Something Wicked Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume Two

by Unknown

  It took some work but I convinced Mom and Dad that the movie theater was not a likely terrorist target. Tom and I got to the movies just as one got started, a real oldie about overpopulation and global warming.

  During the film, I looked over at Tom and saw that he was looking at me. I leaned over. “Are you staring at me?”

  “Maybe,” he said, catching my hand in his. He lifted it to his lips and kissed it. “Watch the movie.”

  Afterward, we got some nachos in the Star Lounge. The big window was about three-quarters full of Earth. Even from here the world looked dingy, and I knew from school that the oceans used to be a lot less green.

  “Do you think it will get that bad?” I said, pointing at the view with my chin. “Riots and people making crackers out of dead bodies?”

  Tom shrugged. “Maybe. That’s what everybody was saying before we left.”

  “Do you ever feel guilty that we got to leave?”

  He shook his head. “I’m right where I’m supposed to be.”

  “What about the people still down there?”

  “They’ll be OK once they get their heads on straight.” Tom grinned at me and took my hand. “Come on. Leave the nachos. I want to show you something.”

  Tom led me to a part of the habitat ring I hadn’t seen before. We stopped in front of a door and he put his hand on the biolock. He smiled. “Come meet my family.”

  Tom’s Dad, Tigh, looked just like Tom, but old. He also looked tired, and like he hadn’t shaved in a couple of days. When we came into the family room he only looked at Tom. “Who’s this?”

  “This is Hayley. You said you were looking for—”

  Tigh held up his hand. “Who are her parents?”

  “The O’Briens. Her Mom is a programmer, Dad works in Engineering.”

  Tigh nodded. “She’ll do.”

  I was doing my best to follow the conversation, but I felt like I was missing something.

  Tigh sighed and rubbed his eyes with the palms of his hands. When he finally looked at me, his eyes seemed wet. “Hayley, today is going to be hard on you, and I’m sorry. This wasn’t part of the plan.” He smiled thinly. “At least not my plan.”

  The air felt thick, and I swallowed to clear it out of my throat. “What are you talking about?”

  “We’re going to stop the colony mission.”

  Oh, crap. “You planted the bomb?”

  He nodded.

  “You killed Spaceman Jen!”

  He shook his head. “That was an accident. No one was supposed to get hurt.”

  I turned to run, but Tom was leaning against the door. I glared at him. “Are you part of this, too?”

  He nodded but didn’t look at me. I turned back to Tigh. “I’m not helping you do anything!”

  He nodded. “You won’t have to. Just look scared.”

  That wasn’t hard to do once he tied me to a chair in front of the Vid and started recording. He waved Tom out of range of the camera before identifying himself as the No Escape bomber.

  “Behold, he cometh with the clouds; and every eye shall see him, and they that pierced him; and all the tribes of the earth shall mourn over him,” Tigh said, reading from his fone, screen. “I am the Alpha and the Omega, saith the Lord God, who is and who was and who is to come.”

  Tigh looked back at the Vid camera. “We live in a time of wonders but have forgotten where these wonders come from.” He shook his head. “We sin and then try to escape God’s judgment by fleeing to the stars. But we can’t.” Tigh looked at his right hand and then raised it to show the camera. “I have given myself to the Lord and this is His hand. With this hand, He can reach you, even here in the darkness.”

  Tigh had started out calm and quiet but his voice rose as he spoke until he was almost shouting. “You cannot hide from Him!”

  Tigh promised to set off another bomb, one that would kill me, kill him, and blow a big hole in the side of the Walton, unless the captain vented the ship’s water into space. If the No Escapers on the other ships were following a similar plan, and it worked, the colony mission would be set back by years, if not stopped completely.

  “You have twelve hours,” Tigh said, and stopped recording.

  I was crying by then, and I could barely see as Tigh turned to Tom. I just wanted to go home.

  “You need to go,” Tigh told his son. “Stay somewhere public. I’ll send the message out in thirty minutes.”

  “But I want to stay with you!” Tom said.

  Tigh gripped his son’s shoulders. “If this doesn’t work, we’ll need you in reserve.” He smiled. “Besides, I’ll need you to explain this to your mother later. You tell her I’m sorry, and that I’m praying for her to find her way back to me.”

  “To us.”

  Tigh nodded. “To us.” He smiled and patted his son’s shoulder.

  Tom looked at me. “I’m sorry.”

  “I thought you liked me.” I cringed at how pathetic I sounded.

  Tom looked like he was about to cry. “I do. But God – my Dad – needs me to do this.”

  “Bullshit!” I threw myself from side to side, trying to get loose. “I hate you. You people are crazy!”

  Tom ducked his head like my words were actually hitting him, and hurried out of the door. I saw Tigh glance at his fone. He sat on the couch and clicked around on the Vid control until he found a movie. “Be quiet and watch this, or I’ll gag you.”

  We watched together for a few minutes.

  “Let me go,” I said. “Please. I’ll hide so they think you still have me.”

  Tigh shook his head. “No you won’t. Watch the movie.”

  It was a comedy. Some kind of mistaken-identity thing. It didn’t hold my interest.

  “Where’s the bomb?”

  “You don’t need to worry about that,” Tigh said. He pointed at the Vid.

  He checked the time a few more times and finally pushed a button on his fone.

  We watched awhile more.

  “I need to use the bathroom,” I said.

  He shook his head.

  “I really have to go. Please!”

  He shook his head again but got up and walked over to the chair. “No screwing around. You have three minutes.”

  I nodded.

  Tigh untied me and walked me to the bathroom. “Leave the door open.”

  I scowled at him and crossed my arms.

  “Fine, close it. But don’t lock it.”

  I nodded and went in. The door slid shut behind me and I immediately slapped the big red button marked “Emergency.” I heard a hiss as the door sealed and the tiny room switched over to its emergency power and air supply. Outside, I knew, a bright red light started flashing over the bathroom door and I heard Tigh start hammering on the lock.

  It pays to read the safety cards.

  There were emergency rations and a comm unit behind the mirror in the bathroom. I called Mom and Dad to tell them I was alright. “Tom is in on it, too. He’s staying out of the way until it’s all over.”

  “Your father is calling the captain now,” Mom said. “Are you sure you’re OK?”

  I swallowed. The sound of her voice made me feel like a little kid, and I suddenly wanted a hug more than anything in the world. I almost told her that I wasn’t OK, that I needed her and Dad to come get me. “Is Dylan there?” I thought my voice sounded shaky.

  He’s right here. Dylan, say something to your sister.”

  “What should I say?” Dylan said.

  “Tell Hayley you love her,” Mom said.

  “I love you.” Dylan paused. “Does it smell bad in there?”

  I laughed, wiping my eyes with my sleeve. “Not as bad as you, punk.”

  I was in the bathroom for about an hour. Tigh tried the pounding thing a few more times, but it didn’t do him any good. I couldn’t hear much more than that through the insulated walls. Mom, Dad, and Dylan stayed on the fone with me the whole time. They only hung up after one of the crew tapped in the code t
o let me out. The chair with the ropes was still there, but Tigh was nowhere in sight. I took a deep breath. The air tasted kind of tangy.

  “Where’s Tigh?”

  The crewman grunted. “In the brig. We gassed him.”

  I nodded. “You get Tom, too?”

  He nodded.

  “Can I leave?”

  The crewman palmed the door open for me. “After you.”

  He walked me back to our quarters. Dylan tackled me as soon as the door slid open. He was crying, and I hugged him hard. Mom and Dad joined the hug and pretty soon we were all crying.

  “What’s going to happen to them?” I asked after a while.

  Dad shrugged. “A trial, probably. There are prison facilities onboard. Maybe they can be rehabilitated. It’s a long way to P.C.”

  I nodded and started sniffling again.

  Mom hugged me. “What’s wrong, honey?”

  I wiped my nose. “Nothing. I’m just glad to be home.”

  THE TIME HANGS HEAVY

  BY ANGEL PROPPS

  The sidewalk was buckled and pitted. In some places, it looked like an earthquake had dislodged the concrete in jagged chunks. The August sun clearly showed the decay and poverty of the street. Honeysuckle vines lay dead on sagging, rusted fences. The thick reek of fried bologna and reefer lay trapped in the layer of wetness that was the awful humidity. Cars sat on blocks. The sound of some old song from the eighties blared from a window momentarily, then died away. There was a stillness broken only by the rattling wheeze of air conditioners that had been patched together with duct tape and prayers by desperate owners, who were not sure the units, or they themselves, could stand it another year.

  Lou Williams stood in front of the huge window that dominated most of his living room. One hand twitched at the curtains he had moved aside just enough to peek through. The other rested on the butt of the old revolver he had taken down from its box in the back of the closet. A dreamlike expression rode his wrinkled old face as he stood there, caught between wondering if that window could indeed act like a magnifying glass and burn right through him, and the vivid memory of bringing his wife Sally home to that house for the first time. He could still remember exactly how her milky white skin had looked as she had lain on the bare floor beneath the then uncurtained window, how she had gleamed with moonlight and desire.

  “Ashes to ashes and lust to dust.” The words were too loud in the hushed living room and he jumped a little even as he uttered them.

  Out on the street, a figure came into view. Lou knew it was Becky Holman and winced at the sight of her. Becky had been afflicted with the same disease that the street, and surrounding neighborhood, seemed to pass on like a carrier. At sixteen, she had been a femme fatale, a Lolita in knee socks and a plaid skirt. Her breasts had bounced under skimpy tops and her hair had swung across her back as she strutted down the steaming asphalt. At twenty-one, she was listless and tired. Her walk was the slow sun-struck stagger of an eighty year old. Her body had gone to seed with the first baby and now, pregnant with number three, she was as misshapen and squat as a troll.

  The street had not always been so unkind to its residents. At one time the street, and the streets beyond it, had been home to a different kind of people. Block parties had filled the summer nights; people had sat out on their porches in the long twilights and spoken to their neighbors. Kids had played simpler games back then. Sweetly-scented wives had kept the houses spotless and the men had cut the grass every Saturday, spring, summer and fall, before neatly stowing the mower away in the back yard shed for the winter.

  Lou could remember how, fifty-five years before, on the day he and Sally had moved in, their kitchen had become filled with casseroles and pies and Jell-O molds. Likewise, when someone died, food had filled the houses. The neighborhood kids dated, then married each other and the sound of football being played at the high school stadium could be heard for miles.

  Then something had changed. Wives began wearing strange, piled-high hairdos and eyeliner both thick and blaring that made their eyes look turned up at the corners. That eyeliner always made Lou think of feral cats. One day he had come home to find a note from Sally on the kitchen table that said she had decided to “find herself ”. He had stood in that kitchen wondering why she needed to find herself; she certainly had not seemed to be lost and if she had been, how could she have gotten that way when she rarely even left the neighborhood at all?

  Things had gone down a bewildering hill after that. Boys ran amok, growing hair to their very asses and women kissed each other and tossed their bras into bonfires. Vietnam bloomed like a malignant rose and the long-haired boys ran for Canada rather than stay and protect their homes. To Lou, that had been unforgivable and he often wondered what was wrong with the youth of America, what had happened to make them so cowardly and ungrateful. Everything had seemed to be moving too fast and when the sixties slammed into the seventies he grew even more confused. Then the seventies careened into the eighties with a loud crash, accompanied by a crash of the economy. Lou had begun to withdraw even more from a world he no longer knew or understood.

  Following Sally’s abrupt departure, he had occasionally taken home a pretty secretary from one of the offices in the spinning mill where he earned his paychecks. He also, less often, went over to the next county to a certain trailer park to see a woman whose specialty was not the soggy pork chop dinner she always served her gentleman callers but the dessert she gave them after.

  When the spinning mill finally went under with a groan and a whimper, he found himself forcibly retired and without any type of structure. His life had revolved around the schedule he had stuck to since the sunny afternoon in nineteen sixty-four when his life as a husband and father had ended. His routine had been easy: breakfast of coffee and two eggs, toast with margarine spread thickly across it with exactly three swipes of the knife, work from seven am until three pm, a quick stop at the grocery store on Wednesday afternoons for the rations of beer and frozen dinners that were his dietary staples, a lonely four-pack of toilet paper, single ply of course, and the odd bottle of dish liquid or shampoo when it was needed. Then home to watch television, eat a slow, sad dinner and go to sleep in his easy chair.

  The chair had caved in completely in nineteen ninety-seven and he had cried for hours. He had no idea why. The loss of that chair had unhinged something in him. When he had lain down in the dusty-smelling bed, on the clammy mattress that had not seen a human body for over three decades, he had felt swallowed up and adrift all at once. The wood of the frame and supporting slats had groaned in protest until he had been unable to bear it and had gone out to try to get some sleep on the spring-busted couch.

  Behind Lou’s head, dust motes spun and whirled in the long column of washed-out sunlight that slid between the chinks in the curtains. Lou knew the kids in the neighborhood knew he watched them but he could not seem to make himself stop, nor could he explain why he had gotten up that morning and gotten the rust-spotted revolver down. He had some vague notion that time had gotten away from him somehow, that he had failed somewhere but he was not certain of where or how.

  He half turned from the window and saw the picture of Little Lou. Little Lou had been barely six years old when his mother had decided to go walkabout. She had never returned; nor had Little Lou as far as anyone knew. Lou looked at the fly shit-speckled photograph of his lost wife and son: the thin wheat-colored hair that had graced their heads, Sally’s anxious brown eyes and Little Lou’s chubby red cheeks. The blue and white jumper that showed the child’s precious dimpled little knees. Lou had never forgotten the sight of his son whirling about on the living room floor to those damn Brits with the bad haircuts and sly grins. He had been outraged by it; it had not been decent, the way Sally would rock and roll all over the house to that damn band of ruffians, and she always got Little Lou to dance along.

  “The little brat always was a Mama’s boy.”

  A half remembered rage fought a thin regret in Lou’s
gut. He had bitterly resented the way the child had refused to play ball with him, running screaming for his mother if he so much as fell or got the slightest knock from a baseball or football. But what could he have done to help mold the kid into a man when every time he tried, Sally came at him like a fire-breathing dragon?

  Once he had caught the kid eating jelly on toast and drinking tea from a china cup with the two Mackie girls. John Mackie had called him, and after some hemming and hawing he had suggested Lou get over there posthaste.

  Lou could still feel the red heat that had crawled into his cheeks at the sight of his son - his son! - perched on a thin, pink chair with a high-crowned hat on his narrow head and a girlish giggle trilling from between his lips as he ate red-smeared toast. The spring sunlight had picked out the tiny white flowers embroidered on the collar of the dress the girls had put on Little Lou, and John Mackie had kept his face averted and down as Lou had stripped his son, beaten him and hauled him home. John had understood why that beating had been necessary. Sally had not.

  “How could you hit him like that?” she had screamed as she stood there with the sniveling kid tucked into her arms. Her eyes had been hard and bright with unshed tears; Little Lou’s had streamed plenty of water, however, and Sally had had to scream louder to be heard over her son’s howls.

  “You monster!” Sally had shouted at him. Nearly five decades later, Lou could still feel that sting. He had not been able to get a word in edgewise, to explain to her why it had been so wrong. He had known, right then, that it had gone too far and the boy was spoiled for life, but he had been unable to say anything that would make her understand, so he had given up.

  Beyond the window, one of the rail-thin young men who lived in the crumbling house on the corner staggered outside and stood there staring up at the sun like he had lost his mind. Lou could recall when a woman named Lisa Nelson had lived in that house. She had been widowed in World War Two; her husband had had the sense to die for his country, and she had made a homemade batch of fudge every Fourth Of July, then crumbled it into the chocolate ice-cream she hand-churned out there on her porch. Looking at the scuzzy man standing on that lawn, Lou felt a sense of total outrage that Lisa, who had come to his house for years on Sunday afternoons to talk for a few minutes and pass him a box filled with homemade cookies or a pie, was dead and the man on the lawn alive.