One Last Stitch

Given that his operating theater was an open casket, Alvin Marks thought he was actually doing a damn good job. If Oretty Whiting hadn't been so determined to find fault with his technique that she ripped her late husband's arm off, no one would even have noticed the way the flesh gave beneath your fingers like squid sushi. And that could hardly be blamed on him.

Besides, Alvin wanted him whole.

"Is this the best you can do?" Paul S. Whiting, Esquire, asked from the casket. "I can pay more, if that's the concern here."

The concern wasn't Paul Whiting's payment schedule, though. It was the smell. Paul Whiting smelled like . . . well, he smelled like a dead man too long in the coffin, was what he smelled like. Alvin only hoped the body would hold together long enough to sew.

Scene from a Post-Apocalyptic Amusement Park

On the ninth day west of Des Moines, the little company came across a crumbling Ferris wheel tilting drunkenly above a starveling cornfield. Here and there, crows picked among the scant remnants. They showed no alarm at the squeaking wagon's approach.

 Angler flapped the reins and Missus Hammeril's pair of horses came to a halt.

 "Oh," Missus Hammeril said, a little sadly. "Orry and I rode one of those, when he was first courting me."

Angler, facing forward with his mistress behind him, rolled his eyes. Exactly who he was rolling them for, he could not say. The crows, maybe.

Crawling Back (NSFW)

When Chrysta's eyes rolled back, when she warned us about the storm, she'd said nothing about dildos rising on the floodwaters.

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

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.