Dark Tidings: Volumes I & II

by Gregory M. Smith

  “Figures,’’ Komar muttered as he stretched.

  “What figures?’’ Shayna asked.

  “They weren’t too happy to send us here,’’ Komar replied. “Small wonder they got in a little payback by killing the air-conditioning.’’

  “Maybe we can fix it from the bridge,’’ Shayna said, moving forward while steadying herself on the bulkhead handrails.

  Other inmates were slowly waking up, but Shayna and Komar paid no attention to them as they made their way to the bridge. Once there, they tried to figure out the controls. It took several minutes to find the switch to raise the blast shields from the view ports. As the shields rose, Shayna and Komar turned to get their first glimpse of Shangri-La.

  “Now we can see the culmination of what Kevanna and Cedric Coogan did for both of us,” Komar commented, smugly.

  “You mean for all of us,” Shayna corrected. “I intend to be one of Kevanna’s top aides and then a politician in my own right, so I might as well start acting...”

  She cut off her last words as her smile turned to abject horror.

  “This can’t be!’’ Shayna exclaimed. “This isn’t supposed to be Shangri-La. What happened to it?’’

  “Maybe we got the wrong coordinates,’’ Komar said, as he ran his fingers over the computer console. “No, these are the coordinates. I remember from what the others said the Coogans told them.’’

  “Oh, my God, no!’’ Shayna screamed. “No!’’

  Prison Vessel X-17 drifted towards Shangri-La, its engines unable to overcome the powerful gravitational pull of the Triellian sun. Within thirty minutes, 250 hardened convicts found out the hard way that doing time on the mining colonies had been the best deal they could have gotten from Earth.

  Volume II

  Horror/Dark Fiction

  Next-Door

  To say I didn’t like my next-door neighbors would not have told the whole story. I didn’t like them, it was true, but I had never really met them. So, I guess it wasn’t them per se, but, rather, their annoying and alarming habits that rubbed me the wrong way. Some of the things they did and some of the people they hung out with raised concern. Other residents in the complex had similar concerns. Maybe that’s why they weren’t surprised so much by what eventually happened.

  My name is Greg, and, yes, I am black. I was born in a different era in America, during a time when black men and women still got Christian names at birth. My life doesn’t match anything on Yo! MTV Raps or BET, so I’ve been accused by many of my fellow African-Americans of trying to be white. Fortunately, I haven’t exhibited the same qualities of my brethren. Otherwise, there would be a lot more dead black fools on the streets. Or more unwed mothers. Or more drug deals.

  I can tell you this much. My social life is virtually devoid of any surprises. My work life, now that’s full of surprises. Working at the airport, you meet tens of thousands of people each week and they always manage to astound me. But, my home life, well, that’s a different beast – a rather tame beast.

  Take my apartment complex, for instance. Its had its ups and downs in the ten years I’ve lived here. It was a nice community when I’d first moved in, filled with an odd assortment of residents. Located in the Woodhaven section of Fort Worth, this complex was unusual. Most of the surrounding complexes, such as those on Oakland, Boca Raton and Brentwood Stair were almost all filled with blacks. My complex had blacks, whites, Asians and Hispanics. The average age of the apartment dweller then was about thirty.

  There had been lesbians who didn’t mind holding hands in public. There were musicians, writers, and even a couple of garbage workers. Everyone talked with one another and I knew my neighbors well. I actually attended the complex Christmas parties and sat around the pool in the summer. Those were the good old days (sometimes I wish things didn’t have to change).

  That happy situation didn’t stay that way for long. Eventually, time took its toll and so did the sometimes-unbearable forces of business. Residents moved out, maybe moving into houses as my first next-door neighbors had; others moved to different cities or different states. The complex managers had to fill the empty units and that’s where the problems lay. Over the years, different managers came in who had different ideas on how to take care of the vacancies. Many of the new residents were suspect, in my eyes.

  You can say what you’re thinking. Ghetto. Hood rat. Most of the new residents moved over from rougher parts of town, like Como and areas around Lancaster, Vickery, Evans Avenue, Riverside and Tennessee. They’d changed their surroundings, but, unfortunately, they hadn’t changed their ways. You can say it’s all about nature and not nurture all you want, but, in my opinion, it’s about fifty-fifty. You can’t alter one without altering the other, if you really want to change. Just look at all those black athletes and musicians with mansions and expensive cars who still get busted for drugs or get shot up by their friends or cronies from the hood.

  So, that’s what I saw coming into my complex. It wasn’t long before I saw little kids running around barefoot, in front of cars and in the street, with no parents to watch them. These same kids would be running through the local stores barefoot, stealing stuff and forcing the owners to put limits on how many of them could be in their stores. At least twice a week, I caught strong whiffs of marijuana coming from one apartment or another. Music so load it rattled the walls kept me from enjoying the Dallas Mavericks and Texas Rangers on the radio.

  Perhaps the two worst changes involved their trash and their friends. Trash usually ended up heaped around the dumpster and not in it. I could never understand how they could not move up an extra two feet and put their garbage into the bin. Old mattresses, old furniture, Hefty bags full of rotten garbage, you name it, was left sitting outside the dumpster.

  Worse than that, many times my new neighbors just left their trash on the ground. Going to and from my car, I was often greeted by the sight of candy wrappers, empty potato chip bags, crushed cans and empty 40-ounce beer bottles on the sidewalks, walkways and grounds. Don’t even get me started about the swimming pool area or the laundry room.

  As for their friends, they kept the same friends from their old ‘hood. Friends that dropped by at all hours of the day and night. Friends that hung out in the parking lot, cursing up a storm and running their game on every female that came by. The ladies – and I use the term loosely – could curse and act stupid just as well as the guys.

  There were tragedies abound. Fatherless kids. Violent, late-night arguments among couples. All too often, those arguments led to domestic violence and my simple trip to put my trash in the dumpster was interrupted by police cars responding to 911 calls.

  Perhaps, to me, the worst tragedy involved the young women. I saw so many of them, beautiful as could be, often shuffling along as single moms or letting themselves be used – and abused – by men and other women. I could literally see a caseload of potential being wasted.

  Now, you may ask yourselves, if my complex has seemingly gone downhill, why am I still here? I’ve often asked myself that question. Certainly, over the years, finances – or lack thereof – have kept me here. The main reason, however, might be that I’ve grown comfortable here, which, in and of itself, would probably seem sad. If the truth be known, my fellow residents haven’t bothered me and I haven’t bothered them. Maybe the silent treatment I give them keeps working. It’s always worked in the past, even when I lived elsewhere. People could see my mood and not even bother to ask me anything. Maybe it’s why I’ve avoided so many of the ills that plague my people.

  I come home, make dinner, watch my old monster movies on VHS or DVD, play on the computer, do up some short stories, read a book or listen to the Mavericks and Rangers on the radio. I’ve grown used to it and I’ve come to welcome it like an old dog that always wags its tail when it sees its master.

  This leads me to my new neighbors. For more than three years, I’ve had no one living in the apartment next door. The last family stayed a mere six months befo
re moving away. In those three years, the complex changed management three times and the complex almost went away. Code Enforcement for Fort Worth came calling a year ago, part of a sly effort by a local councilwoman who, together with area homeowners, had wanted to get rid of the Woodhaven apartment complexes in favor of homes. That the complexes were ninety-five percent black and the homes were ninety-five percent white had caused much grief, with charges of racism thrown about like a football.

  In the meantime, the apartment next door lived up to the dilapidated condition noted by Code Enforcement. I mean, there were pigeons nesting on the apartment’s balcony leaving big piles of droppings. I was forever scraping my front stoop free of the droppings (apparently, the birds wanted to spread the “wealth”). My complaints to management fell on deaf ears. I began to think of moving, but I’ve always been a creature of habit. Nothing as bad as some of my relatives, but a creature of habit nonetheless. I decided to wait it out.

  So, every day, I went to work at the airport in the morning and came home in the evening. Each time, I was greeted by the notice on the door of the apartment next to mine. It said that Code Enforcement had declared it off-limits, unfit for living. It was not the only unit put off-limits and enough of these notices had been put up throughout the complex to make me think my days here might be numbered by outside forces.

  Then, one day, things changed. The notice from Code Enforcement disappeared. At first, I thought it had fallen off or been ripped off by some kids, but, then a family moved into the apartment below me. That unit had been empty for six months, but I paid no real attention. There had been no less than six residents in that particular unit in the previous three years.

  That move-in, though, started an influx of new residents. Several other nearby vacancies were suddenly filled. I came home from work and saw that the balcony of the apartment next door to me had been cleaned. When I thought back, I suddenly realized I’d neither heard or seen a pigeon in days. I began to take notice. The front door had been repainted and a new knocker installed.

  I began to wonder just what kind of neighbors I might be getting. I wanted somebody like the family that had been there when I’d first moved in, but I would settle for just a quiet group, like the last set three-and-a-half years ago.

  I was in for a letdown, of course. What I got was a family like the second-to-last set. A single mother who cursed so much she’d have made a Marine drill instructor blanch headed that particular family. She had two daughters living with her , each of which was also a single mom. One daughter had been only sixteen and already had three kids. There was a son in the household, as well, and the way he acted and the way his mom cursed him out continually, (I would quickly grow tired of the term “baby mama drama,”) I’d guessed he’d fathered a few himself.

  The daughters had been a trip. They always had boys over when mom wasn’t home and I could hear them having sex. It was annoying. They would have their girlfriends over, who were always trying to get me to have sex with them. They were legal, but I didn’t want to get caught up in their games or their lifestyles.

  This new family was already moved in by the time I’d gotten home from the airport. In fact, it would be weeks before I ever saw their faces, but, I heard them long before that. Most disturbing was the crying baby – I don’t know which daughter was its mom. I also heard the loud music they blasted to try to cover the crying.

  The son was the first one of them I “met.” I only saw him a few times, dressed in the latest hip-hop gear (including those annoying saggy pants), talking to his friends. We murmured hellos and I went on my way, leaving him and his friends to block the stairway once again.

  When I finally saw one of the daughters, it immediately drew my ire. I’d been coming up the steps to my apartment just as she and a friend opened their door to step out onto the landing. They saw me, got startled and screamed, slamming the door. I could hear their hysterics when I entered my apartment. I could hear them tell their mother that there was a creepy pervert outside and I got pissed. I later learned that they told the apartment complex managers about me, but that the managers had backed me, telling them I’d have lived here for ten years.

  That complaint aside, there were two things that really irked me about my new neighbors. One was their trash; the other, their friends. These people were so lazy, they couldn’t put their trash in the dumpster. They didn’t just not put it in the dumpster, they never even made it to the dumpster. They just left their bags of garbage right on the landing. There it would stay for days, even weeks. A few times, I got angry and took the bags to the dumpster myself, but I think this only encouraged them to put out more trash. Once, they left three bags of trash on the landing for a month!

  I usually got home too late for the complex office to be open so I could complain, but I finally reached a breaking point early in January of this year. They thwarted me, however. When I got home early from work so I could go to the office, I was surprised to see the trash gone. The landing was clean. I didn’t know if management had called them on it or if they’d gotten some sense of guilt and had cleaned it up, but the trash was gone. A week later, though, more took its place.

  Even more annoying than the trash, were the friends who dropped in unannounced to the apartment next door. Now, I was raised to be a good host, but no one in my family just up and drops in unannounced. My life is so placid at night that a knock at my door literally sends my heart racing into my throat. I don’t like people dropping in unannounced and my friends know it, so I immediately get wary of late night visitors. Too many of my black brothers and sisters say that I need to chill out about this and be like them because that’s what black people do. Well, I’m black and I don’t do that.

  Anyway, for my new neighbors, it was a common thing, something they’d brought with them from the ‘hood. I’d even seen a note pinned to the door telling visitors to pound on the door loudly because the occupants inside slept rather soundly. I thought that had been odd, since that would have meant people coming by in the wee hours of the morning and, to my woe, that was exactly what it meant.

  You couldn’t imagine it. It was one thing to hear people use the little brass knocker on the door or to even knock hard with knuckles, but the knocks soon turned to pounding and it gave no time for an answer. If the door didn’t open within five seconds, even fiercer pounding followed. All hours of the day and night. I lost count of the number of times I’d been roused out of my sleep by someone pounding on that door.

  My mom thought it was something sinister. I just thought it was old friends dropping in anytime they damn well felt like it. The visitors never seemed to leave quickly, as might have been shown by anyone making a drug deal, but I could have been wrong. It could have explained why someone would be assaulting the door at three in the morning.

  Once or twice, the cops came by. The young girls next door had reported stalkers and I wondered if they’d told the cops about all those late-night visits. I believed I’d seen the stalkers, probably a few of the thugs who had camped out on the stairs on several occasions. One had been totally creepy and the other had reeked of marijuana. Both had been alone, with no one from inside the apartment coming out to talk to them during their respective appearances.

  That bothered me to no end and I’d complained to the managers. I’d read of too many incidents of innocent people being killed instead of the true targets in drive-by shootings. I didn’t want someone shooting up that apartment and letting a few stray bullets come through my wall and nail me while I was sleeping. I also didn’t want any visitors for me to have to meet a bunch of thugs.

  At one time, my mom suggested I get to know my neighbors, but I had no urge to do so. I’d heard them talking about me, about how I was strange, about how I was quiet and how it was always the quiet ones that were the most dangerous. I’d heard them laughing and joking about how I was acting “white,” with my science fiction writing, my choice of movies, my lack of hip-hop fashion. I think the apartment managers ha
d tried to make me seem a little more human to them and they had, instead, used that information to mock me. Hell, the mere fact that I had a word like “ne’er-do-well” in my vocabulary separated me from them, even though I learned English in public school, just as they had (well, I assumed that last fact; I couldn’t recall seeing any of the kids waiting at the front gate for the school bus or carrying backpacks or books).

  Maybe that was why the trash had begun to pile up again. Maybe that was why it seemed like more people were pounding on that door. Maybe they had been pushing my buttons, trying to disturb my sleep or make my life hell because they hadn’t thought I was “black” enough. Maybe they would have liked it if I’d had black folks (I absolutely refuse to use the “n” word) coming by at all hours of the night. Maybe they’d have liked to see me out on the landing with a two hundred dollar cell phone going off every two minutes while I drank a 40-ounce. Maybe they would want to see me having “hoes” and “beeotches” in and out of my place. Well, they could “want” all their lives; it didn’t mean it was going to happen.

  They just needed to pick up their trash, tell their friends to stop dropping by at all hours of the night and take care of their kids. Lord, I thought I’d have to call Child Protective Services on those fools. Too many times, I’d hear those kids screaming like they were being beaten and abused, then I’d hear the screams become laughter and realize these kids were just running about, doing whatever the hell they wanted, not listening to anybody and nobody was showing them even a little discipline. Maybe some time with a belt would keep kids like them from having more kids like themselves before they finished high school.

  Whatever my neighbors’ problems with me were, it all ended rather abruptly. I came home to find yellow police tape closing off my landing. An officer stopped me and I asked what had happened. He told me that the family next door had been gunned down – exactly what I had feared would happen. They’d obviously pushed somebody’s buttons way too much.