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Apocalypse by Camellia Paul

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Camellia Paul

Camellia Paul is a graduate student of Comparative and World Literature at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and an alumna of Jadavpur University, India. She is also a member of the Association of Canadian Studies in Ireland. She has presented award-winning research on “Bengal owlscapes” in South Korea and previously worked as a Senior Instructional Designer, with experience in international publishing and academic translation. Her fiction, nonfiction, and translations appear in The Antonym, The Brussels Review, Breath and Shadow, and others. An award-winning visual artist, her poetry, art, and photography feature in The Fabulist, Livewire, The Telegraph (Kolkata), and more. She has designed covers and posters for institutions like Sahitya Akademi and Ashoka University, and received the “Best Artist Award” from KPR International. As an independent artist, she explores everyday narratives across rural and urban spaces in a post-pandemic world. She loves nature, owls, music, and cultural storytelling.
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Gosh Darn It, I’m Wet! by Glenn Dungan

All right, fine.

Okay, so the rubber duck bobs in the water, ignorant of the vapor steaming from the pool and rising to the banisters and balustrades in the warehouse. It wears like a yellow raincoat and holds in a cartoonish way an umbrella inscribed with the words “Gosh darn it, I’m wet!” It drifts in between two pillars of steam, bumping like a lily pad just underneath the nipple of child peddler Marc “The Lobster” Cameron. So fat is the nipple that one might consider it a breast. The tattoo on Marc’s pectoral is further an example of this, a strange attempt at a Chinese dragon that might have looked better on a fit body but has since taken the form of Mushu from Mulan. At least I think that is his name. I don’t know. I’ve never seen it. That or the godawful remake. Don’t ask how I have an opinion of a movie I haven’t seen. I just know. Okay. All I’m saying is that this really goes to show that some movies should be immortalized, having already stood the test of time with intergenerational audiences.

But anyway. I digress.

The duck. So, the duck bobs underneath Marc’s nipple, trailing in between heated hot tub water infused with lime and lye. Reminds me of how some soups—like, if they are really good soups—get a layer of fat on them you have to scoop out. I don’t know much about this either. The only soup I’ve made is lobster soup, which, in case you haven’t noticed, is the center part of this story.

So anyway, as I was saying. Where was I? Right.

Marc wakes up naked in the pool, not really aware of which derelict warehouse he is in or how he went from a lovely high-end courtesan orgy to being strapped here, a la—take your liver and leave you in a tub full of ice sort of deal. It’s actually the duck he sees first, looking up at him.

And so, he says to me and my mate what any logical person would say, “Where the hell am I?”

My mate, a strange country bloke who goes by “The Justice” (stupid name, I know, but he likes comic books. I’ll stick to my name, thank you very much) materializes in the rising vapor. Like any minute now, Marc will realize that we are steadily increasing the temperature.

The Justice stares at Marc like someone shit in his cereal. At least, I think. The Justice wears an astronaut helmet that he claims to be a relic from the Challenger explosion (yeah, right) and construction worker overalls. There is a little faded American flag on the helmet.

The Justice says, “One of your warehouses, Lobster. So you’ll know better than anyone how hard it is to find us. How no one can hear your screams.”

One time, I saw The Justice curb stomp a convicted rapist who got free from sentencing because his dad was some insurance magnate or something. Still not “proven.” One time, I saw The Justice file a wife-beater’s fingernails to the bone. Still not “proven.” And one time, I saw The Justice put on his shoes in the following order: left sock, left shoe, right sock, right shoe. I do not understand The Justice.

Okay, and so Marc “The Lobster” is showing signs of discomfort. He’s wiggling and all that, not quite sure if it’s the kidnapping or the steadily heating hot tub that gives him such a fright. Little Mushu is sweating. And up and down the way the duck goes, drifting stupidly between columns of toxic vapor.

But it’s not long until The Justice comes ’round to Marc and provokes him enough to rattle the chains that cuff him to the floor. This was a stupid move, one which made The Justice very upset. Not that he could hit The Justice’s weird little astronaut visor by any means. It was the intention, and that just about set The Justice off. With two thumbs hooked around his overalls, he kicked the pressure valve and cranked the hot tub up a couple notches. It’s at this point that Marc the Lobster is screaming in his bath of magma.

It only seemed fitting that I put some bubble tincture into the tub. The rubber duck must have felt like he was in some sort of spa. Or maybe it’s a girl. I don’t know.

Where was I? No, I’m not drunk. It’s only been one glass. Well obviously, not including the shot. Sure, I’ll have another.

Shut up, everyone. You asked me to tell the story. Right?

Okay.

So anyway, now Marc is really turning red and blistering. The bubbles and lime and all that other chemical crap The Justice made me buy are causing burns on his body, cracking and flaking his rolls of fat. Reminds me of when the sun beats down on mud and you get those little ravines that, up close, look like they could belong to the Grand Canyon. Have you ever been to the Grand Canyon? Overrated, I say. But anyway, it looks like that. But you know, flesh-colored.

And The Justice says to the Lobster, “Okay, Lobster. I can get you out of here. Treated for all these burns. Tell me which of your warehouses keeps the children.”

And Lobster threatens The Justice again, saying all this bullshit about how he owns half the police force, half the bars around town. Not to mention the obvious fishing and canning warehouses throughout the city. He says that sooner or later someone will find The Justice and make him pay. Then, in a strange turn, offers him money, like, loads of money, enough to retire in the Bahamas with two bikini babes giving you foot rubs kind of money, to just let him go. The Lobster, I mean. Not The Justice.

And The Justice, being the psychopath that he is, doesn’t even shake his helmeted head at the offer, or perhaps he does and we can’t see it. Either way, The Justice answers by grabbing the back of the Lobster’s head and dunking it into the water. Can you imagine all that bubble mixture, lime, and lye going right into your wide-open eyeballs with as much force as a fist to your nose? The Justice holds him under water, his Challenger helmet apathetically still. The Justice holds him underwater until I thought the Lobster was going to stop shaking and then picks him up, not by his hair, but his nape, holding on the rolls of his neck fat like a kitten.

And then the process repeats, over and over, dunking and dunking, layers of the Lobster’s flesh flaking off now like skin peeling from sunburn, little pockmarks of reddened skin underneath all that blubber. About fifteen minutes in, I notice the bubbles are fading, so I put in some more mixture, and voila! It’s like being in a washing machine it’s so steamy in here.

How long did the Lobster last? I don’t know. A pretty long time.

Until finally he just… relents. Picture this: The Lobster with his eyes sunken and swollen, half turned to goo, finally just gives The Justice the locations of his canneries where he is keeping those children in cages like some weird pedo-doggy kennel. And I’m here thinking, why didn’t he just tell The Justice the first time? He would have saved everyone a lot of trouble. 

The Justice asks me to unlock the handcuffs on the Lobster’s wrists. The guy was so swollen and red that I thought he was going to pop. His skin was so moist and weak that the metal cuffs cut into his bone, and when he twisted away from me, thinking I was going to hurt him or something, I actually peeled some of his flesh like I was cutting a gyro meat tower. How do you pronounce it? Giro, geero?

Anyway, I digress. Sorry. Wait, what was that? Okay, sure, one more if you’re buying.

Where was I? Ducky, bubbles, oh, right. Okay.

So, the craziest thing about sticking someone in boiling water with a concoction of salt, lye, lime, and whatever the hell goes into bubble liquid, is that it really erodes the body. Like really erodes. Layers of flesh, like an onion. And here I am trying to pick up that fat blob of fat who everyone calls the Lobster, and jeezus is he heavy and not helping me help him at all. The Justice stands back and watches, afraid to get his hands dirty, I guess. So anyway, I’m picking him up and he just… slides out of my arms, like there are no bones in his body. All those layers of fat just come tumbling off. Looking at his melted mass, I realize that above the water his face was just getting dunked into the sour stuff. But we chained him to the bottom of the pool, and he could not move an inch for… for a while. It was almost cartoonish. His lower half just a mangled mess of skeleton, like someone popped a balloon and all the rubber just splayed out like a dead flower. If you’re wondering what it smelled like, I won’t tell you because you’ll never want to eat hotdogs again. The poor umbrella-wielding rubber ducky now has particles of flesh and meat on him, now bobbing between islands of fat and fingers that rose to the top. The Lobster falls from my grasp, slips out with as much lubrication as a used condom, leaving me with what amounted to a body suit. No, I didn’t keep it. I threw it in the trash.

And some of the Lobster falls into the water with such force that it splashes on The Justice’s visor, a little on his overalls, a speckle on his boots.

He says to me, “Gosh darn it, I’m wet.”

And I truly do not think The Justice understood the irony of it all. He doesn’t think like that, you know? Not how you say… cerebral or all that.

Where is The Justice now? Not telling any of you. I just met you all. Oh, bullshit, I’m not lying to you.

Wait. Why is everyone silent now? Do you all know each other or something?

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Glenn Dungan

Glenn Dungan is currently based in Brooklyn, NYC. He exists within a Venn-diagram of urban design, sociology, and good stories. When not obsessing about one of those three, he can be found at a park drinking black coffee and listening to podcasts about murder.
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Unbeliever by Suzanne Paul

Editor’s note: the following passage includes a racial slur in character dialogue to illustrate bigotry. It appears solely in the speaker’s voice and does not reflect the publisher’s or author’s views.

***

“There’s no such thing.” Leland made his pronouncement like he thought it would be the end of the discussion, but his wife knew better.

“I think I saw something in that basement. You felt it, didn’t you, Momma?” Leigh asked earnestly, her voice trembling.

Phylicia Hampton weighed the option of telling the truth. Her head pounded and her stomach rolled from the entities she sensed at their last stop. The historically preserved farmhouse, complete with gift shop and restaurant, was dubbed “Brantley Station, A Stop on the Underground Railroad.”

The tourist spot had come complete with three angry spirits; two of them were the former owner and his wife—who died when confederate rabble hung them from a tree in their front yard—and the other was a wounded slave they were forced to bury in the basement to keep their station a secret. They were lost, confused souls who didn’t realize they were dead and didn’t understand why so many strangers were trespassing.

“Mom, do you think that house was haunted?” Leigh persisted, her ten-year-old brow furrowed in concentration.

“Yes,” Phylicia answered. She saw them when she closed her eyes, begging to be heard. But the moment the words were out of her mouth, she knew Leland would make her sorry.

“There’s no such thing,” Leland barked. “Your mother doesn’t know what she’s talking about. There’s always a reasonable explanation for everything. What you saw was just a trick of the light. Tell her, Phyl.”

Always the unbeliever. He had to be able to touch it, explain it, or control it. She sighed hard. “Read your book and stop irritating your father.” Phylicia didn’t want to argue with her husband. She just wanted their visit to Carter Springs Memorial Battleground to be over so they could get to her mother’s home in Georgia before dark. State Road 23 stretched out much like her future, a long ribbon of sameness where you had to work to see the good. She wanted badly to see the good.

She laid her head against the window ledge, allowing her mind to be filled with the white noise of the road, pushing out visions of sallow, translucent faces who had reached out to her.

Punching a button on the armrest, she rolled down her window, despite Leland’s protest that she was letting out all the air conditioning. She inhaled deeply of the moist southern air, which carried hints of azaleas and dogwood mingled with marshy scents of the river.

Her family fell quiet for a moment, and she thanked God for the reprieve. Tasha, her eldest, stared out the window, bored with her music and annoyed that her cell phone had no reception so she couldn’t text her friends. Her husband, Leland, wallowed in silent dread of this visit to her mother’s, content to punish everyone in sight for this offense. Leigh, her baby, was reading the brochure about the park where they planned to stop for lunch.

“Daddy, when do we eat?” Leigh asked.

“The battleground is just a few miles up the road. There’s a rest area there,” Leland said.

“Can’t we go to a real restaurant?” Tasha asked.

“Do you see a real restaurant?”

“No, sir.” She huffed, turning on that stony, sulky, teenage silence that transformed her loving child into a surly stranger.

Tasha reinserted her neon orange earbuds and turned on her iPod, the tinny hum carrying to the front seat.

Leigh, bored with the brochure, opened a book titled, From Slaves to Soldiers in the Civil War.

“Mom, it’s too windy to eat outside,” Tasha’s protest pierced Phylicia’s thin veil of sleep like shrapnel. Leland had parked their van beneath a large wood sign that read, “Carter Springs Rest Area, open dawn ’til dusk.” The lot was empty except for a forest service sedan parked by the ranger’s hut. Even the visitor’s center was deserted.

The van’s rear doors stood open, and Leland lifted out the food baskets. Leigh had her book tucked under one arm and held a blanket in the other. Tasha, being stubborn, showed no inclination to join the family.

“Tasha, move,” Phylicia snapped.

The teenager, who had been so sweet just a few years ago, snatched off her headphones and threw them on the seat, huffing her way out of the van.

“Lord, help me,” Phylicia muttered under her breath. She slid from her seat, and followed her unwilling troops.

Leigh had chosen a pretty place at the top of a hill. Leland delved into the baskets, setting up the meal. Phylicia stood with her back to the parking lot, her gaze traveling over the open field spread out below them. A stiff breeze smelling of storm clouds caressed her cheeks. Smaller hills and the occasional bush dotted the landscape, with denser woods edging the river winding in the distance beyond her vision. They weren’t alone here. For all its manicured beauty, the place had the feel of a graveyard.

“What’s so special about a bunch of grass and some trees?” Tasha said as she flopped down on her stomach.

“There was a big battle here during the Civil War. It’s in this book,” Leigh replied. She sat cross-legged on the blanket with the book open in her lap. “It says that one thousand African American Union soldiers and two hundred regular Union soldiers were surprised here by two thousand Confederate soldiers. Some of them were Black, too.” She took a bite of her apple, then spoke with her mouth full. “According to this, the casualties were high ’cause the fighting was mostly hand to hand with swords and bayonets.”

“That’s gross. I’m trying to eat,” Tasha said around a mouthful of corned beef on rye.

“You going to eat, Phyl?” Leland asked.

“I’m too tired right now. I’m just going to stretch out for a while,” Phylicia said, settling on the blanket. Her visions always exhausted her. She rolled onto her side, pillowing her hands beneath her cheek. Pain shot through the back of her hand, and with a yelp, she jerked to a sitting position. A sharp piece of metal protruded from the blanket. It dripped red.

“What’s the matter with you?” Leland asked.

“I cut my hand on something.”

“Mom, look at this.” Leigh had scooted over to inspect the inch-long piece of metal that stabbed through the blanket. “I think it’s the pointy part of a bayonet.”

“Is not. They wouldn’t leave that stuff out here.”

“It’s probably from an old can or something,” Leland said, kneeling close. He gripped it trying to pull it free, but the earth wouldn’t give up her prize. “Ouch,” he jumped back, shaking his hand. “Damn thing cut me, too.” He inspected his finger, then wiped his hand on his jeans.

“Dad, did you know that after battles sometimes they just dug one huge grave and put everybody in it? What if this hill is really a giant grave?”

“Don’t be silly,” he said, resuming his meal.

Phylicia’s hand still stung, and it was bleeding. She went back to the van for the first-aid kit. Climbing inside, she slammed the door and took a closer look at the cut. It was deeper than she’d thought. The antiseptic burned like hell, but the antibiotic cream was soothing. She covered it with a big square band-aid, then let the windows down and tilted her seat fully back. Rest was what she needed, and sleep wasn’t long in coming.

***

She was hot. The air was thick with the undelivered promise of rain. Enveloped in smoke, she coughed, her eyes watering. The heavy voices of struggling men filled her ears. Her eyes cleared, and she saw them fighting, men long deadlocked in eternal battle. Their guttural cries of pain echoed until one by one they went still.

“Sister, you gotta go now,” he said. “Yo’ babies need you. Go now. Hurry, ’fo it’s too late.” He cast a fearful look over his shoulder. She stood rooted in place; the dead had never spoken to her before. He was a young Black man bathed in blood, dirt, and death. He was barefoot and clothed in what, at one time, had been a union uniform. They were alone in the mist.

“Am I dreaming? Who are you? What are you?”

“Git to yo’ girls and look to yo’ husband. He’s done crossed over,” he clutched his rifle to his chest.

“Who? I don’t understand.”

“I’ll hold him back if’n I can, but you got to go now, sister. Cain’t you hear me, woman? Run!”

Her heart pounded, and she tried to run. Her legs felt like they were stuck in swamp mire. She struggled, pushed. Her babies. She had to get to her babies. Those were the words on her lips when she startled awake. “My babies.”

***

It took her a moment to register her surroundings. It was dark outside. Had she slept that long? She looked around for her family but couldn’t see beyond the circle of yellow light from the parking lamps. Dense fog slithered around the lampposts, weaving about like a live thing. Like the smoke in her dream.

She shook off her unease. Leland probably took the girls to the visitor’s center. He’d use any excuse to delay getting to her mother’s. She took her phone out of her purse, thinking of calling and telling her mother they’d be late, but the unit spewed static the moment she turned it on.

Tossing the phone aside, she got out of the van and walked to the ranger’s hut. The lights were still on, and his cruiser was still parked there. She’d ask if he saw them pass by.

She circled around the building to where light spilled through the open doorway.

“Hello… officer?” She looked inside.

It was a small, neat office with a map of the park hanging on the far wall. She happened to look down. His polished boots extended from behind the desk.

“Officer?” She crept in, leaning over the desk.

Blood pooled around him, his short blond hair dark with it. It was spattered everywhere. His shirtfront was soaked, ripped with God knew how many stab wounds.

“Get help,” a small voice inside her head screamed. She dove for the phone and lifted the receiver. Static roared in her ear.

“Damn it,” she slammed down the phone.

Backing out of the room, she stumbled on legs wobbly from shock.

She had to find her girls and Leland, and she needed a weapon. She wasn’t sure if the dead ranger had a gun, but she wasn’t going back inside to check. Her roiling stomach wouldn’t allow it.

His cruiser was there, but the doors were locked. Tears of frustration welled in her eyes. She swung back towards the hut, loathing the thought of going back inside. Rocks surrounded a flagpole that sat at the hut’s entrance. She picked one about the size of her head and smashed the driver’s window, wincing at the noise.

Reaching through the broken glass, she opened the door. Flipping switches on the dash, she tried to turn on the radio, but all she got was that same eerie static.

A quick search of the front and back seats turned up nothing useful. She popped the trunk latch, praying for a miracle. She found a Browning A-bolt rifle and a full box of cartridges wrapped in an old blanket. For the first time, she was grateful to have grown up in a family of hunters. It had been years since she’d fired anything. The weapon lay heavy in her hands, but not as heavy as her fear.

It took a few tries for her shaking hands to get it loaded. She took the dead man’s jacket out of the back seat and filled the pockets with all the spare cartridges they would hold. She would check out the visitor’s center first.

The lights were on, but the place felt deserted. Holding the rifle waist high, in case she was wrong, she searched for her daughters.

The center was just one big display room with a tiny gift shop attached. It looked like a whole battalion had marched through the place, destroying everything. Artifacts from the battlefield were strewn about like broken toys. The Union flag and uniform-clad mannequins wearing the Union blues had been trampled with big muddy footprints. Display cases were overturned, their contents ransacked, and the Confederate notes were gone. What kind of thieves stole worthless money and were willing to kill a ranger over it? Whoever they were, they were long gone.

In the gift shop, there were more destroyed cases and overturned bookracks. Her thoughts full of the dead ranger, she edged around the cases to look behind them. Nothing. Her chest burned, and then she remembered to breathe. A door in the far corner of the room beckoned. She imagined it went to a storeroom or an office. She turned the doorknob, then gripped the gun with both hands, nosing the door open with the barrel.

Gray metal shelves littered the floor, casualties of the same war. There was another door on the opposite side of this room that was clearly marked “Exit.” It was standing open. Her footing was uneven as she walked on top of the debris. She snatched a park issue flashlight from the wreckage on her way out.

She caught her breath, nearly screaming as she stepped through the exit. There was a worn-out Hyundai and a Dodge Dart with a coat hanger antenna parked just behind the building. The bodies were next to the Hyundai, stabbed repeatedly. Lying on her stomach was a pretty Black girl with shoulder-length braids, her shirt shredded through the back. The other one was a middle-aged white woman who had tried to crawl away after the stabbing. Phylicia could tell from the blood streaks on the pavement. Their blue park uniforms showed they had worked in the gift shop.

It was horrible, but she was relieved. This meant her children were still out there somewhere. They were alive, for now. The voice from her dream brushed her mind with gossamer wings. “Hurry.”

She ran now, returning to their picnic site on the hill, the heavy flashlight gripped in her left hand, the gun in her right. The blanket was mussed, the baskets overturned, and what food hadn’t blown away was teeming with ants, but there were no bodies here.

She sprinted down the hill, heading toward the only area that would offer her children a place to hide—the woods by the river. The heavy fog constrained her vision, so her run was more of a jog, but the whisper was louder now. “Hurry.”

Her breath seared her lungs, and her side hurt by the time she reached the woods. She stopped, bent over, listening for some sign of which way to go. Nothing except the rushing water of the river. Pushing ahead, she stumbled through the underbrush, making enough noise to wake the dead. She nearly joined them when the ground gave way to a steep incline hidden by the fog. Something grabbed the back of her jacket, pulling her away from the edge. She swung around, rifle raised, but she saw nothing but mist. She shivered despite the heat.

“Tasha! Leigh! Where are you?” She didn’t care if the killer found her. She screamed at the top of her lungs. “Leigh, Tasha. It’s Mommy! I can’t find you!”

“Down here,” the reply was faint.

She wasn’t completely sure she hadn’t imagined it. She thumbed the safety and hung the rifle and flashlight around her neck. The shroud of fog was thick, so she kneeled on all fours and backed her way down the embankment, duff crunching under her feet as she felt her way down. Her hands were bloody and raw, and her cut knees bled through her jeans by the time the ground flattened beneath her feet.

“Tasha! Leigh!” she called more softly this time.

“Shhh, Mom, he’ll hear you,” Leigh whispered from where she huddled by an overturned tree. “He’s close.”

“Where’s your sister?”

“She said she was going back to find you.”

A high scream sliced through the air.

Tasha.

“Stay behind me,” she told her daughter as they ran along the bank towards the screaming. It was coming from up the embankment.

The fog’s diaphanous veil slipped for just a moment, allowing the moonlight to reveal a form in silhouette holding a bayonet on her baby girl. Phylicia released the safety and raised the rifle with unsteady hands. A chill encased her, and she felt warm hands firmly settle over her own. She nearly balked, but the presence felt familiar somehow.

Her heartbeat surged in her ears as she squeezed the trigger. The crack of the rifle seemed to echo for days. She was sure she had missed, but the dark form tumbled headlong down the rise. He gained momentum until a stand of trees stopped his descent towards the river.

“Tasha! I’m coming!” She reached behind her, seizing Leigh’s hand in an iron grip, still clutching the rifle stock in case she needed it. They climbed up the rise as Tasha scrambled down to meet them, throwing herself in her mother’s arms.

“Did he hurt you, baby?” she asked, terrified of the answer.

Tasha buried her face in Phylicia’s shoulder and shook her head no. “It wasn’t him,” Tasha chanted over and over.

“Wasn’t who?” Phylicia asked, holding Tasha’s trembling body more tightly.

“Daddy,” Leigh offered. “It wasn’t Daddy.”

“Of course it wasn’t,” Phylicia said, shining the light in the trees where the man she shot had landed. Except, it was Leland. She’d chosen that striped shirt for him this morning.

“Oh, my God.” She edged closer, her daughters crowding behind her.

“Shot through by a little nigger bitch,” he said in a disbelieving voice that was Leland’s but wasn’t. He touched his side and held bloody fingers to the moonlight.

“Leland?” She shone the light on his face. The skin seemed to shift and buckle. First it was Leland, then it wasn’t, and for the briefest moment she saw what held him, felt the evil that would not die.

“We’re going to the van,” she told her girls. “Stay with me.”

“But what about Daddy?” Leigh asked.

“We’ll send someone back for him.” They started climbing, clinging to each other in a way that would have been impossible before tonight. Phylicia grieved the fact that it took almost losing their father to bring them together.

***

Phylicia made her pilgrimage alone. Four years had passed and uncounted visits had been made, always alone. Tasha was studying premed, but she couldn’t bring herself to witness the destruction of her father’s soul. Leigh was in high school now, enjoying the social whirlwind that came with it, but Phylicia saw the shadows her daughter tried to hide. Leigh shared her mother’s vision; she knew the shell that held her father was empty. She never visited.

The Mountain Vale Center for Mental Health remained unchanged with its high stone fences and manicured lawns. It was very pretty for a prison. She fingered the cross at her throat as she sat in the doctor’s office, waiting for him to tell her what she already knew. No change. No sign of improvement. Leland had killed those people. The ranger’s murder was on videotape. But she didn’t need that proof to make her believe. She had seen the demon that led him to it. She wondered if his lack of belief had made a difference to the entity.

There hadn’t been a trial. Non compos mentis. He didn’t remember her, his daughters, his life. They’d found him with Confederate script in his pockets, raving about the war, and wanting to go home to Memphis. Leland was from New Jersey.

She listened to doctors explain away the Confederate soldier that spoke with Leland’s voice. They droned on about psychotic breaks and multiple personality disorder, citing new research, newer drugs, and treatments that never worked.

They didn’t have any answers, and she didn’t need any.

The dead had captured an unbeliever.

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Suzanne Paul

Suzanne Paul is a reader and writer of Speculative fiction, specifically Horror. She currently resides in the United States with her Border Collie, Tina Marie.
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Capitalism at Its Finest by John Leahy

Location, location, location was my father’s mantra. He reiterated it to me so much I thought my head would explode. Elementary school, prep school, college… all the way up until he died of a heart attack during a Viagra-fueled sex session with a woman a third his age. Location, location, location! The old man had probably shrieked the phrase as he’d come for the final time and his heart suddenly shut up shop that evening in his Long Island pied-à-terre.

They were the three most annoying words in the universe, as far as I was concerned. But of course, often the most irritating things in life turn out to be the most useful.

On Christmas Eve 2040, eggheads all over the world gazed at four things as they sped down toward the sun from overhead. The eggheads waited for the objects to burn up as they drew closer to the star. But the curiosities, whatever they were, didn’t. They simply disappeared into the sun’s corona. For a few days afterward, the eggheads monitored the star closely. When nothing materialized after a week, they relaxed. A few months later, it was as if the event had never happened.

And then on November 13, 2041, the dulling, as it became known, commenced. The sun’s brightness that had illuminated the Earth for billions of years began to diminish. In hot parts of the world, like North Africa for example, where the sun was a blinding yellow—by November 15, it was no more than orange. By November 18 it was bright red. Humanity no longer had any use for sunglasses. Even fashion obsessives felt ridiculous wearing them.

And then the shit really hit the fan. Four black lines ran haphazardly down along the sun’s face from its northern pole, as though it had suffered a violent blow to its crown and the black lines were streams of blood. Earth immediately grew colder. The lines thickened, covering more and more of the surface of our life-giving sphere. Added to the drop in temperature, scientists issued the alarming message that whatever the black bands were, they were causing the sun to lose its magnetic pull on Earth. We were slipping away from our great star, off into space.

The smart money of the Earth took the expensively bought advice they were given, sold everything they had, and pointed their engines downward. They jetted toward the floors of the oceans, setting up shop by the most powerful hydrothermal vents they could find. Immediately after they had fortified their positions, they pointed their guns above them. There was only so much heat to go around, after all.

And downward they came, those late to the party. With the sun nothing more than a strangely encased black ball over them, they desperately descended toward the heat at the lowest navigable points of the world. Their heat sensors directed them towards areas that had already long been occupied. And heavily armed. The occupants of these locations—myself among them—opened up their guns and fired.

Survival of the fittest, after all. We killed until the seafloor next to our biodomes was thick with death and its remnants. We cared, but not a lot. What we really cared about was that we were alive. In our domes, we lifted our spirits enough to drink, drug, party, and fuck. You could fit about fifty families into each biodome, and each family was paying the dome owner two million dollars a month. I owned four domes.

Five years later, the water above us started to freeze, and day by day ice drew a little closer to us. We turned on our drills and powered down through the ocean floor. The center of the earth had just become prime real estate.

Yep—location, location, location.

***

It was difficult, darkening the view from the domes to keep out the bright lights of energetic activity near the earth’s core. And of course, protecting those inside the domes from the violent heat outside—that was a massive cost that I certainly passed on to my tenants. Not that they cared. To be honest, I’m regretting the loss of an even wider profit margin there.

It was always so weird, having a dinner party amidst the artificial lighting inside our main dome, against the black-colored lining of the heat shield outside. Beyond that all-important coating was the magma and fire of the deep earth, beyond which lay a world that was growing icier all the time.

The increasing proximity of death by extreme cold was lost on no one. We were accelerating away at an almighty speed from a zombie sun. The ice that had frozen the oceans would eventually make its way right through the innards of the planet, to where we were, near its heart. Our scientists came up with something that most of us had difficulty believing could exist until we laid eyes upon its brilliant yellow form—an underground, man-made mini-sun.

Of course, there was a trade-off for this amazing solar replacement. We had to wear spacesuits to keep out the strange little ball’s radiation. There we were in our vast cavern thousands of miles beneath the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, ambling about it in our space-gear, being blasted with cancerous particles from our sphere of artificial energy, blazing away just underneath some jagged stalactites that had probably been dark for nearly a billion years before our refugee party had come bungling into their realm.

It’s a funny thing, sleeping and defecating in an ultra-thick space suit. Cleaning oneself is pretty weird, too. Some of us couldn’t handle it and simply lived the last few weeks of their lives as they’d had way back before all this started, their bodies clad in nothing but the clothes they’d been used to wearing on the surface. The cancer that had hit them had been savage, swiping the hair from their heads in days, and covering their bodies in hideous lumps in even less time.

An obvious and devastating blow to real estate value is decreased population density. When so many of my tenants opted to commit suicide, it meant I had to drop my rental rates. As time went by, I had to drop them even more. I fell short on debt repayments time after time until eventually one day (well it was a day according to our artificial sun) I ended up walking into the dome that housed the headquarters of my good old friends, Trenton Berks, the bank that had funded my family’s property ventures for nearly one hundred and fifty years (the dome next door was a little more than half the size and housed the remnants of the United Nations HQ—an interesting reflection of the public sector’s influence in this new center-of-the-world reality of ours). I informed my loan manager I needed a serious restructuring of my repayments to the bank.

“I’m afraid I can’t accommodate that, Mr. Gantry,” the young, bespectacled woman behind the desk said.

“What do you mean you can’t accommodate that?” I asked. “In case you hadn’t noticed, human beings—especially rich ones capable of paying astronomically high rent—are in short supply these days.”

The young manager slowly removed her spectacles, speaking as she did so. “I’m saying we’ve given you a lot of latitude, Mr. Gantry. We’ve shown significantly more forbearance than your contract warrants.”

“I know, and I appreciate that—”

“The board is moving for repossession of all your rental properties, Mr. Gantry.” The manager remained silent for a second before adding, “And we will also be calling in the personal guarantees you have made to us.”

I swallowed.

“My family has done business with you for one and a half centuries. And now you’re coming for my house?”

My dome, to be more accurate.

“I’m afraid so, Mr. Gantry.”

“You realize that this is a death sentence for me?”

Which it was. It wasn’t as if I could wander the streets like the homeless people of old could. Rivers of magma didn’t allow for the existence of streets. Or walkers.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Gantry.”

Ha. Capitalism at its finest.

***

She gave me six weeks.

For the first fortnight, I blundered around my dome in a drug and alcohol induced daze. Near the end of the fourth week of my stay of execution, I decided to grab the bull by the horns. For a few days, I’d contemplated going out into the magma and just letting it melt me away for however long it took to do so, but my courage left me and the simplicity of self-preservation kicked in. I swallowed my pride and asked my friend—or at least the only person in my life who I could even closely categorize as such—Tyler Matheson, could I stay with him until I got “back on my feet.” Blinking, good old Tyler, a fellow property tycoon, said yeah, of course I could. The number of blinks he emitted told me I had at most a month.

His girlfriend, Iris, who was less than half his age, and a tall pale-eyed beauty, was a serious party animal, who I could tell hated having to explain my presence to those she frequently invited around to her soiree nights. Tyler was enough of a relic to have hanging around her neck. She couldn’t stand to have another borderline senior citizen—me—under the same roof, too. Not that I gave a shit. I was of a serious survivor disposition. I had no intention of letting Iris get rid of me. Hell, not even Tyler himself would get me out of his own house without getting some serious muscleheads to physically drag me from the premises.

So, there I was in Tyler’s spare room, with too much time for contemplation. Sometimes Tyler and Iris were partying below me, sometimes having sex in the room adjacent. I was not a religious man, but while they were copulating, I actually prayed that Tyler would survive the action so that in the case of his demise Iris would not have the aforementioned muscleheads barging in my door in the morning with my impending eviction etched on their features.

Punctuating the worry of this existence was a business thought—why had Trenton Berks repossessed my properties? What use would empty, tenantless properties be to them? The properties were hardly vacant for three weeks before my question was answered.

Two species of fucking alien life forms moved into them.

The first species was basically what you would describe as the torso of a human (they had no head or legs) with four of what resembled arms—one pointing north, the others south, east, and west. At the end of each arm there was no hand, but eight fingers. The second creature… well, I suppose the easiest way to describe it was a faint light inside a ragged, translucent dressing gown.

I heard through the grapevine that the things that had struck our sun had hit countless stars in many other galaxies too, and the same thing had happened to them—the dulling, followed by the black goop (the dressing gown aliens think the objects that struck the stars were some sort of “star virus” that incubated in their cores and ate their way out of the stellar bodies from the inside), cue millions of rapidly freezing planets flying pathetically off into deep space. Some of these poor unfortunates had even become uninhabitable at their core. The denizens of these coffin worlds had sent out distress signals, and who had the strongest signal intercept beacons on good old Earth? Why, commercial enterprises, of course. “Come to Daddy!” Trenton Berks (amongst others) had said. “We can put a roof over your head! Don’t stress! We got this!”

Well. It’s interesting how things turn out. Yesterday was Tyler’s turn. Now his domes are being repossessed. He knows the alien things are going to become tenants of his soon-to-be former properties. And he’s not one bit happy. Iris is gone—shacked up with some guy who actually works with the bank that Tyler had his loans with.

So that’s it for me and him. We’re finished. But it doesn’t mean we’re going to slip quietly into the night (or, more accurately, into the magma). No, sir. Me and Tyler have some money stashed away—a lot of money, actually—enough to go out in one hell of a blaze of glory. We’ve bought a huge stockpile of guns and ammo. We’ve bought off the police for twenty-four hours.

So our strategy is as follows—first the bankers, then those pesky alien renters.

Picture of John Leahy

John Leahy

John Leahy has had three novels published - Harvest, CROGIAN, and Unity. His story "The Tale in the Attic" attained an honorable mention in L Ron Hubbard's Writers of the Future Contest. His short story "Singers" has been included in Flame Tree Publishing's 2017 Pirates and Ghosts anthology, alongside tales by literary greats such as Homer, Joseph Conrad, Rudyard Kipling, Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert Louis Stevenson, H.P. Lovecraft, and H.G. Wells. When not writing he spends his time teaching and performing music, working out, and keeping abreast of the stock market and current affairs. He lives in Killarney, Ireland.
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Past Perfect – Part One by Paul Hodgins

Can you conceive of a less likely place for a haunted house than Irvana, California’s ultimate master-planned community, with its row upon row of tidy pseudo-Tudors and downsized Tuscan villas punctuated at pleasing intervals by tastefully landscaped green spaces, accessed by gently curving roads so immaculately surveyed that scientists could calibrate precision instruments on their seductive radii?

But the house was haunted, for want of a better term. The haunting resided at 21 Rivendell, an ochre-toned rancher perched near the edge of a jagged gulch gouged into Irvana’s pristine surface by last winter’s Biblical rains. The air smelled different here: desiccated, dusty, somehow ancient. Every time I passed the place, Sandy, my otherwise mellow golden retriever, would stop at the lot line, look up at the blank windows—one on each side of the chimney, rectangular eyes framing a stucco-clad snout—then growl, bark, paw the ground and turn tight little circles like a doggy dervish until her leash resembled a hangman’s noose as she tangled herself around the sagging For Sale sign.

Each weekday evening before dinner, I made my neighborhood rounds with

Sandy. Every six months I would change my route; I’m a real adventurer. Last month my new path took me down Deer Run to the River Glen subdivision—a name that (like so many in Irvana) mystifies me, since there’s no evidence of either a river or a glen to be found in its maze of cul-de-sacs.

“All right, girl,” I announced one Thursday, the fourth day of Sandy’s unexpected ballet in front of 21 Rivendell. “Let’s take a look inside.”

Sandy and I walked gingerly across the front lawn as its parched grass scrunched underfoot. The house’s plantation shutters were only partially drawn, allowing an unobstructed peek into the front room.

Even without furniture, it seemed the very picture of bland suburban taste: creamy Berber carpet, a small island of blond hardwood adjacent to the front door, an open stairway that led, no doubt, to a trio of undersized bedrooms.

“Nothing amiss here,” I told Sandy. But she wasn’t buying it. She sniffed the ground suspiciously.

I walked up the side yard—a thirty inch wide canyon of crushed rock, defined by the neighbor’s concrete-block wall on one side and a row of dying bird of paradise flowers on the other.

The backyard, too, was classic Irvana. Its flimsy defense, a termite-weakened wooden gate, swung inward, revealing a swimming pool that had somehow been shoehorned into the thirty foot wide lot. Next to it, a spa. Both were empty and gathering eucalyptus leaves from the trees that bordered the pool’s curving contour. The collected heat of the day radiated from the yard’s apron of Mexican pavers. On a small isthmus of grass between the house and pavers a barbecue lay on its side, its inverted lid about three feet away. It looked like a man who had died trying to retrieve his hat.

I turned toward the back of the house. Again, nothing out of the ordinary: a kitchen with a garden window, a few shriveled cacti mummified on its shelves, a white-tiled dining area, and a sliding glass door, still imprinted with the smudgy afterlife of kids and wet-nosed dogs.

I walked up to the slider and brought my face close to the glass, blocking its reflective glare. Sandy shook beside me. I was looking across the small dining room at the living room from another viewpoint. The slats of the plantation shutters threw striped shadows on the Berber at an obtuse angle.

“There’s nothing in there, you pussy,” I said to Sandy. She looked up at me and licked her lips. Her shaking got worse.

For some reason I can’t explain, I released my grip on Sandy’s leash and pulled on the handle of the sliding glass door with both hands. To my surprise, it whooshed effortlessly to the left. Warm air wafted over me, imbued with the smells of a long-empty house: chemical carpet cleaner, decaying particleboard, floor wax, and mothballs.

Suddenly Sandy bolted, almost careening into the empty pool as she dragged her knotted leash behind her. She found refuge behind a whitefly-infested hibiscus bush and turned to face me, shivering.

I stepped inside and slid the door shut, then walked a few paces into the room. I turned back to reassure Sandy. Staring back at me was a familiar man, face up against the glass, with an anxious golden retriever by his side.

It was Sandy and me. As I watched, we walked away from the door—backwards.

***

Before I go on, I should reassure you I’m not the kind of person either blessed or cursed by extraordinary events. I’m forty-six, married, no children, an associate professor of history at a state school just middling enough to grant me tenure for my half-hearted research. Annie, my determinedly unexcitable wife, is a kindergarten teacher. Our lives are dictated by public radio, the streaming series du jour, and the predictable rise and fall of the Angels’ fortunes. My retirement nineteen years from now, in 2043, has been planned with military precision. My one visit to the hospital was for a tonsillectomy when I was eight. I drink two glasses of California cabernet on Friday nights, play golf in the high 80s on a stellar day, and send the occasional check to USC, my alma mater, though they hardly need it. My life has been as straight and predictable as a Sunday drive down a prairie road. Until now.

As you’ve probably guessed, I’m not given to flights of fancy. And let’s set the record straight—I hate science fiction. Loathe it. And the supernatural—please! It’s a refuge for weak and susceptible minds.

None of which takes away from the surrealism of what I was seeing.

I watched myself bird-walk slowly to the side of the pool, survey the house, then recede to the left, backing up to the open side gate. I heard the gate close—I suppose “unopen” would be the correct term—with an otherworldly click.

I was frozen to the floor for several seconds, devoid of any thought or emotion; the illogic of the event had expelled everything from my brain. Then, with a fury that shocked me, I leaped toward the sliding glass door, ripped it to the right, and tumbled into the backyard. I spun left. The gate was open, just as I had left it. My heartbeat thundered in my ears. I ran to the side yard and looked down its length. Nothing. I felt a whirlwind brush by my right leg and caught my breath. It was Sandy—making a beeline for home. I followed as fast as I could.

I spent a restless night thinking about the absurdity, the mind-blowing craziness, of what I’d seen. The next morning, I rose early, shivering in the chill that poured through the open bedroom window. For some reason, I walked into my study closet, full of clothes that no longer fit me, and unearthed my musty-smelling Society for Creative Anachronisms costume. I favored the look of an Elizabethan gentleman: an off-white linen shirt with matching starched ruffs on collar and wrist; a brocaded, rich green doublet undergirded with whale bone; and a bejeweled codpiece that glinted in the half-light. The last time I squeezed into it was after my bid for full professorship was denied for the third time. Somehow, puttering around the house as a Renaissance courtier had comforted me.

I went back to bed and pulled the covers up to my chin. As Annie snored, I made a list of possibilities.

Was I losing my mind?

Doubtful. No family history of mental instability. No unhealthy thoughts, other than the usual middle-aged male sex and revenge fantasies. I felt fine.

Was it some sort of momentary daydream?

No, I had been in a state of evaluative awareness, carefully taking in everything around

me.

Was it a hoax of some sort?

Impossible. I was standing four feet away from myself. I could see the recent paper cut on the first joint of my left index finger, small but angry red. The effect was like looking in a mirror—at least until my doppelgänger started moving independently.

There was only one thing to do. Go back to the house. This time, I’d bring my iPhone.

The next day, Friday, I could barely focus. I lectured like a zombie. Finally, three o’clock rolled around. I sped home on arterial roads, avoiding the 405 even though it was still early for rush hour. I wanted to get to the house at the same time as the day before.

Sandy usually waited patiently for me in the front hall. On this day, she was nowhere to

be found.

“Here, girl,” I said, picking up her leash from the hall table. “Walkies!” In the silence that followed, I could make out something faint—her rapid panting. She was behind the Stickley armchair.

“C’mon, I know where you are,” I said, directing my attention to the spot. After much reluctance, and more than a few barks, she emerged, head down, and submitted to the leash. I grabbed my iPhone and left.

The house looked the same. I noticed that the “For Sale” sign was accompanied by a flimsy plastic carrier for real estate flyers. There was a single sheet remaining, yellowed and forlorn-looking. I slid it out and looked at it:

YOU’LL SEE FOREVER FROM THIS RIVER GLEN GEM!

Light and Bright!

Needs Nothing but a Little TLC!

This beauty boasts 3 bedrooms and 2.5 bathrooms. Volume ceilings throughout. Pool/spa. Newer paint. Quiet neighborhood. View lot. Make an offer—owner mo-ti-va-ted!

Contact Cindi at MansionsWest. (949) 55CINDI or cindi@mansionswest.com

View lot? I looked up. Yes, beyond the trees in the backyard, I could tell the subdivision sloped gently away toward the southwest. Perhaps if you stood on the roof on an absolutely smog-free day, there’d be an ocean view. Or a freeway view, at least.

As I walked up the side yard, my pace slowed; the first needle-pricks of panic crept up the nape of my neck. What if I saw again what I’d seen, or thought I’d seen, the day before? What if I didn’t? Both prospects terrified me.

Sandy was resorting to her usual routine, whining, barking, and straining to free herself. In the backyard, I tied her to a small jacaranda tree, pregnant with purplish blossoms. She immediately ran around it three or four times, nearly turning her leash into a garrote.

“Sit!” I ordered, glaring. She sat.

The door was still unlocked. Everything appeared the same. When I got to the middle of the dining room—the same spot where I had stood the day before—I switched on my iPhone’s video function, raised it to eye level, took a deep breath, and slowly turned around. And let out an involuntary yelp. My mouth went dry.

Outside, two men were working on the pool. Building it. Or, rather, un-building it. The older of the two—stocky, Hispanic, wearing a brimmed hat and a bandanna—walked backwards up an incline made of boards that led into a shallow depression roughly the size of the pool-to- be. Lifting the back of his hand to his brow, he placed sweat on his forehead. In the hollow, a younger man wearing a dirty Santana T-shirt was taking shoveled mounds of dirt from a wheelbarrow and placing them into fresh holes in the ground. More accurately, the dirt leaped vertically from the wheelbarrow into the tilted working end of the shovel above it, then was lowered into the hole, where it transformed into hard-packed, undisturbed soil. The scene was exactly like watching a film played in reverse. Only it was real—the level of detail banished all doubt from my mind.

I took a step closer, keeping the camera aimed at the scene. A bird flew tail-first from one eucalyptus to another.

On impulse, I stepped up to the sliding door and knocked on the glass, hard. The men didn’t react. “Hey!” I yelled. They kept working.

Stepping to the left, I grabbed the door handle and slid it all the way open. I was greeted by the pool, a quizzical Sandy, the jacaranda, and late-afternoon sunlight. I slowly closed the door. Through the glass, the pool-unmaking crew came back into view. The day was overcast.

Gradually, my fear was bested by dumbstruck fascination. I soaked up the particulars of the scene. The eucalyptus trees were much smaller, only eight or nine feet high. They looked newly planted. The jacaranda was nowhere to be seen. A tricycle was parked on a browning swatch of grass where I knew the spa would be. Its pink handlebar streamers stirred in the breeze.

I heard the faint whine of fanjet engines and looked skyward. A commercial jetliner approached retrogressively, backing lazily up the flight path to John Wayne Airport. There was something odd about it. I raised my iPhone to capture it—an older Boeing 737. And the sunburst yellow logo on its tail: SCA. For years, I had delivered a lecture in my “California Boom and Bust” class about Southern California Air. It had filed for Chapter 11 in 1988.

My God. I was looking back nearly forty years.

I ran home, Sandy practically airborne beside me. Winded and sweaty, I dropped the keys twice trying to unlock the door. Only then, when I was sitting in my Stickley, did I dare to look at the video on my iPhone.

I was greeted by a scene from the house’s backyard. With a complete pool, mature

eucalyptus trees, and Sandy to the left, by the jacaranda, looking intently at me.

Picture of Paul Hodgins

Paul Hodgins

Paul Hodgins is a journalist and academic specializing in the performing arts. He studied creative writing at Capilano University in his native Canada, has a doctorate in music from the University of Southern California, and taught at USC and the University of California, Irvine. Hodgins spent 25 years writing about theater, dance and classical music for The Orange County Register. He has authored three books about California wine. His 1992 book, Music, Movement and Metaphor, is considered one of the foundational works in the field of choreomusicology.
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Mairi by Caroline Ashley

Mairi was my hero.

When I fell and scraped my knees, it was always Mairi who ran to my side—It’s just a scratch, Gracie-Lou. Let me kiss it better. When boys called me four-eyes and spat at my feet, she told me they were nothing, a blip in the road to greatness. When Mom’s latest boyfriend leered at my budding breasts, she spent the night camped in my room—it’s too cold in mine, your bed’s so warm. Mairi was my big sister, the one person in the whole world who would sacrifice her own life for the sake of mine.

She wore gothic prints and flowing lace, her arms clinking with silver bangles that covered tattoos and scars. Our black cat, Isis, would curl on her lap like a witch’s familiar, while she prayed to the moon and the stars for Mom to stop drinking and remember who she was.

Every Saturday, the three of us would huddle on the couch, eating toffee popcorn and watching Disney movies, trying to hold Mom together. We were never very good at it. She loves us, Gracie-Lou—she’s just not well.

Mairi died when I was fifteen.

Her best friend’s car slammed into a tree with such force that it crumpled like an accordion. High on drugs or drunk, it didn’t matter. She was gone.

***

I dedicated my life to bringing her back. I researched cultural and religious beliefs across the world, searching for the uniting threads, the pieces of something real. Scouring the Internet, I joined Discord channels, Reddit threads, and dark websites, looking for the power behind the nonsense.

At times, I was convinced I’d gone crazy. My mind was rotting away before my eyes, unable to sustain life without my sister watering the soil and trimming the dead-heads. I sliced my arms to bind my soul to my body, unwilling to give up until she stood by my side.

I found a trader in Egypt who was willing to part with an eldritch text for the cost of my dignity and the last of my savings. The book was bound in ancient leather, soft and warm like freshly skinned flesh. There were no words on the spine, and the front cover was embossed with a symbol that looked like an Egyptian ankh with feathered wings. A clasp locked the tome closed, but when my thumb brushed the metal, it snapped open, a sea parting ways to welcome its master.

Its pages were smooth vellum, thick as card. The text within was handwritten in a rolling script, the ink as black as the shadows beneath a young child’s bed. The illustrations were blood red, edged with black, detailing the precise placement of every element required for the invocations contained within.

This tome was a guide to breaching the veil between life and death. Speaking to loved ones, touching them, drawing them back—all were possible, if you sacrificed enough in return.

If it worked, I would hear my sister’s voice again.

***

After weeks of preparation, I cleared a space on the attic floor. I ground chalk with my own blood, etched overlapping circles and interlocking runes upon the dusty wood. Sacrifices were placed in predetermined spaces, sweeping across the circles. Some were straightforward: a spider, a mouse, a bird. Others were more personal: a cup filled with menstrual blood; old strands of Mairi’s hair; a tissue soaked with tears.

My voice faltered as I started the chant. Doubt saturated the words, weakening their power. I closed my eyes and pictured her blue eyes meeting my own.

This had to work.

I would not spend my life without her.

The syllables spilled from my lips; the words holding no meaning to me, but the intention as clear as a summer sky. I demanded to be heard.

A whirlwind rose from the floor, encasing the sacrifices within. It howled like a wolf calling to the moon. The sickly taste of almonds and wet rust clung to my tongue. Hair flew across my face, stinging my eyes.

A box clattered to the ground, spilling glittering Christmas decorations that tumbled around my feet. Isis raced out of the shadows and darted through the debris, yowling as she ran.

No! You shouldn’t be here.

Her claws cut into the wooden surface, her eyes wide and teeth bared. She barreled past me on the way to the attic’s ladder and was swept up in the maelstrom.

I reached out to catch her, but my hand met empty air. I was as helpless to save her as I was to save Mairi.

Isis’s body flew in a corkscrew and then slammed to the ground in the center of the circle. The wind froze, leaving silence in its wake. Her tiny body was splayed across the runes, spatchcocked. An unseen force stretched her limbs. Ligaments and bones popped, accompanied by a stomach-churning wail. Light shot forth from her body and rose into the air.

I could hear them. Millions of voices all clamoring for my attention. They screamed in my ears. Sang long-lost lullabies. Begged me to send messages, to finish tasks, to set things right.

I heard a distant meow, and a paw pressed against my leg. The others poked and prodded at me, hundreds and thousands of fingers tapping and pulling at my skin. Set us free. Bring us home. Do not come here. Run, Grace, run!

I was too overwhelmed to speak. I curled into a ball on the floor; the book clutched to my chest. My body trembled with fear, my heart fluttering as I gasped for air. I was trapped by their grasping fingers, lost in their desperate voices.

Please! I begged. Please, let me go!

And then, it stopped.

For a moment, I hesitated, too scared to face what I had done. I inhaled a breath, unclenched my hands, and raised my head. The room was bathed in a soft white light that glowed like the moon. It hovered above Isis’s corpse, expanding and contracting, a living, breathing creature, waiting and watching, expectation filling the air.

The incantation hadn’t worked the way it was supposed to—the ghosts shouldn’t have been able to break through without being summoned. Did the living sacrifice change things? My throat choked with tears. I wanted to pull Isis free, hold her in my arms, but I didn’t dare breach the circle.

An hour later, the gateway still hadn’t closed. Sometimes it moved, twisting at the edges like someone was pulling at the boundary. Sometimes there were voices, too distorted, too quiet, to decipher.

I yelled. I paced. I smashed the glittering baubles that Mairi used to hang from our tree. I cried like a child, my stomach clenched in a knot at the thought of trying to sleep without Isis stretched out across my bed.

But my spell had proven the veil existed.

The door was there.

Maybe I just didn’t do enough to connect to her. The book was written thousands of years ago. Billions of souls had died since then—perhaps Mairi’s voice was lost in the storm; perhaps I needed to offer more to pull her free.

The ball of light pulsed in front of me. There were no answers there. It was up to me to find a way.

I traced another circle, encasing the runes I had already drawn. The new circle was lined with fresh blood, drawn from my wrist. Mairi’s favorite bracelet—imbued with the magic of one sister’s love for another—was thrown into the center, where it landed beside what remained of Isis.

The book heavy in my hands, I spoke once more.

I called for Mairi. I called for Isis. I willed them to cross the veil and return to the living realm. Please, come home to me.

The light expanded beyond the circles. It swallowed my body and burned through my nerves, like lightning melting glass. My mouth was filled with rotting maggots, crawling across my tongue and clogging my throat.

Hundreds of glowing, phantom fingers pulled at the portal’s edges, tearing a hole in the light and forcing arms, legs, and heads through the opening. They spilled forth and filled the space until there was nothing but the impressions of people, overlaid on each other, a sea of ghosts crying for freedom.

Feel what we feel.

We won’t go back.

They hated us all. Wanted to be us. Desperate to bathe in the sun once more.

They rose above my head in a torrent of raging life. I shouted Mairi’s name, begged her to come to me. A soft hand brushed my cheek. I’m sorry, Gracie-Lou. Then the writhing swarm shot apart in an explosion that made my eyeballs vibrate, dispersing out into the world, and returning the attic to darkness.

***

The invocation had drained the strength from my body. I crawled to the window and looked out onto the midnight street. The air echoed with screams, and the streetlights flickered like candles.

A low mewl drew my attention back to the circle. Isis opened her eyes and wrenched her body back in place, one limb at a time. She sat there, in the circle, watching me. When I stroked her head, she stayed motionless, as unresponsive as a doll. You’ll be okay, baby. You’ll be back to normal in no time.

I climbed down the ladder and stumbled to my room. My phone was lying on my bed where I had left it. There were already stories on my news app of mysterious deaths and apparitions laying siege in the darkness.

I found Mom lying on the floor of her bedroom, face frozen in a wide-eyed rictus. Her latest boyfriend was dead in the bed.

What have I done?

I should have felt guilty. All those lives rested on my shoulders, and a reckoning would surely be due one day. But Mairi was out there somewhere, waiting for me. Hope warmed my chest at the thought of hearing her warm laughter one more time.

If I could bring her spirit back, there must be a way to make her whole again. One step closer to my goal—all I needed was the right spell.

I packed my books into a backpack and headed out into the night. Isis padded at my feet, a silent shadow, her eyes unblinking.

I’m coming, Mairi.

Picture of Caroline Ashley

Caroline Ashley

Caroline Ashley is a clinical psychologist who works for the NHS in Scotland. She primarily writes fantasy with the occasional foray into sci-fi and horror. If she had any free time around work, writing and raising her two young children, she would spend it playing board games. Visit her website to view her other published work.
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Swipe to Unlock – Part One by Joshua Ginsberg

Back at the small apartment he rented, Chase was surprised by what he had done earlier that night. He couldn’t remember ever having stolen anything in his life, but the evidence of his criminality was there before him on his living room table: the wallet and the phone.

He understood, of course, why and how it had happened—how it had been the culmination of a series of events that began with him meeting and falling in love in with a young woman, with whom he had moved to Jackson, Mississippi, a city he disliked, from Louisville, which he had quite liked. His girlfriend’s mother and two brothers lived nearby, and she had wanted to be closer to them. So he had given up a job he liked—writing content for a boutique digital media firm—and taken one that he liked far less, as a contracted service associate at a global private equity firm.

In under a year, however, he had lost both the girl and the job. When he lost the girl, it had saddened him, but he clung to the hope that perhaps they could reconcile. Later, when he lost his job—just earlier that day, the day of his theft—he wasn’t sad at all. He was furious. That morning, he had been told that the firm had decided to replace their service staff with an AI platform in which they had invested. No notice, no severance, not even a pat on the back. His manager had handed him and his colleagues flimsy cardboard boxes to fill with whatever personal belongings they had kept at their desks and shove off.

Chase had complied, while down the hall a stern-looking man in an expensive suit—who Chase recognized as a senior partner, or managing director, or senior vice something-or-other—stood watching with arms folded and a look of grim satisfaction as Chase and the rest of the no-longer-needed, nor appreciated, help staff shuffled off.

When Chase climbed into his Ford Taurus, he had planned to just drive home, but on the way to his apartment, he broke out in a cold sweat that clung to the curtain of dark hair that fell over one side of his face. He pulled over to the side of the road and let traffic whiz past him until his breathing became easier and the pounding of his heart slowed to a normal pace.

What would he do now?

He decided the best course of action was to find a cheap bar and drink—which he proceeded to do. He found a particularly rundown, nameless establishment and drank one whisky and Coke after another. He wasn’t much of a drinker, really, so after just a couple of drinks, he felt his face flush. After another, he found that he didn’t so much mind the country music coming from a jukebox that, despite offering thousands of options, seemed set on playing the same half dozen songs.

The clientele looked a little rough to him. His gaze drifted over a landscape of ragged scars and crudely executed prison tats on biceps, elbows, necks and faces.

Suddenly, the door swung open, and into the bar strode a man in a dark jacket and tie, with graying hair combed meticulously over a bald spot that no amount of grooming could conceal. He took a seat in a booth at the far end of the room from the bar, and Chase noticed that he was the very same son of a bitch who had presided over his dismissal earlier that day.

This, coupled with the drinks he’d already had, set his blood to boiling. He ordered another one and watched the smug bastard play with his phone and wallet, then leave both on the table and head to the bathroom.

Overcome by a sudden urge, Chase walked over, pocketed both the phone and the wallet, left enough cash on his table to cover his drinks, and staggered out into the already dark November evening.

Sobriety was creeping in—and guilt along with it. He told himself he would check the wallet and drop it off at the front desk of the law firm the following day.

When he opened it, however, he changed his mind.

There were five twenty-dollar bills and a yellow Post-it note with a short message: Thank you and good luck.

Had that message been meant for him, he wondered? Had that heartless shitbag actually had some sort of pang of conscience and followed him to that crappy little bar to leave him a thank-you?

It didn’t seem to fit what little he knew of the man, and it seemed a strange way of going about things. Why not just send him the money and a nice letter with his last paycheck?

He turned to the phone, which glowed to life at his touch. Above the slide bar was a message: Swipe to Unlock.

Well, he thought, he’d already done one of those two things.

As if in response, the phone unlocked itself.

A few seconds later, it began buzzing with an incoming call, which he answered.

“New job. Delivery. Pays seven thousand,” said the voice on the other end. It sounded English and made him think of the actor Jason Statham in one of those Guy Ritchie movies.

“What? Who is this?”

The caller let the question hang in silence—tense, suspended, like something dangling from the end of a spiderweb.

“Hello?” Chase asked again.

“You’re new, yeah?”

“New? I don’t know—what is this? What job?”

There was a long sigh on the other end of the line. “I assume you’ve recently come into possession of a phone. I’ll spare you the indignity of explaining how that came to be—I can pretty well work that bit out for myself.”

“How… do you know that?” Chase asked, and then after a pause: “What… what else do you know?”

“I know about that sweet little number you like so much. Kaitlyn, is it? I know some bloke she met at the gym two months back is givin’ it to her right now.”

Chase gritted his teeth and clenched a fist, digging his fingernails into his palm. He found himself overcome—for the second time that day—by an uncharacteristic flash of rage.

“I know all sorts of things,” the voice continued. “I’m the dispatcher. It’s my job to know. You have the phone now, so that makes you the runner. I call with jobs. You do the jobs. You get paid. That’s how it works.”

It was Chase’s turn to let the question linger unanswered.

“What if I turn down the job,” he asked.

“That would be a most grievous error of judgment. Let me ask you—does your mom still reside at 1244 Pine Lane in Berks County, Pennsylvania? Neighborhood’s not what it used to be, eh? More crime, from what I hear. Bad things can happen…”

Chase felt a coldness radiating out from his chest through the rest of his body. Between the money—which he needed—and the thought of something happening to his mother, his decision was already made.

“Okay. Okay, I understand. What do I need to do?”

“I’ll text you the address. There’s a truck waiting there for you. Keys in the ignition. Drop off location already programmed in. That’s it. Easy as piss.”

Then, as either an afterthought, enticement, threat—or some combination thereof—the dispatcher added, “I’ll meet you there.”

***

At exactly 12:52 a.m., after some difficulty finding small service roads and side streets, Chase brought the white delivery van to a stop in the parking lot by storage locker forty-four. It was like the ones he’d seen in the show Storage Wars—what looked like a one-car garage, set alongside dozens of others, all equally nondescript.

On the right side of the door stood a burly-looking man in a long jacket, silent and still. Chase assumed that this was the man who called himself the dispatcher. At a glance, not only his voice but his shape did indeed resemble the English actor Statham. But as Chase drew closer, he realized no one would ever actually confuse the two.

The man’s shorn head revealed an oddly lumpy cranium, and it looked as though his facial features had been applied hastily from mismatched parts. His left eye was slightly higher than his right, and they were of two different colors—though in the yellow light of the predawn darkness, Chase could only tell that one was light colored and the other dark. His nose curved to the left, apparently having been broken at least once, and the lower half of his right ear was missing.

His skin was pocked, pitted, and crisscrossed with a variety of lines that had not occurred naturally—the overall effect turning his face into a topographical map of brutality.

“You the dispatcher?” he asked, averting his eyes and looking instead back to the van.

“Aye,” Not-Statham replied.

From around the corner appeared two others who walked briskly towards the van. The shorter of the two was of medium build, with a hooked nose and eyes he kept fixed on the large plastic bin he rolled in front of him. The taller one—clearly the higher-ranking of the pair—sucked on a particularly foul-smelling, unfiltered cigarette, which he flicked away as he reached the back of the van.

The mutant, bizzarro-version Statham lumbered toward the van as well, and Chase followed. They stopped at a respectable distance as the other two men worked.

As the shorter man unlatched and opened the back of the van, Chase noticed an unusual tattoo on the back of his wrist—what looked like the same sort of slide bar that opened the phone he’d filched. The other man had the same marking, he realized.

From inside the van, the smaller man began lifting what appeared to be heavy trash bags into his bin until it was full, then wheeled it off into the storage unit.

“Should we help them?” Chase asked.

“No,” Not-Statham replied. “Your job was delivery. You done that. So now wait till they’re done, then I’ll give you new instructions.”

“What are those tattoos? On their wrists?”

“Means they’re guild members. You don’t talk to them. They don’t talk to you. And if ever you see that mark anywhere but on a job, you make scarce. Understand?”

Chase nodded, even though he was pretty sure he understood none of what he’d just been told.

The smaller man returned, rolling his bin to the back of the van, while the taller man stood beside him, watching a video on his phone. As the smaller man lifted one of the bags, it split, spilling out a few tubelike things that hit the ground with a wet sound.

The taller man looked up angrily from his phone. “Yalla!” he spat, smacking the back of his companion’s head. The shorter man threw up his hands, uttered what sounded to Chase like bitter gibberish, and began lifting the things from the ground.

Limbs, he realized with alarm. Severed human arms, terminating at the elbows and shoulders in ragged, bloody stumps.

Once the remaining bags had been loaded into the cart, the taller man nodded at Chase and the dispatcher, then walked off behind the short man.

“What the fuck is this,” Chase hissed once the two men were out of earshot. “Those were arms. Human fucking arms!”

The dispatcher—whom Chase could no longer associate with Statham—leaned over and said into his ear, “Guess that makes you an arms dealer, don’t it?” He chuckled without mirth at his own joke, then reached into a pocket in his jacket and pulled out a thick manila envelope and a set of keys.

“Pay for your first job. Keys are for the sedan at the far end of the lot. Directions are programmed into the navigation. Drop it off, go home, and wait for your next call.”

Too stunned to reply, Chase simply accepted the envelope and keys, did as he was told, and returned home. He put the phone in the top drawer of the nightstand next to his bed and lay on top of the sheets, staring blankly at the ceiling until sunlight banished the shadows to their daytime hideouts.

***

For three days after the job, Chase existed in a state of limbo that skirted the line between panic and existential dread. Should he call someone? The police? FBI? NSA? He didn’t think he could do so without risking the well-being of himself and his family. And anyone close to him—friends or even acquaintances—he’d be putting in danger.

So he waited and checked the phone every couple of hours. He thought of getting in his car and driving until he came to a river or gorge into which to throw the phone, but that would likely antagonize whatever strange brotherhood (what had the dispatcher called it—a guild of some kind?) he had gotten mixed up with.

On the second day, to try and take his mind off some impending raid by law enforcement, he used some of the money he’d made to buy a new high-end flat-screen television, which he mostly sat in front of without really watching or hearing.

By the third day, he’d started to feel calmer. Maybe they wouldn’t call him again. After all, he thought, if he were part of some international criminal cabal and tasked with selecting someone to run errands, he would be the absolute last person on earth he’d consider for the job.

But then, from another perspective, wasn’t it precisely the sheer improbability of his involvement that made him such an ideal choice?

His internal debate was cut short when the phone began buzzing with an incoming call.

Reluctantly, he answered.

“New job. Alibi. Pays fifteen thousand,” the dispatcher said flatly.

“Alibi?” Chase said. “I don’t think I like the sound of that.”

“You should. It’s an easy one. In ten minutes, you leave your apartment and head to an address I’m texting you now. It’s an old warehouse. Doors open. Go all the way to the office at the back of the building. There’s a pair of gloves and a phone. Put on the gloves. Wait for a call. Answer the phone. Even if it sounds like no one is there, let the call go until it ends. Leave the phone and the gloves where you found them. Leave the building. Go back home. Like I said—easy.”

Chase mulled it over. The idea of making fifteen thousand dollars for listening to a phone made his head swim.

“Okay, but if I do this, I don’t want it to be my last job.”

This evoked no response. Just as Chase began to think the line had gone dead, he received a text with an address.

“I’ve sent you the location,” the dispatcher said. “Go there now.”

The call ended before Chase could confirm that his request had been communicated—and granted.

He put on jeans, a black T-shirt, and a baseball cap pulled low over his face. If it hadn’t been well after nine at night, he might have worn dark glasses as well.

More conspicuous for his attempt at invisibility, he climbed into his car and drove to the destination.

When he arrived, he double-checked the address, parked the car, and pushed through a heavy door which was, as promised, unlocked. He flipped a light switch along one of the walls, but nothing happened. Using the flashlight from his cell phone, he found a stairway leading downward. He brushed away cobwebs, and his footsteps sent clouds of dust swirling through the air.

His footsteps echoed through the space, which seemed to stretch endlessly into the darkness. The poured concrete floor was stained with water that had leaked in through the partially ruined ceiling. The air smelled faintly of crumbling stone, rot, and disuse.

He found the office along the back wall and crept inside. The bare bulb of a lamp—sans shade—bathed the room in sodium-colored light, which deepened rather than dispelled the gloom. There, on a table, were a pair of latex gloves and a phone. He sat down, stretched the yellow gloves over his hands, and waited.

A short time later, the phone rang. Chase answered.

He heard a song—Your Love by the Outfield—nearly drowned out by the sound of wind and things whizzing past. Traffic noises. Someone had called him from a moving car.

He closed his eyes and imagined he was a passenger, zipping down main streets, then onto less busy roads, then side streets. The sound of traffic and wind had faded. The music ended abruptly.

The passenger door opened. The car made a few electronic sounding dings.

Heavy feet crunching gravel.

Then—very faintly—a woman’s voice. Surprised and unhappy.

“Jesus, Charlie, you can’t be here! I have a court order that says if—”

POP!

Chase dropped the phone on the table, eyes now wide open. Mouth too.

A couple seconds later, he picked it back up with trembling fingers and held it cautiously to his ear.

POP! POP! POP!

Three more times—like a car backfiring next to his head.

Then the sound of feet crunching again on gravel. A car door opening. A car door closing. The engine roaring to life.

The call ended, and Chase continued to sit there, paralyzed. He imagined every nerve in his body made of ice, like some weird, human-shaped tree after an ice storm.

He rose with effort and left the building more quickly than he had arrived.

Picture of Joshua Ginsberg

Joshua Ginsberg

Joshua Ginsberg is the author of six non-fiction books on the subjects of off-beat travel, local history and haunted locations, including Secret Tampa Bay: A Guide to the Weird, Wonderful and Obscure and Haunted Orlando. His work has appeared on the NoSleep Podcast, in anthologies such as the award-winning Fumptruck, and in publications including Apex Magazine, Spooky, Tension Literary, Crepuscular, Black Hare Press, Trembling with Fear and Flash Phantoms. He lives in Tampa with his wife, Jen, and their Shih Tzu, Tinker Bell.
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Death From Above by Armand Rosamilia

The flapping of wings brought Clarence out of a good dream, one where he wasn’t being attacked.

He searched in the darkness for his family, but they were long gone. Alone at the bottom of a mineshaft, as well as a bourbon bottle, Clarence didn’t know what time it was. What day it was. Night or day? He had no clue.

To step outside was to invite certain death.

Death by a thousand beaks, he’d always remembered the news reporter say live on television, seconds before she’d been ripped apart. Live on TV, before all of that went away.

There was no more social media. No radio, no news programs, no vehicles. The power grid had gone down months ago.

Clarence and his family had been on vacation in West Virginia, a trip to see distant relatives, when the world had gone south.

He heard beating wings again and knew they were back.

He’d found several bags of rice a couple of weeks ago, when he’d slipped out and crawled nearly a mile, covered in three blankets, inch by inch, to a gas station.

The inside had been gutted, most of the shelves cleared out. People had panicked and taken anything they could get their hands on. So had Clarence.

Inside the mineshaft, he had a lot of odd items: an empty gas can, Christmas ornaments in a box, half a can of cheap coffee, various plates and cups but no utensils, and four bags of rice left.

He’d built a small fire, which he’d used to cook whatever he found even remotely edible. The smoke and smell brought the terrors back, but they couldn’t get through the makeshift wooden walls he’d erected.

Clarence was always in darkness unless he lit the fire, but he knew he’d run out of flammable items soon and have to venture out for more wood.

It hadn’t been so bad in the beginning, a sighting here and there. Maybe half a dozen above, riding on the wind. As time went on, they grew in number. All kinds, too, not just one specific kind.

Hundreds and thousands of them. All attacking anything that moved.

Clarence hadn’t been struck yet, although he’d been attacked a few times. He’d gotten away once because he had a pocketful of change his son had given him, and he tossed quarters into the air and distracted the winged nightmares.

He was out of quarters, though, and nearly out of food. He’d found a drip of rainwater further down the tunnel, but it wasn’t enough to fill more than an inch or two of a cup each day.

At some point, he knew he’d need to take his chances and see what was left of the world.

A couple of nights ago—if it was night or day, he didn’t really know—he’d dreamed of making traps to catch them. A few placed around the entrance to the mine might snag several, and he could roast them properly. Tasted like chicken, right?

Clarence decided to at least peek outside and see what was happening—just a quick look. He wished his phone still worked so he could snap some pictures and take his time studying them, but it was long gone.

When he pulled the wooden blockage from the tunnel mouth, all was quiet. He didn’t see anything in the sky; nothing perched on nearby trees. From this angle he couldn’t see up overhead on the rock wall, but he thought if they were up there, he’d hear them.

Clarence spotted a tree, the closest, and several large branches had fallen off and littered the ground. It would be enough firewood for a few days.

He closed the door behind him and went inside, grabbing a blanket to cover himself. It wouldn’t keep him safe, only a bit safer.

When he stepped outside, he left the wooden door open a crack so in the event he got into trouble, he could easily rush inside and pull it shut.

Clarence took a few steps, eyes on the sky. The rock over the mine was empty, which he took as a good omen.

He rushed to the tree and began picking up branches.

A shadow crossed the ground, and Clarence ducked down, covering up with the blanket. Wondering if he was about to be attacked and die out here, in the open.

When he didn’t feel anything on him, he looked out and saw he was alone. Perhaps it had been passing too far overhead to see him, or he’d covered up in time.

He gathered as much wood as he could carry, tossing the remaining branches in the mine’s direction so next time he’d have a shorter distance to cross, then rushed back to the wooden barricade.

It was open at least another foot than he’d remembered leaving it.

Clarence closed the door behind him and listened for anything inside the mine now. Maybe another person had been hiding nearby, and when he’d covered himself with the blanket, the person had run inside.

It made no sense, but right now, neither did what was happening.

Clarence stoked the fire and piled the new wood so it was within easy reach.

He thought he heard maybe a footstep down the tunnel. He lifted a piece of wood to use as a club. “Hello? Anybody there?”

After half an hour, he put the wood back on the pile. The sound could’ve been anything, from dripping water to the rocks above his head shifting naturally.

He reached for a bag of rice, but the spot was empty.

Clarence was confused at first. He’d definitely left it near the fire, also within reach. It was the last of his food.

“Hello?” There had to be someone else in the mine with him, and that someone had stolen his food.

Clarence walked a quarter mile down the tunnel but didn’t see new footprints in the dirt, although he stooped down a couple of times and picked up grains of rice. Was this person messing with him?

He went back to the fire and took a seat, back against the wall so he could see both the tunnel and the entrance.

His stomach growled. Clarence knew he’d need to leave the safety of the mine in the next couple of days and forage for food. Maybe he could find his way back to that gas station and there’d be a hidden stockpile of candy bars.

Clarence closed his eyes and settled in for some sleep. He never waited for darkness or daylight, since he couldn’t see either of those things here in the mine.

The sound of fluttering wings woke him from a nightmare and into a real one.

All around Clarence they circled overhead, a lot of the winged devils landing on the wood pile and at his feet. Hundreds. Thousands.

Clarence looked for his blankets, but they’d been taken away, and now he saw them drop from the ceiling and into the fire, covering and extinguishing it.

Plunged into darkness, Clarence tried to run, not knowing if he was heading further into the mine or toward the wooden barricade.

Not that it mattered, because tiny claws raked his head and arms, driving him to the ground.

Beaks pecked at his exposed flesh, and he felt his left eye sucked out of its socket.

Clarence opened his mouth to scream, but claws and beaks tore at his tongue.

He hoped to die quickly, wondering if anyone else was still alive out there, somewhere.

Picture of Armand Rosamilia

Armand Rosamilia

Armand Rosamilia is a full-time crime thriller and horror author who enjoys coffee, bourbon and bourbon-flavored coffee. He lives in Jacksonville Florida, where it is too hot to go outside so he stays inside and writes all day.
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Cog by Eric J. Juneau

Four people away from me on the conveyor belt, Wilkins screams. One of the robots behind us marches toward him, taking its time. Wilkins is clutching his wrist—not his hand, because there’s no longer a hand there. Blood is spurting in rhythmic squirts, like a broken water main, coating all the mechanical equipment.

Wilkins works on the combine press. He has to be quick with it. Otherwise, the press’ll come down on his hands before he’s finished aligning the chassis. Wilkins is sixty years old. His reaction time has slowed to where he could no longer do his job.

The robot clamps its metal claw onto Wilkins’s arm. It keeps its yellow headlight eyes straight ahead and starts marching down the conveyor belt, like a demonic Tin Man.

“Jesus, no,” Wilkins says. “No, it’s okay. It’s fine.” Meanwhile, he’s getting pale.

The robot ignores him, and continues dragging him away. Wilkins struggles, but it’s like trying to get away from a moving car with your hand caught in the door. All he does is lose his footing while the robot marches to the end of the factory. They turn left and enter a door that no one ever comes out of. Presumably, that’s where they take us to get gassed, or recycled into food, or whatever it is they do with the useless.

That’s how they all end up once you get too old, or too slow to do your job anymore. You can’t get out of the way when the cutter comes across or you let three assemblies go by with loose or missing screws. You lose an arm, or a face, and the robots drag you away while you’re still bleeding.

I keep doing my job while this is going on, even though the conveyor belt has stopped. I almost weld a hole into the machine.

In five minutes, someone emerges from the common room. Someone who was sleeping five minutes ago. He walks up to Wilkins’s station. The conveyor belt grinds and starts moving again. He handles the combine press with ease, like he does this in his sleep. But I can tell he’s trying to ignore the blood on the press sticking to his fingers.

***

The pulp science-fiction stories have come true. We built intelligent robots. There was a war. And we lost.

The robots wasted no time in seizing control. They decimated the world. They eliminated everything unnecessary to their existence, keeping only what humans needed to survive. Air, some clean water, non-radioactive dirt for food, and the factories provided shelter.

The factories. All the towns, all the cities, were bombed out. All the homes were wasted, consumed for resources. Now, there are only isolated factories on the barren landscape.

Every surface, every piece of equipment, is the same color as the metal it is made from. The only colors I see that aren’t gray, silver, or black are our human skin and hair, covered in the fine dust of metal shavings.

Every day we stand beside one of three long conveyor belts that stretch from one end of the factory to the other. Black and silver parts come down the belt and stop in front of us. We drill, chisel, solder, hammer, wrench, or assemble something on the chassis while our robot overlords watch. They’ve never told us what it is we’re making.

But I have to find out.

Taking over the world was the logical direction towards preserving their existence. Why they keep humans around, I don’t know. It defies all logic, and it drives me crazy. It must have something to do with what they’re building. If I find out what it is, I’ll know why the robots keep us.

I’m a welder. I weld for twelve hours a day, every day. Three joints across a box-like assembly that’s half completed—exposed sockets for wires and holes for transistors that get inserted down the line. Three pre-marked lines. Left to right, left to right, left to right.

The boxes become something about eighteen inches high—a rat’s nest of wires and circuitry encased in an obsidian cover. I’ve never seen it turned on or tested. Maybe they’re computers. Maybe they’re parts for other robots. My brain itches every night with possibilities.

At the end of twelve hours, two things happen. The second shift emerges from the common room, and the truck driver, David, arrives. We all converge on the garage door in the middle of the factory, waiting for it to open.

The truck trailer has two sides. One side is empty—the second shift puts the assembled machines inside. The other is filled to the ceiling with the parts second shift needs to do their job. They don’t know what the machines are for either. It’s funny that, to them, we’re the second shift.

We don’t stop working until every bin of screws, nails, wires, fuses, microchips, motherboards, and circuits are out of the truck. Then the robots’ windowed eyes go from yellow to blue, indicating that second shift has started.

The second shift truck driver takes David’s spot, and the garage door shuts. We’re done. The second shift fills the bins with the spare parts and tops off the fuel tanks. David walks with us into one of the two common rooms, corresponding to our assigned shift.

I have to find out what they’re building. Twelve hours a day, I stare at these things. And I have no idea what they do. That’s not right. Maybe they’re for bigger robots. Maybe they’re part of a collective robot brain. Why don’t they tell us what they’re for?

After twelve hours of work, we spend the other twelve in the common room. You can do whatever you want during this time. There are beds in the back. Otherwise, there are amusements for when we’re not sleeping, bathing, or taking care of bodily functions.

A line immediately forms in front of the drug dispensary. The first guy presses his thumb to a sensor. You can see his tension melt away as it delivers a twelve-hour dose of narcotic—a synthetic drug made by the robots. It has no side effects, no dependency, no letdown. The robots don’t want someone working with a hangover, or any illness for that matter. If you’re not at your station, the robots drag you there. And every thirty seconds you’re not working, they shock you.

For the people who don’t go straight to the drugs, they go behind one of the curtained beds and spend their time screwing, simply because there’s nothing else to do. We think there’s some sterilization thing in the food or water. They take it out when they need more workers.

Besides that, the robots don’t care much about what we do in the off-shift, as long as you don’t interfere with the machine-building process. If I wanted to, I could walk up and down the factory floor. In fact, I have done that on several occasions, trying to figure out what they’re building. It’s too packed to dispense food. It doesn’t look like it plugs into anything.

Otherwise, there’s video games, television, and other diversions. Another dispensary provides food. You can get as much as you want, as long as what you want is a pink plasticky cake containing all your daily nutrients.

And a window. That’s where I’m looking, wondering why they would give us a window. The only thing it looks onto is the gray wasteland. Just desert and dark skies. The darkest blobs are angular boxes pinpricked with light—the other factories—the robotic strongholds. All manufacturing machines night and day. And no one knows what for.

They think I’m looking out the window, but I’m waiting. I don’t know why today is the day instead of any other. Maybe because Wilkins drove it home. Maybe because I’m another day older, another day where my response time has gotten a little slower. Maybe because every day is like the last. There is no better day.

The drug dispensary line wanes. Most people sit on couches and sofas, enjoying the peak of the euphoria that comes with the first hit. Everyone works their twelve hours so they can get to the next twelve hours of bread and circuses. I think the drug has some chemical in it to drive away ambition. There hasn’t been a rebellion that went beyond a guy throwing a tool in frustration. The robots’ eyes turned red, and they converged on him.

They chat about the world that used to be, or Wilkins, or go in back to sleep until the shift begins again. We used to talk about what the robots were making, or why they needed human labor to do it. No one cares now.

After an hour, a blonde woman pulls away the curtain from one of the sex beds. She wanders off to the water dispenser. I casually walk away from the window and head towards the bed she just left. When I pull back the curtain, David is there, stirring under the pink sheet.

“Hey, David,” I say. I would ask how his day was, but there’s no point. Every day is the same.

“Hey,” he responds sleepily. “What’s up?”

“Listen, I’ve been thinking it over. I’m thinking there’s a way to find out what they’re making. Or at least to communicate with the other factories.”

“Mm-hm,” he says. He’s in a sex-induced haze. But he’s always been receptive to ideas of rebellion. We all talk about the glory days, sitting on the couch after a visit to the drug dispenser. I used to be one of them.

“All we need to do is have someone switch places with a truck driver. Then, that person switches with that factory’s truck driver. The robots won’t care as long as there’s a warm body doing the job.”

He arches an eyebrow at me and props himself up on his elbows. “Don’t they keep track of who’s doing what?”

“No, I tried it with Jones. I switched with him one day; they didn’t even care.”

He thinks for a moment. “That actually might work.”

“I’m willing to do it. To take the risk. I just need a truck driver.”

“I’m a truck driver. But the problem is, I couldn’t do your job. I don’t know anything about welding. I’m sure I’d fuck up three times, and then that’d be the end of me.”

This was the inevitable question, and I had prepared for it. “I know. I’ve got a way around that. But it’s only going to work once.”

Like I said—trillions of calculations per second, but not terribly observant. I’ve been practicing slipping it in and out of my sleeve for more than three months during sleep time. I started with a fork, then moved up to heavier things, visualizing the action for months.

The elapsed time from when I brought the screwdriver out of my sleeve to when I shoved it through David’s throat is less than a second. Rich, red blood flows out of his neck like a bubbling brook. It doesn’t spurt like I thought it would. His eyes pop out of his head. He gurgles softly, puts a hand to his throat, then falls back on the pillow.

“Good night, sweet prince,” I say. I take his clothing from the floor and put it on. Then, I lie next to him as the sheets soak up the blood and wait until morning. It’s the least I can do—no one should die alone. David is a necessary casualty to the cause. He’s dying so I can find out what the machines do. It’s a grander fate than any of us have on the assembly line.

Hours later, a buzzy electronic alarm sounds, along with the vents opening, hissing in the wake-up gas. The doors open and we all saunter out, already dressed.

I pull my cap low and hunker down. David and I look enough alike—brown hair, medium height, young faces—to fool casual observers. Staying near the back, so no one notices me, I walk out the exact same door as David. I’ve been watching him so I could copy his stance and gait.

I glance at the crowd to make sure no one’s looking at me. No one is. I wheel a large bin of completed machines from the end of the conveyor belt up to the loading track. The robots don’t care if I look at them, but I can’t pick one up or they would think I was interfering. Maybe they’re decorations, like sculptures for robots.

The second-shift truck driver opens the door and steps out. He gives me a nod as he heads toward the common room. I’ve met the last obstacle before the point of no return and gone past it. I hoist myself into the cab and face the darkness of the tunnel leading out.

Maybe they sell the devices. Maybe they’re delivered across the world and sold to other robots who can use them. Or to aliens.

There’s only a steering wheel. No controls, no gauges, no gas pedal. Just a bench and a windshield. I have no idea how to start this thing. But before I can panic, the trailer door rattles shut. They’re done loading.

I twist back and forth in the seat, looking for a button or switch. If I don’t start driving, the robots are going to get suspicious. How many seconds do I have left before they catch on? Ten… nine…

The van starts off. I bolt upright. Pitch blackness surrounds me, can’t see a thing, but the van feels like it’s moving. I feel like I’ve been swallowed by a whale. The steering wheel drifts of its own accord. I grab it and focus on keeping the truck in a straight line.

After a minute, I see a dim dot of light. It’s the end of the tunnel. The truck emerges outside. Through the windshield, I can see the churning black clouds, the ash-colored earth. Skeletal building foundations sit like half-built toys in the sand.

Evenly spaced pylons mark the road, each slowly flashing a feeble red light in the polluted fog. I guide the truck between them at an automatically controlled pace.

For six hours, I drive through the landscape, making a gentle curve every now and then. One black dot looms larger than the rest. Another factory. I’m heading straight for it.

Once I’m close enough, the wheel freezes and locks. The truck slows down, stops, and makes a three-point turn. It backs into the loading dock with perfect precision. This is it. I open the door.

It’s locked. I guess I’m not supposed to get out of the van. This must be why the truck drivers never say what’s happening with their deliveries. They never get out, so they never know. The truck drives to the factory, delivers its cargo, then heads straight back. The entire process takes twelve hours.

I’ve got to get out of here. I don’t have much time before they’re done. The only thing I can do is kick at the windshield, which I do. Slam, slam, slam. My shins feel like they’re bending back.

I hear the trailer door open. People are climbing in. They’re probably taking the assembled machines out now. I have to get out of here before the truck takes off again. I must find out where they’re taking those machines. One more kick and the windshield pops out.

I crawl out onto the hood and look back through the thin slit between the garage and truck. There’s a factory beyond, just like mine, with three conveyor belts dotted with machine parts. Silver and black everywhere. People gather around the trailer, taking boxes off the truck.

There’s a vent shaft over the cab. No cover, because they never expected humans beyond this point. I climb onto the top of the truck and hoist myself in.

I can barely breathe from all the dust. The seams between vents scrape up my hands. I feel like a mouse running in a maze, making blind left and right turns towards where I think the factory floor is. As far as I know, no one’s following me. I can’t hear a thing. Do the robots know I’m in here? They could gas me or shoot me or firebomb me any second.

I can’t let David’s death be in vain.

There’s a light and a grate at the end of the next turn. No idea where it goes, or if anything’s in front of it. I push open the grate, and it clangs against the floor. Shit. I slide out.

I’m in the observer’s booth—a glass-walled balcony where the robots can watch us. It’s at the same level as the roof scaffolding, high enough to see the entire factory floor, and all the little heads moving around. There are gauges and computer screens here—monitoring tools—but no one’s in here.

I can see everything. People are working on the conveyor belts, tinkering with the machines, setting out parts. The robots are patrolling the floor, but not with their usual passive cadence.

One looks up at the booth and points. His eyes turn from yellow to bright red. It opens its mouth, and a siren blares. I’ve now caused enough risk to their operation for them to take notice.

The robots march for the stairs leading up to the observation booth. This is not good. I exit the booth on the other side, but the robots are coming up there too, pinching me in. I can’t let them catch me. If I do, I’d never learn the secret.

The scaffolding. I might be able to jump to it. Not much choice as the robots march closer. I climb onto the railing and leap off—a leap of faith. My hands grab onto the cutting metal bar of their own accord. The robots convene at my previous position on the stairs as I climb up. One of them extends its arms and grabs onto the railing.

I crawl out farther along the rafters. The humans don’t look up. They’re going about their work, but I can’t tell what it is. They must be under the same rules as us—they can’t stop unless the belt does. What do they do with those machines? A large pallet of black boxes is being moved to the beginning of the belt. Whatever they do, they start there.

Some of the robots are gathering under my position. The others are climbing after me. They don’t need to move fast. They know I’m not going anywhere.

The tools hanging from the ceiling are blocking my view. I crawl closer to the beginning of the conveyor belt, balancing on the thin rebar. I don’t grab right—my hand is sweaty from nerves. My fingers slip off the bar. The world spins around.

My legs clamp up and hook together on the girder. I hang from the rafters upside down. I can’t hold this position for long. More robots are collecting below me. They’ve got me now. But from here, I can see everything.

Someone puts a machine on the beginning of the conveyor belt. The next person pries off the cover. After that, someone uses a drill and removes a part from the chassis. She puts it in a yellow bin. Further down the line, people are using screwdrivers and acetylene torches on the device. They are picking off parts and throwing them in the bins at their feet. Further down, the machine has disintegrated into a few motherboards and circuits. The people at the end of the belt put the green plates into white bins and shut them.

They’re taking them apart.

The realization hits me. I don’t know what to feel. So, I feel it all at once. I no longer know anything.

I smile and release my grip on the rafters. The ground rises to meet me, and I close my eyes.

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Eric J. Juneau

Eric Juneau is a software engineer and novelist on his lunch breaks. He lives in, was born in, and refuses to leave, Minnesota. You can find him talking about movies, video games, and MCU villains on his website, where he details his journey to become a capital A Author.
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Taking Care of Our Own by Kelly Matsuura

“This isn’t the way…” Tears streaked my face, and I couldn’t finish my words. This isn’t the way I want to say goodbye to my brother! If only I could scream it aloud.

It was three-thirty a.m. and we had to be quiet. Our lives depended on it.

We were crossing the alleyway behind a Goldilocks bakery, with Danilo’s butchered corpse in four heavy trash bags.

***

Earlier that night, we had finally caught him. We, being my sister Teresa, and my cousins, Manuel and Joma.

Someone, something, had killed three children in our neighborhood; the poor little kids were found ripped apart and mauled on, their remains lying in pools of blood in the open streets.

Neighbors had seen it on many nights, dashing away from the headlights of the traffic and into the shadows of the parks and deserted buildings. Everyone feared the evil that had arrived in San Pablo.

At first, we hadn’t connected Danilo’s running away with the child murders—he’d been gone a full week before the first one—but then, Joma swore he had seen a rabid Danilo near a dumpster one night. And Joma’s hair, I kid you not, had turned completely white; evidence of true shock, whether real or imagined.

Maybe he had seen an aswang, in human form, out hunting. But Danilo? No, I prayed he was just off partying in Manila with his seedy friends as he’d done before.

My mother certainly believed Joma though and feared for the family.

The day we told her was cool and rainy. Perfect, she said, for preparing a protection spell. This spell begins with picking a fresh coconut at midnight and boiling the guts for its oil. Mother spent hours readying the coconut just right: draining the oil, reciting the protective prayers, and finally, discarding the leftover coconut flesh and shell in a river, far from our home. She then hung the blessed coconut oil in a pouch by the front door. All as folklore insisted she do. If an aswang came by, the oil would boil by itself and warn us of the approaching danger, she explained.

I didn’t believe it, none of us did, but the next night Danilo returned, and the coconut oil boiled over, like lava erupting from Mount Mayon.

He stood in the front yard; a man’s form in Danilo’s ragged clothes, but he was not my brother. This creature had the eyes of a devil. Sharp, gold swirls that cut right through you. How Danilo came to be that way we’ll never know, but we knew that night he was our responsibility. Our blood.

Joma attacked the aswang with my dad’s old machete. The stabs and slices subdued it enough that we could pour the boiling oil over its body and then hack off its limbs and head.

Mother prepared the trash bags.

***

So, there we were in the early hours of the morning, in the alley, taking poor Danilo’s remains to the vet’s office where Manuel’s wife worked. They had an incinerator there for cremations—perfect for our task. We were all trying to be strong, but I wasn’t the only one with shaky legs and wet cheeks.

No one said a word until we reached the small playground close by the clinic.

“The girl was found there,” Teresa whispered.

“Shut up!” Joma urged. “We have to get off the streets before the morning traffic starts.”

We were lucky to be in a quiet, mostly abandoned neighborhood. Only a few cars had driven by.

Manuel, at the front of our procession, suddenly froze.

“What’s wrong?” Teresa asked.

I hurried to catch up and see what had spooked Manuel.

“Oh God!”

Another one! A woman, with the same fire-burning glare and snarl that Danilo had had.

Joma still had his machete and rushed to protect our group.

A rough fight broke out; the three of us dropped the trash bags and grabbed the nearest weapons we could find. For Teresa, a discarded hubcap; Manuel, a rotting fence post from the park; and me—I hit the jackpot with a steel rod. It was rusted and bent but had one sharp edge. I would stick it straight through her eye.

The aswang hissed and snarled, snapped and scratched. We all got bruised, punched and scraped. Thankfully, none of us received a deadly bite. We took that bitch down and stepped back to assess the damage.

“We’re getting good at this,” Teresa joked.

No one laughed.

I wiped the warm blood from my face with the hem of my t-shirt and re-gripped my rod.

“Someone help me cut her into pieces,” I ordered. I wanted to get the hell out of there.

Joma looked around. “Where can we get more trash bags this time of morning?”

Picture of Kelly Matsuura

Kelly Matsuura

Kelly Matsuura is an avid short story writer, with a focus on fantasy, horror, and literary fiction. She has had stories published with Black Hare Press, 100-Foot Crow, Iron Fairie Publishing, Wolfsinger Press, Metastellar, and many more. Kelly lives in Nagoya, Japan with her geeky husband. She loves traveling, knitting, cooking, and of course, reading.