Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume Two

by Short Story Anthology

  “Marc!” It was only four stories. He could still be alive. I put my hand on the fire escape ladder and made the mistake of looking. The world tipped and spun, sending me gasping to my knees.

  Behind me, Natalie and Eliot rose, a hairbreadth slower to react.

  “We have to call 911,” I panted. “Not too late. It can’t be.”

  Natalie gazed down, unaffected by my phobia. She reached back. “Eliot?”

  Eliot took her hand, their faces the same in that eerie, psychic way Eliot had. “Yes.”

  “Do you love me?”

  “Always.”

  “I love you. You and Marc and Kimi.”

  She held her hand out to me. “C’mon.”

  The belief, the love on their faces.

  I gripped her hand, hard, like I would never let go. Together, we stood on the ledge. Four stories below, Marc waited for us.

  “On three?” Natalie said.

  “On three,” Eliot agreed.

  “One.”

  “This is better, isn’t it?” I said. “Better than growing apart and hating each other.”

  “I could never hate you,” Natalie said.

  “Two.”

  “Yes you could.”

  “Don’t be stupid.”

  “Three!”

  Eliot launched himself over, dragging Natalie halfway, their hands clasped tight. In that second of sundered faith, I threw myself flat and gripped the fire escape’s support.

  Natalie screamed.

  We straggled out, flung dangerously over the precipice; Eliot committed to the air, anchored only by Natalie’s tenuous hold. My shoulder burned, wrenched and agonized. Her hand slipped in mine.

  “Don’t let go,” she pleaded.

  “I never did.” I was losing my grip, sliding from the metal support.

  “Eliot, can you reach a branch?” I shouted.

  “It’s too far!”

  Natalie screamed again. I felt them shift, a dead weight on my arm. If I let go, we would all fall. All together, forever, as Marc had wanted.

  I looked into Natalie’s red and frightened face. Below her, Eliot dangled, pale and limp.

  I let go.

  Clinging to the strut of fire escape, I watched them fall away. Vertigo twisted the world into sickening colors and sounds. I clenched my eyes shut and clutched the metal bars.

  *

  “You didn’t come with us.” Marc sat beside me, his fingers toying with the mouth of Eliot’s bong. Although I knew Marc was the ghost, it was the black plastic that looked translucent. “I waited for you, but you never came.”

  The queasy dizziness was gone, replaced with a sober calmness and a certainty granted by facets of Marc’s personality I’d come to understand only now, after his death.

  “How come you wrecked the picture album?” I asked. “We made it together.”

  He scowled. “It was a lie. All those promises, those happy, smiling faces.”

  “Ours, you mean.”

  “I erased the lies.”

  He’d never gotten over his obsession either, not just with me, but with what we’d had with Natalie and Eliot.

  “But you kept waiting,” I said. “And when you realized I wasn’t coming back, you shot yourself. But why did Natalie take the gun, or was it Eliot?” That was the lie she’d tried to hide, the reason Eliot wouldn’t meet my eyes. More than the pot, they hadn’t wanted the police to find the gun.

  His face was intense. “I got you to come back, didn’t I?”

  “Only to say goodbye.”

  “Natalie and Eliot are here. We could be together. They understood when I told Eliot to take the gun away, he understood. You would come if there was a question mark. You never could resist a puzzle.”

  “You can’t keep them, Marc.”

  “Why? Because you want them in spite of everything, even without me?” Was that eagerness in his voice?

  “No. Because I don’t want them. I don’t want them or you. And because I don’t want them, you can’t have any of us.”

  Marc howled.

  I felt only pity when he melted to mist and then nothingness, the bong slipping from his fingers to spill its dirty, pungent water on the carpet.

  *

  I opened my eyes. Across from me, Natalie and Eliot blinked.

  “Since Marc’s death was a suicide,” I said, “I won’t tell the cops that the gun’s at the Center of the Universe, but you’d better do something with it.”

  “How’d you—?” Natalie began.

  I held up my hand, and she trailed into silence. “Eliot knew about the lights and paneling they put in. I figured he or the both of you had been there recently. Besides, where else would you stash it?”

  “We were falling,” Eliot said.

  “I caught you. But I’m done. You can stand or fall on your own.” I left, stepping over the puddle of smoke-infused water seeping into the carpet.

  *

  After Marc’s funeral, Eliot and Natalie invited me back to their place. Eliot suggested I stay in their guest room. I declined. Instead, I went back to my hotel, packed up my belongings, and turned in for an early night. I had a flight home the next morning.

  My house in New Jersey was quiet and dark when I arrived. The motion-sensitive porch light went on as I climbed the steps. I half expected to see a patina of dust and cobwebs overlaying my familiar possessions — my bookshelves, the television, the dining table. But everything sparkled, cleaning-ladies spotless, just as I’d left it mere days ago.

  The number came easily. I hadn’t dialed it since the breakup, had erased it from my speed dial, but my fingers remembered.

  After the third ring, Faye picked up. “Hello?” She sounded sleepy. I envisioned her hair all disheveled from her pillow.

  “It’s Kimi.”

  “Kimi?” In the space of my name, she woke up. “What is it? Is something the matter?” A pause. “Do you know what time it is?”

  “Nothing’s the matter. I got back from my high school reunion.”

  “Oh. Uh, how was it?”

  “Pretty lame. Much as I expected.”

  A long silence hung between us. We both tried to end it at the same time.

  “Faye—”

  “Kimi—”

  I forged ahead when she faltered. “I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry for what?”

  “For everything. For the mess I made of our lives.”

  She surprised me by laughing. “It takes two people to muck up a relationship.”

  “I know.” The newfound resolve I’d found in Concorde was evaporating. “I miss you.” It came out in a rush. “I really miss you.”

  “Moving out was your idea.” It wasn’t an accusation or reproof, just a flat statement.

  “I know.”

  “Look, I never stopped loving you. You know that, right? I told you that.”

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered.

  She sighed, deep and long-suffering. “You want to come over for coffee or something? Have a talk?”

  “Yes. Please.”

  “I’ll be here.”

  “I never stopped loving you either.” The words tumbled out, tripping over themselves in my mouth. They weren’t romantic or heartfelt, and yet they were. “You weren’t waiting for me, were you?”

  “No.” I heard the smile in her voice. “But I kept hoping.”

  The End of the Universe, by Eugie Foster

  Tay felt like he had junkie fever all over again – the itch in his skull that made him want to peel back bone and rasp his fingernails over trembling gray matter; time as an hourglass filled with frosty molasses, and a film of damp slicking the meat of his hands. But he'd been clean, hadn't touched a pill or lit up in months.

  He checked the system again, for the hundred-zillionth time. The master display registers were all green. Everything had been checked and double-checked; the tests had run, and the spells were programmed and compiled. There was nothing left to do.

  Trilling clax
ons shrieked through the lab.

  Even though he'd been expecting them, Tay's heart jolted to a thrumming sprint in his chest. Relief, anxiety, and excitement roiled in his stomach, sending the taste of bile burning up his throat.

  The waiting was over.

  Tay slapped the silencer buttons. 'Places, everyone! This is it.'

  Without the wailing alarms, the air felt light, too light to breathe. He forced himself to suck in a breath, exhale, and gulp in another.

  Beside him, Raize flicked switches, her blonde dreadlocks swinging as she tweaked dials and controls. In the over-light air, her hair seemed to seethe and writhe like fuzzy serpents. Tay remembered an old tale he'd heard about a snake-haired woman that turned men to stone. True, Raize had a certain stiffening effect on him, but he'd always taken the story as being more literal. Besides, Raize's snake-locks were each adorned with a different colored crucifix – an expression of piety as well as fashion. No self-respecting serpent would have tolerated that indignity.

  With a jaw-throbbing hum, Tay's boots activated. The foot he'd raised clanged back to the metal floor.

  'Raize, pull it back. I can't move.'

  'Sorry.' Her fingers tapped in commands.

  Ambulatory once more, Tay clumped to the control stations. 'We have atmosphere?'

  'Confirm on atmo.' Freeloader's silver eyepieces glinted in the white halogescent lights as he surveyed the outputted data. His movements, like his speech, were precise; he wasted neither processing resources nor energy on flashy words or gestures. An ironic turnabout, he kept himself aloof from human emotions and foibles, his reserve only breached during the interface sessions he shared with the AI.

  Next to him, Bomb nodded. 'Clear.' His voice rumbled low and gravelly through his barrel-wide chest.

  'Countdown commencing,' the computer announced. 'Termination of the universe in 10 . . . 9 . . . 8 . . .'

  Eight seconds until the end of everything. No Earth, no galaxy, no existence.

  A cosmic joke or just bad math, there was a flaw in the makeup of reality that manifested every thirty-two thousand years. The rift was like a gap in the celestial highway, a pothole. When hit, it threw everything out of whack, shredding reality in its wake. But there was a fix: symbols, rituals, and equations older than the planet – maybe as old as the universe itself – that kept time and space from derailing over that bump.

  Tay imagined Neanderthal men chanting around a fire while the world fell to pieces around them. Maybe the dinosaurs had been in on it, roaring and stomping the crucial symbols and sounds, safe in a leafy circle of protection. And before them, aliens perhaps, ancient consciousnesses performing the necessary structures and forms to smooth the universal pathway.

  'Have we got visuals?' he called.

  'I'm on it,' Raize said.

  The viewer flashed up. Blackness filled the wide screen, punctuated by motley dots of light.

  '6 . . . 5 . . . 4 . . .'

  The viewer snapped into focus, and the whole galaxy appeared. Spiraling galactic arms laden with starry matter sharpened into clarity. They encircled a central congestion of brightness spreading in waves from the nexus.

  'Stasis field?'

  A sharp click sounded, and Bomb stuck his fist, thumb up, into the air.

  '2 . . . 1. Termination.'

  Tay felt a ripple beneath his feet as the field engaged and separated their self-contained dome from everything of the outside world. He was faintly disappointed. He'd expected the end of the universe to feel different: more spectacular.

  'Look!' Raize pointed.

  Overhead, a slash of carmine split the creamy stars. The rift widened, shivering off splashes of glowing orange and seething yellow.

  'It's true.' Freeloader stared at the screen, his mouth slack. 'I didn't believe—'

  'Mr. Freeloader, your station!' Tay snapped.

  The ritualist's cap gleamed quicksilver as he scanned the scrolling readings. His palm stroked the tactile strip on the interface panel, the exchange of data reassuring computer and ritualist alike. 'Spells at normal parameters.'

  In the viewer, the gash turned into a tear. Dazzling, white light overwhelmed the lesser, fiery shades until Tay's eyes watered.

  'Raize—'

  'On it.' Just prescient enough to discomfit, she had anticipated him.

  The viewer dimmed. In the center of the brilliance, a flicker of shadow obscured the wounded vista. It grew, tendrils of black spreading like a drop of ink in water, eating away the milky swirl.

  Tay gripped the console until his knuckles whitened. The records had been vague on this part. But the protective spells, the runes and equations running in the computer, would keep them whole, isolated from the destruction or the chaos or the nothingness, whatever might happen. He hoped.

  Raize dropped to her knees, tears streaming from her eyes.

  'Holy Father of creation—' She abased himself before the viewer, a litany of prayers spilling from her lips.

  'Raize—?'

  'It's God!' she sobbed. 'Can't you see Him?'

  The viewer showed the swelling black nothingness and nothing more.

  'Freeloader, confirm our status,' Tay called.

  The ritualist whimpered at his console.

  Tay clomped double speed to him. 'What's the matter? Is it the binary cascade again? I thought I'd debugged it.'

  'It's Him,' Freeloader moaned. 'The Great Destroyer, the Deceiver.' He covered his head with both arms.

  The computer shrilled as the movement yanked Freeloader's interface connections free. A blue light blinked on the tower.

  'Mr. Freeloader, attend your station!'

  The ritualist giggled. 'My station.' He reached out. 'My damnation.' Tay lunged, racing to slap aside Freeloader's hand, but the other man was faster. One silver-tipped finger knocked into the little red switch marked with a simple 'O' on one side and an 'I' on the other. With a whine, the systems began powering down.

  'No!'

  Electro-magnets released, and Tay's momentum took him past the AI station in a helpless spiral of freefall. Freeloader spun past him, cackling. Lunatic tears hung in the air, shed from his eyes and suspended like soft jewels in the zero gravity.

  'Bomb, emergency reboot!' Tay writhed, struggling to catch hold of anything solid that would stop his spin.

  The huge man stood with his thick legs braced against two bolted down consoles. He spread his arms in a wide embrace.

  Tay thunked into a steel hub wound with slick cables and delicate fiber contacts. He seized a handful of strut and cord just as the lights went out – the only illumination now the viewer's luminous glow.

  'Nirvana,' Bomb whispered. A beatific smile spread across the ugly man's face in the shadowed crimson.

  Tay's breath billowed out in a mist of condensation. Despite all the insulation in the dome, the temperature was plummeting. To fall so quickly, it had to be cold as space outside. Was there an atmosphere anymore? Did the mountain the dome rested on still exist? He'd anticipated that heat and light, air, gravity even, might go haywire, so he'd programmed environmental safeties with multiple redundancies for each sub-system.

  But the computer could only protect them if it was on.

  Tay craned his neck to the viewer. The emptiness had eaten away more than half the image.

  'We're damned,' Freeloader moaned.

  Tay ignored him, his teeth chattering in the now biting cold. The AI station – power grid, manual ports, and hard boot switch – was across the room, with Bomb anchored between them.

  'Out of my way, Bomb.' Tay gathered his legs against the strut and launched himself at the console.

  Instead of ducking, Bomb turned, his arms still outstretched. Tay could neither slow nor turn. The giant man plucked him out of the air, like a child from a swing, as he flew by. Tay's momentum knocked Bomb out of his stance, and they drifted.

  'Don't struggle,' Bomb murmured. 'Enlightenment comes with acceptance.'

  'What are you babbling about?' Tay
fought to break the other man's hold, but before Bomb had hooked up with Freeloader and joined the team, he'd worked the streets as an enforcer. Tay was outsized, outmatched, and outmuscled.

  'It is Nirvana.'

  'It's not, you thickwit. It's the end of the universe. Can't you feel the cold?'

  'It is not cold.'

  Tay twisted and strained, but Bomb might as well have been a stone block for all the effect it had.

  'Listen to me! Raize and Freeloader are hallucinating. We have to power everything back up and convince the AI to come online.'

  'The AI is not offline,' Bomb said. He swiveled Tay like a rag doll until he faced the viewer. 'Look.'

  The blackness continued to eat a swath through the galaxy.

  'It's growing! We're running out of time.'

  Bomb held him tight, pressing Tay against his chest. 'How is the viewer powered?' he murmured.

  'Huh?' Tay blinked. The viewer, of course, was also linked to the AI. How could it be on with the computer down?

  As soon as he thought the question, the lights shuddered on, splashing them with bright white. They fell, dragged down by their powered boots.

  Bomb rose to his feet and returned his attention to the viewer.

  'What's going on?' Tay asked.

  Bomb neither turned nor answered.

  The delicate ting of metal striking metal brought Tay twisting around. Behind him, Raize was on her knees tearing at her hair. Several of the little crucifixes had come loose, pulled down by the floor's magnetic field.

  'Forgive me, Father,' she sobbed, rocking back and forth. 'Forgive my sins.'

  Behind him, Freeloader's voice rose in a ragged cry. During Tay and Bomb's collision, the ritualist had pulled off his coverall, leaving him naked save for the metal implants mottling his body. He pressed himself in a frenzy against the computer's tactiles. The computer's warning lights flashed as its sensors overloaded.

  'Mr. Freeloader, what the hell are you doing?'

  'Fuck off.' Blood dripped from thin gashes in the ritualist's face where he'd dragged the metal tips of his fingers through his flesh.

  Above him, a face appeared in the viewer, filling it. Eyes that bubbled and overflowed with tears of brackish pus glared out. Jaundiced skin writhed. Boils erupted, sprouting maggots topped with human features. Horribly, the faces were familiar; they wore the likenesses of people Tay had known: his mother before a cancerous tumor had sucked her life away; the last pusher he'd cut a deal with, spiky derma-implant patches bristling from his temple; the counselor in the institution with the sad, disappointed eyes.