by Graeme Hurry
“I did my job.” Freckles stood out dark against her pale skin.
“And how. We’ll still need you for jobs like this—God knows no-one else would be willing—but as for you and me… ” Jimmy shook his head.
“So what, I’m soiled goods now? Repellant?” Her face hardened as she pulled away from him. “That’s a damn shame, Jimmy,” she whispered, “we coulda been great together. For a while.”
She raised a hand. “Take him, boys.”
A light came on behind the mirror, revealing a hidden compartment, from which a pair of armed Martian soldiers held Jimmy in their sights. Three more burst into the room and, before he could make an escape, grabbed Jimmy with their pincers.
Realization turned to hatred as he twisted helplessly in the aliens’ grip. “Traitor!” he spat, “You’re with them!”
Daisy played with her hair. “You knew I worked for the Martians. You just didn’t know in what capacity.”
“What now? You disappear into the sunset, hand in claw with your lizard sex slave?”
“The Major? He’ll be pesto by dawn. These boys’ll see to that.” The soldiers chuckled, eyeing one another knowingly. “We coulda had a great few years together—y’know—hiding from the occupying force, infiltrating their command, me learning your secrets. Now you’ll have to give them all up in a rush. It’ll be lot less fun, I assure you.”
“Humanity can triumph. We will!”
Daisy ran a hand through Jimmy’s sandy hair. “Poor Jimmy: always wanting to play the hero.”
At her signal, the soldiers dragged him towards the corridor. “What happened to you, Daisy?” he screamed from the doorway, “You wanted to be in Space Force!”
“Yeah, I sure loved that uniform. But that was when I was a little girl,” she smiled wistfully.
“Before I learned to pick the winning team.”
DISASTER ADJUSTER
by Peter DiChellis
Jonathan squirmed. Parked on the highway shoulder, he gripped the steering wheel and listened to the emergency radio broadcast. Hundreds dead. Hundreds missing. Bodies in the streets. No electricity, no sanitation. Disease warnings, looters, dangerous animals. What else might I encounter here, Jonathan wondered. He’d know soon enough, he decided. He pledged to himself that he’d survive this place. No matter what. He switched off the radio. Like everyone else in the world, he’d heard the news many times already.
The hurricane had descended on the small city of Tribute, Florida with pure and perfect fury. A Category 5 killer, the storm released horror upon horror. Families that delayed evacuation from flooded low-lying areas drowned in their homes, after climbing in panic atop staircases, appliances, bookshelves, anything, only to watch the foaming water rise and rise, higher and higher, and then feel its cold violence choke and kill.
The lucky few who reached rooftops wept at seeing corpses float out of broken windows, where they bobbed in filthy floodwater until snagging on random detritus and bloating for hours in grim and patient silence.
Jonathan, a hundred miles inland from the devastated Florida city, watched a line of trucks ahead of him, their drivers anxious, engines quiet, loads ready. National Guard, Red Cross, corporate donors, and the U.S. government. Food, water, medicine, and blankets for the living. Body bags for the dead. The vehicles formed a mile-long convoy of last, desperate hope, waiting for the all-clear call from first responders in the city. And right behind the trucks, a phalanx of rental cars. The men and women inside these vehicles, Jonathan among them, wore outdoor gear stitched with the names and logos of major insurance companies.
At last, the truck drivers cranked their engines and rolled forward. Jonathan pulled onto the highway and followed them. As he drove, images from news coverage of the storm replayed in his memory. A column of fire blasting skyward from a ruptured gas line beneath a flooded sinkhole, spewing flames as if the water itself was burning. Homes, businesses, trees, and power poles torn apart, pieces lying in weather-beaten piles of waterlogged trash. An ambulance flipped on its side in a supermarket parking lot. Remnants of a demolished church resting peacefully while its bell somehow chimed in the now dying wind.
***
“Insurance man. Here to help,” Jonathan hollered into a storm-wrecked home. “Anybody in there?”
Insurance man. “Senior Emergency Claims Adjuster” his business cards read. Few people knew it, but insurance claims adjusters entered disaster areas early, where they assessed damages, gave small emergency advance payments, and made offers to settle claims.
Jonathan recalled his supervisor’s instructions. “We’re getting a goddamn hundred-year storm every goddamn year. Our payout forecasts won’t handle more of this. So get some goddamn liability releases and get back to me on how much we’re stuck with. And make sure it’s as little as possible.”
Hundred year storms every year. Nature fighting back, Jonathan thought. At war with our industrial spew. Battling for survival. Adjusting for us.
“Anybody home?” he called out.
Still no response. He took a deep breath and went inside. Mud, black water, ruined furniture. And a dead cat, floating alongside all manner of drenched debris, its eyes open, legs stiff, orange fur matted.
Jonathan wondered how hard the cat had fought to live. Not hard enough, he concluded. A bumping sound from a room down the hall jarred him from his thoughts. Bump. Bump.
“Anybody there?” he shouted. “Anybody hurt?”
Bump. Bump.
Jonathan waded toward the noise, soaking his boots. Careful, he told himself. Dangerous things hide in floodwater. Wounded animals, broken floors, slick surfaces, exposed nails covered with infectious filth.
And down the hall, between him and the bumping noise and just eight feet away before he saw it, the hurricane monster’s latest challenge, a snake. A Florida cottonmouth, poisonous and agitated, displaced by the storm. The cottonmouth glided high in the water, toward Jonathan. Six feet away now. It coiled, cocked its head upward, and opened its mouth, snowy white inside. The snake kept riding the water, venomous fangs set to strike. Only five feet away.
Jonathan remained still and silent. His safety briefing material had told him everything he needed to know about the primitive reptile in front of him. Don’t slosh around. You cannot outmaneuver a cottonmouth, also known as a water moccasin, in water. Sloshing around will only make a cottonmouth feel threatened and when threatened, it bites. Without prompt medical treatment, its bite would be fatal. And the chance of prompt medical treatment in this hurricane-ravaged hellhole was exactly zero. So stand still, leave the damn thing alone, and usually it will slither off. Usually.
The snake was just three feet away now, drifting left.
It uncoiled and sped past Jonathan. Gone. He continued wading toward the noise. Bump. Bump.
Inside a bedroom, Jonathan found a small wooden nightstand, floating. Stuck between the bed and the wall, the nightstand struck the wall in rhythm to the moving water. Bump. Bump. He lifted it onto the bed.
“Insurance man. Anybody here? Anybody hurt?”
No answer. Something across the room caught Jonathan’s eye. Small, clear plastic bags. Several of them, partially submerged, near the closet. He pulled one from the water. A wet film covered the plastic. He held the bag close to his face, squinting, trying to see inside. Something white. A powder.
And then a man’s voice, behind him.
“Shotgun aimed at your spine. Don’t move.”
“Insurance man, here to help.” Jonathan’s voice sounded an octave higher.
“Hands up. Drop the baggie. Turn around.” Midwest accent, maybe Chicago.
Jonathan complied. In the doorway, an exhausted cop held a shotgun.
“Officer, thank God.” Jonathan relaxed his hands.
“Hands up or I’ll shoot.” The cop shouldered his shotgun, aiming at Jonathan’s midsection. “Drug dealers get special treatment in this part of the country.”
“My name is Jonathan Mirle. I’m
an insurance claims adjuster. My company insures this property, and I…”
“And you thought you’d take some dope and make some money. You’re under arrest.”
Half an hour later, Jonathan sat in the back of a speeding police cruiser, his hands cuffed behind him, seatbelt snug around him. The cop had made a quick cell phone call, thrown all the dope into the trunk, and put the shotgun there too. But the car wasn’t headed toward the city, Jonathan knew. They were driving away from it, toward swamps and marshes. The handcuffs and seatbelt seemed to tighten and squeeze. Jonathan’s breathing felt labored and grew loud.
“City streets are flooded,” the cop said. “Calm down. There’s no other way.”
Jonathan took comfort in his company’s policy of notifying local authorities if he missed his daily check-in. Standard emergency safety procedure. Someone will phone this guy’s boss within the hour. Calm down.
***
They drove in silence now, the exhausted cop thinking too. He slurped a warm soda he’d pulled from the trunk. Caffeine and sugar. Wished it was alcohol.
No choice, he thought. Gotta kill this guy. Leave the body where nobody will find it. That’s what the dopers want, and the dopers own me. He’d spent the last twenty-four hours retrieving their cocaine from safe houses around the city. He’d gotten it all. And now he’d kill the insurance guy. People disappeared in hurricanes all the time.
This wasn’t the same guy who’d denied Annie’s medical claims, of course. Different guy, different company, different type of insurance. Didn’t matter. He’d made a deal with the dopers to get money for Annie’s care. And now she was gone and they owned him. He remembered his wife’s brave last days.
I miss you, Annie, he thought. I miss you so much.
Seemed like a long time ago, though it wasn’t. He’d moved here to start over. New city, new police force, new life. But the dopers wouldn’t let go.
“Florida?” they’d said. “Even better.”
The car sped toward a puddle that spanned the road a few yards ahead. Hiding beneath the puddle’s surface, a sinkhole caused by storm flooding. Five feet long, five feet deep. The front end of the car dropped hard through the water and slammed the broken asphalt like a torpedo. The car rocked a moment before settling at a forty-five degree angle, front end submerged, back end in the air, surrounded by water on all sides.
***
A few minutes later, Jonathan shuddered awake to a rancid smell. The cop was slumped in the front seat, unconscious, immersed in waist-deep water. Blood dripped from airbag cuts to his arms and face.
And outside the car window, inches from Jonathan’s face, the source of the rancid smell. An eleven-foot long alligator, snorting putrid breath through the slightly open window, sliming the glass with its snout.
Jonathan struggled against his seatbelt, yelled, and kicked the seatback, trying to wake the cop. The alligator, excited by Jonathan’s movement and the cop’s blood, made a guttural, hissing noise and pressed against the window.
The cop regained consciousness, rolled his shoulders, wiped his eyes.
“Alligator,” Jonathan shouted. “Feeding time.”
The gator hissed again, longer and louder this time, and pressed hard against the window. Feeding time.
The cop hit a toggle switch. The car’s sirens shrieked and flashing red and blue lights lit up the dusk. The startled alligator scrambled away.
Still woozy, Jonathan watched the cop slide open the car’s backseat security divider and stretch across the seatback. He unfastened Jonathan’s seatbelt.
“Back door won’t open from the inside,” he told Jonathan. “Sit tight.”
The cop pushed his own door open and climbed onto the car’s roof. He reached down and used the outside door handle to unlatch the back door nearest Jonathan.
“Kick it open,” the cop said.
Ten minutes later, after much slipping, falling, and wading, they both clambered onto the road. Still handcuffed behind his back, Jonathan was sopping wet from his collar to his boots. The cop was soaked from the waist down, his utility belt, holster, and trousers all dripping muddy water.
“Can you radio for help?” Jonathan asked.
“There is no help.”
“How do we get back?”
The cop just stared.
Jonathan heaved a sigh and closed his eyes, resting, thinking. The cop had said the city streets were flooded. True, but most were passable. Jonathan had driven throughout the city earlier today and saw emergency relief trucks driving everywhere. And how did the cop know the plastic bag held dope? Jonathan could barely see into it up close, yet the cop was across the room. And now he’d wrecked his patrol car at the edge of a swamp, but wouldn’t call for help? Nothing seemed right about the cop now, including how he’d simply thrown all the dope into the trunk. Didn’t cops have legal procedures to follow? What the hell was happening?
Jonathan opened his eyes. The cop was grabbing at his automatic pistol, his contorted face still bloody, his eyes wide and unsettled. Jonathan panicked. The crafty son of a bitch just didn’t want to kill me in his car, he thought. Didn’t want evidence in there. He shivered, watching the cop finally pull his gun from its holster.
“Alligator,” the cop whispered.
And there it was again. Same eleven-footer. It had crawled in the night to within a dozen feet. Protecting its territory, hunting its feeding grounds. The gator stretched its bone-crushing jaws, eighty spiky teeth ready to rip. Its breath stank of dead fish.
The cop faced the gator in a two-handed shooting stance, aiming his pistol between the creature’s merciless eyes. He squeezed the trigger.
Click. Click.
The drenched pistol was jammed with silt, useless. The cop’s hands trembled.
From his safety briefing, Jonathan knew what he needed to know about alligators. Run directly away from them, in a straight line, never a zigzag. People trip and fall trying to zigzag. And an alligator’s stubby legs can power a quick burst that cuts off a zigzag. But gators are lazy feeders and won’t try to outrun you over a distance. So just run like hell, in a straight line.
Decision time, Jonathan thought. Survival time.
“I’ll run straight, you go zigzag,” he told the cop.
The cop nodded. Midwesterner, new to Florida. Didn’t know gators.
Jonathan sprinted away, hard. The cop threw a head fake and started his zigzag. As he cut sideways, the alligator rushed him, clamping onto the cop’s leg with a quick swipe. The fearsome jaws bit down and gripped like a vise, and the gator shook its massive head back and forth. When the cop tumbled to the ground, the frenzied 600-pound carnivore bit down harder and rolled over twice, twisting the screaming cop’s crumpling body against the wet earth.
On the second rollover, the cop’s leg made popping noises as bone, muscle, ligament and arteries all broke loose, the nearly severed limb now protruding from the cop’s battered torso at a grotesque, impossible angle.
Classic alligator attack against large prey. Exactly as Jonathan’s safety briefing had described.
Jonathan heard the cop screaming and turned to see arterial blood spurting, high and dark, framed in soft Florida moonlight. The cop slid into shock and the gator dragged him away.
Jonathan staggered toward the city. The sky was clear, the stars dazzled him, and the scent of Sweetbay trees filled the air. The handcuffs chafed his wrists.
How glorious, he thought, to be alive on a night like this.
THE PRICE OF HEALING
by Kristin Janz
Meka scanned the crowds along the riverbank with a growing sense of desperation, searching in vain for a familiar face, a familiar anything. It wasn’t the City she remembered from her last visit. No neat rows of spacious, whitewashed houses, no peaceful flower gardens built around pools fed by channeled river water. The water smelled like a latrine, with the smoke of what must have been hundreds of cooking fires hanging low in the air, making them all cough.
D
jereb and Hori used the paddles to start pushing the reed boat from the River into the crowded canal. That was familiar, a Grand Canal cutting inland from the river to aid in moving large quantities of grain, brick, reed thatch, and all the other supplies that such an unnaturally large settlement of people needed in such quantity. And yet…
“This can’t be the City,” she told the others. “Either we passed it along the way, or it’s farther downriver.”
“What else could it be?” Enedju lounged in the curved bottom of the boat near Meka, while Djereb and Hori took their turn at the paddles. He made a show of pinching his nostrils shut with all five fingers of one hand. “Only Old Folk could make a place stink so badly!”
“Enedju,” Djereb warned his nephew, his voice mild.
“I see plenty of Young Folk here,” Meka said, pointing to the banks of the canal, where short, brown-skinned men and women resembling her three Young Folk companions mingled with taller, paler Old Folk. “Maybe the stink comes from them.”
Enedju only glowered at her. Meka looked away, irritated with herself. At one hundred and thirty-two years, she was by far the oldest of the four, even if she didn’t look much older than Enedju; she shouldn’t let a child’s comment bother her.
Besides, they had all traded enough insults and accusations the first day of their journey. Short-lived Young Folk grazed their sheep and goats in wheat and flax fields, ruining crops. Old Folk like Meka hunted tame herds, apparently, easier prey than gazelles. When they weren’t stealing Young Folk children.
That was the claim Meka found most unbelievable, that a magician or archmage from the City had stolen Djereb’s daughter. Meka’s mother didn’t find it unbelievable though. And so here Meka was, accompanying Djereb and his two kinsmen to find the woman responsible and to negotiate for the child’s safe return.
“Which tent is your brother’s?” Djereb asked. Young Folk called all dwellings tents. “We’ll let you off there and come back for you tomorrow morning.” This was why Meka had been sent instead of someone more imposing: her younger brother Sekiu was one of the archmages who ruled the City. Since Meka had practically raised him while their mother managed the affairs of the village, she supposedly had more influence over him than anyone else did, and would be able to convince him to help.
