“Stop that man!” shouted the conductor. “He’s stolen part of the train! Hundreds will be late! Dozens will be stranded!”
Recognising Bennie, and the R-shaped lump of brass clutched in his hand, Stevenson booted the Fantabulous Machine out onto the platform so his colleague’s escape would not be hindered.
“Fantabulous work, Bennie,” said Stevenson. “Took the monorail and took part of it to boot.”
As they rushed towards the swanky house, Bennie took a sad look back at the engine, wheezing pitiful puffs of steam, and at the R-valve in his hand. “But was it worth it?” he said, glumly. “Was it worth wrecking the monorail just for this party?”
“Who cares?” said Stevenson. “That guy’s rich, and we’re here in time for cake.”
Damon L. Wakes was born in 1991 and began to write a few years later. He holds an MA in Creative and Critical Writing from the University of Winchester, and a BA in English Literature from the University of Reading.
Every year since 2012, Damon has produced one work of flash fiction each and every day during the month of July. He usually writes humour and horror, occasionally at the same time. Tackling so many stories with such a short word count has given him a knack for well-structured narratives formed of tight prose.
Devil Red
by
Jennifer Silverwood
Underneath the hissing city that never sleeps is an even older, deeper city, an underworld in the figurative, literal sense. For those lucky enough to be born to rule over it, possibilities were endless, the wealth of the world at their fingertips. A rule over flesh and decay and opulence the underlings couldn’t afford but still seemed willing to obey.
She didn’t belong to the elite or with the flotsam feeding off the bottom. She obeyed no law but her own, and pretended she didn’t answer to Overlord Rama and his spoiled son, Gabriel.
Beautiful, tempting son of a bitch.
Isabol, a voice cautioned.
“I don’t answer to them anymore, not to anybody,” she mumbled while setting her sites, numb to the pouring acid rain.
Ominous energy clouds had gathered just before she crawled out of the hole she belonged to, just as the sun disappeared behind steel and stone buildings scraping the sky, reflecting the ruined zeppelin wreckage down the broad way. No one bothered to clean up after the last war, like so many had forgotten the reasons they were fighting. Like no one wondered why surging smoky clouds rolling with electricity never faded, why the rain tasted of acid and rusted parts.
While she had climbed, she cursed the older tiered brick high rise. It wasn’t the first time she climbed a building rather than take the stairs. Gabriel said she had a natural grace for climbing. He was full of shit.
She blinked and peered through her scope, peeking into tarnished windows a hundred meters away. Cold rain blurred her black eyeliner into streaks, mixed with the salty tears on her lips. Her jacket and leathers provided little barrier against the storm, but her blood was hot, always burning like eternal embers. Red like her eyes, like her hair, the color of life and death, symbols of her cursed heritage. Underneath her flesh, the same senseless rage helped to abate the pain, until she could hone it, mold it to predatory focus.
They told her this target was no different from the others, another casualty in the ongoing war between the city that never sleeps and the one decaying beneath it.
Isabol, a husky voice caressed her ear and she shivered, pushing aside the memory threatening to creep into her subconscious again.
“Not now, Jakob,” she mumbled as she adjusted the three-pronged rest at the end of her scope and took a moment to admire her latest invention. The rifle was thin and sleek in a way most tools of murder lacked, a silver creature that she swore hummed every time she caressed the barrel and stock. The scope had three lenses, for three different kinds of seeing, as she once tried explaining. No one ever understood that last part and she was never good with words.
Isabol, his voice again, insistent against her ear, tugging her mind back and further back to…
“Do you truly love me?” Their bare skinned bodies did not feel the chill in the air, the heat between them enough.
Jakob’s strong arms encircled her as he smiled a sharp-toothed grin, pulling back upon his elbow against the leaves. “Isabol,” he chided.
“I’ll rip out your heart if you don’t.” She nipped his neck and he rolled them until her back was buried in the leaves, locked his arms on either side of her, hovering just over her with a wicked grin of promises kept. The season’s first snow lightly began to drift behind him. She lifted a dirt-covered hand to trace his thin dark beard, run her hands through his brown hair. Her eyes softened as he spoke again, with uncharacteristic softness, and none of his usual banter.
“I will love you until the world burns.”
She brought his head down forcefully and kissed him until he met her passion. Together they ignored the sound of many feet rushing through the silent forest, full of different promises, delighting in death.
The glare of city lights pulled her back, forward a hundred years into the stark present, and she dropped the second lens over her site. She blinked as her gaze focused on the apartment windows she had found earlier that week. It was his place, open windows at the top of his crude and rundown brick building, ugly unlike the forgotten masterpiece she watched him from.
Isabol, do you love me? her dead lover’s voice whispered in her ear, haunting her across the black hellish void she had lived since his death.
“You’re in my mind,” she hissed.
Are you sure about that?
“No.”
She blinked back tears and shrugged as a thousand scents from the city washed over her, sickeningly sweet to her tongue. Her blood roared a hot flame, fresh fire for her mission, always the mission, the only thing she had left.
Her finger stroked the crescent trigger while she watched his apartment windows through the scope, through the second lens. The second lens was for a different kind of seeing, deeper. So far during her recon, the target barely graced his flat. It was by chance she caught sight of him returning to it now. She had been waiting hours that flew past her stretched lifespan in minutes.
Through the second lens, she could see through his clothes and skin, to the muscle and organs beneath, shining bright against the gray and shadowed backdrop. Her prey paced, and his heart thudded through his chest almost too quickly, distracting to her for just a moment.
She narrowed her eyes and took a deep breath as she followed his tread between large windows. They didn’t tell her what his crime was, the elite that ruled the world moving beneath the city. They rarely did and she preferred not knowing, to knowing the bare basics, the muscles in his skin, not his face and certainly never what she would find if she put down the third, largest lens. Even if the temptation was so strong now as she watched her victim pace, run his bones through thick dark hair. Muscles in his arms flexed, strong and capable.
Head shots were best, always best and almost always certain, but she couldn’t stop looking at his heart, and this was where she set her sites. She pulled on the trigger a fraction of a millimeter, but then…
Are you sure? Jakob’s voice taunted her.
Isabol gritted her teeth and released the trigger and her breath. “Damn it, stay out of this, for once.”
He’s different, though, isn’t he?
Her eye was drawn again to his heart, beating so fast and strong, stronger than any of the weaklings she had hunted before.
They used to hunt their prey together, once, before the prey turned on them. She blinked and she could still feel her heart beating in time with his as they ran, faster from the approaching villagers…
Running with wild abandon, their feet barely touching the earth, while ranches and thorns cut into their skin. But nothing could dissuade the fire in their spirits, the perfect rhythm of their hearts near to bursting with their steps. Surely no two hearts beat in such perfect harmony, no two souls cried as equal
ly for revenge, no spirits separated by divides too great to cross.
For now, his startling blue eyes met her burning red, and they were one, water and flame.
Isabol gasped, shuddered at the unwanted memory. Damn Jakob for making her remember, not letting her forget. Once, they had been instruments of light, holy warriors in an unholy war. The weapon in her hands was built out of decay, the pit she fell into after his death. Not even her family could drag her out, not even a thousand kilometers’ distance, traveling alone city to city could dull the pain. And here was his voice, pushing and tempting her, the bastard.
You could put down the first lens, Jakob whispered.
She flinched. “No.”
And yes, he was different from the others, the prey moving half a city away, through his crude flat like a caged animal. Window to window she trailed him, preparing herself for the shot. This time she wouldn’t hesitate, certainly not for any damn ghost.
She was sickness now, a symptom of the diseased people that ruled over the weak and poor of this city. She was madness incarnate, a carrion feasting on her own darkness, thriving on flames that should have died long ago.
You can still look, Isabol, he said softly.
“You can go to hell,” she replied, but didn’t mean it, not in a million years would she trade her personal hell. Because he kept her burning from extinguishing like so many of their kind, fallen creatures who shouldn’t survive alongside men.
Isabol…
“Fine,” she hissed, flicking up the first lens, so skin and features made a fine transparent layer over his inner flesh. She needed a clear shot of his face, she reasoned, weakly. She typically used the second lens. It was easier, not seeing their faces, but this one…
The prey ran a hand over his beard and came to the central window of his flat, rested his forehead to the glass.
Her blood, already pounding in time with the rain, came roaring up inside her, deafening, cracking with violet, crimson and cerulean lightning splintering the sky. Jakob’s voice in her head was unusually silent. She couldn’t look away, couldn’t stop her finger from moving to the third lens, the forbidden.
The man lifted his eyes, blue like the hottest center of a flame, burning across a city, looking straight at her.
She gasped. “You can’t see me.”
The light around his eyes seemed to grow, then, pulse as the third lens took full effect. His inner self, what some called the soul, could be different colors, different shapes revealing the true self. Most were dark, black souls she hunted, but his soul was brilliant, bright like the purest light, shining across a city like lost starlight.
The rain eased, while lighting turned and thundered in clouds overhead the city that never sleeps, and the rotten underbelly, sick with its stolen pleasures.
He stared at her, directly at her, she swore, with an expression of terror and wonder and how could he possibly see?
You already know, the voice whispered in her ear, mockingly her own. Because Jakob was not a ghost in her head, had not been over her shoulder like she half believed, needed to believe. Because it had been her fault, letting him take the fall for her, leaving him behind, even if he demanded she listen to him, please God for once in your life Isabol…
Lightning lit the black clouds with strange golden and silvery hues, shades of her murder tool and the man tensed. His light burned her. His eyes never left hers while her tears fell and she forced her trembling hand steady.
They had known, she realized then with vicious clarity, Gabriel and Overlord Rama had known somehow. But she couldn’t think of them yet. She owed them nothing after this, and she intended to give them back everything they deserved, everything she deserved. There would be no mercy head shots for them, no, nothing so quick and easy as that. They had known.
Isabol felt the flames growing inside of her, not so bright and hot as him, never so pure and good as he had been—is.
“I’m sorry, Jakob.”
She held her breath and pulled the trigger and listened to the powerful hum of her tool burst into song.
A steady, albeit distant hum of clicks and ticks echoed in his left ear, syncopated rhythm to his pulse. For some time, he had simply stared at the bullet hole surrounded by broken plaster and vein crevices upon the back wall of his loft. Yet Jakob had never been one to wait for reason and logic to numb his senses.
Her red eyes had practically burned into him. He had felt their heat for some time now, watching, always watching silently. The moment that they had locked eyes at last, the moment he found her, almost effortlessly across the city, past the jutting rusted blades of the zeppelin off broad way at the top of a building decaying in this city of hell, all strength was stripped from his limbs.
His memories were fractured, of that time before what should have been his death. Half the time he felt like a normal man, no different from the hundreds that he passed on the streets every day. He tried to forget that he lived long after them, in an endless cycle of hell, and the only thing, the only image connecting him to that time before was her. Blood-red hair matching eyes that took turns varying shades of autumn and warm, she was always warm, he recalls.
And it was unfortunately his “sight” that got him into this mess, he sensed, owing the piece of slime he earned his living from. The sleeping monster inside of him, the one that made him leave his very normal girlfriend after his bike collided with an eighteen-wheeler, kept him alive. By all accounts he should have been dead. They called him a living miracle. He knew better. The way they looked at him, the way his girlfriend couldn’t look at him, like he was nothing more than a walking corpse, cursed.
She would never have turned away from him, he recalled during his more lucid moments, when the past merged with the present, when he felt the most unhinged.
His mistakes would cost him, he knew, working for the monsters who ruled this city. He never expected punishment to come for him wearing her face.
Isabol.
The world had shuddered like visible ripples as the gears clicked into place, tearing the distance between them until she appeared no further than the broken wall two feet in front of him now.
I should have died. Her bullet should have hit my head.
He had been in such a similar line of business for too long to think she’d missed her target. She had been trailing him for weeks now, before he knew who she was. He still wasn’t sure who she had been to him, but he had a few stolen glimpses of naked flesh, of sweet bliss to guess.
He had thought to end their game first, look at her sooner and let her end his agony. No one would miss him if he were gone. He felt as though he had been gone for decades, too long to care, but too afraid to end it.
To not turn and look into the eyes of his recent shadow was torture. He had felt her presence from the first moments she had begun to track him. Cautious at first, Jakob had not wanted to attract her attention to his similar profession or giver her sight to anything he did not wish for her to know. Had the woman been tracking anyone else, he would have been dead long ago. Or perhaps it was because she was different that he still breathed.
Isabol…
“Do you truly love me?” she had asked him once.
He had seen the shock and reckoning in her eyes, the familiarity, her strikingly unique beauty in the few seconds their eyes finally met. And then she pulled the trigger. He would have thanked her, kissed her and praised her name, to finally find peace.
Instead there was only broken glass and the impact in the brick wall behind him, rain seeping into his flat. And there she was, leaping at unfathomable heights and clinging to impossible surfaces as she darted away like a shadow.
He didn’t need to use his own scoped rifle to track her, he realized after, as she faded into the stream of people beneath neon lights below. The head on collision with an eighteen-wheeler fifteen years ago took care of that. He lost his normal eye, but he gained something with tiny microscopic gears turning in the implant in his head, letting him see s
o much further.
He knew the places she clung to and would crawl back to. He had been studying them the weeks she tracked and retreated from him behind corners and creeping alleys.
He turned to look once more at his loft, at the shattered glass letting the foul city air from below waft up and flare his nostrils. Whoever had sent her would come to clean up the mess and he must not be here when they arrived. For now, he must give into the monster waiting just beneath the surface, so he could follow her.
As his mind turned to the dangerous beauty with ruby eyes, the one who had made him forget himself for the first time in ages, Jakob fled his loft to begin the hunt.
Once, they hunted together, two pure souls in an impure world. Now they were shells of their former selves, ruined by what the war made them. And still, even though he had died before, countless times, he supposed…
“I will love you until the world burns.”
Jennifer Silverwood was raised deep in the heart of Texas and has been spinning yarns a mile high since childhood. In her spare time she reads and writes and tries to sustain her wanderlust, whether it’s the Carpathian Mountains in Transylvania, the highlands of Ecuador or a road trip to the next town. Always on the lookout for her next adventure, in print or reality, she dreams of one day proving to the masses that everything really is better in Texas. She is the author of the Heaven’s Edge series, Stay, Silver Hollow and Craving Beauty.
Homeostasis
by
Petter Skult
Cheshire could not resist the nubile young man on the stage. Bids were already going up from the other Dames, but Cheshire was the richest on the airship. They floated over the mid-Atlantic, where everything was legal. Even slavery.
“I’ll take him,” she said through the brass communications tube—such primitive technology—and the deal was done. Fifteen minutes later he stepped in through the door to her boudoir, wearing only the gauzy suit she preferred all her man-whores to wear.
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