I sat staring at the smoking ruin of my property, dazed and bemused. It occurred to me I should feel a sense of loss. All the evidence of myself, my 75 years of life encapsulated in the contents of that house, obliterated in less than a second. Seventy-five years of struggling to survive, of fighting to make a living, of hard work and sweat, gone in less than the blink of an eye. I should feel bad, disappointed, depressed, but I felt nothing but a sense of being alive, really alive finally, after all those years.
I found myself laughing at myself, at the emptiness of those years. What did they really mean?
All those years living for the future, planning for my own demise, of acting as if tomorrow mattered, only to have my planned “tomorrow” shown up as a sham, a ghost, a phantasm of imagination.
I was stuck with the realization that now was more important than then. Tomorrow would never come, no matter how much I planned.
I sat there, hurting in all my parts, and saw what I had never seen. There would always be a tomorrow. There might not always be a today.
Only then did I think of the wife. Maybe I should have thought of her sooner, been concerned with her, whether she had survived or not. It didn't matter. My conscience could torture me later about it. I set out to find her, but no matter whether I did or not, I knew that tomorrow would never again be as important to me as today.
There would be no more running.
PRIDE OF THE INTERNET
By Nick C. Piers
Prideful has entered #TheJungle
Prideful has changed the topic to “Good luck, Maneframe! We believe in you!”
Pack Leader has entered the room.
Cub Prince has entered the room.
Hannah Savannah has entered the room.
Sarah Sahara has entered the room.
Mane Man has entered the room.
Den Mother has entered the room.
Gazelle has entered the room.
Jungle King has entered the room.
Jungle King given @ status by #TheJungle
Mane Man has left the room.
Jungle King has set Mane Man to +b.
<@Jungle King> No problem. I’ll op a few people, just in case. Back to the news!
Jungle King sets @ status to Prideful, Pack Leader and Cub Prince.
Jungle King has left the room.
<@Pack Leader> damn he’s good
<@Prideful> Yep. By the way, I’m waiting for the street camera to reload again.
<@Prideful> Hey, me too! 25/male/Ann Arbour, Michigan. Okay, really brb, now.
<@Cub Prince> 17/m/Toronto, ON
<@Pack Leader> 99/m&f/Mars
<@Prideful> WHOA!
<@Prideful> Big fireball just came out of the hotel’s front door. Oh, god. I think there’s a lot of people hurt.
<@Cub Prince> Dad just yelled up about it. Said the newsfeed cut out.
<@Cub Prince> Dunno
<@Prideful> Oh, geez. There are a lot of people not moving down there.
<@Cub Prince> Mane Man just messaged me. Says he’ll behave.
<@Pack Leader> let him stew longer i say
<@Prideful> He’ll be fine. Firefighters are already clearing out the door. And look at those emergency crew go! They ran right in there with the gurney!
<@Prideful> I don’t think so.
<@Pack Leader> prob didn’t know about the hostages
<@Pack Leader> get in line. prideful wants him first.
<@Prideful> Heh! You know, a gay joke from you doesn’t seem to hurt as much.
<@Pack Leader> i joke because i love
<@Pack Leader> just not how u love
<@Cub Prince> Oh burn!
<@Prideful> Not a good time to use that phrase, Cub.
<@Cub Prince> !!!
<@Cub Prince> Sorry! Didn’t mean that.
Maneframe has entered the room.
Maneframe given @ status by #TheJungle.
<@Cub Prince> Mane!
<@Pack Leader> mane!
<@Prideful> Mane!
<@Prideful> Yeah, it’s him. Same IP address, even when he just casts the Cyber Chat spell.
<@Pack Leader> how come he’s not talking?
<@Cub Prince> Um. Guys? Turn on the news.
<@Prideful> Wait, the emergency crew are coming back out.
Cub Prince has set Mane Man to –b.
Mane Man has entered the room.
Prideful has kicked Mane Man from the room.
Pack Leader has set Mane Man to +b.
<@Prideful> Thanks, Pack.
<@Maneframe> Hey guys, I have some bad news for all of you.
<@Prideful> I can’t quite tell who’s on the gurney. I hope it’s Mongolian.
<@Maneframe> I set up wrote up and uploaded a spell after I started coming into this channel. It’s called the Final Cyber Rites spell.
Den Mother has left the room.
<@Maneframe> I set it to trigger the moment that I died and it’s been on my memory stick ever since. You never saw it loaded because it was encrypted onto the memory stick very early on.
<@Maneframe> You guys have been the best, too. I know some people call this a fan club channel, but you’ve all be so supportive, I think of all of you as my friends. It’s so lonely being a magic user when there’s so few of us. There’s no one to relate to and you guys (and girls) have been amazing.
<@Cub Prince> afk, going downstairs
<@Maneframe> When my lion spirit guide entered into my laptop, I didn’t know what to expect. I didn’t expect to be this great, celebrated hero. I was still just a dumb kid fresh out of college. But I hope I’ve made a difference in the world.
<@Pack Leader> this isn’t happening
<@Maneframe> I don’t even know if I died from battling some super villain like The Mongolian or maybe just slipped in the tub…
<@Maneframe> …but I do know this. I’ve never met any of you, but I love all of you. And I know a lot of you have become good friends. After this spell is finished, I have one more set up to be cast. It’s called the Pack Reunion spell. Each of your bank accounts will find $1000 in it.
<@Maneframe> You can use it any way you can, but as a last request, I ask this: my mother is going to be lonely, now. I haven’t spent nearly enough time with her since jumping into the hero business. I want each of you to spend that $1000 on a return plane ticket to Chicago.
<@Prideful> Guys, please.
<@Maneframe> I know Mom has plenty of room in the big, empty house, now. So, have fun, on my behalf, okay? Remember some of those puns I used to crack.
<@Maneframe> Just…be good to her, okay? She’s my mom, you know?
<@Maneframe> Take care, everyone!
Maneframe has left the room.
<@Pack Leader> stick around get to know us, we don’t bite
<@Prideful> I’m going to call his Mom. Be back in a bit.
Prideful has changed the topic to “RIP Maneframe”.
Prideful has set themselves as AFK.
<@Pack Leader> no Mane is straight
<@Pack Leader> was straight
<@Pack Leader> damnit
<@Pack Leader> think I’m gun log off
<@Pack Leader> yeah but it didn’t work out
<@Pack Leader> bye girls
Sarah Sahara has left the room.
Hannah Savannah has left the room.
<@Pack Leader> see ya, Gazelle
Pack Leader has left the room.
Prideful has returned from AFK.
<@Prideful> Damn, everyone else has left?
<@Prideful> They’re all taking it pretty hard. Me and his mom cried on the phone, together. I’m still crying. She laughed when I told her about the Reunion spell, though. She said it was so like her son to do that.
<@Prideful> Me, too. I never met him in real life. And now he’s gone. Mongolian’s dead, too, I guess. So’re the hostages. They don’t know what’s happened yet, but they think someone hit a gas pipe while they were fighting.
<@Prideful> I don’t know.
<@Prideful> Yeah…
<@Prideful> Okay. I’ll message you my number.
Gazelle has left the room.
Prideful has left the room.
THE WORLD OF MAGPIE DAR K
By Mark Bousquet
The voice was haunted, female, and whispered.
“You have entered the world of Magpie Dark.”
“I'm not scared of you, freak!”
“You may not be,” the female voice hissed in the air above Gordon Curtis, “but can you say the same for your wife and son?”
Though he knew it was futile in the dark, Gordon tried the light switch on his right. Mockingly, the only response from his expensive house in the Back Bay of Brahmin City was the empty click-clack of the switch on the wall. Feeling sweat begin to break across his skin inside his expensive grey suit, the slightly-overweight, middle-aged man chose aggression over capitulation.
“You'll never make it out of here alive, Dark!”
The woman laughed, mocking and confident.
Gordon swore and reached beneath his jack
et to remove a Colt Police Positive revolver. His eyes searched the high ceiling of his entrance hallway for his tormenter, but there was nothing that he could see beyond the swirling black shadows.
“A Police Positive?” Magpie Dark said, her voice seemingly coming from everywhere around the hallway. “The rumors are true – you do have friends among Brahmin City's finest.”
“That's right!” Gordon assured her, running a hand through his thick, black hair as he took another step into his house. He waved the shiny Colt in front of him. “If anything happens to me, you're dead!”
Magpie laughed mockingly. “The cops already want me dead. They haven't been successful.”
“Then I'll kill you myself!” he promised.
A flash of light to his right had Gordon Curtis spinning hard and firing his Colt into the front sitting room. The handgun rang out loudly in the house and was answered by the pained groan of a woman.
“I got you!” he yelled triumphantly. “Beantown's newest masked vigilante is its newest corpse!”
Flush with success, Gordon strode confidently into the sitting room, determined to unmask the Magpie and dump her body on the front steps of the Old Boston Lamplighter in Haymarket Square. As he entered the sitting room, the moonlight that poured in reflected off the gold-plated face of his grandfather clock. The time was 4:39. Too late for the morning edition. Maybe he'd wait until the day was finished to guarantee the picture made the front of tomorrow's early paper instead of wasting it on tonight's evening edition.
Between where he was standing and where she was laying on the floor stood a sofa that hid most of her body. Gordon could see her legs, though, and could hear her pained moans.
“How does it feel to bleed on a Persian rug?” he asked the Magpie. Another step brought the injured woman into view, and though she was laying on her stomach, he knew instantly that it wasn't the vigilante but rather Ms. Penster. Two hours earlier, Gordon had given this woman a well spent ten grand for women, booze, and narcotics, and now she was bleeding to death on the floor of his sitting room.
“As you can see, Gordon, I wouldn't know.”
His body seized at the arrival of Dark's voice in his ear. Spinning quickly, a hard chop to his right wrist sent his Colt hurtling to the floor, which was followed by an overhanded right punch to his jaw. The blow was enough to knock him off-balance, but he banged into the back of the sofa and regained his footing.
Rat-A-Tat: Short Blasts of Pulp Page 18
