Carrier Wave

by Robert Brockway

picking his nose and carefully examining his discoveries.

She’d brought up these concerns at the time, but the soldiers just grunted and nodded at the vague, abstract concept of Orders — hovering somewhere above them, unquestionable and mighty.

and stepped out into the perfect Burbank sunshine, feeling like a million bucks. Or maybe a billion. I don’t know, whatever inflation says feels awesome.

It’s the authoritarian grumble of distant machinery, buried and forgotten, but still toiling away, oblivious to what goes on above. It is the sacred baritone of priests chanting — the underlying echo of their pious voices bouncing off of cold stone, absorbed into the ancient wood of the pews and forgotten. They don’t sing for celebration, or for posterity, and

they will never be recorded. They sing because they are supposed to. Because they always have. They always will. The bass keeps the order.

I didn’t find a cool sample and build a song around it; I caught a parasite and it took over, forcing me to build a Trojan horse for an army of psychic monstrosities.

They were order. They were chaos. They were fury. They were sleep. No, they had other names. Inside the signal, nestled in between the tones, they whispered them, tauntingly. They wanted to be known. Haruk, The Order. Herote, The Merry. Hoa, The Rage. Himna, The Slumbering.

They gave it to us in the first place. They gave it to us so we could grow, and that’s what we did. Now they’re back to reap the benefits. They’re just farmers. It’s not evil to harvest.”

Everybody else in the world was learning about true violence and horror tonight. Lucas already knew.

all Mari can see is one withered arm and a terrible, placid face. It would be, well, not better if the old woman were snapping or frothing at the mouth or swearing or something. But this is worse. No snarling, no spitting, no emotion at all — her milky eyes watch with sleepy disinterest as her gnarled hand tries to yank Mari to her death. Like the two are separate entities: the face does not care; the hand wants blood.

Her forehead is beeping. She should probably do something about that.

Mari gets a chill in her belly, the kind that always precedes something horrible. Your gut knows it before you do.

“Your dad was a good guy. He went straight after Collins when it started. Almost got him, too. He’s a hero, kid,” Ken says. It’s funny how heroes are always dead, Mari thinks.

They rehash the same points in different words like that’s the problem — if only they could find the right synonym, then everybody would suddenly agree with each other.

He has a cruel face: deep frown lines, forever-furrowed brow, hard-set jaw thrust forward. Mari practically knows his life story, just looking at him: former military, and not happy about the former part. Forced retirement usually, sometimes honorable discharge. They skim around the base bars nursing straight whiskey; sit alone at local diners downing scalding hot cups of black coffee; plant themselves bolt upright on park benches and stare straight ahead. No longer part of the army life, but not knowing anything else. They’re like walking ghosts. And they’re always mad.

Pure fury etched onto his face like god carved it into his skull on the day he was born. Lips just short of a snarl, nostrils flaring, eyes burning.

It’s not useless, but it lives next door to useless.

Its engine screams to split the sky in half.

It’s like a train and a monster truck had a baby that grew up to be a tank.

All of the labels are pure white, with austere black text that simply states their contents, and nothing more. BEANS, they say. And, their point made, they say no more.

He shook the coffee pot. Smelled the quinoa. It was earthy, in an entirely unpleasant way.

Totally correct. Quinoa is gross.

I will never get used to how little a garden actually gets you.”

Ain’t no winning with some folks, and all you’ll do is kill yourself in the trying.

“I don’t underst—” he started, but Mary did it just like Henry had taught her.

Didn't see that twist coming

he told her she was as beautiful as the day they met, and if he was telling lies, Mary never wanted to hear a word of truth.

His adrenalin spiked, hurtled beyond the brief feeling of exhilaration, blew through the shakes and the sickness; it honed down to a knife edge and filleted Sam’s whole being away.

Bobby didn’t break stride. He went from a dead sprint to airborne, both feet forward, body nearly horizontal. He committed to that dropkick like a marriage.

Poor bitch didn’t realize she was in the wrong movie.

Yet she dared not blink back the tears. Not even to get a better look at what was happening. That would mean looking away, and bad things happened whenever she looked away.

They stood facing one another for so long that Carina wondered if something had just broken in reality. God sat on the pause button. The program froze up and crashed. End of episode. To be continued.

The blackness from the Manic’s eye swallowed him whole, and Bobby was nothing. No body. No blood. Nothing left to fall to the earth, nothing left to put beneath the earth.

Sam nodded. A task. A mission. Something meaningful. He practically skipped into action.

she preferred instead to trundle alongside him, occasionally disappearing into the woods to sniff out more mushrooms, berries, roots, tubers, and water.

Good thing they didn't eat her, eh?

Cans of pudding— “It’s expired.” “Does pudding expire?” “Everything expires.” “Don’t be goth.” —which tasted like ambrosia after their days of wild mushrooms. Juice packs— “Okay, I know juice expires.” “Don’t worry, no juice has ever been anywhere near a Capri Sun.”

the audio sounded like somebody had recorded it on a dinner plate and played it back through a watermelon.

That’s the thing with kids: They always think they know. And the harder you tell them they don’t, they harder they believe they do.

Was there a word for being so proud of someone else that you wind up hating yourself in equal measure? Bet the Germans had one.

Stoltzselbsthasse? (Just a guess)

“That mountain is still a mountain, the animals are animals, the plants are plants. This apocalypse only came for us.”

Thirty-nine years old, and he was still waiting for the day he’d become an actual adult.

but she really needs us to because it’s almost the end and they’re going somewhere with a lot of people and they were making their way up the coast to get there when they saw our tower and John Hambo down on the street, so they gave him back and all they wanted for him was my laugh, which I thought was weird, but that’s magic gypsies for you.”

Oh, oh no...

He fought the urge to grab both sides of her furry little face and squeeze as hard as he could. Was it possible to love something so much you just wanted to kill it?

He hands the pistol over like it’s both made of glass and coated in butter.

She has to rush forward, grab his arm, and spin him around and kiss him because you have to do everything for these stupid boys.

If she makes it back to the Snake alive, she’s going to punch Johnson in the balls until he explodes from being punched in the balls too much.