by Apex Authors
"Yes."
Becker emptied the second gun.
He then moved slowly across the lab. Retrieved the rifles and ammo from the two Rangers while listening to Molhenbrock drag himself across the floor behind him.
We can never cure or destroy it...
"Because we are all Cain,” he whispered.
And pulled the trigger again.
Moving through DSTI, he found a dozen more staff in the other rooms.
When the bullets finally ran out, he used his knife.
Then his hands.
And we are all Abel.
It was hours before the police finally arrived and ended things.
* * * *
Jack moved slowly across his big green lawn. The thick grass tickled his bare toes, and he let each step sink in fully before moving to the next. In one hand he carried a small plastic cup that mommy had filled with goldfish crackers. The cheezy pizza kind he liked the most. In the other hand was a grape juice bag. The driveway was hot under his feet, and he walked quicker to his destination. The shade of the big tree where his dinosaurs were waiting. The big T-rex that was his favorite and the new stegosaurus his dad had brought home. He sat down carefully on the natural mound under the great big tree and carefully set his cup of goldfish on the ground. He looked around for any ants.
Across the street, Alec was playing with his mommy. Alec got mad if you called him Alex. Maybe they would play later.
He wondered again if it would be funny to kill Alec. To drown him in the pool. Or hit his head with something until he stopped moving.
Alec and his mommy both waved from across the street.
Jack did not understand why he thought these things. Later, no one else understood, either. There was no history of psychopathic behavior or violence in his family. There had been no physical or mental trauma. His serotonin levels and glucose metabolism were quite ordinary. He was not adopted. His blood and thoughts were entirely his own.
He was just a normal boy. He was every boy.
Jack waved back.
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An Interview With Laura Anne Gilman by Jason Sizemore
Laura Anne Gilman is the author of the popular Retrievers series from Luna Books, which includes Staying Dead, Curse the Dark, Bring It On, Burning Bridges, and the forthcoming Free Fall. She is also the author of more than thirty short stories published in a variety of magazines and anthologies.
Apex Digest: In 2004, the first of your “Retrievers” novels was published—Staying Dead. How do you pitch the Retriever series to potential fans?
Laura Anne Gilman: “It's a caper novel, like Oceans’ 11, featuring a thief and her business partner. Only with magic, set in modern-day Manhattan. With an appropriate amount of sex.” I actually pitched it to my editor as “Remington Steele, with magic” but she and I are of the same age ... I'm not sure how many people remember Remington Steele any more, except as where Pierce Brosnan got his start. No, Sergei is not based on Brosnan. He's based on Mitch Pileggi ("Skinner” on The X Files). Wren's based on an old high school friend of mine, in case anyone was wondering. If she knew, she'd kill me.
AD: Did you have any idea after Staying Dead came out that there would be four more books (at least!)?
LAG: Well, when I wrote SD, I had in mind to do a series, so I had hoped that there would be more. The first contract was for three books, so yeah, by the time SD came out I knew. I didn't know there would be six (6!) before I was done, or that they would have a connected story arc ... that surprised me. I thought I was writing stand-alones, but the story kept evolving and growing ... working on Book Six (BLOOD FROM STONE) right now is interesting, because the first story arc is over, and the characters are moving on, and it's bittersweet, like sending your kids off to college. They're not gone, they're just becoming different people, and you get to re-meet them all over again.
I'm still in shock that we're at six (number four, BURNING BRIDGES, was released this year, FREE FALL will be out in Spring 2008). It's a gift, being able to write these books. A joyous gift.
AD: You wrote the introduction to Lavie Tidhar's HebrewPunk from Apex Publications. What is it about Lavie's writing that speaks to you?
LAG: He's got a very pared down yet evocative style that I like. I'm not a fan of overly-verbose text; if you can say it with ten words, use three. But what makes him stand out for me is that his direct short fiction ancestor isn't Asimov or Lieber or Dick, but Isaac Bashevis Singer, who also mined the incredibly rich Jewish mythology for stories that both embrace and transcend both religion and culture to talk directly about humanity.
AD: You've got quite an extensive short story bibliography. What's your favorite of these stories? What's the single “sale” that you're most proud of making?
LAG: That's a trick question, isn't it? I don't have a single favorite story—there are stories that I loved writing, there are stories that I love re-reading, there are stories that make me laugh and a few that make me cry, even now. My favorite stories are the ones that taught me something about myself, after I wrote them. But they're all beloved.
Mostly the stories—and books—that I love the most are the ones that I haven't written yet. They're still idealized, they still have the chance to be perfect. Once I actually start to write them, no matter how good they are or how well they are received, I get frustrated, and it takes a while—sometimes a year or more—for me to be able to see them for what they are, rather than what I had wanted for them
AD: Tell us a bit about the famous Laura Anne Gilman.
LAG: She hates to talk about herself, for one thing. Um ... okay. Forty years old, gypsy wanderlust in my soles and practicality in my soul, which is an interesting combination. I manage to be both athletic and clumsy, love the outdoors most of all when I'm looking at it from the indoors, and adore the ocean but dislike swimming. I will mess with your expectations just because it amuses me. Rumors that I was a cat in another life have yet to be disproven.
I knew I was a writer when I was seven, but also knew that I didn't have anything interesting to say until I was in my mid-20s. Wrote my first pro-quality story a year after that, sold it to Amazing Stories, still don't quite believe it's all real. Writing is my heart, my pulse. I tell stories to figure out what's going on, why it's going on, and where it's taking us and what we'll find out when we get there.
I knew I was going to be an editor when I was sixteen, spent the next two decades working with other writers to help them reach the top of their game. I was a damn good editor. Not so good at playing the corporate political games, unfortunately, but I was a damn good editor. Still am. Getting other people to the top of their game is something I do very, very well.
I love cooking and talking about cooking as much as I love writing, will talk about wines until people beg me to stop, and have an almost unholy glee in showing off pictures of my cats, Boomerang and Pandora. Consider yourself warned. I photograph badly, mainly because I'm constantly in motion.
Everything else really needs to be learned in person.
AD: You list on your website a couple of Buffy tie-in novels. What was it like writing a tie-in for one of the most revered television series in recent history?
LAG: Oh, writing the Buffy characters was a joy—their voices were just so much fun. I still have an inner cheerleader—who knew Cordelia would be so difficult to evict? But overall it was ... frustrating, mostly. The joke—"Why did I write two Buffy books?” “Because I couldn't bear to write three.” My brain is all full of “what if” and “where do we go from there?” and tie-ins by their nature demand a reset button, so you don't stray too far from canon. Being able to tell a satisfying story while still adhering to that rule ... it's a skill not everyone has, and not one I wanted to cultivate. I'd have to really love a franchise to do it again. House. I'd do it for House, and Pushing Daisies and ... that's about it, right now.
AD: If someone were to describe you in the year 2025, what would they say?
LAG: “Man, did you read her most recent book? Kicked ass. Hell of a career, man. Hell of a career."
AD: Do you still write any short fiction?
LAG: All the time. I tend to use my short fiction to work out things that are bothering me, issues that are still cloudy in my mind, and need to be poked and prodded a bit before I understand where I stand, so it's tough to predict when something will trigger a story. I'm working right now on a series called the Dragon Virus right now, stories about the nature of friends, family, loyalty and what it means to be true. About half of the stories have been published, but I see them as a an complete, interconnected narrative, evolving as humanity evolves. It's fun, but it also requires a lot of research, so the writing comes slow.
AD: Tell us about your other series, Grail Quest.
LAG: Grail Quest was a middle grade trilogy I wrote for HarperCollins, trying to find a new angle on the Arthurian mythology, keeping the traditional feel of the period while still making it interesting to ten-year-olds. I was pretty subversive, actually—good is boring, adventure's only fun when it's dangerous, and evil all depends on who's doing the defining. It wasn't political when I wrote it, but in retrospect...
The main thing was to get kids reading, and keep them reading. I keep hearing from kids who have written book reports on the trilogy, so I guess I did good. Emotionally there's part of me that's still a wide-eyed ten-year-old turning pages ... if you lose that, you can't write for kids. Hell, if you lose that you can't tell stories, period. It's all about being wide-eyed and turning pages.
AD: What do you consider to be essential reading?
LAG: Nothing. Everything. Whatever speaks to you and wakes you up and makes you think and wonder and try again and try harder. ‘s no one thing I can recommend to everyone because everyone has different triggers. The secret is to find what it is that speaks to you, and never let it go. Anything else, any other mass advice, is pretty much useless. Read, listen, learn, grow.
For more information visit www.sff.net/people/LauraAnne.Gilman
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Curve Balls in the Rift
by Durand Welsh
* * * *
Durand Welsh lives in Sydney, Australia, with his wife and one-year-old son. He has a degree in Economics, but has been writing since he was ten-years-old. This is his first published story.
"Curve Balls From the Rift” was the winner of the 2007 Apex Science Fiction and Horror Digest short fiction competition. The theme was “post-apocalypse."
* * * *
My grandfather farmed this land once, tilled it with a horse-drawn plough and dug the irrigation ditches with nothing but a spade. He sowed fields of wheat from a sack of seed slung across his shoulder, hammered in his own fence posts with a mallet, and hand-rigged baling wire from post to post along all the acres to his name.
My father followed in his footsteps, adding cattle driving and sheep pasturing to the family business, although by then the Murray River Basin was running dry and the politicians’ talk was all of drought and half-cocked schemes to reroute the great rivers of the North. I remember how I used to stand beside my father on the front veranda in the late evening light, the smell of mum's cooking wafting through the open kitchen windows and the stock dogs panting under the eaves, and my father and I would look out across the plodding cattle towards the flat horizon and the clear edge of the sky. He used to speak of storms and clouds and rain, and it had seemed so exciting to hear him speak of those things, as if I were a party to some great secret, the inner workings of the universe. I don't know if he kept the doubt and fear from his voice, or if I was simply too young to hear it, but it had seemed a magical, cherished time. It was only looking back that the tableau held a darker shade, a portent, perhaps, of the future.
Like my father and my grandfather, I still earn my daily bread with the sweat of my brow and the strength in my hands. But the farm is decades gone; the dusty dirt beneath my feet is hard to think of as anyone's, let alone mine. Farming's no longer the family trade.
In my father's time, summer was the meanest season. It's still that way. Only the seasons are all summers now: High summer, Low summer, Half-Summer—there's a different frame of reference these days. But if only that were the worst of it. If only...
* * * *
I grab my kit bag from the Ford utility's tray, then stretch the tarp back over and secure the latches on its trailing edge. The gales can detonate in a split second out here. When they do, they sweep the plain like God's own wrath, exploding through the sandstone hollows of the dried river canyons, stripping the crumbled earth down to bedrock. I use my eyes to retrace the utility's tyre tracks across the doomed landscape, over sunburnt hillocks and between dead trees the colour of grey ash. When I reach the limit of my sight, I close my eyes and count to three. I say goodbye to the normal world before turning my back on everything, re-opening my eyes and setting out for the fence.
I'm cresting a dune of stone-flecked sand when I suddenly realise I'm stepping through bones: shards of white curve from the shifting ground—a skull, some ribs, curved horns. They're cattle bones, a herd that ran against the steep rise and didn't find the strength to continue over. I'm glad they're not human. I pick my way through them, bridge the rise, and troop down the other side until I reach the fence.
The fence is slightly taller than head height. It arrows to the left and right, following the laws of perspective down to a tiny point in either direction. It appears to be made of a translucent metallic mesh, but I know that it's nothing so simple. And as for what the fence is holding back...
The joints in my hands burn as I approach, and I go with what the pain tells me—be it hotter or colder—as I stalk up and down the fence trying to find the breach. I finally reach a particular stretch where the pain flares close to agony, nerves frying all the way to my elbows. The hands know, they always do.
When I find the hole, I see it is small, less than half a metre wide. It bleeds a sick bluish light across the sand; on the opposite side of the fence the Southern Chimera Rift ebbs and flows like a diver's viewpoint of the shifting sea. The dreamscape twirls, shimmers, bends, refracts, contracts. However, I long ago gave up chasing the many patterns and shapes with my eye. Down that path lies insanity. Besides, I have a job to do, and my job is simple: I repair the breaches.
Before, when I was still driving cattle and watching the world begin to die, I thought I knew what the worst would be. I figured famine, war, disease. I was wrong.
In the beginning, the chimera rifts appeared in sporadic patches: the windblown Nevada desert, a stretch of the London Underground, a corner of the Amazon Basin. It was as if the basic laws of physics had packed up and left, and what remained behind was something altogether alien, altogether anathema to our reality. The rifts ate up the old world, spreading like clots of mould in a Petri dish. That's when the grinding, straining machinery of civilization truly broke.
The cultists used to believe the chimera rifts were gateways to the Earth's death dream as her spirit died. The cultists are all gone now, mostly having marched in ordered lines into the chimera dreamscape. There're only enclaves of mean, scared folks like me left, awaiting the truth behind the rifts. And the truth will come; every day I live in quiet fear of that.
I pull the stiff length of wire from the bag, and begin to bend and shape it with my hands. Smarter folk than me figured out that bits of the chimera dreamscape could be undreamed enough to form a different substance altogether, something halfway between the other reality and ours. It's enough to hold the rifts back, for now.
My hands glow a delicate blue as I twist the wire just so, and begin to patch the breach. The rift licks at my fingers. It feels cool, like the frosty breath of a low powered freezer. I can sense the breaches easily, now. In the same way my mother's bones used to ache when a storm was coming, my hands will throb with pain as I near a breach. A man can't tangle regularly with a chimera rift and not get a measure of it embedded in him. Thes
e days, my hands are more of the dream world than the old world, but I can still touch and sense the old world things. I'm hesitant to touch people, though. There's always the possibility the dream world will steal through my hands and into their thoughts. Most folks steer clear, anyhow. For the most part I like it that way; although there're times when, like any man, I yearn for something more. There's a crazy woman in the camp, her brain so far gone that my dreamer's touch seems to actually calm the storm inside her fractured mind, and there are nights when I sit beneath the bright stars and simply cradle her head in my arms and stroke my shimmering fingers across her brow as she rolls to the edge of sleep and beyond. It's nothing much, but it reminds me how to feel alive.
The hole is quickly patched. I slip the last piece of wire into place and make ready to leave.
And then I see my son, Richard Zachary Price. He's a mere metre away on the opposite side of the fence, just standing there in the blue chaos.
My son was in the Blue Mountains with Amy, my ex-wife, when the Southern Rift tore open and a million souls vanished in the night. Now and again, on these long patrols of mine, I see him through the fence. Or something which mimics him with uncanny acuity. Usually, I'll only get a glimpse, a flicker in my vision, a teasing instant that fuses the present to a thousand memories of a past that should have led to a different, better place. I always have the sensation during those moments, that the rift, or something nestled in its depths, is testing me—is gauging me, the enemy.
I've heard awestruck men speak as if the rift is a magnificent force of nature—a tsunami, a volcano, a tornado. But I've done more hard time out in the sticks with this seething beauty than any man yet living. In my time, I've travelled a million kilometres of fence with nothing but the Southern Chimera Rift for company. I know it as much as a sane man can know the face of madness. For me, mindless catastrophe is furthest from my thoughts at times like this. No, when I'm out here, I think of it as a great predator—a lion, or a shark—stalking its prey. It is a canny foe we have out there; no wild pig to be cornered by the dogs and laid low with a shot from my old Remington. Out there is something more, and it has my son, and it won't let me forget.
