Sta.sh
Unrelated Short Stories
by ~reidoDays and Hours and Nothing - July 6th, 2007
September. It was unseasonably hot, and the air was thick with insects as we waded through the tall grass to our secret spot, our clubhouse without a house. We babbled on about everything and nothing and everything again. Girls. Sports. It's sorta all blurry now. I remember dropping into the couch, casually, and Sam throwing himself into the broken recliner.
Some time passed. I don't know how long. And then there was a light, just floating in the air in front of Sam, and immediately after that the light was gone, replaced with...
With what, I don't know. A floating shadow? An emptiness? I don't really know how to describe it. Nothingness. Sam looked at it cross-eyed, and reached out and touched it. "It's cold," he said--and then his hand was gone. There was no blood, there was just screaming, screaming from all of us. He tried to pull away but it was like something was holding him in place--no, pulling him in. Soon his arm up to the elbow was gone, vanishing into that floating shadow, that... void. I'll never forget the look on his face, such pure, uninhibited fear, panic, pain.
I grabbed his other arm and pulled--we all pulled, but it was like he was set in stone. It had pulled him in up to his shoulder, and was pressing up against his chest. I could hear his ribs breaking, shattering, crumbling inside. Sam let out a wail of agony--and he died. We fell away, screaming, and his body vanished completely, sucked into that glimmer of nothingness.
Only it wasn't a glimmer anymore. As it had pulled him in it had grown: the size of a baseball by the time it reached his elbow, as big as a pumpkin when it killed him. It wasn't growing anymore, just... floating there.
I blacked out after that.
When I woke up I was on a stretcher in an ambulance. Our secret hiding place was gone--someone had erected a huge white tent over it. Several large men with rifles and gas-masks stood around it in a circle. Men and women in lab coats bustled around. I didn't know what was going on. As I lay there staring at the white fabric, a gust of wind blew one of the tent flaps open and I caught a glimpse inside--the nothingness was the size of a large horse.
Suddenly there was a scuffle--someone was shouting something, some kind of horrible howl was coming from inside the tent--and then the scientist types came running out, and a moment later the tent itself vanished, replaced by... nothing, even larger.
The more it took in, the more it grew. I imagine some poor schmuck tripped and brushed against it and got sucked in.
It's still growing now. We're driving South, towards Mexico. Oklahoma is gone--totally gone. It just keeps getting bigger--we can't run forever. We're not the only ones. Everyone is running--North or South or East or West, everyone running out. It's only a matter of time before there's nowhere to run to.
Untitled - April 4th, 2007
The ship's intercoms are silent. We float through space, idling, almost frozen. Shocked. I imagine the expression is visible even outside, as crazy as that sounds. The communications tech lets his hand fall away from the control panel which, only minutes before, had opened the relays to receive the planetary identification signal of Earth, our home. This signal is sent out from all Colonial planets to aid crews in gaining their bearings for post-hyperspatial travel. His hand had, after hitting the proper keystrokes, remained frozen over the panel.
Utter silence. Traditionally, the signal is broadcast over the ships intercoms to reassure the crew--blinded by opaque hulls and shielded viewports--that they are, in fact, not lost in space, as hyperspatial travel often leads one to believe.
"Open the relays," the captain had barked at him, "and be quick about it." An edge of panic had slipped into his voice.
"They're open, sir," the tech had replied. "Double-checked. There... there's no signals coming through. Silence, sir."
Fear rippled across the bridge crew, cold sweats broke out, hands started to shake. Silence generally meant one thing: there was nothing out there to broadcast an ident. signal, therefore we were no where near a planet--much less the planet we were bound for. Before the adoption of the planetary ident. signal this was how ships became lost in space.
"Open the viewshields," the captain whispered. "Open them, damn it!" Stronger this time. The tech responsible jumped to his duties, fingers flying across the control panel. The gunmetal grey shields that close over the thick glass viewport at the front of the bridge during hyperspatial travel folded down and vanished into their storage bays.
The captain fell back into his chair, a hand over his mouth, his eyes wide. A man screamed. It was far worse than we had imagined.
We were not lost in the endlessness of space. In fact, we were right where we had expected to come out. Earth itself was even there, floating in the middle of the viewport. It was the state of the planet that brought us such shock. The spherical body was shattered in two and twisted, its molten core leaking out and cooling near-instantly, like a constant volcanic eruption. Chunks of shattered earth the size of continents floated amidst the wreckage, still green and blue as they had been when we had last seen the planet.
For a moment I held out hope that life remained on those broken, jagged chunks of planet, that people still clung to life on what remained of our world. I soon corrected myself. The captain came to the same conclusion moments later: "There are no clouds. Not a single goddamn cloud."
He was right. There were no clouds--because there was no atmosphere. Earth had been reduced to little more than a massive, broken asteroid, circling 'round its sun at a limp, dragging pieces of it self in its wake. The planet was as dead as everything that still remained on it. Judging from the wrecks of our defensive fleet, from the burns that scored the metal hulls... it was not a catastrophe that had come about naturally.
Untitled - October 2nd, 2006
There's nothing I can do to convince you that what I'm about to tell you is true. In fact, you'll probably laugh at me and tell me I'm full of shit or that I've read too many comic books.
But it actually happened. I was there. You can see it on the security cameras if you're lucky enough to find a copy. Go to the First National Bank in L.A. and look at the floor if you don't believe me--under the rug, you can barely see the palest of red splotches, resilient even after hours and hours of scrubbing. You'd better do it soon, 'cause they're just gonna replace those tiles eventually.
It started out like any other bank robbery--as if that were commonplace. There we all are, standing around in line, tired and bored and frustrated when these two fucks--let's call them Big Fuck and Little Fuck--no, wait, I'm going to get tired of dropping the F-bomb before I'm done writing this down, so let's call them Big Boy and Little Man--slam the doors closed and draw a couple of huge-ass handcannons from their pants, fire two off at the cieling, and start yelling. We all drop to the floor.
Except this one guy. This... man. Six foot two, black skinned, broad-shouldered and smooth-domed. He just stands there staring at them. "Put the guns down and walk away," he says, his voice a kind of low rumble.
"I said get on the fuckin' floor," Little Man screams. Women scream. I can't remember, maybe I screamed too. "Or I'll blow your fuckin' brains out!" See what I mean about getting tired of the F-bomb?
The man just keeps standing there, hands at his side, staring at Little Man as the idiot strides cockily over--and then it happens. Little Man shoots him nearly point-blank right in the chest. Right in the heart. I swear his blood splattered all over me when the bullet came tearing out his back. The man shakes from the impact, his right shoulder rolls back, he stumbles back a couple of steps, eyes squeezed closed--
And then he balances himself, and opens his eyes, and you can see on the camera all his muscles go real tense.
"The fuck?" I hear Big Boy mutter, his voice surprisingly high-pitched for such a large body.
Little Man's got these huge eyes now--they're all we can see with the ski-mask or whatever--and his hand's shaking. Totally terrified. Then--BAM BAM BAM BAM--he's panicking and squeezing the trigger over and over and emptying his entire gun at the man, and each one hits with sickening accuracy, most hitting him in the chest and stomach, one clipping him in the forehead, all tearing out the back and spraying blood all over anyone behind him--and all this time the bloody man is lurching quickly across what little space is left between him and the gunman, barely phased by the gunfire, muscles rippling--
He grabs Little Man by the throat--he's riddled with bullet holes and it doesn't even phase him--and hurls him across the room but by now I'm not even watching the crooks, I'm staring at this big man's back, soaked in blood, and I can see with my own disbelieving eyes the exit wounds closing themselves up. Little Man crumples in a heap against the wall.
"Fuck me!" Big Boy shouts, then roars as he sprints across the room at his partner's assailant--but the black man grabs both of Big Boy's wrists and pulls down and twists--and I can hear the bone snapping and crunching even over Big Boy's screams of agony--and now he's on his knees in front of the man, our defender, our hero, tears flowing out of his big, stupid, ski-masked eyes--and the hero wraps one hand around his other fist and slams them, together, across Big Boy's face. The crook goes down without a sound.
Hero just stands there for a moment, panting, grinding his teeth. His wounds--even the one on his face, which tore half his head off--are already closed and he just looks like some big dude in a bad fake-blood Haloween costume. His muscles relax. He runs a a hand over his smooth dome of a head.
And he walks out the doors and away without saying a damn thing.
The rest of us just stare as he leaves. We don't get up off the floor, out of sheer shock and disbelief, for at least a whole minute.
The hero's blood is still all over the floor. The janitorial staff can't clean it up. There has been talk about destroying the surveilance tapes. I bet the Feds are involved. But it really happened. I know you won't--don't--can't believe me, but it really happened.
Let's Try Again - September 29th, 2007
"Cold as hell out here," I mutter. She looks at me funny and smiles.
"It's not so bad."
I'm standing knee-deep in the white stuff, smoking one of my last cigars, every inch of my body bundled in layers of clothing and armor. "They'll be here soon?" I say over the roar of the wind as it whips more snow in my face.
"Probably." Her dress isn't moved by the wind at all, nor is her hair.
I squint and wipe my goggles. "Well, I'm sorry it had to happen this way. I miss you."
"I miss you too."
I shoulder my rifle. Already I can see the lights of their flyers on the horizon. I key in the sequence necessary to heat up the internal workings of the weapon and turn away from her, towards the door leading into the bunker which I am the only guardian. "I'm doing the right thing."
"Your team was green." This isn't something she'd normally say, but it doesn't surprise me. She's not really here. "Young. They'll live another day thanks to you. All you have to do is give them time."
"It just means giving up on you." She's silent now. I don't look back. I say, "Good bye, Miranda. I love you."
A single line of footprints in the snow show my path to the door of the barracks. As I turn around to close and seal the hatch, giving those poor recruits a few extra seconds, I see no one standing in the snow where she'd been, no disturbances in the snow to mark her presence.
It only takes the beings in the flyers twenty minutes to find the bunker. I give them hell before I die.
