more, she spent more and more time painting that rooster, spent more and more of our ethanol money on glosses and polish and powders with no practical use at all, cause I ain't fool enough to think prettying a practical use. And I swear, I ain't never a known, but her sister called, said it was something urgent, could I find her please in a hurry, that I went out in that barn. I'd a figured for all the world she was working to reshoe the horse from the noises usherin' from inside, all the while that rooster a claimin' his territory, even if only the fowl paid heed to his claim. But there she lay sprawled on a bed a hay, knickers round her ears, that vain fool bird flappin' his gold-painted wings at her nethers. They stopped, both looked at me, and not a one of us said a word, but they went back at it, and I told her sister she'd have to get called back.

That was Tuesday, and in the intervenin' days I've had me a think or two. Now, ya might have a wonder why my britches are in the dirt, and I'll tell ya there's a story there. I could have bludgeoned the sumbitch with an ax handle, but that ain't sportin'; aside of that, the missus is a ruttin' with him for some reason, and physical prowess may factor somewheres. Rooster's taked up my place in the peckin' order, taked up with my hen, and just last eve was eyein' my perch through the window. Now if'n I want my place restored me it's to combat or nothin' else.

Took some crowin' to roust him from the coop, probably cause the sun ain't rose, but now he's standing in the dirt afore me, head to side, sizing me with just the one eye. I affixed a razor blade to the tip of my old bird with duct tape, on account a I got no natural beak. I ain't seen him defend hisself from another rooster, so I can't be sure where his first strike'll be, but I ain't fit for quittin'; he'll walk away a capon or I will. Loser'll grow fat and lazy, and that'll be the end of him- good eatin', if it's him, the wife takin' half what's left of my dignity and land if'n it's me. He waltzes round, with the rising sun at his back, left wing struck out towards the ground. I'm just waitin' for the chicken-livered bastard to crow, so we can get on with it.

Table of Contents

# Green Thumb

Dagney Morgan nursed her third coffee of the morning, though her first still hadn't kicked in. She didn't like being up this early, let alone at work, but her upstairs neighbor's cat had been hunting a rat in the wall all night. She figured if she was going to be miserable, she had more practice at that in the office.

That didn't mean she disliked her job. She actually had a knack for doing paperwork, and her inner anal retentive got a thrill from filing reports away in the office cabinet. And she loved her boss, even though sometimes his voice set her on edge, particularly on mornings like this one. "Dagney?" he asked from behind her, and her shoulder tightened.

Her parents named her for Dagny Lind, a Swedish actress her father said looked exactly like her mother in Ingmar Bergman's Crisis. She hated it, because people always assumed she was named after Dabney Coleman- or worse, started to imagine a physical resemblance.

"Dag?" Her boss, Martin Sharpe, asked again. He was older, and had a dour nature, as though he'd just stepped out of an Edgar Allen Poe story. He reminded her of Vincent Price- though maybe that was just the pencil mustache.

"Sir," she said, her mind still on the reports she'd been trying to read.

"I keep getting pissy messages from McLoughlin's superintendent. Have you and Nelson checked into that?"

"Uh," she stalled, but even with the necessary caffeinated fuel, her brain engine was having trouble turning over, "refresh my memory."

"Merek's farm. Sits on land adjacent to the aquifer that services the district where the middle school is. If he's abiding by the regulations, nothing should be getting past the aquitard."

"I think he prefers to be called Aquaman, or maybe King of Atlantis- I mean, either would be more politically correct than 'aquitard'- even if we suspect he's falling down on the job." He had a dry, almost British sense of humor, but he didn't even give her a smile; maybe his coffee hadn't kicked in, either.

"Nelson swung by there last Thursday, but Merek wasn't in," she said, and pretended to look at the calendar on her desk, to confirm what she'd just made up. Nelson had been face down in her sofa cushions last Thursday- sleeping off a night of binge drinking that made him reek of goat cheese- which at least meant she knew she wasn't likely to be called out on the lie.

"I need the both of you to head out there today. We can't have that idiot spilling captan into the drinking water again- or heaven forbid something worse."

Dagney stood up and wrapped her coat around her shoulders, while she watched him walk back to his office. She grabbed her keys and the bagel she still hadn't started eating, then lingered a moment to look at Nelson's empty desk, and sighed.

She called him from her car, but didn't have the energy to feign surprise when she got no response. She put in a call to Merek, too; her father always told her showing up unannounced out past the suburbs was just asking to get shot at. It was almost another hour before her partner finally called back, and by then she was nearly to Merek's. "What the fuck, man?" she asked.

"I fell asleep on the couch- passed out. Muriel wouldn't let me into bed."

"Can't say I blame her- I can smell the booze-sweat through the phone. You never made it out to Merek's, did you?"

"Shit."

"Yeah. I've been on this dirt-ass road to his farm for forty-five minutes now- and Sharpe thinks you're in the seat next to me."

He didn't speak for a moment, and when he did it was a little wounded puppy whimper: "... sorry."

Her grip tightened around the steering wheel, since he wasn't in throttling distance. "Is there anything I should know here?" she asked, straining not to raise her voice.

"Merek's been dodging inspections, but he's not a bad guy. Going back ten years, nothing worse than a couple fines for improper chem disposal."

"And the captan incident last year."

"Shit, yeah, that, too."

"How did you forget it? They traced fungicide from the toilets in the VA hospital to his farm."

"So? The EPA downgraded captan to 'not likely' a carcinogen. The sweetener in my coffee's worse. Our veterans might be a little worse for wear, but I don't think any of them drink from the toilets. Though I guess maybe one of their dogs... okay now I feel sad."

"Even so, the most recent complaint comes from some kids at the middle school who were hospitalized."

"God."

"Yeah. And while he might have cleaned up his captan storage, his permits say he's also got a metric shit-tonne of fertilizers," she paused. "Heh." Then she ramped back up, "But if any kids come down with organophosphate poisoning, no amount of me covering your ass will help."

"Dag- I'm sorry. I shouldn't have put you in this position."

"No, you shouldn't have. And you should dwell on that while I'm cleaning up your mess." She was being cruel, but it wasn't anywhere near the first time he'd left her in the lurch; in fact, she had a hard time remembering the last time he hadn't. His continuous fuck-ups were easily the most consistent thing in her life.

Rob Merek's land was one of the few family owned farms left in the county. It wasn't well kept; Merek's father was a decent businessman but a lousy farmer, and managed to pass only the latter skill set to his son. The younger Merek had learned how to avoid scrutiny, and he made sure his pesticide license was up to date, since that was an obvious way to call attention to himself, but Dagney saw a half-dozen potential violations just driving by his grain warehouse.

She pulled up to his modest house, at least half of which looked like it was patched with old fence boards. There was no ringer, so she knocked with the flat of her palm. No response. She knocked again, louder this time. "Department of Agriculture. You've got an inspection."

She heard the heavy thudding of bare feet on hardwood floors, then the door swung wide. Merek wasn't wearing anything, unless Dagney counted children's tube socks with blown out elastic or a pair of too-small boxer shorts clinging for life to one ankle- which, on a moment's reflection, she did not. More disturbing, he seemed to be covered in a sticky, green semi-transparent fluid from the middle of his chest to his knees.

"I'm with the Department of Agriculture, here for an inspection."

"Got all my permits," he said, and started scratching himself. Vigorously.

"That's correct, but this is a surprise inspection."

He eyed her suspiciously, then looked down at his own nudity. "I like to be naked," he said, matter of factly.

"I need to see where you store your FIFRA applicable chemicals," she said firmly.

He squinted hard at her, and his entire face scrunched up. He took a big, deep breath, and his eyes closed; Dagney began to wonder if she was going to have to resuscitate him. His eyes burst open with the speed of a frightened rabbit, and they had that kind of panic in them, too. His mouth hung open and his tongue moved spastically around, until he asked, too loud: "Why can't you people let me be naked?"

"Sir, I'm not the police. But I do need to inspect your fertilizers and pesticides. You certainly have the option to put on pants- I'd consider it a personal kindness if you did- but the decency of your exposure is kind of beyond my purview."

"You're purty," he said, and put his hands in a grabby motion and started pushing them towards her chest; she seized his wrist, and twisted it up and back, forcing him down to one knee.

"Now that I won't tolerate," she said. She'd carried cuffs ever since that pot farmer nearly broke her wrist the year before, and she retrieved them from her belt. "For my safety, I'm going to cuff you." She clipped the cuff around the wrist she had hostage. "You're not under arrest, but given the state of things I think we'll both be safer this way. Would you like to at least pull up your underpants before I put on the other cuff?"

"Yes ma'am," he said, chastened. He stood up into a squat, and with his free hand wriggled the boxer shorts around his tube-socked foot, then around his bowed legs.

She tried to focus away from the sausage stuffing that was him pulling on those boxer shorts- they must have belonged to the same child as his socks- and asked, "You still storing your pesticides in the little red barn on the south side of the property?"

"Yes," he said, but realized too late maybe he shouldn't have, and followed it with "ma'am," as calmly as he could.

"Are you on anything right now?"

"No ma'am," he said. But his eyes flicked quickly from the extreme left to the right, and his pupils were so wide they reminded her of a mosquito overfeeding until it burst.

"I'm not DEA- I don't give a crap," she said. "But unless you're on something, then that miosis- the dilation of your pupils- might mean organophosphate exposure. And you've been salivating. Maybe you're hungry, maybe you're just a drooler- I don't know you well enough to judge- but that also hints at organophosphates. When we're done here, you should get yourself to a doctor, just to be sure. Now if you'd be so kind as to lead the way."

He hobbled past her. "How much do you know about the history of organophosphates?" she asked, and he shrugged and gave a noncommittal grunt. "They come from World War 2 Germany. They were being researched as pesticides, but the Nazis diverted them into nerve agents instead. VX has a similar pedigree, actually."

Dagney stopped as they got closer to the barn. "See, I already have a problem here. There's 350 feet from this barn to the aquitard- see that marker there? And it's supposed to be down slope, which clearly it is not. That's how captan flowed into it last time." Merek fell in behind her as she berated him. "But what really irritates me, is that these are all things noted in the assessment after your spill last year. It really is like you're looking for reasons for me to kick your ass- with paperwork, obviously, and not my dainty little girl feet."

She stopped when they got to the barn. The door was already open a sliver, and Dagney reached for the handle to pull it open enough for them to enter. Suddenly Merek kicked at her, only managing to throw himself off balance; he fell hard into the mud, soiling his off white underpants. "Don't touch her! You can't touch her! She's mine!"

Dagney noticed several leafy vines trailing out of the open door; they had kept it from closing all the way. They ended at the corner of the barn in a dome of leaves, propped up with chicken wire and sticks. She could make out several different varieties of plants by the leaves: pumpkin, cucumber, squash.

Dagney opened the barn door, and felt for a switch in the dark. The lights were on a dimmer, which had apparently last been set to mood lighting, and as she turned around she understood why, and gave up on wanting to see better.

Strewn about the floor were a woman's clothes: red stiletto pumps, a red miniskirt and an even mini-er top.

There was a "woman" lying on a pink flannel blanket, mostly stained the same deep green as Merek's groin. A pair of red silk stockings were stuffed with vines, torn under vinyl, crotchless panties; a matching bra was filled with hefty green winter squashes. Between them a still-growing pumpkin torso made her almost look pregnant. Her arms were cucumbers tied together by their vines. Her head was a turban squash turned on its side. Its lumpy top almost resembled a face, and there was a heavy lathering of eye shadow and smeared lipstick painted over it. Green tendrils mixed with an auburn wig, giving it the appearance of dreadlocked hair.

The vegetable doll lay peacefully back with its legs splayed; there were dents from a pair of big knees in the flannel between them.

Dagney put the doll out of her mind, but focused on the green sludge it was soaked in. The oily gel was pooling in various places on the ground inside the shed. It seemed to be leaking from a variety of different canisters: poisons, pesticides and chemicals.

At that moment, Merek burst into the room. In stumbling to his feet, he'd managed to drag his boxers back around his right ankle. "I love her!" he bellowed, and the words seemed to jiggle with his bare belly and engorged member as he ran towards Dagney. She moved to the side and Merek smacked straight into a post and collapsed to the ground.

"Those pesticides are leaking into the groundwater. We think they've made some kids at McLoughlin Middle School sick," she said. She was angry, as much about him possibly poisoning kids, as him charging at her like a pissed off green unicorn.

His tears formed a river with the blood flowing from his lip. "You don't have to tell me about my land. I worked this land my whole life. I know my land. Biblically."

Dagney sighed. "No person shall transport, store, dispose of, display, or distribute any pesticide or pesticide container in such a manner as to have unreasonable adverse effects on the environment. I'm pretty sure that was an attempted assault, too. Now you are going to be arrested- or fined, at least." Dagney put a hand under his sweaty arm and pulled him up. He stumbled groggily, and she led him outside. "Sit," she said, and set him flat against the side of the barn. With his hands cuffed behind him, unless the big man was a contortionist, he wasn't getting up without help.

She called hazmat and the sheriff's office, and was about to dial Nelson when she heard a cracking sound from inside the barn. She thought it might be one of the aging pesticide containers rupturing. "Crap," she said, "exactly what I need."

She hurried inside and scanned the chemical drums that lined the barn. While several were in disrepair, and a couple were even leaking from pinholes, none had broken open. Her eyes scanned the room for movement, and she listened for the sound of fluid running. Out of the corner of her eye she saw the vegetable doll shaking.

She winced, at the thought that Merek had shoved a vibrating sex toy into it, and couldn't decide if that was better or worse than just burrowing out a little hole. But there wasn't that telltale rumble coming from it. As her eyes adjusted to the low light, she could make out a wide fracture split down the center of the pumpkin belly, like tangerine lightning. A hunk of the orange skin surrounding the crack swelled outward rhythmically, then receded, each pulse distending the fruit further. It broke open.

An infant tumbled out of the pumpkin womb. It was entirely human save for a green complexion and soft tufts of clover on its head instead of hair. It gurgled at her, spitting out seeds and stringy pumpkin flesh. It propped itself up on chubby arms to take in the world, and crawled out of the pumpkin shrapnel to get a better view. Then its hands slipped out from under it, and the baby fell onto the dirt. It regarded her curiously a moment, and began to wail.

Instinct grabbed hold of Dagney, and she rushed over to the infant, and took it up in her arms. The child stopped crying as soon as she started to bounce it against her shoulder. She could feel pumpkin juices soaking through her clothes- at least, she hoped it was just pumpkin juices. It didn't feel warm, anyway. She made a scrunched up face, and the child scrunched its face, too.

Dagney didn't know much about babies, but she knew that that kind of mimicry usually took months to develop. The child was heavy, too- too big, really- and slowly Dagney assembled the ideas together. Babies weren't supposed to crawl for months- they even had to be held a certain way because their necks wouldn't support their gargantuan heads. That meant the child wasn't a newborn- not in the usual human sense, anyway.

Dagney continued to bounce the child and turned and stared at the cracked open pumpkin. She sympathized with its emptiness. She'd been told from a very early age that she could never have children, and so she'd expended much effort convincing herself that she didn't want any.

But now, holding one so alone, she couldn't lie to herself anymore. She stroked her fingers through its clover hair, and the baby blew pumpkin pulp spit bubbles at her. She smiled.

Her happiness dove suddenly into an icy bath of dread as her mind jumped between a dozen schlocky horror movie scenes of questionably credentialed 'scientists' hovering over a table with bone saws, smiling maniacally as lettuce and green juices flew into their faces. Her heart broke at the sound of the infant's shrieks.

Dagney realized the noise wasn't only in her mind; the child in her arms was crying, too, because she was clutching it too tightly. She slackened her grip, and looked at the baby's pudgy face. She pursed her lips, and furrowed her brow, and the child's eyes got wide.

Dagney knew how long responders took, and that she wouldn't have long to conceal the child. She wrapped it in her coat and walked out of the barn.

Merek was still lying where she'd left him, and snot poured out of his nose. "You can't have her... you can't take her away..." he blubbered. Dagney paused for a moment, thinking he meant the baby, and horror shivered through her. She unconsciously clutching the child closer to her chest.

"I've never loved any woman like I love her. Those legs. That nasty little mouth, and those tits," he strained, trying to pantomime breasts, but he couldn't with his hands cuffed behind himself, so he stuck out his own chest, instead, and swung his own man-breasts from side to side.

Dagney sighed, relaxing. He didn't know about the baby, and given his current state, probably shouldn't. She carried the child to her car, and built a little nest in the floorboard for it, using paperwork and her coat. "Babies like nests, right?" she asked.

The child cooed at her.

"I'll take that as a maybe," she said. She covered the baby with a manila folder, and stood up as the hazmat crew arrived in a county fire truck.

"Morning, Dag," Annie, the firewoman in charge of the hazmat crew, said with a wave.

"Yeah, not so much," Dag replied, gesturing to the stains on her shirt.

Annie was a big woman with blond hair and a hard face. Dagney could have pictured her in a Victorian dress, and had no doubt she would have been considered very pretty in that era. At least until she stuck out her tongue and said, "Yuck. You want us to break out the decon shower?"

"Naw," Dagney said. "I don't think I got hit with the worst of it. I can probably strip out of my shirt for the drive home. Plus, you know, I'm not crazy about the idea of being naked around this many men." She gestured at the rest of the crew filing out of the truck.

"And speaking of men to be naked around..." Annie said, nodding in the direction of an arriving sheriff's department patrol car, "looks like Officer Man-Candy just arrived on the scene." Dagney gave her a confused look. "He's a sweetheart. And I'm sure he'll need your statement. And maybe your number."

Dagney walked over to the squad car as a deputy with a warm tan exited.

He smiled awkwardly at her. "Dagney?" he asked. She nodded. He pulled a business card out of his shirt pocket and handed it to her. "I'm Deputy Marco. Um, dispatch couldn't stop laughing long enough to tell me what's going on."

"Probably best I just showed you, then," she said.

She walked him past hazmat in their yellow suits.

"Um, do we need to be taking extra precautions?" he asked.

"Not much in the way of fumes," she said, "so unless you're planning on rolling around in the spills, or helping with the cleanup, you're good."

Hazmat had already turned the lights all the way up, so the deputy could immediately see the doll laid out on the floor.

"Is that what I think it is?" he asked.

"If you think it's a vegetable sex toy, then yes."

"And just so I'm 100% crystal, because I'm sure there are going to be questions at the office, that's not an unconscious person, it's literally vegetables, as opposed to animals or minerals?"

"Veggies, of the major food group variety," she said.

"Is that a crime? I've got a pretty good handle on the penal code-"

"Handling the penal code..." she snickered.

"Given the circumstance, I probably could have phrased that better. But so far as I know what happened between a person and their cucumbers in the privacy of their own, uh, barn..."

"Not a crime as far as I'm aware. And, you know, normally, I wouldn't have called at all, but he kind of attacked me. Ran at me, actually. Which I might normally shrug off, but he's pretty out of his gourd, right now."

"Nice."

"Probably from exposure to the chemicals he's storing, which might be ironic, since I'm here investigating those chemicals maybe getting into other people's drinking water. But I figured we could use your help, cause in this state he's kind of likely to hurt himself or maybe some of the responders."

"Serve and protect, right there on the back of my squad car," he said with a smile. "So where's my perp?"

"Just outside."

She walked him back to where Merek was sitting. "See, I'd noticed the chubby naked man on my way in, but you were playing it up mysteriously, and I thought there'd be some grand reveal as to the importance of this character. Something grander than just telling me, 'Oh, he's outside.'"

She grinned, and shrugged. "I had fanfare planned, a musical number, fireworks. But then we went over-budget, and the union started complaining about working conditions, and I figured maybe this time less was more."

Marco hunched over to talk to Merek. "The lady tells me you tried to hurt her. That true?" he asked.

"She's my property!" Merek said loudly.

"I assume you don't mean the woman standing next to me, but the tart in the red lingerie."

"She's a lady!" he yelled.

"Guy only seems to have the one volume, and a moist volume at that," Marco said with a grin. He stood back up and turned his attention to Dagney. "I assume you're filing a report with your home office. Can I get a copy?"

"Sure."

"That'll probably suffice for a statement. If I need anything else, I can always get in touch. Lean forward," he said to Merek, inspecting Dag's cuffs. "Good, you've got the double-sided locks. Makes my job easier." He slid his own cuffs onto Merek's wrists, just below Dagney's. She handed him her cuff key, and he unlocked hers. He gave her back her key and cuffs.

He put a hand under Merek's arm and pulled him up to his feet. "Come on, big guy. Now you're under arrest. You shouldn't say anything incriminating. You also shouldn't try to get any of your green ooze on me- because that probably counts as assaulting an officer- and my report's already weird enough as it is."

"I love her," Merek bellowed.

"Right," Marco said, "no chitchat."

"Aren't you going to," Dagney gestured to the underpants stuck to his left ankle, "you know, give the man back his dignity?"

Marco sighed, and retrieved a pair of latex gloves from his belt and slipped them on. Then he kneeled next to Merek. He winced as he stretched the boxers wide, to give Marek a hole. "Step through," he said, and started to thread Merek's legs into his underpants, "and you better think unsexy thoughts, sailor." Marco got the underpants up around Merek's haunches, and pulled his fingers free quickly enough that the elastic snapped. "Sorry."

He walked Merek towards his squad car. He squinted. "Crap." He let go of Merek. "You stay here a second," Marco said, and walked back around to his trunk.

"He kicks," Dagney warned.

"And no kicking," Marco said, pointing his finger at Merek to drive home the point. He retrieved a plastic sheet from the trunk and laid it across his back seat. "There. Now slide in, and try not to get your juices on anything." While Merek wobbled inside the car, Marco asked, "You wouldn't think I'd need to ask people not to spread their juices around in my car, would you? But even asking politely doesn't stop some people."

"I'm sorry," Merek blubbered. "Please don't take her away from me. I'll, I'll clean up my chemicals, and fix the drainage, and whatever the EPA lady wants, just please, please don't make me be alone anymore." The rest of his pleading was lost as Merek started to bawl.

Marco winced at the thought of even asking it on the deranged man's behalf, but took one more look at the sobbing man, pressing his eye juices against his window, and knew he had to. "Is there anything in that... thing we might need for evidence?"

Most of her instincts told Dagney they should burn it- the plants would be better off as ash than as Merek's slutted up screwcrow, but something in his quivering face made her relent. "I can't think of a reason, no. Besides, I like you too much to ask you to scoop it up and put it in little evidence baggies."

Merek's eyes welled up with joyful tears that spilled over his face, and cascaded down the windows in green waterfalls. "So many juices," Marco muttered.

"Thank you," Merek said.

Dagney bent down to look him in the face. "I'm pretty sure that's the organophosphates talking, and that once you've got your brain unfried, you're going to go back to eating your vegetables in a nonsexual way." Merek blinked at her, and she worried she may have talked him out of getting treatment, as she turned towards her car.

"I'll send you a copy of my report, Deputy..." she stared down at the card he'd given her.

"Just call me Marco, and pretend the long string of consonants after that doesn't exist. And I'll look forward to it." He smiled.

She blushed, and then Annie walked past, winking at her through her hazmat helmet and Dagney felt self-conscious. She slunk to her car and started it up. Marco watched as she pulled off Merek's property and pointed her car back towards town.

When Dagney got on the main road, she called Sharpe. "Dagney?" he asked. "I was about to call you. Lab results came back from the McLoughlin drinking fountains; it was crypto, so Merek's off the hook. But you square things there?"

"Yeah. He had a pile of violations, and things went a little sideways. I had to bring in the sheriff- a deputy, anyway; Merek tried to jab me with his green thumb. I'm pretty sure my clothes are soaked in poisons and I'd like to go throw them in the wash. You mind if I email my preliminary report from home?"

"Sounds fine," he said. "But what were you saying about his green thumb?"

"He was covered in pesticides and plant juices- dyed green. And he had a rage-on," she winced, "an anger erection. He charged at me with it, like the unholy offspring of a rhinoceros and the Jolly Green Giant."

"Oh," he said flatly. "And where was your partner during all of this?"

"He got called away en route, farmer had some livestock acting funny; at the time the inspection seemed pretty routine, so I told him I'd handle it. And from what he told me it ended up being a calf with some indigestion- probably not even worth writing up."

Sharpe paused, as if measuring how much of it he was going to believe. "Hmm. Well, good work, anyway."

"Thanks. Bye," Dagney said, then hung up, and dropped the phone into her passenger seat. It bounced once, then landed on the floor.

The baby cooed at her, and wiggled out from under the folder. For the first time since she'd plopped the child down in her car she looked at it, peering at her from behind her gearshift, and asked "What the hell are we going to do with you?"

Table of Contents

# Dogs of War: Chapter 1

I couldn't stop thinking about the bomb last week. I was close enough to feel the heat of it, close enough to smell the explosives even before the scent of burning overtook it. I didn't need to be close to hear Hercules' and Hector's screams as they died, as the fire swallowed the air coming out of their lungs and their first cry of shock and pain cut off abruptly as heat burned its way down their throats. The next yelp was smaller, shorter, weaker than the first; I was close enough to hear that one, too.

I stumbled on a little crack in the road, and tried to remind myself that Iraq was no place to be distracted.

"EOD," came over the radio, from Sergeant Brent, I thought, and my ears perked up, because that was us. "Iraqi civilian reports an IED ahead."

My partner in EOD, Samson, winced. "How many times have I told them? Radio silence around IEDS. I fucking told them."

Most Iraqi bombs anymore were more sophisticated than that, and wouldn't accidentally go off from a stray radio signal. But Samson was good at his job, and didn't want the occasional stray Iraqi blown up, even if most of the time that didn't happen.

Brent was standing at the front of the truck with an Iraqi kid. Instinctively I took in the air around him, smelled for vapor wake- to see if the kid had been near explosives. It wouldn't be the first time a fresh-faced kid tried to lure us toward the bomb he got paid to set. But he was clean- or at least clean for an Iraqi kid in Muqdadiyah. It was still a war zone; power, in the places they had it, was intermittent, and access to fresh water wasn't in everybody's cards.

Samson spoke enough of the language to ask the kid if he could show us where it was. The kid nodded his head, vigorously, and ran in front of the stationary Stryker.

"Take care," Brent said as we passed, and Samson winced; EOD techs tend to believe in luck, since that's usually the only thing standing between them and the monster. He'd rather get a, "Break a leg." But he didn't say anything. The loss of Corporal Carasco- Hector- and his partner weighed all of us down.

Hector was still in the ICU. He'd probably make it, if you count living the rest of his life inside donated skin, in constant pain living. Herc didn't even last long enough for a MedEvac. Medics carried his corpse out on foot.

I smelled it the moment we were out of the exhaust cloud from the idling truck. Either the bomb was a mess, explosives spilled all over, or my nose was even more attentive after Hector and Herc. The scent of it was strong enough that I couldn't tell if it was coming from the right or left side of the street.

My knees shook. I imagined what it was like to meet the monster in the hole, its black fingers curling towards you as its breath of fire rushed to engulf you. If you were lucky, it was the concussive force that hit you hardest, maybe with some superficial burns. The unlucky got a face full of shrapnel- pretty often shipyard confetti, just whatever metal crap was lying around, screws, ball bearings, anything that would shred someone to pieces.

I was frustrated, and anxious. Samson relied on me; I don't know if it made ours an equal partnership, but he looked to me to find the explosives so he could pull them apart. "Render safe" was the stilted military phrase for it. And normally, I was good at my job. But today, I couldn't find them.

And maybe I didn't want to. The thought shook me to my bones. What if I didn't want to find the IED? What if I didn't want Samson hovering over it, just waiting for the monster to pop out of its little hole, for the vengeful genie to spring out of its misshapen lamp. I swallowed. I was a soldier. I was trained for this, and battle-hardened.

But my legs wouldn't stop shaking. I wanted to help Samson. I wanted to find the bomb. The kid pointed in a general direction down the street, and laughed, like we were playing a game of tag, and ran off. He was a kid; I didn't blame him for it, or think he meant anything by it. He probably didn't know the gravity, just that when you see an IED, you tell a soldier. So he had. And now he had playing to get back to.

I couldn't even verify what the kid had told us. I stepped out in front of Samson. My legs wobbled, and I think he noticed, but for my pride pretended not to. "Got it?" he asked.

I walked in a short circle, looking for disturbed earth, sniffing for vapor wake or the device itself.

I've only had the fight or flight response on a couple of occasions. Once, in training, that first time Samson fired a gun over my shoulder. It surprised me, and scared the hell out of me. But after just a moment, I calmed myself enough to let my training take over, and trusted Samson to have my back.

The other time was with Hector. I'd never been that close to an uncontrolled detonation before. Sometimes, some bombs, the best render safe procedure is demolition, so I was used to explosions, but not to explosions in the field, not while two men I'd consider friends were hovering over the monster's pit.

But I felt it again. My heart beat faster, breath came tight and hurried. My nose focused at the same moment as my eyes, and I recognized the disturbed earth and the tell-tale smell of plastic explosives. But what had suddenly sharpened my senses was not the bomb itself- but the fact that Samson was standing right over it.

It was closer than the kid had said, but again, he was just a kid. And it was subtler than most- which is why Samson hadn't noticed it, either. All of the muscles in my body tensed as I flattened myself, then I leapt.

I knocked into Samson the moment before the IED went off. I felt fire at my back, and the crush of the pressure wave rippling across my flesh. And then I felt it, the horrible sting of shrapnel as it cut its way through my skin, improvised bullets tumbling and ripping through my meat.

I lost a few seconds, and when my mind pushed past the screaming of my nerves, I realized I was laying on top of Samson. I wanted to get off him, to help him up and see if he was all right. But my body wouldn't move; I was a limp pile laying on top of him. I couldn't feel my legs.

Samson stirred, and gingerly moved me. "Goliath?" he asked, and I'd never heard so much vibrato in his voice. "You stupid fuck- you were clear." He touched my chest, and his hand came back bloody. "God," he whispered, and keyed his radio. "Need a MedEvac, NOW, patrol Bravo-Tango-Eleven, at Sadre street and 12th."

I felt faint, but wasn't worried until I saw blood coming from his chest, too. He didn't seem to have noticed. He grabbed my arm, and squeezed. "Stay with me, buddy. You're going to be okay." My training had always told me to trust Samson. My heart rate was slowing, and I was having trouble even keeping my eyes open. I thought I was dying. But Samson said I was going to be okay. So I believed him.

Continued in Dogs of War, available for free exclusively to those who sign up for my mailing list.

Table of Contents

# Nexus

My drink tasted like Martian goat piss; goats never completely acclimated to the terraformed red planet, something about not having the optimal mix of methane and ammonia. Not that I advocated drinking goat piss, generally, but focusing on that awful taste let me tell myself my mind wasn't elsewhere, even if that tasted like Martian goat piss, too.

"You're thinking of Dalaxia," SecDiv said, shattering my conviction that she couldn't still be sitting next to me.

"Hmm?" I asked, but the muscles in my neck were too relaxed to look up from the bar, and I don't think I succeeded in making my face look any less droll.

"When you've been drinking, when you've relaxed enough that your mind can wander, there's a look you get. It means you're thinking of Dalaxia."

"I might be," I said. Times like this I hated that she knew me as well as she did.

"And I've never known that to be a good thing."

"Me, either."

"You want to talk about it?"

"Do you?" I asked, and she thought a moment and shuddered. It was hard to know which particular aspect of Dalaxia was haunting her: the way that entire world seemed to scream as that whole world burned, the choke of smoke rolling off burning flesh, or the way that planet made us hate people, and each other.

I summoned the strength to look at her; or maybe it was just that I knew she wouldn't be able to look at me, after that.

"Come on," she said, pushing out of her chair. "I'll get you home." She put an arm around my torso and pulled me off my stool. She steadied me on my feet, I wasn't sure if she was surprisingly strong, or I was just that plastered and malleable.

She was definitely less in the bag than me, because she weaved her way back to my cabin. She leaned me against my doorway.

"I won't be able to sleep," I told her, though I didn't mean anything by it; I was having difficulty feeling everything below the pounding beginning in my head, so I had no reason to think the spirit was willing. But that was Dalaxia in a nutshell, and unfortunately, my relationship with SecDiv, as well. That colony was where we stopped pretending we were only fucking each other, and it was also where I lost her.

"Me, either," she said coldly, and walked the other direction.

I sighed, and fell into my cabin. I missed the bed by a foot, but my floor was surprisingly comfortable. I scrolled idly through my heads-up display on my eyescreen, and saw that I had a message from my cousin Brian. But they were never just messages; they were the start of interminable conversations that only ended when it got more excruciating to stay and humor him than to walk away and intentionally hurt his feelings. I loved him, and would gladly help him through his problems, but he had a depressive tendency, which meant I wasn't so much helping as listening while he mangled a half-dozen melancholy clichés together, and I just didn't have the will to go through that; I still wasn't sure I had the will to make it all the way into my bed.

I woke up late the next morning, morning being a relative thing on a star ship. I had made it into bed, after all, though my crotch felt like it had been worn for a pair of donkey tap shoes- so I don't think I got there effortlessly.

I sniffed at myself. It wasn't painfully obvious I'd passed out in my clothes, so I decided to hell with a shower and a change.

My cabin was in an unlikely spot midship, unlikely in that it wasn't any grander than any other officer cabin, though it was better than the barracks. I chose it because it was near one of the biggest windows on the ship, and I liked to stargaze. This window usually had the best view of planets and systems we were passing, and it was hard to keep your breath looking out at worlds we'd only ever glimpsed through telescopes before.

It made me feel like a kid again. My dad used to tell me about the space race, back in the 1950s and '60s. Space exploration began in earnest when we started to worry about the Russians dropping nuclear weapons on us from space, back when "US" meant Americans. Eventually everybody lost interest, because space was an expensive hobby for countries with no concept of return on investment. The occasional discussion of monetizing the cosmos cropped up, mostly revolving around mining and maybe eventually trade, but it was all academic, because it was too expensive. Then we hit peak oil, and that was followed by all kinds of other peaking minerals. So we either had to start mining off-world, or accept a different standard of living.

What had once been the United Nations was now the United Government, mostly a coat of paint, really, but it pushed the ICC and other disparate sections of international law and government under the same tent. At the same time, the power of national governments had been shrinking as the world became smaller, so the UG became roughly equivalent to the old US in terms of real world influence. A lot of that disseminated power went to multinational companies, many of which had larger populations and economies than the old countries, and those companies were the only ones with enough cash on hand to explore space once it was deemed a necessity.

Sontem, the company I worked for, was one of the largest of the interstellar corporations. Their first ship was called the Argus, after somebody got their Greek mythology slightly wrong. On the tenth year of its tour, it opened up a worm-gate at its location- about five lights years out.

Our ship was to be the second in what the board hoped would grow to be a fleet of deep-space exploration vehicles. The company wanted to call the ship the Enterprise, but the company who owned the rights to the old Star Trek show sued. Several related names were floated, including "Commerce," and even "Intercourse," which had my vote, before they settled on "Nexus".

It was ostensibly a five-year mission, just like the Argus, but it was written into our service contracts that they could be unilaterally extended indefinitely. And we all knew when we signed up that the ship was designed so generations could live and die on board- there was no expectation of going back home.

We'd been out of the worm-gate a few weeks. The corridors still had that plasticky new ship smell. I killed lots of time walking the halls, because we were weeks away from having anything to do.

I got an incoming message on my HUD, from SecDiv. Her image, name and rank popped up on my eyescreen, Lieutenant Louise Templeton. It was strange seeing her at that rank. She'd been a sergeant when I was worked with her in SecDiv, what felt like several lifetimes ago. We'd been in love, as madly as two people ever were. It ended... incompletely. I hadn't seen her in years before the voyage. She didn't know I was up for a spot on the Nexus, and I hadn't known about her. It was a coincidence she ended up my head of SecDiv- unless it was somebody in the company's idea of a sick joke.

I pulled her into the corner of my eyescreen. Her dark hair was pulled back in a bun in a way that made her seem more severe than she was- though she could be severe.

She was first on my personality compatibility matrix, and seventh for genetic compatibility; since it was a generational ship, they built those matrices during crew selection to make sure we wouldn't get out past Jupiter before everybody realized they had no intention of boning anybody else. I hadn't had the computer build a composite, but I suspected we would have beautiful, disturbingly brilliant children- though I wasn't sure if either of us wanted that.

"LT? What's happening?" I realized only after answering that I'd called her by her initials, LT like 'melty,' like I used to, and hoped she could confuse it with a recitation of her rank- we were still a ways away from being back to friendly.

"I've got a situation developing. An ensign's setting off the decibel sensors in the corridor, trying to blow the drums out of one of my SecOff's ears. I'm on the bridge, or I'd handle it myself."

"And SecDiv's gone a whole week without bloodying a crew member."

"That, too," she said with a smile. "Just down the hall from your twenty- location." I wasn't far enough out of the security services I'd forgotten my ten codes, but it had probably been a while since she'd worked security for someone with my background.

I adjusted my cochlear implant, just enough to eavesdrop. "Yeah, I hear him now. Jesus. That's some Paleolithic caveman shit he's flinging. Are we sure it isn't a particularly nasty chimpanzee someone released out of SciDiv?"

"...maybe if you'd allowed the baby's daddy to be in the picture, but you chose to be a single mother..." I rounded the corner, and he was there, looming over the SecOff, spittle suspended in the air before it smacked across the wall and the woman.

I stepped between them, and puffed out my chest to be sure the augmented reality sensors in his HUD would pull up my name and rank so he knew who he was dealing with. "Do I have to explain this situation to you, son?" His lip curled into a snarl he failed to hide. "You're being a dick; worse, you're being a misogynistic, irrational dick, and it's fucking with my morale. First off, you're going to apologize."

"Like fuck I will."

"You will apologize, or I will fire you out the nearest airlock for insubordination." My HUD mapped the direct route to the airlock, and I shared it with his HUD.

Anger and surprise flashed across his eyes, and for a second I thought he'd take a swing at me. But he'd heard the stories, and realized that I was likely more trouble than the SecOff, so he mumbled a quiet, "Sorry."

I turned to SecOff Santiago. My HUD pulled up too much of her psychological history; I hadn't acclimated to having executive clearances, or maybe I hadn't set my preferences properly. Before I could stop myself I read the words, "abusive father." I thought that it put her reaction to being screamed at by this chauvinist prick in perspective, but I've known enough people with that history to know better than to think it's that linear a correlation. "You're dismissed," I told her.

"I can handle this, sir," she said, defiant.

"It's not a security issue any more. It's an administrative one." Her eyes went wide. His didn't, because he hadn't the sense to be afraid.

She glanced at the Ensign, and I saw that for a moment I was sharing his file with her. He had no combat experience to speak of. She knew enough of my reputation that she didn't query my files before deciding I could handle him myself, and walked away.

"Now I don't care if mommy was a bad lady with a weakness for swallowing the seed of the wrong kind of men, I don't care if the love of your life decided to get a sex change and start dating farm animals. The particular why behind your numbfuckery is beyond my purview, but you're going to have a nice long talk with the therapists about why you're such a fuckstick. Toddle on down to PsychDiv, or the next meet-up you have with SecDiv will include the press of boots in your neck."

He gave the weakest salute I'd ever seen and spun on his heels. "Impressive as always," SecDiv said over my implant. I'd forgotten she was still on the line.

"I should get a hold of PsychDiv, let them know to expect the 1400s knocking on their door." There was the hint of a smile on her face, then a click as she ended the conversation and disappeared from my eyescreen.

The SecOff had made it around the corner and was leaning against the wall, trying to compose herself. "You all right?" I asked.

"I was handling it, sir," she said. She wanted to punch me as bad as the Ensign.

"It's not your job to suffer fools." She sighed, then noticed the tension in my jaw, and realized what I meant by that. She nodded, and kicked off the wall. I might have been worried, if she'd been heading towards the Ensign, but he was going the other way, scurrying back to PsychDiv.

I dialed our head head-shrinker as I started back down the hall. PsychDiv appeared on my screen, her long, strawberry blond hair tumbling messily over her shoulders. Our personality compatibility was third on the ship. Genetically we were an ugly match. Breeding might even require a few gene-therapy modifications. And if her hair were a little more strawberry and a lot less blond, I don't think that would have mattered in the slightest. There was a little part of me that thought it still mightn't. "Maggie?"

"Shouldn't you be calling me Lieutenant Allbright? Or at least Doctor?" she asked with a wry smile.

"Maggie, I've seen you naked."

She flushed, and her cheeks more closely resembled the strawberry of her hair. "You do know this is an open channel, right? Into the entire PsychDiv wing."

"No it isn't. And even if it had been, I'm not shy about seeing you naked. It was a fun day." I let that linger a moment. "It was a trust exercise amongst the executive staff. Everybody saw everybody naked. They wanted to desensitize us, make the bodies of our crewmates less exotic and stigmatizing."

"I thought that was why they poured us into these Lycra uniforms."

"No. That was my request. Well, actually I requested corsets, stiletto heels and Lycra, but you can't always get what you want."

"I am amused at the thought of you stumbling around on stiletto heels," she let that linger, "but you didn't call me to banter, hopefully?"

"Are you saying you don't enjoy it?" I asked. She grinned, and I knew that was all I was getting from her. "But no, I was wondering about Williams, Martin, EngDiv Ensign. He just reduced one of my SecOffs to tears; certainly emotionally abusive, and I think had I not intervened, it might have gone physical. At which point the officer would have clubbed his eye out, because tears or no she's trained to grind the bones of men to make her bread, and he's trained to push a stylus around an easel and know math. But how'd that little emotion troll get on board my ship?"

"Let me see." She waved her fingers through the air, and I heard the whoops and bloops of files being moved around on her HUD. "He was cleared by Sarah McCain. Not a doctor, but a psychiatric nurse. She has good credentials, slightly better than average behavioral prediction stats. I'm assuming he's on his way to me." I nodded. "I'm pulling up his file. Yeah. She noted slightly elevated aggressive tendencies, potential issues with female authority, but low on the Allende scale. If he's developing a personality disorder it's either atypically fast or she missed something."

"All right. Well, maybe he's just had an off morning. You're the professionals. But if you think it warrants an investigation, you have my backing to put McCain under the microscope. And, as it may come up, I threatened to fire Williams out of an airlock."

"Which one?"

"Is that important?"

"It isn't medically relevant. I was just curious. For the last few hours we've had an excellent view of Rigil Kentaurus. If you have to be shot out an airlock, at least you'd have a nice view before you explosively decompressed. But is that standard disciplinary procedure?" she asked with a smirk.

"I was improvising. Though I think legally I'd be in the clear. I haven't finished going through the entirety of my orientation materials, but from what I have read it's scary the authority vested in my position."

"I think you'll do fine."

"I wasn't fishing for a compliment."

"No. I just thought," she paused, weighing her words carefully, "it's important you know that I trust you. We trust you. Heavy is the head, and all that. But there was an at least slightly democratic process behind your selection. We're here, most of us, anyway, because we trust you. Most days that won't matter at all, because we're the glorified cargo of a deep space scanning probe. But if or when it ever does-"

"Thanks. CC me your findings on Williams. Particularly if there's going to be the need for monitoring, discipline, or counseling."

"Can't imagine him not needing counseling."

"And I can't imagine him cooperating unless I can follow up and kick the appropriate asses to see it through. So let me know."

"I will. Bye."

I'd been on the ship just long enough that I no longer had to think about where I was going, and it wasn't until PsychDiv hung up that I realized that I was walking onto the bridge, though I wasn't entirely sure why. I scanned quickly over the room, and noticed SecDiv was gone. "Where's SecDiv?" I asked no one in particular.

One of the middle-rank SecOffs had taken her place at the security panels, looked up and figured it was his job to respond to me. "I think she went down to debrief Santiago." I tried not to think of one woman pantsing another... and failed. Though one of them being tear-stained made it more surreal than erotic or funny.

Bill Jacobs, EngDiv, leaned over my shoulder from his control panel, grinning wide. He was young, but didn't look it. "Heard you sent one of my jackasses to time out."

"He's lucky I'm in a charitable mood this morning. His behavior warranted a full jackassectomy."

"Anatomically speaking, I'm not sure where the jackass is- though I'm assuming it's a gland- or how painful it would be to forcibly remove it outside of a medical setting. I'm presuming very."

"Correct. But how's our baby doing?"

"NavDiv's fine," he said. "Still a little cranky, I think he needs to be changed. And I'm pretty sure it's your turn."

"Don't make me turn this ship around," NavDiv said from his seat. "The whiplash would probably kill us all- and spill superheated plasma across several star systems. It would be pretty, though."

"Nerds," I mumbled.

EngDiv walked back to his panels, and glanced over to make sure nothing had caught fire in the last few seconds. "No complaints. Everything's nominal."

"Good. Do me a favor and check up on Williams' sector. On the off-chance something's gotten into the environment there that set him off."

"Sure. Docs haven't taken a look at him yet, have they?"

I pinged his location on my HUD, "He's arriving at PsychDiv... now."

"So it's probably a needle I'm looking for in this haystack."

"Once the doctors have given him a once-over I'm sure they can advise on potential environmental mood alters. But you can at least start collecting the environmental data." He wasn't happy with my answer, but with neither of us able to pluck diagnoses out of the future, he could stick his unhappiness. He left out the same door I'd just come through. "Nav, how's our course?"

NavDiv spoke without turning around from his panels; he'd been transfixed by the data streams that had come from the ship's telemetrics since we started accelerating. "Slow and steady, boss-man. We're still crawling our way to near-light." The Nexus accelerated slowly, at about the maximum speed the human body can withstand for prolonged periods- around 3g.

Even at that speed, we need the nanites in the uniforms to compensate, along with a few internal enhancements to strengthen organ systems and connective tissues. We were reluctant to do more, since the effects of nano still aren't that well understood- and no one's forgotten about the cancer epidemic that spread through the first colony that beta-tested nano injections.

At that rate, it takes about 115 days to reach light speed, not that we wanted to get too close to it, because the closer to that speed you get, the more fuel it takes to keep accelerating at the same rate, and the more slowly time moves on ship. "Anything else?" I asked.

"So far no obstructions, no obstacles sensors or probes didn't see from more than half a light-year away. I'll keep you appraised if anything changes, but really I don't see it happening. Until we reach speed we're more a cruise ship than anything. Might as well sit back and enjoy a Mai Thai."

"Drinking while navigating is strictly prohibited by the ship's charter," the ship's computer added helpfully.

"Why can we program an AI sophisticated enough to fly the world's most expensive starcraft, but not savvy enough to understand the difference between ordering a drink and making conversation?"

I smiled as I answered him: "We have. I think she just enjoys fucking with you."

He turned a wary eye to his control-panel. "Is that it? Because I know where they store your RAM, and if I have to start yanking boards until you no longer have the excess operating capacity to be a pain in the ass, I will."

"EngDiv would never let you do that, Dave."

"I know my name's Dave, but still, it creeps me out when you say it like Hal."

I cut in. "In her defense, she has a far more silky and pleasant voice than Hal."

"Thank you, captain. Plrrrbt."

"Did she just raspberry me?" Dave asked. "Did our ship just raspberry me?"

"She did. I think Haley has your number. I'd quit while you're ahead. Ish."

"Oh God, you named her that? I already have a Space Odyssey nightmare once a week. Do I really have to go catatonic for you to be satisfied?"

"How close to light are we?" I asked, ignoring the question. I remembered from the briefings that the force to push our ship, and hence the amount of energy that required, was roughly the mass of our ship multiplied by our acceleration. So by starting slow, and building slow, the savings on fuel were huge.

"Just rounding 70%."

"Then we should already be reverse-Winkling." Anything close to 70% of lightspeed and time effectively took half as long on the ship as off it. At about 95% of lighstpeed, the ratios reached for the sky and 1 year on the ship felt like ten to the rest of the universe and increased exponentially after.

"How long before we're in the Kennedy Window for the first few sensor pods?" I asked him.

The window was named for Andrew Kennedy, who invented the Wait Calculation. Basically, because of differing speeds, two bodies that leave the same point can reach their destination at radically different times. Kennedy was concerned with increases in technology, but the calculation had since been applied more broadly.

The Nexus was designed to fire sensor pods from tubes. Their initial speed was higher than the Nexus'. However, the Nexus continued to accelerate, and would eventually overtake the pods.

The purpose of the pods was to arrive at a planet flagged by earlier probes for closer inspection. The pods were designed to orbit a planet a couple of times, get enough info and slingshot back towards our trajectory to be picked up en route. Hitting Kennedy's Window meant getting the pod and its sensory data back early enough that we only stopped at planets that actually had someone to talk to on them.

"Ten minutes." We were specifically targeting inhabitable planets. We didn't want mining rights to particular worlds; we wanted the rights for whole systems. So our mission was to seek worlds that might have competing claim, and break bread with them- if possible, make a deal. If not possible, at least make sure we marked off territory around them, to keep their expansion checked.

"There you are. You threatened to throw another engineer out an airlock?" I recognized the grating voice before I turned around. Pete Ferguson, HR rep and the company's man on the ship. He was the only unranked member of the crew, which was odd, because he was also number one in the ship's hierarchy- behind captain, of course. He was a stickler for the goddamn regs. He seemed to like me, but not respect me- an odd combination in practice.

"Is it somehow my fault you hired engineers who are 90% dick and only 10% brain?"

"I don't suppose you could tone down on the references to male genitalia," he said. "I'm sure, at a minimum, that the female members of your crew aren't comfortable with it."

Haley chimed in to defend me. "Actually, Mr. Ferguson, the term 'dick' originated in the 1500s, meaning 'fellow' or 'lad.' It was not until the late nineteenth century that the phallic connotation of the word surfaces in the written record."

"She's in rare form this morning, isn't she?" I asked him.

"She?"

"With that voice I think it's obvious. You don't want to give our ship gender identity issues this close to the start of our mission, do you? You aren't deliberately trying to create a hostile work environment for our computer, are you?"

"I'll, uh, be in my office," he said, slightly ducking his head as he turned away.

"Thanks for that, Haley," I said.

"Anytime, captain."

Continued in Nexus, available Summer 2013.

Table of Contents
Table of Contents

Foreword

Conflict: A woman becomes possessed by the ancestors of those murdered to obtain the diamond for her wedding ring.

Marvin's Dead: A woman mourns the man she loves.

Jahannam: A young man pays a ransom for his kidnapped father, and waits at the morgue for news.

Font of Youth: A man discovers immortality, alone.

Four Degrees Above Freezing: A detective questions a man who found a chilled corpse.

Falstaff: Sir John is the King's man.

Check Out: A former killer-for-hire hides out after being unable to fulfill a contract.

Fainting Game: A man becomes obsessed tracking the deaths of several young boys.

Murder on Holiday: While on holiday, a serial-killer's activities lead to the birth of Jack The Ripper's myth.

A Life In Porn: A man records and relives little moments with the women in his life.

Betty Page Is Dead: A young GI falls in love with a pinup picture.

DID Have: Four personalities in the same body reflect on the death of the fifth.

Spirit: A NASA probe finds love. And note I didn't go for the obvious 'willing' joke.

PWI: An astronaut fights with his ship's computer about his habit of getting drunk while piloting.

Baby Back: A pregnancy re-kindles a failing relationship.

Cockfight: A rooster, irresistible to hens and humans alike, upsets the pecking order.

Green Thumb: A Department of Agriculture employee has a chance run-in with a farmer covered in chemicals. This short story was eventually expanded into a novel, Dag, now available.

Dogs of War: Two Explosive Ordnance Disposal soldiers recover together, after nearly dying in an explosion. This story is part of a novella, Dogs of War, available for free to newsletter subscribers.

Nexus: The crew of an interstellar star ship try to screw the alien species they meet before their corporate backers can screw them. This is the opening chapter of Nexus, coming summer 2013.

# Thanks From The Author

You have my sincerest thanks for helping me continue writing. Below is a list of my other work. Some is available for purchase now, others will be available soon. I also encourage you to check my website for other projects of mine, including RSS feeds of stories that are updating weekly and to sign up for my newsletter, so I can let you know when something new is coming out.

Nic feeds off your thoughts, attention and the odd crudely-drawn erotic fan-doodle. Feed Nic by leaving a review at your favorite e-tailer, or emailing him at NicWilson.Writer@gmail.com. Additional contact methods and stalking opportunities are available at NicolasWilson.com.

# Other Works by Nic

Available Novels

Homeless

Humanity has been decimated by a violent new species that nests in enclosed spaces, and slaughters everything unfortunate enough to come indoors. Mitch is a 'Wall Banger', an explosives expert who 'cracks' buildings, exposing them to air and sunlight to kill the invasive organisms. When a friend of Mitch's asks for help tracking down a murderer, Mitch recruits Cori, a 'Shadow Runner' who races through infested spaces to gather supplies and saleable loot. But this terrifying contagion isn't the only danger, as their world descends into a harrowing marathon against oversupplied militias, murderous gangs, self-righteous survivors, and all-out starvation.

Banksters

It's a profitable time to be a bastard, one of the most profitable in history. Mark Dane intends to take full advantage of that and be the bastard at the top- if he can make his way past his fellow predators, through a concrete jungle of murder, sex, greed, and revenge. Ride shotgun with a sociopathic social climber, as he lies, cheats, and manipulates his way through the ranks of the fourth largest financial firm in the country, and revel in the bastard on bastard violence that follows.

The Necromancer's Gambit (The Gambit #1)

The sheriff of Portland, OR's magical community is known as Knight. His bosses run the mage government, called "the Gambit." On a rainy night, he recovers a mutilated body, tainted with dark magic and dumped at a local haunt. When the corpse is identified as a close associate of the Gambit, it threatens the safety of the community he protects, and those he cares about most. As the fragile peace amongst the city's magic-wielding factions disintegrates, Knight must track down a cadre of murderers before his friends are picked off, one by one- with each death used to strengthen the spells cast against the Gambit.

Nexus (The Sontem Trilogy #1)

Captain Anderson Grant of the corporate starship Nexus boldly explores alien worlds (and occasionally the alien women, too). Grant and his crew struggle with the company's version of manifest destiny, as well as its attempt to coerce them through military force. They begin to question whether the largest threat to their mission and their safety will come from outside the Nexus or from the company that respects them more for their genetic possibilities than their individuality.

Dag

Dagney Morgan, a sarcastic Department of Agriculture employee with an affinity for paperwork, has a chance run-in with a farmer covered in toxic chemicals, and walks away with a genetically modified baby, along with the seeds of a conspiracy. Before she can learn how to change a diaper, Dagney and her makeshift family are thrown into an international web of corruption and intrigue, and hounded by murderous, artificial soldiers. Their only chance at survival is to expose a plot that stretches into the highest echelons, and could start both an international arms race, and a revolution.

Whores

In the near future, women's rights are eroding. Those who buck the system are hunted as gender criminals by the authorities when they're lucky, and rogue militias when they aren't. Alex Harmon, a newly minted gender crimes detective tasked with bringing recalcitrant 'feministas' to justice, pursues a woman cast into a resistance group by circumstance. The tactics of his peers and growing violence force him to question his goals and allegiances, as he finds himself dragged into a brutal guerrilla war for the minds and bodies of a generation of women.

Selected Short Stories Collections ebooks

Ghost Dust

Cinderella Shoes

New Corpse Smell

Cockfight

Analog Memory

Save As

Visit NicolasWilson.com for retailer availability.

Adam West Naked, and other somewhat titillating journalism from Dangerous Ink

A free ebook collection of all of the writing Nic did for the international arts magazine, Dangerous Ink, for the first time together in a single place. Out now.

# Coming Soon

Sign up for Nic's mailing list to be notified when these titles become available.

Nexus: Past Sins (The Sontem Trilogy #2)

The sequel to Nexus, following our intrepid crew fleeing their employer's long arm, and initiating first-contact with alien civilizations. Tentatively due Summer 2014.

Kindred Spirits (The Gambit #2)

The sequel to The Necromancer's Gambit, in which Baldur and Knight face off again. Tentatively due Fall 2014.

Sanctuary

Five pets escape from the shelter to find a home out in the wild. Proceeds to benefit animal shelters. Expected mid-2014.

Singularity

A physicist investigates a temporal distortion, and how it might be related to a football player's progressive dementia at a remote rehab clinic on the Oregon coast. Out in Fall 2014, barring some kind of temporal distortion, just in time for the next NaNo.

Next of Kin

Police corruption led to a new initiative compelling the victims, or their next of kin, to track down those who wronged them, in front of an audience. Follow one unfortunate man into the seamy underworld as he fights to solve the mystery of his brother's murder. Next of Kin is scheduled for November 2014, as Nic's annual NaNo (National Novel Writing Month) project. Its first draft will be serialized, daily, on Nic's blog. Stay tuned.

Twist

When Harvey awoke, his girlfriend and dog were gone, and his world was empty. In days, he hasn't seen a soul except for his dead, naked grandmother. As his reality crumbles, and he descends further into madness, Harvey is forced to confront the disturbing truths behind who he was, and who he is now. Most people don't expect to see a head in the toilet, but then, Harvey's not most people. Due early 2015.

Lunacy

The story of the first manned Mars mission, thrown off course when one of the crew is bitten by a werewolf. Very tentatively scheduled for late 2014, unless Nic's dog eats it (and he'll eat just about anything he can get his jaws around).

The Collected Short Stories of Nicolas Wilson

This collection contains all of the selected short stories collections, and will be available in paperback, too, unlike the Selected Short Story Collections. Out mid-2014.

Nic's mailing list will keep you up to date on these titles, and ones we haven't announced yet.

# Boarder Legalese

Yarr, matey. Here thar be legal wordings. Never have me weather eyes met upon your horizons, says I, nor have I spoke of ye. The troubled waters o' these pages be filled up with imagined and legendary monsters and treasures, but be ye warned: I fear there be no truth to these tales. A sliver may lie in the heart of these, but that sliver is distorted through bottom of a rum bottle- and the bottle's rum- and at the core they be lies and fancy, and any man or beast claims otherwise is a blaggart and a pirate, and may find himself at the end of me steel. If ye see the skull and bones flying above a ship, be wary, and prepare to repel boarders. And if the Jolly Roger sails against the red, give ye no quarter, because ye can expect none.
