by Annie Bellet
Forgotten Tigers & Other Stories
A Collection of Science Fiction & Fantasy Short Fiction by Annie Bellet
Copyright 2014, Annie Bellet
All rights reserved. Published by Doomed Muse Press.
These stories are a work of fiction. All characters, places, and incidents described in this publication are used fictitiously, or are entirely fictional.
No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means, except by an authorized retailer, or with written permission of the publisher. Inquiries may be addressed via email to [email protected].
Cover designed by Greg Jensen with art by Kerem Beyit
Electronic edition, 2014
Table of Contents
Story One: Forgotten Tigers
Story Two: The Crimson Rice Job
Story Three: Innocence, Rearranged
Story Four: Falls the Shadow on Broken Stone
Story Five: Singing Each to Each
Story Six: Nos Morituri Te Salutamus
Story Seven: Somebody Else’s Problem
Story Eight: Ghosts in the Mist
Story Nine: Infinitesimal Mercies
Story Ten: FUBAR
Forgotten Tigers
Easie found the alien in the dumpster. He’d clambered over the side quickly, his head-lamp shining where his feet would land amid the bags and twists of wire and other debris from Dupigny Technical College. Movement and something shimmering where there should have been only plastic and metal caught his eye.
Not more than a half-meter away, a strange creature sifted through the rubbish. Alien. That was the word that caught in Easie’s throat. About the size of a goat, it had an oblong body like some exotic egg, and iridescent flesh that looked smooth and hard. A huge pincher like a hermit crab’s thrust out of its side and its four legs were sharp and articulated like a beetle’s. Blue light shone from a single eye in odd beams, like a photocopier as it lifted bits of paper and wire, zoomed its light over them and dropped them again.
Sweat turned the inside of Easie’s yellow dish gloves to grainy soup and he clutched his box-cutter, frozen, with his thumb on the slider. In the distance, he heard a door slam. 2 am. Night guard would be making a tour. He hadn’t drunk near enough of the Asebiode brothers’ rum to be hallucinating. Probably. He’d lived too long in a sugar liquor haze to tell anymore and was too old to care. That thought, and the fact that he was trespassing and technically stealing, stopped Easie from calling out.
The alien picked up a length of PVC, something Easie might have wanted for himself if he hadn’t stumbled onto an alien. Its pincher crushed the pipe and dropped it. As its claw moved, he spied a sack-like, dark area below its eye that inflated and deflated like a bull-frog trying to croak and then changing its mind. Definitely an alien. Easie swallowed and put his free hand on the side of the dumpster.
The alien’s claw snapped out as Easie moved. The pincher snagged his tee-shirt, tearing the thin cotton right through the faded Dominican flag and the words “The Nature Island”. The blue light shone onto him, almost cold, almost tangible, and every hair on his body stood up as his skin tried to shrink and crawl away. Then it was done and the alien released him with a little shove.
His back crashed into the dumpster and pain lanced into Easie’s shoulders. A sluggish, long-unused part of him started to wake up, shaking itself with a hot ripple in his blood. He brought the box knife up, but the alien had moved on, lifting and scanning a water-damaged text book. He was just trash to it, something to scan and discard like all the objects, the broken things around him.
For a moment he felt only relief but it washed away in a tidal wave of anger. Easie kicked the alien, his sneaker smashing into one of the articulated joints on the nearest leg. There was a sound like metal wrenching and the claw snapped back toward him. With an agility he’d thought twenty years behind him, Easie ducked and slashed out with his knife. The blade caught the dark, billowy sack beneath the alien’s scanner and cold air hissed out, followed by a rush of clear fluid that smelled like anti-freeze.
The alien fell back into the rubbish, its legs twitching and its claw clutched close to its body as though it could hold in the gush of liquid. Easie’s head buzzed as the alien emitted a sound almost too high to hear, a noise that vibrated his ear drums and molars and set his eyes watering. Then the alien shook a final time and exploded in a wet gush of sticky fluid.
Easie uncurled from where he’d crouched behind and half on a bag of what felt like rocks but smelled like old tomato sauce. The alien was gone, nothing but dripping clear fluid soaking the trash and his ruined tee-shirt. Not feeling remotely drunk now, Easie hauled himself out of the dumpster and stumbled toward where he’d left his bicycle. He was almost to the Texaco in the heart of Roseau before the adrenaline really hit him and with it a strange flood of memories of a life before he’d been discarded and exiled.
He’d killed an alien. If it existed. Easie thought about going to the police but threw that idea away quickly. He had only his drunk word and some unnamable fluid from a rubbish bin to go on. His thoughts shifted, rusty gears turning as his brain started working down tracks long neglected. The alien had been looking at stuff, Easie was pretty sure of that. He’d felt the way that light cataloged him before it shoved him away. Non-threat, it had decided. The alien had been wrong.
“Jai Mahakali, ayo Gorkhali,” Easie whispered as he crossed the river, his legs on autopilot now for home. The words felt foreign and hollow on his tongue, their taste too sweet for a man used to bitterness.
The Caribbean sun had burnt his skin from cinnamon bark to stained leather and the tourists with their pale faces and shiny clothes never looked twice at him. Even the locals hardly thought about where Easie had come from. His passport was Dominican, his name, John Issay, was generic enough and could have come from any of the islands. His heart, which he’d locked away and tried to drown in a tide of home-made rum and downcast eyes, was still Nepali, still Magar. Still Gurkha.
His heart had slowed somewhat from its manic punching and his mind turned. If he’d been that alien, acting like that, he would have been scouting, cataloging things for later. It had made some kind of noise when it died. It had also dissolved. Nothing for an enemy to take. Noise. That was important. Easie struggled through the rum fog to remember why.
No one cried out if nothing was there to hear them.
Even as he thought this, Easie caught a flicker of movement in a darkened side-street. This late at night, no one was out in Roseau. No cruise ship was in port this week and even the street lamps were half-extinguished, as though caught sleeping on the job. The wooden balconies threw shifting shadows and the wind from the sea was light but cold on his bared skin and wet shirt, carrying the faintest touch of brine. Easie pedaled harder, his little cart jouncing behind him as the text books, broken stool, and spools of wire he’d liberated from the college bins shifted and groaned, protesting the speed.
More flickers of movement danced just out of the range of his headlamp, setting Easie’s heart beating again with painful speed, but no iridescent egg aliens leapt out at him. He reached the alley behind Rozalie’s house and Asebiode corner market, starting to question, to berate himself for thinking anything at all as the anger and adrenaline receded, leaving him shaking and entirely too sober.
“Easie, zanmi mwen,” Strong Vin, the older of the brothers, called out to him as he locked up his bicycle. No one really knew if they were brothers or just cousins and what they called each other depended on their mood. He and Omar sat in front of the little shed, its doors thrown wide, revealing the labyrinth of copper tubing and white plastic buckets.
“We’re testing dat sorrel rum,” Omar said, waved at him. “Jesu. You look...”
Whatever he might have said was cut off by Strong Vin’s girlish shriek as he tried to jump out of his lawn chair and instead crashed sideways.
Easie’s old instincts saved his life. He didn’t turn to track Vin’s wild gesture but instead sprang forward, toward the men and the still.
The alien landed where he’d been, its claw snapping closed with a squeal as it caught only empty air. Twisting, Easie reached for his box knife. He fumbled it from his pocket and jammed the blade open, his eyes scanning for more. The new alien looked just like the one he’d destroyed, only it wasn’t ignoring him.
“What even is dat ting?” Omar shrieked, his accent thickening with his panic.
“Alien,” Easie said, his voice gravely but calm. Calm settled through him. This was a fight. Just him and death, dancing once more. Easie hoped he remembered the steps and his mind flitted to the blade wrapped in oiled cloth and hidden away upstairs, out of reach.
The alien clicked forward, its pincher opening and closing, the blue light flickering around the narrow courtyard, sending tiny chills over his skin every time it caught him in the beam. Beside Easie, Strong Vin had recovered his feet and now held his plastic chair like a shield.
“Go for its sack, that dark thing,” Easie whispered.
“You crazy?” Vin muttered back. “We got to get inside. Call the police.”
“Sure. Tell them an alien is attacking your still.” Easie snorted and adjusted his grip on the box knife.
The alien seemed confused by the three men. It stayed back, its light flickering around, and its weird skin shifting from pearlescent to almost reddish-orange, reminding Easie of a cuttlefish.
“Start waving your arms and yelling,” Easie said. “Lots of movement. Go.”
Maybe it was because they were drunk or maybe it was because those were instructions that meshed with their own immediate desires, but both brothers did exactly as he said without question or protest. It was a tiny miracle that he had no time to dwell over.
The alien moved back, waving its claw, its dark sack heaving in and out. Easie let loose a wild yell and sprang straight at it, slashing for the sack just like he’d done in the dumpster. The pincher slammed down on his arm and Easie had to roll away but the hiss of cold air and the sweet stink of anti-freeze told him he’d hit his target. His arm went numb to the shoulder for a moment but Easie kept moving as the alien started to shiver and twitch like the last one had.
“It’s going to explode,” he called out as he ran around the side of the shed. Omar stumbled over a bucket and joined him but Strong Vin stood there, mouth agape and caught the full squishy force as the alien turned into nothing but goop.
“What you all caterwauling about?” A window slid open, the sound sharp in the sudden silence and Rozalie’s voice penetrated into Easie’s triumphant brain.
“Sacway salop,” Strong Vin swore, spitting. “I need a wash.” He shook his thick arms. “It’s like rotten fruit.”
“Anti-freeze,” Easie said. “That’s what that smell is.” He rubbed his arm and flexed his fingers. Bruised, not broken. He’d even kept a hold of his knife.
“Sure, as you say.”
“Caca liki!” Rozalie slammed the window shut.
“She coming down.” Omar picked up a bucket and used a loose piece of tubing to scrape some of the jelly into it.
“Sa kap. . . What is going on?” Rozalie thumped down the side stairs and around the corner of the house, shifting from Creole to English as she saw Easie standing with the brothers. She had been a beautiful woman, once, supposedly the mistress of a wealthy Dutch businessman before a jealous man cut her face. Her hair was only black because of a bottle now and the scars were lost in the dark furrows of her jowly, fat face.
But age and bitterness hadn’t sunk her. Rozalie was a survivor, running an informal laundry as well as renting the Asebiode brothers their shop space and Easie his room upstairs. As long as the rents were paid, she only glared and didn’t complain or ask questions. She was now, however, staring around at the three of them with her face scrunched up like she’d bit into a pit.
“It was an alien,” Easie said. “I found the first one at the Technical College.”
“You boys all drunk again.” Rozalie shook her head, her hair snaking out from the haphazard twist she had it in. She looked at Easie’s torn shirt and her tongue flicked over her lips. “Fighting, too? Get on with you. All you. Go sleep it off before someone calls the police and complain.”
“I know what I saw, what we saw,” Strong Vin said. “It’s all over me, look.”
“Mon fwé tells the truth.” Omar held up the bucket, sloshing the lumps of jelly he’d managed to collect.
Easie looked up at the sky, the old gears turning faster now, the old patterns and training reasserting themselves. So many stars, like holes worn in a black tarp. The aliens had to be coming from somewhere. He tried to think past movies and television. No earthquakes lately. No shooting stars that he could remember. They’d come here somehow and that second alien had made the same teeth-grating noise as the first.
But unlike the first, it had come for him, tracked him, attacked. These were patterns Easie could understand and respond to.
“Easie? Where you going?” Omar called after him as he pushed past them, heading for the stairs.
“Save that bucket. Rozalie, we need your truck. Vin, Omar, get knives and tape them to some of that pipe there, like a spear. I will be right back.” Easie didn’t wait to hear their responses, which were half Creole curses anyway. He felt Rozalie’s warm body storming up behind him, her weight shaking the steps, but he shrugged off her questions and headed for his room.
His kukri was clean and sharp. Its weight was comforting, like shaking hands with a dear friend after a long absence.
“What is that?” Rozalie folded her arms over her ample, purple cotton-clad bosom and stood in the doorway, preventing Easie from leaving his room.
“It’s a kukri.” He set the kukri down on the narrow cot and pulled off his ruined shirt, knotting it up to take with him. He pulled on a clean shirt, strapped on the leather sheath, and turned back to her, straightening his shoulders and tilting his head up, looking Rozalie in the eye.
“You aren’t John Issay, are you?” she said, her voice losing its edge as she cocked her head.
He splayed his hands, searching for the words. His fingernails were dirty. “I was a Jemedar, an officer in the British army. A Gurkha. You know that scar you asked about?” Years ago she’d asked, how many Easie wasn’t sure. He’d lost too much time in the sliding fog.
“You were a soldier,” Rozalie stated, her head bobbing as though some great cosmic thing had just been explained to her.
The way he felt now, Easie thought maybe it had. “We had a special mission. We killed who we were supposed to, but we got caught doing it. My survival was diplomatically inconvenient. I had a choice. Disappear or be handed over to our enemy. The shame of that would have ruined my family. It was better to go, to be marked ‘Active, Missing’.” The words were bitter in his mind and sharp on his tongue. He flinched saying them but felt like he’d spit out a mouthful of stones once he was finished.
Dominica had been their choice. Twenty-thousand pounds sterling would buy legitimate citizenship and a passport that Easie could never use. They’d dropped him here with a name the locals quickly turned from Issay into Easie, a handful of American dollars, and a warning to stay put. By now he was a faded mark in an old file that was either torched or rotting somewhere in the Himilayas or a dank British basement.
“Easie!” Omar called from behind Rozalie. “Where we going?”
* * *
Rozalie refused to l
oan them the truck, instead insisting on driving herself as the only certifiably sober one. They didn’t have to go far, not yet. Easie directed her to Liron Mark’s apartment, adjacent to the temporary campus of the All Saint’s medical school.
“Ki sa ou vlè?” The x-ray technician had clearly been sound asleep and peeled the door open with a glare. As soon as he saw the Asebiode brothers he shook his head. “Mon pa ni lajan.”
“We don’t want money, zozo,” Strong Vin said.
“We need you to look at something under a microscope. Tell us about it.” Easie said.
“Easie?” Liron straighted up and blinked at the older man. “What’re you mixed up in?”
“Aliens,” Omar squeeked behind them.
Easie turned to glare at him but shimmering movement pulled him fully around. Omar wasn’t being cute, just literal. Three of the aliens were coming fast down the alley, their sharp legs skittering on the cement. Easie drew his kukri, the heavy curved blade glinting in the light spilling from Liron’s doorway. They’d left the make-shift spears in the truck, not wanting to scare Liron.
“I’ll distract them, get inside, find weapons.” Easie barked the orders, his old voice coming through now, his tone firm.
He stepped away from the door. A terrible chill shivered through his bones, the only warning he had as the fourth alien dropped down from the dark balcony above, landing where Easie had been a second before.
Liron screamed, Omar leapt into a bush, and Easie twisted around, trying to keep all the aliens in his vision. The x-ray tech’s scream was cut short in a hot spurt of blood as the alien’s pincher closed on his throat, ripping skin and a spiked leg thrust out, shoving Liron’s twitching body back into his foyer.
Strong Vin was frozen, his hands up as though surrendering. Easie shoved him onto his brother and thrust his kukri into the alien’s sack as it rotated its egg body and tried to rebalance. A front kick thrust it off the low porch and then Easie had to turn back as a pincher narrowly missed him, chill wind in its wake.
