Writer's Journal

“This is highly irregular,” the judge said to the couple standing before him. He’d been brought in while still dressed for bed, and under the judicial gown he wore slippers.

The couple before him stood handcuffed, the man wore a crumpled suit, and the woman a skirt and blouse. His hat–a full-brimmed fedora–looked as if a dog or three had taken a bite out of it, and a mass of surgical tape held his left ear in place. Both seemed to smoke, slightly, but both smiled, and cast sidelong glances at each other. Every now and again, the woman would glomp onto the man and start kissing him. If he didn’t laugh from joy, he’d reciprocate.

The guards pulled her off him, and the man replied:

“What is, yr’onor?”

“Well, the traffic ticket and fighting the officer who arrested you were bad enough, but demanding that you be tried immediately?”

“I had the skrill for it,” the man said. The woman laughed. Remembering himself, the man added a “yr’onor.”

The judge rifled through the paperwork.

“According to the paperwork, you both–Ishmael Caulder and Laurel Frank–are officially dead. I have paperwork for your cremation, young lady.”

“Well, I was,” Laurel replied.

“I wasn’t. I just bribed the coroner.”

“Why?” the Judge asked.

“They don’t let you into the underworld without either two silver coins or the proper paperwork. Rules are rules, and all.”

The judge blinked twice.

“So, how did…?” he began.

“Well, yr’onor, I just got a death certificate, laid down in bed for a couple’a days, and got taken. When I got down there, I searched high and low for Laurel. After I found her–no mean feat, mind–I slung ‘er over my shoulder and booked it for the land of the living. We stole an ‘82 Ford Fiesta and headed for the liquor store, but were stopped around the time that officer got a black eye.”

“So, you’re admitting you punched an officer of the law?” the judge asked.

“To be fair, he started it, yr’onor,” Ishmael answered.

Laurel began to laugh.

“How? How did he start it?”

“He saw us come out of the ground. yr’onor. Tried to shoot us in the head. Don’t know about you, but I’d prefer not to be dead for real.”

Cicatriz Episode 3×01

Now with attempted suicide and awkward sexual tension.

John F. straightened his tie, as the Dealer brought the three safe deposit boxes out and set them on the table. This was a mere formality, they both knew–the decision had already been made, the amounts settled in advance, everything but the check written–but a necessary one.

The first box was opened.

A glass bottle, shaped roughly like a bullet with a cylindrical neck attached to it was removed. It contained a reddish-amber liquid that sloshed thickly like syrup. Something clinked lightly inside it when the bottle was moved.

“Fig brandy,” the collector said.

“Fig brandy?” John F. said, as he felt his throat closing up.

“Made from the fruit of the bodhi tree. Mixed with a portion–as little as a teaspoon–of the ashes of the Buddha, and distilled until almost completely clear, then repeated with the ashes of the third dalai lama. Over the years, it took on the remains of nine boddhisattvas. It is said to be the sweetest, most intoxicating of liquors, but overconsumption leads to a terrible fate, as far as most drinkers would be concerned.”

“How so?”

“Upon waking, one will experience something that is half hangover, half enlightenment, and lose all desire to drink.”

“No.”

The collector put it back, and pulled a small box. Opening it up, he showed a disk of fibrous, brown meat.

“One of the Lanciano Hosts, transformed in the eighth century into human flesh during mass. To all measures, they are indistinguishable from fresh human cardiac muscle tissue. Blood type AB.”

John F. shook his head.

The collector sighed, made a show of being unsatisfied, and brought out the final treasure, a bone tube, which he opened with gloved hands, and from which he pulled a document written in calligraphy. A signature in red was at the bottom.

“The Contract. Signed here at the bottom by Johannes Georg Faust.”

“No.”

The collector sighed, and put the parchment back in the tube. John F. produced a taser and shocked the collector. He pinned the man down, and injected a syringe of ammonia into his jugular vein, and waited. When he was sure the man was dead, he packed away the contract, and put it inside his jacket. He considered taking the others, but felt no need.

As he left the room, and walked out the back way, he pulled out his phone and placed a call.

“Mr. M, I handled the situation. Maybe now we can clear up this DNA test, and we can get to work…”

(Admittedly, this is influenced by two of my favorite dead white men, C.G. Jung and Roger Zelazny [specifically, his story "The Borgia Hand," check it out if you can.])

The boy was in the room when his younger brother died.  Edmund had had the measels.  Now he had nothing.  He was only eleven, at the time.

Two ravens, far from their southerly winter homes, perched on the windowsil.  One–the one on the left, the boy remembered–cawed, and pecked at the glass, before both flew off.  The boy told his parents and went to bed.

As Spring approached, the boy took to walking in the mountains around Leonding, no longer outgoing and confident, he thought of his brother and brooded.

One day, he happened upon a man who sat on a bit of rock emerging from a snowbank.  The man was tall and ancient, with a scar bisecting a vacant eyelid.  A wide-brimmed hat shaded his head, and pipesmoke curled around his face.

“Where are you coming from, boy?” the man asked in accented german, a raven alighting on the rock next to him with a scrap of paper in its mouth.

“Leonding, sir,” the boy replied.

“And where are you going?”

“I don’t know.”

“You do.  You just don’t know you know.”

“That doesn’t make much sense.”

The man laughed, revealing teeth like squares of pewter.

“Tell me, boy.  What trade will you ply when you are older?”

“My father wants me to send me to technical school, but if I had my choice…either a soldier or an artist.”

The grizzled old man put on a show of being impressed.

“Not a problem with any of the three.  Not a problem.  All fitting.  Though, of course, there is more honor in being a soldier than an artist or engineer.”

“Not to hear my father say it.”

“Well.  How about this, then?”

The old man removed a pouch and pulled out a rod of wood–ash, from the look of it–and handed it to the boy.  Turning it over in his hands, the boy saw the symbol of three interlocking triangles carved into t.

“Sleep with this under your pillow for three years.  On a day–you will know which one–in that final year, burn the rod, and dissolve the ashes in a cup of beer or mead, and drink it down before you go to sleep.  Your dreams will come true, exceeding all expectations.  But know this:  You will die by violence, on walpurgis night.”

So the boy slept with the rod beneath his pillow, and every night, he dreamed of the old man, flanked by two ravens, and astride a giant, eight-legged horse, with a spear resting in his stirrup.  And every night he was closer.  On the night his father died, the boy burnt the rod and drank it down.

He dreamt that night of the old man bleeding him out and pulling off his skin.  The old man climbed inside, as if the skin were a suit of finery, and burnt the boy’s remainder, before mixing him into a vat of well water churned by three ageless women, and drank it down.

In the morning, as he walked to school, he did not respond as readily when his friends called him by name, blinking, and confused, as if he did not remember that when they said “adolf” they meant him.

I uploaded these the past two fridays:

Acting as a Wave 1

Acting as a Wave 2

Now, I present the third and final installment of the interlude:

Acting as a Wave 3

I’m going out of town next Thursday, but I will do my damndest to have Cicatriz 3×01 up for your reading enjoyment.

(This is related to my story on Jan 25., “Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes?”)

The Internal Affairs officer examined the scene.  Two dead bodies, one with the top half of it melted, the other with a hole going through his head where his watchman’s lens should’ve been.

The boarding party hadn’t repressurized the room, but they had stapled everything in place with inertial tethers.  The officer stepped through a cloud of blood crystals, and shone his light over everything.

“Whoever this was,” he said, indicating the melted body with his torch, “must’ve been on someone’s shit list.  Military-grade ray, flash-melted like a popsickle put in the microwave…or possibly hit with a civvie ray after decompression.  Hard to tell just by looking at him.”

The IA recorder beeped, logging and transmitting the last statement.

His eyes flashed, the synthetic lenses set into them projecting an image on the inside of his helmet.  An indistinct figure hit with a Military ray, then replayed with a corpse being hit by a civilian-grade weapon.

“Watchman Hsing,” the IA officer hightlighted the fallen watchman, the shattered lens set into his forehead was surrounded by shards of flash-frozen blood, “was in the room…hmm…lens isn’t bloody.  Must have been shot in the head after depressurization.  Why?”

The watchman’s right hand was twisted into a claw, and floated by his side.  The IA officer examined the hand–thumb and index finger broken.

“Someone removed the ray forcefully from his hand.  Can’t tell whether he was dead or alive when it happened, at this point.  Breaking the ban on speculation, I would venture that he was dead when it happened.”

The IA officer straightened, and drifted for a moment, examining the scene.

“There,” he said, sticking out an arm to adjust his rotation, and then kicking towards the wall.

“Bullet-hole in the hull.  Most likely inertial acceleration of a solid slug, no signs of chemical propellant.  This was meant to look like where the decompression occurred, but there are no signs of loose objects being pulled toward it.  Most likely, this is also where the projectile that penetrated Watchman Hsing’s brain went.  In all likelihood, the hull was compromised after routine decompression and then the computer core was scrubbed to remove that information.  Hsing survived for a while, and they shot him in the head afterward.”

The Recorder beeped, logging and sending the note.

“And only another Watchman, or similarly augmented individual, could sneak up on a watchman.  open and shut case.  Find out who was in the area, and send them to the firing squad.  Check and mate.”

(Not quite where I want it to be.  This might be a bit more interesting if the characters were more concrete.  Unfortunately, I didn’t.  I need to remember that for the future.)

The earth shook as if in the grip of a seizure. Something vast and living was moving down beneath the ground.

The seven insurgents sought refuge under a theatre marquee, as they watched a pair of horse-sized insects dogfight with an F-15 high above. The giant bugs had heads that terminated in a mass of tendrils and cilia; every now and then, they would get close enough to the jet and vomit forth a stream of white fluid that scoured the fuselage.

The insurgents—because it’s impossible to be an army with no command—waited. The sound of cracking asphalt and collapsing buildings told them that the burrower was coming to the surface.

One of their number came forward, and raised up the RPG launcher that he’d been carrying for this purpose. Originally, he’d had eight shots. Now, a mere three remained.

The burrower burst from the ground, three blocks away, like a living skyscraper. Its great, dark bulk reared up into the sky, and it snatched at the jet with its tentacular head, only managing to snare and devour one of the insects.

It had four rows of jointed legs, placed equidistant around its body, and the white, basic substance that the bugs vomited dripped from its head.

“Now!” the lieutenant shouted.

The soldier pulled the trigger, and the grenade streaked toward the burrower, striking it in the gap between two plates. A gout of black blood spurted from the wound, the oily substance hissing and burning when it struck concrete.

Immediately, the thing began to withdraw, pulling back underground. It rotated as it descended, spreading its blood in a ring around the opening of the hole, melting the asphalt, concrete, metal and plastic into a plug.

The insurgents breathed a sigh of relief, and their lieutenant growled.

“Stay on your toes. We aren’t in Long Island, yet.”

No reliable internet access, lately.  So…

Acting as a Wave 2

(As for the title:  The following is founded on an observation I had while driving through Tucumcari on Monday.)

A dead tumbleweed bounced across the highway, like a beach ball made out of spiderweb. The hitchhiker watched it go, looked up the highway, and down.

As far as he knew, he was thirty miles outside of Des Moines, with the great, baking field of a mall parking lot behind him. He’d planted a temporary camp in the men’s section of a department store, and raided the food court for supplies.

Everything was so full of preservatives that it was still mostly good. Even the salads had been irradiated so that nothing but a suburban office-lady would eat it. He’d filled three waterskins from the fountain, the water filled with heavy metals, but the hitchhiker preferred that to dying of thirst.

A figure passed on a traveling motorcycle. It could’ve been a man or woman, he couldn’t tell, swaddled as it was in helmet, goggles, bandanna, and leathers. For a split second the biker glanced at him, thumb outstretched, and just sped onward.

The first person he’d seen in a week. If he’d had the courage, he would have walked on to Des Moines or one of the satellite communities. But doubt held him back: he’d start hoofing it when the water gave out. When he was sucking on pennies and nickels for the doubtful, illusory moisture.

The last person he’d seen had been dying of cancer, limping along in an electric car. The man was bloated, and the tumors lurked just under the skin, stretching the splotchy, waxy surface as tight as a drumhead in some places, while letting it hang in others.

The man and the car had died within an hour of each other. The hitchhiker had put him in a car on the corner of the parking lot and given him a motorist’s funeral.

He broke out the windows, and siphoned a little gas from the defunct vehicles around the parking lot into a bucket. Only the ones that would never run—rusted to hell, missing wheels, and the like. He placed a cigarette in the man’s lips, and put the pack in the man’s breast pocket.

He doused the car in gasoline, and sparked it with the man’s zippo, which he then slipped into his own pocket. No laws against grave robbing, anymore.

In the fading evening light, on the baking hot blacktop, he watched the funeral.

The hitchhiker knew in the back of his head that he needed to learn the same lesson. As soon as you stopped, you died.

If he could just find a battery, some source of electrical power that hadn’t yet given out.

Looking up and down the road, the hitchhiker sighed, and put his bundle on his shoulder. He took the tinfoil package of food off the blacktop, and opened it up. A chicken patty hissed in the middle of it, and he bit into it, walking off toward the mall, and his camp in the men’s section.

Tomorrow morning, he would give up hitchhiking and start looking for a battery.

(I see this happening, with all the shit that’s been in the news, lately.)

The last computer to use a LINUX operating system went off-line on March 12, 2033. The ancient server was blown up from a safe distance by an Apple employee wearing white neoprene SWAT armor.

The iStorm troopers, as people called them. A terrible joke, which would usually get the joker knocked out and dumped by the side of the road with a fresh Firefox logo tattooed on their forehead, just for good measure. That never ended well.

When the market share had finally been balanced, that last fraction of a fraction of a percent wiped out, the big four—Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and Apple—met to hash out a peace treaty. Everyone watched, which caused a horrible feedback in Facebook’s monitoring center, with all of those prosthetic eyes focusing on computer screens.

And everyone saw—many cheered—as the screens went blank, everything wiped away in a flash of blazing white. The Newsfeeds all went down, and everyone realized that the summit had been bombed.

Immediately, prosthetic eyes fitted with webcams were ripped out and tossed in microwave ovens. RFID chips were cut out of hands, the spines of the few books left, and out of food packaging and stomped to dust.

The soldiers in their white neoprene-coated armor stood still, waiting for orders that never come.