Michael S. Atkinson's Blog, page 42

Fallen Angel

This story was written for Trifecta’s weekly prompt, which was to use the word “boo”: (verb) to show dislike or disapproval of someone or something by shouting “Boo” slowly.”  It’s also another chapter in Constance’s Story. Enjoy!

A soft yellow glow surrounded Constance as she concluded her thoughtful advice. “And so, Mr. Linderman, that’s why you need to go home and spend time with your daughter. Because she loves you. Really.”

“You’re right,” sniffled Mr. Linderman. “I’ll leave right now. This moment!”

“You do that,” Constance said, beaming. Mr. Linderman slammed shut his briefcase and dashed out of his office, making a beeline for the elevators. Left alone, Constance couldn’t resist taking a spin in Linderman’s very comfortable chair. This angel stuff wasn’t so bad.

Then she heard a distant sound, coming from outside. It didn’t sound like a shriek of distress, or a wail of horror. It was…a boo?

Constance opened the office window and looked out. On the rooftop of the building across the street, a man about her age stood, having just finished a particularly loud boo.

Constance was aghast. “Did you just….did you just boo me? You did not just boo me!”

“Yeah,” he called, “I did just boo ya, cupcake. So whatcha gonna do about it?”

“Cupcake?” Now she was positively offended. “I’m an angel, you twithead! Angel! I have a halo!”

The man offered an extremely impolite suggestion as to what she could do with said halo.

“Okay, buster, you asked for it!” Constance leaped out the window and launched herself across the street. About halfway across she suddenly recalled that she hadn’t earned her wings yet. She plummeted towards the ground, flailing madly and wishing she had just closed the window and ignored her heckler. She didn’t even know that angels had hecklers. This hadn’t come up in training. Now the ground was approaching awfully fast and-

Miraculously, a truck containing a load of soft kitty litter came by at that exact moment. She landed squarely in it, unharmed, but terribly humiliated. The boos above changed to mocking laughter. She glared up at the rooftop, but all that remained was a puff of oily smoke, and a smell of sulphur.

Monster

Sheri was looking over tomatoes in the produce aisle when she felt the ghostly chill. A white corpse shape loomed before her, chanting ominously. Fortunately, she had her Taser. Boom went the draugur. 

This story was written for Trifecta’s weekend prompt, which was to write about beasts in unusual places. A produce aisle certainly counts as an unusual place to have a frightening encounter. Also, “draugur” is apparently a Norse undead creature that was the basis for the barrow-wights in The Lord of the Rings. Who knew?

Constance We Have Heard On High

This story was written for Trifecta’s weekly prompt. For previous stories about Constance, go here. Enjoy!

Constance Magenta was getting bored. She’d been sitting on her cloud for, oh, a good hour at least, and she had nothing to do. Not being a fully realized angel yet, she hadn’t received the usual accoutrements, wings, a halo, and so forth, and she was terrible at the harp anyway. She’d expected the training to start earlier; apparently punctuality was not as heavenly a virtue as one might have thought.  In desperation she turned to the person next to her.

“So…” she said, “What are you here for?”

“I’m a phantom,” came the doleful reply.

“A…phantom.”

“Oh yes. A phantom of death. I’m supposed to go to people when they, y’know, die.”

“How nice,” said Constance, since she wasn’t sure what else to say. In the back of her mind a little tune began to play. “Death angel, death angel, will you be mii-iiine….”   Hastily she suppressed it and tried to think of something more polite. What would her mother, Juliet Magenta, queen of the social set, have said in this situation?  “Have you, er, been at it long?”

“No, not really,” said the phantom. “Only just now. I was supposed to start earlier, but I tried to claim the soul of a zombie, and, well, they don’t have souls, you see, being dead already. So it was decided I needed some training. I’m Winifred, by the way.”

“Constance. I think I’m supposed to be Search and Rescue. Or maybe one of those messenger, types like on that show, Monica what’s her name. Not sure. Just so long as I don’t have to protect my loathsome squid ex-boyfriend Ben. I swear, he’s a real s-”

“Ahem,” rumbled an echoing voice, startling Constance and Winifred both.

“Saint,” Constance said quickly. “Saint, I meant to say. I was not going to use a bad word in heaven.”

“Good thing,” said the angel, sighing. “We do have a policy on that.”

N is for Nearly Impending Doom

Last time in the Catrina Chronicles, the evil Peter Mordred had been fighting a wizard’s duel with the Yellow Fairy, who was trying to change Catrina’s royal consort back from being a bear. Unfortunately, Peter teleported himself into outer space and then transmogrified into a meteor, a meteor which then hurtled down towards Catrina’s kingdom. Given that the author is a fairly big fan of meteor-impact stories like “Lucifer’s Hammer” and the movie “Deep Impact”, this does not bode well…

Catrina was having an exceptionally bad day. Her prince consort, the love of her life, had turned out to be a traitor who’d sold her and her kingdom out to Atlantis. An Atlantean fleet was even now invading her kingdom, with their floating sky-ships and who knows what other advanced technology. They’d stolen Mlrning, the Shovel of Thor, and used it to trap her inside her own wardrobe by freezing the thing in a block of ice. Worst of all, there appeared to be a meteor descending from the heavens to wipe out the world, Atlanteans and Shmirmingardians alike. She didn’t know how to stop it, or how to defeat the Atlanteans, or anything. She wasn’t even sure that she cared anymore. How much of this was a princess supposed to take?

She had made a perfunctory exploration of the wardrobe she was trapped in, just in case it turned out to have a secret passageway to Narnia. No such luck. All  she found in the back of the wardrobe was mothballs. Catrina might’ve gone away and come back, just in case this was the sort of wardrobe that sometimes had a way to Narnia and sometimes didn’t, and of course Catrina would have left the door open, since she knew it was very foolish to shut oneself up in a wardrobe. Unfortunately, in this case she hadn’t shut herself up in the wardrobe; the Atlanteans had done it for her. Using Mlrning, no less, the very Shovel of Thor. How dare they? How could they?

Catrina paused for a moment in her fuming, suddenly intrigued by the question she had posed. How could they, indeed? Mlrning wasn’t your ordinary shovel, after all; it wouldn’t work for just anybody. It had an inscription. “Whosoever holds this shovel, if he be worthy, shall never be Thor in the morning.”  The Atlanteans had invaded Shmirmingard without cause. That meant they couldn’t be worthy. And that meant….”It wasn’t Mlrning.” she said to herself.

She didn’t smile. She might not smile again. Not after Perry. But her green eyes blazed in her face. Acting on instinct, she flung out her hand, willing the Shovel of Thor to come to her. She’d heard that trick could be done with the hammer. It had to work with the Shovel. It had to.

There was a distant crash, and a bang. Someone screamed in a manner that would’ve made the Wilhelm Screamer proud. More crashes. A decidedly loud thud. Several voices yelling a blistering torrent of Atlantean expletives. (Catrina didn’t know the language, or she would have been decidedly shocked.) Then the door to her room shattered as Mlrning came hurtling through it. The mighty Shovel of Thor smashed into the ice surrounding the wardrobe and plowed through it like it was mere slush. Mlrning thwacked into Catrina’s outstretched hand. “Right,” she said. “Now we are in business.”

Her first thought was to hunt down her scruffy nerfherder twit consort and brain him over the head with the shovel for betraying her like that. She’d had twins with him, for heaven’s sake! Then Catrina’s eyes grew wide in sudden fear. The twins. Timothy. Tamalyn. They’d been in the nursery, only a few days old. Suppose the Atlanteans had found them? She took off running as fast as she could, flying pell-mell down the corridors, her heart racing like a jackhammer on speed. Catrina whipped round a corner and plunged through the nursery door, where Sister Mary Patricia should have been standing watchful guard over the slumbering newborns.

Only she wasn’t. Instead the room was fairly packed with Atlantean soldiers in blue tunics. Admiral Lucia stood by Tamalyn’s crib, with both babies in her arms. “Ah,” she said. “You found out. We did not really use the Shovel. Could not get it working. We thought perhaps the name….we do not understand the meaning of Mlrning. Explain?

Catrina was not about to discuss mere questions of Norse nomenclature. Her left hand tightened hard on the Shovel. “Put. Them. Down.”

“Oh no.” Lucia said. “I have a transporter mage on my ship, locked to me. One thought, and I vanish, with your spawn. You surrender, right now, and you keep them. Fight on, one second more, and they are gone. Pick.”

Her mind raced. Mlrning could move very fast, but could it move faster than Lucia’s thought? Could it block a transporter spell? Catrina wasn’t overly keen on magic; the only spell she knew was one that turned her temporarily into a newt, and that wouldn’t exactly work as nullification of a transporter spell. If she ran, stayed and fought, did anything, her twins were gone. But if she surrendered, what guarantee did she have that Lucia wouldn’t take them anyway? The Atlanteans had co-opted Perry, and launched a sneak attack on Shrirmingard; that didn’t exactly give her confidence of their trustworthiness. If she surrendered the Shovel, they might very well just go “Nana, nana boo boo” and hit her over the head with it. Not that they actually would go “Nana, nana, boo boo,”; Catrina was not at all sure that they were familiar with that particular idiom.

She hesitated, not sure what to do. She really had no good options. And she didn’t have much time, not with Lucia standing right there, and then there was the meteor coming down from- 

Catrina almost smiled. Not quite. But almost. “Even if I do surrender, and hand Shmirmingard over to you, it won’t be much use for long. Have you looked outside lately?”

“We know about the meteor. We are taking steps.”

“Oh, are you. And you’re absolutely sure they’ll work? You’re positively confident that your weapons, whatever they may be, can stop a meteor big as a mountain from crashing down and wiping us all out just like the dinosaurs?”

Lucia was a bit rattled; she couldn’t hide it. “They will work. They will work. Our ships will be safe. They are magically shielded.”

“Your ships are safe. How fortunate for them. Assuming those magical shields work, do they cover the countryside as well as the ships? Otherwise you’re going to be left ruling a pretty fair wreck of a kingdom.”

The admiral’s eyebrows raised. “What would you do about it? Can you stop the meteor?”

Catrina honestly wasn’t sure, but she wasn’t about to let Lucia know that. “I have faced down Cthulhu with this shovel, recreated a world, defeated my brother, the leader of Character Hell.” Strictly speaking she hadn’t defeated him; he had been hit by a stray plasma bolt and fallen into lava, but again, this wasn’t a fact Lucia really needed to know at the moment.  “I can stop a meteor. Or maybe I won’t. Maybe I want the meteor to hit. These stories have got to end sometime, right? I don’t want to go on and on, having adventure after adventure until it all gets too unspeakably dull. If I let the meteor come down and end us all, that would be a fairly appropriate conclusion, don’t you think?”

Lucia wasn’t aware that she was only a story character; she thought she was a real person. Therefore, she assumed Catrina had simply gone mad. That wasn’t a comfort. Her thoughtfully crafted invasion plan had not allowed for meteor strikes.

As if on cue, fiery light spilled in through the nursery window. The meteor was nearly upon them. Only seconds remained. “Stop it,” Lucia demanded. “Stop it now.”

“Why should I?” Catrina said in casual tones. “Seriously. Explain why.”

Lucia assumed the princess wanted terms. “We will surrender. My ships will leave. We will return to Atlantis and not bother you again.” Quickly she laid down the twins in their cribs. “There. Proof of our goodwill. Now stop it.”

“That wasn’t much of an explanation. You know what I heard? Blah blah blah blah something about leaving. Go ahead. Go. You won’t outrun it. That thing’s big, have you noticed? It’ll obliterate the continent. I could stop it. But it would make for a fantastic ending. So why shouldn’t I?”

“You have gone mad.”

“Not quite,” said Catrina, her eyes glittering in the light of the descending meteor. “I’ve gone sane.”

She glanced at her reflection in the Shovel’s blade, and made a slight adjustment to her hair. If her story was going to end now, she wanted to look her best.

And the meteor came.

…

This has been a very dramatic episode of the Catrina Chronicles. For previous episodes, go here. Also, today is the last day you can enter the Goodreads giveaway to win a copy of The Catrina Chronicles: Year One, so to do that, go here. Thanks for reading!

Truth Hurts

This story was written for this weekend’s Trifecta prompt, which was to write 33 words about something that scares you or a character. For some reason, my muse went back to ancient Greece. Go figure.

What kept Cassandra lying awake in Troy wasn’t that they wouldn’t believe her doom of fire and slaughter. She had gotten used to that. But suppose they did? What might they do then?

 

Boom, Baby

This week is a fairly special Trifecta challenge, as it’s number ninety-nine.  As such, we get to write 99 words, with one of them being chosen from page 99 of the Oxford English Dictionary. It truly is a special event. I haven’t participated in all the Trifecta challenges, sadly; my first Trifecta story was for week twenty-eight. But it’s been a fun ride since then; I’ve found characters like the Third Little Pig, Rain, and Constance the dearly departed treasure-hunter, and made a lot of fellow writer friends along the way. So, to celebrate this momentous occasion, I decided to revisit the characters in that first Trifecta story, way back in May 2012. Roll film!

Doctor Sheep had wanted revenge against the Sneeze for a long time. Plan A: ruin her prom by unleashing wild mutant wolves. Alas, Emmy had skipped that bacchanal to study for the SAT. Plan B, exploding mangoes, had backfired spectacularly, as Emmy was deathly allergic to mangoes. Plan C hadn’t fared much better. So he’d gone unhappily down the alphabet to Plan Z. Z was the Babushka, a death ray he’d ordered specially from Russia. Z had to work. Just push the red button and-

*KABOOM*

Emmy smirked. Everyone knew blue was the right one. Only idiots pushed red.

Alternatives

This story was written for Trifecta’s weekend prompt, in which we were to write 33 words inspired by the Rolling Stones song “Sympathy for the Devil.”  Inspired by is such a wonderfully vague term.   Also, my muse may have pulled in a reference to one of my favorite works by C.S. Lewis. Enjoy!

“But I don’t want to be an angel!” she protested. “All that shiny halo s…stuff.”

“You want the Other Place maybe?  Randomly turning into a large centipede?”

“Well, no…. not exactly…..ew.”

Shiny

This story was written for this week’s Trifecta prompt, which was to use the word zombie:  “a mixed drink made of several kinds of rum, liqueur, and fruit juice.”.  I decided to revisit the tale of Constance, recently expired treasure hunter, as I’m fond of serial stories. You can read the prior episodes here. Enjoy!

The first thing she noticed was the light. It was way brighter than the environmentally-friendly curly lightbulbs that she usually had in her tiny apartment. This light went right through her eyelids in a blinding glow. Oddly, however, it didn’t hurt. It felt warm, almost happy, like the one time she had splurged on a vacation and gotten a hotel room with a whirlpool in it.

She might have just enjoyed the light for a while, but then a dim memory flickered in her mind. She had been in a bad place before, hadn’t she? There’d been a treasure, and she’d tried to get to it, and….all at once Constance remembered. Her tether had snapped. She’d gone down. Her last thought had been regret that she wasn’t wearing clean underwear. And now…light. Really bright light. “Oh no,” Constance said. “Oh no, no, no, no no! I’m dead!”

This was just terrific. Here she’d been at the peak of her archaeological career. Now, as Monty Python would have said, she was no more. She had ceased to be. Bereft of life, she rested in piece. She was an ex-Constance.

“So….” she mused aloud, “What am I now?”  She clearly wasn’t a zombie, since she was still thinking lucidly. Constance was quite grateful for that. Her one prior experience with a zombie had been of the alcoholic kind, during an ill-fated dinosaur dig in North Dakota. While plastered, Constance had inadvertently loosed a Velociraptor spirit from its ancient bonds, whereupon it had eaten her loathsome squid ex-boyfriend. She’d also spent three hours puking into a towel the next morning. Between the raptor and the killer hangover, Constance had sworn off zombies entirely.

“Which,” said a voice from behind her, “is actually a point in your favor.”

She spun around. “Who’re you?”

“Oh, I’m Montgomery. I’ve been assigned to help you navigate the process of becoming an angel. It’s not so bad, really, and-”

“Becoming a what?”

M is for Mighty Mecha Meteors

Last time in the Catrina Chronicles, our heroine had just discovered that her royal consort Perry was actually an undercover sleeper agent working for Atlantis. Worse, she had made this discover at a singularly unfortunate time, about two seconds after Atlantis had invaded her kingdom. Leaving her to cope with this distressing revelation, we return to the wizard’s duel between the Yellow Fairy and Peter Mordred, son of Morgana Le Fay…..

She knew he was going to cheat. She just knew it. The Yellow Fairy had dealt with Peter Mordred before, and like most villains, he very rarely kept his word. He’d find some loophole in the rules, some ambiguity he’d twist to his advantage. She counted off the requisite ten paces, wondering how he was going to do it.  What clever technicality would he exploit this time?

She was giving him entirely too much credit. Peter Mordred wasn’t planning something twisted and clever, oh no, he was going right for the obvious.  The Yellow Fairy had just reached ten and was reaching for her wand when she heard a sudden furious staccato chatter, like a horde of manic drummer boys. She dove for cover, scrambling into some nearby bushes and ducking swiftly behind a tree. Bullets tore away at the bark, and the Yellow Fairy knew the tree wouldn’t provide shelter for long. She could have protested to Peter that the rules they had agreed upon specifically forbade machine guns, or anything outside of their medieval time period. But since he’d decided to break clean through that rule….

Peter was feeling quite pleased with himself. He’d conjured up plenty of ammunition, and any moment now he expected to see the Yellow Fairy’s corpse tumbling out from behind the tree. Then suddenly the tree was sliced in half by a massive gun  barrel, and its remains crunched into sawdust by mighty iron treads. An M1 Abrams tank rumbled out of the woods and bore down upon him. Peter spat out a flurry of bullets, but they pinged right off the tank’s armored plating. SO, Peter thought, YOU WANT TO PLAY IT THAT WAY, DO YOU? (Peter had always thought as loudly as he spoke. It was a most deplorable habit.)

The machine gun changed, shooting up in a sudden burst of metal and electric sparks. The Yellow Fairy, still in tank form, backed away in alarm. In a complete violation of the law of conservation of mass, it seemed the machine gun had changed into….a giant mecha robot! It had roughly humanoid form, though with at least two extra arms, and so many rocket launchers, plasma cannons, giant metal swords, and various other pointed exploding things that it looked like a crazy armored manic hedgehog. The Yellow Fairy might’ve laughed if it weren’t so serious. For one thing, she’d also spotted the nuclear reactor humming away in its chest, and realized that if Peter lost control of the darn thing he could probably wipe out all of Shmirmingard in a single moment. There was only one thing to do.

The Mordredmecha leveled a plasma cannon at her tank form, clearly intending to vaporize her in one blast. But then the tank changed, morphing up and out, and all at once the Yellow Fairy had turned into a robot at least as tall as Mordred’s, although hers was more streamlined and aesthetically pleasing. Also her energy source was based on clean-burning non-radioactive padamantium crystals. The Mordredmecha fired his plasma cannon anyway, but the Yellow Fairy powered up an energy shield that caught his blast easily and deflected it right back at him.  She then armed her own plasma cannon array, adding in a proton torpedo launcher for good measure. Then she paused. All those plasma explosions were going to do a ton of collateral damage. Her little village of Ewokington on the Sticky Bun River wasn’t all that far away, and probably would get smashed to splinters if she went on. If she unleashed a spread of proton torpedoes and he responded in kind…

The Yellow Fairy-mecha vanished. The Mordredmecha hesitated, whirring in confusion. A speaker burped static near its faceplate. The static cleared up into a thunderous boom. “WHERE ARE YOU?”  it roared. Peter Mordred had been looking very much forward to an all-out mecha battle.

Then the Mordred-mecha’s sound sensors picked up a tiny, almost infinitesimal, beep. Beep….beep…beep..

It surveyed the area with all sorts of infrared detectors and visual scanners. The mecha zeroed in on a round barrel-object sitting quietly against a tree. A string of red numbers ran rapidly down towards zero. Beep, beep, beep, beep beep beep beebeebeebeeeeeeeee….

The Mordredmecha realized what the device was about two seconds before it went off. An electromagnetic pulse blasted away from the bomb and flashed through the forest, instantly depowering the mecha and every other electric device within several miles. Of course, there weren’t any, which was the whole point; the Yellow Fairy knew that an EMP in a medieval area wouldn’t do any damage to anything that belonged there, time-period wise. To a giant mecha robot, though, the EMP basically reduced it to a standing metal junk-heap.  “Right,” said the Yellow Fairy, calmly morphing back to her human form. “I think I’ve won, then. You’ll go away now, won’t you?”

No response. “Oh dear,” she said. “He’s teleported out of there. He knows he’s not supposed to do that!”

It looked like the duel was still on. The Yellow Fairy grabbed her wand and prepared to defend against whatever he threw against her. She had to admit, she had escalated things a bit; an EMP bomb, even if harmless to medieval society, was a bit of a step up from a giant robot. Peter Mordred might decide to escalate things further. But then, what could be bigger than an EMP?

Nothing happened for a while. She wondered if he had given up. The Yellow Fairy sighed. “So much for that then,” she said to Perry the bear, little knowing that his real name wasn’t really Perry. “Right, let’s go on back to my cottage then and I’ll get you human in no time-”

The bear suddenly grunted in alarm, and waved towards the sky with his paw. She looked up. There was a strange light there, shining like the stars around it, only it was bigger and brighter than any star she had seen before. Also it was falling, descending down towards the horizon. It grew, its light spilling out in eerie beauty, and suddenly she knew. “That’s no star,” she said in a horrified gasp. “That’s a meteor!”

The meteor streaked down towards the small kingdom, growing very big now, fire streaming out from behind it and lighting the nighttime sky. The Yellow Fairy didn’t see the astonished looks of the Atlantean soldiers on the ships hovering near Shmirmingard Castle, soldiers who now wondered if the inhabitants of this strange land had called down the meteor upon them. She also didn’t see Catrina, still stuck in her icebound wardrobe, staring bleakly at the meteor’s descent and hoping that it would bring a swift death to her. What she saw was that the meteor was easily the size of a small mountain, and if it landed it would destroy her, her village, and half the continent in the bargain. The trouble was, the Yellow Fairy had no idea how to stop it.

This has been another exciting episode of the Catrina Chronicles. For previous episodes, go here. You can also buy a paperback copy of the first year of Catrina stories by going here, and if you like you can enter a Goodreads giveaway and win a free copy of that for yourself by going here.  Thanks for reading!

Zombie People

For this weekend’s Trifecta challenge, we’re supposed to write 33 words that tells what happens after this illustration. So I asked my muse what would have happened. And, well….

Photo credit: Dan Duford at poisonedplayground.com

 

***

“Oh creature of the undead! Speak to me!”

“Yyyyyyy….”

“Why? Why have I raised you? What dark sorcery compelled me to disturb your slumber?

“Mmmmm….seeeeee…..aaaaaaa…..”

“You have got to be kidding.”