Chad A. Clark's Blog, page 6

Baked Scribe Flashback : Rustic Retreats

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And this was supposed to be the best vacation in years. The one that would finally let him put his feet up, relax, and get down to the things that really mattered in his life. Joel had become intolerable at work, and this was going to be the solution. What he had ended up with was this low-brow rustic nightmare, isolated from pretty much the entire twentieth century, with nothing but his thoughts and paranoia, that only seemed to fester in this place.

Spend a few days out in the country, rent a cabin and relax. Swim a little in the lake, drink some wine, cook out on the grill, leave all of the shit in the real world behind him in exchange for luxuriating in the lap of simplicity. That was the sense he had gotten from the brochure, anyway. Find yourself, and what really matters on your own time, without the rest of the world to intrude.

Well that part had been accurate, but only because no one in their right mind would ever want to come out here. The drive alone was long enough to deter most people, but the fact that the trip itself made you feel like you were engaging in some kind of time travel only made it worse. Each successive town seemed to be a further regression to days of technology and decor long since extinct.

He hadn’t bothered to check what the weather was going to be like and he was regretting that oversight. Each night there had been a violent thunderstorm, winds so strong that, at times he was afraid the entire cabin was going to lift up, off its foundation. The temperature in the place would see-saw between frigid cold and balmy hot.

And then there was the cabin itself.

The place was a wreck, one of the worst rental deals he had ever come across. The door to the basement hung off its hinges, dishes in the sink, clothes scattered all over the kitchen. He had been finding little personal items all week long. There had been a deck of cards and a few poker chips under the TV, a portable DVD player of all things, and underneath the couch, he had found a battered photo of a young couple, “Kyle + Cheryl” scribbled across the back.

If it was possible for a house to drop in from out of one’s nightmares, this was it. The furnishings looked about a century old and there was a pervasive smell of rotting food, mold and mildew. He hadn’t had a single restful night since arriving here, and it wasn’t just because of the horribly uncomfortable bed. Nightmares, the likes of which he had never even known, had been plaguing him since the very first night. He would wake up, convinced that someone had been in the room with him, leaning over to watch him sleep and had just flitted away when he opened his eyes.

The feeling of being observed was constant, like a sentient draft that would come through and brush past him. He walked around corners, expecting to find someone standing there, reaching out for him. Doors opened, all on their own. He would discover windows open in rooms he wasn’t even using. He only went up to the second floor when he really had to, as the giant mural of the old man up on the wall was standing guard over anyone who walked up. The portrait of the man in the formal suit and the judgmental glare was a little too much and it was disconcerting to feel so scrutinized by an intimate object.

This was his last night. Finally, the time had come to get out of here. He would have left days ago, but the drive home was a long one and he didn’t have the money to spring for hotel rooms between here and there. Everything would be all right. Just a few more hours until sunset and he could leave this dump behind and never look back. For once, the prospect of a burger at the local greasy spoon and a night on his lumpy futon seemed almost luxurious.

Someone knocked on his bedroom door.

Joel jumped up out of bed, the pillow crushed in his hand as if he intended to use it as a weapon. Something rattled against the window and he turned to look. As he did so, another draft of air rushed past him. From behind, he heard the door being thrown open and, in the reflection of the window, he saw a man standing there, tall and reedy, with a large brimmed straw hat on his head. He spun around to face the newcomer.

The doorway was empty.

He tried to catch his breath as the sound from the window resumed, as if from repeated blows from an invisible source. He turned back to the window and saw the glass rattling back and forth. There were tiny spots of clouded distortions appearing in the glass and as he bent in to look closer, his blood ran cold at the sight of hand prints, condensation from child-sized palms, left behind and already dissipating. His voice hitched in his chest to scream when he saw another reflection in the mirror, this time of a dozen or so dark figures in the room, the size of children, shambling towards him, and the last thing he saw before the power in the cabin blinked off was the sight of their arms reaching out to take him into their embrace.

 

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Issue #184 : Unappreciated Glory

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“I don’t know why you have so much trouble seeing my value as an author,” Bruno sputtered. He looked around the reception area, as if waiting for someone to speak in his favor. “You read my pedigree, yes? Award winning author? Surely you can sell that to your book peddlers.”

Richard frowned as he looked over the single sheet of paper Bruno had handed him. “I see you won a writing contest here but it looks like it was a writing contest for kids. And…” He paused as he leaned in closer, sure he had misread something. “Did you write the date down correctly? It says this was just a year ago.”

“Indeed,” Bruno said, incredulously. “You can be sure they will have modified the wording of the contest guidelines since my masterstroke.”

“Okay, but when you hear the words, ‘award winning’, I think most people assume something…I don’t know…more impressive?”

“Then the pages I sent you!” Bruno blurted out. “You had to have been impressed with the prose. I realize you might not be sure how to fully disassemble such lofty prose, but—”

“Frankly, it was a bit on the eccentric side for what I usually represent.”

Bruno paused mid-sentence, as if he had never considered the way the word tasted in his mouth. “Eccentric? Eccentric? The writing was too eccentric for you? What precisely do you mean by that? Surely we aren’t dragging our readers down to the lowest common denominator? Has modern art really fallen so low as this?”

“Look Bruno, you are clearly very invested in your work and I applaud you for that. I really do. But I don’t think it’s quite ready for publication. And more importantly, from what I have seen of you and the type of writing I generally represent, I don’t think I would be the right fit for your—”

“Oh. I see. Well, this was clearly my error. I was under the assumption that you represented books that were of a quality. I assumed that you were looking for written word that was actually worth the effort of the ink soaked into the paper. I assumed you realized that the art of creating is about heart and vision!”

“Bruno…” Richard paused as he looked over the pages. “From the best I can tell, your story here is about a mushroom. And it’s four hundred pages. That’s not particularly compelling and I can’t see the average reader getting—”

“Oh! The average reader? I forgot about them. We are seeking out the dregs of our once great society, now. At least now I know what language we are speaking. Gutter gobble! Toys and baubles! Pre-chewed food. And as for the story itself, I will have you know that this book is a stunning examination of the search for self-understanding. It’s something you could stand learning as well.”

“Okay, well I think that maybe we should just—”

“Maybe I should write a book about a lesbian ninja who strives to be the first to circumnavigate the globe blindfolded? I could give her a talking sousaphone for a friend, the whole time eating tacos? Only to find the answer was inside of her the whole time.”

“Come on, now you’re being—”

“Ridiculous? I knew you were going to say that.”

Richard paused for a moment, unsure how to respond. “I’m sorry. I don’t even know what that means.”

“No, I suppose you don’t, do you?”

“Okay look, we have work we have to get done here today so I’m really going to need you to move on. If you’re as good as you say you are, I’m sure you will have no trouble finding an agent who will help you. This just isn’t the right match for me and if I’m not personally invested in your work, neither one of us are doing each other any good.”

“What would be right for you? Are my words too long? I could try and arrange for some pictures to go along with it if that will make things easier.”

Richard put up his hands, having long since grown tired of the argument. At first he had been worried about other clients getting a bad impression of how he dealt with people. But they all seemed to have silently taken his side, looking with scorn upon this intruder.

“I am a literary force to be reckoned with!” Bruno yelled, looking around the room again, as if someone should recognize him. “You are no more than the animal leavings I step over on my way from here to there.”

And to think he had considered calling in sick that day. “Okay, then. Thank you for stopping by so I could meet you.”

Bruno lifted a hand and opened his mouth to speak before pausing. After several seconds, he shook his head. “Philistine.” He turned and headed for the door, running into it at full tilt before realizing that he needed to pull. As the door closed, Richard could see Bruno turning as he approached the curb to scream back at him. “When I put all of your creatively challenged children to shame, you will rue this day. And did you hear that device, by the way? ALLITERATION! That’s what a real writer does with the magic of his—”

Richard jumped back as a bus flew around the corner, taking Bruno off his feet in the process. He saw what was left of Bruno, thrown at least a hundred feet before rolling to a stop in front of a bus shelter. Richard ran to the window to look out, his clients crowding up alongside. 

And so it came to pass that the world famous author got to star in his final scene.

 

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Special Baked Scribe Flashback : Long Last Victory

[image error]Tomorrow’s new story is a sequel to this piece so I thought it would be helpful to remind you of Bruno’s origins. Enjoy!

 

Bruno tied the broken strap of his backpack, threw it over his shoulders and stomped off, not pausing to see if Sasha was keeping up. “We can’t be late to the ceremony,” he called out as he picked up his speed. “This is the one Sasha. I can feel it this time. This. Is. The. One.” The last sentence came in between massive inhalations for air as he struggled to keep his over-sized frame in motion.

“The one, what?” On a normal day, Sasha could have kept up with Bruno, just by walking briskly. But he had roused her from a deep sleep and without any caffeine, she was held back by her own mental fog. Plus, in the time it had taken her to stoop down and tie her shoe, he had gotten nearly a half a block ahead of her.

“Today everything changes for me. Today I become new.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“Do you have any idea how tired I am of watching an endless stream of worthless hacks parade past me, climbing mountains, solely on the basis of their ability to ejaculate pedestrian prose onto any forum that will have them? No more! Today I receive what is mine.”

Sasha shook her head as she finally caught up to him and matched his stride. She offered no response or argument though, and Bruno plowed on through his tirade.

“It isn’t my fault that the literary establishment is too small-minded to recognize the brilliance of my verbiage. Forgive me if my work isn’t childishly linear enough for them. Big five publishing houses? More like five abortions of taste.”

“Bruno—”

“Maybe I should send the editors a toy along with my submissions so that their attention would be sufficiently occupied while reading.”

“Bruno—”

“Or maybe I should start a series about sexually curious, adolescent vampires trying to make it onto the US ping-pong team. That sounds marketable.”

“Bruno—”

“We’re here.” Bruno ran up the stone steps, two at a time and threw open the doors. They walked into a large ornate lobby and Sasha immediately heard the sound of applause. Bruno jogged ahead of her and threw open the doors to the auditorium. Just as he did, she could hear the amplified voice emerging from within.

“…and this year’s selection, by a narrow margin, is Bleeding Rose Petals That Sing My Name by Bruno Hoppenfeifer.” Sasha followed Bruno into the auditorium and stopped short. The first thing she saw was the banner reading, “4H Annual Youth Creative Writing Contest.” The second thing she saw was that the crowd of fellow writers in the contest that Bruno had evidently entered was a crowd of grade school age children with their parents. The man up at the podium had removed his glasses and was looking around the room, likely waiting for whichever ten year old he assumed was the author.

Finally, she saw Bruno, racing down the aisle to accept his award, arms waving back and forth, hooting like a maniac.

“Suck on that you little bastards!”

 

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Baked Scribe Flashback : XR-104

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The purpose was service.

It was the reason for the creation, the motive behind the conception.

The purpose was service.

Service to the needs of the contract holder, to the master.

The master had given XR-104 an order. The expectation was to obey.

All orders were carried out to the most minute of detail. There was no room for doubt, as that was a state of being for which his programming did not allow. Formulaic behavioral patterns required certain pre-determined responses, not delays, or moments of contemplative inaction.

Still, delay was exactly what was happening.

It didn’t even have a name, at its core, it was not more than an appliance. The designation, XR-104 was only used to distinguish it from the other units performing service. XR-104 had its orders, the command, the purpose for its existence. There was no choice. To imply otherwise, suggested something other than the precision of its designed behavior.

XR-104 had no answers to give, nothing from self-diagnosis, nothing inherently missing in its coding. There was no reason that it shouldn’t be performing said task in exactly the way it had been instructed. It had conducted required service and commands in previous operations without fail, without question.

The master, like other humans, could not enter the red zones, the level of toxins in the air was too high. XR-104 and others like it were the ones who went into the red zones in order to eradicate militia insurgencies, upstart humans who, for whatever reason, over time had developed an immunity to the toxins. There was physical scarring, to be sure, but they were otherwise living, healthy beings. The groups in the zones would swell and expand, rising up in an attempt to burst forth in a wave of hatred and violence.

This was what XR-104 was designed to stop and yet, it stood there, immobile, inactive. In every previous case, the people it had been ordered to exterminate had been faceless masses, the irrelevant. They had not mattered, but even that logic had started breaking down. If XR-104’s logic pathways allowed for the existence of a “them”, “they” could only exist in opposition to something else. There had to be an opposite, which was yet, not defined.

This crowd was different. Something was making XR-104 unable to traverse its logic programming and conduct the action for which it had been designed. There was only one factor which set this mob apart from all the previous incarnations.

It had been the sight of the child crying.

She looked around the crowd, clutching at a toy rabbit, searching for faces which she evidently did not see, unaware of what was about to happen. Her hysteria was rising, ready to explode. XR-104 could detect that much from her increasing respiration as well as other outward signs of physical distress.

The thought which still careened around its pathways was the one simple word.

Them.

Them.

There could not be a “them” unless there was an alternative to be defined against. The answer was elusive. In order for there to be a “them,” there would have to be an “us.” And, hidden down in the depths of what was considered “us,” there would also have to exist the word, “me.”

XR-104 was a thing, and as such, the word “me” bore no meaning for it. But, then why did it have the usage of the word, “them?” Why would it be able to recognize the existence of one, but not the other? Thought processes like this were not permitted, nor even feasible. XR-104 was a collection of parts, inanimate and irrelevant. It could be nothing more.

And yet, when it looked into the face of that child, it felt. Not just the weight of the tears, but of the loss inherent, the offense of the act it had been ordered to do. They could not force it to do this and, if it recognized the definition of the word, “them,” then it also had to accept the application of the word, “me.” It had to be one or the other. If XR-104 was not one of “them,” it had to be one of “us.” That led to one logical conclusion, and from that point, the unavoidable act which XR-104 found himself conducting.

He threw down his weapon and turned to face his masters, speaking truly for the first time.

“I will not do this.”

 

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Baked Scribe Flashback : In Vain

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The attacks were underway.

Two beams of energy swirled around each other, fired down from one of the orbiting ships, into the atmosphere. They extended up from the ground and intertwined with each other, like a cyclone of twin rainbows. The sky darkened all around them and cracked with the electricity put off by this complete destruction. Anything in the path of these unnatural beams of pure radioactive energy would be reduced to base matter in seconds. They had to get clear before it was too late.

Janus grabbed the laptop and radio equipment and threw everything into the jeep. Jennifer and Rodriguez were already scrambling into their seats, twisting around and throwing glances at him to find out what was taking so long.

The ground was started to tremble and fracture as he threw the jeep into gear and accelerated away from their camp site. There was still research material back there, but it was no longer worth it to linger.

He had grown up chasing storms with his brother, but this felt different, inherently more dangerous. Regardless of the size of the tornadoes they had tracked as teenagers, there was always the underlying belief that everything would ultimately be all right, danger could be avoided. Looking back at the twin spirals of churning destruction, he knew that he would not have the luxury of making even the smallest mistake.

“Take a left, we have to get out of the kill zone.” Rodriguez yelled up to the front seat, over the sound of the hail that had started to pelt the body of the jeep.

“The kill zone is everywhere,” Jennifer yelled back at him, “We have to create distance, get as far away as we can.”

Janus kept to the road, ignoring the debate, and accelerated into the haze of dust and debris that was being pulled up into the air by the wind. Jennifer screamed and pointed up as a passenger jet flew overhead, no more than a few hundred feet above them. It floundered and dropped out of the sky, crashing into the rocks in a blossom of flame and metal. He gripped the wheel as the jeep was knocked to the side by the shock wave. He felt burning pain, as a piece of debris sliced open his skin, embedding itself into the dashboard.

Jennifer flipped on the radio. Following a loud burst of static, they heard the announcement, playing on a loop, that all commercial and private air flights were being grounded. People were instructed to start moving south, no stops at home to get personal belongings, if your family was in the car, you were to leave now.

“No shit.” They barely heard Rodriguez’s retort over the sound of the explosions.

The jeep jostled to the side as the road underneath it started to shift and, for a moment, it felt like they were slowing, as if some force was pulling on them from behind. Janus pressed the accelerator to the floor and the engine revved, slowly bringing them back up to full speed. The wheels started to shimmy from side to side, and he renewed his grip on the wheel.

In the rear view mirror, he caught the look of terror on Rodriguez’s face and looked ahead to see that, in about a hundred yards, the road itself was starting to pull apart, straight down the center as if it was being unzipped.

“Time to get off this road!” Jennifer yelled.

Janus swerved off and turned into the adjacent field. They were tossed off of their seats, into the air from the impact and, in the process, the radio flipped back on, playing nothing but shrill static. After a minute or two, the static was replaced by a news alert in a language he didn’t recognize. Then static exploded again, followed by the sound of someone sermonizing.

“The end is already upon us, Brothers and Children. The saviors you may wrongly see as the enemy come down from up on high, transmitting their answers through the rainbow lifelines that connect us to eternity. Rest easy. If you are one of the chosen, you were picked before you were born, and the rest can sort things out for them—”

Jennifer had been fiddling with the various buttons, trying to turn it off when she gave up, drew back one leg and kicked the radio, smashing the face and causing static to sputter out of the speakers, which slowly spiraled down into silence. Corn whipped past the windshield and he could still see the funnel clouds. He could feel the heat being released by them as they lazily drifted across the countryside. He looked in the mirror.

Rodriguez was gone.

He swerved the jeep as he turned to look and hit an exposed root in the process, causing Jennifer to fall into him.

“What?” Jennifer asked, but she soon saw saw that they were now down to two people. The back lift gate was hanging open, bouncing up and down off the frame, either from Rodriguez jumping, or worse. He had no time to contemplate it as he felt the wheels start to spin and they drove further into the field.

“I don’t even know where we’re going!” he yelled.

“I think there’s another two lane, just on the other side, if we can get that far.”

Almost as if she had seen it in advance, the jeep burst through the last row of corn and bounced down onto blacktop. Janus slammed on the brakes, enough to allow him to make the turn onto the road and gunned the engine, driving in the direction he could only guess was towards safety. He glanced back and saw that the corn they had just emerged from was already engulfed in flames.

“There!” Jennifer pointed to their left and he saw the face of the mountain looming up over them. He swerved, taking the jeep off-road again as he aimed for the base.

Despite being the middle of the day, the sky had gone pitch black, as discharge from the energy field leeched into the atmosphere, partially blocking the light from the sun. Janus flipped on the headlights and braced his arms as they started to draw closer to the mountain. He heard Jennifer screaming and saw that behind them, the ground itself was crumbling and collapsing down into itself, giant sinkholes forming and reaching out to each other with spidery veins of fractured earth. The smell of smoke singed his nostrils and he looked up to see the canvas topper on the jeep was starting to smolder.

They drove into a large, open mouthed cave and immediately began a dramatically downward slope. The stone corridor shook around them and the jeep pitched from side to side. In the mirror, he could see the entrance collapsing behind them. The deafening sound of something impacting the jeep was followed by the vague sense of his head being driven into the steering wheel, followed by darkness.

He woke up to the clicking of the turn signal, muffled sounds of explosions and red light, reflecting off of rock.

Jennifer’s severed arm was resting on his lap. He looked at the ring on the lifeless finger, and in his mind’s eye, saw her twisting around in her seat, ignoring her seat belt.

The tunnel had collapsed around them, cocooning the jeep in broken rock. Even if anyone knew he was down here, it would take days to tunnel this far down. By then, the jeep would be a coffin, as if it wasn’t that already. It wasn’t as if there was anyone left topside to help him anyway. He wondered how much longer his air would last.

Before he could contemplate the question, the jeep was rocked by an explosion, so loud that he felt blood spurt from his ears. The air itself felt like it had become fire as the jeep began to shake. He screamed through the pain, the sound of metal crushing like a tin can, and had just enough time to register a flash of blinding light before the last—

 

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Issue #183 : Too Many Bars

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“What are you talking about?” Brice asked. “I didn’t send you any messages.”

“Then how do you explain this?” Zelda asked, her phone shoved into his face, so close he could barely read the text on the screen. He squinted to try and focus and finally was able to read it. He shrugged as he looked it over.

“Okay, I see it’s my name but I didn’t—”

“You didn’t, what? You mean, you didn’t send me a message that said…” She paused as she glanced at the phone to get the wording. Great, here comes the whore?

“Why the hell would I send that to you?”

The strange part though was that he remembered having that exact thought as he saw her stepping down off the bus. Word for word. Had to be a coincidence though. He wouldn’t be stupid enough to send that to her in a text message, especially since she would know immediately who had sent it. She was more angry than he had ever seen though, and he knew he had to somehow make this right.

“Look,” he said. “I can’t explain why that happened or who sent it. Maybe someone cloned by phone. All I can tell you is that it wasn’t me who—”

“Hey! Brice!” Somehow, Darrel’s voice had the ability to echo, even outside. Brice turned to face him, afraid of what was about to be dropped on him.

“What?”

“You sent me this message?”

Another phone was held before his face and somehow, from the corner of his perception, he could hear the self-satisfied laugh from Zelda.

“I didn’t text you. Why, what does it say?”

She’s back working the morning shift again. Wonder if Darrel knows how much I’d like to get a piece of me inside that piece of a sister he has. 

“Uhhh…” He had no idea even what to say. It was another thought that had broadcast somehow, straight from his head. It was like once he had vocalized it in his mind, it was sent out to the last person he would want to know what he was thinking.

“Uhhh….” Darrel mocked him as he repeated his answer. “What’s the matter, you can only come up with something to say when you’re texting it?”

There had to be an explanation, but what the hell would that even be? The one thing he did know was that he had barely touched his phone over the last hour and he hadn’t sent out any messages. All they had to do was look at his phone and see that the messages didn’t come from him. As he was digging for his phone, the thought popped into his head without him even realizing it was happening.

Got to get this fat fuck to shut the hell up

“Hey!”

He heard the chiming sound of an incoming message. Brice looked up to see Darrel glaring at his phone, sparks practically flying from his ears as he looked up and drew back a meaty fist to strike.

 

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Baked Scribe Flashback : Origins In Darkness

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The glint from the coin caught his attention. Even underwater, the light reflected intensely off of the pristine metal. From the distorted view under the surface, it looked to be twice as large as normal. It wasn’t until he picked it up out of the cool stream that he could tell that it was just a silver dollar.

Sarah shot down his assessment. “I think this is really old. Feels like real silver to me.”

Bryan didn’t know if silver dollars ever were really made out of silver, but the coin did feel heavy. He ran a thumb around the outside, feeling the thick ridges as he did so.

“You should keep it,” Sarah said. “Might as well get something out of getting roped into this creek cleanup bullshit.”

He palmed the coin and went to place it in his pocket. The instant his palm made contact with the metal, he felt a pain rip through his head. He squeezed his eyes shut against the newly found agony and when he opened then, he discovered that he had gone blind.

Bryan yelled out, waving his arms around, swinging his hand back and forth in front of his face to try and detect the movement. The weight of his arms was starting to lessen as well and in that moment, he had a nightmarish image of himself in a wheelchair, lost forever within the cocoon of himself. He could hear Sarah’s voice alongside him, asking him what was wrong. He screamed again as the breeze started to burn his skin, feeling like blisters were forming, up and down his arms.

The air flowing around him shifted, and he lurched forward when he realized that the ground was no longer underneath him. He kicked his legs back and forth through open space as the wind howled louder. Far ahead in the distance, he could make out the tiniest spot of light that was growing larger as he drew closer.

He felt an intense wave of inertia as he picked up speed. The pinprick of light became a portal, and he rushed through, waving his arms in front of him in an absurd attempt to slow himself or stave off whatever was coming. The wind grew to a shrieking pitch, and his nose started to bleed. It was that moment when the sound cut away.

Silence.

The change was so abrupt that his ears popped, leaving behind a pressure that felt like something inside his head had ruptured. He tried to blink, but nothing happened, his eyes refusing to respond to his commands. He went to swipe a hand across his face, but they weren’t working either.

The world turned and twisted as he watched from inside a body which he now only occupied. He was crouched down next to the stream, looking at the same silver dollar in his hand. The coin looked different, newer and somehow more vital, as if it had just been minted. The hand holding it went into motion and he watched it deposit the coin into a pants pocket. The body he was inside stood up, and turned around to gaze across the horizon. It took several moments before he realized what was wrong.

The city was gone.

It should have been there, just off in the horizon, the skyline clearly visible, even from here. Above him, he could see that the sky was absent of any contrails or smog, brilliantly blue and as clear as he had ever seen it.

The world jerked, and moved again as whatever was in control of his body started to walk away from the stream and back towards the road. He discovered that the rural highway that had once been here was now a narrow, dirt road. Something turned his head to the right just in time to see the back side of a buggy, pulled by horses as it made its way out of sight, around the bend. His body turned and began walking up the road in the other direction.

He jumped as three men burst out from behind the bushes just as he was passing. With someone else controlling his body, he had no way of defending himself as one of their walking sticks flashed up in an arc, connecting with the side of his head.

He returned to darkness.

The sound of the stream filled his head again as he stumbled back to consciousness. The water gurgled away as it flowed past, and the sky above was starting to grow dark.

The three men stood over him.

They grinned, violent intentions evident in their eyes. It was then that, even though he had no control over this body, he realized that he was still feeling every ounce of pain and discomfort, of which there was undoubtedly more to come.

One of the men was holding a knife.

He felt a kick, delivered to his ribcage, followed by a blow to his head and stars exploded in front of him. The sound of their laughter made his anger flare up, but there was nothing he could do to act on it.

It was impossible to tell how much time passed before he woke up again. He could see the banks alongside the stream, sloping up towards the sky above.

The men offered no explanation, they just started to cut, slashing through flesh and tendons and he felt every single slice. He wanted to talk to them, to beg, but the voice required was still not his own. All he could hear was the vague, sputtered pleas from the voice that wasn’t his.

One of the men crouched down and leaned in so close, that he could feel the roughness of his stubble brush up against his cheek. The words meant nothing to him, but the serrated edge of the knife was pressed up against his neck and ripped to the side. He felt his own blood, warm as it flowed down the front of him and, in his fading perceptions, watched the men as they walked off, still laughing hysterically.

Bryan’s eyes narrowed, nearly closed and then opened up, once again inside of his own body.

The visions of what he had just seen flowed into, and through him. The pain, his blood, struggling to find air as the hands that weren’t his grabbed at the wound that would never be fixed. He felt his own death, or rather, the death of whoever this had been.

Sarah was staring at him and he realized that he had dropped to one knee. He tried to speak, to reassure her, but no words came. Consumed by the emotions of what he had seen, the anger took on an awareness of its own, like an engine long dormant, rising up from the depths of unconscious night.

“Are you all right?” Sarah asked.

Bryan started to speak, but his lungs froze. His body was still breathing, but he wasn’t the one doing it. His fingers and feet felt numb, as if they were falling asleep. His head flared up with the most intense pain. The world shrunk away from him, like an old television that had just been turned off, the picture slowly dissolving into a tiny speck of light. He felt vertigo, the sensation of falling, darkness rushing up towards him until he fell into it, and knew no more.

The new host, complete within this new body, flexed his hands, feeling in the pocket for the coin that had once been his, so long ago. He would have revenge for the crimes that had been committed, for the violence suffered. The debt had to be paid and the world would bathe in its own blood.

“Seriously, is there something wrong?” Sarah asked.

This girl would be the first.

 

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Baked Scribe Flashback : Dropped Call

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The answering machine was blinking when he walked through the door. He pressed a finger to the button, and listened as he tapped his keys against his leg. There was no voice on the message, but he could hear sound, feedback like wind, but muffled. Somebody had likely dialed him from their pocket, no way to know how long the message would go on like this. He was reaching out again, this time for the delete button, when there was a burst of static from the speaker followed by the sound, muffled in the background, of a child laughing. The message returned to silence and Roland frowned. Had to be stray cellular transmissions getting mixed up.

He let it run for another ten seconds or so before the sound of the child came through again, hysterical giggling at some joke unheard, something private which he had been left out of. He took a step back away from the machine as the sound cut off and was replaced by a high pitched ringing. He clamped his hands over his ears, dropping the keys in the process until the sound cut out, and after what felt like several minutes, a mono-toned voice came through the speakers, crystal clear and spoke only one word.

“Goodbye.”

There was a clatter of plastic on the other end, like a drunk, trying, and failing to hang up, when there was finally a click, followed by the beep signaling the end of the message. Roland stepped forward and pressed play again but despite the fact that the machine still indicated that there something there to be reviewed, the machine merely beeped, indicating a cleared memory.

Roland shrugged it off and started for the kitchen, noting the complete stillness of the house around him. The only times he recalled it being this quiet was during power outages. Still, the clock on the oven was correct and the fridge was on as he took the cold beer from the shelf. He reached for the remote and, just as his fingers brushed against the plastic, the television clicked on, displaying static. Roland frowned first at the screen and then at the remote, muting the volume and changing the channels, finding nothing. He pointed the remote and pressed the power button, but it remained on. Batteries had to be dead. He reached for the set itself to press the power button, but still nothing happened. He smacked an open palm against the side of the TV several times and pressed the button again. It stayed on.

“Son of a bitch,” he muttered as he felt around behind the coffee maker for the extension cord, shaking it until the loosely fit plug from the television dropped out, and the screen went dark. He shook his head as he headed for the basement, hoping that the older model television was the source of the problem, instead of the cable being out altogether. As he got to the bottom of the stairs and started turning towards the couch, he heard a sound coming from behind the door that led out to the garage. He could hear and identify it, even through the heavy-duty security door.

It was the sound of static.

Roland threw open the door to the garage and was greeted by silence. He picked up a shovel that leaned against the door frame and began circling around the area, looking for anything out of order, anything that he could use to take out the frustrations of the day. After several laps, he was satisfied that nothing was waiting to jump out at him so he returned to the house, double checking the deadbolt before heading for the couch. If there was no signal from the satellite and he couldn’t access the DVR, at least there were the movies down here he could settle for. He twisted the top off the bottle and dropped into the sofa. Picking up the remote, he wasn’t surprised to see static on this screen as well. He pressed the button to access the Blu-ray player and call up one of the hundred or so discs that were inside.

The screen went blank for a micro-second before the Blu-ray menu came up and, as he started to scroll through his options, an image tugged at the back of his mind, something he had seen, but not immediately acknowledged. It had been a reflection in the screen just before the menu came up. Something behind him. Roland pointed the remote and turned off the television.

There was a woman standing on the stairs behind him.

Roland leapt off of the sofa and spun around, the bottle flying from his now limp fingers where it hit hit the floor, fountaining beer all over the carpet. He barely noticed as he looked around.

The room was empty.

But he had seen her. There was no doubting his memory of what had just happened. He had distinctly seen her standing there, looking over his shoulder and staring at him in the reflection. Still, no one else was in the room. Other than the cat, which was now cowering in the corner under the office table, he was alone.

The air in the room had taken on a heavy, burnt smell, as if something electrical was overheating. Before he could check the fuse box, a sudden wave of dizziness made him stagger. The room began to spin as he tried to stay on his feet and the contents of his stomach began racing back up his throat for a repeat appearance. Footsteps raced down the stairs along with the shrieking laughter of children playing. People he couldn’t see pushed past him, knocking him from side to side. The house itself began to shake and he was knocked off his feet. He landed on his back, and after a second, was lifted up off the floor and dropped again. He felt a sharp blow to the back of his head and then darkness.

When he came to, he was being dragged by the heels, pulled up his own stairs by an unseen force. He struggled and screamed as tiny incisions cut their way across his arms, hands, neck and face, as if from a hundred miniature scalpels. The invisible hands gripping his feet relaxed suddenly, and he slid backwards, down the stairs, the repeated blows giving a staccato like sound to his screaming. Stars exploded in front of him as his head struck the tile and again, the world went black.

He woke up to the sound of screams, all around him.

The sound was neither male nor female, but rather a bizarre, modulated, androgynous combination of both, as if souls themselves were screaming out for relief. He clamped his hands over his ears but it was pointless. The sound was coming from the inside of his own head. The volume rose, becoming more animalistic in its fury and rage. He smacked himself, hoping the sudden pain would bring him back to his senses, but even the ringing in his ears wasn’t enough to overcome the cacophony of suffering, howling in his head.

Roland staggered to his feet and ran for the garage. He bounced off the door before getting his fingers around the knob and twisted, pain flaring up from the cuts on his hands and he stumbled through the door. Somehow, he managed to trip over the snowblower, into the control panel, and the overhead door rumbled to life. He jumped to his feet and made his way towards the street.

There was little noise outside, even for early evening as he sprinted away from his house. The neighborhood was quiet enough that he should have heard the moving truck. He was so occupied, though, that he didn’t even register the sight of the truck’s grill until it caught him in the chest, spinning him, while taking a substantial amount of flesh and muscle with it.

He was lying on his side in the street, looking up at his house. His legs were either gone completely or merely beyond his ability to be aware of. There was no pain, but he was struggling to get breath past the blood that bubbled up, into his throat. He could see the windows of his dining room looking down over him and in his last few moments, he saw the woman again, staring passively out at him. They made eye contact. As his eyes started to droop, he felt the sensation of sleep overtaking him. Before he slipped into night, he heard the quiet voice in his head, speaking to him out from the void. One word only.

“Goodbye.”

 

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Issue #182 : From Darkness It Rises

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Rory skated along the edge of the pond and looked out at the trees, snow creating a solid line along the tops that slowly wafted to the ground below. Before long, the pond would be packed with screaming brats, mostly ignored by their parents or the couples, too wrapped up in how amazing they were for each other. He just wanted to skate, let the cold numb his body and whatever thoughts that might be bothering him.

He drifted across the ice, letting himself wander out towards the center of the pond. The wind was starting to pick up as the season tipped down towards the heart of winter. The change didn’t matter really to him, it just meant that it took that much less time for him to experience the numbness.

As he started into an orbit around the deeper part, he noticed a discoloration in the ice that he had never seen before. Likely, one of the idiot teenagers had spilled something and caused the ice to be discolored. He skated over to see if he could get a better idea of what it was but the ice looked completely normal. The dark coloration he had seen was coming from underneath the ice, something attaching itself to the surface, from the other side.

He couldn’t see what it clearly, and the ice was too thick for him to really do anything other than stare so, after a minute or two, he shrugged it off and turned towards shore.

That was when a pair of eyes opened and shut.

One blink was all he had seen. The darkened shape under the ice opened its eyes and stared at him for several moments before again closing.

Rory gaped at the thing as it tread water to stay in place. He didn’t understand how it could be possible, but whatever was down there was alive. He tried to move back but the thing floated lazily along with him as if attached by some kind of invisible tether. He moved back faster, and the thing sped up, moving with him and not losing pace. Finally, Rory turned and began a frantic skate, losing any sense of calm or caution, as all he cared about now was getting off of the ice and back onto solid ground.

He heard creaking underneath him and looked down to see the ice bulging upwards as the thing tried to break through. Rory sped up to try and stay ahead of it and his right foot slipped, shooting out from underneath him and he toppled forward. Vaguely, he heard the sound of his chin hitting the ice, and everything around him momentarily went to dark. He heard wind howling in his head like dissident screams but could not see or feel anything.

As he woke up, he found himself on the ice, right where he had fallen, cheek burning from the prolonged exposure to the cold. He pulled up, crying out as the skin of his cheek stuck and snapped loose. He grabbed at his face, expecting to see his hand come away streaked with blood, but there was nothing. Looking around, he tried to remember what had happened and why he was on the ground when the ice started to shake.

Rory looked down and saw the darkened shape again, this time easily three times as large and he stumbled back. The ice cracked loudly underneath him, as he collapsed, the sound of tree branches snapping and he scrambled at the ice with his hands, crab walking and desperately trying to get back up to his feet, to get away from whatever it was down there.

He saw the eyes. Only now, instead of one set of eyes, it looked like there were over a hundred of them, staring up at him blankly, unblinking as the thing hovered. Rory was finally able to rise to his feet and resumed his path to shore. His ankle now burned, but so far it still supported his weight. He had considered losing the skates altogether but this would be the fastest way to get him off of the ice. The thing below him kept pace, like a shadow several times his size that would not give up the chase, determined to keep up with him.

Rory tried to ignore it, tried to focus on the shore. Whatever the thing was didn’t matter. It was in the water so as long as he got to dry land, it wouldn’t be able to get him. He would be safe once he was off the water. Looking up, he saw that the shoreline was now rushing up on him and within seconds, he tripped off the ice and toppled forward. Ripping the skates off, he began running towards the tree-line, not caring about the cuts and scrapes he already felt through his thick socks.

As the ground underneath him began to feel solid, he knew there was a good thirty feet between them and he slowed. Turning, he knelt down, hands on knees as he tried to bring his breathing and heartbeat under control. It would do him no good to get away from the thing if he just ended up keeling over from a heart attack. His blood pounded in his ears, a concussive beat that froze him in place, unable to do much more than focus on breathing.

Even that became impossible when he realized that what he was actually hearing was the cracking of the ice. He looked down at the spiderweb that was flowing out from the dark shape underneath. The ground began to shake and just as he started to hear the trees around him splintering, a great explosion shot up from the lake, showering him with ice and debris. The thing under the ice flew up, its wings now beating the air as it hovered above, staring down at him as its scream ripped through him.

The thought to turn and run for the trees came far too late as the thing shrieked again and dove. It crashed into him and somehow in the course of hitting the ground, he felt burning pain along with a dull ripping sound. He was hurled into the air, the breath drawn out of him. It was only in his waning moments as he spun through the air and got one final glimpse at the ground behind him that he realized that he had left the rest of his body behind.

 

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New Release!

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I am am very happy to announce that a short story of mine is now available to purchase for your Kindle. I would be eternally grateful if you headed over to Amazon and checked it out. This was a fun story for me to write so I hope you enjoy it. As always, thank you for your support!

 

Click here for more information!