Space Eldritch
Page 35
Perhaps Dreadman can help. His English is worse than his breath, but he’s smart. He has survived out here somehow, untouched by parasites, able to stow away invisibly on alien rune ships. His cloak is probably itself a rune ship. He rode it in here to warn me. He’s still right in front of me.
“What can we do?” I ask.
“Must go,” Dreadman says, grasping an inscribed hem with a three-fingered hand. He begins to ripple out of existence. “Seen!”
Then the rippling stops, but he hasn’t vanished. A tentacle has dropped from the ceiling and is wrapping itself around his neck. He thrashes, clutching at the meat-hawser strangling him. He gurgles a weak scream made out of nonsense, or maybe alien words, and then is pulled to the ceiling with a wet “snap.”
His limp form vanishes into the slick folds of flesh at the top of the room. He came here to warn me, I suppose. Maybe he had a plan. But now Dreadman won’t be helping anybody, not unless they have tentacles and need calories.
“Simonson!” the captain shouts at me. He’s standing next to Willis now. “You’ve killed her, you son of a bitch!”
I didn’t mean to do that. I couldn’t know that the bug monkey would turn solid at my touch, that its grip on her eye socket ran clear back to her brain. But there’s no way the captain will accept that explanation. He storms towards me, his left foot tracking blood from the puddle next to Willis’s head.
One of his strides crosses a particular rune, and when the blood touches it I feel a slight thrum, a minuscule surge of additional power in the ship. The shapes drawn in ancient stone have a stable sort of strength to them, while runes drawn with the transient compounds of entropy-defying life provide a fast, hot punch. Paint it with blood, because red ones go faster.
What was that odd thought I had over dinner? Dead pigs and a bloody lip... how fast can Voidheron fly if there’s fresh meat on that big, stone table?
Pretty goddamn fast, I bet. The devouring maw that lies at the heart of the Abyssal Void, the thing that all the far-reaching limbs eventually feed... how would it feel about eating a rock-and-iron bullet the size of a hotel?
But Captain Adams is not going to assist me with a flight plan that involves ramming the chewy center of the universe, and he is now right in front of me, face flushed with anger, clearly ready to break my face across calloused knuckles.
I reach up and touch the linguini-faced crab. I don’t need to rip it from Adams’s head. I just need to make the thing solid, substantial, and the claw in Adams’s eye will take care of the rest.
The captain should have batted my hand away, but he can’t really see. He couldn’t have known what was coming.
Captain Adams screams as the claw materializes deep inside and behind his eye. He drops to his knees and doubles over, fluids spilling out of his face. The crab thing scuttles away, and a gout of blood erupts from Adams’s right eye socket, filling and overspilling the shallow rune under my feet.
There is another surge of power, but this one is not in the ship. This one is more like when the captain first cut himself to “charge me up.” The giant tilde-J rune in which I stand is linked to me, and the captain’s blood is like a twenty-ounce energy drink, a deep breath of fresh air, and ten years of steroid-assisted daily trips to the gym. It tastes like the food of the gods, by virtue of the fact that it seems to have made one out of me.
I grab the captain by the back of his collar and toss him, one-handed, across six meters of open space, landing him squarely atop the end of the table.
He spasms, legs and arms twitching, as I walk to the head of the table. There’s his belt sheath, a small thing with an even smaller blade in it. Thank you, captain. Now I have a knife.
In for a penny, in for a pound of flesh. I can see all the runes for what they are, now, and I know where the blood needs to go. Mostly it needs to go everywhere, but there are a few lines I’ll need to take care to paint inside of. With a flick of my wrist I open the captain’s right jugular, and his panicked, pounding heart pushes bright, red rocket fuel into the table’s deep grooves. Voidheron shudders, and I can feel her pouring on the speed as Adams pours out the blood.
The tech with the squidroach on his head charges me from the right, ducking into a tackle that will certainly break a few of my ribs. I reach out and touch the parasite, and then sidestep. The tech’s eye explodes and he stumbles and crumples past me. My scalpel opens him up as he goes by, and his life energy splashes across an etched whorl in the floor. More power to the engines.
Imagine a waiter setting a table for a fine meal. He moves around the table, laying flatware and plates, glasses and snifters, with calm precision. That is me, stepping from station to station, repositioning inscribed stones, pulling obelisks across grooves, murdering engineers, technicians, and officers alike and pouring them out as if I’m filling wine glasses.
The rest of the engineering crew has fled, but it doesn’t matter. I have what I need. Voidheron is streaking across the Abyssal Void at speeds impossible to achieve anywhere that relativity might apply. Earth and Terra Tenska are invisibly distant motes behind us, and it occurs to me that our voyage wouldn’t be billed as a three-day trip if the engineers were allowed to bleed a little.
Freedom. This isn’t how I pictured it, up to my elbows in blood, tracing scarlet sigils on the walls, the floor, and the table, piloting a stone-and-iron building into the face of a world-eating monster as if I’m some kind of kamikaze bellhop, but it’s still freedom. I chose this. Not Captain Adams and his parasite-impaired judgment, not Commander Willis and her man-handling eyes, not even helpful, dog-breathed Dreadman and his fantastic rune cloak. This was not their decision. It is mine. I own all of it.
The end will come before I can see it, but I know we’re on target. We’re moving too fast for even blood-boosted, rune-wrought vision to show me the devourer growing with proximity. Still, I can sense its full attention upon us, the souls of twenty-five hundred men, women, and children in a bubble of cold iron and ancient stone, inbound at the speed of life.
I wonder, for just a moment, why it does not move to defend itself.
Contributors
D.J. Butler (Dave) is a lawyer by training, but he’s been writing speculative fiction for all audiences since 2010. He’s working on getting published by the traditional route; in the meantime, he entertains readers with serial adventure tales.
Rock Band Fights Evil follows the escapades of a ragged dive bar band of damned men, struggling against the powers of Hell to get back their souls and keep their freedom. Rock Band comes out in e-book form, and then is collected into paperback omnibuses. Rock Band #1 is Hellhound on My Trail. Rock Band Fights Evil Volume One contains Hellhound on My Trail, Snake Handlin’ Man, and Crow Jane.
City of the Saints is a four-part gonzo action steampunk adventure set in the Rocky Mountains. U.S. Army agent Sam Clemens rolls west aboard his amphibious steam-truck, the Jim Smiley, with a mission: to ensure that the Kingdom of Deseret, with its air-ships and rumored phlogiston guns, brain children of the Madman Orson Pratt, enters the looming civil war on the side of the United States. Can he outrace and outmaneuver his competitors, Captain Richard Burton and the secret agent Edgar Allan Poe? Will Deseret’s own defenders, Orrin Porter Rockwell and Eliza R. Snow, thwart him? Or will he be caught up in the coup d’etat of the mysterious Danites? Part the first of City of the Saints is Liahona; the entire tale will be available in a single paperback volume soon.
Read about D.J. Butler’s writing projects at http://davidjohnbutler.com.
Michael R. Collings is a Professor Emeritus at Seaver College, Pepperdine University, where he directed the Creative Writing Program for over two decades.
He has published over 100 volumes of poetry, novels, short fiction, and scholarly studies of such contemporary writers as Stephen King, Orson Scott Card, Dean R. Koontz, and Piers Anthony. Recent works include Writing Darkness (2012), a collection of essays on prose narrative; The Art and Craft of Poetry (1996, 2009); Toward Other
Worlds: Perspectives on John Milton, C. S. Lewis, Stephen King, Orson Scott Card, and Others (2010); In Endless Morn of Light: Moral Agency in Milton’s Universe (2010); In the Void: Poems of Science Fiction, Myth and Fantasy, and Horror (2009); Matrix: Growing Up West—Autobiographical Poems (2010); BlueRose and Other Chapbooks (2012); A Verse to Horrors—An Abecedary of Monsters and the Monstrous; HAI-(And Assorted Other)-KU (2012); Deep Music: A Collection of L.D.S. Musical Readings (2012); and a Book of Mormon epic, The Nephiad (1996, 2010).
His fiction, also published through Wildside, includes: The House Beyond the Hill: A Novel of Fear (2007); Wordsmith, Volume One: The Thousand Eyes of Flame (2009) and Wordsmith, Volume Two: The Veil of Heaven (2009); Singer of Lies: A Science-Fantasy Novel (2009); Wer Means Man, and Other Tales of Wonder and Terror (2010); Three Tales of Omne: A Companion to Wordsmith (2010); Devil’s Plague: A Mystery Novel (2011); Serpent’s Tooth (2011); Static!: A Novel of Horror (2011); Shadow Valley (2011); and The Slab (2010), the story of a haunted tract house in Southern California... that consumes people.
With his wife Judith, he has also published a unique cookbook, Whole Wheat for Food Storage: Recipes for Unground Wheat, a revision and expansions of their first joint project, Whole Wheat Harvest (1980).
He is now retired and lives in his native state of Idaho.
Robert J Defendi has worked on many projects. He is a former Writers of the Future winner and the writer of the popular podcast audiobook Death by Cliché. His fiction appears in many RPG supplements and smaller venues.
Robert was born in Dubuque, IA to parents who, frankly, should have known better. After a bleak early period, punctuated by too much bad science fiction produced by Walt Disney, he began to read such greats as Tolkien, Niven, Clark, Asimov and Clavell. He’s been influenced by dozens of writers, from Tom Clancy to Barbara Hambly. He studies bad fiction as well as good in every medium but poetry (with which he is abysmal). He feels that writing is a constant process, continuing through every aspect of one’s life, and that the time spent at the keyboard is only a small part of the process.
Carter Reid is a graphic artist/illustrator/cartoonist native to the blasted wastelands of deepest darkest Utah. He graduated from Weber State University with a Bachelor’s Degree by the skin of his teeth, thanks in no small part to the life-giving properties of excessive caffeine use.
Carter runs a growing and slightly sinister empire centered around his epic and awe-inspiring zombie webcomic found at http://www.thezombienation.com. Critics agree that it is a true testament of the human spirit and good for what ails you.
When not drawing like a madman, Carter enjoys fishing, death sports, futile searches for Bigfoot, and night terrors, and never ever takes himself too seriously.
Nathan Shumate is the instigator of Space Eldritch, but in his own defense, it’s not like the rest of these guys needed much encouragement.
For ten years, he wasted every available moment watching B-movies old and new, and reviewing them at length at Cold Fusion Video Reviews. A selection of those reviews form the basis of his book The Golden Age of Crap.
Nathan’s fiction has appeared in such venues as Amazing Stories and the recent anthologies Monsters & Mormons and Finding Home: Community in Apocalyptic Worlds. He also edits the ARCANE series of anthologies, also available from Cold Fusion Media. He blogs at NathanShumate.com.
Howard Tayler is the writer and illustrator behind Schlock Mercenary, the Hugo-nominated science fiction comic strip. Howard is also featured on the Parsec award-winning and Hugo-nominated “Writing Excuses” podcast, a weekly ’cast for genre-fiction writers. Howard’s artwork is featured in XDM X-Treme Dungeon Mastery, a role-playing supplement by Tracy and Curtis Hickman, as well as in the board game “Schlock Mercenary: Capital Offensive” released July 2012 from Living World Games.
His most recent printed work is Schlock Mercenary: The Sharp End of the Stick. His latest complete online story, Schlock Mercenary: Force Multiplication, was on the 2012 Hugo ballot for “Best Graphic Story.” He lives in Orem, Utah with his wife Sandra and their four children.
Brad R. Torgersen is a healthcare computer geek by day, a United States Army Reserve Chief Warrant Officer on the weekend, and a science fiction and fantasy writer by night. He has contributed stories to multiple professional publications, including Analog Science Fiction and Fact magazine, Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show, Russia’s ESLI magazine, Poland’s Nowa Fantastyka magazine, as well as several anthology collaborations with Hugo and Nebula award winner Mike Resnick. Brad’s novelette “Exanastasis” placed in the 26th volume of the L. Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future Contest. Brad’s novelette “Outbound” then won the Analog magazine “AnLab” Readers’ Choice Award for its category, for the publishing year 2010. “Outbound” was also included in the Dell Magazines ten-year Analog retrospective anthology, Into the New Millennium: Trailblazing Tales From Analog Science Fiction and Fact, 2000–2010. Brad’s novelette “Ray of Light,” also published in Analog magazine, was nominated for both the World Science Fiction Society Hugo Award and the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America Nebula Award for its category for the publishing year 2011. In 2012 Brad was also nominated for the Campbell Award for Best New Writer in professional science fiction and fantasy. Married 18 years, Brad now lives in northern Utah with his wife and daughter. His website is http://www.bradrtorgersen.com.
David J. West can’t remember a time he wasn’t writing. From the primordial splash of a drowning Atlantis to a pair of vigilantes’ six-guns blasting raw justice in the Old West, from obsidian-tipped arrows raining down on Cumorah’s slopes to crusaders’ broadswords sweeping over shadowy terrors, and on to the cold vacuum of space and the birth of a new star, David is there, recording it all for your edification and amusement. Check out his first novel Heroes of the Fallen and his other short story collections and anthologies at http://david-j-west.blogspot.com/
If you enjoyed this book, check out some of the other publications from Cold Fusion Media:
Arcane Sampler
Edited by Nathan Shumate
A bite-sized collection featuring twelve unsettling original stories, Arcane Sampler demonstrates the kind of macabre storytelling that characterizes the Arcane series of anthologies — for only 99 cents! Included:
The performers in a traveling carnival suddenly find themselves in mortal danger from their latest exhibit...
A Bible salesman discovers a reclusive family who worships something older… and closer...
A good Samaritan stopping to give roadside assistance encounters something far more dangerous than a flat tire...
***
Arcane
Edited by Nathan Shumate
The first full-length anthology of this series features thirty stories by some of the freshest blood in the horror, dark fantasy and weird fiction fields! Included:
An office worker returns from bereavement leave to find his workplace changing before his eyes…
A priest excites his village to the greatest show of devotion to their god ever seen…
A mortician sees all of his immaculate handiwork destroyed when his clients start rising…
***
The Golden Age of Crap
by Nathan Shumate
Just because you can’t respect a movie doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy it. The Golden Age of Crap serves up a sampling of junk-food flicks that gained their audiences on videocassette rental shelves during the ’80s and ’90s, a time when one couldn’t visit the video rental store without being tempted by Italian post-apocalyptic adventures, ninja revenge yarns, and zombie-filled “camcorder epics.” The movies covered here run from sleeper hits (Phantasm II) to cult favorites (The Dead Next Door), from unknown stinkers (Plutonium Baby) to undiscovered gems (America’s Deadliest Home Video), all examined with a critical but fun-loving eye.
Cold Fusion Media
http://www.coldfusionmedia.us
nbsp; D.J. Butler, Michael R. Collings, Robert J Defendi, Carter Reid, Nathan Shumate, Howard Tayler, Brad R. Torgersen, David J. West, Larry Correia, Space Eldritch