Flash Fiction: Smoking Night

Sometimes on this blog I'll be posting very brief pieces of flash fiction. 

***

Smoking Night

Last night, I woke at 12:30, suddenly aware that further sleep would be impossible. I went out on the roof to smoke a kretek, which is the Indonesian name for clove cigarettes. They are a particularly strong variety, and within several minutes the nicotine had made me quite dizzy. It was a cool, dark night, spoiled only by the yellow of the streetlight that illuminated the back alley. I lay back on the rough shingles of the roof and tried to look at the stars, but my eyesight is bad, so all I could see were indistinct white blurs scattered across the sky. Eventually the brief euphoria of the nicotine high turned into a sick queasiness that I found dull and frustrating, so I crawled back through the window into our seedy little apartment. I had a vague intent to write, but suddenly I felt unbearably hot, so I stripped out of my clothing and simply sat on my bed until the nausea overwhelmed me. Lying on my side, curled into a ball, I was struck by the curves and shadows of the yellow silk pillowcase next to me. It was more vibrant than usual, and the visual and tactile sensations of the moment completely incapacitated me.  I did not get any writing done.   

The Pit: Part 1.2

Part 1.2: Fighting Fire With Fire (Flaming Helen Takes the Fall)

***

She had just hit 35 years old, but three years of hard living had honed her senses and hardened her muscles to the point where a brisk jog shouldn’t have strained her, even with the heavy thrower pack riding her shoulders. Her accelerated heartbeat and the hot-cold flashes that shivered over her skin told her that what was coming soon: the thunderclap under her skull that would steal her vision - and any coherent thought - for as long as it stayed.

It meant that she would soon be helpless, caught out in the open with no shelter and no one to keep the beasts away. And if she was too long, if she was caught, if a pack gathered and Ben came looking for her…

No. She couldn’t let that happen. His healing had been progressing remarkably well, but he was still weak - and too new to the Free Quadrants to be roaming the streets and taking on packs by himself. If they both died because she had taken a stupid shortcut, it would be her fault.

The leaves above her blurred into a melted-butter swirl as she went into a sprint, slapping aside branches and bushes that seemed to rear up out of nowhere. Every ounce of concentration was focused on getting out of the park and into the nearest building, where she needed to find someplace to hide, to ride out the storm that was brewing in her brain. Fury at the thought of being caught by a beast while helpless aided in quenching the nausea that was now in her throat, making its presence known by filling her mouth with saliva and a trace of bile.

She didn’t know what made her fall. Whether it was a rock in loose soil or a humped root, all she knew was that suddenly she was falling, seeing leaf-littered ground become leaf-laced sky as it flew by in slow motion. She landed hard on her side, the pack pulling at her left shoulder as gravity claimed it, and simply lay there, trying to stop the spinning in her head. But it was too late. It wouldn’t stop, and now the ground had joined in beneath her, twirling lazily like a top losing its momentum. She dug her fingers into the loam and held on.

A minute passed. The thunderclap that she was waiting for didn’t come. But a rustle in the leaves only a few yards away told her that something else had. She held her breath and listened, cataloguing every sound she heard. The whisper of the breeze through the boughs. The faint, far-off hum of an aircar a few blocks over. And, conspicuously, no birds.

Predator, then.

She waited another minute, but the rustling didn’t come again. It made no sense. Atlas City was one of the orbiting worlds, artificially constructed and almost completely tame – as far as wildlife was concerned, at least. But if it really were a beast or a spore, it would have been on her already.

When she was certain that whatever she had heard was gone, she lay still for a moment longer. Finally, she was able to raise her head and struggle upwards to sit. It felt like swimming through tar, like the very air was resisting her. When she opened her eyes, she found herself instantly light-blind; the pain stabbed into her temples, making her bite her lip. But she kept them open - and found herself looking into the eyes of a young female beast, crouched not three yards away with a scrap of pink umbrella clutched in her hands.

When the shock of seeing one so close and so uncharacteristically motionless had subsided, Helen was hit with yet another shock.

The beast looked just like Ben. Same features, though feminine and with a twisted savagery. Same sandy hair, though long and stringy with dirt and blood. It couldn’t have been older than twenty. And with that, the beast was no longer an it; it was a she. And she was the first beast that Helen had allowed herself to recognize even in passing as human since her first kill, three years ago.

Helen blinked, unable to believe what she was seeing. The girl was a beast, there was no doubt about that. Her eyes were the correct pearlescent black, all trace of iris and whites erased. Her mouth was open in a half-snarl, her lips and chin dark with dried blood. It was all over her hands and forearms, as well, and under fingernails that were already starting to grow and harden into brutally sharp claws. There were unhealed cuts on her arms from running through trees and bushes, completely insensible to pain.

Most telling of all were the wounds just visible through ripped clothing that was well on its way to rags: deep, vicious wounds that revealed the barest gleam of a rib bone and extended down across one torn-open thigh. Any human with injuries like those wouldn’t have been able to stand, let alone survive the blood loss without immediate medical aid. But the beasts’ blood clotted almost instantly, an effect of the engineering that had created them; they barely bled, but they also never healed. Some were able to go for months before muscles that just wouldn’t work anymore took them down permanently.

She took in the details almost instantly while trying to think through pain that was already building again like a slow, unstoppable tidal wave. But maybe her perception of time had already gone askew; the beast hadn’t attacked, and she had had more than enough time to recognize Helen not only as potential prey, but as weak potential prey.

There was something electric and surreal about the way they studied each other, predator and prey, Helen fighting to keep her eyes open against the light, and the beast with her inscrutable black eyes. She felt a sudden urge to speak to it, but instinct and fear kept her still and silent. The beast began to shake slightly, the pink fabric fluttering in her hand like a captive butterfly.

Helen reached slowly for the knife she kept in her right boot. The beast followed her hand with her eyes and stood slowly, dropping the scrap of pink. Helen recognized the stance, and knew she wouldn’t be able to keep her at bay for long with the knife. It would be no more than a distraction, at best. But she had no other plan, and damned if she wasn’t going to try.

Or would have tried, if the blood hadn’t suddenly decided to leave her head in a rush. She swore viciously as darkness flooded her vision. Then she lost consciousness.

***

Previous installments:

Prologue: The Awakening
Part 1.1

The Pit: Part 1.1

Coming in partway through? You're not too far behind. Catch up with the prologue here.

Part 1.1: Fighting Fire With Fire (Flaming Helen Takes the Fall)

***

Smoke rose from the carcass, the smell of burned, rancid meat making her nostrils flare. Still, she surveyed the kill dispassionately, waiting for that tiny, telltale twitch. It took a while; sometimes, even when she thought the spores were as thoroughly cooked as they could be, there would still be something left, something alive in their warped, rotted,fungal brains that always took too long to get the message. 

And the message was always that she wanted them dead. 

When the twitch came, as she knew it would, she blasted the thing again with a stream of fire from her thrower. Its skin was now blackened and cracked, fluid seeping out and onto the pavement. The breeze crumbled its stalk, the first place her flame had hit, into fine black dust. Coolly, she hooked the thrower’s nozzle onto the pack and stepped over it, suppressing the exhaustion that tried to smother her alertness. 

She had been patrolling her sector since midnight, when Ben had woken her from a few precious hours of sleep to tell her that he’d seen a pack gathering at 5^th and Memorial. It’d been a fresh kill that had drawn them, as it usually was – she’d never seen anything else that could get them together in one area so quickly. The dirty scraps of a little girl’s pink umbrella had said all too plainly what the kill had been. 

Helen refused to speculate on what a little girl had been doing out by the park that late, in that sector. What was done was done. But there had barely been any meat left on the bones by the time they’d arrived, which meant that the spores and the beasts were already beginning to drift away, the spores with their ghost-white mushroom stalks already receding into their neck cavities, and the beasts with their sharp, inhumanly black eyes already scanning the streets for new kills.

Their hunt had been successful, though, at least by her standards. Three spores, their stupid, grinning faces blackened and melted by her flame, stalks instantly pacified, and four beasts. Ben even got two on his own, with the new shock arrows Yasi Clan had sent from Quadrant C. The arrows would last for at least half a year, if he was able to retrieve them after each shot and remembered to keep them charged. The boy was getting better, and she hoped it would be enough to keep him alive. After the ground fight they’d split to watch their own blocks, Ben from his favorite spot in the second floor window of an abandoned apartment, and her on foot.

Filmy gray light was beginning to make its way between the shining blue skyscrapers of Atlas City, blending the shadows together until everything took on a misty pallor. The dense, interlocked foliage of the yellow new aspens formed a frame of gold above her as she cut through the park, amplifying the weak dawn light rather than smothering it. It was her favorite place in the city; the new aspens, a modified implant from the Old World, spent their seasonal changes in various cloaks of yellow, orange, and red. They were like her hair, which never seemed to know which color it wanted to be, and like her flame, which always met its mark. 

The park was the only place in this godforsaken city that she ever came to for pleasure alone. She never hunted here on principle; it was all to easy to imagine a stray blast of fire leaving a slice of burn on the pristine white trunks of the aspens. Besides, the park was small, and the trees close-set; it was simple enough to lure the beasts and spores out onto the surrounding streets for more maneuverable battle. 

As the dawn light became stronger, however, Helen began to feel something that set her already-humming nerves even further on edge. It began quietly, a small tickle behind her eyes. A flash of light at the peripheral of her vision that could easily have been imagined. A sick feeling that slowly crept upwards from her belly. 

She upped her pace to a trot, keeping her eyes peeled for any strays that might be drawn by her movement. The tree trunks, all the same smooth white speckled with gray, began to keep time with the flashes. There were no paths through this park, and suddenly she was disoriented. Had she come from the north or the west? Why couldn’t she remember? Taking deep breaths, she reminded herself that it didn’t matter as long as she kept moving in a straight line. The park was surrounded by roads on every side. She just had to make it out to one.

But she was running out of time.


***

Ready for part 1.2? Get it here.

The Pit: Prologue: The Awakening

This is the prologue of the novellette "The Pit", a work in progress. New installments will be posted once a week (when they're not posted sooner).

Genre: horror, adventure

***

Pain, fading like a fire with no air to feed it. Screaming, screaming, don’t want to fade, don’t want to die.

Don’t have a choice. Can’t fight.

Breath, a last shudder, a last glimpse of sunlight through trees, then-

Dull, numb. Blissful emptiness.

Rest, now. Nothing to feel. No ground beneath, or sky above. Interminable black, and a feeling of soaring through it.

Then-

Slammed back into the body, confused, compressed, blind.

Then-

Hunger.

***

Hunger lifts from the spine and propels it forward, the body, in uncoordinated jerks that make it stumble. The memory returns to the muscle, the jerks smooth into slow, questing movement.

Hunger is the sole drive, coupled with the desire, the need, to propagate the control from flesh to flesh. It can’t otherwise be sustained. It, or what rides with it. The hunger begins as an ache that sharpens into a demand to be recognized. It tears through the abdomen, up to the brain, where electrical impulse fires and commands. The emptiness is all inside, a void, a pit that will suck it down into itself if it is not shored up.

It must find another. One not like itself, one where the blood still pumps hot through the veins to nourish the muscle and warm the skin.

There – scent, like a small, soft beacon. Movement, fast, and the drive to match the speed, bring down the kill. Sharp noises, loud and shrill, but it won’t be distracted, and it can’t stop.

Bringing the other down doesn’t take long. It’s small, but it will shore up the void for now.

Sated, bloated, content.

But something strange begins to happen. With the kill, it becomes aware of the wetness of the blood. The texture of skin and muscle. The weight of the kill in its…hands. It suddenly has names for these things.

It suddenly has a name for itself.

For herself.