by Aeon Authors
“Deke!”
Something scrapes behind me—it’s Deke, desperately levering something between the slats. He grunts, strains. One slat buckles. The man takes advantage of my quick glance over, shoves the black thing at my leg. I leap aside awkwardly, knock my head on the fan. A blade slices my forehead. I blink away blood and the white flare of pain, focus on the gaps between the blades. Nothing. He’s getting cautious. I stumble against the blades, as if by accident. His hand darts through, the metal prongs glowing. I seize his wrist, avoiding the black thing which buzzes and sparks with a scent like burnt wire. The man jerks against my grip, furious, then with quickly growing panic.
Three, two, one, I count. The fan squeals into motion, speeds up, spraying blood. The black thing drops to the floor, and I’m left holding a forearm. It’s heavy, fleshy, still warm in my hands. From the far side of the fan I hear the fat man’s shrieking. But the sound that makes me weep with relief is the one that comes behind me—the metallic clang of a slat popping loose.
Later, Deke worms painfully past the fan and we go back down to get Fiedel who’s crawled into the room with the lights and shit and is busily punching buttons, his lip pooched out in that village-idiot way. Going back through the machine room he makes us flip levers and turn cranks and yank a cable—spitting blue sparks like the black thing did—and shove it into a panel he’s managed to open, before he’ll let Deke carry him back to the fan.
The fat one’s collapsed against the wall of the tunnel, slumped dead in a sticky pool of red. Deke looks down at him. “We can’t just leave him here. What if someone finds him?”
It’s been quiet, there’s no one else down here, but I can feel the weight of the building above me, layer after layer of metal and wires—there’s people up there, lots of them, I can almost feel them.
Fiedel snorts. “Don’t worry about it.” He looks grimly pleased about something, probably to do with all those machines. He leans on my shoulder, and I realize what a weird little picture we make at that moment, the four us—me, Deke, Fiedel and the fat dead man sprawled at our feet.
“Still,” Deke says, “he tastes better than dog, I bet.”
We look at each other, a speculative light in our eyes. I remember the feel of that warm, meaty arm. The fan spins, just behind us. How easy it would be to drag him over, shove him through it….
“Probably does,” I reply, and move past the body.
As I wait for the fan to pause I see the broad light of morning through the gap in the slats.
Much later, now, and I sit, dazed and sleepy, in a pool of sunlight, feeling almost warm. We sit on the muddy ground at the base of the oaks around a large, crackling fire, with another dog roasting over the flames. Deke is grinning. Fiedel cracks a joke while one of the hos bandages his foot. Moof sulks to one side, watching the plumes of smoke rising down by the water with a brooding, sullen gaze. From the corner of my eye I see a flicker of movement—I’ve been expecting it. When Cort leaps up, shouting and brandishing his spear, I call him back sharply. He goes and sits by Moof as the Proms come slowly, hesitantly among us, their eyes also turned to that black, distant smoke. Scram reaches out, cuts a slice from the dog, hands it to a hovering Prom.
I smile, then remember Raym, lying staked right here where we’ve built this fire—spatters of his blood still streak the ground, bright against the dirty patches of snow. I think about Westbrook, and the compound, and how helpless Raym was. It’s going to be a problem, I know, taking care of them till they learn to survive. But that’s just the way it is.
Way down south, like a smudge against the horizon, are the fumes and smokes of Bosstown, a shadow against the gentle blue sky. There’s more of them, I know, many more—and they’ll be coming for us. I have no doubt of that.
But we won’t be here.
The tubies, I think, can only run so far. I’ll have to ask Fiedel about that, but I’m pretty sure of it. And once we get past them, we can think about what’s next.
But first, we’re going to Westbrook. I say now, and one thing sure, I’ll leave no dogs in their cages.
If they want us, they’re going to have to hunt us.
There is a Story
Jaime Lee Moyer
There are stories told of who we are.
The people of the lakes name us Lost Ones,
Their storytellers spinning firelight tales
Of empty shells that walk like a questing man,
Searching for a way home through a rip in the sky.
There is a story whispered in the pine bough
Huts sheltering a fierce and dying mountain clan
About those who hunt innocence through shadows,
Searching for faith to restore a shattered world.
On windswept plains Shaman gaze at crystal balls,
Storytellers of a different kind who use tales
Of tragedy to point fingers at the wandering ones,
Searching for a place to sink roots and call our own.
There is a story told of who we are in every land,
Tales told and spun anew in each great city,
Shepard's cottages, crude hamlets, the palaces of Kings,
Stories spun from fear and the need to understand.
Not one of them is true.
Our Authors
Greg Beatty (“Unnatural Poetry Workshop”) is recently married. He and his wife live in Bellingham Washington. Greg has a BA from University of Washington and a PhD from the University of Iowa, both in English, and attended Clarion West 2000. His work has appeared in 3SF, Absolute Magnitude, Abyss & Apex, Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, Asimov’s, Fortean Bureau, HP Lovecraft’s Magazine of Horror, the Internet Review of Science Fiction, Ideomancer, Oceans of the Mind, Paradox, SCI FICTION, Shadowed Realms Strange Horizons, Star*Line, and The New York Review of Science Fiction, among other venues. In 2005 Greg won the Rhysling Award in the short poem category.
Greg’s poem “Seeking the Lovetrino” appeared in Æon Six, and “The Dolls of Mother Ceres” in Æon Seven.
Visit Greg on the Web at http://home.earthlink.net/~gbeatty/
Daphne Charette (“Eat the Rich”) has written poetry, magazine articles, plays, newspaper columns, short stories, song lyrics, screenplays, and smut. After four years spent pursuing Hollywood from Maine (thereby proving once again her insistence on doing things the hard way), she turned her attention back to writing prose fiction in 2005. Since then, her work has appeared in Byzarium, AlienSkin, and The Sword Review among others, and she has stories appearing in the upcoming Justice Wears a Dress anthologies from RageMachine Books.
Daphne can be found on the Web at http://www.geocities.com/daphnecharette/.
Dr. Rob Furey (“Parallax”) worked on his PhD in Gabon, West Africa, on social spiders. He has returned to his study site several times for his own research, with students and once as a forest guide for a natural history film crew from the UK. He has faced down cobras, retreated from army ants and slept on open wooden platforms in African swamps. Later he went to French Amazonia to work on another social spider species. Not only did he spend time with the spiders, but he watched a gunfight between gold prospectors and French army troops while he ate a meal of roasted tapir. Since then Rob has returned to the tropics several times, usually with students. He spent time as a student himself attending Clarion West. He has published a couple of stories in anthologies since then in addition to articles for dusty tomes on arcane spider behavior. He is currently part of the charter faculty at Harrisburg University, the first new private university in Pennsylvania in over 100 years.
Terry Hayman (“The Girl Who Left”) lives with his family in the Canadian wilds of North Vancouver, beating back beauty with his bare hands, soaking up the liquid sunshine. His short stories have appeared in magazines ranging from Woman’s World and Boys’ Life, to On Spec, Altair, and Dreams of Decadence. You can also find him in the recent anthology Hags, Sirens, & Other Bad Girls of Fantasy and the upcoming Mystery Date an
d From the Trenches.
Robert J. Howe (“Life Sentences”) has published short fiction in Salon.com, the Russian science fiction magazine Esli (If), the magazines Weird Tales, Pandora, Pulphouse, Tales of the Unanticipated, and the anthology Newer York. He has also published a handful of stories in Analog, most recently “From Wayfield, From Malagasy,” in the October 2006 issue. Howe, a native of Brooklyn, New York, is a former coastguardsman and merchant seaman. He is a graduate of the journalism program of Brooklyn College, of the City University of New York, and the Clarion Writer’s Workshop at Michigan State University. He is the editor, with John Ordover, of the Wildside anthology Coney Island Wonder Stories.
Bob’s website is http://www.rjhowe.net.
Marissa K. Lingen (“Michael Banks, Home From the War”) has been published in Baen’s Universe, Analog, Ideomancer, Oceans of the Mind, and other venues. “Michael Banks...” was her fiftieth short story sale. She has just finished writing a young adult novel that had an unplanned and unfortunate outbreak of accidentally magical puffins in the early chapters; she didn’t mean to. She lives in the Minneapolis area with two large men and one small dog.
Marissa’s story “Things We Sell to Tourists” appeared in Aeon Six.
Visit Marissa on the Web at http://www.marissalingen.com/.
Lisa Mantchev (“Mirror Bound”) casts her spells from an ancient tree in the Pacific Northwest. When not scribbling, she is by turns an earth elemental, English professor, actress, artist, dog wrangler, mommy, and domestic goddess. Lisa’s stories have been published in places like Strange Horizons and the SFWA anthology New Voices in Science Fiction and she has just completed her first novel, entitled Scrimshaw.
You can Taste the Bad Candy at her website: http://www.lisamantchev.com.
Josh Rountree’s (“Remember”) short fiction can be found in the anthologies Polyphony 6, From the Trenches, and Book of Shadows, and in the pages of Realms of Fantasy. He lives in Austin, Texas with his wife and two sons.
For more information, visit http://www.joshrountree.com/.
Kristine Kathryn Rusch (“Signals”)’s novels (science fiction, fantasy, mystery/crime, and romance) have been published in 14 countries in 13 different languages. She is the only person in the history of the science fiction field to have won Hugo awards for both editing and fiction. Her short work has been reprinted in six Year’s Best collections. She has also been the recipient of the John W. Campbell Award, the Herodotus Award for Best Historical Mystery Novel, the Ellery Queen Reader’s Choice Award, the Science Fiction Age Reader’s Choice Award, and the Romantic Times Reviewers Choice Award, and been nominated for the Locus, Nebula, and Sturgeon awards, and the Asimov’s Reader’s Choice Award.
From 1991-1996 Kris was the editor of the prestigious Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Before that, she and Dean Wesley Smith started and ran Pulphouse Publishing, a science fiction and mystery press in Eugene, Oregon. She lives and works on the Oregon Coast.
Visit Kris’s website at http://www.kristinekathrynrusch.com/.
Ken Scholes’ (“One Small Step”) quirky, offbeat fiction has been appearing in various magazines and anthologies for the last six years. He’s sold short stories to Realms of Fantasy, Weird Tales, Aeon, Talebones, Wheatland Press’s Polyphony 6 and TEL : Stories anthologies and Suddenly Press’s Best of the Rest 3 and Best of the Rest 4. He is a winner of the Writers of the Future contest with a story appearing in L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future Volume XXI.
Ken’s first stand-alone project, the novella Last Flight of the Goddess, is available from Fairwood Press as a limited edition, signed and numbered hardcover — order your copy at www.fairwoodpress.com.
Ken lives in Gresham, Oregon, with his amazing wonder-wife Jen West Scholes, two utterly worthless cats and a whole lot of books. He invites readers to get in touch with him through his website: http://www.sff.net/people/kenscholes.
Ken’s story “East of Eden and Just a Bit South” appeared in Æon Six.
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Blood, Blade, & Thruster — The Magazine of Speculative Fiction & Satire
Coney Island Wonder Stories, Edited by Robert J. Howe and John Ordover
Electric Story
Fairwood Press
Last Flight of the Goddess, by Ken Scholes
The Paint in my Blood, by Alan M. Clark
From the Trenches, featuring “Possibly Grief” by Josh Rountree
The Retrieval Artists series, by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Scorpius Digital Publishing
Steel Sky, by Andrew Murphy (Per Aspera Press)
Talebones Magazine
Thriller Doctor
Weird Tales
Wheatland Press/Polyphony
