Resistance (Incomplete)

Haven't done a Chuck Wendig challenge piece in a while, so here's something.

This one's incomplete, more of a scene than a story - I'm not sure where to take it in 1000 words or less in the time I have available, so I'll leave it sitting here at 500 words or so and pretend it's a whole story.

--


The pickup bounced by, not on the road but in the high brown grass alongside. Its driver, a Melp with a bunched hairy face and a fat pair of lower lips--typical Melp ugly--clutched the steering wheel in its hair-knuckled fist and squinted into the afternoon sun. The pickup left behind a trail of molten stone. The prairie burned.

Fucking Melp bastard.

Jurgen Jonson watched the truck disappear into a cloud of its own smoke, and with an effort that almost hurt, he relaxed his grip on the battered Bushmaster.

The Felesin wouldn't let the prairie burn, that was sure. Which meant that soon enough there would be the saucers hovering in the sky, the heavy poisonous foam, the unbreathable air.

And everyone would  see the digging.

Miks pulled herself from the hole in the ground. "Monkeyshit," she said. She was wearing a half-shirt and a sunburn and about thirty pounds of dirt and sweat.

"Cover it over," Jurgen told her. "We'll come back tomorrow."

"Bollocks to that," she said. "I need half an hour. Less, maybe. You think the Felesin will get here by then?"

"It's not the Fellies I'm worried about. It's the drones from down Durban way."

Her hand fell to the pistol at her waist and for a moment he thought she was going to draw on him. He might be able to get the Bushmaster turned on her in time, but she was snake-quick.

"You've got a rifle," she said.

He spit. "And they've got the army."

"I do like their hats. You could get me one, if you loved me."

"But I don't love you." He came closer. She smelled rank, dirt and sweat and the too-sweet reek that told them both that she was digging in the right place--the cache her old cellmate had planted there. Before he'd killed himself in a Joburg alley with three shots to the back of his head.

Filthy as she was, his cock still throbbed with the heat between them.

"You're a terrible liar."

Something roared behind him, saving him from a reply. He turned. A lion had burst from the high grass, bolting away from the flame. An old, toothless thing, half-dead, still refusing to die.

Like us.

The old verzetsman had told her what he'd buried would be useful to the Resistance. A burr under their saddles at least. And if it went better--if they could get a sample to the lab buried outside of Pretoria, and if the brainsmen down there could tear it apart and build themselves vast quantities of enhanced synthetic--then maybe they'd end up with a Melp invasion force drugged to the gills, or even better, detoxing all at the same time.

It wasn't much of a weapon. But it was all they had.

"Can you do it in fifteen?" he asked. Already scanning the sky. Nothing, but that meant nothing. Already, satellites could be focusing in.

By the time he dragged his gaze from the southwestern skyline, she was back down the hole.

--

Prompt was to write something based on a picture from the  Secret Door website, which is awesomeness. Having no clue what to write about a pickup truck seemingly spreading fire behind it, I used a random character goal - "to grind something". Jurgen apparently wants to grind down the invaders. Sure, why not. If I was going to pursue this piece, I'd probably start at a different point and put the motivation in conflict with Miks.

If anyone still reads this blog, feel free to finish the story in the comments.

Haiku, and you?

Haven't done a challenge post in a long while (been working hard on stuff to send out to paying markets), but this one (3 linked haiku, combining to tell a story) seemed too easy to pass on. 45 minutes and 15 versions later...

 Titleless, for now.

 ---

the Visitors fell,
yes, you say that i saw but
i can’t remember–

how could i lie to
a jumper cable with my
legs bound apart dear

god i would tell but
the black-jacket man had such
forgetful needles

The NRA - Too Moderate by Half

edited xpost from David Simon's blog:

 Wayne LaPierre is a man who clearly does not know how to think big. And so I’d like to offer my services for his next press conference, with this proposed followup speech.

My fellow Americans:

Thank you for attending this conference call. As before, there will be no followup questions; there's too much talking in the world already, and too much thinking. We'd like to control that sort of thing.

That said, I regret to admit that I misspoke earlier when I recommended armed guards for schools. On further consideration, there is no practical way to establish armed guards in each classroom; even an elite cadre of teachers cross-trained in Language Arts and Violence Studies would be insufficient.

With this in mind, and with only the greatest love for our nation’s children in my heart, I propose the following modest steps:

What we need are armed children. Well-trained, with NRA coursework in NRA-accredited Shooters’ Universities, of course; the NRA would be only too delighted to take over some of the larger existent universities to turn them to the necessary ends, and what American university would not be delighted to do their part in protecting our children? No one is suggesting arming anyone under seven with heavy machine guns, of course; children under seven certainly do not have the necessary discipline to learn basic safety, much less the hand strength to successfully wield such a weapon. So, for children four to seven, shotguns are recommended; for children three to four, 9mm handguns; for children under three but older than one, nothing heavier than a .22 is recommended, though parents who are truly concerned for the safety of their offspring will of course desire a backup .38 in each sock and a military-grade knife in the student’s backpack.

So, that takes care of the children. But basic safety requires going further. and the NRA is for the safety of all Americans. So the NRA will be delighted to offer the services of our mostly-trained, certainly dues-paying members, and their private reserve of heavy-tread vehicles, equipped with the latest in psychotic suppression technology. At 32,000 rounds per minute, any individuals who have managed to slip through our system’s excellent mental-health safety net will be rendered into their constituent parts in less time than it takes to call your congressman to urge him to support this offer.

Of course, no offering would be complete without nuclear weapons. Our founding fathers wanted us to be able to resist the tyranny of the government, and what better way to do that than MIRVs? In today’s dangerous environment, it’s indisputable that the best defense is a good offense; pre-emptive strike capability will leave our children glowing with good health, and their teachers blown away with our generosity.

Some will no doubt say that this does not go far enough; to these individuals, in all humble sincerity I offer our latest technology in safety assurance: The K-11 PlanetBuster. It causes me the deepest regret to tell you that fully one third of Americans are so short-sighted as to think that an asteroid one thousand, nine-hundred and eighty-four miles in diameter would be bad for the environment, but the vast majority of us know that the only way to truly protect America–indeed, the world–is to avoid not only human-on-human violence but also global warming, the fiscal cliff, and the perils of liberal democracy, and what better way to do so than to gently wield this most influential of deterrents. Why, if the K-11 can be guided in at the proper angle of approach, I can guarantee you, ladies and gentlemen, that a brave new world will be brought into being, and those damn dirty apes will–

:: signal lost ::

Fighting Demons

Zhang Pi wakes to the snores of the apprentices. Slipping from his straw bed, he pads shoeless past the forge, to Master Ma's sword in its place of honor on the smithy wall. The simple white hilt smolders red in the forgelight.

When the others awake, this will seem a thievery. It is regrettable. But Pi's sword was  left behind, with his true name.

Pi grimaces, and lifts the sword, and does not feel the slightest eagerness at its perfect balance in his hand.

The Next Big Dragonslayer

"Thing is," Ril tells Norry, "I'm not even sure she wants a new broom. But day after day--"

"Lannald will give you credit," Norry says. "Let tomorrow worry about itself. A happy wife makes a happy husband, I say."

Ril shakes his big head ruefully. "I'm more than this," he says, sweeping his hand to take in all of Slayer's Rest. "One day, Norry."

"One day we'll all eat cake and--hold on. Who's that, then?"

That is the tall, fierce-bearded man leaning casually against the bar, talking to Jick, the owner.

"Dunno." Ril squints through the torch-smoke. "Looks tough enough. Think he's a slayer?"

"We're about to find out," Norry says.

Filling the Void

That night, we occupied the bar in the windowless room within B-'s favorite mansion, before the curtain that led to the door that would almost end the world. For the past few weeks I had been handsomely paid to tend the bar at these events, to ask no questions and spread no tales; tend the bar I did, and if I had questions or tales I kept them to myself.

As had become the custom of late, Charisse stood blindfolded on the low table at the center of the room. For the amusement of all, one of the ladies had gifted Charisse with leather underthings, and of course there were always fresh stockings. The heels were the same that she'd been wearing the first night, when the men had taken her.

Roger was piloting Charisse, blindfolded himself. The better to focus, he had told me the first time I had witnessed the exercise of his talent. Privately, I had always thought it an affectation, but given how this all ended--well, perhaps I was wrong about that, too.

Scary Story in Three Sentences

Moonlight through your baby girl's window and the doll’s cradle by her bed crawling with chittering white-toothed shadows; for just a moment, even before you start to wonder how they got there in the first place, you can’t understand why the fuck the rats are eating the doll.

And then the bloodshitfeardeathsulfur reek, the empty toddler bed and the broken circle, the realization that rats don’t have tentacles.

And the whispers in your head like screams that never end.



-----

Chuck Wendig asked to have the shit scared out of him in a three sentence story of less than 100 words.

I think this one's okay.

Black-Clock Dreams

Yuri learned of the old man from Gregor, who had it from Peter Samovitch, whose prababushka forbade him to tell anyone what she knew. Ordinarily this hearsay would carry all the consequence of a sugar cube, but everyone knew Peter's prababushka for a witch, and a powerful one at that. When she finally died at one hundred and thirty-two, baking cookies for her pravnuks, the residents of every village for fifty kilometers had braved the bitter cold for her pogrebal'nyi. Hers were not words to be taken lightly.

And so the distance has passed under wheel and under foot, and now Yuri finds himself a hundred and fifty kilometers north of Volsk, standing outside the old man's door, one gloved hand in the air and the other clenched around the pistol in the pocket of his fur-lined parka. A large black bell hangs from the iron hook by the door.

Yuri inhales deeply so that the cold bites his lungs. When he exhales, the moisture turns to snow that whips away on the wind. He breathes again. He is not ready for this.

Just Curious

Do me a favor, would you?

If either you've come across this blog serendipitously, or if you've initially arrived via link but have come back because you like what you find here, do me a favor and either say hey in the comments or click one of the vanity radio buttons at the bottom of this post?

If you're only following links and don't plan to come back unless I shove another link in your face, I'm glad to have you... but I'd love to have an idea, a couple months into this project, if my stuff is being read by anyone just 'cuz they like it. :)

Thanks!

Coming Home

Truck paused at the base of the stairs to look up into the shadows. The light was out at the top. Dory wasn't expecting him.

That shouldn't have hurt, but it did.

The smell of boiled cabbage and fatty meat hung in the air, oppressive as poverty. His fault. If he'd stopped for that light--

Truck stood the Mulick kid's bike up against the wall, and started up. The wooden stairs were sticky. They creaked underfoot. By the time he was halfway home, he was clutching the railing, his heart pounding, the darkness blurry before him.

"Stay another night," Dr. Simkins had urged him. "Just for observation." But Truck had been in a coma for seven months, and another night was a lifetime.