Writers of the Future 32 Science Fiction & Fantasy Anthology (L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future)

by L. Ron Hubbard

  “Some people may care about the pearls,” Nahoa said. “But others know the clams are what matters: the good, nourishing parts, not those flashy jewels.” She grasped Keani’s shoulders gently. “Keani, I don’t know whose face I am looking into when I look at you. But I know there is a soul behind that face that I want to know.”

  “Thank you,” Keani whispered.

  “If you want to know it too, all you have to do is ask.” Nahoa patted the knife at her side. “I am not a physician, but that thing in your back is just beneath your skin. And while I can open things with force, I can also be delicate with my blade.”

  “I want to know,” Keani whispered. “I want to be rid of it.”

  “So let me do it. I promise I would be careful.”

  Keani felt dizzy at the idea of that slim blade slicing into her skin, but she nodded.

  “Yes,” she said. “Do it. Cut it out, Nahoa.”

  Nahoa unsheathed her knife. “The water is cool. You’ll feel less if you immerse yourself when I cut.”

  When Nahoa had sterilized her blade, they moved into the water. The parasite in Keani’s back immediately reacted—it twitched painfully, writhing beneath her skin. It knew. Keani didn’t care to let the agony scare her: she only leaned over, offering the parasite to Nahoa’s knife.

  When Nahoa cut, there was blazing pain. The world blurred, the cave around her growing concave and convex, twisting and turning. Something inside of her screamed—or was that her? Keani couldn’t tell.

  When the world cleared again, she was lighter, and her limbs didn’t want to obey her. She saw Nahoa’s face above her, huge and white like a looming moon, oddly twisted.

  “Gone with you, monster,” Nahoa whispered. “Gone with you, forever.”

  She pushed Keani away, and helpless to control herself or to speak, Keani floated off on the black surface. She tumbled in the water, saltiness stinging into her eyes—of which there were not two, but ten, maybe twenty, and she saw the world in a fracture. She wanted to scream Nahoa’s name, but no words came out, for she had no tongue anymore—nor did she have legs or arms, or any other human parts.

  When Keani bobbed upright enough to look around, she saw that Nahoa wasn’t alone. She bent over a girl that bobbed lifelessly in the water.

  Keani knew that girl. Maybe her skin had been bronze once, and maybe she once had had a spray of freckles across her face. Maybe her hair had even been dark and thick. She certainly was beautiful enough for a father to keep her alive with the conscience of a parasite. But no life was left in that girl anymore. All that was left was the shell, blood ribboning in the water.

  And Keani wasn’t her. It had never been her.

  Brandon Knight

  The Broad Sky Was Mine,

  And the Road

  written by

  Ryan Row

  illustrated by

  JONAS ŠPOKAS

  * * *

  about the author

  Ryan Row spent most of his childhood split between the bony deserts of Nevada and the thin-aired forests of the Sierra Mountains. His father and mother both read to him as a child, and like a balloon popping, something in his head was irreversibly broken. How could he be satisfied with the absolute laws of gravity when just inside the paper-thin covers of a thousand books, men flew under the power of their own mythic wings? Wax and iron and flesh. How could he be content with the same pattern of stars every night through his narrow window when mere pages away women in silver jumpsuits sailed on solar winds through an ever-changing cipher of stars? How could he be satisfied?

  He could not. Ever since, he’s been hopping galaxies like a fugitive hopping train cars.

  Ryan began his literary career by attempting to publish stories under the pen name Alan Wor, but now writes under his own name. He is currently studying Creative Writing at San Francisco State University, and he lives in Oakland, California with a beautiful and mysterious woman who every day makes him believe the impossible doesn’t just happen inside the pages of books. The beautiful and impossible can happen right here on Earth.

  about the illustrator

  Jonas Špokas was born in 1990 in Kaunas, Lithuania. From an early age, he felt drawn to science fiction and fantasy in video games and movies. In 11th grade, music inspired him to revive his childhood passion for art. He drew most days, copying wallpapers and characters from video games and movies.

  Jonas aspired to study and draw concept art for video games, but was unable to pursue this passion as there was no such program in Lithuania. Instead, he took an undergraduate course in sculpture at Kaunas Faculty of Vilnius Academy of Fine Arts.

  During these studies his interest for digital art emerged. He found that digital art wasn’t as demanding as sculpting, and it was easier to generate and quicker than traditional painting.

  After graduating in 2013, Jonas started working a part-time job in order to keep consistent income. In his free time, he freelances as a digital artist.

  The Broad Sky Was Mine,

  And the Road

  We’re hunting a stage four in some menial wage suburb. Packed claustrophobic tight with Taco Huts and dirty white apartment buildings with no parking. Samantha drives and I hang my head out the window like an old dog, thermal goggles weighing down my neck.

  The world’s a blotchy mess of shifting blue and green and red and dead black. What I see when I close my eyes after staring at the sun. The colors swim across my sight like recycled dreams. The things I’m not willing to let go of when I wake up. The phosphene wonderland of no pain that’s always in the middle of slipping away. All that’s left of dreams upon waking are their blotchy afterimages on the insides of my eyes.

  Rule: Dream whenever you can.

  “Sensors’ll find it before you do, David.”

  “That a challenge, little girl?” I say it into the wind, but I know she hears it over the com that’s on at all times and burrowed in our ears with temp adhesive. I smell fire on the air.

  “It’s a fact.”

  “You got no faith in the human eye?” After two years, Samantha is still new and eager. She drinks whiskey and water, back at base, and pretends that’s what she likes. She carries her own cigarettes and a personal, ice modified .45 on her hip, like me. She is afraid of not carrying her own weight. But she hasn’t seen action in the hard packed, new deserts of the world. Not yet. She hasn’t felt the exploding drill of an Ashland marauder’s bullet through her gut. And she trusts too much in the immortality of her young body. Some order in the world she still believes in. The last vestiges of childhood rooted deep in her lithe, twenty-year-old frame. I follow the pattern in the colors. The cooling centers of red and yellow.

  “It’s not even your eye. You’re wearing goggles.”

  I sigh, and pull the goggles off my head with an elastic slap. The sun’s high and blue. I see spots of soot on the sidewalk. A few burned corpses, covered in a film of grease and blood that shines like polish in the afternoon light.

  “Will you let me feel like I’m still relevant? Please?” She maneuvers the Humvee around an overturned sedan. She keeps it steady and low, right around twenty.

  “You’re still relevant. You pull the trigger.”

  A tone sounds from the dash console. Angry and robotic.

  Samantha’s brown gaze darts from the road to the dash and back.

  “Hit. 152.2 meters due south,” she says, swinging the car tight around a corner. Kill teams used to be six guys. Then four. I like it better this way. Just a driver and a shooter. The silences are longer and deeper. The communication quick and easy.

  “Running hot?” I ask, pulling one of the two German Armbrusts from its snap holster on the ceiling. It’s a two foot, flat green tube. An open-backed, recoilless, anti-tank rocket launcher. Modified to shoot “Ice Packs,” exploding cans of ultra compressed liquid nitrogen.
r />   “486.6 degrees. Fluctuating up.”

  I grunt and load the Ice Pack. The squat, red can radiates a kind of cold I associate with empty places. I load the second Armbrust and return it to its holster. I hold one in my lap. Then I close my eyes and see, again, the recycled dream of the world. Samantha’s silent. She knows I like it that way right before. I hear the air moving through the window and road crunching under us as if we are driving over bone. And an empty confusion of color is settled everywhere in my mind like a radioactive fog.

  Jonas Špokas

  I feel the car stop, and I open my eyes. Through the windshield, a hundred feet down the road, a black mass of carbon particles in a human shape waves in the air. Like a scribbled spot of ink on the page of reality.

  Samantha’s voice shakes, just slightly, in a rare show of emotion. Something we’ve mutually agreed to ignore.

  “It can’t be over four feet,” she says. “It’s a child?”

  The way her voice rises, just slightly, makes me think she wants a certain answer. I can’t give it to her.

  “It looks lost.” I say. I hear its low, long moan. And a column of smoke rises from its featureless, ever flowing face. I roll up the window.

  “I didn’t think someone so small . . . could . . . sustain stage four.”

  “Guess he’s special,” I say, stepping out. I swing the Armbrust up, resting it on a shoulder. I drop to one knee and press the first button. The heat seeker stuck to the Armbrust’s barrel bleeps wild in my ear. I’m pretty close to lined up to the hottest point in the view of the sensor. Samantha speaks from the cab.

  “David.”

  “Be quiet.”

  “David, what if we—“

  “Whatever you’re thinking, Sam, stop thinking it.”

  At a hundred feet, it’s a gamble whether a stage four will spot you or not. And if it flares, things will get complicated. Samantha goes silent.

  I listen hard to the tone. Searching for the sweet spot of crescendo that tells me to let go.

  I adjust. I adjust. I adjust.

  And when it comes, when I’m aimed right at its bitter-hot core, I squeeze the trigger slow. The sliding thud as the Ice Pack leaves the barrel. The hard crack of the blast out the back end.

  And I think I feel the stage four looking at me. Without eyes. And moaning. Then everything’s a flower of burning ice, the size of a small car, and dots of rainbow flutter and disappear in the air like dreams.

  And I’m cold inside, and, for a moment, I hate Samantha, because she’s not.

  But then I look at her. The way she dulls her eye. Crushes the thoughts under her creasing brow. And I tell myself,

  She will be.

  As I stand, I see Samantha’s eyes, down on the dash console, go wide and wild.

  I smell it before she can speak. The bitter grit of rushing fire. Swirling in itself. Drunk on the air and its own brief life.

  A storefront window explodes to my right. The sound of something giving way.

  Rule: Action is life.

  Twisting, I let myself fall. I let the empty Armbrust drop, reaching for the .45 strapped to my hip.

  A mass of smoke pours through the newly melted hole in the front of the human world. Glowing embers flowing up its particle skin. This one’s at least nine feet by three. No child. The vague shape of a man and strangled moaning from its billowing mouth. Distant and painful and aimless, as if it was crying out in its sleep.

  “It’s flaring!” Samantha shouts.

  I ignore her. I ignore my history. Tangled in my mind. Somewhere in the accumulated grime of this edge city, church bells are ringing. I am those silver tones. Clear and empty. I draw smooth and fire without aiming in the direction of the Fall.

  The .45 fits in my hand the way my heart fits in my chest. Familiar and hard. Icy. The jumping recoil of our secret language. I don’t look, but I hear the Ice Cube shots bursting silver in the stage four’s clouded body. Followed by the hiss of instant evaporation. If I looked, I’d see rainbow silver bursts of ice swallowed in its smoking frame, starting to glow red and yellow like a heated coal. Flaring at the sight of two beating centers of human fuel.

  “Shut the goddamn door! Hit the lure!” I scream as I kick the ground with my legs and pull at the bottom edge of the Humvee with my free hand, sliding my body under the vehicle and shooting random all the mad while. The blasting is reduced to cotton popping by the com buds in my ears. They automatically mute sound over a certain decibel, and I’m thankful. Because I’ve got other things to listen for. I hear the door snap shut. Followed by the sound of a rapid decompression. The heat lure jettisoning off the back of the vehicle. Quiet in the wreckage of noise. Good girl.

  Of course, lures only fool them half the time.

  The hiss of ice converting to vapor is huge and wide and spitting. Too huge. Suddenly the air is thick and hot with moisture. Under the car, everything smells like gas. Samantha is calling to me in one ear, but I ignore her. I stop firing and drag myself backward, practically climbing the undercarriage of the Humvee, oil slick and mechanic jungle gym.

  I pop out the other side into sudden sunlight. The vehicle shakes on its wheels. I know the stage four is pounding the opposite side of the Humvee, but it’s not hot enough to melt the temper glass windows. Not yet. The lure hasn’t gone off. Is it jammed? How long has it been? Only pieces of seconds.

  I’m almost out. When I make it, I will open the back door, and Samantha will drive hard. Toward the church bells. Away from the burning moan that rises and falls in a random scale of pain. Overlapping and trampling itself as if there were two trapped, starving voices. The lure will shoot its fountain of pure white sparks, and the stage four will hesitate long enough for us to get away. And we will laugh, numb with adrenaline and another confirmation of our immortality. In the corner of my eye, I spot a white flowing. I turn. A giant cloud of steam runs over itself and spreads down the street like a pouring liquid. Liquid smoke. Like my confusion.

  Samantha’s voice comes to me as I start to stand. “Still live! Both flaring! Get in the damn car!”

  I’m standing, reaching for the door. Ignoring the profile of her face, staring hard into the clouds of new mist.

  And there is a sound like the moon cracking. Distant and sad and larger than all our little lives.

  The fire child falls out of the air like the meteoric fist of a god. Ember light and atomic energy. The feather leap of a spark. A “flare jump,” we call it. It lands square on the hood of the Humvee and collapses it. The blast of heat is an invisible explosion. It hits me dead in the face, and I know I’m screaming. But I can’t hear it over the new atmosphere of pain radiating from the skin of my face. I stumble backward.

  Don’t fall. Open your eyes.

  I crack them open, but they’re watering, and all the edges of the world run together. I blink rapid. I hear the pounding of stage four, hellfire fists. See the Humvee rocking. The child is aglow now. A child-shaped, living ember. Flecks of soot smoke, black as unconsciousness, float off its drifting amber skin. Most of the smoke clears when they flare, and its glowing body is small, and the air around it bends and twists in the heat. It has both hands flat against the windshield. I can tell from the smell, sharp and chemical like plastic and hair, that the temper glass is melting.

  I see Samantha bend over, and come back up holding the second Armbrust.

  “Don’t!” I shout, and my skin screams in protest at the movement. I can’t get any closer to the radiating sphere of heat. It is the faceless sun in a bent, human shape. And it has melted all my wax dreams and I’m falling down into the sea of ash.

  “It’s okay,” she says over the com.

  Uselessly, the lure crackles and starts shooting its stream of sparks in the still air.

  Go for it, I think. But I know it won’t. The sparks make a human shape and tempe
rature. But stage fours are hard to fool.

  The child sun, in all its magma-skinned glory, falls forward into the cab beside Samantha as the last of the glass melts away like an old frost. Their moaning is high now. Closer to screaming. As if they were the ones being burned alive one bullet at a time. One wide day at a time. One trigger pull and funeral filled with strangers at a time.

  “It won’t always be like this,” Samantha says, turning to me. The cab is a mirage, an illusion of shifting heat. And now she seems very far away. “Remember—”

  The cab explodes white with the battered thud of the Armbrust. Lightning crooked fingers of ice grow in an instant out of the hole in the windshield. Tapered to points and reaching for something beyond sight. Hidden in the fog of steam.

  The com goes dead. Inside the cab, a clenched jaw of broken teeth. A solid ice-like crystal. Catching and breaking the sunlight into rainbow fragments. Scattered over everything in the bitter world. The bells are gone.

  The congested silence doesn’t last. On the far side of the vehicle, the adult stage four moans, and I see a new pillar of smoke diffusing in the air. It’s confused by the sudden, extreme change of temperature. That’s how they see the world. Hot and cold. But its confusion’s not gonna last. I know.

  In a second, I decide against going for the supplies in the back of the vehicle, even with the lure running ten feet back. Extra Ice Packs. Food. Temper suits. Enough to survive. But stage fours are quick as jumping light. No reason good enough to run toward one.

  I’m in the middle of the street. I scan the store fronts behind me. A grocery. A bail bonds place and a pizza joint. A pawn shop. Everything is gritty brick and cracked glass and empty eyes. I give myself two vibrating seconds to decide.

  Sam trusted you like a brother. Why didn’t you confirm the first freeze?

  I crush the thought in my head. Not now. I spot a sign, Vino’s Butcher Shop, and I run. Away from it all. But I feel a hot wind on the back of my neck, and I smell something human burning.